Puttering in the Study

Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon - Craig Nelson

I picked this up on audiobook at HP Books in Arlington the Saturday after Thanksgiving and have been devouring it ever since, since I'm currently in one of my obsessions about the Apollo program (posts soon to following on watching From the Earth to the Moon again, as well as a new paperback of pictures from Apollo 11).

The book is not the start-to-finish that Andrew Chaikin's book is, and it jumps around a bit in a slightly annoying fashion.  But even once it gets going in chronological order, it completely skips Apollo 7, then Apollo 9 and 10 as well, which bothered me because I thought they should have been part of the building block approach that resulted in Apollo 11. The story of the next six missions was left out as well, but a lot of time was devoted to the story of the people of 11 after the mission, and where manned spaceflight is going with NASA these days.  It's interesting, but I just had a lot of trouble not getting the story in the linear form I'm used to from Chaikin's book.

One other complaint.  This book uses a lot of quotes from the participants, and it's easy to either miss the narrator telling you it's a quote, or forgot it's still a quote when you don't have the book in front of you.  So sometimes that was a problem with the quote breaking up the story, and leaving you a little unsettled about where you are in the story.

Overall a good book and an addition to a NASA library I would not miss.  But it was a fairly muddy telling of the story, I thought. 

An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943, Volume One of the Liberation Trilogy - Rick Atkinson

The one book I took to Greece on our recent vacation was volume 1 of Rick Atkinson's trilogy about U.S. Army operations in Europe in World War II.  As I posted recently, I just finished listening to the second volume on the campaigns in Italy and Sicily, and was curious about the first volume on the initial action, which was the invasion of North Africa.

As I suspected, it was a horror story of poor planning, bad leadership, inadequate training, with both cowardice and courage mixed in.  Eisenhower, who's pretty inadequate at the beginning, appears to grow into his role as commander as time goes on (at least that's what Atkinson tells us happens - Ike's story is actually something I'm really interested in after reading these two books).  Likewise, the battlefield commanders, who appear pretty clueless initially, are gradually weeded out and replaced with commanders who can effectively lead and army into battle.  The clearest example is Omar Bradley, who though a mixture of sharp thinking and tactical insubordination actually gets things done where his predecessors and colleagues often didn't.  Logistical operations go from the totally disorganized to the sometimes adequate, with immediate effects at the front, when commanders like Bradley can effectively translate material superiority into battlefield success.  There is also a tremendous quote along these lines from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who observed that battles are won by the quartermasters before the fighting even begins.  That's so true in this book - the Allies are hampered only initially by bad logistics, and the Germans are essentially disarmed by the end of the North African campaign, with no replacements for their destroyed tanks, and no ammunition or fuel for the few that remained at the end.

Atkinson is a terrific writer, but he again suffers from reuse of adjectives - in this books panzers always "slammed into" Allied units, and defenders are always "winkled out" of their positions.  But other than that, the writing is extraordinary.

Museum Masterpieces: The Louvre - The Teaching Company

Last night I finished this short DVD course (12 half hour lectures) by Richard Brettell of The University of Texas at Dallas on the masterpieces of painting in the Louvre.  I didn't realize when I got it that it was limited to paintings, but enjoyed it nonetheless.  We saw only a fraction of the pieces he focuses on, and it was annoying to hear about others that I really REALLY wish I'd seen while we were there, but it's pretty obvious that one day at the Louvre is never enough - even for just the paintings.  The ones we didn't see that after watching this would top my list are the Marie de' Medici cycle by Rubens.

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 - Atkinson, Rick

This is the middle of Atkinson's trilogy on the U.S. military offensive in the European theater of operations in World War II.  The trilogy began with An Army at Dawn (which won a Pulitzer) about the November 1942 invasion of North Africa, and after this book proceeds to the Normandy landings.  Justice Bailey Moseley lent me the audiobook for this one, and I just finished it.

As I was promised, Atkinson can flat write - his language is outstanding and a pleasure to read.  My only quibble would be that the adjective "sanguinary" should only be used once to refer to how much bloodshed a unit suffered - but the author uses it repeatedly.  Once is clever, more than once - even in the same book - is too cute with a serious subject.  You can reuse "bloody" but not "sanguinary," in my opinion.

