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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > War & defence operations > Battles & campaigns
The Gallipoli expedition was the bold and audacious plan of Winston Churchill, amongst others, to force the Dardanelles narrows, by sea and by land, to capture Constantinople from the Turks and to open the Black Sea to ships taking supplies and arms for the Russians on their immense German front. The campaign failed with catastrophic loss of life on all sides, but again and again, unbeknown to the Allies, they came close to achieving a goal that might have led to victory overall. This book, first published in 1956, is still regarded as the best and definitive account of the campaign. It won the Sunday Times Best Book of the Year Award as well as the inaugural Duff Cooper prize when the winner could choose who would present the award. Appropriately enough, Moorehead chose Churchill to make the presentation because the book demonstrated that the faults were not in the conception of the plan. Indeed, long after Churchill had resigned in disgrace, a new fleet was being assembled to again attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1919, which was cancelled when the war ceased and the Armistice was signed. Seen in the new light that Moorehead revealed, the Gallipoli campaign was no longer regarded as a blunder or a reckless gamble; it was the most imaginative conception of the war, and its potentialities were almost beyond reckoning. Certainly in its strictly military aspect its influence was enormous. It was the greatest amphibious operation which mankind had known up till then, and it took place in circumstances in which nearly everything was experimental: in the use of submarines and aircraft, in the trial of modern naval guns against artillery on the shore, in the manoeuvre of landing armies in small boats on a hostile coast, in the use of radio, or the aerial bomb, the landmine, and many other novel devices. These things lead on through Dunkirk and the Mediterranean landings to the invasion of Normandy in the Second World War. In 1940 there was very little the Allied commanders could learn from the long struggle against the Kaiser's armies in the trenches in France. But Gallipoli was a mine of information about the complexities of the modern war of manoeuvre, of the combined operation by land and sea and sky; and the correction of the errors made then was the basis of the victory of 1945. "the story of one of the great military tragedies of the twentieth century, which no writer has described better than Alan Moorehead." Sir Max Hastings.
First published in 1929, it is now available as a brand new book. The story is an account of the lives of ordinary soldiers. The central character, Bourne is an enigmatic character and Manning tells his own wartime experiences through him. It is forcibly written, too forcibly for the sensibilities of the time, and a censored version was produced in 1930 under the title 'Her Privates We'.
What was the role played by local police volunteers in the Holocaust? Using eye witness descriptions from the towns and villages of Belorussia and Ukraine, this text reveals local policemen as hands on collaborators of the Nazis. They brutally drove Jewish neighbours from their homes and guarded them closely on the way to their deaths. Some distinguished themselves as ruthless murderers. Outnumbering German police manpower in these areas, the local police were the foot soldiers of the Holocaust in the east.
Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I dialogues with the variety of texts recently published to commemorate the Great War. It explores Italian socialist pacifism, the role of women during the conflict and a dominant cultural movement, Futurism, whose leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, glorified war and enlisted in the fight. Other soldiers created documents about the war that differ from the heroic and virile endeavor that Marinetti placed at the center of his works on war. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I pays attention to the representations of the soldiers through an analysis of their letters, dominated by descriptions of the terrible hunger they suffered. In contrast, popular film absorbed the cultural lessons in Marinetti's writings and represented soldiers as modernist heroes in comedies and dramas. However, film did not shy away from representing cowards who could only be baffoons and fools in propaganda films. In another medium, the concern was to publish texts that would serve the fighting soldier and inform readers about ideological and historical motivations for the conflict. The publishing industry supported national propaganda efforts. Only socialism could endanger anti-war publication, but after its initial opposition to the conflict, socialists occupied a neutral position. Italian socialism still remained the only European socialist party that did not renege its pacifism in order to embrace nationalism and the war, but it was also not in favor of actions that would sabotage in the Italian war industry. ltalian socialism is only one feature of Italian culture that was dramatically changed during the war. WWI impacted every aspect of Italian and of European cultures. For instance, as an essay in Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I explores, the war industry needed workers. The solution was to bring Chinese men France to contribute in the war effort. After the war, they moved to other countries and in Milan, Italy, they founded one of the oldest Chinatowns in Europe, dramatically changing the human landscape of Italy as they later moved to other Italian cities. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I supplies essential research articles to the construction of an inclusive portrayal of WWI and Italian culture by deepening our understanding of the transformative role it played in 20th century Italy and Europe.
