WW2

THE VENUS OF SALO . . . Between the covers

Not for the first time, I am a late arrival at the party. This is the eighth book in a series featuring Wehrmacht soldier, Colonel Martin Bora. We find him in the north of Italy, in October 1944. It is a strange time in Italian history. The Allies have, at huge cost, breached the various German defensive lines, even the formidable Gothic Line. But winter, with its rain and snow, is not far away, and the fighting in late 1943/early 1944 was a brutal and sapping experience the Allies are unwilling to repeat. In the far north, there is a last pocket of Fascism. This time line of that eventful period may provide a useful backdrop.

25th July 1943, Mussolini dismissed by KIng Victor Emmanuel III and arrested.
12th September 1943, Mussolini rescued from imprisonment by German special forces.
23rd September 1943, Italian Social Republic created, with its capital at Salò.
29th September 1943, the rest of Italy surrenders to the Allies.
28th October 1943, National Republican Army (Esercito Nazionale Repubblicano) created, loyal to Mussolini.
8th December 1943, Republican National Guard created, loyal to Mussolini.
4th June 1944, Allies enter Rome.
20th July 1944, Hitler survives the von Stauffenberg assassination attempt.
14th October 1944, Rommel commits suicide. Announced as death from complications from an earlier road accident.

Most of the action takes place in and around Salò, a town on the shores of Lake Garda. In the mountains and valleys around, German forces and Italian troops loyal to Mussolini are fighting a savage war against Italian partisan groups. Martin Bora, a veteran of campaigns including a spell on the Eastern Front, has been driven by Gestapo agent Jacob Mengs to Salò, where he is told to investigate the theft of a priceless Titian painting, known as The Venus of Salò. It had been ‘borrowed’ from its owner – Giovanni Pozzi – a rich Italian textile magnate, and was hanging in the HQ of the local German army commander when thieves created a diversion, and cut it from its canvas.

In the novel, everyone is at each other’s throats. The ENR can’t stand the RNG (see the timeline), the SS and the Gestapo loathe the regular German army, and the German high command have scant respect for their Italian allies. Even the Italian partisans – divided into communist and royalist bands – are at daggers drawn with each other; both however are contemptuous of local farmers and peasants, especially those they suspect of being collaborators.

As Bora investigates the theft of the painting, there are three deaths which puzzle him. First, a music teacher hangs herself. Then, the maid of a renowned soprano apparently shoots herself with a pistol given to her by an RNG captain, and a seamstress is butchered with a razor-sharp blade. While trying to work out how the three deaths are connected, Bora is entranced by his own flesh and blood ‘Venus’ in the shape of Annie Tedesco, widowed daughter of Giovanni Pozzi. What Bora doesn’t know (but we do, of course) is that all the while he is being set up by the Gestapo and SS. Orchestrated by Jacob Mengs, a dossier of Bora’s apparent disloyalty to the Third Reich is being prepared and, in the wake of the July plot.

Most of the book’s characters are fictional, with the exception of a few more exalted figures (left to right, below), such as SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff (Himmler’s adjutant), Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, head of Italian troops loyal to Mussolini, Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, and top SS man Herbert Kappler.

The notion, in WW2 fiction, of ‘the good German’ as a central character, is certainly not new. Perhaps the best known of these characters is the late Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther, but there is also a good series by Luke McCallin featuring Hauptmann Gregor Reinhardt. The ‘good German’ as a concept in real history is much more complex; at a senior level, Rommel was forced to commit suicide over his alleged involvement in the von Stauffenberg plot, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence), was hanged for treason by the SS just weeks before Hitler committed suicide. Shamefully, Albert Speer, after his release from prison in 1966, made a decent career – lasting almost twenty years – as a media personality and TV ‘talking head’ on the Nazi era.

Ben Pastor’s brilliant novel is an engaging mix of military history. murder mystery, love affair and a study in pyschopathy. Beyond the fiction, however, she reminds us that, for the Allies, the fighting continued almost to the proverbial eleventh hour – the surrender of German forces was formally accepted on 2nd May 1945. The carnage in Italy cost the German army between 30K – 40K dead. The allies suffered more grievously, with deaths estimated as 60K – 70K. The Venus of Salò is published by Bitter Lemon Press and is out now.

May 22, 2024 0

THE HUMAN KIND . . . Between the covers

This is the third novel in Alexander Baron’s WW2 trilogy, and it is rather different to the previous books, although there are obvious links. From The City, From The Plough tells the story of a group of soldiers preparing for, and then taking part in, the invasion of Normandy in 1944, while in There’s No Home the focus is on just a few weeks where an army company takes up residence in the Sicilian town of Catania in 1943. The titles are hyperlinked to my reviews of the novels.

The Human Kind is a sequence of short stories or vignettes, presented as being mainly autobiographical, and they reflect a wide variety of incidents and experiences involving men at arms. I use that phrase intentionally. I an surely not the first person to compare Baron’s trilogy with Evelyn Waugh’s magisterial Sword of Honour trilogy, which comprised Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender. There are stark differences, obviously, in that Waugh’s novels saw soldiering through the eyes of middle class officers. The central character, Guy Crouchback, is from a minor-aristocratic Roman Catholic family, while Baron was a Jewish man from London’s East End. What connects the two trilogies, however, is keen social observation, repeated ironies of circumstance and – most importantly – the fact that for many men the war and military life became central to their very being, despite the obvious hazards and unpleasantness. Baron – a communist in his youth – himself probably despised Waugh’s upper-middle-class reactionary views but he admired his writing, saying it was, “a magnificent illumination of a whole complex of human problems.”

