Krig

Seamlessly blending social, military, intellectual, and technological history, Rhino Tanks and Sticky Bombs weaves an engaging narrative about the roots of American ingenuity during WWII--and makes a compelling case for a specific instance of American distinctiveness that proved crucial to Allied victory.

The previously overlooked story of how the labor of Black GIs helped win the war and advanced racial integration in the US armed forces.More than 80 percent of Black GIs in World War II served behind the front lines. At the beginning of the war, segregation policies maintained physical separation of Black and white GIs and only allowed Black soldiers to do simple, menial work, maintaining a false sense of racial inferiority. But the mechanization of armed forces during World War II demanded more skilled laborers behind the front lines. The Army Service Forces, created in March 1942, turned to Black GIs to solve the serious manpower shortage and trained them for jobs previously done only by white GIs. In Building Bridges, author Douglas Bristol tells the story of how military necessity led to unprecedented changes in the employment of Black troops. These changes had unanticipated consequences. American military leaders adopted a new racial discourse that emphasized the rights and potential of Black GIs. The new opportunities also exposed racial discrimination, giving Black GIs and their allies more leverage to demand better treatment. Black GIs built bridges, roads, and runways. They repaired engines and radios. They transported bombs, bullets, food, gasoline, and water to hard-pressed soldiers on the front lines. Their numbers, skills, and necessity only grew as the war continued. By the end of the World War II, Black GIs had cracked the glass ceiling in the racialized military hierarchy behind the front lines and became indispensable to keeping the American war machine running around the globe.

The first historical look at what happened during the Somalia intervention; what went wrong and what lessons we should learn from it.The story of Black Hawk Down is a familiar one. On 3 October 1993 two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, and in the ensuing Battle of Mogadishu eighteen Americans and hundreds of Somalis were killed. But very few appreciate that this was just one day in a two-and-a-half-year operation; the most ambitious attempt in history to rebuild a nation. The United States sought to show the world that the UN could rebuild a country, but in a dire foreshadowing of the failed efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade later, the intervention in Somalia was plagued with political infighting, policy mismatch, confusion, and fatal assumptions. In 1992 Somalia saw the largest ever deployment of American troops to the continent of Africa, and 1993 brought the first UN-led peace enforcement mission and the most ambitious experiment in nation-building. In Beyond Black Hawk Down, Jonathan Carroll provides the first scholarly military history of the entire intervention, from its early and largely successful humanitarian phase in 1992 through to the ultimate withdrawal of UN forces in 1995. Carroll dispels the myths and misunderstandings surrounding one of the most infamous episodes of the 1990s to present a new interpretation of events, most notably by including the Somali perspective, to argue what went so wrong in Somalia, and more importantly, why. Understanding the intervention in Somalia, its successes and the roots of its failures, is invaluable to contemporary debates on concepts of nation-building and counterinsurgency. Moreover, the increasing regularity of inter-state and intra-state conflicts across the world means the international community will continue to be called upon to intervene in other failed or failing states in the future. Beyond Black Hawk Down is an important new history that will inform the shape and nature of future military interventions.

Alexander Hamilton: A Very Short Introduction provides a brief introduction to the life, work, and legacies of Alexander Hamilton. R. B. Bernstein explores Hamilton's role in revolution, politics, law, constitutionalism, economics, diplomacy, and war, as well as his views on honor and duelling. This elegant profile reveals that Hamilton was one of the key founding fathers of the United States.

Contesting France tells the story of how a transnational web of French sources used their exchanges with US intelligence to shape American policy towards France in the early Cold War. A much-needed addition to intelligence studies, this book will interest students and researchers of the early Cold War.

This book delivers crucial historical background in these times, as bloc-building returns to the global economy and China and Russia massively intensify their economic cooperation.

A pictorial anthology of rare Second World War images and untold human stories

Between 1968 and 1975, there was a subtle thawing of relations between East and West, for which Brezhnev coined the name Détente, and - perhaps - a chance to end the Cold War. The leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, hoped to forge a new relationship between East and West. Yet, the greatest changes of the era took place outside the sphere of international diplomacy. The 1960s brought social collision across the world, from the anti-war protests in America to the student demonstrations on the streets of Paris, and Mao Zedong's Red Guards in China. A new generation, whom advertising executives dubbed the baby-boomers, brought new attitudes to towards sex, gender, race, the environment and religion. In this book, Richard Crowder explores the years of Détente, and introduces us to the key players of the era, whose stories form the narrative of this book.

Teddy Peacock-Edwards was one of eleven young men from Southern Rhodesia recruited into the RAF in 1938. This book, written by his acclaimed fighter pilot son, Rick Peacock-Edwards, describes his father's formative years and gives his overall impressions of his father as an individual, a father, and fighter pilot.

"Starting with a brief history of western naval medical care from the ancient Greeks and proceeding to modern times, this book chronicles the evolution of the Navy's first West Coast hospital, the Mare Island Naval Hospital, as it grew from a "palatial" but primitive facility in the 1860s to the Navy's premier amputee center for Marines and sailors returning from the brutal Pacific war. Located in the Navy's largest California shipyard, the hospital benefited from healthful California weather that permitted creation of a tent hospital to care for Spanish flu victims. Navy Yard engineering and mechanical skills helped create the Navy's first ambulance boats, and in World War II, the best limb prostheses available. Hospital commanders skillfully balanced their obligations as naval officers and as physicians to provide the best possible care for their charges. Damaged by the 1898 Mare Island earthquake, the original structure was replaced. The facility grew over time as structures representing new medical knowledge--laboratory science, neuropsychiatry, infectious diseases, internal medicine, the famous "brace shop"--came on line. Despite concerns that its proximity to the Navy Yard's industrial complex could lead to inadvertent (or intentional) bombing in wartime, at its peak, the hospital's 23 structures covered 48 acres and accommodated about 2,300 patients. This complete history of the Mare Island Naval Hospital draws heavily on primary sources and provides a detailed picture of this pivotal hospital."--

This compendium looks at pen portraits of a selection of soldiers on the Western Front who never returned home.