OT - Book (Non Fiction) Review/Recommendations Thread

[Raellus]

The Liberation Trilogy

I just finished Guns at Last Light by Rick Atkinson. It's the third and final volume in his excellent Liberation Trilogy about the United States' involvement in the ETO during WWII and it focusses on the campaign in northwest Europe from D-Day to VE Day. The first book, Army at Dawn chronicles the campaign in North Africa from Operation Torch onward. The second book, called The Day of Battle, is about the campaigns in Sicily and Italy through 1944. All three books are really, really good. Although they focus on American diplomatic and military involvement in each region, they also cover other Allied personalities and operations as well, especially for joint and/or codependent ops. I can't recommend this trilogy highly enough.

[James Langham]

George MacDonald Fraser

In addition to the Flashman books, George MacDonald Fraser also wrote the wonderful "Quartered Safe Out Here," chronicling his time in Burma in WW2. An unapologetic book it tries to explain the reality of soldiering there and features some wonderful set piece scenes - I defy anyone to not be moved (in both humour and gentle sadness) by the description of the ex-servicemen many years on in the final chapter.

If you enjoy this he continues the story in fictional form in the McAuslen trilogy which I find even better than his wonderful Flashman books.

[Raellus]

Savage Continent- Europe in the Aftermath of WWII

This isn't a review because I haven't read this yet, but this new book looks to be a great source of material on what happens in the aftermath of a devastating, modern, total war situation- the kind you'd expect to see in the Twilight War.

http://www.npr.org/2013/07/24/204538728/after-wwii-europe-was-a-savage-continent-of-devastationutm_source&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130725

I shall be acquiring it forthwith and will post a review once I've finished it.

Incidentally, I just stumbled across a fairly recent (it's new in paperback) book entitled Twilight War, about the simmering decades=long pseudo-war between Iran and the U.S.

[Targan]

Plague Wars: The Terrifying Reality of Biological Warfare by Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, published by St. Martin's Press ISBN 0-312-20353-5 / 0-312-26379-1. The edition I have is from 2001 so it's a little bit dated now but it really is terrifying. Meticulously footnoted for sources and quite a few photos and illustrations too. You don't have to be an epidemiologist to understand this book. The biggest problem I had reading it is that it's so depressing how easily biological warfare could end modern human civilization.

[Raellus]

Savage Continent- Europe in the Aftermath of WWII

I've started reading Savage Continent and, so far, it's proving to be a veritable gold mine for T2K-related world-building. Fairly concise but colorful sections address everything from displaced persons, to famine, the black market, and the the physical and moral degradation and destruction of most of continental Europe. It's a must-have for anyone who wants/needs help creating a grim but realistic post-apocalyptic setting, especially in Europe (although a lot of it could just as well be applied to CONUS or other parts of the western world).

[mikeo80]

The biggest problem I had reading it is that it's so depressing how easily biological warfare could end modern human civilization.

All it really takes is one person with a highly contagious disease that does not manifest for 48-72 hours. (Think a virulent flu) That person gets on a 747 or an Airbus with 500-600 people in an enclosed space for, say, an 8 hour flight. Now you have 500-600 disease vectors getting on OTHER flights. Need I go on

I could see nukes being brought out in very short notice to try and BURN the bug out. All international travel stops. All trade stops.

I have got to stop here. I am depressing myself.....

My $0.02

Mike

[Cdnwolf]

http://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/

This is a fascinating app game I play on my phone and the purpose is to wipe out the world with a plague in the shortest time evolving it. It is scary how fast different virus types and bacteria's evolve.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

If you have at least a high-school graduate education I think Rise and Fall of the Third Reich should be mandatory reading.

[Adm.Lee]

Carnivore: a memoir by one of the deadliest American soldiers of all time

I just picked this one up at the library this week, it started off reading easily. He started as a cavalry scout in 1986, spent a little time in Desert Storm, Bosnia, and then twice into Iraq.

He spent a lot of time in M113, M2 and M3, so hearing about being inside one of those is probably worth looking at, for the crowd around here.

At least two of the brief reviews on Goodreads.com say that others think he's making up some of the stuff. Could be, I am in no position to judge at this time.

[Raellus]

I noticed Carnivore on the shelf at my local bookstore. Reading the dust jacket gave me the strong impression that it's a vanity piece including more than a fair sprinkling of macho B.S.

[Adm.Lee]

It's sounding a lot like "war stories," well-embellished, as told at the bar after the war.

In the initial days of combat in 2003, apparently dozens, if not hundreds of trucks full of Iraqi soldiers kept driving into the fire of his Bradley. He's run his track out of ammo a lot.

It does read well, I've barely spent two hours on it, and I'm 2/3 done.

[Raellus]

In the initial days of combat in 2003, apparently dozens, if not hundreds of trucks full of Iraqi soldiers kept driving into the fire of his Bradley. He's run his track out of ammo a lot.

That's more plausible than what the jacket seemed to imply. It made it sound like he was lighting up T-72s and hopping out of his track to do clean up with a liberated AK (I seem to remember a photo of the author with such an AK on the cover or inside flap of the jacket).

If you haven't already read Thunder Run, by David Zucchino, you really ought to consider it. I think I recommended it in this thread a ways back. The soldiers in that book also blast a lot of wrong-way Charlie Iraqis but they're too busy surviving to keep tally of how many men they kill.

[Adm.Lee]

That's more plausible than what the jacket seemed to imply. It made it sound like he was lighting up T-72s and hopping out of his track to do clean up with a liberated AK (I seem to remember a photo of the author with such an AK on the cover or inside flap of the jacket).

More like lighting up unarmored trucks and cleaning up with an M4 and then an AK, when he runs the M4 out of ammo. He exhibits a healthy fear of T-72s the entire book. On his second tour, he acted as an overwatch sniper when his squadron has both Bradleys and armored Hummers.

I will move Thunder Run up the to-read queue. Johnson was in 3/7 Cavalry, so some of his stuff should re-appear there.

[Adm.Lee]

Command and control: nuclear weapons, the Damascus incident, and the illusion of safe

by Eric Schlosser.

Pretty scary stuff. How nuclear weapons (in the US) were developed (hint: rather haphazardly), including their safety systems, deployment plans (generally driven by Pentagon budget infighting), RAND studies and nuclear laboratory studies.

A major focus is the 1980 Damascus incident, when a Titan II missile caught fire in its silo outside Damascus, AR. Almost every chapter loops back to a journalistic retelling of the response by SAC, the Wing HQ, maintenance and security guys on the ground, local farmers and newsmen.

But, it doesn't ignore the many times that nuclear weapons dropped or nearly fired, airplanes carrying them caught on fire, or just lay around waiting for someone to take them. Consider the Davy Crockett nuclear recoilless rifle. The Army asked for 32,000 warheads for it and other artillery mounts in 1961. This, in the same time period that a bomb nearly went off in North Carolina (only one of four safety devices worked) and it was found that there were no serious, armed, guards on US Jupiter and Thor missile sites in Europe. Oh, and President Kennedy found out that the "missile gap" existed, but the reverse of what he'd been preaching-- we had hundreds of bombers and dozens of missiles-- the USSR had 4 ICBMs.

I'm not halfway through it, and I'm thinking lots of Twilight-ish implications. Missiles not launching, missing targets, warheads not going off at the right times, all kinds of sick things.

A 1948-49 scenario, starting from the Berlin Airlift, seems the Soviets' best chance to take Europe without annihilation. I think that's been raised elsewhere around here. It would be super-easy to do US survivors of the 1st ID or Constabulary regiments, and/or the lone British division, overrun by the Soviets. Potential contact with the UK by radio, perhaps aerial resupply.

[Targan]

Currently reading The Shetland Bus by David Howarth, originally published in 1951 by Thomas Nelson and Sons (although the version I'm reading is a new edition published in 1998 by The Shetland Times Ltd and reprinted five times since then).

The book details the exploits of a combined RN/British Army/volunteer civilian operation to smuggle agents, armaments, ordnance and other materiel into German-occupied Norway during WWII, and returning with civilian refugees and Norwegian military personnel wanting to receive additional training and return to the fight.

They used 50 to 80 foot Norwegian fishing vessels crewed by volunteer Norwegian fishermen and merchant navy veterans to make their runs, armed as best as they practically could, and restricted their voyages to the winter months to take advantage of the extended periods of darkness. These guys surely must have had gonads of solid steel. Imagine sailing from the Shetland Islands to the Norwegian coast, in the howling gales of winter, in wooden fishing boats, over and over and over again, for the majority of the war.

The author was a Lt Cdr in the RN and was the 2IC of the operation. He seems to have been a very humble and modest man and his writing style is concise and easy to read. The book is liberally interspersed with maps and black and white photographs. For those with an interest in the lesser-known allied operations of the war I can't recommend this book highly enough.