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Amid the horror, an age of unparallelled heroism
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February 4, 2010
By Kevin Ritchie
Defeat Into Victory
by Field Marshal Viscount Slim
Absolute War
by Chris Bellamy
Das Reich
by Max Hastings
The Dambusters
by Paul Brickhill
Pan Military Classics, each R185
Seventy years ago, World War 2 began... all of 20 years after the much-vaunted "war to end all wars" ended. This time, the stakes were higher. For one, this was the advent of total war, warfare that involved everyone from indiscriminate bombing raids of densely packed cities to concentration camps where people were systematically exterminated.
It's on to this broad canvas that the reprinted Pan Military Classics fall. You can choose from a number of titles, but the four under review - Defeat into Victory by Field Marshal Viscount Slim, Absolute War by Chris Bellamy, Das Reich by Max Hastings and The Dambusters by Paul Brickhill - are as good a selection as any.
Slim's memoirs of his time as the commander of an army that retreated out of Burma and then came back are compelling. Unlike many other professional army officers, Slim could actually write.
He spent the lean inter war years writing professionally, but that's not what makes this account so compelling; instead it is the brutal candour with which he faces up to his own shortcomings and those of the men under his command - and how he turned the whole lot around to win back Burma from the Japanese.
It's also probably the best "how to get ahead in business" treatise since Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War - after all, here's a guy fighting a war with hundreds of thousands of people drawn from across the erstwhile British Empire, deployed over a front of hundreds of kilometres, with a supply line stretching back thousands of kilometres.
Slim explains just how he managed it, down to the difficulties in speaking to men of 50 different nationalities, and how to delegate life and death authority and responsibility to senior officers you've only met for the first time a week before.
It's a tour de force as a management guide book and it's one helluva memoir to boot.
On the other end of the scale, Bellamy's encyclopedic Absolute War tells the story of just why Adolf Hitler came unstuck on his eastern front, just like Napoleon Bonaparte did more than a century before and why no one has managed to conquer Russia in recent history.
It's the work of 10 years of research that tells the narrative of this gripping and bloody theatre from both sides, providing one of the most complete and compelling accounts of the total conflict yet.
Das Reich is war journalist Max Hastings at his best, telling the story of one of the greatest atrocities of World War II, perpetrated by the SS's crack Das Reich mechanised division, which had just returned from the horrors of the east fighting the fanatical Soviet troops only to be met by the shadowy cut and thrusts of maquisards led by Britain's SOE and the American OSS, the forerunner to the CIA of today.
The German response to this undeclared war was as harsh as it was instant; hundreds of French civilians were executed publicly for every attack on a German soldier.
It's an episode that lives on in the annals of military shame, but Hastings, having spent time speaking to veterans of this lesser-reported conflict, emerges with a moving account that does not seek to absolve anyone of guilt, but does go a long way to explain why men - and woman - are capable of the most heinous cruelty if pushed far enough.
The final book under review is an old personal favourite. I grew up reading The Dambusters, tales of derring-do in Lancasters as the RAF bombers tried their damndest with inventor Barnes Wallis's ingenuity to bomb the dams on the Ruhr to smithereens and destroy the Nazi industrial war effort.
They succeeded, but not without incredible personal cost. Only one name lives on in the public consciousness, bombing wing leader Leonard Cheshire, who was so affected by what he had gone through and the loss of his friends and subordinates that he turned his back on a glittering military career and a lucrative career in law to care for a dying serviceman who he didn't even know.
Today Cheshire homes are dotted all over the world, caring for people who can no longer care for themselves, thanks to the efforts of Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, VC, DSO and two bars and DFC.
Thanks to these military classics we appreciate anew an age where selfless sacrifice was valued so much more than the crass materialism of today.
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