BillP's Book\Miniature\Wargame Blog

I just finished Taught to Kill: An American Boy’s War from the Ardennes to Berlin by John B. Babcock. I must say that this is somewhat different from pretty much any other WWII memoir I’ve ever read. Babcock is a very, very good writer. He is very articulate at expressing his feelings and emotions about the dangerous and chaotic environment he found himself in as a weapons platoon NCO in an ETO infantry division. Babcock’s memoir starts when the 78th Infantry Division was deployed to the ETO just before the battle of the Bulge and ends with his return home in November of 1945.

This, as the title implies, is an examination from a theological and philosophical viewpoint of Greeley’s fiction. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Greeley, he is a Roman Catholic priest, who before sustaining a traumatic brain injury in an accident, wrote “novels of grace” about how God manifests himself in the lives of contemporary Catholics. I have enjoyed Greely’s novels for years, in fact, they were instrumental in bringing me back to the Catholic Church after a long period of absence.

This is my umpteenth reading of this book. For those of you not familiar with Conroy, he writes what might be described as “Southern Gothic” novels of life in the mid to late 20th century South, mainly focused on Charleston. This book is right in that vein being a novel set in a state military academy that is clearly modeled after The Citadel, where Conroy went to college in the mid 60s.

I just finished A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman and I must confess this book is a bit of a cipher to me. I’m not sure what the author was trying to accomplish here. While the book was very engaging and well written, it seemed to lack focus. The book really divides into three main topics; the direct participation of individual Brits in the conflict, the efforts of both Confederate representative to secure support (both material and polticial) and the American representatives to deny them that support, and finally, an examination of the relationship between the US and British Governments which is mostly seen through the lens of relations between Seward and Sumner on the American side and Lyon and Russell on the British side.

Next up was a re-reading of what I think are the best soldier level memoirs to come of WWII. These four books; Quartered Safe out Here, The General Danced at Dawn, McAuslan in the Rough and The Sheikh and the Dustbin, all by George MacDonald Fraser tell the story of the Flashman author’s WWII experience. Quartered Safe Out Here describes Fraser’s combat experience as a private and lance corporal in the Border regiment which was assigned to the 17^th ID (Black Cats) of XIV Army in Burma. The other three books are thinly disguised “novelizations” of the author’s immediate post-war experience as a subaltern with the Gordon Highlanders in Libya, Palestine and Britain.

I love these books. I’ve had paperback editions of them for years and they were amongst the first things I bought for the Kindle when I got one. Fraser is at turns introspective, serious, philosophical and hilarious. The books are extremely well written and really give the reader a sense of the men Fraser served with and the world in which he served. Anyone interested in the experience of men at war, would read these books. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

57 for the year.

Next up was a really good book on the Pearl Attack, Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions by Alan D. Zimm.  Zimm, a former naval officer, works in the Aviation Systems and Advanced Concepts Group at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. In this book he uses Operations Research methods and computer simulations (based on U.S. Naval War College combat models from the period) to analyze the attack resulting in a very detailed evaluation, on both the operational and tactical levels, of the attack.

The results of the analysis are very interesting. Zimm’s conclusion is that contrary to “conventional wisdom” which describes a group of very experienced and expert Japanese pilots executing a brilliantly planned operation  with almost total success, the attack was actually pretty poorly planned and executed, with far less damage inflicted that might have been the case had the Japanese airstrike been effectively planned and controlled.  Among the things pointed out by Zimm:

• Lacking effective radios, the Japanese pilots were pretty much “on their own” one they got over target and outside the visual signal range of their commanders
• Fuchida, in addition to being somewhat “careless with the truth”, bungled the start of the attack by screwing up the signal indicating whether or not surprise had been achieved
• The aircrew involved in the attack where not nearly as veteran and experienced as usually assumed, which may explain why the US fighters that did get airborne  achieved a 4:1 kill ratio against the attackers
• The planning was really poor, with haphazard resource allocation and target selection. For example, despite having a fairly well formed doctrine on the need for Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD), the Japanese planners failed to incorporate SEAD into their attack plan. Consequently, during the attack. American AA was very effective at interfering with torpedo attacks.
• There was no plan for a third attack against the infrastructure and/or oil storage facilities and even had the Japanese mounted such an attack, they simply didn’t have the resources to inflict significant damage and the damage they did inflict would have repaired within months.

Finally, Zimm makes the point that the attack was a strategic and operational failure. Essentially it unnecessarily embroiled the Japanese in a “total war” they couldn’t possibly hope to win without gaining them any significant strategic advantage.

I not sure I totally buy his thesis, but it was a very interesting and thought provoking read. I recommend this one very highly to anyone who is interested in the Pearl Harbor attack and WWII in the Pacific.

53 for the year

Ok,  I read Game of Thrones and really liked it. So I read Clash of Kings and, while I still enjoyed it, I found the series tending toward tedium with too many extraneous sub-plots and a rather depressing story.  Well, I’m sorry to say that my worst fears were realized. I just finished A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, he third and fourth books in the “Song of Ice and Fire” series by George R.R. Martin, and I was grievously disappointed.  These books were just horrible, and not just “one bad book in an otherwise good series” horrible, but Fonzie-jumping-the-shark horrible, and the fourth was even more horrible than the third.

The plot continues to be one of the most depressing I’ve ever encountered. Almost as if someone decided to write a novel about the darkest days of the 30-Years War or the Black Death. The pace of the story is mired in concrete, with what few developments there are buried underneath a morass of irrelevant sub-plots. And the writing is in dire need of an editor.

Finally, in the fourth book, Martin has basically ignored many of the most interesting and engaging characters in his story, relegating them to the fifth novel. For those of you unfamiliar with the back-story, Martin has narrated the action in these books in a series of intermeshing chapters each focusing on the perspective of a single character. The problem is that when Martin finished the “fourth book” he discovered it was far too long (like twice as long) to be published as is. Rather than split it in two by following all of the characters half as long, he chose to split the book “lengthwise” by following half of the characters the entire length of the book and relegating the other (more interesting to my mind) half to the fifth volume.

At any rate, I’ve you’ve read the first three, be advised that the plot on the fourth one isn’t getting any less depressing and that there is nothing at all about many characters including Jon Snow, Danreys and Tryion and only two chapters on Arya.

I’m definitely through with these….

52 for the year.