BillP's Book\Miniature\Wargame Blog

I just finished John Ellis’ magnificent Brute Force. Ellis’ thesis is that the key factor in the Allies victory over the Axis powers was primarily the result of overwhelming economic power which they were able to apply to the battlefield with their immense industrial potential.

Ellis’ book is replete with examples and statistics that prove his point, including a fairly comprehensive set of charts and tables in the appendices that are worth the price of admission all by themselves.  The result of all this is, to this reader at least, utterly convincing.

In addition to proving his central thesis, Ellis provides several interesting insights in the balance of his work, not the least of which was that the average rate of mortality among Bomber Command aircrew actually exceeded the mortality rate of Kamikaze pilots! Another interesting finding is that the level of motor transport necessary to fully supply Rommel’s Afrika Korps at the end of its 900 mile supply line from Tripoli would have required the Wehrmacht to commit roughly 75% of all the trucks it possessed, leaving the forces on the Eastern front more or less immobile.

I found Ellis so convincing that I’m just about ready to sell all of my strategic level wargames on WWII.  I recommend it very highly to pretty much anyone who wants to gain some insight into the results of WWII. If you’re interesting in WWII, you’ve pretty much got to read this book.

51 for the year.

Impressed by the first season of HBO’s production, I decided to read the actual book the series was based on. Game of Thrones is the first volume in George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Ice series of epic fantasy novels. The first volume introduces the milieu and the main “houses”, the Stark’s, the Baratheons, the Lannisters and the Targaryns who will be in conflict for the series. The book and series basically deal with a war of secession over who will control the “Seven Kingdoms” which seems to be a quasi early middle ages sort of place with a small amount of magic to leaven things.

The book is tremendously engaging and very well written.  Some of the characters are very well drawn. In fact, that is what has really drawn me to the series, Martin’s characterizations are quite interesting with none of the one dimensionality so commonly found in fantasy. Nearly all the characters, both the “good guy” Starks and the “bad guy” Lannisters have a bit of the opposite in them, with few of them being wholly good or bad.

I won’t go into too much of the plot, suffice it to say that the I immensely enjoyed the book and look forward to reading the rest of them, in fact I’ve already obtained the next three on my Kindle for Android.

50 for the year.

I recently finished Failure in the Saddle: Nathan Bedford Forrest, Joe Wheeler, and the Confederate Cavalry in the Chickamauga Campaign by Dave Powell. Readers of this blog will recognize Powell as the author (along with Dave Friedrichs, who also did the maps for this book) of the stellar The Maps of Chickamauga. In this book Powell continues to cement his reputation was one of the leading authorities on the Chickamauga campaign.

The book starts with brief biographical sketches of the Bragg and the Confederate cavalry commanders down to brigade level, then proceeds to a summary of Rosecrans’ Tullahoma campaign. Next comes a review of the state and composition of the cavalry of the Army of the Tennessee. All this sets the stage for a detailed analysis of the cavalry operations conducted by Forrest and Wheeler during the maneuvering leading up to the battle of Chickamauga, the battle itself, and its aftermath. Finally the author provides his assessment of the performance of the Confederate mounted arm during the campaign. Given the title, I’m sure that it will come as no surprise that he finds them lacking.

I found the book simply outstanding. It was well researched with dozens of primary and secondary sources cited. It was also very well written, consistently clear, concise and engaging. The maps were excellent in both number and utility. Powell’s thesis, that much, but by no means all, of Bragg’s poor performance during the campaign was a result of the abysmal service provided by Forrest and Wheeler, is convincingly argued. It certainly appears that neither officer seemed to understand the operational functions of cavalry; screening friendly movements while monitoring enemy ones. Wheeler also seems to have been singularly unable to impose any sort of military discipline on the troopers under his command. Powell also survey’s the existing literature on cavalry operations during the campaign to provide readers with the context to evaluate his thesis. Finally the book includes several appendices addressing the strength and losses of Confederate cavalry, reproducing the report of General Roman’s 1865 inspection of Wheeler’s command, providing a detailed examination of the legendary Bragg-Forrest Confrontation and describing a comprehensive driving tour (complete with GPS coordinates!) of the campaign.

I recommend this very highly for anyone who is already familiar with the battle of Chickamauga who wants to understand the maneuvering that drove the battle, readers who do not have such familiarity would be well served by reading Powell’s excellent Maps of Chickamauga first to provide the necessary context to fully appreciate this book.

