Big Week is a fascinating multilevel study of the Allied bomber offensive over Nazi Germany from 1943 to the titular 'big week' at the end of February 1944, which saw the defeat of the Luftwaffe. Holland uses interviews and diaries with flight crew to great effect, putting you in the cockpit above Berlin, and showing the heroism of protagonists, while also pulling back to the big picture of the role of strategic airpower in World War 2.

1943 saw the Allies gearing up for a planned invasion of France. Until troops got their feet on the beaches, the only way England and America could materially effect the war was through bombing. The two allies had different theories about how strategic bombing worked. The British, lead by General Arthur "Bomber" Harris, were classical Douhetians. The role of the bomber was to break civilian morale through massive destruction. In part, this was due to technological limits inherited from 1942, where the limited numbers of British heavies would have no chance over the Reich during the day, so they bombed at night. Technical developments in radio-direction finding, radar-mapping, and the use of elite Pathfinder units to mark targets with flares allowed the British to hit a city-sized target, which they did to devastating effect in Hamburg. While the British could smash cities, killing tens of thousands and rendering hundreds of thousands homeless, as the Blitz proved, civilian morale is surprisingly resilient under bombardment, and the Nazis were not beholden to popular opinion in any case.

The Americans had developed a different doctrine based around "precision" day bombing using self-escorting formations of B-17s and B-24. I use "precision" in quotes, because while in peacetime tests the Norden gyroscopic bombsight was theoretically able to hit a pickle barrel, in actual combat American bombers matched the "somewhere in the city" accuracy of the British. The dream of knocking out key war industries from the air was a fantasy.

Both versions of strategic bombing doctrine had their limits, and worse the bomber force was taking unsustainable casualties throughout 1943. Nazi nightfighters using Wild Sow tactics and Schräge Musik upwards pointing cannons were taking a heavy toll on the British. American formations were vulnerable to cannon-laden FW-190s and Me 110s destroyers firing rockets from outside the defensive range of their .50 caliber turrets. The odds of an Allied pilot making it through their required 25 missions was infitesimal.

The Nazis were under similar stress. While bombing wasn't decisive, it was having an effect on aircraft production. More relevant was the fuel shortage, which had German pilots going into combat with 110 flying hours, while American pilots had at least 750 hours before their first combat mission. The baroque and divided Nazi command structure was another weakness, along with Hitler's continual demands for offensive operations against Britain which diverted resources from fighters. The Nazi were still using the Me-109 and FW-190, good designs for their time, but increasingly outdated against the latest Allied fighters, with the jet-powered Me-262 still too far off. And finally, the Nazi experten system concentrated offensive power in a handful of elite pilots. Just twelve pilots accounted for over 1100 kills in 1943. With no leave and no rest, inevitably these pilots would burn out and make a mistake or simple find their luck run dry and get killed, with only novices to replace them.

While strategic bombing couldn't win the war on its own, air superiority was a necessary prereqisite for the Normandy landings. As 1943 turned to 1944, the Allies sought a clear week of weather for a continuous assault that would draw up and defeat the Luftwaffe, using the newly arrived P-51B Mustang. Big Week closes out the book, as American and British bombers focused on an achievable target and ripped the guts out of the Luftwaffe. While operating over the Reich after the Big Week would never be safe, it was no longer the sure doom that is was in 1943.

This is one hell of a history, and highly recommended.

Tully is one of the coauthors of the fantastic Shattered Sword on the Battle of Midway, so you know his account of the Battle of Surigao Strait is going to be solid. Surigao Strait was the final battleship versus battleship fight, a key component of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history, and one of the most one-sided stomps since the Battle of Tsushima, with heroism, tragedy, and farce in equal measure.

In response to the American invasion of the Philippines, Japan activated Sho-Go-1, a final throw of this dice to achieve a Mahanian decisive battle. The plan was complex and required precise timing. IJN carriers, bereft of striking power since the Marianas Turkey shoot, would serve to lure away the American fleet. Surface battle groups would approach the landing at Leyte through the northern San Bernadino Strait and the southern Surigao Strait, find the transports, and destroy them. It almost worked, and likely would have succeeded without the desperate heroism of the escort group Taffy 3, as documented in the incredible Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.

That's the context. Tully focuses on the two southern groups, a pair of obsolete battleships and escorts under Vice Admiral Nishimura, and a more modern cruiser force under Vice Admiral Shima. For all that the Japanese knew that the invasion was coming, if not the precise details, the initial plan was chaotic. Shima's cruisers were not properly integrated with Nishimura's battleships. Land base airpower was squandered against preliminary attacks from Halsey's carriers.

Around midnight on October 25, Nishimura's battleships entered the strait, with Shima's cruisers an hour behind. American Admiral Oldendorf knew that the Japanese were coming, and had lined the strait with PT boats, and then an escalating series of destroyer attacks, cruiser groups, and finally his six battleships. The PT boat attacks were ineffective, but the following destroyer attack scored multiple torpedo hits. Fuso caught fire and sank (Tully makes a convincing argument the ship did not break into two sections as commonly reported), and as the scattered Japanese ships entered into gunfire range of the American heavies, they were subject to a devastating bombardment that sunk Yamashiro Nishimure's force was annihilated, Shima's cruisers launched an ineffective torpedo strike before withdrawing, and were whittled down on return to base.

While the operation had succeeded in drawing off and engaging Oldendorf's fleet, and the northern deception had pulled away Halsey, the main striking force centered around the battleship Yamato failed to capitalize on the sacrifice of the deception forces and the main American fleet and transports survived.

Tully makes an argument that but Nishimure and Shima were competent professionals, and that in particular Nishimure was fully away that his obsolete 1911 vintage battleships had no combat value, but that a chance at victory required their sacrifice. Given the confused nature of a night engagement, the few survivors, and losses of sunken ship logs, Tully ably reconstructs what happened, though many of the conclusions must remain speculative. He has a palpable excitement for the topic, writing with adjectives and exclamation marks, though this enthusiasm leads him into some minor unprofessionalism.

Brothers, Rivals, Victors is a well-crafted if conventional account of the relationship between the three top American soldiers in the European theater. Working from diaries and letters, Jordan reconstructs the emotional state of these three men as they liberated occupied Europe. The tone of the book is perhaps best brought out by the names used to address the generals, Ike, Brad, and George. This book is familiar and gossipy, Mean Girls in HQ instead of high school.


Mean Girls "On D-Day we wear khaki"

Patton is the protagonist of the book. Charismatic, immensely self-assured, vain, and a warrior to the bone, Patton saw his destiny to be one of the Great Captains of history. His military skills were rivaled by a lack of restraint and a mouth that got him in trouble repeatedly, most notoriously in the Sicily slapping incidents, where he struck two soldiers in the hospital for 'combat fatigue' and berated them as cowards. But again and again, the basic plot of this book is Patton saying something stupid, and Eisenhower saving the old warrior's career.

Jordan is aware of Patton's self-mythologizing and mastery of the press, but not aware enough to avoid participating. It's hard to blame him. Among other traits, Patton was an inveterate diarist and letter writer, and his "private" remarks have an acid candor about the personalities of the other commanders. I use private in quotes because Patton absolutely planned his memoirs. If he had not died in a car crash in 1945, they might have been more edited and considered, but I believe his remarks on Eisenhower's pro-British leanings and Bradley's caution were meant for history, not just venting spleen.