Each of the stories except one, which I will return to, references the military campaigns – Italy, Normandy and Belgium – described in the earlier books. The one that affected me most was Mrs Grocott’s Boy. Raymond Grocott comes from The Potteries, where he lives with his widowed mother. He is, to use an old word, gormless. Nowadays, I suppose, he would have been long since diagnosed with ‘special needs’, and he has failed the basic intelligence test required to be admitted to the army. Having persuaded those in authority to let him join, he takes part in the invasion of Sicily. Contracting malaria, he is invalided out, but is desperate to rejoin his unit which, with some degree of innate cunning, he does. In a stroke of irony that Thomas Hardy would have loved, his company is selected to be shipped home to prepare for the Normandy landings. Out of a misplaced sense of kindness, Raymond’s fellow soldiers cover for him and try to keep him on the straight and narrow paths but, as the landing craft approaches the French beach it finally dawns on him that he could be killed, and he pleads to be sent to the rear for medical attention. It is too late. Somehow, he survives, having been driven on by an NCO. But when what remains of the platoon finally bivouacs in a relatively safe place, he is handed a written order transferring him away from danger and into the care of the medics. As he trudges away, he has a solitary flash of self awareness and he curses the well-meaning men who have delivered him to a place of shame. His parting words to his colleagues are, “I hope you die. I hope you all die.”

There is black humour in some of the stories, as well as a dark awareness of sexuality. In Chicolino, the soldiers in Baron’s platoon ‘adopt’ a homeless Sicilian boy, just into his teens. They share rations with him and treat him kindly, but are shocked to the core when he assumes that they will want to have sex with him in return for their kindness. He would have been quite happy to oblige, and is hurt and humiliated by their rejection. In The Indian, Baron retells the story from There’s No Home of how Sergeant Craddock comes to sleep with the beautiful Graziela. It is the appearance of a drunk but harmless Indian soldier that brings them into each other’s arms. Readers who, like me, are long in the tooth, will remember watching a 1963 movie called The Victors, directed by Carl Foreman. Alexander Baron was the screenwriter, and the story Everybody Loves a Dog, which relates the unfortunate consequences of a friendless and inarticulate Yorkshire soldier befriending a stray dog, was one of many memorable scenes in the film.

One of Baron’s colleagues is an intelligent and educated man called Frank Chase. In The Venus Bar, we read of his liaison with a beautiful but ruthless Ostend brothel owner. but in Victory Night, the war has taken its toll and Chase is shipped home, psychologically broken. He is hospitalised, but can make no sense of his situation.

“He was too bewildered to fight against his loneliness. He did not visit London. It was only to the immediate past, to us, that his memory was able to reach. Peace time had passed out of his life. He was afraid to go to London in search of the ends of long-broken threads. He wondered about in a days, hardly aware of anything that happened except the arrival of letters from his old comrades. He hugged these to him, for they were the raw material of dreams, daydreams that burst inside him like magnesium flares, illuminating with brief, ghostly intensity the supreme experiences he had to live through.”

When victory in Europe is finally declared, Chase is horrified by the drunken celebrations in an English village.

“The faces streamed past him, faces for a Bruegel, red and ugly with drink, the fat faces of alewives glistening with the distant firelight, the suet- lump faces of men who had not been judged young or intelligent enough to die, the vacuous whore-faces, pathetically greedy for pleasure, of little village girls. They squealed and shrieked, filled the night with graceless laughter, bawled idiot songs, coughed, screamed, yelled and belched.”

There are twenty five stories in all in The Human Kind, and all but two are reflections on Baron’s war service. The last one, An Epilogue, is a brief story of something that happened in the Korean War, by which time Baron had been in ‘civvy street’ for some time, but Strangers To Death, the first tale in the book, recounts an incident from Baron’s childhood. He says he was sixteen at the time, so this would place the events in the summer of 1933. He is the proud owner of a new sports bicycle, and he joins a group of local youngsters who cycle out from their East End homes to nearby countryside to camp on the banks of the River Lea. Here, they swim, smoke, cook meals and relish the fresh air, but when one of their number is trapped in the silk-weed growing from the river bed, and drowns, the atmosphere becomes sombre. It was probably Baron’s first intimate encounter with death, but with the insouciance of youth, he and his mates are soon back in the river, daring each other to play tug-of-war with the silk-weed and trying to get as close to the treacherous currents of a weir as they dare. On the way home, Baron comes even closer to death when, his spectacles blurred by rain, he collides with a tram. Miraculously, he is thrown clear, unharmed apart from a graze, and even his precious ‘Silver Wing’ bicycle is undamaged. He would of course, come to stare death in the face all too frequently just ten years later.

It would be inaccurate to say that Baron is a ‘forgotten’ writer, but his name would not be included in most people’s list of great English writers of the final decades of the twentieth century. Many of his other novels, often set in the Jewish London of his youth, are still in print, but his take on what war does to men, women and children is astonishing. His compassion, empathy and simple understanding of humanity should put his books up there with the best contemporary accounts of a disastrous – but necessary – conflict. The Human Kind is republished by The Imperial War Museums,and is available now.

April 24, 2024 1

THERE’S NO HOME . . . Between the covers

Sicily, 1943. A company of British soldiers, serving with the Eighth Army, has arrived in Catania, an ancient port that sits at the foot of Mt Etna. A full size army company would have numbered around 150 men, but this unit is much reduced in size. Although they have experienced battle in North Africa, by the time they get to Sicily, the war has moved on, as the Germans are engaged in a fighting retreat towards the Straits of Messina, where they will hope to cross – with as many men and as much materiel as possible – to the mainland. The Italian army is no longer a viable force,and it would officially surrender in September.

In Alexander Baron’s book – part of a trilogy based on his own war service – the British soldiers are not engaged directly with the enemy. Instead, they arrive in Catania and are assigned billets in the Via Martiri. For both themselves and the residents, it is something of a shock:

“They studied each other with a hostile curiosity. Each group looked the same to the other: filthy, exhausted, more animal than human, the soldiers swaying over their rifles, the civilians at bay before their houses. Each was looking at ‘the enemy’. There across the road (on which ever side one stood)were the people responsible for these last three weeks of suffering. The roadway was wide-miles wide, it seemed at this moment-sunlit and empty. A baby squalled and the children began to creep out from amongst their elders. The people looked at their children with a dullness that was worse than a visible agony. The distress that came into the soldiers eyes was the first human feeling they had betrayed since their arrival. The children all had the same appearance; heads that seemed monstrous on their shrunken bodies; big, appealing eyes; twisted, scabby little legs; and flesh whose colour, beneath the dirt, was a deathly toadstool whiteness.”

As in most of the rest of Catania, there are (with a couple of exceptions) no men in the Via Martiri. All are gone for soldiers. Many are now dead, and the rest are prisoners of the Allies. This creates an unusual problem for the officer in command of the company, Captain Rumbold. He is puzzled when, after a few days, many of his men are unofficially ‘adopted by various women in the street. Publicly, he says nothing, but he views his clerk as something of a confessor: To Piggott, however, who was his confidant as well as his clerk, he was indignantly eloquent.

“Would you have believed it? Chaps out of decent homes! You’d have thought wild horses wouldn’t have dragged them into the kind of pigsties that these people live in. Dark, dirty, smelly, bloody holes – that’s all they are – holes in the wall-full of flies and bugs and fleas. People in rags, scratching themselves day and night, look as if they’ve never had a bath in their lives! I can’t imagine what’s got into the chaps.”

One such soldier is Sergeant Joe Craddock. He has a wife and young child at home but, as the book’s title ominously suggests, ‘home’ has become a foreign concept for many men. They are where they are, with little or no expectation of being reconciled with their families. All they can do is adapt to what the ‘here and now’ offers. In Craddock’s case this takes the shape of a beautiful woman called Graziella. Her husband has gone away to fight, and she has no idea if he is living or dead. After a brief tussle with her conscience, she enthusiastically embraces – in every sense of the word – what Craddock has to offer.

Many of the company have been ‘adopted’ by women in the street. It is a symbiotic process; the men have their washing done, get a break from the abrasive all male life in the billet; not all of the men are claiming conjugal rights, but they can provide basic army rations, and their pay can buy luxuries from the shops and market stalls gradually re-opening after the fighting which caused the departure of the Germans. Inevitably the orders eventually come for the company to move out, and for Graziella and Craddock this is traumatic. She begs him to stay, but the thought of desertion appalls him.

As William Tecumseh Sherman once said, “War is all hell, boys”, but despite the privations and the real chance of serious injury or death, for many men, the army provides a structure, imposes boundaries, and obviates the need to make decisions or wrestle with moral problems. As the weeks of casual life end and the company prepares to move on, the army reasserts itself:

“Pride returned at the sight of the company forming up, the shuffling ranks closing into a neat, solid block of khaki that filled the whole length of the street; the straight lines of helmets swathed in dun sacking, the straight lines of rifles, the straight lines of packs, the straight lines of red faces. It was a single organism into which all individualities and all worries vanished, self sufficient and aloof from the untidy throng of civilians who surged around it as a tall ship is from the sea through which it cleaves.”

Baron’s writing is immensely powerful, and his understanding of fighting men is deep and thorough. In another time and place, he might have been a poet. As the company boards the train taking them who knows where, it is the end of something for the people of the Via Martiri.

“The train gathered speed and passed round the bend. Now there was only the blank end of the rear truck. Now it was gone. The sun’s glare, pitiless, blanched the blue sky, glittered on the deep blue sea, reflected, dazzling, from the walls of the tumbled white houses and drew an oven heat from the bleached pavements. The last tremor died from the rails. Now there was no sound in the blinding white sunlight; no sound but the weeping of women.”

First published in 1950, There’s No Home is republished by The Imperial War Museums, and is available now. For other titles in this superb series, click the link below.

April 19, 2024 1

THE GRAND ILLUSION . . . Between the covers

London. The early summer of 1940. British military leaders, politicians and the general public are wondering quite what to make of Dunkirk. Yes, over three hundred thousand allied servicemen have been rescued from the jaws of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, but they have left behind them their weapons, millions of rounds of ammunition and countless thousands of gallons of fuel. The British Expeditionary Force might still exist, but it has few rifles, artillery pieces or tanks (even if their were any fuel to propel them).

