RugbyRebels

Two books that are oldies but goodies... and both very difficult reads

Chickenhawk by Robert Mason

The autobiography of a Huey pilot flying for the Air Cav in Vietnam. Harrowing, insightful and coruscating account of fighting a war, the death of innocence, development of PTSD, and the sheer pointless bloodyminded tragedy of it all. An important book, but not one with a happy ending. The beginning and middle aren’t overflowing with joy either.


I decided to go from All-American tragedy to... the Ultimate All-American tragedy...

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown.

Jesus fucking Christ this is difficult to read. It’s well written and engaging, but you just end up grinding your teeth in either anger or sadness. It’s the story, in their own words, of the progression into American Indian territory by white European settlers initially, then black settlers after the Civil war ends. The sheer treachery of it, time after time, year after year, of how the land was stolen from tribe after tribe, amid lies, murder and betrayal.



I can totally see how people who’ve read these two books and others like them end up hating the US and western world. It’s hard not to see parallels between the story of the American Indians and how Europeans treated pretty much every country we went into. In fairness, the vikings and mongols and everyone else who ever invaded somewhere did it too, but we were the most recent and worst, probably. Anyway, strong important but difficult books. Read ‘em! I’m off to find some lighter stuff.

I have been pretty full-on since the summer both at work and with my Masters dissertation, but have still managed to crack some worthy reading; sadly I have neglected posting progress on here - so here's a catch-up.

As I draw to a close on my Centenary pilgrimage around the Great War literature I have read Wavell's The Palestine Campaigns, which was written when he was a lowly Colonel and long before his ascent to Field Marshall rank, an Earldom and his rightful place among the admittedly small group of truly intellectual British generals. This is a cracking account and a great introduction not only to Allenby's successful 1917-18 campaign, but to the strategic, operational and tactical problems of campaigning in the desert.

I also rattled quickly through John Terraine's To Win a War: 1918 The Year of Victory. While now slightly dated it still retains Terraine's wonderful capacity to engage an audience. Published in 1978 it flew in the face of the then prevailing myth of The Donkeys and did a comprehensive job of demolishing it. It is a pretty easy read and gives the credit for winning the war to those who deserve it - a British Army forged in the furnaces of battle and led by Generals who had become masters of their grim trade.

Book-ending the spectrum of good and bad history were Allan Mallinson's Too Important for the Generals: Losing and Winning The First World War and David Stevenson's 1914-1918: The History of the First World War. Mallinson, a former cavalry officer and military novelist of some repute (Though I have never read any of his novels), brings the novelists' touch to a highly readable history of the War. This book peddles the 'easterners' view that those who insisted on hammering away at the German army in France and Flanders were wrong - and therefore culpable for the losses - and that the less costly route to victory lay on the strategic flanks by 'kicking away the props' or defeating Germany's allies. What Mallinson fails to grasp, as did so many others (Churchill and LLoyd-George among them), was that far from propping Germany up, the likes of Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria were only kept in the fight at considerable cost to Germany. A good read, but at the end of the day not particularly sound history. By substantial contrast, Stevenson's book is probably the best history I have read on the Great War, though it is a hefty volume, highly academic and I would hesitate to recommend it to the general reader. But if you want to know how the nuts and bolts of something so colossal fit together then get stuck in.

In fiction I picked up a recommendation for Claire Keegan's Antarctica, a collection of short stories which I can't remember much about and only gave it three stars on GoodReads, so presumably didn't think much of it. I also gave three stars to Patrick McCabe's The Stray Sod Country, which is a tale of the Devil at murderous work in a small border town in Monaghan/Cavan in the 1950s. I liked this a good deal more than Antarctica, so I may have to go back and revisit one or both of my reviews.

I tend to measure all of the fiction I read against such giants as Greene and Steinbeck and having put in such a shift over the last quarter I dipped into the ever-diminishing stock of their novels that I have yet to read. Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat was his first commercial success and clearly lay the foundations for Cannary Row and Sweet Thursday - I found it to be, simply, one of the most wonderful things I have ever read.

I read keegan's first world war on your recommendation. Was easy enough to follow even for a simple jock, good starting place for furthering your knowledge.

I did a tour on the staff at Sandhurst and the nature of the job was such that I spent about three days a week in the library. John Keegan was often the bloke sitting next to me at the study table. I loved reading his history, especially the early stuff like The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command.

Was someone on here not friends with Geraint Jones? Just read his 2nd novel, another decent read. Characters developing nicely.

Read Battle Scars by Jason Fox (him off SAS show on TV).

Very interesting and open about his mental health issues.

Big D wrote:Read Battle Scars by Jason Fox (him off SAS show on TV).

Very interesting and open about his mental health issues.

Got that sitting there. In fairness all the guys on that show are quite upfront with it.