49 for the year

Naked Heat by “Richard Castle” is the second in a series of “fictitious” mysteries published to augment the ABC television series about a mystery writer who “rides along” with a team of NYPD homicide detectives. Like the first novel in the series, Heat Wave, this is a well-executed, workman-like little mystery. This book, also like its predecessor, particularly shines at maintaining the illusion created by the TV show of Richard Castle and his relationship with Detectives Beckett, Esposito and Ryan. Whoever wrote the book, has done a very good job of creating characters plausibly “based on” the already fictitious characters of the TV series.

The plot is pretty interesting, starting, as all Castle episodes do, with a dead body. Shortly, we find another dead body that seems connected to the first one, only by the MO of the murder. Then we’re introduced to a whole cast of unsavory suspects, and yet more bodies! Gradually, Heat, Rook and “ROACH” (the collective name for Detectives Reilly and Ochoa) connect all the dots, and unravel the mystery.  Anyway, if you like the TV show Castle, you’ll really like this book. In fact, if even if you’re unfamiliar with (or indifferent to) the show, but like mysteries in general, this isn’t a bad way to kill a couple of hours at the beach or on a plane.

48 for the year.

Next up was Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh. This is a fairly interesting little novel about an intersteller war between the Earth based “Earth Company” and the breakaway forces called “the Union”. The situation that exists before the novel opens is essentially, this:  In the days before FTL travel, The “Earth Corporation” has financed a series of space stations orbiting planetless stars far from Earth. Each of the stations is more or less dependent on trade with Earth for biological material. Because of the difficulty in coordination caused by the time consumed in sub-light travel, gradually the merchant ship crews and station inhabitants become culturally diverse from Earth, but remain dependant on the Earth Company for organic material. The Earth Company of course ruthlessly exploits this dominance.  This equation changes when a habitable planet, Pell, is discovered and a space station is built in orbit around the planet. Since Earth crops can grow on the planet, the influence and dominance of the Earth Company is greatly diminished, and some of the further out stations, centered around another habitable planet, Cyteen, rebel openly.  Eventually, the development of FTL travel, motivates the Company to try bringing the rebellious stations into line, eventually constructing a “Company Fleet”, under Mazian, to subdue the stations,  while the stations form “The Union” to resist. , , becomes less and less connected to the Company.  As the novel opens, Union forces are on the verge of victory, and the space station orbiting Pell is attempting to maintain neutrality in the conflict. The novel described the events and personalities affecting Pell’s fate over the course of six months or so right at the end of the so-called “Company War”.

I’m afraid couldn’t get past Cherryh’s writing style. While the story in the book was interesting and the characters were pretty well drawn,  I’m afraid the book was just too much work. Something about Cherryh’s writing style just doesn’t work for me. I sometimes find her writing terribly opaque, in that I can read a paragraph and not really understand what just happened. It is only by plowing on, that I can infer from later events, what actually happened.  Let me put it this way, after finishing the novel, I went to Wikipedia and, in the synopsis there, discovered several major plot points that I had completely missed. It’s too bad because the story really is interesting and compelling. I just can’t bear to wade through her prose to get to it. There are something like 28 other novels set in this milieu, I won’t be reading any of them.

47 for the year.

The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick I’m frankly, not sure why I picked this book up. I suppose having read Donovan’s A Terrible Glory last year made me somewhat receptive to another Custer book. I’m afraid Philbrick’s book just isn’t quite as good as Donovan’s.  That is not to say that is bad, it isn’t. It just isn’t quite to the same level; I think if I had read Philbrick before I read Donovan, I would have enjoyed it a bit more.

Despite not being quite as good as Donovon, there is one thing Philbrick covers better; the Indian side of things. Philbrick has a lot more material on the Indians especially about Sitting Bull and his relatives. This material includes a fair amount of detail on the motivations and intentions of the natives.  Another thing I appreciated about Philbrick was his candor about the lack of certainty about the movements and dispositions of Custer’s main column, and how its last stand played out. Finally, Philbrick has some interesting things to say about the topography of the battlefield, which might help us to understand how Custer  got himself into this mess.

At the end of the day, I can “take or leave” this book. It wasn’t bad, but having read Donovan’s Terrible Glory, I’m not sure it was worth the time.

46 for the year.

