Download or read book Americans at War in Foreign Forces written by Chris Dickon and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of Americans in the two world wars is well known, but with a glaring exception--one that reveals a little-known aspect of the common history of the United States and Canada. By the time of the American entrance into World War I in April 1917 and World War II in December 1941, tens of thousands of Americans had already fought and died in those conflicts in the uniforms of other nations. Most had quietly traveled over the northern border to join the ground, air and naval forces of the Commonwealth nations, others to France, Poland, China and the other nations and armed forces that played a role in the continuing world conflict of the first half of the century. In preceding their own nation to war, they influenced the course of events in those years and, though threatened with loss of citizenship, were ultimately met with the acceptance of their own government. This book tells the story of who these Americans were, why they took the actions they did, their experiences in war, and the effects of their presence as Americans in foreign forces.
Download or read book Americans All written by Nancy Gentile Ford and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the First World War, nearly half a million immigrant draftees from forty-six different nations served in the U.S. Army. This surge of Old World soldiers challenged the American military's cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions and required military leaders to reconsider their training methods for the foreign-born troops. How did the U.S. War Department integrate this diverse group into a united fighting force?The war department drew on the experiences of progressive social welfare reformers, who worked with immigrants in urban settlement houses, and they listened to industrial efficiency experts, who connected combat performance to morale and personnel management. Perhaps most significantly, the military enlisted the help of ethnic community leaders, who assisted in training, socializing, and Americanizing immigrant troops and who pressured the military to recognize and meet the important cultural and religious needs of the ethnic soldiers. These community leaders negotiated the Americanization process by promoting patriotism and loyalty to the United States while retaining key ethnic cultural traditions.Offering an exciting look at an unexplored area of military history, Americans All! Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I constitutes a work of special interest to scholars in the fields of military history, sociology, and ethnic studies. Ford'sresearch illuminates what it meant for the U.S. military to reexamine early twentieth-century nativism; instead of forcing soldiers into a melting pot, war department policies created an atmosphere that made both American and ethnic pride acceptable.During the war, a German officer commented on the ethnic diversity of the American army and noted, with some amazement, that these "semi-Americans" considered themselves to be "true-born sons of their adopted country." The officer was wrong on one count. The immigrant soldiers were not "semi-Americans"; they were "Americans all!"
Download or read book The Deaths of Others written by John Tirman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans are greatly concerned about the number of our troops killed in battle--33,000 in the Korean War; 58,000 in Vietnam; 4,500 in Iraq--and rightly so. But why are we so indifferent, often oblivious, to the far greater number of casualties suffered by those we fight and those we fight for? This is the compelling, largely unasked question John Tirman answers in The Deaths of Others. Between six and seven million people died in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians. And yet Americans devote little attention to these deaths. Other countries, however, do pay attention, and Tirman argues that if we want to understand why there is so much anti-Americanism around the world, the first place to look is how we conduct war. We understandably strive to protect our own troops, but our rules of engagement with the enemy are another matter. From atomic weapons and carpet bombing in World War II to napalm and daisy cutters in Vietnam and beyond, our weapons have killed large numbers of civilians and enemy soldiers. Americans, however, are mostly ignorant of these methods, believing that American wars are essentially just, necessary, and "good." Trenchant and passionate, The Deaths of Others forces readers to consider the tragic consequences of American military action not just for Americans, but especially for those we fight against.
Download or read book Military Coercion and US Foreign Policy written by Melanie W. Sisson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the use of military force as a coercive tool by the United States, using lessons drawn from the post-Cold War era (1991–2018). The volume reveals that despite its status as sole superpower during the post-Cold War period, US efforts to coerce other states failed as often as they succeeded. In the coming decades, the United States will face states that are more capable and creative, willing to challenge its interests and able to take advantage of missteps and vulnerabilities. By using lessons derived from in-depth case studies and statistical analysis of an original dataset of more than 100 coercive incidents in the post-Cold War era, this book generates insight into how the US military can be used to achieve policy goals. Specifically, it provides guidance about the ways in which, and the conditions under which, the US armed forces can work in concert with economic and diplomatic elements of US power to create effective coercive strategies. This book will be of interest to students of US national security, US foreign policy, strategic studies and International Relations in general.
