Words of Wood

I write up books when I read them and forget to post the actual review, so here's a collection of books I've read sometime in the past six months.

The Anatomy of Courage, Lord Moran
As recommended by black_bentley, a constant pusher of fantastic books, thank you! This is all about fear and courage in warfare and their relationship with shell-shock and other psychological traumas of war. The author was a trench doctor in WW1 and then later became Churchill's personal physician, though this book is almost entirely about his WW1 experiences, written in 1942. It was a really fantastic read.

Sometimes the biases of the era come through: Moran occasionally comes out with stuff about how 'good racial stock' is required for avoiding shell shock and cowardice, but it always feels like those are platitudes he's occasionally diverted by before getting into the practical, vivid and very sensible things he has to say about the causes of mental breakdown, based on his WW1 observations. He has a lot to say about the differences between a professional standing army and a citizen army of conscripts, about how men in a citizen army react to danger, how good morale and esprit du corps are protective against mental trauma, how fear operates and how to combat it, what courage looks like, what kind of leadership soldiers respond to and its impact on the mental wellbeing of the soldiers - he doesn't use modern jargon for any of this, but that's what a modern reader would take from it. He talks a bit about the different branches of the service and how the air force and navy and submarine service have different impacts on mental health both because of the different demands of the service - the group isolation of a ship vs the largely solo isolation of a fighter pilot - and because of the different traditions and beliefs these services held about themselves, and compares that to experience of the infantryman in the trenches.

In an odd way I found it a very relatable and reassuring book. It made me realise that I'm pretty confident I have the type of courage Moran talks about, to hold firm when horrifying things are happening because others are depending on you holding firm, and confident not in a sort of wishful-thinking I'm-sure-I-could-do-that way, but the same way I'm confident I can spell miscellaneous: I've done it, or something as like to it as a middle-aged woman in peacetime can get, lots of times before. I recogised a lot of the emotional dynamics he describes, the way you recover after a sudden shock of violence, the temporary unravelling and how your mind and body heal up again, and I also recognised the factors that protect, or in their absence damage, your ability to hold firm, both practical - food, sleep, rest breaks, humour, health - and moral - the belief in what you are doing and why, social support from others doing the same thing, the conviction that failure is not an option. A really good, insightful book.


Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans, Daniel Cowling
Apologies if the title causes you to get a song stuck in your head for the next week, I already had the song stuck in my head and then tripped over the book. This is a decent general overview of the British occupation of Germany 1945-9; Cowling doesn't go into anything in tremendous detail but gives a little bit of lots of things. I've read books that take a much deeper dive into certain aspects - the Berlin Airlift, the T-Force memoir and also the bonkers sigint book, plus a general book on the postwar atrocities across Europe - and so some of this was a bit top-down overview compared to that. The chapter on 'fratting', for instance, was interesting read against the memoir with its candid details about German women selling sex for food, and the relationship with the former owners when living in requisitioned property. Though, given the memoir's emphasis on partying and having fun and hiring one's friends, that certainly backed up Cowling's chapter on the ineptitude and bad behaviour of the military and civilian government. Cowling's argument comes across a bit incoherent at times - there's an awful lot of 'wow the occupiers were awful and incompetent and made a total mess' followed by a chapter on the rapid recovery, economic growth and stable democratic government in West Germany afterwards, so you're left wondering just how Cowling thinks these two accounts fit together.

There was quite a lot about the economics of the occupation, I did love the chapter on the black market and some of the unforeseen consequences. The 'money for old smokes' scandal was ridiculous: British soldiers and civilians stationed in Germany got a free ration of cigarettes, fifty a week. Cigarettes were the de facto currency of German civilians, the mark being essentially worthless in 1945-6, and so you could trade your cigarettes with German civilians for anything from accordions to dental care (though sex was usually paid for in chocolate or other food). And one thing you could trade them for was German marks, lots of them. But there was one place where German marks were used at their official exchange rate, and that was NAAFI shops. So you could take your free cigarettes, sell them for an awful lot of German marks, then take the German marks and exchange them in the NAAFI shops for whatever you wanted. Which included postal orders and savings bonds in sterling, which you could deposit in your nice British bank account. If you saved up your free cigarettes for a few months, with 500 cigarettes you could easily get £100, which was a tidy sum. And it seems that practically everyone stationed in Germany realised this at once, because this particular type of transaction led to a £50 million hole in the occupation's budget. Which is an argument for the incompetence of the British administration, certainly.

