Book Review - Slim the Standardbearer by Ronald Lewin

 Slim the Standardbearer: a biography of Field-Marshall The Viscount Slim by Ronald Lewin

Ware, Herts.: Wordsworth Editions, 1999 (first published 1976)  ISBN 184022214X

This is a workmanlike biography of an interesting man. The major part of the book focusses on Slims' Burma Campaign, which in a sense is right and proper, but I when I finished the book I felt a little short-changed, as Slim has written so well about that himself. I was hoping for a little more insight into the man than this book delivered, but it was still worth reading to remind oneself of what an extraordinary life he led.

The son of a failed businessman, Slim dreamed of an early age of joining the army, but funds (lack of) seemed to scupper that wish, until the advent of war in 1914. Despite the myth that Slim became a Field-Marshall from the ranks, he was actually commissioned immediately as a second lieutenant owing to his time spend before the war in the Birmingham University OTC (despite not being a student at the University - the first example of "Slim's luck"). He was sent to Gallipoli, where he was wounded: after his recovery he was sent to Mesopotamia to assist in the relief of Kut, where he was wounded a second time. 

After the war he was transferred to the Indian Army where he served with Gurkhas. It seems that this was one of the happiest times of his life - there was much low-level action against rebellious tribes, he met and married his wife, and slowly made his way through the ranks, impressing at Staff College in Delhi and at the Imperial Defence College.

Interestingly he also spent these years writing short stories for money (even though Lewin's book is only just short of a hagiography, Slim's nose for cash runs through the book, from ensuring expense accounts were suitably large, to augmenting his pension in any way he thought he could), which I think is a fascinating insight, although one that Lewin doesn't ponder too much.

Although he is famous for his campaigning in Burma in World War Two, he also served in Ethiopia against the Italians (where he was wounded yet again), and in Iraq, before being sent East. There, in Burma, he famously led the retreat back to India, and then the advance back to Rangoon, through a series of excellent strategic and tactical manoeuvres, and (with the close support of Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of the South East Asian Theatre) working his way through the politics of logistics, supply and recalcitrant commanders (Wingate, Stilwell).

This is the major part of Lewin's work, and he describes well what is required of someone commanding an Army, and how the fighting is just one part. It was in Burma that Slim's ability to get people to follow him, his ability to listen, to plan on the run, and to connect with the average soldier were so much on display. Burma in many ways was (and is) a forgotten campaign, and so Slim's capability has been lost in time as the European and Pacific Campaigns have garnered most of the glory. He was probably the best British field commander of the War.

After the War Slim finally got the job for which he had been destined for a long time - Chief of General Staff. It was a difficult time to undertake the role, with the Army moving from a wartime footing to understanding what it's role would be during the Cold War. Slim instituted many reforms during this time.

Then seemingly out of the blue he was asked to be Governor-General of Australia. He took on the role with gusto, and was again a trailblazer, being the first of the "modern" G-Gs, touring the country and being a force for unification, while trying to stay outside of politics.

His final years as Constable of Windsor Castle were ones of enjoyment and social activities, before his decline and death in 1970.

Lewin's book covers this all in appropriate detail, but with little verve or insight - there is a later biography by Robert Lyman which may be better than this one.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Good-Bye Dolly Gray by Rayne Kruger

 Good-Bye Dolly Gray: the Story of the Boer War by Rayne Kruger

London: Pan Books, 1974 (first published 1959)    ISBN 03300238612

Apart from (even in?) South Africa, how many of the combatant nations remember the Boer War of 1899-1902? My hometown has a magnificent memorial in the main street commemorating the 250 Victorians who died fighting in South Africa, but I'm sure most passers-by these days assume the memorial is to World War One if indeed they notice it at all.

The Boer War was the progenitor of many things: blockhouses and barbed wire entanglements, concentration camps, armoured trains, mounted infantry, and not least the participation of most of the Empire. Kruger's book, originally published when some combatants were still alive, is a good "traditional" narrative history of the conflict, covering the military and the political quite well, the social less so.

"The Boers said the war was for liberty. The British said it was for equality. The majority of the inhabitants, who were not white at all, gained neither liberty or equality." This quote from the final pages of the book is pithy, and is not far from the truth. The Great Trek, undertaken the generation previous to that fighting this war, was undertaken so that the Boers could maintain their independence from the British, who had taken the Cape Colony and Natal for their own. The Orange Free State and Transvaal were in nearly all senses independent states, which both sides found acceptable.

That is, until gold was discovered in the Transvaal. The rush brought many foreigners (Uitlanders) to the state, mainly British. Fearing loss of control, the Transvaal government restricted the franchise of non-Boers. The Uitlanders complained to the Crown. The British had long harboured a desire to unite their colonies with the Boer republics to create a South African state. They thought that supporting the Uitlanders in their claim for representation may be a way to achieve such an outcome via the franchise and demographic takeover. So, like many other wars and revolutions throughout history, the fundamental cause of the Boer War was essentially about taxation without representation.

Militarily, the British Empire was always going to win a long drawn-out struggle. The best the Boers could hope for was to make Britain pay such a price that they would make terms. Eventually this is basically what happened in 1902, when the Boers recognised the suzerainty of the English and South Africa became a reality, but the Boers maintained their culture and language and eventually gained political preponderance over the new territory via their own demographic takeover. The War spilled much blood and spent much treasure to only reach a position that could realistically have been negotiated.

The opposing military forces could not have been more different in 1899. The initial British force, under General Buller (whose reputation suffered an irretrievable collapse during this conflict owing to his caution and tactical blunders) might have been wearing khaki and carrying modern Lee Metford rifles, but were old-fashioned in other ways. Their huge columns, with baggage trains consisting of thousands of carts drawn by oxen, officers that ensured that they brought with them champagne, baths and other luxuries, were no match for the Boers. Boer mobile commandos, who lived off the land (supported by many residents), were incredibly mobile owing to their horsed infantry that travelled without impedimenta, and were tactically supple as everyone had a say in how battle was commenced and fought.

Unfortunately the unique structure of the Boer fighting force also became a weakness as the war developed. With no fixed military structure, Boers came and went from the battle-ground as they pleased, and each commando could decide to engage how it chose to, whether that supported Boer strategy or not.

The British eventually dominated the battlefield through combining two seemingly opposing principles, which they fused into a strategy which eventually brought the Boers to the negotiating table. The first was to create units that copied the Boer way of fighting: mobile columns of mounted infantry, lightly equipped, that could cover distance quickly to bring the enemy to heel. The second was the construction of thousands of blockhouses - small forts that linked together into a military fence across the country. By using the mobile columns to push the commandos onto the lines of blockhouses, the British eventually wore down the Boer forces so much that their will to continue fighting began to fail. The Boers had hoped since the start of the war that their cousins who lived in Cape Colony and Natal would rise in rebellion and support them. This support did not materialise even after the Boers "invaded" the Cape and caused much trouble there. This fact also helped seal the fate of the Boers.

