Reading and Other Stuff

An excellent narrative by the man
who seems to have basically built
the British sniper/scout/observation
concept from the ground up.

What caught my eye:

"A good shot not only strengthens his unit, it raises the morale of the whole unit to know that it contains several first-class shots."

"What was wanted ... was the hunter spirit." (In the sense of having learned to outwit difficult targets)

Observation also useful and important - this explains why snipers are often in the scout or recon platoon, and it's the observer who does much of the work with his telescope (which is claimed to be preferable to the German field-glasses).

This was very painstaking work, and there is an entertaining but eye-opening commentary on the Royal Blankshires and Loamshires (great names for Imagi-nations units!) and how the one's careful design and use of sniping positions is ruined by the other's carelessness when they exchange places in the line. The author uses characterful short-fiction prose to illustrate procedure as well.

The Germans initially had the advantage in sniping (and in light artillery, as they could mortar suspected positions, to the chagrin of everyone else in the British unit). The author mentions doing the same thing, by observing hidden German strongpoints by the sniper positions, then having them bombarded.

Lots of technical tricks and tips, like a dummy head positioned so that after it was shot, a telescope could be placed to look exactly along the opposite line to spot the sniper. There are even puzzle-pictures - "find the sniper."

Makes me want to look up the Vietnam sniper Carlos Hathcock; I had access to a book about him as a kid but never got around to reading it. So far, I can only find audio versions for free, may buy the ebook.

I've got fewer specifics about this book, as I wasn't taking notes, but it's quite good too:

It's not a military history per se; it's more a cultural history. This being the lenses through which people saw how they fought. The title is apropos, because there are many examples of soldiers following the ghosts of the past.

What does this mean? That the Greeks saw the way they waged war as following that fought in The Iliad, and Roman tactics in turn were influenced by the Greeks in whose cultural footsteps they followed. Particularly in late Roman times, "education" was a matter of having read the classics.

The catch is that war in The Iliad was the epitome of "Heroic"; ie, individual heroes challenging each other, to the point that it's actually kind of difficult to tell how the armies of the Trojan War were actually organized or manuevered. There are endless lists of which individual heroes killed who. And this filtered into the way the armies centuries later fought; individual heroism was subsumed into units, and all of a sudden individuals couldn't be famed for their heroism anymore. Except in the sense of, not who or how they killed, but whether they stood their ground in the phalanx. You would think this was the nature of "defending the man next to you," but the author claims it wasn't. The man who stood his ground - which often meant he was killed - was lionized in defeat, while the man who survived (even if he'd been ordered to retreat, saved the colours, etc) was not. This is, of course, where the Spartan meme of "return with your shield or on it" came from, and examples are cited of the families of the dead gaining influence, and being happy and proud of those they had lost, even as they were losing wars, while the families of those who survived were ashamed.

Alexander is said to have fought in the front line not because it encouraged his men or helped him command at the point of greatest importance, but because his education told him that that was what heroes did. And commanders really did go after opposing commanders in those day, just as the fantastic games of Warhammer and 40K tell us they should.

The Romans seem often to have done the same thing; Titus personally seized bits of Jerusalem during the 70CE siege. This despite us thinking of Romans as the soldier end of the soldier vs. warrior dichotomy. The Roman invasion of Persia in the early 300s is also shown as an example, as well as several examples in the late Western Empire of emperors being killed in battle.

I attended OtakuFest (one of our local comic conventions) with the library yesterday, and built a few Paperboys while idling behind the table. Sadly, there weren't enough scissors to get a group of people together and teach them to make their own; I'll bring more next time.

Have been building a lot of paper trees lately - I've been defaulting to it when I can't decide what to work on next, because forests are always useful on a table no matter the period.

Oh, and Oriskany Jim has posted the first half of his video battle report for last post's Anzio game. Enjoy:

Coming up on three years of blogging...!