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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues
In January 1943, not long after his nineteenth birthday, Ralph Sirianni was drafted for active duty by the U.S. Army. Ordered to the European Theatre of Operations in February 1944, Sgt. Sirianni served as the right waist gunner on a B-17. On his seventh mission over Germany, the plane - severely damaged by German fighters - crashed near Wildeshausen. With shrapnel in his legs and shoulder, Sirianni bailed out, and he spent the following 15 months in the infamous Stalag Luft I prisoner of war camp. This memoir offers harrowing stories of combat, including detailed descriptions of each of Sirianni's combat missions; reveals the horrors of confinement and the despair of skin-of-the-teeth survival; and remembers camaraderie in the face of German abuse. Valuable for its vivid account of aerial warfare and imprisonment, this memoir is also a story of postwar reconciliation, both psychological and social. Appendices offer excerpts from Sirianni's POW log book and pilot George McFall's firsthand account of the ill-fated final mission.
First published in 1997, this volume responds to attention in recent years which has been belatedly directed towards reviving World War II issues involving Japan. This study deals first with the manner in which such issues so long fell into abeyance under Cold War conditions, while tracing the vast and varied writing on the war which meanwhile appeared within Japan. Evolving Japanese views on the war are largely focused on debate over the revision of the postwar constitution, especially its renunciation of "war potential". The book also contains the first overview of the decades-long litigation within Japan on the screening of textbooks, especially on the war.
German Disarmament After World War I examines the Allied disarmament of Germany and the challenges that such an enormous task presented to international efforts in enforcing the Treaty of Versailles. In the twenty-first century, disarmament remains a critical issue for the International community. This new book focuses on three key areas and lessons of Allied disarmament operations from 1920-31: the role and experience of international arms inspectors working amidst an embittered German populace the ramifications of the divergent disarmament priorities of the leaders of the disarmament coalition the effectiveness of united Allied policies backed by sanctions. These major issues are examined within the overall context of the assessment of Allied disarmament operations in Germany. While some historians perceive German disarmament as a failure, this book argues that arms inspectors successfully destroyed Germany's ability to pose a military threat to European security. This new study shows how the destructive legacy of war convinced the victorious nations, especially Britain and France, of the importance in minimizing German military strength. French post-war security concerns, however, were often faced with the unwillingness of Britain to enforce the totality of the military articles of the treaty. German obstruction also influenced Allied disarmament policies. German Disarmament After World War I examines the initial effectiveness of Allied disarmament efforts in Germany and explains how they ultimately disappeared through diverging conceptions of a post-war world. This book will be of great interest to all students of disarmament, the interwar period and of military history, modern European history and security studies.
Provides the first comprehensive analysis of the history of returning German POWs after the Second World War, explored as a history of memory both during Germany's division and after unification. Millions of former German soldiers (known as Heimkehrer, literally "homecomers," or returnees) returned from captivity as prisoners of war at the end of the Second World War, an experience that had profound effects on German society and touched almost every German family. Based on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the history of the German returnees, explored as a historyof memory, both during Germany's division and after unification. At its core lies the question of how the experiences of war captivity were transformed into individual and collective memories. The book argues that memory of the experience of captivity and return is complex and multilayered and has been shaped by postwar political and social frameworks. Christiane Wienand is a historian and works in Heidelberg, Germany. She holds a PhD in Historyfrom University College London.
Bringing together the latest developments in the realm of international military expenditure and nuclear weapons, this twenty-third edition also reviews nuclear explosions, arms production and trade, chemical and biological weapons, as well as military use of outer space, proliferation of ballistic missile technology, armed conflicts in 1991, nuclear arms control of the United States and the Soviet Union, and conventional arms control in Europe.
Democracy is unlikely to develop or to endure unless military and
other security forces are controlled by democratic institutions and
necessary safeguards, checks and balances are in place.
In addition to concentration camps, World War II Germany was also home to 54 prisoner-of-war camps, the largest of which was Stalag IVB. Throughout the 5-1/2 years of its existence, Stalag IVB supported numerous satellite camps, eventually housing thousands of prisoners of many nationalities. Here Poles, French, Belgians, British, Americans, Dutch and Russians fought to survive in a place where life's most basic needs were barely fulfilled. Interred in the camp for several months during late 1943, Tony Vercoe engaged in a struggle for life, sanity and escape. This historical chronicle evokes the heartbreaking reality of day-to-day life in Stalag IVB. Rich with firsthand accounts by the author and other veterans of the camp, it provides particulars regarding rations, prisoner-of-war registration, camp hygiene, inmate activities and prisoner morale. Special emphasis is placed on the role of the International Red Cross in prisoner survival and the multinational ""melting pot"" characteristics of the camp itself. Possibilities of flight and the events that motivated prisoners' daring escape attempts are discussed, along with the consequences of their frequent failures. Closing chapters detail the camp's final months and the prisoners' long awaited deliverance.
The surprising story of the Army’s efforts to combat PTSD and traumatic brain injury The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a tremendous toll on the mental health of our troops. In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama took to the Senate floor to tell his colleagues that “many of our injured soldiers are returning from Iraq with traumatic brain injury,” which doctors were calling the “signature wound” of the Iraq War. Alarming stories of veterans taking their own lives raised a host of vital questions: Why hadn’t the military been better prepared to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI)? Why were troops being denied care and sent back to Iraq? Why weren’t the Army and the VA doing more to address these issues? Drawing on previously unreleased documents and oral histories, David Kieran tells the broad and nuanced story of the Army’s efforts to understand and address these issues, challenging the popular media view that the Iraq War was mismanaged by a callous military unwilling to address the human toll of the wars. The story of mental health during this war is the story of how different groups—soldiers, veterans and their families, anti-war politicians, researchers and clinicians, and military leaders—approached these issues from different perspectives and with different agendas. It is the story of how the advancement of medical knowledge moves at a different pace than the needs of an Army at war, and it is the story of how medical conditions intersect with larger political questions about militarism and foreign policy. This book shows how PTSD, TBI, and suicide became the signature wounds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how they prompted change within the Army itself, and how mental health became a factor in the debates about the impact of these conflicts on US culture.
A fresh examination of the ethical and intellectual issues and dilemmas associated with attempts to establish formal humanitarian limits on weaponry. This new study considers how governments, non-governmental organizations, academics, political commentators and others have responded to the predicaments associated with imposing classifications about the relative acceptability of force and what is accomplished in their strategies for doing so. It develops these issues through combining thematic and conceptual analysis with the examination of varied cases of prohibitions on a ~conventionala (TM) and a ~unconventionala (TM) weapons through customary and statutory laws, multilateral treaties, UN resolutions, and national legislation. The book will appeal to students of security studies, military technology, peace studies, international relations and discourse theory.
The 20th century saw the unlawful killing of approximately 200 million civilians. Sadly, the conflicts and tensions that gave rise to these deaths continue into the 21st century and the task of those involved in investigating mass murder, war crimes and genocide is larger than ever.;"Forensic Archaeology, Anthropology and the Investigation of Mass Graves" provides clear theory and practice for investigators in training, and aims to establish best practice by forensic practitioners. Offering detailed advice on locating and excavating graves, the analysis of human remains, and the surrounding social, political and legal contexts - this book, is a useful reference.
This volume deals with aspects of genocide in Rwandaand Cambodia that have been largely unexplored to date, including the impact of regional politics and the role played by social institutions in perpetrating genocide. Although the "story" of the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 and that of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 have been written about in detail, most have focused on how the genocides took place, what the ideas and motives were that led extremist factions to attempt to kill whole sections of their country's population, and who their victims were. This volume builds on our understanding of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda by bringing new issues, sources, and approaches into focus. The chapters in this book are grouped so that a single theme DEGREESs explored in both the Cambodian and Rwandan contexts; their ordering is designed to facilitate comparative analysis. The first three chapters emphasize the importance of political discourse in the genocidal process. Chapters 4 and 5 examine social institutions and explore their role in the genocidal process. Chapters 6 and 7 describe the military trajectories of the genocidal regimes in Cambodia and Rwanda after their overthrow, showing that genocide and genocidal intents as a political program do not cease the moment the massacres subside. The final chapters deal with private and public efforts to memorialize the genocides in the months and years following the killing. Drawing on ten years of genocide studies at Yale, this excellent anthology assembles high-quality new research from a variety of continents, disciplines, and languages. It will be an important addition to ongoing research on genocide.
This book offers a broader theory of nuclear deterrence and examines the way nuclear and conventional deterrence interact with non-military factors in a series of historical case studies. The existing body of literature largely leans toward the analytical primacy of nuclear deterrence and it is often implicitly assumed that nuclear weapons are so important that, when they are present, other factors need not be studied. This book addresses this omission. It develops a research framework that incorporates the military aspects of deterrence, both nuclear and conventional, together with various perceptual factors, international circumstances, domestic politics, and norms. This framework is then used to re-examine five historical crises that brought two nuclear countries to the brink of war: the hostile asymmetric nuclear relations between the United States and China in the early 1960s; between the Soviet Union and China in the late 1960s; between Israel and Iraq in 1977-1981; between the United States and North Korea in 1992-1994; and, finally, between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The main empirical findings challenge the common expectation that the threat of nuclear retaliation represents the ultimate deterrent. In fact, it can be said, with a high degree of confidence, that it was rather the threat of conventional retaliation that acted as a major stabilizer. This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear proliferation, cold war studies, deterrence theory, security studies and IR in general.
This book brings together transcripts of the round table discussions from the historic International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide and emphasizes proposals for the prevention of future acts of genocide.
Bosnia Remade is an authoritative account of ethnic cleansing and its partial undoing in the Bosnian wars from 1990 to the present. The two authors, both political geographers, combine a bird's-eye view of the entire war from onset to aftermath with a micro-level account of three towns that underwent ethnic cleansing and-later-the return of refugees. Through the lens of critical geopolitics, which highlights the power of both geopolitical discourse and spatial strategies, Toal and Dahlman focus on the two attempts to remake the ethnic structure of Bosnia since 1991. The first attempt was by ascendant ethnonationalist forces that tried to eradicate the mixed ethnic structures of Bosnia's towns, villages and communities. While these forces destroyed tens of thousands of homes and lives, they failed to destroy Bosnia-Herzegovina as a polity. The second attempt followed the war. The international community, in league with Bosnian officials, tried to undo the demographic consequences of ethnic cleansing. This latter effort has moved in fits and starts, but as the authors show, it has re-made Bosnia, producing a country that has moved beyond the stark segregationist geography created by ethnic cleansing. By showing how ethnic cleansing can be reversed, Toal and Dahlman offer more than just a comprehensive narrative of Europe's worst political crisis in the past two decades. They also offer lessons for addressing an enduring global problem.
In the post-Cold War era, most countries have been forced to radically reduce their arms industries, and abandon self-sufficiency in favour of a subordinate role in an increasingly globalized worldwide defence industry. This has significant implications for the future of armaments production, for proliferation, and for arms control.
This Adelphi Paper argues that, instead of an imperious strategy focusing on counter-proliferation and the treat of preventive war, the recovery of order must entail the pursuit of international legitimacy as well as efficacy and it will require all states to accept restraint and to honour their mutual obligations.
During the 1990s, military spending, arms procurement and defence industrialisation have all increased rapidly in East Asia. Although these developments do not constitute an arms race, they nevertheless have important implications for suppliers of defence equipment, for arms control and for regional stability. This paper assesses trends in the defence spending of East Asian states, particularly in the light of the economic crisis, which began in mid-1997. It also focuses on three closely-related issues: the nature of the regional market for defence equipment; defence industrialisation; and the effect of trends in defence procurement and industrialisation on East Asian states' military capabilities, and on the regional military balance.
Instead of a nuclear flash-point in Cuba or the Korean Peninsula, could the world now be facing one in a Kashmiri mountain village? The nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May 1998 shook the region, challenged the near-global consensus on non-proliferation and increased the risk that other states would follow suit. The international community has been largely powerless in its response. In the wake of the tests the regions underlying problems have become yet more intractable, the need to resolve them more urgent than ever. This paper argues that attempts to deal with the consequences of the tests are inseparable from the history of nuclear developments in both India and Pakistan.;Sanctions have not succeeded in changing policy in the region and more pragmatic responses are necessary. For example, political stability should be encouraged within the countries concerned, in their relations with each other, and in the wider region. Arms control and measures to increase confidence and security also need to be re-examined and adapted to the changed circumstances.
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The nuclear test explosions in India and Pakistan in 1998, followed by the outbreak of hostilities over Kashmir in 1999, marked a frightening new turn in the ancient, bitter enmity between the two nations. Although the tension was eclipsed by the events of 9/11 and the subsequent American attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, it has not disappeared, as evidenced by the 2001 attack in the Indian Parliament by Islamic fundamentalists out of Kashmir. By 2002, these two nuclear-armed neighbors seemed to be once again on the brink of war. This book outlines the strategic structure of the rivalry and the dynamic forces driving it, and investigates various possible solutions. The expert contributors focus on the India-Pakistan rivalry, but also consider the China factor in South Asia's nuclear security dilemma. Although essentially political-strategic in its approach, the book includes coverage of opposing military arsenals and the impact of local terrorism on the delicate balance of power.
The nuclear test explosions in India and Pakistan in 1998, followed by the outbreak of hostilities over Kashmir in 1999, marked a frightening new turn in the ancient, bitter enmity between the two nations. Although the tension was eclipsed by the events of 9/11 and the subsequent American attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, it has not disappeared, as evidenced by the 2001 attack in the Indian Parliament by Islamic fundamentalists out of Kashmir. By 2002, these two nuclear-armed neighbors seemed to be once again on the brink of war. This book outlines the strategic structure of the rivalry and the dynamic forces driving it, and investigates various possible solutions. The expert contributors focus on the India-Pakistan rivalry, but also consider the China factor in South Asia's nuclear security dilemma. Although essentially political-strategic in its approach, the book includes coverage of opposing military arsenals and the impact of local terrorism on the delicate balance of power.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the potential terror of weapons of mass destruction--from nuclear, biological, and chemical to dirty bombs--preoccupies national security experts. In "Chemical Warfare," Frederic J. Brown, presents a cogent, innovative framework for understanding the historical forces that have restrained the use of WMD and how they continue to have relevance today. Analyzing both world wars, he argues that the restraints on use were complex and often unpredictable and ranged from the political to the technological. The author offers a detailed examination of American chemical warfare policy as it was shaped by industry and public sentiment, as well as national and military leaders. The organization of the book into three parts reflects the importance of battlefield experiences during the First World War and of international political restraints as they evolved during the interwar years and culminated in "no first use" policies by major powers in World War II. Part I examines the use of chemical weapons in World War I as it influenced subsequent national policy decisions. Part II focuses on the evolution of political, military, economic, and psychological restraints from 1919 to 1939. Part III discusses World War II during two critical periods: 1939 to early 1942, when the environment of the war was being established largely without American influence; and during 1945, when the United States faced no credible threat of retaliation to deter its strategic and battlefield use of chemical weapons. Written at the height of controversy about the U.S. use of chemicals in Vietnam, "Chemical Warfare" offers a valuable historical perspective, as relevant now in its analysis of chemical and also nuclear policy as it was when first published.
'I took hold of the fence and pressed my face into the wire, asking myself what I had done to be made a prisoner?' On the Indonesian island of Java, eight-year-old Lise enjoys a happy childhood, thousands of miles away from the war raging in Europe. Then, one day in 1942, her friends and neighbours start to disappear. For two years, Lise and her family were imprisoned in POW camps, surviving starvation, illness and brutal treatment at the hands of their Japanese captors - but they never gave up hope. This is the remarkable true story of a little girl who, even in the darkest depths of war, was able to look beyond the barbed wire, to a time when she would be free. First published in hardback as The Blue Door.
This book puts forward a revisionist view of Japanese wartime thinking. It seeks to explore why Japanese intellectuals, historians and philosophers of the time insisted that Japan had to turn its back on the West and attack the United States and the British Empire. Based on a close reading of the texts written by members of the highly influential Kyoto School, and revisiting the dialogue between the Kyoto School and the German philosopher Heidegger, it argues that the work of Kyoto thinkers cannot be dismissed as mere fascist propaganda, and that this work, in which race is a key theme, constitutes a reasoned case for a post-White world. The author also argues that this theme is increasingly relevant at present, as demographic changes are set to transform the political and social landscape of North America and Western Europe over the next fifty years.
Genocide at the Millennium is the fifth volume in the acclaimed series Genocide: A Critical Bibliographical Review. This latest volume's focus is both the genocidal activity that has taken place over the past fourteen years (including that in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia) as well as a critique of the international community's response to genocide and potential genocidal situations (including those of the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations). Genocide at the Millennium is divided into ten chapters. The opening chapter treats the Yugoslav genocide, discussing the causes of the conflict, the violence that ensued, the reaction of the international community, and the ramifications that are still being felt in that part of the world today. Chapter 2 provides a detailed and thought-provoking examination of the causes, results and ramifications of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Chapter 3 examines the conflict in Kosovo and the events surrounding the controversial intervention by NATO. Chapter 4 discusses the remarkable efforts and successes that various non-governmental agencies have had in addressing a wide variety of issues related to genocide. Chapter 5 examines the United Nations' efforts to address the issue of genocide at the turn of the century. The role of individual states confronting issues and cases of genocide is analyzed in chapter 6. Chapter 7 gives a solid overview of the evolution of international law as it pertains to the crime of genocide and how and why major changes in such law have begun to take place in the 1990s and early 2000s. The international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia are considered in chapters 8 and 9. The concluding chapter provides an extremely detailed and highly informative overview of key aspects of the International Criminal Court. In keeping with the multidisciplinary approach of previous volumes in the series, each of the essays and accompanying annotated bibliographies have been written by experts in their fields, many of whom have worked for many years wrestling the thorny, and often horrific, issues germane to the issue of genocide. |
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