Rachel Williams, "Tabernacles in the Wilderness: The US Christian Commission on the Civil War Battlefront" (Kent State UP, 2024)

There are many books about the war against Al Qaeda. Most of these focus on counter-terrorism or counter insurgency military tactics or espionage operations. These books have become more frequent with the death of Osama Bin Laden. Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (Times Books, 2011) is more than you can expect from its competitors. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker have been reporting on this issue for many years and cover the topic from a number of angles. Most importantly they are the first to give full recognition to the non-military methods used to counter Al Qaeda. They recognize that there is an intellectual chess game at play as well as the brute force of military intervention or drone strikes. Subtle and patient schemes are being used by US governments to undermine the social networks and social capital of the terrorist group. Ploys are used to coax key figures out of hiding. Counter propaganda campaigns are waged to break down support from potential sources of new members. As well as covering the broader and nuanced techniques, the authors also have a clear understanding of the nature of the terrorist threat. Al Qaeda is a terrorist group but not all terrorists are in Al Qaeda. They recognize that this is a group with a unique history and specific goals that needs non-generic responses to break down its strengths. Al Qaeda still exists but is not what it once was. It has weakened but adapted. Schmitt and Shanker provide an excellent coverage of recent history that will allow you to get a more insightful understanding of counter terrorism in modern America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

25 Loka 201342min

Brian Sandberg‘s Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) significantly revises our understanding of early modern military culture and absolutism. By examining the frequent civil wars of the early seventeenth century in France, Sandberg demonstrates that the French nobility were neither merely resisting the spread of the absolutist state nor sitting idly by while modern economic and military forces swept them into obscurity. Rather, by examining the many local and regional conflicts of the era, Sandberg shows that the French nobles of the era were capable actors in a complex arena dominated by a culture of honor, sophisticated systems of credit, and dangerous civil conflicts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

15 Heinä 201357min

Dale Maharidge‘s Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War (PublicAffairs, 2013) is something of a departure from our regular offerings. Normally our authors are established academics specializing in the field of military history. Dale Maharidge, however, is an award-winning journalist who, prior to Bringing Mulligan Home, has had only limited exposure to the subject of the Pacific Theater in World War II. What he does bring however is a personal stake in the topic – his father Steve Maharidge served in the Sixth Marine Division, and took part in the assaults on Guam and Okinawa. As a child and then as a young man, Dale was both enthralled and frightened by his father’s regular accounts of the war – enthralled as a son learning more about his father’s experiences in combat; frightened by the storm of emotions and anger that often accompanied his stories. Inspired to learn more about his father’s service, Dale came to understand how Post-Traumatic Stress and Traumatic Brain Injury shaped his father’s post-war life, as well as that of the dozen other Marines he interviewed who served alongside him. Though written in a journalistic style, Dale Maharidge reserves the bulk of the text for the personal testimony of his twelve interview subjects. The account they weave spares no word or emotion as it offers a harsh testimony of the power and violence of the Pacific War. The collected narratives present a visceral account of combat that rivals Eugene Sledge’s classic With the Old Breed, while also bearing witness to John Dower’s conclusions in his groundbreaking monograph, War Without Mercy. While the book does occasionally lag, caught up in inconsistencies and missed conclusions, in the larger perspective these flaws are minor. Bringing Mulligan Home captures the ugly, nightmarish side of the Pacific War, but never at the expense of the humanity of his father, or his compatriots (well, there is one exception – but more on that in the interview). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

3 Heinä 20131h 13min

Historian David Silbey returns to New Books in Military History with his second book, The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China (Hill and Wang, 2012). The popular uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion has long only been vaguely understood, with Hollywood playing as great a role in shaping common perception of the event as historians have. The result has been a generally misplaced understanding of the event, focusing more on the besieged Western consulates and t  he relief expeditions than on the complex interactions between the Boxers and the Chinese Court, both between themselves and individually and together against the West. Silbey has written a very accessible account of the Boxer Rebellion that also conveys the complexity of these relationships and the often successful resistance Chinese forces raised against the advancing relief columns. As the West imposed its will over the Manchu court, the stage was set for the nation’s first halting steps into the modern era, setting in motion a long history of exploitation and conflict that would end with the rebirth of China as a world power. An interesting study in the nexus between imperialism, racial ideology, and military history, Silbey’s book again provides the reader with a window onto a misunderstood and often ignored incident that remains relevant even now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

