Mission Overseas: Daring Operations by the Indian Military, by Sushant Singh

Military history has four main genres. The first is the ‘official’ military history, or a military historian’s narrative. It is a narration of facts given as accurately as possible, written in an academic manner with maps and sketches. These are difficult to follow by non-military readers and, for that reason, are almost never read by them. The second category are reminiscences (autobiographies or biographies) of those who took part in wars—mostly in important and commanding positions. They can be interesting when written by a talented writer; however, tend to give a one-sided picture of events. The third genre is military history written in a racy manner, with first person accounts and human-interest stories. These make the books interesting to read. They are written more often by military historians who are journalists and are, therefore, attuned to narrate history in flowing prose and a gripping-story manner. Lastly, we come to the fiction-novel history genre, where a fictional story is meshed in with the history and descriptions of campaigns and battles.