New Books in Military History

Was World War II really the 'Good War'? In the years since the declaration of peace in 1945 many myths have sprung up around the conflict in the victorious nations, especially the United Kingdom. In his newest book, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), writer and journalist, Peter Hitchens, past winner of the Orwell Prize and regular columnist for the Mail on Sunday, takes on the myth of World War II as the 'good war', and in the process he deconstructs the many fables which have become associated with this highly popular historical narrative. Whilst not per se arguing against the idea that at some point in time Hitler's Germany had to be defeated, Hitchens queries the need to have commenced that war in September 1939. Along the way, Hitchens queries and or attacks various other myths such as Anglo-American solidarity and the so-called 'Special Relationship'; that the Battle of Britain was an important turning point in the war, or that British and American involvement were the key aspect to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany. By turns, erudite, unorthodox and even funny, Hitchens book is a must read for anyone who is interested in the run-up to World War II and the way in which that conflict was fought. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. 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 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both play a central role in any narrative of the end of the East Asia-Pacific War in 1945, yet Hiroshima has consistently drawn more attention in the ensuing decades. In Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2018), Chad Diehl argues that the tendency to overlook the bomb’s impact on the citizens of Nagasaki and the city’s arduous, contested process of reconstruction is hardly a coincidence. As Diehl exhaustively demonstrates in this richly documented, multi-dimensional study, Nagasaki’s municipal officials and US Occupation authorities worked together—though not necessarily for the same reasons—to downplay the bomb’s horrific impact in order to promote the city’s identity as an “international cultural city.” At the same time, conflicting interpretations of Nagasaki’s atomic past, present, and future have always competed with the officially sanctioned narrative for national and international attention. Throughout the Occupation era and even into the present day, Nagai Takashi (the “Saint of Urakami”), the city’s Catholic community, and survivor-activists have all contributed to a multivocal discourse that, in Diehl’s analysis, provides new insights into the politics of collective memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. 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 his new book, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts (Yale University Press, 2017, Daniel Siemens, professor of European history at Newcastle University, writes a comprehensive history of the SA, from the early 1920s until Nazi Germany’s total defeat in 1945. Siemens demonstrates how the SA evolved from a small organization to a massive and potent force that directly impacted the Nazi rise to power, and how that organization shaped German society during the Nazi period. He tackles the long-held view that the SA had become largely irreverent after the 1934 purge known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” and shows how the SA had significant impact in the military, the management of conquered territories 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

The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question American physiologist Walter Cannon first asked in 1926: “Why don’t we die daily?” In the erudite chapters that follow, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers explore how practitioners and theorists working during and after World War I tried to answer that very thorny problem in light of the challenges of wound shock. This functional disorder demanded that doctors, surgeons, and physiologists account for two medical realities: first, that wound shock was a whole-body, multi-systemic response to trauma; and second, that a fairly homogenous group—namely the young, male soldier-patient—responded to wound shock in highly variable and individuals ways. Whereas the historiography of World War I and trauma has largely focused on psychopathological models, Geroulanos and Meyers illuminate how the work of Henry Head, Réné Leriche, Kurt Goldstein and others enacted a wholesale transformation of the concept of the individual, one that would define medico-physiological individuality as an integrated and indivisible body, but one constantly on “the verge of collapse.” 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 antebellum South was on the road to agricultural ruin, and the Civil War put a brick on the gas pedal. In Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford University Press, 2018), a sweeping reassessment of some of the oldest questions in U.S. historiography, Erin Stewart Mauldin draws on ecology to help her offer a fresh, powerful explanation for why a region that produced so much wealth for centuries became characterized by widespread poverty in the late nineteenth century. She argues that cotton plantations were hardly ecologically sustainable enterprises, yet their habits of shifting cultivation of staple crops and free-range livestock husbandry were better suited to the region’s nutrient-poor soils and oppressive climate than the prevailing land-use practices of northern farmers. But when the war came, the crisis southern farmers had kept in the offing arrived quickly at their shores. Both armies sustained themselves by emptying the South’s granaries, devouring its animals, and razings its forests and fences. Cotton agriculture would never be the same. That is partly because the resources needed to restore it were gone, but also because freed people would not consent to returning to working in gangs on operations large enough to resume shifting cultivation and, when renting or sharecropping fragments of former plantations, refused landowner’s demands that they labor under contract after harvest to maintain the ecological integrity of someone else’s property. So the region turned to growing more cotton in more places and more intensively than before the war and depending on costly fertilizers to do so. Subsistence practices vanished, migrants fled to the cities, and debt ruled the land. Erin Stewart Mauldin is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. She is book review editor of Agricultural History and the co-editor of A Companion to Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics (Naval Institute Press, 2018), edited by Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, is a collection of essays examining military professionalism and ethics in light of major changes to modern warfare. Contributors examine philosophical and legal questions about what constitutes a profession, the requirements of a military professional, and military education. Additionally, the authors tackle questions of ethics related to new technological advancements, such as unmanned aircraft. Finally, an interesting discussion of the military’s relationship with society, and vice versa, is discussed as an important component of oversight of the profession. Today I spoke with Finney and one of the contributors, Brian Laslie. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Many people place the beginning of the American space program at 7:28pm, October 4, 1957 – the moment the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. This event prompted the United States to open up its own crash program to put first a satellite, then later, human beings, into space. The primary motivating factor for all this, was the fear of missiles being the primary delivery system for nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War. Our guest in this episode –Nicholas Michael Sambaluk – makes the case for another perspective on the Eisenhower Administration’s decision to engage in space exploration. In his book The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security (Naval Institute Press, 2015), Sambaluk describes the checkered history of the Dynamic Soarer Space Glider Bomber – a.k.a. “Dyna-Soar,” a heat-resistant single seat-space shuttle that was intended to guarantee American aerospace superiority. Though ultimately canceled, the Dyna-Soar program’s legacy continues to this day in the form of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance Aircraft, the Space Shuttle, and future orbiting space vehicles. Sambaluk is an associate professor of strategy at the Air University, at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza does just that in TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy (Lyons Press, 2018), taking us through a period in which Roosevelt exhorts an America prone to isolationism to join the war against Germany, only for the war to take the life of one of his sons. Pietrusza tracks how Roosevelt’s alters America’s political history, abandoning his “Bull Moose” party and re-uniting the Republicans in hopes of strengthening American foreign policy. And the author chronicles Roosevelt’s heartbreak, unable to die a glorious death on the battlefield himself, but bereaved to see his son die from a policy he advocated. Pietrusza also offers evidence of a controversial theory: that a depressed Roosevelt ultimately took his own life with an overdose of morphine. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Most Americans do not appreciate the extent to which victory in the American Revolution was due to the leadership of a French aristocrat. As Nathaniel Philbrick demonstrates in his new book In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (Viking, 2018), it was Admiral Comte de Grasse’s naval victories which made possible George Washington’s decisive victory at the battle of Yorktown. Such a victory did not seem possible at the start of 1781, as the British imperial forces seemed locked in an intractable stalemate with the rebelling colonists. In that year, however, the assistance of the French helped to tip the balance, not just on sea but in the land war as well. Once Admiral de Grasse’s ships drove off the British fleet in the battle of the Chesapeake, Washington was able to lay siege to General Charles Cornwallis’s forces at Yorktown with a combined Franco-American army, defeating the main British force in the Southern states and realizing America’s independence. 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 her new book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016), Dr. Susan Carruthers, professor of American Studies at the University of Warwick, chronicles America’s transition from wartime combatant to post-war occupier in both Germany and Japan. This excellent book examines occupation by exploring the thoughts and feelings of ordinary servicemen and women who participated in the difficult task of rebuilding defeated nations. By examining occupation from the ground up, this book effectively tackles the mythology surrounding America’s occupation and demonstrates that the rebuilding of post-war Europe and Japan was a difficult and by no means straightforward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the young stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite millions of words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent, brilliant, and previously successful men stumbled so badly. That changes with The Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent Into Vietnam (Harper Collins, 2018). Historian Brian VanDeMark, a professor of history at the United States Naval Academy, draws upon decades of archival research, his own interviews with many of those involved, and a wealth of previously unheard recordings by Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, who served as Defense Secretaries for Kennedy and Johnson. Yet beyond that, Road to Disaster is also the first history of the war to look at the cataclysmic decisions of those in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations through the prism of recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and organizational theory to explain why the “Best and the Brightest” became trapped in situations that suffocated creative thinking and willingness to dissent, why they found change so hard, and why they were so blind to their own errors. An epic history of America’s march to quagmire, Road to Disaster is a landmark in scholarship and a book of immense importance. 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 Civil War was even more disastrous than we thought. Joan Cashin, already a distinguished scholar of the period, looks afresh at the war through the lens of environmental history and material culture and finds only more terrors and even greater suffering. War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2018) draws from a dizzying cache of research from nearly four dozen archives to capture the brutality and desperation of the wars that raged beyond the battlefield—over food, timber, shelter, and the control of people themselves. Most of these struggles were not between the armies, but between soldiers and civilians. Despite Lost Cause slurs against Sherman and his ilk, Cashin finds both armies fully capable of emptying the stores, robbing the woodlots, and torching the homes of white noncombatants. To have two massive armies with nearly inexhaustible appetites for resources crisscrossing the South ensured widespread devastation. But the destruction was all the greater because soldiers on both sides paid little attention to military codes regulating pillage and plunder, and their commanders were usually unwilling or unable to reign them in. So, Cashin argues, the war caused starvation, deforestation, the razing of villages, and an underappreciated amount of hostage-taking and abuse of civilians. After the war, there was no reckoning, no recompense for the toll both armies took on white southerners, and the scars were bandaged with myths that deceive us still. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Dr. Giulio Ongaro, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Economics Department at the University of Milan-Bicocca has just published Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries (Routledge, 2017), a fascinating study of the early modern Venetian military. Rather than focus on the city itself or the republic’s higher-profile naval forces, Ongaro examines the workings of the Venetian land forces—its cavalry, militia, and fortress structures. Financing and supplying these forces required increasingly sophisticated administrative measures that, as in so many European states at the time, drove the expansion of state institutions. Most previous studies have assumed that such expansion came at the expense of local power structures and that state administrations existed in competition with local elites. By examining the records of municipal and rural archives in the Venetian hinterland, Ongaro instead shows that while the central state had the power to make demands, those demands were most often satisfied in cooperation with local forces, rather than in competition. Local elites benefitted from the contracts to provision fortresses or supply saltpeter, for example, and so did not resist state directives as a matter of course. This detailed economic history will expand your horizons and your understanding of early modern military 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 reason for Great Britain’s war against China in the First Opium War (1839-42) is often taken as a given. British merchants wanted to “open” trade beyond the port of Canton (Guangzhou) and continue dealing in the lucrative commodity, opium. Historian Stephen R. Platt’s book, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (Knopf, 2018) proves that the path to war was not so simple. Internal rebellions weakened the Qing military and stretched resources thin. British themselves debated the merits of the Canton system that restricted all Western foreigners and their trade in China to a single port. Some Qing officials considered opium a wholly domestic issue while others considered how best to resolve opium smuggling–by legalizing opium or ejecting foreigners from Canton. Platt traces the narratives of figures who played significant roles in the mounting conflict and identifies lynchpin moments when the history of China and the West could have turned out much differently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

