Books! ACW books to be precise.

Had a wee binge in the surprisingly cheap end of eBay for some light reading; these three plus an Osprey that’s still in the post came in at under £30 total. 

And our son and heir was awake enough to catch the postman while we were up at my parents in Hull, so they were waiting on my armchair when we got back, along with some freshly lasered MDF from Empires of War and Sarissa. Of which more when I’m not so damn tired. 

More research...

Driving from Branson MO to Kansas City, then flying from Kansas City (waves at DaveC on way past) to Minneapolis yesterday, followed by a somewhat hurried trip across town from hotel checkin to Target Field for a ballgame...

Didn’t get time to post - not least because it was swelteringly hot at the ball park (97ºF and borderline 100% humidity) and all I wanted to do when we got back was have a cold shower :D

Did, though, get to get my Kindle Dux Brit research books collated, some more titles added to the Compendium bibliography and some more reading done, so that was good :D As ever, if you have recommendations for good reading matter for the Dux period (be it fact or fiction) please drop me a comment.

Moving boxes, and a shelfie...

Since I now have a large studio space that isn't being used by PE2Collectables, and Reuben left me four bookcases, I've done a bit of moving:

• Because I'm running out of shelf space in the music room (and anyway, I'd rather that shelf space had musical and 3D printer kit on it);
• Because I need shelf space for some scenery bits;
• Because I'm fed up of clearing the kitchen table or half the dining room to play board games;
• Because my military history books are currently upstairs (about 3 shelves worth still to move), and
• I've committed to doing some IABSM and Dux videos (if TFL don't beat me to it), for which a decent uncluttered table area with space around it for camera tripods, with a suitably nice backdrop, wouldn't hurt.

Like... this...

TGIF, web rabbit holes, and a request...

Definitely a pizza (Domino's new chicken/chorizo is well tasty) and TV night tonight. But I did get about an hour of Compendium work in, in dribs and drabs, over lunch and before Anne got home. 

Going to have to spend a little time over the weekend redoing the base table layout diagram for the new Raids, as weirdly it seems to render differently on my two Macs, both of which are running the same version of MacOS, the same version of Pages and have, as far as I can tell, the same fonts installed. 

Picked up a copy of the Pendragon RPG - yes, I am aware that it's very knight-in-armour Mallory/Tennyson Arthuriana, but friends of mine used to play it at Uni, and I'm interested in browsing it for the mythic elements - it's that 'what do people believe?' thing again. Fell into a bunch of Google rabbit holes while doing that, of which a couple were worth keeping: 

• The Dark Ages Britannia site has a huge six miles to the hex map of 5th Century Britain in various formats, which you can even download an editable version of, if you have Hexographer;
• Howard Wiseman's site has a historical look at Arthur and some comparative reviews of some Arthurian fiction. He's biased towards the more historical ones, too, which is good.

About then I figured that adding a bibliography to the Compendium was a good idea. So I made a start.

Which leads me to this, then: if you have suggestions about good books about the Dux Britanniarum setting, let me know. I probably have the obvious ones (and I won't be including John Morris' "Age of Arthur" (not the WAB supplement) :D).

Some Dark Ages pondering....

The Hobnobs are from last night,
yer honour :D

Got the hobby streak in early this morning over tea before heading out for breakfast, in the shape of a long and interesting chat with Andy Hawes (yes folks, he is still alive) on the subject of Dux Britanniarum's battles, shieldwalls, horses, good and bad 'Arthurian' fiction - I suspect it will continue once we get to the O2 for breakfast.

I have yet more stuff on the Kindle to read now, amusingly by someone I know as friend of a friend, who appears to know quite a bit about horses and saddles in warfare.

Get it while it's cheap...

UK readers who don't yet have a copy of "Band Of Brothers" may want to hit their local Tesco (via Paul Baldwin on Twitter):

If you've not read Ambrose's Band of Brothers Tesco has it with the Pegasus Bridge book for £3.85 absolute bargain pic.twitter.com/hr86EssPAR

— Paul Baldwin (@pauljbaldwin) May 31, 2016

Waterloo 200th

Just in case you've been living under the proverbial rock recently, today is, of course, the 200th anniversary of one of the most important and crucial battles for control of Europe, the battle of Waterloo.

I''m not exactly sure when I became aware of it as a historical event - I do know that my first real understanding of it came from being loaned and then given Pericoli's "1815: The Armies at Waterloo", which as well as being full of custom reference plates for the 1970 movie, contains a detailed and well-described account of the progress of the battle by Michael Glover. Which probably got me top marks on my last secondary school history exam before I (for various reasons I should cover in another blog post) gave it up.

The other book that is Waterloo to me is Henry Siborne's "The Waterloo Letters", for its first-hand accounts written after the battle.

It has always been one of my favourite periods of history, and I think the gorgeous plates in Pericoli's book, and the letters written to Siborne, may have quite a lot to do with it :D

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.

Some light reading...

Not a review, as I only bought them today. Just a heads up that Tesco has a bunch of books at 2 for £7 which may be of interest (and actually works out just cheaper than Amazon if you like physical books). There's probably more of these worth a grab, and at least in Tesco you can flick through a book before buying...

Book three of the Tancred series by James Aitcheson, which I'm pretty sure I have the first two sitting in my unread pile.

(Yes. It's a bad sign when you can't remember what's in your unread pile!)



Another take on the origins of WW1, this time by the ubiquitous Max Hastings.

I'll be interested to compare it to the AJP Taylor "War By Timetable"...

And finally, book one of Conn Iggulden's War of the Roses series - I know some people are dubious about the quality of his research, but I do occasionally just enjoy a rattling good yarn, and they're great for working up campaign backstories when you're a drama-loving old hack like me :D

I already have this from Amazon.

Book reviews - a statement in advance

I have been approached now by two publishers asking if I'd be interested in reviewing books of interested to my readers on my blog. Obviously, I'm a touch pleased and flattered, but I am also conscious that my reviews up to now have been impartial (yes, I really DO like Chain of Command that much!) and I'd like to keep it that way. So: from here on in...

• If I review a book, rule set, supplement, whatever, that a publisher has sent me, I will make it explicitly clear that it's a review copy and who the source is (in the event it's not the publisher). 
• The fact that I was asked to review it will not affect what I think or say about it, be that here, on Twitter, Facebook or Google+, or on the Meeples podcast. I have (I trust and hope) a reputation for being honest and direct in my reviews on here, and I don't intend for that to change.
• If I don't think a book is relevant to this blog, I reserve the right to decline. (As a rough idea - wargaming, modelling, the history of those, military history or tactics? all fine. Outside that general area I'd probably look twice.)

OK? (And no, this is not me fishing for stuff to review, either! :D )

Wargaming Books In Schools Project

From Rich Clarke on the Too Fat Lardies blog:

My first contact with wargaming as a hobby came on my first week at senior school when I accidentally picked up a copy of Don Featherstone’s War Games Campaigns. I was absolutely amazed at what I had found and very fortunate that the school library had many of Don’s other wargaming books as well as those by other authors such as Terry Wise and Charles Grant. It was, of course, the start of a long and very happy relationship with the hobby: a hobby which is now both my chosen career and my primary leisure interest. It must therefore be said that I owe much to that chance encounter with a library book.

More recently, a couple of months ago in fact, I was having a conversation with a gentleman who works at a school in Wales who had been asked to form an historical wargaming club for the students. With the passage of time it is hardy surprising that the wargaming books of the 1960′s and 70′s have long since disappeared from school library shelves, and I was very conscious of the fact that any member of school staff undertaking such a worthy project would most likely be lacking much in the way of budget and support materials. Indeed there seem to be few books on wargaming which ever come to the attention of the general public in these days where the internet can mean that niche markets are often invisible to those who are not “in the know”.

[read on here] 

In short? The idea is that those of us who feel some kind of debt of gratitude to school wargaming clubs and libraries may want to donate the price of a copy of Henry Hyde's Wargaming Compendium (which Pen and Sword have agreed to donate for £21), and that schools with a historical wargaming club may wish to apply for a copy.

If you're interested, do go read the full article, and you can contact Rich at toofatlardies@yahoo.co.uk.

