After-action report: 16th International Conference on World War II

An M4 Sherman of the 14th Armored Division crashes through the fence of the POW camp at Hammelburg, April 1945

Last weekend was the annual International Conference on World War II at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. Learning last year—thanks to my friend and colleague Kirk at another college here in South Carolina—that online attendance was free was a major discovery, and this is the second year I’ve been able to tune in from afar.

As I alluded to in my last post, I’ve been sick all week, and though I began with grand intentions to read a lot, catch up on my significant backlog of correspondence, and publish several blog posts that have been simmering in draft form, pretty much all I’ve been able to do is lie in bed and read. I even started to go through my drafts folder deleting partially completed posts that I now deemed irrelevant, but just before I clicked delete on this one I took one more look at my outline and the few synopses I had already written.

I’m glad I did. I decided to buckle down and finish writing these up these, because the conference was excellent and I found blogging about it helpful last year. I hope these brief summaries will be helpful to y’all, too, and that you’ll seek out the recordings of these sessions at the museum’s Vimeo channel.

Thursday, December 7—Pre-conference symposium

The theme of Thursday’s pre-conference symposium was Finding Hope in a World Destroyed: Liberations and Legacies of World War II. The panel discussions therefore primarily focused on things happening immediately after the war or caused by the war rather than the war itself.

Europe in the Rubble, chaired by Jason Dawsey, panelists Robert Hutchinson and Gunter Bischof

A good opening session that paid particular attention to war crimes trials and sentencing. Dawsey outlined Soviet participation in—and manipulation of—the international war crimes trials at Nuremberg as well as the way Soviet concepts like “crimes against peace” have made their way into present-day intellectual norms. Hutchinson, in an especially interesting talk, discussed the often naïve ways American war crimes prosecutors, in the interests of fairness and with the goal of a kind of universalist liberal pedagogy, modeled their sentencing, appeals processes, and standards of “rehabilitation” for former Nazis on the American judicial system. The concept of the Nuremberg trials as “liberal show trials” that were meant, like Soviet show trials, to instruct observers was enlightening. Bischof’s talk briefly covered some major aspects of the Marshall Plan, including its popularity in Austria and the devastating results for Soviet-occupied countries of Soviet refusal to participate.

Books recommended: After Nuremberg: American Clemency for Nazi War Criminals, by Robert Hutchinson

Aftermath in Asia, chaired by John Curatola, panelists Yuma Totani and Rana Mitter

An opening talk on the eventual adoption by Japan of democracy and Western-style concepts of rights and equality as Douglas MacArthur’s greatest victory was somewhat interesting, though I have read enough Yukio Mishima to be suspicious of the supposed benefits of the Westernization, democracy, and capitalism imposed upon the Japanese. The second talk, on the trial and punishment of Japanese war criminals, began with some odd finger-pointing at Russia and the United States (over the invasion of Ukraine and the detention of terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, presumably, though this was not totally clear) as examples of moral failure before moving on to a very hard-to-follow narrative of Japan’s war crimes trials—which, knowing what kind of brutality the Japanese got up to during the war, makes the opening remarks seem silly by comparison. I struggled to follow this one.

The real draw for me was Rana Mitter, whom I have heard on The Rest is History and who always presents his work with enviable enthusiasm and mastery of the material. He didn’t disappoint. His talk on the role of China during the war was excellent, especially his attention to Chiang Kai-shek’s participation in the Cairo Conference, the subsequent reversal of what he accomplished there by the Soviets at Tehran just a few days later, and the lingering relevance of the war in modern China, which still uses the Cairo Declaration as grounds for claiming islands in the South China Sea, for example.

Follow-up Q&A for this one was more interesting, with one audience member asking pretty bluntly whether Emperor Hirohito should have stood trial for war crimes (Totani’s answer: “Yes”) and another describing how his elderly Chinese neighbor, who grew up during the war, is “adamant” that no one gave help to China because of the sheer number of funerals she remembers then.

Books recommended: Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945, by Rana Mitter

A New World Order and Postwar US Responsibilities, chaired by William Hitchcock, panelists Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jeremi Suri, and Lizabeth Cohen

I found myself thinking of this one as “the liberal panel” in the sense of the sentimental, do-good liberalism of FDR. Indeed, the first talk was from a senior scholar of Eleanor Roosevelt and covered Mrs Roosevelt’s involvement in the development of the postwar UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As befit its subject, it was full of gassy positivity about equality and abstract political and social rights as well as gentle, disapproving shock that the US has still not signed onto some of the Declaration’s economic provisions. The third talk was an expert discussion of the ideals and, of course, the failures of “the consumer republic” created by the postwar economic boom, suburbanization, GI Bill education, and so forth, with a heavy emphasis on the failures, exclusions, and inequalities that persisted or were purportedly worsened as a result. You can read precisely the same yes-but approach to 1950s prosperity in the textbook I used for US History II this fall.

The panel ended with the chair suggesting a major lesson of the war was the power of the federal government to solve problems if it were only allowed to grow to the size necessary to handle them, as well as a breathless discussion of “the war on education” being waged in the US right now, with the first panelist admitting she hadn’t looked into its causes but still disapproved. I’d mildly suggest finding out why people are upset and what specifically they’re upset about before dismissing them as waging war on something as abstract as “education.”

However, the second of the three talks, by Jeremi Suri, was a masterful explanation of the quiet political revolution the United States underwent as a result of the war. Suri clearly laid out the ways participation in the war caused a massive extraconstitutional—and often unconstitutional—shift in the way the US government approached foreign policy and the military. The result was a country that began the 20th century with a mostly isolationist stance, an entrenched tradition of a small peacetime army made up of volunteers, and tight congressional controls on warmaking ended the 20th century entangled in the whole world’s affairs, maintaining vast alliances and with troops deployed to dozens of countries, and an enormous military under almost unchecked executive control. This was an excellent short talk and I hope to either assign it or play it in class for future sections of US History II.

We Shall Overcome: From Wartime Service to Social Change, chaired by Steph Hinnershitz, panelists Marcus Cox, Kara Vuic, and David Davis

Unfortunately I was only able to catch the first of the panelists, Marcus Cox, but he gave an exceptionally interesting talk on the challenges and, especially, the opportunities armed service during World War II presented to African-American men. He began with a moving personal reflection on his own grandfather’s US Army career from 1941 to retirement in 1972 and ended with brief snapshots of the roles played in the civil rights movement by black WWII veterans. A strong, worthwhile talk.

Rethinking World War II, Gen Raymond E Mason Jr Distinguished Lecture on World War II, Jeremy Black and Rob Citino

A very good freeform chat ranging across a variety of topics but concentrating mostly on the scale and scope of the war as well as some of its legacies. Black is by some measures the most published historian in the world (he publishes an average of about four books per year; here’s one I reviewed a couple years ago) and an expert on strategy. He had plenty to say on that not only from a theatre but a global perspective—some of his discussion of Japan, China, and the East dovetailed nicely with Mitter’s talk earlier in the day—as well as more nitty-gritty topics. Black is also, like Citino, his interlocutor in this discussion, funny and engaging as well as an expert who can always add more, making them well-matched and enjoyable to listen to. (“Easiest interview ever,” Citino joked at the end of the talk.)

Books recommended: Military Strategy: A Global History, A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps, and Air Power: A Global History, by Jeremy Black

Friday, December 8

Nimitz and His Commanders: Leadership in the PTO, roundtable discussion chaired by Jonathan Parshall, panelists Craig L Symonds and Trent Hone

A good discussion, based on Symonds’s book, of the character and leadership of Admiral Nimitz and the challenges he faced in his role as the Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Fleet from after Pearl Harbor to the end of the war. One especially interesting topic was Nimitz’s Eisenhower-like ability to get difficult subordinates to work together.

Books recommended: Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, by Craig L Symonds

In the Rubble, roundtable discussion moderated by Allan R Millett, panelists Keith Lowe and Donald Bishop

I was especially keen to listen to this discussion since Lowe’s Savage Continent strongly affected my understanding of the end and outcomes of the war when I read it about ten years ago. Both Lowe and fellow panelist Bishop, who primarily focused on Asia, were excellent, explaining graphically but dispassionately both the immediate challenges facing those left in the rubble—disease, starvation, homelessness, prostitution, rape—as well as longer-term problems like the plight of DPs (displaced persons), many of whom languished in camps for years. Lowe also discussed the often-overlooked ethnic cleansing that took place throughout Eastern Europe at the end of the war—at the same time the Soviets were violently suppressing native opposition in order to install puppet regimes—with millions of Germans from historically ethnically mixed regions of Poland, the Baltic, and Czechoslovakia either murdered or driven out, actions that caused the deaths of millions more Germans even after the war’s end. Lowe in particular was able to draw on conversations with a survivor of the aftermath for striking and poignant anecdotes.

Books recommended: A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955, by Ronald Spector, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, by Keith Lowe, War Trash, by Ha Jin

To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945, John C McManus in conversation with Conrad Crane

Another good book-based discussion, this one based on the recent final volume of McManus’s trilogy covering the US Army’s role in the Pacific Theatre, which is popularly associated more with the Navy and Marines. (I have the first volume, Fire and Fortitude, but haven’t read the entire book yet.) Some discussion of New Guinea, the Philippines, and Okinawa.

Books recommended: McManus’s US Army in the Pacific trilogy, Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943, Island Infernos: The US Army’s Pacific War Odyssey, 1944, and To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945.

Missed sessions:

• Our War, Too! chaired by Steph Hinnershitz, panelists Catherine Musemeche, Dave Gutierrez, and James C McNaughton

• Legacies of World War II, chaired by Gordon H “Nick” Mueller, panelists William Hitchcock and Jeremi Suri

Saturday, December 9

Dauntless: Paul Hilliard in World War II, WWII veteran Paul Hilliard in conversation with Rob Citino

Last year the Museum hosted centenarian veteran John “Lucky” Luckadoo, a B-17 pilot who flew 25 missions over Europe. This year the younger—at age 98!—Paul Hilliard gave a talk about his experience as a Marine dive bomber pilot in the Pacific. He also talked about growing up a Wisconsin farm boy and how, despite the Depression, he was largely unaware that his family was poor (“When you’re born on the floor you don’t spend a lot of time worrying about falling out of bed.”) Especially touching was his memory of the train ride from Wisconsin to California when he joined the Marines; he didn’t sleep for three days as he watched the magnificent American landscape roll past his window. After the war he went to college and wound up, through an odd series of circumstances, in the oil business, which settled him in New Orleans, where he has practiced philanthropy toward the WWII Museum, an art museum, and other institutions for decades. I greatly enjoyed Hilliard’s talk, especially since, with his genuine rags to riches story, toughness, and hard work coupled with good humor, he reminded me so much of my granddad.