Against this gloomy backdrop, we meet Daphne Devine and Jonty Trevelyan. They are busy entertaining audiences at London theatres with their conjuring act. Daphne is, of course, the archetypal ‘glamorous assistant’, flashing her shapely legs before the climax of their act, where she apparently gets sawn in half by The Grand Mystique. In much more secret places than the Metropolitan Edgware Road, intelligence officers are wondering just how they can remove the gloves from the British establishment who don’t yet realise that their Nazi opponents have torn up the rules of war and are fighting a very dirty fight. Just as Daphne and Jonty are enlisted as unlikely secret weapons, news comes that the SS Arandora Star, taking hundreds of internees and prisoners of war to Canada has been torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat with the loss of more than 800 lives. Daphne’s Italian uncle is one of those lost.

Unsure of what is to be asked of them, Daphne and Jonty say goodbye to normal life, and are whisked off to a high security unit which seems to specialise in camouflage, pretence and making German aircraft make as many mistakes as possible in identifying targets on the ground. Then, events make another lurch in the direction of the unexpected. The ‘behind-the-scenes’ directors of this unlikely drama have become aware that the Nazi high command are, to a man, deeply susceptible to the occult and the power of astrology. This is the list. The initials are fairly obvious, although I admit to wondering what Reinhardt Heydrich was doing their, as this was only 1940. Then I remembered Hitler’s deputy, that strange who flew a plane to Scotland, and spent the last years of his life in Spandau Prison.

Then, Syd Moore introduces us to the delightful fulcrum on which the rest of the novel pivots. In a briefing Daphne and Jonty are astonished to learn that they are required not just to create an illusion of some astral phenomenon which will deter Hitler and his cohort from invading Britain, but to actually dabble in the Black Arts and recreate the demonic force which – so they are told – wreaked hell and destruction on The Spanish Armada in 1588, thus enabling Sir Francis Drake to continue his game of bowls, safe in the knowledge that the spell has already been cast.

On 31st July 1940, In the full knowledge that there are German spies nearby, observing their every move, Daphne and the other specialists create an elaborate and dramatic psychic event. It is a spectacular illusion. Or is it just an illusion? That is the enigma with which Syd Moore leaves us. Of course, conventional history tells us that the reason Hitler abandoned Operation Sealion was the Luftwaffe’s failure to gain air superiority over the RAF, but this delightful fantasy has other ideas.

The Grand Illusion is published by Magpie Books and is available now.

April 17, 2024 0

THE SAVAGE STORM . . . Between the covers

Soldiers in WW1 sang songs about their war, set to popular melodies and hymn tunes. There is an excellent collection of these in The Long Trail, by John Brophy and Eric Partridge, and parodies like When This Lousy War Is Over are one of the staples of the musical Oh What A Lovely War. There is little evidence that such parodies existed in WW2, but there is one significant exception. In the song D Day Dodgers (sung to the tune of Lili Marlene), soldiers of the 8th Army sing about their time in Italy:

We landed at Salerno, a holiday with pay,
Jerry brought the band out to cheer us on our way
Showed us the sights and gave us tea,
We all sang songs, the beer was free.
To welcome the D-Day Dodgers, way out in Italy

Palermo and Cassino were taken in our stride,
We didn’t go to fight there, we just went for the ride.
Anzio and Sangro were just names,
we only went to look for dames,
For we are the D-Day Dodgers, in sunny Italy.

The song, which has many more verses, was written as a sarcastic response to a statement made – allegedly by the MP Nancy Astor – criticising the 8th Army for not being part of the D Day landings in June 1944. Historian and broadcaster James Holland (left) has written an account of the Italian Campaign from the invasion of the mainland in September 1943 until the year’s end and, having read it, I can only think that the bitterness of the 8th Army men was more than justified.

The 8th Army and their American allies had defeated the Germans and the Italians in North Africa, and had subsequently forced the Axis defenders out of Sicily in 1943. Mainland Italy is separated from Sicily by The Strait of Messina, just short of two miles wide at its narrowest point, but those two miles posed a severe challenge to the allies.

In his book, Holland stresses a key issue often overlooked in stories of the invasion – the position of the Italian armed forces. Mussolini had been deposed and arrested, the Italian government was in turmoil yet, ostensibly, with a million men under arms, they were still German allies. Would they stay in place to fight the Allies on their beaches, or would Hitler, perpetually feeling let down by the Italians, forcibly disarm them? In fact, the ‘government’ – a vague coalition of Italian royalty, noblemen and opponents of Mussolini emerging from their bunkers had already faced the unpalatable fact that unconditional surrender was the only option open to them., but the key issue was the exact timing of the announcement, and its effect on the Germans. In the event, the Italian navy fled to Malta, there were pockets of heroic resistance to German forces – notably in and around Rome but, sadly the Italian forces behaved in a manner which confirmed popular opinion about the martial qualities of Italians.

There were three major obstacles facing the Allies:
(1) The terrain of Italy was a military defender’s dream with its spine of mountains, and consequent rivers, gorges and hilltop villages – each one turned into a fortress.
(2) In charge of the German Army was Albert Kesselring, one of the most competent and resolute commanders of the Wehrmacht.
(3) The fact that both Churchill and Eisenhower both had, in the backs of their minds, the fact that an invasion of France, planned for the following year, would be the key to defeating Hitler, thus becoming cautious about throwing men and equipment at the Italian campaign.

