In 1564 the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, decided to try to put paid, once and for all, to the religious-fanaticism tinged piracy on Turkish shipping of the Knights of St John. To do this he aimed to capture their base on the island of Malta. By early summer 1565 he had put his plan in motion and managed to land a force of over 30,000 crack troops on the island to confront the ten thousand or so knights and men-at-arms under the command of the Order.

So began the first great siege of Malta, and it was an extraordinarily vicious and bloody affair.

Ernle Bradford (1922-86), the author, was a participant in the second great siege of Malta, during the Second World War, as a navigator on a Royal Navy destroyer. So he brings to this account of the battle a strong sense of what it means to wage war on this island.

Bradford is a generous and fair-minded chronicler of the battle, recognising the extraordinary courage of both Christian and Ottoman forces, and the extraordinary barbarism with which they fought each other. For example frequently the Ottomans would execute their prisoners by means of bastinado. Or, following the Turkish capture of one of the Knights’ forts, St Elmo, La Valletta, the Grand Master of the Knights, ordered the Ottoman positions to be bombarded with the heads of murdered Turkish prisoners of war. Such courage and barbarism had the same roots: a belief in the evil of their opponents and a conviction that death in the Holy War in which they fought was the noblest thing, and that it would lead to immediate transportation to paradise.

The outcome of the battle shaped decisively the course of European and Ottoman history. But more than that, the conduct of the battle remains vitally relevant. It gives an insight into the frightening violence that can emerge when human beings believe themselves in possession of so absolute a truth that it not only allows them, but requires them, to be the judge of others.

Valiant Ambition is a sequel to Philbrick’s Bunker Hill. That prior book dealt with the origins of the American War of Independence in Boston, and covered key events including the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, the initial clash of arms at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, where the American’s didn’t shoot until they could see “the whites of their eyes”, and Washington assuming command on the death of General Warren and finally driving the British from the city.

This book takes up the story with Washington’s incompetent defence of New York, his retreat into New Jersey and crossing of the Delaware in a desperate attempt to maintain some cohesion to his army, before his extraordinarily courageous counter attack, re-crossing the Delaware in mid-winter.

Benedict Arnold

In parallel with Washington misadventures Philbrick describes the altogether more effective military exploits of Benedict Arnold, whose extraordinary courage and aggressive instincts time and time again thwarted British stratagems to snuff out the rebellion.

Arnold’s name has become a byword for perfidy in the United States. But Philbrick reminds us just how vital his role was in securing American independence. Philbrick notes how it was American victory in the Saratoga campaign which convinced France to enter the war on the side of the United States, and that it was Arnold’s actions at those battles that, more than anyone else, secured the victory.

But Arnold was a particularly thin skinned soul, and his shoddy treatment by the Continental Congress stoked his alienation eventually leading him to explore the possibility not only of defecting to the British, but inflicting a devastating blow to American independence by surrendering the fortress at West Point.

Self portrait of John Andre

Towards this end he established a line of communication with Major John Andre, a young British officer who had risen to the role of adjudant to Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander in New York. By Philbrick’s account Andre is not the honourable officer of legend, brought low also by Arnold’s treachery. Rather Philbrick notes that he was a hugely charming and erudite officer but a thoroughly ambitious one with a ruthless streak, previously demonstrated by is involvement in actions that verged on being war crimes.

Philbrick argues that it was Arnold’s treason that was decisive in uniting the nation behind the cause of independence: one could get only so far with the inspiration of the heroic Washington, he argues. What the young nation really needed was a villain and Arnold, previously the most effective battlefield general in the American army, filled that role to perfection.

It is an intriguing tale. Doubtless Philbrick is already working on a follow-up.

Summary: a volunteers’-eye perspective on the 1916 battle

The Scrap is an account of the 1916 Rebellion. Like many other fine accounts, such as Charles Townshend’s, it draws heavily on the archives of the Irish Bureau of Military History, which years after the Irish War of Independence gathered the oral testimony of the survivors. But where other accounts seek to tell the story of the overall battle, Kerrigan’s focus is on a relatively small group of participants, principally the members of F Company of the Irish Volunteers.

