American Military History

This second of three volumes of Patton’s War picks up where the first one left off, examining General George S. Patton’s leadership of the U.S. Third Army. The book follows Patton’s contributions to both the Normandy and Brittany campaigns—the closing of the Falaise Pocket in Normandy, and racing to the port cities in Brittany. It ends with Patton and his corps rescuing the besieged town of Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. As he did in the preceding volume, Hymel relies not only on Patton’s diaries and letters, but countless veteran interviews, sur­veys, and memoirs.

Behind Japanese Lines has a great deal to say about the relations with the Filipinos and about the problems of dealing with and fighting the Hukbalahaps, the communist guerrillas or, indeed, in opposing the Japanese. This book adds considerable insights into the significance of guerrilla warfare as it relates to modern warfare in general

Hell Above Earth tells an unforgettable story of two World War II American bomber pilots who forged an unexpected but enduring bond in the flak-filled skies over Nazi Germany. But there's a twist: one of them was related to the head of the Luftwaffe, Reich Marshal Herman Goering, and the other had secret orders from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to kill him if anything went wrong during their missions.

A classic of its kind, The Long Gray Line is the 25-year saga of the West Point class of 1966. With a novelist's eye for detail, Rick Atkinson illuminates this powerful story through the lives of three classmates and the women they loved - from the boisterous cadet years, to the fires of Vietnam, to the hard peace and internal struggles that followed the war.

The Gilded Age was a period in American history that covered the late 19th century, from the 1870s till around 1900. The Gilded Age was a period of great financial development in the United States, specifically in the North and West. The time saw an increase of countless European immigrants, as American incomes were considerably higher than those in Europe, specifically for experienced workers, while industrialization demanded an ever-increasing labor force. The Gilded Age was also a time of severe poverty and inequality.

At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes--mostly working-class Americans in their twenties--became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history.

An American officer presents an invaluable handbook for dealing with cultural issues in the Middle East during military operations....

The army does not want you to listen to this book. It does not want to advertise its detention system that coddles enemy fighters while putting American soldiers at risk. It does not want to reveal the new lawyered-up Pentagon war ethic that prosecutes US soldiers and marines while setting free spies who kill Americans. This very system ambushed Captain Roger Hill and his men.

Hitler's American Friends, by Bradley W. Hart, is an audiobook examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners, and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less-popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

Two great battles, two historic outcomes: Defeat in either would have changed the destiny of America and Israel. In this riveting comparative history, From Gettysburg to Golan, Lieutenant Colonel Barry Spielman shows for the first time the extraordinary similarities between the battles of Gettysburg (1863) and Golan Heights (1973).

The story of the United States Air Force (USAF) stretches back to aerial operations prior to the First World War and looks forward to a new era of airpower in space. Fighting from Above presents a concise account of this history, offering a new perspective on how the air forces of the United States created an independent way of warfare over time.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States accelerated the development of technologies that would give it an advantage over the Soviet Union. Airpower, combined with nuclear weapons, offered a formidable check on Soviet aggression. In 1947, the United States Air Force was established. Meanwhile, scientists and engineers were pioneering a revolutionary new type of aircraft which could do what no other machine had ever done: reach mach 1 - a speed faster than the movement of sound - which pilots called "the demon."

In Little Women, Mr. March went off to war. But in real life it was Jo (Louisa May Alcott herself, an avowed abolitionist) who traveled to Washington to nurse Northern soldiers. Despite the subject matter, her account is full of amusing anecdotes as she makes her way alone from Concord to DC, trying to finagle a free ticket and convinced she will drown during the journey.

In the early hours of June 6, 1944, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, a unit of African American soldiers, landed on the beaches of France. Their orders were to man a curtain of armed balloons meant to deter enemy aircraft. One member of the 320th would be nominated for the Medal of Honor, an award he would never receive because the nation's highest decoration was not given to black soldiers in World War II.

Andersonvilles of the North, by James M. Gillispie, represents the first broad study to argue that the image of Union prison officials as negligent and cruel to Confederate prisoners is severely flawed. This study is not an attempt to "whitewash" Union prison policies or make light of Confederate prisoner mortality.

In The Icarus Syndrome, Peter Beinart tells a tale as old as the Greeks—a story about the seductions of success. Beinart describes Washington on the eve of three wars—World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq—three moments when American leaders decided they could remake the world in their image. Each time, leading intellectuals declared that history was over, and the spread of democracy was inevitable. Each time, a president held the nation in the palm of his hand.

Abraham Lincoln is the central axis of this story about America's seemingly unstoppable march toward war, the shattering of its political landscape, and its grappling with the moral underpinnings of a republic of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Here is a recording of a War Department pamphlet aimed at U.S. Servicemen in Britain in 1942. The jovial tone of the document and its advice about how NOT to offend the British make for a nostalgic - and in places humorous - relic of World War II.

LRPs were all volunteers. They were in the spine-tingling, brain-twisting, nerve-wracking business of Long Range Patrolling. They varied in age from eighteen to thirty. These men operated in precision movements, like walking through a jungle quietly and being able to tell whether a man or an animal is moving through the brush without seeing the cause of movement. They could sit in an ambush for hours without moving a muscle except to ease the safety off the automatic weapon in their hand at the first sign of trouble. These men were good because they had to be to survive.

John Moses Browning was raised in what was at the time the “Wild West” of the Utah Country. His educational upbringing was both sparse and basic, but through the impetus of his father’s gun-making business, he would become the greatest mind of the arms industry’s modern age. Where Colt labored over one solitary concept that eventually led him to the modern repeating revolver, Browning’s instinct proved able to visualize concepts far above his formal training and follow them through to a number of diverse and functional weapons.