Puttering in the Study

Rereads: "Dune", "Declare", "Battle of Britain" and "Overlord" on Audible

I have recently noticed a tendency to reread books that I think I might enjoy - and more often, to start listening to them as audiobooks.  

Most recently, I decided to reread Frank Herbert's Dune in advance of the new film.  I knew I had not read it since the mid-'90s, and that reading had not been especially successful, I remembered. 

The new reading was a disaster.  I was completely unable to read the book without seeing the visuals of the 1984 David Lynch film which, although I love it, was definitely getting in the way of experiencing the novel.  I also could see the tendency to want to skip over narration to get to dialogue, and suspected I was missing important parts of the book as a result.  I could already tell that I was not able to absorb anything of the characters in the book that was not from the movie.

To try to get around this, I downloaded the audiobook and began listening to that.  I can't say that I liked the audiobook per se – dialogue was mostly narrated, but occasionally characters would come in and be voiced separately, and to my taste poorly - but what it did was eliminate any carryover from the earlier film and allow me to focus on what the book and the characters were actually saying.  It's like watching a play – the actor can be doing an inferior job, but it's still Shakespeare.  I did end up reading the last few chapters in the hardback version, but by that time the characters were almost completely divorced from the movie's incarnations.  And I was getting impatient.

While I was reading Dune, I also remembered that I really didn't think I had adequately understood Tim Powers' Declare the first time I read it, and had probably skipped over important parts looking for scenes that had more action or supernatural involvement.  So I got the book for that and listened to it over the next several weeks.  Again, I think I got a much better understanding of the book, as I was forced to listen to everything in it, and not skip over parts that seemed duller.  At least now I know that I actually listened to everything in the book, and didn't skip over any important parts.

The next book, James Holland's Battle of Britain I started in hardback with the copy that Mr. Holland inscribed for me at the World War II conference in 2019.  I had just finished building a new tool Airfix 1/72 Hawker Hurricane and was starting on a new-tool Spitfire and wanted to reread a good book on the subject.  Within a couple of chapters I realized that I was not able to read as much as I wanted in the limited time that I have to read in the study in the evening, and instead got the audiobook and listened to most of the book that way.  The individual accounts got a little tiring after a while, but it ended up being an efficient way of getting the book read.  The hardest part was that a substantial part of the book deals with the battle of France, and it is almost midway through before you get to Fighter Command engaging the Luftwaffe over Britain beginning in the late summer of 1940.  Which began to conflict with the next book I listened to ...

Finally, several years ago I listened to Max Hastings' Overlord because I wanted to read something about the actual D-Day landings.  This is not the best book for that – it focuses on the battle for Normandy instead, and is similarly full of individual accounts that are not exactly what I was looking for – but Hastings does eventually provide commentary and analysis on the major questions surrounding the campaign. 

Central here is British general Sir Bernard Montgomery.  It is pretty well agreed that Montgomery made major mistakes in how he characterized and promised his forces' activities from D-Day to the end of the campaign, but Hastings takes the position that there was in the end nothing lost as a result, because neither Montgomery nor Bradley could actually have done anything earlier than they did that would have generated a faster, or better result.  Hastings is adamant that no advance against the German forces could take place until they had been written down by weeks of attrition.  If you agree with this viewpoint – and it seems sound to me – then much of that heat directed at Montgomery is warranted, but in the end irrelevant.  (Something you can't say about the German leaders and generals' action, I note).  He overpromised and did not manage expectations regarding what he was actually going to be able to do, but in the end it is difficult to see how that had a negative effect on the final outcome.  Hastings even goes so far as to decline to call the failure to close the Falaise pocket an error that had any effect because he believes that even if the forces allotted had closed the pocket, the desperate German forces would have blown through them anyway.

That's what I was in the end looking for.  What were the actions taken, are they subject to criticism, and what effect would different actions have had.

 

Inside the Seraglio: Private Lives of the Sultans in Istanbul – John Freely

This book describes the private lives of the sultans in and around Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire's occupation of the former Constantinople (1453-1922).

I was fascinated by our visit to Topkapi Palace several years ago, and this book puts a lot of color into the now empty chambers that were once occupied by the sultan and his servants and harem.  I still cannot keep the various occupants of the Ottoman throne separate, and in many ways this book doesn't help much because it provides only generic illustrations of some of them – and they were typically depicted similarly by artists. 

But I now know some of the different characters and stories, and have a better understanding of the motivations and tendencies of the various players surrounding the Ottoman throne.

Beans, Bullets, and Black Oil - The Story of Fleet Logistics Afloat in the Pacific During World War II - Rear Adm. Worrall Reed Carter

This is a digital reissue of a 1953 book issued by the Naval War College Press that tells the story of the floating logistics train that made the Navy's drive across the Pacific in World War II possible. 

I can't overstate how impressive a job this book does in detailing what the Navy started out with, and where it ended up.  The daunting challenge of providing logistical support to a fleet that never went back to Pearl Harbor after January, 1944 is detailed, and the author explains what the support arm did, and how it expanded to meet the challenges as the fleet grew and moved further, and further away from established bases on the West Coast and Hawaii.

I am him absolutely looking for a paper copy of this now.

The City We Became (Great Cities #1) - N.K. Jemisin

Yeaaahhhh, not quite.

This science fiction novel takes an interesting point of view, presenting a New York City where individuals become avatars of their borough and fight an existential threat from a parallel universe.

it has some really interesting character development, and some decent horror elements, but I never could buy into the central concept, in part because there were never any clear boundaries on what characters could and could not do.  It was hard to perceive the drama when you didn't know how impossible a situation was wasn't.

The Royal Navy and the Battle of Britain - Anthony J. Cumming

It's rare someone takes issue with Winston Churchill's statement about the Battle of Britain that "[n]ever in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."  But this book does. 

Incidentally, according to Pug Ismay, Churchill's first attempt was "never in human history was so much owed by so many to so few."  Ismay asked "what about Jesus and his disciples"?  Churchill immediately added the qualifier "in the field of human conflict."

This 2010 US Naval Institute Press book takes issue with the credit given to the RAF fighter pilots for saving Britain from invasion after the fall of France, arguing that it was in fact the Royal Navy, and not Fighter Command that made an invasion of Britain impossible during the summer of 1940.  In fact many commentators include the RAF bomber pilots in "the few" since their spoiling raids on not just the cities of Germany, but on the German airfields in France and the buildup of barges for the cross channel invasion played a critical role in convincing Germany that an invasion was not possible. 

Where Cumming adds to the conversation is in his insistence that there is a blind spot when it comes to analyzing whether Germany could have in fact invaded Britain, and that is that the Royal Navy retained unquestioned control of the necessary waterways.  The situation was in fact analogous to the Napoleonic wars when Earl St. Vincent told the Board of Admiralty "I do not say, my Lords, that the French will not come.  I say only they will not come by sea."

But it was not in Britain's national interest to present itself to its potential savior the United States as impregnable and safe behind the unchallenged supremacy of the Royal Navy.  Instead, it was better served by presenting itself as in mortal danger, saved by young, handsome fighter pilots who were daily taking on the Luftwaffe and winning. 

But as Cumming points out, in many ways the RAF's fighters were not "winning".  They were unable to protect their own infrastructure, nor were they able to stop German bombers from attacking British cities that will.  What they were able to do was provide a stubborn defense on a daily basis which showed both Germany and the United States that Britain would not surrender, and could remain in the fight, albeit with American material aid.  While the terrible attrition that Fighter Command inflicted on the overstretched Luftwaffe would not be known for some time (it claimed more kills than it should have, but the actual effect of even roughly equal aircraft losses was catastrophic to the Luftwaffe in a way that was not known at the time).

While the book reflects a somewhat parochial interest, and is written with hindsight not available in 1940, when the advent of aerial bombardment and aerial assaults involving paratroopers made it unclear whether Britain was in fact safe from invasion, it does provide a useful additional insight into who actually should count among "the few".

The Making of the Atomic Bomb – Richard Rhodes

This book took me years to finish, but in the end it was worth it.  It was universally recommended as a good history of the development of the atomic bomb and of the Manhattan Project, but it is slow, slow going for a long time unless you have a working understanding of nuclear physics, which I do not.  But the writing is really good, with Rhodes providing memorable character sketches of the numerous important figures in the development of the weapon.

Where I really got interested was when the physicists' discussions gave rise to a national project to develop an atomic weapon.  The efforts to build the massive infrastructure that development of a bomb would require was simply fascinating, and provided a great background for the watching of Fat Man and Little Boy, which dramatizes a portion of that activity.  I know the author would hate to hear that his book was a good introduction to a generally panned movie, but it really was. 