The first four months of this campaign set a pattern which was to repeated endlessly over the following sixteen months. A German army in retreat, but with total command of the defensive landscape – blowing bridges, mining roads, pouring hell down on the Allied troops from mountain strongholds – and a determination to make British and American soldiers pay a heavy price for every yard of territory gained.

Questions remain. Italy was never going to be ‘the soft under-belly’ of Hitler’s Europe. For me, it has the whiff of The Dardanelles campaign in 1915 – an alternative front, an attempt to attack a perceived weakness, ostensibly a quick victory against a vulnerable opponent. The facts are stark. Hitler’s southern front (via Austria) was never seriously threatened any more than Constantinople and the Black Sea ports were in 1915. Although outside the scope of this book, it is worth noting that the Germans did not finally surrender in Italy until just hours before Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker in April 1945. Holland’s story ends on 31st December 1943, but more – much more – slaughter was still to be endured.

In this book – which makes frequent use of the accounts of men who were there = James Holland exhibits meticulous research and attention to historical detail, but what sets The Savage Storm well above similar accounts of the campaign is that he recounts his story with the narrative verve of a novelist. He tells a grim tale with sensitivity and compassion, and the story is undiminished by our knowledge that the worst was yet to come. The book is published by Bantam and is available now. The last word should be left in the hands of whoever wrote D Day Dodgers. The final verse sums up the campaign to perfection:

Look around the mountains, in the mud and rain;
You’ll see some scattered crosses, and some that have no name.
Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone,
The boys beneath them slumber on.
These are your D Day Dodgers, who’ll stay out in Italy.

October 12, 2023 0

TWO MEN IN BERLIN . . . Bernie Gunther and John Russell (part two)

In part one of this feature I looked at the two fictional characters Bernie Gunther and John Russell and what happens in the novels, by Philip Kerr and David Downing, both series being rooted in Berlin. There, I dealt with the two series separately, and here I look at what divides them, and what common ground they share

In an imaginary world the two men might have met but, of course, they never did, despite Gunther being House Detective for the celebrated Adlon hotel (below), an establishment sometimes patronised by Russell.

Both men fought (for opposing sides) in the Great War and, in theory, coul have faced each other on opposite sides of No Man’s Land. Both have indelible memories of comrades being blown away by artillery and their tunics smeared with the brains of best mates. Both have an almost umbilical connection with Berlin, its parks and rivers, its tram and railway stations and its monumental architecture.

Gunther is on nodding terms with such Nazi luminaries as Joseph Goebbels, Rheinhardt Heydrich and Arthur Nebe. In contrast, John Russell operates well below this elevated level of the Nazi heirarchy, although he references such monsters as Beria and Himmler, and does have face to face meetings with Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (left).

John Russell is, largely, lucky in love. True, he has a failed marriage behind him but Paul, the son conceived and born when he was still married to Ilse, is a huge part of his life. He is also madly in reciprocated love with a prominent German actress, Effi Koenen. In the final novel, Masaryk Station, they are married. Effi is safe and well in Berlin – albeit in a Berlin being carved up between the Americans, the British, the Russians and the communist Germans who would go on to rule East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall. John and Effi have an adopted daughter Rosa, and Paul, who served as a teenager with the Wehrmacht, has survived the cataclysm of Hitler’s strategic blunders in the last two years of the war, and by 1948 he is living in London.

Gunther, in contrast, has known nothing but trauma in family terms. His wife dies in tragic circumstance and then his girlfriend – whi s regnant with his child – dies in one of the most infamous acts of WW2 – the sinking (by a Russian submarine) of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945. This account, detailed in The Other Side of Silence (2016) is, for me, the most compelling part of any of the Gunther novels:

The Wilhelm Gustloff was a cruise liner pressed into service as a military transport vessel, and in January 1945 it attempted to sail across the Baltic from Prussia. It was overloaded with some 10,000 personnel, mostly Germans fleeing the advance of the Red Army. The Soviet submarine S-13, captained by a maverick drunk and against orders sent three torpedoes into the side of the Wilhelm Gustloff. The ship sank killing 9,400, and is the worst maritime disaster in history.

Gunther is not a sexual predator, but beds women when they they present themselves, wherever and whenever. Russell remains resolutely faithful to Effi, but as she is an improbably beautiful film star with a healthy sexual appetite, we should not be placing the martyr’s crown on Russell’s head just yet, but he always has someone to fight for – Effi and Rosa, and his son Paul. By contrast Gunther is mostly only fighting for himself and his tarnished ideas of what is right and what is wrong. When he dies, he suspects that there will be few mourners as his coffin is laid in earth.

As far as Berlin is concerned, the two series run on parallel tracks. They share the final decadence of the Weimar years, the descent into Nazi rule, the devastation after the spring of 1945, and the finger-on-the-trigger tensions of the 1960s.

Russell’s geographical stamping grounds are tight: his domain is Europe – Prague, Triest, Belgrade, Danzig, occasionally London but – of course – always Berlin. Gunther goes where the job – or his pursuers – send him. In the novels, we see him operating all over the world – Argentina, Cuba, Greece, the South of France and Russia. Neither David Downing nor Philip Kerr waste time on political posturing, but both remind us that no known measurement – not even the thickness of the proverbial Rizla cigarette paper – separates the degeneration of Hitler and Stalin. This is never more prominent than in A Man Without Breath in which Gunther is sent by Goebbels to Smolensk. His task? To prove that it was the Russians who murdered thousands of Polish officers and flung their corpses into deep trenches. In the real world, it was not until the 1990s that Russia admitted its guilt.

