Just take a moment......

No matter who they were, where they fought or what side they were on, they all deserve respect.



This blog is closing down - it's been fun, but I can't devote the time to it that I would like. Thanks for looking.

1812 - Adam Zamoyski

I've been silent for awhile, and there's a good reason for that - 557 pages of enthralling account and impeccable scholarship demands that you take your time over things.

You can accuse Hitler of being many things, but a Historian ain’t one of them. If he had been, he’d have realised that invading a certain very big, very totalitarian and very cold country to his immediate north-east wasn’t that great an idea. Unfortunately for the Whermacht, old Adolf thought he knew better. If he had been a historian then he would have known that when Napoleon had tried it, he’d succeeded only in destroying the mightiest fighting force Europe had yet seen.
The contrast between the two, and the comparisons, make for an interesting background to a book like this; Hitler grabbed more land but the Corsican managed what he didn’t – capturing Moscow. However, although the proverbial door was open and the lights on, no one was home. Or rather, not the people that he had been banking on. The Napoleonic system of war was primarily to do with threatening or capturing the enemy's capital, then waiting for them to resign themselves to the inevitable, stack arms and surrender. Unfortunately in 1812, Moscow wasn't the Russian capital....

The Muscovites had fled but had put everything to the torch first, which for a force that pillaged what it needed was a disaster; the Grand Armee had nothing to eat and nowhere to shelter from the vicious winter whilst not eating it. So goes accepted wisdom. Zamoyski shows us that this was not the case - Moscow had plenty of food for a few months and not everything had burned; there was still shelter available. But his lines of communication were distressingly long and vulnerable. History teaches us that when two rulers, each with an ego the size of a continent, clash there can only be one result. Dead men. And when the egos in question command millions of people, tha’s an awful lot of dead men.

So why did Napoleon, the foremost military commander of his age, one of the greatest in history, launch the invasion of a country that had nothing to interest him? He wasn’t obsessed with the idea of Lebensraum, nor did he have a thing for slaughtering any Jews or Slavs that he could find; at this point Russia didn’t know it had oil reserves, didn’t have a very good economy, had no agriculture worth spitting at and was generally inferior to his European domain. So why did he do it?

To put it bluntly it was because the Russians were pissing him off. They refused to enforce his Continental System – the trade embargo against Britain – were fomenting insurrection in the German states and what had been Poland, delighting in the kicking that he was getting in Spain, were scrapping with the Turks (a potential French ally) and were being generally snotty towards all things French. And from a strategic position, to leave Russia unhindered whilst he pacified Spain in person would have been the equivalent of handing Tsar Alexander the keys to Paris and inviting him to stay for awhile. In the man’s own words:

One way or another I want to finish the thing….I don’t want to find myself in my old age in a position where people can kick me in the backside…I am determined to bring things to a finish one way or the other.

And yet, and yet, Zamoyski takes pains to explain that a few years before, France and Russia had been allies of the first degree. What, then, had changed? This book will give you every answer you have ever wanted. It’s a masterwork, nothing less.
One of the enduring mysteries of this campaign (at least in hindsight) is why, when Napoleon knew about the extreme conditions, knew about Russian resolve and knew that he still had an undefeated enemy in Spain and the Germanic states seething under his occupation, why did he wait until so late in the campaigning season to get everything under way?
Zamoyski goes into some detail on this point in an effort to nail down the reasons and distils everything to a few very obvious points, yet they’re so obvious that people seem to have missed them for decades;

1. To gather a polyglot army of half a million from states the length and breadth of Europe took time.
2. The roads in many cases were little more than dirt tracks rapidly churned into mud, not today’s motorways.
3. None of the oats and barley required to feed more than 40,000 cavalry would be ready to harvest until July at the very earliest.
4. Nothing moved faster than a galloping horse. Men had to march the whole way. This was exhausting.
5. The commissariat supply system, unheard of in French armies before this campaign, was still amassing supplies from Paris to Poland.

As mentioned before, the comparisons with 130-odd years later are overwhelming. Supply lines were too long. There wasn't an overall firm idea of what to do (never a good way to launch an invasion - Iraq, anyone?). Preparations weren't accomplished as exactingly as they may have been. Armies assembled from all the nations of Europe weren't enmeshed closely enough. Winter uniforms were not issued and both invaders envisioned a fast war with quick victories and relatively few casualties. And again, in defeating their aggressors, the Russians lost more men than the invaders did - and they were willing to do it.
Again, I cannot stress just how good this book is. If Adolf had had the same depth and quality of information, well, maybe he'd have thought twice about things.

But probably not.

9 out of 10

Blenheim - Charles Spencer

'Go, my children. Plunder, murder, destroy - and if it be possible to commit yet greater cruelties, be not negligent.'

If there's one thing that we Brits and the French have been historically good at, it's beating the crap out of each other. After all, we've been doing it off and on for damn near the last 1000 years...

At Agincourt, Crecy, Poitiers, Calais, all along the Somme river, Spain, Portugal, India, the Far East, Canada, Waterloo and half a hundred other places throughout the world we've turned our grudges into rather large piles of corpses. And with an astounding regularity. Such that any outside observer would be forgiven for wondering whether our 2 countries actually have anybody left in them....

304 years ago we faced off once more, this time infront of 3 little villages in the Bavarian countryside; Oberglau, Hochstadt and Blindheim, and the confrontation which has gone into history as the Battle of Blenheim began. We didn't fancy scrapping by ourselves though, so we invited Bavaria, Denmark, Holland, Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire out to play as well.
On balance it's rather surprising that we actually won; after all, the armies were about the same numbers, had comparable arms and equipment, used similar formations and the Franco-Bavarian force held a hideously strong position (anchored by the Danube, the Hurtingen forest and the 3 aforementioned villages). But we did, and a greater portion of the plaudits go to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and Prince Eugene of Savoy. Ironically, both of whom the French King indirectly helped to their success. He must have been mortified when he realised that later.

Charles Spencer is uniquely suited to a book of this type - he's Marlborough's direct descendant, after all - and since this is his first stab at a work like this it's impressive how well he's managed it.
Marlborough's career up to the start of the 1704 campaign is looked at in some detail (including his commission in the Guards and a £1000 gift for, ahem, services rendered to a courtesan of King Charles II) and takes up the first 85 pages. Now, usually I tend to spit and curse at this kind of slow introduction but this time it's rather valuable; we see how Churchill was formed, moulded and tested into the youngest Captain-General of his times, and the way he ruthlessly whipped the previously ill thought-of British Army into shape. And how the Dutch States-General didn't like it when he suggested going on the attack inside of sheltering behind the border fortresses.
Churchill pulled off a magnificent coup, essentially the 18th century version of Blitzkrieg. He fooled everyone, allies included, into thinking that he was going to strike into France. Instead he moved 40,000 men, with some speed and in enviable condition, into Bavaria and determined on a pitched battle against the nation and the army which had stomped all over Europe for the past 60 years.

Spencer does a superlative job in giving you all the detail you'd want (and some intriguing pictures) about the Rhineland campaign, making a weighty book of close on 400 pages. He's done his research, alright, and at quite painstaking levels of detail, singling out a few characters of note for 'colour commentary' and sticking with them throughout. The success is that he's managed to collect a fair number of reactions and accounts from the Franco-Bavarian as well as the Allied side, thus turning what could have been a one sided piece of ancestor worship into a very worthy way to spend a day or two. Napoleon himself thought highly of 'Malbrouk' and this book explains why.

8 out of 10.

Carrier - Tom Clancy

So, what do you call something that's just about a kilometre long, weighs anything from 95 to 102 thousand metric tonnes, is built at Newport News Shipbuilding, has a service life of 50 years and costs $4.5 Billion to build?.

Well, if you're one of the more than 3,000 sailors onboard you call it home, to any of the 2,800 aircrew (especially the pilots) it's the barn and if you happen to be a submariner it's the biggest damn target you will ever see in your whole career. To the rest of us however, it's a Nimitz-class nuclear propelled aircraft carrier. Big, isn't it? Oh yes; and the U.S. Navy has 10 of them.

Clancy is known for his fiction, indeed is celebrated for it, but this book (which is part of a series) goes to some lengths to show the amount of research that he puts into one. Now, you also get the feeling that this is also a bit of unconscious bragging on Clancy's part, or that he's rather popular with the military (I mean come on. Just what are the chances of a civvie like me getting aboard an aircraft carrier as a guest?) but if so it's for a decent cause and you can't dislike the man too much for being a lucky sod (well, I can, but that's another matter).

