Bad Books

When I see this thread I realise I have the reading and knowledge consumption of a goldfish.
When I see this thread I realise I have the reading and knowledge consumption of a goldfish.
When I see this thread I realise I have the reading and knowledge consumption of a goldfish.
When I see this thread I realise I have the reading and knowledge consumption of a goldfish.
When I see this thread I realise I have the reading and knowledge consumption of a goldfish.

I would not be able to work out mistakes re bad grandma ,linkages of tank tracks.gun calipers,badgers etc
I am happy to be a mug punter for any kind of book plus the added point my piles of books are now in piles of plastic crates.
I go for interesting cover aka magpie buying
With little knowledge it is difficult to state if the book is lacking ,quite possibly be able to tell if badly written as in me not really understanding what the author is trying to tell me via the pages of his/her/gender neutral thought process.
I do wonder during the publishers appraisal of any book how they actually work out if detail is correct or do they rely on the authors bluff and bustle

A critic I would not make
School report :Could try harder and lacks concentration.

 

Not a book on the Second World War and possibly, not a bad book, but one I found to be condescending - it was written for the US market.

 

I could probably nominate the book I reviewed here for the prize:

Book Review - The Secret Life of Fighter Command: The Men and Women Who Beat the Luftwaffe

 

Kenneth Macksey wrote good tank books. Well, he wrote good books, period.

 

Surprised that he didn't make the connection between the book's odd American / Pacific bias and the fact that one of the authors was an ex-US Marine. Or I missed it when my concentration was broken by the better half trying to communicate with me.

 

A couple reviews I did on another forum:

1.

Guderian: Panzer Pioneer or Myth Maker? by Russell A. Hart. I was looking forward to reading this one; the introduction says the book "seeks the real Heinz Guderian, not the man of legend." I was expecting a short but interesting insight into how Guderian inflated his accomplishments, much like Bond and Mearsheimer had done with Liddell Hart (and which Gat later attempted to redress). No less than Richard Dinardo proffered a decently glowing review of the book that concluded with, "This monograph is certainly not the definitive biography of Guderian, and I do not think the author had that goal in mind. As a corrective to one of the more mendacious memoirs of the Second World War, Hart's work clearly hits the mark." Looking good!

As it turns out, the book is a hot mess. It consists of surprisingly repetitious (and it's only 118pp), scantily-researched, poorly-evidenced, and thesaurus-driven prose that does little to convince the reader of the author's arguments unless the reader is fine with simply taking his word on things. (Of course, with the way things go on social media, this may not be an issue...). The third sentence in the introduction is, "Unfortunately, too many of Guderian's biographers have accepted Guderian's view of his accomplishments without sufficient critical scrutiny." In the endnote for this sentence Hart mentions seven such hagiographies, including two editions of Macksey's book on Guderian, Panzer General and Creator of the Blitzkreig. From this strong start, I thought with glee, clearly Hart will offer some hard-hitting, original research using novel sources

Oh. Hart's main sources are the biographies he accused of insufficient critical scrutiny in the third sentence of his book


Hart consistently makes assertions and accusations with no supporting examples, and often with even no citation. Some of this stuff I even believed going in, but if I had disagreed I would not be convinced by Hart simply saying so. E.g., people now realize Lutz had a large hand in forming the German armored forces. Hart agrees, stating. "It was Lutz more than Guderian who transformed the Mobile Troops Command into a strong, coherent branch in the late 1930s. Quietly, with much less fuss and rancor than Guderian was raising, Lutz negotiated, cajoled, listened, and compromised to push forward his command more effectively than Guderian ever could have done." What negotiations and compromises actually occurred are, like many things in the book, left to the reader's imagination.

Hart later says that "Guderian despised the Catholic, Slavic Poles who now [in 1939] occupied parts of his native, beloved Prussia." This is not provided with any citation or evidence. It's not that I wouldn't believe such a statement, but I would expect some evidence to accompany its presentation. Hart later says that during the French invasion, "In his private correspondence, Guderian expressed compassion for the plight of the French populace. This demonstrated that he held the 'civilized' French in much higher regard than he did the Slavic Poles." So I guess that's the evidence? Again, not that I wouldn't believe it, but that connection seems a bit of a stretch.

Likewise, Hart says that during the Polish invasion Guderian "earned the enmity of many a senior officer whose command prerogatives Guderian carelessly and thoughtlessly trampled over. For example, Guderian soon found himself at odds with the 3d Panzer Division commander--Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg--another future rising star of the armored force." What prerogatives were trampled, what odds occurred, and how those odds were resolved are not mentioned.

