ŷ������

Dimitri wrote: "Jill wrote: "I'm glad that was a better book than the one I just finished by the same author. i was rather disappointed in it but this one obviously sticks to the subject."
I know I've posted this..."

I don't know if I'm all that nice, but am adding it to my tbr list. :) Thanks!

AUGUST
36. by Isaac Asimov
Finish date: 8 august 2016
Genre: autobiography
Rating: A-
Review: One of the best things about Asimov's story collections has always been his bio ditties. By the time I discovered his positronic universe (age 12, 1997) , the great man had already departed, but he was considerate enough to publish a full autobiography, recapitulating the decades of In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt before moving onto his twilight years.
It is not quite a replacement for the individual anecdotes that accompany his stories; the discussion on his work is not detailed enough for that. It does breathe life into the facts of Michael White's unauthorized Isaac Asimov: A Life of the Grand Master of Science Fiction . While Asimov, like any person, glosses over a few darker aspects of his life that a biographer need not spare (divorce and infidelities, foremost), as a reader you're apt to root for him always because his reminiscence over departed friends and colleagues is a close as we still can get to appreciating Asimov as a person that you just want to sit down to dinner with and talk science (fiction). The photo selection was indispensable to match faces to praise.

It's a pity he never took to travel much, but how many of us became rich by the very act that safeguarded our mental peace, to the sound of the typewriter?

* by Michael White

I know very little about Asimov the man but his stories are the only SciFi I have ever read. Nightfall.......need I say more?

by Isaac Asimov

JULY
36. by Craig L. Symonds
Finish date: 1 July 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: A-
Review: A very informative look at the Achilles heel of operation OVERLORD : the naval fire support, the cargo transport and the landing craft. Even the might of American industrial production had trouble keeping juggling all these balls between the European & Pacific theaters, with the liberation of Europe seemingly depending on a Landing Ship, Tank (LST) more or less.

37. by Martin Middlebrook
Finish date: 4 July 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: C
Review: Martin Middlebrook's first book was groundbreaking when it first appeared & his selection of 10 individuals to follow around the battlefield is a neat ploy, but he lacked the interweaving talent of a seasoned oral historian; compare with every book by LynnMacDonald. Like most books centered on personal accounts, this shouldn't be your first Somme book. Prior knowledge of the battle is a plus.

38. by Robin Prior (no photo)
Finish date: 20 July 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: C
Review: Prior & Wilson are the bad boys of WWI battle historiography, but while their donkey-bashing of Haig and Rawlingson may appear old-fashioned to some & their alternative solutions too simplistic ("more guns" as one critic summed it up) they provide a wealth of tactical & technical detail on the course of the campaign. Read as a "just the facts, ma'am" battle history, this is great. Unfortunately it clocks in kind of heavy after 300+ pages.

AUGUST
39. by Charles Esdaile (no photo)
Finish date: 4 August 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: B
Review: A history of the Napoleonic period in the Clausewitzian manner. It is a tale of politics and diplomacy where the romantic thunder of guns roars in the distance. This is not to say that pure analysis is neglected, indeed Esdaile distils as much observation into a paragraph as many battle monographies in a few hundred pages, but he doesn't offer a clear military timeline for the unitiated.

He isn't devoid of surprises, either, when held against the light of traditional Boney-bashing historiography. As a specialist of the Peninsular War, he sees the possibility of French victory at the outset, both sides being roughly equal. It's repeatedly stressed that the Coalitions of Napoleonic wars weren not ideological in nature. Rather than reactionist monoliths, all participants continued to pursue the long-term territorial interests that had guided the continuous dynastic warfare of the 18th century. They were perfectly willing to let a Republican France exist, if the peace treaty satisfied said interests. This attitude was extended at the various treaties of the day (most importantly Amiens (1803) and the raft at Tilsit (1807).which would have left France in possession of the Low Countries as well as its satellite states in Italy and Germany.

This leads the book to the conclusion that each renewal of coalition warfare be traced back to Napoleon's insatiable ambitions. Can it ? Apologists maintain that Napoleon's campaigns were at heart defensive in nature. Either way, this is one point where the monster of British folklore rears its head and it costs the book a star. There is also a disproportionate amount of attention for British cabinet politics, where other states' foreign policy is often limited to the standpoint of their rulers.

The global reach of the wars is looked at in detail, from the naval wrestling in Master and Commander over the back-and-forth conquests of Carribean colonies to 'sideshow wars' between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

Bloody "hurrah!"s echo across the Balkan & the Caucasus as the Continental Blockade tightens its grip... but this insightful exposition on the causalities of 1810-1811 fades inevitably into an impatient countdown towards that Barbarossa of the Napoleonic period, the War of 1812.
The pace picks up again at the conference of Vienna, with the "100 Days" delegated to a lost cause. A curious parallel is drawn between Metternich's Cold War-esque design and the power balance as it existed in Europe at the zenith of 1809: an equally strong France and Russia could preserve the peace, with their respective dependencies (the German states, the partitioned lands of Poland) acting as buffers.

40. by Glenn E. Torrey (no photo)
Finish date: 4 August 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: A
Review: A comprehensive look at Romania in the Great War. Traditionally, the focus lies first on the diplomatic manipulations by both the Allied & Central Powers to attach the Kingdom of Romania to their coalition, in the belief that the armies of smaller powers could exert influence disproportionate to their numerical weaknessupon the course of the war as a whole, based upon their geostrategic position. Next, a brief survey of the undeniably skillfully executed 1916 Austro-German 'blitzkrieg' offensive under the auspices of Erich Von Falkenhayn, redeployed after the faillure of Operation Gericht, follows*.

Torrey goes beyond this eclectic view. A sturdy frame constructed from the political situation in the Kingdom, the state of its armed forces and its territorial aspirations allows a Romanian point of view up to the declaration of war in August 1916. After the initial success of the Romanian offensive, the part played by the Ottoman & Bulgarian armies is not overlooked before continuing the story to the grappling offensive of 1917 and the re-entry of Romania into the war on its penultimate day in order to annex lands in Habsburg Transilvania in pursuit of its Romania Mare ambitions.

*Most recently by Michael B. Barrett (no photo) (2013)

41. by Isaac Asimov
Finish date: 8 August 2016
Genre: autobiography
Rating: A-
Review: One of the best things about Asimov's story collections has always been his bio ditties. By the time I discovered his positronic universe (age 12, 1997) , the great man had already departed, but he was considerate enough to publish a full autobiography, recapitulating the decades of In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt before moving onto his twilight years.
It is not quite a replacement for the individual anecdotes that accompany his stories; the discussion on his work is not detailed enough for that. It does breathe life into the facts of Michael White's unauthorized Isaac Asimov: A Life of the Grand Master of Science Fiction . While Asimov, like any person, glosses over a few darker aspects of his life that a biographer need not spare (divorce and infidelities, foremost), as a reader you're apt to root for him always because his reminiscence over departed friends and colleagues is a close as we still can get to appreciating Asimov as a person that you just want to sit down to dinner with and talk science (fiction). The photo selection was indispensable to match faces to praise.

It's a pity he never took to travel much, but how many of us became rich by the very act that safeguarded our mental peace, to the sound of the typewriter ?

WORKS CITED
and by Isaac Asimov
by Michael White

42. by Lyn Macdonald
Finish date: 17 August 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: A-
Review: When I first read Lyn MacDonald a decade ago, I was less than impressed with her. The book seemed to be a disjointed series of first-hand accounts with very little added in her own hand.
That observation still prohibits a 5-star rating, alltough Peter Hart outdoes MacDonald in undercementing his tape transcripts, but provided you have a little knowledge about the campaign at hand, these pages breathe new life into the names set in the cold tombstones of the CWGC.

With the last Victorian generation has been erased by the passage of time, the centennial commemorations run a risk of distorting its idenitity. We focus on the senseless slaughter of a war that can't be painted in the moral black-and-white shades of WWII and draw parallels between the Belgian refugees trudging the cobblestones of 1914 and the Syrians that wash up on our coasts in 2014. The voices of veterans of the Somme, however, reveal a war in which the horrors of the frontline were alternated with the small leisures of the hinterland. Both personal motives and Realpolitik digested through propaganda lent meaning to the continued conflict. Also, as MacDonald points out in They Called It Passchendaele, theirs was a generation bred to accept , long removed from the spouse of a wounded British officer repatriated wounded from the Falklands who went on the BBC to complain that "her husband didn't join the army to get shot at". This mentality is not without inherent abuse, but it also explains why one survivor (1990) summed up what he had to endure as "I did what I had to do".

MacDonald gives them back their individual faces without turning them into supermen. They hug the earth in mortal fear, are secretly relieved to score a Blighty and more than anything else push through on peer pressure. Some of them are unpleasant men whose mean streak lends them a valuable agressiveness in battle. A few are old enough to have sons fighting alongside them, or to serve as surrogate fathers to their CO's, others are underage virgins. One on leave gets a good thrashing by Mum because he got a tattoo.

As far as MacDonald's contribution is concerned, I find her to be more invaluable than orthodox battle histories while Walking the Somme. She knows how to convey the century-old feeling of dread when you look up at the slopes beneath the Thiepval Memorial from a cornfield, where "the Germans had turned every village into a fortress".

That being said, the tales of the living can't completely lift the weight of the dead. Circling the Lochnagar minecrater there are the Plée brothers, killed in 1914, 1916 and 1918, respectively. Was there a fourth brother left to console their mother over the telegrammes in a real-life Saving Private Ryan avant la lettre ? Learning what the Royal Naval Division was doing there, doesn't distract from the Able Seaman buried at Londsdale at age 19 "by his loving mother" or the number of unknown soldiers that always seems to be out of proportion. A small Somme cemetery is able told everyone I care about in the world wiped out in 10 minutes, and walking those rows I can't help but wonder "how many artists, academics and potential children have we lost ?"

Read The Somme . Then eat your favorite food in the sun, have a cold drink and make love.

WORKS CITED
by Lyn Macdonald

43. by Peter Liddle (no photo)
Finish date: 30 August 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: C
Review: This book was a disappointment. With a title like this, one looks forward to a dominant amount of analysis and historical debate, but these make up only a third of the pages. The most interesting parts of the book are thus the first and final chapters. In the first, the current trends in historiography are under discussion.

Broadly speaking, the consensus be situated halfway between the Lions led by Donkeys school of the 1960's and the merciless revisionism of notable Commonwealth historians. The controversy surrending the direction of the battle still centers on Field Marshall Douglas Haig, demonised in Denis Winters' Haigs Command: A Reassessment (1991) but since moderately rehabilited in works such as Haig: A Re-Appraisal 80 Years On.

From this deducts that some of the criticisms voiced by enfant terribles Tim Travers ( The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare ,1987) and Trevor&Wilson (The Somme ,2005) have gained acceptance, but not all.

The academic debate still searches for better solutions to the operational quagmire of the Somme than "More guns. Always add more guns." but agrees, for example, that the notion that the Somme offensive was a knee-jerk reaction of the Entente to the attack on Verdun must be banished from the popular mind; an offensive on such a scale couldn't have been organised on such short notice; the British just took up a larger part of the task so that the French Army could maximize its Moria system on the Meuse front. Of note is also that the heavily burdened greenhorns of the British New Armies did not uniformily advance shoulder to shoulder, but locally adapted more open formation, sometimes inspired by the seasoned habits of the French infantry on the right wing. The kicking of a football across No Man's Land is a famous example of this.

The four chapters making up the middle are a conventional, if usefully brief, history of the battle. If you read this diagonally, there's a lot of operational analysis to the point on offer; it beats weeding through the hundreds of pages by Trevor & Wilson. Some of the testimonials shed light on lesser-known aspects of the Somme battle, such as the attritional cost among pilots to establish air suppremacy.

The final chapter "A verdict" tries to assign credit and blame where due, but it is clear that when framed in the larger context of the war, without the benefit of hindsight, without material constraints or a 21st-century mentality frame, the fight went as well as it could. One of the small plates attached to the planks of the walkway around the Lochnagar mine quotes a veteran who died in 1990 : "I did what I had to do". The contemporary voice definitely seems to make less fuss over the possibility of a less-than-perfect direction.

WORKS CITED
byDenis Winter(no photo)
byBrian Bond(no photo)
byTim Travers(no photo)
byRobin Prior(no photo)

September
44. byDavid G. Williamson(no photo)
Finish date: 1 september 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: B-
Review: Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first. This is a slim volume (170 pages). Williamson is able to translate Polish primary sources to liven up the corpus, but seems to have no desire to incorporate any secondary material into his bibliography. His treatment of the German campaign focusses on the traditional large-scale German pincer movements and Polish counter-manoeuvres, but the reader is left with one map of 1939 Poland and a single map showing the final position of defeat of each Polish Army.

