August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 is the first volume of his The Red Wheel cycle of novels an epic attempt to explain how Russia slid into the twin catastrophes of war and revolution. Where In the First Circle plunges us into Stalin’s infernal machinery, August 1914 takes the reader back to the slaughter of World War I, when Russia’s failures on the battlefield helped set the stage for Bolshevism. The novel is not only a historical narrative but also a philosophical inquiry into responsibility, fate, and the choice to serve when the nation is in peril.

A Novel of History and Conscience

At its core, August 1914 is a work of historical fiction that dramatizes the disastrous Russian campaign against Germany at the Battle of Tannenberg. Solzhenitsyn follows generals, ministers, and foot soldiers alike, weaving together their perspectives into a portrait of a society ill-prepared for war. The novel does not simply reconstruct events; it interrogates them. Why did Russia, a nation of immense size and resources, crumble so quickly? How did the incompetence of leaders and the blindness of institutions.

Solzhenitsyn’s method is almost documentary. He inserts archival material, official memos, and real speeches into his narrative, refusing to let the reader forget that these characters were not mere inventions but participants in a real historical collapse. The result is a hybrid form—part novel, part chronicle—that demands the reader confront history not as distant fact but as lived human tragedy.

The Figure of General Samsonov

One of the most haunting figures in August 1914 is General Aleksandr Samsonov, commander of the Russian Second Army. Samsonov is portrayed with compassion, not as a villain but as a man crushed by the weight of command, undone by poor communications, a divided staff, and his own hesitations. His tragic suicide after the defeat becomes emblematic of Russia’s humiliation.

Through Samsonov, Solzhenitsyn explores the tension between personal responsibility and systemic failure. Was Samsonov a poor general, or was he doomed by a larger structure of incompetence and corruption? Solzhenitsyn leaves the question open but insists that individuals matter—that decisions, mistakes, and moral weaknesses ripple outward into history.

The Theme of National Blindness

Just as In the First Circle exposes how Stalin’s Soviet Union normalized terror, August 1914 shows how Tsarist Russia normalized complacency. Bureaucrats ignored warnings, generals distrusted one another, and ministers jockeyed for power while soldiers starved at the front. The blindness was not merely strategic but moral: leaders refused to acknowledge the rot at the heart of their system.

Solzhenitsyn suggests that the seeds of 1917 were already present in 1914. The Revolution did not come from nowhere; it germinated in the failures of war, in the gap between the Russian people’s sacrifices and the state’s corruption. August 1914 is thus not only about a battle but about the unraveling of legitimacy.

Style and Structure

The novel is sprawling and demanding. Solzhenitsyn shifts rapidly from the trenches to the salons of St. Petersburg, from the thoughts of peasants to the intrigues of ministers. At times, the sheer detail can overwhelm; he includes staff orders, reports, and digressions that feel closer to history than fiction. Yet the density is deliberate. Solzhenitsyn is building an argument: history is not shaped by a few grand figures alone but by a swarm of documents, conversations, and decisions, each carrying its weight.

Amid this density, however, moments of piercing clarity emerge. A soldier’s death in a muddy field, a general’s paralyzing doubt, a politician’s cynical calculation—these scenes crystallize the human cost of institutional failure. Solzhenitsyn writes with the authority of someone who has lived through national disaster, and he insists that history must be understood not only through archives but through moral imagination.

Solzhenitsyn’s Vision

Although set decades before Stalin, August 1914 belongs to the same moral universe as In the First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago. All share the conviction that falsehood and cowardice corrode societies from within. The First World War becomes, in Solzhenitsyn’s vision, a kind of prelude to the greater horrors of the twentieth century. The blindness of 1914 paved the way for the brutality of 1917 and beyond.

What unites Solzhenitsyn’s works is the belief that truth, however painful, must be faced. Just as he stripped the illusions from the Soviet present, here he strips the myths from the Russian past. August 1914 refuses the easy consolations of patriotism or nostalgia. It shows instead a society collapsing under its own deceptions.

