D-Day Anniversary 2013

I neglected this anniversary last year. Can't remember why. June 6, 1944 was not only a turning point in world history, but it ultimately altered my life course forever, as well (when I learned about it). Few films have captured the carnage and desperate struggle for Omaha Beach like Saving Private Ryan, so enjoy these clips and remember that freedom isn't free.

And I may have shown this one before, but because of my Airborne heritage I'm showing it again: the jump into Normandy the night before the invasion, as depicted in Band of Brothers.

Finally, here's a scene from The Longest Day about the poor devils who were dropped over St. Mere Eglise right into the Germans' laps. I couldn't find an unedited clip--somebody superimposed snapshots of some of the real paratroopers from the time.

The Ratbastards #4: Meat Grinder Hill

In an earlier post, I blogged the news about Len Levinson's march to e-book immortality. A couple of his western series have been translated to digital format on Amazon, and one of his war series. After his Sergeant paperbacks (originally released under the name Gordon Davis), his Ratbastards books top my list of guilty-pleasure war fiction.

His platoon of kill-crazy Jap-stabbing GIs now reactivated for a prolonged Pacific combat deployment, I'm still hoping Levinson cuts orders for MSGT Clarence J. Mahoney to resume his gory Kraut-killing campaign in the DTO (Digital Theater of Operations). In the meantime, I am tickled slappy that his blood-splattered prose can now grace the screen of my Kindle.

In this installment, both Master Sergeant Butsko and PFC Frankie LaBarbara are hospitalized in New Caledonia, leaving Texan Buck Sergeant Bannon in charge of the 23rd Infantry's Recon Platoon (the Ratbastards of the title).

US forces are mopping up the final resistance on Guadalcanal, and the regiment is using the Recon Platoon as a screen. In the attempt to catch up to an enemy patrol, Bannon and his platoon of cutthroats stumble right into the Japanese 17th Division, dug in on the Gifu line.

The narrative switches back-and-forth between the action on the 'Canal and the erotic adventures of LaBarbara and Butsko among the nurses on New Caledonia--two completely different plot lines, related only by the fact that these wounded Casanovas are from the Recon Platoon.

There is spectacular action...and not just with the lusty nurses. And not all the combat is against the Japanese. A cheese-eating first sergeant from one of the line companies sics his men on the Ratbastards and the gang violence that ensues is better than any rumble between Crips and Bloods, Outlaws and Hell's Angels, or Jets and Sharks. When the opposing combatants are Japanese, the bloody gore is brutal without the sick, graphic obsession of some more current fiction. And true to form, Len Levinson depicts more bayonet combat in the battle for Hill 27 than probably occurred in the entire island-hopping campaign.

I first read this long ago, in a paperback with Levinson's John Mackie pseudonym on the cover. Upon a recent perusal, it surprised me how many typos I found, and other mistakes (in the space of 3 paragraphs, 1 character's rank changes from captain to lieutenant back to captain, for instance). But it is a great read if you like over-the-top war scenes (without ALL the sickening details of what combat in the Pacific was really like).

As in all his books I've read, Levinson knows how to keep a reader turning pages, sprinkles in some nicely-researched tidbits, and litters the landscape with characters you will either abhor or admire...but always be entertained by.

MEN'S FICTION AUTHOR FROM THE '80S GOING E-BOOK!

My introduction to men's adventure novels, and war fiction, was The Sergeant #4:The Liberation of Paris by Gordon Davis. Up until I cracked open that paperback, I had never read anything like it before. I turned pages in a stunned trance, eyeballs dilated, jaw slack, visions of bayonet duels dancing in my head.

With this new literary universe to explore, I began collecting similar books. (It took me years, but I now have the entire Sergeant series in paperback.) Another series I collected was The Ratbastards by John Mackie. It was also a WWII series, but set in the Pacific rather than Europe.

At the time, I took the different author names at face value, but couldn't help noticing similarities in style, phrases in the dialog, and certain recurring sequences in different battle scenes.
The main protagonist in both series is a big, tough, battle-scarred Master Sergeant in the infantry--Clarence J. Mahoney in The Sergeant and John Butsko in The Ratbastards. Both have loyal junior NCO sidekicks that were once innocent all-American boys, but are now the best soldiers in any man's army.

For the rest of the article, visit Virtual Pulp Press!

