New Books in Military History

The story of India and Indians in World War II has been overshadowed by other historical events of the 1940s, a busy decade that included such historical watersheds as Indian independence (and the anti-colonial nationalist movement that led to it), as well as the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, many in Europe and North America, and even many in India, probably know very little about how crucial India was to the outcome of World War II. India and Indians were a very important part of World War II, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the role of India and Indians was indispensable in securing the victory of the British and Allied powers against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The stories of Indians in World War II have often been forgotten in popular accounts and memories of the conflict, but that is now changing, as more authors and scholars cover this subject.Through highlighting the remarkable life and career of Jehangir Anklesaria, a heroic Parsi (Indian Zoroastrian) doctor who lived in Rangoon at the outbreak of the conflict, Dr. Tehmton S. Mistry’s The 24th Mile: An Indian Doctor’s Heroism in War-torn Burma (Harper Collins, 2021) makes a major contribution to our memory of World War II with the unique story of one individual during the most devastating conflict in human history. When the Japanese invaded Burma in December 1941, Jehangir sent his wife and daughter by ship to India, but feeling duty-bound, he decided to stay back in Burma. He joined the war effort and worked tirelessly to quell a cholera epidemic. He then found himself one of thousands on the trek through the treacherous jungle and mountains towards safety in northeastern India. The book reminds us of the difference a single individual’s foresight and leadership can make in bringing about better outcomes, even amidst war and disease.The 24th Mile is a work of creative non-fiction, which means that although the storyline abides by the historical narrative of the period and follows historical figures, the author has taken the creative license to create secondary fictional characters, write descriptions, and recreate dialogues among the characters. The author, Tehmton Mistry, is part of the extended family and next generation of the protagonist’s family, and he successfully and evocatively recreates the story of Jehangir’s grit and heroism in a death-defying journey to safety in a major theater of World War II.Tehmton S. Mistry is a retired obstetrician and gynaecologist who practiced in St. Louis, Missouri. Born and raised in Mumbai (Bombay), Dr. Mistry moved to the United States from India in the early 1970s, together with his wife – whom he met when he studied at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. The protagonist of The 24th Mile, Dr. Jehangir Anklesaria, was his wife’s uncle and a key influence on their early life. Now retired and living in California, Dr. Mistry enjoys writing, among other hobbies.Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. 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 midst of the ongoing war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, it is vital that the lay-educated public understand the historical origins of the conflict. It is with this in mind, that this episode of ‘Arguing History’, takes a look at the subject of ‘Ukrainian Nationalism and the Russian / Soviet state’. To guide us in this intricate and not well know matter, are three superb historians: John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Alberta; David R. Stone, is a Professor in Russian Studies in the United States, Naval War College; Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London.John-Paul Himka is an American-Canadian historian and retired professor of history of the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Himka received his BA in Byzantine-Slavonic Studies and Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in 1971 and 1977 respectively. The title of his Ph.D. dissertation was Polish and Ukrainian Socialism: Austria, 1867–1890. He received numerous awards for both excellence in teaching and in research. His work on Ukrainian history has been subject to widespread debate and discussion in Ukraine.David R. Stone, the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies at the Naval War College, joined the Strategy and Policy Department in 2015. He received a B.A. from Wabash College and a Ph.D. in history from Yale. He previously taught at Kansas State University. His book “Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union” (2000) won the Shulman Prize of ASEEES and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published “A Military History of Russia” (2006) and “The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917” (2015). He edited “The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945” (2010). He is the author of several dozen articles on Russian military history and foreign policy.Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. His latest book is The Fortress. The Great Siege of Przemysl (London: Allen Lane, 2019). This is the story of the First World War’s longest siege, and of the opening of the brutal tragedy which befell East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It follows a ragtag Habsburg garrison of old soldiers as they desperately defend Central Europe from Russian invasion, and recounts the vicious fighting, starvation and anti-Semitic ethnic cleansing which began in the region already in 1914. The book won a Society for Military History 2021 Distinguished Book Award and was a BBC History Magazine and Financial Times ‘Book of the Year’. The Times newspaper praised it as ‘a masterpiece’. ‘Vividly written and well researched …it deserves to become a classic of military history.’ His two prior books were also award winners.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

