Smelser and Davies, colleagues at the University of Utah, describe in this work a fundamental change in the American understanding of how World War II was fought on the Russian Front. Wartime sympathy for the Russians was eroded by a postwar bombardment of publications from former Wehrmacht generals who had commanded in Russia, officers of the new Bundeswehr who had fought there as captains and majors, and ordinary soldiers who had survived. Whether personal memoirs in a pulp magazine or sophisticated military analysis, the subtext was the same. German soldiers had kept their shields clean, fighting an honorable war against a brutal enemy. Atrocities were the responsibility of the civilian Party apparatus and the Waffen SS.

The authors describe this one-sided view as being accepted and propagated by three subcultures. U.S. military officers sought guidelines for fighting the Russians. Civilian historians working with the military accepted interpreting the Wehrmacht outside its National Socialist context. Popular writers used the Germans' romantic/heroic self-image as the basis for presenting the eastern front in terms of a “Lost Cause” in language similar to the “gunpowder and magnolias” vocabulary surrounding the Confederacy.

The process developed in Cold-War contexts that encouraged accepting Germans (West Germans, at least), as allies while objectifying the Russians as a faceless, soulless mass. The German experience also offered hope that fighting spirit and technical superiority might, should it come to hostilities, stand off the Soviet Union without a nuclear Armageddon. Youth conditioned to military service by the Cold War welcomed remote romanticizing of the Eastern Front as a fantasy-world alternative to realities their fathers and uncles only alluded to. Responding to a growing market, book clubs, magazines, and the History Channel, war gamers, military reenactors, and the Internet contributed to a self-reinforcing popular myth that continues to flourish long after the reunification of Germany and the implosion of the USSR.

The authors use text and illustrations to depict a pattern of jacket blurbs, tables of contents, Web sites, and game designs they describe as preventing any serious engagement with either the true nature of the war in the east, or the true extent of the suffering the Germans inflicted on tens of millions from the basest of motives. From one perspective, they make much from little. Alternative military history is indeed popular—as a pastime. Its scenarios range from Persian victory at Marathon to Mongol conquest of Europe; variant outcomes in the Russo-German War are only a subcategory. Third Reich military memorabilia thrives—but in a niche market. The world of gamers and reenactors seems particularly to concern the authors. Serious participants are again, however, relatively few and overwhelmingly concentrate on the American Revolution and the Civil War. Eastern Front enthusiasts—who in passing by a disproportionate number of the books romanticizing the Eastern Front—are a minority within a minority, as a rule, at some pains to deny sympathy with the Third Reich.

That denial, sincere or not, responds to wider contexts. Smelser and Davies correctly stress that Americans focus on the war in the west at the expense of Russia. Within that parameter the standard works, from Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers through Audie Murphy's memoir To Hell and Back to long-running comics such as Sergeant Fury, depict German soldiers not as romanticized role models, but as dangerous and deadly enemies. But the TV show “Hogan's Heroes” has arguably done more to foster an innocuous image of the Wehrmacht than all of the faux heroic stories with a Russian setting ever published in English. Even then the German/Nazi remains a stock popular-culture villain—usually as an embodiment of ultimate evil.

The book's perspective is limited in another way. The German monopoly of Eastern Front narrative was made possible in good part by the USSR's Cold-War determination to control every aspect of the master story of the Great Fatherland Patriotic War. Entire campaigns, such as the 1942-43 disaster at Rzhev, simply disappeared from the Soviet account. Ordinary soldiers' experiences were submerged in the Soviet aggregate. Most publication on the war was official, so turgidly propagandistic and hagiographic that it remained untranslated and unmarketed in the west. What Smelser and Davis call heroic romanticizing had no effective competition, so like Darwin's finches, it filled every interpretive niche.

The release of Russian primary sources since the fall of the Soviet Union has enabled balanced analysis at academic levels. David Glantz and Catherine Merridale are only two of a whole generation of scholars at this new cutting edge. Popular writers are beginning to follow. A difference in American perspectives on the Eastern Front is nevertheless likely to persist. Russia's war story continues to emphasize the collective. Most German material is individual. Even unit histories, in contrast to their U.S. counterparts, tend to be structured around biographies and personal narratives. This reflects a German cultural pattern of processing war as a Bildungserlebnis: a developmental experience. The German way to tell what Tim O' Brien calls “a true war story” in turn reinforces a central western myth. From David and Goliath and the 300 Spartans to Tolkien's trilogy and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” heroism is defined as individual struggle against overwhelming odds. Eastern Front romanticism adds the paradox that never did soldiers fight better in a worse cause. It offers as well the appeal of taboo-breaking: engaging with extreme forms of masculinity in an era when male values are increasingly questioned.

Eastern Front romanticism thus has cultural as well as intellectual matrices that are a good deal more complex than Smelser and Davis acknowledge. It does not denigrate this work to say that it is incomplete. Nor is it inappropriate to warn of “traffic-light syndrome”: the Nazis used traffic lights; therefore they are everywhere eternally suspect. Availability of technical data, orders of battle, uniforms, and regalia have made the Red Army of World War II the latest thing in gamer chic and reenactor fashion. Is a warning against romanticized Communism becoming correspondingly apropos?