To let you know....

This week, starting today, is going to be 'Fiction Week' - fictional people in military events, just 'cos I can. :)

Brethren - Robyn Young

A slight departure for this one: I've talked about reviewing what I term 'Historical Fiction' before - that is, taking a fictitious character but placed in a genuine historic event during a war - and I've written about what Mallinson does with a Napoleonic Dragoon. Well, time to switch attention to the heavy mob, the Knights Templar during the Crusades - big men on big horses with big swords taking big lumps out of people.

What Young is very good at is what I might term setting the scene; the descriptions of London and Paris during the late 1200's are convincing enough that I can picture the cramped alleyways, see the dark streets and smell the shit on the cobbles (or maybe that's just my loo backing up again?). When we get to Outremer (the Crusader holdings in the Holy Land) I can picture the great limestone fortress of Safed glinting white in the harsh sunlight, feel the heat shimmering from the ground, taste the dryness at the back of my throat. Very evocative and very effective.

The story as it stands, alas, I am compelled to record as somewhat formulaic: secret book gets stolen from the Knights Templar, enough to condemn them all to the stake many times over. Book gets nicked by someone else and pursued by both original thieves and original owners across France. Book is swiped by someone else again and taken to Outremer, now with three factions after it. Book gets recaptured by original owners. Book is destroyed. Yada-yada-yada.

I must also record that the military side of things is depressingly thin on the ground. Okay, this is before the 5th Crusade has started properly and yes, we do get the siege of Safed, the torching of Antioch and so on but in 641 pages there's not a lot of it, especially not for a book where one of the main protagonists are the mightiest band of elite warriors in the Christian West - I mean, these guys had enough military and financial clout to be able to tell Kings and Emperors where to get off. The second is a single man, Baybars.

Now Baybars is interesting, not least because comparatively little is ever written about him compared to Saladin. But this was a real man who rose from a position of slavery (all the Mamluk warriors of Egypt were slaves, though latterly only technically) to become Sultan and actually achieved more than Sladin ever did - it was he who managed to kick the Crusaders out of the Holy Land once and for all.

So much for war. This is, more or less, a detective/crime book more than what you might think based on the cover for it. Annoying, but it was perhaps naive of me to think otherwise. Still disappointing though.

Young is good at setting a scene, creating believable characters and postulating about what or indeed who the Templars might have been (the transition from aspirant to Knight is particularly engrossing) and plonking them all into reality. The unfortunate bit is that this reality is not as action packed as you might expect.

7 out of 10 if you want a good book.
4 out of 10 if you want a military tale.

Hawkwood competition - Da Winner!

Congratulations to Meiko Isazuki, the book will be on it's way to Nagoya just as soon as I get back from holiday! Well done!

More compies on the way, keep tuning in.

Chickenhawk - Robert Mason

Bob Mason never wanted to go to war. What he really wanted was to fly a helicopter around Central American disaster zones, plucking dusky maidens out of the tree-tops with dashing aplomb. Unfortunately, he needed to learn how to fly a chopper first, and the US Army kindly agreed to teach him.

Passing through the huge military flying school then based at Fort Rucker, Mason graduated after a few sticky moments and was assigned to the First Helicopter Squadron based at Andrews AFB. The job of '1st Heli' was to fly members of the Senate to safe places during Bad Times and was considered a plumb posting fit only for veteran pilots - so what a freshly minted warrant officer, second class was doing there was a mystery to just about everyone. The Army was more devious than Mason gave them credit for and soon he was plucked from his blissful job and sent to the newly formed 1st Cavalry Regiment. Which was then sent to Vietnam just as everything began to slide from a counter-insurgency style operation to full out war fighting; although ironically enough Vietnam was never officially classed as such. Something that the majority of veterans have trouble believing.

Assigned to the 'Golf Course' (Camp Radcliffe) in the hills, conveniently near where a Foreign Legion patrol had been ambushed and massacred (always a comfortable reminder of your own mortality in a warzone)Robert Mason spent the next few months flying the transport - Slick - version of the Bell H 1 Iroquois, the famed Huey. Unarmed apart from 2 machine guns and decidedly without armour it's no great surprise that he had a few shot out from under him and many more close calls - a mortar round landing not 3 feet from him but not exploding is a case in point.
Unlike with the Brits or many other armed forces in the world, American troops deploy on overseas operations for a full year which generously gives them plenty more opportunities to be killed or maimed. The fact that Mason wasn't and came out physically intact (though slightly fragile) goes some way towards proving just how good a pilot he actually was. He's a good writer as well, delivering stories of longing, danger, friendship and blind terror with the same panache and wit as those from his days as a candidate back at Rucker.

This is a powerful and moving story of what happens when a sense of blissful, invulnerable naivety collides head on with people shooting at you. It's no great surprise that when he had the chance for some leave he got a little unglued, but then most soldiers do given half the chance; and it can't be denied that these are often the funniest recollections of the lot, albeit tinged with some pathos. By the end of it, Mason has really been through the fire. Whether or not he emerged stronger because of it is something that even he admits that he's not sure about.

7 out of 10

The Operators - James Rennie

This is James Rennie’s life with 14 Intelligence Company - a British military intelligence unit established in 1972 to conduct covert surveillance operations against terrorist organisations (of all stripes) in Northern Ireland. The unit is also known colloquially as '14 Int', and the 'Det' (because it is organised into 'Detachments'). The events related in the book occurred in the 1980s, but the unit is reportedly still in existence.

The selection and training phases absorb well over half the book but that is no criticism: these sections are a gripping read. Such heavy emphasis on the training is quite unusual in this genre, and the effect is to impart a sense of the enormous if not exhaustive, care and preparation that go into forming each “Operator”.
Selection standards for entry into the unit are extremely rigorous, both physically and mentally. The work of 14 Int is much more cerebral than that of other special forces groupings. Accordingly selection fortnight intersperses punishing tests of physical endurance with fiendish mental tests of memory, observation, concentration, planning, effective communication and so on (and on and on). Uniquely amongst British special forces, 14 Int contains women. The standards expected of them in selection and afterwards are exactly the same as those for the men. However far from being the granite-jawed East German shot-putter types you might have expected, they sound rather charming and feminine. Rennie's descriptions of these formidable individuals make very interesting reading. Go back 60 years or so and you'd find the same women in the SOE - they wouldn't seem out of place, either.

Those who successfully pass the selection move on to six months of gruelling training. Much training is conducted right here in the familiar and comfortable surroundings of dear old Blighty - on our public roads, and in our very own sleepy little towns and bustling cities. It must have been rather odd for the author and his fellow trainees to be conducting their cloak and dagger lessons amidst a populace in which friends and loved ones moved. To be forced to peer behind the veil of familiar and cherished perceptions of life in England would to me have felt like a violation and left me wondering what else there was. This is not the same as fighting (or preparing for) a war in some far and alien place. Homesick and frightened soldiers dream dreams of home. What, I wondered, do Det members dream of? Perhaps it’s just as well that we are never allowed to guess.

Seeking out the psychological subtext is very important to an appreciation of what Rennie experienced, of what it is like to serve in this kind of unit. Isolation and loneliness seem to be strong abiding themes of Rennie's recollections of life in the Det. What is intriguing is whether he recognised that himself as he was writing this. The telling phrases and passages are littered throughout: having just passed through the hell of selection he suffers a personal rejection; his previous two years of service in Germany leave him bereft of functioning friendships in the UK; he resorts to placing ads in the lonely hearts columns to find a companion. Much later, undergoing severe interrogation, he comforts himself with thoughts of what his beloved might be doing at that very moment; within the unit itself, members are forbidden to share the details of their lives with each other, and false names are used extensively if not obsessively – but then some things are worth being obsessed about, and for good reasons – but it all adds up to a picture of emotional isolation. Loneliness was, nay, surely must have been, a strong contributory factor in Rennie’s desire to quit whilst ahead and return to civilian life. But will his significant others ever know? I very much doubt it.

On the whole, the impression gained is of a pretty wonderful group - switched on, disciplined and resourceful, but also friendly, egalitarian and relaxed. Rennie himself seems healthily balanced and mature in his comments about 'the opposition' and about his colleagues, even after his experiences.
This is a really engaging read. From now on, if I get splashed with rainwater by a car full of serious-looking people driving like absolute lunatics I will think twice before swearing at ’em!

7 out of 10

Sniper 1 - Dan Mills

We were told that they were peace keeping, but there was no peace to keep.

And the expenditure in 6 months of 33,000 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition by 70 men just underlines it. That was more than the invasion used. And that was a few thousand troopers.

The exploits of the 1PWRR (Princess of Wales' Royal Regiment) Battlegroup have already been the subject of one entry in this blog and that one already mentioned the subject of the siege of CIMIC House. So why do another one? I hear you cry. 'Tis simple; Dan Mills was in it.

Sergeant Dan Mills was the boss (Sniper One) of the 19-strong Sniper Platoon attached to Y Company for the duration of the months long siege. It's a relatively rare event for such specialised soldiers (the sniping course is widely agreed to be the toughest in the army) to be deployed en masse; the usual convention is to be broken down into smaller teams and attached to regular line infantry on a shopping cart system and yet as with many other conventions, Operation Telic broke this one as well.

Sited at one corner of Al-Amarah and with the River Tigris acting as a moat for three sides, CIMIC house was the former residence of the governor, then taken over by the reconstruction agency who fretted at the sight of British GPMG's being installed on the roof next to the new Iraqi flag. However, it was the British Army that had the main say in how the place was fortified and used after a particularly memorable encounter between one of Mill's fellow sergeants and a rather obnoxious character from the reconstructors. Oh, and dealing with American security contractors and their own quartermaster who's safely back behind the lines and has just been told that his precious Mk5 flat bottom boats are no more:

'No, Sarn't Major, not your brand new boats too?
'Yes sir, the boats too.'
'But we only bought them in June! And at some considerable cost, as you well know.'
'Yes, I do know that sir.'
'Are you sure that they're completely unusable?'
'You could put it like that. They're at the bottom of the Tigris.'

And that's one of the main joys of this little book; a first-hand memoir that combines periods of intense fighting - including a rare but deadly '360 contact', numerous mortarings and the odd rocket strike - and the occasional bout of hilarity
(the fake girlfriend and the OC's discovery of a dud mortar).
Being a sniper's account however it's obvious where the bias to it all lies - in feats of shooting, and the shoots recounted are nothing short of spectacular, especially when a pair of "Royal Marines" turn up with a .50 caliber Barrett rifle and explosive ammunition...

Dan reflects on what it means to be a soldier on the frontline in one of the tensest and most harrowingly difficult operations this side of Afghanistan, those precious 6 months of spring to autumn 2004. The fifty-centigrade heat, the throat-stripping dust storms, the mortars, the harrassment, the counter-insurgency at which snipers excel, the armoured resupply convoys, the gut-wrenching fear of the ammunition running out, it's all here with photographs in a mere 350 pages; but what a memorable and enthralling account; I bought this book at 20 past 2 on a Friday afternoon, started reading and when I finished it was half past six, Saturday morning. As a companion book set in the same timeframe as Dusty Warriors, it's best to read them as a pair; Warriors for the overall picture and Sniper for a particular section of it.

There aren't many books that I can read and genuinely find myself unable to put it down without diving back in to see what happens next. This is one of them.

9 out of 10

Giveaway! Hawkwood

Now I reviewed this book awhile ago and thought rather highly of it.

It just so happens that another copy slammed onto my doormat this morning and I only need one. This means that I have 1 to give away. You want it? Do you? Honestly?

Excellent.

All you have to do is send me an email at the address in the sidebar over there ->
and it shall be yours! (Well, someone at random anyway) Include your post address so I know where to send it and mark the email Hawkwood so I know what to look for. This one runs until next Friday - 15th August.

Go on, you know you want to....

Jimmy Stewart - Starr Smith

In March 1941, James Maitland 'Jimmy' Stewart left Hollywood and a burgeoning career in film (he'd just won an Oscar) behind and joined the US Army as a private. Going from a salary of thousands to a humble $21 a month. On December 7th whilst the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour he was a corporal on guard duty at a California airbase. Graduating as a pilot in January of 1942 he shipped out as a second lieutenant to a B-24 bomber base in East Anglia, returning at wars end a full colonel with 20 combat missions under his belt and the DFC and Croix de Guerre on his uniform.

Now Stewart wasn't the only one of Hollywood's elite to join the war effort, far from it, but he was one of the few - along with David Niven and Douglas Fairbanks junior - who actively insisted on going on combat operations; against the wishes both of the Army (fearing the PR disaster if he got captured or killed) and the redoubtable Sam Goldwyn, his boss at MGM. Such pressures had kept men like Errol Flynn and Clark Gable away from the front but Stewart was not to be denied; what is striking is that all his promotions and decorations were earned on merit. And the roles that he had - command pilot, co-pilot, operations officer, squadron commander, squadron ops officer, group ops officer and wing commander - demonstrated clearly to anyone who cared to look that he wasn't just a celebrity in uniform, content to be safe at the back.

Jimmy Stewart wanted front line combat in the tradition of his family (father and grandfather had both served in their time), so much so that the Eighth Air Force eventually barred him from flying, terrified at what might happen to him. Or as one of his men in the 445th Bomb Group recalled:

The brass just couldn't keep him out of the cockpit, no matter what they tried.

This also resulted in Stewart entering the Air Force Reserve at the end of WW2 and becoming a Brigadier General in time for Vietnam.

Starr Smith was an intelligence officer for the Mighty Eighth during the war and worked with the quiet star for some time, building up quite a rapport with him. This is evident in the warm, affectionate, sometimes emotional, but always accurate way that he portrays this legendary Hollywood colossus and it makes him the perfect biographer. The empathy between fighting men of whatever creed is a strong one and this shared ethos helps to form and guide the reader through a side of Stewart that he for one never talked much about after it was all over. What is clear is that he had an unassuming way of connecting with people and getting them to perform at their best; probably because he relied on his actions and natural authority instead of dazzling them with reputation.
Smith presents an engaging 300 page portrait of a man who wanted to do what he saw as his duty despite the barriers put in his way, even those by officious hotel managers, as Charlton Heston recalled:

The Ritz in Madrid was one of those very particular hotels that barred actors from staying due to their insistence on maintaining standards. So when Jimmy turned up in full uniform for his month of service at the airbase nearby, the manager was put out of kilter;

'Ahh, Senor Stewart. Yes, I'm honoured to meet you but...ahhh...you are an actor. We don't cater to actors you see.'

Jimmy looked coolly at him.

'Zat so? Waaal, lemmme tell ya; For the next four weeks I'm Brigadier-Gen'ral James Stewart, United States Air Force.'
He picked up his keys and turned for the elevator.

Or as Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the Eighth commented:

If the war {WW2} had gone on for another month, we'd have made him a Group Commander

An entertaining book, worth a read.

5 and a half out of 10

A Writer at War - Antony Beevor + Luba Vinogradova

Vasily Grossman, alongside Ilya Ehrenburg, was the pre-eminent journalist amongst the Soviet forces on the Eastern Front. Writing exclusively for Krasnaya Zvesda (Red Star) he spent 3 of the 4 years of war continually on the frontlines, becoming a true Frontovik

It is hardly a surprise to anyone that I'm a huge fan of Beevor's work, see Stalingrad and Berlin, however here he takes a different tack as demanded by the subject. Beevor acts as the editor of this book and deprieves us of his incisive portrayal of somewhat cataclyismic events but when you're dealing with Vasily Grossman this is no great loss. The man's descriptions are simple, straightforward and, with the expertise of a true craftsman, massively descriptive in just a few words. Just a line or two for the most part, hurried entries in his journal, jotted down as he sees them, but what power they have!

He experiences the gut-wrenching terror of the first few days of Operation Barbarossa from the Soviet side - the huge pincer envelopments, the senseless waste of life and equipment because those in command are completely paralysed - and from a uniquely personal perspective. Everyone knows now what happened in the first invasion months of 1941 and indeed how and why events turned out the way they did but it's only with the perspective of one who was actually there that the reader can truely appreciate what it was like.
From the terrible, heart-rending abandonment of the Ukraine (Vasily's homeland) where he was in many cases just half a step ahead of the marauding panzer columns (and as a Jew his fate would have been all too clear if captured) to the terrible attrition of Stalingrad, the remorseless tank battles around Kursk and Prokhorovnya, the heartbreaking discoveries of Warsaw and Madjanek and the fierce exhileration of entering Berlin itself, Grossman and Beevor take us on a journey of 4 years and many thousands of miles.

In many ways Vasily Grossman was something of a naive optimist as well as a fatalist (his own fate, not that of the Soviet Union), but then so were the majority of the Frontoviki during that war. The problems of later days lay in the fact that he was more politically naive instead of morally so - he condemned the Red Army's rampage through Germany in the strongest terms, yet they were never published.

Read this. Read it now. 8 out of 10