Accompanied, no less, by a treatise on the weapons that the Chechen fighters had at their disposal, replete with maps and diagrams.ħ Specialists in military tactics should therefore consider themselves the primary audience for this book. Lone Wolf World War 2 Gameplay (PC Game) AllGamesWorldHd 84. At the same time, the chapters are composed of juxtaposed "vignettes" highlighting this or that tactic or masterful military move, which do not however always help to unravel the complexities at play.ĥ Moreover, the order of the chapters devoted to different topics ("Defense of an Urban Area", "Breakout of an Encirclement", "Raids", "Ambush and Counter-Ambush", "Defense of Lines of Communication", "Defense of a River Line", "Mine and Anti-Tank", "Attack", "Shelling and Sniping Attacks"), and the vignettes themselves often deal with events from very different periods, with those of the first and second wars flipping back and forth.Ħ All the same, the reader is privy to numerous historical events that help in understanding how the Chechen strategy gradually developed. There are tantalizing glimpses of all of these things in the book, but they are never fully developed, leaving the general reader somewhat dissatisfied.Ĥ On the one hand, the linear accounts deal exclusively with concrete tactics, which, from the point of view of the social sciences, can only garner limited interest. What also could have become clearer is the process by which these groups of combatants came together, their perception of the war and the effects of their experiences on them after the war, both as individuals and as groups. It could have thereby shed light on the motives they had for their commitment and the various paths that led ordinary people to take up the fight. The introduction, for example, is extremely promising, as is the fact that the author methodically tracked down and interviewed former Chechen fighters, some of whom fought on the front lines. Nevertheless, Fangs of the Lone Wolf could have striven to attract a wider public. In this sense, Fangs of the Wolf adds to and complements Stasys Knezys and Romanas Sedlickas' The War in Chechnya (Texas A&M University Press), which was published in 1999, before the second war with Russia.ģ This book is therefore clearly aimed at specialists and enthusiasts of military strategy who are eager to know how small groups manage against organized armies in cities, mountains and foothills within the context of colonial and guerilla warfare. All of this is then presented within the context of an enormous asymmetry both in terms of military might and in terms of brute number of soldiers, for in these wars a few thousand independence fighters stood against the trained army of a powerful nation. Get Lone Wolf now at .uk (£ 82.95)Īs an Amazon Associate earns a commission from qualifying purchases.1 As the title itself makes clear, this work primarily concerns the military tactics used by Chechen combatants during their two armed conflicts with Russia, from 1994 to 1996 and again from 1999 to 2009.Ģ One of the book's main points of interest, which greatly distinguishes it from the bulk of works on Chechnya that have been published in the last few years, is to show the different stages of the wars, including truces, sudden changes of direction, changes in tactics, lessons learned from various military defeats. This book has been translated into other languages.įrom the review: This well written and researched book (amongst other sources such as interviews with surviving U-boat commanders and Henke's personal records, the extensive and veryĬomprehensive files of the U-Boot Archiv. He is portrayed as being everything from a superb U-boat commander to 'a typical clean-cut, arrogant, ruthless Junker who gloried in the war.' The author provides reasonable, if not completely convincing, explanations for all the questions that are raised by this man's wartime record. Henke served on U-124 with Jochen Mohr under Georg Schulz, legitimately won the Oak Leaves late in the war as CO of the U-515, sank the British liner Ceramic, was captured by Daniel Gallery's Guadalcanal-led task force, and was shot to death at Fort Hunt, Virginia while a prisoner of war. Henke's personality is difficult to understand from his actions, and the situation is compounded by previously published stories about him that might be biased. Lone Wolf The Life and Death of U-Boat Ace Werner Henkeĭescripton: The author chose a tricky subject to explore in this work.
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