by RNS | Jun 24, 2021 | Beating Tsundoku
Simon Elliott, Old Testament Warriors (Casemate, 2021)
In Old Testament Warriors, the prolific Simon Elliott surveys the civilizations of the Ancient Near East with his focus on military systems and developments. He covers almost all the bases and introduces readers to a fascinating list of characters and peoples.
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Elliott begins ‘in the beginning’ with the first attempts at organized warfare, going back into the neolithic period then stressing the importance of the city of Jericho’s defences as an evolutionary step in warfare. That leads him into the Sumerian civilization and growing evidence for warfare and armies. Then came Sargon the Great from Kish who brought Sumerian dominance to a violent end before a resurgence then a final demise in 2004 BCE. That led to the rise of Assyria and Babylon. However, it is to the Egyptians that Elliott turns next. He works through the Old Kingdom and into its neighbours, Nubia, Canaan, and Libya, but eschews later developments to avoid a collision with a companion volume on the later Egyptians.
Chapter 3 introduces the weapon synonymous with this era of warfare: the chariot. Elliott places the chariot military revolution in around 1690 BCE. The Hurrians and Hyksos were the first serious users of chariots in the Bronze Age, and Elliott goes into more detail on the Kingdom of Mitanni, the leading Hurrian kingdom. Coming away from the Near East, Elliott moves into Europe with the Minoans and Mycenaeans. It was the demise of the Mycenaeans among others that led to the mass migration of destructive groups known as the Sea Peoples from around 1230 BCE. They linked Europe to the Near East, and it is to there that Elliott returns to discuss the small but influential Hebrew Kingdoms and the Philistines.
One curious aspect of Hebrew warfare was the lack of chariots, which they made up for with surprise assaults often at night. The Hebrews joined together under the United Monarchy of the Israelites – Saul, David, and Solomon – who fought the Philistines with varied success. The Divided Monarchy followed in the first millennium BCE with war between Israel and Judea. It didn’t matter too much because both would fall, squashed between the rising and ruthless Assyrians and the powerful Egyptians. The Babylonians came next in a winner takes all battle at Carchemish in 605 BCE. They then dismantled Judea.
Elliott closes out his survey with a deeper look at the Hittites, Assyrians, and Babylonians, which were the major powers during the biblical period. He includes here the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE, involving 6,000 chariots! The book ends with the defeat of Babylon by Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE. Elliott concludes with observations on the evolution of warfare in the biblical period and the importance of literacy in cultivating civilizations.
Old Testament Warriors is a solid survey of this period. Each chapter begins with an introduction, which is old-fashioned and a bit wasteful for a book this short, but the narrative and analysis flows quite seamlessly for the most part. Elliott’s writing is clear, as we have come to expect, and his text is supported by photographs of wargames figures, some general landscapes, and archaeological artefacts. The civilizations under Elliott’s gaze are viewed primarily through their military organisations, and we can follow the development of weapons and armour, though that may also be a product of greater archaeological evidence. I would have liked to have seen more references to the Holy Bible and a better bibliography for further exploration, but as a general introduction to this fascinating era of warfare, Old Testament Warriors will do the job.
by RNS | Jun 20, 2021 | Beating Tsundoku
Terry C Treadwell, Outlaws of the Wild West (Frontline, 2021)
The saloon doors swish open, the piano stops playing, and everyone goes silent and looks to see who has entered. It is the gunfighter, a notorious outlaw as seen on the Wanted Dead or Alive poster pinned outside the sheriff’s office. He is here for trouble, and you better keep out of his way. At least that is how the legend goes as captured in the dime novels, movies, and TV shows about the American Wild West. Terry Treadwell’s compilation of real outlaws in the late 19th Century frontier country paints a different picture, one where romance is often replaced by savage reality.
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Treadwell’s thirty-eight criminal histories cover the usual suspects – Butch and Sundance, the James brothers, Billy the Kid – and strips them of their mythologies. Most of his readers will have heard of those and probably won’t be that surprised that the glitter of Hollywood is mostly fairy dust. Some readers will also recognise the ‘Cowboys’, the Dalton brothers, the Wild Bunch, and the surprisingly disappointing Calamity Jane. Treadwell’s exploration into the lesser known outlaws, however, reveals a wide diaspora of criminals from different racial and ethnic groups and class backgrounds. No one, it seems, was immune from the criminality ‘gene’, and the degree of lawlessness did not appear to depend on any background trait either, except perhaps bad luck or poor decision-making. Indeed, Treadwell highlights some truly psychopathic individuals like Cullen Baker and William Longley, among others.
