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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > War & defence operations
Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and Winner of the
Crossword Prize for Non-fiction '"Curfewed Night" is a passionate
and important book - a brave and brilliant report from a conflict
the world has chosen to ignore.' Salman Rushdie Basharat Peer was a
teenager when the separatist movement exploded in Kashmir in 1989.
Over the following years countless young men, fuelled by feelings
of injustice, crossed over the 'Line of Control' to train in
Pakistani army camps. Peer was sent off to boarding school in
Aligarh to keep out of trouble. He finished college and became a
journalist in Delhi. But Kashmir - angrier, more violent, more
hopeless - was never far away. In 2003 Peer, now a young
journalist, left his job and returned to his homeland. Drawing a
harrowing portrait of Kashmir and her people - a mother forced to
watch her son hold an exploding bomb, politicians living in
refurbished torture chambers, picturesque villages riddled with
landmines - this is above all, a story of what it really means to
return home - and the discovery that there may not be any
redemption in it. Lyrical, spare, gut-wrenching and intimate,
Curfewed Night is a powerful and intensely moving debut, combining
the insight of a journalist with the prose of a poet.
The Korean War occupies a unique place in American history and
foreign policy. Because it followed closely after World War II and
ushered in a new era of military action as the first hot conflict
of the cold war, the Korean War was marketed as an entirely new
kind of military campaign. But how were the war-weary American
people convinced that the limited objectives of the Korean War were
of paramount importance to the nation?
In this ground-breaking book, Steven Casey deftly analyzes the
Truman and Eisenhower administrations' determined efforts to shape
public discourse about the war, influence media coverage of the
conflict, and gain political support for their overall approach to
waging the Cold War, while also trying to avoid inciting a hysteria
that would make it difficult to localize the conflict. The first
in-depth study of Truman's and Eisenhower's efforts to garner and
sustain support for the war, Selling the Korean War weaves a lucid
tale of the interactions between the president and government
officials, journalists, and public opinion that ultimately produced
the twentieth century concept of limited war.
It has been popularly thought that the public is instinctively
hostile towards any war fought for less than total victory, but
Casey shows that limited wars place major constraints on what the
government can say and do. He also demonstrates how the Truman
administration skillfully rededicated and redefined the war as it
dragged on with mounting casualties. Using a rich array of
previously untapped archival resources--including official
government documents, and the papers of leading congressmen,
newspaper editors, and war correspondents--Casey's work promises to
bethe definitive word on the relationship between presidents and
public opinion during America's "forgotten war."
Exiled Emissary is a biography of the colorful life of George H.
Earle, III - a Main Line Philadelphia millionaire, war hero awarded
the Navy Cross, Pennsylvania Governor, Ambassador to Austria and
Bulgaria, friend and supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, humanitarian,
playboy, and spy. Rich in Casablanca-style espionage and intrigue,
Farrell's deeply personal study presents FDR and his White House in
a new light, especially when they learned in 1943 that high-ranking
German officials approached Earle in Istanbul to convey their plot
to kidnap Hitler and seek an armistice. When FDR rejected their
offer, thereby prolonging World War II, his close relationship with
Earle became most inconvenient, resulting in Earle's exile to
American Samoa. Earle eventually returned to the United States,
renewing his warnings about communism to President Truman, who
underestimated the threat as a "bugaboo." Now, over four decades
following Earle's death, Farrell has uncovered newly declassified
records that give voice to his warnings about a threat we now know
should have never been dismissed.
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.
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).
Armoured Cars in Eden. A president's son at war in the land that
became modern day Iraq. This is the story of a young American man
serving in a little documented force in an almost forgotten
campaign. More remarkably, he was from a background of military
tradition and adventure and the son of a former United States
president. His war was against the Turkish Ottoman Empire, his
service that of a volunteer in the British army, his familiar
locations Negef, Falujah, Baghdad - exotic place names once again
familiar to Americans at war. His is a story of parallels and
contrasts - of religious sensitivities, rivalries, civil unrest,
occupying armies and conflict along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers
almost a century ago. Roosevelt's experiences conclude in the
Argonne at the end of hostilities.
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.
This is the story of Chęciny, my hometown in southern Poland, and
of the people who lived there between the two world wars of the
20th Century.
The Nazi invasion of Poland in October 1939 started World War
II. Millions of Polish Jews died in the ensuing Holocaust,
including 4,000 citizens of Chęciny, and 50 members of my family. I
was lucky: my mother, brother, three sisters and I had joined my
father in America in 1930. I finished high school in Chicago, went
to college and graduated from the University of Illinois Medical
School. I became a doctor and a psychiatrist, setting up a long and
rewarding private practice in Los Angeles that spanned more than 50
years.
Like the wall paintings in Pompeii, which offer a glimpse into
the daily life of that city before the volcano, I hope that these
stories offer a glimpse into the daily life of my hometown before
the Holocaust.
But most of all, this is the story of my family, and a tribute
to my beloved Aunt Chana and her daughter, my cousin Rachel, whose
courage and self-sacrifice saved Miriam - Chęciny's youngest
survivor of the Holocaust - from the Nazi murderers.
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.
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 stories of these conflicts, with their scores of killings,
torture, reprisals and long lasting bitterness are told concisely
in this book. "Easter 1916" - features the rebellion which took
place in Ireland 90 years ago was arguably the most momentous event
in this country's history. "The War of Independence" - features the
guerrilla war, characterised by marvellous courage and miserable
cruelty. "The Civil War" - features few episodes in Irish history
are as poignant, bloody and unnecessary. This book traces the
causes, events and consequences of these events. It will help a
peaceful generation for which the bloody birth of modern Ireland's
ancient history, to gain a better understanding of the essence of
their nation.
This oral history of the air war in Vietnam includes the stories of
more than thirty pilots who all had one thing in common-after
returning from Southeast Asia and separating from the service, they
were hired as pilots by Western Airlines. As the chapters begin,
Bruce Cowee tells his story and introduces us to each pilot. The
interesting theme is that all of these men served in Southeast Asia
and in most cases never knew each other until they came home and
went to work for Western Airlines. Each of the pilots featured in
this book is the real thing, and in an age of so many "Wannabees,"
it is reassuring to know that each of them was a pilot for Western
Airlines and someone who Bruce worked with or knew professionally.
The stories span a 9 year period, 1964 - 1973, and cover every
aspect of the Air War in Southeast Asia. These 33 men represent
only a small fraction of the Vietnam veterans hired as pilots by
Western Airlines, but this book pays tribute to all of them.
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.
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