Media Monday: Enjoy Entertainment For What It Is

Another short but hopefully thought-provoking post today.

First, I know this has the potential to draw in issues of social justice and other real-world problems that we are all struggling with in one way or another, and I get that. Entertainment is there, first and foremost, to entertain us, and that usually means some element of escapism. That kind of escapism is different for everyone, and while there are certainly some issues that should always be addressed, there are a lot of people for whom escapism means being able to step away from those issues. I am not going to say this is a good or a bad thing, just that it is a sentiment often expressed, and for those people, that sentiment is real. I guess that is my wishy-washy way of saying that I am trying to not directly address social issues here, but instead a more all-encompassing philosophy of entertainment.

For me, that philosophy breaks down to "Enjoy entertaining things for what they are, don't hate them for what they are not". No body of entertainment is perfect, nor can any one body of entertainment media address perfectly all aspects of itself that all consumers may find entertaining. If your go-to for entertainment is gross-out comedy movies, clearly that is not going to appeal to people whose go-to entertainment excludes gross-out humor. I see no point in anyone who dislikes gross-out humor watching such films and then complaining about them. This holds true for almost any form of entertainment, and while we might all be forgiven decades ago for going to movies or watching television shows that we were ignorant of, now that we have the Internet, that is a lack of due diligence on the part of the viewer.

OH NO!

I first started (recently) thinking about this when I saw the fan-rage over the teaser trailer to the latest Star Wars movie, Episode IX, The Rise of Skywalker. There's a moment with a folding lightsaber - yes, that moment, I can see you folks in the back already twitching in your seats - and within hours, never mind days of that trailer going live, the internet was flooded with people screaming and foaming at the mouth over how stupid a gimmick this was and so on. One particular YouTube channel had a 23-minute long video complaining about the lightsaber. Do you know how long it takes to produce a reasonably professional 23-minute long YouTube video? With props and everything? This person likely invested days worth of work to make it, all to complain about something in five seconds of a trailer for a move about laser swords and space magic.

And you know why? Because the video got tens of thousands of monetized views. But that's a whole other article for another day.

People like to get outraged about things. Yes, there are issues worth getting outraged about, but the shape of a science fiction laser sword isn't one of them. This obsessive, fandom-ish need to explain and legitimize and pick apart and deconstruct every single aspect of our entertainment media is not only exhaustive, it's honestly annoying. It becomes this battleground where people spend more time arguing over their entertainment than actually enjoying anything. This is one of the reasons I don't visit Facebook groups around WW2 films or books - everyone in there is a rivet-counting asshole, and if they aren't, they get shouted down by the rivet-counting assholes. Every single movie you bring up in such a group, there's going to be someone who hates it because some aspect of it was displeasing to them.

THE PAINT JOB ARRRRGGGHHH!

I remember someone complaining about the end of Saving Private Ryan because when the Tiger tank is destroyed by the airplane, the plane didn't have empty bomb or rocket racks attached to its lower fuselage. I also remember someone complaining about the movie Fury, and how "laughably stupid" it was that the Tiger in that movie - in real life the only operational Tiger 1 in the entire world, acquired from the Bovington Tank Museum for use in the film - was in its 1943 Tunisian camouflage paint pattern, and not what one would see on a Tiger in mid-1945. Yeah I am sure the staff at Bovington are just going to paint over and then painstakingly strip and re-paint the only operational Tiger tank in the world just for some asshole in a movie theater. I mean, yeah, this is a bit silly.

I guess my overall point here is, be honest about what you want from entertainment, seek that out, and don't complain about what was never intended to be there. Don't watch Wizards in Space for realistic engineering and physics demonstrations. Don't watch war movies if you'll have an aneurysm over the smallest historical inaccuracy. Don't watch horror movies if you're not prepared to see stupid horror movie tropes in action. Don't watch stupid raunchy sex comedies if you're not prepared to see cringe-worthy sex and gender stereotyping. For a large percentage of the population - for good or for ill - humor is about that which causes discomfort. The Office was all about "cringe humor". America's Funniest Home Videos was all about dads getting whacked in the crotch by whiffle bats. There is no getting away from this - it is at the heart of what is entertaining for some people.

Now, to circle back to my opening statement, you can be justified in being upset at something when it tries to do that thing, but actively fails to do so. If your entertainment is about female empowerment, but you fall back on cringy, decades-old stereotypes, or if your message is that female empowerment is in some way bad and you're trying to be edgy by subverting this...than people should call you out for what you are, because you are trying to do that thing and doing it badly. This also doesn't mean you can be left off the hook for obvious racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on just by saying "well this movie was never intended to address that". We live in too-aware a society for that to be a legitimate excuse anymore. I sort of look at it like the old doctor's premise, "First, do no harm". As long as you can avoid being actively racist, sexist, and so forth, I feel you are not required to actively address those and other social issues if that is not the nature and theme of your entertainment.

At the end of the day, as I mentioned in a recent post about modern reading habits and sources of entertainment, we only have so many hours in the day in which to consume entertainment, so why would we purposefully seek out entertainment that doesn't fit with our entertainment comfort zone? Life is too short and blood pressure too high already for us to do that to ourselves.

Wargaming Wednesday: Don't Feel Guilt Buying on eBay

Maybe this is a more controversial topic than I believe it is, but I find weird the pressure people feel against buying second-hand or portioned out miniatures on eBay. To be clear, I am not talking about buying re-casted (aka, illegally copied) miniatures - that's a no-no and should never happen. I'm talking about buying out-of-production miniatures, or second-hand miniatures owned previously by someone else, even if that person just bought a large boxed set (like Games Workshop's Dark Imperium boxed set) and is selling the individual miniatures a few at a time.

These out-of-production models were purchased like this on eBay

There can be a lot of reasons why you'd want to do this. For the out-of-production miniatures, you might just like a particular sculpt of a miniature, but it isn't made anymore. For me, I want to eventually buy and paint one of every GW Space Marine Chaplain, but there are only a handful still being made, while plenty of models with perfectly viable equipment loadouts are still usable in the current version of the game. Another reason might be that you're building, for example, a small display army using older, "retro" models. A lot of people these days are making small Rogue Trader-era forces more for the fun of rediscovering the models than anything else.

Some of the above, now stripped of paint and ready for rebirth!

Another aspect to buying online might be to find a model you want that's not available on its own. For Primaris Space Marines, for example, you cannot buy a Primaris Ancient (aka, Standard Bearer) as its own model anywhere except eBay, since it only comes in the Dark Imperium boxed set. The same goes for the Gravis Captain. In the past, this was likewise the case with other armies. The first official generic Ork Warboss to come with a power klaw didn't arrive until the Assault on Black Reach boxed set for 40K's 5th edition, along with Ork Deffkoptas mounted with rokkits (and the old Deffkopta model is absolutely hideous and ancient).

Tactical marines from the 1993 (!!!) 2nd Edition 40K boxed set.

And of course, another reason might be that you want that ONE particular bit for a model you're making. Maybe you like the look of a certain helmet or sword or gun. Maybe it fits with a theme, maybe the normal kit the part comes in only has 1 per box, and you need five. Sure, you're going to pay more money for it, but this is a leisure hobby, and eBay bits sellers are working from a sellers' market. I've bought plenty of little bits over time in order to build units of a certain theme, and while you're paying a premium for having that degree of choice, I never once felt cheated by the prices.

This Chaplain model has long been OOP. His gun is also an eBay bit purchase.

The biggest criticism or worry I've seen from people who don't want to buy on eBay is that you're not giving money to your Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS). Sure, that's true, but the same reasons you'd be buying on eBay are the same reasons you're not buying at your FLGS - the models and bits are either out of production, or they come in a larger boxed set and aren't sold individually. No one should feel guilty you're not buying a $160 boxed set from your FLGS when all you want is a handful of miniatures you can get on eBay for a fraction of that cost. And as for the idea that Games Workshop isn't getting your money - well, that's bullshit. They got their money for that particular model when that model was first purchased. It doesn't matter if the miniature is 30 years old - at some point, someone gave the company money for that object, and that's that. I hear this as an argument against used book stores pretty frequently - that it keeps the money from the hands of the author - but that's just a guilt trip. A paperback novel is an object, and there's no reason to not sell or give away an object when you are done with it. Conversely, there's no reason you should feel guilt buying it second-hand.

So, with that in mind, if you're looking to build a miniatures army, and you're willing to give older miniatures a little TLC, go onto eBay and do a little investigating. You might be surprised at what you find!

For the Emperor!

Media Monday: War Fever (1969)

Today I'm starting a new push towards regular blogging, and with that, a Monday post every week about some kind of media - film, television, comics, or artwork. Today, I am featuring a film I watched a little while ago on Amazon Prime video, where it is labeled "Salt in the Wound", but the film also has the titles "War Fever", "The Liberators", and its original title in Italian, "Il dito nella piaga", which, according to Google translate (for whatever that's worth) means "The Finger in the Wound".

The plot revolves around Corporal Haskins and Private Greyson, two US Army soldiers who have been accused of crimes (IIRC in both cases, they did commit those crimes), and are sentenced via court martial to death by firing squad. The firing squad detail is led by a shiny new second lieutenant named Sheppard. The two doomed men are driven out to an isolated spot to be executed, but Sheppard gets the directions wrong, and they wind up off the beaten trail. The detail is discovered by a German patrol, and everyone but Haskins, Greyson, and Sheppard is killed. The two convicted men and their executioner flee into the wilderness, armed but ill-equipped, and that's when the movie really begins to pick up.

The dynamic is clear from the beginning. Haskins is a corporal but he's significantly older and more war-weary than Sheppard, who has just come from State-side and has never been in combat before. Greyson is a black man in a white man's army and feels his own bitter resentment towards how he has been treated, and for the first half of the film, he's still in a state of shock, which unfortunately doesn't give the actor much to work with and does a bit of disservice to the character. But Haskins, played by the utterly fantastic Klaus Kinski, sneers and laughs and taunts Sheppard, all the while keeping a Thompson submachine gun pointing Sheppard's way. Haskins doesn't have it in him to kill Sheppard outright, even though he could, and doing so would essentially make him and Greyson free men since there would be no Allied soldier alive who'd know the two doomed men were still living.

When the trio stumble across a small Italian town, there is some rejoicing, as the locals think the Americans are just the lead element in a much larger force sent to "liberate" their town. There are hints of Kipling's "The Man Who Would be King" here, as Haskins soaks up all the glory and warm treatment he can get, playing up his fake role to the hilt, while Sheppard stumbles through the occasion, trying to keep the Italians' expectations realistic, while at the same time, trying to be diplomatic and polite. Greyson, an object of curiosity as the first black man many of the Italians have ever seen, is treated well enough, but it isn't until he befriends a young boy that his character begins to really open up and is given a chance to have significant dialogue and emotion. And of course, there is the extremely cringe-worthy "romance" between Haskins and a young Italiam woman that he relentlessly pursues, in a manner so aggressive that I honestly found myself physically recoiling from the screen at his advances. This is flat-out the worst part of the film.

Of course, inevitably the war comes to the small town, as the Germans have decided it is a good place to defend themselves against an advancing American front. They send an element to capture the town, and soon, Haskins, Greyson, and Sheppard find themselves having to defend the town from the attacking Germans. For a bottom-of -the-budget-barrel film, the combat scenes are actually quite well done, uncompromising in the violence, and while the editing is done in large part to hide the lack of a budget, you can easily follow the action. I won't give away the ending, but let us just say that all sides pay a steep price by the end of the film.

Looks like you can watch the full 97-minute cut of "Salt in the Wound" here at YouTube:

Overall, I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected. Despite its extremely small budget, including weapon props that are quite obviously non-guns in many scenes, I liked the story of a pair of soldier-criminals who are doing everything they can to avoid the war, but wind up finding themselves fighting for the lives of civilians they barely know. I also enjoyed the dynamic between Sheppard and Haskins, even though much of it was over the top, due in a large part to Kinski's sneering visage. Also, I believe that I read somewhere this film was the inspiration for the original The Inglorious Bastards made in 1978 (*not* the Tarantio movie of a similar name but different spelling), which involves a group of American soldiers who are criminals, being sent on a "suicide mission".

THE BUTCHER OF CALAIS is Available Now

The best description of THE BUTCHER OF CALAIS is "Death Wish meets World War Two". Andre Bouchard is a mild-mannered teacher of mathematics living with his wife and daughter in Calais, France. The Bouchards survive the siege of Calais and the fall of the city to German forces in May, 1940, but several weeks later, Bouchard's wife and daughter are murdered by German soldiers.

Driven by grief and rage into a wine bottle, Bouchard's fate is changed by a deadly encounter with a German officer late one night, leaving the German dead and a Luger in Bouchard's hands. With the means and the motive to strike back against those who killed his family, Bouchard prowls the dark streets of Calais, stalking and killing German soldiers. Driven towards more and more acts of violence, Bouchard turns Calais into a battlefield once more, littered with the bodies of the guilty and innocent alike.

Those of you who've read my first two Commando novels, Operation Arrowhead and Operation Bedlam, and the short story The Train to Calais, know Bouchard as "the Butcher of Calais", but the events that set Bouchard on his path were only hinted at in those works. Here, we see the Butcher as he takes those first steps on the road to revenge for his family, and ultimately, freedom for France - at any cost.

THE BUTCHER OF CALAIS is a novella, of approximately 27,000 words. It is currently only available as an eBook, but I plan on eventually releasing it as a slim paperback volume as well.

My 2018 Writing in Review

My usual disclaimer: It is time once again to put forward my writing summary for the past year. As always, the facts and figure I provide here aren't meant to be boastful - I provide the information so that others can have an understanding of what I've done, what works, what doesn't work, and everything in between. I sell more books than some, and fewer books than others, and that's that.

In 2018, I sold 2,149 ebooks and tracked 700,444 Kindle Unlimited ebook pages read of my material. This is down a little more than 400 ebook sales and 9,000 KU pages from last year. As mentioned in 2017's WiR, I didn't put out anything new last year, so going into 2018, I saw my sales continue to steadily decline. I ran a small freebie promotion of my non-WW2 short story material over the summer, which resulted in a minor boost to my KU numbers for short fiction during that time, but overall, non WW-2 material still continued to sell terribly all year long.

In late July, I finally published Book 6 of the Commando series, Operation Eisen. The book has actually sold pretty well, despite some mixed reviews. I was called out by several reviewers for the book's ending, which they didn't like, and this was a major wake-up moment for me, because I had fallen (I feel) into something of a trap, thinking that by this point, as long as I wrote about the same characters and put into the book the same sorts of elements, readers would carry along as usual. To some degree, this was the case, but the book's ending (which was something of a cliff-hanger) was hated by several reviewers, who thrashed me quite severely over it. Lesson very much learned.

Despite all that, the book has so far sold over 600 ebook copies, and tallied 126,000 KU page reads (equivalent to another 500 or so full read-throughs). Not only that, but the addition of another book in the series significantly boosted the sales of all books in the series. That is something very important to remember - even the first Commando book, published six years ago, saw very significant increases in sales and reads with the addition of a new book in the series. Series sells.

In addition to writing, I've continued to teach adult/continuing education classes on self-publishing, and I recently got to speak about writing historical fiction at a small writer's workshop. These might be low-level gigs, but it makes me feel good to be able to educate others based on my experiences over the past seven years. 

My goals for 2019 come down to two interconnected points - keeping myself writing, even if it is only a small amount every day, and putting out new material on a regular basis. 18 months between titles was way, wayyyyy too long a wait. Hopefully, in the next month or so, I will release a new Commando: Short Bursts novella, and after that, I'm going to dive back into several larger, novel-sized projects. I've made myself a daily word-count spreadsheet in order to help track my productivity, because I need some kind of accountability. I'll follow up with how that's going in a month or two.

Well, there you have it. Sales were slow in the first few months - slower than they have been for a long, long time - but my mid-year release helped me bounce back, and I just need to...wait for it...

Always be closing.

COMMANDO Book 6 Title Change

This is a brief post to inform anyone who is confused, that the sixth book in the Commando series is now titled OPERATION EISEN. The former title, which was fine to use when I started writing the book, became the name of a police action against a sex crime ring. Since the last thing I want when people google things related to my book is to stumble across articles related to sex crimes, I made the immediate decision to re-title my book. Thus, Book 6 now has a new title.

Now Available: COMMANDO Operation Elysium

Although it has been a long time since the last COMMANDO novel, Operation Archery, I've finally released the sixth volume of the series, Operation Elysium. The book is currently live in eBook format on the Amazon store (link in the sidebar). The book's description is as follows:

March, 1942. Lance-Sergeant Thomas Lynch and his fellow Commando raiders once again infiltrate Occupied France. Their mission: to carry out a surprise assault on the Chateau de Lorieux, a French estate where heroes of the Waffen-SS enjoy rest and relaxation away from the horrors of war. Unbeknownst to the Germans, Lynch and his comrades bring their own brand of horror, striking in the night with bullets and blades.

But when three of Germany's deadliest and most diabolical SS veterans escape the slaughter, Lynch and the other Commandos find themselves in a race against time. Can they retreat to the French coast and evade the German search parties until salvation arrives, or must they turn their backs to the cold waters of the Atlantic, and fight to the last against impossible odds?

COMMANDO: Operation Elysium is the sixth in a series of military action - adventure novels written in the spirit of classic war movies and wartime adventure pulp fiction.

My 2017 Writing in Review

It is time once again to put forward my writing summary for the past year. As I always mention, the facts and figure I provide here aren't meant to be boastful - I provide the information so that others can have an understanding of what I've done, what works, what doesn't work, and everything in between. I sell more books than some, and fewer books than others, and that's about that.

In 2017, I sold 2,557 ebooks, and had 709,267 Kindle Unlimited page reads. This is significantly less than last year's totals of 5,921 and 849,081 (my numbers in this post might be a little different than last years' numbers, as KDP is providing better tracking tools that make adding all these numbers up easier, so the numbers in today's post are probably more accurate). Percentage-wise, book sales dropped 57%, while KU reads dropped 16.5%. Overall revenue dropped 43.5% this year, which is pretty damn significant - although thankfully, 2016 was by several thousand dollars my best year to date. For those of you who are wondering, paperback sales were too insignificant to even bother including in the above calculations. 

This was the first year since I started publishing in 2011 where technically, I didn't release a new title of any kind (Assault on Abbeville was published on New Year's Eve, 2016). This means as of right now, there hasn't been a new Commando title in two years, which, I am certain, is the reason for the poor sales this year. Historically, every new Commando title has given my sales a huge boost for several months, and kept things at relatively high sales points for the first six months of the book's release. While AoA did pretty well its first few months, it quickly tapered off, probably as a result of it being the only book in the series. Overall, however, its sales figures were reasonably strong, competing with any one individual Commando title. Numbers-wise, AoA made up 18% of my overall ebook sales, and 13% of all KU pages reads. This is highly encouraging, because it means there's definitely an audience for this series, and I am in the process of plotting out the second Revenants book.

Takeaways from all this? It was interesting to see the very large disparity between my sales and KU figures. While sales dropped over fifty percent, KU page reads dropped less than twenty percent. I don't know how that plays out in terms of money, since the value of each KU page read shifts from month to month based on the KU Fund and how many overall page reads there are in all of the KU titles (okay, I could probably figure it out...but I'm not going to bother), it's interesting to see that the the dip was relatively small. Also, as always, my non-WW2 titles sold like garbage. Killer Instincts sold a whopping 18 copies and had about 11,000 pages read in the ebook market this past year, earning me less than $150 for 2017. San Francisco slaughter was about a third of that total. All my other short fiction? A Sergeant's Duty did okay for a short story, pulling in about a hundred dollars. The Train to Calais earned about fifty. Renegade's Revenge? About twelve bucks. Nanok? Two dollars.

So, what happened? Life happened.

I don't want to get into the details, but in the past year, there have been a series of serious problems with multiple members of my family - health, finances, life in general - and the chronic nature of these problems has really thrown me for a loop. I've been anxious, depressed, angry, distracted, annoyed, scared, frustrated...basically every emotion that can grind away at the focus and dedication I need in order to write, I've had those emotions repeatedly over the last year. It is ugly, it is unfortunate, and it is really, really hard to dig out of and get back to the place where I need to be in order to...you guessed it...Always Be Closing.

For 2018, my primary goal is to finish and publish the sixth Commando novel, Operation Elysium. I'm about halfway through writing it, and I think it's going to be a great addition to the series. After that? As mentioned above, there is definitely a market for a second Revenants novel, so that's going to take priority, but I also want to start a new series, focusing on German Panzer warfare. I've got a bunch of research and some substantial plotting done for the first book in the series, so that's also good.

But ultimately, the hardest part will be overcoming the emotional obstacles I've thrown up in my way that prevent me from getting the work done. I find myself actively avoiding writing, which isn't good, and I need to get around that fear and embrace the process as something positive and encouraging, rather than something that I don't want to do, but feel I have to. As I have a full-time job with good pay and benefits, I am under no immediate financial threat if I don't publish, so for me, writing should be a fulfilling, emotionally positive act. I need to find that place again, and if I can, I know I can bounce back.

As always, many many thanks to those people who have sent me messages of encouragement over the past year. I greatly appreciate it, and it is genuinely heart-warming to know that both readers and fellow authors want to see me continue to write and publish. I honestly couldn't do it without that kind of support.

REVENANTS: ASSAULT ON ABBEVILLE is on Sale Now!

Although it was mentioned in last week's 2016 Writing in Review post, I wanted to formally announce the release of the first book in a new series: REVENANTS #1: Assault on Abbeville. The Amazon product description is as follows:

As the Third Reich stands triumphant upon the ashes of Western Europe, five men sneak into France under the cover of night. During the German blitzkrieg, each of them had been left for dead by their comrades. Now, these once-dead men, these revenants, have come together to infiltrate Hitler’s Fortress Europe on a mission of murder. Their assignment: hunt down and assassinate the deadliest German in France.

