A Brace of WWII Fiction

I recently finished two volumes of fiction set during WWII.

First up was the 11th Billy Boyle mystery Blue Madonna. Set in occupied France on the eve of the Normandy Invasion, this story see our hero court-martialed and convicted of black market operations, busted to private and sentenced to 3 months in the stockade. His sentence will be remitted and his rank restored if he volunteers to undertake an SOE mission into occupied France. While he’s there, Allied airmen being sheltered by the Resistance are being murdered and Billy has to figure it out. This was a good to excellent entry in the series and along with The White Ghost restored my enthusiasm for the series after it had waned a bit because of some dissatisfaction with the 9th volume, The Rest Is Silence. Anyway, Benn is back in form and I look forward to the next one. One note, if you’re thinking of reading these, you really should start at the beginning as there is a considerable story arc. A tip of the hat to Consimworld’s Bill Ramsay who let me know it was out.

Next up was Jack Higgins’ Night of the Fox, a WWII thriller where an American Colonel who knows the time and place of the Normandy invasion is aboard one of the transports attacked off Slapton Sands. The ship sinks and our Colonel finds himself injured, and washed ashore on German occupied island of Jersey where he is sheltered by the local Resistance. The SOE decides to send an agent to either retrieve the Colonel or kill him before the Germans capture him and discover the time and place of the invasion. Oh, by the way, Rommel, needing cover for a meeting of the Valkyrie conspiracy, sends a German paratrooper (who is actually a German Jew pretending to be an Aryan) with a gift for mimicry, to pose as the famous Field Marshall and inspect Jersey thus establishing and alibi in case the Gestapo starts asking questions. There’s also a beautiful young English girl involved and a dashing anti-fascist Italian naval officer. The book develops pretty much exactly the way you expect it to, but it was fun and interesting and there are worse ways to kill a flight or an evening.

52 for the year.

 

Odds and Ends

In between all the Indian Wars books, I found time to get through a couple of others.

War Virgin: My Journey of Repression, Temptation and Liberation by Laura Westley is an interesting memoir of a woman’s military career and sexual self-discovery. Westley was raised very strictly as an evangelical Christian who as a youth was deeply into the “purity” mores of her religion and determined to keep her virginity, which she refers to as her “sparkle”, until marriage. She wins an appointment to West Point, graduates, and while serving in the AG corps, participates in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Along the way, she gradually shifts her thinking about “purity”, the gender roles of men and women, and a whole host of other issues. The book was fascinating. Westley is an excellent writer and very candid and self-aware. I’m not sure it’s for everyone, but if definitely provided a different perspective on women and their place in the military.

Next up was another volume of Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael mysteries, about a 13th century monk who unravels murders and brings the perpetrators to justice, The Rose Rent. This one covers a couple of related murders and the kidnapping of a fairly wealthy widow to coerce her to accept an unwanted marriage. This is vintage Cadfael if you like other volumes, you’ll like this one, if you haven’t read any, this is as good a place as any to start.

50 for the year

How One Thing Leads to Another

Some of you who know me from Facebook will remember a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned I was watching one of John Ford’s classic “Cavalry Trilogy” movies She Wore A Yellow Ribbon on Turner Classic Movies. Well that movie has basically focused my reading since then.

As some of you may know, the screenplays for the three “Cavalry Trilogy” movies were written by James Warner Bellah and are also based on his short stories, most of which had originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post during the 1940’s and 50’s. So I went searching for those short stories. I found a copy of Reveille a collection of 11 of Bellah’s “Ft Starke” stories. It was outstanding. Each of the stories was tightly plotted, evocative, and extraordinarily well written. They all dealt with the U.S Cavalry on the western frontier during the 1870’s and they were completely enthralling. Reading those short stories led me to three other, non-fiction, books that told the “real story” of the men in “dirty-shirt blue” who policed the frontier.

First was Robert B. Utley’s Frontiersmen in Blue; The United States Army and the Indian 1848-1865. This book is a kind of a “survey” of how the Army dealt with the “Indian problem” during the period when the main issue was securing the safety of the waves of settlers heading for the far West, as they traveled through the “great plains”. Utley starts with a description of both the US Army of the period and the various Indian tribes then he carefully traces the characters and events, sketches the campaigns, and generally provides an excellent grounding in how events unfolded as well as their primary drivers. It is an excellent book and gave me a good basic understanding of the period.

The next book was Utley’s follow on to Frontier Regulars; The United States Army and the Indian 1866-1891. Everything I said about the previous book holds true here as well. Utley covers the changes in the US Army as a result of the Civil War, and he describes how the Army’s mission fundamentally changed from one of securing safe passage through Indian controlled areas for transient settlers, to one of removing the Indians from very large tracts of land to open it for settlement. He covers events and personalities, sketches the campaigns, and generally provides a good basic grounding in the subject. Having read both of these books, I feel like I have filled in the “hole” in my knowledge of US History.

A couple of thoughts on both books. Utley is very fair and even handed in how he treats the two sides. He recognizes that neither side had a monopoly on virtue. Probably due to sourcing, he seems to cover the Army side a bit more thoroughly than the Indian side, although he does make it a practice to compare and contrast how Army and Indian sources viewed particular events. Additionally, there are extensive bibliographies in both volumes that seem to me at least to be exhaustive. In short, if you want to know about the Indian Wars these two books are an excellent place to start.

