Stories of great human interest that unfolded during World War II have come my way in the last six months.
These books came to the attention of friends and relatives following the success of the New York Times Bestseller Unbroken and were referred to me. I think they’re worth referring to you.
Lost in Shangri-La and Operation Mincemeat are both great reads with softer, albeit very important, story lines than Laura Hilldebrand’s writings on Louie Zamperini.
For those who have yet to read Unbroken, it’s a must read. Her quick, shorter sentence style moves the reader through the many tough parts of Zamperini’s epic struggle for survival during the war.
Both Lost in Shangri-La and Operation Mincemeat are non-fiction adventures. Mitchell Zuckoff’s Lost in Shangri-La follows a group of soldiers and nurses stationed in Dutch New Guinea, a massive island with impenetrable forests, from late Spring into the Summer of 1945, as the war comes to an end.
While flying over a mountain range and looking down into a valley, US pilots discover an entire civilization untouched by the outside world – tribes that are a throw back to prehistoric times.
Excited by their finding, they hurry back to the American base and the pilots start shuttling groups of GIs and nurses over the valley. However, a pilot is called away for other duties and a newbie steps up. While attempting to gain altitude to exit one of the valleys, the pilot miscalculates his ascent and crashes into the mountain side. The survivors then have to engage the inhabitants and find a way to get back to the base, which is hundreds of miles away and no roads to be found. Helicopters were not ready for such rescue missions. This book is a great read about the survivors and how those back at the base would get them out of the valley.
Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre is also an upbeat read of how clever deception by the English intelligence services helped the allies land in Italy with great success and build a second front in Europe.
The book was on the New York Times Bestsellers list, so I may be the last one to learn about this treasure. Malcom Gladwell called it, “Brilliant and absurdly entertaining.” Who is to argue with Gladwell? It’s a fun and well-written journey.
After starting off a bit too Downton Abbey-ish for my liking (aristocratic elite, the incestuousness of participants coming from a few educational institutions, Oh! Ho-hum), I asked myself if this is going to be 300-plus pages of patting the back of the British upper crust. But Macintyre’s book isn’t anything like that and turns into a great story telling yarn of influencing a very thorough German intelligence to shift troops away from Italy and toward Greece.
British intelligence decides to have a dead man’s body float ashore on the Mediterranean coast line. The dead man has a folder containing details of false Allied invasion plans strapped to his body.
Macintyre covers all the details of finding a body to use, to having it float ashore on the Spanish coast so that it would fall into the hands of German spies, to finding ways to ensure that the ink on the documentation located on the dead man’s body would not run. The details were amazing.
Operation Mincemeat provides great insight into how espionage and story telling about espionage would develop as World War II ended was replaced by the Cold War.
Ian Fleming is also part of the deception.
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