Before reading this book, be sure to read the introduction.

"Wait," you might say, "This book doesn't have an Introduction!"

Yes, well, that's the whole problem.

The volume is just what the title promises: A history of the 51st Highland Division during World War II, most of which it spent under the command of Bernard Law Montgomery, called "Monty" for short. But it's very much a ground-level view. You will learn, in extreme detail, the maneuvers this particular division went through in North Africa, Sicily, and the Normandy Invasion. Not infrequently, the descriptions are so detailed that you'll even learn the names of the officer casualties, and some of the enlisted men. If you can figure out the context, it's a very helpful description.

But, unless you know a lot about World War II, you won't know the context. There is no overview of the Desert War, to explain the back-and-forth fighting between Erwin Rommel's Germans and the British forces in which the 51st served. The complicated, and sometimes ridiculous, planning of the invasion of Sicily is not described. When we get to Normandy, the 51st is in the middle of a huge mass of men, with dozens of divisions scattered across France, and there is no way to know what they are doing. The 51st just occupied (e.g.) Lignières (p. 198)? Great. Where is Lignières, and is that important, and where is the rest of the Allied force? There is no way to know. It's like trying to figure out the plot of Hamlet if all you have is a text of the speeches of Claudius! The book really needs some sort of overview. Like an Introduction. Or, better yet, the occasional description of just what is going on.

To add to the problems, the book is very poorly typeset. Whoever typeset it didn't know how to use curly quotes, or even how to turn on "smart quotes," so all the quotation marks are straight quotes " " rather than proper quotation marks “ ” (if you can't see the difference, copy it into your word processor). It uses hyphens (-) for m-dashes (—). And so forth.

Plus it's full of military jargon, most of which is never explained. Some you'll surely figure out, e.g. "Coy" for "Company" and "Bde" for "brigade." But it took me half the book to reason out that "2i/c" is "second in command," and there are abbreviations I never did figure out.

Frankly, it feels like reading official reports rather than an actual history. If you like that sort of thing, this is probably the book for you. If not, well, the 51st has a Wikipedia page.... ( )