What are you reading - Part III.

[593jones]

4 hours ago, Pig of the Week said:

, highly recommended if you're interested in this aspect of the second world war.. 

 

 

One of my favourite books, that I first read well over fifty years ago, is 'Freedom The Spur' by Gordon Instone.  Instone was a gunner in the Territorial Army, captured at Calais.  He escaped from the POW column marching to Germany and was aided by French civilians, eventually reaching Spain via Paris and Marseilles.  Once in Spain he was interned in a Spanish concentration camp before being freed and returning to the UK via Gibraltar.  I still have the original paperback, but also managed to get a hardback copy.  (I prefer hardbacks, so I suppose that makes me a book snob.  Please don't judge me!)

Edited March 6 by 593jones

[stevehnz]

The Interesting Bits by Justin Pollard, one of the researchers for QI, a book my son picked up at an op shop but I started reading. I'm very much enjoying it in a slightly queasy way, there have been some very weird & repulsive people through history. 

Steve.

[FalkeEins]

@Pete in Lincs... a recommendation for you. Currently reading Geert Mak's "In Europe - travels through the 20th Century". Each of the book's 66 chapters (800 page paperback) deals with a city or town in Europe, mostly covering wartime, eg Stalingrad, Vichy, London, Dunkirk, Prague, Budapest, Oosterbeek etc at a particular period. Brilliant & fascinating read.. 

[Whofan]

3 hours ago, Pig of the Week said:

Luckily as a youngster I had a lot of conversations within the family, with people who were there at the sharp end, and were quite happy to talk about their experiences as I was clearly genuinely interested. My grandparents both served in the first world War (even my gran who drove ambulances)

When I was at school pretty much everyone's dad had been in WW2 and their grandad in WW1. 

 

I am probably about the same age as you, but my experience was different; none of my relatives who I knew had been the war ever talked about it.

 

However, my family had few actually in the war ; an uncle who was killed in the Atlantic early on (1939), another uncle captured by the Japanese and subjected to awful, horrible treatment as a POW, my father served in the navy, and told us he felt guilty at having an easy war in naval signals on shore in Colombo for most of his wartime service.

 

Another uncle worked in the BBC during the war, my maternal grandfather was an electrician, a reserved occupation,  and my grandmother, mother and aunts all worked in catering or shops.

 

Mind, having just finished James Holland's book on the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, Brothers in Arms, I can understand my family's reluctance to talk about wartime service.

[Pig of the Week]

Of course there were many who simply wouldn't or couldn't talk about their war experiences, and who can blame them. One of mine, as mentioned, was an RAF POW (of the Germans) from 41 til the end, he was most fortunate not to have been a Japanese POW, a very different prospect altogether, more akin to the Nazi concentration camp type treatment. 

There aren't many of them left alive now that served in the second world war, which I think makes the things they've shared with us directly so valuable. 

Edited March 6 by Pig of the Week

[dnl42]

I'm currently reading Holland's Dam Busters. Quite a fascinating read, as are all of his works that I've read. Interesting that Harris was vehemently opposed to it--repeatedly calling it tripe. Once Portal approved, Harris supported it--quite an admirable quality IMO. My last employer enshrined "disagree and commit" as a corporate value; that is, disagree all you need to while it's being debated, but once a decision has been made, support it fully.

[noelh]

I just finished re-reading 1812, Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow by Adam Zamosky. It's a great read of an incredible campaign and disaster. What is even more interesting is that still echoes down the centuries. Europe was largely united under Napoleon whether they liked it or not. The Grand armee was very much  a multinational force.

 

Britain stood apart and the Russians were paranoid about the 'west' and it's intentions. 

 

Some things never change.

 

I'm now re-reading Gann's, Fate is the Hunter. It's a great read and a wonderful evocation of an era never to be repeated. Being a pilot these days just isn't the same.

[Quiet Mike]

21 hours ago, cmatthewbacon said:

"Italy's Sorrow" by James Holland is very good on this period of the war. Well worth a read.

best,

M.