That point aside, the chief problem with the book is the campaign it documents.  I knew very little about the Italian campaign prior to listening to it.  While I now know the facts of the campaign - the who, where, when and what - I still don't know the why.  Nor, really does Atkinson.  The American high command never wanted to go into Italy, as the British did, and were eventually dragged into the campaign largely by the inertia of having an army finishing up the North African campaign with nothing to do for the next year until the invasion of France could begin.  The ostensible reason for the campaign was to knock Italy out of the war (which the invasion of Sicily accomplished in a nice corner pocket shot) although why that was a war aim given the ineptitude (and exhaustion) of the Italian war effort at that stage, I am not certain.  The secondary reason for the campaign was to tie up German resources so they could not be used in France when the invasion came in 1944, but in a damning admission (at least I think it was) Atkinson's epilogue nowhere noted whether the resources the Germans devoted to Italy justified the forces the Allies invested, and lost (although he makes a great point that effect in aiding Russia probably justified the operation - American and British forces simply could not just sit idle for a year waiting for Andrew Higgins to build boats while Russia was suffering casualties in the millions).  Italy was a terrible place for offensive operations, Atkinson narrates, and a miserable one was well, which I already knew from many years' familiarity with Bill Mauldin's Wille and Joe.  The sheer size of the misery and bloodshed was new to me, though, as were the fairly negative details of the U.S. commander Gen. Mark Clark that Atkinson provides.  (Atkinson's character details are magnificent - even Patton apparently had some redeeming personal characteristics, although Montgomery still awaits a complimentary observation - probably deservedly so).

One thing I would have been interested in, and Atkinson only deals with it obliquely was towards the end of the book, where he does credit the campaign with seasoning and training the American military in modern military operations.  The North African campaign can in many particulars (I look forward to reading his book, but I know a bit about it already) be portrayed as on-the-job training for the U.S. military, especially the Army, and it was replete with fiascos in both operations, leadership, logistics, planning - you name it, at some point it went wrong (something of a European version of Tarawa but far larger and lengthier).  The best part of the book for me is where Atkinson provides a thorough explanation of the many variations of the acronymn SNAFU that were in common use at this stage to describe the indescribable acts of incompetence that were commonplace at the beginning of the campaign, from the individual soldier all the way up to the way Roosevelt and Churchill managed the war effort.  I'm not saying everything was bad, by any means - just that the U.S. simply had no experience in managing a military operation of this size and it took time and a lot of mistakes to work things out.  In the Pacific carrier operations, new admirals sometimes got to watch their predecessors for a few weeks in what was called "makee learn" and that to some extent is what was going on here except there weren't predecessors - the initial commanders were learning on the job.  But as bad as things were at time, what is indisputable was that America was learning - as competent NCOs and officers were identified and gained experience, and gradually learned better ways of doing things, the SNAFUs grew fewer and smaller in scale, and most importantly, claimed fewer lives, as the American war machine gradually learned to do things better.  A good example is airborne operations.  The airborne portion of the invasion of Sicily was a phenomenal SNAFU - but when the airborne parachuted into Salerno to support the initial landings only a matter of weeks later, it did so without a glitch.  Similarly, amphibious operations - poorly done in North Africa, better but still bad in Sicily, were improved at Salerno and (I think) even more so at Anzio.  To what extent this expertise paid off in the Normandy campaign Atkinson does not say clearly, but certainly it must have to some extent.

But Anzio raises the real point - why was the landing made there, and in fact, why was Italy invaded at all?  What was the overall strategic goal, and if there was one, was it met?  Atkinson makes this crucial question the thesis in his epilogue and to me, did not answer it definitively, giving us essentially Ernie Pyle's take on the invasion, which was that he had to believe that the campaign paid for itself in lives saved in the next great offensive in France - because the thought that it did not meant that all the suffering and the loss was for no reason at all.  Again, this misses the larger geopolitical significance of having forces engaged in continental Europe to keep Germany from being able to concentrate against Russia.  And I wonder if it doesn't also miss something Atkinson notes FDR said one time to the effect that the goal was as simple as attrition - that Clark was simply following in Grant's footsteps by being willing to sacrifice whatever was available in the name of killing German troops wherever they were found simply to weaken the German war effort. 

Again, a very good piece of work, and I recommend it highly.  I'm looking forward to reading the prequel and seeing Atkinson's take on the subsequent campaigns.

Versailles: A Biography of a Palace - Tony Spawforth

This was the first of the Paris trip books I started reading.  It's a meaty biography of the palace of Versailles that I saw at a bookstore in the palace.  Interestingly, I only realized a week later that the little bookshop (maybe 12 x 30) occupied what had once been the entire stage of the palace's impossibly cramped opera venue, housed in one of the ground floor arched passageways between the main courtyard and the gardens. 

