New Books in Military History

The First and Second World Wars were separated by a mere two decades, making the period 1914-1945 an unprecedentedly intense and violent era of history. But how did Britain develop its complex military strategy during these wars, and how were decisions made by those at the top?Robin Prior examines the influence politicians had on military operations, in the first history to assess both world wars together. Drawing uniquely on both military and political archives and previously unexamined sources Prior explores the fraught relationships between civilian and military leaders: from Lloyd George's remarkably interventionist stance on military tactics during the First World War to Churchill's near-constant arguments with American leaders during the Second. Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain, 1914-1945 (Yale UP, 2022) tells the complex story of this military decision-making, revealing how politicians attempted to control strategy--but had little influence on how the army, navy, and air force actually fought.Philip Blood is a British historian residing in Germany. His specialist research covers military culture, war, security, genocide and the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Space technology was developed to enhance the killing power of the state. The Moon landings and the launch of the Space Shuttle were mere sideshows, drawing public attention away from the real goal: military and economic control of space as a source of power on Earth.Today, as Bleddyn E. Bowen vividly recounts in Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space (Oxford UP, 2022), thousands of satellites work silently in the background to provide essential military, intelligence and economic capabilities. No major power can do without them. Beyond Washington, Moscow and Beijing, truly global technologies have evolved, from the ground floor of the nuclear missile revolution to today's orbital battlefield, shaping the wars to come. World powers including India, Japan and Europe are fully realizing the strategic benefits of commanding Earth's 'cosmic coastline', as a stage for war, development and prestige.Yet, as new contenders spend more and more on outer space, there is scope for cautious optimism about the future of the Space Age-if we can recognize, rather than hide, its original sin.Bleddyn E. Bowen is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Leicester, specializing in space policy and military uses of outer space. The internationally recognized author of War in Space, he consults on space policy for institutions including the UK Parliament, the European Space Agency, and the Pentagon.Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate, and Army Reserve intelligence officer. His views are his own and do not reflect any institution, organization, or entity with which he is affiliated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (Cornell UP, 2022), Susan Colbourn tells the story of the height of nuclear crisis and the remarkable waning of the fear that gripped the globe. In the Cold War conflict that pitted nuclear superpowers against one another, Europe was the principal battleground. Washington and Moscow had troops on the ground and missiles in the fields of their respective allies, the NATO nations and the states of the Warsaw Pact. Euromissiles―intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be used exclusively in the regional theater of war―highlighted how the peoples of Europe were dangerously placed between hammer and anvil. That made European leaders uncomfortable and pushed fearful masses into the streets demanding peace in their time. At the center of the story is NATO. Colbourn highlights the weakness of the alliance seen by many as the most effective bulwark against Soviet aggression. Divided among themselves and uncertain about the depth of US support, the member states were riven by the missile issue. This strategic crisis was, as much as any summit meeting between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the hinge on which the Cold War turned. Euromissiles is a history of diplomacy and alliances, social movements and strategy, nuclear weapons and nagging fears, and politics. To tell that history, Colbourn takes a long view of the strategic crisis―from the emerging dilemmas of allied defense in the early 1950s through the aftermath of the INF Treaty thirty-five years later. The result is a dramatic and sweeping tale that changes the way we think about the Cold War and its culmination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Sean Lynn-Jones, editor of International Security, interviews author John Schuessler, whose article "The Deception Dividend: FDR's Undeclared War" appears in the Spring 2010 issue of the journal. Their conversation tackles the question of whether FDR willfully deceived the American public in order to persuade them to support WWII – and touches on perceptions of warring democracies as well as comparisons to the 2003 Iraq War. The conversation was recorded on May 21, 2010 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Serbian Paramilitaries and the Breakup of Yugoslavia: State Connections and Patterns of Violence (Routledge, 2022) examines the nature and functions of paramilitary units throughout the 1990s and their ties to the state. The study draws on the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, which conducted dozens of trials relating to paramilitary violence, as well as the records from judicial proceedings in the region. In discussing how and why certain important paramilitary units emerged, the author argues that coordinated action by a number of state institutions gave rise to paramilitaries tasked with altering borders while maintaining plausible deniability for the sponsoring regime. In addition, the outsourcing of violence by the state to paramilitaries led to a significant weakening of the very state these units and their sponsors swore to protect.Iva Vukušić is an Assistant Professor in International History at Utrecht University, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King's College London. She is a historian and a genocide scholar, and her research focuses on irregular armed groups, genocide and mass violence, along with transitional justice and criminal accountability.Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Birds of Prey: Hitler's Luftwaffe, Ordinary Soldiers, and the Holocaust in Poland (Ibidem Press, 2021) is a microhistory of the Nazi occupation of Białowieźa Forest, Poland’s national park. The narrative stretches from Göring’s palatial lifestyle to the common soldier on the ground killing Jews, partisans, and civilians. Based entirely on previously unpublished sources, the book is the synthesis of six areas of research: Hitler’s Luftwaffe, the hunt and environmental history, military geography, Colonialism and Nazi Lebensraum, the Holocaust, and the war in the East. By weaving together a narrative about Hermann Göring, his inner circle, and ordinary soldiers, the book reveals the Nazi ambition to draw together East Prussia, the Bialystok region, and Ukraine into a common eastern frontier of the Greater German state, revealing how the Luftwaffe, the German hunt, and the state forestry were institutional perpetrators of Lebensraum and genocide. Up until now the Luftwaffe had not been identified in specific acts of genocide or placed at large scale killings of Jews, civilians, and partisans. This gap in the historical record had been facilitated by the destruction of the Luftwaffe’s records in 1945. Through a forensic and painstaking process of piecing together scraps of evidence over two decades, and utilizing Geographical Information System software, Philip W. Blood managed to decipher previously obscure reports and expose patterns of Nazi atrocities.AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spofity here. War Books in on YouTube and on Facebook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Mark Axel Tveskov and Ashley Ann Bissonnette's Conflict Archaeology, Historical Memory, and the Experience of War: Beyond the Battlefield (UP of Florida, 2023) presents approaches to the archaeology of war that move beyond the forensic analysis of battlefields, fortifications, and other sites of conflict to consider the historical memory, commemoration, and social experience of war. Leading scholars offer critical insights that challenge the dominant narratives about landscapes of war from throughout the history of North American settler colonialism.Grounded in the empirical study of fields of conflict, these essays extend their scope to include a commitment to engaging local Indigenous and other descendant communities and to illustrating how public memories of war are actively and politically constructed. Contributors examine conflicts including the battle of Chikasha, King Philip’s War, the 1694 battle at Guadalupe Mesa, the Rogue River War, the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862, and a World War II battle on the island of Saipan. Studies also investigate the site of the Schenectady Massacre of 1690 and colonial posts staffed by Black soldiers.Chapters discuss how prevailing narratives often minimized the complexity of these conflicts, smoothed over the contradictions and genocidal violence of colonialism, and erased the diversity of the participants. This volume demonstrates that the collaborative practice of conflict archaeology has the potential to reveal the larger meanings, erased voices, and lingering traumas of war.Philip Blood is a British historian residing in Germany. His specialist research covers military culture, war, security, genocide and the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Bill Fowler, Chair of The New England Quarterly Board of Directors, and author David Naumec discuss his article "From Mashantucket to Appomattox: The Native American Veterans of Connecticut's Volunteer Regiments and the Union Army". The article appears in the December 2008 issue of The New England Quarterly. The conversation was recorded at the MIT Press on December 12, 2008. 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 historian Chris Web about two books detailing the workings of the Nazi extermination camps:  Chris Webb, The Sobibor Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Verlag, 2017) Chris Webb and Michael Chocholaty, The Treblinka Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Verlag, 2021) You can hear Webb discuss his work on the Belzec Death Camp here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

If We Had Wings We Would Fly to You: A Soviet Jewish Family Faces Destruction 1941-42 (Academic Studies Press, 2020) is the first work in any language that offers both an overarching exploration of the flight and evacuation of Soviet Jews viewed at the macro level, and a personal history of one Soviet Jewish family. It is also the first study to examine Jewish life in the Northern Caucasus, a Soviet region that history scholars have rarely addressed. Drawing on a collection of family letters, Kiril Feferman provides a history of the Ginsburgs as they debate whether to evacuate their home of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia and are eventually swept away by the Soviet-German War, the German invasion of Soviet Russia, and the Holocaust. The book makes a significant contribution to the history of the Holocaust and Second World War in the Soviet Union, presenting one Soviet region as an illustration of wartime social and media politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history