JacketFlap connects you to the work of more than 200,000 authors, illustrators, publishers and other creators of books for Children and Young Adults. The site is updated daily with information about every book, author, illustrator, and publisher in the children's / young adult book industry. Members include published authors and illustrators, librarians, agents, editors, publicists, booksellers, publishers and fans. Join now (it's free).
Login or Register for free to create your own customized page of blog posts from your favorite blogs. You can also add blogs by clicking the "Add to MyJacketFlap" links next to the blog name in each post.
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Military, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 25 of 62
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: Military in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
Dogs on Duty : Soldiers’
Best Friends on the Battlefield and Beyond
By Dorothy Hinshaw Patent
Walker & Company. 2012
ISBN: 9780802728456
Grades 2 – 5
To write this review, I checked a copy of
the book out of my local public library.
Dogs are man’s best friend. We’ve
reached for the tissues when reading Finding Zasha (Barrow), Cracker!
: The best dog in Vietnam (Kadohata), Letters from
0 Comments on From the Backlist -- Dogs on Duty by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent as of 5/13/2013 6:01:00 AM
On the 15th of February 1944, Allied planes bombed the abbey at Monte Cassino as part of an extended campaign against the Italians. St. Benedict of Nursia established his first monastery, the source of the Benedictine Order, here around 529. Over four months, the Battle of Monte Cassino would inflict some 200,000 causalities and rank as one of the most horrific battles of World War Two. This excerpt from Peter Caddick-Adams’s Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, recounts the bombing.
On the afternoon of 14 February, Allied artillery shells scattered leaflets containing a printed warning in Italian and English of the abbey’s impending destruction. These were produced by the same US Fifth Army propaganda unit that normally peddled surrender leaflets and devised psychological warfare messages. The monks negotiated a safe passage through the German lines for 16 February — too late, as it turned out. American Harold Bond, of the 36th Texan Division, remembered the texture of the ‘honey-coloured Travertine stone’ of the abbey that fine Tuesday morning, and how ‘the Germans seemed to sense that something important was about to happen for they were strangely quiet’. Journalist Christopher Buckley wrote of ‘the cold blue on that late winter morning’ as formations of Flying Fortresses ‘flew in perfect formation with that arrogant dignity which distinguishes bomber aircraft as they set out upon a sortie’. John Buckeridge of 1/Royal Sussex, up on Snakeshead, recalled his surprise as the air filled with the drone of engines and waves of silver bombers, the sun glinting off their bellies, hove into view. His surprise turned to concern when he saw their bomb doors open — as far as his battalion was concerned the raid was not due for at least another day.
Brigadier Lovett of 7th Indian Brigade was furious at the lack of warning: ‘I was called on the blower and told that the bombers would be over in fifteen minutes… even as I spoke the roar [of aircraft] drowned my voice as the first shower of eggs [bombs] came down.’ At the HQ of the 4/16th Punjabis, the adjutant wrote: ‘We went to the door of the command post and gazed up… There we saw the white trails of many high-level bombers. Our first thought was that they were the enemy. Then somebody said, “Flying Fortresses.” There followed the whistle, swish and blast as the first flights struck at the monastery.’ The first formation released their cargo over the abbey. ‘We could see them fall, looking at this distance like little black stones, and then the ground all around us shook with gigantic shocks as they exploded,’ wrote Harold Bond. ‘Where the abbey had been there was only a huge cloud of smoke and dust which concealed the entire hilltop.’
The aircraft which committed the deed came from the massive resources of the US Fifteenth and Twelfth Air Forces (3,876 planes, including transports and those of the RAF in theatre), whose heavy and medium bombardment wings were based predominantly on two dozen temporary airstrips around Foggia in southern Italy (by comparison, a Luftwaffe return of aircraft numbers in Italy on 31 January revealed 474 fighters, bombers and reconnaissance aircraft in theatre, of which 224 were serviceable). Less than an hour’s flying time from Cassino, the Foggia airfields were primitive, mostly grass affairs, covered with Pierced Steel Planking runways, with all offices, accommodation and other facilities under canvas, or quickly constructed out of wood. In mid-winter the buildings and tents were wet and freezing, and often the runways were swamped with oceans of mud which inhibited flying. Among the personnel stationed there was Joseph Heller, whose famous novel Catch-22 was based on the surreal no-win-situation chaos of Heller’s 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, Twelfth Air Force, with whom he flew sixty combat missions as a bombardier (bomb-aimer) in B-25 Mitchells.
After the first wave of aircraft struck Cassino monastery, a Sikh company of 4/16th Punjabis fell back, understandably, and a German wireless message was heard to announce: ‘Indian troops with turbans are retiring’. Bond and his friends were astonished when, ‘now and again, between the waves of bombers, a wind would blow the smoke away, and to our surprise we saw the gigantic walls of the abbey still stood’. Captain Rupert Clarke, Alexander’s ADC, was watching with his boss. ‘Alex and I were lying out on the ground about 3,000 yards from Cassino. As I watched the bombers, I saw bomb doors open and bombs began to fall well short of the target.’ Back at the 4/16th Punjabis, ‘almost before the ground ceased to shake the telephones were ringing. One of our companies was within 300 yards of the target and the others within 800 yards; all had received a plastering and were asking questions with some asperity.’ Later, when a formation of B-25 medium bombers passed over, Buckley noticed, ‘a bright flame, such as a giant might have produced by striking titanic matches on the mountain-side, spurted swiftly upwards at half a dozen points. Then a pillar of smoke 500 feet high broke upwards into the blue. For nearly five minutes it hung around the building, thinning gradually upwards.’
Nila Kantan of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps was no longer driving trucks, as no vehicles could get up to the 4th Indian Division’s positions overlooking the abbey, so he found himself portering instead. ‘On our shoulders we carried all the things up the hill; the gradient was one in three, and we had to go almost on all fours. I was watching from our hill as all the bombers went in and unloaded their bombs; soon after, our guns blasted the hill, and ruined the monastery.’ For Harold Bond, the end was the strangest, ‘then nothing happened. The smoke and dust slowly drifted away, showing the crumbled masonry with fragments of walls still standing, and men in their foxholes talked with each other about the show they had just seen, but the battlefield remained relatively quiet.’
The abbey had been literally ruined, not obliterated as Freyberg had required, and was now one vast mountain of rubble with many walls still remaining up to a height of forty or more feet, resembling the ‘dead teeth’ General John K. Cannon of the USAAF wanted to remove; ironically those of the north-west corner (the future target of all ground assaults through the hills) remained intact. These the Germans, sheltering from the smaller bombs, immediately occupied and turned into excellent defensive positions, ready to slaughter the 4th Indian Division when they belatedly attacked. As Brigadier Kippenberger observed: ‘Whatever had been the position before, there was no doubt that the enemy was now entitled to garrison the ruins, the breaches in the fifteen-foot-thick walls were nowhere complete, and we wondered whether we had gained anything.’
Peter Caddick-Adams is a Lecturer in Military and Security Studies at the United Kingdom’s Defence Academy, and author of Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell and Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives. He holds the rank of major in the British Territorial Army and has served with U.S. forces in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS. Image credits: (1) Source: U.S. Air Force; (2) Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-2005-0004 / Wittke / CC-BY-SA; (3) Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J26131 / Enz / CC-BY-SA
The Duke of Wellington always has a traffic cone on his head. At least, he does when he is in Glasgow. Let me explain: outside the city’s Gallery of Modern Art on Queen Street, there is an equestrian statue of the celebrated general of the Napoleonic Wars. It was sculpted in 1840-4 by the Franco-Italian artist, Carlo Marochetti (1805-1867), who in his day was a dominant figure in the world of commemorative sculpture. Amongst his works is the statue of Richard the Lionheart, who has sat on his mount and held aloft his sword outside the Houses of Parliament since 1860.
Yet Glasgow’s lofty monument has been a magnet for pranksters – ever since the 1980s, according to the BBC – who regularly scale the pedestal, Copenhagen’s (the horse’s) flanks and then, clinging onto the Iron Duke himself, crown him with an orange traffic cone. This has caused some controversy: the police warn that the acts of intrepid, late-night climbers (who, to be frank, may also have enjoyed the hospitality of the local hostelries) is an act of vandalism and is downright dangerous. The government-funded agency that oversees the care of the country’s historic buildings, Historic Scotland, acknowledges that embellishing Wellington with a modern piece of traffic paraphernalia is now a ‘longstanding tradition’, but emphasises that the statue is A-listed and so needs to be protected from damage – and there has indeed been damage: on different occasions, the general has lost a spur and his sword. Others argue that the ‘coning’ of Wellington is a worthy expression of the people’s sense of humour and that it is as much a part of the cityscape as its historic buildings and monuments. And indeed the statue has become iconic – not because it is a likeness of the Duke of Wellington, but because the general has a cone on his head: postcards proudly depicting this symbol of Glaswegian humour are easy to find.
