Men, Horses, and All Kinds of Weapons

It may startle some people to remember that, little more than a century ago, the horse was not only humanity's primary means of swift transportation, it was also a major participant in warfare. For more than four thousand years, men mounted horses and galloped at one another in large numbers, wielding clubs, axes, lances, swords, bows and arrows, pistols, rifles, and more. They charged into swarms of arrows, hales of bullets, volcanoes of cannon fire, and legions of other men on horseback, chopping, stabbing, hurling spears, and firing guns. And their exploits became the stuff of romance, drama, and legend.

"Mounted Warriors" brings you back through the millennia to discover the beginnings and the development of warfare on horseback and meet some of the most remarkable, daring, and courageous men who ever spurred a charger from trot to gallop. You'll find out how Alexander trained Bucephalus to the saddle when all others failed, how Cromwell was transformed by battle, what several British generals had to say about Light-Horse Harry Lee, and why Phil Sheridan changed his horse's name. You'll even learn how the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott influenced the nature of the American Civil War.

The age of the cavalry charge may be past, but when you read "Mounted Warriors," you'll rediscover all of its drama, pageantry, and glory.

At the outbreak of war in 1939 British tank crews were ill-equipped, under trained and badly led. As a consequence the lives of hundreds of crewmen were wasted unnecessarily. This was due not only to the poor design and construction of British tanks, but also to the lack of thought and planning on the part of successive pre-war governments and the War Office. Death by Design explores how and why Britain went from leading the world in tank design at the end of the First World War to lagging far behind the design quality of Russian and German tanks in the Second World War. This book is a much-needed warning to governments and military planners: a nation must always be prepared to defend itself and ensure that its soldiers are equipped with the tools to do so.

More Damning than Slaughter is the first broad study of desertion in the Confederate army. Incorporating extensive archival research with a synthesis of other secondary material, Mark A. Weitz confronts a question never fully addressed until now: did desertion hurt the Confederacy? Coupled with problems such as speculation, food and clothing shortages, conscription, taxation, and a pervasive focus on the protection of local interests, desertion started as a military problem and spilled over into the civilian world. Fostered by a military culture that treated absenteeism leniently early in the war, desertion steadily increased and by 1863 reached epidemic proportions. A Union policy that permitted Confederate deserters to swear allegiance to the Union and then return home encouraged desertion. Equally important in persuading men to desert was the direct appeal from loved ones on the home front-letters from wives begging soldiers to come home for harvests, births, and other events. By 1864 deserter bands infested some portion of every Confederate state. Preying on the civilian population, many of these bands became irregular military units that frustrated virtually every effort to subdue them. Ultimately, desertion not only depleted the Confederate army but also threatened "home" and undermined civilian morale. By examining desertion, Weitz assesses how deteriorating southern civilian morale and growing unwillingness to contribute goods and services to the war led to defeat. Mark A. Weitz is the former director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College. He is the author of A Higher Duty: Desertion among Georgia Troops during the American Civil War (Nebraska 2005).

At the end of the Great War, the U.S. Army faced the challenge of integrating what it had learned in the failures and ultimate success of its war effort. During the interwar years the army sought to balance readiness and modernization in a period of limited resources and technological advances with profound implications for the conduct of warfare. In After the Trenches, William O. Odom traces the development of combat doctrine between the world wars through an examination of the army's primary doctrine manuals, the Field Service Regulations.

The Field Service Regulations of 1923 successfully assimilated the experiences of the First World War and translated them into viable tactical practice, Odom argues in this unique study. Rapidly developing technologies generated more efficient tools of war and greatly expanded the scale, tempo, and complexity of warfare. Personnel and material shortages led to a decline in the quality of army doctrine evidenced in the 1939 regulations. Examining the development of doctrine and the roles of key personalities such as John Pershing, Hugh Drum, George Lynch, Frank Parker, and Lesley McNair, Odom concludes that the successive revisions of the manual left the army scurrying to modernize its woefully outdated doctrine on the eve of the new war.

