West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army (1860-1960)
West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army (1860-1960)

Author: Timothy Stapleton

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1648250254

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"West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960 explores the history of Britain's West African colonial army based in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Gambia placing it within a broader social context and emphasizing, as far as possible, the experience of the ordinary soldier. The aim is not to describe the many battles and campaigns fought by this force but to look at the development of the West African colonial army as an institution over the course of about a century. In pursuing this goal, it is sometimes useful to employ the lens of military culture defined differently by scholars but essentially meaning a set of shared ideas and behaviors that inform daily life in the military. While other locally recruited colonial militaries in Africa have attracted considerable attention from historians as they served as an essential pillar supporting European rule, this book represents the first comprehensive scholarly study of Britain's West African army which was the largest such British-led force south of the Sahara. The study is based on extensive archival research conducted in nine archives located in five countries"--

Fighting the People's War
Fighting the People's War

Author: Jonathan Fennell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 967

ISBN-13: 1107030951

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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.

Fighting the Mau Mau
Fighting the Mau Mau

Author: Huw C. Bennett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1107029708

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This new study of Britain's counterinsurgency campaign in Kenya examines the difference between official and accepted methods of conquering insurgents.

The Changing of the Guard
The Changing of the Guard

Author: Simon Akam

Publisher:

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781922310279

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A revelatory, explosive new analysis of the British military today. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Britain has changed enormously. During this time, the British Army fought two campaigns, in Iraq and Afghanistan, at considerable financial and human cost. Yet neither war achieved its objectives. This book questions why, and provides challenging but necessary answers. Composed of assiduous documentary research, field reportage, and hundreds of interviews with many soldiers and officers who served, as well as the politicians who directed them, the allies who accompanied them, and the family members who loved and -- on occasion -- lost them, it is a strikingly rich, nuanced portrait of one of our pivotal national institutions in a time of great stress. Award-winning journalist Simon Akam, who spent a year in the army when he was 18, returned a decade later to see how the institution had changed. His book examines the relevance of the armed forces today -- their social, economic, political, and cultural role. This is as much a book about Britain, and about the politics of failure, as it is about the military.

Monty's Men
Monty's Men

Author: John Buckley

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 548

ISBN-13: 0300160356

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Historian John Buckley offers a radical reappraisal of Great Britain’s fighting forces during World War Two, challenging the common belief that the British Army was no match for the forces of Hitler’s Germany. Following Britain’s military commanders and troops across the battlefields of Europe, from D-Day to VE-Day, from the Normandy beaches to Arnhem and the Rhine, and, ultimately, to the Baltic, Buckley’s provocative history demonstrates that the British Army was more than a match for the vaunted Nazi war machine.div /DIVdivThis fascinating revisionist study of the campaign to liberate Northern Europe in the war’s final years features a large cast of colorful unknowns and grand historical personages alike, including Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery and the prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill. By integrating detailed military history with personal accounts, it evokes the vivid reality of men at war while putting long-held misconceptions finally to rest./DIV

Fighting for the United States, Executed in Britain
Fighting for the United States, Executed in Britain

Author: Simon Webb

Publisher: Pen and Sword Military

Published: 2021-07-21

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1526790963

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This book relates a chapter of American military history which many people would rather forget. When the United States came to the aid of Britain in 1942, the arrival of American troops was greeted with unreserved enthusiasm, but unfortunately, wartime sometimes brings out the worst, as well as the best, in people. A small number of the soldiers abused the hospitality they received by committing murders and rapes against British civilians. Some of these men were hanged or shot at Shepton Mallet Prison in Somerset, which had been handed over for the use of the American armed forces. Due to a treaty between Britain and America, those accused of such offences faced an American court martial, rather than a British civilian court, which gave rise to some curious anomalies. Although rape had not been a capital crime in Britain for over a century, it still carried the death penalty under American military law and so the last executions for rape in Britain were carried out at this time in Shepton Mallet. Fighting For the United States, Executed in Britain tells the story of every American soldier executed in Britain during the Second World War. The majority of the executed soldiers were either black or Hispanic, reflecting the situation in the United States itself, where the ethnicity of the accused person often played a key role in both convictions and the chances of subsequently being executed.

Nigeria and World War II
Nigeria and World War II

Author: Chima J. Korieh

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-03-26

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1108425801

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A sophisticated history of colonial interactions in Nigeria during World War II drawing on hitherto unexplored archival resources.

The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution
The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution

Author: Edward G. Gray

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 696

ISBN-13: 0190257768

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The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution introduces scholars, students and generally interested readers to the formative event in American history. In thirty-three individual essays, the Handbook provides readers with in-depth analysis of the Revolution's many sides.

Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War
Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War

Author: Raghu Karnad

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2015-08-24

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0393248100

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“I have not lately read a finer book than this—on any subject at all. . . . A masterpiece.” —Simon Winchester, New Statesman The photographs of three young men had stood in his grandmother’s house for as long as he could remember, beheld but never fully noticed. They had all fought in the Second World War, a fact that surprised him. Indians had never figured in his idea of the war, nor the war in his idea of India. One of them, Bobby, even looked a bit like him, but Raghu Karnad had not noticed until he was the same age as they were in their photo frames. Then he learned about the Parsi boy from the sleepy south Indian coast, so eager to follow his brothers-in-law into the colonial forces and onto the front line. Manek, dashing and confident, was a pilot with India’s fledgling air force; gentle Ganny became an army doctor in the arid North-West Frontier. Bobby’s pursuit would carry him as far as the deserts of Iraq and the green hell of the Burma battlefront. The years 1939–45 might be the most revered, deplored, and replayed in modern history. Yet India’s extraordinary role has been concealed, from itself and from the world. In riveting prose, Karnad retrieves the story of a single family—a story of love, rebellion, loyalty, and uncertainty—and with it, the greater revelation that is India’s Second World War. Farthest Field narrates the lost epic of India’s war, in which the largest volunteer army in history fought for the British Empire, even as its countrymen fought to be free of it. It carries us from Madras to Peshawar, Egypt to Burma—unfolding the saga of a young family amazed by their swiftly changing world and swept up in its violence.