Derek Robinson (Goshawk Squadron, War Story, Piece of Cake etc.) has written an enthralling novel on the RAF's 1919 Russian adventure called "A Splendid Little War" - here's one brief review from The Independent Newspaper:
The Independent Feb 18 2013
The Monday Book
A Splendid Little War by Derek Robinson
MacLeHose Press £18.99
By IAN IRVINE
The anniversary of the First-World War next year means that a rolling barrage of
books is about to sweep over us. One happy consequence is that Derek Robinson's trilogy about the early days of the Royal Flying Corps are now all back in print. The first, Goshawk Squadron, appeared in 1971, making the shortlist for the Booker Prize. Any idea that aerial combat must have been a more gentlemanly business than the mass carnage of the trenches is soon dispelled within a dozen pages. It turned a ripping yarn subject into black comedy as dark as Catch 22 in prose as spare and elegant as Evelyn Waugh's. War Story and Hornet's Sting followed.
Now the RFC trilogy has a coda - Robinson's A Splendid Little War is set in 1919 when Britain intervened in the Russian Civil War. Winston Churchill, then Secretarv for War in Lloyd George’s Liberal-Conservative coalition governmnent, passionately believed that the Bolshevik Revolution should be 'strangled in its cradle". Among the British forces he engaged on the side of the White Russians were several volunteer squadrons of the newly
formed RAF. The novel follows Merlin Squadron from its arrival at the Black Sea, its savage and tumultuous campaign in support of General Denikin, the most successful of the White commanders, on his push north towards Moscow, and then back through the
inglorious and chaotic retreat.
Writing convincing action sequences is a rare skill but Robinson has a superlative talent for aerial combat, making it comprehensible, compelling and frightening. But there are also great comic set pieces, such as Denikin's Lucullan country-house banquet for his commanders: “Russian hospitality is considered to have failed if the guests can walk, unaided to their carriages."
His pilots are mostly in their late teens and early twenties, a motley collection of public schoolboys, military monomaniacs, colonial tearaways and eccentrics. Its high spirits are exhilarating; its underlying message sobering. With such epic action, characters, plot and dialogue, it’s hard to believe that Robinson’s work has yet to be filmed.
Well worth getting and now in paper-back.
