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Posted
13 hours ago, shootER5 said:

 

Same. :(

Sorry. It comes down to weight in a single volume. Really needs to come with a book rest.

The next one should be lighter.

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Posted
1 hour ago, RichTO90 said:

Yeah, sorry about the weight. Couldn't get the idea of two volumes past the Stackpole publications committee.

MTO gets covered in the excerpts from lessons learned. And in other places.

Thank you!

Weight wasn't an issue, I have it on Kindle, which is suboptimal IMO for reference books, but in this case, it's very well laid out. As it didn't have any reviews on the Spanish Amazon sight, I put a 5 stars one :)

Posted
1 minute ago, RETAC21 said:

Weight wasn't an issue, I have it on Kindle, which is suboptimal IMO for reference books, but in this case, it's very well laid out. As it didn't have any reviews on the Spanish Amazon sight, I put a 5 stars one :)

Thanks! I could use some reviews on the US Amazon as well.

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted
On 7/8/2024 at 1:00 PM, RichTO90 said:

Thanks! I could use some reviews on the US Amazon as well.

I'm probably less than a week out from finishing it so I can certainly assist with this.  It's excellent so five stars is easy.  I will say I tend to bounce between a couple books at a time and I'm currently bouncing between your book and "The Second World War Tank Crisis" and it is fascinating to see in great detail just how different the US and British approaches were.  

Posted
1 hour ago, nitflegal said:

I'm probably less than a week out from finishing it so I can certainly assist with this.  It's excellent so five stars is easy.  I will say I tend to bounce between a couple books at a time and I'm currently bouncing between your book and "The Second World War Tank Crisis" and it is fascinating to see in great detail just how different the US and British approaches were.  

Oh, that looks good. Although I'm not sure how he can improve much on Coombs.

Thanks in advance for the review!

  • 5 months later...
Posted

I'm halfway through the book.  I had to wait until this time of year and it's lucky I did as I can barely put it down.  It's as if this book was tailor made for me.  I think it is the perfect blend of technical, operational, and people data.  I had pretty high expectations and the book has exceeded them.

I do believe that I can see where the book was shortened for editing purposes.  If there's ever a "Director's Cut" or a special edition I'm on board even if it is $200.00.  Some thoughts/sections are building up to a conclusion and it's obvious that there was more data that was meant to be there.  I guess a lot of readers wouldn't notice but if you are already familiar with the topic and hand it is visible.

Of course Amazon delivered my copy with the front cover ripped off of the spine.  I sent for a replacement and they somehow can't figure it all out.  I'll leave my Amazon review after I have a good copy and have finished the book.  It's easily an 8 star book but their system doesn't go that high.  The paper quality and type font is good.  The physical quality of the book is good.  It has photos I haven't seen before.

Most of the questions I have will be after it's finished but one I'd like to ask now:

regarding the excerpt of the first fight in North Africa I was under the impression that Stuarts went into action with training rounds as there was an error in loadout and that this had an effect on performance as it surely would.  I've seen that mentioned in many accounts over the years.  In the except the writer goes to great length to remind the reader that his team knew its stuff.  Training ammo and AP are painted differently and if they were issued training rounds the crew would know it as soon as they loaded their ammo racks.  Is the training round thing a myth or did it happen elsewhere to someone different?  I may even know myself and have just forgotten...

Posted

...on the same day, a different unit had a lot of fun on the gunnery range, allegedly causing raised eybrows with the range security officer...

Posted

I could believe it. I know of at least one mild steel training tank, a cromwell, actually made it into combat and remained unrecognised as such, till it was shot at with a 37mm flak. So these things do happen.

Posted
5 hours ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

I'm halfway through the book.  I had to wait until this time of year and it's lucky I did as I can barely put it down.  It's as if this book was tailor made for me.  I think it is the perfect blend of technical, operational, and people data.  I had pretty high expectations and the book has exceeded them.

I do believe that I can see where the book was shortened for editing purposes.  If there's ever a "Director's Cut" or a special edition I'm on board even if it is $200.00.  Some thoughts/sections are building up to a conclusion and it's obvious that there was more data that was meant to be there.  I guess a lot of readers wouldn't notice but if you are already familiar with the topic and hand it is visible.

Of course Amazon delivered my copy with the front cover ripped off of the spine.  I sent for a replacement and they somehow can't figure it all out.  I'll leave my Amazon review after I have a good copy and have finished the book.  It's easily an 8 star book but their system doesn't go that high.  The paper quality and type font is good.  The physical quality of the book is good.  It has photos I haven't seen before.

Thank you very much.

Frankly, you are reading too much into my skill as a writer. the damned thing got so big I actually started forgetting what I had and had not included in it. Thus the building up to conclusions without a conclusion. I will never do anything near its size as a single work again, it was just too big for my small mind to keep track of.

The bits that got edited out were about 100 pages on the Tank Destroyers. I may yet finish that as a separate organizational and doctrinal book to complement Manic's excellent technical study.

Quote

Most of the questions I have will be after it's finished but one I'd like to ask now:

regarding the excerpt of the first fight in North Africa I was under the impression that Stuarts went into action with training rounds as there was an error in loadout and that this had an effect on performance as it surely would.  I've seen that mentioned in many accounts over the years.  In the except the writer goes to great length to remind the reader that his team knew its stuff.  Training ammo and AP are painted differently and if they were issued training rounds the crew would know it as soon as they loaded their ammo racks.  Is the training round thing a myth or did it happen elsewhere to someone different?  I may even know myself and have just forgotten...

Urban legend. The original 37mm AP M51 was apparently pretty crappy and was superseded by the APC M51B1/B2 PDQ but not in time for North Africa. IIRC the original was an uncapped projectile and worked really poorly versus the FH armor plate in the Panzer III and IV.

Posted

As an aside, I read through my copy (and appreciated all of it) while chaperoning my teenage son and his friends for "beach week" after high school graduation.  A most welcome distraction from their antics!

Posted

finished.

I would say this is a seminal work.  Granted, it was probably written for people like me but still.

The format is different.  By breaking up the chapters in the manner that they are sorted it allows the reader to focus on the section at hand.  The histories are brief because there is so much to cover.  I still think I can see the editing out of content that could've been there.  The tables are thorough enough to satisfy most researchers.  The pictures are not repeats of the same ones we've seen so many times.

The book is fairly generous to the participants of the time.  I think this is probably for the best as we are all operating with the benefit of hindsight.  That isn't to say that mistakes weren't made because they most certainly were but it's easy to see things in hindsight that weren't obvious at the time.  The other issue is the enormity of the challenge.  There was so much to do and so little time to do it.

Each time I read about the shortcomings of US Armor in WW2 I get upset about the mistakes that were made.  It got soldiers killed.  At the same time the US did a better job under the circumstances than anyone else did.  The chapter on Where are the tanks is something that could've been a book on its own but that would be a hard book to read.

I encourage everyone to get a copy.  i am hoping to get another reading in before spring but we will have to see.

Very well done, sir!

Posted

The part where you met Belton cooper was a shock to me.  I have his book.  It is not factual in many ways.  It's interesting but not factual.  I hope you were polite.  One of the problems of a book like that is that too much of it becomes fiction due to faulty memory.

Posted
5 hours ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

The part where you met Belton cooper was a shock to me.  I have his book.  It is not factual in many ways.  It's interesting but not factual.  I hope you were polite.  One of the problems of a book like that is that too much of it becomes fiction due to faulty memory.

I think I met him before I read the book. The thing to remember is a large part of that was ghostwritten. Belton was very passionate on the subject, but I honestly doubt he ever had anything other than his personal recollections to go by. I am pretty sure my deduction is correct about the source of his confusion regarding the T26E3 "demonstration" he supposedly saw in England before D-Day.

Posted

I should maybe say that I bought your book, read it, and enjoyed it. Since I have neither deep knowledge nor a deeper interest in the subject matter (beyond "it's about tanks, about tactics, doctrine development, and history" (which already are four big pluses)), I didn't comment on it and maybe couldn't fully appreciate the amount of work that went into it (but I'm glad people like you are fighting this fight while I concentrate efforts on a different front).

I also have to say that in no history book I was made truly aware of the scaling issues that the US Army had to solve from 1939 to 1943, from reading books. Maybe the authors familiar with the subject take it a bit much for granted. Only Manic's video about McNair and the whole topic made me begin to appreciate the monumental effort that went into all this (and to adopt a more forgiving attitude when discussing mistakes that were made at the time).

Posted

Well, I'll add that last year the wife asked if there was something I wanted and I said well there's this um tank book.. and she was like what?! another one? She got my something more useful for mundane life instead. Maybe better luck this year. :D

Posted
14 hours ago, Ssnake said:

I should maybe say that I bought your book, read it, and enjoyed it. Since I have neither deep knowledge nor a deeper interest in the subject matter (beyond "it's about tanks, about tactics, doctrine development, and history" (which already are four big pluses)), I didn't comment on it and maybe couldn't fully appreciate the amount of work that went into it (but I'm glad people like you are fighting this fight while I concentrate efforts on a different front).

I also have to say that in no history book I was made truly aware of the scaling issues that the US Army had to solve from 1939 to 1943, from reading books. Maybe the authors familiar with the subject take it a bit much for granted. Only Manic's video about McNair and the whole topic made me begin to appreciate the monumental effort that went into all this (and to adopt a more forgiving attitude when discussing mistakes that were made at the time).

Yeah, along the lines of me being surprised there's no good history of Free France in WW2, I'm surprised I've never been able to find a general history of the US industrial expansion, which was brilliantly done and made a huge (decisive?) impact on the war. 

Posted
5 hours ago, Angrybk said:

Yeah, along the lines of me being surprised there's no good history of Free France in WW2, I'm surprised I've never been able to find a general history of the US industrial expansion, which was brilliantly done and made a huge (decisive?) impact on the war. 

There is, but most are pretty inaccessible to the average reader. Arsenal of Democracy (Baime) and Freedom's Forge are good popular histories. Arsenal of Democracy (Hyde) and Mobilizing U.S. Industry in World War II (edited by Alan Gropman as a McNair Paper) are more technical, in depth, and very good.

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