Good Reads meta data is 474 pages, rated 4.20 by 3254 litizens.
Genre: Historical fiction.
DNA: Garlic, oops, Gallic.
Tagline: It is worse than you think.
Verdict: I got lost in the backstabbing and betrayals.
That lady killer Giordano Bruno is at it for the fifth time, now in Paris of 1585. In addition to his harem he encounters a mountain of superfluous historical detail and a confusing cast of characters. Worse, he is inept, as usual, but gets away with it because this is a work of fiction.
Catherine d’ Medici is the villain-in-chief, and she cuts quite a figure. Her nearest rival is the Duke of Guise, who thinks he ought to be king since every mirror confirms that he is so damned kingly. Catherine’s son is King Henri III, and he occasionally, but rarely, acts kingly.
The wheels are turning for another religious ceremony of mutual slaughter since it has been so long since the last one in 1572. Check Saint Bartholomew’s CV for details. Along the way we get detailed descriptions of torture, not once but twice, and a recurrent emphasis on the smells of the city in those days before Pine-o-Scent.
I needed a score card to keep track of the characters, but the important ones are clearly differentiated: Catherine, Henri III, Guise, and, especially, Charles Paget, who plays all sides against the others. Also noteworthy was the anonymous doorman who wants no friends.
The tie-up to the plot is genetic. Catherine does what she does because she is a Medici. Why dig any deeper than the name? Very unsatisfactory.
Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life (2023) by Ariel Helfer.
Good Reads meta-data is 301 pages, rated 4.0 by 2 litizens.
Genre: Straussian.
Verdict: Never has so little been made into so much.
Tagline: If you don’t know you cannot be told and if you know you don’t need to be told.
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) educated a well defined cohort in political theory in his years at the University of Chicago. He himself published a series of books that spelled out and exemplified his approach to interpreting texts, and his acolytes, while competing among themselves with the usual academic undermining and backbiting, continue the tradition to this day.
The north star of Straussianism was that great thinkers hide their meaning from both the oppressors and the masses, and these two can be one and the same. Ergo: meaning is hidden in plain sight in the text.
It takes an Indiana Jones of the seminar room to find this meaning, and avoid the snares and blind alleys left for the unwary. To find the way Jones first must study the explicit words of the great mind. That means learning the language used: ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, German, or French, and so on. One must acquire this tool before proceeding.
Next one must enter into the psychic world of the author by studying the context within which he (yes, they are all men) wrote.
Accordingly, there is a long apprenticeship of devotion to the task to be performed.
While great minds may be prolific, everything they wrote forms, if properly decoded, a single text. Note that the process is decoding, not just reading what is on the page but sensing the context in which it was put on the page and – even more important – noting what is not on the page to find what is implicit. Yes, as in aboriginal astronomy the key often is what is not there. If a reader sees a mistake in the text, the fault is in the reader not the author. Think again. Why would a mistake be deliberately inserted? Is it a red herring to distract the unworthy? If something is not there, stop and think, and think again. If it should be there, there must be a deep and dark reason why it is not. Look for the clues. Absence may be evidence.
The single text is like an old dark house where a hidden sliding door set into a wall leads to passageways built into the fabric of the building that Jones using the light of a Straussian lamp navigates step-by-step. Legend has it that some of Leo Strauss seminars spent a semester of twenty plus class hours pondering, often in Quaker-meeting silence, a dozen lines from a Platonic text. Tin foil hats were optional.
If the coded passageways twist and turn that is not an accident or a compromise with the circumstances, still less a mistake, but profoundly intentional. Great minds do not make mistakes or have accidents. Homer did not nod. Everything that is there is meaningful, however specious it seems on the surface (to wit, many of the preliminary arguments in Platonic dialogues are not chaff, warm-ups, or false starts but may be the real message encrypted for Jones to fathom). Moreover, what is not there may be even more meaningful than what is there.
The pièce de résistance is the numerology. Word, page, chapter counts and numbers themselves bear significance in this approach. The seventh word in the seventh chapter must be interrogated with Gestapo thoroughness. An old favourite of this kind is Leo Strauss’s expressed amazement that Machiavelli’s Discourses has 142 chapters, exactly the same number as Livy’s History of Rome. Astonishing! Is it? The Discourses is a chapter-by-chapter commentary on Livy’s History so it almost has to have the same number of the chapters. Thus does the Straussian endow the mundane with mystery.
As regards Plato’s Letters the chief argument of this book is that the letters are to be taken together as a single text, not a scattering of remnants. This is partly proven by the fact that there is nothing in them to indicate that unity, no cross references, few if any continuities. It is a hidden single text that only an acolyte will detect. Likewise, the positioning of the letters in the count strikes another Straussian chord. There are thirteen letters. That cannot be an accident. The longest and most significant is number seven. Again no accident.
