Hart's War

Stalag 17 meets the best of John Grisham in this tremendously exciting and moving new thriller, about a murder trial inside a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. John Katzenbach has taken elements of his own father's history in such a camp, added a racial twist (the defendant is a black pilot, a member of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen), and created a memorable adventure story that soars with hope and cries out to be filmed. The first thing that former law student Tommy Hart does after his B-25 is shot down and he--the only survivor--is captured, is to fill out a form for the International Red Cross, telling his family he's alive and requesting, under "Special Items Needed," a copy of Edmund's Principles of Common Law . Amazingly, the book is waiting when he arrives at Stalag Luft Thirteen in the Bavarian woods. Hart soon puts it to good use, defending (with the help of two other prisoners, a former London barrister and a Canadian police detective) the prickly, proud Lieutenant Lincoln Scott when he is charged with killing a racist and corrupt fellow prisoner. The Nazis, especially a resident SS observer, have their own reasons for wanting the trial to be seen as a fair one, and it takes place against the backdrop of a planned mass escape. Katzenbach deftly balances a dozen major characters with credible scenes of legal and extra-legal action. His previous thrillers, available in paperback, include Day of Reckoning , In the Heat of the Summer , Just Cause , The Shadow Man , State of Mind , and The Traveler . --Dick Adler From Publishers Weekly Vivid and unpredictable characters and diabolically imagined suspense distinguish Katzenbach's (The Shadow Man) seventh novel. Set in the desperately bleak landscape of a German POW compound during the latter days of WWII, this is a thriller with more on its mind than entertainment, as Katzenbach tackles the theme of racial bias that breeds explosive consequences. Held captive since 1942, 2nd Lt. Tommy Hart?ex-Harvard Law student and navigator on an ill-fated B-25?is one of the most senior POWs at Stalag Luft 13 when African-American 1st Lt. Lincoln Scott, P-51 pilot, arrives as a new prisoner in May of 1944. Abrasively antisocial, lone-wolf Scott isolates himself from the other American officers, and quickly becomes the target of racial hatred from oft-decorated, Mississippi-born Capt. Vincent Bedford, aka "Trader Vic"?a treacherous wheeler-dealer who will barter anything to friend or enemy alike. He is soon found in the latrine with his throat cut and Hart is appointed to defend the obvious suspect, Scott, against what seems to be his impending rendezvous with a firing squad. Facing almost hopeless odds, Hart enlists the aid of two British POWs with astute forensic credentials. Slowly, a pattern of deceit begins to take shape, revealing duplicity from both POWs and captors. Katzenbach's setting is flawlessly grim, and his characters chillingly reveal the divisive bigotry of soldiers ostensibly fighting for the same values, as well as some unexpected sources of redemption. Despite some unnecessary repetitive details (e.g., the ineffectively recurring symbol of Hart's cherished wristwatch), this deeply affecting, artfully paced war epic will hold readers enthralled to the nail-biting end. Military Book Club and Literary Guild alternates; film rights to MGM. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews A courtroom drama with an interesting spin on ``change of venue,'' the venue here being a German POW camp. Lieutenant Tommy Hart, sole survivor of a downed B-25, is spending his war in Stalag Luft 13. Like his fellow prisoners, Tommy is bedeviled by his keepers, debilitating homesickness, near starvation, and, perhaps worst of all, tedium. He counters the last by setting himself a major project: reading the law. A third-year student at Harvard when the war interrupted, Tommy's been tapping the Red Cross for books so that he can fill his educational gaps. Then an unsettling, even scary, thing happens. He finds himself thrust into a courtroom for real. Morehe's first chair in a capital case. Still morethe defendant, his client, Lieutenant Lincoln Scott, appears to have been caught dead to rights. And even that doesn't fully cover it. For 1942, Lieutenant Scott is the wrong colorpart of a pioneering wave of black fighter pilots, a color not popular at Stalag Luft 13. On the other hand, the man Scott's accused of murdering could have run for the Stalag presidency and won in a walk. Tommy quickly realizes that he's been placed in first chair mostly so that it can be pulled out from under him: Both he and his client have been set up. At first, their alliance is fragile; then it strengthens as they battle to expose liars and conspirators, in and out of the courtroom, whatever uniform they might wear. As usual with Katzenbach (State of Mind, 1997, etc.), there's just too much novel here, some of it pat and predictable besides. Intermixed, however, are scenes of considerable power, even a few of tenderness. On balance, maybe the authors best. (Literary Guild alternate) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "Few writers of crime fiction seem to understand the criminal mind as well as Katzenbach."