How Britain won the war in 1940

If only all history books could be written by Michael Korda (or David McCullough or Doris Kearns Goodwin or Candace Millard or Stephen E. Ambrose or a handful of other writers with a gift for making history come alive). Enthralled as I was last year reading Korda's Ike, a biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower, with its primary focus on the D-Day invasion, I was eager to read his 2009 book With Wings Like Eagles: The Untold Story of the Battle of Britain. What a fine book it is.

The "untold story" has to do with Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, whom few Americans have even heard of and whom may not even be that highly regarded in Great Britain. Korda says the official history of the Battle of Britain, which sold more than 6 million copies, did not even mention Dowding's name. Yet Korda calls Dowding "the architect of this victory." It was he, more than anyone (with the possible exception of Winston Churchill, who instilled in the British the will to resist Hitler) who prevented a German invasion of Britain in 1940.

The German bombing raids that came to be known as the Battle of Britain were intended to weaken British resistance to an invasion during the summer of 1940. Destroying the Royal Air Force was a major part of that plan. Dowding began developing Britain's fighter planes long before the war started, at a time when most other military authorities thought bombers, not fighters, were where the money should go. When large numbers of German bombers began flying across the English Channel, however, it was Dowding's fighters that intercepted and destroyed so many of them.

Some military strategists try to convince the enemy he faces a larger force than he actually does. Dowding had the opposite strategy. He convinced the Germans the British had fewer fighter planes than it did, so the German kept sending bombers and fighters to try to destroy those remaining fighters, but Dowding brought more and more of them into the fight, weakening the German air force all the while. By the time late September arrived, it was too late in the year to count on favorable weather for an invasion, and Hitler called it off, for good as it turned out. "Perhaps without even realizing it, in mid-September 1940 Hitler lost the war, defeated by the efforts of perhaps 1,000 young men," Korda writes.

Yet in another aspect to this "unknown story," Korda gives credit to the many young British women who played major roles in the victory. Female pilots delivered new fighter planes, ready for combat, to the bases around Britain. Women worked as radar plotters and radio operators, continuing to work even as German bombs dropped all around them. (It was Dowding who insisted back in 1937 that telephone lines be buried deep underground to protect them during any possible airstrike.) Women deciphered German codes and defused bombs and dragged them off runways so British planes could take off and land.

Introverted and not one to build friendships or promote his own causes, Dowding was a controversial figure whose many rivals were always trying to replace. They succeeded long before the end of the war. Even Churchill didn't like Dowding and, according to Korda, never forgave him for being right about sending more fighter planes to France during the German invasion of that country. Churchill wanted to send more and more planes, while Dowding insisted France was a lost cause and those planes were needed to protect England. That Dowding was able to protect as many fighters as he did went a long way to making victory possible.

Teen idol

When I was a member of the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club as a teenager, Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988) ranked among my favorite authors. His sci-fi stories displayed wit and imagination, yet his fanciful plots were generally anchored in the real world, making them easier to grasp and identify with than the works of certain other writers in that genre.

It has been decades since I've read any of Simak's books, but recently I picked up They Walked Like Men (1962) and was reminded of why I liked his stories so much as a kid.

The novel might also have been called They Rolled Like Bowling Balls, for the aliens who have invaded Earth seem to be able to take whatever form suits their purpose. They can turn into men (or money) when they want to buy real estate or into something the size and shape of bowling balls when they want to make a quick getaway. Buying real estate is how these creatures aim to conquer Earth, one plot of ground at a time. They want it all to be perfectly legal (even if they are using phony money) and totally undetectable by mankind until it is too late.

Small-town newspaperman Parker Graves discovers the plot, but getting anyone to believe his story is another matter. Who's going to believe aliens from outer space are trying to buy their house? Many journalists have, in the real world, been enticed into public relations. Simak tells what happens when the aliens who walk like men and roll like bowling balls make Parker an enticing offer to become their public relations man.

