Smiling Al' Tells All
HANSER, RICHARD
WRITERS and WRITING 'Smiling Al' Tells All Kesselring: A Soldier's Record. By Albert Kesselring. Morrow. 376 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Richard Hanser Co-author of "Victory at Sea," prize-winning TV...
...This note of nostalgia for the great days of the past recurs throughout the book...
...How true that is...
...With this book he erects a heroic memorial to himself, gilds it lovingly from head to foot, and invites the world to join him in pelting it with flowers...
...He cites the Hague Convention in a strangulated attempt to justify bis unprovoked bombing of neutral Rotterdam, but refers to Allied attacks on German industrial cities as "terror" raids...
...The writing of the unemployed generals came to an abrupt halt...
...The German Air Force, he tells us further, did not lose the Battle of Britain...
...If Kesselring's story were not so inextricably bound up with the enslavement, agony and death of millions, there would be something positively comical about bis literary performance...
...However, he was soon transferred to another camp, where he was "made to feel that [he] was among people of [his] own kind...
...Reviewing the period when the Luftwaffe was preparing to blackjack Czechoslovakia and destroy Poland, he writes: "My heart leaps up when I think back to those months of constructive work...
...predicted Hermann Goering at Nuremberg, "they will be building monuments to us...
...In Sicily, the Field Marshal's triumphs continued unabated...
...He was never fooled for an instant by the bungling maneuvers of the Allied commanders, and his flight from the island was nothing short of masterly...
...The achievements of the Germans in North Africa "must rank with the epic feats of military history...
...be tells us...
...It goes like this: "To the young I would say that the meaning of life lies in the endeavor to do right, and that perfection is not to be found on this earth...
...whenever Hitler snapped his fingers...
...No wonder, then, that Mr...
...Hitler...
...It was his squadrons that laid Warsaw in ruins, set Rotterdam aflame and devastated Coventry...
...It was now that "Smiling Al" came through handsomely for the Historical Division...
...At Salerno, though handicapped by having superior forces in position and waiting, he contrived to lose the crucial beaches brilliantly...
...The Luftwaffe, he continues, conducted its war on the highest humanitarian level, always confining itself strictly to military targets...
...This is where he became known as "Smiling Al" and where he met S. L. A. Marshall...
...After the war, Kesselring relates with distaste, he was briefly thrown behind barbed wire by the victorious Allies...
...Reviewed by Richard Hanser Co-author of "Victory at Sea," prize-winning TV documentary...
...Chief Historian of the European Theater, who has written the introduction to this book...
...Marshall wrote his grateful introduction...
...Kesselring's qualification for writing a hook is that he was among the foremost of those mindless military lackeys who cracked their heels and bellowed "Jawohl, mein Fuhrer...
...Now he is at large again, strutting at the head of the Stahlhelm, being feted at American air bases, and writing books...
...No detail is spared of his glittering failure to hold Italy, for which he was appointed by a grateful Fuhrer to preside over the culminating insanity of last-ditch resistance inside Germany...
...These, it will be recalled, were the epic feats which, through the tactical genius of Rommel and the inspired strategy of Kesselring, resulted in the surrender of 250,000 troops and the complete collapse of the Axis in the Mediterranean...
...But Field Marshal Kesselring couldn't wait...
...says Kesselring with a perfectly straight face, "was not to bring down enemy fighters, but to get the enemy [the RAF!] to fight...
...journalist, translator "In fifteen years...
...Albert Kesselring reached the apex of his career, and was content...
...With the total disaster of German arms...
...To this day, Kesselring is deeply moved by the unwavering confidence that Hitler bestowed upon him...
...1 had behind me a rich life in which there could be no further peaks of experience...
...Sensitive souls all, they went into a mass sulk at the indignity of having their records read out in public...
...The work went swimmingly until the opening of the Nuremberg Trials (which Marshall, with that cool accuracy of phrase one likes to find in a historian, describes as a "cauldron of calumny...
...And no wonder that be quotes, for the edification of his readers, a little philosophical gem from the Field Marshal...
...we read (and we can all but hear the catch in the throat), "treated me with quite astonishing kindness and consideration...
...and how good of Kesselring to remind us of it...
...It seems that Marshall had rounded up a gaggle of ex-Nazi generals and set them to writing their own accounts of military operations...
...His sentence was first commuted to life imprisonment and then lifted altogether...
...Our difficulty...
...An upside-down, inside-out quality pervades the entire book, as if he were deliberately trying to see what limits of absurdity be could reach and still get into print...
...For the slaughter of civilian hostages in Italy he was condemned to death as a war criminal...
...Twice he lent me his car and chauffeur...
...The people of Kesselring's "own kind," it turns out, were the officers in charge of the U. S. Army's Historical Division at Allendorf...
...Soothing his colleagues' ruffled feelings, he soon had all the historians scribbling busily away again...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 22
