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The title of this book is, I feel, a tad misleading. As a good deal of it is more about SOE, British/Allied special forces, and French Resistance, operating behind the lines, than the infamous SS Das Reich!

Still, whatever it’s about, it’s a fascinating and well-written work on a very particular period and events, including the appalling massacre at Oradour Sur Glane, with which subject The World At War TV series so memorably commences.

One criticism I have, which has several interconnected strands, has to do with the class to which Max Hastings himself and a good number of the public school educated British ‘cast’ of his subject belong.

The self-love and self-regard of all elites is always rather unctuous and not a little odious. And when Hastings rhapsodises over numerous toffs, playing at war, esp’ when it’s real and costs theirs and others their lives, it’s hard not to wince a bit. 

A secondary point arising from this is the possible overstatement of British/Allied efforts, and a concurrent downplaying of the French natives’ own efforts. But rather than going over all this here, I’d urge the interested reader to simply try Max’s book, and decide for themselves. 

The ostensible story simply traces how Das Reich, pulled out of their role on the Ostfront, start out resting and refitting in Southwestern France, are then tasked with fighting insurgents, and finally head for Normandy, in the aftermath of D-Day. And how the aforementioned insurgents, with help from Allied agents, seeks to impede their northward journey. 

Definitely worth reading.

I found it a fascinating and exciting, well-researched and written, and – despite Hastings slightly patrician establishment vibes – pretty well-balanced account of a very interesting episode in the Normandy (and beyond) campaign. 

NB – This is a pretty old (as in years) review, which, for reasons unknown to me, never made it on to my AQOS* mini-military blog. So rather than leave it languishing, I’ve put it up here.

*A Question of Scale.

An interesting WWII movie, partly about Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent, but even more so about the American ‘grunt.’

Robert Mitchum is great, as Lt. and later Capt. Bill Walker, and Burgess Meredith (aka Penguin, from the Adam West Batman!) is terrific as Pyle.

Shot in black and white, and incorporating some real war footage, where appropriate, this is propaganda. But it’s of a much humbler and grittier type than your normal patriotic chest-thumpers.

I really enjoyed this film. It’s intriguingly different from – as well as also sharing many aspects with – many other more genre type war movies.

For example, we hardly see the actual enemy. Modern war movies often make a point, sometimes rather laboured, of showing both sides. This film is resolutely all about the G.I.

It also focuses on the North African and Italian campaigns; the defeat at Kasserine Pass, and the protracted muddy, bloody siege of Monte Cassino. Again not areas addressed by too many other US WWII films.

They use Pyle’s wartime correspondence as a ‘script’, both as narration, and for the substance of some of the dialogue. Again this makes the movie quite different from normal wartime film output.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. When I’m a bit more flush, I might add it to my WWII DVD collection? Definitely worth watching.

Wow! This Hammer movie is excellent. And very different from their more famous/standard horror stuff. A very powerful film.

This mid ‘60s movie is black and white, for starters. And visually strong. It’s set in a culture – a rich family with a live-in nanny – that most of us commoners will find rather alien. 

Bette Davis is the titular Nanny.

On first glance, the family is rather dysfunctional: Mr Fane (James Villiers) is a terse emotionless civil-servant, his wife Vergie, a hysterical wreck, and their young son, Joey, fresh back from a two year stint in a psychiatric home for chilluns, appears to be morbidly psychotic.

Bill Fane is pater-unfamilias, plummy voiced Queen’s Messenger, always off around the world. It transpires Virginia’s near crazed state is due to their daughter, Joey’s younger sister, drowning, for which Joey is blamed. Hence his sojourn in the crazy-kids home. Oh, and Joey hates Nanny, as well. 

When he gets home from the nipper’s nuthouse, it’s open war between them. At least on Joey’s part. The film’s whole set up is very good, because we know something’s very wrong. But we don’t know quite what. 

The first thing you think is, why do they still employ this particular nanny, if it causes so much trouble in the family? They explain that by saying she was the nanny of Vergie and her sister Pen (played by Jill Bennett), and has been with the family ‘forever’.

There’s an incident with mummy, around food and poisoning, and once again, the issue is, did Joey do it, or was it Nanny? And therein lies the crux of the movie’s interest. 

It’s disturbing stuff. Filled with hysteria and cloaked psychological manipulation. The child actors, Joey (William Dix) and Susie (Angharad Aubrey), and upstairs neighbour, Bobbie (Pamela Franklin) are superb. As are the adults. Bette Davis gives a great performance.

It’s not a barrel of laughs, and it’s quite dark. But it’s a great film. Hammer goes Hitchcock, perhaps? Highly recommended.

Today’s delivery shift took me out towards Oundle. I was in several lovely places, such as Stibbington, Wansford and Barnack. All very beautiful.

When I got home, I spent some quality time with The Boy.

