Tags
Belgium, corona, England, game pairings, Germany, Holland, robert harris, rocket science, terror, World War II
Once again, it was dumb luck.
My plan was to grab the next book in Conn Iggulden’s Wars of the Roses series and read it, having now finished A Distant Mirror. Unfortunately, while I quickly located books #4 and #5 in the series, #3 (Bloodline) eluded me. It was quite late at night and so I finally gave up and grabbed another novel from my unread pile.
What I got was another historical drama; one from Robert Harris. His 2020 work is titled V2. He parallels a tale of a German engineer who is working on the development and launch of the V-2 rockets with a British auxiliary who is tasked to stop them from hitting London. How will their trajectories cross?
The timing of my reading choice (which, I of course, didn’t really make) was perfect. I was getting started when I was hit with the rash of news articles leading up to the inaugural flight of the Space Launch System (SLS). As I am writing this, that launch was postponed until tomorrow due to problems with the engine on the launch pad during the final countdown.
SLS was well off my radar. This is a little strange – for reasons that I mostly won’t go into. The short version is I know people who worked on that program and thought I’d be a little more aware of what is going on. Somehow I’ve lost track of it entirely allowing the actual first launch (which didn’t happen) snuck up on me. In my defense, it is one the least elegant* systems that NASA has ever tried to put forward.
For Harris, the choice of subject about which to write stemmed from his having read the obituary of one Eileen Younghusband, a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) posted to Belgium in 1944. Her job was to use the radar tracking of V-2 launches to locate the launch sites in real time. She died in 2016.
Harris wrote his novel while quarantined in his home in England. To me, the writing feels different than his other novels, and this may be a large part of the reason why. V2 is smaller. Smaller both in size (my copy is slightly over 300, modestly-filled printed pages). It’s also smaller in its historical scope. Especially if you’re not an Englishman, the V-2 attacks fade to the margins in the telling of the Second World War; the program had no strategic value and relatively little impact in terms of either human or property loss. That’s little consolation to its victims but this was no “Battle of the Bulge.”
The books mentions, without making it too much of the story, that misinformation ruled this chapter of the war. By 1944, the English had taken control of the German spy network in London and were capable of feeding the Germans whatever information they wanted. By exaggerating the effect of the V-2 in London, they encouraged the Germans to continue a campaign in a manner that was having little practical success. Likewise, the English women were told how their calculations were resulting in destruction of the launching sites that they had traced back. This wasn’t true – the unsteered trajectory of this first-ever ballistic missile had too many unknowns to allow precise location of launch sites, no matter how good the computations.
What is in the book is a sense of futility all around. Germans surely knew the war was already lost and that the V-2 had no chance of changing that. The English also must have been aware that, for all that they were doing** to counter the V-2 system, they were not having much of an impact. After all, the rockets continued to fall upon English citizens and their homes. For the English right in the middle of it all, it must have seemed like an awfully poor way to be winning a war. Is Harris merely capturing this feeling in his protagonists or are we seeing his own frustrations at what we now know to be the futility of mass quarantine of healthy individuals?
There is another example of Harris’ Englishness which goes against my own American experience. In his book, Harris does not give Werner von Braun the best of treatments. Von Braun is not exactly portrayed as a villain but he is shown as an opportunist and a politician. In America, by way of contrast, he was widely treated as a hero – the reformed Nazi who came to help American do the work of the righteous. Harris shows how he had set up his betrayal of his German motherland in advance, preparing to take his secrets to American where he would then be protected from his complicity in destroying England. I can’t say Harris is entirely wrong, but this isn’t the Werner von Braun that I knew.
As I finished the final pages, I gave some thought (as I generally do) to a historical game that might match my historical reading. The best match I can imagine is Hearts of Iron IV as it has the scope to pit technology trees against grand strategy plus the massiveness to dig into the detail. That massiveness, however, means that I’m not even going to try.
Maybe what I ought to do instead is to follow the lead of food blogs. At the bottom of my post I could offer the equivalent of a “wine pairing” to go with my recipe. A “game pairing.” It may not add anything to the discourse but it would sure save me a lot in terms of both research and writing.
*For anyone who doesn’t want to guess what I’m alluding to, the SLS is cobbled together out of the pieces from the Space Shuttle, itself technology from a previous generation.
**The V-1s, the “flying bombs,” could be countered as would a manned aircraft, using fighters and anti-aircraft gunnery. The V-2s were too fast – if you heard it coming, it was already there. A massive anti-aircraft barrage in the general direction of a V-2 would cause more ground damage from falling shells than the rocket could do on its own. Attempts were made to jam the electronics of the rocket but, the missiles were unguided in their terminal phase.