Warfare and military history Archives - Page 3 of 4

Omaha Beach: a Flawed Victory – Adrian R. Lewis

Published on November 5, 2010

Omaha Beach: a Flawed Victory

Omaha Beach: a Flawed Victory
Adrian R. Lewis
381 pages including index and notes
published in 2001

Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory was not quite the book I expected it to be or wanted to read. What I thought I was getting out of the library was a book describing the landings itself, looking in detail at how the battle for Omaha Beach evolved, similar to a book on Kursk I got at the same time. What I got instead was an analysis of the strategic choices made for the landings and how that led to near-disaster at Omaha. The actual battle is dealt with in the first chapter, the rest of the book deals with the reasons why the battle happened as it did.

Any disappointment I felt was shortlived. The book I got was easily as interesting as the book I wanted to get. What it managed to do was to make me question the “official” reasons why the Americans at Omaha Beach did so much worse than their colleagues at Utah or the British/Commonwealth forces at their landings. What I’ve always read was that the American commanders at Omaha had both underestimated the German resistance and the German fortification and had rejected the use of all the various special enginering tanks the British had developed to tackle these fortifications, the socalled “Hobart’s Funnies“. What Adrian R. Lewis argues instead was that the real problem was that the Normandy Landings were planned according to the wrong doctrine, that the experience build up in earlier landings in the Pacific and the Mediterranean was ignored in favour of finding new solutions to the same problems because the commanders in charge of Operation Overlord overestimated the uniqueness of the operation.

The Battle of Kursk – David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House

Published on August 8, 2010

The Battle of Kursk

The Battle of Kursk
David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House
472 pages including index and notes
published in 1999

Kursk is a name most people probably only know from that Russian submarine that sank some years ago. Much fewer people know what that submarine was named after: one of the bloodiest and most important battles of World War II. The Battle of Kursk was fought in 1943, the largest tank battle of the war and was the last battle in which the Germans had the strategic initiative. After Kursk it was the Russians who held the upper hand and the Germans who had to defend. What’s more it was the first battle in which the Russian forces managed to stop the German blitzkrieg
It’s also a battle loved by war nerds, as it got the German panzer army at its peak taking on endless waves of Russian T-34s and Su-76s on the endless steppes and is so much more interesting than the infantry slog of Stalingrad…

However much of what we used to know about Kursk has come from German sources, as Soviet archives have only come available since the end of the USSR. So it has always been about the heroic deeds of the panzer commanders against the endless Slavic hordes so to speak. The emphasis has largely been on the Germans plans for the battle, on what went wrong for them and especially in the memoirs of those particpated, how it was not their fault that the battle was lost but Hitler’s. The Battle of Kursk is one of the first books on the battle to make full use of Soviet archives as well as German ones, giving a much more complete picture of the battle.

Fields of Conflict – Douglas Scott, Lawrence Babits and Charles Haecker

Published on May 15, 2010

Cover of
Fields of Conflict

Fields of Conflict
Douglas Scott, Lawrence Babits and Charles Haecker
450 pages including index
published in 2009

Fields of Conflicts is a collection of essays on battlefield archaeology, based on papers presented on a conference of the same title as the book, held in 2004. Battlefield archaeology as a separate discipline is a relatively recent development, even if military history is of course of quite ancient vintage. Astounding as it may seems, battlefield archaeology only got started in the early eighties, with a groundbreaking research paper on the Little Bighorn battlefield. Though it seems obvious in retrospect to apply archaeological techniques in researching battles and battlefields, battlefields are such ephemeral sites, battles rarely lasting more than a day, while archaeology traditionally focused on sites that had been inhabitated for centuries, that it’s no wonder it took so long for somebody to do so. That somebody was Douglas Scott, also one of the editors of this volume and you realise the impact of his research by seeing how often in the essays collected here it is refered to.

In fact, Douglas Scott is so influential that I’ve seen him on the History Channel showcasing his Little Big Horn research a few years ago, which was the first time I heard of battlefield archaeology. It was fascinating to see how it was possible to almost track the movement of single soldiers on the battlefield by hunting for the detritus they left behind in the course of the battle. Fields of Conflicts shows how much can be known of even obscure battles this way, through creative use of archaeological techniques and especially metal dectoring, but also how much still remains unknownable as well. It’s a fascinating read even for armchair historians like myself, a glimpse in how the real professionals handle these problems.

AK-47 – Larry Kahaner

Published on March 24, 2009

Cover of AK-47

AK-47
Larry Kahaner
258 pages including index
published in 2007

The AK-47 is such an iconic weapon that it’s even present on the flag of Mozambique. As a brand, ít’s as global as Coca Cola, as omnipresent as McDonalds. It’s the prefered weapon of every guerilla or freedom fighter everywhere and is therefore almost always used as the weapon of choice for Hollywood bad guys, just like its heroes used the true blue American M-16. More seriously, the AK-47, because it’s so widespread and cheap has influenced the outcome of more wars in the past sixty years than perhaps any other weapon. In America meanwhile it not only became the symbol of the third world terorist, but also the face of domestic crime, as “the gnagbanger with an AK-47” became the symbol of the evil the gun control lobby was fighting against with the assault rifle ban.

Such an iconic weapon deserves a history that does justice to it, something that goes beyond the usual war nerd recitation of design history and battle use, but which also looks at the cultural and political impact of the AK 47. Larry Kahaner has tried to write such a book with AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War, but isn’t quite up to the task. Judging from the list of titles mentioned on the inside front cover, his true calling lies more in business management books. AK-47 is too slight and too shallow to do justice to this weapon.

Sherman and Firefly – Terry J. Gander

Published on May 3, 2008

Cover of Tanks in Detail - Sherman & Firefly

Tanks in Detail – Sherman & Firefly
Terry J. Gander
96 pages
published in 2003

This is, like the book on the Panzer III an entry in the Tanks in Detail series. This series takes a tank or (part of) a tank family and aims to provide a reasonably indepth look at its development and characteristics, aiming for an audience of World War II enthusiasts and military modelers. They’re sort of inbetween those general overview volumes disposing of all WW2 tanks in less than 200 pages and the really hardcore 500 page tomes that detail each nut and bolt of a particular tank model. There’s only a limited audience for these books, especially books about lesser known tanks, so they tend to be pricey and short, often with a
greater emphasis on pictures than on text. Nevertheless when done well they’re a good introduction to a particular tank or tank model.

Unfortunately, I don’t think these volumes are particularly well done, as I also said in my Panzer III review. Much of the information found here could also be found by a trawl through Wikipedia, let alone some of the more dedicated World War II sites. The pictures on the other hand are copious, but mainly show various Sherman models in action or on display, more as illustration than as an augmentation of the main text, though there are some good interior shots and pictures of the various engines used. Unfortunately however, unlike the Panzer III volume, there are no colour side views to show off the camouflage schemes used on the Sherman, nor are there any technical drawings to scale.