--People Finding Hart's War By John Katzenbach When my father was a young man, he went to war, as so many others of his generation did. When he returned home in 1945, after a year of air combat and nearly three years in a German POW camp, he eagerly went about the routine business of restarting his life. School, family, and career. It was important for him, as it was for so many other veterans, to set aside the horrors they'd experienced, and move directly on to the greater challenge of the normal world. And so, by the time I was born in 1950, the war, and all the wreckage it caused within him, had been shunted aside, replaced with the promises that post-World War II America enthusiastically held out. What happened to him overseas was shelved, like an old book out of print and out of date, destined to gather cobwebs and dust in a darkened corner of some library. He did not speak of his friends on the Green Eyes and how they'd been shot down. Nor did he talk of the cold and deprivation at Stalag Luft 3, or the deadly combination of total boredom coupled with constant fear and doubt as to whether they would survive to live another day. The only lessons we learned from that time was how he'd acquired all his books to complete his undergraduate degree at Princeton, and how he'd used his time in captivity to study. In other words, how he'd helped to create his future, while trapped in near-despair. There were some moments, few and far between, when the memories of those times came to the surface. Once, while arguing with my older brother over the division of some item -- we couldn't have been older than eight and nine -- my father, in frustration, pointed out that when he was in POW camp occasionally a cake or some other delicacy would arrive from the States. He told us that this was always shared among the men in the bunkroom -- with one proviso: whoever divided the cake selected last from the slices. He laughed and told us that men invented sophisticated means of measuring the total, so that each portion would be utterly equal. And so we adopted the same rule in our family, forgetting really where the rule came from, and failing to see the emotional underpinnings of the rule, because what it really said was that every morsel and crumb that arrived in Stalag Luft 3 might be the difference between surviving or not. He took us to see The Great Escape when it came out, and I remember him muttering throughout the film, "Yes, that's right..." at various scenes. He nodded when James Garner scrounges the tools for the tunnel, and shuddered when Charles Bronson nearly suffocates from claustrophobia inside the tunnel. When Steve McQueen jumps the first barbed wire fence on his motorcycle, my father surged forward, as if he could help will the actor over the next obstacle and into Switzerland and freedom. When McQueen's motorcycle slides into the wire, my father leaned back and sighed. But then, because life was so busy in other directions, these memories all returned to that shelf within him. It was not for decades that POW camp was ever mentioned. And then it came in the form of a question. The ideas for novels come from many sources. I have always found them in the near-territory of my imagination, jump-started by something I saw or did in my career as a journalist, inspired by a conversation, an observation, something noticed in a news column, or mentioned by a friend. But as I entered the novelist's middle-age, I found myself reflecting on my family and their pasts, and prominent amidst those long-ignored memories, was my father's POW experience. And so, really with no agenda other than understanding a little bit better where I had come from, I started to ask him some questions about that time. He was, surprisingly, eager to answer. It had been so long, he said, since he had spoken of those times, it was a little like greeting an old, difficult, but valuable acquaintance. And, in the midst of those initial conversations, he said something that resonated within me. I asked him what sort of men he'd known in POW camp, and he'd replied they were mostly fine men, good soldiers and men that went on to accomplish much. But then, he'd added, almost as an afterthought: "...But you know, there could be just about anyone in that camp, because it was a cross-section of the whole Air Corps. Anyone could get shot down: a lawyer, a ballplayer, a teacher, a crook -- anyone. Because there could be just about anyone flying in those planes over Germany." Anyone. This intrigued me. If there could be criminals, could there be a crime? And what sort of crime? And how would it be handled by the Americans in the camp and their German captors? Because, for a mystery and thriller writer such as myself, there can only be one sort of crime: the worst. I began to fire questions rapidly. Questions about race. About the Tuskagee airmen who'd arrived at the camp in 1944. About the men who were there, about the fire some felt to escape, and the fear others felt about surviving. I wanted to know about the food and the wire, the cold and the boredom. I asked him about the Germans and about the British. I wanted to know everything I could. When I thought I had enough information, I sat down at the computer and wrote "Prologue" at the top of the page, indented three or four times, and then typed: "Now he was an old man who liked to take chances." It's probably not a bad idea, to sometimes take those old and ignored memories from the shelves and dust them off. It's a fine way of remembering at least a little bit of lessons learned early, that have stayed with one for years. I believe my writing Hart's War became such a moment for my father. Memory is a fine thing, whether it creates the basis for a novel, or establishes for a family a fair method for cutting cake. From the Inside Flap ear