Books recommended: Dauntless: Paul Hilliard in World War II and a Transformed America, by Rob Citino, Ken Stickney, and Lori Ochsner

Monuments Men and Women: A Never-Ending Story, with Robert M Edsel

The most flat-out enjoyable session of the conference. Edsel is a businessman who first became interested in art preservation during a trip to Italy. Wondering how it was that local people managed to preserve their artistic and architectural treasures during the most destructive war in history, few people were able to offer him answers. He set out to learn for himself. The result was several books, including The Monuments Men, the basis of the George Clooney film ten years ago, and The Monuments Men and Women Foundation, which Edsel helped establish. The MMWF exists to promote the memory of the people, mostly middle-aged academics with no military experience, who worked with troops on the frontlines to protect, recover, and return artwork stolen by the Nazis during the war. It also actively seeks lost artwork—there are still millions of works unaccounted for from the war—for restitution and has worked with the US military to reestablish a unit dedicated to art protection in war zones.

Edsel spoke with great passion as he told the story of the original monuments men—a much larger group and who worked for far longer than the Clooney film could convey—and the work of his foundation. He briefly described the careers of some important members of the unit, as well as the handful who were killed or wounded in action as part of their work. He also told some especially interesting and even moving stories about works of art either stolen by the Nazis or simply taken as souvenirs by GIs at the end of the war being restored to their rightful owners many decades after the war.

But I was most moved by Edsel’s passionate advocacy of the place of art in the memories and souls of people. In an age of ideologically-motivated vandalism and destruction of art, in which crowds cheer the toppling of statues and activists destroy paintings in the name of political platforms, to hear someone speak up so forcefully on behalf of preservation in the name of the dead and for future generations was more refreshing than I can express.

Books recommended: The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, which is the basis of the film The Monuments Men, directed by George Clooney, Rescuing Da Vinci, and Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis, by Robert M Edsel

Mass Murder and Memory in Eastern Europe, the George P Shultz Forum on World Affairs, Christopher Browning in conversation with Alexandra Richie

A grim but outstandingly good discussion. Richie was one of my favorite panelists last year, when she covered the 1944 Warsaw Uprising among other things, so I was excited to hear her talk with the great historian Christopher Browning. They focused primarily on Browning’s classic study Ordinary Men, which examined the role played by a single battalion of reservist military policemen in killing tens of thousands of Jews in one region of Nazi-occupied Poland during the first phase of the Holocaust, when local populations were shot in batches rather than shipped to extermination camps. Browning and Richie walked through the book’s major points—that the reservists in question were not die-hard Nazis but middle-aged, bourgeois types, that there was no penalty for refusing to participate in the killings, that most of them participated in the beginning and all of them participated by the end.

Richie and Browning also discussed some of the aspects of social psychology he used to understand—rather than explain—how these men, who were neither Nazis nor psychopaths, could do what they did, including the Milgram tests, which found that physical and psychological distance were key factors in enabling the maximum infliction of suffering on other people at the behest of authority, and the Stanford prison experiment. They also helpfully talked through some of the controversies about methodology and interpretation surrounding the book.

I routinely recommend Ordinary Men when I teach World War II in class and will certainly use or assign this one-hour talk in the future, offering as it does a succinct but still chilling summary of the book’s themes, the most important of which is the challenging truth that there’s not as much difference between mass killers like these and ourselves as we’d like to think.

Books recommended: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, by Christopher Browning

Missed sessions:

• Forgotten Heroes, chaired by Jeffrey Sammons, panelists Maj Gen Peter Gravett and Cameron McCoy

• General Lesley J McNair: Unsung Architect of the US Army, Mark Calhoun in conversation with John C McManus

Conclusion

I was able to catch a majority of the conference sessions this year, and it was exceptionally rewarding. I’m grateful again to the National WWII Museum for hosting this event and making it available to attend online for free. Their hard work in educating the public and remembering the war and the men who fought it is, I hope, paying off. I’m certainly looking forward to next year.

Thanks for reading! I hope this has been helpful to you and that you’ll check out some of these sessions online as well as some of the books mentioned during the conference.

Corroboration

A few weeks ago when I reviewed the new All Quiet on the Western Front I faulted the filmmakers for thinking they could improve upon the original when the improvements came at the expense of the novel’s characters, themes, and subtlety. There’s a lot of that going around.

Yesterday The Critic had an interesting review of a new BBC miniseries adaptation of Great Expectations, an adaptation the reviewer describes as “extensive literary vandalism.” In omitting much and adding much else, prolific screenwriter Steven Knight claims he “tried to . . . imagine if Dickens was writing the story now and had the freedom to go to those darker places, what would he do? If he had been liberated to write the things that were going on that he wasn’t allowed to write about.”

The Critic’s reviewer rightly takes Knight to task for this tired excuse to “read between the lines”—which being translated is “make stuff up”—and provides a short description of the series’ departures from Dickens. But the penultimate paragraph broadens her scope from this particular bad adaptation to the current wave of them:

Unsurprisingly, the first episode of BBC’s Great Expectations has been reviewed badly. Many commentators have pointed to “wokeness” as the problem. The rot actually runs deeper: it is simply bad, and it’s bad because Steven Knight doesn’t understand Dickens. To junk Dickens’ striking dialogue, captivating plots and nuanced characters is to entirely miss the magic and meaning of the original. Knight isn’t alone in his hubris. Netflix recently took a sledgehammer to Persuasion, replacing Austen’s profound meditations on “perpetual estrangement” with lines like: “we’re worse than exes. We’re friends”. Despite its popularity, nothing incenses me quite as much as the glossy makeover Baz Luhrmann gave to The Great Gatsby. I’ve no doubt that we must brace ourselves for hundreds more of these heavy handed remakes, as director after director imagine themselves better placed to explore the human conditions than artists of old, artists whose works have endured centuries longer than any of these adaptations will. 

“Miss[ing] the magic and meaning of the original,” all in a misguided effort to be gritty. Netflix’s All Quiet fits this description quite snugly. Read The Critic’s whole review here.

A second, smaller point of corroboration of some of what I muddled through in my review came from James Holland and Al Murray’s We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast, in a “USA” episode in which historian John McManus joined them to discuss Saving Private Ryan. These three chatting about that movie was a sure way to get my attention.

At approximately 13:00, Murray makes an interesting aside about the film’s horrifying vision of Omaha Beach and the way that vision was seized upon for promotion:

Al Murray: Have you read William Goldman on um—the screenwriter William Goldman wrote about Saving Private Ryan and he wrote some very interesting stuff about it. Because when it was being promoted, all the PR was: This is the most realistic war film ever made. It’s all true. True to life in its depiction. Yes, it’s a story, but the depiction is entirely true-to-life, was the pitch. And get this—war is hell. War is horror. And Goldman kind of—who wrote A Bridge Too Far, of course—he sort of says, Well, come on, I thought we all knew that. Everyone knows war is hell, war is horror. What are you taking us for, here?

As I wrote regarding All Quiet on the Western Front, platitudes aren’t enough to sustain a movie. No need belaboring the obvious. Fortunately, Saving Private Ryan has more to offer.

A great episode. Listen to the whole thing here.

I wrote about Saving Private Ryan for its twentieth anniversary back in the early days of this blog. The film turns 25 this summer. Holland’s Normandy ‘44, a comprehensive history of Operation Overlord and the Normandy campaign, and McManus’s The Dead and Those About to Die, a study of the 1st Infantry Division at Omaha Beach—a book I would have given anything to have back when I was writing about Corporal Phillips in high school—are both excellent and well worth your while.

2022 in books

I read a lot of good books in 2022, and I had a hard time narrowing them down in the “best of” categories I typically use for these posts, and once I had done that I still had a lot to say about them. So let me end these introductory remarks here and get you straight into the best fiction, non-fiction, kids’ books, and rereads of my year.

Favorite fiction of the year

This was a fiction-heavy year of reading thanks in no small part to two wonderful series recommended by friends, about which more below. I present the overall favorites in no particular order:

Wait for a Corpse, by Max Murray—A really charming and witty mystery from the early 1950s in which the mystery is not who killed the narrator’s awful Uncle Titus but who is going to. A genuinely romantic will-they-won’t-they love story, a variety of humorous and farcical plot complications, and a dash of small-town political shenanigans round out this fun story. Long out of print and probably hard to find, but worth seeking out.

John Macnab and Sick Heart River, by John Buchan—This year I declared my birth month John Buchan June and read and wrote about as many of his novels as I could. I squeezed eight in, and these two were my favorite new reads. One a high-spirited outdoor heist caper set in the Scottish highlands, the other a moody and contemplative outdoor odyssey through the furthest reaches of the Canadian Rockies, both are excellent, gripping, absorbing reads, albeit in dramatically different ways. You can read my full John Buchan June reviews of John Macnab and Sick Heart River here and here.

Fatherland, by Robert Harris—A Kripo detective in Berlin investigates the murder of an obscure Nazi Party functionary as the city prepares to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday—in 1964. I’m not usually one for alternate history, but Fatherland approaches a fantasy world in which the Nazis won World War II through a brilliantly structured mystery-thriller, giving the reader two levels of investigation and discovery that interlock with and complement each other. It’s vividly imagined, plausibly detailed, and briskly written. “I couldn’t put it down” is a hoary cliché, but in this case, for me, it was true.

And the Whole Mountain Burned, by Ray McPadden—A strongly written and hard-hitting novel about two soldiers—one experienced, one green—in the United States’ war in Afghanistan.

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams—The story of a buffalo hunt in a remote pass of the Rockies, Butcher’s Crossing balances a gritty, sweaty, bloody plot with intense character drama, pitting the naïve and sentimental New England boy Will Andrews against the Captain Ahab-like Miller, the guide and trigger-man leading the expedition. Beautifully written and gripping. I blogged about Williams’s use of the senses in Butcher’s Crossing here.

