Saladin: The Sultan Who
Vanquished the Crusaders and Built an Islamic Empire. By John Man. Da Capo.
$26.99.
The Castaway’s War: One Man’s
Battle Against Imperial Japan. By Stephen Harding. Da Capo. $26.99.
The Nazi Titanic: The Incredible
Untold Story of a Doomed Ship in World War II. By Robert P. Watson. Da
Capo. $25.99.
Not many people relish war
nowadays except for the Daesh murder cult and its ilk. But stories about war
are another thing: they have unending (“undying” sounds like a bad pun)
popularity, and new books focusing on widespread mayhem are enduringly popular
and show little sign of becoming any less so. Occasionally – not often, but
occasionally – a war-focused book not only explains events of the past but also
proves to have potentially significant relevance to events of our own time. So
it is with John Man’s well-written, well-researched Saladin, a biography of the sultan Salah al-Din (1138-1193), who
retook Jerusalem from European Crusaders, united the Sunni and Shi’ite sects of
Islam, ruled an empire that included Syria, Egypt, part of Mesopotamia, and
Palestine, and earned the respect of his Christian opponents despite the
undeniable brutality of his battlefield and post-battle tactics (largely
because the Christians were even more brutal and were impressed by Saladin’s
comparatively merciful handling of those he conquered). Saladin was purely a
man of battle and rule, leaving behind no writings and no contributions to
Islam. He did, however, found the Ayyubid dynasty, which briefly ruled much of
the Middle East (1171-1260). Intellectual and economic pursuits flourished
under the Ayyubids, and it is no wonder that modern Muslims wishing for a
resurgence of Islamic power – including the vicious Daesh pretenders – look to
Saladin as a role model. Saladin himself looked to his own mentor, Nur al-Din
(1118-1174), as an exemplar of the sorts of battlefield and political
techniques that would eventually cement the Ayyubid dynasty. It was the death of
Nur al-Din that opened the way to consolidation of power by Saladin, who
married his mentor’s widow and use Nur al-Din’s own techniques to defeat his
mentor’s son and other claimants to the throne. Man’s book focuses with
intelligence and perspicacity on Saladin’s battlefield and post-battle
successes, on his methods of building alliances, on his willingness to be
comparatively gentle with enemies when that served his larger purposes – and
his unquestioned brutality when that
advanced his cause. Man sheds considerable light on an era in which Islamic
civilization was considerably more advanced than European, which was still
mired in the Dark Ages of a religious supremacy every bit as brutal as Islam
and a great deal more hostile to secular knowledge. The great battle that
opened Saladin’s way to conquest of Jerusalem, that of Hattin in 1187, is well
described and well explained, and Man also spends considerable time on the
extraordinary patience with which Saladin planned his campaign against the
Crusaders – an undertaking that took him 20 years. Saladin’s willingness to
bide his time was extraordinary, and his ability to unite his own Sunnis with
Shi’ites was as well. His decision to use Shia-dominated Egypt as his power
base was a brilliant one, and his care not to alienate any Muslims for long
made it possible for him to assemble the force needed to oust the Crusaders. It
is worth mentioning that Man has to pick and choose among sources to put
together his narrative – his remark at one point could stand for the book as a
whole: “Details vary; this account is a compromise.” But what comes through
again and again is that Saladin, whether or not regarded as a humane man by the
standards of his time, was a very determined warrior and a very fine strategist
and tactician. His patience and bridge-building with other Muslims are the
antithesis of the internecine warfare and mass murder of Muslims as well as
Christians by the Daesh of today, who claim him as an inspiration. His direct
influence did not long outlast his own lifetime, but the acclaim for his deeds
and his willingness to turn the enemies of today into the allies of tomorrow remains
even in our own time. His personal probity and austere lifestyle earn continued
praise as well, to such an extent that he appears in many forms in statuary and
other permissible types of display in Muslim countries – despite the fact that
not a single contemporary portrait of him exists and no one knows what he
looked like.
Given the remoteness of
Saladin’s time, it is scarcely surprising that so much about it and him is
unknown. But there is apparently plenty still to be discovered close to our own
time as well, as the unending succession of books about “untold stories” of
World War II indicates. Serious and generally written and researched with
skill, these (+++) books are strictly for people for whom the phrase “glories
of war” is not an oxymoron, people seeking to relive what they consider grand
moments of their own past or that of members of their family, and people enamored
(that is not too strong a word) of the intricacies of gigantic battles and the
many, many human stories of which those conflicts consist. Both The Castaway’s War and The Nazi Titanic fit this particular
subgenre neatly, and both will appeal to the target audience of war fanciers
(“groupies” seems an unkind overstatement, although the word sometimes rings
true). Stephen Harding’s The Castaway’s
War is a sort of Robinson Crusoe tale with espionage and bullets. Set in
1943, it is the story of a Navy lieutenant named Hugh Marr Miller Jr. who
survived a Japanese torpedo attack on his ship, the destroyer USS Strong, which was near the Solomon
Islands. Miller drifted on a floater net until he was eventually beached on
Arundel Island (Kohinggo), where he found food (coconuts) and shelter (thanks
to the trees), but also found he was in the same place as two Japanese infantry
regiments. For 39 days, Miller not only survived but also spied on the Imperial
Japanese Army, gathering information that – after his rescue – was used in
helping determine and focus Allied tactics in the Solomon Islands region.
Miller won the Navy Cross for his accomplishments, and on the basis of what
Harding details in The Castaway’s War,
he certainly deserved it for his bravery, self-reliance and survival ability. Miller
died at age 68 in 1978, and Harding’s book is a more-than-fitting memorial to
his wartime exploits and to the quiet bravery of innumerable soldiers, sailors,
pilots and other warriors who did their duty and did it well – often even
better than anyone had any right to expect. But in a sense, that is the problem
with this book and the many, many similar ones: even the 16 pages of
interesting period photos could just as well have come from (or been included
in) many other stories about the everyday heroism shown again and again by the
men and women in uniform during World War II. It does them no disservice to
state that there were so many heroes that, after a while, their untold stories
– once told – start to blend.
The story of the ship Cap Arcona is yet another previously
untold one, somewhat less than run-of-the-mill because of its focus on a ship
rather than a person, and also somewhat more strained in trying to engage 21st-century
readers in the story of the ship’s adventures and destruction. Robert P. Watson’s
book is called The Nazi Titanic
because of a tenuous connection between the Cap Arcona and the notorious White
Star Line ship – and because the name “Titanic” in a book title is sure to
garner attention. The Cap Arcona was
largely designed to look like the Titanic,
although it was smaller and had three rather than four funnels. For a time it
was, like the Titanic, a luxury
liner, one that had more than a single ill-fated voyage. But when World War II
began, the ship, like many others, was converted to military uses. It was a
barracks, a naval training platform, and a rescue ship. It was used in a
propaganda film and was, indeed, a stand-in for the Titanic itself. And then, toward the end of the war, it was loaded
with prisoners and became a kind of floating concentration camp – a disastrous
final use, because British bombers sent to disrupt German shipping destroyed
the Cap Arcona and killed so many
people that the incident became the biggest case of death by “friendly fire” in
the whole war. This final, tragic role of the Cap Arcona is the central point of the book but is not enough to
fill a book-length manuscript. Furthermore, the fact that the death of so many
prisoners aboard the ship has been largely unknown does not seem to be the
result of some sort of malfeasance or official cover-up – the bombing occurred
after Hitler’s suicide, in the last days of the war in Europe, and simply
became part of the mop-up operation as attention turned to ending the war in the
Pacific. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred not
much later and was far more riveting than the story of the destruction of one
German ship – and the mood of the times was celebratory, not regretful of
inevitable wartime mistakes. Watson tries to rectify the neglect of this final
chapter of the Cap Arcona story
through this book, and certainly his careful exploration of what happened and
why (including the likelihood that the Nazis would have scuttled the ship if
the British bombers had not sunk it) is intriguing and raises meaningful issues
from a vantage point more than 70 years later. And the eight pages of photos
here tie very directly to this specific story, including one of the death of
the film director who used the Cap Arcona
as a Titanic stand-in but fell afoul
of his Nazi bosses, another of the ship on fire after the British bombed it,
and one showing it capsized after the attack. Readers drawn into the story by a
book title with the word Titanic in
it will find considerable intriguing material here. But neither the somewhat
strained Titanic connection nor the
truly horrific final use of the Cap
Arcona can give Watson’s book general appeal: it is just another formerly
untold war story among so many others, gripping for those already inclined to
be gripped by the topic but unlikely to convince others that there are reasons
to revisit the World War II environs again, again and again.
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