Ten World War II Books

Well, ten-ish. Obviously there are hundreds (and hundreds) of WW2 books out there. Mention one and people will mention ten more. As it should be. That's how I ended up with the collection I have, from checking out things I read in interviews or bibliographies. Here's a mix of fiction and nonfiction that I recommend on the topic, in chronological order of publication. 

All non-book-cover-pics from The Atlas of World War Two, Unexplained Mysteries of World War Two, Their War, 1943: The Turning of the Tide, US Naval Institute Calendar 1993,  family archives, and Victory Through Air Power. Here we go.

~

(1947)

I highly recommend James Michener both as an author of engaging reading and as a one-man crash course in any topic he covered. Despite being doggedly of the same political party, his is a different approach to the currently-ascendant Zinn/1619-Project approach re: the ideals and lived reality of these United States. More's the pity for us, but he'll come back around, I'm sure. 

For the moment, is this book better known by musical theater patrons than military history/ war fiction readers? It might be the case. But that just means it can be rediscovered en masses again someday. When that happens, people will find a rather shocking evocation of the war in the South Pacific: the logistics, the personalities, the racism(s), the geography, the jungle, the hardships, the natives, the foreigners *, the hardware, the weather, everything. The non-combat anecdotes, such as island-hopping for booze or the coda with the gravediggers of Guadalcanal, balance the combat sections perfectly. ** 

* I refer here to the Americans. The depictions of the indigenous are colorful but not without the author's biases, something he later wrote on at some length (and with his usual insight).

** If you ever read it, you might want to pick up Michener's Voice of Asia, too, as a sort of immediate-sequel. Not as successful an integration of fiction and nonfiction, but a fascinating look at the war's immediate aftermath throughout Polynesia. 

Even more interesting than this, arguably, are the chapters in Michener's autobiography of his WW2 service. The first chapter concerning the mutiny on the boat and the forged passes should be a movie all on its own. Both books, actually, contain some info I've never seen anywhere else (such as the things NY landlords did during the war, or the added threat of rape from some American servicemen that nurses in the Pacific endured.

~

(1948)

Although Italy was allied with Germany in World War II, the Italian viewpoint on the war often differed sharply from that of the Germans. Malaparte was an eyewitness to the campaigns in Finland, the Ukraine, and Leningrad, and has left behind a moving account of many small incidents in the day-to-day conduct of the war.

D-Day sucks up a lot of air in the room when it comes to most WW2 talk in the West. And the Holocaust. Understandably on both counts, sure, but even beyond D-Day there's often only a handful of events, battles, or personalities that comprise the totality of most people's conception of the conflict. Books like The Volga Rises in Europe broadened my own mind of idea of how (and where) the war was conducted. 

I used to have a huge WW2 wall map that had along the bottom all the flags of the countries that fought in it, and visitors were always surprised to see the blue-and-white swastika for Finland down among the enemy combatants. Yep: they were Hitler's allies, shoring up the northern border of Fortress Europa. They were also not interested in Hitler's aims or Naziism at all; just a means to an end, i.e. reclaiming the territory the Soviets stole from them . (Like 100% of the territories the Soviets invaded in the years prior, during, and after WW2, no one ever made them give it back.) A bit squirrely, all of this, but WW2 forced some strange bedfellows all around.

Everything in this book is interesting reading, from the political dimensions/ between-the-lines stuff, to the logistics of the invasion of the Ukraine. Babi Yar is not mentioned or alluded to, but knowing it is happening gives these sections of people cheerfully laying telegraph and other wire and camp followers and dust and countryside a chilling aspect to be sure. Mazaparte was expelled from the Ukraine before too long for writing the articles included here, regardless. An unfortunate apologist for communism until his death in 1957, he had a varied and interesting life and wrote a few more books that I'd like to read someday.

~

(1952)

Overshadowed by the (excellent) film, here's a gem, not just for the pleasure of well-crafted sentences, dramatic action, or wonderful characterization but for the levels of irony and thematic complexity. The blurb on the back of my copy reads: "Hitherto there has been just one unforgettable picture of a British colonel by a French novelist - Colonel Bramble. He is now joined by Pierre Boulle's Colonel Nicholson." I have not read the Maurois * short story, so can't comment there, but definitely will attest to the iconic status of Boulle's creation. (Also: "A fine ironic novel that is yet another French tribute to British eccentricity.")