August 1914 is dense, sprawling, and often closer to a historical investigation than to traditional fiction. Solzhenitsyn compels the reader to see history as lived tragedy and to recognize how human weakness, bureaucratic inertia, and moral blindness can shape the destiny of nations.

If In the First Circle is a descent into Hell, August 1914 is the map of the road that led there. Both works are united by a single purpose: to bear witness, to insist on truth, and to remind us that history is not fate but the accumulation of choices. In confronting the disaster of 1914, Solzhenitsyn demands that we confront the disasters we inherit—and the ones we may yet create.

Appendix One: A Personal Turning Point

I first read August 1914 in 2006. At the time, I was long removed from my earlier service in the U.S. Army during the 1970s and 80s, nearly a quarter century gone. Yet in Solzhenitsyn’s Vorotyntsev, the thoughtful officer who searches for truth amid confusion, I found something that spoke directly to my own life. Vorotyntsev embodied courage not as bravado, but as clarity—the ability to see through illusions, to recognize responsibility, and to act even when the path was uncertain.

That encounter with the novel stayed with me. The following year, at the age of 54, I re-enlisted in the Army. In 2009, I deployed to Iraq for a year. Many people thought such a choice was reckless, even impossible after so many years away. But Solzhenitsyn had shown me in August 1914 that history, whether of nations or individuals, is not fate. It is made by choices, by the willingness to take responsibility, and by the courage to step forward even when the odds are long.

Vorotyntsev helped me believe that it was not too late, that a return to service was not only possible but meaningful. In that sense, August 1914 was not just a novel I read; it was a turning point, a book that helped set the course of my life in a new direction. Like all of Solzhenitsyn’s work, it insists on truth, responsibility, and action. For me, it became more than literature—it became a call answered in the real world.

Appendix Two:  My Family in August 1914

The date that is the title of Solzhenitsyn's book has huge significance in the history of my family.  In that month my paternal grandfather, Hyman Gussman, began a year-long escape from service and certain death in the Russian army.  The story of his escape is here.

Review of In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sharpens the vast world of his Gulag Archipelago into the story of one vile aspect of a horrible system. The title refers to the First Circle of Hell from Dante’s Inferno: the outer ring of damnation where virtuous pagans reside. They are spared the flames and the grotesque punishments of deeper circles, but they are still in eternal Hell—and there is no hope of leaving it. Solzhenitsyn takes that metaphor shows it is the reality of the Soviet Union’s Gulag system, showing how intellectual prisoners, though treated better than the starving multitudes in labor camps, still inhabit an eternal inferno.

The First Circle as Metaphor

The sharashka—the special prison where engineers, linguists, and scientists work for the Soviet state—stands in for Dante’s First Circle. The inmates are granted privileges: they have beds, books, and food, and they are spared the freezing forests and death quotas of Kolyma or Vorkuta. Yet, as Solzhenitsyn makes clear, this is still Hell. They cannot see their families, their lives are suspended indefinitely, and they are harnessed to serve the same tyrannical system that destroyed them.

Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor is glaringly accurate when prisoners face the prospect of being transferred out of the sharashka into the “real” Gulag. Instead of relief, they feel terror—but also a strange certainty. In the harsher camps, stripped of privileges, there is no illusion: one knows beyond doubt that he is in Hell. In the First Circle, by contrast, the comforts deceive; they risk lulling the prisoner into thinking survival is enough. Solzhenitsyn exposes the cruelty of a system that even in its “mercies” is an instrument of damnation.

Humor and Torment

The inmates of the first circle can be very funny. Solzhenitsyn does not present unrelieved misery; he shows how men, even in bondage, share laughter as a means of survival. The dialogues among prisoners sparkle with irony and wit. They mock the absurdities of bureaucrats, trade jokes about Stalinist slogans, and puncture the pomposity of the officials who guard them. The gallows humor is often bitter, but it underscores how the human spirit resists even in chains.