This impressively researched study of the doctrine of the interwar army fills a significant gap in our understanding of the development of the U.S. Army during the first half of the twentieth century. It will serve scholars and others interested in military history as the standard reference on the subject. Moreover, many of the challenges and conditions that existed seventy years ago resemble those faced bytoday's army. This study of the army's historical responses to a declining military budget and an ever-changing technology will broaden the perspectives of those who must deal with these important contemporary issues.

The product of nearly 25 years of research, Pershing: General of the Armies remains one of the most authoritative biographies of the man known as "Black Jack." Newly appointed head of the American Expeditionary Forces, Pershing sailed for Europe in May 1917. Once in France, he set about the task of building an army. By October the Americans were at the front and over the next year became involved in increasingly significant battles, all vividly recounted here: Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel, and the 47-day slugfest in the Meuse-Argonne. Although the impact of the American forces on the outcome of the war has been much debated, there is no question that the troops acquitted themselves well under Pershing s command. Pershing s postwar life included an unsuccessful run for president, a stint as Chief of Staff, and a secret romance with a French woman 34 years younger than he; nonetheless, his influence as a leader extended into World War II."

The concept of the farmer and shopkeeper pulling rifles off pegs on the wall to fight the British has been the typical image of the American minuteman. The fact that he may have had military training and drilled-and that April 19, 1775 was not his first battle-usually goes unmentioned. Winner of the American Revolution Round Table Award, "The Minute Men" will be of keen interest to those curious about the true history of some of America's first soldiers.

Biographers and historians have lionized Heinz Guderian as the legendary father of the German armored force and brilliant practitioner of "blitzkrieg" maneuver warfare. As Russell A. Hart argues, Guderian created this legend with his own highly influential yet self-serving and distorted memoir, which remains one of the most widely read accounts of the Second World War. Unfortunately, too many of Guderian's biographers have accepted his view of his accomplishments at face value, without sufficient critical scrutiny, resulting in an undeserved hagiography. While undoubtedly a great military figure of appreciable ego and ambition and with a volatile, impetuous, and difficult personality, Guderian was determined to achieve his vision of a war-winning armored force irrespective of the consequences. He proved to be a man who was politically naive enough to fall under the sway of Hitler and National Socialism and yet arrogant enough to believe he could save Germany from inevitable defeat late in the war, despite Hitler's interference. At the same time, Guderian was unwilling either to participate in attempts to remove Hitler or to denounce as traitors the conspirators who did. In the end, he distorted the truth to establish his place in history. In the process, he denigrated the myriad important contributions of his fellow officers as he took personal credit for what were, in reality, collective accomplishments. Thus, he succeeded in creating a legend that has endured long after his death. This brief biography puts the record straight by placing Guderian's career and accomplishments into sharper and more accurate relief. It exposes the real Heinz Guderian, not the man of legend.

Taking up its position astride the Peking-Mukden [Beijing-Shenyang] railway beginning in January, 1912, the United States Fifteenth Infantry Regiment was engaged in protecting American interests in China. The 1000 man force was especially challenged during the 1920s, those tumultuous years when warlords struggled to gain ascendancy in the Chinese Republic. Although Chiang Kai-shek established a measure of control in China by 1928, the regiment remained in China--partially to counter Japan's increasingly aggressive actions—despite considerable misgivings within and outside of the United States Army as to the feasibility, desirability, and ethical appropriateness of the policy retaining it there. The success of the Japanese in conquering much of eastern China finally compelled Washington to withdraw the regiment on March 2, 1938. This work recounts and assesses some aspects of the involvement and service of the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment during its fateful quarter of a century in the Orient between the World Wars. Also detailed is the Army's service in those years in general. Many insights are provided regarding the self-perceptions of a key generation of U.S. military personnel deployed there.

"Weaving together information from official sources and personal interviews, Barbara Tomblin gives the first full-length account of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in the Second World War. She describes how over 60,000 army nurses, all volunteers, cared for sick and wounded American soldiers in every theater of the war, serving in the jungles of the Southwest Pacific, the frozen reaches of Alaska and Iceland, the mud of Italy and northern Europe, or the heat and dust of the Middle East. Many of the women in the Army Nurse Corps served in dangerous hospitals near the front lines -- 201 nurses were killed by accident or enemy action, and another 1,600 won decorations for meritorious service. These nurses address the extreme difficulties of dealing with combat and its effects in World War II, and their stories are all the more valuable to women's and military historians because they tell of the war from a very different viewpoint than that of male officers. Although they were unable to achieve full equality for American women in the military during World War II, army nurses did secure equal pay allowances and full military rank, and they proved beyond a doubt their ability and willingness to serve and maintain excellent standards of nursing care under difficult and often dangerous conditions.

Tank destroyers were the US Army's response to blitzkrieg, and were based around the concept of mounting a large anti-tank gun on a light, fast moving vehicle. They served in the Mediterranean, Pacific, and North-West Europe theatres, and were also supplied to other Allied armies. These vehicles form an attractive modelling subject; their open turrets provide plenty of opportunity for detail work, as demonstrated here by the author in clear step-by-step instructions. Packed with tips and techniques from a leading modeller and Allied armour expert, this title covers the M10, M18, M36, and M39, and features modelling projects in 1/35th and 1/72nd scale.

Prompted by the earnest entreaties of his friends rather than by any wish of his own to relate his experiences, Mr. Slatin wrote these chapters. The author held high posts in the Sudan, traveled throughout the length and breadth of the country and, a perfect master of the language, he had opportunities which few others had to accurately describe affairs such as they were in the last days of the Egyptian Administration. While his experiences during his cruel captivity place him in a perfectly unique position as the highest authority on the rise, progress and wane of that great religious movement which wrenched the country from its conquerors and dragged it back into an almost indescribable condition of religious and moral decadence.

" The Battle Rages Higher tells, for the first time, the story of the Fifteenth Kentucky Infantry, a hard-fighting Union regiment raised largely from Louisville and the Knob Creek valley where Abraham Lincoln lived as a child. Although recruited in a slave state where Lincoln received only 0.9 percent of the 1860 presidential vote, the men of the Fifteenth Kentucky fought and died for the Union for over three years, participating in all the battles of the Atlanta campaign, as well as the battles of Perryville, Stones River and Chickamauga. Using primary research, including soldiers' letters and diaries, hundreds of contemporary newspaper reports, official army records, and postwar memoirs, Kirk C. Jenkins vividly brings the Fifteenth Kentucky Infantry to life. The book also includes an extensive biographical roster summarizing the service record of each soldier in the thousand-member unit. Kirk C. Jenkins, a descendant of the Fifteenth Kentucky's Captain Smith Bayne, is a partner in a Chicago law firm. Click here for Kirk Jenkins' website and more information about the 15th Kentucky Infantry.

The roots of American globalization can be found in the War of 1898. Then, as today, the United States actively engaged in globalizing its economic order, itspolitical institutions, and its values. Thomas Schoonover argues that this drive to expand political and cultural reach -- the quest for wealth, missionary fulfillment, security, power, and prestige -- was inherited by the United States from Europe, especially Spain and Great Britain. Uncle Sam's War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization is a pathbreaking work of history that examines U.S. growth from its early nationhood to its first major military conflict on the world stage, also known as the Spanish-American War. As the new nation's military, industrial, and economic strength developed, the United States created policies designed to protect itself from challenges beyond its borders. According to Schoonover, a surge in U.S. activity in the Gulf-Caribbean and in Central America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was catalyzed by the same avarice and competitiveness that motivated the European adventurers to seek a route to Asia centuries earlier. Addressing the basic chronology and themes of the first century of the nation's expansion, Schoonover locates the origins of the U.S. goal of globalization. U.S. involvement in the War of 1898 reflects many of the fundamental patterns in our national history -- exploration and discovery, labor exploitation, violence, racism, class conflict, and concern for security -- that many believe shaped America's course in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

"[W]e began our advance toward the Mokmer Airstrip. . . . The road climbed a ridge 15 or 20 feet high and we found ourselves on a flat coral plateau sparsely covered by small trees and scrub growth. . . . As we moved westward along the road, two of our destroyers were sailing abreast of the lead elements of the advancing column. The first indication of trouble was the roar of heavy artillery shells sailing over our heads . . . aimed at our destroyers. . . . Shortly after that our forward movement stopped, and we heard heavy firing from the head of the column. . . . As we waited, we began to hear heavy fire from the rear. . . . We were cut off and surrounded!" In the enormous literature of the Second World War, there are surprisingly few accounts of fighting in the southwest Pacific, fewer still by common infantrymen. This memoir, written with a simple and direct honesty that is rare indeed, follows a foot soldier's career from basic training to mustering out. It takes the reader into the jungles and caves of New Guinea and the Philippines during the long campaign to win the war against Japan. From basic training at Camp Roberts through combat, occupation, and the long journey home, Francis Catanzaro's account tells of the excitement, misery, cruelty, and terror of combat, and of the uneasy boredom of jungle camp life. A member of the famed 41st Infantry Brigade, the "Jungleers," Catanzaro saw combat at Hollandia, Biak, Zamboanga, and Mindanao. He was a part of the Japanese occupation force and writes with feeling about living among his former enemies and of the decision to drop the atom bomb. With the 41st Division in the Southwest Pacific is a powerful, gritty, and moving narrative of the life of a soldier during some of the most difficult fighting of World War II.

California Sabers is the story of the California Battalion and Hundred, a group of 500 select men who were the only organized group of Californians to fight in the East during the Civil War. They volunteered their enlistment bounty to pay their passage across Panama and on to
Massachusetts, where they became the cadre of the Second Massachusetts Cavalry.

From mid-1863 to July 1864, the Second Massachusetts fought a bloody guerilla war in northern Virginia against John S. Mosby, the confederacy s "Gray Ghost." In July 1864 the regiment became part of Sheridan s Army of the Shenandoah, and that fall it played a major role in the decisive battles of Winchester, Toms Run, and Cedar Creek.

In early 1865 the regiment was in the column that marched across Virginia destroying the vital railroad and canal that carried supplies from the Shenandoah Valley to the besieged Army of Northern Virginia. In late March, the Second Massachusetts was in the forefront of the battles at Dinwiddie Courthouse and Five Forks, the two actions that finally broke the stalemate at Petersburg and forced Lee to retreat to the west. In the ensuing chase, the regiment was the part of the cavalry spearhead that finally blocked Lee s army at Appomattox Courthouse.

This work, based on extensive research, is the first comprehensive history of this relatively unknown group and will be of great interest to Civil War enthusiasts and historians."

Some of the most brutally intense infantry combat in World War II occurred within Germany's Hrtgen Forest. Focusing on the bitterly fought battle between the American 22d Infantry Regiment and elements of the German LXXIV Korps around Grosshau, Rush chronicles small-unit combat at its most extreme and shows why, despite enormous losses, the Americans persevered in the Hrtgenwald "meat grinder," a battle similar to two punch-drunk fighters staggering to survive the round.

On 16 November 1944, the 22d Infantry entered the Hrtgen Forest as part of the U.S. Army's drive to cross the Roer River. During the next eighteen days, the 22d suffered more than 2,800 casualties-or about 86 percent of its normal strength of about 3,250 officers and men. After three days of fighting, the regiment had lost all three battalion commanders. After seven days, rifle company strengths stood at 50 percent and by battle's end each had suffered nearly 140 percent casualties.

Despite these horrendous losses, the 22d Regiment survived and fought on, due in part to army personnel policies that ensured that unit strengths remained high even during extreme combat. Previously wounded soldiers returned to their units and new replacements, "green" to battle, arrived to follow the remaining battle-hardened cadre. The attack halted only when no veterans remained to follow.

