The Mark of Cain is described in the Judeo-Christian scriptures (Genesis 4) as follows:

And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear

Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.

And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

Since then the Mark of Cain has become part of popular fiction; the idea that killers and performers of iniquitous acts are somehow marked, in their soul if not visibly. (The biblical description of the mark as a warning not to slay Cain and end his suffering appears to have fallen by the wayside). This British TV film from 2007, The Mark of Cain, deals with that sort of mark — invisible from the outside, perhaps, but visible to the bearer.

All the stills the producers released were from the few minutes of combat scenes; most of the movie is spent bashing prisoners, in court martial, or buried in introspection.

It is a troubling film, in the mid-2000s genre of bad “westerners abusing prisoners” films that Hollywood revisited in Zero Dark Thirty. It is promoted as “ripped from the headlines,” which it is not, particularly; so we’re quite disinclined to like it, and we found it disturbing and tendentious.

But. But… what kind of a “but” can we possibly offer now? Only this: it is a powerful film with bold characters and themes, even if its underlying messages: (1) that British soldiers are bigger monsters than Middle Eastern terrorists; and (2) that the biggest monsters go unpunished — are rebarbative. As a drama it is strong and gripping, the writing is taut and the characters are fully drawn, at least, the British characters. (The Iraqi characters are essentially props in this British morality play). Because the characters are a detestable bunch, it’s not an enjoyable movie. So it is, at once, a strong and compelling movie, and one that is an ordeal to sit through.

See what we mean?

The essence of the story is this: a group of seemingly ordinary British squaddies (in the fictitious Northdale Regiment) are deployed to Basra, Iraq. They face an incomprehensible populace, in which hostile elements move invisibly. They want to shoot back, but have no targets. When they’re finally engaged by small arms fire, it’s shocking. Several soldiers are ineffective for one reason or other; one freezes at the wheel of an immobilized Land Rover. A popular officer tries to get him off the X, but an RPG takes both of their lives.

Later, they get a tip that the insurgents involved in that contact resided in a particular village. They seize several men from the village, and hold them in their camp; the military police are delayed in picking them up, and a sergeant suggests that they give the Iraqis a thrashing. The reluctant soldiers manage to peer-pressure themselves into doing it, with one sensitive, introspective boy needing to be bullied into it. But in the end, they all beat the Iraqis.

And that would have been the end of it… if one of them hadn’t taken pictures. After they return from the depoyment, an ex-girlfriend releases the pictures, and all hell breaks loose. The officers and NCOs circle the wagons. The sergeant instigator is not in any of the incriminating photos; he’s in the clear. The soldiers who were proceed to court martial.

One, in particular, the same guy who had to be dragooned into it in the first place, takes it very hard. He obsesses about the Mark of Cain, and about the way, in his case, loyalty trumped moral courage. He finally acts on the understanding he reached, and then another one of the squaddies confesses to the crime and enumerates what everyone else did, too. The film ends tragically for everyone — including the viewer.

The weapons and equipment the British troops display seem generally correct; we did think the combat vehicles were old, lightweight stuff that might have been more fitting in a movie set in South Armagh in 1972. The rifles and LMGs looked right. Of course, we’re not British troopies, so we might be missing something. The combat scenes are quite short vis-a-vis the movie’s overall length.

So we have finally reached the end of the review, and a bottom line is needed. We have to say, we suppose we are glad we watched the movie, but we won’t watch it again, and won’t make a habit of recommending it. We’re as ambivalent about it, then, as we were some 800 words ago.

For J-F Mercier, looks like the jig is up. They do what to spies, again?

Everybody likes a spy movie, right? And everyone likes a movie with a twist. And everyone likes a World War II movie, at least if it doesn’t suck like (we could name names here, couldn’t we?) Spies of Warsaw is a BBC TV film that was shown on BBC 4 in the UK and BBC America in the USA. (It’s available in the US on DVD already). As the title subtly trumpets, it is a spy movie. It’s actually set in the period just before, and in the first few days of, World War II. That’s the first part of the twist. The second part is that the hero is French.

