Reading, Reading over the Bounding Main

After the account of the Saratoga campaign, I'm on to The Coward of Minden, by Piers Mackesy:

An unflattering portrait.

A quite good volume that seeks to rehabilitate Sackville; the author has also written a book on his conduct of the American Revolution that I will read next. He describes the cavalry debacle of Minden very similarly to, say, the Charge of the Light Brigade; as a comedy of errors caused by confusing orders to someone who couldn't see where he was expected to go. Worse, there were multiple contradictory orders, and I feel sympathy for Sackville in that situation. Prince Ferdinand, who commanded at Minden, is depicted as the villain of the piece, in part because he gave little initiative to his subordinates.

Another British submarine memoir:

First read at university
over two decades ago...

A rare account of British submarining - U-boats and US subs get virtually all the WWII press. Quite good and suspenseful account of the North Sea and Mediterranean. I'd be interested to find one of the U and V class boats that sailed out of Malta.

Hastenbeck 1757, by Helion and Company. Still waiting for more of their wargames volumes to show up on Hoopla, or better, the Christopher Duffy books.

The campaign was over some of the same ground as that of Minden. The book is translated from French, and is entirely from the French perspective, but that's not the real problem for me; it's that like many books on the wars in the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire, I'm utterly lost by all the names of towns encountered on the march - except a few from the World Wars - I can orient myself a bit when, say, Ypres or Nijmegen turn up, and I've heard of major cities like Dusseldorf and Munster. The maps, however, are bare bones. In the Minden book there are at least arrows, if not major roads and terrain "hash marks." In this one, there are just rivers and dots-for-towns. There is a ton of potentially useful statistics about supplies, wagons, pontoons, etc, so this might be interesting for a gamer who likes campaigns, but without good maps you'd have to keep it in your head or make your own map! There's only one map with units and arrows on it, the battle of Hastenbeck itself, and that makes the account of the battle more comprehensible.

To be fair, I imagine Europeans reading about the American Civil War are equally as lost.

The battle itself is described pretty clearly, and it ultimately led to the convention of Klosterzeven in which Cumberland gave up Hanover and got in a lot of trouble. Unfortunately for the French commander, he had actually been recalled shortly before the battle, though he didn't learn this until after it, of course. The French were also criticized for not having forced a British surrender.

There are lots of eyewitness accounts, and the book is relatively short. I'm middling in my thoughts about it, but I have learned something about a battle I wasn't familiar with. I'm happy I borrowed it rather than bought it. There are a handful of nice uniform plates.

OK, that's it for this week. On to:

An excellent quote from the above, on Bennington: "Baum ... qualified for marching through a country of mixed friends and foes by speaking no English." His unit included, "... for secrecy, a German band; to speed the column, 170 dismounted German dragoons in search of horses, marching in their huge top boots and spurs and trailing their sabres."

Will I game? Well, maybe. Something solo tomorrow or Sunday. See you then, and thanks for reading.