Cynthia Wachtell, “War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914” (LSU Press, 2010)
My favorite book as a teenager (and in fact the only book I ever read as a teenager) was All Quiet on the Western Front. I liked it mostly for the vivid scenes of trench warfare. Teenage boys love that stuff (or at least I did). But even then I recognized that it was essentially an anti-war book. It was hard to miss: the protagonist, Paul, has a pretty nasty time of it in the trenches, and he gets killed at the end. In the years that followed I somehow got the impression that All Quiet was essentially the first real anti-war book. Before WWI, I thought, everyone who wrote about war glorified it. As Cynthia Wachtell shows in War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914 (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), I was just dead wrong about this. In American letters anti-war sentiment abounded. Many of the leading lights of American lit wrote anti-war tracts, and some of them were remarkably “modern” (those by Ambrose Bierce are particularly astonishing, and I highly recommend them). Wachtell does a masterful job of uncovering many of these neglected works, putting them in historical context, and establishing that there was, in fact, an American anti-war tradition. This is an excellent, eye-opening book. 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 Helmi 20121h 7min
Artemy Kalinovsky, “A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan” (Harvard UP, 2011)
It’s been twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed, and scholars still joust over its long- and short-term causes. Amid the myriad factors–stagnating economy, reform spun out of control, globalization, nationalism–the Soviet war in Afghanistan figures in many narratives. Indeed, the ten-year intervention was the one of hottest and bloodiest conflicts in the Cold War, and its traumatic legacies among a generation of Russian citizens continue to resonate. Interestingly, Artemy Kalinovsky emphasizes in A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011) that the intervention was a “reluctant one,” which the Soviet leadership quickly recognized as a quagmire. Yet the Soviets postponed the inevitable out of a belief that they could stabilize country, help build an Afghan army, and create legitimacy for the government in Kabul. In the end it took Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign policy of New Political Thinking to extricate a beleaguered Red Army, and save whatever face possible, despite its all-too-visible scars on the polity. Simultaneously historical and prescient, A Long Goodbye provides clarity to the logic of Soviet decision making in accepting Afghanistan as intractable and as its echoes amplify in our present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
16 Tammi 20121h 5min
Michael Matheny, “Carrying the War to the Enemy: American Operational Art to 1945” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011)
Ask many military historians about the origins of American operational art and many will place it sometime after the Second World War. Conventional wisdom has long held that the American military only developed a rough understanding of operations – the planning and conduct of large-scale (Corps-size or greater) coordinated offensive and defensive actions – in the twin crucibles of the European Theater of Operations and in the US Navy’s drive across the Central Pacific. These traditionalist accounts have generally put the United States Army in the role of either being reluctant students, schooled in the nuances of modern warfare by the masters of the art, the German Wehrmacht, or as being pulled along unwillingly by the more sophisticated Navy and Marine Corps. If that is what passes for conventional wisdom, then Michael Matheny is having none of it. A senior instructor at the United States Army War College and a retired Army officer, Matheny is the author of Carrying the War to the Enemy: American Operational Art to 1945 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). In this enlightened study of the US Army’s experiences and educational efforts between 1917 to 1945, Matheny introduces a new perspective in the story of American operational art. Even as the United States Army was struggling to learn how to wage mass modern industrial war in the forested hills of France, insightful officers were considering how best to achieve the maximum offensive result, applying the greatest concentration of force at the minimal cost. The new problems uncovered during the First World War became the subject of intensive study during the Interwar Years in the Army’s professional schools, which, Matheny argues quite persuasively, ultimately gave American military officers a qualitative edge over its foreign allies and enemies in the Second World War. While admittedly a take on the American way of war that is rather exceptionalist and triumphalist, Matheny backs up his claims with four solid case studies – Operations TORCH and OVERLORD in the European-Mediterranean Theater, and Operations KING II and ICEBERG, the 1944 invasions of the Philippines and the 1945 invasion of Okinawa. In the end Carrying the War to the Enemy presents an interesting foundation through which to begin reconsidering the course of American arms in the Second World War, and which makes a strong effort to recast a flawed conventional narrative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
16 Joulu 201155min
Timothy Nunan, “Carl Schmitt, ‘Writings on War'” (Polity Press, 2011)
Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was the author of numerous influential books and essays on political theory, law, and other subjects. In Carl Schmitt: Writings on War (Polity Press, 2011), Rhodes Scholar Timothy Nunan has provided us with an excellent translation of three of Schmitt’s essay on military affairs. These essays are relevant from a variety of perspectives. They reflect interwar debates about international law, neutrality, and the League of Nations and so are of interest to historians of the period. Schmitt was also a fervent supporter of Hitler and the Nazi party and so it may be surprising that his influence (note his longevity) may in some ways be increasing. His ideas about what constitutes an empire, his thoughts on “just war,” and on war crimes demand our attention despite our revulsion at his political views. For making more of Schmitt’s work accessible to an English-speaking audience, Nunan is to be thanked. 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 20111h 7min
Peter Mauch, “Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)
Peter Mauch‘s Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exhaustively researched and very rich biographical account of the man who was Japan’s ambassador to the US in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. Mauch traces the geopolitical developments of Japanese/US relations from 1877-1951, a crucial period that embraces two World Wars and many fascinating transformations in modern transnational history. The book relates this story through the life of Nomura, naval officer turned ambassador, allowing readers a rare glimpse into the processes and negotiations through which this sailor-diplomat wrestled with conflicting senses of duty, commitment, and reason. A boon not only for scholars of Japan, the book is also a fascinating model of the historian’s craft in its use of biography to simultaneously offer a macro-history of modern global politics, and a micro-history of a vibrant and critical mind reasoning in the course of some very difficult decisions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
17 Loka 20111h 2min
David J. Ulbrich, “Preparing for Victory: Thomas Holcomb and the Making of the Modern Marine Corps, 1936-1943” (Naval Institute Press, 2011).
