New Books in Military History

Süleyman, who ruled the Ottoman Empire between 1520 and 1566, was a globally recognized figure during his lifetime. In Peerless Among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman (Oxford University Press, 2023), Kaya Şahin presents the life of this sultan, whose domain extended from Hungary to Iran, and from the Crimea to North Africa and the Indian Ocean. The wealth of his treasury, the strength of his armies, and his personality were much discussed by historians, poets, courtiers, diplomats and publics across Eurasia. Süleyman was engaged in bitter rivalries with the Catholic Habsburgs in Europe and the Shiite Safavids in the Middle East. He presided over a multilingual and multireligious empire that promised peace and prosperity to its subjects. During his reign, the Ottoman Empire became a truly global power. Imperial governance expanded considerably, and the law was emphasized as the main bond between the ruler and the ruled. Süleyman's prolific poetic output, his frequent appearances during public ceremonies, his charity, and his patronage of arts and architecture enhanced his reputation as a universal ruler with a well-rounded character. Behind the public façade of might and glory, Süleyman led a complicated life. He grew up with an overbearing father whose legacy was both an advantage and a burden. Defying established practice, he married a concubine named Hürrem whose love and affection became a true refuge. Towards the end of his life, he had to overcome both debilitating sickness and the agitations of his sons to remain on the throne. Nearly half a millennium after his death, the life of Süleyman has been obscured by romanticized and exoticized narratives. Based on original sources in multiple languages, the book narrates Süleyman's achievements as well as his failures. What emerges is a compelling account of a ruler, his family, his close associates, and the Ottoman imperial project itself during the transformational sixteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In March 2004, the unprovoked ambush killing and desecration of the bodies of American civilian security contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, caused the National Command Authorities in Washington, DC. to demand that the newly arrived Marine Expeditionary Force there take action against the perpetrators and other insurgent forces. Planned Stability and Support Operations were cast aside as insurgent fighters dared the Marines to enter Fallujah. Marine infantrymen, tankers, helicopter crews, and amphibious vehicle drivers all pitched into high-intensity battles and firefights during the first fights of Fallujah in April 2004. Across the board cooperation and innovation marked these fighting Marines in combined arms fights that no one expected. Marines fought in the streets, conducted house-to-house searches, cleared buildings of enemy, and used tank main guns in direct support of urban environment operations. Helicopter crews supported operations on the ground with rockets and machine-gun fire, and Amtrac Marines transported forces to face enemy RPG and machine-gun fire. Marines from infantry squad members to a battalion commander were interviewed by Marine Corps field historians within days or weeks of the events at nearby combat outposts and camps. David E Kelly's book First Fights in Fallujah: Marines During Operation Vigilant Resolve, in Iraq, April 2004 (Casemate, 2023) combines these interview notes and the words of the men themselves to create a unique narrative of Marines in this combat. Casualties only stiffened the will of the Marines to crush the enemy. A late April political plan called for the withdrawal of Marine forces from the city, and Marines at every level, though frustrated, understood the need to allow this attempted solution to play itself out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Wartime is not just about military success. Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 2023) tells a different story - about a group of remarkable economists who used their skills to help their countries fight their battles during the Chinese-Japanese War, Second World War, and the Cold War. 1935-55 was a time of conflict, confrontation, and destruction. It was also a time when the skills of economists were called upon to finance the military, to identify economic vulnerabilities, and to help reconstruction. Economists at War focuses on the achievements of seven finance ministers, advisors, and central bankers from Japan, China, Germany, the UK, the USSR, and the US. It is a story of good and bad economic thinking, good and bad policy, and good and bad moral positions. The economists suffered threats, imprisonment, trial, and assassination. They all believed in the power of economics to make a difference, and their contributions had a significant impact on political outcomes and military ends. Economists at War shows the history of this turbulent period through a unique lens. It details the tension between civilian resources and military requirements; the desperate attempts to control economies wracked with inflation, depression, political argument, and fighting; and the clever schemes used to evade sanctions, develop barter trade, and use economic espionage. Politicians and generals cannot win wars if they do not have the resources. This book tells the human stories behind the economics of wartime. Alan Bollard is a Professor of Economics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He formerly managed APEC, the largest regional economic integration organization in the world, and was previously the New Zealand Reserve Bank Governor, Secretary of the New Zealand Treasury, and Chairman of the New Zealand Commerce Commission. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

As Nazi Germany began to conquer Europe, America’s military was unprepared, too small, and poorly supplied. The Nazis were supported by robust German factories that created a seemingly endless flow of arms, trucks, tanks, airplanes, and submarines. The United States, emerging from the Great Depression, was skeptical of American involvement in Europe and not ready to wage war. Hardened isolationists predicted disaster if the country went to war. In V Is For Victory: Franklin Roosevelt's American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II (Scribner, 2023), Craig Nelson traces how Franklin D. Roosevelt steadily and sometimes secretively put America on a war footing by convincing America’s top industrialists such as Henry Ford Jr. to retool their factories, by diverting the country’s supplies of raw materials to the war effort, and above all by convincing the American people to endure shortages, to work in wartime factories, and to send their sons into harm’s way. Within a few years, the nation’s workers were producing thousands of airplanes and tanks, hundreds of warships and submarines. Under FDR’s resolute leadership, victory at land and sea and air across the globe began at home in America—a powerful and essential narrative largely overlooked in conventional histories of the war but which, in Nelson’s skilled, authoritative hands, becomes an illuminating and important work destined to become an American history classic. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In the decades between the Great Depression and the advent of cable television, when daily newspapers set the conversational agenda in the United States, the best reporter in the business was a rumpled, unassuming figure named Homer Bigart. Despite two Pulitzers and a host of other prizes, he quickly faded from public view after retirement. Few today know the extent to which he was esteemed by his peers. Get the Damn Story: Homer Bigart and the Great Age of American Newspapers (Georgetown UP, 2023) is the first comprehensive biography to encompass all of Bigart’s journalism, including both his war reporting and coverage of domestic events. Writing for the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times, Bigart brought to life many events that defined the era—the wars in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam; the civil rights movement; the creation of Israel; the end of colonialism in Africa; and the Cuban Revolution. Bigart’s career demonstrates the value to a democratic society of a relentless, inquiring mind examining its institutions and the people who run them. James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Giulia Pecorella's The United States of America and the Crime of Aggression (Routledge, 2021) traces the position of the United States of America on aggression, beginning with the Declaration of Independence up to 2020, covering the four years of the Trump Administration. The decision of the Assembly of States Parties to the International Criminal Court to activate the Court's jurisdiction over the crime of aggression in 2018 has added further value to a book concerning the position and practice of one of the most influential states, a global military power and permanent member of the UN Security Council. Organized along chronological lines, the work examines whether, or to what extent, the US position has evolved over time. The book explores how the definition of the crime can impact upon the US, notwithstanding its failure to ratify the Rome Statute. It also shows that the US practice and opinio iuris about the law applicable to the use of force might influence, as it has done in the past, the law itself. The work will be a valuable guide for students, academics and professionals with an interest in International Criminal Law. Jeff Bachman is an associate professor at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

When the Soviet K-129 submarine sank in the Pacific Ocean in 1968, the CIA saw a possible treasure trove of intelligence information on Soviet military codes. The race was on to devise how exactly to retrieve this potential information from the bottom of the ocean. After years of careful planning, the result was one of the most audacious espionage missions of the Cold War. The wreck of the K-129 would be recovered intact under the cover of a deep-sea mining operation, funded by business tycoon Howard Hughes. Unfortunately for the CIA, the winds of public opinion about its secret operations were changing in wake of the Watergate scandals that helped expose the operation to a wider audience. Out of the attempt to maintain secrecy that the so-called "Glomar response" of "neither confirm nor deny" was used for the first time in a legal setting. This story and its Cold War context is the subject of M. Todd Bennett's Neither Confirm Nor Deny: How the Glomar Mission Shielded the CIA from Transparency (Columbia University Press, 2023). M. Todd Bennett is associate professor of history at East Carolina University. He is the author of One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II (2012). Bennett was formerly a historian at the U.S. Department of State; there, he edited the Foreign Relations of the United States volume that includes declassified records documenting the Glomar incident. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

As the first Russian bombs drop on Oulu, Finland in early 1940 during the Winter War, Aarne Kovala is a young boy with a great love of the sea. While the war rages, Aarne takes fate into his own hands and joins the Finnish merchant marines. He spends his days delivering war materials between Finland, Poland, and Germany. But when Finland’s ties with Germany are severed after the signing of the Moscow Armistice in 1944, Aarne and his fellow sailors are arrested by the Nazis and sent by cattle car to the infamous Stutthof concentration camp deep in the Polish forest. And thus begins Aarne’s horrific struggle to survive amid dreadful living conditions, scarce food, and grueling work details. In the only letter he is allowed to send home, he prays, “I hope the day soon dawns that we again may meet.” But after months of dark nights and even darker days, how long can his hope survive? Liisa Kovala's book Surviving Stutthof: My Father's Ordeal in a Nazi Concentration Camp (Latitude 46, 2017) is a tale of survival, hope, and ultimately the triumph of the human spirit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Germany's success in the Second World War was built upon its tank forces; however, many of its leading generals, with the notable exception of Heinz Guderian, are largely unknown. This biographical study of four German panzer army commanders serving on the Eastern Front is based upon their unpublished wartime letters to their wives. In Hitler's Panzer Generals: Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt Unguarded (Cambridge UP, 2023), David Stahel offers a complete picture of the men conducting Hitler's war in the East, with an emphasis on the private fears and public pressures they operated under. He also illuminates their response to the criminal dimension of the war as well as their role as leading military commanders conducting large-scale operations. While the focus is on four of Germany's most important panzer generals - Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt - the evidence from their private correspondence sheds new light on the broader institutional norms and cultural ethos of the Wehrmacht's Panzertruppe. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Wegner is not a book about peacekeeping practices. This is a book about storytelling, fantasies and the ways that people connect emotionally to myths about peacekeeping. The celebration of peacekeeping as a legitimate and desirable use of military force is expressed through the unproblematised acceptance of militarism. Introducing a novel framework – martial peace – the book offers an in-depth examination of the Canadian Armed Forces missions to Afghanistan and the use of police violence against Indigenous protests in Canada as case examples where military violence has been justified in the name of peace. It critically investigates the peacekeeper myth and challenges the academic, government and popular beliefs that martial violence is required to sustain peace. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Eighty years on, Lin Poyer's book War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II (U Hawaii Press, 2022) offers a global and comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Indigenous peoples, Poyer shows, had a distinct experience of WWII, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first-century emergence as players on the world’s political stage. This book is available open access here. Lin Poyer is a cultural anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of Wyoming. Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: United Nations Peacekeeping and the Reinvention of Colonialism, 1945–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Margot Tudor reveals how United Nations peacekeeping staff reconfigured the functions of global governance and sites of diplomatic power in the post-war world. Despite peacekeeping operations being criticised for their colonial underpinnings, our understanding of the ways in which colonial actors and ideas influenced peacekeeping practices on the ground has been limited and imprecise. In this multi-archival history, Dr. Tudor investigates the UN's formative armed missions and uncovers the officials that orchestrated a reinvention of colonial-era hierarchies for Global South populations on the front lines of post-colonial statehood. She demonstrates how these officials exploited their field-based access to perpetuate racial prejudices, plot political interference, and foster protracted inter-communal divisions in post-colonial conflict contexts. Bringing together histories of humanitarianism, decolonisation, and the Cold War, Blue Helmet Bureaucrats sheds new light on the mechanisms through which sovereignty was negotiated and re-negotiated after 1945. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

