What are you reading right now?

[Jimbuna]

I guess the true facts will never be known but the actual outcome will always be recognised as to what Churchill ordered....'she had to be sunk/destroyed'.

[HunterICX]

During my visit in Holland I managed to raid the local bookstore there.

purchased 2 books

Anthony Everitt's ''The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire''

and a abridged version of Edward Gibbon's ''The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'' which retains the full scope of the original, but in a compass equivalent to a long novel.

HunterICX

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by kranz

she sinks at the end.

Stop giving away spoilers!

I have a 2000 edition (in Polish). From what I remember Ballard's point was that she was sunk by the crew rather than as a result of the damages.
However, the author doesn't give any clear answer to this, as he was in the rear of the ship.

I've been fascinated by that, since Ballard's pictures show Bismarck buried up to the waterline, making it impossible to see any underwater damage. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the controversy is no closer to being solved than it ever was.

This documentary is the best I've seen.


It includes interviews with Ted Briggs and Baron von Mullenheim-Rechberg. The Baron mentions the controversy and ends saying "You can say to both sides, 'You sank the Bismarck'".

Printed in 1884 there's not a spec of Political Correctness in it!

[Red October1984]

I'm about to start Sniper One by Sgt. Dan Mills



I bought it a few years ago and just never touched it. It looks good.

[Jimbuna]

Currently on a Great War reading binge while preparing a lecture series on period navies and navalism. One of the works consulted is Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin & World War II by Jim Powell.

America's involvement in WW1 is frequently fertile ground for controversy but given the provocative sub-title it was likely to be written as a anti-Wilson polemic and the book is certainly that.

What it is not is an objective or sound work of history.

Powell, a Fellow with the CATO Institute attaches virtually all of the ills of the 20th Century on the decision of President Wilson to bring the United States into Europe's Great War in April 1917. Unfortunately he does a remarkably poor job at connecting the dots since he consistently cherry-picks only the slimmest evidence connecting his central thesis and infers cause and effect that he does not bother to substantiate.

In a nut shell, Wilson's decision to declare war on Germany led to Versailles Diktat which led to the inevitable rise of Hitler and WW2. Big stretch this when he invokes Hitler experts like Alan Bullock who's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny is considered by many to be seminal on the subject. Yet Prof Bullock never considers the rise of Hitler to have been in any sense inevitable. So dumping all the blame on Wilson is disingenuous and intellectually dishonest.

Likewise he extensively quotes from Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 and yet this work makes it very clear that the success of the Bolshevik's was never ordained and could have been derailed at any number of points.

In other words, a vast number of non-Wilsonian ducks had to line up before the events Powell lays solely on the shoulders of Woodrow Wilson could have occurred. That the author is intrinsically aware of this is shown by the fact that much of the book covers the periods after Wilson's final stoke and subsequent death in countries totally outside of the US' sphere. Admittedly, Powell does not link the German 1933 Enabling Act directly to Wilson but virtually every event before that is laid almost exclusively on the 28th President. Likewise he spends much space linking Lenin's propensity to the use of terror directly to the Wilson-enabled Bolshevik seizure of power despite Lenin's own pronouncements on the inherently violent Dictatorship of the Proletarian pre-date the War itself.

Wilson's War is sloppily written and a terrible work of history so anybody with any interest in America and the Great War might wish to look elsewhere. As an attempt at linking cause and effect the book deserves an 'epic fail' rating. It constitutes nothing less than an anti-Wilson tirade whose central argument is contradicted in many of the author's own source material.

However, if you link from here and buy it on Amazon, SubSim gets a little piece of the action. Probably the most positive comment I could make about it.

[mako88sb]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Stop giving away spoilers!




I've been fascinated by that, since Ballard's pictures show Bismarck buried up to the waterline, making it impossible to see any underwater damage. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the controversy is no closer to being solved than it ever was.

This documentary is the best I've seen.


It includes interviews with Ted Briggs and Baron von Mullenheim-Rechberg. The Baron mentions the controversy and ends saying "You can say to both sides, 'You sank the Bismarck'".

I could never understand why it was considered a controversy seeing as there was no way the Bismarck would of ever been a threat again. If the Germans didn't scuttle her, she would of eventually sunk anyway or at most required a few more torpedo's to finish her off. Scuttling just hastened the inevitable.

[Sailor Steve]

I have the 1980 version, so of course I'm no help there at all.

Originally Posted by kranz

From what I remember Ballard's point was that she was sunk by the crew rather than as a result of the damages.

I've read several commentaries on the available information, and I'm still at a loss to understand on what he bases that claim. He says there is no evidence of underwater shell hits or torpedo penetrations, yet every photograph and illustration shows the hull sitting in mud up to the waterline. There is no way to see if there is underwater damage or not. I fail to see how Dr. Ballard or anyone else can draw any conclusion more absolute than "unknown".

[Jimbuna]

The Bismarck was hit by double figure torpedo hits.....draw your own conclusion

[Cybermat47]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

The Bismarck was hit by double figure torpedo hits.....draw your own conclusion

It was Obama!

[mako88sb]

I read on "The Caine Mutiny" IMDB forum about how an officer aboard the USS Vance displayed some similar traits as Lt. Cmdr. Queeg so I finally managed to track down a copy of Neil Sheehan's book. Some pretty incredible instances of strange behavior to say the least. I started with the prologue and I after 45mins I started to think I missed chapter one somehow. Nope, after checking out the contents page, I realized the prologue is 38 of 257 pages! Kind of odd but I guess the author used it for a bit of venting about Arnheiter's behavior that turned him from a proponent of the ex-captain to one who could easily see why the crew took the actions they did.

Just curious how many in the USA navy besides Marcus Arnheiter managed to obtain the command of a ship after being passed over for promotion while an ensign? According to the book, only 5% of ensigns are passed over.

[Red October1984]

Originally Posted by Cybermat47

It was Obama!

NO! It can't be!


Well...time to add another problem to the list of things he's done...

[sharkbit]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

The Bismarck was hit by double figure torpedo hits.....draw your own conclusion

How many penetrated the armor belt, that is the million dollar(or pound?) question?

We'll probably never know.

[Subnuts]

Just finished reading The Evolution of the Wooden Ship. Not really what the title suggests (only the first quarter of the book is actually about the evolution of wooden ships) but a really nice book anyway. Most of the book describes the construction of a two-masted schooner at a small English shipyard in the late 1800s. Lots of wonderfully detailed drawings, showing every step of the building process, from creating the wooden half-model to stepping the masts. Fascinating to think that 7 or 8 skilled craftsmen could build a 120-ton ship in under a year, using only simple hand tools and without drawing a single blueprint.