The concept is interesting and Phil Ward’s knowledge of the military is undeniable. The story revolves around Lieutenant (he gets promoted during the course of the book) John Randall, who does such a bang-up job of leading a small force of British troops slowing the German advance on Calais during the British retreat to the Channel in May 1940, that he is selected to head up an ultra-secret Raider unit.

The book goes into great detail describing the various stages that this fictional unit goes through as it develops into a fighting force. Apparently this is the first installment of a planned series about this outfit. As it is, there is a dearth of actual combat in the book, since so much time is spent on all the various machinations the principle characters go through to obtain weapons and improve their logistics. I guess the bulk of the fighting will take place in subsequent volumes. However, as I got into this book, I found that I had difficulty sticking with it. I kept wanting them to go shoot some Krauts and when they did, it was almost an anticlimax.

The characters were also a bit of a problem. They reminded me of one of the old propaganda movies made during WWII. Among the main characters, all the men are either handsome and brave or are comic relief while the women are all spunky and beautiful. None of these characters ever seem to be lacking a snappy comeback.  The author also has a maddening habit of constantly referring to characters, with few exceptions,  by their full titles…Captain Randall, Lady Jane Seaborn…etc. Until of course, when Jane Seaborn joins the Royal Marines (!!!) and becomes “Captain Lady Jane Seaborn.”

Another issue is that of outright mistakes in the factual material. One of the ‘colorful characters’, Geronimo Joe, who is leading his Wild West Show in a tour around Britain, states that Randall got his battle experience fighting Huk guerrillas in the Philippines. The problem with this, of course, is that the Huk rebellion did not start until 1946…six years after the events depicted in the book takes place. Also, the characters mouth way too many cliche’s. I know that people do that in real life, but it is just as annoying when it really happens.

In short, this is not a work of war fiction that is going to take its place alongside The Thin Red Line, The Winds of War, or for that matter, The Killer Angels. Still, if you don’t need your fiction to be particularly literary, then you might like it. Just don’t expect a lot of shooting until the next installment.

http://www.amazon.com

I ordered the book from Amazon and eagerly awaited its arrival. When I opened it I was immediately struck by the negative tone of the review excerpts on the dust cover. A critic named Henry Allen notes that Thompson reports on “these quarrelsome and oddly self-loathing people,” and an anthropologist named Mark Leone says, “she shows us ordinary men who lead partial lives where their emotional emptiness is met through camaraderie in playing army. An empty America is the result.”

Not a good way to start out. Not only are we self-loathing, but we are apparently responsible for everything that is wrong with America. Considering that we are numerically a very small group of people, I would have thought that at least the crooked politicians and the gang-bangers would have come in ahead of us!

Undaunted, I plunged into the book. The author wrote the book as her Ph.D dissertation at the University of MD. As a result, it is well-organized and heavily annotated. The author spent seven years ‘researching,’ which including insinuating herself into various reenacting organizations and making friends with numerous members, while distributing and studying questionaires. While she covers WWI reenacting in some detail and touches on Vietnam and Korean groups to a lesser extent, her main focus is on WWII, particularly a GI unit, the 4th Armored Div.

The result is a year-by-year critique of the hobby as seen from her perspective. While she does give lip-service to the benefits that it gives to participants, she inevitably comes back around to the negative.

Every blemish, every zit that she notices on the face of 20th Century reenacting is laid out for the reader. Thompson particularly dwells on reenactor politics and the quarreling that goes on among people in the hobby. The guys with whom she spends time never seem to enjoy an event. They constantly bitch and complain about everything to the point that you have to wonder why they do it. (I have known people like that and have wondered the same about them. But in essence, some people just seem to like to complain and they probably do it at home about their neighbors and co-workers as well.)

She notes racism and sexism as problems in the hobby. Yes, these things do exist, just as they do in society and just as they do in other hobbies. But there are plenty of reenactors who don’t have these attitudes as well. She gives a lot of space to the male-dominated aspect of the hobby and offensive bawdy humor etc. If she thinks this is unique to reenacting, she has evidently never walked through the service bay at her local auto dealer or had a drink in a biker bar.

In fact, one of the weaknesses of  this work is its insistance that the culture of reenacting is fundamentally different from that of other hobbies and subcultures and beyond that, is unsavory as a result.  All subcultures have their own unique flavor, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that those flavors are distasteful.

In the end this work fails because Thompson can’t move past the baggage she brings with her. She sees things she doesn’t like about reenacting and moves to the assumption that these things exist because of reenacting. Reenactors are damaged goods with unsatisfying lives to her. When one has a normal existence outside the hobby, they seem to be the exception. God forbid anyone live differently than the prescribed Yuppie lifestyle. I think she probably intended to be even-handed, but usually when she says something good about reenacting, she has to end the section with something that makes her upset or angry.

Overall, one has to question the ethics of doing something like this to people with whom you have made friendships. These are not celebrities with public persona’s or, conversely,  tribesman somewhere out in the Amazon rain forest. These folks in the book will read it and live with the result of their lives being made public. When people pour their heart and soul out to you, does that justify doing an axe job on them just because they signed a disclaimer? Doing so to advance one’s academic career or to sell a few books seems particularly crass.

Maybe the difference between Tony Horowitz and Jenny Thompson is that Horowitz is a Civil War buff to start with, so he had one foot in the hobby in the beginning and ends his tale with affection. I sense little affection in Thompson’s work.  In the end, the book is interesting as a cautionary tale about dealing with the media or interviewers in general. Also, since it does expose every imaginary flaw about the hobby, at least the reader can learn what not to do.

Overall, Jenny Thompson never really understood reenactors because she never had what a friend of mine has called ‘the hook’ for reenacting. She just never got it.

So one last thought for the guys on the dustcover, whom I mentioned earlier, as well as Ms. Thompson.  To quote Mark Twain:

I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value–certainly no large value…However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.
- Mark Twain’s Autobiography

Enjoy your next event!

Jim

The unusual aspect is that the illustrations use dioramas with model soldiers and vehicles to recreate stock photographs of the campaign. Looks interesting. I may have to get this. If anyone else does first, please post a review.

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/war-games/

Jim