The title is not great. The story is so full of incident it becomes schematic, with little room for character. It endsThis review first appeared here.
The title is not great. The story is so full of incident it becomes schematic, with little room for character. It ends abruptly. Usually, I like how these old books are around 120, 130 pages. Modern books are so bloated by comparison, loose and not edited hard enough. These are written to a fixed format. But in this case the author has crammed so much in the book is a little compromised.
Even so, many details ring true, and I confess I found it adequate entertainment. But the bar is pretty low -- I am an easy mark for such stories. Where others watch police procedurals or murder mysteries, I read these old stories. Like a TV mystery, you know what's going to happen in broad terms, but the details always differ. The detective will, in the end, solve the murder.
This tells the story of a British antisubmarine group -- sloops and corvettes, led by a sole destroyer -- hunting for a German submarine wolf pack. Intrigue about a Nazi 'political' on the crew of the lead sub upsets the apple cart, and other incidents occur, and then it all ends.
I cannot recommend it, really, unless you're already a reader of such books; and in truth what are the odds you'd ever see a copy anyway?...more
The cover of this book, and its title, would give you the idea that the whole book is about a lone man escaping from aThis review first appeared here.
The cover of this book, and its title, would give you the idea that the whole book is about a lone man escaping from a damaged submarine at the limit of its depth range. A kind of Gravity underwater. This is only strengthened by the author's bio, which refers to Mars as a wartime submarine ace; it sounds like he was a larger-than-life figure.
In truth, the escape occupies the first few pages -- and it's pretty good stuff. The rest of the book is subterfuge and intrigue on an Italian island, complete with a villa occupied by a beautiful woman, educated in the USA and ready to escape occupied Europe with our (Australian) hero who is a much-needed expert on radar.
Commando operations, a love story, a naval adventure, brave resistance fighters -- it's all here in 130 pulpy pages. It's not going to win any prizes, but it's quite a fun read. It's just not what the cover would imply.
Someone on Goodreads gave this a 1 star review because it is not what they are interested in. I confess I find that weird. I mean, a Review from here.
Someone on Goodreads gave this a 1 star review because it is not what they are interested in. I confess I find that weird. I mean, a book could be a very good example of something that you are not interested in. Why give it a poor review? Just don't read it or review it! I'm not interested in westerns, but I don't give every western a 1-star review because of that.
Anyway.
A short novelised true story about the river steamer Li Wo and its brave, futile battle against the invading Japanese in world war 2. It is perhaps enough to say that her skipper received a posthumous Victoria Cross.
The story focuses on Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Ronald Stanton RNR -- in part at least because he was one of the few survivors.
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This is told in a straightforward, commercial-fiction kind of way. Sellwood wrote a handful of popular histories of the war, and was of the same generation as the people he wrote about. The book has a very close focus on the sailors. I cannot find out, but it is quite possible, likely even, that Sellwood interviewed survivors, presumably Stanton at least, because he used this way of working on other books. This closeness to the ordinary men of the crew results in a book that tries to speak in their words and express their thoughts and points of view. So we see unchallenged 'colonial' thinking and casual racism. We don't see large-scale strategy. We are down in the dirty work, and the book is the better for it. Should they fight? Should they purely aim to survive? What can they meaningfully do? What else is going on? They have to make the best of it. We see them use their tiny, slow little vessel to dodge bombs, fight enemy ships, and try to find a safe harbour -- of which there is none. We're down in the water with them, surrounded by wreckage, as the Japanese turn their machine guns on the injured sailors. The book does not dwell on the brutality --it is pretty matter-of-fact, yet still quite evocative.
This is a good solid read about a time that drove men to their limits. Recommended if you like novelisations of real naval action....more
This book is subtitled 'a global history of World War II', and with the main matter stretching to 920 pages, it certainly has a go at it. On the whole, I would describe the book as interesting, thoughtful and thorough. If we consider its subtitle, I would say that it is perhaps not quite as global as may have been the original intent -- but how could the book have been kept to a publishable length if it were otherwise? Inevitably it focuses on the main combatants, with thumbnail sketches of what is going on in the more peripheral places.
Perhaps inevitably -- living as I do in Australia -- this strikes me. Australia occupies maybe a couple of pages of the 920. Say 0.2%. The rest is implicit; like when the North African fighting is mentioned, Aussies were there, but the author cannot be expected to always note this.
The book focuses on the big picture. How did the Allies come to agree on a 'Europe first' approach? How did the western powers manage to work with a soviet Russia that had, before the Germans turned on it, invaded Poland and provided the raw materials that powered the Nazi assault on France and fueled the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain? A Russia that withheld information, spied on the Americans and the British, and then demanded they send thousands of planes and trucks? No matter what Stalin demanded of the West, it was sanctified by the millions of Russian dead; no matter how hard he was to work with, no-one could say the Russians were not making remarkable sacrifices. And of course, the West worried that Russia might make a separate peace -- something that, in truth, Hitler's ideology rendered extremely unlikely. These sorts of considerations form the meat of the book. There is a little about technology, a little about espionage, quite a lot about signals intelligence (which was hugely important, as the book makes clear) and a lot about why the various leaders did what they did (as far as can be known).
The book is on the whole highly successful. It is unafraid to make judgements on leaders. Roosevelt comes out well, Churchill as less objective but fundamentally sound, Stalin as strong and effective but very difficult to work with. Montgomery comes out badly, King and Marshall well, and Eisenhower comes out well too; better than, say, the egomaniacal MacArthur.
The biggest military operations are described in a little detail -- enough to then back up analysis of how they affected the broader position, or why they justified the recall of a general, for example. The overall ebb and flow of fronts is more the book's style. And then we get an interpolated chapter describing, for example, the home front, or the evolution of key weapons (jets, radar, atom bombs, rockets, that sort of thing).
The book makes it clear that as the war went on the Red Army was not only large, it was also good, something not all histories admit. It pays close attention to deals made over borders and suchlike, and shows how these things had repercussions after the war and up to today.
I would not say the prose is elegant. It is effective enough, but at times I had to reread a sentence or two. There are no pictures apart from a useful set of maps in the back. It is a book that knows what it is about -- understanding the big picture, not minutia. You could almost call it a political history of the war (rather than a military hitory), and as such it is an excellent summary for the reader who is not going to go to primary sources. The author is not afraid to synthesise the material and make his own judgements, and on the whole, from what I know, they are generally interesting and most likely perceptive.
If what you want is what the book aims to deliver, it comes thoroughly recommended.
Sallust lived through some tumultuous times for the Roman republic. He was born in the era of the rise of military dictatorship under Marius and From
Sallust lived through some tumultuous times for the Roman republic. He was born in the era of the rise of military dictatorship under Marius and Sulla, was a young man during the conspiracy of which he speaks, served with Gaius Julius Caesar and saw the apotheosis of that dictator and its ending with assassination. Having seen that, he decided maybe he ought to leave politics and start writing history. Did not live to see Octavian become the first Princeps, however.
The book is well-judged. Sallust is mostly accurate (we're told in the introductions) and though the editor (S. A. Handford) chips in to tell us when he's not, the notes never overwhelm or make the reader lose their way.
The Jugurthine war took place in north Africa a generation or two after the Romans destroyed Carthage for the last time. The puppet states they set up in the resulting power vacuum came to lack leadership, and a charismatic figure who was a few deaths away from the throne of Numidia decided to self-actualise by killing a couple of cousins. The Romans could not let this stand, and spent 5 or 6 years chasing him around the desert before installing an even more puppety ruler. In a sense, Numidia became an example to other states -- don't mess with our arrangements! If we put a king on the throne, leave him there!
In some ways, the most important aspect of the war was that it gave opportunities to Marius and Sulla, both of whom played crucial roles that led to other opportunities that lead to both of them becoming, effectively, military dictators (Marius first, then his arch-enemy Sulla) and hastening the end of the republican era of Rome.
The ConspiracyofCatiline is briefer and more schematic. It touches on many famous lives: Cato the Younger, Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus and more. It portrays Catiline as reckless, undisciplined and foolhardy, though brave, fomenting a revolution for private gain, largely in the hope that his many debts would be forgotten when the wealthy aristocracy was overthrown. One never gets the sense that Catiline never had much chance of success, though that could just be the knowledge that he did not succeed.
He reminds me a little of Lenin, who, as has been noted, did not become a dictator to protect the revolution, but made a revolution so he could become dictator. The main difference is that Lenin succeeded.
This book outlines the campaigns around Leningrad, from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa through to roughly the middle of 1944, when the last German units were pushed out of the region.
It is predominantly a detailed account of the thrusts and counterthrusts by the opponents. There is much talk of left flanks and slow progress and lack of command and control.
The numbers are probably the most impactful thing about it. Around 2 million Russians (roughly half civilians and half soldiers) perished around the Leningrad region, which made up only a relatively small fraction of the front. For comparison, the USA lost about 300,000 soldiers on all fronts combined for the whole war. WWII has been described as 'the eastern front plus sideshows', and in terms of men and machinery, this is not too far from the truth. Of course, other campaigns were of enormous strategic significance -- a quick victory over Britain in 1940 could well have been the catalyst that made everything else turn out differently -- but none ranged over such vast areas or cost so much blood and iron. Russia was always Hitler's primary enemy. His actions elsewhere were more about securing his back before he plunged east. He would happily have left western Europe alone had it promised him a free hand in the east. As such, the battle between Germany and Russia was existential. Hitler conceived of it as Aryan versus Slav. There could be no peace.
The book does not look at those issues. Its focus is narrow. It evaluates the military decisions made, critiques them, looks at lessons learned and at what ramifications the Leningrad fight had for the rest for the front.
There is relatively little about life in the blockaded city. It is not clear from the cover or the blurb, but this is really a book for fans of military strategy and, particularly, tactics.
As such, it has one glaring flaw.
The maps and the text do not mesh well. Repeatedly, pages would be expended describing offensives; the methods, the commanders, the cities and regions they were to fight for. Yet the places mentioned can often not be found on the corresponding maps. I was sometimes able to find them on a map elsewhere in the book, but some locations were just missing and I had to guess or look in an atlas or a map from the interwebs. Or just skip it. It was very frustrating hunting through the various maps looking for one that showed me where somewhere -- where a very important action happened -- was.
Perhaps it was just about limited space on the page, but it was a distinct annoyance.
Apart from that, I think I am perhaps just not enough interested in the arrows showing the marches of the troops and the details of how many miles they advanced and where. My eyes started to glaze over and in a few places I started to skip ahead.
The proofreading is not great, either.
In short, this is probably very interesting to the fan of military tactics who wants to see a whole major campaign laid out and critiqued. Such a reader would see how the Red Army's techniques and tactics evolved over the years and how the tide was stopped and then turned by a combination of persistence, weight of numbers and, eventually, tactical skill. For the rest of us, the book lacks context and the human story. But, I suspect the rest of us is not the audience it is aiming at. At times it sounds like a lecture to officer cadets.
