Bernard Kelly, “Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen and the Second World War” (Merrion, 2012)
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...
21 Feb 201357min
Sanders Marble, “Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of Substandard Manpower, 1860-1960” (Fordham UP, 2012)
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...
28 Jan 20131h 1min
Frank Ellis, “The Damned and the Dead: The Eastern Front through the Eyes of Soviet and Russian Novelists” (University Press of Kansas, 2011)
Frank Ellis’ The Damned and the Dead: The Eastern Front through the Eyes of Soviet and Russian Novelists (University Press of Kansas, 2011) introduces to English-language readers the riches of Soviet ...
5 Des 201253min
John C. McManus, “September Hope: The American Side of a Bridge Too Far” (NAL, 2012)
This past September saw the sixty-eighth anniversary of one of the European Theater of Operations’ most familiar operations. Conceived by Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, MARKET GARDEN was the We...
4 Nov 20121h 4min
Ben Shepherd, “Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare” (Harvard UP, 2012)
With Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare (Harvard University Press, 2012), Ben Shepherd, a Reader at Glasgow Caledonian University, offers us insight into the complex and harrowi...
26 Sep 201247min
Gregory Crouch, “China’s Wings” (Bantam Books, 2012)
When I was a kid I loved the movie “The Flying Tigers.” You know, the one with John Wayne about the intrepid American volunteers sent to China to fight the Japanese before the United States really cou...
30 Aug 201255min
Steven H. Jaffe, “New York at War: Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham” (Basic Books, 2012)
Many people – including myself – are no doubt surprised to learn about New York City’s rich four hundred year military history. I teach in Flushing, New York, deep in the heart of Queens, at one of th...
11 Aug 20121h 28min
Richard Bessel, “Germany 1945: From War to Peace” (Harper, 2009)
One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just the military that suffered: refugees poured west ...
2 Jul 201255min