At the same time, the novel is suffused with torment. The small humiliations—the inability to visit a wife, the forced participation in projects that strengthen the secret police, the betrayal of colleagues—create a steady rhythm of despair. Solzhenitsyn captures not only physical imprisonment but also moral torment. Many prisoners wrestle with the temptation to collaborate, to use their talents to build the machinery of repression. The novel insists that the Gulag was not just a site of suffering but also a test of conscience, where the stakes were one’s soul as much as one’s body.

The Portrait of Stalin’s Soviet Union

Beyond the prison walls, Solzhenitsyn paints a vivid picture of Soviet life under Stalin. The novel opens with an NKVD officer wrestling with whether to denounce a diplomat who confided doubts about the regime. That single act of conscience—or cowardice—carries life-or-death consequences. The arbitrariness of power, the climate of fear, and the suffocating surveillance of everyday life are all laid bare. The state is shown not as a distant apparatus but as an intimate presence in every household, every phone call, every whisper among friends.

What makes In the First Circle throb with pain is that it reveals how a society can normalize terror. Families live under the constant threat of arrest; neighbors inform on one another; bureaucrats follow orders without question. The prison is only the most visible symbol of a larger cage enclosing the entire nation. Solzhenitsyn’s mastery is in showing the continuum of oppression—from the First Circle to the labor camps to the ordinary citizen’s apartment block—each a cog in Stalin’s vast machinery of repression and death.

The End of Illusion

The novel’s conclusion brings the metaphor full circle. When some of the First Circle prisoners are slated to leave the sharashka, they realize with bitter clarity what awaits them: the true Gulag. Their dread is mingled with certainty. They will no longer be cushioned by privileges; they will no longer risk mistaking survival for freedom. In the harsher camps, the truth of Hell will be undeniable. Solzhenitsyn drives home the paradox: the First Circle is in some ways the best place in Hell, but because it is still Hell, its false mercies are the cruelest torment of all.

In the First Circle is a novel of moral witness. Solzhenitsyn fuses humor and torment, narrative sweep and personal testimony, to create a vision of Stalin’s Soviet Union as an infernal landscape. The metaphor of the First Circle resonates because it captures the essential cruelty of the regime: even its kindnesses were poisoned, even its privileges a form of damnation. To read this novel is to descend into Hell—but with eyes opened by a writer who refused to let truth be extinguished.

In the end, Solzhenitsyn reminds us that there is no such thing as a humane Hell. The First Circle may offer bread, books, and laughter, but it is still eternal confinement, a parody of life under a system that devoured its own people. That is why In the First Circle is a clear, sad, and piercing indictment of totalitarianism. Like his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, this novel illustrates what Gulag Archipelago documents.

-----

I read this novel shortly after re-reading Purgatorio by Dante.  In this second book of the Divine Comedy, the poet Virgil is sent back to the First Circle of Hell without a word, after guiding Dante through Hell and up Mount Purgatory.  It is a cruel fate and a betrayal. 

 

The Remains of the Day – Two Readings, Two Shadows

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

 Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is, on the surface, a beautifully restrained novel about a butler looking back on his life. Its prose is measured, elegant, and deceptively calm—much like Stevens himself, the narrator whose voice guides us through decades of service at Darlington Hall. On my first reading a decade ago, I was delighted with the irony of Stevens’s life: his unwavering devotion to a flawed master, his refusal to acknowledge love when it stood before him, his self-delusion disguised as dignity. The book struck me as quietly comic and deeply human. Ishiguro’s sentences glided, and Stevens’s missteps felt both tragic and oddly endearing.

When I returned to the book recently, however, I found it much darker. In the intervening years I have visited ten Nazi death camps in Poland, Germany, France, and Czechia. That experience pressed new weight onto Ishiguro’s novel, which is, among other things, a story about collaboration, denial, and the moral cost of misplaced loyalty. What once seemed like a sad but somewhat abstract tale of professional blindness now read as a chilling study in the ordinary mechanisms of evil.

Lord Darlington’s Shadow

On the earlier reading, Lord Darlington registered to me mainly as an aristocrat duped by history, a man too naïve to see through German diplomacy in the 1930s. His Nazi sympathies were embarrassing, even foolish, but I read them with a degree of detachment. This time, they chilled me. Darlington did not simply invite Herr von Ribbentrop for tea; he opened his estate to treasonous meetings where appeasement and collaboration were dressed in the garb of “gentlemanly understanding.” Knowing, now, what Auschwitz looks like, or Majdanek, or Ravensbrück, I could not skim past these episodes. They stood out like black stains across the otherwise polished wood of Ishiguro’s setting.

Ishiguro is too subtle to sermonize. Instead, he lets the horror seep through by contrast. The novel’s silences—its evasions, its unspoken acknowledgments—become thunderous. Darlington’s name, disgraced after the war, is defended by Stevens with painful loyalty, and each defense now reads like complicity. “Lord Darlington was a gentleman of great moral stature,” Stevens insists, and one feels the lie tightening like a noose.

The Choices Stevens Made

This darker emphasis recast Stevens for me as well. Before, I pitied him primarily for his personal failures: his inability to accept Miss Kenton’s affection, his cold dismissal of his father’s dying hours, his blindness to the possibility of a life beyond service. Those ironies still sting, but now they seem less like the gentle sadness of a missed romance and more like evidence of a man who gave away his humanity to serve a cause unworthy of him. Stevens’s professional pride, his endless rationalizations about “dignity,” become mechanisms of denial.

One moment that haunts me is Stevens’s absence at his father’s deathbed. He tells himself that duty requires him to attend to Lord Darlington’s important guests. Those guests, we later understand, include Nazi envoys. His choice is not only between filial love and professional duty; it is between human compassion and participation, however indirect, in the machinery of evil. On my first reading, I saw this as tragic misjudgment. Now it looks like moral blindness of the gravest kind.

The Machinery of Rationalization

Stevens’s narration, with its pauses and hedged justifications, is itself a case study in self-deception. Ishiguro crafts a voice that reveals by what it hides. Stevens insists, for instance, that “it is not my place” to question Lord Darlington’s political views, and in that deferential phrase lies the whole tragedy: the abdication of moral responsibility under cover of professionalism. He repeatedly reframes his life’s choices as minor sacrifices for the sake of dignity, yet the cumulative effect is devastating. The more he rationalizes, the more hollow his life becomes.

This rationalization felt poignant before; now it feels terrifyingly familiar. The history of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s is full of men and women who “just did their jobs,” who persuaded themselves that loyalty excused silence. Stevens, in his small way, becomes their mirror.

Beauty and Darkness

And yet, the book remains beautiful. Ishiguro’s prose is spare, controlled, almost like chamber music. The road trip frame, with Stevens driving through the English countryside, provides moments of pastoral calm that contrast with the storms beneath the surface. The understated style amplifies the darkness because it refuses melodrama. By the time Stevens realizes—too late—that he has given his life to a cause both ignoble and loveless, the quietness of the revelation is more devastating than any outburst could be.

The irony that first delighted me is still there, but now it feels less like a gentle smile and more like a knife’s edge. Stevens is both comic and tragic, both absurd and horrifying. Ishiguro allows us to see how an ordinary man, clinging to ideals of service and dignity, can waste his life in the service of betrayal.

Reading The Remains of the Day twice, ten years apart, shows how literature deepens with us. The book I first encountered was about lost love and misguided loyalty. The book I read now, after walking through Auschwitz and Dachau, is about moral blindness, the banality of evil, and the human cost of devotion to the wrong master. Both readings are true; the difference is in the shadow that history casts.

Ishiguro’s genius lies in writing a novel supple enough to contain both. Stevens remains one of the great unreliable narrators of modern fiction, and The Remains of the Day remains, for me, a masterpiece that only grows darker—and more necessary—with time.

Also, The Movie

A postscript: I have not and will not see the movie version of The Remains of the Day.  My habit is not to see movie versions of novels I love. But in this case, I heard Ishiguro speak at the Philadelphia Free Library in 2015.  He was talking about his just-released book (my second favorite of  his novels) The Buried Giant. As soon as the host asked for questions, everyone wanted to talk about The Remains of the Day. 

