Month: May 2022

The War in the West, James Holland, Bantam Press, 693pp, £25
Germany Ascendant 1939-1941
An interesting one-volume history of the early part of the Second World War. This book give a readable account of the war, as seen through the eyes of an number of participants on both sides. It also deflates a number of myths about the war, in particular about the strength and invincibility of the German forces. While the Germans had a formidable army and air force, their navy was small and their army was not as mechanised as the popular image of fast-moving Panzers would suggest. Germqn propoganda obscured the fact that they were less motorised than most of their opponents and their field guns were still drawn by horses. Germany also lacked the raw materials and other resources needed to sustain a long war. Bad planning ensured that the Germans lacked some useful aircraft types.
The French were better equipped with tanks and had an army of comparable strenth, a bigger navy and also an air force, but intimidated by German propoganda managed to defeat themselves rather than be defeated by the Germans. The French political establishment was split by internal squabbles and the army was consistently slow to respond and its leaders unwilling to fight.
Reading this book I was struck by several similarities between WWII and the Ukranian crisis. In both, a dictatorial leader acts ignoring the advice of his more cautious military staff, and takes over several countries before mounting an egregious attack on another counrry, forcing allies to respond. In both, the attacked country does not get as much support as it hoped for. The aggressor armed forces turn out to be less powerful than their propoganda persuaded their opponents they were. In both pre-wars, attempts at negotiation or appeasement turned out to be pointless.

Butler to the World, Oliver Bullough, Profile Books, 273pp, £20. How Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals.
The subtitle says it all. This is a very readable expose of the mysterious workings of international finance and how money moves around without any checks or supervision. After Suez, Britain having lost an empire was looking around for a new role, and found one in acting as a ‘butler’, i.e. providing services without asking awkward questions. Bullough describes institutions, structures and personalities with whom the general reader will be unfamiliar but which effect the secret movements of billions of pounds.
Bullough illustrates these murky dephs by means of a number of examples, of which one ‘The Scottish Laundromat’ will suffice here. US-based investigators advised the Scottish police about a crime in Moldova, where criminals had via a scam stolen a billion dollars from Moldovan banks and caused the money to vanish without trace. In turn one of the police tipped oof an investigative journalist, who confirmed that the last known destination of the money was an ordinary Scottish house in Edinburgh, home of a Scottish Limited Partnership, actually controlled by two companies in the Seychelles, where ownership of companies is a closely guarded secret. SLPs (with which few will be familiar) do not have to register their actual identity anywhere, making them the perfect tool for moving money around. The journalist uncovered many other instances of the nefarious misuse of SLPs. An official of the newly empowered Scottish National Party, Roger Mullin, was appalled by these revelations and took up the case. Investigators found that there had been a boom in SLPs, most owned by anonymous offshore companies, evidently used on an industrial scale for hiding stolen money. Mullin found strong indications that the financial services industry and Scottish lawyers would rather SLPs were left alone. So what happened? Nothing, except that by an obscure process the regulations were relaxed even further.
If you are disturbed by this and similar activities, you need to read this book.