Tag Archives: Book review

Books, Britain, Government, History, Military, Russia

Book Review: The Red Atlas

The Red Atlas

The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World

Intro: As the Head of The British Army predicts that Russia may start a war, a new book reveals they’ve had detailed maps of our secret military complexes for decades

FOLLOWING the events such as the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, and the execution of the Tsar and the imperial family, the Russian Revolution ushered in a world of horror and mass death.

It was Stalin, the then General Secretary of the Communist Party, who personally signed-off the lists of execution quotas. He had avidly read and annotated torture reports and was responsible for sanctioning what was to befall. In 1937 and 1938 alone, more than 681,000 people received a bullet in the back of the neck.

Terror was used by the KGB and its forerunner, the NKVD (the secret police), to ensure obedience and to suppress discussion and dissent. As capitalism was overthrown, businesses were nationalised, private property was confiscated, and the mass media was controlled.

Government regulations and bureaucracy intensified, the dictatorship of the proletariat was imposed, and Stalin’s purges eliminated political rivals, scholars, artists, and anyone else who was of mild intelligence. In the Ukraine, food, grain and livestock were requisitioned and some 4 million people were deliberately starved – implemented through an organised famine, or genocide, to punish “anti-party elements and saboteurs”.

Had NATO not kept them the other side of the Iron Curtain, it was Stalin and his successors’ resolute ambition and intention to have brought their Marxist ideology to London.

 

PART of the enormous and secret infrastructure of the Cold War involved the Soviets creating amazingly detailed maps – useful for invading armies and occupiers – which were designed and intended to support civil administrators when the “entire world is communist”.

On the evidence of their maps of Britain they imagined they could one day possess, the authors write that the “Russians didn’t miss much”.

Using high-altitude aircraft, satellite imagery and missiles bearing reconnaissance cameras, the Russians plotted every inch of our islands, continually revising and redrawing the maps “to keep up with the transformation landscapes”.

The Russians also deployed people on the ground, quietly walking down the streets, looking. This was enacted through Le Carre-esque like double-agents who relayed back to Moscow details of factories, including their production outputs and ownership. The size and shape of buildings were of great interest. Every high-rise and low-rise in Southampton, for example, was known by the enemy.

The utilities, industries and transport systems were fully documented and recorded – the width of roads, the height and dimension of bridges, their load capacity and construction materials used. Local terrain was scrutinised – forests, the types of trees, height, girth and spacing. Railway signals, timetables, and even disused tracks were drawn, in case they could be reinstated.

The Russians were also very keen on marine areas and navigable rivers. They marked spot depths, dredged canals and tidal ranges. The water speed and flow at estuaries fascinated them: the Mersey at Liverpool, the Forth at Edinburgh, and the Medway at Rochester and Chatham. In 1919, all mapping activities were put under state supervision by Lenin.

It was Stalin, however, who created the Military Topographic Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Army. It was a massive secret enterprise involving thousands of people. Up to 2 million maps were made of the West, which were kept under armed guard in a series of 25 humidity-controlled vaults.

Even within the Soviet hierarchy, military officers who were required to use maps for training and exercises had no idea of the extent and scope of Stalin’s project. Every map and chart had to be returned to the depot after use.

It is no quip to suggest that the Russians knew more about Britain than the average British citizen. On our own Ordnance Survey maps, for instance, there are frequent blanks, known as security deletions. Sensitive information is excluded from public view.

With the help of their spies and saboteurs, however, the Kremlin knew all about our secret military installations and complexes. In their Red Atlas they drew every hut and barrack at the Royal Naval dockyard at Pembroke, an RAF flying boat base.

They knew the berth length and channel depth at Chatham, where submarines were built and maintained. They could have found their way blindfolded around the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield, near Reading, where nuclear warheads are constructed. Even Google Maps omitted this place until recently.

John Davies and Alexander J. Kent grow melancholic and pensive as they recount the story of the Soviet cartographic enterprise. That story has never been told until now. The maps themselves, which began to be leaked to the West after the pulling down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, have rarely been publicly displayed.

The craftsmanship involved is tremendously skilled. We are told that the “sheer beauty of the maps makes them mesmerising… the use of colours, lines and geometric shapes lends them an Art Deco feel.”

