More reading/listening

Not much chance for practical hobby stuff yesterday, as I was off to Hull for my annual eye checkup. Having time to listen to stuff on the train, I was continuing my way through D-Day Through German Eyes Book 2 (link to Kindle version) - interesting stuff. Basically, it's pretty literal transcripts of interviews with German survivors of D-Day, that were conducted in the 50s by the author's grandfather while writing for 'Die Wermacht' magazine. A wide range of accounts, many with vastly differing views on the war, the French, the British, the Americans...

Browning FP-45 - CC BY 4.0,
from https://digitaltmuseum.se/011024251246/pistol-fp-45

The interesting one yesterday was an interview with German military policeman Niklaus Lange, and his account of a resistance assassination of a Panzer officer using a Browning FP-45 Liberator, essentially a one-shot pistol dropped for the French Resistance's use. Lange (judging from the transcript) clearly was still suffering from PTSD, but it remains a fascinating account.

Background reading... well, listening...

Had a pleasant morning in bed yesterday (a lie in, yay) re-listening to "D-Day: Through German Eyes" on Audible. (And was gigging last night so didn't have time to post this).

Interesting book (and I must get on with part 2, too), based on 5 accounts recorded in the 50s. Fascinating to see how the perspective (obviously) differs from the much-more-often read Allied accounts. Well worth a look or listen.

Book Review - "The Last British Dambuster"

I'm actually listening to this (as a break for my still-iffy eyes) rather than reading it, but I'd strongly recommend it either way - the audio book is superbly read.

This is the autobiography of George "Johnny" Johnson, DFM, bomb aimer with Joe McCarthy's crew on the Dams raid and veteran of two tours of duty with Bomber Command. As well as being the story of his life both in and out of the RAF, it's one of the few books that seems to convey what it was actually like to be part of the crew of a Lanc.

Look, just read it, ok? :D 

Book Review - "Hobart's 79th Armoured Division At War" - Richard Doherty

This book is what it says on the tin, really - a fascinating history of Sir Percy Hobart and the 79th Armoured Division, the 'Funnies'. As well as the story of the division's CO, it's full of snippets of action from the Normandy campaign and onwards, little pocket stories of heroism involving the unit.

If I had a gripe, it'd be that I'd have liked more diagrams - for that, I suspect tracking down a copy of Geoff Futter's "The Funnies" is called for - I had a copy from our library when I was a teenager, but it seems to be out of print and hellish pricey.

[Note: this is NOT a review copy from Pen and Sword (were it so, you'd have got a longer review!): I actually picked this up as a Kindle deal for a massive £0.81, but it's currently £6 and change on Kindle and still, IMO, worth it.]

Book review - "The Martian", Andy Weir

I rarely, if ever, review non-historical fiction for this blog, but if you're a fan of the space program, hard sci-fi and a rollicking good yarn, and you haven't read this, run, don't walk, to your nearest online or bricks-and-mortar bookstore and BUY THIS BOOK.

"The Martian" is Andy Weir's first novel: it was self-published in 2011 (first as a free online serial. and then as a 99p Kindle book), and was republished by Crown in 2014. There's a movie in the works, starring Matt Damon (well, it'd either have been him or space nut Tom Hanks, let's face it), directed by Ridley Scott, due out in November 2015.

What's it about? Well - Mark Watney is an astronaut on one of the first manned missions to Mars: he's stranded and left for dead by his fellow crew during a Martian sandstorm, and has to figure out how to survive long enough to be rescued. What makes the book excellent is that Weir genuinely knows his stuff - the science works. According to an interview with Weir, there's precisely one spot where he has to fly in the face of what would be accepted wisdom and NASA practice, but you can forgive him that, and most folks probably won't know enough to realise. It's told through Watney's warts-and-all journal, plus viewpoint shifts to NASA on Earth, and it's an absolute riot - consider Apollo 13 with a dose of Castaway and Gravity.

I'm not going to spoiler it, because, honestly, half the fun is figuring out how he's going to make it. Hence no Wikipedia link, since the page for the book is one massive spoiler.

'Nuff said. Buy the book. The cover's a link to my Amazon associate page for it.

Book Review: "AD69: Emperors, Armies and Anarchy", Nic Fields

[Free review copy supplied by Pen and Sword Books. My usual statement applies. Price £25 hardback, or £15 digital.]

What we have here is a very nice-looking, circa-250-page hardback, covering the Year of the Four Emperors, in which, in the aftermath of the death of Nero, the position of Roman Emperor was held in fairly rapid succession by Galba, Otho, and Vitellius before settling into the markedly more stable hands of Vespasian. It's where the collection of ways to die in the Imperial purple moves on from the merely suspicious (did he really die of natural causes?) and starts getting interesting: Nero (suicide), Galba (killed by his Praetorians), Otho (suicide), Vitellius (killed by Vespasian's troops). From a wargaming point of view, it's a fabulous excuse for pitting legionary against legionary - witness our WAB campaign day last November, which was themed around this year's events.

