Book Review: OPERATION KILL IKE by Charles Whiting

First, apologies for posting a review of the fourth book in a series of six - this just happened to be the first book in the Destroyers series to reach me via the various meandering routes these used books are taking to get to me. I am now reading the first book in the series, OPERATION AFRIKA, and I'll be reviewing it as soon as I finish it.

Charles Whiting is probably one of, if not *the* most prolific writer of WW2 fiction out there, having penned a number of series over the years under several different pen names (such as "Leo Kessler"). This series, the Destroyers, centers on a British army lieutenant, Richard Crooke, VC, who won that medal in the failed attempt to kill Rommel during Operation Flipper. Crooke was a colonel then, but gets busted back to second lieutenant for punching a general in the face when Crooke's request to return to North Africa is denied (all of this is laid out in the beginning of Operation Afrika, by the way).  The series, as best as can be determined, was originally titled "The Dirty Devils", a play off of "The Dirty Dozen" (written a decade before this series was penned) of course, but someone must have realized that wasn't actually a good thing, and renamed them the Destroyers, as the later books post-Afrika refer to them as such, although the "devils" term is still used a couple of times in KILL IKE.

EDIT: After some more digging, it appears that "The Destroyers" is the UK name for this series, and when it was brought over to the US, it was renamed "The Dirty Devils", no doubt to play off of the name recognition of The Dirty Dozen. 

Crooke leads a four-man team of scumbags, all of whom have been given prison sentences at one point or another, and they're basically let out of jail to go run amok against the German army on various "dirty" missions, sent on their way by one Mallory, a commander in British Naval Intelligence. The Destroyers are comprised of one Cockney Brit, one half-English, half-Egyptian thief, one Yank, and one defected German. I do like the idea that the unit is multi-national, although it does play into a lot of caricatures (a not-too-terrible problem with such pulpy fare).

In OPERATION KILL IKE, the Destroyers are sent to the front lines in the Ardennes Forest, famous for the Battle of the Bulge. They are to meet a German scientist who has a bottle of "heavy water" that Allied scientists need to analyze in order to determine how close the Germans are to building an atomic bomb. However, when they get to their rendezvous, the scientist is dead, although the bottle is intact, and the German offensive kicks off just as they're trying to make their way back to friendly lines. As they try to fall back, they encounter an American soldier named Weed, a very innocuous-seeming fellow, but it turns out that Weed is actually a German Abwehr agent, who's been sent behind the lines to - of all things - find and assassinate General Eisenhower. The Destroyers then enter into a cat-and-mouse game across France as they try to catch Weed before he completes his mission, which would throw the Allies into such a state of disarray that the Germans (might) have a chance of throwing back the Western front long enough to turn their full attention towards the Russians.

Overall, this was a pretty interesting read. There was a lot less combat than I expected, mostly because of the investigative nature of the mission, but there were a few short fights here and there, and a goodly amount of tension. Whiting as a writer doesn't focus that heavily on the "gun porn" aspects of the action, keeping things breezy and using typical slang like "tommy guns" and "schmeissers", which is again perfectly fine for writing like this. The book is also a very quick read, and easily finishable in either one long evening or over the course of a lazy weekend.

You can find these used paperbacks online (I found all of mine through various used booksellers on Amazon), and although they might be a bit on the pricey side, if this sort of pulp WW2 fare is your cup of tea, you're probably willing to pay for these vintage paperbacks. I still paid less than ten bucks apiece per book - still not cheap, but half of the cost was typically wrapped up in shipping, anyway.

Next up - OPERATION AFRIKA.

Rapid-Fire Reading Reviews

I've been a little lax on writing book reviews lately, so I thought I'd get a few short reviews out the door today.

First up, I just finished Rick Atkinson's The Guns at Last Light, the third and final installment of his Liberation trilogy, chronicling the growth and maturation of the US armed forces fighting in the European theater of World War Two. This is a great series, starting with An Army at Dawn, which covers the North Africa campaign, followed by The Day of Battle, focusing on the campaigns to take Sicily and Italy.  If you've an interest in World War Two, especially how the American army went from what was essentially a territorial peacekeeping force to a globe-spanning juggernaut, this is the series for you.

Next, I was happy to beta-read the "heavy metal horror" novella Mudslingers co-authored by Mark Allen, a writer who has visited and commented here many times in the past. Mudslingers is, as best as I can describe it, a written version of those great and gory Tales From the Crypt episodes from the 80's, or a grindhouse-y B-grade horror movie. Sex, Drugs, Rock n' Roll, and a lot of gratuitous violence. If you dig raunchy horror with a strong dose of dark comedy, give it a shot.

