Kategoria BISAC: History >> Wars & Conflicts - General

A nurse administers anesthetic with the aid of a flashlight as snipers try to pick off members of a U.S. surgical team in Algiers. One member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots tows targets for U.S. antiaircraft trainees, while another test flies repaired military aircraft in Texas. Another American woman in the Philippines smuggles food and medicine to prisoners who survived the Death March on Bataan.

In "Her War," American women tell the personal, largely unknown stories of their experiences serving their country in World War II. These are not reminiscences recalled through the 60-year...

This timely volume addresses urgent questions about the nature of war crimes, nationalism, ethnic cleansing and collective responsibility from a variety of moral, political and legal perspectives.

Thucydides called his account of two decades of war between Athens and Sparta "a possssion for all time," and indeed it is the first and still most famous work in the Western historical tradition. Considered essential reading for generals, statesmen, and liberally educated citizens for more than 2,000 years, The Peloponnesian War is a mine of military, moral, political, and philosophical wisdom.

Thucydides called his account of two decades of war between Athens and Sparta "a possssion for all time," and indeed it is the first and still most famous work in the Western historical...

Following Germany's defeat in World War I, the Germans signed the Versailles Treaty, superficially agreeing to limit their war powers. The Allies envisioned the future German army as a lightly armed border guard and international security force. The Germans had other plans.

As early as 1919, James Corum contends, the tactical foundations were being laid for the Nazi Blitzkrieg. Between 1919 and 1933, German military leaders created and nurtured the Reichswehr, a new military organization built on the wreckage of the old Imperial Army. It was not being groomed for policing purposes....

Presenting a significant new interpretation of Napoleonic warfare, Robert M. Epstein argues persuasively that the true origins of modern war can be found in the Franco-Austrian War of 1809.

Epstein contends that the 1809 war--with its massive and evenly matched armies, multiple theaters of operation, new command-and-control schemes, increased firepower, frequent stalemates, and large-scale slaughter--had more in common with the American Civil War and subsequent conflicts than with the decisive Napoleonic campaigns that preceded it.

Epstein examines 1809 in terms of the evolving new...

From 1926 to 1933, a vast transformation swept through the Soviet Union, a massive militarization of society that was as powerful and far-reaching as the Revolution itself. In Hammer and Rifle, David Stone chronicles this transformation and shows why it is so central to our understanding of Stalin's emergence and consolidation of power.

While collectivization dramatically altered rural Russia and Stalin ruthlessly secured his control over the state apparatus, a military-industrial revolution remade the USSR into an immensely powerful war machine. As Stone reveals, the militarization of...

The writings of Carl von Clausewitz loom so large in the annals of military theory that they obscure the substantial contributions of thinkers who came after him. This is especially true for those German theorists who wrote during the half century preceding World War I. However, as Antulio Echevarria argues, although none of those thinkers approached Clausewitz's stature, they were nonetheless theorists of considerable vision.

The Kaiser's theorists have long been portrayed as narrow-minded thinkers rigidly attached to an outmoded way of war, little altered since Napoleon's time....

In 1847 General Winfield Scott boldly led a small but undaunted army from the Mexican coast all the way to the Halls of Montezuma, routing Mexican forces at every turn while pacifying the countryside. Scott's military campaign--America's first ever in a foreign country--helped pave the way for victory in the wider war against Mexico and also posed new challenges for discipline, logistics, and the treatment of civilians. Yet it has remained largely neglected by historians.

In this first book-length study of Scott's brilliant six-month campaign, Timothy Johnson shows how Scott overcame such...

Recently declassified documents and new scholarship have prompted this reassessment of the collusion between Israel, France and England which drove the 1956 War. The book opens with the international aspects of the war, deals with regional issues and concludes with a fresh look at Israeli involvement. Issues such as the plot which paved the way to the eruption of hostilities, Egyptian losses and gains and Soviet and American opposition come under scrutiny.

