Off Topic: World War 2--- Playing the Nazis For Chumps

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, Ben Macintyre, Crown Publisher, 416 pages, illustrations, maps, $25.99.

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Ben Macintyre’s account of a British double agent,Agent Zigzag, his second effort seemed appealing. Operation Mincemeat is a thorough updating of a previous book, The Man Who Never Was, that I had read during junior high study halls.

Operation Mincemeat and The Man Who Never Was reveal the elaborate British deception of the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning an invasion southern Europe from Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily.

Ewen Montagu, author of The Man Who Never Was and co-planner of Operation Mincemeat could not have been more different than Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and British naval intelligence officer. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister and Cholmondeley was an adventure seeker. Together they created an ingenious up tenuous plan: Plant a corpse on a Spanish beach and load it with false and misleading documents concerning the invasion. Approved by Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond) and other British intelligence officials the plan was present to Winston Churchill who believed it might look real to the Nazi and mislead them.

Presenting previously top secret material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness and yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war. Most importantly, the corpse does not remain anonymous.

Macintyre's discovery of the identity of the corpse, its route into the hands of the British intelligence officers and then its delivery into the sea currents that took it ashore is astonishing and compelling. At the end of the book, the reader is conveyed to a Spanish cemetery that holds the body of an improverished and mentally disadvantaged Welshman who inadvertently committed suicide and afterward heroically served his country.

Top Image: Paul Davis On Crime

Off Topic----Wired For History: World War 2, A College Text, and A Web Game

Wired For History: Company, Harvard Prof Work on Web-Linked Textbook, WWII Game, Paul Restuccia, Boston Herald, May 24, 2010.

A renowned Harvard professor is teaming with a local software company to change the way students learn history.

Niall Ferguson, a revisionist economic historian best known as the author of “The Ascent of Money” book and TV series, has helped create a World War II strategy game and is also developing a Web-enabled history textbook that integrates his lectures on Western civilization with data, images and minigames for students to play at critical moments. “Today’s students want to be engaged, and those who play strategy games know more about history than those who just read today’s textbooks,” said Ferguson. “The interactive approach to learning history is going to be a game-changer.”

Dave McCool, who founded Newburyport-based Muzzy Lane Software in 2002, is a pioneer in creating complex simulations for classroom use. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology grad developed networking systems for Bedford-based Shiva and Chelmsford’s Aptis Communications, which he co-founded and later sold to Nortel Networks. For Muzzy Lane, McCool created the Sandstone 3-D platform, which allows seamless integration of video, audio, images, games and live chat.

McCool developed “Making History I” for the education market, licensing it to several hundred high schools and colleges as a World War II teaching aid. The company, which now employs 20 people, is also developing interactive content for clients such as McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, the MacArthur Foundation and the Defense Department’s DARPA research agency.

Ferguson has been a Muzzy Lane consultant since 2005, after responding to a request for an expert that McCool made to Harvard faculty. Ferguson has a dual appointment as a professor of European history and business administration at Harvard Business School. Ferguson said his role as a “counterfactual historian” who explores “what-ifs” drew him into the endeavor, even as McCool describes the globe-trotting prof as “the busiest person I’ve ever known.” “I also saw how much my sons have learned from playing computer strategy games,” Ferguson said. With Ferguson’s input, “Making History” has undergone a two-year reworking into a full-fledged commercial game, with the subtitle “The War of the World,” named after Ferguson’s book that analyzes the economic and ethnic forces that led to World War II.

Ferguson supplied “Making History II” with enormous amounts of economic and natural resource data for the some 224 countries modeled in the game, which was upgraded with a “Civilization”-style 3-D interface with realistic topography. He added features such as the option to either annex a defeated country, or turn it into a colony or puppet state. Ferguson is happy with how the game has turned out. “It’s a pretty good cartoon stylization of what the world was like back then,” he said. “We did had to leave out some things, so that the game is also fun to play.”

Muzzy Lane hopes to sell 50,000 to 100,000 copies of the game, which has just become available for digital download and will be on store shelves next month. And it’s seen as the first in a series of grand strategy games on 20th-century global conflict, which will feature titles on World War I, the Cold War and the current “New World Disorder.”

Ferguson, in the middle of writing a warts-and-all biography of Henry Kissinger, said he is even now exploring Cold War “what-if” scenarios with the former secretary of state that will no doubt be incorporated into a future game’s artificial intelligence. While he has penned more than a dozen books, Ferguson has also developed a number of TV series for the BBC and PBS. “I’ve learned from my work on television that multimedia is a great way of teaching history,” he said.

But when he and McCool first approached textbook publishers about multimedia textbooks five years ago, no one was listening. Now, the recession, coupled with student’s low opinion of traditional textbooks, has publishers rushing to develop them. Companies in “the educational market tend to be slow adopters, but the time has arrived,” said Ferguson.

Next year, Pearson Education plans to publish a Web-enabled textbook that uses Muzzy Lane’s Sandstone engine and Ferguson’s Harvard lectures on Western civilization. The written textbook will be augmented by a course-specific Web browser where students can get additional video, data and images and play minigames at critical historical moments. “I plan to use the Web-enabled textbook in my Harvard undergrad course,” Ferguson said.

At the business school, he envisions interactive learning complementing the traditional case studies model, including micro-corporate strategy and energy-allocation minigames. Muzzy Lane’s Sandstone platform is also being used to create an interactive textbook for McGraw-Hill as well as the ClearLab learning project to develop better ways to teach middle-school science. “The education-side market for games is just going to explode within the next five years,” McCool said. “We want to be the technology platform educational publishers use.”

CWL: Hmmmmmm . . . How about Stephen Recker (Virtual Gettysburg) and Jim McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom) having a chat?

Text and Image Source: Boston Herald, Photo by Stuart Cahill
Middle Image Source: Channel 4
Bottom Image Source: Gamezplay.org

Off Topic---Biography: Bill Mauldin and the Common Soldier

Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, Todd DiPastino, W. W. Norton Publishing, 370 pp, illustrated, index, notes, 2008, $27.95 (hc), $14.95 (pb)

American Civil War readers often encounter Walt Whitman's statement, “The real war will never get in the books.” That statement is now assumed to be true of all American Wars. Todd DePastino shows how cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose subject was the American combat soldier during World War II, did get the real war into the books. Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front is authoritative but not exhaustive biography. DiPastino's focus is on the creative work of Mauldin. There are many more stories that could be told

Mauldin grew up during the Great Depression in the mountainous region of New Mexico. Raised by eccentric parents, Mauldin's family was very poor. Taking advantage of very limited resources such as his high school's ROTC-style club, student newspaper and yearbook, as well as several very fine art teachers, Mauldin managed to gain admission and pay the tuition at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts for one year. To establish an income he joined the newly mobilized 45th Infantry Division of the Arizona National Guard and then became the 45th Division News's cartoonist.

Deployed to North Africa in 1943, Mauldin participated in the invasions of Sicily and Italy; later he was assigned to France. In 1944, while on staff at the army's newspaper Stars and Stripes, Mauldin created unique characters that irritated the army brass, even George Patton. The weary, disheveled, officer-abusing enlisted men Willie and Joe became soldiers' heroes as the cartoon characters uttered thoughts that could not be spoken to an officer.

After the war and in the course of his life, Mauldin published several bestselling cartoon collections, two autobiographies, acted in Hollywood, ran unsuccessfully for Congress and received his career with two Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning. Thoroughly researched with the immense cooperation of Mauldin's family and friends, DePastino's biography is an introduction to an American who set standards for illustration and content that are stilled used today. His impact on his profession is immense. Charles Schultz, leader of a machine gun squad in Europe and creator of the cartoon Peanuts, recognized Mauldin as a hero of both WWII infantrymen and cartoonists.

