h i s t o r y
Wehrmacht and SS formations fought tenaciously, even fanatically, in defence of the Fatherland, it was in the service of a flawed and ultimately doomed strategy. The ordinary British soldier rarely demonstrated the kind of implacable ferocity that his German counterpart often did, but it is unreasonable to suppose that he ever might have done. The Germans were fighting in defence of a totalitarian regime that had no compunction whatsoever about murdering tens of thousands of its own soldiers in order to stiffen their resolve. The British Army was composed of conscripts who stubbornly remained civilians under their uniforms to the end,
and it had to respect the fact that there were definite limits to their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the cause, however just they felt it to be.
Still, if Monty’s army lacked the grim fervour of Hitler’s, what it did possess was an overall operational coherence which the Germans, with their fixation on combat, lacked. The Wehrmacht paid far too little attention to the logistical underpinnings necessary to keep a modern military force viable in the long term – unglamorous but critical functions such as intelligence gathering, communications, supply, medical support and the welfare of the troops. It was in these areas that the British excelled,
and, as Buckley shows in example after example, the disparity would mean that while the tough but brittle Wehrmacht would ultimately fracture into pieces under the stresses of continual battle, Monty’s force was able to endure a similar battering yet emerge from it whole. Bravery is all very well, but it is betrayed in the absence of cool, competent man-management, something the British demonstrated in 1944 and 1945 and the Germans did not. ‘Who won the bloody war anyway?’ Buckley is reminding everyone, in effect. And he has a good point. To order this book for £20, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 38
j ay pa r i n i
Wire Power The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers,
Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America
By Simon Winchester (William Collins 463pp £25)
Simon Winchester is one of those quintessentially British writers who will go anywhere, literally and figuratively. He is perhaps most famous for his bestselling The Professor and the Madman, a wholly original and compulsively readable book in which he explored the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. But he has also, in the course of many decades as a journalist and writer of nonfiction books, walked around Korea on foot, studied the violence of the Balkans up close and sat in prison in Argentina at the time of the Falkland mayhem of 1982 (he happened to be on the islands during the Argentine invasion and was later captured in Patagonia and jailed for several months). He has been a field geologist in Uganda and worked on an oil rig in the North Sea.
What gives a kind of unity to the man and his work is a vast curiosity about the world. In book after book he lets himself roam freely in a subject, trying to find meaning in the broadest sense: the links that exist between isolated moments of individual inspiration and larger events – geological or psychic.
In an age when specialists dominate most academic professions, it’s something of a relief to come upon the likes of Winchester, who is foolhardy enough to take huge intellectual leaps. No sane historian would want to go where he goes in The Men Who United the States. But, in large part because of his amateur status, boldness and decidedly nonacademic approach to history, Winchester achieves something quite remarkable here.
The book is not perfect, of course. What book is? But it is remarkable. He wonders in these highly readable pages how it came to be that the various states of this extremely disparate country managed to
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become the USA. He doesn’t, of course, ask whether this was a good thing or not. (I myself feel extremely uncomfortable whenever I leave Vermont; I regard Texas, in particular, as a place so foreign that it hardly seems to belong to the United States. But that’s me.)
Winchester sets out, often on foot, to rediscover the men who managed to create an American infrastructure. Many of them, such as Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Thomas Edison, are extremely well known; others, such as John Stevens, a pioneer in steam-propelled transportation, and Bill Siemering, who had a great deal to do with the establishment of National Public Radio (NPR), made huge contributions but seem to have slipped through the cracks of history.
The book is neatly organised into five sections that connect to five elements: wood, earth, water, fire and metal. Each of these sections charts some particular phase in the development of a national infrastructure, whether it be the creation of roads, highway systems, canals and intercontinental railway links or the plan to push electric power lines and telephone lines from coast to coast. Winchester takes us all the way up to the recent creation of the internet – perhaps the most unexpected and powerful of all linking systems in history.
Of course, the developments of national infrastructure relate closely to the idea of Manifest Destiny, which found an eloquent theorist in Frederick Jackson Turner,
d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3 / j a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 | Literary Review 13
