Category Archives: War

Commandos’ war in a small corner of Croatia: Island of Terrible Friends, by Bill Strutton

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KomisaOn holidays on the island of Vis a few years ago I came across a memorial to British commandos in the harbour of Komisa. I found this book after I got home, a non-fiction novel told from the perspective of the real British doctors who worked on the island, in and around Komisa, when it was one of the few bits of Croatia unoccupied by the Germans.

Komiza CommandosThe author, himself a veteran of the war in the Eastern Mediterranean, had clearly taken the time to visit the island as the accounts he gathered are precisely rooted in the geography of the island – its possible to find and follow the roads described in the story and find the locations of many of the incidents. And, while the story is told from the perspectives of the allies and based on the accounts of allied combatants, particularly the doctors on the island, it does not shy away from the nastier aspects of the war: the beautiful island I could see from the window of my holiday apartment, for example, is identified as the place that the Partisans took both German prisoners and their own people judged guilty of infractions to execute them.

Overall a facinating and engagingly written story of deeply likeable people in a bloody but forgotten corner of the bloodiest of wars.

War by Sebastian Junger

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War is a book derived from the author’s time spent with an American combat unit in Afghanistan. It is is an exceptionally honest and thoughtful meditation on battle, what it does to combatants and the nature of courage.

RestrepoJunger frequently allows himself into the story but by and large avoids the “journalist as hero” cliche, using his presence as a surrogate for the reader, trying to make sense, with occasional reflection on social science and history, on what he is seeing and experiencing.

The book generally eschews context, both geo-politcal as well as local, with the voices of Afghans barely heard, and the politics of the region largely undiscussed. Junger argues, not unreasonably, that this is beyond the scope of his research focus. Nevertheless the book remains vital for understanding the risks inherent in waging this type of war. If the reader bothers to contemplate this book beyond the fine writing and gripping descriptions of battle, death and survival, they will find an unsettling moral: if courage is love, as Junger argues convincingly that it is, then the loyalty that breeds may also provide, at least sometimes, the basis for individual participation in atrocity and cover up.

20 years on from Kapuscinski: Fragments of a Forgotten War by Judith Matloff

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luanda-angolaTwenty years on from Kapuchinski’s exceptional account of the coming of Angolan independence, Another Day of Life, Judith Matloff, an American journalist, reported on the country. Subsequently she produced this book, one of the best English language books on modern Angolan history.

Matloff covers a period which I found particularly compelling because it was that just before the time I worked in Angola myself. She gives us a fine narrative account of these years of continuing civil war, between the governing MPLA and the rebel UNITA movement under the leadership of the psychotic Jonas Savimbi, and the stumbling, ultimately illusory efforts towards peace. Her work is rooted in attention to the history and culture of Angola with a focus on the impact the slaughter had upon the ordinary people. Matloff allows herself into the story occasionally, but with refreshing honesty about her weaknesses and mistakes, avoiding the “journalist as hero” cliche.

Matloff’s title reminds the reader how the bloodshed of Angola’s protracted war was generally ignored by the world for years on end. It is a pity that the book itself also seems to have become as forgotten in the West as the Angolan war was. This is war reportage in the finest tradition of Martha Gelhorn.

Citizen philosophers and a dimwit go to war for Old Ireland: my review of Insurrection by Liam O’Flaherty

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imageLiam O’Flaherty’s 1950 novel is an account of a small group of rebels progress through Easter Week 1916, starting with the storming of the General Post Office, through an action clearly based on the intense fighting around Mount Street Bridge, to the final hours around the GPO leading up to the surrender.

As in his books Skerrit and The Informer, O’Flaherty’s principle protagonist is a pretty dim one, in this case a Connemara man Bartley Madden, who is transformed, though not intellectually, by his experiences during the novel. How much you enjoy having a Stage Irishman at the centre of the novel you are reading is probably a matter of personal taste, but I could have done without it. Such a device seems to have been chosen by O’Flaherty in order to explore his political and philosophical ideas, and it is these more than the fighting that are central to his concerns in this novel.

And, unfortunately this makes for a rather unbelievable and clumsy novel. Pages are taken up with philosophical and cod-philosophical discourse. Perhaps this is how soldiers, most particularly citizen-soldiers, spend their time in battle. But even if it rings true I found many of their conversations uninteresting and the view of O’Flaherty, who had been a combatant in both the first world war and the struggles around Irish independence, bleak.

Those who know a little about the 1916 rising will recognise that O’Flaherty is generally faithful to the course of events and the geography of Dublin. However if one is searching for a gripping introduction to the 1916 rebellion, Charles Townsend’s historical account is both more informative and, for me, much more exciting.