Maltese Mystery Solved

Today the Miami Herald announced that “Aurora Trust, a not-for-profit ocean exploration and education foundation, has solved a World War II British mystery” with its discovery of a long-missing submarine.

 “On May 8, 1942, under the cover of darkness, the British submarine HMS Olympus (N35) was attempting to leave the British Naval Base in the Grand Harbor of Malta, a tiny island nation just south of Sicily and north of Tripoli that was blockaded by the Germans and Italians.”

Subjected to prolonged bombing and blockading by first the Italians and then the Germans, the small island of Malta was considered to be of strategic importance in the Mediterranean, and endured two years of air and naval attacks, known as the Siege of Malta.  For its heroism during the ordeal, the entire island of Malta was awarded the George Cross, the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross. 

 For more on the role of Malta during the war, check out this fascinating web site.

For a gripping fictional account, I recommend a recently released thriller, The Information Officer, by Mark Mills, which sets a tense thriller during the siege.

Remembering Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle with K-9 friend

Today’s 11/11/11 edition of The New York Times has a story about the struggles of the Ernie Pyle Museum in Dana, Indiana. 

Since it is 11/11, Veterans Day, but also 2011, a time when hard-core journalism is struggling, I thought a reminder of Pyle and his accomplishments might be in order. 

Ernie Pyle was what they did not yet call an “embedded” reporter (they were “combat correspondents” then) following the infantry in North Africa and Europe in 1943and 1945, before he moved to the Pacific theater, where he was killed by enemy fire near Okinawa in April of 1945.  He wrote about the day to day life of what he called “the mud-rain-wind-and-frost boys” and once opined, “Folks with boys over there are a damned sight more interested in reading the homely, every day, what do they eat and how do they live sort of stuff, than they are in reading the heavy strategic, as-I-predicted-in-my-analysis-back-in-1920 sort of stuff.” 

He was right.  Having chosen the unenviable task of conveying the reality of the front back to the home front, he performed his job with little thought to his own comfort or even his career, and found it wrenching to say goodbye to the troops in Italy to go to the Pacific.  The G.I.’s loved him, and so did their families.  Mothers wrote to Pyle personally, asking him to look up their sons.  After he campaigned, through his columns, that combat soldiers should receive an additional “fight pay” just as pilots earned “flight pay,” Congress did indeed pass such a law, which was called “the Ernie Pyle Bill.”

A native Hoosier, Pyle attended Indiana University, which later named its School of Journalism building after him.  Buried in Okinawa alongside fallen troops, Pyle was one of the few civilians to earn a Purple Heart.

Enigma

CNN reported today that an Enigma machine, the encoding device used by the Germans in World War II, was sold at Christie’s after a three-day bidding war for $208,137, to a “collector.” A collector of what, I wonder? Archaic keyboards? Not that I have anything against archaic keyboards, mind you. I still miss my typewriter, and think fondly of the insanely and even then antique huge adding machine my father had in his office. More likely, the collector collects memorabilia of World War II, which makes me wonder what else he has in his collection, if he can shell out that much for an unsightly and useless machine.

The reports of the sale, to this enigmatic collector, touch glancingly on the novel “Enigma” by Robert Harris, giving greater weight to the fact that the novel was made into a “Hollywood movie starring the award-winning actress Kate Winslet.” This is unfortunate, because the movie was rubbish, but the novel really is very good.
A high-strung, brilliant mathematician,Tom Jericho, returns to Bletchley Park (headquarters of the code-breakers) after cracking up while trying to crack the code. His fickle perhaps traitorous former flame Claire (played in the film by Saffron Burrows) has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Claire’s plain Jane roommate Hester (played in the film by Kate Winslet, in glasses and a frumpy cardigan because, right, that will make her plain), also employed at Bletchley, assists Tom in his quests to break both the Enigma code and the mystery of what happened to Claire and why the Nazis suddenly changed the code after Claire disappeared.

I read this novel several years ago and what I remember most is its depiction of a nearly-defeated Britain, in its fifth year of war, depleted of nearly all its resources, fighting to keep what little remained out of the hands of the callous Americans. A riveting read.

An Interview with Rebecca Cantrell

Rebecca Cantrell

I’m interested in how this series was conceived.  Did you have in mind a situation where a German citizen watches the rise of the Nazi party in horror and must take action, or did you conceive of Hannah Vogel, your protagonist, first?

I did it completely backwards! The story started with Ernst Vogel, Hannah’s brother and the murder victim in “A Trace of Smoke.” I had a gay host brother when I lived in Berlin and after I saw a faded pink triangle on the wall at Dachau concentration camp, I realized that he would have been killed 50 years earlier just for being who he was. So I started thinking about gays who died in concentration camps and that led me to the thriving gay scene in Weimar-era Berlin which led to Ernst who led to Hannah who led to the series. It was a bit of a winding cobblestone street.

The opening of the first novel, “A Trace of Smoke,” is so compelling — Hannah sees a photograph of her younger brother, who she raised, in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead at the Berlin police station, but can’t let anyone know who he is. 

