#2,739

How could I not buy the Kindle edition of Berlin Calling? The story of Kelly Dunham's heroine spans the seven years from 1938 until 1945. My own Chance Of Reign covers only seven months in 1936. But my narrative also features the nascent Nazi radio propaganda apparatus of the time and so I was anxious to learn how the author had approached the topic.

It is a highly entertaining piece of storytelling, full of detail speaking of serious research and where poetic license has been taken it is fully justified. There are reader reviews on the Amazon site which accuse the author of being too soft on the Germans and deplore the Irish-American heroine's lack of patriotism. I disagree profoundly with such opinions, for one of the biggest challenges when writing about the epoch in question is finding ways of dealing honestly with the astonishing ambiguities of the times. One of the sponsors of Hitler's 1936 Olympics was, after all, Coca-Cola! Kelly Durham rises to the task admirably, offering us protagonists who are merely misguided as well as others who are devious and brutal. It is a nuanced and well-calibrated narrative and should please readers who prefer not to view history in terms of black and white but (dare I say it) in shades of grey.  

It is entirely coincidental that BBC Radio 4 very recently broadcast a half-hour program about Radio Caledonia. Donald Alexander Fraser Grant was the voice of the shortwave station. The broadcasts attacked the British establishment and fomented Scottish Nationalism. The clandestine Nazi radio station broadcast to Britain between June 1940 and August 1942.  The man from Alness on the Black Isle peninsula north of Inverness, known on-air as ‘Jock Palmer’, argued in his broadcasts that a Hitler-controlled Scotland would be vastly preferable to ‘an England run by a war-mongering Churchill’.

The audio documentary gave this Scot, at home for almost a decade in modern Germany, much to ponder over.

The radio program is linked here.