• Storm of Steel is a good one for sure. I am just beginning To Rule the Waves How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World

  • '17 '16 '15

    @Private:

    Just finished Six Minutes in May by Nicholas Shakespeare. About Churchill’s promotion to PM despite the debacle in Norway. Forensically strips away Churchill’s obfuscation and lays bare his personal responsibility for what went wrong. Understanding the obstacles to Churchill’s appointment emphasises the qualities that still made him the best option.

    Chamberlain comes out better than expected. Although his government was not waging war effectively he does get credit for delaying hostilities in 1938 and then massively increasing UK defence budgets.

    heh heh yea he gets credit for that alright.  :-)  looks like an interesting read


  • There is a fictional account of Munich by Robert Harris, barney. That is also well worth reading for its take on Chamberlain’s reasoning.


  • @ABWorsham:

    Just got Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger in the mail.

    Storm of Steel was an amazing read. It’s a great firsthand account of the brutality of the Western Front.


  • A Perfidious Distortion of History by Jurgen Tampke

    Found this a very interesting read. It attempts to dismantle the often accepted view that the Versailles peace treaty was so damaging that it lead directly to WW2. I did not find every argument advanced by Mr Tampke convincing, but there is a lot of worthwhile argument and analysis, covering the causes of WW1, the subsequent peace and so the causes of WW2. The general conclusion is that Versailles - being so very much less onerous than treaties imposed by Germany on its defeated enemies - did not deal with the underlying causes of European conflagration, allowing those to come to the fore again.

    For anyone interested, here is The Times review of this book:

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-perfidious-distortion-of-history-the-versailles-peace-treaty-and-the-success-of-the-nazis-by-juergen-tampke-80sm5rt0n


  • @Private:

    Found this a very interesting read. It attempts to dismantle the often accepted view that the Versailles peace treaty was so damaging that it lead directly to WW2. I did not find every argument advanced by Mr Tampke convincing, but there is a lot of worthwhile argument and analysis, covering the causes of WW1, the subsequent peace and so the causes of WW2. The general conclusion is that Versailles - being so very much less onerous than treaties imposed by Germany on its defeated enemies - did not deal with the underlying causes of European conflagration, allowing those to come to the fore again.

    The Times website won’t let me read more than the opening paragraph of the article, so it’s hard to evaluate the book’s arguments, but I’d say that while Versailles certainly contributed to the eventual outbreak of WWII it’s questionable to claim that it led “directly” to it, given that the two wars were twenty years apart.  The Franco-Prussian War similarly contributed to the eventual outbreak of WWI forty years later, but similarly did not lead to it directly.  The argument that “Versailles did not deal with the underlying causes of European conflagration, allowing those to come to the fore again” sounds at least partially right.  WWI caused serious cracks in the European power structure which had been in place for the past couple of centuries, and Versailles was arguably an attempt by the winners to patch up the cracks in their part of the edifice and restore the status quo.  The restoration proved superficial; WWI caused serious economic, demographic and political damage to all the participants, including the winners, and this damage left them in a fragile state throughout the 1920s and 1930s – which is one reason why Britian and France in particular were in such a weak position to face expansionism by the Axis powers.  It took WWII to finish the job started by WWI, i.e. the replacement of the European order by the new global order which emerged after the war – a global order characterized by the bipolar US/USSR superpowerdynamic and by the crumbling of the British and French colonial empires over the following couple of decades.


  • Agree with all of that Marc. The book would add a number of points, of which here are a couple:

    1. The key cause or WW1 was a Prussian military mindset and bureaucracy, fostered over the previous century and more, but greatly strengthened by Bismark’s wars in the pursuit of German unification. Germany really was determined upon European hegemony and the allies were right to defend a balance of power. This contradicts the generally held perception of WW1 being a failure by all parties to avoid war.

    This military mindset and bureaucracy survived Versailles, despite the departure of the Kaiser. For example, the judiciary and the army both demonstrated support for right-wing politics and hostility to the left. The false myth of Germany not being defeated in WW1 was assiduously nurtured by its governing classes, adding a powerful drive to return Germany to its rightful position of European dominance.

    I found the book rather convincing an this point.

    2. Versailles left Germany as the dominant European power. Less than 2% of Germany’s native population were lost by territory being ceded, leaving Germany with a much larger population than France. Within a a very few years its industrial output surpassed pre-war levels. Much of the huge reparations bill was structured with no expectation of it being paid, but included in the total to mollify the electorates of the allied nations. In fact Germany then paid only a tiny fraction of the reparations that the allies were expecting. The huge costs of rebuilding swathes of France and most of Belgium were actually funded by the allies.

