Eleven Days on the Colorado
The Standoff Between the Texian and Mexican Armies and the Pivotal Battle Unfought
-by James E. 'Jim' Brasher '80

A good read if you're a fan of Texas history. A lot of detail about Sam Houston and the Texas army retreat from Gonzales to the Colorado River locations. Plus a well written detail on the characters during that time period.

Staying with the war in Iraq.

Just finished "A Chance in Hell" by Jim Michaels. Deals with the fight for Anbar and working with the Sheiks.

Started "Black Hearts" by Jim Frederick tonight. About a platoon from the 502nd infantry regiment and the breakdown of discipline, etc. that led to the rape and murder of a 14 year old girl and her family in Iraq.

Aggie1205 said:

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Read Lonely Vigil: Coas****chers of the Solomons by Walter Lord.

Before reading this I was aware that coas****chers were used but didn't really know specifics of their contribution. I also had seen the Mother Goose movie on TCM back in the day but nothing in the book involved an alcoholic beach bum getting paid by sighting by the revelation of where the next bottle was buried. Lots of great detail about their activity and how they played a really large role especially in providing warning of attempts to bomb Henderson Field.

They were also key in rescuing downed pilots. One ended up rescuing a good number and started a club called the Ancient Order of the Rubber Rafters of Choiseul. Each pilot got a handwritten membership card upon getting rescued that said the requirement of the club was that every year on the anniversary of rescue the recipient was required to get drunk and try to get others equally drunk.

Lots in the book about the contributions of natives and local missionaries that were there. In many cases the coas****chers wouldn't have made it without them.

Other notable contributions were rescuing many of the USS Helena crew and in helping rescue a young guy from a well known family called Kennedy. He went on to bigger things of course.

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Kept with the Solomon Islands theme to a degree by reading Baa Baa Black Sheep by Pappy Boyington next.

The Viking Battalion - Norwegian American Ski Troopers in WW2 - edited by Minge, Ward, and Brun. Not a continuous book, this is really a compilation of material that had been done over the years by members of the 99th Infantry Battalion (Sep) that was built primarily of men from Norwegian American families or in many cases Norwegian sailors caught away from home. They trained in the mountains of Colorado but of course there never was an invasion of Norway. A number of them did end up getting recruited into OSS units for work in Norway. They ended up serving in France, Holland, as the linking unit in the encirclement of Aachen, near Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge, plus in Germany in a number of roles. They did end up going in Norway after the surrender.

There was some really interesting material in this book, in some ways not what you typically would find in a WW2 book. Lots more descriptions of non-fighting duties and down time than you normally see, especially since some of the material is letters sent home the fight. The level of detail also helps show the number of injuries and even deaths that occurred away from the battle due to traffic accidents, mine accidents, sporting injuries, and sickness. Some accounts are very open about times when they simply ran away from the Germans, especially when tanks were involved, regrouping further back. Lots of good mentions of how French and Belgian civilians were so grateful to see them and were very welcoming. Several of the accounts did speak about Malmedy in particular though where they felt the citizens were very pro-German. The unit medical staff helped treat the few survivors of the Malmedy massacre that occured nearby.

After some time with Fiction and a couple of biographies, I returned to history, specially WW2. It wasn't planned this way, but generally most ended up being linked to the campaigns in Italy and Southern France.

Bloody River: The Real Tragedy of the Rapido - Blumenson - Story of the 36th division attempted crossing of the Rapido (Gari) river. Breaks down why the attempt was made and where different people were on whether it was a good idea. Gave some background as to why the attempt at Anzio was made and why the timing of that was important. (They couldn't hold the landing craft in the Med longer as they needed to begin building up in England.

When the Odds Were Even - Bonn - This book details the campaign in the Vosges area of France. It works to compare a time when the American Army and German Army were roughly equal in manpower and where air power wasn't as dominate for the Americans to see how the units stacked up against one another. The author points out that this is in contrast to some of the post war writing that portrays the Germans as superior and just overwhelmed due to bad decisions be Hitler etc. The 36th division played a role here as well.

Against All Odds - Kershaw - Detailed biographies of 4 Medal of Honor winners, plus mentions of many others including Aggie Eli Whiteley. One of the 4 major characters is Audie Murphy. Lots of mentions of the 3rd Infantry decision in particular in Italy and France.

The Last Ridge - Jenkins - History of the 10th Mountain Division from how it got started to the men involved with recruiting for it. Details their time in Northern Italy and securing key points in the Gothic line. The author did seem to miss that they weren't the only troops training at Camp Hale in CO, as the Viking Battalion was also there getting the same training.

I'm currently reading The Liberator. It's about the 45th ID "Thunderbirds " . They are part of the Sicily, Anzio, Vosges campaigns.

Also were there when liberating Dachau. I was hoping for a more personal story, buts basically following lt col Sparks on his actions from Sicily to VE Day.

lb sand said:

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I'm currently reading The Liberator. It's about the 45th ID "Thunderbirds " . They are part of the Sicily, Anzio, Vosges campaigns.

