Grand unified books thread

[Threviel]

When was the Swedish military in Africa?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis

[Malthus]

Finished The Lion From The North: The Swedish Army During The Thirty Years War, by von Essen, 2 volumes. A good modern overview. The first volume covers the reign of Gustavus Adolphus, and the second the post-1632 Swedish army. The second volume also briefly describes the navy, and the Swedish military in North America and Africa.

https://youtu.be/T1gvNaC17B4

[The Brain]

Huh.

as in, I had never heard of that.

You're not the only one. I might not have heard of it if it wasn't for the Swedish comic Johan Vilde (John the Savage), which was a thing in Sweden in the late 70s and 80s (about a Swedish boy who goes native in Africa).

[The Brain]

Finished The Lion From The North: The Swedish Army During The Thirty Years War, by von Essen, 2 volumes. A good modern overview. The first volume covers the reign of Gustavus Adolphus, and the second the post-1632 Swedish army. The second volume also briefly describes the navy, and the Swedish military in North America and Africa.

https://youtu.be/T1gvNaC17B4

I learnt recently that Sabaton played in occupied Crimea in 2015, a concert organized by Putin's favorite biker gang. I'm not anal about artists acting within the bounds of decency, but that's a bit too much for me. Playing in Russia, fine, but giving Ukraine and democracy the finger like that...

Of course, the biggest crime of Sabaton remains that all their songs sound the same.

[The Brain]

Finished Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, by Applebaum. Very interesting and well written. I'm not an expert on the famine but my impression is that the book is an accurate description.

[Syt]

I bought the 97 Cooper edition of Plato's Complete Works a while ago and have been working my way through its dialogues (it's sorted into Thrasyllus's tetralogies, which I understand is not how modern scholars would do it, but *shrug*. I found the first four ones surrounding Plato's trial and execution (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phædo) quite interesting to work through. There's some good video by philosophy professors out there that give further background and analysis of the dialogues which I found helpful.

Similar, in the second tetralogy the Theaetetus and Sophist. Cratylus' endless pages of ancient Greek etymologies - yeah, could have done without. Currently on Statesman which is a bit of a slog. I'm not sure yet if I will stick with the reading order after this or if I will pick the ones on topics I'm interested in and that are considered his main works.

[crazy canuck]

Finished Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, by Applebaum. Very interesting and well written. I'm not an expert on the famine but my impression is that the book is an accurate description.

I have been wanting to get this

[crazy canuck]

I bought the 97 Cooper edition of Plato's Complete Works a while ago and have been working my way through its dialogues (it's sorted into Thrasyllus's tetralogies, which I understand is not how modern scholars would do it, but *shrug*. I found the first four ones surrounding Plato's trial and execution (Cryto, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phædo) quite interesting to work through. There's some good video by philosophy professors out there that give further background and analysis of the dialogues which I found helpful.

Similar, in the second tetralogy the Theaetetus and Sophist. Cratylus' endless pages of ancient Greek etymologies - yeah, could have done without. Currently on Statesman which is a bit of a slog. I'm not sure yet if I will stick with the reading order after this or if I will pick the ones on topics I'm interested in and that are considered his main works.

I recommend putting down Statesman and go to Gorgias. It is not only a good, and relatively short, example of the Socratic method but I think it sets the stage for the other pieces.

[KRonn]

A while ago I read a WW2 book "The Liberator" by Alex Kershaw. It's about a US infantry officer named Felix Sparks in the 45th division and all he and his unit went through. It told of the tough fighting, heavy casualties in places like Anzio where his unit barely held on, losing most of the company. It brought home the heavy casualties taken by this unit but which would be similar for any combat unit. They fought in Sicily, Italy, then into southern France into Germany. I wasn't really surprised by the heavy casualties as I've seen that before, and when looking at the actions of my Father's 90th division.

Also recently re-read a book "Samurai" about Saburo Sakai, Japanese Navy pilot. Kind of tough reading given that he was in an elite unit at times which shot down many allied aircraft. The Japanese later on suffered from not training enough pilots. Sakai describes how before war with the US/allies their training program was overly stringent about who could become a pilot. Later he lamented that process as his units were short of trained pilots as the war progressed.

