New Books in Military History

Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan for almost the entire duration of the American invasion and occupation, beginning shortly after 9/11. In her new book The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), Gall combines searing personal accounts of battles and betrayals with moving portraits of the ordinary Afghans who endured a terrible war of more than a decade. Her firsthand accounts of Taliban warlords, members of the Pakistani intelligence community, American generals, Afghan politicians, and the many innocents who were caught up in this long war are riveting. Her evidence that Pakistan protected and fueled the Taliban and protected Osama bin Laden is convincing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Beth Linker is the author of War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (University of Chicago Press, 2011). As she reveals, the story of individual rehabilitation from war-related injury was intertwined with other political concerns at multiple levels. These century-old accounts matter greatly, as the First World War was that point where modern rehabilitative medicine and social policy was born, with many of the attitudes and aspects of this early response lingering to the present day. Beth’s book is an insightful consideration of the conflicted responses Americans presented to the unanticipated challenges of post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation for the nation’s thousands of veterans, standing in no small way as a cautionary tale as America winds down from its latest conflicts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Guy Chet, Associate Professor of early American and military history at the University of North Texas, in his book The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) makes a well-crafted argument for the persistence of Atlantic piracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after the age of Blackbeard and Captain Kid. He asserts that piracy was not abruptly stamped out by the royal navy but remained normal rather than exceptional for a long time past the 1730s. The end of piracy is described in the traditional historical narrative as a speedy decline due to the central state’s extension of its authority into the Atlantic frontier and its monopolization of violence. Chet, following methodology established by legal and borderland historians, critiques this assessment pointing out that frontier conditions are sustainable for long periods of time. He fleshes out through each section of his work why the monopoly on violence pronounced in statutory law was not accepted as legitimate or seen in reality in peripheral communities. Despite the central state’s use of army, navy, courts and gallows to extend authority to the frontier, Atlantic piracy waned only slowly in the face of these delegitimizing efforts. 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 Russian Empire once extended from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan and contained a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Willard Sunderland‘s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) is an engaging new take on the empire that explores the tumultuous history of its final decades through the life of a single imperial person, the Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War and, briefly – and strangely – became the de facto ruler of Mongolia in 1921. Following Baron Ungern through his youth and subsequent military career, the reader is treated to an adventure across Eurasian space. The first chapters take us into the peoples and politics of Russia’s western borders and the grand imperial capital of St. Petersburg. We then shift thousands of miles eastward to Siberia and the faraway territories where Russia bumped up against the edges of Mongolia and China. Indeed much of the book unfolds as an attempt to make sense of the movements and connections between east and west that at once held the empire together and, paradoxically, helped to undermine it as well. Using Ungern as a guide to the empire, Sunderland’s detailed research exposes the Russian government’s interactions with its far-flung borderlands and in the process challenges some of our assumptions both about borders themselves and about the complicated politics of nationalism and imperialism that defined the history of Eurasia at the dawn of the twentieth century. This is a very readable study, which comes across as both history and biography and is a welcome addition to the rich new scholarship that has appeared on the tsarist empire in recent years. 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 are many movies about evil CIA agents assassinating supposed enemies of the US. Those who saw the latest Captain America movie will have witnessed the plan by Hydra (a fascist faction within a secret agency presumably within the CIA) build floating gunships that can identify and eliminate those who pose a threat to national security. We are not there yet, but Mark Mazzetti‘s book The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth (Penguin, 2013) should give us some anxiety about the current technology used for “extra-judicial killings”. Mazzetti gives us the history of the drone wars – a term hated by the Air Force who note that the drones are piloted aircraft albeit from a remote location – and their ability to be used for the elimination of… well, enemies of the US and its allies. Having said that, this is not a diatribe of opposition but a balanced and careful examination of history and political process. At the core of the book is a discussion of how the CIA and the US military are running parallel drone operations with different criteria and standards of care and success. Mazzetti’s book presents us with, what I found to be, a frightening insight into operations that are so common that they rarely rate a mention in the media. I highly recommend the book and suggest that anyone running a course on military ethics include it in their reading list. There is more than enough ethical controversy raised in the book to fill a semester of discussion. 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 1969, the United States created and implemented a new method of drafting young men for military service–the “draft lottery.” The old system, whereby local draft boards selected those to enter service, was corrupt and unfair. The new system, whereby men would be chosen at random, would be incorruptible and fair. Or at least so it was thought. As Tom Weiner points out in his remarkable book Called to Serve: Stories of Men and Women Confronted by the Vietnam War Draft(Levellers Press, 2011), “the lottery” was also corrupt and unfair. The wealthy, white, and educated often had access to numerous kinds of “outs”: deferments for things like college-going, doctors who would support claims of disability, and resources to leave the country or mount successful claims of conscientious objection. The poor, non-white, and uneducated usually had none of these things, so when their numbers came up (literally), they went. In this book Tom interviews all those affected by “the lottery”: those who served in the military, those who went abroad to avoid service, those who stayed but refused to serve, those who beat the draft, those who obtained CO status, and those (women) who supported and counseled men in all these groups. Their stories are fascinating, moving, and relevant today as we fight a new “longest war.” Listen in. 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 this original and innovative study of the American military chaplaincy, Jacqueline E. Whitt examines the institution’s challenges and struggles in the post-World War II era, with the Vietnam War acting as the fulcrum for existential change in its identity and mission. By all accounts a largely ecumenical based ministry before Vietnam, according the Whitt the chaplaincy underwent a bell-wether change, becoming more conservative and evangelical in composition and outlook after 1975. The greater context of the book, however, focuses on the experiences of the chaplains, individually and collectively, in the face of tremendous challenges to the institution, the soldiers and civilians they served, and their own concepts of morality and obligation to authority. Bringing God to Men: American Military Chaplains and the Vietnam War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) is an important study of a very overlooked and often taken for granted branch of the military, and should be of special interest to students and scholars of the intersections of civilian society and military institutions, in time of peace and 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

For over three years, from June 1941 to late 1944, the German Army and related Nazi forces (the SS, occupation troops, administrative organizations) conducted a Vernichtungskrieg–a war of annihilation–against the Soviet Union on Soviet soil. The Germans killed millions upon millions of Red Army soldiers, Communist Party officials, and ordinary Soviet citizens. As the Germans were pushed back by the Soviets, they conducted a ruthless scorched-earth policy. Stalin’s propaganda organs made much of German atrocities and encouraged Soviet soldiers to punish Germans wherever they found them. It’s little wonder, then, that Soviet troops sought a kind of wild, indiscriminate revenge against the Germans as they crossed into German territory. They murdered, raped, and pillaged on an incredible scale. But, as Filip Slaveski shows in his remarkable new book The Soviet Occupation of Germany: Hunger, Mass Violence and the Struggle for Peace, 1945-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), the Soviet authorities did not turn a blind-eye to this sort of retribution. Though they wanted to demilitarize Germany and to strip it of industry, they did not plan or condone mass violence against Germans. Moscow quickly replaced the Red Army as an occupying force with SVAG, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany. It’s task was to end the wild violence and govern (indeed, protect) the German population. Slaveski demonstrates that SVAG’s task was very difficult or, perhaps, impossible. It neither had the political support from the top (Stalin pitted it against the army) nor the resources to both police the million plus vengeful Soviet troops in occupied Germany nor manage the impoverished German population. Ultimately, the violence only ended when most of the Soviet troops left. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Stephen R. Platt‘s new book is a beautifully written and intricately textured account of the bloodiest civil war of all time. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Vintage Books, 2012) is a deeply international history of the Taiping Civil War that situates the story of modern China within a broader, global history of civil war in the US and beyond. Platt refocuses our gaze on the crucial role of a cast of characters who shaped the war and its aftermath but are often overlooked in its histories. Rather than echoing previous accounts of the Taiping that focus on the visionary Hong Xiuquan, Platt thus highlights Hong’s lesser-known cousin, Taiping “Shield King” and keeper of pickles Hong Rengan; the long-haired and wily Frederick Townsend Ward with his tight-fitting black uniform and army of filibusters; and the reluctant and toothache-suffering general Zeng Guofan and his “Confucian scholar’s vision of an army.” (Though he appears only briefly, look out also for Queen Victoria’s unfortunately-named dog “Looty.”) Platt is equally at home when bringing readers into the theater of sieges and political treaties, and while developing very affecting and humane accounts of men and women in the midst of making very difficult decisions in exceptionally challenging circumstances. This award-winning book is well worth reading, both as a masterful history of modern China and a model of evocative and gripping historical writing. Enjoy! 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 I was in graduate school, those of us who studied World War One commented regularly on the degree to which historians concentrated their attention on the Western front at the expense of the other aspects of the war. In the years since then (I won’t say how many), historians have worked hard to remedy this neglect. Nevertheless, we still know much less about the Eastern Front than we do about events in France or even the homefronts of Western and Central Europe. Geoffrey Wawro‘s new book A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire (Basic Books, 2014), fills in an important part of this gap. Wawro is most interested in understanding why the Empire chose to go to war despite (or perhaps because of) its many challenges and why it failed so immediately and drastically. Decisions made by diplomats, soldiers and politicians in Vienna played a critical role in starting the war. And decisions made by the leaders of the Monarchy’s army’s played just as important a role in leading an admittedly flawed instrument to defeat. Wawro tells this story with verve and insight. His characterizations are compelling and his prose stimulating. It’s a book that reads like a novel yet answers crucial questions about the course of the war. It helps us understand a collapse that set the stage for decades of death and destruction. For that reason alone, Wawro’s analysis of that collapse is a great addition to our understanding of the war and of Central Europe in the Twentieth 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

Recent controversies over integrating the military have focused on issues of gender and sexuality. In the 1940s and 50s, however, the issue was racial integration. As Christine Knauer shows in her new book Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), the persistence of soldiers and activists of color forced the Truman administration to bar discrimination in the military. Even then, however, it took continued agitation — and the military crisis of the early days of the Korean War — to force the army to allow black soldiers to fight alongside their white brothers-in-arms. Let Us Fight as Free Men illuminates how agitation for Civil Rights did not begin with the Brown decision in 1954 or the Montgomery Bus Boycott several years later, but was a long-term struggle with its roots in 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

In their new survey for Routledge, military historians Matthew Muehlbauer and David Ulbrich move beyond a simplified critique of Russell F. Weigley’s critical “American Way of War” thesis to offer a reassessment of how the construct evolved from a number of original influences to take on various forms and applications as circumstances dictated. The end result is a view of American military affairs that is marked by an inherent flexibility that has on occasion been hamstrung by misperceptions on the part of the nation’s civilian and military leaders. Based on a wide range of secondary scholarship in American Military History, Ways of War: American Military History from the Colonial Era to the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2013) offers far more analytical and narrative detail than many other like-minded surveys, making it a worthy candidate for supplementing and succeeding Weigley’s original 1973 work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Tobie Meyer-Fong‘s beautifully written and masterfully argued new book explores the remains (in many senses and registers, both literal and figurative) of the Taiping civil war in nineteenth-century China. Often known as the “Taiping Rebellion” in English, the war is most often narrated as the story of a visionary (Hong Xiuchuan) or the movement he inspired. What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 2013) transforms how we understand a civil war that deeply marked the physical and textual landscapes of modern China. In a series of chapters that move us through the texts and bodies (living, dead, and commemorated) of the war, Meyer-Fong simultaneously introduces readers to a world of fascinating source materials into which these bodies are inscribed. Thus a moving and incisive narrative also becomes a historiographical lesson on the significance of bringing a subtle and nuanced reading of gazetteers, martyrologies, newspapers, diaries, and memoirs to bear on understanding the everyday experiences of life, death, and violence in modern China. It is a book not to be missed, and it will change the way we understand and teach this formative period of nineteenth-century history. For Meyer-Fong’s recent article in Frontiers of History in China, see Tobie Meyer-Fong, “Urban Space and Civil War: Hefei, 1853-1854,” Frontiers of History in China 8.4 (2013): 469-492. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Just as there is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be, so there is no rule dictating that biography must be about the life of a person. In recent years, the jettisoning of this tradition has led to a number of compelling explorations of the lives of commodities (such as salt or the banana), texts (Gone with the Wind, for example), diseases (including cancer or cancer cells), and even the Atlantic Ocean. The latest entry into this realm of biographical inquiry is Robert Neer‘s Napalm: An American Biography (Harvard University Press, 2013). As the title suggests, this is a consciously American biography, meaning that Neer (a core lecturer at Columbia University) traces the arc of the life of the incendiary gel whilst also situating it in a national context. Napalm is, after all, an American invention and, as Neer writes in the prologue, “It’s history illuminates America’s story, from victory in World War II, through defeat in Vietnam, to its current position in a globalizing world.” Much as napalm sticks to everything it encounters, so it sticks to our national history, splattering into the lives of those involved in its creation, the victims of its use, and the way America- to this day- wages war. *To briefly highlight another emerging biographical trend, many authors are now posting their research online so that it is easily accessible to readers. Thus, the endnotes of Napalm: An American Biography, including relevant hyperlinks, can be accessed 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

The question of Wehrmacht complicity in the Holocaust is an old one. What might be called the “received view” until recently was that while a small number of German army units took part in anti-Jewish atrocities, the great bulk of the army neither knew about nor participated in the Nazi genocidal program. In other words, the identified cases were isolated exceptions. Who was at fault? Why, the SS of course. This view was spread by German generals in post-war memoirs, by the German government and courts, and by the German press and the public that read it. The “Good Wehrmacht” image was influential: many people–including scholars of the war–in countries that had fought Germany could be found rehearsing it. In his eye-opening book Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Harvard UP, 2013), Waitman Beorn challenges the “Good Wehrmacht” image. By focusing on a few units that participated in the invasion and occupation of Belarus in the late summer and fall of 1941, he is able to show without any doubt whatsoever that regular Wehrmacht forces not only participated in executions of Jews and others, but initiated them. The leaders of these units ordered them to aid the Einsatzgruppen in organizing mass murder and to actively hunt down “partisans” who were nothing but innocent Jews. Waitman does an excellent job of not only documenting Wehrmacht complicity, but also of trying to explain it. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Ken MacLeish offers an ethnographic look at daily lives and the true costs borne by soldiers, their families, and communities, in his new book Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton University Press, 2013). His intimate exploration of military lives makes salient the numerous and often contradictory ways that war enters into the everyday lives of soldiers and their families in Killeen, Texas. MacLeish begins by defining the site of research–Fort Hood is one of the largest military installations in the world, and many of the 55,000 personnel based there have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He then moves to an intense and palpable examination of the embodied experience of being a soldier, making a striking argument that “war persist in the lives, bodies and social worlds it has touched” (4). Thus, he connects the experiences of the body and the mind, exploring both physical and mental pain and the issues that surround the pursuit of healing. Moreover, he analyzes the complex burdens placed on people’s relationships and the love that binds them in contradictory ways through the ins and outs of military life. The final chapters examine the gap between obligations and exchange in relation to the value of a soldier’s labor, showing how they materialize in different aspects of soldiers’ lives from the “burden of gratitude” to the overdistribution, and hence devaluation, of medals and honors. Interweaving brutally honest narratives with critical theory and anthropological analysis, MacLeish invites us to re-examine the condition of vulnerability pervasive in the words and lives of soldiers and their families in Fort Hood, fleshing out the myriad ways in which military life is always mired in the production of war, at home and abroad. 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 tend to understand the modernization of Japan as a story of its rise as a techno-superpower. In East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2013), Aaron Stephen Moore critiques this account in a study of the relationship between technology and power in the context of Japanese fascism and imperialism. Moore traces the emergence of a “technological imaginary” in wartime Japan, exploring how different groups (including intellectuals, technology bureaucrats, engineers, and state planners) invested the term “technology” with ideological meaning and power in the course of discussing and shaping national policy. Paying careful attention to the ways that technological and colonial development co-produced and challenged each other, Moore’s story respects the archives of both text and practice: the book deeply cuts into into the intellectual history of technology in the context of Japanese empire, while also following the activities, material difficulties, and large-scale products of many thousands of engineers as they traveled to Korea, Taiwan, Manchukuo, and China to build roads, canals, ports, dams, cities, irrigation, sewage and water works, and electrical and communications networks. It is a fascinating case study that informs a larger global historiography of the modern technosciences, while also using the social study of technology to extend the historiography of Japanese 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

There are many books about the war against Al Qaeda. Most of these focus on counter-terrorism or counter insurgency military tactics or espionage operations. These books have become more frequent with the death of Osama Bin Laden. Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (Times Books, 2011) is more than you can expect from its competitors. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker have been reporting on this issue for many years and cover the topic from a number of angles. Most importantly they are the first to give full recognition to the non-military methods used to counter Al Qaeda. They recognize that there is an intellectual chess game at play as well as the brute force of military intervention or drone strikes. Subtle and patient schemes are being used by US governments to undermine the social networks and social capital of the terrorist group. Ploys are used to coax key figures out of hiding. Counter propaganda campaigns are waged to break down support from potential sources of new members. As well as covering the broader and nuanced techniques, the authors also have a clear understanding of the nature of the terrorist threat. Al Qaeda is a terrorist group but not all terrorists are in Al Qaeda. They recognize that this is a group with a unique history and specific goals that needs non-generic responses to break down its strengths. Al Qaeda still exists but is not what it once was. It has weakened but adapted. Schmitt and Shanker provide an excellent coverage of recent history that will allow you to get a more insightful understanding of counter terrorism in modern America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Brian Sandberg‘s Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) significantly revises our understanding of early modern military culture and absolutism. By examining the frequent civil wars of the early seventeenth century in France, Sandberg demonstrates that the French nobility were neither merely resisting the spread of the absolutist state nor sitting idly by while modern economic and military forces swept them into obscurity. Rather, by examining the many local and regional conflicts of the era, Sandberg shows that the French nobles of the era were capable actors in a complex arena dominated by a culture of honor, sophisticated systems of credit, and dangerous civil conflicts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Dale Maharidge‘s Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War (PublicAffairs, 2013) is something of a departure from our regular offerings. Normally our authors are established academics specializing in the field of military history. Dale Maharidge, however, is an award-winning journalist who, prior to Bringing Mulligan Home, has had only limited exposure to the subject of the Pacific Theater in World War II. What he does bring however is a personal stake in the topic – his father Steve Maharidge served in the Sixth Marine Division, and took part in the assaults on Guam and Okinawa. As a child and then as a young man, Dale was both enthralled and frightened by his father’s regular accounts of the war – enthralled as a son learning more about his father’s experiences in combat; frightened by the storm of emotions and anger that often accompanied his stories. Inspired to learn more about his father’s service, Dale came to understand how Post-Traumatic Stress and Traumatic Brain Injury shaped his father’s post-war life, as well as that of the dozen other Marines he interviewed who served alongside him. Though written in a journalistic style, Dale Maharidge reserves the bulk of the text for the personal testimony of his twelve interview subjects. The account they weave spares no word or emotion as it offers a harsh testimony of the power and violence of the Pacific War. The collected narratives present a visceral account of combat that rivals Eugene Sledge’s classic With the Old Breed, while also bearing witness to John Dower’s conclusions in his groundbreaking monograph, War Without Mercy. While the book does occasionally lag, caught up in inconsistencies and missed conclusions, in the larger perspective these flaws are minor. Bringing Mulligan Home captures the ugly, nightmarish side of the Pacific War, but never at the expense of the humanity of his father, or his compatriots (well, there is one exception – but more on that in the interview). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Historian David Silbey returns to New Books in Military History with his second book, The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China (Hill and Wang, 2012). The popular uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion has long only been vaguely understood, with Hollywood playing as great a role in shaping common perception of the event as historians have. The result has been a generally misplaced understanding of the event, focusing more on the besieged Western consulates and t he relief expeditions than on the complex interactions between the Boxers and the Chinese Court, both between themselves and individually and together against the West. Silbey has written a very accessible account of the Boxer Rebellion that also conveys the complexity of these relationships and the often successful resistance Chinese forces raised against the advancing relief columns. As the West imposed its will over the Manchu court, the stage was set for the nation’s first halting steps into the modern era, setting in motion a long history of exploitation and conflict that would end with the rebirth of China as a world power. An interesting study in the nexus between imperialism, racial ideology, and military history, Silbey’s book again provides the reader with a window onto a misunderstood and often ignored incident that remains relevant even now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