We have all seen pictures of the “Big Three” (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) at their historic meeting Yalta in February 1945. The three leaders command the viewer’s attention, naturally, but in the background of the various versions of that photo are other important figures. One can glimpse George Marshall in some. Foreign ministers Eden and Molotov appear in others. American Admirals King and Leahy are there. And so is a U.S. Army Air Force general named Larry Kuter. Not exactly a household name, Kuter was an enormously influential figure, who richly deserves this excellent biography written by airpower expert, Brian Laslie: Architect of Air Power: General Laurence S. Kuter and the Birth of the U.S. Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2017). Dr. Laslie is the Deputy Command Historian at NORAD and US Northern Command and the author of another noteworthy book on the U.S. Air Force: The Air Force Way of War: U.S. Tactics and Training after Vietnam (2015), which I can also recommend. Laslie kept encountering Kuter’s name or photo as his work took him to Air Force bases and installations around the world and began to ask questions. Kuter was the co-author of AWPD-1, the first American plan for air war and a strong proponent of daylight, precision strategic bombing. He commanded American forces all over the world, served immediately under Harold George in the postwar Air Transport Command, which gave him responsibility, among other things, for the Berlin Airlift in 1948. He set up the United States Air Force Academy; he commanded NORAD; in retirement, he worked with Pan Am on the 747 project. And there was much more to Kuter’s story, as you can read in Laslie’s book after you enjoy our conversation here. Listeners might also be interested in the author’s blog, Balloons to Drones. 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 6th century CE, the Roman emperor Justinian embarked upon a series of wars that seemed to herald the restoration of the Roman empire in the western Mediterranean. In his book Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Heather recounts the campaigns of Justinian’s armies and the factors that made them possible. As Heather explains, the Roman imperial state in the 6th century was one focused mainly upon the waging of war, though for all of the revenue expended upon its armies the eastern Romans had experienced a series of defeats at the hands of their Sassanian Persian rivals to their east. Soon after Justinian took the throne, however, the eastern Roman armies enjoyed a series of successes thanks to the leadership of his most successful commander, Belisarius. While these victories helped define Justinian’s stature as emperor, maintaining them ultimately proved the greater challenge, one that Justinian’s successors were unable to accomplish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs,’s edited volume Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017) developed out of a special journal issue of Critical Military Studies organized on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Taylor and Jacobs have gathered a subtly interwoven set of papers that together offer a distinctly post-Cold War perspective Hiroshima and Nagasaki—not just the bombings, but their long, continuing aftermaths. At various levels of granularity and expansiveness, the contributors present a diverse set of approaches and findings in what the editors describe as the “exciting new field of Nuclear Humanities.” The contributions to this volume are arrayed along five “pathways” laid out by the editors in their introduction: “testimony from lived experience;” “memorialization and commemoration;” “ordinary people’s resentment, suffering, and forgiveness;” the long-term and universal effects of nuclear weapons; and the transdisciplinary exchanges that characterize Nuclear Humanities. 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 we are joined by Gerald Gems, Professor of Kinesiology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and the author of several books on sports history including Sport in American History: From Colonization to Globalization (2017), Sport and the American Occupation of the Philippines (2016), and Blood and Guts to Glory: A History of Sports (2014). Gems is also the former president of the North American Society for Sport History, the former vice-president of the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sports, and a former Fulbright Scholar. In Sport and the American Occupation of the Philippines: Bats, Balls, and Bayonets (Lexington Books, 2016), Gems explores the history of sport during the US occupation of the Philippines. Based on extensive primary and secondary source research, Gems work uses hegemony theory to investigate how and why American colonizers imported ideas about sports to the Philippines, and in what circumstances Filipinos adopted, adapted, rejected these sporting practices. He shows that American politicians, military planners, missionaries, and businessmen saw sports like baseball and basketball as essential for keeping soldiers physically and morally fit, while teaching American values including capitalism, militarism, and work ethic. Filipino sportsmen and women played some American sports, first baseball and later basketball, but on their own terms. For many Filipino athletes, sports became a way to assert Filipino nationalism. When they played basketball against US soldiers, they overcame American height advantages by developing a fast paced style and they likened their victories to the rapid strikes of Filipino guerrillas against the occupying forces. Gem’s work has resonance beyond the Philippines and will be interesting reading for scholars studying the translation of American ideas in similar colonial contexts. 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 a break with protocol, I decided to interview a novelist rather than a military historian. Nick Dybek, a creative writing professor at Oregon State University has written a terrific novel, The Verdun Affair: A Novel (Scribner, 2018). It’s protagonist is Tom, an American living in France after World War I, having served as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service. He has the macabre task of gathering bones from the battlefield at Verdun, in preparation for the construction of ossuary there. Families come from all over France, looking for news, or perhaps the remains, of loved ones reported missing or dead during the war. One such pilgrim is Sarah, also American, looking for her husband, Lee, whom she is convinced still lives. You can learn more about the story in the interview (or go read the book!), which also details some of the remarkable historical research that Dybek conducted as he wrote. The sense of global catastrophe, the losses of grieving families, the search for meaning, the efforts to rebuild, all conjure the atmosphere of postwar Europe. Dybek’s descriptions of Verdun, of the battles on the Isonzo and in the Dolomites, the fascist violence in Italy reflect that careful research and teach the history of the period with greater impact than all but the best works of 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

Conventional wisdom has long held the position that between 1945 and 1949, not only did the United States enjoy a monopoly on atomic weapons, but that it was prepared to use them if necessary against an increasingly hostile Soviet Union. This was not exactly the case, our guest John M. Curatola argues in his book, Bigger Bombs for a Brighter Tomorrow: The Strategic Air Command and American War Plans at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, 1945-1950 (McFarland & Company, 2016). Curatola is a professor of history at the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He presents the story of an ad hoc, frequently chaotic, strategic defense posture at the opening of the Cold War. Inter-service rivalries, inter-agency bickering, and deficiencies in equipment, morale, and training all left the United States Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission to pursue their own strategic plans, which Curatola notes were unrealistic, and in some cases, almost ludicrous. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Austria established itself as one of the dominant powers of Europe, despite possessing much more limited fiscal resources when compared to its counterparts. In The Sinews of Habsburg Power: Lower Austria in a Fiscal-Military State, 1650-1820 (Oxford University Press, 2018), William D. Godsey uses the financial support provided by one region of the Habsburg’s empire to understand how it maintained its status during a time of change in the nature of military power. As Godsey explains, the challenge was posed by the contrasting trends of a need for a larger standing army and the ability of the region’s economy to support it. In response to the demands placed on it, the Estates of the region – the assemblage of clerical, noble, and municipal leaders who implemented taxes for the monarchy – evolved to play a regular role in supplying the Habsburg armies with the resources it needed to operate. This evolution preserved the importance of the role the Estates played in the exercise of Habsburg power, one that was challenged occasionally by such events as the centralizing reforms of Emperor Joseph II but nonetheless persevered well into the 19th 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

The title of Guy Laron’s The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University Press, 2017) says it all. As Laron notes in this interview, the fact that the war led to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East is an accepted interpretation of the war’s meaning. However, through his research Laron has provided a new lens by which to understand the war. Using a holistic perspective that situates the war in the context of the Cold War and the economic development of the non-western world, Laron argues that several broader trends pushed the Israeli and Arab states into conflict in 1967. As developmental aid disappeared, Arab and Israeli governments alike were facing crises of confidence from their own populations. Reliance on the military became a way to earn legitimacy with a public that was becoming disenchanted, though it also fed into a number of increasingly belligerent moves that ultimately led to war on June 5, 1967. Laron’s research shows as well the role of the superpowers in this conflict. As development aid gave way to military aid, they fueled the rise of militarism in these countries, and their often-contradictory diplomacy only muddied an already difficult situation. The legacy of the war, in addition to the ongoing conflicts that Israel faces in Palestine and its issues with neighbors such as Syria, was an erosion of civil-military relations that gave outsized roles to generals in the region. To write this history, Laron drew on archival research in the archives of former Soviet states and the literature that already existed on the topic. In doing so, he moves the study of the war from being a strictly regional issue to a global one. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Though Great Britain’s warships ruled the waves throughout the First World War, their greatest challenge came from just underneath them. Nowhere was this better demonstrated in the Western Approaches, where, as Steve R. Dunn details in his book Bayly’s War: The Battle for the Western Approaches in the First World War (Naval Institute Press, 2018), the Royal Navy found themselves hard pressed even to secure the trade routes just off their western shores from the threat posed by Germany U-boats. At the start of the war, the command covering the region, the Coast of Ireland station, was something of a backwater, one not anticipated to be a major area of the war. The U-boat campaign against British trade soon changed this, as sinkings such as those of the liner Lusitania demonstrated the vulnerability of shipping in the region. In response the Admiralty nominated the dynamic Lewis Bayly to take over as commander. Setting a focused, no-nonsense tone from the start, Bayly soon moved to protect merchant shipping and hunt down U-boats by every means possible. Bayly’s greatest success, though, came with the entry of the United States into the war in 1917, as he presided over the successful integration of American naval vessels into his command, where they provided the necessary protection for the ships transporting American soldiers to the battlefields of the Western Front. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Though there are numerous books about the naval history of the Second World War, very few of them attempt to cover the span of the conflict within the confines of a single volume. Craig Symonds undertakes this challenge in his book World War II at Sea: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2018), which provides him with a perspective that produces a new understanding into how the conflict was waged. Symonds demonstrates that the naval campaigns were pivotal in determining the winners of the war, given the vast mobilization of resources undertaken by many of the combatants. For the Germans, disrupting this was key, and the fall of France dramatically changed the balance of the naval war in Europe. Yet the British and the Americans were hard pressed to focus on the German threat to British trade once Japan attacked their Asian colonies in an effort to expand their own empire. The result was a juggling act, as the western Allies were forced to constantly readjust finite naval resources to wage two maritime struggles on opposite ends of the Earth. 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 Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses the relationship between the social sciences, academia, and national security institutions. Through an examination of the use of military research during the Cold War, Dr. Rohde raises questions about the ethics of scholarship, the military industrial complex, and the role of expertise in the national security arena. This book is a thought provoking read on the implications of military-funded social science. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Coincident with the hundredth anniversary of the first American engagements in the First World War, Andrew J. Huebner joins New Books in Military History to talk about his book, Love and Death in the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2018). Through a collection of vignettes – some quite personal to him – Huebner considers the First World War through the lens of the average American citizen soldier and his family. Accordingly he describes how Americans genuinely believed they were taking part in a war to keep their families and futures safe from German aggression. Following a course largely set by propaganda, Americans personalized and romanticized the war far more than historians have thought in the past. Rather than being an agent for change, Huebner also presents the war as a call to normalcy, one which would reassert white Anglo-Saxon masculine prerogatives in a society that, under the Progressives, had for many become unmoored from its past. 