Current Reading: February 2021

Have finished Warship 2019, a so-so edition of the long-running annual (2020 looks more promising (I already have it)), and Nine Days in May, a very good account of the actions that netted the 1st Brigade of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division a Presidential Unit Citation in 1967.

Making a new attempt on Hellenistic and Roman Naval Wars, which I made an abortive start on back in December.

Finished The Tanks of Operation Barbarossa over lunch, which turns out to be a worthwhile number looking at why the great Soviet tank park that had been collected by 1941 did not translate into greater military power. Focusing on the Soviet perspective, one suspects that the target audience is the smarter players of games such as "World or Tanks" or "War Thunder."

Grinding through the Kindle version of British Submarines in Two World Wars by Norman Friedman. A typical Friedman book, some part are rather interesting from a technical point of view, and then we go through pages of the findings of this committee or that budget review and I lose interest for awhile. Still, I couldn't beat the Kindle price for a Friedman book!

>4 jztemple: I'll eventually get to that one.

Finished with Operation Don's Main Attack yesterday evening, or at least as much as I'm going to at the moment, seeing as it's as much a reference guide as a narrative history. Considering that Col. Glantz is now a rather elderly man, and that the Kansas University Press might be closed down, it's hard to imagine that we're going to see this kind of work again.

Finished Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall. Now reading Hell In A Very Small Place.

Finished an interesting Tommy Atkins: The Story of the English Soldier by John Laffin.

My last book for the month is Hellfire Boys, which takes you from the discovery of a forgotten chemical weapons dump in Washington DC, to the Great War, and America's race to gain a chemical-weapons capability. I liked it, but it is like one of those over-stuffed pub sandwiches; the ingredients are good but it might be a bit more than you want to consume.