Current Reading: January 2022

... or watching, as the case may be!

Was fossicking about in the Classic DVD section at JB Hi-Fi in Brighton and stumbled across copy of the 1956 film A Town Like Alice based on Neville Shute's novel of the same name, starring Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch.

A story about British women civilian prisoners in Malaya in the Second World War and an Australian Soldier who helps them. Actually quite a powerful movie and worth a watch if you can find a copy.

Filmed on location in Malaya, Australia and the ubiquitous Pinewood Studios, England. DVD release by ITV studios.

Finished Battle-cruisers: A History, 1908-48 by Ronald Bassett. This is a narrative history of the British Battle-cruisers. It is pretty good, with interesting detail on how the crews lived, how they were paid, and the actually experience of combat aboard one of this massive ships. The book however is a bit spoiled by the author's strong and sometimes spiteful opinions on various persons involved.

Just about to start The Battle for Shaggy Ridge by Phillip Bradley about the campaign against the Japanese in the Finisterre Mountains, New Guinea, 1943-1944.

Knocked off Finnish & German Seaplane Colours. Finland 1939-1945, another typically good work from the author in question.

Still working through The Day of Battle. People forget how awful war is and this one in particular. The Italian campaign gets lost behind D-Day. Rick Atkinson really knows how to reconstruct the events step by horrible step.

>5 varielle: I read the first book of the trilogy but since I'm rather off WW2 books as of late I haven't gotten to this one yet. Really glad to know that it's worth reading.

Finished Pershing's Tankers, an edited collection of personal essays written by the officers of the U.S. Army's Tank Corps; this turned out to be a worthwhile little number.

Finished a very well done Six Battles for India: Anglo-Sikh Wars, 1845-46 and 1848-49 by George Bruce.

Finished The Battle for Shaggy Ridge essentially the story of the campaign at section, platoon and company level based upon the first hand recollections of the Australian infantry, however also includes first hand Japanese accounts. The effectiveness of the Japanese mountain guns and snipers in defence is prominent, and also of interest is the close air support provided by RAAF Boomerangs and US 5th Airforce P39's, P40's and B25's.

Just finished Life's Too Short to Cry by Tim Vigors. Joining the RAF on the cusp of the second world war the author flew Spitfires with 222 Sqn with Douglas Bader over Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain. Burnt out and needing a change, he arrived in Singapore in early 1941, serving as a flight commander with 243 Sqn and with 453 Sqn (RAAF) flying Brewster Buffaloes. Tasked with fleet air defence, his anger at the failure of the agreed air cover plan to be implemented by the Navy on the day HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse were both sunk is palpable. Shot down over Malaya and severely injured, he managed to escape Singapore before it fell, which is where the story ends. Published posthumously without a lot of editing, the memoir doesn't suffer from that, beyond some minor chronological and factual inconsistences.

Finished Half to Remember published in 1975, a memoir of the author's infantry service in the Second World War with the 2/13 Battalion, 9 Division, Australian Imperial Force, at Tobruk and El Alamein in 1941-1942, and later with the 2/3 Battalion, 6 Division, AIF in the Aitape-Wewak Campaign in New Guinea, 1944-1945.

Completed Jack Tars and Commodores: American Navy, 1783-1815 by William M. Fowler. A good history of the United States Navy from just after the Revolution through the War of 1812.

A bit of a different pace from recent reading, I'm currently on The Search for Alexander by Robin Lane Fox (circa 1980), picked up secondhand for a pittance. I've no great interest in Alexander per se, however I do have a broad interest in ancient history, and to that end the book is lavishly illustrated with colour photos of ancient artifacts and ruins. Text has been a bit humdrum to date, although the author is clearly enamoured of his subject.

Finished up Hitler's Fremde Heere Ost, an occasionally labored look at why German military intelligence seemed to consistently come up small in regards to the Soviet Union. I thought it was worthwhile but it's certainly inter-library loan fodder. I also certainly didn't read it in German!

>15 Shrike58: ...as a contrast I was surprised to learn in Dimbleby's Barbarossa (read last month) how much advance intelligence the Soviets had of Nazi plans to invade, yet Stalin refused to accept any of it.

Finished a short but interesting To the Last Salute: Memories of an Austrian U-Boat Commander by Georg von Trapp. The book is a reissue of the 1935 memoirs of Captain von Trapp, to most folks only remembered as the character played by Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music. The book includes an introduction by his granddaughter and a brief chapter concerning the pre-WW1 Austrian Navy.

>17 jztemple: You may enjoy John Biggins fictional Otto Prohaska series. I've never read them, but a mate of mine reckons they're worth a read.

>9 Bushwhacked: you've convinced me, I've put that on hold at the library now, thanks.

