Len Deighton's Blood, Tears, and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II: Some Reflections

Picking up Len Deighton's history of the early portion of World War II Blood, Tears & Folly I was not sure what to expect--the main draw the fact that Deighton created the fictional secret agent who has since come to be known to the world as "Harry Palmer." Alas, my reading of the book corresponded to the Kirkus Reviews assessment of the book as, in spite of its promises from its subtitle forward, not only lacking "original research," but "fresh perspectives,"but instead, as the review has it, the book proving just "mildly contrarian" as it went over what, for those of us in the English-speaking world at least, were the most familiar and exhaustively studied aspects of the conflict, rather conventionally treated.

Still, if the book fell well short of the promise it seemed to make it seems to me to, three decades on, have interest at least as a reflection of the years in which it appeared. Deighton's Blood, Tears and Folly appeared as part of that body of revisitation and revaluation of the was that questioned the received, patriotic, view of Britain's role in the way--the years when Correlli Barnett was still putting out his "Pride and Fall" quartet, when British government whistleblower-turned-historian Clive Ponting published 1940: Myth and Reality--and when those defending the received view, from people like Ponting more than Barnett, fired back at them (with such counterblasts coming from some surprising places, as I was surprised to see when I read Angus Calder's The Myth of the Blitz).

At the same time there is what gave that revisitation a contemporary edge, namely the parallels of the Britain of the World War II era as Barnett, Ponting et. al. described it, and the Britain of their own time--not least the country's elite overrating its strength and importance in the world, and failing to come to grips with important industrial and economic weaknesses. Indeed, writing of Britain (and America) up against Germany and Japan in the 1940s Deighton drew an explicit parallel with the English-speaking powers in their economic competition with Germany and Japan in the 1990s--which, like many at the time, he thought Germany and Japan might have already won. ("Is the European Community . . . about to become that faceless bureaucratic machine that Hitler started to build? Is the Pacific already Japan's co-prosperity sphere?" Deighton asks in the introduction.) In his thoughts about such matters Deighton struck me as orthodox and conventional and unimpressive in his thinking (certainly relative to the impression he makes as a novelist, and his promise of a "revisionist" view), with his remarks about the U.S.-Japanese competition in particular telling in this respect. (In his book's last pages he describes that competition as a matter of whether a "closed, class-conscious, racially exclusive" society would triumph over "the world's most open and dynamic one." Japan did not triumph as many expected, of course, but the causes and consequences of Japan's failure to do so were quite remote from what he seemed to think.)

Still, had he focused on developing that idea, rather than devoting most of his time to recounting the familiar highlights yet again in the familiar ways (Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the fall of Singapore)--and in the process, maybe moved his thinking beyond the conventionalities--he might have delivered that "fresh perspective" the book he delivered so sorely lacks.