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




 * By Hawkeye7

This book is a dual biography of US Army generals William H. Simpson and James Edward Moore, the commanding general and chief of staff of the Ninth United States Army in the campaigns in northwest Europe in 1944–1945. The coverage of these campaigns in the literature is uneven. Although the Ninth Army participated in the Battle for Brest and the November offensive, it did not directly participate in the much-written-about Battle of the Bulge; the final campaigns in the Rhineland and Central Europe are the least written about, and despite involving five US armies over three months, are covered only in one volume of the official history, the United States Army in World War II.

When it comes to Simpson, it is sometimes asserted that he was "colourless", but really the key issue was that Simpson and the Ninth Army, like the bulk of the US Army, only took to the field after June 1944. If you think about it, the best-known commanders are those associated with the campaigns of 1942 and 1943, when US participation in the war was relatively small. The US media sought to cover the war with an eye to playing up US participation, and themselves added most of the "colour".

Biographies of generals of the 1944–1945 campaigns have been slow in coming, and those of generals like Jacob L. Devers have only recently appeared. Simpson is an unusual case. A US Army officer, Thomas R. Stone, wrote his masters and PhD theses on Simpson back in the 1970s. These are now available online, and I used them for Simpson's Wikipedia article. For his theses, Stone interviewed Simpson, Moore and other members of the Ninth Army staff. But when it came to turning his thesis into a book, it was rejected on the grounds that it did not cover Simpson's critical opinions about other officers with whom he served. There was a reason for this: Simpson seemed temperamentally incapable of offering any.

Reviewing the lost work, a historian concluded with a question particularly relevant to the construction of military biographies on Wikipedia:

"This begs the question what a "good" military biography looks like. Must it tell the story of the subject’s entire life, or will a "military life" suffice? What is the correct balance between the subject's role in combat operations and the other aspects of military service? What about controversial material – must a biography include the subject’s views on and criticisms of peers, policies, and superiors? Must it reveal personal, intimate details about the subject’s private life?"

Is this the missing book about Simpson? Not really, although the author had access to Stone's papers. It is a rather slim volume that concentrates on the Ninth Army's campaigns. The staff of the Ninth Army worked "by the book" and were more professional than those of the First and Third Armies. One reason for this was that Simpson and Moore insisted on the senior staff being graduates of the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. Simpson was no great intellect: he graduated 101st out of 103rd in the West Point Class of 1909, which also included John C. H. Lee (12th), Jacob Devers (39th), George Patton (46th) and Robert Eichelberger (68th). Under the American system, the top graduates tended to go into the Corps of Engineers, while the lowest-ranking went into the infantry.

Simpson may not have been very smart, but he knew his limitations, and relied heavily on others. He was averse to making snap judgments, preferring to take issues to his staff, who gave them due consideration. He established good relations with Sir Miles Dempsey and his British Second Army, and with the US First Army, which was more difficult to work with. The Ninth Army had no difficulty dealing with Lee and the Communications Zone. Outside observers from the Army Service Forces noted that the Ninth Army had the best acumen when it came to logistics, and that its accounting matched that of the Communications Zone. At great length this book describes how the Ninth Army dealt with these other headquarters, preferring cooperation to confrontation even when it was being treated unfairly.

Although Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley rated Simpson below Hodges and Patton, historians have reversed this order, and regard Simpson as the best of America's army commanders in World War II. This book is another contribution to the reassessment of Simpson as a "general's general".

Publishing details: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Coordinators/Newsroom




 * By Hawkeye7

This book is about The Six, the first six women chosen as NASA astronauts in NASA Astronaut Group 8 in 1978, nearly half a century ago now. Their story is "untold" unless you count their biographies; Seddon and Sullivan have written autobiographies, and Ride has a first-class biography by her friend, journalist Lynn Sherr—or, you know, their Wikipedia articles, all of which are featured.

Grush, the daughter of two NASA engineers, is a journalist who covers space. If the story she is telling isn't really untold, it is rendered with a relish and in an engaging manner. The story is a good one, every bit as interesting as that of their male counterparts, the Mercury Seven. Grush tells of the sexism that they had to endure and overcome to get where they did, but never gets strident or worked up about it, and does not go into the embarrassing details about just how sexist and racist an organisation NASA was in the 1970s (although there are plenty of examples).

The Six were fortunate to be around at the time when tomorrow suddenly came, and their dream of space flight could become reality, but their ascent marked the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. It would be another twenty years before a woman took the controls of the Space Shuttle.

Annoyingly, the book ends with the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. To be fair, this is usually regarded by space historians as marking the end of the first phase of the Space Shuttle program, but Seddon, Sullivan and Lucid went on to fly more missions, and Sullivan carved out a distinguished post-NASA career as Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The death of Resnik underlined the sad fact that despite everything, the odds of survival of The Six turned out to be no better than those of the Mercury Seven after all.

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 * By Nick-D

Paul Bidwell was the head of archaeology at the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums in the north-east of England. This book provides a short (152-page) overview of the Roman fortifications in the UK. It has a strong focus on the fortifications in north-east England, especially Hadrian's Wall and those in the Tyne and Wear region, but covers other notable fortifications across the country.

I impulse-bought this book last year at the rather good shop at the Vindolanda museum, and am very glad that I did. Bidwell obviously had deep expertise on this subject, and it comes through in every page. He seems to have been a good communicator as well, and the book packs a lot of information into its short length - it's a serious work of history aimed at general readers with an understanding of Roman history, rather than a souvenir book. It's also well illustrated, with very good site plans and photos illustrating interesting sites. The extensive material on the Arbeia fort at South Shields was particularly interesting to me, as I was very impressed by this site (which Bidwell was heavily involved with) when I visited it last year. The book also features a good bibliography and guide to further reading, focused usefully on relatively recent works.

The only shortcoming of the book is that its maps are hard to read and use as they contain too much information for their small size. I suspect that Bidwell didn't have the budget for dedicated maps for this work, and had to make-do with what was already available.

Overall, this is an excellent overview of this topic and a must-read for anyone interested in Roman fortifications in north-eastern England in particular.

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