Convoy

Posted on November 18, 2015 by smellincoffee

Convoy: The Greatest U-Boat Battle of the War
© 1976 Martin Middlebrook
384 pages

In his memoirs,  Winston Churchill admitted that nothing worried him quite so much as the U-boat menace. Britain could stand alone against a continental menace, but not without supplies from friends and her Empire abroad.  Submarine attacks on merchant shipping broke out almost as soon as war was declared, and reached their peak in 1943 as a massive wolf packs gathered and waited for convoys to appear   After an introduction which gives an intimate introduction to civilian sailors, Allied navy men, and German submariners,  Martin Middlebrook takes readers across the storm-tossed North Atlantic, following two convoys in a running battle with the greatest concentration of U-boats in the war. Dozens of merchant ships sank into the deep,  at little cost to the assailants, and Middlebrook uses the week-long drama as a case study to examine the U-boat threat and Allied responses to it. Though in part a military history, here civilian men and women are heroes as well,  fighting against their own fear and struggling together in the aftermath of attacks to survive.

 By 1943, U-boats were no longer patrolling vast areas of the ocean and pursuing alone any merchantman they came across.  They were strategic weapons, directed and controlled from Europe itself, and fed by intelligence reports that let them know when to expect victims and where.  In response to the Allied strategy of forming convoys — scores of merchant ships flanked by a handful of escorts —   U-boats gathered en masse as well, forming picket lines where they expected a convoy to pass and then converging on it once contact had been made. As its name implies, Convoy is foremost a naval drama, but aviation is an indispensable aspect of the story.  Aircraft were the mortal enemies of submarines, providing effective screens around the coast and depth-charging vessels caught cruising on the surface.  Even B-17s could only range out so far, however, leaving an “air gap” over the mid-Atlantic,a large window of opportunity for U-boats to wreak havoc unmolested. It is in that window of space, the submarine hunting ground, that Convoy sets forth in.

For several days and nights, vast and lumbering ships carrying locomotives, invasion barges, cotton, wheat, and other sundry supplies to Britain lay at the mercy of dozens of U-boats, defended by a mere handful of escorts.   These escorts were not brand new destroyers run by top-rated seaman, either, but sometimes converted civilian ships equipped with depth charges, captained by retired gentlemen who in peacetime commanded only their personal yachts. One craft in the battle was so old that the English declined to borrow it through the Lend-Lease program! The middle section of Convoy follows the constant harrying of the fleet by a formidable gathering of U-boats, and is solid historical journalism; Middlebrook constructs the story based on numerous ships’ logs and survivor accounts. The appeal is not strictly military, however; as so many of the players  are civilians in extraordinary circumstances. Logs from both Allied and German sources are used, and the details and photographs communicate the combatants’  commonality as well. Though divided by war, they are no less united in their human frailty, in their vulnerability on the open oceans and their isolation and loneliness from serving from months on end in ports and waters far from home. The book is most helpful to a student of the period, however, ending with an analysis of the battle. Despite the losses inflicted on the Allies, matters could have been worse;  while the U-boat formation was engaged in confronting these two convoys,  so thick was the Atlantic with traffic that other convoys were able to hustle through other now un-guarded sea lanes.  Within two months’ time, various pieces of Allied anti-submarine warfare would click together; the air gap would be closed with longer-ranging aircraft, and the daunting strength of the U-boat fleet broken.   At the moment recorded here, however, and for the three years preceding it, their hands were at Britain’s very throat, and Middlebrook delivers a sense of peril quite well.

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The Foxes of the Desert

Posted on November 18, 2015 by smellincoffee

The Foxes of the Desert
© 1960 Paul Carell
370 pages

When Erwin Rommel was dispatched to Africa to rescue his nation’s ailing ally against the small-but-feisty English Eighth Army, he earned the lasting respect and dread of those commanders tasked with defeating him.  The Desert Foxes delivers the story of the Second World War in Africa from the German perspective, with Rommel’s Africa Korps as its stars. Like the English who humbled an Italian army tasked with rebuilding the Roman empire, Rommel would box out of his weight for  two years until he was finally cornered in Tunisia, but the months between victory and defeat created for ‘the Fox’ a lasting reputation; he is admired even today,  hailed for his chivalry and fighting spirit.  

