Steel My Soldiers' Hearts is the story, from D-Day to the armistice, of a Canadian tank man who fought the campaign in Northwest Europe at the sharp end - told from the fighting man's perspective. The armoured war involved the main battles for which WWII was famous: the Normandy landing; the battles to defend the beachhead; the fighting for Caen and Falaise; the pursuit across France and the Low Countries; the "Market Garden" exercise to capture the Rhine bridges at Arnhem; the Siegfried Line penetration and finally the Rhine crossing before the march deep into Germany. Stewart's personal war also involved the loss of three tanks and many gallant comrades. To accomplish their feats, the author and his colleagues had to "steel their hearts" indeed.
This book contains comments (in separate chapters) which could have been made by officers in their messes, postulated via the author's knowledge of the history of WWII. However, since the author was not an officer during the war, these chapters are pure fancy, and this is why the work is called a novel - not an autobiography. The stories are exactly as Stewart experienced them, and the names are of people, many still alive, that were with the author.

Philip D. Beidler, who served as an armored cavalry platoon leader in Vietnam, sees lees and less of the hard-won perspective of the common soldier in what America has made of that war. Each passing year, he says, dulls out sense of immediacy about Vietnam's costs, opening wider the temptation to make it something more necessary, neatly contained, and justifiable than it should ever become. Here Beidler draws on deeply personal memories to reflect on the war's lingering aftereffects and the shallow, evasive ways we deal with them. Beidler brings back the war he knew in chapters on its vocabulary, music, literature, and film. His catalog of soldier slang reveals how finely a tour of Vietnam could hone one's sense of absurdity. His survey of the war's pop hits looks for meaning in the soundtrack many veterans still hear in their heads. Beidler also explains how "Viet Pulp" literature about snipers, tunnel rats, and other hard-core types has pushed aside masterpieces like Duong Thu Huong's "Novel without a Name. Likewise we learn why the movie "The Deer Hunter doesn't "get it" about Vietnam but why "Platoon or "We Were Soldiers sometimes nearly do. As Beidler takes measure of his own wartime politics and morals, he ponders the divergent careers of such figures as William Calley, the army lieutenant whose name is synonymous with the civilian massacre at My Lai; and an old friend, poet John Balaban, a conscientious objector who performed alternative duty in Vietnam as a schoolteacher and hospital worker. Beidler also looks at Vietnam alongside other conflicts--including the war on international terrorism. He once hoped, he says, that Vietnam had fractured our sense of providential destinyand geopolitical invincibility but now realizes, with dismay, that those myths are still with us. "Americans have always wanted their apocalypses," writes Beidler, "and they have always wanted them now."

This second volume in the two-volume series Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5, comprises nineteen chapters and is largely based on the papers presented at a special conference convened at Nichinan, Kyushu, Japan, in 2005. Importantly, it brings together a set of original essays by Japanese, Korean and Chinese scholars, together with analyses by Russian, US and European specialists, thereby reflecting the multinational mix of contemporary influences forming the international vortex of the war. The contributions are thematically structured into six topics: The Force of Personality, Facets of Neutrality, The Power of Intelligence, Interior Lines, Gender and Race, and Global Repercussions. Above all, through the use of primary sources which could not be readily accessed by contemporaries, the contributors have sought to highlight the setting of the conflict in the development of international politics and strategic thinking in the twentieth century, but at the same time eliciting fresh perspectives on the human experiences and dilemmas which impacted on different individuals and groups during the course of the war.

Edmund Candler was the correspondent of the correspondent of the Daily Mail who accompanied the British expeditionary forces that in 1903. He provides an eyewitness account of Great Britain's first and last military incursion in to the forbidden land on the roof of the world .The British expedition to Tibet in 1903 and 1904, led by Sir Frances seeking to prevent the Russian Empire from interfering in Tibetan affairs and thus gaining a foothold in one of the buffer states surrounding British India.

'Breathtakingly, brutally and hilariously honest. This is the finest book about youth and war I've ever read.' -Clinton McKinzie, bestselling author of Crossing the Line 'The sergeant major, right after he told us at Fleibel's funeral that nobody owed us anything and took back the medals he had given us, he told us, all of us, that it's our duty to tell our Army story. That there was a lot of negative publicity out there circulating about the Army and that each one of us has an Army story within them, and it was our responsibility to have it be told. I'm not sure that this is the story the sergeant major had in mind, but he didn't specify, he just told us to tell our story.' When the 9/11 terrorist attacks took place, Johnny Rico was well into his twenties, with a masters degree and a dead-end job. Inspired by this terrible event, Rico decided to join the Army, not so much out of patriotism as a desire to find purpose in his life. Far from being a star soldier, the author found himself assigned to the worst unit in the army. Rico joined the hunt for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Unconvinced by what he saw around him, yet fully aware that a dangerous enemy was never far away, the author became increasingly cynical about the US Army's role in Afghanistan. The Story I Was Ordered to Write is a compelling tale, written with great honesty and humour. About the Author Johnny Rico graduated from the University of Colorado in 2001. A month after September 11, 2001, he joined the Army under the delayed entry program. He was sent to Afghanistan with C. Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Infantry, of the 25th Infantry (Light) Division in Hawaii, where he served as an infantryman in three different areas of operation. He was released from active duty in September 2005.