Planning to go see Red Tails

2011 struck me as a more-abysmal-than-usual year for Hollywood. The two bright spots, for me, were Captain America: The First Avenger and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But George Lucas' new WWII flick is one I'll probably see in a theater instead of via Redbox.

Reason enough is that some friends I haven't spent time with for quite a while suggested we go see it together. But there's a lot of other factors motivating me to spend a small fortune at the box office. The most obvious to Two-Fisted Blogees is that I like history, and am a WWII buff. That's still the most fascinating time period for me, out of many. (As I've admitted before, it was from learning about D-Day and the 101st's defense of Bastogne during the Bulge that made me want to go Airborne...)

In addition, I studied both the Tuskegee Airmen and the Buffalo Soldiers (and began writing about them) years before movies were made (by someone else, doggone it) to bring the subject matter into the popular consciousness.

While I vainly(?) hope I'm not going to be cinematically lectured for two hours on what a racist nation we are, the fact is there was a lot of institutionalized racism back then, which is infuriating to think about. History has been revised to deceive the masses about what side of the aisle it came from, and that's infuriating, too.

In the film titled Tuskegee Airmen (also staring Cuba Gooding, Jr.), the filmmaker focused not exclusively on race-based oppression, but how a group of determined Americans overcame it and beat all the odds stacked against them. If Red Tails takes the same approach, I'll probably like it.

The Dawn of Apartheid: Power of the Sword by Wilbur Smith

I discovered Wilbur Smith by chance. The public library just happened to have Triumph of the Sun in audiobook and I just happened to find it when desperate for something to listen to during commute time. Since then I've been looking for his titles.

Smith's chosen genre is one I guess I'd label "historical adventure." He follows the Courtney family's generations through different periods of history, but always somewhere in Africa, so far as I can tell. Some of his novels strike me as sagas while others, like this one, might be described as "epics." For some reason Africa has always fascinated me, and the continent comes alive through Smith's skillful prose.



This novel's setting is South Africa, from the early days of the Great Depression up to the beginning of Apartheid. I've long considered Wilbur Smith an armchair social anthropologist, and it may not be as evident in the characters of this book, but he certainly gave every last one of them some serious flaws...so much so that it's difficult for me to decide who the hero is. I guess I'd have to name Centaine Courtney as the heroine. She may be an adulterous, ruthless capitalist opportunist who destroys those who get in the way of her ambitions with no remorse, but the author bothers to show sympathetic traits in her perhaps more than any other character.

She seems like a choir girl compared to ganglord/political organizer Moses Gama; his half-brother Swart Hendrick; Centaine's bastard son Manfred, who grows up to become a fanatical Nazi; or even her ostensibly legitimate son, Shasa, who grows up to be a pampered, womanizing, shallow fop. I think my sympathies lied mostly with Lothar De La Rey, father of bastard Manfred.

At the very beginning of this tale, Lothar has just gambled all he has on a fishing business and through cunning and determination, has just brought in a haul that will pay all his debts and put him on firm footing to build an inheritance for Manfred. That's when Centaine shows up to utterly wreck him and his business. She has bought up his debt and now prefers to let his fish rot in the cargo holds than to let him can them and use the profits to get in the black. She has bad blood for her former lover and it's about to cause a vicious cycle.

Lothar decides that an eye for an eye is in order, and plans a robbery of Centaine's diamond mine. It's a clever and detailed plan, actually, with multiple safeguards...all rendered moot by fate, Centaine's tenacity, and, most of all, Lothar's fits of mercy. It goes downhill from there, and I must admit I skimmed a bit when I got too disgusted with the characters. Not just the deceit of Moses or his revolting behavior; or the corruption of the weak-minded Swart Hendrick; but also the gullibility and stupidity of the book-smart Manfred. And what he does to the girl who sincerely loves him. Of course my disgust is probably testament to the author's masterful orchestration of the elements of fiction.

Half brothers Shasa and Manfred are on a collision course that has ramifications well beyond the looming global conflict. When they do come full circle, their meeting was rather disappointing for my taste. Still, even at his worst (?), Wilbur Smith is a master storyteller, and despite my issues with this book, it's rich with South African history, geography and cultural insights. And for those who like family dynasty drama on an epic scale, this book is dripping with it.

Omaha Wasn't the Only Beach

It's D-Day Anniversary minus 1. Aside from the related airborne operations, I've been neglecting everything besides the landing at Omaha. Why? Because that was the point of heaviest German resistance; hence the bloodiest battle; hence a significant hinge point in the invasion, the war, and history. But I haven't emphasized it because I don't appreciate what happened on Gold, Sword, Juno and Utah.

Though less dramatic, here's a scene based on the Utah landing, with Henry Fonda playing Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Now this is more like what military strategists would like to see during amphibious landings. Most of MacArthur's landings in the Pacific met light resistance like this, if they weren't altogether unopposed.

And here's a scene from Sword Beach, so you Anglophiles don't get upset with me. Notice Sean Connery in a fairly early role, before the James Bond persona so rubbed off on him that he carried it with him into every flick he acted in.

Finally, here is a documentary which provides a little perspective on the invasion.

At this time 63 years ago, General of the Army and Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower was visiting the paratroopers who would be dropping behind the Atlantic Wall in a few hours.

Hope everybody had a good weekend. Stay tuned for more 2-fisted blogging.

Hell Harbor: The Sergeant # 2 by Gordon Davis

In keeping with my lead-up to the D-Day anniversary, I decided to post a review of a relevant installment of my favorite pulpy WWII series. I'm thankful I've had so much free time lately, but I'm not sure how frequently I'll be able to blog between Sundays after this.

Previously, I've reviewed Death Train and The Liberation of Paris from this series. In addition, Jack Badelaire has reviewed Slaughter City and Hammerhead at Post Modern Pulps. You might consider reading those reviews, if you haven't already, as a sort of introduction to Master Sergeant Clarence J. Mahoney.

It's D-Day plus 3 (in the book) and, though conventional Wermacht wisdom had the allies invading across the narrowest point in the English Channel (into Pas de Calais) and in good weather, those crafty Yanks and Limeys have instead landed at Normandy during a brief lull in horrible weather. The German commander in Cherbourg has rigged a gawd-awful amount of explosives in the sewers. Enough to destroy the entire harbor and deny its use to the allies. Without that key harbor, reinforcing and resupplying the invasion force will become very difficult. And, if Hitler decides to release his panzer divisions, the invasion force will probably be crushed against the Channel. Between perdition and the deep blue sea, if you will.

Lucky for the allies, a young German officer who thinks with the wrong head has gotten friendly with a local French girl who knows how to play with both heads quite effectively. The French girl also happens to have a patriotic streak, and is a valuable intelligence asset for the good guys. Through her, the Allies learn of the German plan to destroy the harbor.

Enter chain-smoking, hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, butt-kicking Sergeant Mahoney, fresh back to the 23rd Rangers from his cloak & dagger mission with the Maquis. Along with Corporal Cranepool, Captain Boynton, and a handfull of other rangers, he is voluntold to fight his way inside Cherbourg and figure out some way to prevent the demolition.

It's hard to believe Boynton and his superiors are so dim-witted that storming the German fortress would be the best plan they could come up with. But eventually they wise up and, unfortunately for the rangers behind German lines, the mission devolves literally into the crappiest operation Mahoney can imagine. So crappy that he vows to quit the Rangers and transfer to a line unit if he survives.

There is all the bloody mayhem you should expect from a title in this series, plus the subplot of the German officer and French spy (which provides some good laughs), a groanable episode in which Cranepool mistakes a VD inspection tent for a USO donut tent, and a somewhat longer episode in which Mahoney first impersonates a doctor, then plays doctor with a lonely nurse.

By the end of the book Gordon Davis (Len Levinson) has nicely set up Mahoney's transformation back to a line doggie--which means reams of ludicrous bayonet combat in subsequent books. Speaking of that, I have finally acquired The Sergeant # 3: Bloody Bush, making me the first one on my block to own the entire series. Very soon, hopefully, I'll have a chance to read it and complete my Mahoney/Cranepool education.

...Not a German Was Shamming, Except For Erwin Rommel

We're at D-Day minus four (Memorial Day plus two), and I'm nowhere near out of cool clips to post on the topic.

By the way, my first unit's barracks was on the street at Fort Bragg named after Carentan (almost all the streets in Division's area were named after WWII battles fought by the All Americans).

Here's another fantastic piece of film making--the Omaha Beach sequence from Saving Private Ryan:

Field Marshal Von Rundstedt actually had a logical plan for countering the invasion of Fortress Europe. Thankfully, Rommel agreed with Hitler's typical "don't surrender one single inch to the enemy" philosophy, and thought success meant he had to stop the allies right on the beach. Hitler's assumption that the entire coastline of Europe could be simultaneously defended was, of course, ludicrous, even for a Wermacht not spread out on multiple fronts. This accounts for the fairly light resistance encountered at Gold, Sword, Juneau and Utah Beaches. But Omaha was a meatgrinder--the bloodiest amphibious landing in recorded history.