Two accounts of men of the Legion during the First World War
This startling book reveals the military and political plans of the Axis in the very words of its own generals and admirals. The advent of Adolf Hitler has Germany's supreme leader marked the inauguration of the deliberate plans for world domination by the Third Reich. These plans were not secret; other nations simply refused to take them seriously. They followed the tradition of one hundred years of German military thinking form Clausewitz to Ludendorff. They were implicit in Mein Kampf. During the years from 1933 to 1939 they were worked out in detail by those who today are in charge of the Nazi armies. These writing, in fact, contain the Blueprints for the Total War. Now, for the first time, they have been assembled, translated and made available to all who want to understand the nature of the enemy with whom they are engaged in a life and death struggle. The Axis Grand Strategy describes the plan for modern war from the earliest political and psychological preparation to the ultimate campaign of militar
In the ruined Europe of World War II, American soldiers on the front lines had no eye for breathtaking vistas or romantic settings. The brutality of battle profoundly darkened their perceptions of the Old World. As the only means of international travel for the masses, the military exposed millions of Americans to a Europe in swift, catastrophic decline. Drawing on soldiers' diaries, letters, poems, and songs, Peter Schrijvers offers a compelling account of the experiences of U.S. combat ground forces: their struggles with the European terrain and seasons, their confrontations with soldiers, and their often startling encounters with civilians. Schrijvers relays how the GIs became so desensitized and dehumanized that the sight of dead animals often evoked more compassion than the sight of enemy dead. The Crash of Ruin concludes with a dramatic and moving account of the final Allied offensive into German-held territory and the soldiers' bearing witness to the ultimate symbol of Europe's descent into ruin--the death camps of the Holocaust. The harrowing experiences of the GIs convinced them that Europe's collapse was not only the result of the war, but also the Old World's deep-seated political cynicism, economic stagnation, and cultural decadence. The soldiers came to believe that the plague of war formed an inseparable part of the Old World's decline and fall.
At the Violet Hour argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. At the Violet Hour offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names "enchanted and disenchanted violence." In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of "violet hour," the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.
During World War II the Japanese were stereotyped in the European imagination as fanatical, cruel, almost inhuman - an image reflected in most books and films about prisoner of war in the Far East. While the Japanese cetainly treated those they captured badly, behaving far worse to Chinese and native captives than to Europeans, the conventional view of the Japanese is unhistorical and simplistic. It fails to recognize that hte Japanese were acting at a time of supreme national crisis trial, at a particular period of their history, and that their attitudes were influenced by a combination of their perception of their own racial identity mixed with a powerful historical tradition. This collection of essays, by both western and Japanese scholars, aims to see the question from a historical viewpoint, and from both a western and Japanese perspective, looking at it in the light of both longer-term influences, notably the Japanese attempt to establish themselves as an honorary white race. The essays also examine particular instances. Conditions in the almost self-run camp at Changi contrasted remarkably with those on the Burma Railway, where disease and a failure to provide supplies caused terrible suffering. The book also addresses the other side of the question, looking at the treatment of Japanese prisoners in Allied captivity.
Paris - Underground BY ETTA SHIBER IN COLLABORATION WITH ANNE AND PAUL DUPRE NEW YO K 1943 For KITTY AUTHORS NOTE The basic facts in the boo are a matter of record. Most of the names of the persons whose activities are described in this boo have been changed, for obvi us reasons, i few details, not already matters of record t nown to the Gestapo f have been recast, a few omitted, and the roles of various persons interchanged, in order to ma e it impossible for any use to be made of this boo by the German mthorities against anyone described in it. Contents CHAPTER PAGE I Escape from Europe i II Flight from Paris 13 III The English Pilot 22 IV Running the Gauntlet 31 V They Are Here 37 VI Plans for Escape 51 VII William Escapes 57 VIII A Trip to Doullens 67 IX Ten Thousand Englishmen 80 X The Gestapo Pounces 86 XI Where Is Lieutenant Burke 93 XII Nach Paris 103 XIII The Wound no XIV Friends or Enemies 17 XV A Visit to Father