Outnumbered and outgunned, the Revenants must rely on their cunning, their skill, and their cold brutality to do the impossible and survive. The odds are overwhelmingly against them, and there are enemies at every turn, but when everyone thinks you’re already dead, you’ve got nothing left to lose.

REVENANTS: Assault on Abbeville is the first in a series of military action - adventure novels written in the spirit of classic war movies and wartime adventure pulp fiction. It is related to the author's COMMANDO series, but can be read and enjoyed on its own.

 Unlike the Commando series, Revenants features five men who once served in different Allied armies: France, Belgium, Norway, Poland, and the Netherlands. Each of these men was left for dead on the battlefield during the 1940 invasion of Western Europe, and through one method or another, found their way to England. There, these five men were recruited to carry out assignments that no Allied government would officially sanction.

In contrast my Commando series, I intend for Revenants to be darker, both in tone and in moral outlook. These men aren't bound by any "rules of warfare", and while the Commandos aren't ones to favor a fair fight, the Revenants live to fight dirty - it's the only way five men can survive any battle against the Nazi war machine.

If you are a fan of the Commando series, I think you'll enjoy the Revenants series as well. They are both in the same "universe", meaning references to characters and events may cross over between the two series, much like my fellow author Dan Eldredge's Ranger series, but you in no way have to read one of my Commando stories in order to enjoy Assault on Abbeville.

Currently, only the eBook edition is available on Amazon, but I hope to get the paperback edition published before the end of the month. There is a link to the book on the right-hand sidebar, but if you are viewing this on a mobile device, you can go to the Amazon page by clicking on this link.

My 2016 Writing in Review

Hello all, and happy New Year. I've written one of these "writing in review" posts every year for the past several years, and wanted to get this one out as soon as possible (I realize I don't have a tag for these posts, so I'll be creating one now if you would like to go back and read the others). Although I did not actually publish anything in the calendar year of 2015, I sort of only book-ended this year with a major release in January and one with just hours left on New Year's Eve. And, as always, just to preface, I give my sales numbers only for the purposes of providing information for folks, not as some measure of my subjective success or failure. I do better than some authors sales-wise, but many others do better than I do, and that's a-OK.

This was easily my best year by a considerable margin. While last year I was down, money-wise, this year I beat last year by several thousand dollars. I had over 5,100 sales of all ebook titles, and I cleared over 840,000 Kindle Unlimited pages read (which works out to roughly 4,000 of my titles read through, on average). While that sales figure is down compared to last year by about 500 sales (and keep in mind that for the first half of 2015, I was counting KU "borrows" as sales), my average daily KU page read counts have skyrocketed. Between July and December of 2015, I had 170,000 KU page reads, which averages out to around 944 pages a day. This year's daily average is about 2,311 pages a day, nearly a 150% gain. In addition, starting in April of this year (when I received royalties for February, the first full month after Operation Archery was released), my monthly royalties were higher - sometimes double - every single month this year.

That is, of course, the good news. The bad news is that the percentage of books sold that aren't associated with my Commando series is, basically, almost non-existent. I sold twenty-five copies of San Francisco Slaughter this year, as well as thirty-two KU reads. Now, looking at my overall yearly sales figure, we see that SFS was less than one-half of one percent of all my sales this year. Killer Instincts sold 225 copies, about 80% of them over a two-month period during which I ran a large sales promotion after it received the new cover. There were also 96 KU reads, about half of those very clearly due to the visibility of the promotion. Both ebook and KU sales come out to about 4 1/2 percent of my totals for the year. As for all the other non-Commando shorter works, barely anything moved. Twenty-three copies of Renegade's Revenge were sold. Eight copies of Spiders & Flies (each moved a few hundred KU pages, a mere handful of reads). The rest are even more pitiful.

Last year the Commando series accounted for around 90% of my totals, but this year that number has nudged up to probably around 93-94%. While some of that growth can be attributed to having a new title in the series that sold quite well, it is clear that everything else I've written is just ignored. Keep in mind that without that KI promotion, that percentage would go from about 4.5 to barely 1 percent of my sales, so without those extra 180 or so sales, Commando titles would probably be...97-98% of my income this year.

Which is a little disconcerting, especially as I have just released Assault on Abbeville, the first in a new WW2 series, REVENANTS. This series is set in the same "universe" as my Commando books, so they are indirectly related, but that is no guarantee that the readers of one will be interested in the other - I may very well have another San Francisco Slaughter on my hands. I also want to push and get a Panzer-focused series out the door this year, after the publication of Operation Elysium, and my biggest worry is that title dying as well. As much as I enjoy writing the Commando books and short stories, I fear the notion that such are the ONLY things I can write which will earn me any kind of appreciable income.

And, of course, all of this comes back to productivity. This year after releasing Operation Archery in late January, I began work on Operation Elysium, but got side-tracked and wrote Assault on Abbeville, as well as polishing up and publishing A Sergeant's Duty, the second "Short Bursts" story. As of right now, about 15% of Elysium has been written, and the rest extensively outlined. In the next couple of days, while my day job is still quiet, I'll be making an effort to push forward on the first draft, with a great determination to have the book done by the spring, which will hopefully leave me with more than half a year to write and publish the first Panzer book, which also have some extensive outlining right now.

So now, it is just a matter of getting my shoulder against the wheel. I know I can do it - in 2014, I was actually surprisingly productive, releasing Operation Dervish, SFS, Renegade's Revenge, and Spiders & Flies - It is just a matter of sitting down, writing, and repeating that process as frequently as possible.

Book Review: FINAL HARBOR by Harry Homewood

I never really thought that a novel following the action of a WW2 submarine crew would be interesting and exciting enough to keep my attention, but FINAL HARBOR proved me wrong. Not only is this book very well-written, the level of technical and historical detail is, in a word, staggering. In fact, if there are any complaints to be had about this book, it is that the little technical details occasionally get in the way because, while it may be proper protocol to repeat every command given, it doesn't need to really be written out that way!

But that is really about the only complaint I have regarding this book, and that complaint is relatively minor. The plot does occasionally stray into the domestic lives of the crew, but I think taken as a whole that isn't a bad thing, as it does tie us more strongly to the characters, and when there are casualties among the crew, the effect it has on the reader is a lot more pronounced. these aren't just cardboard cutout submariners firing torpedoes at the enemy and gritting their teeth while being depth charged, these are human beings with families and friendships, goals and aspirations.

As for the action itself, the scenes are extremely well written. Submarine warfare is very much winner-take-all, because even a single torpedo hit is capable of blowing a ship in half, while even one depth charge, if well-placed, is enough to shatter a submarine's hull and send her entire crew to the bottom of the ocean. Harry Homewood is able to deliver these scenes with nail-biting tension, and you come out on the other side with a sigh of relief, or a gasp of horror. Like war itself, this book does not pull its punches!

In conclusion, if you have any interest in WW2 submarine warfare, especially in the Pacific theater, I highly recommend this novel, and you can find it here on Amazon. There is a sequel, SILENT SEA, which I have read, and found equally engaging. Check them out!

The Wonderful World of Tanks

A little over a month ago, I finally caved and installed World of Tanks, an online game where you and fourteen other random Internet People fight fifteen other random Internet People in a head-to-head death match, as you each command a tank and drive around a map, smashing through stone walls and knocking over trees while blowing each other up and setting each other on fire.

I've never been that interested in playing online games. I grew up in an age where video games were something you either played on your own, or with a friend using another controller, as you sat in your living room bathed in the television's glow and ate junk food while punching each other in the shoulder because your friend managed that last takedown combo before you did. When, after college, I first began to explore online gaming while playing Quake Online or Ghost Recon, the novelty of fighting against some random Internet Person soon wore off.

Someone's about to have a bad day...

People in general are rude, insensitive jerks who hate their fellow man, but when you add in the anonymity of the Internet, plus a game where you're trying your best to kill each others' digital avatars, the worst in people really comes to the fore. In the last month, I've been insulted in ways I'd forgotten about since junior high school, and while the nostalgia is cute for a moment, it soon sours in the belly and you realize you're approaching the big 4-0 and someone out there still wants to insult you like it's 1990. Thankfully, the wisdom of age - and countless online flame wars - tempers my replies, and I usually tell them they're being adorable and just move on.

On the other hand, I have to admit, World of Tanks is kind of fun. The game features tanks from all the major powers of WW2, and the tanks start with the old, pre-war models (some of them nothing more than prototype tanks) and gradually progress in "tiers" up to tanks from the '70s and '80s, in a ranking of Tiers 1 through 10. In the early games, your range of tiered tanks will be pretty narrow - Tier 1 tanks face off against each other, while later Tier 2-3, and by Tier 5 you might be fighting anyone from Tiers 3-8, depending on the tank you're in (even in a specific Tier, some tanks rank higher than others and get matched against a higher Tier more often).

Just some dudes waiting to kill some other dudes. No big whup.

In addition, there are five categories of tanks: Light, Medium, Heavy, Tank Destroyers, and Self-Propelled Guns. The three weights of tanks are just that - abstract categories that usually match up with historical categories of tanks. For example, the British Crusader tank is a Light tank, while the Churchill is a Heavy tank, and so on. Tank Destroyers often look like tanks, but their armor isn't as good and they're more vulnerable, while their guns are better and their range of vision superior, Self-Propelled Guns are artillery pieces that lob huge explosive shells high into the air, and while they're easy to kill up close, they rain down death from a LONG distance away.

And there's a lot of death to be had, for sure. Tanks have armor, of course, but in WoT, they're pretty good about assigning different armor values to different parts of the tank. The frontal armor is usually the thickest, while the sides and rear are thinner. Sloped armor plates can often bounce incoming shells, while things like tank tracks are easy to cripple with "critical hits". Sometimes a hit to a tank's engine area can set the engine on fire, causing the tank to slowly lose points until it blows up. Crew members can also be killed or wounded, which causes the functions of the tank relying on that member to be worsened. For example, if the driver is killed, another crew member has to take his place, and the overall performance of the tank is now worse.

About what my tank looks like two minutes into most games...

When I first started playing WoT, I joked to myself that this was "research" for my upcoming PANZER series of WW2 adventure novels, but I didn't really believe it. Now, after just passing my 1,000th battle mark, I realize that while yes, it is just a game, it does give some insight into tank tactics. The importance of using terrain to your best advantage cannot be stated enough, especially if you're in a light "scout" tank. Staying behind hills, using depressions in the earth to go hull-down (meaning only your turret is visible), and otherwise remaining unseen (or at least unhittable) are incredibly important. You also very quickly learn how to "sneak and peek" with your tank, because driving boldly at the enemy and relying on your armor is a surefire way to wind up dead very fast.

Overall, it is a fun game that provides a little excitement now and then. It is free to play, although you can spend money to get upgrades faster (I refuse to do this), and it seems like many players consider this poor sportsmanship and the sign of a garbage player. And, while it is frustrating to have to "grind" through a bunch of games in a bad tank in order to earn enough experience to move on to a better one (there is a tree-like progression of Tiers for each country's tank development), there are very few tanks that are absolute garbage. For example, the M3 Lee is absolute garbage. I hate that stupid tank. Hate it.

I hate this tank so much. So very, very much. This image, like all above, grabbed from various Internet sources.

If you play as well and want to say hello some time, you can find me on WoT as "Badelaire". My schedule is rather irregular though, so there is little likelihood of a match-up, but you can always view my terrible statistics.

Available Now: COMMANDO Operation Archery

December, 1941. Corporal Thomas Lynch and the rest of 3 Commando board a pair of troop ships and set out on the largest Commando raid yet. Their mission: assault the Norwegian island of Vaagso, neutralize the German defenders, and destroy anything supporting the Axis war machine.

Lynch and the other Commandos storm the island and quickly find themselves engaged in brutal house-to-house fighting. Casualties begin to mount, and the fighting spirit of Britain’s finest is severely tested as the ferocious German defense pushes them to the breaking point.

COMMANDO: Operation Archery is the fifth in a series of military action - adventure novels written in the spirit of classic war movies and wartime adventure pulp fiction.

Although it has taken longer than I expected, the fifth book in the COMMANDO series is now live on Amazon in eBook format. I will be working on the print copy over the next few weeks, and it should be available sometime in February. Over the last year or so I've received a lot of very complimentary queries asking when this book will be released, and it's really great knowing I've got a strong fanbase eager for the next volume in this series.

I'll be starting on the draft of the sixth book, Operation Elysium, in the next couple of days. It'll be set in the spring of 1942, pitting Lynch and the lads of 3 Commando against some of the deadliest enemies they've ever faced...

My 2015 Writing in Review

For the past several years now, I've been writing a year-end post about how my various books have performed, and although I haven't published anything in 2015 (more on that later), I wanted to give a rundown of the year's sales, as much for my own analysis as anything else. As always with such things, I provide these numbers not to boast, or to whine, but merely to inform. Some folks out there are doing much worse than I am, while others are doing much better. This is just the way it is, so take the following as provided for information purposes only.

In 2015, I sold roughly 5600 books, about 90% of those in ebook form. This is down about 2,000 sales from last year. A portion of that loss is, without a doubt, due to the new Kindle Unlimited payment method of calculating royalties based on pages read, not on 10%+ "borrows" as before, and in the past, I have been factoring any "borrow" as a sale to keep the bookkeeping simple. Since July of this year, when KU 2.0 went into effect, I've had about 170,000 pages read, which if divided by an average of 200 pages (the shortest of my Commando books, just for the sake of rough calculation), gives me another 835 sales, bringing me to around 6400 books sold. Of course, not everyone who started one of my books finished it, and it is impossible now to track such things.

In terms of what percentage of my sales went to each book, the total is overwhelmingly my Commando series. While last year I sold some 700+ copies of my western, Renegade's Revenge, This year I sold less than a hundred copies, with some modest few hundred pages borrowed. I was actually rather amazed at how RR sold very strongly for months, and then sales dried up almost overnight. While there were months where I'd sell over a hundred copies, now I am shocked if the title sells more than 4-6 copies in a month. Since RR was about 9% of my sales last year, losing it as a sales stream had a significant impact on my numbers this year as compared to last.

As for all my other titles, the numbers are minimal, at best. Killer Instincts sold about 300 copies and had a couple thousand KU pages read, but the bulk of that was due to a very successful promotion in March. San Francisco Slaughter didn't hit a hundred sales, and all of my short stories totaled together don't even break 100 sales for the year. That means the Commando series accounted for more than 90% of all my books sold in 2015.