The best way to describe this book is that it's a university textbook - lotsa statistics, all of them impressive, lots of exploded diagrams and patient explanations like you might see and hear in a lecture hall (now we know why Jack Ryan started as a teacher). To call it dry in places would be an insult to dry and yet the greater majority of the time I felt myself pulled into the reams and reams of facts and figures somewhat against my will but at least I went in with open eyes. Ever wondered how they test the steam catapults? Well, there's a bunch of remarkable photos that will help you visualize it accompanied by enough text to leave you in no doubt at all that they can each fire a 50 ton sled at 120mph, 300 feet into the Chesapeake within 5 seconds of hitting the trigger. See what Imean about being overwhelmed with numbers?

It's not just the ship though, Clancy delves into everything onboard apart from the engines and the performance ("Sorry sir, restricted area - now, just turn around and walk away before the nice Marine shoots you"). So, we get detailed and exhaustive descriptions of the aircraft from the ageing but impressive Tomcat to the latest variant of the Seahawk helicopter (the naval version of the Army's Blackhawk) and their specifications; weapons load, sensor capability, rated engine power, specific role, what and how many from each production run, when they were built, lifespan of the airframe, yadda, yadda, yadda.

"Look. I'm a bloke, right? I don't like dry stats, I like big bangs. Lots of them. Preferably somewhere other than where I am right now."

"Okay, let's have a look in the bomb locker, shall we?"

Yep, it's weapon time kiddies. And a Nimitz carries some pretty hefty firepower - every conceivable type of bomb is onboard save for nuclear ordnance (now, anyway, they used to carry a few of them, too - or so rumours go) and for any eventuality you care to imagine; M16 rifle, 50 cal and 30mm cannon rounds, air to air missiles, torpedoes, depth charges, gravity bombs, smart bombs, you name it and a carrier probably hauls it around the ocean - along with about 10million gallons of jet fuel. Now that'd make a pretty big bang.

Clancy sadly bores the arse off me at times and the interview with the then Chief of the Navy is just one of those moments; although things start to perk up a bit when they discuss options and plans for the next generation, or "Carrier XX" as it's known. Then he delves briefly into his more entertaining craft and sets up some futuristic scenarios and slices of fiction where the carrier and crew are pitched in at the deep end.

A worthy book, if heavy going, should you want to know every minuscule little thing about a ship you'll never get to board (unless you're in the USN). I can't help thinking that it could have been a deal more interesting though. It'd be nice if there wasn't so much damn flag-waving, as well.

5 out of 10.

Sloop of War - Alexander Kent

Hi-ho Hi-ho, it's off to sea we go.....
The year is 1778 and the setting is Antigua during the American Revolution. Richard Bolitho is about to get his greedy little mitts on his first command - HMS Sparrow - the aforementioned sloop. How he does, what he does and how he handles what he does, will be another matter entirely. Isolated from the main fleet because of his duties and virtually on his own, this is going to be a serious test for the newly promoted captain. He used to be one amongst many in the wardroom of a big two-decker. Now he's completely alone.

It's made clear right from the start that Bolitho is a very small cog in a huge great wheel; alongside the larger frigates, sloops and brigs were the smallest warships ever used by the Royal Navy and were vital for patrols, scouting, relaying messages and general poking about places where they weren't really meant to go. Kent, like C.S Forrester before him and Patrick O'Brien after, knows his ships and knows how they sail and perform - there are plenty of intricacies in terms of rigs, lines, wind direction, weather and so on and this is only right and proper for a book about sailing ships - but never does he allow it to get in the way of what you might term the exciting stuff; the crashing broadsides, desperate boarding actions and sneaky little raids that small vessels are so good at.

Bolitho is helped by Sparrow itself, which has the advantage of carrying some seriously big fire-power for such a small ship; historically, normal sloops of the period(those converted from merchantmen) carried nine-pounders as the norm. Sparrow carries twelve pounders which are a load heavier and grants Boltiho's command the ability to out-range and out shoot anything that he can't run away from. Whilst this seems a clear case of what might be termed "super ship syndrome" it's actually not; yes, Sparrow is heavy in the guns department, but the explanation for it is entirely plausible and fits with the character of the Navy at the time. This is fortunate because he's going to need them....

319 pages is what this book weighs in at, which is just perfect for an hour or two of a Sunday afternoon. But despite this, to use a phrase, the book is rammed; petty politicking amongst the ships' officers is mirrored with rather more large-scale politicking ashore with an end result that you're not quite sure of. In the meantime there are Redcoats to rescue, French frigates and American privateers to sink, friends to be made and lost and even the time for a burgeoning love-affair in the middle of it. And the constant question of how a ships' company mostly pressed into service against their will is to be kept from mutiny.

I tell you, Royal Navy captains were a busy lot back then!

8 out of 10

Hero of the Imperium - Sandy Mitchell

Ciaphas Cain is a Commissar. One of the hard-boiled, flint-eyed, no-mercy watchdogs of the armed forces. A man who will take on the enemy with a sharpened chair leg to save his comrades, his brother officers and his charges of the 597th Valhallan regiment of the Imperial Guard and so rightly be judged a living Hero of the Imperium. Or so the propaganda would have you believe.

The problem is that this is not what Cain wants at all. He’d much prefer a very, very deep hole (preferably well armoured) that he can duck into and cower in comfortably abject terror until all the loud noises stop. Either that or a fast starship for somewhere a long way away. But this is the 41st Millennium, mankind teeters on the brink of extinction with enemies on all sides; some mortal, others not. A quiet life for this front-line soldier is most decidedly NOT on the cards. No matter how much he wants one.
I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually review a book from the Black Library before too much longer. I have after all been a collector and painter of Games Workshop’s models for a long time now and always admired the lengths that they went to to create a realistic, believable, above all intricately detailed universe. I know it’s not strictly military history in the conventional sense; it’s firmly in the sci-fi leagues, but it’s still military fiction and written in retrospect, so it is a history – see? So it gets a place in the blog. And if you disagree…. Well, who’s Blog is this anyway? :)

‘Hero of the Imperium’ is first off fantastic value. You get three 200-plus page novels and 3 more 20 page short stories for a tenner. Not bad, not bad at all really. Moreover, Sandy Mitchell is a as good a writer as one would expect – he’s written books, screenplays, magazine articles and other stuff for nigh on 20 years.

Cain is a scoundrel – he might be perched triumphantly on a pile of enemy corpses, but if you nipped around the back you’d find the ladder and note that he hadn’t fired a shot. He wheels, he deals, he bribes and he threatens in an eternal effort to either be somewhere safer or, failing all else, that there’s someone closer to the foe than he is. He is in all truth a bit of a bastard. But he’s funny with it. A futuristic Flashman if ever there was one.
But it’s not all cowardice, duty-dodging and dryly ironic put-downs, there’s some honest-to-God war-fighting in the middle of it, and Goddamn it’s well written. It may be futuristic in terms of some weapons and equipment but you’ve still got rifles, pistols, chemical explosives and swords – albeit two foot long with a chainsaw for a blade. The emotions are the same as well; working on the fundamental view that soldiers will always look, act, talk and fight like soldiers no matter which century they’re in. Same as a rifleman in Afghanistan or Iraq is going to be just as shit scared on his first patrol as a longbowman was at Crecy or Agincourt.

Cain might be a reluctant hero, very reluctant in fact, but when he has no choice he is a superlative soldier and very skilled with it. His is also a dry commentary on his own life – these are supposed to be his memoirs after all and they’re written so well, and it’s so humanly obvious that he is who he is, that you’d be forgiven for believing that when the chips are down this man is you. You don’t want to fight, but if you have to then you’ll get through it as best you can. There’s a bit of the everyman in Ciaphas Cain and that’s why the character is so good.

Maybe he’s not as well-regarded as some who might be termed his peers – Allan Malinson, Mark Bowden, Tom Clancy and Alexander Kent amongst them – but if you want to be entertained and have a laugh to go with your action and sympathy, Sandy Mitchell is hard to beat.

9 out of 10.

To let you know....

This week, starting today, is going to be 'Fiction Week' - fictional people in military events, just 'cos I can. :)

Brethren - Robyn Young

A slight departure for this one: I've talked about reviewing what I term 'Historical Fiction' before - that is, taking a fictitious character but placed in a genuine historic event during a war - and I've written about what Mallinson does with a Napoleonic Dragoon. Well, time to switch attention to the heavy mob, the Knights Templar during the Crusades - big men on big horses with big swords taking big lumps out of people.

What Young is very good at is what I might term setting the scene; the descriptions of London and Paris during the late 1200's are convincing enough that I can picture the cramped alleyways, see the dark streets and smell the shit on the cobbles (or maybe that's just my loo backing up again?). When we get to Outremer (the Crusader holdings in the Holy Land) I can picture the great limestone fortress of Safed glinting white in the harsh sunlight, feel the heat shimmering from the ground, taste the dryness at the back of my throat. Very evocative and very effective.

The story as it stands, alas, I am compelled to record as somewhat formulaic: secret book gets stolen from the Knights Templar, enough to condemn them all to the stake many times over. Book gets nicked by someone else and pursued by both original thieves and original owners across France. Book is swiped by someone else again and taken to Outremer, now with three factions after it. Book gets recaptured by original owners. Book is destroyed. Yada-yada-yada.

I must also record that the military side of things is depressingly thin on the ground. Okay, this is before the 5th Crusade has started properly and yes, we do get the siege of Safed, the torching of Antioch and so on but in 641 pages there's not a lot of it, especially not for a book where one of the main protagonists are the mightiest band of elite warriors in the Christian West - I mean, these guys had enough military and financial clout to be able to tell Kings and Emperors where to get off. The second is a single man, Baybars.

Now Baybars is interesting, not least because comparatively little is ever written about him compared to Saladin. But this was a real man who rose from a position of slavery (all the Mamluk warriors of Egypt were slaves, though latterly only technically) to become Sultan and actually achieved more than Sladin ever did - it was he who managed to kick the Crusaders out of the Holy Land once and for all.

So much for war. This is, more or less, a detective/crime book more than what you might think based on the cover for it. Annoying, but it was perhaps naive of me to think otherwise. Still disappointing though.

Young is good at setting a scene, creating believable characters and postulating about what or indeed who the Templars might have been (the transition from aspirant to Knight is particularly engrossing) and plonking them all into reality. The unfortunate bit is that this reality is not as action packed as you might expect.

7 out of 10 if you want a good book.
4 out of 10 if you want a military tale.

Hawkwood competition - Da Winner!

Congratulations to Meiko Isazuki, the book will be on it's way to Nagoya just as soon as I get back from holiday! Well done!

More compies on the way, keep tuning in.

Chickenhawk - Robert Mason

Bob Mason never wanted to go to war. What he really wanted was to fly a helicopter around Central American disaster zones, plucking dusky maidens out of the tree-tops with dashing aplomb. Unfortunately, he needed to learn how to fly a chopper first, and the US Army kindly agreed to teach him.

Passing through the huge military flying school then based at Fort Rucker, Mason graduated after a few sticky moments and was assigned to the First Helicopter Squadron based at Andrews AFB. The job of '1st Heli' was to fly members of the Senate to safe places during Bad Times and was considered a plumb posting fit only for veteran pilots - so what a freshly minted warrant officer, second class was doing there was a mystery to just about everyone. The Army was more devious than Mason gave them credit for and soon he was plucked from his blissful job and sent to the newly formed 1st Cavalry Regiment. Which was then sent to Vietnam just as everything began to slide from a counter-insurgency style operation to full out war fighting; although ironically enough Vietnam was never officially classed as such. Something that the majority of veterans have trouble believing.

Assigned to the 'Golf Course' (Camp Radcliffe) in the hills, conveniently near where a Foreign Legion patrol had been ambushed and massacred (always a comfortable reminder of your own mortality in a warzone)Robert Mason spent the next few months flying the transport - Slick - version of the Bell H 1 Iroquois, the famed Huey. Unarmed apart from 2 machine guns and decidedly without armour it's no great surprise that he had a few shot out from under him and many more close calls - a mortar round landing not 3 feet from him but not exploding is a case in point.
Unlike with the Brits or many other armed forces in the world, American troops deploy on overseas operations for a full year which generously gives them plenty more opportunities to be killed or maimed. The fact that Mason wasn't and came out physically intact (though slightly fragile) goes some way towards proving just how good a pilot he actually was. He's a good writer as well, delivering stories of longing, danger, friendship and blind terror with the same panache and wit as those from his days as a candidate back at Rucker.

This is a powerful and moving story of what happens when a sense of blissful, invulnerable naivety collides head on with people shooting at you. It's no great surprise that when he had the chance for some leave he got a little unglued, but then most soldiers do given half the chance; and it can't be denied that these are often the funniest recollections of the lot, albeit tinged with some pathos. By the end of it, Mason has really been through the fire. Whether or not he emerged stronger because of it is something that even he admits that he's not sure about.

7 out of 10

The Operators - James Rennie

This is James Rennie’s life with 14 Intelligence Company - a British military intelligence unit established in 1972 to conduct covert surveillance operations against terrorist organisations (of all stripes) in Northern Ireland. The unit is also known colloquially as '14 Int', and the 'Det' (because it is organised into 'Detachments'). The events related in the book occurred in the 1980s, but the unit is reportedly still in existence.

The selection and training phases absorb well over half the book but that is no criticism: these sections are a gripping read. Such heavy emphasis on the training is quite unusual in this genre, and the effect is to impart a sense of the enormous if not exhaustive, care and preparation that go into forming each “Operator”.
Selection standards for entry into the unit are extremely rigorous, both physically and mentally. The work of 14 Int is much more cerebral than that of other special forces groupings. Accordingly selection fortnight intersperses punishing tests of physical endurance with fiendish mental tests of memory, observation, concentration, planning, effective communication and so on (and on and on). Uniquely amongst British special forces, 14 Int contains women. The standards expected of them in selection and afterwards are exactly the same as those for the men. However far from being the granite-jawed East German shot-putter types you might have expected, they sound rather charming and feminine. Rennie's descriptions of these formidable individuals make very interesting reading. Go back 60 years or so and you'd find the same women in the SOE - they wouldn't seem out of place, either.

Those who successfully pass the selection move on to six months of gruelling training. Much training is conducted right here in the familiar and comfortable surroundings of dear old Blighty - on our public roads, and in our very own sleepy little towns and bustling cities. It must have been rather odd for the author and his fellow trainees to be conducting their cloak and dagger lessons amidst a populace in which friends and loved ones moved. To be forced to peer behind the veil of familiar and cherished perceptions of life in England would to me have felt like a violation and left me wondering what else there was. This is not the same as fighting (or preparing for) a war in some far and alien place. Homesick and frightened soldiers dream dreams of home. What, I wondered, do Det members dream of? Perhaps it’s just as well that we are never allowed to guess.

Seeking out the psychological subtext is very important to an appreciation of what Rennie experienced, of what it is like to serve in this kind of unit. Isolation and loneliness seem to be strong abiding themes of Rennie's recollections of life in the Det. What is intriguing is whether he recognised that himself as he was writing this. The telling phrases and passages are littered throughout: having just passed through the hell of selection he suffers a personal rejection; his previous two years of service in Germany leave him bereft of functioning friendships in the UK; he resorts to placing ads in the lonely hearts columns to find a companion. Much later, undergoing severe interrogation, he comforts himself with thoughts of what his beloved might be doing at that very moment; within the unit itself, members are forbidden to share the details of their lives with each other, and false names are used extensively if not obsessively – but then some things are worth being obsessed about, and for good reasons – but it all adds up to a picture of emotional isolation. Loneliness was, nay, surely must have been, a strong contributory factor in Rennie’s desire to quit whilst ahead and return to civilian life. But will his significant others ever know? I very much doubt it.

On the whole, the impression gained is of a pretty wonderful group - switched on, disciplined and resourceful, but also friendly, egalitarian and relaxed. Rennie himself seems healthily balanced and mature in his comments about 'the opposition' and about his colleagues, even after his experiences.
This is a really engaging read. From now on, if I get splashed with rainwater by a car full of serious-looking people driving like absolute lunatics I will think twice before swearing at ’em!

7 out of 10

Sniper 1 - Dan Mills

We were told that they were peace keeping, but there was no peace to keep.

And the expenditure in 6 months of 33,000 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition by 70 men just underlines it. That was more than the invasion used. And that was a few thousand troopers.

The exploits of the 1PWRR (Princess of Wales' Royal Regiment) Battlegroup have already been the subject of one entry in this blog and that one already mentioned the subject of the siege of CIMIC House. So why do another one? I hear you cry. 'Tis simple; Dan Mills was in it.

Sergeant Dan Mills was the boss (Sniper One) of the 19-strong Sniper Platoon attached to Y Company for the duration of the months long siege. It's a relatively rare event for such specialised soldiers (the sniping course is widely agreed to be the toughest in the army) to be deployed en masse; the usual convention is to be broken down into smaller teams and attached to regular line infantry on a shopping cart system and yet as with many other conventions, Operation Telic broke this one as well.

Sited at one corner of Al-Amarah and with the River Tigris acting as a moat for three sides, CIMIC house was the former residence of the governor, then taken over by the reconstruction agency who fretted at the sight of British GPMG's being installed on the roof next to the new Iraqi flag. However, it was the British Army that had the main say in how the place was fortified and used after a particularly memorable encounter between one of Mill's fellow sergeants and a rather obnoxious character from the reconstructors. Oh, and dealing with American security contractors and their own quartermaster who's safely back behind the lines and has just been told that his precious Mk5 flat bottom boats are no more:

'No, Sarn't Major, not your brand new boats too?
'Yes sir, the boats too.'
'But we only bought them in June! And at some considerable cost, as you well know.'
'Yes, I do know that sir.'
'Are you sure that they're completely unusable?'
'You could put it like that. They're at the bottom of the Tigris.'

And that's one of the main joys of this little book; a first-hand memoir that combines periods of intense fighting - including a rare but deadly '360 contact', numerous mortarings and the odd rocket strike - and the occasional bout of hilarity
(the fake girlfriend and the OC's discovery of a dud mortar).
Being a sniper's account however it's obvious where the bias to it all lies - in feats of shooting, and the shoots recounted are nothing short of spectacular, especially when a pair of "Royal Marines" turn up with a .50 caliber Barrett rifle and explosive ammunition...

Dan reflects on what it means to be a soldier on the frontline in one of the tensest and most harrowingly difficult operations this side of Afghanistan, those precious 6 months of spring to autumn 2004. The fifty-centigrade heat, the throat-stripping dust storms, the mortars, the harrassment, the counter-insurgency at which snipers excel, the armoured resupply convoys, the gut-wrenching fear of the ammunition running out, it's all here with photographs in a mere 350 pages; but what a memorable and enthralling account; I bought this book at 20 past 2 on a Friday afternoon, started reading and when I finished it was half past six, Saturday morning. As a companion book set in the same timeframe as Dusty Warriors, it's best to read them as a pair; Warriors for the overall picture and Sniper for a particular section of it.

There aren't many books that I can read and genuinely find myself unable to put it down without diving back in to see what happens next. This is one of them.

9 out of 10

Giveaway! Hawkwood

Now I reviewed this book awhile ago and thought rather highly of it.

It just so happens that another copy slammed onto my doormat this morning and I only need one. This means that I have 1 to give away. You want it? Do you? Honestly?

Excellent.

All you have to do is send me an email at the address in the sidebar over there ->
and it shall be yours! (Well, someone at random anyway) Include your post address so I know where to send it and mark the email Hawkwood so I know what to look for. This one runs until next Friday - 15th August.

Go on, you know you want to....

Jimmy Stewart - Starr Smith

In March 1941, James Maitland 'Jimmy' Stewart left Hollywood and a burgeoning career in film (he'd just won an Oscar) behind and joined the US Army as a private. Going from a salary of thousands to a humble $21 a month. On December 7th whilst the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour he was a corporal on guard duty at a California airbase. Graduating as a pilot in January of 1942 he shipped out as a second lieutenant to a B-24 bomber base in East Anglia, returning at wars end a full colonel with 20 combat missions under his belt and the DFC and Croix de Guerre on his uniform.

Now Stewart wasn't the only one of Hollywood's elite to join the war effort, far from it, but he was one of the few - along with David Niven and Douglas Fairbanks junior - who actively insisted on going on combat operations; against the wishes both of the Army (fearing the PR disaster if he got captured or killed) and the redoubtable Sam Goldwyn, his boss at MGM. Such pressures had kept men like Errol Flynn and Clark Gable away from the front but Stewart was not to be denied; what is striking is that all his promotions and decorations were earned on merit. And the roles that he had - command pilot, co-pilot, operations officer, squadron commander, squadron ops officer, group ops officer and wing commander - demonstrated clearly to anyone who cared to look that he wasn't just a celebrity in uniform, content to be safe at the back.

Jimmy Stewart wanted front line combat in the tradition of his family (father and grandfather had both served in their time), so much so that the Eighth Air Force eventually barred him from flying, terrified at what might happen to him. Or as one of his men in the 445th Bomb Group recalled:

The brass just couldn't keep him out of the cockpit, no matter what they tried.

This also resulted in Stewart entering the Air Force Reserve at the end of WW2 and becoming a Brigadier General in time for Vietnam.

Starr Smith was an intelligence officer for the Mighty Eighth during the war and worked with the quiet star for some time, building up quite a rapport with him. This is evident in the warm, affectionate, sometimes emotional, but always accurate way that he portrays this legendary Hollywood colossus and it makes him the perfect biographer. The empathy between fighting men of whatever creed is a strong one and this shared ethos helps to form and guide the reader through a side of Stewart that he for one never talked much about after it was all over. What is clear is that he had an unassuming way of connecting with people and getting them to perform at their best; probably because he relied on his actions and natural authority instead of dazzling them with reputation.
Smith presents an engaging 300 page portrait of a man who wanted to do what he saw as his duty despite the barriers put in his way, even those by officious hotel managers, as Charlton Heston recalled:

The Ritz in Madrid was one of those very particular hotels that barred actors from staying due to their insistence on maintaining standards. So when Jimmy turned up in full uniform for his month of service at the airbase nearby, the manager was put out of kilter;

'Ahh, Senor Stewart. Yes, I'm honoured to meet you but...ahhh...you are an actor. We don't cater to actors you see.'

Jimmy looked coolly at him.

'Zat so? Waaal, lemmme tell ya; For the next four weeks I'm Brigadier-Gen'ral James Stewart, United States Air Force.'
He picked up his keys and turned for the elevator.

Or as Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the Eighth commented:

If the war {WW2} had gone on for another month, we'd have made him a Group Commander

An entertaining book, worth a read.

5 and a half out of 10

A Writer at War - Antony Beevor + Luba Vinogradova

Vasily Grossman, alongside Ilya Ehrenburg, was the pre-eminent journalist amongst the Soviet forces on the Eastern Front. Writing exclusively for Krasnaya Zvesda (Red Star) he spent 3 of the 4 years of war continually on the frontlines, becoming a true Frontovik

It is hardly a surprise to anyone that I'm a huge fan of Beevor's work, see Stalingrad and Berlin, however here he takes a different tack as demanded by the subject. Beevor acts as the editor of this book and deprieves us of his incisive portrayal of somewhat cataclyismic events but when you're dealing with Vasily Grossman this is no great loss. The man's descriptions are simple, straightforward and, with the expertise of a true craftsman, massively descriptive in just a few words. Just a line or two for the most part, hurried entries in his journal, jotted down as he sees them, but what power they have!

He experiences the gut-wrenching terror of the first few days of Operation Barbarossa from the Soviet side - the huge pincer envelopments, the senseless waste of life and equipment because those in command are completely paralysed - and from a uniquely personal perspective. Everyone knows now what happened in the first invasion months of 1941 and indeed how and why events turned out the way they did but it's only with the perspective of one who was actually there that the reader can truely appreciate what it was like.
From the terrible, heart-rending abandonment of the Ukraine (Vasily's homeland) where he was in many cases just half a step ahead of the marauding panzer columns (and as a Jew his fate would have been all too clear if captured) to the terrible attrition of Stalingrad, the remorseless tank battles around Kursk and Prokhorovnya, the heartbreaking discoveries of Warsaw and Madjanek and the fierce exhileration of entering Berlin itself, Grossman and Beevor take us on a journey of 4 years and many thousands of miles.

In many ways Vasily Grossman was something of a naive optimist as well as a fatalist (his own fate, not that of the Soviet Union), but then so were the majority of the Frontoviki during that war. The problems of later days lay in the fact that he was more politically naive instead of morally so - he condemned the Red Army's rampage through Germany in the strongest terms, yet they were never published.

