Tuesday, 12 September 2017

The Battle of Britain - An Epic Conflict Revisited

Christer Bergstrom, Casemate 2014. New HB.

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN – Review by Mark Barnes

Sep 2, 2015 Mark Barnes

A recent book I reviewed was about the Battle of Britain and here we are again with yet another. It really is a case of ‘we shall fight them in the bookshops’ during this seventy-fifth anniversary year of the series of events that made up the epic battle. I have others to look at.

Here we have a really rather neat and considered piece of work by Christer Bergstrom, an author who has spent many years researching facts and collating conversations with some of the men who took part, including many top names.

The book takes us through the battle in some details along with a reassessment of significant features and statistics. We are treated to comparisons of the major aircraft and look at some important characters in addition to a diary of events with descriptions of major incidents from specific days.

This is a wide-ranging book looking at all aspects of the battle and brings it together in a single attractive package. The book promises rarely seen images and while there are many old favourites I noted a good number I had not seen previously. It looks good and feels substantial. Right from the off when we see Stanley Devon’s classic image of three Hurricanes converging on a Fairey Battle it is easy to presume we will be in safe hands and this seems to be the case.

There really isn’t much I can add to the Battle of Britain story. I grew up with it from a young age and pictured many of the RAF heroes of the battle as little more than gods. I loved the planes and the drama and followed it via films, war comics, Dinky toys and model kits. It was at a time when footballers were becoming a little more celebrated and the only big stars were musicians or in the movies. Our Battle of Britain heroes were not famous in the context of people who bake cakes on the telly but they were marked as heroic and that is a different kind of fame altogether. We rarely see people like it nowadays because our celebrity culture is so ingrained in ‘journeys’ and all those other dodgy descriptions for just getting on with things.

I have never met any participants from the battle but have been a semi-assiduous gatherer of books about it since I read Peter Townsend’s Duel of Eagles as a teenaged kid marooned in a village near Clonmel a million summers ago. Visits to the RAF Museum at Hendon were always a joy and any time I hear a Merlin engine I still sprint out into my back garden to see what has taken off from my local airport. Only the other day a couple of lovely Spitfires thundered over

The author of this book will probably identify with much I have said about my feelings for the battle. He retains a carefully neutral view of events and I guess this reflects the wave of respect there is for pilots on both sides nowadays. Although the battle remains the source of immense pride here in sunny Britain

our connection with it, like so much else, is fading. Facts emphasise that for all it meant to my country it was a genuinely international event with participants coming from far and wide. While I am not trying to make it sound like a sports event, it illustrates what a polyglot of nationalities the RAF was becoming as early as the summer of 1940. Mr Bergstrom offers respect to all of them.

I like this book. It has a cool design and goes together well. The translation from the original Swedish by Donald Bryant and Louise Stromback flows along nicely.

The use of illustrations is handled with care and not a little style. It doesn’t feel like an English book and clearly it isn’t. I guess the big question is how well it will fair in the blizzard of other B of B titles that are out there. There are three more on my ‘to do’ pile. The Battle of Britain will never go away, a fact I imagine pleases a lot of people all over the planet. Mr Bergstrom gives a good account of it and if you are looking for an image heavy one-stop history this might be all you need.

Reviewed by Mark Barnes for War History Online

As anniversaries go, the seventy-fifth of the Battle of Britain was obviously a big one. There were ceremonies and epic flypasts and decent, occasionally well-informed, coverage in the media. Add in a few new books and any enthusiast had it made, particularly if they lived in the UK. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of many new titles on the subject although there were clearly a few. The hardcover edition of Helen Doe’s Fighter Pilot and the Pen & Sword edition of Australia’s Few and the Battle of Britain by Kristen Alexander come to mind but that’s it at the moment. I think that’s probably because I didn’t pay much attention because I spent a fair bit of time with my nose in what just might be the final word on this most famous of aerial battles. Christer Bergström spent more than four decades gathering material for The Battle of Britain, An Epic Conflict Revisited, and it shows. This must surely be one of the last books to be released that will use original, unpublished veteran interviews as source material.

Right from the start the author makes his intentions clear. The BoB, being entrenched in popular culture as it is, is one of those periods of history where myths and half-truths evolve into apparent fact and are spouted left, right and centre by anyone with a passing interest. Alongside legendary exploits such as the Dams raid and the Doolittle raid, the Battle of Britain grabs the attention. There are tales of derring-do on both sides, Britain with its back against the wall, a rampaging Germany stopped in its tracks. It’s stirring stuff and, best of all, it really did happen. Who needs fiction when history is so much better? As time goes on, however, and these things are analysed ad nauseum and different opinions and conclusions put forward, even movies made, the line between fact and fiction starts to blur and some of the ‘faction’ starts to become accepted or even common knowledge and is certainly not helped by being regurgitated by the media. You know about the BoB, you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise. Have a think about these half-truths. What comes to mind? Göring was a bumbling fool. Fighter Command stood alone. The Bf 110 was a sitting duck against the Spitfires and Hurricanes. You know the drill. Bergström sets about proving these to be wrong. Göring, while clearly a man who enjoyed the finer things in life, was an old fighter pilot, and a successful one at that. He related well with his fighter units and understood their desire, their need, to hunt. He was not a fan of tying the fighters to the bombers but had to keep his bomber group commanders happy. He did allow his fighters to go on free hunting sweeps ahead of the day’s bombing raids and these were successful until Fighter Command cottoned on that there were no bombers in the incoming radar plots. It was Göring who had fresh fighter formations, those that had not flown on the returning raids, cover the withdrawal across the Channel. He proved insightful, adaptable and trusting of his men. He had his finger on the pulse but, ultimately, with a rather large commitment to the east requiring attention, the Italians in the Mediterranean needing reinforcing, not to mention a fair bit of angst among his commanders who did not implement his directives in full, he was up against it to achieve the required result especially when the RAF proved so hard to dislodge.

It was such a close run thing, though. Some of the loss statistics are harrowing and you have to remember that there is at least one man involved in each of those aircraft lost. Even in October, when many regard the Battle as more or less having run its course, the Germans shot down more aircraft than the RAF did. At the time much of the daylight activity was centred around fighters escorting fighter bombers in an attempt to draw the RAF up. Within six months, the RAF was trying to do the same thing to the Luftwaffe over occupied Europe. Contrary to popular belief, the RAF suffered at the hands of the Bf 110 crews. It had the range and firepower to be an absolute menace particularly when working in concert with several other ‘110s. As someone who doesn’t read a lot about the BoB, I was consistently surprised, and somewhat disturbed, at the number of Spitfires and Hurricanes that fell to the guns of the big fighter. Some of the Zerstörer units, some of the Luftwaffe’s most effective offensive units, had better kill/loss ratios than some of the Bf 109 units. While units on both sides, and flying all types, were withdrawn to regroup, it was surprising how truly ineffective some of the Luftwaffe’s single engine fighter groups were. It’s not a viewpoint I’ve come across before, partly because of the dearth of recent reading on the subject, but the analysis is due to the author getting to grips with German records.

It is pleasing to see Bomber Command receive regular attention as the author progresses through the timeline. More than just hitting the invasion barges in the Channel ports, the Whitleys, Hampdens, Blenheims and Wellingtons were taking the fight to Germany itself. While they were mere pinpricks compared to what the Germans achieved with their bomber formations, they were a nuisance that led to at least one Bf 110 unit being withdrawn for a rest and conversion to night fighting.

This is as good a discussion of the progression of the BoB as I’ve ever read. It includes the usual formation numbers on such and such a date and losses for the day as expected but, like some books before it, it includes a surprising amount of recollections from the pilots themselves. Again, nothing really new there but these are the product of the author’s own interviews and many were recorded decades ago. Of course, many of the men interviewed are no longer with us.

Chapters are split roughly in to months and the narrative is incredibly detailed when it comes to looking at the machinations of the German hierarchy behind the scenes. The whole thing was really theirs to lose.

This is a book that everyone who is interested in the period should have on their shelf. It is critical, but fair, and pulls no punches. The author is not backwards in coming forwards when it comes to discrediting accepted truths and it is a testament and tribute to his decades of work that everything about the analysis, discussion and conclusions is supported by the most comprehensive bibliography, using sources from both sides (some of which would rarely see the light of day, I imagine), that I have seen. The range of photos used is second to none and include a stunning colour photo section and the ubiquitous profiles. Many of the captions are long and provide excellent detail.

The aircraft are introduced at the start and, weirdly, the Westland Whirlwind is mentioned but the Bristol Beaufighter is not. It’s the first time I’ve seen the Whirlwind included as one of the aircraft that contributed to the Battle of Britain. There are long passages for the Spitfire and the Messerschmitts, little on the Hurricane and the Defiant receives as much attention as the Whirlwind. As great as this book is, this is just one of the odd little things within its pages (and let's not go in to the 'modern' Hurricane on the cover!).

Continuing in this vein, this book needs an edit. A serious edit. It was originally written and published in Swedish and may (I do not know) have been translated in to English by the author. I very much doubt whether this English translation was edited because it really does appear that it wasn’t. There are clumsy sentences and statements where the order of the words is wrong or extra words are included. This occurs on every page. I raised this as I was reading it. Some were not concerned as they felt it took nothing away from the book, and they’re right, while others found it distracting. On top of those opinions, all of which I agreed with, I don’t think it honours the work of the author. Here’s a man who has spent more than forty years collating the material to produce a gem of a book only to have it tarnished by many apparent oversights post-manuscript submission. A full read through edit would have picked up some errors in the captions and some minor double-checking of details in the narrative. I would have no hesitation calling this book the ultimate discussion of the BoB if these errors and oversights were cleared up (and I have a list!) because it would then be near perfect. With luck a further print run or a second edition will clear this up but it will require a good dose of work that should have been done before the book was published.

Don’t let me put you off. This is the book on the Battle of Britain and this review isn’t intended to be a blow by blow account of the Battle or to approach the detail of the narrative. A large, A4 format of 330 pages and hundreds of photos, it takes into account all that have preceded it and gives credit where it is due. It is, however, an entirely original discussion, based on familiar knowledge, that goes beyond anything before it. It is mature, incredibly well-researched and insightful beyond belief.

Epic conflict. Epic book.

Andy Wright

The Squadron That Died Twice - No 82 Squadron RAF

Gordon Thorburn, 2015. New HB.

Author:: Gordon Thorburn

This book tells the story of a traumatic few weeks in the life of 82 Squadron RAF in 1940. On the 17th May 1940 – with the Battle of France raging – 12 Blenheim light bombers left Watton airfield in Norfolk on a daylight raid to attack a crossroads in France to hold up the German advance. Only one badly damaged aircraft returned. On the 26th July 1940, in the early days of the Battle of Britain, the reformed squadron sent 12 Blenheims on another daylight raid against the Luftwaffe airfield at Ålborg in occupied Denmark. One Blenheim turned back with technical problems; the rest were shot down.

It is also a story of two very different command styles. During the Battle of France, 82 Squadron was commanded by Wing Commander Paddy Bandon. An Irish Earl, Bandon was a natural leader, much loved through the RAF for his irreverent attitude to formality. By the time of the second raid, the squadron was led by Wing commander Edward Lart. He had a cold hatred of the Germans, frequently continuing attacks when the cloud cover needed to shelter the aircraft from marauding Me 109’s had faded away. It was that ‘press on’ attitude that would lead to the disaster over Ålborg.

Finally, this book is a reminder of the frightening pace of technological change. In 1936 the Blenheim was the first all metal aircraft delivered to the RAF. Fast for its time, it could outrun most of the biplane fighters that equipped the bulk of the world’s air forces. Just four years later it was lethally vulnerable to Me 109’s in clear skies and to light flak at low level.

The book is in eight chapters. The first covers the history of 82 Squadron up to the outbreak of the Second World War. It also gives a brief history of the design and development of the Bristol Blenheim. The second chapter has a thumbnail sketch of 82 Squadron’s recently built airfield at Watton and their activities during the phony war. It also contains a brief biography of Paddy Bandon. The third chapter covers the squadron’s early actions in the Battle of France as they strove to stem the German advance by bombing bridges and crossroads.

The fourth chapter covers the disastrous raid on the crossroads at Gembloux. The French Army was in retreat and the intent was to block a choke point by destroying the buildings around it. Light flak accounted for several of the dozen Blenheims; Me 109’s for the rest. When the sole surviving aircraft landed back at Watton, heavily damaged and on one engine, it was met by Bandon. “Where’s everyone else, Morrison?” he plaintively asked the pilot.

The fifth chapter describes how Paddy Bandon persuaded the Air Ministry not to disband the squadron and how he rebuilt it through sheer force of personality. It briefly also covers what happened to the few survivors of the shot down aircraft. The bulk of the chapter goes on to cover 82 squadron’s operations immediately after it resumed operations.

The next chapter contains a biography of Edward Lart and the very different leadership style he brought to the squadron after he took it over. By this time daylight raids were only being ordered if there was sufficient cloud cover, with pilots being given discretion to turn back if the clouds thinned. Lart invariably pressed on even if the cloud cover vanished and for some weeks he led a charmed life.

The seventh chapter covers the raid on Ålborg. The Air Ministry ordered the raid to be carried out at all costs at 20,000 feet and without any cloud cover. The Blenheims were highly visible to German observers and too far above the ground to escape by low flying. Lart – leading from the front as ever – led the raid. Disaster was inevitable. With the exception of a single aircraft that turned back with technical problems, the rest were massacred.

The final chapter tells what happen to those survivors fortunate enough to escape from their doomed aircraft. Most ended up in prisoner of war camps for the duration. The book ends with an appendix giving the fates of each of the 24 Blenheims and their crews, while a postscript tells of what happened to a number of participants later in the war.

These two raids are often given a paragraph or two in general histories of Bomber Command, so this book fills in a gap in the literature. It is fairly well researched, but could do with an index. It will probably interest someone more concerned with the detail of Bomber Command’s operations than it will the casual reader.

Ton Up Lancs

Norman Franks, 2005. Grub Street new HB.

TON-UP LANCS – A Photographic Record of the 35 RAF Lancasters That Each Completed 100 Sorties – Review by Mark Barnes

Apr 24, 2016 Mark Barnes

I will put it straight out there and say I don’t hold with any notions of guilt or contrition for the British bombing offensive against Germany and occupied Europe during World War II. I well remember a drama about Bomber Harris where one of the people questioning the campaign he inherited turned the Ethics of bombing into the Bombing of ethics. I can see the arguments, but the hand wringing done by the British establishment from Churchill downwards in 1945 was insulting to the bomber crews who survived and treachery to the fifty-five thousand who died. That is my view. No decent leadership would send people out to do their bidding and then wash their hands of them when they come home. But it happened.

I’ve just written another review that touches on heroes and it happens that the bomber men have always been as such to me. I well remember an encounter in a supermarket checkout queue with a frail old man and his wife and as we got talking he told me he had been an air gunner. I shook that man’s hand and said thank you. I suspect he will have passed on by now. My uncle Harry was a proper cockney cheeky-chappie who loved his family, football and ducking and diving. He was an intensely loyal man but I didn’t see much of him in my adult years and I wish I had talked to him about his time on the bombers, but it never happened. Harry had been badly injured in a flying accident that affected him all his life, but his cheerful exterior never faded.

Norman Franks is well known in the premier league of aviation history writers and to say he is prolific would be an understatement. This book came to WHO a while back and was in my pile of ‘don’t leave it too late’ books I have been meaning to get round to but never quite manage it. Ton-Up Lancs is not new book and this edition, ten years younger than it’s predecessor; is, itself, derived from an earlier title.

Thirty-five Avro Lancasters survived to complete a hundred or more operational sorties. Over seven thousand were built and more than three thousand were lost on combat operations. A further two hundred were lost in accidents. Perhaps my uncle Harry was in one of those. We only have to consider how much interest was generated when the Canadian Lanc came over to the UK to fly with the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight’s aircraft. Vera and Thumper were a magnificent sight and, thankfully, I managed to see them when they flew off from my local airport. I had been to an air show where their appearance was cancelled and had to work on other occasions when I might have seen them. To say I was gutted would be putting it mildly. Everyone loves a Spitfire but you really have to see a Lancaster in flight. Happily the BBMF’s Lanc survived an engine fire and will be back in the air for us to admire in due course. Lancasters are now rare sights but if you are in London get yourself to the RAF Museum to marvel at their example, a plane that tops the tree completing one-hundred and forty combat sorties.

