What are you reading at the moment?

What a beaut! Just my type of reading...

Is there, by a very small chance, an e-version? Importing books down here is worst than a pain the ar*e!

 

I've started reading Come to Dust by Robin Maugham, published or at least written in 1945. If this isn't simply a slightly fictionalized memoir of the author's time in the desert I'll eat my hat. 4CLY becomes the Crendon Yeomanry, and I expect all of the names are changed, but he's at Sidi Rezegh and helps Brigadier Gatehouse when they are nearly overrun, and goes back to the railhead with tankless crews around the time of Rommel's dash to the wire.

So it's interesting to read another first person account of that battle and in the shorter way in which the author is writing (compared to Bob Crisp's daily account) I expect it will stretch through to Gazala as well.

 

The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell. If you want to get an idea of what the experience of the war in wartime Britain was like for an intelligent and politically aware man then read this. I could go on about Orwell endlessly. One interesting thing is how often he gets things wrong. In July 1940 he called on the government to arm the people, this at a time when there weren't even enough weapons for the army.

 

Some great stuff in that collection. I read this after I’d gone through all the novels.

 

Got this in my pile too. As my forum name may hint, he is one of my heroes. Principled, intelligent, wrong at times but always an astute observer and predicator of future trends.
His 'Politics and the English Language" is an essay I still recommend everyone who reads English read at least once.

 

I'm sure this was something the government didn't want people to know.

 

I've done a couple of re-reads lately, but as it stands, I am completely up to date with my reading and have no new books to turn to!!

 

This is a shameful admission!

 

Trust you to see this painful disclosure first!

 

I’d been eyeing this up for a while and finally managed to poach a copy for a tenner rather than the daft amounts touted online. Only a skinny book but I don’t feel short changed as the text is tiny!
Tom had an electrical engineering degree pre enlistment and was a navigator on a special duties squadron, accompanying raids in order to try and pick up Luftwaffe fighter radar.
He was one of the vaulters for the wooden horse escape and also mentions a further variation on the scheme called ‘Margaret’ where the prolonged Appel was used to disguise a chap digging a tunnel from out in the open. It was never completed or discovered apparently!
The overall impression of Tom is a very modest man who liked keeping busy, being heavily involved with the theatre orchestra and mastering German to interpreter level in only a couple of years. The chapters are set out thematically rather than by strict chronological order which gives a sense of the key memories he had rather than trying to tell the story of his entire incarceration. Definitely not as descriptive as the classics but an interesting read from a man who was certainly in the thick of POW life.

 

I wrote July but Orwell actually wrote that appeal on June 22nd, a week before after he joined the LDV/HG after being turned down for the army. It was months before his Home Guard unit (in London, mind you) got more than one rifle per every five or six men. It's not clear to me if Orwell knew that the arms shortage was real or whether he thought it was a government plot to keep the Home Guard from becoming a People's Army. Orwell, of course, hoped that it would indeed become just that.

 

The cover artist did a good job on that MG 34.

 

Yes, I disagree with him about ideology but I admire his high principles and his humanity even towards those he disagreed with--a pleasant contrast to our own times. He stuck up for people like Wodehouse and corresponded amiably with T.S. Eliot, a Tory.

 

Coasters go to War. Military sailings to the Continent 1939-1945.
Ships in Focus. 2009.

I missed this when it ws published. It is now offered brand new from Postscript Books. It seems to have full listings for coasters used to supply the BEF and Normandy beaches. Convoy numbers, destinations, cargo, dates etc. Very meaty stuff.

Mike

 

I am currently about two thirds of the way through John Frayn Turner’s The Bader Wing and am finding it a bit off. I understand that the author was a friend of Bader’s, which is fine, however, it may also have clouded his judgement. The book opens with a strange preface explaining how the author had put together a comprehensive account of 12 Group through “every original log of every single sortie by every pilot in 12 Group” as well as other records and interviews. Frayn Turner goes on to talk about the Big Wing controversy and how Bader would have liked to have distanced himself from any controversy and how by assembling the “aerial jigsaw” facts would speak for themselves about the Big Wing, which Frayn Turner believed worked.

There follows a detailed prologue describing Bader’s accident at Kenley and his recovery back to flying. Then follows accounts of each squadron’s movements and actions during the lead up to and shortly after the Battle of Britain. The problem I am having is that Frayn Turner mentions every single patrol and loss/victory in way too much detail. When he first approaches the effectiveness of Big Wing at 12 Group level he doesn’t really offer much of an argument apart from the tally of enemy aircraft downed and the RAF losses. He follows up with this gem of a statement- “suggestions from post-war writers that the Big Wing was clumsy in operation are nonsense and without foundation”.

In his defence he does mention repeatedly that 12 Group should have been scrambled earlier, suggesting the same time as 11 Group were scrambled as to form in a Big Wing and gain the essential height advantage over the incoming Germans and points out some reasons why this did not occur. His evidence though supporting the effectiveness of the Big Wing so far only seems to be the numbers of German and RAF losses and provides no point of comparison had 12 Group not been employing the Big Wing tactics. It makes sense that the RAF tally would increase as the Germans sent larger numbers of bombers over the Channel as the battle increased in intensity whether Big Wing was being used or not.

There are a couple of other minor annoying points- the Heinkel 113’s make a re-appearance and there is an image of Bader climbing into his Hurricane when in fact it is clearly a Spitfire.

Has anyone else read this book? I would be interested in opinions.

Hopefully it may make more sense as I near the end of the book.

Scott

 

Coming to the end of 'The Day of Reckoning' by Donald Edgar. Quite a short book, which is a prequal to 'Stalag Men' which was about his five years as a POW (I've not read this). The main theme is that three TA 'labour' divisions ended up facing a Panzer assault despite minimal training and the absolute basic amount of equipment and weapons.
We have fifty pages of a very personal memoir describing his time during the phoney war (he had a bit of cash to spare compared to to the other enlisted men so seems to have been at restaurants largely, he goes off on historical tangents randomly and mentions three times by page 50 that his favourite newspaper is the Manchester Guardian). Then twenty pages of arriving in France (more historical digressions into the history of the French family he's with). I'm on the next section which is about the TA divisions but there's not much detail other than where they encountered the Germans and what their loss rate was.
It may well pick up a bit in the remaining forty pages or so, but I get the sense this is a bit rushed in the hope of capitalising on his POW memoirs the year before.

 

I am currently reading Dick Taylor's new book on the Matilda and there are a few changes I would have made to what I've read so far. There is a pretty long chapter on inter-war tank development. Some of it IS relevant but I think it's too long. There is also an account of the Battle of Arras but this is placed in the chapter on the Matilda I (A11). This seemed "off" to me, although now that I think about it most of the British tanks involved were A11s and not A12s.

There is also a bit talking about the introduction of Matildas to the North African theatre which on the face of it states that 7RTR arrived in September but since it doesn't say "September 1940" would actually lead one to think they arrived in September 1941!

 

Henry Maule's Caen. A bit too flimsy for my liking. If anyone knows a better one-stop source for the fighting in and around the city please let me know. I'm after good examples for an urban warfare project so any tips on Aachen and Nijmegen (or all those places I haven't heard of) also welcome.

 

Will email some in a moment (Aachen, Metz, Cherbourg and urban warfare in the Rhineland 1945, Hannover, Magdeburg, Ortona and Groningen).

 

Got distracted from the Matilda by the book on Brazilian Stuart tanks. It's pretty good so far! Quite a bit of it is off-topic to the forum, but I was surprised to learn how many tanks Brazil purchased/acquired from the USA during the war, as they insisted on being the ones to defend the northeast where installations were being set up to support convoys going along the coast. I think 300+ Stuarts, half that of Lees, and about 50 Shermans, none of which served with the Brazilian Expeditionary Force in Italy. The book also has some interesting generally useful information on the Stuart such as a listing of the different sub-variants with diagrams of the different turrets and so on.