Eisenhower is the second great personality of the book. Ike and George were genuine friends, dating back to joint service in the nascent tank corps immediately after WW1. But where Patton was a showboat who saw the tank as a means to an industrial version of the classic cavalry pursuit, Ike became a well-rounded, strategic commander. Picked by Chief of Staff Marshall for the key job of overseeing the American contribution to North Africa, Ike's steady leadership and ability to balance the competing military and political priorities across the services and allies made his the central figure of the war. Despite the lofty title of 'Supreme Commander', Eisenhower had less direct power than it seemed. His orders always had to be filtered through subordinates, not all of whom were willing to listen, and political considerations complicated direct military strategy. One thing that comes through is the stress Eisenhower was under as the face of the Allied effort. He smoked up to four packs of cigarettes a day and basically imploded his health trying to keep the war together.

Bradley is the forgotten member of the trio, lacking Eisenhower's presidential legacy and Patton's gift of showmanship. It's an unfortunate oversight, as Bradley was Eisenhower's trusted right hand, and in the first ranks of American combat commanders along with General Grant and General Sherman. Bradley's steadiness in combat and reputation as the 'GI's general' was balanced by an explosive temper and a merciless attitude towards subordinates who he deemed incompetent. Patton was a sentimentalist, and Ike was willing to bestow second chances. Bradley would cashier an officer who made a single mistake.

If there's an antagonist to this book, it's British general Bernard Montgomery. Monty used his reputation as the hero of El Alamein and his position as the senior British ground commander to demand the lion's share of supplies and key terrain features, claiming priority for his immaculately planned set-piece attacks which often came to naught (Market Garden), or were superseded by events.

Overall, I'd describe this book as 'Dadly'. It's not that far from the movie version of Patton with extra footnotes. As a conventional Greatest Generation hagiography, it's not particularly challenging, but it's well done.

In August 1942, the Axis was at its maximum extent, having conquered much of Europe, penetrated deep into the Soviet Union, and expanded through North Africa. While the Japanese had been checked at Midway, and the Nazis outside Moscow, the weight of Allied superiority had yet to bear down. In these dark days, the island fortress of Malta was under a brutal siege, on starvation rations and barely able to defend itself. If Malta were to last through September, it would have to be resupplied, and all previous convoys had been turned back at a heavy cost.

Operation Pedestal was the last desperate hope to relieve Malta. This was no mere convoy; the covering force included two battleships and five of England's seven carriers. Only high speed cargo ships were included, with a speed of 18 knots. The Admiralty expected that the Axis would throw everything at Pedestal, an expectation which was well born out. The convoy endured grueling attacks by airplane, U-boat, and torpedo boat, before the survives limped into Malta.

Hastings has nothing but praise for the endurance of the ordinary sailors under desperate conditions. Command and control proved a perennial problem on all sides. The British convoy was uncoordinated with their air support. Meanwhile, on the Axis, the Italian Navy, Italian Airforce, and Luftwaffe all despised each other. Both sides failed to realize the critical importance of the oiler SS Ohio, which was the key critical objective of the convoy.

Hastings maintains his usual high standards, and this book is next to Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors for a study of a single naval action.

The Battle of the Atlantic was one of the few truly critical campaigns of the war. While other campaigns mattered, especially to the people who fought in them, ultimately the material superiority of the Allies meant the initiative would return, the Axis would be pushed back eventually. But if the Atlantic convoys did not get through, England would have starved. Russia would not have gotten its Lend-Lease trucks and locomotives that supported the Red Army. The state of the Battle of the Atlantic was one of the few things which scared Winston Churchill during the war.


Tom Hanks in Greyhound, a damn good movie about North Atlantic convoys

Parkin makes a strong case that the key piece in this allied victory was the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, a wargame training team in Liverpool lead by Captain Gilbert Roberts, who had been invalided out of the Royal Navy due to tuberculosis pre-war, and was staffed mostly by the young women of the Wrens (Women's Royal Navy Auxiliary). Roberts and his Wrens created and ran a series of intensive tabletop exercises to teach anti-submarine tactics, training 5000 officers from January 1942 till victory.

