Military, Scientific, and Technological
Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War by danny orbach. Pegasus, 2022, 400 pp.
Orbach has written a detailed, sobering, and absorbing account of the many ways in which ex-Nazis managed to lead comfortable and active lives after World War II. He begins with General Reinhard Gehlen, a former Wehrmacht analyst, who used his trove of material on Soviet forces to start a new career running an intelligence organization, first for the Americans and then later for West Germany. Gehlen drew on the Third Reich’s vehement anticommunism while shedding the rest of his Nazi baggage. Other former Nazis moved closer to Moscow, including as kgb agents who used Gehlen’s organization to insert themselves into West German intelligence. Many never abandoned their anti-Semitism. One of the architects of the Holocaust, Alois Brunner, ended up in Damascus, where he advised the regime of Hafez al-Assad on torture techniques and sought to avoid the fate of his former boss Adolf Eichmann, who was kidnapped by the Israelis in 1960 while hiding in Argentina. Orbach includes some jaw-dropping stories of double dealing, espionage, and outright criminality. The book inevitably raises questions about those in the West who were happy to make use of these ex-Nazis without worrying about their checkered pasts.
The Great War and the Birth of Modern Medicine by thomas helling. Pegasus, 2022, 496 pp.
It is one of the paradoxes of war that the enormous effort put into harming people often gives rise to medical breakthroughs and great strides in the treatment of the wounded. This valuable and thoroughly interesting study, informed by the author’s own experience of military surgery, contributes to the histories of both World War I and modern medicine. Helling shows how the horrors of war spurred medical research, including about how to address the effects of gas, reconstruct disfigured faces, use simple splints so that shattered limbs mended in ways that avoided later deformities, understand the psychology of “shell shock,” and deal with the influenza epidemic that began in 1918. It was not just new techniques that made the difference but also new infrastructure, as surgical facilities were moved closer to the frontlines so that soldiers could be treated as quickly as possible.
A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA by rhodri jeffreys-jones. Oxford University Press, 2022, 320 pp.
Jeffreys-Jones, who has been studying the trials and tribulations of the cia for many years, provides a concise, informed, and thoughtful history of the agency.
Intelligence agencies will never fully satisfy their political masters because some important events simply cannot be anticipated. The cia has had the additional problem of being responsible for covert operations. The exposure of such operations and consequential embarrassment (perhaps most famously in the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961) has given the cia an unwelcome reputation for torture, assassinations, and coups. It can be tempting to treat the agency’s history as a succession of scandals, awkward revelations, and official investigations—a “legacy of ashes,” as the journalist Tim Weiner has dubbed it. Jeffreys-Jones’s approach is more balanced, addressing such issues as “excessive Ivy League influence” and lack of diversity in the agency. He notes that much of the cia’s influence depends on its relationship with the sitting administration. For the system to work best, the cia’s director must have access to the president and be given the autonomy to present uncomfortable assessments while resisting politically convenient claims—a task the agency has often failed to accomplish, perhaps most significantly in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945–1955 by ronald h. spector. Norton, 2022, 560 pp.
After the Japanese surrender in World War II in August 1945, European powers reclaimed their former colonies in Asia, failing to appreciate how much their return would be resented and resisted. The world is still living with the consequences of this complacency and the violent conflicts it triggered. In this compelling account, Spector combines meticulous research with lively writing to describe these extraordinary bloody conflicts, as the Dutch struggled to hold on to Indonesia, the French to Indochina, and the British, more successfully, to Malaya. The United States became involved in Asia to check the growth of communism (especially in the wake of Mao Zedong’s victory over the nationalists in China in 1949), culminating in the decision to defend South Korea from the North’s invasion in the summer of 1950. Washington viewed matters through a Cold War lens, neglecting the strong anticolonial currents rippling through the upheavals of the time. By 1955, the end of Spector’s period of investigation, most of the old colonies had won their independence, and the Korean War was over with the seemingly indelible partition of the peninsula.