Current Reading: July 2021

So, I've been dipping in British Aircraft Carriers over the last few weeks and it's another worthy book by the author, who if he doesn't know it about aviation in the Royal Navy you probably don't need to know it either.

Give Me Back My Legions by Harry Turtledove. In this case this isn't alternate history or fantasy, it is a 'story' about the Battle of Teutoborg Forest in 9 AD.

Knocked off Custer: The Making of a Young General. It was a good enough book for my purposes, even though Longacre really doesn't have a great answer for how such a slacker at West Point could turn into such a motivated careerist in wartime. Even if you posit the drive to win sufficient respectability to gain the approval to marry Elizabeth Bacon, that doesn't seem that likely as an explanation; Custer always had a few irons in the fire.

Finished Thunder on Bataan; good, detailed tactical and social history undermined by the author being less than forthcoming about his own position regarding events than he needed to be. Caldwell seems to be sympathetic to the so-called "isolationist" outlook, which is his business, but he needed to be upfront about it.

Finished Tower of Skulls, in which the author writes a China-forward narrative of the war; recommended.

>5 Shrike58: Wow, thanks for posting about that book, I hadn't heard of it. I've added it to my wishlists.

I posted the following message to other threads but didn't post it here, but since a good deal of the book is about military history, I'll post it now:

Finished Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America's First Frontier by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. For the most part it was pretty good, being focused on the conflicts between the whites and the Indians as much as it was about Boone. The authors were a bit stylized in their writing, sometimes being a bit too moralizing for my taste. Also, while I considered myself rather well read, I was off to the dictionary for words such as evanescent, brume, mephitic, banjax and quotidian. And to Wikipedia for a reference to the Grand Guignol. For a book that is supposed to be popular history, this seems a bit much.

Basically finished up Soviet T-62 Main Battle Tank, the fourth in a continuing series examining post-1945 Soviet armored vehicles. I think these books are great (but I've spent way too much time online playing games such as "World of Tanks" and "Armored Warfare") and it'll be interesting what the authors say (or can say) about the enigmatic T-64 (presumably the subject of the next book in this series).

>7 Shrike58:

Off topic strictly speaking, but your reference to various online war games called to mind this recent article:

Classified details of army’s Challenger tank leaked via video game (Guardian)

Classified details of the British Army’s main battle tank, Challenger 2, have been leaked online after a player in a tank battle video game disputed its accuracy. The player, who claimed to have been a real life Challenger 2 tank commander and gunnery instructor, disputed the design of the tank in the popular combat video game “War Thunder”, arguing it needed changing. He claimed game designers had failed to “model it properly”. To support his argument the player posted pages from the official Challenger 2 Army Equipment Support Publication – a manual and maintenance guide...

>8 John5918: Now that's funny...I'm sure the Russians have already read the supporting publications for the tank.

I have just dived into How to Plan a Crusade by Christopher Tyerman which I picked up for a song at the Harry Hartog bookshop in the Union Court of the Australian National University.

Cheers