The journey of the Russian Baltic Fleet to their doomed end at the Battle of Tsushima is one of the lesser known sagas of naval history. I have a fondness for the period due to many happy hours with Distant Guns a decade ago. Phleshakov has produced a very Russian popular history, focusing on the commanding Admiral Rozhestvensky.

The Russo-Japanese War was one of those tragedies of Empire, with Japan and Russia dueling over control of Korea and Manchuria. Tsar Nicolas II had a racist disregard for the Japanese, amplified by an attack he suffered as a youth touring Japan. He thought a short victorious war would be just the thing to shore up his tottering regime. Unfortunately, the war turned against Russia early on, with a surprise torpedo boat attack damaging two Russian battleships. Two more Russian battleships hit mines while on patrol, killing Admiral Stepan Osipovich Makarov, the most able Russian commander in the region. A breakout attempt failed in the Battle of the Yellow Sea, and with Japanese artillery closing in on Port Arthur, the Russian Pacific Fleet seemed doomed.

Except for one insane idea. Russia had another major fleet in the Baltic. What if they sailed around the world, combined with the remains of the Pacific Fleet, and then crushed the Japanese with superior numbers? It would be an audacious gamble, a long distance deployment unparalleled in naval history, and one that could win the war. Pulling off this maneuver would require discipline, technological efficiency, and world-spanning logistics and intelligence. Tsarist Russia had none of these.

The story, as it develops, is a classic Russian tragedy. Rozhestvensky, one of the better Russian naval officers of the era, was burdened with a staff of lesser Romanov cousins and other gilded incompetents. Tsar Nicolar ordered the largest fleet possible, including several transports and obsolete battleships in doubtful mechanical condition. Steam battleships required ample coaling, and Russia had no worldwide empire to support the ships, making logistics a matter of desperate improvisation. Intelligence was a faulty mess of paranoid conspiracies, leading to the Dogger Bank incident, where the fleet shot up English fishing trawlers under the misapprehension they were Japanese torpedo boats, causing a major international incident.

The flotilla limped along at five to eight knots, halting for frequent breakdowns. Only French colonies would permit resupply, and then under protest. The fleet spent two months at Madagascar and another month in Vietnam, waiting for the even more ramshackle reinforcements of the Third Pacific Fleet and going slowly mad under the tropical sun. Admiral Tojo of Japan used this time for a full refit and more training, sharpening the already elite Japanese battlefleet to a razor's edge.

When the fleets finally found each other in Tsushima strait, the battle was as much as foregone. Tojo crossed the Russian T, allowing his entire battle line to focus on the lead ships of the enemy, who were unable to reply in turn. Rozhestvensky was soon wounded, unable to exercise tactical command, and the Russians were defeated in detail before enduring a sad captivity while peace negotiations proceeded.

The Tsar's Last Armada is narrowly focused, and I believe somewhat sensationalized, but it's a solid naval history. And the acknowledgement has the best dedication, which I will reproduce in full.

"I want to end my acknowledgement with a very Russian twist. I am extremely grateful to these people who persistently discouraged me from writing this book. They did not like me, or the project, or in most cases both. Thank you--your hostility fortified my will and made me work harder."

Get some.

Everybody knows about the Second Indochina War. That's the one that America fought conventionally from 1965 to 1972, and unconventionally for quite a few years before and after. And if you're a Vietnam War history buff, you know the First Indochina War, likely from Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place. But did you know that just a few years after the fall of Saigon, there was a Third Indochina War, this one between the Communist victors?

Red Brotherhood at War covers this Third Indochina War from political science perspective, and takes a generally bro-Vietnamese stance. The Fall of Saigon left several major issues open, among them the remaining Vietnamese forces along the Ho Chi Minh trail in Cambodia and Laos, border disputes remaining from French Colonial administrative zones, the nature of the governments in those countries, and Vietnam's relationships with the Soviet Union and China. There was a chance that this issues could have been resolved diplomatically, and indeed some were in Laos, where a government headed by the Pathet Lao entered into a fruitful alliance with Vietnam.

