By the Sword is an epic history of sword fighting—a science, an art, and, for many, a religion that began at the dawn of civilization in ancient Egypt and has been an obsession for mankind ever since. With wit and insight, Richard Cohen gives us an engrossing history of the world via the sword.

The U.S. Army entered World War II unprepared. In addition, lacking Germany's blitzkrieg approach of coordinated armor and air power, the army was organized to fight two wars: one on the ground and one in the air. Previous commentators have blamed Congressional funding and public apathy for the army's unprepared state. David E. Johnson believes instead that the principal causes were internal: army culture and bureaucracy, and their combined impact on the development of weapons and doctrine.

Johnson examines the U.S. Army's innovations for both armor and aviation between the world wars, arguing that the tank became a captive of the conservative infantry and cavalry branches, while the airplane's development was channeled by air power insurgents bent on creating an independent air force. He maintains that as a consequence, the tank's potential was hindered by the traditional arms, while air power advocates focused mainly on proving the decisiveness of strategic bombing, neglecting the mission of tactical support for ground troops. Minimal interaction between ground and air officers resulted in insufficient cooperation between armored forces and air forces.

Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers makes a major contribution to a new understanding of both the creation of the modern U.S. Army and the Army's performance in World War II. The book also provides important insights for future military innovation.

Beginning with World War II, missiles transformed the art of war. For the first time, cities of warring nations were vulnerable to sudden, unannounced, long-distance attacks. At the same time, rockets made possible one of the great triumphs of the modern age--the exploration of space. Beginning with the origins of rocketry in medieval and early modern Asia, "Rockets and Missiles" traces the history of the technology that led to both the great fear of global warfare and the great excitement of the Space Age.

This volume focuses on rocketry in late-twentieth-century Western Europe, Russia, and the United States, as well as the spread of rocket technology to East Asia and the Middle East. It covers the full history of rocket technology--including how rockets improved in performance, reliability, and versatility and how they affected everyday life.

In June 1941 - during the first week of the Nazi invasion in the Soviet Union - the quiet cornfields and towns of Western Ukraine were awakened by the clanking of steel and thunder of explosions; this was the greatest tank battle of the Second World War. About 3,000 tanks from the Red Army Kiev Special Military District clashed with about 800 German tanks of Heeresgruppe South. Why did the numerically superior Soviets fail? Hundreds of heavy KV-1 and KV-2 tanks, the five-turret giant T-35 and famous T-34 failed to stop the Germans. Based on recently available archival sources, A. Isaev describes the battle from a new point of view: that in fact it's not the tanks, but armoured units, which win or lose battles. The Germans during the Blitzkrieg era had superior tactics and organisations for their tank forces. The German Panzer Division could defeat their opponents not by using tanks, but by using artillery, which included heavy artillery, and motorized infantry and engineers. The Red Army's armoured units - the Mechanized Corps - had a lot of teething troubles, as all of them lacked accompanying infantry and artillery. In 1941 the Soviet Armoured Forces had to learn the difficult science - and mostly 'art' - of combined warfare. Isaev traces the role of these factors in a huge battle around the small Ukrainian town of Dubno. Popular myths about impregnable KV and T-34 tanks are laid to rest. In reality, the Germans in 1941 had the necessary tools to combat them. The author also defines the real achievements on the Soviet side: the blitzkrieg in the Ukraine had been slowed down. For the Soviet Union, the military situation in June 1941 was much worse than it was for France and Britain during the Western Campaign in 1940. The Red Army wasn't ready to fight as a whole and the border district's armies lacked infantry units, as they were just arriving from the internal regions of the USSR. In this case, the Red Army tanks became the 'Iron Shield' of the Soviet Union; they even operated as fire brigades. In many cases, the German infantry - not tanks - became the main enemy of Soviet armoured units in the Dubno battle. Poorly organized, but fierce, tank-based counter-attacks slowed down the German infantry - and while the Soviet tanks lost the battle, they won the war.

Thread of the Silkworm tells the story of one of the most monumental blunders the United States committed during its era of McCarthyism. It is the biography of Dr.Tsien Hsue-shen, a pioneer of the American space age who was mysteriously accused of being a Communist and deported to China, where he became-to America's continuing chagrin-the father of the Chinese missile program.

Nazi Germany's MP 38 and MP 40 submachine guns are among World War II's most iconic weapons, but it is often forgotten that they continued in use all over the world for many decades after 1945, even being seen during the fighting in Libya in 2011. Widely issued to Fallschirmjager (parachute infantry) owing to their portability and folding stocks, the MP 38 and MP 40 became the hallmarks of Germany's infantry section and platoon leaders; by the war's end the Germans were following the Soviet practice of issuing entire assault platoons with submachine guns. Over 1 million were produced during World War II, many finding their way after 1945 into the hands of paramilitary and irregular forces, from Israel to Vietnam; the Norwegian armed forces continued to use them until the early 1990s, and examples and derivatives saw widespread use in the Yugoslav wars of that decade.
The submachine-gun concept had its origins in the trenches of World War I, as German designers sought to develop a new weapon that utilized pistol ammunition to deliver devastating bursts of automatic fire at close ranges. The massively influential Bergmann MP 18, the world's first purpose-built 'machine pistol' (submachine gun), spearheaded the German assaults of 1918 and, although the Treaty of Versailles banned the study and manufacture of light automatic weapons in Germany, weapons designers like Berthold Geipel and Heinrich Vollmer of Erfurter Maschinenfabrik (Erma) covertly continued to innovate in this field.
An open-bolt, blowback-operated weapon with a single-feed 32-round magazine offering fully automatic fire only and a patented telescoping return spring guide that served as a pneumatic recoil buffer, Geipel and Vollmer's MP 38 drew upon earlier prototypes such as the VMP 1930 and MP 36, as well as the EMP 35, another Erma design that was widely exported and saw combat in the Spanish Civil War. The MP 38 was one of the first of the lighter, more compact "second generation" of submachine guns, utilizing stamped-steel and plastic components that made it easier to produce than earlier types such as the M1928 Thompson and the MP 18, which featured wooden stocks and employed machined-steel parts. It was rapidly adopted by Germany's armed forces and first saw combat during the invasion of Poland in 1939. An improved version, the MP 40, made greater use of stamped steel and electro-spot welding to simplify production further; a twin-magazine version, the MP 40/II, was briefly and unsuccessfully considered as a counter to the select-fire Soviet PPSh-41 with its 71-round drum magazine.
The MP 38 and the MP 40 saw combat in the hands of German troops in every theater in which they were involved, and have become synonymous with Nazi Germany's war effort in popular perception. Even during the war Geipel and Vollmer's designs, mistakenly attributed to the rival designer Hugo Schmeisser by the Allies, profoundly influenced the British Sten and the US M3 "grease gun" as well as postwar weapons such as the Spanish Star Modelo Z-45 and the Yugoslav M56. Featuring specially commissioned full-color artwork and period and close-up photographs, this is the story of the origins, combat use, and lasting influence of two of World War II's most famous firearms.