Also were there when liberating Dachau. I was hoping for a more personal story, buts basically following lt col Sparks on his actions from Sicily to VE Day.

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my grandpa was bombardier in that campaign on the Liberator.

This book isn't about the b-24. It's more literal in that this lt. col. sparks (later bg) was a liberator of people.

I'm about 100 or so pages into Volume 1 of David Glantz's magnum opus, Barabarossa Derailed: the Battle of Smolensk, 10 July - 10 September 1941.

I'm not using the term magnum opus lightly. The two volumes of the narrative combine to around 1,300 pages. Volume 3 contains translations of many of the Wehrmacht and Red Army orders and reports. Volume 4 is an atlas, and is scheduled to be released December 15th.

Glantz's thesis is that Smolensk, even though it was ultimately a huge defeat for the Red Army, massively unhinged Germany's Barbarossa plan, although he acknowledges in the introductory chapters that the German plan, which called for the destruction of the Red Army west of the Dvina-Dnieper river line, was already failing Army Group North and Army Group South's sectors, because they simply lacked the mobile mechanized forces to encircle and destroy the Red Army units in their sectors. (The great Kesselschlacht at Kiev would only be achieved by diverting Guderian's Panzer Group from Army Group Center to the south.)

Introduce enough friction when battling the Germans and eventually you win. War for them is always based on speed and timing. Get them in a war of attrition and it is over for them. That is if you can also withstand the attrition.

BQ78 said:

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Introduce enough friction when battling the Germans and eventually you win. War for them is always based on speed and timing. Get them in a war of attrition and it is over for them. That is if you can also withstand the attrition.

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On that note I'm about 1/3 into The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Bever. Makes me glad I wasn't a German of any profession back then.

BQ78 said:

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Introduce enough friction when battling the Germans, and eventually you win. For them, war is always based on speed and timing. Get them in a war of attrition, and it is over for them. That is, if you can also withstand the attrition.

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I've been studying the Battle of Britain, and this was the German mindset: crush the British in 6 weeks and all is well; they were not prepared for a long drawn-out engagement, which ultimately cost them aircraft and, more importantly, skilled pilots.

I am about 1/4 of the way through Stanley Payne's "A History of Fascism." It's pretty dry, but it is worth reading for the treatment of the differences between real fascism and the more common authoritarian nationalism.

During a weekend on a late June business trip, I toured the Cologne Gestapo HQ. After I returned to Texas, I almost immediately started Aftermath by Harald Jahner (in July) and followed with Larson's In the Garden of Beasts (in August).

I've been struggling to process what I saw in Cologne. I had this same problem, a quarter century ago, when I visited Dachau.

ABATTBQ87 said:

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BQ78 said:

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Introduce enough friction when battling the Germans, and eventually you win. For them, war is always based on speed and timing. Get them in a war of attrition, and it is over for them. That is, if you can also withstand the attrition.

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I've been studying the Battle of Britain, and this was the German mindset: crush the British in 6 weeks and all is well; they were not prepared for a long drawn-out engagement, which ultimately cost them aircraft and, more importantly, skilled pilots.

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What cost the Germans the Battle of Britain was there sudden change of tactics. Instead of continuing to bomb the RAF and its infrastructure they suddenly stopped and started terror bombing English civilians. They had the RAF on the ropes and took the pressure off, which let them catch their breath and ultimately defeat the Luftwaffe.

JABQ04 said:

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ABATTBQ87 said:

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BQ78 said:

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Introduce enough friction when battling the Germans, and eventually you win. For them, war is always based on speed and timing. Get them in a war of attrition, and it is over for them. That is, if you can also withstand the attrition.

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I've been studying the Battle of Britain, and this was the German mindset: crush the British in 6 weeks and all is well; they were not prepared for a long drawn-out engagement, which ultimately cost them aircraft and, more importantly, skilled pilots.

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What cost the Germans the Battle of Britain was there sudden change of tactics. Instead of continuing to bomb the RAF and its infrastructure they suddenly stopped and started terror bombing English civilians. They had the RAF on the ropes and took the pressure off, which let them catch their breath and ultimately defeat the Luftwaffe.

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German fighters only had enough fuel to spend about 10 minutes over Britain

German pilots shot down that survived were POWs, British pilots that survived were back in the pub hours after recovery

RADAR, Coastal Observers, the Dowding system was unparalleled in communication of inbound aircraft

Bombing London, then RAF raid on Berlin, shifted the focus from tactical to terror.

Bomber command did night raids on German fighter bases in France.

German pilots were exhausted from flying over the channel 4+ times a day

ABATTBQ87 said:

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JABQ04 said:

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ABATTBQ87 said:

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BQ78 said:

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Introduce enough friction when battling the Germans, and eventually you win. For them, war is always based on speed and timing. Get them in a war of attrition, and it is over for them. That is, if you can also withstand the attrition.

