Book Review of Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee's Memoir of World War II

Imagine being an exchange student on your way to a keg party one Saturday afternoon, and being picked up by the police and sent to camp, and then a series of prison-like camps in England and Canada for the next seven months before they bother to find out who you actually are. This is how the Accidental Journey begins. Had the Cambridge student, Max-Otto Ludwig Lowenstein, of Stuttgart, Germany chosen to go to Oxford, he would have been overlooked, but because Cambridge is near the coast, people of German and Austrian origins were rounded up and forced into internment camps in August 1939. About a month later, along with German POWs, German internees of every background suffered slave ship like conditions on their way to camps in Canada. Six months later, formal interviews were finally given to discern their level of threat to the Anglo-Allied world and Lowenstein was freed. His school ties came in handy because the Commissioner for Prisons who interview him had come occasionally to speak at his school. Granted formal status in England as a friendly alien, Lowenstein became a private in the Pioneer Corps, the only military organization in England that accepts foreigners.

By 1942, the British Army created special units that allowed some foreign participation. After passing all of the requirements for a Glider Regiment, Lowenstein had to change his name to a British sounding one, Mark Oliver Lawrence Lynton. By 1943, Lynton was able to transfer to the Royal Armored Corps, the Royal Tank Regiment of the British Army. Thanks again in part again to Lynton's (Lowenstein's) Public school ties, in which he played rugby, he was recommended to officer school (p.100). For the remaining 165 pages of the book, Lynton takes us through officer training school and back into the Third Tank Regiment of the Eleventh Armored Corps Division, the same regiment that was victorious against the Italians in North Africa earlier in the war. Lynton's stories and observations are always entertaining and revealing of the absurdity of the internment and the lower echelons of the military, but his stories from the Third Tank Division and subsequent assignments in the Secret Service during the Occupation of Germany show especially well the British and Allies' perspective of the war and the Occupation of Germany.

As a Second Lieutenant (he eventually becomes a Captain), Lynton led a squad of tanks in the invasion of Normandy seven days after D-Day, and helped lead the Allies into Germany until the formal end of the war almost a year later. Because the tank division is the primary advancing unit, Lynton saw fighting up until the end of the war in early April:

There is a widelyheld belief that once the Allies broke out of the Normandy beachheads, the remaining war was just a breeze, except for a few hiccups like Arnhem, Ardennes, or Huertgen Forest, and the mention of twenty-mile a day tank runs reinforces that view. But a few figures show a different picture. From the day Eleventh Armored landed in Normandy to the day of German surrender, the war lasted 330 days. The division started with 400 tanks, which meant 2000 men, and of those, 602 were dead on May 8, 1945. Among them were 201 tank commanders and 78 officers. Allowing for the traditional ratio of three men wounded to one man killed, that means more than 2,400 people either wounded or killed, thus we turned over the entire division more than once; not exactly a walkover (pp.124-5).

During the eleven months of battle, Lynton lost four tanks to the more technologically advanced German 88 millimeter guns and tanks, the Tiger and Panther. According to Lynton, the much congratulated Allied strategy on D-Day, etc., was not as decisive a factor:

Whole libraries have been filled with dissertations on the strategy of that period, how Montgomery and the British and Canadian component of the Allies were to immobilize the Germans by constant frontal attacks, so as to allow Patton and the U.S. troops to hook around the right flank and break through. Maybe that was the plan, perhaps these luminaries had even talked about it and, though less likely, knew what they were doing; none of it percolated down the line. We just slugged it out with assorted Panzer divisions, like a couple of punch drunk fighters, and after a while they literally ran out of gas, and we got lucky. When we did break through, we had beaten the Germans, but not because we were better at fighting. I am firmly convinced, as others have been, that we did not win the war; Hitler lost it. (pp.132-3).

Lynton's storytelling keeps the reader moving along with the Third Tank Regiment as it liberates Belgium, celebrates, and then continues into Germany. Lynton's offers numerous candid views of the way how many British viewed the American forces around time of the German Ardennes offensive in December 1944:

There was a lack of both interest and respect for U.S. troops among the British soldiery at the time, based very largely on ignorance. The Americans had not been impressive in their first outing in North Africa, the only time when they and the British had directly fought together. Third Royal Tank Regiment had been there and was dismissive about their efforts. Nothing during their stay in England had endeared them to their British colleagues; they were too rich, too noisy, too successful with girls, and there were too many of them. About the only interesting thing about Americans was that there were also black troops, then still and intriguing novelty in England; that these were in fact segregated, was an aspect we were unaware of.

All we knew about Americans since the Normandy invasion was what we had read in the papers, which mostly featured Patton, who sounded as much a son of a bitch as Montgomery, and was and "expensive" general to boot. Montgomery was not likely to win any popularity contest with the Third RTR (Royal Tank Regiment) or any other British troops, but he did have two things going for him. He would tell you what he intended to do and then do it -- other British generals told you nothing, and then it became painfully clear that whatever they were not telling you was not working anyway. More importantly, Montgomery was an "economical" general; he may have missed opportunities and wasted material (he certainly had don so time and again since Normandy), but he did not waste lives if he could keep them alive and that was the beginning and the end of Monty's popularity.

