What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

[Cancer]

Fleet Admiral King -- A Naval Record by Ernest King and Walter Whitehill, being King's memoirs.  An important book (King was "only" C-in-C United States Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations during WW2), but unfortunately a bad one, serving mostly to inform the reader about Navy politics in a roundabout way, and King's personal feelings about command style. 

 

As an example of why this is a bad book:  the US began the war with the Mark 14 torpedo with its Mark 6 exploder, a combination which is infamous for being probably the worst in the world at the outset of the war.  Tests done in Australia during the war under Adm. Charles Lockwood's (commander Pacific submarines for the latter half of the war) direction demonstrated that the torpedo consistently ran 10 to 15 feet deeper than it had been set, and that a flush 90-degree impact on a surface at its operating speed tended to destroy the exploder without setting off the warhead.  Combined with circumstantial evidence that the exploder's magnetic influence operations did not work at the latitudes in which the Pacific War was fought, the torpedo system all but worthless through 1942 and much of 1943.  Navy politics meant that the Bureau of Ordnance could and did reject the results Lockwood provided; supposedly only by the direct order of King did the Bureau investigate the situation and eventually correct the defects.  (I say "supposedly" because that is stated in a different book, not this one.)

 

In King's book, Lockwood is mentioned twice and the troubles with the Mark 14 torpedo not mentioned at all (and there is no mention of torpedoes in the book after an event in 1909).  By contrast, Admiral Hugh Rodman, whom King clearly disliked intensely, receives eight separate sneers.

[death tribble]

Quartered Safe Out Here - George MacDonald Fraser

The author is the same man who wrote about Harry Flashman the coward from Tom Brown's Schooldays. Fraser served in the British army in Burma following the victories at Imphal and Kohima. So this is as the war is ending but the soldiers at the time did not know that. It covers this period until the end of the war with Japan and has an epilogue when celebrating 50 years since VJ Day. It is nice to see a British view of the war in the East even if it is just the tail end. Recommended for those who like war anecdotes. 

[death tribble]

The Face of Battle by John Keegan

This looks at military history and then at three specific battles, Agincourt, Waterloo and The Somme. It shows how big the battles were and how large were the forces involved. It also shows how warfare evolved in each case. The Somme covers the most as it is not a simple task to explain what happened and why. It is a fascinating read.

[death tribble]

Mud, Blood and Poppycock by Gordon Corrigan.

The aim of the book is to overturn what popular opinion has said about Britain's participation in World War 1. Written by a military man, it concentrates on where the war was to be won, on the Western Front. He does a thorough job on tackling the myths of the Lost Generation, Lions led by Donkeys and what you might term military injustice. His view is that the generals are unfairly blamed and that the politicians should get blamed for some of their ideas. It also shows why the war had an enduring and lasting effect on the British public and should do so. A great read for the military minded.

[Rich McGee]

Just finished a book I found in among my deceased father's things, one of very few (less than two dozen) he owned and (probably) bought for himself.  It was published in the early 1960s and unimaginatively titled Strategic Air Command.  Dad served a brief stretch in a missile silo outside of Plattsburgh NY during that period although he never talked about it much, so I'm still unsure exactly what he did beyond a lot of maintenance and repair.  I'm not even positive he was there during the Cuban missile crisis, which was by far the high point of that 12-silo command's importance to the US.  Despite only being partially completed, the operational silos represented a major part of the land-based missile strength of the country and would probably have been some of the first warheads to arrive in the USSR if the world had committed suicide that October.

 

The book itself was written before that crisis, and is an interesting window into strategic thinking in the period and the severe limitations of predicting where technology was going so far back.  It's also a jarring and quite awful piece of propaganda.  It spent a fair bit of its word count with bitter complaints about how all the wonder weaponry SAC wanted should have been funded already and would have been if congress wasn't full of traitors, everyday citizens weren't lazy greedy slobs who refuse to pay higher taxes for national security, and the Navy and Army weren't so busy wasting the military budget on useless toys instead of nuclear bombers and shiny new missiles.  All of which is made more pathetic from a 2023 perspective where the future knows every one of the weapons they wanted so badly either never saw service or was retired as obsolete well before 1970.  The Atlas silos my father served at were functional for less than five years total, technology was changing so rapidly.  Also very disturbing how they stick the word "neutral" (as in neutral nations) in quotes every time they use it, and boldly declare that anyone who wasn't with NATO and the US is a pawn of the Reds whether they know it or not.