Lt. Colonel Jean-François Mercier (David Tennant) is a French attaché — and, to be sure, spy and spymaster — in Warsaw. The movie sweeps along from 1937 or so to the first days of September, 1939. A great deal of the suspense is created because the viewer, unlike the characters, know what’s ahead for them, or at least people like them: the Old Bolsheviks, suddenly given a recall to Moscow. The gallant Polish officer who is ready to fight the Russians as he did in the Polish War of Independence, when the Bolsheviks first invaded the fledgling state after Versailles; but he also has to be ready to fight the Germans. And are the Germans preparing to fight? The answer seems to be ganz klar, but that raises the next burning question: where?

It’s for us to know, and Mercier and his agents and friends to find out (we assume that most readers of this blog are up on who attacked whom, where, and in what order; and what fates befell the nations attacked over the next six or so years).

Mercier has to deal with the case officer or agent handler’s common issues: agents who get burned by the SD and wind up dead; agents who lose their access, and therefore utility; agents who flip and start sending rubbish; agents who won’t cooperate unless they’re blackmailed; agents to whom you make promises, that are then broken by your superiors. Then there are the issues faced by every intelligence officer, whether he handles human sources or not. Chief among these is overcoming superiors who don’t trust you.

Mercier finds himself a Cassandra in France, even after he pulls off a case officer’s career coup: recruiting an officer on the German General Staff, one who had previously worked for the Soviets.

The two-part film is based fairly closely on a novel by Alan Furst, with a great deal of trimming to fit two 90-minute episodes (with a cliffhanging kidnapping at the end of the first). One nice touch for Furst fans is a character or two from other Furst novels — something Furst himself seems to delight in doing in the print realm.

By filming in part in Poland, the producers had access not only to convincing Polish as well as “Czech,” “German,” and “French” terrain, they also were able to deploy Polish reenactors as Wehrmacht and Polish Army extras. One real coup was obtaining the use of two very convincing Panzer II replicas, which were used in two scenes. As this page explains, they were replica Pz. IIs built on the chassis of a small Franco-German APC, the Hotchkiss Schutzenpanzerwagen. Unlike CGI tanks or many stage-lot replicas, these things move like tanks.

There are two inaccuracies in the movie’s portrayal of small arms: while the spies of all nations use handguns, there’s a little too much use of the then-novel Walther P.38 to be accurate — the gun had barely been adopted by the aggressively rearming Wehrmacht, so it’s a bit strange to see them in the hands of foreign spies. And, in one case, an assassin is armed with a suppressed pistol — with a tiny, “Hollywood” suppressor. Other than that, and perhaps a slightly too dramatic gasoline explosion in one scene, the weapons depicted are correctly portrayed and used. In fact, this is one of the few movies where good guys as well as bad guys can fire a bunch of shots without connecting — just like real life.  A very few actual Panzer IIs and variants, of the many thousands manufactured, survived the war.

The script and acting are, as you might expecrt from the Beeb, first-class. There’s a tangled love affair that proves somewhat distracting to Mercier (with the distracting Janet Montgomery playing a League of Nations lawyer, a character description that just screams “naive and helpless,” like the League itself). There’s a best buddy, the friendship complicated by him being of another nationality (Polish). He’s ably portrayed by Polish actor Marcin Dorocinski. Character actors fill out the small and even bit parts convincingly.

Bottom line: at the end of two 90-minutes sessions of this, we were aching for a sequel, or at least another Furst adaptation, if we can’t have the sequel he didn’t write. We like the movie, and think that you will, too. It deserved better than a near-simultaneous cable and DV release, with zero publicity. So let’s give it some!

We’ve just been reading this remarkable novel. We don’t usually read science fiction, but this novel, while set in the far future amid an interstellar war, is really a novel of underground warfare.

The first few pages set the UW value proposition before you as well as any other document in history has done, as the recruiting spymaster, a Mr Wolf, sets the hook for protagonist James Mowry, in a parable of Churchillian vision.

Wolf stared at him again, long and penetratingly. “You’ll do. Yes, I’m sure you’ll do.”

“Do for what?”

“I’ll tell you in a moment.” Opening a drawer, he extracted some papers, passed them across. “These will enable you better to understand the position. Read them through – they lead up to what follows.”

Mowry glanced at them. They were typescript copies of press reports. Settling back in his chair he perused them slowly and with care.The first told of a prankster in Roumania. This fellow had done nothing more than stand in the road gazing fascinatedly at the sky, occasionally uttering ejaculations and loud phrases such as, `Blue flames!’ Curious people had joined him and gaped likewise. The group became a crowd, the crowd became a mob, and the bigger the mob the faster it grew.