Now onto the good stuff. The campaign chronicle is se is a good foundation for in-depth study, with clear recapitulations as to the outcome of all these advances. It is also preceeded by a decent comparison of all three belligerent forces as they developped during the interwar period. For the benefit of the less polophile reader, the Polish part comes with an encyclopedic intro to the country's reformation as a state in the wake of the Austro-Hungarian implosion.

A hefty dozen of individual memoirs and eyewitnesses breathe life into the text, with a few cocky young Wehrmacht recruits thrown in for good measure. The lesser known aspects of the Polish campaign are present such as the naval siege of the Hel peninsula, the escape of Polish submarines to neutral countries or the relatively intact emigration of the Polish Air Force.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Romania playing a role into the survival of the Polish Armed Forces, as the High Command retreated to the southeastern border ahead of the joint German-Russian invasion. The subsequent odyssey via the Balkan to (French) Beirut and hence to France or Great Britain is mind-boggling.

Concerning these allies, the book offers a righteous aroma of l'Albion perfide as they never made good their repeated promises or threats of intervention. From their point of view, the Chamberlain cabinet was still committed to re-armament and there was little to spare that wouldn't endager the material effectiveness of its own forces. Still....

Myths reinforce one another, as do truths. Poland is one of the better examples of the war. The Wehrmacht wasn't the well-tuned Blitzkrieg machine of popular lore, nor did Polish cavalry execute lance charges against PzkW's. In reality, the Polish cavalry fought as mounted infantry, coupling mobility with anti-tank firepower on terrain that was too marshy or rugged to facilitate wheeled transport. The German tank unts, for their part, suffered mass mechanical breakdown. The Sitzkrieg was a necessary breathing spell for them; without Czech Skoda tanks they couldn't have amassed enough penetration power to successfully invade the West.

45. byNils Johan Ringdal(no photo)
Finish date: 3 september 2016
Genre: social history/journalism
Rating: B
Review: t is in essence a global social history of prostitution, particularly its ever-evolving position of tolerance or ostracization in society. It makes a strong case for tolerance in the present day, where legalization is a gateway to proper medical prevention, without passing a verdict on the benefits of ‘white�� prostitution when it comes to economical advantage or protection against violence. The mixed results of legalization policies on those points are clearly visible when the state relies too much on overzealous Social Justice Warriors in the implementation of its policy.

Antiquity is fairly uniform. This comprises the Ancient Middle East, the first civilization of the Indus valley, the Egypt of the Pharaohs and our own Classical world. The principle of “temple prostitution�� is found throughout this period, in marked contrast with later times dominated by monotheistic world religions. The omnipresent pejorative distinction between questionable streetwalker (or doorwaystander, to be precise) and the unattainable courtesan has, by contrast, has survived into the present day in the low-level prices of the red light district and the high-class escort. The focus lies on the comparatively rich and accessible source material of the Greco-Roman world, which operated within an entirely different mental frame. It was a fashionable subject in Antiquity studies around the turn of the millennium, see among others Bisexuality in the Ancient World by Eva Cantarella and Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity by Grant . Some of the vignettes employed here will be familiar? From Thaïs of Athens inciting Alexander to burn down the palaces of Persepolis to the sharp verses of Martialis.

The position of Christianity was understandably conflicted from the beginning, which translated into a sharper social division of prostitution. Both Augustinus and Thomas Aquinas softened a run-of-the-mill Puritan stance with the acknowledgement of prostitution’s social necessity. The Church preferred it as a lesser evil to homosexuality among the clergy. In a clever twist, clients of the cloth could claim to “rescue�� a prostitute when caught. No wonder that the 13th century tale of van den vos reynaerde speaks of “signing the hymns�� as a metaphor for intercourse! In the secular world, the licensed brothel prospered, under close medical supervision of the urban authorities and with generous contributions to religious architecture. For some reason, the author speaks of the predominant use of the missionary position here. Is it possible that the very art of lovemaking went into decline? The admonishing of an Italian courtesan to her daughter seems to second this, complaining that it’s the clients who come up with crazy positions. I chose to question this part vehemently.

The Renaissance meant, in the realm of love for sale, foremost a Renaissance in venereal disease. Syphilis reared its ugly head around 1450 and caused a severe decline of the brothel, driving ordinary prostitution into an unsanitary underground. On the other end, high-class courtesans attained an unprecedented level of fame, not by sheer virtue of their looks or amorous talent, but also by their skills as donna universalis and as a source of inspiration for artists. In other fields, the shadow of the Middle Ages stretched forth across the centuries. Within the nobility and royalty, the political influence of the blonde nymph had her roots there; my favourite anecdote concerns a courtesan who was the only women to ever seduce Henri II of France, who mostly preferred male company until the captain of his bodyguard accidentally pierced his brain with a lance splinter at a tournament.
The pace of the story quickens in tandem with the pace of European exploration: the main novelties of the 18th century as presented here seem to be the happy hooker Fanny Hill of John Cleland (1748) who stood opposite Defoe’s tragic Moll Flanders to shape new incarnation of the Madonna-Whore complex. Up to that point, Maria Magdalena had been a contradiction in extremis par excellence for many Christian thinkers and, according to diaries preserved in the archives of the religious orders, a nightly temptation for the more imaginative monk. Devout yet fallen, she was more human and easy to relate to than many figures in the pantheon of saints, gaining fame as a patron saint not just for the ladies of the night, but also for such borderline crafts as glove-making. She was omnipresent in the art of the crucifixion, gradually letting her hair and her gown down. This tells us something of what was considered seductive from generation to generation (to the modern eye, the evolution is appreciatively revealing).

Away from the creamy skin on dark satin, adventurous explorers came into contact with cultures whose mores were different and deceptively more easygoing than those of the Old World. Here the story really spreads its wings. African polygamy, the equality of the sexes on the isles of the South Seas and the truly matriarchal philosophies of Native American cultures all precluded the existence of prostitution as understood in a brutally economic context. The next two hundred years would see these practices pushed to the periphery as the global economy became more rigid under the umbrella of imperialism first and neoliberal capitalism second. Time and again, a work force made up predominantly of young unmarried men concentrated in mercantile and industrial areas, resulting in a corresponding concentration of bordellos.

Japan, as so often, proved an exception to the rule prior to the arrival of commodore Perry. All though the concept of prostitution was so superfluous to the easygoing culture of sexual relations both hetero- and homosexual in pre-Edo Japan that it had to be imported from China, it found fertile ground in the atmosphere of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603), whose samurai enjoyed the lavish services of geishas in a special town on the outskirts of the capital, sometimes to the point of financial ruin that many an Italian would’ve sympathized with. The formality to prevalent in Japanese society created a unique aloofness where the girl would not so much as smile or make eye contact during the preceding meal, but at the same time these visits where the talk of Edo thanks to the mandatory presence of her entourage. (it is worth noting here that the dimension of gossip nowhere is touched upon in any depth, not even for the Roman period) A further twist is self-mutilation as an expression of love, not unlike the chivalric romance of European feudalism, sometimes accumulating in hara-kiri as in the play Madame Butterfly.

Alas, Josephine Butler, in her laudable fight against the discriminating Contagious Diseases Acts and white slavery (both actual trafficking and moral panic), has created a political framework that sanctions intervention by the police force and social welfare organizations out of a perceived moral superiority, dangerously oversimplifying the complex reality of 21st century prostitution. In a part of the world where we should congratulate ourselves on the absence of religion as a basis of legislation and the nefarious manifestation of the Morality Police, don’t deliver us to the Hall Monitors of Morality.

WORKS CITED
byEva Cantarella(no photo)
byCraig A. Williams(no photo)

46. byCatherine Merridale(no photo)
Finish date: 8 september 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: A-
Review: The story of the Soviet war experience from the ground up as recorded through dozens of interviews with octogenarian veterans has a distinctly polycephalic feel to it. The passage of time has left Catherine Merridale with a drop out of an ocean’s worth of stories, but by the time you turn the last page it will become clear why this is for the best. It was not only dangerous to testify against the authorized tale of the war, it often became simply inconceivable for the survivors to recount those years from a different mental framework.

This state of reference has survived the collapse of the USSR in some aspects. “Having a bit of fun with a woman�� is one Stalinist expression still useful on the subject of the mass rapes in East Prussia. It is left to the interviewer to provide context, to touch upon the Puritan streak in Soviet ideology that produced a generation whose first sexual experience would often occur as part of a gang rape. She also chronicles in broad strokes the experience of the millions that gave in to the human urge to forget a harsh past that only led to an equally harsh present, devoid of realization of dreams that they nurtured between battles, as they went back to the plough or scraped out an existence as crippled beggars.

The main course of the war runs in the background with a familiar rumble: Barbarossa, Typhoon, Stalingrad, Kursk, Bagration, Crimea, Berlin�� In the foreground treads the proverbial Ivan as immortalized in the mythology of the Great Patriotic War: inured to hardship by his peasant roots, stoic in urban defense yet bold in attack, with a blood-curling “Hurrah !��. There is little room for individuality within the colossal numbers that convey the scale of the fight on the Eastern Front.

A handful of living individuals, reinforced by the letters of people long dead that they have preserved, cannot fully turn ink into blood, no matter how diverse their backgrounds; apart from Russian frontoviks from the ranks we find their former officers, pressed men from the satellite states, women in uniform or on the home front, even politruks . Yet they unveil so many aspects that were shared by millions in khaki that they make an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Russia’s war.

While malnutrition as a phenomenon can be recognized as part of front-line hardships, it is discomforting to see it result in dysentery, boils and sores, gingivitis and a greater death toll from feverish afflictions due to a vitamin-depleted immune system. Victims from methanol or antifreeze fit the stock image of the hard-drinking Russian. In an amusing recollection, these simple men could discriminate against a fine French champagne in favor of properly intoxicating cognac. Others developed a taste for Rhine wine; such men of refine would evolve into pivotal players on the black art market. It comes as expected that PTSD, contemporarily known as battle fatigue or shellshock, was ranked as a quantité négligable by the Red Army command, but it becomes surprising when the leading role of Russia’s medical establishment in the last decades of Tsarist rule is taken into consideration, with the own war against Japan (1904-05) as well as the proxy wars in the Balkans (1912-13) as source material.

The cry of Uri! Uri! is as common in the German memory as the photograph of a Red Army soldiers with a dozen watches on each arm that jerks a bicycle out of a German woman’s hands, only to unaccustomedly pedal it into the first ditch. Yet parcels of plunder mailed home are a good reflection of private preoccupation that doesn’t fit the indiscriminate looting: a selection of shoes that his children could grow into, wrapped in quality wool cloth to sew them winter clothing, or a rolled-up saw to rebuild a devastated farm. Even the attitude towards the Frau softened once the red banner flew over the Reichstag ruin, with men settling into a rudimentary form of playing house that differed from the casual polygamy of campaign mistresses. Either way, the Kremlin introduced another abrupt shift in policy within its zone of occupation that curtailed the worst excesses, even if it merely regimented the export of German machinery to rebuild the domestic industry west of the Urals. (one specific aspect, the NKVD-led search for Nazi Germany’s atomic laboratories and their personnel, is sadly absent from this book)

We are on murkier ground with the dissection motivation and beliefs. The forementioned fossilization of veterans�� attitudes once again casts the historian in the role of main speaker. It is easy to trace the evolution of party rhetoric from internationalism (muted by the Nazi invasion) over Great Russian neo-patriotism (Stalin’s first speech, addressing the peoples of the Soviet Union as “brothers and sisters��) and back to a harder form of Soviet nationalism that neither the destalinization under Khrushchev nor the formalized commemoration under Leonid Brezhnev did much to alter.

Hate for the enemy was readily nurtured by the devastated landscape of western Russia, but the notion of socialist brotherhood remained brittle in an army saturated with ad hoc replacements (a practice which eroded esprit de corps in all combatant armies of WWII) and plagued by 100% casualty rates on the bloodiest days of battle. The stabilization of the frontlines after Moscow and Stalingrad helped somewhat; tank crews especially reached a bounding level during long periods of training together. However, the subsequent battle of Prokhorovka signaled a switch to offensive operations where the universal 1:3 ratio indicted losses among the attackers that reached the old levels of 1941. Of course, with a certain typical Soviet disregard for human life is a factor not be neglected here, As Zhukov would demonstrate with the ill-illuminated frontal assault on the Seelower Höhen and later famously tell Eisenhower “We sent troops into a minefield as if there were no minefield. The losses are similar if we attack positions defended by machine-guns instead of minefields.�� The fatalism of the assault troops under these conditions is the hardest to dissect and, unfortunately, a part of war that does not feature prominently in veterans�� stories. Like aging men everywhere, they filter out the sheer brutality and panic of combat.

It is possible to reconstruct the effect of wartime indoctrination by political commissars on the troops, as they gathered around a little red flag on the pre-1939 border. The animosity of the ‘liberated�� Poles and Ukrainians came as a surprise to many. The sight of the neat German houses or even the well-stocked individual farms that dotted the countryside around Bucharest raised more alarming questions. The answer as to why any people who had it so well would choose to invade the motherland could be conveniently lost in the clouds of Hitler’s warped Realpolitik, but the divide between the agricultural wealth of the West and the much deplored kolkhoz would oft awaken the unfulfilled ambition of a private farm on the rich soil of the Ukraine.

The Balkan stirred up an emotion that the Baltics could not: the sense of crossing the line between the world that the Red Army had rightfully wrestled from the German invaders and the capitalist world, where its reason to exist was a lot vaguer. All tough some countries were former Axis allies, they did not feature on the mental map of Europe as the dim corners of “the Beast’s Lair��. This matter is dealt with lightly, as any justification occurred post-war. Stavka would reorientate the compass of several Soviet armies another abrupt time by sending them across half a dozen time zones to Manchuria.

Cleaning the skeletons out of the closet is the third layer in the narrative. The voices of the past speak here, too, but they can no longer speak for the present. This is the level of the inferno shaped by the merciless Stalinist Empire, a place glimpsed from the outside by few and discussed by fewer, where Merridale guides us past unsung heroes such as the shtrafniki, the minefield fodder whose rehabilitation depended on the shedding of their own blood. Most infamously, the many atoned for the sins of the few. Contrary to the popular myth, the welcome extended by Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists was not an expression of enthusiasm but of caution. As the Polish fable goes, the cat only helped the bird out of the turd to eat it. Still, large Cossack formations took to the steppes in German service, Estonian SS-volunteers made a last stand in the ruins of Berlin and most nationalities between Oder and Dnepr were represented in the Vlasov Army. This proved ample justification for the NKVD to organize the deportation of entire ethnic minorities to the barren interior; it would equally prove good training to repatriate all Soviet POWs as traitors to the Gulags. How does oral history fit in here? Just as military comradeship was not as plentiful as propaganda proclaimed, so racism was not absent among the ethnic Russian conscripts.

Conversely, anti-Semitism was relatively rare, which makes the official Soviet stand on the Holocaust all the more deplorable. Arguably, the western Soviet Union had witnessed an amount of suffering that was hard to surpass, but The Einsatzgruppen had operated on these lands and Babi Yar near Kiev has become a symbol of the ‘wild�� extermination of the European Jews (one of the interviewees�� father was executed in the ravine). So it is awkward to stress the multi-national nature of the Majdanek concentration camp to guarantee that Soviet martyrdom reigned supreme in the post-war memory.

Well, the collected stories cited are legion. They have one thing in common: sad or happy in nature, they leave a Western reader with a bitter taste in the mouth. We do not have a perfect record of reintegrating our troops into society. We can reconstruct disfigured faces and replace missing limbs with high-tech prosthetics, but we cannot heal their mental scars. We can offer them a good education and employment, but an honest reappraisal of the wars they fought in is only possible after a lifetime’s worth of political debate. This is why the voices of veterans come only in old age, when only a minority is left to speak. Nevertheless, “Ivan�� had seen a better world, only to return to the old world to face the continued oppression in the name of the collective, with little to help him build a new life.

47. by Michael B. Barrett
Finish date: 11 september 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: B-
Review: The quality of this study is unquestionable. The operational narrative is simply comme il faut , with a solid grasp on the vagaries of weather and soil in a high-altitude environment. The quality of the editor is superb. The layout eliminates the need for 99% of my customary pencil markings and each chapter is rounded off by a crisp conclusion. The supply of maps is plentiful and they are easy on the eyes. It fully earns the endorsements by pees who have earned their spurs writing about the eastern fronts of the Great War: Richard C Hall, Graydon A. Tunstall and foremost Glenn E. Torrey.

The battle-hardened professionalism of the German Army is evident when setting up a flow of men, horses and supplies down treacherous passes between cliff and stream. Similarly impressive is the tenacious ingenuity of the mountain troops as they battle their way from peak to peak in brutal close combat. To counter the illusion of infallibility, the nefarious effect of the (sometimes petty) arguments within the Austro-German command is a constant theme. Von Falkenhayn was unable to regain the position of influence within the High Command which he held prior to the stalemate at Verdun. The ambition of Archduke Karl, following his coronation in the midst of the Romanian campaign, to recalibrate the junior position of his armed forces within the Central Powers, proved equally illusionary.

On the other side of the mountain, the military misfortune of the Romanian armed forces get a fairer share of attention than the title would suggest. The crux of their strategy of liberating the Ruthenian lands under Hungarian overlordship. The three armies tasked with the initial drive into Transylvania represented 75% of their manpower, but a premeditated retreat by Habsburg border units caused them to disperse too widely in an area where the benefit of interior supply lines (read: railways) passed to the enemy.

The most interesting secondary theater, in my opinion, is the Dobrogea. This recently annexed province shows the classic shape of the salient. Its isolated, degraded fortifications were an easy prey for vengeful Bulgarian troops. Once the valued presence of their German allies under the redoubtable Von Mackensen cured their hydrophobia, they staged a series of amphibious operations that rank among the most colourful of the war, with an Austrian monitor flotilla prohibiting the intervention of the Romanian detachment upriver as they provided devastating naval fire support.
With 15 passes to defend, a successful breach in the barrier of the Carpathians was inevitable; the process of elimination from the side of the Central Powers serves to illustrate the invisible headaches that plague the adversary even as your strategic situation deteriorates into a two-front invasion (aggravated by the customary rivalries within the High Command).

Regarding the final phase, the fall of Bucharest and the retreat onto Iasi, the belated contribution of Russian troops to hold the line as the French military mission set out to revive the shattered Romanian forces is a dimension of note, since again, no author is obliged to include the friction between chief-of-staff Dumitru Iliescu and his passive Tsarist ally into the “Austro-German Campaign��.

So why do I only rate it 3 stars? It’s not business, it’s personal. The comparison with The Romanian Battlefront in World War I rears its head. It had more politics and more Romania to give it flavour, to make it fun. The exhaustive level of detail here is�� exhausting. Notwithstanding the clarity of the maps, a fluid reading requires a detailed familiarity with Romanian geography which I sadly lack. On a minor note, the bibliography is very light on Romanian sources compared to Glenn Torrey. In a perfect world, these two fine books would exist as one.

WORKS CITED
by Richard C. Hall (no photo)
and byGraydon A. Tunstall(no photo)
byGlenn E. Torrey(no photo)

48. by Stephen King
Finish date: 11 september 2016
Genre: supernatural
Rating: B
Review: You can feel the sun burning on the blood-stained fields before the strength saps out of your legs as they touch the wood of the electrical chair. The story's that good.

It also makes you think. While it doesn't push an overtly political agenda pro- or con capital punishment, the daily reality of Death Row inevitably chips away at the marble of Blind Lady Justice. The damage done to the dead and their relatives cannot be reversed by executing the killer in return.

This point is brought forward blunty via both Paul Edgecomb's internal monologue and the zealous sadism of Percy Whitmore, who fails to comprehend the importance of keeping the peace in a prison which he "sees as a piss bucket to drown rats in. ". The futility of this attitude is well confirmed by interviews with U.S. prison guards. The prison itself is the punishment, partially populated by lifers who have nothing to lose by stabbing you a 100 times.

Personally, I prefer the subtlety of the attending witnesses' spontaneous hatred during an execution. While these people have deeply personal, emotional reasons to act this way, it also holds up a mirror to your law-abiding reader.

The convicted men's motives run from simple greed (the President) over drunk rage (the Chief) to the stock misantrope (the Kid). Delacroix is harder to fit into any category. He's a rapist-killer who tried to destroy the forensic evidence by burning the body, which inadvertedly torches down an entire building and its occupants. Behind his meek, guilt-ridden demeanour he's (possibly) a hebephilic with poor impulse control and self-loathing.

The Green Mile has the feel of a Jesus parabel. It will not be everybody's cup of tea, but one does not pick up this novel to read a treatise on the death penalty. The framing story - the daily life of a centennial Paul in the nursing home - is weak, but delivers in the end. The sense of wonder radiating from John Cofey's hands is ultimately grounded into the grit of reality, as innocence and healing powers cannot save him from the chair. But until then, enjoy the walk along the six parts of the Mile.

Mastery of supernatural fiction is a strength that can aptly compensate for a weakness in historical knowledge. While Stephen King has clearly done his homework to set his story in a realistic flashback to the Great Depression, in the introduction he freely admits to some lucky guesses, such as the Popeye Tijuana bible. But the setting is all about the atmosphere of the Great Depression and that's where he's King.

49. byHolger H. Herwig(no photo)
Finish date: 12 september 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: A-
Review: Arguably the most famous map concerning the First World War is the one showing the initial German offensive, with a set of giant arrow sweeping through Belgium towards Paris. It looks like the Entente armies stopped a broom dead cold on the Marne. Holger Herwig has taken this sterile image and brought it to life with all the colourful élan and pulsating action of a swashbuckler film. This was a war of movement, fought by opponents schooled in the offensive, who continuously sought to thrust at the flank and parry at the front, drawing blood in turn to a martial soundtrack of bugles and thundering guns. Formations fixed bayonets and charged forward with flying colours, gallantly led by sabre-yielding officers��

…To be cut down by machine-gun fire and artillery like grain before the scythe. This was the swansong of the colourful art of war seen on paintings of Frederick the Great, the Duke of Marlborough and Napoleon.

Basically, the armies of 1914 took to the field like a pair of gunslingers at high noon: whoever could bring all his lethal firepower to bear first, would utterly annihilate his opponent before he had a chance to do the same. Thus, the French Army cultivated the spirit of the offensive à l’outrance, while the German Army spared no effort in order to keep up with the pace set by the Schlieffen Plan. Thus, the protection afforded by the oft-maligned trench was seldom present in the August heat, resulting in casualties on a scale that would not be seen again until the last year of the war.

Herwig takes us through this set-up inconspicuously; most books dealing with any feat of arms anno 1914 will discuss up to a century of evolution within the European armies; most can rely on an enormous body of secondary literature to get the main facts right. His main claim to fame is the German perspective he provides, compared to the Anglo-French focus of many current titles. It would have been real nice of him to provide us with a “further reading�� essay to bolster this claim, because we can’t keep relying on Spears and Tyng in reprint*. Nevertheless, he is too modest in his preface: This is nothing less than one of the best overall histories of the 1914 campaign in the West I’ve yet come across. The scope of the book is wider than the Marne 1914 needs to be. We start with the assault on the Position Fortifiée de Liège, with bloody detours into the rugged forests of the Ardennes, where De Bello Gallico makes more than one appearance to illustrate the eternal constraints of the fog-shrouded terrain. For once in the English-language literature is the British Expeditionary Force reduced to its true size amidst the vast continental hosts, as a numerically small (3%) and often (to French eyes) obstinate ally.

Herwig’s greatest gift is to lift the opening round of the war out of the rigid mold of hindsight. There was nothing predetermined about the Allied victory on the Marne. While a textbook Kesselschlacht was never a realistic prospect for the Imperial Army, the successful distortion of the French Plan XVII cost France over 400.000 casualties as well as a significant portion of her industrial capacity, losses that could’ve persuaded the French cabinet to throw in the towel. On the other hand, the German war plan started to unravel fast because Helmuth Von Moltke the Younger had neglected two homegrown maxims: one was Clausewitz�� fog of war, the other a quote by his own uncle: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy��. The retreat of the Belgian field Army towards the national redoubt of Antwerp (as per its pre-war plan of defense) necessitated a detachment which, together with accumulating losses and the transfer of two corps to the Eastern Front, weakened the “hammer�� of the right wing from a proportional strength of 7:1 to 3:1. At the same time, the general march direction steadily deviated from south-west to a straight southbound. On the other side of the front, the imperial scions Rupprecht and Crown Prince Wilhelm became ambitious to create their own modest Cannae-style envelopments, overextending the center and left wing armies in the process.

