Thanks to Casemate Publishing & IPMSUSA for the review copy!

Oman is a country with a rich history of trading, and an ancient crossroads commanding the Straits of Hormuz. Over millennia, tensions between rival sects of Islam led to internal strife in Oman and surrounding areas, disrupting trade. To ensure their own financial benefits, different European countries set up the Sultanate of Oman to restore order, and traded places until the British occupied Oman and helped to quell a civil war. This book tells the complicated story of how conventional military operations were followed by civil development programs to unify disparate groups and hold a stale peace. Even though this book is thin, the pages are loaded with text that delves into the complicated events.

This volume is from MMP’s Maritime Series and is a comprehensive description and history of the Royal Navy’s base in the Orkney Islands at the Northern tip of Great Britain during WW II, Skapa Flow. It starts with a complete geographic description and a brief pre-WW II history of the base and then goes into a step-by-step description of the base’s development, facilities and defenses, including several maps of the locations of anti-aircraft defenses, mine fields and, anti-submarine barriers I am sure Germany would have liked to get a hold of. There are chapters dealing with the antiaircraft defenses, coastal artillery and barrage balloons, the RAF’s presence, minefields and wrecks, and everyday operations as well as the eventual fate of the base at the end of the war. There is even one chapter that details U-47’s raid under Gunter Prien into the harbor that sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak.

Historical Background

This is one of the first historical accounts of the Lend-Lease program designed to aid the Soviet Union in its war against Nazi Germany. The backgrounds are rather confused, because in the late thirties, the Soviets and the Nazis, along with the Italian Fascists, seemed to be working together to dominate nearly all of Eastern Europe. In 1939, The Germans invaded Poland, but they didn’t do it alone. They were aided by the Soviets, who attacked from the east. The Poles resisted, but the Germans and Russians were just too powerful, but for a while, it appeared that the Germans and Russians were allies.