Cambodia, on the other hand, was the sparkplug of the war. The Khmer Rouge seized power from the right-wing government of Lon Nol and embarked on their genocidal self-immolation of the long Year Zero from 1975 to 1978. Ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia were one of the major targets of these attacks, and the Khmer Rouge took a maximally revanchist position on the borders, refusing negotiations and claiming territory to the maximum extent of the Champa kingdoms. With hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into Vietnam, and its own troops attacked by Khmer Rouge forces, Vietnam launched an invasion of Cambodia, captured Phnom Penh, revealed the horrors of the killing fields, and set up a Communist government. In response, China attacked northern Vietnam. Vietnam, despite being outnumbered, managed to embarrassingly defeat the Chinese Army, using modern Soviet and captured US/South Vietnamese arms to establish air superiority and outgun the Chinese Army, which had languished in terms of technology and doctrine since the Korean War.

Then things got weird. The rump Khmer Rouge, operating out of refugee camps in Thailand and separatist zones in Cambodia, was still the legitimate government of Cambodia despite their crimes against humanity. Throughout the 1980s, the Khmer Rouge was maintained in official sovereignty by an alliance of enemies consisting of China, the United States, and ASEAN countries, willing to use any foil to impair Communist Vietnam. Throughout the 1980s, Cambodia remained a bleeding ulcer of a war, with guerrilla war by the Khmer Rouge and other rebel factions against the Vietnamese backed People's Republic of Cambodia, and the long war bringing the usual horsemen of famine and disease.

As mentioned, Evans and Rowley take a general pro-Vietnamese stance, which in retrospect seems reasonable against the rather hysterical propaganda from Maoist and American Conservative types. They do acknowledge that the Marxist Five-Year Plans of Vietnam were generally failures, and that hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the country due to political repression and economic conditions. And since this book came out in 1984, and was updated in 1990, it still treats the USSR as a going concern, and doesn't cover the end of the Khmer Rouge.

And personally, I was hoping for more of a military history. Thinking about it, the NVA circa-1975 is actually a pretty impressive army. After all, they endured through the Second Indochina War and defeated the ARVN. But conquering Cambodia and fending off a Chinese attack in the space of year is tactically impressive, and gets relatively little page count. Most of this book is the fumbling of states, and their willingness to accept ongoing human suffering rather than adjust their agendas an iota.

Sometimes, it actually is rocket science. Clark was a leading liquid fuels scientist from the 1950s to the 1970s, and this book is a hilarious collection of anecdotes organized around rocket fuels. On the one hand, rocket fuel isn't that hard. Tsiolkovsky figured out that liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were pretty much as good as chemical fuels can get, and they're used in high performance applications today. But LOX and liquid hydrogen are horrific to work with, and as rockets move from applied science experiment to key military technology, fuels have to get a lot less cryogenic and volatile. Hence, people like Clark, and billions of dollars of research into hydrazine, nitric acid, boron compounds, and more exotic chemistries.

Clark is a great story teller, and when he injects human interest, abound funding, lab explosions, and horrible ideas like mercury based rocket fuel, the book is quite good. But it's organized by chemistry, rather than chronologically, so expect to spend a lot of time with reaction diagrams and wandering in the forest of alternatives abandoned because their freezing points were too high, density too low, or they simply failed to ignite reliably.

I want to close with the famous quote about, Flourine Trioxide, the best part of the book.

“It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

One of the things I miss most about physical libraries is serendipity. Sometimes, search weirdness can make up for that. I actually wanted to read Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Refugees, but my library didn't have it. they did have this book, which is straight literary fiction, a multi-generational story about overcoming the trauma of historical events.

The Mountains Sing follows two parallel tracks. In the present is Tran, growing up in Hanoi in the 1970s with her grandmother. Tran's mother, father, and three uncles have all gone south as part of the NVA, and after an American bombing raid, the story is about the return of the traumatized veterans in her family, or the eternal absence.

The other track is her grandmother's stories, growing up as a rich peasant in the 1940s and 50s. These were truly awful times for Vietnam. Grandma's father is decapitated by the occupying Japanese for taking potatoes to Hanoi. Everybody nearly starves to death in the post-war famine (2 million Vietnamese died). In the Communist land reform, following the partition, Grandmother is denounced and forced to flee with her five children, begging on the road and making desperate bargains to survive.

But this is a sentimental story, and things work out mostly okay in the end. There's some nice moments of tenderness with Tran, and the sensual invocation of rural Vietnam, but I've left unsatisfied with this book, like a meal missing a main course.

