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 Okt 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 Okt 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 Sep 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 Aug 20111h 5min
Rodric Braithwaite, “Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89” (Oxford UP, 2011)
I was still in high school the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 1979. I remember reading about it in Time magazine and watching President Carter denounce it on TV. The Soviets, everyone said, were bent on ruling the world. Detente had been a ploy to lull us to sleep. In Afghanistan, the Communists had renewed their campaign. We had to do something. So we didn’t go to “their” Olympics. Oddly, that brave gesture failed to bring them around to our way of thinking. There are two really wonderful things about Sir Rodric Braithwaite‘s new book Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89 (Oxford UP, 2011). First, Sir Rodric shows in excruciating detail just how wrong we got it. The tiny cabal of Soviet leaders who sent the Red Army into Afghanistan weren’t imperialists pursuing some grand strategy to conquer the globe. They were scared, sometimes confused old men in a situation that was made impossible by conflicting, contradictory aims. They wanted to protect the USSR’s southern boarder; they wanted to keep the US out of the region; they wanted to stop the local Communist Party from turning Afghanistan into another Cambodia; they wanted to protect their personal friends and allies, people they knew, trusted, and liked; and, almost more than anything else, they wanted to give the Afghanis peace, stability, and prosperity so they just wouldn’t have to think about Afghanistan ever again. That’s right, the men in the Kremlin were not evil; they wanted to do good, if only for their own sake. The trouble was–and this brings us to the second wonderful aspect of Sir Rodric’s book–they couldn’t accomplish all these things. They knew this: the horrible example of America’s effort to “help” Vietnam was right before their eyes. But they were frightened, prone to catastrophic thinking, and didn’t want to appear weak. So they had to do something. They couldn’t very well refuse to go to their own Olympics. So, by steps, they invested Afghanistan. First there were advisors. Then there were troops to protect the advisors. Then there was political unrest, calls for help, and the dispatch of larger army units to “restore order.” Order was not restored, so the generals (though not all of them) reasonably asked for more troops. And so it went until the Soviets conquered Afghanistan but did not hold it; ruled it but did not govern it; won every battle in it but lost the war against it. If this sounds familiar to Americans, it should. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
26 Aug 20111h 6min
Michael Neiberg, “Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I” (Harvard University Press, 2011)
As we close in on the centennial of the First World War, no doubt there will be a flood of new interpretations and “hidden histories” of the conflict. Many books will certainly promise much, but in the end deliver little. Fortunately this is not the case with Michael Neiberg‘s latest book Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2011). In this important new view of the opening months of the war, Neiberg offers a fresh look at the July Crisis, how it was perceived across Europe, and the first two months of the war. Rather than focusing on the same old voices of the European literati and political elites, Neiberg shows us how the average person considered the march to war. In the process he reveals a number of startling insights that challenge the war’s standard historical orthodoxy, revealing that many of our assumptions about the collective and individual responses to the July Crisis are based on misperception and poor assumptions. Rather than a continent primed for war through a network of military alliances, unfettered military bureaucracies, and a cultural predisposition that viewed war as the great test of nations and men, he reveals a society that genuinely believed peace was possible until the very last moment, and which only accepted war as a last alternative, and which would be defensive in nature. This insight and so many others earn Dance of the Furies the label of “revisionist history” in the best possible sense. 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 Aug 201149min
Konrad H. Jarausch, “Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front” (Princeton University Press, 2011)
Konrad H. Jarausch, whose varied and important works on German history have been required reading for scholars for several decades, has published Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front (Princeton University Press, 2011), a collection of his father’s missives from Poland and Russia during the early years of the Second World War, now translated into English. As you can imagine, this was an intensely personal project, and one that says almost as much about the postwar generation of “fatherless children” like Jarausch as it reveals about men like his father (also named Konrad) who found themselves in the cauldron of war. Jarausch seems to resist the comparison but I liken this work to Victor Klemperer’s diaries, I Shall Bear Witness, that were published with great fanfare almost fifteen years ago. The circumstances of the two men were vastly different (Klemperer was converted Jew, married to an “Aryan,” living in Dresden during the years of Nazi rule). But both men were deeply humanist members of Germany’s educated middle class (Bildungsburgertum) who saw their fellow Germans go insane and take the nation they loved down the path of moral and physical ruin. This work is of special interest to military historians because the elder Jarausch documents areas of activity rarely touched upon by other Wehrmacht memoirists and writers. Too old to serve in the combat arm, Jarausch spent his time in rear areas in Poland and the Soviet Union, training recruits and guarding prisoners. In clear and often touching prose, Jarausch documents both the drudgery and the deadly dilemmas of service in Hitler’s army. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
12 Juli 201157min
Christopher DeRosa, “Political Indoctrination in the U.S. Army from World War II to the Vietnam War” (University of Nebraska Press, 2006)
One of the greatest challenges American military leaders have faced since the American Revolution has been to motivate citizens to forego their own sense of private identity in favor of the collective identity needed to wage war effectively. This problem became more acute in the twentieth century, when mass conscript armies were raised from a disparate American landscape of ethnic enclaves and highly localized regional communities. These challenges, and the US Army’s response from the start of the Second World War through the Cold War until the end of the Vietnam War, are the subject of Christopher DeRosa‘s book Political Indoctrination in the U.S. Army from World War II to the Vietnam War (University of Nebraska Press, 2006). DeRosa investigates the cultures and mechanisms of creating political cohesion in the draftee army during the heyday of American conscription. Insofar as it focuses on the intellectual and cultural legacy of a military institution, DeRosa’s work is clearly identifiable as a contribution to the so-called “New Military History.” But the book also represents just the sort of synthesis of military and social history that is at the core of the “War and Society” approach, in that it places military institutions squarely within the context of the societies they serve. 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 Juni 20111h 8min
