Tour War-Torn Europe by Tramp Steamer: Review of Dark Voyage

Dark Voyage by Alan Furst

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I generally enjoy the heck out of Alan Furst's novels. The atmosphere he creates is very immersive, and even when the main character is a bit inscrutable, supporting characters can just send your brain spinning off into the possibilities of their backgrounds and futures.

This volume is one of the most disjointed of Furst's novels I've read. The narrative can jump several days, then backtracking as our PoV character thinks back to how they survived the last cliffhanger. The role of S. Kolb feels a bit like a red-herring, never truly panning out. The ship-board setting feels a bit thinner than wartime Paris common in other volumes.

For all those complaints, I still recommend the book. It was a fun read and a nice break between denser fare.

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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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When the Pulp Age Meets the Stone Age: Review of Lost in Shangri-La

Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II by Mitchell Zuckoff

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

More unbelievable stories from WWII.

Upon reading the subtitle, I thought "Most Incredible Rescue Mission"? Those are fighting words, especially if you have read Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission. But that book's author, Hampton Sides was willing to write a blurb for the back cover. The difference between these two missions does focus on the "incredible" aspect. The Alamo Scouts' rescue mission in the Phillipines was amazingly well executed and very lucky. The accident and airlift from Shagri-La in New Guniea was a matter of "really, who writes this stuff?"

So well before Gilligan's Island every aired, the Army Air Corps ran a "three-hour tour" sight-seeing flight over an isolated stone-age valley deep in the mountains. This wasn't the first fly-by, but this flight was mainly a morale-builder for WACs based in Hollandia. Mistake number one? Picking a plane called the 'Gremlin Special' - really!

After the inevitable crash, we have a set-up from a bad Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp novel. Two men and one woman trapped in a land time forgot - with cannibals! The survivors even knew the tropes and joked about having to swing on vines to cross streams and debating which of the men would inevitably have to marry Maggie the WAC once they were rescued.

Oh, no, that's not good enough. We have to meet the young-go-getting officer of the rescue party, an Anglo officer of a unit of Fillino-American guerilla-trained paratroopers. He aso has MAJOR daddy-issues as his father is stayed in the Phillipines to run a partisan movement and has asked the Army brass to bench his son's unit since his son can't possibly measure up. Serious guy-shit!

And the rescue? Gathering a rag-tag band of experts and equipment from across the Pacific to try and land a glider and then snatch it back into the air. All this while reporters circle the valley conducting interviews by radio and a former actor/jewel thief/sailor parachutes in (drunk) to catch the whole thing on film for the propaganda value.

OK, so this is all very American pulpy. But this is not the real strength of the book. Mitchell Zuckoff has travelled to Shangri-La to interview the locals who remember the crash and rescue effort. Seeing the whole first-contact aspects through the locals eyes really does help show how strong the pulp-stories were in the minds of the Americans and colored everything they saw around them.

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When Truth is Pulpier Than Fiction: Operation Mincemeat

Operation Mincemeat by Ben MacIntyre

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

All throughout this book I kept thinking "where do they find these people!" At times WWII feels like it was a play populated with the most absurd, and yet stock, characters from all the bad pulp stories. Of course our British Intelligence hero is jewish - ah, but not just jewish, a second son from a prominent banking family - the Montagus! And don't forget that his younger brother renounces the family fortune to pursue his twin loves for communism and ping-pong (with his wife - nicknamed Hell).

But wait, that's not British enough, we need a real stiff-upper-lip type - we'll call him Charles Chemondeley and make sure he has one of thos crazy handle-bar moustaces. He'll be Montagu's partner. And hey, didn't Ian Fleming work from British Intelligence in the war? Lets bring him in too - oh heck, bring in every hack spy novelist you can find!

Ooh! And make the Nazi spy master in Spain be "cadaverous" and his boss in Madrid is secretly 1/4 jewish and so feeding bad intel to Berlin to pump-up his reputation to avoid the concentration camps. And we need a Good German too! The intelligence analyst in Berlin! We'll make him be an anti-Hitler conspirator who is lying about Allied troop levels to try and get German to lose faster!

Any thing else? Yeah, the sub that delivers the body, it isn't just some random sub. It also smugged Gen, Mark Clark into Algeria, smuggled a French general out of France (while pretending to be an American sub) and gets to be a pathfinder/beacon for the actual Husky invasion forces!

If this was a novel, any reviewer worth their salt would go nuts at the stereotypes and coincidences. And just think, this is the more heavily researched, less censored and propagandized version!


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Role-Playing in War - GURPS Mass Combat

GURPS Mass Combat by David L. Pulver

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Now here's the book we needed for that WWII Supers campaign. It would have been much better to play-out the Battle of Kasserine Pass (with the odds sufficiently stacked to ensure a historical US defeat) or had our super-soldier enhanced Polish Parachute Brigade fight a battle in Dresden against Nazi werewolves than sort-of hand-wave those fights as window-dressing.

It's always been interesting to me that RPGs have traditionally had trouble in handling army-on-army combat. The ancestor of all RPGs is after all a miniatures wargame - Chainmail. But I've seen lots of systems proposed that just didn't work right. I haven't played Pulver's rules here, but this volume really looks like it strikes a nice balance, not getting bogged in details and still allowing for pauses in action for character-level fights and heroic action. I've always been a fan of giving my characters skill ranks in Administration, Strategy, and Intelligence Analysis even when I know the GM prefers to have players role-play these skills (yes, it is a bit method-actor-y of me). With this book, your stargetic-genius space-merc can really shine by turning the tide with a rag-tag band, and you won't be stuck arguing with the GM about how good your tactical ideas are.


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May Dancing at the Boston Food Fest

Fascism in America - the View from 1930s Vermont: Review of "It Can't Happen Here"

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the 1930s, the world was becoming increasingly dominated by totalitarian states, and these were not just the banana republics that we have grown accustomed to seeing in Africa, Latin America or the Middle East. Totalitarianism, whether in the form of fascism or communism, seemed to have a monopoly on new thinking and revolution. It was far from unthinkable that this was the new way of the world.

It was into this world thatSinclair Lewis injected It Can't Happen Here. The fictional rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip is rapid and shocking, showing just how fragile America's constitutional balance of power is. I found that rise to be a bit precipitous (vs. similar fictional American fascist movements laid out in The Plot Against America or The Center Cannot Hold and [The Victorious Opposition]. Sinclair is a better author than either Roth or Turtledove, but the later books take things slower. Those feel more plausible, but Sinclair's history is amazingly possible.

Another place where Sinclair seems to skip a cylinder is in the brutality of the Windrip Corpo regime. The repression is brutal and torture is always awful, but Sinclair did not have a conception of the mechanized murder and evil that was to come in the Holocaust. Turtledove does not flinch from a proposed Confederate Holocaust and the threat of the Holocaust is ever-present in Roth's book. But I can in no way blame Lewis for failing to foresee the twists that the mind of Adolf Hitler would take (even if Japanese behavior in Nanking and other Chinese cities had given a taste of what was to come).

And don't rest on your laurels America, thinking that the age of totalitarianism is past and so is the threat that Lewis wrote of. I worry about the claims made by an imperial presidency, regardless of party. Always question those who have all the answers.

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Fascism in America - the View from 1930s Vermont: Review of "It Can'y Happen Here"

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the 1930s, the world was becoming increasingly dominated by totalitarian states, and these were not just the banana republics that we have grown accustomed to seeing in Africa, Latin America or the Middle East. Totalitarianism, whether in the form of fascism or communism, seemed to have a monopoly on new thinking and revolution. It was far from unthinkable that this was the new way of the world.

It was into this world thatSinclair Lewis injected It Can't Happen Here. The fictional rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip is rapid and shocking, showing just how fragile America's constitutional balance of power is. I found that rise to be a bit precipitous (vs. similar fictional American fascist movements laid out in The Plot Against America or The Center Cannot Hold and [The Victorious Opposition]. Sinclair is a better author than either Roth or Turtledove, but the later books take things slower. Those feel more plausible, but Sinclair's history is amazingly possible.

Another place where Sinclair seems to skip a cylinder is in the brutality of the Windrip Corpo regime. The repression is brutal and torture is always awful, but Sinclair did not have a conception of the mechanized murder and evil that was to come in the Holocaust. Turtledove does not flinch from a proposed Confederate Holocaust and the threat of the Holocaust is ever-present in Roth's book. But I can in no way blame Lewis for failing to foresee the twists that the mind of Adolf Hitler would take (even if Japanese behavior in Nanking and other Chinese cities had given a taste of what was to come).

And don't rest on your laurels America, thinking that the age of totalitarianism is past and so is the threat that Lewis wrote of. I worry about the claims made by an imperial presidency, regardless of party. Always question those who have all the answers.

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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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