What Are You Currently Reading? 2014

[Tukhachevskii]

For Christmas I received the following books (I recommend reading No. 1 before No. 2, No. 3 is optional, depends what you're into you kinky buggers)

1. Not Mentioned In Despatches (I had to ignore most of his befehlstaktik vs auftragstaktik nonsesne- he has a habit of making the same points over and over again- and his manoeuvre warfare agenda but it is still a very worthwhile read.)

2. Nine Battles to Stanley (The perfect accpaniment to "Not Mentioned..." and contains an analysis of boths sides)#

3. The Steampunk Illustrated Bible (Yeah? And?)

[jcustis]

"Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942" by Clay Blair. I picked it up for $5 in new condition at a Tampa Bay used bookstore and have been grinding through its 864 pages at a steady clip. http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-U-Boat.../dp/0679640320

This is the first volume of a massive two-book effort. The second volume details the period of 1942-1945 when fortunes were reversed and the German vessels became the hunted.

Like John Lundstrom's "The First Team: Pacific Air Combat from Perl Harbor to Midway", Blair's work is very detailed and draws from a wide range of sources to paint a picture that contrasts those put forth by many historians.

Blair asserts that the German WWII U-boat effort was not as effective as many historians otherwise believe, and he does so with a really good narrative style which has made the book much easier to read than Lundstrom's resource.

I always found submarine warfare an interesting, if only peripheral topic to read on, but I have really enjoyed the various movies like Das Boot. Blair's work is a good book that covers a lot of ground while still providing details where they matter--at least for my taste.

[Granite_State]

1. Patton and Rommel, Dennis Showalter. Good read, and a good introduction to both. Read D'Este's Patton biography, to which this doesn't compare, but didn't know much about Rommel. Showalter does a good job of showing Rommel's genius for knowing where to be on a battlefield, and how he was Johnny on the spot over and over again. He shows the limitations of that too, but not as fully. Showalter's writing style annoyed me though, he threw in all kinds of contemporary analogies (Monica Lewinsky IIRC!) which now read as very dated and forced.

2. Men Against Fire, SLA Marshall. I know (thanks to the old thread on here actually) that his combat participation stuff is widely debunked, and he played fast and loose with the facts. But I figured if General Van Riper is convinced of its value, it's gotta be worth reading. Enjoying the book, but taking it with a big grain of salt.

[Firn]

I finished now the paper summing up the book Farm to Factory by Robert C. Allen to understand more about the pre-war Soviet economy. It is interesting to compare the early Soviet experience with the later (early) Chinese one of which I got a decent understanding thanks to The Chinese Economy by Barry J.Naughton.

Soviet economic performance is usually dismissed as a failure. In contrast, I argue,the Soviet economy performed well. Japan was certainly the most successful developing economy of the twentieth century, but the USSR ranked just behind it. This success would not have occurred without the 1917 revolution or the planned development of state owned industry. Planning led to high rates of capital accumulation, rapid GDP growth, and rising per capita consumption even in the 1930s. The collectivization of agriculture was not necessary for rapid growth--I argue that industrial development would have been almost as fast had the five year plans been carried out within the frame work of the NEP–but it none-the-less nudged up the growth rate.

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, authors of Why Nations Fail have a blog entry based partly on his graphs.

The important leap in Allen’s conclusion, and the reason why his thesis is ultimately unconvincing is that as Gerschenkron noted long ago in Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, partly in the Russian context also, backward economies can grow rapidly and may do so using a variety of arrangements. This is made feasible because they are benefiting from catch-up and technological convergence. The fact that Soviet Russia took advantage of catch-up opportunities and transferred resources from its massively inefficient agriculture to industry implies neither that central planning was efficient in the short run nor that it could be a steppingstone for more growth-enhancing institutional structure in the long run.

Without entering into the debate itself, in which many questions are still open it is certainly interesting to note the effect of big shift from the surplus labour in agriculture into the producing sector and mostly heavy industry. Female labour was also moblized to a far greater degree. This was enabled by the steady increase in capital investment coupled with ruthless policies and more (technical) education for a far greater part of the population.

The many modern factories built in that period were heavily influenced by the American way of mass-production and given the policies of the regime and the many basic needs of the population and economy aimed at producing decent-enough quantiy then quality. Military production received very considerable attention quite early and the factories seem to have been easy to switch to war production. Basic ressources were rather readily accessible with capital being the bottleneck, although food production suffered initially very severly under a bundle of radical Soviet policies, resulting in widespread famines, especially in the Ukrainian SSR.