Patton, on the other hand, seemed a "blood-and-guts" clown, forever taking unnecessary risks at his soldiers expense,and old hand like Third RTR despised and feared such grandstanding glory hounds and disdained troops who seemed to admire such antics. Omar Bradley, on the other hand, seemed cautious and competent, but then you never read much about him. No one ever viewed Eisenhower as a fighting general; he seemed a kind of administrative coordinator and spokesman, and anyway was operating so far in the rear as to be on another planet. In short, the news of American setbacks did not particularly concern us (pp.144-5).

Franklin Delenor Roosevelt, however, represented a better side of America to many British, and his death stunned British troops, according to Lyndon. Without, Roosevelt, says Lynton, Churchill could not have united Britain as easily:

Churchill sustained and saved England, there is no doubt abou that. But he could not have done it and we would not have been here without FDR. . . . I remember the sudden and total silence at the announcement and then several men sobbing; it seemed wholly natural that they would. Most of all I remember that I was sitting not ten feet away from a dead German lying in the ditch, and here I was mourning a man I had never seen, and I had no emotional response at all to a dead fellow human being (p.156-7).

The last hundred pages of the book are devoted to the Occupation of Germany when the author worked at increasingly high levels in Intelligence as an interrogator of many of the ex-German soldiers and officers. From this unique perspective, Lynton observes different styles and relationships among the Allies and between the Allies and Germans. Lynton's comments shed light on post-war international relations.

The Germans were organized and painstaking, the Americans had limitless equipment, funds, and enthusiasm but were poor analysts, the Russians had manpower, perseverance, and no analytic skills at all, and the French were subtle and intuitive but could not be bothered to gather facts. It is conceivable that the British melange of humor, craftiness, self-deprecation, perfidy, luck, inspired guessing, amateurism, indolence and almost four centuries of "having been at it" (ever since Walsingham and Queen Elizabeth) made them particularly suitable. Secrecy and deviousness tend to appeal to the British, the ability constantly to hide behind a bluff John Bull image being just being just one example, so maybe they are better at this game than others. Whatever the explanation, my ability to speak German the way I did was never once inquired about.

Russian participation in the Occupation, provided a crucial dynamic for post-war international relations. The Germans hated and feared the Russians more than any country and willingly gave secrets to the British so that the Russians would not get them. Night vision technology is one example.

Just about all Germans then and for years afterwards believed war between the West and Russia to be inevitable and wanted us to be as well equipped for that showdown as possible. After the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, I hardly met a German who did not urge use of it against Russia and the sooner, the better, as long as we had the advantage. The German fear and hatred of the Russians was not merely an amalgam of historical mistrust and antagonism but was based on the overriding memory of merciless fighting in Russia, the scope and bitterness of which was wholly inconceivable to us, and the utter savagery with which the Russians retaliated, both in battle and subsequently in occupation. The Russian front was one huge killing ground; nothing, in any war, can compare with it. These feelings were of course wholly reciprocated by the Russians.

According to Lynton, every country abused their power in Germany, but Russia, was the most affirmative of abuse:

There was of course not much left to rape or loot by that time, and dismantling and removing factories and capital goods naturally continued. However, contrary to what many believe, particularly in Germany, the atrocities began and ended as a deliberate and organized action of terror and retribution. The savagery was both encouraged and controlled, and at no time were the Russian troops out of hand in terms of their own discipline and chain of command (pp.188-9).

Examples of Russian organized atrocity are lacking from Lynton's generalizations, but his ample examples of British abuse of power, lead the reader to take him at his word that the Russians had a different view of humanity than other Allied nations by the end of the war. Russian suffering and loss of 20 million during the war created a world view that was almost incomprehensible to Anglo-American countries in particular. A description of an exchange in a seminar on winning wars given by Allied generals, Eisenhower, Zhukov, Montgomery, and de Lattre is a good example:

During the ensuing "question and answer" period, Zhukov queried the delay in breaking out of the Normandy bridgehead. Monty replied, via his interpreter, that the number and density of the minefields we encountered had made it impossible to move faster. Zhukov's comment was brutally simple and equally scary. He too had run into minefields on his advance; his tactics in such case had been to hold back his tanks and ram a couple of infantry divisions through the minefields. They would get blown up and so would the mines, and he could then push his tanks right through the gap without loss of momentum. Thus, he asked again, what had held us up? End of my story.

Lynton's memoir of his seven year 'accidental journey' is not a sob story of a minority being persecuted during the war; it is rather an entertaining, and rich vein of oral history from in which to consider the heroism and folly of war, as well as the comedy and tragedy of various cultures interacting.