Latest Readings Page 3

  O’Brian doesn’t really know what to do with an interesting female character. The only woman on a par with the leading men gets killed off in a coach accident. No, these are boys’ books, and the lesser for it. I try to remember that most of the fans of O’Brian that I have met are women, but I suspect that they want a holiday from feminism, just as his male fans want a holiday from inertia. (I should leave room at this point for the possibility that some of the female Aubrey experts in my vicinity see no contradiction between feminism and their allegiance to the age of sail, and quite fancy the picture of themselves dressed as commodores with epaulettes.) But if the Jack Aubrey books are merely entertaining, they are that at a high level. Part of the charm of O’Brian’s magnificently decorated sequence—it makes me think of the bowsprit on HMS Victory—is the continuous and lavish deployment of seafaring terminology. Scuttle the larboard strakes! Every sheet and cleat is named. It doesn’t matter much if you don’t know what he is talking about. Aubrey has to tell Stephen what a “cunt splice” is. I didn’t know either, and still don’t; and even Google was too shy to speak on the subject; but I was ensnared by yet another example of the salt-sprayed vocabulary. It really does help to learn the names of all the sails; but then, the same thing helped when one was reading the Hornblower books, all those years ago.

  Today, I should perhaps read Forester again. Here again, the screen images are so powerful they almost convince you that you don’t need to open the books. In the movies, Gregory Peck was an ideal Hornblower. (Imagine Burt Lancaster in the same role: with bared teeth and somersaulting through the spars, he would have been the Crimson Pirate in a different hat.) And I have several times each seen all the Hornblower stories well done on television. Ioan Gruffudd is excellent casting in the title role, because he looks pensive; just as Russell Crowe is well cast as Aubrey, because Crowe, while always looking to be on the verge of converting himself into Oliver Hardy, is a thick-necked ball of energy; and O’Brian, though he gives Aubrey a fine practical mind, has made him as much of a man of action as Forester made Hornblower a sensitive thinker. On being drawn into the comparison, however, I have to say that the Aubrey fans who surround me—there are several people within a hundred yards of my house who own the complete set of novels, neatly lined up—enrage me when they praise Aubrey at Hornblower’s expense. Yes, I must read the Hornblower books again soon, if only to confirm my memories of them as a brilliant sequential creation. According to my recollection, Hornblower is at least as good a portrait as Aubrey of a man rising through the navy because his talent is seen to be more forceful than the system of seniority that would like to keep him down. And isn’t Forester’s technical vocabulary just as detailed and poetic, even though there are no cunt splices in it? Other times, other customs.

  War Leader

  IN THE COURSE OF a lifetime’s intake of books about the leading figures in World War II—having been born only a month after it started, I have always felt that those years were the beginning of my schooling—I somehow didn’t get round to reading General Sir David Fraser’s biography Alanbrooke. I should have. It is not only well written, it is well judged. That second quality is important because the hidden hero is Churchill, and anyone writing about the war from the British angle must have the critical scope to see that although Britain would not have survived without him, the war would have been lost if he had been left to himself. Churchill needed a lot of handling, or he would always be off on some wasteful scheme; and his handlers were a special breed. They had to respect his spirit, but if they couldn’t rein in his wilder plans, they were useless. I probably won’t feel the need to read Lord Ismay’s memoirs again, but I can remember that I was full of admiration for the bravery, common sense, and efficiency of Churchill’s chief military assistant, a normal man who learned how to serve a genius.

  Alanbrooke, by Fraser’s account, was of the same stamp. He started from a privileged background, and was lucky, in the First World War, to be an officer of artillery rather than of infantry: the death rate was much lower. In India there was always polo, but Alan Brooke (as he then was: he didn’t become Lord Alanbrooke until after World War II) was so well connected that he could still pursue his shooting and riding when he got back to England, where those hallowed aristocratic activities were a lot harder on the pocket. Capable as well as clubbable, he went steadily upward into the higher ranks until finally he was C.I.G.S. (Chief of the Imperial General Staff), where he was just in time to help save his nation from the potentially deadly combination of Nazi barbarity and Churchillian enthusiasm. A clear, logical speaker—with the sole drawback that he talked too quickly, especially for the Americans—he would fearlessly read Churchill the riot act. For a subordinate to fearlessly contradict his boss, it helps if he is not afraid to lose his job: the chief advantage of having been brought up well-off and well placed. Even the Americans, normally suspicious of toffs, were impressed with Brooke, although they didn’t like the sound of that word “Imperial” in the title of his job. But for the nonce, the British and the Americans were not at loggerheads about their plans for the future: they were brothers in arms in the present, and if D-Day can be counted as a triumph for one man, that one man was Brooke. He made sure that the potentially explosive combination of Eisenhower and Montgomery remained potential.

