Military Bookshelf: Spring Potpourri

Military.com - Tom Miller

"Bathtub Admirals: A Novel", by Jeff Huber.  Kunati, $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-60164-019-2

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.  Huber spent twenty years in the Navy, rising to the rank of Commander before retiring to collect a Navy pension.  What the Navy gets in return is the funniest send-up of a military service since Richard Hooker skewered Army medicine in his classic MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors.

Huber's hero is Jack Hogan, a young officer who rises to the rank of Commander.  Hogan is an unassuming, principled, and hard-working officer.  You just know that he's going to get shafted by a culture that seems to reward the well-connected and bureaucratically-adroit. 

When the novel begins in the 1980s, the long-simmering Cold War keeps the Navy busy with a real mission.  In that environment, the ever-diligent Hogan shines—besting the Soviet Pacific air forces in an exercise immortalized as the "Great Big Backfire Raid," and taking command of the bridge during a storm to safely land the carrier's aircraft in the "Rocky Horror Recovery."  Hogan is repeatedly decorated and promoted early.

Then, the Cold War abruptly ends, and in the absence of a real conflict, the "sandbox generals and bathtub admirals" are reduced to playing war.  In such a milieu, "straight-ahead guys like Jack" quickly find themselves at a competitive disadvantage to unprincipled but politically-adept officers. 

The Naval bureaucracy—and its petty rules, infighting, and embrace of political correctness—make an easy target for Huber's irreverence.  Among other things, he gleefully holds up the military's "Don't ask; don't tell" policy to well-deserved ridicule. 

The large cast is mostly notable for their venality, but a few stand out for their humility.  One such is Lieutenant Judy Davis, the JAG [Judge Advocate General] Fag Hag.  "I kick little dykes and fairies out of the Navy," LT Davis explains to Hogan.  To her credit, she would rather be doing something else and even risks her career to help Hogan secure an honorable discharge for an enlisted man before he's exposed as a homosexual. 

If you're ready to laugh out loud, grab some Nairobi Trail Markers [Salisbury steaks] and bug juice [Kool-Aid], and settle down with the Tall Thai Girl, the Naked Muslim Babe, President Pants, Senator Ex-Prisoner, and assorted eccentrics for a hilarious cruise.
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"Italy's Sorrow: A Year of War: 1944-45", by James Holland.  St. Martin's, $26.95 (640p) ISBN 978-0-312-37396-2

For too long, the Italian campaign of World War II was treated as a sideshow to the larger Allied campaign in Western Europe.  Controversial from the beginning, it was often dismissed as a distraction at best and even unnecessary. 

The campaign is only now getting its due.  Last year, Rick Atkinson published the second volume of his ambitious Liberation Trilogy (after An Army at Dawn which told the story of the campaign in North Africa).  The Day of Battle carried the war to Sicily and Italy and demonstrated convincingly that the Italian campaign contributed materially to Germany's defeat. 

Now, in a companion study, British historian and journalist Holland (Fortress Malta) follows his own study of the North African campaign (Together We Stand) with an exhaustive chronicle of the final year of the war in Italy. 

Atkinson focuses on the years 1943-1944 and only sketches the final year of the fight in Italy.  Holland, on the other hand, picks up story in May 1944 and follows it through to the German surrender in May 1945—a year that he notes was "one of the most terrible in Italy's history." 

Because of it's geography (a narrow peninsula dominated by rugged mountains), Italy was "a truly terrible place to fight a war."  The forbidding terrain and fierce German resistance turned Italy into a bloody "war of attrition." 

Towns were blasted into oblivion.  Cassino, the site of the famous monastery, was fought over for months, and by the time the Allies captured it, was "utterly—100 per cent—destroyed."  The story was repeated the length and breadth of the peninsula.  Moreover, the campaign claimed over one million casualties—combatants and civilians. 

But, like Atkinson, Holland concludes that however terrible the price the campaign succeeded in its major goal: to "draw German divisions away from Normandy." 

Holland has written a first-rate story of an underappreciated campaign.  Between them, Atkinson's The Day of Battle and Holland's Italy's Sorrow offer a definitive account of a controversial campaign and "a truly terrible" fight.  
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"Hollywood Crows" by Joseph Wambaugh.  Little, Brown, $26.99 (343p) ISBN 978-0-316-02528-7

A former LAPD detective and best-selling author, Wambaugh (Hollywood Station, The New Centurions) is on familiar turf with this irreverent, politically-incorrect, and darkly humorous cop novel that asks the question, Can an estranged couple murder each other and get away with it?

But, first things first.  The Hollywood Crows of the title are the officers of the Hollywood Station's Community Relations Office, or CRO and pronounced Crow.  With the LAPD operating under a federal consent decree, the CRO's community liaison beat is especially important.  The beat cops dismiss the CRO as the "sissy beat," but in "the land of diversity where all behavior that was not overtly criminal must be understood and respected," their opinion doesn't matter much. 

There are enough characters here to satisfy the most jaded reader: Hollywood Nate Weiss, who carries his SAG card next to his badge; Bix Ramstead, "the elusive Monogamous Male Cop"; surfer cops Flotsam and Jetsam; Doomsday Dan Applewhite, who always expects the worst; and Veronica "Ronnie" Sinclair, known to one and all as Sinclair Squared because of her marriages to two Sinclair cousins. 

If this mix isn't volatile enough, Wambaugh introduces a competing set of characters from the other side of the law:  hapless petty thief Leonard Stilwell; sexy Margot Aziz, a former exotic dancer; and Margot's estranged husband and former boss Ali. 

It seems that the Aziz divorce has turned ugly, and both Aziz's would like for the other one to disappear—permanently.  With Stilwell's help, Ali hopes to poison Margot.   Margot, who's having an affair with Bix Ramstead—who's not so monogamous after all—plans to use the unsuspecting cop to lure Ali into a deadly trap in her bedroom. 

Wambaugh has his characters' lives intersect in odd but telling ways in an inventive and entertaining "six degrees of separation" novel.  If it was a movie, it'd be "Crash Lite."  

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Copyright 2012 by Tom Miller