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

Generals - Mark Urban

Mark Urban has won praise in the past for Rifles, Fusiliers and Big Boy's Rules. Here he turns his attention to 10 British Generals who he considers to have changed World history. What you get are essentially 10 mini-biographies ranging throughout British history from George Monck, restorer of the monarchy in 1660 and was, in the words of Samuel Pepys: "The heaviest man in the World, but stout and loyal to his country" to that of Montgomery, created Viscount of Alamein after his stunning success in the Western Desert in WW2. Also including such luminaries as Marlbrorough, Wellington, Kitchener and Allenby this is a brisk jog through 313 pages and 500 or so years.

Each biography is however perfectly formed, explaining in some detail exactly what, to Urban's mind, makes each candidate deserving of such a lofty approval. Contained in each is a brief resume of each career before they came to prominence, the events which led to them being so and the results both for them and for their country.
It is perhaps a little disingenuous to refer to them all as having gone so far as to change the world since Monck and the Duke of York only really had a permanent impression on this country; but I suppose "8 Comanders who shaped the World and 2 who shaped Britain" would have been a little unwieldy for a title. Not quite as grand or attention-grabbing for sure.

The mark of the consummate researcher is throughout this book, which is not really a surprise since Urban is a former Defence correspondant and Diplomatic Editor. Two fields of study that are very well suited to each other, being in effect two mirrors for one subject. This ability to read events in seperate ways means that Urban is probably the perfect choice to author such a book, his expertise is not merely one sided but in many cases sparks off each other to give interesting conclusions.

6 out of 10

Stalingrad - Antony Beevor

Okay guys, this is where it gets serious. It is often said that military history is a cold artform and there was nowhere colder, both physically and mentally than the East Front in the years 1941 to 1943.

Make no mistake, this is a masterwork of the craft. Described evocatively as "bedtime reading only for those who do not dream." Stalingrad follows the fortunes of the Ninth Army and it's commander Paulus over 5 sections and 431 pages in harrowing detail from the initial thrusts of Operation Barbarossa through the well-known events in the city itself to the fates of those captured. It's a measure of Beevor's narrative skills and faultless research that by the end of the book you almost feel more pity for the Germans than for the Soviet army that clung on desperately, fought for every singe centimetre of ground and took casualties in the hundreds of thousands.
Yet this is not to say that in some quirk of history the Soviets are portrayed as the bogeyman to the proud and upstanding Whermacht fighting for an insane master; this book also follows the fortunes of the Red Army in equal precise detail from the dark times of the invasion to the fierce exultation in victory and the start of the roll towards Berlin. With a stoicism that would put Ancient Greeks and Romans to shame the 64th Army under General Chuikov clung on despite everything that the Germans threw at them - and they threw a lot.
But there was a third group of people cowering in the rubble, flinching at the shriek of bombs and rockets, dreading the squeaks and squeals of tank tracks - the civilians. People who should have been evacuated during the narrow window of opportunity were not, thanks to Stalin's belief that soldiers would fight harder for a live city than for a dead one; many thousands of them died as well - from the schoolgirls who were too close to an oil storage tank when it was bombed by the Luftwaffe to the ones buried alive by artillery fire to those who succumbed to Typhus, Typhoid, Jaundice, Lice and general starvation - but they endured.

From high strategy in heated conference rooms to desperate hand to hand brawls in bombed-out cellars to fleeing, frozen, desperate escapees on the unsheltered steppe the sheer scope of this book numbs the mind whilst at the same time stimulating with a breadth, precision and humanity that has rarely, if ever, been seen before and never bettered.

Read this book. Read it now.

10 out of 10

Whicker's War - Alan Whicker

Growing up in the early 80's I used to find myself watching 'Whicker's World' and was captivated by all the far-flung places that he went to every week, bringing Brazil, Hong Kong and various parts of Africa into a dreary Oxfordshire town house. When I got to the age to think about such things I could have sworn blind that this guy had a trace of the officer about him; a saturnine and almost condescending voice, perfect pronounciation, very 'stiff upper lip' mannerisms, a trace of humour and of course that bristling mustache.

Turns out that I was right.

Alan Whicker was enlisted into the infantry in 1939 and, adjudged perfect cannon fodder, was promptly shipped out to officer training in the depths of Wales - 164 OCTU at Barmouth to be exact. After surviving the regulation Coldstream Guards drill sergeant-from-Hell and the perils of the inter-company boxing tournament he was in his own words 'spat out rather ingloriously' at the other end as a fully fledged Second Lieutenant in the Devonshires. He was amongst the first to note that a regiment named 'The Bloody 11th' might not be the best place for a man who wished devoutly not to be interrupted by any flying metal...
Salvation came with an embarkation lunch in London with a Brigadier at the same table as he and his uncle. Said staff officer wondered if the young single pip officer might be able to direct sergeant cameramen in a warzone as part of the first AFPU section. Whicker signed up right away - on the principle that though it might be a more adventurous form of suicide it might prove somewhat more stylish than being sick in a troop transport.