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 World War is usually associated with Trench Warfare, industrial mobilization, and the Lost Generation. In her recent book, Sexual Treason in Germany during the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Lisa M. Todd reveals an obsession among elites, the state, and everyday people with sex in the midst of such disruptive warfare. She argues that the state, the churches, and even their neighbors viewed men and women who had sex outside of marriage as traitors to the nation. Critically exploring explosive debates among moral Christians, sex reformers, military figures, and politicians, this book demonstrates the profound ambiguities of the era. Balancing everyday stories with major legal changes and cultural discourse, Todd assesses sexual encounters on the western, eastern, and home fronts. She analyzes fraught issues such as sex work, POW labor, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Combining dynamic individual stories from a rich archival base, this book is one that will appeal to many listeners. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in the fall of 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro, takes a data-based approach to examine how actions can affect violence in asymmetric conflicts. Using data sets from Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines, the authors evaluate several variables, including the role of civilians, mobile communications, and foreign aid projects. The book is data-rich and accessible, with findings presented at a tactical level and a policy level. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Sit alongside a disabled teenage Southerner as he records his experience in The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865 (Savas Beatie, 2018). This unique document—rare for its teenager’s perspective, rare for its register of daily pain across five years—is a testament to what it means to watch the world of the Confederacy slowly fall as one’s body fails, too. LeRoy Gresham, from Macon, Georgia, began writing his diary at twelve years old. His leg had been smashed by falling rubble from a chimney of a burned-out house that he and friends were exploring. LeRoy writes daily, most often from a reclined position and with a mind full of good humor and acid wit. Snark lurks quietly in his words. He covers the goings on of his home, family, slaves, and the people who pass through town and his house, as well as what he reads in newspapers and in a never-ending stream of novels. The war proceeds with fits and starts, and he adds his cheers for the Confederacy, until, finally, the dream of that nation comes to an end, and he also dies, at the age of seventeen. The cause, it is today decided in a detailed medical afterward written by a specialist in nineteenth-century medicine, was spinal tuberculosis, something much more insidious than a broken leg. Janet Elizabeth Croon—recently retired from teaching International Baccalaureate History in Fairfax County, Virginia—has transcribed, edited, and annotated the diary, and provides detailed information about the people around LeRoy, as well as the results of battles and the realities of his ailments at which he could only guess. Listen to my conversation with Janet as we talk about how the not so trivial details of food and weather and playing chess become momentous in his felt understanding of the world. Although he could see his body deteriorate, the point of LeRoy’s own written record is that the experience of pain is never completely localizable. The more his body was down, the more his ears were perked, receptive to the latest vagaries of the time. One of the ongoing themes in our conversation is that LeRoy’s physical separation from the fight opened a wider space to consider it, inciting much laughter at his own predicament (and the country’s), and a deep absorption of the trials and joys around him. Eventually his thoughts on the talents and blunders of the war’s commanders and his thoughts on his daily pain become one. He comes to an end, and the world has changed. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: A History of the “Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy” of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He will be a Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin beginning this fall. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

There has been historiographical revolution in the literature of the war on the Western Front in the past thirty years. In Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Front (Oxford University Press, 2018), Jonathan Boff, Senior Lecturer in History and War Studies at the University of Birmingham, brings that revolution further along by presenting to an anglophone audience the figure of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Rupprecht, who was for the entirety of the war the British army’s most consistent military opponent on the Western Front, is presented in a new light by Boff. Using primary source materials that have rarely if ever been used previously, Boff shows to the reader how the war from its beginning in August 1914 to the German defeat in November 1918, appeared to Rupprecht himself. Along the way, Boff deals with some of the unresolved issues that historians are still dealing with as per the war on the Western Front, such as ‘was the Battle of the Somme a British victory or a defeat’? And ‘what were the reasons for the collapse in German morale in the summer and fall of 1918’. Written by one of the premier British historians dealing with the subject, Haig’s Enemy is a book that the reader will find both educational and fascinating. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Simeon Man‘s book Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (University of California Press, 2018) focuses on the role of Asians who worked within the making of U.S. global power after 1945. Man argues that the Cold War divide between communism and liberal democracy cast Asians into either bad or good—the bad being the Communists and Viet Cong, and the good being military servicemen channeled into American war zones. Following the labor circuits of Asian military workers and soldiers as they navigated an emergent Pacific world, Man reframes Asians as both U.S. citizens and as people from Asian countries like the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan. Doing so, Man writes, allows us to understand how U.S. empire took hold through a murky process of decolonization that on its surface sought to create an “Asia for Asians” but actually legitimated and obscured U.S. state violence. At the same time, Man traces other forms of decolonization by Asian soldiers who sought freedom and self-determination beyond the nation-state form, and saw decolonizing projects as permanently suspended and incomplete. Christopher B. Patterson teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University and is the author of Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Tarak Barkawi, a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, has written an important book that will cause many of us to rethink the way we understand the relationships between armies and societies. In Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Barkawi argues that many scholars of Western armies tend to overstate the degree to which motivation and fighting spirit as well as the urge to commit atrocity derive from the characteristics, strengths or weaknesses of the societies the solders come from. Studying the British Indian Army in Burma during World War II, Barkawi sees instead the way that ritual, drill, and constructed traditions that are more internal to the army itself do more to explain how that army fought so relatively effectively. The Indian peasants who filled the ranks of the British Army shared little socially, politically or otherwise with the United States Marines who fought the Japanese on Guadalcanal. And yet they fought equally hard and with equal brutality against their foe—on behalf of their colonial overlords. Barkawi attends not only to larger political context of British India and to the recruitment and training of the British Army in India, he also describes in considerable detail specific engagements in Burma that make clear how group solidarity and the will to combat are constructed even in an army for whom the normal Western markers of belonging (patriotism, religion, ethnic heritage, even a common language) are absent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