  One of the secrets of his plainspoken dominance—in the office, he always expressed himself in the minimum of words—was that he was secretly a master of improvised talk, and at the dinner table he would let the secret out, charming everyone present. Since he had spoken French before he spoke English, he could disarm even the Free French leaders, who were always apprehensive that they might be patronized. A star talker doesn’t necessarily have to be a mimic, but a surprising number of them are. (I have no gift for mimicry myself, but wish I did.) Reputedly, Brooke’s mimicry was perfect. I wish I could have heard it.

  In my time I have been lucky enough to share a table with Peter Bogdanovich, whose mimicry is so accurate that he doesn’t need to be funny: he is, but you would be riveted even if he weren’t. Kingsley Amis was a great mimic. Having heard him many times in his later life, I can well believe Philip Larkin’s story of how his future friend, when they first met in Oxford, staged a gunfight with what sounded like real guns. Kingsley’s son Martin can do it too, although I notice that he has been wise enough never to do it for journalists, who would manufacture reams of copy with such evidence of his multiple identity, etc. I once spent two weeks filming a television special about Mel Gibson, and he would not be drawn into revealing even a hint of his ability to “do” the voice of any male film star since sound came in. This knack was famous among his friends, but in front of my camera he wasn’t going to give away the magic. He was right, of course. Half the secret of public life is not to blur the image. Gibson wanted to be thought of as an actor, not as a vaudeville turn; just as Alanbrooke wanted to be thought of as a soldier. Short of manpower and money, always building the wrong tanks, Britain in World War II was lucky in its senior officers; the traditional military caste, for the last but most crucial time in the nation’s history, came through with the goods. It should be added, however, that by the time of the Falklands War the armed forces were being ably led by “the boys from the state schools.” It had been Churchill’s phrase, coined during the Battle of Britain: he had foreseen the future, and guessed that it would work.

  But during the war, the British forces, with the possible exception of the RAF, had toffs at the top. In view of that fact, it remains remarkable that the Americans so smoothly accepted the alliance. A lot of the bonding happened between Churchill and Roosevelt, but the next level down was the crucial one, and on that level it was a sheer fluke that the very American George Marshall and the very British Alan Brooke could have talked strategy together without grasping each other by the throat. Helping them reach harmony was the stroke of luck by which the Americans themselves thought the Germany First strategy was the way to proceed, so the British didn’t have to
sell them the idea: they were already working on it. But the whole business of a joint command that operated on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously is an inspiration to read about, because it shows what democratic nations can do when the chips are down. Lately I have been reading what I would guess to be the best book on the subject (it’s a theme that nearly all the military historians have taken a crack at): Masters and Commanders, by Andrew Roberts. Of the book’s many virtues, the most important is that the author knows how to bring the four main characters alive: Churchill, Roosevelt, Marshall, and Brooke are all there, at least three of them acting more strangely than you might have imagined. But if Hitler and Tojo could have put together a team like that, the world would have been lost.

  Sebald and the Battle in the Air

  AN ADMIRER OF W. G. Sebald, I know my way around the often intricate paths of all his major books up to and including the magnificent Austerlitz, but I had never read his little book about the Allied air war against Nazi Germany. I was put off by the reviews, which, even when they praised the book, did too good a job of outlining the essential fatuity of its thesis. According to Sebald, German literature after the war had never faced up to the subject of the bombing raids. That much was perhaps true, but Sebald had gone on to claim that the subject was therefore a lacuna in the German national consciousness. Since I have always been convinced that a national consciousness is formed by secondary writing rather than by serious writing, I put off reading the book: why spend time reading even a great writer when he was trying to make bricks without straw?