It is a probably obvious fact that the thirty-five aircraft featured here had charmed lives and didn’t keep the same crews or even stay with one squadron. There were name changes and modifications and the men who flew them came and went. Surviving aircraft are all more akin to Trigger’s Broom than wholly original. The important thing is how Mr Franks uses the planes to talk about the men who flew them. They matter most. I come back to my friend in the supermarket. Just as in every facet of the armed forces, not all the men were heroic or angelic and they all had their reasons for being there. But the bomber men mean a great deal to me and, again, if you are in London, visit their memorial at Green Park and say your thanks.

Not all the Lancs featured here had nose art or interesting names but I am drawn to Uncle Joe for it’s echoes of Len Deighton’s Bomber, a bitter sweet fictional account of the bomber war written over forty years ago. There was no sentimentality at the end of the war and whether a plane had flown a hundred sorties or not it was just as likely to end up as razor blades as all the others. This wasn’t exclusive to the UK, only recently I was doing some work on Hell’s Angels the first B-17 to surpass twenty-five missions which returned home to the United States where it was feted for a while and eventually scrapped.

This is a top class book packed with faces and information and it should act as a bit of a lightning conductor to get new readers interested in the exploits and valour of Bomber Command between 1939 and 1945. The archive photography is well up to standard and it is worth remembering that not every aircraft in service was photographed to any extent and finding images of so many is fantastic for us, the reader. Happily I have a belated link to the book – the image of ED860 with ED588 comes from the collection where I do my day job and I recently had the negative in my hands. I love this sort of connection.

Mr Franks has built up a huge volume of research material to produce books like this with confidence and Grub Street retains their reputation for sympathetic aviation histories. Revised editions of popular books are always worth a look. I did not have the first edition, so will cherish this one. It may, on the face of it, be about just thirty-five aircraft, but in reality it represents so much more.

Reviewed by Mark Barnes for War History Online

TON-UP LANCS
A Photographic Record of the Thirty-Five RAF Lancasters That Each Completed One Hundred Sorties
By Norman Franks
Grub Street
ISBN: 978 1 90980 826 3

The Kamikaze Hunters

What it was like to fight the Japanese Kamikaze

Kamikaze expert Will Iredale describes the horrifying experience of the men who fought against suicide pilots off the coast of Japan in 1945

World War Two kamikaze suicide pilots of the Imperial Japanese Navy 1943 Photo: World History Archive / Alamy

By Will Iredale

8:17AM BST 18 May 2015

Comment

Seventy years ago Britain rejoiced. War in Europe was over. The British Army and the RAF were still fighting against the Japanese in the jungles of Burma, but for other British forces, peace finally reigned across much of the world.

Except, not quite.

For few people knew then — or realise now — that 6,000 miles away deep in the Pacific Ocean, the biggest fleet ever assembled by the Royal Navy in World War Two was entrenched in a bitter battle against Japanese kamikaze suicide planes.

The British Pacific Fleet was largely political by design, with the British Chiefs of Staff and, after some initial reluctance, Winston Churchill, deciding in September 1944 that a British strike fleet fighting alongside the vast US Navy would be recognized after the conflict as a contribution to the defeat of Japan.

Despite US reluctance, a few months later the fleet was born, spearheaded by four aircraft carriers – with dozens of smaller ships as backup — from which the 'flyboys' formed the largest airborne strike force in British naval history. Over 250 aircraft were supported by more than 10,000 sailors and aircrew.

Many of these men were schoolboys when war broke out. They now found themselves in the war’s final act: the battle for Japan. 89 per cent of British airmen were volunteers and over half had trained in America. They developed transatlantic twangs in their accents and chewed gum.

^{British Pacific Fleet member Chris Cartledge pictured in front of a Royal Navy Corsair, IWM Duxford, April 21st, 2015 (Photo: Emilie Sandy)}

Faced with a dearth of decent home-grown machines, the Royal Navy adopted American carrier aircraft such as the F4U Corsair, a reptilian looking 400mph fighter nick-named “whistling death” by the Japanese because of the eerie whining sound it made when diving.

The Supermarine Seafire — a nautical version of its more famous cousin the Spitfire — also featured, and although it struggled with the rough and tumble of carrier landings, it excelled in the air as a kamikaze hunter.

In early March 1945, the British Pacific Fleet sailed from its base in Sydney 4,000 miles north to join the American 5th fleet. It would be away from land for the longest period of time since Nelson’s day. A ‘fleet train’ of ships maintained supplies.

The crews began to realize the huge scale of the Pacific. Day upon day they saw nothing but other ships, ocean and sky. A canvas of blues and greys. There was an unsettling vastness to it all.

Finally, as the ship neared the front line, American Rear Admiral Marc Mitscher, a master of modern carrier fighting, sent a signal: ‘Fifth Fleet welcomes Task Force 57 (the code name for the British Pacific Fleet) and wishes you good hunting.’

The Americans were preparing to invade Okinawa, the strategically crucial island just 350 miles south of the Japanese home islands. From there, the Allies could plan the invasion of Japan itself, proposed for late 1945.

"What do you think of our bloody British flight decks now?"

HMS Formidable Captain, speaking to American liason officer

The British Pacific Fleet’s aircrews were expected to hunt down kamikazes in the air or on the ground.

Why did the Japanese resort to such extreme tactics? Because they knew their air force was no match for the Allies, in short. The Allies estimated that a Japanese pilot, using conventional tactics, might make just two sorties in his lifetime, with a three per cent chance of hitting a ship. In a suicide attack, however, the chance of hitting a ship rose to between 15 and 20 per cent.

On April 1st the Americans landed in force on Okinawa. At 0650, the radar of the British Fleet stationed 200 miles to the south-east picked up a formation of about twenty aircraft flying at 8,000 feet and closing fast at 210 knots. The Japanese First Air Fleet based in Formosa was about to launch its first kamikaze attack on the British Pacific Fleet.

Admiral Philip Vian, the British air commander, directed already airborne aircraft to intercept while others took off from the carriers to beef up defences. A well-practised drill clicked into place, with the fighter control officers in the plotting rooms of the carriers following the enemy contacts on the radar, directing fighters towards them.

"I didn’t want to admit how scared I was," said one crew member. "You have a large fleet of aeroplanes approaching, many of whom will probably be kamikazes. They don’t drop bombs that probably miss you, they hit you, and doing nothing, hanging around waiting, was petrifying.’

The fighter direction rooms in the carriers were tense, hushed and lit only by the bluish glow of the radar screens. The only sounds over the hum of the ventilation fans were the quiet voice of the fighter direction officer passing the airborne aircraft their courses to intercept the enemy and the loud intermittent fuzz over the radio as the pilots radioed back acknowledgements. In the thick of the action a few thousand feet above, the pilots’ voices were strained and tense.

The last line of defence was the fleet’s gunfire, which now opened up in a thunderous roar, peppering the surrounding skies with hundreds of explosions.

For the gunners on deck this was both terrifying and exhilarating. One, hunched in his seat and crouched like a jockey, sang at the top of his voice, ‘How we gonna keep ’em down on the farm?’ to the rhythm of his gun, watching the little yellow tennis balls of tracer bubble up from its muzzle.

Dogfights littered the sky, which was filled with thick smoke, making the panorama of the battlefield even more disorienting. The fleet’s fighters managed to shoot down some Japanese aircraft but others penetrated the fighter screen.

^{British carrier HMS Formidable moments before and after it is hit by a Kamikaze, May 4th 1945. (Fleet Air Arm Museum)}

One Japanese fighter broke through the bursting flak, swooping low over British carrier Indomitable. Bullets crackled and popped along the entire length of the flight deck, ripping through a group of running sailors, killing one and wounding six.

Dickie Reynolds, a 22-year-old pilot nicknamed ‘Deadeye Dick’ because of his skill in shooting down enemy aircraft, engaged a Japanese Mitsubishi Zero, twisting and turning in his Seafire.

With some sharp shooting he managed to pepper a wing with cannon fire, but before he could get his aircraft into position to deliver the kill, the Zero rolled onto its back and smashed into the flight deck of British carrier Indefatigable, causing an enormous ball of flame which covered the ship from stem to stern.

Armed with a 550-pound bomb, the kamikaze hit the ship at the junction of the flight deck and the island, exploding on impact, killing three officers and five ratings instantly. The ship’s barber, who also acted as a messenger during action stations, said later "the smell of dead flesh stayed there and in that part of the island till the day I left the ship".

^{Every British carrier on the front line was attacked by kamikazes, including HMS Formidable (Getty)}

This was 360-degree warfare, directly affecting everyone, regardless of rank. "The kamikazes didn’t distinguish between the admiral or the boy sailor," one seaman said. "The skipper later joked with us it had been an Easter egg sent by Hirohito. But we felt we were all in it together."

For weeks afterwards some men reported seeing ghosts walking through flames on the flight deck.

In their squadron diary the pilots of 894 Seafire squadron in Indefatigable gave their own unique account. "APR 1 'ALL FOOLS DAY' and did we buy it! Early in the morning the Japs attacked with suicides – their first reaction . . . Diving from 2,000 ft, it hit the bottom of the island doing no mean rate of knots. SPLATTTTT!"

Despite the carnage, aircraft were taking off and landing on the ship less than an hour later. Unlike the wooden flight decks of the American carriers, the British ships had four-inch armoured flight decks.

When the Royal Navy carrier Formidable survived a kamikaze attack on May 4th, filling in a hole caused by the attack with quick drying cement, its captain grasped the arm of an American liaison officer standing alongside and, shaking his fist, asked, "What do you think of our bloody British flight decks now?"

"Sir," came the reply, "they’re a honey."

^{Wally Stradwick in Miami in late 1943, soon after receiving his wings after learning to fly in America during the war}

Wally Stradwick, a 22-year old pilot from Clapham, was flying his Corsair at 6,000ft above Formidable when he saw a kamikaze pilot crash into its flight deck. In his diary he recalled: "One of our carriers appeared to explode. I could only see the bows protruding from a colossal pall of black smoke in the centre of which was an ugly sheet of flame."

Formidable was attacked again on May 9th, 1945. "As a terror weapon, these kamikazes have a quality of their own," one officer in Formidable later wrote. "There is [still] something unearthly about an approaching aeroplane whose pilot is hell bent on diving himself right into the ship. 'Wherever you are, he seems to be aiming straight for you personally."

Another sailor, from Portsmouth, said: "I remember thinking, I’ve been through the Blitz; we’ve had bombs, we’ve had incendiaries, we’ve had landmines thrown at us, but it’s the first time I’ve had the bloody plane thrown at me as well. You feel that it’s aimed at you, especially when he looks around and you think: can he see me?"

For the pilots too, the enemy was unknown. "It’s a dirty war; all war is dirty, this one particularly so," wrote 22-year old Chris Cartledge, a Corsair pilot with 1842 squadron in a letter home on 16 May 1945. "Judging by the fanatical methods of defence used by the Japs they do not intend to give in however hard pressed…one cannot anticipate the reactions of a race so radically different from us. We can’t apply our logic to them."

^{Reunited after 70 years: HMS Formidable airmen (from left to right) Chris Cartledge, Roy Beldam and Keith Quilter (Pic: Emilie Sandy)}

Hunting down these fanatical flyers before they attacked the fleet became a game of cat and mouse. The tactics books used in the previous six years of war were ripped up. Often pilots were deployed by their ships without success.

Between April 1st and May 9th 1945 every single British aircraft carrier on the front line was hit by kamikazes, killing 44 men and wounding almost 100. Its pilots shot down more than 40 enemy aircraft, the majority of them suicide bombers.

The Daily Telegraph

24 Hours At The Somme - 1 July 1916

Robert Kershaw, 2016. New HB.

http://robertjkershaw.com/24_hours_at_the_somme/

Gallipoli

Alan Moorehead, 2007. New HB

Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead and Gallipoli: the Dardanelles Disaster in Soldiers’ Words and Photographs by Richard van Emden and Stephen Chambers, review: 'vivid'

Saul David applauds two historical studies that reveal the futility of the Gallipoli landings

Stretcher-bearers enter the dressing station at Y Ravine Photo: Stephen Chambers

By Saul David

11:09AM BST 24 Apr 2015

No campaign of the First World War better justifies the poets’ view of the conflict as futile and pitiless than Gallipoli. From the initial landings in April 1915 to the final evacuation in January 1916, only a few miles of ground were gained at a cost of 250,000 Allied casualties, including 42,000 dead. Turkish casualties were similar, though more were killed.

The initial plan – the brainchild of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty – was for the Navy to “force” the Dardanelles, bombard Constantinople and knock Turkey out of the war, thus removing one of the Central Powers’ main props. When the naval attempt failed in mid-March 1915, the War Cabinet decided to send troops to capture the Gallipoli peninsula and open up the route to the Turkish capital.

READ: Gallipoli film review

The initial landings on April 25 1915 at the tip and north coast of the peninsula were by a combination of British, French and Anzac troops; and when they failed to advance more than a short distance, a third front was opened up at Suvla Bay on August 7. It was also contained within a narrow beachhead, thus condemning the Allied troops to months of bombardment in a harsh, barren and waterless terrain.

Could the plan ever have worked? Not according to Richard van Emden and Stephen Chambers, the authors of a new oral and pictorial history. “If ever a campaign was doomed from the start,” they write, “then the year-long slog in the Dardanelles was the case in point.” Most modern historians agree, including Max Hastings in his foreword to the latest edition of Alan Moorehead’s classic account of Gallipoli (first published in the Fifties). The plan, writes Hastings, was “fundamentally flawed, as well as ineptly executed”.

READ: Churchill and Empire by Lawrence James, which argues that the Dardanelles disaster should be blamed on local bungling rather than Churchill's design

The wartime investigation into the campaign’s failings was nearly as categorical. “From the outset,” it concluded, “the risks of failure attending the enterprise outweighed its chances of success.” This is probably fair. There were a couple of moments when things could have gone differently: at Anzac beach on April 25, and Sari Bair Ridge and Suvla Bay on August 7-11, when the attackers almost took and held the high ground, thus forcing the Turks to withdraw. But a combination of poor generalship, bad luck and stout defence enabled the Turks to hold on.

With jeopardy in short supply, the true fascination of the campaign lies in its unutterable horror. “When the deepest point of penetration into enemy lines was just three miles,” write van Emden and Chambers, “then the entire position was, in effect, one front line… The Turks were able to land shells almost anywhere they wished.” It was a position that, according to the general who ordered the withdrawal, possessed “every possible defect”: it was “without depth, the communications were insecure and dependent on the weather. No means existed for the concealment and deployment of fresh troops destined for the offensive.”

Some of the most savage fighting was during the diversionary attack by the Australians at Lone Pine on August 6. “In the semi-darkness under the pine logs [covering the trenches],” writes Moorehead, “there was very little space to shoot; on both sides they fought with bayonets and sometimes without any weapons at all, kicking and struggling on the ground, trying to throttle one another with their hands.”

Seven Victoria Crosses were won by Australians at Lone Pine (two posthumously) as the Turkish front-line trench was captured at a cost of 2,000 casualties. But their effort was in vain because the main attacks farther north were repulsed. By the evening of August 8, notes Moorehead, “the Allies had reached none of their objectives”. He adds: “The Suvla plan, which was a good plan, had failed because the wrong commanders and soldiers had been employed, and at Anzac the best officers and men were employed upon a plan that would not work.”

READ: Catastrophe, Max Hasting's account of the First World War

Both books have merit. Moorehead’s is a vivid narrative that includes primary material from both sides of the conflict, including the war diary of Mustapha “Ataturk” Kemal, a Turkish army officer and, later, first president of Turkey. It is refreshingly balanced in its assessment of the campaign, describing it as “the most imaginative conception of the war, and its potentialities were almost beyond reckoning”. It would provide a “mine of information” for the planners of amphibious operations, including D-Day, in the Second World War.

Van Emden and Chambers’s book makes little attempt to assess the wider significance of the Gallipoli campaign, beyond remarking that April 25 – Anzac Day – has become “inextricably linked” with the Antipodeans’ “perception of national identity”. In Britain the campaign is “remembered as one of waste, yet fought with great heroism and in the teeth of impossible odds”. The authors’ achievement is in bringing together a collection of photographs – many taken by the soldiers themselves – with some graphic first-hand accounts from the diaries, letters and memoirs of combatants on both sides.

