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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > War & defence operations
The quantity of journalism produced during World War I was unlike
anything the then-budding mass media had ever seen. Correspondents
at the front were dispatching voluminous reports on a daily basis,
and though much of it was subject to censorship, it all eventually
became available. It remains the most extraordinary firsthand look
at the war that we have. Published immediately after the cessation
of hostilities and compiled from those original journalistic
sources-American, British, French, German, and others-this is an
astonishing contemporary perspective on the Great War. This replica
of the first 1919 edition includes all the original maps, photos,
and illustrations, lending an even greater immediacy to readers a
century later. Volume IV covers December 1916 through March 1918,
from the entrance of the United States into the conflict through
the last of the zeppelin raids on the Western Front. American
journalist and historian FRANCIS WHITING HALSEY (1851-1919) was
literary editor of The New York Times from 1892 through 1896. He
wrote and lectured extensively on history; his works include, as
editor, the two-volume Great Epochs in American History Described
by Famous Writers, From Columbus to Roosevelt (1912), and, as
writer, the 10-volume Seeing Europe with Famous Authors (1914).
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the latest chapter in a series of
events that have their origins in World War One. The difficult
existential questions that emerged before and during this conflict
still remain unresolved. Contrary to the claim that wars are not
supposed to happen in Europe or that we live in the era of the End
of History, the experience of Ukraine highlights the salience of
the spell of the past. The failure of the West to take its past
seriously has left it confused and unprepared to deal with the
current crisis. Unexpectedly fashionable claims about the
irrelevance of borders and of nation states have been exposed as
shallow myths. The author argues that the West's self-inflicted
condition of historical amnesia has encouraged it to disregard the
salience of geo-political realities. Suddenly the once fashionable
claims that made up the virtues of globalisation appear threadbare.
This problem, which was already evident during the global Covid
pandemic has reached a crisis point in the battlefield of Ukraine.
History has had its revenge on a culture that believes that what
happened in the past no longer matters. The Road To Ukraine: How
the West Lost Its Way argues that overcoming the state of
historical amnesia is the precondition for the restoration of
global solidarity.
Translated into English as the Winner of the Geisteswissenschaften
International Translation Prize for Work in the Humanities and
Social Sciences 2015. During the Great War, mass killing took place
on an unprecedented scale. Violence and the German Soldier in the
Great War explores the practice of violence in the German army and
demonstrates how he killing of enemy troops, the deaths of German
soldiers and their survival were entwined. As the war reached its
climax in 1918, German soldiers refused to continue killing in
their droves, and thus made an active contribution to the German
defeat and ensuing revolution. Examining the postwar period, the
chapters of this book also discuss the contested issue of a
'brutalization' of German society as a prerequisite of the Nazi
mass movement. Biographical case studies on key figures such as
Ernst Junger demonstrate how the killing of enemy troops by German
soldiers followed a complex set of rules. Benjamin Ziemann makes a
wealth of extensive archival work available to an Anglophone
audience for the first time, enhancing our understanding of the
German army and its practices of violence during the First World
War as well as the implications of this brutalization in post-war
Germany. This book provides new insights into a crucial topic for
students of twentieth-century German history and the First World
War.
World War II saw the first generation of young men that had grown
up comfortable with modern industrial technology go into combat. As
kids, the GIs had built jalopies in their garage and poured over
glossy, full-color issues of Popular Mechanics; they had read Buck
Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century comic books, listened to his
adventures on the radio, and watched him pilot rocket ships in the
Saturday morning serials at the Bijou. Tinkerers, problem-solvers,
risk-takers, and day-dreamers, they were curious and outspoken--a
generation well prepared to improvise, innovate, and adapt
technology on the battlefield. Since they were also a generation
which had unprecedented technology available to them, their ability
to innovate with technology proved an immeasurable edge on the
field of combat. This book tells their story through the experience
of the battle of Normandy, bringing together three disparate brands
of history: (1) military history; (2) the history of science and
technology; and (3) social, economic, cultural, and intellectual
history. All three historical narratives combine to tell the tale
of GI genius and the process by which GI ingenuity became an
enduring feature of the American citizen-soldier. GI Ingenuity is
in large part an old-fashioned combat history, with mayhem and mass
slaughter at center stage. It tells the story of death and
destruction on the killing fields of Normandy, as well as the
battlegrounds that provide the prologue and postscript to the
transformation of war that occurred in France in 1944. This story
of GI ingenuity, moreover, puts the battles in the context of the
immense social, economic, scientific, and technological changes
that accompanied theevolution of combat in the twentieth century.
GI Ingenuity illustrates the great transition of the American
genius in battle from an industrial-age army to a postmodern
military. And it does it by looking at the place where the
transition happened--on the battlefield.
Second World War British Military Camouflage offers an original
approach to the cultures and geographies of military conflict,
through a study of the history of camouflage. Isla Forsyth narrates
the scientific biography of Dr Hugh Cott (1900-1987), eminent
zoologist and artist turned camoufleur, and entwines this with the
lives of other camouflage practitioners, to trace the sites of
camouflage's developments. Moving through the scientists'
fieldsite, the committee boardroom, the military training site and
the soldiers' battlefield, this book uncovers the history of this
ambiguous military invention, and subverts a long-dominant
narrative of camouflage as solely a protective technology. This
study demonstrates that, as camouflage transformed battlefields
into unsettling theatres of war, there were lasting consequences
not only for military technology and knowledge, but also for the
ethics of battle and the individuals enrolled in this process.
The battles in Russia played the decisive part in Hitler's defeat.
Gigantic, prolonged, and bloody, they contrasted with the general
nature of the fighting on other fronts. The Russians fought on
their own in "their" theater of war and with an indepedent
strategy. Stalinist Russia was a country radically different from
its liberal democratic allies. Hitler and the German high command,
for their part, conceived and carried out the Russian campaign as a
singular "war of annihilation." This riveting new book is a
penetrating, broad-ranging, yet concise overview of this vast
conflict. It investigates the Wehrmacht and the Red Army and the
command and production systems that organized and sustained them.
It considers a range of further themes concerning this most
political of wars. Benefiting from a post-Communist, post-Cold War
perspective, the book takes advantage of a wealth of new studies
and source material that have become available over the last
decade. Readers from history buffs to scholars will find something
new in this exciting new book.
This unique volume combines the book Tiger I In Combat with a
facsimile of the original German wartime crew manual for the Tiger
tank, the Tigerfibel. This overview draws on a wide variety of
primary source accounts of the Tiger I in action from both the
Allied and the German perspective. Rare photographs, technical
drawings and contemporary reports of the Tiger in combat help to
set aside the myths and bring the reality into focus. General Heinz
Guderian authorised the publication of the Tigerfibel from 1943
onwards. This highly unorthodox publication was full of risqu
drawings and humorous illustrations and was designed to convey
complex battlefield instructions in a simple and memorable manner.
The manual contains everything the reader could ever wish to know
concerning how the crews were instructed to handle the Tiger I
under combat conditions. The Tigerfibel contains detailed
instructions on aiming, firing, ammunition and close combat. There
are extensive sections on maintenance, driving, radio operation and
the essentials of commanding a Tiger I in combat. This book
contains the original German publication with a complete English
translation, new overview and introduction by Emmy Award winning
historian Bob Carruthers. Highly accessible, this book is essential
and rewarding reading for all readers interested in the history of
the Tiger I.
This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It
contains classical literature works from over two thousand years.
Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore
shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the
cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical
literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the
mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from
oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of
international literature classics available in printed format again
- worldwide.
Coral Comes High is Captain George P. Hunt's account of what
happened to himself and his company during the initial stages of
the Peleliu invasion by the US Marines during World War 2. The
company sustains terrible casualties and is isolated in a seemingly
hopeless position for a nightmare forty-eight hours. Outnumbered
and outgunned by the enemy, they beat off all attacks and seize the
Point with a courage which is at the same time matter-of-fact and
almost superhuman.
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