Sunday, January 16, 2022

Recommended "Great War" books, submitted by Dwight Mercer

 

Marching to Armageddon - Canada and the Great War 1914-1919

Desmond Morton and J. L. Granatstein, Lester & Orpen Dennys, (1989) - provides a good initial overview of the conflict from a CEF perspective

 

When Your Numbers Up - The Canadian Soldier in the First World War

Desmond Morton, Random House of Canada (1993)

-  details training and life of a typical Canadian soldier

 

The Journal of Private Fraser - Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914-1918

CEF Books, Edited by Reginald Roy, (1998)

-  excellent, observant, personal journal on one man's direct experiences

 

Barker VC - William Barker, Canada's Most Decorated War Hero

Wayne Ralph, Doubleday Canada (1997)

-  Canada tends not to honour any war hero - Barker included

 

Vimy

Pierre Berton, McClelland and Steward, (1986)

-  a classic, easy-read of one of the pivotal battles of the Canadian Corps but with some inaccuracies

No Place to Run - The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War

Tim Cook, UBC Press (1999)

-  documents poison gas by and on the CEF - will become a classic reference text

 

Shock Army of the British Empire - The Canadian Corps in the Last 100 Days

Shane B. Schreiber, Vanwell Publishing Ltd. (2004/1997)

-  a well written account by an active Canadian military officer of the Corps and reasons for its success

 

Canada's Army, Waging War and Keeping the Peace

J. L. Granatstein, Univ. of Toronto Press (2002)

-  sound overview of many conflicts including the Great War

 

Paris 1919

Margaret MacMillan, Random House, (2003)

-  very well written with a great deal of information packed into it

 

Passchendaele - The Sacrificial Ground

Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Cassel Military Paperbacks (2000)

-  an extended series of personal accounts of the true horror of this battle

 

Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War - Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919,

Colonel G. W. L. Nicholson, C.D., Army Historical Section

Canadians on the Somme - The Neglected Campaign

William F. Stewart - Helion & Company August 2017 Hardback, 432 pages

-  one of those rare books on the Great War which presents (i) a fresh illumination to challenge long-standing assumptions coupled with (ii) very detailed and well researched material;

(iii) and a new perspective on a major battle.  It  destined to become a key reference text to be studied rather than casually read.

Monday, December 6, 2021

War Book Club, November 5th, 2021 -- Books discussed at the meeting

 

War Book Club, November 5th, 2021.

Items discussed during the October meeting; * indicates the item is available thru RPL:

 

*The Afghanistan Papers: a secret history of the War/Craig Whitlock:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/3083069

 

*The Art of Resistance: My Four-years in the French Underground: a memoir/Justus Rosenberg:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/2694051

 

*A Hundred and One Days: a Bagdad journal/Asne Selerstad:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/209715

 

*A Wampum Denied: Proctor’s War of 1812/Sandy Antal:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/2647663

 

*The Crusades (Osprey):

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/748270

 

*The First Wave: the D-Day warriors who led the way to victory in World War II/Alex Kershaw:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/2694051

 

*Hitler’s Collaborators: choosing between bad and worse in Nazi-occupied Western Europe/Philip Morgan:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/2591506

 

*Lakota America: a new history of Indigenous power/Pekka Hamalainen:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/2817910

 

*Operation Pedestal: The Fleet that battled to Malta/Max Hastings:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/3085821

 

The Rani of Jhassi: Gender, history and fable in India/Harleen Singh:

https://www.amazon.com/Rani-Jhansi-Gender-History-Fable/dp/1107042801

 

The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings/Lars Brownsworth:

https://www.amazon.com/Sea-Wolves-History-Vikings/dp/1909979120

 

Storming the Falklands: My war and after/Tony Banks:

https://www.amazon.com/Storming-Falklands-My-War-After/dp/0349000190

 

The Relief of Lucknow/William Forbes-Mitchell:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48572675-the-relief-of-lucknow

 

*Taking Paris: the epic battle for the City of Lights/Martin Dugard:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/3078121

 

*Trial by Fire: a novel/P.T. Deutermann:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/3030264

 

*The Vietnam War: an intimate history/Ken Burns & Geoffrey C. Ward:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/2250014

 

*The World Played Chess: a novel/Robert Dugoni:

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/3082916

 

*Blood Red Snow: the memoirs of a German soldier on the Eastern Front/Gunter Koschorrek (Ebook):

https://www.reginalibrary.ca/search/2910035

 

and, Finally:

 

Volokolamsk Highway/Alexandr Bek:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volokolamsk_Highway

Friday, November 26, 2021

The Bomber Mafia/Malcolm Gladwell -- review submitted by Greg Mulatz

 

I would like to recommend this book for the blog.  “The Bomber Mafia” by Malcolm Gladwell – a writer who I have found is from the school of “America Won The War All By itself”. All that being said there is a number of interesting side stories.  This is a new edition to the RPL and I picked it off the floor display on spec as I was killing time one afternoon. I ended up reading it as – I can’t believe it – my sister bought the book as she has read a number of Gladwell’s offerings.

The book focuses on Curtis LeMay and his theory about the US bombing strategy in the Second World War.  It seems that there competing strategies for conducting the bombing campaign in WW2 and he was the ultimate victor according to Gladwell.  What is interesting over and above this discussion is some of the side stories that are revealed.  In my opinion one of the most interesting side notes is how the jet stream influenced the use of napalm in the bombing of Japan.  This is just one of a number of chapters that provide an insight on the campaign and of course there are other factors the author addresses in Lemay’s favour – rightly or wrongly. 

I have read other sources that indicate that if the Axis powers would have won the war that Lemay would have been one of the first Americans on the gallows.  Such is history and how it is portrayed by the victors.

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

What Happened to MI1 -- MI4? Submitted by Will Chabun

What happened to MI1 - MI4? 

MI5 was founded as the Home Section of the Secret Service Bureau. It was part of the War Office in the First World War, between 1916 and 1918. During this time it was renamed MI5, referring to its status as the fifth branch of the Directorate of Military Intelligence (see the FAQ "Where does the name "MI5" come from and why is this name still used?"). In the Second World War, MI5 was independent of the War Office, though it worked closely with it. 

There were a number of MI (Military Intelligence) sections within the War Office's Directorate of Military Intelligence during both the First and Second World Wars. There were eventually ten MI sections during the First World War and seventeen by the end of the Second World War. The number of MI sections and their precise functions varied considerably as the demands of the war effort changed. 

Few had anything to do with secret intelligence. For instance, MI4 during the First World War was responsible for supplying military maps, while MI9 during the Second World War helped Allied troops to evade and escape from behind enemy lines. 

All of these sections, with the exception of our colleagues in the SIS (MI6), were later discontinued or absorbed into other organizations. 

Source: https://www.mi5.gov.uk/faq 

MI2, the British Military Intelligence Section 2, was a department of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, part of the War Office. It was originally set up to handle geographic information. MI2a handled the Americas (excluding Canada), Spain, Portugal, Italy, Liberia, Tangier, and the Balkans. MI2b handled the Ottoman Empire, Trans-Caucasus, Arabia, Sinai, Abyssinia, North Africa excluding French and Spanish possessions, Egypt, and the Sudan.

After the First World War, its role was changed to handle Russian and Scandinavian intelligence. These functions were absorbed into MI3 in 1941. 

MI4 was a department of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, Section 4, part of the War Office. It was responsible for aerial reconnaissance and interpretation. It developed into the JARIC intelligence agency. The present day successor agency to MI4 is the Defence Intelligence Fusion Centre.[citation needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MI7 - propaganda and laison with British news media 

MI8, or Military Intelligence, Section 8 was a British Military Intelligence group responsible for signals intelligence and was created in 1914. It originally consisted of four sections: MI8(a), which dealt with wireless policy; MI8(b), based at the General Post Office, dealt with commercial and trade cables; MI8(c) dealt with the distribution of intelligence derived from censorship; and MI8(d), which liaised with the cable companies. During World War I MI8 officers were posted to the cable terminals at Poldhu Point and Mullion in Cornwall and Clifden in County Galway, continued until 1917 when the work was taken over by the Admiralty. In WW2, MI8 was responsible for the extensive War Office Y Group and briefly, for the Radio Security Service. 

