Category: Books
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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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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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Condor Blues – British soldiers at war
A very interesting book about the British Army experience from the point of view of two platoons embedded in training the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC) in the aftermath of the invasion (so the first half of 2004 approximately). Both platoons belonged to the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, but one was on secondment from the…
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Company Training by Gen. Haking
When in Southport last week I found an antiquarian bookshop in a very small gap between two other shops. It was very much like the fabled ‘magic’ shops that when you go back to it isn’t there. (Although I hope it is if I get a chance to go back, it had a fantastic collection of…
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The Defense of Jisr Al-Doreaa
This is an excellent update of an old classic. Two books in one, the author’s have brought Swinton’s Duffer’s Drift and re-written it for the modern conflicts (which bear more than a passing resemblance to the Boer War). Swinton’s book is in the second half of the volume. Â The basis for Duffer”s Drift (if you…
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Book Review – Blitzkrieg Legend
A book review of Bltzkrieg Legend, the German Army official history of the 1940 Campaign in the West
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St.Valery: The Impossible Odds by Bill Innes
This is a collection of first hand accounts, mainly posthumously published from three men who were ordinary soldiers in the 51st Highland Division in 1940. None of them were officers (although one was commissioned after his escape and return home). The main part of the book is a personal account originally published in Gaelic and…
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The Battle for France didn't end at Dunkirk
The title of Saul David‘s “Churchill’s Sacrifice of the Highland Division” is possibly erroneous, the book doesn’t come out for what happened to the 51st Highland Division in June 1940 as being a political gesture of allied solidarity on the part of Churchill. It is certainly the fullest account of the 1940 campaign of the…
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Book Review – Field of Fire: Diary of a Gunner Officer by Jack Swaab
Field of Fire: Diary of a Gunner Officer by Jack Swaab My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read the hardback version very shortly after it came out. I collect first hand accounts of the WW2 and unit histories of the 51st Highland Division in particular, so this one was a must buy. That said…
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Tank Tracks, Peter Beale
This is the story of 9 RTR in WW2 written by one of its officers and including material from many of the survivors and contemporary diaries, including the battalion war diary, the brigade history and at one point the radio logs. It is packed with a wealth of material, much of which is directly quoted from a primary…
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Taming the Panzers, Patrick Delaforce
Taming the Panzers: 3 RTR at War, 1914-45 This is a history of 3rd Royal Tank Regiment (a battalion sized unit for those not au fait with UK Armoured regiments). It starts with a chapter of their origins in the First World War and then their subsequent peacetime evolution. 3RTR fought in the 1940 France campaign at Calais, then…