Kim J Cowie Author Posts

Slaughter at Sea by Mark Felton

Another book in my reading from the war section of the local library. This book is sub-titled “The Story of Japan’s Naval War Crimes.” The Japanese Imperial Navy (IJN) had poor relations with the Imperial Army. Consequently, the Navy gave all its recruits basic military training and had its own ship-borne soldiers who were frequently deployed onshore. The Navy was often given the task of administering captured islands and territories. As this book explains, this gave the IJN the opportunity to commit many land-based atrocities.

Clearly, the rape of Nanking (mentioned in reviews below) was not an isolated lapse, but symptomatic of a sinister general attitude towards anyone who fell under their power. In the territories over-run by the Japanese during World War 2, it was the norm for both military personnel and civilians, both white and non-white, to be ill-treated, robbed, and frequently murdered. This book details many incidents in which groups of captives were ill-treated and then murdered.

Most chilling is the revelation that it was official IJN policy, expressed in orders, that the crews of ships sunk by the IJN should be killed. In many cases, lifeboats were machine-gunned or rammed after the captain had been taken aboard the attacking vessel. American and British prisoners of war got no better treatment. If not murdered immediately, they would suffer ill-treatment while being interrogated and then transferred to “hell ships” taking them to slave labour elsewhere in the Japanese empire. Many were murdered on the Pacific islands after being held captive for some time. Others perished in several incidents where un-marked prison ships were torpedoed by Allied forces.

Allied naval sailors and airmen were often murdered in revenge for reverses, or even attacks, suffered by Japanese forces.

For the most part, the enlisted men and junior officers appeared to enjoy having the power to maltreat and kill prisoners, and had no problem at all in following orders to kill prisoners. In a very rare case, one Commander Junsuke Mii protested vigorously to several senior officers, including his Vice Admiral, about orders to “dispose” of a group of prisoners from a sunken ship. Mii sent ashore double the number he was ordered to, saving some thirty people. The rest of the captives were murdered and dumped at sea, the actual killing being done by junior officers and enlisted men using swords. Nothing happened to Mii, who was later promoted to Captain.

And why did the Japanese behave like this? Hard to say, but almost to a man they held the lives of non-Japanese to be of no account. And Japanese politicians can still be heard dismissing these war crimes today.

I found this book quite an eye-opener. It comes complete with notes, references, and brief accounts of war crime trials. Japan-ophiles will find this book uncomfortable reading, but it is part of a war record that, in common with the Jewish Holocaust, should not be brushed out of history.

Over the winter of 2008/9, I read several books related to Germany and World War 2.
The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940 1945 by J Friedrich. This is about the destruction of German cities by aerial bombing, and from a German point of view. It reveals quite a number of facts that make uncomfortable reading today. The destruction by the end of the war was remarkably complete, with no German city or town of any size escaping destruction, and in most cases suffering the destruction of something like 75% of the buildings. Many towns and cities were so shattered that they had almost ceased to exist. Civilian casualties were correspondingly high. The author describes the suffering of the bombed population, and rather pointedly, town by town, describes the fine or historic buildings that existed pre-war and were destroyed in the bombing. There was little pretence at precision bombing of military targets; at first, area bombing was all that was possible, and when it proved singularly destructive, area fire-bombing was refined, and if the primary target was masked by bad weather, a secondary target of no military importance would do, or failing that, anything German.

The cost to the attacking airforces in men and material was also high. And for what? The fire-bombing was designed to break civilian morale, and in this it signally failed, just as it failed in Britain.  In the latter, post-Normandy phase of the war, when the bomber fleets went increasingly unchallenged, the raids were supposed to encourage the German troops and civilians to surrender, but, as the author points out, they lived in a totalitarian state, and it is very difficult to surrender to an air force…

(No wonder the British and American governments have been unwilling to condemn the recent Israeli bombing of Gaza in forthright terms.)

After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh. This is a massive 600-page book about what happened in the German territories after the end of the war in Europe. The dying didn’t stop in May 1945, when Germany surrendered, and things didn’t start to get better till around 1948.