MI9, the British Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 9, was a department of the War Office between 1939 and 1945. During World War II it was tasked with supporting available European Resistance networks and making use of them to assist Allied airmen shot down over Europe in returning to Britain. MI-9 infiltrated agents, usually by parachute, into occupied Europe. These agents would link up with a Resistance cell and organize escape-and-evasion efforts in a particular area, usually after being notified by the Resistance of the presence of downed airmen. The agents brought false papers, money and maps to assist the downed airmen.

Friday, January 22, 2021

MOSCOW RULES -- a book review by Will Chabun

 

Anthony “Tony” Mendez was close to a legend in CIA circles. He spent several decades in the agency’s technical services arm, specializing in forgeries and then in disguises.

He quarterbacked the exfiltration (love that word!) of six American diplomats from Tehran (q.v. “the Canadian caper”) in February 1980.

He also spent more than a little time in Moscow.

All through the decades, he also had a front-row seat to the developments in tradecraft (the mechanics of spying, notably how you meet with agents).

Moscow is rightly regarded as the toughest place in the world to practice the intelligence craft — a “denied area”, in spyspeak.

Soviet counterespionage (the KGB or Committee for State Security) had thousands of officers there that it could assign to surveillance work, and it did not need to fret about a subject’s legal rights either.

No surprise, then, that for many years, American spy efforts in Moscow were modest.

To begin with, the U.S. did not have a permanent foreign intelligence service until 1947, decades after the British and Soviet agencies had begun. The elderly apartment building that had become the American embassy in 1935 was honeycombed with listening devices and the local staff the Soviets forced the Americans to use were all informers.

As a result, Mendez says the CIA throughout the 1950s had no human sources in Russia – not a single one. That is why so much emphasis was put on the U-2 spyplane program and electronic listening stations on the edge of the Soviet empire. So bad was the spying situation that when a Russian GRU officer came forward with information on Soviet intentions during the Cuban missile crisis, the Americans had to ask the British intelligence service (MI6) to meet him in Moscow and take his information.

The CIA director of counterespionage, the paranoid James Angleton, was convinced that every Soviet “walk-in” was a “dangle” sent by the KGB to trick the Americans with false information.

In the face of all that, the aging Ivy League preppies who ran the CIA 60 years ago decided that running agents in Moscow was not worth the danger and political risk.

What turned things around was the retirement of the wartime generation of operations officers and managers. Angleton was pushed out. A new chief of the CIA’s Soviet and Eastern Europe section did some research and found the KGB had so little trust in its own officers that it had never “dangled“ one of them to the CIA – apparently fearing they would give away priceless information, then leave the country.

A new generation of CIA case officers -- the people who deal with sources -- began pushing for more aggressive action. A CIA officer in Prague learned from experience that the local counterespionage types were creatures of habit, so he began developing “the brush pass” – an ultradiscreeet handoff to get a small package from a source to a handler.

“If the right techniques were used, anything was possible,” Mendez writes.

The CIA got its first female operations officer and sent her to Moscow, where she operated successfully, picking up information from a KGB officer who’d been recruited in Columbia. She continued this for several years before being caught and (as a diplomat) expelled — the cost of doing business.

One of the products of this era were “the Moscow rules” a checklist of attitudes and practical tips to make the intelligence officers handler’s life easier and safer. (See below)

Mendez entered this world in the mid-1960s, hired out of a job as a technical illustrator for a defense
contractor. He became the CIA chief of disguise in 1974 and soon found himself picking the brain of a legendary Hollywood make up artist, and also those of a magician, to teach young agents how to use deception and distraction to do their jobs. CIA technicians between jobs in Bangkok came up with the idea of a “jack in the box” that could be opened in a car in seconds, giving the impression a person was still occupying a seat vacated by a human agent.