---

I've been studying the Battle of Britain, and this was the German mindset: crush the British in 6 weeks and all is well; they were not prepared for a long drawn-out engagement, which ultimately cost them aircraft and, more importantly, skilled pilots.

---

What cost the Germans the Battle of Britain was there sudden change of tactics. Instead of continuing to bomb the RAF and its infrastructure they suddenly stopped and started terror bombing English civilians. They had the RAF on the ropes and took the pressure off, which let them catch their breath and ultimately defeat the Luftwaffe.

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German fighters only had enough fuel to spend about 10 minutes over Britain

German pilots shot down that survived were POWs, British pilots that survived were back in the pub hours after recovery

RADAR, Coastal Observers, the Dowding system was unparalleled in communication of inbound aircraft

Bombing London, then RAF raid on Berlin, shifted the focus from tactical to terror.

Bomber command did night raids on German fighter bases in France.

German pilots were exhausted from flying over the channel 4+ times a day

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Agree with this. The RAF was never really on the ropes. Did the change help them? Yes. But they weren't going to collapse. The Germans were losing at too high of a rate, especially after the battle for France where they also had losses.

Just purchased "Guadalcanal's Longest Fight: The Pivotal Battles of the Matanikau Front" by Dave R Holland. Excellent read.

On the flight from Dulles to St. Louis, I read "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder. The level of detail was lighter than I had wanted, but it was an interesting read. In the 19th century, it would have been called a pamphlet. It was worth the (admittedly very limited) time required.

Twelve Desperate Miles by Tim Brady - Story about a mission to take an airfield down a river in Morrocco during Operation Torch (Western task force). They used a local guide that was pulled out of North Africa by OSS. SS Contessa was used to bring supplies up and the Destroyer Dallas brought in Rangers. Goes into backgrounds of the people involved, ships involved, and the planning.

Clash of the Carriers - Barrett Tillman - Book about the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Goes into the background and a high level of detail about the battle itself with close to hour by hour descriptions. Lots of tables as well showing the dominance of US shipbuilding during WW2.

The River of Doubt - Candice Millard - Story of Teddy Roosevelt and his journey down a river in the Amazon that hadn't previously been mapped. Very well done book and interesting story. I hadn't been aware of the level of risk or this trip and how close to death he was. Can you imagine a modern former US President taking this kind of risk? I guess one difference is we keep electing really old ones.........

Zebulon Pike: The Life and Times of an Adventurer - John Upton Terrell - Description of the trip by Pike to scout Spanish frontier defenses under the guise of a scientific exploration trip. James Wilkinson was of course heavily involved so you know there was shady plan involved. Pike is an interesting character. On one hand making the trip as he did with as little prep and relatively small team is impressive. Of course this is balanced by his mistakes on the trip (both his unintentional and "unintentional" ones).

I just finished this. It's the story of James Garfield's tragic life. He isn't given much consideration today because he served as president for only four months before being shot then died a lingering death due to infections two and a half months later. I think he was one of our most intelligent and compassionate presidents (he wrote an original proof of the pythagoreon theorem while in congress). He truly believed in the equality of races, well before his time. Although he was from Ohio and served as a brigadier general for the Union his death was mourned in the south.

The book goes into medical history of the time. His doctors sadly didn't believe in Joseph Lister's antiseptic practices which had been accepted in Europe for over ten years. And Alexander Graham Bell's furious rush to invent a device that could locate the bullet in Garfield's body which was still in use during WW1. A very interesting story by one of my favorite authors.

Aggie1205 said:

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Clash of the Carriers - Barrett Tillman - Book about the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Goes into the background and a high level of detail about the battle itself with close to hour by hour descriptions. Lots of tables as well showing the dominance of US shipbuilding during WW2.

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Something that I just picked up in a YouTube interview of Jon Parshall was that, after the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October of 1942, there were no carrier battles until Philippine Sea, a span of roughly 20 months. Plenty of surface fights, mostly in and around the Solomons, but no carrier fights. This was mostly because for a good chunk of that time, each side had only two fleet carriers left - Enterprise and Saratoga for the US and Shokaku and Zuikaku for Japan. And all of those had been damaged to various extents. That situation held until the Essex class carriers started arriving roughly a year after Santa Cruz.

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I just finished The Road to Stalingrad and am starting The Road to Berlin by John Erickson. These were among the first broad scale treatments of the Eastern front done in English. One thing that I've noticed, just getting into the second book, is that Operation Mars, the Nov-Dec 1942 Soviet offensive against the Rhzev salient near Moscow, which was a bloody failure, seems to be totally missing. Not mentioned at all in the first book, and not so far in the second, with no mention in the index of either book.
I know that Soviet sources tended to downplay, if not outright omit, many of their failed offensives - the failed attempt to break into Romania at the tail end of their winter/spring 1944 Ukraine offensive is another example ( see David Glantz, Red Star Over the Balkans). I wonder if this is an issue of the limitations of Erickson's source materials on the Soviet side.