This tale manages to be both exciting and humorous at the same time. It also contains better prose than some might usually associate with science fiction. Here are some descriptive lines Simak wrote that I particularly like:

"The rustling of the drying leaves, heard in the silence of the night, sounded like the furtive pattering of many little feet."

"... where empty bookshelves gaped back at me like an old man with a toothless grin."

"Then the brake lights burned red holes in the night ..."

I don't think I was wrong to have admired Clifford D. Simak so much as a teen.

Anchored to one's house

"For books are a desperate nuisance; a library of even a few thousand volumes anchors a man to one house, because it is such a task to shift them."

Robertson Davies, Holiday magazine, 1962

This wonderful sentence was written by Canadian novelist Robertson Davies (1913-1995) for a magazine essay, which was later reprinted in his 1970 collection The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies and then again in A Passion for Books (1999), which is where I found it. Rather than comment on the sentence as a whole, I thought I would break it down into phrases.

For books are a desperate nuisance

I like the author's chosen modifier: desperate. Books are not just a nuisance, but a desperate nuisance. They are costly, they take up space, they collect dust and, as Davies goes on to point out, they are hard to move from one place to another. As with nagging spouses, unruly children or barking dogs, one has to really love them to put up with them.

a library of even a few thousand volumes

The word that jumps out at me here is even. I would love to know how many books Robertson Davies owned to use the phrase "even a few thousand volumes." I own about 5,000 books, which apparently falls into the "even" category. Writer Pete Hamill claimed to have 10,000 books. I notice that one member of the LibraryThing website owns almost 18,000 books. Many other members have many more books than I do.

anchors a man to one house

Here the key word is anchors. Once your library begins to expand, you simply don't want to move, not even to a bigger house with more room for books. It's not just the thought of moving tons of books that anchors a book lover. It's also the fact that no matter how many books you own, you probably have a pretty good idea where each of them can be found. They are organized in a way that makes sense to their owner, even if not to anyone else. Moving those books to a new home means losing that disorderly order and that unorganized organization.

because it is such a task to move them.

But, yes, the real problem is the task of moving them. It can take many years to collect "even a few thousand volumes," and by that time the collector is no longer young. That makes the task of moving all the more taxing. Most of my own books are shelved (or floored) in my upstairs library. So that means not just boxing and lifting those thousands of books, but also carrying them down a flight of stairs. Yes, I can hire someone else to do the work, yet I still think of it as my task, not something to be entrusted entirely to a stranger.

Also, as one ages, any possible move is likely to be to a smaller home, not a larger one. That means an additional task of sorting through one's books and deciding which to keep and which must go. I would prefer to delay this task as long as possible. Thus I remain anchored to my house.

Racial boxes

Mary Omosa of Kenya

I heard the guest preacher say this phrase last Sunday morning: "an African-American woman who is from Kenya." Was she really an African-American woman from Kenya? Or was she an African woman from Kenya? Or perhaps just a Kenyan woman?

I have always resisted the term African-American, in part, for this very reason. It requires too much knowledge both about a person's racial background and about his or her national background. Or, as in the case of the preacher, it requires simply ignoring what knowledge one does possess and using the term out of habit in order to avoid the supposedly insensitive word black. Yet calling an African woman an African-American strikes me as much more insensitive. But I don't know why it was necessary to make an reference to the woman's race at all, both because most Kenyans are widely known to be black and, more importantly, because the woman's race was irrelevant to what the preacher was saying.

Perhaps also because I was a newspaper copy editor for so many years, I dislike African-American because it is long and unwieldy. It doesn't fit easily into a headline. Why use long words or multiple words when shorter words or shorter phrases work just as well, if not better? That's why I would rather tell someone "Good day!" than "Have a good day!" or, worse, "Have a good rest of the day!"

