What are you reading at the moment?

Finally getting round to reading this one. The author was one of the pilots I was lucky enough to hear give a talk a few years back. I can't recall any other memoirs from a pilot stationed in Australia that I've read before, so this will be something fresh.

 

Rabaul 1943-44 Reducing Japan's great island Fortress.

 

Re-reading From Dingle to Delhi, by Chindit Jack Lindo. Apart from this being a valuable war memoir, it contains some fabulous stories and descriptions of life in Liverpool during the 1930's.

 

I’d be interested in a review of this if you’d be willing Clint. It’s a new series and I want to make sure it does justice to the subject

 

Still making my way through The Day Rommel Was Stopped. I know someone posted some maps and I printed out one of them, but I am considerably annoyed that there is a chapter discussing the Brigadier's battle map in detail but only a portion of the map is provided. So for instance there is a bit on page 80 talking about a track starting in the SW corner of the map and it took a while before I realized I simply do not have that portion of the map.

I don't suppose anyone has a scan of a period map for the El Alamein area in detail?

 

I've long been looking around for something like that online but haven't turned anything up, I'm afraid.

I've never tried getting maps photographed from the National Archives, but perhaps I might see what they have in the future.

 

This title came this afternoon from Amazon. It is a bit of wrap around reading for me in regards supply dropping on Chindit 1:

 

Follow up to their excellent work Autumn Gale
Details here:New Book: Kampfgruppe Walther & Panzer-Brigade 107 (Netherlands 1944)

 

I picked this one up for cheap and am currently half way through it. Starts off very promising, but the descriptions of Odette (whom he later married) are almost Mills & Boon in their soppiness and then he finds God and starts thanking the Lord for his daily bread (quite literally) which make the book drag out almost as long as the 318 days he spent in solitary confinement. It seems to be picking up a bit now that he's been moved to Sachsenhausen and has the other 'prominante' to interact with, so I've probably just got over quite a bit of filler. In fairness this is the third book about his wartime experiences, so a lot of the more interesting aspects of his career have already been dealt with.
EDIT!! Having finished this, I'd call it definitely a book of two halves. Skip the first bit and start from Sachsenhausen. There's some great descriptions of what Dowse, Day, Dodge, James and Churchill (not the author) got up to following their tunnel escape. I still find it amazing that some of the survivors from the Great Escape would tunnel out of a concentration camp.

 

Just finished reading this recently. Very interesting history of the forming of the Air Sea Rescue Units in various parts of the world during 1939-1945. Incredible stories of how some downed airmen survived, plus the lengths to which the ASRUs went to find them and bring them home. Extremely readable since the stories are pretty "bite-sized". I enjoyed it.

RRTB

 

Found this book in a garden shed along with other curios which were up for sale.By coincidence the printer's and the author
live just a few miles away from where I live. (cost £1)
It looks a very good read.(uploaded the forword to give member's a rough guide on it's content's)
Graham.

 

I've been on a Pacific War binge. I've re-read most of what I have on Burma, including Slim, Louis Allen, Michael Hickey, Masters, Rhodes James, Ogburn, Shelford Bidwell's The Chindit War, and The Stillwell Papers. Burma connects naturally to Singapore so I've re-read Brian Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore, and Alan Warren, Britain's Greatest Defeat. I've also gone through two Midway books, Parshall and Tully's Shattered Sword and Craig Symonds' book. All of these are good to excellent, especially the Burma books. The literature for that campaign seems to be of unusually high quality.

 

Finished The Day That Rommel Was Stopped. Mixed feelings, will probably have to read it again.

Currently finishing off Lord Strathcona's Horse: A Record of Achievement and a non-WW2 book, The Conqueror by Rob Griffin, about the Cold War tank.

 

Supreme Corage by Sir Peter de la Billiere. Heroic stories from 150 years of the VC.

 

After watching the great film The Book Thief I couldn't resist reading the book and I can tell you it was brilliant.

 

I've now moved on to Perhaps they left us up there by Harold Lake (1995), a memoir by an artillery OP NCO with the 166th (Newfoundland) Field Regiment, which served in Tunisia and Italy.

 

Just finshed the above title. An amazing story of an airline that kept going through almost 15 years of war, civil unrest and regime change. The pilots that flew these routes were incedibly skilled and courageous men.

 

Ben Kite's account of 21st Army group in Normandy Stout Hearts: The British & Canadians in Normandy 1944.

Don't know if it's been reviewed already here - should've searched before posting, I realise belatedly... Anyway, it's a good take, for me, in that it relates the experience and tactics from the sharp end up, so to speak, with plenty of direct quotes from veterans, and doesn't dwell primarily on higher level angle too much. My only gripes are minor and in one case my own fault: the Kindle version I'm reading doesn't do justice to the illustrations! There are also a number of little punctuation blips which I find mildly distracting at times (but then, I'm a terrible pedant - I hate a misplaced apostrophe, me). But otherwise I'm enjoying it very much.

The book is well-conceived, well-constructed and well-written. It is helpfully constructed in several sections, each dealing with an 'arm' such as infantry, tanks, medical, engineers, naval, air force, etc. Several times Kite relates an illustration of something in one section and later points it out in a different context e.g. a particular small-scale action seen from an infantryman's perspective which is then referred to while describing the same action but from a tank perspective, etc. I found this knitting together of his material extremely instructive. I also liked his basic stance, that the British & Commonwealth forces in Normandy were not inherently inferior to their German opposition and their 'more energetic' American allies, but in fact the attritional nature of the fighting was (a) strategically planned, and (b) a result of 21st Army Group's fighting capacity, not an illustration of any lack of it.

Cheers, Pat.

 

I recently finished Barrie Cassidy’s ‘Private Bill’, a story about his father’s experiences as a POW during the war and the effect it had upon his life and that of his family. It is a shortish, easy to read book and goes into some detail of his father’s experiences on Crete and his subsequent time spent in several camps. Towards the end of the war he was allowed to work outside the camp as a delivery driver in the town where the camp was based, something that I was not aware of.

It isn’t a bad book, similar to the last WW2 book I read, where it relies heavily on family memories. However I think these books are aimed at a more general audience than those readers with a deep interest in the war and ultimately I found it a little light.



Scott

 

I want to read two books at the same time!

I started The Black Panthers At War and so far it's written through biographical description of the experiences of several soldiers and I'm enjoying it a lot.



But some library book requests came in so I have to put that on hold while I read this first: