Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/October 2016/Book reviews

Your military history newsletter – Issue CXXVI, October 2016 Front page • Project news • Article news • Book reviews • Op-ed • World War I timeline

The World's War - David Olusoga

A group of soldiers from the Indian Corps who had been mentioned in dispatches during fighting on the Western Front

By Nick-D

The World's War seeks to bring the experiences, and contributions, of African and African American, Chinese and Indian soldiers and labourers of World War I to light. Olusoga argues - convincingly - that these men have been largely written out of the war's history, despite serving in huge numbers, and focuses the book on their service and the discrimination they faced.

Olusoga's book is made up of a series of thematic chapters, with most focusing on the experiences of a particular ethnic group in a single theatre of the war. This approach generally works well, with the chapter on the Indian Corps in France being particularly successful. The discussions of the experiences of soldiers from France's African empire are also well executed, and illustrate the callous way in which these men were treated by French generals and senior politicians who openly referred to them as cannon fodder.

However, other chapters are uneven. In particular, the pair of chapters on Germany's efforts to win the support of Muslims in the Allied Powers felt like they belonged in another book, and were confusingly written (I ended up giving up on both chapters). I would also have liked to have seen more material on the experiences of the huge numbers of Chinese labourers who served in France, and the chapter on African Americans feels a bit rushed.

Overall, The World's War succeeds in bringing to light an important, and greatly underappreciated, aspect of World War I. Hopefully it encourages more specialised works on the different ethnic groups and their experiences, as well as proper recognition of the significant contribution made by non-White soldiers and labourers in general histories of the war.

Publishing details: Olusoga, David (2014). The World's War : Forgotten Soldiers of Empire. London: Head of Zeus. ISBN 9781781858981.

Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga story - Elizabeth Tynan

Buffalo 4, one of seven British nuclear tests at Maralinga in Australia

By Hawkeye7

There are several books that have come out lately about British nuclear tests at Maralinga, mostly with sensational titles like Maralinga: The chilling expose of our secret nuclear shame and betrayal of our troops and country (Frank Walker, 2014), Maralinga: Australia's Nuclear Waste Cover-up (Alan Parkinson, 2015), Maralinga's Long Shadow (Christobel Mattingley, 2016), and The Long Road to Maralinga (Reg Simpson, 2014). And then there's this one. This book is derived from Elizabeth Tynan's PhD thesis at James Cook University. She's a journalist and science reporter. So the book oscillates between interesting and factual (for example, that while most people know that Maralinga was an Aboriginal word, it is not a local one; it comes from a language once spoken on the Cobourg Peninsula ) and usual sort of tone we expect from journalists. There are copious references for each chapter but no footnotes!

If you feel the urge to write on a topic like this, I strongly recommend you read the Wikipedia first. Here you will find most of the facts you need to know to avoid embarrassing yourself. Take this for example:

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a crude nuclear weapon codenamed Little Boy, based upon uranium-235 and a technique known as gun technology that quickly became obsolete. It involved driving a cylinder of uranium-235 into the centre of another cylinder of the same substance with a hole in it The bomb dropped on Nagasaki was nicknamed Fat Man and operated quite differently using plutonium. The basic idea of was to jam two half-spheres of plutonium together by detonating high explosives in a small place, initiating a chain reaction in which neutrons split the atoms and released energy. Fat Man was superior to Little Boy in design but had some drawbacks. In particular the weight of the conventional explosive needed to initiate the reaction made the bomb much bigger than Little Boy — hence "Fat Man" — which presented logistical difficulties. The aircraft that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, Enola Gay, could not drop Fat Man. Instead, a specially modified B-29 called Bockscar was used for the task. (pp. 48-49)

The Wikipedia would have told her that:

1. Little Boy and Fat Man were the codenames of the types of bombs, not the particular bombs. The Los Alamos Laboratory used the euphemism "gadget" for "bomb".
2. While Little Boy used uranium-235, it was uranium enriched in uranium-235, not pure uranium-235. The enrichment was about 80% uranium-235
3. The projectile was the hollow cylinder, not the target (although it had a bolt through the centre).
4. The Fat Man core consisted of two hemispheres with a ring around the middle. They were solid, except for the pea-sized "urchin" polonium-beryllium neutron initiator at the centre. The two hemispheres were already together! The implosion compressed them to make to plutonium go critical. The chain reaction was started by the initiator, which was crushed by the implosion. (I was so concerned about this that I ran it on the Wikipedia front page in September.)
5. Enola Gay and Bockscar were identical in all respects, being Silverplate B-29s. Both were capable of dropping Fat man bombs.

Thus, while the book has its moments and contains some interesting material, in the end it fails in its mission, because it cannot process aspects of the story.

Publishing details: Tynan, Elizabeth (2016). Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga story. Sydney, New South Wales: University of New South Wales Press. ISBN 978-1-7422-3428-1. OCLC 953439293.

Recent external reviews

Taylor, Alan (2016). American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393082814.

• Wood, Gordon S. (6 September 2016). "How the American Revolution Worked Against Blacks, Indians and Women". The New York Times.

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