Take These Men by Cyril Joly

It was uncanny that out of the silent, motionless wastes of desert there should be coming so much noise.  Interspersed with the duller, heavier explosions of the field-guns I could hear the sharper, vicious cracks of the high-velocity guns and the frenzied chatter of machine-guns and rifles.  Gradually over the edge of the horizon there rose a pall of black, billowing smoke, touched here and there with a long tongue of flame. 

Spine of copy
I read

Followers of this here blog and of my thrilling twitter feed (have you heard I am collecting glow-in-the-dark dinosaur bones made in China and marketed to cranky seven-year-olds who have been dragged against their will to the supermarket?) may recall that I admire Robert Crisp's memoir of his service in tanks in North Africa, Brazen Chariots, first published in 1959.  In Brazen Chariots Crisp mentions Cyril Joly, a fellow tank officer, and praises Joly's novel, Take These Men.  Via interlibrary loan I borrowed a dilapidated copy of the 357-page novel, published in Great Britain in 1955 and currently owned by the University of Baltimore, and over the last week or so I read it.

Take These Men, which Wikipedia tells us is a "lightly fictionalized" account of Joly's own experiences serving with the 7th Armored Division in North Africa, has six parts.  As the novel begins in Part One it is 1940 as our narrator, a Regular Army officer and veteran of the fighting in France whom other officers call "Tony," arrives in Egypt to take command of a troop (three vehicles) of A9 tanks.  An Italian attack across the Libyan border is expected, and Tony fights in skirmishes on patrol before the attack and major battles after it comes, as well as during the British counterattack which makes up Part Two of the novel and routs the Italian forces.  The British conquest of eastern Libya is short-lived, however, as the Germans arrive in 1941 with their superior equipment (at this point the British Army in Africa is so short of tanks that Tony's regiment is manning captured Italian M13 tanks) and push the Allies back towards the Egyptian border in Part Three.  Tony's M13 is damaged, and he switches to an A9, but this tank is knocked out while Tony is bringing up the rear of the British retreat and he and his crew have to sneak back to Allied lines on foot over a series of days; they hide by day, move at night and steal food and water from poorly guarded Italian camps.  After further fighting in British tanks, at the end of Part Three the commander of Tony's squadron, Kinnaird, is promoted to command of an entire regiment, and brings Tony with him to Cairo as his adjutant.  In Part Four, after helping organize the new regiment, Tony is given command of one of its four squadrons (a squadron is made up of four troops plus a command troop) and heads back into battle, this time in American-built Stuart tanks, called by the British troops "Honeys" due to their superior reliability.

Joly does a terrific job of describing both the routines of daily life of the tankers in the desert and their harrowing experiences of battle.  There are vivid descriptions of varied types of engagements, and the author also touches upon the roles played in the campaign by armored cars, anti-tank guns, infantry, supply units, artillery, etc.  We learn all about the physical conditions and psychological stresses endured by the fighting men, and about their relationships with each other; those between officers, and between officers and enlisted men.  Deep friendships can quickly grow among personnel who spend their time crammed together, travelling in, maintaining and fighting in the same tank.

The links of discipline, though strong, were tempered as nowhere else by a degree of tolerance, compassion or mutual esteem which bound the crew together as a small but complete family.  There were liberties which I expected and accepted from my crew which I would not have countenanced from any other man, except perhaps my batman.  

Just as quickly these deep relationships can dissolve when the crew is split up after the tank commander is promoted or transferred, or each crew member is of sent to a different tank after their own is incapacitated.  Tony commands many different crews over the course of the three-year war, as his tanks are often damaged or knocked out, in which event he commandeers the tank of some inferior officer and leaves behind his former mates.  There is also the fact that people are getting killed left and right, and Tony learns not to become too closely attached to fellow officers because they have a tendency to get blown to pieces.

The term "batman" brings up class issues, and those interested in such issues may find much to chew on in Take These Men.  The way Joly, an officer and an educated man who is writing in the voice of a man much like himself, describes the men who serve under Tony and his efforts to portray working class men (trying to reproduce their accents via phonetic spellings, for example) are worthy of scrutiny. This early description of some enlisted men, one of Tony's first crews, hints at Tony's background and the author's experiences and perspectives back in England:

My crew were all old soldiers with a keenness and sense of humour which amused and encouraged me.  They reminded me of my father's workers at home: men who knew their jobs and who were as capable of deciding what was to be done as my father was himself, but who nevertheless never resented the show of authority inherent in each instruction that was given. 

This passage foreshadows how, again and again in tight spots, Tony, who at times is at a loss how to proceed, seriously considers the advice and suggestions of his crewmen, and often seizes upon their solutions.

