|
Death on the Don - Favorite book read this year. Shattered Sword by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully - It's a good account of Midway. Great breakdown of the Japanese planning and the combat from the Japanese perspective. I don't feel it's as revolutionary as many people indicate. It’s a seminal work but like all seminal works there are some massive issues. The book needed much tighter editing. It has two authors and reads like it. Bit schizophrenic in its criticisms. It’ll take the piss out of a previous author and then immediately make faulty claims of its own. Midway was not possible for the Japanese to win. The authors insistence to the contrary detracts from the great points they make about the flaws in the plan and Japanese planning. The authors coming down hard on the side of the Japanese does make for a good starting point if you want to create a dialogue about Japanese damage control (They weren't as bad as most people seem to think). Instead of Shattered Sword, the book about 1942 and carriers people should read is Black Shoe Carrier Admiral. It is the culmination of Lundstrom's trilogy covering carrier operations during the first year of the Pacific War. Leveraging the research of 9 years and three books, he attacks the ill reputation of Vice Admiral Fletcher, America's commander at the tip of the spear for the first 9 months of the war. Some of his defense is a bit iffy, proving a negative is a struggle, but there is no better single source on the strategy and commanders for the first 9 months of the Pacific war. If nothing else, it's worth a read to find out why the Hornet's air group went off on a goosechase at the Battle of Midway. The First Team by Lundstrom - A history of the Navy carrier fighter pilots in the Pacific that America began WWII with. In describing their actions and doctrine it follows every American carrier mission from Dec. 7 1941 to Midway. Does a great job analyzing every aerial combat between American carrier planes and Japanese carrier and island-based planes. It picks apart the Zero Supremacy of the early war and explains how US carriers were able to hold their own in the engagements of 1942. The First Team and the Guadalcanal Campaign finishes out 1942 with the aerial and naval battles of Guadalcanal. Chase it down with Operation KE by Roger & Dennis Letourneau which details the Japanese withdrawal from Guadalcanal in January of 1943, rounding out the Guadalcanal narrative. Path of Infinite Sorrow follows the result of Coral Sea derailing the Japanese plan leading to the attempt to take Port Moresby by crossing the Owen Stanley. I'm a big fan of all of Robert Cressman's works, but the one I'd most recommend is his book on Wake Island, A Magnificent Fight. It's a very detailed account of the construction and defense of the island and explores narrative conflict between the Navy island commander and the Marine garrison commander. Cressman makes full use of his position as historian at the Naval History and Heritage Center to dig up a wealth of archival sources. His two carrier histories, of the Yorktown & Ranger, are the best books about individual carriers yet. Stafford's Enterprise is good, but when comparing his memoirs to the Enterprise it's easy to see that his writing is better when he has personal familiarity with the subject. The U. S. Navy, The Neutrality Patrol, And Atlantic Fleet Escort Operations, 1939-1941. It's a paper, but it's a great dissection of America's involvement in World War 2 before Pearl Harbor. For two years the Atlantic Squadron operated on a war footing before America's official entry. The paper details the technology & doctrine sharing between US & UK as well as the combat the convoys and patrols looked for. I appreciate it because it looks beyond the U-boat and includes the raiders. On December 7th there were more American carriers in the Atlantic than in the Pacific. The Pacific has gone down as the Carrier War and the Atlantic as the U-boat War, but America entered the war with 4 carriers in the Atlantic and they weren’t there to fight the u-boats. Available here: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a245396.pdf John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy by Evan Thomas is a good biography on the American naval hero. I was worried that it'd be jingoistic and/or whitewash his character flaws. Instead it's a well-sourced biography that makes extensive use of correspondence to highlight how Jones demeanor routinely alienated friends, created political enemies, and prevented him from attaining any lasting command and employment. Before reading this book I did not know that he served in the Russian navy or died in France poor and alone. Moving forward read Teddy Roosevelt's Naval War of 1812. Prior to Teddy, the history of 1812's naval conflict was firmly dictated by a Brit who hated Americans and misconstrued data to downplay American victories and swell British triumphs. America had its own author but he neglected to do his own data research and ceded the battleground of statistics to the Brits. Teddy compares the histories and does his own research to support his hypothesis that victory goes to those who invest in training and modern technology. It is incredible fun to read Teddy parsing William Jame’s ridiculous assertions. For example James often goes to great lengths to contrive that America owes its victories to her vessels being crewed by Brits not Americans. Teddy takes the logic of this excuse to its next step which would demonstrate that American officers lead Brits better than Brit officers. Not what James was intending. Armored Thunderbolt - History of the design and development of the Sherman tank of World War II. Does a good job laying out how the Sherman came to be, why it received limited gun and armor development, argues well that the tank was an eminently suitable workhouse, and even makes a case for it as the best tank of 1943. Recommended if your opinion of the Sherman is derived from Deathtraps, History channel documentaries, or other sources that focus on the German cats. Follow it up with Death on the Don for a reinterpretation of the performance of German allies on the Eastern Front. If you read Armored Thunderbolt first, it will make a lot more sense why the lesser Axis armored divisions were still incredibly useful even if equipped with outdated and very-outdated tanks. Riviera to the Rhine - US Army Green Book on the campaigns from the landings in southern France in September 1944 through the Vosges and the last German offensive on the Western Front in January 1945. A little dry but packed with information. The whole Green Book series is a recommendation. I'm highlighting Riviera to the Rhine because there are so few secondary sources about Dragoon that people often don't know that there was an Army Group on Patton's right or that there was a German offensive after The Battle of the Bulge. I don’t care much for examining what-ifs too far, but Riviera to the Rhine does a good job explaining why the Eisenhower did not support the Sixth Army Group in crossing the Rhine in 1944. A more thematically focused alternative would be When The Odds Were Even. Keith Bonn uses the Vosges campaign to argue against the notion that the Wehrmacht was superior to the U.S. Army at the tactical level and that America only won battles by drowning the Germans in planes, artillery shells, and cheap tanks. Imperfect but recommended if you're tired of germanophiles. Day of the Panzer is a more focused account on the landings in Southern France and the pursuit of the German army group. Bit weird because the book is a lot of context for a specific engagement where the author’s dad is killed before they’d ever met each other. Otherwise well-written and interesting view-point of the race to the Lower Vosges. Cutthroats by Robert Dick is a good account of late-war tank combat in the Pacific. Robert drove a tank in the Philippines in 1944 and commanded a tank in Okinawa in 1945. His description of combat on Okinawa is particularly interesting. For some humor, pay special attention to Robert's three run ins with colonels. Hidden Warbirds is a decent book about locating, salvaging, and restoring airplane wrecks. A large number of museum aircraft are restored wrecks pulled from the water or remote locales. If you've been to an air & space museum, you've seen a plane whose salvage is described in this book. A little samey between stories, a little dry, but fascinating. After reading go to Udvar-Hazy and look into the conservation shop. Lately there is also a conservator working on the blimp gondola in the exhibit floor. If you can, talk to the conservators about creating components to restore planes without any specialized tooling machines. Warthog by William Smallwood is a good book on the A-10 in the Gulf War published in 1993. The A-10 was the first plane I loved. If you've mentioned affection for this plane on these forums and haven't read this book, you need to pick it up. Bomber Pilot - the first memoir I read which got me started in reading military history. B-24 squadron commander in the Med during 1943 and operations officer in England during 1944. He Forest Gump'ed his way through '43 & '44. Leading his squadron to Ploesti, bombing beaches on D-Day, and serving with Jimmy Stewart are just a few notables. Good author. Easy reading. Wildcats Over Casablanca - an account of VF-41, The Red Rippers, in Operation Torch. It was published in 1943 so there is definitely some bias. Only half of it was written by the pilots; the other half was written by the ghostwriter from notes. Pretty easy to tell the halves apart. Every Ripper survived the action despite several of them being shot down. That makes for an easy, uplifting tale for wartime, but also highlights the important element of good luck in Torch. On paper Casablanca was tougher than the other major American landing of 1942, Guadalcanal. The Japanese had the success of Savo but never took the invasion transports under fire. The French light squadron did. Had a submarine torpedo connected with the Ranger, had a shell of the Jean Bart hit the Massachusetts or Augusta, or had the the DB-3s laid a bomb or three into the transports and the landings on the Atlantic coast may not have gone down in history as the easy victory it did. Chase or lead with Vincent P O’Hara’s The US Navy Against the Axis, Surface Combat 1941-1945, if you need to reexamine the importance of surface units at the dawn of the carrier. Little Ship Big War & Subchaser by Edward Stafford - two memoirs by the same author detailing his experiences in American escorts. He commanded a subchaser in the Atlantic/Med in 1943 and was First Lieutenant for a destroyer escort in 1944-1945. Stafford is a good author and his memoirs read well. Wages by SA's own Zack Parsons is a fun near-future private-security dystopia. The premise gets less funny every year now. As I love the USS Ranger, I must recommend Torpedo Squadron 4 by Gerald Thomas. An informative account of the actions of Torpedo Squadron 4 in 1943 on the Ranger, 1944 on the Bunker Hill, and 1945 on the Essex. The focus is on VT-4 but he includes information and stories from the other squadrons of Air Group 4. Notable missions include Operation Leader and strikes in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Japan. Air Group 4 shared the Essex with the first Marine Corsair squadrons to be assigned to carrier duty. The book provides good descriptions of carrier operations in WWII and is crammed with photographs. There is also a separate photo supplement with even more photos! Torpedo Squadron 4, Manilla Harbor, 1944 November 14 posted:“Coming out of there the Ack Ack was pretty heavy, but I saw our bombs hit --not one but two direct hits! I called Scott and asked if we were going to attack that cruiser and I asked how he wanted the bombs set. He said ‘at 700 feet.’ So I set them. But as we got closer I thought ‘What the Hell! You’re a better bomber than that.’ So, I reached in and reset for 400 feet. We ended up with two direct hits.”
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2017 03:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:42 |
|