Reading List?

[CINDERS]

Got both of those reads good books plus Anzac Sniper, Ed Klugers book Dead Center, Dear Mom, Silent Warrior, 13 cent Killers, Shooters, Sniper One, Marine Sniper, The Last Wolf, SAS Sniper, With Snipers To The Reich, Sniper One on One, Stalk and Kill, A Sniper In The Arizona 2nd Batt 5th Marines 1967. And the usual books by Skennerton & Senich.

Another good aerial book is Fate Is The Hunter By Ernest Gann puts a whole new perspective on being an airline pilot pre WWII and then a transport pilot over the hump in WWII nearly had a close encounter with the Taj Mahal building then how he beat un-porting by being fat (carries enough fuel) and dumb when a particular type of air liners were inexplicably crashing, an interlude to mexico! Shooting rats in thin walled hotel rooms with a 45ACP, the front few pages are pretty sobering with a good many names of his friends their wings forever folded.

[RASelkirk]

I've always gravitated towards the intel stuff. After watching Midway again, I had to pull out and reread "And I Was There" by Edwin Layton. Layton was a master crypto-analyst who fervently studied the Japanese before and during the war.


Russ

[ssgross]

Selkirk if you are interested in the scientific side of that story, I have several good mathematical reads on the topic - illustrating the evolution of what we borrowed from those early US analyists' discoveries in the creation of modern algorithms.

I finished the Azad book. In the end it was and enjoyable read and interesting perspective, but reading on did nothing to change my opinions on what I perceived as embelishments.

I also finished "Shots fired in anger". I have read several other first-person-eye-witness accounts before, as well as had the privilege to talk in person with veterans when I was much younger, but only from the Marine side. That supply depot in and around lungs point was regularly raided by Marines. As the author of Shots Fired points out, sneaking in and trading for a new-in-box Garand was the ultimate achievement.
It was enlightening to have a similar ground level story from the Army perspective in contrast - very different to say the least. It's also interesting to contrast the officer's perspective with similar enlisted accounts. I've done this on the Marine side, but so far only read the army officer's account from this book. The differences in these accounts, marine vs. army or officer vs. enlisted tend to be stark.

[RASelkirk]

Selkirk if you are interested in the scientific side of that story, I have several good mathematical reads on the topic - illustrating the evolution of what we borrowed from those early US analyists' discoveries in the creation of modern algorithms.

I finished the Azad book. In the end it was and enjoyable read and interesting perspective, but reading on did nothing to change my opinions on what I perceived as embelishments.

I also finished "Shots fired in anger". I have read several other first-person-eye-witness accounts before, as well as had the privilege to talk in person with veterans when I was much younger, but only from the Marine side. That supply depot in and around lungs point was regularly raided by Marines. As the author of Shots Fired points out, sneaking in and trading for a new-in-box Garand was the ultimate achievement.
It was enlightening to have a similar ground level story from the Army perspective in contrast - very different to say the least. It's also interesting to contrast the officer's perspective with similar enlisted accounts. I've done this on the Marine side, but so far only read the army officer's account from this book. The differences in these accounts, marine vs. army or officer vs. enlisted tend to be stark.

Are you selling books or advising titles, do tell! Yes, I'm interested in American/British code breaking. That and any stories on the "great American torpedo fail" or the coast watchers of WWII.

Russ

[ssgross]

An eye opener for me professionally was when I accidentally read Katz and Lindell's Introduction to Modern Cryptography and a rigorous text on the reverse engineering of the Enigma at the same time. I don't remember the title/author of the latter, but I remember I was reading it for pleasure, and I was also digging for something in the former for work. Some googling for you turned up a nice expository Master's Thesis
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/144149789.pdf
I've always been a romantic when it comes to math, and by then I had tired of the usual high-level spy drama. I wanted to know the science of how it works. Any thorough academic text on cryptography will quickly show you that our ideas today aren't as new and exciting as we think. For example, all of the mathematics for the most popular public key algorithms had all been laid down by Gauss and Euler long before Diffie and Hellman, or those RSA guys wrote down their algorithms. The only part missing was the modern computational need to drive the application.

And poor old G.H. Hardy thought he wasted his life with "silly" math only good for solving puzzles in the back pages of whatever magazine he was reading.
https://www.math.ualberta.ca/mss/mis...%20Apology.pdf
The essay above really illustrates the backwards nature of the cryptography story...oh I won't ruin it for you. I would recommend starting with this essay, then the masters' thesis, then...at least that would be my "wax on...wax off" baby step approach for any student who inquired.

[RASelkirk]

An eye opener for me professionally was when I accidentally read Katz and Lindell's Introduction to Modern Cryptography and a rigorous text on the reverse engineering of the Enigma at the same time. I don't remember the title/author of the latter, but I remember I was reading it for pleasure, and I was also digging for something in the former for work. Some googling for you turned up a nice expository Master's Thesis
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/144149789.pdf
I've always been a romantic when it comes to math, and by then I had tired of the usual high-level spy drama. I wanted to know the science of how it works. Any thorough academic text on cryptography will quickly show you that our ideas today aren't as new and exciting as we think. For example, all of the mathematics for the most popular public key algorithms had all been laid down by Gauss and Euler long before Diffie and Hellman, or those RSA guys wrote down their algorithms. The only part missing was the modern computational need to drive the application.

And poor old G.H. Hardy thought he wasted his life with "silly" math only good for solving puzzles in the back pages of whatever magazine he was reading.
https://www.math.ualberta.ca/mss/mis...%20Apology.pdf
The essay above really illustrates the backwards nature of the cryptography story...oh I won't ruin it for you. I would recommend starting with this essay, then the masters' thesis, then...at least that would be my "wax on...wax off" baby step approach for any student who inquired.

Thanks, even though I could not DL either file. Attempting to save showed "network error". But I finally got them by letting the PDF load in Brave and saving them as...a PDF. Go figure!

Russ

[CINDERS]

Another good read harrowing......one for the secret stuff........another of a rather hilarious endeavour if it were not so serious

[ssgross]

I just put down "Alone at Dawn", about John Chapman's Medal of Honor action in Afganistan in 2002. There is a predator drone video of the entire battle in another post, that prompted getting the book to fill in the details. Very sad, but moving story.
https://www.milsurps.com/showthread.php?t=73575