Book Review of Steel Girls on the Home Front by Michelle Rawlins

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The war in 1940 without the benefit of any hindsight or strategic overview.

 

This is well-researched historical fiction, but the author has done a good job of finding out (and imagining) what her characters would have known and thought about the early stages of the second world war rather than conducting detailed research into the big picture at any particular stage. Everything is changing because of how the war is going in Norway, but this is all about working class people in Sheffield and they had only the vaguest idea just what it was that was happening in Norway. (Non-fiction works that I have read suggest that in early 1940 the British War Cabinet didn’t really know either. It was only after the surviving Norwegian forces were based on British soil that cooperation and information-sharing really began to happen.)

When the same disaster happens in France, then the Cabinet does know, because British forces have been there in strength for long enough to establish proper communications and the distances are shorter. This magnifies the shock when the public are actually told the worst because their new Prime Minister actually knows how bad things are.

Most of this book is about how the women who work for Vickers in Sheffield cope with not knowing where most of their menfolk are and how much danger they are in. They cope by unselfishly looking after each other and the few men they have left as best they can -and by keeping as busy as they can, not only to “do their bit” and help the war effort, but also to stop themselves thinking about what might happen. (Incidentally, in both NAZI Germany and the Soviet Union the ruling party took control of neighbourliness and social cohesion at every level through national party organisations or local party committees. Britain may have benefited from not having a ruling party as such during the second world war because it ruled out an entire category of fatal mistakes.)

But then there is the question of how such brave and kind women, mostly quite young, make the transition from coping with the unknown to coping with the worst. And that appears to be a question for the next book in this series.

Steel Girls on the Home Front by Michelle Rawlins is published in the UK by HQ on the 18^th of August 2022.

Book Review of Daughters of Paris by Elisabeth Hobbes

 

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Two young women grow up as France changes

This is a novel about two girls from different social classes growing up together in a time when the French middle classes were still trying to get back to the world they knew before the Great War and many of the social and political changes which took place in Britain and the United States in the twenties and thirties (especially votes for women) simply did not happen. But the author gets it right, rather than right-on, and the characters see things as young women of the the time might have seen them -and this changes throughout the story -and France changes with the young women.

The failure of French government and army in 1940 destroys that world and all hope (or danger) of it ever coming back, and the German occupation of Paris brings the two young women, who had been drifting apart, back together and steadily destroys the social and economic distinctions between them. We see the women coping with the occupiers (surrendered soldiers were sent at once to do forced labour in Germany, followed later by nearly all the young men who had not been soldiers) and the resistance eventually depends on brave young women when brave young men cannot be seen to walk the streets.

This is all well-described, and although the author doesn’t beat the reader over her head with her research she does get a lot of details pleasingly right: a single Lysander flying over a drop-point as if by chance and releasing a single supply cannister rather than drawing attention to any particular spot by landing on a field at night (which needed all sorts of extra skills and preparation) is exactly right for a supply drop to the French Resistance in the early days when everything had to be kept as simple as possible. As an Army Cooperation machine, dropping supply cannisters was designed into the Lysander from the start and was even used to sustain rearguard troops during the battle of France in 1940. The author also shows us that brave young French women were always likely to regard the cannister’s parachute as a resource to equal the cannister’s contents.

The other historically-accurate detail is that the greatest danger to all citizens in Occupied France, whether they were resistance workers or just young mothers desperate to find food for their children, was a denunciation to the Police or Gestapo born completely out of spite over some entirely petty confrontation or vendetta. (There actually was an internal Gestapo memo in 1942 which complained that most of the people they were arresting were completely innocent and had been denounced either for revenge or for rewards.)

This is a pleasing book which gets its messages across in the right sort of way.

“Daughters of Paris” by Elisabeth Hobbes is published in the UK by Harper Collins on the 5^th of August 2022.