Thus began the oddyssey of Whicker in Italy. Landings at Pachino, Salerno and Anzio soon followed as he and the rest of the Army slogged their way through all 660 days of the Italian Campaign until a triumphant end as a captain in Venice. Throughout the book Whicker is a thoroughly engaging travel companion, as is only to be expected; mixing tragedy with humour, anguish with laughter and fearful angst with downright hilarity. From the WW1 trench warfare around the Anzio beachead to the triumphal entry into Rome (which he took the first pictures of) to accepting the surrender of the whole of Milan's SS garrison this is a lively exploration of a unique country in a unique time, told with verve, panache and always a little half-smile.
It is the height of iony that for an eventual travel writer his first experience of air travel was lying flat on his back;

"Nowadays, of course, they charge you extra to fly like that."

7 out of 10

Storm Command - Gen. Sir Peter de la Billiere

You don’t mess with Peter de la Billiere. If the granite face and manifest toughness of this former 4 star general, Knight of the British Empire, SAS CO and 40 year professional soldier doesn’t tell you that, the piercing blue eyes certainly will. A shade lighter and they’d belong to a madman, but these tell you very clearly that if this man wants anything you have, you’d better hand it over right quick.
Don’t think that de la Billiere is a mere knuckle-dragger though; there is a keen mind behind those eyes and a ready humour, though I suspect that you’d have to work hard to find yourself worthy of either. And in the Saudi desert in 1990/1991 he needed every bit of both that he could get.
He used it, too.

'Storm Command' recounts the whole of what is known in the British Army lexicon as Operation Granby, to the Americans as Desert Shield/Desert Storm and to everyone else as The Gulf War (1). It was, as the book recounts, somewhat hectic - hardly helped by the fact that halfway through deployment the emphasis changed abruptly from defensive preperations to offensive ones.
Co-ordinating all the British forces in theatre from the Army tankers of the Desert Rats through the RAF Tornado's scattered up and down Saudi Arabia to the ships of the RN taskforce plying the Gulf itself, Billiere's command stretched over an area roughly double the size of the Southern UK. At the same time there was a strong diplomatic element as well, from dealings with the inimitable and often irascible Norman Schwarzkopf and the military men of other Coalition Forces to the gaggle of rulers and other chieftains throughout the Arabian Peninsular.
Equally there was the aspect of the media to contend with; this being the first 'War by TV' for the British since the rather restricted coverage of the Falklands. Inbetween that and the Gulf, 24 hour rolling news channels such as Sky, BBC and CNN had become a regular fixture, requiring delicate handling. Add to that an attitude amongst politicians that he himself describes as the 'arm in the mangle' and the dethroning of Margerat Thatcher and installment of John Major and there was enough on his plate to keep ten generals occupied.

There is an undeniable pace to it all - deployment, build up, operations and return in a somewhat short 300 odd pages - andt’s a little dry in parts but that’s the reflection of the man. Always keep in mind that this is not someone contemplating a far off battlefield from the comfort of a study, this isn’t a scratching biography by an armchair warrior, this is the man’s own reflections. This is what he thought, what he felt, what he valued. Yeah, it’s dry and a touch stilted, maybe a touch arrogant at times but what did you expect? Generals, British Generals in particular, do not rush around like a civilian with his head cut off; they’re not expected to, they’re not meant to and they’re damned well not paid to. And if you’ve done the kinds of things he has then you have every right to be a teensy bit proud of yourself, haven’t you?

5 and 3/4’s out of 10

Razors Edge - Hugh Bicheno

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. There are few books these days that I’ll take off the shelf once, read them and never touch them again. I feared that when I began this might well have been one of them. So far up his own arse he could clean his teeth from the inside. Stuffed full of political crap, backstabbing and downright treachery that I was thinking of offering this book to conspiracy theorists with an “This is how it’s done” sticker on it. Yes; politics, like it or not, infuses and sets the scene for everything, not least military moves but also no; some things are just too depressing for words. And when these words are printed in black type on a white page by Outraged of Ashdon-under-Lyme, the depression gets really bad. Turgid prose when describing it really does not help.

Well, those were my orginal thoughts.

Hugh Bicheno does know his stuff. He does. A former Intelligence Officer (cynical squaddies will claim that this is a contradiction in terms), fluent in both English and Spanish and a resident of the British Embassy in Buenos Aries provides ample background currency. So too does an outstanding bibliography of 22 pages, covering everything from Web sites to Videos and everything inbetween; as you’d expect from an Intelligence officer the research is painstaking and exquisitly detailed. But it suffers from the disease of bigness. There’s just no escaping it. At the risk of sounding flippant it’s somewhat like Vulcan 607 – we don’t need to know everything. Useful, certainly, but not strictly needed. But perhaps I’m missing the point; an unofficial history will hardly contain the brevity of a regimental or battalion war diary.
The good part is that politics takes up only a third of this book. The bad news is that that is still 84 pages or so. But once the politics are left behind and things move on to the actual operations, Hugh scores in spades. For here the detail becomes impressive instead of merely overwhelming. The maps are precise and rendered in simple style, the battles explained in detail, photos provide scale and clarity and the privations are readily apparent to anyone. If anything, here the previously stilted prose becomes an asset – it forces you to slow down, to reflect, to take pains to understand what’s going on. Never a bad thing for a retrospective account – this is how you learn things.
Bicheno’s great achievement however is that he doesn’t take sides. Partly this is due to his own experiences and outlook but also out of a scruplous sense of fairness – just as much trouble is taken to desribe conditions amongst the Argentine conscript garrisons in Stanley, viewing their officers and professionals with resentment and shivering on mountain tops as those of the British paras wading ashore at San Carlos, marching across bogs and huddled in wet dugouts under mortar fire.

The Falklands War was unique in many ways that conflicts since have not been; much of the weapons and equipment on both sides were the same – everyone had single shot SLR rifles, comparable artillery and mortar pieces (often made by the same company) and in an uncomfortable irony the Argentine Navy had the exact same Type 42 destroyers as the Royal Navy, built in the same shipyards…
There are always 3 sides in a war – attackers, defenders and the poor sods stuck in the crossfire who really don’t belong there. Hugh Bicheno describes all three but you need to wade through an awful lot of boredom to get there. Persevere though, and you might be surprised.

6 and a 1/2 out of 10

Vulcan 607 - Rowland White

From the sand to the skies this time. In 1982 we Brits had a problem - Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. We had another problem - with the Task Force to retake them still thousands of miles away in the Atlantic, the Argentinian military was using the runway at Port Stanley to fly reinforcements in hand over fist as well as base attack aircraft on it. We couldn't use cruise missiles - launched from the 2 SSN's we had on station - because we hadn't bought any yet (D'oh). We couldn't use naval gunfire because Exocets woud have sunk the lot miles from Stanley; for the same reason we couldn't use an airstrike from the inbound carriers - Harriers are subsonic, therefore easy meat, and had no payload worth talking about. But we had to do something to remind the Argetinians that we were serious about retaking what was lost, reassure the islanders that we were coming and try to knock out aforementioned aircraft before they sank every ship in the fleet.
What to do?

The Vulcan! A quintessential Cold War aircraft, last of the RAF's traditional heavy bombers and 3 months away from being scrapped. The bomb bay was hastily refitted from a nuclear payload to a conventional one (81 1000 pounders), air-to-air refuelling kit not used for years was refurbished, aircrews trained and then together with every tanker that the RAF could scrape up, the whole lot was sent to Ascension Island. But Stanley was still four thousand miles further than the Vulcan's could reach from Ascension even on a one-way trip. Hmmmmm, 3rd problem.

This book rattles along nicely to start with and has a few real derring-do moments that made even me laugh out loud. USAF fighters are specifically prohibited from flying inside the Grand Canyon (Independance Day and Will Smith not withstanding) yet the Vulcans did it quite regularly, often flying 50 feet or more below the Canyon lip. And this was a bomber.

Sadly, once the initial spurt of action is done with and before the tension of the actual Black Buck raid starts, there is the most horrendously yawn-inducing section which takes up a good third of the book. Yes, I grant you that no-one can go into combat without a secure logistics train behind him, and yes I recognise that a lot of backroom work needed to be done very quickly, but please. We didn't have to be told everything. Whether this was a deliberate artifice to let the reader down gently before ratcheting everything up again I know not; I suspect it is and it actually does this very well, but at the risk of becoming so dry it rivals a dead dog in a desert.

But where this bok does score, and score pretty highly, is in the sheer balls needed to do the job. Alone. At night. At low level. With ten minute's worth of fuel in the tanks before an abort. With none of the fancy navigational or aiming devices that air forces seem to rely on now. And no support of ay kind to help a bomber get past air defence radars, missile batteries, AAA guns and probable fighter attack. This was stuff straight out of WW2 manuals with mostly Korean War-vintage equipment. This was flying.

If you can handle the boredom part, this is worth a read. If not, steer clear.

6 out of 10

Dusty Warriors - Prof. Richard Holmes

From an invader of Iraq in the past we now turn our attention to an invader from the present day. Like it or not, that's exactly what we Brits did and although politics will have no place in this blog I shall merely note that whether or not we should be there is somewhat immaterial these days. Like it or not, the simple fact is that we are and this book gives a perfect taste of life out East in war conditions. For that's what it is.