The story of the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific Theatre in the Second World War is no doubt quite familiar to our listeners. Less well known, however, is the story of how the Marine Corps readied itself for the challenges of amphibious warfare during the interwar period. No less obscure is the record of the Corps’ first commandant, Thomas Holcomb. Generally overshadowed by the combat narrative of the Marines’ first year in the South Pacific and the subsequent tenure of his successor, Alexander Vandegrift, Holcomb has long been skipped over by scholars and students. Historian David Ulbrich remedies this oversight in his Preparing for Victory: Thomas Holcomb and the Making of the Modern Marine Corps, 1936-1943 (Naval Institute Press, 2011). This well-received book presents its subject as a model of the Progressive Era officer who shepherded the American military into the modern era. Despite his mild demeanor, Holcomb – a combat veteran of the First World War and an experienced “China Marine” – exercised total control over the Marine Corps at a critical stage in its history. While the organization had long shed its role as the chief agent of American policy in the Caribbean and Latin America during the “Banana Wars” of the 1920s, the effects of that experience lingered. Looking ahead to the possibility of a conflict with a major naval power, Holcomb guided the Marine Corps to its new mission as an amphibious expeditionary force, capable of waging war across long distances. Thanks to Holcomb’s insight and leadership, Ulbrich concludes, the Marine Corps was well on its way to becoming an essential component of the American war effort in the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
5 Loka 20111h 11min
John Grenier, “The Far Reaches of Empire: War in Nova Scotia, 1710-1760” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)
For many readers, colonial history begins and ends with the original 13 American colonies. This perception overlooks the other British colonies throughout the New World, each of which created their own unique challenges for their imperial master. Historian John Grenier considers one of these “other” colonies in his book The Far Reaches of Empire: War in Nova Scotia, 1710-1760 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008). Part of the Campaigns and Commanders series from the University of Oklahoma Press, Grenier’s book builds upon the framework he constructed in an earlier work, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814 (Cambridge University Press, 2005). There he introduced the idea that a uniquely American way of war evolved in response to the clash of cultures taking place in the New World, drawing equally from the realities and perceptions of war with the Native Americans and the petit guerre -“little war” or irregular war – of the European continent. In this book, Nova Scotia serves as a case study for the First Way of War. Acquired by Britain after Queen Anne’s War, the province was occupied both by French-speaking Acadians and several Native American tribes. Within half a century, however, this population was supplanted by English-speaking settlers, largely from the Massachusetts colony, the original settlers displaced by war and policy. Grenier’s study is thus more than a simple campaign history; instead it presents a complex and intriguing account of the negotiations and conflicts between the island’s diverse Acadian and Native American population, their English overseers, and the encroaching “Yankees” from the colony of Massachusetts offers a fresh take on colonial history. Grenier highlights how a new form of irregular warfare took shape in the New World, on the fringe of Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
23 Syys 201146min
Charles Townshend, “Desert Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia” (Harvard University Press, 2011)
An earlier author described the British invasion of Mesopotamia in 1914 as “The Neglected War.” It no longer deserves that title thanks to the brilliant treatment of the subject by Professor Charles Townshend (University of Keele). His Desert Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia (Harvard University Press, 2011) describes in impressive detail both the political background and the military operations that made modern-day Iraq quite literally hell for the British soldiers engaged there from 1914 to 1918. A parsimonious British administration waged the campaign, seen at the time quite understandably as something of a peripheral concern, on a shoestring, and the absence of the most basic materials, especially shipping and medical supplies, was paid for by the largely Indian soldiery in blood. Using sources ranging from the highest level strategic plans and parliamentary inquiries, to the quasi-anthropological studies of Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence, to the memoirs and letters of the common soldier, Townshend demonstrates convincingly that British frugality combined with an ideology of rational administration created “mission creep” that drew the British further and further into a theater of war in which they were ill-equipped to fight and led them to make arrangements for the postwar Middle East that reverberate to this day. Townshend is laudably cautious in extrapolating from the experience of 1914-1918 to the present day, but an attentive reader will be in no doubt about the ways in which today’s Iraq is a product of its past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
31 Elo 20111h 5min
