An absorbing and definitive modern history of the Vietnam War from the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Secret War.

Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the 1968 Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and also much less familiar miniatures such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh’s warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people.

Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings, and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners’ victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls, and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, and Huey pilots from Arkansas.

No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings’ readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the twenty-first century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.

In their initial effort to end the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger attempted to lever concessions from Hanoi at the negotiating table with military force and coercive diplomacy. They were not seeking military victory, which they did not believe was feasible. Instead, they backed up their diplomacy toward North Vietnam and the Soviet Union with the Madman Theory of threatening excessive force, which included the specter of nuclear force. They began with verbal threats then bombed North Vietnamese and Viet Cong base areas in Cambodia, signaling that there was more to come. As the bombing expanded, they launched a previously unknown mining ruse against Haiphong, stepped-up their warnings to Hanoi and Moscow, and initiated planning for a massive shock-and-awe military operation referred to within the White House inner circle as DUCK HOOK. Beyond the mining of North Vietnamese ports and selective bombing in and around Hanoi, the initial DUCK HOOK concept included proposals for "tactical" nuclear strikes against logistics targets and U.S. and South Vietnamese ground incursions into the North. In early October 1969, however, Nixon aborted planning for the long-contemplated operation. He had been influenced by Hanoi's defiance in the face of his dire threats and concerned about U.S. public reaction, antiwar protests, and internal administration dissent. In place of DUCK HOOK, Nixon and Kissinger launched a secret global nuclear alert in hopes that it would lend credibility to their prior warnings and perhaps even persuade Moscow to put pressure on Hanoi. It was to be a "special reminder" of how far President Nixon might go. The risky gambit failed to move the Soviets, but it marked a turning point in the administration's strategy for exiting Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger became increasingly resigned to a "long-route" policy of providing Saigon with a "decent chance" of survival for a "decent interval" after a negotiated settlement and U.S. forces left Indochina. Burr and Kimball draw upon extensive research in participant interviews and declassified documents to offer a history that holds important lessons for the present and future about the risks and uncertainties of nuclear threat making.

The First World War (1914-1918) marked a turning point in modern history and culture and its literary legacy is vast: poetry, fiction and memoirs abound. But the drama of the period is rarely recognised, with only a handful of plays commonly associated with the war."First World War Plays" draws together canonical and lesser-known plays from the First World War to the end of the twentieth century, tracing the ways in which dramatists have engaged with and resisted World War I in their works. Spanning almost a century of conflict, this anthology explores the changing cultural attitudes to warfare, including the significance of the war over time, interwar pacifism, and historical revisionism. The collection includes writing by combatants, as well as playwrights addressing historical events and national memory, by both men and women, and by writers from Great Britain and the United States.Plays from the period, like "Night Watches" by Allan Monkhouse (1916), "Mine Eyes Have Seen" by Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1918) and "Tunnel Trench" by Hubert Griffith (1924), are joined with reflections on the war in "Post Mortem" by Noel Coward (1930, performed 1944) and "Oh What A Lovely War" by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop (1963) as well as later works "The Accrington Pals" by Peter Whelan (1982) and "Sea and Land and Sky "by Abigail Docherty (2010).Accompanied by a general introduction by editor, Dr Mark Rawlinson.

During the Civil War, cities, houses, forests, and soldiers' bodies were transformed into ""dead heaps of ruins,"" novel sights in the southern landscape. How did this happen, and why? And what did Americans-northern and southern, black and white, male and female-make of this proliferation of ruins? Ruin Nation is the first book to bring together environmental and cultural histories to consider the evocative power of ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change. Megan Kate Nelson examines the narratives and images that Americans produced as they confronted the war's destructiveness. Architectural ruins-cities and houses-dominated the stories that soldiers and civilians told about the ""savage"" behaviour of men and the invasions of domestic privacy. The ruins of living things-trees and bodies-also provoked discussion and debate. People who witnessed forests and men being blown apart were plagued by anxieties about the impact of wartime technologies on nature and on individual identities. The obliteration of cities, houses, trees, and men was a shared experience. Nelson shows that this is one of the ironies of the war's ruination-in a time of the most extreme national divisiveness people found common ground as they considered the war's costs. And yet, very few of these ruins still exist, suggesting that the destructive practices that dominated the experiences of Americans during the Civil War have been erased from our national consciousness.