This perspective reminded me of Cornelius Ryan’s frontline account of D-Day, The Longest Day. The result is a hugely rich work, which offers, at least to me, a whole array of new detail and insights on the fighting. For example I never knew that Oscar Traynor, a future commander of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA, had been professional goalkeeper for Belfast Celtic. Or that Arthur Shields, the actor who was a regular member of John Ford’s company perhaps most famously playing the Church of Ireland vicar in The Quiet Man, was a veteran of the 1916 Rising. Or that the rebels had made radio broadcasts from O’Connell “Sacksville” Street to announce the Irish Republic to the world.

John Wayne, John Ford, and Arthur Shields on the set of The Quiet Man

In the midst of this there is further important detail on aspects of the fighting including initial clashes in the north of the city around Fairview, at the City Hall, and a worm’s eye view of the desperate fighting around Henry Street in the final hours of the Rebellion. The book also throws interesting light on the actions and decisions of the leaders during the Rising, particular Pearse, Connolly and McDermott.

Kerrigan does not shy away from the horrors of the battle either. In one disturbing passage a medic examines the head of an injured child in the darkness, accidentally running his fingers across her mouth and feeling her teeth. When a light is brought he finds that he has actually run his hand across a gaping wound in the dying child’s head.

Gene Kerrigan is a legendary journalist and makes no attempt to dress this book up as academic history: there are no footnotes, for example. He is also an exceptionally gifted writer and this is a remarkable and arresting contribution to the literature on the1916 Rebellion, giving a strong sense not just of what happened, but what it was like to be there.

Summary: “The rebels who went out to do battle on Easter Monday morning may have been marching into the unknown, but they shared one expectation: that the British military response would be rapid and hard.”

On Easter Monday, 24th April, 1916, a group of armed Irish rebels occupied the General Post Office (GPO) and other major buildings across the city of Dublin. It was the beginning of the Irish War of Independence that would last with varying degrees of political and military intensity until 1921.

The O’Rahilly

The troops who occupied these strongpoints were members of the Irish Volunteers, a force assembled to defend the Home Rule promised Ireland by the British Government, and the Irish Citizen Army, a force organised by the trade union movement to protect workers from the police. But it was neither an Irish Volunteer nor Citizen Army rebellion so much as an Irish Republican Brotherhood one. The IRB was a highly secretive revolutionary organisation, and with the rebellion they were in fact trying to organise a coup on the leadership of the Volunteers including Eoin MacNeill, the Chief of Staff, and Michael “The” O’Rahilly, Director of Arms.

When MacNeill learned of the IRB plan, to use proposed training exercises on Easter Sunday 1916 to stage a rebellion, he countermanded the order. Consequently instead of tens of thousands rising up all over Ireland, less that two thousand mobilized in Dublin alone.

The remote chances of success were further dented by a considerable quantity of bad luck. The great Irish anti-slavery activist and revolutionary Roger Casement was captured with the huge quantity of German arms he was trying to smuggle into Ireland for the rebellion.

Added to this, from the start there were gaping flaws in the plan. The strong points taken by the rebels were disconnected and hence unable to provide mutual support. They failed to take Dublin Castle, which was virtually undefended because of the Easter holidays. They could have made better use of guerrilla tactics. Where they did, at Mount Street Bridge, a handful of intensely brave Irish soldiers inflicted tragic and devastating losses on the young Sherwood Foresters they fought there.

After six days it was over, crushed by the might of the British Empire that overwhelmed them with troops and heavy guns. The O’Rahilly, despite his opposition to the rebellion, ultimately felt duty bound to participate, and was killed towards the end leading an attack on a British machine gun position to give cover to the withdrawal from the GPO. As The O’Rahilly himself had put it in a phrase later taken up by Yeats, the man who had helped wind the clock came to hear it strike.

Charles Townshend, a distinguished English historian of Ireland, published this exceptionally fine account of the origins, course and consequences of the 1916 Easter rebellion in 2005. It is, therefore, the product of a life of scholarship rather than a rush for centenary sales. It is both an accessible starting point for those who wish to learn more as well as a valuable contribution to the ongoing conversations about and considerations of the Rising.

It has been argued that the 1916 Rebellion could never be classified as a just war, given the hopelessness of the cause and that the use of violence could not have been viewed as a last resort. The Easter Rising also casts something of a shadow between unionist and nationalist communities to this day: unionists regard it as a stab in the back of those who were serving and dying in the British Army in the defence of “small nations”.

By the standards of the First World War this was a trifling affair. In the blood bath of the Somme that would begin a few weeks later thousands of Irishmen, nationalist and unionist alike, were pointlessly butchered alongside English, Scots, and Welsh, in the name of Empire.

