Acquisitions

Christy Campbell. Target London: Under Attack from the V-Weapons During WWII. London: Little, Brown, 2012. A popular (and in this case, cheap) account of the V-1 and V-2 campaigns with a nicely over-the-top cover illustration. As the title suggests, it does concentrate on London, but Antwerp's ordeal also receives some attention.

Hugh Dolan. Gallipoli Air War: The Unknown Story of the Fight for the Skies over Gallipoli. Sydney: Macmillan, 2013. On the one hand, it's good to see an Australian book about Gallipoli which isn't yet another Anzac story; and any book which cites Frederick Sykes (commander of the RNAS during the campaign) on the back cover and figures him prominently in the index gets bonus points from me. But if you're interested in Sykes you need to read Eric Ash's Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution (1999), but it's not cited here. And while it's clear from the bibliography that extensive archival research has been undertaken in both the UK and Australia, unfortunately there are no endnotes, which limits its scholarly usefulness.

John Keegan. The Face of Battle. London: Penguin, 1978. Don't tell anyone, but I've never read it.

Mark Mazower. Governing the World: The History of an Idea. London: Penguin, 2013. The subtitle is a bit misleading, I feel: except in the early part of the book which deals with the nineteenth century, it's not an intellectual history of world government proposals so much as a history of practical internationalism -- the Hague conferences, the League of Nations, and especially the United Nations and the proliferation of international bodies since 1945. Not that this isn't interesting or useful, but I'd like to know about the dreamers, too.

N. A. M. Rodger, ed. Naval Power in the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. While obviously not intended to form a coherent approach to the topic, there's at least one chapter on most of the major navies. A couple of the chapters are particularly aviation-related: Michael Simpson's on airpower and seapower in the Mediterranean during the Second World War, and Eric Groves' on the Royal Navy's air-sea strategy east of Suez in the early 1960s. Something for everyone (for very small values of everyone).

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4 thoughts on “Acquisitions

  1. Post author

    Alan:

    It can be both!

    Jakob:

    Yes, that's the one. It may well be duff; it doesn't look like it rises much above a popular narrative account, for a start. Which is why I hadn't picked up before it got cheap.

    Jerry:

    Thanks for that.

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