Soon the audience blocked the street, overflowed into side-streets. Police tried to break it up, making matters worse.

Some fool summoned the fire squads. Hysterics on the fringes swore they could see or had seen something weird above the clouds. Reporters and cameramen rushed to the scene.

Rumours raced around. The government sent up the air force for a closer look. Panic spread over an area of two hundred square miles from which the original cause had judiciously disappeared.

“Amusing if nothing else,” remarked Mowry. “Read on.”

The second report concerned a daring escape from jail of two notorious killers. They had stolen a car, made six hundred miles before recapture. Their term of freedom had lasted exactly fourteen hours.

The third detailed an automobile accident. Three killed,.

one seriously injured, the car a complete wreck, the sole survivor had died nine hours later.

Handing back the papers, Mowry said, “What’s all this to me?”

“We’ll take those reports in the order as read,” began Wolf.

“They prove something of which we’ve long been aware but, maybe you haven’t realised yourself. For the first one, that Roumanian did nothing, positively nothing save stare at the sky and mumble. All the same, he persuaded a government to start jumping around like fleas on a hot griddle. It shows that in given conditions action and reaction can be hopelessly out of proportion. Also that by doing insignificant things in suitable circumstances one can obtain results monstrously in excess of the effort.”

“I’II give you that.” Mowry conceded.

“Now the lamsters, They didn’t do much either; climbed a wall, grabbed a car, drove like mad until the petrol ran out, got caught’ He leaned forward, continued with added emphasis,

“But for most of fourteen hours they monopolised the attention of six planes, ten helicopters, one hundred and twenty patrol-cars, eighteen telephone exchanges, uncountable phone lines and radio link-ups, not to mention police, deputies, posses of volunteers, hunters, trackers, forest rangers and National . Guardsmen to a grand total of twenty- seven thousands scattered over three states.”

“Phew!” Mowry raised his eyebrows.

“Finally, let’s consider this auto smash. We know the cause; the survivor was able to tell us before he died. He said the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and started buzzing around his face.”

“It nearly happened to me once.”

Ignoring that, Wolf went on, “The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn’t even use it. Nevertheless it killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap.”

“I see the point,” agreed Mowry, “but where do I come in?”

“Right here,” said Wolf. “We want you to become a wasp.”

Mowry does, in fact, “become a wasp,” and travels to an enemy planet, where he is infiltrated clandestinely and sets to work sabotaging and disrupting the enemy. He relies on the fact that in any society there are disgruntled individuals; when he cannot suborn or exploit them to his ends, or make common cause with them, he’s quite content to let them be fall guys for his actions.

The tradecraft in the novel is very reminiscent of World War II SOE operations (with a touch of period SIS and OSS as well). This is true of both the offensive tradecraft employed by Mowry, and the defensive craft set against him by he Sirian Secret Police, the dreaded Kaitempi (clearly playing on the feared Imperial Japanese CI agency, the Kempeitai).

Wasp was written by Eric Frank Russell in 1957, and is available online as a .pdf here. (A fan has a large repository of Russell’s books on that site). It also has a footnote in music history: the Beatles’ firm, Apple Corps, optioned it in 1970 as a potential vehicle for Ringo Starr in the Mobry role. The film was never made.

It’s a hell of a story of a singleton agent in a repressive alien (literally) society. And it still really, really needs to be made into a film. Ringo was right!

Both of these videos were featured by our friends over at the Gun Wire, and they both tell you something useful. But compared to one another, one is much stronger, and we’ll tell you why.

First, Rich from GunTortureTests.com explains in detail how to cut the foam in a Pelican case to custom-fit a weapon. Having done this about 1000 times, it’s good to see him hit most of the caveats and warnings we learned by experience (pay special attention to his warning about rubber cement!). (We found it here on GunWire).

Next, Andrew Tuohy with a short and sweet reminder about that favorite bugbear of wilfully ignorant news mites, Cop Killer Bullets. We found this one here on GunWire. (Did we mention that we really like TheGunWire, and rely on it every day?)

Here are some comments on the two videos:

• Both videos avoid the most common YouTube error: they stick to one thing.

• Rich’s 18 minutes are just too long. He could have expressed the same information in 10 minutes or less, in fact, in five minutes.

• People’s time is critical to them. Don’t waste it and you become a go-to guy.

