My Amazon Review of William Walker's "War Ups the Ante"

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)

My Amazon Review of William Walker's "If War Should Come:....."

 

War On

 

This is William Walker’s fourth novel about the banker/diplomat/spy Paul Muller, a man who moves in the highest circles of the Swiss government.( Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of William Walker's "A Spy in Vienna.....")  In prior novels we find Muller in Danzig, Vienna, France and Germany, this time we find him in Romania, Turkey, and Finland as he intersects with prewar crises and the start of World War II. Thus, we see those historic events through the eyes of neutral Switzerland. With the war on the great fear in Europe is that of the Russo-German de facto alliance created by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would destroy the West.

 

The novel opens in September 1939 with Muller acting as a representative of the Bank for International Settlements where he takes possession of the Polish gold reserves being transported by train from the Polish/Romanian border to port of Costanza. This is sort of a follow-up to Alan Furst’s great novel “The Polish Officer.”

 

From Romania he gets caught up in the intrigue of Istanbul, Turkey where neutral Turkey is under pressure from Germany and Britain to enter the war on their respective sides. German Ambassador Franz von Papen and his wife who Muller had a dalliance with her in Vienna make a cameo appearance here.

 

The novel ends with Muller on the Finnish border fighting for the Finns in response to Russian aggression in November 1939. Quite a life telescoped into four months of 1939.

 

My quibble with Walker here is that he gets wrong the price of gold, the number of grams in a troy ounce and the price of jewelry in the Turkish bazaar of 1939. My sense is that he used today’s prices for 1939’s. Otherwise I found his latest novel to be a satisfying way to get a sense of Europe at war, but it is not quite as good as his earlier efforts.

For the full Amazon URL see: War On (amazon.com)