Waiting for "Double Crossed" by Brian wood to come out this month. Details his harassment from IHAT.

OptimisticJock wrote:

Big D wrote:Read Battle Scars by Jason Fox (him off SAS show on TV).

Very interesting and open about his mental health issues.

Got that sitting there. In fairness all the guys on that show are quite upfront with it.

Waiting for "Double Crossed" by Brian wood to come out this month. Details his harassment from IHAT.

Yeah he covers that in his book that he was nervous about it.

It was just refreshing to read anyone, never mind someone from the SBS spend 280 pages talking about his mental health etc.

Big D wrote:

OptimisticJock wrote:

Big D wrote:Read Battle Scars by Jason Fox (him off SAS show on TV).

Very interesting and open about his mental health issues.

Got that sitting there. In fairness all the guys on that show are quite upfront with it.

Waiting for "Double Crossed" by Brian wood to come out this month. Details his harassment from IHAT.

Yeah he covers that in his book that he was nervous about it.

It was just refreshing to read anyone, never mind someone from the SBS spend 280 pages talking about his mental health etc.

In danger of veering wildly OT but the show is great for breaking down the stigma, particularly amongst the forces community.

OptimisticJock wrote:

Big D wrote:

OptimisticJock wrote: Got that sitting there. In fairness all the guys on that show are quite upfront with it.

Waiting for "Double Crossed" by Brian wood to come out this month. Details his harassment from IHAT.

Yeah he covers that in his book that he was nervous about it.

It was just refreshing to read anyone, never mind someone from the SBS spend 280 pages talking about his mental health etc.

In danger of veering wildly OT but the show is great for breaking down the stigma, particularly amongst the forces community.

Good to hear that's the case. Battle Scars is better than Ant Middletons book (different sort of books to be fair) and no doubt I'll read the book by Ollie Ollerton too.

From reading about Mark Billingham I'd like to read his book if he ever did one. I believe he was awarded his commendation for bravery after using himself as bait, was a Warrant Officer Class 1 (forgive my ignorance but assume that is high?), been a celebrity bodyguard, and does a good bit for charity. Seems like he has lived a full life!

Once read Sniper One by Sgt. Dan Mills. That was a good read too (no idea if it was embellished at all).

Big D wrote:

OptimisticJock wrote:

Big D wrote:
Yeah he covers that in his book that he was nervous about it.

It was just refreshing to read anyone, never mind someone from the SBS spend 280 pages talking about his mental health etc.

In danger of veering wildly OT but the show is great for breaking down the stigma, particularly amongst the forces community.

Good to hear that's the case. Battle Scars is better than Ant Middletons book (different sort of books to be fair) and no doubt I'll read the book by Ollie Ollerton too.

From reading about Mark Billingham I'd like to read his book if he ever did one. I believe he was awarded his commendation for bravery after using himself as bait, was a Warrant Officer Class 1 (forgive my ignorance but assume that is high?), been a celebrity bodyguard, and does a good bit for charity. Seems like he has lived a full life!

Once read Sniper One by Sgt. Dan Mills. That was a good read too (no idea if it was embellished at all).

That's the highest NCO (other than the new Army Sgt Major) and a particularly impressive achievement if he gained his warrant in SF.

Yeah I'd take it with a pinch of salt. Conveniently fails to mention the Black Watch snipers attached iirc.

OptimisticJock wrote:
Yeah I'd take it with a pinch of salt. Conveniently fails to mention the Black Watch snipers attached iirc.

I figured he probably left bits out. Same with the US book "No Easy Day". I would bet good money that it is embellished a fair bit and not just to protect identities.

I once shared a platform at a symposium at Trinity College Dublin with an IRSP author and activist. The theme was the continuity of Irish service in the British Army after Partition and the socialist republican was on the ticket because both his grandfather and father had served in the British Army. His father, who combined a fearsome wit with a propensity for hugely inventive indiscipline, won the George Medal.

The story that he told of his grandfather, however, struck me as very telling. He recalled being a very young boy out walking with his grandfather in Dublin when his grandfather stopped to talk with another man. After a few minutes they walked on and his grandfather told the young boy that he had served with the man in France during the war but that he wasn't like the other soldiers; he murdered people; he was a sniper.

A couple of wonderful pieces of academic history finished since Christmas.

William Philpott's Attrition: Fighting the First World War would have benefited from slightly tighter editing, but there is no doubting the strength of Philpott's argument that the horrific costs of the war were not only the consequence of deliberate strategy, but inevitable once a war between nations mobilised for massed, industrialised conflict had reached the point of stasis and positional stalemate. This view will not sit well with those who remained fixated by the ill-informed, naive and wholly discredited mythology, but it is founded on a true understanding of the nature of The Great War and forms an important part of the growing body of rigorous and credible academic study.

