For more than one hundred twenty-five years virtually every history book in print has contended that no white man survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Custer made his famous "last stand." This book provides compelling proof that at least one member of the Seventh Cavalry, a man named William Heath, did indeed escape. In this intriguing analysis of hitherto neglected historical documents, Vincent J. Genovese provides verifiable evidence that dispels the long-held myth that none of Custer's soldiers survived the massacre that took place in Montana on June 25, 1876.
Genovese chronicles the life of this "Lazarus of the Little Bighorn," who joined the army at age 27 after fleeing from Pennsylvania under threats on his life. Documents show that Billy Heath lived in a small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania and that he enlisted in the Seventh Cavalry in 1875, not long before the fateful battle. Further, U.S. Army records verify that he was one of the soldiers at the Little Bighorn. His name also appears on a list of those killed in action and is inscribed on the official monument that stands at the battle site.
What makes Genovese's contribution to the history of this famous event so interesting are public records that he here introduces, which show indisputably that William Heath lived on for fourteen more years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Birth records from his hometown in Schuylkill County, PA, indicate that he fathered seven children before dying in obscurity. His gravestone still exists in the local cemetery.
This is a unique and fascinating re-evaluation of a storied event in American history, which will surely provoke controversy.

War in the post-9/11 world is far different from what we expected it be. Counterinsurgency and protracted guerrilla warfare, not shock and awe, are the order of the day. David Kilcullen is the world's foremost expert on this way of war, and in The Accidental Guerrilla, the Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq surveys war as it is actually fought in the contemporary world. Colouring his account with gripping battlefield experiences that range from the jungles and highlands of South and Southeast Asia to the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the dusty towns of the Middle East and the horn of Africa, The Accidental Guerrilla will, quite simply, change the way we think about war. While conventional warfare has obvious limits, Kilcullen also stresses that neither counterterrorism nor traditional counterinsurgency is the appropriate framework to fight the enemy we now face. Certainly, traditional counterinsurgency is more effective than counterterrorism when it comes to entities like Al Qaeda, but as Kilcullen contends, our current focus is far too narrow, for it tends to emphasize one geographical region and one state. The current war presents a much different situation: stateless insurgents and terrorists operating across large number of countries and only loosely affiliated with each other.

During the brutal and destructive King Philip's War, the New England Indians combined new European weaponry with their traditional use of stealth, surprise, and mobility.

Horace 'Jim' Greasley was twenty years of age in the spring of 1939 when Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and latterly Poland. There had been whispers and murmurs of discontent from certain quarters and the British government began to prepare for the inevitable war. After seven weeks training with the 2nd/5th Battalion Leicester, he found himself facing the might of the German army in a muddy field south of Cherbourg, in Northern France, with just thirty rounds of ammunition in his weapon pouch. Horace's war didn't last long. He was taken prisoner on 25th May 1940 and forced to endure a ten week march across France and Belgium en-route to Holland.

Horace survived...barely...food was scarce; he took nourishment from dandelion leaves, small insects and occasionally a secret food package from a sympathetic villager, and drank rain water from ditches. Many of his fellow comrades were not so fortunate. Falling by the side of the road through sheer exhaustion and malnourishment meant a bullet through the back of the head and the corpse left to rot. After a three day train journey without food and water, Horace found himself incarcerated in a prison camp in Poland. It was there he embarked on an incredible love affair with a German girl interpreting for his captors.

He experienced the sweet taste of freedom each time he escaped to see her, yet incredibly he made his way back into the camp each time, sometimes two, three times every week. Horace broke out of the camp then crept back in again under the cover of darkness after his natural urges were fulfilled. He brought food back to his fellow prisoners to supplement their meagre rations. He broke out of the camp over two hundred times and towards the end of the war even managed to bring radio parts back in. The BBC news would be delivered daily to over 3,000 prisoners. This is an incredible tale of one man's adversity and defiance of the German nation.

British Counterinsurgency examines the insurgencies that have confronted the British State since the end of the Second World War, and at the methods used to fight them. It looks at the guerrilla campaigns in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, South Yemen, Oman, and most recently in Northern Ireland, and considers the reasons for British success or failure in suppressing them. It provides a hard-nosed account of the realities of counterinsurgency as practiced by the most experienced security establishment in the world today.

