Tracing the Winds of War

By John Skow

THE NIGHTMARE YEARS: 1930-1940 by William L. Shirer Little, Brown; 654 pages; $22.50

The author of this admirable memoir began the 1930s as a journalistic adventurer of 26, jauntily evading an English blockade of the Khyber Pass to reach Afghanistan. By 1940 he regarded himself as middleaged, worn by work, fear and revulsion, after several years of broadcasting and writing from within the increasingly brutal world of Hitler's Germany.

Shirer has written other books about this period, notably Berlin Diary and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but the memoir form in this case offers far more than familiar material rechewed. This is his second book of reminiscence. The first, 20th Century Journey, published in 1976, had as its center a misty evocation of Paris in the '20s and was in some ways a familiar story worn by the telling.

Volume II has no such liability. Few Americans were on the scene as the Third Reich took form. Shirer was in Berlin, and accompanied Hitler and his entourage to Paris when the Petain government surrendered in 1940. At the start he was a newspaperman; Edward R. Murrow hired him away in 1937 to be the other half of CBS Radio's staff in Europe. Shirer's journalistic credentials eventually brought him invitations to the bizarre Nazi Bierabends (get-togethers over beer) organized for the press by Alfred Rosenberg, the official Nazi philosopher. Hermann Goering would circulate, fat, affable and crude; then came the Fuehrer's "somewhat dim-witted 'deputy,' " Rudolf Hess; then the "vain, pompous, incredibly stupid" Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was to be Foreign Minister. Shirer recalls being dumbfounded by Bernhard Rust, the Nazi Education Minister, a bureaucratic ideologue who explained the difference between serious, careful, Aryan physics and the degenerate Jewish physics, as represented by the mountebank Einstein.

Shirer was close enough to Hitler to feel the Nazi leader's messianic personal force. Even in the early '30s, his memoir makes clear, he was not tempted to underrate the Fuehrer. But the collection of crackbrains and third-raters with which Hitler surrounded himself was absurd enough, by Shirer's account, to suggest a reason for the long years before the Nazis were taken seriously in England and the U.S.

Shirer's autobiographical narrative threads in and out of the chaos in a remarkable manner. Some of the recollections are simply good journalistic yarns, such as the one about flying with Goering and Aviator Charles Lindbergh in what was claimed to be the world's largest aircraft, a cumbersome, eight-engine passenger plane recently built for Lufthansa. "Goering turned over the controls to Lindbergh somewhere above the Wannsee, and we were treated to some fancy rolls, steep banks and other maneuvers for which the Goliath machine was not designed. I thought for a few moments that the plane would be torn apart." Much of the account is touching and personal; Shirer tells of his marriage to an Austrian woman, the difficult birth of their daughter, their brief vacations while the crash of Europe rumbles in the background, his worry as shaky news-service jobs wash out from under him. His account of trying to get CBS to pay attention to the imminent annexation of Austria, while a New York executive insisted that he set up a series of children's choir broadcasts, is a classic tale of the man in the field confounded by home-office buffoonery.

The beginning of actual fighting did catch the network's attention, but it did not end the correspondents' problems with bosses who were entertainment biggies, not newsmen. No one had ever covered a war by radio, but it was clear to Shirer and Murrow that the way to do it was to record the sounds of bombs and guns--and interviews with combatants when these could be arranged--and then to weave these bits into a nightly broadcast. The Germans, proud of their blitzkrieg success in the early months of the war, offered mobile recording facilities. CBS refused, Shirer recalls with anger that is still raw, because of "an idiotic ruling" that all broadcasts must be entirely live. The British bombing of Berlin was live enough, and it came at the right time for Shirer's nightly 1 a.m. broadcast back to the States. But German censors shut off mention of the raids and installed a lip microphone that "did not pick up the roar of the antiaircraft batteries ringing Broadcast House nor the thuds of bombs exploding near by." Meanwhile, German bombs could be clearly heard on Murrow's broadcasts from London.

During the war's early stages, his battles with the censors were tolerable wrangles. As the momentum of Hitler's first successes slackened, censorship tightened and Shirer's struggles to tell something of the truth in his broadcasts became more and more acrimonious and futile ("You can't call Germany aggressive and militaristic," he was told; "please remember that it was Poland which attacked us first"). By autumn of 1940, he was giving his best material to his diary--his sighting, for instance, of Soviet Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov on his way to meet a German delegation headed by Goring and Ribbentrop. Molotov looked "expressionless" and "dour . .. like a provincial schoolmaster." But the diary, quoted extensively in this journal, also records Shirer's edginess and fatigue.

Word has been passed to him that he is suspected of being a spy. American neutrality has become a fiction. He is not certain that the secret police will stamp his exit papers. When he finally does leave in early December, having talked gullible Gestapo officials into sealing two bags containing his contraband diaries against customs inspection, the suspense is as tightly strung as any in The Winds of War.

Shirer gives himself no airs as thinker or writer, but the fact is that he was a superb journalist, who knew his subject, spoke the languages, did his digging and got the news out. And at 80, living now in Lenox, Mass., he still writes an unusually fine book.

--ByJohnSkow