Let no one try and say that Richard Holmes is not the consummate military historian. He is an absolute master of his craft. There are few of his peers who are his equal in terms of dispassionate objectivity and scrupulous research (Antony Beevor being the exception) and none have got as close to the British soldier in terms of character, experience and knowledge.

The reason for this is very simple - he is one. A former battalion commander and Brigadier in the Territorial Army he was, until his retirement in 2007, also Colonel in Chief of the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment. 'PWRR' in the army lexicon, 'The Tigers' in everyone else's. This book concerns the deployment of the 1st Battalion (1PWRR) to Basra and environs in April 2007. From meeting with Tribal Chiefs and Marsh Arabs to the epic 100 day+ defence of CIMIC house, Al-Amarah, this 'County Regiment' went through a lot.

Holmes does a masterful job in guiding the reader gradually to this point with a consummate explanation of what a regiment is, what it can do and the organisation of it on all levels before it gets pitched, sometimes calm, sometimes screaming, into an anti-insurgency campaign. The actions of the individual soldiers are portrayed in exquisite detail and the maps in the book are commendably clear and uncluttered; giving quick and easy reference on the occasions when military references and the welter of call signs and 'Zap numbers' become overwhelming in combat.

For despite this being a history book and an autobiography of sorts the pace is relentless, driving along at a rate that would leave many thriller/drama authors floundering and coughing on the dust kicked up by the regiments' Warrior AFV's and the odd Challenger 2 MBT.
Despite all the action, however, there are quieter moments of reflection and introspection that provide a wonderful snapshot into the diplomacy and hospitality of both soldiers and the mass majority of the Iraqi people - from lavish banquets thrown by Tribal elders to the tireless work done to restore amenities shattered by combat.

If you want a picture of hectically paced yet organised infantry operations in urban combat, this is hard to surpass.

9 and 3/4's out of 10. It's that damn good.

Tamerlane - Justin Marozzi

To kick the blog off, given all the kerfuffle about the Middle East, I thought it might be a little useful to pull an Islamic Conqueror from History and Justin Marozzi's book is a superb beginning.

From his birth in about 1336 to his death in 1405, Temur Gurgan carved an empire that was fully the equal of Alexander the Great or his ilustrious predecessor, Genghis Khan, with one minor difference. Temur was a Muslim where one had been a polytheist and the other a believer in the shamanistic rituals of the steppe, but it would be fair to say that for all his protestations he was only Muslim when it suited him: he was just as ready to accept astrology and shamanistic approval as that of Allah. Indeed it was hard to tell whether he ascribed to the Shia or Sunni creed as he seemed perfectly willing to slaughter either or both to get what he wanted. This formed the major bone of contention within the Dar-al-Islam of his times since he never truely renounced his steppe origins. Ironically enough for a man described as the Sword of Islam it seems that his main claim to fame in history was his willingness to use the sword to part Islamic heads from Islamic bodies....

But his achievements were remarkable even given the bloodiness of them, and in this Marozzi gives the most well-rounded and perfect appreciation - here is a warrior who made great inroads into India (which Alexander never did) and was heading for a campaign in China at his death (which Genghis never attempted). The Middle East and the former USSR was his stamping ground and this warmaster stamped as hard and as often as he could - the tiny Christian kingdom of Georgia was raided, sacked and occupied no fewer than 8 times.

Marozzi does not dwell solely on military achievements however, and in this is the real strength of this work. Temur is portrayed as a shrewd, cautious man who could take dazzling chances when he had to but knew full well the power of preperation. Not for him the headlong blind charge but the steady measurement and assessment before rapid action. It also reveals why a conqueror who swept aside rival Islamic potentates like so much confetti never bothered with Europe but instead cultivated diplomatic and trading links with it.

The contrast with the glories of Temur's Empire and the gaggle of current post-Soviet republics is a cruel one and does much to illustrate the ravages of time; yet at points this threatens to overwhelm the core of the book to the detriment of the whole which is a shame. There were moments when I was stuck by the Aral Sea in modern times and the next was on some wind-swept hillside outside Damascus a good six hundred years earlier. Most confusing for a moment and the main area where this lost marks for me.

But don't let this put you off too much; for a portrait of a savage but smart conqueror, this book is hard to refuse.

8 out of 10

And so it Begins......

Well, time to start my own Book Blog. Why the title? An idea shamelssly half-inched from somewhere I forget about right now:

'The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword'.

This is indeed true because let's be honest about it: which would you rather get stabbed with?

As it kind of implies, this is going to be a review blog about all books military - first-hand accounts, biographies, fictional themes around real events, that kinda thing. To start with I'll just be posting stuff that's on my bookshelf as of right now but I'll be getting new ones in time which ought to add to the fun and at least try and keep this marginally current.

Well.... (takes absurdly deep breath) here goes nothing......