“The Wolf”, Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen

A very brief one this time - as I'm currently doing a full review of this for Intelligence and National Security, but given the extent to which this is currently being pushed in the UK's airports some initial thoughts might be of interest.

Telling the story of the German warship Wolf's long raiding cruise between late 1916 and early 1918 "The Wolf" is unashamedly populist and while this makes it possible to question it academically the publishers almost certainly took the decision to make this a deliberately accessible book, and on a summer afternoon with competition for attention this is no bad thing.

The actions of the Wolf in the later part of the First World War were to all intents and purposes inconsequential to the ultimate outcome of the war, but this does not alter the fascinating human story of the ship, its crew, and its victims, as well as the wider impact of World War I on Australasia in the later part of the conflict told by Guilliat and Hohnen. It's also a lovely opportunity to go into a little known aspect of Great War naval history - while the Emden and the rest of Graf Spee's raiders have had their time in the sun, the later raiders are largely forgotten. It's easy to be sceptical about airport history, but in this case the result is really rather pleasing.

“Hops and Glory: One Man's Search for the Beer the Built the British Empire”, Pete Brown

Pete Brown should have crossed my path earlier in life. He went to St Andrews a year or so ahead of me, and clearly enjoying the finer things in life (namely beer), it should be inconceivable that our paths didn't cross in one of north-east Fife's many watering holes. It is however, a matter now of public record that that did not happen, and it was only a chance outing with some of my wife's work friends to the launch of “Three Sheets to the Wind” in Ottakar's Greenwich in 2006 that made me discover him and his work. In the flesh he's entertaining, personable, and anything but a beer bore, and this comes across in both his previous books and in his highly enjoyable blog.

Part social history of the British empire and part travelogue “Hops and Glory” is a lot more serious than his previous two books. He's always been capable of striking a sober note when needed, but there's a dark despairing edge to this one that at times almost perturbs. In the early chapters I suspected that this might be classified as his mid-life crisis book, and by the latter half it almost has more akin to Peter Nichols' “A Voyage for Madmen”.

It is a tribute to Pete Brown the human and the author that the tribulations of recreating a voyage of traditional India Pale Ale from Burton on Trent to Calcutta didn't break him, despite fate's best efforts, and that the end result is quite such a satisfying read. Despite its more serious tone and the more challenging personally honest sections to the narrative it's a tremendously enjoyable read and one that was read far more quickly (and in the face of some stiff competition for reading attention) than either of his previous works. Overcoming all the periodic bleakness is an irrepressible sense of humour, with elements that make you want to stop and read bits out to anyone who'll listen.

Reading “Hops and Glory” undeniably informs as both beer history and travelogue. Like many other relatively casual drinkers of what's referred to British pubs as IPA I'd never really given the roots of it much thought, and blindly taken at surface value the assertions that what's sold as IPA now was true to its origins. Brown comprehensively demolishes this illusion and makes us re-evaluate our thoughts about beer in general and IPA in particular. It's the sort of engaging story told with a passion about the produce that makes you go and seek out the few British examples and perhaps rather more numerous American beers that hold true to the notion of what an IPA historically was. It's also an interesting thought that IPA, as a light beer with most fermentable matter removed and almost pasteurised by its long sea voyage might, in fact, have a touch more in common with the Cobra we drink in Indian restaurants than the thick, yeasty, brown British session bitter

One is also more informed about travel with places throughout described with colour. Canal boating is effectively shown to be hard work on your own – although I suspect getting RSI while steering such a vessel is probably going a bit far, and cruising, despite its reasonably favourable treatment at the hand of the author, does come across as being a little bit ghastly, his account of Bryan Ferry vengefully readying an Exocet to fire at the cringingly appalling cover band aboard cuts to the heart of why I, having encountered similar outfits in the 1990s on a the Le Havre-Rosslare ferry, never want to go on a cruise. More adventurously, a tall ship comes across as a beautiful way of crossing the Atlantic, and a container ship voyage across the Indian Ocean (made seductive by Icebreaker International's “Trein Maersk”) seems dully mechanistic and stripped of all romance.

“Hops and Glory” is a genuinely good book. I'm very sadly going to miss Pete Brown's South London launch of the book in Forest Hill next Thursday (11 June, full details on his blog, linked above) when instead I'll be relaxing (probably with a Maredsous) watching sportscars at Le Mans, but if you're in the area you could do a lot worse than go along, listen to someone with some very good stories to tell, pick up a copy of “Hops and Glory”, and if Pete Brown has had anything to do with picking the venue, drink some really very good beer.

“Riding the Retreat: Mons to Marne 1914 Revisited”, Richard Holmes

The flat countryside of northern France and Belgium is eerie when viewed with a historical eye. Today the train from London to Brussels hurtles through an emotive landscape, punctuated by periodic glimpses of pill boxes and cemeteries, grim reminders of 20th century European history. A short train ride south from Brussels brings you to the town of Mons, capital of Hainault, and site of the British Army's first engagement of the First World War. With "Riding the Retreat" Richard Holmes, perhaps best known for his magnificent “War Walks” series, incomprehensibly unavailable on DVD, combines a readable history of the opening part of the Great War with a personal and likeable travelogue recreating the headlong retreat on horseback.

 

When one thinks of the 1914-18 war one cannot help conjure up a picture of cloying mud, trenches, and endless static fighting for gains measured more in yards than miles. This masks the period in August 1914 when the long 19th century ended, when there was truly a war of movement and cavalry was not quite yet the tragic anachronism it would become in a matter of months. It is this war of movement that has largely preserved the Mons area and the countryside over which the British retreated, and this means that to this day the visitor can still see the landscape much as it would have been nearly 100 years ago. Holmes skillfully applies the story of the soldiers of 1914 to what is visible today, and as such brings it to life in a moving, emotional way. Having been privileged to live in Mons in 2007 I found this especially easy to relate to.  Then my apartment, not far from the Berlin Gate to NATO's present day Supreme Headquarters, was just beside the point, in the little village of Casteau, where the first meeting took place, and every Friday I would drive to Soignies, in whose narrow streets the breakneck cavalry running battle ended

 

Holmes makes the point that August 1914 was one of only two periods when the war could have been comprehensively lost militarily, and this is spectacularly illustrated in “Riding the Retreat”, where the headlong pace of the retreat, is shown by pointing out how units dispersed in Belgium, only managed to reform in western cities such as Le Mans. The point too, that the British were not forced due east, but in a much more southerly direction after Mons is driven home, which highlights the gaping hole the Germans blew in the allied lines, and what made the prospect of success for the Schlieffen Plan much more than a nebulous idea. The speed of the German advance, the disorganised chaos into which the allies were thrown, and the perpetual motion of the retreating British Expeditionary Force describe a very different war from that which we associate with the 1914-18 period.

Affecting and compelling as the history is, this book's real strength is in the travelogue of Holmes and his companions, human and equine, as they make their way through Belgium and France. This aspect of the book is a very human story, with engaging and entertaining characters. Holmes describes the sort of interesting misadventures, lovely people, and fantastic meals that make this a journey one wants to have been part of, and one which it is a pleasure to read about. As such this book, really about a monumental human tragedy, as few of those fighting in August 1914 survived unscathed to November 1918, is one that makes you smile, which is in itself a sort of tribute to the sacrifice made by soldiers and civilians on both sides.

“Phoenix Squadron”, Rowland White

Sometimes it's obvious where a book has come from. Rowland White's “Phoenix Squadron” is clearly cut from the same cloth as his previous “Vulcan 607” in celebrating the extemporised innovation and heroism of British military aviators, more striking however is how much is owed to the seminal fly on the wall documentary “Sailor”, which charted HMS Ark Royal's final deployment. Both the 1970s television series and the 2009 book successfully evoke the spirit of life aboard the ship, and the manner in which the Royal Navy operated.

Like “Vulcan 607” White hangs the wider story of how an organisation functions and how the constituent personalities interact on the pillar of a particular operation. While this worked in the case of the Vulcan raid on Port Stanley for his first book, the Ark Royal's engagement in a classic late colonial exercise of gunboat diplomacy in Central America in 1972 does not quite provide enough material to really drive the book of this size. White almost admits as such in the preface, where he makes it clear that he wanted to write about Ark Royal, but that it was comparatively late in the process when the idea of looking at the deployment in support of Belize, and the sortie of 809 Squadron on 28 January 1972 came to him. This lack of central focus in the writing process does come through in the course of the book, where often it feels like a loosely connected series of vignettes about the navy, the Fleet Air Arm, and a group of people serving aboard the ship rather than a clearly constructed narrative connected to a specific issue.

The lack of sufficiently powerful central theme might have reduced the effectiveness of the book, but it testament to White's ability to capture atmosphere and personality, as well as the basic charisma of Ark Royal herself, that much like “Sailor”, the simple telling of shipboard life and how the vessel operated makes for a highly engaging read. It doesn't have pretensions to being high naval history, but is none the worse for it, and indeed this populism is interesting given the current climate.

Despite its periodic bittiness “Phoenix Squadron” remains a useful addition to the body of literature on the phenomenon of gunboat diplomacy in its coverage of the Belize/Guatemala incident. Indeed, while the dispute over British Honduras has a long history giving rise to successful British applications of purposeful force dating back at least to 1948's deployment of Sheffield and Devonshire, yet there is little narrative history on the nuts and bolts of how the Royal Navy was able to successfully shape Guatemalan policy and how limited naval force can be used for political ends.