 

Another highly recommended book on the Italian Front (I had a Grandfather and a Great Uncle who served there, and knew Naples well) is Naples '44 by Norman Lewis. Not only where the Itlalians mistreated by the retreating German troops ... Accounts of what the French colonial troops did is absolutely sickening. It is a heartbreaking read.

 

Even though I prefer personal accounts, James Holland is very good. This is on my list.

[Quiet Mike]

Halfway through Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser. (Famous for his Flashman series of books, but I'm afraid I only know these from their racy Frank Frazetta covers)  I can't put it down, it is brilliant and frank account of his war as a young soldier in Burma near the end of the War. A fascinating extra for any of you interested in old English dialects, George writes what his comrades say phonetically. As most of them are Cumbrian, this is a real treat, especially for this Southerner.

[Quiet Mike]

15 hours ago, Pig of the Week said:

Of course there were many who simply wouldn't or couldn't talk about their war experiences, and who can blame them. One of mine, as mentioned, was an RAF POW (of the Germans) from 41 til the end, he was most fortunate not to have been a Japanese POW, a very different prospect altogether, more akin to the Nazi concentration camp type treatment. 

There aren't many of them left alive now that served in the second world war, which I think makes the things they've shared with us directly so valuable. 

 

I'm 50, so my parents are the boomers, and my grandparents great aunts and uncles the wartime generation. (All the Great War generation had pretty much gone by the time I turned up) I was always interested in their wartime stories and tales, as a young nipper. I quickly realised, those closer to the sharper end of things talked the least. Also, I wish I'd talked more with grandmothers and great aunts about their time in the factories and Land Army. My parents generation didn't seem to be interested, at least not until much later, when a lot of them had passed away. Family interest seems to skip a generation?

[MikeR]

Currently reading this new release from Helion and Company:

 

 

First heard about this campaign when I was reading the Bolitho series book "Command a King's Ship" by Alexander Kent/Douglas Reeman when I was teenager.

 

Apparently both Suffren and Hughes were, er.... big lads who liked their food!

 

Mike.

[Pete in Lincs]

53 minutes ago, Quiet Mike said:

Accounts of what the French colonial troops did is absolutely sickening. It is a heartbreaking read.

They get mentions in the book I'm reading. Known as Goums they were compared by the author with the Ghurka's as fierce fighters. 

[Procopius]

15 minutes ago, Quiet Mike said:

 

I'm 50, so my parents are the boomers, and my grandparents great aunts and uncles the wartime generation. (All the Great War generation had pretty much gone by the time I turned up) I was always interested in their wartime stories and tales, as a young nipper. I quickly realised, those closer to the sharper end of things talked the least. Also, I wish I'd talked more with grandmothers and great aunts about their time in the factories and Land Army. My parents generation didn't seem to be interested, at least not until much later, when a lot of them had passed away. Family interest seems to skip a generation?

 

I'm 41 (or will be next week), and so I'm a member of probably the last generation to have regular contact with people who lived through the war. My grandfather inflated weather balloons on Midway as a meteorologist (and may, based on his service record, been involved in supporting the first Privateer detachments in the USN's air service), but didn't really have much to tell or much interest in discussing the war, and my great uncle was an enlisted man in MacArthur's headquarters in the SWPA and beyond, and typed up the surrender document for the Japanese to sign (he shrewdly kept his carbons, which were donated to the MacArthur museum in Norfolk, VA, many years later). He was in Manilla shortly after its disastrous liberation, and did not care to discuss it. (This was typical of Uncle Walter; when he and his longtime companion Bob were mugged and knifed in the early 1980s, they were rushed to separate hospitals. Walter lived; Bob died. My parents went to pick him up after he was ready to come home -- he had been opened from stem to stern -- and when handed his shoes, covered with the blood of the person closest to him, he glanced at them, said "Well, I'll never wear these again," and threw them in the wastebin.) 

 

I always think of this passage in Achtung Schweinhund!, by Harry Pearson:

 

Quote

"It says something about the difference between our two nations that the American comics were in colour while ours were in black and white. More than that, though, the nature of the heroes differed wildly. The American kids had Spiderman, Daredevil, Batman, and Thor. British kids had the Second World War. Burma and the Western Desert were our Gotham and Metropolis. The men who saved our world didn't have extraordinary powers, fancy gadgets, or bizarre costumes (though Keith's granddad sometimes wore his old jungle hat when he pruned the roses and Mr Maynard from down the road who'd help sink the Tirpitz owned a colour telly)."