All this came about through a series of flanking maneuvers and exploitation of gabs in the German columns: the most familiar for English readers will be the position of the B.E.F. between the First and Second German Armies. The French, however, were a lot more active in this field, immortalized in the ‘taxis of the Marne�� (whose contribution is mercilessly demythologized here). The increasingly feverish back-and-forth by which history distinguishes the battles grouped under the nomer ‘Battle of the Frontiers�� and ‘the Great Retreat�� is defined by the presence of French armies between German armies, stretching in a loose barrier from Charleroi to the Vosges. The former generally tried to exploit the gaps between columns, which put the latter at risk of losing touch in an age were wireless communication was still not a fully trustworthy alternative to a speedy staff car.

Communication between the Armies and their General Headquarters in 1914 are a symptom of the difference in style of command between the antagonists. The inscrutable Joffre kept his commanders on a tight leash, fully exploiting the speed of the automobile to spur and limoger where needed. Von Moltke by contrast kept to Luxemburg and was often in the dark about the exact situation of his most important formations: the First Army under Von Kluck and the Second Army under Von Bülow. While their eventual route east of Paris was made in accordance with a 1905 staff ride (traditionally seen as pure improvisation), their corps got into each other’s way, which, coupled with the flank attack out of Paris, was instrumental in bringing the German advance to a halt on the Marne.

Above and underneath this waltz of banners, Herwig does not neglect the human factor in war. Anglo-French coalition warfare had its precedents, most recently at the Crimea, but a formally unified command structure was as yet an unknown phenomenon, which would not reach maturity until WWII. The inherent tensions created by divergent war aims were aggravated by mutually poor language skills �� we’ve all seen the emotional exchange between Joffre and Sir John French: “Monsieur le Maréchal, c'est la France qui vous supplie.�� - “Damn it, I can’t explain! Tell him that all that men can do, our fellows will do.�� . Their antagonists knew their share of animosity as well: on several occasions conflicting orders necessitated those ad hoc decisions that keep the ink flowing over the “what if�� of the Marne campaign.
By the time the footsore Feltgrau formations reach the riverbank, the voices of the survivors have shown us the burnt-out rubble, bloated animal carcasses and mangled corpses in pantaloons rouges strewn about golden fields like grotesque poppies. Mingled among an endless stream of bleeding wounded in dusty uniforms are the civilian refugees from the furor teutonicus .

WORKS CITED
bySewell Tyng(no photo)
byEdward Spears(no photo)

50. by Martin Middlebrook
Finish date: 18 september 2016
Genre: military history
Rating; A-
Review: Some men don’t want to talk about it, others can’t stop talking about it. Martin Middlebrook has listened to the latter before age silenced their tongues. He tells the tale of Arnhem in the words of 500 men who were there, obtained both through interview and correspondence. Add to this their reminiscences about the fallen and the material already available in print, most famously the memoirs of Urquhart and Sosabowski* to double the amount of voices. Together, this gives him a considerably larger data pool to work with than for his debut *the First Day on the Somme*. Once again, the protagonists are British: the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions do not share the spotlight here.

He also brings twenty years�� experience to the page to good effect. His sentiments while walking the fields of Picardy were central to Somme and a string of ten picked individuals gave us a feel for the ground in 1916, but it was hard to make themselves heard above the din of millions and the net effect was rather chaotic.

With Arnhem , chaos is still present, but this time it is part of the plan. Two main features of Market Garden were the isolation of lightly armed airborne units (most prominently the 2nd Parachute Battalion at the Arnhem road bridge) and the piecemeal reinforcements by air. This isolation came partly from the original battle plan, with three airborne holding autonomous perimeters around the Rhine bridges until linked by the advance of XXX Corps. The deployment of the 1st British Airborne Division was successfully contested by German Kampfgruppe. Their opponents had learned that airborne assaults depended upon the first strike for success; the best tactical response was an equally rapid disruption.

The resulting dispersal of companies dictates the structure of the book. Where possible we see the airborne assault grind down on a day-to-day basis, but sometimes we stay in the slit trenches for days on end, with no insight as to how the battle develops down the road.

It is a maxim of military historiography (and if it isn’t, I totally call dips!) that “a good battle history needs 100 pages to get started�� and Middlebrook is not far off the mark. He briefs us on the plan for twin operations MARKET and GARDEN with an eye for their potential strategic rewards. Here, he approaches the level of Lloyd Clark. The limitations/inherent risks of the airborne assault become a lot less deliberate when the flight plan is taken into account. With his analysis of the British OOB, he has written a chapter that will continue to serve me well, no matter how many of the 500+ books on the subject come my way. He is especially strong on the types of aircraft used and the variety of support troops involved, with a nod of respect towards the RAF personnel. They suffered 40% of the casualties during airlifts and supply drops, but in the movie they’re just those idiots who get a paratrooper killed to retrieve a wrongly dropped container full of spare berets �� that iconic trivia gets explained near the end.

Once the book is airborne, the writer retires wholly behind the curtain and the combatants take center stage. He only emergences to side with them in the aftermath, where most grew to agree with Montgomery’s quote in years to come, it will be a great thing for a man to be able to say: 'I fought at Arnhem' . It is an unsurpassed British talent to turn defeats into their finest moments, but a universal human need to take pride in battles fought.

On the other hand ... the knee reflex to condemn the MARKET GARDEN plan can't be surpressed : between instant doubts among the commanders (Sosabowski...) distant drop zones, ignored intelligence on two armoured outfits combined with the known German talent for ad hoc counter-attacks and the continous penny-dripping of companies into the Arnhem road bridge objective area... I'll never understand 100% why this thing was greenlighted !

Is this the best Arnhem book? Not sure, a lot has been written since the early ��90s. Is it one of the best? Probably. It’s so good it becomes a shame that Middlebrook didn’t tackle the exploits of Horrocks�� XXX Corps on Hell’s Highway as well and/or the American airborne operations.

WORKS CITED
by Martin Middlebrook

51. byJames Goldrick(no photo)
Finish date: 27 september 2016
Genre: military history
Rating; B+
Review:[part 1] Before Jutland, the King’s ships were at sea and there was many a thing wrong with them. The professional eye of Rear-Admiral James Goldrick offers an arcane analysis of the Grand Fleet’s deficiencies as revealed during the first 6 months of the war. On the surface, the Royal Navy justly deserved its reputation of invincibility. Not only was it numerically stronger in capital ships, it also boasted the greatest number of Dreadnoughts that combined the speed of a cruiser with the unprecedented firepower of a 12-inch broadside.

The war could yet be lost in an afternoon. Since their main enemy, the German Hochseeflotte , could not hope to achieve parity, much less superiority, it opted for a strategy of mutual assured destruction. The problem, as the nuclear age has shown, is that mutual destruction tends to be applied mutually. Both sides strived for an encounter where the advance guard would pin down its opponent until the main force could close in and annihilate it.

Operationally, this was similar to the massive battle which was grinding down along the frontiers of France, albeit with one crucial difference. The naval version gave a prominent role to a shadowy kind of skirmishers, lurking inconspicuously in advance of the main body. While a modern battleship was all-steel and heavily armoured to withstand the impact of explosive shell that literally weighted a ton and survive to sail another day, it was not immune to the principles of Archimedes A single penetration of the hull under the waterline could sink it as easily as a wooden ship of the line. That is why a screen of torpedo boats and submarines �� and their natural enemy, the destroyers - accompanied the battleship squadrons, to tilt the balance even before the broadsides could be brought to bear.

Both weapons saw the light around 1900. The torpedo had evolved from a mine into a self-propelled weapon with a reach of several thousand yards. The diesel-powered submarine had a handful of pre-industrial precedents, but had made its debut in battle as recently as the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Their capabilities were therefor poorly understood. It was clear that the days of the close blockade were numbered when harbours were defended by these new vessels, but how would they perform in open waters? They were not truly submersibles, since the limited power of their batteries forced them to stay on the surface most of the time and only dive for attack.

The net result was a submarine paranoia which runs through the book like a comic relief through a soap opera. Destroyers would engage phantom submarines after a cruiser hit an errant mine; even solitary foam-capped waves were mistaken for the predator eye of a periscope. Goldcirk anchors the rest of the story firmly within the technology and doctrine of the pre-war Navy.

The celebrated one-volume treatments of the First World War by Keegan & Strachan paint a rosy, almost inspirational picture of the service. It goes something like this. The Armies turned a blind eye to the obsolescence of cavalry and the bayonet and neglected the value of the airplane; as Foch infamously declared, it was only good for sport. By no fault of their own, communications remained stuck on a 19th century level thanks to the cumbersome radio apparatus. By contrast, the navies of the Great Powers were unhindered by misplaced nostalgia. Sailing ships swiftly gave way to ironclads fired by coal and oil. Broadsides by 32-pdr muzzle-loaders with an effective range of a few hundred meters were replaced by breech-loading turrets which could hit a ship miles away. There was sufficient room to accommodate wireless, abolishing the reliance on visual signals.
The reality was less crystal. The most modern compass could completely prevent the all-age guesswork about one’s position on the open sea, even less so in relation to both friend and foe. The effective range of wireless on smaller ships was often insufficient for the flagship to maintain effective control over the line of battle. The continuously belching smoke obscured the traditional flag signals. When it conspired with humid weather to form smog banks, the oily fumes even affected battle.

This was only the most visible of the problems inherent to the age of coal-burning fleets, which would not fully evolve into oil until after the war. Goldrick presents us with some of his most graphic excerpts on this subject, since the men who lived through the transition claimed themselves that people who hadn’t, couldn’t fully imagine the amount of effort required to feed the fire. Even during peacetime manoeuvers, the top speed of the newest capital ships was seldom achieved because of the frightfully high (and thus expensive) consumption rate of the furnaces. The backbreaking labour was continuous and a ship’s de facto cruising speed depended more than anything on easy-to-access coal bunkers. Consequently, the cruising speed of a squadron was dictated by the best effort of its elder pre-Dreadnought capital ships to catch up. The inferior quality of German coal restricted their operative range as a fleet largely to the Heligoland Bight.

Artillery had always been an exact science and naval gunnery in ��14-��18 was, despite the development of primitive targeting computers, no less challenging than in the age of sail. Even a 4000 m² ship with a towering superstructure made for an elusive prey while in motion at 10 to 20km distance (beyond pre-war estimates), with its own muzzle flashes the only colourful spot amidst the dull waters and smoke. The number of hits versus expended shells was drastically low, with the misses throwing up curtains of water around the target. On the other hand, when a 12-inch battery found its mark, it could sink a ship within minutes if the crew was lucky enough to score a square hit in the ammo stock. Each country had its own procedures regarding the loading and stocking ammunition from hold to turret, but captains on both sides had to watch helplessly as the next ship (or their own!) vanished in one gigantic explosion.

A final common defect that plagued both the vessels and the crews was as old as war itself. Prussia, with its relatively short Baltic shoreline, had no naval tradition to speak of. The manpower demands of the Kaiserliche Marine were far larger than the number of fishermen etc. who could leaven it with some sea legs. Great Britain had a proud naval tradition, but it had been sitting on the docks for almost a century. Certainly, the Royal Navy had dispatched a field Army to the Crimea and patrolled the shipping lines of the Empire, but it hadn’t operated as a concentrated force in a single theatre of war or maintained a blockade at any distance since the original “Great War�� of 1792-1815. The annual peacetime maneuvers were conducted in the mild climate of the azure Mediterranean at low speeds.

These were peacetime navies about to get their first taste of war. The High Commands had no clear idea of the wear and tear that continuous patrols in the foggy greys of the North Sea entailed. The engineers had never driven the engines to the limit for hours on end in a feverish attempt to close the range on a fleeing flag. The crew had never stood by the guns as the walls vibrated with the thunder of impacting shells and the air was thick with the taste of cordite.

Apart from shared constraints by the limits of technology, the Grand Fleet and the Hochseeflotte each had worries of their own. To various extents, they each managed to corroborate the other side’s additional problems. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say. The wealth of sources produced by both sides (mostly post-Jutland), with the interwar German accounts often translated into English, enables us to regularly switch bridges in this balanced account.

The British had a long eastern coastline to protect and wide shipping lanes to patrol as part of their distant blockade. The Germans organized a few sorties against seaside towns, inflicting upon the civilian population the terror of the bombardment of Alexandria (1882) where Jellicoe had served as a young officer.

The existing anchorages for the Grand Fleet squadrons were not only too widely dispersed to timely intercept these raids; they also made it difficult to assemble the fleet for large-scale attacks. Scapa Flow emerged as the solution, but its growth was marked by poor infrastructure, groundings, collisions and a few dastardly U-boat intrusions. The Germans were at an advantage here, with their fleet centered on Wilhelmshaven (to this day it functions as the main naval base and only deep-water port of the Bundesrepublik ).

