New Books in Military History

Michael Bryant’s book is both less and more ambitious than its title. He’s writing less of a history of war crimes than he is a history of the idea and concept of war crimes. He’s most interested in what people have considered a breach of the norms of warfare and how this concept has changed over time. The triumph of A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the Present (Bloomsbury, 2016) is it’s reminder that, while expectations about how soldiers (and others) would act during warfare are not new at all, the notion of war crimes is actually quite recent. Bryant argues that ideas about the proper conduct of war go back to the ancient Near East. But these ideas were rarely based on the dignity of human person. Instead they derived from religion or from the shape of the political institutions in society. It was only in the 18th and 19th century, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, that norms about conduct during warfare began to be based on the idea that mistreating civilians or wounded soldiers was a crime. And even then, these notions were activated through bilateral or multilateral treaties–implying that the recognition of human dignity had very real limits. It’s an audacious task to attempt to survey the history of war crimes, especially a global history. Meant as a textbook, Bryant inevitably privileges European history. But it’s a thoughtful, well-written, provocative survey, exactly what we hope for in a textbook. Kelly McFall is Associate Professor of History at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas, where he directs the Honors Program. He is particularly interested in the question of how to teach about the history of genocides and mass atrocities and has written a module in the Reacting to the Past series about the UN debate over whether to intervene in Rwanda in 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

18 Maj 20171h 14min

Most accounts about the naval battles of the First World War focus upon the stalemate between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet, or the German raiders who attempted to disrupt Allied commerce. In Securing the Narrow Sea: The Dover Patrol 1914-1918 (Seaforth Publishing, 2017; distributed in the US by Naval Institute Press), Steve Dunn focuses on the often overlooked service of the British naval forces stationed in the English Channel during the conflict. The eclectic collection of destroyers, converted yachts, and requisitioned trawlers that comprised the patrol made for a considerable contrast with the dreadnoughts at Scapa Flow, yet, as Dunn demonstrates, they played a vital role in securing the Channel for the safe transport of British troops to France and in opposing the transit of German U-boats to their stations. In describing the admirals who commanded the station over the course of the war, the lives of the men who served aboard the ships, and the various engagements which they fought against their German opponents, he explains the unglamorous yet frequently dangerous contribution the patrol made to Britain’s victory over Germany in 1918, one that was subsequently glossed over in the postwar era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

15 Maj 201746min

When America went to war against Germany in 1917, the scale of the conflict required the mobilization of women as well as men in order to achieve victory. In The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Lynn Dumenil describes the many ways in which women participated in the war effort and the ways in which it transformed their lives. As she notes, in the years leading up to the war increasing numbers of American women were employed outside the home and involved in the public sphere. For many the politically-engaged among their number, the decision to go to war presented an opportunity to demonstrate their gender’s patriotism and worthiness for the vote. Thousands showed their support for the soldiers by participating in a variety of volunteer activities, with some even traveling to Europe to work in canteens or as nurses. Many more took up the jobs that the men left behind, filling the void created by their enlistment. These efforts were celebrated in the popular media of the time, though often with the message that these new roles were only temporary. Yet as Dumenil demonstrates, while postwar gains were indeed limited, the involvement of women in the war accelerated many of the changes taking place in politics and society, changes which were reflected in new attitudes and expectations held by these women in the 1920s and beyond. 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 Apr 201748min

Phil Gurski‘s Western Foreign Fighters: The Threat to Homeland and International Security (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) is his second recent monograph on terrorism, and another useful resource for practitioners and non-specialists alike. Written in an approachable, grounded style, Western Foreign Fighters is both topical and novel; its comparative analysis of volunteers’ participation in non-sanctioned conflicts both jihadist and secular is especially notable. Gurski’s measured, thoughtful analysis is a credit to the Canadian intelligence community (wherein he spent his entire career) and I look forward to his further publications. 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 Apr 201753min

Seth Barrett Tillman has written “Ex Parte Merryman: Myth, History and Scholarship,” an article about the famous case that is popularly thought to demonstrate a conflict between the President and the federal courts during the American Civil War. Tillman’s article is an effort to revise the standard historical understanding of the case called Ex Parte Merryman. In the spring of 1861, just as the hostilities had begun in the Civil War, famously issued an order to the U.S. Army granting army officials discretion to suspend the writ of habeas corpus if resistance or treasonous activity were encountered in Union territory. That spring, as soldiers poured into the Washington, D.C. area through Maryland, the Army was confronted with popular protests and violence by civilians. One suspect was John Merryman, a young man from a prominent Maryland family. Merryman hired lawyers to seek his release via the traditional method of asking the federal courts for an order to release Merryman pending his trial. However, Merryman was not initially released and was confined in Ft. McHenry, a military base near the port of Baltimore. The traditional account of the case portrays Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney as heroically seeking to vindicate the rights of a civilian prisoner wrongly held by the military and Lincoln as defying an order to comply with the Constitution. In this podcast Professor Tillman, a lecturer in the Department of Law at Maynooth University in County Kildare, Ireland, discusses his arguments that the traditional account of the Merryman case is built upon multiple myths. If Tillman’s view of the case is correct, it holds the potential for overturning our understanding of this important period in constitutional history and civil-military relations. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. 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 Apr 20171h 17min

Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) explores the drug culture of Nazi Germany. Far from being a nation of physical and mental purity portrayed by Goebbels’s propaganda machine, Ohler shows Germany was a hub of drug production and abuse during the 1920s. Manufacturers like Merck and Bayer openly marketed their wares to the public, building the basis of so-called big pharma on intoxicants. Produced by Temmler, the Nazi elite embraced methamphetamine as a wonder drug, free of the connotations of disease and degeneracy associated with the drug culture of the Weimar years. Stimulants became a valuable tool in Germany’s wartime arsenal. The German military acknowledged the value of amphetamines and distributed Pervitin en masse. Ohler argues amphetamines powered the Wehrmacht’s armored Blitzkrieg of 1939-1941, defeating the Allies in France and elsewhere. These gains were short-lived, however. Nazi Germany’s Faustian bargain with drugs evaporated during the Battle of Stalingrad and in the distant steppes of the Soviet Union. Ever more powerful drug combinations were desperately sought by the Nazi state to save the Reich from annihilation, exposing horrors of the regime from experiments on concentration camp prisoners and drugged child soldiers. Blitzed details how Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Theo Morell, administered vitamin concoctions and hormone injections common to athletic doping to pump up Hitler’s ailing body during the war years. Though Hitler had promised to cleanse the nation of drug abuse, he himself became utterly dependent on drugs to survive. Military defeat and destruction took their toll on Nazism embodied, Morell increasingly looked towards methamphetamine and oxycodone (Eukodal) to keep Hitler wake and alert during the last apocalyptic years of the Reich. In so doing, Morell himself built an impressive medical empire based on quack medicines and bought political access. Ohler shows how in the final months of the conflict, Morell’s supplies of drugs ran out, exposing Hitler’s frail body to his inner circle with health crises, symptoms of chemical withdraw, and fits of madness. James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

8 Mars 201752min

The intersection of colonialism and mass atrocities is one of the most exciting insights of the past years of genocide studies. But most people don’t really think of the Soviet Union and the American west as colonial spaces. But while there are limitations to this, both fit well into a kind of geography of colonialism. This is why Edward Westermann‘s new book Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016)is so interesting. Westermann teaches at Texas A & M University at San Antonio. Prior to this work, he wrote a well-regarded volume on the German police battalions on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Before joining the university world, he was an officer in the US military, and he brings his training and experience to a study of the strategy and tactics of the armies which fought in each space. In doing so, he sheds new light on how each army behaved. He’s particularly good at understanding how tactics and military culture drove the American army to act in ways that killed women and children without that being their goal. But he’s also good at analyzing the broader cultural climate that informed policy makers in each society. His discussion of the regional splits in policy toward American Indians was noteworthy. It’s a book that made me think about the American west in a new light. Kelly McFall is Associate Professor of History at Newman University in Wichita Kansas, where he directs the Honors Program. He is particularly interested in the question of how to teach about the history of genocides and mass atrocities and has written a module in the Reacting to the Past series about the UN debate over whether to intervene in Rwanda in 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

2 Mars 201759min

In The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2016), acclaimed historian Michael Neiberg examines the background of war fever in the United States between 1914 to 1917 to present a new interpretation on the nation’s slide to entering the First World War in April 1917. In a departure from the general outlook on the war, he presents a case where the American public was more engaged in the process than has been allowed by historians who have traditionally focused on the Wilson administration’s leadership in the varying crises in German-American relations following the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in the winter of 1917. Rather than being passive observers who had to be convinced to join the war, Neiberg argues that many citizens, including ethnic German and Irish-Americans, were convinced by the course of actions over the three year period of neutrality that war was inevitable and the sooner the United States joined, the more quickly it could be resolved. Michael Neiberg is the inaugural Chair of War Studies at the United States Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The views he expresses, both in The Path to War and in our interview, are his own, and in no way reflect the opinion of the United States Army War College or the Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

28 Feb 201743min