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


 * By Nick-D

Embattled Rebel covers the role President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis played in the American Civil War. Written by veteran Civil War historian James M. McPherson, it discusses how Davis attempted to resolve the main challenges that arose during the war and his relationship with the CSA's senior generals.

Given McPherson's expertise, I was a bit disappointed with this book. The main flaw is that there's surprisingly little coverage of the grand strategies Davis adopted during the war: he's presented as mainly reacting to events, and what he hoped to achieve in key periods of the war is often unclear. The book also doesn't really provide a good assessment of his overall performance in guiding the CSA's war effort – instead the focus is on Davis' role in a fairly generic account of the Civil War. Given that McPherson states that Davis micro-managed the war effort (even personally approving minor purchases for the military at times) and worked incredibly long days in doing so, I was left a bit confused about what it was Davis actually did.

That said, Embattled Rebel does have some real strengths. McPherson clearly sets out how outmatched the CSA was, and provides good analysis of why its bid for independence failed. He also provides a refreshingly frank assessment of the CSA's generals, presenting pretty much all of them as mediocre at best and noting that Davis repeatedly failed to make the best of the generals who were available to him (which wasn't helped by his habit of being drawn into their disputes). As a result, the book ends up being more useful as a short general history of the Confederate war effort than it is as a biography of Davis' role in it.

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 * By Hawkeye7

I don't normally give a book five stars, but The Search for Tactical Success in Vietnam is not only the best book I have ever read on the Vietnam conflict, it is one of the best books on military history. A great many books detail the difficulty in fighting a counter-insurgency war. One that comes to mind is Gregory A. Daddis' No Sure Victory: Measuring US Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War (2011), which chronicles the difficulty the US Army encountered determining whether it was winning or losing the war in Vietnam, but it offers no solutions. Similarly, John A. Nagl's and Peter J. Schoomaker's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (2005), talks about the process of learning. Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr.'s The Army and Vietnam (1988) also provides a lot of detail about the problem.

This book analyses the war, and in the end it offers some actual and truly interesting answers.

The Australian Army sent a brigade-sized 1st Australian Task Force to fight in Vietnam in 1966. It had a different doctrine to its US allies on how to fight counter-insurgency, or counter-revolutionary warfare as the Australian Army called it, based upon its experience in fighting the Malayan Emergency (1948-60) and the Indonesian Confrontation (1963-66). An Army raised for the latter fought in Vietnam instead. It was not entirely Australian; it also included important New Zealand Army components, and a battery of US Army artillery. Occasionally, ARVN units were attached.

The 1st Australian Task Force assumed responsibility for South Vietnam's Phuoc Tuy Province, a small and province south east of the South Vietnames capital of Saigon. It had a small port called Vũng Tàu through which the Australian force could draw logistic support (or make a hasty departure in the event of an Allied collapse). Over the next five years, the Australian Task Force drove the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army main force units out of Phuoc Tuy, and kept up the pressure on its arch-nemesis, D445 Battalion. This had a strength of 550 in 1966, and, despite a constant stream of reinforcements, less than 150 in 1971.

After compiling a database of all the Australian actions in Vietnam, the three authors of this book break them down into different types, such as pitched battles, patrol contacts, ambushes and mine warfare. Since the Australian Army kept training for Vietnam for decades after the war ended, its tactics may be familiar to many: slow-moving, silent foot patrols lasting up to a month; cross-country movement using map and compass while avoiding tracks and roads; nightly harbours and carefully sighted ambushes; battle drills for most situations. The war was fought between two well-matched sides, and with the notable exception of the Claymore mine, the Russian-made small arms carried by the enemy were generally superior to the US-made ones carried by the Australian Task Force.

In such an environment, how could the Australian Task Force expect to gain the upper hand? This book explains how. It also goes further, and provides comparisons between the Australian and the US and New Zealand Armies.

Recommended.

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