New Books in Military History

Tarak Barkawi, a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, has written an important book that will cause many of us to rethink the way we understand the relationships between armies and societies. In Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Barkawi argues that many scholars of Western armies tend to overstate the degree to which motivation and fighting spirit as well as the urge to commit atrocity derive from the characteristics, strengths or weaknesses of the societies the solders come from. Studying the British Indian Army in Burma during World War II, Barkawi sees instead the way that ritual, drill, and constructed traditions that are more internal to the army itself do more to explain how that army fought so relatively effectively. The Indian peasants who filled the ranks of the British Army shared little socially, politically or otherwise with the United States Marines who fought the Japanese on Guadalcanal. And yet they fought equally hard and with equal brutality against their foe—on behalf of their colonial overlords. Barkawi attends not only to larger political context of British India and to the recruitment and training of the British Army in India, he also describes in considerable detail specific engagements in Burma that make clear how group solidarity and the will to combat are constructed even in an army for whom the normal Western markers of belonging (patriotism, religion, ethnic heritage, even a common language) are absent. 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 Mai 201838min

There’s been something of a revival of interest in the Vietnam War in the past years.  Perhaps it’s the influence of Ken Burns’ documentary miniseries, perhaps it’s just the distance from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  For whatever reason, 2016, 2017 and 2018 saw the publication of a number of new works about the war. In Enduring Vietnam: An American Generation and its War (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) James Wright employs a generational framework to understand the experience of the war.  He offers a careful and persuasive synthesis of the political and diplomatic history of the war.  But Wright’s interest really lies in the experience of the ordinary men and women who fought in the war or who saw it from afar.  Surveys of the experience of fighting in Vietnam are interspersed with fascinating discussions of responses in the US.  His pairing of a discussion of Memorial Day, 1969 as experienced across the US with the fighting at Hamburger Hill is particularly engrossing. My father’s generation grew up in the midst of Vietnam.  My generation grew up in its shadow.  My students learned about the war in a day in high school, if that.  For them, Iraq and Afghanistan are ‘America’s Longest War(s).’  Wright’s book is a great way to open a conversation between these generations. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. 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 Mai 201850min

As any scholar of the Vietnam War can tell you, the field doesn’t lack for study: it’s one of the most-studied fields for both military and diplomatic historians. And yet, for all of the scholarly attention it has received, there are understudied facets of this complicated, multilateral conflict, particularly in its early years, before American ground troops entered the country in large numbers. Jessica Elkind’s Aid Under Fire: Nation Building and the Vietnam War (University of Kentucky Press, 2016) does precisely this by examining U.S. development programs that tried to foster a viable South Vietnamese state in the 1950s and early 1960s. The outcomes of those disparate programs ultimately deepened a U.S. commitment to the Republic of South Vietnam and helped set the United States on the road to war. Dr. Elkind’s research was conducted using U.S. government sources, private collections from Michigan State University, and South Vietnamese government sources held in Ho Chi Minh City. Michigan State University was an important actor in this narrative because it was responsible for establishing and running certain programs. In each of the book’s five chapters, she examines a different aid program, ranging from the resettlement programs created for refugees fleeing the newly-created North Vietnam, to agricultural aid and development, to police training. What emerges from these various perspectives is a view of widely-ranging intentions and goals that often differed starkly. Not only did the U.S. government and South Vietnamese government disagree on what would constitute effective aid and development, the public-private partnership that existed between the U.S. government and Michigan State University also frayed as the individual aid workers began to lose faith in their mission. As the United States and the international community confronts global problems about development and nation-building, Aid Under Fire suggests lessons that policymakers and the public should heed. Development cannot succeed without taking into account the wishes of the people who are receiving aid, and simply transplanting western modalities cannot work without taking into account the conditions on the ground. As Elkind demonstrates, overconfidence in nation-building can have dire consequences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

9 Mai 201857min

Steven L. Ossad joins New Books at Military History to talk about his award-winning biography, Omar Nelson Bradley: America’s GI General, 1893-1981 (University of Missouri Press, 2017).  Following the suggestion of his mentor, Martin Blumenson, Steven delivers a comprehensive look at the life and career of this central, but little-studied, figure in the Allied effort toward victory in the European Theater of Operations in World War Two.  Rising up from abject poverty to become the last of the American “five stars” – those general officers esteemed enough to be awarded the rank General of the Army – Bradley stands out not only on the balance of his wartime service, but his critical stewardship of the Veterans Administration and later his service as the nation’s chief military advisor to President Harry S. Truman.  Steven Ossad delivers a highly anticipated, “warts and all”, look at this important man and his legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

