ABSTRACT
War is subjected to innumerable falsifications in popular fiction. Arguably the truest reflection comes in that depressed, post-bellum trough a few years after victory: the period that in America produced such bestsellers of the late 1940s and early 1950s as The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, The Caine Mutiny and in Britain The Cruel Sea. Naturalistic treatments of war (which is essentially what the foregoing are) represent an interlude, or hangover phase, between the headlines of wartime propaganda and peacetime’s mythic, reductive, romantic, wish-fulfilling and fantastic treatments. At all periods, however, war is a popular subject. Any decentsized W.H.Smith’s will have a whole section devoted to ‘war’ and various kinds of war novel in it. (The largest European invasion of British bestseller racks has taken place in this genre, with the works of H.H.Kirst and Sven Hassell.) From the currently fashionable formulas of 1970s war fiction I have taken two. The first is ‘the secret history of the Second World War’, the second ‘fantasies of Nazism resurgent’. Both formulas are heavily imbued with a paranoid suspicion that the real course of events and state of things are very different from what the authorities and their ‘official’ histories would have us believe.
