Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Military

Enslaved Black people took up arms and fought in nearly every colonial conflict in early British North America. They sometimes served as loyal soldiers to protect and promote their owners' interests in the hope that they might be freed or be rewarded for their service. But for many Black combatants, war and armed conflict offered an opportunity to attack the chattel slave system itself and promote Black emancipation and freedom.

War presents the most degraded moral environment humanity creates. Individuality is subsumed in collective violence, and humanity is obscured as a faceless, merciless enemy. A barbaric logic has guided the conduct of war throughout history. Yet as Cathal Nolan reveals in this powerful book, even as war can obliterate hope and decency at the grand level it simultaneously produces conditions that permit astonishing exceptions of mercy and shared dignity. Pulling the trigger is usually both the expedient thing and required by war's grim and remorseless calculus.

In the Cold War conflict that pitted nuclear superpowers against one another, Europe was the principal battleground. Washington and Moscow had troops on the ground and missiles in the fields of their respective allies, the NATO nations and the states of the Warsaw Pact. Euromissiles—intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be used exclusively in the regional theater of war—highlighted how the peoples of Europe were dangerously placed between hammer and anvil.

In the forty-four months between December 1941 and August 1945, the Pacific Theater absorbed the attention of the American nation and military longer than any other. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. especially was committed to confronting Tokyo as a matter of urgent priority. But from Oahu to Tokyo was a long, sanguinary slog, averaging an advance of just three miles per day.

The Great "What Ifs" of the American Civil War: Historians Tackle the Conflict's Most Intriguing Possibilities is a collection of fourteen essays by the historians at Emerging Civil War, and includes a Foreword by acclaimed alternate history writer Peter G. Tsouras.

The Kennedy Withdrawal offers an inside look at presidential decision-making in this liminal period of the Vietnam War and makes clear that portrayals of Kennedy as a dove are overdrawn. His proposed withdrawal was in fact a cagey strategy for keeping the United States involved in the fight—a strategy the country adopted decades later in Afghanistan.

After Nuremberg is about the fleeting nature of American punishment for German war criminals convicted at the twelve Nuremberg trials of 1946-1949. Because of repeated American grants of clemency and parole, ninety-seven of the 142 Germans convicted at the Nuremberg trials, many of them major offenders, regained their freedom years, sometimes decades, ahead of schedule. High-ranking Nazi plunderers, kidnappers, slave laborers, and mass murderers all walked free by 1958.

Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada's role in the bloody conflict that claimed more than 600,000 lives. A surprising 20,000 Canadians went south to take up arms on both sides of the conflict, while thousands of enslaved people, draft dodgers, deserters, recruiters, plotters, and spies fled northward to take shelter in the attic that is Canada. Though many escaped slavery and found safety through the Underground Railroad, they were later joined by KKK members wanted for murder.

In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. His goal was to secure weapons and start a slave rebellion. The raid was a failure, but it galvanized the nation and sparked the Civil War. Still one of the most controversial figures in American history, John Brown's actions raise interesting questions about unsanctioned violence that can be justified for a greater good.

In the last days of World War II, a new weapon terrorized the United States Navy in the Pacific. Told from the perspective of the men who endured this horrifying tactic, At War with the Wind is the first book to recount in nail-biting detail what it was like to experience an attack by Japanese kamikazes. Born of desperation in the face of overwhelming material superiority, suicide attacks—by aircraft, submarines, small boats, and even manned rocket-boosted gliders—were capable of inflicting catastrophic damage, testing the resolve of officers and sailors as never before.

The Second World War was the defining moment in the history of the Soviet Union. With Stalin at the helm, it emerged victorious at a huge economic and human cost. But even before the fighting had ended, Stalin began to turn against the architects of success. In this original and comprehensive study, Alfred J. Rieber examines Stalin as a wartime leader, arguing that his policies were profoundly paradoxical.

World War II was a media war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the press to a great extent, of course, but as the war progressed, the media also came to influence commanders' decisions on the battlefield. The Media Offensive offers a new way to understand military-media relations during World War II. The press and public opinion shaped not only how the conflict was seen but also how it was fought. In what could be called "the new history of war reporting," the focus is switched from how the military controlled reporters to how military decisions were shaped by the press.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, it invaded Georgia. Both states are part of Russia's "near abroad"—newly independent states that were once part of the Soviet Union. While the Russia-Georgia war of 2008 faded from the headlines in the wake of the global recession, the geopolitical contest that created it did not. Six years later, the specter of a revanchist Russia returned when Putin's forces invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula. Eminent political geographer Gerard Toal moves beyond the polemical rhetoric to study the underlying territorial conflicts and geopolitical struggles.

The service of African-American soldiers during the Civil War is one of that conflict's most stirring, if still not completely understood, aspects. Riders in the Storm covers the story of the African-American cavalrymen of the 5th Massachusetts. Where the infantry regiments recruited largely free Blacks from the North, the 5th focused on escaped slaves, who it was believed would be better horsemen. Not only would the former slaves be fighting for themselves, but they would be fighting to liberate loved ones still enslaved.

An eleven-year-old boy and his siblings fight for survival after the evil of the Nazi regime descends upon Poland. Time after time, they miraculously escape certain death as the murderous fascists attempt to make their hometown of Tluste Judenrein. Their luck seems to have run out when the Germans order to liquidate their work camp. Unexpected help comes from Timush, a man known for his terrible deeds against the Jews.

R. D. Hooker, Jr. was a combat soldier and leader in five wars. He then served as a senior Pentagon advisor and as a White House staff member in four different administrations. At the time of his retirement from the military in 2010, he was the most decorated colonel in the US Army. Beginning with his enlistment at eighteen in 1975, this memoir chronicles his experiences in the post-Vietnam Army as a young paratrooper, as a West Point cadet, and as a combatant in the many military conflicts which followed.

By early 1951, American forces and their UN allies had been driven more than 100 miles down the Korean peninsula by the Chinese. The situation was bleak when Gen. Matthew Ridgway ordered a last stand at the village of Chipyong-ni. There a single regiment (the 23rd Infantry) of fewer than 5,000 U.S. soldiers defeated a Chinese division of 25,000 men in what has been called the Gettysburg of the Korean War.

The First Counterspy is the story of spy, counterspy, and an American family unwittingly caught in its web. Until this case, the FBI had never recruited civilian counterspies to catch a Soviet agent. The first two were Larry Haas, a leading aviation engineer at Bell Aviation, and Leona Franey, head librarian at Bell's technical library. The FBI pitted them against Andrei Ivanovich Schevchenko, operating legally as one of the highest Soviet officials in the United States during WWII, and illegally as head of a wide-ranging spy network hidden within the American aviation industry.

A story ultimately without a time and ultimately without a place. It's a memoir of families across generations of peace and of war, of homes that become lost and hopes that are kept, and a belief in a future that's better than the present. In each family, a fundamental life event spawns ripples that sweep across time and generations that would fade forever without exploration and would otherwise shed all meaning. The key event in many lives is making the decision to leave home forever and to strike out, not knowing if it leads to disaster or to a future and a better place.

In December 1944, while supporting General MacArthur's invasion of the Philippines, Admiral William "Bull" Halsey neglected the Law of Storms, placing the mighty US Third Fleet in harm's way. Drawing on extensive interviews with nearly every living survivor and rescuer, as well as many families of lost sailors, transcripts and other records from naval courts of inquiry, ships' logs, personal letters, and diaries, Bruce Henderson finds some of the story's truest heroes exhibiting selflessness, courage, and even defiance.