In the Russian ranks :

[206thCEF]

In the Russian ranks : a soldiers account of the fighting in Poland, by John Morse.

Seems to be mainly about the beginning of the Eastern Campaigns.

From the American Libraries Internet Archive.

Joe

http://www.archive.org/details/inrussianranksso00mors

[bob lembke]

I spent 10-15 minutes looking thru this book, or, more accurately, pages 1 - 9, and to the point that it states facts, names, units, etc., it is absolute, contrived, utterly false rubbish. An officer that the author "met" is mentioned by name and unit, the officer, a "colonel", did not exist, and his unit, ready to plunge into Russia, is actually, at that moment, garrisoned on the French border. Other somewhat less concrete assertions are also totally wrong. German troop strength on the Eastern Front, specified in detail, is exaggerated by at least 1000%. All of Germany is supposedly mobilized (before mobilization), and every junior officer knows the exact war plan and freely shares it with an Englishman, who has been traveling thru Germany for weeks on business, and now is right on the Russian border, but of course does not know a single word of German or Russian. This is all before the war started. The author travels thru Germany for weeks, weeks before the war started, and it is crystal clear to the author (of course knowing not a word of German) that Germany is mobilized and about to march off to war based on an evil plan.

Not trying to slam Joe, I thank him for posting links to many interesting books that are now on line, but just to warn the Pals that this clearly is an utterly unreliable book, and very likely totally fabricated out of nothing, like so many others of the period. So much fabrication and clear nonsense and propaganda on the first nine pages that it is hard to see how anything in it could be accepted.

Bob Lembke