• Don’t “uhm” and “ah.” If you do, punch in and retake that part.

• Face the camera and engage the audience.

• Simplify the backdrop even if the natural clutter of your office or shop means you have to green-screen it in.

• If you’re showing something, show it — have the camera zoomed in on it and voice over.

• A script makes sure you cover everything, miss nothing, and avoid rambling. This makes it easier to make a 1-minute or 5-minute video full of impact. If you’re a clear and hesitation-free public speaker, not given to breath effects and delaying particles (“Um, ah”) you can deliver your message from an outline.

• The most effective videos known to mankind are, what? Commercials, right. And outside of Super Bowl halo projects, most videos tell their story in 30 or even 15 seconds. What can you say in 15 seconds?

This is why we liked Andrew’s video better than Rich’s. Following more of these suggestions would make Rich’s videos even better (he’s obviously pretty good already, as he’s built a following). Want to see what a truly effective instructional video looks like? Check out Khan Academy. Especially if you have kids.

Hells Angels is a time capsule from the 1920s, and as such it differs in many, many ways from the more recent films we’re accustomed to reviewing here. The long-drawn-out making of the film, and its woeful gestation, are fairly well depicted in the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator; the movie was Hughes’s masterpiece, and his obsessive micromanagement — mostly — led to a successful film.

It is more successful in some parts than in others. The story is remarkably cornball: two English brothers have a German college friend, and they all meet their destiny in the skies of World War I.

The German is drafted into the Zeppelin service, and the brothers join the Royal Flying Corps. There is a love triangle, of sorts, with Jean Harlow in her first role as the woman the idealistic brother puts on a pedestal, while the practical — and cowardly — brother recognizes her as a fellow sinner.

The human side of the plot, however, is not why anyone still watches this octogenarian opus. They do it for the aerial scenes. In the era before CGI, the only way you could depict an aerial battle was with models, or, if you were willing to burn money wantonly, with real airplanes. Producer/director Howard Hughes used both approaches here, and they hold up very well. The aerial formation and aerial battle scenes are nearly unequalled. (The Battle of Britain took a similar approach in 1968, and is the only film to show air war at this level).

Hughes deployed scores of planes and pilots, many of both actual World War I veterans. Real Fokker D7s and SE.5s met in the skies as they had a dozen years before. A one-off Sikorsky biplane was expended, standing in for a Gotha bomber. (It was close enough that movie stills have occasionally been mistakenly captioned as an actual German bomber). The aerial choreography was done by Hughes himself with Hollywood aviation legend Paul Mantz, and it was as risky as it looks. Three pilots and a mechanic died in filming (two men in the deliberately-crashed Sikorsky S-29A, apparently unable to jump as they were supposed to). Hughes himself undertook a stunt that Mantz refused as too dangerous, and proved Mantz right: the crash put Hughes in critical condition with a fractured skull. This obsessive pursuit of realism created aerial scenes that subsequent directors have fallen short of time and again.

The armament on the aircraft is generally, but not always, period-correct. Some of the mock-up cockpits seem to have an ancient Hotchkiss gun fitted, but generally the Germans have Maxims and the Allies Vickers and Lewis guns. The aircraft themselves are, usually, right for the time and place. (There is some use of Thomas Morse scouts, an American type that never saw combat. Try to spot them!).

The movie was originally going to be silent, and its mid-course correction to a talkie produced some peculiarities. The Zeppelin scene was shot as a silent scene, with sound dubbed later, and some of the acting appears to be far overdone, Royal Hospital for Overacting level. Still, the captain of the Zep is played with such malicious delight that you have to enjoy the performance. Apart from the Germans — whose dubbed dialog is dubbed in German with an occasional desultory subtitle for the monoglot moviegoer — most of the characters speak with jarring American accents, even though none of them are supposed to be Yanks.

Along with the sound track, another unusual feature in the film is color. A scene of a ballroom dance is presented in full color, and night scenes, including a duel shot very effectively in silhouette and the downing of the mighty Zeppelin, use blue or other background colors, even as most scenes are hot in black and white. Obviously color was one more technology that Hughes was playing with.

The Zeppelin scenes in general are among the best in the movie. Tension ratchets up and up. The curious internal structure of these rigid airships is well-depicted. The power of the airship is perhaps exaggerated, but films that bring the majesty of these long-abandoned weapons to life are few and far between.