Although the tanks of the Afrika Korps take center stage, Carell enjoys sharing the wartime version of human interest stories, and occasionally pauses from his storytelling — which indeed it is, being no less fact-laden for its dramatization —  to deliver accounts of commandos or extraordinary aviation heroics.The action here is frantic, pitting hundreds of tanks against one another in single battles.  Momentum shifts from side to side, and several times both forces hang on the verge of utter defeat, both experiencing victory and desperation in their turn. Time is ultimately against Rommel, as British forces in the air choke him off from what few supplies drift his way, but  sheer audacity takes him  all the way to Egypt where at last he breaks on the battle-worn English defense.  The arrival of green American troops fresh off the boat allows for a few more brazen victories, but ultimately the two allied armies corner the Africa Korps in Tunisia, where — denied the possibility of retreat by Hitler’s declaration that they fight to the last bullet — the remnant surrenders.  The fast pace and fascinating little stories (like that of a general, separated from his legs by an explosion, using his last moments of life to pen a page-and-a-half letter to his wife) make for engaging history, and Carell’s German perspective adds additional interest. His book is not simply about the Germans; here, they are the protagonists,  fighting the good fight against the ‘Tommies’. While upholding the Afrika Korps as admirable soldiers and men, Carells’ opinion about Germany’s political leadership is far less friendly. (The word used for Hitler is “maniac”.)    How genuine that contempt is I am not sure, but the book stays well away from Europe and allows the reader to enjoy the narrative of strategy and combat removed from the horror of Nazi-controlled Europe.

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War, spam, and more war

Posted on November 14, 2015 by smellincoffee

Today I finished Spam Nation, a journalistic takedown of the spam industry which is centered in Russia. The book is a strange collection of memoir and journalism on criminal relationships so entangled that I felt like I was reading about the securities market. There’s a fascinating chapter on who actually buys products that are advertised via spam (mostly medicine that’s illegal in Europe or too expensive in the US) and how that market compares to legitimate ones, though most of the book is about two Russian  cybercriminals who dominate the arena, whose infighting over turf exposes their dirty laundry and allows the police and other interests to take them on.  It doesn’t read as neatly as @ War, but it does shed light on a murky corner of the internet. Essentially, these men use viral programs to coopt other people’s computers to send billions and billions of spam messages,  chiefly marketing black market drugs and porn but also launching  other revenue-boosters like scareware, programs that hijack a computer, announce computer infection and bid the victim to buy their security program to get rid of it. I’ve been on the receiving side of those when trying to fix relatives’ computers: they are not fun at all.  (Some disable any executable, including viral protection.)   The book is interesting, though not entirely impressive;  surely these two don’t account for all spam, given how much ‘real’ advertising is done by email these days.  The title is ambitious.

My library is currently packing up some nonfiction books to send to a newly-created rural sister library,  and a lot of books I’ve kinda-sorta wanted to read but haven’t gotten around to because I figured they would be there when I wanted to are on the list.  Trying to read them before they disappear is why I picked up Miracle at Dunkirk a few weeks ago and got into this World War 2 reading kick.

Earlier in the week I read Operation Compass 1940, a short work (80~  pages) on the early war in northern Africa, in which Italian troops set on seizing Egypt were savaged by a far smaller British force on the counteroffensive. The work was strictly military history, with good maps but a fairly narrow scope, focusing just on this particular battle.  The Italian humiliation here seems have prompted the Germans to take Africa more seriously as a campaign ground, so I’m following it with The Desert Foxes by Paul Carell.  It’s a strange work, very sentimental and war-smitten. I looked up the author to see if he’d written anything else, and it turns out he’s an honest-to-God-Nazi.  Oops. I’m still trying to find out how bad an apple he was.

The World War 2 reading will continue for the time being, though I intend on mixing other subjects in.  For instance, I have an interlibrary loan book on order about a band of Irish immigrants who fought in the US-Mexican war…for Mexico!  Another book on the way involves….horses.  As far as the 2015 Reading Challenge goes, once I take down A Classic Romance, that will be it. I have the Christmas read already purchased, and it’s a quickie. (Tease: it’s about Jacob Marley.)  My book with antonyms was That Was Then, This is Now. If I didn’t have a mound of books on the Great War, World War 2, and cities, plus four books in the mail, I might be tempted to re-read everything Hinton.  I still may.   My self-control regarding books is on the anemic side. I know the stories, I just want to encounter the writing again.

