Just finished this short book about the relationship between the two dictators leading up the the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It’s more of a talk than a book, and the citations are thin, but it’s an excellent study of how the two men related to each other, why Hitler did what he did, and what Staling refused to admit it was coming.
The Devil Rides Out - Dennis Wheatley
I don’t know how this happened. Some post somewhere suggested that this was a classic piece of horror fiction from the 1930’s, and it ended up being almost camp.
The summary of the 1950’s Hammer movie based on it (which tells you all you need to know) tells the story:
”When the Duc de Richleau (Christopher Lee) and Rex Van Ryn (Leon Greene) arrive at a fashionable party thrown by de Richleau's protégé, Simon Aron (Patrick Mower), they soon realize that the party is in fact a gathering of a Satanic cult, led by the high priest Mocata (Charles Gray), that plans to initiate the beautiful Tanith (Nike Arrighi) that night. It's up to de Richleau and Van Ryn to defeat the devil-worshiping Mocata and save innocent young Tanith and the others from a terrible fate.”
That’s pretty much it. The best part of the book was the 1930’s environment it was set in, complete with cars, manor houses and airplanes. It wasn’t bad at all - it was about like watching an old episode of MacGyver. Or, candidly, a dramatic version of a Scooby Doo episode. That’s just true horror fiction though. It wasn’t remotely scary or supernatural.
The Devil Rides Out - Dennis Wheatley
I don’t know how this happened. Some post somewhere suggested that this was a classic piece of horror fiction from the 1930’s, and it ended up being almost camp.
The summary of the 1950’s Hammer movie based on it (which tells you all you need to know) tells the story:
”When the Duc de Richleau (Christopher Lee) and Rex Van Ryn (Leon Greene) arrive at a fashionable party thrown by de Richleau's protégé, Simon Aron (Patrick Mower), they soon realize that the party is in fact a gathering of a Satanic cult, led by the high priest Mocata (Charles Gray), that plans to initiate the beautiful Tanith (Nike Arrighi) that night. It's up to de Richleau and Van Ryn to defeat the devil-worshiping Mocata and save innocent young Tanith and the others from a terrible fate.”
That’s pretty much it. The best part of the book was the 1930’s environment it was set in, complete with cars, manor houses and airplanes. It wasn’t bad at all - it was about like watching an old episode of MacGyver. Or, candidly, a dramatic version of a Scooby Doo episode. That’s just true horror fiction though. It wasn’t remotely scary or supernatural.
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa - E.B. Sledge
This is the first of several books that were required reading for my first WW II Studies course, and while only part was required - the portion on Okinawa, I read the entire thing since I was familiar with the author because he is one of the primary characters in the HBO miniseries The Pacific.
They were not wrong to focus on him. Sledge had a distinguished career as a college professor and only wrote what was initially intended as a private memoir for his family late in life, but he - like Alvin Keenan, who I’ve written about previously - puts his academic skills for writing to good use here, narrating how Marines were trained and how they fought in two of the worst battles of the war - Peleliu and Okinawa.
The book is rightly considered one of the best military memoirs of all time, and we’re fortunate that someone stared at the horrors of close combat over a prolonged period of time, and had the ability to explain to the rest of us what he saw.
The Shadow Land - Elizabeth Kostova
I am an eternal follower of Kostova because I loved The Historian so much. That means I will (eventually) drag myself through even this book, which tells a lengthy story about political persecution in postwar Bulgaria.
As always, it’s well-written, but it was mistake to get it on audiobook, where I had to sit (drive, actually) through the endless travails of the narrator, who discovers the story of a political prisoner in Bulgaria during its tenure at a communist satellite of the Soviet Union. I could have sped-read through much of it and gotten the story without marinating in the misery. Yeah, that’s shallow of me, I know, but this is one I came really close to never finishing.
Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journey - Michael Collins
Collins’ book about his experiences as an astronaut in the space program is hands down not just my favorite astronaut memoir, but probably my favorite memoir of all. He is good at relaying the relevant information about his experiences in a way that makes you understand what he’s talking about. And funny - he is so funny. No matter how serious the issue, he sees the humorous side.
If you’re going to read one book about an individual in the race to the moon - this is the one.
Marshall: Organizer of Victory - Leonard Mosley
Several years ago, when I was looking at whose portrait I would put over my non-naval military history shelves, I had a hard time deciding on someone. Naval was easy - the steady hand of Chester Nimitz during the Pacific meant he was the first of the bas-relief medallions.
But who for the military? I considered Winston Churchill for a long time since there are few leaders who make the decisively right choice at the right time with such enormous consequences as his in the summer of 1940 to stand against Hitler. But even before reading Hamilton's complete trilogy, it was already clear that Churchill as a military leader had serious flaws, and his support for colonialism was a bridge too far.
But who else is there? Most good military leaders have limited scope, and few are free of bad decisions. Patton? Not MacArthur, certainly. Montgomery, Eisenhower - maybe Grant?