The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey—A severely injured police inspector tries to solve a 450-year old mystery from his hospital bed. It’s better than it sounds—astonishingly good, in fact. Full review from last month here.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie—The work of Agatha Christie is a weird lacuna in my reading, and until this year the only one of her novels I’d ever read was Murder on the Orient Express way back in high school. I fixed that this fall with one of her other most famous books, And Then There Were None. This review will be short: it’s regarded as a masterpiece for a reason.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe—Poe’s only novel, Arthur Gordon Pym purports to be the journal/memoirs of a New England youth who stowed away on a ship and got considerably more than he bargained for, including mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism, ghost ships, and a final voyage into terra incognita, violent encounters with undiscovered peoples, and… something far worse. Poe combines Moby-Dick-style kitchen sink realism, a Robinson Crusoe-style spirit of adventure, and plenty of his own trademark feel for the uncanny and terrifying for an engaging and uniquely thrilling tale. I had only ever heard bad or dismissive comments about Pym up until this time and was very pleasantly surprised by it.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy—Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since The Road sixteen years ago starts as a sort of New Orleans No Country for Old Men in which Bobby Western, the brilliant son of a Manhattan Project physicist who is now a salvage diver, starts his own investigation into the mysterious crash of a private jet in the Mississippi River only for terrible unseen forces to array themselves against him. This storyline is interspersed with that of Bobby’s sister, a child prodigy afflicted with intrusive schizophrenic hallucinations, whom we know from the opening pages eventually hangs herself. But neither storyline goes anywhere, exactly. Long, talky, meandering (none of which are intended as criticisms), The Passenger is as vividly written as any of McCarthy’s other work but clearly has much more going on in it thematically than the straightforward plot elements, and I knew even while reading it that it would stick with me and reward me more later through simply letting it sit in the back of my mind for a while, and that has proven to be the case. But that doesn’t make it a completely satisfying read. So, caveat lector. The companion volume focusing primarily on Bobby’s sister and her institutionalization, Stella Maris, is already out but I haven’t gotten to it yet. We’ll see how this informs and recasts the events of The Passenger in the new year.

Witch Wood, by John Buchan—I read this just a week or so ago, so you can expect a full, thorough treatment this coming John Buchan June, but for the time being let me recommend it as a strongly written, engaging, atmospheric, suspenseful, and genuinely spooky historical novel in which a young minister discovers the existence of a devil-worshiping cult in his seemingly upright Scottish parish. A favorite of CS Lewis, who wrote of it, “for Witch Wood specially I am always grateful; all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish. That's the way to do it.”

Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—This was a reread, but it was a special reread for me. This was the first novel by McCarthy that I read as a callow college student more than fifteen years ago, and I was unprepared for it. (I’ve described starting McCarthy’s corpus with Blood Meridian as “jumping into the deep end first.”) But it stuck with me, haunting me, and steadily grew in my regard, and within a year or two I had read almost everything else McCarthy had written up to that point. This year it was finally time to revisit Blood Meridian, and with the intervening years and maturity and experience it was like reading a different novel, or the fulfilment of the novel I struggled with one summer in college—gripping, bleak, and overwhelmingly powerful. So I’m including this reread among my favorite fiction reads of the year, and giving it a stronger recommendation than ever.

Discoveries of the year

Let me here thank my friends Dave Newell and JP Burten (whose novels Red Lory and Liberator y’all should check out) for introducing me to the following two series, of which I read too many volumes to include in the usual “favorites” format above but which I have to acknowledge as highlights of the year:

The Professor Dr von Igelfeld Entertainments, by Alexander McCall Smith—An absolute hoot, these short stories and novellas follow the marvelous philologist Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, an aristocratic German scholar of the Romance languages and proud author of the seminal 1200-page study Portuguese Irregular Verbs. Von Igelfeld is a brilliant creation, simultaneously pompous and polite, rigid and kindhearted, humorless and eager to please, tone-deaf to social niceties but ostentatiously courtly, jealous of his own honor and childishly naïve. (He does not understand, for instance, why so many other prominent professors have such attractive graduate assistants, or why so many students are so obliging about coed room assignments on what is supposed to be a scholarly reading retreat in the Alps.) This is a charming combination of foibles that consistently lands him in uncomfortable situations ranging from awkward silences to high farce, situations from which he is either too proud or too oblivious to extricate himself. Pure, unalloyed fun.

• Volumes read: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

• Volumes remaining: Your Inner Hedgehog

The Slough House series, by Mick Herron—An excellent series of spy thrillers featuring the outcasts, losers, and screwups of MI5 who, rather than being fired and creating public embarrassment, are shunted into dead-end jobs at a site called Slough House under the management of the slovenly former “joe” or field operative Jackson Lamb. Each volume is intricately plotted, engagingly and suspensefully written, and—what sets it most apart from the novels the series is most often compared to—funny. I’ve enjoyed these so much that I’ve forced myself to space them out so that I can squeeze in other reading.

• Volumes read: Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, Joe Country

• Volumes remaining: Slough House, Bad Actors, and Standing by the Wall

Best of the year:

My favorite fiction read of the year is, for the first time in one of these lists, a reread. I had thought that rereading The Road in 2019 was my favorite that year, but it turns out I had misremembered. The novel is James Dickey’s Deliverance.

Deliverance is notorious in my hometown because John Boorman’s film adaptation was shot there and the movie hangs brooding over us like a specter. Plenty of cultures have to live with unflattering stereotypes, but toothless hillbilly sodomites has to be among the worst. Certainly, the “paddle faster, I hear banjos” bumper stickers got old pretty quick.

But as I discovered when I finally read it during grad school, Deliverance the novel is something else entirely—an involving, horrifying, thrilling, deeply and disturbingly beautiful novel with a rich narrative voice and strong, poetic writing.

If you’re familiar with the movie you already know most of the story; the film adapts the novel quite faithfully. But by the nature of its medium, the film has to deal in visuals, actions, and sounds—externals, surfaces. Dickey’s novel is internal, with deep, swift, very cold currents flowing beneath the surface. Its characters, chief among them narrator Ed Gentry, are all psychologically rich, and the seemingly simple actions of the plot—the drive north, the canoe trip, the horrible encounter with the moonshiners, the flight downriver, ambush, killing, and the final lie meant to flood and hide the events of the canoe trip forever—are complicated and intensified by the characterization and by Ed’s transformation from soft suburbanite to killer, a transformation we witness.

Deliverance is a brilliant novel, an intricately crafted prose poem, a haunting evocation of real environments, a thrilling tale of survival, and a weighty morality play concerning sin, guilt, and the thin layer of civilization far too many trust to keep them from the darkness in their own hearts.

Rereading Deliverance after well over a decade of reflecting on it made this the best fictional read of my year. Though it is not for the faint of heart, I strongly recommend it.

After finishing it this summer, I blogged here about John Gardner’s principle of using vivid, concrete detail to create a “fictive dream” in the mind of the reader and used Deliverance as a major example, comparing it to several other favorites from the spring and summer—Blood Meridian, John Macnab, and Sick Heart River. You can read that post here.

Favorite non-fiction of the year

While fiction threatened to take over my reading this year, I plugged away at a number of good works of history, biography, literary study, and cultural commentary. In the best of these those categories overlapped generously. The following handful of favorites are presented, like the fiction, in no particular order:

In the House of Tom Bombadil, by CR Wiley—An insightful and warmly-written literary, philosophical, and theological look at the meaning and significance one of the most perplexing characters in all of Tolkien’s legendarium. Full review from earlier this year here.

Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, by Katja Hoyer—A very good short history of the German Empire (1871-1918) with attention to its origins in post-Napoleonic nationalist movements, political intrigue, and military victory; its politics, finances, and imperial ambitions; its culture and key personalities; and, inevitably, its downfall in the catastrophe of the First World War. Well-structured and balanced and highly readable, this is the best book of its kind that I’ve come across.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, by Scott Peeples—An engaging and insightful short study of the life of Edgar Allan Poe and the chaotic, striving, rumbustious landscape of antebellum America through the prism of the cities where Poe lived most of his life. Full review from October here.

Poe: A Life Cut Short, by Peter Ackroyd and Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, by Paul Collins—Two elegantly written short biographies of Poe that complement each other nicely. Collins’s biography gives extraordinarily good coverage to Poe’s work for such a concise book, and Ackroyd’s gives greater depth to Poe’s tragic personal life. I’d readily recommend either of these to someone looking for an introduction to Poe that cuts through the manifold myths (insanity, drug abuse, etc etc) and fairly represents the man’s life and work. Short Goodreads reviews here and here.

A Preface to Paradise Lost, by CS Lewis—I have tried and failed many times to love Paradise Lost, so I’ll let CS Lewis love it for me. This is an outstanding introduction not only to Milton’s great epic, but to the origins and history of epic poetry generally and to Milton’s place in the story of this genre. Being a fan of epic from Homer to Dante, I most savored the earlier chapters that explain its history and contextualize Milton’s work, but the entire short Preface is an excellent piece of scholarship and worthwhile whether you love Milton or not. (Side note: While I have a very old paperback copy of this book from Oxford UP, I read the nice recent hardback reprint from HarperOne. My only criticism is some slipshod typography, which turned the letters ash (æ) and thorn (þ) in Old English quotations into Œs and Ps.)

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray—A bracing look at the climate of skepticism and outright hostility to Western civilization and the past, with many thoroughly documented examples and a strongly argued case for preserving, maintaining, and celebrating our inheritance. Would pair well with a read of Murray’s longer, more detailed, but more general The Madness of Crowds, one of my favorites of 2020.

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl Trueman—Both a summary and extension of the key themes and arguments of Trueman’s longer and more scholarly The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—which is high on my to-read list for this year—Strange New World is an excellent guide for general readers to how we got to where we are today, a world in which the transcendent is regarded as an oppressive myth and personal identity and sexuality are market commodities subject to infinitely recursive individual self-revision. A demonstration that ideas have consequences.

Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin—A trenchant reappraisal of World War II with Stalin and the USSR as its central focus. McMeekin reminds the reader that Stalin was as much an aggressor as Hitler—indeed, the two allied to invade and divide Poland, a fact that was memory-holed during the war and has only seldom returned to public consciousness since—and demonstrates that even when Stalin could justifiably claim to be a victim following Nazi betrayal in the summer of 1941, he was a master manipulator who brazenly played the Allies to get what he wanted. And he got everything he wanted. Most damning are the book’s long middle chapters recounting in punishing detail the Lend-Lease bounty continuously heaped upon Stalin, entirely on Stalin’s terms, with Stalin offering almost nothing in return but contempt and ever larger demands, all while dealing high-handedly with Allied leaders and waging war with the same brutality he had brought to the invasions of Poland and Finland. FDR turned a blind eye and forced all around him—from anticommunist members of his administration who found themselves ousted all the way to Churchill himself—to do the same. Stalin’s War both reinforced some conclusions I had already intuited from years of studying and, especially, teaching the war, and placed Stalin at the center of a truly global picture of the conflict and how its results guaranteed decades of Cold War and continued bloodshed. A worthwhile corrective to rosy pictures of World War II—its aims, and prosecution, and its results.

Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann—Sharply observed, unflinching, disturbing, and utterly exhilarating, this is one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Like Blood Meridian, this is a reread of an old favorite that has exercised a profound influence on me, but the rereading experience was so gripping, so bracing, that it deserved to be among my other top non-fiction reads of the year. At the beginning of December I typed up some thoughts, observations, and reflections inspired by this second reading, which you can find here.

Best of the year:

If I cheated a bit by naming a reread as my favorite fiction of the year, I’ll do same here by picking two titles to share a best-of distinction for non-fiction. In this case, both books are fascinating, readable, deeply-researched works of scholarship in Anglo-Saxon history and literature.

The great Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey’s Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is a short monograph that makes a strong case on a contentious topic.

Less than a century ago, Beowulf was wrongly looked at as a difficult, fatally flawed historical source for the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire, a frustrating farrago of myth and vague allusion to things 19th-century scientific historians wanted straight data about. This viewpoint changed with Tolkien’s 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which argued that Beowulf is first and foremost a work of great poetic genius and unsurpassed thematic power, and that the historical elements are there to ground a fantastical story in what, for its original audience, felt like a real world.

Now, Shippey argues, the pendulum has swung too far the other way, with Beowulf viewed only as a poem or myth and neglected as a historical source. Marshaling an impressive array of literary, linguistic, and especially archaeological support from sites like Lejre in Denmark, Shippey argues that Beowulf is not only a great poem but also a broadly accurate and trustworthy window into the region, period, and culture in which it is set—the tribal Germanic peoples of early 6th-century Denmark and Sweden.

Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is an indispensable read for anyone interested in Beowulf or this time period, and a boon to anyone who, like me, intuited Beowulf’s importance and authenticity as a representation of this world but lacked the archaeological clout to make such a strong case for it.

Just as readable and well-researched but probably of greater general interest is Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year. In this book Parker, a medievalist who maintained the the excellent Clerk of Oxford blog and has an extraordinary talent for making foreign minds understandable, tackles the nature of time itself—how Anglo-Saxon people thought about and reckoned it, and how they marked and celebrated the passage of it, season by season, year by year.

Parker draws from a huge array of Anglo-Saxon literature—part of the book’s purpose, she writes, is to introduce this literature and encourage people to seek out more of it—to describe first how the heathen Anglo-Saxon peoples’ understanding of time, years, and seasons changed with their conversion to Christianity, and then how they lived their lives within this new understanding. She gives good attention to everything from the number and names of the seasons (originally, it seems, only two: winter and sumor, with spring and fall by many other names imported from the Continent along with Christianity), the months, the work and pastimes of people from all walks of life at different times of year, and, perhaps most importantly, the intricate liturgical calendar and its many, many feasts, rites, and holidays. What emerges through this carefully arranged study is a holistic picture of a lost people and its lost way of life.

Appropriately for a culture whose poetry is so thoroughly tinged with elegy and ubi sunt reflection, I ended this book both delighted and saddened: delighted at the richness of this harmonious yearly cycle and the vividness with which Parker narrated and explained it, and saddened at what has been lost since that time. Winter, and specifically the early days of the twelve days of Christmas, unsurprisingly proved the perfect time to read Parker’s book.

I give my highest and strongest recommendations to both Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings and Winters in the World for anyone interested specifically in the Early Middle Ages and Anglo-Saxon England or for anyone willing to venture out and explore times, places, and minds alien to our own. You’ll find both books richly rewarding.

Rereads

In addition to a lot of good reading this year, I did a lot of good rereading. Rather than pick and choose and then burden y’all with more one-paragraph summaries, I’ve simply listed all of them as usual. But by virtue of my having taken the time to revisit these this year, please understand all of them to rank somewhere between good and excellent. Audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks*

• Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism*

• After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman

• Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy

• Socrates: A Man for Our Times, by Paul Johnson*

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman*

• The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan

• Greenmantle, by John Buchan

• How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic, by Sallust, trans. Josiah Osgood

• Deliverance, by James Dickey

• Gisli Sursson’s Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri, trans. Martin Regal and Judy Quinn

• Das Nibelungenlied, trans. Burton Raffel

• Beowulf, Dragon Slayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff

• Life of King Alfred, by Asser, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge

• Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann

• The Third Man, by Graham Greene

Kids’ books

All of the books listed below were read-aloud favorites for myself and our kids this year. I had a hard time narrowing this selection down, but these are certainly the favorites, and I’d recommend any of them without hesitation.

• Caedmon’s Song, by Ruth Ashby, illustrated by Bill Slavin. A beautifully illustrated children’s version of an important Anglo-Saxon story related by Bede. Short Goodreads review here.

• Myths of the Norsemen, by Roger Lancelyn Green—An old favorite of mine that proved an excellent introduction to these stories for my seven- and five-year old.

• Alexander the Great and The Fury of the Vikings, by Dominic Sandbrook—Two volumes from Sandbrook’s Adventures in Time series that I read out loud to my kids this fall and winter. Perfect for our seven-year old, who thrilled to Alexander’s campaigns and the various Viking Age figures (e.g. Ragnar Loðbrok, Alfred the Great, Leif Eiriksson, and Harald Hardrada), and though our five-year had a somewhat harder time tracking with the stories he still enjoyed them. I strongly recommend both and look forward to other entries in the series.

• Basil of Baker Street, by Eve Titus—A fun, light, nimbly paced adventure with a clever mouse-level perspective on Sherlock Holmes and just enough of the trappings of Conan Doyle’s stories to hook new fans.

• Read-n-Grow Picture Bible, by Libby Weed, illustrated by Jim Padgett—A childhood favorite, a surprisingly thorough and serious illustrated Bible, read to my kids over several months. Short Goodreads review here.

• A Boy Called Dickens, by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by John Hendrix—A delightful and beautifully illustrated short retelling of Charles Dickens’s childhood and the influence growing up among the workhouses and debtors’ prisons of industrial London had on his imagination.

• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson*—A hilarious and genuinely moving Christmas tale that combines farce, nostalgia, and remarkable depth, especially on one of my favorite themes: the foolish things of the world confounding the wise. My whole family enjoyed this greatly on our car trip to Georgia for Christmas.

Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, thank you for sticking with me, and I hope you’ve found something enticing to seek out and read during the new year. Thanks for reading, and all the best in 2023!

Deception in the name of crisis management

Last week I finished reading Sean McMeekin’s mammoth study Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II. It’s a weighty book in both senses, by turns overwhelming, depressing, and infuriating. I may or may not write a full review here, but it will certainly be in my year-end reading recommendations. For the time being, here are two passages quoted by McMeekin that struck me pretty forcefully, which I present with a minimum of context and comment.

The first comes from Nikolai Verzhbitski, a Russian journalist who recorded the following in his diary on October 18, 1941, when the Germans had advanced to within a hundred miles of Moscow from the both west and the south. Verzhbitski describes a Moscow prostrated by the invasion:

Who gave the order to close the factories? To pay off the workers? Who was behind the whole muddle, the mass flight, the looting, the confusion in everyone’s minds? . . . Everyone is boiling with indignation, talking out loud, shouting that they have been betrayed, that “the captains were the first to abandon ship” and took their valuables with them into the bargain. People are saying things out loud that three days ago would have brought them before a military tribunal. There are queues: noisy, emotional, quarrelsome, agonising. The hysteria at the top has transmitted itself to the masses.

That’s the crisis and the way the leadership botched it, and, according to Verzhbitski, the people saw clearly the many ways in which their leadership failed them:

People are beginning to remember and to count up all the humiliations, the oppression, the injustices, the clampdowns, the bureaucratic arrogance of the officials, the conceit and the self-confidence of the party bureaucrats, the draconian decrees, the shortages, the systematic deception of the masses, the lying and flattery of the toadies in the newspapers. . . . People are speaking from their hearts. Will it be possible to defend a city where such moods prevail?

This kind of deception, as it turns out, is contagious, and at least some people were alive to that fact. McMeekin quotes an address from Senator Robert La Follette Jr delivered on June 23, 1941, the day after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa:

[I]n the next few weeks the American people will witness the greatest whitewash act in all history. They will be told to forget the purges in Russia by the OGPU, the persecution of religion, the confiscation of property, the invasion of Finland and the vulture role Stalin played in seizing half of prostrate Poland, all of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. These will be made to seem the acts of a “democracy” preparing to fight Nazism.

Amnesty for Stalin, perhaps? “Let’s acknowledge that [he] made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty.” That was more or less the Roosevelt approach, anyway—minus any acknowledgement.

McMeekin also charts the consequences—in the United States!—of criticizing Stalin and the Soviets: purges in the federal bureaucracy, often conforming to enemies lists provided by the Russians; the replacement of diplomatic and military leaders with either Roosevelt lackies or actively pro-Soviet agents; the burial or rewriting of inconvenient reports; official coordination with the press to suppress damaging stories, smear dissenters, and spread Soviet spin; and, of course, widespread, purposeful deception. All in order to win the war, of course.

The more things change. And, of course, Verzhbitski’s concluding question remains pertinent.

The passage of Verzhbitski’s diary quoted by McMeekin comes from Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War, by Rodric Braithwaite, who quotes the diary at greater length. La Follette’s speech was reported in the New York Herald Tribune’s June 24, 1941 issue, which I haven’t been able to access (for free) in full.

