Tag: British Army
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Stress of Battle – Part 2 – Op Research on Urban Battles
This is the second part of my review of The stress of battle: quantifying human performance in combat by David Rowland, which is an essential piece of Operational Research on WW2 and Cold War combat operations. For this part I thought that I would focus on the lessons on urban battles. Rowland and his team used…
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Book Review – The Stress of Battle by David Rowland (Part 1)
Not exactly a book review, more of a synopsis of a great work of Operational Research by David Rowland. The Stress of Battle: Quantifying Human Performance in Combat is the end result of years of work by David Rowland and his team at the Ministry of Defence. Rowland was the father of historical analysis as…
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A215 TMA01 – Night Patrol
Here is the text I submitted for the Creative Writing assignment. The first and third parts are unaltered. I lightly edited Part 2 based on the feedback received (in net terms I added five words). Part 1 is a freewrite, intended to spark ideas based on a prompt. Part 2 is, in my case, a…
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Book Review – In the Face of the Enemy by Ernest Powdrill
In the Face of the Enemy: A Battery Sergeant Major in Action in the Second World War by Ernest A. Powdrill My rating: 5 of 5 stars I borrowed this from the library and liked it so much that I bought my own copy. I found it very interesting because it is unusual for an…
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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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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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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…