Chuck Melson on 'Kleinkrieg'
Books Written by My Friends (III)
Charles D. Melson has written many books about the history of the Marine Corps and four on the subject of German military history. Works of the first category include monographs published by the History Division of the Marine Corps University and several short studies put out by the good people at Osprey, those of the second focus on the German experience of guerrilla warfare.
The first book of the latter group to roll of the press describes the airborne raid, carried out on 25 May 1944, aimed at the capture of Yugoslav partisan leader Josef Broz Tito. While this Operation Knight’s Move failed to achieve its purpose, it provides a useful companion to the many studies that have been written of a more famous operation – the rescue, by Otto Skorzeny, of Benito Mussolini from his mountaintop prison on 12 September 1943.
Originally published, in 2011, as the ice-breaker of the short-lived Studies in Battle series of the Marine Corps University Press, Operation Knight’s Move has since disappeared from the website of that organization. Happily, a couple of other websites – the Internet Archive and Govinfo.gov – offer free downloads of the digital (PDF) version of the book. (As busybodies love to remove books like this from the internet, I recommend that you download a copy as soon as you can.)
In 2016, Casemate came out with Kleinkrieg (‘small war’), a volume that combined translations of two German handbooks on guerrilla warfare with commentary by Major Melson. Three years later, the same publisher reprinted this book under the title The German Army Guerrilla Warfare Pocket Manual.
The used-to-be-a-tree versions of this double-named work have, alas, fallen out of print. However, the Casemate website offers digital copies for sale. (Marvelous to say, the PDF of The German Army Guerrilla Warfare Pocket Manual costs much less than the PDF of Kleinkrieg.) If, moreover, you wish to spend more, or purchase precarious access, you can also find paperless copies on the websites of the usual suspects.
Next year, Casemate will publish German Counterinsurgency Campaigning in the Balkans, 1942–45. Bearing the subtitle Jaegers and Partisans, this monograph will combine unit history with ‘a philosophical and doctrinal inquiry into how counterinsurgency was understood, practiced, and justified’.
For Further Reading
Happy new year
And, BTW, happy new Year Everyone