New Books in Military History

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very often on its front lines. In Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence (Penguin, 2024), he traces the war’s decisive moments—from the battle for Kyiv to more recently the gruelling and bloody arm wrestle involving the Wagner group over Bakhmut—to show how Ukraine and its allies have turned the tide against Russia, one of the world’s great military powers, in a modern-day battle of David and Goliath. Putin had intended to conquer and annex Ukraine with a vicious blitzkrieg, redrawing the map of Europe in a few short weeks with seismic geopolitical consequences. Ukrainian resistance—determined, nimble, often heroic—upset those plans. Trofimov’s eloquent reporting of resistance in Ukraine is simultaneously clear-eyed and complex; his account is as illuminating as it is riveting. In this conversation of May 2024, he talks as well about how the situation is evolving.Yaroslav Trofimov, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is a seasoned war reporter and a native of Kyiv, Ukraine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Indoctrinating the Youth: Secondary Education in Wartime China and Postwar Taiwan, 1937-1960 (U Hawaii Press, 2024) examines how the Guomindang (GMD or Nationalists) sought to maintain control of middle-school students and cultivate their political loyalty over the trajectory of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese Civil War, and postwar Taiwan. During the Sino-Japanese War the Nationalists managed middle-school refugee students by merging schools, publishing and distributing updated textbooks, and assisting students as they migrated to the interior with their principals and teachers. In Taiwan, the China Youth Corps (CYC) became a symbol of the regime’s successful establishment. Tracing Nationalist efforts to indoctrinate ideology and martial spirit, Jennifer Liu investigates how GMD leaders Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo tried to build support among young people in their efforts to stabilize Taiwanese society under their rule. By comparing two key youth organizations—the Three People’s Principles Youth Corps in China, and the CYC on Taiwan—Liu uses education as a lens to analyze state-building in modern China.Liu’s careful analysis of the inner workings of GMD youth organizations also illuminates the day-to-day operations of military training in gender-segregated upper-middle schools—including how the government selected instructors and the skills taught to students. According to Liu, mandatory military training contributed to preventing major protest against the government but the policy was not without critics. Intellectuals, parents, and students voiced their dissent at what they perceived as excessive control by a repressive government and a waste of resources interfering with academics. The government-mandated civics curriculum, including government-approved textbooks and standards, reveals the characteristics and duties GMD officials believed modern citizens of the next generation should possess. Through provisions for refugee students, youth organizations, military training, and civics classes, GMD secondary education policy played a critical role in the process of state building in both modern China and Taiwan.Skillfully combining archival work in Nanjing and Taipei, along with oral interviews with former students and CYC administrators, instructors, and members, Liu offers a unique perspective toward a balanced assessment of Nationalist Party rule.Jennifer Liu is associate professor of East Asian history at Central Michigan University. She specializes in the political and social history of twentieth-century China, particularly education, youth culture, studen​t protest, and ethnic identity.Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Marc McMenamin's Ireland's Secret War: Dan Bryan, G2 and the Lost Tapes that Reveal The Hunt for Ireland's Nazi Spies (Gill Books, 2022) is a thrilling account of the true extent of Irish-Allied co-operation during World War II. It reveals strategic Nazi intentions for Ireland and the real role of leading government figures of the time, placing Dan Bryan and G2 - the military intelligence branch of the Irish Defence Forces - firmly at the centre of the country's battle against Nazi Germany.With the help of over thirty-five hours of previously unpublished audio recordings that were held in storage in northern California for over fifty years, McMenamin reveals the extraordinary unheard history of WWII in Ireland, told from the point of view of the main protagonists.Fascinating and entertaining, Ireland's Secret War reassesses the legacy of the Irish contribution to the Allied war effort through the voices of those involved at the time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In 1997, Saul Friedländer emphasized the need for an integrated history of the Holocaust. His suggestion to connect ‘the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society, and the world of the victims’ provides the inspiration for this volume. Following in these footsteps, this innovative study approaches Holocaust history through a combination of macro analysis with micro studies. Featuring a range of contemporary research from emerging scholars in the field, New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust (de Gruyter, 2023) provides detailed engagement with a variety of historical sources, such as documents, artifacts, photos, or text passages. The contributors investigate particular aspects of sound, materiality, space and social perceptions to provide a deeper understanding of the Holocaust, which have often been overlooked or generalised in previous historical research. Yet, as we approach an era of no first hand witnesses, this multidisciplinary, micro-historical approach remains a fundamental aspect of Holocaust research, and can provide a theoretical framework for future studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Throughout the nuclear age, states have taken many different paths toward or away from nuclear weapons. These paths have been difficult to predict and cannot be explained simply by a stable or changing security environment. We can make sense of these paths by examining leaders' nuclear decisions. The political decisions state leaders make to accelerate or reverse progress toward nuclear weapons define each state's course. Whether or not a state ultimately acquires nuclear weapons depends to a large extent on those nuclear decisions.Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a novel theory of nuclear decision-making that identifies two mechanisms that shape leaders' understandings of the costs and benefits of their nuclear pursuits.The internal mechanism is the intervention of domestic experts in key scientific and military organizations. If the conditions are right, those experts may be able to influence a leader's nuclear decision-making. The external mechanism emerges from the structure and politics of the international system. This book identifies three different proliferation eras, in which changes to international political and structural conditions have constrained or freed states pursuing nuclear weapons development.Scholars and practitioners alike will gain new insights from the fascinating case studies of nine states across the three eras. Through this global approach to studying nuclear proliferation, this book pushes back against the conventional wisdom that determined states pursue a straight path to the bomb. Instead, nuclear decisions define a state's nuclear pursuits.Our guest today is Lisa Langdon Koch, Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The Future of War Crimes Justice (Melville House, 2024), journalist and war correspondent Chris Stephen takes a colourful look at the erratic history of war crimes justice, and the pioneers who created it. He examines its shortcomings, and options for making it more effective, including the case for prosecuting the corporations and banks who fund warlords. Casting the net wider, he examines alternatives to war crimes trials, and looks into the minds of war criminals themselves through an evaluation of evidence from psychiatric studies. With international law advocates fighting for justice on one side, and reluctant governments unwilling to relinquish control on the other, he sets out to answer whether the world of the future will be governed by the rule of law or might is right.The podcast begins by exploring what is meant by ‘justice’ in the context of war crimes – whether it is (or should be) a process and collection of rights-respecting investigations and trials, or an outcome (the prosecution, conviction and sentencing of people who have committed the worst crimes) – and then discusses the challenges at the heart of the system of international war crimes justice as it has developed from the post-World War II trials of Nuremberg and Toyko. Chris Stephen discusses the impossibility of bringing leaders of major powers to justice, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, under the current system of war crimes justice, acknowledging the role that realpolitik and national state interest plays in preventing greater engagement with the International Criminal Court in The Hague.Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. Twitter: @batesmith. LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2023) traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war.Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.Lisa Bhungalia is Assistant Professor of Geography at Kent State University. Her new position (as of fall 2024) will be Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-war Statebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Shelley X. Liu explores how wartime processes affects post-war state-building efforts when rebels win a civil war and come into power. Post-war governance is a continuation of war--although violence has ceased, the victor must consolidate its control over the state through a process of internal conquest. This means carefully making choices about resource allocation towards development and security. Where does the victor choose to spend, and why? And what are the implications for ultimately consolidating power and preventing conflict recurrence?The book examines wartime rebel-civilian ties under rebel governance and explains how these ties--along with rebel governing institutions--shape the rebel victors' post-war various resource allocation strategies to establish control at the sub-national level. In turn, successfully balancing resources dedicated toward development and security helps the victor to consolidate power. The book relies on mixed-methods evidence from Zimbabwe and Liberia, combining interviews, focus groups, and archival data with fine-grained census, administrative, survey, and conflict datasets to provide an in-depth examination of subnational variation in wartime rebel behavior and post-war governing strategies. A comparison of Zimbabwe and Liberia alongside four additional civil wars in Burundi, Rwanda, Côte d'Ivoire, and Angola further demonstrates the importance of wartime civilian tie-formation for post-war control. The argument's central insights point to war and peace as part of a long state-building process, and suggest that the international community should pay attention to sub-national political constraints that new governments face. Her findings offer implications for recent rebel victories and, more broadly, for understanding the termination, trajectories, and political legacies of such conflicts around the world.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Cecily N. Zander’s The Army under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era (LSU Press, 2024) is a pathbreaking study focusing on the fierce political debates over the size and use of military forces in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. It examines how prominent political figures, especially in the new Republican Party, interacted with the professional army and how those same leaders misunderstood the value of regular soldiers fighting to reunify the fractured nation and to extend it westward across the continent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The British Army won a convincing series of victories between 1916 and 1918. But by 1939 the British Army was an entirely different animal. The hard-won knowledge, experience and strategic vision that delivered victory after victory in the closing stages of the First World War had been lost. In the inter-war years there was plenty of talking, but very little focus on who Britain might have to fight, and how. Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman's book Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40 (Bloomsbury, 2023) clearly illustrates how the British Army wasn't prepared to fight a first-class European Army in 1939 for the simple reason that as a country Britain hadn't prepared itself to do so. The failure of the army's leadership led directly to its abysmal performance in Norway and France in 1940.Victory to Defeat is a captivating history of the mismanagement of a war-winning army. It is also a stark warning that we neglect to understand who our enemy might be, and how to defeat him, at the peril of our country. The British Army is now to be cut to its smallest size since 1714. Are we, this book asks, repeating the same mistakes again?General The Lord Dannatt GCB CBE MC DL is one of the UK's most respected military commentators. He was chief of the Defense Staff and Commander-in-chief, 2006-2009.Robert Lyman is one of Britain's top military historians. He spent 20 years in the British Army and he is currently a Research Fellow at the Changing Face of War Centre, Pembroke College, University of Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history