At the close of World War II, Allied forces faced frightening new German secret weapons--buzz bombs, V-2's, and the first jet fighters. When Hitler's war machine began to collapse, the race was on to snatch these secrets before the Soviet Red Army found them.

The last battle of World War II, then, was not for military victory but for the technology of the Third Reich. In "American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffe's Secrets," Wolfgang W. E. Samuel assembles from official Air Force records and survivors' interviews the largely untold stories of the disarmament of the once mighty Luftwaffe and of Operation Lusty--the hunt for Nazi technologies.

In April 1945 American armies were on the brink of winning their greatest military victory, yet America's technological backwardness was shocking when measured against that of the retreating enemy. Senior officers, including the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold, knew all too well the seemingly overwhelming victory was less than it appeared. There was just too much luck involved in its outcome.

Two intrepid American Army Air Forces colonels set out to regain America's technological edge. One, Harold E. Watson, went after the German jets; the other, Donald L. Putt, went after the Nazis' intellectual capital--their world-class scientists.

With the help of German and American pilots, Watson brought the jets to America; Putt persevered as well and succeeded in bringing the German scientists to the Army Air Forces' aircraft test and evaluation center at Wright Field. A young P-38 fighter pilot, Lloyd Wenzel, a Texan of German descent, then turned these enemy aliens into productive American citizens--men who built the rockets that took America to the moon, conquered the sound barrier, and laid the foundation for America's civil and military aviation of the future.

"American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffe's Secrets" details the contest won, a triumph that shaped America's victories in the Cold War.

The German destroyer fleet of World War II consisted of nine classes: the Diether Von Roeder Class, the Leberecht Maas Class and the wartime classes Z23, Z35, Z37, Z40, Z43, Z46 and Z52. These vessels, though fewer in number than the British destroyer fleet, tended to be much bigger and more powerful than their allied counterparts. They served their country well in operations in the Channel, North Sea, the Far North and in the rescue of civilians from East Prussia during the final days of the war. This title describes their design, development and operational use from the fjords of Narvik to the final days of the war.

The proliferation of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is now the single most serious security concern for governments around the world. Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James J. Wirtz compare how military threats, strategic cultures, and organizations shape the way leaders intend to employ these armaments. They reveal the many frightening ways that emerging military powers and terrorist groups are planning the unthinkable by preparing to use chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in future conflicts. Distinguished specialists consider several states and organizations that have this weaponry: Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel, as well as the Aum Shinrikyo cult. The contributors expose plans for using unconventional weapons, highlighting the revolutionary effects these arsenals might have on international politics and regional disputes.

Assesses the challenges facing the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union in controlling and monitoring military-related exports. These states inherited the weapons, materials and technology of the Soviet Union, but not the ability to control their borders or the movement of sensitive items. This book examines and compares export control development throughout the former Soviet Union and explores the various theoretical approaches involved.

Although skill, leadership, strategy, and number of forces have been important factors in battles, armaments have played the most decisive role in determining ultimate military victory. Entranced by the power and precision of armaments, man has continuously invented faster, more accurate, and more devastating weapons, from the javelin, stone axe, sword, and the arrow to the cannon, musket, rifle, tank, super-fortress, and missile. In this study of the influence of armaments on history, J.F.C. Fuller shows how the inventive genius of man can potentially obliterate his sense of moral values and destroy civilization. Divided into armament epochs--Ages of Valour, Chivalry, Gunpowder, Steam, Oil, and Atomic Energy--"Armament and History" examines the most influential military innovations of each period as well as the key leaders (including Alexander, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, and Napoleon) who skillfully employed these weapons. Although the author acknowledges that war cannot be eliminated entirely, he urges man to impose restrictions on warfare before society descends into a second Dark Age. Completed immediately after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--chilling examples of mass destruction caused by armaments--this impassioned work remains relevant more than a half-century later.

Hitler first considered an invasion of Great Britain in autumn 1940, then scheduled Operation Barbarossa, the conquest of the European part of the Soviet Union, for May 1941. Anxious to emulate Hitler's successes, the Italian dictator Mussolini embarked upon unnecessary military adventures in North Africa and the Balkans, which forced Hitler's intervention, diverting and depleting precious German resources, and a six-week postponement of Barbarossa. In this second of four volumes [Men-at-Arms 311, 316, 326 & 330] on the German Army of the Second World War, Nigel Thomas examines the uniforms and insignia of the forces involved in North Africa and the Balkans.

