Current Reading - November, 2024

Finished up Strategy Shelved, a study of the USN in the Cold War from the perspective of its form of strategy creation, and how that capability may have been lost.

Somebody's getting a head start on next month ;)

It's fine though, it helps balance all the times I forgot that a new month has started and posted to the old month :)

Since I'll still be reading it well into November, let me mention Alan Moorehead's The Desert War, a trilogy on the North African campaign 1940-43, where he was a war correspondent.

In my own circles he is known for his two excellent non-military books The White Nile and The Blue Nile, and I wasn't aware of his military writing. I'm just rereading the first of those two, and I did a Google search on Moorehead and discovered his World War II book, which I immediately obtained on my Kindle.

>2 jztemple: You can call it an incipient senior moment...or a marker of where my mind really is.

Hello! This is my first time on LibraryThing. I recently interested in reading books with time periods including and after World War 2, but narratives not analysis. It's also been a while since I read so I wanted to start with some easier books. I finished "Laxmi Panda - Netaji's Youngest Spy" last night, and wanted something a bit more challenging. My irl friend suggested "A Thousand Splendid Suns". Would you have any recommendations?

This book is from the Journal of the American Revolution publishers. It focuses on one of the generals who served during the revolution, mostly with Washington but also on detached duty. There is a little new insight of events during this period from the book, mostly it is simply a retelling of military campaigns during the war. There isn't much about what Muhlenberg did during this time as sources are few, instead the author makes assumptions and does a lot of quoting of letters. If the reader is interested in this particular individual the book might be worth reading, but there are much better books out there about the war.

>5 nix335: I think you need to be more specific as to your area of interest.

>3 John5918: I'm reasonably well acquainted with Moorehead, as he was born and raised in my hometown of Melbourne Australia before expatriating himself to the UK, starting out as a journalist, then war correspondent and later popular historian. I first encountered him as an author many years ago when as a teenager I read The Fatal Impact. His autobiographical A Late Education is also an interesting read, and I've got a few other books of his in my library: The Desert War Trilogy, Gallipoli and Cooper's Creek. There's also been a reasonably recent biography of him Our Man Elsewhere. His star seems to have faded somewhat over time, I remember his books being reasonably prominent in libraries when I was a kid.

>8 Bushwhacked:

Thanks. I like his writing style and I'm enjoying reading his work. I'll look for some of those other titles that you mention.

>9 John5918: You've got me wanting to track down both those titles on the Nile... I think I may have read a library copy of one long ago.

Currently listening to Richard Dunlop's Donovan: America’s Master Spy and Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile. I've also got my bookmark a couple chapters into Vickers' By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy. Have to set these aside for a minute to complete some other reads ... the Vickers' book is excellent history from the perspective of an on-the-ground source.

Without being from Texas I have managed to be 2 degrees of separation from Mr. Wilson, and he came up in a recent conversation so thought I'd get the book. Years ago I saw the film. The film tells the extraordinary tale but sometimes a book provides little bits one might not notice in the visual re-telling. Not far enough into it yet to say one way or another.

And while I'm listing all my intriguing reads, pun intended, I should give a shout out to some podcasts: I can barely wait every week for the new episode of Intelligence Matters the Relaunch, and binged this past weekend on the CIA's The Langley Files. No Such Podcast hosted by the NSA, like The Langley Files, is heavy on recruiting, but some of the discussions on history and actual jobs within the agencies is excellent for separating fact from fiction. I'm always interested in the different perspectives of history, so this area seems a natural complement to 20th century American history.

>5 nix335: you could do worse than starting off with Rick Atkinson's Liberation trilogy about the US Army in the Mediteranian and European theaters in WW2. The Army at Dawn The Day of Battle (note- the link brings up the wrong book) and The Guns at Last Light. For individual battles, anything by Anthony Beevor is good. For a small unit history Ambrose's Band of Brothers. Individual WW2 memoirs include Company Comander Goodbye Darkness with the Old Breed Quartered Safe Out Here .
And of course I have not gotten to books on the navel and air wars, not to mention Korea, Vietnam etc. Follow this thread and stuff will pop up that should interest you.

Finished Henry V's Navy, which turned out to be a very comprehensive overview of the naval force in question, and how it contributed to Henry's military victory.

Finished John France's Medieval France at War. It's a shortish, but good, military history of the French monarchy from the late ninth to early fourteenth centuries.

Finished The Deadly Stroke by Warren Tute, the fascinating story of how the British navy came to attack and destroy part of the French Atlantic fleet in Algeria during WW2. Very well written.

Knocked off Brazilians at War: Brazilian Aviation in the Second World War. Really my first exposure to one of Helion's "...at War" books. What you get is something of an expanded Osprey booklet, only in a large-page format; very informative.

>3 John5918:

I've now finished the first book in Moorehead's trilogy. A really good read, both in style and content. A couple of random reflections.