Ariel Helfer
This veneration of the text, one might think, is compromised in ancient authors like Plato because we have no original texts, but the Straussian thesis is that such genius as Plato’s prevails against the ravages of time and tide and translation from Ancient Greek into Arabic then Latin then later Greek then modern Greek then English for the masses. (Ancient Greek is to modern Greek as Old Norse is to contemporary English, I have been told.) Yes, the fog descends at this point but the momentum continues. For an outline of this approach I have tacked on at the end the notes I used to discuss this method with students in days of yore.
In most of the letters Plato is replying to someone who has asked his advice on what to do in a political situation. While the book runs to three hundred pages, its interpretation of Plato can be summarised this way: there is no point in offering advice because all existing polities are corrupt. This is true by definition because all that exists is frangible. Any advice would be corrupted and so serve no purpose. It takes 300-pages to air that less than nourishing conclusion.
Given the Straussian emphasis on context it is curious to note that in the discussion of the minute detail of Plato’s visits to Syracuse, the author makes no mention of the last time Athenians went to Syracuse in the Sicilian Expedition of 415 B.C.E. a generation earlier. It is all but certain that relatives of Plato’s took part in that debacle. But then Alcibiades, a leader of that expedition, is not mentioned in the text either, yet his name is on two alleged Platonic dialogues.
How do we explain spurious letters or other texts attributed to ancient writers like Plato? There was an incentive to forge letters in ancient world to sell to private collectors and to the libraries at Alexandria, Pergamon, and Byzantium and when these libraries fell down the memory hole, a quick and clever forger would turn out a letter that had allegedly been saved from the ruins and put it up for sale. Of course such creativity was not limited to letters. It may be the source for the spurious dialogues, essays, and plays attributed to Plato, Xenophon, and others. But short letters were the easiest to prepare and did not require much intellectual input. They sell on their provenance, not content.
….
How to read a book in the Straussian way.
Leo Strauss
First make explicit the assumptions naive readers make.
1. the text is accurate and complete as the author could make it.
2. the text conforms to the author’s intentions.
3. the author wrote freely, uncensored.
4. the unit of meaning is the chapter, paragraph, page, and line
5. the meaning is in the words used.
6. the author is trying to communicate with any and all readers.
7. errors, omissions, contradictions are errors, omissions, and contradictions. They may be explained but they have no meaning.
8. purpose of writing is to test arguments and propositions, and to persuade.
In contrast Straussian reading assumes:
1. There are Great Truths. The esoteric. Like the statue in the block of marble, they have to released.
But they cannot be explicitly spoken. Why not? Because they would infuriate both the elite and mass, because the elite is corrupt, and mass is inferior.
To speak the great truths would both shake the polity and so endanger the speaker.
2. Therefore the Great Truth sayers are always persecuted and censored. They react accordingly.
3. Great Minds know the Great Truths, and they know persecution prevails over Great Truths.
4. Great Minds elude persecution in writing Great Books.
Indeed, persecution is a necessary condition for writing a Great Book.
5. Great Books publicly deceive; they deceive censors and the censorious part of each reader.
Privately, between the lines, the Great Books carry a coded message to informed readers.
Great Books combine the advantages of general communication for being widely available but avoid the threat of censorship and danger with the advantages of private communication carrying a frank and important hidden message to select readers.
6. Great Books reveal themselves to Great Readers who:
– are careful for everything in a Great Book has meaning.
Everything. What is said and what is not said. What is there and what is not there.
– interpret not just each passage alone but each passage in the context of the work, and the life work of the Great Mind.
– read between the lines, giving meaning to silences, i.e., what is not there.
– realize that a Great Mind may repeatedly say A is B but mean by that repetition for the reader to conclude that A is not B.
– apparent errors, omissions, and contradictions are intended to encode the secret message.
– look for irony in things said but not meant. Thus is Plato’s repeated assertion that women equal men is dismissed as a joke.
Divine that brevity may be a form of emphasis.
perceive that the coding may be within the structure, the middle line, etc. Hence the numerology.
See Leo Strauss, ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing’ (1941) for details.
—
This lengthy addendum is one reason why I don’t often comment on vocational reading. I get carried way.
Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy (2023 ) by Robin Waterfield
Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages rated 4.21 by 73 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: Greek.
Tagline: A new bottle for old wine.
Verdict: Old News.
Amazon web page opens with this sentence. So I thought it was a biography. How silly can I get? See below for an answer.
‘The first ever biography of the founder of Western philosophy.’
An account of the life and work of Plato (of Athens) from go to gone. It was a common name and became more common after his death, though it hardly seems necessary to say ‘of Athens’ since most of us never heard of all those others. Needless pedantry some might say. Right, Sal. (You either get it or you don’t. There is no try.)
The book pulls together a mass of material and relies mainly on ancient sources rather than the army ants of academic commentators that live off Plato’s corpus. Guilty of that myself. That reliance on the fragmentary remnants of ancient sources makes the book distinctive, though it is rather like assembling an incomplete jigsaw puzzle.
But wait, those ancient authors were not his contemporaries, apart from a very few, ahem, mainly Aristotle. Most of the venerable ancients the author scours wrote, such shards as survive, 400 or 500 years after Plato’s death. Ancient does not mean contemporary to Plato, though it certainly means closer, but does proximity mean accuracy? The assumption is that they had access to sources now lost which sources they seldom name.
The author sifts this material because it is, of course, contradictory. Even then scholars strove to be different. He, for example, denies the authenticity of the Platonic epistles while Ariel Helfer, Plato’s Letters (2023) affirms them. We readers are left no wiser in this clash of footnotes. The reasons Waterfield cites to reject the authenticity of a letter are the very reasons Helfer uses to affirm its legitimacy. Though these two books appeared in the same year, I doubt the authors’ paths crossed. The Englishman Waterfield on his Greek island, and Yankee Helfer in his hometown Straussian cocoon would not mix.
I gave in to the temptation to read this book because Amazon offered it as a biography, and I wondered how one could write a biography of Plato, who himself was reticent and from whose time so little has survived. That answer came quickly: It is not. It a contextualization of Plato’s works. Indeed, the book is a serial interpretation of the Plato’s dialogues with reference to the social and historical context of the times. When I realised that I reached for a paraphrase of Thomas Carlyle: Biography is history, but history is not biography.
Since I have spent so much time in the last several years with the difficulties of a biography of a Sixteenth Century figure, I was primed for this exercise. (You know whom I mean.)
The most biographical part of the account is the one we all want to know more about, Plato’s three trips to Syracuse, and these are given due weight, but no revelations follow. That is asking too much. And despite denigrating the Platonic letters, much use is made of two since they are the main source for the visits.
Robin Waterfield, renowned.
Aside: I tried to read a biography of Plato many years ago, Ludwig Marcuse, Plato and Dionysius: A Double Biography (1947), written as a see-it-now novel in which Dionysius stands in for Hitler and Plato for Churchill. Not recommended.
A reader particularly interested in these insular adventures might do better to read Mary Renault’s novel The Mask of Apollo (1966). Surely banned in Florida for its casual acceptance of homosexuality. Indeed, most ancient Greek texts would have to be banned for the same reason. Thus does the world get smaller and smaller.
Good Reads meta-data is 408 pages, rated 3.77 by 31,854 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Yankee 1914.
Verdict: Pluck galore.
Tagline: Conny got her gun.
When in 1914 the arrogant and not very bright young company town mill manager, drives his new-fangled auto-mobile into Constance Kopp’s horse drawn carriage outside Paterson New Jersey, he meets a woman who fights back. Barely stopping he refuses to acknowledge fault or pay compensation, and buzzes off. Constance (Connie to me) doesn’t take ‘No’ for an answer and pursues him by fair means or foul for restitution.
He retaliates, so unaccustomed is he to being held responsible for his stupid actions as a rich man’s son, he ignores her and then turns even uglier. The town police have no interest in challenging the son of the owner of the town in all but name, but the county sheriff has his own reasons for taking up the case.
Escalation follows as the young man’s threats take the form of bricks and bullets, and the sheriff, seeing in Constance someone who is constant, gives her shooting lessons against the final solution.
In the course of digging into the owner’s many other misdeeds, Constance is reminded of one of her own. Ahem. Not all is as it seems among the three Kopp sisters living alone on a farm outside of town. There are a lot of back- and side-stories. [Yawn.]
Nonetheless, justice is done, though less because of the sheriff’s considerable efforts, and the dire risks Constance took, than the revulsion of the manager’s family at his criminal actions. Bit late in coming that. Without the family behind him, he was suddenly alone. Very neat but a long time in coming.
Amy Stewart
The time and place are well realised and the characters are differentiated from the repellent plutocrat to the cross-pressured sherif and the sisters themselves alike but different. First in a series: Miss Kopp Won’t Quit, Dear Miss Kopp, Kopp Sisters on the March, Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions, Lady Cop (Kopp) Makes Trouble, Miss Kopp Investigates, and counting.
Good Reads meta-data is 300 pages rated 4.54 by 759 litizens.
DNA: Holmes (attenuated).
