Latest Readings Read Online Free PDF

Falklands War the armed forces were being ably led by “the boys from the state schools.” It had been Churchill’s phrase, coined during the Battle of Britain: he had foreseen the future, and guessed that it would work.
    But during the war, the British forces, with the possible exception of the RAF, had toffs at the top. In view of that fact, it remains remarkable that the Americans so smoothly accepted the alliance. A lot of the bonding happened between Churchill and Roosevelt, but the next level down was the crucial one, and on that level it was a sheer fluke that the very American George Marshall and the very British Alan Brooke could have talked strategy together without grasping each other by the throat. Helping them reach harmony was the stroke of luck by which the Americans themselves thought the Germany First strategy was the way to proceed, so the British didn’t have to sell them the idea: they were already working on it. But the whole business of a joint command that operated on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously is an inspiration to read about, because it shows what democratic nations can do when the chips are down. Lately I have been reading what I would guess to be the best book on the subject (it’s a theme that nearly all the military historians have taken acrack at): Masters and Commanders , by Andrew Roberts. Of the book’s many virtues, the most important is that the author knows how to bring the four main characters alive: Churchill, Roosevelt, Marshall, and Brooke are all there, at least three of them acting more strangely than you might have imagined. But if Hitler and Tojo could have put together a team like that, the world would have been lost.

Sebald and the Battle in the Air
    AN ADMIRER OF W. G. Sebald, I know my way around the often intricate paths of all his major books up to and including the magnificent Austerlitz , but I had never read his little book about the Allied air war against Nazi Germany. I was put off by the reviews, which, even when they praised the book, did too good a job of outlining the essential fatuity of its thesis. According to Sebald, German literature after the war had never faced up to the subject of the bombing raids. That much was perhaps true, but Sebald had gone on to claim that the subject was therefore a lacuna in the German national consciousness. Since I have always been convinced that a national consciousness is formed by secondary writing rather than by serious writing, I put off reading the book: why spend time reading even a great writer when he was trying to make bricks without straw?
    But finally the book came and got me, in the form of a thin Fischer paperback on Hugh’s bookstall in the Cambridge marketplace. Already before I had paid for it and taken it away, I was deep into Luftkrieg und Literatur . The prose, being Sebald’s, was exquisite. His manner of squeezing historical significance from objects and landscapes—a manner which has by now filtered down to such best sellers as Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes —was as seductive as ever. But the basic idea was, for him, uniquely nonprofound. He hadn’t even considered that the generation of young male readers in postwar Germany might have learned, while growing up, all about the air war from quite another source than serious literature. He grew up in Germany himself—he didn’t move to Britain until 1965—but he seems not to have read much of the unserious literature that his fellow Germans were reading in their childhood and adolescence: unserious literature in which the air raids were a prominent theme. In the kind of war-story magazines that seldom end up in libraries, there were sensationally illustrated articles about German night-fighter pilots flying into action against the RAF four-engine bombers that had come to devastate the German cities. The magazines were pulp, but the storythey were telling was true, and young German boys—probably not the girls, but for