As it happens, the guns don’t have a very central role in Guns at Batasi, but it’s an interesting tale of an unusual period — the early 60s, when Britain was fleeing its overseas responsibilities, first East of Suez and then everywhere, and when African nations were taking their first steps towards independence and the classically African political institution: one man, one vote, one time. This interesting, forgotten black and white drama deserves wider viewership and appreciation.

Batasi Camp is the regimental home of the “2nd African Rifles,” a unit where a British commander, officers and key NCOs mentor African native other ranks and emergent officers. The two key Britons are the commander, Colonel Deal, ably played by Jack Hawkins, and RSM Lauderdale, played with eye-popping uptightness (and snap-cracking dialogue) by Richard Attenborough. Had Attenborough not done dozens of these things, you could call it the role of a lifetime, but of course he did; so you are never ill advised to pull out an obscure DVD from the $5 “fin bin” if his name is on the marquee.

In this case, a mostly bloodless coup leaves the officers isolated in their mess, the colonel away to consult at the embassy, and the sergeants isolated, and nearly unarmed, in the sergeants’ mess, with some unexpected visitors: Private Wilkes (John Leyton), a day from demobilization from his National Service; a comely UN worker, Karen Eriksson (Mia Farrow) who has taken a shine to Wilkes; a traveling lady MPm Miss Barker-Wise (Flora Robson) who has strong opinions about the Africans’ readiness for self-rule, and equally strong and far more negative opinions of military men; and Captain Abraham (Earl Cameron), the former senior African officer, now wounded and hunted by the coup leaders.

We have already seen Attenborough establish several aspects of RSM Lauderdale’s complex facets. That he is a martinet, and often the butt of behind-his-back snark from the sergeants, is shown to the viewer, rather than told to them. So is his unflinching character. Likewise, the tension in the country is shown, rather than told, to us, as Wilkes and Eriksson make their way through a hostile mob.

The dialogue rules here. Here are three prize pronunciamentos of Lauderdale:

• “Let me tell you. There’s no alteration, no celebration. No argumentation, no qualification in this mess that escapes my eyes! Read, learn, and inwardly bloody digest!”
• “I have seen Calcutta. I have eaten camel dung. My knees are brown, my navel is central, my conscience is clear, and my will is with my solicitors, Short and Curly.” (He says it in such a manner that you can’t quite be sure whether he’s referred to his “will” or to his “willy.”)
• “I can always stomach a good soldier whatever his faults! What I can’t stomach are Bolshies, skivers, scrimshanks, and boghouse barristers! I’ve broken more of them than you’ve had eggs for breakfast! If I take a likin’ to you, lad, I’ll be your good friend and counselor. If you offend me, I’ll pull out your sausage-like intestines, hang ‘em round your neck, and prick ‘em every so often like they do real sausages!”

The guns that don’t play a very large part in the movie, actually, are all accurate, with one possible question. There are a mixed bag of then-current British arms (SLR, Stirling) and WWII arms that a colonial army base might have had (Brens, and we see No. 4 Enfields in racks). The one questionable arm is the presence of two 40mm Bofors guns in what’s supposed, after all, to be a rifle unit. Usually, specialty antiaircraft weapons like that are the province of AA Artillery units. But the Bofors guns play a very important part in the plot of the film.

Using sheer bluff and force of Attenborough’s character, the sergeants mount a raid on the arms room, arming themseves with BREN guns, grenades and Sterlings (prior to this, they are only armed with Wilkes’s L1A1 SLR). After they bluff their way past the guard on the facility, RSM Lauderdale derides him to the others: “That one’ll never make an NCO. No initiative.” He is, in fact, always thinking about the future of the Army and the Regiment, and these small asides are the mortar in the wall of believability that he builds for his character. (In several of them, he’s trying to persuade Wilkes to re-enlist).

Soon the plot’s local leader, Lt. Boniface, discovers that the sergeants are hiding Abraham and demands him, the arms, and — in a telling description of his character, and most of the real-world African leaders on whom he’s based — the regimental silver. He gets the silver, but Abraham has been offered the protection of the sergeants’ mess, and they will give him up only over their dead bodies. Boniface is coool with that and has two Bofors guns with which he intends to reduce the mess building t rubble if his ultimatum is not satisfied.

