Current Reading - February 2018

Finally completed Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor by James M. Scott. An excellent, comprehensive history of the raid, including the events that lead up to it and what happened afterwards. Although I had read The Doolittle Raid: America's Daring First Strike Against Japan by Carroll V. Glines years ago, I learned a number of new details from this new book.

Completed my latest Kindle book, Grierson's Raid by Dee Alexander Brown.

Now you're ready for the novel, the Horse Soldiers (Harold Sinclair, 1956) and the John Wayne movie version!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse_Soldiers

Just finished Battle Studies by Ardant du Picq which was a bit repetitive and a slog in spots, but on the whole was very good. Had been on my to be read list for years.

In what has been a productive month so far I've finished Operation Typhoon, The Great War in Russian Memory and Fall of the Double Eagle. All three are well worth your time as Stahel is looking more and more like the gold standard for analyzing Germany's war with Russia, Patrone is considering how the Soviet experience short-circuited the struggle to come to terms with the experience of World War I and Schindler gives you as good a one book examination of why the Duel Monarchy failed so badly in a war they felt they had to win as you're probably going to get.

Finished an excellent The British Invasion of the River Plate 1806-1807: How the Redcoats Were Humbled and a Nation Was Born by Ben Hughes. Well written and furnished with many maps.

As for naval reading there were American Naval History, 1607-1865: Overcoming the Colonial Legacy (B+), French Destroyers: Torpilleurs d'Escadre and Contre-Torpilleurs, 1922-1956 (A) and Thetis Down: The Slow Death of a Submarine (C-). Dull is mostly writing an annex to his studies of the great Anglo-French contest for world supremacy, Jordan & Moulin have produced another typically excellent study of the French navy that went to war in 1939 and Booth has written an over-sensationalized account of a disaster at sea that I really don't trust.