For a supposedly educated Jew, I'm actually pretty week on my own culture. Schama's magisterial history cultural history is triumph of ordinary Jews across the millennia. He begins, not with the Torah or the Patriarchs, but with the Egyptian town of Elephantine, a frontier garrison with a thriving Jewish community, their lives recorded in garrulous Hebrew potsherds and a semi-heretical temple.

Then it's off through the Iron Age, the Second Temple, Herod, and so on. This was a period of exile, of return under Cyrus the Great, and of Jewish kingdoms playing a key role in the fraught politics of the Alexandrian successor states.

Jewish history isn't quite a dirge, but there are many mournful points, most involving the other monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam. Jews were cast as god-killers from the origin story of Christianity, with the key anti-Semitic mythos promulgated by 4th centruy archbishop John Chrysostom, who declared Judaism anathema in an effort to bulwark up the shakily Christian Eastern Roman empire. While relationships with Muslim communities were generally better, Jews were still forbidden from bearing arms and forced to pay a humiliating head tax.

This is a long book, hard for me to sum up, but to essay an attempt, Schama has a talent for showing the diversity and continuity of Jewish life across time, and how it has thrived in harsh terrain.

Terry Pratchett is one of the great fantasy novelists of the 20th and 21st century. The Discworld books are hilarious, inventive, humanistic, and remarkably good for such an extended series. The worst you can say about the weaker of the 40 odd novels is they're just okay. This collection of short fiction is worse than just okay.

We have two decent stories. The quite good Discworld short "The Sea and the Little Fishes", which features a witching competition, and why Granny Weatherwax always wins. "The High Meggas" is the genesis of the Pratchett/Baxter Long Earth books, about parallel dimensional travel. "The High Meggas" was written at the same time as The Colour of Magic and Discworld proved such a runaway success that the idea never really went anywhere. It's okay, a little punchier on action compared to character.

But the rest of this collection is junk of interest only to the Pratchett completionist. We have his first published story, written when he was 13, jobbing fiction from the 70s, and a bunch of Discworld sketches, of which you've probably seen the jokes in print in the actual books.

My overwhelming sense is on of annoyance at the editors and publishers who took the crumbs of stories from Pratchett's disk drives and figured that they'd make a complete book.

Strahan is quickly becoming one of my favorite anthology editors; a man capable of assembling impressive contemporary talent. This collection is themed around emergency in space, in the Apollo 13 style "Failure is not an option" improvisations. It's an inspired prompt, one that allows a crew of genre masters to rapidly develop setting and character and throw them into the ringer. Special award to By The Warmth of Their Calculus by Tobias Brucknell for a resolutely analog spacefaring culture, and one that tells the classic short story The Cold Equations to get stuffed.

I found two stories unreadable, which brings this down a peg, but it's hard for an anthology to bat 100, and with short stories, there's no harm in bailing.

Churchill's Shadow Raiders is the story of the birth of British special operations, when in the darkest days of WW2, with fascism advancing everywhere, Churchill looked for courageous men to set Europe ablaze.

Lewis covers two operations in detail. The first, Operation Colossus, was an attack on an Italian aqueduct that ended in cruel farce. The plane carrying the sappers and the majority of the demolition charges dropped their parachutists one valley over, and the explosives on hand were enough to shatter the aqueduct, but not bring it down. When aerial reconnaissance revealed the aqueduct still standing, command concluded the mission had failed and ordered the submarine designated to evacuate the raiders to return home. All of the Colossus raiders were captured, and the stench of failure settled over parachute operations.

Operation Biting, the Bruneval Raid, was a chance at redemption. Photo reconnaissance had revealed a strange parabolic antenna, which the boffins figured was a radar system more advanced than anything the British had in Chain Home. Of course, officially radar was solely a British advance; the Germans didn't have it at all. Stealing everything not nailed down at Bruneval would prove that British technology needed to constantly evolve to match the Nazis.

The plan was to parachute 120 SAS commandos into the area, seize the radar, and evacuate to the sea before an armored response force could arrive. It was a desperate action that almost never worked right in training, the seaborne evacuation being a particular sticking point, with the assault boats running around. The airborne side was smoother, but still complicated by the crudity of available tech. Paratroopers dropped out of a chute in the belly of the obsolete Whitley Armstrong bomber, armed only with knives and pistols. Their weapons and supplies were dropped separately in lighted containers, and the first task was to get their guns.