“Your mother is not crazy. Neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother. He is merely miscast in a play. He would have made the perfect knight in a different century, or a very good pagan prince in a time of heroes. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to do anything and finding nothing he wants to do.”

(Rumble Fish, S.E. Hinton)

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That Was Then, This is Now

Posted on November 13, 2015 by smellincoffee

That Was Then, This is Now
© 1971
160 pages

Mark and Byron were more than best friends; they were brothers. They grew up half-feral, raised by a struggling mom and struck by violence at an early age. Their fond childhood memories included fighting with other ‘greasers’, and staying up all night smoking and drinking to impress chicks. No matter what kind of trouble came their way, Mark and Bryon could charm or wiggle their way out of it…but the magic is wearing off with age.  At sixteen, adulthood is not as far away as it once was, and Bryon in particular is starting to sense his age. He can recall his youthful self in the idiotic young teenyboppers trying to strut their stuff across the street, and is beginning to wonder what the meaning of it all is.  That Was Then, This Is Now is a tragic story of the two boys as they grow apart, divided  by the choices they make and the people they are becoming.  The story is tragic not simply because relationships die, because in the end the narrator is left with nothing but anguished questions.

I read That Was Then countless times in high school, and even today it holds a coveted place in my headboard book shelf.  It’s a short tale full of  emotion, a gritty story of working-class toughs trying to figure out their place in the world. In the early part of the book,  Mark and Bryon drift along aimlessly; they fight, they hustle, they hit on girls. They both seem conscious that their lives are changing, or about to, but Mark resists and hardens himself, while Bryon is taken along by it. He becomes involved with a girl, Cathy, and for once it’s more than chemical infatuation; she becomes his friend in a way that no other girl ever has. For the first time, he’s emotionally engaged with someone who isn’t Mark, who isn’t just a beautiful lion who only cares for himself and his brother.  When Mark and Bryon witness a friend shot down for defending them,  the crack between the two widens.   Bryon begins to feel the weight of consequence, which Mark continues to shrug off, and when Bryon realizes Mark is involved in something so serious it can’t be ignored, he makes a fateful decision to hold his brother accountable.  There is no happy ending, only the realization that some things destroyed can never be rebuilt.

I read everything of Hinton I could find after encountering this book in high school, attracted by working-class characters whose lives were nevertheless completely different than my own sheltered one. (My neighborhood’s idea of a gang war involved mud balls and plums, not switchblades and broken beer bottles.) Some of Hinton’s characters have a vividness about them that despite not having read the books for well over a decade,  they still persist in my memory; That was Then‘s M&M is one such character, unforgettable despite his supporting role.  For the uninitiated, there’s a curious period charm to this as well, set as it is in the early 1970s,  with ample hippies. For me, reading this only restored in sharper detail a story which I’ve never forgotten, even though why its hooks are in me so deep I don’t quite know.

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Battles for Scandinavia

Posted on November 11, 2015 by smellincoffee

Battles for Scandinavia
© 1981 John Elton
203 pages
Time-Life History of WW2

In Battles for Scandinavia, John Elton takes readers into the three nations who had the distinct bad luck to lay between the warring powers of World War 2.  Norway, Sweden, and Finland lay to the north of Germany, the east of Britain, and the west of Russia,  guarding the sea access to both Russia and Germany’s heartland.  In the opening year of World War 2,  Finland and Norway would fall to the Soviets and Nazis respectively, while Sweden armed itself to the teeth and dared the evil empires — “Molon labe!”   Although devoured by separate empires, the Scandinavian nations shared a common plight, and Battles combines three distinct conflicts: Russia’s attempted takeover of Finland, the German seizure of Norway and Denmark, and the shoving match between Germany and Russia that entangled Finland once more. In Battles we see three nations over their heads but resisting as best they can.