Spielberg's film pushes my suspension of disbelief a little too far later on, but this opening sequence is a masterpiece IMO. I've never participated in an amphibious landing, and watching this clip is as close as I ever want to get to a hellground like Omaha Beach.

...And All Through Northern France...

 

Some guy added music and really fowled up this scene, but you can still get an idea what a nightmare these guys dropped into at St. Mere Eglise when they overshot the drop zone. They really earned their jump pay that day, to say the least.


Nobody FUBARed the next clip up with music, so, in the spirit of the coming D-Day anniversary, here is another clip from The Longest Day--the Rangers assaulting Pointe Du Hoc to knock out some German guns they were told could wreak havoc on the invasion fleet.

Personally, I think some handheld camera/POV shots could have enhanced this scene, because, to me, the danger of this mission doesn't really come across as is. Scaling cliffs like that with weapons and gear would have you smoked WITHOUT enemy gunners on the high ground enjoying a turkey shoot at your expense. RAAAAAAAAAAAIN-JAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!!! Hoowah! Woof, woof, hui hui hui!

BTW, Happy Memorial Day and thanks to all who have served or are serving.

T'was the Night Before D-Day...

The D-Day Anniversary will be here before we know it. With both that and Memorial Day coming up, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit some cinematic recreations of a momentous point in history.


Here, from the Band of Brothers miniseries, is a dramatization of the jump into Normandy the night before D-Day. And a nice piece of film making IMO.

By the time I myself became a paratrooper, the Actions On Aircraft routine had only changed a little bit from what is shown here in this WWII jump.

As a side note, it was my personal studies of WWII--particularly of the 101st Screaming Eagles' defense of Bastogne--that greatly influenced my decision to go Airborne. Unfortunately the 101st was no longer truly Airborne by the time I came of age (actually, the "Airborne" tab above their division patch had been rendered meaningless long before), and the only Airborne Division left was the 82nd...so that's where I wanted to go.

Concerning this series, this is rather ironic because the Bastogne episode was maybe the most lackluster in Band of Brothers IMO, capturing none of the desperation...or, dare I say: heroism...of that battle. Nevertheless, this drop into Normandy sequence is a gut-wrencher, I think, capturing the nerves, danger, and havoc of that night pretty well.

For the non-historians/military buffs out there, one classic purpose for airborne troops was a tactic called "vertical envelopment"--paratroopers are dropped behind the lines to catch an enemy in the rear while conventional forces meet them head-on. In recent history, the Rangers were thus employed in Grenada; the 504th PIR (82nd) in Panama; and the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Iraq during the opening stage of OIF. Granted, the missions in Grenada and Panama had plural purposes, but this is just a simplified explanation.

Specifically, in France the Airborne was supposed to capture key bridgeheads inland from the invasion beaches and either hold them until Allied armor could break out, or blow them before German armor could blast the Allies back into the English Channel. In theory, paratroopers are supposed to be dropped in undefended, or lightly defended, drop zones within a reasonably short march to their objectives. But American and British air forces had been bombing the living crap out of Germany and Hitler's "Fortress Europe" was bristling with anti-aircraft guns, ready to open up on anything coming from a westerly direction. Ike and his staff actually expected 60% casualties--an unheard-of risk acceptance for American planners.

Well, I could go on about this, but hats off to producer Spielberg and the film makers for telling Easy Company's story, and hats off to the men who put it all on the line in the fight against Nazi Germany.

Behind the Lines by W.E.B. Griffin

 

My introduction to W.E.B. Griffin's fiction was a few volumes from the Brotherhood of War series (or so I thought--more on that later). I read The Captains,The Majors, and The Colonels from that series before giving up on it. I wanted to read some war novels, and wasn't sure beyond a reasonable doubt until after reading three installments that Griffin wasn't really trying to write war novels. He is more interested in the back room/office politics of military brass--some of which takes place when the country happens to be at war. Those three books, to me, read like novelized versions of a few seasons' dose of Army Wives--albeit with a FAR greater degree of accuracy in military details.