 

As I endlessly tell people, as a small boy of nine or ten, I wrote a letter to the Spitfire Society's magazine, DCO, and asked pilots to write to me (as any normal child living in Middle America does), and quite a few did, and were rewarded in return with largely incoherent missives from a small, excited child who had access to an early version of Microsoft Word and could thus communicate without reliance on his unintelligible handwriting. But what I was trying to tell them, from the depths of my being, in a way I couldn't fully understand myself, was that I loved them, more than anything, more than my parents, more than my pets, and that on some elemental level for me, everything that made life bearable or worth living was in some way because of their efforts, however small they may have seemed. Stephen Bungay mentions in The Most Dangerous Enemy that for him it was like meeting one of Nelson's men, but I might go further. There's a passage in the Iliad, where Diomedes, the noblest of the Greek captains, "hefted a boulder in his hands, a tremendous feat—no two men could hoist it, weak as men are now, but all on his own he raised it high with ease," that I think of often; to me it was as if I were exchanging words with demigods. And while I know now that they were all fallible men (or boys, falling at ages young enough to make them a child to me), that has somehow only increased their stature in my eyes.

 

And of course, being normal, healthy people, with a good sense of proportion, they would have found this ridiculous, if not embarrassing. As probably anyone should.

 

Anyway, right now I'm slogging through To Hold the Westwall, nominally about Panzer-Brigade 105 in the autumn of 1944, by Timm Hassler, who is German and even if I didn't know that, his writing style is so Teutonic that it would be obvious to even a casual reader. The book relies heavily on primary source material (EG operational records, daily reports, etc), leavened with postwar extracts from veterans newspapers and reminiscences, and makes for very dry reading. One often gets a sense that the situation was extremely confused, but (perhaps due to translation from German) it's a very detached feeling, and typically all one learns of an action is something like "Panzerregiment 2105 sent detachments to Doopledorff (or wherever), but it is not known in what strength. However a Panther was knocked out on hotdogstrasse in Doopledorf by the Americans at 2230, and this must have been the rearguard. Eight men were killed." Riveting stuff. The sheer effort to comb through both American and German archives is not easily dismissed, however, and a lot of work clearly went into this. As I putter along on aimless and meaningless wargaming projects, including recreating part of Panzer-Brigade 107, it had a lot of very useful information on the composition of Panzer-Brigades and how they were formed. Between this and my recent reading on Market Garden (and my attempts to find good sources on the fighting along Hell's Highway), one really gets a sense of how small the actions were that were taking place during these huge offensive movements, often a battalion or two, fighting along a very wide front, the "empty battlefield" we hear so much about, and which wargames are so poor at showing.

[Procopius]

1 hour ago, Quiet Mike said:

Halfway through Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser. (Famous for his Flashman series of books, but I'm afraid I only know these from their racy Frank Frazetta covers)  I can't put it down, it is brilliant and frank account of his war as a young soldier in Burma near the end of the War. A fascinating extra for any of you interested in old English dialects, George writes what his comrades say phonetically. As most of them are Cumbrian, this is a real treat, especially for this Southerner.

Quartered Safe Out Here is a great book; the bit with the PIAT is a particular favourite. The first Flashman book suffers, I think, from the era it was written in; Flashy outright rapes a woman (which has real and painful consequences for him), but it's a little bit much to permit one to think of him as a cheeky rogue. In later books, the character is softened (as is, to some extent, GMF's opinion of the Victorians as a whole) and is much more palatable, although as a scale modeller, I find raw sexual magnetism difficult to relate to.

[Pete in Lincs]

54 minutes ago, Procopius said:

 although as a scale modeller, I find raw sexual magnetism difficult to relate to.

I scratchbuild in multiple scales. I have to live with it on a daily basis. 😁                  It's Hell I tell you!

@noelh I have a copy of Fate is the Hunter. I reread it every couple of years. Brave and chilling stuff.

