My Washington Times Review Of 'The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, And A Friendship Made And Lost In War'

The Washington Times published my review of James McGrath Morris’ The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War.

Although the late, great writer Ernest Hemingway has many detractors, he remains popular and is still read, written about and discussed today. Not so for Mr. Hemingway’s contemporary, the late novelist John Dos Passos.

But Dos Passos gets his due in James McGrath Morris‘ “The Ambulance Drivers,” a book about both writers who came of age during World War I, and became popular and critically acclaimed novelists in the post-World War I era.

I’ve been a Hemingway aficionado since my teenage years in the 1960s and I learned of Dos Passos when I read biographies of Hemingway. I went on to read Dos Passos‘ “USA” trilogy, which I found interesting, but a tough read. As an anti-communist, then and now, I was interested in reading Dos Passos due to his anti-communism, which is covered in the book.

… Their long friendship dissolved over political differences. Ironically, Dos Passos had been the leftist idealist, while Hemingway was apolitical. Both of their views, and their friendship, would change during the Spanish Civil War.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/8/book-review-the-ambulance-drivers-hemingway-dos-pa/ 

On This Day In History Mata Hari Was Executed

As History.com notes, on this day in 1917 Mata Hari was executed in France for espionage.

You can read about Mata Hari via the below link:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/mata-hari-executed?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2016-1015-10152016&om_rid=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa&om_mid=99001965&kx_EmailCampaignID=7608&kx_EmailCampaignName=email-hist-tdih-2016-1015-10152016&kx_EmailRecipientID=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa

On This Day In History Exotic Dancer And Convicted Spy Mata Hari Sentenced To Die

As History.com notes, on this day in 1917 exotic dancer and convicted spy Mata Hari was sentenced to die in Paris, France.

You can read about Mata Hari via the below link:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/mata-hari-sentenced-to-die

Thunder And Flames: Americans In The Crucible Of Combat, 1917-1918

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review in the Washington Times of Edward G. Lengel's Thunder and Flames: Americans in the Crucible of Combat, 1917-1918.

In a decision that history declares was perceptively wise, President Woodrow Wilson kept the United States out of World War I until a string of outrageously dumb decisions by Germany — notably unrestricted submarine warfare — left him little choice but to enter the hostilities.

Even then, his intervention was cautious. He and the American commander, Gen. John J. Pershing, decreed that U.S. troops would fight on their own, in discrete units, rather than be integrated into war-weary British and French divisions. (The British commander, Gen. Douglas Haig, felt this stricture was “ridiculous.”)

Pershing wanted to build a force strong enough to “push the enemy out of the trenches and force the fighting into the open,” and to do so with maximum use of artillery barrages and head-on assaults.

Edward Lengel's book is valuable because he draws heavily upon German and French military records as well as those of the U.S. Army. And he concludes that much of what earlier historians have written about key events does not hold up.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/feb/9/book-review-thunder-and-flames-americans-in-the-cr/ 

Stalin's First British Spy Ernest Oldham May Have Caused The Second World War

Warren Manger at the British newspaper the Mirror offers a piece on the Soviet Union's first mole in the British government, predating Kim Philby and the Cambridge spy ring.

He was blown up on the front line during the First World War and helped to draft one of the most important peace treaties in history.

He even delivered coded messages to the King.

But Ernest Oldham was no national hero – he was one of Britain’s worst traitors.

As the first British spy to work for Stalin’s Russia, he sold vital secrets and spent the cash on chauffeur-driven cars, foreign holidays and endless bottles of booze.

The infamous Cambridge spy ring – including Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt– were still students when Oldham was selling secrets in the early 1930s.

As a civil servant at the Foreign Office, he was trusted with encrypted messages sent to embassies and consulates around the world.

And as a member of the team working on the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War, his treachery could even have helped bring about the Second World War by enabling the Russians to scupper later negotiations between Germany and the rest of Europe.

The backlash from those failed talks caused such anger in Germany that it carried Adolf Hitler to power in 1933.