After work, Teresa and I went to Tesco, for our ‘biggus shoppus’. I tried on a bunch of clothes. And decided to buy a couple ‘winter shirts’. As pictured. The plaid one is L, the needle-cord one XL. I like the fit of each in the different sizes. And better yet, it means I can wear the plaid as undershirt, and the needle-cord as a lightweight ‘jacket’.

And now we’re watching The Rings of Power. I’m utterly exhausted. So I’ll be turning in ‘toot sweet’, as soon as this Middle Earth business is over.

Well, we wound up bingeing on two episodes. Which brings us up to date. Episode seven ended with a Heavy Metal track! Featuring Jens Kidman of Meshuggah, on vocals, and Gene Hoghlan on drums. Yuurrrr!

Our local Tesco Metro shut briefly very recently. And it has now reopened, re-branded as a branch of Budgens.

The post office counter is, thank goodness, still there. Today I returned my broken iPhone SE to the Tesco Insurance section via the PO counter.

I thought I’d post the above two images here, just in case I were to lose or temporarily misplace the pertinent paperwork.

Milton Hall, an interesting place. Private, and off the beaten track. Just outside Peterborough.

As well as the imposing property itself, there’s all the stables and whatnot, at the rear. What a place!

Inside a stable block, I stumbled upon this commemorative plaque:

Definitely a place to try and revisit.

Wow!

I finished this last night. When I say ‘finished’, what I actually mean is that I read up to the Conclusion. There’s a huge amount of additional material – chronology, notes to the main text, glossary, lists of ships – that I haven’t read in full.*

It’s my personal view that it’d be churlish to give this any less than five stars. It’s an astonishing feat, at least to my mind. I’m no expert on naval history of any kind. But it’s clear that the two volumes I’ve so far read – by accident I came to volume two, The Command of The Ocean, first – are the product of immense research and sharp perceptive intelligence.

And to write such weighty tomes on a specialist subject in such a way as to engage the lay reader, such as myself, is in itself no mean feat. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed volumes one and two. Such that I can’t wait for volume three; The Cost of Victory, due out very soon, this Autumn, 2024.

In these works, Rodger gives us an astonishingly formidable synthesising history of the many threads that combine to tell the fascinating naval tales of these isles.

I believe I detect more than a faint whiff of modern day(-ish) Conservatism, in Rodger’s accounts of British politics. But that’s fine. Indeed, in my experience the vast majority of what one might broadly refer to as ‘military history’ seems the preserve, by and large, of right leaning types (think Andrew Roberts, for example).

As I grow older I find it harder and harder to position myself, politically. As nothing out there accords with my own personal pot-pourri of views. I say views rather than beliefs deliberately. Both can and should change, as we learn more. But views are, perhaps, more easily changed than beliefs. Anyway, I digress.

I needn’t entirely concur with the authors’ own politics – and as far as I can judge this is an admirably balanced account – to enjoy and benefit from his erudition and insight. And I’ve found reading volumes II and I – I put it that way ’cause that’s the order in which I read them – hugely enjoyable, and very informative.

Both books use a form of treatment that I ought to be able to recapitulate easily, but – I’m currently both ill with a cold and recovering from a bout of depression – find myself a little foggy on. What I’m alluding to is how he organises the vast inchoate masses of information he must necessarily marshal.

It’s kind of cyclic, but not rigidly formulaic: he usually commences with ‘operations’, the action (this is the largest category, I reckon); sometimes he’ll address the technology, in ‘ships’; then there’s ‘admin’, the Pepysian dimension; and lastly, ‘social history’.

The way Rodger uses these organising categories is, in my view, exemplary. They help him arrange and convey the necessary information. But he uses them in varied and fluid form; not slavishly, but rather in accordance with the shifting shoals of his subject. It really is masterfully done.

And he’s an excellent writer. In the fields (seas and skies) of military history writing – and Rodger’s monumental work is far more than purely military/naval – there are many authors who either have very obvious axes to grind, or whose specialist knowledge is impressive, but whose general writing skills are less so. Happily, Rodger’s prose is lucid, cogent, and engaging.

Inevitably, given the huge scope of these works, there’s repetition, or perhaps what feels like repetition, as he returns to how different players reprise the constant but evolving themes of sea-power. That he keeps it all fresh enough to make a vivacious and engaging read is, even if these works boasted just that one accomplishment, frankly astonishing.

But it’s far better than that. The enormous sweep of it all – it has to take in everything, touching on politics, agriculture, industry, war, peace, individuals, society, you name it, and not just within the British Isles, but also all those nations and peoples the seas have connected us to, through time – is constantly leavened and enlivened, by character observations and anecdotes, keeping the whole story warmly human.

For all these reasons and more, both this and volume two are very much five star fare.

And I haven’t even really discussed the specific content, yet. And frankly, I don’t think that’s even entirely necessary. Suffice to say that he chooses to start in 660, and work his way to 1649, during the ECW. So, covering here a period just shy of a millennia.

We witness an ebb and flow that is neither regular nor inevitable, as – and I’ll let him say it, as he does so so very eloquently and succinctly – ‘the peoples of the British Isles learnt, relearnt, or did not learn at all how to use the sea for their own defence.’

I’m very lucky, in that I have a beautiful Folio edition of this brilliant author’s earlier work, The Wooden World, which I can now read, whilst I eagerly await publication of the third volume of his truly awesome trilogy.

Can’t recommend these books highly enough.

*I often referred to the notes and glossary, and occasionally perused random bits of the other sections.

I just finished Nicolas Rodger’s epic first volume of naval history, Safeguard of the Sea. I’ve posted about the book itself elsewhere. But it finishes with the end of the ECW, and the advent of the Rump Parliament.

I’ve been getting interested in the ECW, or rather Wars, for some time, of late. Partly from a potential wargaming perspective. But more so from an interest in the politics of the era.

As Rodger points out, much of the politics of those years aligned with differing varieties of Christian ‘faith’. Broadly speaking the ‘Arminian’ High Anglicanism of the King was (and still is!) barely distinguishable from Catholicism, whereas Protestantism was (and still is), an, ahem… very broad and fractious church, wherein we find many troublesome and uppity agitators.

I’ve been intending to watch the Mollo/Brownlow film Winstanley for absolutely ages. I really ought to do so, ASAP. My only issue is that I’ll prob’ have to pay to watch it. So, do I just buy it, on DVD?

I have neither read this, nor seen it enacted. Maybe I should? Can anyone recommend a staging, or adaptation?

Rather like art, culture, history, music and my many other interests, sex is frequently on my mind. And consequently sex in art and culture kind of triple-whammies things.

One thing I find kind of odd and irritating is that there’s not much that sits in my own idea of the Goldilocks zone, when it comes to sex. The way sex is treated is, all too often – unless absent altogether – either too tame or too extreme.

[NB: The above gallery uses very poor quality images, borrowed from the gutenberg.com online version of this work.]

By way of explaining what I mean, you go from the ubiquity of tits n’ ass – usually but not always clothed – in mainstream movie culture, to stuff like Pasoloni’s Salo.

I’m leaving the whole sticky area of porn to one side, as that’s essentially a masturbatory aid, rather than art or ‘culture’.*

In literary terms I guess you could equate this with a spectrum that ranges from the frisson of sex that smatters (or should that be splatters?) popular fiction – from Mills & Boon to Shades of Grey – to stuff that’s truly outside the pale, like de Sade’s deliberately ‘sacrilegious’ extremism.

In the end the kind of innocent yet knowing, or what I want to call ‘liberated’ handling (chortle) of sex quite often winds up being expressed at the level of folk art.

In jokes, bawdy songs, strange efflorescences of varied artefacts, from phallic devotional objects/totems, to mosaics and wall paintings, or decorating earthenware, jewellery, and whatnot. I wonder why this might be?

As Neil MacGregor discusses, in the brilliant History of the World in 100 Objects, when considering the Warren Cup, what was once shocking and taboo can become commonplace. What once, allegedly, threatened to shake polite society to its very foundations suddenly passes unnoticed.

The softer more titillating treatment of sex is almost always the more commonplace (superabundant these days), at least relative to the darker side. But even that relationship can shift over time. It wasn’t long ago, in myth if not in real life, that gods and beasts were frequently copping off with humans, or vice (pun intended) versa.

I think David Lee Roth put it quite well, when he described erotica as a feather, and porn as the whole plucked chicken.

Oscar Wilde, the author of Salome, was, as we all ought to know, jailed for two years for being gay. Or ‘gross indecency’, as it was then styled.

Homosexuality in England remained a ‘crime’ til 1967. In America this didn’t happen til 2003! And, unbelievably, in 2003 (under Blair) ‘The Sexual Offences Act 2003 made it illegal for more than two men to engage in consensual sexual activity in private.’ I’m shocked at that.

Voltaire once said ‘I don’t think there was ever any civilized nation that enacted laws against mores.’ Which, given how he was himself persecuted, seems unbelievably naive. But at the same time it shows that some societies 300-400 years ago might actually have been more liberal/tolerant than our supposedly permissive modern day ones. Even those that pride themselves on being ‘democratic’ and ‘free’!

To my eyes, Beardsley’s Salome illustrations appear tame. But if we are to believe some folk, they were at the time highly scandalous, just like the author of the work, Wilde. It’s hard for the modern liberally minded humanist to see how or why.

But there have always been hawkish prudes, eager to burn whoever is the witch of the hour. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are as many such now as there ever were.

*Of course there is crossover. You get artistic porn, and pornograohic art. And every conceivable shade or combination between and beyond. But that’s not what I’m touching on (titter) here.

** I believe I/we once had some Beardsley coasters, sporting this image. I wonder what became of them?