Thank you! I stumbled across a mention of that hall in Joseph Roth’s “What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933,” which is a fascinating compilation of newspaper articles that Roth wrote while living in Berlin. He had an eye for the darkness and rot hidden beneath the frenetic façade of Weimar-era Berlin and that hall is one example. Once I read his piece, I knew that the story had to start there.

There are several detective novel series (Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshaswski, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone) with female protagonists, and I’ve always been fascinated by the balance these writers have to maintain between the physical violence protagonists must endure in these types of scenarios, and the fact that the protagonist is female, as is much of the readership, so violence must usually remain more threat than action.  There were some scenes in “A Game of Lies,” where Hannah was in real danger.  Can you address the issues you face as a writer in maintaining that balance?

I have to follow Hannah wherever she goes, and she keeps going to very dangerous places. Real women got hurt during that era, so I don’t shy from showing that, although I also don’t dramatize every bit of gore. I think it’s a balance of showing what’s there, but not showing it in a way that makes the reader turn away for good. Then and now women faced acts of violence against them. It’s part of real life, and it’s part of Hannah’s.

You do a wonderful job of conveying the hardships the German population had to endure after the first world war — the inflation, the unemployment — without coming across as lecturing.  I wonder what the feedback on this has been?   Do you have readers writing to you who say “I never knew this”?

I often hear exactly that from readers! Although just as often I also hear “I did know that and I’m glad to finally see in on the page.” My readers are an interesting mix of very knowledgeable history buffs and those just learning about life in Berlin in the 1930s for the first time.

Speaking of feedback, has any of it been negative.  I ask because our current sociopolitical landscape has become so black and white.  Has anyone taken you to task for presenting the German citizens as ordinary people caught up in an evil government, as opposed to evil people?

So far, so good. Like every other author, I’ve had a few negative reviews on Amazon, but overall the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I expected more of a reaction to portraying German people during the Nazi era as just as nuanced and complicated as people everywhere, but so far readers seem to be understanding the truth of that.

Can you discuss integrating real historical figures into your stories?

That’s been an interesting challenge. I have several characters in the books who existed in real life—Ernst Röhm, Theodor Eicke, Hans Frank, Adolf Hitler, Bella Fromm, Sefton Delmer—and I try to be as meticulous as I can with that research. I consult as many sources as I can find so that the characters feel true to who they were originally and also that any real life events I portray (such as Röhm’s arrest and execution) follow the historical record as closely as possible.

Your next novel is called “A City of Broken Glass.” I assume it’s about Kristallnacht.  If it were all up to you, would you continue to write the series so that it covers the whole span of the war?  Would you take the characters beyond that, to an occupied Berlin?

It is, indeed, about Kristallnacht. I would like to do nine books: a pre-war trilogy (which is already written, with “A Trace of Smoke,” “A Night of Long Knives,” and “A Game of Lies”), a war trilogy (“A City of Broken Glass,” something set in Palestine in 1940, and one set in Berlin in 1945 as the city is falling), and a post-war trilogy (with books about re-uniting families, hunting Nazi war criminals, and the Berlin airlift). There is such an incredibly rich history there to explore!

Your glossaries and author’s notes at the end of each book are so helpful.  What authors, books, and resources have particularly helped you through your research  journey?

For nonfiction books, I loved “A Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larsen (I only wish he’d published it years earlier so he could have saved me some time.)  The Joseph Roth I mention above, “Before the Deluge” by Otto Friedrich and “The Weimer Republic Sourcebook” by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, and “Voluptuous Panic” by Mel Gordon.

But really the best source is diaries, like Bella Fromm’s “Blood and Banquets” and Sefton Delmer’s “The Counterfeit Spy” and “Berlin in Lights” by Harry Kessler and “I Bear Witness” by Victor Klemperer.

And don’t even get me started on the wonderful fiction out there, from Philip Kerr’s “Berlin Noir” series to David Downing’s Station books to the original Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories” to Jeffrey Deaver’s “Garden of Beasts.”

Plus the movies filmed in Berlin in the early 1930s…

Rebecca Cantrell’s most recent novel is “A Game of Lies.”  Visit her website at http://rebeccacantrell.com.

“So Much So Many So Few” Launches

Welcome

Welcome to the launch of the book blog So Much So Many So Few, which covers the literature of World War II. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” declared Winston Churchill in a speech commending the efforts of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain in 1940. That sentiment remains true, as the war shaped the world into what it is today.

The stories of those who fought and lived through it remain one of the most popular topics for fiction. While researching my own novel about a group of women and their contribution to the war effort, I read entirely “in period” for two years.  Novels like “The Postmistress” by Sarah Blake, “The Information Officer” by Mark Mills, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” by Jamie Ford (our inaugural review) and the entire works of writers like Alan Furst and John Lawton were of great inspiration to me, and as I continue to research, I want to share my experience of these books with you.

Reviews will be on the “Review” page.  The focus of So Much So Many So Few is literary and mystery fiction, and literary memoirs. The “Remembrance” page will feature contributions by individual readers describing a relative’s experience during the war.

Comments

Your comments are welcome.