A Soccer Story
Posted: July 15th, 2010 | Filed under: Other Sports | 72 Comments »
There were so many interesting and surprising things about covering my first World Cup … but in the end, I would say what was most interesting and surprising was the really cool feeling of being young again.
Here’s what I mean: I know very little about soccer. Oh, I mostly know the rules, I have a rudimentary understanding of strategy, I can appreciate the skill in a basic way, I can get excited when someone does something remarkable. But I don’t KNOW soccer — don’t know the players, don’t know the history, don’t know all the great stories. And it’s the stories that for me bring color and light to a sport like baseball. I don’t think I could love baseball the way I do if I did not know about Babe Ruth’s called shot, Jackie Robinson’s refusal to fight back, Roberto Clemente’s arm, Roger Maris’ hair falling out, Hank Aaron’s box of racist letters, Ted Williams’ bold wish to want people to see him walking down the street and say “There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.”
I don’t think I could love baseball the way I do without remembering the way Pete Rose slid head first, George Brett chasing .400, Dwight Gooden (when he was Dwight) throwing high fastball past the world, Pedro Martinez painting outside corners.
The knuckleball wouldn’t mean as much to me if I didn’t know Bob Uecker’s secret to catching one — wait until it stops rolling and then pick it up.
Albert Pujols’ brilliance would not mean as much to me if I didn’t know about Stan Musial and his peekaboo batting stance that Ted Lyons said looked like a boy looking around a corner to see if the cops were coming.
The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry would not mean so much to me if I didn’t know about Bucky Dent and Dave Roberts. The Giants-Dodgers rivalry would not mean so much to me if I did not know about Bobby Thomson winning the pennant and Juan Marichal clubbing Johnny Roseboro. The Cubs would not be the Cubs if I did not know about 102 years of frustration. Washington’s baseball history would not be quite as poignant if I did not know about our capital’s past of being first in war, first in peace, last in the American League.
The point is, I learned these things, many of them when I was a kid. I didn’t know anything so baseball as an open world, full of discovery, full of stories, full of great characters, full of funny lines. It still can be, and I still hear about teams and players I knew nothing about. But it’s not the same … I know the main characters, and I know the biggest stories. The same is true for football, for basketball, for golf, for just about all of our games. This is what happens when you grow up a sports fan in America. It’s the biggest reason why I love our games.
But … I know almost nothing about soccer’s past. I know only a handful of names, know only a handful of stories. I know Pele’s father cried when Brazil lost the 1950 World Cup final, and Pele promised him that someday he would win the World Cup. I know a bit about how the New York Cosmos tried to make soccer popular by importing gigantic stars to the North American Soccer League. I know Beckham married a Spice Girl. I know how Nick Hornby fell in love with Arsenal. That about covers it.
So, soccer is an open world for me … coming to soccer at the World Cup really felt a bit like being a kid again. And at the World Cup in South Africa people (fans, journalists, strangers on the street) were thrilled to talk soccer, to teach a few basics, to educate an American who showed any curiosity at all. More than once, I heard Kansas City Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt try to explain why he loved soccer — Hunt is in the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame and was for much of his life one of the leading forces in the effort to make the world’s sport more popular here. He told me that he went to the World Cup in 1966 and fell in love with the passion of the game. That was the word he always used — the word everybody tends to use about soccer. Passion. It’s everywhere at a soccer match. It’s on the field. It’s in the stands. It’s in the game reports. People just care SO much, and it’s a difficult thing for a soccer amateur to understand. But people always wanted to share it with me. And I realized when I was there that you don’t have to understand it to love it.
I also heard soccer stories … lots of soccer stories. About Total Football in Holland. About Garra in Uruguay. About Maradona in Argentina. About the importance of beauty in Brazil. About self loathing in England. About the German persistence. About artistry in Spain.
I also heard a story that I had never heard … one that I suppose is extremely famous in soccer communities, probably every bit as famous around the world as the 1958 NFL Championship or Carlton Fisk’s home run or the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team or Michael Jordan’s final shot against Utah is here at home. Someone mentioned it to me in passing while I was in South Africa, and I said something like “What’s that?” The shake of the head suggested that I was missing something EVERYBODY knows. There’s a good chance you’ve heard it already.
The story comes from 1942, in Kiev, which is the capital of the Ukraine and also its largest city. That year, it was the capital of the Soviet Ukraine … and it was very much at the center of Nazi power and inhumanity. The Nazis had taken the city early in their invasion. Kiev is probably most remembered for the horrible tragedy that happened in September of 1941. More than 30,000 Jews were pulled from Kiev and massacred at Babi Yar, a ravine near the city.
