Current Reading: March 2022

KeskusteluMilitary History

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Current Reading: March 2022

1Bushwhacked
Muokkaaja: maaliskuu 1, 2022, 4:56 am

... or watching as the case may be. Too busy with work during the day and too perturbed by the ongoing antics of these Russians at night, I haven't been reading a great deal. Picked up a copy of a telemovie 'Curtin' about Australia's wartime Prime Minister John Curtin, covering the period 1941-1942, up until MacArthur's appointment as Supreme Commander South West Pacific Area. Interesting to see accurate portrayals of Fred Shedden (Secretary of Department of Defence) and Chief of General Staff Vernon Sturdee (about whom there should be written a decent biography, but alas not - a glaring omission of military historians).

Some relevant books from my library:

John Curtin's War
Defence Supremo: Sir Frederick Shedden and the Making of Australian Defence Policy
MacArthur as Military Commander

2Bushwhacked
maaliskuu 2, 2022, 1:18 am

... just something that has arrived in the mail recently - Ben Kite's 2 volumes on the British and Commonwealth War in Air 1939-45 (substitute "Commonwealth" with "Dominion" or "Empire" to your taste!). A good general reference work and recommended if you want an overarching read on the topic.

The British and the Commonwealth War in the Air 1939-45 Volume 1: Through Adversity
The British and the Commonwealth War in the Air 1939-45 Volume 2: Undaunted

3Bushwhacked
Muokkaaja: maaliskuu 4, 2022, 3:52 am

... or watching as the case may be. Needed something to cheer me up so am watching Operation Petticoat. Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, a submarine (painted pink) and its crew... and some rescued Army nurses... double entendres and hilarity ensues. Military History??? Well... some of the plot lines are actually sourced from real events and the "USS Sea Tiger" is portrayed variously throughout the movie by 3 boats which actually completed war patrols in the Pacific in the Second World War...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Petticoat

4Shrike58
maaliskuu 5, 2022, 6:59 pm

Finished The German Army and the Defense of the Reich, which I feared would come off as hackneyed after 10-plus years of publication, but which was very enlightening about the thought processes of the Interwar German military.

5Bushwhacked
Muokkaaja: maaliskuu 16, 2022, 9:29 pm

... or watching, as the case may be. Follow second world war British conscripts through training and into battle in The Way Ahead (aka "The Immortal Battalion"). Full Metal Jacket it ain't. Starring David Niven, it includes a cast member who later became a Dr Who, and another who later starred in Dad's Army. A Military History angle, you ask? Well... the biggest whinger amongst the conscripts, Private Stayner, is played by Jimmy Hanley, previously an infantry officer wounded in the Norway campaign.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSdeNGCG-Aw

6John5918
maaliskuu 16, 2022, 11:36 pm

>5 Bushwhacked:

I've seen that film and really enjoyed it.

7Bushwhacked
Muokkaaja: maaliskuu 17, 2022, 7:38 am

Military History... in the making...

I was reading an article today about the Ukraine War which contained an analysis of the Russian tactics... apparently in the last decade or so the Russians have reorganised their forces around the concept of a combined arms battalion group as their primary combat unit (armour, apc's, artillery, air defence and infantry all in the one battalion). One of their major errors with the concept has been that these battalions only have around 200 infantry allocated, which is way too little to provide a cordon for force protection, let alone to mount a sustained assault. Hence Ukrainian infantry appear to be able to close with and ambush these units with relative impunity. That said, the latest man portable smart anti-armour weapons, the Javelins and NLAWs, appear to be complete game changers, giving the humble infantryman a new dominance over the battlespace in the type of war the Russians have been waging to date.

8Bushwhacked
Muokkaaja: maaliskuu 24, 2022, 3:10 am

>6 John5918: I find that there are a lot of classic British movies for free on Youtube if you hunt around, whereas classic Hollywood movies and television, once freely available, tend to be progressively removed and shoved behind a paywall.

9Shrike58
maaliskuu 17, 2022, 7:32 am

>5 Bushwhacked: Speaking of war and memory, I just finished up the brick that is Sand and Steel, and memory and popular culture versus actual history is a big part of the author's mission, as he is often comparing and contrasting the actual records with The Longest Day and "Saving Private Ryan. Apart from that it's all good stuff, as Caddick-Adams deals with a lot of "ifs, ands and buts" that often get glossed over. I would warn that the book's military coverage basically stops at Midnight on June 6.

