With the onset of World War II, African Americans found themselves in a struggle just to be allowed to fight for their country. Individuals like Lt. General Leslie McNair and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt fought against the military's discrimination, arguing that the nation could little afford to overlook such an important source of strength. Their eventual success took the form of a military experiment designed to determine whether African Americans were as capable as white soldiers. The 784th was one tank battalion formed as a result. Part of an effort to chronicle the history of the first African Americans to serve in armored units, this history recounts the service of the 784th Tank Battalion. Replete with observations and comments from veterans of the battalion, it paints a vivid picture of World War II as seen through the eyes of soldiers who had to confront second-class treatment by their army and fellow soldiers while enduring the horrors of war. It details the day-to-day activities of the 784th Tank Battalion, describing basic training, actual combat, occupation and, finally, the deactivation of the unit. Special emphasis is placed on the ways in which these war experiences contributed to the American civil rights movements of the 1960s.

This indispensable Civil War reference profiles some 2,300 staff officers in Robert E. Lee's famous Army of Northern Virginia. These men--ordnance officers, engineers, aides-de-camp, and quartermasters, among others--worked at the side of many of the Confederacy's greatest figures, helping to feed and clothe the army, maintain its discipline, and operate its military machinery. A typical entry includes the officer's full name, the date and place of his birth and death, details of his education and occupation, and a synopsis of his military record. An introduction discusses the role of staff officers in the Confederate army, describes the evolution and importance of individual staff positions, and makes some broad generalizations about the officers' common characteristics. Two appendixes provide a list of more than 3,000 staff officers who served in other armies of the Confederacy and complete rosters of known staff officers of each general in the Army of Northern Virginia. Synthesizing the contents of thousands of unpublished official documents, Staff Officers in Gray will be of interest to anyone studying the battles, personnel, and organization of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Drawing on unique first-hand data from Russia's North Caucasus, this study is the first of its kind to detail the causes and contexts of individual disengagement of various types of militants: avengers, nationalists, and jihadists. It aims to considerably enhance our theoretical understanding of individual militants' incentives to abandon violence.

This biography of Field Marshall Lord Roberts charts a remarkable life that spanned the apogee of the British Empire. During a diverse career, Roberts won the Victoria Cross, planned the strategic defence of India, turned the tide of war in South Africa, introduced army reform and campaigned for National Service before 1914. Rodney Atwood explores his military career, in particular his role as a tactician and strategist in Afghanistan, Burma the North-West frontier, South Africa and Europe, but also looks at Roberts as a symbol of Empire and explores his celebration in British culture.

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.

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.

"Learning to Forget" analyzes the evolution of US counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine over the last five decades. Beginning with an extensive section on the lessons of Vietnam, it traces the decline of COIN in the 1970s, then the rebirth of low intensity conflict through the Reagan years, in the conflict in Bosnia, and finally in the campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ultimately it closes the loop by explaining how, by confronting the lessons of Vietnam, the US Army found a way out of those most recent wars. In the process it provides an illustration of how military leaders make use of history and demonstrates the difficulties of drawing lessons from the past that can usefully be applied to contemporary circumstances.
The book outlines how the construction of lessons is tied to the construction of historical memory and demonstrates how histories are constructed to serve the needs of the present. In so doing, it creates a new theory of doctrinal development.

Since the end of the cold war, a series of costly civil wars, many of them ethnic conflicts, have dominated the international security agenda. The international community, often acting through the United Nations or regional organizations like NATO, has felt compelled to intervene with military forces in many of these conflicts -- four of which comprise the heart of this book: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Somalia, Cambodia, and Rwanda. "Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention" is a detailed examination by a host of distinguished scholars of these recent interventions in order to draw lessons for today's policy debates.

The contributors view ethnic conflict and internal war through the prism of the concept of the security dilemma -- a situation in which parties with strong incentives to cooperate wind up nonetheless in bloody competition out of distrust of the opponent. "Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention" assesses how international intervention can help solve the security dilemma in civil wars by designing political and military arrangements that make security commitments credible to the warring parties. The mixed record of partial successes, failures, and in some cases counterproductive interventions suggests an urgent need to extract lessons with a view toward developing a framework for making future policy choices.

A gripping account of the Second World War, from the perspective of a young tank commander. In 1944, David Render was a nineteen-year-old second lieutenant fresh from Sandhurst when he was sent to France. Joining the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry five days after the D-Day landings, the combat-hardened men he was sent to command did not expect him to last long. However, in the following weeks of ferocious fighting in which more than 90 per cent of his fellow tank commanders became casualties, his ability to emerge unscathed from countless combat engagements earned him the nickname of the 'Inevitable Mr Render'. In Tank Action Render tells his remarkable story, spanning every major episode of the last year of the Second World War from the invasion of Normandy to the fall of Germany. Ultimately it is a story of survival, comradeship and the ability to stand up and be counted as a leader in combat.

As the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, it discovered that the Russians possessed heavy tanks that German anti-tank guns were ineffective against.
The German Army developed the 37-mm Pak 36 in 1936 to provide the primary weapon for its panzerjagers, who were responsible for anti-tank defense in infantry divisions. Realizing that the new Wehrmacht offensive doctrines intended to fully exploit the shock effect, firepower and mobility of armor, the panzerjagers were intended to enable German infantry to fend off enemy tanks. Although the Pak 36 was adequate against most pre-war tanks, during the 1940 Campaign in the West it proved unable to defeat the British Matilda II or French Char B, so the Wehrmacht began developing the 50-mm Pak 38 to supersede it. However, the process of re-equipment was slow and most German infantry divisions that participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 only had a handful of Pak 38s and still relied mainly on the Pak 36. Just four days into the invasion, German troops encountered the first KV-1 and KV-2 tanks near Raisinai in Lithuania and the impotence of both the Pak 36 (soon derisively labeled the "Door Knocker") and the Pak 38 was revealed. Thus at the start of this decisive campaign, the German Army was faced with the reality that it's panzerjagers could not provide effective anti-tank defense against Soviet heavy tanks and the Wehrmacht was forced to adopt a crash-program to upgrade its division-level AT defenses. New weaponry, including the 75-mm Pak 40, captured Soviet 76.2-mm guns converted into Pak 36(r), HEAT shells and tungsten-core rounds, offered possible solutions to the Soviet armored behemoths, but would require time to develop. In the interim, the panzerjagers were forced to adopt a variety of ad hoc tactics and stand-in equipment to survive in an unequal duel with heavy Soviet tanks.
On the Soviet side, based upon lessons from the Spanish Civil War, the Red Army decided to develop a heavy "breakthrough" tank to smash enemy infantry defenses. The result was the KV-1 and KV-2 tanks, introduced in 1939. At the start of Operation Barbarossa, both these tanks were virtually invulnerable to the weapons of the panzerjager and demonstrated their ability to overrun German infantry on several occasions. This advantage gave the Red Army a window of opportunity between the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1942 to use their heavy tanks to repel the German invasion in a series of desperate counteroffensives. Yet the window of Soviet advantage was a narrow one and the duel between the Soviet KV heavy tanks and German panzerjagers had a major impact upon the struggle for the strategic initiative in 1941-42.

Little is known about the Tamil liberation cause and struggle, as it has been widely dismissed by global powers of all persuasions - the USA, Russia, China and India - each driven by their own real politik reasons and self-interests. Isolated in their struggle and condemned by world opinion, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) nonetheless proved capable of withstanding all external forces for a period of decades, drawing large numbers of Tamils, both inside Sri Lanka and outside in the Tamil Diaspora, to support its cause. The LTTE created a progressive internal movement that succeeded in breaking down ancient caste barriers that had resisted the political inducements and leadership of figures such as Gandhi, and inculcated a climate of social justice and equality. This book, written by a Diaspora Tamil engaged in human rights work in the Tamil-controlled area of Vanni up until it was overrun by Sri Lankan forces, provides a compelling insider's look at the motivations, issues and complexities of this largely secret civil war. This is what life was like on the ground inside Tamil-controlled territory where the forces of war were held at bay - until 2009 when it was overrun by the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil genocide began.

Tank design bureaus first became involved in the development of very heavy tanks after WWI. In addition to the militaries of Germany and England, the Soviet Union was also fascinated by these monsters. Behind it was the concept of transferring the heavy armament of naval warfare to land warfare. These superheavy vehicles were to move across the land the way battleships moved on the sea, and were to be capable of simultaneously defeating enemy forces from any direction. In this follow-up to his highly regarded work on the Panzerkampfwagen "Maus," Michael Froehlich turns his attention to the other superheavy Wehrmacht designs, such as the Grille 17, the Loewe VK 7001, the Raumer S, the Moerser Bar, the E-100 (successor to the Maus), and the 1,100-ton Urling armored howitzer. Froehlich comprehensively describes their development, technology, and testing, and the eventual fate of those vehicles that were built or only projected. Many rare and never-before-published photographs and drawings of the vehicles complement this unique work.

At peak utilization, private security contractors (PSCs) constituted a larger occupying force in Iraq and Afghanistan than did U.S. troops. Yet, no book has so far assessed the impact of private security companies on military effectiveness. Filling that gap, Molly Dunigan reveals how the increasing tendency to outsource missions to PSCs has significant ramifications for both tactical and long-term strategic military effectiveness--and for the likelihood that the democracies that deploy PSCs will be victorious in warfare, both over the short- and long-term.
She highlights some of the ongoing problems with deploying large numbers of private security contractors alongside the military, specifically identifying the deployment scenarios involving PSCs that are most likely to have either positive or negative implications for military effectiveness. She then provides detailed recommendations to alleviate these problems. Given the likelihood that the U.S. will continue to use PSCs in future contingencies, this book has real implications for the future of U.S. military and foreign policy.

The sought after original SS publication "Waffen-SS im Western" is available here for the first time. Translated into English and carefully reproduced, this rare SS book photographically documents the Waffen-SS campaigns in Holland, Belgium, and France during 1940. The photos were taken by SS war correspondents and vividly illustrate the early SS combat troops as they conquered Western Europe. A clear concise history showing wartime footage, including uniforms, insignia, headgear, weapons and more. This book has often been regarded as one of the best publications ever printed by the Nazi regime on the Waffen-SS. It is a highly valuable photographic study for military historians and collectors alike.

This book covers the diverse amounts of American and British tanks that the Germans used in service during WWII.

A photo chronicle of the LAH in over 300 photos including formation and campaigns throughout WWII.

Covers unique variants and original designs of Panzer tanks.

The epic story of how the Second World War was won.On 4 January 1945, General 'Blood and Guts' Patton confided gloomily to his diary, 'We can still lose the war.' The Nazis were attacking in Eastern France, Luxembourg and Belgium. General Eisenhower's allied armies had lost over 300,000 men in battle (with a similar number of non-battle casualties) and they were still in the same positions they had first captured three months before. Would the German will to resist never be broken? Veteran military historian Charles Whiting assembled individual stories from the frontline as the war entered its last bloody, but ultimately victorious phase. From material such as diaries, interviews and battalion journals he vividly builds up a picture of the soldiers and combatants. As the greatest conflict of them all came to its epic crescendo, those on the ground knew that paths that lead to glory could also lead to death... Perfect for fans of Anthony Beevor, Richard Overy and Damien Lewis.

Mark C. Yerger, responding to requests from readers of his previous books, this new photo album provides material for the model builder, vehicle enthusiast, memorabilia collector and those interested in SS holders of the Knights Cross.

Britain was France's most implacable enemy during the Napoleonic Wars yet was able to resist the need for conscription to fill the ranks of its army and sustain Wellington's campaigns in Portugal and Spain. This new study explains how the men were found to replenish Wellington's army, and the consequences on Britain's government, army and society.

All variations on the 20mm FLAK anti-aircraft gun, including towed versions, and self-propelled as used by all arms of Wehrmacht.