Presumably the copy I read
once had a charming jacket like this

Take These Men is a valuable record of the fighting in North Africa prior to El Alamein; I feel like I know much more about the experiences of the participating soldiers in than I did before.  But does Take These Men work as a novel?  The book is definitely vulnerable to the charge that it reads more like a war memoir than a conventional piece of fiction.  Obviously, there is not a lot of suspense or surprise about big issues--we know ahead of time that Tony doesn't get killed and that the Allies win the war, and Joly exacerbates this issue by giving the chapters titles that spoil the fates of many of the characters, titles like "Templeton Dies," "Peters is Killed" and "Posted to Brigade Headquarters." However, individual scenes do achieve suspense of the "how will he get out of this one?" sort, and there are many exciting adventure-type episodes whose ending I could not predict.  In one such episode, during a withdrawal as the sun is setting, Tony's tank is immobilized and its radio knocked out.  Will Tony and crew bale out and sneak back to Allied lines on foot, or try to repair the track under cover of darkness?  Will the noise of using sledgehammers to fix the track attract a German patrol, or a British patrol which might shoot them down before identifying them?  In another scene Tony acts in the finest Nelsonian  tradition, pretending to not have heard a radio signal from Kinnaird ordering him to withdraw so he can instead strike out on his own to wipe out two dozen defenseless German trucks ("lorries") and a battery of anti-tank guns which is hooked up behind the trucks for transport.  Will our narrator be punished for his insubordination?  Will his refusal to return to his commander when ordered to do so put some other plan in jeopardy or some of his comrades in danger?

Joly's emphasis on the characters' psychologies, I think, also has some literary merit and provides compelling reading for those not fascinated by military equipment and battle tactics.  As the novel and the war wear on, Tony, and those around him, are changed by their terrible experiences.  In one memorably horrible episode in late 1941 fourteen hapless Italian soldiers surrender to Tony's tank, and to the shock of all concerned Tony's gunner massacres them with the Stuart's machine gun.  When upbraided by our appalled narrator, the gunner explains, "They killed me Mum and Dad with a bomb.  They deserved it....Ities or Jerries, it's just the same--they're as bad as each other."

Another such scene of horror grounded in psychology and human relationships is the final monologue of a troop commander who didn't get along well with his fellow officers.  When he and his troop are outflanked by the Germans and his tank is destroyed in a hail of fire, the misfit suffers an agonizing and lingering death, and his bitter and pathetic dying words, in which he curses the other members of the squadron ("Oh God, if they've deserted us, we haven't a hope in hell....the bastards have deserted me....They all hated me, and now they have left me....") are heard over the radio by the rest of the squadron, who have been ordered to escape without him.  The sensitive reader will have difficulty avoiding imagining himself in the place of the dying man, and in the shoes of the officers who do nothing to save him--chilling!

It is not all horror, though.  Our narrator and Kinnaird, who is a sort of role model and father figure to Tony, grow as people over the course of the book, learning to manage the weighty responsibilities and face the dreadful challenges presented to them by the war.  "Through it all I had gained a degree of self-confidence which I could not have acquired in any other way.  I had had responsibilities thrust upon me which before the war I would never have dreamnt of."  In the nightmare of war, Tony (and Joly?) found what the shrinks call self-actualization.

At the end of Part Four, on Christmas Eve, 1941, Tony suffers a head wound and is sent back to Cairo to recuperate for two months.  When he is done convalescing his squadron is equipped with American-built Grant tanks armed with a 75mm gun that can fire the kind of high explosive shells needed to deal with the famously effective German anti-tank guns.  (The A9 carried a 40mm gun, and the Stuart a 37mm.)  Part Five covers famous events like the fall of Tobruk and the Battles of Gazala and Alam Halfa, and is the least interesting and entertaining part of the book because much of it reads like a conventional military history--this division went here and fought that division and took this point after suffering so many hundred casualties and then the next day was reinforced by this other division zzzzzzzzzzzz--with fewer of the adventurous capers and intimate details about daily life of front line soldiers that made the earlier chapters so interesting and entertaining.  (Though there are still some good scenes about fighting in the Grant tanks and Tony's relationships with his fellow officers, including a working class noncom who gets a commission.)  The theme of Part Five is that under Auchinleck the Allied forces face setbacks because of a lack of a coherent plan and because the British armored units are dispersed throughout the Allied army-- in contrast, Rommel concentrates the Afrika Korps' tanks and thus achieves local superiorities which enable him to defeat the British tanks piecemeal.  As Joly tells it, the arrival of Montgomery, of whom Joly apparently heartily approves, vastly improves morale and paves the way for victory. as the Allied forces "were now controlled by a strong hand...there was no vacillation or indefiniteness in our plans."  (Joly doesn't actually name Auchinleck or Montgomery, just says things like "...the commander of the Army was changed...." but looking at the dates involved makes it clear who he is talking about.)

The comparatively brief Part Six sees Kinnaird promoted to brigadier (commander of three regiments), and Tony accompanies him as his right-hand man.  From this relatively lofty perch Tony observes the climactic (Second) Battle of El Alamein in October of 1942 and the British pursuit of the defeated Axis forces through Egypt, Libya, and into Tunisia where they finally surrender in May 1943.  Of interest in this section is the comparison of Tony's veteran force, the British Eighth Army, with the fresh British force which landed with the Americans in French North Africa, the British First Army.

