Thursday 12 February 2009

Book Recco. Unconventional Military Strategies.

Turn Around And Run Like Hell By Joseph Cummings (pdf) is about war strategies that worked against the odds, usually. Covering battles from 539bc with the Persians giving Babylon a nudge to 1956.

From the link:

This is a history of unorthodox military strategies, unprecedented ideas from leaders who
thought outside the box-who, in fact, wouldn’t even know a box if they saw one- and
whose unconventional, even heretical, tactics not only changed the course of battles, but
sometimes became part of the military canon.
In this book, we learn how to exploit an enemy’s weak spots and how to fashion handy
weapons out of everything from trees to dead bodies. In more than one story, we appreciate
that there comes a time in every general’s career when the best possible strategy is to
swallow his pride, turn around — and run like hell!.

I've just started it but I'm really enjoying it. It plays out more like an against the odds book. It's got a chapter about the Maori running the English to a stand still and to a treaty. The Maori have never been conquered in war.

19 comments:

  1. Looks good. Another for the list.

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  2. "The Maori have never been conquered in war".

    Maybe not war, but they have been in Rugby League.

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  3. Hey...AND CRICKET, AND Beer drinking and ..well, Hell They ARE!, Kiwis afteral. Not that hard to beat them. "runs"

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  4. I'll beat you on the Battlefield my friend. lol

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  5. "in fact, wouldn’t even know a box if they saw one" - they can't all be Greek!

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  6. Beating the English in a battle isn't exactly unusual, perhaps we should remember the punch up the poms got into with those who went on to found a place called America? The real reason the Maori's have never lost a battle is they have never gone to war against Australia.

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  7. IT was a war, not a battle, and the English troops came from Australia.

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  8. ...and I didn't say they were the only ones to beat them.

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  9. ya so did make you self a target there my friend

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  10. No, but the Maori could have probably used a better translator, having signed a treaty which had different binding clauses depending on whether it was the Maori or Pakeha versions you were referring to, and hence got shafted. (Or so our Maori research facilitator tells us. Repeatedly.)

    The Maori never went to war against or in Australia largely because they were never actually that interested in the joint. Went through every island in the Pacific rather than go there. Probably tells you something about the habitability of northern Australia compared to, say, the Bay of Islands or the Marlborough Sounds. I dare say the Maori would have belted seven bells out of your average Aboriginal tribe - who'd existed pretty much in isolation of social evolution, the development of weapons and interactions with other peoples - all things which gave the Maori huge advantages over other indigenous peoples (all of which did a lot worse than the Maori out of colonisation). But I guess they didn't see much in the place - or hadn't got around to looking - they only reached NZ in about the 1200s (AD.)

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  11. The English never took a completed Pa.

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  12. Actually, and interesting war would be a Samoan and Maori one.

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  13. I think i might get this one. Thanks.

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  14. Probably happened. Couple of thousand years ago, somewhere in Polynesia. Saw a decent show on TV here a while back with a Maori and a Samoan TV personality (obviously the term is used pretty loosely as regards NZ TV) following the trail of polynesian migration from NZ backwards through Fiji, Samoa and Tonga to the Solomons and right back to Taiwan where the ancestors of all Pacific peoples apparently came from - the indigenous people of Taiwan. Amazing to think all that happened inside a few thousand years - migration across tens of thousands of open sea to colonise a bunch of flyspeck islands in the middle of nowhere - and meanwhile the Aborigines had pretty much had the run of Oz for 100,000 years.

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  15. Yeah, it's an amazing thing.

    There's still rivalry between the Maori and Sa.

    Don't think the Indige Aussies were really a warring type of people. War was invented, conflict wasn't. They traded with the people of southern Asia. They probably had life sorted out right. Europeans rocking up fucked everything up for them.

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  17. I flicked you an email re: da fiction

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  18. The REAL reason why the Maori never went after Auz..
    because the british had it and still have it.

    They figure the abos have enough trouble with the white prisoners ;)

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