Forgotten Armies

Forgotten Armies PDF Author: Christopher Alan Bayly
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674017481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world. More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.

Forgotten Armies

Forgotten Armies PDF Author: Christopher Alan Bayly
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674017481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world. More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.

Forgotten Wars

Forgotten Wars PDF Author: Włodzimierz Borodziej
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108944884
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Włodzimierz Borodziej and Maciej Górny set out to salvage the historical memory of the experience of war in the lands between Riga and Skopje, beginning with the two Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 and ending with the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916. The First World War in the East and South-East of Europe was fought by people from a multitude of different nationalities, most of them dressed in the uniforms of three imperial armies: Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian. In this first volume of Forgotten Wars, the authors chart the origins and outbreak of the First World War, the early battles, and the war's impact on ordinary soldiers and civilians through to the end of the Romanian campaign in December 1916, by which point the Central Powers controlled all of the Balkans except for the Peloponnese. Combining military and social history, the authors make extensive use of eyewitness accounts to describe the traumatic experience that established a region stretching between the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black Seas.

Hitler'S Forgotten Armies: Combat in Norway and Finland

Hitler'S Forgotten Armies: Combat in Norway and Finland PDF Author:
Publisher: Coda Books Ltd
ISBN: 1781580979
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description


Vanished Armies

Vanished Armies PDF Author: AE Haswell Miller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0747809275
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
In the years immediately before the First World War, Archibald Haswell Miller, a young artist, travelled Europe to study painting. While he was there he indulged his other great interest the military. On his travels he observed first-hand the soldiers of the European Armies in the last days of the colourful and elaborate uniforms that were giving way to grey and khaki across the continent. Realising that this was a great military heritage that was slipping away he set out to record these splendid uniforms. In those uncertain days before the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Haswell Miller sketched and painted hundreds of figures, each wearing a different uniform, from the armies of Britain, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Sweden. Just before the First World War the paintings were exhibited in Leipzig, and it seemed they might be published. But when war broke out they were returned home and lay forgotten for nearly one hundred years. Now published together at last, they represent a unique record of the uniforms of the last great age of military dress. Accompanied by, in Haswell Miller's own words, 'notes and memories of the days before “the lights went out in Europe” in the year 1914', this is a book of great historical importance.

Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present

Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present PDF Author: Max Boot
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871404249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 809

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Book Description
As fitting for the 21st century as von Clausewitz's "On War" was in its own time, "Invisible Armies" is a complete global history of guerrilla uprisings through the ages.

Forgotten Ally

Forgotten Ally PDF Author: Rana Mitter
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 054784056X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 485

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Book Description
A history of the Chinese experience in WWII, named a Book of the Year by both the Economist and the Financial Times: “Superb” (The New York Times Book Review). In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very survival. In this book, prize-winning historian Rana Mitter unfurls China’s drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter, and political intrigue as never before. Based on groundbreaking research, this gripping narrative focuses on a handful of unforgettable characters, including Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and Chiang’s American chief of staff, “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell—and also recounts the sacrifice and resilience of everyday Chinese people through the horrors of bombings, famines, and the infamous Rape of Nanking. More than any other twentieth-century event, World War II was crucial in shaping China’s worldview, making Forgotten Ally both a definitive work of history and an indispensable guide to today’s China and its relationship with the West.

The Savage Wars Of Peace

The Savage Wars Of Peace PDF Author: Max Boot
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465038662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
America's "small wars," "imperial wars," or, as the Pentagon now terms them, "low-intensity conflicts," have played an essential but little-appreciated role in its growth as a world power. Beginning with Jefferson's expedition against the Barbary Pirates, Max Boot tells the exciting stories of our sometimes minor but often bloody landings in Samoa, the Philippines, China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. Along the way he sketches colorful portraits of little-known military heroes such as Stephen Decatur, "Fighting Fred" Funston, and Smedley Butler. From 1800 to the present day, such undeclared wars have made up the vast majority of our military engagements. Yet the military has often resisted preparing itself for small wars, preferring instead to train for big conflicts that seldom come. Boot re-examines the tragedy of Vietnam through a "small war" prism. He concludes with a devastating critique of the Powell Doctrine and a convincing argument that the armed forces must reorient themselves to better handle small-war missions, because such clashes are an inevitable result of America's far-flung imperial responsibilities.