On a trip many years ago to New Delhi, I was struck by an official memorial to Subhas Chandra Bose, the wartime leader of the Indian National Army, the Japan-affiliated force of Indians who fought against the British during the Second World War. India, of course, has a more complex view of the fight against Japan than other countries involved in the War–with these soldiers being contentious, debated and, at times, celebrated. In this interview, I’m joined by Tanvi Srivastava, translator of The War Diary of Asha-san: From Tokyo to Netaji's Indian National Army (HarperCollins India: 2022). The book is a unique historical document showing the life of Lt Bharati ‘Asha’ Sahay Choudhry, a 17-year-old Indian girl, raised in Japan, who signed up to fight the British in 1943. While she never quite makes it to the frontlines, her story—as translated by her eventual grandaughter-in-law, Tanvi—discusses the war’s events from a different vantage point. Tanvi Srivastava also writes fiction and was a member of the 2021 cohort of the Write Beyond Borders programme funded by the British Council. She has been published in journals like Kitaab, Gulmohur Quarterly, New Anthology of Asian Writing, and The Reading Hour. She can be followed on Twitter at @tanvisrivastava and on Instagram at @tanvisrivastava_a. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The War Diary of Asha-san. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Alison S. Fell's book Warrior Women: The Cultural Politics of Armed Women, c.1850-1945 (Cambridge UP, 2023) examines women warriors as vehicles of mobilisation. It argues that women warrior figures from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War are best understood as examples of 'palimpsestic memory', as the way they were represented reflected new contexts while retaining traces of legendary models such as Joan of Arc, and of 'travelling memory', as their stories crossed geographical borders and were re-told and re-imagined. It considers both the instrumentalisation of women warriors by state actors to mobilise populations in the world wars, and by non-state actors in resistance, anti-colonial and feminist movements. Fell's analysis of a broad range of global conflicts helps us to understand who these actors were, what motivated them, and what meanings armed women embodied for them, enabling a fresh understanding of the woman warrior as an archetype in modern warfare. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Today, the countries bordering the Red Sea are riven with instability. Why are the region's contemporary problems so persistent and interlinked? Through the stories of three compelling characters, Colonial Chaos in the Southern Red Sea (Cambridge UP, 2021) sheds light on the unfurling of anarchy and violence during the colonial era. A noble Somali sultan, a cunning Yemeni militia leader, and a Machiavellian French merchant ran amok in the southern Red Sea in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In response to colonial hostility and gunboat diplomacy, they attacked shipwrecks, launched piratical attacks, and traded arms, slaves, and drugs. Their actions contributed to the transformation of the region's international relations, redrew the political map, upended its diplomatic culture, and remodelled its traditions of maritime law, sowing the seeds of future unrest. Colonisation created chaos in the southern Red Sea. Colonial Chaos offers an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between the region's colonial past and its contemporary instability. Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Senior Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Exactly a century ago, intelligence agencies across Europe first became aware of a fanatical German nationalist whose political party was rapidly gathering momentum. His name was Adolf Hitler. From 1933, these spy services watched with growing alarm as they tried to determine what sort of threat Hitler's regime would now pose to the rest of Europe. Would Germany rearm, either covertly or in open defiance of the outside world? Would Hitler turn his attention eastwards - or did he also pose a threat to the west? What were the feelings and attitudes of ordinary Germans, towards their own regime as well as the outside world? Despite intense rivalry and mistrust between them, these spy chiefs began to liaise and close ranks against Nazi Germany. At the heart of this loose, informal network were the British and French intelligence services, alongside the Poles and Czechs. Some other countries - Holland, Belgium, and the United States - stood at the periphery. Drawing on a wide range of previously unpublished British, French, German, Danish, and Czech archival sources, Spying on the Reich: The Cold War Against Hitler (Oxford UP, 2023) tells the story of Germany and its rearmament in the 1920s and 1930s; its relations with foreign governments and their intelligence services; and the relations and rivalries between Western governments, seen through the prism of the cooperation, or lack of it, between their spy agencies. Along the way, it addresses some of the most intriguing questions that still perplex historians of the period, such as how and why Britain defended Poland in September 1939, and what alternative policies could have been pursued? Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Why does state-led and intercommunal violence occur? How do past episodes of mass violence reverberate in the present? How do victims and perpetrators make sense of each other in the aftermath of mass violence? What are the ethical and professional obligations of historians who uncover episodes of mass violence in the course of their research? These questions, and the difficult search for answers, are at the core of recent books by Nicole Eaton and Max Bergholz about violence in the context of the Second World War. Eaton is the author German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg became Soviet Kaliningrad (Cornell UP, 2023). Bergholz is the author of Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell UP, 2016). Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Drone Warfare is the first comprehensive analysis of one of the fastest growing--and most secretive--fronts in global conflict: the rise of robot warfare. In 2000, the Pentagon had fewer than fifty aerial drones; ten years later, it had a fleet of nearly 7,500, and the US Air Force now trains more drone "pilots" than bomber and fighter pilots combined. Drones are already a $5 billion business in the US alone. The human cost? Drone strikes have killed more than 200 children alone in Pakistan and Yemen. CODEPINK and Global Exchange cofounder Medea Benjamin provides the first extensive analysis of who is producing the drones, where they are being used, who controls these unmanned planes, and what are the legal and moral implications of their use. In vivid, readable style, this book also looks at what activists, lawyers, and scientists across the globe are doing to ground these weapons. Benjamin argues that the assassinations we are carrying out from the air will come back to haunt us when others start doing the same thing--to us. Hugh Gusterson is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University. He is the author of Nuclear Rites and People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Command in war is about forging effective strategies and implementing them, making sure that orders are appropriate, well-communicated, and then obeyed. But it is also an intensely political process. This is largely because how wars are fought depends to a large extent on how their aims are set. It is also because commanders in one realm must possess the ability to work with other command structures, including those of other branches of the armed forces and allies. In Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2022), Lawrence Freedman explores the importance of political as well as operational considerations in command with a series of eleven vivid case studies, all taken from the period after 1945. Over this period, the risks of nuclear escalation led to a shift away from great power confrontations and towards civil wars, and advances in communication technologies made it easier for higher-level commanders to direct their subordinates. Freedman covers defeats as well as victories. Pakistani generals tried to avoid surrender as they were losing the eastern part of their country to India in 1971. Iraq's Saddam Hussein turned his defeats into triumphant narratives of victory. Osama bin Laden escaped the Americans in Afghanistan in 2001. The UK struggled as a junior partner to the US in Iraq after 2003. We come across insubordinate generals, such as Israel's Arik Sharon, and those in the French army in Algeria, so frustrated with their political leadership that they twice tried to change it. At the other end of the scale, Che Guevara in Congo in 1966 and Igor Girkin in Ukraine in 2014 both tried to spark local wars to suit their grandiose objectives. Freedman ends the book with a meditation on the future of command in a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on technologies like artificial intelligence. A wide-ranging and insightful history of the changing nature of command in the postwar era, this will stand as a definitive account of a foundational concept in both military affairs and politics. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity over the past two decades, their impacts worsened by climate change, urbanization, and persistent social and economic inequalities. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay between natural disasters and armed conflict, Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts (MIT Press, 2023) explores the extent to which disasters facilitate the escalation or abatement of armed conflicts—as well as the ways and contexts in which combatants exploit these catastrophes. Tobias Ide utilizes both qualitative insights and quantitative data to explain the link between disasters and the (de-)escalation of armed conflict and presents over thirty case studies of earthquakes, droughts, floods, and storms in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. He also examines the impact of COVID-19 on armed conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints is an invaluable addition to current debates on climate change, environmental stress, and security. Professionals and students will greatly appreciate the wealth of timely data it provides for their own investigations. Dr. Tobias Ide is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. His work broadly focuses on the intersections of environmental change and environmental politics with peace, conflict, and security. Sidney Michelini is a PhD student at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research with the FutureLab - Security, Ethnic Conflicts and Migration. His work focuses on how climate, climate shocks, and climate change impact conflicts of different types. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In October 1938, eight-year-old Josef Rosenbaum, his mother, and his younger sister set out from Germany on a cruel odyssey, fleeing into eastern Europe along with thousands of other refugees. Sent to Siberian slave labor camps in the wildernesses, they suffered brutal cold, famine, and disease. When Germany invaded Russia many refugees were forced out of Siberia to primitive tent camps in Uzbekistan, accompanied by the Polish army-in-exile previously imprisoned by the Soviets. Within weeks the commander of the army, General Wladyslaw Anders, received orders to relocate his army to Iran to train to fight alongside the British in North Africa. Instructed to leave without the civilians, Anders instead ordered all evacuees, including Jews, to head southward with his troops. Joe and the refugees were again loaded on trains, accompanied by the Polish soldiers, and sent to the port of Pahlavi on the Caspian Sea. Then, transported by trucks over treacherous mountain roads, they finally arrived in Tehran, where they struggled to survive in horrifying conditions. In October 1942, the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem accepted responsibility for the nine hundred orphaned Jewish children in the camp, and by January 1943, the agency secured travel certificates for the Tehran Children to evacuate to Palestine. Joe and the other children, after five terrible years, finally reached safety at the Athlit Detention Camp, north of Haifa, on 18 February 1943. Readers will find the story is one of the swift brutalities of war, and the suffering of civilians swept up in the maelstrom of fierce conflict. Randy Grigsby's book A Train to Palestine: The Tehran Children, Anders' Army and Their Escape from Stalin's Siberia, 1939-1943 (Vallentine Mitchell, 2019) recreates a remarkable, and little-known story of escape and survival during the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

"'The God of War' is near to revealing himself, because we have heard his prophet." So wrote Jean Colin, naming Napoleon the God of War and Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, comte de Guibert, as his prophet. Guibert was the foremost philosopher of the Military Enlightenment, dedicating his career to systematizing warfare in a single document. The result was his magnum opus, The General Essay on Tactics, which helped to lay the foundation for the success of French armies during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In Jonathan Abel's Guibert's General Essay on Tactics (Brill, 2021), it is presented in English for the first time since the 1780s, with extensive annotation and contextualization. Jonathan Abel is Assistant Professor of Military History at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond. For too long, their lived experiences have been sidelined, impoverishing our understanding of the obstacles post-Civil War Black families faced, their inspiring determination to survive, and the physical and emotional scars they bore because of it. In I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kidada E. Williams offers a breakthrough account of the much-debated Reconstruction period, transporting readers into the daily existence of formerly enslaved people building hope-filled new lives. Drawing on overlooked sources and bold new readings of the archives, Williams offers a revelatory and, in some cases, minute-by-minute record of nighttime raids and Ku Klux Klan strikes. And she deploys cutting-edge scholarship on trauma to consider how the effects of these attacks would linger for decades--indeed, generations--to come. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Arthur Snell's book How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan (1997-2021) (Canbury Press, 2022) critically assesses UK foreign policy over the past 25 years, from Kosovo in 1998 to Afghanistan in 2021, while also scrutinising British policy towards the powerhouses of the USA, Russia, India, and China. Far from being unimportant, Snell reveals, Britain has often played a pivotal role in world affairs. For instance, London supplied the false intelligence that justified the Allied invasion of Iraq and plugged Russia's corrupt elite into Western economies. Then come the bungled humanitarian interventions in foreign states. Without the UK's marginal but key role, the author argues, it's likely that wars would not have blighted the Balkans, Iraq, and Libya, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved, and the world would be a safer place in the 2020s. Taking in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Snell charts the key political, economic and geographic factors that drive the behaviour of the most powerful and populous countries. Like a diplomatic version of Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall, How Britain Broke the World reveals the ignominious reality of UK foreign policy and the true state of world affairs. It is a must-read for anyone interested in Britain's role in international affairs. Philip Blood is a British historian residing in Germany. His specialist research covers military culture, war, security, genocide and the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

This book distills war down to individual young men climbing into defenseless gliders made of plywood, ready to trust the towing aircraft that would pull them into enemy territory by a single cable wrapped with a telephone wire. Based on their after-action reports, journals, oral histories, photos and letters home, Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin: The Glider Pilots of World War II (Osprey, 2023) reveals every terrifying minute of their missions. They were all volunteers, for a specialized duty that their own government projected would have a 50 percent casualty rate. None faltered. In every major European invasion of the war they led the way. They landed their gliders ahead of the troops who stormed Omaha Beach, and sometimes miles ahead of the paratroopers bound for the far side of the Rhine River in Germany itself. From there, they had to hold their positions. They delivered medical teams, supplies and gasoline to troops surrounded in the Battle of the Bulge, ahead even of Patton's famous supply truck convoy. These all-volunteer glider pilots played a pivotal role in liberating the West from tyranny, from the day the Allies invaded Occupied Europe to the day Germany finally surrendered. Yet the story of these anonymous heroes is virtually unknown. Here their story is told in full - a story which epitomizes courage, dedication and sacrifice. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