* Although I just won an auction of André Maurois books so that will change soon. Huzzah!

"Clipton cursed the Colonel but was forced to yield, (sending) back to work a crowd of limping crimples, walking wounded, and malaria cases still shaking with fever but capable of dragging themselves along. They did not complain. The Colonel had the sort of faith which moves mountains, builds pyramids, cathedrals or even bridges, and makes dying men go to work with a smile on their lips. (...) With this fresh impetus the bridge was soon finished. All that remained now was what the Colonel called the trimmings, which would give the construction that "finished" look in which the practiced eye can at once recognize, in no matter what part of the world, the craftmanship of the European and the Anglo-Saxon sense of perfection."

Boulle's specific experiences before and during the war color most of the detail of Kwai. I'm making my way through all of Boulle's stuff. A great companion read to this is his My Own River Kwai, about his experiences (and capture) during WW2. I wanted to include it on this list because it gives such a fun and detailed account of a theater of the war (Indochina under the joint Vichy French/Japanese occupation) often neglected. But I thought including two Boulles would be too much, and Bridge deserves the honor more. 

~

(1955)

The story of Convoy FR77 to Murmansk – a voyage that pushes men to the limits of human endurance, crippled by enemy attack and the bitter cold of the Arctic.

I've got stacks of paperbacks that are falling apart that I nevertheless cannot throw out. Mostly I use them as side-stacked shelf ballast; they break up my eyelines agreeably. 

A lot of these are Alistair MacLeans. Many are in rough shape. I liked this one (and South by Java Head, which I also could've included here but see above remarks for My Own River Kwai) enough to buy a better copy. 

"Heavy gray clouds, formless and menacing, blotted out the sky from horizon to horizon. They were snow clouds, and please God, the snow would soon fall: that could save them now, that and that alone.

"But the snow did not come - not then. Once more there came instead only the Stukas."

Everything about the Murmansk run - from rendezvous in the middle of the North Atlantic/ lower Arctic to sailing it to loading it to unloading it to flying out and back to bomb it - sounds like it was hell on Earth. The misery of this one is etched forever on my brain. I can remember whole scenes in vivid detail, but one in particular, of the Captain visiting the doomed men below-decks, zombie-eyed, half-submerged in ice water that they must keep from freezing by moving in slow, agonized circles or vital equipment will be destroyed, doomed to die in their frozen tomb, stands out. 

Someone needs to make it into a movie, but it'd be too disappointing to see an inferior realization. I can picture the movie poster, though, of a frigate with its landing deck snarled up like the peeled cover of a sardine can with Arctic spray and gloom and the Luftwaffe approaching. 

~

(1960)

Here’s the story of the USS Wahoo, the most successful submarine in the WW2 Pacific Fleet, told in the rhythm and vernacular of the submarine service of the era. Brutal work; there’s always brutality to spare in WW2 reading, but there's something extra brutal about the sub service in any war. The Battle of the Atlantic gets a lot of the attention, but the most successful American patrols were in the Pacific. Success measured, here, in tonnage sank. The Wahoo sent twenty one ships, sixty thousand tons and untold lives to the bottom of the ocean. It was due to the efforts of ships like the Wahoo (captained by the amazingly named Mush Morton) and the USS Tang (captained by her ontetime first mate of the Wahoo Dick O’Kane) that Japan was largely unable to resupply its armies.

Sterling was the sub’s yeoman, so he was privy to most of the intel going to and from the Wahoo, and he had contact with everyone on the ship, regardless of rank. In one of those random strokes of luck that haunt survivors for the rest of their lives, he transferred off the Wahoo as it was refueling at Midway. The officers and crew threw him a going away party and all agreed to meet up in the year 2000. The sub never returned (it was later found by the Russians, still largely intact from where it was bombed). He died in 2002.

Most of the pages of mine have come unglued in the middle, so rereading it is a delicate affair. Nevertheless I’ve done so four or five times over the years. I love submarine stories, and if this one was not on here I’d include Run Silent, Run Deep or Sunk (the Japanese ss), both worthy inclusions. There’s something special about Sterling’s account, though, so here it is.

