Customer Reviews

My Father's Secret War: A Memoir

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

The greatest thing about The Greatest Generation is how little they burdened their kids. They fought demonic Nazis and maniacal Japanese, and after they won the war, they came home and picked up their lives where they left off. And if they didn't talk about what they'd done between 1942 and 1945, all the better --- who really wants to hear war stories?

The underside of myth is nightmare. Yes, many World War II vets sucked it up and maintained radio silence to the end of their days. But not without paying a high price --- what we now call "post-traumatic stress." If you are the child of a vet, you may have seen these symptoms: damaged relationships, alcoholism, chain-smoking, suicide and other forms of early death.

Silence turns out not to be such a virtue after all.

Lucinda Franks was the youngest journalist ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. But for most of her life, she had very little interest in finding out why her father was so remote: "The Man Who Wasn't There." With good reason --- Tom Franks was a world-class jerk.

When she was just 7, Lucinda learned --- from her miserable mother --- that her father had a girlfriend. Late at night, she heard the sounds of Daddy slapping Mommy. And in her bedroom, her father thoughtfully stored a gun under her mattress. When Lucinda was in college, he proposed that she meet his lover. Later, when she was covered in glory at The New York Times, he retreated.

"My Father's Secret War" begins with an eviction notice. Lucinda's mother is long dead, Tom's world has shrunk to cigarettes and coffee and gun magazines, and now he's about to lose his home. Lucinda drives up to make some sense of the chaos --- and, in a carton, finds World War II maps and an Iron Cross, symbol of the Nazi party.

And with that, the book takes off --- Lucinda will turn her reportoring skills on her father, racing to learn who he really was before he topples into dementia and dies.

Many of us had difficult fathers, some as remote as Tom Franks. I did, and it never occurred to me to mount a multi-year probe of his past. A few facts suffice; the conclusion is obvious; move on.

But Lucinda Franks --- she's a pit bull. She strips away layer after layer of her father's defenses. The process runs the gamut. She can be sweet and seductive. And she can be bare-knuckles brutal, reducing her father to blubbering.

You know how the story ends: no reconciliation, no book. It's the road traveled that is so compelling. If you like war stories, here's a twisted one: a veteran who takes wartime secrecy so literally he can't open up, even after half a century. And if you like family dramas, here's a story of a father's love masked as indifference and a daughter's need for a father so desperate it drives her to her own kind of brutality.

In the end, we are re-introduced to Tom and Lucinda Franks. In this telling, he's a hero --- a real one. And although she never says it, isn't she a heroine for penetrating his armor and learning his story?

There are two books here. For most of us, this book will be a first-rate psychological detective story that's perhaps a bit too richly reported. But for adult children seeking reconciliation with their aging fathers, it's more like a gift --- an ice breaker, a way to start a conversation that might bring revelation and closure before the old man shuffles off. For those readers, "My Father's Secret War" will be less like a book and more like a public service.

Three cheers for both books.

Lucinda Franks "My Father's Secret War:A Memoir" is the best book I've read in a long time. No surprise,really,coming from a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist.It touched me on so many levels.It's both an intellectual search for an understanding of her father's secret past as a spy in WW11 as well as a heart-wrenching story of the complexities of the author's relationship with him.What makes this book so very compelling is the honesty and poetic telling of naked truths in a truly real family drama.Everything is here: searing hatred and long-awaited forgiveness,love's disappointments, parents
failings,alcoholism,psychological torture, adultery,rebellion,revelation and resolution. We care deeply as the author so desperately searches to understand why her relationship with her father had changed from childhood idolization to hatred,because of his alcoholic withdrawl.This is a universal story of every daughter's struggle to know and forgive her father as he ages and declines.This author's telling is unbelievably poignant. A must read!Thank you Lucinda Franks!

There are stories galore about "unavailable" fathers and the anguish they have caused their adoring daughters. But rarely have the fathers had such a back story of intrigue and deception as that recounted by Lucinda Franks in this memoir. Franks' determination to tease that story out is a tribute to her perseverance and her investigative skills. In the process, she comes to terms with her largely absent father, and gives us extraordinary insight into the life of an extraordinary man.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Lucinda Franks relates the heart wrenching story of her search for her father's past.
Tom Franks was a young, outgoing, affectionate man when he entered the US Navy to help win World War II. Though he returned physically uninjured, he was never the same man again. He was reclusive, cold towards his wife, and a heavy drinker. Growing up with him, though there were high points, was not a happy childhood experience for the author and her sister, Penny. After the death of her mother, Lucinda revives the relationship with her father, and through patience learns of some of his war experiences, many of which don't match up at all with his official file. Lucinda is shocked to learn that her father was a covert operative, a real life spy, who participated in clandestine operations all over Europe and the Pacific Theater as part of a little known program called Argus. He witnessed first hand the suffering in the death camps, and at one point had to kill a fellow operative, and these experiences forever changed him.
Through the journey to learn about his past, Lucinda befriends her father's mistress, and many of his fellow servicemembers, all of whom were by that time in their eighties. She learns about the man he once was, and through that is able to recognize some of those attributes in the man he became later in life.
The story is well written, and moves well, with a heavy dose of emotion along with the facts. Though a memoir and not a history lesson, any history buff will learn a bit about clandestine operations in World War II. Further, it is a must read for those with an interest in understanding how combat stress affects the family dynamic.