On the face of it, Treadwell’s compilation of stories is a well-written, entertaining collection, but reading them all in one go will wear down your good humour. His stories are also illustrated with photographs – many outlaws enjoyed having their portrait taken, though Treadwell includes many of their sharply contrasting posed death photographs that frontier law enforcement enjoyed equally. Dig deeper into these stories, however, and you discover a Wild West scarred by racism and bigotry, a failure of capitalism on the fringes, and, of course, violence and vigilantism. In that regard, Outlaws of the Wild West is more than a collection of stories but a thought-provoking exposure of a fissure in American history.
by RNS | Jun 18, 2021 | Beating Tsundoku
Will Yates, War Trials (Pen & Sword, 2021)
War Trials examines the corrosive effect the war in Iraq has had on the people and institutions that became involved in the debacle. At its heart is the story of a young Irish Guardsman, Joe McCleary, who is accused of a war crime in British occupied Basra and breaks into pieces under the intolerable mental weight of the event and the investigation that follows. But he is not the only one on trial in Yates’ superb investigation into the decision makers at all levels whose actions put this man into an impossible situation and to all intents and purposes left him there to rot.
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Part I opens in blitz-shattered Bootle that McCleary’s grandparents struggled to survive. Post-war dreams faded more slowly for the town, and it was into this damaged environment that Joe McCleary joined the world in 1981. Yates switches to Basra in May 2003 and the search for an Iraqi boy drowned in the canal. A complaint is made to the British army by the boy’s father and an investigation begun that homes in on Joe McCleary of the Irish Guards. Yates continues to alternate stories in this fashion, narrating the investigation while allowing the background biography of McCleary to catch up with events. That happens with dramatic intensity when McCleary cracks under the pressure of the investigation and his experiences as a soldier. He is in very deep trouble.
Yates’s focus shifts in Part II to the war in Iraq. He spirals in from the causes of the war to the preparations by the British Army and McCleary’s role in it. Meanwhile, the investigation continues, and Joe’s mental decline accelerates. He has PTSD, but who wouldn’t based on the case Yates builds through these chapters, recounting atrocities on both sides in a war that should never have been fought? Yates flips around between the horrors of Basra and the dislocation of Bootle, the two melting together in McCleary’s shattering mind. The intertwining narratives are harrowing but necessary if we are to enter into McCleary’s world.
McCleary’s impending court martial set against a backdrop of terrorist attacks opens Part III. McCleary adds paranoia to his assembly of symptoms as his trial approaches. That took place in April 2006, but Joe McCleary’s personal trials had already taken place in Iraq, and his trial and subsequent naming in wider inquiries continued his ordeal well past the time when it should have been settled. Yates keeps that story bubbling while revealing what happened in Basra on the day that changed McCleary’s life.
War Trials is a searing indictment of the war in Iraq, the British Army, and a succession of British governments who did next to nothing to help soldiers like Joe McCleary caught up in their machinery. Yates’ writing is brilliant, exposing layer after layer of a modern horror story while keeping a sharp focus on the tragic destiny of the young soldier. His descriptive passages of the war claw at the emotions – I was reminded of Michael Herr’s unforgettable book on Vietnam, Dispatches. There are excuses for why all this happened, but Yates eviscerates any attempt at providing reasons. If War Trials does not leave you feeling angry that all this happened and could easily happen again, go back and start again. This is easily the best book I have read this year and perhaps the best written about the senseless war in Iraq.
by RNS | Jun 13, 2021 | Beating Tsundoku
Dan Hagedorn & Mario Overall, The Caribbean Legion and its Mercenary Air Forces 1947-1950 (Lime Tree Press, 2021)
Welcome to the post-World War II world of the Caribbean Legion, an organisation dedicated to the overthrow of dictatorships in the region and the implementation of democracies. Dan Hagedorn and Mario Overall are experts in warfare in this part of the world, and in this book they guide us through the exploits of the Legion with an emphasis on their use of a makeshift airforce.
