The Strange Case of Hellish Nell: The Story of Helen Duncan and the Witch Trial of World War II
By Nina Shandler
Da Capo, 289 pages, $25
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Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940
By Margaret Gaskin
Harcourt, 430 pages, $27
Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden
By Marshall De Bruhl
Random House, 346 pages, $27.95
Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany
By Donald L. Miller
Simon & Schuster, 671 pages, $35
Too Dead to Die: A Memoir of Bataan and Beyond
By Steve Raymond and Mike Pride
Plaidswede, 209 pages, $24.95
In the midst of relentless Nazi bombing, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill was momentarily distracted from his country’s uncertain fate by the case of a Scottish soothsayer, Helen Duncan, a.k.a. “Hellish Nell.” The fuming Churchill was wondering how, in 1944, a woman could be brought to trial under that country’s Witchcraft Act of 1735. And how did it come about that the English courts were ” `kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery.’ “
The answer to Churchill’s disdainful query is “The Strange Case of Hellish Nell: The Story of Helen Duncan and the Witch Trial of World War II,” a dusty shred of World War II history brought to light by author Nina Shandler. The quirky tale moves at a fast-paced narrative gait that will remind readers of all the pleasures contained in “The Devil in the White City.”
Duncan, whom Shandler calls “the most widely traveled and talked-about medium in Britain,” overindulged in whiskeys and cigarettes. Her shiftless husband, Henry, exploited her “talents,” booking her into seance circles across the British Isles at a time when trying to communicate with the dead–called spiritualism–was on the rise.
In was during one of these seances that Duncan, channeling her usual spiritual guide, “Albert,” leaked the story of the sinking of the HMS Barham. In an attempt to keep the full extent of damage from the Nazis, the Brits had kept the loss hush-hush. With an unsuspecting wife of one of the Barham’s sailors in attendance, Duncan brought forth her husband’s apparition, who lamented:
” `Sorry Sweetheart, my ship sank in the Mediterranean. I’ve crossed over to the Other Side.’ “
Duncan was soon arrested, and nervous intelligence officials wanted her locked away for the duration of the war to keep other military movements secret, most importantly, the coming Allied invasion of Europe. Shandler deliciously recounts the trial and its cast of litigants. Through it all, Duncan remains a fabulously unsympathetic character.
In a bloody, three-month span in 1940, from Sept. 7 to Dec. 8, there were only three days when the German Luftwaffe did not bomb London, Margaret Gaskin tells us in “Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940.” Adolf Hitler’s strategy of “air raids to disable and demoralize before ground troops rolled in” was successful in Poland, Spain and the Netherlands. Indeed, it was the reason he had conquered most of Europe. But relentless bombing could not break England. So, on Dec. 29, Hitler tried to burn London to the ground.
“Blitz” recalls that fateful, courageous day of British resistance while placing the bombing within the larger context of World War II. Margaret Gaskin’s account is well worth enduring a choppy, scattershot style that incorporates too many similar perspectives.
What does come across in “Blitz” is England’s unified effort to remain the last free democracy in Europe. Buoyed by Winston Churchill’s defiant pledge, ” `[W]e would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes, than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved.'” Londoners of all stripes rallied to Churchill’s call. At the symbolic St. Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of London’s historic square mile, a 24-hour volunteer watch was formed with ” `men from forty to sixty who can walk up stairs and not fear heights or fire.’ “
At 6:17 p.m. the Luftwaffe began dropping the first of “10,470 firebombs into the heart of the British Empire.” Firestorms with winds of more than 60 m.p.h. quickly spread through the city. Although damage was heavy, meteorological luck played a part in stemming further damage. A second sortie by the Nazis–one that would have attacked fire crews–was canceled because of the usual rotten weather that plagues northern Europe. In all, casualties were light, around 200. And when the smoke cleared, St. Paul’s emerged intact.
Dresden, Germany, would have no such luck on Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day 1945, when more than 35,000 people were killed from three relentless waves of British and American air strikes that resulted in a horrific firestorm. The Saxony center of art and culture dubbed “Florence on the Elbe,” was a “highly combustible” city of ancient buildings and a population of mainly women, children and elderly men, according to Marshall De Bruhl’s “Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden.” Dresden was also a hub of war industries.
