When repatriated prisoners began returning from the Soviet Union reciting communist propaganda, it was charged that their indoctrination had been designed to create “class hatreds between officers and enlisted men.”39 It had, but many demobilized veterans returned from other places than the U.S.S.R. cynical and contemptuous of the officers who had led them in battle. This was especially true among soldiers who had been ordered to fight to the bitter end in the fanatic and futile final campaigns of the war. The group cohesion and discipline of the military hierarchy had not been built, as its
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