One of the first questions was about the movie. In answering the questions, Ishiguro talked about being a young novelist and all the excitement of having his novel made into a movie.  He said, "I would not have chosen Anthony Hopkins as Stevens."  

The man who could play a convincing Hannibal Lecter, Odin, Nixon and C.S. Lewis could not also be the sort of shallow martinet that is Stevens.  

Virgil Got Eternally Screwed: Review of Dante’s Purgatorio (Mark Musa Translation)

Dante’s Purgatorio, in contrast with the fire and fury of Inferno and Roman splendor of Paradiso, is the canticle of hope. It is the most human of the three canticles because the tormented souls know there is an end to their torment—which makes the fate of Virgil  in this canticle all the more terrible. 

Dante ascends Mount Purgatory in the company of Virgil, who guided him from the “dark wood” through the depths of Hell. Together, they climb terraces where the souls purge themselves of sin in anticipation of paradise. The climb is steady, less terrifying than Hell, less ecstatic than Heaven, full of longing, humility, and hope. The heart of the poem is not just Dante’s journey toward God but his relationship with his guide—a relationship that ends in silence, with Virgil dismissed back to Hell without acknowledgment.

The Human Shape of Purgatory

Mark Musa’s translation emphasizes the beauty and clarity of Dante’s verse. Musa avoids archaic heaviness, letting Dante’s voice speak in measured English in blank verse. (Of the seven translations I have read, I prefer Musa’s translation for the entire Commedia, but slightly prefer Robert Pinsky’s Inferno. Rhymed translations like those of Dorothy Sayers and John Ciardi distract me from the flow of the narrative.) 

Souls on the mountain describe their sufferings with startling candor, often asking Dante to carry news of them back to the living world. Unlike in Hell, there is no pride in sin here. As Dante says, “Here let death’s sting be turned to joyful laughter” (Purgatorio II.75). Musa captures this tone of penitential optimism: the souls are burdened, but they know their suffering has an end.

The mountain’s structure reinforces the idea of progress. Whereas Hell spirals down into eternal stasis, Purgatory rises toward transformation. The climb itself is strenuous; Dante frequently struggles, needing Virgil’s guidance. Yet with each terrace, the air grows lighter. Musa’s English renders Dante’s sense of relief as he nears the summit, reminding us that this is a place of preparation, not damnation.

Virgil the Guide

From the beginning of Inferno, Virgil represents reason, human wisdom, and the legacy of classical civilization. Dante reveres him as “my master and my author” (Inferno I.85). In Musa’s translation, Dante’s words retain both awe and filial devotion. Virgil leads Dante with patience and authority, even when Dante falters in fear or fatigue. By the time they reach the top of Mount Purgatory, Virgil is more than a guide—he is a companion, almost a father figure. Their bond is the emotional thread of the first two canticles.

That makes Virgil’s fate all the more cruel. He has shepherded Dante from the bottomless pit of Hell to the threshold of Paradise, only to be dismissed at the decisive moment. As a virtuous pagan, Virgil is barred from Heaven; his lot is Limbo, where “there was no weeping here, except for sighs” (Inferno IV.25). He cannot share in the beatific vision. His role is to lead Dante to Beatrice, and once that role is complete, he vanishes. 

The Silent Dismissal in Canto 30

The climax of this dismissal comes in Purgatorio XXX, when Beatrice appears in a procession of dazzling radiance. Dante, overcome, instinctively turns to Virgil for reassurance:

“I turned to the left with the confidence  

of a little child running to his mama  

when he is frightened or distressed,  

to say to Virgil: ‘Not a single drop  

of blood remains in me that does not tremble;  

I recognize the signs of the old flame.’  

But Virgil had left us deprived of himself,  

Virgil, sweetest father, Virgil, to whom  

I gave myself for my salvation.  