4 Mai 20181h 13min

Since 1945, the United States has lost every war it started. Why? A Vietnam War veteran, Tufts University Ph. D. and intimate of many of the leading figures in the American national security apparatus in the past forty-years, Dr. Harlan Ullman‘s new book endeavors to find the answers to this most disturbing of queries. An in depth examination of American strategic and military decision-making since the Eisenhower era, Dr. Ullman shows the reader the flawed policy processes and decisions which made debacles such as Vietnam War, the Second Gulf War and the ongoing war in Afghanistan all too predictable. According to Dr. Ullman one answer to his query is simply that almost all presidents and administrations since 1960 have consistently failed to use sound strategic thinking and lacked sufficient knowledge or understanding of the circumstances prior to deciding whether or not to employ force. From John F. Kennedy to Donald Trump, from Vietnam to the war against ISIS, Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Every War It Starts (Naval Institute Press, 2017) is in the words of Edward Luce of the Financial Times a must read book for anyone who wishes to find out why American foreign policy has in too many cases been a catalog of failure. All from the man who invented the concept of ‘Shock and Awe’. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. 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 Mai 20181h 8min

In his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a comparative and trans-imperial approach to map a global network of camps established by Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1876 and 1903, officials set up famine, plague, and wartime concentration camps across India and South Africa in response to a number of interconnected global emergencies. Situating these imperial camps within a longer tradition of Victorian reforms, Forth argues that, while the camps ostensibly provided care and relief for millions of inmates, they simultaneously functioned as sites of social control and confinement. In this way, Barbed-Wire Imperialism challenges existing understandings of British concentration camps, recasting them not as exceptional wartime measures, but as ubiquitous tools of imperial governance. Aidan Forth is an Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches courses on modern British history, colonialism, transnational urban history and European urban history. Jess Clark is an Assistant Professor of History at Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario). She is currently writing a history of the beauty business in Victorian London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

24 Apr 20181h 7min

Counterinsurgency doctrine, the Vietnam War, and the vagaries of politics all come together in Max Boot‘s latest work, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (Liveright, 2018). One of the most prolific and iconoclastic commentators on American foreign policy currently active in American letters, Max Boot examines the life and career of General Edward Lansdale, in this detailed and quite personal biography. As he considers the various successes and failures of Lansdale’s professional life, as well as his role as the inspiration for some of the most telling fictional accounts of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, Boot also develops a context for counterinsurgency that positions strategic empathy as the most essential characteristic for its success. Yet the story of Lansdale’s life and career is also a riveting chapter in the great American tragedy that is the Vietnam War, one of which Boot offers an unvarnished and stark assessment. 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 Apr 201845min

In Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the short-lived but crucial “age of steam.” Drawing on British government and military records, ships’ logs and mariners memoirs, Gray examines coal from multiple, intersecting perspectives. Beginning with its geopolitical importance, Gray shows that steam powered ships significantly increased the nature and frequency of material supplies needed to maintain a navy at sea. Unlike the relatively self-sufficient sailing ship, steam-powered vessels had an almost insatiable appetite for coal, requiring resupply much more frequently. Further, not just any coal would do: after extensive tests on the quality of coals from across the globe, engineers found that Welsh steam coal was the essential fuel for Britain’s steam-powered navy, and there were precious few suitable alternatives. These facts, then, shaped the construction and maintenance of a system of fossil-fuel infrastructure that spanned the globe. Gray rounds his analysis out by following coal’s journey from mines, through depots and coaling stations, in lighters, and then into ships holds. He identifies coaling stations as unique imperial spaces, in which naval personnel, administrators, and local inhabitants crossed paths. He considers the innumerable hands and backs that groaned under the weight of tons of black rocks, including indigenous laborers and British sailors. Throughout, he demonstrates conclusively the utter centrality of coal to the late-Victorian and Edwardian Royal Navy, and hence to the British Empire. Steven Gray is Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Naval History at the University of Portsmouth. He studies imperial, maritime, transnational, global and transoceanic history, with particular interest in the material infrastructures of global networks, and how these facilitated the mobility of goods, people, militaries and empires. David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Laguna College of Art and Design, and Chapman University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British 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

10 Apr 20181h 9min