I (and very likely our club) will certainly be donating.

Osprey Easter sale

Heads up for the bibliophilic[1] amongst you. Osprey are doing an Easter sale, from now through Monday, with 20% off everything - including ePubs and PDFs, and if you're already getting a membership discount, it stacks :D

Remember, that also includes all their war-game rules such as Dux Bellorum, In Her Majesty's Name, Of Gods and Mortals...

Their store is here - have at :D

---

[1] Oo. Good word.

(Audio) Book Review - "The Liberator" by Alex Kershaw

[Flying back to Seattle today. Should have more time in the evenings for the rest of this week - being mostly over the jet lag helps!

Must not succumb to 15mm 'Nam...]

Picked this up on my Audible subscription a month or so ago: it's the biography of Felix Sparks, an officer in the US 157th Infantry Regiment from the Sicily invasion through to the liberation of Germany during WW2.

Impressions?

From a wargamer/military history point of view, it did open my eyes rather to the 'other' European campaigns (Sicily, Italy and the South of France), which is good, as I think we do tend to all get a bit hung up on the glories of D-Day and the Normandy campaign. Certainly gave me some ideas.

The writing is definitely more of a biography than a military history - it does also jump viewpoint characters a bit, for all it's about Sparks. My major gripes? The excusable one is the classic 'every gun's an 88' - not quite true in this case, but there are things referred to as '88s that I'd be very surprised if they were. The author also suffers a bit from the 'make and model'-itis disease a lot of military writers do - everything on the US side has to have its model name... My major gripe, though is that Kershaw does get a bit 'gosh wow' about stats - every artillery barrage is categorised in terms of rounds/minute, and every one tries to be the worst yet, for example.

That aside? An interesting and thought-provoking listen. The author does a particularly good job of covering the controversy surrounding the shooting of a number of SS soldiers by some of Sparks' men during the liberation of Dachau. I need to do some more research from other viewpoints about the whole story of those events, but Kershaw certainly makes me want to do so.

The book's full title is The Liberator: One World War II Soldier's 500-Day Odyssey From the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau, and if you'd rather read it than listen to it, that's an Amazon link.

Book review - "Seelöwe Nord", Andy Johnson

As a change from the collection of historical stuff I've been reading, I picked up on Kindle (for reasons which should be pretty obvious if you follow this blog) Andy Johnson's hypothetical tale of a German invasion of Britain. It's quite interesting reading this in parallel with listening to the audiobook of Peter Fleming's "Operation: Sealion" (which, for the curious, I'm just over half-way through): very different styles, but the Fleming does give an interesting insight into how much work has to be done in a what-if scenario to get round the things that prevented a German invasion of Britain in Real Life

I'll not give too much away, but if you know me, one of the reasons I like the book is I grew up in the area of the German invasion Johnson sets out to narrate, and indeed I've played as a kid on some of the beaches. This makes the book easier for me follow than for some people - while I do relate to the reviewers who've complained about the lack of maps, it really didn't bother me, since I carry a pretty decent set in my head.

The author apparently originally created the scenario as a military tactical exercise, and on his retirement from the Forces, used it to create the book. As such, it's clear he knows his stuff, and writes with a degree of authority, whether it's putting words into the mouths of historical figures, or of his own characters.

If there are criticisms, they're mostly about the writers craft, rather than the story and the technical competence of the story teller. It does need the attentions of a proof-reader and to a lesser extent an editor. His Germans are a bit stereotypical, and I found their use of English idiom and swearwords a touch jarring - that said, I can't decide whether I'd have preferred a more Commando Comics approach to their dialogue or not, though. One of the Amazon reviewers has some more detailed criticisms of the naval combat, which I confess I'm not qualified to comment on.

Having said all that? It's fast paced, a absolute rip snorter of a riot, and a fun read. (Even the afore-mentioned reviewer gave it four stars out of five, for heavens sake!)

More than that? It's giving me ideas. Mwahahaha... :D :D

Book Review - "Battle For The Falklands", Bishop/Witherow

Short review tonight - my apologies, but I've driven to Hull and back (and spent an hour+ motionless in a traffic jam) for an eye appointment today, so am somewhat weary, sufficiently so I didn't make it to the club except to pick up some scenery for Saturday's demo game of Chain of Command.

"Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War" is a relatively short book by a pair of (at the time) rookie journalists embedded with different parts of the British Task Force during the Falklands War.

I was only about 18 during the conflict, and I have to confess to not totally paying attention to how the short campaign unfolded. As a result, reading this is something of an eye-opener to the actual course of the war. I would say though that it falls more under the category of 'rattling good yarn' than 'deep military history' - for the latter you want the Max Hastings book, I suspect - I'll let you know when I've finished the latter :D Having said that? Enjoyable read, and probably, to be honest, a good set up for reading the Hastings.

Book Review - "Company Commander",

Company Commander: The Classic Infantry Memoir of World War II, to give it its full title, is pretty much what it says on the tin - a memoir written by Captain Charles B. Macdonald, covering encounters in and around the Ardennes forest during the winter of '44.

Unlike a lot of such memoirs, it was written pretty soon after the war, and has an immediacy as a result that you don't get from some of the more recent ones.

I picked this up about a year ago, on recommendation of folks on the TFL Yahoo! group. I was reminded I hadn't reviewed it when the friend I loaned it to returned it today...

So?

In summary? It's a fascinating memoir, and it does give a very definite sense of how small and local one unit's view of the front is. Read it, especially if you want an insight into what it was like actually being in charge of a company during WW2. It's not all blood, guts and glory, but it is a very frank and honest account of events. And please, please ignore the Amazon reviewers who bleat about it not having any maps. It's not that kind of book.

Book Review - "War By Timetable". AJP Taylor

Or, to give it its full title, War by Timetable: How the First World War Began.

I've been in London all day at a security conference, and like an idiot I forgot to stick a book in the bag (alongside the two laptops, iPad mini and notebook). So I figured it was about time to catch up on the collection of assorted free Kindle books I've been picking up on the iPad.

Wasn't sure what to expect of this, having not read anything by AJP Taylor before, but it was fairly short, so I figured I could get through it easily enough. Very pleasantly surprised - it's a fascinating discourse on the progression of actions from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand (an event that one of my favourite books calls 'a cloud, no bigger than a man's hand') through to the British declaration of war (which will be 100 years ago just before my birthday next year). Very clearly written, with some intriguing insights into what was going on behind the scenes, and I learned a lot.

It was free when I got it, but with hindsight? I'd have gladly paid the £1.99 it is now, brief though it is.

Donald Featherstone, March 20, 1918 - September 3, 2013

Woke up this morning to a note on the Too Fat Lardies list (and confirmation on Wargames Illustrated's Facebook page) of the passing of Don Featherstone.

Most gamers of my era, I suspect, cut their teeth on his prolific output of wargaming books: I certainly did, blessed by the fact that whoever did the buying for our village library clearly thought it was a good idea, as there were at the very least copies of Skirmish Wargaming, War Game Campaigns, Solo Wargaming, Advanced Wargaming, several of the Tank Battles In Miniature series, and probably others. I don't think I ever actually played anything from any of the books (except for a hazy memory of the school club using the Wild West rules from Solo Wargaming), but... oh, the inspiration. And the sense of 'where the <deleted> does he get all those figures for periods Airfix don't make from?' :D

He was a leading light and inspiration in the hobby for many years, editing War Games Digest, running the first UK wargames convention... The list goes on. His books and thoughts on the hobby probably permeate everything we do as wargamers, even now, even if you're too young to have heard of him or only play Warhammer,

Happily, many of his books are being republished via John Curry's History of Wargaming project. I do strongly commend them to anyone who hasn't read them: the rules may be of their time, but the concepts and ideas behind them are still as inspiring as ever.

RIP, and thank you, Don.

Today's delivery

Some light reading for later review and reference: Henry Hyde's "The Wargaming Compendium", Francis Pryor's book on the search for Arthur, and the Osprey on the War of the Roses.

I also took delivery of a wargaming-related invitation, which rather amused my colleagues as I had to explain (at least a bit) why I was bouncing in my chair. Can't tell you what it is, though: you'll just have to wait and find out.

In other news, jet lag still sucks.