Derek Nudd's Blog, page 5

The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters

The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters: Linchpin of Victory 1935-1942 by Andrew Boyd

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If you are looking for a minute-by-minute analysis of the loss of Force Z (Prince of Wales and Repulse) look elsewhere - many authors have covered that disaster in detail. Boyd steps back for a strategic view, and rappels down the cliff of time to get the perspective of 'then'. What did the decision makers know and not? What uncertainties did they have to take account of? What were the 'unknown unknowns'?
The timeframe of this weighty book is interesting. In the author's view 1935 was when the Royal Navy first began to plan seriously for a two-hemisphere war, and by the end of 1942 the fruits of the 1938-9 building programme were coming on stream and the point of greatest danger was past.
The RN did not have the capacity to confront three first-rank enemies in five theatres and two hemispheres simultaneously. Its strategy was therefore to rely on the support of allies - France in the western Mediterranean and the US and Dutch navies in the East. The collapse of France and (later) Pearl Harbour and the initial ineffectiveness of the US submarine arm changed the picture.
Then there were the uncertainties. Would Japan attack British interests only, allowing the US to stay neutral? Would Russia hold out?
Naval Intelligence had a surprisingly accurate picture of Japanese capacity and intentions. The Admiralty was faced with two choices: to focus on the defence of the Indian Ocean trade routes and accept that Singapore was ultimately expendable, or commit to an aggressive strategy northward from Singapore in support of the US Eastern Fleet.
The reader will need to keep track of a heady list of assessments, conferences and agreements. Boyd's argument is that, far from the conventional picture of Churchill bullying a reluctant Admiralty into a desperate gamble, there was a deliberate change of strategy from defensive to aggressive in the last quarter of 1941 - without the resources to implement it.
Having dealt with Force Z from a purely strategic perspective Boyd goes on to a more detailed description of Somerville's inconclusive dance with a greatly superior Japanese fleet off Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in April 1942. Admitting the mistakes made, he argues that with just a modicum of luck it could have been a British Midway.
Overall the book provides a refreshing perspective on one of the lesser known aspects of WW2. Boyd argues convincingly that the Indian Ocean and eastern Mediterranean were critical to the Allied war effort by assuring supplies of Persian oil to the east, Imperial troops and supplies to the European and Mediterranean theatres, and above all keeping the southern supply route to Russia open.
Given the timeframe and geographic focus I find it odd that he doesn't mention the Battle of the Java Sea. My other reservation is the frequency with which the expressions 'might have', 'could have', and 'would have' crop up. Surely these open up his flank to a carping historian (no such creature!) complaining about speculation.
The book is well produced and written with a plate section containing 26 well-chosen illustrations.



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A Time Without Shadows

A Time Without Shadows by Ted Allbeury

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I am currently re-reading several of Ted Allbeury's books, which had me captivated at the time. His writing is still skilful and pacey, but I find in some of his books the storytelling ages in a way that his contemporaries Le Carré, Price and Deighton don't. This is not one of them.
I am coming to the conclusion that his best work is that which draws most directly on his own experience during and after World War II. This falls into that group and focusses on a post-war effort to unravel the betrayal of a Special Operations Executive (SOE) network in France. It mixes in the bitter rivalry between SIS (MI6) and SOE, and blends fictional characters into real events in the manner of the best historical fiction.
Thematically, then, it has a certain amount in common with The Dangerous Edge. Both are worthwhile reads or re-reads. The world they describe feels real and relevant while some of his more imaginative works can seem a bit laboured in retrospect. Some of the phrasing is 'of its time' but less so than many others.



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Strange Intelligence

Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service by Hector C. Bywater

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Parts of this book need to be treated with a degree of caution. Bywater was careful to avoid compromising secrets (unlike some other authors) but eager to promote the value of 'professional' agents as opposed to eager bodgers. To read his account the Admiralty knew everything worthwhile about German naval technology and intentions by about 1912, and any lack of readiness was purely down to the use they made of the information.
With that one caveat the book is an interesting and entertaining read. It gives insights into pre-WW1 tradecraft and the sheer brass neck needed to operate in an increasingly hostile environment. In some ways it is even more interesting when Bywater covers topics where he has no personal engagement. He adds useful commentary on the trial of Brandon and Trench after they were caught snooping on Borkum in 1910 (they were less amateurish than he gives them credit for). He adds material on the interrogation of U-boat skipper Freiherr Spiegel von und zu Peckelsheim (weird name, devious so-and-so) and describes the painstaking work of the cryptographers.
So yes, a quickish read that exceeded my expectations.



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The Rules of the Game

The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command by Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I was hesitant to pick this book up because of the size of it - 600 pages before we get to the appendices, notes, bibliography and index. I need not have been. It combines forensic analysis with superb writing.
The core of it is the battle of Jutland / Skagerrakschlacht, from which no senior commander on either side emerged smelling of violets, though some came out whiffier than others.
Gordon sets the scene and then winds the clock back to the nineteenth century debate between the 'control' and 'ratcatcher' schools of tactical thought in the Royal Navy. The former's insistence on precision seamanship and balletic fleetwork was ironically reinforced after the traumatic loss of HMS Victoria in a collision with Camperdown caused by rigid obedience to an impossible signal.
Returning to Jutland he completes his account of the battle and its sordid political aftermath. His account is compelling but other, later historians disagree in some points. It is worth the reader's while keeping an eye on the 'Courses and Directions' table in Appendix 1 if they are not familiar with boxing the compass.
He completes the book by raising the important question, what can this teach us today? Writing after the 1982 Falklands conflict and the first Gulf War he was very aware of the tension between proponents of rapid technological change (enthusiastically supported in the media) and the empirical knowledge of people who had been there. One group is accused of preparing for the last war, the other, perhaps, of optimising for peacetime conditions.
The one thing I wish he had gone into in a bit more depth (perhaps in yet another appendix) is the debate between the Dreyer and Pollen fire-control systems. He alludes at several points to the shortcomings of the Dreyer table but without being specific.
As ever, we should 'check our privileges' of safety, comfort and hindsight before passing judgement on people who had none of those benefits.



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Hour of the Donkey

The Hour of the Donkey by Anthony Price

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In this one book Anthony Price, an established spy-fi author of note, proves he can do historical fiction too. He elegantly weaves his worms-eye narrative of the Battle of France through the tapestry of historical fact to a nail-biting dénouement 'explaining' Hitler's notorious stop order at the Aa Canal. In the process he fills in the prehistory of the David Audley novels. The pace is frenetic but still just about credible. There are no brass heroes (though a couple of monsters), mainly ordinary human beings on both sides making the best of the situation they are in. What is not to like?



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Francis McCullagh: Prisoner of the Reds

A prisoner of the Reds, the story of a British officer captured Siberia by Francis McCullagh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


To be taken prisoner of war once is unfortunate. Three times (according to himself) begins to look reckless. Yet this was the fate of Francis McCullagh, a journalist by trade, who was serving as intelligence officer with the British intervention in Siberia in 1919. He was with a small left behind to watch developments as the bulk of the force retreated in the face of the Red Army offensive. They didn't get out quickly enough.
McCullagh, with the agreement of his colleagues, reverted to his civilian identity and made the journey under guard to Moscow, where he was able to see something of ordinary Russians' life in the freshly-minted Bolshevik state. Eventually the system caught up with him and he was pulled in by the Cheka, spending an uncomfortable few days in the Lubianka before being released and deported. In the meantime his place and uniform at Ekatarinberg had been taken by someone else who urgently needed to leave the country, so two Francis McCullaghs were eventually repatriated.
As we would expect the book is well written, given that the language is of its time. McCullagh is no fan of the Tsarist regime and open-eyed about the mutual incomprehension of capitalist and communist world-views. He writes,
'Seldom since the Crusaders came into conflict with the Saracens did two schools of thought more diametrically opposed to one another find themselves face to face. ... We had had a prejudice against people who ate with their knives, or had relatives in the tailoring business, or had been in jail, or had had a Board School education, or who, to put it briefly, were not Sahibs.'
And a little later, on meeting an Englishman in Moscow,
'... he expressed surprise at my having got a commission, though not belonging to any of the old county families.'
He sees the potential in the socialist approach but is horrified by the societal collapse he sees around him: starvation in a country where food is seized by the collective then wasted for lack of the means of distribution; absolute authority delegated on the basis of nepotism and political conformity rather than ability; world history rewritten from a single, blinkered point of view.
Somehow McCullagh also manages to investigate and produce a remarkably coherent account of the murder of the Tsar's family.
A word of warning: there is more than a hint here of the antisemitism that was to emerge in McCullagh's later writing. This would not have been controversial at the time and it took another twenty years for a different despot to show us where that road leads. Even so ....



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Anthony Price: The Memory Trap

The Memory Trap by Anthony Price

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I have just finished re-reading Price's David Audley novels in chronological sequence, an entertaining exercise. Some of his phrasing wouldn't pass a modern editor but his dense plotting and storytelling is as good as ever. One thing that does strike me is that with the last two - this and A Prospect of Vengeance - he knew he was coming to the end of the line. 'Vengeance' tidied up the loose ends of Frances Fitzgibbon's life, and perhaps should have been subtitled Yesterday's Ghost. This answers the question, 'Whatever became of Peter Richardson?'

Having sorted out the R&D old guard and passed the baton on to a rising generation, introduced in previous books, he leaves the survivors to fade away knowing they have done their best and kept the monster from the gates for another day. And the monster just might be us.

So, don't expect clearly defined heroes and villains, with trumpets and triumph for the good guys. Audley sees his contemporaries - dangerous old men - come out of retirement one last time and feels his own encroaching mortality. In Price's final words of the series,

'And, whether you were young and beautiful, or old and stupid ... survival was a virtue.'



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Churchill's Secret War With Lenin

Churchill's Secret War With Lenin: British and Commonwealth Military Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1918-20 by Damien Wright

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a useful and important book. Too few people even know that the WW1 allies continued fighting in Russia afterward, and too many of the existing accounts are partial, distorted or biased. Damien Wright has produced a comprehensive overview, organised by battle front, stretching from the start of the British and Commonwealth intervention in 1918 to their final withdrawal in 1920.
There are plenty of 'What?' moments. Both sides had a track record of executing prisoners, using poison gas, and shelling villages (the fate of the inhabitants in a northern winter is not discussed). Early on, British troops worked with the Bolsheviks against White Finns who were allied with the Germans. Four WW1-vintage Mk 5 tanks left with the Estonians after the British withdrawal were used against German panzers in WW2. The engagement was predictably brief. British submarine L55 was lost with all hands but salvaged by the soviets and remained in service with them until 1953, as well as being the model for their Leninets class. The Japanese (allies at the time) were the last to leave, preserving a foothold in Siberia until 1922.
The reasons for going in were rational enough at first: to protect large deposits of British stores at Archangel (largely appropriated by the Bolsheviks before they arrived), to prevent, as far as possible, the redeployment of German divisions from the eastern front to the western, and to prevent U-boats using the ice-free port of Murmansk to bypass the North Sea blockade. These aims, however, were irrelevant after the Armistice yet Britain and her allies found themselves being sucked into an ever-increasing commitment to a civil war they didn't understand, where complex loyalties could shift without warning. And Russia is a big place. Failure was built into the equation.
Except in one place. The Royal Navy's role in establishing and defending the independence of the Baltic states against both Russian and German aggression was the one clear benefit to come out of the whole sorry tale.
So why only three stars for the book? Even allowing for the mind-numbing complexity of the subject matter, it is hard going. I came away with the feeling that the chapters had been written independently and bolted together at the last minute, so that ideas are too often explained long after their first use. There is repetition, disjointedness, and some parts read like a mashup of regimental war diaries with far too much extraneous detail. Where the people involved went on to influential or interesting lives after their service in Russia it is understandable that Wright stops to describe them, in some other cases it is a little puzzling. The book would be greatly improved by extracting the detail of casualties and awards to chapter endnotes, and by a thorough edit of the rest.
The campaigns in the north, from Murmansk and Archangel, take up roughly two thirds of the text. The pace improves markedly when the author moves on to the other fronts.




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Empireland

Sanghera spent two years researching and writing this book. The quality of his investigation and intellect shine through, as does his balanced approach to the topic. He rigorously avoids being sucked into the imperial shouting match, yet the reader can feel his rising fury (is that too strong a word?) at the things that he, and we, were never told.

Quibbles? There are a few points where he lumps together widely separated instances in the same paragraph to support the same argument. Is this to say that there is a common thread across the years? That may be so but the argument isn't followed up. More seriously, he almost completely ignores the maritime dimension, both mercantile (except for the slave trade) and naval. He recognises that Britain acquired its 18th and 19th century empire almost by accident and governed it with relatively tiny military and political resources. The same period saw Britain's suspicion of large standing armies (they tend to get ideas above their station) balanced by strenuous, and successful, efforts to control the world's oceans. In modern terms that was a huge force multiplier.

Sanghera reminds those of us who try to avoid looking at the past through a filter of current ideology that many of the actions we discuss were controversial at the time. If I have a few reservations it is still a hugely valuable book, mixing personal and dispassionate perspectives to great effect. And yes, it has changed my views.

Vanguard

Vanguard: The True Stories of the Reconnaissance and Intelligence Missions behind D-Day by David Abrutat

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


There is an excellent book here, screaming to get out. It just needs a good editor to release it.
Let's get the grumbles out of the way first. As it stands the book is repetitive, disjointed and sometimes inaccurate - even contradictory. The chapters seem to have been written separately over time and then combined without a detailed read-through, resulting in a certain amount of material duplicated between chapters. Then there are the odd sillies - for example '... its contribution to the war intelligence machinery cannot be underestimated, ...' Errr, no, I don't think that's what he meant. And a trivial personal gripe, he capitalises 'radar' throughout. It's not an acronym. Fixing these problems would make it shorter, more readable and allow the author's genuine scholarship to shine through.
That's it for the gripes. Books have been written about each topic covered by this one individually; the unique strength of Abrutat's work is that he brings all the threads together and shows how they build the overall picture. For that reason, despite my whinges, it is a valuable addition to the bookshelf. It would best suit a reader who already has some knowledge of the topic and can extract the juice without being deterred by the sometimes bitty structure.
I read the first UK hardback edition and a should say a word about the production quality, which is superb. Heavy, semi-gloss paper does justice to the illustrations without the need for a plate section and you feel that if you dropped it you might crack the tiles. I hope the author has taken the opportunity of the later paperback edition to render my moans above obsolete.



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