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




 * By Hawkeye7

Operation Market Garden is one of those battles that holds a special fascination for readers of military history. It was breathtaking in originality and scope. Three airborne divisions landed in Holland in 1944 in the largest airborne operation in history. Their objective was to capture a series of bridges over rivers and canals, facilitating a rapid armoured advance through an area that would otherwise have been easily defended. It established Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery as a brilliant and innovative commander. And too, while the operation was a failure, there were many acts of heroism, earning five Victoria Crosses and two Medals of Honor, and it came close to success.

There are a couple of good films about the operation. Theirs Is the Glory (1946) was filmed on the actual battlefield with a cast largely comprised of veterans of the battle, many of whom played themselves, and who assisted with the script. The later film A Bridge Too Far (1977) depicts the whole operation, including the Polish and American contribution. The latter was based on the 1974 book of the same name by Cornelius Ryan. If you like military history that is full of fighting and anecdotes, you should seek it out.

This book is a collection of papers on Operation Market Garden from a conference in 2014, the seventieth anniversary of the battle. If you are unfamiliar with the battle, then it will be very difficult to follow it from reading this book. (I would suggest Arnhem: Myth and Reality by Sebastian Ritchie.) It is for the reader who is very familiar with the battle, and is rounded out by papers on related British, Polish and Canadian operations, probably of tangential interest at best.

It contains some good papers though, and there remains lively debate about what the proper strategy for 1944 should have been, how the airborne forces should have been deployed, and what lessons were learned, with the authors of the papers not in agreement. There is a good article on the capture of Nijmegan Bridge based on the Cornelius Ryan collection, and a well-researched account of the exploits of the 406th Infantry Division, a German division so obscure that it has no Wikipedia article.

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 * By Hawkeye7

This book is about military tropical medicine in general, and the Australian Army Malaria Institute in particular. As the book progresses, the former becomes the latter. There is a lot of interesting material about the role of tropical diseases in military campaigns. In most wars before the 20th Century, casualties from diseases heavily outnumbered those in battle. In one campaign in 1809, a force of 40,000 suffered 23,000 deaths, of which only 217 were in combat. Generally speaking, most could have been avoided by simple hygiene precautions that any Army could have adopted since the Stone Age. Without a scientific understanding of disease, the need was not understood. This occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. What often goes unappreciated is the role that military medicine has played in this.

The Australian Army has a long history of fighting disease that goes right back to its origins. It has been blessed with a succession of fine doctors like Neil Hamilton Fairley. Their work saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen during World War II. Australia was fortunate in having fine doctors and an absence of the religious and ideological structures that have hampered medicine in many other countries. Today the AMI is one of very few such organisations in the world. Luckily, it survived an attempt by the Howard Government to abolish it shortly before it was urgently needed in East Timor. It has some real challenges ahead of it as we move towards a world without antibiotics, and without a treatment for malaria.

This book is obviously written by a doctor. There's a fair bit of medical jargon, and a propensity to use Latin instead of English. It could have benefited from more editing. The index is terrible, and the bibliography is a mess. References frequently cite books not in the bibliography. A more serious drawback though is it passes over the serious issues about the toxicity and side effects of the drugs it used to combat resistant strains of malaria.

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