Europe Goes to War
To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, the western democracies were not interested in war, but war was interested in them. This is the fifth in a series of Paul Muller books written by William Walker. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of William Walker's "If War Should Come:....." ) Yet again, Walker does not disappoint. Muller is a banker/diplomat/spy working for the Swiss government immediately preceding and at the start of World War II. As usual Muller is up to his eyeballs in the diplomatic intrigue of that era.
The book opens with Muller in Finland where his
acclaimed for helping to fight off the Russian invasion. This notoriety does
not sit well with neutral Switzerland, so he is farmed off to the League of
Nations where he is instrumental in getting the Soviet Union kicked out because
of its invasion of Finland. There he meets his Hungarian “spy” girlfriend.
Muller soon gets involved in a British plot to block
iron ore shipments from neutral Sweden through a planned attack on the
Norwegian port city of Narvik. As Alan Furst noted in his “Blood of Victory”
novel the British and French plotted to block Danube oil traffic from the
Ploesti oil fields in Romania and seriously planned to bomb the Russian oil
fields in Baku which were feeding Hitler’s war machine. Walker notes that the
“phony war” between October 1939 and April 1940 wasn’t so phony after all. So
afraid were Britain and France in confronting Germany on the western front,
they planned these peripheral actions. Needless to say, they did not succeed,
and they would soon meet the full weight of the German blitzkrieg in May 1940.
As in his prior novels Walker gives us a window into
the diplomacy of the era. He is especially acute in discussing the role of
William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France. It makes for an enjoyable read.
For the full Amazon URL see: Europe goes to War (amazon.com)
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