Robert Wilson’s spy novel The Company of Strangers was published in 2001. It spans the period 1940 to 1991, though over two-thirds of the book is set in the 1940s.

In 1940 Andrea Aspinall has survived German bombing in London which reinforces her hate of Germans. Her mother seems cold towards her so there is no love between them either. We then leap two years to the German invasion of Russia. Captain Karl Voss is disillusioned by the incompetence of Hitler who is unwilling to admit his forces face defeat against the cannon fodder of Russia. ‘It’s as if God’s lost control of the game and the children have taken over – naughty children’ (p328). Before he can be slaughtered, he is sent home to Berlin on compassionate leave in 1943. While there he is approached by a high-ranking officer; he is to be transferred to the German Legation in Lisbon. He is to become a spy – with the intention of shortening the war by clandestinely meeting with sympathetic British agents... 

In 1944 Andrea is recruited and trained as an agent for ‘the Company’ to work in Lisbon under the name of Anne Ashworth. Despite Portugal being neutral and one of England’s oldest allies, the country was not regarded as a safe haven. Under Salazar’s quasi-fascist regime, ‘Secret police – Gestapo trained – called the PVDE. The city’s infested with bufos – informers’ (p82). ‘... what she knew about the Portuguese – they understood tragedy, it was their territory’ (p413).

Voss is entangled in the secret machinations of Operation Valkyrie – the assassination attempt on Hitler – as well as his growing relationship with Andrea. There are shifting allegiances, it seems, and nobody can be trusted. That includes the bickering Americans, Hal and Mary Couples, Andrea’s host Wilshere and his demented wife Mafalda, the SIS agents Meredith, Sutherland, Rose and Wallis and the suspected turncoat Lazard. There is also the mystery of her predecessor, the American Judy Laverne who was either deported or died in a terrible motor accident. And behind the scenes Russian spymasters are lurking.

The febrile atmosphere in Lisbon is projected realistically and the action scenes, where blood is spilt, are dramatic and exciting. From time to time the suspense is high, too. And while the plot is convoluted it remains compulsive, and despite the narrative moving across many years the reader’s interest is held for the 560+ pages.

The book title crops up at least twice. Once when strangely she suddenly harbours a fear while flying, when God might ‘let them drop from the sky and she would die in the company of strangers, unknown and unloved’ (p417) and referred to again on p542.

When writing of the tragedy of Portugal, he could have been referring to the tragedy of the main characters. Sadly, I found the ending unsatisfactory – though in all probability truthful. This is only my opinion, after all. Indeed, Wilson is a good writer and has a gift for the telling phrase and metaphor, such as these samples:

‘She gave him a smile torn from a magazine’ (126). [Like this, better than giving him an insincere smile...].

‘blistered with rust’(p203) – a good description.!

‘He stirred his tea for a long time for a man who didn’t take sugar’ (p431). [conveys disguised mental turmoil, perhaps].

‘She listened again to the settling house and painted the desktop with her torch beam’ (p202). [better than his torch lit up the desktop].

‘Cardew shifted in his seat and looked as wary as a grouse on the Glorious Twelfth’ (p95).

‘Cardew stared intently at the windscreen as if the entrails of squashed insects might lead him somewhere’ (p97).

‘... fighting his way into unconsciousness, desperate  to stop living with whatever he had in his mind’ (p118).

‘The wind was stronger out here, blowing sand across the road, which corrugated to washboard, hammering at the suspension’ (p121). [good visuals!].

The blurb refers to this book as a thriller. While there are thrilling interludes, I feel it is too sedate to be a thriller. It’s a good novel, though.

Editorial comment – for the benefit of writers:

‘the incessant chatter in the room suddenly grated on Anne’s ears like a steel butcher’s saw ripping through bone’ (p160). [Probably should be a butcher’s steel saw, since he wouldn’t be a robot?]

‘I tried to join the WRENS...’ (p181). This should be either lower case Wrens or uppercase WRNS.

So many scriptwriters do this all the time: ‘... she saw Lazard and I together in the casino...’ (p269) – Should be ‘Lazard and me’. And ‘...Rocha had seen Voss and I together in Bairro Alto’ (p330).

I feel that metaphors are sometimes best jettisoned:

‘... a voice as clipped as a shod hoof on cobbles’ (p149).

‘He searched himself for words, like a man who’s put a ticket in too safe a place’ (p163).

‘He waited for a lifetime, which in normal currency was only twenty minutes’ (p320).

Uki Goñi’s  2022 book is sub-titled ‘How Nazi War Criminals Escaped Europe’ and is an updated version of a book of the same title published in 2002. He has been relentless in delving into old archives in Argentina and Europe, and even the CIA. This testament reveals the people ‘co-mingling in a common cause: a bitter and shared hatred of communism that united the unlikely combination of capitalists, fascists and Catholics into the project known by Nazi sympathisers as the ‘Reich migratory route’.

While it is probably common knowledge that a number of war criminals escaped to Argentina, I for one was surprised at how many succeeded and escaped censure, later dying of old age. There were literally thousands who got away with mass murder.

In the 1970s, Goñi’s newspaper office was inundated with concerned citizens: ‘Daily, mothers of the victims would come in to report their tragedies. Men in green uniforms had broken into their homes in the middle of the night and taken their children from their beds to an unknown destination. They were never to be seen again’ (pxxxii).

Before the war, all nationalities were welcome to Argentina as immigrants. That changed in July 1938:  Directive 11 was sent out to all consuls, ordering them to deny visas to Jews trying to reach Argentina. The order only fell into disuse in the mid-1950s and was only repealed in 2005.

Goñi states: ‘I realised that the problem was not the bad guys: the problem was the good guys who out of fear or affinity protected them (the war criminals)’ (pxli)

During the war the Argentine embassy in Madrid served as a transit point for Nazi arms purchased by Argentina. It had the secret support of Franco’s regime, which provided cover for the overland transport of guns and munitions through occupied France to Spanish ports and their conveyance from there in Spanish ships to Argentina’ (p5).

Franco’s Spain was not quite as neutral as it appeared. ‘During the last days of the war neutral Spain became the main safe haven for fugitive Nazis and their French and Belgian collaborators...’ (p65). Spain and Italy aided and abetted by functionaries of the Vatican. Virtually every false passport of the Nazi criminals had the religion stated as ‘Catholic’. In fact, a good number of Jewish passports declared the same religion...

A good number of those who escaped did so with funds, some of which was doubtless passed on to them by Swiss banks. Funds pilfered from their countless victims. The sequestered money was meant to finance a post-war Fourth Reich (p248). Using their ill-gotten gains, many Nazi immigrants contributed to Perón’s election campaign in 1946. Perón dreamed of turning Argentina into a military-industrial power and utilising the many escapees’ expertise in munitions and aircraft-design and build...  (p138). The argument went that if Argentina didn’t get the German technicians then the Soviets would (not to mention the Americans and British) (p151). There were many reasons for this: one was that Perón and his Nazi pals believed a Third World War was imminent – against the Russians, probably in 1948.

Moral blindness: the Vatican and Allied intelligence conspired to look the other way regarding the whereabouts of the majority of Nazi war criminals – because they were anti-Communist, against International Marxism...

Goñi provides several biographies of escapees. It is remarkable how many Nazi war criminals were held in prisoner of war camps yet managed not only to escape but also to identify and use appropriate ‘ratlines’ to get them to Argentina.

Compulsive and gripping, these revelations, even at this time, are still deeply shocking.

Doris Lessing’s second book in her semi-biographical ‘Children of Violence’ series, A Proper Marriage (1954) is her sequel to Martha Quest (1952). Certain observations made below are not spoilers – they are mentioned briefly in the book blurb.

The point-of-view is omniscient, so we get inside the heads of several characters, often in the same scene. The story is set in the fictional African country of Zambesia (not a million miles away from Southern Rhodesia where Lessing lived most of her formative years (1925-1949)): ‘The small colonial town was at a crossroads in its growth: half a modern city, half a pioneers’ achievement; a large block of flats might stand next to a shanty of wood and corrugated iron, and most streets petered out suddenly in a waste of scrub and grass’ (p10).

