Books

August Wichmann could sway almost anyone. And his means of persuasion were legendary.

The SS took notice. So did the Resistance. They both wanted his persuasion skills for their purposes. As a rising SS officer, he convinced himself that he was dedicated in service to his country.

Until he witnessed the brutalities firsthand. After that, working with the SS was a daily torment. Doubling for the Resistance created a different kind of agony, as he had to feign indifference to the atrocities to keep his cover secure.

In his desperate, no-win state, he shared his fears with Brigitte, herself a pawn in the deadly games.

Their only reprieve came from those entrenched in the Resistance, including spymaster Admiral Canaris and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who became the fixed star by which August and Brigitte navigated their shifting moral boundaries.

There’s an old saying that the difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale starts off with “Once upon a time” and a sea story starts off with “This is no shit.”

Here in these pages is a heaping pile of “This is no shit” and it starts with the notion that in the Navy, the cardinal rule is: If you can’t pay attention, take notes.

When does this rule apply? In the Navy, all the time: when training for war includes playing pinochle, when you’re mistaken for an NIS agent, when Robert Mitchum (yes, that Robert Mitchum) stops by your barracks for a beer or two, when advancing in the Navy is one damn thing after another.

The fun frolic through the sea stories of a Navy “lifer” (seen partly through the eyes of his Navy brat daughter) includes a series of adventures and misadventures when he commandeers an Army jeep in Vietnam, discovers that some side work in New Jersey was mob-related, and commutes to the ship via helicopter. Hear that? They’re piping us aboard. Let’s weigh anchor and get the sea stories underway!