What is everyone reading?

Just finished reading "Fire and Fury" by Robert Hanson. It details the Night carpet bombing efforts of the RAF and contrasts that with the AAF daylight pinpoint effort. It is a great read, basically saying that the RAF strategy on bombing did very little to ultimately win the war and that many of their missions were "just worthless slaughter" The AAF on the other hand, with their strategic hitting of Oil and Transportation targets from May of '44 onward, did much to thwart the Nazi war machine and to shorten the war. Pick up a copy!

Best to all, Mike

 

Sounds very objective - any fresh info there about how the 8th dealt with cloud-covered targets,,,? Certainly sounds a great read - the RAF wasted their time on 'worthless slaughter' while the USA shortened the war.....

( I just tried to check it out on Amazon but it seems that the book isn't published in the UK - I wonder why ? )

 

Well put Martin
Bet they missed out the bit where the 8th Air force bombed Dresden twice as well

 

In the middle of reading The Battle of the Narrow Seas witch is about the M.T.B battle in WW2 & it a great read

 

I bought this book for my son, but I can't seem to put it down... DK Eyewitness Books (World War II), as well as many other titles, check them out at Dorling Kindersley - Illustrated Reference Publisher

I am also reading The Mammoth Book of Boys Own Stuff, by Jon E. Lewis ~ SAS survival skills, how to make invisible ink, Fighter Aces of the World, The Indian Tribes of North America, 10 World Famous Battles, and many more

BLINK by Malcom Gladwell ~ The power of thinking without thinking... very interesting.

all the best,

Jem

 

..sorry but the Yanks were just as eager to bomb the big German cities as we Brits had been and the USAAF tried any number of times from March 1944 (Berlin) when they felt sufficiently strong enough to do it. The moral repugnance that is increasingly attached, almost wholly, to RAF Bomber Command serves totally unfairly to exonerate the Americans who on this evidence continue to protest that theirs was a precision campaign; the truth is that the USAAF were still carrying out large scale 'area' raids as late as April 1945 until they finally called a halt when there were no worthwhile targets left to hit......and as for transportation targets, take those in France perhaps, where the Allied air forces ( including the American 8th and 9th ) killed more Frenchmen than the Germans ever did. In the Japanese theatre the Americans went on to unleash the "area-bomb" par excellence in the form of the nuclear weapons that devastated two cities and which significantly for the critics of area bombing brought about the Japanese capitulation....even the Germans recognised that a few more attacks like those which razed Hamburg in July 1943 killing tens of thousands in huge firestorms could have potentially ended the war there and then....


BTW ..currently reading Carlo d'Este's study of Churchill entitled "Warlord"

 

Reading World War 2: Day by Day, just finished Wild Blue Yonder about the 8th US airforce in England.

 

Tend to agree with what has been said. It sound to me like a rehash of the post-war US Strategic Bombing Survey.

Currently reading:

Michael Neifield and Michael Berenbaum (Eds.) The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003)

and

Vincent Orange, Tedder: Quietly in Command (London: Routledge, 2006)

Ross

 

I just picked up, and started reading, a copy of "Beyond Uncertainty" by David C. Cassidy, published by Bellevue Literary Press in 2009. It's the biography of Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist who stayed in Germany, and headed up the German atomic bomb project in the late 1930's, despite being the object of vicious media attacks by the Nazi Party and the SS. Heisenberg did the initial feasibility study for the German atomic bomb, but badly screwed up his calculations and reported that a practical nuclear bomb would not be technologically possible for many years. The German military therefore decided to concentrate on other applications, such as nuclear power, and never came close to producing an A-bomb.

Later, after the American bombs were dropped on Hiroshima, Heisenberg was astonished that a practical atomic bomb was produced in only a matter of a few years. He then tried to claim that his error was deliberate and motivated by a desire to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Nazis, but this tale has generally been discredited.

Next up on my reading list is "Empires in The Balance" by H. P. Willmott, published by the Naval Institute Press.

 

I recently finished _Crete: The Battle and the Resistance_ by Antony Beevor (John Murray Publishers, 1991,2005).

I am now reading _Steel Boat, Iron Hearts: A U-Boat Crewman's Life Aboard U-505_ By Hanns Goebeler with John Vanzo (Savas Beatie, 2005, 2008). This is a very good read and should be on the reading list of every student of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Greg C.

 

more US combat reports via 8th AF Mustangs during November/December 44 for a future title in progress.

fun-enlightening stuff gents

 

just finished
auschwitz - laurence reese
the miracle of dunkirk - walter lord
d-day - anthony beevor
dunkirk - hugh sebag montifiore

just started on "home run escape from nazi europe" - john rennel and tony nichol (again)

 

Just finished reading Christer Bergstrom series of books.

Barbarossa: The Air Battle July-December 1941

Stalingrad - The Air Battle: 1942 through January 1943

Kursk: The Air Battle

Bagration to Berlin: The Final Air Battles in the East 1944-1945

 

Right now i'm reading An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson. I just started it today. So far, so good.

 

On the last chapter of 'The Bloody Triangle-The Defeat of Soviet Armor In The Ukraine, June 1941.' It centers around the Russian failed counter-attack around the Dubno region during the early stages of barbarossa. The book is very interesting and told through the Soviet viewpoint .

 

I am currently reading 1776 by David Mcullough.

 

Me too Gund1. I just received the two existing parts to the Liberation Trilogy, Army at Dawn and Day of Battle and started on book one almost immediately. It is off to a magnificent and riveting start, hard to put down.

 

Gail Chatfield: By Dammit, We're Marines!




Eric Hamell: Pacific Warriors

 

what did you think ?

..I was asked by the publisher to copy-edit the first two books in that series (ie put them into English). As you probably know the author is not a native speaker. Three months later I'd more or less lost the will to live ....but at least they are "readable" in English...otherwise there is some excellent material in there from both sides ..