They entered West Point shortly before the end of World War II. Four years later the class of USMA '49 graduated amid peacetime military cutbacks and national complacency. A year later these young officers were plunged into a cruel and unexpected war and were forced to compensate, by valor and leadership, for the nation's unpreparedness. Some called it a U.N. Police Action, but to the 2nd lieutenants fighting as platoon leaders, forward observers, and jet pilots, it was war to the fullest.
Men of '49 served along the Naktong Perimeter, landed at Inchon, flew combat missions against...

Stationed at a lonely wind-pounded outpost in an isolated backwater of World War II, the nineteen men of the Greenland Ice Cap Detachment were charged with erecting a weather/rescue station on the ten-thousand-foot-high Ice Cap to serve the Polar aircraft-ferrying route to Europe and to provide vital weather data for the expanding war effort. "Greenland's Icy Fury" is a lighthearted accounting of one of the least accessible and least known but most stunning parts of the globe--southeast Greenland--and its natural history, geography, geology, glaciers, and foremost, its savage weather and...

Who was Warner Robins, for whom an Air Force base in Georgia was named? "To write a story about General Robins is to write abut the Olden Days'" his widow has remarked, "for Warner Robins was not in the Air Force as it is today." No, but he helped to form the Air Force as it is today. His professional life developed along with the air service during that brave and daring era between the two World Wars. As author William Head explains, Robins was "one of those courageous few who left an indelible mark on today's Air Force."
As a West Point cadet (1903-1907), Augustine Warner Robins...

Why is war, with all its terror and destruction, so seemingly attractive to humankind? "The Antique Drums of War" provides a deeply thoughtful and provocative consideration of the sources of war: in archaic instincts, social ritual, animal behavior and evolutionary logic, mythmaking, and psychology. It traces the continuity of such aspects of war as unit size, tactics, and the function of uniforms from primitive beginnings through recent wars. The actual experiences of men in battle, drawn from the personal reminiscences of soldiers from various periods of history, give a sense of immediacy...

As German pressure on Europe escalated in the late 1930s, a young Belgian pacifist completing his Ph.D. in chemistry watched with horror the preparation for the inevitable invasion of his country. In the face of advancing German troops, his passion for freedom and his growing hatred of Hitler led him and a group of his friends into the resistance movement and five years of privation, danger, and, for some, torture and death, at the hands of the Gestapo.
This dramatic memoir traces Herman Bodson's transformation from a pacifist and scientist to, in his own words, "a cold fighter and a...

Begun in the late 1940s, before Vandiver enrolled in the doctoral program at Tulane University, research for this book started with his interviewing the Confederate ordnance chief's daughters and included perusal of Gorgas's 1857-1877 journals.
Gorgas is credited with creating, in the Confederacy's ordnance department, "success beyond expectation." With the South having far less capacity to produce arms than the North and with communications from the field severely hampered throughout the war, the former West Pointer nevertheless was responsible for the fact that, as some have argued, the...

The French Indo-China War of 1946-54 was one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century. Dien Bien Phu became the site of the decisive battle of the French Indo-China War. Indeed, the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu set the stage for America's own military involvement in Viet-Nam a decade later. Yet despite its historic importance, there is still uncertainty about why the French chose to fight in a location that, in hindsight, involved such risks. In The Undetected Enemy, John Nordell examines that question by telling the full story of the strategic, tactical, logistical,...

When America entered World War II, the surge of patriotism was not confined to men. Congress authorized the organization of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later renamed Women's Army Corps) in 1942, and hundreds of women were able to join in the war effort. Charity Edna Adams became the first black woman commissioned as an officer.
Black members of the WAC had to fight the prejudices not only of males who did not want women in their "man's army," but also of those who could not accept blacks in positions of authority or responsibility, even in the segregated military.
With...

Early in World War II, two hundred years after Vitus Bering made the first Siberian connection with Alaska, Russians once again returned to Alaska as part of the U.S.-Soviet Lend-Lease program to ferry American-made aircraft to Siberia.
American Lend-Lease generosity helped to join Russia and America in a wartime alliance against Germany. However, Russia, suspicious of American sincerity, delayed the establishment of an Alaska-Siberia delivery route (known throughout the war as ALSIB) to the German war front. Instead, other routes via the North Atlantic and the Persian Gulf were employed...

At one o'clock in the afternoon of July 1, 1898, thirty-nine-year-old Colonel Teddy Roosevelt prepared to advance at the head of his Rough Riders during the Cuban phase of the Spanish-American War. A mixture of cowboys and socialites, the Rough Riders were the most colorful regiment in the American V Army Corps. Their immediate target was the central sector of the fortified San Juan Heights. Capturing the blockhouse on San Juan Hill was key to breaching the Spanish defenses on the heights above the city of Santiago de Cuba. Roosevelt and his volunteer cavalry were positioned in the rear of...