>19 bernsad: Glad you were able to find a copy, I gather they have been out of print for a while.

>16 Bushwhacked: In the short run Stalin seems to know he was screwed...and that whole business has the wiff of desperation about it.

>18 Bushwhacked: That's sorta on my long-term reading list too...my understanding is they're available in a print-to-order format.

... in our search for Alexander we continue our ransacking of the Persian Empire, only waylaid by the captured coterie of courtesans, concubines, young men and eunuchs our wine soaked leader takes to his bed along our route of march. Finally we approach the Indus. May we please go home now, before this oversexed megalomaniac drunkard gets his hands on a copy of the Kama sutra?

>23 Bushwhacked: I'm curious. Does the emphasis on bedding belong to Alexander, Robin Lane Fox, or to the reader?

>24 Rood: ... oh you made me laugh! Certainly Alexander's off battlefield amorous antics and alcohol consumption form a narrative strand of the admiring Mr Fox, conflated humourously in this instance by myself in an attempt to motivate me to get to the end of the book. (Colloquially in Australia it's called "taking the piss". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_the_piss)

My copy of A History of the Mediterranean Air War Volume 5 From the Fall of Rome to the End of the War arrived in the post today. I suspect that like the previous 4 volumes I will just dip in and out of it over time, rather than read cover to cover. I can't believe there is a volume 6 yet to come.

Received in mail on 25 January ... and read on 27 January (International Holocaust Remembrance Day) ... I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror.

At age 17, suspected of being gay by the Gestapo, Seel was tossed into the Schirmeck Concentration Camp in his native Alsace, where he was brutalized, and, along with his fellow inmates, forced to watch Jo, his best friend, stripped naked and eaten alive by German Shepherd guard dogs. After six months of similar horrors, Seel was inexplicably released (for good behaviour!) by the camp Commandant, but then quickly drafted into the Wehrmacht, where he spent the next three years in sometimes senseless circumstances .. to Yugoslavia, Greece, Berlin (several times), and in the spring of 1943 even to the project dear to both Hitler and Himmler ....
the "Lebensborn" located in Bad Polzin, Pomerania, where blond, blue-eyed men and women produced blond, blue-eyed children for the Reich.

Towards the end of the war he was sent to the Russian front ... near Smolensk. Assigned as an orderly to a young officer, the two eventually escaping west, traveling alone, only at night. Separated by circumstances, Seel eventually burned his German uniform, exchanging it for a forester's civilian clothes. Setting off on his own ... If he met German soldiers ... he was a German, escaping the Russians, and if he ran into Russians, he was a Frenchman escaping a German prison camp. As it happened, Seel did join a Russian unit. After the war ...he found himself in Odessa ... on the Black Sea.

One would think his troubles were over, but in Alsace ... newly reincorporated into France, Seel was still listed as a gay man ... subject to the anti-gay laws promulgated by the Vichy Regime ...which remained on the books until 1982, when Seel was 59. Indeed, anti-gay penalties had been increased during the de Gaulle presidency.

To survive, Seel married and raised a family ... Only in 1982, after the Bishop of Strasbourg issued a statement saying that he considered gay people to be sick, did Seel come forward to challenge public opinion. Eventually Seel became a minor celebrity. The cities of Toulouse and Paris even named streets after him.

My last read for this month: Journeys into Night by Don Charlwood.

This 1991 autobiography is very much a memorial to those with whom the author served and who paid the highest price, incorporating photographs and letters from those times.

Enlisting in the RAAF in 1941, after completing his initial training in Australia, the author joined a draft of 20 young men bound for Canada to be trained as Navigators under the Empire Air Training Scheme. Joining 103 Squadron RAF Bomber Command in 1942 flying Lancasters, what follows is the growing psychological tension of months of war where friends and comrades lives are seemingly randomly extinguished on operations, and his crew creeps towards the 30 missions they are required to complete an operational tour.

Towards the end of the book the author deals with some of the demons that perhaps haunted him since. Especially jarring is the moral criticism of Bomber Command's operations from the people who first supported them, and the contention at home that the war in the air in Europe was somehow easier, if not glamorous. Hard to reconcile with the fact that of the 20 young men the author left home with, only 5 would live to see Australia again.

>5 varielle: I think I might have to track down this trilogy as it sounds a most interesting and worthwhile read... As an aside, you may be interested in the Recollections of Rifleman Bowlby which is a memoir of the Italian campaign by a British rifleman. I read a library copy many years ago and note on Book Depository that it is currently scheduled for paperback re-release in March - I intend to pick up a copy, as I recall it as being one of the best memoirs I had read.

>17 jztemple: They should have focused on him instead of the nun (Julie Andrews).