This translation of Johann Ewald's classic essay, Abhandlung Uber den kleinen Krieg, published in 1785, describes light infantry tactics in an era of heavy infantry formations. Robert Selig and David Skaggs comment on Ewald's treatise on partisan warfare and its relevance to current military doctrine. They also provide extensive scholarly notations with the text, explaining people, places, and events during the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution, where Ewald had extensive experience as a company commander in the Hessian Field Jaeger Corps. This first English translation should be of real interest to historians of American Revolution and pre-Napoleonic warfare and of special use to military professionals today in the Army and Marine Corps. Captain Ewald, eventually a Major General in the Danish Army, describes the recruiting and training of light infantry troops, and discusses their use both in the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution at length. He provides illuminating insights into light infantry tactics and doctrine.

At 17, Curtis "Kojo" Morrow enlisted in the United States Army and joined the 24th Infantry Regiment Combat Team, originally known as the Buffalo Soldiers. Seven months later he found himself fighting a bloody war in a place he had never heard of: Korea. During nine months of fierce combat, Morrow developed not only a soldier's mentality but a political consciousness as well. Hearing older men discussing racial discrimination in both civilian and military life, he began to question the role of his all-black unit in the Korean action. Supposedly they were protecting freedom, justice, and the American way of life, but what was that way of life for blacks in the United States? Where was the freedom? Why were the Buffalo Soldiers laying their lives on the line for a country in which African-American citizens were sometimes denied even the right to vote? Morrow's story of his service in the United States Army is a revealing portrait of life in the army's last all-black unit, a factual summary of that unit's actions in a bloody "police action", and a personal memoir of a boy becoming a man in a time of war.

"The Specht Journal" is one of the major diaries written by Braunschweig military personnel during the Burgoyne campaign of the American Revolutionary War. From the departure from Wolfenbuttel on February 22, 1776 to the end on Winter Hill near Boston on November 9, 1777, the narrator faithfully accounts for each day of the ill-fated campaign. He describes the astonishing affair at Ticonderoga, the short battle at Hubbardton, and the toilsome march south to Fort Miller via Forts Ann and Edward. The campaign ends after two indecisive battles at Saratoga, where Burgoyne, without supplies and badly outnumbered, has to sign a Convention with the victorious American commander Horatio Gates.

Hitler's tank divisions were some of his most feared troops and most lethal weapons in the taking and securing of territory during World War II. From success to failure, in victory and in defeat, each division played a role in Hitler's campaign against the Allies. This is the first guide to chronicle the history of each division from its inception to its destruction. With painstaking research and attention to detail, Mitcham describes the formation and organization of each, then discusses its overall combat history. He also includes a career sketch of every panzer divisional commander.

While this reference will serve as a valuable research tool, it contains more than facts and figures. Mitcham assesses the performance and quality of each division, including how and why it changed over time. He evaluates strengths and weaknesses during different phases of the conflict in terms of manpower, vehicles, and armor quality. He also analyzes commander performance and its impact on overall efforts. The story follows the panzer legions until their ultimate disposition-destruction or disbanding. Includes a comprehensive index of individuals, units, battles and campaigns.

Downsizing has become one of the defining phenomena of the post-Cold War era, a trend affecting few sectors of American life more than the armed forces. Between 1989 and 1996, the active duty Army was cut back by more than a third, from 770,000 soldiers to fewer than half a million. Additional cuts are virtually certain to follow.

How has the Army implemented this mandate to downsize? What common threads exist between past post-war cutbacks and today's redistribution of the "peace dividend"? How has downsizing affected the morale, devotion, and disposition of the Army's officers, whose commitment to the institution profoundly determines its effectiveness? Crucially, is it truly possible to institute the radical transformation that downsizing requires without affecting the Army's ability to fight and win future wars?

As David McCormick demonstrates in this authoritative volume, the Army's downsizing is a story of both failure and success. Unable to make a persuasive case for a larger force, the Army's leaders made dramatic reductions, particularly among the officer corps. Though executed with compassion and precision, these cuts have taken their toll, undermining morale and resulting in dangerous pathologies which threaten the Army at its core. While the downsizing of the Army is unique in that it was externally mandated, the Army's experience is instructive for all organizations--government, corporate, and nonprofit alike--faced with the need to streamline their operations.

Basing his conclusions on hundreds of in-depth interviews with officers across all ranks and senior civilian and military leaders, as well as exhaustive research with Pentagon documents, McCormick has given us a definitive portrait of today's U.S. Army in transition, one that will transform our thinking about both downsizing and the military.

This ethnography describes the intense contradictions that exist between the cultural values of American life and the cultural values needed to survive in combat, as represented through the experiences of forward-deployed U.S. Army units in Germany during the height of the Cold War. Living in constant military readiness, yet participating in peacetime community and family processes, Army personnel had to tolerate the contradictions and live by both sets of principles. In soldier perception, family life and community activities ought to have been guided by American rather than military values. Yet the military ran the community, and military activities penetrated and disrupted family life.

In Germany the penetration and disruption was much exacerbated by isolation, for these Americans did not generally have the language or cultural skills to escape from the military community. Rather, they were marooned in an intensely judgmental fish bowl community where there was no private life. The resulting scrutiny and the measures people took to avoid it and sustain autonomy corrupted the community, its families, and the units themselves. The scrutiny, with its attendant risks, and the intense contradiction in values led to feelings of profound alienation.

This short history is the first broad and selective survey of the phenomenon known as "jointness"--the co-operative operations of land and naval forces until the twentieth-century and of land, sea, and air forces since World War I. Touching on operational, doctrinal, and political dimensions, the survey ranges from the ancient Mediterranean to recent times while focusing on European and American experiences from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, including Desert Storm. Illustrative cases and reference materials are attuned to the interests of scholars, defense analysts, and students of military affairs. Jointness, subject of major concern to military historians, policymakers, politicians, and military professionals has in the past been covered within certain periods on a case by case or topical basis. This history begins instead with a broad survey from ancient to modern times and then focuses more closley on joint operations since World War I with wide-ranging examples to illustrate trends and patterns of Jointness. The survey closes with a discussion of the central problem of friction and other paradoxes connected with joint military operations. A selected bibliography provides an array of sources both for general readers and military professionals. Maps and appendices further enrich this important history.

The end of the Cold War brought about dramatic changes in the militaries across Europe. The armed forces of former Communist European countries have undergone a double transition: the move to market-based liberal democracies and a rapid movement towards a radically different relationship with the civilian population. NATO has also played a leading role in the change process for the former Eastern Bloc. This book aims to give students a broad introduction to the military's role in the post-Cold War Europe.

The ability to organize millions of people for political purposes is a potent and relatively recent weapon in the struggle for power. Political scientists have studied two types of mass organization, the political party and the interest group. In this book Gregory Kasza examines a third type, which he calls the administered mass organization. AMOs are mass civilian bodies created by authoritarian regimes to implement public policy. Officials use them to organize youths, workers, women, or members of other social sectors into bodies resembling the mass conscript army. A network of AMOs produces a conscription society, a major force in twentieth-century politics in over 45 countries. Using comparative history and organization theory, Kasza analyzes the politics of the conscription society in both military and single-party regimes. He discusses the origins of AMOs in Japan, the Soviet Union, and Fascist Italy and their subsequent spread to China, Egypt, Nazi Germany, Peru, Poland, and Yugoslavia. He focuses on the use of AMOs to curb political opposition, to mobilize for war, and to shift control over the means of production. Kasza shows how, in the hands of despotic rulers, AMOs have contributed to the extremes of political barbarism characteristic of the twentieth century.

Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. military forces have participated in an increasingly complex array of military operations, from disaster relief and peacekeeping to deadly combat. The unique nature of many of these missions calls into question what it means to be a soldier and may require adjustments not only in military doctrine, but also in the military's combat-oriented warrior identity. Franke examines the extent to which individuals who will lead U.S. forces in the 21st century are prepared cognitively to shift among mission requirements.

Using survey methods, Franke explores the social, political, and professional attitudes and values of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. By comparing cadets' responses across classes, he assesses the effects of military socialization on their commitment to the military's dual-mission purpose and their cognitive preparation for combat and non-combat assignments. By developing a dynamic model of social identity, Franke extends the applicability of social identity theory from the experimental laboratory environment to a genuine social field setting. Assessing the dynamic relationship between identity, values, and attitudes for identifications that are normatively meaningful to respondents, he illustrates the importance of individuals' identification with social groups for their behavioral choices.

