A logistics narrative: Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army by Donald W. Engels

Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army is a fairly recent addition to my collection. I picked it up after it was cited on my favorite blog, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, the blog by Prof. Bret Devereaux. The book comes up fairly regularly in ACOUP (I love that initialism) when talking about how much armies eat, and how fast they can move. After seeing, it comes up a bunch (at least 5 times) I decided to pick it up, and I did not regret it.

Great color choice here, and very nice image selection.

I have to applaud Donald Engels for doing something I have never seen done before. Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army is a logistic narrative. It tells the history of Alexander's campaign in the Persian empire entirely based on how the army was supplied and moved. This approach is deeply fascinating because it covers the parts other narratives would brush over, and skips over what others would narrate. That means it deals with the day-to-day experience of the army much more than a focus on the battles would. It is important to remember that until the First World War battles would be a rare experience for the soldier. How they got their food, how they marched, and what effect this had on the local population, are the majority of soldiers' experiences. The battle is not going to be fought if the army cannot get there in order to fight it. 

I love the reversal of the colors on the back cover too. Great graphics design.

Indeed Engels makes a point that Macedonian logistics were at least as revolutionary as anything they did on the battlefield. No greek army could have done what Alexander did, and because its logistics could support the rapid conquest of a disintegrating Persian empire the Macedonian king created the Hellenistic world. The hidden secret of greatness, do the basics really well. It is important to be reminded of, even if Putin's war is also serving that point with comparisons of the Americans and the Russians. American technology is not so much different from Russian technology, but the American army has fought three successful lightning campaigns in thirty years halfway across the globe while the Russians failed to do one against their neighbor because the Americans can do the logistics, and the Russians can not. 

While the book was an interesting read it also left me wanting more. There are so many histories that go over the fighting again and again. It would be a nice change of pace to read a history that covers the logistics of say, the allied advance across Europe after D-Day, or the epic campaign across the Pacific. The two-ton truck might not seem impressive compared to a Tiger tank, but it certainly got the job done. I think that is a good review to leave on a book that was written very academically. I found most of the books written like this to be much less inspiring. 

So I would have to recommend Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army. Not only is it a welcome difference from most military histories, but it also contains important information about how armies worked before the internal combustion engine. I would recommend it to anyone that wants to understand how armies of the past worked. It helps that it is on the short side, so it is not a big ask to read. 

Now on to the next book. I didn't get any books for Christmas this year, same as most every year, but I am still working through a number of recent real-world book acquisitions. Of course, it goes without saying that my ebook collection cannot stop growing, especially with the large number of interesting books available on Kindle for quite cheap, but this section of the blog is focused on books I can smell. Maybe Ill cover ebooks on this blog as well in the future. 

That's a nice painting. The painting as cover is a bit lazy but effective.

I rolled up The American Indian Wars by John Tebbel & Keith Jennison. The subtitle on the front cover reads "The conquest of America by the white man revealed in all its drama, cruelty, and heroism." Oof. Copywrite MCMLX or 1960 in useful numbers. Hopefully, it is more even-handed than the year and that subtitle would lead me to expect. I am cautiously hopeful. Though I am an American I have not really engaged with much of my own country's history because I found it so boring. I blame the fact that between first and third grade we covered the period between 1776 and 1900 at least three times. 

Technically A History - Confound & Destroy: 100 Group and the bomber support campaign by Martin Streetly

There is an interesting subset of military history that I think of as technical history. These are histories focused on the technical minutia of a specific topic, with little space given over to any other aspects. These produce a fascinating contrast to more usual history in that they almost entirely remove the human actors because that would detract from the various technical factors. Confound & Destroy: 100 Group and the bomber support campaign is definitely one of these, and is a great example of the type.

I don't feel that the photo does it credit, but red and black on yellow are not great colors.

