Most Secret War

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James Hornfischer. The amazing courage shown by the US Navy sailors as their tiny 2,000 ton Destroyers and Destroyer Escorts faced a Japanese fleet of Battleships, Cruisers, and Destroyers at The Battle Off Samar. Inspiring and horrifying, the DDs and DEs of the US navy were protecting "Escort Carriers" which were smaller aircraft carriers made from cargo ship hulls. Warning, may inspire you to learn a whole bunch more about world war 2. And 2 books that sort of go together: Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway by Walter Lord, and Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully. Read Incredible Victory first, learn about the luck, good and bad, that led to a much-needed victory in the Pacific. Then read Shattered Sword and get a fuller picture of events, especially from the Japanese side. Learn about how hubris and dogma led to the Japanese Navy's defeat. Then learn about how saving face led to history not being accurately told by the witnesses on the Japanese side. All 3 are great books that are well worth your time. Others that I've enjoyed:…

Anyone who browses HN regularly will probably enjoy the book "Most Secret War" by R.V. Jones (or the accompanying TV show "The Secret War"). Jones was a physicist working for Churchill directly by the end of the war. Everyone has heard of Bletchley park and the Manhattan project, but Jones's book covers the game of genuinely deadly cat and mouse that was played throughout WW2 as each side learned and adapted to eachothers scientific intelligence. Radar, Sonar (ASDIC at the time), Magnetic mines, etc. Its easy to think of it as an intellectual game of chess but it is telling that when the Allies bombed Peenemunde (Nazi area 51) they flew straight over the laboratories to bomb the houses of the scientists. The TV adaptation is brilliant - thoughtful documentary production, not dumbed down, and most of the people were still alive when it was filmed. https://youtu.be/GJCF-Ufapu8…

...and in a related vein, anyone with a hacker mindset ought to check out R.V. Jones’ ‘Most Secret War’; Jones was the UK senior scientific adviser during WW2 and the book reads like an endless string of anecdotes about one-upping the Germans. I guess tricking early IFF and radionavigation systems could be considered cyber crime - today, at least, he’d get the DMCA thrown at him for his trouble. :)

For sheer engineering fun, R.V. Jones' "How I Won the War" (No, not really; it is called "Most Secret War") is hard to beat; it is the memoirs of Britain's chief scientist during WWII; hundreds of pages of one-upping their Axis counterparts - the birth of electronic warfare. Excellent read.