What book(s) are you reading currently?

[OldSchool47]

[73north]

Rude Mechanicals: Account of Tank Maturity During the Second World War

In this sequel to "An New Excalibur", which examined the development of the tank during World War I and after, AJ Smithers examines the role played by British Tanks in World War II.
if you want to know why British Tanks were so bad , generally in the Second World War , and the detailed reasons why -
this is the book for you , as it details the penny-pinching and inter-war neglect of the Tank Force -
What this book does very well is give some reasoned explanation of the apparently mainly poor and confused mass of British tank designs of World War II. As Smithers explains underfunding and the desperate rush to produce any tanks at all after Dunkirk were important contributing factors to the problem. Perhaps worse was the doctrine, which appears to have prevailed to as late as 1942, that there should not be just one or two key models of general purpose tank - but many different types: cruisers, infantry tanks, heavy tanks, medium tanks, light tanks and even dedicated 'assault tanks'.
One good story is how General Martel witnessed demonstrations of Soviet tank designs, including the BT tank, which had been influenced by American J. Walter Christie's work. Martel urged the adoption of the Christie suspension and Christie's practice of using a lightweight aircraft engine, such as the Liberty Engine. The government authorized the purchase and licensing of a Christie design via the Nuffield Organization, rather than contact the Soviet authorities. The UK then bought the rights to the Christie Suspension and produced the Cruiser III - one of the few highly effective British Tanks in 1940 and 1941 - and her successor , the Crusader which was vital to British success in North Africa during 1941 to 1942 .
as ever recommended

[rosestone]

'The Debacle' by Emile Zola.



I've never read any Zola before*, but I just read a history of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and this book kept coming up as the definitive novel about the conflict. It's brilliant so far.

*I wrote this because I wanted to make myself sound like the type of person who might have read Zola before, rather than the vague divvy that I actually am.

[73north]

This is a Desert Battle where it is rarely written about in any detail
and to my knowledge this remains the only in-depth book there is

When Churchill grandly stated that "Before Alamein we never had a victory" he was grossly and unfairly in error. The epic of Alamein had been preceded a year before by the British 8th Army's first victory: Operation Crusader, 8th Army's first desert offensive, launched on 18 November 1941. Crusader not only cracked the myth of Rommel, the 'Desert Fox', but also the invincibility of his Afrika Korps. Crusader was the mobile battle incarnate. It was not dominated, as were Gazala, Tobruk, Alamein or the last battles in Tunisia, by attempts to breach or turn a fortified line. Minefields and fixed defences played little or no part. Crusader was nearly all pure manoeuvre in the virtually featureless open desert, governed by the efforts of either side to locate and destroy the enemy's armoured forces: the battle of the desert.

This is a really well-written and researched book about Operation Crusader , and I am proud to have it on my bookshelf
please note ! - The artist drew the wrong type of tank
this is not a Crusader Tank , but a type that saw no action in WW2 -
this is the Covenator - as the Radiator covers are at the left front -
whereas the Crusader never had this configuration

[scoundrel]

Not an easy read for tired minds, but a really good novel, more about character and motivation than about mere action. It reminds in some ways of Daphne du Maurier's classic mystery story, Rebecca. Just as we never meet Rebecca, and yet she is critically important in the story, so we never meet Claire Romilly, a young woman with whom the hero, Cambridge mathematician Tom Jericho, is hopelessly obsessed; yet Claire turns out to be the spindle around whom the action revolves. Also, just as with Rebecca, the first two thirds of Enigma are quite slow and deliberate in pace, but they constitute a gradual coiling of the spring which is released with great force in the final third of the story.

There are two parallel plots which are united by the experience of one character, Tom Jericho. We meet Tom at Kings College, Cambridge, where people who are relegated and quite uninvolved with the great events of the Second World War suddenly find back in their society a man who had essentially disappeared more than three years ago. They only know who he used to be, a fellow of the college and a pre-war postgraduate student of the absent Professor Alan Turing. who went missing only days later than Professor Turing disappeared. Who he is now they do not know and they only know that they aren't allowed to ask questions.

In fact, Tom Jericho is back because he has fallen to pieces at Bletchley Park. He has recently broken the German naval enigma (codename "Shark") after a ten months intelligence blackout which caused horrendous damage. However, as his line manager Guy Logie sums up: "You broke Shark; and Shark broke you." Too much benzedrine, too many nights without sleep, too close to it for too long; Tom has started to have fainting spells which he can no longer conceal from Bletchley Park, a side effect of the amphetamines, or possibly epilepsy.

To cap it all, he was briefly taken up by a beautiful and sophisticated young debuttante society lady who was new in Hut Three at Bletchley and who was/is fascinated by the quality of his mind: he is serious genius level smart and has an eidatic memory as well, plus he is extremely polite and considerate towards women. But Claire, though always kind, is not serious towards him, essentially enjoying a brief dalliance before moving on; whereas Tom is not the flighty type and was almost certainly a virgin until Claire deflowered him as it were. Combine profound nervous exhaustion with the effects of a well and truly broken heart and Tom Jericho is a complete basket case.

But such is the nature of life that a man can't even be allowed to enjoy his nervous breakdown in peace. Sure enough, the German Navy changes the Shark code to a four wheel enigma from a three wheel enigma and Bletchley are shut out again. Professor Turing is in America and with his pupil, Tom Jericho out of action, there is now no one there who has what it takes to crack the new conundrum. It no longer matters that Tom is as mad as a box of frogs and just one step up from suicide watch; all that matters is that he is the only one available with the mental tools to crack the new Shark code.

