Briefly Reviewed: October 2026

Kruger’s Korps

By H.W. Crocker III

Publisher: Knox Press

Pages: 224

Price: $28.99

Review Author: Scott J. Bloch

Kruger’s Korps arrives at a charged moment, when the moral clarity of World War II feels increasingly elusive. H.W. Crocker’s thriller stands out by revisiting a time when the lines between good and evil were sharply drawn, and the heroes and villains — sometimes hidden under clever disguises — could be clearly identified and confronted. Crocker’s novel is a zany and wicked ride through the shadows of the war, reminiscent of classics like Where Eagles Dare, with elements of Patton and the television drama The Desert Rats. Moreover, it embraces the intelligence-thriller tradition established by authors like Alistair MacLean and Graham Greene, blending espionage and action in a way that fans of Three Days of the Condor would appreciate. Yet Crocker’s work, no mere homage, combines these elements into a fresh narrative rich in unexpected twists and moral complexity.

Readers might find themselves openmouthed at the seemingly improbable adventures Crocker catalogs. But the real history behind the story is even more fantastic. Consider Julia Child, who began her remarkable career mixing chemicals for explosives, or Wild Bill Donovan, a man deeply hated by KKK-sympathetic federal officials like J. Edgar Hoover, largely for his edgy, conservative Catholicism. These real-life figures and their extraordinary roles highlight the complexity and strange ironies of the era Crocker explores. That strangeness is present from the very first scene, in which the novel’s narrator, American spy Rolf Kruger, is posing as a German Panzer officer while trying to fry eggs on a tank in the Sahara: “An enemy shell came shrieking through the air and exploded ten yards in front of us, sending up cascades of sand, showering our eggs with Sahara. I felt an icy jolt of fear. Steiner’s pale blue eyes shined through his sand-splattered face. He was perfectly calm. ‘They’ll pay for that.’” A combination of absurdity and lethality is the novel’s signature tone, and Crocker sustains it with impressive consistency across a plot that ranges from the deserts of North Africa to the jungles of Cameroon.

The story bursts into action from the first chapter. When Donovan outlines the mission, which includes infiltrating the Afrika Korps and investigating a shadowy German-communist weapons conspiracy, Kruger replies with deadpan bravado: “Of course, sir. It’s why I joined the Navy — to impersonate a panzer officer in North Africa, foil an Islamic holy war, aid the anti-Nazi resistance, and perhaps fight the opium trade and Communists in Cameroon. Anything else I can do?”

This sets the tone for a globe-trotting adventure filled with intrigue, humor, and moral questions that go beyond simplistic dialectics. Unlike many World War II tales, Kruger’s Korps doesn’t shy away from the bizarre or the wickedly funny — or even the philosophical and metaphysical. The cast of characters alone is extraordinary: a flying padre, a skeptical Army major who “starches his underwear,” an eccentric Austrian antiques dealer fond of quoting Jane Austen, a Chinese crime lord in a jungle fortress, and the magnificent Lieutenant Hans Steiner — part Rommel, part Don Quixote — who responds to being cut off behind enemy lines by proposing to march across Africa while eating a disgusting tin-bound beef concoction called Alter Mann and loving every bite.

Steiner is, in many ways, the novel’s most arresting creation. Physically imposing, he radiates a kind of chivalric madness that Kruger finds impossible not to admire, even as he suspects he may one day have to kill him: “He was supremely competent, a veritable one-man army, and with such a reputation for emerging unscathed from the most dangerous encounters that he appeared a true Übermensch. Yet, whatever his orders, I had to foil them.”

Meticulously researched, with carefully observed details of military and desert operations, the adventure gains traction and believability in passages that capture both the physical misery and psychological weight of war. Kruger thinks “of the men I had seen incinerated in the Free French attack, the casualties we had inflicted, and Ravenhorst’s driver shot dead and heaped on the funeral pyre of his Kübelwagen.” And he ponders his possible fate: “I realized I could be shot by a firing squad if caught; I realized that members of my own adopted family, the people in these photos, could pronounce my death sentence.”

Crocker explores the spiritual dimensions of adventure, and this is where the book most distinctly distinguishes itself from its peers in the genre. The above meditation on mortality leads directly to prayer: “I pulled out Ravenhorst’s rosary and began fingering the wooden beads. I consider God a hard man, but a fair man, like myself. I banished all unworthy thoughts and decided to invest in some spiritual capital. The prayers came easily. God and I have always seen eye to eye.” This will not surprise readers of Crocker’s other works, from the novels reimagining Custer in a Jules Verne-meets-Wild West mix, to the rollicking and amazing Triumph, a 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church in 500 pages, or his Politically Incorrect Guides to Robert E. Lee and the Civil War. Faith here is neither sentimental decoration nor ideological posturing but woven into the moral architecture of the story. When Kruger watches men burn in their vehicles or debates the fate of a deranged prisoner, the rosary in his pocket is not a prop but a compass. Father Halley — priest, pilot, and OSS operative — embodies the same integration of faith and action, and some of the novel’s wittiest exchanges occur when the skeptical Major Creasy and the good padre trade worldviews under fire.

Crocker proves a sharp satirist of ideology in all its forms. The villain Lothar von Ravenhorst, discovered in a jungle dungeon ranting about a bomb capable of destroying the Vatican and Berlin alike, is a devastating portrait of the intellectual unmoored from conscience. Lothar raves, “I am done with words and numbers! I am done with calculating and figuring! I must build the bomb! I must wreak destruction! I must have vengeance!” Kruger responds to Lothar’s revolutionary self-justifications and insistence that rejecting his family’s faith and traditions is an act of liberation by firing back, “You’ve run out on your country, your family, your friends. You’re a moral coward…. You’re denying your conscience.” When Lothar retorts that his conscience is no longer enslaved to “false guilt,” Crocker has already shown us — through the broken figure of General Ravenhorst, through Siegfried’s quiet fidelity, through the prayers fingered on a wooden rosary — what the alternative looks like.

The novel’s climax (not spoiled here) is both wildly entertaining and faintly parabolic. Evil, however elaborately constructed, tends to collapse under its own weight.

Readers longing for a World War II thriller that both honors classic representations of that war and challenges them with fresh energy and insight will find Kruger’s Korps a compelling choice. Crocker has crafted a story in which a man with a rosary and a good right hook can still make a difference.

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