The War That Came Early

Recently I finished yet another of Harry Turtledove’s alternate history series, this one he calls The War That Came Early, the books being Hitler’s War, West And East, The Big Switch, Coup D’Etat, Two Fronts, and Last Orders.

Premise.  In real life, the 1938 talks at Munich between Adolf Hitler (Nazi Germany), Eduard Daladier (France), and Neville Chamberlain (UK), resulted in an agreement essentially allowing Germany to swallow up Czechoslovakia, which the Germans did by March 1939.   The Czechs were not part of this negotiation and the benefit (to the extent we can ascertain any benefit at all) was that the European powers avoided a war – only temporarily.  The UK and France thought Hitler would stop here, but of course he was simply getting what he could without war but would invade if he had to, e.g. Poland just a year later.  Who knows how much firmer Chamberlain might have been had he known this – which is where this story picks up.

In this timeline, German-Czech troublemaker Konrad Heinlein is assassinated by a Czech troublemaker.  Although the Germans had nothing to do with it, Chamberlain and Daladier believe it’s too convenient and probably a set-up intended as an excuse to allow the Germans to invade Czechoslovakia.  Angered by what they perceive as immense bad faith by the Germans, they break off the talks.  Hitler, frustrated by this turn of events, decides to invade anyway, and the war which was postponed until September 1939 in real life, with the German invasion of Poland, arrives in 1938 with a German invasion of Czechoslovakia.  That goes fairly well for the Germans, and a French incursion into Germany stalls not far over the border. 

Spain.  In real life, Marshal Sanjurjo was the intended leader of the Fascist revolt, which began in July 1936.   Taking off with a small plane from Portugal overloaded with his heavy crate of uniforms, the plane crashed and he was killed, leaving Franco to lead the Fascists…to victory in March 1939.  Here, the pilot persuades Sarjurjo to leave his uniforms behind and he lands safely, surviving to lead the Fascists.  To victory?  We’ll see.  Since the real Spanish Civil War ended in March 1939 with the real WWII beginning in September 1939, versus, in these books, war breaking out in Europe BEFORE the Spanish Civil War ends, this cuts off the supplies to the parties involved so this war continues far longer, while WWII is still going on. 

Far East.  The Japanese succeed at defeating the Soviets up in Manchuria…for the time being.  Having his hands full fighting the Germans and Poles + the British and French, Stalin cuts a deal with the Japs just so he can focus on things further west.   They also romp over the Far East, but the Pearl Harbor attack never happens.  The Japanese use germ warfare against their opponents.

Eastern Front.   Poland and Germany are allies against Soviet Russia.   They make some modest progress into Russia, later losing that ground after the alliance with Britain and France breaks down and the two front war re-erupts.

Western Front.  The UK and France initially fight against Germany, briefly ally with Germany and help invade Russia, then switch back to being against Germany, returning to a two front war.  The UK itself has some internal struggles which cause it to switch sides twice, and the French simply followed their lead each time.

Holocaust & Internal Affairs.  Jews are mistreated in Germany, but the Final Solution never gets running.  Moreover, when the war turns into a stalemate, many of Hitler’s generals start causing problems.  The biggest problem is that the “blitzkrieg” which happened in the real war never quite gets full steam here, so most of the war is a series of stalemates on various fronts. Hitler has no decisive victory against any opponent to make him popular with his people or apparently infallible to his generals.  

United States.   The US enters the Pacific War against Japan, fighting over Wake Island and Midway, but stays out of the war in Europe.  There doesn’t seem to be much cooperation and coordination between Germany and Japan - or I should say, even less than there was in real life. 

War details.  The biggest nugget I got from this (Dana Carvey-as-Johnny Carson “I did NOT know that!”) was discussion of the German Panzer II tank.  I knew it had a 20mm cannon, but I didn’t know the cannon fired on full auto from a 10 round magazine.  I also didn’t know the radio man sat towards the back, near the engine, rather than up front next to the driver; there was no bow machine gun.  Plus there's some discussion of the Red Air Force, the dynamics between the various nationalities in the Soviet Union, and some some fun about "mat", which is the highly colloquial and heavily colorful slang which Russians use, particularly peasants and underworld denizens.  

Writing.   By now I’ve read the reviews on Amazon of Turtledove’s work and I agree with the consensus.  As a storyteller in terms of plot and what actually happens, Turtledove is fine.  No one really complains all that much about where his stories go. 

            It’s his writing that we beef about:  grotesquely repetitious.  What is a six volume series should really be a three volume series.  Every time a character is dealt with, HT has to repeat – even later in the same book – the same opinions, idiosyncrasies, and problems the character has.  Issues about ersatz coffee, cigarettes, etc. are repeated OVER and OVER again.  It becomes a deliberate pattern of conspicuous padding, and severely compromises the quality of his work and our ability to enjoy it.  This seems to be the most consistent complaint readers articulate against Turtledove for most of his books.

            Another problem I have with his writing, and which I haven’t seen complained of (yet), is the tone.  HT tells the story in a way that overexplains things to the point where you wonder who his target audience is.  Alternate history is a subset of science fiction which would only find an audience among people who know the real history and derive some entertainment from an alternative narrative.  I’m 46.  HT writes like he’s writing to his 12 year old nephew.  Are young teenage boys the target market?  Are the girls reading Harry Potter while the boys read Turtledove?  Is this Young Adult Fiction in disguise?  It’s just a step above Harry Potter in narrative sophistication, and J.K. Rowling seems fairly open about HP’s market, even if plenty of adults such as myself have actually read the books.  Just a thought…    

Jews Fight Back (Part I)

I’ve noticed a substantial movement of blatantly anti-Semitic propaganda on Facebook.   Mostly these cowards tend to whine that they’re “simply against Israel and not Jews” but then post the same big-nosed caricatures we recognize from Nazi propaganda.   This brings me to my topic for this week.

Fighting Back, by Harold Werner.  My colleague Mr. Campbell got me this book for Christmas last year and I finally finished reading it.  It chronicles the struggle to survive in the forests of Poland from 1939 to 1944, wherein a Jewish partisan group had to arm itself and fight back to avoid being wiped out.  Fortunately the author survived to tell the story, but many of his friends, family and comrades did not.

Defiance.  This movie covers almost the same territory even if the characters are different (though also true), taking place in Byelorussia as opposed to Poland.  But the same issues arise:  to survive, young Jewish badasses have to get weapons, extract friends, family and loved ones from local villages and larger ghettoes, somehow find food, avoid anti-Semitic locals eager to sell them out to the Nazis, and of course, fight back against the German Police and SS units sent into the forest, heavily armed, to wipe them out.  The main fighters are played by Daniel “007” Craig and Liev Shreiber (Ray Donovan and other roles).  [No famous people on the German side here.]

Since that book and this movie tend to reinforce and complement each other, I’ll combine the analysis of the two.

Themes:   Hostile locals.  When an entire nation defended its Jews against the Nazis – as the Danes and Bulgarians did – the Holocaust was stopped dead in its tracks.  The Final Solution was impossible without substantial cooperation and assistance by locals.  However, Werner noted an interesting dynamic.  If the Germans were armed and violent, but the Jews were not, the locals would cooperate fully with the Nazis.  However, if the Jews showed up with weapons and the inclination to use them, that now put the locals in a spot.  Faced with two sides willing to kill them, they generally picked the Jews to side with.  This was pushed further in the Jews’ favor after Stalingrad (February 1943) and Kursk (July 1943) when it became more apparent that the Nazis weren’t going to win the war.  Showing up with guns, the Jews turned the locals’ contempt into fear and respect, though whichever locals had pre-existing anti-Semitic tendencies tended to remain pro-Nazi longer than the others.  When the Red Army came close by, even the nastiest bastards began thinking twice about supporting the Fritzes. 

Useless mouths.  Unfortunately, most of the Jewish refugees were women, children, elderly, disabled, etc.  Many of the men were urban intellectuals with limited combat skills or outdoors knowhow.  Only a minority were young, able-bodied men capable of fighting.  In rare but valuable occasions the fighters had Polish Army experience.  Most of the fighting had to be done by the small fraction of willing and able men – with a few women scattered here and there.  

Russians.  While not particularly enamored of Jews, and fairly brutal thanks to Comrade Stalin, the Russians are mainly good guys in this story.   Once the Jews convinced the Soviets that they were willing, able, and competent fighters, that they were willing to fight alongside the Russians and risk their own lives defending themselves, the Soviets began supplying them with weapons, ammunition, supplies, and even a few advisors.  As the front moved westwards, so did much larger Russian partisan forces.  These forces were so large, well-equipped, and well-organized as to qualify as armies in their own right. 

Two Polish Armies.  Werner describes not one but TWO Polish resistance armies (actually he mentions others, but these are the main two): The Army Ludowa and the Army Krajowa.  The latter is the larger, more famous Home Army which shows up in the 1944 Warsaw uprising.  According to Werner, the Ludowa group was Communist and allied closely with the Soviets, and almost always highly favorable to the Jews.  On the other hand, the Army Krajowa, while not explicitly anti-Semitic, was no better than neutral and did betray them to the Nazis on multiple occasions. 

