What are you reading at the moment?

I just picked up Ryan's A Bridge Too Far. I'm about 90 pages in, a great read thus far.

 

My latest is a book on WW1 by Elizabeth Greenhalgh Victory Through Coalition. I am writing a review for H - War about it. As to WW2 I am readin R V Jones' memoir Most Secret War.

Ross

 

I just finished Flyboys by James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers.
The narrative follows the lives of several naval aviators who took part in air raids against the radio towers on Chichi Jima. Several were shot down by the island's excellent anti-aircraft defenses. Those who were captured were later executed and eaten by the Japanese.
One of the pilots, Lt. (j.g.) George Bush, was very lucky to have been rescued by a submarine.
If you can get by the author's hyperbole, adjectivitis, occasional sensationalism, and an ellipsis here and there (he sometimes shifts location and time from one paragraph to the next without caesura or transition), it's a spellbinding (and sad) story.
JT

 

I just finished Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley, and was absolutely spellbound. I've just started Len Deighton's Blood, Sweat, and Folly for more of a background on the war, and so far it's great.

 

Sharpe's Havoc

 

I just finished Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley, and was absolutely spellbound. I've just started Len Deighton's Blood, Sweat, and Folly for more of a background on the war, and so far it's great.

I read this recently as well. It was an excellent book, but I think Bradley is a little over-the-top in his writing style.

 

Numerous bloody journal articles and government reports on Land Access, CRoW Act 2000, Land Ownership, Game keeping & Hunting. Shoot me. Please, for the love of God!

 

I'll give you special dispensation.

 

Im reading 1984 by George Orwell for school. I must say that Animal Farm was more enjoyable.

 

Numerous bloody journal articles and government reports on Land Access, CRoW Act 2000, Land Ownership, Game keeping & Hunting. Shoot me. Please, for the love of God!

Sort of know how you feel. I am looking through medical books to get info for my new website up and running. Confusing info at every turn.

 

Sort of know how you feel. I am looking through medical books to get info for my new website up and running. Confusing info at every turn.

Right with you there! I'm beginning to wonder if it would be a good idea to read the dictionary first. :wow:

 

reading

Station 43
Audley End House and
SOE’s Polish Section

Author - Ian Valentine

 

I'll give you special dispensation.

Ok. I've got a current hunting license.

http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/%5BIMG%5Dhttp://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f84/jacobtowne/Smilies/MG3.gif%5B/IMG%5Dhttp://www.ww2talk.com/forum/%5BIMG%5Dhttp://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f84/jacobtowne/Smilies/MG3.gif%5B/IMG%5D

I'm halfway through Richard Wheeler's A Special Valor: The U.S. Marines and the Pacific War. Very well done so far. This evening I embark on the New Britain (Rabaul) Campaign, then on to the Marianas.

The author also wrote two books about the Battle of Iwo Jima, which I haven't yet read, Iwo and The Bloody Battle for Suribachi. Wheeler is a Marine veteran who fought on Iwo.

JT

 

The nuclear barons - Peter Pringle and James Spigelman
Target: Hitler's oil - Ronald C.Cooke and Roy Conyers Nesbit

 

Ok. I've got a current hunting license.

Make it quick, please.

 

Make it quick, please.

Would you like a blind fold? No! Good! :m1:

 

Oi! Rules of War state I get a blindfold! I know they do cos I just wrote it in there!

 

I read this recently as well. It was an excellent book, but I think Bradley is a little over-the-top in his writing style.


Yes, a bit, but I thought it was a nice change from the very dry, text-book style writings one usually finds on the subject. I think I'd get a little poetic, too, writing about the heroism of my father and his comrades.

 

I'm reading a book about a polish officer who is arrested by the russian and is sent to a gulag in Siberia. After that, he escapes with six companions till they arrive at India.
It's a true story. The title is "The long walk" an de the author is Slavomir Rawicz.

Walking the talk?


By Hugh Levinson
Producer, BBC Radio 4's The Long Walk
An epic story of human endurance is being challenged. Did wartime prisoners really walk from Siberia to India?
In 1956, a Polish man living in the English midlands published an extraordinary book that became one of the classic tales of escape and endurance.
In The Long Walk, Slavomir Rawicz described how, during the Second World War, he and a group of prisoners broke out of a gulag in the Soviet Union in 1941. They walked thousands of miles south from Siberia, through Mongolia, Tibet, across the Himalayas, to the safety of British India.
The only question is: is it true? From the start, a ferocious controversy has raged about whether anyone really could achieve this superhuman feat. Critics particularly questioned one chapter in the book where the walkers apparently see a pair of yetis.
But The Long Walk was a sensation. It has sold over half a million copies and has been translated into 25 languages and is still in print.
Archive trawl
Contemporary reviews raved about the story. Cyril Connolly said it was "positively Homeric". The Spectator said "the adventures it describes must be among the most extraordinary in which human animals have ever found themselves involved".



