Customer Reviews

The NIGHT RAIDERS

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an excellent book about the history of the Israeli Navy's Special Warfare unit. It is a solid read and hard to put down.

A very comprehensive history of the IDF's Navy SEAL equivalent. I especially like the way Katz tries to biograph the lives of two of Flotilla 13 and IDF/Navy commnders, Ze'ev Almog and Ami Ayalon, both of whom have gone on to bigger things.

The Shayetot (naval recon. commandos) are amazing. They are the best naval special force operators in the world. The Navy Seals and the SBS never come close to the Shayetot's optempo and DAILY combat experiences. Sure, it was extremely hurt to remember the debacle of the batmen's ambush in South Lebanon in 1997. But the debacle had to do with the faculty and compromised intelligences. Otherwise, the Israeli commandos, Mossad and the IAF are the biggest nightmare to the Hizbollah terrorists. The terrorists should better watch their back, because one would never know when they would be permanently custodied by the biblical justice.

This is one of those books that could have stood a much better editor. The author's a journalist, but apparently he lacks the skills to edit his own work, and the result is a lot of information which is very poorly presented.

Israel's Navy started out basically as a bunch of frogmen working to slow down first the British blockade of Israel itself, as refugees tried to enter the country; afterwards, the Israelis started out the fighting against the Arab nations by sinking the Egyptian Navy's flagship with limpet mines used by frogmen. From then on, apparently, they spent much of the time trying to raid and move around behind enemy lines along the coastline.

There's a lot of good information here, but as I said, the author apparently can't write competently without an editor, and the publisher apparently decided not to employ one. As a result, faux pas that should never appear in a book are repeated endlessly. Paragraphs a page or more in length, restating facts and re-explaining circumstances, aren't uncommon, and often the pronoun doesn't match the subject or object its referring to. So a singular is them and we becomes a singular, that sort of thing. It's just annoying and very poorly done. The whole book is of course very pro-Israeli, of course. I'm not particularly pro-Arab, but the book makes no pretense of objectivity. I wouldn't recommend this book except to someone very interested in the subject, or who's willing to overlook the bad writing.