What are you reading right now?

[TorpX]

Finished:

Unrestricted Warfare

Hunt and Kill: U-505 and the U-boat war in the Atlantic



Started:

Silent Running by James F. Calvert Looks to be a great book.

The Groundwork of Practical Naval Gunnery: A Study of the Principles and Practice of Gunnery, and of the Computation and Use of Ballistic and Range Tables

by James Monroe Ingalls and Philip Rounseville Alger

I got these from Amazon. This is a public domain reprint by Nabu. I have a long standing interest in the subject matter, and I was very excited to get this, BUT, the print is hard to read and the subscripts in the equations are too small to make out. What is worse, is that many pages are missing. I am going to try and get a copy from another source. Otherwise, I guess I will have to make do.

Anyone ordering Nabu books be forwarned: this seems to be a common complaint. These books are printed from scans made from library copies and quality is uneven.

[sharkbit]

Originally Posted by TorpX

Silent Running by James F. Calvert Looks to be a great book.

It is.
You won't be disappointed.

Not about war but important to the story of the submarine is The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas (author of Serpico and The Valachi Papers).

On 23 May 1939, the new fleet boat USS Squalus (SS 192) sailed from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to conduct diving tests. During the first submergance, the main induction valve failed to close and both engine rooms flooded drowning 27 of her crew and the boat sank in 240 feet of water. 33 sailors survived in the forward compartments and this book is the story of their rescue.

Told with the flair of a novelist, The Terrible Hours is very readable but it lacks notes, an index and is about as non-technical as it is possible for a submarine book to be. However, the account of how an officer of vision (LCdr Charles "Swede" Momson) and his invention (the McCann Rescue Chamber) came together to perfom that rescue is worthy of fiction with the advantage of being true.

The book also tells of the recovery of the sunken submarine, itself a significant achievment with 1939 technology.

Squalus would be renamed USS Sailfish and go on to a successful career in the Pacific war.

[STEED]

Just in time for the 70th anniversary, reading Ospreys campaign 232 The Bismarck 1941 - Hunting Germany's greatest battleship.

Couple of days to read this one.

[kiwi_2005]

Tom Clancy - Submarine

[Thunder]

Just started Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. Nothing to do with the sea, but Vietnam.
So far i am finding it a pretty good read, although i need to brush up on my military hierarchies.

A review
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032903635.html

Will let ya know how it goes.

Before that some good Sci Fi by a British guy called Peter F Hamilton.
His stuff is epic (i mean galaxy encompassing stuff) as well as long reads, with alot of his books going over 1000 pages... and trilogies at that

But i really do love getting into a great book and knowing there is a lot more good stuff to go.

[commandosolo2009]

Clear the bridge by RAdm Dick O'kane. About to finish it (at Formosa strait coming up)

[sharkbit]

Finished Clay Blair's "Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted". Whew...what a read.

Needed some lighter fare...
"Das Boot" for the umpteenth time. About half way through.

On deck is "The Ultra Secret" by F.W. Winterbotham.

[STEED]

Finished reading..

The German Fleet at War 1939-1945
By Vincent P. O'Hara

Good account of all the surface operations. A little on the sterile side the style of the book but never less a good read.


With the 70th Anniversary of Barbarossa this month I've moved on to another book on this subject, you can never have enough books on this one.

Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (Cambridge Military Histories)
By David Stahel

Not naval related but just finished Norman Stone's The Eastern Front 1914-17.

This well researched study on the Russian Army in WW1 shatters the conventional view of what went wrong in the war that doomed the Czar and gave the world its first communist regime.

While the popular image of Russsian soldiers fighting without rifles is accurate on the surface, that picture is woefully incomplete and distorted. The facts are that by all conventional yardsticks czarist Russia became a relative economic powerhouse as a direct result of the war. But this ocurred within a system that rewarded incompetence, where cities starved as excess grain rotted in the countryside, where gold was shipped overseas to pay for contracts that were never filled while war production at home, ammunition, weapons and rations sat unused in magazines and forts rather than going to the combat troops. Where over aged, incompetant generals were continually removed from one command for failure only to be placed elsewhere to repeat the process.

The Eastern Front 1914-17 does not cover the events of the Bolshevik revolution of November 1917 but does show how the fall of the Czar and rise of the Provisional Government really did not lead to any substantive improvements as the army melted away: "voting with their feet" in the famous phrase of Lenin.

A worthy read for anybody with an interest in World War 1, Russia or the Russian Army.

[Castout]

Military classics' The Korean War 1950-1953, Brian Catchpole.

[matti95]

Just now im reading escape from the deep.
It's the story of USS tangs last mission
And before i read the swedish book havets vargar (sea wolves) I dont know if it has come out on english but i really recommend it

[TLAM Strike]

Just finished Executive Orders by Tom Clancy, now reading Red Rabbit by the same.

(Not reading, listening on an audio book, that way I can work and read at the same time.)

[Platapus]

I just started reading

Business in Great Waters: U-Boat Wars, 1916-45 by John Terraine.

I am only about 100 pages into it. But so far it is a very interesting history of WWI submarine warfare. It goes into nice, cited, detail on the difficulties that Germany had concerning the decision for unrestricted submarine warfare. I did not know there was that much dissent in Germany about this.

It also goes into detail not found in other books on how the decision for unrestricted warfare came about and what the British did to escalate it.

I am only about 1/5th through the book. But if it continues as it started, I am glad I added it to my library.

Good index and nice citations. I like that in a history book.

[Subnuts]

I've just started on Norman Friedman's US Aircraft Carriers - An Illustrated Design History. So far, it's a lot more readable than his book on American submarines up to 1945, which I had to read twice because it was so dense and oddly edited.