Bøger af Gregory F. Michno

"With careful attention to his book's subtitle, Michno presents the most important surviving testimony of Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux participants in the 1876 Little Bighorn battle. He follows the virtual minute-by-minute approach successfully used in John S. Gray's Centennial Campaign (CH, May'77) to describe events in meticulous detail. Michno's intimate knowledge of the battlefield, as well as his close reading of white accounts and recent archaeological investigations, helps bring the conflict into sharper focus. He also discusses many of the long-standing controversies about the number of warriors in the encampment, the weaponry arrayed on both sides, the movements of various companies and even individual soldiers, the exploits of specific Indian warriors, and the probable casualties. For this reason, the frequent content footnotes must be read in their entirety because they deal historiographically with the points of dispute and conflicting testimony. A final chapter traces the lives of some of the most prominent Indian participants during the decades after the battle. Although intended for the specialist who is well grounded in the literature, this book can be enjoyed by anyone interested in the story of Plains Indian warfare or 19th-century military history."--M. L. Tate, University of Nebraska at Omaha

Though the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war during World War II has been written about before, only with this detailed chronicle will readers come to appreciate the true dimensions of the Allied POW experience at sea. It is a disturbing story; many believe the Bataan Death March pales by comparison. Survivors describe their ordeal in the Japanese hellships as the absolute worst experience of their captivity. Crammed by the thousands into the holds of the ships, moved from island to island and put to work, they endured all the horrors of the prison camps magnified tenfold.Gregory Michno draws on American, British, Australian, and Dutch POW accounts as well as Japanese convoy histories, recently declassified radio intelligence reports, and a wealth of archival sources to present a detailed picture of what happened. His findings are startling. More than 126,00 Allied prisoners were transported in the hellships with more than 21,000 fatalities. While beatings, starvation, and disease caused many of the deaths, the most, Michno reports, were caused by Allied bombs. Bullets, and torpedoes. He further reports that this so-called friendly fire was not always accidentalat times high-level decision were made to sink Japanese ships despite the presence of POWs. The statistics led Michno to conclude that it was more dangerous to be a prisoner on the Japanese hellships than a U.S. Marine fighting in the campaign. His careful examination of the role U.S. submarines in the sinkings and the rescue of POWs makes yet another significant contribution to the history of the Pacific war.

It's a cinematic image as familiar as John Wayne's face: a wagon train circling as a defensive maneuver against Indian attacks. This book examines actual and fictional wagon-train battles and compares them for realism.