What are you reading at the moment?

I have had this for some time now but I keep going back to it - it is an amazing reference covering:-
Secrets Weapons before 1939.
Maritime Weapons Programme.
AFVs and Self-propelled Guns.
Super Guns and Railway Guns.
Infantry Weapons.
Aircraft Secret Weapons Programme.
Missiles and Air-launched Weapons.
Chemical and Nuclear Weapons.

 

Picked up "The Storm of War" by Andrew Roberts', on sale here in Thailand. Yet to start it, but it looks interesting and the price was too good not to buy.

 

'A Clasp For The Few' by Kenneth Wynn. A Biographical account of the 129 New Zealanders who served as Pilots, Air Gunners and Observers with Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain.

 

John Nichol's account of Bomber Command’s March 1944 Nuremberg Raid – the RAF’s costliest night of the war. Highly recommended. He gets the technical elements right and from a wide variety of sources, really captures the mood of the times and the day to day of bomber crews.

 

I'm starting a series of re-reads, beginning with 'The Road Past Mandalay' by John Masters.

 

Hi all, first post here... I decided to get into WW2 scale modelling very recently and also dived into reading.

I recently finished re-reading Barry Pitt's Crucible of War which I last read in the 80s as a teenager. Still a fantastic read.


And in a used bookstore I stumbled across Ken Ford's book Battleaxe Division which I really enjoyed. It made me want to read more divisional histories, although I also like reading individuals' memoirs.


And now for better or worse, also cheap in a used bookstore, I'm reading Monty's words themselves - at least I know in advance that he "smoothed things over" as it were. Normandy to the Baltic.

 

Normandy to the Baltic and the earlier El Alamein to the River Sangro, although very much voicing Monty's perspective, were ghostwritten by (Maj.Gen.) David Belchem, his chief of operations -- and they're fairly non-controversial. Monty's Memoirs, however, could only have been penned by the man himself as the narrative 'voice' is unique. It's hard to describe the tone, but in my mind's eye the manuscript was submitted in crayon with a note appended to indicate the edits or suggestions for ammendment were unacceptable. Please don't take that as the criticism it probably sounds like: I enjoyed reading them immensely despite (possibly owing to) embellishment and selective memory!

Auchinleck gets the worst of it and, if I recall correctly, was urged to instigate legal action by his allies, but, a more noble soul than Monty, he let it all pass. I believe that (Maj.Gen)'Chink' Dorman-Smith also went as far as seeking legal advice before being talked down - there were concilatory changes in later editions.

As close to a 'true Monty perspective' is found in Operation Victory by his mercurial Chief of Staff (Maj.Gen.) Freddie de Guingand. His Generals At War supplies the amusing details and tittle-tattle of his relationships with Ike, Brad and others, and in a way serves as a model for David Irving's (yes, that one) The War Between The Generals, which I believe is now online for free.

Also noteworthy are David Belchem's own publications, All In a Day's March and Victory in Normandy, the latter of which drew ire from American sources in the debate over Monty's progress forecasts for Normandy.

If you're interested in a good divisional history, Fourth Indian Division by G.R. Stevens is a corker - they were in the thick of it from Africa to Greece and there was a lot of variety in their composition.

Welcome to the board, Seroster.

Edited to add: very interesting essay on the war of thd memoirs here:

https://www.google.co.kr/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.bu.edu/historic/conf2012/Startup.2.doc&ved=0ahUKEwintsWo8vXNAhUBopQKHdkvA1wQFggcMAE&usg=AFQjCNGr8cxHCDP6A_cxj0ClYZ73U7A1ZA&sig2=z8NgpCehHYPEabFOU8_1jg

 

Hi Charley,

Thank you very much for the informative post. I thought... hmm... I thought Normandy to the Baltic was supposed to explain away operations that were failures, that sort of thing? If not, good, although I have to say that I would have appreciated far more than the 2 maps in my edition. I'm not finding it easy to locate towns mentioned in the text because the map is very dense.

I found the essay about the war of memoirs very interesting[1]. I was actually not aware of the extent to which Monty/Churchill misrepresented things. Personally, given that I admire O'Connor's work in the early part of the war, I think it's a shame we don't have his memoirs, but I completely appreciate his point of view about feeling it would be profiting off of the dead.

I will try to track down Fourth Infantry Division!

[1] it also reminds me of an old Goon Show radio comedy episode in which the British generals spend all their time in the war writing their memoirs. Must have been right at the time all the controversy was going on!

 

Just started "Fighter" by Len Deighton, the story of the Battle of Britain. I really enjoyed reading some of his novels years ago (only read non-fiction these days) so I think this will be a good read.

 

Serostar,

The thing about the essay is that it is all flannel - there is absolutely no evidence for anything he claims. I would suggest looking at the war diaries of the units rather than anything that Barnett or Dorman-Smith wrote.

Or even better read 'Crisis in the Desert' - Auchinleck had been C-in-C Middle East for almost a year and the way that 8th Army was commanded during Gazala is hardly something that he would have been proud of!

Regards

Tom

 

Ehh.... "Crisis" is $125 Canadian on abebooks...

I should do more reading though.

 

I'll start by agreeing with some of what you've written: there is a lot of flannel and interpretation in the essay (which I take to be a draft) and the tone is far too sychophantic and tendentious -- it clearly shows only one side of the argument. Nonetheless, to state that there is 'absolutely no evidence for anything he claims' is hollow messageboard rhetoric.

First, the essay bears footnotes to supprting sources (the reading is not simply plucked out of the air), and second it leans heavily on Greacen's biography of Dorman-Smith, Connell's biography of Auchinleck, and Baynes' biography of O'Conner. The latter two offer a perspective unseen in Montgomery's and Churchill's writing and provide a wealth of documentary support (I haven't read the first).

I have no interest in writing in support of Barnett and revisionist historians of the Desert War, but is pretty widely established that the first wave of histories and memoirs was myopically partisan and released to a reading public without access to the kind of documentation we now enjoy that reveals the state of play with regard to manpower and materiel. Accordingly, the press and popular imagination was happy to accept those who 'succeeded' as heroes and those who 'failed' as slighly lesser men without further qualification.

I am a very great admirer of Montgomery and his team at 8th Army and 21st Army Group and think he was indespensible to the war effort at several stages, but it does not tarnish his laurels in my eyes to acknowledge that as well as his inspirational leadership he enjoyed advantages and patronage that helped to make his success possible where others had failed. Wavell, for one, was a very great man who was repeatedly set impossible goals with inadequate resources and pretty much told to hold his theatre(s) together until they could get around to helping him. No doubt he and later Auchinleck made mistakes (I've read of a few and am happy to hear of more), but Montgomery and Churchill hint that it was more down to a lack of willpower or vision than anything else (were plans for a retreat really made and were they really burnt? And if they did exist, wouldn't it be negligent not to plan for the contingency given the vagaries of war?)

I have as you suggest read a few War Diaries for units involved in the retreat and - as you say - the picture is chaos, but they tell you little of the reasons for that chaos beyond that which you must infer (intelligence and communication breakdowns stand out in what I've read). They are extremely valuable but as sources far from interchangable with memoirs and biographies - they can only fairly be read in the light of each other to give a full view de haut en bas. That essay I linked to - for all its ackowleded faults demonstrates that there is more to the situation that was laid out in the writings of the more voluble commanders who went to print first.

 

Saul David MUTINY AT SALERNO Brassey's.. Its the only book that I've had to wipe a tear away.. Other versions of this account are available. I've not read them. The powers that be made a rather large cock up. In time, they may see that they where wrong. ( I live in hope) I get the point that a example had to be made. But did the top brass have to go so far?

Stu.

 

Of the mess at ANZIO, I think these two books are worth obtaining. They don't cost a second mortgage! Both have detailed maps, & some unseen photos..Edit. Some may have been seen before.

Regards
Stu.

 

Charley,

I think you misunderstood me, or I wrote too loosely (which is more likely). I was talking about the level of evidence actually included in the essay rather than in any of the sources he was quoting from.

The other problem with the essay is the way he conflates Churchill's historical account with that of Montgomery. I don't recall Montgomery ever laying in to either O'Connor or Wavell in anything he wrote. He was very critical of Auchinleck of course, and no doubt that reflects the state of 8th Army in August 1942, what he was told about previous operations during his takeover, but also his seeming vendetta against Auchinleck. It's a matter of interpretation which was more important, but personally I'm not at all sure that 8th Army would have won Alam Halfa without a new commander in August 1942.

As for Dorman-Smith's notebook - I'll obviously have to look at this biography but whether a few scribbled notes in a notebook should be taken as proof that D-S shouldn't have been sacked is an interesting point I guess. There was no way he was going to stay with Montgomery in charge, but it certainly seems churlish of Monty to follow up by getting him sacked when he had returned to command a battalion/brigade.

The key war diaries that I have never been able to get access to are those of the NZ Division which, on reports of the next German attack, was going to withdraw from it's forward defences and take up defensive positions on Alam Halfa ridge - Monty regarded this as a recipe for disaster and given the inability of British forces in general to conduct such manoeuvres (as shown, for example by 7 Armd Div, at Gazala) and during El Alamein 1, I have always tended to agree with him. I've begun to collect 44 Div war diaries but only rarely get to Kew and there is so much to collect and so little time to do it!

Thanks for replying, though. It's a fascinating subject.

Regards

Tom

 

Tom, if you are after NZ unit histories try the link below, there is also an entire chapter on Alam Halfa and Alamein.

http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-WH2.html

 

Have started reading the recently released 'After Stalingrad: Seven Years As A Soviet Prisoner Of War' by Adalbert Holl.
This is a follow up book to the excellent 'An Infantryman in Stalingrad' and was originally written in 1965 but has only just been released in the English language. Holl served with the 94.Infanterie-Division at Stalingrad as an officer and was captured in the final days of the battle.
This book covers an area that is very seldom reported in detail. Where most memoirs tend to stop with their capture or cover their time as a Russian prisoner in a few pages, the moment of capture is where this one starts. It covers the death marches through waist deep snow without food with very little rest that, along with a typhus epidemic in their first PoW camp, killed thousands upon thousands in the days following the end of the battle. It also covers the attempts of the (what Holl viewed as traitorous) Committee For A Free Germany to recruit among the prisoners which bred an atmosphere of mistrust within the prisoners as they felt they couldn't trust anyone.

Being about the life of a prisoner, this isn't an action packed book but it is one that does give a good idea of the despair and hardships that the prisoners had to face and survive at the hands of the Russians.

 

Those official histories are very good - doubly so as they've been made available online and seem scrupulous about naming soldiers of all ranks who were involved at key points. That said, they aren't the diaries from which they were no doubt sourced. The logistical end of business has been stripped out to give a good narrative, which is valuable in itself but doesn't give the full picture.

Similarly, I want to see the 25 Battalion (NZ) Diaries for Cassino, but can't find a researcher to make the necessary visits.

 

The London railway atlas and Scammell the load movers fom Watford


Memo to self:you need to get out more

Plus Blenheim Boy

 

Clint NZ,

Thanks for the link - it's a great site and, as Charley says they are fantastic sources. I particular admire both the NZ and the Australian Official histories for the way they include details of even the lowest ranking soldier.

Charley,

I think I need to combine a research trip with the next Lions Tour!

Regards

Tom