A fourth example: "Largely as a result of Guderian's insistence, these [Hummel and Wespe] were produced only in limited numbers, sufficient at best to equip a single battalion in each panzer artillery regiment during 1943-5. The lack of self-propelled guns reflected Guderian's opposition to diverting resources and production capacity to artillery weapons and his firm prewar belief that only tanks could fight other tanks effectively." This cites pp.216-22 in Panzer Leader. Unfortunately, my edition is apparently paginated differently, because there is nothing in those pages in my copy that talks about Guderian's opposition to SP arty. I did find where Guderian laid out the notes he took to his 9 March 1943 conference with Hitler et al after becoming Inspector-General of Armored Troops, which included "9.The artillery of the panzer and motorized divisions will from now on be receiving the adequate number of self-propelled gun-carriages which has been requested for the past 10 years...Tanks of latest design must be supplied for artillery observers."

A final example of evidenceless assertions for this post, but by no means final in the book: "[Guderian's] response to that trend [of the SS and Nazi party gaining influence and threatening taking over the army in 1944] was to more strongly identify himself and the armored troops with the national socialist worldview and agenda." No citation, no elaboration on how Guderian identified the armored troops with the Nazi worldview and agend, or even what that means, really.

Hart can't seem to decide how well Guderian performs as far as politics and influencing others. He variously describes him as having "political naiveté" (p.90), being "a consummate political operator" (p.92) who "continuously politicked" (p.93) those in Hitler's sphere, who executed a "calculated political neutrality" (p.102) after the assassination attempt on Hitler, yet who was again "a political neophyte" (p.115) who was "politically naive" (p.117). This list starts at p.90 only because that's when I bothered to start keeping track. It exists throughout the book.

I generally like historical scholarship and biographies to take a decently even-handed approach, but Hart makes no attempt to hide his bias with word choice, time and again throwing out strings of adjectives full of negative connotation: "More than anything else, it was his repeated, insolent defiance of higher authority, his insatiable and threatening demands for more of everything, his inability to understand the needs of other commands or act as a team player, combined with his inability to finesse his superiors, that cost Guderian his appointment." Jeez, say how you really feel.

So, in sum, I was disappointed. I went into this book believing that Guderian made more of himself than he should have re: the formation of German armored forces, but Hart did little to convince me had I not already thought so. The book is not all bad (I hadn't heard of the bribes Hitler gave to senior officers, but this research is not original to Hart, who cites others' work), but it's shallow and I feel it's not very good scholarship, especially from a history professor and PhD-holder who specializes "in the history of the Second World War in the European Theater." At least it was only like $12.

2.


Alaric Searle's Armoured Warfare: A Military, Political and Global History. From the title, I expected something interesting and unorthodox in the vein of Patrick Wright's Tank, but alas it turns out to be mostly a shallow history of armored battles throughout history that is laden with small errors. In the preface Searle notes that he's a college professor who teaches a class on the history of armored warfare (whatever level 5 means), and felt that he could not recommend to his students a reputable single-volume text on the subject that covered multiple timeframes and countries. Hence, this book. The "global" part comes from the fact that, besides the usual topics like the World Wars and Desert Storm, he talks (sometimes quite briefly) about other conflicts like the Iran-Iraq war and French experience in Indochina. The "political" aspect of the subtitle, and the main reason I ordered the book, is limited to a 15-page chapter penultimate to the conclusion. There are numerous small errors throughout, e.g., gun caliber, introduction dates, confusing the T-64 and the T-62, etc., and for what is described in the preface as a book for teaching, he often throws around names of vehicles with no description of their form or purpose. E.g., when talking about the formation of the Bundeswehr: "The first American AFVs the Germans received in 1956 were 1,110 M47s, 152 M41s, 100 M39s, and 300 M74s." The only machine in the list he had previously discussed was the M47, and the only one to be mentioned later in the text is the M41. I suppose students are expected to look up on their own what their textbook does not define. Or maybe Armoured Warfare (level 5) students are expected to know. Anyway, bottom line is that I anticipated some unconventional analysis, but ended up with a short, meh attempt at an overall history. I do like the mustache on the cover, though.

 

Well, I confess that I thought the Stalingrad book was an OK read. You may kill me now.

