Can Bomber Command Get Any Respect? Review of Bomber Boys

Bomber Boys: Fighting Back 1940-1945 by Patrick Bishop

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sometimes it is amazing to see the differences between how different people (or peoples) see the same events. Like his earlier book Fighter Boys Patrick Bishop tells Bomber Boys from a British perspective and for a British audience. However, I was well aware of the great stories and mythos of Fighter Command and the Battle of Britain. That quintessentially British story had been transported across the pond with only changes to vocabulary.

I didn't even realize how unfamiliar I was with the story of RAF Bomber Command. I had assumed that the RAF's strategic bombing campaign was held in the same generally high esteem in the UK as the strategic efforts of the Eighth Air Force are held in the US. Apparently, this was a very false assumption.

While the public in the US debated the efficacy and ethics of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the British public debated (or ignored) the ethics and efficacy of the entire area-bombing effort against Germany.

I don't think this is the book to truly explore these issues. It is a history of the people who flew the planes, not an operational history or philosophical treatise. Bishop assumes the audience has been following these discussions and avoids making a ruling on either ethics or ultimate cost/benefit analysis.

The ultimate difference in how the US and the UK welcomed their Bomber Boys home rests on the fact that the British had suffered under a bombardment of their own. People don't like being bombed, ergo people who have been bombed, don't like bombers.

I think I just added another month or so until I can face the volume on my shelf addressing the campaign from the German pespective.

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Blimps Over Blighty: Review of British Airships 1905-30

British Airships 1905-30 by Ian Castle

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a deal book I found prowling through the local Borders that was in its final death throws. I thuink I have found that I like the Osprey Publishing books and may breakdown and buy more in the future. They seems a little "lite" and are therefore more likely to get you a querolous look from a guest who sees it on your bookshelf than the latest Ian Kershaw.

I enjoyed the coverage of all the military airship models, complete with contemporay photos and color plates of most classes. It was only mildly dissapointing not to something more deep-steampunk.

So many people have tried to populate a world with airships, blaming the Hindenberg for destroying such an elegant way of flying. But reading about the crash of the R101 reminded me that Hindenburg was just the last of the air behemoths to die a fiery death, not the only one.

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Defenders of the Air: Review of "Fighter Boys"

Fighter Boys: The Battle of Britain, 1940 by Patrick Bishop

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ah, the Brits.

Normally, while I'm reading a book, I find myself pulled to a theme in my thoughts. For some reason, this book didn't get me on a single thought, so please excuse my disordered ramblings.

It is always amazing to me how very different the American and British views of the same events can be. This book is so much broader and yet seems much more genuine that Kershaw's The Few. I know Kershaw was focusing on a much smaller selection of pilots - the dozen or so Americans to participate in the Battle of Britain - but when his story is slotted in next to Bishop's broader (and yet shorter) history, it just feels pale in comparison.

The other part of reading a British author is the differing and increased vocabulary. The interviewed pilots casually mention "debagging" their squadron lead - I had just come across the term "debag" in Reading the OED where the (American) author had been surprised that the term and practice (better know in the Colonies as pantsing) was still in use in the early 20th century. It was only near the end of the book that a discovered that one pilot's constant "lurcher" companion was a dog, not his batman as I had thought (bad enough that I knew what a batman does - not chase criminals in Gotham City).

Finally, I must say it was a it disorienting to be reading about the Battle of Britain at the same time as reading The Hobbit to my daughter. To have the heroic Bard the bowman leading the archers of Laketown in a desperate rushed (and ultimately triumphant) defense against the depredations of the fire-breathing Smaug just seemed to echo the RAF too well. And remember, Tolkien published The Hobbit only two years after the Luftwaffe was even established.