Finally, reading those two books led me to Don Ricky’s simply outstanding Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars. Ricky was a long time historian for the National Park Service and during his tenure launched a project to collect the memories of Indian War veterans. During the 1950s, Ricky mailed questionnaires to all the surviving veterans. The returned questionnaires form the basis of this book. The book is divided into chapters each covering one aspect of soldier life on the plains beginning with Enlistment and ending with Discharge and Retirement. If you’re at all interested in the Indian Wars, this is basically a must read.

So that ends my foray into the Indian Wars. And it all started because a John Wayne movie came on TCM.

48 for the year.

Two Sides of the Same Vietnamese Coin

Also on my recent cruise, I read both H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam and Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen.

Dereliction is a exhaustively researched, thoroughly documented and ultimately compelling step by step account of how America became directly embroiled in the Vietnam war on the watch of LBJ, Bob McNamara, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. McMaster explicitly lays out the decision process and the lies that accompanied the implementation of the decisions. McMaster spares no one in this work. He blasts LBJ’s inability to see the situation in Vietnam through any lens except that of how it could impact his election in 1964, or later, its effect on the passage or financing of his “Great Society” programs. He blasts McNamara for his arrogant and unshakable by reality belief that all problems would be quantified and managed by application of statistical analysis. He blasts LBJ’s civilian advisors for their disdain and contempt for the military wisdom and experience of the Joint Chiefs. He blasts the Joint Chiefs for letting parochial service concerns and their own fecklessness facilitate their manipulation by McNamara, LBJ, and his advisors. No one comes out of this book looking good. Reading it was horrifying and deeply disappointing.

One criticism of Dereliction is that it there is virtually nothing in it from the Vietnamese perspective. That is true, but it seems to me that the purpose of the book was not to give a balanced account of the Vietnam War, but to closely examine how America came to be so heavily involved.

Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, covered almost exactly the same material from the perspective of the North Vietnamese government, and ironically enough, it was much the same story. After the 1954 Geneva Accords two factions emerged in North Vietnam. One faction, “North First” believed that that the government should focus primarily on development of the North and once that was accomplished then they could use the strength acquired by development to “liberate” South Vietnam. This faction was led by Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap and probably was supported by a narrow majority of those in government. The other faction, “South First” believed that the primary focus of the government should be “liberating” the South and unifying it with North Vietnam, then developing the country. This faction was led by Le Duan and Le Duc Tho and in the late 1950s was probably held by a large minority of those in the government.

One of primary themes of this book is how Le Duan gradually accumulated enough power within the NVA government, mostly by marginalizing his opponents and creating a police state that crushed repression, to implement the “South First” agenda. The book also recounts Duan’s three disastrous “General Offensive-General Uprising” (GO-GU) operations. The first one, in 1964 was an attempt to destroy the RVN before America would intervene with enough strength to save it, the second one, the Tet Offensive in early 1968, was an attempt to eject the Americans, the third one, the Easter Offensive of 1972, attempted to win the war before Nixon’s foreign policy of Détente and recognition of the PRC dried up the DRV’s source of military assistance. Each of these offensives was intended to win the war outright, and each of them were costly failures.

Finally the book concludes with a detailed account of the Paris Peace talks from the North Vietnamese perspective, which I found fascinating.

All in all, I can’t recommend these books highly enough. But readers should be aware that neither book covers the actual military operations or the stories of the men who did the fighting. And both books assume that the reader will have a fairly extensive knowledge of the actual events of the Vietnam War.

Every once in a while I read a pair of books that complement each other perfectly. This is such a pair. The two books cover much of the same ground in terms of events and chronology but from diametrically opposed perspectives. It was fascinating.

44 for the year

The Last Two Spensers and a New Billy Boyle

On my recent cruise I wrapped up the last two of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels and a recent Billy Boyle.

Early Autumn (#7) has Spenser being hired by a mom whose son has been “kidnapped” by her ex-husband in a custody dispute. When our hero realizes that the kid is just a pawn being used by two narcissistic parents to hurt each other, he takes matters into his own hands.

Looking for Rachel Wallace (#6) tells the story of Spenser being hired to bodyguard a radical feminist author on a book tour. Sparks fly between Spenser and the author, she fires him, and later gets kidnapped. Spenser steps in to rescue her.

The White Ghost is the tenth book in James R. Benn’s Billy Boyle series. For readers who aren’t familiar with the series, it covers the exploits of Billy Boyle a young Boston PD detective who is distantly related to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s wife. When Billy gets drafted during WWII, Uncle Ike picks him up for his staff and assigns him as a sort of a personal troubleshooter whenever there is a politically sensitive crime, usually a murder. This book is no different, when LTJG John Fitzgerald Kennedy finds a dead body on a beach while recuperating from the sinking of PT 109, he immediately becomes a suspect. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy pulls some political strings and has Billy assigned to sort the case out. So Billy and his pal Kas (a LT in the Polish Army and a Baron) travel out to the Solomons to investigate.

Long time readers of this blog with a good memory will remember that I wasn’t very impressed with the last Billy Boyle book I read feeling that Benn has kind of “phoned it in”. This book allays all those concerns. It was excellent! Good plotting, good writing, very engaging, it really gave me a sense of what being in the South Pacific in the summer of 1943 must have been like. Benn has done a great job and I recommend the series very highly. One note, they should probably be read in publication order since there is a bit of a story arc. A tip of the hat to Bill Ramsay for reminding me of the series!

42 for the year