This controversy sprang to mind when I was first putting together a proposal for writing a Very Short Introduction on the Napoleonic Wars. One of the reviewers very helpfully suggested that the book might consider a chapter on the conflict in historical memory and commemoration. When I came to write this, the final chapter, I considered opening it with an account of the ‘coning’ of the Duke of Wellington, but in the end I felt that such irreverence and jocularity sat rather uneasily with the content of the rest of the book, which tells a tale of aggression, international collapse, and human suffering. Yet the fact that the Duke still sits, as ever, with a garish point on his head – gravity making it lean at a jaunty angle – did make me wonder about how far the Napoleonic Wars (including, by extension, the French Revolutionary Wars from which they emerged – collectively the wars lasted from 1792 to 1815) have left a legacy that is embedded, visibly or otherwise, in our European cityscapes.
This might well be more obvious on the continent than in the British Isles, since there was a direct impact as armies rampaged across Europe – and there were therefore more sites clearly associated with Napoleonic conquest, European resistance to it, and later commemoration of the conflict. In Paris, the very same Marochetti was responsible for one of the reliefs on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the one depicting the Battle of Jemappes (one of the French Revolution’s early victories over the Austrians in 1792). The Arc was completed under the July Monarchy (1830-48), which worked hard to appropriate the Napoleonic legacy for its own political purposes. The same regime nearly awarded Marochetti the commission to create Napoleon’s tomb in the Church of the Invalides when his body was repatriated from Saint Helena. The sculptor, in fact, was producing models for this work as he was busy on Glasgow’s Wellington statue (giving the latter a pedigree that surely reinforces Historic Scotland’s mild-mannered point). Yet British towns and cities are also embedded with places that are connected with the French Wars – as barracks, as headquarters, as places of exile and refuge, as naval dockyards, as depots for PoWs, as sites of popular mobilization. Sometimes the associations are long-forgotten, sometimes they are commemorated. The conflict is remembered in the monuments that ask us not to forget the carnage and in the individuals who are commemorated in stone and bronze. These may, like Glasgow’s Iron Duke, have become so much part of our urban environment that they are almost unnoticed unless they have a cone on their head, but the traces and memory of the French Wars in Britain’s towns and cities… now there’s a project!
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only VSI articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Statue of Wellington, mounted. Outside the Gallery of Modern Art, Queen Street, Glasgow, Scotland [Author: Green Lane, Creative Commons Licence via Wikimedia Commons]
Here are new adult releases for the week. It’s a monster list, with quite a few titles from my wish list. I think I am most excited for Her Amish Man because it looks wonderfully cheesy, and Not Proper Enough. Are there any must haves from your list? Check back tomorrow for new and notable Young Adult releases.
Jessica Scott is the author of Until There Was You, which is the follow-up to her debut title Because of You. Both books are published under one of my favorite imprints, Random House’s Loveswept line. I was delighted when Jessica recently dropped by the virtual offices to chat. She even brought along a present for one of you to win– a digital copy of Until There Was You!
[Manga Maniac Cafe] Describe yourself in 140 characters or less.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] Can you tell us a little about Until There Was You?
[Jessica Scott] Until There Was You is the story of two army captains who must overcome their differences to save a mutual friend from self destruction. I love that it not only features a man in uniform but a woman in uniform, too. Both are seasoned combat veterans with a whole lot of emotional scars.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] How did you come up with the concept and the characters for the story?
[Jessica Scott] I wanted to write a story where the hero had to overcome the heroine’s tough exterior. Strong heroines are tough to write and still make them sympathetic but in Claire, I wanted to find a way to heal the damage from her past.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What three words best describe Claire?
[Jessica Scott] tough, damaged and deeply loyal
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What are three things Evan would never have in his rucksack?
[Jessica Scott] panties. No just kidding (there’s more to that story in the book). Wow, tough question. He’d never have pain medication because he’s so stubborn, he’d never have something not on the packing list. So if the list said no pogey bait, you better believe he would not have any pogey bait.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] If Claire had a theme song, what would it be?
[Jessica Scott] Rescue Me by Digital Summer. It’s 100% Claire’s song.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] If Evan started a campfire, what would he cook over the flames?
[Jessica Scott] He’d probably have some rations, properly packed and sealed. An MRE. He’d cook an MRE (Meal, Ready to Eat)
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What are your greatest creative influences?
[Jessica Scott] Music, honestly. I get some really crazy ideas from music. Otherwise, while it may seem like I’m wrapping myself in the flag, the soldiers around me. There’s so many stories to tell. I only help I tell them in a way that’s respectful and meaningful.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What three things do you need in order to write?
[Jessica Scott] my MacBook (with scrivener), a song stuck in my head and a character that will not leave me alone.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What is the last book that you read that knocked your socks off?
[Jessica Scott] it’s a toss up between Amber Lin’s Giving It Up and Nalini Singh’s Archangel’s Blade. Such incredibly damaged characters.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] If you had to pick one book that turned you on to reading, which would it be?
[Jessica Scott] You know, I don’t ever remember not reading. I’ve always loved reading. I can tell you that authors like Anne McCaffrey are a big part of my inspiration and why I write but I can’t pick just one book.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What do you like to do when you aren’t writing?
[Jessica Scott] um, that would imply that I have a life outside of the army and my family, which I don’t. Writing is my me time, you know?
[Manga Maniac Cafe] How can readers connect with you?
[Jessica Scott] Twitter is probably the easiest. I’m @jessicascott09. I check Facebook pretty regularly (facebook.com/jessicascottauthor and I’m on goodreads though sometimes not every day. Email is the best way to reach me.
Thanks so much for having me here! I’d love to give away a copy of UNTIL THERE WAS YOU to one lucky commenter!
From the author of Because of You comes an all-new contemporary eBook romance. He plays by the rules, she’s not afraid to break them. Now these two strong-willed Army captains will prove that opposites attract . . .
A by-the-book captain with a West Point background, Captain Evan Loehr refuses to mix business with pleasure–except for an unguarded instance years ago when he succumbed to the deep sensuality of redheaded beauty Claire Montoya. From that moment on, though, Evan has been at odds with her, through two deployments to Iraq and back again. But when he is asked to train a team prepping for combat alongside Claire, battle-worn Evan is in for the fight of his life.
Strong, gutsy, and loyal, Captain Claire Montoya has worked hard to earn the rank on her chest. In Evan, Claire sees a rigid officer who puts the rules before everything else–including his people. When the mission forces them together, Claire soon discovers that there is more to Evan than meets the eye. He’s more than the rank on his chest; he’s a man with dark secrets and deep longings. For all their differences, Evan and Claire share two crucial passions: their country and each other.
Includes a special message from the editor, as well as excerpts from these Loveswept titles: Blaze of Winter, The Devil’s Thief, and Santerra’s Sin.
Review:
I read Until There Was You because it is an original Loveswept release. Loveswept has been a favorite series of mine for years, and I am delighted that Random House is releasing older titles in digital, as well as new titles. Jessica Scott’s first release, Because of You, looked intriguing, but I was swamped when it came out, so it kept getting shuffled to the bottom of the review pile. When I had the opportunity to hop onto a blog tour for Until There Was You, Jessica’s follow up, I eagerly hopped on. I haven’t read many military romances, so I wanted to give myself a little more exposure to them, and after learning that the author is in the Arm has Army experience, it became that much more interesting.
Claire Montoya is a career soldier, and after years of dedicating herself to the military and the war efforts in the Middle East, she was promoted in rank. Now an officer, her current assignment is to prep a newbie unit for the rigors of warfare. They will be deployed in five weeks, and Claire’s good friend, Sarah, is in charge of the unit. With her best friend, Reza, an enlisted man, Claire must get these young soldiers ready for their convoy duties. The task seems impossible; Claire’s superior officers are focused on skills that Claire and Reza deem unimportant to the survival of the troops. With great despair and trepidation, Claire must set aside her personal views about the training and stick to the program, or risk being disciplined and tossed out of the Army.
I found this an fascinating read because I know so little about military life. The story is set after the Surge, when US troops were supposed to provide more of a support function to the fledgling Iraqi government. Life for the deployed soldiers was still frighteningly dangerous, and Claire had been faced with many decisions early in her career that left soldiers injured or dead. She doesn’t want to see any more lives lost, so she is frantic to prepare Sarah’s troops for the dangers they are about to face. She is constantly clashing with Evan, a West Point officer she has been sparring with for years, about the appropriateness of the training schedule. She calls Evan Captain America because of his unwavering dedication to rules and his job duties. Claire is a bit of a rebel, and she’s paid a price for her outspokenness. She has not been promoted as quickly as she might have been otherwise, but she won’t back down when she thinks she’s in the right and that soldiers will be needlessly killed. The conflict between Evan and Claire seemed insurmountable to me. How could either one of them ever compromise on this very basic but personality defining stance? Follow the rules to the letter, or bend them in order save lives.