Tagline: … [can’t think of anything].
Verdict: Number 18 in the series and it shows.
Mr and Mrs Holmes of Baker Street are at it again. Mary Russell may be Mrs Holmes, but the absent and deceased Irene Adler remains the love of Holmes’s life, now personified in a son from that brief and sinful liaison. Holmes has to rescue Son and then Son has to rescue father. Then Mary Russell has to explain it all to them.
Despite the turbans and lascars inconspicuously getting up to no good in rural Provence, this is a Holmes family reunion. And like most family gathering where the participants have nothing in common but blood, it is b-o-r-i-n-g.
To bring the generations together several laws of nature are set aside. The plot is a kaleidoscope that must have been worked out by Barry Jones in one of his maze flow charts. Turns out Holmes is Indian or Sikh, a Swami, or something. Dunno lost the plot. There is very little detecting and much musing.
Ahem, I can’t let that high score on Good Reads pass without a comment. I wonder if number 19 in this series appeared as 200 blank pages, would it get a similar rating. The author has a loyal following that sees what it wants to see. This book will not add any new adherents to that happy crew.
The Master and the Margarita (1967 [1928+]) by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)
Good Reads meta-data is 320 pages rated 4.29 by 364,380 litizens
Genre: Fantasy, satire
Tagline: The devil you say! Yes, I do.
Verdict: Trip without arrival.
A conversation in public park between two savants – one a pompous professor and the other a prosperous poet- is interrupted by a distinguished gentleman who intrudes to correct an assertion the professor made, namely that there was not an historical Jesus. Oh yes, says the interrupter, there was and proceeds to recount Pontiac (spellchecker bite) Pilate’s interview of this man, a telling that does not quite accord with the gospels, but these, according to the professor, are indeed fiction. But the gentleman named Woland insists his account is true, because he witnessed it!
Thus the pair suppose Woland to be a lunatic. But we readers, thanks to the blurb, know better. He’s a charming devil and that is the literal truth. In the translation I read, there are many references to the devil and to god. How did that sit with the Comrades at the time, I wonder. Had they not yet become godless communists?
The stories thereafter proceed in parallel as we find out more about Pilate and witness the superficial corruption of the new approved artistic elite of Moscow who are beguiled by prestidigitator Woland whose entourage include a large talking cat with a taste for vodka and a witch with a Boeing broom stick for flight.
The Master and Margarita (the Qantas broom stick was late arriving) only enter in the second act and through many trials and tribulations (see above) they achieve a certain kind of survival in limbo, resonant of Dante’s Purgatorio.
The book has a varied and vexed publication history. It was written over a period of years, and in regime thaws parts of it were published with heavy censorship, while several samizdat versions came and went, but it was not until 1967 the version I have was published. I read this same version shortly after publication as a student and recall liking it, although on this reading I found the string of incidents tedious since there seemed to be no purpose but the string itself.
Good Reads meta-date is 236 pages, rated 4.06 by 4,705 litizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: UK.
Verdict: Enough, already!
Tagline: All show, no go.
Our hero gets caught between the Titans and, well, other Titans. These titans really are big, and one can only become a titan with the wealth of an Arab oil sheik. Think of them as bodybuilders on the ultimate steroid. They are the 1% who own the government, police, media, and …. When one of them is murdered, who you gonna call? Someone who can’t say no, that’s who: a Tiny investigator with gum on his shoe and chip on his raincoat shoulder.
The murdered Titan was an odd ball, even, or especially for a Titan, and Investigator spends a lot of time and adds to the body count unravelling the deceased’s past. How did such a schomo get to be a Titan? And what was he up to once he became? And what does cage fighting have to do with it? All good questions.
The plot is outlandish, to say the least, but the pace, the dialogue, my curiosity kept me reading, but – warning – the author seems to think ‘noir’ means keeping the reader in the dark. Much of the dialogue is cryptic and incomprehensible. There are pages and pages of pointless banter filling out the bulk. Passing points are laboured and pivotal plot points flash by.
Nick Harkaway
It is sold as noir but I would say it is more nihilism than noir. Part of a series, but this one is probably enough for your reader to ingest (but not digest).
Balzac as He Should be Read (1946) by William H. Royce
Good Reads meta-data: it is listed without any details. It has 48 pages.
Tagline: Useful.
Verdict: A gem.
A retirement project I once had in mind was to read in sequence Honoré de Balzac’s La Comedie humaine. I made a false start more than a decade ago and got bogged down in one of his novels that was epistolary, letters between two sisters, which was boring. He must have needed the francs per word and spun it out. The reading I did then was in publication order, which is not the sequence in which his grand comedy of life fits together.
