One Texan called them "blue-coated dogs of despotism." They were the federal army, and in Texas after the Civil War they were an army of occupation. Their role in carrying out Reconstruction in Texas was especially difficult because the state had a large voting majority of white former Confederates. The army was essential to the enforcement of loyalist policies and, more controversially, to the electoral success of the Republican party.
How the military tried to achieve these ends varied over three major periods corresponding to the tenure of three chief officers: Generals Philip H....

The air force made a huge impact on the events of World War II, but this new force of men and machines did not simply appear out of the blue. There was a long history leading up to the use of air power in military campaigns. When Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, the leaders of the Army Air Corps wanted to force him, Congress, and the Army General Staff to create an independent air force. Using Billy Mitchell's tactics of public confrontation, exploitation of the air corps's poor condition, and unproven claims about air power, these officers only antagonized the people...

Between the two world wars, the United States Army was "a school, an athletic club, an orphans' home, and a boys' camp." That description of Victor Vogel's "Old Army," in which he enlisted as a private in 1934, gives a small hint at how old-fashioned the army was in an age of isolationism and meager congressional appropriations.
In the pre-World War II army, cavalry troops were still mounted, horses pulled artillery carriages, and mules hauled supply wagons. The soldiers' basic weapon was the Springfield rifle, which was virtually an enemy itself as the men learned to fight its vicious...

In November, 1950, with the highly successful Inchon Landing behind him, Gen. Douglas MacArthur planned the last major offensive of what was to be a brief "conflict": the drive that would push the North Koreans across the Yalu River into Manchuria. In northern Korea, US forces assembled at Chosin Reservoir to cut behind the North Korean forces blocking the planned march to Manchuria. Roy E. Appleman, noted historian of the Korean conflict, describes the tragic fate of the troops of the 31st Regimental Combat Team which fought this engagement and presents a thorough analysis of the physical...

On the heels of New Deal administrators, an army of business executives arrived in Washington in 1940 to prepare the nation for war. Among this contingent were two wealthy investment bankers and longtime friends: Ferdinand Eberstadt and James Forrestal. Together they played integral roles in the massive war mobilization program and, later, in the formation of institutions for postwar national security.
Jeffery M. Dorwart's research and analysis provide a fresh look at the friendships, connections, and mindsets that steered the growing federal government in the first half of the twentieth...

George W. Goethals successfully engineered the Panama Canal, but he could not engineer a modern, rational organization for the U.S. Army, even in the face of the crisis of World War I. Despite his best efforts at centralization of the General Staff, American military logistics remained painfully chaotic, and the heads of bureaus--the so-called chiefs--proved adept at preserving their authority. At war's end, Goethals found himself with a largely paper organization, which dissolved during the confusion of demobilization.
Goethals was recruited to manage the military mess that existed in...

Brothers by blood before the war; brothers in blood after. The blood mingled in the Civil War became the symbol and perverse source of indissoluble union between two sections, two ways of life, two visions of the future, and even two revolutions. In riveting detail yet with broad sweep, veteran Civil war historian Frank E. Vandiver recounts the campaigns and major battles of the first war of the Industrial Revolution, with its machinery, firepower, and engineering beyond imagination. With provocative insight, he traces a picture of the war as rooted in the character and vision of its two...

The first year of the Korean conflict was a dark and humiliating period for many of the troops who fought there. Against a backdrop of U.S. political indecision and reduced military capability, American soldiers fought a dedicated and numerically strong enemy force that was determined to overrun South Korea. One of these units, the segregated 24th Infantry Regiment, was made up of black soldiers, commanded for the most part by white officers. Lyle Rishell, an infantry platoon leader, led a black platoon of Able Company in that regiment. This book tells the dramatic, often frustrating,...

Who lost the war in Vietnam? Popular mythology has blamed politicians, the press, or Jane Fonda and the antiwar movement. Crosswinds, a riveting and incisive analysis by a former Air Force officer who served as an intelligence specialist during the war, demonstrates convincingly that the U.S. Air Force was indeed set up for defeat, but not by an America that tied its hands. Rather, the Air Force was a victim of its own history, its institutional values, and an intellectually ossified leadership which could not devise a strategy appropriate to the war at hand. These factors within the Air...