The Pacific theater is fertile ground if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor for ghost lore. The Last Battleship by Joseph J. Christiano is a great one of those. There are hundreds, like I say. I didn't want to include any WW2-adjacent works, so to speak, but while we're here.

~

(1970)

I bought this at the late great Bonnett’s Bookstore in Dayton back in the 90s but never read it until five or six years ago. Amazing stuff. A Pacific Theater counterpoint to Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, told mostly from the Japanese POV. One of these days I'll get the whole collection of the History of Naval Operations in World War II and read the whole damn thing start to finish. And if there was a comparable volume for the Imperial Navy, I'd read that too. 

The only glaring deficiency is barely a whisper of the occupation of Korea or many of the other activities in the occupied zone. Ah well. (Maybe the Kempeitai got to Toland.) The only true villain of the entire saga, it seemed to me, was one particular guy, Colonel Tsuji. Even he had a fair point about some things - Asia was undeniably under the racist dominion of the West for centuries, after all. He's a bit like the General Sherman of the Japanese side, perhaps. Not that that excuses a single atrocity he (or anyone, on either side) committed. I was flipping through the endnotes in completion-victory and was intrigued by this:

"To avoid standing trial as a war criminal, Colonel Tsuji went underground in Thailand immediately after the surrender, disguised as a Buddhist priest. He made his way secretly to Japan and in 1952 was elected to the Diet from the first district of Ishikawa Province. He was re-elected in 1956 but resigned 3 years later to run for the House of Councilors, to which he was elected. As he was taking his seat, General Kawaguchi (an old nemesis from Guadalcanal) shouted at him and accused him of lying, as well as charging him with atrocities in Singapore and the Philippines. The two eventually had a face-to-face debate before a capacity audience at Town Hall in Kanazawa. Tsuji denied the accusations but admitted he had erred in calling Kamaguchi a coward.

"In 1961 the Japanese government sent Tsuji to Southeast Asia, where he vanished in Laos. Several months later it was reported he had entered Red China. He was never found, and his mysterious disappearance has resulted in numerous sensational rumors. Mrs. Chitose Tsuji believes her husband is dead, but Shigeru Asaeda - who accompanied him on numerous diplomatic postwar trips - believes he is in a Red Chinese prison."

There were also rumors he advised the North Vietnamese. Sounds like a movie to me! 

~

(1970)

I actually haven’t read this yet. It and Canaris look very imposing on the shelf. Speaking of, somewhere along the way publishers stopped putting so many swastikas on book spines which as a WW2 collector, I appreciate. When I belonged to the Military Book Club there was a three to four months stretch where every other monthly selection was The Illustrated History of the Gestapo or the Tottenkopf. I got them all of course, but it made for some uncomfortable decor. I remember throwing a party once and turning that whole stretch of shelf terrain around lest people got the wrong idea.

This one, a memoir by "Hitler's Architect", was controversial upon release. Was he whitewashing his story? Was a Nazi Inner Party member profiting on his activities during the war? You'll have to answer these questions yourself. For my part, there are only a handful of Nazi Inner Party memoirs even available; that makes them an amazing resource. Of course no one should take any memoir as anything other than the person writing it putting a spin on their life and times. They can't be objective observers; all the more fascinating to read. 

Along those lines, I remember getting a rash of social media crap back in the day when I announced I was reading The Service by Reinhard Gehlen. I didn’t include it here not because I don't recommend it - I do -  only because it’s primarily a book about the post-WW2 years. Gehlen was one of the Nazis spirited out of Germany before the Soviets could grab him. His story, like Speer's or Werner Von Braun's or our or any country's, is not as morally cut-and-dried as perhaps we like. Like I say, all the more reason to read it.

I just realized I should also have included this book. How did I forget that? I'll just mention it for now - amazing read. There's a movie on Heydrich in Prague directed by Fritz Lang, as well - watch it. 

