Current Reading: August 22

Not quite Military History... currently reading Goodbye Mickey Mouse by Len Deighton, an historical military fiction about USAAF P 51 pilots in England. The Librarything reviews don't rate it that highly, but it's managed to hold my interest through the first few chapters, so we shall see. Len Deighton is probably better known for his other fictional Second World War novels Bomber and SS-GB as well as his Cold War spy novels starting with the Ipcress File.

Simultaneously reading Our Boys: the Story of a Paratrooper by Helen Parr which I shall probably write a brief review of when I get it finished.

>1 Bushwhacked:

I read Goodbye Mickey Mouse recently and it also managed to hold my interest, although I think I found the other novels you mention more enjoyable.

Finished North American Aviation O-47, a fairly extensive history that covers the fall from eminence of the "corps observation" plane in the U.S. Army Air Force, as much as it is a "type" history of the O-47 in particular.

>3 Shrike58: I have to profess my complete ignorance of even the existence of the type. Learn something new every day.

>4 Bushwhacked: Which is interesting, as about a dozen of the type did wind up in Australia; mostly for utility work. To put it another way, you know an American WWII aircraft is obscure when it doesn't have an official or informal nickname.

>5 Shrike58: you know an American WWII aircraft is obscure

Maybe that's what the O stands for in its official designation...

>5 Shrike58: ... So... from what I have gleaned they were on their way to Malaya (!) when the convoy they were on was diverted to Brisbane, and seem to have formed a USAAF observation unit there until later dispersed as squadron hacks. Interestingly the link below pictures one at Evans Head (1 BAGS - Bombing and Gunnery School) circa 1944, though there is no record I could find of them having ever been pressed into RAAF service. One can only ponder if out there somewhere in the rural coastal hinterland of northern New South Wales or southern Queensland, there is the fuselage of an O-47 slowly decaying, just waiting to be discovered, having been in use as a chicken coop since 1945...

https://aeropedia.com.au/content/north-american-o-47/

I might undertake a bit of hunt and see if I can find some other local photos where an 0-47 might be spied lurking in the background.

... some success... OA-47 at Amberley, Queensland early '42.

https://www.ozatwar.com/ozcrashes/qld274.htm

Having pondered this a bit more... I reckon it's more likely they were on their way to Philippines when they got diverted... it's interesting that they appear to have been formed from National Guard units, as that fits with the 32nd and 41st Infantry Divisions (both being formed from National Guard units) deployed to Australia in early 1942.

>9 Bushwhacked: There had been stories of machines of this type serving in the Philippines, but the Hagedorn debunks that notion.

>6 John5918: Nice call! One of the points of the book is that the O-47 represented something of a last gasp to keep observation machines relevant in the USAAF, and reflected the wish list of the flyers. The ground-pounders probably would have preferred something that looked more like the Lysander or the Hs.126; the mid-wing designed might have helped aerodynamic performance but did nothing for the O-47 as an observation platform (see the follow-on Curtiss O-52, a high-wing machine).

>10 Shrike58: If the situation hadn't deteriorated so quickly I think they probably would have gone to the Philippines. However, Macarthur had withdrawn to Bataan by January 1942, and left under orders for Australia on 11 March, Bataan falling in May. Malaya had been abandoned by 31 January and Singapore fell on 14 February. I reckon by the time they got everyone on the boats and underway from San Francisco the decision had probably already been made to re-route to Australia.

>12 Bushwhacked: Pretty much. The paper work for sending these planes out still exists, according to Hagedorn, and reflects the post-Pearl Harbor rush to reinforce the Philippines. Though Singapore, apparently, might have been a possible destination, considering that these planes were mostly being sent as a coastal patrol force. Again, they mostly served with the in-theatre troop carrier groups as liaison machines.

The real natural habitat of the O-47 in WWII was Panama; about 20% of the production run wound up serving in the Canal Zone.

Now, for something somewhat different, I wrapped up Mussolini's War, which gives you a comprehensive strategic-operational perspective of how Rome conducted itself from Ethiopia, through the fall of Il Duce's regime; good stuff.

>14 Shrike58: ... sounds interesting, I'm sure there was 'method in the madness'.

>14 Shrike58:

Forty years ago I knew a South Sudanese chap who had been part of the British campaign to expel the Italians from Ethiopia. He was an old man whose English was pretty patchy, but he could still recite the names of his British officers, the serial number of his Bren gun, and sing "God Save the King", while standing smartly to attention, before miming machine-gunning the enemy, "Killing Italians with fire", as he put it. After that performance, of course, one just had to reach into one's pocket for the expected tip.

>16 John5918: ahhh... John, that put a smile on my face after a very long day! Thanks!

>15 Bushwhacked: You might say that the Italian experience represented an effort to redeem the "mutilated peace" of World War I, only choosing the side with insufficient resources to win, assuming the other side kept its nerve in. We all know how that worked out.

If you wanted to do a really deep dive, you might try and hunt down Fascism's European Empire. Much of the motivation boiled down to building a polity where Italy wouldn't bleed population to emigration, and be lost to Italian war potential. It's a very academic book translated from the Italian, but it does get down to bedrock issues.

>18 Shrike58: Maybe I missed the point of the posts, but it is my understanding that Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in the thirties was to avenge their loss at the battle of Adwa in 1896. I never knew anything about it until I read The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire by Raymond Jonas. It's a very interesting story.

>18 Shrike58: ... well the attempt to stop the 'bleeding population to emigration' part failed ... it only accelerated ... Melbourne where I live has a very large Italian population and descendants, most of it post war.

https://origins.museumsvictoria.com.au/countries/italy/

We had about 18,000 Italian POW's here during the war and they were put into agricultural work, most not returning to Italy until 1947... I gather a lot of them then turned around and came straight back!

The Catholic parish to the east of London where I grew up in the late 1950s and '60s started out as a corrugated iron chapel in an Italian POW camp. Local people started attending mass there, and priests from the nearby parish continued holding services there for them there after the Italian POWs had left. Eventually it became a fully-fledged parish. Although it has a name, St John Vianney, in my youth it was always referred to by the locals simply as "The Camp".

>19 jztemple: That too...getting "pay back" and gaining respect was always an objective in Italian calculations.

Switching topics, I just finished Lutzen, a very snappy monograph that makes me want to read the author's books on the Holy Roman Empire and the Thirty Years War.

>23 Shrike58: I have the vaguest recollection of reading something on Lutzen once... I suspect as a teenager in Great Battlefields of the World by John Macdonald... and can recall absolutely nothing about it whatsoever!

.... struggling to get through anything at the moment... I'm at about the 100 page mark on Goodbye Mickey Mouse which seems to be more focused on horizontal engagement with the local female populous than aerial combat with the Luftwaffe...

As for Our Boys: the Story of a Paratrooper, it's very much a worthwhile read and the Guardian review below is a good primer:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/13/our-boys-by-helen-parr-review-falk...

Finished Pulp Vietnam, an examination of the consequences of the clash of bad popular culture and real conflict in the Vietnam War. This stuff would be hysterical if there weren't real, sobering consequences; particularly in regards to social-sexual relations between the U.S. military and the Vietnamese civilian population.

I'm not sure to what extent folks here would consider the IRA's campaign against the British in Northern Ireland during the Troubles to be military history per se, but I thought I'd mention anyway that I've just completed Patrick Radden Keefe's excellent Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. My full review is up on the book's work page and on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

>27 rocketjk: I think that the British Army would definitely recognise it as part of their history and incorporated experience.

>28 Bushwhacked: Fair point.

>29 rocketjk: ... further I note the British General Service Medal 1962 onwards has a clasp for service in Northern Ireland (1969-2007).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Service_Medal_(1962)

>27 rocketjk: Just out of curiosity, does John Wear Burton get mentioned? He was part of a mediation team working with the conflict but cut his ties with the program when he discovered that British security was using him as a pointer to people they wanted to detain. I know this because he was one of my professors in grad school.

>31 Shrike58: I don't recall the name or the incident, though the incident doesn't surprise me in the least, given the descriptions in the book of the way the British operated. If your former professor is still alive, maybe he ought to contact Keefe so Keefe can include that incident in any future revisions/editions.

>32 rocketjk: Dr. Burton has been dead for some time now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Burton_(diplomat)

He was quite the crusty character.

Finished In the Waves: My Quest..., which while dealing with the science of the loss of the "Hunley," and the author's own pursuit of getting a life, does spend a lot of time on the history of the Confederate submarine effort. Whatever else I can say about the book is that Dr. Lance is a good storyteller and I'd cheerfully give her the chance to tell me another; I'll always tip my hat to someone who appreciates the work of archivists!