Gunther is – first and last – a cop. He is physically imposing and familiar with violence. Russell is – at least in his day job – a freelance journalist, and avoids physical confrontation if he possibly can. Stylistically, the novels are also chalk and cheese. We share Gunther’s world through his own voice while we learn what John Russell is up to via the invisible third party. There is another important difference in the way the two series sit in what could be called a family tree of thrillers. Philip Kerr shapes his man more in the image of Philip Marlowe, albeit a Marlowe much more enthusiastic about using his fists (or any other available weapon). Gunther also echoes Marlowe’s bitter poetry, and talent for memorable descriptions. This is Bernie Gunther on Heidrich:

“Tall, skeletally thin, his long, pale face lacking expression, like some plaster of Paris death mask, and his Jack Frost fingers clamped behind his ramrod-straight back, Heydrich stared outside for a moment or two, saying nothing to either of us.”

David Downing portrays the world of espionage in a way familiar to readers of John Le Carré; this world is undeniably dangerous and fatal to those who make mistakes, but it it is less overtly dramatic, and – although more subtle – nonetheless deadly. John Russell is – in his heart – a socialist, but one who despairs of the direction taken by post 1945 communist regimes. Bernie Gunther is resolutely German and someone who has suffered grievously at the hands of the Russians, but a man who has gazed into the depths of evil plumbed by Hitler and his minions and realises that there are four combatants in his particular battle – the Germans, the Russians, the Anglo-Americans – and himself.

David Downing’s series ends with John Russell and Effi, like tens of thousands of other Berliners, becoming engulfed by the total Russian shut-down of land access to the city in 1948 – the act that precipitated the legendary Berlin Airlift. Philip Kerr’s premature death in 2018 means we shall never know if Bernie Gunther eventually enjoyed his retirement, but David Downing is – happily – still with us, and an eighth novel, Union Station, is due in 2024, and jumps forward to 1953, with Russell living in California.

June 23, 2023 1

TWO MEN IN BERLIN . . . Bernie Gunther and John Russell (part one)

Bernie Gunther is the anti-hero of fourteen novels by the late Philip Kerr. Berlin cop, turned private investigator, sometime employee of Goebbels and Heydrich, and finally an international pariah, Gunther’s exploits span post Great War Germany to international intrigue in the 1950s. John Russell is an Anglo American journalist who begins the series of seven books by David Downing based in Germany. The books are all named after railway stations and span the years 1938 – 1948.

BERNIE GUNTHER

Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir series was published between 1989 and 1991, and introduced the world to Bernie Gunther. Strangely, it wasn’t until 2006 that the books March Violets, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem were followed up with The One from the Other, and until his death the Edinburgh-born author brought us regular episodes from the life of his tough, resourceful and compassionate hero. The final novel in the series, Metropolis, was published in 2019 after Kerr’s death and, ironically, is set in the earliest part of Gunther’s career.

To begin with, Gunther has survived two world wars and seen death in all its forms. However, what makes the series fascinating is the challenge he faces, which is to keep his moral compass steady. Uniquely amongst fictional detectives, Bernie has to operate during the dark and savage days of the Third Reich.

Having returned from the trenches of The Great War, Gunther becomes a member of Kripo (Kriminalpolizei), the investigative branch of the Berlin police. During the turbulent years of the 1930s, he tries to steer an even and honest course between the rival political thuggery of the Nazis and the Communists, and when Hitler seizes power he eventually finds himself forced to join the SD (Sicherheistdienst), the intelligence division of the SS. Sent to Ukraine as part of an extermination group but having no stomach for this, he is shunted into the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, and is captured by the Russians. After the War, his ambiguous record makes him a person of interest to the Americans, the Russians and the leadership of the GDR, and he leads a dangerous existence among Nazi refugees in Cuba and South America.

Like John Lawton and George Macdonald Frazer, with their respective Freddie Troy and Flashman series, Kerr places fictional characters within real events and alongside celebrated or notorious historical figures. And, he manages to do so in a fascinating and totally plausible way. Assuming that Gunther was born in the mid-to-late 1890s, he can still be at work in the mid 1950s, albeit a heavier, slower and more breathless version of his former self – a latter day Ulysses.

“Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield,” writes Kerr of his hero.

The author’s style, particularly his use of dialogue, set him apart from most contemporary writers. His books were genuine literature, although I suspect written without literary pretension. In Prague Fatale, he described Gunther meeting an American war correspondent in a Berlin blackout:

“His Old Spice and Virginia tobacco came ahead of him like a motorcycle outrider with a pennant on his mudguard. Solid footsteps bespoke sturdy wing-tip shoes that could have ferried him across the Delaware….his sweet and minty breath smelled of real toothpaste and testified to his having access to a dentist with teeth in his head who was still a decade off retirement.”

