The Nightstand Front

 War loomed on my bedside nightstand last week. I commonly keep two books there (trading off to keep each fresh) for the stretch of time after clambering into bed before Morpheus pays a visit, which can be anything from 2 minutes to 2 hours. One was historical fiction and the other just history. “History” is frequently fiction, too, either by accident or design, but in this case the author at least made a real effort to be accurate.

**** ****

December 6, a novel by Martin Cruz Smith

The UK edition is titled Tokyo Station, probably because December 6 is a less ominous date on that side of the pond than on this one. Japanese attacks on British holdings began on December 8 thanks to the International Date Line. 12-07-41 was such a memorable date for my father, who had served on US merchant ships in WW2, that it was the combination to his attaché case. (The utility of a combination lock on an attaché case, which easily can be carried off in toto, is a question for another place and time.)

I have read and enjoyed a smattering of Martin Cruz Smith (including Stallion Gate and Nightwing) since 1981 when I bought in hardcover Gorky Park, the first of his Arkady Renko detective novels. I’ve since dropped the Arkady Renko series in favor of the Fandorin series by Boris Akunin, but I doubted I could go very wrong picking up December 6.

In this novel, set early in December 1941, we meet Harry Niles who runs the Happy Paris nightclub in Tokyo. I don’t know, but I suspect that Smith while writing the book was influenced by the American nightclub owner played by Bogart in Tokyo Joe (1949). I couldn’t help picturing Harry as Bogie in any case. Few American authors are good at capturing the nuances of other cultures except from a The Innocents Abroad perspective of an outsider looking in. Smith did reasonably well with Gorky Park back in ’81, but Russia is, more or less, a Western country. Getting 1941 Tokyo right is a much harder task, and Smith was wise to make the protagonist a wayward scoundrel son of American missionaries who was raised in Japan. The one-foot-in-each-country personal history of the character allows for his deep familiarity with Japan while still accounting for missteps. We thereby get an interesting look from a semi-Western perspective at Tokyo on the eve of war – of an expanded war, that is. War with China had been in progress for 4 years – 10 if you count from the invasion of Manchuria. Harry’s romantic entanglements are also dual: the wife of a British diplomat and the very complicated Michiko.

Harry has connections in the Western embassies and in the Imperial Navy for entirely lowlife reasons. What he sees and hears alarms him, but his unsavory reputation keeps him from being trusted enough by any of them to heed his warnings about the coming conflict that in retrospect seems somehow both inevitable and unnecessary. The reader already knows how history on a grand scale turned out, but, as the hours tick past, Harry’s arc also involves intrigues of personal love and revenge: matters as fateful for him individually as the larger events are for the world.

Thumbs Up.

**** ****

The War for Africa: Twelve Months That Transformed a Continent – by Fred Bridgland

Conflicts that don’t directly involve troops (officially) from one or more of the major powers tend to be regarded as sideshows by journalists and historians from the major powers, when they are regarded at all. The conflicts are central to the people caught up in them of course, and they sometimes have a significance far beyond what is commonly recognized.

A very long and bloody conflict that mattered immensely both locally and broadly was the Angolan civil war that followed the Portuguese departure from Angola in 1975. Fred Bridgland (correspondent for Reuters, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Scotsman), was on scene at various times during it. In The War for Africa he gives a brief overview of the first decade of fighting, but concentrates on the critical period of 1987 and 1988, when Cubans ramped up their intervention on the side of the MPLA (the official government in Luanda: the MPLA military was called FAPLA) while the South African SADF intervened on the side of the rebel UNITA forces led by Jonas Savimbi. Most of the book is a military history of that year, though always in the context of political and diplomatic events. At the time, the MPLA, SWAPO (Namibian rebels based in Angola), and the ANC all were avowedly communist. (The ANC later modified its position and has been the governing party in South Africa since Mandela’s election in 1994.) Pretoria in the ‘80s regarded them as existential threats on the northern border of South West Africa (Namibia), which South Africa still administered. The Cuban interest was ideological while the Soviets played Cold War chess by sending supplies (and unofficially advisors) to the Cubans and the MPLA. The Western powers covertly supported UNITA, but were unwilling to align themselves openly with South Africa. Savimbi himself for obvious political reasons also long denied cooperation with South Africa, but for Machiavellian reasons in fact coordinated closely; there was little real choice. In truth, none of the players in the war was admirable (except sometimes in purely military terms), but the war had profound consequences.

Who won? That depends on how you look at it. The MPLA remained in power and remains in power today, so in that sense it prevailed. Yet it has abandoned communist ideology (it’s now regarded as center-left) while UNITA negotiated participation in a unified Angola as a legal political party. During peace negotiations in ‘88 a strongly reinforced Cuban/MPLA offensive checked the outnumbered SADF at Cuito Cuanavale, which does count as a success. Yet the SADF and UNITA inflicted heavy losses on their opponents and remained in control of core UNITA-held territory, so to that extent they succeeded. Meantime, the war was a serious drain on the already overburdened USSR, which sent the MPLA and Cubans large quantities of weapons including tanks, BMPs, and Mig 23s. The war thereby accelerated changes in Moscow. The 1988 settlement paved the way for the South African withdrawal from Namibia on terms they could accept, Cuban withdrawal from Angola on terms they could accept, and (indirectly) the end of apartheid in South Africa. It’s probably most accurate to say that no one won the war. Yet no one lost either, and in the end that proved to be more important. The civil war in Angola started up again in the early 90s (this time without major outside intervention) but was resolved in 2002 after Savimbi’s demise on terms similar to ‘88.

Since Bridgland had more physical access to the SADF and UNITA, most of the author’s perspective (though not always his sympathies) is from that side of the lines. Nonetheless, despite this limitation, the book is as detailed and fair an account of events as he could assemble.

Another Thumbs Up.

Trailer – Angola the War