Blood in the Forest by Vincent Hunt
Blood in the Forest tells the brutal story of the forgotten battles of the final months of the Second World War. While the eyes of the world were on Hitler's bunker, more than half a million men fought six cataclysmic battles along a front line of fields and forests in Western Latvia known as the Courland Pocket. Just an hour from the capital Riga, German forces bolstered by Latvian Legionnaires were cut off and trapped with their backs to the Baltic. The only way out was by sea: the only chance of survival to hold back the Red Army. Forced into uniform by Nazi and Soviet occupiers, Latvian fought Latvian - sometimes brother against brother. Hundreds of thousands of men died for little territorial gain in unimaginable slaughter. When the Germans capitulated, thousands of Latvians continued a war against Soviet rule from the forests for years afterwards.An award-winning documentary journalist, the author travels through the modern landscape gathering eye-witness accounts from seventy years before piecing together for the first time in English the stories of those who survived. He meets veterans who fought in the Latvian Legion, former partisans and a refugee who fled the Soviet advance to later become President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, a survivor of the little-known concentration camp at Popervale and founder of Riga's Jewish Museum, Margers Vestermanis has never spoken about his personal experiences. Here he gives details of the SS new world order planned in Kurzeme, his escape from a death march and subsequent survival in the forests with a Soviet partisan group - and a German deserter. With eyewitness accounts, detailed maps and expert contributions alongside rare newspaper archive, photographs from private collections and extracts from diaries translated into English from Latvian, German and Russian, the author assembles a ghastly picture of death and desperation in a tough, uncomfortable story of a nation both gripped by war and at war with itself.
Hunt, Vincent: - Vincent Hunt is a documentary journalist and award-winning BBC producer. Crossing Latvia interviewing people who suffered at the hands of the KGB or fought against their system of totalitarian control he sets the political and social context of what Communism actually meant in this Baltic state: interrogation, surveillance, deportation and often death. This is his second book about Latvia's recent history, following on from Blood in the Forest - the end of the Second World War in the Courland Pocket (Helion 2017) which detailed the six desperate battles by German and Latvian forces to halt the Red Army advance into Latvia. His work explores pan-generational trauma, forgiveness and legacy, with the journey to see the landscape now an important part of understanding sorrow, loss and memorial for those left behind. His first book Fire and Ice (The History Press, 2014) was a journey across Arctic Norway meeting people affected by the Nazi scorched earth retreat of 1944 and the forced evacuation of the region. Along the way he discovered the shocking stories of 13,700 Soviet prisoners worked to death in sub-zero conditions or murdered by their Nazi captors.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781913336035 |
| ISBN 10 | 1913336034 |
| Title | Blood in the Forest |
| Author | Vincent Hunt |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Helion & Company |
| Year published | 2020-01-15 |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |