The Third Reich in Power by Richard J Evans

The Third Reich in Power

Richard J Evans

This is the second of three volumes. The first chronicles the rise to power, the third the war; this is 1933 and the seizure of power through to the start of the war.

It is thorough and interesting. Possibly one if its most interesting aspects is the insight it gives into how the Nazis held onto power when they were so extreme and so bad for so many.

We look back and ask, “How could that happen?” Especially if you’ve grown up in a liberal democracy, the rise of the Nazis, the lack of meaningful opposition to them, the way the nation followed them into a war and all the way into complete destruction — it all seems strange. Yet who among us would be prepared to rise against our own government in armed opposition? Would we be sure that it was the right thing to do? Who is willing to march at the front of that demonstration and take the bullets so the others can be free? Some people, yes — but enough? Add to that the undoubted brutality of the brownshirts and the bogey men that the SS and Gestapo became (and the disappearances of people into the concentration camps). Add to that the jobs that rearmament created.  Yes, they were lousy jobs with long hours and low pay, but they were seen in contrast to the lack of any work during the Depression. Add to that the international successes that Hitler accrued — the Saar, the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, Memel — and the pride that he gave back to many Germans … and you see a situation in which by the time the case for meaningful opposition had become incontrovertible, nothing short of a full rebellion by the army could have stopped the coming catastrophe.

And the army … well … loyalty, confusion, greed, bribery, scandal, indecision … and Hitler had them in the palm of his hand.

It’s not a good thing if an army is too ready to throw out a legitimate (at first) government. But it is tempting to believe that one great German general in the right place at the right time could have stood up.

A very useful book if you want to understand a very important time and place.

 

History

 

A very big picture: A world at arms by Gerhard L Weinberg

This book is subtitled ‘a global history of World War II’, and with the main matter stretching to 920 pages, it certainly has a go at it. On the whole, I would describe the book as interesting, thoughtful and thorough. If we consider its subtitle, I would say that it is perhaps not quite as global as may have been the original intent — but how could the book have been kept to a publishable length if it were otherwise? Inevitably  it focuses on the main combatants, with thumbnail sketches of what is going on in the more peripheral places.

Perhaps inevitably — living as I do in Australia — this strikes me. Australia occupies maybe a couple of pages of the 920. Say 0.2%. The rest is implicit; like when the North African fighting is mentioned, Aussies were there, but the author cannot be expected to always note this.

The book focuses on the big picture. How did the Allies come to agree on a ‘Europe first’ approach? How did the western powers manage to work with a  soviet Russia that had, before the Germans turned on it, invaded Poland and provided the raw materials that powered the Nazi assault on France and fueled the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain? A Russia that withheld information, spied on the Americans and the British, and then demanded they send thousands of planes and trucks? No matter what Stalin demanded of the West, it was sanctified by the millions of Russian dead; no matter how hard he was to work with, no-one could say the Russians were not making  remarkable sacrifices. And of course, the West worried that Russia might make a separate peace  — something that, in truth, Hitler’s ideology rendered extremely unlikely. These sorts of considerations form the meat of the book. There is a little about technology, a little about espionage, quite a lot about signals intelligence (which was hugely important, as the book makes clear) and a lot about why the various leaders did what they did (as far as can be known).

The book is on the whole highly successful. It is unafraid to make judgements on leaders. Roosevelt comes out well, Churchill as less objective but fundamentally sound, Stalin as strong and effective but very difficult to work with. Montgomery comes out badly, King and Marshall well, and Eisenhower comes out well too; better than, say, the egomaniacal MacArthur.

The biggest military operations are described in a little detail — enough to then back up analysis of how they affected the broader position, or why they justified the recall of a general, for example. The overall ebb and flow of fronts is more the book’s style. And then we get an interpolated chapter describing, for example, the home front, or the evolution of key weapons (jets, radar, atom bombs, rockets, that sort of thing).

The book makes it clear that as the war went on the Red Army was not only large, it was also good, something not all histories admit. It pays close attention to deals made over borders and suchlike, and shows how these things had repercussions after the war and up to today.

I would not say the prose is elegant. It is effective enough, but at times I had to reread a sentence or two. There are no pictures apart from a useful set of maps in the back. It is a book that knows what it is about — understanding the big picture, not minutia. You could almost call it a political history of the war (rather than a military hitory), and as such it is an excellent summary for the reader who is not going to go to primary sources. The author is not afraid to synthesise the material and make his own judgements, and on the whole, from what I know, they are generally interesting and most likely perceptive.

If what you want is what the book aims to deliver, it comes thoroughly recommended.

War

A mighty interesting read

A mighty fortress by Steven Ozment:  a review

Subtitled ‘a new history of the German people’, A mighty fortress begins with the Alemmani and other tribes and their interactions with Rome, and ends with reunification and the fall of the Berlin wall.

The book lays out German history in good depth for its length – after all, it’s the kind of topic that could expand to fill a bookshelf – and makes good, logical, chronological sense. Some aspects seem a little thin to me – where was ‘the wonder of the world’? Otto the Great? But this is hardly fair. I always feel that the further back into the past one goes the briefer coverage it gets. Sure, this is partly lack of known detail, but I wonder if there is an unchallenged assumption that the closer we get to today the more interesting things become; which is not true for me. A quarter of the way through the book we have covered three-quarters of the time span. The three centuries before Luther seem almost elided compared with those after.

But these are small complaints. The book is highly readable, picks out the most crucial events, and presents a very coherent narrative of the development of a complex, important and impressive nation.

At the same time, it does not assume too much knowledge – no need to be a European history scholar to follow it. A useful text for someone who wants to know more than is given in a typical brief European or world history, but is not yet ready for more academic texts.

Enough of that topic.

Jugurthine war and Conspiracy of Catiline by Sallust

Sallust lived through some tumultuous times for the Roman republic. He was born in the era of the rise of military dictatorship under Marius and Sulla, was a young man during the conspiracy of which he speaks, served with Gaius Julius Caesar and saw the apotheosis of that dictator and its ending with assassination. Having seen that, he decided maybe he ought to leave politics and start writing history. Did not live to see Octavian become the first Princeps, however.

Penguin cover

The book is well-judged. Sallust is mostly accurate (we’re told in the introductions) and though the editor (S. A. Handford) chips in to tell us when he’s not, the notes never overwhelm or make the reader lose their way.

The Jugurthine war took place in north Africa a generation or two after the Romans destroyed Carthage for the last time. The puppet states they set up in the resulting power vacuum came to lack leadership, and a charismatic figure who was a few deaths away from the throne of Numidia decided to self-actualise by killing a couple of cousins. The Romans could not let this stand, and spent 5 or 6 years chasing him around the desert before installing an even more puppety ruler. In a sense, Numidia became an example to other states — don’t mess with our arrangements! If we put a king on the throne, leave him there!

In some ways, the most important aspect of the war was that it gave opportunities to Marius and Sulla, both of whom played crucial roles that led to other opportunities that lead to both of them becoming, effectively, military dictators (Marius first, then his arch-enemy Sulla) and hastening the end of the republican era of Rome.

The Conspiracy of Catiline is briefer and more schematic. It touches on many famous lives: Cato the Younger, Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus and more. It portrays Catiline as reckless, undisciplined and foolhardy, though brave, fomenting a revolution for private gain, largely in the hope that his many debts would be forgotten when the wealthy aristocracy was overthrown. One never gets the sense that Catiline never had much chance of success, though that could just be the knowledge that he did not succeed.

He reminds me a little of Lenin, who, as has been noted, did not become a dictator to protect the revolution, but made a revolution so he could become dictator. The main difference is that Lenin succeeded.

history

Salambo (Salammbô) by Gustave Flaubert

Salambo by Gustave Flaubert

World Distributor’s LIbrary, 1959; 253 pages

Whew! Blood, guts (literally), human sacrifice, battle upon battle, feast upon feast, betrayal upon betrayal, you get the idea. This would make a movie in the tradition of 300 and suchlike, except there is really no-one to root for. Maybe Matho, the besotted mercenary general and his cowardly lieutenant Spendius? Maybe the titular priestess? Maybe Hamilcar Barca, the brilliant, ruthless, wealthy general of the Carthaginian forces? Certainly not the Carthaginians themselves. This is a story of brutal times, when life was not valued (unless it was that of a rich person) and people felt their lives controlled by incomprehensible, brutal gods who had to be bribed and sated.

Front cover

Back cover

Despite the effective description and deft characterisation (albeit of ‘bigger than life’ characters), the death does get wearying. Another torture. Another death. Another …

Flaubert is most famous for Madame Bovary, a very different story from this. What’s the Bovary body count? I suspect it’s a little less than the hundred thousand odd mercenaries, citizens, slaves and soldiers who get burned, gutted, impaled, starved, crucified, trampled, crushed, gored, bitten and stabbed here. Pretty much any form of death that the technology of the time allowed occurs here. Well, except natural and accidental — nobody dies of old age or even disease, not even the ancient leprous suffete Hanno, whose face is rotting off his bloated, diseased body such that the back of his throat is visible and he wears a veil.

The copy I have is a cheap, old paperback; the colour cover is badly printed, the paper is yellow. It’s the perfect format for a (despite the author) pulpy story. The cover tries to suggest the story is sexy, but there’s little sex. Some infatuation, yes.

Pulpy story? Classic writer? Yes. OK. It’s not entirely pulp. Flaubert does not dwell lasciviously on breasts and blood and suchlike. Given the brutality of the incidents, he retains a distance. One suspects he is working to accurately describe a way of life alien to us, and in a voice that refrains from judgement and seeks to describe. And he basically succeeds, and in that it is not a pulp story.

It could well be worth a read if you like the TV Game of Thrones (though I did not watch beyond episode 1, so I am guessing about that).

Blood. Barbarians. Battles. Swords and pikes and axes. Exotic names and weapons. Sieges, fights to the death. If that’s your thing, it’s a winner.

 

Winner!

The Siege of Leningrad by David M. Glantz: a review

The Siege of Leningrad by David M. Glantz

Cassell 2004, 334 pages

This book outlines the campaigns around Leningrad, from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa through to roughly the middle of 1944, when the last German units were pushed out of the region.

It is predominantly a detailed account of the thrusts and counterthrusts by the opponents. There is much talk of left flanks and slow progress and lack of command and control.

The numbers are probably the most impactful thing about it. Around 2 million Russians (roughly half civilians and half soldiers) perished around the Leningrad region, which made up only a relatively small fraction of the front. For comparison, the USA lost about 300,000 soldiers on all fronts combined for the whole war. WWII has been described as ‘the eastern front plus sideshows’, and in terms of men and machinery, this is not too far from the truth. Of course, other campaigns were of enormous strategic significance — a quick victory over Britain in 1940 could well have been the catalyst that made everything else turn out differently — but none ranged over such vast areas or cost so much blood and iron. Russia was always Hitler’s primary enemy. His actions elsewhere were more about securing his back before he plunged east. He would happily have left western Europe alone had it promised him a free hand in the east. As such, the battle between Germany and Russia was existential. Hitler conceived of it as Aryan versus Slav. There could be no peace.

The book does not look at those issues. Its focus is narrow. It evaluates the military decisions made, critiques them, looks at lessons learned and at what ramifications the Leningrad fight had for the rest for the front.

There is relatively little about life in the blockaded city. It is not clear from the cover or the blurb, but this is really a book for fans of military strategy and, particularly, tactics.

As such, it has one glaring flaw.

The maps and the text do not mesh well. Repeatedly, pages would be expended describing offensives; the methods, the commanders, the cities and regions they were to fight for. Yet the places mentioned can often not be found on the corresponding maps. I was sometimes able to find them on a map elsewhere in the book, but some locations were just missing and I had to guess or look in an atlas or a map from the interwebs. Or just skip it. It was very frustrating hunting through the various maps looking for one that showed me where somewhere — where a very important action happened — was.

Perhaps it was just about limited space on the page, but it was a distinct annoyance.

Apart from that, I think I am perhaps just not enough interested in the arrows showing the marches of the troops and the details of how many miles they advanced and where. My eyes started to glaze over and in a few places I started to skip ahead.

The proofreading is not great, either.

In short, this is probably very interesting to the fan of military tactics who wants to see a whole major campaign laid out and critiqued. Such a reader would see how the Red Army’s techniques and tactics evolved over the years and how the tide was stopped and then turned by a combination of persistence, weight of numbers and, eventually, tactical skill. For the rest of us, the book lacks context and the human story. But, I suspect the rest of us is not the audience it is aiming at. At times it sounds like a lecture to officer cadets.

Verdict: Good, but for the aficionados.

 

A tragedy

Formatting text and printing on the Brother EP-44

The EP-44 is a serial printer/terminal/typewriter made by Brother around 1984. Used as a printer, it can print ASCII text, though only the characters you can find on its keyboard, and possibly not all of them (eg I’m not sure about accents). Lines are 80 columns wide.

Here is Linux script to format for printing on the EP-44 (called ‘text file formatter’, tff):

$ cat ~/bin/tff

sed ':a;N;/\n$/!s/\n/ /;ta' $1 | fold -s --width=70 | pr --header=$1 --indent=5

Call it like this:

$ tff textfile.txt > textfile.tff

Yes, it’s a trivial use of fold and pr, and a slightly less trivial use of sed, which I stole from here. And yes I know I could probably do it all in sed. But it works nicely.

How it works:
(1) The sed line joins non-empty lines until it finds an empty line, which it leaves alone. I’ve done this on the assumption that an empty line is a paragraph separator and I am printing text, not code or data. The result is piped into…

(2) fold, which cuts it into 70 character wide columns, breaking the line on spaces (-s). This could be done in sed pretty simply, but anyway…

(3) pr puts an indent of 5 spaces (so the text column is centred with 5 spaces to either side). The header bit is because the file name information is lost on piping the output.

The EP-44 has 80-character lines, but a 5 character margin gives much more readable output. That leaves a page width of 70.

The result looks something like this:

$ tff fallofforts.txt


     2018-08-03 09:51                 fallofforts.txt                  Page 1


     This is a very fine book. Bendiner was not a famous pilot like Guy
     Gibson (Enemy Coast Ahead) -- he was a navigator who managed to
     complete a tour of 25 operations over occupied Europe in B-17 Flying
     Fortresses that steadfastly continued to attack during daylight
     hours, and suffered horrendous losses as a result. When 10% per
     mission was considered an acceptable loss rate, not many can have
     made it through 25.

     But what makes the...

Or, as printed on the EP-44:

Text formatted on an old AlphaServer and printed to a Brother EP-44 typewriter that is even older.

But sending it to the printer is not as simple as I had hoped.

To print a substantial file to the EP-44, I run linebyline.sh, which looks like this:

stty -F /dev/ttyS1 1200
while IFS= read line
do
echo "$line" > /dev/ttyS1
sleep 6s
done < $1

$ linebyline.sh filename.tff

Now, this is pretty nifty!

The problem with just sending the whole text file is that the printer cannot keep up; it does not have enough memory to buffer much text — about 4 or 5 lines. I found that even if I set the baud rate to 75 on each device, the bits still come too fast and eventually the output fragments as it just prints whatever characters it can make sense of. There might well be a serial port setting that can fix this. I have a vague idea I printed once before and all was well. Anyway, this might be a bodge, but it works.

linebyline.sh just sends one line at a time to the printer then waits 6s and sends the next one. The print speed is about 15 characters per second, and with a line 80 characters wide that means it takes a little under 5s to print a line. Add on the time it takes to return the print head and then a little margin for error and the 6s wait means it can keep up.

The computer only sends one line at a time. One line can fit easily in the printer’s memory, and it’s printed by the time the next line is sent.

Hokey dokey.

Fall of Fortresses by Elmer Bendiner — a high-quality WWII memoir

This is a very fine book. Bendiner was not a famous pilot like Guy Gibson (Enemy Coast Ahead) — he was a navigator who managed to complete a tour of 25 operations over occupied Europe in B-17 Flying Fortresses that steadfastly continued to attack during daylight hours, and suffered horrendous losses as a result. When 10% per mission was considered an acceptable loss rate, not many can have made it through 25. (OK, you have a 90% — that is 0.9 — chance of surviving any one mission. 0.9²⁵ = 0.072, so you have a 7.2% chance of completing a tour — that is, about 1 in 14, or 93% loss! Of course, ability and other factors will play a part…)

The cover of the edition I read.

But what makes the memoir interesting is not Bendiner’s achievements — not that they are negligible — but the honesty and insight that he brings. The book was published 35 years after the war ended, and that critical distance allows Bendiner to be autobiographer and biographer at the same time, something made possible I suspect by the intensity and otherness of war. There is a point in the book, near the end, when he has finished his tour but not yet been allowed to leave the aerodrome:

How stupid, how cruel to let me stay alive and safe among those who are still hostages to death. No surgeon would leave an amputated limb near the living patient.

This captures his ability to look upon the events from inside and outside at the same time, and to come up with a striking metaphor to capture it. Few war memoirs are as notable for the prose as this one, though it is worn lightly.

A few examples:

The cottage had a fine, dishevelled look, like a girl fresh from tumbling about in the hay.

I cannot take seriously those who adopt the pose of the disenchanted without having experienced the prerequisite enchantment.

It could be J. G. Ballard:

The earth was no longer tilled land. The cities were empty and staring. One imagined a world of grotesque fungi. The only signs of animation appeared in the yellow flicker of burning B-17s.

Or, speaking about a General after a raid that cost many men and machines:

He was in the position of a man who does not know precisely what he has bought but is certain that it was very expensive.

On keeping notes while flying:

I would have noted my heart’s blood dripped to the floor — the time, place, altitude.

Or, showing how we get the inside and the outside at once, he talks about watching a formation of planes heading out on a mission:

I exulted in that parade. I confess this is an act of treason against the intellect, because I have seen dead men washed out of their turrets with a hose. But if one wants an intellectual view of war one must ask someone who has not seen it.

And a little bon mot, yet hardly free of irony:

Navigators must exude self-confidence or abdicate.

I really cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is written with the wit and artistry of a top-line novelist, tackles some of the greatest topics in art, literature and life — war, death, life — and is a page-turner as much as any thriller.

It is interesting to compare it to one of the most famous war memoirs ever written, If this is a man by Primo Levi. Both authors are Jewish, and Bendiner reflects on his war and the experiences of the prisoners in Dachau, and shakes his head and knows that what he saw tells him nothing about that — but the similarities run deeper than happenstances of religion. Both books combine intellect and artistry to deal with the unexplainable. They show how human beings somehow survive, and how important it is that they fool themselves.

Bediner picked a poppy before every mission. He knew it was pointless, but he also knew that without it he was doomed.

 

Antithesis.

The Balloon Factory — a travel book

The Balloon Factory by Alexander Frater

The cover says ‘the story of the men who built Britain’s first flying machines’ but what it really is is ‘The story of the author’s journey to go to places related to the men who built Britain’s first flying machines’. There is a lot of the author in this book. Now, if you like the author to take centre stage and tell us about his own flying lessons and about how he went to Africa (or whatever) and the interesting chap he had lunch with while researching this book, then that suits fine. It’s a bit like those nature documentaries where we mostly see the presenter talking about their efforts to find the animal, rather than the animal itself.

Cover of The Balloon Factory by Alexander Frater.

The book contains some stuff about Sam Cody, De Havilland and Sir George Cayley, and J. W. Dunne who made strange but effective aeroplanes and An Experiment with Time. It is written with great fluency and charm, and does indeed contain some interesting information. Perhaps because written by a travel writer, it does not spend too much time on the technical aspects but tells the human stories of its protagonists, and they are an interesting bunch. On the other hand, it is far from comprehensive — there were many significant figures (the Short brothers, for example) who get very little attention. The author has been captured by a couple of personalities, mainly Cody who seems to occupy fully half the book, and so the picture is skewed and highly personal.

Despite the title, there is very little in it on balloons. Just FYI.

Conclusion: If you like a congenial host getting between you and the material and telling you his story as well as the story of his subject, this is a very pleasant read. If you prefer a book to focus on the subject rather than the teller, this may not suit. It is not a bad book, but it may not be what you expect.

 

What you expect.

Monitor

The battle between the Monitor and the Virginia appears with monotonous regularity in books about ships, particularly fighting ships. It was the first battle between iron ships, the first involving a ship with a turret, the first involving ships that did not rely on sail, nor even have masts as backup to the engines.

Cover of Monitor, the book about the boat.

One thing this book brings home is how small it was. No great fleet action like Jutland or Lepanto or Trafalgar — it was really just a skirmish, though one with great repercussions.

deKay does a nice job of bringing these repercussions to light. They were strategic, technological and even geopolitical.

Strategic: The Confederate states needed access to weapons and materiel from Europe, and the Virginia‘s job was to break the blockade set up by the North. Hampton Roads was a vital nexus for bringing cargo from the Atlantic to inland waterways, and it was here that Virginia sallied out and caused pandemonium amongst the wooden ships. Though she was slow and hard to control, she was also impervious to their shots and could stand off and pound the Union ships into pieces. Had the Monitor not been flanged together in about 3 months and thrown into battle against the _Virginia_ almost as soon as completed, the civil was could have looked very different. Had the Confederates gained mastery of the east coast the marked superiority of the North in terms of industrial capacity would have been at least partially mitigated by better access to imports. Further, it is supposed that had the South been able to maintain this kind of sovereignty over its borders, which would promote interchange with Europe, it might have been granted diplomatic recognition by more potential trading partners. So the book pitches the one-on-one battle as a kind of ‘for want of a nail’ situation. Of course, it’s natural for an author to point out the significance of their topic — they’ve bothered to write about it after all — but there is some substance to this. Had the South been closer in stature to the North, the likelihood of a genuine fissioning of the USA would have to have been greater. We shall never know. Most likely, the war would have gone on even longer, caused even more suffering, and had the same outcome.

Technological: At a stroke, Monitor ushered in a new age in warship design. Though it low freeboard and raft-like construction limited it to coastal waters, it’s general concept — an iron hulled ship, powered by steam, dispensing with sail altogether and armed with turreted guns — was to dominate naval thinking until the rise of the aircraft carrier during WWII. Previous ironclads had looked like modified sailing ships, still arranging their guns in broadsides and still carrying a full complement of sails. Monitor must have looked like something from another world. Just as the Dreadnought reset the benchmarks in 1905, the Monitor forced a reappraisal of what made for a power navy. What value was a hundred ships of the line if a handful of ironclads could pick them off at leisure? So influential was the design of the Monitor that it leant it’s name to a style of ship. Shipyards around the world started building ‘monitors’, and would continue to turn them out for fifty years to come.

Geopolitical: It could be argued that the Monitor is the first significant example of the USA gaining technical, military leadership over Europe. It can be thought of as the very beginning of the process that led the USA to gain military and technological leadership during the 20th century. Ericsson, the man behind the Monitor, was a migrant who had been unable to sell his design in Europe. The strength of the US coming from its inclusiveness is a very modern idea, and the Monitor is an early and potent example.

Anyway, the book follows the politics and the military sides of the story. How the ship got built, how the battles were fought, and what it all meant. I would have liked more technical details — we do not even get a table summarising the capacities of the two combatants. Some more diagrams, perhaps cutaway, and clearer illustrations of how the two ships were laid out and so on, would have buttressed the work nicely and made it more rounded in its coverage. As it is, it is a nice little read.

 

Monitor.