A Month of Reading

I've actually avoided tabletop this month. Stayed home two Saturdays that Tactical Combat was on at Das Krieg Haus because this has really been an exhausting month that I am glad is over (though I still need to finish my monthly report for work). I'm hoping to get off work February 18th for a mini-convention at the club, but it doesn't look likely. When I get home at the end of the day, I mostly just want to rest and read. So I've gone through quite a bit.

One of the games I've missed, from Sitrep Podcast:

Anyway - reading.

Mark Bowden is best known for Black Hawk Down. Hue 1968 is broader in scope but just as gripping - if you're interested in city-fighting (plenty of ideas for scenarios here) or in the Tet Offensive, check this one out. There are actually three or four other books already on the topic, but none where the author interviewed participants (civilian and military) from both sides and delved into what it was like on the ground. The smell and desperation of civilians and soldiers alike comes through in these pages. Hue was the longest and heaviest battle of Tet, because it was the only one where the initial Communist objectives were met. This is a very intense story, particularly for the Vietnamese civilians who were trapped between the Communists and American-South-Vietnamese. The Communists had lists of enemies to round up and kill (they shot thousands and even buried some alive), and were disappointed when those they left alone did not rise to support them as expected. Unfortunately, those civilians who escaped to Allied lines were crammed into badly kept refugee camps, and those who didn't were shot at by the Americans as assumed VC. We learn what it was like to smuggle weapons in and people out of the city, and what it was like to survive among the rats and rubble.

The American civilian perspective is well-represented, particularly by the press, many of whom were present and a few trapped in VC-taken territory. The "turning point" of political discourse is clearly visible here, and when Walter Cronkite turned up the writing was very much on the wall. There is also an undercurrent of American frustration that they seemed to be doing all the fighting for the South Vietnamese; an elite ARVN "tiger" unit actually stemmed the initial assault and held its own throughout the battle, but was not publicized and not in sight of the Marines who were grinding their way through Hue.

The urban combat was fatiguing. One of the interviewees was a woman VC who started out singing and looking forward to liberation, then spent several weeks hiding in trenches from bombing runs, watching friends dismembered. American and French civilians caught in the area also had harrowing stories to tell; some captured and sent North, others making it to American lines. Attacking Hue by air was at first outlawed, because it was an ancient cultural touchstone - but its own fortress construction made it a perfect defensive position, so restrictions were gradually lifted and the city was pounded into rubble.

The battle, despite actually being the largest and with the heaviest casualties of the Tet offensive (most of them civilian), was relatively small, with only a few US battalions fighting at any one time, and a mere handful of tanks and Ontos vehicles. Barring the cultural and political aspects, there is plenty of inspiration for small-scale city-fighting scenarios here. A worthy successor to Black Hawk Down.

The Vietnam Experience is a series I've always wanted to read, and Hue made me go hunting for it. Only a couple volumes were available online, so this was a taster. It is not, despite my initial impression, a Time-Life series, but by Boston Publishing Company. There is more text and fewer images - primarily photographs with a few maps and graphs. Appropriately given my most recent reading on the war, I found Nineteen Sixty-Eight. This was, of course, the watershed year, both in America's time in Vietnam and on American politics, both of which this volume spends equal time on. There are volumes specifically on North and South Vietnam, so I expect the emphasis on the "home front" is not typical. Plenty of space is given to protests, assassinations, and "flower children;" almost none to my favorite, tactics and equipment. No real gaming interest here. It's more an overview of society (in Vietnam as well as the US) as they recognized the weakness of South Vietnam. We tend to talk a lot about how Tet made the US recognize the futility of the war, but (to a greater if more general amount than Bowden's book), the South Vietnamese perspective is also shown. Its citizens increasingly lost confidence in the capacity of their government to protect them, and the NVA and VC deliberately targeted civilians to engender this.

Just as important to this period is the South Vietnamese government. There was still plenty of factionalism and corruption, despite a brutal crackdown on the latter. The initial peace negotiations are also discussed, and put into context the memetic claim that they foundered over the shape of the table. There really was difficulty over that table, because North Vietnam wanted the southern insurgency represented, while South Vietnam did not want to give the impression that it recognized that insurgency in any way. Given its political struggles, this seems entirely understandable under the circumstances!

Less enjoyable in some ways than the Time-Life Civil War series I'm also working through, mostly due to a simpler graphical style, but still a good read. I will order more of the series.

Peter C. Smith is a very prolific writer on the topic of dive-bombers, as I discovered when I looked up the Blackburn Skua. Since I discovered it in a book on WWII naval aviation in childhood, it's been one of my favorites. I'm not sure why, though it might be owing to my Anglophilia. It also appeared in a propaganda-adventure series my dad introduced me to, the adventures of Dave Dawson and Freddy Farmer, red-blooded teenagers who join the RAF. In the third volume, they serve in the Western Desert shortly after Operation Compass, and fly a Skua up against six Italian and German planes, shooting four of them down.

The Skua, sadly, turns out to have not been that impressive as a fighter plane. If any Skua crew had shot down more than one plane in a single action, it would have been prominent in this book, and the crew would have gotten Distinguished Flying Crosses. It was designed as a dual fighter/dive bomber, a bit like the better known Dauntless, but wasn't especially good at either role as a result. It wasn't a terrible interceptor, but could not in any way hold its own against genuine fighters. However, it was innovative as a dive bomber, in particular equipped with the first "swing-out" device to push the bomb away so that it didn't strike the propellor when dropped during a steep dive.

The British - particularly the air force - were very resistant to dive-bombing. Smith provides plenty of detail on the Skua's fraught gestation immediately before WWII. One problem was that the standard dive before the war was only of 45 degrees - not nearly as accurate and safe from flak as the steeper 70-75 degree dive the Skua was capable of, or the 90-degree dive true dive-bombers could make.

Smith delves deeply into engineering specifications, construction details and testing phases, as I've discovered while starting his equally comprehensive volume on the Vultee Vengeance. He writes not just about combat histories, but about the design aspects that make a dive-bomber good at its job ... or not. So I learned more than I thought possible about wing-folding, self-sealing fuel tanks, and safety equipment. The Skua, as a naval aircraft, included watertight compartments and an integral dinghy. As a carrier plane, it required folding wings and tough landing gear, but most of its combat operations were from land - it had the range to fly from Scotland to Norway, although a couple squadrons also operated from Norway itself. This is why the only extant Skuas remaining have been recovered from there - also because one of them was buried under ice for a while.

Every single combat sortie of a Skua and Roc (the turreted-fighter version of the Skua) is covered, complete with crew names and aircraft serial numbers. (X, Y, and Z flew to Narvik on this day, etc.) This builds up a comprehensive look at the ongoing routine of a combat squadron, which is interesting in itself. A couple chapters are devoted to the Skua's one real success - sinking the German light cruiser Konigsberg in harbor. Only a couple of direct hits were scored, and I was interested to learn that the worst damage was from a near miss that exploded in the water and buckled the ship's hull. The Skua, however, had a short combat life, being used only as target tugs from late 1941 on. Almost nothing is said of the Roc, like the Boulton-Paul Defiant an ineffective turret fighter that also saw primary duty as a tug.

There are copious photos and diagrams. Smith's books are much wordier and more technical than Squadron/Signal volumes - an engineer's dream but a book to make a more casual reader's eyes glaze over with specifications and statistics. Still quite good - there is plenty of operational info, and the technical detail, though complex, provides a history of development and its difficulties that you don't often get in "lighter" volumes. I enjoyed it, but admit that it is for a specialist interest. I've started reading his volume on the Vultee Vengeance, another aircraft that isn't as famous as it probably should be.

A last volume I almost forgot:

An excellent volume on the Muslim-Christian struggle for the Mediterranean, the story is packed with character and, dare I say, adventure. Starting in 1520 with the siege of Rhodes that drove the Knights of St. John to Malta, and ending with the tremendous clash of galleys at Lepanto, the tale is tensely told. Slavery was, for both sides, both a means and a purpose of battle, but religion - vicious in its hatreds - played the greatest role. Here are the emperors Philip and Suleiman, the pirate Barbarossa, the admirals Don Juan and Andrea Doria, and Pope Pius V. For them, the Mediterranean was just that, the center of the world, where if it could be taken all roads of conquest were open. It's illustrated with period etchings, vistas and maps. There is plenty of inspiration for a gamer here - it makes me want to break out the galleys and fortifications. Especially at Malta, there is scope for ambushes, betrayals and forlorn hopes. I did learn that Lepanto was not actually all that decisive - it was not quite a disaster for the Turkish fleet. There are many points, both there and at Malta, where chance (or perhaps the will of God) changed the fate of many, or, as the author would have it, the fate of Christian Europe. Highly recommended.

Finally, I received the Games Workshop "Warhammer Alliance" school/library kit. I hope to try building some of the figures tomorrow with the teens at work; will post pictures if I do. Happy February.