[Pete Robin]

Just finished Catch 22. I started this waayyy back in the early 70s. Finally sat down and went through it fully. Interesting, I "get" the overall message but, I'm afraid a lot of it went past at Mach 22 and didn't register. My fault, not the books', I am sure. 

 

Regards

Pete

 

[Pete in Lincs]

Henning Mankell's Wallander. The Troubled Man. It's the detective with a Background of spies in the Swedish Navy. 

[Whofan]

Currently reading the Abbey Road story, about the famous recording studios in St John's Wood.

 

When I saw this book on the shelves at Waterstones, I had to buy it - especially as I walked across the Zebra crossing outside the studios, walking in the footsteps of the Beatles last July.

 

(With about 30 or so to other fans, doing the same thing!)

 

It's fascinating to read how the studios changed, to work with the artistes, and it has plenty of anecdotes about the artistes who recorded there and how the recording process changed as time went by.

 

 

 

Edited March 10 by Whofan

[Billy54]

Just started "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. It is the first thing I have ever read by her although I am somewhat aware of her political views. I was somewhat surprised by her writing, it wasn't what I had expected. I had envisioned long sentences and multiple adjectives instead I am finding her writing easy to read. She does write long paragraphs and it will take me, with my reading habit, at least a couple of weeks to finish. 

[Whofan]

I’ve now finished The story of Abbey Road studios, and a jolly fascinating story it is.

 

If you are a musician, or interested in music, then I would think you would be interested in this book.

 

And to continue the musical theme, I have now started Sunset Swing, by Ray Celestin, which is book 4 of his City Blues Quartet, starting in 2919 LA, and ending in 1967 in LA.

 

It promises to marry Jazz, Mafia and Murder in a riveting portrait of a corrupt Los Angeles.

 

Phew!! Sounds exciting!

[Redstaff]

Just finished Jackie Stewarts autobiography "Winning is not enough"

I know autobiographies are about what the person has done from their point of view, but I've never read one that was as self promoting and name dropping as this one. All with the blowing of his own trumpet soundtrack. I like and respect  Jackie Stewart and his career and his work on making F1 safety improvements over the years were great, but a little bit of humility would have made it easier to read. I had to put it down a few times as it was hard to wade through the mush.

But that's only my opinion, others might really like it.

Ian 

[593jones]

6 hours ago, Redstaff said:

Just finished Jackie Stewarts autobiography "Winning is not enough"

I know autobiographies are about what the person has done from their point of view, but I've never read one that was as self promoting and name dropping as this one. All with the blowing of his own trumpet soundtrack. I like and respect  Jackie Stewart and his career and his work on making F1 safety improvements over the years were great, but a little bit of humility would have made it easier to read. I had to put it down a few times as it was hard to wade through the mush.

But that's only my opinion, others might really like it.

Ian 

 

If you want an autobiography by someone with an ego the size of a planet, then try David Bailey, 'Look Again', it really is quite remarkable.  According to Bailey, he and Jean Shrimpton invented the '60's, which only about 160 people 'got'.  Also by 1964 it was all over, the rest was just for tourists.  Still he was a pretty good studio photographer 😁

[Pig of the Week]

The Illustrated History of BR Wagons by P. Bartlett & D. Larkin... 

( go ahead call me an anorak 😁) 

A great book if you like modelling railway stuff.

.... and, this book was Free !  It was one of those books people leave on the "help your self" book exchange shelf at the station... 👍

[stevehnz]

A Passage to Africa, by George Alagiah . Alagiah, who passed away last year from cancer, was a senior BBC correspondent who specialised in African crises/conflicts. About a 1/3 of the way through & finding it very interesting & very well written. At much the same age as me, I am sorrowed by his early passing & heartened by his obvious humanity. Very much someone with something to contribute.

Steve.

[Neil.C]

About half way through CJ Sansom's Tombland. It's a big book, 800 pages and I'm already immersed in it.

 

He really brings the middle ages to life with true and historically accurate characters and incidents.

 

I'd read a couple previously (Dissolution and Sovereign)  and this one appeared in a local charity shop so I had to have it.