"From Pusan to Panmunjom" is the candid and revealing wartime memoir of the soldier who, at the age of thirty-two, became South Korea's first four-star general. It brings an unprecedented perspective to a cataclysmic war.

Despite the growing number of publications on the Russo-Japanese War, an abundance of questions and issues related to this topic remain unsolved, or call for a reexamination. This 30-chapter volume, the first in the two-volume project Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, provides a comprehensive reexamination of the origins of the conflict, the various dimensions of the nineteen-month conflagration, the legacy of the war, and its place in the history of the twentieth century. Such an enterprise is not only timely but unique. It has benefited from a multinational team of thirty-two scholars from twelve nations representing a broad disciplinary background. The majority of them focus on topics never researched before and without exception provide a novel and critical view of the war. This reexamination is, of course, facilitated by a century-long perspective as well as an impressive assortment of primary and secondary sources, many of them unexplored and, in a number of cases, unavailable earlier.

In the vast body of material dealing with Custer's ""last stand,"" the journal kept by young Lieutenant James H. Bradley of the Seventh Infantry is at once graphic, incisive, and of first-rate historical importance. It is also little known.It records in detail the major incidents of the march of the Montana Column, under command of Colonel John Gibbon, to participate in the Sioux campaign of 1876. Beginning on March 17, when five companies of the regiment left Fort Shaw, it traces the progress of the column and ends abruptly with the entry for June 26, when Gibbon's command camped on the site of present Crow Agency, Montana, amid abundant indications that Custer's Seventh Cavalry had met with disaster. A letter written by Bradley describing the finding of the bodies on the Custer battlefield on the Little Big Horn is appended to provide a fitting conclusion. Bradley's journal, however, is much more than an account of a military command moving through unsettled country against a primitive foe. The Lieutenant was a gifted writer with definite scientific and historical interests, a man of infinite curiosity, who not only recorded the daily progress but also added ""historical notices of the country traversed."" His description of the grief of the Crow scouts on hearing the first news of the disaster of the Little Big Horn is a classic in the literature of the American West. A rare treat for all readers interested in the Indian wars, the journal was first published in a limited edition in 1896.

The SIPRI Yearbook is as an authoritative and independent source of data and analysis on armaments, disarmament and international security. It provides an overview of developments in international security, weapons and technology, military expenditure, arms production and the arms trade, and armed conflicts and conflict management, along with efforts to control conventional, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. This 50th edition of the SIPRI Yearbook covers developments during 2018, including - Armed conflicts and conflict management, with an overview of armed conflicts and peace processes as well as a focus on global and regional trends in peace operations - Military expenditure, international arms transfers and developments in arms production, - World nuclear forces, with an overview of each of the nine nuclear-armed states and their nuclear modernization programmes - Nuclear arms control, featuring North Korean-US nuclear diplomacy, developments in the INF Treaty and Russian-US nuclear arms control and disarmament, and implementation of Iran's nuclear deal - Chemical and biological security threats, including the investigation of allegations of chemical weapon use in the Middle East and the attempted assassination in the United Kingdom - Conventional arms control, with a focus on global instruments, including efforts to regulate lethal autonomous weapon systems and explosive weapons in populated areas, and dialogue on international cyber security - Dual-use and arms trade controls, including developments in the Arms Trade Treaty, multilateral arms embargoes and export control regimes, including the challenges of seeking to control transfers of technology as well as annexes listing arms control and disarmament agreements, international security cooperation bodies, and key events in 2018.