As usual, once I saw the palace I got very interested in its history, and this book is a good overview of its construction, use, and how it has changed since it ceased being used as a royal residence in 1789.  It is a very new book, having been reviewed just two months ago in the Times Online out of London. I liked it fine - although I thought it would have more on the actual construction, and I thought it badly needed maps of the palace and grounds.  It had one of sorts in the beginning, but it wasn't very helpful, and the only map of the grounds was in the endpaper - and it predated construction of the Petit Trianon and Marie-Antoinette's hamlet, and so wasn't very helpful if you didn't have resort to other maps.

Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution - Richard Beeman

One of the good things about being on the State Bar's Litigation Section Council is that we often help in getting speakers for the annual meeting, and as a result we often get these speakers for dinner the night before they speak.  Last month I had the enjoyable experience of sharing a table with Dr. Beeman and hearing some of his thoughts about his new book on the Constitutional Convention in addition to hearing him speak on the subject during the meeting.
I just finished the book (graciously inscribed to a "plain, honest lawyer" by the author at another party we attended) and really enjoyed it.  I knew practically nothing about the CC before reading it, and found while reading it that I also knew practically nothing about the Confederation period and how badly, hopelessly screwed up it was - and how bereft of role models or tested ideas the guys that showed up at this thing were.  In addition to enormous regional differences and obligations to their respective states that were almost crippling at best, the delegates had drastically different ideas on what form a new government should take.  Add to that the startling (to me) realization that this was not remotely a "democracy" meaning a rule explicitly by the people, nor was it really intended to be.  The founders had a republic, meaning not a monarchy, but it was only marginally democratic, and really far more intended to be a aristocracy of merit, where large property owners would come together to rule for the benefit of the mass of people, but without the inconvenience of actual, direct, input.
The House was to be elected by popular vote, true, by senators were elected by state legislatures and were not proportionally representative, and the "president" (whatever the hell that institution was going to be) was selected by this unbelievably complicated indirect "electoral college" mechanism.  So you had a republic, but it was only moderately democratic at the outset (and even that much was hotly contested).
What was really interesting to me was that, in addition to a healthy measure of elitism (and I won't even get into the debates over how slaves were to be included) the reason for the distrust of the general public actually had a somewhat logical basis given the times - the fear that given the nation's large size and the paucity of communications there was no way that the public could be expected to be informed about candidates outside their states.  If that was true, then how can you expect the public to cast an informed ballot on something like a "president"?  (The delegates even thought that representatives elected for more than a few tens of thousand of people would not be close enough to the people for effective representation).  Well, you pick intermediaries or presidential "electors" who are presumably better informed, and you let them decide.   Fortunately, the public soon became well-enough educated on such issues that the provincial bias the framers feared seems to have disappeared pretty quickly, replaced by regional and ideological beliefs than were far broader, and meant that debates over candidates became over ideas and issues, and not merely state citizenship, and the electors quickly became proxies (except in rare instances) for the popular vote.  Similarly, the intense fears of large vs. small state rivalries were ill-founded, and soon replaced by regional blocs (north v. south, slaveholding v. nonslaveholding).
It was just fascinating watching the delegates come up with these ideas and debate them efficiently and effectively.  And speaking of the debate, I've never read much about George Washington, but Beeman reiterates that he was here as in so many other places the one indispensable man whose prestige lent the convention's work much-needed credibility.  He also served as the model for the presidency - that much is certain - and reassured many that they would at least have a chance of making this elected monarch thing work.
All in all, an enjoyable book, and one that taught me a lot.

Storm Over the Gilberts: War in the Central Pacific: 1943

This is a short book about the landings on Tarawa and Makin in November 1943, the essential (but bloody) proving ground for major amphibious assaults in the Pacific.  I was pretty disappointed in it - no map of the island to provide context, and the narrative was disjointed and not very helpful.  Halfway through in exasperation I dug out the December 2008 issue of Naval History, which had a package of issues and art commemorating the 65th anniversary of the landings.  It was far superior to this, providing detailed maps, artwork, articles explaining the broader context of the invasion, and providing important context.

It got me to thinking, because Hoyt's book on the Battle of the Coral Sea was the major one I read growing up, and in retrospect I wonder if these type books may have been the '70's historical equivalent of pulp fiction - short books that recycled the primary sources.  This is actually the shortest of Hoyt's books I have, and I suspect that the choice of subject - a single invasion and a restricted time frame ended up making it briefer than he may have intended.

