Game For Heroes

 

With World War 2 approaching its end, one-eyed commando Owen Morgan is tasked with a mission. He's to scout out one of the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands--an island on which he grew up--because it was feared that the Nazis on the island would not surrender once Germany fell.

An American commando team accompanies him, assigned to sabotage any ships in the island's harbor. Things go awry and both Owen and the commandos are captured.

From here, things get really interesting. Owen actually befriends a German sergeant named Steiner, a hard-core veteran of the Russian front, but who is not a Nazi but a decent human being. But the commander of the Germans on the island is a fanatical Nazi named Radl, who holds the loyalty of a unit of SS troops. It's Radl who refuses to accept the news that Hitler is dead when this is reported over the radio.

The book is obviously setting up a clash between the prisoners & good Germans vs the SS troops. But before that, in an incredibly intense action scene, Allies and Germans must team up to take a life boat out into a near-hurricane storm to save the crew of a German ship hung up on some rocks.

This leads directly into the equally intense climax, in which the Allies and good Germans do indeed have a final battle against Radl and the SS.

It's a book that kept me up until 1 am last night because I didn't want to put it down. Great action, great characters, with themes of friendship and courage running throughout.

This was written in 1970 under Higgins' James Graham pen-name, a few years before "The Eagles as Landed" put him on the bestseller list. It's interesting to note that he reused several character names (Steiner and Radl) for major characters in "The Eagle as Landed" and also reused a minor plot point. (The Steiners in both books briefly serve in a unit that has men riding a modified torpedo that carries a second torpedo to be launched at Allied shipping.) Higgins also used the idea of Allies and Germans teaming up to save lives as a major plot point in his later novel "Storm Warning." And his World War II novels often explore the idea that not every German fighting in World War 2 was evil.

Higgins was writing adventure novels, not dissertations on morality, but I always kind of wished he had explored the idea of good Germans a little further. Usually, Higgins admirable German characters are brave soldiers serving their country. A discussion of about the right/wrong of serving one's country when that country is ruled by a despotic maniac bent on racial genocide would have been interesting. To be fair, Higgins does deal with the evils of Nazism quite powerfully, but his good Germans are still on the front lines shooting at the Allies. This doesn't make them less effective as characters in Higgins' novel and the author's general point about not condemning every German is valid. But I'm always reminded of the character of Eric Koenig from Marvel Comics. Eric was a German who fought with the Allies as a member of Nick Fury's Howling Commandoes. In his view, overthrowing the Nazis was the best way to serve Germany.

But then, if Higgins spent too much time delving into moral philosphies, there wouldn't have been room for his great action scenes. Game for Heroes is intense and unputdownable.