There’s an old Army saying that “”Artillery Lends Dignity to What Otherwise Would Be a Common Brawl”, and Bradley M. Gottfried’s The Artillery of Gettysburg tells you pretty much everything you need or want to know about “The King of Battle” at Gettysburg. Gottfried starts out with a fairly comprehensive introduction describing the organization and command structure of the artillery of the two armies, the characteristics of the three main types of cannon (rifles, napoleons and howitzers) employed, an overview of the various types of ammunition (shot, shell and canister) and finally takes the reader through the “nuts and bolts” of how the gun crew actually served the gun.

The book then proceeds to describe, in great detail, the employment of artillery during the various phases of the three day battle. This section, divided into eleven chapters, is very well written, with many excellent maps and makes extensive use of primary and secondary sources. Finally the book wraps up with an excellent set of detailed orders of battle for the artillery of both sides at the battery level (which include type of guns in the battery and losses) as well as a handy reference table for the characteristics of the various guns employed by the armies.

This book is, as far as I can tell, pretty much the definitive monograph on Artillery at Gettysburg. In fact, readers will find it an excellent primer on Civil War artillery in general. Furthermore, the book is surprisingly engaging for such as narrowly drawn and technical subject. It is well written, lively, and detailed without bogging down in technical detail or minutiae.  Readers should be aware that the book is fairly narrowly focused and therefore should not be the first book one reads on Gettysburg. With that caution, this is an excellent book, which I recommend highly.

45 for the year

I just finished Three Months in the Southern States: April, June, 1863 by Sir Arthur Fremantle. This is the diary of a Coldstream Guards officer who spent three months travelling around the Confederate states during the Spring and early summer of 1863. During his trip, Fremantle visited Atlanta, Augusta, GA, Charleston and Richmond, hobb-nobbing with a variety of Confederate officials high and low.  He also spent a considerable amount of time at the headquarters of I Corps Army of Northern Virginia and become fairly familiar with Longstreet, Lee and members of their staffs. Additionally, Fremantle actually travelled with the Army as it advanced across Maryland and into Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg campaign as was present, at I Corps HQ during all three days of the battle. Then after the battle, on his way back to England, Fremantle wound up in New York City pretty much at the height of the Draft Riots.

I must say, the book wasn’t as good as I thought it would be. I think perhaps I was looking for more insight or consideration than Fremantle was interested in (or capable of?) providing. It seems to me that Fremantle’s observations were fairly superficial and perhaps a touch naive. He seems very willing to take pretty much everything he was told by Confederate officials about their war effort and race relations pretty much at face value. He was very impressed with the Southerner officers he met and didn’t seem much impressed by the Northern civilians he encountered during the invasion. Although the book was published in 1864, based on his experiences through July 1863, one gets the impression that, even at that late date, Fremantle expected the CSA to prevail in the conflict.

Anyway, it was interesting enough, and at 140 pages didn’t take very long to read so I recommend it, but not strongly.

44 for the year.

This week was Dead Reckoning, the 11^th volume in Charlaine Hariss’ “Southern Vampire Mysteries” series. By this time the series is starting to show its age, and frankly this volume wasn’t as good as previous ones. Most of these books begin with some sort of crime, which Sookie spends the book unraveling. Inevitably the crime involves one or more members of Louisiana’s “supernatural” community and unraveling it usually gives us more information about the politics and culture of the “supes” as well as Sookie’s evolving relationships with its members.

This book begins conventionally enough with a fire-bombing of Merlott’s, the bar where Sookie waitresses, but the fire-bombing quickly is eclipsed by a plot which I won’t describe, but which becomes the main focus of the book. The problem is that the book fells perfunctory and kind of “phoned in”, which I guess is nearly inevitable on the 11^th outing for these characters. Anyway, it was okay, and I”ll probably keep reading them, but I won’t be buying any more of them.

43 for the year.

I just finished the four book series of John Christian Falkenberg books by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling. The four books; Falkenberg’s Legion, Prince of Mercenaries, Go tell the Spartans and Prince of Sparta cover the last 30ish years of Pournelle’s “CoDominium” a alternative future history where the US and USSR combine and form a “CoDominium” to essentially rule Earth without any interference from other powers.

I guess the books are supposed to be something of a treatise of the role of military power in politics and the honor of soldiers as well as a primer on counterinsurgency. And they are more or less successful in those areas. But I must say I wasn’t as enthralled by them now, at 48, as I was I my early 20s when I first read them. They are still good, well written, stories albeit ones with more or less predictable plots and somewhat two-dimensional characters. They just aren’t as a good, or profound as I remember them being.

42 for the year