I knew little of the Winter War except that Finnish soldiers defending their land from Soviet aggression exacted a heavy price from the invading army, inflicting five times as many casualties as they took. Throughout a savage winter, Soviet ineptitude at fighting in novel terrain and Finnish guerilla tactics that made the most of limited resources made Soviet ambition cost them dearly.  In the end, their sheer weight of numbers did force the Finns into a settlement, but no sooner had a cease-fire been declared there than did German troops launch an invasion of Norway. They were competing with English troops who wanted to seize key ports to prevent their being used to aid the Nazi war effort, but fortunately the Norwegians overlooked that little detail and welcomed any assistance against their new peril.   The English fared well on the high seas, but an attempt to fracture the German offensive at Trondheim ended only in retreat.  Norway would remain Germany’s for most of the war, providing space for airfields and submarine pens to launch attacks against Britain.   Immediately after the conquest of Norway, of course, Germany invaded France and then spent a deadly summer threatening Britain with its own invasion until the weather changed and Germany shifted its focus to invading Russia, instead.    When the devils’ alliance ended with Panzers racing through the rodina, the Germans found an interesting ally — Finland, who had not been conquered, merely temporarily pacified.  The Germano-Finnish invasion put the Allies in a difficult place:  the Finns were counterattacking, not building empire, but Stalin demanded somebody do something to help.  Britain did declare war on Finland, but mercifully never crossed swords with it.  The book is full of little anecdotes, and a favorite is an Finnish soldier who sighs at the English declaration: “We shall have to shave now, we are fighting ‘gentlemen’!”    Finland’s alliance with the Nazis would ultimately backfire, however;  kept alive by English blood and American resources, the Soviets would recover and drive back the Germans. Threatened with Soviet wrath, Finland made a separate peace and found itself ravaged instead by its one-time ally, who slammed the door and burned everything on the way out, with an indignant “Thanks for nothing, ‘comrades-in-arms!”.   Poor Finland — so far from God, so close to nations with dreams of world conquest.

Battles for Scandinavia also covers Sweden and Denmark, though more briefly. Denmark was taken by Germany so quickly that its dazed population woke up to find Germany already in control of the country; only later did resistance break out.  Along among the north countries, Sweden remained free: refusing to entangle itself in alliances, its people and its leaders determined to make themselves as “indigestible” as possible. Sweden became an armed camp,  a nation prepared to fight for its life.  Much of the combat around Scandinavia happened literally around it,  in the sealanes that allowed the Allies to transport war material to Russia. The nearness of combat to the pole made such sea transit doubly dangerous: the Artic seas are harsh and unforgiving, and Allied ships sailed through months wintry gloom under a blackout,  waiting for an enemy to shoot from the dark.The Germans were late to realize the importance of the convoys to Russia, but once they do an extensive chapter on naval warfare follows. As with other Time-Life books, photographs here are ample, and include paintings depicting life in the snowy wastes.  Maps are very good, and the writing well communicates the suffering of men fighting in intense conditions.

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We Who Dared Say No to War

Posted on November 11, 2015 by smellincoffee

We Who Dared Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now
© 2008 Murray Polner, Tom Woods
368 pages

The image of anti-war protesters in America is of the left, especially the student left, haranguing the government for overseas debacles, bloodbaths like Vietnam and Iraq that seem to rival the Trojan War in their length. As We Who Dared Say No to War demonstrates, however,  bipartisan public outcry against government bellicosity has been around since the creation of the Republic.  The joint work of a progressive and a libertarian,  this anthology of anti-war literature demonstrates that war is the enemy of us all, destroying lives and turning governments into monsters.

I’d planned to buy this work years ago purely on the face of it, especially given its unlikely neighbors: Howard Zinn and Russell Kirk, both of whom are represented here. Aside from some more famous names, like President Eisenhower , most of the contributors are nigh-anonymous, largely forgotten by history. Their motivations for opposing war are diverse, but of this collection there are two predominant objections, moral and constitutional.  Arguments opposing the war from the perspective of Christian pacifism pepper the work, from an early piece written to the Confederate president maintaining that Christians cannot be forced to fight a war against God’s commands, to the Berrigan brothers (both Catholic priests) who raised a righteous ruckus during Vietnam, at one point sneaking into a courthouse to burn draft documentation.  Another well-represented motive is Constitutional corruption; both authors decrying the fact that the president has forced the country into war despite the fact that this is Congress’s purview, and those warning that wars are the lethal enemy of democracy and republican government, reliably leading to a worship of the State and the severe curtailing of liberties both civil and political.  Political objections to war run the gamut, from conservatives like Robert Taft denouncing it a menace to public health, to conservatives in the person of Eugene Debs pointing out that wars are invariably fought by a subject class who gain nothing from it but families destroyed and survivors haunted by the horrors of the battlefield.