Diarmaid Ferriter's A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-1923 was superb. It is presented in 3 parts, the first offering an excellent critical historiography of the period, the second a chronological narrative and the third dealing with commemoration and how the events of 1913-23 have shaped - and continue to shape - society on the island of Ireland today. It is not the book for the beginner and its narrative assumes an existing knowledge that might exclude the casual reader, but I'm a snobby ballix when it comes to History and I loved it.

Sticking with the Irish rebellion and wars of the early 20th Century, I've had a 1st edition of Desmond Ryan's Invisible Army sitting on my shelves for a few years and it escaped without too savage a mauling by Ferriter so I read it on the back of A Nation and Not a Rabble. It is very much a novel of its time (Ryan knew most of the key players on the Irish side during the War of Independence and Civil War) and has a 1920s feel to it that often made it difficult to stick, but all of the key events and key players are in there and there's no doubting the quality of the yarn; tragic, but quality.

I read the Accidental Spy about David Rupert and how he ended up spying against Irish Republicans for both MI5 and the FBI.

Some story to be fair.

Hitch-22 - memoir by Christopher Hitchens. Such an engaging write as well as speaker. Highly recommended....

Having submitted my Masters Dissertation there's a bit of time to catch up on a a few books I've managed to read either as part of my studies or as a break from them.

Surprisingly, I read and quoted Dickens' Hard Times as I worked on my paper. I have to admit that it was one of the lighter interludes of my studies and well worth a read. I also read Richard Vinen's National Service: Conscription In Britain 1945-1963 to inform my paper; it was OK, but not much better than that and I found too many references to RAF conscripts. The vast majority of conscripted Britons served in the Army and while the Crabs may have been the more literate (And therefore left behind a greater body of written memoir), the balance of the narrative was off. It was, nevertheless, an interesting social study.

Michael Hopkinson's The Irish War of Independence was part of my ongoing centenary literary pilgrimage, while Saul David's Victoria's Wars: The Rise of Empire was simply a random dip into military history from a period that I find compelling by an author that I have heard of (And seen on the telly) but never read. Neither of these books was particularly striking, though Hopkinson's did, at least, bring some originality to the party. Saul David's book offers a good introductory reader to the campaigns of the Victorian Army starting in Afghanistan, ending in China and taking in the Crimea and Indian Mutiny along the way.

I hauled my way through Anna Burns' Milkman, last year's Booker winner, and it was a real struggle. Had it not been a solicited Christmas present I would almost certainly have given up on it. Despite the judges' enthusiasm for its style and originality, I found it a tedious and uninteresting exercise in word-smithery.

Finally, Rick Atkinson's The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945. This is the final part of Atkinson's 'Invasion Trilogy' and while it fails to meet the sublime standards of An Army at Dawn (2003) it is still a great piece of military history. I am taking part in a battlefield study of the Normandy Landings over the 75th anniversary so this was a book that I'd had sitting on the shelves waiting for the right time to dig into it. The Normandy piece is well covered, albeit centred principally on the Americans (As is the whole book) but it is visceral enough to maintain the human interest across a huge strategic canvas. Atkinson is not as well known over here as the likes of Beevor or Hastings, but he is their peer when it comes to writing accessible and yet valuable military history.

What's your dissertation on?


I started Adam Jowetts "No Way Out". Assume you know him?

The dissertation was on 'Learning and Education in Military Museums'. A gift really as our museums do not do it well and there is plenty of low-hanging fruit by way of recommendations.

I know of Adam, but I don't know him. We lost three lads on that tour and another good friend who was serving with the SRR. It was a rough six months for the lads who were on it (We eventually sent the guts of a company in two reinforced platoons). Most of them, surprisingly, have very little by way of baggage, probably because they were all volunteers and were able to hit back harder than they were hit.

SerjeantWildgoose wrote:The dissertation was on 'Learning and Education in Military Museums'. A gift really as our museums do not do it well and there is plenty of low-hanging fruit by way of recommendations.

I know of Adam, but I don't know him. We lost three lads on that tour and another good friend who was serving with the SRR. It was a rough six months for the lads who were on it (We eventually sent the guts of a company in two reinforced platoons). Most of them, surprisingly, have very little by way of baggage, probably because they were all volunteers and were able to hit back harder than they were hit.

Easy Coy? That's what his book is about. About a 1/3 of the way in and he has really only started talking about the siege. 3 ir 4 days in and they've already been horrendously smashed.

I'm forgetting he was a para (via guards) and not RIR, obviously it's his "coy" that is mostly your lads.

