Blitzkriek does what it says on the cover – gives a swift account of the rise of Hitler to power, then skates quickly over the years of crisis which led up to the start of World War Two, in order to focus on what really fascinates Len, the theory and practice of Blitzkrieg itself, and then its implementation in the Battle for France.
This hinged on the battle for the river Meuse, a few key days in May 1940 when the German army surprised the world by using tank divisions supported, not by lumbering artillery which would have slowed them down, but by agile fighter-bomber airplanes which could keep up with them as they tore through France’s supposedly impregnable defences. The German panzer divisions deliberately avoided confrontations with France’s strongpoints (the major error of World War One), instead racing for the Channel ports and effectively cutting off the French Army and British Expeditionary Force in the north from their supply routes and surrounding them, before closing in for the kill.
What the German Army failed to achieve in 4 years in 1914-18, it achieved in 5 weeks in 1940 using this new Blitzkrieg strategy (Blitz = lightning, Krieg = war) , made possible by modern developments in tank and plane technology. This is what Deighton’s book sets out to analyse and explain in detail.
The book is divided into five parts:
Part one – Hitler and his army (the rise of Hitler): 68 pages
Part two – Hitler at war (reclaiming the Ruhr, Anschluss, invading Czechoslovakia etc): 47 pages
Part three – Blitzkrieg: weapons and methods: 94 pages
Part four – The battle for the river Meuse: 83 pages
Part five – The flawed victory (Hitler’s flawed victory ie Dunkirk): 36 pages
The overall story is too well known and too long to repeat here. Nor am I tempted to quote any of the hundreds and hundreds of surprising facts, figures and shocking events which it describes; any account of the war (of any war) contains them. Nor am I qualified to compare and contrast Len’s theories and emphases with other historians of the period, nor to point out the ways in which 36 years of research and books by the numerous professional historians of the period have doubtless changed our understanding of various aspects of this vast subject.
I’m more interested in the light it sheds on Len’s practice as a novelist.
Opinionated
Len is not afraid to be boldly opinionated:
A Nazi regime without anti-Semitism would probably have had some form of atomic warhead and V-2 rockets to deliver them by the late 1930s. Thus I am of the opinion that but for his anti-Semitism Hitler might have conquered the world. (p.86)
A disproportionate number of senior German generals came from the artillery… M. Cooper in his book The German Army, attributes this to the brains required for gunnery and the much lower casualty rate that gunners suffer in war. I cannot agree… (p.103)
It is partly the forthrightness of his opinions which makes this narrative more readable than other, more scholarly and tactful accounts, might be.
Some histories tell stories of German freighters in Norwegian ports, filled with infantry, waiting like ‘Trojan horses’ for zero hour to disgorge their invaders. One history says that such freighters sailed but were sunk in transit. This is incorrect. (p.120)
As the book progresses Len’s anger at the incompetence of the Allies – France and Britain – mounts, resulting in open displays of sarcasm. Remember, Len had produced and written the screenplay of the searing anti-war film, Oh! What A Lovely War ten years earlier, in 1969, and was to publish an overview of war’s stupidity 14 years later – Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II (1993).
The French High Command, which already had the worst system of command in the world – many different HQs far apart, with commanders not certain where their authority ended – was able to integrate into this, the worst air force command system. (p.221)
In the latter parts of the book there is some fierce criticism of the wholesale inadequacy, laziness, stupidity and then self-serving defeatism of the leaders of the French Army. ‘Cheese-eating surrender monkeys,’ seems to be a simple statement of fact. Len quotes a military commentator:
‘The Maginot Line was a formidable barrier, not so much against the German Army as against French understanding of modern war.’ (p.351)
And when the pathetically defeated French Army ended up, by the irony of politics, taking over the French government in the shape of the 84-year-old puppet figure, General Pétain, one French minister wittily commented:
‘The republic has often feared the dictatorship of conquering generals – it never dreamed of that of defeated ones.’ (p.360)
Still, Len goes out of his way to give credit to the units of the French army which did fight bravely and gallantly and, in particular, to the French soldiers who held the perimeter at Dunkirk thus allowing almost all the British Expeditionary Force to be evacuated. But the French High Command and senior politicians… dear oh dear.