In his toughness, moral strength and cynical view of the world, Gunther is very much the heir of Philip Marlowe. His descriptions, sarcasm and one-line put-downs can be very funny. This is a line from A Quiet Flame, which came out in 2008:

“The isosceles of muscles between her chin and her collar-bone had stiffened, like something metallic. If I’d had a little wand I could have used it to tap out the part for triangle in the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin.”
For more on Bernie Gunther, click the link below

https://fullybooked2017.com/tag/bernie-gunther/

JOHN RUSSELL

Russell is an English journalist with an American mother. Until 1927 he was a member of the Communist Party but, like many others, he fell out of love with the kind of socialism being espoused by Stalin and his acolytes. After serving with the British army in The Great War, he moved to Berlin, married Ilse, and they had a son – Paul. The marriage didn’t last.

In terms of the actual time setting, Wedding Station (2021) gives us the earliest glimpse of John Russell.It is just months after Hitler’s rise to power, and Russell watches the Reichstag burn. Four weeks after Hitler’s accession, brownshirt mobs stalk the streets and the press prints what the Party tells it to.

In the first book (in publication terms) in the series, Zoo Station (2007) we are are introduced to Russell. It is 1939, Berlin, and Russell is an accredited American journalist, safe (for now) from the excesses of Hitler’s government. He has a glamorous girlfriend in Effie Koenen, who is a rising star in German cinema, but he still has a relatively civilised relationship with Ilse – and her new husband – and has regular access to Paul.

His communist background, American passport and fluency in both Russian and German make John Russell a unique target for the intelligence services of all the major powers and, almost like a serial bigamist he becomes wedded to the Sicherheitsdienst, the NKVD, the Abwehr, and the OSS. He plays each one off against the other, more or less successfully and, along with Effie and son Paul, survives the war, but finds ‘the peace’ post 1945 just as traumatic. In Masaryk Station (2013) set in 1948, Russell is told by a Soviet stooge that there is still a war, but that it is different:

“That war is over. It’s time you realised that another struggle – one every bit as crucial – is now underway.”

One of the main anxieties in Russell’s complex life is his son Paul. As the boy reaches his teens he becomes – like millions of other German lads – a member of the Hitlerjugend, and this threatens to drive a wedge between father and so. In Stettin Station (2009) we are in November/December 1941, and a famed German air ace of WW1, Ernst Udet is dead. In fact, he shot himself, disillusioned with Luftwaffe chief Goering, and the general conduct of the war, but for the purposes of national solidarity the official story is that he died in a plane crash. As his elaborate funeral cortege passes their viewing point, Paul chides his father for not making the Seig Heil salute with enough reverence. Russell dreads the day when Paul is conscripted to the army and sent to fight on the Eastern Front.

John Russell’s contact with senior Nazi officials is limited, but he does occasionally come face to face with Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, the intelligence service of the German army. One of Russell’s many uneasy allegiances is to the Abwehr which, in fiction if not in fact, has been seen as the acceptable face of the Third Reich. This is perhaps born out by the fact that Canaris was executed for treason on 9th April 1945, in the dying days of Hitler’s regime.

Russell’s connection with Joseph Goebbels is more distant, and it is through Effi Koenen. She is probably the most ‘box office’ star of German cinema, and Goebbels – as propaganda minister – has absolute control over what films can be made, and what message they send out. As such, Effi is much sought after. Again in Stettin Station David Downing presents us with the bitter irony that Effi – pale, dark haired and sexually vibrant – is required to play a Jewish woman in a film with a vehemently anti-Jewish screenplay. For full reviews of Silesian Station and Wedding Station click the link below.

https://fullybooked2017.com/tag/david-downing/

IN PART TWO OF THIS FEATURE
I will examine the differences – and similarities between Bernie Gunther and John Russell.

June 18, 2023 0

MAILED FIST . . . Between the covers

The superb Wartime Classics series from the Imperial War Museum includes stories from the home front, such as Plenty Under The Counter, To All The Living, and Mr Bunting at War. Eight Hours From England took us to the undercover war in Albania, Patrol was set in the North Africa campaign, and in Trial by Battle, we sweated along with the men fighting in the Malayan jungle. The battle in the air was covered by Pathfinders and Squadron Airborne. Now, in the twelfth of the series, Mailed Fist joins Warriors For The Working Day and Sword of Bone with an account of the fighting in mainland Europe.

Cedric John Foley MBE (7 March 1917 – 8 November 1974) was a British Army officer, author, broadcaster, and public relations specialist. A regular soldier between 1936 and 1954, he was made MBE for his services to the Royal Armoured Corps during WW2. A man of wide interests, he was also known as a broadcaster and scriptwriter, and was military advisor to the popular ITV comedy show, The Army Game.

This is perhaps the least fictionalised of all the books in the series. Foley faithfully records his own experience after being commissioned into the Royal Armoured Corps in 1943. He was to command Five Troop – a trio of Churchill tanks named Avenger, Alert, and Angler. Foley follows the progress of the Allied forces through Normandy, the Ardennes and eventually – after bitter and brutal fighting against German forces – across the Rhine into Germany itself.

Earlier editions of the book had a very gung-ho blurb on the front but it is worth pointing out that although Foley is, as one might expect, intensely loyal to the Churchill tank, it was widely regarded as being something of a lame duck in the tank world. The massed-produced American Shermans, the devastating Panthers and Tigers of the Panzerkorps, and the Russian T34s were all probably superior in overall performance.

