The Doctor Is In – Prit Buttar & The Eastern Front of World War I (A Trip Around My Bookshelf #9a)
Imagine a warfront that stretched almost a thousand miles, equivalent to the distance between New York and St. Louis, where millions of men fought for over three years in mountain passes and across wide swathes of steppe, in supersized fortresses and squalid villages. Where one and a half million Germans, over three million men from Austria-Hungary and an estimated six million Russians were either killed or wounded. And grasp the fact that the Russian Revolution, the destruction of three empires and much of old, aristocratic Europe were brought to heel by the fighting on this front.
More remarkable was the fact that until relatively recent times, trying to find English language books on the Eastern Front of World War I was a difficult task. Perhaps that was because of the language barrier or the revolutions which swept away many of the source materials. It might also have been because of the totalitarian regimes and Iron Curtain which cordoned Eastern Europe off from the world for much of the 20th century. Whatever the reason, a hundred years would pass before the Eastern Front was given its proper due in English language works of history. One of these, Prit Buttar’s multi-volume history, finally gave the Eastern Front the kind of long overdue coverage it deserves.
Gap Years – The Unknown War
While in high school I first became interested in the Eastern Front. There was only one problem, it was difficult to find many decent English language history books on the topic, let alone books dedicated to separate campaigns or individual battles. My reading was relegated to general reference works and a few specialized, but hard to find titles. The Marshal Cavendish Encyclopedia of World War I was invaluable in this regard. It provided an unprecedented scale of coverage. Volumes specifically dedicated to the Eastern Front were extremely hard to come by. Two of the very few to focus on the front were Norman Stone’s The Eastern Front 1914 – 1917 and The Unknown War, by far the most obscure work in Winston Churchill’s monumental multi-volume The World Crisis. Even the authors of these works might have been hard pressed to recall that they had written about this extremely important and overlooked front. I know this from first-hand experience.
A couple of years ago I had dinner with Professor Stone in Budapest. When I mentioned that I spent part of a South Dakota winter reading The Eastern Front, he looked at me with a combination of confusion and bemusement. He then laughed and said, “I didn’t think anyone remembered I wrote that.” I commended him for providing an entry point into that part of the war. Stone’s work was a rare exception. The fact that it was written in 1975 and still considered essential would have surprised no one familiar with the lack of coverage. For much of the 20th century in English language histories, the Eastern Front seemed to start and end with Germany’s crushing victory at the Battle of Tannenberg over the Russians in the early weeks of the war. Never mind that the battle, at least from a strategic standpoint, did little to settle the war. Fighting would continue all along the Eastern Front for three long and largely horrific years.
Classic work - The Eastern Front 1914 - 1917 by Norman Stone
The gap in Eastern Front historiography between the Battle of Tannenberg and the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in English language history books was a yawning chasm. That only began to change during the past decade. The main driver of growing interest in the Eastern Front was the centennial commemorations of the Great War. Publishers became much more interested in areas and aspects of the war that had been overlooked in the past. Scholarly and in several cases popular histories, offered coverage of topics related to the Eastern Front such as the Siege of Przemysl (Alexander Watson’s Fortress), Germany & Austria-Hungary during World War I (Watson again with Ring of Steel), the Gorlice-Tarnow Campaign (Richard DiNardo’s Breakthrough), The Carpathian Winter War of 1915 (Graydon Tunstall’s Blood on the Snow) and Austria-Hungary’s opening campaign for the war on the Eastern Front (Geoffery Wawro’s A Mad Catastrophe) have been among the works that shed light on previously underexplored parts of the Eastern Front. These books were all written by professional historians and are well worth the time it takes to read them. Nevertheless, the most comprehensive history of the Eastern Front happens to be four magnificent volumes that have come from the pen of an amateur.
Total war - Soviet troops in Konigsberg East Prussia 1945
Total War In East Prussia - History Makes A House Call
Prit Buttar was a doctor, not of history, but medicine. Now retired, Dr. Buttar was a General Practitioner at Abingdon surgery just south of Oxford, where he completed part of his studies. He also spent five years as a medical officer and surgeon in the British Army. A man of prodigious intellect, Buttar became interested in the Eastern Front after an unforgettable experience he had with one of his patients in 2002. The woman, an ethnic German who had long since emigrated to Great Britain, had served as a nurse in East Prussia. She proceeded to tell Dr. Buttar her story of survival on the Eastern Front during World War II. As a nurse she had been an eyewitness to the German Army’s collapse as the Red Army invaded and conquered East Prussia. During that time, the region was consumed by an orgy of violence.
It is not an understatement to say that East Prussia in 1944-1945 was one of the most violent places in human history. Murder and rape were commonplace. Ethnic Germans fled the area in droves. Many were lucky to make it out of the region alive. Whatever they left behind was destroyed or stolen. The entire region was a battlefield. From aristocratic homes to remote hamlets, tiny villages to the once sparkling provincial capital of Konigsberg, nothing was safe. Total war took place on an apocalyptic scale. It resulted in the destruction or expulsion of almost every ethnic German in the province. Look on a map of Europe today and East Prussia does not exist. The next time you hear the phrase wiped off the map, think of East Prussia. A steel stake was run through what the Soviets believed was the heartland of German militarism. As for Dr. Buttar, he was riveted by the stories he heard. Little did his patient know that her tales were laying the groundwork for Dr. Buttar’s second career as an historian. After hearing her experiences, Dr. Buttar felt compelled to research and write his first non-fiction work of history. Many more were to come. They would all have one thing in common, the Eastern Front.