Not that Oldham lived to see all the consequences.

After four years of selling secrets he was found dead in a gas-filled kitchen in the upmarket Kensington area of London in September 1933, aged 39.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/stalins-first-british-spy-ernest-5831372

The Fall Of The Ottomans: The Great War In The Middle East

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review of Eugene Rogan's The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East for the Washington Times.

For obvious reasons, most English-language books published on the Great War of 1914-1918 are Eurocentric, focused on the grinding trench warfare of the Western Front. Even the occasional glances eastward seldom got beyond the Gallipoli campaign, and even these accounts stressed the role of Australian and New Zealander troops, not the Middle Eastern armies.

Now comes an absolutely magnificent account of the war from the viewpoint of the Ottoman Empire, which sided with Germany during the conflict and suffered a crushing defeat that turned much of the Middle East into British and French colonial satraps. Eugene Rogan, a British scholar now teaching at Oxford, lived in the Middle East for years. Importantly, he had the linguistic ability to do research in Turkish and other archives seldom visited by Western historians.

His account is geopolitical and military writing at its best — taut, anecdotal and extraordinarily researched. A tangled story, to be sure, one that both commands and rewards the reader’s attention.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/mar/22/book-review-the-fall-of-the-ottomans-the-great-war/ 

Review Of Alvin York: A New Biography Of The Hero Of The Argonne

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review of Colonel Douglas V. Mastriano's Alvin York: A New Biography of the Hero of the Argonne in the Washington Times.

Those of us of a certain generation first became aware of the World War I hero via the 1941 movie, “Sergeant York,” starring Gary Cooper in the title role, for which he won an Academy Award. Even at age 7, sitting in a movie house in East Texas, I realized that Alvin York was a special human, both as a warrior who shot up a German machine gun nest and captured 132 prisoners, and as a decent man with devout religious beliefs.

In subsequent years, York was nitpicked by skeptics ranging from jealous colleagues-in-arms who had never liked the taciturn Tennessee country boy, to persons who scoffed at the audacity of a born-again Christian crediting God for bringing him through fierce combat unharmed.

Now, Col. Douglas V. Mastriano, a U.S. Army veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, restores York to his rightful place in military history. His book is also a valuable depiction of how a created-on-the-fly Army entered battle during the war, a welcome addition to the flood of anniversary books gushing from publishers these days.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/19/book-review-a-war-hero-who-lived-his-faith/

Lawrence In Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly And The Making Of The Modern Middle East

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a review of Scott Anderson's Lawrence In Arabia: War, deceit, Imperial Folly And The Making of The Modern Middle East in the Washington Times.

For political scientists, and especially academics, intelligence is the dark angel of foreign affairs, eager to topple governments and betray other persons — including allies — through stealth and lies.

Oh, perhaps. The chronicles of spookdom certainly brim with case histories of chicanery. But in terms of flagrant international treachery, few episodes in diplomatic history surpass the sordid record of the allied powers — including the United States — in their dealings with Middle East nations during World War I, 1914-1918.

Much of what the average reader knows about intrigue during the period revolves around the British anthropologist-turned-intelligence-operative T.E. Lawrence, a covert agent for the Crown who strove to inspire the so-called “Revolt in the Desert,” an attempt to stir an Arabic uprising against Germany. Lawrence’s image benefited from his own books and from an adoring “biography” by Lowell Thomas, the famed radio commentator.

But Lawrence was far from being the only intelligence agent in the game. The United States, Germany, France, even stateless Israelis trying to form their own nation, vied for influence among the disparate tribes that occupied Arabia. The goal was to wean away Turkish support for Germany during the first years of the war so as to protect Britain’s routes to India.

Scott Anderson relates the story with vivid writing supported by a staggering amount of research — one of the more fascinating reads I have encountered in years. His cast of characters alone satisfies one’s appetite for how espionage really works in the field.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/11/book-review-lawrence-of-arabia/