Log 6

The more I kept reading Tigers In The Mud, the more interesting thoughts and descriptions that I had found. The author, Otto Carius saw things from unique perspectives, for he was in a different position, country and era. For example, the German soldiers at that time never had a good evaluation for their equipment, which was totally opposite to the common sense nowadays. When Otto met his new tank: the fierce Tiger tank, all readers could receive was his complaint. The shape looked just like a metal lunch box. Compared to their opponent: Russian’s T-34, it seems like the engineer didn’t put too much effort on it. The appearance of Tiger just looked not reliable or advanced enough. And the mobility only met their minimum requirement, the weight of Tigers just made it couldn’t be fast. Overweight also puts a huge burden on the suspension, increasing the time and the cost of maintenance. These evaluations showed a totally opposite fact that is out of people’s expectations in our generations. 

In video games, movies or TV series nowadays, people always tend to have an infinite delusion for Germany technologies during World War 2. In their imagination, out of this world, there were always certain “Hitler’s super weapons” that were hidden in a secret abandoned bunker. They could be anything, sometimes they might be elements in sci-fi movies, like nuclear weapons or biological monsters; Sometimes they also could be something more fantasy, like magic or a teleport gate. Well, usually they played the role of MacGuffin in a story, no matter what they were. But they definitely showed people’s ridiculous creativity and imagination for that wartime history.

I always thought that this kind of fiction just popped up in recent years. I finally found myself wrong after I found out about this alternate history novel: The Man in the High Castle. Written by Philip Kindred Dick in 1962, The Man in the High Castle described an alternative history of the war in which the Allied Powers conquered the whole world. Even judging it with a modern view, the plots of this novel were still extremely amazing and bizarre. But that’s the spirit of an alternate history novel, I think. No matter what kind of unbelievable plot or assumptions were made, they must be based on true true history, and answer a “What if” question logically. By that, we readers can find our joy from the combination of truth and absurdity. After finishing the book I was reading right now, I think I would like to read this interesting  novel, see how people imagined this kind of subject matter sixty years ago.