CMH Publication 70-30. Edited by Frank N. Schubert and TheresaL. Kraus. Discusses the United States Army's role in the Persian Gulf War from August 1990 to February 1991. Shows the various strands that came together to produce the army of the 1990s and how that army in turn performed under fire and in the glare of world attention. Retains a sense of immediacy in its approach. Contains maps which were carefully researched and compiled as original documents in their own right. Includes an index.
WHIRLWIND is the first book to tell the complete, awe-inspiring story of the Allied air war against Japan—the most important strategic bombing campaign inhistory. From the audacious Doolittle raid in 1942 to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, award-winning historian Barrett Tillman recounts the saga from the perspectives of American and British aircrews who flew unprecedented missions overthousands of miles of ocean, as well as of the generalsand admirals who commanded them. Whether describing the experiences of bomber crews based in China or the Marianas, fighter pilotson Iwo Jima, or carrier aviators at sea, Tillman provides vivid details of the lives of the fliers and their support personnel. Whirlwind takes readers into the cockpits and gun turrets of the mighty B-29 Superfortress, the largest bomber built up to that time. Tillman dramatically re-creates the sweep of wartime emotions that crews endured on fifteen-hour missions, grappling with the extreme tedium of cramped spaces and with adrenaline spikes in flak-studded skies, knowing that a bailout would put them at the mercy of a merciless enemy or an unforgiving sea. A major character is the controversial and brilliant General Curtis LeMay, who rewrote strategic bombing tactics. His command’s fire-bombing missions incinerated fully half of Tokyo and many other cities, crippling Japan’s industry while still failing to force surrender. Whirlwind examines the immense logistics and construction efforts necessary to support Superfortresses in Asia and the Mariana Islands, as well as the tireless efforts of engineers to build huge air bases from scratch.It also describes the unheralded missions that American bomber crews flew from the Aleutian Islands to Japan’s northernmost Kuril Islands. Never has the Japanese side of the story been so thoroughly examined. If Washington, D.C., represented a “second front” in Army-Navy rivalry, the situation in Tokyo approached a full-contact sport. Tillman’s description of Japan’s willfully inadequate approach to civil defense is eye-opening. Similarly, he examines the mind-set in Tokyo’s war cabinet, which ignored the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, requiring the emperor’s personal intervention to avert a ghastly Allied invasion. Tillman shows how, despite the Allies’ ultimate success, mistakes and shortsighted policies made victory more costly in lives and effort. He faults the lack of a unified command for allowing the Army Air Forces and the Navy to pursue parochial goals at the expense of the larger mission, and he questions the premature commitment of the enormously sophisticated B-29 to the most primitive theater in India and China. Whirlwind is one of the last histories of World War II written with the contribution of men who fought in it.With unexcelled macro- and microperspectives, Whirlwind is destined to become a standard reference on the war, on multiservice operations, and on the human capacity for individual heroism and national folly.
Amid a great collection of scholarship and narrative history on the Revolutionary War and the American struggle for independence, there is a gaping hole; one that John Ferling's latest book, Whirlwind, will fill. Books chronicling the Revolution have largely ranged from multivolume tomes that appeal to scholars and the most serious general readers to microhistories that necessarily gloss over swaths of Independence-era history with only cursory treatment. Written in Ferling's engaging and narrative-driven style that made books like Independence and The Ascent of George Washington critical and commercial successes, Whirlwind is a fast-paced and scrupulously told one-volume history of this epochal time. Balancing social and political concerns of the period and perspectives of the average American revolutionary with a careful examination of the war itself, Ferling has crafted the ideal book for armchair military history buffs, a book about the causes of the American Revolution, the war that won it, and the meaning of the Revolution overall. Combining careful scholarship, arresting detail, and illustrative storytelling, Whirlwind is a unique and compelling addition to any collection of books on the American Revolution.
