“A History of the Luftwaffe”, by John Killen

336 pages, Bantam, ISBN-13: 978-0553262759

John Killen’s A History of the Luftwaffe is written in a florid, flashy, and very visually descriptive style. It makes the book a very easy and light read; no problem there because history books should not be dense and reserved for scholars only. It is a problem though when the style is the substance and the historical facts are of secondary importance. Then you have a story, not history. And that’s what we have here.

A couple of broad generalizations and sweeping statements that the author makes are mentioned here. In Chapter 6, Air Force in Embryo, the author makes reference to German pilots “working with Mussolini’s Regia Aeronautica in July 1933, developing the new theory of Blitzkrieg”. Widespread use of the term Blitzkrieg only came into effect following the German invasion of Poland in 1939. The word itself has been attributed to three different sources – Hitler, a British tank expert and Time Magazine. Whichever is correctly credited for coining the word makes no difference here; the point is this – the earliest possible use of the word is 1936, it can't be applied to the battlefield exercises that the Germans and Italians were practicing in 1933. Lightning war as a theory was also not new. The Prussian army had been practicing and developing upon the concept for a long time.

The author is no longer making generalizations when discussing the development of the Me 262 in Chapter 21, he’s now making errors. In describing the reasons for the delay in production of this fighter jet, Killen gets his facts wrong. He states that Milch and Goring were indifferent and that “in an effort to arouse official interest, Professor Messerschmitt invited Adolf Galland to flight test an Me 262.” The historical record shows that far from being indifferent Milch, from as early as January 1943 had requested an Air Ministry officer to put pressure on Messerschmitt to complete the Me 262. The Ministry subsequently accorded priority to the completion of a small number of prototypes. Further, it was Milch who requested that Galland do the flight test and it was Milch whom Galland excitedly telephoned with his now famous assessment, that it flew "as though an angel’s pushing. There was a meeting on June 27^th, 1943, to which Hitler had summoned the top seven aircraft designers. Messerschmitt was there naturally and the record shows that far from promoting his jet, he actually warned Hitler against the folly of mass producing the Me 262. The reason: its fuel consumption was higher than piston engine aircraft. Messerschmitt was well aware, but chose not to mention, the fact that the jet used a lower grade fuel than aviation spirit and that it was readily available. What strange behavior from someone who would be credited with designing the world's first operational jet! One of the reasons behind it had to do with the personal animosity between Milch and Messerschmitt.

The bottom line with this book is that to do justice to the whole story of the Luftwaffe, more discussion on some of the background issues and the personalities, policies and politics involved is necessary. By trying to describe every event of significance in the life of the Luftwaffe – in 300 pages – we are left with a story very light on historical facts.

“Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War”, by Nathaniel Philbrick

480 pages, Penguin Books, ISBN-13: 978-0143111979

I think it's safe to say that most Americans are now aware that the myths of our nation's origins cover over more than a little of the brutality of the process. Yet many of us don't know the details of the encounters whose echoes are still heard down the long halls of history. Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War goes a long way toward illuminating a seemingly familiar corner of American history, filling in the shadows with tales of heroes and scoundrels from both sides of the encounter. Philbrick mainly covers the period from 1620 (the year the Pilgrims sailed) through 1676 (the end of the bloody work of extermination known as King Philip's War). This is roughly the period of the Pilgrims, their children and grandchildren. Yet while the period ended in a brutal mostly one-way slaughter, it also enshrined a 56-year period of relative peace, in which the two sides, ever needful of each other, managed to live in a version of harmony.

Indeed, Mayflower is full of noble acts and savagery by both sides. The cohesiveness and piety of the Mayflower passengers both propelled them to the New World, and kept them together and sane once they arrived. The great sachem Massasoit, for his part, is depicted as moving beyond fear and prejudice to ally himself to the new colonists. For their part, the Pilgrims produced great leaders and diplomats like William Bradford and Edward Winslow who were able to keep the colony secure in spite of the terrifying newness that surrounded it. But scoundrels abounded as well. Miles Standish is portrayed as a genocidal maniac who delighted in killing Indians. The Wessagusset raid that he led is depicted in all of its duplicity, manic violence and betrayal of hospitality. Squanto, the Indian who helped the Pilgrims survive their first winter, is shown using the Pilgrims to advance his own leadership ambitions. Later in the saga, we are introduced to cowardly and ineffective King Philip, stalwart and humane Benjamin Church, doughty Indian captive Mary Rowlandson, cautious female sachem Weetamoo, warrior and praying Indians, and more. By the end of the tale, you will have become acquainted with John Alden and Roger Williams and comprehend what brought them to Plymouth and what drove them from it. You will learn the difference between Pilgrims and Puritans, Pokonokets and Narragansetts, sachems and powwows, flintlocks and matchlocks. And you will have witnessed a strange and wonderful tableau of the "first Thanksgiving" in 1621, including naked Indians and meat pottages boiling over open fires. You will also gain an appreciation of the mentality in 17th century New England that allowed such a horror as King Philip's war to break out. You'll understand how the Indian way of war was so different from the more lethal English variety.

For all the recent focus on the treachery and savagery of Europeans, I appreciated Philbrick's attempt to focus on the positive and peaceful coexistence of the two sides from the 50-odd years following the Pilgrims’ arrival. However fleeting and tenuous that peace might have been, it stands as a testament to the possibility that recognition of mutual humanity and need can forge a relationship among the most divergent of cultures.

“The Leopard”, by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, Archibald Colquhoun, and Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi

186 pages, The Folio Society

The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa (and, in a fashion, by the English translator of this edition, Archibald Colquhoun) is situated during the time of the Italian re-unification, the rise of Garibaldi and his Red Shirt movement and the decline and subsequent transformation of the feudal nobility in the late 19^th Century. Di Lampedusa was himself a descendent of one the noble families, and the story that he narrates is ostensibly that of his grandfather. The Leopard is the symbol of the family of which Prince Fabrizio, the principal character in the novel, is the head. The novel reminded me of a couple of other such works, one of which is surely Century in Scarlet by the Hungarian writer Lajos Zilahy. Both deal with more or less the same theme, though from somewhat different sides: namely, the coming into being of modern nation states in the 19^th & 20^th Centuries, and the identities of two nations that were probably at the far end of the nation forming processes that were set into motion a century or more earlier in some of the other European states. I am not sure how comprehensive the novels are from a sociological or political point of view, but both do provide the nearest equivalent in a literary form.

Both the novels are very straightforward in nature and though written in the 20^th Century, they are in the nature of the 19^th Century novel, with a linear narrative structure and few complexities in terms of the underlying ideas they seek to communicate. The style is closest to Balzac’s, more in case of The Leopard than perhaps Century in Scarlet, and is the story of Prince Fabrizio who is forced to relinquish the control of his estates in the light of the advance of Garibaldi’s republican forces. His ambitious nephew Tancredi moves over to the new forces, calculatedly marrying the daughter of a rising rich, though uncouth merchant Don Calogero who is eager to establish a lineage for himself by marrying into the family of a noble, in the process spurning Fabrizio's own daughter's hand. “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they'll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”, he informs his uncle, even as he looks at his uncle with the “affectionate irony that youth accords to age”. That Prince Fabrizio aids and abets his nephew in his cunning endeavors speaks much of the Prince's own instinct for survival: “The bourgeois revolution climbing his stairs in Don Calogero's tail coat”, as the Prince thinks while observing Don Calogero in his house.

And historically speaking he is right: the decline of the nobility is complete and the power has shifted decisively in favor of the commercial bourgeoisie, with the corresponding shift from the monarchy to a republic and the ideological shift from the church – when the nobility's land is ostensibly “the patrimony of the poor” – to the republican ideals. With the story being as simple as that what holds the reader is the author’s effusive description of some of the lesser known areas of Europe, Sicily, in this case. Added to that is the author’s deep insight into human nature, which renders the novel a universal appeal and finally his smooth, delectable, almost tropical prose. His metaphors are particularly imaginative and I suppose that probably owes something to the richness of the original language itself.

There are a number of insightful sentences that are a delight for a reader. Though the novel may beg comparison with, say, a 'War and Peace', to say nothing of a novel like Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World which is far more complex in the treatment of a similar theme. Nevertheless, The Leopard establishes itself as a minor classic of the 20^th Century and hence an important novel to those trying to understand the evolution of nations in an era that seems to be dissolving a number of attributes of what have been associated with the nation and national identities.