[jumpy]

'The Forgotten Soldier' is a great read, and if not a verbatim factual account (as claimed by some) it certainly has enough of the feel for life on the eastern front to have my esteem for anyone who suffered it.
Another good one is 'Sniper on the Eastern Front' pretty brutal stuff, but a good read none the less.

On another note, there was a history channel program on about the Waffen SS no so long back; one of the men they interviewed was speaking about a russian attack on their trenches: he said 'this russian, a huge fellow attacked me with his bayonet, down in the trench... and, ...I don't like to speak about what I did then. Well, I bit him, with my teeth, in the throat ...like an animal, I killed him.' or words to that effect. He goes on to talk about the overwhelming will to live and the things you become capable of in those conditions. Most of the veterans are all visibly scarred emotionally, which becomes so clear when they are recounting their experiences; the look in their eyes, as they relive events of 60 years ago like it was just yesterday, is a painful thing to behold.

TBH I think there's always going to be a little bit of 'storytelling' involved with books of these kinds; after all they are not textbooks - look to our modern counterparts 'Bravo 20' (andy mcnab) and 'The One That Got Away' (chris ryan) they might be based to a greater or lesser extent on reality, but remember that a factual account of such things would most likely be rejected out of hand by a publisher for being too dull, so we have embellishment for the benefit of the reader and sales.
Perhaps our own resident novelist could shed some light on the business of negotiating a manuscript with publishers?