European RC #2

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

Call it Treason – George Howe

Sometimes a guy needs a break from westerns and mysteries, so what better than a spy novel with heft? This 1949 thriller starts in February 1945 as operatives of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) recruit German POWs to serve as secret agents back inside Germany in order to collect information on military capacities and activities. Author Howe touches on the question “Why does a spy risk his life? For what compulsion, and for what torment in his life? The gunpoint never forced a man to loyalty, and still less to treason, whose rewards at best are slim and distant. If the spy wins he is ignored, if he loses, he is hanged.”

Howe presents three characters that are motivated by three drives: hankering for money and the goodies that go with it; love of risk and adventure; and the idealistic sense of duty to make a better world. The documentary start is full of interest, telling how agents were recruited from the Sarrebourg stockade in Lorraine. The OSS HQ was located in a castle near Lyon. Recruits were trained by the OSS team in a tiny inn hidden in a forest near Birkenwald village. There was time only for the ABCs of espionage training hurriedly given in the dining room, around a large oak table surrounded by heavy wooden chairs. Agents parachuted into remote areas away from towns to evade observation and allow agents time to bury their chutes.

Howe’s depiction of a police state in action in every nook and cranny of the country is harrowing and utterly believable. Happy, the 18-year-old who feels the duty to fight for freedom, sees the bodies of people hanged for the capital crime of defeatism, denounced by neighbors for uttering pessimistic ideas about the looming end of the war. Innkeepers and other ordinary people are scared to death of attracting the attention of the police. Hemmed in by so many anti-hoarding and other regulations, they know they are guilty of something, some crime that the authorities will find if they only look and trump up.

Written by OSS operative George Howe, this novel was made into a movie Decision before Dawn in 1951. He brings his WWII espionage experience in providing documentation (forging probably) and cover stories to this novel. Educated at Harvard, Howe has a respect for language and a storyteller’s gift for keeping the tale moving. I recommend this fictionalized memoir to fans of WWII novels such as The Cruel Sea.