Until There Was You is a book about conflict and conflict resolution. When we meet Claire and Evan, neither of them is able to adequately work through the conflicts in their life. Claire is driven to train Sarah’s troops as best she can with Reza’s help, but Reza, having seen several deployments, is suffering from PSTD. To keep his demons at bay, he has taken to drinking excessively, partying and hooking up with women indiscriminately. He’s two steps away from being court-martialed, but Claire is skilled at running interference for him. This adds to the tension between Evan and Claire. He doesn’t see how she can, in good conscience, keep covering up for him. Reza is going to get people killed one day, if he doesn’t kill himself first. Claire already tried to save her father from the demons lurking in the bottom of a liquor bottle. Her failure haunts her, and she isn’t ready for a repeat of that.
Evan hasn’t had an easy life either. He feels responsible for his sister’s death, and his guilt has driven him away from his family and away from close relationships. He and Claire make for a sympatric couple because both of them are so damaged. Neither of them can trust themselves to care for someone else for fear of being hurt again, so it’s easy to get behind their relationship and hope that they will somehow find a way to be together, even as messed up as they both are. It is Evan who takes that first, frightening step of accepting his feelings, and of having to face his fear of Claire’s rejection.
One thing that frustrated me about this story was my lack of understanding of military protocol. I was confused by the chain of command, and about why some of the events would have such disastrous outcomes for the characters. The pacing of the story was also uneven in parts; I found the training sequences fascinating, but found some of Evan and Claire’s missteps irritating in their frequency. Overall, this is an emotional, satisfying read, and I will have to dust off my copy of Because of You for another military romance fix.
The steady flow of new books about Winston Churchill should confirm that the famous wartime prime minister is now the best known and most studied figure in modern British history.
Churchill, a tireless self-promoter in his own time, would undoubtedly have taken a great deal of satisfaction from knowing that the legend he helped to craft would endure well into the twenty-first century. Unlike most politicians, he was deeply concerned with how he would be remembered – and judged – by history. And, although the verdict today is by no means universally positive, there is no doubt that he has achieved a level of fame that few can rival.
Academic historians (like me) spend so much time immersed in the study of the past that we cannot help but see it as a crowded place full of familiar faces. And a figure like Churchill is impossible to ignore: his memory, like the man himself, positively demands our attention. But the full-time historian is generally able to tune Churchill out when necessary: for most of us, he remains just one of the many historical actors we must look at to understand the past.
For the public at large, however, the past is a very different place. Most people approach it as they would a party full of strangers: instinctively scanning the crowd as they enter in hopes of spotting a familiar face. But the more time that passes, the more unfamiliar the past becomes – and the fewer faces we are likely to recognize. Our collective historical memory is subject to a natural sort of attrition process. Most of Britain’s leading politicians, statesmen and warriors of the early twentieth-century, many of them household names in their own time, are now barely remembered at all. Lord Kitchener’s famous recruiting poster from the First World War is still instantly recognizable, but every year there are fewer and fewer people who can put a name to the face of a man who in 1914 was better known – and certainly more widely admired – than Churchill.
The process has distinctly Darwinian overtones, as the most famous figures of yesteryear gradually displace their lesser-known rivals – and eventually each other – in the competition for a place in our collective memory of the past. Only a handful of famous twentieth-century Britons can share the historical stage with Churchill and demand anything like equal billing. And even they do not seem to share his seeming immunity to the passage of time. Neville Chamberlain, for example, remains an iconic figure, although for many he is not an important historical actor in his own right so much as a supporting figure in a better-known, and implicitly more important, story: Churchill’s triumphant rise to power in 1940.
Britain has good reason to look back on the Second World War as the “People’s War”, but the fact remains that only one of “the people” could be reliably identified today in a police line-up. And he is recognizable precisely because of his role in this great conflict. Churchill’s near-mythical status was ensured by his leadership in the critical months between the army’s evacuation from Dunkirk and the Royal Air Force’s victory in the Battle of Britain. At a time when Britain’s defeat seemed not only possible but imminent, Churchill rallied and inspired the people as no other contemporary politician could have. In Britain’s national mythology, he almost single-handedly changed the course of the war by sustaining the morale of the British people at the height of the Nazi onslaught, and in so doing ensured Hitler’s ultimate downfall.
