The Other Face of Battle

The Other Face of Battle

Author: Wayne E. Lee

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-05-10

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0190920661

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Taking its title from The Face of Battle, John Keegan's canonical book on the nature of warfare, The Other Face of Battle illuminates the American experience of fighting in "irregular" and "intercultural" wars over the centuries. Sometimes known as "forgotten" wars, in part because they lacked triumphant clarity, they are the focus of the book. David Preston, David Silbey, and Anthony Carlson focus on, respectively, the Battle of Monongahela (1755), the Battle of Manila (1898), and the Battle of Makuan, Afghanistan (2020)--conflicts in which American soldiers were forced to engage in "irregular" warfare, confronting an enemy entirely alien to them. This enemy rejected the Western conventions of warfare and defined success and failure--victory and defeat--in entirely different ways. Symmetry of any kind is lost. Here was not ennobling engagement but atrocity, unanticipated insurgencies, and strategic stalemate. War is always hell. These wars, however, profoundly undermined any sense of purpose or proportion. Nightmarish and existentially bewildering, they nonetheless characterize how Americans have experienced combat and what its effects have been. They are therefore worth comparing for what they hold in common as well as what they reveal about our attitude toward war itself. The Other Face of Battle reminds us that "irregular" or "asymmetrical" warfare is now not the exception but the rule. Understanding its roots seems more crucial than ever.


Henry Ware Lawton

Henry Ware Lawton

Author: Michael E. Shay

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2017-06-01

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0826273653

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Henry Ware Lawton’s nearly four decades as a professional soldier in the U.S. Army tie his story closely to that of America in the nineteenth century, from the Civil War to the settlement of the West, to the experiment with empire. Lawton served the country nearly uninterrupted from the day he enlisted at age 18—soon after Lincoln’s first call for volunteers to fight in the Civil War, where he earned a Medal of Honor—to his death at age 56, a major general in the Philippine War. In between, he fought in the Spanish-American War and the Indian Wars; during that time he rose to national prominence as the man who captured Geronimo.


The US Volunteers in the Southern Philippines

The US Volunteers in the Southern Philippines

Author: John Scott Reed

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2020-07-23

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0700629726

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In fighting the Philippine-American War, the United States counted heavily on twenty-five new regiments raised in the summer of 1899: the United States Volunteers (USVs). The USVs outnumbered regular regiments in eleven of eighteen military pacification districts, particularly through the southern archipelago, where they bore the brunt of field service, combat, and disease casualties until relieved in spring 1901 by a reconstituted Regular Army. The US Volunteers in the Southern Philippines offers the first full account of this historically unique 35,000-man force—and in the process describes how the USVs decisively contributed to the United States’ single most successful counterinsurgency campaign waged outside the Western Hemisphere. A close examination of the military achievements, garrison life, and institutional characteristics of the US Volunteers reveals how the force effectively combined the best elements of the American regular and militia traditions during its brief existence—abetted by an Army medical system vastly improved since debilitating losses in Cuba and the United States during 1898. Countering recent readings of the pacification of the Philippines as a near-genocidal event, John Scott Reed uses court-martial records to argue for a high disciplinary and behavioral standard among the USVs—in garrison, in the field, and, most critically, in their interactions with Filipino villagers. This standard, his evidence suggests, was supported by a late-Victorian, reflexively patriotic sense of masculinity that motivated the Volunteers, along with a profound belief in the self-evident superiority of American institutions. He also draws on recent Filipino scholarship to clarify the role of landed and commercial elites in initially supporting the Philippine Revolution and later collaborating with the US occupation. Bridging military history and post-colonial studies, Reed’s work provides a new and clearer understanding of the short-lived but highly effective US Volunteer force, and a new perspective on a critical moment in America’s military and colonial past.