There’s been something of a revival of interest in the Vietnam War in the past years. Perhaps it’s the influence of Ken Burns’ documentary miniseries, perhaps it’s just the distance from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For whatever reason, 2016, 2017 and 2018 saw the publication of a number of new works about the war. In Enduring Vietnam: An American Generation and its War (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) James Wright employs a generational framework to understand the experience of the war. He offers a careful and persuasive synthesis of the political and diplomatic history of the war. But Wright’s interest really lies in the experience of the ordinary men and women who fought in the war or who saw it from afar. Surveys of the experience of fighting in Vietnam are interspersed with fascinating discussions of responses in the US. His pairing of a discussion of Memorial Day, 1969 as experienced across the US with the fighting at Hamburger Hill is particularly engrossing. My father’s generation grew up in the midst of Vietnam. My generation grew up in its shadow. My students learned about the war in a day in high school, if that. For them, Iraq and Afghanistan are ‘America’s Longest War(s).’ Wright’s book is a great way to open a conversation between these generations. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. 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 any scholar of the Vietnam War can tell you, the field doesn’t lack for study: it’s one of the most-studied fields for both military and diplomatic historians. And yet, for all of the scholarly attention it has received, there are understudied facets of this complicated, multilateral conflict, particularly in its early years, before American ground troops entered the country in large numbers. Jessica Elkind’s Aid Under Fire: Nation Building and the Vietnam War (University of Kentucky Press, 2016) does precisely this by examining U.S. development programs that tried to foster a viable South Vietnamese state in the 1950s and early 1960s. The outcomes of those disparate programs ultimately deepened a U.S. commitment to the Republic of South Vietnam and helped set the United States on the road to war. Dr. Elkind’s research was conducted using U.S. government sources, private collections from Michigan State University, and South Vietnamese government sources held in Ho Chi Minh City. Michigan State University was an important actor in this narrative because it was responsible for establishing and running certain programs. In each of the book’s five chapters, she examines a different aid program, ranging from the resettlement programs created for refugees fleeing the newly-created North Vietnam, to agricultural aid and development, to police training. What emerges from these various perspectives is a view of widely-ranging intentions and goals that often differed starkly. Not only did the U.S. government and South Vietnamese government disagree on what would constitute effective aid and development, the public-private partnership that existed between the U.S. government and Michigan State University also frayed as the individual aid workers began to lose faith in their mission. As the United States and the international community confronts global problems about development and nation-building, Aid Under Fire suggests lessons that policymakers and the public should heed. Development cannot succeed without taking into account the wishes of the people who are receiving aid, and simply transplanting western modalities cannot work without taking into account the conditions on the ground. As Elkind demonstrates, overconfidence in nation-building can have dire consequences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Steven L. Ossad joins New Books at Military History to talk about his award-winning biography, Omar Nelson Bradley: America’s GI General, 1893-1981 (University of Missouri Press, 2017). Following the suggestion of his mentor, Martin Blumenson, Steven delivers a comprehensive look at the life and career of this central, but little-studied, figure in the Allied effort toward victory in the European Theater of Operations in World War Two. Rising up from abject poverty to become the last of the American “five stars” – those general officers esteemed enough to be awarded the rank General of the Army – Bradley stands out not only on the balance of his wartime service, but his critical stewardship of the Veterans Administration and later his service as the nation’s chief military advisor to President Harry S. Truman. Steven Ossad delivers a highly anticipated, “warts and all”, look at this important man and his legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Since 1945, the United States has lost every war it started. Why? A Vietnam War veteran, Tufts University Ph. D. and intimate of many of the leading figures in the American national security apparatus in the past forty-years, Dr. Harlan Ullman‘s new book endeavors to find the answers to this most disturbing of queries. An in depth examination of American strategic and military decision-making since the Eisenhower era, Dr. Ullman shows the reader the flawed policy processes and decisions which made debacles such as Vietnam War, the Second Gulf War and the ongoing war in Afghanistan all too predictable. According to Dr. Ullman one answer to his query is simply that almost all presidents and administrations since 1960 have consistently failed to use sound strategic thinking and lacked sufficient knowledge or understanding of the circumstances prior to deciding whether or not to employ force. From John F. Kennedy to Donald Trump, from Vietnam to the war against ISIS, Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Every War It Starts (Naval Institute Press, 2017) is in the words of Edward Luce of the Financial Times a must read book for anyone who wishes to find out why American foreign policy has in too many cases been a catalog of failure. All from the man who invented the concept of ‘Shock and Awe’. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. 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 his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a comparative and trans-imperial approach to map a global network of camps established by Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1876 and 1903, officials set up famine, plague, and wartime concentration camps across India and South Africa in response to a number of interconnected global emergencies. Situating these imperial camps within a longer tradition of Victorian reforms, Forth argues that, while the camps ostensibly provided care and relief for millions of inmates, they simultaneously functioned as sites of social control and confinement. In this way, Barbed-Wire Imperialism challenges existing understandings of British concentration camps, recasting them not as exceptional wartime measures, but as ubiquitous tools of imperial governance. Aidan Forth is an Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches courses on modern British history, colonialism, transnational urban history and European urban history. Jess Clark is an Assistant Professor of History at Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario). She is currently writing a history of the beauty business in Victorian London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Counterinsurgency doctrine, the Vietnam War, and the vagaries of politics all come together in Max Boot‘s latest work, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (Liveright, 2018). One of the most prolific and iconoclastic commentators on American foreign policy currently active in American letters, Max Boot examines the life and career of General Edward Lansdale, in this detailed and quite personal biography. As he considers the various successes and failures of Lansdale’s professional life, as well as his role as the inspiration for some of the most telling fictional accounts of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, Boot also develops a context for counterinsurgency that positions strategic empathy as the most essential characteristic for its success. Yet the story of Lansdale’s life and career is also a riveting chapter in the great American tragedy that is the Vietnam War, one of which Boot offers an unvarnished and stark assessment. 