10Shrike58
Muokkaaja: maaliskuu 17, 2022, 7:41 am

>7 Bushwhacked: I was certainly having the impression that this campaign was turning into the "Winter War" on steroids, and that there had to be something congenitally wrong with how the Russians were going about this; over and above not taking the Ukrainians seriously. There are many questions to be begged but a big one is whether there is some Zhukov or Timoshenko figure who can wade in and turn things around, since there is a race between the Russian economy collapsing and the Russians sorting out their logistics enough to make some progress.

How does the war end? The question to be answered is how much of the Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas is Kiev prepared to write off as a sunk cost and what's the minimum that Putin and his inner circle are prepared to accept as to allow them to declare victory. I don't think the convergence point has yet been reached, and I suspect that it comes down to Odessa.

11Bushwhacked
maaliskuu 17, 2022, 7:49 am

>8 Bushwhacked: I haven't watched "The Longest Day" in while... the thing I remember most was just how many different ways they managed to kill people. But you're right, the interpretation of a war in the movies versus actual history certainly changes over time. For example, of the two second world war movies I have referred to this month The Way Ahead (1944) is standard wartime propaganda, whilst Operation Petticoat (1959) casts a nostalgic glow over the war.

12Rood
maaliskuu 17, 2022, 3:59 pm

>4 Shrike58: And now, today in March 2022, the Germans have begun planning and building what promises to be the largest army in the world .... outside only of the armies of China and The United States. Putin's aggressiveness has surely precipitated the beginnings of a new world

13Bushwhacked
maaliskuu 18, 2022, 4:16 am

>10 Shrike58: It was certainly a puzzle when I started looking closely at all the imagery coming out of Ukraine... pulverized tanks and apc's, very little infantry casualties, but also columns of destroyed artillery / rockets / service and supply vehicles that I would have thought would have been divisional / corps level assets - But no... it appears all this stuff was in the forward echelon in these combined arms battalion groups. How does it end? I don't know. Putin seems to have no qualms about shelling civilians and it also appears his intention to let loose irregular or mercenary forces to make up for the failures of his regular troops. I do wonder if there is anyone of any seniority and substance in Russia who would have the courage to step up and remove him, but I think not.

14Shrike58
maaliskuu 18, 2022, 10:29 am

>13 Bushwhacked: I ran across a comment, I'm not sure whether it was the Twitter feed of Tom Ricks (the one-time military correspondent) or Charlie Stross (the SF writer), that the Russians have gone very combined-arms in their mechanized units but they don't seem to have built in enough infantry resources. So that while the tank-heavy units go bounding ahead the logistical echelons are easy meat, and have been targeted accordingly. From the Russian perspective, it also doesn't help that the forces menacing Kyiv were much less well prepared than than the forces coming out of the Crimea.

15Shrike58
maaliskuu 19, 2022, 8:20 am

Knocked off Spain in Arms, which could have been been a good overview of the last twenty years or so of writing on the Spanish Civil War, but mostly looks like a disjointed collection of vignettes and factoids.

16Bushwhacked
maaliskuu 21, 2022, 8:20 am

Some light reading... I picked up a secondhand 1970's Osprey / Airwar title which I thought may be interesting... RAF Combat Units SEAC 1941-45.

Alas, the text was rubbish, and the colour plates weren't much chop either... Oh and hmmm... I thought SEAC didn't come into being as a command until 1943(?)

The redeeming feature was that nearly every page had large black & white photos of a variety of aircraft and aircrew, mainly dated to 1943-45.

On a related topic, can anyone out there recommend a good volume on USAAF operations in the China / Burma / India theatre?

17Shrike58
maaliskuu 21, 2022, 11:12 am

>16 Bushwhacked: Your last point is a tough call, as the Air Commandos in Burma, the 14th Air Force, and the strategic bomber operations out of China tend to be compartmentalized.

18rocketjk
maaliskuu 21, 2022, 2:02 pm

>10 Shrike58: "I was certainly having the impression that this campaign was turning into the "Winter War" on steroids . . . "

I've been having this thought, too. As the fighting started, and the Ukrainians were having relative success slowing the Russians, I thought of something I'd read about American perceptions of that first Russian/Finnish war, that people in the U.S. were all astounded and rooting on the plucky Finns and organizing aid, etc., and then it seemed like suddenly, out of nowhere, the Finns were suing for peace. In my relatively limited reading, I have retained the impression that, expecting a walkover, the Russians initially sent in troops that were far from their best, but that once they ran into trouble deployed more experienced and powerful units. This did, indeed, seem close to what we were reading about in Ukraine, and I was wondering whether the initial Ukrainian successes were going to, similarly, be followed by what would seem to us as a sudden collapse of their efforts. Weeks later, though, it seems this is not the case.

