What are you reading at the moment?

Read this book in high school as part of my NJROTC curriculum. Now it looks like I'm going to have to dig it up and go through it again.

 

Mate, does this one give good coverage to the Timor Sea operations? I had high hopes pinned on Avonmore's new release, "The Empire Strikes South - Japan's Air War Against Northern Australia 1942-45" but it deals exclusively with air traffic from the NEI to Oz, and not the other way around , so your suggestion just made it to the top of ye olde buying queue, and it will stay there depending on your feedback

 

Yes it does. Timor in relation to the RAAF history and operations for that area get a few mentions in various chapters and Chapter 7 itself is called 'Thrilling but Terrifying - The Netherlands East Indies'.
I have it on Kindle and have just done a word search for 'Timor' and these two screenshots show just a handful of mentions (not including Chapter 7).

 

Well, buy it I will, then .

Thank you!

 

Autumn Gale / Herbststurm, the story of Kampfgruppe Chill, september 1944.

 

Now reading and excellent.

 

I'm currently reading



as this is helping me with my research into 5th Beds and Herts. Borrowed it from the library, when I opened the front cover there was a touching inscription.

 

The Battle For Heraklion. Crete 1941: The Campaign Revealed Through Allied And Axis Accounts: Yannis Prekatsounakis: 9781911096337: Books - Amazon.ca

 

The Naked Island.

In 1941, after graduating from the University of Sydney, Russell Braddon enlisted in the Australian army. Together with thousands of other young Australian soldiers, he was sent to Malaya, where Allied forces were attempting to halt the territorial expansion of the Japanese. Although much vaunted as an impregnable fortress, Singapore proved instead to be a deadly trap, and Braddon spent almost four years as a prisoner of war after the city fell to the Japanese. This is not only the harrowing record of the years he spent struggling for survival in the notorious Pudu Gaol, in Changi, and in the tragic H Force on the Thai-Burma railway, but also of the equally brutal treatment of the native populations by the Japanese and the hollowness of the Greater Asian Co-prosperity Sphere they promised. Braddon emerged from Changi on swollen legs and ulcerated feet, from calls with desperate illnesses such as beri-beri and other starvation diseases, malaria and dysentery. Intelligent, tough, resourceful and tough in body and spirit, he was determined to surmount his ordeal. He even sharpened his mind by memorising the sole available book Mein Kampf! The Naked Island vividly portrays battle and prison life as experienced in the ranks. It is a tale of heroism, horror, squalor, starvation and disease endured with fortitude, ironic humour and extraordinary ingenuity.

 

Bought 2 books for a quid each at the local hospital book sale

D-Day by Stephen Ambrose

Hitler's Foreign Divisions. Foreign volunteers in the Waffen-SS 1940-1945 by Chris Bishop

 

Great book. This was the first book on the subject of Far East POW's I ever read, my Dad had a copy when I was a lad.

 

I quite fancied having a look at that, but I've previously bought his biography of Leonard Cheshire: Cheshire V.C: A Study of War and Peace and found it to be shockingly bad. It reads like a tabloid newspaper article and is full of hopeless cliches - it isn't often that I leave a book unfinished, but this was one such.

 

Did this book have much about his time at Cassino?
I've just found the title elsewhere and am interested.

Edit: to answer my own question, "Yes"
Under shellfire in the shadow of Cassino - WWII Today - and several citations in other books.

 

A History of the 6th Battalion The Black Watch 39-45. B.J.G. MADDEN.. Its a book that would cost a fortune to obtain. Thank the lord for military library's. The maps are some what detailed. Some of the most quality maps I've come across in a Regimental history.
The only thing is, one will need a A3 scanner for most of the maps.

 

Working through this one now.



Sorry about the oversized picture. It wouldn't let me copy and paste a much smaller one here.

Anyway, this is about the 5th book regarding the guerrilla war fought in the Philippines after the formal surrender of the USAFFE (United States Armed Forces of the Far East) in 1942. Maybe I'm getting too familiar of the rise of the guerrilla movement in this area of operations, or something else is missing here. The protagonist, Robert Lapham wrote this book some 50+ years after the Philippines were liberated, and some of his information is a bit vague. So that doesn't make for very exciting reading right now, but I'm only about 1/3 the way through the book so far. Hopefully it will start picking up later on.

 

Operation Neptune, Commander Kenneth Edwards, R.N., 1946


Obviously a bit dated but some interesting snippets about the small ship actions on the Trout Line I'd not come across before. Believe it was reprinted a few years ago.

Next will be this


Forgotten, Linda Hervieux, 2015, about the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion

 

I'm currently reading Rude Mechanicals (about British tank development during WW2) and the problem is I'm not sure I'm going to be able to finish it before throwing it against a wall.

 

Just finished:


Now onto:

 

Fighting Back, British Jewry's Military Contribution in the Second World War. By Martin Sugarman.

An interesting book, which contains some remarkable facts and figures and many stories of bravery and courageous service.

 

Oh - recently read too and highly recommend:



Actually I haven't quite finished this. Highly recommend to those who understand what all these words about engines mean . Overall interesting though: