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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Military life & institutions
Portuguese paratroopers or "paras" began as a stepchild of the army
and found a home in the Portuguese Air Force in 1955. Initially,
the post-World War Two Portuguese Army seemed to have had mixed
emotions about the need for elite, special-purpose forces that
operated in small units with the attendant flexibility and elevated
lethality. Shock troops have been traditionally controversial, and
even the vaunted military theorist Baron Karl von Clausewitz saw
little point in them. The history of the paras in the Portuguese
Army is illustrative of this ambivalent view. Nevertheless, in a
"war of the weak" in which insurgents avoid government strengths
and exploit its vulnerabilities using agility, deception, and
imagination, such small, crack government units are particularly
well suited to counterinsurgency operations. This appreciation
emerged with the threat of a new kind of war in Portuguese Africa,
an insurgency, and the new and visionary Air Force well understood
the potential of paras when combined with the mobility of the
helicopter. The Air Force saw an urgent need for troops who could
fight an unconventional war, who could not only defeat an enemy but
separate him from the population in which he sought concealment and
support and on which he depended for funding, recruits, and
intelligence. These were specialised warfighters who in one minute
were physically destroying an insidious enemy and in the next
administering aid and support and protecting a vulnerable
population. These were just the troops that Portugal would require
for military success in its approaching battle fought between 1961
and 1974 to retain its African possessions, and this vision would
be realized on the African battlefield with devastating
consequences. This book tells the paras' story as researched from
Portuguese sources. It details how they were formed and trained and
how they developed their imaginative, effective, and feared tactics
and applied them in operations to protect the population from
insurgent predations and destroy a vicious enemy.
Choice Outstanding Title Scorned by allies and enemies alike, the
Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was one of the most maligned
fighting forces in modern history. Cobbled together by U.S.
advisers from the remnants of the French-inspired Vietnamese
National Army, it was effectively pushed aside by the Americans in
1965. When toward the end of the war the army was compelled to
reassert itself, it was too little, too late for all concerned. In
this first in-depth history of the ARVN from 1955 to 1975, Robert
Brigham takes readers into the barracks and training centers of the
ARVN to plumb the hearts and souls of these forgotten soldiers.
Through his masterly command of Vietnamese-language
sources-diaries, memoirs, letters, oral interviews, and more-he
explores the lives of ordinary men, focusing on troop morale and
motivation within the context of traditional Vietnamese society and
a regime that made impossible demands upon its soldiers. Offering
keen insights into ARVN veterans' lives as both soldiers and devout
kinsmen, Brigham reveals what they thought about their American
allies, their Communist enemies, and their own government. He
describes the conscription policy that forced these men into the
army for indefinite periods with a shameful lack of training and
battlefield preparation and examines how soldiers felt about
barracks life in provinces far from their homes. He also explores
the cultural causes of the ARVN's estrangement from the government
and describes key military engagements that defined the
achievements, failures, and limitations of the ARVN as a fighting
force. Along the way, he explodes some of the myths about ARVN
soldiers' cowardice, corruption, and lack of patriotism that have
made the ARVN the scapegoat for America's defeat. Ultimately, as
Brigham shows, without any real political commitment to a divided
Vietnam or vision for the future, the ARVN retreated into a
subnational culture that redefined the war's meaning: saving their
families. His fascinating book gives us a fuller understanding not
only of the Vietnam War but also of the problems associated with
U.S. nation building through military intervention.
In this compelling new study of the disastrous 1940 campaign in
France and Flanders, Matthew Richardson reconstructs in vivid
detail the British army's defeat as it was experienced by the
soldiers of a single battalion, the 2nd/5th Leicesters. These men
typified the ill-equipped, under-trained British battalions that
faced the blitzkrieg and the might of Hitler's legions. They were
thrown into a series of desperate, one-sided engagements that
resulted in a humiliating retreat, then evacuation from Dunkirk.
This is their story.Matthew Richardson is curator of social history
at Manx National Heritage and was formerly assistant keeper of the
Liddle Collection at the University of Leeds. He has a long-term
interest in military history and research, focusing in particular
on the First and Second World Wars and on the history of the
Leicestershire Regiment. In addition to writing many magazine
articles on military history, he has published the following books:
The Tigers and Fighting Tigers. He is currently working on 1914:
Clash of Empires.
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