James Whitman wants to revise our understanding of warfare during the eighteenth century, the period described by my late colleague and friend Russell Weigley as the “Age of Battles.” We commonly view warfare during this period as a remarkably restrained affair, dominated by aristocratic values, and while we recognize their horrors for the participants, we often compare battles to the duels those aristocrats fought over private matters of honor. Not true, claims Whitman, who argues instead that battles during the period 1709 (Battle of Malplaquet) and 1863/1870 (Gettysburg/Sedan) were understood by contemporaries not to be royal duels but “legal procedure[s], a lawful means of deciding international disputes through consensual collective violence.” [3] Understanding war as a form of trial is what gave warfare of the era its decisiveness (sorry Russ) and forces us, according to Whitman, to change the way we interpret, for example, Frederick the Great’s invasion of Silesia. Whitman, who is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School and an academically trained historian (PhD Chicago 1987), brings the perspective of both lawyer and historian to his work ways that teach us much about both the military history and the law of the period he considers. 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 Spanish Civil War is one of those events that I have always felt I should know more about. Thanks to Stanley Payne‘s concise, lucid new work on the subject, I feel less that way. I do not exaggerate when I say that Payne, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, is the nation’s foremost expert on Spanish history and on historical fascism in general. That expertise shines in this book and really comes to the fore in this interview. Published by Cambridge University Press as part of its Essential Histories series, Payne’s work synthesizes a lifetime of study in Spain, laying out the origins of the civil war in Spain’s deeply fractured political culture, and tracing the international and military developments that led to Francisco Franco’s eventual triumph in 1939. As Payne points out, the Spanish Civil War has been mythologized for political purposes since the day it began, much to the detriment of our understanding of the real story. The details of how and why the war began, how it was fought, and what was at stake have too-often been lost in a public effort to assign blame or capture the war’s legacy for political purposes. Payne revels in debunking some of these myths while carefully balancing conflicting arguments and accounts. Enjoy. 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 Republic of Ireland (aka The Irish Free State, Eire) declared neutrality during the Second World War. That wasn’t particularly unusual: Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland did too. Yet around 60,000 “neutral” Irish volunteered to fight on one side (with the Allies, in this case). That was unusual. After the war, most of the Irish volunteers remained in the UK. But 12,000 of them came back to Ireland. In Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen and the Second World War (Merrion, 2012), Bernard Kelly tells their story. Like most things in Irish history, it’s complicated. On the one hand, the volunteers had served in the armed forces of Ireland’s archenemy (at least according to Republicans). On the other hand, they had fought the Nazis and thereby protected the Free World. Bernard explains how the Irish veterans were received and, interestingly, how they are still being discussed in Ireland 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

Sanders Marble, senior historian of the United States Army’s Office of Medical History, presents a collection of essays related to the problems of substandard manpower as defined at different times in Western militaries over the modern era. Accordingly normally rigorous peacetime entrance standards have established conditions for the exclusion of certain individuals on the basis of physical, intellectual, ethnic, and racial criteria. During conflict, however, such notions of exclusion and exceptionalism are modified to reflect the needs of the army relative to the specific crisis. Marble’s Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of Substandard Manpower, 1860-1960 (Fordham University Press, 2012) examines eleven case studies related to so-called “substandard manpower,” offering a series of assessments on military force structure in wartime. in this interview, our host talks with Sanders Marble about the overall project and his specific essay on American forces in the twentieth century, “Below the Bar: The U.S. Army and Limited Service Manpower.” He also speaks briefly with sociologist Thomas Sticht about his contribution to the volume, a deep analysis of the Department of Defense’s much-maligned “Project 100,000” in the essay “Project 100,000 in the Vietnam War and Afterward.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Frank Ellis’ The Damned and the Dead: The Eastern Front through the Eyes of Soviet and Russian Novelists (University Press of Kansas, 2011) introduces to English-language readers the riches of Soviet war literature and argues that much of that literature constituted a meaningful form of resistance to the Soviet state. Refusing to write stories that corresponded to the mythology of the Soviet soldier-hero, authors such as Vasilii Grossman, Iurii Bondarev, or Vasil’ Bykov provided true insights into the Soviet war effort, including the bungling of the leadership, the deprivations suffered by the soldiers, and the stifling effect of ideological surveillance. This wide-ranging interview also touches upon some of Ellis’ other interests and should excite listeners to track down some of the few Soviet war novels available in English. I know that the work mentioned in Ellis’ title, The Damned and the Dead, by Viktor Astaf’ev is on my reading list. 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 past September saw the sixty-eighth anniversary of one of the European Theater of Operations’ most familiar operations. Conceived by Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, MARKET GARDEN was the Western Allies’ great gamble in the fall of 1944. With the Nazi war machine appearing to be on the ropes following its ignominious collapse in France, victory seemed for a brief moment to be just within grasp. The single problem, in Montgomery’s eyes, was logistics and the inability of the Anglo-American coalition to maintain the broad front strategy promoted by SHAEF commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. By offering a bold departure from his normal cautious outlook, Montgomery convinced Eisenhower to favor his Army Group with the supplies needed to carry out a bold stroke aimed at the lower Rhine crossings in Holland. Through an airborne coup de main, the Allies would seize three highway bridges at Nijmegen, Eindhoven, and Arnhem, opening up a pathway into the North German Plain, and in Montgomery’s view, very likely end the war by Christmas. Of course, we know the operation was a dismal failure, with the British First Airborne Division nearly annihilated at Arnhem, as Montgomery went “a bridge too far,” in the words of journalist cum historian Cornelius Ryan. Indeed by this point, with numerous historical monographs and edited collections, a feature film, dozens of documentaries, an HBO miniseries, and more board games and computer games than can be counted, one might be forgiven for thinking that there is little left to be said about Operation MARKET GARDEN. But then along came historian John C. McManus‘ exhaustive study of the American dimension of the battles for the Dommel, Maas, and Waal River crossings and the subsequent bitter winter fighting on the so-called “Island” between the Waal and the Lower Rhine estuary. His book, September Hope: The American Side of a Bridge Too Far (NAL, 2012), is built from a treasure trove of oral testimonies, official after action reports, captured documents, and other sources to create the single most comprehensive account of the fighting from the perspective of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, as well as the 104th Infantry and 7th Armored Divisions. The book is a very compelling account of a very bitter and misguided operation, but its true strength lies in McManus’ own insights and conclusions regarding the viability of the operation and the failings in SHAEF leadership than allowed the operation to go forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

With Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare (Harvard University Press, 2012), Ben Shepherd, a Reader at Glasgow Caledonian University, offers us insight into the complex and harrowing history of the German Army’s occupation of the former Yugoslavia from 1941-1943. By analyzing the command structures at the divisional and regimental level, Shepherd helps to explain how and why the violence ebbed and flowed in the various occupied regions. But he also looks further down, to see how the behavior of specific units was shaped by the vagaries of terrain, supply, the character of the opposition, and even certain commanders’ backgrounds and experiences. Always cautious not to make claims beyond the limits of his evidence, Shepherd nevertheless draws important conclusions about how history, personality, and National Socialist ideology shaped the behavior of the German Army in the Second World War. For that and for illuminating in clear and concise prose the foggy and chaotic political and military environment in the Balkans during those years, Shepherd should be congratulated. 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 I was a kid I loved the movie “The Flying Tigers.” You know, the one with John Wayne about the intrepid American volunteers sent to China to fight the Japanese before the United States really could fight the Japanese. I recall building a model of one of their P-40 Warhawks with their distinctive “shark’s mouth” nose art. And though I knew a lot about The Flying Tigers, I didn’t really know much about the Big Picture in which they operated. Thanks to Gregory Crouch‘s fine China’s Wings: War, Intrigue, Romance, and Adventure in the Middle Kingdom during the Golden Age of Flight (Bantam Books, 2012), I do. Greg does not tell the story of The Tigers; he tells the story of the aviation pioneers who made The Tigers possible. These were the man of the China National Aviation Corporation. They brought commercial aviation to China, which is an excellent tale in itself. But they also volunteered to fight the Japanese even before The Tigers entered the picture. Importantly, they also blazed “the Hump,” the dangerous trans-Himalayan air route between India and China that kept the Nationalist Chinese in the game and generally provided aid and comfort to anti-Japanese forces. This is a wonderful book full of remarkable characters and unbelievable adventures. There’s a bit of romance as well. I asked Greg during the interview whether he’d sold the film rights. I imagine he will soon. 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 – including myself – are no doubt surprised to learn about New York City’s rich four hundred year military history. I teach in Flushing, New York, deep in the heart of Queens, at one of the country’s largest public universities. And in my American History survey classes, I strive to bring as much of the city’s history to bear as possible. Now after reading Steven Jaffe‘s book, New York at War: Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham (Basic Books, 2012), I realize that I could do a lot more covering New York’s military history. Jaffe escorts his reader on a dramatic tour of New York at war, from the settlement of New Amsterdam by the Dutch in 1624, to the city’s response to the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. It is an entertaining and informative tour, and one which I can attest will certainly affect my own treatment of the city’s history in my classes. Overall New York at War is a pleasure for all readers, but it should have a special place for our listeners from the metropolitan New York area. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just the military that suffered: refugees poured west to escape the brutality of the Red Army’s advance through the historic German lands of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia; and civilians in the cities bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s failure to stem the allied bombing campaign of the RAF at night time and the USAAF during the day. The staggering scale of losses during those last months of war also hints at why 1945 is such a grimly fascinating one from a historical perspective: Nazi Germany faced an inevitable end, yet continued to fight grimly until the bitter end, achieving a total defeat that was unprecedented in modern history. In doing so it created a ‘zero hour’ for the German people, who then set about rebuilding their lives, economic activity and ultimately Germany itself, with the Nazi era firmly in the past. The legacy of the Nazis, of course, was all around – not just in the sheer scale of destruction and suffering, but also in the survivors of Nazi camps, both Jewish and otherwise, and the foreign labourers, all of whom found themselves freed in a defeated nation. The country was divided into zones of occupation, each with their own character, their own challenges and their own solutions. In the midst of this a new Germany was born -or more accurately, two new Germanys). Much of the eventual political, economic and social achievements of West Germany were founded on the peculiarities of 1945, in particular the totality of the Nazi defeat and the yearning for stability after chaos and destruction. There was also – and this sounds peculiar to us looking back at the crimes of the Nazis – a distinct sense of victimhood. Richard Bessel‘s Germany 1945: From War to Peace (Harper, 2009) is an excellent guide to that tumultuous and difficult year, from the military reverses of the early months to the immense challenges that rose in the wake of defeat. It was a book that I came across almost by chance, in a shop in Doha airport that frustratingly failed to provide me with a copy of The Economist to read on a flight back to London. I was already fifty pages in by the time we lifted off, and – once home – I got in touch with the author, hoping for an interview. I hope you enjoy listening to the results! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Ask any student or aficionado of the Vietnam War (1965-1972) for a top ten list of artifacts “unique” to the war, and chances are the phenomenon of “body counts” as a tool for measuring success in the field will come up. Indeed, the use of casualty metrics, while not the sole means of calculating progress in this unconventional war, was one of the Army’s most heralded – and subsequently, most criticized – assessment tools. Taking its place alongside more esoteric metrics, such as gauging security on the basis of population resettlement, calculating the denial of strategic space by measuring raw acreage of defoliated land, and estimating anticipated casualties on the basis of ordnance tonnage expended on a defined area, body counts became the most visibly broken method employed by the Pentagon during the war. Even now, nearly fifty years after the war began, historians continue to debate the effectiveness of such metrics, and how they did or did not accurately portray the course of the conflict. Gregory A. Daddis’ new book, No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War (Oxford University Press, 2011), takes direct aim at the questions of how a technologically-advanced army measures its progress and success in an asymmetrical conflict. Recognizing that data collection efforts frequently overwhelmed any effort at proper and judicial analysis, Daddis considers how the quest for reliable metrics of success affected the conduct of operations in the field. No Sure Victory is a critical addition to the historiography of the Vietnam War, and presents a valuable addendum for students and practitioners of unconventional war alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Raymond Jonas‘ The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire (Harvard UP, 2011) places Menelik alongside Napoleon and other greatest strategists. The Ethiopian emperor carried out a brilliant maneuver across hundreds of miles, essentially defeating his Italian adversaries without battle. That battle came was the colossal blunder of the Italians and one that cost thousands of Italian and Askari soldiers their lives. More than just the history of the campaign, The Battle of Adwa provides keen insights into Menelik’s court and elucidates Italian imperial ambitions. 