Current Reading: July 2022

First up I see. Finished Wings for the Rising Sun, which, while it covers all aspects of Japanese aviation, spends a lot of time on the personalities, policies, and strategic outlook of the Imperial Japanese military in regards to aircraft and air warfare. Short version: The Army started out strong, but, when the original pioneers moved on, their successors were lacking in vision and effectiveness. The Navy, for the most part, was consistently more competent during the period in question.

I'm currently reading Beyond the Reach of Empire: Wolseley's Failed Campaign to Save Gordon and Khartoum by Mike Snook and I'm very impressed with it. I very much enjoyed his books on Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift which motivated me to get this book. I think it can be safely identified as the definitive history of the campaign, or at least one of the top ones. His end notes are very comprehensive and he quotes primary sources throughout the book rather than relying too much on secondary sources. Like the other two books I mentioned, he has actually walked the ground and done extensive research. It is however not an easy read nor a quick one, with the main body over five hundred densely printed pages and many, many names of which to keep track. But I am finding it worth the effort.

>2 jztemple: I may just have to hunt down a copy of that book... just around the corner from my office in Melbourne is a statue of Gordon, erected by its loyal citizens at a time when it was the second biggest city in the Empire...

https://citycollection.melbourne.vic.gov.au/general-charles-gordon-memorial/

Of course you can always watch the Hollywood version (all star cast!):

Khartoum

>2 jztemple:

Thanks. I hadn't heard of that book and will look for it. Having lived in Sudan, I have "walked the ground", including the site of the later Battle of Omdurman, as it came to be called by the British. The British colonel in charge of the British Army Training Team forty-odd years ago used to give an annual guided tour of the Omdurman battlefield on the anniversary of the battle. It was very enlightening standing on a hill overlooking the battlefield and having it explained. That battle was known by the Sudanese as Karari, and I can highly recommend a book by Sudanese military historian ʿIṣmat Ḥasan Zilfū entitled Karari : the Sudanese account of the battle of Omdurman. The basic events of the battle itself are not in dispute, but the background and context vary depending on which side is describing it.

PS: On the Battle of Omdurman, I can also recommend With Kitchener to Khartum by G W Steevens, a contemporary account published in 1898.

>3 Bushwhacked: Snook actually makes references to the movie, although mostly to debunk some aspects of it. For instance, Gladstone was not present at the meeting of the cabinet members with Gordon before he left, in fact those members purposely left Gladstone in the dark concerning some verbal orders given Gordon.

>6 John5918:

Definitely. There are many inaccuracies in the film. It's pure Hollywood.

>5 jztemple: I haven't watched it for some years... just flashed into my brain as I read your post... (I actually thought the lead was Burt Lancaster, but it's Charlton Heston!)

And Gordon's death also spurred the dispatch of Australia's first expeditionary force, from the Colony of New South Wales...

https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/atwar/sudan

... who didn't get up to much when they got there... then came home!

>8 Bushwhacked: Thanks for that link! I see that the force made good time from Sydney to Suakin, 26 days. Interestingly, many leaders advised Wolseley to land troops from Britain directly at Suakin and march cross-country to Berber. It had been done as early as during the Napoleonic Wars, but Wolseley, based upon his experiences with the Red River Expedition in Canada in 1870, was convinced that a movement up the Nile in small boats would be more effectively, along with a camel borne contingent coming south from Egypt. It turned out all rather badly, as the book describes.

>9 jztemple: Yes, that is pretty good steaming time. I'm guessing they went south, across the Bight, coaled at Fremantle, then Colombo, then Aden.

Edit: it would appear I'm partly incorrect, probably would have coaled at Albany, King George Sound, rather than Fremantle at that time in history.

The "Melbourne to Marseille" steaming time through the Suez Canal is given as 35 days at that time, which I thought rather quick. Then by train to London, presumably.

Finished Focke-Wulf Ta 154, a fine study of the pathologies of the post-1942 Luftwaffe, besides being an in-depth examination of the aircraft itself.

>2 jztemple: Well tickle me with a feather... or four of them actually! The things a man must do to re-gain the hand of a fair Miss Seymour... your post led me track down my favourite version of this film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crRwpyJBf1E

>11 Shrike58: "a fine study of the pathologies of the post-1942 Luftwaffe"... cracked me up...

Finished Emory Upton: Misunderstood Reformer, which works both as a life of the subject and a debunking of the conventional wisdom of what Upton was trying to accomplish.

Finished The Fairey Battle, another tile in the author's mosaic of how the RAF came to have a pathological commitment to the "independent" mission of strategic bombing, at the expense of operational, combined-arms warfare with land and naval services.

Currently dipping in and out of Selected Poems of Rudyard Kipling , which of course contains some well known soldiering verse in including 'The Young British Soldier', 'Danny Deever' and 'Gungha Din', amongst others...

From 'The Young British Soldier':

If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it’s ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier

>15 Shrike58: ... an aircraft that actually went on to have unsung widespread use in the Empire Air Training Scheme down here during the War...

http://www.adf-serials.com.au/2a22.htm

>16 Bushwhacked:

It's become almost a cliche now, but I have always been struck by the last verse of that poem:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier...

Thinking of that era of British imperial military history reminds me of Queen Victoria's Little Wars by Byron Farwell. Here's the review I wrote of it a while ago:

Apparently there were wars going on during every one of Queen Victoria's years on the throne from 1837 to 1901. Some were major ones that everyone has heard of - the Zulu, Ashanti, Sudanese and Boer wars in Africa, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, various campaigns in Afghanistan, etc - but many smaller conflicts have faded into the mists of time and the author admits that the list in his appendix may not be complete.

The book is a bit of a hodge-podge, but none the worse for that. Farwell does not attempt to be systematic, but focuses on items of interest. At times it seems he focuses a bit too much on individual officers, and one wonders whether this book is a spin-off from another of his works, Eminent Victorian Soldiers. But he manages to give a flavour of the British officer class, the regimental system, and life in the army.

One gets the impression that Farwell is intensely interested in all this, but he is no jingo and gently mocks the 19th century military establishment.

>19 John5918: I've heard of it, I've actually got a copy of his Eminent Victorian Soldiers.