They had lots of trouble with B-17s at first, surprised at how fast and rugged they were. But they found they could have more success with earlier models with head on attacks. Same as I've read before with German pilots vs bombers. I read one story about him damaging a US fighter aircraft so badly that it couldn't maneuver, rudder shot away, describing the pilot as a big man. The plane went down through some clouds. In a WW2 magazine I read recently of that encounter and found out that the pilot bailed out and survived.

[grumbler]

The Japanese pilot selection was so stringent because the Japanese High Command assured itself that the war would be won quickly, so quality counted more than quantity.  You could only carry around 70 planes on a carrier, so you wanted those seventy pilots to be elite.  That was pretty much their policy on ships and aircraft, as well.

The real Japanese mistake was to never allow pilots to rotate back to training units (except when disabled), like the other major powers did.  The lessons learned by the front-line pilots didn't get back to the pilots in training except very slowly and very incompletely.

[KRonn]

The Japanese pilot selection was so stringent because the Japanese High Command assured itself that the war would be won quickly, so quality counted more than quantity.  You could only carry around 70 planes on a carrier, so you wanted those seventy pilots to be elite.  That was pretty much their policy on ships and aircraft, as well.

The real Japanese mistake was to never allow pilots to rotate back to training units (except when disabled), like the other major powers did.  The lessons learned by the front-line pilots didn't get back to the pilots in training except very slowly and very incompletely.

Yep, that sums up much of what the pilot said, and the Japanese military paid dearly for it, more and more, as the war went on.

Early in the war he was a Lae with an elite group of fighter pilots. He was at Iwo Jima when US aircraft first attacked but it would be quite a few months before the invasion as the allies were still moving through other Pacific islands. He said that Iwo was lightly defended and could have easily been taken at the time he was there. He also spoke of newer US aircraft, was mostly impressed and also spoke of new Japanese aircraft towards the end of the war as Japan developed some good models.

I saw in a documentary that Japan, along with getting jet tech from Germany, was probably equal to or better than Germany in jet aircraft tech and had secret underground factories. They would have had at least some and maybe quite a few if an invasion of Japan had occurred.

[grumbler]

The first Japanese jet flew its first test flight the day after Hiroshima was bombed.  There was no hope that it could have been in operational units by November and, in any case, it was inferior in all respects to the P-51 other than, maybe, firepower.

The US would have been better-advised to attack Iwo Jima along with the Marianas, rather than Palau.  Palau was not strategically valuable, and Gen Kuribayashi had only just arrived on Iwo Jima.

[KRonn]

Interesting. I had wondered if the US should have or would have been able to attack Iwo Jima a lot sooner. Given that US carrier planes were attacking the island it would have been a huge advantage if an invasion could have been planned. But I assume there were other areas the US considered necessary before Iwo. What you say about bypassing Palau may have been a better path to get there faster; I'm not that familiar with that possibility. My great uncle fought as a Marine on Iwo and had some hair raising stories of it along with some wounds received there. As a youngster I asked him if his unit fought at Okinawa after Iwo. He just said there was nobody left.

[grumbler]

Iwo Jima featured the 1st, 3rd, and 4th Marine divisions and Okinawa the 2nd, 5th, and 6th Marine Divisions (plus four Army divisions).  Only the Naval units fought at both (in part because their invasion planning and training was much simpler).

[KRonn]

My uncle was in the 4th Marine division. About ten years ago one of my relatives told the story of his time at Iwo Jima. He was the nephew of my Marine great uncle (not sure what that makes him to me in relation). Anyway, he was on a cruiser offshore and knew a guy in the radio room so would check casualty lists every day to see if his uncle was on it. One day found out he was but the wounds weren't life threatening, though my uncle got a bit of a limp from it and still had pieces of shrapnel coming out years later. It was a bit emotional listening to him tell the story and he was emotional telling it. It was the first I'd ever heard about that and found it an amazing piece of the story.

A bit maudlin perhaps but as we talked about this some of these family stories came back to me. And these are the tame stories.