Peter Englund: November 1942. The month of fate through the eyes of ordinary people (Onda nätters drömmar). Finnish Sirpa Hietanen. WSOY. 505 pp.
All started in Pultava. Swedish by Peter Englund the breakthrough work was also published in Finnish in 1989 and reminded us how history can be brought to life, even when writing about killing and death.
Heikki Ylkankanka it inspired me to write The road to Tampere with the aim of “creating as realistic and truthful a picture as possible [sisällis]from the everyday life of war, from its grassroots level”. The book was awarded at Tieto-Finlandia.
Others also began to pay even greater attention to the way history is presented, to the pull of the story without compromising analysis and the pursuit of truth. The trend has borne good fruit, even if there are excesses.
In Englund’s production, I have not been inspired so much by the splashes of battles as by his essays, which have been published in three collections in Finnish. In them, individuals elegantly open up to the general, combining insightful views with the mental landscapes of the past.
Second World War has been rigged from every angle so that it is not easy to come up with a new income angle to satisfy the demand that remains high. Everything has been said about Stalingrad and Treblinka, but the reason is that they are still repeated through both fact and fiction.
Englund’s new work November 1942 lingers in both, but they are just stoppages among dozens of others on the world’s burning stage. The war is depicted along with the Eastern Front and extermination camps in North Africa, the Atlantic and the Far East, where the Allies launched an attack against Japan on the island of Guadalcanal.
The same truth applied everywhere: “It wouldn’t be easy to get out of this hell alive, but it would be a hundred times harder to stay human.” And life or death was decided by the “sacred geometry of chance”, regardless of the fitness or courage of each individual.
For Englund, the war is not a neat job at the headquarters’ maps. The generals have no place in this mosaic of fragments except as guardians of their own reputation, for which others pay the price.
Numbing more interesting than the combat depictions are the glimpses of civilians offered by both a British pacifist and a student opposition cell in Germany. Or all those who just tried to continue an ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances: in Berlin, Brussels, Leningrad, Paris…
Three American women building a B-17 bomber. Before the war, women made up one percent of the workforce in the aviation industry, in 1943 already 65 percent.
There was no fighting on the American continent, but young men and women were harnessed for war work there as well. If Germany and Japan relied on the victory of the will of the master nation over matter, Englund reminds us of the superior production capacity and logistical organizational ability of the United States.
A shipyard is being built on the coast of Georgia in Savannah, and an atomic bomb is being prepared in Chicago. There are also goodies in the book Casablanca-finishing the film towards its premiere tied to the course of the war.
It is more difficult to enjoy the fate of Korean comfort women in the field brothels of Burma. The German submarine crew, on the other hand, was reserved unlimited wine and women in a French mansion, before the order went to the depths of the sea, on average the third time for good.
Englund’s novelty does not aim to tell the plans and course of military operations, but “what it was like”. November 1942 offers a global panorama built on individual experiences recorded in diaries, letters and memoirs. Women’s gaze is admirably included.
A piece of the North African desert and not much else could be seen from the observation port of the tank. Afterwards, the men were able to wash the sand from their eyes and read that they were part of El Alamein’s world-historical turning point.
Photograph of the Battle of Buna by George Silk. Australian soldiers next to a carefully camouflaged and well-constructed, now captured Japanese bunker. In the foreground, four of the slain defenders of the structure.
The frog perspective has evidentiary force because the frame narrative is familiar. The footnotes contain a moderate amount of nipple information for those who need it.
When the German writer Ernest Younger loiters in the final pages on the eastern front, what he sees corresponds to the apocalypse of the Thirty Years’ War from the 17th century. The same chaos prevails on Englund’s battlefields as in Pultava, which is still located today in Ukraine.
A Lancaster bomber over Hamburg on the night of January 31, 1943, photographed by the target camera of another bomber. This is what the British bomber air force’s all-time fiercest air attacks on various targets on the European continent looked like. The larger, fuzzy lights are light projectiles, the squiggly lines are anti-aircraft light streaking projectiles. Their old ones in the picture are due to the long exposure time of the camera and the movements of the aircraft. – Peter Englund’s book illustration.
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The view from Syvär
Ruotsinkieliseltä Collected from Ostrobothnia, JR 61 is one of the most studied regiments of the Continuation War. In November 1942, it was stationed in Syväri, where a 19-year-old soldier Kurt West got his baptism of fire in the middle of a mostly uneventful positional war.
The case and the place fit perfectly into Peter Englund’s personal gallery, but produce a couple of problematic generalizations. According to the book, on the home side of the frustrated corporals, tango plays in dance restaurants, there are swing clubs in the city and life is seemingly carefree.
However, there was a ban on dancing in Finland, for breaking which thousands were sentenced every year.
Of course, the law was known to be circumvented in, for example, dance schools, such as Marko Tikka and Seija-Leena Nevala describe in their Finlandia award-winning study. “In Helsinki, perhaps around 10,000 people per week protest,” the Suomen Sosialidemokratti complained in the fall of 1942.
Englund also refers to the fact that the Swedish speakers were not enthusiastic about the Suur-Suomi projects, when they themselves were even tried to threaten the Finns. Certainly so, but skepticism about the war of conquest did not travel along the language barrier.
The author is a docent of political history at the University of Helsinki, who works as a researcher at the think tank Magma.