The actual mission went much better, with luck helping and hindering the British raiders in equal measure. The team with the key job of seizing of the evacuation beach was dropped on the wrong side of the town of Bruneval, and had to fight their way to the objective, arriving in the nick of time. The Royal Navy flotilla commander brought his ships in closer to shore, a fortunate modification to the plan because the original offshore rally point was in the middle of a German sea lane, and if the ships had been there they would have collided with a patrol of Nazi destroyers and torpedo boats. Despite two Commandos KIA, and six left behind in the chaos of evacuation, the mission was a stunning success, a scientific coup which provided a much needed boost to morale.

Lewis writes a fast-paced, very readable history, but also one that doesn't reach beyond the cliches of the swaggering SAS commando. The best bits are on the triumph of the French Resistance in getting near complete intelligence on the sight, including the names of key Nazi officers.

An absolutely astonishing autobiography, the Vietnamese equivalent to A Bright Shining Lie, and a candid look into the inner workings of the revolution, its strengths, and its flaws.


Tang was a child of privileged in colonial Saigon, second of sixth sons, educated in French culture by his father and Confucian tradition by his grandfather. In 1945, when the Japanese surrendered and Ho Chi Minh proclaimed a revolutionary state, Tang took his father's bird rifle and joined the vanguard youth, where be became a platoon commander by virtue of being the only one with a gun. He quit in disgust after seeing other vanguard youth beat an innocent French civilian. Tang went to Paris to further his education, and while he met Ho Chi Minh and was most impressed with the man's personal integrity and humility, and became patriotic and anticolonial, remained resolutely anti-political. He returned to Saigon after the Paris peace accords, eager to help build an independent South Vietnam and willing to give the new American-backed President Diem a chance. Within a year, Diem's brutality and incompetence had blown through Tang's goodwill and optimism, and he became a committed revolutionary.


By day Tang was Director General of the national sugar company, but by night he was a leader of the resistance-organizing meetings among the Saigon elite. A first arrest in 1965 had Tang in prison with what seemed like most of Siagon's civil society-businessmen, professors, doctors, lawyers, poets. This was fun, but a second arrest in 1967 saw Tang personally tortured by Nguyễn Ngọc Loan (subject of the infamous Tet Offensive street execution picture) and confined in a dark, solitary cell for 6 months. When Tang was released in a high-level prisoner exchange with the Americans, he decamped to the jungle full time. As a guerrilla fighter, Tang survived earth-shattering B-52 strikes, starvation rations, and malaria, becoming Minister for Justice in the new Provisional Government of South Vietnam.


Looking back, Tang saw his time with the guerrillas as one of the best of his life-part of a clear fight against American imperialism for the good of the Vietnamese people. But not all was well in the revolution: Northerners and hard-line Communists came to dominate the National Liberation Front. Once the war was over in 1975, Tang became Minister of Justice, but he was merely a rubber stamp for the Politburo. Perhaps the most tragic moment in a book full of tragedies is when Tang personally drove two of his brothers to their 'reeducation' camps. He expected they would be in for a 30-day seminar on Marxism and their own anti-revolutionary attitudes, similar to the one he had undergone in the jungle; an experience that was frustrating and aggravating in the extreme, but ultimately innoxious. Tang never saw his brothers again, and they along with hundreds of thousands of others, were imprisoned for years in reeducation camps. With arbitrary imprisonments and confiscations going on at all level by locust-like Northern Cadres, and the surviving Southern liberals locked out of power, Tang saw no future in Vietnam. With dozens of others, he boarded a boat and fled the country, ultimately becoming a refugee in Paris. A sad end for a dedicated patriot.


The biography is wonderful, but Tang also writes well about the political strategy of the Revolution, as opposed to the military strategies adopted by the United States, South Vietnam, and ultimately the Communists. For Tang, every action had to be evaluated holistically; success was measured by having more allies at the end of the day than they had at the beginning. The goals were to demonstrate the moral rightness of the National Liberation Front as opposed to the corruption and brutality of the Government forces, and to separate the hardlines from potential allies. Peace activists and liberals were courted, the inflexible transformed into the open minded. The difference between Tang's means and ends and that of the Government side, which aimed for momentary military freedom of action even at cost of moral legitimacy or its alliances, is staggering. That America was not able to reach an accord with Tang and his comrades, and that they were ultimately betrayed by their Communist allies, is one of the greatest historical tragedies of a very tragic war.