SLAVOMIR RAWICZ
Born 1915 in Pinsk, Poland
Arrested in 1939 after Soviet occupation of Poland
His book, The Long Walk, described a 4,000 mile, 11-month escape by Rawicz and six prisoners from a Soviet camp to India
He settled in Nottingham, UK after the war, died in 2004

One of today's leading explorers, Benedict Allen, says The Long Walk has served as a personal inspiration. "It was just from the heart and - bang - you get this story of this man who lived this tale and I loved it for its simplicity."
Rawicz himself could never produce a single piece of evidence to support his story.
So now, 50 years on, I set out in a BBC Radio 4 documentary to investigate the claims. I sent out enquiries to contacts in Poland, America, Lithuania, Finland, Latvia, Sweden and elsewhere. We sent out enquiries to Rawicz's old school, to the Polish military archives and to the Ministry of Defence.
The programme's presenter, Tim Whewell, travelled to Moscow to see if he could find any records of Rawicz's imprisonment in the gulag files - but there was no mention there.
Then our first breakthrough came from an unlikely source - an archive in Belarus, the most closed country in Europe. They sent us a package of documents which shed amazing detail on Rawicz's pre-war life.
Conflicting evidence
There were official documents he had filled out as a young man, which tell us a lot about his family and his background. But they couldn't confirm his arrest, or his escape.


Our next find came at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, a treasure trove of Second World War memorabilia.
We found Rawicz's military record, which clearly says he had rejoined the Polish Army in Russia. We wondered how this could possibly fit with the story of The Long Walk.
The missing link came through documents discovered by an American researcher, Linda Willis, in Polish and Russian archives. One, in Rawicz's own hand described how he was released from the gulag in 1942, apparently as part of a general amnesty for Polish soldiers. These are backed up by his amnesty document and a permit to travel to rejoin the Polish Army.
These papers make it almost impossible to believe that Rawicz escaped, unless there is a case of mistaken identity. However, the name and place and date of birth all match.
The documents also show that rather than being imprisoned on trumped-up charges as he claimed, Rawicz was actually sent to the gulag for killing an officer with the NKVD, the forerunner of the Soviet secret police, the KGB.
Re-creating the journey
When I showed the evidence to Benedict Allen he was visibly taken aback.


"It's shocking for me personally," he said, "because it means the whole of that great account is a - it's not all a fabrication, but the meat of it, the great wonderful inspiring trek, is actually not that.
"And it's all the more shocking because he has provided the evidence that all that was faked."
The news has also jolted French explorer Cyril Delafosse-Guiramand, who is currently retracing the route of Rawicz's escape on foot and who has been walking for several months. We spoke to him by satellite phone from Mongolia.
"Let me just react physically, my hands are all wet right now, my back is completely wet," he said. "That, that is amazing. I'm shocked because I've been working on something that took me so much time, so much energy."
Delafosse-Guiramand remains determined to continue his trek in memory of victims of the gulag.
Starvation
But what inspired Rawicz to write the book? Its dramatic passages tell of extremes of exhaustion, starvation and thirst as the group of prisoners survived snowdrifts and storms and even the pitiless Gobi Desert.


"In the shadow of death we grew closer together than ever before. No man would admit to despair. No man spoke of fear. The only thought spoken out again and again was that there must be water soon. All our hope was in this."
A clue may come from the story of Rupert Mayne, a British intelligence officer in wartime India. In Calcutta in 1942, he interviewed three emaciated men, who claimed to have escaped from Siberia.
Mayne always believed their story was the same as that of The Long Walk - but telling the story years later, he could not remember their names. So the possibility remains that someone - if not Rawicz - achieved this extraordinary feat.
Rawicz's children, however, defended the essential truth of the book. They said in a statement: "Our father was dedicated to ensuring the remembrance of all those whose graves bore no cross, for whom no tears could be shed, for whom no bell was tolled and for those who do not live (or die) in freedom."
The Long Walk is broadcast at 2000 GMT on Monday 30 October on BBC Radio 4. You can also listen online for 7 days after that at Radio 4's Listen again page.