Will o'the Glen on Books

Meredith Hindley’s Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II  succeeds on so many levels that I had trouble deciding where to begin this review. With so much attention having been paid in recent years to WW II action in mainland Europe and the Pacific, especially through feature films and TV mini-series that reach huge audiences ( Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, The Pacific ) it’s gratifying to see the spotlight turned on a lesser-known theater of operations. Casablanca, a port city on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, in the northwest corner of Africa, became an important place in the world in the aftermath of the fall of France, when the French government, and their military forces, capitulated to Nazi Germany, compromising with their conquerors by establishing a collaborationist Fascist government in the south of France in exchange for giving up Paris and the north. Refugees from France, and...

World War II history, and particularly the period between the fall of France and the United States’ entry into the war, has always been of great interest to me. Most of my reading on this period has been focused on the Battle of Britain—the quite brief span of time in the late summer/early autumn of 1940 when the men and women of the Royal Air Force fought a desperate battle to prevent the Luftwaffe from achieving air superiority over the English Channel and southern England as a prelude to an invasion of the British Isles. Lately, however, I have been seeking out books that deal with the larger picture of that fateful period of over 2-1/2 years when England and the Commonwealth stood alone against the Fascist tide that had swept across continental Europe. Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile chronicles this crucial period; specifically, the first year of Churchill’s tenure as Prime Minister of England, and the author takes a unique approach, mining the journals and personal dia...

Henry Hemming’s Agents of Influence was a real revelation to me, recounting as it does a British effort to bring the United States into World War II that went far beyond anything that I was aware of before reading this book. In addition to documenting the activities of British diplomats and the British intelligence service, MI6; not to mention the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill – to sway the U.S. government and U.S. public opinion in favor of entering the conflict in support of Great Britain, Hemming details the efforts of both the Nazi regime and the American isolationist movement, spearheaded by the “America First” organization and their spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, to keep the United States out of the war. Some might characterize the activities of the U.S.-based office of MI6, led by Canadian William Stephenson, as underhanded, and even duplicitous, but they were fighting a desperate battle to combat misinformation (while spreading a bit themselves, in a good cause) and turn ...