World War II Archives - Page 2 of 2

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. New York: Scribners, 2014.

Summary: Two teenagers, a blind French girl, Marie-Laure, and a German orphan, Werner Pfennig, with a gift for radio electronics, are brought together at the end of World War 2 through underground radio broadcasts by her great-uncle of recordings by her grandfather while a dying German Sergeant Major seeks a treasure in the girl’s possession.

I don’t think I’ve been gripped by the “voice” of a writer as I was from the first pages of this book since reading Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country. It is a voice that quietly and deliberately creates an atmosphere that evokes the mixture of wonder of two children coming of age and discovering the world and their own loves, the pall of sadness and terror surrounding the German invasion of France, and mounting tension, as a sinister and dying Sergeant Major confiscating treasures for the Fuhrer closes in on Marie-Laure, all alone in one of the few standing houses in St. Malo, days before it fell to the allies in August 1944.

The book opens with the opening of the invasion. Marie-Laure is blind and alone in the house at 4 Rue Vauborel, her great-uncle Etienne having been interned and her father lost or dead in a German prison camp. Werner is five blocks away attempting to find the source of underground broadcasts, which are being made by Marie-Laure’s uncle, shelters and is trapped in the basement of a collapsed hotel.

The story shifts back and forth between the invasion of St. Malo, and a telling of the story of the childhood of these two and the events that brought them together in St. Malo in August of 1944. We learn of a blind girl whose father is a locksmith for the Natural History Museum of Paris and how she learns to find her way around the city from a scale model her father makes. We see her growing love for the creatures of the sea as she reads a Braille version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. We learn of an orphan boy, Werner, who finds and old radio and makes it work, revealing a growing gift for radio electronics. He and his sister tune into wondrous broadcasts (that we learn were made by great-uncle Etienne and Marie-Laure’s grandfather). This is an example of the luminescence of Doerr’s writing:

The brain is locked in total darkness of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Werner’s talents come to the attention of the Reich and he is sent to a school that exists to develop the Aryan super race. He learns triangulation which leads to eventual deployment hunting down underground transmitters. Meanwhile, he witnesses the brutal destruction of his one friend Frederick, who loved birds more than war. During this time Marie-Laure and her father flee Paris, the father being entrusted with a precious diamond, the Sea of Flames, and end up with her great uncle Etienne in St. Malo on the coast of Brittany. The remainder of the story traces how the lives of Werner and Marie-Laure come together in St. Malo while tension builds as the sinister and dying Sergeant Major von Rumpel closes in and then occupies the house where Marie-Laure is staying while she hides in the attic accessed by a secret door in the back of a wardrobe.

Doerr gives us a story of beauty, pathos and mounting tension. He explores through the sightless Marie-Laure and the orphan Werner the incredible wonder of discovery, whether of the world of snails and sea creatures, or the fascinations of electronic circuitry and the wonders of science. Doerr portrays the beauty of the love between daughter and father, between brother and sister, and the growing friendship between Werner and Frederick. We see that the most terrible thing about war is the brutality that is oblivious of such beauty and which seeks to obliterate the better angels of our nature. [In this context, it should be noted that there are descriptions of violence and one scene of sexual assault, none of which is gratuitous.]

Doerr’s work won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction and I would contend that it was utterly deserving of such recognition. Doerr is a master painter with words, with all the strokes falling just as they should. I’m glad for the light it shed in my life.

The Battle for Leyte Gulf: The Incredible Story of World War II’s Largest Naval Battle by C. Vann Woodward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The battle for Leyte Gulf could very easily have turned out differently. The Japanese had designed a strategy that succeeded in pulling the bulk of U.S. naval forces away from the critical San Bernadino Strait that gave Japanese Central Force under Admiral Kurita the opportunity to thwart our landings in the Philippines.

C. Vann Woodward gives us a moment-by-moment and battle-by-battle account of what was in fact our largest naval engagement in World War II, one which finished off the Japanese Navy as an effective force. The strategy itself was a desperation move that consisted of a three-pronged approach designed to draw off the bulk of the 3rd and 7th Fleets covering the landings at Leyte Gulf. The northern and southern prongs basically sacrificed a significant portion of Japan’s naval power to buy time for Kurita to strike at Leyte Gulf.

It nearly succeeded. First, aerial attacks on Kurita’s Central Force while it was steaming through the Sibuyan sea over-estimated the damage wrought against Kurita’s force, deceiving Admiral Halsey of the Third Fleet into thinking he could take his forces north to wipe out Ozawa’s decoy force of carriers coming from the north. Ozawa’s decoy was successful at the cost of his carriers and other shipping in the Battle of Engano. Halsey compounded his error of judgment by vague communication that suggested he was leaving “Task Group 34” to cover the San Bernadino Strait when he in fact took this force with him.

This vague communication led Admiral Kinkaid to conclude that he could take his Seventh Fleet to confront the southern prong of the attack in the Surigao Strait. Because of communication and other problems Admirals Nishimura and Shima failed to coordinate and American forces were for the last time able to “cross the T” with devastating effect on Nishimura’s force. While victorious, Kinkaid has used up most of his firepower and was not in position or adequately prepared to respond to the threat that emerged from the San Bernadino Strait as Kurita’s force emerged. The only force there were poorly armed escort carriers and a screening destroyer force, seemingly no match for Kurita.

Only heroic action by the American destroyers and covering aircraft prevented the rapid destruction of the fleet. Yet all appeared lost when suddenly Kurita stopped and turned around and went back to the Sibuyan Sea. It was clear that had he pressed on, he could have won the engagement, having removed the destroyer screen and begun attacks on the carriers. From post-war interviews which Woodward includes, it appears that Kurita rationalized his decision based on the delay he had with the attacks in the Sibuyan sea, thinking he was encountering a greater force, losses to his own shipping, and the opportunity for engagement with Halsey’s returning force. In actuality, after a brief reconnaissance of the area, he turned back, having sacrificed the Japanese Navy without achieving his aim of repelling the American landings in the Philippines.

Woodward explores this mix of strategy, communications and miscommunications, and the relative strengths of each force. In the end, the outcome came down to the perception and resolution of a key leader, Admiral Kurita and the heroism of the escort carrier forces. A different outcome would still have meant catastrophic losses to the Japanese Navy and only delayed the inevitable.

Perhaps that was what was on Kurita’s mind…

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