April 2019 - Current Reading

Finished Heroes of the Crimea: The Battles of Balaclava and Inkerman by Michael Barthorp. Very well written and informative.

I finished Guerilla Days in Ireland: a First-Hand Account of the Black and Tan War (1919-1921) by Tom Barry. Commandant General Tom Barry was the commander of the West Cork Flying Column of the I.R.A. during the days of the Irish guerilla war aimed at expelling the British from Ireland. Guerilla Days in Ireland is Barry's memoir of that campaign and his role in it, written and published 25 years after the events described. Barry chronicles in detail the ways that the decidedly outgunned (even when they had enough guns to go around, they rarely had enough bullets) and outmanned IRA forces carried on an effective enough campaign to eventually force the British government to offer truce terms in 1921.

I just finished Partisans and Redcoats by Walter Edgar about the Revolutionary War in South Carolina. I live right next door. Even though we drive by the markers on the highway I never realized how nasty it was. Total terrorism on both sides that’s shocking even by today’s Standards. I picked it up because I hear Mr. Edgar’s excellent show on SC history on South Carolina public radio.

>3 varielle: Thanks for posting about that book. It looks interesting and I've added it to my various wishlists.

Finished reading the Kindle version of Thor: Anatomy of a Weapon System by Geoff Goodchild. Unfortunately I cannot recommend it. While I like a nice technical book as much as anyone (and probably more), this book reads like a bunch of copy and pastes from technical manuals. There's really nothing about the personnel, training or the reactions of the English folks who had nuke missiles essentially in their backyards.

Completed reading a very, very technical, even for me, Seek & Strike: Sonar, Anti-submarine Warfare and the Royal Navy 1914-54 by Willem Hackmann. No tales of daring do, just the very complete story of the administrative and technical history of the development of anti-submarine senors and weapons for the listed time period.

Also finished the Kindle version of Tragedy at Honda: The Greatest Peacetime Tragedy of the U.S. Navy by Charles A. Lockwood. From Wikipedia: "The Honda Point disaster was the largest peacetime loss of U.S. Navy ships. On the evening of September 8, 1923, seven destroyers, while traveling at 20 knots (37 km/h), ran aground at Honda Point, a few miles from the northern side of the Santa Barbara Channel off Point Arguello on the coast in Santa Barbara County, California. Two other ships grounded, but were able to maneuver free off the rocks. Twenty-three sailors died in the disaster."

That pretty much sums up the event. The writing is alternatively florid and overwrought and there is much that seems like invented dialog. I can't recommend this book, even though it is cheap.

Have been fairly active so far this month in terms of finishing Every Day a Nightmare, The Brusilov Offensive and Warships After Washington. These books have been on various TBR lists of mine for awhile and for various reasons I now wish that I had gotten to them sooner. In the case of Bartsch it turns out there's a lot more to say than I thought there might be, and part of this appears to be because of out and out suppression of the record by the USAF, as they found the whole business just too embarrassing to deal with; better to dwell on George Kenny's successes after he took command of 5th Air Force.

As for Dowling's book, it's just old enough to have become part of the conventional wisdom and to be a little undercut by the new scholarship coming out for the centennial of the Great War; it might have had more impact on me a decade or so ago.

Regarding Jordan even he apparently wasn't sure that he had that much original to say with this book but there is the twist that he takes the Washington Treaty regime and the circumstances that called it into being seriously, which tends not to be the case.

Completed The Devil Himself: The Mutiny of 1800 by Dudley Pope, the story of the seizing of HMS Danae by members of its own crew who turned the ship over to the French during the Napoleonic wars.

We'll finish the month up with Striking the Hornet's Nest (A), a fascinating examination of the precocious USN efforts to strike German U-Boat bases in Belgium by round-the-clock strategic bombing in the Great War on one hand and Earl Hess' examination of the conventional wisdom of Civil War tactical combat in Civil War Infantry Tactics (A) on the other.

>10 Shrike58: Sounds very interesting, I've added it to my wish lists.