Rubbishy mil hist books...wow, there are so many of them and so many different types of rubbish. At the top, there are scholarly and well-written books whose theses I nonetheless disagree with, sometimes violently. I would put Ellis' Brute Force in that category, also the Dupuy's A Genius for War. H.P. Willmott was a serious scholar and in his early phase a good if idiosyncratic writer, but he wrote a book on Leyte Gulf which I couldn't get through because of its coagulated prose and sneering, know-all tone. I have a history of WWII by Allan Millet and Williamson Murray. Both these men are serious scholars and they write competently, but the book is marred by their general denigration of the British armed forces and Murray's US Marine Corps chauvinism (he's an ex-Marine, and boy does it show). I have Fuller's and Liddell-Hart's histories of WWII, and both irritate me intermittently because of their aggrieved if-only-the-Allied-leaders-had-listened-to-me tone. Fuller's far right views are never far away either. Max Hastings can write well and I enjoyed his Bomber Command book, but he irritates me too. He is not so much a revisionist as a Maxvisionist, a schoolmaster perpetually wagging a scolding finger at the Allied leaders for not doing as they should have done and as he would have done had he been in their place.

I know it is the done thing here to denigrate popular historians. How dare they write for the masses, how dare they sell books!
Well, popular history, like academic history, can be well done or poorly done. Martin Middlebrook wasn't a professional academic, and his work impresses me. Stephen Ambrose is now well hated, but people forget that he started out in academia. In his early days, he was something of a left-winger as well. Over time, though, he moved towards the popular audience and urrahpatriotismus, very possibly because there was money in it. (Hey, academics can get tired of poverty too, you know.) I suppose Arthur Bryant followed a similar trajectory.

I read a lot of popular military history when I was young. In those days (60s and 70s) pop mil hist of WWII was almost the only kind readily available, unless you wanted to get lost in the thickets of the official histories. You had to go to libraries for those anyway, and the same was true for the official records of our Civil War. On the other hand, you could get a nice military history paperback at the local bookstore for a buck or less, and I bought hordes of them. These were of widely varying quality. Bruce Catton was a good writer and a serious researcher and his Civil War books were generally sound, but these days I find his romanticism unpalatable. Lots of people hate Alan Clark. I suppose his scholarship was superficial, but he could at least write well and I enjoyed Barbarossa. To be fair, there wasn't a lot in English on the Russian Front then anyway. A lot of what seems bad to us now about the WWII literature of that time was simply the product of a lack of sources, a situation which didn't really change much in WWII studies until the archives and private papers began to open up several decades after the war. I read a lot of the Ballantine/Purnell WWII paperback series, and again the quality varied considerably. Kenneth Macksey's and Dominic Graham's volumes were good. Geoffrey Jukes wrote well, but he was hobbled by the lack of Soviet sources.

Looking over this, I see that I have not listed many really bad books so far. I suppose that is because I take the trouble now to browse through a book before I buy it or even take it out of the library. I can generally tell after a few pages whether the thing is worth bothering with or not. I do recall a very mediocre book about the Bulge by Charles Whiting, an ex-Recce Corps man who wrote pop histories of irregular value. I got rid of it eventually, something I rarely do with a book. Edwin P. Hoyt was an ex-Marine who churned out tons of popular histories for various publishers, though I think he may have begun with a couple of fairly useful academic things. I have several volumes he wrote about the amphibious operations in the Central Pacific and two about the Korean War. These are almost entirely cribbed from the official histories, especially those of the USMC, which of course in Hoyt's eyes could do no wrong and was the greatest thing since Caesar's X Legion, if not indeed since sliced bread. The indexes are lousy and the Korean volumes are further marred by a ranting against Douglas MacArthur which can only be called hysterical. (Max Hastings' book about the end of the Pacific War has the same problem; what is it about Mac that brings this out in people?)

 

Ten Armies in Hell. Peter Caddick-Adams. Garbage. Written in a rush, poorly researched and appallingly edited. Even the title is wrong.

F

 

Horace Greasley. RIP.

 

Shite.

 

I was literally mind blown at how bad "Rude Mechanicals" was. I don't think there is a single sentence in that book that is factually correct.

 

I just put the book down when he started waxing eloquently about the TOG, more or less. I never finished it.

 

He's a fan of TOG? You must be joking. That's like being a flat-earther.

 

I'm serious. He wrote something about how TOG was exactly what the British army actually needed. Not because of how it looked, but because it had thick armour. I mean, 3"! Never mind that the Sherman had effectively 3" with sloping, or the penetrating power of German 75mm and 88mm anti-tank guns.