And not all that our ancient mother lost  

could keep my cheeks, though washed by dew,  

from darkening again with tears.” (Purgatorio XXX.43–51, Musa)

This is one of the most devastating moments in Dante’s entire poem. After more than sixty cantos together, Virgil disappears “without a word,” sent back to his eternal confinement. Dante is left weeping, not only because Beatrice overwhelms him but because the companion he relied upon is gone forever. Musa’s phrasing—“Virgil, sweetest father”—emphasizes the intimacy of their bond, even as it underscores the finality of the loss.

What is striking is the lack of comment from Dante himself. The poet offers no reflection, no complaint against God’s justice. Virgil simply vanishes. This silence is its own commentary. Dante’s grief is immediate and human, but the narrative moves on. In the divine order, reason must yield to grace, and Virgil must yield to Beatrice. Yet for the reader, the abrupt dismissal of so faithful a guide feels both heartbreaking and unjust.

Musa’s translation avoids ornate flourishes that might soften the blow. He lets the loss to strike the reader with the same suddenness it strikes Dante. Musa also provides helpful notes that clarify Virgil’s status—honored, indispensable, but excluded from salvation. For modern readers, who sympathize with Virgil as the great poet of Rome, this exclusion is a profound tragedy. (I read Dante with a group of young soldiers at Camp Adder in Iraq. They were angry at Dante for betraying his “Battle Buddy” just as they reached the peak of Mount Purgatory.)  

In the world Dante created, human reason, represented by Virgil, can guide us far, but it cannot bring us to God. Only divine grace, embodied by Beatrice, can do that. This moment lingers long after Dante moves on into Paradise. Virgil is the shadow haunting the poem’s final third, a reminder of what even the noblest human achievement cannot attain in the world of Medieval Catholic belief. The Divine Comedy is the theology of Aquinas in verse. 

As Dante steps into eternity, Virgil returns to his sighs in Limbo. The hope of all the penitents in Purgatorio is inseparable from the bitterness which is Virgil’s fate. 

Eternal Hell is deeply embedded in western culture seeming to be the mirror of eternal Heaven.  Two years ago I read and re-read That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Eternal Salvation, in which the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart asserts that there is no eternal Hell. He overturns the theology of Aquinas and shows the mistakes that led Augustine to put eternal Hell in Christian doctrine and through his influence into western thought. 

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is a novel built on the slow recovery of memory. Rather than unfolding in a straight line, the story emerges through chance encounters and long conversations between the narrator and Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian. At first, Austerlitz appears as an eccentric scholar, obsessed with fortifications and railway stations. Gradually, however, we learn he is a Holocaust survivor, sent on a Kinder transport from Prague to Britain at the age of four. His life becomes clearer little by little, as if he himself is uncovering it alongside the reader.

Sent away from Prague on a Kindertransport at the age of four, he was raised in Wales under another name, unaware of his origins. His adoptive parents, though well-meaning, effectively erased his past. They gave him shelter but not a history, safety but not belonging. Their refusal to acknowledge his origins—partly out of love, partly out of denial—left him doubly orphaned: first by the Nazis, and then by silence. His adoptive mother dies then his adoptive father, an eccentric minister, loses his sanity when Austerlitz is still a child.

The brilliance of Sebald’s narrative lies in this pacing. The novel mirrors how trauma is recalled: obliquely, unevenly, with sudden moments of clarity followed by long silences. As Austerlitz revisits train stations, libraries, and archives, memory attaches itself to physical spaces, and the architecture he studies becomes a metaphor for his own buried history.

Sebald’s novel is also a meditation on the way the Holocaust (and by extension the entire war in which the Holocaust occurred) brings pain and trauma to lives far from the horrors of the Nazi death camps. The victims were not only those who were murdered in camps, but also those who survived in exile—especially the children. Austerlitz, though “saved” from the Nazis, grows up an orphan of memory, severed from language, family, and belonging. His life is marked by absence: the parents he cannot remember, the home he lost before he knew it, the identity he had to reconstruct decades later. In this sense, Sebald insists that survival itself carries its own tragedy.

The use of blurred photographs embedded in the text deepens this sense of fractured memory. Images of buildings, train stations, and unidentified faces appear like ghosts, reminders of a past that resists full recovery. The photographs do not clarify the narrative; instead, they underscore its uncertainty, leaving both narrator and reader adrift in a landscape of half-revealed truths.