After the war, the Jews faced reprisals from Army Krajowa forces – who even killed many Jewish partisans who had managed to survive the war.  The author had to flee Poland and found his way to the USA. 

My father once spoke with a genuine French resistance fighter.  He said that during the war, the Resistance never mustered more than a few hundred men and women at tops.  However, after the war, somehow that number expanded exponentially, after the fact: thousands of people emerged from the woodwork claiming to have helped out the Resistance in various ways.  The truth is that most of these people might not have been outright collaborators or Milice, but they certainly weren’t Resistance.  Probably they were minding their own business, just trying to stay alive. 

Likewise it seems that the Polish resistance armies – particularly the Army Krajowa – claimed to have supported the Jews and opposed the Nazis.   I believe in some cases this is probably true – but clearly not all.  As for resolving discrepancies between what surviving Jews claim vs. what the Polish resistance armies claim, I’m more inclined to believe the former.  While there is little reason for Jews to attribute collaboration or hostility to Poles who weren’t actually so, there is ample incentive for embarrassed anti-Semites, after the fact, to claim to have been more supportive of the Jews than they actually were.    

Uprising.  This is a recent film with an all-star cast.  NOTE: there were TWO Warsaw uprisings.  The 1943 “Ghetto” uprising was the Jewish uprising.   The later 1944 uprising was the Polish Home Army uprising.  This movie focuses on the former.

            This story has an all-star cast: Hank Azaria (best known from the Simpsons and as Gargamel in the live action Smurfs movies), David Schwimmer (Ross Geller on “Friends”), Leelee Sobieski, Donald Sutherland (a hero here, not the vile President Snow), and even the German side has some star power:  Jon Voigt as Jurgen Stroop, the SS commander who put down the uprising, and Carey Elwes as the Nazis’ chief propagandist.  Instead of forests, the locale is the Warsaw Ghetto, i.e. street fighting which eventually led to many Jews escaping through the sewers.  Here again, you have Jews fighting back and trying to stay alive, but it’s in a demolished city and its sewer complex rather than the wild forests. 

Both “Defiance” and “Uprising” are long movies, but they complement each other.  Naturally, however, “Schindler’s List” remains the definitive Holocaust movie to date.  

Brant Bjork

I’ve been listening to a bit more of this guy lately, in particular, Gods And Goddesses and Punk Rock Guilt.   Prior to that it was Jalamanta, Saved By Magic, and Black Flower Power.

In the beginning:  there was Kyuss, famous for giving us Josh Homme, the lead dude of Queens of the Stone Age.  With that band he’s on Wretch, Blues for the Red Sun, (Welcome to) Sky Valley and ....And The Circus Leaves Town.  Since Kyuss are also famous for being one of the first stoner rock bands, and are still well esteemed to this day, that alone would give BB solid stoner rock credentials.

Then it was  Fu Manchu, for the albums, No One Rides For Free, The Action is Go, Jailbreak, Eatin’ Dust, King of the Road (their best album), and California Crossing. 

QOTSA bassist Nick Oliveiri had a falling out with Homme – who can be a bit strong-minded about running his band – so he wound up making his own band, Mondo Generator, which has two studio albums, Cocaine Rodeo and A Drug Problem That Never Existed, both of which BB is on.

Solo.  He has 7 albums as “Brant Bjork” (Jalamanta, Brant Bjork & the Operators, Keep Your Cool, Local Angel, Tres Dias [a compilation with only one unique song], Punk Rock Guilt, and Gods & Goddesses), two as “Brant Bjork and the Bros” (Saved By Magic and Somera Sol), and one with his “Low Desert Punk Band” (Black Flower Power).  The solo distinction is that with the prior bands, he was playing drums, whereas now he’s playing multiple instruments and seems to be on guitar & vocals live – basically doing a Dave Grohl/Foo Fighters switch.  I suppose you could call him the Dave Grohl of stoner rock.  What’s even funnier is that Grohl himself played drums briefly with Queens of the Stone Age and teamed up with Josh Homme and John Paul Jones (yes, the Led Zeppelin bassist/keyboardist) for Them Crooked Vultures.

Although I haven’t heard all his material, I’ve heard the Kyuss, the Fu Manchu, about 1/3 of his solo material.  It all qualifies as stoner rock, and all has a definite groove of coolness.  I’ve seen him in concert a few times, although only as a drummer: Kyuss (1995), Fu Manchu (2002), and Kyuss Lives (2011).  I’m still trying to catch him playing a tour as his solo band. 

