Legion of the Damned (Cassell Military Paperbacks)

I have little to add to the excellent review by Richard Luhrs, other than to emphasize that this is a great anti-war war story. Legion of the Damned is the best of the series, and also the darkest (if that's possible). The book will haunt you for years. I read a borrowed copy 20 years ago or so, but I felt compelled to buy a new copy and read it again.

Some of it might be fiction, but it still tells a great story. As you read, it comes to your knowledge that Sven is anti-nazi(and thats fine with me)and if he really didn't fight in WW2, it really does not matter, if you can write and sell millions of books say whatever want, but don't talk bad about a dead man. It does no good and besides in the book he does say the C word.

LEGION OF THE DAMNED, the first, most famous and ostensibly most autobiographical of Sven Hassel's fourteen World War II novels, doesn't really qualify as the start of a series. While Hassel himself serves as the narrator of all of his works, and many characters introduced here do indeed reappear in most or all of his subsequent books, the relationship between LEGION and the (more genuine) series of stories which followed it is only tangential. For one thing, most of the aforementioned characters have died in battle by the time LEGION reaches its harrowing - and, in my own opinion, beautifully written - final pages, in effect rising from the grave to take up their roles in Hassel's later books. The tone of LEGION is likewise more somber, more sorrowful and far more intensely bitter than that of any of its "sequels," dark as they frequently are. The lingering question of just who Sven Hassel is/was, and what if anything he did as a Danish Wehrmacht soldier during the Second World War, constitutes an intriguing mystery in its own right; but for the moment I'll take the man at blurb-value and assume that his alleged experiences in a penal battalion (to which he was sent after deserting the regular German army in 1939) are more or less genuine. He certainly crafts a hell of a story, regardless: LEGION and all of his subsequent books offer up an admixture of nauseous violence, slapstick humor, disillusioned nihilism and earnest longing which makes the Hollywood concept of "The Good War" look as silly, simple and manipulative as it really is. LEGION probably accomplishes this best, as the later books do tend to give their primary group of characters a sort of bulletproof, swashbuckling veneer which frequently undermines the quality of the stories themselves. All of Hassel's books follow a set structural pattern: brief snippets of real-life wartime horror, running from a few lines to several pages, precede each chapter and are often (though not always) expanded and/or commented upon in fictional form therein. The characters - Hassel himself, the Old Man (Hassel's sergeant) and Porta (the rogue soldier), plus later additions like Tiny (the simpleminded giant), Heide (the Nazi) and the Legionnaire (no explanation necessary), kill vast numbers of people, steal and consume huge quantities of goods and ruminate over their luckless lot and the disgraceful politics which have brought them to it. It sounds formulaic, and indeed can get repetitive after a while; but there's no denying the profound power of the cumulative effect. What is perhaps most refreshing and impressive about Hassel's books is the fact that he utilizes a group of Wehrmacht soldiers not as the fulcrum for yet another tired exposition of the evils of Nazism, but for an anlysis of the far greater and vaster evil of war itself - all war, at all times, in all places. To be sure, these men aren't heroes, nor even antiheroes in the sense we've come to recognize. They kill, spare and jo

"Legion of the damned" is undouubtably the best book i have ever read.The style that Sven Hassel wrote this book is unique and graphic.The story focuses on a doomed platoon of German soldiers on the western front in 1944, with Sven Hassel as one of them.The story is about death, destruction and struggle. "Legion of the damned" is a very easy book to pick up and read and very hard to put back down! I definetly recomend this book to anybody except the squemish as throughout the book there is a lot of fighting and killing.The only negative point about "Legion of the damned" is that it is quite a depressing book (some parts nearly made me cry!)DEFINETLY BUY THIS BOOK!!!

If you want to know what hell on earth in Germany during the WW2 and the life of the Penal Batallion, read this book. This author was in most large German campaigns during the war and survived. I have found that this author's books, especially this one is an exciting beginnning to end in one read as you cannot put the book down because it is action all the way.All of his paperbacks have been reprinted many times and it is about time they began to reprint them again so that we don't forget what war is all about- kill or be killed! There is nothing good about war and warriors!