A book can be good and bad at once. It can have aspects that command admiration and others that elicit involuntary mirth. A wonderful example of this A book can be good and bad at once. It can have aspects that command admiration and others that elicit involuntary mirth. A wonderful example of this is Nightfighter by W.R.Bennett. This is, objectively, not a good book. The plot is clunky, the characterisation crude, the prose overblown such that I am going to have to quote a bit of it (see below) and yet... it reads like the author knows something about flying a plane over enemy territory. Winding back the boost, operating the AI set (airborne interception -- radar, we would call it now), he knows the minutiae. In the best scenes, despite the purple prose, the book does give a sense of wrestling a complex machine through the sky. Flying a Mosquito or other plane of WWII vintage was not a case of being "at one with the machine" and just hurling it around the sky. Everything was manual, so the pilots and navigators had to have substantial knowledge of the mechanicals, had to be able to adjust air/fuel mixture, not just push on the throttles. And this book captures all that prosaic knowledge. I wonder if a prose artist without the knowledge would be able to capture that sufficiently.
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The cover of Nightfighter by W R Bennett.
Brief, flawed, utterly without pretence; quite enjoyable.
Quotes:
[image] ...ing continguity of death, angrily hurling fiery barbs of retaliatively-convulsing objection into sky, vainly attempted to protect its skeletonized remains as the grumbling procession of ghouls came on to claim the last fetid pieces of flesh from its scarified bones.
Not sevenfold, not terrible vengeance, but it would go on. This was war, the price of one man's Machiavellian crime, paid for in grisly and horrifying currency. Human lives, mutilated bodies, agonized souls and distorted minds -- irredeemable, these, all uselessly sacrificed on the cruel altar of a maniac's desires for world conquest and an unholy ambition to close the ears of his people to the teachings of God.
[image]The wind-whipped silence in the cockpit was eerie and weirdly primed with ominousness.
This is a very fine book. Bendiner was not a famous pilot like Guy Gibson (Enemy Coast Ahead) -- he was a navigator who managed to complete a tour of 25 operations over occupied Europe in B-17 Fly Fortresses that steadfastly continued to attack during daylight hours, and suffered horrendous losses as a result. When 10% per mission was considered an acceptable loss rate, not many can have made it through 25.
[image] The cover of the edition I read.
But what makes the memoir interesting is not Bendiner's achievements -- not that they are negligible -- but the honesty and insight that he brings. The book was published 35 years after the war ended, and that critical distance allows Bendiner to be autobiographer and biographer at the same time, something made possible I suspect by the intensity and otherness of war. There is a point in the book, near the end, when he has finished his tour but not yet been allowed to leave the aerodrome:
How stupid, how cruel to let me stay alive and safe among those who are still hostages to death. No surgeon would leave an amputated limb near the living patient.
This captures his ability to look upon the events from inside and outside at the same time, and to come up with a striking metaphor to capture it. Few war memoirs are as notable for the prose as this one, though it is worn lightly.
A few examples:
The cottage had a fine, dishevelled look, like a girl fresh from tumbling about in the hay.
I cannot take seriously those who adopt the pose of the disenchanted without having experienced the prerequisite enchantment.
It could be J. G. Ballard:
The earth was no longer tilled land. The cities were empty and staring. One imagined a world of grotesque fungi. The only signs of animation appeared in the yellow flicker of burning B-17s.
Or, speaking about a General after a raid that cost many men and machines:
He was in the position of a man who does not know precisely what he has bought but is certain that it was very expensive.
On keeping notes while flying:
I would have noted my heart's blood dripping to the floor -- the time, place, altitude.
Or, showing how we get the inside and the outside at once, he talks about watching a formation of planes heading out on a mission:
I exulted in that parade. I confess this is an act of treason against the intellect, because I have seen dead men washed out of their turrets with a hose. But if one wants an intellectual view of war one must ask someone who has not seen it.
And a little bon mot, yet hardly free of irony:
Navigators must exude self-confidence or abdicate.
I really cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is written with the wit and artistry of a top-line novelist, tackles some of the greatest topics in art, literature and life -- war, death, life -- and is a page-turner as much as any thriller.
It is interesting to compare it to one of the most famous war memoirs ever written, If this is a man by Primo Levi. Both authors are Jewish, and Bendiner reflects on his war and the experiences of the prisoners in Dachau, and shakes his head and knows that what he saw tells him nothing about that -- but the similarities run deeper than happenstances of religion. Both books combine intellect and artistry to deal with the unexplainable. They show how human beings somehow survive, and how important it is that they fool themselves.
Bediner picked a poppy before every mission. He knew it was pointless, but he also knew that without it he was doomed.
This is quite possibly the worst book I have ever managed to finish. Doing so was an effort of will, undertaken for reasons that are not clear to me but may involve my desire to write this review.
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Cover of The Sky Remembers by Brennan; this is the best bit of the book.
The story is simple enough. A cocky fighter pilot, a real leader of men, has had the stuffing knocked out of him by a near death experience. He's recuperating, he's lost his bottle, but it's the darkest days of the Battle of Britain and he's needed in the air.
He battles through his overwhelming doubt and his many losses and proceeds to return to the fight.
And on it goes. It reminds me of Beckett's The Unnameable, but not in a good way. It's 155 pages but a well-written 50 could have made this an evocative little piece. Instead, the author flings words at the reader in a desperate attempt to convince and evoke. Why say something once when you can say it three times?
