books and books review

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II — Michael Green

Published on May 4, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of American Tanks & AFVs of World War II

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II
Michael Green
376 pages including notes & index
published in 2014

It’s a fact of life that interest in World War II armour tends to focus on Nazi Germany, with Soviet vehicles perhaps a distant second. Understandable, considering how many interesting and downright strange types made it into production or had at least a prototype created. It’s always tempting to think about what if those potential wunderwaffen had made it into service, whereas the realities of western allied armour are always much more mundane. At least the French and to a lesser extend, the British, had some cool but impractical dead ends available in the early war, but American armour was just relentlessly pragmatic. the answer to any problem encountered seemed to be let’s build more Shermans, rather than creating some new exotic prototype.

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II does nothing to disabuse you of those preconceptions. Yes, there are some what ifs to be found, but in case after case what Michael Green documents here is the ruthless pragmaticism of the US army during world War II. It’s not just that the whole design and procurement process was much more centralised and efficient than that of Nazi Germany — but it certainly helped that there was no Hitler type mucking about on the US side. It’s also that the first instinct was always to look for solutions through modifying existing vehicles, rather than creating new ones. A determination not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good or even good enough. If it worked, why replace it just because there was a better option? That’s the attitude that comes across reading this book.

The Key to the Bulge — Stephen M. Ruseicki

Published on April 24, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of Snow & Steel

The Key to the Bulge: The Battle for Losheimergraben
Stephen M. Ruseicki
195 pages including notes
published in 1996

A visit to the Bastogne War Museum when I was on a holiday in the Ardennes last October got me interested in the Battle of the Bulge again, as did the series WW2TV did on the campaign in December. Their interview with Peter Caddick-Adams on 10 Facts about the Battle of the Bulge everyone should know led me to read his excellent book on the campaign as a whole. Which in turn whet my appetite for more on the individual battles within the Ardennes Campaign. Military history like all history is fractal after all. You can get a broad overview but if you zoom in you get a lot more detail, new insights. Which is where this book comes in. With Snow and Steel I got the broad strokes of the Ardennes Campaign, with this I got an overview of one of the most important of the early battles in it, one that could be argued determined the outcome of the entire Ardennes Offensive…

That battle was the battle for Losheimergraben, then, as now, a small border crossing between Belgium and Germany, too small even to call a village. In December 1944 this was the front line, the furthest point reached by the great Allied breakout from Normandy earlier that year. Since then the front line in the Ardennes had been largely static; the real fighting continued further up north, in the Netherlands and around Aachen. The Ardennes itself was quiet, an ideal sector to introduces green troops to life at the front and blood them before they got thrown into real battle. Losheimergraben and neighbouring places like Lanzerath were held by such troops, the 394th Infantry Regiment of the 99th infantry Division. It was these troops that would hold out for thirty-six hours against the Sixth Panzer Army starting on the 16th of December, denying it the quick victory it needed to comply to its already impossible schedule.

Not even leaving language untouched

Published on February 7, 2022Leave a comment

This bit in Marco Roth’s review of several Russell Hoban novels hit a chord with me and made me scrabble in my bookcases for my own copy of Riddley Walker:

Unlike Tolkien’s Middle Earth and its logical Elvish languages, intended to provide an ordered universe for dualistic fantasies of good v. evil, Riddley Walker’s world is our own, warped to breaking point. The pleasure of puzzling over Hoban’s inventiveness is complicated by the horror of the novel’s premise. The hellish aftermath of nuclear winter isn’t funny, and every pun or chopped up bit of language is a trace of this, as well as a game for the reader.

Adam Roberts in his foreword to the 2012 SF Masterworks wrote about being sixteen in 1980 when reading Riddley Walker and “the pervasive, acute anxiety that nuclear war might break out any day”. I’m a decade younger than him and I also remember that fear growing up in the eighties, only receding in the latter half of the decade. It might not be a coincidence that this novel, though started the year of my birth, 1974, was only finished and published in 1980. Roth cuts at the heart of Riddley Walker with this paragraph: nuclear war as a disaster that not just destroys society, but language itself. It reminds me of Threads, which similarly argued that the real disaster of nuclear war wasn’t just the war itself, but the destruction of human culture in its aftermath. My own fears at the time were more primeval, as in just not wanting to die in a nuclear war. It’s only later that I understood that as the true horror of a nuclear war. The threat of the destruction of not just civilisation, but of humanity smashed back to the stone age, its history lost, unable to climb back on.