Other CIA technicians in Washington came up with the Discus: a handheld device using a stylus to compose messages that could be beamed a few hundred metres to another one.

But the second half of the 1980s saw the pendulum of spying swing back toward the Soviets.

An eccentric American ambassador removed the few curbs on Russian civilian staff in the American embassy. Marine Corps guards were seduced to get into the few secured areas in the building. The KGB started bombarding the embassy and apartments the apartments of American diplomats with low intensity microwaves designed to make personnel sick.

Key loggers were found in the electric typewriters in the embassy and cameras in the photocopiers.

When American diplomats were on holidays at work or on holidays, KGB agents would break into their apartments, steal goods and even kill pets, Mendez says.

Worse, the Soviets succeeded having several agents in the very heart of American intelligence.

This brings us to the topic of MICE, the acronym explaining why people commit espionage: take the first letters of the words money, ideology, coercion and ego -- the latter being a sense that one’s talents were being overlooked and that “I’ll show them!”

That was typified by Robert Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence agent who thought he was undervalued.

Money was the motivator for Aldrich Ames, an undistinguished CIA middle manager who, with his spendthrift wife, ran up huge bills.

By the time they were caught and jailed, the Soviet Union had collapsed and transformed into the Confederation of Independent States and then Russia. The feared KGB was divided into the Federal Security Bureau and the SVR, the new foreign intelligence service, which operated in competition with the GRU, or military intelligence.

The first few years under new management was chaotic and saw the release of archival documents proving that the Soviets had hundreds of agents in the US in the 1930s and 1940s, though virtually all of them had been caught or expelled by the time Senator Joe McCarthy started his ferocious witch hunt in 1950.

Very quickly, though, the Russian SVR and GRU was back in business. Remember the dozen agents caught in New York, trying to cozy up to the city’s movers and shakers? And the assassination plots (one successful, one not) against Russian defectors in the UK?

Can’t forget the recent hacks at US government agencies, a digital raid attributed to the Russians by just about everybody -- except Donald Trump. Hmmmmm.

 

MOSCOW RULES

 

  Murphy is right.

  Never go against your gut.

  Everyone is potentially under opposition control.

  Don't look back; you are never completely alone.

  Go with the flow; use the terrain.

  Take the natural break of traffic.

  Maintain a natural pace.

  Establish a distinctive and dynamic profile and pattern.

  Stay consistent over time.

  Vary your pattern and stay within your profile.

  Be nonthreatening; keep them relaxed. Mesmerize!

  Lull them into a sense of complacency.

  Know the opposition and their terrain intimately.

  Build in opportunity but use it sparingly.

  Don't harass the opposition.

  Make sure they can anticipate your destination.

  Pick the time and the place for action.

  Any operation can be aborted; if it feels wrong, then it is

wrong.

  Keep your options open.

  If your gut says to act, overwhelm their senses.

  Use misdirection, illusion, and deception.

  Hide small operative motions in larger nonthreatening motions.

  Float like a butterfly; sting like a bee.

  When free, in obscura (IO – literally, in the dark and masked from enemy surveillance), immediately change direction and leave the area.

  Break your trail, and blend into the local scene.

  Execute a surveillance-detection run designed to draw them out over time.

  Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is an enemy action.

  Avoid static lookouts; stay away from choke points where they can reacquire you.

  Select an IO (in obscura) or meeting site so you can overlook the scene.

  Keep any asset separated from you by time and distance until it is time.

  If the asset has surveillance, then the operation has gone bad.

  Only approach the site when you are sure it is clean.

  After the IO meeting or act is done, close the loop at a logical cover destination.

  Be aware of surveillance's time tolerance so they aren't forced to raise an alert.

  If an alert is issued, they must pay a price, and so must you.

  Let them believe they lost you; act innocent.

  There is no limit to a human being's ability to rationalize the truth.

  Technology will always let you down.

  Never fall in love with your agent.

  Betrayal may come from within.