One British officer spoke for many when he wrote during the evacuation: “What of the men we were to leave behind us there? The good comrades, who had come so gaily with us to the wars, who had fought so gallantly by our side, and who would now lie for ever among the barren rocks where they had died… No man was sorry to leave Gallipoli; but few were really glad.”

The Daily Telegraph

The Secret War - Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-45

Max Hastings, 2015. New HB.

Monday, 11 September 2017

The Red Line

2013. New PB.

Dunkirk - The Men They Left Behind

2008. New PB.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/ordeal-of-scots-who-missed-the-dunkirk-boats-1-1433251
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4731202/Allied-POWs-captured-evacuation-Dunkirk.html

Sea Wolves - The Extraordinary Tale of Britain's WW2 Submarines

2011. New PB.

http://www.timclayton.co.uk/portfolio_page/sea-wolves/

https://www.ft.com/content/995688de-9c16-11e0-bef9-00144feabdc0

The First and The Last - Adolf Galland

1954. Good S/H copy. HB no D/J.

BY WALTER J. BOYNE
8/24/2017 • AVIATION HISTORY MAGAZINE

The First and the Last: The Rise and Fall of the German Fighter Forces, 1938- 1945

by Adolf Galland

It is difficult to overstate the tremendous impression that Adolf Galland’s The First and the Last made on aviation history buffs when copies of it became available in the United States in 1954. Here was the first insight into the Luftwaffe from a renowned German ace who had personally known Adolf Hitler, famously stood up to Hermann Göring and was highly respected both by his colleagues and his former foes. The big question of course was how he would handle his having flown for the hated Nazi regime, scoring 94 official (and more unofficial) victories against the Allies.

The answer was that he handled it well, giving a reasoned explanation of both the success and the ultimate failure of the Luftwaffe. While never apologetic, Galland distanced himself from Nazi evils by providing his personal insight into the motivation and actions of the major figures who influenced the Luftwaffe. These included some remarkable portraits of Hitler and Göring, sympathetic views of Ernst Udet and Hans Jeschonneck, and professional assessments of Erhard Milch, Werner Mölders and others.

Galland is at his best when describing some of the early Luftwaffe triumphs, such as Operation Thunderbolt. He directed the Luftwaffe operation, which allowed the successful escape of the battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst from Brest. He is naturally less compelling when he assesses the hopeless situation in which the Luftwaffe found itself after 1943, unable to cope with the rising tide of Allied strength. He places the blame for this quite accurately, never failing to note how well the Luftwaffe air and ground crews did in an increasingly desperate situation. His book set the standard for future German aviation memoirs.

He frequently visited the United States in later years, making friends everywhere and becoming increasingly frank in his opinions. I saw evidence of his martial nature one night when he was to deliver a talk at the National Air and Space Museum. During dinner beforehand, it became clear that he was terribly ill, and in such great pain from an eye problem that he sat slumped in his chair, unable to eat. But when I asked him if he wanted to cancel his talk and rest, he insisted on going on. He got up, marched out to the podium and, standing ramrod straight, delivered a great talk, without any sign of his difficulties. At the end he graciously answered many questions before leaving—to a standing ovation. He then walked to an area behind the stage and slumped in a chair again. It was an impressive display of pride and self-discipline that gave insight into Galland’s character and strong will. So does his book.

The Boer War

1979. New PB.

The Boer War 1899-1902

By Iain R. Smith

Published in History Today

Military

During the century since it took place, the South African War of 1899-1902 has never ceased to attract interest from the general public and debate amongst historians. Controversy over its origins, already underway when J.A. Hobson and L.S. Amery published their opposing interpretations in 1900, has continued ever since. Participants on both sides in the war found a ready market for their published accounts even before it was over, although some of the best were only published much later.

Amongst the many books written about this war by both amateur and professional historians, the best known is Thomas Pakenham's The Boer War, which has been a best-seller ever since it first appeared in 1979. Well-researched and engagingly written, Pakenham's account has deserved its success, despite sniffy reviews from some academic historians. The wealth of visual evidence available about this war - already indicated in the illustrated edition of his book which Pakenham published in 1993 - is well represented in some of the books under review, where many photographs are reproduced for the first time.

Tabitha Jackson's smoothly-written book will not satisfy professional historians, and is too neglectful of key aspects of the war to become the introductory text they will recommend to their students, but it draws substantially on the magnificent archive of visual material and oral testimony assembled by the Twenty Twenty Television team during the making of the four-part documentary film about this war to be screened on Channel 4 in the early autumn. Future historians of this war will have every reason to be grateful for the wide range of fresh material assembled over the past year in the course of this production. Meanwhile, as the book of the television series, this volume is likely to sell well.

David Smurthwaite has produced an excellent short, pictorial history of the war for the general reader. Well-organised, lavishly illustrated, it covers the main features of the war in a series of well-informed, succinct summaries and includes a useful Timeline. But it breaks new ground in the wealth of extracts from eye-witness accounts, both Boer and British, many of them unpublished, which make up more than half the text. Chosen with care, these give immediacy and substance to a book which is far more than a picture book and deserves to reach a wide audience. Its author (who is Assistant Director at the National Army Museum in London) neither avoids the fighting nor restricts his scope to military matters. He has supplemented British sources with material from collections in South Africa, where his book is also likely to be popular.

