The Liberation Trilogy
 

I just finished Guns at Last Light by Rick Atkinson. It's the third and final volume in his excellent Liberation Trilogy about the United States' involvement in the ETO during WWII and it focusses on the campaign in northwest Europe from D-Day to VE Day. The first book, Army at Dawn chronicles the campaign in North Africa from Operation Torch onward. The second book, called The Day of Battle, is about the campaigns in Sicily and Italy through 1944. All three books are really, really good. Although they focus on American diplomatic and military involvement in each region, they also cover other Allied personalities and operations as well, especially for joint and/or codependent ops. I can't recommend this trilogy highly enough.

George MacDonald Fraser
 

In addition to the Flashman books, George MacDonald Fraser also wrote the wonderful "Quartered Safe Out Here," chronicling his time in Burma in WW2. An unapologetic book it tries to explain the reality of soldiering there and features some wonderful set piece scenes - I defy anyone to not be moved (in both humour and gentle sadness) by the description of the ex-servicemen many years on in the final chapter.

If you enjoy this he continues the story in fictional form in the McAuslen trilogy which I find even better than his wonderful Flashman books.

Savage Continent- Europe in the Aftermath of WWII
 

This isn't a review because I haven't read this yet, but this new book looks to be a great source of material on what happens in the aftermath of a devastating, modern, total war situation- the kind you'd expect to see in the Twilight War.

http://www.npr.org/2013/07/24/204538...paign=20130725

I shall be acquiring it forthwith and will post a review once I've finished it.

Incidentally, I just stumbled across a fairly recent (it's new in paperback) book entitled Twilight War, about the simmering decades=long pseudo-war between Iran and the U.S.

Plague Wars: The Terrifying Reality of Biological Warfare by Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, published by St. Martin's Press ISBN 0-312-20353-5 / 0-312-26379-1. The edition I have is from 2001 so it's a little bit dated now but it really is terrifying. Meticulously footnoted for sources and quite a few photos and illustrations too. You don't have to be an epidemiologist to understand this book. The biggest problem I had reading it is that it's so depressing how easily biological warfare could end modern human civilization.

Savage Continent- Europe in the Aftermath of WWII
 

I've started reading Savage Continent and, so far, it's proving to be a veritable gold mine for T2K-related world-building. Fairly concise but colorful sections address everything from displaced persons, to famine, the black market, and the the physical and moral degradation and destruction of most of continental Europe. It's a must-have for anyone who wants/needs help creating a grim but realistic post-apocalyptic setting, especially in Europe (although a lot of it could just as well be applied to CONUS or other parts of the western world).

All it really takes is one person with a highly contagious disease that does not manifest for 48-72 hours. (Think a virulent flu) That person gets on a 747 or an Airbus with 500-600 people in an enclosed space for, say, an 8 hour flight. Now you have 500-600 disease vectors getting on OTHER flights. Need I go on?

I could see nukes being brought out in very short notice to try and BURN the bug out. All international travel stops. All trade stops.

I have got to stop here. I am depressing myself.....

My $0.02

Mike

http://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/

This is a fascinating app game I play on my phone and the purpose is to wipe out the world with a plague in the shortest time evolving it. It is scary how fast different virus types and bacteria's evolve.

If you have at least a high-school graduate education I think Rise and Fall of the Third Reich should be mandatory reading.

Carnivore: a memoir by one of the deadliest American soldiers of all time
 

I just picked this one up at the library this week, it started off reading easily. He started as a cavalry scout in 1986, spent a little time in Desert Storm, Bosnia, and then twice into Iraq.

He spent a lot of time in M113, M2 and M3, so hearing about being inside one of those is probably worth looking at, for the crowd around here.

At least two of the brief reviews on Goodreads.com say that others think he's making up some of the stuff. Could be, I am in no position to judge at this time.

I noticed Carnivore on the shelf at my local bookstore. Reading the dust jacket gave me the strong impression that it's a vanity piece including more than a fair sprinkling of macho B.S.

It's sounding a lot like "war stories," well-embellished, as told at the bar after the war.

In the initial days of combat in 2003, apparently dozens, if not hundreds of trucks full of Iraqi soldiers kept driving into the fire of his Bradley. He's run his track out of ammo a lot.

It does read well, I've barely spent two hours on it, and I'm 2/3 done.

That's more plausible than what the jacket seemed to imply. It made it sound like he was lighting up T-72s and hopping out of his track to do clean up with a liberated AK (I seem to remember a photo of the author with such an AK on the cover or inside flap of the jacket).

If you haven't already read Thunder Run, by David Zucchino, you really ought to consider it. I think I recommended it in this thread a ways back. The soldiers in that book also blast a lot of wrong-way Charlie Iraqis but they're too busy surviving to keep tally of how many men they kill.

