The Katyn Order by Douglas W Jacobson

The German War Machine is in retreat as the Russians advance. In Warsaw, Resistance fighters rise up against their Nazi occupiers, but the Germans retaliate, ruthlessly leveling the once-beautiful city. American Adam Nowak has been dropped into Poland by British intelligence as an assassin and Resistance fighter. During the Warsaw Uprising he meets Natalia, a covert operative who has lost everything—just as he has. Amid the Allied power struggle left by Germany’s defeat, Adam and Natalia join in a desperate hunt for the 1940 Soviet order authorizing the murders of 20,000 Polish army officers and civilians. If they can find the Katyn Order before the Russians do, they just might change the fate of Poland.

I read Douglas W Jacobson's debut novel A Night of Flames, and thoroughly enjoyed it, so when I saw that there was a new book coming out I instantly knew that I had to have it!

Adam and Natalia are members of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) known as the AK. It is 1944 and the AK is fighting a lonely, losing battle against the might of German Army as they destroy the city of Warsaw in the process, whilst the Red Army sits within striking distance taking no action to assist the partisans.

Adam is an Polish born American who came back to Poland to live with his aunt and uncle in the years before the war. He is also a crack sniper, code name Wolf. Just as he doesn't know the true identities of many of his AK colleagues, they also know nothing of his true identity. Adam's grief for his uncle, who he knows died in the very early years of the war has driven him to become a killing machine - a man who is good at what he does, and without much emotion attached to the actions he undertakes.

One of the few people to get under his cold mask of emotionless existence is Natalia - code name The Conductor. She has been a key member of the organisation in her role as a messenger passing papers from Krakow to Warsaw, but she is also driven by grief at the loss of all her family and determination that Poland should not be overrun by the German army. Unfortunately it looks like the alternative is that they will be taken over by the Russians, and that isn't much of a better option.

At the core of this book is the search for the one piece evidence that would prove who authorised the massacre of more than 20000 Polish officers in several locations, including the Katyn forest. When the mass graves were discovered in 1943, the Russians blamed the Germans and vice versa.Now that the war is coming to it's end, the winners are dividing up the spoils, including the entire country of Poland. If the evidence can be found that it was a Russian atrocity, then maybe, just maybe, Poland can be saved from becoming part of the Communist bloc.

Jacobson does a great job at portraying the desperation of the fighters, the horror of a city being destroyed, almost brick by brick by the German army - churches, hospitals, civilian houses - nothing is off limits. I wasn't quite as convinced by the relationship between Adam and Natalia as I was in his previous book, by the relationship betweeen Jan and Anna.

I think part of the reason that I wasn't as convinced is that I would classify this as more of a historical thriller than Night of Flames, or at least what I remember of Night of Flames (when I reread the review earlier it turns out that I did have some of these same issues). The book is filled with lots of action, the characters move between Poland, England and Germany, the body count is high, but to sum it up in just a few words - it was definitely a page turner!


I remember visiting Dachau when I went to Germany many years ago and seeing the displays there and being horrified at the things that humans do to each other in the name of war. At that time, the Balkan conflicts involving the former Yugoslavian states were under way and I remember thinking how it was that we don't seem to learn the lessons of the past. Given the news that we see quite regularly it appears that we still don't, so it is important that novels like this are written to remind us not only about this fact, about the terrible and needless atrocities that humankind seem to be able to inflict on each other, but also the triumph of the human spirit under the most trying of circumstances.

Rating: 4/5

Interested in finding out more? Check out the guest post by Douglas W Jacobson that we posted a few weeks ago!

Guest Post: Getting it Right . . . Doing Research for Historical Novels

Today we are very pleased to welcome Douglas W Jacobson to Historical Tapestry as part of his blog tour with Pump Up Your Books! Later next month I will be review his new book, The Katyn Order. I read his debut novel, Night of Flames, a couple of years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.

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As the old saying goes, “The devil is in the detail.” One of the reasons I have always loved historical fiction is that it is a truly marvelous way to learn a bit of history. Some authors of non-fiction (Stephen Ambrose comes to mind) have a flair and style of writing that make their work enjoyable and easy to read. But, in my humble opinion, there’s nothing quite like curling up with Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance or Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth for the ultimate reading experience . . . and, a great way to learn history.

And that brings us to the issue at hand. Writing good historical fiction places a special burden on the author, the burden of getting it right. And getting it right doesn’t stop with the big stuff, the dates and locations, the battles and who won the war. It gets right down to the detail. For example, what would a serf in the thirteenth century be likely to eat for breakfast? What type of profanity would a soldier likely have used during the Napoleonic wars? Did the troopers of the Polish cavalry carry lances during World War Two?

It’s the detail that immerses the reader in the time and place of your story. It’s the scent of the kerosene lanterns and the smell of the boiling cabbage, the sticky mud of the footpaths and creaking of the yardarms that give a story its life and vitality. It’s what makes it real. But, making it real, of course, means doing the research.

When I set out to write my first book, Night of Flames, I had been studying and reading about World War Two for most of my adult life. I knew a lot, but not nearly enough. For instance, I wanted to write about the Polish cavalry because the notion of horse-drawn armies in WW2 has been largely ignored even though almost all the armies in the first few years of the war—including those of Germany and Russia—relied heavily of horses for transportation. But how was a Polish cavalry brigade organized? What type of weapons did they carry? What did their uniforms look like? How far could they travel in a day? Where did they find food for the horses and who re-shod them when necessary? Did they really charge tanks?

Let’s stick with this issue for a moment to pursue the ways and means of research. You can learn a lot on the internet these days and, indeed, I found numerous websites filled with detail about WW2 era cavalry. I also found a marvelous book entitled, The Cavalry of World War Two, chock full of information about specific cavalry regiments from Poland, France, Germany and Russia, their organization and leadership, the types of horses and weapons, battles and anecdotal accounts. But the most fascinating of all was my experience at The Battle of the Bzura Museum in Kutno, Poland, which I visited during one of my trips to Poland. It was a treasure of maps, artifacts, displays of uniforms and weapons, canteens and knapsacks. And, even more fascinating, was an encounter the next day with an elderly gentleman in Walewice, Poland who happened to be sitting on the front porch of his home while we were wandering around the town square looking for some type of commemorative plaque. Through the translation offered by my friend and Polish history scholar, Slawomir Debski, the elderly gentleman confirmed that the Wielkopolska Cavalry Brigade did, indeed, cross the Bzura River and confront a German infantry battalion in that town on 14 September, 1939. He knew . . . because he was there. And that’s the best kind of research.

Having developed a discipline of research, I found the going much easier when I started my latest book, The Katyn Order. Some basic information from earlier research efforts was useful since the book is also set in Poland in WW2. But in this case I had to learn a lot about Russians and the relationship between Russians and Poles in WW2. What I learned was fascinating and absolutely energized me to write the story. There is nothing like the true facts of human experience to motivate the writer (and hopefully the reader) of historical fiction.

Douglas W. Jacobson is an engineer, business owner and World War Two history enthusiast. Doug has traveled extensively in Europe researching stories of the courage of common people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. His debut novel, Night of Flames: A Novel of World War Two was published in 2007 by McBooks Press, and was released in paperback in 2008. Night of Flames won the “2007 Outstanding Achievement Award” from the Wisconsin Library association. Doug writes a monthly column on Poland’s contribution during WW2, has published articles on Belgium’s WW2 escape organization, the Comet Line and other European resistance organizations. Doug’s second historical novel, The Katyn Order, which will be released in May, 2011, focuses on one of history’s most notorious war crimes, the Katyn massacre.

You can visit his website at www.douglaswjacobson.com.

Douglas Jacobson on Why I Love War Stories

We are very pleased today to welcome Douglas W Jacobson, author of Night of Flames. This is his entry in our ongoing Why I Love series of posts. You can read my review of Douglas' book here.


I must correct myself straight off. I don’t really love war stories as much as I do stories about the people caught up in them. War is as much a part of the human experience as breathing. Throughout history there have always been conflicts among people and there always will be. It is part of our nature as fallible human beings.

War is an extension of conflict taken to the extreme. And the ultimate tragedy of war is that the people who suffer the most are the common people swept up in it, those who had nothing to do with starting it and whose only desire is for the strength and good fortune to live through it.

In his book, World Crisis, Winston Churchill wrote, “Thus when all the trumpets sounded, every class and rank had something to give . . . but none gave more, or gave more readily than the common man or woman.” In those eloquent words lie the essence of the story I endeavored to tell in writing Night of Flames. Through the characters in the story—Anna Kopernik, a university professor in Krakow, Poland and her husband, Jan, a cavalry officer—I have attempted to pay tribute to the countless acts of nobility and courage performed by common people caught up in the catastrophe of humanity’s darkest hour. What Anna and Jan endured during the long night of Nazi occupation is exactly what hundreds of thousands of real life people endured during this greatest and most damaging of all wars. I have tried, through this work of fiction, to honor their bravery and their memory so that future generations may know the real tragedy of war.