"England's Last Hope" studies how the part-time auxiliary Territorial Force was raised, clothed, trained, housed and administered during the crucial years of its development in the years before the Great War. As such, it fills a fundamental gap in the understanding of how the force's units were able to take the field as part of the BEF in 1914.

With an Introduction by Angus Calder. As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition, 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War'. Lawrence's younger brothers, Frank and Will, had been killed on the Western Front in 1915. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written between 1919 and 1926, tells of the vastly different campaign against the Turks in the Middle East - one which encompasses gross acts of cruelty and revenge and ends in a welter of stink and corpses in the disgusting 'hospital' in Damascus. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is no Boys Own Paper tale of Imperial triumph, but a complex work of high literary aspiration which stands in the tradition of Melville and Dostoevsky, and alongside the writings of Yeats, Eliot and Joyce.

Although it is generally assumed that there have always been limits to what soldiers are permitted to do in war, it was not until 1863, in the heat of the Civil War, that the United States issued its first Army manual. Subsequently, manuals of land warfare were issued in 1914, 1934, 1940, 1944, 1956, and 1976 by the American military. In this volume, Wells provides a systematic examination of the evolution of American rules of warfare. In addition to providing the texts of key elements of the manuals and analyzing them, Wells relates the manuals to international attempts to set limits on war practices. This book will be invaluable to those concerned with military law, here and abroad, to students of international law, and to military policy makers.

An Army officer must lead men into frightening and dangerous situations and sometimes make them do things that they never thought they could do. This book recounts how British officers have led their men, and commanded their respect, from the days of Marlborough to the Second Iraq war of 2003. Anthony Clayton explores who the officers, men and now women, have been and are, where they came from, what ideals or traditions have motivated them, and their own perceptions of themselves. His account tells the fascinating story of how the role of the military officer evolved, illustrated by a selection of captivating images, and the personal memoirs, biographies and autobiographies of officers.

For centuries, mounted cavalry dominated the battlefield through shock and mobility. Man maintained a symbiotic relationship with the horse, which became particularly sacrosanct on the battlefield and even created a new, exalted social class. These mounted warriors sought to preserve their prestige despite the advent of new technologies threatening to render them obsolete. In Cavalry from Hoof to Track, Roman Jarymowycz traces the evolution of the cavalry from the warhorse to the armored tank and demonstrates how its survival is a history of determined and creative responses to the changing dynamics of modern warfare. Ultimately, he argues, the very concept of cavalry exists as its own state of mind. The cavalry and its doctrine are misunderstood, and its tactics and operations remain a mystery for many civilians. New technology and the increased integration of the armed forces create the illusion that the cavalry no longer exists as a distinct military entity and philosophy. Jarymowycz clarifies these misconceptions by offering a comprehensible overview while explaining military terminology and outlining basic cavalry principles. The book concludes by suggesting how the cavalry will continue to evolve in response to contemporary third world conflicts, perhaps even reverting to its original, tactical role of close quarter combat.

Some semi-public, exclusive male settings, most noticeably in the military, encourage the production of intimacy and desire. Yet whereas in most instances this desire is displaced through humor and aggressive gestures, it becomes acknowledged and outright declared once associated with sites of heroic death. In his provocative study of interrelations between friendship in everyday life and national sentiments in Israel, the author follows selected stories of friendship ranging over early childhood, school, the workplace, and some unique war experiences. He explores the symbolism of friendship in rituals for the fallen soldiers, the commemoration of Prime Minister Yzhak Rabin, and the national infatuation with recovering bodies of missing soldiers. He concludes that the Israeli case offers an extreme instance of a much broader cultural phenomenon: declaring the friendship for the dead epitomizes the political "blood pact" between men, taking precedence over the traditional blood ties of kinship and heterosexual unions. The book underscores nationalism as a homosocial-based emotion of commemorative desire.

Written by the leading political expert on Suriname, this thrilling tale describes ethnically inspired guerilla warfare, terrible human rights violations, military coups, painful redemocratization processes, and economic implosion. Although part of the American family of nations in the Western Hemisphere, there is almost nothing written about Suriname as a modern country. There are some ethnographies, some histories of ex-slave rebellions, and passing references to the atrocities of colonial plantation systems. After that, the dark clouds of obscurity close over a fascinating if beleaguered close American cousin, one whose history as an independent nation has much to say to the strife-ridden trouble spots of the 1990s--Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Liberia, and Nicaragua.

In conflict zones around the world, the phenomenon of foreign insurgents fighting on behalf of local rebel groups is a common occurrence. They have been an increasing source of concern because they engage in deadlier attacks than local fighters do. They also violate international laws and norms of citizenship. And because of their zeal, their adversaries - often the most powerful countries in the world - are frequently incapable of deterring them.
Foreign fighters have made headlines in recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, and the term is widely equated with militant Islamists. However, foreign fighters are not a new phenomenon. Throughout modern history, outside combatants have fought on behalf of causes ranging from international communism to aggrieved ethnic groups. Analyzing the long history of foreign fighters in the modern era helps us understand why they join insurgencies, what drives their behavior, and what policymakers can do in response.
In Foreign Fighters, David Malet examines how insurgencies recruit individuals from abroad who would seem to have no direct connection to a distant war. Remarkably, the same recruiting strategies have been employed successfully in all foreign fighter cases, regardless of the particular circumstances of a conflict. Malet also catalogues foreign fighters in civil wars over the past two centuries, providing data indicating that they are disproportionately successful and growing in number. Detailed case histories constructed from archival material and original interviews demonstrate the same recruitment patterns in highly diverse conflicts including the Texas Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Israeli War of Independence, and the Afghanistan War. The results show that foreign fighters from Davy Crockett to George Orwell to Osama bin Laden create and respond to strategically crafted appeals to defend transnational communities under dire threat.

This is the story of a civil war within the Civil War. Many mountain whites in Southern Appalachia opposed the Confederacy, especially when the South's conscription and impressment policies began to cause severe hardships. Deserters from the Rebel army hid in the mountains and formed guerrilla bands that terrorized unprotected Confederate homesteads. Violence escalated as Rebel guerrillas fought back. The conflict soon took on some of the ugliest aspects of class warfare between poorer mountain whites, who were usually Unionists, and the more well-to-do mountain property owners, who supported the Rebels. "Mountain Partisans" penetrates the shadowy world of Union and Confederate guerrillas, describes their leaders and bloody activities, and explains their effect on the Civil War and the culture of Appalachia.

Although it did not alter the outcome of the war, guerrilla conflict affected the way the war was fought. The Union army's experience with guerrilla warfare in the mountains influenced the North's adoption of hard war as a strategy used against the South in the last two years of the war and helped shape the army's attitude toward Southern civilians. Partisan warfare in Southern Appalachia left a legacy of self-imposed isolation and distrust of outsiders. Wartime hatreds contributed to a climate of feuds and extralegal vigilantism. The mountain economy never recovered from the war's devastating effects, laying the groundwork for the region's exploitation and impoverishment by outside corporations in the early 20th century.

In 1987–1988 was die stowwerige Angolese dorpie Cuito Cuanavale die toneel van die laaste gevegte van die Grensoorlog. Sedertdien is dit die fokuspunt van ’n openbare debat oor wie eintlik hierdie oorlog gewen het.

Die leierskorps van die Suid-Afrikaanse Weermag (SAW) hou vol hulle is nooit verslaan nie, terwyl die alliansie van die Angolese MPLA-regering, Kuba en Swapo beweer hulle het die SAW uit Angola en Suidwes-Afrika verdryf. Hulle glo voorts die SAW wou Cuito Cuanavale beset en as afspringplek gebruik om Luanda in te neem.

Maar was Cuito Cuanavale ooit regtig ’n doelwit vir die Suid-Afrikaners? Dit is die vraag wat Leopold Scholtz vra wanneer hy onlangs gedeklassi-fiseerde dokumente in die weermagargief bestudeer en die taktiese en strategiese besluite ondersoek wat ’n bepalende rol in die ses groot veldslae van dié veldtog gespeel het.

Sy kritiese ontleding wys hoe maklik propaganda en politiek in die pad van feite kan staan.