More like lighting up unarmored trucks and cleaning up with an M4 and then an AK, when he runs the M4 out of ammo. He exhibits a healthy fear of T-72s the entire book. On his second tour, he acted as an overwatch sniper when his squadron has both Bradleys and armored Hummers.

I will move Thunder Run up the to-read queue. Johnson was in 3/7 Cavalry, so some of his stuff should re-appear there.

Command and control: nuclear weapons, the Damascus incident, and the illusion of safe
 

by Eric Schlosser.

Pretty scary stuff. How nuclear weapons (in the US) were developed (hint: rather haphazardly), including their safety systems, deployment plans (generally driven by Pentagon budget infighting), RAND studies and nuclear laboratory studies.

A major focus is the 1980 Damascus incident, when a Titan II missile caught fire in its silo outside Damascus, AR. Almost every chapter loops back to a journalistic retelling of the response by SAC, the Wing HQ, maintenance and security guys on the ground, local farmers and newsmen.

But, it doesn't ignore the many times that nuclear weapons dropped or nearly fired, airplanes carrying them caught on fire, or just lay around waiting for someone to take them. Consider the Davy Crockett nuclear recoilless rifle. The Army asked for 32,000 warheads for it and other artillery mounts in 1961. This, in the same time period that a bomb nearly went off in North Carolina (only one of four safety devices worked) and it was found that there were no serious, armed, guards on US Jupiter and Thor missile sites in Europe. Oh, and President Kennedy found out that the "missile gap" existed, but the reverse of what he'd been preaching-- we had hundreds of bombers and dozens of missiles-- the USSR had 4 ICBMs.

I'm not halfway through it, and I'm thinking lots of Twilight-ish implications. Missiles not launching, missing targets, warheads not going off at the right times, all kinds of sick things.

A 1948-49 scenario, starting from the Berlin Airlift, seems the Soviets' best chance to take Europe without annihilation. I think that's been raised elsewhere around here. It would be super-easy to do US survivors of the 1st ID or Constabulary regiments, and/or the lone British division, overrun by the Soviets. Potential contact with the UK by radio, perhaps aerial resupply.

Currently reading The Shetland Bus by David Howarth, originally published in 1951 by Thomas Nelson and Sons (although the version I'm reading is a new edition published in 1998 by The Shetland Times Ltd and reprinted five times since then).

The book details the exploits of a combined RN/British Army/volunteer civilian operation to smuggle agents, armaments, ordnance and other materiel into German-occupied Norway during WWII, and returning with civilian refugees and Norwegian military personnel wanting to receive additional training and return to the fight.

They used 50 to 80 foot Norwegian fishing vessels crewed by volunteer Norwegian fishermen and merchant navy veterans to make their runs, armed as best as they practically could, and restricted their voyages to the winter months to take advantage of the extended periods of darkness. These guys surely must have had gonads of solid steel. Imagine sailing from the Shetland Islands to the Norwegian coast, in the howling gales of winter, in wooden fishing boats, over and over and over again, for the majority of the war.

The author was a Lt Cdr in the RN and was the 2IC of the operation. He seems to have been a very humble and modest man and his writing style is concise and easy to read. The book is liberally interspersed with maps and black and white photographs. For those with an interest in the lesser-known allied operations of the war I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Started reading "Street Without Joy" just the other week.
Could never find a copy in Australia and I finally gave in and bought a digital copy through Google Play.

Also got "The Sorrow Of War" from Google Play and although it's fiction, the novel is strongly based on the author's own experience as a North Vietnamese soldier fighting in the south during the Vietnam War. Had started reading a family friend's copy some years back but only got through the first few chapters before having to give it back, so I never got to finish it.

The author, Hoàng Ấu Phương, was only 13 years old when he joined the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade (mostly composed of teenagers) and was one of only ten survivors out of 500 at the wars end ten years later. He then served for another three years with a graves registration unit finding fallen comrades. Like many others, he was dismissed from the army when the government had no more use for him.
As a side note, of the ten survivors of the Glorious 27th, six are said to have committed suicide not long after they left the North Vietnamese Army.

He wrote the novel (under the pen name Bảo Ninh) as his graduation project for the Nguyen Du Writing School in Hanoi and although it was not officially published (as the communist Vietnamese government didn't agree with it's lack of "heroic struggle" portrayals) it was copied via roneo machine in 1991 and distributed privately through Vietnam (under the title The Destiny of Love) before being translated to English and offered to a British publishers where it received the name The Sorrow Of War.

This title seems more apt, given that early in the novel, the protagonist Kien is searching the Forest of Screaming Souls for the remains of fallen comrades from the 27th Battalion. He is the only survivor of the 27th, destroyed in that forest except for him.

