Christian Jennings
Autor/a de Mouthful of Rocks: Modern Adventures in the French Foreign Legion
Sobre l'autor
Crèdit de la imatge: Author and ex - Legionnaire
Obres de Christian Jennings
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Gènere
- male
- Nacionalitat
- UK
- Llocs de residència
- Turin, Italy
Membres
Ressenyes
Llistes
Potser també t'agrada
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 10
- Membres
- 286
- Popularitat
- #81,618
- Valoració
- 3.4
- Ressenyes
- 29
- ISBN
- 34
- Llengües
- 2
- Preferit
- 1
Using a large amount of original research, Jennings has put together a story told, not only through official documents, but also through personal accounts from people of a wide range of different viewpoints who were there. The story starts with Allied forces in a race to reach Trieste and then tells of the interactions with Yugoslav troops - sometimes cordial, sometimes tense and on one occasion, fatal. Eventually, agreements are reached on the boundaries each side should observe, and a military administrator arrives to govern the city until a transfer to civilian rule can be agreed.
Jennings is stronger on the military history than the civilian: we go quickly from an account of CIA activity in the city in 1951 to suddenly an accord being signed in 1954, with little indication of the political and diplomatic negotiations that took place. It might be argued that this isn't entirely Jennings' aim: he set out to tell the military story and that he does. But it isn't the full history of the city.
In the telling of this story, Jennings gives a lot of background. He covers partisan activity in the region, on both the Italian and Yugoslav sides; he includes a history of the war in Yugoslavia to tell the story of the rise of the partisan forces and their leader, Tito. Indeed, although Tito isn't one of the figures Jennings chooses to tell the story through, he is nonetheless one of the leading characters in the story and a lot of space is devoted to his life.
Jennings also taught me new things; that it was the surrender of German forces in northern Italy following back channel negotiations in Switzerland between the British and Americans on one side and the theatre commander of the Waffen SS that led to Stalin's break with the west. The Russians were not kept advised of these negotiations - although Moscow soon became aware of them via NKVD undercover operations in Switzerland - and Stalin saw them as evidence that the British and Americans could not be trusted and harboured intentions hostile to the Soviet Union. In this, Stalin might have had some justification; another new thing for me was the account of Operation Unthinkable, the plan drafted on Churchill's instructions to explore the possibility of launching a pre-emptive attack on Russia in the summer of 1945, created as Stalin's hostility towards his former allies became more evident. (Jennings doesn't make it totally clear that this was a paper exercise rather than a proposal for immediate action.)
Many British officers who worked with Tito in the earlier stages of the Yugoslav campaign saw the tension between Tito's avowed communism and his desire for the Yugoslav people to be the masters of their own fate after victory; the more astute of them could see the seeds of division between Tito and Stalin. Jennings devotes some space to Stalin's actual instructions for Tito's assassination, again something I was not previously aware of.
So there is much in this book that is valuable and worthwhile. But I had problems with it.
The first was the packaging. The jacket illustration, the straplines and the blurbs could make a reader think they were looking at a Cold War historical thriller novel. Once inside, the reader finds a fast-moving text, but I rapidly began to trip over some problems with the style. Jennings repeats himself frequently; an explanation given in one chapter turns up again in the next. Organisations such as SOE (Special Operations Executive) and the OSS (Office for Strategic Services) are referred to frequently as "the British SOE" and "the American OSS" long after a reader can be assumed to have understood that. And half-way through the book, there is an account of the British Foreign Secretary going to a meeting with "Field Marshal Josef Stalin" - even if a reader didn't know who Stalin was at the beginning of the book, they would most likely know who he was by the middle of it, and shouldn't need this spelling out in such detail.
There are failures of research: at one point, Anthony Eden is referred to as "the British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs", which is incorrect. "Commonwealth" was not added to the job title until 1968. There is also very poor sub-editing; the place name "Omsk" appears on one page, mis-spelt in two instances out of the three appearances. It may be a foreign place name, but how hard can it be to spell a four-letter place name correctly?
The sub-editing ought to have also flagged up early on that Jennings appears to be using sentence fragments far too often. Jennings is supposed to be an experienced author and journalist - so why do so many of his sentences have no verbs in them? This makes the work look like flashy pop journalism rather than a serious book of history; frankly, it happens so often, I would almost call it illiterate.
So: a worthwhile book spoilt by atrocious sub-editing and some basic errors in fact-checking, not its subject, but so-called "common knowledge". Plenty of other authors fall into that trap, but it's sad to see this book, which I was looking forward to reading, marred in this way.… (més)