~

(1973)

William Craig’s unforgettable book on the nightmare of Stalingrad. The story writes itself: the city Hitler never meant to capture and that Stalin never meant to defend, the premature minting of coins commemorating German victory, the encirclement and destruction of the Sixth Army, the brutal incompetence of Russian military command vs. the determination of the grunts, the last flight out, the terror of the Russian prison camps in frozen Siberia, the tide finally turning in favor of the Allies.  

The author relays events chronologically with generous recollections from the few survivors and official accounts – Russian, German, and Italian. I hadn't read this when the movie came out, but going to see that in the theater was interesting. Everyone in the audience was a single man - that is, they were there by themselves - and when Bob Hoskins appears on screen as Krushchev, someone in the front row shouted out a bunch of Russian at the screen and then walked out. 

The film has its fans, but I thought it was crap. How do you screw up such an amazing story? I haven't seen the latest version, but the Stalingrad movie from the 80s or 90s, whenever it was, is great. Neither beats reading this book, though. While we're here, I'll recommend the Why We Fight: Battle for Russia program, as well. All of those Why We Fights are amazing. The Russian front took over my imagination in the winter of 2000; I remember watching that thing on the little TV I had back then, in the dark in my little studio apartment in North Providence (with a British and Soviet flag in the window to boot), during some raging snowstorm, hypnotized.

~

(1991)

When Warsaw falls, Maciek escapes with his aunt Tania. Together they endure the war, running, hiding, changing their names, forging documents to secure their temporary lives — as the insistent drum of the Nazi march moves ever closer to them and to their secret wartime lies.

Here's a harrowing read. I mentioned the Murmansk run as hell on Earth. Probably only WW2-era Poland rivaled it for such a distinction. Kosinsky's The Painted Bird - covering similar terrain - had a big effect on me when I read it, but Kosinsky is an unreliable narrator, in more ways than one. Not so with this memoir.

A reader on Goodreads perhaps said it best: 

"This incredibly well-written novel is not the typical - if you'll forgive calling a Holocaust survival story 'typical' - story of a survivor of WWII. The perspective is that of a Jewish boy in Poland who never sees a concentration camp, but lives a different kind of trauma in hiding his Jewish identity throughout the war. The novel addresses many complexities, but for me ultimately raised questions of "honorable" choice: is there more honor in surviving a war, and in this case escaping the worst atrocity, one way versus another? How does the unsentimental practicality inherent in a survivor's generation impact a child? What does it mean to be a survivor on the fringe of a community already on the periphery? Highly recommended - also a quick read."

~

(1991)

This history of obscure Waffen-SS units has all the elements of a war novel: ambushes, glider assaults, rescues, courage, betrayal. Included are Turkic, Hungarian, Serbian, Czech and Russian formations, as well as never-before-seen photos, diagrams, maps and first-hand accounts from diaries and survivors.

Here's another Military Book Club selection from yesteryear. It and another one I picked up at the same time (Gotterdammerung by Russ Schneider) will tell you more about the eastern front of WW2 (from the inside) than many other books. 

I've seen some criticism of this one as being almost pro-Waffen-SS. I did not find it to be that way, only that it did not go out of its way to be anti-Waffen-SS. As loathsome as the Nazis obviously and inarguably were, it's silly to think of every soldier who fought on the Axis side - especially those from captured territories - as the same degree of evil. Working for an evil side, sure, again no arguments. It's just: do we ignore every last soldier's experiences, then, because evil? Seems silly to me. Just as it's silly to think of everyone who fought on the Allied side - especially those from the stockades who were handed a rifle - as morally superior. 

Some of us just want to read about what happened and what it was like without an author's heavy hand in any direction. 'Nuff said. I enjoy reading about things left out of most narratives of WW2, such as basically everything in this volume. 

~

(1992)

This could pretty much be insert-Ambrose-here. You can't really go wrong with anything by him you pick up. You don't need me to tell you anything about this one, I assume, but if you've only ever seen the (excellent) mini-series, you should give the book a read. Especially the endnotes. 

If I have a criticism of the author, it's that he sometimes goes a bit overboard on the heroism and courage descriptors. I certainly prefer it to approaches that attempt to minimize such things, and I've no beef with it in principle. Just there are a few times where he describes otherwise neutral actions with hyperbole. Not quite at Battle Cry by Leon Uris levels, but tilting in such a direction, here and there. 