After-action report: 15th International Conference on World War II

John “Lucky” Luckadoo, 100-year old veteran of the 100th Bomb Group, at the National WWII Museum

Over the weekend, the National WWII Museum in New Orleans hosted the 15th International Conference on World War II. The theme this year was “Resistance,” and the Museum had an excellent lineup of sessions, panelists, and speakers. Unfortunately, tickets were prohibitively expensive, and when I first looked at the program back in the late spring I wrote it off as something that wouldn’t happen. So I’m especially grateful to an old classmate who now teaches history at another college here in South Carolina for telling me about the Museum’s free streaming option just a few days before the conference started.

I wasn’t able to “attend” every session, but those that I did were exceptionally good and I wanted to catalog them here, along with a few notes, thoughts, and book recommendations—either books by the panelists or books recommended during a panel discussion. I hope this will provide a good resource for y’all as well.

Thursday, November 17th

Resistance from Within: Germany and Austria, chaired by Jason Dewey, panelists Nathan Stoltzfus and Günter Bischof

Stoltzfus described resistance movements within Germany while Bischof, an Austrian, concentrated on the wide array of Austrian anti-Nazi activity in the years immediately following the Anschluß in 1938. Both emphasized mass support for the Nazis—for whatever reason, including the restoration of national glory, economic revival, militarism or revanchism, or, the elephant in the room, anti-Semitism—as a major obstacle for resisters.

Living Under the Rising Sun, chaired by Richard Frank, panelists Ricardo Jose and Ethan Mark

I was unable to attend this session as it straddled my back-to-back classes Thursday morning classes, but a colleague told me it was excellent and passed along Richard Frank’s recommendation of the book below. I’ve had this on my to-read list since it came out, but this recommendation will bump it up in priority. Frank, by the way, is a name I’ve been familiar with for a long time (I have his most recent book, Tower of Skulls, on my desk waiting to be read right now), and he proved a highlight of every panel he either chaired or participated in.

Book recommendations: Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945, by Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio

Between Hitler and Stalin on the Eastern Front, chaired by Jennifer Popowycz, panelists Robert Citino and Alexandra Richie

Perhaps my favorite academic panel. I’ve known Citino’s work a long time—his study The German Way of War was immensely helpful to me when I first started studying modern German history and German military history specifically. I was unfamiliar with Richie, though reazlied I had heard of her book Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw Uprising. Both were impressive, and together they had an eloquent, nuanced conversation about the extremely complicated and tricky subject of resistance in Eastern Europe.

Citino specifically critiqued the “Manichean” view of the war common to Americans, a view in which one sorts all participants into simplistic “good” and “evil” categories. This is dangerous, Citino implied, because it does not prepare the student of history for things like, for example, Latvian partisans who were anti-Nazi (good!) because they were ardent nationalists (hmm…) who wanted a Latvia for Latvians, specifically one free of Jews (uh-oh). The war was considerably more complicated for the occupied in the East than the Allies vs Axis global-strategic perspective many hold by default.

Richie especially impressed me with her encyclopedic and carefully explained view of Polish resistance to both the Nazis and Soviets, whether predicated on nationalism, Catholicism, Communism, something else, or some combination of these. Her closing remarks on how the Polish experience of World War II and the Cold War has given the Poles a keen sense of the value of freedom—and the worthiness of sacrifice to preserve it—was moving.

Book recommendations: Irena’s Children: A True Story of Courage, by Tilar Mazzeo

Missed sessions:

• Living Under the Rising Sun, chaired by Richard Frank, panelists Ricardo Jose and Ethan Mark—Included discussion of the Philippines and Indonesia under Japanese occupation.

• Fighting a Common Foe in Asia, chaired by Allan Millett, panelists Xiaobing Li and Dixee Bartholomew—Included coverage of the “united” effort of Nationalist Chinese forces and Mao’s Communists against the Japanese and the American OSS’s assistance to Ho Chi Minh’s Communist guerrillas in Indochina.

• External Threat, Internal Struggles: Europe Under Occupation, chaired by Mark Calhoun, panelists Sarah Bennett Farmer and Jason Dawsey—Included discussion of the French resistance and Italian partisans.

• Conference Opening—Richard Overy presented on his newest book, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945, which is another book high up in my to-read list.

The Museum has the entire day’s sessions in one video file on Vimeo here.

Friday, November 18th

Losing at War: Battlefield Blunders and the Men Who Made Them, chaired by John Curatola, panelists James Holland and Conrad Crane

I missed the first few minutes of this panel owing to office hours obligations, but the rest of it was quite excellent. James Holland (Tom’s brother), well-spoken as usual, with a startlingly precise command of figures and statistics, paired well with Crane, who made the point early on that while tactical decisions are more exciting to study, logistics and preparation are usually more important overall to the outcome of battles. “Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.” Crane also warned against “theoritis,” the neglect of real-world conditions in favor of theories that could only work under impossibly ideal conditions.

The Q&A proved especially fun, as everyone who studies World War II for even a few minutes comes to firm conclusions about who won, who lost, and why, and Holland and Crane were particularly good off-the-cuff here.

I took exception to one minor offhand remark by Holland re. the production of the Tiger tank as a “strategic” error considering how many resources each Tiger gobbled up. Holland made the valid point that, given Germany’s logistical situation, it made sense to focus on quality rather than quantity (cf. Soviet tank production), but that the Tiger was overcomplicated to produce, difficult to maintain or repair, and hard to drive. “This was like putting an eighteen-year old who doesn’t know how to drive in a Lamborghini,” or words to that effect. The points on design, production, maintenance, and repair I agree with, but the Tiger was not actually difficult to drive or learn how to operate, having intuitive controls, a well-positioned internal layout, and—unlike many other tanks including the Sherman, which Holland specifically described at one point—a steering wheel.

I gave up on arguing with people about the Tiger a long time ago—I think it’s cool and impressive, and I’m just going to enjoy it—but this was fresh on my mind thanks to this video essay on the Tiger’s strengths in “soft factors” from the inimitable Lazerpig. I feel a little silly recommending that, but it’s good.

Well, there I go coming to firm conclusions. At any rate, this was a fun and excellent panel.

Book recommendations: Hell in the Hürtgen Forest: The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment, by Robert Rush

Asia Aflame, chaired by Richard Frank, panelists Xiaobing Li and Ethan Mark

A good, wide-ranging panel on Imperial Japan in Korea, China, Burma, India, and other mainland Asian territories that covered everything from strategy and resources to the experiences of ordinary soldiers, civilians, Korean “comfort women” pressed into prostitution for the Japanese army, and the long-lived after effects of the war in all of these places. (A nurse with experience in China pointed out during the Q&A that she struggled to impress upon some elderly Chinese grandmothers in the late 90s that childhood obesity was a serious problem, the assumption among that generation being that fat babies were healthy—because it was fat babies that survived the Japanese.) There was also an interesting side discussion of Japan’s actual longterm goals. Did they want to conquer North America in a “Man in the High Castle scenario”? Short answer: No.

Book recommendations: Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders, by Gerhard Weinberg

The Old Breed, K Company and Eugene Sledge, chaired by Richard Frank, panelists Saul David and Henry Sledge

One of the outstanding sessions I was able to attend. David has recently published a unit history of K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, the unit in which Eugene Sledge served on Peleliu and Okinawa. Henry Sledge is Eugene’s son. David provided lots of interesting context for K/3/5’s experience of the war, including on campaigns like Guadalcanal and New Britain before Sledge joined the unit, and Henry Sledge gave a wonderful child’s perspective on his father’s later life, his writing of With the Old Breed (“I’d see him up late at night, writing on a yellow legal pad, and ask ‘What are you doing, Dad?’ ‘Nothing! Go to bed.’ He was nicer than that, but…”), and the special place that memoir has in the lives of veterans, veterans’ families, and the public’s understanding of what it was like to serve in World War II. Lots of insight and some profoundly moving stories.

Book recommendations: With the Old Breed and China Marine, by EB Sledge; Devil Dogs: King Company, Third Battalion, 5th Marines: From Guadalcanal to the Shores of Japan, by Saul David

Missed sessions:

• Women at War: Resistance, chaired by Steph Hinnershitz, panelists Elizabeth Hyman and Lynne Olson—Included discussion of women who participated in the Warsaw Uprising and the archaeologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the subject of Olson’s most recent book.

• “I Was There”: WWII Veteran Conversation, chaired by Michael Bell, guest Z Anthony Kruszewski, a veteran of the Polish resistance and the Warsaw Uprising.

The Museum has the entire day’s sessions in one video file on Vimeo here.

Saturday, November 19th

Final Resistance—July 20th and its Legacy in Germany, chaired by Alexandra Richie, panelist Levin von Trott zu Solz

This was the first of two outstanding sessions that I watched featuring speakers with direct personal connections to the war. Levin von Trott zu Solz is the nephew of Adam von Trott zu Solz, an ardent anti-Nazi who gained an important position in the Third Reich’s Foreign Ministry and who became a key associate of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in the Officers’ Plot. How closely did Trott zu Solz and Stauffenberg work on the plot? The night before the attempt on Hitler’s life, Stauffenberg’s driver recorded visits to two places: a church and Adam von Trott zu Solz’s house. And it was the driver’s logs of these visits that got Adam arrested.

Richie and Trott zu Solz talked through the course of Adam’s life and education (Rhodes Scholar, graduate of Balliol College, Oxford), his work in China, and finally his determination to carry on resistance to the Nazis from “inside,” at home, which he felt was an inescapable duty. His patriotic motivation was quite movingly explained, though I would like to have learned more, as in the panels on Austrian and Polish Catholic resistance, about Adam’s devout and outspoken Christianity (something Adam had in common with Stauffenberg). Trott zu Solz’s narrated his uncle’s arrest, trial, and execution straightforwardly and without embellishment, making it all the more powerful—especially as he explained how Adam and others of the conspirators attempted to outmaneuver the Gestapo and other authorities even in the midst of interrogation and torture.

An informative personal look at just what “resistance” really demands of people.