It falls to Attenborough and a volunteer — if one can be found — to mount a raid on the Bofors guns, to take Boniface’s strongest pieces off the chess board.

Meanwhile, the British Embassy is frantically negotiating with the new government.

There is quite a bit of drama and quite a few surprises, and the end is anticlimactic, but realistically so. It seems that some good deeds, in the dark and confused world of the early 1960s, cannot go unpunished. Some outcomes can shake even a sergeant major, but in the end, the righteousness of his decisions, however much they have caused his superiors political problems, are reinforced by the respected Col. Deal announcing that he’d have done the very same thing.

We leave RSM Lauderdale as we found him, then: strutting across the parade ground, the model of a sergeant major. Bravo to the cast and crew, particularly Attenborough, director John Guillermin, and screenwriter Robert Holles (based on his own novel), who put those remarkable quote in Attenborough’s capable hands for delivery.

We thought we’d launch the new week with a new feature, calling attention a stack of new books — some, just new to the Unconventional Warfare Reference Library but others new on the market. These are not reviews per se as some of these books are lined up to be read, and others are in process. (It’s not unusual for two dozen books to be ongoing at a time). As befits our interests, some books dwell on weapons and others dwell on unconventional, guerilla, or clandestine warfare. We think they’re all good enough to have spent our own money on them, and think if you like this blog you might find something of interest here.

Engineers of Victory by Paul Kennedy

Kennedy, a Yale historian, is an eminent modern historical writer, and he’s tackled a subject near and dear to our hearts: the scientists and engineers that develop war-winning weapons. His subtitle is The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, so as you might expect, focus is on Allied scientists and engineers in the criticial middle and climactic years of World War II. Feats like the rapid design and manufacture of the Grumman F6F, the arduous development of the problem-plagued B-29, and rapid developments in antisubmarine warfare are the stories told here. Small arms don’t much enter into it, as the Allies’ only real feats were of industrial production, but the tank production of the Allies, which buried their opponents quantitatively and qualitatively, does come in for study.

From a review in the New York Times by Presidential hagiographer Michael Beschloss, one of the more controversial assertions by Kennedy is that Allied codebreaking, while beneficial to their cause, was not decisive. This is closely in keeping with a thesis advanced in the next volume.

Amazon link.

Intelligence in War by John Keegan

This is a remarkable 2003 book by the late author of several landmark works of mlitary history (The Face of Battle, The Price of Admiralty, The Mask of Command). Keegan tries to address what wartime intelligence is and what is in not, and produces a work suitable for students of history on the one hand, and for producers and consumers of intelligence on the other.

Perhaps the most powerful argument we took away from this book is that Intelligence is seldom decisive in itself. Keegan, too, centers this argument on codebreaking, and one of his key examples is the sad case of Poland, perennial doormat of European conquerors. At the outbreak of World War II, the Poles had accomplished the greatest imaginable intelligence breakthrough: using sheer intellectual effort and mathematical skill, they cracked the “unbreakable” German Enigma cipher machine. As a result, they had remarkably complete and deep knowledge of German dispositions, plans and intentions. It availed them nought; they were still a welterweight in the ring with the Heavyweight Champion of the World, and a perfect understanding of the heavyweight’s boxing style was small succor against his advantage in reach and strength.

We have long observed that every war can be analyzed as a bilateral (or multilateral, in some of your more complex conflicts) laundry list of errors and screwups, and the side with the lesser weighted total of screwups prevails. But what a Marxist historian would call a “correlation of forces” is rather important: strategically, the American Indians were going to lose the wars for the plains, and not much they could have done, and little they might have known, about their white opponents could have brought them victory. In a 20th Century, industrial war, Germany and Japan could not successfully take on the US, let alone the US, USSR, and UK simultaneously; too much hinged on production of trained men and serviceable equipment.

Amazon link

Road of 10,000 Pains by Otto J. Lehrack

This has actually been sitting in the queue since its release in 2010, and we’re just now getting to it. And now that we’re reading it, we regret the delay. Unlike Kennedy and Keegan, or even Beschloss, Lehrack is not a name all history buffs have heard. Whilst Kennedy and Beschloss were punching their tickets at Ivy League institutions, Lehrack was punching his as a Marine, serving two tours in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, the blurb quotes on his book come not from journalists and Ivy League opinion makers, but from fellow Marines, mostly very distinguished ones who fought in the battles at hand. The Marines, more than any American service, love and cherish, and try to learn, from history, theirs and others’, and Lehrack is an exemplar of that movement. He has written on Vietnam and subsequent conflicts, always from the Marine’s point of view, and the book in hand is, for all intents and purposes, an oral history of the epic infantry battle waged across I Corps in Vietnam by the Marines and the nearest thing the enemy had to a large-scale corps d’elite, the 2nd NVA Division.