But one cannot deny the extraordinary courage and idealism of those who went out to fight: Grace and Malone at Mount Street Bridge; The O’Rahilly in the retreat from the GPO; Ned Daly in the Four Courts. These were people who displayed enormous grace under pressure in the face of overwhelming odds, in the name of an unquestionably just cause, if, perhaps, not in a just war.

Yeats was perhaps never more prescient, both politically and historically, than when he finally published his view of the Rising: “A terrible beauty is born”.

 Summary: The Troubles through the prism of Kevin Myers’ favourite subject – himself

Kevin Myers is one of the finest writers of his generation. An exquisite prose stylist, he is the author of some of the most compelling and elegantly written journalism of the past 40 years.

He is also an arsehole of the first order: If the Oxford English Dictionary is considering a pictorial edition they would probably include a picture of Myers to illustrate the term “West Brit”. Since the events covered in this book Myers has transformed himself into a smart-arsed apologist of the establishment, frequently economical with the facts where they may conflict with his opinions. Indeed, if there is an entry for “Smart-Arsed Apologist of the Establishment” in the Oxford Pictionary, Myers photo would probably be there too.

Given all the aforementioned, I deliberately bought this book in a charity shop in the hope that this would deny Myers any financial benefit from my purchase. As Myers is a voluble opponent of international aid this purchase therefore represented something of a double-whammy.

Watching the Door is a memoir of Myers time as a young journalist in Belfast in the early 1970s. It displays a considerably higher degree of self-awareness than I expected. Myers, it seems, has always known he was an arsehole, and a foolhardy one at that.

A former housemate of mine once almost got himself very badly hurt by a frankly stupid disregard for the dangers posed by a Belfast city centre car bomb. This prompted a house meeting with one item only on the agenda: whether we should kick his shite out for being such a stupid fecker. (We didn’t… even though he was.)

Myers does not appear to have had any housemates to slap him around for his reckless behaviour. Even had he not been so reckless the daily grind of reporting one of the most brutal periods of the Troubles would have resulted in profound post-traumatic stress.

Myers now appears repelled by his youthful self, and the portrait he presents of himself as a youth is repellent. The 180 degree transformation that he has fashioned of himself is also repellent. So in that at least he is consistent.

But he is still an exquisite writer and this is an important subject as the horrors of the 1970s begin to be overlaid by romantic hues and preposterous myths: one article I read recently by an American journalist seriously reported the inspiration that Gerry Adams claimed to take from Martin Luther King, the same Adams whose first appearance in these pages relates to his instruction to an IRA minion on how to deal with a local thug: “Shoot him.” On another occasion, when questioned by a journalist about the disappearance and murder by the IRA of Jean McConville, a single mother, on the trumped up charge of informing, Adams glibly asserted “These things happen in wars.” Indeed they do. They are called war crimes.

Sean O’Callaghan, an Irish Police informer in the IRA, also alleges that Adams contemplated at one stage assassinating John Hume, the most passionate of King’s disciples ever to walk the island of Ireland. John Hume only makes a fleeting appearance in this book. The Peace People are mentioned a couple of times. Seamus Mallon not at all. It may be that they rarely encroached upon Myers consciousness in the midst of his alcoholic stupor from the considerable time spent in late night drinking dens with murderous Loyalist and so-called “Republican” paramilitaries. However their exclusion may be simply to bolster a dubious thesis in this book: that no matter how horrific the paramilitary actions became, and to his credit Myers details many atrocities the former paramilitaries would like to forget, they were never condemned or repudiated by their communities. Hume and Mallon became hoarse in their condemnations of the atrocities of all sides, including the British who Myers, to my mind, soft pedals on, and the SDLP consistently outpolled Sinn Fein by a ratio of 2 to 1 during the period that the Provos waged their illegal war.

The repudiation of sectarianism and violence by many ordinary people in the North was also illustrated in two of the most horrific incidents of the Troubles, which Myers choses to skate over in this book: the Miami Showband and the Kingsmills Massacres. To be fair after the litany of bloodshed which he has already recounted he may have felt exhausted at having to confront these atrocities as well. But there are important details.