Of the many comments about My Father's Secret War the one most appropriate comes from the Library Journal that referrd to the book as "A moving and rewarding novel..." Simply put, the story evolved from the author's imagination. From dubious evidence daughter Lucinda convinced herself of her father's wartime espionage role and proceeded, with leading questions, to take him where she wanted to go, his declining mental state aiding in the effort. The "evidence" she accepts to establish his role as spy was his possession of a Nazi SS cap, a collection of handguns, a German Iron Cross and some blank periods found in his military records. All this and more "evidence" is available from thousands of WW II veteran, yours truly included. My hunch, from what I read in the book, is that in the Pacific Lt. Franks was assigned to radar, secret then but no more. And when shifted to Europe, attached to the Navy Technical Mission (As was Charles Lindbergh who also visited a German concentration camp) a sensitive activity dedicated to scavenging German military technology together with the experts. The hunt was on among the Allies as the war wound down to capture and exploit such items as rockets, jet aircraft, even advances in medicine, much gained from inhumane experiments. Lt. Franks, considering his education, would have been an asset to such duty though daughter Lucinda wold have had a much less exciting story to tell

Lucinda Frank's memoir of her childhood is a courageous journey into her past. She never knew that the sensitive father, who seated women at this thanksgiving table with the manners of an English lord, was secret agent who worked behind enemy lines during WW11. Her interviews with her father are laced with the gentle skill of a kind journalist, probing yet never insulting. Her loving manner and curiosity work well throughout the book along with the probing dialogue she tenderly uses on her unsuspecting father to gather the pieces of his hidden past. The interviews are masterfully executed. We the reader are on this journey with her opening drawers to find guns, almost tasting the fresh bay scallops from Poole's fish market she has fried to please her father. Franks has demonstrated her skill as a Pulitzer Prize winner may she enjoy the kudos that deservedly comes her way.

As I read the other reviews, I realized they are all true. In many ways this is a poignant and touching story. But Franks takes so long describing their disfunctional family and getting to the interesting part -- her father's war experiences and the process of finding the information -- that I almost put it down without finishing it. I'm glad I stayed with it, as Lucinda finally gets to the real story and redeems herself. (I didn't like her at all at the beginning of the story but I forgave her for her honesty at the end.)

Imagine, for a moment.

You are a young child. Your father is the greatest hero you could hope for. He is a protector and a devoted man. You feel safe with him.

You are getting older. Your father is not how you saw him when you were a child. He is sad, drinks to excess, and tells you he loves a woman other than your mother and wants to leave. He is no longer a hero to you.

He takes long business trips, but your mother can never locate him where he says he's going. Phone calls to the house have no one on the other end, and your mother suspects he's having an affair. You hate him, even though he never leaves and continues to stay by your mother's side as cancer slowly takes her from you.

Imagine you are older. You are married and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. And you still hate your father for all he never was --- a false hero. You need to help him and do so grudgingly. You are surprised at how his life has collapsed. And as you help him and simplify his life, you stumble on a Pandora's Box of secrets, one that will forever alter your view of the man you so despise.

In MY FATHER'S SECRET WAR, Lucinda Franks details a years-long investigative inquiry into her father's life that is troublesome and heartwrenching. She always knew he fought in World War II as a young man and spent time in the Pacific Theater. He never talks about it except for minor remembrances and light tales.

While digging through a box as she packs up his life, with the beginning stages of Alzheimer's starting to rifle his memory and abilities, she stumbles across a Nazi hat and finds herself struggling for answers, ultimately discovering that her father was a secret operative for the military.

Sworn to secrecy, Tom Franks never spoke to anyone of the things he saw and did during the war --- the secret radar operations, the assassinations, the infiltration of enemy encampments. Nor did he ever talk about the horror he witnessed in coming to Ohrdruf, the first concentration camp liberated by the Allies.

Using all her skills as an investigative reporter for The New York Times, Franks lures her father to speak, at first not believing what she has uncovered. The business trips were more than business but not affairs. The silent calls were not from a mistress, though he did have one. The guns hidden all over the house and under the beds begin to make sense. All the while she must untangle a web of history and hidden documentation and memory while trying to connect with her father and understand him for the first time.

How does war, and the especially savage nature of concentration camps and assassinations, affect the life of a young man? How does keeping all of that pain bottled inside for decades alter every relationship he will ever have? How did it destroy the love he had for her mother, who waited for him while he was fighting?

Throughout, Franks does not pull her punches. The memoir is packed with honesty, from the deep-rooted spite and contempt to the ultimate understanding and love, and a return of the hero she had long lost. After hunting for the man who was her father, she sees him "through eyes that have no memory" and exposes a great and difficult story with an ending that is not so much happy as it is bittersweet.

--- Reviewed by Stephen Hubbard

This seems to be a book with the best of intentions.
I liked Thomas Franks, and clearly Lucinda Franks is an accomplished journalist.
But the story itself is all over the place. Too many quick episodes and incidents about too many irrelevant characters. All I really wanted to know was what happened to the author's father during the war.
I didn't appreciate Lucinda Franks's decision to take us on her arduous journey of finding the truth about her father, either. "Did you do this, Dad?" "Did you do that?" "Were you serving here, Dad?" "Were you serving there?" All answered with a "Well, perhaps," or "Let's not talk about that now." A sentence or two along the lines of, "It took me years to get the most basic information out of my father, but finally I did: here is his story," would have made for much more compelling reading.

I found this book to be very well-written, powerful and thought provoking. I can't even imagine what I would have done or felt in the authors situation. Reading this book made me re-evaluate some of my thoghts, feeling and actions as my mother was dying of cancer. The historical aspect of this book alone makes it worth reading, but if you are dealing or have dealt with someone afflicted with cancer or alzhiemers, this book can make you both laugh and cry.