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Birth of Middle-Earth in the Fields of France: Review of Tolkien and the Great War

Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth by John Garth


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book was something quite different from what I expected. Going in I expected a book focused on J.R.R. Tolkien almost exclusively, with discussions of the hells of the Western Front in WWI and then a deeper discussion of the themes of loss or nature and industrialization play out in The Lord of the Rings. I was looking forward to that analysis of the 'coming of the machine age' that Peter Jackson had played up so beautifully in the movie version of The Two Towers.

Instead, Garth treats us to a view into a group of Victorian friends with discursions on the philological and poetic world/myth building that Tolkien was working on at the time. The group of friends are the four self-appointed members of the 'Tea Club and Barrovian Society" (shortened to TCBS for most purposes). The grand name concealed what was no more than a high-school clique. I'm reminded of my own high-school poseur-gang dubbed "the D-Men" although in practice, the TCBS was closer to Tufts University's Film Series club.

Each of the four members of the TCBS saw themselves and the group as having the potential to change the world and bring forth works of immortal quality. Garth asserts that the TCBS was purely middle-class, but there is a strong strain of upper-class Victorian exceptionalism in Tolkien's peers views of their world. After being split apart to attend Cambridge and Oxford, the four friends still exchanged letters, poems, writings, and music and periodically met in what were referred to as ‘Councils.’

It’s all very idyllic and the reader can’t quite say whether these young men were destined to be the next Algonquin Round Table or just a group of high-school alumni pen-pals. And then Tolkien’s generation of young academics was swept-up in the Great War. Three of the four TCBS members were young officers leading patrols and assaults in the Battle of the Somme, the fourth was on a battlecruiser in the Battle of Jutland. Only one of the three sent to France came back. Tolkien was infected with lice-borne “trench-fever” and spent second half of the war on home guard duty and medical convalescence.

Garth makes a good argument for the power of Tolkien’s experience in the Somme for shaping much of his mythic background for Middle-Earth, particularly the stories that went into his Book of Lost Tales and The Silmarillion. I was pleasantly surprised to learn of the conceptual links between Tolkien’s mythology and books of H. Rider Haggard.

In the long Postscript, Garth makes an effort to place the writings of Tolkien in a literary universe defined by post-Great War writing. He makes a case that Tolkien was writing about his wartime experience without falling into the two major camps of war-writing of the period. Tales of Middle-Earth are neither the ‘high diction’ propaganda created by imperial powers in the image of Haggard and [William Morris} to impress their people and drive in recruits nor the studied, modernist, or gritty writings of Robert Graves or Sigfried Sassoon. Instead, Tolkien sought to create a new style. In the process, he created a whole new genre of popular literature.

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The Royal Navy's Home Port: Review of Scapa Flow

Scapa Flow in War and Peace by W.S. Hewison


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This an abridged version of Hewiston's larger work, This Great Harbour: Scapa Flow. It's a slim little volume of history of the sheltered anchorage in the middle of the Orkney Islands off the northern shore of Scotland.

The body of the book covers the First and Second World Wars when the relatively isolated harbor served as the primary port for Great Britain's main fleet (the Grand Fleet in WWI and the Home Fleet in WWII). The position of Scapa Flow gave the fleet the best staging ground for intercepting any German warships attempting to break out into the Atlantic or shipping attempting to break the British naval blockade applied in both wars.

The book does not cover the various missions and encounters that the Royal Navy engaged in with much detail. Instead, the focus is on activities in the harbor itself. The two most dramatic incidents both involved German warships in the Flow. First, Scapa Flow hosted the German High Seas Fleet when it was interred after the end of WWI. On the summer solstice in 1919, two days before the Versailles Treaty would have ordered the ships of the German fleet distributed to the various victorious allies, the German admiral in charge ordered the whole fleet scuttled.

The next dramatic moment came in the early days of WWII when a German U-Boat penetrated the insufficient defenses of the harbor to sink the British battleship Royal Oak. This incident lead to a major build-up of defenses and forces in the Orkneys, and listing these defenses and emplacements is where this little volume shows its greatest value.

Hewison assumes that his reader already knows a fair deal about the two world wars, the Royal Navy, and the general geography of Great Britain and the Orkneys. The strength of the volume is in the details and the point of view of a native Orkadian.

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Looking for Churchill's "Sunlit Uplands" - Review of "The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire"

The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of the Pax Americana by Peter Clarke

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Clarke writes a quite effective summary of Anglo-American relations from the Quebec Octagon Conference in September 1944 through the end of the Raj in India and the referral of the Palestinian Mandate to the UN in August 1947. The author relies heavily on primary source materials - mainly diaries of major political players and their courtiers as well as extensive mining of contemporary newspaper articles and opinion polls. The war in Europe dominates the narrative, not reaching V-E Day and the Potsdam conference until three quarters of the way through the book. The Pacific Theater and Far East (beyond India) receive surprisingly little attention in my mind (although Canada does get more attention than I'd expect).

The main focus of this book however is on what Winston Churchill called "the most unsordid act in the history of any nation," the Lend-Lease Act. By shipping supplies from America's "Arsenal of Democracy" to the front lines in Britain, this act served to keep the British war effort afloat, especially through the years before the U.S. entered the war.

I'm a little bit of two minds about this book. First, I was clearly not the intended audience. Clarke is clearly a Brit writing for a British audience. This is seen in both the vocabulary and especially in references to British political figures with the clear assumption that the reader would know of their reputation during and after the period of time being examined. While I'm an amateur WWII history buff, I'm not an Oxford historian versed in the academic debates and various theories why the British Empire dissolved. Therefore the Introduction and Epilogue especially seemed to be defending the book against attacks that I have never truly seen.

The most interesting, and at times frustrating, facet of this book is the economics. I'd heard plenty about how Lend-Lease saved Britain (and even propped-up the Soviet Union in her hour of need), but I hadn't thought much about how (if at all) the US got those loans back. I'd thought even less about how such a massive flow of aid and armaments would distort the British economy to the point that peace would bring almost the same level of economic hardship as the Blitz. The problem is that I'm just not well enough versed in Keynesian macroeconomics to understand the difference between hard and soft currencies and how the advent of convertability of British pound sterling to US dollars would hurt Britain. Maybe this is a failing in my education, but it is also a red flag for those readers not in academia.

Overall, I was happy to read a book covering this period that wasn't shackled to the story of the Crusade in Europe and the inevitable Cold War to follow. Here is a story (or rather the epilogue to a story) that easily straddles those two narratives and gives some vital insight into two conflicts (Israeli-Palestinian and India-Pakistan) that are currently dominating the narrative of the twenty-first century.

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Churchill in Four Colors - Review of 'The Happy Warrior'

The Happy Warrior: The Life Story of Sir Winston Churchill, as told through Great Britain's Eagle comic of the 1950s by Clifford Makins

This book is an interesting primary source material, but I'm having some trouble understanding exactly who the target audience is. The volume is primarily a compilation of comic-book style pages from the British boys magazine 'Eagle' from the 1950s. Pulled together into a single binding, 'The Happy Warrior' becomes a graphic-novel biography of Winston Churchill. This collection runs from his boyhood through adventures in India, Egypt, South Africa, the Western Front in WWI France, and British politics before spending the second half on his WWII leadership (leaving off his Cold War influences).

This graphical section is quite effective in showing how Churchill was viewed, especially in Britain, before more critical histories of his life and leadership were published. The problem with the volume falls in other sections. An overly long introduction gives the reader an history of the 'Eagle' magazine and a blow-by-blow description of what aspects of Sir Winston's life made it into the biography and what sections were omitted at the time, and perhaps why. From the tone, the author of this section doesn't seem to know whether he is speaking to the children (now grown) who read the 'Eagle' pages in their original form, speaking to those who had never heard of the 'Eagle' before (including me), or defending Churchill (and Churchill hero-worship) before some kind of historical jury. At the end is appended the entire Wordsworth poem "Character of the Happy Warrior" -- which I have to admit I couldn't bring myself to read. The net effect is a bit jarring.

As I've said before, I am a sucker for pulp, and Sir Winston's life sometimes reads like 'Alan Quartermain and the End of the Empire!' If you were trying to create a leader to lead a Britain who stands alone before Nazi Germany in the Fall of 1940, you really couldn't think of a better background than Churchill's.

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Review: Agent Zigzag

Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal by Ben MacIntyre

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
On my way to work, a co-worker asked me what I was reading so avidly. I replied "Agent ZigZag. It's about a British bank robber who is stuck in WWII occupied Europe, volunteers to be a spy for the Germans, parachutes into Britain and immediately calls MI5 to volunteer to work for them instead."

"So fiction then." my co-worker replied.

"No way, they can't write fiction this absurd. It'd never get published." (in a later chapter, an MI5 interrogator wrote almost that same line into Eddie Chapman's files).

The thing is, I was only half-way into the book. I still hadn't gotten to Eddie Chapman's adventures in Lisbon, Oslo, Berlin, or his second parachute jump into the British countryside.

This is one of two books about Eddie Chapman's wartime exploits as a double (or is it triple or quad or something) agent. I haven't gotten my hands on the other one, entitled just Zigzag. According to the NYT review, this is the "more graceful(ly)" written of the two books, and importantly, the more skeptical. Chapman himself had a habit of retelling his story in a way that best fit the wants of the listener. So there is a need for the author to corroborate the cleaims of meeting both Churchill and Hitler.

I have to wonder when the movie version is coming. There was a 1966 movie Triple Cross, but from all accounts it was so censored by the Official Secrets Act and rewritten as to be merely "inspired by," history and truly owes more to James Bond than Eddie Chapman (though both Ian Fleming and the inspiration for his fictional tech-geek "Q" do appear in the book).

More evidence that large chunks of WWII seem to have been cast and written by pulp-fiction writers!

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Lightning Buried on a Welsh Beach

Unusual weather in Wales has revealed a treasure from WWII. A P-38 Lockheed Lightning has been found buried in tidal sands on a Welsh beach. The plane was abandoned in September 1942 after its pilot had to ditch due to a malfunction with its fuel system. If recovered, it will be the oldest Lightning to survive the war.

I have special fondness for the P-38. My grandfather was a mechanic in the European theatre working on Lightnings and Thunderbolts (a regular Hephaestus). The twin-boom design was the work of 'Kelly' Johnson, who's famous Skunk Works would later create the U2 and SR-71 spy planes, as well as the first stealth fighter.

The P-38 is also notorious as the weapon used to assassinate Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. American 'Magic' code-breaking was used to determine Yamamoto's flight schedule to Solomon Islands. The Lightning was the only plane with the range to intercept the Admiral.

America's ace of aces (having the most kills of any American flier) was Richard Bong who shot down 40 Japanese enemies why flying a Lightning named Marge during WWII.

Titanic II -- This Time the Iceberg IS the Ship

Habbakuk.

A funny-sounding name for a funny idea. At the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, the British were willing to listen to any new idea that promised to make their convoys safe. Enter Geoffrey Pyke, with his idea to build a massive ship out of ice. The full design was to be a 2,000 feet long, 300 feet wide, and 2 million ton aircraft carrier with a hull 40 feet thick. The hull itself was a mixture of ice and sawdust, dubbed 'Pykrete' after its creator.

Alas for the future of Britania's iceberg-navy, the demand for so much sawdust would have been a drain on wartime paper production and the idea was shelved. The farthest it got was a 30 X 60 foot test bed floating in Patrica Lake in Alberta, Canada.

"Look among the nations! Observe! Be astonished! Wonder! Because I am doing something in your days-- You would not believe if you were told." (Habakkuk 1:5)