Bøger i Modern War Studies serien

When large formations of Allied four-engine bombers finally flew over Europe, it marked the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. Providing a deeper and more accurate understanding of the bomber campaigns' role in the Allied victory, this study testifies to the strategic importance of these efforts in that war.

Takes a look at the Vietnam war and the debates about it. Highlighting Ike's seminal and long-lasting influence on the Vietnam policy, this book demonstrates how and why our range of choices narrowed with each passing year, while our decision-making continued to be distorted by Cold War politics.

The Carpathian campaign of 1915, described by some as the 'Stalingrad of the First World War', engaged the million-man armies of Austria-Hungary and Russia in fierce winter combat that drove them to the brink of annihilation. This title presents an account of the Carpathian Winter War.

A true Band of Brothers story from the Vietnam War, this first unit history of a naval air squadron uses extensive interviews to highlight the Navy's contribution to the air war.

Movingly chronicles the lives, deaths, and memory of nine Marines from the mining community of Morenci, Arizona, who were transformed from happy-go-lucky high schoolers to soldiers in Vietnam. Only three of them survived the war. Their story encompasses pride, loss, grief, and the devastating impact of war on a small town.

In 1847, General Winfield Scott's military campaign helped pave the way for victory in the wider war against Mexico and also posed new challenges for discipline and logistics. This work highlights the visionary command of this general, the toughness of the troops he led, and the emergence of the United States as a potential global military power.

This single volume work serves as an introduction and overview of the authors Stalingrad trilogy that transformed our understanding of the Nazi Soviet War and its impact on world history.

This study provides an appraisal of Germany's air forces from the post-World War I era through the early stages of World War II. The author demolishes several myths surrounding the Luftwaffe, including the belief that they had no ideas beyond the support of ground forces.

Presents an account of institutional transformation under extreme stress that balances Churchill's self-serving memoirs. This work demonstrates that what political leaders demand from their armies is less important than what those armies are designed to do - and that this oft-recurring disconnect lies at the root of wartime civil-military tension.

This text examines the role of the news media during the Vietnam War. The author aims to demystify the subject, using military documents and news reports to explore how the press contradicted themselves and each other and how the war came to be seen as a hopeless effort.

Coveying both the epic and everyday aspects of Mortain's field of battle, Lieutenant Colonel Mark J. Reardon takes the reader down to the platoon level on both sides to produce a comprehensive look at the battle to halt Hitler's Panzer divisions in 1944.

In the face of the German onslaught in World War II, the Soviets succeeded, as Molotov later recalled, in relocating to the rear virtually an entire industrial country. It was an official declared one of the greatest feats of the war. Focusing on the Kirov region, this book offers a different and considerably more nuanced picture of the evacuations than the typical triumphal narrative found in Soviet history. In its depiction of the complexities of the displacement and relocation of populations, Stalins World War II Evacuations also has remarkable relevance in our time of mass migrations of refugees from war-torn nations.The citizens and government of Kirov, some 500 miles northeast of Moscow, provided food, clothing, and shelter to the people and institutions that descended on the region in numbers far exceeding prewar plans or anyone's imagination. But as they continued to share their already strained resourceswith adult evacuees, Leningrads children, wounded and ill soldiers, factories, and commissariatsthe people of Kirov became increasingly resentful, especially as it grew clear that the war would be prolonged, and that their guests demanded privileged treatment. Larry E. Holmes reveals how, without directly challenging the Stalinist system, they vigorously advanced their own private and regional interests. He shows that, as Kirov and Moscow pursued their respective agendas, sometimes in concert but increasingly at cross-purposes, they exposed preexisting and highly dysfunctional dimensions of Soviet governance at both the center and the periphery.The dictatorial center and the periphery literally came face-to-face in the evacuation to Kirov, allowing for a new, informed understanding of the tensions inherent in the Stalinist system, and of the power politics of the wartime Soviet Union.

Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's plan for invading the Soviet Union, has by now become a familiar tale of overreach, with the Germans blinded to their coming defeat by their initial victory, and the Soviet Union pushing back from the brink of destruction with courageous exploits both reckless and relentless. And while much of this version of the story is true, Frank Ellis tells us in Barbarossa 1941, it also obscures several important historical truths that alter our understanding of the campaign. In this new and intensive investigation of Operation Barbarossa, Ellis draws on a wealth of documents declassified over the past twenty years to challenge the conventional treatment of a critical chapter in the history of World War II.Ellis's close reading of an exceptionally wide range of German and Russian sources leads to a reevaluation of Soviet intelligence assessments of Hitler's intentions; Stalin's complicity in his nation's slippage into existential slaughter; and the influence of the Stalinist regime's reputation for brutalityand a fear of Stalin's expansionist inclinationson the launching and execution of Operation Barbarossa. Ellis revisits two major controversies relating to Barbarossathe Soviet pre-emptive strike thesis put forward in Viktor Suvorov's book Icebreaker; and the view of the infamous Commissar Order, dictating the execution of a large group of Soviet POWs, as a unique piece of Nazi malevolence. Ellis also analyzes the treatment of Barbarossa in the work of three Soviet-Russian writersVasilii Grossman, Alexander Bek, and Konstantin Simonovand in the first-ever translation of the diary kept by a German soldier in 20th Panzer Division, brings the campaign back to the daily realities of dangers and frustrations encountered by German troops.

Most students of history assume that the age of the "e;warlord popes"e; ended with the Renaissance, but, long after the victory of Catholic powers at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Papacy continued to entangle itself in martial affairs. The Vatican participated in six major military campaigns between 1796 and 1870, flew the papal flag over a warship as late as 1878, and during the Second World War mobilized more than 2,000 of its own troops to defend the Pope. David Alvarez now opens up this little-known aspect of the Papacy in the first general history of the papal armed forces. His is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive chronicle of the modern Vatican's military and security forces from 1796, when the armies of revolutionary France invaded the Papal States, through the wars for unification, to the present-day deployment of modern weapons, technology, and skills to protect the Holy Father and the Vatican from terrorists and assassins.Most papal histories make little reference to military affairs, while the few that address them do so only in passing or focus narrowly on particular units or campaigns. Alvarezs history expands our understanding of the Papacy's military through the exceptional research he has done as the first American scholar to gain access to the archive of the Pontifical Swiss Guard and the modern military records in the Vatican Secret Archive. He is also the first historian of any nationality to use the records of the Vatican Gendarmeria.Alvarez chronicles the exploits of the Vatican's military leaders and soldiers in their campaigns and battles, focusing on how those units under the Popes authorityincluding the Vatican navyengaged in actual military operations. He also deals extensively with the Vatican Gendarmeria as well as the Popes Noble Guards, Palatine Guards, and Swiss Guards, describing their distinctive responsibilities and revealing the competition and internal tensions that sometimes undermined the morale, preparedness, and cohesion of the Pope's guards. Filled with information that will surprise scholars of the Papacy and military historians alike, Alvarezs highly original work illuminates a shadowy corner of Vatican history and will fascinate all readers interested in the role of the church in the broader world.

Japan's invasion of China in 1937 saw most major campaigns north of the Yangtze River, where Chinese industry was concentrated. The southern theater proved a more difficult challenge for Japan because of its enormous size, diverse terrain, and poor infrastructure, but Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek made a formidable stand that produced a veritable quagmire for a superior opponent-a stalemate much desired by the Allied nations.In the first book to cover this southern theater in detail, David Macri closely examines strategic decisions, campaigns, and operations and shows how they affected Allied grand strategy. Drawing on documents of U.S. and British officials, he reveals for the first time how the Sino-Japanese War served as a "e;proxy war"e; for the Allies: by keeping Japan's military resources focused on southern China, they hoped to keep the enemy bogged down in a war of attrition that would prevent them from breaching British and Soviet territory.While the most immediate concern was preserving Siberia and its vast resources from invasion, Macri identifies Hong Kong as the keystone in that proxy warvital in sustaining Chinese resistance against Japan as it provided the logistical interface between the outside world and battles in Hunan and Kwangtung provinces; a situation that emerged because of its vital rail connection to the city of Changsha. He describes the development of Anglo-Japanese low-intensity conflict at Hong Kong; he then explains the geopolitical significance of Hong Kong and southern China for the period following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Opening a new window on this rarely studied theater, Macri underscores China's symbolic importance for the Allies, depicting them as unequal partners who fought the Japanese for entirely different reasonsChina for restoration of its national sovereignty, the Allies to keep the Japanese preoccupied. And by aiding China's wartime efforts, the Allies further hoped to undermine Japanese propaganda designed to expel Western powers from its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. As Macri shows, Hong Kong was not just a sleepy British Colonial outpost on the fringes of the empire but an essential logistical component of the war, and to fully understand broader events Hong Kong must be viewed together with southern China as a single military zone. His account of that forgotten fight is a pioneering work that provides new insight into the origins of the Pacific War.

On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin. There followed a massive military purge, from the officer corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting the German invasion of June 1941. Why take such action on the eve of a major war? The most common theory has Stalin fabricating a "e;military conspiracy"e; to tighten his control over the Soviet state. In The Red Army and the Great Terror, Peter Whitewood advances an entirely new explanation for Stalin's actionsan explanation with the potential to unlock the mysteries that still surround the Great Terror, the surge of political repression in the late 1930s in which over one million Soviet people were imprisoned in labor camps and over 750,000 executed.Framing his study within the context of Soviet civil-military relations dating back to the 1917 revolution, Whitewood shows that Stalin sanctioned this attack on the Red Army not from a position of confidence and strength, but from one of weakness and misperception. Here we see how Stalin's views had been poisoned by the paranoid accusations of his secret police, who saw spies and supporters of the dead Tsar everywhere and who had long believed that the Red Army was vulnerable to infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies engaged in a conspiracy against the Soviet state. Recently opened Russian archives allow Whitewood to counter the accounts of Soviet defectors and conspiracy theories that have long underpinned conventional wisdom on the military purge. By broadening our view, The Red Army and the Great Terror demonstrates not only why Tukhachevskii and his associates were purged in 1937, but also why tens of thousands of other officers and soldiers were discharged and arrested at the same time. With its thorough reassessment of these events, the book sheds new light on the nature of power, state violence, and civil-military relations under the Stalinist regime.

November 1917. The American troops were poorly trained, deficient in military equipment and doctrine, not remotely ready for armed conflict on a large scaleand they'd arrived on the Western front to help the French push back the Germans. The story of what happened nextthe American Expeditionary Force's trial by fire on the brutal battlefields of Franceis told in full for the first time in Thunder and Flames.Where history has given us some perspective on the individual battles of the periodat Cantigny, Chateau Thierry, Belleau Wood, the Marne River, Soissons, and little-known Fismettethey appear here as part of a larger series of interconnected operations, all conducted by Americans new to the lethal killing fields of World War I and guided by the battle-tested French. Following the AEF from their initial landing to their emergence as an independent army in late September 1918, this book presents a complex picture of how, learning warfare on the fly, sometimes with devastating consequences, the American force played a critical role in blunting and then rolling back the German army's drive toward Paris. The picture that emerges is at once sweeping in scope and rich in detail, with firsthand testimony conjuring the real mud and blood of the combat that Edward Lengel so vividly describes. Official reports and documents provide the strategic and historical context for these ground-level accounts, from the perspective of the Germans as well as the Americans and French. Battle by battle, Thunder and Flames reveals the cost of the inadequacies in U.S. training, equipment, logistics, intelligence, and command, along with the rifts in the Franco-American military marriage. But it also shows how, by trial and error, through luck and ingenuity, the AEF swiftly became the independent fighting force of General John "e;Blackjack"e; Pershing's long-held dreamits divisions ultimately among the most combat-effective military forces to see the war through.

In their initial effort to end the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger attempted to lever concessions from Hanoi at the negotiating table with military force and coercive diplomacy. They were not seeking military victory, which they did not believe was feasible. Instead, they backed up their diplomacy toward North Vietnam and the Soviet Union with the Madman Theory of threatening excessive force, which included the specter of nuclear force. They began with verbal threats then bombed North Vietnamese and Viet Cong base areas in Cambodia, signaling that there was more to come. As the bombing expanded, they launched a previously unknown mining ruse against Haiphong, stepped-up their warnings to Hanoi and Moscow, and initiated planning for a massive shock-and-awe military operation referred to within the White House inner circle as DUCK HOOK.Beyond the mining of North Vietnamese ports and selective bombing in and around Hanoi, the initial DUCK HOOK concept included proposals for "e;tactical"e; nuclear strikes against logistics targets and U.S. and South Vietnamese ground incursions into the North. In early October 1969, however, Nixon aborted planning for the long-contemplated operation. He had been influenced by Hanoi's defiance in the face of his dire threats and concerned about U.S. public reaction, antiwar protests, and internal administration dissent.In place of DUCK HOOK, Nixon and Kissinger launched a secret global nuclear alert in hopes that it would lend credibility to their prior warnings and perhaps even persuade Moscow to put pressure on Hanoi. It was to be a "e;special reminder"e; of how far President Nixon might go. The risky gambit failed to move the Soviets, but it marked a turning point in the administration's strategy for exiting Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger became increasingly resigned to a "e;long-route"e; policy of providing Saigon with a "e;decent chance"e; of survival for a "e;decent interval"e; after a negotiated settlement and U.S. forces left Indochina. Burr and Kimball draw upon extensive research in participant interviews and declassified documents to unravel this intricate story of the October 1969 nuclear alert. They place it in the context of nuclear threat making and coercive diplomacy since 1945, the culture of the Bomb, intra-governmental dissent, domestic political pressures, the international "e;nuclear taboo,"e; and Vietnamese and Soviet actions and policies. It is a history that holds important lessons for the present and future about the risks and uncertainties of nuclear threat making.

What was for the United States a struggle against creeping Communism in Southeast Asia was for the people of North Vietnam a "great patriotic war" that saw its eventual victory against a military Goliath. Victory in Vietnam is the People's Army of Vietnam's own account of two decades of struggle, now available for the first time in English.

Most people think Star Wars was Reagan's idea, but its roots reach decades farther back. Military historian Don Baucom traces them to the dawn of the atomic age in 1944. In this first scholarly account of the origins of SDI, Baucom brings together the political, technological, and strategic forces that have shaped the history of ballistic missile defenses from World War II to the present.

The Kaiser's military theorists have often been portrayed as narrow-minded thinkers wedded to an outmoded way of war. This book argues that they were fully aware of the implications of advanced weaponry and that the slaughter of World War I was due to deficient training amongst younger officers.

An intimate history of the lives of ordinary Japanese during World War II. Among others readers are introduced to housewives in provincial cities struggling to feed their families while supporting the war effort, a conscript who endured the harshest and most abusive training imaginable, and a Kyoto octogenarian whose inability to contribute to the war effort leads him to contemplate suicide.

No mission too difficult, no sacrifice too great - Duty First!"" For a century, from the Western Front of World War I to the wars of the 21st century, this motto has spurred the soldiers who wear the shoulder patch bearing the Big Red One. In this comprehensive history of Americas 1st Infantry Division, James Scott Wheeler chronicles its major combat engagements and peacetime duties.

Continuing his magisterial account of the Eastern Front campaigns, David M. Glantz focuses here on the Red Army's operations from the fall of 1943 to April 1944. Glantz chronicles the Soviet Army's efforts to further exploit their post-Kursk gains and accelerate a counteroffensive that would eventually take them all the way to Berlin.

Popular impressions of the imperial Japanese army still promote images of suicidal banzai charges and fanatical leaders blindly devoted to their emperor. Edward Drea looks well past those stereotypes to unfold the more complex story of how that army came to power and extended its influence at home and abroad to become one of the world's dominant fighting forces.

During its struggle for survival from 1954 to 1975, the region known as the Central Highlands was the strategically vital high ground for the South Vietnamese state. Successive governments, their American allies, and their Communist enemies all realized early on the fundamental importance of this region. Paul Harris's book examines the struggle for this region from the mid-1950s to 1965.