Still intellectually slumming it this month and not able to get through much reading once I get home from work at nights... brain being somewhat fried... So therefore watching tonight North West Frontier. Our British Officer (Kenneth More) during the course of the movie wins over a rather sexy Lauren Becall whilst fighting off what in polite circles may be described as 'dissident tribesmen'. Special call out here to >John5918 to identify the locomotives on screen! (John - whilst the movie was set in India I gather it was filmed in Spain).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn_KIuZvJPk

>34 Shrike58: ... like the author of your book I clearly need to get a life... the Confederate Navy even visited my home town of Melbourne for supplies and recruits, circa 1865... see Australian Confederates . See also:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-25/australias-link-to-american-civil-war-rem...

>36 Bushwhacked: Interesting sounding book! I've added it to my wishlist.

>37 jztemple: it's been a while since I read it... but if I recall correctly I think a few of the 'Australians' were Americans looking for a way home. A lot of US citizens arrived in Australia from California in the 1850's in search of gold in the Victorian gold rushes at Ballarat and Bendigo. The use of the word 'Australians' is probably a bit of a misnomer in the circumstances, because at the time 'Australia' was still only six separate British colonies and 'Australians' were actually Britons. The local British authorities I gather, were treading a fine line through the whole affair, with the local US Consul not at all being happy about the situation.

>38 Bushwhacked: James Belich in his Replenishing the Earth, a population history of the rise of the greater English-speaking world, notes a tendency for the same people to pop up in various 19th-century gold rushes, as though there was a professional (for lack of a better term) class of gold miners.

As for myself, I just finished up Riding for the Lone Star, which is an in-depth examination of the Texas cavalry tradition. While it reads like someone's doctoral thesis (meaning dry), the author has really pulled together so much information that I have to respect it.

>39 Shrike58: I have read Belich's book at some point, which I found very interesting, but I don't have a copy in my library, and have just now remedied via Book Depository, so thanks for reminding me of it. I gather there were plenty of colonials from New South Wales who made their way across to the Californian rushes, the resultant manpower drain in the colony at the time rather alarming the government.

I've just finished reading The Devil's Paintbrush, an intriguing treatment of the life of a famous Scottish soldier, fictional in detail but with its broad outline based on fact. I enjoyed it and gave it five stars in an Amazon review, but it is a little odd and might not be to everybody's taste.

Sir Hector MacDonald is a well known name for me as he basically saved the day for the British at the Battle of Omdurman. Kitchener, believing the Mahdist assault on his zariba was defeated, had already begun to redeploy his troops for a victorious advance on Omdurman, when MacDonald became aware of a new flank attack. He turned his men, mainly Sudanese slave battalions in the service of the British, while under fire, a complicated manoeuvre which required tremendous discipline, cool headedness and drill training, and managed to hold the line until Kitchener became aware of the new threat and was able to meet it. However reading up on MacDonald I later learned that he also distinguished himself in South Africa, Egypt and India, and earned the nickname "Fighting Mac". He was a raw Scotsman who had risen from the ranks to become a general, and was never really accepted by the "gentlemen" of the military establishment. Following a scandal during a posting to Ceylon, he committed suicide in Paris.

The book focuses fictionally on the last few days of his life in Paris, during which he is known to have met the infamous Satanist Aleister Crowley, but his military career is well covered in flashbacks. The title "Devil's Paintbrush" comes from a military nickname for the Maxim gun, which produced a splattering of red like a surrealist painting as it mowed down lines of attacking infantry.

>35 Bushwhacked:

I'll have to re-watch North West Frontier to give you a comment on the steam locomotives! It's years since I watched it. If it was filmed in Spain chances are they used Spanish locomotives, but I'll see if I can check that. Britain supplied locomotives to the world, including Spain, so it's quite possible that some Spanish locos were at least similar to those used in India.

But wait - Wikipedia tells me that the film began filming in India but many of the cast and crew suffered from dysentery and other illnesses. "The metre-gauge railway running through Jaipur was used for the scenes where More escapes by train and later discovers the massacre of the refugee train". Other rail sequences were then filmed in the province of Granada, Spain, in the northern part of the Sierra Nevada between Guadix and Baza, and the Anchurón bridge over the Solanas de la Carreta near the hamlet of Belerda.

>35 Bushwhacked:

Having now watched the film, I can't shed much light on the steam locomotives. I'm not au fait with either Indian or Spanish railways; I've searched the web a bit but I don't really know where to look in depth. But I see some resemblance to Spanish tank engines. Now if it was southern or eastern Africa...

As with most films that include railways, I'm always very conscious of the unrealistic aspects which do not reflect real-life railway practice, but one very realistic bit was the use of a hammer on a malfunctioning whistle mechanism. Footplate crew often say, "If it doesn't work, hit it with a hammer. If it still doesn't work, use a heavier hammer!"