3.6 million homes had been destroyed, leaving 7.5 million homeless. As many as 16.5 million Germans were to be driven from their homes, and some two and a quarter million would die during the expulsions from the south and east. The victorious Russians seized eastern territories from Poland, and gave to the Poles large tracts of eastern Germany, lands such as East Prussia that lie now deep within 21th century Poland. The nine million Germans living here were driven out of their homes, beaten, robbed and starved. Tens of thousands of those trying to flee died in refugee ships sunk by the Russian forces in the Baltic. Others died when trying to escape across the sea-ice. Others died of starvation while waiting for permission to travel westwards. It was a similar picture in the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia.  The ethnic Germans were forced to flee to Germany, but not before the victorious Czechs had rounded them up into unofficial concentration camps, where they were beaten up, robbed, starved and sometimes killed.

In the Soviet-held territories, Russian soldiers raped and robbed at will, and in the French sectors the French colonial troops were equally energetic rapists. Everywhere, mobs of hungry and homeless former prisoners and slave workers took revenge against the Germans. The victorious Allies were slow to take control and restore order, and were more interested in apportioning blame and sorting out the more guilty from the less guilty in a wide-sweeping “de-Nazification” process.  The prevailing feeling was that the German people as a whole deserved to be punished, and as is well known a number of prominent Nazis were tried and sentenced at Nuremburg. In the West, the Allied troops were given orders forbidding “fraternisation”. In the Soviet sector, rape and looting were tolerated at the highest  level, right up to the Kremlin. Soviet troops stole anything that took their fancy, being particularly attracted to watches, gramophones and bicycles. Much German factory machinery was removed, particularly in the Soviet sector.

Meanwhile the Germans starved and shivered among the rubble. In any case, with the most fertile farmlands under Soviet occupation, there wasn’t enough food in Europe to feed them. Mostly, it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death, but women, children and old men.  And despite the trials, quite a number of nasty Nazi war criminals escaped any punishment.

A striking feature of the book is the personal stories of individual Germans caught up in the aftermath of the war. Collectively, they paid a terrible price for having lived in Hitler’s Reich.

Reading the whole 600 pages, and the accounts of what happened to individual Germans, one cannot help but feel that this is a second holocaust that has been largely unknown to history, and that if it hadn’t been for two events: (1) the war and (2) the Jewish Holocaust, the fate of the German populations would have been the cause of some international outcry. As it was, they paid a terrible price for living in Hitler’s Reich.

Also received:

World War Two BEHIND CLOSED DOORS by Laurence Rees.  This book accompanies a six-part BBC documentary series.  This is a well-written and revealing book about the Allied leaders’ dealings with the Soviet leader, Stalin.  British readers may recollect that the trigger for Britain declaring war on Germany was the German invasion of Poland.  A few days earlier the Germans and the Soviets, formerly ideological enemies, had concluded a treaty of convenience. Rees explains the reasons why they did this. There had been feelers from the West about a possible treaty with the Soviet Union, but Stalin saw little point in making a treaty with unsympathetic nations. And two weeks after the Germans invaded Poland,  the Soviets invaded Poland from the east. Their occupation had all the usual features of Soviet rule: terror, the pretence of coming to liberate, the destruction of the monied and educated classes, arbitrary arrests, mass murder, deportations, pillage, and the devaluing of the Polish zloty.

So did we declare war on the Soviet Union in defence of Poland? No we didn’t, because Britain had little enthusiasm for a war with the Soviet Union. There was also a secret treaty with the Poles that limited Britain’s obligation to defending them against attack from Germany.  And did the conclusuion of WW2 leave Poland at liberty? No it didn’t; in common with the rest of Eastern Europe, the Poles endured another four decades of tyranny.

In 1941, however, Hitler found it expedient to break his treaty and mount a blitzkreig invasion of the Soviet nion. Stalin ignored warnings that an invasion was imminent, but later stalled the Nazi advance with his characteristic determination and brutality.

Rees criticises Churchill and Roosevelt for their poor handling of meetings with the Soviet leader. Stalin made demands for an immediate second front in Europe, and for massive shipments of war supplies, niether of which Britain could readily accomplish.

In the Ruins of the Reich – Douglas Botting. An earlier work, one of the sources mentioned in “After the Reich.”

A Strange Enemy People – Germans under the British 1945-50 by Patricia Meehan. An earlier work, one of the sources mentioned in “After the Reich”.