The shipping lanes which interconnected the vital resources of the Empire, including 50% of the food consumption of the Home Isles and many raw materials for the armaments industry, needed protection. The Germans were able, to In accordance with pre-war strategy, German surface raiding, most famously by the runaway Far East Squadron under Admiral Von Spee, stopped the Royal Navy from concentrating its assets in the North Sea Theater. The dispatching of cruisers to hunt the poachers was partly alleviated by units from the Mediterranean, where the allied French Navy took up the watch.

So far, nothing you can’t hear from Robert K. Massie. Largely. But Goldrick, as befits an Australian, looks out at all sides of the globe. One story of interest not often told concerns neutral Sweden. It played an uneasy game with its minefields, occasionally relaxing the traffic regulations. Why Sweden ?

A distinct flavour comes from the subtitle of the book “the war in Northern European waters�� Waterzz as in plural; Goldrick generously includes the operations in the Baltic, with recent gems such as To Crown the Waves (2013) to help with the Russian side of things, since apart from a few submarines the Royal Navy played no part in this theatre. The Russian Imperial Navy was just starting to pull itself together after the near-fatal twin defeats of Port Arthur and Tsushima, but the psychological scars still ran deep. For one “fleet in being�� was a principle adhered to in the extreme when it come to the precious new Dreadnoughts. For another, the prospect of a surprise torpedo attack on Kronstadt reinforced a defensive posture, with liberal use of minefields (which, like on the other side of Denmark, occasionally sank friendly vessels). Ironically, Germany was always on the lookout for an amphibious assault on the Baltic coast that could, in the larger scheme of things, cut off the flow between the twin land fronts and the hinterland. As things stood, the Baltic Islands became a center of contention (and the site of a successful German occupation in 1917).

Scouting is a small but highly intriguing subject of comparison: the British used their cruisers as the hunting dogs of tradition next to the first proto-aircraft carriers whose seaplanes were the eyes of the future. The Germans put more effort into their Zeppelins* and preferred to deploy submarines as an early warning system when they were not busy bending the established rules of ‘civilized�� naval warfare by indiscriminately attacking neutral shipping in the War Zone around the Home Isles, until the German ambassador in Washington faced an irate Woodrow Wilson over the sinking of the RMS Lusitania . Dawn bombardments and Zeppelin raids on towns along the East Coast likewise infuriated the British press, pressuring the Grand Fleet into action.

Review [part 2] A few minor sorties towards Wilhemshaven can be traced back exclusively to this dimension of the total war that was taking shape between the sobbing ruins of civilian targets, but at no point did political pressure launch the military into a turbine-propelled Balaclava.

The battles at Heligoland Bight and the Dogger Bank showed foremost that the ‘piecemeal�� strategy didn’t work out for either side. The elements of the Grand Fleet were (initially) too dispersed to concentrate in time, while the German High Command was too cautious, with the mercurial anxieties of the Kaiser looming over every cancelled sortie in strength. Both sides showed a tendency to increase the minimum size of the sortie force. In the parlance of World War II, a flock of “carrier battle groups�� centered around Dreadnought battleships could not easily be cut into motti like Soviet infantry battalions during the Winter War.

Although the main duel between Sheer and Jellicoe still lay over a year in the future at the end, there was too little time to correct these defects, creating a draw at Jutland that we’ll continue to dissect for another century. It is impossible to understand this hotly debated clash without knowledge of how the opposing fleets came into being or how the experience of 1914-15 shaped their commanders. Many respectable works on Jutland will provide this background information in abridged format, but Goldrick twists our head around to see the events ‘prior�� in the contemporary fashion, with pre-war assertions slowly unraveling and every sighting of the sleek Kaiserliche Marine as THE long-awaited opportunity to wreck it into state of irreversible harmlessness.

Overall, this is a worthwhile revision of 1984's The King's Ships Were at Sea...it just DRAGS in the middle because, let's face it, there's not a whole lot of salvoes going on...

*Angus Konstam in his book on Jutland touches upon a wireless monitoring system in South-East England that could deduct the movements of German flotillas based on the intensity of their radio traffic, in a way that is reminiscent of the Chain Home system that traditionally is credited with victory in the Battle of Britain. See also Battlebags and Naval Aviation

WORKS CITED
The King's Ships Were at Sea: The War in the North Sea, August 1914-February 1915(no cover) byJames Goldrisk (no photo)
by John Keegan
by Hew Strachan
& by Robert K. Massie.
byVincent P. O'Hara (no photo)
British Airships of the First World War an Illustrated History by Ces Mowthorpe(no photo)
by R.D. Layman (no photo).
by Angus Konstam

52. by James Lyon
Finish date: 30 september 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: B+
Review: The Austrians tried to invade Serbia 3 times. They got their ass handed to them 3 times. They came back next year. That's how DiNardio wraps things up for the Drina in Invasion: The Conquest of Serbia, 1915. While useful as an arch inscription for a memory palace, this synopsis simply wouldn't do, so I turned to this eminent Balkanologist who strives for quality to honour the memory of his father.

Inevitably, the focus is with the Serbian Army. Steeled and blooded in two Balkan Wars to the point of brittleness, the third round saw a greater proportion of the male population mobilised than any other belligerent of WWI to maintain the numerical strength of the army. The majority of its formations and their personal weapons would be ranked as second or third line troops by the standards of Great Power armies. Teenagers whose faces had barely seen a razor followed in the wake of grizzled grandfathers who had volunteered for the Herzegovina Uprising of 1875. Modern (heavy) artillery was in short supply and the country's single ammunication factory could not hope to keep pace with the gluttonous demands of the conflict to come. The logistical situation is best illustrated by the empty peasant cart while its driver scores the nearest village for provisions. This type of foraging complicated the problem of outright desertion, already prevalent in a defensive campaign fought on home soil.

The army of Serbia was even weaker than Allied propaganda at the time potrayed it, but not as weak as the strategy planners of the Kaiserliche und Königliche believed it to be. They had manpower issues of their own. First, some of the units that formed part of the Fifth and Sixth armies featured a high proportion of South Slav conscripts whose loyalty was, if not outright questionable, then liable to become a problem once their Serbian counterparts opened fire. Not for nothing was the elimination of Serbia as beacon of Pan-Yugoslavic aspirations a political goal of the Dual Monarchy's war, lest it be weakened into some kind of Triple Monarchy or even dissolved along ethnic lines.

Second, Chief of Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf changed his mind about the implementation of the pre-war mobilisation plans. Either way, the army was split in three groups. Two were earmarked respectively for Russia (Galicia) and Serbia respectively. The third was held in reserve until the likelihood of a large scale Russian attack into Austrian Poland was determined, upon which it could be attached to either group. Since von Hötzendorf was hawkishly set on the destruction of Serbia , the reserve was sent south over a single-track railway, only to be turned around to face the Russians while the first invasion of Serbia was already well under way.

Sheer battlefield experience was not be discounted irregardless of quantotative superiority, however. Artillery was not a concern to the Austrian commanders, but their troops would serve as the first test case for the dominance of the gun on the 14-18 battlefields. Whereas the Habsburg gunners were reluctant to close the range, Serbian batteries would tear through enemy columns point-blank, consuming the ammo supply of disabled neighbours as needed. The compact nature of many battlefields, with mountain plateaus commanding the passes to the interior, concentrated the carnage all the more.

With this tribute to the gallant Serbian troops, Lyon has plugged an imported gap in the centennial assessment of World War I. He provides us with a liberal amount of maps. They are easy to read, but still don't show every site mentioned in the text. Personal knowledge of the country wouldn't hurt, either. At least they illustrate the geostrategic context of Serbia, with a mountaneous frontier sheltering the main railway line to the Allied world. Lyon has mustered an impressive array of "Yugoslav" sources, so prepare for the consequent use of Morava division II ban rather than "2nd Division" and such.

Lyon is not afraid to humble his confraters when justified, even when it's Christopher Clark (from the magistral The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914) : Alltough one historian claimed that the Serbian response [ to the Austrian ultimatum of july 23] was a masterpiece of "diplomatic equivocation ...the claim often made in general narratives that this reply represented an almost complete capitulation to the Austrian demands is profoundly misleading... it was a highly perfumed rejection on most points." Such analysis demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the events behind the Sarajevo assassination, Vienna's expansionist policy after 1903 as well as the legal and constitutional limitations the Serbian government faced in 1914.

He's conversely a bit light on Habsburg archives. Memoirs from the interwar period by senior officers dominate the German-language section, with Rothenberg's omnipresent The Army of Francis Joseph from 1976 on call. A good companion is The Serbian Army in the Great War, 1914-1918.

This costs the book its fifth star, but let's end on a positive note: Lyon breaks a lance on the armour of occidental eurocentrism in historiography. For us, 1914-1918 mark the Great War, with two little weird Balkan Wars as a prelude. To Serbia, 1912-1918 is the National War of Liberation all in one, as their own historians proudly attest*.

Works cited:

by Gunther E. Rothenberg (no photo)
byDusan Babac (no photo)
byRichard L. DiNardo (no photo)
* by Andrej Mitrović (no photo)

OCTOBER
53. byIan Ousby(no photo)
Finish date: 1 oktober 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: B-
Review: Buyer beware: his book is NOT a classic study of the battle of Verdun (February-October 1916) and has a distinct schizophrenic feel. Ousby did not set out to write a battle history, but couldn’t properly examine the mentality surrounding Verdun without dipping a toe in the trenches. Unfortunately, the two halves don’t quite come together, even if the middle chapters that concern themselves with the fight proper also focus with martial vocabulary such as tenir, cran & ��é�ڲ����������Գ��� which was applied liberally in inspiring communiqués to the troops, yet at the same time maintained the divide between themselves and the world outside the battlefield. Such language was also a brick in the wall built by the censor to shield the home front from reality, and part of the military justice jargon which ensured obedience to the civil government by mandatorily witnessed executions pour encourager les autres .
Surely, these are interesting subjects, which are touched upon lightly in traditional military history. The keen eye can even spot a few technical facts that Horne* left out. While the wear and tear on the German heavy artillery is presented as a factor in Von Falkenhayn’s change of plans halfway through the battle, (resulting in the extension of the zone of attack to both banks of the Meuse), but this didn’t come as a surprise to him: his meticulous preparations listed not only narrow gauge railways and battalion-sized Stollen but also repair shops to replace recoil springs and barrels. Pétain, on the other side, was an early proponent of central grouping (corps level or higher) to maximize heavy firepower as needed.
The surrounding chapters on pre-war mentality are nevertheless the most interesting, with special attention paid to Ernest Renan’s 1882 lecture ”Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?�� which Ousby describes as one of the few 19th century texts on nationalism that remains relevant into the 21st. He razes the remaining rethoric ruthlessly: French theory spoke more in terms of ‘damsel in distress�� and the undivided country, while German scripture centered on the themes of Blut und Boden and the continued rivalry between both nations dating back to Louis XIV. Both sides misrepresented Alsace-Lorraine for their own purposes. The region was neither wholly French nor Fully German, with distinct regional languages.

WORKS CITED
by Alistair Horne

54. byJohn Wilcox(no photo)
Finish date: 16 October 2016
Genre: historical military fiction
Rating: B+
Review: An everyman flawlessly entwined into the legendary twin battle of Islawanda and Rorke's Drift. These dramatic events don't need a deep embellishment and John Wilcox grasps this : the novel bends history far less to the demands of fiction as is common, which is neatly charted in his afterword. The greatest asset of its fictional characters is to look into the Zulu perspective even deeper than Stanley Baker's classic movie. The only criticism I can level at this book concerns the chapters leading up to Fonthill's deployment to the Cape. The casual mention of big events in history for the period 1865-such as the Crimean War, Reconstruction, the Great Game, P.M. Gladstone and the Russo-Turkish War could've used a little explanation. For those with an interest in technology, the dawn of electricity under Thomas A. Edison passes by as well. War correspondent for "the Morning Post" Alice, to my surprise, turned out to have a real-life inspiration present at the Commune of Paris and the first Anglo-Boer war, Frances Whitfield.

55. byDon M. Fox(no photo)
Finish date: 25 october 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: B-
Review: A general history tells dozens of heroic deeds and praises them. A unit history tells hundreds and considers them all part of the job. The outstanding record of the 4th U.S. Armored Division in the European Theatre of Operations doubles as an immersion in the gritty reality of small unit tactics. Lieutenants don’t get to fall on the field of honor as they lead the final charge; they take a sniper bullet in the head first. The grizzled NCO who saves the day may be awarded that medal, but he’s likely to die in the next encounter before it can be presented to him.