The Deighton paragraph
Len’s prose comes in crisp paragraphs. Some stories or moments are dwelt on in detail, for example the Night of the Long Knives. In other places, particularly in the hasty second section which skims over the diplomatic history around Hitler’s confrontations with the Allies as he bullied and blustered his way to seizing the Ruhr, Austria, the Sudetenland etc, Len’s connecting paragraphs cover big subjects in a handful of taut sentences, which feel almost like notes.
Poland was a huge parcel of land which had emerged periodically from the mists of European history, but never in exactly the same place. Three times already Poland had been divided between Germany and Russia. Now it was to happen for a fourth time. (p.101)
Everywhere the Luftwaffe submitted the Poles to machine-gun fire and bombs. Every account of the Polish fighting has to be read bearing in mind this German command of the air. It was a war of continuous movement; no front formed for more than a few hours. (p.109)
Reading his style in a factual book sheds light on his fiction, which shows the same tendency to blithely skip over explanations when they’re boring. In the early Ipcress novels this produces the attractive, cool, ellipticism of the style ie it often misses out so much you’re not sure what’s going on. Even in the later, more ordinarily written novels there are still moments where a door opens and someone comes into the room and starts talking and the reader has to stop and figure out who from earlier clues, rather than Deighton being so mundane as to simply name them and describe them entering.
Boys with their toys
The long middle, Blitzkrieg, section revolves around interesting discussions about the origin and development of the tank and fascinating accounts of the between-the-wars ‘tank theorists’, with learnèd speculation about their influence on the man who emerged as a leading proponent of the Blitzkrieg strategy, Panzer General Heinz Guderian. This, the heart of the book, contains some formidably thorough technical descriptions of tanks, half-tracks, artillery and so on – if you like technical specifications, these pages are for you:
The two German battle tanks were given entirely different armament. The PzKw IV carried the stubby 7.5cm gun, one of the largest-bore tank weapons on the battlefield, but its muzzle velocity was only 1,263 feet per second (fps). The short range of this weapon made it particularly unsuited to tank-versus-tank combat. But if it got as near as 500 yards to an armoured target, it could penetrate 40mm armour (and few tanks had thicker armour than this) and the missile from this 7.5cm KwK L/24 weighted 15 pounds. Compare this to the 3.7cm KwK L/45 that was fitted to the PzKw III tanks. This small-bore gun had a muzzle velocity of 2,445 fps, with all the characteristics of the high-velocity gun, but of less use against infantry or anti-tank batteries. (p.190)
These sections are accompanied by wonderfully lucid, innocent line drawings by technical illustrator Denis Bishop – 23 in all, with titles like ’12 ton Sd. Kfz.8 half-track towing 15cm sSH. 18 heavy gun’. Bishop illustrated numerous other books about World War Two weaponry.
Depth of research
Maybe the most obvious point of relevance to Deighton’s practice as a novelist is the phenomenal depth of research his history books reveal, in a number of ways:
- there is the sequence of events themselves and his interpretation of them, standard territory for a historian
- there is great attention paid to the arms and equipment used in the war, with Bishop’s drawings – less often found in ‘pure’ histories
- there are references to Len’s personal expeditions to visit all the major sites connected with the battle, and the book includes photos taken by him of key locations
- and the reference sections at the back mention the many conversations, letters and correspondence he had with men who played major roles in events
Reading this history goes a long way to putting in context Deighton’s war fiction eg Bomber or SS-GB or the wartime background to XPD. Each of these texts is obsessed with pursuing into minute detail the precise organisational structures of the, generally, Nazi organisations involved in the stories, as well as displaying a profound grasp of the inter-departmental rivalries among the jostling, competing Nazi departments: this is especially true of SS-GB where a good deal of the plot boils down to the scheming rivalry between two senior Nazi policemen who belong to different and rival parts of the SS.
The paradox of war hobbyists
I always find it paradoxical that so many men who are otherwise kind and gentle husbands and fathers, delight in the technical spec of wartime tanks, planes, guns and grenades, attending military shows and vintage air displays, collecting guns and wartime memorabilia. As I read page after page about armour-piercing shells, howitzers’ explosive capacities, lighter, more efficient machine guns, the use of new short-fuse hand grenades — I am continually thinking that absolutely all these devices, so cunningly designed and crafted, are designed for one thing only, which is to murder human beings: to eviscerate, blind, maim, blow up, vaporise and destroy human beings, and I can’t help shuddering.