Some will be shocked to find out that the United States and Ho Chi Minh, our nemesis for much of the Vietnam War, were once allies. Indeed, during the last year of World War II, American spies in Indochina found themselves working closely with Ho Chi Minh and other anti-colonial factions - compelled by circumstances to fight together against the Japanese. Dixee Bartholomew-Feis reveals how this relationship emerged and operated and how it impacted Vietnam's struggle for independence. The men of General William Donovan's newly-formed Office of Strategic Services closely collaborated with communist groups in both Europe and Asia against the Axis enemies. In Vietnam, this meant that OSS officers worked with Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, whose ultimate aim was to rid the region of all imperialist powers, not just the Japanese. Ho, for his part, did whatever he could to encourage the OSS's negative view of the French, who were desperate to regain their colony. Revealing details not previously known about their covert operations, Bartholomew-Feis chronicles the exploits of these allies as they developed their network of informants, sabotaged the Japanese occupation's infrastructure, conducted guerrilla operations, and searched for downed American fliers and Allied POWs. Although the OSS did not bring Ho Chi Minh to power, Bartholomew-Feis shows that its apparent support for the Viet Minh played a significant symbolic role in helping them fill the power vacuum left in the wake of Japan's surrender. Her study also hints that, had America continued to champion the anti-colonials and their quest for independence, rather than caving in to the French, we might have been spared our long and very lethal war in Vietnam. Based partly on interviews with surviving OSS agents who served in Vietnam, Bartholomew-Feis's engaging narrative and compelling insights speak to the yearnings of an oppressed people - and remind us that history does indeed make strange bedfellows.|Some will be shocked to find out that the United States and Ho Chi Minh, our nemesis for much of the Vietnam War, were once allies. This book reveals how this relationship emerged and operated and how it impacted Vietnam's struggle for independence.

John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition. Two weeks a year, a free education. But in 2002, one term shy of graduation and on his honeymoon, Crawford was shipped off to the front lines in Iraq. Once there he was determined to get it all down, to chronicle the daily life of a soldier.

On June 8, 1967, at the height of the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Israeli air and naval forces attacked the USS LIBERTY, an intelligence-collection ship in the service of Israel's closest ally, while that vessel steamed in international waters off the Sinai Peninsula. The Israelis killed 34 Americans, wounded 171, and nearly sank the ship. Dozens of theories exist about what happened that day. Official inquiries conducted in both the United States and Israel attributed the event to faulty communications and tragic error, but survivors remain outspoken and not alone in their belief that the Israelis acted deliberately. Federal judge and former naval aviator A. Jay Cristol places the incident in its proper context. The Israeli strike, he argues, can only be understood in light of the Cold War, the outbreak of war in the Middle East, interservice rivalry within the Israeli Defense Forces, and the chaos of an operational environment. That both the United States and Israel kept much of the data concerning the incident classified for more than ten years served only to fuel the fires of intrigue and charges of conspiracy to cover up the truth, but since the incident significant portions of most of the official inquiries have now been declassified. Cristol draws on these, on documents recently obtained by him through the Freedom of Information Act, and on extensive oral history interviews to deliver the most comprehensive treatment of the episode that threatened to ruin Israel's relations with the United States and has served as a nagging source of suspicion for so many years.

The Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal was the most bitterly fought contest of nineteenth-century Europe. From 1808 to 1814, Spanish regulars and guerrillas, along with British forces led by Sir John Moore and the duke of Wellington, battled Napoleon's troops across the length and breadth of the Iberian Peninsula. Napoleon considered the war so insignificant that he rarely bothered to bring to it his military genius, relying instead on his marshals and simultaneously launching his disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. Yet the Peninsular War was to end with total defeat for the French, and in 1813 Wellington's army crossed the Pyrenees into mainland France. What Napoleon had called "the Spanish ulcer" ultimately helped bring down the French empire. Michael Howard of Oxford University hailed this book as "a major achievement...the first brief and balanced account of the war to have appeared within our generation." Illustrated with over a hundred maps and fifty contemporary drawings and paintings, this is a richly detailed history of a crucial period in history that resonates powerfully to this day--and figures prominently in Bernard Cornwell's internationally acclaimed novels of the Napoleonic era.

The Russian writer Isaac Babel (1894-1940) is widely acknowledged to be one of the great masters of twentieth-century literature, hailed as a genius by such critics as Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. The work for which he is best known is a cycle of stories called Red Cavalry, which depicts the exploits of the Cossack cavalry during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920 and is based on Babel's experiences as he rode with the Cossacks during the campaign. Throughout this period Babel kept a diary, in which he recorded the devastation of the war, the extreme cruelty of the Polish and Red armies alike toward the Jewish population in Ukraine and eastern Poland, and his own conflicted role as both Soviet revolutionary and Jew. The 1920 Diary, a vital source for Red Cavalry as well as a compelling narrative, is now published in English for the first time. The 1920 Diary is the most significant contemporary account of the tragedy of Eastern European Jewry during this period. The Diary also yields important insights into Babel's personal evolution, showing his youthful curiosity and his anguish as, frequently concealing his own Jewish identity, he mingled with the victimized Jews of the region's shtetls and with his Cossack comrades. Finally, the Diary sheds light on Babel's artistic development, revealing the path from observations recorded in excitement and despair to the painstakingly crafted narratives of the Red Cavalry cycle.

"Dommen s book promises to be the definitive political history of Indochina during the Franco-American era." William M. Leary,
E. Merton Coulter Professor of History, University of Georgia

This magisterial study by Arthur J. Dommen sets the Indochina wars 'French and American' in perspective as no book that has come before. He summarizes the history of the peninsula from the Vietnamese War of Independence from China in 930-39 through the first French military actions in 1858, when the struggle of the peoples of Indochina with Western powers began.

Dommen details the crucial episodes in the colonization of Indochina by the French and the indigenous reaction to it. The struggle for national sovereignty reached an acute state at the end of World War II, when independent governments rapidly assumed power in Vietnam and Cambodia. When the French returned, the struggle became one of open warfare, with Nationalists and Communists gripped in a contest for ascendancy in Vietnam, while the rulers of Cambodia and Laos sought to obtain independence by negotiation.

The withdrawal of the French after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu brought the Indochinese face-to-face, whether as friends or as enemies, with the Americans. In spite of an armistice in 1954, the war between Hanoi and Saigon resumed as each enlisted the help of foreign allies, which led to the renewed loss of sovereignty as a result of alliances and an increasingly heavy loss of lives. Meticulous and detailed, Dommen s telling of this complicated story is always judicious. Nevertheless, many people will find his analysis of the Diem coup a disturbing account of American plotting and murder.

This is an essential book for anyone who wants to understand Vietnam and the people who fought against the United States and won.
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"Firefight at Yechon" is the harrowing story of Charles M. Bussey, a former Tuskegee airman and one of the first American combatants in the Korean War. He led the Seventy-seventh Engineer Combat Company for 205 days filled with almost continual fighting, during which he and his fellow American soldiers served with distinction. They also felt the effects of racism in the U.S. Army and wartime media, which singled out African American units for blame in the early days of the war.

"Firefight at Yechon" sets the record straight about the contribution of African Americans in the Korean War. It also paints an unforgettably realistic portrait of the terrifying first days of fighting in 1950, when American soldiers, both black and white, were reeling under the assault of the North Korean People's Army. The Seventy-seventh Engineer Combat Company played an instrumental role in the retaking of Yechon on 20 July, the first major victory for the U.S. Army. The carnage of that fight and the shining courage of his fellow soldiers would never be forgotten by Bussey.

* Powerful, passionate and highly topical critique of humanitarian intervention* International political theorist with eight top-selling books"Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat."In this first time translation in English, Danilo Zolo considers Carl Schmitt's maxim in the context of the "humanitarian war" waged against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the Spring of 1999 by 19 NATO countries. This erudite and disturbing book is a political, legal and philosophical reflection on an extraordinary display of Western Power and its present and future impact on the global system of international relations.Zolo's account of the war is located within the context of the irresistible drive of globalization which he argues brings economic, financial and military, ecological and ethnic-religious turbulence in its wake. Not only the future of the Balkan region, he suggests, is at stake here, but the fate of international law, the future role of the United Nations and the political destiny of Europe.

"Outstanding....Hibbert has an eye for character and a gift for bringing to life the impact of small-minded incompetents on the wide sweep of history."— Associated Press

The story of this war has usually been told in terms of a conflict between blundering British generals and their rigidly disciplined red-coated troops on the one side and heroic American patriots in their homespun shirts and coonskin caps on the other. In this fresh, compelling narrative, Christopher Hibbert portrays the realities of a war that raged the length of an entire continent—a war that thousands of George Washington's fellow countrymen condemned and that he came close to losing.

Based on a wide variety of sources and alive with astute character sketches and eyewitness accounts, Redcoats and Rebels presents a vivid and convincing picture of the "cruel, accursed" war that changed the world forever. 16 pages of illustrations. "Hibbert combines impeccable scholarship with a liveliness of style that lures the reader from page to page."—Sunday Telegraph

Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Concise Edition

The closest most of us will ever come to being inside the Oval Office at a moment of crisis.

For sheer drama, this work of history may never be duplicated. The events of the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold in the actual words of President John F. Kennedy and his top advisers. Now available in a new, concise edition, this book retains its gripping sense of history in the making. 20 photographs.

"[A] splendid achievement, as powerful and exciting a book as one is likely to read this year...."—Barry Gewen, New York Times Book Review

"Gripping history."—Richard J. Tofel, Wall Street Journal

"[M]esmerizing. I was utterly fascinated....the best, fullest account of crisis yet and will remain so for decades to come."—Stephen E. Ambrose

"[A]s close as most people will ever get to being a fly on the wall during the discussions of leaders."—Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, James G. Blight

The three Punic Wars lasted over 100 years, between 264 BC and 146 BC. They represented a struggle for supremacy in the Mediterranean between the bludgeoning land power of Rome, bent on imperial conquest, and the great maritime power of Carthage with its colonies and trading posts spread around the Mediterranean. This book reveals how the dramas and tragedies of the Punic Wars exemplify many political and military lessons which are as relevant today as when Hannibal and Scipio Africanus fought to determine the course of history in the Mediterranean.