Postwar – a history of Europe since 1945 by Tony Judt. Massive 900-page volume giving the political, social and economic history of Europe from 1945-2005. ‘A masterpiece of schloarship’.

Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace (355pp)

A cracking good novel by Peace, set in 1946 Tokyo. It’s part historical novel, part crime story, and strikingly original. The main character is a police inspector, Detective Inspector Minami (or at least that’s what he says his name is), is one of the Tokyo police force’s finest, but like the rest of the  defeated Japanese, hungry, ill-paid, ill-housed, and flea-bitten. Minami is given the task, with his subordinates, of investigating the murder of a girl whose body has been found in a park.  This means working from their office without a break for twenty days or until the case is closed.  Minami finds that the case is linked to others, and to another case a year ago. Meanwhile the police force is being purged of unsuitable elements by the Public Safety Division, a branch of SCAP, i.e. the Victors.

Against a background of occupation, racketeering, prostitution, scavenging, and nasty rapes and murders, the police find a suspect. Serious violence breaks out between immigrant gangs and Japanese racketeers. Meanwhile Minami finds himself in trouble.

The novel, clearly well researched, vividly recreates the unpleasantness of survival in a defeated Japan, and explores the life and work of the immediate post-war police, which isn’t a common setting for fiction.

Recommended.

Lancaster by Leo McKinstry, 592pp
a long book which has enough space to get into everything to do with the Lancaster bomber, from its manufacture, to the heroics of the aircrew, to the still-controversial area bombing of German cities. Certainly Arthur Harris was determined to area bomb all German cities as thoroughly as he could manage, but at the time almost everybody agreed with him. It was only after Dresden that politicians started to distance themselves from this strategy and point the finger of blame at Harris.  Few books go into the detail of the disagreements between Harris and his superiors in the Air Ministry, but this one does.  Harris was clearly a difficult man and the bosses had great difficulty in getting him to do anything he didn’t want to do.    He refused to attack  point targets even after his force demonstrably had developed the capability to do so. He was an enthusiast for the Lancaster and repeatedly demanded that production of all other heavy bomber types be wound down.

Surprising facts: 1) While in 1939 the RAF bombers  had difficulty in bombing within 5 miles of the target, by 1944, using the best bombsights and electronic aids, they could achieve a degree of accuracy that would be thought not bad even in 2010.  It was quite good enough to demolish individual factories, bunkers and troop concentrations.   2) The Lancaster could carry a slightly greater bomb load than the USAAF’s huge B29, and with its single bomb bay could accommodate a much longer bomb. Hence it was briefly considered for use in dropping the atom bombs on Japan.  3) 10% of Lancaster crew fatalities occurred during training.

I was sufficiently impressed with this book to order the paperback for my library after reading the public library’s hardback.

B-17’s Over Berlin: Personal Stories from the 95th Bomb Group by Ian Hawkins (424pp)

Personal accounts of the men who served in the USAAF’s 95th Bomb Group, based in East Anglia, UK, during WW2. By skilful selection of personal accounts, Hawkins reveals what it was like to be several miles above Germany, freezing cold and being shot at, as well as how the air bases affected life in Norfolk and Suffolk, and how the men and planes were moved from the US to the UK. There are accounts from ground crews, and from men who were shot down and who evaded the Germans or were captured.  Particularly memorable, apart from the high loss rate on some bad missions, are the frequent losses from causes other than enemy action. Take-off crashes and mid-air collisions while forming up were a daily occurrence. One young man had both feet amputated because of frostbite, just because the electric heating of his flying boots failed at altitude.  Crew losses in the USAAF air war were in the tens of thousands. Many of these brave young men now lie in the American cemetery at Madingley, Cambridge.

Crews often fought gun battles with German fighter planes, and shot down many of them.

This is an excellent book which paints a remarkably complete picture of the 95th Bomb group operations.