The foreword mention of the rare Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation, only awarded twice on divisional level during World War II, sets the tone for a tale of excellence through teamwork as the key to success. This tone is carried through in a brief look at the training phase in the homeland under the philosophy of the division’s ‘father��, Major General John Wood.

The level of improvisation at times surpassed the conditions within the Reichswehr.Where Guderian’s disciples used wooden silhouettes or dummies of tanks, the future tank crews of the Fourth sometimes moved as one body, holding each other by the shoulder like the blind of Bruegel the Elder as they trotted the Mojave desert. Nevertheless, combined arms cooperation and swift exploitation of any weaknesses in the enemy line reached a high level. Of long-term importance was the excellent relationships fostered between the ‘core�� units of the division and the ‘attached�� units, who felt part of the team rather than a disposable convenience. Small things could make the difference, such as not “buttoning up�� (closing the hatch) while pushing forward.

Once across the Atlantic, there was no romantic Phony War period. The English buildings were marked by the Blitz. The tankers saw the battle-scarred air fleet return from the first D-Day run while training on Salisbury Plains. On July 19th, Omaha Beach was still littered with debris of the landing. Bradley’s policy of blooding new units saw the armoured infantry battalions baptized by German shells in the old-fashioned role of doughboys in slit trenches. There was some panic among the green troops, some wild rumors about broken lines, but in general they stood their ground well. It became clear that the role of the Fourth Armoured, at least prior to the Breakout in Normandy, would not be that of dashing mechanized cavalry.

Fox still credits their overall performance with one of many useful end-of-chapter recapitulations: Due to their courage and aptitude under fire, by the end of the final day of july 1944, the city of Avranches was secured. The road into Brittany and the interior of France was open, courtesy of the Fourth Armored Division.. Once Middleton of VIII corps put it in the saddle, it showed the future of U.S. armoured doctrine by frustrating the German defenders as much as Wood’s direction had frustrated the umpires during the large-scale exercises in the Tennessee Maneuver Area: Rennes was a major objective that was captured at moderate cost. The division had demonstrated how the right combination of speed, maneuver and firepower could outwit the enemy and save lives. What could’ve been a costly frontal assault instead became a grand encirclement that cut off and demoralized the enemy.

Fox feels comfortable reciting the reminiscences of veterans (he interviewed or corresponded with 20 surviving officers to supplement the available memories in ink). They range from the sobering to the incredible. On one end, an officer spots a lone disabled Tiger in a field, its powerful main gun still sighted on a line of five Shermans on a distant ridge, each shot clean through the big white American star which graced their front armor. It was proof enough to give the divisional tank park a paint job. On the other, the division artillery liaison, Major Charles Carpenter, kept in touch with the tank battalions in a customized Piper Cub with 6 bazookas rigged under the wings, to do a XIX Tactical Air Command act of his own which earned him the nickname “Bazooka Charlie��.

Sometimes he gets carried away. Systematically decimating 350 German Landser packed onto a train by disabling the locomotive, then raking the cars one by one with machine guns will give even a seasoned GI pause for thought, but not bloody likely about the “just and noble cause��(p.75)! It is possible to use a certain amount of hyperbole in a unit history, but on page 70 Fox blunders with an offhand remark about the failure to close the gap between Argentan and Falaise that makes no sense whatsoever, it jumps out from the page: “In some respects, by making this decision, Eisenhower and his top generals returned the favor that Hitler had granted the British at Dunkirk in 1940 . That myth has been busted since the late 80’s, harking back to original post-war statements by Hitler’s generals. Similarly, the phrase “In retrospect it is really quite remarkable that Hitler was able to foresee where the front would stabilize and where his opportunity would reside�� graces page 131. Such foresight on Hitler’s part in mid-September is a factoid that most solid accounts of the Ardennes offensive will contest.

“P�� Wood was a good friend of George Patton, which did not prevent him from being relieved from command shortly before the Bulge, a subject which Fox tackles with indignation but is unable to clarify. Roughly the final third of the book is dedicated to the Fourth’s famous drive on Bastogne, after which things come to an abrupt end. A proper unit history would’ve seen it through to the occupation of Germany and its 1949 deactivation.

P.S. A critical source (available online) here, with links to the AirLand battle doctrine of the mid-80s, is �� the Fourth Armoured Division in the Encirclement of Nancy �� by Dr. Christopher R. Gabel, Combat Studies Institute, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavensworth, Kansas, april 1986.

56. by Angus Konstam
Finish date: 26 october 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: A+
Review[part 1]: A bird's-eye view of the North Sea. Two opposite lines of grey ships, white scars moving over the water behind them. Close-up on the tense face of a British Officer. Close-up on the face of a German clock striking the minute. Close-up on the face of a German officer yelling "FEUER". Bird's-eye view of two lines of broadsides.

JUTLAND
The Motion Picture
starring
STANLEY BAKER as Admiral Beatty
MAXIMILIAN SHELL as Admiral Reinhard Scheer
and introducing MICHAEL CAINE as First Lieutenant Wood


This is how appealing this book is to a visual mind. It's Zulu at sea.

What do military historians and policemen have in common? They are not satisfied with the facts, but need to set a fight into a proper context. Konstam has his work cut out for him there, since Jutland took place two years into a naval war that was at least a decade in the making, but he strikes the balance between brevity and detail. He’s clearly a fan of Jackie Fisher; the man’s career is also ideally situated to trace the development of the battleship from the armour-plated teenage years to the Dreadnought. From the perspective of Jutland, it is subsequently easy to be brief about the Royal Navy in wartime, since the greater part consists of a contemplative lull. After the Dogger Bank, activity dwindled down, in spite of a rejuvenated policy of aggression under Reinhard Scheer (Von Pohl died suddenly of liver cancer in 1916) to justify the existence of the outnumbered ‘luxury fleet��. Only once did the tango of squadrons come close to a clash, during Scheer’s sortie of April 24. He bombarbed several seaside towns in order to bait Beatty’s pre-Dreadnoughts but instead missed the opportunity to turn on Jellicoe’s fastest Dreadnoughts as they chased him full speed on his way home. A certain furtiveness was studied. By spring 1916, both sides had grasped the importance of battle group deployment. Any seductively lone group of destroyers or elderly capital ships could be counted on to have a powerful flotilla of battleships and armoured cruises parked behind the next seagull. Any plans to alter the Mutually Assured Destruction inherent to the Order of Battle through piecemeal and annihilation were beginning to look stale. At the next sortie west of Heglioland, the British would bring everyone to the party. This included their third generation Dreadnoughts with eight enormous 15 cm guns.

While the traditional chronology of Jutland differentiates between different “runs�� based on the main direction of movement of one or both fleets, there is another (Anglocentric) bisection at work here: Jellicoe and Beatty. The latter made up the vanguard as the commander of the First Battlecruiser Squadron; the former brought up the main force. This basic arrangement, reminiscent of a hunter and his hounds, was bedeviled by Beatty’s erratic communication habits, something he was known for during peacetime maneuvers. His hybrid ships were too strong to stay out of the fight but too weak to disentangle themselves If they faced a stronger foe than their exact counterparts. Their close cooperation with the main body was instrumental in avoiding a new Tsushima: a blinded Grand Fleet might very well stagger onto the T of the German battleships. Yet the saga of Beatty’s battlecruisers reads like a miniature version of everything that went right and wrong with the reality of Jutland.

Brute force and skill-at-arms dictated the bloodshed in equal measure. While the Germans generally showed greater accuracy, enjoyed the protection of sturdier armour (and would prove themselves more adept at nocturnal fights before they docked), British gunnery was (initially) at a double disadvantage: they themselves were silhouetted against the sun, while their German adversaries were obscured by smoke. Temporarily beneficial meteorological circumstances aside, rangefinders of superior quality gave German gunnery overall superiority in terms of both accuracy and the swiftness with which they found the range. Distance was the key to a hit. This explains Beatty’s preference for the open compass platform to the armoured confines of his flagship’s conning tower and it was from here that he peered at the enemy�� on the bridge of each ship, as the gun crews waited for the order to fire, a midshipman was holding up a little handheld device which showed just how high the ship in front should be when it was almost exactly 500 yards away. In the end, the sheer volume of fire delivered by the British Dreadnought broadsides more than compensated for the occasional faulty fuse.

Human error and the fog of war steered the battle off course from the start and the opening round played out as well for the German admirals as could’ve been expected. Hipper reinforced his light cruisers with battlecruisers because he wasn’t sure exactly what kind of naval force his scouts had run into. Beatty squandered his numerical advantage when his “fast battleships�� (the 15-inchers) didn’t see the flag signal to alter course through the smoke of his flagship!

Konstam employs a mixture of memory and modern to imprint the psychological impact of sailors on both sides when the training waters gave way to the real thing. “The job of aiming and firing was much easier if nobody was firing back at you. The brutal realities of naval gunnery were being driven home with awe-inspiring force�� . “Awe-inspiring�� was the right word when explosive shelves the size of large, well-stocked freezers came hurling in your exact direction.

The clash of cruisers, while less massive in scope than the “Duel of the Dreadnoughts�� phase of the Battle of Jutland so beloved by editors, provides what is, in my opinion, the most haunting passage of the entire book. The burning flagship Lion was saved by the quick thinking of a dying officer of marines who had the ammo magazine of the mauled midships turret flooded, which doused any risk of chain ignition. This risk was graphically demonstrated a few minutes later in the duel between the battlecruisers Von Der Tann and Indefatigable . A handful of hard hits saw her staggering closer towards the German guns, smoking as if on fire and listing as of taking on water. Two more shells hit clean ��. At 4:03 P.M.. there was an almighty explosion. Crimson and orange flames shot well above her foremast, then quickly turned into thick black smoke. As hundreds of shocked onlookers on both sides watched, the heart of the battlecruiser was ripped out and she quickly turned over to port and sank. On the “Von Der Tann�� the initial cheering died off as the full implications of the blow they had meted out became clear. [ Based on their own complement ] In an instant just over a thousand sailors like themselves had been killed or were about to die as the sea closed over them. Only two men survived �� both masthead lookouts who had been thrown clear when the ship rolled over.

There was no time to mourn the Indefatigable; Queen Elisabeth had just joined the melee. Hippers cigar-sucking sangfroid cracked as he saw the Von Der Tann being pelted with vengeful salvoes of 15-inch shells from the four fast battleships under direction of Admiral Evan-Thomas. These heavyweights turned the tide in Beatty’s favour until he could disentangle his cruisers. The first bout between battlecruisers thus took a turn for the worse, both literally and figuratively. Outnumbered by four, Hipper sent the nearest light cruiser flotilla into the fray. Little did it matter that they ended up in a Mexican standoff of their own with the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron under Admiral Goodenough. Help was on the way. “At 4.30 P.M. the lookouts spotted more smoke behind her �� lots of it. Goodenough trained his binoculars on the SMS Rostock, then looked beyond her. Appearing over the horizon were the topmasts and then the upper works of what seemed a compact mass of Dreadnoughts. It was the Hochseeflotte.�� Scheer had saved Hipper by bringing a bigger gun to the fight, just as Evan-Thomas had saved Beatty. The hunter had become the hunted.

Or had it? As the British ships hauled stern amidst splashing salvoes, they also lured the entire enemy fleet towards Jellicoe. The thrill of the case, exchanging shots on the run like cowboys and Indians in a Western, slowly stretched out the German fleet into single file. The older ships fell behind while Hipper’s nimble cruisers raced ahead. The wireless on Beatty’s flagship Lion was out. Forwarding messages by visual so that the less powerful sets on other ships could beam them made them prone to delay and confusion, adding to his tendency to be incommunicado. In this crucial phase of the battle, Jellicoe had to feel around him while his “eyes and ears�� was so frustratingly silent. While he knew the general direction in which to steer, he could not simply wait for Hipper to make his presence known with muzzles flashes. He needed time to deploy from the box-shaped cruising formation of 6 battleship lines behind a cruiser/destroyer screen into a screenless line of battle which ideally would cross the T with Japanese imaticulateness. The trick was to find the exact whereabouts of Beatty’s advance guard before he morphed.

