The Second Opinion

Piece of Cake

Derek Robinson, Piece of Cake.  Toronto: Bantam, 1986.  Originally published London: Hamish Hamilton, Ltd., 1983.

Truth is a casualty of war... and of legend.  The pilots of the RAF's Fighter Command who fought in the Battle of Britain have been lionized since the dark days of the autumn of 1940 when Churchill referred to them as 'knights' and said that never had so much been owed by so many to so few.  In his novel Piece of Cake, Derek Robinson attempts to bring back some of the truth about the pilots, the RAF, and the Battle of Britain.  His intent is not to denegrate the men of Fighter Command.  Rather, by showing them as fallible human beings and not knights of the air, he hopes to show just how remarkable and praiseworthy their aerial battle against the Nazis was.

In the late summer of 1939, most people in Britain and especially in the RAF are certain that war with Germany is inevitable.  For the pilots of Hornet Squadron(1), war is more an exciting prospect than something to be dreaded, and in any event it does little to dampen their youthful high spirits.  The get drunk, drive their cars very fast, crash, steal a tractor and horses, and otherwise raise hell in the British countryside near their base, safe in the knowledge that their commander, Squadron Leader 'Ram' Ramsay(2), is safely in London.  Ram is a tough officer, determined to be the youngest Wing Commander(3) in the RAF, but in his training methods we begin to see that Fighter Command is far from ready for the upcoming war.  Ram is far more concerned with his squadron's ability to scramble and get to combat altitude than he is with their gunnery or tactical skills.  After he is killed in a freak accident just after the war starts in September, 1939, the wealthy Squadron Leader Rex takes command and the squadron deploys to France.

Rex's wealth and the "Phony War" of the autumn and winter of 1939 - 1940 allow the squadron plenty of rest and relaxation.  Quartered in a French chateau, drinking the finest wines and eating the best food provided by the well-lined purse of Rex, the pilots have a grand time.  Tragedy strikes when 'Dicky' Starr is killed trying to fly beneath a bridge, but the real problems for the squadron begin when an American pilot, Chris Hart, is assigned.  A veteran of Spain and China, Hart knows what it takes for a fighter pilot to be successful - even to simply survive - but his ideas are unacceptable to Rex.  He criticizes almost every aspect of Hornet Squadron's readiness, from the tight formations Rex teaches them to fly to the armament, wooden propellers and fabric-covered wings of their Hurricane fighters to the pilots' total lack of tactical skills.

The anticipated German invasion of France comes in the late spring of 1940, and as the the pilots experience their first heavy combat, they learn the hard way that Hart was right.  Aircraft mysteriously disappear from the squadron's tight formations, victims of German Me-109 fighters that sneak up on the pilots while they are so preoccupied with trying to 'close up' that they don't look out for the enemy.  Attacks on German bomber formations fail because the pilots have been taught to fire from too great a range, their machineguns are not powerful enough to quickly inflict fatal damage, and their gunnery is horrible.  Within a very short time, Hornet Squadron has lost several aircraft and men, and the survivors are forced to try to learn overnight the lessons that Hart had tried to teach them throughout the Phony War.  When Rex proves inflexible, the pilots actually connive to murder him by holding back and allowing him to attack a German formation single-handed.  Not long after, the decimated squadron returns to Britain where Hart and a few other veterans soon find themselves trying to fight the Battle of Britain against overwhelming odds while simultaneously trying to keep untrained replacement pilots alive long enough to learn the lessons that cost Hornet Squadron so much in France.

Piece of Cake has been praised by some as another Catch-22 and condemned by others as a libel on the brave men of Fighter Command who fought with such bravery and determination during the Battle of Britain.  Both interpretations are wrong.  While the pilots of Hornet Squadron are amazed, frustrated, and even killed by many instances of military stupidity, Piece of Cake is not a satire as was Catch-22.  It is also not a hagiographic portrayal of RAF pilots such as many people know from various World War II films, where the British are always portrayed as superbly calm as they stroll off for a nice cup of tea after knocking down a few Messerschmidts and Heinkels.  Robinson's portrayal of the pilots has an edgy quality of realism that one finds in many better memoirs and contemporary accounts of fighter pilots and their lives.  Especially during the Battle of Britain, the pilots of Hornet Squadron live in a state of constant stress and exhaustion with many periods of fear and even ouright terror as they scramble several times each day to intercept German aircraft or endure attacks on their own airfields.  They engage in adolescent humor, personal quarrels, and even fistfights.  'Flash' Gordon goes mildly insane.  They quarrel with their intelligence officer, 'Skull' Skelton, over claims of enemy aircraft shot down until he forces them to watch gun camera film that shows them firing at too great a range, missing their targets, or even shooting at each other by mistake.  And, most importantly, they die, regularly and in grisly fashion, blown apart by machinegun bullets and cannon shells, burned alive in their aircraft or drowned at the bottom of the English Channel. 