Martha is now nineteen and married to a clerk, Douglas Knowell. She is strong-willed, restless and not particularly enamoured of boring married life – though at the beginning of the book she has only been married five days... ‘Until two weeks ago, her body had been free and her own, something to be taken for granted...’ (p37).

It’s the start of the Second World War, though at the outset this does not seem to affect the township. The townsfolk are conscious that there is a ‘big issue’ with the black population, however: ‘any expression of a desire for improvement on the part of the natives was immediately described as impertinence, or sedition, or even worse’ (p62). The parson’s wife observes: ‘If they learn to use arms, they can use them on us... this business of sending black troops overseas is extremely short-sighted. They are treated as equals in Britain, even by the women’ (p66).

When Douglas and his pals sign up to fight, Martha is taken aback; she is not enough for him, he prefers to ‘rush off to war’... (Douglas) ‘had not known how intolerably boring and empty his life was until there was a chance of escaping from it’ (p80).

When Martha learns that she is pregnant and the illegality of an abortion crops up, she ‘flew into an angry tirade against governments who presumed to tell women what they should do with their own bodies; it was the final insult to personal liberty’ (p106).

Throughout the book there are fine examples of Lessing’s eye for description: ‘The jacaranda were holding up jaded yellow arms. This drying, yellowing, fading month, this time when the year tensed and tightened towards the coming rains, always gave her a feeling of perverted autumn, and now filled her with an exquisite cold apprehension. The sky, above the haze of dust, was a glitter of hot blue light’ (p113). Another brief example: ‘Soon the wings of her joy had folded’ (p124). ‘Martha drifted to the divan, where she sat, with listening hands, so extraordinarily compelling was the presence of the stranger in her flesh’ (p129).

The actual scenes running up to and encompassing the birth are very well done. ‘Every particle of her flesh shrieked out, while the wave spurted like an electric current from somewhere in her backbone and went through her in shock after shock...’ (pp163-167). [Lessing gave birth to her first child in 1940].

One observation is certainly no longer true in the age of social media: ‘... one of the minor pleasures of power is to exchange in private views which would ruin you if your followers ever had a suspicion you held them’ (p188)! Also relevant, perhaps: ‘Unfortunately nine-tenths of the time of any political leader must be spent not on defeating his opponents, but on manipulating the stupidities of his own side’ (p365).

Martha gets involved with a group expounding Communism which appeals to her disenchantment with the rich crowd she has been with; and while Douglas is away training, she also flirts with RAF pilots stationed nearby. This is a depiction of a disintegration of a marriage – a marriage perhaps she should never have embarked upon.

There is very little feeling that there is a war ‘in the north’. No wounded, limbless survivors of conflict appear; food and material shortages are not evident.

Martha will appear next in A Ripple in the Storm.

 

 

Philip Vella’s comprehensive account of the Second World War siege of Malta was published in 1985; my copy was the third edition, 1989. In the 1970s a group of Maltese enthusiasts formed The National War Museum Association and over the years they have collected and collated documents, photographs, first-hand reports, interviews and eye-witness testimonies about the Battle for Malta. This large-format book is a result of those endeavours.

Besides relating in detail from the outset of hostilities, it also contains almost a hundred pages of appendices recording convoys, daily rations, buildings destroyed or damaged, honours and awards. There are also dozens of illustrations, maps and black-and-white photographs. It is a treasure-trove for any writer or student of history.

In the summer of 1939, when it seemed that war was imminent, the Admiralty pressed to strengthen the island against air attack by installing 122 heavy AA guns, 60 light AA guns and 24 searchlights. Inertia hampered this process. On June 10, 1940 Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. Malta was in the firing line and by this time the islands only had 34 heavy anti-aircraft guns and 8 Bofors; the number of searchlights was up to strength, however.

‘... Malta’s loss would have denied the Allies of a staging post to the Middle East, jeopardised the fate of the British Army fighting in North Africa, and turned the Mediterranean into an Axis lake’ (p163).

