Coppel dedicated Order of Battle to his son, a sergeant in the U.S. Army special forces, and the dedication page features four lines from A. E. Housman:
The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
Order of Battle consists of nine chapters, each named for one of four characters. The Deveraux chapters are in the first person, a sort of memoir, but the Anne, Harry, and Porta chapters are in the third person. The edition of Order of Battle I read is 273 pages long, but there are lots of blank pages between chapters, like 20 total, and the book doesn't feel long.
The first chapter is one of those in the voice of Mark Deveraux of California, pilot of a P-38G of the fictional 903rd Fighter-Bomber Group, based in southern England. The 903rd strafes and bombs barges, flak towers, locomotives, etc., across the Channel in France--they have never been given escort duty and have never been in any dogfights because all the Luftwaffe fighters are sticking close to Berlin. This chapter introduces us to these sorts of military matters, various characters at the air base, including Deveraux's wingman, fellow college-educated Californian Harry Ward and his flight leader, working-class MidWesterner Raymond Porta, son of a "Portuguese steel puddler," and the fact that Devaraux is cheating on his wife with a widowed Englishwoman, Anne Charing.
The second chapter is told in the third person, though we are privy to the thoughts of Anne Charing. Her husband was killed fighting in North Africa in 1940, and she met Devaraux in 1943. This chapter is all about the love affair of the English widow and the American airman, how each feels guilty for betraying his or her spouse, how each is jealous of the other's spouse, how they wonder if what they have is love or just animal lust. Much of the text is taken up with their cruel verbal jousting, her crying, her resisting his aggressive desire even as her body responds to his touches. (This book is full of scenes of men using a little muscle to make women succumb to their physical desires.) This relationship stuff was a little boring and had me yearning to get back to the 20mm cannons, 500 lb bombs and explosions.
The fourth chapter has as its protagonist Harry Ward, Deveraux's wingman. This dude is a mediocre pilot and a virgin, sort of a square and a loser who was raised by a single mother (a widow) and his sisters in a quiet town, shy and ineffectual. In London on leave with the other men in his and Devaraux's flight (Deveraux is still convalescing) he runs into a Royal Navy pilot with a wooden leg (this guy lost his limb after ditching his Swordfish in the ocean) who turns out to be Anne Charing's cousin. Harry ends up meeting Anne and trying to seduce her but failing--she treats him like a mother treats a sad child and comforts him, but refuses to allow any hanky panky, and, unlike the masculine Deveraux and Porta, Harry is not the sort to use physical force to get what he wants from a woman.
The fifth chapter has more about how Deveraux misses Anne. Harry is seeing Anne, but I don't think she is putting out, though this is left ambiguous. The 903rd starts being assigned escort missions and being sent further afield, carrying auxiliary fuel tanks instead of bombs and running the risk of dogfights with Me-109s, Me-110s and Focke-Wulfs. Deveraux and Harry are witness to the tragic destruction of a B-17--they are in radio communication with members of its crew as they die.
In that fifth chapter the commander of Deveraux's flight, Ray Porta, shoots down a Me-109, and the sixth chapter is the sole chapter named after him and is all about him and the aftermath of his victory. Porta is an ambitious working-class man, a former enlisted man, who finds the poetry and modern painting that interests many of the other pilots (most of whom are college-educated, unlike Porta) bewildering or even disturbing. But he is the best pilot in the Group. Coppel uses Porta to address the theory (expressed by a minor character who is a medical officer) that "the really successful fighter pilot is basically a psychopathic personality," as well as the belief that women find such aggressive men sexually exciting. Deveraux, with some reason, blames Porta's chasing after German fighters--and leaving the heavy bombers unguarded--for the loss of that B-17; Porta and Deveraux have butted heads before, and Porta silently swears revenge on Deveraux. We readers are left to wonder if Porta's killer instinct and selfish ambition further the war effort or hamper it.
The big seventh chapter also features Deveraux learning that his wife back in sunny California has fallen in love with another man and wants a divorce; Deveraux's manic reaction is to show up at Anne's place and, more or less, rape her. This wrecks his friendship with Harry, as you might expect. Porta then works his revenge, getting Deveraux assigned to a tank battalion as a forward air controller, like that Frenchman. Deveraux finds the idea of serving on the ground horrifying, something we vividly learned earlier in the chapter, when seeing dead Allied troops and knocked out Allied vehicles from his cockpit made him physically ill with sympathetic fear.
I was totally stoked (as the kid say) to read all about what it was like to be a forward air controller in 1944, but--plot twist!--at the start of the eighth chapter Porta is doing some crazy aerobatics, showing off, and crashes, killing himself and two other people, and Deveraux takes his place as flight leader. Then Harry gets shot up over the Netherlands and ditches in the Channel, breaking his legs; he is sent home to California. Then comes another twist, a welcome one: out of a sense of penance or something Deveraux volunteers for that forward air controller job!
The final chapter has Dev attached to an American armored unit that is in the process of crossing a river; he and his team deploy beyond the armored unit's perimeter to spot artillery fire for 105mm guns and direct air strikes conducted by Dave Weiner and other people from the 903rd that knock out 88mm Flak guns and halt the advance of ten Tiger tanks. Dev has to call a napalm strike down so close to his own position that he is burned and ends up at a hospital back in England. (People getting burned is a recurring motif of the novel.) Anne comes to the hospital and we are expected to believe that his horrible experiences have taught him how to love, something Anne recognizes. Now that Dev is a better person (and his wife wants a divorce) she agrees to marry him. The End.
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| I found it challenging to find decent photos of Order of Battle online |
The military stuff in Order of Battle is all good, though there is an error that might just be a printing mistake, a character asserting that the Me-109G could carry a 40mm cannon--in reality, the weapon in question is a 30mm cannon. The Ray Porta character stuff is effective, how he resents the middle-class "college boys" as he incessantly calls them and wants to show them up and irrationally blames them when his kill is not officially recognized because his gun camera malfunctioned. Devereaux's character arc--I guess we are supposed to believe he almost became a selfish ambitious monster like Porta but stepped back from the brink to become a giving person--is merely acceptable. (A contrast to Brian Aldiss's A Soldier Erect, in which the battle stuff was pedestrian and the character interactions were fun, striking and entertaining.)
A paperback edition of Order of Battle sells it as a "powerful love story," but I found the love story of Dev and Anne pretty opaque. I couldn't even understand what they liked about each other--sure, they are both needy and horny, but it wasn't clear why, of all the other needy and horny people in Southern England in 1943 and 1944, they each choose the other over the many alternatives. Dev and Anne are boring characters--Porta, who is driven and something of a fish out of water, is interesting, and Harry, who is a mediocrity and something of a fish out of water, is interesting, but Dev and Anne have no compelling character traits that I can recall, and most of their dialogue is them being jerks to each other. Well, maybe I missed something.
Worth my time, but not spectacular.
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If you have an itch for more Alfred Coppel content, two of this blog's biggest supporters have reviewed Coppel novels. Tarbandu of The Por Por Books Blog in 2017 wrote about The Apocalypse Brigade, and in 2019 Joachim Boaz of Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations reviewed Dark December. Check them out!
The overwhelming feel of Dark December was a realism on the experience of a soldier -- both his physical and mental struggles. And that certainly elevated what, at first glance, could be a pretty bog standard post-nuclear war novel.
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