Hot Blood & Cold Steel

Tag: WW2

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Allies at Dieppe – 4 Commando and the US Rangers by Will Fowler

    This is an excellent history of a small unit action set in the wider context of the war, and well explained for those not steeped in military history or the second world war. IWM caption : THE DIEPPE RAID, 19 AUGUST 1942 Lt Col The Lord Lovat, CO of No. 4 Commando, at Newhaven after…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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

  • Preparing For War – Onside Report

    Onside report of a design session/roleplay game run at the CLWG November 2009 session where I tried out some ideas for a game of the administration and training of a WW2 infantry company.

  • 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…

  • Battle of the Hills, 21 January 1943

    This is a short article about the advance of the 51st Highland Division in Tunisia in the follow up from El Alamein. I wrote this to be played as a tabletop wargame.

  • 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…