The air-raid sirens sounded to warn of the first raid on June 11, 1940. ‘... ten Savoia Marchetti 79s crossed the 60 mile channel on their way to their target Hal Far airfield’ (p6). Other targets were the dockyard and forts. There were seven bombing sorties that first day, with no planes lost on either side.

That year, Malta suffered 211 air raids. Succeeding years increased in number, 963 and 2,031 for 1941 and 1942 respectively. The devastation was horrendous (as many photographs attest); ‘the Royal Opera House was demolished along with several other buildings in Valletta on April 7, 1942’ (p111); the ruins of the opera house are still there, concrete yet mute testimony to the siege. Two days after that, a bomb penetrated the dome of Mosta Church but instead of exploding merely bounced among the congregation. In the first weeks of 1942 ‘the number of unexploded bombs from heavy daylight raids by German aircraft rose from 6 to 143 per week’ (p128).

Civilians sought refuge in ‘the old railway tunnels in Valletta and Floriana, as well as in the Hypogeum, a prehistoric underground burial place, and also the Catacombs at Rabat’ (p15).

The Royal Malta Artillery recruited ‘a motley crowd of clerks and farmers, shop assistants and masons, intellectuals and illiterates’ (p34). In fact, as early as September 1938, ‘3,000 volunteers enrolled in the Women’s Auxiliary Reserve set up by Lady Bonham-Carter, the wife of the then Governor of Malta’ (p73). The native RMA and the Royal Artillery raised a curtain of flame that was fearful to behold... Captured German pilots admitted that they had been unnerved by it. It probably saved the Island from devastation, saved many a British warship... Remarkable was the stoicism of the civilians’ (p173).

Supplies came by seagoing convoy, the first in September 1940 from Alexandria. Subsequent convoys sailed from Gibraltar as well. Freight was also transported by RN submarines, among them HM Submarines Porpoise, Rorqual, Cachalot, Osiris and Otus [While in SM drafting in the 1970s I sent men to submarines that bore these names, but newer boats of the Porpoise and Oberon class, launched 1958 to the 1960s]. Submarines based in Malta attacked German convoys destined for Rommel’s Afrika Korps, sending to the bottom of the sea some 400,000 tons of supplies. In April 1942 HM Submarine Upholder was lost on her twenty-fifth patrol.

Shortages meant that improvisation was the order of the day; ‘men found fig and vine leaves a substitute, albeit a distasteful one, for tobacco... women made coats from blankets and dresses from curtains’ (p77). By September 1941 the only unrationed items were bread, pasta, cheese, rice and tea. At this stage of the war, the Enigma codes had been cracked and warnings of imminent attacks on convoys could be countered. ‘Cigarette-smokers took a deep breath when, on October 30, 1942, after many months of enforced abstinence, an issue of 30 cigarettes a week was introduced on a ration basis, to be increased to 50 with effect from January 15, 1943’ (p172).

‘Radar... is regarded as one of the main contributors to Malta’s defeat of the enemy. Radio Direction Finding was first brought to Malta in Marsh 1939 when the Air ministry Experimental Station was set up at Dingli Cliffs, one of the highest spots on the Island’ (p83).

Allied aircraft were transported by convoy but many were lost during the air-raids on Ta’ Qali, Hal Far and Luqa airfields. ‘In answer to the 200-240 daily Axis sorties, Malta could seldom muster more than six fighters at one time’ (p101).

In September, 1942, even while conflict still raged, the King presented the George Cross to the Island Fortress and its people, acknowledging the ‘gallant service’ the Maltese people had already rendered in the fight for freedom (p120). On June 20, 1943 the King visited the Island, ‘sailing through a hostile sea, with enemy air bases a mere 60 miles away’ (p184). He was given a rapturous reception by civilians and the armed forces; he toured much of the Island all day, witnessing the destruction and speaking to the Maltese. Prime Minister Churchill visited the Island on November 17 for two days and President Roosevelt arrived on December 8 and presented the people with a citation concerning their ‘valorous service above and beyond the call of duty’ (p197).