The story goes that Kiev had a good soccer team before war — known as Dynamo. After the war started, and Kiev fell into German hands, the team stopped playing soccer, of course. But the players did not want to stop. One of them, a goalkeeper named Mykola Trusevych, started to work at a bakery in the city. He was given the job, apparently, because the owner admired the way he played goal. That owner missed soccer and what it had done for the city, and so he asked Trusevych to put together a team. Trusevych searched the city to find his old teammates from Dynamo. After a while, many of the players began to work at this bakery. And they would sneak out to a field to practice. They called themselves FC Start.
There were others who wanted to play soccer at the time — something to remove themselves from the madness surrounding them. I’ve often thought about the Japanese-Americans who were held in internment camps here during the war, and the many stories you would hear about them playing baseball behind barbed wire. There is something so human about that, and so the players of FC Start joined this rag-tag league in Kiev, filled with other teams of other players who just wanted to feel a little bit normal in a time of madness*.
*One of the trips a group of us made in South Africa was to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was jailed for so long. It was an emotional experience, of course (and not only because I almost lost it with seasickness in the short ferry ride over). We saw the garden area where Mandela had hidden the book he was writing. We saw his cell. We walked into other cells, read stories on the walls, heard from a former prisoner who took us to the limestone quarry where he had worked. But the thing that stuck with me most came from our guide, who had been a political prisoner and who was the leading goal scorer in the prison soccer games one year. The guide, Dumizami Mwandla, remembered precisely how many goals he had scored. Eighteen.
The Germans heard about FC Start and suggested a little soccer match against a German army team. If this sounds a lot like the story of the movie “Victory,” well, yes this is the inspiration. But this story goes in a different direction, to say the least. The Germans suggested opening up the stadium and playing a match to build up morale, to help the city feel a bit more normal again. According to the story, the players were torn. Many of them thought that playing the Germans in a time of war was terribly wrong. Others thought that if they could beat the Germans, it would, in fact, lift the spirits of the people. They decided to play.
Many of the “Victory” elements are there. The FC Start players were malnourished and exhausted compared to the Germans. The referee was apparently an unabashed Nazi supporter. The Germans scored first and played violently.
Only then, the players from Kiev came together. They scored the tying goal. And then, not long before the end of the first half, they scored the go-ahed goal. They led 2-1, and the fans in the stands cheered loudly enough that supposedly German police rushed down, fired shots up in the air and threatened anyone found cheering again. FC Start scored a third goal before the whistle.
Then came halftime, and according to “Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel,” a German officer came into the locker room and said this: “That’s great — you’ve played some very good football and we appreciate it. You have done quite enough to uphold your honor as sportsmen. But now, in the second half, you don’t play so keenly. You must understand. You must lose. You must. The German army hasn’t lost a single game yet, certainly not in occupied territory. This is an order. So, if you don’t lose the game, you’ll be shot.”
Well … here it is. We talk a lot about courage in sports, and it’s usually a ridiculous use of the word. Courage to make a putt. Courage to drive in the winning run. Courage to stand in the pocket. Now, here, this is at the heart of courage — what do you do? Do you lay down in the second half, lose the game, lose what matters most to you in order to stay alive? Or do you keep playing in the belief that this game is more than a game, that winning and losing is more than a score?
The players from Kiev kept playing. They scored a fourth goal, and then a fifth goal, and the Ukrainian fans cheered and cried in joy. There’s a story that late in the match, a defender named Oleksiy Klimenko broke through the German defense, beat the goalkeeper and, instead of simply punching the ball into the net, turned and kicked the ball as hard as he could back into the middle of the field. The final score was 5-3. Every version I’ve heard insists that the referee stopped the match long before the 90 minutes were up. It is said that guard dogs were let loose on the fans.
And … then what? Well, the story as told by Eduardo Galeano in the impossibly beautiful “Soccer in Sun and Shadow” is that the players were immediately captured and “all 11 were shot with their shirts on at the end of a cliff.” Some say they were shot a few months later. Other reports say none of this is exactly right. Apparently there was another game. And this time the players from FC Start clearly were warned that if they did not lose, if they did not stand down, they would be shot. They won again. And this time, several players were arrested, questioned, tortured, and four were later killed in a labor camp.