Download or read book The American Way of War written by Russell Frank Weigley and published by New York : Macmillan. This book was released on 1973 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this authoritative and controversial study, Russel F. Weigley traces the emergence of a characteristic American way of war - in which the object of military strategy has come to mean total destruction of the enemy, first of his armed forces, often of the whole fabric of his society.
Download or read book Anatomy of Failure written by Harlan Ullman and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, since the end of World War II, has the United States either lost every war it started or failed in every military intervention it prosecuted? Harlan Ullman's new book answers this most disturbing question, a question Americans would never think of even asking because this record of failure has been largely hidden in plain sight or forgotten with the passage of time. The most straightforward answer is that presidents and administrations have consistently failed to use sound strategic thinking and lacked sufficient knowledge or understanding of the circumstances prior to deciding whether or not to employ force. Making this case is an in-depth analysis of the records of presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama and Donald Trump in using force or starting wars. His recommended solutions begin with a "brains-based" approach to sound strategic thinking to address one of the major causes of failure ----the inexperience of too many of the nation's commanders-in-chief. Ullman reinforces his argument through the use of autobiographical vignettes that provide a human dimension and insight into the reasons for failure, in some cases making public previously unknown history. The clarion call of Anatomy of Failure is that both a sound strategic framework and sufficient knowledge and understanding of the circumstance that may lead to using force are vital. Without them, failure is virtually guaranteed.
Download or read book On War written by Carl von Clausewitz and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Intervention written by Richard Haass and published by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This book was released on 1999 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Fact Sheet Draws upon case studies - including Iraq, Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, & Lebanon - & suggests political & military guidelines for potential U.S. military interventions ranging from peacekeeping & humanitarian operations to preventative strikes & all-out warfare.
Download or read book The Foreign Burial of American War Dead written by Chris Dickon and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Normandy, Flanders Field and other overseas cemeteries of the American Battle Monument Commission (ABMC) are well known. However, lesser-known burial sites of American war dead exist all over the world--in Australia and across the Pacific Rim, in Canada and Mexico, Libya and Spain, most of Europe and as far north as the Russian Arctic. This is the history of American soldiers buried abroad since the American Revolution. It traces the evolution of American attitudes and practices about war dead and provides the names and locations of those still buried abroad in non-ABMC locations.
Download or read book How We Fight written by Dominic Tierney and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans love war. We’ve never run from a fight. Our triumphs from the American Revolution to World War II define who we are as a nation and a people. Americans hate war. Our leaders rush us into conflicts without knowing the facts or understanding the consequences. Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq and Afghanistan define who we are as a nation and a people. How We Fight explores the extraordinary double-mindedness with which Americans approach war and articulates the opposing perspectives that have governed our responses throughout history: the “crusade” tradition, or our love of grand quests to defend democratic values and overthrow tyrants; and the “quagmire” tradition, or our resistance to the work of nation-building and its inevitable cost in dollars and American lives. How can one nation be so split? Studying conflicts from the Civil War to the present, Dominic Tierney uncovers the secret history of American foreign policy and provides a frank and insightful look at how Americans respond to the ultimate challenge. And he shows how U.S. military ventures can succeed. His innovative model for tackling the challenges of modern war suggests the possibility of enduring victory in Afghanistan and elsewhere by rediscovering a lost American warrior tradition.
Download or read book What Soldiers Do written by Mary Louise Roberts and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-17 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways. That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.
Download or read book War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning written by Chris Hedges and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: General George S. Patton famously said, "Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, I do love it so!" Though Patton was a notoriously single-minded general, it is nonetheless a sad fact that war gives meaning to many lives, a fact with which we have become familiar now that America is once again engaged in a military conflict. War is an enticing elixir. It gives us purpose, resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. Chris Hedges of The New York Times has seen war up close -- in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central America -- and he has been troubled by what he has seen: friends, enemies, colleagues, and strangers intoxicated and even addicted to war's heady brew. In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, he tackles the ugly truths about humanity's love affair with war, offering a sophisticated, nuanced, intelligent meditation on the subject that is also gritty, powerful, and unforgettable.
