The Real Crime

AN OPERATIONAL NECESSITY by Gwyn Griffin. 477 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

British Novelist Gwyn Griffin here uses a straightforward, fast-paced plot chiefly as a scaffolding from which he can poke and probe into some of the profound moral problems raised by war.

Toward the end of World War II, Eugen Kielbasa, a German U-boat commander, torpedoes an Allied freighter in the South Atlantic. The skipper then orders his young gunnery officer, Emil Kummerol, to destroy all "floating wreckage"--including a dozen helpless survivors. Otherwise, he explains to his shocked crew, Allied planes and subchasers would detect and destroy the U-boat. One of the helpless seamen survives machine-gunning, grenade tossing, ramming, and torturous exposure to the sea. Because of his testimony, Kielbasa and Kummerol are eventually brought before an international war-crimes tribunal. The captain's defense is that the slaughter was "an operational necessity," essential to preserve his own crew. Gunnery Officer Kummerol's defense is that of a subordinate obeying a superior officer.

The crime and the plea recall Nurnberg, of course, and other "war crimes" trials following World War II. Griffin makes his point through the U.S. officer defending the Germans. "We talk now of 'war crime,' " says the defense counsel, "but the real crime is war itself and the war criminals are those who commence it or who, having the power to do so, fail to prevent it. We can no more make laws against it than we can make laws against love or fear or hate for it is as much a part of all ordinary men as they are."

That is the theme of Griffin's book --but not its sum total. The author has endowed his characters with enough depth, human good and human frailties so that neither victor nor vanquished monopolizes virtue. One cannot, even during the submariners' trial, condone their atrocity. But, Griffin wonders, was the crime any greater for the U-boat officers than for the pilots who bombed Dresden or the German scientists who built the buzz bombs that terrified London? And if so, why? Because the lifeboat victims were visible to the killer and therefore more human than the unseen victims of an air raid?

Griffin does more than tell a good yarn. He points out the hopelessness of trying to apply humane laws to the inhumane lawlessness of war.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.