The Maginot Line was the last great gun-bearing line of subterranean forts built before World War II. Although it acquired an unjustified reputation as a white elephant, the Maginot Line fulfilled the role for which it was built, allowing the French High Command the opportunity to mass its forces and counter the German invasion. Unfortunately, the French leadership failed to make the most of its assets, with the resulting disastrous outcome.

During the 1920s, the French High Command formulated a number of offensive plans to strike at Germany, but by the end of the decade, it...

In this general history of the development of rockets and missiles, Chun traces the technology that made attack from beyond the horizon possible. A former missile launch officer, he focusess not only on the development and employment of the ballistic missile--from early German V-2 use to today--but on their subsequent impact on national strategies, doctrine, force structure, and politics. The development of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads had a profound impact on superpower rivalries and structured international relations for decades. The advent of the ballistic missile changed the...

World War II saw the first generation of young men that had grown up comfortable with modern industrial technology go into combat. As kids, the GIs had built jalopies in their garage and poured over glossy, full-color issues of Popular Mechanics; they had read Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century comic books, listened to his adventures on the radio, and watched him pilot rocket ships in the Saturday morning serials at the Bijou. Tinkerers, problem-solvers, risk-takers, and day-dreamers, they were curious and outspoken--a generation well prepared to improvise, innovate, and...

Rapid and momentous technological changes at the turn of the 20th century forced military professionals and educated civilians to envision the future of war and warfare, especially during an age where nations found themselves aggressively competing for dominance on the world stage. Antulio J. Echevarria II offers a comparative study of these predictions to assess who got it right and why. He concludes that professionals were particularly adept at predicting the warfare of the immediate future by framing their discussions in terms of solving tactical problems, but they were much less...

For centuries, mounted cavalry dominated the battlefield through shock and mobility. Man maintained a symbiotic relationship with the horse, which became particularly sacrosanct on the battlefield and even created a new, exalted social class. These mounted warriors sought to preserve their prestige despite the advent of new technologies threatening to render them obsolete. In "Cavalry from Hoof to Track," Roman Jarymowycz traces the evolution of the cavalry from the warhorse to the armored tank and demonstrates how its survival is a history of determined and creative responses to the...

From the American entry into World War II until September 1943, U.S. submarines experienced an abnormally high number of torpedo failures. These failures resulted from three defects present in the primary torpedo of the day, the Mark XIV. These defects were a tendency to run deeper than the set depth, the frequent premature detonation of the Mark 6 magnetic influence exploder, and the failure of the contact exploder when hitting a target at the textbook ninety-degree angle. Ironically, despite using a completely independent design, the Germans experienced the same three defects. The...

The Eastern Front in World War I has been neglected for too long. "Breakthrough: The Gorlice-Tarnow Campaign, 1915" is the first English-language study of the first of the great breakthrough battles of the war--one of the Great War's critical campaigns.

The book covers the initial attack of the German Eleventh Army and the Austro-Hungarian Third and Fourth Armies in Galicia as they outflanked the Russian position in the Carpathian Mountains that threatened Hungary. Subsequent chapters cover the retaking of Galicia, including the recapture of Przemysl and Lemberg. The examination...

Providing a unique assessment of naval strategy and historic outcomes across centuries of warfare, "Understanding Victory: Naval Operations from Trafalgar to the Falklands" presents four case studies that examine each ship-based battle narrative to expose and analyze the factors that contributed to each side's success or defeat. The work opens with an overview of the general causes of success and failure in naval operations. Each case study starts with a detailed narrative of the battle and then reviews the conflict from the key perspectives identified in the introduction. These classic...