Download or read book Taking Leave Taking Liberties written by Aaron Hiltner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American soldiers overseas during World War II were famously said to be “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” But the assaults, rapes, and other brutal acts didn’t only happen elsewhere, far away from a home front depicted as safe and unscathed by the “good war.” To the contrary, millions of American and Allied troops regularly poured into ports like New York and Los Angeles while on leave. Euphemistically called “friendly invasions,” these crowds of men then forced civilians to contend with the same kinds of crime and sexual assault unfolding in places like Britain, France, and Australia. With unsettling clarity, Aaron Hiltner reveals what American troops really did on the home front. While GIs are imagined to have spent much of the war in Europe or the Pacific, before the run-up to D-Day in the spring of 1944 as many as 75% of soldiers were stationed in US port cities, including more than three million who moved through New York City. In these cities, largely uncontrolled soldiers sought and found alcohol and sex, and the civilians living there—women in particular—were not safe from the violence fomented by these de facto occupying armies. Troops brought their pocketbooks and demand for “dangerous fun” to both red-light districts and city centers, creating a new geography of vice that challenged local police, politicians, and civilians. Military authorities, focused above all else on the war effort, invoked written and unwritten legal codes to grant troops near immunity to civil policing and prosecution. The dangerous reality of life on the home front was well known at the time—even if it has subsequently been buried beneath nostalgia for the “greatest generation.” Drawing on previously unseen military archival records, Hiltner recovers a mostly forgotten chapter of World War II history, demonstrating that the war’s ill effects were felt all over—including by those supposedly safe back home.
Download or read book Mission Failure written by Michael Mandelbaum and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mission Failure argues that, in the past 25 years, the U.S. military has turned to missions that are largely humanitarian and socio-political - and that this ideologically-driven foreign policy generally leads to failure.
Download or read book Sovereign Soldiers written by Grant Madsen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-04-04 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They helped conquer the greatest armies ever assembled. Yet no sooner had they tasted victory after World War II than American generals suddenly found themselves governing their former enemies, devising domestic policy and making critical economic decisions for people they had just defeated in battle. In postwar Germany and Japan, this authority fell into the hands of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, along with a cadre of military officials like Lucius Clay and the Detroit banker Joseph Dodge. In Sovereign Soldiers, Grant Madsen tells the story of how this cast of characters assumed an unfamiliar and often untold policymaking role. Seeking to avoid the harsh punishments meted out after World War I, military leaders believed they had to rebuild and rehabilitate their former enemies; if they failed they might cause an even deadlier World War III. Although they knew economic recovery would be critical in their effort, none was schooled in economics. Beyond their hopes, they managed to rebuild not only their former enemies but the entire western economy during the early Cold War. Madsen shows how army leaders learned from the people they governed, drawing expertise that they ultimately brought back to the United States during the Eisenhower Administration in 1953. Sovereign Soldiers thus traces the circulation of economic ideas around the globe and back to the United States, with the American military at the helm.
Download or read book Entangling Alliances written by Susan Zeiger and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2010-03-22 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the twentieth century, American male soldiers returned home from wars with foreign-born wives in tow, often from allied but at times from enemy nations, resulting in a new, official category of immigrant: the “allied” war bride. These brides began to appear en masse after World War I, peaked after World War II, and persisted through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. GIs also met and married former “enemy” women under conditions of postwar occupation, although at times the US government banned such unions. In this comprehensive, complex history of war brides in 20th-century American history, Susan Zeiger uses relationships between American male soldiers and foreign women as a lens to view larger issues of sexuality, race, and gender in United States foreign relations. Entangling Alliances draws on a rich array of sources to trace how war and postwar anxieties about power and national identity have long been projected onto war brides, and how these anxieties translate into public policies, particularly immigration.
Download or read book A Great Place to Have a War written by Joshua Kurlantzick and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.
