BOOKS.

THE LOGISTICS OF MOBILIZING AND SUPPLYING THE UNION ARMY DURING THE INITIAL STAGES OF THE CIVIL WAR

This week I have read two books. That is not to say I have increased my read speed as one of the books is quite small.

This book was written as a thesis by an unnamed student and published by one of the many American Civil War research groups. The title caught my eye scrolling through Amazon a couple of years ago. Having  read it again my conclusion remains " good effort but not much original material". The book is a typical thesis in that there is a great deal of repetition, summarising and conclusions, all targeted on the methodology rather than the actual material. The content is all based on secondary rather than primary sources. It also only really addresses two areas, namely recruitment and provision of small arms. That said its interesting but could have been so much more.

My second read this week is more interesting.

A SUBALTERNS ODYSSEY

This is another autobiography by an artillery Lieutenant  in World war One. The author served from 1915 until badly wounded in 1917. There is a lot of interesting material about the daily demands on subalterns in artillery batteries including some unusually horrific descriptions of the results of German counter battery fire. The author survived his injuries and went on to serve throughout the 1920s and again during World War Two. This is clearly a case of a soldier who not only coped well with the horrors of war but actually, according to his son's foreword,  " I have no doubt he enjoyed the war."

Finally, as you may have noticed from elsewhere in my blog, I have a passion for numbers, that being the case, I have just counted the number of books I have, 703 so far. Of those about 180 are on the First World War, almost 70 on WW2 and over 60 on the Vietnam war. I have about 40 on big game hunting, mainly man eater hunting including all the books written by the famous Jim Corbett.  The rest of my library comprises books about the US Civil War, Indian Mutiny, Boar War, Napoleonic Wars, both land and sea, The Crimea, Victorian engineering and social history with a smattering of woodworking books and assorted odds and ends. My tastes cannot be described as broad  !!!!!!!!!