The difficulty at that time was compounded because the Rocket e-Book reader of the day did not make it easy. The text was there but not word wrapped on the screen. That made a considerable difference to my surprise. Moreover the only available digital editions were out of copyright Victorian translations that were censored and stilted
To begin anew, I needed a kick start, and this little book did it. In case a reader does not realise why a spark-plug is needed, please note that more than ninety (90) stories comprise the whole, and many of those are full-length novels. Balzac was a Niagara of words.
The complete Human Comedy in translation.
Royce offers three suggestions about how to immerse oneself in Balzac’s waters. One is to read in publication order as I tried. Royce himself rejects this because in subsequent editions, Balzac manipulated the sequences to suit the growth and interaction of the 2,450 characters he created on the page. The time of publication did not coincide with the overall narrative which grew in all directions, including backward. Ergo to read a novel published in 1840 set in 1840 before one published in 1842 with many of the same characters set in 1830 when they were younger convolutes the narrative in favour of the publication date. Balzac often birthed characters at age 30 or 40, and then later went to back to them when they were younger. Eugène de Rastignac appears in nearly thirty of his novels at different ages. Needless to say these thirty were not published in chronological order of Rastignac’s age. (See Anthony Pugh, Balzac’s Recurring Characters [1974] for pedantic detail.)
Second is by the order of events dated in the novels and stories and this he offers to the reader with the gargantuan appetite for the whole. Let it be noted that Balzac is largely consistent on dates within each novel and refers to an event or person that can be dated in nearly every story.
Willian H Royce
Third, embedded in that chronological list Royce bolds the titles of twenty novels that he deems the core of the Comedie humaine. That is a much more digestible banquet, and since long ago I read The Chouans, Père Goriot, the Wild Ass Skin, The Unknown Masterpiece, and Cousin Bette which were included in that twenty, I had a running start with this selection. Assuming those six I went to Amazon to find a Kindle version of the next novel: Une Ténébreuse Affaire. It has many titles in English but none are available for Kindle.
While confirming that absence, Amazon began besieging me with other titles, and I bit on one which I will comment on later. Suffice to say here that it is a biography (not of Balzac) but of seven of his principle characters. It was an intriguing idea and I have started on it to my satisfaction. More on this later, if you are good.
Personal indulgence. The first Balzac title I read was Père Goriot in high school for an AP World Literature class. The other Balzac’s I read in college for a similar class. What do students read today in high school classes? Comments welcome.
I went through Maison de Balzac in 1980, but all I can remember is that there was a secret backdoor through the rear garden that he used to escape the creditors and bailiffs when they came in the front door, usually by kicking it in. He moved around a lot and used false names to elude debt collectors who were legion.
Royce’s long out print book came into my hand thanks to Katester’s perspicacious insight in making it a Christmas gift.
GoodReads meta-data is 399 pages, rated 3.97 by 12,264 litizens.
Genre: History.
Tagline: Believe it or not!
Verdict: Quite a story.
Operation Fortitude incorporates the many elements that went into the effort to deceive Germans about the site for the opening of a second front in Western Europe. The six double agents described in this book were the lynchpin of the Operation, but other parts were crucial to create a mutually supportive house of cards.
As one of the British instigators of the Operation said, we only have to convince one German, Hitler, and he will order all others to obey.
It should be borne in mind that the deception continued well past D-Day to cause Hitler to hold German army reserves in place – for more than month into July.
The deception stood on two legs. First, was an inflation of Allied troops in Britain to take part in an invasion and second was the locale of the invasion. These two interacted as will be explained below. Stay tuned.
The aim of the inflation of the forces available (men, armour, and air) was to lead the Germans to the conclusion that there would be a major diversionary attack, followed by the real thing. To make that credible it had to appear that the Allies had 80 or more army divisions in Britain. (A full strength division would field between 10,000 and 15,000 or more troops, capable of sustained tactical warfare. The Allied divisions would be full-strength, while by 1944 many of the German ones were at half-strength.) With forces of this magnitude a diversionary attack could be 20-30 divisions, leaving a 50 or more for the real thing. The diversion, which by definition would be first, could involve as many as 250,000+ soldiers. I’ll come back to the magic that did this inflation below.
Second, as to locale, the important thing was to sow confusion and cause the Germans to split their forces. Several prospects were mooted from Norway (to link with the Soviets in the north) and then bring Sweden into the war, to the Bordeaux region of France (with part of the forces to attack this latter area sailing directly from the United States, as had done the army that landed in North Africa in November 1942), and the Marseilles area using North Africa as a base, as well as the obvious choice: the Pas de Calais. The goal was not to convince them it was one of the other, but to foster uncertainty about which.
The inflation of Allied forces centred on the fictitious FUSAG – First United States Army Group in South eastern England commanded by General George Patton who was much in evidence as though inspecting troops, supervising preparations, briefing officers, enthusing men, and so on. He was the star of a one-man show.
Around him was an army of illusion of a mere 40,000. Equipment, tents, tanks, trucks, aircraft, ships – moved around him for German aerial reconnaissance photographs. Many were props supplied by London stage magicians, movie studio carpenters, and their ilk to create an illusion. Many of vehicles were painted balloons, the barracks were roofs only, the tents were dyed sheets, the ships moored here and there and occasionally moved were plywood facsimiles. All this activity by Patton’s 40,000 was to simulate 500,000 men or more.
Meanwhile, the South East corner of England buzzed with US Army radio traffic. All fictional but most of it contrived on the assumption that the Germans would hear it.
Most of the effort went into focussing in everything but word on the Pas de Calais zone, but a secondary effort of the same kind was aimed at Norway.
The double agents reaffirmed much of this with reports on unit badges of fictitious formations and sightings of important generals, and Churchill himself once. Eisenhower had a second fictitious HQ in the area in which he never set foot, yet streams of radio messages went in and out of it, as did dispatch riders on motorbikes who roared through the local villages sporting phoney unit badges on their shoulders.
As to locale, the greater the spread of possibilities the better. To confirm an attack on Norway, the exiled King of Norway was much seen along Scotland’s east coast, where the many ships of the Norwegian merchant marine assembled. To salt the idea of Marseilles an actor imitating General B Montgomery visited Gibraltar where it was carefully arranged that he should be seen by a well known German spy, a Spanish police officer.
Likewise, reconnaissance flights and bombing missions concentrated on the Pas de Calais and Norway, but Bordeaux and Marseilles were also hit. The latter were each bombarded by the Royal Navy at times.
Meanwhile, the French resistance became very active in the Pas de Calais area, and the Norwegian resistance left a trail of activities that could only be mapping, charting, and sounding inlets and bays for amphibious landings.
Another thread to this tapestry of lies was that an armada was being prepared in the USA and Canada for direct transportation to Bordeaux. German agents in the USA, most double agents for the US, reported all manner of preparation in harbours from Norfolk to Boston and Halifax. That was compounded by indiscrete planted news items concerning troops and generals. The closing of harbours, the heavy security around fenced off military bases (which were mostly empty), the stockpiling of foodstuffs and equipment. This latter would evidently make its way to Normandy, but at the time the hint was that it was Bordeaux bound.
In order to freeze the German strategic reserve in place, the deception continued after D-Day. To preserve their credibility, the double agents made carefully timed reports that implied that there would be a landing at Normandy but that it would be diversionary. In this case, as in all others the reports did not flatly say that but rather scattered clues in the text, allowing the German analysts to connect the dots, which they did.
Did all of this intelligence, creativity, effort, and risk work? Yes.
The 15th Panzers stayed in reserve at Calais for a month after 6 June, waiting for the real invasion to strike there. By the time it was deployed the Allied foothold was secure, Allied force was dominate, tactical airpower was overwhelming and immediate from airfields in France. The Germans could not travel roads in daytime such was the blanket of tactical airpower, so they drove at night. But where?
French Resistance twisted around road signs between Pas de Calais and Normandy. The Germans had erected their own road signs, and these were moved around rather than destroyed, so they looked right but were wrong. More than one unit of artillery, tanks, or infantry followed the signs into a marsh or bluff.
All the while a highly trained mountain army of 250,000 Germans remained in Norway, waiting for the real invasion. Likewise, half of the German troops in France remained concentrated in the south in anticipation of a Mediterranean landing.
That one person who had to believe the lie was Hitler, who had been telling the generals for months that the attack would be at Pas de Calais since (1) it was closest to England and for that reason had been used by Henry V and William the Conqueror for their invasions and (2) it had a deep water harbour with good rail connections and was close to the best harbour in northern Europe at Antwerp. Since Hitler, like all weaklings, could never admit to being wrong, he stuck firmly to that thesis for more than month – nursed along by the misinformation which continued after D-Day, and he held that powerful panzer force for the real invasion to come at Pas de Calais, despite the pleas of the generals facing the invasion.
As the deception unfolded in May and June, MI5 had confirmation that it was working. That came partly from intercepted German radio traffic (which Bletchley Park had cracked long ago, RAF reconnaissance photographs, reports by resistance groups in Norway, Belgium, and France. But the most authoritative source was Hitler himself! Huh?