The German units in the Hurtgenwald suffered the same horrendous attrition, with one telling difference. German replacement policy detracted from rather than enhanced German combat effectiveness. Organizations had high paper strength but low manpower, and commanders consolidated decimated units time after time until these ever-dwindling bands of soldiers disappeared forever: killed, wounded, captured, or surrendered.
The performance of American and German forces during this harrowing eighteen days of combat was largely a product of their respective backgrounds, training, and organization. This pre-battle aspect, not normally seen in combat history, helps explain why the Americans were successful and the Germans were not.

Rush's work underscores both the horrors of combat and the resiliency of American organizations. While honoring the sacrifice and triumph of the common soldier, it also compels us to reexamine our views on the requisites for victory on the battlefield.

A groundbreaking book when first published in Russia in 2005, now Valeriy Zamulin's study of the crucible of combat during the titanic clash at Kursk - the fighting at Prokhorovka - is available in English. A former staff member of the Prokhorovka Battlefield State Museum, Zamulin has dedicated years of his life to the study of the battle of Kursk, and especially the fighting on its southern flank involving the famous attack of the II SS Panzer Corps into the teeth of deeply-echeloned Red Army defenses. A product of five years of intense research into the once-secret Central Archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Zamulin lays out in enormous detail the plans and tactics of both sides, culminating in the famous and controversial clash at Prokhorovka on 12 July 1943. Zamulin skillfully weaves reminiscences of Red Army and Wehrmacht soldiers and officers into the narrative of the fighting, using in part files belonging to the Prokhorovka Battlefield State Museum. Zamulin has the advantage of living in Prokhorovka, so he has walked the ground of the battlefield many times and has an intimate knowledge of the terrain. Examining the battle from primarily the Soviet side, Zamulin reveals the real costs and real achievements of the Red Army at Kursk, and especially Prokhorovka. He examines mistaken deployments and faulty decisions that hampered the Voronezh Front's efforts to contain the Fourth Panzer Army's assault, and the valiant, self-sacrificial fighting of the Red Army's soldiers and junior officers as they sought to slow the German advance, and then crush the II SS Panzer Corps with a heavy counterattack at Prokhorovka on 12 July. The combat on this day receives particular scrutiny, as Zamulin works to clarify the relative size of the contending forces, the actual area of this battle, and the costs suffered by both sides. The costs to General P. A. Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army and General A. S. Zhadov's 5th Guards Army as they slammed into 1st SS Panzer Grenadier Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, 3rd SS Panzer Grenadier Division Totenkopf and a portion of 2nd SS Panzer Grenadier Division Das Reich were particularly devastating, and Zamulin examines the nuts and bolts of the counteroffensive to see why this was so. Zamulin does not exclude the oft-overlooked efforts of Army Group Kempf's III Panzer Corps on the right-wing of the Fourth Panzer Army, as it sought to keep pace with the II SS Panzer Corps advance, and then breach the line of the Northern Donets River in order to link up with its left-hand neighbor in the region of Prokhorovka. Zamulin describes how the Soviet High Command and the Voronezh Front had to quickly cobble together a defense of this line with already battered units, but needed to reinforce it with fresh formations at the expense of the counterstroke at Prokhorovka. Printed on heavy stock gloss paper, illustrated with many photographs (including a colour section showing present-day views of the battlefield), specially-commissioned colour maps and supplemented with extensive tables of data, Zamulin's book is an outstanding contribution to the growing literature on the battle of Kursk, and further demolishes many of the myths and legends that grew up around this battle.

James W. Johnston was a self-confessed small-town youth, who like so many others patriotically stopped what he was doing and enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor. Johnston chose the Marines, a decision that sent him to years of bloody combat through the Pacific as Allied troops fought their way toward the Japanese home islands. Many did not come back; of those who did, very few have told us what it was like. Johnston tells us directly and honestly, taking us with his First Marine Division through New Guinea, New Britain, Peleliu, and Okinawa.

In one of the very few balanced accounts of Texas's epic struggle for independence from Mexico, Albert Nofi provides a chronicle of the events and personalities of the war. He includes readable and accessible maps of military movements and a strategic and tactical analysis of each battle, supplemented with technical information about the weapons used, casulty data, orders of battle, finances, and the story of a little-known war at sea. Prominent personalities of the was are profiled in sidebars, and maps of military movements are included. Nofi also addresses the extraordinary number of myths that the Alamo has engendered and exposes the truth about a conflict that has taken on legendary proportions.

Craig Chapman presents the definitive history of the First North Carolina Volunteers/11th Regiment North Carolina Troops--the legendary Bethel Regiment.

This is a Syriac text written, in all probability, by an inhabitant of Edessa almost immediately after the conclusion of the war between Rome and Persia in 502-506 AD. Although that conflict is treated in other ancient texts, none of them can match "Joshua" in his wealth of detail, his familiarity with the region where the hostilities occurred, and his proximity in time to the events. The Chronicle also vividly describes the famine and plague that swept through Edessa in the years immediately before the war. The work is a document of great importance for both the social and military history of late antiquity, remarkable for the information it provides on Roman and Persian empires alike.

John Spaul continues his up-dating of Conrad Cichorius' articles in Real-encyclopadie der Altertumswissenschaft with this complete documentation of the epigraphic sources for cohorts of the Roman army. His complementary volume Ala 2 is still available. Contents: Cohortes Ciuium Romanorum; Cohortes Provinciae Sardiniae, Lusitaniae, Hispaniae, Galliae, Britanniae, Germaniae, Alpium, Raetiae & Norici, Dalmatiae, Pannoniae, Moesiae & Macedoniae, Senatus, Orientis, Australia, Aliae & Alienae. The catalogue is followed by a broad discussion of cohorts and their deployment around the Roman Empire.

Did the Vietnam War have to happen? And why couldn't it have ended earlier? These are among the questions that Robert McNamara and his collaborators ask in "Argument Without End," a book that will stand as a major contribution to what we know about the Vietnam War. Drawing on a series of meetings that brought together, for the first time ever, senior American and Vietnamese officials who had served during the war, the book looks at the many instances in which one side, or both, made crucial mistakes that led to the war and its duration. Using Vietnamese and Chinese documents, many never before made public, McNamara reveals both American and Vietnamese blunders, and points out ways in which such mistakes can be avoided in the future. He also shows conclusively that war could not be won militarily by the United States.McNamara's last book on Vietnam was one of the most controversial books ever published in this country. This book will reignite the passionate debate about the war, about McNamara, and about the lessons we can take away from the tragedy.

When brothers William and John Wright arrived in the United States from Ireland in 1850 and could find no other suitable employment, they joined the U.S. Armys Regiment of Mounted Rifles, which served on the Texas frontier. Their description of their experiences is unusual on several counts: it is a view of Texas in the 1850s, when personal accounts were rare, and it is written from the point of view of visitors to this nation. And because the Wrights published their book in 1857, only three years after they left the army, their story has an immediacy lacking in many memoirs. He was a man in the prime of life, tall and slender, with black plaited hair descending all the way down his back, and a countenance, whose handsome, intelligent, and dignified expression, was scarcely concealed by the red streaks of war-paint that covered it. Little mercy is shown to an Indian in war, and especially by the Texan rangers, who are scarcely, if at all, advanced beyond the savage state themselves. So the prisoner was immediately tied to a tree, and a number of men were selected to shoot him. On ascertaining his fate, he instantly commenced singing his death-song...which vibrated like the notes of a clarion on the air of early night. ..until his voice was lost in the fatal volley, and all was over. This softcover facsimile of the Book Club of Texas' 1995 fine limited edition of 300 copies makes this classic firsthand account available to a broad audience for the first time since 1857. It is illustrated with wood engravings from William H. Emorys Report of the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey.