Download or read book War of Supply written by David D. Dworak and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The era of modern warfare introduced in World War II presented the Allied Powers with one of the more complicated logistical challenges of the century: how to develop an extensive support network that could supply and maintain a vast military force comprised of multiple services and many different nations thousands of miles away from their home ports. The need to keep tanks rolling, airplanes flying, and food and aid in continuous supply was paramount to defeating the Nazi regime. In this extensively researched book, David Dworak takes readers behind the scenes and breaks down the nuances of strategic operations for each of the great Mediterranean military campaigns between 1942 and the conclusion of World War II on May 8, 1945. Dworak gives readers a glimpse behind the curtain, to show how the vast administrative bureaucracy developed by the Allies waged a literal "war of matériel" that gave them a distinct, strategic advantage over the Axis powers. From North Africa to Southern France, their continued efforts and innovation developed the framework that helped create and maintain the theater of war and, ultimately, paved the path to victory.
Download or read book Supplying War written by Martin van Creveld and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1977 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did Napoleon succeed in 1805 but fail in 1812? Were the railways vital to Prussia's victory over France in 1870? Was the famous Schlieffen Plan militarily sound? Could the European half of World War II have been ended in 1944? These are only a few of the questions that form the subject-matter of this meticulously researched, lively book. Drawing on a very wide range of unpublished and previously unexploited sources, Martin van Creveld examines the 'nuts and bolts' of war: namely, those formidable problems of movement and supply, transportation and administration, so often mentioned - but rarely explored - by the vast majority of books on military history. In doing so he casts his net far and wide, from Gustavus Adolphus to Rommel, from Marlborough to Patton, subjecting the operations of each to a thorough analysis from a fresh and unusual point of view. The result is a fascinating book that has something new to say about virtually every one of the most important campaigns waged in Europe during the last two centuries.
Download or read book Civil War Supply and Strategy written by Earl J. Hess and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2020-10-07 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award Civil War Supply and Strategy stands as a sweeping examination of the decisive link between the distribution of provisions to soldiers and the strategic movement of armies during the Civil War. Award-winning historian Earl J. Hess reveals how that dynamic served as the key to success, especially for the Union army as it undertook bold offensives striking far behind Confederate lines. How generals and their subordinates organized military resources to provide food for both men and animals under their command, he argues, proved essential to Union victory. The Union army developed a powerful logistical capability that enabled it to penetrate deep into Confederate territory and exert control over select regions of the South. Logistics and supply empowered Union offensive strategy but limited it as well; heavily dependent on supply lines, road systems, preexisting railroad lines, and natural waterways, Union strategy worked far better in the more developed Upper South. Union commanders encountered unique problems in the Deep South, where needed infrastructure was more scarce. While the Mississippi River allowed Northern armies to access the region along a narrow corridor and capture key cities and towns along its banks, the dearth of rail lines nearly stymied William T. Sherman’s advance to Atlanta. In other parts of the Deep South, the Union army relied on massive strategic raids to destroy resources and propel its military might into the heart of the Confederacy. As Hess’s study shows, from the perspective of maintaining food supply and moving armies, there existed two main theaters of operation, north and south, that proved just as important as the three conventional eastern, western, and Trans-Mississippi theaters. Indeed, the conflict in the Upper South proved so different from that in the Deep South that the ability of Federal officials to negotiate the logistical complications associated with army mobility played a crucial role in determining the outcome of the war.
Download or read book The War Against Rommel s Supply Lines 1942 1943 written by Alan Levine and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1999-06-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exciting account of a little-known, yet vital part of World War II, the Allied effort to blockade Axis forces in North Africa with a relatively small number of planes and submarines included some of the war's most spectacular air battles, and opened the way to the attack on Fortress Europe from the south. This is the first book-length treatment of the crucial struggle to cut Axis supply lines in the Tunisian campaign of 1942-1943, a battle often ignored or played down even by official historians. The campaign marked the first big U.S. victory against the Axis powers and served as a proving ground for several top Allied commanders. This study fills an important gap in the history of the war, reevaluating the development of Allied airpower and the role of Italy in the campaign. Allied success in interdiction was a critical factor in the greatest Allied victory in the Mediterranean campaign, a victory which left the enemy so weakened that it could not stop the subsequent invasion of Europe from the south. Despite initial disorganization and early disappointments, the British waged one of only two successful submarine campaigns ever fought. This study describes some of the war's most amazing air battles, notably Operation Flax against the enemy's air transport fleet, and attacks on convoys, all interwoven with the events of the ground war in the desert and comparisons with the Pacific effort. It details the struggle to reorganize and improve the Allied effort, the belated success of sea sweeps against enemy ships, and the final victory in the spring of 1943, in which an air blockade was clamped on the sea and sky approaches to Tunisia.
Download or read book Logistics in World War II written by United States. War Department. General Staff and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Civil War Logistics written by Earl J. Hess and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies by the New York Military Affairs Symposium During the Civil War, neither the Union nor the Confederate army could have operated without effective transportation systems. Moving men, supplies, and equipment required coordination on a massive scale, and Earl J. Hess’s Civil War Logistics offers the first comprehensive analysis of this vital process. Utilizing an enormous array of reports, dispatches, and personal accounts by quartermasters involved in transporting war materials, Hess reveals how each conveyance system operated as well as the degree to which both armies accomplished their logistical goals. In a society just realizing the benefits of modern travel technology, both sides of the conflict faced challenges in maintaining national and regional lines of transportation. Union and Confederate quartermasters used riverboats, steamers, coastal shipping, railroads, wagon trains, pack trains, cattle herds, and their soldiers in the long and complicated chain that supported the military operations of their forces. Soldiers in blue and gray alike tried to destroy the transportation facilities of their enemy, firing on river boats and dismantling rails to disrupt opposing supply lines while defending their own means of transport. According to Hess, Union logistical efforts proved far more successful than Confederate attempts to move and supply its fighting forces, due mainly to the North’s superior administrative management and willingness to seize transportation resources when needed. As the war went on, the Union’s protean system grew in complexity, size, and efficiency, while that of the Confederates steadily declined in size and effectiveness until it hardly met the needs of its army. Indeed, Hess concludes that in its use of all types of military transportation, the Federal government far surpassed its opponent and thus laid the foundation for Union victory in the Civil War.
Download or read book The Hump written by John D. Plating and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-08 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicling the most ambitious airlift in history . . . Carried out over arguably the world’s most rugged terrain, in its most inhospitable weather system, and under the constant threat of enemy attack, the trans-Himalayan airlift of World War II delivered nearly 740,000 tons of cargo to China, making it possible for Chinese forces to wage war against Japan. This operation dwarfed the supply delivery by land over the Burma and Ledo Roads and represented the fullest expression of the U.S. government’s commitment to China. In this groundbreaking work—the first concentrated historical study of the world’s first sustained combat airlift operation—John D. Plating argues that the Hump airlift was initially undertaken to serve as a display of American support for its Chinese ally, which had been at war with Japan since 1937. However, by 1944, with the airlift’s capability gaining momentum, American strategists shifted the purpose of air operations to focus on supplying American forces in China in preparation for the U.S.’s final assault on Japan. From the standpoint of war materiel, the airlift was the precondition that made possible all other allied military action in the China-Burma-India theater, where Allied troops were most commonly inserted, supplied, and extracted by air. Drawing on extensive research that includes Chinese and Japanese archives, Plating tells a spellbinding story in a context that relates it to the larger movements of the war and reveals its significance in terms of the development of military air power. The Hump demonstrates the operation’s far-reaching legacy as it became the example and prototype of the Berlin Airlift, the first air battle of the Cold War. The Hump operation also bore significantly on the initial moves of the Chinese Civil War, when Air Transport Command aircraft moved entire armies of Nationalist troops hundreds of miles in mere days in order to prevent Communist forces from being the ones to accept the Japanese surrender.
Download or read book Pacific Express written by Sandra V. McGee and published by Amphibious Operations in the S. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning author William L. McGee has gathered under one cover an edited collection of the best works by noted military historians on the importance of military logistics in World War II. "Pacific Express" is on the Marine Corps Commandant's Professional List and is required reading for active duty and reserve Marines on the subject of Logistics.
Download or read book War Porn written by Roy Scranton and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “War porn,” n. Videos, images, and narratives featuring graphic violence, often brought back from combat zones, viewed voyeuristically or for emotional gratification. Such media are often presented and circulated without context, though they may be used as evidence of war crimes. War porn is also, in Roy Scranton’s searing debut novel, a metaphor for the experience of war in the age of the War on Terror, the fracturing and fragmentation of perspective, time, and self that afflicts soldiers and civilians alike, the global networks and face-to-face moments that suture our fragmented lives together. In War Porn three lives fit inside one another like nesting dolls: a restless young woman at an end-of-summer barbecue in Utah; an American soldier in occupied Baghdad; and Qasim al-Zabadi, an Iraqi math professor, who faces the US invasion of his country with fear, denial, and perseverance. As War Porn cuts from America to Iraq and back again, as home and hell merge, we come to see America through the eyes of the occupied, even as we see Qasim become a prisoner of the occupation. Through the looking glass of War Porn, Scranton reveals the fragile humanity that connects Americans and Iraqis, torturers and the tortured, victors and their victims.
Download or read book The Civil War Supply Catalogue written by Alan Wellikoff and published by Three Rivers Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For memorabilia collectors and military buffs, nostalgia fans and historians both amateur and professional, here is the ultimate reference guide to Civil War artifacts still available today--as well as such "contemporary" items as Abraham Lincoln impersonators and reenactment groups to add a note of authenticity to celebrations. 250 photos and drawings.
Download or read book Threshold of War written by Waldo Heinrichs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990-03-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the first comprehensive treatment of the American entry into World War II to appear in over thirty-five years, Waldo Heinrichs' volume places American policy in a global context, covering both the European and Asian diplomatic and military scenes, with Roosevelt at the center. Telling a tale of ever-broadening conflict, this vivid narrative weaves back and forth from the battlefields in the Soviet Union, to the intense policy debates within Roosevelt's administration, to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck, to the precarious and delicate negotiations with Japan. Refuting the popular portrayal of Roosevelt as a vacillating, impulsive man who displayed no organizational skills in his decision-making during this period, Heinrichs presents him as a leader who acted with extreme caution and deliberation, who always kept his options open, and who, once Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union stalled in July, 1941, acted rapidly and with great determination. This masterful account of a key moment in American history captures the tension faced by Roosevelt, Churchill, Stimson, Hull, and numerous others as they struggled to shape American policy in the climactic nine months before Pearl Harbor.
Download or read book The War Against Rommel s Supply Lines 1942 43 written by Alan J. Levine and published by Stackpole Military History. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps regrouped in Tunisia in late 1942, the Allies began a blockade of the Germans with a relatively small number of planes and submarines. Rommel's campaign relied on sea and air supply lines across the Mediterranean and would bve crippled if the flow of fuel and supplies was cut off. The American and British interdiction operation produced some of the fiercest air battles of World War II and one of only two successful submarine campaigns ever fought. It played a critical role in the Allied victory in North Africa."--Back cover.
Download or read book Logistics in World War II written by Center of Military History United States Army and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-01-21 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Logistics in World War II: Final Report of the Army Service Forces is the after-action report of the vast logistics undertaking by the ASF headquarters both in the zone of interior and in distant theaters during World War II, considered to be a logistician's war. Long out of print, this facsimile edition covers what was done, how it was done, the problems and their solutions, and the successes and failures, ending with key lessons for future application. The report provides insights into methods and practices to achieve logistics readiness, and serves as an invaluable reference source for those researching the logistical dimension stretching from the factory floor to the foxhole. ARMY SERVICE FORCES, known as the Services of Supply until 12 March 1943, was responsible for administrative, supply (including procurement), and service activities for the War Department as a whole. With its creation, Army logistics was put on what promised to be a businesslike footing.
Download or read book A Call to Arms written by Maury Klein and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The colossal scale of World War II required a mobilization effort greater than anything attempted in all of the world's history. The United States had to fight a war across two oceans and three continents--and to do so, it had to build and equip a military that was all but nonexistent before the war began. Never in the nation's history did it have to create, outfit, transport, and supply huge armies, navies, and air forces on so many distant and disparate fronts. The Axis powers might have fielded better-trained soldiers, better weapons, and better tanks and aircraft, but they could not match American productivity. The United States buried its enemies in aircraft, ships, tanks, and guns; in this sense, American industry and American workers, won World War II. The scale of the effort was titanic, and the result historic. Not only did it determine the outcome of the war, but it transformed the American economy and society. Maury Klein's A Call to Arms is the definitive narrative history of this epic struggle--told by one of America's greatest historians of business and economics--and renders the transformation of America with a depth and vividness never available before.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of the Second World War Volume 2 Politics and Ideology written by Richard Bosworth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-23 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War is often described as an extension of politics by violent means. With contributions from twenty-eight eminent historians, Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of the Second World War examines the relationship between ideology and politics in the war's origins, dynamics and consequences. Part I examines the ideologies of the combatants and shows how the war can be understood as a struggle of words, ideas and values with the rival powers expressing divergent claims to justice and controlling news from the front in order to sustain moral and influence international opinion. Part II looks at politics from the perspective of pre-war and wartime diplomacy as well as examining the way in which neutrals were treated and behaved. The volume concludes by assessing the impact of states, politics and ideology on the fate of individuals as occupied and liberated peoples, collaborators and resistors, and as British and French colonial subjects.
Download or read book Pogue s War written by Forrest C. Pogue and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2006-02-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " With a foreword by Stephen Ambrose and a preface by Franklin D. Anderson Forrest Pogue (1912-1996) was undoubtedly one of the greatest World War II combat historians. Born and educated in Kentucky, he is perhaps best known for his definitive four-volume biography of General George C. Marshall. But, as Pogue's War makes clear, he was also a pioneer in the development of oral history in the twentieth century, as well as an impressive interviewer with an ability to relate to people at all levels, from the private in the trenches to the general carrying four stars. Pogue's War is drawn from Forrest Pogue's handwritten pocket notebooks, carried with him throughout the war, long regarded as unreadable because of his often atrocious handwriting. Pogue himself began expanding the diaries a few short years after the war, with the intent of eventual publication. At last this work is being published. Supplemented with carefully deciphered and transcribed selections from his diaries, the heart of the book is straight from the field. Much of the material has never before seen print. From D-Day to VE-Day, Pogue experienced and documented combat on the front lines, describing action on Omaha Beach, in the Huertgen Forest, and on other infamous fields of conflict. He not only graphically -- yet also often poetically -- recounts the extreme circumstances of battle, but he also notes his fellow soldiers' innermost thoughts, feelings, opinions, and attitudes about the cruelty of war. As a trained historian, Pogue describes how he went about his work and how the Army's history program functioned in the European Theater of Operations. His entries from his time at the history headquarters in Paris show the city in the early days after the liberation in a unique light. Pogue's War has an immediacy that much official history lacks, and is a remarkable addition to any World War II bookshelf. Franklin D. Anderson, Forrest Pogue's nephew by marriage, is a longtime educator. He lives in Princeton, Kentucky.
Download or read book The Burning Shore written by Ed Offley and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 15, 1942, as thousands of vacationers lounged in the sun at Virginia Beach, two massive fireballs erupted just offshore from a convoy of oil tankers steaming into Chesapeake Bay. While men, women, and children gaped from the shore, two damaged oil tankers fell out of line and began to sink. Then a small escort warship blew apart in a violent explosion. Navy warships and aircraft peppered the water with depth charges, but to no avail. Within the next twenty-four hours, a fourth ship lay at the bottom of the channel— all victims of twenty-nine-year-old Kapitänleutnant Horst Degen and his crew aboard the German U-boat U-701. In The Burning Shore, acclaimed military reporter Ed Offley presents a thrilling account of the bloody U-boat offensive along America’s east coast during the first half of 1942, using the story of Degen’s three war patrols as a lens through which to view this forgotten chapter of World War II. For six months, German U-boats prowled the waters off the eastern seaboard, sinking merchant ships with impunity, and threatening to sever the lifeline of supplies flowing from America to Great Britain. Degen’s successful infiltration of the Chesapeake Bay in mid-June drove home the U-boats’ success, and his spectacular attack terrified the American public as never before. But Degen’s cruise was interrupted less than a month later, when U.S. Army Air Forces Lieutenant Harry J. Kane and his aircrew spotted the silhouette of U-701 offshore. The ensuing clash signaled a critical turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic—and set the stage for an unlikely friendship between two of the episode’s survivors. A gripping tale of heroism and sacrifice, The Burning Shore leads readers into a little-known theater of World War II, where Hitler’s U-boats came close to winning the Battle of the Atlantic before American sailors and airmen could finally drive them away.
