Book Review: Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves

In the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s several books about World War I came out that have become seminal works in their own right.  Among these is Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves, his autobiography written and published in 1929 that mainly covers his time as a British officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Western Front during the war. As opposed to other memoirs or semi-autobiographical accounts of the war such as Storm of Steel or All Quiet on the Western Front, Goodbye To All That is essentially an unvarnished account of what the war was like for an unconventional English gentleman.  Graves was from … More after the Jump…

Book Review: Decision Points by George W. Bush

Decision Points is a book I have put off reading for several years but finally got around to. I mainly put it off because I have essentially avoided reading any histories of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars as they hit a little close to home for me. I finally changed my mind because I decided enough time has passed. Don’t get me wrong, I was not angry about the wars, I fought in Iraq in 2003-2004 with the Big Red One, at best I am ambivalent. That is a combination of the military historian and the veteran in me. I decided to read Bush’s memoir because I was curious to … More after the Jump…

Where are the honest Nazi’s?

I was reading an article in the current issue of the Journal of Military History and it hit me once again that there are no memoirs from Germans in World War II that are really honest about what they thought. The article in question is Hagermann, Karen. Mobilizing Women for War: The History, Historiography, and Memory of German Women’s War Service in the Two World Wars Journal of Military History, Vol. 75 no. 4 (October 2011), 1055-1094. I actually don’t have a problem with the article itself, it is written well although I don’t necessarily agree with the vaguely feminist premise of the article itself, it is pretty interesting. What … More after the Jump…