Current Reading: May 2022

Currently reading Mariners are Warned!: John Lort Stokes and H.M.S. Beagle in Australia 1837-1843. John Lort Stokes was a British naval officer who served on all three voyages of HMS Beagle, the most famous second Voyage of the Beagle carrying Charles Darwin around the world. This book describes the Beagles third voyage. One of the Royal Navy's most important tasks in the 19th century was the hydrographic survey and mapping of every corner of the globe, and this is a really well written account of one of those voyages. The author Marsden C. Hordern served on small boats on independent operations in northern Australia and the islands to the north during the second world war, and his memoir of that service A Merciful Journey is also worth a read.

Just finished The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America's First Military Victory. It was a good, fairly short (just under 200 pages) telling of the battle. The author seemed a bit biased towards Jackson, I'd be interested to read a more neutral telling too.

Currently reading a charming little discovery from the catacombs of Grants Bookshop - Official Naval Despatches: The Admiralty's Reports of The Battle of the Bight, Destruction of the German East Asiatic Squadron, Sinking of the Emden, and other Work of the Navy in the War, for the year 1914. The text is accompanied by contemporary pen and ink sketches of ships, maps, and men sourced from The Illustrated London News Picture Library, and even better, has a centrefold of 16 full page gloss photos of ships and sailors mentioned in the despatches.

Currently reading Luftwaffe Squadrons 1939–45 - Identification Guide ordered cheaply from Booktopia in the hope it might shed some light on the numbers, letters, and various straight and squiggly lines on Luftwaffe aircraft. Alas not. Nice aircraft profiles though, interestingly grouped. If any of you out there can advise me of a definitive guide to explaining Luftwaffe markings please let me know! I've never really got beyond Theatre bands...

Finished up The Last Battle: Victory, Defeat, and the End of World War I, which is a pretty good popular account of the breaking of the Hindenburg Line.

I finished The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in the Korea by Andrew Geer. This book was not what I was expecting. It was written while the Korean War was still going on. On the book's front cover flap, we're told that the author, a WW2 Marine veteran who'd returned to duty for the Korean conflict, serving in 1950-51, "had access to the complete file of Marine combat reports and was able to gather material at firsthand as an active Marine field officer during the dreadful spring and summer of 1950-51 in Korea. He interviewed 697 Marines individually in preparing this history." It was those 697 interviews that gave me the impression that the book was going to be a series of oral histories about frontline life and combat during the war. What Geer did instead was lean more on those official combat reports to create detailed narratives of the troop movements, battles, down to individual skirmishes, throughout the Marines' first years of combat in Korea. Geer's accounts get very, very detailed, down to orders given and followed by individual rifle companies on a day-to-day basis. Battle scenes are often detailed by the acts--frequently the heroics--of individual enlisted men, non-coms and officers during battle, including the specifics about what individual Marines were doing, or attempting to do, when they were killed, and what they said just before their deaths. I assume that these details come from those 697 interviews. The time period related here spans from the Marines' first entry into Korea shortly after the beginning of hostilities, their fight to liberate Seoul, their march northward to the Chosin Reservoir, where they became surrounded, and their fight to break through this containment and make their way to the sea and evacuation. The enervating and deadly cold and the effects of frostbite and malnutrition, as well as the horrifying attrition as Marines are wounded or killed, are described in detail effectively enough to give the reader a feel, even from the remove of decades, of what the men experienced.

You won't find much if anything here about the politics or larger command strategies of the Korean War. Instead, this is a report of the day to day experiences of soldiers within a hellish cauldron of war. It should be noted that as realistic and well written as the book is, it's also essentially a work of propaganda. No matter how poorly a particular battle goes, for example, it is never described as having been the result of a strategic mistake. And while there are occasional references to "slackers" or "stragglers" among the Marines, for the most part, everyone is a hero. There is, I am grateful to be able to say, no description of the Korean War itself as a noble cause. The war is simply taken for granted as an assignment.