Christian 129 XVI The Death Decree 139 fcvn An Old Friend 14 XVIII Check to the Gestapo 160 Made in Heaven 174 f wo Scares CONTENTS CHAPTER. XXIII First Day in Prison XXIV The Stool Pigeon XXV Release XXVI Where Is Kitty XXVII Travels with a Shadow XXVIII Prison Again XXIX Kitty XXX The Trial XXXI Captain Weber Speaks XXXII The Sentence XXXIII Cut Rate for Freedom XXXIV Micheline XXXV A New Cell-Mate XXXVI Louise Clears Up a Mystery XXXVII A New Prison XXXVIII Prison at Troyes XXXIX Pearl Harbor. Axis Report XL A New Arrival XLI Spring XLII Parole XLIII Father Christian XLIV Last Days in Paris PAGE 212 225 234 244 255 271 28l 290 299 308 314 323 327 335 340 349 355 361 368 374 38i 387 PARIS - UNDERGROUND CHAPTER ONE Escape from Europ - TTSAID no good-bye to Europe Iwas below decks when the ship JL began to move Her engines were so smooth and noiseless that they must have been running for some time before I became con scious of their muffled pulsing I hurried up on deck, expecting to find the ship coursing down the broad Tagus River, with the many colored buildings of Lisbon piled in confusion on its shore But from the deck, there was already no sight of land Behind us, I knew, was the coast of Portugal, but it was lost in the evening haze The sea was a dirty gray The engines of the great ship hummed soothingly, monotonously, as she plowed smoothly through the waves, America-bound at last The sky was overcast As the night darkened, not a star showed to relieve the pitch blackness of the sea Our ship alone moved in a blaze of brilliance through the surrounding gloom All other vessels, I knew, would show no lights as they slipped silently over the black waves But as I leaned over the side I could read the great black letters on her white hull, glowing in the light of powerful reflectors, which explained why we alone dared to pass warships, submarines and planes with every light ablaze Diplomat Drottmngholm Diplomat For this was the return trip of the Drottnmgholm, whose safety was guaranteed by both sides, because she had taken Axis officials and correspondents to Lisbon, and was now heading back to the United States with her exchange cargo of American diplomats, con sular officials and newspapermen I was neither a diplomat, nor a consular official, nor a newspaper man I was a unique passenger on this official ship I was an ex changed prisoner, released from a German cell because somewhere m the United States a prison door had swung open for some onewhose return Germany desired I was a pawn in this bargain, made through a neutral nation between the governments of Hitlers Reich 2 PARIS UNDERGROUND and my own United States I had had nothing to do with its con...
How Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger pursued their public vow to end the Vietnam War and win the peace has long been entangled in bitter controversy and obscured by political spin. Recent declassifications of archival documents, on both sides of the former Iron and Bamboo Curtains, have at last made it possible to uncover the truth behind Nixon's and Kissinger's management of the war and to better understand the policies and strategies of the Vietnamese, Soviets, and Chinese. Drawing from this treasure trove of formerly secret files, Jeffrey Kimball has excerpted more than 140 print documents and taped White House conversations bearing on Nixon-era strategy. Most of these have never before been published and many provide smoking-gun evidence on such long-standing controversies as the "madman theory" and the "decent-interval" option. They reveal that by 1970 Nixon's and Kissinger's madman and detente strategies had fallen far short of frightening the North Vietnamese into making concessions. By 1971, as Kissinger notes in one Key document, the administration had decided to withdraw the remaining U.S. combat troops while creating "a healthy interval for South Vietnam's fate to unfold." The new evidence uncovers a number of behind-the-scenes ploys--such as Nixon's secret nuclear alert of October 1969--and sheds more light on Nixon's goals in Vietnam and his and Kissinger's strategies of Vietnamization, the "China card," and "triangular diplomacy." The excerpted documents also reveal significant new information about the purposes of the LINEBACKER bombings, Nixon's manipulation of the POW issue, and the conduct of the secret negotiations in Paris--as well as other key topics, events, andissues. All of these are effectively framed by Kimball, whose introductions to each document provide insightful historical context. Building on the ground-breaking arguments of his earlier prize-winning book, "Nixon's Vietnam War, Kimball also offers readers a concise narrative of the evolution of Nixon-era strategy and a critical assessment of historical myths about the war. The story that emerges from both the documents and Kimball's contextual narratives directly contradicts the Nixon-Kissinger version of events. In fact, they did "not pursue a consistent strategy from beginning to end and did "not win a peace with honor.
