I have what looks like a cracking good thriller next to my armchair, written by Jo Nesbo, the Norwegian writer but, for a change, this is not one of his police procedurals. I have just started it and it looks as though it's going to be a corker, and I really do want to finish it, but . . . but . . .
Although it's hard work, although I keep erupting in either fury or anguish, although it's bloody heavy to hold, although it runs to nearly a thousand dense pages, I just cannot tear myself away from Allies of a Kind by Christopher Thorne. It tells the history of the war with Japan. I'm only on the first few chapters which describe the run up to war and I don't know whether to burst into tears or hurl the book out of the window! Here is crass stupidity piled upon blind folly with more than enough to go round all the nations involved and their principal actors. Roosevelt, and some of the crafty dunderheads around him, come out as small-town politicians, not fit for purpose. To be fair to the president, he never lost sight of the fact that the American public were acting as one almighty sheet-anchor against anything he might try but his lack of clarity and purpose was almost criminal. Equally, Churchill comes out of it as an antidiluvian, romantic imperialist stuck somewhere in the early Kiplingesque era of the 19th century. Most of those who surrounded him, at home, or even worse, out in Singapore, were brain-dead from the arse both ways!
And so, slowly but inexorably the great wheel turns, the ratchets meet the cogs, and war looms and no-one is prepared, no one has a plan, all is left to chance. "Oh the horror, the horror!"
Come on, cheer up! We invented the atom bomb, so it all ended happily ever after, didn't it!
Posted by: Whyaxye | Tuesday, 29 November 2011 at 17:11
'W', you strain irony to breaking point, you rascal!
Posted by: David Duff | Tuesday, 29 November 2011 at 21:22