  But finally the book came and got me, in the form of a thin Fischer paperback on Hugh’s bookstall in the Cambridge marketplace. Already before I had paid for it and taken it away, I was deep into Luftkrieg und Literatur. The prose, being Sebald’s, was exquisite. His manner of squeezing historical significance from objects and landscapes—a manner which has by now filtered down to such best sellers as Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes—was as seductive as ever. But the basic idea was, for him, uniquely nonprofound. He hadn’t even considered that the generation of young male readers in postwar Germany might have learned, while growing up, all about the air war from quite another source than serious literature. He grew up in Germany himself—he didn’t move to Britain until 1965—but he seems not to have read much of the unserious literature that his fellow Germans were reading in their childhood and adolescence: unserious literature in which the air raids were a prominent theme. In the kind of war-story magazines that seldom end up in libraries, there were sensationally illustrated articles about German night-fighter pilots flying into action against the RAF four-engine bombers that had come to devastate the German cities. The magazines were pulp, but the story they were telling was true, and young German boys—probably not the girls, but for anyone except the Russians the air war was a man’s world—did their first reading about the war the same way I did. Out there in Australia, I read Flames in the Sky, by Pierre Clostermann, and dozens of other books like it. In Germany, the youngsters read about such highly decorated night flyers as Major Heinz Wolfgang Schnaufer, who shot down a scarcely believable 121 RAF bombers. Books with cheap titles like Luftwaffe at War showed young war buffs of the English-speaking world what the air war over Europe had been like. Except, apparently, for Sebald, Germans of my age saw books just like them: hundreds of photographs, but with the captions in their language instead of ours. Sometimes the captions were approximately informed junk, but in many cases they were expertly done. Put all that pulp and glossy publishing together and it added up to an information system: a system that helped prepare a young intelligence to make properly considered judgments later on. It was information that Sebald could have made something of, if he had seen enough of it. But it seems likely that he was shut off from informatively trivial publications by his exclusive concern with serious publications, and in this one area he ended up running thin on facts. In Austerlitz he can write a sublime cantata dedicated to Liverpool Street Station because he turned himself back into a wide-eyed young observer before he sat down to write. About that subject, to achieve his adult prose, he did the childish thing, and became a fan. About the air war, he didn’t have the same deep background.

  On the market stall I picked up one of those elementary-looking, large-format illustrated war books in which it is a moot point whether the chapters are long captions or the captions are short chapters. Purporting to be an account of the Luftwaffe from 1933 to 1945, this one was called Hitler’s Eagles: an unpromising title. There was even less promise in the author’s name: Chris McNab. He sounded as if he might also have written picture books about motorcycles. But after only a quick skip-through, Hitler’s Eagles stood revealed as the work of an expert, so I broke my own embargo—no more picture books about anything—and took it home.

  Most of the pictures of German planes and pilots I had seen before in the Nazi magazine Signal, from which a file of extracts is still on my shelves even after the most recent culling of my books. (My great source for that kind of stuff, incidentally, used to be one of the bookstalls under the arches at Friedrichstrasse railway station. I would go there whenever I was in Berlin, but since I got sick I have not been back.) There were only so many photographs of, say, Werner Hartmann, the Luftwaffe ace of aces who shot down an astonishing 352 enemy aircraft, most of them on the Eastern Front. By now all the photographs of him and his fellow aces have shown up somewhere; and likewise there will probably be no more previously unseen images of the Me262 jet fighters as they taxied out to use up the last few drops of Nazi Germany’s fuel. But the text is full of observation, judgment, and accurate detail, and those things are always new.