I found that it whetted my appetite for a work describing the American air war in WW2 in strategic terms, and for comparisons with the British effort.  The B-17 was designed to fly in defensible formations, and had larger caliber guns than British bombers, more guns, and more gunners. American bombers sometimes returned with the floors covered in thousands of spent shell cases, while British bombers might not fire a single shot.  Despite this, the USAAF  bombers required fighter escort to make their missions survivable.  Lancaster pilots often struggled to pull their plane out of a high-speed dive, wheras no B-17 pilot in Hawkins’ book mentions this.  There are many accounts of all ten crew baling out of a stricken B-17, but few of all 7 crewmen bailing out of a Lancaster, where the narrow escape hatches were a cause of complaint.  The B-17 had an autopilot which was of great help during a bail-out.  Mainly because of its heavy armament, the B-17’s bomb load was no greater than that of the smaller and lighter two-engined DH Mosquito, and much less than the maximum load of a Lancaster.

The Dead Hand by David E Hoffman, Icon Books, 577pp, 2010.

The Dead Hand gives us the untold story of the cold war arms race and the efforts made to clear up the Soviet arsenal after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Its opening chapters relate the efforts made by Reagan and Gorbachev to negotiate away their nuclear arsenals. Ronald Reagan was vehemently anti-Communist but was shaken by a presentation in which officials showed him what would happen to the USA in the event of a nuclear attack.  Consequently he became determined to eliminate the threat of nuclear war, either by getting rid of the weapons or by constructing an impenetrable anti-missile shield, the SDI or “Star Wars” project.  Mikhail Gorbachev had similar ideals. Unfortunately, in the prevailing atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, civil and military officials on both sides did not share their leaders’ ambitions. Reagan, encouraged by his officials, clung to his dream of SDI (a project which was, and remains, entirely imaginary) and this is why Reagan and Gorbachev came within a whisper of abolishing strategic nuclear weapons but in the end accomplished little.  With the paranoia, the false alerts and the brinkmanship, it seems largely a matter of luck that we’re all still alive today.  The USA and Russia even now have enough nuclear weapons targeted on each other to destroy everybody several times over.

The Soviet military-industrial complex was nothing like as technically advanced as American officials believed.  The Soviets had a Star Wars program to make space-borne lasers, but it never worked. What they were able to do, was to keep making missiles and warheads and weapon systems in an unstoppable stream. There was, literally, no way of scaling back the production, and they had so many missiles it didn’t even occur to them to use cheap dummies instead of fully functional missiles for launch training.

The Soviet “Doomsday machine” was real. It was called “Dead Hand” and was a semi-automatic system for enabling the launch crews to launch their missiles should the central command be destroyed.

In the 1970’s the Soviets and the USA renounced chemical and biological weapons and agreed to dispose of all stocks, which the USA duly did. The paranoid Soviets didn’t believe this, and during the 1980’s and the 1990’s, they continued a massive, totally secret, and illegal CBW program, employing thousands of people and costing billions of roubles.

With the fall of Gorbachev and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the USA was faced with a new headache. The Soviet empire was disintegrating, but known to be armed to the teeth with huge quantities of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that were not secured and could fall into the hands of who knew what rogue state or terrorist group.  The production of nuclear weapons stopped only when the USSR collapsed and the money stopped, but the CBW programs were even more difficult to stop, and were still running even after Russian president Boris Yeltsin tried to have them cancelled.

The Iranians, North Koreans and others made efforts to acquire experts and weapons technology from the collapsed USSR, but a program headed by American visionaries was largely successful, at the cost of a few billion dollars, in removing stockpiles to safety, providing money for desperate Russian experts, and encouraging the suspicious Russians to improve their terrifyingly rudimentary storage procedures.

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman
Hardcover, paperback, Kindle and audiobook formats
I listened to this book in the unabridged audiobook format, which was well read and produced.
This is the second of the ‘Book of Dust’ series, which is a sequel to the ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. The first ‘Book of Dust’ – ‘La Belle Sauvage’ – features Lyra Silvertongue, the principal character of all the books, as a baby.
In ‘The Secret Commonwealth’ Lyra is twenty years old, and a student at Oxford. She has a difficult relationship with her daemon, Pantalaimon. Pantalaimon witnesses the murder of a scholar at a riverside, which leads to the duo obtaining the dead man’s rucksack and notebooks. This leads to Lyra and friends starting to investigate a complex mystery involving roses, rose-oil, a fanatical far eastern sect, and Dust. The Magisterium, a repressive religious organisation, also features in the book, appearing remarkably resilient considering the events in the previous trilogy. Pan leaves Lyra and goes off on a quest of his own (the ability of some humans and daemons to separate is an important part of the story). The story develops into an eastward quest with Lyra and Pan separately pursued by Marcel Delamare, an official in the Magisterium, and Olivier Bonneville, son of a man who featured in ‘La Belle Sauvage’.
I found the story gripping, and liked it more that ‘La Belle Sauvage’ which I thought was a somewhat unnecessary book. The numerous exotic settings are well realised, and the dramatic turns of the plot hold one’s attention. Readers may be conscious of echoes of contemporary trends in our own world. There are no principal characters under the age of twenty, so I am not sure how well TSC will be received by readers expecting a book for young people. With its violent events and philosophical references, it seems aimed more at an adult audience. ‘TSC’ is a long book, over 700 pages, but the story is not resolved in it. Unlike the previous volume, it ends on a cliff-hanger.
Some reference is made to events in ‘His Dark Materials’ and ‘La Belle Sauvage’ but it is not essential to be overly familiar with either.

The Many Not the Few – the stolen history of the Battle of Britain by Richard North. (This is the first of what I hope will become an occasional series of book reviews)

Richard North is a defence analyst and blogger. In this book he seeks to dismantle the myth that ‘The Few’ – the small group of fighter pilots who fought in the ‘Battle of Britain’ – saved Britain from invasion in 1940. North paints a much wider picture.

Hitler’s war aim was to force Britain out of the war rather than to defeat Britain, and to achieve this he had to force Britain to come to terms. To do this, he mounted a three-fold pressure. While diplomatic approaches seeking a settlement were made in secret, Hitler attempted a blockade, threatened an invasion, and sought to undermine the morale of the British population. The blockade consisted of attacking shipping bringing supplies to British shores, and attacking our ports from the air. Preparations were made for an invasion, a threat which also had the useful result of keeping within Britain forces that could have been used elsewhere for fighting in the Mediterranean or protecting convoys. Finally, air attacks were meant, among other things, to undermine the will of the British people to resist. If the people had not been determined to resist, Churchill would have been forced to come to terms, just as various countries on the Continent had done.

Resistance to Hitler’s aims at sea was just as important as the battle in the air, and so was the determination of the people to resist bombing attack. North points out the importance of wartime propoganda: claims of Luftwaffe losses were greatly exaggerated, compounded by the comparison of Fighter Command losses with total German fighter and bomber losses. In fact, if one counts the total losses in all air commands on both sides, British and German aircraft losses were almost equal. The existence of an invasion threat was useful to Churchill, who could point to it to stiffen the resistance of the British people.

In actuality, the invasion threat was just that, a threat. The Germans gathered large numbers of barges in visible preparation for an invasion, but unlike the Allies in 1944 they did not possess any of the specialist ships and landing craft required for an opposed beach landing, in which material had to be unloaded at speed. German generals and admirals knew this and kept pointing it out to Hitler. Even when it became clear that an invasion was not practical, the Germans kept up the pretence of preparation to maintain the pressure on Britain.

On the whole, the British Government did a good job of resisting the Germans, though there were significant lapses. Even though fighter pilots were a scarce resource, no official efforts were made to rescue them should they have to bale out over the Channel, and many were drowned. Air-sea rescue was only set up much later. The Germans on the other hand had an efficient seaplane rescue service. The British rather unsportingly used to shoot these planes down.

Initially, little or no provision was made to aid people bombed out of their homes, and they were left to go from one office to another trying to get relief, being treated rather like cross-channel migrants. In a notorious incident hushed up at the time, a school acting as a relief centre for the bombed out, who should have been bussed to safety, suffered a direct hit from a bomb which killed a large but still unknown number of people. The provision of deep shelters was actively refused as a matter of policy, and people were forbidden from using the Underground stations as deep shelters. Only when people started breaking in, or buying platform tickets to gain access, was this policy reluctantly reversed. In various places, people used dank and facility-less tunnels as ready-made shelters. With a bit more incompetence in this area, a change in public mood could have lost us the war.

The question of war aims was another bone of contention. Those of a socialist bent wanted the Government to promise a workers’ utopia, wheras Churchill was determined that after the war things would remain the same as before. This thinking found its outlet in the myth of ‘The Few’ versus a ‘people’s war’.

This is a thought-provoking book and well worth reading.