Hot Blood & Cold Steel

Tag: book review

  • 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.  The basis for Duffer”s Drift (if you…

  • Book Review – Blitzkrieg Legend

    Book Review – Blitzkrieg Legend

    A book review of Bltzkrieg Legend, the German Army official history of the 1940 Campaign in the West

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Blue Fires, Gary Hyland

    “Gary Hyland owns a successful company that produces original sculptures. He has a long-held fascination for the Nazis’ development of new technologies during the Second World War.” Do I need to add any more? Synopsis This is one series of speculations about how the nazis might have invented (and built prototype) flying discs at the…

  • Making A Killing, James Ashcroft

    Review of “Making A Killing” by James Ashcroft who was a mercenary in Iraq in 2003 & 2004. Well worth reading.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…