Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/February 2016/Book reviews


 * By Hawkeye7

I bought this book as part of my growing collection of books on nuclear weapons and the United Kingdom. So far that has yielded only two articles, on James Chadwick and the British contribution to the Manhattan Project. The shopkeeper said that he had bought a stack of them two days before, and my purchase meant there was only one left. Why they were flying off the shelf he had no idea. Clearly the topic is of more general interest than either of us realised. Hence, the book review.

Between 1958 and 1963, the Royal Air Force operated 60 Thor missiles. A knee jerk response to the Sputnik crisis, the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) was stopgap technology, a strategic missile with a limited range of up to 2000 nmi. This meant that targets in European Russia could only be reached from sites in Europe. As such, it was a crash US Air Force program, utilising the latest management techniques such as PERT and CPM. It was also completely redundant, as the US Army was concurrently also developing an IRBM, the PGM-19 Jupiter. This book chronicles the long struggle to get the Thor working.

The decision was made to base the Thor missiles in Britain, and agreement was reached that they would be operated by the Royal Air Force. Every now and then a missile would be selected at random and transported, with its operators, to Vandenberg Air Force Base on the West Coast of the United States, from whence they would be test fired. Basing the Thor and Jupiter strategic missiles in NATO countries helped cause the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly triggering the nuclear war the missiles were intended to fight. The missiles were then withdrawn, but soldiered on in USAF service performing various tasks until 1980. They were never fired in anger, although five were fired with live 1.4 MtTNT warheads.

This book details how things unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic. If you've read a lot about the British nuclear program then much in this book will not be new. If you want to know more about it, I would recommend Nuclear Illusion, Nuclear Reality: Britain, the United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1958-64 (2010). I can't help thinking that with more pictures this would have made a great coffee table book.

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 * By Nick-D

Australia 1944–45 is the third and final book in a recent series bringing together prominent military historians to cover Australia's experiences in the Pacific War (following on from Australia 1942 and Australia 1943). In line with the earlier books, it includes a large number of short chapters on the key thematic issues facing Australia and military campaigns its forces were involved in in the Pacific during the period, with most of the chapters being written by a leading expert on the topic. I was impressed with the first two volumes in this series and find the final 18 months of World War II to be fascinating, so I was very pleased when I saw the ad for this book.

Given the diverse nature of Australia's military effort in the Pacific and the transitions taking place on the home front, the authors of this book faced some unusual issues. For instance, the chapters covering military campaigns needed to cover the political background to the operations, the seemingly endless disputes among Australian and American officers that preceded them and the challenges the military personnel faced in professionally executing operations whose value was often questionable. Similarly, the authors of the thematic chapters on Australia's war strategy and war economy needed to cover a lot of complex ground in very little space. By and large they succeed, and the book provides excellent coverage of Australia's war effort.

The highlight of the book is the series of chapters covering the main Australian military campaigns in New Guinea and surrounding islands during 1944-45 and in Borneo during mid-1945. Lachlan Grant's chapter on the little-remembered Aitape–Wewak campaign was particularly strong, and Garth Pratten's two chapters on the Borneo Campaign were very well executed. While all of these chapters are pitched at readers with little prior knowledge of the battles, they also provide information from recent research that will be new to many people who are familiar with this period in Australia's military history.

The book's thematic chapters are slightly less successful. While it seems churlish to criticise the extraordinarily prolific David Horner, his chapter discussing Australia's war strategy felt a bit incomplete - later chapters by other authors make up the gaps though. I found that the chapters on the Royal Australian Air Force and Royal Australian Navy's efforts during this period also tried to fit too much in, and it seems odd to have allocated these services only a single dedicated chapter each. In contrast, John Blaxland's chapter on Australia's intelligence services and special operations forces provides a fantastic overview of this complex topic.

Overall, Australia 1944–45 deserves a place on the bookshelf of everyone interested in Australia's experiences in World War II, or the Pacific War more generally. While it's not perfect, it's an important addition to the surprisingly thin literature on this period, and is an excellent reference.

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