19Shrike58
Muokkaaja: maaliskuu 23, 2022, 12:23 pm

>18 rocketjk: The current state of play seems to be that the Russian forces have tried to regroup, and are in a race between taking ground (or at least making existence for Ukrainian civilians intolerable (precipitating a collapse)) and their logistics totally falling apart. The rumor of the day is that Putin has strong-armed Minsk into active participation; that then begs the question of what the NATO/EU next response is. One thing that seems to be the case is that Putin is now in win or die mode; it would seem stupid to foment a bigger conflagration (participation of Belarus would seem to be necessary to attack the Baltic States), but all options would seem to be on the table.

20Bushwhacked
maaliskuu 23, 2022, 10:52 pm

>19 Shrike58: My only advice to Mr Putin at this juncture, given his masterful powers of self delusion, would be to Declare (an imaginary) Victory over the (imaginary) Nazis, and then 'about face' the remnants of his (imaginary) Army and march them back to Mother Russia for an (imaginary) Victory Parade down Red Square. Having done that, he may then well expect the world would return to normal, in which case his imagination would have taken him a step too far.

Back in the less imaginary world, I'd be surprised if the average Belorussian conscript has any greater fervour than his Russian counterparts to die in the Ukraine let alone the Baltic, which would precipitate a wider war that could not possibly be won by Russia or its satellites using conventional forces, based upon performance to date. The real fear, of course, lies beyond the use of conventional forces...

21Bushwhacked
Muokkaaja: maaliskuu 24, 2022, 3:52 am

>17 Shrike58: I have to admit to almost complete ignorance of the US operations in the CBI, beyond a little knowledge of the Flying Tigers and something I read once about 'flying the hump' in Ernest Gann's memoir ... I think it was Fate is the Hunter. Is it just me, or is there not a lot of material on USAAF operations in the Second World War outside of the ETO/MTO and Strategic Bombing of Japan? It took me a number of years to assemble a small but interesting collection of volumes on the 5th Airforce's operations in the SWPA (and finding material on the US Army's operations in New Guinea has been just as hard).

22Shrike58
maaliskuu 24, 2022, 7:25 am

>21 Bushwhacked: With the US Army one at least has the "Green" books to fall back on. Speaking of books and authors, what do you think of Michael Claringbould? He's an Australian aviation writer with excellent linguistic skills (a result of being an Australian foreign service officer) who seems to be rewriting the history of WWII air operations in the SWPA.

23Bushwhacked
maaliskuu 24, 2022, 7:58 am

>22 Shrike58: It's coincidental that you should mention Michael Claringbould as I have been remiss in picking up his recent series of which I have only the first volume: South Pacific Air War Volume 1, so can't really comment objectively.

I definitely recommend getting a copy of one of his earlier works which I have in my library Black Sunday - When the US Fifth Air Force Lost to New Guinea Weather, published about 20 years ago but should be available with a bit of a search. Eagles of the Southern Sky on the Japanese Tainan Air Group which he co-authored is also worth a look, published about a decade ago.

As an aside, I have long been meaning to pick up a copy of General Kenny Reports and recently stumbled across a PDF copy freely available online:

https://media.defense.gov/2010/May/26/2001330291/-1/-1/0/AFD-100526-032.pdf

24ChristopherBock
maaliskuu 24, 2022, 8:21 am

Tämä käyttäjä on poistettu roskaamisen vuoksi.

25jztemple
maaliskuu 24, 2022, 11:01 am

>21 Bushwhacked: If you are looking for more information on USAAF operations in China, you can look for Way Of A Fighter by Claire Lee Chennault. It's his memoirs but it concentrates on his time in China. I used to have a copy but perhaps unperceptively donated it to a local library in one of my occasional sweeps to free up some space on my bookshelves.

26Bushwhacked
maaliskuu 24, 2022, 6:08 pm

>25 jztemple: I'd take you up on that advice but... youch ! It doesn't appear to have been reprinted since the original and the secondhand prices are not encouraging.

27Bushwhacked
Muokkaaja: maaliskuu 24, 2022, 10:33 pm

>22 Shrike58: And having had a further look online at Book Depository at what's currently in print / available he appears to have somewhat flooded the market in the last few years with various series. Apart from the early volumes of the South Pacific Air War Series I haven't seen any of these publications in bookstores down here in Melbourne, and I doubt they would normally carry these. Specialist military bookstores, outside of online secondhand, have died a bit of a death down here in Australia in recent years. I'm guessing his target market would be the US, as I am not sure demand locally would support the volume of titles he currently has out there.