Masters of the Air, the Bloody 100th, and John “Lucky” Luckadoo, chaired by Donald Miller, panelist John Luckadoo

The second session I watched on Saturday, and the last overall I was able to catch, featured another person with a direct connection to the war—the 100-year old John Luckadoo, the last living original B-17 pilot from the 8th Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group. Luckadoo was astonishingly sharp and expressive, despite admitting that he had trouble hearing questions during the Q&A, and offered up lots of long-view perspective as well as specific details about what serving aboard a B-17 meant. It was so cold at bombing altitude over Germany, for instance, that when flying through flak or attacked by Luftwaffe fighters he would start sweating in fear and the sweat would freeze—which would then block oxygen flow to his mask. Miller also noted how young the pilots and crews were: Luckadoo was 22 years old when the war ended.

Luckadoo also described a briefing with General Curtis LeMay himself, a planned mission over Berlin that would have amounted to a suicide run but was only aborted after they had crossed the Channel into Occupied Europe, and the worst mission in his experience, a raid on Bremen. Throughout, Luckadoo was also self-effacing, pointing out that surviving all of his missions did not make him exceptionally skilled or special but simply lucky—“Damn lucky,” as in the title of Kevin Maurer’s recent book about him.

The Q&A was especially interesting, as many older members of the audience mentioned having fathers or other relatives who served as crewmen on B-17s. Others had good questions about things like the likelihood of survival when bailing out of a stricken bomber. The cockpit of the B-17 was so cramped, Luckadoo answered, that you had to put on your parachute and other equipment after you got aboard. But if you were hit, “You could go through a knothole and you wouldn’t touch either side.”

This was one of several sessions I wish could have gone on even longer.

Book recommendations: Damn Lucky: One Man’s Courage During the Bloodiest Military Campaign in Aviation History, by Kevin Maurer

Missed sessions:

• Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom—Rob Citino in conversation with Andrew Nagorski, author of the titular book, which covers the effort to help Sigmund Freud emigrate to England following the Anschluß.

• A French Teenager in the Resistance—Steph Hinnershitz in conversation with Nicole Spangenberg, who was 12 at the time of the German invasion of France.

• Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad—Marcus Cox in conversation with author Matthew Delmont on his newly released book.

• Closing Banquet Presentation—Ben Macintyre, author of Operation Mincemeat, one of my favorite reads last year, presented on his most recent book, Prisoners of the Castle, a history of British POWs in Colditz.

The Museum has the entire day’s sessions in one video file on Vimeo here.

Conclusion

I was able to “attend” just under half of the Conference’s panels, interviews, and presentations, but what I saw was excellent. I learned a lot and was encouraged by the palpable enthusiasm for the topics. I was also glad to discover that the Museum has made available, at least for now, the recordings of each day’s sessions. I’ve linked all of them above. I plan to revisit several of these and catch up on the ones I missed. And I’m looking forward to next year’s conference.

I hope this has been a help, and that y’all will check some of these panels out, not to mention the many excellent books recommended over the course of the conference. Thanks for reading!

In memory of Corporal Phillips

This is my old M41 field jacket, which I’ve shared photos of before but probably never really talked about. This is a reproduction item I found at a now-defunct army surplus store in Westminster, SC and saved up to buy when I was fourteen or fifteen. The 1st Infantry Division “Big Red One” insignia and WWII-era corporal’s chevrons I got from Medals of America (which was also the first place I ever heard of Fountain Inn, SC, where I now live).

Why the Big Red One, and why a corporal? Because this was the jacket that belonged to one of my first serious fictional characters, Cpl John Phillips.

Cpl Phillips was born in 10th grade keyboarding, a class in which I quickly outstripped our weekly typing exercises and was left with free time. A lot of free time. I would run out the clock hammering away at you-are-there scenes of the first wave at Omaha Beach—climbing down net ladders from their transports into Higgins boats that pitched and yawed in the heaving Channel; riding in to the smoking shore, some laughing, some throwing up; dashing into hell down a steel ramp; and working up the beach, through the wire, up the bluffs, and inland, scraping together what ad hoc forces they could along the way; culminating in the destruction of a German pillbox defending one of the beach’s critical draws. Cpl Phillips told me all about it, dispassionately, in great detail. He was my narrator.

Over my last three years of high school I spun out Phillips’s entire wartime career—from Oran and Sicily to the Hürtgen Forest and the Reich itself—and wrote two whole novels about it, both set in Normandy and the bocage, with its fortress-mazes of hedgerows.

Phillips’s stories owed a lot to the grunt’s-eye view stories in Stephen Ambrose and the first-person present-tense style of All Quiet on the Western Front, and were heavy on action, especially inspired improvisation in the face of surprising reversals. They were juvenilia in the purest sense—sincerely, straightforwardly imitative, learning by copying, and almost sweet in their naïve tough-mindedness and their desire to simultaneously shock, thrill, uplift, and move.

I spent a lot of imaginative time with Cpl Phillips. And well into college I’d occasionally check in with him mentally. He was born in 1920, and while I never got around to writing down all of his adventures or exploring all of the tragedies that befell his platoon, it really was like visiting an old family friend to think back and say, yes, Phillips survived the war, and got back to his wife Katherine, and he’s still alive and well at 82 (high school graduation). Or 87 (college graduation). Or 90 (grad school graduation).

But of course that would make him 102 now, and Phillips was too much of an average joe to have made it that long.

Suddenly this jacket, which I got in high school and added accurate patches to and actually wore around a lot (I was even cooler then than I am now, you see), has somehow become an heirloom to me, its original owner. So when I think about this fictional character, about whom I haven’t written a word in twenty years, a little part of me grieves. Were he real, he would have died sometime since he first told me those stories. And of course he was real enough to me.

Part of the curious and melancholy magic of imagination, of storytelling—even when those stories have never seen (and never will see) the light of day.

Not to end on a downbeat note, of course. Because in another part of me, Cpl Phillips is still alive and kicking, still cleaning his Thompson submachine gun, or sleeping in his foxhole, or swapping stories with Pfc Friday and Pfc Brown, or writing yet another letter home to Katherine.

Let me offer this as a coda: While Phillips himself has been minding his own business and I’ve mostly left him alone, his platoon commander did show up in Dark Full of Enemies, where he’s placing Pfc Grover Stallings under arrest in the Big Red One’s camp in southern England six months head of D-Day. That’d be 1/Lt Roberts, who I’m sad to say went on to die in late June of 1944 despite Phillips’s heroic efforts to carry him to an aid station. (I did mention All Quiet on the Western Front as an inspiration, didn’t I?) And let me here apologize that, on his way into the plot of Dark Full of Enemies, Pfc Stallings stole his pistol. Roberts may have died in my imagination, but the last time we see him alive in that novel he’s young, irritated, overawed and a little bewildered by the arrival of a Marine in the OSS, and still hasn’t discovered the theft. Though I’m sure Phillips and everyone else will hear about it later.

I’m sure they’re still laughing about it.

The Rocketeer at 30

Here’s an appreciation that’s been a long time coming—growing off and on for thirty years (thirty years exactly on the 21st of this month), through nearly every phase of my own life from childhood to middle age and now extending into the childhoods of my children, and finally prompted by video essays by two of my favorite YouTubers. The subject: a modest action adventure from Disney, back when Disney still produced modestly sized movies, that is nonetheless masterfully crafted and rich with detail, not to mention a ripping good story. That film is The Rocketeer.

The movie

If you haven’t seen The Rocketeer, go and do yourself a favor and watch it. If you have seen it, a summary shouldn’t be necessary, but I’ll provide a short one here out of a sense of duty.

The film takes place outside Los Angeles in the fall of 1938, with Europe a year away from war (the Munich Agreement would have been signed just before our story takes place) and America rather insistently at peace. Our hero is Cliff Secord, a young pilot. When we meet him, he and a bunch of buddies at a rural airfield are taking their brand-new racing plane out for a spin after years of scrimping up what they can from crop-dusting and performing stunts at airshows. A police chase involving the FBI and gangsters with stolen merchandise—some kind of secret “gizmo”—intrudes, wrecking Cliff’s plane and almost killing him. He and his pals, right on the cusp of long-awaited great things, have just been set back years.

But then Cliff and his mentor Peevy discover something hidden in the cockpit of a superannuated biplane that they use for the humiliating “clown act” at airshows: a rocket pack. Cliff and Peevy intuit quickly that it’s designed to be strapped to a pilot’s back for rocket-speed flight. They test it, Peevy tinkers with it, and at the next airshow they are forced to give it a trial run to save an elderly and ailing pilot’s life. It’s a glorious success—but it also brings Cliff and his pals to the attention of the gangsters who were after the thing in the first place, the federal authorities who are hunting them, the industrialist who designed the rocket pack and is trying to recover it, and the highly-placed money behind the gangsters—and even his bosses far, far away.

The plot also sweeps up Cliff’s aviation buddies, including Peevy, Cliff’s beautiful girlfriend and aspiring actress Jenny, and their friends from around the airfield.

From this point forward The Rocketeer is a chase, a swashbuckler, a Flash Gordon adventure, an espionage thriller, a ritzy Hollywood chamber drama, and a gradually unfolding and ever escalating mystery. It’s great.

What makes The Rocketeer great

Why is it great? I can give you a short answer in three words: love, fun, and craftsmanship. Let’s start with the latter two.

First, The Rocketeer is a ton of fun. The period setting, the cast of characters, the heinous and varied villains, the combined dash of classic aviation and romance of classic Hollywood, the high stakes conflict boldly attacked by a spirited young hero who is still finding his calling and learning what is best in life—all contribute to the fun. All tell us, unequivocally, this is an adventure.

For me, the setting is a big part of the appeal. The trappings of the late 1930s are fun—the cars, the clothes, the hats, the planes, the music, the slang (“He hangs one on my kisser and you let him waltz?”), the guns (see below), the payphones and hatchecks and rumble seats, the look of the buildings from the hangars to the nightclub, and, relatedly, all that Art Deco design. The whole movie has a canvas, leather, and steel rivet chic that I’ve heard called dieselpunk. It’s beautiful. All the best of late 1930s material culture is here, and if you’ve ever fancied wearing a fedora (a real fedora, not the hipster hat, which is actually a trilby) and a trenchcoat under the cool light of the moon on a dark street corner, there’s something in The Rocketeer that you’ll like to look at.