The good news is, in terms of royalties, I ended the year only about $1,000 under what I made in 2014. Again, I think some of this discrepancy is due to difficulties in calculating sales vs. royalties because of KU 2.0, combined with much softer sales of my shorter works like RR, which paid out less than the longer works. In addition, more of the sales in 2014 were from countdown deals and other discounted sales, while most of the 2015 sales - especially the Commando titles - were at full price, making my average royalty per sale much higher overall.

And now we come to the fact that in 2015, I didn't publish anything. The year in general was frustrating for me, both in terms of my day job (I am firmly burned out there) and in terms of getting past my writer's block and completing Operation Archery, the fifth Commando novel. Archery deals with the Vaagso Raid of December 1941, and there is a lot of very detailed information out there about the events of that raid. I found myself frustrated at many points, often trying to figure out how to weave my fictional characters into the historical timeline in a way that gave them something to do, while not stealing the thunder from historical characters. It was a really good learning experience for me, because it taught me that, while I enjoy writing historical fiction, I am not great at writing about specific historical events. Thankfully, at the end of the year I was able to press on and finish the manuscript, and Archery is now in the editing stage, with a hopeful release in the next week or so for the ebook version.

So, what does 2016 look like? At this point, I dare not speculate, because I had extraordinarily high hopes for 2015, none of which came to fruition. Archery will be published this month, and I am already working on Operation Elysium, the sixth book in the Commando series. Beyond that, I really don't want to make any promises, although I have some ideas for what I want to accomplish. As with 2014, the vast bulk of my success as an author last year was tied to the Commando books, so that is where I need to focus my energy, but as we also saw, that comes with the risk of hitting a wall, and not being able or willing to step around it and carry on with something else. At what point does exploiting success at the expense of diversification mean you burn out on what you love? Let's hope we don't find out any time soon.

As always, please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section.

Available Now: RANGER Operation Axehammer by Dan Eldredge

Click the Cover to View on Amazon!

Fellow author Dan Eldredge has just gone live with a WW2 action-adventure novel written as a companion series to my COMMANDO stories, but featuring US Army Rangers. If you're interested in "Men's Adventure" styled WW2 fiction, take a look.

Eager to take the fight to the Germans, hundreds of young American soldiers volunteer to become Rangers, an elite unit modeled after the famed British Commandos. Chuck Hawkins and Alan Patrick are two such men, ready to accept the challenge and show the world that Americans are ready to fight.


After surviving months of hellish training, Hawkins and Patrick are selected to join a Ranger squad on a covert mission in occupied France. Under orders to avoid contact with the Germans, the plan goes awry when bullets start flying minutes after their landing. Hawkins, Patrick, and the rest of the Rangers are determined to complete their mission, all the while pursued by a ruthless SS officer and his fanatical troops.

RANGER: Operation Axehammer is a military action - adventure novel written in the spirit of classic war movies and wartime pulp adventure fiction.

This edition also includes the World War II short story: Our Turn to Shoot:

In early 1942, while the Imperial Japanese Navy rampaged in the western Pacific and the East Indies, the US Navy was desperately attempting to recover from the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. A raid by US Navy aircraft carriers on the Japanese-held Marshall Islands was a small but important step in showing the world that America was still in the fight.

Ensign Jim Novak is a dive bomber pilot on board USS Enterprise, eager for a chance to take the fight to the enemy. This will be his first mission to strike a blow against the Japanese, but it could also be his last...

Our Turn to Shoot is a short story of approximately 6,300 words.

COMING IN 2016 - RANGER

Book Review: TIGER TRACKS and THE LAST PANTHER by Wolfgang Faust

A very common phenomenon in the vague, sweeping genre of "war memoirs" is the false memoir, especially the false World War Two memoir, purported to be written by (most often, I've found) German soldiers and either lost or "published now for the first time" decades after the war. WW2 fiction and/or greatly embellished memoirs of wartime sold rather well among certain demographics, and even today - as I myself can attest - new WW2 fiction is popular among readers. So it is natural that, even now, false or at least dubious memoirs of the war are being "re-published" as ebooks. The "StuG Command" book I reviewed about a year ago was a perfect example of this, a story I am entirely certain is a complete fabrication (and not really that great a book, either).

I found TIGER TRACKS and THE LAST PANTHER a couple of months ago, and bought both for my Kindle. I recently read the two of them back to back - they're both fairly short reads, probably around 25-30,000 words apiece - and I have to say, they were pretty enjoyable. I don't believe for a second that Wolfgang Faust is a real person, or that the name is even a pseudonym of a real person, but I have to admit that the story reads well, albeit rather over-the-top in terms of the lurid violence and misery. The two stories cover different periods of time during Faust's career; TIGER TRACKS takes place in 1943, while THE LAST PANTHER takes place in April of 1945, right at the very end of the war.

Of the two, TIGER TRACKS (available here on Amazon) is probably the weaker story. Faust's unit of twenty Tiger heavy tanks is assigned to take some hill from the Soviets. The fight is bloody and several Tigers are immediately taken out of the fight, but in the end, the Germans defeat the Soviets and take the enemy position. However, the reinforcements that were originally promised never arrive, and they are forced to retreat, after capturing a Soviet female radio operator. The Tiger force is constantly harassed by Soviet attacks, encountering enemy armor, infantry, air attack, artillery, and even a particularly terrifying ambush by a flamethrower team. Whoever Wolfgang Faust really is, the writer is quite good at depicting the absolute horror of mechanized warfare. In particular, Faust is good at showing how the Tiger might be a very tough tank, but it is far from indestructible. Tigers are destroyed by hits from enemy anti-tank guns and other tanks, cracked open by air attacks, set ablaze by flamethrowers or Molotov cocktails - the list goes on and on. He also points out that a tank is not designed to drive everywhere under its own power - it requires tank carriers or rail transports, and must receive constant maintenance. Faust, as the Tiger's driver, is in charge of the mechanical care of the tank, and he is constantly worrying about the bogie wheels, the track links, the transmission and all other aspects of the fighting vehicle, because he knows that no matter how strong their armor, or powerful their gun, all it takes is one broken track link pin to immobilize the panzer and doom them.

On the other hand, the story kind of rambles. After their mission, Faust's tank commander (who is now in charge of what's left of the force) decides they need to bring the Soviet radio operator back for interrogation. So they set off for the rear lines, and the story just becomes a series of harrowing vignettes, until they reach their destination. There's no real drama, other than the need to get back to the rear echelon area, and even when that happens, the ending is a bit flat. I'm willing to forgive that, though, because the action throughout the story is still, in my opinion, rather top notch. As fun as the PANZER PLATOON series is (and I'll write more reviews of it later on), the combat scenes in these two books are far superior.

THE LAST PANTHER (available here on Amazon) is the better story of the two, mostly because it has a clear end-goal, and works to ratchet up the tension in getting you there, and the end of the story carries a lot more weight and pathos. In addition, the story revolves around an actual historical event, the "Halbe Kessel" or Battle of Halbe, a week-long retreat by German forces attempting to flee West and surrender to the Americans, rather than be captured (and probably killed or sent to a gulag) by the Soviets. Faust is, by 1945, a Panther panzer commander, and is tank is one of the few remaining in good condition within the group of German soldiers and civilians fleeing the oncoming Soviet army. They know they have to cross the Elbe river, where on the other side the US Army is waiting, but the Soviets are not only to the East, but essentially all around them, slowly closing in and crushing them.