Luckily, Beatty’s battlecruisers were not the only hare and the Queen Elisabeth were not its only teeth. Reinforcement by Hood’s 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron was �� in retrospect �� instrumental in keeping up the pressure on Hipper, otherwise he might’ve established contact with the Grand Fleet before it had the chance to deploy. In short, Hood prevented Jellicoe from having his T crossed. Unlike Goodenough, he was still in the dark over what lay ahead. While British intelligence ranked as the best in the world in WWI, the decoders in Room 40 had dropped the ball on this one. The latest news on the bridge was still that there had been a mistake earlier. The German main fleet was reputedly still at anchor and only Hipper’s cruisers had made a sortie. Interception of German wireless at 2.30 P.M., visual sightings of enemy cruisers and �� at long last �� an engagement report by Beatty did nothing to alter this perception. Goodenough helped a little by reporting that the enemy was steaming north. All of this was not conclusive enough to safely deploy into line of battle, but clearly a little support wouldn’t hurt. When he finally established contact with Beatty at 6 P.M. A fresh and final indication that something was up reached Jellicoe’s ears. Gunfire was coming from two sides now. Hood was already clashing with his first Dreadnought. After five minutes of deliberation, the six columns of the Grand Fleet deployed into line to port, creating a safe distance between the capital ships and a surprise torpedo attack.

The Germans drew first blood, sinking two cruisers with 12-inch Dreadnought shells. Yet the main phase of the battle would be characterized by their increasing desire to escape the full might of the Royal Navy, mainly by executing a curb motion in unison. Having successfully executed a third battle turnaround thanks to the suicidal rearguard attack by his battlecruisers, Hipper kept his fleet in a compact formation. Essentially the Dreadnoughts, pre-Dreadnoughts and battlecruisers formed three neat and parallel columns, with the battle fleet in the centre, the vulnerable pre-Dreadnoughts to starboard and the battlecruisers to port.

Review [part 2] Nightfall didn’t necessarily spell the end of the naval battle as far as Jellicoe was concerned. With a mere 5 hours to sit out until dawn, he could stay the course between his enemy and its harbour. Three times already had Scheer given him the slip, twice under fire, but without altering the strategic situation. The nocturnal interlude was inspired by caution as much as confidence. Outsized British gunnery and superior numbers could carry the day, but German darkness training and unseen torpedoes could carry the night. When discussing the four escape routes open to the Hochseeflotte at dawn of June 1, the maps of Jutland 1916: Clash of the Dreadnoughtswill prove invaluable.

The cruelty of the sea shimmers through in isolated sentences, which together paint a picture that freezes the blood. Sailors who had survived the explosion of their ship were pulled under by the whirlpool suction of the sinking hull or run over by friendly ships. Others slowly died from exposure as they huddled on rafts in the hope of rescue. At least one British vessel overcrowded with relieved drifters was later blown to pieces by German shells. The matter-of-fact Victoria Cross citations, as so often, speak volumes from beyond the grave. One was awarded posthumously to Boy 1st Class John Corwell: wounded when the shield of his 5.5 inch gun took a direct hit from a German 15 cm shell, he died two days after the battle at age 16.

The legend of Jutland is rife with minor inaccuracies. The transparency of Konstams prose is all the more surprising in this light. The trick is to steer clear of them unless absolutely necessary or where due credit is lacking. A notable example is the duel at dusk between Beatty and his battlecruisers, once more onto the breach, and the half dozen pre-Dreadnought battleships that were not caught up in the fleet’s gradual western course. These so-called ��5 minute ships�� (the Air Force didn’t have the monopoly on gruesome monikers in WWI) are attributed by the German Official History with brave return fire. Their squadron battle report shows that they couldn’t even hit the flank of a battlecruiser, not with only its muzzle flashes to aim at. The misty darkness put an end to the fight. Konstam in conclusion credits it as the salvation of the High Seas Fleet in its entirety by avoiding a renewed cruiser on cruiser round: “And so bringing Scheer to battle during the last minutes of twilight. If he had, then Jellicoe could have caught the still disorganized High Seas Fleet between two fires.�� In short, the weakest link in the German line of battle had unraveled the original Hammer and Anvil scenario of the Dreadnought era.

57. by Richard Overy
Finish date: 30 october 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: B+
Review: The finest hour of the Spitfire gets the Marie Kondo treatment from a historian in the know. By challenging all of our assumptions, he leaves us with a clear framework for further study. As the title implies, there's a fair amount of de-mythologizing in this slender volume, yet in turn there's also some re-mythologizing through the winding turns of historiography. For example, the principal popular phrase of The Few from Churchillean rethoric is first debunked as the effectives of Fighter Command and three Luftflotten over the Channel enjoyed a rough parity. Next, it is reinstated as the actual fighter-to-fighter confrontation were decided by a highly trained elite numbering a few hundreds.

This principle of parity is extended to the machines, where the agile Spitfire's armament is no match for the armour on his opponents and the Stuka can outdive the Hurricane. The novelties begin with the framing of the aerial duels within the wider context of "the invasion of Britain" as it was contested into 1941, with Coastal Command making an undervalued contribution, with the Krieksmarine cultivating plans of its own without much regard for the sky and with the U-boats chasing up the graphs of shipping losses in the nascent Battle for the Atlantic. The role of AA defences, the focus of the interwar bombing scare, is shown to be in symbiosis with radar-based warning systems, as the time gap between detection and squadron scramble was often minute.

The political introductions is straightfoward, with the exception of the murk surrounding the replacement of Air Chief Marshal Dowding in November. Noteworthy is the absence of any demarkation of the battle in time and space, since it concerned a threedimensial space without landmarks in which the intensity of the fighting rose & ebbed slowly.

One simple point is clear that both countless professionals and amateurs have made: the home team always has an advantage. Especially if the alternative is fighting at the end of your operational range, with the cold comfort of the English waves or a Canadian POW camp as the only way out .

NOVEMBER
58. byMartin Brawley(no photo)
Finish date: 1 november 2016
Genre: uniformology
Rating; A-
Review: Do not dismiss this as another mere picture book. The level of detail in the close-ups and the in-depth knowledge summarized in the captions vies in quality with the sheer variety of uniforms on display.

59. byRichard Windrow(no photo)
Finish date: 1 november 2016
Genre: uniformology
Rating; A-
Review: A high-quality uniformology study featuring an outstanding cast of re-enactors, whose work often finds its way into other publications, for example the Spearhead series:
byIan Westwell(no photo)

60. byKeith Grieves
Finish date: 6 november 2016
Genre : military history
Rating: C-
Review: A series of endnote-studded chapters with a singular focus on the evolution of the British manpower policy. There is the occasional quotation from high-level politicians' memoirs and a newspaper extract or two to flavour the text, but the monomaniac approach to the workings of the various governmental agencies leaves it dry as dust.

Its academic merit is beyond reproach, and more recent works will benefit from this entry in a bibliography. the inner workings of various governmental agencies such as the Manpower Distribution Board and Chamberlain's failed National Service project are not discussed in isolation, but justly entwined with the games of cards played in the Houses of Parliament, as the cabinet of Asquith made way for Lloyd George.

Still, a lot is missing here that could've been grafted on the subject. There are no voices from below to show us how the erratic pursuit of manpower affected the common man who was pulled away from civilian life to shore up the numbers in khaki. There is no exploration of contemporary attitudes expressed through the medium of newspapers to show what the theoretical concept of "wastage" was perceived.

The overall impression is of a government that never quite got its act together, forever keeping five balls in the air. The needs of the Western Front were paramount, those of the war industry almost as important. These two create the main dynamic. Further down the pecking order stood the needs of the other British theaters of war, in terms of manpower allocation they truly were the "sideshows", together with Home Defence, which was steadily erroded after Jutland as the threat of invasion loomed smaller. In between darted the notion of reserves, ever more furtive as the bottom of the barrel was scraped and the American divisions started slowly filling the gap.

A parting tought of my own: Britain's military culture. Leave things to the professionals in the far-away country. A century of this and it's a hard job indeed to shape the notion of conscription. It was never universally or rigorously applied.

This rating was conflicted. Three stars for merit. One star for pleasure. Academics don't write for pleasure.

61. by James Edwin Gunn
Finish date; 9 november 2016
Genre: litirary criticism
Rating: B+
Review: It is impossible to write a literary critique of Asimov without mapping his development as a writer, which necessitated a substantial insertion of biographical info. For this, Gunn could draw on his personal experiences as well as Asimov's avaliable autobiographies In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt . The focus remains on the effect events in his life have had on the irregular frequency of his output, such as his spell in the Army or the plain fact that he didn't see fiction as a viable income until this 'hobby' surpassed the earnings of his scientific career in chemistry. His personality traits are more intimately entwined with the stories themselves: the claustrophilia that shapes the Caves of Steel and the humanism that minimizes the presence of alien lifeforms in favour of a galaxy dominated by the human Empire of the Foundation universe.

It's 2016 now, not 1982. What does this book still have to offer ? Conversely, what can it no longer offer ? Let's look at the negatives first. Asimov was still alive, with a decade to go. Allthough his most memorable ideas had already been put to paper, this is still an incomplete critique. Furthermore, a biographical frame during life is a sanitized thing; the autobiographical Asimov who provided it was with fewer flaws than the Asimov revealed in Isaac Asimov: A Life of the Grand Master of Science Fiction For one thing, the green sexuality and stock woman characters in Asimov fiction (apart from the metal-blooded Susan Calvin) can only be understood by looking behind the writer's bedroom door. The wide social sphere which recognition in the field of Science Fiction brought him was not without its friction, nor were his relationships with John Campbell and other editors. You will not find this in any of the bio-pieces that introduce his stories collections.

Contemporary bias apart, the analysis is outstanding. Gunn traces the evolution and main themes of Asimov's work with greater clarity than later chronicers of the man and his typewriter. It is interesting to see how well a "Universe" took shape in the hands of a man who never really aspired to unify his visions of the future into a coherent timeline. They cannot be linked without contradictions, but to the reader, the Asimov history of the next millennia is tangible. The sparseness of his prose (the 'empty stage' as Gunn likes to call it), so devoid of the action that would be expected of a boy raised on pulpy 20's SF, is defended here as the prerogative of the scientific mind which believed in rational paths to solve a problem. Flash Gordon was already fleshed out by laserbeams to preach the gospel of 'aggresive negotations'.

It's a fair point against those who portray Isaac Asimov as a loud-mouthed Smart Alec with more quantity in output than style. He could be all of that - there have to be a few turds in an opus this vast - but 400 books doesn't bestew the recognition of 'one of the great Three of Science Fiction' upon you, with engineers embracing the Three Laws of Robotics as they build their machines to mount the stairs or react to human emotion with the proper facial expression.

If numbers were literary merit, Danielle Steel would be Jane Austen. And I just know somebody will bring up the fact now that Jane Austen in every novel was harping against the "women are who they marry" milieu of her day. She used that emotion to shape a universe that will serve gender debates for another two centuries. And we'll no doubt write our robot's Laws accordingly by then.

WORKS CITED
and by Isaac Asimov
by Michael White

62. byCatherine Merridale(no photo)
Finish date: ? November 2016
Genre: history
Rating: B
Review: Sometimes we gaze out over the red brick walls at pivotal moments taking shape across the vast Russian landscape; sometimes we look down upon the Moskva but most of the time we're on the inside, watching buildings rise and crumble as Byzantine robes give way to red banners.

Neither fish nor fowl, it's easier to say what this book is not. It's not a history of Russia nor a history of Moscow. It's not completely a history of the Kremlin, either. That would entail an in-depth look at the architecture of the complex from medieval times to the post-Soviet restaurations. The buildings mostly come into focus at the stage of construction and demolition, their fragile splendor interpreted as symbols of tsarist power. All this talk of marble and gold would've warranted a substantial illustration section that leaves Putin out of the picture. It's easy to see why he's featured tough: the Kremlin can only be a lightweight subject unless intermingled with the lineage of Russia's rulers over the past thousand years. It doesn't hurt to have some prior knowledge*.

Merridale's own stories as a researcher make clear that the Kremlin is a place where history is an illusion, a reconstructed story of the past, to the Nth degree. While the modern complex may seem an organic whole on display, it is populated by the ghosts of palaces long demolished. Visitors glimpse only a small part of what is left standing, the staff holding the ornate keys to entire churches that silently turn to dust behind hidden gates. Even in the 21st century, the state reserves the right to control the narrative in the interest of its legimitation. In this respect, little has changed since before Alexander Nevsky defeated the Teutonic Knights on the ice (he did not ).
To the Byzantine splendor that defined the timeless otherness of the Russian lands to the Western eye was added the Enlighted veneer of the great Peter and Catherine, as their realm was enlarged across Siberia to the Pacific coast and inched forward at the point of a bayonet on its western borders to redefine Russia as a European Great Power. The Red stars planted upon the domes radiated the legitimacy of Soviet overlordship as the internationalist principle of pre-revolutionary communism gave way to a centralized empire of socialist states under Russia. The rallying cry of Za Rodina was briefly resurrected with Army Group Centre at the gates of Moscow and preserved in the postwar nomenclature of the Great Patriotic War.