Field Marshal Lord Carver has produced a rather different kettle of fish from previously unpublished material in the archives of the National Army Museum. Dismissing any claim to 'a comprehensive or properly balanced history', he has plumped for a British view of the war as seen through the eyes of those participants whose letters and diaries happen to be in this archive. Roberts and Rawlinson are therefore well represented but Buller, White and Methuen (whose papers are elsewhere) are not. The strength of the book lies less in its narrative text than in the extensive extracts from ordinary soldiers' writings and the very direct way these convey what the war was actually like for Tommy Atkins. Testimony abounds to the poor provision for the British soldiers in this war: few tents, shared blankets, inadequate clothing, meagre rations, desperate thirst, huge distances marched through arid terrain in searing heat or drenching rain on an empty stomach, long night marches followed by poorly scouted military engagements, daylight hours spent immobilised under intense rifle-fire and a scorching sun amidst dead and dying comrades. The deadly exchanges of day-to-day warfare are graphically described along with the devastating results of poor field hygiene and inadequate medical provision (three quarters of British casualties were due to disease). The sense of blood-lust in battle and the intense satisfaction experienced after a successful skirmish are vividly conveyed, along with the score in killed and wounded. The courage, stamina and concern for their comrades exhibited by ordinary soldiers emerge clearly from these extracts along with a remarkably cheerful and philosophical acceptance of the harsh conditions under which they did their duty.

As the most costly and extensive war fought by Britain between 1815 and 1914, this war was certainly no picnic. The poor opinion of Lord Roberts for most of his military subordinates is largely shared by Lord Carver. But his figures for a war which he describes as 'an expensive failure' which should never have taken place, follow the 'official' British figures published shortly afterwards and take little account of much recent scholarship which has convincingly revised them.

Although Kitchener's complacency about the conditions in the concentration camps established by the British for Boer civilians is starkly revealed, Lord Carver himself seems to believe that these camps were set up more as a humanitarian measure than as part of a military strategy to win what had become a guerrilla war. He underestimates the numbers of Boers who died in these camps (the accepted figure is between 27,000 and 28,000) and he totally omits the existence of, and deaths in the parallel camps established for Africans (now estimated at 20,000). The role of Africans generally in this war, which has been the subject of much recent research, receives scant recognition. Still, this is a book essentially for military buffs, who will relish the military detail and the range of extracts from material in the National Army Museum which it makes available to a wider audience.

Bill Nasson's book, written as a volume in a series on Modern Wars, is likely to become the established text for students of this war wherever it is taught in universities.
It is well-informed, from sources in both Afrikaans and English, and absolutely up-to-date with the latest research. Whilst it deals crisply and adequately with the actual fighting, his book is more than a military history and nicely contextualises the war not only in terms of 'the Anglo-Boer crisis' in South Africa, at the end of the nineteenth century, but also within the wider frameworks of South African history, British society and the British Empire at that time. It is a good synthesis, having something to say about most aspects of the war, including how it was reported and received in Britain itself and what the attitudes and beliefs were of those who were involved in it. It is a densely written account, which avoids the highly personalised approach of Thomas Pakenham and has little space for eye-witness quotations, but it conveys a wealth of accurate information in a lively style with playful verbs and a taste for irony. Although devoid of illustrations, it has some excellent maps of the military deployments at the major battles, each of which is crisply and succinctly described. Nasson includes, at many points, the widespread involvement of the African population in what was certainly not just a white man's war and became a war with civil war dimensions to it. War went on at many different levels in South Africa, between 1899 and 1902, and there were other battlefields apart from those which have so preoccupied military historians. Many of the conflicts which then erupted into open warfare were home-grown, internally generated out of the recent South African past.

Nasson's book has many layers to it. Some will feel that it is too even-handed, and regret the loss of peaks and troughs. Others will feel short-changed by the matter-of-fact summaries accorded to the Brandwater Basin and the legendary exploits of leaders like Smuts and De Wet. This is an account with no heroes and precious few villains. But it is good, sound history.

With Fransjohan Pretorius's prize-winning book (this is an English translation of a book originally published in Afrikaans in 1991) the reader is presented with a work of genuine scholarship on a specific theme which will at once be welcomed by English readers who have hitherto had to rely largely on Deneys Reitz's classic account, Commando (1929) to learn what life on commando was really like during what Pretorius insists on calling the Anglo-Boer War. Here, one of South Africa's leading historians demonstrates just what old-fashioned, empirical history can achieve, to a generation of historians (and their students) too easily blown hither and yon by passing breezes of caprice and theory. This is a book based on painstaking, wide-ranging research and it radiates an authority and grasp of its material that one soon learns to trust. At every point, its conclusions are underpinned by evidence; and where the evidence is thin or non-existent, the author clearly indicates what can, and cannot be concluded.

On the larger issues of interpretation, as well as on the precise matters of facts, dates and figures, here is a book to be grateful for. Pretorius opens up the daily facts of life, for those on commando, in a fresh and engaging way and then goes on to analyse key themes in a series of well-constructed chapters dealing with provisions and food supply, clothing, tents, arms, ammunition, horses, recreations, religious beliefs, the matter of military discipline in a citizen army, group and social relations, attitudes towards and contact with Africans, foreign volunteers, women, the fierce and determined fight to preserve the independence of the Boer republics against the khakies and the reasons for finally accepting that the bitter end had been reached at Vereeniging in May 1902. Not content with conveying what the situation on commando was, and how it changed during the course of the war, Pretorius also explores how the war was experienced and interpreted, by those on commando, through their mostly unpublished writings. This is a substantial book, clearly organised, well-translated, which breaks new ground for the English reader. In South Africa it has long since established itself as the standard source on the subject. This is a book - this is history - which will last.

About the Author

Iain R. Smith is author of The Origins of the South African War, 1899-1902 (Longman, 1996)

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