Military History

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  Peace And Disarmament: Naval Rivalry and Arms Control, 1922-1933

  Arms control remains a major international issue as the twentieth century closes, but it is hardly a new concern. The effort to limit military power has enjoyed recurring support since shortly after World War I, when the United States, Britain, and Japan sought naval arms control as a means to insure stability in the Far East, contain naval expenditure, and prevent another world cataclysm.

  Richard Fanning examines the efforts of American, British, and Japanese leaders— political, military, and social—to reach agreement on naval limitation between 1922 and the mid-1930s, with focus on the years 1927-30, when political leaders, statesmen, naval ...Read More

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  Taps for a Jim Crow Army: Letters from Black Soldiers in World War II

  Many black soldiers serving in the U.S. Army during World War II hoped that they might make permanent gains as a result of their military service and their willingness to defend their country. They were soon disabused of such illusions. Taps for a Jim Crow Army is a powerful collection of letters written by black soldiers in the 1940s to various government and non-government officials. The soldiers expressed their disillusionment, rage, and anguish over the discrimination and segregation they experienced in the Army. Most black troops were denied entry into army specialist schools; black officers were not allowed to command ...Read More

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  Archives of Memory: A Soldier Recalls World War II

  “Tell me about the war”—these words launched a ten-year project in oral history by a husband-and-wife team. Howard Hoffman fought in World War II from Cassino to the Elbe as a mortar crewman and a forward observer. His war experiences are of intrinsic interest to readers who seek a foot soldier’s view of those historic events. But the principal purpose of this study was to explore the bounds of memory, to gauge its accuracy and its stability over time, and to determine the effects of various efforts to enhance it. Alice Hoffman, a historian, initiated the study because she recognized ...Read More

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  We Shall Return! MacArthur's Commanders and the Defeat of Japan, 1942-1945

  They were the forgotten commanders of World War II. While the names of Bradley and Patton became household words for Americans, few could identify Krueger or Eichelberger. They served under General Douglas MacArthur, a military genius with an enormous ego who dominated publicity from the Southwest Pacific during the American advance from Australia, through New Guinea, to the Philippines. While people at home read about the great victories that were won by “MacArthur’s navy” and “MacArthur’s air force,” his subordinates labored in obscurity, fearful lest attention from the press lead to their replacement.

  Historians too have paid little attention to ...Read More

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  Submarine Commander: A Story of World War II and Korea

  A fascinating personal memoir of underwater combat in World War II, told by a man who played a major role in those dangerous operations. Frank and beautifully written, Submarine Commander’s breezy style and irrepressible humor place it in a class by itself. This book will be of lasting value as a submarine history by an expert and as an enduring military and political analysis. In early 1943 the submarine USS Scorpion, with Paul R. Schratz as torpedo officer, slipped into the shallow waters east of Tokyo, laid a minefield, and made successful torpedo attacks on merchant shipping. Schratz participated in ...Read More

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  A Combat Artist in World War II

  Many artists have fought in wars, and renowned painters have recorded heroic scenes of great battles, but those works were usually done long after the battles were waged. Artists have also been commissioned to visit, briefly, war-torn areas and make notes of the devastation and horror. Yet few artists who were members of any armed services have drawn or painted daily while they fought alongside their comrades.

  Edward Reep, as an official combat artist in World War II, painted and sketched while the battles of the Italian campaign raged around him. He was shelled, mortared, and strafed. At Monte Cassino, ...Read More

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  Draftee Division: The 88th Infantry Division in World War II

  The involuntary soldiers of an unmilitary people such were the forces that American military planners had to pit against hardened Axis veterans, yet prewar unpreparedness dictated that whole divisions of such men would go to war under the supervision of tiny professional cadres. Much to his surprise and delight, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall found that the 88th Infantry Division, his first draftee division, "fought like wildcats" and readily outclassed its German adversaries while measuring up to the best Regular Army divisions. Draftee Division is at once a history of the 88th Division, an analysis of American ...Read More

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  Diary of a Disaster: British Aid to Greece, 1940-1941

  On October 28, 1940, the Italian army under Benito Mussolini invaded Greece. The British had insisted on guaranteeing Greek and Turkish neutrality, despite the fact that Greece was never more than a limited campaign in an unlimited war as far as they were concerned. The British, however, were never quite sure that Greece was not their last foothold in Europe, and they harbored dreams of holding on to this last bastion of civilization and of protecting it with a diplomatic and military alliance—a Balkan bloc. These dreams bore little relation to military and economic realities, and so the stage was ...Read More

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  War in the Modern Great Power System: 1495–1975

  The apparently accelerating arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union and the precarious political conditions existing in many parts of the world have given rise to new anxiety about the possibility of military confrontation between the superpowers. Despite the fateful nature of the risk, we have little knowledge, as Jack S. Levy has pointed out, “of the conditions, processes, and events which might combine to generate such a calamity. “No empirically confirmed theory of the causes of war exists, and the hypotheses—often contradictory—that have been proposed remain untested.

  As a step toward the formulation of a theory ...Read More

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  GI Jive: An Army Bandsman in World War II

  Frank Mathias was a teenager in a small town when the draft swept him into the army and then halfway around the world to the jungles of the South Pacific. He served in the huge invasion force in the Battle of Manila, the deadliest single battle of the Pacific War. As an army musician attached to the 37th Infantry Division, Mathias saw the war from the bottom of the heap, where young privates lived and died. In his best selling book The GI Generation, Mathias tells of growing up in small-town America between the wars. In GI Jive he recalls ...Read More