Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/February 2018/Book reviews




 * By Nick-D

In Nelson's Wake is an ambitious single volume history of the Royal Navy's role in the Napoleonic Wars and War of 1812, with an emphasis on its activities following the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805. Its author is a former curator at the National Maritime Museum who now works as an academic historian specialising in maritime military history.

It would be difficult to write a book about the Royal Navy of this era that wasn't interesting and occasionally startling, and this is no exception. Davey does a good job of describing the RN's campaigns and their results, with the narratives of some of the battles being genuine page-turners. While the overall emphasis of the book is on the Navy's operations, he also provides useful coverage of the efforts needed to sustain its fleets around the world. An unexpected delight is the lively concise biographies of the Navy's key officers and ship captains which Davey weaves into the narrative (my favourite being the admiral who retired from hard service on a blockade to live with his flag captain's widow and a large collection of parrots). The analysis of the Navy's operations and logistics is well developed, and generally convincing.

The book's main fault is that it covers too much ground in too little space. It would have benefited from some additional analytic sections comparing the strength and capabilities of the Royal Navy at different times with that of its enemies, as this is regularly hinted at but only rarely described. Davey's central argument that the Navy at times struggled to contain powerful French forces in the decade after Trafalgar also wears a bit thin at times - while the French seem to have built large numbers of ships (though how many, and where, is never made clear), the narrative suggests that they struggled to man them with trained sailors and confident leaders, leading to fiascoes whenever they put to sea.

Overall though, In Nelson's Wake is an excellent work of naval history which will be of interest to a wide range of readers.

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 * By Hawkeye7

The subject of this book is the staff of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Montgomery preferred men that he had worked with before, generally categorising them into either "brilliant" or "useless". He had favourites, and liked to take them with him from one assignment to the next. Many of the "Monty Boy's" who were present at the Second Battle of El Alamein remained with him until the end of the war. This book provides thumbnail biographical sketches of them, but it isn't the main thrust of the book.

What this book does have a lot to tell the reader about is the functioning of the staff system. Before 1984, British Army staffs were organised along different lines to the continental system used in France, and subsequently adopted by the United States and other NATO countries. Staffs were divided into three branches: a G (general) branch, responsible for operations, intelligence and training; an A (adjutant) branch, responsible for personnel management, and a Q (quartermaster) branch, responsible for logistic and equipment support. The staff were saddled with cumbersome traditional titles, such as Deputy Assistant Adjutant and Quartermaster General (DAA&QMG).

A recurring problem was the cleavage between the G and Q branches, which meant that operations were not properly coordinated with logistics. To get around this, some commanders modified the system by adding aspects of the continental system, usually by designating the head of the G branch as a chief of staff. Montgomery adopted this, designating (Major General Freddie de Guingand as his chief of staff, with authority over the administrative branches (headed by Major General Brian Robertson and later Major General Miles Graham).

Another innovation that Montgomery adopted was splitting the headquarters (HQ) into three parts: Rear, Main and Tac. An army or army group headquarters is necessarily large, and moving it is therefore difficult and disruptive. Montgomery always remained at Tac, and almost never visited Rear HQ. De Guingand was in charge at Main, and usually Major General Gerry Feilden at Rear HQ, as Graham was at Main. A great deal of time was lost by de Guingand and Graham in travelling back and forth between Main and Tac.

Montgomery's doctrine was that senior commanders should visit their subordinates, and not the other way around. Fine when dealing with General Harold Alexander, but apt to cause difficulties with a commander who does not subscribe to the theory, like General Dwight Eisenhower. Montgomery's eccentricities loom large, but he was a general who won battles, and made tough decisions when they needed to be made.

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 * By Hawkeye7

This is a comprehensive and highly detailed account of World War II in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, the south-eastern part of France. The war in this part differed somewhat from that in other parts of France. It went through five phases: the early war up to the fall of France in June 1940, including the desultory Italian invasion of France; the Vichy France period, which lasted until its eclipse in the wake of the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942; the Italian occupation, which lasted until the Italian armistice in September; the German occupation, which lasted until the Allied landings on the Riviera in August 1944; and finally the liberated period, which lasted until the end of the war. Of course, events in the Côte d'Azur could never be entirely separated from what was going on in the rest of France, or across the border in Italy, but as a result, the war was much less harsh than elsewhere in France, to say nothing of what was going on elsewhere in Europe.

The author, George G. Kundahl, was a major general in the United States Army, who served as executive director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence. He has a PhD in political science from the University of Alabama and has written a couple of military history books on the American Civil War. More importantly, he has been living on the Riviera for the past 15 years, which has given him plenty of time to travel about and talk to the locals about the war. There are books on various aspects of the war in France, but this is the most comprehensive about the war in France. It extensively covers the various resistance movements, and the role of SOE, and details everyday life in the period, which of course greatly depended on individual circumstances. The author is very even-handed in his treatment of the Germans and Italians. Throughout it all, the stunning beauty of the landscape suffuses the narrative.

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