 

Still, it had a lot of nice black & white military tech porn, made better because so much of it showed off weapons and aircraft that saw limited or no operational deployment.  Pentagon pipe dreams galore.  

[Cancer]

Another piece of context for the above: the US Air Force had become fully independent of the Army in 1947 (before then it was the US Army Air Force).  So a bunch of what you've described above is the result of a service that is newborn and definitely suffering from Jealous Kid Brother syndrome, trying to convey to the world -- and themselves -- that they are the ones that really matter.

[Rich McGee]

It's a factor, but nowhere near on par with SAC's utter conviction that they were the only thing keeping the Russians from nuking us into ruin within hours of dropping our guard and therefore deserved first place in line at all times.  That was very much a SAC thing rather than the whole branch from the period vets I've known.  Even the rest of the Air Force occasionally bemoaned the amount of their budget that went to delivery platforms for nukes instead of conventional combat aircraft.  Korea had taught them that nukes weren't the answer to everything and conventional wars still needed to be fought.

 

None of that conventional weaponry even gets a mention in the book.  It was titled "SAC" after all, the rest of the Air Force hardly mattered. 

[Cancer]

I lived on a SAC base 1971-74 (and into 1976, part-time after I started college), so I'm aware of the mindset, albeit 15-20 years later.

[death tribble]

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of The East India Company by William Dalrymple

If you think that modern corporations are dangerous then let me introduce you to the prototype, The East India Company. How it was founded in Elizabethan times to how it came to India and how it developed. It was the East India Company who came to conquer India not the British government. It was not the policy of the company to do this but certain people employed by the company took it that way. It also showed how the Mughal Empire came apart and that a lack of unity amongst the Indians led the company to take over bit by bit. It also shows how Robert Clive became famous which is what we are not taught in school nor any of this period of history. It also shows how problems in India like the Bengal famine of 1770 led to the American War of Independence, that as well as a fear amongst Americans that the East India Company would come to America and do to them what they were doing to the Indians. It also shows how bankers in India contributed to the success of the company and what monies were sent home to Britain. The figures involved are staggering, It also shows the importance of Napoleon's campaign in Egypt as he was intending to come to India.

As the author says Walmart and Microsoft do not have nuclear submarines. The East India Company had an army which it used.

[megaplayboy]

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani, which takes a more optimistic look at future trends and suggest a near-future world where personal health, autonomy and free time is maximized, as many mundane and menial tasks are done by automation and AI.  I have some quibbles with some of the author's premises, but on balance a thought-provoking read.  

 

 

[death tribble]

Last Man Standing (Tales from Tinseltown) - Roger Moore

Reminiscences and tales most of which are second hand about people Roger knew or worked with. This is not as good as the autobiography but it has some nice bits. And it keeps up the 'Frank Sinatra was a good guy' theme

 

[death tribble]

The Making of the British Landscape by Nicholas Crane

 

This book attempts to explain how the British landscape came to be as it is today. It goes into pre-history and how the Ice Ages and global warming shaped the country and the lives of those around it. It was fascinating. Especially as the writer was one of the main presenters of the series Coast on the BBC which looked at various places around the country and went into their background.

[death tribble]

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

The guy who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm went to Spain and took part in the Spanish Civil War. By his own admission he did little but he did take part and you also have a view of the infighting in the Left. Orwell was in one of the factions that was not liked by the USSR. That meant the faction would not get guns etc. Orwell suffered injury (shot in the throat) and that was how he got out. The last two chapter of the book are appendices covering the infighting and what led to it. It is a good read. 

[Cancer]

Prisoners of History, by Keith Lowe (St Martins Press, 2020)

 

An examination of 25 selected monuments for WW2 phenomena, ranging from things ranging from the  specific to much broader memorials.  Locations span Asia and Europe, with two in the United States (the Marine Corps memorial in D.C., and the mural in the UN Security Council Chamber).  Monuments tell stories about the cultures that build them, perhaps even more so than they tell about the events they memorialize, and those stories are usually complex, have very deep emotional and political loading, and often strong controversy both international and internal -- controversy that some cultures choose to ignore or suppress.  Highly informative, though I suspect that the political and social contexts described in the book are broader and deeper than the book lays out. 

 

Superficially, I wish it had better illustrations.

[death tribble]

Setting the East Ablaze: on Secret Service in Bolshevik Asia by Peter Hopkirk

How the Soviets tried to forment revolution in Asia and how it failed. There is the Civil War between White and Red Russians; how Russia tried to turn India communist; how a number of British agents took on the Russians and how several people became warlords. There is dashing and derring do on both sides but it shines a light on a neglected piece of history, Britain vs Soviet Russia for control of India. A fascinating read

[DShomshak]

1 hour ago, death tribble said:

Setting the East Ablaze: on Secret Service in Bolshevik Asia by Peter Hopkirk

How the Soviets tried to forment revolution in Asia and how it failed. There is the Civil War between White and Red Russians; how Russia tried to turn India communist; how a number of British agents took on the Russians and how several people became warlords. There is dashing and derring do on both sides but it shines a light on a neglected piece of history, Britain vs Soviet Russia for control of India. A fascinating read

I remember at least one Fantasy novel that was basically the French Revolution with the serial numbers filed off. Just this brief description makes me think it could be turned into a whole Fantasy series. And a kick-ass one at that.

 

Dean Shomshak

[L. Marcus]

What was his name, the Russian psycho of a nobleman who tried to become a new Mongol Khan ... ?

[death tribble]

you have heard of Baron Ungern-Sternberg ?

[L. Marcus]

Roman von Ungern-Sternberg. That's the loon.

[Cancer]

Tower of Skulls, by Richard B Frank, (c) 2020.  A detailed and well-researched book on the first segment of WW2 in the Asian and Pacific theatres, i.e., against Japan.  Intended to be the first of a three-book sequence on the war, in terms of coverage (with bits of earlier history as needed for background) it ranges from the "Marco Polo Bridge Incident" in July 1937 to the surrender of Corregidor on 6 May 1942.  It has much greater insight into conditions in China, the "workings" of the Japanese government (that word is in quotes because events by peripheral hotheads could and did overrule any policies that might have been concocted in Tokyo), and a better correlation of events in Asia with events elsewhere in the world than all the materials I'd read previously (which are strictly English language, albeit a mix of US, UK, and Commonwealth authorship). 

 

For instance, the victories of Allied cryptanalysis over the German Enigma-based cypher are well documented now, and the ability of the US to read the Japanese diplomatic code (what the Americans called "Purple"), are pretty commonly known now.  There is a very abbreviated account -- yet much more than anything I had previously read -- about how the breaking of Purple came to be.  At least as important is the evolution -- invention, really -- of how such intelligence came to be used by the American government and armed forces.

 

Soviet flip-flopping on its support (and lack thereof) of China is better correlated with events happening in Europe at the time compared to other works I've read, making clear that Stalin was paying attention to Japan and China but events in Europe necessarily commanded his policy decisions in ways that are easy to see.

 

Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd, commander of Battleship Division 1, was aboard his flagship, USS Arizona, on the morning of the Pearl Harbor attack.  "Of Kidd, all that was found was his Naval Academy ring fused to the conning tower."  It is also pointed out that all the battleship sinkings happened during the first wave of the attack, and that the Japanese planes suffered much greater losses in the second wave, suggesting that even twenty minutes' warning (as might have been provided by the radar "sighting" of the incoming first wave, had it been handled promptly) could have drastically altered the outcome if the attack.

[Old Man]

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, because I didn't have enough to worry about already.  Technically fiction, but I'm putting it here because it is a highly plausible scenario based on years of research and interviews with people who have been at high levels in the U.S. strategic armed forces.  The good news is that I already had a pretty good grasp of the effects of nuclear weapons, perhaps because I own a copy of The Effects Of Nuclear Weapons, a cornerstone reference book in the field.  The bad news is that there are some new weapons systems, and some old systems that don't work very well, which alter the calculus of responding to a potential nuclear threat, and not in a good way.

 

A quick read--300 pages--partly because global thermonuclear war only takes an hour or so, and partly because that hour is really packed full of action and drama.