Read this. Read it now. 8 out of 10

By the Sword - Richard Cohen

Is there any weapon in the whole of recorded history that has had more emotional and physical impact than the sword? Oh sure, guns punch neat holes in things, maces and grenades both make a decided mess and bows of all varieties can turn a man into a veritable pincushion with disdainful ease, but none of these have the damned elegance of a sword. So is there another of the same calibre? I don't think so. Neither does Richard Cohen.

Once again this man is unrivalled proof that the best books about a subject are ones written by those who know a bit about it. Cohen is a 5 time UK champion with the sabre and made the Olympic team 4 times running, he's also an editor and article publisher so he knows how to write clearly and concisely about the weapon that so fascinates him.
He needs to as well, beacause the history of the sword can really be said to be the history of civilisation - or at least the greater part of it. It's surprising just how many of the world's movers and shakers have been or are swordsmen; Churchill, Shakespeare, Karl Marx, Grace Kelly, Washington, Mussolini, Michelangelo and Voltaire amongst them. President Truman fought for his wife (if he won, she'd marry him, if she beat him then he was out the door), most others fought for their lives.

Cohen gives us first a potted history of swordplay and it's eventual morphing into fencing (though still covering 4 chapters and a hundred pages) from the earliest Ancient times right through to Waterloo; dropping some surprising diversions along the way and mentioning any number of things and episodes affected by the blade - the military salute amongst them.
The second part is chiefly concerned with how a sword is actually fashioned and the techniques and history of smithing (it takes 82 seperate acts to turn a steel bar into a fencing sabre)with emphasis given to the famed schools of Damascus and Toledo and the master sword of them all: the Japanese Katana.
The third is slightly more distateful in these supposedly enlightened times; when a man's honour and position in society depended more on his sword arm than his innate worth, a period that lasted for about two hundred years in Europe and also includes the Samurai code as well. Part 4 also dovetails neatly into this part of history as well so needs little oversight.

So much for past history. With parts 5 and 6 Cohen brings the sword and fencing into the modern age - the Olympics and exhibition bouts. The developments of technology that resulted in the spectacle that we recognise from TV today, all flashing blades, stamping feet and screeching markers, are fully explored as well as the schools and masters that taught in them and had just as much of an impact on things as their illustrious forebears. In fact in an age of nuclear weapons, battle tanks, artillery and aircraft the simple yet highly complex sword has perhaps more exposure now than it has ever done; when a man's worth is decided by his skill and not by how many he has killed.

It's never boring though; I found myself turning pages avidly from 10 o'clock last night and when I looked up again it was 5 this morning! This book sucks you in with its lively and engaging style - well worth getting as much for entertainment as factual knowledge.

7 and 3/4's out of 10.

Ivan's War - Catherine Merridale

"Whenever people think that they will have to fight a war, they start to imagine what it will be like"

This is the fist line of Merridale's book and, if you were writing a synopsis about it, this isn't a bad place to start. War is ultimately a story of people after all. During the Second World War, every nation's soldiers were characterised by a stereotype for good or ill that was used as shorthand both by themselves and usually those on the opposite side; the British soldier was Tommy, an American Joe (regardless of his actual first name). Germans were universally known as Fritz. The Russian infantryman was Ivan. Ivan Ivanovich to give him his full title.

The Red Army was probably the most diverse conglomeration that saw action during what they refer to as the Great Patriotic War; conscripts from the Urals and Siberia rubbed shoulders with Poles, Tatars, Cossacks, Ukrainians, Georgians, Muscovites and half a hundred other satellite nations. Conscripts, volunteers, the sweepings of the Gulag, forced servicemen from liberated countries, commissars and officers, all had their part to play in what became the largest military force known to mankind since Antiquity; a veritable Juggernaut of men and steel that rolled over everything in it's path on the march to Berlin.

Or at least that's the popular view. Where Merridale scores is her ability to coax stories and reminiscences from men who in the most part are trying very hard to forget them. Because of this talent and the time devoted to it we are presented with something long overdue; the opinions and feelings of soldiers from other nations during war are well known and a matter of public record - but the Soviet soldier was silent. Stalinism and then general communism expected, nay, demanded, nothing less. The greatest myth of the New Soviet Man was that he didn't have a voice of his own. Well, this book gives the lie to that assumption. Whilst there are the normal periods of Stalinist reticence (how could there be otherwise? that was all these men knew) there are more patches that reveal the true men under the bluff shroud.

Merridale guides us through every moment of life on the Eastern Front from the crushing defeats of scared and confused Ivans in the first days of Operation Barbarossa, to the tough, hardy force that kicked in the gates of Germany and then proceeded to wreak absolute havoc. But she never loses sight of her original statement and thus we are neatly brought full circle by the last lines.

"They don't talk very much. They don't seem to need to. Sometimes they just stand and weep."

8 and 3/4's out of 10

Red Storm Rising - Tom Clancy

Time for a little diversion this morning; Clancy has always woven some element of military action into all of his bestselling 'Jack Ryan' series, Hunt for Red October and Sum of All Fears being cases in point but he always has a load of political/moral baggage getting in the way; to the extent that sometimes you wonder what Clancy might be able to produce were he to break away from Ryan for a moment and go all out to do the job properly. Well, he did and the result is Red Storm.

There's no Jack Ryan, no CIA, very little politics, little dead wood, just 725 pages of action, strategy and humanity that rattles along at a fantastic pace. The scenario is that hoary old favourite of World War 3, except Clancy decides to do things slightly differently; no nuclear weapons and their attendant mega-death count, this is a conventional war fought with conventional weapons in conventional style. Set in the 1980's this is a classical study of why a nation goes to war - usually because the blokes in charge fear war less than the consequences of no war. In this case the ignition point (quite literally) is a terrorist strike on the Soviet Union's chief oil production and refining fields. Faced with slow strangulation and unwilling to reveal their weakness to the West by asking for help, the Communists decide that there is plenty of oil in the Persian Gulf. All they need to do is march in and take it.

Problem: NATO will kick up a stink.
Answer: Okay, we'll trash NATO first, then.

And so it begins, with the curtain raiser being the exquisite Operation: Polar Glory. Clancy really lets his imagination and experience loose in this one by taking a handful of individuals on both sides and letting them just get on with the business of fighting a war instead of chaining them down with a lot of baggage that detracts from the story. We go from Atlantic convoy duty to armoured divisions fencing in Germany to the escapades of a group on the run in Iceland to underwater SSN operations and back to the convoys in a repetitive cycle, but within that cycle the episodes are rotated, so that nothing appears formulaic and thus boring.

Clancy displays a panache that is sometimes woefully missing from his other works, concentrating on action on the frontlines instead of plans in musty offices. There is some of the latter of course because soldiers uniformly do some hard thinking before they hazard their lives, but only as much as necessary to set the scene and tone - the naval engagements are the best by far, including the aforementioned operation, tense sub-hunting and a Soviet strike on the Nimitz.

There's only one problem I have with this book, as indeed with all Clancy's works; he seems to have succumbed to the Hollywood Disease, also known as the 'Saving Private Ryan' syndrome. By this I mean that all Europeans (particularly we Brits) are displayed as bumbling idiotic cowards who have to be rescued by the smart, sharp, tough Yanks - and since this comes through in all his books, one suspects that this is Clancy's personal view instead of 'getting into character' as it were. A tendancy to tar everyone not under the Stars and Stripes with the same brush is irritating at best and explosively infuriating at worst; I know that Clancy is primarily writing for an American audience and I also accept that we on the other side of the Pond are not uniformly the sharpest tools in the box. But then again, there are many in the Land of the Free (tm) who ain't exactly swift in the head either. There's an institutional arrogance that's very grating and somewhat misplaced should he have bothered to do a little checking. For example Europeans are said to

Know beans about handguns

All fine and dandy except that the US military uses the Beretta (Italian) and the Secret Service (Presidential bodyguard) uses the SigSaur that comes from Germany!

Thus there's an overwhelming urge to scream Get it right at the most basic of levels. Dopn't let my agonised ravings put you off, though. This is a class way to spend a few hours.

7 out of 10.

Gunpowder - Clive Ponting

It's surely the nastiest and most uncomfortable irony in all of recorded (and probably unrecorded) human history; the discovery of gunpowder was prompted by alchemists searching for the Elixir of Life....