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War – Malcolm Gladwell

This was a great little read that I picked up after listening to Gladwell on a panel about the bomber war at the World War II conference in New Orleans last month.  It was a quick read, but a very informative look at the general issues surrounding strategic bombing as practiced in World War II.  It covers ground addressed in more detail in other books, but does so in a different way.

At the conference, I was told that the book was not as good an experience of the subject as the podcast on which it was based was.  And in places you could see the podcast format peek out, such as when someone was quoted extensively, and you could tell that that had been an audio clip in the podcast.  But it wasn't distracting, and didn't make me feel that I was reading an inferior version of the story.  and it certainly didn't stop me from taking the opportunity to get an autographed copy!

The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of the Pax Americana - Peter Clarke

I ran across this book while searching for additional sources for one of the papers I was updating for my capstone project.  I needed more information on Britain's plans for British Malaya after the war, and how those plans may have differed from its plans for other territories that were formerly part of the British Empire.

The book is much broader than that obviously, and deals not just with specific territories but with the larger political debates going on within the British government and between Britain and the United States over the nature of that portion of the postwar  world which was formally known as the British Empire.  It was an interesting book, and I enjoyed it and recommend it highly if you are looking at the jockeying for postwar position between the allies which culminated in Britain's departure from India.

The Battle for Hell's Island: How a Small Band of Carrier Dive-Bombers Helped Save Guadalcanal - Stephen L. Moore

This was one of my least favorite books about the Pacific war.  It wasn't because of the subject, which was always interesting, or the writing, which was always good, or the data contained, which was exhaustive.  It was because I could not figure out what the book was about.  It began by relating accounts of seemingly every sortie flown by a dive bomber in the Pacific beginning months before Pearl Harbor, then had unexplained gaps for things like, say, the battle of Midway, and then picked up again with the Guadalcanal campaign.  Again, the account is interesting, but it's like listening to the broadcast of a game – it is a narrative, but not a story.

Only at the end of the book, frustrated, was I able to go back and ascertain what the book had been about.  It is the story of the dive bomber pilots on the Enterprise during the Guadalcanal campaign who operated off of Guadalcanal after their carrier was damaged, and played an important role in fending off the Japanese assault during the critical phases of the battle.  The reason you wouldn't know this is that the book starts with pilots flying from the Lexington and the Yorktown months earlier engaged in unrelated activity.  After Coral Sea they are amalgamated into a new squadron and sent out on Enterprise.   There is no introduction telling you this.  There is a preface, but it doesn't tell you this, and instead starts you with a pilot operating from Enterprise, not Guadalcanal.  

So what you get is a narrative about pilots that is untethered to any particular story, objective, or goal.  It was very frustrating reading because the accounts jumped from ship to ship with no reason given for why, and was always only a small part of the story him him I knew was there.  If I had known at the outset that this was the story of pilots who would later play a key role in a major battle, I would have had the necessary framework for the book.  Yes, I assumed it had something to do that because of the title, but I assumed the content of the book would reflect the title, and it simply didn't until late in the narrative.  So what would otherwise have been an informative and interesting read ended up being an exercise in frustration, searching for nuts of information about a subject I am usually interested in.

It's hard to write a book about American aircraft carriers in the Pacific in 1942 that I don't like.  But this book did it.

To the Marianas: War in the Central Pacific 1944 - Edwin P. Hoyt

Hoyt's "Blue Skies and Blood" was the earliest book I had on the Battle of the Coral Sea, and I later discovered he had written a number of others on different stages of the Pacific War, which I started to pick up as I saw them.  This volume picks up after "Storm Over the Gilberts", which I have, and is followed by another on Leyte Gulf - which I saw at a HP Books last month and chose not to bring home.

It's not a knock on this book as much as it is on Leyte - there are numerous more recent books on the subject, and while Hoyt is readable, my research into his books indicates he tends to churn out volumes that don't really add to the existing knowledge on a topic.  But for this book that wasn't a problem, since there isn't a lot of literature on the drive across the Central Pacific in the first six months of June 1944, and that's a subject I was particularly interested in.  The Gilberts campaign was very much a trial run for the long-anticipated drive, and this book explains how that matured.

It's a good book, and a very informative addition on this corner of the conflict.