The violence that has ravaged Algeria has often defied explanation. Regularly invoked in debates about political Islam, transitions to democracy, globalization, and the right of humanitarian interference, Algeria's tragedy has been reduced to a clash of stereotypes: Islamists vs. a secular state, terrorists vs. innocent civilians, or generals vs. a defenseless society. The prevalence of such simplistic representations has disabled public opinion inside as well as outside the country and contributed to the intractability ofthe conflict. This collection of essays offers a radical corrective to Western misconceptions. Rejecting the usual tautological approaches of inherent, predetermined conflict, Hugh Roberts explores the outlook and evolution of the various internal forces as they emerged - the Islamists, the Berberists, the factions within the army, and the regime in general - and he looks at external interests and actors. He explains their strategies and the maneuvers in which they haveengaged. The resulting analyses illuminate the startling dynamics of the conflict and the real issues at stake, and identify the implications not only for Algeria but also for this crucial region. Informed by a deep knowledge of Algeria and Algerian history, these accessible essays guide the reader through the extraordinary politics of the drama in all its complexity.

The Mortarmen is an untold story of world War II. The book details the fighting history of the men of the 87th Chemical Mortar Battalion. The battalion was armed with the powerful 4.2 mortars and following its landing on Utah Beach on D-Day fought in every major engagement in France, Belgium, and Germany.
The 4.2 mortar battalions were the most sought after fire support units in Europe. The 87th was in combat for 326 days and the book follows each of the four companies as they participate in the Battle for Normandy, the fight for Cherbourg, the battles of Aachen and the Hurtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, and finally the crossing of the Rhine and the final victory in Germany.
The book contains excepts of diaries and quotations from the men who fought in the unit and from some of the German soldiers who opposed them. It is a story of heroism, tragedy, and the triumph of soldiers fighting for freedom.
Veterans of the 87th Speak out about The Mortarmen:
"The author has performed admirably in depicting the complete story of the 87th Mortar BN from training camps thru D-Day and the entire WWII operations in Europe.
"A great contribution to WWII History, comparable to Stephen Ambrose's story of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division in 'Band of Brothers'."
1st Lt. Sam Deal
B Company
87th Chemical Mortar Battalion
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"I browsed your book first, and now am reading it line by line slowly. You have done the most wonderful job in the writing, You have brought back all the feelings, the fear, the wonder, the comradeship; all of those feelings and more. I thank you "
Alexander Cannon
Pvt. BCompany
87th CMB
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"This is an important book because it tells, for the first time, the history of the critical role of this group of 4 mortar companies of men, of the 87th Mortar Battalion, which was positioned just behind the front lines, giving direct support to the infantry companies or battalions that had critical assignments in World War II.
"This book is must reading for those interested in the full history of WW II."
Ralph Gerald Jerry Portis
Staff Sgt. C Company
87th CMB
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"What a great job you did putting all this historical data together; weaving the whole thing with personal, anecdotal recollections and whipping the whole thing into an informative and entertaining historical document."
H.R. Bob Loomis
Sgt. D Company
87th CMB

Between the two World Wars, the US contributed significantly to the development of the tank, a weapon invented by the British and the French seeking a way to break through the lines of German trenches. From the employment of the French Renault FT and British Mark V during their involvement in World War I, the US branched out with their own indigenous designs including the M1 Cavalry Car and the M2 Light and Medium tanks, the precursors to the Stuart and Grant tanks of World War II. Tank designers in this period faced unique challenges and so the story of early American armour is littered with failures amongst the successes. Featuring previously unpublished photos and fully illustrated throughout, Early American Armor (1): Tanks 1916-40 is essential reading for anyone interested in American armour, or in the development of tank design.

Adrian Goldsworthy examines how the Roman army operated on campaign and in battle. He compares the army's organization and strategic doctrine with those of its chief opponents and explores in detail the reality of battle: tactics, weaponry, leadership, and, most of all, the important issue of morale.