DiPastino's focus is on Mauldin's career and dwells on family issues as they relate to his journalism. The author's thorough research supports his frankness in describing the women, alcohol, and personal tensions in Mauldin's post WWII career. Containing more than ninety cartoons and photographs, DiPastino's work sets the reader within Mauldin's historical era. Accessible in style, DiPastino's work moves thoroughly but not tediously through WW II and post-war veteran issues, American journalism and politics, and the changes in Mauldin's drawing techniques. Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front is recommended for advanced placement high school students and up. Anyone who enjoys reading a biography of a soldier and artist whom the odds of success were set firmly against, who at times created his own luck and at other times had unexplainable good fortune, who was born with a gift and did not squander it will be satisfied with DiPastio's work.

Image: Bill Mauldin, Willie and Joe (1944)


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New In the Personal Stack: Infantry Tactics of WWII

Infantry Tactics of the Second World War, Stephen Bull, Gordon L. Rottman, Osprey Publishing, photographs, maps, illustrations, diagrams, index, bibliography 224 pages, 2008, $24.95.

When CWL is not reading in the American Civil War, then World War II and modern wars are a substitute. A common thread among each of the wars is house to house fighting. Recently CWL has posted on Fallujah and Saigon and is looking at accounts of street fighting in the American Civil War. With an query regarding house-to-house and street-to-street fighting to online discussion group, an appetite grew for a greater familiarity with World War I and World War II infantry tactics. I managed to find a great deal on a new book from Osprey Publishers. Heavily illustrated with drawing, photographs and maps, Infantry Tactics of the Second World War covers squad and platoon, company and battalion, and anti-tank tactics of the European and Pacific Theatres. Diagrams of weapons, watercolors of street fighting highlight the chapters. I'll be looking for a companion volume on World War I. For upcoming reading on Leningrad, Moscow, Sicily and the Italian peninsula CWL will keep Infantry Tactics of the Second World War close by.

Off Topic---Stalingrad, Soldiers' Voices, and Oral History

Voices from Stalingrad: Unique First-Hand Accounts from World War II's Cruellest Battle, Jonathan Bastable, David and Charles Publishing, subject index, contributors index, chronology, glossary, illustrations, maps, 304 pp., 2006, $24.99.

If CWL had to rank the earth's battles in order of ferocity and casualties, Stalingrad would be among the top three. The Siege of Stalingrad is among the very bloodiest battles in all of history. Combined casualties are estimated to be above 1.5 million. Brutality toward military causalities and disregard toward civilian casualties was a characteristic of both sides. The Nazi offensive against the Soviets began in June 1941; in June of 1942 the German offensive to take Stalingrad began. The campaign lasted from June 28 1942 to February 2 1943. The battle toward the city, then inside the city, and the Soviet counter-offensive which trapped and destroyed and captured remnants of the German 6th Army with European auxiliaries was the first large-scale German defeat of World War II.

Jonathan Bastable's Voices from Stalingrad is a compelling work. The campaign' history told by the battlefront soldiers is difficult to put down. On nearly every page, Bastable offers several paragraphs of a direct quote from a soldier, prisoner, and casualty. He tightly brings the words of the soldiers together with a chronological narrative, photographs and maps. His own text is never extraneous to the voices of the soldiers but firmly and succinctly builds the context for the soldiers narratives. A Soviet rifleman brings down a plan that is 300meters overhead. German soldiers die at night from no obvious cause; autopsies reveal that 20 year olds had the hearts of 80 old men, such was the starvation and fatigue of the armies. Rats are rampant and gnaw on corpses; horse meat is the only meat for soldiers. The war on the Volga River is treacherous: snipers, ice flows, and artillery interrupt Russian support to the beleaguered city in which cannibalism is not unheard of.

From house to house, factory to factory, and street to street, Bastable offers a chorus of voices that describe a 200 day battle in which the distance between life and death is the distance which can be covered by the toss of a hand grenade.