The battle between the Monitor and the Virginia appears with monotonous regularity in books about ships, particularly fighting ships. It was the firstThe battle between the Monitor and the Virginia appears with monotonous regularity in books about ships, particularly fighting ships. It was the first battle between iron ships, the first involving a ship with a turret, the first involving ships that did not rely on sail, nor even have masts as backup to the engines.
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Cover of Monitor, the book about the boat.
One thing this book brings home is how small it was. No great fleet action like Jutland or Lepanto or Trafalgar -- it was really just a skirmish, though one with great repercussions.
deKay does a nice job of bringing these repercussions to light. They were strategic, technological and even geopolitical.
Strategic: The Confederate states needed access to weapons and materiel from Europe, and the Virginia's job was to break the blockade set up by the North. Hampton Roads was a vital nexus for bringing cargo from the Atlantic to inland waterways, and it was here that Virginia sallied out and caused pandemonium amongst the wooden ships. Though she was slow and hard to control, she was also impervious to their shots and could stand off and pound the Union ships into pieces. Had the Monitor not been flanged together in about 3 months and thrown into battle against the _Virginia_ almost as soon as completed, the civil was could have looked very different. Had the Confederates gained mastery of the east coast the marked superiority of the North in terms of industrial capacity would have been at least partially mitigated by better access to imports. Further, it is supposed that had the South been able to maintain this kind of sovereignty over its borders, which would promote interchange with Europe, it might have been granted diplomatic recognition by more potential trading partners. So the book pitches the one-on-one battle as a kind of 'for want of a nail' situation. Of course, it's natural for an author to point out the significance of their topic -- they've bothered to write about it after all -- but there is some substance to this. Had the South been closer in stature to the North, the likelihood of a genuine fissioning of the USA would have to have been greater. We shall never know. Most likely, the war would have gone on even longer, caused even more suffering, and had the same outcome.
Technological: At a stroke, Monitor ushered in a new age in warship design. Though it low freeboard and raft-like construction limited it to coastal waters, it's general concept -- an iron hulled ship, powered by steam, dispensing with sail altogether and armed with turreted guns -- was to dominate naval thinking until the rise of the aircraft carrier during WWII. Previous ironclads had looked like modified sailing ships, still arranging their guns in broadsides and still carrying a full complement of sails. Monitor must have looked like something from another world. Just as the Dreadnought reset the benchmarks in 1905, the Monitor forced a reappraisal of what made for a power navy. What value was a hundred ships of the line if a handful of ironclads could pick them off at leisure? So influential was the design of the Monitor that it leant it's name to a style of ship. Shipyards around the world started building 'monitors', and would continue to turn them out for fifty years to come.
Geopolitical: It could be argued that the Monitor is the first significant example of the USA gaining technical, military leadership over Europe. It can be thought of as the very beginning of the process that led the USA to gain military and technological leadership during the 20th century. Ericsson, the man behind the Monitor, was a migrant who had been unable to sell his design in Europe. The strength of the US coming from its inclusiveness is a very modern idea, and the Monitor is an early and potent example.
Anyway, the book follows the politics and the military sides of the story. How the ship got built, how the battles were fought, and what it all meant. I would have liked more technical details -- we do not even get a table summarising the capacities of the two combatants. Some more diagrams, perhaps cutaway, and clearer illustrations of how the two ships were laid out and so on, would have buttressed the work nicely and made it more rounded in its coverage. As it is, it is a nice little read.
Dreadnought by Richard Hough, Michael-Joseph 1965 (268 pages).
They day of the battleship was over by 1940 at the latest, though they did valuable work right through WWII. The Dreadnought was launched in 1906. In those few years -- historically, very few indeed -- vast quantities of steel and oil and coal and human misery were expended on The Battleship, a symbol of sovereignty and national pride, and for some time seemingly a measure of nations and empires. They became a sort of international pissing competition. Whose gun was biggest? Who had the most, the fastest, the longest, the strongest?
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The front cover of Dreadnought by Richard Hough.
In truth they achieved little, especially in WWI. Economically they were money-pits and helped sink the British Empire as much as save it. They strike me as a symbol of everything that is stupid about war -- the wasted resources, ingenuity, and lives, the misplaced effort. How many people could be lifted out of poverty for the price of a battleship?
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The back.
And yet for all that they remain magnificent creations; fast, powerful (thrusting?), impressive.
The attractions of the technology of war is an interesting topic to me. As a kid I glued together Spitfires and read about the Nazis sweeping across Europe, about the Manhattan project and the bouncing bomb. Books like The Dam Busters and Night Fighter might keep track of the men lost and comrades who suffered death and disfigurement, but despite themselves they give off a glimmer of glamour. The lone genius in his laboratory developing the weapon that will save us from Hitler, the brave pilot battling a dozen Fokkers (or a dozen Camels -- stories come from all sides) over the Western Front. The fascination is undeniable. Yet all that bravery and technical brilliance is for what? So old men could refuse to apologise to each other, or take what was not theirs? (Or what their grandfathers had possessed for a few years decades earlier, and which they therefore saw as 'theirs'?) (Yes, I am using male pronouns; that was the world of which I am speaking.)
My reading has largely moved from the machines to the history. Dreadnought covers the technology,the politics and the tactics of the 20th century battleship. It is authoritative, slightly astringent (pleasingly so), well-illustrated (though I believe there may be a paperback version, which of course would be less so) and essentially, given that apart from brief flurries (Vietnam, Lebanese Civil War, Gulf War) the battleship story was over when it came out, definitive. Hough's writing is very easy yo read -- this is the third book of his I have read after The Fleet that Had to Die and The Hunting of Force Z -- and I can recommend it as a quick read for anyone who's curious about the big boats with big guns, or who has heard of the Yamato or the Bismarck or the Missouri and would like to see them in context, rather than as modern myths.
