New Books in Military History

He was the son of a prominent politician, Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law, and viewed by many as the Duce’s likely successor, only to die before a fascist firing squad near the end of the Second World War. In  Galeazzo Ciano: The Fascist Pretender (U Toronto Press, 2021), Tobias Hof examines Ciano’s career for the many insights it has to offer into Italian fascism and Italian politics during the years of its dominance. As Hof explains, Ciano benefited considerably both from his father Costanzo’s political connections during the early part of his career and from his 1930 marriage to Mussolini’s daughter Edda. During the 1930s Ciano enjoyed a rapid ascent to high office, which fueled the belief that he was being groomed to succeed his father-in-law. Yet Hof demonstrates how Ciano’s positions and bourgeois public persona often were at odds with the views of committed fascists, and that he enjoyed little support from either the monarchy or the Catholic Church. Instead, Ciano found himself increasingly marginalized once Italy entered the war in 1940, while his vote to oust Mussolini from his position as prime minister led to his trial and execution less than a year later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

2 Marras 20211h 4min

An elite platoon of Marine Scout-Snipers, Lieutenant Frank Tachovsky's "40 Thieves" were chosen for their willingness to defy rules and beat all-comers. When two Marines got into a fight, the loser ended up in the infirmary, the winner in the brig. Tachovsky wanted the winner on his team--a brush with military law was a recommendation. These full-blooded men were trained in a ruthless array of hand-to-hand killing techniques and then thrown into the battle for Saipan--Emperor Hirohito's "Treasure" and the bulwark of the Japanese Empire in the Pacific--where they would wreak havoc in and around, but mostly behind, enemy lines. They witnessed inhuman atrocities; walked into an ambush after the cunning Japanese used wounded Marines as bait; endured body-punishing extremes of heat, hunger, and thirst; fought a relentless enemy who would not surrender; and watched best friends die. In 40 Thieves on Saipan: The Elite Marine Scout-Snipers in One of WWII's Bloodiest Battles (Regnery History, 2020), Tachovsky's son Joseph tells their remarkable story--a story he didn't even know until after his father's death--reported from an extensive documentary record, including priceless mementos his father kept, and from exhaustive interviews with survivors who served under Lieutenant "Ski." 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 Loka 202140min

Today I talked to Viviana MacManus, author of Disruptive Archives: Feminist Memories of Resistance in Latin America’s Dirty Wars published by the University of Illinois Press in 2020. It has just received Honorable Mention for the 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize. The National Women's Studies Association awards the prize for groundbreaking scholarship in women's studies that makes significant multicultural feminist contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship. Viviana McManus is at the department of Spanish and French Studies, Occidental College in Los Angeles. Her current research focuses “on feminist uses of horror in contending with gender state and racialized violence in Latin American film and literature”. In Disruptive Archives, Macmanus throws light on the many women activists who survived the years of repression in Argentina and Mexico and who have been relegated to the category of the unseen or are portrayed as underlings to the men who they fought alongside with. She also discusses how human rights texts and masculinist Left accounts of dictatorships have made women’s struggles invisible as they have remained silent and consequently helped post dictatorship regimes who have a vested interest in brushing uncomfortable truths under the carpet. Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

22 Loka 202155min

We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious. With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) (U Chicago Press, 2018), Sam Wineburg offers answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades! If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we must explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate. It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il 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 Loka 20211h 1min

Dr. Leonidas Mylonakis (PhD in History from the University of California, San Diego) is the author of Piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean: Maritime Marauders in the Greek and Ottoman Aegean (Bloomsbury, 2021). This captivating book is based on rich sets of Ottoman, Greek, and other archival sources. Dr. Mylonakis shows that far from ending with the introduction of European powers to the region around the year 1830, Aegean piracy continued unabated into the twentieth century. The book considers how changes in global economic patterns, imperial power struggles, ecological phenomena, shifting maritime trade routes, revisions in international maritime law can explain the fluctuations in violence at sea. Finally, Dr. Mylonakis concludes that pirates' place in state-building processes changed only around 1900, as modern states reevaluated the role of irregular warfare. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

20 Loka 202133min

Perhaps no prediction has been as consistently made—and as consistently wrong—as the imminent death of amphibious operations. Whatever the changes in warfare and technology, the necessity of amphibious force projection endures, long outliving those who claim its time has passed. Changes in how amphibious operations are conducted, however, are just as consistent. This essential contributed volume arrives at a vital point of transition.  The essays in On Contested Shores: The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare (Marine Corps UP, 2020) highlight both changes and continuities, examining historical amphibious operations as early as the sixteenth century to the near future, describing both lesser-known cases and featuring more nuanced views of famous campaigns, such as Gallipoli and Normandy. With the release of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030, this volume gives historians, theorists, and practitioners an opportunity to ground the coming changes in the historical context as they seek to find out what it takes to win on contested shores. Timothy Heck is an artillery officer by trade. A graduate of several military staff schools, he recently finished his MA in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. His work currently focuses on the Red Army during and after the Second World War. B.A. Friedman is a military analyst and an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He holds a BA in history from The Ohio State University and an MA in national security and strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He is a founding member of the Military Writers Guild, the editor of 21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy (2015), and the author of On Tactics: A Theory of Victory in Battle (2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

19 Loka 202138min

Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers UP, 2020) studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone--including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness--are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of human action in making technopolitics that comes to be opposed to "man" and the paradoxes at their basis. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

19 Loka 202156min

For more than half of its existence, members of the Marine Corps largely self-identified as soldiers. It did not yet mean something distinct to be a Marine, either to themselves or to the public at large. As neither a land-based organization like the Army nor an entirely sea-based one like the Navy, the Corps' missions overlapped with both institutions. Heather P. Venable, How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique 1874-1918 (US Naval Institute Press, 2019) argues that the Marine Corps could not and would not settle on a mission, and therefore it turned to an image to ensure its institutional survival. The process by which a maligned group of nineteenth-century naval policemen began to consider themselves to be elite warriors benefited from the active engagement of Marine officers with the Corps' historical record as justification for its very being. Rather than look forward and actively seek out a mission that could secure their existence, late nineteenth-century Marines looked backward and embraced the past. They began to justify their existence by invoking their institutional traditions, their many martial engagements, and their claim to be the nation's oldest and proudest military institution. This led them to celebrate themselves as superior to soldiers and sailors. Although there are countless works on this hallowed fighting force, How the Few Became the Proud is the first to explore how the Marine Corps crafted such powerful myths. Alex J. Beckstrand is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Connecticut, where he researches Woodrow Wilson’s civil-military relations. He most recently published a review in H-War and has a forthcoming article in the Journal of Military History on the 1916-1917 American expedition into Mexico. He is an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves, is a Lecturer at Central Connecticut State University, and works in the aerospace industry. Email: alex.beckstrand@uconn.edu Twitter: @AlexBeckstrand Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

18 Loka 202147min