MHM 140 Letters – May

This article is from Military History Matters issue 140

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PRECISION RAIDS

I enjoyed Taylor Downing’s excellent review of Masters of the Air (MHM April/May 2024) and, having seen the series in the company of enthusiasts, I have to say it was epic.

There were some minor issues, though. The punch-up between Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force was, I thought, very tame and gentlemanly. A veteran told me that the occasional fracas in Cambridge at ‘time’ in the evening, between the pubs The Baron of Beef (Bomber Command) and The Mitre (the Eight Air Force), was a lot more than a minor skirmish.

And in the article I was somewhat irritated by Downing’s reference to the ‘carpet or indiscriminate bombing’ of Bomber Command. The RAF were often highly accurate in their targeting of European cities such Eindhoven, Amiens, and Copenhagen, and of course on operations such as Chastise, the attack on Germany’s Ruhr Valley dams in May 1943.

It should be remembered that over Japan, the campaign of the US Twentieth Air Force under Curtis LeMay had been an abject failure. Only by adopting Bomber Command’s precision techniques did the end of the war in the East begin to hasten.

Let us remember the courage, professionalism, and dedication of our bomber veterans, and what they achieved during that conflict.

Rod Sanders, Metheringham, Lincolnshire

NAPOLEONIC SPECTACLE

While I agree with most of what Taylor Downing says in his review of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (MHM February/March 2024) regarding historical inaccuracies, I do however take objection to his statement that ‘in terms of spectacle [the film] is second to none’. There are many equally spectacular, if not better scenes in other films and television shows depicting the same era, such as 1970’s Waterloo, both versions of War and Peace, Abel Gance’s 1960 film Austerlitz, and the 2002 French-American miniseries Napoleon: an epic life. 

While each of those productions admittedly had its own weaknesses too, when it comes to spectacle Scott has in no way eclipsed them.

James N Kocur, Linden, New Jersey

TERRIBLY FLAWED

I was amused by the recent article on the M551 Sheridan tank (MHM February/March 2024), which was indeed a terribly flawed bit of hardware. As well as often falling to pieces when air-dropped, resulting in road wheels detaching and bouncing around a drop zone, a more hazardous drawback was the main gun, designed to fire a 152mm round or a ‘Shillelagh’ wire-guided missile. Firing this weapon required a guidance ‘key’ in the breech to be extended to accept the weapon’s body. However, if the ‘key’ was left up when the crew decided to load conventional ammo, it would rupture the combustible case of the round, spilling explosive propellant all over the floor of the hull. This was understandably hazardous to the crew.

In truth, of the thousands of Shillelagh missiles produced, I don’t think there were more than a half dozen fired in anger. Compounding this issue was the vehicle’s aluminium hull, which was extremely vulnerable variously to small-arms fire, land mines, and rocket-propelled grenades. 

In short, it was not a very well thought-out project.  

Fred Chiaventone, Weston, Missouri

CIVIL WAR CAMPS

Thank you for your excellent article on the career of Nathan Bedford Forrest (MHM December 2023/January 2024), which was no doubt a difficult subject to address. The issue of the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp – at Andersonville, Georgia – is an interesting one. As the article made clear, it was a truly horrifying place. Of the 45,000 Federal prisoners held there in cramped and unpleasant conditions, 13,000 would die of dysentery, scurvy, and other diseases.

Unmentioned in the article, however, was the equally grim camp for Confederate soldiers (pictured) in Elmira, New York, which operated during the final year of the Civil War. Conditions there were also brutal, and around 3,000 of the camp’s 12,000 inmates died due to the poor conditions – a similar number, in percentage terms, to the death toll at Andersonville. Confederate prisoners there, not unsurprisingly, referred to it as ‘Hellmira’.

Rand McCoy, via email

UNIQUE DIMENSION

I am reaching out to convey my appreciation for the content in each issue of Military History Matters magazine. As a tenth-grade student with a great interest in the past, particularly in World War II, your magazine has become a great resource for my learning.

I particularly appreciate the magazine’s commitment to inclusivity, featuring first-hand accounts and interviews that provide a human touch to the historical events. These personal stories have added a unique dimension to my understanding of the subject.

Ian McMahon, via email

Please note: letters may be edited for length; views expressed here are those of our readers, and do not necessarily reflect those of the magazine.