the novels of John Katzenbach have earned acclaim from across the country. "Mesmerizing" announces The New York Times . . . "gripping" trumpets The Washington Post Book World . . . "compelling" raves the San Francisco Chronicle. Now, Katzenbach has written his most powerful novel yetx97an unforgettable courtroom drama of heroism and sacrifice, honor and betrayal that ignites within the explosive confines of a World War II prisoner of war camp.Life isn't easy when you should have died, recalls Second Lieutenant Tommy Hart, the navigator of a B-25 who was shot out of the sky in 1942. Hartx97burdened with guilt as the only surviving member of his crewx97becomes just another kriegie ("war captured") at the fiercely guarded Stalag Luft 13 in Bavaria. But routine comes to a halt with the arrival of a new prisoner: First Lieutenant Lincoln Scott, an African American Tuskegee airman who instantly becomes the target of contempt from his fell "Few writers of crime fiction seem to understand the criminal mind as well as Katzenbach."--People John Katzenbach has written six previous novels: the Edgar Award-nominated In the Heat of the Summer, which was adapted for the screen as The Mean Season; the New York Times bestseller The Traveler; Day of Reckoning; Just Cause, which was also made into a movie; The Shadow Man (another Edgar nominee), and State of Mind. Mr. Katzenbach has been a criminal court reporter for The Miami Herald and Miami News, and a featured writer for the Herald's Tropic magazine. He lives in western Massachusetts. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Lincoln Scott spoke first."Well," he said quietly, "it seems bleak."At first Tommy wasn't certain whether the fighter pilot was speaking about the case or the room, because the same could have been said of both. Everything accumulated by the other kriegies who'd once shared the space had been removed. All that remained was a single wooden bunk with a dirty blue ticking pallet stuffed with straw. A solitary thin gray blanket had been left behind on the top. Lincoln Scott tossed his remaining blankets and clothing down on the bed. The overhead electric bulb burned, although the room was filled with the remaining diffuse light of afternoon. His makeshift table and storage area were at the head of the bed. The flier looked inside and saw that his two books and store of foodstuffs were all intact. The only thing missing was the handmade frying pan, which had inexplicably disappeared."It could be worse," Tommy said. This time it was Scott's turn to look at him, trying to guess whether it was the accommodations or the case that he was speaking of.Both men were quiet for an instant, before Tommy asked: "So, when you went to bed at night, after sneaking around to the toilet, where did you put your flight jacket?"Scott gestured to the side of the door. "Right there," he said. "Everybody had a nail. Everybody hung their jackets there. They were easy to grab when the sirens or the whistles went off." Scott sat down heavily on the bed, picking up the Bible.Tommy went over to the wall.The nails were missing. There were eight small holes in the wooden wallboard arranged in groups of two, and spaced a couple of feet apart, but that was all."Where did Vic hang his coat?""Next to mine, actually. We were the last two in line. Everybody always used the same nail, because we wanted to be able to grab the right jacket in a hurry. That was why they were spaced out, in pairs.""Where do you suppose the nails are now?""I haven't any idea. Why would someone take them away?"Tommy didn't answer, although he knew the reason. It wasn't only the nails that were missing. It was an argument. He turned back to Scott, who was starting to leaf through the pages of the Bible."My father is a Baptist minister," Scott said. "Mount Zion Baptist Church on the South Side of Chicago. And he always says that the Good Book will provide guidance in times of turmoil. Myself, I am perhaps more skeptical than he, but not totally willing to refuse the Word."The black flier's finger had crept inside the pages of the book, and with a flick, he opened the Bible. He looked down and read the first words he saw."Matthew, chapter six, verse twenty-four: 'No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other.'"Scott burst out with a laugh. "Well, I guess that makes some sense. What do you think, Hart? Two masters?" He snapped the Bible shut, then slowly exhaled. "All right, what's the next step? Now that I've gone from one prison cell to the next, what's in store for me now?""Procedurally? A hearing tomorrow. A formal reading of the charges. You declare your innocence. We get to examine the evidence against you. Then, next week, a trial.""A trial. A nice word to describe it. And counselor, your approach?""Delay. Question authority. Challenge the legality of the proceedings. Request time to interview all the witnesses. Claim a lack of proper jurisdiction over the matter. In other words, fight each technicality as hard as possible."Scott nodded, but in the motion of his head there was some resignation. He looked over at Tommy. "Those men just now, in the compound. All lined up and shouting. And then, when we passed through, the silence. I thought they wanted to kill me.""I did, too."He shook his head, his eyes downcast."They don't know me. They don't know anything about me."Tommy didn't reply.Scott leaned back, his eyes looking up to the ceiling. For the first time, Tommy seemed to sense a mingling of nervousness and doubt behind the flier's pugnacity. For