In closing I would repeat the quotation from the legendary general of the 1st World War, Ferdinand Foch, which has served as an inspiration in my writing; “The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul of fire.”

Douglas W. Jacobson is an engineer, business owner and World War Two history enthusiast. Doug has traveled extensively in Europe researching stories of the courage of common people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. His debut novel, Night of Flames: A Novel of World War Two was published in 2007 by McBooks Press, and was released in paperback in 2008. Night of Flames won the 2007 OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT AWARD from the Wisconsin Library Association. Doug has also published articles on Belgium’s WW2 escape organization, the Comete Line; Poland’s 1st Armored Division; and the liberation of Antwerp. Doug has just completed his second novel set in Europe at the end of WW2. You can visit his blog at www.douglaswjacobson.blogspot.com.

Blog Tour: Night of Flames by Douglas Jacobson

Today we are pleased to be participating in the blog tour for Douglas Jacobson's WWII novel, Night of Flames.

In 1939 the Germans invade Poland, setting off a rising storm of violence and destruction. For Anna and Jan Kopernik the loss is unimaginable. She is an assistance professor at a universitry in Krakow; he, an officer in the Polish cavalry. Separated by the war, they must find their own way in a world where everything they ever knew is gone.

Anna's father, a prominent Polish intellectual, is deported to a death camp, and Anna must flee to Belgium where she joins the Resistance. Meanwhile, Jan escapes with the battered remnants of the Polish army to Britain. When British intelligence asks him to return to Poland in an undercover mission to contact the Resistance, he seizes the chance to search for his missing wife.

Though the long night of Nazi occupation, Anna, Jan, and ordinary people across Europe fight a covert war of sabotage and resistance against the overwhelming might of the German war machine. The struggle seems hopeless but they are determined to take back what is theirs.

At the beginning of the year Anna and Serena announced the War Through the Generations reading challenge, focusing on WWII. Very early on in the challenge, they featured posts from Douglas Jacobson, author of Night of Flames, where he talked about some members of the resistance in Belgium. I think I had heard of Night of Flames before that, but it was definitely those guest posts which convinced me that I needed to read the book. I am certainly glad that I did so.

The main characters in Night of Flames are Anna Kopernik, daughter of a university academic and her husband, Jan who is a Polish cavalry officer. With the inevitable onset of war with Germany, Anna and Jan have been separated for quite some time when the novel opens. Anna is in Krakow when the city is bombed. She barely escapes with her life, and it is the start of the first of many close shaves for her as she tries to survive along with her Jewish friend Irene and Irene's son Justyn, starting with a nightmarish drive back to her home in Warsaw.

When she returns home she finds that her father has been arrested, and that due to some tenuous links with resistance groups she too is a target of the German authorities, Anna must use those links to find a way out of Poland quickly.

Meanwhile, Jan is fighting battles against the German enemies, often mismatched. There is one scene where the Polish cavalry is on horseback riding through a forest when the German airplanes start firing on them. My heart was racing as I read through that scene.

As the separation lengthens, both Jan and Anna find themselves outside of their homeland, involved in organisations devoted to fighting against the Germans in different countries. The story begins to encompass the actions of the resistance in Belgium, and for Jan, details of how a Polish officer becomes involved in work behind enemy lines as orchestrated by the British armed forces.

When, as part of his undercover work, Jan finds himself in Poland, he begins the search to find out what has happened to his wife. The question is can he do what he has been ordered to, survive and find his wife. And will she survive her own trials for long enough to be found.

For all that I enjoyed this book, there were some flaws. The most obvious was the introduction of several different points of view. For example, early on, there are just a few pages which are told from the point of view of a German soldier. Whilst I got what the author was trying to achieve with these brief interludes, some times they were a distraction. To be fair, at the moment I am reading another book with a WWII setting at the moment, and the author uses the same multiple view points, some of which are stronger than others.

I also found some of the events, particularly in relation to Anna in the later stages of the book to be a bit cliched, but by that time was emotionally invested enough in the characters, particularly Anna, so that I just wanted to know what happened next.

Overall this was a good read with vivid scenes, some relatively unknown history and a fascinating look at life inside the Resistance organisations, particularly in Belgium. So often, WWII literature use France as their location, so it was a change to read about Poland and Belgium.

I enjoyed it very much and I hope to read more from this author. If you are looking for an interesting read about WWII, or a book to read for the War Through the Generations reading challenge, then this book would be worth taking a look at!