It was important to the Vietnamese to recover their dead for burial after the war as they believed that if a person is not buried properly, their soul will wander forever. Traditional Vietnamese belief holds that Kien Muc Lien reached enlightenment as a young boy but his mother had been evil. At her death she was punished with eternal torment and so her son asked Buddha for help upon which Buddha instructed the boy in the Vu Lan ceremony (wandering souls ceremony AKA the Amnesty of Unquiet Spirits) to allow his mother's soul to find peace.

As might be guessed, this novel had a profound impact upon me even after a few chapters because it was the first time I encountered what the aftermath of the war was like for the Vietnamese who fought on the communist side. The author seems to be reaching for catharsis as much as for understanding of what happened to his teenage life and the spiritual aspects of his search resonate strongly in his book.


Hmm, apologies all, didn't mean for this to turn into a review of a fiction title but I really do feel this book is worth reading by anyone interested in the Vietnam War because most of what we have seen published is entirely from our sides perspective.

I've read The Sorrow of War and it had a profound impact on me, too. I got the impression that it was an autobiography thinly disguised as fiction to avoid trouble with the Vietnamese authorities. Great book.

House to House, by David Bellavia
 

Wow. This is intense, as advertised in this thread. The final room-clearing fight is still rattling through my head, a day after I finished reading it.

I was possibly most impressed by the fortification work done by the jihadis, building house-sized IEDs, bricking up doors, windows, and stairwells to channel the Americans and Iraqis, and removing stairs to limit roof access.

Relative to T2k, I was also impressed by the massive amount of bullets shot, relative to hits recorded. It reinforces my impressions that the low number of hits/accuracy/etc. in T2k v1.0 rules (1 roll per 3 bullets, accuracy limited to 60% of skill).

Something else struck me, maybe I missed something-- only 2 squads in a Bradley platoon?

One million steps: a Marine platoon at war by Bing West
 

This is about 3rd platoon, Kilo Company, 3/5 Marines, during their Oct 2010-Mar 2011 deployment to Sangin in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. The reinforced platoon deployed to a patrol base separate from their parent company. They sent out two or three squad patrols per day to harass the Taliban. (They soon received two squads of reservists to hold down their patrol base, and there was a platoon of Afghans there, too.) Snipers, mortars, and engineers were attached, rounding the platoon up to 50 members.

Strong leadership, esprit de corps and cohesion are the themes that run through the whole account. The Marines patrolled daily, pushing back the Taliban despite IEDs and ambushes. In retrospect, I am surprised to not see bombardment by rockets or mortars, as one reads about in similar positions in Iraq or Vietnam. Their post seemed to be relatively untouched.

West is a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, author of several books, including The Village, which detailed the Combined Action Platoon concept as it developed during that war.

West has harsh words for SecDef Gates and Pres. Obama, who made noises about the surge, but put a short time limit on the war. Generals McChrystal and Petraeus get praise for understanding how a counter-insurgency campaign needed to be fought, and mild criticism for not recognizing (publicly) that Afghanistan and especially Helmand were too broken for such a system to work, and for accepting a too-low force level. The Marine leadership (division, brigade, regiment) he praises for seeing that the province was too far gone for hearts and minds, it needed clearing of Taliban pure and simple. The Marines' ability to create cohesive and experienced combat teams and leaders is the real praise from the author, as well as the dedication of the individual grunts.

It read very well to me, I had trouble putting it down and burned through it in about 3 days. I've liked West's other books, I think I've read all but 1 or 2 of his works by now.

Thanks for the recommendation, Admiral. That one slipped by me. I've read The Village and West's book about the Marines' part in the Battle[s] of Fallujah, No True Glory, and liked them both.

Here are last ten books that I have read:

1. Sir Brian Horrocks Corps Commander
2. A Soldier Speaks (Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur)
3. Field Book for Canadian Scouting
4. Europe without Defense?
5. From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War
6. Champagne Navy, Canada's Small Boat Raiders of the Second
   World War
7. Basic Rescue Skills
8. Trump-Style Negotiation: Powerful Strategies and Tactics for Mastering Every Deal
9. Duffy's Regiment: A History of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment
10. Emily Post on Entertaining

I also snagged Daniel Bolger's "Why we lost"-- he opens with stating that along with other US Army generals, he shares responsibility for the losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm looking forward to it, I have enjoyed everything of his that I read before.

Shock effect: American snipers in the war on terror
 

Really only covers three separate areas in Iraq. One is back-to-back tours by SEAL team snipers in Ramadi, 2006; another is Marine snipers in Anbar province, 2004, and the last is Oregon NG scout-snipers in Baghdad, 2004, during the Sadr uprising then. The last one was the most intriguing to me, you can find plenty of books on SEAL and Marine snipers, I thought.

One of the authors is an Oregon journalist who embedded with the 2-162 Infantry, the other is a Marine gunnery sergeant, and most of the 2nd section is all his recollections, including some Somalia stories for completion.

Good reading, a fair description of sniper techniques, and three good looks at urban warfare from above street level.

The great gamble: the Soviet war in Afghanistan by Gregory Feifer
 

This work uses a fair number of interviews with Soviets, both soldiers and officers, mostly paratroopers and pilots. It served to remind me how brutal and ugly the Soviet army on campaign could be. Afghans are killed left and right, and looting is rampant. Also, how crappy Soviet logistics were: the looting was largely of consumer goods that couldn't be bought in the USSR, and of food or warm clothing that the soldiers couldn't get at all. The Soviet conscripts were terrorized and beaten down by their senior privates, not the sergeants. The Afghans' loyalty was as suspect and pliable that we have heard from the American war in that same country.

The Soviet (non)decision to intervene, as well as the Afghan disintegration that led to it, seemed to take a long time to read, while once the shooting starts, the interviews with veterans made this a great read.

Irony: Najibullah's government that was left behind when the Soviets finally pulled out in early 1989, no one expected his government to survive. It outlasted the Soviet Union. By only a few months, really.

What struck me in relation to T2k: the Soviet Army we see here is really pretty crappy. Something had to have changed (in timeline) to make the Soviets such a power in 1995-1999.

Ashley's war
 

Ashley's war: the untold story of a team of women soldiers on the special ops battlefield / Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

This was really well-written, in that I had trouble putting it down.

The book follows a group of women (already in the Army) who were among the first to compete to be on Cultural Support Teams, women who accompanied spec-ops raids in Afghanistan for intelligence & security tasks. Since women in Afghan culture need to be kept separate and safe from non-family men, American/Western troops would anger the locals by searching or interrogating any women they found, and usually not get any information. By bringing women along to calm the Afghan women, keep them safe from the raiders or the Taliban during a raid, and ask them questions without the eyes of men on them, they could ease tensions and collect information.

From about 2010, Joint Special Operations Command started pushing for such women "enablers", and got a lot of volunteers-- Army women who wanted to do more than sit at desks. They ran them through a quick training course in both Ranger/SF operations, and Afghan culture. (Language was an unfortunate shortfall, so female interpreters who could keep up with the Rangers-- really rare-- had to be picked up once they got there.) The women they got were the ones who were already very physically fit, able to beat the men's PT requirements and very motivated to do something active.

The book follows the "plank-owners" of the CSTs to Afghanistan in 2011, with interviews from many of the participants. Ashley of the title is 1LT Ashley I. Stumpf-White, who was killed by an IED in 2011, so far the only woman lost from the CSTs. The writer spends 2 chapters with her family and husband (active-duty artillery officer), as well as the other CST members and an interpreter in the aftermath of her death. I was very impressed with not just the Army's reaching out to the family, but the Rangers-- both in Afghanistan and in the States-- taking over. They didn't write her off as "not one of us" or "just an enabler", but embraced her as a Ranger.

T2k value? It's something to consider in interrogating locals (especially in the Middle East), that women might more likely talk to non-threatening women, rather than foreign men.

With the new translation to English, here is a chance to read about the Continuation War from 1941-44, written from the point of view of a machinegun company in the Finnish Army. While some characters are fictional and others are a combination of several real personnel, there are some actual individual soldiers (under different names), who servee during the war in the said company. It's also a good description of how many Finns viewed the war.

As some of you already know, I've been collecting technical specifications on various equipment and weapons since getting back into Twilight2000. I was dismayed at the lack of detailed information on weapons like back blast, travel/flight speed and minimum arming distance. I found a book published by Osprey about the RPG that has a great deal of information in it. Gordon L. Rottman wrote The Rocket Propelled Grenade and it is full of little gems that will help you "flesh out" the RPGs in your game. There is the occasional mistake in the book, like the editor accidentally putting the stats for the RPG-2 in the RPG-7's chart, but the book is packed with useful information. I have had experience actually firing an RPG-7 in Africa (during Restore Hope) and again when I fired a Chinese Type 69 while working with a security detail that traveled to Afghanistan. Mr. Rottman's experience with the weapon mirror my own. Check out the book at Osprey Publishing.

My last read books:

Kill or Get Killed by Rex Applegate
A Rifleman Went to War by Herbert McBride
Men Against Tanks by John Weeks
How to Make War by James Dunnigan
Hatcher's Notebook by Julian Hatcher

I need to buy a copy of "How to Make War", I've read the library copy so many times. Jim Dunnigan was "the Grand Old Man" of wargame designers, and that book is an excellent introduction to the subject.

Back to Life
 

I just had to add one or two;
To Hell and Back- Audie Murphy the reason I went in the Army.
The Longest Day Book not the movie (not bad Movie)
The Red badge Of Courage simple short and classic the writer knew what courage was /is
Pork Chop Hill again Book Not movie. I am so glad I did not fight in the frozen wasteland.
Any WEB Griffin Book
Lee’s lieutenants