several seconds, Scott stared at the whitewashed boards of the roof, then at the bare bulb burning in the center of the room."I could have run, you know. I could have got away. And then I wouldn't be here.""What do you mean?"Scott's voice was slow, deliberate. "We had already flown our escort mission, you see. We'd fought off a couple of attacks on the formation, and then delivered them to their field. We were heading home, Nathaniel Winslow and myself, thinking about a hot meal, maybe a poker game, and then hitting the hay, when we heard the distress call. Right in the clear, just like a drowning man calling out to anyone on the shore to please throw him a rope. It was a B-17 flying down on the deck, two engines out and half its tail shot away. It wasn't even from the group we were supposed to be guarding, you see, it was some other fighter wing's responsibility. Not the 332nd. Not ours, you see. So we didn't really have to do anything. And we were low on fuel and ammo, but there the poor bastard was, with six Focke-Wulfs making run after run at him. And Nathaniel, you know, he didn't hesitate, not even for a second. He turned his Mustang over on its wing and shouted at me to follow him, and he dove on them. He had less than three seconds of ammunition left, Hart. Three seconds. Count them: one, two, three. That's how long he could shoot. Hell, I didn't have much more. But if we didn't go in there, then all those guys were going to die. Two against six. We'd faced worse odds. And both Nathaniel and I got a kill in our first pass, a nice side deflection shot, which broke up their attack, and the B-17, it lumbered out of there and the FWs came after us. One swung around onto Nathaniel, but I came up before he could line him up and blew him out of the air. But that was it. No more ammo. Got to turn and run, you know, and with that big turbocharged Merlin engine, weren't none of those Kraut bastards gonna catch us. But just as we get ready to hightail it home, Nathaniel, he sees that two of the fighters have peeled off after the B-17, and again, he shouts at me to follow him after them. I mean, what were we going to do? Spit at them? Call them names? You see, with Nathaniel, with all of us, it was a matter of pride. No bomber we were protecting was going down. Got that? None. Zero. Never. Not when the 332nd was there. Not when the boys from Tuskegee were watching over you. Then, goddamn it, you were gonna get home safe, no matter how many damn planes the Luftwaffe sent up against us. That we promised. No black flier was going to lose any white boys to the Krauts. So Nathaniel, he screams up behind the first FW, just letting the bastard know he's there, trying to make the Nazi think he's dead if he doesn't get out of there. Nathaniel, you know, he was a helluva poker player. Helped put himself through college taking rich boys' allowances. Seven card stud was his game. Bluff you right out of your shorts nine times out of ten. Had that look, you know the one, the 'I've got a full house and don't you mess with me' look, when really he's only holding a lousy pair of sevens...."Lincoln Scott took another deep breath."They got him, of course. The wing man came around behind and stitched him good. I could hear Nathaniel screaming over the radio as he went down. Then they came after me. Blew a hole in the fuel tank. I don't know why it didn't explode. I was smoking, heading down, and I guess they used up all their ammunition getting me, because they broke off and disappeared. I bailed out at maybe five thousand feet. And now I'm here. We could have run, you know, but we didn't. And the damn bomber made it home. They always made it home. Maybe we didn't. But they did."Scott shook his head slowly."Those men out there in that mob. They wouldn't be here today if it'd been the 332nd flying escort duty over them. No sir."Scott lifted himself from the bed, still clutching the Bible in his hand. He used the black-jacketed book to gesture toward Tommy, punctuating his words."It is not in my nature, Mr. Hart, to be accepting. Nor is it in my nature to just let things happen to me. I'm not some sort of carry your bags, tip my hat, yessuh, nosuh, house nigger, Hart. All this procedural crap you mentioned, well, that's fine. We need to argue that stuff, well, you're the lawyer here, Hart, let's argue it. But when it comes right down to it, then I want to fight. I did not kill Captain Bedford and I think it's about damn time we let everyone know it!"Tommy listened closely, absorbing what the black man had said and how he'd said it."Then I think we have a difficult task ahead of us," he said softly."Hart, nothing in my life up to this point has been easy. Nothing truly worthwhile ever is. My preacher daddy used to say that every morning, every evening. And he was right then, and it's right now.""Good. Because if you didn't kill Captain Bedford, I think we're going to have to find out who did. And why. And I don't think that will be an easy task, because I haven't got even the slightest idea how to get started."Scott nodded, and opened his mouth to speak, but before any of the words came out, he was distracted by the sound of marching boots coming from the exterior corridor. The steady resonant noise stopped outside the doorway and seconds later the single thick wooden door to the bunk room flew open. Tommy turned swiftly toward the sound, and saw that MacNamara and Clark, along with a half-dozen other officers, were gathered in the hallway. Tommy recognized at least two of the men as former... Read more