Kramer's War

Kramer is a young bombardier from an American Liberator that is shot down in the English Channel in early June, 1944. He survives and washes ashore, in the middle of the night, on the island of Jersey, a British property which has been occupied by the Germans for four years. His first priority is to escape back to England, but this requires causing some trouble for the German soldiers on the island and the local islanders. Making matters more complicated, a new German commandant has arrived, determined to turn the island into a fortress. Kramer wants to start a resistance movement to help the imminent Allied invasion, and the German commandant is aching for a chance to show off the power of the Third Reich. Field Marshal Rommel will soon be arriving for an inspection, after all, and it might just be an innocent little island of no strategic value to anyone, but it's the principle of the thing that matters. Caught between these two forces are the islanders, who want nothing to do with either of them. The Germans have mostly left them alone, and they know perfectly well that the island of Jersey is just not that important, so they may as well go on living their lives until liberation comes along, eventually. Some of them feel differently, and some of them change their minds. Mr Robinson creates a convincing cast of characters and a story with humor and suspense. He has a knack for picking out-of-the-way locales for the settings of his war novels, and Jersey is a perfect example. He uses these fairly simple stories, full of action and laughs, to ask why we fight wars, and whether anything we do will have any possible effect on anything. Does it matter if the islanders resist their German oppressors? What difference will it make, to their lives or others' lives? KRAMER'S WAR is perhaps not as compulsively readable as Robinson's aviation novels, but even though it might be lacking airplanes, it still has all his trademark black humor and vivid style. Too bad that it's out of print.