The Soviets transliterated many towns and cities for Warsaw Pact commanders. Rochester became Roczyste, Chatham labelled as Czetem, Herne Bay denoted as Hen-Bei, Margate became Magyt and Maidstone converted to Mejdsten.

Like William the Conqueror, it can be guessed where the Red Army planned to arrive on our shore. Sussex and Kent were in the firing line. The Soviets were also very interested in Cambridge: “The lodging houses and their lecture halls are reminiscent of monasteries or ancient castles . . . there is rain on 12-14 days each month.”

The university is where all the spies were educated: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt. Perhaps Moscow assumed their battalions would get a big welcome when they turned up there in force.

– The Red Atlas by John Davies and Alexander J. Kent is published by the University of Chicago Press for £26.50

Standard
Arts, Books, History

Book Review: The London Cage

REVIEW

Synopsis: In a Kensington basement after the war, a British colonel drew a confession from the brutal Nazi who massacred 100 of our surrendered troops. So, were we guilty of torture too?

THE FORMER member of the Gestapo was arrogant and defiant as he faced his interrogators. No, he snarled, refusing to discuss his part in the murder of two of the British airmen who had tunnelled their way out of Stalag Luft III in the Great Escape in 1945.

Fifty of the captured escapers had been summarily shot on the orders of Hitler, and, with the war over, British investigators were rounding up those suspected of the killings.

One of them, Erich Zacharias, was brought to the so-called London Cage, a clandestine interrogation centre run by the Secret Service behind closed doors in an exclusive, leafy private road in Kensington, London. Elegant rooms had been turned into cells and dormitories. The basement billiard room housed the interview rooms.

There, the man in charge, the redoubtable and fearsome Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland, staged a special scenario to loosen his captive’s tongue.

“The blinds were drawn, the lights were on. Zacharias was brought in with handcuffs and made to kneel in front of a table. Four of us faced him.”

This was a deliberate re-enactment of the scene when Zacharias tortured the two escaped airmen in his charge before killing them – as Scotland knew from other witnesses.

“A statement was read out giving the facts about his part in the murder. I put my hand on his shoulder and said: ‘What is the truth?’” Shocked, unnerved and intimidated, Zacharias broke down immediately and blurted out his admission of guilt to the shooting.

For Scotland, it was job done – in just five minutes. He recorded: “It is true we tried a little showmanship with Zacharias but this was a matter of psychology, not force.”

Certainly no direct physical violence was used to extract the confession, but did his actions still amount to putting undue pressure on the suspect? Did Scotland contravene the standards of behaviour towards prisoners laid down by the Geneva Convention?

These sorts of moral questions have always hung over what went on in the mysterious London Cage, and they are raised again by historian Helen Fry in this impressively forensic study, which not only throws light on an intriguing (and murky) backwater of World War II but also on an unresolved ethical dilemma still with us today.

The Cage – housed behind the ornate facades of numbers 6,7 and 8 Kensington Palace Gardens and backing onto the Palace grounds – was not a cosy place to find yourself in, and was never meant to be.

It was intended for the extraction of vital intelligence, initially information from German PoWs and then, after the war, evidence to convict those suspected of war crimes.

Scotland, as tough and motivated as any Nazi but outstandingly clever and psychologically perceptive, ran it with a rod of iron. He claimed an intimate knowledge of the mindset of Germans, and that they responded only to a figure of authority.

So he barked and bawled, demanding submission and cooperation from the thousands of inmates who passed through it. His penetrating gaze alone could make strong men quail. Those who chose to take him on were humiliated.

In his memoirs – which went unpublished because MI5 banned them under the Official Secrets Act – he maintained that “it was necessary to discipline tough, arrogant and impudent prisoners and we had our methods for these types”. But he insisted that “no physical force was used, no cold-water treatment, no third degrees”.

Fry comes to a different conclusion. “Few can deny he went too far,” she concludes as she examines evidence of prisoners being deprived of sleep, doused with cold water and made to carry out humiliating chores, such as scraping a toilet with a razor or toothbrush. Some were exercised to exhaustion on the parade ground, others kept in solitary confinement for extended periods.

The most uncooperative found themselves in Room 22 in the basement, which was dark, damp and kitted out like a dungeon. Prisoners were forced to stand naked for hours, sometimes chained, or kept for prolonged periods in a cold bath.

There was talk of electric shock treatment and the use of tongue-loosening ‘truth’ drugs. Four Cage prisoners committed suicide.