A very nasty surprise in industrial production was in store for the invader, which could only deploy part of his industrial power. (Obviously there is a great deal of propaganda and illusions in it, but the surprise was certainly there. Notice the very lenghty discussion of the oil problem and it's strategic implications for Mr. Hitler. Fits perfectly with what Tooze worked out).

[Steve Blair]

Read D'Este's Patton biography

+1. D'Este's book is fantastic.

[Backwards Observer]

Van Halen: Exuberant California Zen Rock 'N' Roll by John Scanlan

review - examiner.com

…

The Apocalypse Now Book by Peter Cowie

review - variety

…

Dictator's Homes by Peter York

review - the age

[Firn]

A Soldier's Tale: The Bloody Road to Jerusalem by Uri Avnery.

This book unites two classic works on the War of 1948, first published in 1949 and 1950 and adds an introduction and some commentary.

The first book, 'In the Fields of the Philistines' was a huge success. Still today it feels fresh and captive, pulling you sometimes right into the actions and giving you the impression of looking out of the eyes of somebody else. The style is powerful and able to paint memorable and fitting pictures for the mind. The author later explained how the book was crafted.

I wrote before the action, during the action, and after the action. When an exhausting battle was over, my comrades would lie down and snore. I picked up my pencil and paper and wrote. I wrote on the ground, in the trenches, and on the hood of a jeep. I wrote in the canteen surrounded by hundreds of noisy comrades and I wrote in bed at night.

I wasn’t writing a diary. A diary is a dialogue with yourself, a record of your most intimate thoughts. But my articles were meant to be published. I knew they would appear the next day in black and white in the newspaper. All these reports appeared in the paper Yom Yom (Day by Day), the evening edition of the great Israeli daily paper Haaretz (The Land).

He was involved in many important battles during the war, first around the road to Jeruslam and later in the South and becomes a member of the famous Samson's foxes. Mounted on Jeeps, perhaps influenced by the SAS experience in North Africa, the small unit is highly influential because it is a rare combination of mobility and firepower. Some themes become a bit repetitive, like the conflict between front line troops and the 'shirkers' back home and his view about politicians. He sounds indeed like the radical voice of the 'youth'.

'The other side of the coin' was written in one go after the war and offers sometimes a stark contrast to the first book. It combines the story of his recovery at a hospital with intermitting memories, handling themes which didn't make it into the field reports. To avoid the military censorship it was tagged as literature, and it does certainly contain actions and orders which show dark sides. For example civilians get shot following orders from higher up with the intention to get others to flee and to stay away.*

All in all it offers a multifaceted view of the conflict from a soldiers eyes and ears, with acts heroic, good, curious, strange, bad or ugly.

*As Ariel Sharon died I took a look at his life and his controversial role as leader of unit 101. Having read the book the Qibya massacre does no longer stand out that much as it is put into a bloody and murky context of other war crimes inflicted by people on both sides.

[omarali50]

Just finished Lawrence in Arabia. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...ence-in-arabia

My review:
The author has collected a lot of information (some of it new, a lot of it not well known) and it would have been a 5 star book if he had stuck to telling great stories; but he also wants to right historical wrongs and sell the book as some sort of "explanation" of how and why the modern Middle East became what it did. In this respect, he rarely rises above the "Guardian" level of fashionable BS; it would have been so much better if he had tried to just calmly tell us the stories without attempting to justify the sub-title (War, deceit, imperial folly and the making of the modern middle east) since this is actually NOT a book written at that level and shouldn't pretend to be one.
And dont expect this to be a good description of the long and confused war fought in that region from 1914 to 1918. Several major events are mentioned and some British defeats are described in greater detail, but almost always without any systematic description of the fronts, the opposing armies, or the bigger economic or military picture in the region (touched upon, but not systematically described, analyzed, etc.).
Still, worth reading if you want to know more about some very interesting characters (first and foremost Lawrence, but also Kurt Prufer, William Wales, Aaron Aaronson, etc) and their adventures in the region. But unless you are willing to blindly trust the author's ability to pick and choose what to highlight and what to ignore (and I would not), you cannot take this anecdote-heavy account as a balanced and accurate account of the forces at play, much less a good analysis of why things turned out the way they did.