Break Out Area Showing 1,401-1,450 of 2,602

[Boudewijn]

Couldn't agree more AussieRick. We're here to discuss books, not politics.

[Colin]

I agree, no politics, just history.

[Bev]

I was so pleased several nights ago to find a blog posted online by the grandson of my father's commanding officer in the 6th Canadian Field Dressing Station. My Dad is mentioned often and Major Alexander's stories fit in with the letters my Dad sent home. Imagine my pleasure on finding a photograph of Major Alexender with an "unknown officer" who just happens to be my Dad. I am now in touch with Rob Alexander, (his grand-son) and sharing has begun! A photograph that my Dad took of the tent inspection room is also on the banner headline for the blog. I suspect many members would be interested in reading about Doc Alexander. You will find the blog here: https://docalexander.wordpress.com/ab...

[carl]

Exciting find bev!

[Bev]

Very much so!

[happy]

Good Call!!!!!!!!!!!

[Boudewijn]

@Bev, exciting to read about the villages and cities in the Netherlands which I know so well. My respects for those people who served and gave their lives for our liberation. Up to this day we hold those people in our heart. Thank you liberators!

[Lee]

Not WW2, but after. I find peacetime armies just as fascinating as wartime ones, it seems. Brian McAllister Linn wrote , for the prewar erar, and now he's written to cover the postwar Army. I'm looking forward to it.

The Army between WW2 and Vietnam is perhaps of particular interest, since my father was on active duty (stateside only) during the first half of the Vietnam War. Mom spoke briefly of white gloves at the Colonel's wife's tea, or something like that. I think this fascination started when I found his old Officer's Guide from that period, as I was considering ROTC for myself.

[carl]

Wife and I took about 200 yrs of US history to dinner for US Veterans Day.

Bob, 97 yrs old, doing great, B-24 pilot, 35 missions over Eurpoe, 2 crash landings, 1 with over a 1000 bullet holes in the plane , never lost a crewman.

The youngster Jim, 91, US Marine, 3 first waves, Marshalls, Guam, Okinawa.

Highlight of evening was when 20 yr old waiter thanked them for their service, and told us how he'd been reading about ww2, and how much he thought of them. So you know, made them feel the younger generation is salvageable.

Two modest and great guys with great stories. A note on my generosity about dinner, Vets dine free for Veterans Day...

[Liam]

'Aussie Rick' wrote: "I'll head this off before it starts, the election in the United States appears from the outside to have been quite divisive so let's leave the election out of the group discussion as much as I know..."

I'm with you, Rick, and thank you. This is a refuge for all of us, even in the "Break-out Area". The last thing we need to do here is argue about politics. "Divisive", by the way, is an extreme understatement. May God help my poor country...

[zed]

carl wrote: "Wife and I took about 200 yrs of US history to dinner for US Veterans Day.

Bob, 97 yrs old, doing great, B-24 pilot, 35 missions over Eurpoe, 2 crash landings, 1 with over a 1000 bullet holes in t..."

That would have been outstanding.

You have reminded me of a stat I read a day or two back that it was thought there was only 2% of WW2 vets still alive worldwide. As a young bloke here is Brisbane I played competitive darts with a bunch of mates for many years. I had a family friend who was a member of the local RAF association that had both Aus and Brit members. He arranged for our team to come over and play darts again them for an evening as they were always looking for events. It was funny as when us young blokes got there and started the match one of my team mates noticed they had a few blokes playing cribbage in the corner. That was it for a few of the younger blokes, they wanted to learn crib as it was the game of choice among the long days of playing cards during WW2. What a great night that was. Our family friend is still alive and well into his nineties but very frail. Reading your post has made me realise that nights such as mine and yours are soon to be nothing but passing memories.

['Aussie Rick', Moderator]

carl wrote: "Wife and I took about 200 yrs of US history to dinner for US Veterans Day.

Bob, 97 yrs old, doing great, B-24 pilot, 35 missions over Eurpoe, 2 crash landings, 1 with over a 1000 bullet holes in t..."

That's a great story Carl, thanks for sharing with the group, I bet it made those blokes day and the waiters!

[Manray9]

4ZZZ wrote: "carl wrote: "Wife and I took about 200 yrs of US history to dinner for US Veterans Day.