WW II - James Jones

I had this book in paperback when I was a kid and quickly decided that I didn't like it.  It didn't talk about planes and tanks and ships and cool stuff like that.  It just went on and on about soldiers and I remember noting that it was pretty profane, and obsessed with some things that a sixth grader in 1976 wasn't very familiar with.  I saw a format large hardback copy of it a few months ago at a HP Books and got it, as it seemed to have a visual component that maybe I'd missed.  Sure enough, it's now one of the best books on the war I've ever read.  (Of course if you didn't already know, the author also wrote From Here to Eternity, one of the best pieces of fiction about the war).
Why Jones didn't call it "Evolution of a Soldier" I don't know, because that's his theme.  Well, one of them because the book is really two books in one.  It is, first, a large format art book, intended to gather together the best of the war art available (subsequently documented in a PBS series as the link reflects), and Jones was originally just narrating that. 
But at some point - likely Jones just couldn't talk about the war without it turning into a memoir - he turns the book into a narrative of the war from the soldier's point of view, telling stories from his time in combat in the South Pacific, but focusing on the EVOLUTION OF A SOLDIER as he insists on repeatedly capitalizing it.  And this is the best part of the book, because Jones explains in a way that few can, or have, exactly what a soldier has to go through to become a soldier - essentially the deadening of the ordinary instincts of survival and freedom.  It has nothing to do with the artwork, except to explain where the artwork actually catches the experience.  A good example is The Price, a painting by Tom Lea of a Marine at Peleliu.  Jones explains that the painting is not medically possible, but he - as someone who was there - says that it's an extremely accurate representation of what being there was like, reinforcing the horror that a combat soldier endures.
It's a powerful book, and I understand far better now what it is trying to convey.

Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream - Doris Kearns

This is the third of Kearns Goodwin's presidential biographies that I've wanted to get read before seeing her at the State Bar convention in Dallas next week.  It is also the first LBJ biography I've read, and it just blew me away.  Kearns of course had a front row seat with LBJ in his final years, working with him on his memoirs, but the maturity in this 1976 work is amazing.  She never overreaches to impose her judgments unfairly on what Johnson did (she was a antiwar voice before being hired as a White House Fellow late in LBJ's administration) but does point out where his undisputed gifts as a public figure led him into trouble as President.
The thing I was reading closely for was her conclusion as to "of course" what he should have done regarding the war, but it never comes.  She freely admits that pretty much any president would have escalated in Vietnam given the facts and historical assumptions, and although she believes that he alone would have engaged in the deception as to the war's cost given his commitment to his Great Society programs, she never opines on what he could or should have done that would have extricated the U.S. from Vietnam any earlier without running risks that were then considered unacceptable in terms of containing Communism.  The best I could tell is that he refused to give up on Vietnam or his domestic goals significantly longer than any other conceivable president would have - something that invites discussion as to whether his decision to stay the course longer on both hoping for a better turn of events was a better one.  The reader (at least this one) finishes the book concluding that LBJ was in a no-win scenario (to coin a phrase).  He believed that he was preventing global nuclear war at worst or a global takeover by Communism at best by sacrificing fifty thousand American lives, and I nowhere saw anything that indicated that he could or should have thought anything different - a remarkably disciplined job by a historian seeking to explain only what he did and why - not necessarily what he should have done. (Other books surely do - just not this one.)
Anyway, a great book - I really enjoyed it.

The Story of England - Christopher Hibbert

I finished this little book a few weeks ago.  It looked like a good concise overview of the history of England, written by Hibbert, who is one of the most readable of modern historians, so I picked it up at a HP Books a few years ago, intending to read it on plane trips.  He passed away several weeks ago, and the obituaries had a lot of good things to say about him, so I learned more than I had intended to - principally that he tells a good story.

The book was really good, but had a glaring omission at the end that caused me to question the entire book.  The entire Second World War is handled with one short paragraph narrating the rise of Germany, and then two sentences on the war itself - a sentence noting Churchill was prime minister, and then a second sentence noting that near the end of the war he was replaced.  I couldn't believe it.  Nothing about England's role in the war, or the Battle of Britain - not a single word about the military conflict at all.  In contrast individual pieces of social legislation in the 1800s got more than this.  The military campaigns of individual Roman emperors got more than this.  I know that this wasn't intended to be a detailed history, but surely the war merited at least a paragraph in addition to noting who the prime minister was!  At the very least, I don't think any history of England's involvement in the war can avoid Churchill's quote that the beginning when it stood alone against Germany was at least described as "its finest hour". 

But other than that I liked it, and learned a lot.