tss Posted March 5, 2000 Share Posted March 5, 2000 Yesterday I stumbled on a new book (or more precisely, a new paperback edition of a 9 year old book) about Winter War between Finland and Soviet Union. As this was the first modern English book on the subject that I've seen, I had to buy it. The book is William Trotter's 'A Frozen Hell' and it is a general account of the war. The book is very easy to read (I've read about a half of it today) but it lacks depth. The latter property is quite understandable as the book covers the whole war and it's only about 280 pages long. I've not noticed any serious errors in it thus far. The author classifies the Italian Fiat G.50 fighter plane as a modern twin-engined bomber for some reason, but that is a minor gripe. Also, the author has the usual foreigner's approach to 'ä', 'ö', and 'å' letters, using the accents quite randomly (in particular, he seems to have used a word processor incapable of printing 'å'). Trotter captures the essence of the events quite nicely and some of his one-sentence characterizations are very accurate, for example: [About Soviet Navy] "... and, again, one must question the competence of any naval commander who orders two destroyers to tackle a battery of ten-inch coastal artillery on their own." Some other of the characterizations were not so good, for example he claimed that old French 19th century vintage fixed-carriage field guns "couldn't be fired with any accuracy" while in fact those guns were surprisingly accurate and their real problems were slow rate-of-fire (one or two shots a minute) and malfunctioning fuzes. Actually, during the Continuation War Finns could lay more accurate fire in forests using 1887 model 120 mm cannons than Germans with modern 105 mm howitzers. Though I've above presented mainly problems in the book, it's actually a pretty good one and the general outline of the war is clearly presented. It is not excellent but it's clearly the best one in English that I've read about Winter War, not that I've read many. - Tommi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ash Posted March 5, 2000 Share Posted March 5, 2000 I remember him writing about the war between Finland and Russia in an issue of PCgamer. ------------------ The names Ash, Housewares Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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