Movies and Music!

Patrin, Nate.  The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock'n'Roll to Synthwave.    

        Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023,  ISBN: 9781517913243

How much does the soundtrack of a movie affect your enjoyment of a particular movie?  What about your memory of a movie, does a particular song stick in your head as emblematic of the movie?   That is the question Nate Patrin chose to explore in The Needle and the Lens.

Nate Patrin defines a "needle drop" as using a preexisting song to provide context for the film.  He takes sixteen movies that use songs not written/recorded for the movies and explores the interaction between the movies, the songs, and the audience.  Some of the combinations are very well known - Easy Rider/"The Pusher," The Graduate/"The Sound of Silence ," or American Graffiti/"Do You Want to Dance?"  Others are a bit off the wall (but then I have not seen all of these movies) such as Killer of Sheep/"This Bitter Earth," Blue Velvet/"In Dreams," or Drive/"A Real Hero."  Then there are ones I just had not thought of in this fashion - mainly Apocalypse Now/"The End" and Wayne's World/"Bohemian Rhapsody" that just work well. While individual chapters may be less of a treat, the book as a whole is a good read.

 

Nate Patrin enjoys exploring the intersection of movies and music and sharing his findings with an appreciative audience.  If you think you might be in that crowd, pick up The Needle and the Lens and join the conversation! 

Sunken Sub Sinks Aircraft Carrier!

Moore, Stephen L.  Strike of the Sailfish: Two Sister Submarines and the Sinking of a Japanese 

         Aircraft Carrier.  New York: Dutton Caliber, 2023.  ISBN: 9780593472873

"Down periscope! Dive!  Dive!" is the cry of the submarine's captain as submarine and her crew seek to sink beneath the waves before the enemy spots them.  Many books and movies have this scene.  In Strike of the Sailfish, this scene plays out several times as the Sculpin and the Sailfish search the Pacific Ocean for prey.

 

As the title states, Strike of the Sailfish is the intertwined tale of two submarines - the Squalus and the Sculpin.  The tale starts when the Squalus sank during a test dive in 1939 killing half the crew.  The Sculpin happened to be in the area and helped in rescuing the crew and recovering the boat.  The Squalus was refitted and renamed the Sailfish in May 1940 before getting a new crew and reentering the fleet.  

After United States entered the war, both submarines were sent to the Pacific to attack Japanese shipping.  Each submarine suffered through the teething issues of dud torpedoes, bad warheads, and plan bad luck.  But by 1943, better weapons had arrived and the submarines started coming into their own.  But when the Sculpin attacked a convoy near Truk on November 19, 1943, her luck ran out and she was sunk. Part of the her crew were captured and taken to Truk and then transferred via aircraft carriers to Japan.  But on December 3-4, 1943, the Sailfish as part of a wolfpack attacked this convoy in the midst of a typhoon and sank the aircraft carrier Chuyo. I took three separate attacks to sink it.  George Rocek was the only Sculpin sailor onboard the Chuyo to survive.

Strike of the Sailfish provides a very gritty look at World War II submarine warfare through the lenses of two U.S. submarines and the stories of their crews.  Stephen Moore provides plenty of details of a submariner's life and the plight of submariner POWs alongside the various attacks and other duties the submarines performed.  If you enjoy reading about WW II naval action, pick up this title.  It will not disappoint!

Great War Saboteur Manhunt

Mills, Bill.  Agent of the Iron Cross: The Race to Capture German Saboteur-Assassin Lothar 

        Witzke during World War I.  Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.  ISBN: 

        9781538182086

 

Secret agents, sabotage, planned invasions, codes breaking and double agents are often the stuff of spy stories, but can be found in real life as well.  Agent of the Iron Cross documents Lothar Witzke's story as German agent, running loose in the United States and Mexico from 1915 till his capture and trial in 1918.  

 

At the opening of World War I, Witzke was a midshipman on the German cruiser Dresden and wounded in the final battle with the British Navy off the coast of Chile.  He escaped from the hospital at Valparaiso, Chile, and disguised as a Danish seaman who had lost his papers made his way to San Fransisco.  Consul Bopp employeed Witzke as a courier until he hooked up with Kurt Jahnke and became a saboteur.  He helped plant explosives on merchant ships and with involved in the Black Tom Island and the Mare Island Naval Station explosions.  In 1917, Witzke and Jahnke moved to Mexico to stay in communication with their HQ while continuing their operations.  One such operation involved creating labor unrest at mines in southwestern United States so that local US Army troops would be called out while also having blacks in the South rise up in insurrections followed by the Mexican Army invading and occupying parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and California.  All this mayhem would keep the United States out of the war in Europe.  Fortunately, for the United States there were some competent undercover agents and double agents embedded in the German camp so that this plot could be thwarted.  As part of the plot, Witzke crossed the border into Texas and was arrested, his luggage searched and a code found.  The contents of the coded message played its part in the court-martial trial in convicting Witzke of espionage and sentenced to be hanged.  After judicial review in 1919, the sentence was changed to confinement at hard labor.  In 1919, Witzke and two other prisoners broke out of Fort Sam Houston prison but quickly recaptured and he ended up in Leavenworth for several years until released in 1923.  Witzke moved back to Germany and  joined the Abwehr under Canaris before World War II started.  After the war Witzke served in the Hamburg legislature from 1949-1952.  He died on January 6, 1962.

If you are interested in spies, secret agents, double crosses and feats of daring, pick up a copy of Agents of the Iron Cross and pick up a few little known facts!