by RNS | Jun 21, 2020 | Beating Tsundoku
Greg Way, Fallschirmjäger! (Helion, 2020)
In Fallschirmjäger!, Greg Way records the memories of some of Hitler’s elite paratrooper troops. He is an admirer of an almost completely volunteer force that exemplified the virtues of soldiers, their esprit de corps. He interviewed veterans and solicited more memories through a website. He soon had enough material to merit collating it in a permanent record. Fallschirmjäger! is the very worthy result.
Fallschirmjäger! is structured as a source book with just a brief introduction for ranks, a glossary of terms, and a précis of operations. Each chapter is handed over to a single veteran’s recollections, of which there are sixteen in Part I, and three war diaries in Part II. The recollections begin with a brief biography of the veteran, their wartime service, and what became of them after the war. Way sprinkles their accounts with illuminating photographs donated by the veterans and footnotes for confirmation and context. The men describe their rigorous selection process and intense training befitting an elite unit. Then they took part in the Invasions of Poland and the Low Countries, dropped on Crete in that expensive operation, and fought in Italy, North Africa, the Eastern Front, and Normandy. All of Way’s veterans, except one, were captured and spent time as POWs.
Reviewing a source book of this nature boils down to one question: does it help us understand the subject? In this case that receives a resounding, yes. Way’s sensible approach, to let these soldiers speak in their own voices without interference, brings out the immediacy of their experiences: their arduous training, jumping into the dark over enemy territory, the terror and helplessness of floating to the ground under fire, the intensity of combat, the shock of being wounded, frostbite on the Eastern Front, a comrade’s suicide, the fear of capture; the general horrors of war. Memoirs such as these can also be problematic because of what is often missing, or misremembered, such as political affiliations, thoughts on their leadership and role in the war, and the rare mentions of German atrocities, though those against them are prominent. Nevertheless, Way has performed a valuable service for the historical record of the Fallschirmjäger that will be useful for historians and general readers interested in World War II. 9/10
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by RNS | Jun 19, 2020 | Beating Tsundoku
Alexander Merrow, Agostino von Hassell, and Gregory Starace, Caesar’s Great Success (Frontline, 2020)
The Roman General Julius Caesar must rank in the top three of the Western Hemisphere’s greatest generals. During his meteoric rise in the 1st Century BCE, Caesar dominated multiple enemies in far-flung environments, winning dozens of battles along the way. Nevertheless, argue the authors of Caesar’s Great Success, it was Caesar’s logistical brilliance, two-thousand years ahead of is time, that makes him stand out from the rest. They set out their case in this occasionally quirky book.
The opening chapter narrates Caesar’s campaigns and examines the size of his army during those operations. That was a huge number, bearing in mind all the animals and non-combat manpower involved, and they all had to be fed. Caesar’s army required mountains of grain as the staple ingredient in their diet – they marched and fought on bread and porridge. The soldiers supplemented their grain with meat, salt, olive oil, and cheese to a greater or lesser degree, and they drank sour wine (posca). Caesar’s success came from ensuring his men had a good supply of all that. The authors are careful to point out that Rome already had a logistical framework in place, but Caesar enhanced its administration and transport infrastructure, improving road and river communications. He was also a master of creating and maintaining effective supply lines. We follow the army on the march, discovering what the soldiers carried, how they constructed marching camps, why they foraged and what for, and requisitioning supplies, which at times took the form of pillaging and plunder. All of this logistical effort had a strategic purpose. Caesar’s campaigns often had supply in mind, though he sometimes surrendered that security for speed and surprise. He also blocked enemy supplies, especially water sources. The authors illustrate Caesar’s tapping into a ‘timeless framework’ of logistical support through a comparison with the North African campaign in World War II. They conclude with a chapter on Caesar’s legacy in modern cuisine, though they dispel the myth that Caesar Salad had any connection to the great general!
The claim that logistical brilliance was Caesar’s Great Success may be over egging the pudding, but the authors cannot be blamed for hyping what is after all the unsexy side of military history. That might also explain the peculiar inclusion of recipes to end each chapter and the colour plates of meals. The unnecessary addition of the comparison with a World War II campaign also feels contrived: a more useful historical comparison might have been with Alexander the Great’s army as detailed in Donald Engels’ excellent Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (UC Press, 1980) that covers much of the same ground. Setting aside those conceptual issues, the authors have produced a valuable book for understanding how Caesar’s campaigns worked and his strategic considerations. Their sifting of the evidence used to recreate the soldiers’ lives away from the battlefield is deftly handled, as is the authors’ setting that into the broader context. Merrow and his colleagues have written a recipe for related inquiries into other ancient armies, and you won’t read Ancient military history quite the same way again after reading this book.
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by RNS | Jun 18, 2020 | Beating Tsundoku
Gerry Van Tonder, Korean War Chinese Invasion October 1950 – March 1951 (Pen & Sword, 2020)
In October 1950, the CIA reported to President Truman that there was little likelihood of a Chinese invasion of North Korea. They were very wrong. A month later, a tsunami of Chinese soldiers had poured across the border with the aim of extinguishing the United Nations forces, and they nearly succeeded. In his continuing series on the Korean War, Gerry Van Tonder brings us that story.
Van Tonder begins with a survey of the newly constituted Chinese army. This was a massive organization, full of veterans from the Chinese Civil War, though logistically deficient. And far from their tactics being mindless human waves, the Chinese used the Korean terrain to their tactical advantage to infiltrate and undermine their enemy. The Chinese presence was soon felt by the geographically divided UN forces as they advanced north. The Americans quickly took to the defensive backed by British and Commonwealth forces; the Republic of Korea forces meanwhile melted away under the initial onslaught. Van Tonder places significant weight on the air war that initially favoured the Americans but became more equal with the arrival of Soviet MIG-15s into the infamous Mig Alley. It would be well into 1951, however, before the Chinese found their feet in this new age of jet warfare. Back on the ground, the vainglorious MacArthur seemed to ignore the Chinese threat and pushed towards the Yalu river in his ‘home-by-Christmas’ campaign. But the Chinese lured them forward and hit hard, sending the UN forces back in what would become a full retreat, the most famous part of which was the incredible escape of the US 1st Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir aided in no small part by American air superiority. Van Tonder describes the subsequent evacuation of UN forces as ‘MacArthur’s Dunkirk’. Despite suffering enormous casualties, the Chinese pressed on with a new offensive into the New Year with Seoul falling on 4 January, but the UN held their lines, just. A UN counterattack recovered Seoul and solidified along the 38th Parallel, and that is where Van Tonder leaves this book to begin his final volume in the series.
Like the other volumes in this series, Chinese Invasion is mainly concerned with operational matters peppered with lower level experiential stories to enliven the narrative. The latter is Van Tonder’s strength while for the larger history it is sometimes confusing when Van Tonder skips back and forward across the chronology to highlight different aspects of the fighting. I also found the inclusion of snippets from British newspapers an odd source when discussing American operations. Nevertheless, readers attracted to the Korean War will no doubt find this book interesting and a useful addition to their collection.
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by RNS | Jun 15, 2020 | Beating Tsundoku
Geoffrey Pimm, The Violent Abuse of Women in 17th and 18th Century Britain (Pen & Sword, 2019)
In The Violent Abuse of Women in 17th and 18th Century Britain, Pimm argues that the two centuries he covers were periods of profound change between the mediaeval and modern worlds. For women, however, that transition into an ‘enlightened’ future barely made a dent in their standing and treatment at the hands of the patriarchy: women were the ‘weaker vessel’ and easily influenced by the devil; they had few rights under a misogynistic law and little recourse to a gentler society. That sets the tone for Pimm’s catalogue of abuse directed against women at all levels of British society. It is a sometimes distressing read, but also fascinating.
Violence began at home where the man ruled over his wife and household almost without limits. That extended to children and servants. Sexual violence was a pronounced component of that abuse at one end of the spectrum, while libel and slander caused damage at the other end. Violence also underpinned many clandestine marriages and abductions. All of this was conducted under a lax legal system for perpetrators. But the legal system itself sanctioned extreme cruelty. Women sentenced to prison for even the most minor misdemeanours, including cross-dressing, were held in disgusting conditions, but they were also routinely whipped, often publicly in front of a crowd, some of whom attended for erotic satisfaction, and not just men. Branding and maiming also occurred as did the scold, a bracket placed round the head of female gossips and blasphemers. The latter might also be subject to ducking in the village pond or a river, or a whipping, and sometimes worse – Quakers had a particularly bad time at the hands of legally sanctioned religious fanaticism. The worst legal punishment for women was execution by burning, which was replaced by hanging under the notorious Bloody Code. Others were transported to the colonies where if anything conditions were worse than prisons. Women convicted of lesser offences might suffer the public pillory where they might endure anything from indignity to life-threatening violence. Being exposed in a cage was, however, on the way out in the 18th Century, though it was still used. Pimm concludes with the growing reform movement in the 19th Century that led to the end of these sustained levels of violence against women. Four appendices follow, providing more detail on some specific cases and a list of whipping offences in Jamaica from 1858, long after the Mother Country had stopped.