~

(2008)

With original and controversial insights brought about by meticulous research, Human Smoke re-evaluates the political turning points that led up to war and in so doing challenges some of the treasured myths we hold about how war came about and how atrocities like the Holocaust were able to happen. 

So says a blurb from the official release. I think this book is amazing, but it seems to have garnered a bit of a reputation as historical revisionism. And I don't think fairly. 

What it does is collect quotes from all sides (and some sides you wouldn't think to include in such a book as this, such as Gandhi's) to paint a broader picture of the years leading up to the war and the aims / tactics of the various powers. In so doing it complicates a black-and-white view of FDR, Churchill, Hitler, et al. But that's all it does: complicate hagiography, not revise or alter or reframe the historical record. I see that happening often enough out there, and it worries me deeply. I don't think it's happening in Human Smoke. 

One thing missing from works such as this that should be kept in mind is that while it gives an interesting picture drawn from many angles, it's not a complete panorama. (It says so right in the beginning!) Another book, for example, A Man Called Intrepid , describes actions running concurrently as any described here. More than one thing can be true at any one time and always often are. 

~

(2020)

This came out last year, but I didn't read it until 2021. The press around its release felt like part of an electioneering strategy last year, which was gross. I'm glad I waited, as it was probably much more revealing reading it in the first hundred days of the Biden administration rather than the last hundred days of Trump's. That won't be the case for everyone, though. 

Whatever the case, the story of how a deeply divided nation was transformed into a one-party dictatorship, to the sound of wild cheers and parades, tolerating things it would never have tolerated - indeed was founded not to tolerate - is urgent in any era, any country. When the Nazis were elected, they quickly set about (1) dismantling, absorbing, or ghettoizing any threats to their political hegemony (the Enabling Act), (2) establishing Reich commissars over local states and governments, (3) abolished the trade union (by merging their reason for being with itself, i.e. fascism, corporate-government), (4) legally disenfranchising German Jews as prelude to the horrors to come, (5) defunding police forces (and replacing them with its own), (6) inserting ideological watchdogs in every formally independent strata of society. 

If you know where you want to get to, have the will to pursue it, and hit the ground running, there's an awful lot you can accomplish before anyone even gets their bearings. Be careful who you sweep into power in a pique! I'm not comparing anyone to Hitler. Sincerely - these are lessons evergeeen.

~

Sometime in the future, America and its allies will again face an external threat of equal or greater menace than the Axis. Will we, of whatever political stripe, pull together to face it? May we forever use the example of World War Two to urge us together to face it. 

The Drifters by James Michener

"Revolutionaries do not have to be paupers."

"They rarely are," I growled. 

Despite being one of 20th Century America's best-selling authors, Michener has barely any online presence at all. His wikis are sparse, and there is no online go-to Michener resource that lists all of his works, characters, themes, and (most especially) real-world analogs or rationale for the composites for his historical fiction. I joined the James Michener Society on Facebook hoping for such a thing, but it's not a very active site. Goodreads has plenty of fan reviews, but these can be hit or miss, especially for the kind of info I'm looking for.

Had I world enough and time, I'd make developing and maintaining such a thing a personal goal. He's a bit out of fashion, perhaps, but the man's work deserves it. I have, however, neither world nor time, so the best I can manage is a few blogs here and there as I make my way through the man's work.

Which brings us to:
 

(1971, Random House)

I mentioned that some of Michener's wikis are sparse. That isn't the case for this particular one. Here's how its plot is described over there: 

"The novel follows six young characters from diverse backgrounds and various countries as their paths meet and they travel together through parts of Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Mozambique. The story is told from the perspective of the narrator, George Fairbanks, who is an investment analyst for the fictional company World Mutual Bank in Switzerland. Mr. Fairbanks is connected with nearly every character in some way, and they all seem to open up to him throughout the novel in one way or another." 

I originally intended to cover this as one of ten books in a planned "Ten by Michener" post, but I ended up with enough quotes and things I wanted to talk about to warrant its own post.

