Sven Hassel and books for boys

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

The Danish writer Sven Hassel wrote fourteen novels set during the Second World War. The second of these, Wheels of Terror, which was first published in 1959, has just been reissued by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Paperback, ��8.99), in anticipation of a graphic novel version by Jordy Diago, which Weidenfeld are bringing out in October.

Alan Sillitoe, the author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, is quoted on the back cover of Wheels of Terror: ���This is a book of horrors, and should be left alone by those prone to nightmares . . .  a great war novel!���. Well, that last point is highly disputable.  Under the rubric ���Great War Novels��� I would put All Quiet on the Western Front and Gabriel Chevallier���s Fear, the Sword of Honour trilogy and Catch-22, among many others. But not Wheels of Terror, which is certainly brutal, remorselessly, almost monotonously violent and crude. The narrator Sven is in the fictional 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment. The misfits and chancers of the 27th, who are regarded as entirely expendable, find themselves on the Russian front, where the fighting is at its most ferocious and shambolic, and the Geneva Convention is routinely flouted. The main character Joseph Porta is a lanky Communist sympathizer from Berlin; there���s a certain irony in the fact that he has been sent to fight against the Red Army (���Ivan���). Sven writes that ���we cared nothing for the Fatherland or Hitler���s war-aims. We fought only for our lives���.   

The dialogue, at least in I. O���Hanlon���s translation of 1959, is frequently terrible (it may be better in the original Danish): ������We���ll burn the fat off Hermann [Goering]���s backside when we have our revolution,��� hissed Porta���. ������Soon we���ll be back at the front and then we���ll see what���s in you, you Schleswig bible-puncher������. ������You call our F��hrer crazy? I���ll take a note of that!������ Comical . . .

Are Hassel���s books anti-war novels or glorifications of military violence? Hassel would claim they fall into the former category, written by a witness to terrible events, and it���s probably fair to give him the benefit of the doubt. The author was born Sven Pedersen in Denmark in 1917. After a period of unemployment he appears to have joined the Wehrmacht in 1937 and taken part in several campaigns, including the Russian one. In a Guardian obituary of the writer in 2012, Dan van der Vat wrote ���Mystery surrounds the events of [Hassel���s] own life���. The Danish journalist Erik Haaest, meanwhile, alleged that Hassel never served on the Russian front and that he got his information for his books from Danish Waffen SS officers. But Haaest also denied the existence of the Nazi death camps, so maybe his claims should be treated with scepticism.  

Britain accounts for some 15 million of Hassel���s worldwide sales of over 50 million books ��� a figure rather dwarfed by the late Jackie Collins���s 400 million. He was certainly popular when I was at school in the 1970s (his Monte Cassino was much passed around). His books fed a seemingly insatiable appetite for WW2 and Cold War spy stories, or tales of baddies intent on world domination. Into the mix I would also throw the novels of Alistair MacLean (my own favourite), Desmond Bagley and Hammond Innes. None of them had any literary pretensions, I sense, but they wrote exciting, well-plotted adventure stories. The anonymous TLS reviewer of MacLean���s Ice Station Zebra (1963) praised the way in which ���the story evolves in a succession of masterful puzzles as astonishing as they are convincing���. Does anyone recall MacLean���s The Guns of Navarone (made into a good film with Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn), Where Eagles Dare (film version with Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood and Mary Ure), or Caravan to Vaccar��s?

And then there was the former Times man Ian Fleming, whose James Bond novels were essential reading. I worked my way through the thirteen books in fairly short order. The Fleming world view is terribly politically incorrect of course: the back cover of my Pan edition of Dr No describes the Dr as ���a ruthless, power-crazed Chinaman���, while Le Chiffre in Casino Royale is a ���formidable, dangerous French Communist with large sexual appetites���. Of the wonderfully named Vesper Lynd (in the same novel), Fleming wrote, ���the conquest of her body would each time have the sweet tang of rape���. A pre-teen reader in the 70s would have been oblivious to the offensiveness of such an observation. The actor Daniel Craig recently criticized Bond's Neanderthal attitudes towards women. He has a point.