Was Afghanistan the Soviet Vietnam? Was Vietnam the American Afghanistan? During the Cold War, military conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan validated the crucial importance of war in global power dynamics. After approximately a decade of intense effort, military intervention proved too costly in human and material terms to be politically sustainable for the USA and USSR. In the end, both superpowers were thwarted in obtaining their original war goals and withdrew in disgrace. As a result, the parallelism between the US experience in Vietnam and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is now a...

This study analyzes the readiness of the British military establishment for war in 1899 and its performance in the South African War (1899-1902). It focuses on the career of Field Marshal Paul Sanford, 3rd Baron Methuen (1845-1932), whose traditional military training, used so effectively in Queen Victoria's small wars, was put to the test by the modern challenges of the South African War.

Just before Christmas, 1989, a small group of armed fighters crossed a narrow river marking the frontier with the Ivory Coast and entered the West African state of Liberia. The civil war which followed plunged the African continent's oldest republic into a long and agonizing nightmare. The war promised to liberate Liberians after almost ten years of vicious dictatorship; instead the seeds of Liberia's devastation were sown.

Was Afghanistan the Soviet Vietnam? Was Vietnam the American Afghanistan? During the Cold War, military conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan validated the crucial importance of war in global power dynamics. After approximately a decade of intense effort, military intervention proved too costly in human and material terms to be politically sustainable for the USA and USSR. In the end, both superpowers were thwarted in obtaining their original war goals and withdrew in disgrace. As a result, the parallelism between the US experience in Vietnam and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is now a...

This study analyzes the readiness of the British military establishment for war in 1899 and its performance in the South African War (1899-1902). It focuses on the career of Field Marshal Paul Sanford, 3rd Baron Methuen (1845-1932), whose traditional military training, used so effectively in Queen Victoria's small wars, was put to the test by the modern challenges of the South African War.

Drawing on a vast range of previously classified government archives as well as interviews with key participants, this first volume of the official history of the Falklands Campaign is the most authoritative account of the origins of the 1982 war.

In the first chapters the author analyzes the long history of the dispute between Argentina and Britain over the sovereignty of the Islands, the difficulties faced by successive governments in finding a way to reconcile the opposed interests of the Argentines and the islanders, and the constant struggle to keep the Islands viable. He...

In this official history of the Falklands Campaign, Lawrence Freedman provides a detailed and authoritative account of one of the most extraordinary periods in recent British political history and a vivid portrayal of a government at war.

After the shock of the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in April 1982, Margaret Thatcher faced the crisis that came to define her premiership as she determined to recover the islands. Freedman covers all aspects of the campaign - economic and diplomatic as well as military - and demonstrates the extent of the gamble that the government took....

This book explores the nexus between railways and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) - the first modern war, and one in which the railways played a key part.

Felix Patrikeeff and Harry Shukman examine some of the key dimensions of the Russo-Japanese War, most notably how uncomfortably technological and human dimensions of Russia's war effort interleaved in the course of the conflict. They demonstrate how advantages that might have been built upon were squandered, blunt traditional forms and habits were applied in politically tortuous contexts, and technological edge negated by the...

Prelude to the Easter Rising casts light upon the clandestine activities of Sir Roger Casement in Imperial Germany from 1914 to 1916.
German military intelligence and the Imperial Foreign Office had far-reaching plans to use the Irish in the war against Britain. Radical Irish-American leaders were behind Casement's mission to Berlin. It took some time for the highly sensitive and idealistic Casement to realize that neither the German General Staff nor the Imperial Chancellor was able or willing to lend full military support to the Irish. When Casement began to see that the rising would be...

The Trojan War is one of history's most famous conflicts, a ten-year-long war waged over the beautiful Helen. For more than two thousand years this story has been a source of artistic inspiration. But is it true?

In The Trojan War historian and classicist Barry Strauss explores the myth and the reality behind the war, from Homer's accounts in The Iliad and The Odyssey to Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of ancient Troy in the late nineteenth century to more recent excavations that have yielded intriguing clues to the story behind the fabled city. The Trojans, it...