The British, while eventually "winning", also paid a heavy price. As many wars have, the Boer War brought down a government, and also a way of governing. The many failures of both politics and military during the war led to the British public losing faith in the rule of the upper classes. The Liberals took over politics, and the British officer class, where commissions were bought rather than earned, was dismantled after the war by Kitchener, who was the modernising leader of the forces in South Africa.

Kruger's book lists a catalogue of military blunders, with the British consistently underestimating the capabilities of the Boers, and the Boers suffering from too much or too little caution, often failing to press home their advantage or fruitlessly attacking points that were too strong. Early in the war the Boers laid siege to Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberly. They failed to take any of these places, and if they had the war may have taken a different turn.

By the same token, if Buller had moved more decisively and had more tactical nous, the Boers may not have won their early victories and in fact might have suffered defeats that may have led to them putting down their rifles much earlier than they did.

Kruger spends a few chapters on the political aspects of the war, particularly in England, but glosses over the politics of the participation of the Empire in the war, as well as the politics of the Cape Colony and Natal during the conflict. While he describes the concentration camps, again it is a side-issue in this book to the descriptions of the military activity.

If you want to get a grip on the military progression of the Boer War, Good-Bye Dolly Gray (the title comes from a well-known song from the era) is not the worst place to start.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hitler's Army by Omer Bartov

 Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich by Omer Bartov

New York: Oxford University Press, 1991                        ISBN 0195068793

This book was written at a hinge-point in our modern history: published in 1991 when the certainties of Cold-War Europe were disappearing and a new united Germany was allowed to come to be. This change in the political scene led to a wellspring of historical effort and post-revisionism about Germany's recent history. It had suited Cold-War confrontation to paint the horrors of the Third Reich as the result of an appalling dictatorship imposed on an unwilling populace - the Germans were all "victims" of the Nazis. This view posited that the soldiers that served in Hitler's army were not Nazis or Nazi sympathisers, did not willingly partake in the horrors of the regime, and were in many respects dupes of the hierarchy, such was the revisionist history of the mid Cold-War era.

In Hitler's Army Bartov sets out to question this idea, positing that - especially on the Eastern Front - the Wehrmacht was indeed more than willing to engage in criminal acts, spurred by an internalization by the troops of the tropes of Nazi propaganda and ideology.

Bartov's first steps in setting out this argument require him to dispel the idea that the Wehrmacht was merely an army rather than an instrument of Hitler's will. He demolishes the idea that Germany fought for so long because a) they were highly mechanized, and b) the army was organized around a "primary group" of soldiers drawn from the same area, and that these two things helped make them better fighters.

Through the use of simple statistics Bartov successfully demolishes both positions. Even in June 1941 when Germany invaded Russia, it was the Soviets who were the more mechanized army. This gap widened dramatically as the Germans failed to replace lost materiel and the Russians (and Americans via Lend-Lease) massively increased their production.

The staggering losses of men during the war in Russia (losses which rapidly rose from the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa) very quickly made the idea of a "primary group" impossible to maintain. In fact even by 1943 many groups were already ad-hoc, with whole regiments disappearing and joining with other remnants into "battle-groups".

So, if the revisionist historians were wrong: that it was not technical prowess and group cohesion that kept the Wehrmacht in the field, what was it that did? This is the major focus of Hitler's Army. Bartov contends that far from being duped by the Nazis, many (most?) soldiers duped themselves, by twisting reality to the point where they almost saw the War backwards. Soldiers saw Russian brutality and squalor at the Front as confirming what their propaganda had told them, without reflecting that what they were seeing was the brutality and squalor inflicted on the Russians by Germany.

They even came to believe in a sense that they were engaged in a preventative war, stopping the invasion of Europe by the Untermensch. The soldiers came to believe that they had a civilizing mission (even while destroying villages, massacring Jews and "Partisans") and so became increasingly frustrated when Russians continued to fight. 

This combined with an almost religious belief in the rightness of Hitler became in the end a fatal self-delusion: for example the thought that Hitler would sacrifice his soldiers pointlessly (in Stalingrad for example) was too absurd to be believed, so it wasn't.

Some of this thinking - this self-delusion - has an internal rationality when looked at from the viewpoint of an individual soldier. No soldier can find it easy to admit that their sacrifice will be in vain, or is in pursuit of an evil cause. Irrational belief in a final victory when all the evidence suggests the opposite must be maintained to avoid despair. These are in some ways natural responses.

As is the attempt after the defeat to try and deflect any responsibility for their actions, or indeed responsibility for believing in the cause. When your victors in pursuit of their own ends allow that deflection to stand, and indeed re-use some of the same men in rebuilding German armed forces, then alternatives to the truth easily become the accepted version of events.

A lot of the above is now well known and accepted by the serious student of Nazism and World War Two, but in 1991 Bartov was one of those scholars (like Goldhagen and Evans) who brought a new unprejudiced light to bear on the evidence. His arguments are mostly sound.

This is one for the serious student of World War Two.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hitler as Military Commander by John Strawson

 Hitler as Military Commander by John Strawson

London: Sphere Books Limited, 1973 (first published 1971)    ISBN 0722182090

John Strawson was a retired British General by the time he came to write this book, which looks specifically at Hitler's ability as a commander of armed forces, which he was over every battleground during World War Two.

Strawson divides his book into two sections; the period of the War when Hitler was making the geopolitical and military running and other countries were reacting to his moves, and the latter period of the War when he was reduced to himself reacting to the decisions and actions of the Allied powers.

Over the course of his narrative, Strawson makes a case that while Hitler had a strong geopolitical sense, and grasped how modern weaponry and combined-arms operations could change the way war could be fought, he had no real grasp of how individual armies should be manoeuvred and used tactically or even strategically.

It was the Battle of France that, despite the German success, is the first illustration of these fundamental flaws within Hitler. He quickly grasped the way that a combined arms attack could quickly dislocate and destroy the French position and lead to disarray, with a bolder vision than that held by his General Staff. The absolute success of the attack on France fed Hitler's massive ego, and led him to believe that not only was he a better strategist than his Generals, but also superior when it came to tactics.

However, it was precisely at the level of army tactics that Hitler let down his armed forces. As Strawson writes "...in spite of being a gambler [Hitler] was unwilling to stake all on a winning number." As evidence of this view Strawson puts forward several examples, including Hitler's failure at Dunkirk, and his failure to adequately support the Afrika Korps until it was too late to make a decisive difference.

The most interesting part of the book for me was Strawson's writing on the Mediterranean Theatre, explaining that far from being a sideshow, if Hitler had fully understood Grand Strategy he would have grasped that: a) it was important to keep the Allies out of the basin as that secured his Southern flank (the Balkans, Italy, Greece, Türkiye) and b) that by pushing the British out of Egypt (eminently possible if Rommel had been supported in an adequate and timely manner) he could have threatened Ukraine and the Caucuses oil fields far more effectively and changed his Russian campaign.

That he didn't do these things comes down fundamentally to the fact that Hitler lacked the imagination to create dynamic strategy. All he could see is the dreams of his youth, and was unable to change as the situation of the War developed. He was unable to see the openings that his gambles had created, and unable to take advantage of them.

His lack of experience in tactics of deploying armies (as opposed to Companies or Platoons, which he also did) and his refusal to listen to those that did have experience led to the suicidal attacks and last-man defences that did so much to destroy the Wehrmacht as a fighting force as the War progressed.

Strawson's book is well-argued, but written in a somewhat pedestrian manner. There is a lot of explicatory material that - while it might be necessary for those unschooled in this subject - can bog down the reader. Of interest to arm-chair strategists only methinks.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Markham and Ramu Valleys 1943-1944 (Australians in the Pacific War)

 The Markham and Ramu Valleys 1943-1944 (Australians in the Pacific War)

Researched and written by Dr. Mark Johnston, Text and photo editing by Courtney Page-Allen

Canberra: Department of Veteran's Affairs, 2005       ISBN 9781920720490

This little book is part of a wonderful series printed by the Australian Department of Veteran's Affairs on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War Two. They consist of a short section of text and a carefully curated collection of photographs which illustrate a particular piece of Australian activity in the Pacific War. The books were distributed freely to libraries and schools to help to keep memory alive.

This particular volume describes the actions that led to the taking of Lae and the campaign up the Markham Valley through Nadzab, Kaiapit, and on to Shaggy Ridge, a name that rings through the history of Australia in World War Two. Battalions of the Seventh Division fought their way up into the Finisterre Ranges and along the ridge (which was often only wide enough for one man to walk along), fighting hand-to-hand battles to take features such as Johnson's Knoll and the famous Pimple.

The text, while very brief is crisp and accurate, and is wonderfully complemented by the photographs, which show the difficulty and danger of this campaign which lasted from September 1943 through to February 1944. The photos are especially poignant for me, as one of my Great Uncles with whom I used to spend my Summer holidays, fought in that campaign.

We will remember them.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Pictorial History of the Royal Australian Air Force by George Odgers

 Pictorial History of the Royal Australian Air Force by George Odgers

Sydney: Ure Smith, 1977 (first edition 1965)         ISBN: 0725403942

An interesting little book. George Odgers was a Group Captain in the RAAF and a respected historian of the service, responsible for one of the volumes of the official history of the RAAF in World War 2. This book is a very potted history, beginning at the beginning and taking the reader into the 1970s, when the airforce was still running the Mirage III as our main fighter, the F111 as our strike 'plane, and Neptunes for maritime patrol.

The Army was interested in aviation soon after the advent of the airplane, but it was 1912 before the first flight, with four officers, was formed. Soon after, World War One began. The Australian air effort began in Mesopotamia, where a small contingent of Australians fought the Ottomans alongside Lawrence of Arabia amongst others, and developed supply from the air during the siege of Kut. Soon more were fighting in Europe, with Australian squadrons formed initially within the RFC.

It was not until 1921 that the RAAF was formed, and the first years as an independent service were hard, with a lack of funding affecting every aspect of work. Soon enough war clouds were forming in Europe again, and with the outbreak of World War Two came the most rapid expansion in the history of the Australian Military forces. After World War One, the service was hoping to have 3,300 personnel - during World War Two over 200,000 men and women were enlisted, thousands of aircraft were taken into service, and Australian aircrew flew bombers over Germany, fighters in Italy, as well as the more commonly known theatres of war in the Middle East and the Pacific.

While the Australian effort was a big one for our capacity, it was a small part of a much bigger Allied effort. Soon enough the RAAF were employed in a small way in the Korean War, Malaya, the Indonesian Confrontation, and Vietnam. The crews and 'planes employed punched above their weight, and Odgers describes the individual exploits as well as the tactical and strategic outlook.

Being a pictorial history, the illustrations are as important as the text. The colour plates are magnificent, and the liberal sprinkling of black and white photos are perhaps not what one would expect - many of them I haven't seen in other works, and there are as many pictures of men and women at work as there are of aircraft.

Not a bad little book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A History of Warfare by John Keegan

 A History of Warfare by John Keegan

London: Pimlico, 1994 (first published 1993)             ISBN:  0712698507

It took me a while to warm to this book. The opening section, which contains psychological insights into human character, and discussions of primitive peoples, was not what I was expecting. As I read further, it became clear what Keegan was trying to say, and his conclusion ties up his thesis very nicely, whether you agree with it or not (in fact you could probably just read the conclusion and not bother with the rest of the book if all you want is Keegan's view on the history of warfare).

Written in the 1990s, history has overtaken some of his final conclusions, but here is what the book contends, in a nutshell. In primitive societies, warfare in the sense we know it doesn't exist. Conflicts involved a ritualised exchange of violence, where death was in fact rare (vide traditional fighting in Papua New Guinea as a recent example, or descriptions of Australian Aboriginal fighting). The fight was more about serving "honour" rather than killing or taking land. Sometimes disagreements were resolved by "champions" from each side fighting in lieu of a general melee. Keegan points out that sometimes killing and taking land did happen, but that was the exception rather than the rule.

At some stage in Mesopotamia, things got more organised. The more settled societies could organise for small periods of time groups of warriors, who now had reason in an agricultural world to protect their own lands and perhaps take the land of others. The development of the horse into a weapon of war is hard to track, but it's impact was decisive. Development of the chariot revolutionized how battles were fought, and led to the rise of the Hittites. However it was some time yet before horses could be ridden and men fight from horseback.

Most warfare at this time did not involve close combat. Keegan explains that most battles were fought at as great a distance as possible, and retreat was not seen as dishonourable if one's foe had greater strength. The culture that changed this outlook was the Ancient Greeks. It was they, with their closely-packed phalanxes, that brought the horror of mass hand-to-hand fighting into war. It was this revolutionary change that led to their success on the battlefield. It is at this stage of the history of warfare that Keegan explains we see two differing ways of making war. Those from the Middle East, the Steppe lands and China, stuck to the idea of a hit-and-run type of warfare, attacking and retreating as necessary. This style of warfare was greatly aided by the development of the horse, saddle, and stirrup to enable a man to fire his newly developed composite bow while riding.

When the Romans took over hegemonic status in Europe from the other powers such as Greece and Carthage, they did so using Greek methods of warfare. Their centralized control, and logistical ability to keep great armies in the field, led them to quickly overrun not only the other powers, but move into areas such as Gaul where older tribal ways of warfare still prevailed. Those areas were quickly crushed - Keegan points out that the boundaries of the Roman Empire at its peak delineated in a general way the boundary between agricultural and pastoral land.

And it is those boundaries, delineated by geographic and climatic factors, Keegan sees as the most important factor in warfare almost until the arrival of gunpowder and the nation-state. The ways of war that suited each landscape could not be readily translated to the other. The horse lords of the Steppe could overrun settled areas for a time (Huns, Goths etc.), but the structure of their armies did not suit long-form siege warfare, and more importantly the settled areas of Europe could not support the huge numbers of horses that were required by such armies for long. Keegan suggests that it is for those reasons that the invasions from the Steppe lands always petered out - the invaders could not our would not change their way of life to enable them to control the settled lands.

The opposite side of the same coin meant that generally speaking the organised phalanx-style armies of the settled areas were mostly ineffective against mobile warriors that would not stand and fight, and such armies couldn't penetrate far into the pastoral lands owing to logistics not being resilient enough to keep up supply.

Once the Roman Empire collapsed, and along with it revenue to the centre from taxation, and supplies from the centre out to the armies and garrisons, a new way for leaders to gather fighters needed to be developed. That new way developed into the Feudal system. A leader gave land, with the expectation that those he gave it to would come to his support in a time of crisis with an agreed number of troops. Despite the internal problems with such a system, it prevailed in Europe for hundreds of years, and led to the development of the knightly class.

Keegan is a bit iconoclastic about the value of knights on horseback, and suggests that their effectiveness was much less than legend would have us believe: he notes that if one reads the accounts of Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, the knights mostly fought dismounted. Infantry soon came up with tactics to counter horsemen, using lances or longbows and then crossbows to keep them at a distance.

The codes of chivalry, and their equivalents in the East, were developed partly to separate the warrior class from the rest of society, and to impose (harking back to primitive times), some sort of accepted ritual to combat. The ascent of gunpowder changed that, and a lot else besides. Firstly gunpowder put paid to city walls and castles, and led to a whole new theory of fortification. Secondly, it destroyed the notion of a warrior class - gunpowder put lethal force into the hands of people who didn't need a lifetime of training to be effective.

Gunpowder led to a change in naval warfare as well. Galleys, which had been the prime warfighting vessel up until the advent of gunpowder, were ships that needed to keep close to shore - with their many oarsmen, they couldn't keep at sea for long time periods. In fact most naval warfare up until the gunpowder age was conducted in conjunction with land campaigns. Guns required bigger ships - sail took over, and without oarsmen, ships could be built that could range over oceans and stay for years away from port. It was this revolution that enabled Europe to dominate the world.

They could do this because the reaction to gunpowder in the East was to reinforce the specialty warrior class, and to reject the new technology. That's fine if you are only fighting other people who share the same ethos: something that illustrates this clash vividly (although apocryphal) is the doomed charge of the Polish Lancers against German tanks in 1939.

If the invention of gunpowder enabled deadly force to be placed into the hands of almost every man with a limited amount of training, it was the creation of the nation state, the development of nationalism and the industrialisation of industry and society that meant that mass armies could fight a mechanised war. The notion of a superior warrior class being able to take the battlefield owing to their prowess was shown in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be an obsolete idea - it was the ability to put large numbers of men in the field, and critically, to overpower the enemy with material and the logistics to get it to the point of need in quantity, that became key to victory.

With the atomic bomb, Keegan (writing in the early 90s), suggested that we were on the verge of seeing the end of war. Sadly this has not turned out to be the case.

Once Keegan got himself underway in this book, there is much to study and absorb. Worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - HMAS Melbourne by Timothy Hall

 HMAS Melbourne by Timothy Hall

Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1982      ISBN 0868612847

A nice little time-capsule of a book, if somewhat slapdash in execution. Written by a journalist, this book was published just as HMAS Melbourne was being prepared for decommissioning, and is a combination of reportage and potted history.

In a series of intertwined chapters, Hall relates what it was like for the sailors and airmen to live and work on what was by 1980 an obsolescent ship, that was kept running more by hope, will and ingenuity than anything else. He also delves into the history of the ship, initially constructed as a "disposable" wartime asset, but like many of her contemporaries, sent off to new lives all around the world. There are of course chapters on the collisions with HMAS Voyager and the USS Frank E. Evans.

In a fairly businesslike manner, Hall describes the lives of the sailors and airmen when they are on board at sea. Explaining the watches, the roles of the officers and men, and the ironically cramped conditions for those aboard. He describes in detail the immense power and responsibility vested in the Captain, and how difficult it is to coordinate flying activities from a rolling pitching deck moving at over twenty knots. In the case of HMAS Melbourne, everything is made more difficult because the ship itself was never designed to last forty years, so by 1980 everything was breaking.

A large part of the book is devoted to the two accidents, and the subsequent Royal Commissions and inquiries. Hall himself seems to have no love for the Navy particularly, but he describes the first Royal Commission into the sinking of the HMAS Voyager in a very scathing tone, pointing out that an inquiry into a naval accident is not a trial, and the facts of the matter (that the Voyager was in the wrong and there was little the Melbourne could do to avoid the collision) should have exonerated Captain Robertson. Hall holds much the same scorn for the US Navy inquiry into the sinking of the Frank E. Evans, which was the worst type of political stitch-up.

There are better books to read than this one on both of those disasters, and the sometimes flippant tone that Hall uses when describing life at sea can be grating. The fact that this book falls between the posts of a history of the ship, and reportage of what sailing on her was like is also frustrating, as there is not really enough of either. The captions on many of the photographs are obviously wrong, which makes me wonder how much of the rest of the text might also be inaccurate.

One other irony: this book was I imagine written quite quickly after the decision by the Australian Government to purchase HMS Invincible as a replacement for the Melbourne, and the final few pages look forward to the passing on of status of flagship, which never happened as the sale fell through. So when she was decommissioned in May 1982, the Melbourne ended Australia's dalliance with aircraft carriers.

This book was a trip down memory lane, but I can't really recommend it as worth hunting out.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - HMAS Sydney by Tom Frame

 HMAS Sydney by Tom Frame

Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2018 (originally published 1993)       ISBN 9780733640179

"The Sydney-Kormoran action should have been a one-sided contest. Sydney should have sunk Kormoran without any risk of damage to herself. This made the loss of Sydney inexplicable." These lines, appearing about half-way through this excellent book about the sinking of the Sydney, sum up why there has been so much ink spilled on what is the Royal Australian Navy's greatest disaster.

HMAS Sydney was probably the most famous RAN ship of World War II at the time of her loss, owing to her sterling service in the Mediterranean, where she played a major part in the sinking of the Bartolomeo Colleoni, an Italian cruiser. Sydney was herself a cruiser, sister-ship to the other RAN vessels Perth  and Hobart, with only the latter surviving the War. Her loss in a battle with the German auxiliary cruiser and mercantile raider was a huge disaster - the loss of 645 lives, as well as the ship in what should have been an unequal battle was, and is, hard to understand.

Australia has been blessed over the years with some excellent military historians, beginning with Bean, through Long, to the current generation of fine writers, of which Frame is a leading light. He has written the authoritative book on the Voyager disaster as well as other interesting books on Australia's naval history. The book under review is in reality the third edition of his book about the Sydney, having been updated several times owing to new evidence being found, although Frame's conclusion has not changed from the first publication in 1993.

Frame was initially drawn to write about the sinking of the Sydney owing to the publication of two books 50 years after the sinking, one that claimed a Japanese submarine assisted in the sinking, and another which accepted the German version of what happened and in the process heaped some calumny on the commander of the Sydney, Captain Joseph Burnett.

Frame, through a patient sifting and analysis of the available evidence, shoots down the Japanese sub theory (they are all accounted for in Japanese naval records, and none were in the area at the time of the encounter. Frame also points out that there was no real co-operation between the German and Japanese navies at that time). He also shows, through evidence, that Captain Burnett was by all accounts a prudent and cautious sailor.

Which brings us to the mystery of what happened on that November day in 1941. It's clear that Burnett closed to within 2000 yards of the Kormoran, far too close for safety, and in fact almost ensuring if not destruction, very heavy damage to the Sydney. Why did he do that? Frame has his theory, which is that Burnett may have thought that the Kormoran was actually the Kulmerland, the supply ship, and so was reluctant to engage at long range, partly so that he could capture the ship and learn of the movements of the raider, but also because he may have thought there were Allied prisoners on board. 

That still doesn't explain why the Sydney came so close to the Kormoran, but Frame has an explanation for that as well. He feels sure that the Captain of the Kormoran, Theodor Detmers, lured the Sydney in by feigning surrender. While he has no definite proof that this occurred, the evidence that he does present (Burnett's usual caution, Detmers' strange obsession with potentially being court-martialled by the Australians, several Kormoran survivors mentioning that Sydney was potentially lowering a boat), could be construed as supporting Frame's supposition.

Frame's theory delivers an answer to the mystery, and is something that certainly could have happened. We will never know: those members of the crew of the Kormoran who knew the truth certainly made no admissions (why would they), and of course there were no survivors from the Sydney to tell their side of the story.

This updated edition covers the discovery of the wrecks of the Kormoran and Sydney. This final piece of the puzzle closed the mouths of many of the conspiracy theorists that have buzzed around the incident for the last thirty years or so. The Kormoran was found where the crew said it would be, the Sydney where they said they last saw it, and the damage to both vessels confirmed the general outline of the battle that was given to the Australian authorities by the survivors of the Kormoran.

If you want the closest you'll ever get to a comprehensive guide to the build-up, battle, aftermath and controversies that surround the loss of the Sydney, I can highly recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Last Stand by Nathaniel Philbrick

 The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick

New York: Viking, 2010                                                        ISBN 9780670021727

Could this be the definitive book on the Battle of the Little Bighorn? It may well be. Nathaniel Philbrick has brought his considerable talents to bear on the events that occurred between May 1876 when Custer and the Seventh Cavalry headed out to face the Lakota, and early July, when the news of Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn became public. Along the way the reader not only gets an insight into Custer's character and history, but also those around him, and of the Indians, for whom this battle was also a "last stand".

While at times I felt the structure of this book was a little formulaic, with the narrative drive of Custer's demise interrupted by asides into history or culture, there can be no doubt that Philbrick has amassed voluminous sources and presented the reader with an account that has looked at all the evidence at hand (in a book of 466 pages, there are 92 pages of notes and a 27 page bibliography) and explained as near as can be known exactly what happened on the bluffs overlooking the Little Bighorn on 25-26 June 1876.

While many books about this subject have a barrow to push, either excoriating or glorifying Custer, Reno, Benteen or others, Philbrick has let the facts speak for themselves, noting when the "facts" might be passed down to us by someone with an axe to grind. No-one comes out of Philbrick's telling unscathed.

 Anyone who has read anything about Custer will know of his rashness and inability to follow orders: Philbrick emphasises that Custer had other worries than Indians on his mind in June 1876. He was seriously in debt after some disastrous investments, and as also in political trouble, coming out for the Democrats in opposition to President Grant. He needed a grand victory to secure himself both financially and politically. 

Major Reno perhaps comes out of this telling of the tale worst. His poor leadership and drunkenness during the battle led to the rout of his companies down on the plain, and if it wasn't for Benteen taking control on Reno Hill he too may have been lost with all his men. There is little to be said in his defence, and in fact the most interesting thing about his role in the battle is why Custer put him in charge of the left wing of his divided force to begin with, given the open hostility between the two. Reno could never surmount the misfortunes life threw at him, and died a drunk and broken man.

The most interesting character from the US Army side was Captain Frederick Benteen. A pathological hater, especially of Custer, his mix of disobedience, insubordination, lack of discipline and outright inspiration and bravery in those two days are breathtaking. He truly hated Custer and his decision to stay with Reno rather than go to Custer with ammunition is one of the great "what ifs" of the battle. While we will never know if it would have been decisive for him to join with Custer, we can be fairly sure that if he had moved on and left Reno to his own devices, Reno's battalions would have suffered a similar fate to those of Custer. In the end, it was Custer's desperation for a victory that he wanted to claim for himself and himself alone that led to disaster.

Philbrick, in my opinion, provides the clearest most easy-to-follow account of the fight on Reno Hill, and also reconstructs a very plausible account of what happened to Custer and his men. In the end, after all that has been written over the years, it is becoming clearer and clearer that Custer was simply outnumbered, and would most likely have been overwhelmed no matter what tactics he might have chosen to employ. That the situation came to that is a result not only of Custer's undoubted shortcomings and flaws, but of the machinations of Terry, the tentativeness of Crook, and even the actions of Sheridan and Grant.

What was meant to be a simple victory over a people being dispossessed became instead a symbol of hubris and mismanagement. The victory was merely delayed, and not by very long either. As Philbrick explains, most of the Indians involved in the battle were in reservations by the beginning of Winter 1876. He touches on the tragedy that was to follow, from the deaths of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to the tragedy of the massacre at Wounded Knee, and the end of a way of life, if not a people.

For those interested in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and in what actually happened on those summer days in 1876, I can highly recommend this book.

  

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning

 Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning

New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992                                       ISBN 0060190132

"In mid-March 1942 some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished. A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the percentages were exactly the reverse." With this stark statement Christopher Browning begins his study of one part of that whirlwind of murder, the work of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland between July 1942 and November 1943.

That Browning is able to undertake this study is due to the fact that in the 1960s prosecutors interviewed 210 members of the Battalion in their investigations of war crimes from the period. Delving through the obfuscation and downright lies that are contained in some of the testimony, Browning lists a catalogue of horrors undertaken by this unit, and speculates how the "ordinary men" of Battalion 101 could do such things to their fellow human beings.

Unlike the Einsatzgruppen or the members of the SS assigned to run the death-camps, the Reserve Police received no special training or ideological reinforcement before being assigned to murder Jews. The Battalion was a mixture of career policemen, recruits too old to serve in the regular army, or who had joined the Reserve Police to avoid conscription. By no means were all members card-carrying Nazis, although there was a small core of party members among the group. When they were shipped to Poland, they were under the impression that they were being sent to ensure order in the civilian population behind the front lines.

However, not long after they got to Poland, they were assigned to clear the town of Jozefow of Jews, which meant sending the fit Jews away, and massacring the rest of the population. The Battalion had no idea how to go about such a task, and the resulting slaughter was a horrible mess. An extraordinary detail which the prosecutor's interviews reveal, is that the commander of the Battalion, Major Trapp, allowed members to be excused from the killing if they felt they couldn't participate. That only a few took up this offer is at the core of Browning's history....why so few?