There have been people who have studied what is now known as “The Death Match” … and there are a few who insist that the death of the players had little or nothing to do with winning the game. Time blunts emotion and leaves behind vague hints. But the story is still told, year after year, and maybe to know the story is to understand soccer just a little bit more, to understand why it means so much to so many people all over the world. The stadium where the FC Start and the Germans played the match is still standing in Kiev — it is now called “Start Stadium.” There’s a monument in front to the players who would rather win and die.
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thanks joe.
Wonderful story, and you’re correct, one I’d never heard before. We silly Americans!
However, one quibble:
You’ll never find “the Ukraine” on a map. The name of the country is, and always has been, very simply, Ukraine.
I have never heard that story, either. Thanks Joe!
Wow. Great story.
I like the reaction you got when asking what the Death Match was.
It’s funny how we expect others to know the stories and people we hold so dear. I was on the other side of this when traveling overseas, and realizing none of the sports fans on my tour from outside the US knew who Lou Gehrig was.
“I understand if you don’t know who the ‘luckiest man on the face of the earth is,’ but the guy’s got a disease named after him for crying out loud.”
a great story…one i was most certainly not familiar with.
thanks joe
Terrific recounting of a story that was, admittedly, already familiar to this soccer fan. I can’t suggest enough that you read Simon Kuper’s “Football Against the Enemy” and Franklin Foer’s “How Soccer Explains The World,” both of which are full of this stuff.
Joe, the best book on the subject is Dynamo by Andy Dougan
http://www.amazon.com/Dynamo-Triumph-Tragedy-Nazi-Occupied-Kiev/dp/1592284671/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279227816&sr=8-6
Its one of my favorite books and stories of all time.
Jesus. Breathtaking story. Thanks.
And thanks for the tip on “Soccer in Sun and Shadow”. Just ordered it.
100% identify with the appeal of watching a sport you know next to nothing about. It’s truly one of my favorite things about soccer.
As recently as this time last year, the extent of my knowledge about soccer was that you couldn’t use your hands. No joke — I didn’t even know how many players were on each side. Then my daughter (she’s 9) decided she wanted to play. My wife and I very much encourage both our kids to try new things, so we signed her up.
She had wonderful coaches. They not only taught her how to play, they taught me the game as well. Any question I asked, they patiently answered.
This year, Philly received an expansion MLS team. I asked my daughter if she’d be interested in going to the first-ever game, played at the football stadium. I didn’t really know what to expect, other than a day out with my daughter.
I was overwhelmed by the passion. That’s exactly the right word. This was the first-ever MLS game in Philly, and the passion was there. The singing and chanting and cheering and blaming the ref for blown calls. All of it. And it’s all new and exciting, for both of us. We’re now season ticket holders for the Philadelphia Union. It’s been a wonderfully fun experience so far.
Thanks, Joe. It’s a story I hadn’t heard yet — like so many of soccer’s great stories.
“Ha ha, the Ukraine. Do you know what the Ukraine is? It’s a sitting
duck. A road apple, Newman. The Ukraine is weak. It’s feeble. I think it’s
time to put the hurt on the Ukraine.”
Beautiful, Joe. Thanks.
Great story Joe!
You realize of course that those poor bastards would probably have ended up in the Gulag when the war was over, for collaborating with the enemy.
I assume you’ve heard of it, but another great soccer story is the WWI Christmas Truce, when german and british soldiers started singing christmas songs at each other from their respective trenches. Eventually, the singing turned into talking, burying the dead, and, because it was the only game both groups knew and happened to have a ball for, soccer matches.
Here’s a link with a little more detail.
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/truce.asp
Tremendous article, joe. your point about the heart of a game being in it’s stories, and the excitement of hearing those stories for the first time, strikes a real chord with me. i took the opposite journey to yourself – i grew up in ireland as a soccer supporter, then discovered baseball five years ago. ever since i have been devouring the anecdotal history of the game with relish, and i’ve found no writer greater at conveying those stories, that wonder, that passion, than yourself. Thank you, and long may you continue!
Great strory. But there was no World Cup final in 1950. There was a 4 team round robin to decide the winner. As luck would have it the last match turned out to be the top 2 teams (Brazil & Uruguay).
Also there is a wonderful book about this story called ‘Dynamo’ by Andy Dougan.
I fell head over heels for soccer during the 2006 World Cup at age 50+; right after that Cup I subscribed to Fox Soccer Channel, Gol TV, and Setanta, and have avidly followed the Premier League and La Liga ever since, as well as having season tickets for my local MLS team. And what you describe has definitely been a big part of it — learning all the soccer stories and lore have put me back in touch with the sports fan I was as a kid, learning all about US sports. Wish I’d gotten into it sooner, but better late than never.
btc@14
Great book for history: “The Glory of Their Times” by Lawrence Ritter. You’ll love it.
Just one more story from Joe that makes me look inside myself.
Wow… I mean, just wow. There’s really nothing more to say about this.
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Just want to add my voice in praise of “Soccer in Sun and Shadow.” It reads like a book of myths, precisely told tales that reach beyond rules and regulations, wins and losses, and, yes, maybe even the absolute truth to reveal the soul of the sport. It will give you goosebumps.
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Wow. Just perfect. Thank you so much.
I had not heard this story before, probably because I am not great with soccer. But wow, what a powerful story.
Thank you.
They should have never played the Germans; telling them instead to fuck off (or, get lost, for you innocent readers).
Thanks Joe – that story was new to me too, and I love your dedication to journalism in reporting the uncertainties in the story rather than making the best narrative out of it.
Might I suggest that the Babi Yar massacre was more an atrocity than a tragedy? Not trying to be PC or anything – the word “tragedy” has just gotten so hard to use with any vigor and force now that it can denote dogs hit by cars and 93-year-olds dying in their sleep at the end of long and dignified lives.
#25, of course everybody’s welcome to express an opinion, but do you really feel like you can put yourself in their shoes enough to know what they should have done? Occupation’s got to be one of the hardest situations to bear honorably… to some extent even existing day to day is a collaboration.
Thanks so much Joe. I’d love to hear more great soccer stories you picked up over there; I’m a very mild soccer fan but have a hard time appreciating the sport (the diving, the low scores, the diving, the diving, the diving, and the diving). Hearing stories, whether incredible ones like the one you just told or the more mundane is an amazing window into the passion soccer fans have for their sport.
I propose a weekly feature(or, knowing Joe, a daily feature)! Great Soccer Stories, As Told To The Childlike American reporter!
Gol.
@25/26 — I kind of agree with Damon Rutherford…it was a no-win situation. If FC Start wins, the Germans will exact revenge somehow(I didn’t quite foresee murder, but they are zee Germans), and if FC Start loses, the citizenry are further demoralized.
I know nothing about baseball. I know nothing about basketball (well, NBA basketball). I’ve never even watched a single game of American football. Despite my father being a golf freak, that sport’s lost on me too. I’m a twenty-six year-old Uruguayan female and I have no idea who you are (from the comments, I’m assuming you must be a big sports journalist in the States). I discovered your blog from your Uruguayan garra post. And after what happened with Suarez, I decided to check back and follow the blog’s feed. I’m glad I did. I’ll be honest – I don’t read any of posts about baseball, or basketball, or golf… I just can’t follow them. But, to get to the point, I truly think you’re one of the best sports writers, just from the way you write about football. You can write like this despite being new to it. Despite just getting the passion, the feelings, the emotions that that sport carries with it. Being Uruguayan – and especially because of the things that happened during this World Cup, I’m not just talking about the language barrier – it’s VERY hard to make people understand what everything that happened means to us as a country, as a nation, as a group of people that’s always been trampled on but now has something to feel PROUD. I realize your post isn’t about that at all, but I think it helps people get there. Just a tiny baby step, but stories like these help people get there. Thank you and I really hope you continue to write about football/soccer.
That’s a very nice story I never heard, but am I the only one whose reaction to this is, “Man, those Ukranians were stupid?”
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“…but do you really feel like you can put yourself in their shoes enough to know what they should have done? ”
It was more what *I* would have done. Or what I hope I would have done.
For anyone that’s interested in learning more about the history of soccer, I HIGHLY recommend the documentary series “The Beautiful Game.”
It was made in 2001, so it could probably afford another episode to sum up the past decade. But I would put the series up there with Ken Burns’ “Baseball.” Although I’ve been a footie fan for many years, I was very ignorant of the history of the sport pre-1994. But this series is an EXCELLENT introduction to the game’s greatest teams, characters, evolution, and cultures throughout the world. It’s available on Amazon- 18 dvds for only 40 bucks. Pretty great deal.
If given a choice I would have never played the match in the first place because I see it as “Lose/Lose.”
