Book Review: Murder in Memoriam (1984) by Didier Daeninckx

France's conflict in Algeria from 1954-62 is to French culture and history what the American Civil War and Vietnam are to America. It's a conflict that was exceedingly cruel and bloody, and almost led to a coup d'etat in France. Needless to say, writing or talking about this war within France can still raise hackles across the political spectrum, and it's only in the last twenty or so years that France has really begun to have some honest conversations about its involvement in Algeria.

Murder in Memoriam is an agitprop murder mystery. The plot is about the apparently senseless murder of a university student, which, as it turns out, relates directly to the murder of his father twenty years previously. The father was killed on the night of October, 17, 1961, in Paris during the protests by Algerians for Algerian independence. But the goal of the novel is to throw some light on the brutal crimes perpetrated by the Paris police and the government against the protestors. It's estimated that perhaps 300 of these people were shot down in cold blood, beaten to death, or handcuffed and thrown into the Seine to drown. It's a massacre that wasn't spoken about for years in France, and, according to the introduction, this book eventually led to the man who was Prefect of Paris at the time being put under investigation. He was found to be a war criminal who had enthusiastically helped the Nazis round up Jews in France. He went to trial, was found guilty, and sent to prison.

Daeninckx's book works quite well as a mystery, and his Inspector Cadin is an enthusiastic and engaging detective, but the author's real purpose is to rip off the scab that's formed over France's memories of October 17/61 and the role of French citizens in the Holocaust. It's a tall order, but he pulls it off neatly, never sounding preachy or didactic. Algeria is still a hot button topic in France. A film made about the October 17 massacre a few years ago (the title escapes me) shied away from showing just how bloody it was. And a film called Days of Glory (2006) gives France's Algerian colonial troops, called Goumiers, the full Saving Private Ryan treatment for their role in the Second World War. This turns out to be a whitewash job as revealed in Jame's Holland's book on the Italian campaign. It's clear that the French, like any ex-colonial power, have an extreme reluctance to confront the crimes of the past. And for my dual review of two excellent Franco-Algerian themed films, The Battle of Algiers and The Day of the Jackal, click here.

Book Review: Italy's Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944-45 (2008) by James Holland

The Italian campaign has often been glossed over in histories of the Second World War. It didn't have the epic scope of the Russian Front, the strategic significance of the invasion of France or the drama of the war in the Pacific. The war as it was waged in Italy was a long, hard slog that featured no famous battles and no charismatic commanders. Italy's landscape of hills, mountains and poorly-built roads made it ideal for defense, and James Holland shows how the Allies were doomed to an arduous fight to climb up the length of Italy.

Two things stand out in this history: the first is the ferocity and frequency of German reprisals against the civilian population. Partisans in northern Italy were a serious menace for the Germans ( far more so than what they faced from the French Resistance), and they responded to partisan attacks with mass shootings of civilians, including women and children. The worst atrocities took place on the Monte Sole plateau as the Germans tried to root out the Stella Rosa partisan group. The civilian population of the area was almost entirely massacred, including over 200 women and children in a single killing in a cemetery. The second revelation is that not all atrocities were committed by the Germans. Holland reveals, in sickening detail, the wholesale rapes committed by French colonial troops from Algeria (called Goumiers) as they fought their way up Italy's spine. Their crimes went unpunished. The French film Days of Glory (2006) is about the Goumiers and turns out to have been a complete whitewash job.

James Holland is a decent writer, but he doesn't offer the wit or acute analysis that you get with Max Hastings, the current king of military historians. Holland's book would have been better with more discussion of the civil and political disorder that gripped northern Italy in the immediate aftermath of the war. He also glosses over the way the Allied forces allowed the mafia to become even more entrenched in southern Italy.