Behind the Lines was my introduction to his "The Corps" series, my favorite of his military novels, and a pretty good read. WWII is still the period of history that fascinates me most, and American guerrilla action in the Philippines is a subject I haven't read much about, so those were points in the book's favor. But I think what made it a winner for me were the characters. I related to Fertig, McCoy and Weston, and wanted them to prevail.

My complaints about this book are similar to those I have against other Griffin tomes: office politics are interesting up to a point, but he really emphasizes them at the expense of plot and action. The word-for-word (simulated) top-secret memos did become old after about six of them. Characters who jump from enlisted ranks--or even civilian life--into O-3 to O-5 commissions are extremely over-represented, while officers like Macklin are severely under-represented. There were also some plot devices, meant to up the tension probably, that just didn't strike me as worthwhile (all wrapped up in the aforementioned back-room politics). But there was enough good in this book to outweigh all of that.

Griffin may pick details to dwell on that run against my tastes, but his stories are very plausible. His main characters are three-dimensional. Macklin, for instance, probably couldn't have been drawn better. Also, I hadn't experienced Griffin getting into the minds of the opfor before, so it was nice to find that he gave just as much careful attention to depicting characters and office politics on the Japanese side as the American.

All-in-all this was a page-turner; and I cared about what was going to happen to the characters, from beginning to end.

Imagine my surprise when, after googling Griffin, I discovered that he also authored one of my all-time favorite young adult books under a pseudonym. I read that one before ever imagining I would have an interest in the military (much less join it). Stylistically or content-wise I could never have guessed it was the same writer. It shows how versatile this author is.

Death Train: The Sergeant # 1 by Gordon Davis

Back in October 2010, I reviewed the first book I ever read in this series, which was also my introduction to war fiction and military pulp (though I didn't know it was considered pulp until many years later).

The title character is Master Sergeant Clarence J. Mahoney, a bruising, brawling hardcorps hardcase who is one of those characters you love to read about (guiltily, perhaps), but who you probably wouldn't care to associate with in reality. Speaking of reality, this guy is not the kind of soldier who would go far in the post-war peacetime Army, despite his spit & polish proclivities hinted at in this book, and his mercurial egocentric nature. He's a whoring, hard-drinking savage not good for much of anything besides killing and fornicating. No Neanderthal Switch to turn off until the next war.

Mahoney and his sidekick Corporal Cranepool are introduced to us working with the maquis of the Resistance in German-occupied France shortly before D-Day in 1944. They've been dropped into Fortress Europe with other volunteers from the 23rd Rangers because they speak fluent French. (Mahoney also speaks fluent German--evidently this caveman from New York City is an idiot-savant when it comes to languages--hence his code name/nickname "the Parrot.") To preempt redeployment of Wermacht divisions when the invasion takes place, Mahoney and Cranepool are ordered to destroy a crucial railroad bridge.

The Air Force has bombed this bridge to little effect. Ike wants it ruined, and ruined good, post-haste. Mahoney asks for 10 crates of TNT. The French give him two. When he sees the bridge, it's obvious he can only do minimal damage to it with the ordinance at hand. He decides that the mission could be better accomplished damaging the railroad somewhere else, and a local member of the Resistance cell Mahoney and Cranepool are attached to just happens to be a former railroader.

Gestapo Major Kurt Richter is on the ball, however, and hot on their heels, rallying SS troops from around the region to hunt them down. When the two forces meet, the action is bloody and fast-paced.

I read numbers four-through-nine in the series many years before, and re-read a few several times, but was a little spoiled by the gratuitous frontline infantry combat to read about Mahoney and Cranepool behind the lines pulling off demolition missions while posing as French peasants. It was interesting, when I finally did delve into Death Train, to observe the author's style shortly after conceiving the character. I don't mean to say the character evolved much over the series, but how other characters thought of him seemed to (they tend to recognize him for what he is in this first book).

Later in the series brief mentions are made of Mahoney's past in New York, but this first installment brings it into sharper focus. Mahoney was basically a hoodlum who joined the Army in 1934 because he couldn't make a living elsewhere during the Depression. I personally think such a man would have prospered in the short-term just fine rolling drunks, mugging people in Central Park, or as hired muscle for an Irish gang. Lucky for us pulp addicts, though, three squares a day in uniform must have had more appeal than (eventually) three squares a day in the slammer. He later volunteered for the Rangers because it offered more pay. He stuck with that up to this point because the professionalism of soldiers in an elite unit appealed to him more than the mediocrity of the line doggies.

It's even more obvious here than in subsequent books what a whoremonger our "hero" is, yet the sexual interludes are not nearly as graphic as they later become. Mahoney's habit of stealing watches off of KIAs originates here, too, BTW.

This is not a bad (for a trashy pulp) novel, but is probably my least favorite in the series. Mostly because the character is better suited to conventional combat (of the pulpy persuasion) than this clandestine stuff. There is no need to read the series in sequence. Other than recurring encounters with Richter, the progression of the war, and the deaths of some supporting characters, there is no continuity to keep track of. Each book stands alone just fine.

The Sergeant series is a guilty pleasure, and the cold brutality of the protagonist is perfectly acceptable to most readers because he has been unleashed against the Germans during Hitler's reign. Gordon Davis (a pseudonym of Len Levinson, from what I read) had a lot of fun writing this series, I suspect. And we can have a lot of fun reading it.

Read my Review of The Sergeant #2 Hell Harbor: The Battle For Cherbourg.

Read my review of The Sergeant #4 The Liberation of Paris.

Grayton Beach Affair by James Harvey

This is the second tour for the Two-Fisted Blog. This time, I'm featuring author James Harvey and his debut novel, Grayton Beach Affair. Here's some details on the author and his book:

Returning to Berlin after being educated but disenchanted with America, Christian Wolfe finds that he and Germany are on a collision course with destiny. Because of his skills in English and knowledge of America, he is coerced by the German military to board a U-boat bound for the Gulf of Mexico to locate and extract a high level German officer imprisoned in a POW camp near the coast. Christian's mission runs smoothly until he witnesses an unusual and violent act by Maggie Neal, a young woman living in Grayton Beach, against a man who had taken advantage of her and her servant. Suddenly their lives collide, resulting in a death and involvement with the local police. He and Maggie discover they need each other to survive. Sparks fly and they have a brief and passionate affair, leaving each with deep but unsettled feelings for the other. Upon returning to France, Christian relies on his instincts when an opportunity arises to reconsider his future. He joins the French Resistance and when he saves an American flyer who offers him a new start in America after the war is over, he seizes it. Arriving in Atlanta, he is determined to find Maggie, but with their relationship founded on death and deception, could they possibly build a future together?

James Harvey was born in a small textile and farming town in South Alabama just a few miles from the town portrayed in To Kill A Mockingbird. His family was a poor, but genteel southern family more resembling a Tennessee Williams story than Margaret Mitchell. Harvey’s grandparents owned a home in Fort Walton Beach, Florida where he spent summers and heard stories of World War II German submarine activity in the waters off shore in the Gulf of Mexico.

Upon graduation from Troy State College, Harvey borrowed enough money for a one way ticket to Key West where he taught for a year at Key West High School. During this time, he fell in love with Florida and especially Key West where he enjoyed fishing, diving the reefs and navigating the local bars. In the spring of that year, Harvey met his wife-to-be, Marie, on a Friday and asked her to marry him the following Monday. He courted her on his only means of transportation - a motorcycle – and they will soon celebrate 43 years together.

Realizing that he would rather be in the jungles of Vietnam than the high school class room, Harvey attempted to join the military as an officer, but due to a military oversight, was given a deferment. He reluctantly left the Keys and began a successful career with IBM, first in Boca Raton and then in Atlanta. During his IBM career, he went to law school in the evening and was awarded a Juris Doctorate in 1984 from Woodrow Wilson College of Law. Realizing that most new lawyers barely make a living, Harvey used his degree to leverage advancement in the business world. After taking an early retirement from IBM, he began a second career in commercial real estate brokerage and development in Atlanta, advancing to Vice President of one of Atlanta’s largest office park developers.

The stories of German submarine activity that he heard growing up continued to intrigue Harvey, and in 2007, he began work on his first novel, Grayton Beach Affair in his spare time. In 2009, he made the decision to write full time and is currently working on his second novel. 

Harvey and his wife live in North Georgia where he fly fishes the North Georgia and the Rocky Mountain trout streams when not writing. Living in Key West opened Harvey’s eyes to the beauty of the area and influenced him to pursue sport fishing, diving and sailing throughout the Keys and Bahamas. They also live part of the year in the Panhandle of Florida where he fishes the Gulf waters.

After starting on the review copy sent to me for the blog tour, I had some questions for the author.

Two-Fisted Blogger: What is the inspiration behind Grayton Beach Affair?

