Reviews for Battle Babies: Story of the 99th Infantry Division

The average rating for Battle Babies: Story of the 99th Infantry Division based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-12-30 00:00:00 Jeffrey Drummond Concise history of the 1956 Sinai campaign of the Israeli Army as the faced a numerical superior Egyptian army. The Egyptians had the advantage of of being in well prepared defensive positions with superior numbers of tanks, anti-tank (AT) weapons and aircraft. What they did not have was the will and fighting spirit of the Israeli citizen-soldier who proceeded to drive the Egyptian forces out of the Sinai causing a huge lose of military supplies and equipment while inflicting personnel loses in the form of KIA's, WIA's, missing and POW's.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-01-21 00:00:00 Pierre Gr�goire In the early 1950s Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the Suez Canal and the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. In late October 1956, with the goal of reopening both, the Israeli army crossed from Israel into the Sinai. Published in 1958, just two years after the 1956 Suez War, S.L.A. Marshall's Sinai Victory is the story of the Sinai campaign as studied on the Israeli side. Marshall wrote this book is solely about the military action of the Israeli army in that campaign. He omits political discussion and makes scant mention of the actions of France and Great Britain, both of whom took part. The crux of the book is a chronology of the 1956 Suez War from the Israeli army's view, fleshed out with a thorough explanation of its military philosophy. This is a military history that succeeds in holding a narrow focus on the how, not on the why of the campaign. Analysis is broad but not particularly in-depth, leaving the reader to assay it himself. Marshall's blow by blow writing is thorough and somewhat more graceful than a report but it's less than riveting unless you enjoy the military history genre. The many illustrations are quite good but seem to me a mite fragmented. I often had the feeling that the microscope's magnification should've been backed off by half an order of magnitude. It's the kind of book that begs for a foldout map. The book's greatest weakness, though, is its lack of bibliography and footnotes/endnotes. There must have been a presumption that the reader has all that kind of information in hand. Still, I feel like I have a much better understanding of that milestone in near* east history. *In my school days in the 1950s and 1960s this region was the near east with the middle east considerably further east, say, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India. It probably became the mid-east when some TV reporter with a weak understanding of geography but with a huge audience began mistakenly calling it that.