Blood in the Forest: The End of the Second World War in the Courland Pocket by Vincent Hunt

I'm always interested in diving into historic accounts that try their best to tell a story few are familiar with or will ever discover without having in-depth knowledge of specific events, people, places, etc.  "Blood in the Forest" is one such account but, unfortunately, it is too often marred by a weak narrative that reads as if it was written by someone with a passing interest and knowledge of the subject at hand.  More often than not the author is interested in tugging at heartstrings rather than letting the historical record and eye witnesses speak for themselves.

This is not a straight forward chronology of events but rather the author's trips from town to town that he intersperses with historical details and discussions about the history of Latvia, the Eastern Front, the Courland Pocket, the Soviet Union, the Holocaust, collaboration, etc. As such, there is much repetition throughout.  Nevertheless, all these topics have entire libraries devoted to research done by academics, journalists, and amateurs which could have readily helped create a historical record of this period/events but on more than one occasion the source material mentioned came from various websites rather than research trips to libraries or archives.  No matter how helpful, insightful, or emotionally draining eye-witness accounts are (and some of them are quite emotional and deserve to be told and better known) there is no excuse for not contextualizing better the various events these veterans and survivors went through with at least some additional primary or even secondary research.

With that being said, this text makes a good starting point for looking at the latter period of the war and the difficult decisions Latvians had to make as brother fought against brother because of poor luck or a fate no longer theirs to dictate.  Red Army offensives launched against the Courland pocket were bloody affairs that never achieved their set objective, only resulting in countless casualties on both sides.  Yet blame needs to be placed on those soldiers fighting on the other side as well who knew there was no hope left but still continued to take a devastating toll on their Red Army attackers, who often included Latvians in their ranks.  This is a chapter of the Second World War and the Eastern Front that defies the black and white view so many have of the war as 'good' versus 'evil.'  Here, among these pages, the reader will encounter multiple shades of gray surrounded by blood and tragedy.