Conclusion
If the book has one message it is that, whatever the term’s precise origins (which he discusses in detail) and whatever the word exactly meant (there were and are different definitions), Blitzkrieg was only actually put into practice this one time, in the Battle for France, where conditions were perfect for it: good road systems, relatively small battlefields, failure of the French Army and Air Force to make a coherent stand, pre-emptive strikes on enemy airfields giving complete air superiority, lightning speed and efficiency at achieving definable goals (crossing the river Meuse, racing to the Channel ports, thus splitting the French Army and the British Expeditionary Force from their supply lines).
Few if any of these factors were to apply in the subsequent theatres of war, in North Africa and then, fatally, in the attack on Russia.
Related links
- Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk on Amazon
- Blitzkrieg Wikipedia article
- Al Reason review
- enotes summary
- Review on the Deighton Dossier website
- Independent obituary of Denis Bishop, illustrator of Blitzkrieg and much else
Len Deighton’s novels
1962 The IPCRESS File Through the thickets of bureaucracy and confusing misinformation which surround him, an unnamed British intelligence agent discovers that his boss, Dalby, is in cahoots with a racketeer who kidnaps and brainwashes British scientists.
1963 Horse Under Water Perplexing plot which is initially about diving into a wrecked U-boat off the Portuguese coast for Nazi counterfeit money, then changes into the exposure of an illegal heroin manufacturing operation, then touches on a top secret technology which can change ice to water instantly (ie useful for firing missiles from submarines under Arctic ice) and finally turns out to be about a list – the Weiss List – of powerful British people who offered to help run a Nazi government when the Germans invaded, and who are now being blackmailed. After numerous adventures, the Unnamed Narrator retrieves the list and consigns it to the Intelligence archive.
1964 Funeral in Berlin The Unnamed Narrator is in charge of smuggling a Russian scientist through the Berlin Wall, all managed by a Berlin middle-man Johnnie Vulkan who turns out to be a crook only interested in getting fake identity papers to claim the fortune of a long-dead concentration camp victim. The Russians double-cross the British by not smuggling the scientist; Vulkan double-crosses the British by selling the (non-existent) scientist on to Israeli Intelligence; the Narrator double-crosses the Israelis by giving them the corpse of Vulkan (who he has killed) instead of the scientist; and is himself almost double-crossed by a Home Office official who tries to assassinate him in the closing scenes, in order to retrieve the valuable documents. But our Teflon hero survives and laughs it all off with his boss.
1966 Billion-Dollar Brain The Unnamed Narrator is recruited into a potty organisation funded by an American billionaire, General Midwinter, and dedicated to overthrowing the Soviet Union. A character from Funeral In Berlin, Harvey Newbegin, inducts him into the organisation and shows him the Brain, the vast computer which is running everything, before absconding with loot and information, and then meeting a sticky end in Leningrad.
1967 An Expensive Place to Die A new departure, abandoning all the characters and much of the style of the first four novels for a more straightforward account of a secret agent in Paris who gets involved with a Monsieur Datt and his clinic-cum-brothel. After many diversions, including an induced LSD trip, he is ordered to hand over US nuclear secrets to a Chinese scientist, with a view to emphasising to the Chinese just how destructive a nuclear war would be and therefore discouraging them from even contemplating one.
1968 Only When I Larf Another departure, this is a comedy following the adventures of three con artists, Silas, Bob and Liz and their shifting, larky relationships as they manage (or fail) to pull off large-scale stings in New York, London and the Middle East.
1970 Bomber A drastic change of direction for Deighton, dropping spies and comedy to focus on 24 hours in the lives of British and German airmen, soldiers and civilians involved in a massive bombing raid on the Ruhr valley. 550 pages, enormous cast, documentary prose, terrifying death and destruction – a really devastating indictment of the horrors of war.
1971 Declarations of War Thirteen short stories, all about wars, mainly the first and second world wars, with a few detours to Vietnam, the American Civil war and Hannibal crossing the Alps. Three or four genuinely powerful ones.