A few years ago I read novels about World War II naval warfare by Royal Navy combat veterans Alistair Maclean and Nicholas Monsarrat, and these books were in my mind as I read Joly's Take These Men.  MacLean's novel, H.M.S. Ulysses, was an extravagant tragedy, portraying the Germans as superior to the Allies and the sailors of the Royal Navy as victims of an incompetent British government and high command, while Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea was full of criticism of British civilians, suggesting that unionized workers, unfaithful wives and smothering mothers were failing to do their part in the war effort and undeserving of the sacrifices and heroism of the Royal Navy's servicemen.

Epigraph from the title page

Joly's project, signaled by his choice of title page epigraph, a quote from Pericles which suggests the people of the British Commonwealth deserve freedom and prosperity because their men have had the courage to fight for them, is a different one from MacLean's or Monsarrat's.  In his intro Joly provides two reasons for writing his book: firstly, as a response to the incessant talk about the Afrika Korps ("...we have heard and read so much of Rommel and the Germans that we may perhaps forget that they originally learnt the foundations of their armoured doctrine from us and that we beat them soundly in the end.")  Reflecting this aim of the author's, Joly's characters, during Part Five, insist that German success is a result not of any peculiar genius on Rommel's part, but because the Germans have superior equipment.  Secondly, Joly tells us that most writing about the Desert War has been focused on the movements of entire armies and divisions, and Joly believes the "gallantry" of the ordinary Allied soldiers, the ways they lived, fought and died in North Africa, has not been but deserves to be recorded. While Joly talks at length about the psychological stresses suffered by the Allied servicemen, and almost all of the many characters we meet get maimed or killed, in contrast to MacLean, Joly is not cynical or bitter, and the soldiers he writes about are not the pitiful victims of higher powers but heroes who are fighting for freedom and justice.

When all was done and still no orders had come, I asked and obtained permission to visit the grave.  The burial party had long since gone, so that I was alone as I stood, beret in hand, in silent homage to the dead.  I felt no sorrow.  I knew that Peters had died in a just cause, as many more would die.  Rather, his death had steeled my determination for ever.     

Even though the whole novel takes place in Africa, in contrast to Monsarrat's criticisms of people on the home front, Joly finds a way to shoehorn in some mentions of the bravery of English civilians, and the officer's wives Tony meets in Cairo are all devoted to their husbands and the war effort.

When you read books from the past you gain insight into the thinking of an earlier age, thinking which, perhaps, is anathema to today's moral arbiters, an offense to our sensibilities.  Is there anything in this 60-year-old book that might stand out to readers in our politically correct age?  Reading Bill Mauldin's very interesting 1945 book Up Front a few weeks ago (I paid two bucks for a copy of the fourth printing at the Upper Arlington Library's huge book sale, where I got a stack of books and which I recommend to all in Central Ohio) I was surprised at how low an opinion Mauldin expressed of Italian civilians--the women and children are all entitled beggars and the men are all thieves, apparently--and in Take These Men I was a bit taken aback by Joly's harsh commentary on the Egyptians and Arabs native to the region where the Allies and Axis powers fought the titanic struggle he describes.

We saw the Egyptians as a craven and crooked nation, hiding behind the shield of our protection.  To us all it seemed natural that a race who would not move in self-defence even when the enemy had actually crossed their borders should be reviled in word and deed whenever need or opportunity arose.  We could have no respect for them, no sympathy with their sufferings, no hesitation in thinking of them as "Wogs" or "Gyppos" or "Gyppies."  The only words of their language which we bothered to learn were the more offensive and shorter epithets to summon or dismiss them.

In a scene late in the book the British tank crews and their vehicles are riding a train from Cairo to the front lines, and Tony and his comrades cannot sleep while en route, because the train must stop frequently and when it does "we had immediately to guard the whole length against a swarm of thieves and pilferers who emerged mysteriously from the shadows...." Later, when the narrator arrives at a battlefield in Tunisia he finds that the bodies of the German dead have "been denuded during the night by swarms of thieving Arabs."

(No doubt the people of North Africa would have equally choice words for the European interlopers who highhandedly dominated their region for ages, and as for looting German bodies, Joly makes no secret of the fact that individual Allied soldiers and the formal military apparatus are constantly appropriating the supplies and equipment of defeated Axis troops.)

Also noteworthy (to me at least), is what Joly's characters say about the Soviet Union. It is normal when people talk about World War II to hear a lot about the great sacrifices of the Russian people and how such and such high percentage of German divisions or casualties suffered were on the Eastern Front, but we don't get any of that from Tony and his subordinates.  When the British troops in Africa hear of the German invasion of Russia, Joly relates: "There was no sympathy with Russia, after her dealings in the summer of 1939 and the rape of Poland.  Indeed, I felt the situation could not have been better put than by my driver, who remarked tersely, 'Thieves always fall out.'"  When the United States is dragged directly into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a lorry driver cheerily announces "We've got friends besides them twisty Ruskies now."  It seems likely that Joly had the same attitude about revolutionary communism expressed so memorably by Bertie Wooster in that immortal classic of literature, "Comrade Bingo": "...as far as I can make out, the whole hub of the scheme seems to be to massacre coves like me; and I don't mind owning I'm not frightfully keen on the idea."

