Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/August 2021/Book reviews




 * By Hawkeye7

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the British Army began considering the possibility of tapping into the manpower of the self-governing Dominions. The South African War had demonstrated that the British Army was nowhere near large enough to fight a major war against a European power like Germany or Russia. Although the British government was wary about a continental commitment, the country was on trajectory towards one. Even today many British people think that the armies of the Dominions were part of the British Army, but this was never the case. What was the case was that they did not have the resources to develop their own weapons, so adopting those of the British Army seemed a reasonable course of action. Tactics and organisational structure, at least at the lowest levels, generally followed suit, although there were always local variations (which this book does not cover well).

Things went further than that though; the British Army offered places to the Dominion armies at the British staff colleges at Camberley in England and Quetta in India, and at the British Army's other schools. There were also secondment and exchange programs. The Dominions, at least in the early years of the 20th century, lacked the economies of scale to run their own training establishments. Offering places cost the British Army very little, and in return they got a commonality of doctrine and procedures as well as organisation and equipment. This created a high degree of interoperability. It also meant that British and Dominion officers were familiar with each other on a personal basis, which offered intangible but substantial benefits. The benefits were seen in the Great War, when the Dominion armies contributed a fifth of the British forces on the Western Front. This was repeated in World War II, when Australian and New Zealand forces fought alongside the British in the Western Desert campaign, and the Canadian Army in Italy and North West Europe.

The strength of this book is in the way that it places the narratives of the different Dominions side by side, where the common themes are exposed. This is very well done. Its weakness is that in its broad scope it does not go into a great detail after the first couple of chapters. It also stops at the end of the the Second World War; coverage of Korea and the subsequent military relationships between the former Dominions would have been a good addition to the work.

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 * By Hawkeye7

This book is a memoir by Rod Barton, an officer of the Australian Defence Intelligence Organisation, who served in Somalia and Iraq. It chronicles his career from its humble beginning in the 1970s to the first decade of the 20th century. Along the way he has many adventures, eventually getting entangled in the biggest intelligence stuff-up of the century. He recounts how he told the Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, at the time of the Gulf War that Iraq had chemical weapons but no biological weapons, and was a long way off developing nuclear weapons. He offers that one out of three isn't bad.

After an interlude in war-torn and chaotic Somalia, the rest of the book chronicles the efforts of a multinational team of spies to track down and uncover the truth about the Iraqi biological weapons program. It shows how the picture was assembled piece by piece through painstaking work in the face of obstruction by Iraq, and later by the United States.

Since the author was cleared to Top Secret, he cannot tell you everything, and there are obvious gaps. The book also falls well short of a detailed account of the Iraqi weapons program, or the work of the various UN inspection teams. Nonetheless it is an interesting read, which I'm sure many people will enjoy.

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 * By Nick-D

The Struggle for Seapower is a lengthy (476-page) history of the naval aspects of the American Revolutionary War. It was written by the historian and TV presenter Sam Willis. As an Australian, I know very little about the American Revolutionary War, so purchased this book to educate myself about its naval campaigns.

I found the book to be rather uneven. The early chapters are its greatest strength, Willis providing lively and detailed accounts of the naval aspects of fighting in the first years of the war. This includes some pretty sharp analysis of the strengths and failings of the American, French and British forces. Willis convincingly establishes the importance of sea power in the war, and sets out the fundamental logistical constraints which hobbled the European powers in the Americas.

As the book went on, the narrative fell away a bit. Accounts of the late-war campaigns are generally much less detailed than those in the early years of the war, despite them often being larger. The analysis is also less convincing, Willis being unable to square the circle regarding the improvements to the Royal Navy, decline of the American, French and Spanish navies and the British defeat. Some clumsy writing, especially in the later chapters, didn't help. The jingoistic 'Royal Navy vs the world' concept that's made explicit in the book's title might be responsible for the straightjacket here: this is one of the few wars in the age of sail where the RN came off second best, with its tactical excellence being unable to make up for poor strategic leadership and the Allies' superior numbers, and Willis at times struggles to present this frankly - perhaps as he was worried about what the book's mostly British audience would make of this.

Overall, this is a thought provoking and useful work, but would have benefited from tougher editing to improve the later chapters.

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 * By Nick-D

As is indicated by this book's lengthy title, it is a history of the Royal Australian Air Force's very successful mine-laying campaign during World War II that was undertaken by the specialist No. 76 Wing using PBY Catalina flying boats. It was jointly written by Robert Cleworth, a historian who has produced a thesis and previous book on this topic as part of efforts to understand his brother's death in a mine-laying mission, and the journalist and true crime writer John Suter Linton.

This is an odd book. It appears that Suter Linton has attempted to convert Cleworth's thesis into a book aimed at a mass market, the target audience seemingly being people who are almost totally ignorant of the war. As a result, a surprisingly large portion of the book is a general history of the Pacific War. Presumably the intent was to put the RAAF's mine laying operations in context, but the end result is that a lot of the book feels like padding. Two pages are devoted to the Battle of Iwo Jima, for instance, despite it being almost entirely irrelevant.

This is a great shame, as the material on the mine-laying campaign is very interesting. Cleworth interviewed many veterans during the 1980s and 1990s, and undertook archival research in Australia and the United States. As a result, the book provides a detailed account of the experiences of the airmen and how missions were conducted. He also makes good use of his family's experiences to illustrate the cost of this campaign - an anecdote about his mother left me in tears. There's also a useful overview of the path of the mine-laying campaign, but this is often buried by the general history material. The book features an excellent set of photos from official and personal collections, as well as some good maps and useful appendices.

The book ends with a chapter complaining about the mine layers not receiving the credit they deserved in most post-war histories. Unfortunately, the approach taken by the authors here means that it doesn't contribute anywhere near as much as it should have to correcting the record. In short, it is an interesting and useful book, but I suspect that Cleworth's thesis and previous book are going to be more useful to Wikipedia editors.

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