But it could be there was pressure placed to play in the first place; they were the Germans after all. In that case, I’d like to think I’d play to win despite the threat but I know from experience that you cannot figure how you will respond in true life and death situations.
I admire their courage and I especially admire Joe’s ability to write to try to make people see that words like “courage,” “warrior,” “hero,” or any other similar words ordinarily don’t really apply to sports.
Well done, Joe.
Yes, the Russians suffered horribly from the German invasion during WWII (about 10 million civilians were killed). But any tales of Russian heroism during the war should be tempered by a recognition that nothing the Germans did to Russians could equal in horror what the Russians had done to themselves over the previous two decades. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people were slaughtered by Russia during the 1920′s and ’30′s. The Kiev soccer story asks us to buy into the myth that
Russia’s suffering in the 20th Century was caused by the barbarism of Hitler. It wasn’t.
Yet another example of why joe’s the best sportswriter on the web.
Ryan F. – the disease is not really named after Lou Gehrig precisely – it is called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS. It is known as Lou Gehrig’s disease in North America, but from what I can tell, it is ALS (or some translation) in most other places.
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Great story Joe, good to see you heard lots of football stories in South Africa. You missed a great opportunity to use the word equalizer* though when describing the “tying goal”.
*There is no way equalizer could ever work in baseball the way it does with football. For one American sports don’t really have draws and so the significance of pulling level is not as much as in football where a draw could actually mean victory e.g. playing a cup game over two legs where away goals count double (if scores are level)
Also “go-ahead goal” just seems out of place to me, There is nothing wrong with it as a phrase but I personally relate it to American sports, specifically baseball. Again just to clarify I have no problem with the phrase and it probably resonates more with all your readers in the USA but for me (I’m English) it is a little odd seeing it.
On another note Joe, Fulham have lot their manager to Liverpool. Roy Hodgson did a terrific job with Fulham and I can’t blame him for moving to a bigger club but it now leaves me wondering if the great strides taken last season will now be reversed and we will see a Fulham side struggling to stay up again.
DIT, he is a great writer. I have come to believe that sport is sport because of the humanity – it is really hard to come to a new sport at an adult age (ask most of us here trying to come to soccer – I fell hard for your Forlan this past summer but I still don’t feel soccer like you and most of the world). If you get a chance to watch, try to take in a baseball game with someone who can tell the stories – baseball is perfect for stories that get punctuated by the action.
Steve in 36, Ukranians aren’t Russians. They’re Ukranians who were occupied by the Russians. Yes, Russians were bad in the early 20th century. But if you take from Joe’s story that, gee, we’re being too nice to the Russians, well…I don’t think you got the point.
Cheers, Joe. That was great.
Great strory! Thanks
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Wow. Somehow the honest uncertainty about how the story ended in real life makes it an even better story. I don’t understand why.
Tom – #34…the set on Amazon with that names is 7 DVDs, not 18……and a couple of reviewers thought it kinda light on action. Is that the same set, or is there another version?
Quite simply, stories such as this transcend sport and would be equally as moving if the game in question was soccer, baseball, team handball, or unicycle hockey.
P.S. – Unicycle Hockey is a “real” sport. Their website:
http://www.mpch-mainz.mpg.de/~sander/uni/
Thanks for bringing this story into the light. Futbol is full of passion…
@DIT (#30): Welcome to the site. Nice to have you around, enjoying Joe’s work with the rest of us. My daughter and I were both taken in by your country’s achievements this World Cup. It was quite fun to watch.
@Geoffrey (#40): Also “go-ahead goal” just seems out of place to me, There is nothing wrong with it as a phrase but I personally relate it to American sports, specifically baseball. Again just to clarify I have no problem with the phrase and it probably resonates more with all your readers in the USA but for me (I’m English) it is a little odd seeing it.
What word or phrase is used over on your side of the pond in that situation?
Another book recommendation: David Goldblatt’s “The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer.” It’s long but great!
Never saw “Victory”, but “The Great Escape” (Steve McQueen and others) dragged in the same prisoners vs Germans story, moving it to Paris.
Version I heard, the bakery’s best player, a striker born in a town close to Kiev, switched sides at the half, saying he just wanted to win. Name of LeBronjuk.
@38, thanks for the clarification, but I am very familiar with ALS. It was more of a joke than anything else, but also illustrating how important he is to our sports/national culture and how irrelevant to others.
But still, a number of the folks on my tour were from Canada, where if I understand correctly it is called ‘Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” Still no idea. Plus a few of them were from Toronto and claimed to at least ‘follow’ baseball.