But the setting also enriches the tone and dramatic subtext of the film. This is America late in the Depression, on the cusp of World War II but still at peace. This is also an era of change and potential. Everywhere we see the old alongside the new: Peevy’s truck and Cliff’s motorcycle, the biplane Miss Maibel and the Gee Bee, the oil derricks and orange groves of rural Los Angeles and the encroaching glitz of Hollywood. You can see this clearly in the film’s villains. The early villains, an Italian mob, are a known quantity—part of the status quo. Everyone knows who they are and what threat they represent. Howard Hughes is even a bit dismissive of them, calling them “hired muscle.” The film’s brilliant third act revelation of the real villains, the Nazis, points toward a terrifying new unknown.

And that’s another aspect of the setting that works gangbusters—there may have been more evil people or more lethal regimes, but there is no better screen villain than the Nazis. Just ask Indiana Jones.

The revelation of Nazi involvement in the plot also points toward the second thing that makes The Rocketeer so great, which is its craftsmanship.

The plot is perfectly structured, with a steady series of revelations that raise the stakes. Look at how the story progressively intensifies. First we have Cliff just trying to get ahead, then he and his friends are set back by unrelated mob crime, then he publicly rescues a friend using the rocket pack, then not only the mob and the FBI but an unstoppable ogre of a man begin pursuing Cliff, then not only Cliff but Jenny are endangered as Neville Sinclair tries to seduce her, and, the final revelation—the rocket pack isn’t just a MacGuffin for Cliff or the mob or even Neville Sinclair himself to chase, it’s the chosen tool of world domination by the Nazis. By the climax of the film all of the various plot threads have come together and the tension is at fever pitch, the stakes as high as they can go. It’s brilliantly done.

Furthermore—and this is especially important—nothing in the film comes out of nowhere. Everything that matters to the story, from plot points and important props (e.g. chewing gum) right down to jokes and incidental details, is properly set up earlier in the story. Consider Eddie Valentine and his gangsters’ turn on Neville Sinclair at the end. The film has already shown us the tensions in this patron-client relationship and the threat presented by the Nazis, so Eddie’s change of heart isn’t so much a change as the natural and rational step for his character to take given what he has just learned. For this moment to work so well takes the craft and dedication not only of the screenwriter but the director and editor. The Rocketeer, like Cliff’s jetpack, is a well-engineered and smoothly running machine.

So there’s the craftsmanship put into the story, but everything else in the film is finely crafted, too. The production design is stellar. The sets and costumes, from the dingy overalls at the airfield to the black tie and ballgowns at the nightclub, and most especially the Rocketeer’s costume—everything looks fantastic, helped along by Hiro Narita’s beautiful and classically-styled cinematography. The special effects, by ILM, for whom director Joe Johnston had previously worked on the first two Indiana Jones films and all three Star Wars films, are also the best possible for their time, with the climactic Zeppelin sequence being especially convincing and thrilling.

And, of course, there is the cast. The Rocketeer is perfectly cast, not only with good actors from the stars to the extras but with actors who are right for their roles. Even here all of The Rocketeer’s parts fit together smoothly. Billy Campbell is pitch perfect as Cliff, with just the right dash of cockiness and daring to complement his earnestness and naivete; Jenny could easily have been an eye-candy role, but Jennifer Connelly imbues her with life and drive, not to mention her own kind of daring and a radiant, classic Hollywood femininity; Timothy Dalton proves an outstanding villain, showing depth and layers of deception without simply being a caricature of a snobbish actor; and Alan Arkin is wonderful as Peevy (about which more below).

The supporting cast is also excellent, and rather than gush for another thousand words let me focus on three standouts. First, Coen brothers regular Jon Polito, a natural for period films, makes a strong impression with his handful of scenes as Bigelow, the penny-pinching owner of the airfield. Polito also gets one of the best lines in the film (again, see below). Second, Terry O’Quinn as Howard Hughes exudes authority and intelligence and is a natural fit for the story, Hughes being someone Cliff and Peevy would respect enough to make their continued “borrowing” of the rocket pack a real dilemma. And finally, seven-foot-tall Tiny Ron as Lothar, Sinclair’s henchman, is a wonderful old Hollywood type and presents a real threat. I remember dreading his appearance onscreen as a kid. The scene in which Lothar murders injured gangster Wilmer in the hospital, which Johnston and Narita stage in chiaroscuro shadows borrowed straight from black-and-white horror films, is genuinely terrifying and disturbing.

It’s that connection to classic Hollywood that brings me to the final and most important thing that makes The Rocketeer great—love.

I don’t just mean the love story between Cliff and Jenny, but the love the filmmakers had for everything about the movie. It’s apparent that they loved their work, and that love made the story infectious. It’s the root of both the craft and the fun of the movie.

The filmmakers’ love of old Hollywood comes through not only in the setting but in the camerawork and editing. I’ve mentioned the 1930s horror style of Lothar’s first murder, but The Rocketeer also employs classic tools like match dissolves—the best being the transition from Cliff flying over the moonlit mountains outside Los Angeles to the rumpled satin sheets on the bed where Neville Sinclair has deposited the drugged and kidnapped Jenny. That love also extends through every aspect of the look of the film, which I’ve already described but warrants mentioning again.

There’s also the music, an unapologetically heroic and beautiful score by James Horner. Horner was himself a pilot, and his score brings out the adventure, romance, and awe of flight. Look at the way the music during the airshow rescue moves naturally between all of those emotions. This is what flight would feel like if set to music, and it complements the movie perfectly. The Rocketeer is almost certainly my favorite of Horner’s many excellent soundtracks.

And there’s the filmmakers’ love of the story and of adventure for its own sake. The Rocketeer has dangerous villains who wish real evil upon the world, a genuine hero who behaves with integrity despite still having a lot to learn, and a community of people who matter to each other. It’s about courage and boldly facing danger to defend others, about the power of friendship and love and learning that those things are worth taking pains to protect. It’s about a man reaching adulthood and accepting responsibility and learning to think of others, and about the right use of skill, intelligence, and strength. It’s a sincere, heartfelt, uncynical movie of the kind Hollywood doesn’t produce any more, and I think that’s a shame.

Observations

As I’ve hinted above, The Rocketeer isn’t only about its characters, plot, and action, it’s rich with side details and the unnecessary grace notes that show creative people enjoying their work. Here are a few things I want to draw attention to:

• Peevy is a great mentor. His tough-love speech to Cliff about losing Jenny being his own fault is exactly the kind of thing that young men don’t want to hear but need to. Whatever happened to wise older male characters like this?

• Comic relief: I’m sick of Marvel-style quips and gags and pop culture references, especially where they undercut the sincerity of the drama. The Rocketeer is funny throughout without throwing shade at itself, its characters, or its story, and it roots its humor in character, character relationships, and the characters’ responses to their situation. They’re serious when they should be and funny when it’s appropriate to be and the humor isn’t just there to make people laugh but to make the story feel real.

• Cameos: I Like that two big names in 1930s Hollywood show up at the South Seas Club; I also like that the movie didn’t overdo it and turn that scene into one of those Looney Tunes shorts with all the celebrity caricatures. As with so much else, The Rocketeer got this just right.

• Speaking of the South Seas Club, that’s Melora Hardin singing “Begin the Beguine.” You might, like me, know her better now as Jan Levinson of “The Office.” This is one scene in the film that has aged weirdly for me.

• One more thing about the South Seas Club: to this day when I hear the word nightclub I imagine something like the South Seas Club—black tie, big band music, and elegant dining. I’ve gathered that modern nightclubs… aren’t like that.

• Guns: This movie is a smorgasbord of great-looking classic firearms. As I mentioned when reviewing The Highwaymen, I’m a total sucker for interwar and World War II-era hardware like this. The M1928 Thompson submachine gun, one of the most beautiful guns ever designed, is most prominent, and a nighttime shootout at Cliff and Peevy’s house—a gloriously over-the-top use of excessive firepower by the FBI (one of the film’s unintentionally realistic touches)—takes full advantage of the distinctive muzzle flash created by that model’s Cutts compensator. But there are some great automatic handguns, too. Lothar carries two .45 Colt M1911A1 pistols; Sinclair, once fully revealed as a Nazi spy, produces a then-new 9mm Walther P38; but the best of them is the Mauser C96 that Cliff picks up off of one of the German commandos at Griffith Observatory—a pistol he carries for about five minutes and never fires, but that looks fantastic. Those commandos’ main weapon is clearly the MP40 submachine gun, an anachronism as the MP40 wouldn’t be manufactured until 1940. But because the early MP38 looked almost the same (it had milled rather than stamped parts), the MP40 is so cool-looking, and, like the Thompson, its lines are so iconic, I’m happy to give this a pass—and have since I was about ten. You can browse a pretty thorough catalog of the film’s guns at the IMFDB.

• Cussin’: This movie feels squeaky clean now, but as a kid I fretted about watching this when we had a babysitter over and wondered why people in the 1930s and 40s said damn so much. (Another point of reference was my mom’s repeat viewings of Fried Green Tomatoes.) This may also be where I learned the expression son of a bitch—which, if you’ve read Dark Full of Enemies, you may know is McKay’s go-to exclamation.

• This is also where I learned the word fascist. Kudos to my dad for actually trying to explain this concept to seven-year old me.

• This was my first exposure to former 007 Timothy Dalton. I’m in a minority of Bond fans in liking The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, but because I had years and years of The Rocketeer to my credit ahead of watching either of those I always have a hard time shaking my impression of him as a villain.

• Nitpick: Why does Neville Sinclair kind-of, sort-of have a German accent once he’s aboard the Zeppelin at the end? Is he actually German and has been concealing it his whole career? I always took him to be a British Nazi-sympathizer—there were plenty of those in Britain and America in those days—rather than an actual German.

• I’ve mentioned that the cast are perfect from top to bottom, but let me point out one more thing about the bottom here—The Rocketeer is full to the brim of great faces. Pause the film sometime and look, really look, at each of Cliff and Peevy’s friends at the airfield, or the folks at the diner, or the film crew of The Laughing Bandit. It’s easy to fill the small roles and bit parts with just anybody, but I always like a film that gets interesting faces, faces that hint at their own histories and lifestories behind them. (Mel Gibson as a director has this talent in spades.)