Many others, while not "officially" standing apart from the killing, found other ways to not pull the trigger, by making themselves scarce, or participating in other tasks during that time. Browning's take on the evidence is that there was a very small number of willing killers, a majority that would kill when told to do so, a small number who tried to avoid killing when they could, and the very few who objected from the beginning, and took no part in the killing (although they did participate in other tasks such as clearing ghettos, loading Jews into trains for shipment to the death-camps, and so on).

Browning, in the last chapter of his book, goes into some detail about the theories as to why people such as the members of this battalion did the things that they did. He focuses mainly on the results of the Milgram experiment which showed that people will follow authority and do things that they wouldn't otherwise do if it is normalized in some way. The members of Battalion 101 not only had the formal structure of being ordered to do things, but also the over-arching mentality, ideology and thought-patterns of the Nazi world pushing the idea that exterminating the "Jewish threat" was for the good of their Fatherland. Most importantly, in Browning's view, is the pressure to conform with other members of their unit, which is indeed a powerful force in group dynamics. The final words in the book state the problem succinctly - "Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?"

I am not someone who feels themselves extremely well-informed about the Holocaust, so a source of fascination for me was the apparent disorganized way in which much of the killing took place. From a general understanding of World War Two and Germany, the impression is of the Holocaust as a well-oiled killing machine, trains running to timetables, and bureaucrats ticking Jewish populations off as they were transported to their deaths. The truth, it seems, was sometimes far from that. We have the example of Reserve Police Battalion 101 itself, being thrust into the maelstrom without any preparation, and having to almost make up the procedure of killing as they gained experience. Browning, in the beginning of this work, explains how the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia was expanded to include firstly the Jews in Poland and then the rest of Europe, but no extra manpower was assigned to those that Himmler instructed to complete the task. And so not only the Reserve Police, but groups of ethnic Germans, Latvians and others were brought together to assist, as did at times Waffen SS and even Wehrmacht troops.

Ordinary Men is a fascinating and horrible journey into the heart of one of the most terrifying events in human history. What makes it terrifying is that Browning shows clearly that such horrors can be committed by people just like you and I. For an insight into the inner workings of the Holocaust, I can highly recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Poland 1939 by Roger Moorhouse

 Poland 1939: the Outbreak of World War II by Roger Moorhouse

New York: Basic Books, 2020 (originally published as First to fight: The Polish War 1939 in 2019)

ISBN 9780465095384

We all know that World War II started when Germany invaded Poland on the first of September 1939. We also know that Poland was overrun in a matter of a month, and we may have heard stories of Polish cavalry charging at Panzers with horse and lance. Beyond that, what is known in the West of the Polish campaign? Moorhouse argues in the preface to this book that the attack on Poland that precipitated a World War needs to be given more than the couple of paragraphs and the well-worn clichés that many English-language histories of World War II give it. It's hard to argue against that.

In this well-written book, Moorhouse covers not only the fighting in detail, but also the machinations of the Nazi attack, the Russian intervention, and the atrocities committed mostly by the Germans (but also Soviets and civilians). The plight of the civilians is not overlooked by this book, but is more an underlying theme rather than a specific highlight.

While the German campaign against Poland was successfully completed in only 35 days, that doesn't mean that the Poles did not fight, and fight hard, or that the Germans didn't have setbacks and failures. As is usually the case in warfare, the protagonist with the greatest economic heft wins in any protracted campaign. Moorhouse states a "rather telling statistic...is that the entire Polish defense budget for the five years to 1939 amounted to only 10 percent of the Luftwaffe's budget for 1939 alone." That is probably all that needs to be said about the equipment disparity between Poland and Germany.

Another truism is that warfare is an extension of politics. No political or diplomatic manoeuvres by Poland would have forestalled Hitler's invasion, but politics did cruel Poland's chances of victory over and above their economic (in)capabilities. The pact with Britain and France was meant to be a deterrent: Britain and France thought that the threat of their intervention would be enough to stop Hitler, and never developed any serious plans to attack Germany if an invasion of Poland took place. Poland on the other hand thought that they needed to show Britain and France that they were serious and so placed most of their armies on the borders with Germany and Slovakia. This made political sense, but it didn't make military sense especially knowing that if war came they would need to hold on for as long as possible to allow their allies time to assist. Setting up at the borders meant that Poland's armies were on ideal campaigning territory, ideally suited for quick moving mechanized troops to drive through any holes in the front and encircle their enemies. Poland's army was not highly mechanized, so this was no advantage to them. Add to that the obsessive secrecy of the Polish armed forces, not sharing plans and not even allowing neighbouring armies to communicate with each other directly, and defeat was almost assured.

Moorhouse covers the military aspect well. Despite being out-gunned, the Polish forces gave the Wehrmacht some severe checks during the campaign. When they were able to be entrenched well with artillery, or when they had the element of surprise, the Polish army could inflict localized defeats on the Germans (and, later on, the Soviets). The cavalry too could be effective in dispersing infantry and allowing freedom of movement for Polish troops, until German or Soviet armour could arrive on the scene. Moorhouse points out that the famous image we have in our heads of Lancers charging tanks was a fiction created by an Italian correspondent, but they did on several occasions charge groups of infantry with success.

The military story is one of soldiers grimly holding on until their ammunition and food ran low, or of fighting retreats to try and join comrades, and at the end a fight to reach the borders. There were some occasions when the troops were routed, mostly it seems due to the bombing from the Luftwaffe rather than infantry attack. The Luftwaffe was also responsible for destroying many Polish cities and towns, in particular Warsaw, which was bombed incessantly throughout the campaign for terror more than for military reasons. 

The Nazi ideology of racial superiority was well-entrenched within the German military, and this meant from the first that atrocities were committed on both Polish military and civilian victims. Mass shootings were common, the shooting of hostages was policy, and when the SS and Einsatzgruppen arrived in numbers, Jews and Polish "intelligentsia" were in mortal danger.

While the Nazis were imposing their racial war on Poland, the Soviets, once they arrived to "liberate" the "suppressed" Ukrainians and Byelorussians (Stalin's cover for his land-grab) began their class war. Quite often in the early days of their occupation of Eastern Poland, just having soft hands was enough to see a person sent to a prison camp, or worse. While the Katyn massacres are outside the scope of this book, Moorhouse lets the reader know where most of the Polish officers captured by the Soviets ended up and sets the scene for the about-to-unfold tragedy that was Poland's fate until (and after) 1945.

In his conclusion, Moorhouse notes that the invasion of Poland by Germany and the USSR was far from a minor event in human terms - 60,000 Polish troops, 20,000 German and perhaps 18,000 Soviets died in those 35 days, and about 100,000 Polish civilians, which includes 16,000 "falling victim to extrajudicial killing by German military and security forces during the period of the military campaign." That's about five and a half thousand deaths per day during the fighting.

Moorhouse in this history doesn't really go into the question of whether this tragedy was avoidable (probably not in my opinion), but does give the reader a good insight into both the immediate background to, and the progress of, this tragic month of history. If you want to flesh out those few paragraphs in any omnibus history of World War II that you might have read, I can recommend this book (apparatus is a mixed bag - good bibliography and notes, OK index, poor maps).

