Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/September 2017/Book reviews




 * By Nick-D

Last month I reviewed an example of Osprey Publishing at its worst. This month, I'm pleased to report on an example of the prolific firm at its best. Volume 248 of the New Vanguard series covers one of the most significant, but least remembered, topics of World War II: the failure of the Imperial Japanese Navy's anti-submarine force, which played a major role in the country's defeat.

Despite the vital importance of maritime trade and transport to Japan's war economy and war effort, the Imperial Japanese Navy devoted hardly any attention to anti-submarine warfare prior to the outbreak of war with the United States. Mark Stille makes good use of the book's 48 pages to provide an outline of the IJN's faulty doctrine, and the poor-quality ships and weapons that resulted from it. The coverage of why the Navy made this major mistake is short but highly convincing, and Stille explains its results clearly. The majority of the book is given over to descriptions of the various classes of anti-submarine vessels that served with the IJN (often collectively known as Kaibōkan), which provides useful analysis of their characteristics and performance as well as the usual key statistics. I tend to be critical of the artworks in Osprey books (which can often be unrealistic and waste scarce pages), but those in this book serve a very useful role given how little-known these vessels are.

The book's main shortcoming is that it's too short. Stille clearly knows his stuff, and the 48-page limit doesn't provide him with enough room to communicate it. Hopefully this work will encourage more detailed books on the IJN's efforts to protect shipping. As things stand. though, it's an excellent introduction and will be invaluable to anyone with an interest in World War II-era naval combat.

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 * By Hawkeye7

I don't normally give five-star ratings, but this is an important, well-written and informative book. It belongs on the Chief of Army's reading list.

Phuoc Tuy was one of the smaller provinces of South Vietnam. It is mainly remembered in Australia today as the province where the 1st Australian Task Force operated between 1966 and 1971. One of the advantages of writing Australian military history is that it allows one to delve into more detail than a corresponding work on the much larger US Army. In particular, the microscopic view of Phuoc Tuy demonstrates how the situation could differ from one village to the next, or even, in the case of Hoa Long, within the same village.

But this deserves a readership beyond Australia. The course of the pacification effort did always not follow that of the military operations that are usually the centre of accounts. The US Army's counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam was the subject of Andrew Krepinevich's The Army and Vietnam (1986) and more recently John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (2005). Like them, Destroy and Build identifies the roots of the US Army's inability to come to grips with the problems of counterinsurgency in American civil and military culture. This book emphasises, though, that the actual problem was always a Vietnamese one.

Richardson does not let the Australian Army off the hook. Its counterinsurgency doctrine, though different to that of the US Army, was not effective, not consistently applied, and frequently not the main focus of the 1st Task Force, which prioritised the campaign against the Viet Cong, and even left Phuoc Tuy for extended periods in 1968 and 1969. Sometimes even the Australian Army's professionalism could work against it, as it showed the local people an Army that was far better trained and behaved than its own.

The worst thing I can say about this book is that it would have been a lot more useful twenty years ago. But here it is now.

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