Scotland, however, always maintained that he only ever used “moderate” physical force – such as boxing an inmate’s ears – as a disciplinary measure, not as a way of extracting out information. Allegations of serious misconduct generally came from those whose necks were literally on the line, such as Zacharias.

When he went to trial in 1947, his German defence lawyer accused the British of obtaining his confession by force, and Scotland spent three days in the witness box denying that he had struck Zacharias or used electrical devices on him. The court believed him, accepted Zacharias’s confession as genuine and sentenced him to hang.

In explanations of his actions, Scotland wrote: “You don’t allow tough Gestapo criminals to imagine they have arrived at a kindergarten or for a rest cure. But there were ways of putting a cocky prisoner in his place without beating him up.

Another who alleged misconduct was SS officer Fritz Knochlein, responsible for the massacre of nearly 100 British soldiers who had surrendered en route to Dunkirk in 1940.

 

SCOTLAND admitted he was tempted, describing him as “the worst German we ever had in the Cage. I could hardly look at him without wanting to hit him.

“He aroused the worst side of my nature. His evilness, lying and brutal nature and the thought of the brave men he had caused to be slaughtered, made me long to give him a taste of the SS medicine.” But he was adamant that he had not done so.

In court, Knocklein alleged that he’d been whipped, kicked, beaten and tortured, but the judges who heard his war crimes trial decided that, even if true, the allegations were irrelevant to the charges against him. He, too, hanged.

For Scotland, the verdict did not amount to a vindication. Rumours and innuendo clouded his reputation, and still do.

Seventy years on, it’s easy to be shocked by the excesses that undoubtedly went on at the Cage. The liberal conscience is offended, as if Scotland were equivalent in evil to the atrocities of the Nazis.

Fry is aware of this, urging us to keep the backdrop of the Cage in proper focus. They had to deal with some of the toughest prisoners ever held by the British, perpetrators of the vilest acts of inhumanity, genocide and cruelty on an unprecedented scale.

But how rough is rough? There’s the rub. The line crossed at the Cage was a thin and uncertain one, with which we still struggle.

We were at war then, and are in a war now, against terror. To what lengths should those charged with our protection be allowed to go, compiling information to secure our safety?

That was Colonel Scotland’s dilemma, and it’s the same not only for the security forces of the 21st century but for every citizen, too. I only wish there were an easy answer

– The London Cage by Helen Fry is published by Yale for £18.99

Standard
Books, France, History

Book Review: At The Edge of The World

REVIEW

The remarkable story of the French Foreign Legion, and its dramatic rise throughout the nineteenth century.

Intro: Murderers, gamblers, criminals on the run – French Foreign Legion soldiers were the toughest in the world and would march in 50C heat till their . . . Boots filled with blood.

You may not have been alone when younger if you more than half-wondered if the French Foreign Legion was an invention of Hollywood.

Cary Grant and Gary Cooper capered about in the desert wearing those distinctive hats with the white hankies dangling down the backs of their necks.

Laurel and Hardy ran away to join the Foreign Legion, as did Jim Dale in Carry On… Follow That Camel, which was filmed in exotic Camber Sands. Marty Fieldman directed, co-wrote and starred in The Last Remake Of Beau Geste, with Peter Ustinov as the sadistic sergeant.

Edith Piaf had a famous song about a night of hectic passion with a tattooed recruit, which she compared to “a thunderstorm through the sky”. And it is her image of the moody and uncompromising Legionnaire, attracted by the promise of “blood, bullets, bayonets and women in an Arab land”, that gets closest to the historical and psychological truth, as laid before us in this gripping, disturbing and controversial account of the Legion’s first century.

For the all-volunteer corps of the French Army, founded in 1831, was neither comical, nor an excuse for high-spirited larks. It was brutal and often monstrous.

Created to participate in France’s colonial expansion to Algeria, Morocco, Madagascar, Indochina and Mexico, “we scare people, we inspire fear and perhaps admiration, which is a little too thin a reward sometimes; but love, never”.

Even the unique right to hire men regardless of their nationality was a cynical move.

 

SINCE Napoleon and his casualties were still a living memory, the French government wanted an army “that could face danger and human losses without drawing the political backlash that French-born victims would elicit”.

