Tag Archives: wars and conflicts

**** Fighter Pilot: The Memoir of Legendary Ace Robin Olds

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By Christina Olds, Ed Rasimus and Robin Olds. Narrated by Robertson Dean. A tale of modern derring-do, with Olds–a flying ace in both World War II and Vietnam, who led that war’s most renowned air battle–fighting both the enemy and the Pentagon. The authors credit him with impeccable judgment about strategy and tactics in both the immediate flying situation and long-term for the U.S. military. His heavy drinking, failed marriages, and lack of diplomacy are glossed over as “I am who I am.” He was a larger-than-life personality, and it’s a great story. His views about Vietnam don’t square with contemporary assessments, but reflect the frustrations of military men at the time that, if the country was going to commit young lives to the effort, they should plan to win, not pull their punches.

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** George Washington’s Secret Six

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By Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger – The story of “the spy ring that saved the American Revolution.” This book should have been lots more exciting, but perhaps it wasn’t because there are not a lot of facts to go on about the five men, whose names are known, and one woman (“Agent 355”) who formed the Culper Spy Ring. For several years, they fed information direct to George Washington about British activities from the heart of occupied New York and had only to recall the hanging of Nathan Hale to know what would happen to them, should they be discovered. The Culper Ring was directly involved in such tide-turning events as misleading the Brits about the approach of French naval support, exposing the perfidy of Benedict Arnold, and stealing the British Navy’s code book. Knowing Kilmeade is a cohost of Fox News Channel’s morning show may have prompted me to expect a lightweight presentation, and my expectations were rewarded. (3/8)

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In the Land of Blood and Honey

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Angelina Jolie, movie, In the Land of Blood and Honey

Possibly you didn’t know Angelina Jolie has directed a movie, and, if so, probably you haven’t seen it. I heard about her 2011 film about the Bosnian war, In the Land of Blood and Honey (trailer), in Serbia last fall. Due to Serbian objections to the film, it was actually shot in Hungary, with actors from the former Yugoslavia (starring Zana Marjanović, Goran Kostić, and Rade Šerbedžija). Jolie, whose humanitarian work is well known, says she was motivated to write the script after twice visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador and because this conflict was the worst European genocide since World War II. An estimated 100,000 people were killed, and 20,000 to 50,000 women were raped.

It’s a love story between a Muslim woman and a Serbian military officer, with all the inter-ethnic and wartime complications you can readily imagine. But what’s interesting is that, for the most part, the story is told from the point of view of women and what they endure during wartime and how they survive.

The film received mixed reviews in the United States, Rotten Tomatoes rating: 56, with many critics seeming to take issues with Jolie’s humanitarian impulses themselves. However, Newsday’s critic Rafer Guzman said, “It’s a tough, clear-eyed look at a ghastly ethnic war, with an admirably wide perspective that affords compassion for both sides,” while Roger Ebert, who gave it a low ranking, acknowledged that “The film does what all war films must, which is to reduce the incomprehensible suffering of countless people into the ultimate triumph of a few.”

The film was highly controversial in Serbia, not surprisingly, and Jolie and some cast members received threats. Serbs claimed it was propagandistic and reduced Serbs to caricatures of evil. I didn’t see it entirely that way; there were sympathetic Serbs, including the main character. (And the Serbs did carry out “ethnic cleansing,” after all.) Interesting that it won an honorable mention in the Sarajevo Film Festival and a peace award at the Berlin film festival.

My bottom line is that the film is pretty good, even if it does use some tired tropes, but the ultimate question—what was the rest of the world doing while all this was going on?—is still worth asking. Critics might dismiss the film, but no one should forget the tragedy  behind it.

The Monuments Men

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Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, George Patton, looted Nazi art

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, accompanied by Gen. Omar N. Bradley, and Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., inspects art treasures stolen by Germans and hidden in German salt mine in Germany. April 12, 1945. (photo: U.S. Army)

OK, reviews of The Monuments Men (trailer) have been tepid, George Clooney did give himself all the high-minded speeches, and it was hard to suspend disbelief with the star-power cast (who did a great job but are monuments themselves). Still, despite all those quibbles—and the spate of belated “the real story” websites and compelling personal stories emerging—this was an entertaining and satisfying movie, based on the book by Robert Edsel. For an exciting fictional treatment of this episode, see my review of Sara Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

The characterizations of the architects, archivists, and artists that formed the film’s Monuments Men team are strong, and a surprising amount of humor is inherent in their personalities and the interactions between them, despite their desperate mission. Its purpose, as George keeps telling us, was not just to preserve “stuff,” but our way of life, our history, patrimony. The movie spares us conflicted opinions about its characters. They’re pure black or white, good or bad, people who want to save art or those who want to burn it. This oversimplification is a source of some of the criticism.

That is to say, there’s something comfortably old-fashioned about this film. If you’ve seen enough WWII films, you can guess the directions the plot will take, but really, the stakes are so high, does it matter?

Clooney’s character is right. This was a vitally important mission. It was hard. It was dangerous. And these heroes—seven actors representing around 350 real-life “monuments men” from many countries—accomplished it. Together they recovered more than five million paintings, sculptures, church bells, tapestries, and other works looted by the Nazis.

Edsel knew his material and made it real. Previously, he co-produced a documentary of historian Lynn Nicholas’s award-winning book, The Rape of Europa.

Jewess with Oranges, looted art, Aleksander Gierymski

“Jewess with Oranges” by Aleksander Gierymski, looted, and found at an art auction near Hamburg in 2010

Hungary, Budapest, St. Stephen's CrownThe Monuments Men is especially fun viewing for those of us here in Princeton, because more than a dozen of the real Monuments Men had ties to Princeton, two of whom directed the Princeton University Art Museum from 1947 to 1972.

One of the directors, Dr. Patrick Kelleher, wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1947 about St. Stephen’s crown, a Hungarian national treasure he helped recover from the Nazis . I saw it in Budapest, after it was restored to the Hungarians by former President Jimmy Carter.

Not everything the Nazis looted was saved; and not everything has been found—“The Amber Room” is a premier example. Many stolen works may today be stored in basements and attics or even hanging on the walls of the children and grandchildren of ordinary soldiers who carried them home. And they still make news, as recently as last week. (And again, on April 8 and on April 12) As author Robert Edsel says, “They can be found,” as “Jewess with Oranges” was in 2010. His Monuments Men Foundation is intended to accomplish exactly that.

Queen Nefertiti, EgyptAt the opening of the movie in Princeton, current and retired Princeton University Art Museum leaders spoke with the audience and related this anecdote: On Christmas Eve, 1945, some Monuments Men were celebrating in a room full of unopened cartons. Someone said, “Hey, it’s Christmas, shouldn’t we open a package?” He found a crowbar and pried open a wooden crate, reached in, and pulled out the bust of Nefertiti. Was it worth it. Oh, yes.

Alas, the lessons of this extraordinary collaboration between the military and the world of art and archaeology were neglected in the 2003 assault on Baghdad, when U.S. troops failed to secure the high-priority National Museum of Iraq (below; photo: wikimedia.org) Although museum officials already had quietly hidden most of the collection, some 15,000 items looted items have still not been recovered.

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*** The City of the Sun

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By Juliana Maio – “Cairo during the war was what Casablanca had been mythologized as in the eponymous Humphrey Bogart film–a romantic desert crossroads of the world, of spies and soldiers and cares and casbahs and women with pasts and men with futures . . .” (William Stadiem). So begins the epigram to Maio’s thriller, her first book. She picked this less well-trodden geography and a pivotal time–1941–as her setting. Rommel threatens the city from a rapidly diminishing distance and the Muslim Brotherhood and a group of dissident Egyptian Army officers threatens from within. With great potential for drama and the urgency of war, she places her two main characters, who are fairly well-rounded, and a second tier of less compelling actors. The writer relies too heavily on cliches–”happy as a clam” “looking resplendent and every inch a woman”–that made me wince, but the storytelling kept the pages turning.  (2/15)