Showing results for "Military R" in Wars & Conflicts

How history's only five-star admirals triumphed in World War II and made the United States the world's dominant sea power. Only four men in American history have been promoted to the five-star rank of Admiral of the Fleet: William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and William Halsey. These...

The 16 case studies in this volume examine the culture of armies, navies, and air forces from the Civil War to the Iraq War and how and why culture affected their performance in the ultimate arbitration of war.

General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the US Army during World War II, faced the daunting task not only of overseeing two theaters of a global conflict but also of selecting the best generals to carry out American grand strategy. Marshall and His Generals is the first and only book to focus entirely on that selection process and the performances, both stellar and disappointing, that followed from it. Stephen Taaffe explores how and why Marshall selected the Army's commanders.

In 1938, British statesman and soon-to-be Prime Minister Winston Churchill published his book Arms and the Covenant. It was published three months later in the US under the title While England Slept. In 1940, future President John F. Kennedy, who was a senior at Harvard University, wrote his dissertation, criticizing Churchill’s harsh blame of England’s leaders, even drawing comparisons between England and the United States for its own similar lack of preparedness against the totalitarian Nazi regime. Responding to Churchill's title, Kennedy named his book, Why England Slept.

Born and raised in Mississippi, Peter K. Lutken, Jr. (1920–2014) joined the army in 1941 and was assigned to the Coast Artillery. Originally sent to India to guard airfields, he was reassigned to the British V Force, then the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services and precursor to the CIA) after he volunteered for reconnaissance missions behind Japanese lines. Skills he had learned as a boy in the backwoods and swamps around the Pearl River stood him in good stead, and by the end of the war, he attained the rank of major, commanding an entire battalion of ethnic Kachins and other local people of northern Burma (now called Myanmar).

Volume Four begins in March, 1865 with Lee's starving soldiers facing annihilation at the hands of Grant's enormous army. Surrounded, with all avenues of escape cut off, Lee honorably surrendered the remnants of his valiant Army of Northern Virginia at Appamattox on April 9. Having done his military duty to his people, Lee next asked himself, "What is now my duty?" Declining handsome financial rewards for the use of his name in commercial ventures, Lee decided to share the misery of the people of Virginia and the South.

Volume three opens in May 1863 as Lee assessed his situation after the great Confederate victory at Chancellorsville and the loss of General Jackson. Lee quickly reorganized his army and headed north, hoping to inflict a war-ending defeat on the Union. But absent Jackson, his army was not the same.

Volume Two opens in March, 1862 with Lee back in Richmond after a lengthy absence. He was shocked by the chaos and panic evident in the Confederate capital. McClellan had assembled a superbly equipped army of over 100,000 soldiers which Virginians feared might invade at any time. In May, McClellan began to move his huge Army of the Potomac up the peninsula and so close to Richmond that church steeples were within his view. The situation seemed hopeless.

R. E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman was the recipient of the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It was a richly deserved honor, for Freeman's biography of the distinguished Virginian went on to become one of the most celebrated of all American biographies, a favorite of General George Marshall and President Dwight Eisenhower, among many others. Since his death, thousands of American soldiers have sought to emulate Lee's example of virtue, courage, and duty.

The Matanikau battles proved to be the critical turning points in the land campaign for Guadalcanal—the campaign's longest and bloodiest ground fight. A five-month conflict raged along the river and its basin. The real importance of this area has long remained unrecognized, yet the American and Japanese forces that fought over it knew that it was the key to the ultimate prize of Henderson Airfield. In this mile-long bloody tug-of-war from the river across to the hills and ravines were fought seven major battles and countless smaller skirmishes.

""The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C."" —H. R. McMaster (from the Conclusion) Dereliction Of Duty is a stunning analysis of how and why the United States became involved...

Only a boy when World War II broke out, E. C. R. Baker was gripped by the stories he heard of heroism in the skies as the Allies defeated the mighty Luftwaffe. But in the years after the war, he was struck by how few of the RAF's legendary fighter aces could be named by the general public.

Loyal Americans marched off to war in 1861 not to conquer the South but to liberate it. So argues Elizabeth R. Varon in Armies of Deliverance, a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims. Northerners imagined the war as a crusade to deliver the Southern masses from slaveholder domination and to bring democracy, prosperity, and education to the region. As the war escalated, Lincoln and his allies built the case that emancipation would secure military victory and benefit the North and South alike.

Following the disastrous Java Sea campaign, the Allies went on the offensive in the Pacific in a desperate attempt to halt the Japanese forces that were rampaging across the region. With the conquest of Australia a very real possibility, the stakes were high. Their target: the Japanese-held Soloman Islands, in particular the southern island of Guadalcanal. Hamstrung by arcane pre-war thinking and a bureaucratic mind-set, the US Navy had to adapt on the fly in order to compete with the mighty Imperial Japanese Navy, whose ingenuity had fostered the creation of its Pacific empire.

This Kind of War is a monumental study of the conflict that began in June 1950. Successive generations of U.S. military officers have considered this book an indispensable part of their education. T. R. Fehrenbach's narrative brings to life the harrowing and bloody battles that were fought up and down the Korean Peninsula.

A young US Marine officer recounts his experiences of the Vietnam War over a 19-month period. He graphically describes what it was like to perform three distinct combat missions: long-range ground reconnaissance in the Annamite Mountains of I Corps, infantry operations in the rice paddies and mountains of Quang Nam Province, and special police operations for the CIA in Tay Ninh province. Using official Marine Corps unit histories, CIA documents, and his weekly letters home, the author relies almost exclusively on primary sources in providing an accurate and honest account.

On April 18, 1775, a riot over the price of flour broke out in the French city of Dijon. That night, across the Atlantic, Paul Revere mounted the fastest horse he could find and kicked it into a gallop. So began what have been called the "sister revolutions" of France and America. In a single, thrilling narrative, this audiobook tells the story of those revolutions and shows just how deeply intertwined they actually were.

Surge is an insider's view of the most decisive phase of the Iraq War. Using newly declassified documents, unpublished manuscripts, interviews, author notes, and published sources, Surge explains how President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ambassador Crocker, General Petraeus, and other U.S. and Iraqi political and military leaders shaped the surge from the center of the maelstrom in Baghdad and Washington.

Da Pearl Harbor allo sbarco in Normandia. La nostra storia nasce in queste pagine. Dal fronte italiano alla Russia, da Pearl Harbor allo sbarco in Normandia, tutti gli scontri decisivi dell'ultimo conflitto. La seconda guerra mondiale rappresenta senza ombra di dubbio lo spartiacque della storia del novecento, un evento unico per la ferocia dei combattimenti e il numero di persone coinvolte. Il crudele bilancio finale parlerà di sessanta milioni di morti in uno scontro che, sui diversi fronti, non è stato solo una contrapposizione di eserciti.

A groundbreaking new history, telling the stories of hundreds of African-American activists and officeholders who risked their lives for equality - in the face of murderous violence - in the years after the Civil War. By 1870, just five years after Confederate surrender and 13 years after the Dred Scott decision ruled blacks ineligible for citizenship, Congressional action had ended slavery and given the vote to black men. That same year, Hiram Revels and Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African-American U.S. senator and congressman respectively.