The book covers every conflict from 1812 ’til the present day, if not by name then by association: The War of 1812, the invasion of Mexico, the Civil War,  the Spanish-American war, the world wars, the “Cold War”, Vietnam,  and the War on Terror, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan.    Early on, a fair bit of the moral objection is patriotic: authors see in the United States an unstained and free republic, one which has never raised the sword except in its own defense.  Do not reduce us, they plead, to the level of the old world,  constantly invading and advancing the flag of conquest. May the stars and stripes, they pray, remain free of the imperial eagle. Alas for them, between Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines,  under the swagger stick of executives like McKinley and Roosevelt, the great experiment deferred to the familiar path of empire — and even after a momentary retreat during the Depression, it came back for a vengeance after World War 2, and remains with us today.  Of all the wars covered here, World War 2 is addressed most lightly; one author maintains he’s sitting this one out because history seems to indicate the futility of it. How many resources were poured into Europe to defeat the Kaiser in an alleged crusade to make the world safe for democracy, only to release a fouler creature?  We traded Hohenzollern for Hitler;   dispatch him, and what fresh hell do we risk?    There is slight drift from idealism to resignation within the book; the authors are not oblivious to the fact that they were preceded in their arguments by other generations, and eventually one wonders if we’re not damned to the same mistake over and over again.  Our enemy, one author writes, is not fascism,  or even materialism, but the beast within man. Til it be tamed with reason — til, as Plato mused, the love of wisdom commands cities — we will defeat one enemy only to create another.

This is a work brimming with quotability, with utterly delicious surprises.  We find, for instance, Abraham Lincoln denouncing a war started on suspicious grounds only a decade before he becomes the author of a similar conflict.   Later on, a Democratic presidential candidate,  George McGovern, hails the virtue of paleo-conservative arguments against war and chastises Congressional republicans by quoting Edmund Burke and declaring that the legislative chamber stinks of blood.  Though most of the material is primary sources — essays, poems, and songs —  Woods and Polner also provide some narrative introduction to each chapter that provides some cohesion and historical analysis — decrying, for instance,  the rise of liberals eager to wage war in other countries for Wilsonian ends, and the rise of neo-conservatives who abandoning contempt for interventionism and profligate spending to play war across the globe.

Although the subject  here is American anti-war writing, the book commends itself to general reading. The motives and consequences of war affect other nations no less than the United States, a fact born out by the fact that many of the contributors here point to examples in history. The role of war in centralizing power, in corrupting a nation –  enriching defense contractors with the right connections, forcing a disconnect between the morality of home and the  desire of the state — in turning perfectly friendly people into frenzied madmen — is a universal human problem, particularly so in that there is no easy fix. Fighting  is second nature to us,  though at the level of state versus state it is virtually indefensible.  Beyond war,  We Who Dared Say No communicates important values;  moral authority and a state that is kept within its limits by the people.   Unfortunately, it is a work that will never lose relevance…at least, not this side of a coronal mass ejection.  While we can never stop the state’s wars, we can refuse to participate, awaken others to its obscenities, and sap ever so slightly its power.  This is invigorating and encouraging,  demonstrating that parties that disagree on other subjects can come together to resist  and overcome the beast that is war, and the beast it makes of those who surrender themselves to it.

Related:

  • Weapons of Satire, Mark Twain. A collection of Twain’s rebuke of American imperalism in the wake of the Spanish-American war.
  • Voices of a People’s History, ed. Howard Zinn. An anthology of first-hand accounts railing against imperialism among other subjects. 
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The Lost History of Christianity

Posted on November 9, 2015 by smellincoffee

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia — And How It Died
© 2008 Philip Jenkins
315 pages

For the first millennium of the church’s history, Europe was less Christendom than a dismissed backwater. The heart of the faith was its fount in the middle east, where it saturated the landscape and spread through two empires across the vast expanse of Eurasia. Within five hundred years of Christianity’s millennial birthday, however, its reach had vanished, lost in political upheaval and newly arrived competition. Though advertising itself as a history of the global church,   Lost History is principally about religious transformation  in the middle east, with Christianity as its case model. 

There is immediate intrigue in Jenkins’ history merely for the fact that his primary subjects are unrecognizable to most as Christian.  Around the Mediterranean,  Rome — in the person of the emperor — maintained a faith common to all.  Achieving and enforcing orthodoxy was the reason Constantine urged on the Council of Nicaea. Outside the empire, however,  Christianity grew wild, running bramble-like clear to Asia.  Aside from stray missionaries from the Latin and Greek church,  most of the Christians covered here belonged to the Nestorian church,  which retained an orthodox-like hierarchy outside the authority of  the Greco-Roman sphere, with hundreds of metropolitans and bishops. How much of “Christianity” really survives the trek to Asia is a question Jenkins does not pursue, though the mention of a “second Jesus” buried in India allows a lot of room for doubt.   The Nestrian branch found a particularly cozy home in the Persian realm, safe from Orthodux rebuke, but the African church would vanish almost overnight, save for the impressively resilient Copts. 

The rise of Islam set the stage for the middle-eastern church’s downfall, but it was not strictly a matter of religious competition.  Jenkins records Islam and Christianity meshing at first; considering the  power of Arian-like sects which effectively denied the divinity of Jesus,  they shared much more common ground than not. (So much so that medieval personalities denounced Muhammad not as a false prophet, but as a schismatic!) The golden age of  Islam was built on such ground,  flourishing through  the communities of Christian Syrian scribes and researchers.As Islam grew in self-confidence, however, and especially after it began brawling with outside powers, the  Christians within its midst were viewed as suspect. When the Black Death reared its head for the first time, a wave of persecution followed —  Christians playing the part of scapegoat that was assigned to Jews in Europe. When new powers arrived on the scene, like the Mongols and Turks, they frequently inaugurated a new era of religious oppression; the Crusades were a response  to Turkish abuses, not the nigh half-century old occupation of Jerusalem by Islamic forces.  (Interestingly, the Mongols who destroyed the high water mark of golden-age Islam, Baghdad, first persecuted  Islam and then became its champions, persecuting Christians.) Political stress turned into religious persecution again and again, a theme that runs  clear to the 20th century, when an on-the-ropes Turkey decided to rid itself of minorities with suspect loyalties. The Armenian genocide was the result.  Early Christian activity in China and Japan perished after upsurges in nationalism, as well.

This history of religious transformation in the middle east is then used by Jenkins to examine the life of religions in general, their ‘struggle to survive’.  Though Christianity and Islam were rivals, they wore off on one another:  the Eastern Orthodox church’s iconclastic period (that ghastly preview of Puritanism) marks Islamic influence, and mosques modeled themselves on the architecture of churches. Such architectural borrowing went the other way in Spain, where rebuilding churches incorporated elements of Islamic design  into their structure.  Even after Christianity vanished from an area, it left its mark: in rural Turkey, for instance, parents continued to have their children baptized to ensure the blessing of God.  Jenkins  speculates on various reasons regions thrive or perish amid competition; he notes that the church in Egypt became part of the culture, while in other parts of Africa it merely existed as outposts, like Roman military encampments that disappeared when the Romans left. Those churches were sustained from without, rather than from within. Faiths can also hedge their bets by expanding;  when Christianity virtually perished in the middle east, it continued to flourish in Europe; even as it fades in Europe, it grows again in Africa.

All this fairly interesting, though the book has certain frustrations. Belief, for Jenkins, is a moot point;  Nestorian doctrine or what Jacobites practiced, none of this matters. All the reader is really given is politics and labels; there were people here, they called themselves Christians, and then they were killed.  Jenkins has a peculiar understanding of Christianity, announcing to the reader that understanding the early church is impossible because Christianity was driven from its home region.  Since when is Christianity like Temple Judaism or Islam, fixated on a certain patch of earth?  What is revealed is how unimaginative humans are at creating ways to persecute one another:  Just as Christians were made to wear patches identifying them as an underclass and forced to dismount at the approach of a Muslim, so in the 20th century German Jews were made to wear patches and blacks had to vacate the sidewalk at the approach of a white.  One wonders how ubiquitous these shaming behaviors are — did the Japanese practice them in China, for instance? The Lost History of Christianity is certainly relevant, given the ongoing slaughter of innocents at the hands of ISIS. It is a fascinating history of the middle east’s religious evolution,  though of limited use for truly learning about the ancient church outside of Rome and Constantinople.

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One Year After

Posted on November 9, 2015 by smellincoffee

One Year After
© 2015 William Forstchen
304 pages

It’s been two years since an EMP blast reduced most of the United States to medieval conditions. After cars and the electrical grid failed, everything went to hell — complete with hordes of the damned, mobs of men and women given over to madness attacking anything in their path. In the aftermath, starvation and disease again reared their heads, killing millions. Colonel John Matherson was a history professor on the Day of the attack, but in the wake of the chaos became the commander of his community’s defensive forces.  He could do nothing against the death of his daughter and other loved ones by disease, but he could fight gangs, and so stand for the rule of law as to prevent his own friends from becoming monsters themselves.  In One Year After, we find Matherson and the town council of Black Mountain attempting to rebuild, nearly on the verge of establishing a electric generator. But beyond the mountains there is a continent of forces fighting for chaos and order, and  the fair city of Black Mountain has caught their eye.  As Matherson attempts to negotiate a peace between his city and a smaller community nearby, the area becomes of interest to a Federal government attempting to reconstitute itself.  Torn between hope that this is a genuine start to national recovery and his fears that the ‘federal administrator’ isn’t on the level,  Matherson and Black Mountain stand cautious, and are ultimately caught up in another life-and-death struggle.

One Second After read like a science-fiction horror story, chronicling a catastrophic breakdown of society; One Year After’s story is far less harrowing, being mostly politics and combat as Matherson works with his neighbors and the government in nearby Bluemont that claims to be the legitimate government.  Black Mountain has weathered the worst of the breakdown, but  its neighbors spell trouble. Not only is there constant feuding between mountain clans that frequently bleeds over into his city, but those warring tribes have caught the attention of the Bluemont government. The United States’  overseas meddling has for once paid off;  the troops and equipment stationed outside of the EMP bursts are alive, kicking, and back in the states to restore order.  At the novel’s opening, a draft has been imposed on the populations in contact with Bluemont, as it is attempting to create an Army of National Recovery to put an end to the multitude of highwaymen and cults now peppering the landscape.  Faint broadcasts from the BBC hint that interesting goings-on are happening around the globe, dropping secret messages to ‘friends in Montreal’ or Prauge, and detailing the ongoing failure of Bluemont to  put down a monster ruling in Chicago while the Chinese occupy California.. As the plot of the book unfolds, Matherson increasingly suspects that this new Federal authority isn’t one worth of trust, and eventually has to make a decision:  conscience or convenience.   Temptation is an ongoing theme here in his social balancing act;  how easy would it be to say to hell with his raiding mountain neighbors, instead of swallowing pride to make a peace with them; how simple his life would be if he would simply throw his lot in with Bluemont. Time and again Matherson hovers between what he believes is right, and what seems right, with Forstchen using cigarettes as a visual clue.  Accept an offered smoke and enjoy immediate satisfaction…but at the price of reviving a long-beaten addiction.

Although One Year After doesn’t  have the immediate punch that One Second After did,  the firefights amid abandoned and repurposed sights of urban decade are well done, especially as they happen alongside Matherson’s frequent soul-searching bouts of tough decision making. I appreciated the nuance here; unlike Patriots,  antagonists are redeemable — even the Feds.

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The Battle of the Atlantic

Posted on November 5, 2015 by smellincoffee

The Battle of Britain
© 1977 Barrie Pitt, series editor William Goolrick
208 pages
Time-Life History of WW2

Long before panzers roared through Paris and Stukas littered the fields of France with burned-out machines, the Phony War existed only in name. The months of silence on land in Europe that prevailed between the Allied declaration of war and Hitler’s spring seizure of everything in grabbing distance were loud indeed on the sea — filled with crashing waves as U-boats and raiders  plowed through the waves hunting for supply ships to sink.  So sooner had the war begun than ships inbound to England were being sent to the bottom, and with them precious lives and supplies.  The threat of strangulation by U-boat had imperiled Britain before, during the Great War, but naive trust that future conflicts would abstain from a now verboten weapon  meant Britain’s neck was again on the line. Battle of the Atlantic, part of the Time-Life history of World War 2,  combines full-page spreads and photo essays to deliver a sense of the action and peril at sea, where civilians were military targets and the stakes were never higher for the Allies.

Unlike the Battles of France and Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic stretches out over not weeks or months, but years. Despite catastrophic losses — over half the boats and lives committed by German to the U-boat fleet would be claimed by the sea —  Germany continued producing and sending out submarines against Allied shipping until the very end of the war.  The worst ravages would be over by 1943, but for Britain and her allies, the struggle was uphill. Lessons of the Great War’s  anti-submarine campaigns had to be relearned, and new strategies created as the U-boats came this time not alone, but in radio-coordinated packs.   The convoy system was Britain’s best hope, comprising multiple cargo ships guarded by whatever escorts could be found.  Escorts were not necessarily warships, even aged ones; a fishing trawler equipped with racks for depth charges might qualify for duty.  The U-boat menace could have been even more dire had Hitler committed naval resources to a full undersea fleet, instead of insisting on a ‘balanced’ fleet that involved big and shiny surface ships like the Bismarck, which made for great press but poor strategic weapons.   The Allies also produced new weapons to take down the U-boats, developing shipboard radar that could locate vessels on the surface of the sea, where — despite their name — Unterseebooten spent most of their time.  They also learned to use the U-boats’ frequent radio communication  (vital in coordinating the wolf packs) to triangulate on their position, and began to incorporate airplane patrols to boot.    By the time the German command realized  how advanced British radar had become and began to develop countermeasures,  Germany was waist-deep in Russia and fighting an Allied invasion of Rome. The combination of bitter experience, new tactics, new weapons, and increasingly green and scattered German mariners, broke the wolf packs’ control of the sea.

The Battle of the Atlantic is valuable as a brief overview of the naval war between the Allies and Axis, providing raw data as well as first-hand accounts by both British and German mariners (sometimes from the same battles) to put the reader on the deck of their subjects. There is also a collection of art produced by  sailors who wanted to recreate the scenes burned into their memory, like the despair of huddling lifeboats, watching as their home sinks into the deep. I appreciated the attention given surface ships at the beginning, and the surprising chapter on Caribbean altercations. The data presented is also surprising —  while I knew U-boats patrolled the eastern seaboard of the United States, the amount of tonnage sunk places the seaboard as one of the most perilous places to sail, along with the ‘western approaches’ that paralleled German U-boat bases in France.

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V for Vendetta

Posted on November 4, 2015 by smellincoffee

V for Vendetta
© 1988 Alan Moore and David Lloyd
300 pages

Remember, remember the Fifth of November.  The Britain of 1998 is a nation that has lost its spirit,. After nuclear war and crop failures, widespread disorder was quelled only by the face of a fascist order, Norsefire.  Controlling the country through ideology, violence, and a computer known as Fate, they rule over a bleak place whose greatest claim to fame is that it at least survived the nuclear war. Vast portions of Earth — including Africa — are simply “not there”.     Enter “V”, however,  a mysterious masked marauder who dreams of inspiring the people of this Airstrip One-in-the-making to revolution. Channeling the story of Guy Fawkes, who was caught attempting to blow Parliament to perdition,  V is at the story’s start engaging in a two-year propaganda campaign involving blowing up symbolic institutions, while at the same time close to finishing a vendetta against people involved in an insidious concentration camp experiment.   The story is much the same as the movie based on it — a woman named Evey falls in with V as a detective named Finch tries to find the man responsible for so much bedlam — but there is significant characterization here completely missed on the big screen. Detective Finch, for instance, nearly destroys his mind with drugs attempting to get a handle on who V is and what he wants.  Although V orates on the distinction between anarchism and chaos — “without rulers” and “without order” —  the story is more effective at communicating the importance of myth to the human imagination, of legends and symbols.  The historical story V appropriates has little bearing to his actual ideal; Guy Fawkes intended no revolution, but the restoration of England’s traditional order against rising Puritanism in Parliament.  What matters to V, however, is that people see and remember him as a revolutionist; ultimately, V himself becomes the symbol.   As much as I like the movie (I watched it three times in two weeks), this graphic novel did a better job reminding me of and supplementing the dramatized version that it did winning me over in its own right.

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