The narrative covers the unit that supported the British and American bomber campaigns against Nazi Germany with jamming, chaff, and night fighters from before its inception to just after the end of the war. Unlike a more usual history that would have had accounts from the pilots and aircrew to add a little humanity and human interest to the book, Confound & Destroy has no interest in that. It has a lot of ground to cover to trace the technical and tactical developments as the British and Nazis strive for dominance over the night skies over Europe. The number of different radars, radar jammers, and night fighter techniques is extensive, as are the five appendixes that cover the equipment, the British and Nazi units, operations elsewhere, and both sides' aircraft. 

This book is brought to you by Jane's, makers of fine identification guides.

This is not a book for beginners. The device names and acronyms fly thick and fast, and missions are summarized in tables, rather than described in the narrative. This allows Confound & Destroy to cover a lot of ground, but it makes it more difficult to understand why things are happening. If I had not read (or listened to, Audible is great) books like Big Week by James Holland I would have had no idea about how the German air defense system worked, and why the British were employing these techniques. Ironically the appendix chapter on the Nazi air defense system covers this excellently and touches on the personalities behind it. This might be a product of the date that this book was written. Published in 1978, it is entirely possible that some British sources were still classified, even though the back of the book says it is based on the latest declassified documents. 

What the book does get across is the ever-evolving nature of radar technology of the period, and the constant need to adapt to the enemy's innovations with ones of your own. I just wish that it had been covered in a more engaging read. Hopefully, in the future, a historian will approach the subject again in a book that should be more readable, and probably more accurate. That is the funny thing about history, the latest books tend to be the best because they are building on what came before with the perspective gained by distance. It is just a shame that this area has not garnered that much attention. Would I recommend it? Yes, if only because I have not seen anything better, and it is very interesting. 

One of my older dice sets, that I picked up at a con while in college. Ahh nostalgia.

For the next book this blog will go back to its roots a bit, but still, stay in the new books section. I went to a book sale at the local library where they would let you get a bag of books for ten bucks on the last day of the sale, so I walked away with a significant number of additions to my collection. I wholeheartedly recommend going to the local library's book sales. I have 18 books in the new book section, so a roll of a d20 will determine the next subject. 

Look, I got yet more shelves. I still need more, I can never have enough.

I roll up a 14 and get Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army by Donald W. Engels. Two strange coincidences, this book is also copyrighted 1978, and I am finishing up the audiobook Philip and Alexander by Adrian Goldsworthy. I am always glad for additional context. 

Big Guns, Big Mistakes: Million Dollar Barrage: American Field Artillery in the Great War by Justin G. Prince

It was a nice coincidence to finish this book on Armistice day. I wish I could say that I intended it, but that would be inaccurate, it was a nice coincidence that I was about done with the book and I had today off. It is nice to work at a company that recognizes holidays with time off. I got to enjoy some hot chocolate and a good book. 

I really love the color choices on this cover.

I really enjoyed reading Million Dollar Barrage by Justin G. Prince. The subtitle is not especially accurate. With a subtitle like American Field Artillery in the Great War, I would have expected it to cover the whole experience of American field artillery units in combat, but it instead did something much more reasonable. Justin Prince tracks the evolution of American Field Artillery (as opposed to coastal artillery a different branch) equipment and training before the war, how that translated to fighting the first world war, and what lessons they took from it after the war. There is one chapter examining the battle of the Meuse-Argonne as a case study but most of the book is on training and equipment. The author manages to make that interesting, helped massively by the short-sighted views of American leadership, and how unprepared they were for the type of war they were fighting. Incompetent fumbling can be a pretty entertaining read. 

Blurb is pretty standard.

Million Dollar Barrage has also got me thinking about great man history, which might seem a little strange. After all, this is not a book about a "great man", but a book about training systems and equipment acquisition. There are "trends and forces" going on that shape these systems, but the great men shape them too. That comes up here with General Pershing and others in the American Army's leadership, who wanted to train the American Expeditionary Force for open warfare, with an emphasis on open warfare, the light artillery piece, and the rifle rather than the aspects of trench warfare that the AEF would need to succeed in the trenches like indirect fire and modern combined arms. Many hours of training were wasted on training techniques that would not help on the battlefield, and that had to be made up for by training and experience in the field. But it was made up for. A "great man" made bad decisions, but the individuals that made up the AEF adapted, and eventually turned themselves into a modern army. The individual is important, but individuals in numbers are more important. No man is truly capable of being a force all in themselves. They can attempt to, but that relies on others accepting their will. Truly charisma is the most dangerous stat. 

Would I recommend it? Yes, I would. It is a bit specialist, but it is a good read, and it has some relevance to the inertia of modern bureaucracies. I could be entirely off the mark, as I am deep into World War 1 tactical minutia. It is well-written, and it was easy to keep up the momentum while reading it. If you are interested in how the AEF fought pick it up.

I have a note, too much yellow.

As for the next book, I am continuing to work my way through my recent purchases. I will be reading Confound and Destroy: 100 Group and the Bomber support campaign by Martin Streetly. I picked it up after I saw a passing reference to British night fighters operating over Germany during the combined bomber offensive. Imagine my surprise that after studying World War 2 for my whole life there was something I had missed. So I ran off to Amazon to find a book about it, and Confound and Destroy was the only book I found. So I am reading that next. See you then. 

False Advertising: Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

 It has been a while, hasn't it? I did not think it would take me this long to read this. It's a novel, it will be fun. It shouldn't take that long right. I was wrong. I had forgotten the experience of reading The Name of the Rose in college. I was seduced by the blurb on the back cover. I did not comprehend Umberto Eco. Of course, life also had its hand in delaying me. I had to bury my grandfather one week and celebrate the wedding of a friend the next. But, I found this book hard to read.

I don't have much to say about the cover, but I like it.

I enjoyed and breezed through the first 300ish pages. The book's opening is great. The mystery of the missing friend, the attempts to break the password by being cleverer and cleverer, and then the revelation that the password is No, and that the way to get to the truth was to avoid clever overcomplicated solutions and be simple is great hook when you have read the back blurb. The blurb promises a story about people in over their heads, who endangered themselves by being too clever.  The opening delivers on this really well. That momentum carried me forward for about 300 pages. But that is where my problems with the structure of the books dragged my enjoyment of the book down. 

Expectations are important, and this blurb sets the wrong one.

I feel like I would like this book better if it was two or three books. One that covers the blurb, one about a young boy's life in occupied Italy and how that shaped the rest of his life and a history of the Knights Templar conspiracies. That way these interesting ideas get their own space. The novel really has two protagonists, the protagonist in whose mind we exist, and Belbo, the protagonist of the occupied Italy story. Where these two stories meet is very awkward, and the themes do not seem to interact. So at 300 pages, when I felt the pace slow down and I was wondering when we were going to get to the thing I bought this book for in the first place, the editors inventing a conspiracy, I checked the page count. 641 pages. I was not even halfway done. That was a crushing revelation for my reading speed.

I dragged myself through the rest of the book. There are long sections that I found completely unengaging, and the language itself became more long-winded and introspective. The novel I thought I was getting appeared every now and then, but it didn't feel like enough. When it finally got to the part where the editors put together the computer program it feels rushed. There are other, less interesting, and more forgettable sections of the book that feel lavished with pages, but the thing that got me interested in reading the book feels a bit secondary. At the end, it feels even more rushed, and the danger they unleashed with their program that invents connections overtakes them far too rapidly to be interesting. When I was done I felt relieved. 

Would I recommend Foucault's Pendulum? Not unless you are a fan of classic literature, or prefer your novels more focused on thought and impression. If you liked Albert Camus I think you would be right at home, but it has been a while since I read anything by him. That idea got me thinking. I am not sure how well the novel traditions of France and Italy translate into what English readers of the internet age think of as a novel. It seems that modern novels focus more on telling an entertaining story than delving into some deeper meaning, and I am there for that. I doubt fictions ability to show the truth about humanity and the human condition because it is fiction. Someone made it up. Can fiction have meaning? Absolutely, but if you want the truth about human nature read a bunch of history books. 

The cover and title are great.

The next book for this blog is going to be another book I selected myself. Another project I set myself is transcribing my great-grandfather's diary from the First World War. He served with the AEF in France with an airplane squadron as a mechanic and observer and was trained in artillery. So, to better understand his experience I am reading Million-Dollar Barrage: American Field Artillery in the Great War by Justin G. Prince. Some good modern scholarship. I am looking forward to it. 

Much used, and little loved: The Rationalists

The Rationalists is an old textbook of mine from college. I took a lot of philosophy and political science in college, so much so that I could have double majored in poli sci if I wasn't convinced that it would have been a waste of time.  I won't call all of them wasted, but the philosophy credit hours would probably have been better spent somewhere else. I don't regret the poli sci classes though, that Thucydides class was great, even if the professor was wrong about the ending. This book was a much-recycled textbook. I count three different used stickers on my copy. Much used, and little loved, the fate of many a textbook.

Dear Reader, I did not finish The Rationalists. In truth, I barely gave it a start. I come to you now to confess my sins. I bounced right off of Descartes. That is a combination of the language and the subject matter. I have never read the work in its original language, and I never will, but the translator didn't punch up the language to make it more readable. "For to hold converse" is a phrase that exists, and I don't like it. I prefer a translation that preserved the text's meaning without using styles and structures that seem like gatekeeping. By that, I mean that the construction of the sentences makes it harder to understand what the author means, in a way that those who cannot parse it easily get frustrated and those that can feel superior. The responsibility of effective communication lies in the communicator, not the recipient. Too much of philosophy and political science is focused on communicating with their peers, and not being approachable to the general public. This lets ideas in more approachable formats spread better than other works. A good example of this is the works of Ayn Rand, which would not have been half as successful if not presented in a novel.

Enough about the language, now onto the subject matter. I did not find the ideas gripping. I will admit that I ventured none to deep, but I was unconvinced from the start of my revisitation. Descartes states early in the book that his approach to truth was to sit in a room alone and think his way through the issue. To trust that Descartes got anywhere near the actual truth is to have a great deal of trust in Descartes. But my points of view are so different than his that the base he builds his conclusions on does not seem like a solid stone foundation but rather sand. With that, every one of his conclusions is shaky. 

What is more, I recently bought a bunch of books. With a nice, new book sitting so tantalizingly close, it is hard to force yourself to work through a book you already read before, and are sure you are not going to really enjoy reading again. So I am dropping The Rationalists and reading a book new and interesting to me that I didn't pick at random. That book is Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I am looking forward to it.

A real time capsule: U.S.S. Lunga Point CVE94 A Pictorial Log covering the ship's Career in the War against the Axis

 Hey Eric, wasn't your next post supposed to be for a completely different book, one on philosophy? Yeah, but I read this one instead because it was so much more interesting and it came to me in an interesting way. My grandfather recently passed away, the last of my three grandfathers. Grandpa was a hoarder, and what is more he had a lot of land in rural Wyoming, which only served to facilitate his hoarding tendency. Now it has fallen to my father to be the executor of the estate so he has been driving out there and coming back with truckloads of family heirlooms, and on the most recent trip, he also brought home this book. My family has no idea why he had it.

Very auster and serious cover on this one. 

My Grandfather didn't serve in the Second World War and as far as we know none of that side of the family served in the navy during the time. None of the names in the crew list are familiar to me. There are some pencil marks in the book to several names, but I don't know what they mean. Very mysterious.

If you can read the above or know one of the names with arrows let me know

What isn't mysterious is the purpose of the book. My dad has a book like this from his days in the navy. Ships would put together a cruise book to commemorate the voyage so people could look back on the fond memories. It is basically a yearbook for warships. In this case, it is almost exactly a year. The main part of this book runs from May 14th 1944 when the ship was commissioned, to May 14th, 1945 and commemorates the first year of the life of the U.S.S. Lunga Point, but because the war ended only a few month later there is a bit added on the end to bring the story full circle. 

