Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2018/Book reviews





Operation Market Garden, the Campaign for the Low Countries, Autumn 1944: Seventy Years On

U.S. paratroops land in Holland as part of Operation Market Garden

By Hawkeye7

Operation Market Garden is one of those battles that holds a special fascination for readers of military history. It was breathtaking in originality and scope. Three airborne divisions landed in Holland in 1944 in the largest airborne operation in history. Their objective was to capture a series of bridges over rivers and canals, facilitating a rapid armoured advance through an area that would otherwise have been easily defended. It established Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery as a brilliant and innovative commander. And too, while the operation was a failure, there were many acts of heroism, earning five Victoria Crosses and two Medals of Honor, and it came close to success.

There are a couple of good films about the operation. Theirs Is the Glory (1946) was filmed on the actual battlefield with a cast largely comprised of veterans of the battle, many of whom played themselves, and who assisted with the script. The later film A Bridge Too Far (1977) depicts the whole operation, including the Polish and American contribution. The latter was based on the 1974 book of the same name by Cornelius Ryan. If you like military history that is full of fighting and anecdotes, you should seek it out.

This book is a collection of papers on Operation Market Garden from a conference in 2014, the seventieth anniversary of the battle. If you are unfamiliar with the battle, then it will be very difficult to follow it from reading this book. (I would suggest Arnhem: Myth and Reality by Sebastian Ritchie.) It is for the reader who is very familiar with the battle, and is rounded out by papers on related British, Polish and Canadian operations, probably of tangential interest at best.

It contains some good papers though, and there remains lively debate about what the proper strategy for 1944 should have been, how the airborne forces should have been deployed, and what lessons were learned, with the authors of the papers not in agreement. There is a good article on the capture of Nijmegan Bridge based on the Cornelius Ryan collection, and a well-researched account of the exploits of the 406th Infantry Division, a German division so obscure that it has no Wikipedia article.

Publishing details: Buckley, John; Preston-Hough, Peter, eds. (2016). Operation Market Garden, the Campaign for the Low Countries, Autumn 1944: Seventy Years On. Wolverhampton Military Studies Series. Solihull: Helion & Company. ISBN 978-1-910777-15-2.


Lessons Learned: The Australian Military and Tropical Medicine

Lieutenant J.J. Garrick SX23142 , 2/6 Cavalry (Commando) Regiment places a tablet in the mouth of Trooper G. E. Martin TX9153 during the atebrin parade. Although resented by many of the troops, these parades helped dramatically reduce the incidence of malaria.

By Hawkeye7

This book is about military tropical medicine in general, and the Australian Army Malaria Institute in particular. As the book progresses, the former becomes the latter. There is a lot of interesting material about the role of tropical diseases in military campaigns. In most wars before the 20th Century, casualties from diseases heavily outnumbered those in battle. In one campaign in 1809, a force of 40,000 suffered 23,000 deaths, of which only 217 were in combat. Generally speaking, most could have been avoided by simple hygiene precautions that any Army could have adopted since the Stone Age. Without a scientific understanding of disease, the need was not understood. This occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. What often goes unappreciated is the role that military medicine has played in this.

The Australian Army has a long history of fighting disease that goes right back to its origins. It has been blessed with a succession of fine doctors like Neil Hamilton Fairley. Their work saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen during World War II. Australia was fortunate in having fine doctors and an absence of the religious and ideological structures that have hampered medicine in many other countries. Today the AMI is one of very few such organisations in the world. Luckily, it survived an attempt by the Howard Government to abolish it shortly before it was urgently needed in East Timor. It has some real challenges ahead of it as we move towards a world without antibiotics, and without a treatment for malaria.

This book is obviously written by a doctor. There's a fair bit of medical jargon, and a propensity to use Latin instead of English. It could have benefited from more editing. The index is terrible, and the bibliography is a mess. References frequently cite books not in the bibliography. A more serious drawback though is it passes over the serious issues about the toxicity and side effects of the drugs it used to combat resistant strains of malaria.

Publishing details: Quail, Geoffrey Grant (2017). Lessons Learned: The Australian Military and Tropical Medicine. Australian Army History Collection. Newport, New South Wales: Big Sky Publications. ISBN 978-1-925520-22-4.


Recent external reviews

A French railway gun of World War I

Jaundrill, D. Colin (2016). Samurai to Soldier: Remaking Military Service in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 1501703099.

Marble, Sanders (2016). King of Battle: Artillery in World War I. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-30524-3.

Duffett, Rachel (2015). The Stomach for Fighting: Food and the Soldiers of the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-9987-8.

Hanson, Victor Davis (2017). The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. New York City: Basic Books. ISBN 0465066984.


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Hello Hawkeye — The Operation Market Garden page does not mention the Medal of Honor. I'm guessing it is Joe E. Mann. If that is correct, I'll tweak both pages. Thanks, and belated happy new year. user:JMOprof ©¿©¬ 19:40, 12 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

My mistake; there were two Medals of Honor awarded for Market-Garden: to Joe E. Mann of the 101st Airborne Division, and John R. Towle of the 82d Airborne Division. The Market-Garden article only mentions one of the five Victoria Crosses. In addition to the RAF's Flight Lieutenant David Lord, VCs were awarded to Captain John Hollington Grayburn of the 2nd Parachute Battalion, Captain Lionel Ernest Queripel of the 10th Parachute Battalion, and Major Robert Henry Cain and Lance Sergeant John Baskeyfield of the 2nd Battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment, although they are listed in the Battle of Arnhem article. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:21, 12 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hawkeye — done, I think. I came to this page to see how tropical medicine was being used in Market Garden. At least that's what the Bugle made me believe you wrote about. ☺ user:JMOprof ©¿©¬ 17:13, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]