War Books Review

Hellfire

ED MACY 
In his earlier book, Apache, the author established himself as a first-rate front-line chronicler of the air war in Afghanistan. In this present despatch, Macy focuses on some key episodes from his 2006 tour, while also filling in details of his earlier life as a troublesome teenager and gung-ho paratrooper, whose ambition to join the SAS was brought to a painful and abrupt end through injuries sustained when he was knocked off his bicycle into the path of an oncoming car.

With his tabbing days over, Macy looked for something new to provide a military challenge, and was accepted into the Army Air Corps as a helicopter pilot. Clearly a driven man, he was determined to get to the top of his profession; he harboured hopes of becoming a special forces pilot working with the SAS. But the arrival of the upgraded US-built AH-64 Apache attack helicopter refocused his goal to be one of the few to pilot this awesome weapon of war. Vastly expensive, the Apache is a helicopter of superlatives, a quantum leap in technology when compared to the Gazelle and Lynx helicopters in British service.

The first part of Hellfire is chiefly devoted to Macy’s training in the Apache and how the machine works: its fearsome armament of 30mm chain gun, unguided rockets and laser-guided Hellfire missiles, and the extraordinary array of electronics that enable the two crew members to fly the machine and deliver its weaponry with pin-point accuracy. It would take little exaggeration to say that Macy loves the Apache, and he communicates this enthusiasm to the reader.

Although there is some inevitable repetition with events described in Apache, this does not detract from the thrill of the battle scenes that figure in the second half of the book. For the soldiers of 656 Squadron, this was their opportunity to convince the British Army that the Apache was the right weapon for this war. Macy describes his part in Operation Mutay (4 June 2006), which makes an illuminating comparison with the on-the-ground 3-Para narratives from Stuart Tootal and Patrick Bishop. Macy was also the first British pilot to fire a Hellfire missile in anger, taking out a heavy anti-aircraft machine-gun in Now Zad – hence the title of the book. There are also many excellent photographs and maps to illustrate the main missions. The paperback edition provides a novel opportunity to link with extra online material that expands the scope of the printed book, with author interviews and footage of the Apache in action (www.harperplus.com/hellfire).

Harper Press, 468 pages, £7.99 (p/b); HarperPress, 468 pages, £18.99 (h/b)



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Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital, 1939-45

ROGER MOORHOUSE 
One of the first themes to emerge from this engaging, well-written study of Berlin in World War II was the actual lack of enthusiasm for the war shown by the vast majority of its inhabitants. The spectre of defeat from the last war hung heavily over the capital, so that news of the invasion of Poland produced a sense of shocked disbelief while the rumour that peace had been declared in October 1939 led to scenes of delirious rapture, albeit temporary. But as the author points out, Berlin – with its large, traditionally left-wing working-class districts and aggregations of liberal intelligentsia – had ‘never been a natural constituency for the Nazis’. And it was surely no coincidence that few leading Nazis came from the city.

What resistance there was to the regime was typically muted and small-scale, and, with the presence of the Gestapo and its army of informers, usually short lived. Typical acts of rebellion included the defacing of posters, distribution of seditious literature and a refusal to give the stiff-armed ‘German greeting’ favoured by the Nazis. A more productive form of resistance was the help given to the city’s Jewish population. As in the rest of Germany, Nazi persecution of the Jews followed an incremental process: ritual humiliations, then loss of income, food and housing, before the inevitable deportations to the East. To escape this fate, more than 5000 Jews had gone underground by 1943, hiding in disused buildings or taking on assumed Aryan identities. A few did this alone, but most were helped by non-Jews who took great risks in protecting their new ‘guests’. 

Although motives for helping Jews were sometimes mixed, most were acts of selfless generosity. They were, unsurprisingly, performed by a select few, with most Berliners keeping their head down and enjoying what pleasure they could. In the early years of the war – despite the black-out and rationing – outside observers commented on the unwarlike nature of the city, with the parks and lakes full of sunbathers in the summer and skaters and skiers in the winter.  But, inexorably, the war came to Berlin.