At the Battle of Saratoga, the tide of the Revolutionary War turned in favor of unlikely victors: the American patriots. What were the major strategy elements at play in the Saratoga Campaign, and why did it prove so crucial? Where did England misstep, and what did the Americans get right? To find out, we chat with Kevin Weddle *03, Professor of Military Theory and Strategy at the Army War College. A graduate of West Point and veteran of operations Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom, Dr. Weddle received his PhD here at Princeton, and was the 2019 William L. Garwood visiting professor with the Madison Program. He is the author of The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution, winner of the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur: War, Diplomacy, and Knowledge in Habsburg Europe (Cornell UP, 2022), Suzanne Sutherland explores the role of the military entrepreneur and explains how these international military figures emerged from, and exploited, the seventeenth century's momentous political, military, commercial, and scientific changes. During the Thirty Years' War, these figures traveled rapidly and frequently across Europe using private wealth, credit, and connections to raise and command the armies that rulers desperately needed. Using the individual of Raimondo Montecuccoli (1609–80), a middling nobleman from the Duchy of Modena, who became one of the most powerful men in the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, Sutherland uncovers the influence of military entrepreneurs not only commanders but also diplomats, natural philosophers, information brokers, clients, and subjects on the battlefield. The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur explains how Montecuccoli addressed battlefield, court, and family responsibilities while contributing to the world of scholarship on an often violent, fragmented political-military landscape. As a result, Sutherland shifts the perspective on war away from the ruler and his court to instead examine the figures supplying force, along with their methods, networks, and reflections on those experiences. Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The surprise success of the German offensive in the West that commenced on May 10, 1940 caught the Allies completely off-guard, and France would soon capitulate to the Germans in late June. During the course of the campaign, large numbers of Allied forces would become trapped along the coast of the English Channel at the port of Dunkirk. The mass evacuation of Allied forces at the port of Dunkirk in 1940 is often considered one of the most iconic moments of the Second World War (1939-1945), demonstrating the resolve of the British in particular to carry on the fight against Nazi Germany. This image was portrayed in Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film Dunkirk (2017). By extension, the mass evacuation of Allied forces is also often considered a "missed opportunity" on the part of the Germans to deal a decisive blow to the British war effort. How exactly did the German High Command and German soldiers interpret the situation at Dunkirk? Through extensive research into German military archives, historian Robert Kershaw was able to provide an answer in his book Dünkirchen 1940: The German View of Dunkirk (Osprey Publishing, 2022). Robert Kershaw is a graduate of Reading University. He joined the Parachute Regiment in 1973 and ultimately commanded 10 PARA. He attended the German Staff College, spending a further two years with the Bundeswehr as an infantry, airborne and arctic warfare instructor. He speaks fluent German. On leaving the British Army in 2006 he became a full-time author and a military analyst. He has recorded for BBC radio and published frequent magazine and newspaper articles. Two of his books have been serialized in the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. He lives in Salisbury, England. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The history of reportage has often depended on outsiders--Ryszard Kapuściński witnessing the fall of the shah in Iran, Frances FitzGerald observing the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. What would happen if a native son was so estranged from his city by war that he could, in essence, view it as an outsider? What kind of portrait of a war-wracked place and people might he present? A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War (Knopf, 2023) is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq's history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities. When the "Shock and Awe" campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad's book decenters the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown sideways through life by the war, and the proliferation of sectarian battles that continue to this day. Here is their Iraq, seen from the inside: the human cost of violence, the shifting allegiances, the generational change. A Stranger in Your Own City is a rare work of beauty and tragedy whose power and relevance lie in its attempt to return the land to the people to whom it belongs. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Today, fighting with dagger versus dagger, or with knife versus knife, is not a common scenario that people might expect to face. However, it was more common in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, when it was normal for people to wear a dagger on their belt. Arguments or fights with daggers could break out; and while duels were more often fought with swords, combatants could also agree to do so with daggers. Carlo Parisi's Dagger Fencing: The Italian School (Fallen Rook, 2016)is not a book on modern knife fighting; rather, it is a book dealing with the historical knife fighting of Renaissance Italy. The modern blade aficionado will also find material of interest. The book offers several views of short bladed weapons that were developed and tested when cold steel was the king of weaponcraft and when duels were more common than today. Carlo Parisi was born in Northern Italy in 1974. He has always been interested in weapons and martial arts, and the two met in Historical Fencing, which he began practising in roughly 1998. A few years later, he started doing his own research, and became a member of HEMAC in 2003. Since then, he's been teaching classes at various events in Europe, and set up his own club in 2011. His main interests are sabres and daggers, but he studies a variety of weapons and methods. This is his first book on fencing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

