Assault #1: The Raid On Reichswald Fortress

Assault #1: The Raid On Reichswald Fortress, by J.M. Flynn

No month stated, 1974  Award Books

A short-lived attempt at a Dirty Dozen-styled action series, Assault only ran three volumes, and might have caused some reader confusion because it was credited to two different authors. Veteran writer J.M. Flynn handled this first volume, and the other two were credited to C.J. Floyd. I’m assuming then that Award Books didn’t consider this series along the lines of Nick Carter: Killmaster, as only one volume was published a year and the series was not credited to a house name. Speaking of which, Flynn gets some imprint in-jokery in, with the mention late in the novel of a character reading “a dog-eared French translation of a Nick Carter book,” though given that this novel occurs in the early 1940s, it must be one of those early 20th century Detective Nick Carter pulps. 

Whatever the story behind the series’ origin, Assault #1 proudly boasts its “in the tradition of” heritage, namechecking both The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare on the back cover. At only 172 pages, The Raid On Reichswald Fortress is a fraction of the length of E.M. Nathanson’s The Dirty Dozen, but like Nathanson, J.M. Flynn spends a goodly portion of the narrative focused on training, with the climactic “raid” almost an afterthought. Hey, it just occurred to me: E.M Nathanson, J.M. Flynn, C.J. Floyd…gee, do you think Award was trying to establish a trend? “Don’t just rip off the plot – rip off the author’s name, too!” 

J.M. Flynn was quite prolific, but in all the years of the blog I’ve so far only read and reviewed his Joe Rigg books, which were published by Leisure after this Award series and were credited to “Jay Flynn.” It’s been so long since I read the Rigg books that I can’t tell how Flynn’s narrative style here in the first Assault compares. He does have a gift for memorable opening lines, and tries to bring realism into his tale. He doesn’t deliver much on the action front, but he does cater to the genre demand for sex, with hero Sgt. Brendan Deasy Jackorowsky (aka “Mister Jack”) scoring with two ladies in the short course of the novel. However, given that Award was a slightly more upscale imprint than Leisure, there’s none of the “I want you in my ass!” raunch of the Joe Rigg books. The sex scenes here are more along what one might find in the Nick Carter: Killmaster books, if only a little more explicit. 

Flynn does bring a little more evocative scene setting to the opening than the typical men’s adventure novel, opening the tale with a young Mister Jack (I refuse to type out his long last name!) as a young man just out of the States, starting his life as a mercenary in the Spanish Civil War. From there he goes to a tenure as the overseer at a plantation in South America, then finally into a six-year hitch in the Marines to avoid prison time. We’re told in almost off-hand fashion of the “dirty tricks” Mister Jack pulls on the Germans as the action starts up on the European front, but again he rubs officials the wrong way and is sent back Stateside, where he becomes a drill sergeant – which is where he picks up the “Mister Jack” title. 

Luckily Flynn doesn’t spend the entire novel on this origin material. We get to the meat of the plot pretty quickly. It’s before the Normady invasion and Mister Jack is called in by an Army general to head up a special project that was dreamed up by the “Psych Warfare Department.” These guys claim that “suicide squads” are all the rage, and that condemned men might fight better and harder than normal soldiers. Given his past, with dirty tricks on the Nazis and his general run-ins with authority, Mister Jack is picked as the man to helm this project, even though he’s a Marine and it’s officially an Army deal, one that’s being run by the OSS. 

All this seems rather heavy-handed so far as setup goes, made even more strange given that Flynn makes a big deal out of the “instant hate” Mister Jack has for his commanding officer, portly old deskbound General Mose Barnum, who misses the days back in the Great War when he ran his own dirty tricks on the Germans. But here’s the thing – despite what Flynn tells us, Barnum and Mister Jack get along pretty much without any trouble. In fact, General Barnum even sneaks his way into the climactic raid, proving his own despite being over the hill. What I mean to say is, it seems Flynn was given this inordinate setup – have a Marine head up an Army job with a commanding officer he hates – but he only sort of catered to it. I mean General Barnum spends the first part of the narrative huffing and puffing at Mister Jack’s various “derelictions,” but then just looks the other way. There’s no tension or confrontation or anything. 

Anyway, as for the project Mister Jack will head up – of course, it’s the Dirty Dozen deal. Flynn’s given various dossiers of imprisoned soldiers and puts together a group of thirty who will ultimately become his “Assault Team.” Flynn only focuses on a few of them – the ones, of course, who will be chosen for this novel’s assignment. There’s Truman Belcher, a black guy who speaks perfect French. And Calvin Justice, a “non-gay” drag queen who was thrown in the brig and has been “raped more times” than he can count by his fellow soldiers because he looks so much like a woman when he’s in drag (a drag queen soldier – how prescient! In today’s Army he’d make general!). There are also a pair of “forage masters” from the South named Eastwood and Dixon who “forage” by stealing things. 

Flynn rather clumsily wields together two subplots: while first coming onto the job Mister Jack goes into the city one night and picks up a hotstuff brunette named Elaine. She claims to be engaged to a soldier who is overseas, but she hasn’t heard from in a while. Mister Jack rather easily breaks down her “I’m engaged” defenses and…she gives him a bj, folks, one of the stranger “first date sex scenes” I’ve yet read, particularly given that Flynn doesn’t go for full-bore sleaze in the details and leaves much to the reader’s fevered imagination. Humorously, Elaine will be there to fulfill the narrative’s need for random sex, as Mister Jack will occasionally head off-base to get some nookie, also successfully breaking down Elaine’s “I’m engaged so I’ll just give you a b.j.” defenses so that they engage in full hardcore shenanigans. As mentioned though the sexual material in the novel isn’t too raunchy, along the lines of “She made love fiercely” and the like. Hey, wasn’t that the title of a Monkees song?

Anyway, here’s the messy subplot-tying: one day Mister Jack is receiving a new batch of GI prisoners from overseas, guys who have ran afoul of the brass while stationed in Europe, and wouldn’t you know it but one of them’s Elaine’s fiance!! Indeed, he’s been arrested for murder. But man, Flynn does zilch with this setup…no spoilers intended, but Elaine’s fiance is out of the novel posthaste and Elaine never even finds out about any of it. In fact, Elaine herself is soon gone from the narrative, but (again apologies for the spoilers) she shows up at the end without much fanfare. The entire “fiance” subplot has no bearing on the plot, and to tell the truth it offended me on a personal level. 

Once his thirty men are chosen, Mister Jack and his second in command Charlie Bates head out to a base in the Nevada desert for even more training! This entails the forage masters rustling up game to eat, others on the team working on the buildings they’ll live in, and in general more training for their eventual dirty tricks missions on the damn Nazis. Finally the job comes up – did you guess it was going to be a raid on someplace called Reichswald Fortress? Some British OSS guys give Mister Jack the mission: it’s in the South of France, and the job entails springing a double agent named Annabelle who has gone missing and likely is being held in the fortress. Mister Jack and a select few of his team are to go in there and rescue her – or kill her if they can’t. They show Mister Jack her file photo and he sees that she is “all woman, with out-thrust breasts.” Ah, the days when you didn’t need to be a biologist to know what a woman is! Simpler times. 

Even here we are denied much action. The team heads over to London – where, coincidence be damned, Mister Jack bumps into Elaine again, for a little more hanky-panky – and then they move to France, where they split off in various undercover roles. The feeling is more of a caper as the crew, even old General Barnum, pose as locals and try to get the scoop on the fortress. The heavy lifting is done, unexpectedly, by the transvestite, as Calvin Justice poses as a local floozie and gets cozy with a Nazi official who is stationed in the fortress – including such memorable stuff as Justice getting the guy too drunk before he can successfully feel up Justice and realize “she” is really a he. 

More heavy lifting is done by Belcher, who poses as “a pimp from Marseilles” and gets intel on Reichswald thanks to the hookers he assembles for his stable. We get our first action scene when Eastwood and Dixon take on a German squad; this happens fairly late in the novel, which should give you an idea of how “action packed” The Raid On Reichswald Fortress is. In fact, the titular raid is over and done with in a page or two, Mister Jack and team wearing hoods with googles and “spraying” Nazis with submachine guns as they swoop in and rescue Annabelle. Of course, she will turn out to be Mister Jack’s second conquest, Flynn so casually dropping the sex scene into the narrative that you suspect he’s meeting an editorial quota. Even more humorous is that we have another vague-ish sex scene immediately thereafter, once Mister Jack has returned to the US and reconnected with Elaine. 

This was it for Flynn’s involvement with Assault, but by novel’s end we learn that Mister Jack’s team is now a “unified assault team” and is ready to go on missions across Europe at the behest of the OSS. We’ll see if C.J. Floyd retains the same setup and uses the same characters for the team members, or if he introduces new ones for each new assignment. I’ll also be curious to see if Elaine is established as Mister Jack’s main squeeze, which definitely is implied at the finale of The Raid On Reichswald Fortress.