• Quotability: This movie supplied and still supplies a lot of one-liners and allusions to my family. To this day my dad will say “It’s all part of the show!” in reference to any oddity that disrupts the regular flow of things. Also, the first time Cliff suits up: “How do I look?” “Like a hood ornament.” This line also has the virtue of feeling period-correct. The director of Neville Sinclair’s movie to the well-connected actress who got a speaking part over Jenny: “Acting is acting like you’re not acting. So act, but don’t act like you’re acting.” Millie, the owner of the diner, after Cliff’s date with Jenny goes down in flames: “Well, go after her, ya dope.” And Peevy after the shootout: “We don’t got a house, we got a gazebo.” I could populate a long list of good lines, but I’ll stop with this immortal line from Eddie Valentine: “I may not make an honest buck, but I’m 100% American and I don’t work for no two-bit Nazi.” I couldn’t type that without smiling.

• Aviation stuff: Last but not least, I have to mention the planes. The Rocketeer is a love letter to flying. The movie is full of beautiful vintage planes—real planes, not computer generated ones—and takes aviation seriously, including the gearhead culture of pilots and mechanics, and serves up a beautiful sample of what it is that lovers of aviation care so much about. It helps that Billy Campbell read up on flying ahead of playing Cliff and that composer James Horner was himself a pilot (see above).

Conclusion

The Rocketeer’s “critics’ consensus” on Rotten Tomatoes rather dismissively describes it as “anachronistic.” If this film is an anachronism then I don’t want to be up-to-date. It’s old-fashioned in the best sense of that term—fashioned as in made, shaped, crafted the old way—and it still works.

More fun and craftsmanship motivated by love and untainted by cynicism or—especially now—political partisanship, please. In the meantime, The Rocketeer, even after thirty years, holds up. Watch it if you haven’t.

More if you’re interested

I own the single-disk 20th anniversary Blu-ray of The Rocketeer. It’s of excellent quality; the picture is sharp and the digital transfer is very filmic, with a wonderful texture to the image, only further enhancing its old Hollywood appeal. Alas, it totally lacks special features. (See the episode of “Re:View” below.) The movie is also available on Disney+ with a subscription and to rent from Amazon Prime. James Horner’s magnificent soundtrack is, unfortunately, out of print if you’re a dinosaur who, like me, still likes to buy CDs, and YouTube recently removed a complete playlist of the score. An MP3 album based on a 2020 remaster is available for download on Amazon, albeit at a bit of a stiff price.

The two YouTube essays I mentioned above are Mike and Rich’s episode of “Re:View” from RedLetterMedia and a shorter video from Scots novelist Will Jordan, aka The Critical Drinker. Mike and Jay got me thinking about writing this appreciation when their video posted a year ago. Jordan finally got me writing about it.

Further notes on bureaucratese

Last week I wrote here about Chesterton and Orwell’s objections to long words, especially the typically Latin-rooted jargon of the bureaucrat or the man with something to hide. I’m currently reading Prit Buttar’s history Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany’s Eastern Front 1944-45, and, via some reading adjacent to that book, came across a perfect example of the kind of obfuscating bureaucratese that Chesterton and Orwell had in mind.

Buttar has mentioned Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg several times so far, always in the context of Ehrenburg’s popularity among Red Army troops and the influence his writing—in Soviet rags like Krasnaya Zvezda—had on the troops. Look Ehrenburg up on Wikipedia and you will find this in the article’s introductory paragraphs:

His incendiary articles calling for vengeance against the German enemy during the Great Patriotic War won him a huge following among front-line Soviet troops, but also caused controversy due to perceived anti-German sentiment.

Emphasis mine.

Both Chesterton and Orwell note how the roundabout, euphemistic vocabulary of the bureaucrat or journalist—or Wikipedia editor?—can obscure simple truths we’d rather not acknowledge. So how much can be obscured by a phrase like the one italicized above? Here are some of the passages from Ehrenburg’s pamphlets and columns that Buttar quotes.

Writing in Krasnaya Zvezda in 1942:

We know all. We remember all. We have understood: the Germans are not human beings. From now on the word German means to use the most terrible oath. From now on the word German strikes us to the quick. We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. . . . If you kill one German, kill another—there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Do not count days, do not count kilometers. Count only the number of Germans killed by you. Kill the German—that is your grandmother’s request. Kill the German—that is your child’s prayer. Kill the German—that is your motherland’s loud request. Do not miss. Do not let up. Kill.

And from a leaflet distributed to the Red Army in October 1944:

Kill! Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn is anything but evil! Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army.

“Perceived anti-German sentiment,” indeed.

Buttar cites the latter passage in connection with the atrocities committed at Nemmersdorf in East Prussia the same month. The Red Army would go on to rape as many as two million German women, an estimated quarter million of whom died as a result.

HHhH

HHhH is an unusual novel. The title is the first hint. An abbreviation of a German phrase purportedly current within the upper echelons of the Third Reich, HHhH stands for Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich—Himmler’s Brain is called Heydrich. The Heydrich in question is Reinhard Heydrich: disgraced naval officer; violinist, champion fencer, and connoisseur of the arts; model Aryan; object of admiration from no less than Hitler himself; head of the Gestapo, Criminal Police, and Security Service, and other powerful instruments of Nazi order; and one of the architects of the Final Solution. He is one of the most powerful and evil people who ever lived, and HHhH tells the story of his assassination by agents of the Czech resistance.

Sort of.

The author, French novelist Laurent Binet, begins with an image of one of the assassins, Slovak commando Jozef Gabčík, trying to sleep in his safehouse in Prague ahead of the assassination attempt. From there the novel backtracks, backtracks all the way to Heydrich’s family and birth, his upbringing and abortive naval career—cut short after he seduced the daughter of Admiral Raeder—and his entry into the world of Nazism and the SS. The novel tracks, in often surprising detail—crucial context, the author assures us, and he’s right—the career of Heydrich and his steady, implacable rise. From the annexation of the Sudetenland and the subsequent dismantling and takeover of Czechoslovakia and its transformation into the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, to the invasion of Russian and the deployment of the Einsatzgruppen—mobile death squads that could shoot over 30,000 Jews at a time at places like Babi Yar outside Kiev—to Heydrich’s scourging of even the mildest resistance and his hosting of the infamous Wannsee Conference, over and over again he is the right man at the right place at the right time to take advantage of new developments, of new positions, of the frequent changes in the Nazi hierarchy, and he uses his positions to advance the cause of Nazism ruthlessly. And the nicknames he garnered along the way reveal much: Himmler’s Brain, The Butcher of Prague, and, from Hitler himself, The Man With the Iron Heart.

By the midpoint of the book Binet brings us back to the assassins, the Slovak Gabčík and his Czech partner, Jan Kubiš. Having escaped Europe by circuitous routes—which Binet notes would make smashing adventure novels of their own—they find themselves training in England and assigned to Operation Anthropoid, the plot to drop into Bohemia, infiltrate Prague, and murder Heydrich.

From this point forward the novel, already compulsively readable, proves difficult to put down. It’s over 300 pages and I read it in two days. Binet deftly interweaves the stories and, even with asides, detours, admittedly unrelated information, and reflections on the craft of historical fiction (about which more below), HHhH thunders along like a freight train—or like Heydrich’s Mercedes convertible on that fatal day in 1942. We know what’s coming from the beginning, and it approaches inexorably, with mounting dread and, yes, excitement.

But here’s where the “sort of” above comes in. HHhH not only tells the story of the assassins and of Heydrich’s life but the story of the author himself: how he came to the story, how his interest grew and deepened, and, throughout, how he decided to write this story, decided he couldn’t, and decided he must regardless. The result is a very postmodern combination of historical fiction, memoir, and commentary on historical fiction and memoir.

A sample: Binet steps back at one point to comment on the title of his manuscript, the manuscript that became the novel I read and that you’re reading about now:

Whenever I talk about the book I’m writing, I say, “My book on Heydrich.” But Heydrich is not supposed to be the main character. Through all the years that I carried this story around with me in my head, I never thought of giving it any other title than Operation Anthropoid (and if that’s not the title you see on the cover, you will know that I gave in to the demands of my publisher, who didn’t like it: too SF, too Robert Ludlum, apparently).

Later, in a passage that makes up the entirety of the novel’s Chapter 205, Binet reflects that, “I think I’m beginning to understand. What I’m writing is an infranovel.”

The distance, the authorial intrusion, the holding of one’s craft at arm’s length—all these deconstructive or self-consciously “meta” effects usually irritate me. Usually. But you might have picked up as well on Binet’s utter sincerity, the quality most often lacking in postmodern fiction. Where the last few generations of literary novelists handle fiction like a bauble they are inspecting for flaws, finally judging the enterprise meaningless, Binet is grappling with the tools at hand for the best way to tell a story that needs to be told. What he wants to do, however much his world, the French literary establishment, has called the very idea of fiction into question, is pay tribute to Gabčík and Kubiš and everyone who helped them on their way and suffered for it.

In other words, to pay tribute to heroes.

That motive infuses HHhH with heart. For all its self-consciousness, postmodern literary effects, its pauses to reflect on everything from trips to museums to love affairs to actors who have played Heydrich on film, and its open admission that the author is not up to the task, HHhH is a riveting, suspenseful, uncommonly rich, and finally—in relating the sad fates of Lidice, a village incorrectly implicated in the assassination, or of the parachutists who took on Heydrich and of everyone who helped them—profoundly moving. HHhH is an excellent example of what an historical novelist, moved by the proper love of his subject, can still accomplish in the postmodern age, and I highly recommend it.

More if you’re interested

HHhH was adapted into a film called The Man With the Iron Heart, starring Jason Clarke as Heydrich and Rosamund Pike as his ardent Nazi wife Lina. I haven’t seen more than clips from it, but it looks decent. That film came out a year after Anthropoid, which focuses on Gabčík and Kubiš, played by Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan respectively, and on the plot itself, relegating Heydrich to an ominous background presence. Anthropoid is excellent, an overlooked masterpiece, and even if you don’t read HHhH you should do yourself the favor of watching Anthropoid at least once. Here’s the meticulously reconstructed assassination scene, an extraordinarily tense three minutes.

Related: I have written here before, in this blog’s early days, about the film Conspiracy, which Binet ponders over early in the novel. Conspiracy dramatizes the Wannsee Conference in real time, with Kenneth Branagh playing Heydrich. Binet: “Branagh’s portrayal of Heydrich is quite clever: he manages to combine great affability with brusque authoritarianism, which makes his character highly disturbing.” Read my examination of the film here.