New Books in Military History

The experiences of the Irish in France during the war were overshadowed by the threat of internment or destitution. Up to 2,000 Irish people were stuck in occupied France after the defeat by Nazi Germany in June 1940. This population consisted largely of governesses and members of religious orders, but also the likes of Samuel Beckett, as well as a few individuals who managed to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in internment camps (or worse). Isadore Ryan's book No Way Out: The Irish in Wartime France, 1939–1945 (Mercier Press, 2018) examines the engagement of the Irish in various forms of resistance. It also reveals that the attitude of some of the Irish towards the German occupiers was not always as clear-cut as politically correct discourse would like to suggest.There are fascinating revelations, most notably that Ireland’s diplomatic representative in Paris sold quantities of wine to Hermann Göring; that Irish passports were given out very liberally (including to a convicted British rapist); that, in the early part of the war, some Irish ended up in internment camps in France and, through the slowness of the Irish authorities to intervene, were subsequently sent to concentration camps in Germany; and that a couple of Irish people faced criminal proceedings in France after the Liberation because of their wartime dealings with the Germans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Eight years after annexing Crimea, Russia embarked on a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February 2022. For Vladimir Putin, this was a legacy-defining mission--to restore Russia's sphere of influence and undo Ukraine's surprisingly resilient democratic experiment. Yet Putin's aspirations were swiftly eviscerated, as the conflict degenerated into a bloody war of attrition and the Russian economy faced crippling sanctions. How can we make sense of his decision to invade?Samuel Ramani's Putin's War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution (Hurst, 2023) argues that Putin's policy of global counter-revolution is driven not by systemic factors, such as preventing NATO expansion, but domestic ones: the desire to unite Russians around common principles and consolidate his personal brand of authoritarianism. This objective has inspired military interventions in Crimea, Donbas and Syria, and now all-out war against Kyiv.Ramani explores why Putin opted for regime change in Ukraine, rather than a smaller-scale intervention in Donbas, and considers the impact on his own regime's legitimacy. How has Russia's long-term political and foreign policy trajectory shifted? And how will the international response reshape the world order?AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Christopher Harrison's book Genocidal Conscription: Drafting Victims and Perpetrators Under the Guise of War (Lexington Books, 2023) examines how some states have employed mandatory military service as a tool to capture and kill the victims of genocide by recruiting the perpetrators from other minorities, and shifting blame away from the state. The book highlights several unique intersections that connect military history, Holocaust studies, and genocide. The study details an original framework that encompasses intentions and outcomes of wartime casualties, Clausewitzian wastage, and genocidal massacres. Christopher Harrison traces and compares how two genocidal regimes at war – the Ottoman Empire during World War One and Axis-era Hungary in World War Two – implemented certain policies of military service to capture and destroy their targets amidst the carnage of modern warfare. Following this historical comparative study, the author then summarizes relevant implications and ongoing concerns. The conclusion includes insights into conscription by contemporary authoritarian regimes. By examining these histories and crises, the book suggests that several states are at risk of carrying out genocidal conscription today. While difficult and unlikely, due to political disincentives, the implication of this analysis considers reforms which may prevent states from repeating similar policies and actions again.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman 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 final episode of Season 3, Annika sits down with James Fenelon, a veteran-turned-historian, who served in the Army for over a decade and is a graduate of the US Army’s Airborne, Jumpmaster and Pathfinder schools. They about his latest book, Angels Against the Sun: A WWII Saga of Grunts, Grit, and Brotherhood (Regnery, 2023), which chronicles the 11th Airborne Division, nicknamed "The Angels," and their campaign.A bit about the book: The Pacific theater of World War II pitted American fighting men against two merciless enemies: the relentless Japanese army and the combined forces of monsoons, swamps, mud, privation, and disease. General Joseph Swing's rowdy paratroopers of the 11th Airborne Division-- nicknamed the "Angels"--fought in some of the war's most dramatic campaigns, from bloody skirmishes in Leyte's unforgiving rainforests to the ferocious battles on Luzon, including the hellish urban combat of Manila. The Angels were trained as elite shock troops, but high American casualties often forced them into action as ground-pounding infantrymen. Surviving on airdropped supplies and reinforcements, the Angels fought their way across nearly impassable terrain, emerging as one of the most lethal units in the Pacific War. Their final task was the occupation of Japan, where they were the first American boots on the ground. Angels Against the Sun is an unforgettable account of the liberation of the Philippines. In the tradition of Band of Brothers, historian and former paratrooper James M. Fenelon offers a grunt's-eye view of the war. This is a soldier's history at its best.Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. She graduated from Stanford University in 2021, where she studied Classics and Linguistics. She was also Editor-in-Chief of the Stanford Review and a member of the varsity fencing team. Previously, she was a Research Assistant in Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. 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 talked to Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan about their new book Understanding Ethiopia's Tigray War (Oxford UP, 2023)The ongoing war and consequent famine in the Ethiopian province of Tigray are increasingly critical. International journalists are not being allowed to travel to the region, which is almost completely sealed off from the outside world. This is a deliberate strategy by the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments prosecuting the war: their aim is to crush the Tigrayans at almost any cost. This differentiates the current crisis from the famine of 1984-5, when 400,000 died of starvation primarily as the result of a prolonged drought, exacerbated by war and government inaction. Today's famine is a direct result of supplies to the region being cut off. Hatred of Tigrayans has been stoked by senior advisers to Ethiopia's Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed: they have called Tigrayans "weeds" who must be uprooted, their place in history extinguished. This language is reminiscent of the statements that preceded the genocide in Rwanda. The present situation has been orchestrated since 2018 by Eritrea's President Isaias Afwerki, who wields considerable influence over Ethiopian affairs. His troops are deep inside Ethiopia, his security agents in its towns and cities. For both the Eritrean President and the Ethiopian Prime Minister, this appears to be a fight to the finish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The history of South Vietnam (1954-1975) is in the midst of a major revision. Historians such as Van Nguyen-Marshall are rejecting old clichés of corruption and subservience to the United States of America as they craft a new narrative that puts everyday Vietnamese people at the center of the story. In Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam, 1954-1975 (Southeast Asia Program, 2023), she examines an array of voluntary activities, including mutual-help, professional, charitable, community development, student, women's, and rights organizations. Focusing on the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State challenges persistent stereotypes of South Vietnam as a place without society or agency. Nguyen-Marshall shows how an active civil society survived despite difficulties imposed by the war, government restrictions, economic hardship, and external political forces. These competing political forces, which included the United States, Western aid agencies, and Vietnamese communist agents, created a highly competitive arena wherein the South Vietnamese state did not have a monopoly on persuasive or coercive power. To maintain its influence, the state sometimes needed to accommodate groups and limit its use of violence. Civil society participants in South Vietnam leveraged their social connections, made alliances, appealed to the domestic and international public, and used street protests to voice their concerns, secure their interests and carry out their activities.Van Nguyen-Marshall is an Associate Professor of History at Trent University where she specializes in modern Vietnamese History, focusing on associational life, civil society, and the Vietnam War. She has published a number of articles as well co-editing The Reinvention of Distinction: Modernity and the Middle Class in Urban Vietnam with Lisa Drummond and Daniele Belanger (2012) and her first book In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam (2008).Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

"That Russia and Ukraine have diverged politically so radically since 1991 is partially due to their position vis-à-vis the imploded empire they emerged from," writes Mark Edele in Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (Melbourne University Publishing, 2023).As its subtitle suggests, this short work - "a book by an outsider written for outsiders" - has big ambitions to explain the immediate, long-, and very long-term reasons for the war. How did two so similar yet so different nations emerge? How can “outsiders” separate national myths from true origin stories? Who started the war and how will it end?Mark Edele is a Russianist who became - in his own words - a historian of the Soviet Empire largely due to his "encounter with Ukraine and its history". Hansen Chair in History at the University of Melbourne, he was born and raised in southern Bavaria and educated at the universities of Erlangen, Tübingen, Moscow, and Chicago, where he completed his doctoral research on Soviet World War II veterans under Sheila Fitzpatrick.*The author's own book recommendations for the Writers' Writers tip sheet are German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad by Nicole Eaton (Cornell University Press, April 2023) and The Rider by Tim Krabbé (Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2016 – first published 1978).