Tag: Second World War

The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin

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The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin was published in 1943, while the second world war was still going on. I am quite surprised that publication of this short, vivid and grim novel was allowed under wartime censorship rules, given the rather jaundiced picture it paints of the scientific establishment of that time. The wartime civil service atmosphere is very well caught; they work long hours and weekends with little time off. It is written in a terse, stripped-down, dialogue-heavy style, so that when there is a figure of speech it comes as a surprise.

Complex bureaucracy and office politics figure strongly in this story of a small technical research unit. The Reeves gun is an anti-tank weapon at the experimental stage; the army doesn’t like it, and the narrator, scientist Sammy Rice, has written a report saying it isn’t ready. However, his boss, Waring, and Professor Mair, head of the unit, have already persuaded their minister that the gun is a good idea.

Any consideration as to whether this will eventually be a useful weapon takes second place to a plot to oust Mair. The effectiveness of the gun becomes merely a pretext in the power struggle. The senior scientists and civil servants seem less interested in winning the war than scoring points off each other. Mair tells Sammy that scientists over fifty are not capable of original thinking anymore; it’s all about competing for knighthoods and so on. When Holland, the old soldier, intervenes in a meeting to make a point about the soldiers who will eventually have to use the gun on the battlefield, Sammy thinks he is the first person who has spoken as if they meant what they said.

Sammy is not very good at all this game-playing and career making. He has an artificial foot, a drink problem and a tendency to feel sorry for himself. He rails against “the bloody silly way things were arranged”. He doesn’t realise he is being sounded out as deputy director of the unit and is amazed when the job goes to Waring, the ex-advertising man who knows next to nothing about science, but is good at selling ideas to people.

Sammy is kept more or less on an even keel by his relationship with Susan, Professor Mair’s secretary. They have a ritual to keep Sammy’s drinking under control. She asks him if he would like a whisky and he replies that, no, he wouldn’t.

The real war in which people get killed keeps intruding into this world of farcical meetings and inconclusive conversations. Sammy’s younger brother Dick, is a twice-decorated fighter pilot who volunteers for secret and highly dangerous duty. Sammy has been asked by the engineer officer Captain Stuart to help with the investigation into a booby trap bomb the Germans are dropping, that is responsible for the deaths of several children.

Eventually, two of the bombs are found intact on a west country beach. Sammy tells Stuart to wait until he gets there before starting work. But by the time Sammy’s train gets in, Stuart has gone ahead and been blown up while attempting to defuse the first one. Sammy is a civilian; it was Stuart’s responsibility to do the dangerous part, but for various reasons, Sammy volunteers to defuse the second bomb.

We have now arrived at the novel’s tense, dramatic and unforgettable climax, with Sammy alone on the beach, working painstakingly on the second unexploded bomb, using the notes left by Stuart, giving a running commentary on every move he makes to the control point by telephone, in case he too should be killed. It tends to be this part of the novel that readers remember, despite the fact that it is only one chapter or so. It leaves a very strong impression.

I’m not sure if this novel actually introduced the phrase “back room boys”, to mean wartime scientists. The phrase is usually attributed to Beaverbrook, but I think the novel may have popularised it. The dialogue is full of 1940s expressions, such as “the balloon going up” and “I’ll put you in the picture”.

It was filmed in 1949 by Powell and Pressburger in a black and white expressionist style, I think they altered it a little too much. It’s time for a remake, in colour and widescreen, more faithful to the realism of the book.

Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis

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Is this a travel book or a war memoir? A bit of both, I would say. It was based on Norman Lewis’ diary of his wartime experiences as an intelligence officer in Naples, but was not published until 1978. It is about a very specific time and place but has a hint of the universal about it. It is subtitled “An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth”, which sums up the situation the author found himself in nicely.

Lewis arrived as part of the American invasion of southern Italy. The Italians had switched sides and the Germans retreated northwards, leaving the allies in charge of the civilian population of a bomb-shattered Naples and the surrounding area.

Events of jaw-dropping random cruelty and absurdity are recounted. The occupying forces, whether American, British, or Canadian, do not come out of this well. You can imagine what happens when most of the women in the Naples area are near to starvation and will do anything for a meal. An arbitrary rule bans fishing from boats, so the Neapolitans make improvised rafts from anything they can find. Anything that can be eaten, is eaten, such as the rare fish in the public aquarium.

A booby-trap bomb explodes, killing many civilians and giving rise to a rumour that the whole city is riddled with bombs, set to explode when the electricity is switched back on. The entire population is hurriedly evacuated, but it turns out to be a German ruse to spread chaos.

Mysterious tapping sounds in the catacombs suggest that a squad of German soldiers has remained there, ready to come out and commit acts of sabotage; a search reveals nothing, and Lewis thinks that if they were there, they have been spirited away by collaborators.

The former head of the mafia gains a foothold in the new military government which quickly becomes completely corrupt. The American decision to send officers of American-Italian background looks increasingly daft, as it enables the Italian criminal elements to embed themselves.

Almost every sort of item brought in by the Americans is soon available on the thriving black market. Italians caught with illicit items that are freely available on stalls in the street are given hugely disproportionate jail sentences. The criminal gangs behind it all go free. Meanwhile, Canadian army blankets become a form of currency as they can be skilfully tailored into overcoats.

It gets so bad that essential items such as penicillin are soon more readily available on the black market than they are to the occupying forces.

Lewis witnesses the eruption of Vesuvius: “It was the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen, or ever expect to see”. A village is engulfed by a slow-moving column of lava, advancing at walking pace down the main street. Eventually it slows to a halt, seemingly stopped by the power of faith, leaving half the village intact.

Naples has been bombed back to the mediaeval era, thinks Lewis, and consequently old beliefs are revived. There are reports of effigies of saints in churches weeping, bleeding and talking. Is this just mass hysteria on the part of the traumatised population?

An attempt to check the spread of sexually transmitted disease is undermined by a corrupt doctor selling false certificates of health to the girls. Lewis reflects that the Italian system encourages corruption because police pay is so low. When he is posted to a village in the zona camorra he realises that it is a way of life, an established system, not quite corruption as it appears to a Briton. In this lawless region, a group of French colonial troops embark on a rampage of brutal sexual assault against the local women. They are dealt with by the men of the camorra in the time-honoured, equally brutal way.

This might sound like a depressing read, but it is not, partly because it is written in such elegant prose that you read on, fascinated. Lewis takes a slightly detached viewpoint, as his job obliged him to do.

Some of the British troops can’t wait to leave, but by the end of his year in Naples, Lewis has formed a completely different view. He has come round to a great admiration for the humanity and culture of the Italians. So much so that if he could be born again, he tells us, and choose the country of his birth, he would choose Italy.

I must declare an interest. My father was in Italy during the second world war, but a little earlier and a little further south.

I discovered this book via the Italian documentary film, assembled from existing film clips and narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch.