IPMS/USA Reviews

Professor Michael Fredholm von Essen is an historian and former military analyst who has published extensively on the history, defence strategies, security policies, and energy sector developments of Eurasia. He currently is the Head of Research and Development at IRI, an independent research institute. Educated at Uppsala, Stockholm, and Lund Universities, Michael Fredholm von Essen has lectured, including during conferences and as visiting professor, at numerous institutions and universities around the world.

The planning, execution and consequences of Operation Vengeance - the interception, shoot-down and death of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the architect of Japan's surprise attack upon the U.S. Fleet at Pearl Harbor - have generated a sizable literature. This Osprey title, the 53rd in its Raid Series, is a succinct but comprehensive summary of that material.

Author Si Sheppard begins with a look at U.S. efforts to read Japanese secure message traffic - codes and cyphers - that began to slowly gather momentum soon after World War I, only to be abruptly halted in 1929 by Henry Stimson, President Hoover's new Secretary of State, on the grounds that, as Stimson had famously said, "Gentlemen do not read one another's mail." Fortunately, an outbreak of realism soon followed, and in the 1930s both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army made important breakthroughs in intercepting and reading encrypted Japanese military and diplomatic messages. Unfortunately, their efforts were separate and insufficiently shared, both because of the sensitivity of the subject and, to a sad extent, because of inter-service rivalry.

This book vividly describes life in Hitler's Fuhrerbunker below the German Reich's Chancelleries as the Soviet Red Army closes in on Berlin at the end of WWII. Two French officers secretly entered the bunkers in November 1945 and gathered hundreds of documents that describe the living conditions and actions of the bunker's inhabitants at the end of WWII. These documents form the basis for this book.

Fuhrerbunker is divided into chapters that chronologically describe the last few months of Germany's Reich at the end of WWII. Each chapter contains written text, sidebar narratives with first-person accounts, B&W and color photos with descriptive captions, photos of historical documents, and color illustrations. The chapters are:

Prologue: Berlin 1945

The opening chapter describes the chaos and devastation following the bloody assault on Berlin by the Red Army.

This review looks at Mission Model Paints Farm Tractor Yellow (MMP-126), Hiway Yellow 1930/1990 Heavy Equipment (MMP-041), New Construction Yellow 1990 to Present (MMP-125), and Concrete 1 (MMP-127). This is a comparison of the paint colors to actual vehicles or materials. Check out my earlier review on the use and performance of MMP Paints.

Mission Models Paints are non-solvent base organic acrylics that produce a flat finish.

Construction Equipment Colors

MMP has released three yellow colors for construction equipment:

There is an old axiom that amateurs pursue tactics, but professionals manage logistics. It is a topic that largely goes unexplored in the voluminous literature of the Second World War. Outside of the modeling world, I am an academically trained military historian who works in the public history field. I have had a keen interest in the topic. Given my background, I was keen to review this work. From a production point of view, Pen and Sword knows what they are doing - high quality binding, heavy paper, and well produced photographs, contemporary to the war and modern, color photographs of restored vehicles form the Second World War. My criticisms are with the content.