Drawing together a wide variety of primary source documents from across the United States, Europe, and Asia, this book illuminates the events and experiences of World War II-the most devastating war in human history. World War II was the most destructive and disruptive war ever, a global conflict that in one way or another affected the lives of people across the planet. Voices of World War II: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life coalesces a wide variety of primary source documents drawn from across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Supplemented by interpretive material that enables readers to analyze them, assess their impact and significance, and place them in context to comparable situations today, the documents provide rare insights into World War II. Expert commentaries and additional information on these texts enable a greater understanding of the background to these documents, providing valuable training in learning to interpret, assess, and evaluate historical sources. Intended primarily for upper-level high school and undergraduate-level history students, general readers will also appreciate the variegated array of primary material from World War II, which depicts numerous aspects of the conflict, often in extremely personal terms. A chronology lists all major events of World War II A bibliography provides an up-do-date selection of basic books, Internet sources, and movies and television series on World War II A glossary defines key World War II terms and phrases Extensive commentary, contextual information, and guiding questions accompany each document
Mersey to mud - war and Liverpool men Like many large cities, Liverpool raised a number of battalions in the Great War. Notable among them were the Pals, the Liverpool Irish and Scottish, but this book concerns the wartime history of the 9th Battalion - The Kings. Originally formed in 1859 for volunteers from the Liverpool newspaper and print industries, it was, by the outbreak of World War 1, an experienced part of the Territorial Force, but no previous experience could prepare the battalion for war on the Western Front. Once in the line, the exacting toll of modern warfare caused immediate casualties, including the commanding officer invalided home and another quickly killed in action. The King's endured gruelling life and death in the trenches to the full measure. In the course of the war the battalion fought at Aubers Ridge, Loos, the Somme, Third Ypres, Cambrai and Arras. This moving history of the battalion is essential reading for military students and genealogists since it includes a substantial Decoration Roll.
The incredible wartime saga of the only American submariners to survive the sinking of their ship and evade enemy capture in WWII On the night of August 13, 1944, the U.S. submarine Flier struck a mine in the Sulu Sea in the southern Philippines as it steamed along the surface. All but fifteen of the more than eighty-strong crew went down with the vessel. Of those left floating in the dark, eight survived by swimming for seventeen hours before washing ashore on an uninhabited island. The story of the Flier and its eight survivors is wholly unique in the annals of U.S. military history. Eight Survived tells the gripping story of the doomed submarine and its crew from its first patrol, during which it sank several enemy ships, to the explosion in the Sulu Sea. Drawing on interviews with the survivors and on a visit to the jungle where they washed ashore-where a cast of fascinating characters helped the U.S. sailors evade the Japanese-Douglas Campbell fully captures the combination of extraordinary courage and luck that marked one of the most heroic episodes of World War II.
In early 1942, following a string of successes, the Japanese seized nearly 10,000 American soldiers, among them Pvt. Oscar Smith, on Manila Bay and marched them to a near-certain death through Bataan. A few days later they put Smith to work burying the stacked bodies of his own men. Robert Salmon had already served his time in the military during World War I, fighting for his native England. He was teaching biochemistry to Chinese students in Shanghai when the Japanese arrested him in 1943 and condemned him, with thousands of confused Western missionaries, to spend the remainder of World War II in an abandoned tobacco factory. German soldiers, marching toward what would be known as the Battle of the Bulge, captured Ed Uzemack, a Chicago journalist turned soldier, at an abandoned Luxembourg inn. By cattle car they sent him to a crowded, wind-swept POW camp, once the final internment spot for Jewish concentration camp victims. In 1945 Hermann Pfengle, just fifteen years old, had been released from German mil
This book celebrates the achievements in Viet Nam of the US Special Forces soldiers, popularly known as "The Green Berets." These are America's finest warriors, our elite force who fuse military and civil skills in a new form of victorious warfare. This book focuses on Viet Nam during 1968 and 1969, the two most crucial years of that conflict. The Berets learned many lessons in Viet Nam. Not only are these historically interesting, but they are the keys to success in our Global War on Terrorism. The first lesson emphasizes the proper advisory relationships that must exist when our American military train and work with the military of other coalition nations. The second lesson stresses the need for the integration of the military and civilian sides of any war. Little is accomplished if bloody battles only result in producing more enemy. Rather our strategies must combine appropriate military measures with psychological operations and civic actions that win over nonaligned groups, and attract even hostile forces. The third lesson demands mutual and unwavering loyalty between America's forces and those they train and advise. An enemy has no greater weapon than to boast that Americans will eventually grow weary and desert their friends while the enemy will always endure. The fourth lesson calls for our American military to know how to work with others, not merely in spite of differences, but actually appreciating and building upon this diversity of races, religions, cultures, political views, and tribal backgrounds. I am positive that the reader will find many more lessons from the accomplishments of the Green Berets related in this book.
This study examines what led the leaders of Austria-Hungary and Germany to launch major military offensives at the beginning of the First World War. The focus is on understanding why these two countries adopted high-risk offensive strategies during an international confrontation rather than a defensive military stance. The decision to attack or defend did not occur in a political vacuum. The leaders of Austria-Hungary and Germany adopted offensive strategies as a way to achieve their political ambitions. The offensives undertaken by Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1914 thus reflected their political goals as well as the strategic doctrines of war planners. The concluding chapter of this study explores why deterrence failed in 1914. |
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