Current Reading: August 2021

Finished up Ghost Division, which would have been great military historiography up until about 1985, but which now reads as being a bit dated.

Just finished Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles by Bernard Cornwell. I think it's the clearest and most readable account of the Battle of Waterloo that I have ever read. The "three battles" referred to in the title are Ligny, Quatre Bras and Waterloo itself; he mentions Wavre only in passing. The "three armies" are the British, French and Prussians, although he points out that under British command there were also Dutch and German troops. He emphasises that this was an allied operation from start to finish, and that the question of whether Wellington or Blucher "won" the battle is irrelevant. Napoleon lost.

He also talks about how difficult it is to describe such a battle, where most individuals only see the very small area immediately around themselves (indeed many never actually see the enemy and are simply firing into the smoke in more or less the right direction, or at the flashes of the enemy guns) and have no idea what is going on elsewhere, and also have no sense of time or of the sequence of events. Hence the difficulty in presenting a clear account. He quotes Wellington that describing a battle is akin to describing a ball - how does one describe in detail a ball where hundreds of dancers are whirling around for several hours, constantly changing their partners, their position in the ballroom, and what they are doing at any one moment?

Having read Cornwell's non-fiction account, I'm now reading his fictional Sharpe's Waterloo. In an updated foreword, he notes that the account given in the fictional work, while not inaccurate, is one-sided as it is seen through the eyes of one actor, the fictional Lt Col Richard Sharpe. A more complete account is the one in his later non-fiction work.

>2 John5918: I have Cornwell's non-fiction account on my shelf. Good to know that it is such a good book.

I read part of but gave up on Spain and the Independence of the United States: An Intrinsic Gift by Thomas E. Chavez. It had promise, being the history of how Spain contributed to the success of the American Revolution by undermining the British early on and then later through supporting the rebels and actual military actions against British outposts. However, it was rather ponderous and the first part was so much focused on the personalities of this minister and that governor. And then it was correspondence and talks and I finally just decided life is too short to grind through it. It's not a bad book, but I just don't want to spend hours and hours on who said what to whom and when.

Finished up French Armoured Cruisers yesterday evening, a worthy addition to John Jordan's works dealing with French warships. It'll be interesting to see if he tackles, say, aviation ships, pre-1918 torpedo craft, or submarines.

>5 Shrike58: I geek out over books like that. I have an almost embarrassing number of Norman Friedman books ;)

>6 jztemple: I know the feeling. I'm thinking of getting Friedman's book on British submarines as an inter-library loan, as a $30-40 buck copy hasn't popped up yet.

Finished Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914, a really excellent study that privileges the Serbian perspective, while at the same time not gratuitously bashing the Austrians (I'm looking at you Geoffrey Wawro).

I just got through The British Assault on Finland, 1854-1855: A Forgotten Naval War by Basil Greenhill. Not exactly a page turner due to a lot of Scandinavian names and some rather esoteric discussions of Finnish and Åland Islands history, but it was interesting never the less. I enjoy reading books about subjects I know very little about and this certainly qualified. It was well written and quite informative.

>8 Shrike58: Thanks for posting about that book. I've got a number of WW1 books but that's an area I'm rather vague about.

>10 jztemple: The particular virtue with this study is that it gives one a good sense of the assorted national agendas before the outbreak of the war and the actual culpability of the Serbian government in the Sarajevo assassination, before giving you the blow by blow of the operational conduct of the Austrian invasion and the Serbian defense.

Finished British Cruiser Warfare yesterday evening, which really doesn't work as a narrative, an analysis or a reference book, despite all the work it reflects. One suspects that Raven ran out of time and published what he had; he can't be a young man. Would still buy a copy if it were remaindered.

Winding up the month with Blackburn Buccaneer; quite good, but I'm not sure that it's eighty bucks good. Another book that I picked up cheap back in the day and that has turned into a collector's item!

>13 Shrike58: Good gosh that's a lot of money! Thankfully thirty or so years ago I was at the stores picking up various Osprey aviation series and similar items.

>14 jztemple: I was quite the vulture in 2008-2010! I recognized that as a dependably employed man with no dependents I had a golden opportunity to build the collection I had always dreamed of. Now I just got to make plans to move it to Ohio in a couple years when I retire!