Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/August 2017/Book reviews




 * By Hawkeye7

For the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Messines, Blue Sky Publications has released this book. It comes in the wake of the A Greater Sum of Sorrow on the Battle of Bullecourt earlier in the year. Overshadowing any work on Australia in the Great War is Charles Bean's monumental Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918. Volume IV covers 1917, in somewhat less depth than 1915, 1916 or 1918, but nonetheless goes down to platoon level, and while sometimes economical with the truth, Bean rarely makes an error or even an omission. The sheer size of his work—and the 1917 volume still weighs in at nearly a thousand pages—makes it intimidating to even serious military history readers, not to mention the writers, but it does provide an opening for someone who wants to write 300 pages on a particular battle.

In this, Deayton succeeds fairly well. While not presenting much that is new to someone who has read Bean's account, Deayton does supplement the earlier work with a series of balanced judgements of the commanders involved, starting with Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the BEF's controversial commander. Haig's expansion of the battle plan, while well-intentioned and a fairly good idea in many respects, had the unfortunate outcome of dislocating the well-laid plans of his army commander, General Herbert Plumer. Plumer built a reputation—with Messines as its foundation—as the best of Haig's army commanders; but Deayton notes that he made some serious and costly mistakes. At II Anzac Corps there was Lieutenant General Sir Alexander Godley, who did not have a great reputation before the battle. His contribution at Messines did nothing to improve this, and he went on to a major disaster later in the year.

Deayton does not restrict himself to the Australians, but tells the story of the whole of II Anzac Corps, although not in the same amount of detail. Leading the Australian 3rd Division was Major General John Monash, about whom much has been written. Deayton contrasts Monash with Major General William Holmes of the Australian 4th Division. While the former was less effective during the battle, he exerted a much greater influence before and after. Monash's efforts to determine what went wrong led to a series of reliefs; this is contrasted with Holmes, who swept everything under the rug. Much more could have been said about Major General Sir Andrew Russell and his New Zealand Division. Similarly, there is a bit, but not a great deal, on the British 25th Division and its commander, Major General Guy Bainbridge, whom even Haig described as "not a popular or tactful officer".

So the book is mainly about the Australians. Like Bean, Deayton tries to be fair and even-handed, and is on guard for popular myths. He emphasises that up to this point, the Australians and New Zealanders had done little to to distinguish themselves on the Western Front. Indeed, Messines was the first battle for the 3rd Division. If you're interested in finding out about the battle, this is a good read.

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 * By Hawkeye7

This is the third in a series of books produced by the Australian Army History Unit on recent events; earlier volumes covered the Australian participation in the 1994 United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda and the War in Afghanistan. Intended to be read by senior officers, this volume is about the role of the senior leadership in the period from 1972 to 2012. It consists of six essays by four authors.

While a great deal has been written about the role of generals in time of war, rather little has been devoted to generalship in time of peace. Following the end of the Australian commitment to the Vietnam War in 1972, there was a long period of twenty years in which the Australian Army saw little action, with only the occasional commitment of token numbers of peacekeepers. From 1992 on, these became more common and more substantial; starting with the 1999 intervention in East Timor, the Australian Army entered on a period of frequent and intense operations, with multiple wars going on simultaneously in East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Solomon Islands.

With no war to fight, and no identifiable threats, between 1972 and 1992 the Army was in a period of uncertainty. What structure and equipment is appropriate when you do not know what you are going to be called on to do? While the other services responded to the call from the civilians in the Department of Defence for a strategic posture centred on the defence of Australia, in which the most likely contingencies were considered to be low-level raids, the Army resisted, clinging to an orientation towards medium-level conflict. Senior officers tend to prefer large structures, which gives them plenty to do, but lacking manpower such structures tend to result in a "hollowed out" Army.

The enhanced tempo of the last two decades resulted in the Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Ken Gillespie and his deputy (and successor) Major General David Morrison instituting the Adaptive Army concept, under which different functional commands gave generic training (for a war), specialised instruction for the mission on hand (for the war), and planned for the future (for the next war).

This book is not entirely free of jargon, and falls well short of a complete history of the Australian Army's senior leadership since 1972. There is a lot more that could have been written on the subject; notable omissions are a discussion of equipment purchasing and efforts to change Army culture. Nonetheless, despite its slim size, it still has a great deal to say. For senior leaders and students of strategic studies, there is much here to ponder.

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 * By Nick-D

Book 243 in Osprey Publishing's vast New Vanguard series covers the use of armoured fighting vehicles by the Apartheid-era South African Army in the South African Border War. Co-written by young South African historian Kyle Harmse and Osprey veteran Simon Dunstan, it generally uses the standard format for works in this series: a length of 48 pages, summary-style coverage of its topic and lots of illustrations, including original artworks showing the main types of South African AFVs. The main deviation is that it's largely a campaign history of the South African armoured units, and provides relatively brief coverage of the design and features of the AFVs.

I found this book to be disappointing. The South African Army of this era and the Border Wars are interesting and important subjects which have received little attention by mainstream publishers outside of South Africa, with post-Cold War coverage of the topics largely being limited to somewhat dubious works issued by obscure firms. While this book has been published by a mainstream British publisher, it unfortunately falls squarely into the literature on this topic. It is written from the South African perspective only, and repeats the usual tropes: the Border War is described as being a defensive conflict for South Africa (the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that it was actually part of an aggressive strategy to destabilise the country's neighbours), the narrative is focused on South African victories, and some of the more morally indefensible elements of the South African security forces such as the Koevoet teams are singled out for praise. The fact that the word "Apartheid" never appears in the text is indicative of the book's style and perspective.

Leaving aside issues with balance, the book does provide some useful information. While coverage of the design of the main AFVs is somewhat brief, the summaries are clear and interesting. Likewise, the accounts of the main operations involving South African armour are succinct but useful, though let down by a complete lack of maps and hard-to-credit claims of lopsided casualty ratios (most battles described are claimed to have ended with hundreds of South Africa's opponents being killed against a handful of South African casualties). The many images and photographs are probably the best element of the book, and are well selected and executed.

Overall, this would have been a much stronger and more useful work if it had focused on the South African AFVs rather than the campaigns they were involved in. For instance, it would have been interesting to have included much more detailed material on the development of innovative AFVs such as the Ratel IFV and the features of their variants, and whether the mix of AFVs reflected the South African Army's preferences or was forced upon it by the arms sanctions which came into effect during the 1970s. The views of South Africa's opponents on the effectiveness of these AFVs would have also added a useful dimension to the book. Given the issues with the book's bias, it's a difficult work to recommend.

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