Bøger i Legacies of War serien

Jack H. McCall Sr. was a born storyteller, an inveterate practical joker, and a proud Tennessean whose flaws included a considerable taste for candy, or "pogiebait" in Marine parlance. Like so many other able-bodied young people in on the eve of World War II, he decided to enlist in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Much more than a family memoir or nostalgic wartime reminiscence, this painstakingly researched biography presents a rich, engaging study of the U.S. Marine Corps, particularly McCall's understudied unit, the Ninth Defense Battalion--the "Fighting Ninth." The author provides a window into the day-to-day service of a Marine during World War II, with important coverage of fighting in the Pacific Theater. McCall also depicts life in wartime Franklin, Tennessee, and offers a poignant and personal tribute to his father. McCall dramatizes some of the classic themes of the war memoir genre (war is hell, but memories fade!), but he sets riveting descriptions of decisive action against rarely seen views of mundane work and daily life, supported with maps, photographs, and fresh interpretations. Another distinction of this work is its attention to the action on Guam, a very unpleasant late-war "mopping up" that has received relatively little scholarly attention. In his portrait of the bitter island-hopping war in the Pacific, the author shows how both U.S. and Japanese soldiers were often eager innocents drawn to the cauldron of conflict and indoctrinated and trained by their respective governments. Reflecting on the action late in life, Jack (as well as several other Ninth veterans) came to a begrudging respect for the enemy. >

This investigation of Karen Baum Gordon's family history is grounded in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie Baum, Karen's grandmother, between 1936 and 1941. In five parts, Gordon examines pieces of these well-worn, handwritten letters and other archival documents in order to discover what her family experienced during the Nazi period.

While many associate the concept referred to as the 'military-industrial complex' with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the roots of it existed two hundred years earlier. This concept, as Benjamin Franklin Cooling writes, was 'part of historical lore' as the American nation discovered the inextricable relationship between arms and the State.

While biographies of William Howard Taft and histories of US-Philippine relations are easy to find, few works focus on Taft's vision for the Philippines. William Howard Taft and the Philippines fills this void in the scholarship, taking up Taft's vantage point on America's imperialist venture in the Philippine Islands between 1900 and 1921.

Analyses student activism at the University of Pittsburgh, Ohio University, and West Virginia University during the Vietnam War era. Drawing from a wide variety of sources, Thomas Weyant tracks the dynamics of a student-led campus response to the war in real time and outside the purview of the national media.

After more than four decades, the Viet Nam War continues to haunt America's national memory, culture, politics, and military actions. In this probing study, Susan Lyn Eastman examines a range of cultural productions that have tried to grapple with the psychic afterlife of traumatic violence resulting from the ill-fated conflict in Southeast Asia.

One of the deadliest phases of the Holocaust, the Nazi regime's "Operation Reinhard"produced three major death camps--Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor--which claimed thelives of 1.8 million Jews. In the 1960s, a small measure of justice came for those victimswhen a score of defendants who had been officers and guards at the camps were convictedof war crimes in West German courts. The conviction rates varied, however. While all butone of fourteen Treblinka defendants were convicted, half of the twelve Sobibor defendantsescaped punishment, and only one of eight Belzec defendants was convicted. Also, despite the enormity of the crimes, the sentences were light in many cases, amounting to>In this meticulous history of the Operation Reinhard trials, Michael S. Bryant examinesa disturbing question: Did compromised jurists engineer acquittals or lenient punishmentsfor proven killers? Drawing on rarely studied archival sources, Bryant concludesthat the trial judges acted in good faith within the bounds of West German law. The keyto successful prosecutions was eyewitness testimony. At Belzec, the near-total efficiencyof the Nazi death machine meant that only one survivor could be found to testify. At Treblinkaand Sobibor, however, prisoner revolts had resulted in a number of survivors whocould give firsthand accounts of specific atrocities and identify participants. The courts, Bryant finds, treated these witnesses with respect and even made allowances for conflictingtestimony. And when handing down sentences, the judges acted in accordance with>Yet, despite these findings, Bryant also shows that West German legal culture washardly blameless during the postwar era. Though ready to convict the mostly workingclasspersonnel of the death camps, the Federal Republic followed policies that insulatedthe judicial elite from accountability for its own role in the Final Solution. While trialrecords show that the "bias" of West German jurists was neither direct nor personal, thestructure of the system ensured that lawyers and judges themselves avoided judgment.

Examines the role of the army chaplain since World War II, revealing how the corps has evolved in the wake of cultural and religious upheaval in American society and momentous changes in US strategic relations, warfare, and weaponry. From 1945 to the present, Anne C. Loveland shows, army chaplains faced several crises that reshaped their roles over time.