Diving In To Panther Soup
Categories: Travel , Staff Picks , Nonfiction
In 2004, British travel writer John Gimlette enticed Putnam Flint, an 85-year-old American veteran of World War II to return to Europe and retrace the journey of his Tank Destroyer unit (nicknamed The Panthers) sixty years earlier. The result is Panther Soup: Travels through Europe in War and Peace, a fascinating book that considers lingering effects of the great conflict on the land, the people, and cultures of Europe, as much as it does the war itself. The author remarks on how the combatants, especially the Germans, so often named their killing machines after large cats: “It’s odd to think of the European chaos as the work of cats, a sort of feline stew, a Panthersuppe.” And thus, he discovers his title.
With Flint and Flint’s grandson, Gimlette begins the journey in Marseilles, the oldest, most spacious, and most notorious city (for it’s crime, hookers, poor accommodations, and anti-authoritarian populace) in France, where the American 7th Army landed in December of 1944. Gimlette and company push north up the Rhone River valley, just as the American army did in following the retreating Germans 60 years before.
Strangely, Flint’s 824th Tank Destroyers fought in support of the 397th Infantry Regiment, but were not well equipped to confront superior German armor—much less, to destroy it—burdened as they were with ponderous, poorly armored, and noisy half-track vehicles. (Later, the half-tracks were replaced by M18 Hellcat, the fastest tracked vehicle of the war.)
Gimlette throws out some astounding numbers. The French spent over 5 billion francs to build the Maginot Line (which the Germans ignored), shifting enough earth and concrete to bury the city of London to a depth of 20 feet. Until 1942, the Germans controlled France with a garrison of 30,000 soldiers, about the same number of men as were in the Paris police force. The Germans looted 320 million bottles of wine, per year!
Along the journey through France, Alsace, Lorraine, and into Germany and Austria, Gimlette seeks of evidence of the war in the landscape and the rebuilt towns, and in the memories of the locals who survived the war. (An estimated 47 million civilians died in World War II) Flint, himself, is reticent concerning death. “Flint would never talk about the people who’d died. It was almost as if some soldierly pact existed between him those he killed.”
For Flint and The Panthers, operations ended in the Tyrol, the last stronghold of the SS, 800 miles from Marseilles. For Gimlette, the present-day journey ends with a visit to Erwin Rommel’s son, a physician who lives in a suburb of Stuttgart.
Panther Soup is compelling nonfiction for those who like to read about the wars of recent history, as well as those who enjoy travel books. It brings real detail and focus to the big, messy, ugly business of 20th century warfare.