There are all the component parts of a really good book in here. It covers the lead up to Nero's death and whole story of AD69, with lots of nice titbits about legionary organisation, ancient sources, some fascinating speculations about various folks' motivation, some interesting parallels to the here and now etc etc. But... and I really hate to say "but", because I so wanted to like this book....

The warning bells rang when the first thing I read after turning over from the contents page is the full captions for all the plates in the middle of the book. Huh? Flicking to the middle, all the photos have short captions as well. Better, surely would have been facing pages of captions and photos? Anything that stops me flicking from the beginning of the book to the middle and back every time I want the details of a photo. 

The main text itself covers the whole story, with, it has to be said, an awful lot of editorialising by the author - some of which I find it hard to agree with, some less so. But you reach the word 'FINIS' on page 99. The next 140 pages are: appendices, several of them fascinating; a sprawling list of footnotes; a bibliography and a pretty decent index. More than half the book is not the main text. More to the point, a lot of the appendices belong in the main text - for example, Galba's speech after he's made emperor and adopts Piso Licinianus resides for some reason in Appendix 9, as does the lex de Imperio Vespasiani, the law the Senate enacted in the last days of December 69 to bestow power on Vespasian. Many of the footnotes are ten to twenty lines long, many contain valuable and interesting information. Am I really supposed to read with a finger in the appropriate page of footnotes and look up every one as I go? I'll be honest: I didn't read a good third of this book by page count, and that's really not a good thing for a reviewer to be saying.

In short? It's a frustrating book, that you can't read from front to back if you want to get all of its considerable and interesting content in any semblance of a sensible order or context. And that's a crying shame, because the words, the sentences, the paragraphs and the pictures contain individually and severally the ingredients of a really good book on a fantastic period of history, that's fundamentally been put together wrong.

Book Review: "One-Hour Wargames", Neil Thomas

[Free review copy supplied by Pen and Sword Books.]

I've had a couple of Neil's books out of the local library - he probably would't mind me saying that in a way he's a bit of a latter-day Don Featherstone, in that his stock-in-trade is the themed book (by period or other theme) with one or more rulesets within it. This one could be seen as filling a hole in the area covered by things like Solo Wargaming, Skirmish Wargaming and similar books, I guess. 

The stated aim is pretty much given away in the title - to provide the time-starved wargamer with inspiration (and rules) to play in the time available. Or perhaps I should say time and space, since the book's longer title probably ought to be "One Hour, One Square Yard Wargames". Neil devotes the first half of the book to 9 periods, from Ancients to WW2, with two chapters to each. The first is a potted history of the period, and a broad sweep through the troop types - Ancients starts with Infantry, Archers, Skirmishers and Cavalry, for example. Obviously it's a gross over-simplification (after all, there's only so much you can do in three or four pages) but he does do his best to capture the flavour. The second chapter of each pair contains the rules which are, again by necessity, a small, relatively simple-minded set, unit- rather than figure- based, with constant size/abilities for each troop type. The nice thing is that the rules evolve from period to period, with extra rules and troop types being added as the book progresses through history.

It is, as I said, very simple-minded (all tanks are the same, for example!), but you do need to remember that the stated aim is to provide a framework for quick, small games for the space- and time-strapped wargamer, not a detailed simulation of each period. I'll be honest: I haven't playtested the core rules, but they look like they'd do the job. They would also, and this is a decent plus, be a great way of drawing younger gamers into the hobby (and teaching them not to be afraid to tweak the rules!)

Neil uses one of my favourite words during the introduction to the book: "context". Have a listen to the first (and sadly only, so far) episode of the Miller's Tale if you want to listen to me rambling on on the subject, but essentially context is the 'why' of the battles we fight. The second part of the book is devoted to providing context for small battles - its a set of thirty double-page spreads which are basic scenarios, ranging from the pitched battle (as beloved of thrown-together club night battles everywhere) to assorted defence, ambush and retreat scenarios - thirty of them. Consider it, perhaps, a light version of Charles S. Grant's "Scenarios for Wargamers" or an extended version of the half-dozen scenarios you find in the back of many rulebooks. If for nothing else, I'll be keeping the book handy for those sixty pages - being able to pull a basic scenario out at random (or to suit a campaign narrative) will actually be really useful.

The book's wrapped up with a set of the usual appendices on further reading both wargaming and historical (with very useful potted reviews - the author does cover most of the wargaming classics), and where to get figures and terrain, which is perhaps inevitably hampered by the delay between writing and print (Warlord are a bit more than up-and-coming, nowadays!), and is a tad incomplete.