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 Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the short-lived but crucial “age of steam.” Drawing on British government and military records, ships’ logs and mariners memoirs, Gray examines coal from multiple, intersecting perspectives. Beginning with its geopolitical importance, Gray shows that steam powered ships significantly increased the nature and frequency of material supplies needed to maintain a navy at sea. Unlike the relatively self-sufficient sailing ship, steam-powered vessels had an almost insatiable appetite for coal, requiring resupply much more frequently. Further, not just any coal would do: after extensive tests on the quality of coals from across the globe, engineers found that Welsh steam coal was the essential fuel for Britain’s steam-powered navy, and there were precious few suitable alternatives. These facts, then, shaped the construction and maintenance of a system of fossil-fuel infrastructure that spanned the globe. Gray rounds his analysis out by following coal’s journey from mines, through depots and coaling stations, in lighters, and then into ships holds. He identifies coaling stations as unique imperial spaces, in which naval personnel, administrators, and local inhabitants crossed paths. He considers the innumerable hands and backs that groaned under the weight of tons of black rocks, including indigenous laborers and British sailors. Throughout, he demonstrates conclusively the utter centrality of coal to the late-Victorian and Edwardian Royal Navy, and hence to the British Empire. Steven Gray is Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Naval History at the University of Portsmouth. He studies imperial, maritime, transnational, global and transoceanic history, with particular interest in the material infrastructures of global networks, and how these facilitated the mobility of goods, people, militaries and empires. David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Laguna College of Art and Design, and Chapman University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British empire. 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 her new book, Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Sandra Ott, Associate Professor of Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno examines German occupation of the Pyrenees. Particularly, Dr. Ott examines cases of collaboration and later justice and demonstrates how collaboration was often motivated out of base desires. She tells the story of this unique region through nine case studies of collaboration with a diverse group of characters bringing to life this fascinating 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

Who was the spymaster of the Third Reich? How did Nazi ideology influence intelligence collection? Katrin Paehler answers these questions with the first analysis of Office VI of the Reich Security Main Office in her new book The Third Reich’s Intelligence Service: The Career of Walter Schellenberg (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Tracing the development of a distinctly and catastrophically ideological approach to intelligence gathering through an institutional biography of the SS security service, its operations in Italy, and clashes with rival agencies inside Germany, Katrin argues that Shellenberg’s ultimate aim was no less than carving out of an independent foreign policy cast in Himmler’s worldview. Katrin Paehler is an associate professor of history at Illinois State University. She was also a member of the Independent Historians’ Commission of the German Foreign Office and Nazism and its Aftermath. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Tore T. Petersen, Professor of International and American Diplomatic History at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, studies the final wars on the prairie from the Native American perspective in The Military Conquest of the Prairie: Native American Resistance, Evasion and Survival, 1865-1890 (Sussex Academic Press, 2016). When the reservation system took hold about one-third of tribes stayed permanently there, one-third during the harsh winter months, and the last third remained on what the government termed un-ceded territory, which Native Americans had the right to occupy by treaty. For the Federal government it was completely unacceptable that some Indians refused to submit to its authority. Both the Red River war (1874-75) in the south and the great Sioux war (1876-77) in the north were the direct result of Federal violation of treaties and agreements. At issue was the one-sided violence against free roaming tribes that were trying to maintain their old way of life, at the heart of which was avoidance on intermingling with white men. Contrary to the expectations of the government, and indeed to most historical accounts, the Native Americans were winning on the battlefields with clear conceptions of strategy and tactics. They only laid down their arms when their reservation was secured on their homeland, thus providing their preferred living space and enabling them to continue their way of life in security. But white-man perfidy and governmental double-cross were the order of the day. The Federal government found it intolerable that what it termed “savages” should be able to determine their own future. Vicious attacks were initiated in order to stamp out tribalism, resulting in driving the US aboriginal population almost to extinction. Analysis of these events is discussed in light of the passing of the Dawes Act in 1887 that provided for breaking up the reservations to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 that gave a semblance of justice to Native Americans. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. 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 her new book, The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia (NewSouth Books, 2018), Christina Twomey, Professor of History at Monash University, explores the “battle within,” the individual and collective challenge of rehabilitating Australian prisoners of war in the post-war decades. Using a variety of sources, including memoirs and the archives of the Prisoners of War Trust Fund, Twomey argues that the commemorations of the 1980s and more recent decades were actually a change from the quiet decades of mid century, when the country struggled to address the needs of its returning servicemen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