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Hagedorn and Overall begin by establishing the political context of a Caribbean region in flux during and shortly after WWII. They trace the origins of that into the promotion of democracy from the 1920s onwards in opposition to dictatorships in the region. The Caribbean Legion would take up that mantle after the War and had coalesced into an organization by February 1946. Their first serious test was the Cayo Confites affair, an attempt to remove the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. This was a failure but created the first air component for the Legion, the ELA at this point, with a transport service and some US warplanes. In short order, they had themselves a handy little airforce. They also acquired a few ships to support their invasion of the Dominican Republic. And then it all fell apart, including their collective arrest and transfer to Guatemala.
The Legion’s next adventure in 1948 was more successful, helping to knock over the Costa Rican government as part of the civil war that swept that nation, though few of the men took part in the actual combat. Their makeshift airforce was again prominent with some interesting modifications to some of the planes to turn them into fighting craft. The Legion’s leaders had outstayed their welcome in Costa Rica by January 1949, though most of the men had left by then. The Legion’s followed that with a return to the Dominican Republic to remove Trujillo. The planned airborne ‘invasion’ was an unmitigated fiasco. Subsequent diplomatic moves in the region heralded the end of the Legion. The authors add appendices on the various airplanes of the Legion, the Dominican military, and the Nicaraguan Air Force.
Hagedorn and Overall tell a fascinating tale of high ideals and low skulduggery as they piece together the exploits of the Caribbean Legion. They do so in an almost journalistic style replete with personal commentary and asides that makes this a fast read; perhaps a bit too much at times as the uninitiated reader struggles to hold on to the details. I sensed that there was a much bigger book in this if more of the background could have been fleshed out. Nevertheless, they capture the chaotic events involving the Legion very well and they clearly know their material. They are supported in their endeavour by some excellent photographs of warplanes. Readers interested in air warfare and post-War Caribbean conflict will enjoy this very much.
by RNS | Jun 12, 2021 | Beating Tsundoku
Hans Seidler, H*tl*r’s Anti-Tank Weapons 1939-1945 (Pen & Sword, 2020)
“Germans were masters of anti-tank warfare,” notes Hans Seidler. They ought to have been given the number of tanks they faced and the variety of weapons at their disposal. Seidler surveys these weapons and how they were used in this addition to Pen and Sword’s Images of War series.
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The first serious German anti-tank gun was the PaK35/36, which was small and reliable. They took thousands of them into Poland in 1939, according to Seidler, most of them towed by animals. But these were not good enough to take out heavier tanks than the Poles fielded. The Germans therefore brought in the 4.7cm gun for future campaigns and mounted some on vehicles. Better organisation was also introduced. The invasion of France, while successful, heralded the problems to come on the Eastern Front. The 5cm PaK38 proved it could do the job against T-34s and 7.5cm PaK40 guns also came into play, along with better dedicated ammunition. The problem became producing enough of them to counter the growing number of enemy tanks, despite the Germans using captured weapons when they could. The Germans also needed manoeuvrability, so introduced the Marder anti-tank vehicles that performed well, but again there were never enough.
In 1943, the 8.8cm PaK43 came off the assembly line, becoming the most powerful gun the Germans had used to date. This was also mounted to create new tank hunters such as the Nashorn and Elefant. Seidler also surveys the Italian front where PaK40s proved useful but cumbersome. Metal shortages affected production by this time, leading to some German use of hybrid weapons. The Normandy landings and aftermath saw the rise of the hand-held panzerfaust and Panzerschreck anti-tank weapons used effectively by the infantry, which became common on all fronts. By 1945, anti-tank guns and vehicles outnumbered tanks on the Eastern Front, but they were spread too thin, according to Seidler. Indeed, the situation grew desperate despite the Jagdpanzer IV and Jagdpanther’s introduction in 1944, until the Germans were finally overwhelmed. Seidler concludes, however, that the anti-tank component of the Germany army had certainly made its mark.
The Images of War series relies heavily on the photographs to make the books work. Seidler’s anti-tank weapons succeeds on that score with many excellent photographs to accompany his basic but informative text. However, the balance of pictures is also important, and this book falls down somewhat on that with almost no coverage of the desert war and limited photographs from the Western Front; students of the Eastern Front will be very happy with it though. Diorama modelmakers and wargamers will especially appreciate Seidler’s book, though any WWII reader will enjoy this too.