Quick and to the point: A review of Hunting the Bismarck by C.S.Forester.
Mayflower, 1974 (118 pages)
The Bismarck was one of a pair of battleships completed for the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, early in World War II, the other being the Tirpitz. Often lauded as a fearsome ship, the Bismarck in fact showed signs of being derived from a World War I design; in particular its disposition of armour was more suited to dealing with shells than ordnance delivered by aircraft, and its anti-aircraft armament, while substantial, was not as comprehensive as later experience in the war would suggest was necessary. It was one of a relative handful of capital ships operated by the Kriegsmarine, which served to focus attention on it all the more. Hence it gained almost mythological significance, which Forester buys into almost completely. In this book the ship is the largest, the most modern, the most dangerous and so on. The outcome of the war hinges on her fate. I'm not sure that's true, but I am sure that in the grim days of 1941, when the Third Reich had been stopped at the English Channel but remained everywhere else victorious, a victory of this magnitude was no doubt a fillip for the Brits. Even after the loss of the Hood in an early engagement with the Bismarck, in the end the RN could absorb the loss of a capital ship far more easily than the Kriegsmarine. One need only look at how the Tirpitz was used to see the effect; it spent most of the war hiding in various Norwegian fjords, too psychologically valuable and too practically vulnerable to risk. It played a strategic role in tying up enemy resources, but it never fought a real battle.
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Cover of Hunting the Bismarck by C.S.Forester.
The plan was for the Bismarck to break out into the Atlantic -- the very phrase indicates one of the problems faced by German sea power, getting past the British Isles -- and operate beyond land-based air power, running amok amongst allied convoys. In the end, she copped one shell in the engagement with Hood and Prince of Wales, decided to head for France for repairs to a damaged oil bunker, was crippled by Swordfish torpedo planes which enabled British battleships to catch up with her, and sunk by sheer volume of fire.
Forester brings this to life by getting close to the men involved. He presumably invents much of the dialogue -- this is not solely a history but a careful re-enactment, so we get conversations between Admiral Lutjens and Captain Lindemann on the bridge of Bismarck, we get tense words in the British HQ. Presumably when he quotes a signal or similar it is correct, but it is not clear what is exactly as happened and what has been imagined for dramatic effect; which is not the say the imaginings lack authenticity or overstate things. They are there to bring us closer to the real lives. When we read that two thousand men went down with the Hood or the Bismarck, we must recall that those are lives, not numbers. Indeed, the book ends with a reference to wives and children and mothers of those who died -- and on both sides.
It is a very 'easy' read. The prose is workmanlike, the terminology sound, the events very easy to follow. Maps illustrate every step of the action. The handling of the chase and the deductions made by the pursuing British is well drawn -- we can see how they eliminate possibilities, make reasonable guesses, cover every option when resources allow, and in the end succeed, with the aid of a little luck and much determination and organisation.
The events here are seventy-five years old. They are, I am sure, receding into the past and few younger people know them in any detail. This book, brief, to the point, riveting, does a great job of illustrating an important event.
Rommel is a highly illuminating figure when looking at the success of Hitler in Germany up to about 1941, and at the underlying rot in the regime. Brilliant leader of men that he was, Rommel was little interested in politics, and in a sense consciously simplified his life by ignoring it. The tactical sense and discipline of him and others like him allowed the early victories and extended the Nazi empire to the corners of Europe and beyond. Slowly they came to understand the evil of their leaders -- or, perhaps more realistically, to admit it to themselves (those who did not embrace the 'new way'). For years they fell into the same trap as the bulk of the populace -- the idea that Hitler was okay but he was taking advice from bad elements, and if only one could make the Führer see what was really happening all would be all right. (Tellingly, there were no Waffen-SS units in North Africa, no Einsatzgruppen moving into the occupied areas to commit their atrocities and alert Rommel to the deeper implications of Nazi victory. How would he have reacted to the Eastern front?) But eventually he met Hitler on a bad day, got insights into the real man, and he learned. Yet only when the damage being done by Hitler's schemes became omnipresent -- in the lead up to Normandy in 1944 -- did he begin to act outside the circumscribed field of military tactics. He was the conspirators' choice for a prospective President of Germany after their coup, chosen as the only figure with enough stature who would be sufficiently respected by the Allies and viewed as sufficiently apart from the Nazi regime. High praise indeed! But when this became known to the Gestapo, Rommel, recovering from serious injuries incurred when his car was strafed by Allied planes, was given a pair of dreadful alternatives -- take poison and be given a state funeral as a hero of the Reich, becoming even in death a tool of the Nazi party, or continue to try to undermine Hitler and be killed also, but on the understanding that his family would end up dead or in concentration camps.
We see him in WWII developing the tactics of tank warfare in North Africa, where his limited fuel and the unreliability of the Italians had to be factored in to every plan. He often fought from one fuel dump to the next, fighting logistics as much as the Allies. Young is not blind to Rommel's weaknesses -- his style relied too heavily on himself, his knowing every detail and his own example as a leader, things which could not always function at every corner of the battlefield at once -- but the figure painted is an admirable one, if perhaps narrow, with few interests outside his profession.
The book is in a sense a tragedy, as we see the inevitable fate of a man of integrity within the Nazi apparatus.
