“I WILL SHOW YOU WHERE THE IRON CROSS GROWS”

             Perhaps the most famous and recognizable medal of World War II is the German Iron Cross. I’ve been a lifelong student of WWII all my life. I remember watching the hundreds of WWII films that were made in the 50s, and perhaps thousands since then, and more than one film has made reference to the Iron Cross. As a teen, I had a German couple who moved next door to my family in Dallas. He had served in the German Army as a photographer on the Eastern Front. He shared with my father and me many of the photographs he had taken. Until that moment, I did not know anything about the Eastern Front in WWII. You can see my published short story I wrote about meeting this German soldier in my blog post, “Like a Good German Soldier.” Sometime in the early 1980s, I once met a veteran in Berwick, Pennsylvania, who showed me a Luger and held an Iron Cross medal he had brought back from his service time in WWII.

As a teen at  W.T. White High School in Dallas, the only class I have memories of is my English class. Our teacher had us read three books that made a deep impression on me: Romeo & Juliet (she also encouraged us to see the 1968 film), The Red Badge of Courage (I still have that paperback), and All Quiet on the Western Front, of which three movie versions would be made–1930, 1979, and 22. I was fascinated to learn that the author, Erich Maria Remarque, was a World War I veteran and that the novel was semi-autobiographical.

My interest in the Eastern Front was further stimulated by reading Alexandr Solzhenitzen’s novel August 1914, as well as the numerous references I found in reading the three-volume set, The Gulag Archipelago. Fortuitously, I discovered Willi Heinrich’s novel,  The Cross of Iron, which was also made into a movie. (You can see the trailer below).  The title of my blog post, “I will show you where the Iron Cross grows,” is a quote from the novel and from the movie, which is said to be one of the highest-rated war films of our age.  From this novel, I moved on to Heinrich’s second novel, Crack of Doom. Heinrich was a soldier on the Eastern Front. This reading was followed by The Devil’s Guard, a historical novel about partisan hunters in Russia, who joined the French Foreign Legion and fought the Viet Cong in Vietnam.

Perhaps the longest and most revealing read about the Eastern Front in World War II was a memoir, The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. It is so well written and so full of sensory information that I could feel the hunger the soldiers felt as well as the bone-breaking cold of Russia.

Here are the covers for the books I have mentioned in this blog post:

HERE IS THE TRAILER FOR THE CROSS OF IRON MOVIE: