Tag Archives: ww2

The Gathering Storm

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If you condensed The Second World War, Volume 1: The Gathering Storm into one sentence, it would be: “See, I told you so!”  Churchill’s Theme of the Volume is

“How the English-speaking peoples
through their unwisdom,
carelessness, and good nature
allowed the wicked to rearm.”   

I am ambivalent about Sir Winston.  He sounded the warnings, raised a ruckus and was unconcerned about opinion polls and minority viewpoints.  Sadly, what he predicted came to pass.  Reading the section on German rearmament and European appeasement is an exercise in frustration.  Thank God for Winston Churchill.

And yet…  There is a know-it-all attitude that I find off-putting.  Too many details included for vindication’s sake.  Too many speeches reproduced verbatim.  What kept me going through the pages was his command of English: the satisfying sentences, the robust words, the grand oratory.   

…amid a ceaseless chatter of well-meant platitudes…

Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve,
ready to shear away the peoples en masse…

British fatuity and fecklessness which,
though devoid of guile, was not devoid of guilt…

So they go on in strange paradox,
decided only to be undecided,
resolved to be irresolute,
adamant for drift,
solid for fluidity,
all-powerful to be impotent.

One can hardly find a more perfect specimen of humbug and hypocrisy…

I always went to bed at least for one hour
as early as possible in the afternoon
and exploited to the full my happy gift
of falling almost immediately into deep sleep.
By this means I was able to press a day and a half’s work into one.

The_Gathering_Storm_2002_poster  

Not everyone has time for chunky books: voila the DVD!  Albert Finney excels as Winston Churchill.  There are moments of mild vulgarity: some backside nudity (of an old man getting into a bathtub – ewww!) and some tacky language. But the movie tells the story of the people who made history.  I loved how Churchill composed speeches while he dressed and shaved, the interactions between Clementine and Winston, the long-suffering private secretary, the pontificating in Parliament, the scenes at Chartwell.  If you love England, if you love the BBC, you will like The Gathering Storm.

The Second World War in Color

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photo credit: Imperial War Museum
my favorite photo:  a RAF pilot reading
John Buchan’s Greenmantle while getting a haircut
(I see the book, my son sees the Spitfire!)

Sniffing around our public library, I found The Second World War in Color a companion book to a documentary by the same name.  Initially, I thought I’d just flip through the book and return it to the library.  The pictures, however, were compelling.  Respect demanded more than a flip-through.  Then the diary entries hooked me; soon I started on the title page and read through the book. 

As in this blog entry, the photographs and the diary entries in the book have no relation to one another.

The diary entries and official announcements come from combatants and civilians from most of the nations involved in WWII.  A Russian surgeon writes:

Even those who disliked and dread Stalin have learned to trust him.  Propaganda?  Yes and No.  He has succeeded in transforming the country, though often by savage methods.

A British pilot, killed on his first flight:

The most terrible aspects of Nazism is its system of education, of driving in instead of leading out, and putting the state about all things spiritual.  And so I have been fighting.

The notes of Theodor Morell (condensed here), Adolf Hitler’s personal physician on 20.7.44, the day of the explosion set by Lt. Col. von Stauffenberg which killed four officers, interested me so soon after watching the movie Valkyrie.  Hitler went on the radio later explaning that his survival was ‘a confirmation of my assignment from Providence to carry on my life’s goal as I have done hitherto’. 

Blood pressure [evening after explosion] 165-170
Blister, burns, contusions, open flesh wounds 

Photo credit show me a man reading and I’m smitten

Ivor Rowberry’s letter to his mother, written in the event of his death, won the Best Letter Written by a Member of the Armed Forces during the Second World War contest.  Oh. My. Heart.  Yet the wry humor about grammatical tenses! It begins:

Dear Mom,
   Usually when I write a letter it is very much overdue, and I make every effort to get it away quickly.  This letter, however, is different.  It is a letter that I hoped you would never recieve, as it is verification of that terse, black-edged card which you received some time ago, and which has caused you so much grief.  It is because of this grief that I wrote this letter, and by the time you have finished reading it I hope that it has done some good, and that I have not written it in vain.  It is very difficult to write now of future things in the past tense, so I am returning to the present.