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@30: You and your fellow Urayuayans have much to be proud of
@52: Quite funny
@31: Try to understand these Ukrainians were occupied by the Germans. People under extreme duress either fight back or fold like a cheap lawnchair. They chose to fight, and I’d like to think we Americans would do the same. Oh, and by the way, the Nazis killed 20 MILLION Russians, most of them civilians.
Good story, makes you think. The Ukrainians really had no choice but to play — and win. The way the Nazis worked, they probably could have just shot the team for holding practices without proper authorization. It’s one those you-know-you’re-dead-anyway situations, so make it mean something.
“But … I know almost nothing about soccer’s past. I know only a handful of names, know only a handful of stories.”
Joe, if you want to learn about one other name from soccer’s past, the guy you need to know about is Sir Stanley Matthews – the player that Pele said was “the man who taught us the way football should be played.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Matthews
And what’s unique about Matthews is that he wasn’t a great goalscorer (although he certainly could score when needed). What he did was dribble, and pass, and cross the ball like no other player before, or possibly since. He was the consumate team player, and in a career that lasted at the top level from 1932 to 1965, he was never booked – never once given a yellow card. The 1953 FA Cup Final when Blackpool came back from a 3-1 deficit to win 4-3, is universally known as “The Matthews Final”. And Matthews didn’t score a goal in it…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_FA_Cup_Final
If soccer is indeed “the beautiful game”, Matthews is the player most responsible for first making it so.
Thank you, Joe. That’s it, really– Thank You.
A story like this makes me realize just how very lucky Americans have been. No disrespect to Jackie Robinson or Hank Aaron or anyone else, but there has never been a situation in American sport where it was literally life or death. We should probably thank God every day for those two wonderful oceans which largely shielded us from a century of death.
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@49 John in Philly
We wouldn’t use any particular phrase to describe the goal. It would just be mentioned as x scored to take the lead or something similar. Because the game ended up at 5-3, the goal to make it 2-1 would not be seen as a big deal unless it completely changed the momentum of the game, or was a spectacular strike.
We do however like the use of the phrase “the winner” to describe the winning goal e.g. then in injury time x scored the winner
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It’s called Ukraine not the Ukraine. This isn’t Seinfeld
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Thoughtful sportswriting about life. Who would have thunk it. Thanks for all the great articles, Joe.
A couple of people have had a problem with saying “the Ukraine”. I am not sure they are right. I get it, the country’s name is “Ukraine” and that is what is on a map. But it seems to me that any time a country starts with the letter “U” that is pronounced “U” (rather than how Uruguay is pronounced), we put “the” in front of the country’s name when talking about it. For instance, I live in the United States of America or I live in the United Kingdom. Or I live in the Ukraine. Not I live in United States of America or I live in United Kingdom or I live in Ukraine. This is unlike other countries, I realize. I live in Poland, I live in Russia, I live in France.
It seems unique to how English speaking people talk about those countries.
Carry on.
This is not a historical or political blog, but just to give a little background on Ukraine’s position at the outset of WWII, they were literally caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. In the 1930s, millions of ethnic Ukrainians had been killed by the Soviet regime, either through execution or forcible starvation. They hated the Soviet Russians and welcomed the Nazi invasion in 1941 with open arms. Their belief that the Nazis came as liberators was quickly debunked by the Nazis’ actions (essentially the Nazis had the same plans for the Ukraine as the Soviets did in the 1930s, which was to depopulate it for the most part, removing its citizenry to Western Siberia, and then importing their own citizens to it). From a military standpoint, the Nazis failure to utilize the available resources, including manpower, in the Ukraine and White Russia and Georgia against the Soviets was their biggest blunder of the war. They turned willing allies into enemies.
Geoffrey @63: Thanks. I’m still learning soccer/football lingo. I’m having a great time, though, going to MLS games with my daughter!
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Thanks to all those suggesting books — having grown up with season tickets to the Washington Diplomats (and no Senators), soccer was my first sporting love (with (Jon Miller doing the radio broadcasts!. . . baseball began creeping in as my father relented to the idea of Washington not getting a ball team back and began taking us to Baltimore . . . to the NASL’s demise . . . but also, significantly, to the local library’s complete dearth of soccer books. Baseball books became all I read from 4th to 9th grade and, though love of soccer is native to me, I’ve never gone out and pursued good soccer books.
Joe, that note from the Uruguayana should go in your wallet.