THE LAST PANTHER is definitely more intense than Faust's first story. The inclusion of German civilians, who all know their fate in the hands of the Soviets pretty much involves rape, murder, or (likely) both, definitely makes for much stronger tension over the course of the novel. Women and children die in great numbers as the Soviets attack their column over and over again. The Germans, especially the panzer forces, do what they can to protect the civilians, but they can only do so much, especially as their vehicles keep breaking down, getting stuck, or destroyed by the enemy. Faust is constantly terrified that his Panther's engine will die, because he knows the engine is only good for about 800 kilometers, and at the start of the novel, they're already pushing 900. Fuel is also a big concern, and they're constantly on the lookout for more gasoline, usually taken from broken-down vehicles.

But the story also involves a lot more in-fighting and social tension, between the regular Wehrmacht troops, the Waffen-SS forces, and the civilians. Some of the SS are fanatics, to the point of killing Germans who do not stand and fight, while others are cowards who shed their uniforms and try to hide as civilians because they know the Soviets will give SS men no mercy. The worst-fated of all are the Soviets who are prisoners of the Germans and serve as laborers, because they know their own countrymen will kill them - and probably their families back home - if they're ever captured, but they're the Germans' lowest priority in terms of ensuring those in the Kessel escape the encirclement. Historically, only about 30,000 people - a mere fifth of those attempting the breakout - successfully escaped, so you can imagine the scale of slaughter that takes place in this book. There's on scene in particular, as the column tries to punch through a German village as they're being savaged by a Soviet bombardment, which is particularly awful, but by no means is it the only scene of massed slaughter.

Like TIGER TRACKS, this second book features some really solid, tensely-written combat scenes, and Faust is very good at portraying the various fighting vehicles in something approximating their historical strengths. The Panther was an excellent tank, with a main gun capable of defeating any tank in the world at that time, and very thick, sloped frontal armor that was probably the equivalent, if not superior to, the Tiger's frontal protection. However, the Panther was a smaller, lighter, faster tank, making it more maneuverable and not quite so mechanically fragile (although like all the late-war Panzers, it did break down in great numbers). There are also some good scenes involving King Tigers, Hetzer tank destroyers, and other German vehicles which added to the flavor of the combats.

All in all, these two books are relatively inexpensive ebook reads, fairly short by novel standards but fast-moving and filled with action. They both get relatively good reviews on Amazon (although a fair number of low reviews, mostly complaining about them being "false memoirs"), and they both seem to be selling quite well. If you're a fan of WW2 action-adventure fiction, I highly recommend reading both of them - I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Movie Review: FLIGHT WORLD WAR II (2015)

Note: Not actually based on true events...

There are a lot of cheesy, low-budget World War Two movies out there, especially in the last few years. IRON SKY is one of my particular favorites, a "Nazis on the Moon" film full of good, dorky fun. A few days ago, I happened to notice another low-budget WW2 movie pop up on Netflix, FLIGHT WORLD WAR II, about a modern passenger airliner that time-travels back to the beginning of the Second World War and "must change the course of history" in order to return.

Okay, this sounds kinda dumb, but for a lazy Sunday morning, I'm intrigued. So I gave it a view, and like most movies put out by The Asylum, it was pretty corny. The only actor of any note at all is Faran Tahir, who plays the airliner's captain, and is the same actor who played the captain in the first few minutes of 2009's STAR TREK reboot. Aside from him, it is the usual cast of C-grade direct-to-video/streaming talent, some of whom do a decent job with what they have to work with, while others are just cringe-worthy. The SFX were actually pretty good, which says something about a "shoestring budget" movie studio being able to put German fighter planes into dogfights, or depict an entire city being bombed to rubble.

Plot-wise...well...things get rough. A 757 en route from Dulles to Heathrow flies through an "anomaly" and winds up in June 17th, 1940. They overfly a city being bombed, and a couple of history professors (WW2 buffs, of course) identify some German bombers, and that the city is on the coast, but we also see an Me262 do a fly-by of the airliner. The history nerds surmise that the city is St. Nazaire (thus the date), but are boggled that the German jet fighters are operational in 1940, about four years before they'd take to the air in force. And, after contacting a British radio operator, they find out that the Dunkirk evacuation was a complete disaster, resulting in the loss of half a million people (in reality, it was the exact opposite). In addition, they learn that the British don't even have working radar systems - they're still in development (again, not true to actual history).

After some confused head-scratching, the nerds postulate that they've fallen into an alternate timeline, where the Germans are much more technologically advanced at this point in the war, having operational jet fighters while the British don't even have radar. The Germans attack the airliner several times in the hopes of shooting it down, but the pilot manages to avoid death (the 757 somehow survives dozens of 30mm cannon shell hits, but hey...Hollywood, am I right?). The British are worried that, if the airliner *does* have radar (the way in which all this gets concluded is very odd), they must shoot the plane down to prevent the Germans from possessing it and getting even more of an advantage. Eventually, the airliner crew cut the radar free from the nose of the plane, drop it down to the British, who then use it (!!!) to direct Spitfires out to defend the airliner just before the plane flies through another anomaly and back into our normal timeline.

I'd like to point out that, as ridiculous as this plot is, a half-decent film could have been salvaged from this wreckage. The 1980 film THE FINAL COUNTDOWN postulates what might happen if a 1980s era aircraft carrier wound up in the Pacific just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. With the premise of FLIGHT WORLD WAR II, a story of how a modern airliner (with its far superior air radar), as well as two nerds who know everything about the war, could turn history around in an alternate past where the Germans are clearly dominating even more than they were in our own 1940.

EDIT: Apparently modern airliners don't carry any kind of radar, relying on their transponders and Air Traffic Control systems to guide them around potential hazards. So, basically, this movie is pointless when it comes to the whole radar angle.

But instead, things are just bungled. My biggest complaint is that the plane flies across the Atlantic and winds up over the French coast. Fine - no big deal. They even claim at one point to have (I think), just under half of a full fuel load. I just looked it up, and Dulles to Heathrow is a little under 3,700 miles, while the 757 has a range of around 4,500 miles. So, this jet winds up over St. Nazaire with about 800 miles of fuel left - certainly a lot less than "just under half a tank". However, any pilot will know that if you're somewhere near the coast of France, just pointing your plane north and flying for (in this case) about half an hour will put you over England, at a 757's cruising speed of a bit over 500 miles an hour.

Instead, somehow, this plane spends the entire movie flying *east*. At one point they even figure out they're near (IIRC) Reims, which is to the north-east of St. Nazaire by several hundred miles, and at another point they're near Metz, *four hundred* miles from St. Nazaire. Hey, guys! You're going the wrong way! And, what makes things weirder, by the time they are near Metz and drop the radar system, it is picked up by British forces after a brief firefight against some Germans, and within a couple of minutes, it is in the hands of the radio operator they've been talking to the entire time. So, apparently, despite Dunkirk being a total slaughter, this radio operator is *hundreds of miles* behind what are now the enemy lines? How does this even make any sense? Even if the radio operator was behind enemy lines and the salvation of the war effort was to get radar into the hands of the British, the operator should have just said "Fly north for half an hour and get to Blighty, you bloody fools!". The British are even trying to shoot the airliner down "to keep the radar from the Germans". You know how you could also do that? Tell them to fly to England. Shooting down a great big, obviously not the usual 1940s prop plane, over enemy territory is probably the worst thing they could do!

At one point, one of the passengers tries to take over the plane, insisting that, with the help of the history nerds and their books, they could find and kill Hitler and re-write history. An Army sergeant flying aboard the plane talks sense into him and the rest of the passengers, pointing out that pulling something like that off is highly unlikely, and the most likely scenario is them letting both the airplane, the history nerds, and all their history books fall into the hands of the Nazis, making everything worse. This was probably the moment of the film that made the most sense.

To conclude, this movie was more disappointing as a story than it was as a technical production. I'll always give The Asylum a pass on production values and acting - all that requires a lot of money and time, which they don't really have - but a good script and a plot that makes sense just requires a competent storyteller and a modicum of research. This movie *could* have been made on the same budget, with the same cast and production values, and made a lot more sense.

Book Review: PANZER PLATOON #2 - INVADE RUSSIA! by Gunther Lutz

The second in this six-volume series kicks off a short time after the invasion of Russia by the German army in the summer of 1941. Rather than their lightweight Panzer II, this time Micki Boden and his crew are operating a Panzer III, one of the mid-war models with a short-barreled 50mm anti-tank gun. The extra crew members are characters we were introduced to in the first book, as coming from one of the other Panzer IIs in Boden's platoon.

Like the first book in the series (and most of the books, as I've now read the first four of the six as of this review), there is no real overarching plot to each book. Rather, the novels are a series of vignettes tightly tied together, providing a good representation of whatever is occurring in that theater of operation at the time. In this case, Boden and his crew are involved in Operation Barbarossa, during the operation's heyday from summer to fall of 1941, before the brutal winter sets in and the German advance is stopped.

For the most part, Boden and his panzer crew encounter relatively little resistance from the Russians, and their biggest problems are the over-stretched supply lines, coupled with a new platoon commander who proves to be a constant nuisance to Boden and the rest of the platoon. This new commander isn't a veteran of the '39 or '40 campaigns, and so lacks the necessary combat experience to lead a platoon, especially as the panzers wander further and further afield. This becomes especially problematic when one of Boden's crew is injured, and they have to seek medical aid from a local Russian doctor. Food also becomes an issue, as they've ranged so far ahead that the "goulash cannon" (field food service units) are nowhere to be found and they must forage locally for their rations.

Throughout the book, there are many hints as to how the entire Russian campaign is a bad, bad idea. Early on, Boden's crew discovers an intact panzer...but the five-man crew is dead, each man decapitated, their bodies left in their proper positions inside the tank, their heads put on display outside the hamlet where they parked, probably to also forage or rest for the night. This gruesome display puts Boden's men on edge, because it hints at the savagery the Russians are capable of, and how tenacious a foe they can be if given a chance. Later on in the book, Boden joins in defending a position against a Russian counter-attack, one that is bolstered by the deadly Russian T-34 medium tank. The T-34 outclasses the Panzer III of the time in almost every respect - main gun, armor, and mobility - and they're the boogeymen of the Russian battlefield. The climax of the book is a tank duel between Boden and the rest of his platoon against several T-34s in an abandoned factory, and it is a tense, exciting scene where clever tactics and luck face off against far superior Russian tank design.

This book is definitely an excellent sequel to BLITZKRIEG, and gives the reader what they really wanted from a series called "Panzer Platoon" - battles between tanks which are roughly equivalent to each other. The action is well-written and shows how careful and analytical a panzer commander needs to be in order to survive on the battlefield, and as mentioned, this book does a great job at hinting towards the horrors of the "Ostfront" (which we see in full force in the next volume, BLOOD & ICE).

Book Review: PANZER PLATOON #1 - BLITZKRIEG by Gunther Lutz

Sorry, Tiger tank - wrong year!

The PANZER PLATOON series is a six-book run of WW2 stories told from the perspective of a German tank commander. The series was written through the late '70s and published by Sphere Books, a UK paperback publisher. The author, "Gunther Lutz", is probably a pseudonym, and I am following some leads to track down the author's real name.

The first book in the series, BLITZKRIEG, follows Micki Boden, an Unteroffizier commanding a Panzer II light tank. What exactly Boden's rank is gets kind of muddled - sometimes he is referred to as a corporal, but the rank could be higher than that. Boden is in charge of two men, his driver and his loader / radio operator, and we know at least Boden and his driver were in the Polish campaign of 1939. The loader/operator is a Nazi fanatic, always going on with party slogans and ideology, and it is made clear that Boden considers himself a soldier first, but he rolls his eyes and actively makes fun of his loader/operator for the young man's fanaticism. I feel like this is a requirement of every German protagonist in WW2 fiction - he's just doing his duty for his country, not one of Hitler's goose-stepping puppets! At the very least, it lets you sympathize with him more, since you're not just chomping at the bit, waiting for Boden to get vaporized by a howitzer shell.

The story itself is essentially a series of vignettes, as Boden and his crew make the race to the French coast. The French and British forces are collapsing faster than the Germans can advance, and Boden's tank platoon finds itself often just passing by wrecked or abandoned Allied equipment, often destroyed by airstrikes. His first action in the book is to support a company of assault pioneers as they take a French bunker. This assignment separates Boden's tank from the rest of his platoon and the regiment, and most of the book is spent trying to catch up with their unit, which allows for some smaller-scale battles, pitting Boden and whatever band of Germans they come across against some token French or British forces.

The action in this book is pretty well-written, and the author largely knows his technical details, although there are a couple of glitches here or there. A common editing mistake in this book is that the author sometimes mis-types "cm" and "mm" for weapons, so he'll reference a "20cm" anti-aircraft gun which is no doubt the German 20mm AA autocannon, and this sort of thing happens a few more times throughout the book. In my experience, Germans tend to refer to their weapons by centimeter caliber, while the British refer to them by millimeters, so I think the author just never quite figured out which he wanted to use and there was the resulting mixup. There are a couple of other minor details that he gets wrong - for example, the KwK 30 autocannon in his Panzer II can fire both armor-piercing and high explosive ammunition, but the author states in the book on a couple of occasions that it can only fire AP. Whatever - it doesn't really matter, and there's a lot of other good information to make up for a couple of small mistakes.

There are several tank duels between Boden's Panzer II - a very light tank, more equivalent to an armored car than what we'd consider a real frontline tank - and both French and English tanks. Each scene is very tense, and the author does a good job of showing Boden's tactical prowess, maneuvering and picking just the right ground to fight from and the right moment to attack to make best use of his limited firepower. Those not so aware of German panzer history might not know it, but in the first few years of WW2, the majority of Germany's panzer inventory were light tanks, inferior in armor and firepower to the enemies they faced off against. It was their superior tactics, communication, and supporting elements that gave the panzers their victories. This is very well illustrated throughout the course of the novel.

Overall, I really enjoyed BLITZKRIEG. I was concerned going into the book that it was going to be a lot worse than it was, and although there are some cheesy interludes here and there (2 1/2 books into the series now, I see that the author likes having his characters encounter women during their downtime, with the usual "mature content" results), overall these books feel very gritty and unglamorous. A lot of men die very brutal, pointless deaths, and the survivors must carry on and do their duty no matter what.

These books were not particularly cheap to come by (I think I paid $10 for this book, not including shipping), but if you like WW2 fiction written at the height of the British War-Lit era of the 60s through early 80s, I think you'll enjoy the PANZER PLATOON series.