4 chapters - tagore

Best of AA Gill - some decent parts to it but overall not mad about him

The soul of the marionette by John gray - really good quick read

The half brother by Christensen - couldn't recommend

The revenant - major problem here is the revenge stotyline where the author completely loses the last 50 pages, should have left it as a fantastic frontier story 3/5

Opinion of film drops further

Just started the gunslinger a first from Stephen king since misery about 20 years ago

The Gunslinger - Stephen King, Loved this as a western but when it went totally into the fantasy realm at the end he lost me, toying with the idea of the 2nd book

In the heart of the sea by Nathaniel philbrick - thought I was in for a right goos adventure story but its much grimmer than that, still a cracking read 4/5

The sisters brothers - DeWitt - cracking western, give it a go

cashead wrote:The Gunslinger has always been part of a fantasy series.

It's like saying "I really enjoyed Lord of the Rings as a travellogue, but the fantasy stuff really lost me."

Not what I said really, the first 2/3 of book 1 is a western

Following on from Rick Atkinson's The Guns at Last Light, I smashed through a ton of reading in preparation for the Normandy battlefield study. The Rifles Are There: 1st and 2nd Battalions The Royal Ulster Rifles in the Second World War by David Orr and David Truesdale was next to shyte, but since the actions of these two battalions were the focus of our study it had to be read. Having access to the Royal Ulster Rifles' museum archives was a true eye opener since it became abundantly clear that Orr and Truesdale merely harvested the archive and threw the results into a book to which they added next to nothing.

Anthony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy was OK but falls a long way short of his magisterial works Stalingrad and Belin (But nothing that he has written has come close to either of these superb histories). It is, nevertheless, a very accessible account of the campaign from landings to breakout and if that's what you're looking for it is a good choice.

Dan Harvey's Bloody Dawn: The Irish at D-Day is a collection of personal stories dredged from across the entire invasion and is somewhat misleading in its title. The only two Irish battalions in the invasion force came ashore long after dawn and their first day in France was far from Bloody (That was soon to change). If you have no interest in the Irish then there's no point picking this one up; even if you have, there are better things to do with your time.

In order to gain a perspective from the German side I dipped into two books edited by David Isby, namely Fighting the Invasion: The Germans at D Day and Fighting in Normandy: The German Army from D Day to Villers Bocages. These books are simple collections of commanders' reports but given that this is effectively primary source material from the likes of Keitel, Guderian and Blumentritt, it is pretty good stuff. Again, unless you are looking for the detailed perspective they are not worth burrowing into.

By far the best book I read in preparing for the battlefield study is Chester Wilmot's The Struggle for Europe. I gave it five stars on Goodreads and that is not something I do often (Perhaps two or three books a year, often none). It is up there with the other two books that I would consider essential to understanding D Day and the Battle for Normandy, namely Carlo D'Este's Decision in Normandy and John Keegan's Six Armies in Normandy. My review for Goodreads is:

This book is essential reading for any serious student of modern war and for anyone hoping to understand the strategic nuances of the Anglo-American alliance's war against Germany and the laying of the foundations of the Cold War. It is superb. Australian war correspondent Chester Wilmot's credentials are impeccable (He landed with the British 6th (Airlanding) Brigade on the evening of D-Day) but he stays clear of the tactical trip-wires in this unsurpassed and magisterial examination of the United Nations' operations in North West Europe. His sources, which include the post-capture testimonies of senior German officials and officers, transcripts of the Nuremberg interviews, recovered fragments of the twice-daily conferences held by Hitler with his senior military staff and personal interviews, give his account a balance that few have since achieved. Suggestions that The Struggle for Europe is Anglo-centric are simple nonsense (I have yet to meet an Australian that would give the English any benefit of doubt); Wilmot is clinical in his collection and assessment of evidence and entirely unbiased in his narrative.

He does not shy away from criticism of Montgomery and Churchill, but their all too apparent human frailties did not mean that they were always wrong just as their all too apparent human qualities did not mean that they were always right. That Eisenhower was probably the greatest leader of a military coalition that the world will ever see does not make him faultless, but Wilmot deals with Ike with the same dispassionate measure as he does with the other key players. He rightly points out that Patton's relentless aggression probably did as much strategic harm to the Allied campaign in western Europe as it did operational good, and that Bradley, while superb in command of an Army operating on the Normandy battlefield shaped by Montgomery, was virtually witless in command of an Army Group when faced with the daunting challenge of shaping the battlefield himself following the breakout.

The real value in this essential book lies in its command of the socio-economic as well as the military factors that played their tightly interconnected roles in determining the strategic direction of the final year of the Second World War - and in doing so it does not forget Stalin and the Russians. Those reviewers who have condemned The Struggle for Europe as Anglo-centric may wish to go back and read its last hundred pages and ask themselves whether our post-War world might perhaps have been a little safer had Roosevelt adopted a little more Anglocentricity at Yalta.

There are some superb histories of the Normandy campaign that tell the stories of the soldiers who fought and provide wonderful operational narratives. If you are looking for that then The Struggle for Europe is not for you. But if you want to know why they fought when and where they did, then you must read this book.