Download or read book Freedom s Soldiers written by Ira Berlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-03-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom's Soldiers tells the story of the 200,000 black men who fought in the Civil War, in their own words and those of eyewitnesses.

Download or read book The Ghost Army of World War II written by Rick Beyer and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A riveting tale told through personal accounts and sketches along the way—ultimately, a story of success against great odds. I enjoyed it enormously.” —Tom Brokaw The first book to tell the full story of how a traveling road show of artists wielding imagination, paint, and bravado saved thousands of American lives—now updated with new material. In the summer of 1944, a handpicked group of young GIs—artists, designers, architects, and sound engineers, including such future luminaries as Bill Blass, Ellsworth Kelly, Arthur Singer, Victor Dowd, Art Kane, and Jack Masey—landed in France to conduct a secret mission. From Normandy to the Rhine, the 1,100 men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, known as the Ghost Army, conjured up phony convoys, phantom divisions, and make-believe headquarters to fool the enemy about the strength and location of American units. Every move they made was top secret, and their story was hushed up for decades after the war's end. Hundreds of color and black-and-white photographs, along with maps, official memos, and letters, accompany Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles’s meticulous research and interviews with many of the soldiers, weaving a compelling narrative of how an unlikely team carried out amazing battlefield deceptions that saved thousands of American lives and helped open the way for the final drive to Germany. The stunning art created between missions also offers a glimpse of life behind the lines during World War II. This updated edition includes: A new afterword by co-author Rick Beyer Never-before-seen additional images The successful campaign to have the unit awarded a Congressional Gold Medal History and WWII enthusiasts will find The Ghost Army of World War II an essential addition to their library.

Download or read book The Stuff of Soldiers written by Brandon M. Schechter and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Stuff of Soldiers uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. Brandon M. Schechter attends to a diverse array of things—from spoons to tanks—to show how a wide array of citizens became soldiers, and how the provisioning of material goods separated soldiers from civilians. Through a fascinating examination of leaflets, proclamations, newspapers, manuals, letters to and from the front, diaries, and interviews, The Stuff of Soldiers reveals how the use of everyday items made it possible to wage war. The dazzling range of documents showcases ethnic diversity, women's particular problems at the front, and vivid descriptions of violence and looting. Each chapter features a series of related objects: weapons, uniforms, rations, and even the knick-knacks in a soldier's rucksack. These objects narrate the experience of people at war, illuminating the changes taking place in Soviet society over the course of the most destructive conflict in recorded history. Schechter argues that spoons, shovels, belts, and watches held as much meaning to the waging of war as guns and tanks. In The Stuff of Soldiers, he describes the transformative potential of material things to create a modern culture, citizen, and soldier during World War II.

Download or read book The Invisible Soldier written by Mary Penick Motley and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By turns shocking, nightmarish, despairing, bitterly ironic, and, in rare instances, full of laughter, the fifty-five oral histories in The Invisible Soldier add a significant chapter to black history. The interviews disclose the brutality of the unseen wars black servicemen fought when confronted with the official army policy of segregation and by attitudes in southern communities, as well as overseas.

Download or read book The Soldier Experience in the Fourteenth Century written by Anne Curry and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2011 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays throwing fresh light on what it was like to be a medieval soldier, drawing on archival research.

Download or read book Forever a Soldier written by Tom Wiener and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains thirty-seven narratives, drawn from letters, diaries, private memoirs, and oral histories in which American veterans describe their experiences serving in conflicts from the First World War to the twenty-first-century war in Iraq.

Download or read book Black Soldiers in Blue written by John David Smith and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired and informed by the latest research in African American, military, and social history, the fourteen original essays in this book tell the stories of the African American soldiers who fought for the Union cause. An introductory essay surveys the history of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) from emancipation to the end of the Civil War. Seven essays focus on the role of the USCT in combat, chronicling the contributions of African Americans who fought at Port Hudson, Milliken's Bend, Olustee, Fort Pillow, Petersburg, Saltville, and Nashville. Other essays explore the recruitment of black troops in the Mississippi Valley; the U.S. Colored Cavalry; the military leadership of Colonels Thomas Higginson, James Montgomery, and Robert Shaw; African American chaplain Henry McNeal Turner; the black troops who occupied postwar Charleston; and the experiences of USCT veterans in postwar North Carolina. Collectively, these essays probe the broad military, political, and social significance of black soldiers' armed service, enriching our understanding of the Civil War and African American life during and after the conflict. The contributors are Anne J. Bailey, Arthur W. Bergeron Jr., John Cimprich, Lawrence Lee Hewitt, Richard Lowe, Thomas D. Mays, Michael T. Meier, Edwin S. Redkey, Richard Reid, William Glenn Robertson, John David Smith, Noah Andre Trudeau, Keith Wilson, and Robert J. Zalimas Jr.

Download or read book The Good Soldiers written by David Finkel and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. "Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences," he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them. Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad, and almost every grueling step of the way. What was the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? Those are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale—not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.

Download or read book Doughboys on the Great War written by Edward A. Gutiérrez and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It is impossible to reproduce the state of mind of the men who waged war in 1917 and 1918,” Edward Coffman wrote in The War to End All Wars. In Doughboys on the Great War the voices of thousands of servicemen say otherwise. The majority of soldiers from the American Expeditionary Forces returned from Europe in 1919. Where many were simply asked for basic data, veterans from four states—Utah, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Virginia—were given questionnaires soliciting additional information and “remarks.” Drawing on these questionnaires, completed while memories were still fresh, this book presents a chorus of soldiers’ voices speaking directly of the expectations, motivations, and experiences as infantrymen on the Western Front in World War I. What was it like to kill or maim German soldiers? To see friends killed or maimed by the enemy? To return home after experiencing such violence? Again and again, soldiers wrestle with questions like these, putting into words what only they can tell. They also reflect on why they volunteered, why they fought, what their training was, and how ill-prepared they were for what they found overseas. They describe how they interacted with the civilian populations in England and France, how they saw the rewards and frustrations of occupation duty when they desperately wanted to go home, and—perhaps most significantly—what it all added up to in the end. Together their responses create a vivid and nuanced group portrait of the soldiers who fought with the American Expeditionary Forces on the battlefields of Aisne-Marne, Argonne Forest, Belleau Wood, Chateau-Thierry, the Marne, Metz, Meuse-Argonne, St. Mihiel, Sedan, and Verdun during the First World War. The picture that emerges is often at odds with the popular notion of the disillusioned doughboy. Though hardened and harrowed by combat, the veteran heard here is for the most part proud of his service, service undertaken for duty, honor, and country. In short, a hundred years later, the doughboy once more speaks in his own true voice.

Download or read book Africa and World War II written by Judith Ann-Marie Byfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a fresh perspective on Africa's central role in the Allied victory in World War II. Its detailed case studies, from all parts of Africa, enable us to understand how African communities sustained the Allied war effort and how they were transformed in the process. Together, the chapters provide a continent-wide perspective.

Download or read book Fire and Fortitude written by John C. McManus and published by Dutton Caliber. This book was released on 2019 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "John C. McManus, one of our most highly-acclaimed historians of World War II, takes readers from Pearl Harbor--a rude awakening for a ragtag militia woefully unprepared for war--to Makin, a sliver of coral reef where the Army was tested against the increasingly-desperate Japanese. In between were nearly two years of punishing combat as the Army transformed, at times unsteadily, from an undertrained garrison force into an unstoppable juggernaut, and America evolved from an inward-looking nation into a global superpower."--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book We Return Fighting written by Nat'l Mus Afr Am Hist Culture and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly illustrated commemoration of African Americans' roles in World War I highlighting how the wartime experience reshaped their lives and their communities after they returned home. This stunning book presents artifacts, medals, and photographs alongside powerful essays that together highlight the efforts of African Americans during World War I. As in many previous wars, black soldiers served the United States during the war, but they were assigned to segregated units and often relegated to labor and support duties rather than direct combat. Indeed this was the central paradox of the war: these men and women fought abroad to secure rights they did not yet have at home in the States. Black veterans' work during the conflict--and the respect they received from French allies but not their own US military--empowered them to return home and continue the fight for those rights. The book also presents the work of black citizens on the home front. Together their efforts laid the groundwork for later advances in the civil rights movement. We Return Fighting reminds readers not only of the central role of African American soldiers in the war that first made their country a world power. It also reveals the way the conflict shaped African American identity and lent fuel to their longstanding efforts to demand full civil rights and to stake their place in the country's cultural and political landscape.

Download or read book The Soldier s Story written by Samuel Brackett Wing and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Connected Soldiers written by Spencer John Spencer and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-07 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Spencer was a new second lieutenant in 2003 when he parachuted into Iraq leading a platoon of infantry soldiers into battle. During that combat tour he learned how important unit cohesion was to surviving a war, both physically and mentally. He observed that this cohesion developed as the soldiers experienced the horrors of combat as a group, spending their downtime together and processing their shared experiences. When Spencer returned to Iraq five years later to take command of a troubled company, he found that his lessons on how to build unit cohesion were no longer as applicable. Rather than bonding and processing trauma as a group, soldiers now spent their downtime separately, on computers communicating with family back home. Spencer came to see the internet as a threat to unit cohesion, but when he returned home and his wife was deployed, the internet connected him and his children to his wife on a daily basis. In Connected Soldiers Spencer delivers lessons learned about effective methods for building teams in a way that overcomes the distractions of home and the outside world, without reducing the benefits gained from connections to family.

Download or read book Why Soldiers Miss War written by Nolan Peterson and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ask most combat veterans to name the worst experience of their lives, and they'll probably tell you it was war. But ask them to choose the best experience of their life, and they'll usually say it was war, too. For someone who has not been to war, this is nearly impossible to understand. The spectrum of emotions experienced by a combat veteran is far wider than that experienced in civilian life and for that reason it can be hard for a veteran to re-assimilate to civilian life. Ask a combat veteran about this, it's a common feeling.What is it about war that soldiers miss? This is a question that every civilian should try to understand. Weaving together a wide range of stories from the flight deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier off Syria to climbing a forbidden Himalayan pass into Tibet, this moving and insightful book explains one of the most everlasting human pursuits - war. But its focus isn't solely war; it is also about coming home and confronting another kind of struggle, which we all share--the search for happiness.In this collection, Peterson writes of war from the perspective of both a combatant and a witness taking the reader from combat missions over Afghanistan as an Air Force special operations pilot to the frontlines against ISIS in Iraq, and the trench and tank battles of the war in Ukraine. Interweaving his frontline reports with a narrative about his own transformation from a combat pilot to a war journalist, Peterson explores a timeless paradox - why does coming home from war feel like such a disappointment?

Download or read book American Soldiers written by Peter S. Kindsvatter and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2003-04-03 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some warriors are drawn to the thrill of combat and find it the defining moment of their lives. Others fall victim to fear, exhaustion, impaired reasoning, and despair. This was certainly true for twentieth-century American ground troops. Whether embracing or being demoralized by war, these men risked their lives for causes larger than themselves with no promise of safe return. This book is the first to synthesize the wartime experiences of American combat soldiers, from the doughboys of World War I to the grunts of Vietnam. Focusing on both soldiers and marines, it draws on histories and memoirs, oral histories, psychological and sociological studies, and even fiction to show that their experiences remain fundamentally the same regardless of the enemy, terrain, training, or weaponry. Peter Kindsvatter gets inside the minds of American soldiers to reveal what motivated them to serve and how they were turned into soldiers. He recreates the physical and emotional aspects of war to tell how fighting men dealt with danger and hardship, and he explores the roles of comradeship, leadership, and the sustaining beliefs in cause and country. He also illuminates soldiers’ attitudes toward the enemy, toward the rear echelon, and toward the home front. And he tells why some broke down under fire while others excelled. Here are the first tastes of battle, as when a green recruit reported that “for the first time I realized that the people over the ridge wanted to kill me,” while another was befuddled by the unfamiliar sound of bullets whizzing overhead. Here are soldiers struggling to cope with war’s stress by seeking solace from local women or simply smoking cigarettes. And here are tales of combat avoidance and fraggings not unique to Vietnam, of soldiers in Korea disgruntled over home-front indifference, and of the unique experiences of African American soldiers in the Jim Crow army. By capturing the core “band of brothers” experience across several generations of warfare, Kindsvatter celebrates the American soldier while helping us to better understand war’s lethal reality--and why soldiers persevere in the face of its horrors.

Download or read book A Soldier on the Southern Front written by Emilio Lussu and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rediscovered World War I masterpiece—one of the few memoirs about the Italian front—for fans of military history and All Quiet on the Western Front An infantryman’s “harrowing, moving, [and] occasionally comic” account of trench warfare on the alpine front seen in A Farewell to Arms (Times Literary Supplement). Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JŸnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu’s memoir as an infantryman is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals in spare and detached prose the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy—the alpine front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. For Lussu, June 1916 to July 1917 was a year of continuous assaults on impregnable trenches, absurd missions concocted by commanders full of patriotic rhetoric and vanity but lacking in tactical skill, and episodes often tragic and sometimes grotesque, where the incompetence of his own side was as dangerous as the attacks waged by the enemy. A rare firsthand account of the Italian front, Lussu’s memoir succeeds in staging a fierce indictment of the futility of war in a dry, often ironic style that sets his tale wholly apart from the Western Front of Remarque and adds an astonishingly modern voice to the literature of the Great War.