war is hell on the civilians

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	• Payback Gert Ledig Granta UK, 2003 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

war is hell on the civilians

This book is fiction, but the author actually lived through the events described. The descriptions of people buried alive in air raid shelters, trapped in burning buildings, dying in graveyards while tombstones, coffins, and corpses explode around them are not for those with weak stomachs. This book depicts the firestorms and carpet bombing of a German city (probably Dresden or Hamburg). The same thing happened in many cities on both sides in the second World War (e.g., Warsaw, London, Tokyo). It is a profoundly wrenching story, and gave me the beginning of an understanding of what this must have been like. It's important to me because one of my best friends, now deceased, lived through this and would never talk about it. I'd give this book ten stars for graphic realism and it should be read by those fortunate enough not to have lived in a war zone.

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tough stuff

Payback Not since Johnny Got His Gun have I read a book about war that makes such a memorably distasteful statement about the stupidity and waste of military conflict. Like the aforementioned book, this novel focusses less on the actual battlefield and more on the suffering of the combatants, civilians and maimed survivors. This work is relentlessly grim and graphic, perhaps too much so; but the prose is clear and succinct and worth reading for anyone interested in the inanity of war.

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A hidden gem

Excellent writing, excellent characters. Highly recommended as both literature and a terrible depiction of war.

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Fiction or Non-Fiction?

"This book is fiction".

where is that derived from?

I could only presume the author had many true stories to retell for publication. One must presume, non-fiction.

"O war! Thou son of hell

whom angry heavens do make their minister, thrown in the frozen bosoms of our part hot coals of vengeance."

These words from Shakespeare's King Henry VI, Part II sum up with unfortunate precision the hell that descends from the angry heavens described in Gert Ledig's recently `rediscovered' story of a horrific WWII daylight bombing raid on Germany in his book "Payback". In fact the title of the book in German, "Vergeltung" translates into English as vengeance. There is no small amount of irony in the title when one considers that Hitler had promised that his "V" or "Vergeltung" rockets would pay back the English for their raids on Germany. The hot coals of vengeance unleashed in "Payback" however fell not on England but on a German city and the irony of the title does not seem at all accidental.

Ledig was born in Germany in 1921 and enlisted in the German army in 1939, at age 18. He was wounded seriously during the Battle of Leningrad and was sent back to Germany to work as an engineer. While back in Germany he lived through some of the horrifying air raids unleashed on Germany by the Allies. His experiences in Leningrad found their way into his first book "The Stalin Front". That book was very well received when in was first published din Germany in the 1950s. Ledig's experiences during the air raids informed his other major work "Payback". For various reasons, some of which may derive from the implication of the title, that the bombing campaign was payback and was either not entirely unjustified or at least expected, Payback was met with a great deal of criticism. Ledig never wrote another book.

Set within a small sector of an unnamed German city (perhaps Munich where Ledig was posted after his injury, Dresden or Hamburg) the events of the book take place in exactly 70 minutes during an Allied bombing run. The book consists of a series of vignettes about the experiences of various people in this air raid. It is horizontally structured so that these vignettes include an American flew crew unleashing bombs over the city, to a rag tag group of German soldiers manning anti-aircraft guns on roof tops, drunken soldiers and Russian workers wandering around at street level on down through residents in apartment buildings who make their way down and down as the bombing raid begins and continues. The raid in question was one of many in which the carpet bombing included an attack with incendiary bombs. Ledig describes the ensuing inferno with detached precision, from the `hot coals' of the bombs to the boiling tar of what were once city streets. As in the Stalin Front his descriptions of death and the manner of those death is even more horrifying for the matter of fact way in which they were described.

There is no plot to speak of as we follow the stories of the various participants in the book. We see an American pilot parachuting down into the inferno after his plane is shot down. Ledig's description of his descent is evocative of a journey into hell. An aging couple wishes to sit at their dining table so they can die with some shred of dignity in their own apartment. A very young girl, partially trapped in a subterranean pile of rubble is raped by a neighbor. When the girl cries, "but I'm your daughter's age" the simple response is "you're not my daughter".

As the book closes Ledig notes a slogan familiar to his fellow soldiers and citizens: "God is on our side". But he goes on to note with no small amount of bitter irony that "but he was on the others' side as well." Ledig closes by noting that "an hour was all it took for terror to triumph. . . . It was unstoppable. It just wasn't the Day of Judgment" and so the bombing resumed.

Payback is a chilling book on many levels. It is not for the faint hearted, the darkness of the scenes Ledig paints is described in an excellent introduction on Ledig and the book as reaching the point of irreducible finality. There is no light at the end of this tunnel. Nevertheless, Payback was as compelling as it was disturbing.

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During the course of an hour in July 1944, bombers fly over an unnamed German city, while down below, civilians live out their last days. First published in 1956, and now available in English for the first time, Payback paints a savage and unflinching picture of the realities of warfare for ordinary men and women.

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