>7 rocketjk: I always find reading contemporary or near contemporary narratives of historical events both stimulating and challenging, as it forces you to look through the eyes of someone who often has a different understanding, interpretation and set of life experiences that makes you re-examine your own views.

>8 Bushwhacked: Absolutely. That's a favorite type of reading experience for me, as well. Sometimes, as you say, it makes you examine your own views or sometimes it makes you realize new things about the era in which the book was written. For example, I recently read a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Andrew Jackson first published in the 1930s (not exactly contemporary to Jackson's day, of course, but much closer to his than to ours, now) in which the biographer provided his readers with a defense of slavery. I don't mean that he was reporting what his subject thought of slavery. He was editorializing in his own opinions. From this I learned that this sort of thinking about the slavery system was still common coin in the U.S. in the 1930s. Not really a surprise, I guess, but I'll admit that I was surprised to find it in a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography.

>7 rocketjk: Speaking of Korea, my uncle was in a tank battalion assigned to the U.S. 25th Infantry Division. He was in towards the end, and I'm pretty sure it didn't get him down, but he also didn't have much cause to speak about it. Too bad he passed on before I could have asked him some intelligent questions about his experiences.

>10 Shrike58: Those American Tankers were everywhere in Korea... in the Battle of Kapyong, when the 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment was awarded a US Presidential Unit Citation, 'A' Company of the US 72nd Heavy Tank Battalion were in support with their Shermans (presumably considerably up-gunned from the Second World War).

We had a federal election here in Australia last weekend, electing a new government and new prime minister, Anthony Albanese. Whilst "Albo" (as he is known) has been in parliament since 1996, the election brought attention to his formative influences.

In today's Australian Financial Review I read an article "Albanese: from paperboy to PM" written by journalist and author Paul Cleary who has known the new prime minister since school days, and the article explored the influences that contributed to the man. It was interesting to note that two of the most influential men in Albo's life were both second world war veterans: Tom Uren, an army veteran and prisoner on the Burma railway and in Japan, later a federal politician; and Ted Wheelright, a RAF veteran who flew with Bomber Command, who later lectured in economics at Sydney University.

I found this to be vaguely reassuring, as it occurred to me that some of the people I most looked up to as a boy were second world war veterans as well, now sadly all long gone. But it occurred to me what made them special wasn't because they had served, so much as the way they lived their lives after the war when I knew them. There always seemed to be a quiet self discipline for hard work and order, coupled with a simple appreciation for what they had in life, and a willingness to teach and share by example, that perhaps formed me in ways I only understood as I got older.

Not a bad legacy to have passed on.

>12 Bushwhacked: it occurred to me what made them special wasn't because they had served, so much as the way they lived their lives after the war when I knew them

Thanks for that thought. When I was growing up almost every adult I knew had been through World War II, either in the military (including both my parents as well as uncles, teachers, neighbours, etc) or being bombed on the "home front". I think it did generally instil a degree of self-discipline and social responsibility, an ability to cope with hardship and austerity, and perhaps a sense of what is important in life and making the best of what you have.

>13 John5918: One of the things that's made me a little sad over time is that the Second World War generation, at least in Australia, seem to have just been allowed to fade away in public memory and their achievements only selectively recognised. I contrast this with the at times disconcerting worship, to the point of deification, of our last Great War Gallipoli veterans in the late 1980's and early 1990's, a theme which continues to this day.

Wrapping up the month with Twice Forgotten, an excellent oral history of African American service in the Korean War, and how that service contributed to the Civil Rights Movement.

Worked my way through a very slow A Storm of Spears: Understanding the Greek Hoplite in Action by Christopher Anthony Matthew. Exceedingly academic with lots and lots of references to this historic commentator and that ancient piece of pottery. However, there were the interesting bits where using modern recreations the author was able to establish the most likely way (in his opinion) that the Greek Hoplites fought. A challenge to read and not for the casual reader.

I know it is a little late, but >6 Shrike58: and >7 rocketjk: both look interesting, thanks for the write-up.

>17 Karlstar: Never too late for a compliment! And you're welcome.