The game itself was played on an immense linoleum floor strewn with models and chalk tracks. Players stood around the perimeter of the room, peering though canvas sheets with holes in them that simulated the limited situational of a ship in the tossing seas. U-boat tracks were marked in green chalk, invisible from a distance, while the convoy and its escorts were indicated in white chalk. Players had two minutes to evaluate the situation and give their orders for the turn, after which the Wrens would advance the board and repeat until debrief.

The WATU game has moments of hilarity. A 20 year-old Wren with no combat experience who had possibly never been to sea telling a grizzled destroyer captain, "I wouldn't do that, sir," and being right. Or proving the effectiveness of a new "Beta search pattern" by putting Admiral Max Horton, England's most decorated submariner and then-Atlantic escorts commander, as the U-boats player and having the Wrens depth-charge him five times in a row. But the WATU game is enough for a short article (Strong, 2017, "Wargaming the Atlantic War: Captain Gilbert Roberts and the Wrens of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit", Military Operations Research Society), and this book covers the unit in context.

This historical non-fiction approach is both a strength and a weakness, as other reviewers have noted. Parkin writes with novelistic flair, mining memoirs and contemporary articles for dialog and detail. Some of this works: sections on the torpedoing of the SS City of Benares, carrying British children to America, and the SS Aguila taking Wrens to Gibraltar, makes the human terror of the U-boat war real in a way that tallies of tonnage sunk doesn't. Details of romances and daily life among the Wrens make their service feel more real, though there were tens of thousands of Wrens, and only 64 served in the WATU. The weakness is a certain floppiness in chronology: I remember a one year jump between a bet between U-boat aces over who would hit 250,000 tons and an Admiralty response at one point, and the first chapter ends which a cheap scare of a stranger with a gun entering Captain Parker's quarters which does not pay off. While I am confident in Parkin's sources and methods having checked the footnotes, this is not an academic work. Someone looking for a complete history of the Wrens or the Battle of the Atlantic may feel disappointed.

Like most historians, Parkin puts the critical moment of the Battle of the Atlantic in May 1943, but he focuses down even more to the action of Convoy ONS.5, where over seven days multiple escort groups managed to defend the America bound ships from a super-wolfpack of fifty U-boats. The convoy took losses, but the escorts sunk a U-boat for every two Allied ships lost. After the painful losses of May, Admiral Donitz ordered a 17 week pause in U-boat operations, and even when the U-boat returned it was a far cry from the deadly "happy days" of the early war, with perilous losses for few successes. There are many contributing factors to this Allied victory: a critical density of escort ships, long-range aircraft that could plug the 500 mile gap in the mid-Atlantic previously out of air surveillance, better radar and weapons like the Hedgehog mortar, breaking the Enigma code and conversely securing Allied codes against Nazi codebreakers.

Parkin makes the compelling case that it was teamwork among escort commanders that was the critical factor, and this teamwork was learned at WATU, from young women in uniform, by playing a game.

Duel of Eagles attempts to straddle a grand history of the Battle of Britain with individual pilot accounts, and doesn't quite manage to do justice to either of them. While a solid history, it's likely been supplanted by more recent works.

The story starts back in the First World War, with the initial Zeppelin bombing raids on England and the organization of the Royal Air Force, and then ambles through the 1920s and 30s as various pilots come of age and become obsessed with flying, everybody cuts defense budgets, Hitler rises to power, and Germany embarks on a genocidal war of conquest. The Fall of France happens about half of the way through, to give you an idea of the pacing.

The grand history is one of RAF commander Dowding against Goering's Luffwaffe. Britain had a just barely sufficient defensive system, with a small margin of modern fighters, but more importantly a chain of radars and observes integrated into central command posts such that Hurricane and Spitfire squadrons could be vectored on to incoming bombers. Dowding had internal enemies to match the Nazis; political superiors who had underinvested in defense for years, and insubordinate commanders who favored a "Big Wing" tactic of massed defense too slow to repel bombers. But the main enemy was Goering, who along with numerous personal weaknesses, addiction, emotional volatility, not being very smart, being a Nazi, etc., had to contend with an airforce operating at the end of its range, and constantly shifting strategic objectives. Townsend argues that attacks on airfields and radar very much had fighter command on the ropes, when an RAF bombing of Berlin caused retaliatory bombing of London and other "strategic" targets to prepare for the invasion of England. If the Luftwaffe had fought an air superiority campaign, they might have won!

