Apr 1, 2023·edited Apr 1, 2023Liked by ROB SCHÄFER
I had a mixture of emotions reading this. Peters is clearly indoctrinated up to his eyeballs (or is reassuring his brother?), and this has resulted in a certain naivety: ‘Tommy/the Canadians can’t fight’, and while confidence is vital, he doesn’t acknowledge that he and his unit had been moving backwards for two whole months, and that the enemy haven’t yet been thrown back into the sea.
In his final letter, I think he knows he’s in the sh** because he writes to his brother and not his mum, leaving how much to disclose up to Reinhold. It was getting very dicey, and he knew it.
It seems he died in his Panther, so I’m going to bring up Ukraine (of course I am): every time I see a Russian tank decapitated, my initial ‘Yay, another one bites the dust!’ is simultaneously tempered by the knowledge that, whatever the politics and criminality of the regimes they served and serve, every dead soldier is a mother’s son. Their deaths might or might not be instantaneous, but the suffering of those who remain at home lasts a lifetime.
Also, Rob, I think that’s the best contemporary photo of a Panther I’ve yet seen.
I had a mixture of emotions reading this. Peters is clearly indoctrinated up to his eyeballs (or is reassuring his brother?), and this has resulted in a certain naivety: ‘Tommy/the Canadians can’t fight’, and while confidence is vital, he doesn’t acknowledge that he and his unit had been moving backwards for two whole months, and that the enemy haven’t yet been thrown back into the sea.
In his final letter, I think he knows he’s in the sh** because he writes to his brother and not his mum, leaving how much to disclose up to Reinhold. It was getting very dicey, and he knew it.
It seems he died in his Panther, so I’m going to bring up Ukraine (of course I am): every time I see a Russian tank decapitated, my initial ‘Yay, another one bites the dust!’ is simultaneously tempered by the knowledge that, whatever the politics and criminality of the regimes they served and serve, every dead soldier is a mother’s son. Their deaths might or might not be instantaneous, but the suffering of those who remain at home lasts a lifetime.
Also, Rob, I think that’s the best contemporary photo of a Panther I’ve yet seen.
Harrowing stuff.
It's interesting to read these old letters. We get an insight into real life as it was at that moment.