Finally I realized that there was a single figure who was the indispensable man at the center of the U.S. preparation for war, whose integrity and good sense made so much of what the Allies accomplished possible. To be sure, his strategic sense can be questioned. His belief that France could be invaded by Allied troops in 1942 or even 1943 was wrong, as was his opposition to the peripheral operation that did make sense - the November 1942 invasion of North Africa. Nor is his management of the Army before Pearl Harbor beyond reproach, although there he had a lot of company.
But George Catlett Marshall was a man of honor and accomplishment, as this book I picked up two months ago at a HPBooks in Waco makes clear. It was actually a really good read - but what I'll always remember about it is the incredibly poor quality of the paper. I've never seen such a relatively new book (1983) so eaten up with acid. The paper was substantial but quite brittle. I was glad when I finished it, not because I was glad to be done reading it, but because I was glad to be able to stop handling such a fragile book.
One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon - Charles Fishman
This is my most recent Apollo program read, and I enjoyed it very much. The author's premise is that the digital world owes its origins to the Apollo program, and makes a strong case that it was Apollo's use of then-uncommon computer "chips" that both drove their price down and their reliability up so that they became a mainstay of modern products.
He also tells the fascinating story - based on later declassified recordings of a meeting JFK had on space policy with his advisers and a private meeting NASA chief James Webb in late 1963 that make clear that Kennedy's commitment to the moon race was flagging by the time of his trip to Texas as it became clearer that the program would not make it to the moon during his presidency, the cost of the program would require continuing support from Congress, and the original reason - the show American superiority over the Soviets in space technology - was being satisfied by the program's advances since 1961.
So while it was Kennedy that set the goal, it was only his replacement by a true believer in the space race - Lyndon Johnson - that ensured the level of financial commitment needed to get to the moon before the end of the decade.
Fishman also addresses the constant "what we could have done with that money" argument, making clear that spending for Apollo wouldn't have simply been redirected to antipoverty or other programs, and can't be blamed for the levels of spending those programs enjoyed. Apollo ended up costing almost exactly what its initial estimates predicted - about $20 billion, with spending peaking in the mid-60's at around $3 billion a year. I can't recall the precise figures, but at exactly the same time the U.S. spent about five times as much - per year and overall - on the Vietnam War, which mnakes clear that the money was there - it was just spent on something else.
The book also tells the fascinating story of the development of the Apollo computer hardware and software, as well as the guidance systems. Interestingly, the book told very few stories that I had heard before - even in part. It was new stories and new insights into a story that is now half a century old.
Guadalcanal: Decision at Sea - the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, November 13-15, 1942 - Eric Hammel
This is the third of Hammerl's three books of the Guadalcanal campaign. I had read The Carrier Battles, but not Starvation Island, and thought this might explain the surface actions a little better. Did it ever.
The book began by patiently explaining that in the first year of the Pacific War, U.S. ships had both a poorly prepared cadre of combat leaders based on prewar caution, and widely varying fits with respect to fire control, radar, and training on both. Some ships relied on manual firing of their guns, some had various systems to more accurately direct their fire, and some had the brand-new "radar" units, some of which could aid in firing accurately, especially at night, and some of which could aid in locating enemy vessels in the first place. Importantly, some commanders did not yet understand that it could do that.
This explains the two nights of battles covered in the book. In the first, a poorly organized and led line of U.S. ships was heavily damaged by a Japanese formation, despite having the tools on various ships to do much better. The second battle a couple of nights later saw a more evenly matched engagement, where the U.S. flagship, the battleship Washington made effective use of its radar-controlled fire to destroy the Japanese battleship Kirishima.
The emphasis on the various radars had a distinct effect on my next modeling project, in which I updated an old Matchbox destroyer USS Fletcher (DD-445) which was tail-end Charlie the first of the two nights. But it had both fire control radar, SC air search radar and - crucially - the new SG surface-search radar. So unlike the two flagship cruisers where the admirals sat, it could - and did - accurately locate the enemy. So I scratchbuilt a new mast to carry carefully fabricated photoetched versions of all three.
How Carriers Fought: Carrier Operations in WWII - Lars Celander
Now this was an unusual book. It dealt with the nuts and bolts of how aircraft carriers operate - from what happens in the cockpit to how aircraft and the ships that carry them actually work, to the battles they fought in. The book concludes with an analysis of various carrier design and combat tactics which I found very interesting.
Carriers tend to be approached either as historical objects or as tools used in significant historical actions. Some books deal with them from a design perspectives, but few deal with carrier tactics, much less analyze why the tactics were what they were, and whether they, the the ships' design, should have been otherwise.
Celander's book also discusses postwar developments to a certain extent, explaining how carriers developed postwar and why, and - I especially liked this part - why they would not have developed as they did had the wartime need for "deck-load" strikes persisted. It never occurred to me that angled decks only made sense if a carrier is constantly rotating aircraft, and would have been highly problematic had carriers still been launching massive strikes as was usually the case in naval combat. Celnader's book doesn't get into this, but had that need remained we might have seen carrier design divide into "rotating" air operations carriers, as we have now, with a few "battle" carriers which are designed to launch and land large numbers of aircraft in a short period of time, while protected by "rotating" carriers. WW II task forces did that by sometimes having certain carriers assigned to provide CAP (combat air patrol) while others launched strikes, but that isn't how modern air operations work.
All in all, a very interesting book.