New Books in Military History

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 60,000 “neutral” Irish volunteered to fight on one side (with the Allies, in this case). That was unusual. After the war, most of the Irish volunteers remained in the UK. But 12,000 of them came back to Ireland. In Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen and the Second World War (Merrion, 2012), Bernard Kelly tells their story. Like most things in Irish history, it’s complicated. On the one hand, the volunteers had served in the armed forces of Ireland’s archenemy (at least according to Republicans). On the other hand, they had fought the Nazis and thereby protected the Free World. Bernard explains how the Irish veterans were received and, interestingly, how they are still being discussed in Ireland today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

21 Feb 201357min

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 Western militaries over the modern era. Accordingly normally rigorous peacetime entrance standards have established conditions for the exclusion of certain individuals on the basis of physical, intellectual, ethnic, and racial criteria. During conflict, however, such notions of exclusion and exceptionalism are modified to reflect the needs of the army relative to the specific crisis. Marble’s Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of Substandard Manpower, 1860-1960 (Fordham University Press, 2012) examines eleven case studies related to so-called “substandard manpower,” offering a series of assessments on military force structure in wartime. in this interview, our host talks with Sanders Marble about the overall project and his specific essay on American forces in the twentieth century, “Below the Bar: The U.S. Army and Limited Service Manpower.” He also speaks briefly with sociologist Thomas Sticht about his contribution to the volume, a deep analysis of the Department of Defense’s much-maligned “Project 100,000” in the essay “Project 100,000 in the Vietnam War and Afterward.” 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 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) introduces to English-language readers the riches of Soviet war literature and argues that much of that literature constituted a meaningful form of resistance to the Soviet state. Refusing to write stories that corresponded to the mythology of the Soviet soldier-hero, authors such as Vasilii Grossman, Iurii Bondarev, or Vasil’ Bykov provided true insights into the Soviet war effort, including the bungling of the leadership, the deprivations suffered by the soldiers, and the stifling effect of ideological surveillance. This wide-ranging interview also touches upon some of Ellis’ other interests and should excite listeners to track down some of the few Soviet war novels available in English. I know that the work mentioned in Ellis’ title, The Damned and the Dead, by Viktor Astaf’ev is on my reading list. 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 Dec 201253min

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 Western Allies’ great gamble in the fall of 1944. With the Nazi war machine appearing to be on the ropes following its ignominious collapse in France, victory seemed for a brief moment to be just within grasp. The single problem, in Montgomery’s eyes, was logistics and the inability of the Anglo-American coalition to maintain the broad front strategy promoted by SHAEF commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. By offering a bold departure from his normal cautious outlook, Montgomery convinced Eisenhower to favor his Army Group with the supplies needed to carry out a bold stroke aimed at the lower Rhine crossings in Holland. Through an airborne coup de main, the Allies would seize three highway bridges at Nijmegen, Eindhoven, and Arnhem, opening up a pathway into the North German Plain, and in Montgomery’s view, very likely end the war by Christmas. Of course, we know the operation was a dismal failure, with the British First Airborne Division nearly annihilated at Arnhem, as Montgomery went “a bridge too far,” in the words of journalist cum historian Cornelius Ryan. Indeed by this point, with numerous historical monographs and edited collections, a feature film, dozens of documentaries, an HBO miniseries, and more board games and computer games than can be counted, one might be forgiven for thinking that there is little left to be said about Operation MARKET GARDEN. But then along came historian John C. McManus‘ exhaustive study of the American dimension of the battles for the Dommel, Maas, and Waal River crossings and the subsequent bitter winter fighting on the so-called “Island” between the Waal and the Lower Rhine estuary. His book, September Hope: The American Side of a Bridge Too Far (NAL, 2012), is built from a treasure trove of oral testimonies, official after action reports, captured documents, and other sources to create the single most comprehensive account of the fighting from the perspective of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, as well as the 104th Infantry and 7th Armored Divisions. The book is a very compelling account of a very bitter and misguided operation, but its true strength lies in McManus’ own insights and conclusions regarding the viability of the operation and the failings in SHAEF leadership than allowed the operation to go forward. 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 Nov 20121h 4min