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’re all familiar with the film cliche of the little band of soldiers who in ordinary life never would have had met, but who learn to appreciate each other in the battles of World War II. All white, of course: African Americans would have to wait till the integration of the armed forces. But still, there’s a kind of earnest 1940s diversity in those movies: maybe a wide-eyed kid from the farm, a privileged college boy, and a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. With some subplot about a faithful girlfriend, or maybe an unfaithful one, back home. In the Red Army, the situation was a little different. There, the women were snipers, tank drivers, combat pilots, machine gunners, and the like: skilled purveyors of lethal violence, serving side by side with men (and sometimes above them, as their commanding officers). This was the first Soviet generation, educated in co-educational schools where everyone participated in paramilitary exercises and no one took home economics. When the long-awaited war with Germany came, women of this cohort took for granted that they would take up arms. Anna Krylova‘s book, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press, 2010), tells their story. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, letters, oral histories, and state records, Krylova reveals a world in which neither men nor women considered the “woman soldier” to be an oxymoron. And she reveals how this history was thoroughly marginalized after the war. Anna Krylova is associate professor of history at Duke University, and her book is the 2011 winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. It’s a great read for anyone interested in the Second World War – and it’s a thoughtful lesson in the possibilities for reimagining gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Historical studies on the European memory of World War I are, to put it mildly, voluminous. There are too many monographs to count on a myriad of subjects addressing the acts of remembrance and commemoration of the so-called war to end all wars. But when it comes to Russia, from which 15 million men fought, 2 million died, 5 million were captured and an estimated 1.5 million civilians perished, there is a strange historiographical silence. In fact historians of Russia speak more often of an absence of memory because the Bolshevik revolution labeled WWI as an “imperialist war,” and thus rendering its remembrance illegitimate. It is because of this silence that Karen Petrone‘s The Great War in Russian Memory (Indiana University Press, 2012) is such an illuminating and refreshing book. Petrone shows that much like their European counterparts Russians produced a rich memory of the war, even within the strictures of the Soviet system. And the issues that memory addressed were many we assume were forbidden in Soviet Russia: the sacred and the religious, Russian nationalism and patriotism, and the war’s physical and psychological traumas, to name a few. In Petrone’s study, Russia is rightly restored as part a pan-European reckoning with the Great War, the remembrance and commemoration of which was far reaching and impossible to tame despite the Bolsheviks’ best attempts. 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 grandfather joined up when the Second World War broke out, but he was soon returned to civvy street as he was much more valuable employing his mechanic’s skills to fight the Nazis from a factory in Newcastle. He ended up making the parts of the spot lights that were used to guide anti-aircraft batteries (and my grandmother made parachutes, just over the River Tyne in Gateshead). Although this was not half as exciting to find out about as a young boy as discovering that he was in fact a Commando or part of the Long Range Desert Group, what my grandfather was part of was vital to the defeat of Nazism. In his excellent book, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2011), David Edgerton is all about this crucial non-military part of Britain’s war with Germany, and it sets about challenges perceptions almost from the front page. His argument is that Britain was actually far more able and well resourced than commonly thought. It entered the war as the richest per-capita nation in the world, a ‘world island’ interconnected with markets across the globe. It had industry and it had a formidable military. Even after France fell, Britain still had its empire to fall back on, and that is before the economic (and then military) assistance of the USA is taken into account. It had the luxury of fighting a war that it was comfortable with, through Bomber Command and in North Africa and the Mediterranean: not for Britain the mass bloodshed that characterized the Eastern Front. Even by the end of the war, an exhausted Britain was still in enviable shape, although – especially in comparison to the USA – it did not seem to be. The book is full of fascinating information, facts and arguments. I did not realize that (again, contrary to accepted opinion) British tanks were actually extremely highly rated, or that British units were extremely well equipped with armour. The bombing campaign was extremely well suited to statistical analysis. In 1939 the Admiralty was sent around a thousand letters a day from garden-shed inventors, each promising that his amateur tinkering had produced an invention that might win the war against the Germans. I also appreciated that this book explained to me exactly how my grandfather (and grandmother) had done so much to win the war, without having to fire a shot. It was not risk free: I remember my grandfather telling me how a bomb had scored a direct hit on the factory’s toilet, just after one of his colleagues had disappeared inside with his morning newspaper. But it was also vital, and I thoroughly recommend the book, especially to those who want to know a little bit more about how war was fought, beyond the simple matter of bullets and blood. 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 week we’re continuing our focus on the Second World War, as our guest author, Jorg Muth, chats about his recent book Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II (University of North Texas Press, 2011). Muth’s book, which has recently been selected for the U.S. Army Chief of Staff’s Professional Reading List, is a provocative analytical comparison of the respective cultures of officership in the US Army and the German armed forces in the first half of the twentieth century. In setting up his comparison, Muth pulls few punches in his critique of the flaws resident in both institutions. Yet while the American army managed to overcome these flaws, Muth notes that the Wehrmacht ultimately fell victim to its own hubris and ossified culture inherent in its origins. He continues to offer valuable insights as to how these institutional problems and successes continue to shape the culture of officership in the US Army today. I especially recommend reading Muth’s book in tandem with one of our earlier choices, Michael Matheny’s Carrying the War to the Enemy: American Operational Art to 1945; taken together, the two books present an interesting debate on the subject of American military culture in 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

North East India is, as Marcus Franke’s War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas (Routledge, 2011) all too convincingly demonstrates, often considered peripheral to ‘India (or even South Asia) proper.’ A densely wooded, sparsely populated tract of hills (in fact the Eastern Himalayas), the moniker refers to the Indian states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Tripura, with the former kingdom of Sikkim often included. This beautifully diverse, hard to reach region is today home to dozens of separatist movements, fighting against what is often referred to as the Government of India’s indifference, perhaps hostility, to the cultures and lifestyles of the region- customs and rituals which vary sharply from those of the plains of India. Border disputes with China and Bangladesh, and amongst the states, add to regional instability and have resulted in heavy militarization- Marcus’ book talks about the engagement between the Indian governmental apparatus and the Naga people right from the time the British were drawn into these wild hills down to the blockades and skirmishes that attest to the region’s uneasy engagement with the Indian political metropole. The Indian State and the Nagas is an excellent, detailed analysis of the political and cultural history of the region, and a great primer for understanding the dynamics of the groups fighting to preserve their tribal identities even as they call for greater economic investment in the region. 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 week’s podcast is an interview with David Stahel. I will be talking to him about his 2009 work, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2009). One of our previous guests, Matthias Strohn, recommended the book, and I am glad he did. Stahel’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of German planning for and execution of Operation Barbarossa. Stahel highlights the many flaws and paradoxes intrinsic to German thinking about war in the East, not least of which was the deception perpetrated by Halder, who masked the centrality of the drive on Moscow to his own plans in order to avoid confrontation with Hitler. By late August 1941, Stahel argues, the German failure decisively to defeat the Soviet regime (even while winning significant victories at places like Minsk and Smolensk) spelled doom for the Wehrmacht. Nor is Stahel resting on his laurels. By the time I conducted the interview, his second work had just hit the shelves. In Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Stahel analyzes in detail the critical battle on the southern front. After talking with Stahel late last year, that one is on my reading list as well. And Typhoon is on its way after that. 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 favorite book as a teenager (and in fact the only book I ever read as a teenager) was All Quiet on the Western Front. I liked it mostly for the vivid scenes of trench warfare. Teenage boys love that stuff (or at least I did). But even then I recognized that it was essentially an anti-war book. It was hard to miss: the protagonist, Paul, has a pretty nasty time of it in the trenches, and he gets killed at the end. In the years that followed I somehow got the impression that All Quiet was essentially the first real anti-war book. Before WWI, I thought, everyone who wrote about war glorified it. As Cynthia Wachtell shows in War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914 (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), I was just dead wrong about this. In American letters anti-war sentiment abounded. Many of the leading lights of American lit wrote anti-war tracts, and some of them were remarkably “modern” (those by Ambrose Bierce are particularly astonishing, and I highly recommend them). Wachtell does a masterful job of uncovering many of these neglected works, putting them in historical context, and establishing that there was, in fact, an American anti-war tradition. This is an excellent, eye-opening book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

It’s been twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed, and scholars still joust over its long- and short-term causes. Amid the myriad factors–stagnating economy, reform spun out of control, globalization, nationalism–the Soviet war in Afghanistan figures in many narratives. Indeed, the ten-year intervention was the one of hottest and bloodiest conflicts in the Cold War, and its traumatic legacies among a generation of Russian citizens continue to resonate. Interestingly, Artemy Kalinovsky emphasizes in A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011) that the intervention was a “reluctant one,” which the Soviet leadership quickly recognized as a quagmire. Yet the Soviets postponed the inevitable out of a belief that they could stabilize country, help build an Afghan army, and create legitimacy for the government in Kabul. In the end it took Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign policy of New Political Thinking to extricate a beleaguered Red Army, and save whatever face possible, despite its all-too-visible scars on the polity. Simultaneously historical and prescient, A Long Goodbye provides clarity to the logic of Soviet decision making in accepting Afghanistan as intractable and as its echoes amplify in our present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Ask many military historians about the origins of American operational art and many will place it sometime after the Second World War. Conventional wisdom has long held that the American military only developed a rough understanding of operations – the planning and conduct of large-scale (Corps-size or greater) coordinated offensive and defensive actions – in the twin crucibles of the European Theater of Operations and in the US Navy’s drive across the Central Pacific. These traditionalist accounts have generally put the United States Army in the role of either being reluctant students, schooled in the nuances of modern warfare by the masters of the art, the German Wehrmacht, or as being pulled along unwillingly by the more sophisticated Navy and Marine Corps. If that is what passes for conventional wisdom, then Michael Matheny is having none of it. A senior instructor at the United States Army War College and a retired Army officer, Matheny is the author of Carrying the War to the Enemy: American Operational Art to 1945 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). In this enlightened study of the US Army’s experiences and educational efforts between 1917 to 1945, Matheny introduces a new perspective in the story of American operational art. Even as the United States Army was struggling to learn how to wage mass modern industrial war in the forested hills of France, insightful officers were considering how best to achieve the maximum offensive result, applying the greatest concentration of force at the minimal cost. The new problems uncovered during the First World War became the subject of intensive study during the Interwar Years in the Army’s professional schools, which, Matheny argues quite persuasively, ultimately gave American military officers a qualitative edge over its foreign allies and enemies in the Second World War. While admittedly a take on the American way of war that is rather exceptionalist and triumphalist, Matheny backs up his claims with four solid case studies – Operations TORCH and OVERLORD in the European-Mediterranean Theater, and Operations KING II and ICEBERG, the 1944 invasions of the Philippines and the 1945 invasion of Okinawa. In the end Carrying the War to the Enemy presents an interesting foundation through which to begin reconsidering the course of American arms in the Second World War, and which makes a strong effort to recast a flawed conventional narrative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was the author of numerous influential books and essays on political theory, law, and other subjects. In Carl Schmitt: Writings on War (Polity Press, 2011), Rhodes Scholar Timothy Nunan has provided us with an excellent translation of three of Schmitt’s essay on military affairs. These essays are relevant from a variety of perspectives. They reflect interwar debates about international law, neutrality, and the League of Nations and so are of interest to historians of the period. Schmitt was also a fervent supporter of Hitler and the Nazi party and so it may be surprising that his influence (note his longevity) may in some ways be increasing. His ideas about what constitutes an empire, his thoughts on “just war,” and on war crimes demand our attention despite our revulsion at his political views. For making more of Schmitt’s work accessible to an English-speaking audience, Nunan is to be thanked. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Peter Mauch‘s Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exhaustively researched and very rich biographical account of the man who was Japan’s ambassador to the US in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. Mauch traces the geopolitical developments of Japanese/US relations from 1877-1951, a crucial period that embraces two World Wars and many fascinating transformations in modern transnational history. The book relates this story through the life of Nomura, naval officer turned ambassador, allowing readers a rare glimpse into the processes and negotiations through which this sailor-diplomat wrestled with conflicting senses of duty, commitment, and reason. A boon not only for scholars of Japan, the book is also a fascinating model of the historian’s craft in its use of biography to simultaneously offer a macro-history of modern global politics, and a micro-history of a vibrant and critical mind reasoning in the course of some very difficult decisions. 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 the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific Theatre in the Second World War is no doubt quite familiar to our listeners. Less well known, however, is the story of how the Marine Corps readied itself for the challenges of amphibious warfare during the interwar period. No less obscure is the record of the Corps’ first commandant, Thomas Holcomb. Generally overshadowed by the combat narrative of the Marines’ first year in the South Pacific and the subsequent tenure of his successor, Alexander Vandegrift, Holcomb has long been skipped over by scholars and students. Historian David Ulbrich remedies this oversight in his Preparing for Victory: Thomas Holcomb and the Making of the Modern Marine Corps, 1936-1943 (Naval Institute Press, 2011). This well-received book presents its subject as a model of the Progressive Era officer who shepherded the American military into the modern era. Despite his mild demeanor, Holcomb – a combat veteran of the First World War and an experienced “China Marine” – exercised total control over the Marine Corps at a critical stage in its history. While the organization had long shed its role as the chief agent of American policy in the Caribbean and Latin America during the “Banana Wars” of the 1920s, the effects of that experience lingered. Looking ahead to the possibility of a conflict with a major naval power, Holcomb guided the Marine Corps to its new mission as an amphibious expeditionary force, capable of waging war across long distances. Thanks to Holcomb’s insight and leadership, Ulbrich concludes, the Marine Corps was well on its way to becoming an essential component of the American war effort in 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

