What are you reading at the moment?

A Bridge Too Far and The Longest Day are most valuable for the personal accounts they contain. They have to be checked against other things, obviously, but Ryan could write and his books read well.

 

And the movie (Die Langste Tag) had what I call "The March of the Penguins". (Giggle if you know what I mean.)

 

The RAF Regiment at War: 1942-1945.

 

Current read:

 

Facing the Red Army in Festung Posen.

 

A Dawn Like Thunder, very good book on the battles in the Pacific

 

Now today I finished A Dawn Like Thunder, which was very good for me anyway. And I understand that for the majority of folks on the forum this probably would not interest them? So now, tonight, I just started this by James D. Hornfischer. I read one of his other books and was impressed. I can read about the European theatre of war from time to time but now my interest lies in the war in the Pacific.

 

Airborne Engineers by Fred Gray, my go to book whenever I'm attempting to research any post WW2 Airborne Engineers.

I was very lucky to meet Fred a few years back when, on his way to Hull, he popped in for a coffee. We've remained friends ever since.

Incredibly, Fred has just sent me a copy of Chris Davies' latest book, "Sublime Shock Troops", a History of the 1st Parachute Squadron Royal Engineers. Another cracking read.

 

Very off topic. William Thomas Hamiton's My Sixty Years on the Plains. Fur Trade era stuff. He discusses how his company of free trappers (20 men) repelled a 100 strong Ute charge. They fired their rifles at 50 yds (17 had rifles, 3 had double barrel shotguns loaded with buck and ball) and afterward each man resorted to his (two) six shooters. The Utes were unaware that the mountain men had six shooters and had counted on over running the mountain men who would not have time to reload their rifles. A few mountain men were lightly injured (they had prepared for the charge and were prone) and the Utes suffered 30 killed or injured including their chief.

Don't horse race against the Shoshone.

The Crows and Shoshones met and decided to race their horses. On the first day, the Shonshone brought out their second rate ponies and the Crows easily won. The Crows believed that their horses were the swiftest and most invincible in a race.

The Shoshone offered a rematch which the Crows confidently accepted and bet everything, including their prized horses. The Shoshones then brought out their best horses and easily won, taking the Crows' horses as their justly won prizes. The crestfallen Crows left but asserted they would return with more horses.

 

The instructions on my Apixaban.

 

I shall be reading this in a few days as I just received it today. I believe it is to be as good as they get.

 

Have finished two chapters. It's really good so far!

 

Think I will be investing in that book as well!

 

So far, it seems to be a very myth-busting or iconoclastic work. The first chapter takes a critical eye at the planning, and the second at the actual effect of the opening artillery barrage. There was an after the fact report called the Swann Report but it homogonizes the data and effectively gets it wrong.

 

I've done a moderate amount of research on Veritable from the armoured perspective, and it basically seems to have been one long traffic jam.

 

That's true. In Chapter 3, he examines how basically the initial plan involved forcing far too many vehicles onto roads that couldn't handle it, and which were actually far in excess of the force needed.

I hadn't thought about it, but it has an element of "try and just hope for the best"...

 

Average British operation.

 

Birth of Fire, by Jerry Pournelle.

If you haven't read any Niven and Pournelle scifi, and like the genre, I recommend this dynamic duo. The sequence where what are essentially "mice" destroy a battlecruiser is amazing.

 

It usually takes me a couple of weeks to read a 400 + page book. I read rather slowly, unless it’s one of those that I have a hard time putting down. The book I mentioned above, “Remember US”, by Robert Edsel, was hard to put down. It only took me a couple of days. Among the reviews of the book on Amazon, one individual stated that this book was worthy of the Pulitzer Prize for literature. I have read quite a few that I thought were very good, like “The Longest Day” and “Band of Brothers”, to name just two. This was a different kind of World War II war story, not about one particular battle or campaign, but of individual people, some soldiers and some airmen and some of civilians in Holland, who never forgot who came to rescue them from the German army. From 1940 and until years after the war, this book is right up there with the best of them.

 

I got this used…………