After the unexpected fall of France in the summer of 1940, the British had no choice but to import food and supplies exclusively by sea. So the Nazis directed their U-boats, now departing from the more advantageous ports of the occupied country next door, to target merchant ships. The strategy: Starve the British, force them to give up. Catching them unprepared, it almost worked. In A Game of Birds and Wolves (2020), Simon Parkin examines the Battle of the Atlantic during World War II and finds a profusion of material, beyond the gritty details of combat and the development of tactical maneuvers through gameplay. The reader gets a sense of what life is like on a British ship and a German U-boat. Even as Parkin condemns the Nazis, he takes the additional step of granting them human faces too. He spotlights the personal histories of a number of figures and their experiences during and after the war. He has anecdotes, one of the best involving a woman named Pamela George: She's tasked with delivering an important message from one side of Plymouth to the other, where the commander-in-chief is. She jumps on a motorcycle and flies through the night as the Luftwaffe drop bombs on the city. One blows up near her. She's thrown off and the bike's tires are mangled. She runs the rest of the way. Upon delivering her message, she offers to deliver the response. Parkin traces the origin of the Wrens, women, some fresh out of high school, recruited reluctantly by the navy to, among other things, devise advanced naval tactics through war games and teach them to seasoned veterans. He looks back on the second-class status of women in British society prewar and, to some extent, postwar. He takes an interest in the budding romances between men and women on the job. He speaks directly, contemplating the senselessness of war. He notes his family's connection to the story. Where Parkin falters is in managing all of this.
The opening section ends on a cliffhanger straight out of a generic spy novel or movie. When it is finally revisited, near the end of the book, it turns out to be a minor incident of little importance. Destruction at sea, destruction on land, privation, numerous lives lost - it's plenty grave but Parkin, maybe for fear of losing the reader early, frames it with what comes off like a cheap rug-pull gag. From here, awkward choices continue to grate. Within chapters, chapter after chapter, his tone and perspectives shift, he jumps back and forth through time, digresses, making his story an unnecessary chore to follow. Good luck trying to sort out names. And what he does and doesn't foreground can be baffling. He makes room in the main text for anecdotes about pubic hairs and flatulence. But he relegates the following paragraph to a footnote:
The British government was also accountable for ensuring its colonial subjects had food during wartime, a responsibility in which it often failed. In Bengal, for example, between two and three million Indians died of preventable famine after the British government prioritized distribution of food supplies to the military, civil servants and other "priority classes." This tragic fact must temper any sense of national pride at this moment of overcoming wartime hunger on the home front that same year.
Glibness, tortuousness, disproportion. Parkin attempts to capture everything about his subject and nothing quite pierces. He flattens a story of life-or-death consequence.