The mixing of races in today's world has reached the point where a stranger, or in some cases even the person in question, cannot easily identify the race of that person. Perhaps the time has come, or soon will come, when we should stop trying to fit individuals into racial boxes. Certainly that is what last Sunday's preacher should have done.

New books on old subjects

People never seem to tire of reading about certain subjects and certain people. Perusing two catalogs of recent books I found 19 books about the Kennedy assassination, including at least three suggesting Lyndon Johnson had something to do with it and one blaming the CIA. These books have titles like A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination and Unsolved History: JFK, Death in Dealey Plaza. Then, too, we find We Were There: Revelations from the Dallas Doctors Who Attended to JFK on November 22, 1963 and Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination.

I count 16 books about Abraham Lincoln (including Did Lincoln Own Slaves and Lincoln's Melancholy) and eight books about Winston Churchill (including Churchill Defiant: Fighting on, 1945-1955 and Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1946). There are at least 11 new books or new editions of older books about Marilyn Monroe. You might try Marilyn Monroe: The Final Years or Marilyn Monroe: Gone, But Not Forgotten. One book, Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-ups, that discusses Marilyn's death also discusses JFK's death, so I counted that one in both categories.

I didn't even try to count all the books about the Civil War and World War II, two broad topics that may never lose their appeal to those who enjoy reading about military history. I happen to be reading an excellent book about World War II myself.

I understand the attraction of each of these subjects because I own several books about each of them. I once got rid of a couple of my Churchill biographies because I thought had too many, but I still have five of them. I also seem to be overloaded with biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Hardy and, of all people, Ivan the Terrible. We just can't seem to learn enough about certain people and certain events of the past.

A knack for aphorisms

Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafon, whose book Marina I reviewed here in my last post, is a writer who, like Louis de Bernieres in his terrific novel Birds Without Wings, displays a knack for aphorisms. Every few pages, usually through one of his characters, he says something that would not be out of place in a fortune cookie or, better yet, a book of quotations. He has a way of summing up one of life's truths in just a few words.

Here are some lines I noted in Marina:

"To paint is to write with light."

"Sometimes, the things that are the most real only happen in one's imagination."

"The territory of humans is life. Death does not belong to us."

Those lines are pretty good, but Carlos Ruiz Zafon does even better in some of his other novels. Here are a sampling from The Shadow of the Wind:

"We exist as long as somebody remembers us."

"Books are mirrors. You only see in them what you already have within you."

"Keep your dreams. You never know when you might need them."

And here are a few from The Angel's Game, to date my favorite of his novels:

"Theory is the practice of the impotent."

"To believe or to disbelieve is a pointless act. Either one knows or one doesn't."

"One can convert only a sinner, never a saint."

"Routine is the housekeeper of inspiration."

Those are some pretty good lines, I think. Bartlett's should reserve a page for this writer in their next edition.

He just met a girl named Marina

Marina, the latest novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, was actually published in Spain before The Shadow of the Wind and other novels that have proven so popular in their English translations in the United States. Reading it one can see why this earlier story was not translated into English before now. While worth reading, Marina is just not up to the standard American readers have become used to.

Set in 1980 in Barcelona, the novel tells of a 15-year-old boy named Oscar stuck unhappily in a boarding school. Wandering the streets one day he meets a lovely girl named Marina and her father, a once great painter who gave up art after the death of his wife. Soon Oscar becomes so involved in their lives that his own life, his own family and his school shrink in importance.

All this is fascinating, but then it becomes fantastic as Oscar and Marina's adventures take them, quite literally, into the Barcelona underworld, where a tortured madman, like a 20th century Frankenstein, seeks to reanimate the dead. While all this seems far-fetched, the hardest thing for me to believe was how other characters, including a hardened former police officer, so quickly and seriously accept these two kids as if they were Sam Spade-like investigators, instead of sending them home to their parents.

Of course, all of Ruiz Zafon's novels have a bit of the gothic and the fantastic in them. That explains their appeal. Marina just seems like too much of a good thing.