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: Sharks and Little Fish by Wolfgang Ott

This book was originally published in 1957 and is basically a novelised memoir based on the authors own experiences in the U-Boat service in World War II. If you have ever read “All Quiet on the Western Front” or seen the movie “Das Boot” then you will know what I mean when I say this book is written in a typically German style. Almost entirely written in a first person perspective with the main protagonist being a young midshipman named Teidemann.

Now, to the skinny. This is a good book. The main character is lifelike and rather funny. There are the required nasty bits in it where crewmates lose heads or limbs. And of course, the Germans lose. I don’t know that this book is quite the classic that those girly gushers over at Barnes & Noble claim but it was certainly better than that turd I just finished by Arnie what’s his name.

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: 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!