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 harrowing history of the German Army’s occupation of the former Yugoslavia from 1941-1943. By analyzing the command structures at the divisional and regimental level, Shepherd helps to explain how and why the violence ebbed and flowed in the various occupied regions. But he also looks further down, to see how the behavior of specific units was shaped by the vagaries of terrain, supply, the character of the opposition, and even certain commanders’ backgrounds and experiences. Always cautious not to make claims beyond the limits of his evidence, Shepherd nevertheless draws important conclusions about how history, personality, and National Socialist ideology shaped the behavior of the German Army in the Second World War. For that and for illuminating in clear and concise prose the foggy and chaotic political and military environment in the Balkans during those years, Shepherd should be congratulated. 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 Sep 201247min

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 could fight the Japanese. I recall building a model of one of their P-40 Warhawks with their distinctive “shark’s mouth” nose art. And though I knew a lot about The Flying Tigers, I didn’t really know much about the Big Picture in which they operated. Thanks to Gregory Crouch‘s fine China’s Wings: War, Intrigue, Romance, and Adventure in the Middle Kingdom during the Golden Age of Flight (Bantam Books, 2012), I do. Greg does not tell the story of The Tigers; he tells the story of the aviation pioneers who made The Tigers possible. These were the man of the China National Aviation Corporation. They brought commercial aviation to China, which is an excellent tale in itself. But they also volunteered to fight the Japanese even before The Tigers entered the picture. Importantly, they also blazed “the Hump,” the dangerous trans-Himalayan air route between India and China that kept the Nationalist Chinese in the game and generally provided aid and comfort to anti-Japanese forces. This is a wonderful book full of remarkable characters and unbelievable adventures. There’s a bit of romance as well. I asked Greg during the interview whether he’d sold the film rights. I imagine he will soon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

30 Aug 201255min

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 the country’s largest public universities. And in my American History survey classes, I strive to bring as much of the city’s history to bear as possible. Now after reading Steven Jaffe‘s book, New York at War: Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham (Basic Books, 2012), I realize that I could do a lot more covering New York’s military history. Jaffe escorts his reader on a dramatic tour of New York at war, from the settlement of New Amsterdam by the Dutch in 1624, to the city’s response to the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. It is an entertaining and informative tour, and one which I can attest will certainly affect my own treatment of the city’s history in my classes. Overall New York at War is a pleasure for all readers, but it should have a special place for our listeners from the metropolitan New York area. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

11 Aug 20121h 28min

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 to escape the brutality of the Red Army’s advance through the historic German lands of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia; and civilians in the cities bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s failure to stem the allied bombing campaign of the RAF at night time and the USAAF during the day. The staggering scale of losses during those last months of war also hints at why 1945 is such a grimly fascinating one from a historical perspective: Nazi Germany faced an inevitable end, yet continued to fight grimly until the bitter end, achieving a total defeat that was unprecedented in modern history. In doing so it created a ‘zero hour’ for the German people, who then set about rebuilding their lives, economic activity and ultimately Germany itself, with the Nazi era firmly in the past. The legacy of the Nazis, of course, was all around – not just in the sheer scale of destruction and suffering, but also in the survivors of Nazi camps, both Jewish and otherwise, and the foreign labourers, all of whom found themselves freed in a defeated nation. The country was divided into zones of occupation, each with their own character, their own challenges and their own solutions. In the midst of this a new Germany was born -or more accurately, two new Germanys). Much of the eventual political, economic and social achievements of West Germany were founded on the peculiarities of 1945, in particular the totality of the Nazi defeat and the yearning for stability after chaos and destruction. There was also – and this sounds peculiar to us looking back at the crimes of the Nazis – a distinct sense of victimhood. Richard Bessel‘s Germany 1945: From War to Peace (Harper, 2009) is an excellent guide to that tumultuous and difficult year, from the military reverses of the early months to the immense challenges that rose in the wake of defeat. It was a book that I came across almost by chance, in a shop in Doha airport that frustratingly failed to provide me with a copy of The Economist to read on a flight back to London. I was already fifty pages in by the time we lifted off, and – once home – I got in touch with the author, hoping for an interview. I hope you enjoy listening to the results!   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 Juli 201255min