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell

 Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Evan S. Connell

London: Picador, 1986 (first published 1984)                                       ISBN 0330293400

I wish I had read this book twenty years ago. Twenty years ago (give or take a few years), I had the fortune to visit the valley of the Little Bighorn, and walk over the battleground where Custer and so many of the Seventh Cavalry lost their lives that fateful June day in 1876. Evan Connell has written the most wonderful account not only of that day, but of Custer, the West as it came to be up to the battle, the white American mindset, and of the Indians, what happened to them up to and after the battle, and what now remains - the legacy of violence, misunderstanding and dispossession that continue to this day.

Connell was better-known as a novelist before this book was published, and he has used a novelist's mind to create this book, with its tangents, loose ends, unknowns and climaxes. While it covers much familiar territory to those of us with an interest in the battle and the American West more generally, it does so in new and different ways. The book begins with a description of Reno's fight on the bluff from the viewpoint of the soldiers, before segueing into the history of Reno himself, and on to Benteen, before taking a step back in time to see how the fates led Custer and co. to their destiny on June 25.

Connell investigates the "facts" that surround Custer and so many of the men and women associated with this story: sometimes the stories that cloud around these people obscure whatever truth there may have been to find (names in particular, not only of the Indians, but so many of the white participants seem to have varied names, names that changed or have been half-remembered... a kaleidoscope of faces that can't be pinned to a particular). He is not afraid to vent his opinion about some of the histories that have been written of those times, and can be scathing of those whom he thought had exaggerated in search of fame or a dollar.

Some surprising facts pop up throughout the text. One that struck me particularly is that the last living witness to the battle died the same year my wife was born. What seems like ancient history is only just out of reach really. The fog of battle is often impossible to pierce, yet it seems fairly certain that Custer was shot from long range and died "with a smile on his face". While it is pure speculation on my part, Connell describes a character in Custer, that may have been smiling because he knew his name would go down in history. There is no doubt that he was incredibly vain, self-centred and reckless, and it seems he deliberately disobeyed the orders given to him by Terry to wait for the main force to join him before attacking the Indians, most probably so that he could take all the glory for himself.

His wife burnished his legend (she died only in 1933) so that he seemed - until revisionists such as Connell appeared on the scene - like a god, a genius at battle, a wonderful leader to his men, as well as kind to animals, and the greatest Indian fighter of the US Army. That he was none of those things Connell makes clear. He was personally brave, of that there is no doubt, and he was assiduous in trying to work his good fortune in battle into promotions and appointments (it seems plausible that he was thinking of running for President at the time of Little Bighorn).

To his men Custer was a hard-driving martinet, not afraid to use the lash, or to punish them for minor misdemeanours, all the while working hard to minimize his own transgressions, which were not infrequent or insignificant. His leadership against Indians in battle was at best one-dimensional, which is what got him into so much trouble in June 1876. He should have been more circumspect and waited for Terry (although Connell seems to think that even the addition of Terry's men wouldn't have led to a US victory).

Connell spends as much ink on the Indian side of the story as he does on Custer. The Indians had a well-deserved reputation for savagery, which was partly due to their warrior culture, but mostly a response to unrelenting harassment by the white invaders. That they were invaders is without doubt, as it was the US Government itself that gave the lands around the Black Hills to the Sioux "for ever" eight years before the battle. Connell writes that even then, just before Little Bighorn, Indians were willing to negotiate, but the Army did not allow time for that to happen. In so many ways, the disaster was of white man's making...

Son of the Morning Star is very well-written, taking the reader on a journey into the West, and giving as many sides of the story as is possible, even to the point of four or five differing versions of the same story - although unlike an academic tome Connell is quick to let the reader know which version he favours. The book deserves the accolades it received, it is a hinge between "old fashioned" Custer history and the newer more nuanced writing, and is just a wonderful read! 

(This Picador edition suffers from the maps being almost illegible - the Bibliography is good, but the index is terrible.)

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Bormann: the Man who Manipulated Hitler by Jochen von Lang

 Bormann: the Man who Manipulated Hitler by Jochen von Lang with the assistance of Claus Sibyll (Translated from the German by Christa Armstrong and Peter White)

London: Book Club Associates, 1979 (published in German under the title Der Sekretar in 1977)

"Give them a uniform and they think they're Hitler!" How many times I've heard that when people rail against the petty bureaucracies of modern life. After reading this well-researched piece of journalism and history, you will understand that the quote should be slightly changed to read Bormann in place of Hitler, for it was Martin Bormann, with his lack of vision, but lust for power and control, who was the master of using bureaucracy to make hell of the lives of not only ordinary people, but even the paladins of the Nazi Government and Military.

Von Lang begins his book by explaining that, to the vast majority of German people, Bormann was unknown, even after the War. He stayed in the shadows away from publicity (von Lang notes several instances where his name was mis-spelled on the rare occasions he did make it into the papers). However, through his tenacity and willingness to take on any job no matter how mundane, he gained the trust of Hitler and became indispensable to him. He used this closeness to the Fuhrer to enlarge his sphere of influence, eventually becoming a gatekeeper, and so in many ways he controlled the Third Reich by controlling access to its head.

In reading von Lang's book, it seems that Bormann's greatest ability was the ability to work. He had no grand visions of his own: he ensured that Hitler's rantings were written down, and he saw his role as turning these rambling thought bubbles into concrete orders and programs. His role as the Secretary to the Fuhrer meant that he could state that anything he proposed came from the Fuhrer, and by restricting access to Hitler frustrated those who might want to push their own programs. Those who disagreed with Bormann, or who wanted him moved on, sometimes grouped together to try and push him out or reduce his influence, but invariably they failed. Bormann had ensured that a wide range of people within the party owed allegiance to him, and so often knew of intrigues before they came to fruition, and the complete trust that Hitler had in him meant that it was usually impossible to cast any doubts on his performance.

It's well-known that Hitler disliked giving power to any one individual or group, which caused many problems in running Nazi Germany as it seemed that everyone had a finger in every pie. Bormann used this tendency to his advantage, supporting one group, then another, to ensure that decision-making was impossible unless he facilitated it. Many Nazi potentates held their noses while dealing with Bormann, but deal with him they had to.

Bormann was not a good speaker, he was not a charismatic man, and he didn't come from a good family. Many Nazis in the early days looked down on him, which came back to haunt them when he gained power: he often used it to diminish or destroy those that had snubbed him in the early days - this even extended to his own Father-in-law. Unlike a lot of other top Nazis, he didn't crave medals, or even wealth (although he did amass real estate). What he craved was to be indispensable to his Fuhrer, and to be the one wielding the power that emanated from him. As Germany foundered, the Party became more important than the Government, or even the Military. His power increased with that of the Party which led to the "grotesque irony of Bormann the bureaucrat... that, as his sphere of authority expanded, the actual physical area where that authority counted shrank. The more completely he got his hands on Hitler's domain, the smaller the domain became. Shortly before his death, he had thirty-six hours of glory as absolute regent and supreme commander of the Nazis, but his rule extended over not much more than one square kilometer of Berlin real estate."

