New Books In Military History

Robert J. Mrazek, an author of eleven books and former congressman from New York, has written a gripping account of one the most determine heroines of World War II: The Indomitable Florence Finch: The Untold Story of a War Widow Turned Resistance Fighter and Savior of American POWs (Hachette, 2020). Florence Finch was the widow of an American intelligence officer who died in the Battle of Bataan. Finch pledged to her husband’s memory that she would contribute to the effort to defeat the Japanese Army after it consolidated its control over the Philippines in 1941-42. Soon Finch was organizing fuel shipments under the Japanese occupiers’ noses and selling fuel on the black market in order to provide medicine and food for American POWs imprisoned in the Philippines. Finch did not merely play a small part in the Philippine resistance; she was central to the survival of American military and other civilian prisoners. Mrazek also tells the story of Carl Engelhart, a supervisor and friend of Finch, who became a POW

In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German.  And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as the radicals lecturing workers about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek.  War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War (Basic Books, 2020) explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in

Understanding how people cope with large-scale traumatic events has become more urgent as we continue to cope with the effects of the pandemic. In Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 2021), Jillian Rogers examines France in the aftermath of World War I, which left its residents mourning a lost generation and many soldiers suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder.  Through analysis of French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, as well as music and archival materials, Rogers argues that music was a significant method that French people used to manage and perform trauma. Employing innovative analytical techniques, Rogers shows that stylistic developments in post-war French music may have been responses to trauma suffered by the composers. As a consolatory practice, French performers used music to remember loved ones but also to sooth themselves through the repetitive bodily movements required to play neoclassical music.

British hopes that the American War for Independence would be brought to a swift conclusion began to wane in the early months of 1777. Despite brilliant victories over Washington and his continentals in the battles of Long Island and White Plains, the rebellious colonies were no closer to being pacified. Success in and around New York City was offset by a failed operation along the Lake Champlain corridor and negated, at least in terms of morale, by Washington’s stunning triumphs at Trenton and Princeton. After nearly two years of open warfare, Britain had little to show for its efforts. Nor was there an end in sight—the Americans, it seemed, were determined to fight on. It was against this backdrop of stalemate and fatigue that, in early 1777, British Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne proposed a daring plan: to end the war, once and for all, with a powerful thrust from Canada, down along the Lake Champlain and Hudson River Corridors, that would permanently sever the head of the rebellion in New England from i

We are familiar with the history of the division of Vietnam in 1954 into two states, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south. What started out essentially as a civil war turned into one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Cold War. Much of the scholarly, and indeed popular interest in the history of this period has been about the bitter and divisive American experience of the war. But beyond the military conflict we are much less familiar with the everyday live of the youth in the two opposing states. Olga Dror's Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965-1975 (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a rich and fascinating study of how Vietnamese youth in the two states experienced this tumultuous period in very different ways. Dror also argues that much maligned South Vietnam deserves fairer treatment in the history of the Vietnam War. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He c

In Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature (Princeton UP, 2021), Emmanuel Kreike offers a global history of environmental warfare and makes the case for why it should be a crime. The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature.  In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces

Today I talked to Michael Gorra about his new book The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (Liveright, 2020). This episode touches on two of William Faulkner’s novels in particular: The Sound and the Fury as well as Absalom, Absalom! It considers the role of memory and history, Faulkner’s alcoholism, the sexual exploitation practiced by plantation owners, and the greater presence of Nathan Bedford Forrest over Robert E. Lee in Faulkner’s fiction writings. Ties to today’s reckoning for racial justice is a part of the episode, too. The author of Portrait of a Novel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Michael Gorra is a Professor English Language and Literature at Smith College and the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me

Few human enterprises are as complex, dynamic, and unpredictable as war. Armed conflict substitutes the relatively ordered reality of peace with the undeniably chaotic reality of combat. Militaries, by design, seek to make sense of and prepare for that chaos. And as long as there have been organized militaries, there have been military officers, theorists, and observers, like Ardant du Pique or B.H. Liddell Hart, who sought to predict the fundamental nature of the next war. But as Lieutenant General David Barno and Dr. Nora Bensahel observe in Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime (Oxford University Press, 2020), anticipating the complexities, subtitles, and character of the next war is no simple task. Warfare has a nasty habit of confounding pre-war assumptions and rendering impotent cherished pre-war doctrines, technologies, and leaders. To successfully contend with warfare’s radical shifts and rampant unknowns, Barno and Bensahel argue, modern militaries need to be adaptable. They must bu

The First World War was marked by an exceptional expansion in the use and production of military cartography. But World War II took things even further, employing maps, charts, reconnaissance, and the systematic recording and processing of geographical and topographical information on an unprecedented scale. As Jeremy Black—one of the world's leading military and cartographic historians—convincingly shows in this lavish full-color book, it is impossible to understand the events and outcomes of the Second World War without deep reference to mapping at all levels. In World War II, maps themselves became the weapons. A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps (University of Chicago Press, 2020) traces how military cartography developed from simply recording and reflecting history to having a decisive impact on events of a global scale. Drawing on one hundred key maps from the unparalleled collections of the British Library and other sources—many of which have never been published in book form before—Jeremy Bl

The 1930s-40s expansion of the Japanese empire was marked by significant interest among Japan-based scholars and policy-makers in China’s Muslim population and how best to write them into a new pan-Asian story. At the very same time, as Kelly Hammond shows in China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II (UNC Press, 2020), members of this longstanding community of Sino-Muslims were themselves engaged in numerous complex debates over culture and identity, and their place in an emerging post-dynastic China and a wider Islamic world. Choosing to reciprocate Japanese interest was thus just one possible path. Expertly navigating the multi-layered, transnational concerns which are brought into focus by the twentieth-century encounter between Japanese Empire, Chinese Nationalism and Sino-Muslims, Hammond reframes our understanding of wartime East Asia. From global developments stretching as far afield as Central Asia, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to the more intimate everyday experiences of S

When we read the Declaration of Independence, what tends to jump off the page are the lofty propositions concerning natural rights. Yet over a third of the brief document is taken up with a set of charges aimed at George III, many of them relating to war - whether the maintenance of standing armies, the lack of civilian control over the military, or the forced quartering of troops who enjoyed judicial immunity. The King, it blared, ‘has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns and destroyed the lives of our people’. Two hundred and forty-four years on, historians of the Revolution are still grappling with a durable foundation myth that is focussed on ideas and leaders, and projected through plays and musicals. What that obscures is the sheer violence of the late 1770s, a decade defined by conflict in a century of more or less constant war. Historians of slavery and Indigenous America have been filling in corners of the picture, but we still know less than we should about individuals who found t

In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. This key event in 20th-century history continues to fascinate the public imagination, yet few historians have examined in depth the regional context which allowed this assassination to happen or the murder's ripples which quickly spread out across the Balkans, Austria-Hungary and Europe as a whole. In Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Professor Mark Cornwall, a Central European specialist at the University of Southampton, has gathered an impressive cast of contributors from a 2014 history conference to explore the causes of the Sarajevo assassination and its consequences for the Balkans in the context of the First World War. With Professor Cornwall writing a highly informative introductory essay, this volume assesses from a variety of regional perspectives how the 'South Slav Question' destabilized the empire's southern provinces, provoking violent discontent in Croatia and Bosnia

The story of the battlefield in the 20th century was dominated by a handful of developments. Foremost of these was the introduction and refinement of tanks. In Tank Warfare (Indiana UP, 2020), prominent military historian Professor Jeremy Black offers a comprehensive global account of the history of tanks and armored warfare in the 20th and 21st centuries. First introduced onto the battlefield during the Great War, tanks represented the reconciliation of firepower and mobility and immediately seized the imagination of commanders and commentators concerned about the constraints of ordinary infantry on the western front. The developments of technology and tactics in the interwar years were realized to a degree in the German blitzkrieg in World War II and beyond. Yet the account of armor on the battlefield is a tale of limitations and defeats as well as of potential and achievements. Tank Warfare examines the traditional narrative of armored warfare while at the same time challenging it, and Black suggests that

In historical writing on World War I, Czech-speaking soldiers serving in the Austro-Hungarian military are typically studied as Czechs, rarely as soldiers, and never as men. As a result, the question of these soldiers' imperial loyalties has dominated the historical literature to the exclusion of any debate on their identities and experiences. Men Under Fire: Motivation, Morale, and Masculinity among Czech Soldiers in the Great War, 1914–1918 (Berghahn Books, 2019) provides a groundbreaking analysis of this oft-overlooked cohort, drawing on a wealth of soldiers' private writings to explore experiences of exhaustion, sex, loyalty, authority, and combat itself. It combines methods from history, gender studies, and military science to reveal the extent to which the Great War challenged these men's senses of masculinity, and to which the resulting dynamics influenced their attitudes and loyalties. Jiří Hutečka is an Associate Professor at the Institute of History, University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic.  St

Although World War II had been largely remembered in the People’s Republic of China as an experience of victimization since its founding in 1949, that view has been changing since the Deng Xiaoping era in the 1980s. Rana Mitter’s newest book on modern China, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard University Press 2020), traces this transformation in the Chinese interpretations of the war from one marked by humiliation to one that celebrates victory. This change in the discourses surrounding the war began with a changing historiography led by Chinese academia in the 1980s, when research on a variety of previously forbidden areas of historical study was encouraged. Then, through local and public attempts at reviving and celebrating war memories through museums, TV, film, and the online space, WWII has been increasingly narrated in these different arenas as China’s “good war.” What came out of these new narratives, Mitter points out, is an attempt to rehabilitate Chiang Kai-shek

Donald Trump campaigned on a great many things in 2016, but one of the issues he used to criticize Democrats was their role in supporting sequestration and cuts to the military budget. While partisan rhetoric about the country being unsafe or the military being underfunded plays well, it obscures an important reality about the relative size of U.S. military funding. The United State spends more than the next ten leading countries combined. The Democratic Party, while often criticized as soft on defense, generally supports high military spending. This seems to contradict many statements made by politicians, and it also confounds expectations about where one might expect the Democrats’ priorities to lay. How did it get to be this way, with Democrats and Republicans supporting high military spending? Michael Brenes’ For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy explains this contradictory history. Brenes argues that after the beginning of the Cold War, defense spending bec

In 1964, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military industrial complex in the mountains of inland China was built, which the CCP hoped to keep hidden from enemy bombers. Mao named this the Third Front. The Third Front received more government investment than any other developmental initiative of the Mao era, and yet this huge industrial war machine, which saw the mobilization of fifteen million people, was not officially acknowledged for over a decade and a half. In Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China (Cambridge UP, 2020), Covell Meyskens provides the first history of the Third Front campaign. He shows how the militarization of Chinese industrialization linked millions of everyday lives to the global Cold War, merging global geopolitics with local change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History and geography delineate the operation of power, not only its range but also the capacity to plan and the ability to implement. Approaching state strategy and policy from the spatial angle, Jeremy Black argues that just as the perception of power is central to issues of power, so place, and its constraints and relationships, is partly a matter of perception, not merely map coordinates. Geopolitics, he maintains, is as much about ideas and perception as it is about the actual spatial dimensions of power. Black's study Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance (Indiana UP, 2015) ranges widely, examining geography and the spatial nature of state power from the 15th century to the present day. He considers the rise of British power, geopolitics and the age of Imperialism, the Nazis and World War II, and the Cold War, and he looks at the key theorists of the latter 20th century, including Henry Kissinger, Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington, Philip Bobbitt, Niall Ferguson, and others. Charles Coutinho P

In his latest monograph, All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and The Origins of the Second World War (Harper, 2020), Professor Paul Jankowski (Brandeis University) provides a wide-angled account of a critical period of world history, the interwar years, in which the world transitioned from postwar to the prewar and saw the disintegration of collective security and international institutions created after the First World War. Drawing on international history’s methodology of multi-archival research, Jankowski constructs an elegantly written and deeply researched narrative history of this decline by looking at both high-level diplomacy and the changing popular mentalities that influenced many of the decisions of policymakers. Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow hi

Andrea Pető's book The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) analyses the actions, background, connections and the eventual trials of Hungarian female perpetrators in the Second World War through the concept of invisibility. It examines why and how far-right women in general and among them several Second World War perpetrators were made invisible by their fellow Arrow Cross Party members in the 1930s and during the war (1939-1945), and later by the Hungarian people's tribunals responsible for the purge of those guilty of war crimes (1945-1949). It argues that because of their 'invisibilization' the legacy of these women could remain alive throughout the years of state socialism and that, furthermore, this legacy has actively contributed to the recent insurgence of far-right politics in Hungary. This book therefore analyses how the invisibility of Second World War perpetrators is connected to twenty-first century memory politics and