Let's start with "Mr. Fairbanks." Would the novel be better-served by removing this character altogether? He's obviously Michener's real-life stand-in, i.e. the old man talking to these 60s kids, who are all drawn from real people, too. Which is fine. But as a dramatic construct, the Mr. Fairbanks character is ridiculous. He's fine as the lens through which we see all events, and I always appreciate Michener's over-my-shoulder perspective and historical perspective as events unfold. But a) I just don't buy these kids would adopt (or interact with) him the way they do, b) he is simply a device to move these characters from place to place, some of which seem wildly unrealistic for these kids to get to, c) the attempts to distinguish Mr. Fairbanks from real-world Michener (Fairbanks went to the University of Virginia and not Swarthmore, etc.) fall completely flat. 

And d) as a character, he's not just never well-realized. He's had a fallout with his son, for example - we never learn why, nor is there any reconciliation, nor do we ever meet him or learn anything about his mother, etc. It's just there to half-justify why he's taking the considerable time he's taking with these younguns.

There is one other justification: one of the characters (Monica) is the daughter of an old friend, whom he's promised to look after. This is the most serious problem with the book. The relationship between Monica and Fairbanks is largely one of convenience and neglect. When he (Fairbanks) attempts to analyze why he makes no attempt to arrest her self-destructive behavior (besides knowing how ineffective such an attempt would be, which, to his credit, he realizes) he goes into an aloof aside about Lady Jane Digby, a lady of eccentricity who flaunted the conventions of her era to do as she will. 

Thing is, I have no doubt Lady Digby did inspire the character of Monica, or perhaps the real-world inspiration for Monica made Michener think of Lady Digby, but it's an awful excuse for letting his friend's daughter - whom he's pledged to look after - sink to the levels of depravity she does, leading ultimately to her death after much abuse. This - Fairbanks' failure and what it says, both about the generation gap to which the author has pledged himself - should be brought into the light and made an explicit theme of the book. Instead, Monica's tragedy, while certainly felt by all the characters, is not internalized by Fairbanks (or Michener) anywhere close to how it should be. 

Nevertheless, the presence of a Michener stand-in here allows for some very insightful remarks about more than just the young people turning the world upside down in the 1960s but, remarkably and admirably, of our own era as well:

"The new generation was so convinced of its values that it judged us older people, not by our standards but by their own. I was a flop, but if they had got to me forty years ago, I might have been redeemed. This attitude angered me, because although I saw their manifest weaknesses, I never felt that if they had had my education they might have been saved. They needed desperately some of the things I had acquired; surely Joe's problems would have been simpler had he seen history as I did, and Cato never would never have invaded the church had he acquired my attitudes toward social change but never in my arrogance did I believe that I could have saved these young fellows by training them in my own pattern. It was this arrogance of youth, this precious insolence that set them apart."

Talitha and John Paul Getty, "Marrakesh Chic," 60s.

That one resonated with me because if I'm being absolutely honest, I wonder sometimes if I do think that sort of thing about training people in my own pattern. It's pleasant to be reminded that this is a mistake, just part of the glaucoma of aging, that maybe my increasing exasperation with the reactions and ignorance of "the kids today" isn't as severe or urgent as it sometimes seems to me. Another way of putting that: it's perfectly fine and natural for the young to be possessed with an over-abundance of the seemingly contradictory qualities of ignorance and arrogance.

"I'm sixty one. I'm not in jail. I'm not nuts. I figure I'm ahead of the game. I'm an old man, encrusted with all the errors and abuses of my age. I carry the stamp of my education - automatic patriotism, a certain attitude toward women, a belief in contracts, faith in the ideals that were prevalent in 1932, and were proven so dreadfully wrong."

Or how about these thoughts on "the Haymakers," Michener's stand-in for the SLA / the Weathermen?

"The Haymakers, most of them under thirty, were committed to the total destruction of American society, nothing less. Their program was simple: move into every disturbed situation, exacerbate it, allow it no time to stabilize, sponsor anarchy, and rely upon the resulting turmoil to radicalize the young people. When a sufficient cadre of able young people had been converted into dedicated revolutionaries, large mass movements would be initiated to tear down the social structure: banks would be discredited, the National Guard immobilized, universities destroyed, and the usefulness of social agencies like newspapers and television stations neutralized."

When Michener wrote that, he might have been more aware than his audience, given his abiding interest in the cyclical patterns and passions of history and people, that he was speaking of something true to ages beyond the 1960s. Certainly it resonates with its era, but (making some allowances) this was as true in 9th century Byzantium as it was in 1969, or in 2017.

Another such thing: the irony of the first "atomic" generation rejecting science and "the establishment" in favor of ancient lore and folk music, astrology and numerology. 

"What you're doing is gambling that the economic system which men like me organize and keep going will be elastic and secure enough to enable you to enter it on your own terms, grab off a little cash, and return to your six-month vacation."

"Exactly. With one correction. The system exists primarily for your benefit. You don't run the system for us. You run it for yourself. But in order to keep it functioning, you need our work and our consuming. You need us as much as we need you."

Let's look at the novel's other characters, starting with the young people and ending with Fairbanks' tech-man contemporary, Harvey Hoyt. 

Joe is the novel's stand-in for the young, white conscientious objector. He was "radicalized," so to speak, although he's never quite a radical, by watching his college roommate get beaten for burning his draft card and by the inequities built into the college deferment system in general. ("A man cannot cooperate indefinitely with an immoral situation without becoming contaminated. And I do not intend to contaminate myself.") 

Joe's okay - kind of a blah character compared to his companions, but he's realistic enough. At least until the novel gets to Marrakesh, whereupon everything he gets into and everything alluded to after the novel closes (driving the VW-pop tart across Europe and Asia to Japan) loses me completely. I will say this, though; the name of the book is The Drifters, and Joe is exactly what a drifter looks, sounds, and feels like.

This, though, from the first chapter we meet him, speaks to me muchly: "He shied away from exhibitionism. To stand in a conspicuous group while girl students were chanting 'The answer is blowing in the wind' would be ridiculous. That was out."

I think Joe would hate 2017.

Britta is a girl from Norway who simply wants to live in the sunshine. She moves to Torremolinos in Spain to escape the drudgery of her home in the Arctic Circle. She's another character who's perfectly fine - her concerns and remarks are all reasonable and she is not reactionary in the slightest - until Michener makes the odd decision of having her fall in love or at least pledge eternal devotion to Harvey Hoyt. This seemed... massively unrealistic to me. Or at least should have been examined a little more. Part of her background is rebellion (of a sort) against her father, a former anti-Nazi resistance fighter who has surrendered to a life of daydreaming about Ceylon (aka Sri Lanka). That the novel ends with her going off with a man her father's age to Ceylon is remarked upon, ever so slightly, but its more Freudian implications seem left to one side. This seems an evasion to me.

Perhaps it's just that it seems like the conclusion only an older man would reach - oh, he's exactly what someone like Britta would need. Maybe so. But I don't buy that the character would come to the same conclusion at the point in her life the novel depicts. It was a real left turn for me.

Gretchen is probably the character I liked the least. It's not really her (or Michener's) fault, it's just that the Cantabrigian well-to-do intellectually-insulated folk-singing chanteuse who tucks her bare feet under her legs and brushes her hair away before leaning into the microphone to say "Child 231" (referring to the name of the man who excavated the folk music she's learned, a nod to Pete Seeger's Appalachian-music-excavations) is someone I try to avoid in fiction, life, or otherwise.

It's like what Stephen King said about Joan Didion's 60s experience; having your mental breakdown in a spa (or traipsing around Europe and Africa, as Gretchen does, with her inheritance) is a whole different kettle of 60s fish. 

Monica is the beautiful daughter of an aristocratic British-Africa family, the kind being systematically removed when they didn't leave on their own accord across the continent in the 60s (and other decades). She's both a cautionary example of the danger inherent in the 60s rebellion(s) and a realistic psychological sketch (as was Ellen Jasper in Caravans) of a sizable amount of white daughters "of privilege," rejecting everything associated with it and dressing it up in slogans but slowly losing her grip on reality altogether. 

"It was ironic: children of the affluent classes sitting in Haifa cellars or Vwarda * bungalows and and listening to laments about murderers, bank robbers, bums, revolutionaries and motorcycle Robin Hoods, all chanted by unshaven young men in dungarees who earned a million dollars a year." 

* The fictional post-colonial African republic from which Monica hails.

Cato. Michener is hit-or-miss with Cato, the young black son of a preacher in Philadelphia. Mostly hit, though - he's a well-drawn enough character, all the more surprising given the author's age and demographic. But that's what makes Michener a great writer; he doesn't only hear what he wants to hear. That said, several of Fairbanks' "straight talks" with Cato (such as happens after a visit to the mausoleum of Moulay Ismail, one of the great mass murderers of history) would certainly make classrooms uncomfortable in 2017. Good! History is a fascinating nightmare riddle.

Or when he somewhat harshly cuts Cato down to size after Monica cruelly (but inevitably) dumps him. Not that Cato listens. Which seems realistic. After converting to Islam and a visit to Mecca, Cato returns to the States, presumably to join the agitating ranks of the Nation of Islam. A

Mozambique in the 60s.

Yigal, last of the youths, is a young man caught between Israel, Britain, and the United States. Michener somewhat improbably has him as a 15-year-old in a tank commander crew during the Six Day War (in what sounds like a fictionalization of one of the Egyptian/Israeli battles at Mitla Pass during one of their armed conflicts) but no matter. 

In some ways, Yigal could probably be excised from The Drifters and not be missed much. But Michener deftly contrasts the vertical mobility of Jews in America, being the same color as the WASPs holding all the power up to that point in US history, with that denied to black Americans, for whom no amount of assimilation can compensate. The hostility Cato visits upon Yigal is uncomfortable, but it's a very real part of the Jewish/black relationship in America, and Michener was right to include it. 

Yigal's midnight visit to Petra - punishable by death if he was discovered - was a rite of passage for young Israelis in the 50s and 60s, and probably beforehand, too.

Finally, there's Harvey Holt, a character who only first appears in the ninth chapter, or several hundred pages into things. He makes that particular entry because it is right before Chapter 9 that the youths, on Fairbanks urging, decide to go to Pamplona fort he festival of San Fermín (i.e. the running of the bulls.) So Michener stops everything and introduces us to Hoyt, an old friend of Fairbanks and a "tech man" on radars in remote locations who has lived everywhere from Afghanistan to Sumatra to Thailand. "That lineal descendant of the gifted wagon maker who can't get along with his neighbors in Pennsylvania but is invaluable on the frontier."

I appreciate much of what Harvey has to say, and I imagine the author speaks through his mouth on more than one occasion. He's basically only in the book so he and Fairbanks can commiserate on what a bunch of spoiled brat losers these kids are, even if they kinda like them. Much is made (as only make sense for an era which required so much more thought, expense, and expertise in having portable music of any kind) of his music tapes and his sound system, and (motif alert) the music of Bea Wain and Enoch Light is used to demonstrate the generation gap between men of Fairbanks/Hoyt's generation and the youths.

"It's protest against things you don't understand... destruction against things you do."

It is only when the youths (the heathens) are sitting around trashing Glenn Miller and Casablanca and Hoyt and Fairbanks gets so angry that I suddenly realized how effective it was to include this character, even if I thought Britta's falling for him was highly improbable. By contrasting the relationship between men of his generation had with the pop culture of his (the WW2) era with the youths and their own Dylan-and-Donovan/like-wow pop culture, we see the generation gap for what it is: simultaneously insurmountable and completely arbitrary.  

"He lived an intense emotional life which appeared on casual inspection to have been structured upon the films made by Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy. Actually, it was the other way around: American life in those years was so clear-cut, the national values so well agreed upon, that films mirrored the consensus-type of life Hoyt led. Instead of his aping Tracy and Bogart, they were copying him. Art thus followed life, which is the preferred sequence; today art, especially popular music, invents new patterns which students follow in enthralled obedience."

The Drifters is filled with such passages - great insights into Western civilization, psychology, men, women, age, youth, and the simpler and more pleasurable things like sunsets, groovy tunes, and sex. Michener wrote it to explain the younger generation to his own peers - and to us. If I quibble with some of his artistic choices/ characters, or even the wisdom of some of his conclusions, I remain in awe of his ability to communicate.