Bob, 97 yrs old, doing great, B-24 pilot, 35 missions over Eurpoe, 2 crash landings, 1 with over a 1000 bull..."

4ZZZ -- Back in my days in the U.S. Navy, cribbage was the game of choice aboard submarines. Cribbage tournaments started as soon as we were underway and continued until homeport again.

[carl]

AR, 4Z, Indeed! hard to believe these fellows won't be with us one day. We kid Bob about making it to 100. He always replies,

"Gawd I hope not! "

[Mikey B.]

I went to the Remembrance Day Ceremony (Nov. 11) where I live in London/ON and was impressed that there were well over a thousand people who showed up of all ages and nationalities.

[zed]

Manray9 wrote: "4ZZZ wrote: "carl wrote: "Wife and I took about 200 yrs of US history to dinner for US Veterans Day.

Bob, 97 yrs old, doing great, B-24 pilot, 35 missions over Eurpoe, 2 crash landings, 1 with ove..."

I was under the impression that the US boys played games such as poker and crib was a Commonwealth pastime. I just had an internet search and have found that crib in fact holds pride of place as the game of choice among US submariners. Live and learn. http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.as...

[Liam]

Here is my Veterans Day story, unsurprisingly a few days late...

Anyone who is in the habit of buying books about military history (or anything else, for that matter) from second-hand book shops, which no doubt includes nearly all members of this group, will be familiar with the experience of opening a newly-purchased volume and finding an inscription on the fly-leaf, usually consisting of a name, date and location or military unit. Normally, these are not particularly interesting, though occasionally they will induce a moment's curiosity ("Joe Blow, Saigon, Christmas 1967", for example). At this point in my life (like most of you, I suspect), I have so many books in my library which at some point were written in by someone else that I couldn't even begin to guess at a number. Once in a while, for whatever reason, my curiosity gets the best of me, and I become obsessed with finding out who the book's previous owner, who wrote the inscription, was. This has happened exactly twice; it's as though a ghost is whispering in my ear *there's a story here- tell my story!*. Rick, Happy, Geevee and perhaps others may remember the first time this happened; I told that story in Message 168 of the "Books Of Interest" thread over in the Military Professional Reading Group (https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...). At the end of that message, which told the story of the late Colonel Patrick G. Collins, I wrote: "Now if I can just find some more information about the late George S. Read, I'll be even happier!"...

This particular story starts about 12-14 years ago (I don't remember the exact date), when I bought a nice First Edition copy of B.H. Liddell Hart's The Strategy of Indirect Approach from John K. King Books here in Detroit. Sadly, it doesn't have a dust-jacket, but what it does have is an inscription on the fly-leaf: "George S. Read, 1942", and a sticker from a book-shop in Durban, South Africa. I was curious, obviously, but I didn't follow up on it. Over the course of the next decade, every time I had nearly forgotten about that inscription, I would be at King Books and find something I just had to buy in the Viet Nam War section, or the Middle East sections, or the Irish History section, or the Biography section- and when I opened the book, it would say "George S. Read" on the fly-leaf. I have right around 20 books now (I stopped counting at 12) that once belonged to Mr. Read; the most recent of these acquisitions, roughly a year and-a-half ago, was De Gaulle and the French Army: A Crisis in Civil-Military Relations, by Edgar S. Furniss Jr. I don't remember which book it was, but one of them had an old return-address label pasted inside the front cover, with a Detroit address. By this point, my curiosity was definitely getting the better of me- who the hell was George S. Read? Why was his taste in reading material damned near identical to mine??? What was this guy, who was apparently a U.S. citizen, or at least a resident alien, doing in S.A. in the middle of the war? Was he a naval officer whose ship was making a port call? Or was he perhaps some sort of diplomat?

The Detroit address in addition to the name gave me a better chance of finding something relevant with a web-search, so I "Googled" Mr. Read- and found practically nothing useful: only that he was in fact deceased (I had hoped against hope that he was merely in some sort of elder-care facility, retirement community or the like), he had lived in Grosse Pointe (a posh suburb of Detroit), probably after he resided at the Detroit address, and that he had a surviving son.

Well, it will come as no surprise to many of you that I'm a bit scatterbrained; it only occurred to me a few days ago to try a web-search using "Grosse Pointe" rather than the Detroit address... I was completely amazed by what I found, which was this obituary:

"George S. Read, 86, banker and longtime Grosse Pointe resident, died Friday, August 2, 2002 in Olathe, Kansas. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where he majored in Greek and Latin. In 1939 he began a career in international banking, joining the First National City Bank of New York at its branch in Shanghai, China. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was interned by the Japanese. He escaped in early 1942 and, together with two comrades, made his way to safety, mostly on foot, across 1800 miles of Japanese occupied China. After returning to the United States, he enlisted and served for the remainder of the War as a Navy Lieutenant in the South Pacific. In 1946 he married Julia Schairer and the two moved to Shanghai, where Mr. Read resumed his banking career with the First National City Bank of New York. The couple left China in 1947 following the Communist revolution, living first in Manila, and then in Hong Kong and Singapore. They returned to the United States in 1953, whereupon Mr. Read joined the Northern Trust Company of Chicago as head of its international banking division. In 1966 they moved to Detroit, where Mr. Read became Vice President of the City National Bank of Detroit. Following his retirement, the Reads continued to live in Grosse Pointe, where he remained a voracious reader and collector of antique maps. They moved to Olathe, Kansas in 2001 to be near their son. Mr. Read is survived by his wife Julia; a son, George Sullivan, Jr.; a daughter in law, Maureen; and two grandsons, William and Thomas. A memorial service will be held at 11:00 a.m. on Friday, August 30 at Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian Church, 8625 E. Jefferson Avenue, Detroit. Memorial contributions may be made to Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, 20 Roszel Road, Princeton, New Jersey 08540."

Pretty amazing, right??? In case anyone missed it, he could only have purchased the Liddell Hart book while returning to the U.S. after escaping from the Japanese internment camp! What's even more amazing is something I still need to follow up on- I seem to remember reading a story at some point, possibly told by the late Professor Harold R. Isaacs, about being interned by the Japanese in Shanghai, and three men going over the wall and escaping...!!!

[Liam]

One of the weirdest aspects of this story is that I knew Mr. Read was a naval officer almost from the first time I read the inscription in that first book; what's more, I knew he was U.S.N.R. and not a regular. I wasn't sure whether he was in S.A. as an attache or for some other reason, but I knew he'd been in the navy at some point. The only explanation I can think of is that he somehow told me...
For a guy who has little interest in naval warfare, I seem to attract navy ghosts. Between 1992 & 2014, my mother owned a house in Wyandotte, MI which had been built in 1946 on part of a wartime naval aviation training field. Whenever I was there, especially at night, I would hear channels flipping on the television in the front room of the house; when I went to investigate, I'd invariably find the television tuned to some program or other about WWII sea battles. My mother, who lived in Canada with her second husband by that time anyway, has little or no interest in that sort of thing. When my wife and I first had to live in that house between 2001 & 2004, we both had the experience several times of falling asleep on the couch, then waking up in the darkened house to see the silhouette of a tall, thin, vaguely stoop-shouldered man peering through the entry-way at us. He wasn't really frightening after the first few times; he actually seemed as though he didn't want to intrude, invariably ducking around the corner and disappearing whenever one of us saw him. Every time that happened, we would wake up in the small hours of the morning (when the History Channel repeated the previous night's schedule) to the sound of naval gunfire from the television downstairs...
True story, for what it's worth.

[Chin Joo]

Thanks Liam.

There's something romantic about this story.

[carl]

Good stuff MB.

Mikey B. wrote: "I went to the Remembrance Day Ceremony (Nov. 11) where I live in London/ON and was impressed that there were well over a thousand people who showed up of all ages and nationalities.



"

[Elinor]

Bev wrote: "I was so pleased several nights ago to find a blog posted online by the grandson of my father's commanding officer in the 6th Canadian Field Dressing Station. My Dad is mentioned often and Major Al..."

I hosted Rob Alexander on my website here, if anyone wants to read a more complete story of his grandfather at the ill-fated raid on Dieppe: http://elinorflorence.com/blog/dieppe...

[Bev]

Elinor wrote: "Bev wrote: "I was so pleased several nights ago to find a blog posted online by the grandson of my father's commanding officer in the 6th Canadian Field Dressing Station. My Dad is mentioned often ..."

Thanks for sharing Elinor. I had read some of the info before but not the total.

['Aussie Rick', Moderator]

That's a great story Liam, thanks for sharing with the group. I have a few books which a number of previous owners have written their names and date, some starting in the late 1800's. I have added my names to the list as well :)

[happy]

To all that celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday

Happy Thanksgiving

for those who don't

Happy November 24th :)

Don't eat toooooo much :D

[Manray9]

happy wrote: "To all that celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday

Happy Thanksgiving

for those who don't

Happy November 24th :)

Don't eat toooooo much :D"

Thanks, Happy. To you and yours too.

Eating too much is guaranteed.

[Dimitri]

Happy thanksgiving to all! two 80th birthdays in the family this week, so I'll partake in the gluttony & the giving of the thanks.

[Jonny]

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Sixth birthday party tomorrow, so less gluttony but I guess the burgers and chicken nuggets are on me.

[Marc]

I wasn't sure if this was the right spot to discuss this (if there's a more exact thread, please let me know) but I was wondering if anyone in the group has experience with setting up a local discussion group where people would meet to discuss military history? I've been contacted by a local author who might be familiar to some of you, Eric Hammel, about setting up such a group in our hometown. Any and all advice is welcome!

['Aussie Rick', Moderator]

Good as place as any to try and find some information. I tried once to set up a local reading group by using my work place intraweb forum to advertise the fact, got a few interested parties. What about using your local library to promote the idea?

[Bev]

I would agree with the local library. I know ours will often set things up around dates like Remembrance day and that could be good as an option to meet others with similar interests. They might help advertise for you too.

[happy]

I thought this was an interesting article on the equipment of the PBI and how it could be improved relatively inexpensively

http://www.nationalreview.com/article...

also this month photo essay

http://www.nationalreview.com/slidesh...

[Dimitri]

I hope we have no group members among the wounded in Berlin ? It's a WWII group, you just know that city is interesting to us....so...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/wor...

we heard 2,5h ahead of the NY times. Euro-perk.

['Aussie Rick', Moderator]

I second your sentiments Dimitri, sad to hear of another such attack just prior to Christmas, my thoughts go out to all who may be affected by this tragic incident.

[happy]

I thought this was a great article - originally published in '09

http://www.nationalreview.com/article...

Also - this is a pretty damning article on Navy procurement/ship development - about the Zumwalt class destroyers

http://www.nationalreview.com/article...

I think could easily be applied to all DoD procurement

[Manray9]

happy wrote: "I thought this was a great article - originally published in '09

http://www.nationalreview.com/article...

Also - this is a pretty da..."

Happy: Unfortunately, Congress makes the rules and the services are bound by them.

[happy]

I know, I know - I used to work in procurement

[Gustavo]

Merry Christmas, guys! God bless you!

[Jonny]

Merry Christmas everyone! Have a good one.

[Doubledf99.99]

Merry Christmas from the ROK, hope you all and your families have a wonderful holiday season, and be safe!

['Aussie Rick', Moderator]

A very Merry Christmas to all from sunny Australia and all the best for 2017, may it be a great year for everyone with lots of great books :-)

[Michal]

Happy Holiday for You and your families!

[happy]

Let me wish all of my friends here a very Merry Christmas and a Joyous New Year!!!

[Positive Kate]

Best wishes for a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

[zed]

Merry Christmas from a rather cool and rainy Brisbane. Highly unusual this time of year.

[Chin Joo]

Merry Christmas everyone! From sunny... oh wait, rainy, oh heck... Singapore.

[Mike, Assisting Moderator US Forces]

Merry Christmas to all!

[Tony]

Merry Christmas from still-dark London. Wish I was still asleep....

[happy]

Let me add my Christmas wishes to all those here

Merry Christmas and have a safe and Joyous New Year

We actually have a White Christmas this morning! Yesterday was in the low 40s(5-6C) and raining, so what snow we had on the ground melted away. It started snowing about midnight and as I type this (1130 RMST) we have about 6 inches in the yard and it is still snowing! I makes me glad I live within walking distance from my church!

[Liam]

Merry Christmas to all of you from me as well; I hope you all had a nice Christmas and, ideally, have some new books to read!

[Paul]

I quote the great Mel Torme: "Although it's been said, many times, many ways, Merry Christmas to you."