From summer 1941 onwards, Romania actively pursued at its own initiative the mass killing of Jews in the territories it controlled. 1941 saw 13,000 Jewish residents of the Romanian city of Iai killed, the extermination of thousands of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia by Romanian armed forces and local people, large-scale deportations of Jews to the camps and ghettos of Transnistria, and massacres in and around Odessa. Overall, more than 300,000 Jews of Romanian and Soviet or Ukrainian origin were murdered in Romanian- controlled territories during the Second World War. In Simon Geissbühler's edited volume Romania and the Holocaust: Events, Contexts, Aftermath (Ibidem Press, 2016), a number of renowned experts shed light on the events, the contexts, and the aftermath of this under-researched and lesser-known dimension of the Holocaust. 75 years on, this book gives much-needed impetus to research on the Holocaust in Romania and Romanian-controlled territories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Again and again, American taxpayers are asked to open their wallets and pay for a national security machine that costs $1 trillion operate. Yet time and time again, the US government gets it wrong on critical issues. So what can be done? Enter bestselling author Thom Shanker and defense expert Andrew Hoehn. With decades of national security expertise between them and access to virtually every expert, they look at what's going wrong in national security and how to make it go right. Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats (Hachette Books, 2023) looks at the major challenges facing America--from superpowers like Russia and China to emerging threats like pandemics, cybersecurity, climate change, and drones--and reimagines the national security apparatus into something that can truly keep Americans safe. Weaving together expert analysis with exclusive interviews from a new generation of national security leaders, Shanker and Hoehn argue that the United States must create an industrial-grade, life-saving machine out of a system that, for too long, was focused only on deterring adversaries and carrying out global military operations. It is a timely and crucial call to action--a call that if heeded, could save Americans lives, money, and our very future on the global stage. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Why should we study Robert E. Lee? Why did he make the fateful decision to betray his country? How should we judge Robert E. Lee? Allen C. Guelzo, Director of the James Madison Program's Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship, joins Madison's Notes to answer these questions and others. Guezlo is the author of Robert E. Lee: A Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

"The Ukrainian nation will emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity than at any other point in its modern history," writes Serhii Plokhy at the end of The Russo-Ukrainian War (Norton, 2023). But that's not all, says the man acclaimed by the Financial Times as “the world's foremost historian of Ukraine” - author of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, and Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russian aggression is destined to promote Russia's own nation-building project. Russia and its elites now have little choice but to reimagine their country's identity by parting ways not only with the imperialism of the Tsarist past but also with the anachronistic model of a Russian nation consisting of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. By paying an enormous price in wealth and blood of its citizens, Ukraine is terminating the era of Russian dominance in a good part of eastern Europe and challenging Moscow's claim to primacy in the rest of the post-Soviet space". Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard and director of the university's Ukrainian Research Institute. *The author's own book recommendations are The Zelensky Effect by Olga Onuch and Henry Hale (Hurst, 2022) and Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer (Allen Lane, 2023) Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The U.S. Air Force had to struggle to establish itself as an independent branch of the American military, and originally was an extension of the Army. The experiences during World War II (1939-1945) and the beginning of the Cold War afterwards helped propel the process towards becoming a separate branch in 1948. An important but less studied aspect of this process was the necessity for the Air Force to have its own special intelligence branch, which would later become the Security Service. Undertaking painstaking operations to decipher enemy communications and intentions, the Security Service thought of itself as the first line of defense for the United States and its NATO allies. The hard-won struggle for the Air Force to be an independent branch of the military marked the Security Service as having a certain maverick status within the larger American military intelligence community. The story of this lesser-known branch of U.S. military intelligence is the subject of Philip C. Shackelford's Rise of the Mavericks: The U.S. Air Force Security Service and the Cold War, 1948-1979 (US Naval Institute Press, 2023). Philip C. Shackelford is currently serving as the Library Director at South Arkansas Community College in El Dorado, Arkansas. He is a past president of the Arkansas Library Association, and is committed to supporting the Arkansas library community in a variety of other capacities. As a military historian, Philip Shackelford brings a unique focus on organizational culture and development to the history of communications intelligence, national security, and the U.S. Air Force. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Today I talked to Robin Bartlett about his new book Vietnam Combat: Firefights and Writing History (Casemate, 2023). The year 1968 was arguably the most significant year of the war. It was the height of the American involvement, and because officer casualties had been so great after the Tet Offensive of January 1968, all prior officer assignments were canceled. 1st Lieutenant Robin Bartlett, originally on orders to the 101st Airborne Division, suddenly found himself at the "repo-depo" in Bien Hoa reassigned to the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). The unit had more helicopter support than any other unit in Vietnam. The soldiers carried lighter packs, more ammo and water because of the availability of rapid helicopter resupply. Immediate support from artillery, helicopter gunships and ARA (aerial rocket artillery) was only minutes away to support a firefight. Wounded troops could be medevaced even in dense jungle using "jungle penetrators." It also meant that Bartlett's platoon could deploy through helicopter combat assaults into hot LZs (landing zones) at a moment's notice if an enemy force had been spotted. And they did. It was with extreme anxiety that Bartlett made his way to join his battalion and company - it was the worst of times to be a platoon leader in Vietnam, let alone a grunt serving in a combat unit. Bartlett also had to cope with personal issues of commitment to a war that was rapidly losing support not only back home but among the soldiers he was leading through the jungles of I Corps on "search and destroy" missions. Fifty years later, Bartlett's vivid combat experiences are brought to light in a fast-moving, well-written, first-person narrative expressing the horror, fear, anguish, and sometimes illogical humor of that war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Mark Galeotti's book Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the two military incursions into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the eventual invasion of Ukraine itself. But it also looks more broadly at Putin's recreation of Russian military power and its expansion to include a range of new capabilities, from mercenaries to operatives in a relentless information war against Western powers. This is an engrossing strategic overview of a rejuvenated Russian military and the successes and failures on the battlefield. Thanks to Dr Galeotti's wide-ranging contacts throughout Russia, it is also peppered with anecdotes of military life, personal snapshots of conflicts, and an extraordinary collection of first-hand accounts from serving and retired Russian officers. Russia continues to dominate the news cycle throughout the Western world. There is no better time to understand how and why Putin has involved his armed forces in a variety of conflicts for over two decades. There is no author better placed to demystify the capabilities of the Russian military and give a glimpse into what the future may hold. Putin's Wars is an engaging and important history of a reawakened Russian bear and how it currently operates both at home and abroad to ensure Russia is front and centre on the world stage. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to "close ranks" and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished. In The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War (FSG, 2023), Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois's failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois's struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race and democracy for Black people in the twentieth century. Drawing on a broad range of sources, most notably Du Bois's unpublished manuscript and research materials, Williams tells a sweeping story of hope, betrayal, disillusionment, and transformation, setting into motion a fresh understanding of the life and mind of arguably the most significant scholar-activist in African American history. In uncovering what happened to Du Bois's largely forgotten book, Williams offers a captivating reminder of the importance of World War I, why it mattered to Du Bois, and why it continues to matter today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Situated in the middle of the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man is like a stepping-stone between the lands that surround it. In medieval times, it played an important role in the histories of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales. A Mighty Fleet and the King's Power: The Isle of Man, AD 400 to 1265 (John Donald, 2023) by Dr. Tim Clarkson explores the first part of that turbulent era, tracing the story of the Isle of Man from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries. It looks at the ways in which various peoples – Britons, Scots, Irish, English and Scandinavians – influenced events in Man over a period of more than 800 years. A large portion of the book is concerned with the Vikings, a group whose legacy – in place names, old burial mounds and finely carved stones – is such a vivid element in the Manx landscape today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia (Cornell UP, 2021) brings us back to the post-Vietnam era, when the US Air Force launched two new, state-of-the art fighter aircraft: the F-15 Eagle and the F-16 Fighting Falcon. It was an era when debates about aircraft superiority went public--and these were not uncontested discussions. Michael W. Hankins delves deep into the fighter pilot culture that gave rise to both designs, showing how a small but vocal group of pilots, engineers, and analysts in the Department of Defense weaponized their own culture to affect technological development and larger political change. The design and advancement of the F-15 and F-16 reflected this group's nostalgic desire to recapture the best of World War I air combat. Known as the "Fighter Mafia," and later growing into the media savvy political powerhouse "Reform Movement," it believed that American weapons systems were too complicated and expensive, and thus vulnerable. The group's leader was Colonel John Boyd, a contentious former fighter pilot heralded as a messianic figure by many in its ranks. He and his group advocated for a shift in focus from the multi-role interceptors the Air Force had designed in the early Cold War towards specialized air-to-air combat dogfighters. Their influence stretched beyond design and into larger politicized debates about US national security, debates that still resonate today. A biography of fighter pilot culture and the nostalgia that drove decision-making, Flying Camelot deftly engages both popular culture and archives to animate the movement that shook the foundations of the Pentagon and Congress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In 1995, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing launched the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Successive UN Security Council resolutions highlighted the need to include more women in peace processes, the perpetration of gender-based violence during war, the underrepresentation of women as peacekeepers, and the need for greater diversity at all levels of governance to respond to international security challenges. These norms seemed clear, feminist, and ambitious. Dr. Stéfanie von Hlatky’s new book, Deploying Feminism: The Role of Gender in NATO Military Operation (Oxford UP, 2022), argues that these WPS norms were distorted during the implementation process. NATO, a predominantly male organizations experimented with gender mainstreaming but instead of serving general equality goals, the Women, Peace, and Security norms served operational effectiveness. Women on the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq were seen as a military asset – because they were able to interact with local women and children or more effectively get information from male inhabitants. The ambitious Women, Peace, and Security global norms ultimately left military culture untouched. Deploying Feminism provides a detailed account of the changes made within the NATO military due to WPS norms. Using comparative case studies, interviews, and feminist I.R. scholarship, Dr. von Hlatky examines why norm distortion occurs and how the military carries it out. She recommends ways that the military might implement gender norms without distortion. distorting it. Dr. Stéfanie von Hlatky is an Associate professor of political studies and Canada Research Chair on Gender, Security, and the Armed Forces at Queen’s University. She is also fellow at the Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP). She is the author of American Allies in Times of War: The Great Asymmetry (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-editor of Going to War?: Trends in Military Interventions (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016). Daniella Campos served as the editorial assistant for this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the French Third Republic sought to rebuild its strength to avenge its defeat and secure itself as a major world power. To help achieve these ends, the first professional intelligence services were created to help secure French interests against all possible enemies - both foreign and internal. This gripping story of French intelligence during the late nineteenth century is the subject of Deborah Bauer's Marianne Is Watching: Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and the Origins of the French Surveillance State (‎University of Nebraska Press, 2021). Dr. Deborah Bauer is an associate professor of history at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Her research has focused primarily on the cultural, diplomatic, and military history of France and the French Empire at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with the most densely populated coastline on Earth. Over the course of just a few hours, the Great Bhola Cyclone would kill 500,000 people and begin a chain reaction of turmoil, genocide, and war. The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation (Ecco Press, 2022) is the dramatic story of how that storm sparked a country to revolution. Bhola made landfall during a fragile time, when Pakistan was on the brink of a historic election. The fallout ignited a conflagration of political intrigue, corruption, violence, idealism, and bravery that played out in the lives of tens of millions of Bangladeshis. Authors Scott Carney and Jason Miklian take us deep into the story of the cyclone and its aftermath, told through the eyes of the men and women who lived through it, including the infamous president of Pakistan, General Yahya Khan, and his close friend Richard Nixon; American expats Jon and Candy Rhode; soccer star-turned-soldier Hafiz Uddin Ahmad; and a young Bengali revolutionary, Mohammed Hai. Thrillingly paced and written with incredible detail, The Vortex is not just a story about the painful birth of a new nation but also a universal tale of resilience and liberation in the face of climate emergency that affects every single person on the planet. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The First and Second World Wars were separated by a mere two decades, making the period 1914-1945 an unprecedentedly intense and violent era of history. But how did Britain develop its complex military strategy during these wars, and how were decisions made by those at the top? Robin Prior examines the influence politicians had on military operations, in the first history to assess both world wars together. Drawing uniquely on both military and political archives and previously unexamined sources Prior explores the fraught relationships between civilian and military leaders: from Lloyd George's remarkably interventionist stance on military tactics during the First World War to Churchill's near-constant arguments with American leaders during the Second. Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain, 1914-1945 (Yale UP, 2022) tells the complex story of this military decision-making, revealing how politicians attempted to control strategy--but had little influence on how the army, navy, and air force actually fought. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

On Operations: Operational Art and Military Disciplines (US Naval Institute Press, 2021) traces the history of the development of military staffs and ideas on the operational level of war and operational art from the Napoleonic Wars to today, viewing them through the lens of Prussia/Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States. B. A. Friedman concludes that the operational level of war should be rejected as fundamentally flawed, but that operational art is an accurate description of the activities of the military staff, an organization developed to provide the brainpower necessary to manage the complexity of modern military operations. Rather than simply serve as an intercession between levels, the military staff exists as an enabler and supporting organization to tacticians and strategists alike. On Operations examines the organization of military staffs, which has changed little since Napoleon's time. Historical examinations of the functions staffs provided to commanders, and the disciplines of the staff officers themselves, leads to conclusions about how best to organize staffs in the future. Friedman demonstrates these ideas through case studies of historical campaigns based on the military discipline system developed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

New York City, the strategic center of the Revolutionary War, was the most important place in North America in 1776. That summer, an unruly rebel army under George Washington repeatedly threatened to burn the city rather than let the British take it. Shortly after the Crown’s forces took New York City, much of it mysteriously burned to the ground. The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution (Yale UP, 2023) is the first book to fully explore the Great Fire of 1776 and why its origins remained a mystery even after the British investigated it in 1776 and 1783. Uncovering stories of espionage, terror, and radicalism, Benjamin L. Carp paints a vivid picture of the chaos, passions, and unresolved tragedies that define a historical moment we usually associate with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

By the Tet Offensive in early 1968, what had been widely heralded as the best qualified, best-trained army in US history was descending into crisis as the Vietnam War raged without end. Morale was tanking. AWOL rates were rising. And in August of that year, a group of Black soldiers seized control of the infamous Long Binh Jail, burned buildings, and beat a white inmate to death with a shovel. The days of "same mud, same blood" were over, and by the end of the decade, a new generation of Black GIs had decisively rejected the slights and institutional racism their forefathers had endured. In An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era (UNC Press, 2023), acclaimed military historian Beth Bailey shows how the Army experienced, defined, and tried to solve racism and racial tension (in its own words, "the problem of race") in the Vietnam War era. Some individuals were sympathetic to the problem but offered solutions that were more performative than transformational, while others proposed remedies that were antithetical to the army's fundamental principles of discipline, order, hierarchy, and authority. Bailey traces a frustrating yet fascinating arc where the army initially rushed to create solutions without taking the time to fully identify the origins, causes, and proliferation of racial tension. It was a difficult, messy process, but only after Army leaders ceased viewing the issue as a Black issue and accepted their own roles in contributing to the problem did change become possible. Beth Bailey is Foundation Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kansas. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Toward the end of World War II, Hitler's many health complications became even more pronounced, making an evil man yet more erratic and dangerous. While the subject of Hitler's health has been catalogued previously, never has it been done so this thoroughly or with this level of up-to-date medical expertise. Tom Hutton's Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II (Texas Tech UP, 2023) draws from a lifetime of medical research and clinical experience to understand how the dictator's particular medical history further warped a deformed personality and altered Hitler's decision making. Dr. Hutton trained under the world-renowned neuropsychologist and father of modern neuropsychological assessment, Dr. Alexander Luria, giving him a uniquely qualified eye to undertake this most difficult assessment. While many books on the subject thumb through the annals of popular psychology to understand history's most famous monsters, Dr. Hutton's latest book uses contemporary clinical knowledge, lucidly synthesizing medical complexities for all audiences. Here Dr. Hutton undertakes a thorough medical history to elucidate a pivotal historical moment, examining how disease impacted Hitler's destructive life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The American war in Vietnam has left many long-lasting scars that have not yet been sufficiently examined. The worst of them were inflicted in a tiny area bounded by the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in neighboring Laos. That small region saw the most intense aerial bombing campaign in history, the massive use of toxic chemicals, and the heaviest casualties on both sides. In The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam (Knopf, 2023), George Black recounts the inspirational story of the small cast of characters—veterans, scientists, and Quaker-inspired pacifists, and their Vietnamese partners—who used their moral authority, scientific and political ingenuity, and sheer persistence to attempt to heal the horrors that were left in the wake of the military engagement in Southeast Asia. Their intersecting story is one of reconciliation and personal redemption, embedded in a vivid portrait of Vietnam today, with all its startling collisions between past and present, in which one-time mortal enemies, in the endless shape-shifting of geopolitics, have been transformed into close allies and partners. The Long Reckoning is being published on the fiftieth anniversary of the day the last American combat soldier left Vietnam. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman's edited volume Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus (U Rochester Press, 2020) is the first book devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, exploring mass killings, Jewish responses, collaboration, and memory in a region barely known in this context. When war between the Soviet Union and Germany broke out in 1941, thousands of refugees - many of whom were Jews - poured from war-stricken Ukraine, Crimea, and other parts of Russia into the North Caucasus. Hoping to find safety, they came to a region the Soviets had struggled to pacify over the preceding 20 years of their rule. The Jewish refugees were in especially unfamiliar territory, as the North Caucasus had been mostly off-limits to Jews before the Soviets arrived, and most local Jewish communities were thus small. The region was not known as a hotbed of traditional antisemitism. Nevertheless, after occupying the North Caucasus in the summer and autumn of 1942, the Germans exterminated all the Jews they found - at least 30,000 - aided by local collaborators. While scholars have focused on local collaboration during the German occupation and on the subsequent Soviet deportations of entire North Caucasian ethnic groups, the region has largely escaped the attention of Holocaust researchers. This volume, the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, addresses that gap. Contributors present richly documented essays on such topics as German killing operations, decision-making by Jewish refugees, local collaboration, rescue, and memory, taking care to integrate their findings into the broader contexts of Holocaust, North Caucasian, Russian, and Soviet history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history