This book covers his whole life, focussing of course on WWII but illustrating crucial episodes from WWI when his initiative, boldness and physical toughness marked him out as a leader of men, at least on the small scale, and meant there was room for him in the 100,000-strong inter-war army allowed by Versailles. Thus he was a professional soldier. And Young was also, which shows in his grasp of the subject matter both the details of battles and the minds of the soldiers. As a military biography is has a clarity, a sympathy and a range of insights to be admired. A necessary book for the student of WWII or of arms in general.
Hitler by Joachim C. Fest, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1974. 844 pages. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston.
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Title page of Hitler by J.C.Fest. Cancelled from the Monash University library.
This is a biography, though after about 1933 it really becomes a history of the third Reich, albeit one that pays even more attention that usual to the Führer's quirks and foibles -- for Hitler is always, always, viewed from some distance. The tenor is more like a biography of some figure shrouded in the depths of history, a Hannibal, perhaps, or a Otto III. After a discussion of Hitler's origins, his formative influences and his time in Vienna, there are very few glimpses of his private life. He fell in love with a half-niece of his, Geli Raubal but she killed herself in the early thirties, possibly to get away from him, and this appears to be an event that affected him deeply and permanently. But beyond that there is very little here that is truly personal. He liked to (or felt compelled to) pontificate for hours in the evenings to an audience that felt compelled to listen politely. And he liked his Wagner. But he never shapes up as a whole man. Can this be done? Do his deeds make it impossible to (want to) consider him as a rounded human being, or was there no such thing present in the first place? In that sense he remains a hole at the centre of the book.
So the usual examination of private life as found in almost every modern biography is absent. Hitler ate simple meals, loved his dogs and was a mess of neuroses, anxieties, mad theories and cunning, but his dreams, errors and 'achievements' were all written out in his actions, as if he had no private life, no thoughts beside the grandiose. He had his dreams -- like emptying the Crimea and importing the whole population of the South Tyrol to live there, like establishing Berlin as a world capital -- but they were all akin to the things he did do. There are few private dreams (though he did imagine retiring to curate and art gallery), no personal scandals, no jilted lovers and divorced wives. Not even a drinking problem (though there is an apparent dependence on mood altering drugs as the war went on, but even those are more to keep him functioning in a mechanical, lifeless kind of way). Even Eva Braun barely gains a mention, and given her tightly circumscribed role in Hitler's life, this is as it should be.
The book opens with a prologue, (provocatively?) titled 'Hitler and Historical Greatness'. It makes the point that, had he died in 1938, he would have been seen as the rebuilder of Germany, a man who, yes, had some unseemly quirks, but who put a great nation back on its feet, gave it confidence and set it on the path to recovery after the grim years of the Weimar republic and the depression. (I am not so sure -- Hitler's Germany was paying its bills by printing money and would have come undone financially had it not gone to war, I suspect.)
We see the miasma of anti-Semitism and German nationalism that existed in pre-WWI Vienna, we see the reaction to the 'betrayal' of 1918, the anger created by the Versailles treaty and war reparations -- Hitler comes out (inevitably, perhaps) as a mix of his inherent nature (his ability to judge and manipulate people, his uncanny abilities as an orator, his unshakeable belief that he and he alone knew what to do and how) and the environment that shaped him, that let his warped genius thrive. The way he turned so many reversals into triumphs in the early years, the faith he had in his own vision and his own leadership, these things are remarkable and show him as just as driven, compulsive, and inflexible in the 1920s as he was in the 1940s. Crucially, Fest clearly demonstrates that Hitler did not 'go crazy' as the war went against him. Indeed, the war stripped away a veneer of reasonableness which he had put on in the 1920s as part of his strategy to gain power, and showed him more clearly as what he always had been. His consistency is remarkable. The war of 1939, the turning against Russia in search of lebensraum, the Holocaust, his ongoing desire to reach an understanding with the British Empire (basically, “you let me do as I like in Europe, and I won't challenge you at sea, do we have a deal?”); it is all in Mein Kampf or one of his early speeches. One of the many remarkable sides to the story is just how frank Hitler was in his statements of intent, and yet how, when he switched tactics and extolled peace and made political deals in the 1930s, statesmen were prepared to -- were desperate to -- believe him.
We see how the many opportunities to halt his momentum were wasted, right up to the phoney war of 1940, when 100 French divisions could -- as they had promised Poland they would -- have rolled into western Germany in the face of at most 25 German divisions. But his grasp of the lack of will in his opponents was uncanny. Indeed, amidst the cavalcade of weak leadership, the arrival of Churchill -- glimpsed tangentially here -- only grows in importance. Germany was never strong enough in men and material to wage a massive war of attrition, and when the rapid victories ceased, doom was a matter of time. (That, says Fest, is the true reason behind blitzkrieg.) When an implacable foe arose, Hitler was oddly powerless. He could not understand a man who would not negotiate opportunistically.
War, it is clear, was inevitable -- it was his aim all along. The politicking of the 1930s was explicitly a preliminary for war. He did not strengthen Germany to improve the lives of Germans but to create an arsenal. He could not have drawn back, pleased with building his greater Germany after the Anschluss and his success in Czechoslovakia any more than he could have ceased his anti-Semitism or fear/hatred of Bolshevism.
Similarly, even more grimly, the minorities he oppressed were always doomed. The Holocaust was no striking out of a doomed regime but integral to the machinery of state. Nazi Germany was ruled by a political system built on obedience, violence, and exclusion. The Holocaust was a completely natural extension of Hitler's racial theories and of his anti-Semitism, both of which pre-dated even World War I.
Hitler, the prologue suggests, made a lot of history, yet there was no greatness in him. He was a small man, full of fear, vindictiveness and wrong-headed idiocy, yet convinced of his own destiny such that he managed to drag a whole nation, one in desperate need of self-belief and revenge, along with him to its doom.
Macdonnell lets himself intrude into the story -- there is a point where he basically says, "Look, as a bloke who spent years as a gunnery officer, and many long nights closed up inside a gun turret, let me tell you what it was almost certainly like for these guys." And despite the purple prose and the manufactured dialogue (Macdonnell invents key conversations between key figures, like the German Admiral and Bismarck's Captain), it all has a pleasant ring of veracity. Macdonnell fought at sea in a range of ships, including cruisers. He saw battle. But he also takes the time to look at the official reports. Where messages are known, where words and actions are documented, the book sticks to the facts.
The book could be charged with glamourising the conflict. The deaths are kept at a distance, the hardware is rather celebrated (I cannot count how many times he mentions the calibres of guns, the ranges and weights of the shells).
The sequence where he likens the gunner who sends the shell that was destined to take out Hood (and 1500 men) to the bomb aimer who nuked Hiroshima is novel but unconvincing.
The participants (on both sides) are painted sympathetically, though he notes the reports back in Germany (and even to the ship's own crew) that relentlessly overstate Bismarck's successes. He makes no editorial comment, but this is clearly in contrast to the essentially truthful reports amongst the Allies. Germans are thorough, a little unimaginative, and mired in a culture that cannot communicate without propaganda, it seems.
The crashing water and plummeting shells and the invisible fingers of radar groping through the darkness to find a fearsome enemy; all are evoked well. The book successfully puts us on the ships yet keeps us in touch with the bird's-eye view.
A map would have been handy, but the pulpy, budget paperback series does not permit it. Were I to read it again, I'd grab a map off the interweb -- for example this one.
Given Bismarck's fame, it is surprising the title does not use it as a selling point.
Peter Bamm was a surgeon at a German Main Aid Post on the Russian front in World War II as the Germans first advanced through Ukraine and then withdrew. Through it all, until virtually the end of the war when defending Germany itself, Bamm operated in hospitals and commandeered houses and even bunkers and tents while the shells whistled overhead.
[image] Cover of the 1962 Penguin edition of The Invisible Flag by Peter Bamm.
The book details the technical difficulties of operating close to the front, the camaraderie that made it all bearable, and the spectre of Nazism that hung over the Wehrmacht and which they did not speak against yet which they knew was a sickness at the core of the war effort and which made victory impossible. One thread in the book is that the Soviet Union contained many minorities -- some very large -- who were oppressed by their own government and who could have massively augmented the German effort, had the Nazis not instituted their various evils once the army had rolled through. In this, and in its inherent lack of trust and reliance on informers and violence, Bamm sees the Nazis ultimately defeat themselves. How much of this insight was really present in 1942 and how much was seen in hindsight cannot be known.
The book is endlessly quotable:
This small miracle is accomplished with a piece of thin steel which weighs less than a couple of ounces - a scalpel. At its tip converge years of skill and training; a technique developed through centuries of experiment; the immense and complicated organization of a modern army's medical services. And above it, as it cuts deep to heal, above the little tent in the wood by the Dniester, there flutters beneath the wide Ukranian sky a small dauntless flag: an invisible flag: the flag of humanity.
We see Bamm and his colleagues tend to Russian soldiers and peasants as well as the German soldiers. We see them break the rules to obtain the machines and the supplies they need to do their job. We see them fail to believe that anything other than losing this enormous war can be done to stop the suicidal Nazism of the Germany they love, and they try to mitigate at the lowest level, that of a single human being hurt by "the Dictator's" (he is never named) folly and arrogance, the damage that is being done.
Geographers draw and imaginary line ... and they call it the border between Europe and Asia. But the true dividing line is between men's souls.
Or:
The dictator who stood to benefit by it [the spirit and hard work of the foot soldiers] knew as much of Prussian discipline as a Congo witch doctor knew about science.
Or:
The System was built on force. And it was only by methods of force that it could exert itself. That is not to say that all the mistakes made during the war could have been avoided. It was just that they were part and parcel of the system itself.
Or:
The rats were also the reason why one had to learn to sleep with one's head under the blanket.
Or:
Like a tortoise with its shell, the conqueror drags his own world around with him. It is hard to get to know a foreign country if you are only there to conquer it.
Or (on speaking out against the Nazis):
I do not of course imply that such self-sacrifice would have been useless in a moral sense. I am only saying that as a practical measure it would have been pointless.
Or:
When the autumn storms came and the steppe witches darted once more across the empty countryside in ghostly zig-zags, the god of war removed his last mask.
Or:
Set against the sublime splendour of creation, man's petty strivings seem as senseless as the migrations of the lemmings.
And so on. While I cannot help but wonder what was left out, what was retrospective and what was invented entirely, much of the book is moving, evocative, and strangely beautiful. One cannot help but feel for good, honest men, fighting a war they cannot win for a country they love ruled by a party they do not believe in. Sort of....more
This is a story of betrayal during the Pacific war. It begins with Dutchy Holland under attack from Japanese bombers and fighters, under circumstances that suggest a tip-off. Similar events occur back in port at Darwin, when another bombing sortie arrives with particularly apposite timing.
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Covers of Judas Rat.
This story is heavy-handed in the extreme, and full of padding, before a climax that is unlikely to take anybody by surprise.
