Author: james
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New Model Army by Adam Roberts
It has a Fab Concept. However it doesn’t quite work. Some of it is too heavy handed and not well enough researched to be credible. I bought this book because I liked the premise, a change in the nature of warfare brought about by better information available to the whole army through a wiki style…
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For Fuhrer and Fatherland: SS Murder and Mayhem in Wartime Britain
This was the first time I have read a prisoner of war story involving Germans as the POWs, apart from having read the official history of British Intelligence in WW2 (which only dealt with the captured German spies). I have, however read lots about the prisoners of the Germans. It was interesting that security in…
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Book Review – To Reason Why, by Denis Forman
This is more than just an infantry officer’s memoir. Denis Forman was closely involved in the Battle School movement that transformed the British Army’s infantry training during the second world war. He then went on to serve alongside Lionel Wigram (the primary proponent and intellectual leader of the Battle School movement) in Italy. The story…
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Black Watch by Tom Renouf – Book Review
This is a campaign history written by a veteran of 5th Bn Black Watch who later became the secretary of the Highland Division Association. Direct personal accounts, both from the author and other veterans, are used to tell the story of the 51st Highland Division in a very personal way. This book offers some new…
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Midnight in Some Burning Town –a Review
I actually enjoyed reading this book, even though it wasn’t the book that I thought I was buying. I had ordered it expecting that it would tell me about the various special forces missions that UK forces had been up to between the first Gulf War in 1990-91 and when it was published (in 2004).…
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Urban Nightmare – the megagame pt.2
Shortly after lunchtime (when I ate my lunch, megagames don’t have breaks, they run continuously until the end) I changed role. The trigger for this was that the Emergency Services didn’t really need two players (and Geoff had clearly got the hang of megagames even though it was his first time). Also Federal assistance was invoked,…
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Urban Nightmare megagame
The Urban Nightmare megagame, is a political crisis management game of a zombie outbreak in Romero City. I played the Deputy Chief of the Emergency Services. (A combined paramedic and firefighter service). We had 20 fire appliances and 8 emergency ambulances to service the city. During the megagame I posted tweets of what we were doing, remembering…
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Defeat Into Victory
A friend sent me a copy of Field Marshal Bill Slim‘s Defeat Into Victory. It has always been on my list of books I’d like to read, but somehow I’d never quite got round to acquiring a copy. The version I have is a reading copy of the original edition, with fold out maps all through it. The reading…
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Megagame: Invasion from Mars – the end
Dateline 3127.160 General Buck’s HQ, BRADLEY It’s all over bar the talking. Army Group West is now all back on the East Continent. With due pomp and ceremony (we got a band in) the Mech Brigade left by sea and then my HQ flew out. I was the last member of the DRC forces to…
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Megagame: Invasion from Mars 11
Dateline 3127.150-154 General Buck’s advanced HQ, FAREAST The political negotiations continue, there is much discussion of setting up a supra-national bode to co-ordinate trade, although I do not believe that our government is terribly keen on this idea unless there are appropriate safeguards in place. I have done another deal and persuaded the New Cydonia…
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Megagame: Invasion from Mars 10
Dateline 317.145-149 General Buck’s advanced HQ, FAREAST, West Continent, Cydonia Having brokered a deal via the Earther Military Attaché the Infantry Brigade near ENSEMBLE is flown to BRADLEY (the DRC capital city) by the shuttles of the North Continental Company. This happily bolsters the defences in the capital just in case there is any unpleasantness…