And now? The Soviet Union fell a generation ago, the initial euphoria has waned and the geostrategic giant on feet of clay ponders its place in the world. Again, the mass of the Kremlin whispers “It is your destiny to be great��.

63. by Rosemary Sutcliff
Finish date: ? november 2016
Genre: historical fiction
Rating: C+
Review: As I saw the movie first, a comparison is inevitable. The movie creates a more realistic sense of danger (in spite of Hollywood's employment of deus ex machina and happy ending formulas) and the uncle from the book simply cannot match the modernist cynicism of a Donald Sutherland, yet the book conveys more respect for the Celtic foe by lingering on the voluntary integration of a survivor of the Ninth Legion. The prose is a bit stilted and asexual by today's standards; it is worth comparing Sutcliff's tales of battle and hunter's pursuit with the page-turning passages of Simon Scarrow's Eagle series. Perhaps this book was an inspiration for his early novels set during the conquest of Britain ?

64. by David M. Glantz
Finish date: 15 november 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: B-
Review: The human tragedy of the Leningrad siege cuts to the bone; Glantz puts the meat of the military context on it. When he isn't drowning you in his customary alphabet soup of unit numbers, it answers some interesting questions : how did the initial defence hold out ? What was a Baltic Fleet of 200+ vessels doing ? How was the relief incorporated into the offensives of 1942-1944 ? What was the role of the Finnish Army in the investment, how exactly did it "idle away" the years until it was repulsed to the 1940 border ? Offensive hubris is a mainstay feature of the Soviet war effort, ruthless cruelty even more so; but as Glantz makes clear, brutality saved the day.

It's not a book about the siege (those are listed aplenty in the introduction) and the German story is definitely in the margins. Be careful what you look for. But if you know the man, you know what to expect

65. byGeorge Forty(no photo)
Finish date: ? november 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: B+
Review: It's impossible for me to be wholly neutral on the subject of the WWII unit whose uniform I've chosen to wear on occasion, yet this is a short and sweet introduction to the exploits and organisation of Patton's Vanguard: The United States Army Fourth Armored Division. General Wood, Lucky Luciano and other outstanding individuals enrich the narrative with quotes. The interspersed photos and equipment section aid the re-enactor, the maps assist the battlefield traveller and the organograms complete a dense booklet of information.

WORKS CITED
byDon M. Fox(no photo)

66. by Kate Mosse
Finish date: 22 november 2016
Genre: romantic historical fiction
Rating: D
Review: Inspired by a commemorative plaque in the Carcassone region listing two unknown women, Mosse's fleshed them out as the core of an all-female Resistance group. The Midi setting is beautifully crafted as befits a Languedoc trilogy, with some colour locale breathed by the dialect dialogue. It will pull your inner travel goose, but as a war novel it fals flat on its face: some romance, some ancient artifact mystery that never gets off the ground and a gallery of Vichy/Nazi characters that are as believable as the antagonists of 'Allo 'Allo! even tough they're not played for laughs.

67. byIstvan Lazar(no photo)
Finish date: 26 november 2016
Genre: history
Rating: C-
Review: It is hard to say something positive about this read. The translation from Hungarian is dry and factual, like a textbook catering to foreign interest about the land of the vampires. Yet the coherence of Transylvanian history is weak prior to Early Modern times, with few words spared for Vlad Dracul. There is a solid academic foundation, the bibliography of which has sadly been omitted from the original version. I wonder how much weight titles in Romanian or German carry in it. There are definitely moments of nationalistic bias against the loss of this borderland to the Romania Mare , alltough in all fairness mr. Lazar knows its limits : this theory was developped and propagated as the completely erroneous Hungarian answer and as a spiteful reaction to the equally fantastic Romanian hypothesis of the Daco-Roman continuity. . He also points out the restraint by the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Empire in its foreign policy towards Romania prior and during WWI, a restraint apparently respected until the perfect opportunity presented itself in summer 1916. This, the existence and effect of interbellum nationalisation policies and Hungary in WWII are parts of the story that inevitably are handled too swiftly to satisfy my appetite.

68. by Stephen E. Ambrose
Finish date : 26 november 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: B+
Review: Fresh off his Eisenhower biography*, Ambrose was looking for a short and sweet subject. He found it and gives it to us short and sweet, without pulling any 'Ambroses'. It is most touching to see friendships develop between a few former adversaries. Also, in spite of the just resentment by the French civilian population, it's hard to be hard on young, conscripted Poles who relished wine and women more than weapons drill, wisely taking to their heels when confronted with devilishly blackened elite attackers. The bravado inherent to Airborne units lends a surreal touch to many of the tense accomplishments during the two-day holding operation.

* by Stephen E. Ambrose

69. by David Swanson
Finish date: 29 november 2016
Genre: political manifesto ?
Rating: C
Review: I knew I'd end up disagreeing with David Swanson. Yes, War is hell. Yes , war is a last resort ... but war CAN and WILL be necessary. Always.

He has good points and a fabulous editor to turn those points into large-font titles, so it's easy to leafe through it. But he hammers his points home with the subtlety of an elephant at a toga party. The argumentation is drawn from a narrow selection of America's 20th century military history. He defintely drops the ball on WWII. What choice was there, even if the cornerstones of our perception of "the good war - that is, then Holocaust and anti-Nazism, took a contemporary backseat to anti-Japanese hatred ? Also, a prime feature of 20th century military culture is that the common soldier has been given a voice, an individual tribute, from a renewed interest in WWI oral history over the Facebook groups dedicated to the last of the Greatest Generation and the freakin' Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. All the way back to the Victoria Cross in the aftermath of the Crimea, to recognize (often posthumous) bravery with a more individual token than a campaign medal.

IS wasn't on the scene yet when Swanson wrote this. What alternatives could he provide to plain, cruel, Geneva-only-counts-when-CNN-is-watching warfare until the worst scourge since Nazism is fully exterminated ? He never takes into account the Chinese philosophy of war, where it's a necessary evil to restore balance to the universe.

Or, as the great American Dwight D. Eisenhower put it :
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Yet he did what he had to do. I'm alive in a free Belgium because of it.

Still, in his bluntness Swanson might just get through his target American audience : some confused college students and a Bible belt warmonger or two.

DECEMBER
70. byRobert Wallace(no photo)
Finish date: 4 december 2016
Genre: history
Rating: B
Review: While slightly dated, it is still rich in overleafs, easy-to-understand science and above all human interest to convey the hardships of an existence that was deemed (doomed) romantic, stretching for two generations into the 20th century with improved tools, but without better prospects.

71. by Jeff Lindsay
Finish date: 7 december 2016
Genre: graphic novel
Rating: C-
Review: Be careful what to expect. The truth might hit you like a needle to the neck.

With the way the TV series declined in quality after the heights of season 4 (alltough religion and darker love interests were worth exploring) many people must've wondered how the story arch 'd have fared if Jeff Lindsay had set it in stone, much like Vince Gillighan did for Breaking Bad .

This comic offers a glimpse: based on a script by the original author and illustrated by an artist who didn't watch the series for inspiration. It shows that at least Dexter himself, Debra and Rita have a 'residual self' (cfr. the Matrix) derived from how the Lindsay novels describe them, for they show an uncanny resemblance to their TV actor counterparts.

The blood drawings have a purposefully frozen feel to them and close-ups of the antagonists convey a sense of menace. The atmosphere of Miami sithers through the colour palet. In other respects, the artwork feels wooden.

The story in itself is too big for its boots, taking up enough room to fill the length of a season but told at a pace equivalent to a single episode. It shares askew similarities with "Those Kinds of Things" (#6.1), showing just how memorable a high school reunion could be as a starting point. A more leisurely hunting game, black and white flashbacks to the Tonton Macoute period or the growth of New Hope as well as more interaction with Dexters family life would've been ...not filler, but fleshing out of a bare scenario.

72. by John Wyndham
Finish date: 7 december 2016
Genre: Dystopian SF
Rating: B
Review: With far less focus on the walking cannibalistic plants than the popular memory retains, this story is the antithesis of World War Z in that it follows a singular narrator and builds a dystopia on a simple and elegant premise, rather than dozens of eyewitnesses caught up in a maelstrom of classic monsters. Pandemic loss of sight as a metaphorical breakdown of society would later be explored on Nobel prize level in Blindness by José Saramago and there is definitely a hint of hommage in 28 Days Later, where the male lead also wakes up in an abandoned hospital after the initial wave of chaos has struck.

WORKS CITED
by Max Brooks
by José Saramago

73. by Jon E. Lewis
Finish date: 10 december 2016
Genre: history
Rating: B+
Review: It's surprising how well the mythology of the Wild West (Lucky Luke comics included) can serve as a framework for the history of the West. The thematic approach is slightly based upon controversy. The story moves swiftly from the first centuries of European colonisation to the Lewis & Clark expedition, after which the mass migration trails for land and gold spread across the map. Out of the resulting frictions, the legendary figures of the age were born: the cowboy, the miner, the prospector, the outlaw... and oddly enough, the clash between sheep and cattle breeders over the grass of the Great Plains. Somehow, a sense of chronology is kept up, with the railways as the main breaking point between the 'true' Wild West and the West that was molded into the framework of the Reconstruction nation. This goes also for the last quarter of the story, devoted wholly to the Indian Wars. It's a shift of focus away from the 'settling' in all its forms and the native inhabitants of the land that are forever pushed to the margins. Sometimes they pushed back. Hard.

What's striking when your field is 20th century wars, is how recent the West came to end, preserved only in a heavily sanitized rodeo show form; the generation that rode out into the sunset went to the grave while their grandchildren read about the sinking of the Titanic and periodical tensions among the Great Powers of Europe.

What is striking for everyone is how HARD life on the frontier was : most of its romantic heroes never even reaped the benefits of their labour; that went to the men in top hats and golden chain watches on their waistcoats.

74. byPhilip J. Haythornthwaite(no photo)
Finish date: 18 december 2016
Genre: military history
Rating : B+
Review: "Gallipoli for dummies" and it will make you smart.
The Osprey maps combine well with a text that contains a minimum of analysis - alltough there's several books' worth of arguments behind every poor command or badplan. The bare facts will serve any student as a useful framework or back-up in case you get lost in the detail of Fitzsimons* and his brethern, or can't tell the Krithia battles apart anymore.
WORKS CITED
by Peter FitzSimons

Dimitri,

you forgot to put part of the format in message 88. You only put the review.

75. byRobert T. Foley(no photo)
Finish date: 22 december 2016
Genre: military history
Rating: A-
Review: have you read what they read ? It's a popular question to introduce any questionably 'smart' reading list, but with this book it fits like a glove. EVERY book since 2005 that even remotely deals with Verdun or German strategy in WWI has this book listed in the bibliography. Why ?

Because it kicks the gospel out of the church. The Schlieffen Plan wasn't inevitable (thank you, Terence Zuber, for pointing that out ad nauseam) and Von Falkenhayn's plan to bleed the French Army to death was less innovative than posterity assumed.

Foley looks at the genesis of German strategy in 1916. As with most armies who put on their thinking cap in peacetime, this goes back to its previous war experience, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. A bold Auftragungstaktik coupled with superior numbers from conscription and hastiliy massed artillery fire had carried the day against the cautious defensive strategy of the French regular Army, anchored on the deadly accurate long-range fire of the Chassepot rifles. Yet at great cost. The war had evolved into a franc-tireur -infested protraction by the popular government and a costly investment of Paris, instead of a Napoleonesque triumphal entry into la ville lumière following the swift collapse of the Imperial government. Also, the senior officers at the Grossgeneralstab had not forgotten what "grabbing a corner of the towel, then see how big it is" meant to them, when as young officers they crouched on the ground in a desperate attempt to close in on the French grumblers, whose mitrailleuses turned men into pulp while their marksmen skythed bloody holes in the ranks until the Krupp guns silenced the lot.

Samanta wrote: "Dimitri,

you forgot to put part of the format in message 88. You only put the review."

Done, Samanta.
I hope this feverish catch-up earns me the right to a "50 books in 2017" topic. I got the hang of it now. Probably won't capsule review everything, mostly the war books... those books that deserve it.

Bentley has already started creating new "50 books" threads for the members. Everyone who took part this year, automatically gets the 2017 edition. I'm sure your thread will be up soon.

Dmitri - your thread will go up soon - I am working through the list now. But you do not have to worry because only books completed in 2017 will be able to be posted on the 2017 thread. So you are OK for now until I get to it which I am doing.