Though it has flaws when taken as a whole and considered solely as a work of modern fiction, Take These Men is full of very entertaining battle and adventure anecdotes and is a great source of knowledge about the lives of British soldiers serving in North Africa in the Second World War.  Highly recommended for WWII buffs and for fans of realistic adventure fiction.

Legion of the Damned by Sven Hassel

The Old Un was white in the face: "Let us promise each other that those of us, or the one of us, who escapes alive from this will write a book about this stinking mess in which we are taking part.  It must be a book that will be one in the eye for the whole filthy military gang, no matter whether German, Russian, American or what, so that people can understand how imbecile and rotten this sabre-rattling idiocy is." 

Remember when I read war fiction by a British Army officer who fought in the First World War and by Royal Navy officers who served in the Atlantic during the Second World War?  Well today we are going to the other side of the hill and reading war fiction by a Dane who joined the Wehrmacht and spent years  serving with the fighting forces of the diabolical Axis powers!  My edition of Legion of the Damned by Sven Hassel (birth name Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen) was printed in Great Britain by the Orion Publishing Group, apparently relatively recently, a translation from the Danish by Maurice Michael.  I got my copy at the Old Worthington Library's book sale.  (Worthington is this charming town with cute shops and an elaborate weekend farmer's market just north of Columbus.) The novel first was published in 1957.

There is quite a bit of controversy about what exactly "Hassel" did during the war--maybe he fought on the Eastern Front and maybe he was a uniformed collaborator in occupied Denmark who learned about the Eastern front from real Danish Waffen SS combat veterans.  I don't feel like examining all that very closely--Wikipedia will clue you into to some of that if you are interested.  I am going to read Legion of the Damned first and foremost in hopes of finding an exciting adventure story, and secondly with hopes of getting some kind of insight into what it was like to fight in World War II in Eastern Europe, as well as first-hand impressions of National Socialism, Soviet Socialism, and German and Russian racism, anti-Semitism and imperialism from somebody who wore an Axis uniform during the 1939-1945 cataclysm.

***********

I'm going to have to say that Legion of the Damned has been a disappointment. Rather than an adventure story or a realistic and detailed description of service in the Second World War, it is an impressionistic and emotional parade of incidents, a catalog of horrors, intended, ostensibly, to "oppose all war" and persuade the reader of "the need not only for revolt but for organised revolt against war."  While the narrator serves in the German Army and kills countless Red Army personnel, he is bitterly opposed to Nazism and is sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and almost all the book's characters share his attitude.  (There is no discussion of why or how Hassel, "an Auslands-deutscher...called up in Denmark" joined the German military in the first place.)

Like Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Legion of the Damned is a first person narrative that purports to be the memoirs of a protagonist with the same name as the novel's author.  The first scene is set at a court martial.  Caught trying to desert from the "11th Regiment of Hussars" (the names of units in the book appear to be fictional; according to Wikipedia the German Army's 11th Regiment of Hussars was disbanded in 1918), Hassel is sentenced to the "SS and Wehrmacht's Penal Concentration Camp, Lengries," where sadistic SS men torment, torture, and murder the prisoners for fun. Transferred to "Fagen Concentration camp near Bremen," the narrator is put to work in a quarry, and then defusing the unexploded British bombs that litter the surrounding German countryside.  (Wikipedia is telling me the RAF dropped over 12,000 tons of bombs on Bremen over the course of WWII--get to work, Hassel!)  When Hassel gets sick he is subjected to horrible medical experiments.

All this concentration camp stuff only takes like 20 pages, then Hassel is inducted into a penal battalion and we get 20 pages of anecdotes about how brutal the training is--much harder than the training of the regular troops.  Finally our narrator is assigned to the "27th Tank Battalion (Penal)" and meets the four friends with whom he will serve through many nightmarish hardships.  All four of these guys, like Hassel, are penal soldiers who are opposed to Hitler ("an untalented little bourgeois") and National Socialism ("a cause that we abominated"); they are also just the kind of broad and exaggerated characters we see in war movies all the time:

The Old Un, the tank commander, who is never afraid and is "almost like a father" to the rest of the tank crew,

Porta, the tank's driver, a sophisticated Berliner and a communist, an expert comedian, musician, sniper, and story teller who also excels at cheating at cards and seducing women, 

Pluto, the gunner, a "mountain of muscle" who ended up in the penal battalion as punishment for his career as a thief,

and Titch, the loader, a short man who worked in the perfume industry before getting in a brawl or something and falling into the clutches of the law and ending up in the penal battalion.

Our narrator operates the tank's radio ("wireless" is the word used in this British publication) early in his career as a tank crewman but for dramatic reasons sometimes mans the main gun or flamethrower.  As the penal battalion suffers casualties Porta and Hassel rise in rank and are given command of their own tanks.

These five cut ups do the kinds of things you see in service comedies and irreverent anti-war fiction all the time: stealing food, getting drunk, playing cards, adopting a child or animal as a mascot and giving it an ironic name ("Stalin," a cat, in this case,) humiliating the squares who take regulations seriously, murdering an abusive officer (a "bourgeois swine"), getting mixed up with the local women and getting in trouble with the military police.  Most of this stuff felt tired and was boring.

I thought it a little odd that the National Socialist government was issuing its precious tanks to the communists, thieves and deserters of the penal battalion, and I also thought it odd that Hassel, convicted deserter, was given a pass and allowed to ride a passenger train unguarded from the Balkans to Vienna to meet his long term girlfriend Ursula, whom he never mentioned during those months in the concentration camps. And if I thought hearing about Porta stealing Romanian civilians' geese and cheating a Romanian baron at cards was boring, I thought Hassel's little vacation with Ursula even more boring.  Hassel (the writer) includes these chapters with Ursula so we will be moved when, a hundred pages later, character Hassel receives word she was executed by the Nazis for participating in a political protest, but since she is so uninteresting the reader just shrugs off yet another execution; by then we (along with Hassel the character) have witnessed several.

(Writer Hassel is not averse to reusing ideas; late in the novel narrator Hassel gets a second girlfriend who gets killed in an Allied air raid, and our heroes murder a fanatical chaplain in much the same way they murdered that abusive officer.)    

Our protagonists leave the Balkans for North Africa, but their troop ship is sunk by Allied aircraft, and after they are rescued from the sea by an Italian destroyer they are sent to the Russian Front via train.  When the train stops next to a German concentration camp in occupied Poland the soldiers of the penal battalion link their belts to produce a makeshift rope and liberate three women from the the other side of the fence and somehow contrive to get them on a train going to occupied France.

Finally, on page 115 of this 249 page book, comes what I was waiting for: a combined arms attack on the Red Army in late 1941!  The Old Un's tank is right in the thick of things, battling Soviet armor and infantry.  After eight weeks of success, however, bad weather and supply shortages halt the German advance and the penal battalion has to blow up its own tanks and retreat, Hassel and friends fighting a rearguard action as infantry.  By page 123 Hassel is a prisoner of the Soviet Union!

As a prisoner in Russia, Hassel is beaten and sees scores of people--men and women, natives and invaders--tortured and executed by the communists, but he warns the reader not to let this color his attitude about Stalin or socialism. While he draws direct parallels between his treatment in the USSR and Nazi Germany ("...a GPU officer received us with well-directed blows of his fist, exactly the same fare as the SS had given me in Lengries"), he rejects "...the easy view that Nazism and the People's Democracy were one and the same thing, and that Stalin and Hitler were of the same kidney."  Hassel bases this assessment on a study of representations of the dictator's faces(!): "One look at their portraits will show that that is nonsense....Hitler and Stalin were as far from being alike as two men can be."

At times the incongruity between Hassel's descriptions of life in communist Russia and his defenses of the Soviet regime made me wonder if there was a chance he was being sarcastic, or was satirizing Western Soviet apologists.  After spending page after page describing how murderous, corrupt, class-ridden ("He [a minor character, a committed Bolshevik] was well-off, had a good salary and enjoyed all the privileges of the upper-class Soviet citizen, including being able to shop in the big party stores..."), and unpopular the communist party is, and how inefficient the sectors of the Soviet economy he witnessed are, he feebly suggests that things in other parts of the USSR were probably going just fine and what he saw shouldn't lead to suspicions about socialism in general or the USSR in particular.

After being held in various prisons and working in various factories in Russia, Hassel escapes and rejoins the penal tank battalion.  There are some interesting scenes of fighting in the last hundred pages of the book; these include tank battles, but since the 27th Battalion's tanks keep getting knocked out, Hassel and his buddies must often serve as infantry and defend trenches and go on night patrols in no man's land where they map enemy minefields and cut openings in the enemy wire.  At one point the Old Un is assigned command of a train car ("a coach") on an armored train mounting 120mm guns; the train does battle with Soviet tanks which "gradually closed in on us like ghastly attacking insects."  Then our heroes are issued armored cars and serve in a recon platoon.  (The author seems so determined to showcase as many facets of the war as possible that I began to wonder if Hassel might find himself manning the machine guns on a medium bomber or a submarine.)  There are chapters in hospital when Hassel is seriously wounded, while some of the most interesting and amusing chapters are those describing Soviet propaganda and other methods of inducing Wehrmacht soldiers to desert.