By the novel’s end, what remains is not closure but the recognition that some losses cannot be repaired. Austerlitz’s search is both noble and futile: he uncovers fragments of his past, but the larger picture remains irretrievably broken. Sebald’s shows that history, particularly the history of the Holocaust, is not a single story but a set of absences that shape the lives of even those who “escaped.”

Austerlitz is a masterpiece of memory, architecture, and mourning. It reminds us that the Holocaust claimed not only lives but also futures, identities, and connections—that even those rescued as children were haunted by destruction for the rest of their lives.

A Man Called Intrepid: How Intelligence Kept Britain Alive in World War II

 

William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid tells the story of Sir William Stephenson, the Canadian who became Britain’s intelligence chief in the United States during World War II. The book shows how espionage was not just an accessory to the war but a decisive factor in Britain’s survival against Nazi Germany.

By 1940, Britain was battered, nearly alone, and short on resources. What kept the country in the fight was a hidden network of intelligence and subversion. Stephenson’s British Security Coordination in New York linked MI6 with American counterparts, built support for Roosevelt’s pro-British policies, and paved the way for the OSS. Espionage provided more than information; it delivered influence.

Through deception and propaganda, Allied intelligence pushed Hitler into major errors. British support for a coup in Yugoslavia diverted German forces into the Balkans, forcing a delay in the invasion of Russia. Those lost weeks ensured the Wehrmacht ran into the Russian winter before reaching Moscow. Similarly, manipulation of German perceptions helped convince Hitler that Britain and the United States were weaker than they were. When Japan struck Pearl Harbor, Hitler rashly declared war on America—an act that sealed his fate.

The book makes clear that the war was fought as fiercely in safe houses, code rooms, and radio stations as on battlefields. Intelligence turned Britain’s weakness into time, time that allowed American industry and manpower to enter the war.

Stevenson’s account sometimes edges toward the dramatic, but the core argument holds: without Stephenson’s covert empire and the Allied ability to mislead Hitler, Britain might not have survived 1940–41. A Man Called Intrepid is a reminder that victory in World War II depended as much on deception and espionage as on tanks and planes.

I love this book.  I would recommend it to anyone interested in World War II and espionage.

Talking Electric Cars in a Rural Massachusetts Restaurant

 

I'm in Providence RI for the week.  My wife is at a math conference. I am riding and visiting friends here and in Boston.  Yesterday I rode east toward Taunton MA. On the way back I stopped at a local restaurant named iAlive in Rehoboth MA.  They describe themselves as a comfort food restaurant.  And they live up to the description.

I ordered the Monday lunch special: Scrod, mashed potatoes, green beans and rolls.  The portions were so big I was not sure I could ride the rest of the way to Providence.  Perfectly baked scrod.  

I sat in a small booth in the middle of the restaurant.  The counter near the entrance was full with a dozen customers who clearly knew each other.  They joked in thick Boston accents.  

Across from my booth was a table with six men between late 60s and early 80s.  They were railing against electric cahhs when I sat down.  "They sit for an ow-ah waiting for the chah-jahs," said one of the loudest of the group. The others laughed and added their stories of watching electric car owners wait for chargers. 

When my food arrived, I watched a 1986 Formula 1 race on my phone as I ate so I could not hear the conversation around me. 

When I finished eating (and watching Nigel Mansell win the British Grand Prix), I looked over and saw a woman sitting at the end of the table across from me. The talk was quieter.  I looked around toward the far end of the restaurant and saw eight women sitting at another table set end to end with the "guys" table.  I smiled thinking six men and nine women all about the same age meant six couples and three widows (men don't live as long as women).  

The woman at the men's table went back to the women's table.  The men started talking about a fair in Taunton.  

When I walked out I looked around the parking (pah-king) lot.  Several pickup trucks and big SUVs.  A few sedans.  No electric cars.  None of those guys were going to get stuck waiting for a chah-jah!!