This book argues that postwar Britain's 'imperial over-extension' has been exaggerated. Britain developed and adjusted its defence strategy based upon the perceived Communist threat and available resources. It was especially successful at adapting to meet the strategic and resource challenges from the Far East from 1947-54. There British and Gurkha forces were deployed only in contingencies that threatened vital British interests, while the U.S. and Commonwealth allies were persuaded to accept key wartime missions, thus preserving Britain's ability to fight in Western Europe.
Jonathan Fennell captures for the first time the true wartime experience of the ordinary soldiers from across the empire who made up the British and Commonwealth armies. He analyses why the great battles were won and lost and how the men that fought went on to change the world.
Leading historian of the war in the Far East, P.H. Willmott, provides a concise, readable account of the conflict. The book is fully illustrated throughout and incorporates computer generated graphics that bring the battlefields to life.
A gripping account of the final period of the war in the Asia Pacific during WWII. The last installment of the War in the Far East trilogy, Asian Armageddon 1944-1945, continues and completes the narrative of the first two volumes, describing how a US-led coalition of nations battled Japan into submission through a series of cataclysmic encounters. Leyte Gulf, the biggest naval battle ever, was testimony to the paramount importance of controlling the ocean, as was the fact that the US Navy carried out the only successful submarine campaign in history, reducing Japan’s military and merchant navies to shadows of the former selves. Meanwhile, fighting continued in disparate geographic conditions on land, with the chaos of Imphal, the inferno of Manila, and the carnage of Iwo Jima forming some of the milestones on the bloody road to peace, sealed in Tokyo Bay in September 1945. The nuclear blasts at the end of the war made one observer feel as if he was ‘present at the creation.' Indeed, the participants in the events in the Asia Pacific in the mid-1940s were present at the creation of a new and dangerous world. It was a world where the stage was set for the Cold War and for international rivalries that last to this day, and a new constellation of powers emerged, with the outlines, just over the horizon, of a rising China. War in the Far East is a trilogy of books comprising a general history of World War II in the Asia Pacific. Unlike other histories on the conflict it goes into its deep origins, beginning long before Pearl Harbor, and encompasses a far wider group of actors to produce the most complete account yet written on the subject and the first truly international treatment of this epic conflict. Author Peter Harmsen weaves together complex events into a revealing and entertaining narrative, including facets of the war that may be unknown even to avid readers of World War II history, from the mass starvation that cost the lives of millions across China, Indochina, and India to the war in sub-arctic conditions in the Aleutians. Harmsen pieces together the full range of perspectives, reflecting what war was like both at the top and on the ground.
American Military History provides the United States Army-in particular, its young officers, NCOs, and cadets-with a comprehensive but brief account of its past. The Center of Military History first published this work in 1956 as a textbook for senior ROTC courses. Since then it has gone through a number of updates and revisions, but the primary intent has remained the same. Support for military history education has always been a principal mission of the Center, and this new edition of an invaluable history furthers that purpose. The history of an active organization tends to expand rapidly as the organization grows larger and more complex. The period since the Vietnam War, at which point the most recent edition ended, has been a significant one for the Army, a busy period of expanding roles and missions and of fundamental organizational changes. In particular, the explosion of missions and deployments since 11 September 2001 has necessitated the creation of additional, open-ended chapters in the story of the U.S. Army in action. This first volume covers the Army's history from its birth in 1775 to the eve of World War I. By 1917, the United States was already a world power. The Army had sent large expeditionary forces beyond the American hemisphere, and at the beginning of the new century Secretary of War Elihu Root had proposed changes and reforms that within a generation would shape the Army of the future. But world war-global war-was still to come. The second volume of this new edition will take up that story and extend it into the twenty-first century and the early years of the war on terrorism and includes an analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq up to January 2009.
The Far Eastern policy pursued during the Roosevelt-Truman administrations has long been the subject of spirited controversy among historians. This volume, first published in 1963, is the result of seven years of intensive research into a mass of documentary data dealing with the Communist conquest of China. “Professor Kubek discusses with unusual candor and clear vision the many mistakes of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations with reference to the Far East. There are new data and fresh interpretations that lend additional evidence to support the contentions of earlier writers that the diplomacy of the Administrations of Roosevelt and Truman was disastrous in the extreme. The strange actions of General Marshall in China, and his blind policy while Secretary of State, were chief factors in the loss of China to the Communists. In a noteworthy chapter that all Americans should read, Professor Kubek traces in damning detail the tragic role that Marshall played in the fall of Nationalist China. “This is a volume that will earn the sharpest criticisms of the motley hordes that crowded the Roosevelt and Truman bandwagons, but it is a must book for any American who wants to know why the present sawdust Caesar, Khrushchev, can insult at will the President of the United States and can hurl continual threats to “bury” all Americans. Soviet militate might is the direct product of billions of Democratic Lend-Lease aid, coddling of Communists in high places in the American Government, and failure to understand the basic drives of world Communism. Never before in our history was Presidential leadership so devoid of vision, and never before had the mistakes of our Chief Executives been so fraught with peril to our nation. Read this book and then begin to worry about how Americans will fare in the next decade.”—Charles Callan Tansill, Professor Emeritus of Diplomatic History, Georgetown University (Foreword)
