New Books in Military History

The little-known history of U.S. survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings reveals captivating trans-Pacific memories of war, illness, gender, and community. The fact that there are indeed American survivors of the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima & Nagasaki is not common knowledge. Even in Hiroshima & Nagasaki the existence of American survivors is not well known. American survivors, however, number in the thousands. This number, like that of survivors in general is dwindling fast. But they have a unique and important history. And, Naoko Wake have written this book almost at the last possible moment to capture it.Counterintuitively, American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Cambridge UP, 2021) argues that it the very marginality of this group that make American survivors important. As she writes, “If, indeed, it is ‘not the centre that determines the periphery, but the periphery that ... determines the center,” US survivors’ history is a periphery that threatens to disassemble established meanings of the bomb that have not taken notice of it.’ (2). Based on oral testimonies and extensive documentation, American Survivors trace the history of American survivors from the interwar years to the present.American Survivors argues that Hiroshima, and to a lesser extent, Nagasaki (both of which were port towns) were cities of immigrants, and as such the attack on these cities was not just an attack on supposedly homogenous Japanese cities (as it is commonly understood) but on diverse communities. Wake traces the way immigration and re-migration between Hiroshima and the US, Korea, and other locations, as well as war time dislocations created the immigrant communities in Hiroshima. These trans-pacific connections, and what she terms “strengths of weak ties” in the history of immigration in the Pacific,” had an important impact on subsequent histories, which the b ook examines with great detail and deftness. Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In the exhausted, repressive years that followed Napoleon's defeat in 1815, there was one cause that came to galvanize countless individuals across Europe and the United States: freedom for Greece.Mark Mazower's wonderful The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (Penguin, 2021) recreates one of the most compelling, unlikely and significant events in the story of modern Europe. In the face of near impossible odds, the people of the villages, valleys and islands of Greece rose up against Sultan Mahmud II and took on the might of the imperial Ottoman armed forces, its Turkish cavalrymen, Albanian foot soldiers and the fearsome Egyptians. Despite the most terrible disasters, they held on until military intervention by Russia, France and Britain finally secured the kingdom of Greece.Mazower brilliantly brings together the different strands of the story. He takes us into the minds of revolutionary conspirators and the terrors of besieged towns, the stories of itinerant priests, sailors and slaves, ambiguous heroes and defenceless women and children struggling to stay alive amid a conflict of extraordinary brutality. Ranging across the Eastern Mediterranean and far beyond, he explores the central place of the struggle in the making of Romanticism and a new kind of politics that had volunteers flocking from across Europe to die in support of the Greeks. A story of how statesmen came to terms with an even more powerful force than themselves - the force of nationalism - this is above all a book about how people decided to see their world differently and, at an often terrible cost to themselves and their families, changed history.Mark Mazower is the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author of Governing the World, Hitler’s Empire and The Balkans: A Short History, winner of the Wolfson Prize for History, among other books. He lives in New York City.Thomas Kingston is currently a Huayu Enrichment Scholar, studying Mandarin Chinese at National Taiwan University, as he finds himself in post MPhil and pre PhD limbo. He holds an MA in Pacific Asian Studies from SOAS, University of London and an MPhil in Philosophy from Renmin University of China. His research interests focus on the political and intellectual histories of nationalism(s), imaginaries and colonialism in the East and Southeast Asian context.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The Second Battle of El-Alamein, alongside Stalingrad and Midway, is taught in schools the world over as one of the turning points of the Second World War—or, depending on who you talk to, the turning point.But what led to that battle? How did Rommel’s army push so far across North Africa? And why, perchance, did he push one time too many? What were those in Egypt and the Middle East—and not just their British overseers, thinking about the coming invasion.War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East (PublicAffairs: 2021), written by Gershom Gorenberg, tells the story leading to the British Army holding off the Nazis at El Alamein: a battle not just of soldiers and tanks, but spies and codebreakers.In this interview, Gershom and I talk about the years preceding the Battle for Egypt: those who broke Enigma, the spies who unlocked their enemies secrets, and the troubled relations between nominal allies. Gershom Gorenberg’s previous books are The Unmaking of Israel (HarperCollins: 2011), The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (Macmillan: 2007), and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford University Press: 2002). He also co-authored The Jerusalem Report’s 1996 biography of Yitzhak Rabin, Shalom Friend, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Gershom is a columnist for The Washington Post, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and in Hebrew for Ha’aretz. He can be followed on Twitter at @GershomGYou can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of War of Shadows. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Geographic and temporal limits have typically contained modern wars—rulers can ask their populace to risk lives and treasure for so long before losing legitimacy. But wars have also been horrifyingly unlimited in cruelty. Over the course of the past two decades, American activists and government officials have sought to make war less cruel and more humane. The consequence of this, Samuel Moyn argues in his well-reasoned and polemical book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, has been the elimination of those earlier geographic and temporal guardrails on war. And the evidence isn’t hard to find. The contemporary US military may leave a smaller body count than it did during, say, the Vietnam War, but it has also entered the third decade of a War on Terror across a so-called “global battlefield.” This scope is unprecedented.Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (FSG, 2021) is a book about war and peace, specifically about how Americans have “made a moral choice to prioritize humane war,” rather than a “peaceful globe.” And, as the United States wraps up its occupation of Afghanistan but continues to pursue its global War on Terror, this is a choice that Americans need to grapple with. In my conversation with Moyn, we discuss everything from Tolstoy’s critique of humane war and the rise of the peace movement to the Obama administration’s role in smashing the geographic and temporal limits of war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Yuri Kostenko’s Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2020) is a meticulous account of how the Ukrainian government made a decision in the 1990s to give up the nuclear status. The book includes unique documents from the private archive, which Yuri Kostenko shares with the readers. Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament provides not only an account of nuclear weapons elimination in Ukraine, but also offers a broader picture of the political environment in which Ukraine found itself after the fall of the USSR. What political players participated in the construction of the newly formed independent state? What challenges did the country face? In addition to this retrospective approach, the book also provides insights into the present moment, particularly in terms of the ongoing armed conflict initiated by Russia in 2014. Yuri Kostenko mentions that the occupation of the Crimea and the subsequent Russian military aggression against Ukraine were not a surprise to him. The book engages with the consequences of the nuclear disarmament and prompts the readers to draw parallels between the decisions that were made in the 1990s and the current international position that was created for Ukraine. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The lives of ancient Egyptians were truly colorful, and of them, the royals led the most vivid lives. The military pharaohs have left behind many records that give us a glimpse into their warfare style and accounts.In this new episode, Anthony John Spalinger, Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Auckland, paints a captivating picture of the pharaoh court, based on his work, “The Books behind the Masks – Sources of Warfare Leadership in Ancient Egypt. Ancient Warfare Series Volume 4.”The book takes previous study of the leadership characteristics of the military pharaohs one step forward by analyzing the war records and literary compositions composed to glorify their rule. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Aubrey L. Glazer's Mystical Vertigo: Contemporary Kabbalistic Hebrew Poetry Dancing Over the Divide (Academic Studies Press, 2013) immerses readers in the experience of the contemporary kabbalistic Hebrew poet, serving as a gateway into the poet’s quest for mystical union known as devekut. This journey oscillates across subtle degrees of devekut―causing an entranced experience for the Hebrew poet, who is reaching but not reaching, hovering but not hovering, touching but not touching in a state of mystical vertigo. What makes this journey so remarkable is how deeply nestled it is within the hybrid cultural networks of Israel, crossing over boundaries of haredi, secular, national-religious, and agnostic beliefs among others. This volume makes a unique contribution to understanding and experiencing the mystical renaissance in Israel, through its multi-disciplinary focus on Hebrew poetry and its philosophical hermeneutics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Today I spoke to John D. Gazzelli about his book Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, KCB: The Planner Who Saved Europe (Palmetto, 2021).History has forgotten Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, yet without Morgan there would have been no D-Day. In the development and execute of the operational plan that was to become OVERLORD, Lieutenant General Morgan faced numerous challenges, the most pressing being the inability of American and British political and military senior leaders to agree to a common strategy for the defeat of Germany. Morgan also faced challenges with a lack of resources to support what was to become the primary mission of the Allies, the return to the Continent. Finally, Morgan dealt with personalities, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bernard L. Montgomery, who assumed responsibility for OVERLORD and in the case of Montgomery summarily dismissed all of Morgan's efforts. Despite all these challenges, Morgan produced a plan for OVERLORD that was fundamentally followed on June 6, 1944. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

He was the son of a prominent politician, Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law, and viewed by many as the Duce’s likely successor, only to die before a fascist firing squad near the end of the Second World War. In  Galeazzo Ciano: The Fascist Pretender (U Toronto Press, 2021), Tobias Hof examines Ciano’s career for the many insights it has to offer into Italian fascism and Italian politics during the years of its dominance. As Hof explains, Ciano benefited considerably both from his father Costanzo’s political connections during the early part of his career and from his 1930 marriage to Mussolini’s daughter Edda. During the 1930s Ciano enjoyed a rapid ascent to high office, which fueled the belief that he was being groomed to succeed his father-in-law. Yet Hof demonstrates how Ciano’s positions and bourgeois public persona often were at odds with the views of committed fascists, and that he enjoyed little support from either the monarchy or the Catholic Church. Instead, Ciano found himself increasingly marginalized once Italy entered the war in 1940, while his vote to oust Mussolini from his position as prime minister led to his trial and execution less than a year later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

An elite platoon of Marine Scout-Snipers, Lieutenant Frank Tachovsky's "40 Thieves" were chosen for their willingness to defy rules and beat all-comers. When two Marines got into a fight, the loser ended up in the infirmary, the winner in the brig. Tachovsky wanted the winner on his team--a brush with military law was a recommendation.These full-blooded men were trained in a ruthless array of hand-to-hand killing techniques and then thrown into the battle for Saipan--Emperor Hirohito's "Treasure" and the bulwark of the Japanese Empire in the Pacific--where they would wreak havoc in and around, but mostly behind, enemy lines. They witnessed inhuman atrocities; walked into an ambush after the cunning Japanese used wounded Marines as bait; endured body-punishing extremes of heat, hunger, and thirst; fought a relentless enemy who would not surrender; and watched best friends die.In 40 Thieves on Saipan: The Elite Marine Scout-Snipers in One of WWII's Bloodiest Battles (Regnery History, 2020), Tachovsky's son Joseph tells their remarkable story--a story he didn't even know until after his father's death--reported from an extensive documentary record, including priceless mementos his father kept, and from exhaustive interviews with survivors who served under Lieutenant "Ski." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history