Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/June 2023/Book reviews




 * By Hawkeye7

Historian John Blaxland wrote a couple of volumes of the ASIO history. In the wake of this, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) decided that it would like to have its story told too, and Blaxland was commissioned to write it. This followed a pattern in the UK, where GCHQ, ASD's British counterpart in the Five Eyes, had commissioned an official history after MI5 and MI6 had done the same. It seems that once-secret organisations can't get enough publicity these days. After Blaxland had worked on the project for some time, the director of ASD, Rachel Noble, decided that she didn't like what had been written and terminated the contract.

Blaxland kept the intellectual property for what he had written though. The result is this book, an unofficial history of Australian signals intelligence. It has a broader scope, and is largely drawn from published sources. This is both the strength and the weakness of the book. In its broad scope, it doesn't go into a lot of detail, and the chapters consist of lots of disconnected sub-chapters. So if you want one just book on the subject, this would be a good buy. It covers everything broadly, and if you want to know more, there are good footnotes and an extensive bibliography. If, however, you are a buff who collects a whole shelf of works on intelligence, then you will find that there is not much here that is new.

ASD was formed in 1947, using personnel who had staffed the Central Bureau and Fleet Radio Unit, Melbourne, during the war. It was a secret organisation for many years, but is well-known today. It has had its embarrassing moments, such as when it was revealed that it had been spying on friendly countries, and had bugged the Chinese embassy. The book brings the story up to the present day, although I fear that the term "cyber" has become one of those buzzwords used by management without knowledge of its meaning.

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 * By Nick-D

The most recent book in the Australian Army Campaigns Series covers the mid-1945 Borneo campaign which saw two Australian Army divisions, bolstered with many supporting units, successfully attack several locations in Borneo. It was written by Dayton McCarthy, who is a historian, defence consultant and Army Reserve officer.

The strategic rationale and morality of the Borneo campaign was controversial at the time as the Australian forces attacked cut-off Japanese positions and there was little interest in using Borneo for strategic purposes had the war not ended when it did. McCarthy acknowledges these debates briefly, and fairly, but his focus is on the series of amphibious operations conducted by the Australian units using mainly American shipping and supported by a mix of Australian and US air units. He provides good descriptions of each of the landings, with a focus on illustrating how complex these operations are even when the side conducting them has near-total air and naval superiority. I was very interested in the detailed coverage of the planning processes and the logistical preparations the book provides. As is common with works in the series, it is well illustrated with photos, but the maps are a bit of a let-down.

Through this approach, McCarthy clearly justifies his conclusions about the depth of professional competence, material superiority and training needed to pull off amphibious operations. He also makes good observations about the excellence of the Australian Army by this stage of the war: division, brigade and battalion planning teams prepared complex plans in remarkably short periods of time, and the well trained and equipped soldiers then executed them successfully.

To my mind, the main weakness of the book is that McCarthy side-steps the debate over the morality of the campaign a bit too much. While he's right to not weigh into the debate over the strategic rationale for the campaign, it's disappointing that he didn't comment on the morality of massive firepower the Australian and American forces directed at the landing sites when describing the fire support the infantry received. He notes in passing that this destroyed the main towns and their infrastructure, but doesn't comment on civilian casualties and whether such bombardments were necessary given the poor condition of small Japanese forces in the regions, most of whom turned out to be dug in away from the towns. Surely this also has lessons for modern military operations?

Overall, this book will be of value to anyone with an interest in late-World War II amphibious tactics or the Australian Army's role in the war, and is a very useful addition to the somewhat thin literature on this campaign.

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 * By Hawkeye7

Another Osprey book. Recently the campaign series has gotten up to 1945, with books on the Remagen and the Rhine Crossings. The title seems to lack a bit of marketing acumen, as few military history readers will have heard of Nierstein or Oppenheim. The subtitle, "Patton Bounces the Rhine", would probably be better from a marketing point of view, if a bit misleading. What most of the book is about is Patton's advance from the Moselle to the Rhine in March 1945, followed by the initial crossings at Nierstein and Oppenheim. These were given a great deal of publicity at the time, as they came just before British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's Operation Plunder, a much more elaborate show. The Americans were getting annoyed at the way the British newspapers were reporting on the war, and were still smarting from the German Ardennes offensive.

The problem is, Nierstein and Oppenheim were just the first of three crossings that the Third Army made. The next one, around Oberwesel and Boppard, was a more embarrassing effort. Patton attempted to achieve surprise by crossing the Rhine at the worst possible point. One sure way of achieving surprise is by doing something incredibly stupid. Even this was overshadowed soon after by the affair of Task Force Baum, also known as the Hammelberg raid, in which Patton sent a task force to rescue his son-in-law, which was a disaster. Moreover, the crossing sites at Nierstein-Oppenheim and Oberwesel-Boppard were inconveniently located from a logistical point of view, necessitating a third crossing effort at Mainz. None of this is covered. I guess we will have to wait for an upcoming book.

Even in what is covered, there are a couple of incidents of Patton covering up mistakes made by subordinates, one of whom he would have sacked if he had found a decent replacement. The book points out that, despite what the Wikipedia says, these crossing operations were not part of Operation Plunder. Patton didn't use code names much. (The Seventh Army attacks that formed the other half of the pincer movement were Operation Undertone.)

The book has its strengths. It covers what it does in impressive detail, and gives some insight into Patton's generalship. It notes, for example, how Patton emphasised manoeuvre by attaching infantry regiments from infantry division to armoured divisions whereas infantry commanders tended to attach the combat commands of armoured divisions to infantry divisions to give them more firepower. The book pushes things a bit far in its claim that the high-level manoeuvres that the U.S. Army conducted at home were a substitute for the German Army's combat experience (and omits the fact that the last divisions shipped without).

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