From the late imperial period until 1922, the British and French made private and government loans to Russia, making it the foremost international debtor country in pre-World War I Europe. To finance the modernization of industry, the construction of public works projects, railroad construction, and the development and adventures of the military-industrial complex, Russia's ministers of finance, municipal leaders, and nascent manufacturing class turned, time and time again, to foreign capital. From the forging of the Franco-Russian alliance onwards, Russia's needs were met, first and foremost, its allies and diplomatic partners in the developing Triple Entente. In the case of Russia's relationships with both France and Great Britain, an open pocketbook primed the pump, facilitating the good spirits that fostered agreement. Russia's continued access to those ready lenders ensured that the empire of the Tsars would not be tempted away from its alliance and entente partners. This web of financial and political interdependence affected both foreign policy and domestic society in all three countries. The Russian state was so heavily indebted to its western creditors, rendering those western economies almost prisoners to this debt, that the debtor nation in many ways had the upper hand; the Russian government at times was actually able to dictate policy to its French and British counterparts. Those nations' investing classes-which, in France in particular, spanned not only the upper classes but the middle, rentier class, as well-had such a vast proportion of their savings wrapped up in Russian bonds that any default would have been catastrophic for their own economies. That default came not long after the Bolshevik Revolution brought to power a government who felt no responsibility whatsoever for the debts accrued by the tsars for the purpose of oppressing Russia's workers and peasants. The ensuing effect on allied morale, the French and British economies and, ultimately, on the Anglo-French relationship, was grim and far-reaching. This book will contribute to understandings of the ways that non-governmental and sometimes transnational actors were able to influence both British and French foreign policy and Russian foreign and domestic policy. It will address the role of individual financiers and policy makers-men like Lord Revelstoke, chairman of Baring Brothers, the British and French Rothschild cousins, Edouard Noetzlin of the Banque de Paris et de Pays Bas, and Sergei Witte, Russia's authoritative finance minister during much of this age of expansion; the importance of foreign capital in late imperial Russian policy; and the particular role of British capital and financial investment in the construction and strengthening of the Anglo-Russo-French entente. It will illustrate the interrelationship of political and economic decision-making with the ideas and beliefs that inform security policy. Drawing upon both the traditional archival sources for diplomatic history-the government holdings of Great Britain, France, and Russia-and the non-governmental archival holdings of international finance-this project looks beyond the realm of high politics and state-centered decision making in the formation of foreign policy, offering insights into the forms and functions of diplomatic alliances while elucidating the connections between finance and foreign policy. It is a classic tale of money and power in the modern era-an age of economic interconnectivity and great power interdependency.

The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the attack by Confederate forces under Forrest's command left many of the Tennessee Unionists and black soldiers garrisoned there dead in a confrontation widely labeled as a "massacre." In "The River Was Dyed with Blood," best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its defenders. Rather, the general's great failing was losing control of his troops.

A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort Pillow--which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters "dyed with blood"--occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war. After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends, popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves.

Wills sets what took place at Fort Pillow in the context of other wartime excesses from the American Revolution to World War II and Vietnam, as well as the cultural transformations brought on by the Civil War. Confederates viewed black Union soldiers as the embodiment of slave rebellion and reacted accordingly. Nevertheless, Wills concludes that the engagement was neither a massacre carried out deliberately by Forrest, as charged by a congressional committee, nor solely a northern fabrication meant to discredit him and the Confederate States of America, as pro-Southern apologists have suggested. The battle-scarred fighter with his homespun aphorisms was neither an infallible warrior nor a heartless butcher, but a product of his time and his heritage.

This volume contains Kipling's collected of essays, poems, theories, and reminisciences on sea warfare, from submarines to destroyers, with the personal and philosophical touches that mark all of his best works. Includes "The Fringes of the Fleet," "Tales of 'the Trade'," and "Destroyers at Jutland."

The Gallipoli expedition was the bold and audacious plan of Winston Churchill, amongst others, to force the Dardanelles narrows, by sea and by land, to capture Constantinople from the Turks and to open the Black Sea to ships taking supplies and arms for the Russians on their immense German front. The campaign failed with catastrophic loss of life on all sides, but again and again, unbeknown to the Allies, they came close to achieving a goal that might have led to victory overall. This book, first published in 1956, is still regarded as the best and definitive account of the campaign. It won the Sunday Times Best Book of the Year Award as well as the inaugural Duff Cooper prize when the winner could choose who would present the award. Appropriately enough, Moorehead chose Churchill to make the presentation because the book demonstrated that the faults were not in the conception of the plan. Indeed, long after Churchill had resigned in disgrace, a new fleet was being assembled to again attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1919, which was cancelled when the war ceased and the Armistice was signed. Seen in the new light that Moorehead revealed, the Gallipoli campaign was no longer regarded as a blunder or a reckless gamble; it was the most imaginative conception of the war, and its potentialities were almost beyond reckoning. Certainly in its strictly military aspect its influence was enormous. It was the greatest amphibious operation which mankind had known up till then, and it took place in circumstances in which nearly everything was experimental: in the use of submarines and aircraft, in the trial of modern naval guns against artillery on the shore, in the manoeuvre of landing armies in small boats on a hostile coast, in the use of radio, or the aerial bomb, the landmine, and many other novel devices. These things lead on through Dunkirk and the Mediterranean landings to the invasion of Normandy in the Second World War. In 1940 there was very little the Allied commanders could learn from the long struggle against the Kaiser's armies in the trenches in France. But Gallipoli was a mine of information about the complexities of the modern war of manoeuvre, of the combined operation by land and sea and sky; and the correction of the errors made then was the basis of the victory of 1945. "the story of one of the great military tragedies of the twentieth century, which no writer has described better than Alan Moorehead." Sir Max Hastings.