Bøger i Modern War Studies serien

Offers new insight into the workings of a military giant and also restores Leon Trotsky to his rightful place in Soviet military history by featuring his ideas on building a new army from the ground up. This book is an important look behind the scenes at a military establishment that continues to face leadership challenges in Russia today.

The Kaiser's military theorists have often been portrayed as narrow-minded thinkers wedded to an outmoded way of war. This book argues that they were fully aware of the implications of advanced weaponry and that the slaughter of World War I was due to deficient training amongst younger officers.

When General Douglas MacArthur led Allied troops into the jungles of New Guinea in World War II, he was already looking ahead. By successfully leapfrogging Japanese forces on that island, he placed his armies in a position to fulfill his personal promise to liberate the Philippines.

Presents facts that reveal how the Axis coalition undermined Hitler's objectives from the Eastern Front to the Balkans, Mediterranean, and North Africa. The author argues that the Axis military alliance was doomed from the beginning by a lack of common aims, the absence of a unified command structure, and each nation's mistrust of the others.

Focusing on the mobilisation of national resources, Koistinen analyses all relevant aspects of the American World War II economy from 1940 to 1945, describing the struggle to establish effective control over industrial supply and military demand.

This work presents a new narrative history of the Philadelphia campaign that took place not only in the hills and woods surrounding Philadelphia, but also in east central New Jersey and along the Delaware River.

In addition to a wide variety of traditional sources, this volume provides two major categories of documentary materials hitherto unavailable to researchers. The first consists of extensive records from the combat journal of the German Sixth Army, which were only recently rediscovered and published. The second is a vast amount of newly released Soviet and Russian archival material.

When large formations of Allied four-engine bombers finally flew over Europe, it marked the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. Providing a deeper and more accurate understanding of the bomber campaigns' role in the Allied victory, this study testifies to the strategic importance of these efforts in that war.

Most people think Star Wars was Reagan's idea, but its roots reach decades farther back. Military historian Don Baucom traces them to the dawn of the atomic age in 1944. In this first scholarly account of the origins of SDI, Baucom brings together the political, technological, and strategic forces that have shaped the history of ballistic missile defenses from World War II to the present.

This work investigates the facts and fictions of the South's victories and defeats during the American Civil War. It debunks long-standing legends, offers evidence explaining Confederate actions and considers the idealism, naivete and courage of military leadership and would-be founding fathers.

Richard Lukas presents the compelling eyewitness accounts of Polish Christians who suffered at the hands of the Germans. Their stories provide a somber reminder that non-Jewish Poles were just as likely as Jews to suffer at the hands of the Nazis, who viewed them with nearly equal contempt.

In the hell that was World War II, the Eastern Front was its heart of fire and ice. Gottlob Herbert Bidermann served in that lethal theater from 1941 to 1945, and his memoir of those years recaptures the sights, sounds, and smells of the war as it vividly portrays an army marching on the road to ruin.A riveting and reflective account by one of the millions of anonymous soldiers who fought and died in that cruel terrain, In Deadly Combat conveys the brutality and horrors of the Eastern Front in detail never before available in English. It offers a ground soldier's perspective on life and death on the front lines, providing revealing new information concerning day-to-day operations and German army life. Wounded five times and awarded numerous decorations for valor, Bidermann saw action in the Crimea and siege of Sebastopol, participated in the vicious battles in the forests south of Leningrad, and ended the war in the Courland Pocket. He shares his impressions of countless Russian POWs seen at the outset of his service, of peasants struggling to survive the hostilities while caught between two ruthless antagonists, and of corpses littering the landscape. He recalls a Christmas gift of gingerbread from home that overcame the stench of battle, an Easter celebrated with a basket of Russian hand grenades for eggs, and his miraculous survival of machine gun fire at close range. In closing he relives the humiliation of surrender to an enemy whom the Germans had once derided and offers a sobering glimpse into life in the Soviet gulags. Bidermann's account debunks the myth of a highly mechanized German army that rolled over weaker opponents with impunity. Despite the vast expanses of territory captured by the Germans during the early months of Operation Barbarossa, the war with Russia remained tenuous and unforgiving. His story commits that living hell to the annals of World War II and broadens our understanding of its most deadly combat zone.Translator Derek Zumbro has rendered Bidermann's memoir into a compelling narrative that retains the author's powerful style. This English-language edition of Bidermann's dynamic story is based upon a privately published memoir entitled Krim-Kurland Mit Der 132 Infanterie Division. The translator has added important events derived from numerous interviews with Bidermann to provide additional context for American readers.

Offering an in-depth history of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) from 1955 to 1975, the author takes readers into the barracks and training centers of the ARVN to plumb the hearts and souls of these forgotten soldiers. He explores the lives of ordinary men, focusing on troop morale and motivation within the context of Vietnamese society.

Presents an account of institutional transformation under extreme stress that balances Churchill's self-serving memoirs. This work demonstrates that what political leaders demand from their armies is less important than what those armies are designed to do - and that this oft-recurring disconnect lies at the root of wartime civil-military tension.

In the spring of 1972, North Vietnam launched a massive military offensive designed to deliver the coup de grace to South Vietnam and its rapidly disengaging American ally. But an over-confident Hanoi misjudged its opponents who. This is the story of heroism against great odds.

The Carpathian campaign of 1915, described by some as the 'Stalingrad of the First World War', engaged the million-man armies of Austria-Hungary and Russia in fierce winter combat that drove them to the brink of annihilation. This title presents an account of the Carpathian Winter War.

Takes a look at the Vietnam war and the debates about it. Highlighting Ike's seminal and long-lasting influence on the Vietnam policy, this book demonstrates how and why our range of choices narrowed with each passing year, while our decision-making continued to be distorted by Cold War politics.

Lyndon Johnson, when it comes to his role in the Vietnam war, is popularly portrayed as an irrational ""hawkish"" leader who bullied his advisers and refused to solicit a wide range of opinions. That depiction, David Barrett, argues, is simplistic and far from accurate.

This work provides an analysis of the evolution of Stalin's Red Army during the 1930s and its near decimation at the beginning of World War II. It argues that the Stalinist state largely failed in its attempt to use military service as a means to indoctrinate its citizens, especially the peasantry.

This volume describes the multifaceted impacts of the Civil War on Northern society. Weaving together insights from literature, law and politics, it shows how the North redefined itself as a modern nation through two linked events - the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution.

Time after time during the Vietnam War, the United States sent Vietnamese spies and commandos behind enemy lines only to have them killed, captured or compromised into reporting back false information. This is a sobering account of the disastrous secret programme.

This volume chronicles the first five months of Truman's presidency, encompassing the destruction and defeat of the Axis Powers in Germany and Japan, the dropping of the first atomic bombs, the birth of the United Nations, the death of colonialism and the beginning of the Cold War.

A prize-winning historian chronicles the weakening Germany army in 1943, now fighting on the defensive but still remarkably dangerous and lethal. Reveals how the Wehrmacht, heirs to a military tradition that demanded relentless offensive operations, finally succumbed to the realities of its own overreach.

A pathbreaking study of the Romanian Front in World War I. Provides a unique account of Romanian military operations and restructures our understanding of the Balkan and south Russian theaters of operation.

Often portrayed as an inept and stubborn tyrant, South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem has long been the subject of much derision but little understanding. This work provides a complex portrait of Diem as both a devout patriot and a failed architect of modernization.