3 Kesä 20131h 16min

James Whitman wants to revise our understanding of warfare during the eighteenth century, the period described by my late colleague and friend Russell Weigley as the “Age of Battles.” We commonly view warfare during this period as a remarkably restrained affair, dominated by aristocratic values, and while we recognize their horrors for the participants, we often compare battles to the duels those aristocrats fought over private matters of honor. Not true, claims Whitman, who argues instead that battles during the period 1709 (Battle of Malplaquet) and 1863/1870 (Gettysburg/Sedan) were understood by contemporaries not to be royal duels but “legal procedure[s], a lawful means of deciding international disputes through consensual collective violence.” [3] Understanding war as a form of trial is what gave warfare of the era its decisiveness (sorry Russ) and forces us, according to Whitman, to change the way we interpret, for example, Frederick the Great’s invasion of Silesia. Whitman, who is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School and an academically trained historian (PhD Chicago 1987), brings the perspective of both lawyer and historian to his work ways that teach us much about both the military history and the law of the period he considers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

29 Huhti 201342min

The Spanish Civil War is one of those events that I have always felt I should know more about. Thanks to Stanley Payne‘s concise, lucid new work on the subject, I feel less that way. I do not exaggerate when I say that Payne, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, is the nation’s foremost expert on Spanish history and on historical fascism in general. That expertise shines in this book and really comes to the fore in this interview. Published by Cambridge University Press as part of its Essential Histories series, Payne’s work synthesizes a lifetime of study in Spain, laying out the origins of the civil war in Spain’s deeply fractured political culture, and tracing the international and military developments that led to Francisco Franco’s eventual triumph in 1939. As Payne points out, the Spanish Civil War has been mythologized for political purposes since the day it began, much to the detriment of our understanding of the real story. The details of how and why the war began, how it was fought, and what was at stake have too-often been lost in a public effort to assign blame or capture the war’s legacy for political purposes. Payne revels in debunking some of these myths while carefully balancing conflicting arguments and accounts. Enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

13 Maalis 201357min

The Republic of Ireland (aka The Irish Free State, Eire) declared neutrality during the Second World War. That wasn’t particularly unusual: Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland did too. Yet around 60,000 “neutral” Irish volunteered to fight on one side (with the Allies, in this case). That was unusual. After the war, most of the Irish volunteers remained in the UK. But 12,000 of them came back to Ireland. In Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen and the Second World War (Merrion, 2012), Bernard Kelly tells their story. Like most things in Irish history, it’s complicated. On the one hand, the volunteers had served in the armed forces of Ireland’s archenemy (at least according to Republicans). On the other hand, they had fought the Nazis and thereby protected the Free World. Bernard explains how the Irish veterans were received and, interestingly, how they are still being discussed in Ireland today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

21 Helmi 201357min

Sanders Marble, senior historian of the United States Army’s Office of Medical History, presents a collection of essays related to the problems of substandard manpower as defined at different times in Western militaries over the modern era. Accordingly normally rigorous peacetime entrance standards have established conditions for the exclusion of certain individuals on the basis of physical, intellectual, ethnic, and racial criteria. During conflict, however, such notions of exclusion and exceptionalism are modified to reflect the needs of the army relative to the specific crisis. Marble’s Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of Substandard Manpower, 1860-1960 (Fordham University Press, 2012) examines eleven case studies related to so-called “substandard manpower,” offering a series of assessments on military force structure in wartime. in this interview, our host talks with Sanders Marble about the overall project and his specific essay on American forces in the twentieth century, “Below the Bar: The U.S. Army and Limited Service Manpower.” He also speaks briefly with sociologist Thomas Sticht about his contribution to the volume, a deep analysis of the Department of Defense’s much-maligned “Project 100,000” in the essay “Project 100,000 in the Vietnam War and Afterward.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

28 Tammi 20131h 1min