Pimm’s absorbing survey contains twenty chapters, which is disappointing in that there were so many facets to violent abuse against women. That might explain Pimm’s short chapter on the almost exclusively female crime of witchcraft, however, while I am not sure the Whipping Tom stories of obviously criminal behaviour quite fit into this book; they could have been excised to make more room elsewhere for deeper analysis. Pimm also derives many accounts directly from the sources, including some surprising perpetrators such as James Boswell, Jonathan Swift, and especially Samuel Pepys. Moreover, Pimm brings out the obvious patriarchal side to this story, but also the hypocritical class aspects, and he mentions race where applicable, all of which points to violence as an instrument of planned social control, though Pimm swerves round that conclusion. Nevertheless, Pimm has added to our knowledge of women during that transitional era in an enlightening but often uncomfortable read. 8/10
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by RNS | Jun 14, 2020 | Beating Tsundoku
Ian Baxter, The Destruction of 6th Army at Stalingrad (Pen & Sword, 2020)
Pen & Sword’s Images of War series continues to expand in interesting directions. Ian Baxter’s The Destruction of 6th Army at Stalingrad returns us to the Eastern Front during World War II in a volume that is somewhat problematic but still valuable.
After a brief survey of the background that brought Paulus and his 6th Army into the 1942 campaign on the Eastern Front, Baxter begins his narrative with the operations leading to the disaster at Stalingrad. The 6th Army started east of Kharkov and advanced steadily, pushing the Soviets back across the steppes from the Don to the Volga. There the smooth progress ended in attritional street warfare that cost both sides dearly, but the Germans could not afford their losses. The Soviet offensive around the city in November, coincided with the onset of Winter, and the 6th Army was soon surrounded. A relief force in December failed to get through. Paulus fought on until the Soviets literally fought their way to his door. A useful appendix outlining the Orders of Battle concludes Baxter’s book.
To make these books work, the accompanying photographs have to add to the narrative as well as telling stories in themselves. Baxter gets that aspect right for the most part with an excellent selection of photographs depicting German soldiers, with his captions highlighting details we otherwise might miss. The images begin with the Germans advancing in high spirits and well-resourced. Then we see more smoke on the horizon, and more Soviet POWs. The problem is that it takes a long time for Baxter to get his 6th Army into Stalingrad – the first snow photograph is on page 114 out of 150 – and the army’s destruction is narrated with photographs for only eleven pages at the end; for an army that had endured 199 days of ‘brutal combat’ that coverage seems very condensed. It is as if Baxter has baulked at the final fence, and it is not clear why he did so given the title of this book. For well-annotated images of the German advance into the Soviet Union, this is a very good book; but those interested in the plight of the 6th Army at Stalingrad could be very disappointed. 6/10
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by RNS | Jun 12, 2020 | Beating Tsundoku
The Hardest Slog
Simon Forty, Allied Armies in Sicily and Italy 1943-1945 (Pen & Sword, 2019)
In Allied Armies in Sicily and Italy 1943-1945, Simon Forty reminds us that mountainous Italy with its fickle environment is no place to fight a war. But the polyglot Allied forces did so anyway, slogging up the peninsula for nearly two years most of it against a redoubtable and nimble German army and the elements. Forty takes us on that journey in this welcome addition to Pen & Sword’s Images of War series.
After an overview of the Italian campaign, Forty begins his narrative with the invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky, in July 1943. The successful campaign lasted six weeks and taught the Allies many lessons, but the German army mostly slipped away to fight on the mainland. The Allies barely paused for breath before invading the peninsula in a three-pronged attack that almost ended in disaster. They pushed inexorably on, however, as the Germans withdrew behind carefully established defensive lines. Forty pauses at the infamous Battle of Monte Cassino and the German Gustav Line, which held up the Allied advance at great cost. Then came the flawed flanking landings at Anzio and the unnecessary progress to Rome. The advance north began again, tying down German troops, although the Allies did not have the strength to strike the decisive blow. In the end, both sides ran out of war to fight with the German surrender in May 1945.
The Images of War books rely heavily on photographs accompanying the text to tell a more complete story. Forty gets the balance right in this edition, particularly in showing the nature of the terrain and the conditions under which the campaign was fought. The photos also make it clear the Allies did not have it all their own way. Both the photos and the text give due weight to the multinational force on the Allied side with not just the British Commonwealth forces and Americans, but Poles, Greeks, Brazilians, and other contingents playing their part. The Italian partisans too are given their credit for weakening the Germans behind the lines at such high risk to the civilian population. There is a bit of an imbalance in Forty’s account with Sicily receiving a bit too much emphasis, but that is a minor quibble in what is a very useful book from the Images of War stable. 8/10
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