And as for the title, Cowling doesn't ever really engage with the question: were we beastly to the Germans, and should we have been. It's interesting to compare this book to Keith Lowe's Savage Continent, which is a much broader book in scope and yet also vastly more detailed and incisive: Lowe really engages with the question of human suffering on all levels and the historian's ethics, he talks about the lack of acknowledgement of the Holocaust in the immediate post-war attempts to prosecute war crimes and care for refugees, about the expulsion of ethnic Germans from much of eastern Europe and how the very real suffering this caused is used by historians of particular political bents who want to argue that the Germans were the real victims of WW2 and setting it in the context of what else was happening and to who... by contrast Cowling never really gets into the difficult questions. He quotes an awful lot of British newspapers and their opinions of how generous or harsh we should be to German civilians postwar - in many ways this is a British newspaper account of the occupation: how it was perceived at home in the context of what was happening politically in the UK, and that's about the level on which Cowling engages with the question. He gives brief snapshots of varying attitudes - a display in London of daily rations for German civilians which was designed to show how much worse off they were in 1946 than British civilians (whose food was rationed even more severely than in wartime) ended up with a lot of people thinking the Germans were still getting much too generous an allocation. On the other hand Cowling also includes stories of British soldiers routinely handing over their rations to famished German children. But he never really engages with it beyond this superficial skim of attitudes, and he also avoids exploring the German perspectives and what they thought about it. So, a good general overview of the occupation and introduction to it all, but go elsewhere for insight and detailed analysis.


Paid To Be Safe, Margaret Morrison & Pamela Tulk-Hart
The final of my IWM wartime novels, written together by two ATA ferry pilots about a fictional ATA ferry pilot. So not quite a memoir, but strongly based on real experiences and set at real airfields. I really enjoyed this, it's deftly written, captures the essense of the experience beautifully and is full of fascinating detail. And also death: this is a book in which a lot of the characters die, because it's wartime and that's what happens in wartime and I don't doubt that the main character's experience of multiple bereavements is both realistic and realistically written.

Our heroine is Susan Sandyman, who managed to escape Singapore before the Japanese arrive and has just arrived back in England, with husband and infant child both dead and desperately in need of something to think about that isn't that. And she learned to fly back when she lived in Malaya, and so she joins the ATA to become a ferry pilot, and we follow her adventures until the end of the war. There's a tremendous amount of fantastic detail about the training process, vivid descriptions of life in the training schools, the different people Susan meets and what the training is like, and all the things she learns about all the different aircraft and the process of learning how to cope with a job where you might fly five different types of aircraft in one day, compared to the normal RAF training where you might only ever fly one or two. There were some fantastic stories that must have been drawn from life like how a caterpillar in a pitot tube can very nearly make you crash.

The title, Paid To Be Safe, is what was drummed into the ferry pilots: their job is not to take any risks, their job is to transport the valuable and much-needed aircraft safely from A to B, their job is to keep themselves and their aircraft safe at all times and to know how to never get into dangerous situations in the first place. Despite this it is still a dangerous job, and ferry pilots die in training and in service - as I said, this is a book where sudden death can happen to anyone at any point, whether it's disease or bombs or airplane crashes, a very wartime book with this constant thread of trauma running underneath everything else.


The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
This was a really good Terror forced proximity AU readerfic that had an incoherent plot sellotaped to it. Loved the time travellers getting to know each other and the modern world, and their characters were drawn fairly well, but all the other characters were pretty bland, and the main character and narrator in particular was very much a generic-tumblr narrative voice. There was plenty of drama and excitement and events, I whizzed through the book waiting for the moment when it would all make sense, but it never did, the plot was just tacked on to try to explain to the non-fandom world why the author was writing Graham Gore/modern reader self insert. But despite that I'd have read another 100k of Time Travellers Have Adventures With Bikes And Spotify, especially if it had involved more about one of the secondary time travel characters, Captain Arthur Reginald Smyth, retrieved from the Somme about five minutes before his death and by far my favourite of the characters for highly predictable reasons. A fun but frustrating book.