Photo credit British soldier and Italian women doing wash

I particularly liked the glimpse of community (perhaps membership, à la Wendell Berry…in microcosm?) between British liberator and the liberated people of Belgium in this letter dated 9-29-1944

All these people had only a few rationed, foul cigarettes and had not seen chocolate for more than 4 years.  How pleased they are when we give them a bar!  They give us all they can, we give them all we can, there is no mention of money at all, and it is all quite a Christian affair.  For four months now, money has just not meant a thing to me; I rather like it.

Because of this book, I learned of the Imperial War Museum Collections, another place to visit if I ever make it to London.

Relentless Tedium

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Read on Wednesday, from All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: 

Industrialized workers discovered “a new capacity for boredom.” 
Factories introduced an uncommon level of tedium to the lives of the workers.

Read this morning from The Second World War in Color:

As Soviet territory was consumed by German armour the death squads followed in their wake, beginning a regime of terror that would last for three years and bring brutality and death to countless millions.  [countless millions…a disturbing phrase]  Eventually, the machine-gunning by the execution squads became so routinely boring and exhausting for the perpetrators that they resorted to throwing their victims into their mass graves alive.  In fact, the relentless tedium of shootings was one of the reasons why death by gas became the preferred method of the Final Solution when it emerged during 1941.

Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

This is a heavy WWII study we are in.  The statistics are so gruesome that the mind gets numb to the numbers.  We have begun watching Band of Brothers.  Lt. Dick Winters is a bright light is such a dark story.

This afternoon we’re going to the theater (! – last theater movie was Prince Caspian) to watch Valkyrie, the story of a failed plot to kill Hitler.  The word Valkyrie fascinates me.  It means one of the handmaidens of Odin who choses heroes to be slain in battle and conducts them to Valhalla.  But when I look at the word I see: Valkyrie.  And Kyrie = Lord, have mercy.  That’s a word study for the future.

I need a counterbalance to this heaviness.  I just finished listening to The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope.  I’m thinking it might be time for P.G. Wodehouse.   

Bittersweet Française

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Suite Francaise is my first book completed for the WWII Reading Challenge.  Listening to the audiobook with the French accents made the book more present, more authentic.  I was so captured by this story that when bedtime came and I had one disc left, I went to bed with headphones on.  (“Has it come to this?” my husband wondered.)

Irène Némirovsky’s tragic story makes this a bittersweet read.  She lived through the German invasion and occupation of France, writing these two novellas as the events were current. She died in Auschwitz in 1942.  Her daughters rescued her manuscript and left it, untouched,  in a suitcase for 60+ years.  The English translation was published in 2006.  This is very likely the first WWII fiction written.  I am eager to read Némirovsky’s story in the appendix of the print edition.  Her words from the story give us a glimpse of what her life must have been like:

Living constantly in fear of death like this was only bearable if you took one day at a time.  If you said to yourself each evening, “Another twenty-four hours where nothing really bad has happened, thank God.  Let’s see what tomorrow brings.”

The first novella, Storm in June, follows several Parisians scurrying to the country to avoid the Nazis. Némirovsky chronicles the confusion, the chaos, the denial that exasperated the lack of preparedness. This isn’t a happy story of people banding together, displaying sacrifice and courage. She paints realistic pictures of art dealers who care more about porcelain than people, a mother who sees herself as generous until she realizes her family may suffer want, an author who pulls strings to get favorable treatment.  Some of the characters don’t survive.

The second novella, Dolce, set in the countryside, examines life under German occupation.  Most able-bodied French men are gone, leaving the women to manage then daily challenges and adjust to having Germans live with them in their homes.  Némirovsky’s watercolor of French country life was my favorite part of the Suite.

I am not sure how/if this book was edited. There were places where editing would have improved the writing.  But as a first draft (if that is what it is) this book is magnificent.   

A few more quotes:

They didn’t speak.  Between these two women every topic of conversation was a thornbush they only approached with caution.  Reaching out a hand might result in injury.

~   ~   ~

Jean-Marie never got tired of watching them.  He wanted to write a story about these charming little horses, a story that would evoke this day in July, this land, this farm, these people, the war, and himself. He wrote with a chewed up pencil stub in a little notebook which he hid against his heart.  He felt he had to hurry; something inside him was making him anxious, was knocking on an invisible door.  By writing he opened that door.  He gave life to something he wished to be born.

~   ~   ~

Her upbringing had been strict and Puritanical, but she had not been unhappy.  The garden, the housework, a library–an enormous, damp room where the books grew mouldy and where she would secretly rummage around–were all enough to amuse her.

         

World War II Reading Challenge

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I asked Hope at Worthwhile Books what WWII books she would suggest. She introduced me to the War Through the Generations Reading Challenge. 

I love the discipline of a reading challenge: I get heftier books read, ones that don’t always go down easy, when I plan my reading in advance.  Because, the truth is this: I’m never quite ‘in the mood” to read Mein Kampf.  

I’m starting the challenge with books from my bookshelf. 

Winston Churchill:

Adolf Hitler

Stephen Ambrose

Dick Winters

William Manchester

Tadeusz Borowski

Leo Marks

Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War, 1941-1945
Leo Marks is the son of the owner of the Marks & Co., the bookstore at 84 Charing Cross Road.

Tom Brokaw

Elie Wiesel

Richard J. Maybury

John Betjeman

Trains and Buttered Toast: Selected Radio Talks
This isn’t specifically a WWII book, but many chapters are BBC radio talks during the war.

Thomas Keneally

Stewart Binns and Adrian Wood

Theodor Seuss Geisel

I also plan to listen to Shaara’s WWII books: The Rising Tide and The Steel Wave.   

Trolling through other participants’ reading lists, got me jonesing for more books.  Hope will write one of her stellar reviews and I’m sunk.  But I will begin with what I have available to me.  The problem with WWII literature is that the vast number of books written on this subject makes one dizzy.

I’m thankful for a summer and fall immersed in reading, viewing and listening to all things “Great War.”  That gave me the foundation (and perhaps the fortitude) to tackle and understand better another grim war. 

Onward, then.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

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Whenever I take a trip, I deliberate about which books I should bring.  Which is truly not necessary whenever I’m visiting my family.  Because there are always wonderful books waiting for me there.  This is the book that was waiting for me in Maine.  Like The Thirteenth Tale,  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a book whose author understands the allure of a reading life. 

The Channel Island of Guernsey was occupied by the Germans in WWII.  With no communication with the outside world allowed, a group of neighbors and friends in the closed community found great comfort in reading books together.  The book is epistolary – written as a series of letters between Juliet, a London journalist, and members of the Society, who tell their story after the war.   I found myself going back and checking, reading carefully to catch subtle details and hints.   

The most persuasive words are quotes from the book itself – no spoilers, I promise. 

I don’t want to be married just to be married.  I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with.  (p. 8) (my emphasis)
That’s what I love about reading:  one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book.  It’s geometrically progressive-all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.  (p.11) [Yes!  Word perfect quote.]  

None of us had any experience with literary societies, so we made our own rules:  we took turns speaking about the books we read.  At the start, we tried to be calm and objective, but that soon fell away, and the purpose of the speakers was to goad the listeners into wanting to read the book themselves.  Once two members had read the same book, they could argue, which was our great delight.  We read books, talked books, argued over books, and became dearer and dearer to one another.  Other Islanders asked to join us, and our evenings together became bright, lively times–we could almost forget, now and then, the darkness outside. (p.51)

Spring is nearly here.  I’m almost warm in my puddle of sunshine. (p.98)

Have you ever noticed that when your mind is awakened or drawn to someone new, that person’s name suddenly pops up everywhere you go?  My friend Sophie calls it coincidence and Mr. Simpless, my parson friend, calls it Grace.  (p.116)

This 2008 book is the perfect-for-fall, warm, easy read.  A few evenings of light-but-not-fluffy reading.  If this book were a food it would be a bowl of soup, perhaps butternut squash soup with a sprinkle of nutmeg. Thanks to you, my beloved sister-in-law Kathleen.  What percentage of my reading, I wonder, has been influenced by you? 

Addendum:  I’ve also described this as Huckleberry Pie reading: healthy sweet.