Absolute War
Absolute War

Author: Chris Bellamy

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 876

ISBN-13: 9780330510042

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Absolute War tells the story of the greatest and most terrible land-air conflict of all time: the war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. There have been many individual accounts of particular moments in the vicious war between the Nazi regime and the Sovet behemoth, but none which sets out to tell the full and dreadful story of that absolute war: absolute because both sides aimed to 'exterminate the opponent, to destroy his political existence' and total because it was fought by all elements of society, not simply the armed forces, but civilians - men, women, children - too. Chris Bellamy, Profesor of Military Science at Cranfield University, is one of the wolrd's leading experts on this subject and has been working on this book for almost a decade. It benefits from his remarkable insight into strategic issues as well as exhaustive research in hitherto unopened Russian archives. It is the definitive study of what the Soviets called - and what their fifteen successor states still call - the Great Patriotic War.

The Literature of Absolute War
The Literature of Absolute War

Author: Nil Santiáñez

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-28

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1108853366

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This book explores for the first time the literature of absolute war in connection to World War II. From a transnational and comparative standpoint, it addresses a set of theoretical, historical, and literary questions, shedding new light on the nature of absolute war, the literature on the world war of 1939–45, and modern war writing in general. It determines the main features of the language of absolute war, and how it gravitates around fundamental semantic clusters, such as the horror, terror, and the specter. The Literature of Absolute War studies the variegated responses given by literary authors to the extreme and seemingly unsolvable challenges posed by absolute war to epistemology, ethics, and language. It also delves into the different poetics that articulate the writing on absolute war, placing special emphasis on four literary practices: traditional realism, traumatic realism, the fantastic, and catastrophic modernism.

Absolute Destruction
Absolute Destruction

Author: Isabel V. Hull

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2013-02-15

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 080146708X

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In a book that is at once a major contribution to modern European history and a cautionary tale for today, Isabel V. Hull argues that the routines and practices of the Imperial German Army, unchecked by effective civilian institutions, increasingly sought the absolute destruction of its enemies as the only guarantee of the nation's security. So deeply embedded were the assumptions and procedures of this distinctively German military culture that the Army, in its drive to annihilate the enemy military, did not shrink from the utter destruction of civilian property and lives. Carried to its extreme, the logic of "military necessity" found real security only in extremities of destruction, in the "silence of the graveyard."Hull begins with a dramatic account, based on fresh archival work, of the German Army's slide from administrative murder to genocide in German Southwest Africa (1904–7). The author then moves back to 1870 and the war that inaugurated the Imperial era in German history, and analyzes the genesis and nature of this specifically German military culture and its operations in colonial warfare. In the First World War the routines perfected in the colonies were visited upon European populations. Hull focuses on one set of cases (Belgium and northern France) in which the transition to total destruction was checked (if barely) and on another (Armenia) in which "military necessity" caused Germany to accept its ally's genocidal policies even after these became militarily counterproductive. She then turns to the Endkampf (1918), the German General Staff's plan to achieve victory in the Great War even if the homeland were destroyed in the process—a seemingly insane campaign that completes the logic of this deeply institutionalized set of military routines and practices. Hull concludes by speculating on the role of this distinctive military culture in National Socialism's military and racial policies.Absolute Destruction has serious implications for the nature of warmaking in any modern power. At its heart is a warning about the blindness of bureaucratic routines, especially when those bureaucracies command the instruments of mass death.

On Absolute War
On Absolute War

Author: Eric Fleury

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1498565425

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Nearly two decades after the declaration of a ‘War on Terror,’ the precise relationship between warfare and terrorism remains unclear. The United States and its allies have long sought to inflict a decisive defeat upon groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, while regarding their individual members as malevolent criminals undeserving of combatant status. A clearer understanding of how terrorists define victory, and how their method of fighting relates to conventional military forces, is necessary in order to devise more realistic and effective strategies of counterterrorism. On Absolute War constructs a theoretical framework for the study of terrorism based on Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, widely regarded as the greatest analysis of war ever written. Through a review of Clausewitz’s work and a set of historical case studies ranging from the Fenian Dynamite Campaign of the 1880s to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Prof. Fleury reveals just how closely terrorism mimics the logic of war. Terrorism attempts to restore war to its theoretical baseline, a condition that Clausewitz called ‘absolute war’ featuring relentless escalation toward a climactic result. While never achieving this ideal in practice, terrorists succeed to the extent that they compel their enemies and their prospective followers to engage mutual escalation, which will ultimately favor whichever side is better able to jettison logistical and normative limits. Consequently, states must engage terrorists on the basis of Clausewitz’s two most important injunctions, namely that war is temporary and subordinate to political controls. Given the very real prospect of a war without any temporal and spatial limits, On Absolute War provides the theoretical basis for a strategy of limiting the effects of terrorism, rather than repeatedly trying and failing to destroy it.

Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction
Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Michael Howard

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2002-02-21

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 0191604488

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Karl von Clausewitz's study On War was described by the American strategic thinker Bernard Brodie as 'not simply the greatest, but the only great book about war'. It is hard to disagree. Even though he wrote his only major work at a time when the range of firearms was fifty yards, much of what he had to say remains relevant today. Michael Howard explains Clausewitz's ideas in terms both of his experiences as a professional soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, and of the intellectual background of his time. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Time: Absolute Victory
Time: Absolute Victory

Author: Editors of Time Magazine

Publisher: Time

Published: 2005-09-06

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9781932994735

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In the last, triumphant months of World War II, young Americans won their nations greatest victoryor victories. For the war they won was a world war, a conflict fought on two very different fronts in two very different ways. In Europe, the battle-tested troops who had landed in Normandy on D-Day fought their way onto Adolf Hitlers doorstep, then crossed the Rhine and brought down the Nazis thousand-year Reich. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, sailors, Marines and airmen teamed up to invade a series of crucial islands Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawarolling back a tough Japanese enemy and paving the way for the surprising end of the war with the dropping of an atom bomb on Hiroshima. Every step of every day, these members of The Greatest Generation were shadowed by reporters and photographers from two great American magazines, Time and Life. Now, the editors of Time have returned to these archives to compile a memorable, visually stunning portrait of those stirring times, Americas Greatest Generation and Their World War II Triumph.

Command Of The Air
Command Of The Air

Author: General Giulio Douhet

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2014-08-15

Total Pages: 620

ISBN-13: 1782898522

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In the pantheon of air power spokesmen, Giulio Douhet holds center stage. His writings, more often cited than perhaps actually read, appear as excerpts and aphorisms in the writings of numerous other air power spokesmen, advocates-and critics. Though a highly controversial figure, the very controversy that surrounds him offers to us a testimonial of the value and depth of his work, and the need for airmen today to become familiar with his thought. The progressive development of air power to the point where, today, it is more correct to refer to aerospace power has not outdated the notions of Douhet in the slightest In fact, in many ways, the kinds of technological capabilities that we enjoy as a global air power provider attest to the breadth of his vision. Douhet, together with Hugh “Boom” Trenchard of Great Britain and William “Billy” Mitchell of the United States, is justly recognized as one of the three great spokesmen of the early air power era. This reprint is offered in the spirit of continuing the dialogue that Douhet himself so perceptively began with the first edition of this book, published in 1921. Readers may well find much that they disagree with in this book, but also much that is of enduring value. The vital necessity of Douhet’s central vision-that command of the air is all important in modern warfare-has been proven throughout the history of wars in this century, from the fighting over the Somme to the air war over Kuwait and Iraq.

How Wars End
How Wars End

Author: Dan Reiter

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-09-06

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 069114060X

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"Dan Reiter explains how information about combat outcomes and other factors may persuade a warring nation to demand more or less in peace negotiations, and why a country might refuse to negotiate limited terms and instead tenaciously pursue absolute victory if it fears that its enemy might renege on a peace deal. He fully lays out the theory and then tests it on more than twenty cases of war-termination behavior, including decisions during the American Civil War, the two world wars, and the Korean War. Reiter helps solve some of the most enduring puzzles in military history, such as why Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, why Germany in 1918 renewed its attack in the West after securing peace with Russia in the East, and why Britain refused to seek peace terms with Germany after France fell in 1940.".

Absolute War
Absolute War

Author: Mark Hewitson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0198787456

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Wars have played a fundamental part in modern German history. Although infrequent, conflicts involving German states have usually been extensive and often catastrophic, constituting turning-points for Europe as a whole. Absolute War is the first in a series of studies from Mark Hewitson that explore how such conflicts were experienced by soldiers and civilians during wartime, and how they were subsequently imagined and understood during peacetime, from Clausewitz and Kleist to Junger and Adorno. Without such an understanding, it is difficult to make sense of the dramatic shifts characterising the politics of Germany and Europe over the past two centuries. The studies argue that the ease - or reluctance - with which Germans went to war, and the far-reaching consequences of such wars on domestic politics, were related to soldiers' and civilians' attitudes to violence and death, as well as to long-term transformations in contemporaries' conceptualisation of conflict. Absolute War reassesses the meaning of military conflict for the millions of German subjects who were directly implicated in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Based on a re-reading of contemporary diaries, letters, memoirs, official correspondence, press reports, pamphlets, treatises, plays, and cartoons, this volume refocuses attention on combat and conscription as the central components of new forms of mass warfare. It concentrates, in particular, on the impact of violence, killing, and death on many soldiers' and some civilians' experiences and subsequent memories of conflict. War has often been conceived of as 'an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds', as Clausewitz put it, but the relationship between military conflicts and violent acts remains a problematic one.