Although he only devotes a few pages to it, nevertheless it's probably the most I've ever seen written about the Italian invasion of Sudan and the little known campaign to dislodge them from Sudan and Ethiopia. I'm interested in that campaign as I lived for many years in Sudan. Forty years ago I knew an elderly southern Sudanese chap who had been part of the force which fought the Italians in Sudan and Ethiopia. If prompted he would recite the names of his British officers and the serial number of his Bren gun, mime "killing Italians with fire", and then stand to attention, salute and sing "God Save the King", after which he would expect a small tip for his trouble! Incidentally Lee Enfield rifles from that era were still in front line service with Sudanese rebels in the 1980s, and could still be seen in the hands of the police as late as 2007.

And a little nugget which caught my interest concerning the main north African campaign was Moorehead's comparison of Italian 10-ton lorries and British 5-tonners, captured examples of both of which were used by both sides. He far preferred the latter, because if a lorry was destroyed or captured you only lost 5 tons of supplies and not ten, and when they broke down or got bogged down (as inevitably many of them frequently did), you only had to painstakingly lug 5 tons into other transport rather than ten. A little bit of soldiers' realism!

I'm looking forward to the next two books in the trilogy.

>17 John5918: I have to admit to knowing very little about the East African campaign myself, other than its where Ord Wingate first shot to fame, and was also the one and only combat deployment of one of my favourite 1930's British aircraft, the Vickers Wellesley... I suspect the only place I have read anything about the campaign is Moorehead's history, though I note Osprey Publishing have scheduled for release in the next month or so as part of their "Campaign" Series East Africa Campaign 1940–41 The Battle for the Horn of Africa.

As for trucks... well... for a soldier, any truck is a luxury item... I remember long ago we'd happily travel in the back of a Unimog as far as it could take us... 'cos when you debussed the hard work really started...

Finished the Osprey ”Duel” British Battlecruiser vs German Battlecruiser yesterday. Basically a good example of the breed, though the analysis section repeats some conventional wisdom that’s not borne out by the book’s own narrative: in particular, heavy battlecruiser losses at Jutland wasn’t the result of putting them in the line of battle against dreadnoughts - they were sunk by other battlecruisers.

Less conventionally, Stille suggests that building battlecruisers in the first place was a mistake, because their tasks could have been more cheaply accomplished by armoured cruisers. Perhaps if both sides had conspired not to build them, but if one side had built battlecruisers and the other stuck to armoured cruisers, the latter would have had a very rough day at Dogger Bank.

>19 AndreasJ: On something somewhat related to your post and that book, I saw in the Amazon product page write-up this sentence: "British communication was poor, with British crews relying on ship-to-ship flag and lamp signals even though wireless communication was available." I read a few years ago The Electron and Sea Power by Arthur Hezlet which had a fascinating chapter on wireless and its use during the Battle of Jutland. The British did indeed use wireless throughout the battle, although perhaps not at the crucial times. Admiral Jellicoe's flagship actually had an impressive suite of wireless sets allowing separate channels for destroyer leaders and other entities. If someone has an interest in naval warfare in the 20th century it would be a worthwhile book to peruse.

Stille's suggestion about using armored cruisers certainly does seem odd, one should look at the Battles of Coronel and the Falkland Islands in 1914 to see how effective a battlecruiser could be in an open sea fight.

Finished up Foch in Command. Really dense, but probably essential reading if you're a hardcore student of the Great War. Greenhalgh's blow by blow accounting of how the anti-German coalition was falling apart before the war was even over is downright poignant considering what was to come.

Finished Hadrian's Wall by David J. Breeze and Brian Dobson, a good standard work on the subject. Lots of details about the Roman army there as well.

Gave up after about reading a third of Gordon of Khartoum: From the Crimea to China to Sudan by Alexander McKee. This is one of ninety-nine cent Kindle books published by Sapere Books which are re-releases of older books. Unfortunately I found the author's style of writing to be irksome. He gives opinions on many things which gets tiresome after a while. And he goes off subject on times, discussing for instance Marxism and Fascism when it wasn't really pertinent to the events at hand. And at times he goes off for many pages without talking about Gordon at all. Not recommended.

>21 Shrike58: Thanks for mentioning that book, I'd never heard of it before. Added it to my wishlists. By the way, the Amazon link on the LT book page points to the wrong book, but a quick search found it.

Going through some books, I found (about 10 minutes ago) Destroyer Captain, The Life of Ernest E. Evans by James D. Hornfischer and David J. Hornfischer. I won on GR or LT. I do not usually read military but this was an interesting book.

I finished Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege - 1942-1943, military historian Antony Beevor's well-written, lucid, extremely detailed and horrifying history of arguably the most pivotal battle of World War 2, at least in the European theater. Having had access to new troves of information, including soldiers' diaries and letters home, Beevor is able to give us insight into the planning, execution and errors on both sides of the battle, and focus all the way down to moment-by-moment experiences of individual soldiers. A very grim read, but very much recommended for anyone with an interest in the Second World War itself and also the lengths to which human beings are willing to endure hardship, pain, misery and exhaustion in service to a cause or what they see as their duty. My longer review is up on my Club Read thread.

>24 jztemple: Interesting. It's old enough that it's become a common citation, and I almost didn't read it on those grounds.

Wrapping up the month with Warships of the Soviet Fleets 1939-1945, Volume I. Yes, it's mostly page after page of tabular data, but it's the best tabular data on the Red Fleet that I expect to see in my lifetime.