  An excellent chapter on the night fighters tells us that in the last phase of the war they were pressed into service against the American bombers in daylight, with shocking losses. Weighed down by their radar equipment and aerials, they were easy meat for the American long-range day fighters. McNab has read the German sources and knows that in the group of Pathfinders assigned to mark the target for an RAF night raid, the leading plane was nicknamed the Zeremonienmeister (master of ceremonies). This is the kind of detail which tends to run thin in the more serious histories: their authors just aren’t thrilled enough by the machinery. You could call it Small Boys’ Knowledge: in my generation, the generation which is now growing old and getting ready to die, there were always small boys who could name the planes in the images. But for quite a while now a new generation has been in charge of communications, and they either don’t know or don’t care. It’s an inevitable declension: in my own time as a writer-narrator of television documentaries, few of the young researchers could understand why I got so exercised about footage of the wrong plane dropping bombs on the wrong place. Just as long as it was a plane and it was dropping bombs on something, they protested, it fitted my narrative. (They were equally puzzled when I flipped my lid at the spectacle of the wrong tanks going the wrong way in the wrong war.) And I suppose that, time having elapsed, they were bound not to see the point, just as I don’t care much whether the Roman chariots racing on screen are of the wrong type, as long as they don’t have exhaust pipes. (Strangely, Hollywood, which is famous for playing fast and loose with historical detail, was always fanatical about the authenticity of the hardware. The production design departments were hotbeds of pertinent knowledge; it was the dialogue that was anachronistic, and no studio mogul ever cared as long as the scene played well.) Apropos, the paper cover of Sebald’s little book about how the Germans have never known enough about the air war against the Reich carries a photograph that suggests he never knew enough about it either. If he okayed the cover picture, he okayed the wrong thing. The twin-engine planes flying low over the burned-out Reichstag are not American or British bombers. Almost certainly they are Russian, finally showing up over Berlin in the very last hours of the war. (Anyone familiar with that particular image knows that if you pull back a bit, there is a Russian tank in the foreground.) The Russian air force, mainl
y a tactical weapon to be used over the battleground, wasn’t really part of the Allied air attack on Germany that Sebald talks about. But the publisher’s art department was full of young people who didn’t know the difference between one aircraft and another, and I suppose we should be glad that the day will come when hardly anybody knows, except the kind of machine buff who could equally be compiling a picture book about the history of customized motorcycles in California.

  Phantom Flying Saucer

  IF A BOOK CONTAINS hard facts about World War II, I find it hard to toss it aside even when the author inadvertently makes clear that he has fallen for a journalistic myth. I’m too scared of missing something vital. In Last Days of the Reich, James Lucas tells the awful story, not often enough told, of the atrocities that went on after the war was over. In some of the countries which had come under the control of the Soviet Union, or else of the Communist partisans, the locals strove to show any German civilians they could catch that the behavior of the Wehrmacht and the SS in Russia could have its counterpart in central Europe now that the tables had been turned. Hounded to death by the thousands, the victims were innocent civilians; but the victors were working on the principle that nobody was an innocent civilian. James Lucas, who died in 2002, was the author of a whole row of secondary books about various aspects of the war: the kind of book that is useful but not really essential. His Last Days of the Reich, however, would come close to being essential if it did not demonstrate at one point that the author can’t tell a fact from a myth. He reports that the German aircraft industry, in its last phase before it ran out of petrol, developed a flying saucer that flew at eighteen hundred miles an hour. Connoisseurs of sensationalist rubbish will have met this German flying saucer before. In Brighter than a Thousand Suns, Robert Jungk’s international best seller of 1970, the German flying saucer put in an appearance as if Jungk knew all about it. Excited journalists had to be told by aviation experts that if the Germans had developed a high-speed saucer, then it would have been copied straight after the war by either the United States or the Soviet Union, or perhaps by both. Already in contention for military supremacy, the two victorious superpowers had taken all the German aircraft industry’s experts and documents home. Besides, there could have been no such leap forward by an aircraft unless there was an engine to propel it. There was no such engine, nor any prospect of one. And so on: for once, the facts were so overwhelming that they even managed to kill a media myth, which is usually hard to do. World War II was, and remains, a potent inspiration to fantasy. There were people who were actually in the war who came away believing things that they should have known to be impossible. Gore Vidal would have been among the U.S. service personnel who invaded Japan if the atomic bombs had not been dropped. Yet he believed until the day he died that President Roosevelt tricked Japan into the war. There were plenty of ultra-right-wing Japanese madmen who were glad to have his support for their views; but really there was less than nothing in the idea. As the scientists say, the theory was so bad that it wasn’t even wrong.