    All of this runs against our awareness of hyper-inflation in Weimar Germany. It seems that inflation was actually encouraged by the Weimar government to reduce the actual value of reparations, which were set in German Marks.

    I was less sure on this point, although the book quotes all sorts of statistics.

    Sorry you could not open the full article.


  • @Private:

    The book would add a number of points, of which here are a couple:

    A few comments on this.  First, I doubt that France and Russia saw themselves as defending “a balance of power” in Europe; if any of the Allied powers thought that way, it was Britain, whose foreign policy in the decades leading up to WWI basically aimed at keeping Britain’s options open.  This non-committal policy infuriated the French, whose objective was to get Britain solidly on-side for any eventual war with Germany.  (Ironically, that’s pretty much what Britain’s own objective was vis-a-vis the U.S. from 1939 to 1941).

    Second, the search for a single “key cause” for WWI is a quest that has occupied historians and other commentators for a whole century, with the pendulum swinging back and forth (according to the fashion of the day) between “it was Germany’s fault” (see Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, a.k.a. the War Guilt Clause) and “it was everyone’s fault” (see Margaret MacMillan’s book “The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War”, though she does attribute significant blame to Kaiser Wilhelm, arguing that his unstable personality would not have been an issue if he’d been the ruler of Lichtenstein rather than of the preeminent military land power of his era).

    Third, it should be noted that Germany wasn’t the only major power of the day where right-wing views were espoused by the army and other leading social actors.  The pre-WWI Dreyfus Affair scandal in France illustrated a similar dynamic, and in the run-up to WWII the right in France hated the left to such an extent that it was sympathetic to the concept of an authoritarian regime, which is exactly what France got from the Vichy Regime under Marshall Petain (who, when France was crumbling in June 1940, blamed its defeat on (as I recall) “twenty years of Marxism”).


  • Quite. It is this moving interpretation that makes this book interesting. Sounds like you should read it! :-)


  • Currently I’m reading a book titled David the Great, it’s covers the life of King David from the Old Testament.


  • I’m currently reading The Road Past Mandalay by John Masters.


  • Operation Drumbeat by Michael Gannon.
    About initiation of U-boot operations off U.S. east coast.


  • @ABWorsham4 I’m currently reading H.W Schmidt’s With Rommel In The Desert.

    It’s a great read. Its interesting to see the war in the desert from a staff officer and company commander’s view.


  • My recommendations:
    http://legendarywarbooks.blogspot.com/

    Check at least
    Witold Pilecki The Auschwitz Volunteer, really amazing real life story WW2

    And
    Kurt “Panzer” Meyer, Waffen SS General
    Something like “Saving private Ryan” on steroids.

    -Krp-

  • '20 '19 '18

    Just finished A Hobbit, A Wardrobe and A Great War by Joseph Loconte.

    In my youth, I read (and re-read) J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (and The Hobbit), as well as C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Loconte’s book taught me that the aforementioned authors’ works were heavily influenced by their experiences in World War One. From descriptions of battle to individual characters, the connections are there. I used to think it curious that, after doing the LOTR and Hobbit movies, Peter Jackson would move on to They Shall Not Grow Old; it now makes perfect sense…And now, I have to re-read The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy.


  • I just finished *The Battle For North Africa *by John Strawson.

  • 2023 '22 '21 '20 '19 '18

    all of the “Sharpe” novels by Bernard Cornwell. Not quite halfway through. Only read 3 or 4, years ago. Kinda dime novel type reads but he has them based on real events.

    I’ve always liked a ruthless protagonist anyway. Probably why I like “Jack Reacher” too. lol


  • @barnee said in What are you reading:

    all of the “Sharpe” novels by Bernard Cornwell. Not quite halfway through. Only read 3 or 4, years ago. Kinda dime novel type reads but he has them based on real events.

    I’ve always liked a ruthless protagonist anyway. Probably why I like “Jack Reacher” too. lol

    If you like Sharpe, barnee, you should try his The Last Kingdom series. In my view they are even better.


  • Recently finished “Churchill: Walking with Destiny” by Andrew Roberts. I thought it was a marvellous book. But then I am as much of a Churchill fan as the author and now rather better informed as to why I am right to be!


  • @Private-Panic

    Thanks Panic. Are those the “Uthred” ones ? I read a couple a few years ago. They are pretty good. I’ll have to start from the beginning so I can get them in order. I read the very first two i think and then missed some, so quit reading them.

    I see there’s a tv show/netflix or something series too. might be worth checking out.

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