Von Lang came to this story through his journalism, when Bormann's and Stumpfegger's bodies were found in Berlin in 1972. The story of proving they were Bormann's, and reconstructing his last day form the last chapter of this book, but they were the first foray of von Lang into this story. There had been much speculation as to what happened to Bormann before and after the bodies were found: that he had made it to South America, that he ran a "Fourth Reich" organisation, and so on. Von Lang provides conclusive evidence in this book that he died in Berlin, with final proof via genetic testing coming in the 1990s.

If you want a comprehensive account of the life of one of the more shadowy leaders in the Nazi world, I can recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Rorke's Drift by Michael Glover

 Rorke's Drift: a Victorian Epic by Michael Glover

London: Leo Cooper, 1975                                                ISBN 0850521823

This book has exceed expectations for me: I often find Leo Cooper/Pen&Sword books can be very militarily "geeky", diving down the rabbit-holes of equipment or drill, minute descriptions of tactical movements, which make the books of value only if the reader already has broader knowledge of the incident or battle in question. Thankfully Rorke's Drift does not fall into that category.

Although this is a short book (less than 150 pages) Glover has not only given us a blow-by-blow description of the action at Rorke's Drift, but also a close description of the disaster at Isandhlwana earlier in the day, and a concise exposition of the history of Southern Africa that had led to the situation where Cetshwayo's Impis attacked the British after they had crossed the Buffalo River into Zululand.

Glover well describes how it was as much British public opinion at home as it was activity on the ground that drove the British to expand their hold on Natal, which impinged on the Boers and also the Zulus, who were finding that the Boers were impinging on their land. The Zulu tribe had emerged as a successful warrior force, and their social structure almost required them to engage in battle (warriors had to have "washed their spears" in blood before they could marry).

In the clashes between Zulu and Boer, the British, given the times, naturally leaned toward supporting the white man over the black, and so gave an ultimatum to Cetshwayo to disband his army, something that he couldn't and wouldn't contemplate. That ultimately was the reason Chelmsford crossed the Buffalo in January 1879.

Glover explains quite clearly how the Zulus defeated the British at Isandhlwana - a combination of poor leadership, and poor use of the country doomed the British column - in open ground and in loose formation, less than two thousand British troopers armed with Martini-Henry rifles could not but succumb to an estimated 15,000 Zulu warriors. Conversely, in a well-led defense of a well-fortified position, approximately 150 British troopers could fight off 4,000 Zulus. Glover explains that it was much safer for the garrison to stay put than try to run, as in the open all the advantages lay with the Zulu warriors, but in a fortified position, the advantage lay with the British.

I won't go into the detail of Glover's description of both battles, other than to state they are well-written, clear, and concise. Along the way he puts paid to some of the images that might be in the reader's head from the movie Zulu (although the battle scenes do ring true). Bromhead was not young, and he and Chard worked well together from the start. The 24th Foot was a regiment of experienced and hardened soldiers. And Private Hook, far from being a shirker, was an out-and-out hero during the battle (and he was also in real life teetotal!).

Glover's final chapter looks at the politics surrounding the battle - the heroic stand at Rorke's Drift covered up for the disaster at Isandhlwana and so was boosted by those who's careers could have been ended by the loss of the first battle. There is no doubt that incredible heroism was shown by the members of the garrison, but one wonders whether the award of eleven VCs wasn't at least in part influenced by factors other than those which occurred during the Battle. Glover also makes clear the heroism of the Zulu warriors, who time after time flung themselves forward into a rain of bullets.

So, if you want a short history of the battle, and one that sets it in full context, and is good reading, I can recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Tokyo Trial by Higurashi Yoshinobu

 The Tokyo Trial: War Criminals and Japan's Postwar International Relations by Higurashi Yoshinobu

Tokyo: Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture, 2022   (First Japanese edition 2008)

                                                                                                                   ISBN 9784866582306 

Those of us with an interest in World War Two history, it would be fair to say, have some sort of understanding of the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi Leaders that took place after the War - who was tried, what the charges were, and the sentences handed out. Knowledge of the Tokyo Trial of "Class A" war criminals is much less common - people might know that it happened, and that Tojo was executed, but that might be the limit of what people know.

Higurashi has written a comprehensive history of not only the Tokyo Trial, but the strategic and political factors that weighed on its staging, who was charged, and what happened to the prisoners after the Trial finished. A Professor in the Faculty of Law at Tokyo University; Higurashi cannot himself be charged with being a great stylist (the translation by the Japan Institute of International Affairs may not have helped his cause here), with the text being quite dry and legalistic, and the book sometimes back-tracking on itself. These issues can lead the reader to get lost occasionally, but are minor impediments to working through the text.

The book is comprehensive: in eight chapters, Higurashi covers viewpoints on the Trial, the framework of the Trial, what charges were brought, the Japanese response, how the Judgement was written, why there were no further trials, and how and why the surviving Class A prisoners were released. He describes how the Trial became problematic almost from the start. The Allies had already begun the process of developing charges in Nuremberg, and tried to translate that process to the Japanese sphere, which didn't really work. There was no all-governing party such as the Nazis, and no SS, so the charges for the "Class A" criminals were confined more to waging aggressive war and conspiracy (war crimes such as atrocities and murder of prisoners etc. were "Class B" and "Class C" trials, and so are not covered by Higurashi).

Conspiracy was not a concept in Japanese law, and there was much discussion about ex-post-facto law. However, the trial moved forward, with general approval of the Japanese populace, who were looking for someone to blame for their predicament. How the Emperor escaped getting any of the blame for the War is well-explained in this book - a combination of politics and loyalty meant that he was never brought to trial, despite many of the nations participating in the proceedings wishing to do so. In this case, as in many others, the wishes of the United States were granted, as they felt that lenient treatment of the Emperor was key to controlling Japan during the Occupation.

Higurashi describes in great detail the progress of the Trial, the conflicts between the various Allied powers, how the verdicts were reached, and the dissenting judgement of Judge Pal from India. He notes that by the time the Trial was nearing its end, not only the Japanese population, but also the peoples of the Allied nations were less interested in the outcome (the full transcript of the Trial has never been published, according to Higurashi). The Allied populations were more interested in the trial and conviction of the "Class B" and "Class C" criminals.

At the end of the Occupation, Japan began lobbying for the surviving "Class A" criminals to be released. The onset of the Cold War meant that Japan was a vital strategic asset to the Western Powers, and so quickly and quietly, about ten years after conviction, the surviving prisoners were paroled - many went on to careers in politics in the New Japan.

Higurashi briefly describes the development of the idea in Japan that the trial was merely "Victor's Justice", and how it came to be that war criminals were inducted at the Yakasuni Shrine, but that is not the focus of this work.

This is not really a book for sitting down and reading in front of the fire: it is however a highly detailed and solid reference work on the Trials. While the translation may be workmanlike, the apparatus is very good - a good index, and useful bibliography.

If you are at all interested in the Tokyo Trial, this is worth hunting out.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell