The Ariadne Objective - Wes Davis

 This is the story of the SOE in Crete.  It syntheses the personal accounts of Paddy Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss (see various posts on this blog over the last couple of months) with the 'universal' approach of pure military historians like Antony Beevor.   It works well and is probably the best introduction to the subject.  What Davis brings to the party is deeper research than Fermor or Moss could ever have achieved.  Davis, for example, gives us the names of the crew of the bomber that dropped Fermor but was unable to drop Moss onto the Cretan massif in February 1944.   Where Davis differs from other accounts - for example, the type of bomber it was that carried Fermor and Moss - I tend to side with Davis.  In this instance, for example, why would a British crew fly an American bomber?

Davis is particularly could on John Pendlebury, the eccentric British academic who carried out the groundwork for Fermor and Moss (and Xan Fielding, come to that) and who died the ultimate hero's death during the Fall of Crete in 1941.  Pendlebury gets a chapter to himself - richly deserved.   Davis slightly plays down the abduction of General Kreipe in April '44, which reflects its importance with historical retrospect but does not reflect the fervour it raised at the time.

Obviously I am now quite familiar with the central story but Davis adds a lot of fresh detail and has a 100% engaging style.  I thoroughly enjoyed The Ariadne Objective.  I recommend it to generalist and specialist alike.

The First Day on the Somme - Martin Middlebrook

 The classic account of perhaps the greatest organised bloodbath in history.   I remember when it came out in 1970, it completely upended all the sentimentalised tosh we had been taught to believe about our heroic grandfathers.   There was heroism, that's for sure - and it was all for nothing.   Something like half a million men died on July 1 1916, for absolutely nothing.

The great breakthrough had been planned for several months but it had to be brought forward in order to releive the French at Verdun.   To be clear, the French withstood hell at Verdun.   We should also remember, which Middlebrook reminds us from time to time, that this was a Franco-German war, a re-run of 1871, and we were only there on a gentleman's agreement, helping out.

The scale of the battle, even on that first day (which was meant to be the only day) was too immense for the modern reader to assimilate.   This is where Middlebrook's stroke of genius, since adopted by many, comes into play.   He has chosen ten men, from all over the UK and of all ranks, whose fortunes he follows.   They range from the outliers - the 68 year old who volunteered along with three sons - to the everyday run-of-the-mill man who wanted something more exciting than drudgery in the aforementioned mill.   They allow us to relate.   The machine of the new style of war is humanised.

Middlebrook also draws on first-person testimony.   Again, he covers the range.   There are the published war diaries of Earl Haig and his commander on the day, General Rawlinson; and there are dozens of privates and lance-corporals whom Middlebrook interviewed during his research.  The interviewees all, of course, survived.

Middebrook is the only war historian I recall reading who explains how armies are built.   He takes the time to point out that the German army on the Somme were all conscripts - Germany and France both had forms of national service which meant that every man under sixty had been trained in weaponry, discipline and basic military tactics.   Britain had a small regular army, recently backed up by Territorials primarily meant for home defence.   Everyone else was a volunteer (conscription did not even begin in mainland UK until 1916 and none of the first conscripts were anywhere near battle-ready in July).   Most of those volunteers, and the vast majority of the Brits on the field on July 1 were New Army, men who had responded to Kitchener's famous (or infamous) "Your Country Needs YOU!" appeal.   Kitchener was their hero; he had died at sea less than a month before the Somme, and now he was mythical, a hero.   For every member of the New Army, this was to be their first action.

Middlebrook takes us carefully through the day, with pauses for review at midday and dusk, the same times the generals at HQ could have used to capitalise on the few successes there had been and do something about the appalling disaster unfolding elsewhere.   He then takes us, commendably briefly, through what happened next.   For the ten men whom he chose as guides, he tells us what became of them. 

The book is, as I say, a classic.   It is sobering, instructive, horrendous in what is described but always compassionate.   The errors of leadership were largely unavoidable.   Some misjudgments, however, were built into the plan from the first.  The real catastrophe, it seems to me, was the failure of the man who was told to arrange eighteen trains to ferry the worst casualties from the field to hospital, who on day only managed three.  How many deaths did he have on his bill?  

The sort of slop I was fed as a child is now forcefed to contemporary children about World War II.   The truth will come out and I'm sure there are historians out there waiting to bring it to light.

Richard III and the Bosworth Campaign - Peter Hammond

Written in 2010, that is to say before the discovery of the body in the car park, Hammond writes in the belief that nothing the likes of Thomas More, the Croyland Chronicler, and indeed every single contemporary chronicler said about Richard III was true.  Of course the undoubted body demonstrates that everything they said about his appearance and death was absolutely true, which logically suggests that everything they said about his usurpation was true too.  Hammond is a dyed in the wool Ricardian, a former research officer of the Richard III Society.  As such he seems reluctant to accept that Richard's seizing of the throne was a usurpation, and no mention is made here of the fact that he had his nephews murdered.  Instead we have a long and unnecessary passage about how he didn't really want to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York, albeit, according to Hammond, Elizabeth was mad keen on marrying Richard.  This is piffle and our author is wearing blinkers.

We know where he starts from by his use of the works of Ashdown Hill, who has won awards for his genealogical research but who labours under the belief that everybody in the 15th century was either illegitimate, responsible for whole tribes of illegitimate offspring, or preferably both.  Here we are given two Ricardian bastards, John and Katherine, both of whom seem to have been teenagers, albeit their putative father was only 32 when he died.  It is of course perfectly possible for Richard to have fathered children when he was himself an early teen but let us not forget (what Hammond and Ashdown Hill didn't know in 2010) that Richard's puberty was much worse than most with his spine curving by the day.  It had to hurt and it had to have had psychological impact.  Still, perhaps his response to the trauma was to go out and get bastards.

The main problem with this book, though, is that it doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know about the battle.  Surely A L Rowse did a better job back in 1966?  Funnily enough, Hammond doesn't cite Rowse in his bibliography.  He does, however, make extensive use of the Mancini text, and the second continuation of Croyland, which both have the merit of being contemporary.  I'm sure everything Hammond says about the battle is true so far as it can be, but in a book of only 116 pages, specifically about a battle and written for a specialist military publisher (Pen & Sword), less than ten pages of actual battle is not enough.