New Books In Military History

Five hundred years ago, a flotilla landed on the coast of Yucatán under the command of the Spanish conquistador Hérnan Cortés. While the official goal of the expedition was to explore and to expand the Christian faith, everyone involved knew that it was primarily about gold and the hunt for slaves. That a few hundred Spaniards destroyed the Aztec empire--a highly developed culture--is an old chestnut, because the conquistadors, who had every means to make a profit, did not succeed alone. They encountered groups such as the Tlaxcaltecs, who suffered from the Aztec rule and were ready to enter into alliances with the foreigners to overthrow their old enemy. In addition, the conquerors benefited from the diseases brought from Europe, which killed hundreds of thousands of locals.  Drawing on both Spanish and indigenous sources, this account of the conquest of Mexico from 1519 to 1521 not only offers a dramatic narrative of these events--including the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and the flight of the

Why do pogroms occur in some localities and not in others? Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg examine a particularly brutal wave of violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The authors note that while some communities erupted in anti-Jewish violence, most others remained quiescent. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of communities saw pogroms in 1941, and most ordinary gentiles never attacked Jews. Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 2018) is a novel social-scientific explanation of ethnic violence and the Holocaust. It locates the roots of violence in efforts to maintain Polish and Ukrainian dominance rather than in anti-Semitic hatred or revenge for communism. In doing so, it cuts through painful debates about relative victimhood that are driven more by metaphysical beliefs in Jewish culpability than empirical evidence of perpetrators and victims. Pogroms,

In Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence, Mani Sharpe peploys the term “late-colonial” to describe (mostly) French films made during, and in response to, the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Sharpe argues that late-colonial cinema represents a formally and thematically important, yet unappreciated tendency in French cinema; one that has largely been overshadowed by a scholarly focus on the French New Wave. Sharpe contends that whilst late-colonial French cinema cannot be seen as a coherent cinematic movement, school of filmmaking, or genre, it can be seen as a coherent ethical trend, with many of the fifteen central case studies explored in Late-colonial French Cinema filtering the Algerian War of Independence through a discourse of “redemptive pacifism”. Dr. Mani Sharpe about Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence out in 2023 with Edinburgh University Press. Dr. Sharpe is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Leeds. He previous

Why aren't ordinary Russians more outraged by Putin's invasion of Ukraine? Inside the Kremlin's own historical propaganda narratives, Russia's invasion of Ukraine makes complete sense. From its World War II cult to anti-Western conspiracy theories, the Kremlin has long used myth and memory to legitimize repression at home and imperialism abroad, its patriotic history resonating with and persuading large swathes of the Russian population. In Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia (Bloomsbury, 2023), Russia analyst Jade McGlynn takes us into the depths of Russian historical propaganda, revealing the chilling web of nationwide narratives and practices perforating everyday life, from after-school patriotic history clubs to tower block World War II murals. The use of history to manifest a particular Russian identity has had grotesque, even gruesome, consequences, but it belongs to a global political pattern - where one's view of history is the ultimate marker of political loyalty, patriotism and

While the popular image of the US military is one of citizen soldiers protecting their country, the reality is that nearly 5 percent of all first-time military recruits are noncitizens. Their reasons for enlisting are myriad, but many are motivated by the hope of gaining citizenship in return for their service. In Green Card Soldier: Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat (MIT Press, 2023), Sofya Aptekar talks to more than seventy noncitizen soldiers from twenty-three countries, including some who were displaced by conflict after the US military entered their homeland. She identifies a disturbing pattern: the US military's intervention in foreign countries drives migration, which in turn supplies the military with a cheap and desperate labor pool—thereby perpetuating the cycle. As Aptekar discovers, serving in the US military is no guarantee against deportation, and yet the promise of citizenship and the threat of deportation are the carrot and stick used to discipline noncitizen soldiers. Viewed at vari

The Second World War was arguably the defining moment in the history of the Soviet Union. In Stalin as Warlord (Yale University Press, 2022), eminent Russia specialist Alfred J. Rieber examines Stalin as a wartime leader, arguing that his policies were profoundly paradoxical. In preparation for the war, Stalin mobilized the whole of Soviet society in pursuit of his military goals and intensified the centralization of his power. Yet at the same time, his use of terror weakened the forces vital to the defense of the country. In his efforts to rebuild the country after the devastating losses and destruction, he suppressed groups that had contributed immeasurably to victory. His steady, ruthless leadership through war cultivated a legacy that burdened the Soviet Union, and continues to burden Russia through its present-day invasion of Ukraine. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, amo

The twenty years between the World Wars saw remarkable changes in the Middle East. In Palestine, Britain struggled to maintain its Mandatory Authority as Arabs and Jews fought not only each other but the British Government too. Failing to satisfy either side Britain was stuck in the middle, and separating the warring parties was a distraction they hardly needed.  In Mandate: The Palestine Crucible, 1919-1939 (Vallentine Mitchell, 2021), Turnberg explores why the British Government maintained its responsibilities under the Mandate at a time when they were suffering severe economic and social problems at home, and the threat of war with Germany. How was it possible for the Zionists' dream of a homeland in Palestine to survive when they were faced by a Government regretting its commitments, exasperated by both Jewish demands and placating the Palestinian Arabs. The Jews were outnumbered ten to one by the Arabs, but they persisted and, as described here, survived. Events in the first twenty years of the Mandate t

A veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films of all time, Saving Private Ryan. From rural beginnings in northwestern Iowa, Sampson’s life would take him from the University of Notre Dame to the battlefields of Normandy on D-Day, the ambitious failure of Operation Market Garden, the harshness of a winter as a POW of the Germans during the closing stages of the Second World War, to the fall of North Korean capital Pyongyang in the early stages of the Korean War. Part of the very rare breed of Parachute Chaplains, in his case with the 101 st Airborne Division, Sampson spent much of his career as an army chaplain in the center of maelstroms of the 20th century. Throughout it all, Sampson offered a valuable Christian witness in the darkest of times and the most difficult of circumstances. This second edition of his memoirs, Look Out Below!: A Story of the Airborne by a Paratrooper Padre (Catholic U of America

Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war--and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated. In The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (Norton, 2023), Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault--on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament--the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia's ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics,

Committed in utmost secrecy in April-May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly fifty years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity, their story unchallenged by Western governments fearful of upsetting a powerful wartime ally and Cold War adversary.  Surviving Katyn: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth (Oneworld, 2021) explores the decades-long search for answers, focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake - the few survivors of the massacre and the Polish wartime forensic investigators - whose quest for the truth in the face of an inscrutable, unknowable, and utterly ruthless enemy came at great personal cost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In And Then I Cried: Stories of a Mortuary NCO (Tactical 16, 2012), Justin Jordan details life as an Air Force Mortuary Non Commissioned Officer. In his stunning debut Jordan forces the reader to walk beside him on his journey in this gruesome world. Jordan holds nothing back, and shares in graphic detail how he honored Americas heroes, both at deployed locations and stateside. This books describes the challenges he faced daily, from dealing with the families of the fallen, to witnessing the embalming and preparations of the deceased. Jordan also shares how this job taxed his mental well being, as he suffered in silence, longing not to care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

From 2-13 March 2022 - only a week into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine - Russian forces tried and failed to take and hold Voznesensk, a small but strategically important town 80 kilometres northwest of Mykolaiv. Looking back, the commander of the 300 professional troops that repulsed the attacks with the help of civilian volunteers concluded that this "one small, decisive and improbable victory … almost certainly saved Ukraine from a larger encirclement and most likely from the prospect of defeat". In A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine (Ithaka, 2023), Andrew Harding tells the story of the battle for Voznesensk through the eyes of its participants - from commander "Formosa" to 32-year-old mayor Yevhenii to the "archipelago of stranded, pensionless pensioners" like Svetlana eking out a living and redefining their identities through war. Although he has been reporting from the front line for the BBC since March 2022, Andrew Harding is the BBC’s Africa correspondent and has lived

Today I talked to Rotem Kowner about Tsushima (Oxford UP, 2022), which is part of the great battle series in Oxford University press. The Battle of Tsushima, in which the Japanese Imperial Navy defeated the Russian Imperial Navy, was unprecedented in many ways. It marks the first naval victory of an Asian power over a major European power; the most devastating defeat suffered by the Imperial Russian Navy in its entire history; and the only truly decisive engagement between two battleship fleets in modern times. In addition, the Battle of Tsushima was also the most decisive naval engagement of the Russo-Japanese War and one that exerted a major impact on the course of that war. Its impact was so dramatic, in fact, that the two belligerents concluded a peace agreement within three months of the battle's conclusion. Beyond the military and diplomatic realms, being the first great defeat of a “Western” “power” by a non-Western modern military the battel had profound implications across Asia and the colonial world

Today I talked to Danny Orbach about his book Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War (Pegasus Books, 2022). Shrouded in government secrecy, clouded by myths and propaganda, the enigmatic tale of Nazi fugitives in the early Cold War has never been properly told—until now. In the aftermath of WWII, the victorious Allies vowed to hunt Nazi war criminals “to the ends of the earth.” Yet many slipped away to the four corners of the world or were shielded by the Western Allies in exchange for cooperation. Most prominently, Reinhard Gehlen, the founder of West Germany's foreign intelligence service, welcomed SS operatives into the fold. This shortsighted decision nearly brought his cherished service down, as the KGB found his Nazi operatives easy to turn, while judiciously exposing them to threaten the very legitimacy of the Bonn Government. However, Gehlen was hardly alone in the excessive importance he placed on the supposed capabilities of former Nazi agents; his American sponsors did much th

Meryl Ain's Shadows We Carry (Sparkspress, 2023) is a follow-up to the author’s 2020 novel, The Takeaway Men, focuses on fraternal twins Bronka and JoJo Lubinski, now in college and figuring out what to do with their lives. Beginning with the assassination of President Kennedy, we watch the sisters navigate social upheaval, family expectations, and all the usual aspects of growing up, but they were born in a DP camp after WW2 and are children of Holocaust Survivors, now referred to as “Second - Generation Survivors.” They’ve inherited their parents’ guilt (their mother lives a Jewish life but never converted) and emotional trauma (their father’s first family was killed by Nazis) but they live in 1960s and 70s New York and also have to navigate relationships, career dreams, and social expectations for women of that generation. Then Branka, who dreams of becoming a serious journalist but has been relegated to the food column, is asked to cover a neo-Nazi protest, and her eyes are opened to the presence of Hitle

Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of global politics. In this study, Stanford historian and lifelong Orwell scholar Peter Stansky incisively demonstrates how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed social

The recent conclusion to the war in Afghanistan — America’s longest and one of its most frustrating — serves as a vivid reminder of the unpredictability and tragedy of war. In Military History for the Modern Strategist: America's Major Wars Since 1861 (Brookings, 2023), esteemed military expert Michael O’Hanlon examines America’s major conflicts since the mid-1800s: the Civil War, the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. O’Hanlon addresses profound questions. How successful has the United States been when it waged these wars? Were the wars avoidable? Did America’s leaders know what they were getting into when they committed to war? And what lessons does history offer for future leaders contemplating war?—including the prospects for avoiding war in the first place. Certainly, Vladimir Putin should have thought harder about some of these questions before invading Ukraine. O’Hanlon looks for overarching trends and themes, along with the lessons for the military strategists and political leaders

The move away from post-Cold War unipolarity and the rise of revisionist states like Russia and China pose a rapidly escalating and confounding threat for the liberal international order. In Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Samuel Helfont offers a new narrative of Iraqi foreign policy after the 1991 Gulf War to argue that Saddam Hussein executed a political warfare campaign that facilitated this disturbance to global norms. Following the Gulf War, the UN imposed sanctions and inspections on the Iraqi state—conditions that Saddam Hussein was in no position to challenge militarily or through traditional diplomacy. Hussein did, however, wage an influence campaign designed to break the unity of the UN Security Council. The Iraqis helped to impede emerging norms of international cooperation and prodded potentially revisionist states to act on latent inclinations to undermine a liberal post-Cold War order. Drawing on internal files from the ru

Süleyman, who ruled the Ottoman Empire between 1520 and 1566, was a globally recognized figure during his lifetime. In Peerless Among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman (Oxford University Press, 2023), Kaya Şahin presents the life of this sultan, whose domain extended from Hungary to Iran, and from the Crimea to North Africa and the Indian Ocean. The wealth of his treasury, the strength of his armies, and his personality were much discussed by historians, poets, courtiers, diplomats and publics across Eurasia. Süleyman was engaged in bitter rivalries with the Catholic Habsburgs in Europe and the Shiite Safavids in the Middle East. He presided over a multilingual and multireligious empire that promised peace and prosperity to its subjects. During his reign, the Ottoman Empire became a truly global power. Imperial governance expanded considerably, and the law was emphasized as the main bond between the ruler and the ruled. Süleyman's prolific poetic output, his frequent appearances during public cer

In March 2004, the unprovoked ambush killing and desecration of the bodies of American civilian security contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, caused the National Command Authorities in Washington, DC. to demand that the newly arrived Marine Expeditionary Force there take action against the perpetrators and other insurgent forces. Planned Stability and Support Operations were cast aside as insurgent fighters dared the Marines to enter Fallujah. Marine infantrymen, tankers, helicopter crews, and amphibious vehicle drivers all pitched into high-intensity battles and firefights during the first fights of Fallujah in April 2004. Across the board cooperation and innovation marked these fighting Marines in combined arms fights that no one expected. Marines fought in the streets, conducted house-to-house searches, cleared buildings of enemy, and used tank main guns in direct support of urban environment operations. Helicopter crews supported operations on the ground with rockets and machine-gun fire, and Amtrac Marines tra