To paraphrase a much longer scene in the book:

Tom Jericho: Admiral, you mentioned those enormous convoys and how important it is to crack Shark before they meet up with those 46 U Boats in the Atlantic?
Admiral: Keep talking, I'm interested.
Tom: Well...there's good news and there's bad news.
Admiral: Hmm?
Tom: The good news is that we have a workable plan which might crack the code. However, for the plan to work, we need multiple broadcasts of a standard, identical signal
Admiral: Such as a U Boat sighting report when it makes contact with a convoy?
Tom: That's right.
Admiral: How many sighting reports will you need for your plan to work, if it's going to even work?
Tom: At least thirty reports. Probably more.
Admiral: To generate thirty reports will require at least nine different U Boats to sight the convoy.
Tom: That's a minimum number.
Admiral: I'm starting to get the picture on the "bad news" thing. To save the convoy we have to lose the convoy.
Tom: That's right.
Admiral: When you get strange piercing pain sensations that will mean I have finished building your voodoo doll.
Tom: But the next convoys should benefit.
Admiral: Until they change the code again.
Tom: Well...
Admiral: Jesus on a bike.

Meanwhile, Claire has gone missing, as have several uncracked enigma transmissions which originated from a Gestapo station somewhere near Smolensk. Tom's personal life is every bit as screwed up as Shark and probably going to be even harder to resolve, what with MI5 all over him like a skin disease....

[loplop]

A new book telling the story of the Ford GT's return to Le Mans in 2016 and goes back and reviews the history of the GT from the 1960's to last year's race. One of the best racing books I've read in some time.

[palo5]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

Meanwhile, Claire has gone missing, as have several uncracked enigma transmissions which originated from a Gestapo station somewhere near Smolensk...

I suppose they know this is fiction? According to Keegan, none of the Gestapo enigma codes were broken in WW2

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by palo5

I suppose they know this is fiction? According to Keegan, none of the Gestapo enigma codes were broken in WW2

As far as I know there was nothing different about the Gestapo enigma machine and no reason in the world why Bletchley would not have broken it. The Abwehr used a four rotor machine like the German navy and were harder, but not as secure as the navy because their machines lacked the plug board on the front. A lot depended as well on the diligence and skill of the operators; each different code was usually betrayed by an operator error.

For example, Mavis Batey broke the Italian naval code in 36 hours without sleep and won the Battle of Taranto, simply because she took a second look at a long signal she had been given and noticed that it did not contain a single letter L. Every other letter, but never L. The key weakness of the Enigma machine was that no letter was ever itself, never ever. Therefore, if there was no L in the signal, the operator had set every rotor to the letter L. L for Lazy.

I don't want to give too much of the story away, but will divulge that the content of the Gestapo signals turns out to be very important to the story of Claire Romilly. As a man who knows Russian history in WW2 quite well Palo, you might be able to guess what the Gestapo were reporting from near Smolensk in February and March 1943 that was so sensitive that the British side might have deliberately stopped decoding it, might not have wanted to know. The USSR was a vital ally of Britain and Britain could not afford to allow a certain story to become known. Trying to avoid spoilers here.

It is a work of fiction. People who worked at Bletchley criticised it for lack of realism. But after having visited Bletchley twice I can say that the evocation of the place and description of where things were, what went on in which hut is accurate. So, I think, is the feel for wartime Britain as experienced by the small fry: what it was like to survive on almost no meat and how hard it was not to stink when you were allowed one bath a week, if your billet even had a bathroom; four lumps of coal for a whole evening; and your one room was cold enough to store meat, if you had any, which you didn't because your landlady took your food ration book in return for providing breakfast and evening meals.

[palo5]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

As far as I know there was nothing different about the Gestapo enigma machine and no reason in the world why Bletchley would not have broken it. The Abwehr used a four rotor machine like the German navy and were harder, but not as secure as the navy because their machines lacked the plug board on the front. A lot depended as well on the diligence and skill of the operators; each different code was usually betrayed by an operator error

That's what Keegan says too. He says there were numerous codes never broken, mainly because they were used by careful & disciplined operators. The Gestapo codes were among them

Keegan is very knowledgeable and astute. He knows that having a code, or part of one, can be important, but he also knows it can't win a war, and he says exactly that

[73north]

Mediterranean Maelstrom:
H. M. S. "Jervis" and the 14th Flotilla by G.G. Connell

This is a superbly well-written and informative book on HMS Jervis which served continuously from the outbreak of WWII to the cessation of hostilities in Europe.
For me its ' personal ' as HMS Jervis was one of the very first old and original postcards that I bought in the early 1980's when starting a Royal Navy Postcard Collection - so has always been a favourite ship !

She was completed just before the outbreak of war as a Flotilla Leader ( which means she would command 7 other destroyers in battle ) ,and was Flotilla Leader successively, of 7th and 14th flotillas .
HMS Jervis was awarded no fewer than thirteen battle honours, a record shared by only two other ships of the fleet.
Connell concentrates on her time as leader of the 14th Flotilla, mainly in the Mediterranean, using much first-person material and a wealth of well-chosen photographs (many from previously unpublished personal collections) .
If you like real Ship Stories that cover the Royal Navy I would recommend any of his books ( he died in 1992 sadly )