Harry Crocker’s ‘Kruger’s Korps’: A Review
For H. W. Crocker III, the past may be a foreign country, but going there is much more fun if you eschew preparations, steal a jeep, infiltrate the Nazi Afrika Korps, and take a plunge into history at a hundred miles an hour, never letting up—even at the dinosaur crossings. Crocker’s World War II North Africa Campaign adventure, Kruger’s Korps is Moliere meets The Lost Patrol, with some P. G. Wodehouse absurdity marbled in like fat in a good cut of steak, to create a 1950s afternoon serial of a novel.
Early in the story, U.S. Navy ensign and OSS recruit Rolf Kruger discusses Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies with his handler at a DC antique shop that’s actually a front for William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services analytical division. Kruger rigorously defends Weissmuller from charges of ungentlemanly behavior as the King of the Jungle, whereas the Austrian emigrant who runs the shop front wishes his fellow countryman’s Tarzan character would conform more to the European norms that would befit an English lord. After all, Tarzan may have identified as an ape, but he was born an earl.
Referencing Tarzan and the afternoon serials of yore is foreshadowing for the absolute locomotive of an adventure romp that follows with Crocker piling on elements from H. Rider Haggard, Zane Grey, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. (You want a Fu Manchu opium kingpin? You got one. You want dinosaurs in a secret African gorge cut off from history for eons? Well, there may be dinosaurs in a secret African gorge cut off from history for eons for our hero to contend with.) But first and foremost, it’s a great World War II North Africa campaign tale, filtered through all the years of World War II movies, serials, and novels that followed, so historical accuracy lies side by side with fabulism and wish fulfillment. Yet somehow it all works like a cuckoo clock that’s been taken apart and accidentally reassembled into a time machine.
The story revolves around Rolf Kruger’s assignment by OSS director Donovan to take the place of a German soldier in a remnant of the Afrika Korps, now cut off from retreat by the British and making instead for the heart of darkest Africa on a secret mission to deliver a scientist with know-how to build a super weapon developed in a place called Peenemünde. But the same scientist is greatly desired by a Chinese opium kingpin (who looks a lot like Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu) on their trail.
German-speaking Kruger is thus a spy tasked with reporting on a German patrol that may itself be working for a Junker German general who is trying to subvert the fascists and turn the war into what it properly should have been from the start, a fight to reestablish the lost and lamented Habsburg Empire, of course.
“How Donovan could think me worthy of so titanic a responsibility was beyond me,” Kruger reflects, “but these days a lot of men were being called to do something extraordinary—to be their best, their most heroic selves, the sort of men who Herr Hass had wished Johnny Weissmuller was, or should have been, as Tarzan.”
If mid-20th-century history, both military and popular appeals to you, you’ll find this a heady mix of high points that Crocker somehow manages to pull together into a straightforward military adventure that is accurate, gritty, and highly engaging on its own—that is, if the idea of the Rat Patrol or the commandos of Inglourious Basterds stumbling into The Land that Time Forgot at all appeals.
It’s held together by Crocker’s astonishing ability to keep his first-person narrator, the redoubtable Ensign Kruger, dancing in and out of farce, satire, meta-fictional self-reference, and straight military history (on which Crocker maintains an iron grasp). One detects the strong influence of Winston Groom (author of Forrest Gump, among other romp-through-historical highlights novels) and perhaps Charles Portis’ hard-charging, half-naïve, half-knowing narrator, Mattie Ross from True Grit—someone who seems made to be a patsy, but who always manages to turn the tables on those who seek to use her for ill purposes. Plus, there’s a Thomas-Berger-like take on the ironies of historical memory, but fortunately, Crocker puts a much more positive, whimsical spin on the paradoxes of visiting the past than does Berger with Little Big Man’s whiny, moralistic posturing.
Crocker’s ability to weave history, current events, politics, and popular culture so coherently may come from the years he spent as an editor at conservative publisher Regnery, where he acquired and edited books by many of the stars of modern conservatism long before they had Fox News evening shows, hit podcasts, or resurgent careers as bison-grilling, bow-hunting libertarian Second Amendment advocates. Crocker is also the author of nonfiction. His The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War is a humorous work of understated revanchist subversion (and presents a rather convincing case for the South’s better angels), and his muscular popular history of Catholicism, Triumph, is equally absorbing.
Similar in vein to Crocker’s Custer of the West fiction series, where he does for the Old West what he achieves here for World War II, Crocker’s madcap narrative style in Kruger’s Korps may be an acquired taste for some, but if your day has been spent in staid and serious-minded straits, escapism into a fever-dream of history that never was, but ought to have been, may be just the ticket. Kruger’s Korps is a learned, patriotic, gloriously unserious-serious adventure that reminds us that history is not a courtroom for grievances but a playground for courage, wit, and the revisiting of lost—or maybe not-so-lost—causes.
Tony Daniel is editor in chief of Ark Press and the author of twelve science fiction novels from Baen Books, Pocket Books, HarperCollins, and Tor, as well as many award-winning short stories.
