Featured battle : Messines

Part of First World War

Date : 07 June 1917 - 14 June 1917

A limited but successful attack by combined arms - Artillery, gas, tanks and mines as well as infantry. It set the pattern for the offensives of 1918.

Battle of the Bulge. The German View

Danny S Parker Ed.
A book both enjoyable and frustrating. Enjoyable because of its insights into the complexity of planning the campaign and for the remarkable different view one gets of Hitler. In my view worth reading for that alone. The content is all meat, no padding, and rich in depth and width. A thoroughly worthy piece of work. The frustration comes with the paucity of maps for which I had to compensate with a much larger scale map. If I were Prime Minister I would make it a law that in any work of fact every place named in the text must appear on a map in the book. Also frustrating was the lack of a glossary. Many German general staff ranks are mentioned in abbreviated form and lots of formation initials are used which one has to reference elsewhere. This detracts from the enjoyment and makes reading in bed difficult.
Even with those criticisms I would commend this book to anyone interested in a fuller understanding of how wars/battles are planned or with an interest in the Battle of the Bulge.
Frontline Books. Pen & Sword Books \ltd., 2016