Ultimately, World War II was the first war won by technology, but within only a few weeks after the war began, the U.S. Navy realized its torpedo program was a dismal failure. Submarine skippers reported that most of their torpedoes were either missing the targets or failing to explode if they did hit. The United States had to work fast if it expected to compete with the Japanese Long Lance, the biggest and fastest torpedo in the world, and Germany's electric and sonar models. Hellions of the Deep tells the dramatic story of how Navy planners threw aside the careful procedures of peacetime science and initiated "radical research" gathering together the nation's best scientists and engineers in huge research centers and giving them freedom of experimentation to create sophisticated weaponry with a single goal--winning the war.

The largest center for torpedo work was a requisitioned gymnasium at Harvard University, where the most famous names in science worked with the best graduate students from all around the country at the business of war. They had to produce tangible weapons, to consider production and supply tactics, to take orders from the military, and, in many cases, also to teach the military how to use the weapons they developed. World War II grew into a chess match played by scientists and physicists, and it became the only war in history to be won by weapons invented during the conflict.

For this book, Robert Gannon conducted numerous interviews over a twenty-year period with scientists, engineers, physicists, submarine skippers, and Navy bureaucrats, all involved in the development of the advanced weapons technology that won the war. While the search for new weapons was deadly serious, stretching imagination and resourcefulness to the limit each day, the need was obvious: American ships were being blown up daily just outside the Boston harbor. These oral histories reveal that, in retrospect, surprising even to those who went through it, the search for the "hellions of the deep" was, for many, the most exciting period of their lives.

While the US Marine Corps was one of the smallest of American armed services in World War II (1939-1945), its contribution to the final victory cannot be overstated. The US Marine Corps may have only comprised 5 percent of America's armed forces, but it suffered 10 percent of all World War II combat casualties. Above all, the amphibious nature of the war in the Pacific imposed on the Marine Corps greater tasks than any it had ever before been called upon to perform. This title details the organization, weapons and equipment of the US Marines of World War II.

Making Arms in the Machine Age traces the growth and development of the United States Arsenal at Frankford, Pennsylvania, from its origin in 1816 to 1870. During this period, the arsenal evolved from a small post where skilled workers hand-produced small arms ammunition to a full-scale industrial complex employing a large civilian workforce.

James Farley uses the history of the arsenal to examine larger issues including the changing technology of early nineteenth-century warfare, the impact of new technology on the United States Army, and the reactions of workers and their families and communities to the coming of industrialization. Shortly after the War of 1812, the U. S. Army founded several new arsenals, including Frankford, to build up supplies of arms and ammunition then in short supply. At that time, the Army was held in low regard because of its perceived poor performance in the war, so the arrival of arsenals was not welcomed. By 1870, however, the arsenal at Frankford had integrated itself into the community and become a valued and respected member of it.

Farley argues that the Ordnance Department of the U. S. Army created an industrial system of manufacture at Frankford well in advance of private industry. He also contends that the evolution of the Army into an employer of a large-scale civilian workforce helped to end the isolation and anti-militarism that plagued it after the War of 1812. Farley's study joins recent work in the history of technology, such as Judith McGaw's That Wonderful Machine, that seeks to understand technological change in its social and cultural context.

As World War II entered its later stages and Germany was forced increasingly onto the defensive, the need for fast-moving mobile forces lessened and the Wehrmacht required better protected and more powerfully armed tanks. After debacles against the T-34, Hitler and the Panzerwaffe were determined not to be unprepared again. The result of this determination was the production of the heaviest and largest tank to see combat during World War II, the Tiger II or Konigstiger (Kingtiger). This title examines this formidable weapon, covering the problems and controversies surrounding its design and production as well as a detailed listing of every unit that was equipped with the Tiger II.

This is the third volume of a projected four-volume work delineating, in text and voluminous illustrations, every aspect of the uniforms and equipment of that most colorful of all United States military forces - the cavalry.In Volumes I and II the author described and pictured the uniforms, arms, and equipment of the cavalry from Revolutionary days to the outbreak of the Indian Wars. In this volume the author addresses the period of the cavalry's decisive conquest of the Indians and the securing of the western frontier, the Spanish-American War and the glory of ""Teddy Roosevelt's boys,"" and the years when the thunder of the Great War in Europe was echoing ominously across the Atlantic to America. Each era made its demands upon the horse soldier and his mount, and the author shows how the government dressed, armed, and supplied them to meet those demands. Volume III, like the earlier volumes, is lavishly illustrated with two color plates and 168 black-and-white drawing, meticulously detailed. This book and the two earlier volumes in the series are indispensable reference works for researchers and historians of America's military past.