>44 John5918: ... just Googling around I came across statistics indicating 12,000 - 14,000 British locomotives were imported to India prior to independence, so the locomotives in the first part of the movie are probably of British origin.

Finished a short but interesting Ball's Bluff: A Small Battle and Its Long Shadow by Byron Farwell. I have pretty much all books written by the author and I would have sworn he was some British academician but it turns out that Byron Farwell (Wikipedia link) was born in Iowa, served in WW2 and Korea and later moved to Virginia where he was mayor of a small town. When living there he developed an interest in the nearby American Civil War small but important battle of Ball's Bluff (Wikipedia link), the story of which is related in the book. Farwell tells the story of the battle very well. And the "Long Shadow" part is the story of the Union commanding general Charles Pomeroy Stone (Wikipedia link) who was accused by a Congressional committee of various discrepancies and was subsequently arrested and held for months without trial or even a formal charge.

Perhaps part of Farwell's interest in Stone was that after several years of trying to make a career as a civilian, from 1870 to 1883 he served as chief of staff and general aide-de-camp for the khedive Isma'il Pasha of Egypt, as well as for his son Tewfik. The service came upon the recommendation of William T. Sherman, who was by 1870 the U.S. Army's Commanding General. And later he was Chief Engineer of the Statue of Liberty project at Bedloe's Island, New York Harbor, and planned and supervised the construction of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal, concrete foundation and the reassembly of the Statue of Liberty after its arrival from France.

>46 jztemple: Well the man's books are certainly out there! John5918 posted a review of one of his books in July and I have one of his books in my library as well. The photo on his Wikipedia page looks a lot different to the one on his Librarything page, but it seems to be the same guy.

To finish up August I'm currently reading The Tsar's Last Armada: The Epic Voyage to the Battle of Tsushima by Constantine Pleshakov. The author was born in Russia and had an interest in the story since a young age. His writing is a bit stylized but interesting. He freely admits that while he was able to access Russia sources and translate them himself, he speaks no Japanese and so wrote the book with an emphasis on the Russian experience. So far it is entertaining and quite informative. His section on the intelligence efforts of Russia, Japan and the other major powers is new to me.

Finally finished The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy. It was a long slog but well worth it. I had to take it in small bites because it was so intense.

>49 varielle: Thanks for alerting me to The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy. I've just ordered a copy of the book.

One of my many uncles fought in Africa, Sicily and Italy, and though he wasn't physically injured ... he suffered mightily from the pain of having had to witness the constant carnage. One of my earliest memories is having him come through our door, shortly after 1945, wearing a neck brace, following a drink-inspired crack-up. I'd like at last to gain some understanding of what he was forced to endure.

In later years, my younger brother, by then a former Marine, managed to discuss some of that uncle's trying experiences, particularly those at Anzio. By that time he had effectively put much of the horror behind him ... thanks in large part to his long-suffering wife, who absolutely refused to let him go out drinking with his many brothers and their spouses, who often assumed she was criticizing them.

>50 Rood:

There was also a tendency in some quarters, particularly after the D-Day landings in 1944, to look down upon those who fought in Italy and to sarcastically refer to them as "D-Day Dodgers", avoiding the "real" war in Normandy, which must have been very hurtful and demoralising for them given how much "constant carnage", as you rightly put it, they experienced in the Italy campaign. I first became aware of this through the song D-Day Dodgers which was popular in some quarters during my youth.

In Boston where the JFK Presidential Library stands at Columbia Point Dorchester, was an Italian prisoner of war camp during World war Two, Security was so lax these guys where taking the subway to the North End, That's probably an exaggeration. After the war these guys,a lot of them did not want to repatriate. The barracks they lived in were cut in half and sold as bungalows, to this day they dot the lakes and ponds of the So. Shore of the Ma. coast. I bought one of these in 78, no heat, cloth electric wires, no cellar, moved four kids into it and lived on a man made lake, like a king. This lake was so deep because of the Iron ore dug out and smelted into cannon balls sent south to arm the artillery of the Union Army....AMDG....

>51 John5918: That sounds like a great way to start a bar-room brawl.

I can remember sitting in a brew pub in Alexandria (Va.) between a U.S. Army major explaining why the Vietnam War wasn't that particularly important in the long-run to a man who the major didn't realize was a Vietnam vet, and who was just itching to start something, and I was wishing I was somewhere else. It eventually dawned on the major he was digging a deep hole rather fast and found a gracious way to talk his way out of getting slugged.