Book reviewed: Inferno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg 1943 by Keith Lowe

I don’t know if it was because this was the first book I read using my Sony Reader or some inherent fault in the book itself but I found this account of the fire raids on Hamburg to be an unsatisfying effort.

The author has tried his best to stitch together survivor accounts from both the RAF bombers and the poor bloody Germans to get that “there” feeling in his story but it doesn’t work. The book is lacking in detail and it just feels like he tried to make a 700 page book out of a 50 page story. Maybe it’s the fact that the fashionable way to write these accounts nowadays is to get interviews with the low level combatants hasn’t helped him here because there’s just too few of them left in any condition to recount their experiences.

Additionally I found the book too ready to assign feelings of remorse or horror to the Allies which just isn’t borne out by other books I have read. From my experience the fliers were just thinking about how to survive their 30 op tours to really give two shits about the civilians they were incinerating below. This book felt like revisionism and to tell you the truth, I wish the Sony Book Store had a better return policy.

Book Reviewed: Fiasco, the American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks

Lately I have been reading more books about the American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Primarily it’s because I think enough time has passed to be able to get some useful insight into what actually happened without having to eat a side-order of hyperbole along the way.

This book was first released back in 2006 and was updated to reflect the changing situation in 2007 when the “surge” happened. The author outlines an almost unrelenting series of “misunderestimations” and outright screwups by the U.S. executive and the military in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam. Mind you, with a title like this it’s pretty much what you would expect.

What is discouraging is that we seem, now, to be heading back to those days of car bombs and massive bloodshed that, in mid-2008 many pundits were hoping we were past. This book is useful but because the story isn’t finished in that unfortunate country, it can’t be definitive. What a fuck-up.

Book Reviewed: Eight Lives Down by Chris Hunter

You may have noticed that I have been reading a shit load of books lately. This is because I have been spending an inordinate amount of time either in various North American airports, budget airline seats and skanky hotels in crime ridden US cities. This week I was in that urban slum Atlanta, Georgia and as a side pursuit, when I got sick of being accosted in the main street by crack addicts, I worked my way through this tome, a memoir of a tour in Iraq by a British Army captain whose pursuit of happiness consisted of defusing roadside bombs in Basra. Fucking lovely.

The guy is not a professional writer and sometimes his military dependence on casual army-guy jargon is a bit jarring (“blues and twos” anyone?) but overall it was a quick and undemanding read with some great anecdotes (“what do you feel when you kill women and children? Recoil Ma’am, recoil”) so I found it a useful throwaway book. Not one to read twice but not one to tear into bits like that piece of shit Jeffrey Archer book I suffered through last year.

Book Reviewed: Tobruk by Peter Fitzsimons

These days it seems I am spending less time reading general campaign histories and more time reading specific battle accounts, sort of pouring sand into the glass of rocks of my obsession with World War 2.

This battle, the 1941 siege of Tobruk, never caught my attention before, primarily because even though it was a major part of the Western Desert campaign, it only had Australians in it, no Kiwi’s so I avoided it as I avoid all things Australian.

I picked this up in New Zealand when I was down in January with my mother but never got to read it before I came home. I had left it on the coffee table at Mum’s house and it was still there when I came back this time.

It was a worthwhile book. The writer isn’t the best, but he has done a lot of research and had some great anecdotes which both entertained and enlightened. I especially enjoyed one where a Pom officer got told to piss off by an Australian major. You know I am a bit mixed on this book, really it’s pretty clumsily written and normally that would be enough to give me the shits. But the author did a great job in hunting down veterans of the battle to get primary sources so I’ll give it a tentative thumbs up.

Book reviewed: How to Lose a Battle by Bill Fawcett

I have just completed my last run down to New Zealand, this time to help with my Mum’s funeral arrangements. I needed some lightweight reading material for the flight down so I picked up a couple of Bill Fawcett’s books from the airport bookshop.

I didn’t have much of a selection or much time to check them out and it is these reasons that I will choose now to make an excuse for buying such a shit bunch of books. The guy apparently just pumps these books out like a vegan pumps out a turd, often and with little real pleasure or art.

I won’t go into great detail about this books shortcomings except to suggest that the only reason you could have for reading this book once would be to avoid having to read those terrible airline company shit-rags they stuff in the seat in front of you. Not a keeper, in fact I sent it to the recycling yard in the sky as soon as I finished it.

Spike Lee, I want my eternity back!

I should have known better than to select a movie based on the back cover. The blurb that gushed “combat sequences that rival Saving Private Ryan in their intensity” and the fact that I had seen a couple of Spike Lee’s efforts in the past led me astray I am afraid.

What a load of shit this movie was. I know that if you have to work your way through a Spike Lee movie you accept you have to eat his message “Black people need to be angry cos white people are all racist arseholes” but please, at least try to make the story coherent. The movie was overly long at 2:40 with a horrible dead patch in the middle filled full of negro stereotypes. There were so many characters brought on stage that none of them were ever developed enough for you to give a shit about any of them.

I could go on forever telling you the bits I hated in the movie but I will just content myself by saying this movie is television quality and best watched free on cable if you have to watch it.

I will note the huge number of gross inaccuracies in the military side of the movie. Thompson machineguns were never issued as section level weapons so how come three of the four main characters ended up with one. No commander would ever allow a company level attack to go forward over open ground like that for so long without strong reconnaisance and an artillery stonk to suppress fire or smoke barrage to reduce enemy LOS. And where the fuck did the Germans get all the American White M3 half-tracks from? What the fuck was that homemade medal at the throat of the SS officer in charge of the St. Anna massacre and who the fuck issued him with that shirt? What kind of crazy German officer would hand a loaded pistol to a wounded enemy and not expect to get shot? Why the fuck do people insist on portraying German infantry attacks like they are a chorus line at La Folie! I could go on but I won’t instead…

I can honestly say that the only thing that saved this movie are Valentina Cervi’s quite wonderful tits. Sorry, wrong, in fact the only thing worth watching were Valentina Cervi’s quite wonderful tits, nothing could save this turkey.

Book reviewed: Night After Night, New Zealanders in Bomber Command by Max Lambert

The last book I read about the British night bomber offensive against Germany was Martin Middlebrook’s book, “The Nuremberg Raid”. It was a great recounting of one particularly nasty there and back by the “heavy” boys, leading to hundreds of airmen getting killed in particularly nasty ways.

Lambert’s tome is different in it’s approach. It doesn’t really go into the technicalities of the campaign at all, what it is is a fairly straightforward enumeration of the Kiwi’s who served and died in the RAF or RNZAF in Bomber Command. Each loss or close scrape is described with the best of the available information. The way the author laid out the book makes it fairly tedious to work through in many ways and although I found some of the descriptions of the missions quite illuminating I think the value of this book lies more in the manner in which he was able to track down so many veteran survivors so late in the day and get them to actually recount their experiences in their own words.

Not a great book but given the subject, better than nothing.

An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 by Rick Atkinson

This bloke has written three books as a series on the three major allied landings in Europe in 1942-1945, North Africa, Sicily/Italy and Normandy. This book is about the Torch landings in French North Africa and the final fall of the Italo-German campaign in North Africa.

Bloody good read. The author has done his homework and provided so great original source material on this campaign. I have never read more than the bare minimum about the U.S. Army in the desert and so it was interesting to see just what a disaster the Battle of the Kasserine Pass was for them.

Now I have to go make a start on his second book about Italy. Of course that’s going to be a fair way away as I have about a dozen books stacked up ahead of it. Excellent.

We’re gonna have to slap the dirty little Jap

I have a few character flaws. Some are nature, some are nurture.

Since my grandfather fought the Japanese during World War Two there has existed a strong anti-Japanese streak in my family’s zeitgeist.

Since the little yellow bastards thought they were going to include my home country in their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and we would have ended up being their uneducated slave race (as they did in China) I don’t feel a great deal of guilt over this. So in the interest of being completely incorrect politically here are the lyrics for a particularly nasty bit of American racism from 1941 called “We’re gonna have to slap, the dirty little Jap”.

We’re gonna have to slap the dirty little Jap
And Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it
We’ll skin the streak of yellow from this sneaky little fellow
And he’ll think a cyclone hit him when he’s thru it
We’ll take the double crosser to the old woodshed
We’ll start on his bottom and go to his head
When we get thru with him he’ll wish that he was dead
We gotta slap the dirty little Jap

We’re gonna have to slap the dirty little Jap
And Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it
The Japs and all their hooey will be changed into chop suey
And the rising sun will set when we get thru it
Their alibi for fighting is to save their face
For ancestors waiting in celestial space
We’ll kick their precious face down to the other place
We gotta slap the dirty little Jap

We’re gonna have to slap the dirty little Jap
And Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it
We’ll murder Hirohito, massacre that slob Benito
Hang’em with that Shickle gruber when we’re thru it
We’ll search the highest mountain for the tallest tree
To build us a hanging post for the evil three
We’ll call in all our neighbors, let’em know their free
We gotta slap the dirty little Jap

I have the mp3 of this but my free WordPress account won’t let me upload it of course. And the excellent result of tonight’s googling led me to EBay where I picked up a copy of the original record. Ha! I shall play it with the windows open as soon as it arrives!

Book reviewed: Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, by Donald L. Miller

About 25 years ago I read a single book about the U.S. 9th Air Force campaign in the Mediterranean in WW2. While, of course, I know a fair bit about the 8th Air Force campaign against Germany I had never stopped to read an entire volume dedicated to the subject.

That was before I burned through this book. I don’t get to read much anymore, maybe a book every couple of weeks, 20 or 30 a year. This one followed from bedside to bathroom to camp and back pretty much religiously for the three or four weeks it took me to finish it out.

What I find great about war books today is that the authors are forced to turn to the rank and file participants in order to get first hand narratives. This is wonderful as they have a much better perspective from my POV than do the Generals and Air Commodores et al, especially for a campaign narrative like this book.

After the war all of the senior commanders wrote their own memoirs, mostly self-serving or bound up in Official Secrets Act red tape. These were uniformly dry (try reading Mansteins “Lost Victories” for a perfect example) and written to hang a post war reputation on.

Books like this one, on the other hand, are brutally frank about the realities of the ETO and the air war that the participants fought in. I don’t think you’ll find anecdotes describing co-pilots heads knocked off by cannon shells or men urinating in their flying suits to stay warm at 15,000 foot in December in Butcher Harris’s dusty unread tomes.