Out of this came the Legion’s legendary appeal to ne’er-do-wells, broken-hearted lovers, criminals, political refugees and ‘scions of aristocratic families leaving behind gambling debts’.

Anyone physically fit was accepted, especially if they had teeth strong enough to bite the biscuit rations. No questions were asked at the headquarters in Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria.

“You can choose a new name if you like,” recruits were told. “We don’t ask for documents.”

As mercenaries, the men fought for the Legion itself, united against everyone else.

‘Legio Patria Nostra,’ ran the motto – the Legion is our country. ‘We don’t give a damn what we fight for. It’s our job. We’ve nothing else in life. No families, no ideals, no loves.’

By 1900, there were 11,500 men in this band of scary outcasts. Blanchard calculates that between 1831 and 1962, when Algeria was grudgingly granted independence and the French left North Africa, approximately 600,000 people had enlisted.

“The substantial majority of them were Germans or Northern Europeans,” we are informed. The rest were Belgians, Spaniards and Britons. There was one Turk, one New Zealander and lots of Americans during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Exhausting route-marches in Saharan temperatures of 50C with heavy backpacks, where “acid sweat burned your skin” and “you march with your shoes full of blood”, would not be many people’s idea of military adventure. But, according to Blanchard, the typical Legionnaire was a man who found “redemption and an existential purpose through camaraderie and abnegation”.

A Legionnaire who was shot in the stomach and lying on the ground with his intestines escaping was heard to murmur to his captain: “Are you happy with me?” This is the kind of stoicism that was expected.

“Excessive revelry” was condoned by the generals, who believed “one did not build empires with virgins”. Sex with prostitutes was encouraged, despite the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, as were heavy drinking and brawling. How hilarious it must have been to terrorise the natives – the Legionnaires “can hardly keep beating, so hard they laugh”, ran a report.

The French government maintained that this imperial experiment was to bring ‘reason, progress, science, culture and freedom’ to backward jungle regions and wildernesses.

The Legionnaires were expected to fight ‘in the professed name of civilisation and’ – here comes the catch – ‘in the name of racial superiority’.

While we can applaud their achievements as engineers – digging and building roads, constructing forts and laying telephone lines – the fact remains that, for these mercenaries, “the gift of French civilisation” in practice meant the opportunity for the savage conquest of African tribes and, in Indochina, the Vietnamese patriotic resistance.

Legionnaires went about “civilising the barbarians of this world with cannonballs”. Villages were pillaged, ransacked and burned, the women raped, the men decapitated. “We were allowed to kill and plunder everything,” recalled a soldier. “We went to the villages and surprised the people in bed.”

One Legionnaire received no censure when he made a tobacco pouch from cured human skin. Nevertheless, killing civilians must have taken its toll – indeed, Legionnaires were among the most screwed-up soldiers in history.

In a group of 350 men, 11 deaths were put down to suicide, but there may have been many more, disguised in the record as death from disease. The belief was: ‘It was better to be dead than go through hell.’ There was alcoholism and much illness – typhoid, tropical fever, dysentery, malaria.

The deliberate hardship was not unlike that of a religious order, with its renunciation of worldly comforts – though entertainment involved lots of drag shows.

 

LEGIONNAIRES made “splendid female impersonators”. Homosexual activity was commonplace with “5,000 young solid males, boiling with vigour and vitality” at a loose end in the fort.

When Kaiser Wilhelm tried to discourage Germans from joining up by publishing articles warning against sexual abuse in the desert, men with Heidelberg duelling scars raced to enlist.

As 43 per cent of the corps was German, perhaps it is no surprise the Foreign Legion didn’t rescue France when the country was occupied by Nazis during World War II.

Blanchard’s story concludes with the centenary of the corps in 1931, the parades and so forth.

Reading about post-colonial activities in a further volume might be appealing, particularly because, since 1962 when Sidi Bel Abbes was abandoned for a new HQ in Marseille, some 50,000 men have felt the need to run away by joining the Legion.

It is perhaps chilling to discover that Jean-Marie Le Pen spent a formative three years in the Legion, and that recently a retired commander was arrested for making anti-Islam protests in Calais.

To avoid any confusion of doubt, it is only officers enlisted to the French Foreign Legion who must be of indigenous French origin and nationality.

–   At The Edge of The World by Jean-Vincent Blanchard is published by Bloomsbury for £20.

 

Standard