With the retreat of the Germans from Italy in 1944, few air-raids occurred and none resulted in any further damage or deaths. The last alert sounded on August 28.

‘... looking back across the years, serving at Malta in spite of the hardships, hunger and the constant presence of danger and death, is curiously one of these parts of one’s life, which if given the chance, one would do all over again’ – Leo Nomis, an American pilot flying from Ta’Qali (p154).

 

Christopher Reich’s period thriller has the strapline ‘Fatherland meets The Day of the Jackal in the thriller of the year.’ For a change, the publicity isn’t an exaggeration. It’s only taken me 21 years to get round to reading this one, just sitting on the shelf waiting; it was published in 2000.

It’s July 1945 and the war is over. Erich Seyss, who had been an accomplished runner in the 1936 Olympics is a captured SS officer in a POW camp awaiting trial by the War Crimes Commission – until he boldly escapes.

Devlin Judge, a lawyer with the International Military Tribunal learns of the escape shortly after finding out that Seyss was responsible for his brother Francis’s murder along with other American soldiers, all massacred in cold blood at Malmedy. Judge requests seven days’ leave to hunt down Seyss.

On a couple of occasions he comes close to catching his man, but the ex-SS officer is too quick, too fleet of foot to be trapped. During the hunt, Judge suspects that there is a conspiracy at the heart of the American military hierarchy that could pitch Europe into another deadly conflict. Of relevance to the allusion of The Day of the Jackal is the Potsdam Conference which was held in Potsdam, Germany, from July 17 to August 2, 1945. The participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, represented respectively by Premier Joseph Stalin, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, and President Harry S. Truman…

One of Judge’s contacts happens to be Ingrid, one-time lover and jilted fiancé of Seyss. She too gets sucked into the gripping quest in which it is sometimes difficult to determine friend from foe.

Reich tells his tale with masses of period detail, plenty of action, in an authoritative style that makes the story believable. The descriptions of a bomb-blasted Berlin and the scrabbling survivors living from hand-to-mouth put the reader there. There is some clever blending of fact with lashings of fiction. He has a good turn of phrase, too: ‘She smiled, and the smile was like the first crack in a pane of glass. She could feel the fissure splintering inside of her, its veins shooting off in every direction. It was only a matter of time until she shattered.’ (p456)

The publisher of the paperback (Hodder Headline) excelled here, not only showing the runner on the front cover resembling the swastika, but also having inserted at the bottom of each page the silhouette of a runner in different poses; if you flick the pages from the beginning of the book to the end, you will see the silhouetted figure running from left to right. (see below) Neat.

 

 

 V2

 Robert Harris

 

Bestselling author Robert Harris meticulously relates in this novel events that take place over five days at the end of November 1944, involving both British and German protagonists in the Second World War.

On the German side is rocket engineer Rudi Graf, friend and associate of Wernher von Braun, working on the new V2 rockets that can break the sound barrier and are unstoppable, unlike the earlier V1s. Like von Braun, Graf dreamed of building spaceships that could reach the moon, but the only way to finance that dream was to engage with the army. Hitler was won over by von Braun and development was well under way by November 1944. They were firing several per day at London with devastating effect.

On the British side is Kay Caton-Walsh, an officer in the WAAF, who experiences first-hand the explosive effects of a V2 when in London conducting an affair with a married senior officer. Shortly after her close shave with death, she is recruited to join a select group on a mission in Mechelen, in newly liberated Belgium. Their task is to track the parabolic course of launched V2s, aided by radar reports and information of the coordinates of the actual hit, working backwards armed with slide rules and mathematical calculations to identify the launch sites for RAF bomb attacks.

As you’d expect from an accomplished writer, you’re speedily involved in the lives of these two characters and the realistic detail and characterisation of everyone puts you there.  There is added tension as you follow the track of a deadly V2 on more than one occasion.  Also, the forced labour by prisoners is duly acknowledged; some 20,000 slave labourers died in the manufacture of V2 rockets. Yet at no point did I feel that the story was spoiled by being swamped with technical detail.

Highly recommended.