The military was quick to see the advantages of railways in warfare, whether for the rapid deployment of men or the movement of heavy equipment like artillery. From here it was a short step to making the train a potent weapon in its own right - a mobile fort or a battleship on rails. Armed and armoured, they became the first practical self-propelled war machines, which by the time of the American Civil War were able to make a significant contribution to battlefield success. Thereafter, almost every belligerent nation with a railway system made some use of armoured rolling stock, ranging from low-intensity colonial policing to the massive employment of armoured trains during the Russian Civil War. And although they were somewhat eclipsed as frontline weapons by the development of the tank and other AFVs, armoured trains retained a role as late as the civil wars in the former republic of Yugoslavia. This truly encyclopaedic book covers, country by country, the huge range of fighting equipment that rode the rails over nearly two centuries.While it outlines the place of armoured trains in the evolution of warfare, it concentrates on details of their design through a vast array of photographs and the author's meticulous drawings. Published in French in 1989, this highly regarded work has been completely revised and expanded for this English edition. It remains the last word on the subject.

The Constitution provides Congress with broad powers over the Armed Forces, including the power "to raise and support Armies," "to provide and maintain a Navy," and "to make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces. "It also provides the Senate with the authority to provide Advice and Consent on presidential nominations of all other Officers of the United States, which includes military officers. On the basis of its constitutional authority, Congress has passed a number of laws which govern important aspects of military officer personnel management, including appointments, assignments, grade structure, promotions, and separations. This book provides an overview of active duty general and flag officers (GFOs) in the United States Armed Forces -- including authorizations, duties, and compensation -- historical trends in the proportion of GFOs relative to the total force, criticisms and justifications of GFO to total force proportions, and statutory controls.

El Salvador's civil war began in 1980 and ended twelve bloody years later.It saw extreme violence on both sides, including the terrorising and targetingof civilians by death squads, recruitment of child soldiers, and the death anddisappearance of more than 75,000 people. Examining El Salvador's vibrantlife-story literature written in the aftermath of this terrible conflict-includingmemoirs and testimonials-Erik Ching seeks to understand how thewar has come to be remembered and rebattled by Salvadorans and what thatmeans for their society today. Ching identifies four memory communities that dominate nationalpostwar views: civilian elites, military officers, guerrilla commanders, andworking class and poor testimonialists. Pushing distinct and divergent stories,these groups are today engaged in what Ching terms a "narrative battle"for control over the memory of the war. Their ongoing publications in themarketplace of ideas tend to direct Salvadorans' attempts to negotiate thewar's meaning and legacy, and Ching suggests that a more open, coordinatedreconciliation process is needed in this postconflict society. In the meantime,El Salvador, fractured by conflicting interpretations of its national trauma,is hindered in dealing with the immediate problems posed by the nexus ofneoliberalism, gang violence, and outmigration.

The Greek Civil War was one of the bloodiest of modern times: it cost the lives of more than 600,000 people out of a population of 7 million. It was one of the founding moments of the Cold War and a pilot experience, in Europe itself, of the Western imperialist intervention practised in South-East Asia and elsewhere today. This book is the first blow-by-blow account of the process of the Greek Revolution and its background in the Resistance against Nazi occupation and fascist collaboration in the Second World War. The 'kapetanios' were the guerilla chiefs in the mountains in Greece who led the anti-fascist partisans, first against the Italian and German occupying forces and their Greek quislings, and then against the British troops who landed to prevent a partisan victory. Besides extensive use of Greek, British and German written sources, the author has interviewed many of the surviving Greek partisans and political leaders. He reconstructs the course of the Civil War and establishes the depth and significance of British intelligence activity and military intervention. He also recreates the internal conflicts which simmered and exploded within the ranks of EAM - the Greek National Liberation Front. This was a conflict between those who were for an all-out offensive against British occupation and its Greek supporters, and those orthodox Communists who obeyed Stalin's acceptance at Yalta of British dominance in Greece - and ordered the guerillas to lay down their arms in 1946. Eudes shows how, in the 'second' Civil War that followed, the Greek partisans suffered from this fateful initial surrender. However, it was only after years of bitter fighting and massive intervention by British and US forces that the Greek monarchist counter-revolution achieved ultimate victory in 1949. The consequences of that victory of the 'free world' can be seen in the fascist military regime of Papadopoulos today.

Italian performance in the First World War has been generally disparaged or ignored compared to that of the armies on the Western Front, and troop morale in particular has been seen as a major weakness of the Italian army. In this first book-length study of Italian morale in any language, Vanda Wilcox reassesses Italian policy and performance from the perspective both of the army as an institution and of the ordinary soldiers who found themselves fighting a brutally hard war. Wilcox analyses and contextualises Italy's notoriously hard military discipline along with leadership, training methods and logistics before considering the reactions of the troops and tracing the interactions between institutions and individuals. Restoring historical agency to soldiers often considered passive and indifferent, Wilcox illustrates how and why Italians complied, endured or resisted the army's demands through balancing their civilian and military identities.

By the end of the First World War the combat formations of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in both France and the Middle East were considered among the British Empire's most effective troops. While sometimes a source of pride and not a little boasting, how the force came to be so was not due to any inherent national prowess or trait. Instead it was the culmination of years of training, organisational change, battlefield experimentation and hard-won experience-a process that included not just the Australians, but the wider British imperial armies as well. This book brings together some of Australia's foremost military historians to outline how the military neophytes that left Australia's shores in 1914 became the battle winning troops of 1918. It will trace the evolution of several of the key arms of the AIF, including the infantry, the light horse, the artillery, and the flying corps, and also consider how the various arms worked together alongside other troops of the British Empire to achieve a remarkably high level of battlefield effectiveness.

From the Paris Commune in 1871 to Hue, Cordoba and Detroit in our day, the history of of proletarian insurrections is largely uncharted-particularly in its strictly military and technical aspects. Yet for Marx, Engels or Lenin it was axiomatic that 'insurrection is an art', and that without the most careful preparation and planning for insurrection (as in Hue), the spontaneous revolutionary action of the masses would always be defeated by the organized violence of the ruling class (as in Cordoba or Detroit). This book was produced in 1928 as a practical insurrectionary manual for communists. It discusses the role of armed insurrection in the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution, analyses a number of insurrections-both successful and unsuccessful-with the aim of determining the conditions for victory, and gives detailed information on the tactics of street fighting-ranging from the respective advantages of offensive or defensive action to the best method of building a barricade. Written in Moscow under Comintern auspices, it is a classic Third Period document. Its republication will contribute to the recovery and appraisal of the early years of Soviet and Comintern history which is so essential an ingredient in the forging of all revolutionary theory and practice today. Published under the pseudonym of 'A. Neuberg', the work was in fact written by a group of leading Comintern political and military experts. One of the authors, Erich Wollenberg, military leader of the Bochum rising in North Germany in 1923, has written a new introduction for this edition (the first edition in English) in which he gives his own account of how the book came to be written, analyses the unstated political background to the various insurrections it examines, and identifies such of the authors as were known to him. These include Mikhail Tukhachesvsky, then second-in-command of the Red Army, Ho Chi Minh, Vice-President of the Secretary of the Comintern, and the German Communist and leader of the Hamberg Insurrection, Hans Kippenberger. The work was assembled by the Agitprop section of the Comintern, headed at the time by Palmiro Togliatti.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States Army became the principal agent of American foreign policy. The army designed, implemented, and administered the occupations of the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan, as well as many other nations. Generals such as Lucius Clay in Germany, Douglas MacArthur in Japan, Mark Clark in Austria, and John Hodge in Korea presided over these territories as proconsuls. At the beginning of the Cold War, more than 300 million people lived under some form of U.S. military authority. The army's influence on nation-building at the time was profound, but most scholarship on foreign policy during this period concentrates on diplomacy at the highest levels of civilian government rather than the armed forces' governance at the local level. In Army Diplomacy, Hudson explains how U.S. Army policies in the occupied nations represented the culmination of more than a century of military doctrine. Focusing on Germany, Austria, and Korea, Hudson's analysis reveals that while the post--World War II American occupations are often remembered as overwhelming successes, the actual results were mixed. His study draws on military sociology and institutional analysis as well as international relations theory to demonstrate how "bottom-up" decisions not only inform but also create higher-level policy. As the debate over post-conflict occupations continues, this fascinating work offers a valuable perspective on an important yet underexplored facet of Cold War history.

The Eastern Front of World War I is sometimes overshadowed by the fighting in the West. But the clashes between Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia in East Prussia, Poland and Lithuania were every bit as gruelling for the participants as the great battles in Western Europe. In spite of the crushing German victory at Tannenberg in August 1914, the war in the East would grind on into 1918, hampered by supply problems, difficult terrain and appalling weather conditions. In this study, author Robert Forczyk assesses the tactics and combat performance of both sides fighting in the brutal clashes at Gumbinnen, Goeritten and Mahartse, examining their contrasting fortunes and revealing the evolving nature of infantry warfare on the Eastern Front during World War I.

Most Americans are familiar with major Civil War battles such as Manassas (Bull Run), Shiloh, and Gettysburg, which have been extensively analyzed by generations of historians. However, not all of the war's engagements were fought in a conventional manner by regular forces. Often referred to as "the wars within the war," guerrilla combat touched states from Virginia to New Mexico. Guerrillas fought for the Union, the Confederacy, their ethnic groups, their tribes, and their families. They were deadly forces that plundered, tortured, and terrorized those in their path, and their impact is not yet fully understood. In this richly diverse volume, Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and Matthew C. Hulbert assemble a team of both rising and eminent scholars to examine guerrilla warfare in the South during the Civil War. Together, they discuss irregular combat as practiced by various communities in multiple contexts, including how it was used by Native Americans, the factors that motivated raiders in the border states, and the women who participated as messengers, informants, collaborators, and combatants. They also explore how the Civil War guerrilla has been mythologized in history, literature, and folklore. The Civil War Guerrilla sheds new light on the ways in which thousands of men, women, and children experienced and remembered the Civil War as a conflict of irregular wills and tactics. Through thorough research and analysis, this timely book provides readers with a comprehensive examination of the guerrilla soldier and his role in the deadliest war in U.S. history.

This book unveils the role of a hitherto unrecognized group of men who, long before the International Brigades made its name in the Spanish Civil War, also found reasons to fight under the Spanish flag. Their enemy was not fascism, but what could be at times an equally overbearing ideology: Napoleon's imperialism. Although small in number, British volunteers played a surprisingly influential role in the conduct of war operations, in politics, gender and social equality, in cultural life both in Britain and Spain and even in relation to emancipation movements in Latin America. Some became prisoners of war while a few served with guerrilla forces. Many of the works published about the Peninsular War in the last two decades have adopted an Anglocentric narrative, writing the Spanish forces out of victories, or have tended to present the war, not as much won by the allies, but lost by the French. This book takes a radically different approach by drawing on previously untapped archival sources to argue that victory was the outcome of a truly transnational effort.

This book is dedicated to the command and observation tanks of the German Army in World War Two. It deals with their history, operational use, organisation, special markings, technical description, serial numbers (when available), and data on the radio equipment. The book is completed by some 105 colour profiles, produced by Jean Restayn, and by about 65 black and white historic photographs. A must for any enthusiast of the German military and of the Second World War, and a unique reference for all the serious modellers.

This title explores the conception and design of a range of enormous and powerful tanks that came to be designated as 'super-heavy'. The fascinating super-heavy tanks of World War II were heirs to the siege machine tradition - a means of breaking the deadlock of ground combat. As a class of fighting vehicle, they began with the World War I concept of the search for a "breakthrough" tank, designed to cross enemy lines. It is not surprising that the breakthrough tank projects of the period prior to World War II took place in the armies that suffered the most casualties of the Great War (Russia, France, Germany). All of the principal Axis and Allied nations eventually initiated super-heavy development projects, with increasingly heavy armor and armament.
Much as the casualties of World War I prompted the original breakthrough tank developments, as Germany found itself on the defensive, with diminishing operational prospects and an increasingly desperate leadership, so too did its focus turn to the super-heavy tanks that could turn the tide back in their favor. Although only a small number of super-heavy tanks were built, much less saw active service, their impressive appearance and specifications - not to mention the possibilities of what might have been - have captured the interest of AFV enthusiasts, historians and military personnel. This illustrated and detailed study explores and compares these designs in unprecedented depth.

On 1 July 1916, after a stupendous 7-day artillery preparation, the British Army finally launched its attack on the German line around the River Somme. Over the next four and half months they continued to attack, with little or no gain, and with horrendous losses to both sides. This book, written by the world's foremost expert in the subject, describes in chilling detail everything from the grand strategy to the experience of the men on the ground. Illustrated throughout, it is a stunning and absorbing depiction of the horror that was the Somme in 1916.

For nearly three years, August 1941 to March 1944, 47,000 Spanish soldiers served under German command on the Russian front, two of those years con tinuously in the line in the siege of Leningrad. There were 22,000 casu alties, of which 4,500 were killed in ac tion or died of wounds, disease, or frost bite. Fewer than 300 prisoners of war finally were repatriated in 1954. The story of these Spanish volunteers told here, largely from original Spanish and German archival sources, in the graphic detail of a military history cover ing the major battles of the Russo-German war, gives an entirely different perspective to the siege of Leningrad which is neither Communist nor Nazi but Mediterranean. Thinking of themselves as warriors, as opposed to soldiers, the Spaniards fought with great courage and dash. Masters of improvisation, they lived off the countryside, regarded the Russians as human beings, and often formed strong bonds with the peasants--so strong that the Russian population often protected the Spaniards from both the Red Army and the partisans.

Gary Sheffield is one of the most versatile and stimulating of military historians at work today. For 25 years, in a series of perceptive books and articles, he has examined the First World War from many angles - from the point of view of the politicians and the high command through to the junior officers and other ranks in the front line. Morale and Command presents in a single volume a range of his shorter work, and it shows his scholarship at its best. The range of his writing, the insights he offers and the sometimes controversial conclusions he reaches mean this thought-provoking book will be indispensable reading for all students of the First World War and of modern warfare in general.

The topic of proxy war is currently subject to intense debate with reference to US, British and Israeli accusations that Iran is sponsoring subversive and insurgent movements from Lebanon to Afghanistan; contemporary academic and media controversies over the effect of international assistance to the Afghan mujahidin in the subsequent destabilisation of the country; and the contentious circumstances surrounding the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, and the 'independence' of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. While there is no shortage of academic literature dealing with specific cases of proxy warfare, there is no work providing an overarching analysis of the factors which lead to this type of conflict, or the potential consequences for the states concerned, the non-state proxies and their external patrons. Using examples from post-1945 history, and focusing on three case studies (the Afghan war of 1978-1989, Lebanon 1975-1990, Angola 1975-1991), Geraint Hughes offers terminology intended to clarify scholarly understanding of proxy warfare, a framework for understanding why states seek to use proxies (insurgent groups, militias, terrorist movements, mercenaries, and even organised criminal groups) in order to fulfil strategic objectives, and an analysis of the potential impact of such an indirect means of waging war on not only the states that are subjected to this phenomenon, but also the proxies, their sponsors and the wider international community. This book has a historical focus, but will be of utility to contemporary security scholars, and those involved in political/military policy.