For many readers, colonial history begins and ends with the original 13 American colonies. This perception overlooks the other British colonies throughout the New World, each of which created their own unique challenges for their imperial master. Historian John Grenier considers one of these “other” colonies in his book The Far Reaches of Empire: War in Nova Scotia, 1710-1760 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008). Part of the Campaigns and Commanders series from the University of Oklahoma Press, Grenier’s book builds upon the framework he constructed in an earlier work, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814 (Cambridge University Press, 2005). There he introduced the idea that a uniquely American way of war evolved in response to the clash of cultures taking place in the New World, drawing equally from the realities and perceptions of war with the Native Americans and the petit guerre -“little war” or irregular war – of the European continent. In this book, Nova Scotia serves as a case study for the First Way of War. Acquired by Britain after Queen Anne’s War, the province was occupied both by French-speaking Acadians and several Native American tribes. Within half a century, however, this population was supplanted by English-speaking settlers, largely from the Massachusetts colony, the original settlers displaced by war and policy. Grenier’s study is thus more than a simple campaign history; instead it presents a complex and intriguing account of the negotiations and conflicts between the island’s diverse Acadian and Native American population, their English overseers, and the encroaching “Yankees” from the colony of Massachusetts offers a fresh take on colonial history. Grenier highlights how a new form of irregular warfare took shape in the New World, on the fringe of 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

An earlier author described the British invasion of Mesopotamia in 1914 as “The Neglected War.” It no longer deserves that title thanks to the brilliant treatment of the subject by Professor Charles Townshend (University of Keele). His Desert Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia (Harvard University Press, 2011) describes in impressive detail both the political background and the military operations that made modern-day Iraq quite literally hell for the British soldiers engaged there from 1914 to 1918. A parsimonious British administration waged the campaign, seen at the time quite understandably as something of a peripheral concern, on a shoestring, and the absence of the most basic materials, especially shipping and medical supplies, was paid for by the largely Indian soldiery in blood. Using sources ranging from the highest level strategic plans and parliamentary inquiries, to the quasi-anthropological studies of Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence, to the memoirs and letters of the common soldier, Townshend demonstrates convincingly that British frugality combined with an ideology of rational administration created “mission creep” that drew the British further and further into a theater of war in which they were ill-equipped to fight and led them to make arrangements for the postwar Middle East that reverberate to this day. Townshend is laudably cautious in extrapolating from the experience of 1914-1918 to the present day, but an attentive reader will be in no doubt about the ways in which today’s Iraq is a product of 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

I was still in high school the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 1979. I remember reading about it in Time magazine and watching President Carter denounce it on TV. The Soviets, everyone said, were bent on ruling the world. Detente had been a ploy to lull us to sleep. In Afghanistan, the Communists had renewed their campaign. We had to do something. So we didn’t go to “their” Olympics. Oddly, that brave gesture failed to bring them around to our way of thinking. There are two really wonderful things about Sir Rodric Braithwaite‘s new book Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89 (Oxford UP, 2011). First, Sir Rodric shows in excruciating detail just how wrong we got it. The tiny cabal of Soviet leaders who sent the Red Army into Afghanistan weren’t imperialists pursuing some grand strategy to conquer the globe. They were scared, sometimes confused old men in a situation that was made impossible by conflicting, contradictory aims. They wanted to protect the USSR’s southern boarder; they wanted to keep the US out of the region; they wanted to stop the local Communist Party from turning Afghanistan into another Cambodia; they wanted to protect their personal friends and allies, people they knew, trusted, and liked; and, almost more than anything else, they wanted to give the Afghanis peace, stability, and prosperity so they just wouldn’t have to think about Afghanistan ever again. That’s right, the men in the Kremlin were not evil; they wanted to do good, if only for their own sake. The trouble was–and this brings us to the second wonderful aspect of Sir Rodric’s book–they couldn’t accomplish all these things. They knew this: the horrible example of America’s effort to “help” Vietnam was right before their eyes. But they were frightened, prone to catastrophic thinking, and didn’t want to appear weak. So they had to do something. They couldn’t very well refuse to go to their own Olympics. So, by steps, they invested Afghanistan. First there were advisors. Then there were troops to protect the advisors. Then there was political unrest, calls for help, and the dispatch of larger army units to “restore order.” Order was not restored, so the generals (though not all of them) reasonably asked for more troops. And so it went until the Soviets conquered Afghanistan but did not hold it; ruled it but did not govern it; won every battle in it but lost the war against it. If this sounds familiar to Americans, it should. 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 we close in on the centennial of the First World War, no doubt there will be a flood of new interpretations and “hidden histories” of the conflict. Many books will certainly promise much, but in the end deliver little. Fortunately this is not the case with Michael Neiberg‘s latest book Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2011). In this important new view of the opening months of the war, Neiberg offers a fresh look at the July Crisis, how it was perceived across Europe, and the first two months of the war. Rather than focusing on the same old voices of the European literati and political elites, Neiberg shows us how the average person considered the march to war. In the process he reveals a number of startling insights that challenge the war’s standard historical orthodoxy, revealing that many of our assumptions about the collective and individual responses to the July Crisis are based on misperception and poor assumptions. Rather than a continent primed for war through a network of military alliances, unfettered military bureaucracies, and a cultural predisposition that viewed war as the great test of nations and men, he reveals a society that genuinely believed peace was possible until the very last moment, and which only accepted war as a last alternative, and which would be defensive in nature. This insight and so many others earn Dance of the Furies the label of “revisionist history” in the best possible sense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Konrad H. Jarausch, whose varied and important works on German history have been required reading for scholars for several decades, has published Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front (Princeton University Press, 2011), a collection of his father’s missives from Poland and Russia during the early years of the Second World War, now translated into English. As you can imagine, this was an intensely personal project, and one that says almost as much about the postwar generation of “fatherless children” like Jarausch as it reveals about men like his father (also named Konrad) who found themselves in the cauldron of war. Jarausch seems to resist the comparison but I liken this work to Victor Klemperer’s diaries, I Shall Bear Witness, that were published with great fanfare almost fifteen years ago. The circumstances of the two men were vastly different (Klemperer was converted Jew, married to an “Aryan,” living in Dresden during the years of Nazi rule). But both men were deeply humanist members of Germany’s educated middle class (Bildungsburgertum) who saw their fellow Germans go insane and take the nation they loved down the path of moral and physical ruin. This work is of special interest to military historians because the elder Jarausch documents areas of activity rarely touched upon by other Wehrmacht memoirists and writers. Too old to serve in the combat arm, Jarausch spent his time in rear areas in Poland and the Soviet Union, training recruits and guarding prisoners. In clear and often touching prose, Jarausch documents both the drudgery and the deadly dilemmas of service in Hitler’s army. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history