Postscript... and illustrating my complete ignorance, they're all published locally ... well, Adelaide:

https://avonmorebooks.com.au/

I note I actually have a number of titles by different authors from this Publisher in my library and they are pretty good. The Darwin's Air War volume (2nd edition) in particular showcases a nice collection of colour photos of USAAF P-40's in Darwin in 1942.

28Shrike58
maaliskuu 25, 2022, 11:59 am

>27 Bushwhacked: Good to know...not knowing the author and the publisher made it hard to come to any judgements about whether these books were worth pursuing.

29Bushwhacked
maaliskuu 25, 2022, 7:56 pm

>28 Shrike58: You've spurred me into action... I have ordered the 4 volumes of South Pacific Air War not in my library direct from the Publisher. Once I've got through them I'll post a review. Just looking at the overall product line-up there would appear to be a bit of overlap in the titles, some of it being aimed at history buffs and other volumes probably aimed at scale modelling enthusiasts.

30Shrike58
maaliskuu 26, 2022, 8:27 am

Speaking of books aimed at modelers, I finished "Rogozarski IK-3" by Nenad Miklusev yesterday evening. Kagero is now meeting Stratus in terms of quality and between the plans and cutaways, assuming you have the skills, you could build a really nice model of this plane, which is something of an icon.

31Bushwhacked
maaliskuu 28, 2022, 5:59 am

>30 Shrike58: I don't know why, but I distinctly remember the last model kit I ever made was circa 1990... a Matchbox Grumman Prowler in 1/72 scale. If I recall correctly I did a not half bad paint job on it, and as I have no other artistic talent whatsoever I perhaps should give it another go...

32John5918
Muokkaaja: maaliskuu 28, 2022, 6:42 am

>31 Bushwhacked:

As a railway modeller most of the models I am making now are non-military, although as a child and a teenager I made many military models, land, sea and air. However my current OO/HO scale model railway layout is set in Africa in the 1960s and '70s, and it has some military models on it. I'm waiting to receive the Airifx Scammell tank transporter kit and will hopefully be making that model soon, and I have an Airfix Land Rover kit which I haven't put together yet. I also have a C-47 which I've painted up in civilian colours and am using as part of a model humanitarian aid airlift - can't remember whether that one is an Airfix or Revell kit. I've found some of the north African war-gaming models to be very useful - my desert railway station is a model of El Alamein Station, and I've found quite a lot of north African buildings which fit well on various parts of my layout. I'm also waiting to receive a war-gaming kit of a ruined house which I will use as a house on fire, with a fire engine and firefighters posed around it, cotton wool smoke, and some flashing LEDs inside to simulate the fire.

33Bushwhacked
Muokkaaja: maaliskuu 28, 2022, 7:20 am

Viestin kirjoittaja on poistanut viestin.

34Bushwhacked
maaliskuu 28, 2022, 7:19 am

>32 John5918: Both model railways and restored steam and diesel are huge in Australia. I put the phenomena down to the historical 'break of gauge' between states... before Federation in 1901, Australian colonies all developed their own railway systems. In Victoria we had broad and narrow gauge, New South Wales was standard gauge, Queensland narrow gauge, the South Australian's eventually had all three! Standard gauge is now the main gauge between states, however the move in this direction didn't really occur until the 1950's-60's. When the US Army arrived here in 1942 I gather they were completely perplexed by the total inefficiency of the system when it came to figuring out how to move troops and supplies arriving in the south to where they were needed in the north of Australia.

35Shrike58
maaliskuu 28, 2022, 7:54 am

Last model I built was a Heller PZL "Karas" in Romanian colors, ca. 1980. I was hanging around with an IPMS group that was meeting in a building on the University of Pittsburgh campus. I find it very restful to watch people work on kits on You Tube; the skills of some of these folks are awesome.

36Shrike58
maaliskuu 28, 2022, 7:55 am

Speaking of books, I finished up Italian Battleships yesterday. Hope the authorial team tackles Italian cruisers next.

37Bushwhacked
maaliskuu 28, 2022, 9:52 pm

I've long found the Empire Air Training Scheme in the Second World War a fascinating subject, aircrew being gathered and trained from all over the world and then dispersed amongst RAF squadrons. 41 Squadron RAF was one such squadron that took in EATS aircrew from all over the globe molding them into an effective fighting force. I have recently received by post two monumental volumes of 41 Squadron history in the Second World War by Steve Brew being Blood Sweat and Courage and Blood Sweat and Valour which I have eyed somewhat avariciously over the years. At over 900 pages per volume, these are going to be books I'll dip in and out of over time, rather than read from cover to cover.