This story is all very interesting, but handled better in Korda's With Wings Like Eagles (a much younger Korda is acknowledged by Townsend for help with the research). Where Townsend has unique insight is that he was an RAF fighter pilot who fought in the Battle of Britain, and could tell the stories of his comrades and the enemy pilots as their peer. The personal narratives are fascinating, but there's not enough for a thorough oral history, and while Townsend is a serviceable writer, he's not quite up to the grandeur of flight and sudden death in the air.

While somewhat obsolete, this book is a still worth a look for the airpower buff.

The Winter War was one of the side stories of the Second World War. In 1939, the Soviet Union decided to extend its defenses around Leningrad by taking out Finland, a former Russian province that had broken away during the Revolution. Tiny and poorly armed, war with Finland should have been short and victorious.

While the Finns lacked tanks, aircraft, and artillery, they had a deep reservoir of fighting spirit. The classic story is of Finnish ski guerrillas cutting road-bound Soviet columns to pieces in the frozen woods, and while that did happen, Trotter goes beyond the popular heroics to show the war as it really happened. These 'motti' tactics were ones of desperation and weakness. The Finns would have much preferred a quick victory so they could redeploy forces to the decisive theater of the Karelian Peninsula. On the Mannerhaim line, they held out through sheer will against uncoordinated Soviet attacks. Russian attacks were massive, but tanks and infantry didn't work together, and artillery alone couldn't dislodge the dug in Finns.

The Western powers promised aid, which was slow in coming and insufficient. Finally, in March the Soviets reorganized, and this time their attacks overwhelmed the Finnish defenders. Finland signed a harsh peace treaty at gunpoint, and then fought another hard war again as part of the Axis, the Continuation War. While Finnish casualties were small in absolute terms, and lopsided in relative terms, for a nation of 4 million people they were decimating, and the scorched earth defense, territorial concessions, and the later Continuation War left a bitter peace. The weakness of the Soviets may have played a role in Hitler's decision to betray his then ally in Operation Barbarossa, while also giving Stalin a hint of his military's failures, and enough time to initiate reforms that ultimately lead to victory in the broader war, though not without millions of dead Russians and other Soviet peoples in the process.

Trotter is biased towards the Finns, but not to the point of blindness. He admires their courage, but also notes that amateur tank hunting teams with satchel charges are no substitute for actual anti-tank weapons, which the Finns lacked. Their commander, Mannerhaim, was an archaic cipher, a Tsarist officer and Swedish noble who never mastered Finnish and who at minimum allowed atrocities when he was the leader of White forces during the 1919 Finnish Civil War, and may have ordered war crimes against Finnish socialists. But ultimately, he was the man of the hour, an iron-willed commander who enabled a stiff defense at a time other European powers collapsed. Trotter's book is about as good as an English history is going to get.

The End is a meticulous survey of the collapse of Nazi Germany, from the July Plot on Hitler's life to the final surrender.

There's not much variation in what happens. The military situation lurches from bad to worse against the implacable weight of the Red Army, the Allied bombing campaign, and the invasion in the west. Hitler sought an increasingly delusional victory, based on superweapons, the volkssturm militia, and a heroic mobilization of an exhausted population. Many senior leaders, both Nazi Party members and the "apolitical" generals and bureaucrats who had no problems with fascism, knew that the war was lost but were too scared to do anything to shorten it. And ordinary people, both civilian and military, did their best to survive under increasingly bad conditions.