That’s the difference between Riddley Walker/Threads and most American nuclear holocaust fiction. By the eighties it was impossible to pretend here in Europe that a nuclear war could be survived, let alone won; there just isn’t any place to escape to if the bombs had started dropping. In America on the other hand, with its still massive wilderness, you could imagine surviving away from the cities, rebuilding something akin to civilisation. Whether that would’ve been true is another matter.

Snow & Steel — Peter Caddick-Adams

Published on January 7, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of Snow & Steel

Snow & Steel: the Battle of the Bulge 1944 – 45
Peter Caddick-Adams
872 pages including notes and index
published in 2014

Nuts!

The story of the Bulge should be familiar. Hitler’s last roll of the dice, an offensive that nobody expected. The goal: to split the western allies apart by reconquering Antwerp. Elite panzers racing through the Ardennes, reliving the glory days of May 1940, expecting little resistance from the outnumbered and inexperienced American forces stationed there. the allied airfoces, grounded by bad weather and unable to come to the rescue. The unexpected resistance and Hitler’s hopes smashed at Bastogne, when after an imperious demand to surrender now the town was surrounded, the commanding American officer responded with a simple “Nuts!”

It’s a great story, a story the town of Bastogne dines out on to this very day. When I was there on holiday last October literally every second shop window had something about the siege in its display. It also has the benefit of being mostly true. But it isn’t the entire truth of the Ardennes Offensive, or Peter Caddick-Adams wouldn’t have needed almost nine hundred pages to tell its story. There were other sieges beside Bastogne, other places where American resistance held up the Nazi attack long enough for it to ultimately fail, other tales of heroism and tragedy to be told. Arguably, one could say that the fate of the offensive had been determined long before Bastogne had even been reached. Similarly, the story didn’t end when the siege of Bastogne was lifted. There was more hard fighting to be done, fighting which lasted into January and February of 1945.

Why keep a large library?

Published on September 11, 2021Leave a comment

Umberto Eco walking through his 30,000 library to get a book he knows exactly where to find it is such a power move:

Some nerdy Economist writer: hE cAn’T hAvE rEaD aLl ThOsE bOoKs:

I’m a huge Umberto Eco fan, fiction and non-fiction.
But his private library – said to contain 30,000 books – is clearly nonsense.
That’s more than *a book a day every day of his adult life*. Can we please get a tiny bit serious?

All in defense of the idea that people only keep books to impress others, a dumb person’s idea of what would impress a clever person. Why would anybody be impressed by the mere fact you can write books written by much more smarter people than you (and the occasional numbnut)? But what struck me the most with this particular tweet from that thread was the sheer inability to understand what a personal library is for and how it functions. That idea that it should only contain the books you’re going to read immediately, that anything else is preening is just incomprehensible. Fair enough if that’s your personal preference, but beware that it’s a strange notion to have if you’re not forced to by matters of economics or convenience.

part of the bookshelves in my living room

The entire thread has a very, ah, economist view of books in that they have to be useful and should be discarded if no longer so. It’s on a par with the prolier than thou leftie clickbaiter that you should sell or donate any books you have read or not planning to read right now because otherwise you’re hoarding. The assumption that you always know what you want to read or need to read and can plan accordingly and therefore you only need to keep those books to hand. Real life never works that way. And even if it did, insisting this is the only way to read is denying yourself the pleasures of choice, of having that freedom to say fuck it and read something else.

oh also, people have a comically phony number of books!
The dude in FT story has a library of 8000 books – has he been reading 2 books a week for 80 years??

A solid year of reading (say 50 books) = 90cm of bookshelf. So people with 100m of books are full of it.

Perhaps it’s just that you’re a slow reader if you think fifty books is a year’s worth of reading and that’s why you’re so amazed at libraries of thousands of books. But to think Umberto Eco, of all people, wouldn’t have been able to read all the books in his library? Not that he necesssarily had, as Eco knew the value of unread books. The incredulity at what are not that large libraries is hilarious, the misunderstanding that every book in it is meant to be read is dangerous. Not every book you buy needs to be read right away; not every book needs to be read at all. There’s a pleasure in simply having a book. Lords know I’ve bought books with no intention to read them. The greatest joy of any library is having books at hand to be able to read whenever you choose to. Especially if, like Umberto Eco, you grew up pre-internet when you either had to have them yourself or you had to hope the local library had them or you were out of luck…

Let’s just get rid of this idea that you have to justify why you keep a library or when or how you read. Just accept that people differ in how they read and that there’s more value in a library than it just having the books you need to read right now.