Equally valid is viewing the work as a contribution towards Cold War naval history. Striking in this aspect are the passages concerning Ark Royal's role within NATO as part of Striking Fleet Atlantic. This makes clear that the roots of the Maritime Strategy of the 1980s, with its very aggressive use of naval aviation north of the Greenland-Iceland-Unitied Kingdom gap truly had roots stretching back into the 1970s. Descriptions of operations in Norwegian fjords and targetting of the Kola peninsula are very reminiscent of Hank Mustin's leadership of 2nd Fleet during the 1980s (related both in numerous articles in US Naval Institute Proceedings and in John Morton's 2003 family history), and show that the Nelson's dictum that a captain can do little wrong by laying their ship alongside their enemy was just as applicable in the 1970s as ever.

“Phoenix Squadron” could be seen as being a highly timely work. Just as the the intervention in Belize could be seen as the final flowering of Royal Navy big carrier gunboat diplomacy and the use of a capability that went away with the scrapping of Ark Royal, the retelling of this story, in a highly populist work, could be seen as a useful ploy in explaining why, in highly straightened economic times, the United Kingdom is seeking to re-enter the large carrier club with the two Queen Elizabeth class vessels.

“Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance”, Giles Milton

September 11 is now, for all of us, a tremendously emotive date, so much so that it is surprising when one comes across seismic historic events that did not take place in New York and Washington in 2001 it brings one up short. September 11 1922 is one such date.

I've been reading and thinking about the birth of modern Turkey, to one extent or another, for 20 years or so, and it's a credit to the power of this book that it captured my attention and served very well to keep my attention through a day in a Budapest airport riven by crowds, strikes, and the aftermath of altogether too much hospitality the night before.

Giles Milton's telling of the fall of Smyrna intermingles the broad sweep of the long First World War with individual tales, first of opulence, then of heart rending atrocity. Smyrna is portrayed as a bucolic pleasure garden destroyed in an orgy of vandalism by a victorious Turkish army, and as such this should read as a classic tale of 'good and evil'. Interestingly however, Milton cannot achieve such a simplistic conclusion, and ultimately this is the real strength of the work.

There are villains in the piece, but none of them were directly responsible for setting fire to Smyrna in September 1922; indeed at no stage is an attempt made to seriously posit that the fire that engulfed the city was a consciously taken political decision. Instead the reader finds complicity further afield. Smyrna ultimately was not destroyed by Turks, it had, after all, flourished under Ottoman rule and the decentralised Ottoman system of government allowed it to function freely through the First War. Instead the megali idea of Venizelos (and Milton accurately links this etymologically to the concept of megalomania on p.38), supported energetically by Lloyd George. Cast in this light the destruction of Smyrna is only the most tangible instance of the willful attempt to smash the Turkish state at Sevres.

None of this excuses the atrocities perpetrated in September 1922 and the wholesale ethnic cleansing that took place in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish war, stains that persist to this day, however the broad sweep of Milton's work helps understand why tragedies occur, and why simplistically assigning blame is seldom the correct course of action.

"Monocoques and Ground Effects", Janos Wimpffen

This is a brilliant yet strangely frustrating book; but maybe this reflects my personal prejudice more than it should.

The period it covers (1982-1992), the final decade of the World Sportscar Championship, coincides with the awakening of my interest in the subject, and as such I approach a book like this with high levels of enthusiasm, but also high expectations. This is compounded by my familiarity with Wimpffen's previous works, from the magisterial Time and Two Seats, through the direct three predecessors covering sportscars in pictures.

The period enjoyed a huge richness of entries and rounds, and in the scope of a volume such as this, especially one following on from the preceding volumes and sharing their high presentational values, there will inevitably be omissions. Wimpffen does a sterling job mixing the headliners with the weird and wonderful, but there are times when you wish for more of the pithiness that sometimes accompanied the earlier volumes. Equally, there are times when one wonders about the opinions voiced - to describe the De Cadenet of 1982 as "one of the most attractive cars of the early Group C period" (p.59) does somehow make one wonder if the author is operating on a different aesthetic plane.

More than usually one is lost without the companion "Time and Two Seats", in and of itself no bad thing, but when one bears in mind the lap space of this late evening reviewer, it does stretch things ever so much.

David Bull are usually to be commended about their production values however there are a couple of glitches that should have been caught - a missing photo on p.94 and the need for a fuller explanation of Jose Thibault's 1987 entry on p.239 at times make one pause, but do not detract from the overall experience.

Ultimately this is a sad book. I loved the period and it produced some of the finest racing and finest cars sportscar racing has ever seen, but it also came to standstill in 1992. Where "Time and Two Seats" takes this in its stride it is impossible to avoid the feeling of impending doom as "Monocoques and Ground Effects" winds into the late '80s and early '90s. The difficult times the sport is now encountering make the final pages poignant reading, the finality in 1992 not giving much retrospective hope for us looking towards 2009 and beyond.

Through all this though do not forget that there is genius contained within. In trying to summarise what to many is the golden age of sportscar racing Wimpffen will always leave some disappointed, but nonetheless the field of literature is hugely enriched by "Monocoques and Ground Effects". If you have an affinity for the period, and ideally a dining table where you can spread this alongside "Time and Two Seats" now is the time to devote some time to reading this book.

One can only await what comes next from the sportscar sage of Seattle.