While a few chapters are effective, Legion of the Damned doesn't really work as a story.  The novel is episodic and flat, just a series of bloody incidents with very little plot, no climax, and little tension.  The characters aren't interesting enough for us to care when they get killed or lose family members to the war, and they do not evolve; Hassel is against the war and hates the Nazis and sympathizes with the Soviets at the start of the book and feels the same way at the end, and everybody agrees with him. (In a conventional narrative characters accomplish some goal or learn something about the world or themselves, but not in this one.)  The book rings the same notes again and again, depicting one gruesome death after another, one act of German or Soviet government cruelty, callousness or duplicity after another.  The style is bland (though that very well could just be a deficiency of the translation) and the jokes are banal and vulgar--two examples:

Before he [Porta] fell asleep he broke wind and said: "Take a sniff, dear children.  There're vitamins in the air."

Porta blew his nose in his fingers and spat at the wall, hitting a notice announcing that spitting was forbidden.

So, the book is not particularly entertaining.  But did I learn anything?  I have to say, not really.  I was hoping to learn all about combat tactics and the maintenance and use of equipment and weapons, and to hear characters from different demographics (social classes, religions, regions) talk about why the NSDAP appealed or failed to appeal to them, and maybe even hear Slavic characters talking about how Marxism and the Communist Party appealed or failed to appeal to them.  The combat scenes are vague and impressionistic; for example, Hassel and his buddies operate and lose numerous armored vehicles, but we are only told the model name of one, a Panther.  One tank they crew is armed with both a 105mm gun and a flamethrower, and I doubt such a vehicle really saw service in the German Army in WWII--at least I'm not finding anything like that in my copy of Chamberlain and Doyle's Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War Two.  (Woah, this book is worth 5 or 10 times what I paid for it in 2001.)

The sympathetic characters and narrator do talk about politics a bit, but they all speak with the same voice, a sort of conspiratorial leftism that detests the Nazis and hopes for world revolution; the author makes no effort to investigate the thinking of Nazis or to understand Nazism's appeal, and all the Nazi characters are despicable sadists, like movie villains.

In a chapter about Romania Hassel lays out his view of the war's causes.  Romania's leaders, Hassel asserts, allied with Germany not out of fear of the USSR but so that the German military would augment the Romanian police force and protect "oil wells, mines...and infinitely other monopolies" from being nationalized.  Hassel claims that the entire war was caused by the "indecently rich" to prevent just such "nationalisation": "The point of it was that we were to pull certain chestnuts out of the fire."  In a later chapter The Old Un suggests that Hitler was merely the puppet of other (unspecified) forces:

"Hitler and his dregs will be slaughtered, of course, and the sooner the better, but what are they but filthy puppets?  And it's not making a revolution if you just smash the puppets and let the director run off with the takings."            

Hassel has contempt for ideas of democracy and individual freedom, and thinks that to create a world of peace and plenty will require mass compulsion and an abandonment of traditional ideas of liberty:

I will willingly submit to even the strictest compulsion, if that be necessary, in order that we may live our lives in peace....there has to be an assertion of will; somebody has to see that all get enough to eat...and it will call for considerable toil...the need to subordinate oneself to the requirements of the general weal...that people forget self...." 

Legion of the Damned contains almost nothing about German anti-Semitism and racism or the Nazi regime's plans to exterminate the Jews and expel and enslave the Slavs.  The novel is full of victims of the Nazi regime but the foremost of these victims are German soldiers; it feels like one of Hassel's sub rosa aims is to distance the servicemen of the German armed forces from the Hitler regime and its evil and catastrophic policies, to portray them as victims instead of perpetrators, even though the armed forces were the instrument of those policies.  (This is the book in which German soldiers liberate women from concentration camp instead of imprisoning them in them.)

One of the things which made the war fiction I alluded to earlier (Sapper's No Man's Land, Alistair MacLean's H.M.S. Ulysses and Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea) engaging was how their authors, included in their books ideas that were challenging, surprising, or counterintuitive.  Sapper tried to convince us that World War One, which we've always been told was a stupid waste, had a positive side, MacLean portrayed the Royal Navy, which we usually see portrayed in an heroic light, as a bunch of fuck ups, and in his book Monsarrat bitterly complained about how civilians, like women and labor union workers, refused to pull their weight during the 1939-45 war and failed to treat British servicemen as well as they deserved.  There isn't much like that in Legion of the Damned.  Sure, it's crazy that a Dane would join the German Army, but Hassel never explains how this happened.  Instead he spends the whole book trying to convince us that war is bad and Nazism is bad, things we already believe and have already been told a hundred times (and more compellingly.)  In a just world, Hassel's apparent sympathy for the communist party of the Soviet Union and its leader, Josef Stalin, would be surprising and challenging, but during a career in academia and a life among arty people I have read and met plenty of Marxists and Soviet apologists.

Legion of the Damned didn't really hold my interest; in fact, I found myself putting off reading it to instead play a seven-year-old PC version of Games Workshop's "Blood Bowl."  So, gotta give this one a down vote.  Too bad.  People interested in anti-war literature which tries to shock you with depictions of atrocity and gore, and people interested in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union of the Stalin era may find Legion of the Damned a worthwhile read, but I believe it fails as a novel, and that people already interested in its topics will learn little from it.

**********

I actually own a rusty old German helmet in the style of those worn during the World Wars, though I have no idea how authentic it might be. A kid living next door to my maternal grandmother, with whom my brother and I would play Games Workshop games in the late '80s and early '90s, brought it over once, having found it in his basement, where it had accidentally been spotted with silver spray paint. He never took this artifact back home, and when my grandmother died and my parents cleared out her house I ended up with it.  I sometimes wonder if Gefreiter Franki or Franzki, or whatever it is that the inscription signifies, was a real soldier and if he survived the war to lead a normal life or if he died in some dreadful circumstances in a battle or some kind of internment.

[Update 8/29/2016: Text of paragraph about North Africa and Poland amended at suggestion of commenter SK.]

The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat

When Ericson looked round his own wardroom, he saw in theory a journalist, a barrister, a bank clerk, and a junior accountant; but these labels were now meaningless--they were simply his officers, the young men who ran his ship and who had adapted themselves to this new life so completely that they had shed everything of their past save the accent it had given them.

MPorcius Fiction Log's Middle West HQ recently moved from the Des Moines area to the environs of Columbus, Ohio, and on my solo 11-hour drive, poor Toyota Corolla weighted down with boxes of vases and statues I didn't trust to the movers, I stopped in Urbana, Illinois, to stretch my legs and check out a book store.  When I walked into the store I was met by the strains of classical music and found my path obstructed by a cart full of sheet music and the store's bespectacled inhabitants.  These worthies were discussing some kind of recent symphonic composition, how its movements symbolized different eras in the history of Western civilization.  Or something; it was pretty far over my head.

As they opined I walked the aisles between the towering stacks of hardcover books.  I didn't see any paperbacks, and I didn't see a science fiction section, either.  I was too shy to ask the sophisticates where (if?) they carried such books, but I wanted some kind of souvenir of this pit stop on my journey from one four-letter Midwest state to another, so I scrutinized the fiction section.  Maybe there would be something worth buying by Lessing, Maugham or Nabokov, writers whose work I could purchase in view of these Urbana geniuses without embarassment.

Lying crosswise atop a shelf of Ls, Ms and Ns was a lone paperback, a Cardinal Giant edition of The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat.  (I actually read Monsarrat's memoir Three Corvettes in the '90s, but I don't remember anything about it.)  Along with the surprisingly cheerful naval officer (I guess he doesn't know anybody on that burning ship in the background), the cover was marked with a blurb from a California newspaper declaring The Cruel Sea to be the best novel about naval warfare of all time!  This sounded like a direct challenge to Alistair MacLean's 1955 novel H.M.S. Ulysses, which I read last year, and which also has an extravagantly superlative cover blurb.  I have always been interested in British naval history, and the musicologists only wanted one dollar for this volume (just double the cover price!), so I snatched it up.

My 1954 edition of The Cruel Sea, a novel first published in 1951, clocks in at 501 pages.  The book follows the officers of H.M.S. Compass Rose, one of the first Flower-class corvettes, small slow ships tasked with defending convoys from Axis submarines.  Compass Rose's captain, Ericson, is a professional naval officer, but the bulk of the crew is made up of people who have joined the Navy since the start of the war, leaving behind civilian careers; Ericson's lieutenants left law offices, banks and newspapers for just a few weeks of training and then a few years fighting for their lives against the elements and the Kriegsmarine.  Compass Rose is based in Liverpool, and Ericson and company go on dozens of voyages, escorting convoys of supply ships, troop transports, and merchant vessels to and from the midpoint between Canada and Britain, as well as to and from Gibraltar.  While on these missions she, her fellow escorts, and her charges are menaced by German aircraft and U-boats, and many Allied ships and seamen (and even some women!) are wiped out by torpedoes and bombs.

In the first 100 pages or so of the novel we have a villain, Bennett, an Australian, the second-in-command of the Compass Rose, who bullies his direct subordinates, shirks his duties, and lied about his experience in order to secure this position.  This brute, after Compass Rose's first few voyages, feigns an illness that gets him transferred to a safe job ashore.  In the last third of the book we learn that he has become Australia's national hero by lying about his exploits, claiming he sank many submarines but was callously unrecognized by the English government.  Leftist English people I have met (academics, like most of the people I meet) have expressed to me a distaste for Australians quite similar to the hostility evinced by left-wing Northeasterners for Texans--in the eyes of these English acquaintances of mine Australians are "macho" braggarts, uncouth and unsophisticated cowboys.  Reading The Cruel Sea I wondered if Monsarrat, who portrays a skinny English journalist (Lockhart, who replaces Bennet as second-in-command), a shy English bank teller (Ferraby, who manages the depth charges on Compass Rose) and an impeccably educated English lawyer (Old Wykehamist Morrell) as more courageous than the boisterous and muscular Australian Bennett, was somehow voicing a criticism of the Australian citizenry held by many English people.

