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Johnnie Shaux, a pilot in the RAF during World War II, flies Spitfires and Mosquitoes. His wife Eleanor, an analysist at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), is a senior planner working with Eisenhower.
In Dangers and Difficulties: A Novel of World War II, by John Rhodes, they work together yet separately to defeat Hitler. This book opens in spring 1944. Overlord, the invasion of France at Normandy, is at hand.
Jonnie is in a new role. He is going to serve as ground controller for airstrikes. Using fliers to coordinate ground support is an experiment Johnnie advocated. He is heading to Sword Beach on a landing craft with a radioman.
Eleanor is at SHAEF headquarters. Her specialty is games theory, calculating the odds of the invasion's success. Her predictions guide Eisenhower on when to start Overlord. She is a WAAF air commandant, the equivalent of a brigadier.
Both end up sidetracked from their primary roles. Johnnie’s radio fails to work, so he ends up operating an antitank rocket launcher, attacking German fortifications on D-Day. Rather than running numbers and odds Eleanor ends up babysitting Churchill to keep him out of Eisenhower’s way. Yet both contribute to victory on D-Day through their efforts.
The book follows the pair through World War II in Europe from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge. It focuses on crisis points, the V-1 and V-2 attacks, Operation Market Garden, and the German Ardennes Offensive. It highlights these by showing Johnnie at the sharp end doing the fighting and Eleanor within the ranks of the high-level planners. The combination gives modern readers a three-dimensional view of the war in Europe, simultaneously providing a view of the high-level uncertainties in war with the close-up view of men in combat.
Difficulties and Dangers is as much a love story as a war story and stronger for that. Both Johnnie and Eleanor are loners with strong personalities. They come from vastly different backgrounds: Eleanor from England’s gentry class, Johnnie an impoverished orphan. Despite the need for independence of both, their need for each other is still stronger. It shows the compromises each accepts to make the relationship work.
The fourth book in a series, Difficulties and Dangers works well as a stand-alone, without having read the early works. Although possessing a few anachronisms and errors, it is well-written and entertaining. You cannot ask more from a novel.
Dangers and Difficulties: A Novel of World War II,” by John Rhodes, Roundel House, December 2024, 306 pages, $16.95 (paperback), $4.99 (e-book)
This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.
Discussion (7)
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Sounds fascinating! Thanks, Seawriter.
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I'm in the middle of the second of the series. Enjoying it. Glad to hear it continues to be worth reading.
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Sounds like an enjoyable read that will me ease me into teaching my WWII unit in a few months.
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Seawriter, my father was an RAF mosquito navigator/pilot. He was shot down on his 41 mission, after D-day. He did have some “interesting” gear on board at the time and was interrogated for 3 months in hopes of his sharing details. After being told by his SS interrogator at Oberursel that the commandant was losing patience seeing his rather distinctive name, George Cross, at the top of his list of prisoners, and was planning to hand him over to the Gestapo, my father invented a “cock and bull” story and was sent to POW camp Stalag Luft Vl for the remainder of the war.
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Reminds me of a similar story about a Coastal Command pilot who got captured. His aircraft had a new radar in it, which was recovered with the wreckage. When interrogated, he convinced the Germans it was a device that tracked U-boats by following the signals generated by the German Metox radar-detecting antenna, something that warned when the U-boat was hit by the long-wave radars carried early in the war.
It is theoretically possible to track a U-boat by its Metox, but in practice this is impossible. The Germans believed his story and disabled the Metox units on all U-boats. In reality the electronics found was a centimeter-wave ASV III unit that broadcast on a frequency invisible to the Metox. But by disabling the Metox radar detectors, the POW made the ASV II units still carried on many Coastal Command aircraft, useful again. Losses went up.
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