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In 1811, Napoleon stood at his zenith. He had defeated all his continental rivals, come to an entente with Russia, and his blockade of Britain seemed, at long last, to be a success. The emperor had an heir on the way with his new wife, Marie-Louise, the young daughter of the Emperor of Austria. His personal life, too, was calm and secure for the first time in many years. It was a moment of unprecedented peace and hope, built on the foundations of emphatic military victories.But in less than two years, all of this was in peril. In four years, it was gone, swept away by the tides of war against the most powerful alliance in European history. The rest of his life was passed on a barren island. This is not a story any novelist could create; it is reality as epic.Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821 (Pegasus Books, 2023) traces this story through the dramatic narrative of the years 1811-1821 and explores the ever-bloodier conflicts, the disintegration and reforging of the bonds among the Bonaparte family, and the serpentine diplomacy that shaped the fate of Europe. At the heart of the story is Napoleon's own sense of history, the tensions in his own character, and the shared vision of a family dynasty to rule Europe.Drawing on the remarkable resource of the new edition of Napoleon's personal correspondence produced by the Fondation Napoleon in Paris, Michael Broers dynamic new history follows Napoleon's thoughts and feelings, his hopes and ambitions, as he fought to preserve the world he had created. Much of this turns on his relationship with Tsar Alexander of Russia, in so many respects his alter ego, and eventual nemesis. His inability to understand this complex man, the only person with the power to destroy him, is key to tracing the roots of his disastrous decision to invade Russia--and his inability to face diplomatic and military reality thereafter.Even his defeat in Russia was not the end. The last years of the Napoleonic Empire reveal its innate strength, but it now faced hopeless odds. The last phase of the Napoleonic Wars saw the convergence of the most powerful of forces in European history to date: Russian manpower and British money. The sheer determination of Tsar Alexander and the British to bring Napoleon down is a story of compromise and sacrifice. The horrors and heroism of war are omnipresent in these years, from Lisbon to Moscow, in the life of the common solider. The core of this new book reveals how these men pushed Napoleon back from Moscow to St. Helena.Among this generation, there was no more remarkable persona than Napoleon. His defeat forged his myth--as well as his living tomb on St. Helena. The audacious enterprise of the 100 Days, reaching its crescendo at the Battle of Waterloo, marked the spectacular end of an unprecedented public life. From the ruins of a life--and an empire--came a new continent and a legend that haunts Europe still. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Eastern Europe, the moniker, has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone now, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics, or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe and Croatia is in the Eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural memory. Yet it remains a powerful marker of identity for many, with a fragmented and wide history, defined by texts, myths, and memories of centuries of hardship and suffering.Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land (Pantheon Books, 2023) is a masterful narrative about a place that has survived the brink of being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a kaleidoscopic tour recounting the rise and fall of the great empires—Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian—the dawn of the modern era, the ravages of Fascism and Communism, as well as Capitalism, the birth of the modern nation-state, and more. A student of literature, history, and the ghosts of his own family’s past, Mikanowski paints a magisterial portrait of a place united by diversity, and eclecticism, and a people with the shared story of being the dominated rather than the dominating.The result is a loving and ebullient celebration of the distinctive and vibrant cultures that stubbornly persisted at the margins of Western Europe, and a powerful corrective that re-centers our understanding of how the modern Western world took shape.AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The small Boston-built schooner Sultana served as a customs-enforcement interceptor on the North American eastern seaboard in the period leading up to the American Declaration of Independence, when British taxation of American trade was a hugely contentious issue. As a typical workaday British American merchant ship taken into naval service, Sultana offers a rare opportunity to understand a technology of paramount importance to this world, where records for merchant ships are scarce, but where in this case a wealth of information, from plan drawings to the fully-intact logbooks, has survived. Phillip Reid's book A Boston Schooner in the Royal Navy, 1768-1772: Commerce and Conflict in Maritime British America (Boydell Press, 2023) provides a detailed narrative of the ship's activities, and reveals the nature of life on board and the day to day business of operating a small sailing ship. It explores the technology of the ship and her sailing qualities as revealed by the ship's logs and also by the performance of a modern replica. In addition, the book situates Sultana's role within the wider picture of the British Atlantic in this crucial period. It is thereby both naval microhistory and also Atlantic history for all scholars interested in the formation and development of the British Atlantic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history