Despite the best efforts of a number of historians, many aspects of the ferocious struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War remain obscure or shrouded in myth. One of the most persistent of these is the notion - largely created by many former members of its own officer corps in the immediate postwar period - that the German Army was a paragon of military professionalism and operational proficiency whose defeat on the Eastern Front was solely attributable to the amateurish meddling of a crazed former Corporal and the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Red Army. A key pillar upon which the argument of German numerical-weakness vis-à-vis the Red Army has been constructed is the assertion that Germany was simply incapable of providing its army with the necessary quantities of men and equipment needed to replace its losses. In consequence, as their losses outstripped the availability of replacements, German field formations became progressively weaker until they were incapable of securing their objectives or, eventually, of holding back the swelling might of the Red Army. This work seeks to address the notion of German numerical-weakness in terms of Germany's ability to replace its losses and regenerate its military strength, and assess just how accurate this argument was during the crucial first half of the Russo-German War (June 1941-June 1943). Employing a host of primary documents and secondary literature, it traces the development and many challenges of the German Army from the prewar period until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. It continues on to chart the first two years of the struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union, with a particular emphasis upon the scale of German personnel and equipment losses, and how well these were replaced. It also includes extensive examinations into the host of mitigating factors that both dictated the course of Germany's campaign in the East and its replacement and regeneration capabilities. In contrast to most accounts of the conflict, this study finds that numerical-weakness being the primary factor in the defeat of the Ostheer - specifically as it relates to the strength and condition of the German units involved - has been overemphasized and frequently exaggerated. In fact, Germany was actually able to regenerate its forces to a remarkable degree with a steady flow of fresh men and equipment, and German field divisions on the Eastern Front were usually far stronger than the accepted narratives of the war would have one believe.
CMH Publication 70-30. Edited by Frank N. Schubert and TheresaL. Kraus. Discusses the United States Army's role in the Persian Gulf War from August 1990 to February 1991. Shows the various strands that came together to produce the army of the 1990s and how that army in turn performed under fire and in the glare of world attention. Retains a sense of immediacy in its approach. Contains maps which were carefully researched and compiled as original documents in their own right. Includes an index.
A woman’s true account of eighteen years as a Soviet prisoner: “Not even Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich matches it.”—The New York Times Book Review In the late 1930s, Eugenia Ginzburg was a wife and mother, a schoolteacher and writer, and a longtime loyal Communist Party member. But like millions of others during Stalin’s reign of terror, she was arrested—on trumped-up charges of being a Trotskyist terrorist counter-revolutionary—and sentenced to prison. With sharp detail and an indefatigable spirit, Ginzburg recounts her arrest and the eighteen harrowing years she endured in Soviet prisons and labor camps, including two in solitary confinement. Her memoir is “a compelling personal narrative of survival” (The New York Times Book Review)—and one of the most important documents of Stalin’s brutal regime. “Deeply significant…intensely personal and passionately felt.”—Time “Probably the best account that has ever been published of…the prison and camp empire of the Stalin era.”—Book World Translated by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward
The epic saga of the Civil War told from the viewpoints of eleven principle players in the drama: Abraham Lincoln, R.E. Lee, Mary Livermore, Jefferson Davis, William Tecumseh Sherman, Mary Boykin Chesnut, Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, Cornelia Hancock, John Wilkes Booth, and Walt Whitman.
A highly illustrated, absorbing account of the first battle of the desert war: the British against the Italians. Operation Compass was originally envisaged as a spoiling attack, combined with a reconnaissance in force to disrupt the Italian forces that had advanced into Egypt in September 1940. Lt Gen. Richard O'Connor launched what amounted to a British 'Blitzkrieg'. In less than two months the British forces swept 500 miles along the coast of North Africa. 7th Armoured Division raced across the desert to cut off the retreating Italians, and O'Connor's men destroyed 9 Italian divisions, and took 130,000 prisoners. In March 1941 General Rommel and the Afrikakorps landed at Tripoli.
The book shows how the wartime alliance of engineers, scientists, and the military exemplified by MIT's Radiation Lab helped to transform research and development practice in the United States through the end of the Cold War period. This book presents an organizational and social history of one of the foundational projects of the computer era: the development of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system, from its first test at Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1951, to the installation of the first unit of the New York Air Defense Sector of the SAGE system, in 1958. The idea for SAGE grew out of Project Whirlwind, a wartime computer development effort, when the U.S. Department of Defense realized that the Whirlwind computer might anchor a continent-wide advance warning system. Developed by MIT engineers and scientists for the U.S. Air Force, SAGE monitored North American skies for possible attack by manned aircraft and missiles for twenty-five years. Aside from its strategic importance, SAGE set the foundation for mass data-processing systems and foreshadowed many computer developments of the 1960s. The heart of the system, the AN/FSQ-7, was the first computer to have an internal memory composed of "magnetic cores," thousands of tiny ferrite rings that served as reversible electromagnets. SAGE also introduced computer-driven displays, online terminals, time sharing, high-reliability computation, digital signal processing, digital transmission over telephone lines, digital track-while-scan, digital simulation, computer networking, and duplex computing. The book shows how the wartime alliance of engineers, scientists, and the military exemplified by MIT's Radiation Lab helped to transform research and development practice in the United States through the end of the Cold War period.