During the Second World War, locals in Australia and Britain described American GIs as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” But this conflict between civilians and the military didn’t only take place abroad. Civil-military tensions could be seen at ‘home’ too. Nearly three-quarters of servicemen in the months leading up to D-Day were stationed domestically, while one in four never went abroad at all. In other words, a lot of GIs spent a lot of time in the continental United States. Their presence, combined with the anti-civilian culture that the US military cultivated during the war, made places like Times Square, Hollywood Boulevard, and Coney Island look like occupation zones.A new book tells this important yet overlooked history of the Second World War. In Taking Leave, Taking Liberties: American Troops on the World War II Home Front (U Chicago Press, 2020), Aaron Hiltner follows GIs as they traveled through transport hubs, trained at domestic military bases, and took leave in ‘liberty ports,” such as Boston and San Francisco. By doing so, Hiltner, a lecturer at University College London, shows how theft, assault, catcalling, murder, rape, drunkenness, harassment, rackets, and fist fights were a part of the everyday domestic wartime experience. The book, therefore, challenges our tendency to isolate the home front from the war and makes us rethink where US foreign relations take place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

On October 27, 1930, members of six Taiwanese indigenous groups ambushed the Japanese attendees of an athletic competition at the Musha Elementary School, killing 134. The uprising came as a shock to Japanese colonial authorities, whose response was swift and brutal. Heavy artillery and battalions of troops assaulted the region, spraying a wide area with banned poison gas. The Seediq from Mhebu, who led the uprising, were brought to the brink of genocide.Over the ensuing decades, the Musha Incident became seen as a central moment in Taiwan’s colonial history, and different political regimes and movements have seized on it for various purposes. Under the Japanese, it was used to attest to the “barbarity” of Taiwan’s indigenous tribes; the Nationalist regime cited the uprising as proof of the Taiwanese peoples’ heroism and solidarity with the Chinese in resisting the Japanese; and pro-independence groups in Taiwan have portrayed the Seediq people and their history as exemplars of Taiwan’s “authentic” cultural traditions, which stand apart from that of mainland China.This book brings together leading scholars to provide new perspectives on one of the most traumatic episodes in Taiwan’s modern history and its fraught legacies. Contributors from a variety of disciplines revisit the Musha Incident and its afterlife in history, literature, film, art, and popular culture. They unravel the complexities surrounding it by confronting a history of exploitation, contradictions, and misunderstandings. The book also features conversations with influential cultural figures in Taiwan who have attempted to tell the story of the uprising.Michael Berry is professor of modern Chinese literature and film at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2005) and A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008), and he is the translator of several novels, including Chang Ta-chun’s Wild Kids: Two Novels About Growing Up (2000) and Wu He’s Remains of Life (2017).Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center 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

In Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Duke UP, 2020), Brandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women during and after the Civil War. Reconstructing the grassroots pension network in New Bern, North Carolina, through a broad range of historical sources, she outlines how the mothers, wives, and widows of black Union soldiers struggled to claim pensions in the face of evidentiary obstacles and personal scrutiny. Brimmer exposes and examines the numerous attempts by the federal government to exclude black women from receiving the federal pensions that they had been promised. Her analyses illustrate the complexities of social policy and law administration and the interconnectedness of race, gender, and class formation. Expanding on previous analyses of pension records, Brimmer offers an interpretive framework of emancipation and the freedom narrative that places black women at the forefront of demands for black citizenship.Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu. 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 late eighties and early nineties, driven by the post–Cold War environment and lessons learned during military operations, United States policy makers made intelligence support to the military the Intelligence Community's top priority. In response to this demand, the CIA and DoD instituted policy and organizational changes that altered their relationship with one another. While debates over the future of the Intelligence Community were occurring on Capitol Hill, the CIA and DoD were expanding their relationship in peacekeeping and nation-building operations in Somalia and the Balkans.By the late 1990s, some policy makers and national security professionals became concerned that intelligence support to military operations had gone too far. In Subordinating Intelligence: The DoD/CIA Post-Cold War Relationship (UP of Kentucky Press, 2019), David P. Oakley reveals that, despite these concerns, no major changes to national intelligence or its priorities were implemented. These concerns were forgotten after 9/11, as the United States fought two wars and policy makers increasingly focused on tactical and operational actions. As policy makers became fixated with terrorism and the United States fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, the CIA directed a significant amount of its resources toward global counterterrorism efforts and in support of military operations.Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate, and Army Reserve intelligence officer. The opinions state here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the view of the USG, DoD, Special Operations Command, or Joint Special Operations 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 history of India and Pakistan since Partition has been marked by countless skirmishes–and four major wars. The second conflict–the 1965 war between India and Pakistan along the long land border–featured some of the largest tank battles since the Second World War and some of the first skirmishes between the Indian and Pakistani air forces. It reshaped regional and global geopolitics, pushing India closer to the Soviet Union and Pakistan closer to China.But the war didn’t arise from nowhere, as Shiv Kunal Verma notes in his newest history 1965: A Western Sunrise (Aleph Book Company: 2021) The book notes the timeline leading up to the war, including the 1962 war with China and the skirmish in the Rann of Kutch months before Operation Gibraltar in Kashmir. Nor did it end with a great deal of finality, with months of conflict following a ceasefire—and instability that again erupted in war in 1971.Shiv Kunal Verma is a military historian and filmmaker, working with all three branches of the Indian armed forces. ces. He helped to write The Long Road to Siachen: The Question Why (Rupa & Co.: 2010) and Courage & Conviction (Aleph Book Company: 2013), the autobiography of General VK Singh. His latest book, 1962: The War That Wasn’t (Aleph Book Company: 2016) has been hailed as one of the most definitive works on the Indo-China conflict.In this interview, Kunal and I talk about the 1965 India-Pakistan War–how the 1962 war with China helped to set the stage for the 1965 war, the breadth of the conflict along the India-Pakistan border, and how the ‘65 war has repercussions that can still be seen today.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of 1965: A Western Sunrise. 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

Most existing literature regarding civil-military relations in the United States references either the Cold War or post-Cold War era, leaving a significant gap in understanding as our political landscape rapidly changes. Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: The Military, Society, Politics, and Modern War (Oxford UP, 2020) builds upon our current perception of civil-military relations, filling in this gap and providing contemporary understanding of these concepts. The authors examine modern factors such as increasing partisanship and political division, evolving technology, new dynamics of armed conflict, and the breakdown of conventional democratic and civil-military norms, focusing on the multifaceted ways they affect civil-military relations and American society as a whole.Lionel Beehner, Risa Brooks, and Daniel Maurer, serving as both editors of the volume and authors themselves, recruited contributing authors who come from a diversity of backgrounds, many of whom have served in the military, or in the foreign service, have worked as policy makers, and many who have held academic appointments in security studies, war studies, and at the military academies as well as at civilian institutions. Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations helps to define and examine the roles and responsibilities of the military, civilian leadership, and the public, centering the sections of the book around these definitions, then delving deeper into the intricacies of their relations within the chapters in each section of the book. The first section of the book analyzes the military’s roles and responsibilities, focusing on limits of the military’s political activity as well as long-standing conventions and norms of professionalism that are part of the old Cold War structures. The second section explores the civilian side of the civil-military equation, particularly the role of the soldier, both as a member of society and a member of the military. This section also explores the marginalization of civilian voices in military policy making and factors that may contribute to that marginalization. The third section focuses on the relationship between society and the military, exploring societal attitudes toward the military and identifying how trends in partisanship and polarization are challenging civil-military relations. The fourth and final section of this volume examines the fragility and erratically fluid nature of our current historical moment, and how challenges in civil-military relations can arise from the changing realities of war, armed conflict, and domestic political dynamics.Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military (Duke UP, 2021), Andrew Bickford analyzes the US military's attempts to design performance enhancement technologies and create pharmacological "supersoldiers" capable of withstanding extreme trauma. Bickford traces the deep history of efforts to biologically fortify and extend the health and lethal power of soldiers from the Cold War era into the twenty-first century, from early adoptions of mandatory immunizations to bio-protective gear, to the development and spread of new performance enhancing drugs during the global War on Terrorism. In his examination of government efforts to alter soldiers' bodies through new technologies, Bickford invites us to contemplate what constitutes heroism when armor becomes built in, wired in, and even edited into the molecular being of an American soldier. Lurking in the background and dark recesses of all US military enhancement research, Bickford demonstrates, is the desire to preserve US military and imperial power.Dr. Bickford is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. You can learn more about his work here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

War is ever changing. Just within the last decade or so, new domains have opened up as potential battlefields of the present and the future. These range from traditional land battles to space as well as social media, among other domains. Combined this with the recent resurgence of great power competition on the world stage, the challenges being faced are quite daunting. What are the implications for military strategy? Such issues are addressed in Old and New Battlespaces: Society, Military Power, and War (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2022) co-authored by Jahara Matisek and Buddhika Jayamaha.Jahara ‘Franky’ Matisek is a Lieutenant Colonel and Senior Pilot in the US Air Force and will be serving as a Military Professor at the US Naval War College this Fall. He earned his PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University and was previously an Associate Professor in the Department of Military Strategic Studies and Senior Fellow at the Homeland Defense Institute at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He is also the Fellowship Director for the Irregular Warfare Initiative and has published over 70 articles on war and strategy in peer-reviewed journals, policy-relevant outlets, and edited volumes.The views expressed by Lt Col Matisek are his own and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Naval War College, U.S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or U.S. Government.Stephen Satkiewicz is independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history