Australians aren't the only group that comes in for criticism in The Cruel Sea--in fact they get off lightly compared to the French (Free French sailors, who are said to be uncommitted to the struggle and eager to return home, whether or not France is liberated from German control, are unfavorably compared to Scandinavian sailors) and the Irish.  Monsarrat blames Ireland's neutrality, which bars British use of naval and air bases which could extend the range of Allied warships and warplanes hundreds of miles, for many Allied losses, and grouses that the Irish are free riders who enjoy the protection from Hitler's tyranny provided by the hard-pressed Allies while contributing nothing.  And then there are the Liverpudlian dockworkers who refit Compass Rose in 1941.  Not only are most of the "dockies" slackers who do a mediocre job, but their unions actually use the current crisis that is threatening to destroy modern civilization as an opportunity to go on strike and wring more money out of the British taxpayer!  Lockhart muses, "They were among the people whom sailors fought and died for; at close quarters, they hardly seemed to deserve it."

The Cruel Sea is quite superior to H.M.S. Ulysses.  For one thing, Monsarrat's tone is more mature, varied, and believable.  MacLean wrote hyperbolically, the text full of extremes: at the start of his novel we were told, at some length, about how the eponymous vessel was the most advanced ship in the world and the crew the most put upon crew in history sent on the most difficult mission in history.  Then every page was about the Allies fucking up again and again and getting thrashed by the Germans again and again.  H.M.S. Ulysses was a kind of operatic tragedy brimming over with larger than life characters enduring the biggest storms of all time and the most dangerous battles of all time, suffering the most crushing defeats of all time. Monsarrat's writing is more even, more realistic, with a mix of ups and downs and a cast of more easily relatable characters with believable flaws and virtues.  There are plenty of Allied fatalities and British screwups--like a horrific friendly-fire incident when Compass Rose drops depth charges in the vicinity of some 40 swimming Allied sailors, killing all of them (and no Germans, alas)--but there are Royal Navy successes, too, U-boats sunk and hundreds of Allied seamen rescued.

Another advantage of the Cruel Sea is that it follows the course of the entire Second World War (H.M.S. Ulysses only covers one mission between Britain and Russia), so we see the characters and the nature of the war they are immersed in evolve over time, and get to observe the characters' home lives, sexual relationships and friendships.  I thought almost all of the human relationships--those with nagging mothers-in-law, stifling mothers, and unfaithful wives; the relationships between Ericson and his son and between Ferraby and his daughter; and the bond that develops between Ericson and Lockhart--rang true and were, at times, touching.  I should perhaps note that feminist readers may have as much to complain about the book as Australians, Frenchmen and Irishmen; women in the book tend to be pretty crummy--manipulative, deceitful, selfish, or just boring.  The Cruel Sea isn't "We're all in this together!"/"Diversity is our strength!" war propaganda or a feel-good story in which each gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation has an heroic representative and all demographics contribute equally to victory.  The characters feel like real people, not archetypes or tokens, and one of Monsarrat's themes is that people are most emphatically not "all in it together," nor are they contributing equally--many nations, sectors of society, and individuals do not take the war seriously at all, or exploit it as an opportunity to pursue their own selfish goals.

Belgian poster for the 1953 film version
of The Cruel Sea

Just past the 300 page mark Compass Rose is sunk by the Germans, and fewer than a dozen of the approximately 90-man crew escape a horrible death.  Ericson, Lockhart and Ferraby are among the survivors, though Ferraby is mentally shattered and spends the rest of the war in a psychiatric hospital.  Ericson and Lockhart are given command of a River-class frigate, Saltash, a somewhat larger vessel based in the Clyde, and Ericson is promoted to managing entire convoys that sail all the way to Canada or to Murmansk.  The Saltash spends two months refitting in New York, so we get Monsarrat's opinion of the U.S.A. (Americans are likable and hard-working and America is obviously the future) as well as of Communist Russia (inefficient and oppressive.)  

One of the book's few false notes is also to be found in its Saltash portion: Lockhart starts a love affair with a Glasgow-based female officer who is startlingly beautiful (before the war she was on the cover of Vogue) and turns out to be the perfect life partner for him.  Not only is she too good to feel true, but Monsarrat describes their first meeting, their dates, their first sexual congress, and their undying love in a romantic gushing fashion that feels sappy and overdone.  In keeping with one of Monsarrat's themes, that the true practitioner of war is consumed fully by the war and distractions can only blunt his ability to perform, the fashion model turned Wren is tragically killed back in Scotland while Lockhart is in New York, which was a relief to this reader!

It took me like two weeks to read The Cruel Sea, but this was because I have been so occupied with settling things in the new domicile--the novel is good, both interesting and entertaining, and does not feel long.  As I have said, the human relationships are good; the maritime anecdotes, action scenes and scenes of gory or macabre death also work.  As with H.M.S. Ulysses and Sapper's No Man's Land, I found intriguing the opinions about war in general and of a particular campaign of a man who actually fought in the campaign under discussion.  I would certainly recommend The Cruel Sea to military history buffs and readers of war and adventure fiction.