The book is markedly different from Warriors For The Working Day, another account which included a description of a tank regiment advancing through Normandy. Peter Elstob’s writing is much more, for want of a better word, poetic, while Foley’s words have more the feel of a diary. He also concentrates more on the mechanics of the war, rather than the emotions of the men fighting it. That isn’t to say that Mailed Fist isn’t well written, and there are some memorable passages, such as this description of a column of German prisoners:

“One cheerful imp-faced man – obviously the platoon jester – gave a Nazi salute grinned broadly as he turned it into a mime of pulling a lavatory chain. At the end of the column came a boy, he looked about thirteen years old and as he stumbled past he used the sleeve of his greatcoat to wipe the tears from his eyes.”

If you hadn’t worked it out from the featured illustration, the book’s title refers to the cap badge of the Royal Armoured Corps. Mailed Fist is a highly readable and authentic account of a crucial stage during WW2. It is published by the Imperial War Museum, and will be available on 21st April.

GLOSSARY OF SOME MILITARY TERMS USED IN THE BOOK

BESA British version of a Czech machine gun, frequently mounted in WW2 British tanks. Fired 7.92 Mauser rounds.
BOCAGE Countryside in Normandy typified by small fields, dense hedgerows and sunken roads. Difficult country for offensive warfare but ideal for defenders.
CHURCHILL British tank, well armoured, but lacking the firepower of its German adversaries. Still in use in the 1950s.
ENSA Entertainments National Service Organisation – dedicated to bringing light entertainment to serving military units.
LST Landing Ship, Tank. American boat used to transport tankson D-Day
PANTHER German tank considered one of the best of the war in terms of fire power, protection and mobility.
SHERMAN The ubiquitous Allied tank of WW2. American designed and built, easy to run and maintain, produced in huge numbers.
SPANDAU German machine gun, firing up to 1200 rounds a minute/Known to the Allies as ‘Hitler’s Buzzsaw’.
TELLERMINE Literally ‘Plate Mine’ – German anti-tank mine.
TIGER Probably the supreme tank of WW2, at least in theory. Fast, manoeuvrable, with a powerful gun and formidable armour, it was, difficult to repair and too highly engineered to be produced in sufficient numbers.

April 13, 2022 1

MR BUNTING AT WAR . . . Between the covers

This is another in the superb series of republished novels set in the Second World War. As author Wiliiam Boyd remarked:

“If poetry was the supreme literary form of the First World War the, as if in riposte, in the Second World War, the English novel comes of age. This wonderful series is an exemplary reminder of that fact.”

Robert Greenwood introduced Mr Bunting to the world in the book of the same title, published in 1940. He is something of a ‘stuffed shirt’, but entirely without malice, and he lives with his family in Essex, but within commuting distance of his work at an ironmongers in London. This is set in 1941, with London under siege from the skies, but by the end of the book the strategically unimportant district where the Buntings live is feeling the full wrath of the Luftwaffe.

George Bunting and his wife Mary have three grown up children, Chris, Ernest and Julie. Chris is, it could be said, George’s favourite son. He is practical, endlessly optimistic and cheerful, while Ernest is more introspective – and a gifted pianist. Both young men are trying hard to make a go of their respective careers, while Julie is something of a dreamer, and looking for suitable work.

The day to day world that Robert Greenwood describes would have been completely familiar to thousands of readers in 1941. So many elements of life then, however, are almost unimaginable to us now: the sheer terror of being under regular attack from the skies, the dread of receiving a telegram from the armed forces, the privations and shortages of food and the heavy hand of a wartime government laid on every aspect of normal life.

I was initially tempted to compare Mr Bunting with another gentleman from an earlier generation, Charles Pooter. Mr Pooter (the creation of George and Weedon Grossmith in Diary of A Nobody) lived closer to ‘town’, in Holloway. His house was called The Laurels, while Mr Bunting lives at Laburnum Villa. While the Grossmiths wanted us to laugh at Mr Pooter, Robert Greenwood takes a very different approach. He invites us, perhaps, to smile and raise an eyebrow at Mr Bunting’s rigid view of the world and his own place in it, but he never mocks. Bunting is a man of simple pleasures:

“There was nothing Mr Bunting liked better than to escape from the war and listen to his wife and daughter-in-law discuss the technicality of ‘turning the heel’ or report on experiments with recipes recommended by the Ministry of Food. To sit placidly smoking and listening to these discussions was to realise one had a home and a wife who was a jewel. If there was anything better in life, Mr Bunting wanted to know what it was.”

Through Mr Bunting, as he travels into London each day on his morning train, we see the carnage being wrought on the city. As he walks from the station to Brockleys, things almost become too much for him:

“Through the devastation he walked, stepping over hoses, skirting the edge of craters, threading his way past grimed and bloodshot firemen, single-mindedly pursuing his own particular business. There were gruesome sights, too, sensed rather than seen, tarpaulins stretched over what he knew were human forms. Once, a lock of a girl’s hair fluttered brightly as the wind ruffled her crude shroud. He bit his lip, and looked away.”

In George Bunting, Robert Greenwood created a character who is ordinary in the extreme, socially gauche, but from a generation of people who simply ‘got on with things’ when the darker side of life – in this case, a world war – threatened to overwhelm them. When tragedy strikes the family, he is devastated, but breaking down is simply something that was ‘not on’ in those days. To the fraudulent modern day gurus of self-love and ’emotional intelligence’, George Bunting would seem like someone from another planet, but Greenwood gives him courage, dignity and – above all – common decency. Mr Bunting at War is an Imperial War Museum Classic, and will be out on 21st April.