Armageddon: A Novel of Berlin by Leon Uris

I went through a phase of reading everything available by Leon Uris, but I never read this one. It is about the army of occupation in Germany and the final third of the book center on the Berlin Airlift. And, after all, I was there. So I decided that it was high time that I read it.

After all eight or nine hundred pages (it is hard to tell - not all Kindle books have page numbers), I suspect that I may have started it at some point and not finished it. In Mila 18 and Exodus the history is very present, but it is all delivered as part of the story. In this one, characters and "story" are secondary to long lectures on the history. Sometimes the history is delivered by "Big Nellie," the omnipresent columnist, but sometimes it is just parked between passages of narrative.

A number of the characters have great potential, but we are not allowed to get close enough to any of them to care very much. The opening character is an Army captain, Sean O'Sullivan, from San Francisco. He hates the Germans personally for the deaths of his two brothers during the war. His persistent hatred is inconsistent with the character as developed and is consistently jarring. None of the characters seem very complete and the ones we spend the most time with all end badly.

The details of the Airlift are, as always in Uris' work, very thoroughly researched and were fascinating. For me, of course, there was the additional side note of the dates of Mother's letters and knowing that at this point or that we were in or near the action of the story. I found the "story" part of this book so disappointing that I almost with that it were simply a history of the occupation and airlift with the real names of the players. Of course, if it had been that sort of book I almost certainly would not have ever read it. Maybe I should hunt up some actual historical accounts of the airlift.