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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fun read but shallow and badly over done,
By
This review is from: TOBRUK (Hardcover)
This book has some very good points and some astonishingly serious problems. First the basics. This book covers the exploits of the Australian Army in the Mediterranean during the first years of World War II. The author (probably justly) felt that the contributions to the war by the Australian fighting men have been grossly under appreciated being overshadowed by other nations legendary accomplishments such as the British at Dunkirk, the RAF over London, and the American's in Normandy. He also feels that in Australia the national legend surrounding the Anzacs at Gallipoli during WWI crowd out in the national psyche the exploits of their sons in WWII. He sets out to correct this grievous oversight.
Unfortunately, he makes several serious mistakes in the attempt. First, he spends an inordinate amount of time on the back-story. Chapters are devoted to the early lives of Hitler and Mussolini and the interwar years are covered in great depth to no useful effect (they don't really effect the main line of the story). The story does not even get to the defense of Tobruk until the middle of the book. This was frustrating but is not a fatal flaw as the reader may simply skip ahead. However, much much worse is the authors absolutely bizarre use of language. The entire text is written in an irreverent stream of Australian gutter slang . He has made up scores of them. The author simply has never found a picturesque, folksy, Ausie phrase that he didn't like. For example, instead of a unit withdrawing rapidly it "Ran like an emu stung by a bee on the but." The entire book is written in such language. That would be fine if it were the words of the participants or subjects but is obnoxious when they are the invention of the author. He was also frankly disrespectful of both the German and the Italian soldiers at times. After a while this became VERY tedious. One has the feeling that he was trying to write a moving screen-play rather than serious history. It is possible that he simply was pitching his story to a much lower level perhaps to gain and keep the attention of much younger readers. I suspect the problem is that he is a journalist trying to write history without the discipline required and has perhaps confused crudity with accessibility. That said, there was some excellent history and the story of the Australians during WWII has not been well documented and it was good to see it done in detail. He also captured the human elements brilliantly. I would recommend this book to any of the following: Those interested in the WWII Mediterranean campaign PRIOR to Operation Torch; Australians; those who like their history very engaging and are not too picky about historical discipline. All in all, and using the type of comparison the author used a lot, the book was like a cheap Australian Chardonnay, very fruity and with a lot of oak but lacking in depth and complexity.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Ripping Yarn,
By
This review is from: TOBRUK (Hardcover)
The Author seems to have set out to write a ripping yarn rather than a serious historical analysis. It turns into parochial diatribe about what amazing warriors us Aussies are and how we taught the Germans and Italians a thing or two about how to fight, most of which is simply incorrect.
I won't be reading on of his books again.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
a bit folksy for history,
By
This review is from: Tobruk (Paperback)
While I've read extensively on WWII, I had not previously read a book dedicated to the critical Battle for Tobruk (April - December 1941). Stuck in the Melbourne airport 59 years after the start of the conflict, I was pleased to find what appeared to be a deep history of this subject by an Australian journalist and author -- who therefore would have had easier access to many original sources, including the Australians who fought at Tobruk.
Caveat: this review is written from the point of view of an American reader with a good background in WWII, but not a historian. From the book's cover, which described FitzSimons as Australia's "most beloved popular historian", I half-expected an antipodean James Mitchner, but hoped for someone like Stephen Ambrose, whose histories of WWII to me are the comparisons for this kind of non-academic history. I was disappointed, and will address the book from a reader's point of view more than a historical one. FitzSimons spends far too much time bringing us up date on World War II, 70 pages out of 500, not including the introduction. This is probably unnecessary since anyone who chooses this book has probably read enough WWII history to be familiar with both the historical background to the war and the events that transpired in the war up to this point. He at last begins -- in chapter four -- a fine description of German general Erwin Rommel. We get a good sense of the actual combatants as people: the author follows a few of the Aussie defenders from early childhood, and also lets us know some of the German attackers -- telling us about their experiences and feelings on this dust-cloud-covered, mobile battlefield -- so there is a good balance between strategy and the men who had to execute it. Unfortunately, some of his background detail is simply unnecessary and more melodramatic than historical ("...they had waited a long, long time for the good Lord to bless them with a child.."). In general, the entire book is filled with gratuitous dramatizing of already dramatic events. Punctuation is definitely odd to this American reader: a vastly liberal use of exclamation marks in descriptions; subjects' unspoken, unquoted rhetorical questions end in question marks as if being asked by the author and not the person in question; and so many paragraphs end with "..." that the book sometimes reads like a college-boy's melodramatic essay. Letters to and from the men in the field use a number of confusing and difficult-to-read different fonts instead of simple italics (sorry, Mr. FitzSimons, I know you didn't design the book -- but you could have objected when reading the galley proofs). Quotes in perfect English, or German translated into perfect English, make the protagonists sound like schoolteachers, whether literally in the middle of a battle ("...either you get into that tank or I shoot you for cowardice in the face of the enemy") or during a strenuous political argument. Mr. FitzSimons slips frequently -- and sometimes jarringly -- between description and the presumed thoughts of a soldier on the ground at that moment. Italicized phrases in German or Italian, as well as Aussie slang, whether in quotes or not, are thrown in -- again -- to seemingly add drama and humanity to the characters when they actually break up the flow. Since many of these phrases are not in quotation marks, I can only assume this is literary license -- but this is history, not fiction. The cursing sounds like a bunch of Boy Scouts, not working class Aussies in a fight for their lives. Since this is an Australian writer writing about a critical battle that was fought by 15,000 Australian troops (supported by British artillery), FitzSimons' liberal use of Aussie slang is appropriate but will be confusing to non-Aussie readers. There are only four maps, all at the front of the book. Two show the entire battlefield: one in plan and the other in perspective, but do not include the same places, making it very difficult to locate some events during the battle. Hill 209, a critical objective in the Battle of the Salient, is identified as such on the first of these two maps, but on the second is identified by its original Arabic name as used by the Germans, Ras el Medauur, and not indicated as a hill at all. One extremely critical issue: there are two points at which Mr. FitzSimons uses another writer's unique phrase as if it were his: The second of these, is on page 410 of my Harper-Collins 2006 paperback: he writes that the British supply ships would "...slip the surly bonds of the harbor...." This phrase, these words, are almost exactly those in the poem HIGH FLIGHT, by John Gillespie Magee, Jr, which begins with the well-known phrase "Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth..." The poem was first published in 1942 after Magee, an American flying with the RAF in WWII, was killed piloting his Spitfire. It's difficult to imagine that FitzSimons was unaware of his copying, but in any case it should have been caught by an editor. The other earlier, example is as glaringly obvious, but i didn't mark it and so can't reference it. Perhaps another reader can. Conclusion: clear exposition of events that led up to this battle, as well as the strategic considerations applied by both attacker Rommel and the various Australian and British generals defending Tobruk. For this reader, much new information on the strained relationship between Australia and Great Britain regarding the use of Aussie troops here as well as how it effected the defense of Australia while the unstoppable Japanese army advanced south toward New Guinea, an obvious jumping-off point for the expected invasion of Australia. Powerful images of the battlefield, including the physical experience of both the scorching, unforgiving desert landscape and the bursts of battle for both sides. Profoundly touching and thoughtful descriptions of the relationships between the Aussie soldiers, often from the same towns, who trained together and came so far to die in this desert, and tender depictions of those they left at home as well as of their dreadful anxiety about their men so far away. Clear history, but frustrating -- sometimes amateurish, sometimes melodramatic, sometimes silly -- writing style. (Amazon, the author's name is spelled FitzSimons, not Fitzsimmons)
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