It cannot be recommended to anybody but a die-hard JEM fan. The best thing about it is the "complete list of the novels in Macdonnell's naval series" in the back (not in the 'classic' edition).
Technically, this review contains spoilers, but really I'm not going to tell you anything you could not have guessed.
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Front cover of Behemoth by J. E. MacDonnell.
This is the story of Der Tiger, a fictional German pocket battleship in World War II, dispatched to the Indian Ocean to first sink as many Allied ships as possible without giving away her existence, and then to occupy as many Allied units as possible in the search for her. She sails under the command of Captain Wolfgang Rofmann, who is under strict instructions to keep her presence a secret for as long as possible -- no matter what measures must be taken.
This requires him to be ruthless, determined and, basically, nasty.
This book is one of hundreds written by MacDonnell over about 40 years; at the peak of his productivity he churned out about one a month, cheap paperbacks almost all put out by Horwitz, a publisher better known for magazines. These were very much news-stand books, bought alongside those Commando magazines and other war comics. Their popularity remains undimmed; I can't help but wonder if the copyright holder might not make a few bucks selling them off as e-books -- though who would digitise them all?
Anyway, this story is the battle of MacDonnell's serial hero, the 'mulish old barnacle', destroyer driver John Benedict 'Dutchy' Holland, to shadow, tackle and help defeat Der Tiger, a ship six times the size of his own Jackal. Along the way we see MacDonnell's greatest strength -- the (apparent but probably real) authenticity of his descriptions of life at sea, battle action and ship handling. We also see his weaknesses -- a hero who is just a bit too lucky and clever, an enemy who is a little too unrealistically foolish when the plot demands it and who is painted in rather flat, dark colours to ensure we know who the villain is. Having said that, the German crew are not all shown to be immoral fanatics, which causes some on-board conflict and adds well-judged complexity to the story.
The book is a very representative example of MacDonnell's art. It is readable, evocative, shows the RN and RAN as bastions of integrity, and gives the reader the feeling that they are getting some insight into life at sea during the war. MacDonnell wrote a lot of books rather than a handful of 'better' ones. He aimed for the news-stand rather than C.S.Forester, though his Brady series is clearly his Hornblower, and nottoo far overwhelmed by the comparison. I for one am not disappointed by this. While his novels can be silly, samey, repetitive, casually racist (unpleasant but perhaps not surprising from a man who spent five years fighting the Japanese), plotless (one is basically entirely about the complex procedure of towing a stricken ship through rough seas) and sometimes clunky, they all show his lived expertise, and since there are so many there's always another one to read.
(1) I am not saying Anton Richler is a hack. The presentation of the book, though, makes him look like one. It is a 'Trojan' paperback, but the original publisher is (possibly) Badger books, an imprint hardly renowned for quality and carefully considered output... there is minimal publication info (no date of original publication, no date of this issue), no page numbers (!) and no cover art credit. The typesetting is careless -- the letters ripple up and down. There are more than a few typographical errors, and the paper is only one step above the stuff that wrapped my fish and chips last week.
(2) This is actually a fascinating story, made doubly so by my recent reading of Cheshire, VC and The Dam Busters, two non-fiction books, written about the victorious British by a couple of victorious Australians. The Cheshire book is worth a review, and such a review may get written one day...
Reading Sky Command (a generic name if ever there was one), there is something poignant that comes through even in the purplest of prose -- the men portrayed are just men, fighting hopelessly to defend a country they love that is ruled by a party they do not believe in and that had dragged them into this useless war. The knowledge that their efforts are doomed adds a resonance that an equally pulpy but ultimately triumphal story would not have. The result is that despite some fairly purple prose that smacks of padding the book is quite compelling reading, with sympathetic protagonists, economically evoked action scenes, and apparently a sound knowledge of the aircraft and the military situation around the time of the Ardennes campaign (the 'Battle of the Bulge').
(3) The setting of the book around the time of the Ardennes campaign is a master-stroke, as well; we get the very moment when the last slim hopes of throwing the Allies back into the sea are ended, viewed through the eyes of a small band of exhausted pilots whose job is to support the offensive with air-strikes against enemy convoys. When the remaining pilots are withdrawn to defend Berlin from the advancing Russians, the hopelessness of the German cause becomes clear. The pragmatists hope merely to slow the Russians down, on the principle that the less of Germany under Russian control the better. The fin de siècle atmosphere is apparent. And through it our protagonist fights on, though he wonders why.
(4) In conclusion: This is a book of many weaknesses -- several of them the fault of the book production department, not the author -- but many compelling strengths. I love that cover with the two guys walking away from the holed plane, one using his hands to illustrate some point of the aerial battle just gone. Richler gives it an air of authenticity and a mood and atmosphere that lends the tale depth. The view from 'the other side' (compared to what is usually published in English) is fascinating. The prose and the dialogue are rather blunt instruments at times, and a couple of paragraphs read as if there was a bomb strapped to the typewriter that would go off if the author stopped hitting keys. Yet the tale remains entertaining. Richler knows what makes a story work, knows how to keep you reading, and does not turn anybody into cannon fodder or a faceless scapegoat.
It is that kind of pulpy, hackish fiction that borders on being really very fine. If the author had more time to spend, if the publishers edited it properly, if the author perhaps thought more of his own talents and aimed at All Quiet on the Western Front rather than the newsstand, this could have been a major work.
But, hell, it's a lot of fun. And if I could write a book like this, if I could be a hack as good as this author, I'd be a happy man....more
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