Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/February 2024/Book reviews


 * By Hawkeye7

Yes, another book on logistics, this time in the Great War. The author is a graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and the Staff College, Camberley who served with the Royal Corps of Transport and the Royal Logistic Corps. He puts considerable effort into translating period terminology into the latest military buzzwords, demonstrating that the concepts if not the neologisms themselves were well understood a century ago and probably long before that.

The author concedes that the subject of this book is too large to be adequately covered in the pages available, so what we get is a series of essays. He does not restrict himself to the British Army; there are chapters on the Royal Navy, the munition industry and the British Indian Army. What we have is well-researched, detailed, informative and interesting.

The book is printed on heavy glossy paper that allows for images and colourful maps. It is elaborately footnoted even by Wikipedia standards, and the footnotes at the bottom of the pages sometimes crowd out the text. The footnotes are full of interesting trivia, and list lots of books on the subject that are well worth a look.

In other words, this is my kind of book.

Publishing details:


 * By Hawkeye7



Moving on from his book on the BEF in World War I, Maginniss decided to write about the BEF in World War II. This book is better that its predecessor: it is more tightly written, more comprehensive and more cohesive. The chapters fit together neatly, rather than being separate essays. The author still likes his trivia, with lots of biographical tidbits, but there are also useful definitions, such as the difference between a depot and a dump, and the doctrinal definition of a railhead.

The campaign of 1939-1940 would not have been most historians' choice; apart from the Dunkirk evacuation, it hasn't been well-covered, and what has been written does not cover logistics, which has never been a popular subject either. This book is therefore invaluable and indispensable to an understanding of the campaign, and much of it covers some new ground, with a whole chapter on the BEF's preparations for chemical warfare. Between September 1939 and May 1940, the BEF suffered only nine fatal casualties. The lack of combat operations allowed logistics to run more smoothly. There are chapters on the railways, ordnance and motor transport.

The fighting begins on page 403. During World War I, the BEF had drawn its supplies from the Channel ports, but in 1939 fear of aerial attack led to a line of communications (LOC) being established from ports in Western France instead. In 1918 the Germans had struck at the southern end of the British line, but had they broken through the BEF would fallen back on its LOC. This time the LOC was cut, leading to the very situation that the British commanders had sought to avoid. Food, water and ammunition soon began to run short, and the logistical units fought a frantic campaign against a rising tide of chaos.

Publishing details:


 * By Pickersgill-Cunliffe



This book sets out to provide an entry on every Royal Navy loss between 1649 and 1860. This is not Hepper's first attempt at doing this; the book is an updated and revised version of his 1994 publication British Warship Losses in the Age of Sail 1650 – 1859. For every entry Hepper provides the date of the loss, the name of the ship and prevalent details of its history, the technical specifications of the vessel, and the name (and fate) of the captain where known. This is followed by the narrative of the loss in question. Entries are referenced individually, and the book is easy to navigate with a thorough index and ship names highlighted in bold throughout.

The book is organised chronologically, moving from the Interregnum to the beginning of the British Empire. Despite having renamed the book from "1650–1859" to "1649–1860", Hepper still finishes this edition at 1859, which is somewhat strange. This niggle aside, the book is the clear frontrunner in its field. There is in fact no other that attempts its breadth. Terence Grocott's Shipwrecks of the Revolutionary & Napoleonic Eras is an excellent work, but only for those studying 1793–1816. For the naval historian looking for Royal Navy losses outside of this period, there is no other work. The book covers losses of every type, from surrender in combat to destruction in hurricane, and from schooner to first rate. With hundreds of entries to cover, ships receive half a page at best, which misses out perhaps some of the finer details, but provides a workmanlike summary and an excellent springboard for further research.

Hepper struggles occasionally with ships out of place by a year in the chronology, completely changing the context of their loss. This is in no way an insurmountable failure, but is a confusing mistake for the author to have made. Despite this, Hepper's wide-ranging and thorough work is indispensable to any historian covering the Royal Navy, and is in many cases the only secondary source to go into any detail about losses, especially those of the 1600s.

Publishing details:


 * By Hawkeye7

This rather unusual book applies statistical techniques to the analysis of military history. Four scenarios are examined: the Battle of Jutland, the Battle of Britain, the Vietnam War and Able Archer 83. Different statistical techniques are used to examine each case study. The book therefore provides a guide to using these techniques to evaluate other cases. The limitations of the approaches are also documented. The best chapters are the first two; the use of bootstrapping for evaluating the Battle of Britain is quite clever, as it incorporates all the technicalities while deftly bypassing the complexities of twentieth century warfare.

The book aims to minimise the background in statistics involved. The appendix at the back that gives some background on statistics is without equations, although there are plenty in the Able Archer 83 chapter. However, high school level statistics would be an advantage to the reader who might otherwise puzzle over standard deviations and normal distributions. Most would have to take approximate Bayesian computation on faith. There is far more military history than statistics though. The book can be regarded as an introduction to the use of statistical techniques for bolstering historical arguments.

Publishing details: