Michael Coffey - Days Of Infamy: Military Blunders Of The Twentieth Century

I don't remember buying this book, but I think that I could have spent my money better elsewhere. Coffey's Days of Infamy was similar in intent to Macksey's Military Errors of World War Two, except that Coffey claimed to look at more than just that war.


Similar to Macksey, Coffey focuses all of his time looking at the big blunders that have been examined countless times before, such as Dunkirk and Market Garden. When he does look at smaller blunders, he does not connect them to the war effort by showing their significance the way he does with the big ones. He also falls short by simply listing out the mistakes that were made and then moving on. Where Macksey attempted to both explain how and why the mistakes were made and then look at what might have happened had things gone differently, Coffey simply lists the facts. In general, that made for fairly boring reading.

I had hoped that Coffey's focus on military actions other than World War Two would help his book become more interesting, but I was wrong. His examination of World War One mistakes could have been interesting, but like with the WWII events he simply breezed through them without examination. I was most excited for the events after World War Two, but Coffey barely looked at them, listing only a few of the very well known events (the Bay of Pigs and Tet Offensive, for example). In addition, there are a whole host of factual errors throughout the book which make its reliability suspect.

Overall, Days of Infamy was a fairly boring read. Coffey fails in his attempt to look at military blunders of the twentieth century, instead looking at military blunders of World War Two with a few extras tacked on. He also fails to inject interest into the already well-known stories by digging deeper. In general, Days of Infamy reads like it was written by who it was: a journalist with very little extensive knowledge of the wars of the twentieth century.