This book does indeed have plenty about the usage and employment of small arms. One interesting fact is that these Marines were among the Corps units that were issued the XM16E1/M16A1 with very minimal training, and some of them had poor experiences with it. As Lt. Frank Teague remembered (page 12):

About a week before [being sent into enemy territory in search of a lost, cut-off Marine company] we were issued the M16 rifle. It was a nightmare. Mine jammed all the time. Everybody had been trained on the M14, which was like your right arm, and we got this Tinker Toy that didn’t work. I remember thinking that I’m a college grad, and I’m having trouble with this friggin’ thing. Some of my men just don’t get this shit. This thing doesn’t work. So I was off on the Bald Eagle [codeword for a heliborne reaction force -Ed.] with my M16 in a garbage bag to keep the dirt out. My platoon was going to be first in the LZ, and I was afraid it was gonna be hot.

Teague was right about that; his platoon walked into a meatgrinder and he was caught up in the whirlwind of command, and doesn’t appear to have ever fired the troublesome M16. His recollections continue:

The next thing I knew, one shot rang out from across the paddy, and it nailed one of my guys. In my experience of four months, the one thing I knew was that the gooks couldn’t shoot, especially from four hundred meters. I was thinking someone was shooting at us with a sniper scope. And somebody just wiped out a Marine company. There had to be a big-mother unit over there in those trees.

There surely was, and soon Teague’s part in the operation ended when he was wounded recovering one of his own wounded men. He was medevaced, triaged as “expectant,” and given extreme unction by a priest; but it time the docs caught up, and he lived to contribute his tale to this remarkable history (and to receive the Bronze Star for Valor). But Lt. Teague’s contribution in its immediacy and power is a glimpse of what the whole book has in store for a reader.

Even though it is primarily an oral history, Lehrack does reference NVA sources, particularly when assessing the consequences of the months of fighting (to which he attributes the 2nd NVA Division’s failure to reconstitute in time and achieve its mission in the Jan-Feb 1968 Tet Offensive).

Amazon link.

Invisible Armies by Max Boot

We shan’t go into depth on this because we’ve just recently covered a Boot appearance promoting the book in the WSJ, and his own five-book GW “must read” list, but this is Boot’s new history of Guerilla Warfare. Boot is a must-read historian and an experienced officer as well.

Amazon link.

Anyway, those are a few of the general UW/GW books that have crossed our desk recently. Looking back at this post, it’s rather long on UW and short on hardware-specific books, so we promise more of books about clever devices for maiming people and breaking things, in the next edition of New in the UW Reference Library.

Ballad of a Soldier is a remarkable film: a work of Soviet propaganda that manages not to dwell upon Soviet, or Communism, or Marx or Engels or Lenin or Stalin. It is a work, rather, of Russian nationalism that would have worked as well to sell patriotism for a Tsar, for a liberal Yeltsin, or for an authoritarian neosoviet Putin. Director Grigori Chukrai used powerful black and white images and a lyrical, sensitive script to tell a tale that works on several levels, but most powerfully as a love poem to home and homeland. Chukrai took advantage of the brief artistic flowering in the interregnum between the bleak Stalin and Brezhnev censorship areas to make a film that speaks to all people in all times.

It is not particularly a combat film, although it contains some combat scenes. It’s mostly a tale of people and their relations set against the backdrop of war.

The events in the film

As the film opens, we learn that a mother mourns her lost son, who is memorialized only by a grave marker in a foreign land that says “A Russian Soldier”. Then we flash back to the principal combat scenes of the film. Young private Skvortsov, Alexei Nikolayevich, is in a forward observation position with another soldier when German tanks appear. The tanks quickly overrun their position and Skvortsov flees, finally throwing away his radio to save himself. Ultimately, he is chased into an abandoned trench where he seizes an abandoned PTRD anti-tank rifle, and smokes two tanks with it. The Germans turn tail and retreat.

Skvortsov is ordered to see a general. He has no idea what he’s in trouble for, but as it turns out the affable general wants to decorate him. The general is taken with Skvortsov’s self-effacing modesty, and when the private asks, instead, if he could get a brief leave, as his mother has written that her house needs repairs, the general assents and orders leave papers to be drafted.

Skvortsov has a few days to get home to his village of Sosnovka and back, and of course train travel in wartime is complicated by guards, schedules, interruptions (sometimes by the Luftwaffe), and all these various entanglements elucidate Skvortsov’s character and speak to an essential theme of love. There is an innocent, bittersweet romantic love with a young girl he meets on the way, and two married couples where both the husbands and the marriages have had different fortunes in the war. There are entertaining and coherent bit characters: a self-serving guard, a nervous truck driver, a lieutenant whose reputation as “a beast” has gotten far out ahead of him. He finally does connect with his mother, after many adventures, and for far too short a time before he must retrace his steps to the front and his unit. Love of home and mother is a great thing, but so is fidelity to duty. The movie doesn’t state or hammer these themes; instead, it shows them to you through the actions of its central character, and it is all the mightier for that.

Skvortsov as the innocent, well-meaning Everyman handles a German bombing with more aplomb than his love relationship. He handles the wounded warrior who is depressed and fears his wife will not want him; he handles the wife who failed to keep faith with her soldier husband. He always acts with decency and resolve, he is as pure of heart as Galahad (well, rather more so) and he’s the son you wished you had or the friend you’d have liked to make.

All the while, we are aware, at least subliminally, that the opening scenes of the movie told us that this young man did not survive the war. And, indeed, the closing scene bookends the movie and closes, in effect, with a great sigh about what he might have been.

If you don’t think that’s a powerful film, our review has not been equal to Chukrai’s work.

Weapons and realism?

We’re going to give the film a split decision on this. The German tanks are crudely mocked-up Tigers on T-34s; Skvortsov’s valiant defense against tanks with a PTRD anti-tank rifle is, tactically, ridiculous. (You could shoot at Tigers all day with 14.5mm AP and all you’d do is irritate the Germans inside, who’d then come looking for a fight). Worse, the scene in which Skvortsov flees from the German tank, with its nightmare quality, has that in part because nightmares aren’t real, and a soldier outrunning a tank — even a slow-moving Tiger on terrain — is even less likely than the crew of the tank not bothering to grease him with the bow MG or the co-ax. Instead, we see a remarkable crane shot of the tank chasing Skvortsov, something that was done in all earnestness but made us think it should have a soundtrack: Theme from the Benny Hill Show. It’s that wrong. 

So with all that wrong, how do we get to split decision? There were two things we really liked seeing. The first, of course, was the PTRD AT rifle. It’s hell for rare in the real world as well as on film, and it’s just the sort of oddball weapon that would have us making room on the slatwall in the gun room if we could get our hands on one (or a PTRS, even more so, for that matter). It’s enough of a treat to see an anti-tank rifle in a movie that we can excuse errors in the depiction of its tactical employment, and gross errors in depicting its capabilities.

The second thing was that Chukrai had the courage to cast a young actor of private-soldier age as a private soldier (Vladimir Ivashov was 19). His love interest was also played by a 19-year-old actress, Zhanna Prokhorenko. One wearies of Hollywood’s delusion that make-up on a 40 year old can make a convincing 20-year-old.

The bottom line

This is a movie to watch, and enjoy, if you understand Russian or tolerate subtitles (the subtitles, at least on the Criterion Collection edition, are decent). The American movie it feels most like is The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), in that it’s a depiction, mostly, of soldiers in home front life as a backdrop for an essentially human story. Ballad of a Soldier was awarded a Lenin Prize, which in 1959 probably didn’t mean much except that “Khrushchev liked it,” but also won an award from BAFTA and was nominated for a screenplay Oscar, so it was quite a sensation when new. It has a rare 100% score on RottenTomatoes.com, so those still paying attention to it still like it. While the film is little remembered today except by film students, who can get quite deep in the innards of Chukrai’s script, direction and cinematography, it’s as entertaining now as Khrushchev thought it was in 1959. Our fellow capitalist-roaders can snag a DVD from Amazon.com, put it in their Netflix queue, or possibly borrow the film from their local library.

And where else are you going to see a PTRD?