This is the second volume of a projected four-volume work. In Volume I the author delineated the uniforms, arms, accouterments, and equipment of the period from 1776 to 1850. In this volume he addresses himself to the eventful, bloody tragic mid-nineteenth century. Here he describes the dress and equipment of the horse soldier of the early frontier, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the wars with the Indians. The uniforms, insignia, decorations, arms, and horse gear are described and profusely illustrated in three color plates and 126 black-and-white drawings. For his models the author used actual uniforms and equipment, supported by official government documents.

Among the subjects covered in this volume are the dress and equipment manufactured to meet the needs of cavalrymen at the early outposts east of the Missouri and in the brief War with Mexico that was a testing ground for the Civil War to come. (Ironically, much of the equipment and arms used by the United States Cavalry was designed by officers and government employees who later joined the Confederates.)

After the war came a new duty for the horse soldier--pacification of the hostile Indians of the West. As the needs of this harsh and demanding duty became clear, radical modifications were made to meet them. All these changes are described and minutely illustrated in this, the second volume of an indispensable reference work for American historians.

This is the first volume of a four-volune work. The total work represents the culmination of more than twenty years of painstaking research. It is an exhaustive delineation, in words and pictures, of every aspect of the attire and equipment of that most exciting of all United States military forces - the cavalry.Volume I covers the Revolutionary period, with a detailed account of the ""sires"" of the United States Cavalry, the Continental Light Dragoons. Then come the War of 1812 and the formation of the United States Mounted Ranger Battalion, and later the United States Dragoons. The uniforms, insignia, decorations, arms, horse equipment, accoutrements, and saddles are described and profusely illustrated in 11 color plates and 96 black-and-white drawings. Appended are sections defining the nomenclature of the horse, horse equipment, and arms, as well as a roster of cavalry bugle calls. In the work Steffen, a widely renowned military artist and historian, presents American military history from a perspective until now only superficially viewed. Historians, military specialists, and researchers will find a wealth of hard-to-find detail. The author's color plates and meticulously detailed drawings, reproduced from actual uniforms and equipment and official government specifications, show us the cavalryman as he actually looked, wherever he was stationed, whatever his war, wherever he was sent to be a horse soldier for his country.

The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare is not only a historical study of mankind's most time-honored enterprise--war--but an excellent way to understand the potentiality of modern weapons, techniques, and technologies, and to realistically forecast how they will be applied in future wars. In this absorbing chronicle of the art of war, Colonel Dupuy examines the relationship between weapons and strategy--on land, on sea, and in the air--and discusses the eighteen major advances in weapons lethality, from the Macedonian sarissa (the long pike used by the armies of Alexander the Great) to the atomic bomb. Dupuy emphasizes two major paradoxes: although weapons have become increasingly deadly, battle casualty rates have just as steadily declined; and despite tremendous technological changes in warfare, the fundamental principles of war have changed little. But this book not only deals with ideas and technological advances, it confronts the drama and horror of battle. Far more than a textbook summary, it is an engrossing account of the development and use of the most significant weapons human ingenuity has been able to devise, and an acute commentary on the essence of warfare.

This definitive overview of the development and use of artillery makes the complex artillery systems of today understandable, while at the same time showing how they have evolved and how they are likely to change in the future. The author, until recently chief of artillery for the British Army, is considered one of the world's foremost experts on the subject. Unlike other books that either describe the technical aspects of present-day firepower or outline its history during specific wars, this work provides both a detailed explanation of the modern artillery system and a history of its development over the past six hundred fifty years, identifying its enduring principles and changing practices against an ever-changing background of technology, tactics, and strategy. When an earlier version of this book was published in 1989, it became known as the best single source on field artillery in the English language. This new edition has been fully updated and substantially expanded to cover a wide range of contemporary military debates and the role of firepower, and is certain to be regarded as the ultimate work on the subject for years to come. J. B. A. Bailey assesses major developments over the past decade, analyzing artillery operations in airborne, urban, littoral, desert, jungle, mountain, artic, and nocturnal environments. He examines direct fire, counterfire, the suppression of enemy air defenses, and force protection methods. He explains field artillery from its primitive beginnings to its dominance as an art in World War II and its potent utility in operations since 1945 and into the future. The book will be of particular interest to military historians and those engaged in debating firepower's future. Published in cooperation with the Association of the United States Army. 15 photographs. 8 line drawings. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 7 x 10 inches.