“Firestorm” raises important questions regarding so-called moral bombing, the intentional killing of civilians. De Bruhl writes that World War II marked an ominous turning point in warfare, when “no weapon was considered inappropriate and all targets–whether persons or places–were considered appropriate.”
Certainly those rules of engagement applied to both sides. The German Luftwaffe ruthlessly bombed Coventry and London in England, and Rotterdam in the Netherlands; Allied forces razed the German cities of Cologne, Luebeck, Pforzheim and Hamburg, the site of the war’s first firestorm.
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Operation Thunderclap, however, took moral bombing to a new level. America’s role was especially cruel. After British planes laid down a carpet of incendiaries (Churchill wanted to use poison gas) that set off the firestorm, American B-17s dropped tons of bombs on “emergency workers and rescuers.” Pilots’ orders were to hit “anything that moved.”
The question of why continues to haunt historians. After all, the war was all but over. Dresden was virtually unguarded. Was it simply revenge? Military experts point out Dresden’s support of the German war effort. Sir Arthur Traver Harris, commander of Britain’s Bomber Command, said at the time:
” `Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.’ “
A thorough examination of the evolution of U.S. bombing policy is an underlying theme in Donald Miller’s absorbing and exhaustive history of the U.S. 8th Air Force, “Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany.”
The 8th, created in 1942 by Lt. Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, consisted of a diverse collection of volunteers who faced heart-breaking attrition rates. When pilots weren’t being fatally wounded by flak or held prisoner–sometimes in secret Swiss prison camps–they suffered frostbite, chronic middle-ear infections, oxygen deprivation and emotional breakdowns. The 8th Air Force lost more men during the war than did the entire Marine Corps. The genesis for the inclusion of all civilians as enemy combatants came from an Italian air commander, Gen. Giulio Douhet, whose 1921 book, “The Command of the Air,” became the model for American William “Billy” Mitchell, an early and important advocate for the use of air power to lessen the type of “close-quarter slaughter” between infantrymen so prevalent in past wars. Mitchell agreed when Douhet wrote, ” `War . . . has to be regarded unemotionally as a science, regardless of how terrible a science.’ ” In World War II, Miller says, “1.5 million people, more than one-half of them women, were killed by bombs . . . as opposed to roughly 3,000 in World War I, a 500-fold increase in civilian mortality.”
Miller leaves no doubt as to the contribution of the 8th Air Force to defeating the Germans and helping end what could have a much longer war. A captured Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister for armaments, said, ” `The losses inflicted by the American and British airfleets . . . constituted for Germany the greatest lost battle of the war,’ and it was the Americans, he emphasized, who delivered the most telling blows.”
On Dec. 7, 1941, 17 days after Army Air Corps recruit Steve Raymond disembarked in the Philippine capital of Manila, the same Japanese air force that attacked Peal Harbor attacked his unit. Raymond was one of 12,000 U.S. and 66,000 Filipino troops captured four months later on the Bataan peninsula. After surviving the infamous, 65-mile Bataan Death March, Raymond would spend the next 31/2 years as a slave for the Japanese. Throughout this ordeal, even when his weight dropped to 108 pounds and his hands were numb from beriberi, he somehow scrawled out a diary, often dutifully recording the names of his fallen comrades.
“Too Dead to Die: A Memoir of Bataan and Beyond” is Raymond’s inspiring, nail-biter of a story that highlights the cruelty of captivity and means of survival. The rough edges of the narrative are polished smooth by Mike Pride, editor of New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor.
After barely managing the Death March, Raymond was held at Camp O’Donnell, a Dante’s “Inferno” of barbarity and disease, where some 18,000 Filipinos and 1,600 Americans died in the first six weeks. “There were no saints in O’Donnell,” Raymond writes, as he describes prisoners knocking gold and silver out of the teeth of fresh corpses to later trade for rations of food.
Equal parts fortune and moxie kept Raymond alive through his labors at a steel mill and a loading dock until the day in 1945 when a Japanese guard said, ” `Senso Owaru’ . . . the war is over.” Early on he divided his fellow prisoners into two groups, “the give-ups and the believers.” He fell into the latter category, the ones who “knew they had not reached the end of their endurance.”