Speaking of beta reading, my friend Justin Aucoin has been working on several swashbuckling pirate adventure shorts. While none are on sale just yet, you should check out Justin's writing blog, and get a sneak peek at the awesome cover for his first short, "A Pirate's Honor".

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I took the plunge and read another of Leo Kessler's Assault Battalion Wotan novels, Forced March. While it still had some of the distasteful elements found in the first book (after all, the main characters are all SS...), this book was a much better read. It focused on the failed raid on Dieppe by the British and Canadian (and token American Ranger) forces, and a number of chapters are written from the British point of view. I thought this helped balance out the book a lot more, giving us someone to cheer for, even if we knew from the outset their mission was doomed to failure. Kessler (real name Charles Whiting) makes an interesting argument; that Churchill intended the Dieppe raid to fail, indeed wanted it to fail, to prove to the Soviets that the Western Allies weren't prepared to invade the European mainland yet.

That's it for now! I'm going on vacation for two weeks at the end of this week, so hopefully there will be some more reviews when I wrap that up. I hope to have a couple more posts here during that time period as well.

Book Review: SS Panzer Battalion (Dogs of War #1) by Leo Kessler

I've hemmed and hawed over how to write this review for a couple of days now.

"Leo Kessler", aka Charles Whiting, was an extremely prolific author who, according to Wikipedia, wrote 350 books - fiction or otherwise - over the course of his career. Although he clearly had a keen interest in World War Two, I've seen nothing to indicate he was any kind of closet Nazi or Nazi sympathizer, so I don't believe in any way that his SS-centric storyline in the Dogs of War series should be - or could be - taken as Whiting trying to make the SS the "heroes of the story". And within a few chapters of reading SS Panzer Battalion, well before they kick off the invasion of Belgium, it is clear that every main character in the book is pretty much a detestable scumbag. At best, the characters are completely self-serving pricks who'll screw each other over at a moment's notice. At worst, they're fanatical Nazis who worship Hitler as some kind of demigod, leading their country on a path to dominate the world and crush all other, lesser races underfoot.

So the reader is put in the unenviable position of having no one to actually like while reading the book. Yeah, you might get a chuckle when one of the soldiers seduces the wife of his sergeant because the sergeant caused him to botch breaking a marksmanship record, but then you learn he's now given the wife a venereal disease. And once the soldiers get out into the field, the "chuckle factor" quickly goes away. They use civilians as human shields. They shoot unarmed men out of hand. One character, who is secretly Jewish, murders a defenseless Jewish man because the man recognizes him from some temple service (a weird and rather unnecessary plot point). One character gets busted in rank for bedding a lascivious village idiot, then blackmails his superior into getting his old rank back because he discovers the officer is secretly a homosexual (and also a vaguely suggested pedophile, since he seems most interested in "boys", although that might simply refer to young men).

As to the "gritty, realistic depiction of war"? Sure, Whiting's prose is filled with the worst that total war has to offer. An SS assault battalion is no parade of boy scouts, and the horrors of modern war are seen aplenty. People are blown to bits by land mines, incinerated by flamethrowers, torn to pieces by machine gun fire, stabbed by bayonets, hacked by entrenching tools - the list goes on. Soldiers fight dirty, casualties pile high, and there is no room for moral quibbling on the battlefield. On the other hand, I think this sort of novel could have just as easily been written with a cast of Wehrmacht characters performing their patriotic duty sans the thick veneer of rabid Nazism.

So, what was Whiting looking to achieve with this series? That it was popular, there is little doubt. According to this website, the series went on for forty-two novels. That's quite a run, and clearly shows that people were more than willing to keep reading the series. And of course, that at least a portion of the series is now available on Amazon in ebook form only furthers this belief. Was Whiting trying to convey the horror - and diabolical allure - of war by, in some way, forcing us to relate to, and sympathize with, WW2's most villainous combatants? Not a bad way to counterpoint the "War - it's FAN-tastic!" vibe you might get from other books. But again, you can show how terrible and awful war can be without making your main characters completely vile.

Ultimately, I find myself on the fence with this series. I can't condemn Whiting out of hand, because he was clearly writing with a purpose in mind, and that purpose wasn't one of pro-Nazi sentiment. On the flip side, I don't think I can really recommend this series to anyone but the most cast-iron stomached war pulp enthusiasts, because everyone in the books is a heartless Nazi. And when it comes to Nazis, I defer to Doctor Indiana Jones:

"Nazis. I hate these guys."