Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/June 2022/Book reviews




 * By Nick-D

The 240th book in Osprey Publishing's 'Elite' series is a bit of a departure from the usual focus on different military units/types. This book covers the Japanese home front during World War II in more or less its entirety, and provides a short summary of everything from the country's air defences to the use of children as labourers. Appropriately, the book is weighted towards coverage of the civil defence units and community associations that responded to air raids, but the scope really is remarkable for what's only a 64-page book.

While a range of previous works have been published on this topic, most of them are hard to track down. As a result, this little book fills a useful gap. While coverage of each topic is fairly brief, the level of detail will be useful for high-level Wikipedia articles. Jowett also clearly explains the total inadequacy of Japan's industry and civil defences, and in doing so helps to illustrate the desperate state the country was reduced to by 1945. A clear implication is that the country was in no shape to mount a sustained resistance if the war had continued for much longer. The book is also very well illustrated, with the usual Osprey illustrations of what different types of home front workers and service people looked like (it's interesting to see this style of artwork, which usually depicts soldiers in artificially clean uniforms, illustrating women and children dressed in rags in this book).

The book's main flaw is that it is based only on English-language works, several of which are elderly. This is a real shame, as it means that it's not going to be up to date with the main body of literature on the topic. The book's structure is also somewhat confusing - it would have benefited from a brief introduction explaining the structure.

Overall though, this is a very useful book that punches well above its weight.

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 * By Hawkeye7

This book gets off to a slow start. Frankly, I dislike the custom of starting with a dramatic situation in the first chapter. In this case it is the Berlin Crisis of 1961, and really has little to do with the rest of the book. It then goes into a sluggish but sketchy account of the origins of Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at the University of California in Berkeley, and its involvement in the Manhattan Project.

After that there is an account of the origins of the Livermore, California, branch of the Radiation laboratory, which was created in 1952. At this point, the book improves greatly, and there is a lot of really interesting stuff about the development of nuclear weapons by the Livermore Laboratory. This is mostly sourced from classified internal documents, and therefore we have to take the author's word for it when he says that a design was ground-breaking or revolutionary. I would have appreciated more information, but it is still quite fascinating.

The University of California Radiation Laboratory was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory soon after Lawrence died in 1958, and the two branches at Berkeley and Livermore were separated in 1971, although both are still administered by the University of California. The author, Tom Ramos, is a West Point graduate (Class of 1969) who taught physics there before moving to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1981. Regrettably, the book only covers the 1950s and early 1960s. It would have been much better if it had continued the story for a few more decades, perhaps even covering the author's own work with X-Ray lasers.

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 * By Hawkeye7

I have something of a collection of books on the Falklands War, a little-known conflict between the UK and Argentina in 1982. That's as distant now as World War II was then. The war was pretty unusual, being fought with modern weapons, far from the homelands of both countries, and involving a major amphibious operation. This has been of particular interest in China.

This book is about the experience in that war of the Mountain and Arctic Warfare Cadre. This was a small unit of the Royal Marines, consisting of only 36 men, organised into eight sections of four with a four-man headquarters. All its members were officers or NCOs, and all were graduates of the Royal Marines' demanding ML1 or ML2 mountain leader training courses. The unit was drawn from the instructors and the recent students on the course, who had just completed the training when the war began. The unit had a dual role of training in peacetime and action as the Brigade Patrol Troop in wartime; since then the two roles have been separated. Their mission in the Falklands was providing outposts ahead of the main force.

It is my personal opinion that altogether too much is written about special forces and elite units; that too many armies expend too much effort on them, particularly the British Army; that they are overused; and that all this is to the detriment of overall efficiency. The author has little time for the SAS, which he describes as "insular" and "arrogant" with a "prima donna approach". "In essence", he writes, "there were too many forward operating troops in an area that did not justify that many". (p. 120)

That having been said, this is a solid book. It is written, largely in the first person, by the officer who commanded the Mountain and Arctic Warfare Cadre in the Falklands, drawing also on the recollections of other members of the unit, which is still possible.The book contains vivid accounts of what it was like, particularly the problems of long night marches negotiating the notorious stone runs in the dark while carrying a full kit. it also has a blow-by-blow account of the Mountain and Arctic Warfare Cadre's attack on Top Malo House, where half the unit fought against the Argentine 602 Commando Company, a unit of nearly equal size. The action is told with accounts from both sides.

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 * By Hawkeye7

There is a certain mythos surrounding the British Special Air Service (SAS). This is usually considered to have started with the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege. Since then there has been a lot written about elite units, which has been considered problematic. Almost all armies have Special Forces, but the British Army has always had a particular fondness for them, often to its detriment. This book is written by Lieutenant General Sir Cedric Delves, who was the commander of one of the two SAS squadrons deployed in the 1982 Falklands War.

The original role of the SAS was operating in small groups behind enemy lines, gathering intelligence, organising guerrillas and conducting raids and demolitions in cooperation with spies and resistance fighters. Because they operate in small groups, the SAS are trained to take a great deal of initiative. The problem with this became evident in the Falklands; it is unwise to give someone prone to being captured too much information. The first mistake made was in sending D Squadron, which was trained for the Mediterranean, instead of G Squadron, which was trained for the Arctic. (Despite the letters, there are only four SAS squadrons.) G Squadron subsequently sent, but this meant that there would be two SAS squadrons on hand when there might not be sufficient missions for one. D Squadron was therefore taking up space that might have been better allocated to an operational or logistical unit.

The immediate result was that D Squadron was deployed to South Georgia for Operation Paraquet in a role for which it was poorly trained and equipped. This resulted in a troop being stuck on the Fortuna Glacier and requesting dust off, resulting in the loss of two valuable helicopters. A second attempt at reconnaissance fared little better, two patrols being swept out to sea in faulty boats, resulting in an air-sea rescue. The arctic-trained Mountain and Arctic Warfare Cadre or the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) were available and would have been a better choice for the mission. In the end the Argentine garrison surrendered without the need for formal attack on its positions.

If there was plenty of enthusiasm for the SAS, there was uncertainty as to what its role should be. There wasn't really any scope for action behind enemy lines in the Falklands; there were just Argentine positions and a vast no-man's land. The need for coordination between Special Forces units and a mechanism for the proper allocation of tasks to them was a major lesson of the campaign. The SAS's raid on Pebble Island was judged a success, and a reversion to the raiding role of the SAS in the Western Desert campaign of the Second World war where airbases were an important target, but the damage was slight, the lost aircraft were quickly replaced, the radar installation that was the primary target was not there, and risk to the fleet, including the vital aircraft carrier HMS Hermes (R12) was considerable.

The value of special operations has to be balanced against the resources they consume, and that is considerable. Later in the campaign a four-man patrol was taken by surprise by an Argentine one and a dust off was requested by the two members who were neither killed nor captured. This was, quite rightly, turned down; helicopters were a scarce and valuable resource, and they were needed to provide the artillery with vital ammunition to support the attacks on the high ground around Stanley. That a four-man patrol could be surprised was not unexpected, and the SAS were supposed to be trained in escape and evasion. To risk two helicopters for four men seemed unsound. The SAS didn't see it that way, and they escalated their request to Commodore Michael Clapp, who reluctantly released two Westland Sea King helicopters.

This book does not provide a full account of the SAS in the Falklands: it is a personal account, so in the most part it doesn't cover events he wasn't involved in. But it is not a Boy's Own adventure either. There is much in it for the serious student of military operations, particularly regarding the role of Special Forces, which is frequently misunderstood, the units misused, and the popular image becoming more of a millstone around the neck.

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Recent works on the American Civil War