Note: despite the term “stoner rock”, much of this music is not psychedelic at all, and Bjork’s stuff is not either.  It’s riff driven, with some bands like Bjork’s having a definite groove element to it, almost “heavy-funky”.  The scene also includes bands which are much slower and sludgier (“doom”), such as Electric Wizard and Acid King (imagine Black Sabbath’s “Into the Void” – but even slower), or others which pick up the tempo considerably with a quasi-thrash vibe, like High On Fire.  It’s not music which requires marijuana to enjoy, but many of its fans are proud tokers, and some bands even celebrate it in their names:  Bongripper, Bongzilla, Weedeater, Weedpecker, etc.  The genre seems to take Black Sabbath as its starting point, and then spliff it up with some weirdness, a la Pink Floyd, or what I call Black Floyd.  They inject just enough originality to avoid simply being de facto Black Sabbath tribute bands, but they often sound very much the same as each other. 

If you’re a fan of classic heavy metal – AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest – you’re going to find that the bands are getting older and touring less and less.  Black Sabbath will be lucky to follow up 13 with another album and tour – and Bill Ward is effectively retired.  Priest are close to shutting down.  AC/DC may have one more album and/or tour after Rock or Bust, and Maiden eked out its most recent album, Book of Souls, which still hasn’t been released (ETA 9/4/15), before Bruce Dickinson’s cancer scare.  When they do tour, it’s large venues at high prices.  The beauty of the stoner rock scene is that none of these bands have blown up huge, so they’re playing local clubs fairly often for modest prices.  There are some stoner rock festivals in Europe, but I haven’t seen one come by the DC area yet.  But the bottom line is that you get “Black Floyd” in your home town fairly often.  And you don’t even have to toke up.  

Where The Eagles Dared To Land

I watched one again for the first time in ages, the other for the first time ever.   Here’s the brief story on each.

The Eagle Has Landed (1976).   An elite squad of German Luftwaffe commandos, led by Major Steiner (Michael Caine) attempts to assassinate British Prime Minister Winston Churchill – fairly late in the war.  Admiral Canaris (Anthony Quayle, the luckless broken-leg guy from “The Guns of Navarone”) questions the practicality of the mission at that late stage.  Robert Duvall plays the German Army colonel who puts the whole thing together – and gets rewarded later.  Donald Sutherland is a snaky, oily Irish nationalist, Devlin, who accompanies them as a traitor.

The team lands in a village close to where WC is supposed to be coming by.  They’re dressed as UK paratroopers, but with German uniforms underneath – that erroneous memo from Hitler’s JAG about “not violating the rules if you’re not caught actually shooting in enemy uniform” – the whole thing gets messed up when a German soldier rescues a young girl who fell in the water and ends up impaled on the water wheel.  Then all hell breaks loose.  Despite that memo, the Germans STILL wear the UK uniforms even while shooting.   The Allied response is a large group of Americans including Larry “J.R.” Hagman, Jeff Conaway, and Treat Williams.   Steiner sneaks out the back door of the church with Devlin to take out Churchill personally.

A major tidbit of this movie: it’s filmed in Mapledurham, a small village west of London in the English countryside.  That town’s landmark is its still-operating watermill, which exposed the heroic Luftwaffe man on the waterwheel.  Although the camera angle is never quite close enough to compare, the same watermill can be seen on the cover of Black Sabbath’s first album, which was released 6 years before this film.

Where Eagles Dare (1968).   Somehow Clint Eastwood managed to make this AND “Coogan’s Bluff” in 1968.  He was busy.  I’d never seen this one before.

            A team of British commandos, dressed as Germans, tries to infiltrate a German fortress up high up in the mountains (Dr King Schulz: “It’s a German story, there must be a mountain there somewhere”), supposedly to rescue an American general who has knowledge of D-Day plans – so the story takes place in early 1944.  The leader, Smith (Richard Burton) invites along an OSS (American), Schaffer (Eastwood) for reasons which become apparent much later.  Midway through the film, the plot takes a few swerves, then comes back to them simply shooting their way out of the castle, back down to ground level, and get on the air transport (a captured Ju-52) back to England.  Derren Nesbitt, who plays one of the #2’s in “The Prisoner”, is here as the black-uniformed SS officer.  Lots of good action, some confusing spy nonsense, and decent acting, make this another good WWII film.  Worth seeing once - or more.