My students don’t remember Vietnam. That’s hard to believe, for someone born in 1968. But it’s true, nonetheless. High school history courses rarely make it past World War Two. The Cold War and the Berlin Wall are mysteries. And Vietnam, unless someone in their family fought there, is just a country. But most, if not all, of my students have heard of the Vietnam Memorial. They may not know what or who it commemorates. But they’ve seen it on class trips, or in textbooks. And they universally praise its power and simplicity. So, unless you’re my age, it’s hard to imagine the bitterness and divisions which greeted Maya Lin’s memorial. In his new book A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial (Arcade Publishing, 2017), James Reston, Jr. retells this story in a way that brings it alive again. Reston brings a journalist’s eye for character and narrative to the book. Several authors have told this tale, but Reston is by far the best at bringing the story to life. Less interested in putting this memorial into the broader context of memorialization in the 1970s, he instead concentrates on retelling the story and on explaining to a modern audience why it matters. And, when you’ve finished the narrative heart of the book, you suddenly learn why the story seems so personal and important to Reston. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Pastseries, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda,1994. 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 this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given the significant efforts of the field’s founder, Norbert Wiener, to distance cybernetics from military research and application, as well as the ethical stances of some of the field’s later leading lights such as Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Herbert Brun, Ranulph Glanville and Larry Richards, it should not be surprising if some contemporary cyberneticians might find the particular combination of words in the books title somewhat disconcerting. However, far from producing a strictly first-order technological study or strategic “how to” manual, Greek military officer Tsirigotis has carried out a decidedly second-order examination of the subject that supplants the mainstream assumption of cyberspace as a set of technologies with a notion of cyberspace as a set of social practices produced, and reproduced, autopoietically through what he calls “cyber discourse.” Grounded in notions of emergence and complexity and employing digital tools of corpus linguistics on policy documents from over the past seven decades, Tsirigotis traces the transformation of such notions as “security” and “threat” in British military circles. The result is a conception of the state, not as a particular bounded geographical region, but as a network of autopoietic social practices; and of a world in which such states do not seek to extinguish external threats through the deployment of hard military power but rather seek to use their networks to adapt to the constant presence of threats in their environment. Along the way, Tsirigotis provides a striking example of what a truly second-order social science, capable of engaging with all manner of social practices beyond the military sphere, might look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Civil wars are among the most intractable conflicts in the world. Yet exactly distinguishes civil war from other types of armed struggle? In his book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Vintage Books, 2017), David Armitage examines the evolution of the concept over the centuries while explaining the relevance of that debate for today. As Armitage demonstrates, the Romans were the first to define civil wars as we understand them, giving us the name we use today. Their efforts were reflected in the works of authors in early modern Europe, who drew upon the classical tradition in order to comprehend the conflicts of their own day. Precision in defining war became increasingly relevant, both to distinguish civil wars from the newly recognized phenomenon of revolutions and with the emergence of efforts in the nineteenth century to regulate war through treaties and legal codes. This effort continues down to the present day, with the question of whether a conflict is or is not a civil war often determining how the international community responds to it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Despite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained in the western Indian Ocean through the mid-1800s, even after the cessation of most imperial slave trading activities in the Atlantic World. The British Royal Navy’s response was to dispatch a squadron to patrol East Africa’s coast. Following what began as a simple policing action, Squadron: Ending the African Slave Trade (Overlook Duckworth Press, 2017) is the story of four Royal Naval officers who witnessed and wrote about the rampant slave trading in this region, while attempting to capture slaving vessels and recover enslaved peoples. The book grew from historian John Broich’s passion to hunt down firsthand accounts of these untold stories. Through research at archives throughout the U.K., Broich tells a tale of defiance in the face of political corruption, while delivering thrills in the tradition of high seas heroism. John Broich is the author of London: Water and the Making of a Modern British City, for which he received the WAMC/Northeast Public Radio’s President Award. He holds a PhD in British History from Stanford University, and is an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University, where he teaches about the British Empire, the British in the Middle East, and World War II. Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World. 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 World War was not limited the trenches on the Western Front. Nor was the system of internment camps it spawned. In his new book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mahon Murphy looks at the experiences of German colonial settlers interned by the Entente Powers, particularly the British, during World War I. Challenging Europe-centric interpretations of the conflict and internment, Murphy uses a wide range of sources, illustrating both the global integrated camp network, and how experiences of internment varied according to social class, gender and race. He also explores the effects of internment on Germans’ national identity, and how their experiences of post-colonial, Weimar Germany led many to believe that true Germanness was only to be found in the colonies. A must read for anyone interested in the global dimensions of internment and First World War. Anyone in London on 19 March is cordially invited to attend the launch of the book at the London School of Economics. Speakers include William Mulligan and David Stevenson. Information available here. Darren O’Byrne is a PhD student in History at Cambridge University, where he is researching the Ministerial Bureaucracy’s role under National Socialism. He can be contacted at [email protected] or on twitter at @darrenobyrne1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Paraguay’s intervention in a crisis between Uruguay and Brazil in November 1864 began the bloodiest and most destructive conflict in South American history. Thomas Whigham begins his book The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay versus the Triple Alliance, 1866-1870 (University of Calgary Press, 2017), the second volume of his epic two-volume history of the war, with the allied powers of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay having driven Paraguayan forces out of Argentina and preparing their invasion of Paraguay. While heavily outnumbered by their enemies, Whigham credits the Paraguayan population with a cohesion and endurance that defied Brazilian, Argentinian, and Uruguayan expectations of a swift victory. Despite the formidable defenses constructed by his men, however, the Paraguayan leader, Francisco Solano Lopez, repeatedly ordered attacks in the Alliance forces that debilitated the Paraguayan ranks. By 1868 the Alliance captured the Paraguayan capital Asuncion, yet the conflict dragged on for another year and a half as Lopez fought on in the countryside. It was not until Lopez was killed by Brazilian soldiers in March 1870 that the war ended, leaving as its legacy a continent transformed in ways still being felt 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