In summary? It's not a classic of the genre, though I wanted it to be. The rules are lightweight and appear to have the potential for quick and easy fun, and wouldn't be a bad way to introduce younger gamers to the historical side of the hobby, but Don Featherstone it isn't, though. (But he does use the word 'context' the same way I do, and for that alone he gets points!) The scenario section is the most useful bit of the book, along with the potted reviews of the literature, and for those it's still definitely worth keeping around. There are too few people writing wargames books per se these days, anyway.

It's currently on sale at Pen and Sword, with 20% off, at just over a tenner.

Book review - "Spearheading D-Day" - Jonathan Gawne

Wow.

When I bought this on Amazon, I was expecting your usual trade paperback sized WW2 history book...


Not so's you'd notice. This is A4 or bigger, an inch and a half thick, and 288 pages absolutely chocka with photos and details.

It covers all the US special units that landed on D-Day, from the range of landing craft and ships used, through the positive arsenal of things that go boom that the engineers carried, to a look at the design and history of the assault vest. It also contains some useful organisation charts (for example, for the assault sections landing on Utah and Omaha) and a few painting guide notes that I'd have missed (did you know all US Navy personnel on the beaches or likely to end up on the beaches, such as LCVP crew, were required to have a grey band round their helmet, signifying "do not order this man inland off the beach"?).

Excellent book. If, like me, you're researching US forces for D-Day for any reason, treat yourself. And there are copies available from sellers on Amazon that give you change from £15, which is more than reasonable.

Book Review - "The Other Side Of Airfix" - Arthur Ward

[Free review copy supplied by Pen and Sword Books under their "Remember When" imprint.]

Now, I don't know about anyone else, but Airfix was a constant thread through my childhood. When I was about eight or thereabouts, my grandfather (a retired Civil Service Engineer/Inspector, who I gather spent a goodly part of the last war dealing with projects he wasn't allowed to talk about!) bought and helped me built their 1/72 Lancaster, not long after I'd devoured Paul Brickhill's book on the Dambusters. 

Not long after that, I negotiated my pocket money up to 'more than an Airfix Series 1 kit', and I spent a lot of time assembling and painting aircraft kits on Gran's kitchen table. And then there was the annual pilgrimage to the model shop in Hull (Sid will remember it? Not that far from Paragon station) for the new catalogue, to be pored over, and its contents wished for (and hinted about to doting grandparents!).

By the time I got to secondary school, I discovered wargames, and moved to building tanks - and I suspect, like everyone else, got massively frustrated at those blasted rubber tracks. My pride and joy, though, was the 1/24 Spitfire - now that was a kit!

But we're not here to talk about that. The book, Mike, the book!

In a way, the book isn't talking about that, either. Sure, it touches on the kit range, with which the name is pretty synonymous to most of my readers. It's much more about three things - the history of the company, the other ranges - the toys, games and crafts - and the people. And I have to admit I found it fascinating, not least because I spent a lot of time going 'crumbs, I didn't know Airfix made that", in many cases ("Super Flight Deck" springs to mind) even though I used to own it! 

Ward obviously knows and loves his stuff - this is his fourth book on Airfix, after all! - and with the help of folks from the Airfix Collectors club there's a huge range of photos of things in the company's range, from babies' dummies/pacifiers to Weebles. (Airfix made Weebles? I never knew!). On top of that, the text covers the story of the company from its first flounderings in wartime to the initial demise in 1981, and its subsequent reviving by several companies including the three H's of Heller, Humbrol and Hornby. One of my favourite bits is the brief look at Airfix artist Bill Stallion's work on the box covers for a lot of the plastic figures, including some photos taken by his wife of him with wooden mock weapons to get a pose right for a cover. 

It's a tough book to position, I guess. If you're a serious toy collector (which I'm not), it probably doesn't tell you much you didn't know. It's not a wargamers book per se, either, and as such it skates the edge of what I'd review here. But - if you simply grew up in the 70s, though (like, I suspect, a worryingly large number of the folks reading this!), it's a delightfully nostalgic read. Sure, it's not a book you're going to keep around for reference - it's pretty much a coffee table book. 

Would I have bought it for myself? Mmm. Good question: probably not, but at least in part because it's not a book I'd have been looking for, so wouldn't have realised it existed! It's £19.99, which for 177 pages of colour picture-heavy, largish hardback is fair enough. (It's not as big as the concussion-inducing Wargames Compendium, mind you!) Being Pen and Sword, of course, it's also available in Kindle and ePub format, and I certainly would recommend it at that price (under a fiver) if you want to revisit your childhood.