America's Forgotten Army

America's Forgotten Army PDF Author: Charles Whiting
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312976552
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This first book to examine the World War II exploits of the U.S. Seventh Army traces its initial combat in Sicily through its invasion of southern France and its capture of Hitler's "Eagle's Nest". The author also chronicles the men who risked their lives for the Seventh -- from Patton to Audie Murphy, America's most decorated fighting man -- and offers blow-by-blow accounts of the army's battles.

The Other Face of Battle

The Other Face of Battle PDF Author: Wayne E. Lee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190920645
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Taking its title from The Face of Battle, John Keegan's canonical book on the nature of warfare, The Other Face of Battle illuminates the American experience of fighting in "irregular" and "intercultural" wars over the centuries. Sometimes known as "forgotten" wars, in part because they lackedtriumphant clarity, they are the focus of the book. David Preston, David Silbey, and Anthony Carlson focus on, respectively, the Battle of Monongahela (1755), the Battle of Manila (1898), and the Battle of Makuan, Afghanistan (2020) - conflicts in which American soldiers were forced to engage in"irregular" warfare, confronting an enemy entirely alien to them. This enemy rejected the Western conventions of warfare and defined success and failure - victory and defeat - in entirely different ways. Symmetry of any kind is lost. Here was not ennobling engagement but atrocity, unanticipatedinsurgencies, and strategic stalemate.War is always hell. These wars, however, profoundly undermined any sense of purpose or proportion. Nightmarish and existentially bewildering, they nonetheless characterize how Americans have experienced combat and what its effects have been. They are therefore worth comparing for what they hold incommon as well as what they reveal about our attitude toward war itself. The Other Face of Battle reminds us that "irregular" or "asymmetrical" warfare is now not the exception but the rule. Understanding its roots seems more crucial than ever.

Underground Asia

Underground Asia PDF Author: Tim Harper
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674250621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 873

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Book Description
An Economist Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A major historian tells the dramatic and untold story of the shadowy networks of revolutionaries across Asia who laid the foundations in the early twentieth century for the end of European imperialism on their continent. This is the epic tale of how modern Asia emerged out of conflict between imperial powers and a global network of revolutionaries in the turbulent early decades of the twentieth century. In 1900, European empires had not yet reached their territorial zenith. But a new generation of Asian radicals had already planted the seeds of their destruction. They gained new energy and recruits after the First World War and especially the Bolshevik Revolution, which sparked utopian visions of a free and communist world order led by the peoples of Asia. Aided by the new technologies of cheap printing presses and international travel, they built clandestine webs of resistance from imperial capitals to the front lines of insurgency that stretched from Calcutta and Bombay to Batavia, Hanoi, and Shanghai. Tim Harper takes us into the heart of this shadowy world by following the interconnected lives of the most remarkable of these Marxists, anarchists, and nationalists, including the Bengali radical M. N. Roy, the iconic Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, and the enigmatic Indonesian communist Tan Malaka. He recreates the extraordinary milieu of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, and conspiracies in which they worked. He shows how they fought with subterfuge, violence, and persuasion, all the while struggling to stay one step ahead of imperial authorities. Underground Asia shows for the first time how Asia’s national liberation movements crucially depended on global action. And it reveals how the consequences of the revolutionaries’ struggle, for better or worse, shape Asia’s destiny to this day. Previous praise for Tim Harper Praise for Forgotten Wars: “[A] compelling book.”—Philip Delves Broughton, Wall Street Journal “Lucid...majestic.”—Peter Preston, The Observer “Authoritative.”—Pankaj Mishra, New Yorker Praise for Forgotten Armies: “Panoramic... Vivid.”—Benjamin Schwarz, New York Times Book Review “A spectacular book.”—Martin Jacques, The Guardian