As the war closes in on it's end, faith in the Nazi Party and Hitler collapse. True believers carried out punitive executions against deserters and traitors, while concentration camp victims were sent on purposeless death marches across Europe. Even so, German soldiers kept fighting, motivated by terror of reprisals under Soviet occupation, fear of their leaders, and a kind of bloody-minded obstinance.

This is a long, ugly book, and deeply researched, but I'm not sure any words can capture those final months of collapse.

World War 2 was a global war, and that included South America. Though only a handful of naval battles were fought around South America, the continent was the site of logistical, propaganda, and intelligence battles. McConahay is a journalist rather than a historian, and she looks for the human interest, finding the last of the Greatest Generation and telling their stories rather than digging into the archives.

Three major themes emerge. The first is the covert war for the resources of South America. In the 1930s, South America was full of Germans. Airlines and radio networks were run with German technicians, and there was a natural alliance between European fascists and local authoritarian populists, like General Vargas of Brazil. Stockpiled Mexican oil fueled the early blitzkrieg, but as the war went hot, the British naval blockade effectively cut South America off from the Axis powers, and South American resources went to the Allies. This economic maneuver was aided by intelligence efforts, as well as propaganda tours which had Orson Welles and Walt Disney tour the continent.

The second story is one of civilians caught up in the war. I hope most people are aware of the Japanese internment, one of the darker moments in American history for its unnecessary racist cruelty, but America also pushed Latin American countries to send their citizens of German and Japanese origin to the United States for imprisonment without trial, breaking families and shattering lives. Japanese-Peruvians were used as bargaining chips to free American civilians trapped inside the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

And a third factor is the aftermath, the infamous "Nazis in Argentina" after the war. Both Allied intelligence services and the Catholic Church saw Nazi war criminals as useful agents for the next war against Soviet Communism, and were more than happy to provide ratlines to South American countries, where the perpetrators of the Holocaust could live out their days in peace. There are some links between these Nazis and the white terror of the 1970s in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, but the CIA and the School of the Americas have much more obvious ties.

McConahay also makes sure to tell about the almost forgotten Brazilian Expeditionary Force, 25000 soldiers who fought in the Italian campaign. Though in one of the horrible ironies of the war, the Brazilian rubber campaign, which sent out of work farmers from the northern coast to the Amazon to harvest rubber, suffered an order of magnitude higher casualties than actual combat troops.

The Tango War is somewhat scattered, but often fascinating, and shines a light on a forgotten theater of the war.

This book is a gut punch. Millions of women served in the Soviet Armed Forces, and unlike other militaries, which tried to keep women in auxiliary roles like nurse, clerk, or ferry pilot, Soviet women were on the front lines as snipers, machine gunners, pilots, field medics, and partisans, as well as behind the lines. And once Victory, glorious Victory was achieved, these Soviet women soldiers were asked to forget their role, their heroism, their trauma, and return to being wives and mothers. The official narrative of collective sacrifice didn't easily allow for women soldiers.

Alexievich spent decades conducting an oral history project, no easy thing in the Soviet Union, when going against the official narrative didn't just have the weight of Greatest Generation social pressure, but also could provoke official censorship. This book is stitched together out of hundreds of interviews, a quilt torn full of holes, yet big enough to cover the entire front.

The experience is harrowing. Themes stick out, volunteering in the first flush of patriotism, losing womanhood to become a soldier, seeing such intense death and destruction, the privation of life in the trenches, attempting to seize some form of normalcy (these were after all young women), and then coping with the aftermath.

I thought I was handling it well, but one story hit me like a lightning bolt. This woman fought with a partisan band near her village. The Nazis would gather the women who remained (the men were dead or in the army) and have them walk ahead of their patrols to set off mines. As the partisans lay in ambush, they would see their family members pass by, "There goes my mother. That's my sister," and pray that in the firefight no their family members would survive. That's the stuff of nightmares.