1972 Close-Up Odd departure into Jackie Collins territory describing the trials and tribulations of fictional movie star Marshall Stone as he betrays his wife and early lovers to ‘make it’ in tinseltown, and the plight he currently finds himself in: embroiled in a loss-making production and under pressure from the scheming studio head to sign a lucrative but career-threatening TV deal.
1974 Spy Story The Unnamed Narrator of the Ipcress spy novels returns, in much tamer prose, to describe how, after escaping from the ‘Service’ to a steady job in a MoD war games unit, he is dragged back into ‘active service’ via a conspiracy of rogue right-wingers to help a Soviet Admiral defect. Our man nearly gets shot by the right-wingers and killed by Russians in the Arctic, before realising the whole thing was an elaborate scam by his old boss, Dawlish, and his new boss, the American marine General Schlegel, to scupper German reunification talks.
1975 Yesterday’s Spy Another first-person spy story wherein a different agent – though also working for the American Colonel Schlegel, introduced in Spy Story – is persuaded to spy on Steve Champion, the man who ran a successful spy ring in Nazi-occupied France, who recruited him to the agency and who saved his life back during the war. Via old contacts the narrator realises Champion is active again, but working for Arabs who are planning some kind of attack on Israel and which the narrator must foil.
1976 Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (aka Catch a Falling Spy) The narrator and his CIA partner manage the defection of a Soviet scientist, only for a string of murder attempts and investigations to reveal that a senior US official they know is in fact a KGB agent, leading to a messy shootout at Washington airport, and then to an unlikely showdown in the Algerian desert.
1977 Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain Abandoning fiction altogether, Deighton published this comprehensive, in-depth and compelling history, lavishly illustrated with photos and technical diagrams of the famous planes involved.
1978 SS-GB A storming return to fiction with a gripping alternative history thriller in which the Germans succeeded in invading and conquering England in 1941. We follow a senior detective at Scotland Yard, Douglas Archer, living in defeated dingy London, coping with his new Nazi superiors, and solving a murder mystery which unravels to reveal not one but several enormous conspiracies.
1979 Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk Another factual history of WWII: Deighton moves quickly over Hitler’s rise to power and the diplomatic bullying of the 1930s, to arrive at the core of the book: an analysis of the precise meaning of ‘Blitzkrieg’, complete with detailed notes on all the weapons, tanks, artillery and hardware involved, as well as the evolution of German strategic thinking; and then its application in the crucial battle for the river Meuse which determined the May 1940 Battle for France.
1980 Battle of Britain
1981 XPD SIS agent Boyd Stuart is one of about 20 characters caught up in the quest for the ‘Hitler Minutes’, records of a top secret meeting between Hitler and Churchill in May 1940 in which the latter was (shockingly) on the verge of capitulating, and which were ‘liberated’ by US soldiers, along with a load of Nazi gold, at the very end of the war. Convoluted, intermittently fascinating and sometimes moving, but not very gripping.
1982 Goodbye, Mickey Mouse Six months in the life of the 220th Fighter Group, an American Air Force group flying Mustangs in support of heavy bombers, based in East Anglia, from winter 1943 through spring 1944, as we get to know 20 or so officers and men, as well as the two women at the centre of the two ill-fated love affairs which dominate the story.
1983 Berlin Game First of the Bernard Samson spy novels in which this forty-something British Intelligence agent uses his detailed knowledge of Berlin and its spy networks to ascertain who is the high-level mole within his Department. With devastating consequences.
1984 Mexico Set Second of the first Bernard Samson trilogy (there are three trilogies ie 9 Samson books), in which our hero manages the defection of KGB agent Erich Stinnes from Mexico City, despite KGB attempts to frame him for the murder of one of his own operatives and a German businessman. All that is designed to make Bernard defect East and were probably masterminded by his traitor wife, Fiona.
1985 London Match Third of the first Bernard Samson spy trilogy in which a series of clues – not least information from the defector Erich Stinnes who was the central figure of the previous novel – suggest to Samson that there is another KGB mole in the Department – and all the evidence points towards smooth-talking American, Bret Rensselaer.
1987 Winter An epic (ie very long and dense) fictionalised account of German history from 1900 to 1945, focusing on the two Winter brothers, Peter and Paul, along with a large supporting cast of wives, friends, colleagues and enemies, following their fortunes through the Great War, the Weimar years, the rise of Hitler and on into the ruinous Second World War. It provides vital background information about nearly all of the characters who appear in the Bernard Samson novels, so is really part of that series.
1988 Spy Hook First of the second trilogy of Bernard Samson spy novels in which Bernie slowly uncovers what he thinks is a secret slush fund of millions run by his defector wife with Bret Rensaeller (thought to be dead, but who turns up recuperating in a California ranch). The plot involves reacquaintance with familiar characters like Werner Volkmann, Frau Lisl (and her sister), old Frank Harrington, tricky Dicky Cruyer, Bernie’s 23-year-old girlfriend Gloria Kent, and so on.
1989 Spy Line Through a typically tangled web of incidents and conversations Samson’s suspicions are confirmed: his wife is a double agent, she has been working for us all along, she only pretended to defect to the East. After numerous encounters with various old friends of his father and retired agents, Samson finds himself swept up in the brutal, bloody plan to secure Fiona’s escape from the East.
1990 Spy Sinker In the third of the second trilogy of Samson novels, Deighton switches from a first-person narrative by Samson himself, to an objective third-person narrator and systematically retells the entire sequence of events portrayed in the previous five Samson novels from an external point of view, shedding new and sometimes devastating light on almost everything we’ve read. The final impression is of a harrowing world where everyone is deceiving everyone else, on multiple levels.
1991 MAMista A complete departure from the Cold War and even from Europe. Australian doctor and ex-Vietnam War veteran Ralph Lucas finds himself caught up with Marxist guerrillas fighting the ruling government in the (fictional) South American country of Spanish Guiana and, after various violent escapades, inveigled into joining the long, gruelling and futile trek through the nightmareish jungle which dominates the second half of the novel.
1992 City of Gold A complex web of storylines set in wartime Cairo, as the city is threatened by Rommel’s advancing Afrika Korps forces in 1942. We meet crooks, gangsters, spies, émigrés, soldiers, detectives, nurses, deserters and heroes as they get caught up in gun smuggling, black marketeering and much more, in trying to track down the elusive ‘Rommel spy’ and, oh yes, fighting the Germans.
1993 Violent Ward Very entertaining, boisterous first-person narrative by Los Angeles shyster lawyer Mickey Murphy who gets bought out by his biggest client, menacing billionaire Zach Petrovitch, only to find himself caught up in Big Pete’s complex criminal activities and turbulent personal life. The novel comes to a climax against the violent backdrop of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in April 1992.
1993 Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II
1994 Faith Return to Bernard Samson, the 40-something SIS agent, and the world of his friends and family, familiar to us from the previous six Samson novels. Most of the characters (and readers) are still reeling from the bloody shootout when his wife returned from her undercover mission to East Germany at the climax of the previous novel. This book re-acquaints us with all the well-loved characters from the previous stories, in a plot ostensibly about smuggling a KGB colonel out from the East, but is really about who knows the truth – and who is trying to cover up – the real cause of the Fiona-escape debacle.
1995 Hope 40-something SIS agent Bernard Samson continues trying to get to the bottom of the death of his sister-in-law, Tessa Kosinski and is soon on the trail of her husband, George, who has gone missing back in his native Poland.
1996 Charity Ninth and final Bernard Samson novel in which it takes Bernard 300 pages to piece together the mystery which we readers learned all about in the sixth novel of the series, ie that the plot to murder Fiona’s sister, Tessa, was concocted by Silas Gaunt. Silas commissioned Jim Prettyman to be the middle-man and instructed him to murder the actual assassin, Thurkettle. Now that is is openly acknowledged by the Department’s senior staff, the most striking thing about the whole event – its sheer amateurish cack-handedness – is dismissed by one and all as being due to Gaunt’s (conveniently sudden) mental illness. As for family affairs: It is Bret who ends up marrying Bernard’s one-time lover, the glamorous Gloria; Bernard is finally promised the job of running the Berlin Office, which everyone has always said he should have: and the novel ends with a promise of reconciliation with his beautiful, high-flying and loving wife, Fiona.
Books & Boots 