Initially, Piece of Cake seems unfair or unbalanced: one never meets a German at all.  Surely they, too, felt the stress of war.  Surely their aircrews grew increasingly nervous and fearful as fewer and fewer returned from raids on Britain.  I realized, however, the Robinson's intent is to show how the battle affected BRITISH pilots.  The reader really only knows what they know, and begins to suffer with them.  Sixty-five years after the battle, it is easy for us to take for granted the outcome: that the Germans stopped their massive raids on Britain and cancelled their plans for invading the island.  The men of Hornet Squadron have no such comfort, and Robinson does his best to ensure that we understand that.  This, then is his praise for them: they were average men fighting what seemed a hopeless battle against a skillful enemy and overwhelming odds.  Despite exhaustion, strain, and fear, they kept climbing into their Hurricanes and Spitfires and defended their island home until Hitler had had enough.

The stories of men at war are subject to many distortions.  The men of RAF Fighter Command, like so many victors before them, have been praised so much that they have taken on superhuman qualities of courage, honor and dedication.  It seems too often that they were invincible, that the outcome of the Battle of Britain was decided before the first shots were fired because the Germans could not possibly have defeated such splendid men.  Derek Robinson reminds us that they weren't splendid men or knights in shining armor, and to treat them so cheapens their actual feats of heroism and sacrifice.

(1) A fictitious name.  While British squadrons had nicknames, they were officially designated by numbers, e.g. No. 123 Squadron.

(2) Equivalent to a major in American service.

(3) Equivalent to a lieutenant colonel in American service.

The new Hillary book

Yesterday I caught a few minutes of Sean Hannity's interview with Ed Klein, author of the new book The Truth About Hillary.  Perhaps I'm projecting, but Hannity didn't sound exactly enthusiastic about the book. I would even go as far as to say that he sounded vaguely uneasy about it.  The principal reason seems to be that Klein discusses the events surrounding Chelsea's conception.  He quotes an anonymous source that was with Bill and Hillary when they were on a trip to Bermuda in 1979.  After some drinks, Bill said that he was going to go rape his wife.  The remark was clearly in jest, but the source claims that their cottage was thoroughly trashed the following morning as if they'd had a big fight.  That's a pretty sordid matter to publish about ANYBODY'S marriage.

Hannity asked how many sources Klein had for such a shocking tidbit.  It seemed to me that Klein was hemming and hawing a bit; he only had one source, but he claims to have checked out the source pretty well.  He told Hannity that he put the incident in the book to demonstrate the extent to which Hillary was willing to overlook Bill's sexual misconduct, and also how little affection she actually has for him.  Klein stated that Bill didn't even know Hillary was pregnant until he read about it in the Little Rock newspaper three months later.

As much as I despise Bill and Hillary, and as much fear and loathing I have at the idea that she might one day sit behind the big desk in the Oval Office, I can't support this kind of 'reporting'.  Frankly, I don't care what Bill and Hillary's private life is like... or, more to the point, I've already figured out that their's is a marriage of convenience between two utterly self-centered and amoral people who will do anything to advance their own selfish interests.  I don't want to know all the sordid little details.

But is that all there is to the book?  Is the New York Post's Ian Bishop right when he says:

Klein rehashes four decades of salacious claims about the Clintons' sex life.

Tony Blankley, a columnist whose work I admire very much, was also 'put off' by the salacious claims of rape, but plowed through the book anyway.  He writes:

This is not a scandal book intended merely to gratify the reader's salacious interests. Instead, Mr. Klein has written a serious political and psychological biography of the most likely next Democratic nominee for president — and thus, quite plausibly I fear, the next president of the United States.

Maybe it's a good book.  Maybe it's a hack job.  Either way, I don't think it will find its way to my shelf.