U.S.S. Lunga Point was an escort carrier, a merchant ship hull with a flat top and elevators, the bare minimum needed to work as a carrier. Too slow to ride with the battlefleet and too short to launch the most modern fighters escort carriers were called expendable for a reason. They provided excellent air cover for merchant convoys or air support for landings. For most of its life that was the Lunga Points job. It was a veteran of the liberation of the Philipines, and the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It was a dangerous job, and the book has great first-person accounts of being shot down on Japanese-held islands and desperate escapes, and action photos of incoming Kamikazes. The real danger comes through in these sections.

But the book is pretty light-hearted. They are mostly inside jokes though. There is a lot of references to the smoking light being lit or going out that really confused my mother. It must have been constant. Also, the section of one sentence reminders must bring a lot of chuckles to those who were there but is a bit of a mystery today. In this way it accurately represents the experience of war. It is not combat all the time, it had the light hearted moments, and the moments of just people being normal. The joy of ice cream, the private jokes, the birth of children. The men and women who fought that war were not mythically tough, they were just normal people. So I would encourage you to take a look around your house for a book like this, and get a chance to connect with the past. While the past is a foreign country, the people there are humans like you and me, and not totally alien. Next time it should be back to the usual.

I think I need an updated version: Books in World History: A Guide for Teachers and Students by W. Warren Wagar

Books in World History: A Guide for Teachers and Students by W. Warren Wagar came into my collection in the great college expansion. I was working at the college library one summer when they were downsizing the collection. They wanted to create more room for study tables, and get more people into the library. It is an interesting trend among libraries, one I originally opposed, but now I feel better about. As a result, they were getting rid of a boat load of books, and by getting rid of I mean recycle. I had the job of getting books ready by cutting the covers off and then cutting the binding up. Reader, it was hard for a book lover to destroy that many books. However, there was an out. I could take the books home with me. I cannot remember how many I took, but it was either 1 of every 5 books, or more reasonably, 1 of every 10. Now that left me with a problem. Books are pretty dense, and I have had to carry these books around ever since. 

The stark red and white really work here.

So what did I get for all the years of carrying this book from place to place, and state to state? Well, a fun little read, and I do mean little. Books in World History is only 182 pretty small pages, and it really took no time at all. This was helped by the nature of the book. The author wants to create a guide to world history to help the poor teacher that has to teach the subject. As a guide he selected a number of books that cover the whole of human history, tell you where you can get them, how much is will set you back and why you should read it. These summaries are really great, concise and engaging. The biggest problem I had was that the books I wanted to get for myself as a result were all way too expensive. He picked books that were currently being printed, so 50 years latter most of them are out of print. But there is more to the book then just these summaries.

W. Warren Wagar offers his own thoughts on teaching World History, and sadly a lot of his ideas are still relevant. World History is poorly taught, because after high school and maybe Western Civ in college every other history class you take is very specialized, so when those students go back to teach world history they are unprepared. It is an interesting conundrum, and Wagar has some interesting ideas about it, especially the idea to teach world history backwords. Unfortunatly interesting approaches to history class seem unlikely in the current teaching reality of overworked and underpaid teachers teaching standardaised classes. But it is good to dream, and Wagars ideas are worth approaching. So I would recommend reading Books in World History: A Guide for Teachers and Students by W. Warren Wagar but I would even more recommend keeping an eye out for an updated version, maybe filled with books that are presently advalible for reasonable prices. If you have a recommendation like that please let me know.

Is this the best picture of dice ever? No, no it is not

On to the next one. Shelf 2, book 13. Lucky number 13. The result is The Rationalists a collection of the writings of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. I am not sure if there is an author to pick from all of these, because they all have different translators. Five books collected into one.

The philosophers of the seventeenth century had great hair.

This one should be interesting. Delving deep into seventeenth century philosophy. Unlike the last time I touched on philosophy we won't be getting it in a text book, this time its straight from the horses mouth.