James Harvey: I grew up in the area of Grayton Beach and learned of German submarine activity off the coast during the war.  I then learned of German POW camps that were established in Florida and the SE U.S.  I realized that a lot of people were unaware of both and thought it would make a good story .  I was able to incorporate an actual U-boat voyage and a German POW camp that existed near Grayton Beach to add depth to the book.  I started with the idea that it would be a war, action and danger story for the male reader, but when I introduced the female character and made her very strong and willing to take control of her circumstances,  the book evolved more into one of war, action, danger, sex and romance.  

Two-Fisted Blogger: How much has Grayton Beach, Florida, changed since WWII? Is it still as isolated as you describe in the book?

James Harvey: Grayton Beach is still a small community of approximately 240 residents at the end of a two lane road.  There are only 3-4 businesses, including The Red Bar, a popular restaurant and meeting place for visitors in the area.  The Red Bar was previously known as Butler's store, a grocery store and bar, referred to in the book as Bailey's store.  In the 1970's, the residents were able to establish prohibitions against high rise condos and as a result, maintains an old world charm. There are new homes, but most are contructed to maintain the old "Florida cracker" style of architecture that I tried to describe in the book.  Nearby Grayton Beach are large developments such as Seaside, Watercolor, etc, but Grayton Beach is on 18 mile "scenic highway' 30-A that prohibits highrises, billboards and fast food chains. 

Two-Fisted Blogger: How many ships did German U-Boats actually sink off our southeastern coasts?

James Harvey: I don't remember.  I did a lot of research on U-boat activity on the Gulf Coast and there are some really good non-fiction books that would easily answer that question.  Once I found U-67 and determined that her voyage would perfectly suit my needs to get my character to Grayton Beach, I focused on that.  U-67 sank 8 ships in the Gulf in the months of June and July, 1942. 

Two-Fisted Blogger: It surprised me that Christian experienced such anti-German prejudice so long after the First World War, and yet well before fear of Germany's ambitions broke out again in the United States after Pearl Harbor (and quickly reached a fever pitch). Is this one of those trends in history that has been swept under the rug?

James Harvey: Growing up in the deep and segregated south in the 40s and 50s, I saw prejudice on all fronts;  Religion other than christian (even catholic), race other than white, etc.  A lot of the people were uneducated, struggling to make a living during and after the depression and distrustful of anyone not from the south.   I used that general distrust and prejudice only to move the story along, not because people were focusing on Germans.

Thanks, James, for taking the time to answer my questions.


 

I've been fascinated with all aspects of WWII since I was a teenager, so when approached to join this blog tour for a wartime novel, I made room in my schedule.

Grayton Beach Affair, as the title implies, is about an affair that takes place in the Florida panhandle, and how that chance connection affects the involved parties for the duration of the war. Despite the sex scenes in the book, I found the romance between Christian and Maggie to be presented quite innocently. This is love at first sight, pretty much. I once knew a gunbunny from the Aleutian Campaign who met his wife at the USO. When he first laid eyes on her, he told his GI buddies she was the one. Sixty years later, they were still together. So that kind of storybook stuff was not unheard of in that generation.

I've read/watched wartime romances about Americans trapped inside Fortress Europe (in fact, my first abysmal effort at a war novel had such a scenario), but not too many about Germans hiding out in the USA. Christian is not a Nazi, but there's no love lost between him and Uncle Sam, either, having lived in the Southeast USA and suffering some perhaps anachronistic anti-German bigotry. He's a civil engineer, which gives him a military deferment in the Fatherland despite being of draftable age. Nevertheless, his fluent American English makes him a candidate for a mission to rescue a Nazi rocket scientist from an American POW camp in Florida, near the title location. Even a loyal German citizen would balk at such a mission, but der SS haff vays uff makink you covoperate...in this case, the threat of conscripting Christian and shipping him to the Eastern front.

What I found most thought-provoking in this book was Maggie's dilemma. She intuits that Christian is basically a decent guy, sees some evidence to support that, and there is a physical attraction...yet she knows he is a German agent, on a mission for a foreign power her nation is at war with. His life is in her hands. Should she do her patriotic duty and dime him out, or trust her heart/hormones and hide him? I wonder what choice real life people would make in her circumstances.

Well, Christian is a decent guy, after all. The plot takes an interesting turn when, instead of returning to Berlin after his mission, he joins the French Resistance. He has opportunities to bed other women in France but doesn't, usually because he's still smitten by Maggie. As very well should happen in such a story, the two do meet again...but Maggie is engaged to a Georgia attorney. You'll have to read the book to find out what happens from there.

You can buy this book at Amazon or here. My thanks to Florida Book Bloggers and James Harvey for the review copy.


Hank

Liberation of Paris: The Sergeant # 4 by Gordon Davis

I first discovered The Sergeant as a teenager, before I imagined I would one day be a soldier myself. This book was my introduction to the series, and to the war genre.

Davis' work is rare in that whatever age I was when I read it or re-read it, the experience was just as entertaining (though I developed an appreciation for his scene shifts into the German field commands to provide strategic perspective as I grew older).

The Sergeant is Master Sergeant Clarence J. Mahoney, a senior non-com from Hell's Kitchen in NYC, who speaks fluent French and German, and is invincible in bayonet combat (which he sees a lot of). He's actually a rather despicable brute who you would probably shy away from in real life. He's a selfish, ruthless pragmatist with limited intelligence or imagination, who will ____ any female willing to raise her skirts (and, like the bayonet clashes in this WWII setting, the frequency of instances defy believability). And I mean ANY female, as proven in this story. And he's not ashamed to pay for it, either. His trusty, loyal sidekick is Corporal Cranepool, who he speaks to with extreme condescension. Sounds like a real-life NCO, personality-wise.

The first book of the series is a cloak-and-dagger pre-invasion mission with the French underground. The First 3 were published by Zebra Books. This book marks Mahoney's first literary forray into conventional combat published by Bantam.

The story opens with Mahoney fighting the division heavyweight champ as a sort of morale-boosting exhibition for the troops. Our pack-of-cigarettes-a-day, boozing, whoring protagonist is too tough (and stupid?) to go down from the champ's more polished boxing skills, and clubs him unconscious. This gets him the attention of some senior officers, who decide to attach him, Cranepool and some other G.I.s to a French formation slated to liberate Paris from the Germans.

"Cushy" duty.

But nothing is cushy for Mahoney for long, and he finds himself in the midst of a see-saw tank battle between the French and Germans, and then in urban combat during the liberation. At one point he enters a Parisian shop during the lull in battle, and hears the sound of a typewriter beyond the locked door of a basement. This strange detail is never overtly explained, but during another scene he encounters war correspondent Ernest Hemingway, who is covering the liberation. I suspect it was Hemingway locked in the basement with the typewriter.

There is a XXX porno scene in a fancy hotel with two French prostitutes, and more graphic violence than you can shake an M-1 Garand at. I think some of us enjoy reading about this incorrigible barbarian so much because we subconsciously wish we could unleash our own primordial base instincts with the same abandon, once in a while, and suffer no significant consequences...just like the Sergeant.

OK, so I've just described an exploitative escapist book full of graphic violence and sex, about an amoral neanderthal who you wouldn't want anything to do with if you met him in real life. Now I'm admitting that I always enjoy reading it and will probably read it again some day.

No Glory--Just Grime (The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer)

Guy Sajer was a unique individual to start with, born and raised in an area contested by France and Germany for many years. He had family ties to both sides and his worldview strikes the modern reader as an idiosyncratic, naive, homogenized nationalism. He was filled with pride, for instance, when the Vichy French joined the Axis--his 2 nations, fighting as 1 (as he saw it).

But putting his convoluted motivations aside, Sajer wrote one of the best war memoirs ever--and about one of the biggest, bloodiest campaigns ever: WWII on the Eastern Front. His experiences as an infantryman should be required reading for every young man who imagines war to be heroic or glorious.

His honesty about what he saw, did and thought is striking. The closest anyone in Sajer's auto bio comes to heroism is a man Sajer often refers to as "the veteran" (Wiener was his name, so Sajer undoubtedly did him a favor by dubbing him with that title). Sajer and the other soldiers came to depend on the veteran, who was a pragmatic survivor, almost never lost his cool, and had a keen grasp of the strategic big picture well beyond his tactical grunt's-eye-view. The men in his squad thought him invincible. "Combat fatigue," "shell shock," "post traumatic stress" or whatever you choose to call it affects every soldier differently, and I found it profoundly sad what happened to the veteran's mind by the end.

The reason for the war on the Eastern Front was that one power-mad dictator wanted territory (Leibensraum) from another. But Sajer's story resonates with the experience of veterans of any war who endured heavy fighting and monumental hardships.