MAN OF ACTION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 757, 22 January 1954, Page 13

MAN OF ACTION

BOLDNESS BE MY FRIEND, by Richard Pape; Elek, English price 16/-. \ ARRANT OFFICER PAPE’S adventures are so fantastic and come so thick and fast that one wonders for a time whether they are true or whether he is merely telling a good story. He has been wise to produce documentary proof by including amongst the illustrations photographic copies of official letters and of the citation for his M.M. which confirm his narrative. Navigator of a bomber shot down in Holland, he is helped by the Dutch underground, arrested with false papers and in civilian clothes by the Gestapo, and suspected of being both a British agent and a German traitor. (Pape is also a German name.) In Stalag VIIIB, Lamsdorf, he changes identity with a New Zealander, escapes from a German coal mine into Poland,.and again falls fou! of the Gestapo, this time with Polish name and forged papers. After a second unsuccessful escape from a farm in Czechoslovakia, his rea] identity is discovered. He later feigns nephritis and is repatriated in September, 1944, exactly three years to the day after he was shot down. This is not a gentle story nor is it subtly told. Written in a racy style that is easy to read, the book is frank, earthy and often crude, at times deliberately and unnecessarily so. Pape writes callously of killing and of trying to kill, of battering with a poker an innocent Hungarian whose wardrobe he was caught robbing, of trying to strangle an old Dutch woman, of his prowess: with the knife, Is he deliberately trying to shock or has he perhaps been hardened by his experiences? He is courageous, fanatical in his determination to escape, ruthless in pursuing that end, resourceful in outwitting his guards and defying the Gestapo; in emergency, a man of action who thinks with his fists and feet

and risks the consequences.

W.A.

G.