January 2017 Reading

Another year, another month, another book.

Have been working my way through Ring of Steel (A), which is essentially an effort to gauge how the political psychology of the Great War in Germany & the Duel Monarchy evolved. While a bit of a slog it received the awards it did for a reason.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Steel:_Germany_and_Austria-Hungary_at_War,...

John Haldon's Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World. As you'll expect from the title, there's a lot on martial ideology, the social position of soldiers, etc., but it also deals with more "pure" mil-hist subjects like tactics, weaponry, etc.

I just finished The Unknown Eastern Front: The Wehrmacht and Hitler's Foreign Soldiers by Rolf-Dieter Müller . Good book that examined at a very high level the motivations of each country that provided volunteers to fight with or provide labor to the Wehrmacht/Waffen SS/Police on the Eastern Front. Interesting but dry. The book had a six page bibliography which was good but was incomplete.

Finished an excellent Logistics in the Falklands War by Kenneth L. Privratsky.

Finished The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler's Atomic Bomb by Neal Bascomb.

Also finished a short but interesting Pueblo Warriors & Spanish Conquest by Oakah L. Jones.

Will be wrapping up the month with the hardware books M7 Priest 105mm Howitzer Motor Carriage (A) and The Littorio Class (A+).

Am reading Memoirs of General Sir George Richard Greaves

>3 rudel519: I'd be interested to know what that book had to say about the Spanish soldiers who volunteer and/or were sent by Franco, known as the Blue Division, correct?

>9 rocketjk: rocketjk: Correct, it was the Blue Division. Since this book is so high level, it only has eight pages devoted to Spain. The author basically said that Spain after it's civil war was weak and did not want to incur the wrath of the Western Allies. Only when Hitler invaded Russia, did Franco offer a volunteer national unit to fight against Bolshevism in Russia. And when the West invaded Italy, he requested the return of the Blue Division. By April 1944, only a few hundred Spanish volunteers were left, having renounced their government and continued to fight on until the end in Berlin.
There's two good books exclusively on the Blue Division: Hitler's Spanish Legion: The Blue Division in Russia and The Military Intervention Corps of the Spanish Blue Division in the German Wehrmacht 1941-1945: Organization-uniforms-insignia-documents

As a bonus, I finished up Soviet Autogyros 1929-1942 yesterday evening. I'd give it a "B+" for content but a weak "C" for production values; Helion's standards are not up to that of, say, Stratus/Mushroom Modeling.

Just finished Hawker V C; the Biography of the Late Major Lanoe George Hawker VC, DSO which was written by his brother. Very well written and provided a good portrait of an unfortunately and undeservedly less documented WWI British ace.