Even in 1940, there was already a tendency to regard Churchill as the personification of Britain’s collective war effort and the embodiment of the nation’s heroic defiance of Nazi Germany. Churchill himself once attempted to put his role into perspective when he declared that “It was a nation and a race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” How far Churchill really believed this is debatable. In his speeches and memoirs he consistently downplayed the doubts and fears that pervaded Britain after the fall of France. But he knew better than anyone how close Britain may have come to a negotiated peace with Hitler in 1940 – and how important was his role in preventing this.
As more and more of Churchill’s contemporaries have receded and then disappeared from public memory, the popular association of Churchill with this defining moment in Britain’s history has only grown stronger. He may soon be, if he isn’t already, the last (recognizable) man standing in the history ofBritainduring the first half of the twentieth century.
Churchill believed that history was made by “great men”, and it is hard to imagine him being troubled by this trend. Historians might lament the public’s disproportionate interest in any one particular individual, but this is not to suggest we don’t need any more books about Churchill. The central place he enjoys in our memory of the twentieth century makes it all the more important that the record is as full and accurate as possible. The challenge is to populate that history with real people, and recognize that Churchill was also a supporting character in their stories.
Christopher M. Bell is Associate Professor of History at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of The Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy between the Wars (2000), co-editor of Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (2003), and author of Churchill and Sea Power (2012).
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only British history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Slideshow image credits: all images by British Government [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons (1, 2, 3, 4).
When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, neither the Atomic Bomb nor the Holocaust were on anybody’s agenda. Instead, the Nazi’s top aim was to rid German culture of perceived pollution. A priority was science, where paradoxically Germany already led the world. To safeguard this position, loud Nazi voices, such as Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, complained about a‘massive infiltration of the Jews into universities’.
The first enactments of a new regime are highly symbolic. The cynically-named Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, published in April 1933, targeted those who had non-Aryan, ‘particularly Jewish’, parents or grandparents. Having a single Jewish grandparent was enough to lose one’s job. Thousands of Jewish university teachers, together with doctors, lawyers, and other professionals were sacked. Some found more modest jobs, some retired, some left the country. Germany was throwing away its hard-won scientific supremacy. When warned of this, Hitler retorted ‘If the dismissal of [Jews] means the end of German science, then we will do without science for a few years’.
Why did the Jewish people have such a significant influence on German science? They had a long tradition of religious study, but assimilated Jews had begun to look instead to a radiant new role-model. Albert Einstein was the most famous scientist the world had ever known. As well as an icon for ambitious young students, he was also a prominent political target. Aware of this, he left Germany for the USA in 1932, before the Nazis came to power.
How to win friends and influence nuclear people
The talented nuclear scientistLeo Szilardappeared to be able to foresee the future. He exploited this by carefully cultivating people with influence. In Berlin, he sought out Einstein.
Like Einstein, Szilard anticipated the Civil Service Law. He also saw the need for a scheme to assist the refugee German academics who did not. First in Vienna, then in London, he found influential people who could help.
Just as the Nazis moved into power, nuclear physics was revolutionized by the discovery of a new nuclear component, the neutron. One of the main centres of neutron research was Berlin, where scientists saw a mysterious effect when uranium was irradiated. They asked their former Jewish colleagues, now in exile, for an explanation.
The answer was ‘nuclear fission’. As the Jewish scientists who had fled Germany settled into new jobs, they realized how fission was the key to a new source of energy. It could also be a weapon of unimaginable power, the Atomic Bomb. It was not a great intellectual leap, so the exiled scientists were convinced that their former colleagues in Germany had come to the same conclusion. So, when war looked imminent, they wanted to get to the Atomic Bomb first. One wrote of ‘the fear of the Nazis beating us to it’.
Szilard, by now in the US, saw it was time to act again. He knew that President Roosevelt would not listen to him, but would listen to Einstein, and wrote to Roosevelt over Einstein’s signature.
When a delegation finally managed to see him on 11 October 1939, Roosevelt said “what you’re after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up”. But nobody knew exactly what to do. The letter had mentioned bombs ‘too heavy for transportation by air’. Such a vague threat did not appear urgent.