It seems only fair, what with China in resurgence these days, that we pause for a moment and give due praise to Chinese ingenuity. Not only did they discover what happens when you mix charcoal, saltpetre and sulphur in the correct proportions but they subsequently developed the great majority of what we arrogant Westerners consider to have been 'our' greatest military advances - they had bombs, incendiaries, rockets, landmines, cannon and guns a thousand years before the rest of us stopped bashing each other with metal sticks. Directly or indirectly they actually dragged the rest of us kicking and fighting into the modern age whilst we clung to swords and spears screaming at the top of our lungs that we didn't want to go. In fact it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to note that China has already attacked the USA, albeit indirectly; their gunpowder rockets were refined by Tipoo Sultan of India to give the 18th century Redcoats a tricky time of it; recognising a good thing when we saw it we Brits subsequently used them to shell the rebellious North Americans. Thus giving the world the "Star Spangled Banner" with the line in the rocket's red glare.

Sorry.

Clive Ponting goes in depth to explore the history and the spread of this outwardly innocuous substance; starting in China (where it was a state secret for 400 years on pain of instant death) and moving to the Muslim world where the rest of us got a taste of just how powerful this thing really was - the triple walls of Constantinople had gone unchalleneged for a hundred years and more, until in 1453 the Ottomans bashed holes in them within 7 days. India also got it's rude introduction to modernity thanks to the Mughals - of whom the aforementioned Tipoo was one. From the East it then hit Europe and, thanks to us, crushed both Inca and Aztec empires, freed a continent and enslaved another one before returning East and giving the Samurai of Japan a nasty surprise. Perhaps one of the first examples of an invention that had truly global impact.

Ponting's achievement is in turning what might have been just another dry textbook about a handful of dry chemicals into something that could capture the imagination of any schoolboy; each chaper deals with a specific application of the "fire drug". What it's made of, how it's made (though fortunately not the particulars), the differing types of powders and the uses of each, the effect and development of the weapons, the impact on Europe, Africa and the Americas etc etc. 200-odd pages in fact of what might have been dull but is actually fairly entertaining.

6 out of 10

Hawkwood - Frances Stoner Saunders

Question: What's the similarity between Pablo Escobar and Sir John Hawkwood?
Answer: Both rose from obscurity to infamy by consummate nastiness.
Question 2: What's the difference between them?
Answer 2: In the 14th Century, everyone was being nasty.

And in a nutshell, that is the life story of Sir John Hawkwood, Condottierei.
Hawkwood was one of the thousands of British soldiers discharged at the end of the Hundred Years War between England and France, just one of the many who feared peace more than they feared war. War had been the making of him after all and yet now there was no need for warriors; if not for a richly equipped knight then certainly not for a lowly longbowman like John Hawkwood who owned only his bow and the clothes on his back. Unwilling to go home and unsure what to do in his brave new world, joining the eponymously titled Great Company and becoming a mercenary was the obvious career path. Enough so that he formed his own force, the famed White Company.
But where to go?

How about sunny Italy?

Italy of the early Renaissance was hardly a single entity - riven with faction fighting, dominated by city states such as Milan, Florence, Venice and Rome and growing rich on trade. As well as being temptingly rich targets for plunder, the city states were admirably (to Hawkwood's eyes) pragmatic: not many of their respective populations were much cop at this war malarkey and even fewer had the stomach for it; so why not hire these roving, hardened, experienced multi-national armies to do their fighting for them? And if the cities didn't do it then one of the Popes surely would, if only to try and give his rival a right good kicking. Perfect.
And so began a career that would see this humble archer rise to become one of the richest and skilled warriors in the whole of Europe - enough so that on his death no lesser person than the King of England himself demanded that his body be repatriated.

Saunders' account is a thing of beauty; there's as much politics and diplomacy as there is outright brawling and Hawkwood is shown to be effective at all 3 when the picture of a 14th Century mercenary (or at least the one I received in school) is generally of a frequently drunken maniac who delights in breaking things and picking fights with his own side. Apart from one glaring episode that gained him widespread notoriety (ironically enough when in the Pope's service) Hawkwood seems to have had a firmer grasp on the concepts of loyalty and honour than most of his higher-stationed contemporaries, again giving the lie to the thick-headed mercenary picture. When he was called on to draw his sword, however, he was almost chillingly effective and hardly ever beaten throughout his career.

This is a wonderful read - fast paced and atmospheric enough to grab your interest and keep it, yet subtle enough that by the end of it you get the feeling of learning something without actually doing much work. The Holy Grail of Military History if ever there was one.

7 out of 10

Tools of War - Jeremy Black

Okay, here's a challenge for you; first compile a list of the inventions of military usage that mankind has devised since the year dot. Then, from that massive list, pick 50 or so that you think have made the biggest impact on the world and it's goings on.
Third challenge - justify them.

Tough call, ain't it?

Have no fear of being swamped in dusty cupboards though, Jeremy Black has done all the work for you, including sections on Stone and Metal (the very first weapon of all was surely a lump of stone plonked onto someone elses' head), Shields, Armour, Chariots, Siege Engines, the Macedonian Sarissa, the Roman Gladius, Stirrups, Longbows, Gunpowder, Rifles, Bayonets, the Minie Ball, Railways, Steamships, Radio, the Machine Gun, Ironclad ships, Submarine and the Torpedo amongst many others. This is how he justifies picking the longbow:

"Experienced archers could manage 8 to 10 arrows a minute. With this shooting rate, the 5,000 English archers on the field of battle that day could launch 40,000-50,000 arrows a minute, or 700 a second. French infantry and cavalry alike were decimated under the barrage of deadly missiles, and the Battle of Crecy was won for the loss of only 200 English soldiers, to nearly 10,000 French dead. The conquest of France beckoned..."

So, was the longbow the most significant weapon in the course of history? Or the iron sword, stirrup or chariot that allowed the victories of the great early empires of the East? Though gunpowder, the flintlock and the Gatling gun caused more carnage, did they cause swifter victory? And could anything compare to the effects - militaristic and economic - of the mass military industrialization of the World Wars, with tank, B52, V rocket ...and the atomic bomb? Or must all bow before the new weapons of stealth and precision of the 'military information age'? "Tools of War" tells, chronologically, the stories of 50 of the most significant advances in military technology and, in doing so, provides an insight into the history of warfare and conquest.
Each chapter focuses on a specific technology, from the Stone Age to the information warfare age, which has conferred a decisive advantage on the user and changed the way in which war is waged. Author Jeremy Black discusses the specific engagements or campaigns where the weapon had most effect, providing the reader with a crash course in military history as well as an overview of world history itself.

An interesting little book with a unique slant on many things.

6 out of 10

A Close Run Thing - Allan Mallinson

A little diversion today; the other thing this blog is designed for are reviews of fictional military history, or fictional events in a military context and so it’s about time to do one.

On first inspection there isn’t much to interest the reader about Cornet Matthew Hervey; It’s drawing near the end of the Peninsula campaign of the Napoleonic Wars and Hervey is a junior officer in the light dragoons. He’s got none of the rough edges that make his peers (Sharpe in particular) so engaging – he’s a dutiful, honourable minor gentleman; speaks Greek, German and Latin, conscientious, well-educated, a firm favourite in the officer’s mess, popular with his men, God-fearing, never swears, loves his mother and father, adores his sister and secretly pines for the brunette beauty who lives down the road – he is, in short, a paragon of all the virtues and disgustingly perfect. So why is he so engaging?
The answer comes partly from his profession – being a soldier amidst the mud, blood and carnage of a Napoleonic battle was never the gentlest of occupations – but mostly from the way he interacts with other people, particularly said beauty. The son of a vicar is minor gentry himself and yet she is so far above his station it’s a wonder that he can see her petticoat, let alone anything else and the stumbling way that he pursues his adoration, deals with a rival suitor and gets wrapped in the enigma that she gleefully spins for him is enough to make anyone feel more than a hint of “I’ve been there myself, mate”.
It’s also the situations and the sheer scope of them that add to the intriguing nature of Mallinson’s first book. Hervey serves in Southern France, Ireland and England before the great denouement at Waterloo and runs into nuns, crofters, idiots, ex-cavalrymen, high aristocracy, churchmen, soldiers and a sergeant and groom who both speak a nigh-impenetrable strain of Tyneside.

It would have been all to easy and, one suspects, very tempting to pitch this epitome of an officer kicking and screaming into the Hellfire of Waterloo just to see how well he comes out of the other side – Bernard Cornwell does precisely this with Sharpe and his own fictitious regiment – and yet this ex-Colonel doesn’t. Hervey is despatched on a very sneaky sneaky assignment far removed from the smoke of the gunline and so therefore misses the great majority of it. In this he is fortunate, he survives, but does so only due to the self-sacrifice of a sergeant which leads to more wrangling with his conscience. This is actuallty more plausible than many books of this type and so resists the urge to turn this meek man into a hero who positively has to be in every major scrap regardless of what history actually records, thus avoiding the trap that Sharpe for instance and Aubrey for another seem to fall into on a regular basis. It also offers a plausible explanation of what you feel was going on behind the scenes on the 18th June, 1814; the link up with the Prussians and how adroitly it was done.
The best military fiction, especially, the historical type, is that written by once serving soldiers themselves, for they can provide a depth and an insight into the little nuances that a civilain will miss. Being an ex-cavalryman himself though of the armoured variety, Mallinson brings his knowledge of a modern army and translates it very well back in time for the simple reason that throughout history soldiers have always acted and thought like soldiers, the quintessential insiders’ club and completely unlike mere civilains.

We have here the horseborne equivalent to Hornblower of the Royal Navy and it’s about damn time.

8 out of 10

First into Action - Duncan Falconer

“I was in my first ambush, waiting to kill 2 men that I had never met before”
And so begins the first of many first hand accounts of unbearable tension that litter Duncan Falconer's personal memoir.
Special Forces are a tricky subject at the best of times, always anxious to remain out of the public eye as much as possible and yet the Special Air Service, for all it's mystique, has never quite managed to pull it off thanks to a slew of books, TV documentaries and even live footage of them. The Special Boat Service, however, is a different matter.

Their ethos is in almost complete contrast to their more widely known peers and is summed up by their respective motto - "Who Dares Wins" is indicative of derring-do and perhaps the merest touch of swaggering flamboyance, certainly every man is a remarkable example of a soldier.
"By Strength and Guile" is completely opposite; the troopers are just as good (if not actually better in some cases) but there is more than a hint of stealth and secrecy - born out by the simple fact that the books about them are not even the square of those published about their sister force.
There are other diferences as well, chief amongst them being that although the SAS has the enitre army to draw upon for recruits (which must all then be trained to the same standards), the SBS do it solely from the ranks of the Royal Marines (so harmonization of newcomers is a lot easier). This differing ethos is partly because of their specialisation for water-borne environments but, in the Gulf, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and half a hundred other places they've proven that they're not exactly fishes out of water. The Marines have more battle honours than any other unit in the British military.

First into Action is the first Special Boat Services memoir written from the inside. It tells how Duncan Falconer trained with the Royal Marines in Deal before being recruited into the SBS at Poole in Dorset. The regimen of ruthless training is graphically described and the book also includes revelatory accounts of SBS operations in Ulster, Bosnia and the Gulf War, and of the intense rivalry between the SAS's individualist mentality and the more team-based, marine ethos of the SBS. Duncan Falconer's grippingly detailed memoir is sure to command the attention of anyone interested in the Special Forces and how they operate.

It's not solely bullets and grenades though, as with any military autobiography there are moments of the humour unique to men under arms and there are more whimsical moments as well, all culminating in a simple yet complex problem; what do you do with a supremely trained fighting man when you get rid of him? One moment RSM with all the status that that implies, the next moment faceless civilian with no job.

7 out of 10

Barbarians - Terry Jones

Any book with an ex-Python involved with it is going to be a fun read anyway. When said ex-Python is also a formidable Historian in his own right, even a TV tie-in book becomes worth it.

Terry Jones offers us an alternative view of the Roman Empire; many believe that the Romans were, in terms of technology and progressive thought, the greatest thing since sliced bread. Balls. They were indeed very good, but what they were really good at was unashamed looting of ideas that weren't their own, imposing their version of events on everyone else, beating seven shades of Hell out of anyone who said different or failing that, rewriting history to blot out people who were just as good at kicking arse as they were.
So I for one never heard much detail about the Celts, the Huns, the Palmyrians and the Visigoths whilst at school and nor, I suspect, did many. Oh I knew they existed but was always of the impression that they were weak little proto-kingdoms who were no match for the might of Rome and her Legions of professional soldiers.

But as Jones says himself, it wasn't like that. It wasn't like that at all.

And for 260 always entertaining and frequently enlightening pages he goes to some lengths to point out why this is so. Jones may have started as a comedian, but the man can do his research and put across a point as adroitly as anyone I've yet come across - yes, sometimes you get the feeling this was written with an eye more towards entertainment than scholarship but there are some serious points made here, some of them making for rather uncomfortable reading at times but such will always happen when preconcieved notions are swept away. E.g: we have the recieved wisdom that when the Goths entered Rome they sacked, looted and burned every square inch of it. The reality is that not even the Roman version of a garden fence was knocked over - on pain of death, what is more.
We also have the notion that no power in the East was equivalent to the military might of Rome. But the Pathians and Sassanians inflicted Rome's heaviest defeats since Hannibal some centuries before - perfume and jewellery wearing generals notwithstanding.

Jones (and his co-writer Alan Ereira) attempts nothing short of rewriting the history books, albeit in a minor way, and produces what is surely one of the most thought provoking books that I've read in a long time and, I suspect, in your time as well.

7 out of 10

Berlin - Antony Beevor

"That's how Berlin is going to look!" - These words, screamed at his prisoners by a Soviet officer in the ruins of Stalingrad neatly sum up the whole premise of this book; encapsulating in a single sentence all the hate, despair, shattered hopes and lust for vengeance planted by the German Sixth Army on the shores of the Volga in 1943.

That I am a devout fan of Beevor's work is already a matter of record - see my review of Stalingrad - but I always wondered after finishing it how he was going to match it's breathtaking scope and detail and the sheer hubristic tragedy of it all. Turns out that I needn't have worried.
The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Political commissars rammed home the message of Wehrmacht and SS brutality. The result was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known, with tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pillage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army. Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanatacism, revenge and savagery, but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds.

It's easy to lose sight of the fact that wars involve individuals, each with their own hopes, fears and desires. Berlin: the Downfall, 1945, is Antony Beevor's account of the bloody Götterdämmerung that brought the Second World War in Europe to an end, and in which he has fused the large and the small scale effects of war. Beevor paints the broad picture of Marshals Zhukov and Konev, competing for glory and Stalin's attention, as they race their armies towards Berlin. He gives the reader a gripping account of the brutal street-by-street fighting in the German capital and provides an unforgettable portrait of the last, insane days of Hitler and his entourage in the bunker.
His attention to emotional detail is what made his previous book such a magnificent work, combining sweeping hisorical narrative with high human drama. Yet he also highlights the small details of ordinary people caught in the nightmare of history -the sick children evacuated at the last minute from a Potsdam hospital; the Soviet soldiers shaving themselves for the first time in weeks so that they would make appropriately presentable conquerors; and the Nazi Youth teenagers peddling their bikes in despairing, last-ditch attacks against the Red Army's tanks.
The story Beevor tells is an almost unremittingly terrible one--one of death, rape, hunger and human misery--but he tells it with an alertness to individuality. The result is a masterpiece of narrative history that only narrowly gives the crown to his previous book, and that purely because after Stalingrad, everyone knew what Beevor was capable of.

9 and 3/4's out of 10

Killing Pablo - Mark Bowden

"Hang on a minute! If this is a military history blog, why have a book about an ordinary criminal in it?"

Because, gentle reader, this was no ordinary criminal. This was Pablo Escobar, El Doctor himself. And it took the military of 2 countries to finally take him down.
Pablo Escobar ruled the Colombian city of Medellin with the classical iron fist or as he called it plato o plomo: if you didn't accept his plato (money) then you were surely going to receive his plomo (lead). In any other context this would have been the classical 'poor kid makes good' story - becoming a multi billionaire, running for congress, entering politics etc etc but the means he employed to do it were beyond the pale for anyone; extortion, killing, torture, random violence and political corruption at the highest levels.

Mark Bowden is the author of the rather seminal Black Hawk Down, a book which is far better than the somewhat ropey film made of it. He approaches this subject in the same methodical way, a short history of the region and the violent circumstances which moulded Pablo into the man he became; it becomes clear that he was very much a man of both his country - Colombia has a history of violence that rivals anything from the Middle East and smuggling is almost an honoured profession - and his times.

However, in direct and rather stark comparison to most of the books that I've reviewed in this blog so far 'setting the scene' is wonderfully brief and concise, but it still manages to tell you exactly what you need to know and not one jot more. Then it's away from the slightly boring stuff and into the main event which gallops along almost as fast as Pablo's rise from car thief and protection racketeer to kingpin and kingmaker. There's a little pause in the middle when he goes to jail (having set the terms, conditions and exactly how said jail was to be built) but the action picks up when he goes on the run again and this time things are not so wonderful for him; what with Delta Force, the Search Bloc and Los Pepes scrambling for his head it was a wonder that he survived as long as he did. The end was somewhat tawdry for such a giant of a character though - a one-sided gunfight on a roof top in Bogota. There's more than a little double standard from those who were hunting him as much as he employed himself and, though he names no names, Bowden relates that some of the coincidences were certainly fortuitous...

Bowden does a wonderful job at turning a course of events that were weirder and more elaborate than many thrillers into the quintessential factual yet entertaining account. The long running duel between Escobar and Colonel Hugo Martinez is an epic in itself even without everything else that was going on.

5 and 3/4's out of 10.

Men of Honour - Adam Nicolson

We’ve been on the land, we’ve been in the air – now it’s time to put to sea. For about seven hours on the morning of October 21st 1805, in an area scarcely a mile and a half long by half a mile wide nearly 75 ships of the line from three navies – British, French and Spanish - battered at each other near Cape Trafalgar on the Spanish coast.
In a battle where a three-decker could kill 230 men in a little over a minute and put almost 15 tons of iron into opponents, there was always going to be a huge butcher’s bill. Nelson himself considered that no captain could do much wrong by putting his ship broadside to broadside with another and hammering away until someone gave in. In brute terms, Trafalgar was a slugging match, no more and no less. Whoever could kill the most men the fastest was the winner; it was as simple as that.
Appropriately enough for a book dealing with sea warfare in the age of sail, Nicolson moves rather like one of the ships he describes. Lumbering, unwieldy, a lot of smoke and thunder but not actually getting anywhere fast….

It takes 209 pages before the first gun is fired and then in a mere (by comparison) 66 pages the battle is done, Nelson dead and Brittania triumphant. Music plays and credits roll. So, it might be fair to ask, for the previous chapters what has Nicolson actually been doing?
The answer is spending a lot of time setting the story and delving deeply into the period before comitting anything to paper. Now usually this is a benefit in such historys and indeed there is a lot of interesting detail here; how the separate navies differed in traditions, expectations and men, to the training of said men and the results of it. In terms of raw materials the French had by far the superior ship designs, the Spanish marginally better guns, but it was the British who had the best firing devices for their own weapons which, coupled with incessant training meant a 32 pounder fired every ninety seconds in the Victory and scarcely every 3 minutes in the Santissima Trinidad, the largest ship in the whole battle.
Every British officer had to be a seaman first, officer second and his station in life depended entirely upon success. Their Spanish counterparts were officers of the aristocracy first and seamen were those who obeyed commands, whilst it is cruelly generalising it but oddly accurate that the French were a plain mess. As Nicolson puts it, Trafalgar was the combination of:
“Antique Spanish stiffness; French post-revolutionary uncertainty; and British commercial, bourgeois dynamism.”

This book actually points out that by a rather simple manouver Nelson’s tactics could have been totally thrown against him with far different results. But as much as it pains me to say it, I couldn’t actually finish. A rarity for me. Others have raved about it but I for one cannot find the “brilliantly dramatic account.” spoken of by the Independent’s book critic.

Yawn. Next!

Thermopylae - Paul Cartledge

To the ancient world, this time; to be exact a small mountain pass near Mt Callidromos, Greece, during the high summer of 480 B.C. A force of roughly 6 to 7 thousand Greek hoplites face down an immense Persian army under Great King Xerxes and do so with striking (and presumably Xerxes found it maddening) success for 3 days, before most were dismissed or fled as their flank was turned, leaving the Spartan contingent under King Leonidas to fight and die.

So far, so 300. The actual battle itself and the end result are of course well known - forgone conclusion would not be stating it too obviously - and even better documented from the writings of Heroditus right up to the present day, so much so that one could justifiably argue that everything that could be written already has been.

Paul Cartledge begs to differ. Instead of the who, what, where or when he seeks to give us the why.

Professor of Greek History at Cambridge for the last 29 years and author or editor of at least 20 books to with his chosen subject he is the acknowledged authority on all things Spartan and therefore qualified perhaps beyond any other to give surely the most complete account ever. Not that he glosses over the difficulties however; the least of these being that we have only 1 real source for the events that occured and he was ardently biased. There is no Persian historian to match Heroditus and certainly no impartial chronicler of the facts. What makes this book so interesting is that Cartledge goes into great detail to explain exactly why this is. If it was from any lesser author you might justifiably call this an exercise in excusing himself but it's done in such detail and draws such sharp contrasts between the Greeks and the Persians that it's most engaging.

Indeed, for a book of some 198 account pages (there are another 100 or so of sources and afterwords) only 14 of them are dedicated to the actual fighting. This could be decried as a cardinal sin for a history of a battle and may give rise to cries of "Well, why are you reviewing it then, doofus? It's hardly very Military is it?"
- quite true and yet beyond an actual battle, or to be more precise before it, there are the three overarching questions of why it was fought and what led to it? More important still in this case is: what happened afterwards?
Cartledge answers these questions by giving a potted history of Sparta and it's system - a system that gave the world the first true standing army, something never achieved before - and why that system was as radically different from the recieved wisdom of Greek society as Greek society was from Persian Empire. Much has been made of the contrast between Sparta and Athens and there was a deal of fighting between the pair both before and after 480 but the bottom line was that they shared so much - language, gods, customs and methods - almost unity, but not quite.

Just as tellingly he also provides two sections dealing with the aftermath and what it meant, both in the ancient world and in the modern as well. Sometimes this makes for uncomfortable reading - Hitler clearly saw his last gasp at Berlin in the same mould as Thermopylae - and sometimes frankly amusing; an Athenian ambassador was escorted from Sparta to Athens by an honour guard of 300 warriors, just to ram the point home a little.

Indeed it is this combination of retrospection, absorption and digestion that makes this book so worth reading.

7 out of 10

Op. Certain Death - Damien Lewis

There are 2 routes that can be taken with military history, particularly recent military history; either it's a cold and dry rehashing of the facts without the perspective of being there at the time or it can be all of the latter with little of the former, in which case it often becomes little more than sensational with a side order of rampant fiction. This book combines both but not as skillfully as others, perhaps. Certainly there's a deal of sensation in it.

But this is more a mark of the subject and how it's told rather than a criminal lack of information. Special Operations are, by their very nature, not reported on beyond rather dry after-action reports for only purely military circles - certainly not for a good few years at any rate. We know much of SAS operations in the Libyan and Iraqi deserts or in the Falklands thanks to the passing of time but very little (reasonably and sensibly) about things that occured only scant years ago. In providing a such a pacy account as this (as close to a Clancy or Cussler novel as he could reasonably get), Lewis has drafted an interesting study of human nature as well as straight soldiering - the prolonged effects of being a hostage contrasted with the resolutely upbeat tone of their would-be rescuers makes for interesting reading.

The book deals with the capture and subsequent rescue of a patrol from the Royal Irish in Sierra Leone. A place where the usual rules have been thrown out of the window and where the UN have signally failed to achieve much of consequence save a portion of their peackeepers apparently selling arms to the rebel insurgents. That these were then used to fire on British troops gives plenty of evidence as to whose sympathies this book is playing to although there are also more reflective periods - the proposed usage of mercenaries (or Private Military Companies to use the correct term) to provide the UN some teeth instead of the marginally effective 'Blue Helmets' that are deployed at present. Marginal because they are usually subject to the whim of their home nation and by simple understanding and common practice are never the best soldiers that said nation can put into the field - they'd much rather keep ahold of those. Mercs are usually of a high quality and whilst they have a price tag to match the cost of them instead of the cost of a bad operatrion and then rescuing it seems almost cheap by comparison.
In this account at least, mercenaries are seen in a more positive light - going into action alongside the SAS, SBS and the Paratroopers. This makes for interesting reading

One thing to note; if you're averse to bad language, you might want to look elsewhere. This book was written for the soldiers' benefit and it gets distinctly earthy at time. Interesting, though.

6 out of 10