In May 1919, 30,000 Winnipeg workers walked away from their jobs, shutting down large factories, forcing businesses to close and bringing major industries to a halt. Mounted police and hired security, at the behest of the ruling class, violently ended the protest after six weeks. Two men were killed. What started as trade union revolt, the Winnipeg General Strike became a mass protest and was branded as a revolution. In Magnificent Fight, Dennis Lewycky lays out the history of this iconic event, which remains the biggest and longest strike in Canadian history. He analyzes the social, political and economic conditions leading up to the strike. He also illustrates the effects the strike had on workers, unions and all three levels of government in the following decades. Far from a simple retelling of the General Strike, Magnificent Fight speaks to the power of workers’ solidarity and social organization. And Lewycky reveals the length the capitalist class and the state went to in protecting the status quo. By retelling the story of the Strike through the eyes of those who witnessed it, Lewycky’s account is both educational and entertaining.
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese land-based bombers pounded Wake Island, the American advanced base that was key to the U.S. Navy’s strategy in the Pacific. Throughout the next two weeks, the Wake Island garrison survived nearly daily bombings and repulsed the first Japanese attempt to take the atoll. The determined defenders provided a badly needed lift to American morale. Cressman was the first to make extensive use of Japanese materials to identify the enemy order of battle and the roles each unit played in the drama to provide a moving account of the heroism of the defenders in the face if tremendous odds.
Warfare...hell...demons..."I'm just trying to drive my kids to school and stay on top of the laundry. " "What does any of that have to do with me?" You've heard plenty of talk about evil. You've heard about binding Satan and breaking strongholds and calling demons by name. You've heard you should claim your victory in Christ...but you're not really sure how to do that. This isn't a book about evil. With passion and strength, Mary DeMuth brings balance and insight to the often murky realm of spiritual warfare. As you embrace the abundant life to which God calls his daughters, she'll tell you why your voice matters for eternity. And on the darkest days, you'll know that spiritual warfare is about bowing before the Creator, not cowering before the devil. It's about finding freedom and beauty in the midst of devastation. It's about the power of God to heal our hearts, to move mountains, to intercede when we're weary. It's about crucifixion and a defiant, glorious resurrection. It's about truth. It's about power. Join Mary in the beautiful battle, and be renewed on the journey.
In a groundbreaking book that rethinks spiritual formation, Gary Thomas argues that the contemporary church is in danger of accepting Christianity as a historical reality but not as a present power. Is the grace that pardons powerful enough to transform? Answering with a resounding yes, Thomas presents a compelling picture of what it means to be a “God oasis” in a God-forgetting world.“The first chapter alone is worth reading many times. This is beauty and struggle. This is the death that leads to life.”John Ortberg, Pastor and Author, Menlo Park Presbyterian Church“Set this book down ... slowly ... turn around ... and run away ... unless you hunger for a deeper vision of faith and thirst for genuine life transformation ... if you do, read on.”Kevin Harney, Pastor and Author“Once again, Gary Thomas challenges me to live passionately for God and to apply his transforming power to my daily decisions.”Kay Warren, Executive Director, HIV/AIDS Initiative, Saddleback ChurchThe Beautiful Fight will energize your life and your church. It will inspire you, equip you, and challenge you to delve ever deeper into what it means to be a truly holy believer, transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. Discover just how radical Christian transformation can be, as you learn to see with new eyes, think with a new mind, and feel with a new heart. Thomas rallies you to the Beautiful Fight—the struggle to fully express the wonder and life-changing power of Christ in this world through every aspect of who you are.
The never-before-told story of one of the most decorated units in the war in Afghanistan and its fifteen-month ordeal that culminated in the 2008 Battle of Wanat, the war's deadliest A single company of US paratroopers--calling themselves the "Chosen Few"--arrived in eastern Afghanistan in late 2007 hoping to win the hearts and minds of the remote mountain people and extend the Afghan government's reach into this wilderness. Instead, they spent the next fifteen months in a desperate struggle, living under almost continuous attack, forced into a slow and grinding withdrawal, and always outnumbered by Taliban fighters descending on them from all sides. Month after month, rocket-propelled grenades, rockets, and machine-gun fire poured down on the isolated and exposed paratroopers as America's focus and military resources shifted to Iraq. Just weeks before the paratroopers were to go home, they faced their last--and toughest--fight. Near the village of Wanat in Nuristan province, an estimated three hundred enemy fighters surrounded about fifty of the Chosen Few and others defending a partially finished combat base. Nine died and more than two dozen were wounded that day in July 2008, making it arguably the bloodiest battle of the war in Afghanistan. The Chosen Few would return home tempered by war. Two among them would receive the Medal of Honor. All of them would be forever changed.
From one of the most important army officers of his generation, a memoir of the revolution in warfare he helped lead, in combat and in Washington When John Nagl was an army tank commander in the first Gulf War of 1991, fresh out of West Point and Oxford, he could already see that America’s military superiority meant that the age of conventional combat was nearing an end. Nagl was an early convert to the view that America’s greatest future threats would come from asymmetric warfare—guerrillas, terrorists, and insurgents. But that made him an outsider within the army; and as if to double down on his dissidence, he scorned the conventional path to a general’s stars and got the military to send him back to Oxford to study the history of counterinsurgency in earnest, searching for guideposts for America. The result would become the bible of the counterinsurgency movement, a book called Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. But it would take the events of 9/11 and the botched aftermath of the Iraq invasion to give counterinsurgency urgent contemporary relevance. John Nagl’s ideas finally met their war. But even as his book began ricocheting around the Pentagon, Nagl, now operations officer of a tank battalion of the 1st Infantry Division, deployed to a particularly unsettled quadrant of Iraq. Here theory met practice, violently. No one knew how messy even the most successful counterinsurgency campaign is better than Nagl, and his experience in Anbar Province cemented his view. After a year’s hard fighting, Nagl was sent to the Pentagon to work for Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, where he was tapped by General David Petraeus to coauthor the new army and marine counterinsurgency field manual, rewriting core army doctrine in the middle of two bloody land wars and helping the new ideas win acceptance in one of the planet’s most conservative bureaucracies. That doctrine changed the course of two wars and the thinking of an army. Nagl is not blind to the costs or consequences of counterinsurgency, a policy he compared to “eating soup with a knife.” The men who died under his command in Iraq will haunt him to his grave. When it comes to war, there are only bad choices; the question is only which ones are better and which worse. Nagl’s memoir is a profound education in modern war—in theory, in practice, and in the often tortured relationship between the two. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of America’s soldiers and the purposes for which their lives are put at risk.
25 December 1941 is known to this day by the people of Hong Kong as ‘Black Christmas’. The battle for Hong Kong is a story that deserves to be better known.
The author examines the defense plans prepared before the war and how grim necessity compelled the modification of those plans. The central part of the work recounts how the Wake garrison survived nearly daily bombings and repulsed the first Japanese attempt to take the atoll. This small band of defenders consisted of marines from an understrength defense battalion and a composite aviation unit equipped with a dwindling number of fighter planes, augmented by sailors and civilian volunteers.
"Breaching the Marianas" by John C. Chapin is a book about the WWII campaigns and Marine Corps history. The book gives a detailed account of what happened on the Mariana Islands of Saipan during the war. Excerpt: "Breaching the Marianas: The Battle for Saipan by Captain John C. Chapin, USMCR (Ret) It was a brutal day. At first light on 15 June 1944, the Navy fire support ships of the task force lying off Saipan Island increased their previous days' preparatory fires involving all calibers of weapons. At 0542, Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner ordered, "Land the landing force." Around 0700, the landing ships, tank (LSTs) moved to within approximately 1,250 yards behind the line of departure. Troops in the LSTs began debarking from them in landing vehicles, tracked (LVTs). Control vessels containing Navy and Marine personnel with their radio gear took their positions displaying flags indicating which beach approaches they controlled."