Night raids by the RAF in the autumn of 1940 had given the people a foretaste of what was to come, although it was not until the winter of 1943 that the bombing began in earnest. The following year the RAF was joined by USAAF, with raids going on around the clock. Taken by tonnage of bombs dropped, Berlin was the hardest hit city in Europe, but its wide stone-built avenues helped prevent the conflagrations that devastated the tightly packed conurbations of Hamburg and Dresden. Good civil defence also reduced casualties, so that by the end of the war Berlin’s total death toll for aerial attack was 50,000 – the same number of casualties inflicted on the people of Hamburg during the firestorm attack of July 1943.

But by 1945 Berlin was a city in ruins, and worse was to follow. As the Red Army closed on Berlin in the spring of 1945, its citizens rightly feared retribution for the atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The Nazi response was characteristically nihilistic. Berliners were encouraged to commit suicide, with cyanide available on request from the health authorities; at a performance of the Berlin Philharmonic boys from the Hitler Youth handed out poison capsules. During April there were 4000 officially reported suicides, although many more went unrecorded. When the Red Army smashed its way into the city, Soviet soldiers went on a rampage of theft and rape, although killing on a mass scale was rare. Once the authorities restored order, the people of Berlin cautiously clambered out of the rubble to rebuild anew.

In such a wide-ranging subject, authorial control can easily be lost, but Moorhouse has successfully integrated the thematic elements of his story within the general chronological narrative. Based on solid research the book vividly recreates what life was like for Berliners during the most cataclysmic episode in the city’s history, and despite the generally grim nature of the subject material it remains an engrossing read.

Bodley Head, 448 pages, £25 (h/b)
 

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Belfast Boys: How Unionists and Nationalists Fought and Died Together in the First World War

RICHARD S. GRAYSON 
In Britain, history is generally considered as an academic subject – interesting to some, boring to others – but in Northern Ireland it has long been an ideological weapon to belabour your opponent. With this being the case it was hardly surprising that World War I would become one of Ireland’s great historiographical battlefields, fought over by Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Unionists. The pivotal year was 1916: while Nationalists turned their back on Ireland’s substantial contribution to the war and looked to the Easter Rising in Dublin as a source of Republican inspiration and legitimacy, the Unionists seized the battle of the Somme as a symbol of what they claimed as an exclusive blood sacrifice – to bind them to Britain and Britain to them.    

Taking mixed West Belfast (including the Falls Road and the Shankill) as his area of study, Richard Grayson has conducted a forensic examination into the religious and political affiliations of these men who fought for Britain, studying local newspapers, church memorial rolls, wills and pension and service records. His subjects have included not just those who served in the predominantly Protestant 36th (Ulster) Division and the other Irish formations (10th and 16th Divisions), but in the British armed forces as a whole.

While most tightly focussed histories of this kind start with the individual’s unit, Grayson makes the point that his approach ‘begins in the street rather than the trench’. This allows him to reveal that counter to ‘official’ mythologies from both sides, Catholic Nationalists from West Belfast volunteered in large numbers and fought alongside their Protestant neighbours throughout the war. Many factors lay behind these decisions, ranging from the prosaic – a chance to escape unemployment, for example – to the more high-mindedly political, with some Nationalist leaders calling upon their supporters to enlist as a first stage in gaining Home Rule.

The author follows his Irish regulars and volunteers through the course of four years of bloody conflict, telling their story from Mons to final victory in 1918. Arguably, the most interesting section of the book is to be found in its final chapter: how people in today’s Belfast have arrived at a new valuation of the war. With the advent of the peace process many Unionists have accepted that Nationalists were their brothers-in-arms during 1914-18, with both the 36th and 16th Divisions commemorated for their role on the Somme and in the great victory at Messines in 1917, now eloquently commemorated by the Island of Ireland Peace Park. From the other side are the testimonies of ardent Republicans. In the name of their struggle, they had formerly suppressed the stories of their fathers and grandfathers in the British Army, but have now come out into the open, albeit in their own words, ‘admiring the men if not the cause’. Belfast Boys is an original and valuable work of scholarship, confirming the importance of history, not least to those who have so often been its victims.

Continuum, 272 pages £12.99 (p/b); Continuum, 272 pages, £25 (h/b)

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