The Miami Showband, in one of their last publicity images

The Miami Showband was non-sectarian and religiously mixed. According to Stephen Travers, the band’s bassist and one of the survivors, his best friend in the band, trumpeter Brian McCoy, a Protestant from a Unionist background in County Tyrone, understood the rest of the band’s concern at having been stopped by the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). McCoy whispered to Travers that he could stop worrying when a British officer showed up. That did not protect them unfortunately when the bomb the UDR was trying to plant in the band’s bus went off and killed two of these British armed and directed terrorists. The UDR soldiers, whose dual membership in the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force had not been a barrier to their entry into the British Army, then started butchering this group of defenceless musicians who represented the best of society of the whole island of Ireland.

The Protestant victims of the IRA’s Kingsmill massacre also showed a impressive anti-sectarian heroism as they tried to protect their Catholic colleagues from what they initially thought was a similar UDR/UVF attack, before the horrendous realisation that the war criminals in question on this occasion had come to butcher them.

So in spite of the author’s arseholeism, and the exaggerations, evasions and distortions that pepper this account of war and his, sometimes quite bizarre, sexual adventures, this book is an important one. As many of those who directed war crimes in the course of this illegal war attain high office in both parts of Ireland it reminds us just how horrendous and shameful the Troubles actually were.

For this reason I can only hope many more charity bookshops will benefit from the sale of this book in the years to come.

 There was no “phony war” at sea. The Battle of the Atlantic started on the first day of the Second World War, 3 Sept 1939, with the sinking of SS Athenia by a German U-boat. It continued until the last day of the war and so was the longest campaign of the Second World War and the most destructive naval conflict in history.
Dimbleby’s account of this campaign is an elegantly written horror story, alternating between accounts of the ghastly fighting at sea, and the operational and strategic planning of the Allies and the Axis that guided the slaughter.

Churchill famously said that the U-boat menace was the one thing that gave him sleepless nights during the war. However it would be fair to say he brought many of the nightmares that afflicted him on himself. Most damningly Churchill prioritised the militarily pointless and morally indefensible bombing of German cities by the psychopathic head of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, over the vital defence of the convoys across the North Atlantic. Hence Coastal Command was denied the relatively few aircraft that could have turned the tide of the battle months earlier.

Dimbleby asserts that Churchill was possessed of a great strategic vision. But this seems rather at odds with the account presented which suggests a certain strategic fickleness on Churchill’s part. It is true he did have a vast and complex set of problems on his mind. But one does get the impression of a man easily given to temporary military enthusiasms to little useful purpose but to the detriment of some truly vital endeavours. Dimbleby puts this into sharpest focus on some of Churchill’s choices around the Battle of the Atlantic. But one sees this in many other places such as his failure to finish the defeat of the Italians in North Africa before, wholly ineffectually, attempting to arrest the invasion of Greece.

Rather than military strategy Churchill’s genius was of the political variety. His forging of the trans-Atlantic alliance with Roosevelt was perhaps his finest hour. This resulted ultimately in the Allied victory, not least by bringing the true strategic genius of the US General George Marshall to bear on the situation. This inexorably refashioned Allied strategy away from Churchill’s fanciful Mediterranean focus – which arose more from his desire to keep some semblance of unity on the British Empire rather than to pose a lethal threat to the Axis – and towards an altogether more effective intent to mount an invasion of France to swiftly strike at the heart of Nazi Germany.

In spite of these strategic failings a combination of increasing effectiveness of convoy tactics, and improved technology ultimately, and with dramatic suddenness in May 1943, turned the tide of the Battle in the Allies’ favour. Thereafter, with victory in the North Atlantic, victory in the overall war was assured. Convincingly Dimbleby argues that the code-breaking of Bletchley Park was only marginally a factor in this victory, not least because the Germans had also cracked the Royal Navy code and the advantages that Bletchley provided were somewhat cancelled out in the war at sea.

The Battle of the Atlantic was to any imagining horrendous and Dimbleby conveys this well – from the account of Italian prisoners weeping in terror as they drowned imprisoned in the holds of the torpedoed Laconia, to the massacre of the Arctic Convoy PQ 17, condemned to its doom by incompetence in the Admiralty for which, of course, no one was ever held to account: That the lives and heroism of merchant seamen were held cheap by the Establishment is a recurring theme in this book.

The Battle of the Atlantic is a gripping and generous-spirited book, drawing on the accounts of German as well as Allied participants recognising the courage and humanity of all the participants in the Battle, while also recognising the horrendous things that many of these ordinary human beings did to each other.