It seems that he had a particular liking for Baron Oshima, the Japanese ambassador to Nazi Germany, himself a Germanophile who spoke the language fluently and who was an ardent fascist. Though quite how Hitler squared that with his birthright racism and his aversion of close contact with anyone who was not a servile subordinate remains a mystery. Oshima must have been one smooth operator.
Oshima was also a good listener, as many diplomats are, and he often had private tête-à-têtes with Hitler who spoke freely and in some detail to this trusted associate. And I mean private, just the two of them.
Oshima on the left
As well as a good listener, Oshima also had a prodigious memory and was a conscientious official who, after every meeting with Hitler, would transcribe the conversation and radio it to Tokyo. These reports sometimes ran to 20 or more pages. The US Navy had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes in 1941, and read Oshima’s reports each time. In them, even after 6 June, Hitler was positive that a real attack would come later at Pas de Calais, and told that to Oshima more than once in June and July and the baron passed it on to Tokyo.
Part of the reason for the success of Operation Fortitude was the corruption, incompetence, and internecine conflict among Nazi intelligence agencies. Ideological purity trumped competence. They were ready to undermine and denounce each other, either for personal gain or to out-Nazi each other in finding traitors under every bed, and so to save their own necks spymasters had to paper over every crack, double down on every assertion, and overstate the cases they were making to deflect this rivalry. The effect was to cause German intelligence officers to emphasise the positive, and hide the negative from their murderous rivals. Yes, I know it sounds like McKinsey management.
While the Fortitude orchestra of deception played more or less from the same music, there were wild cards. There was one freelance interloper, who had offered his services to the Germans as a spy, claiming to have a network of twenty or more informants in Great Britain. These twenty were complete fantasy but the German foreign intelligence services combined being inept with a thirst for knowledge and they bought this lie. This individual lived in the City of Spies that Lisbon became.
The Iberian fantasist just might, in spewing out nonsense, include Normandy. The Brits had tumbled on to him early on and let him run to sew confusion with the Germans, but now the stakes were both high and immediate. Should they continue to ignore him, or silence him (by kidnap or murder). In the end the decision was to let him continue so as to drown the Germans in information. Though the Germans listened to this Iberian, they were somewhat skeptical because his reports were always much more explicit than the double agents the British were running. In short, his reports often seemed too good to be true, and also they did not have the confirmation of other activities as enumerated above, like aerial reconnaissance, fabricated radio traffic, body doubles, and the like.
While the double agents risked their lives, most of their work was done in Lisbon or London sending back misinformation to their respective spymasters of things they and their fantasy networks of agents in Great Britain had seen or overheard. However, one was kidnapped from Lisbon by the Gestapo and returned to Germany where he did not survive interrogation, but miraculously did not give away the plan. His arrest had to do with embezzlement not spying. He was crooked all the way around.
While the double agents did their jobs, being chancers, odd balls, and worse, their British spymasters found them personally distasteful. The agents were certainly not ‘one of us’ from Cambridge. This disdain often showed in their treatment of these assets. One of the irritating qualities nearly all of them had, was the refusal to be bought. Money was not a means of control for any of them. They hated the Nazis, that was motivation enough. Most were pro-British even Anglophile, but there was one, who hated the Nazis, but did not love the British, and this annoyed her case officers constantly. She said sarcastically once, that she would not sing ‘Rule Britannia’ while listening to German officers’ loose lips in occupied Paris. This witticism drove her case officer into a paroxysm of temper, while she laughed in his face. When endangered she was abstracted from Paris and sequestered in a safe house in London for months to keep her cover intact. When her usefulness was at an end she was more or less literally turned out into the street and and charged back rent on the safe house to which she had been confined for months at a time. Such was the thanks of a grateful nation.
By the way ‘Double Cross’ did not refer directly to the deception, rather it was the roman numeral XX, and the committee that had hatched Operation Fortitude was Committee 20, there being 19 others. Of course, the designation Double Cross took on a second meaning as the event proceeded.
Side note. While not wholly relevant to this story, I am reminded of the fact that Hitler liked bigger and better weapons, and one of those was the 70-ton King Tiger tank. By contrast the Panther tanks that led the invasions of Poland and France weighed in at just under 9-tons. The King Tiger was indeed formidable and perhaps a hundred of these steel monsters reposed around Calais. But once deployed they were their own worst enemy: They consumed twice as much fuel as any other German tank, had a commensurate short range between refuellings, were too wide for country roads and lanes in Normandy’s bocage, were too heavy for nearly all bridges in Northern France, and their ammunition was incompatible with other tanks. They also presented Allied tactical bombers with big, slow moving targets if they moved in daylight. But they had shock absorbers and some kind of air conditioning for the crew who sat on leather covered seats. The result was that few of these behemoths contributed to the battles that followed. They had been designed and built for the open plains of Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, Belorussia but Hitler had withdrawn from there to sit in France. Later they were not able to pass through the forest paths and roads in the Ardennes and did not have enough fuel during the Battle of the Bulge and many of them sat idly behind the lines. Such was the genius of Hitler.
GoodReads meta-data is 364 pages, rated 4.13 by 17,490 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: Brit.
Verdict: Strange but true.
Tagline: An Iron Cross, believe it or not.
Eddie Chapman was a rough diamond who early discovered his talent for crime and honed it. He was a versatile criminal who burgled houses while the owner slept; he mastered the use of gelignite to open safes in businesses; drove cars into showroom windows to snatch fur coats and more. He was handsome and had learned to affect the purple, though he had not been born to it, and anyone who had been would realise he wasn’t, but the veneer worked its magic often enough on others to sustain his career of crime.
With an accumulated fourteen years of imprisonment on his card, he broke bail and ran to the island of Jersey in the English Channel with Betty. He was 25 and she 19, terribly flattered by the attentions of this apparently wealthy man of the world. As they dined in Jersey’s most expensive restaurant, he said to her ‘You’re the one.’ He had known quite a few women, but he meant what he said to Betty. She was thrilled, but before his meaning could fully sink in, after a glance at the restaurant door where two beefy men in coats were entering, he said to her ‘I’ll be back,’ and then he leapt up from the dinner table and jumped out a nearby window, disappearing from her life it would have seemed.
Bergerac did catch him and put him in the local chokey while the legal wheels turned to extradite him to Old Blighty because Jersey has its own slow-moving legal system which is half French and totally amateur. It mattered not for no sooner did Eddie land in the slammer than the Germans landed on Jersey in 1940. To get out of jail (and back to Betty) he decided to convince the Germans that he was on their side. So began his years as a spy, counter-spy, and double agent.
It took him months to convince the Germans that he hated the English who had jailed him, speaking a passable German (which he had learned from an earlier mistress), knew how to use explosives (from his safe blowing experience), he argued in schoolboy German that spy craft was but an extension of crime craft, evidence of his mastery of the latter was in the court and police records he had compiled. During this time he was first abused and used by the Gestapo, and then when he was accepted as an agent by the Abwehr he was wined and dined.
After training he was parachuted into England on a mission of sabotage. He promptly turned himself into the police and explained the situation to the incredulity of the locals, but eventually MI5 took an interest. He had hoped to buy his freedom (from those fourteen years) with the information about the Abwehr he had memorised but instead he was soon blackmailed into becoming a double agent and going back to the Germans to plant disinformation. To do that the English had to convince the Germans he had succeeded in his missions to protect his cover when he returned. That is quite a story in itself. He was so successful, it was made to seem, that the Germans presented him with an iron cross, as above.
The details that follow are many, and often boring. Yes, the life of a spy, even a double agent, consists of hours of sitting and waiting.
What is very clear, though the author has no interest in it, is the organisational dysfunction of both the British and German intelligence agencies. First there are turf wars among them. If he was an MI6 spy, then MI5 tried to undermine his credibility in preference to its own agents and if his credibility was unassailable, then MI5 tried to poach him from MI6 by overt or covert means. Of such malfeasance knighthoods are born. And the clowns of SOE always wanted cannon fodder.
It was no different with the Germans. Worse even because in the chaotic German arrangements there were more players and few of them played by any rules. Any Abwehr agent was suspect to the Gestapo, the SD, the RHSA, the SS, and so on and on in alphabet soup of murderous rivals. When in 1944 an enraged Hitler destroyed the Abwehr, and had murdered many of its agents from the top down, Chapman was spared because he had long been rusticating in Oslo which was beyond the immediate blast zone of Hitler’s wraith at the time.
Another organisational insight that is more obvious on the German side, though relevant to the British, too, is the mutual dependence of spy and spymaster. To establish his own importance the spymaster must have at least one successful spy. That means the spymaster is inclined to read success into the spy’s activities and to protect the spy from the critics and rivals. Both Ed’s English and German spymasters needed him to succeed for their own good.
Likewise, a rival spy master has an incentive to undermine the spies of another master, namely to shore up his own position in comparison: McKinsey management in the making with those Killing Performance Indicators.
During Ed’s years of absence Betty had married another man, who was killed in the war, changed her name, and moved several times. Then one day in 1946 when she was having tea in a shop, Ed appeared at her side and said, ‘I told you I’d be back.’ He had hired a private detective to find her. Off they went never to be parted again, except by the plod, because he continued his life of crime. By the way, the godfather to their first born was his German spymaster!
He was the model for John Robbie in To Catch a Thief.