But in 1940, German Jewish exiles in Britain realized that if the small amount of the isotope 235 in natural uranium could be separated, it could produce an explosion equivalent to several thousand tons of dynamite. Only a few kilograms would be needed, and could be carried by air. The logistics of nuclear weapons suddenly changed. Via Einstein, Szilard wrote another Presidential letter. On 19 January 1942, Roosevelt ordered a rapid programme for the development of the Atomic Bomb, the ‘Manhattan Project’.
Across the Atlantic, the Germans indeed had seen the implications of nuclear fission. But its scientific message had been muffled. Key scientists had gone. Germany had no one left with the prescience of Szilard, nor the political clout of Einstein. The Nazis also had another priority. On 20 January, one day after Roosevelt had given the go-ahead for the Atomic Bomb, a top-level meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee outlined a “final solution of the Jewish Problem”. Nazi Germany had its own crash programme.
US crash programme – on 16 July 1945, just over three years after the huge project had been launched, the Atomic Bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert.
Nazi crash programme – what came to be known as the Holocaust rapidly got under way. Here a doomed woman and her children arrive at the specially-built Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination centre.
As such, two huge projects, unknown to each other, emerged simultaneously on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The dreadful schemes forged ahead, and each in turn became reality. On two counts, what had been unimaginable no longer was.
Gordon Fraser was for many years the in-house editor at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. His books on popular science and scientists include Cosmic Anger, a biography of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim Nobel scientist, Antimatter: The Ultimate Mirror, and The Quantum Exodus. He is also the editor of The New Physics for the 21st Century and The Particle Century.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only physics and chemistry articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credits: Atomic Bomb tested in the New Mexico desert. Photograph courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory; Auschwitz-Birkenau, alte Frau und Kinder, Bundesarchiv Bild, Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.
Anne Elizabeth, author of SEAL at Heart, is visiting the virtual offices today. Please give her a warm welcome! After the interview, enter for your chance to win a copy of SEAL at Heart!
[Manga Maniac Cafe] Describe yourself in 140 words or less.
[Anne Elizabeth] I’m a romance writer, comic book creator, monthly columnist, wife, step-mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, godmother, daughter, sister, friend, and adventurer.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] Can you tell us a little about SEAL at Heart?
[Anne Elizabeth] Being a SEAL means everything to Petty Officer First Class John Roaker. So when a head injury coupled with a bout of amnesia takes him out of the action, he has to find a way to heal his wounds and recover his lost memories. Enlisting the help of beautiful physical therapist Laurie Smith, he heals his body and discovers that his unlocked memories hold a dangerous secret about his last mission that threatens his life, his country, and the woman he’s starting to fall in love with.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] How did you come up with the concept and the characters for the story?
[Anne Elizabeth] One night, my husband and I were sitting around the dinner table with a friend talking about SEALS and romance. The idea popped out of my mouth and I knew it was the one. BTW, my husband is retired from the Teams.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What three words best describe Laurie?
[Anne Elizabeth] Courageous, passionate, and determined.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] If Jack had a theme song, what would it be?
[Anne Elizabeth] Queen, WE WILL ROCK YOU
[Manga Maniac Cafe] Name one thing Laurie won’t leave the house without.
[Anne Elizabeth] Laurie would never leave the house without her purse. It holds all the magical things she cannot live without during the day–from lipstick to a small first aid kit.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What three things will you never find in Jack’s bedroom?
[Anne Elizabeth] Collectible figurines, framed photographs, and large pieces of furniture—Jack doesn’t have any of those things. Instead, he can pack and be out the door in under an hour with everything he owns packed in duffel bags.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What are your greatest creative influences?
[Anne Elizabeth] I have a lot of creative influences. From my husband’s presence to the nature surrounding us, I draw it all in and it ends up in my stories.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What three things do you need in order to write?
[Anne Elizabeth] In order to craft, I need a strong connection with my story and characters, support from my family and friends, and my laptop. I also need time–an opportunity to research, think, and type.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What is the last book that you read that knocked your socks off?
[Anne Elizabeth] I read a lot of books. I am huge fan of Cathy Maxwell, Suzanne Brockmann, and Anne Rice. I’ve loved all of their latest books!
[Manga Maniac Cafe] If you had to pick one book that turned you on to reading, which would it be?
[Anne Elizabeth] Dante’s THE DIVINE COMEDY—I’ve read that book at least a hundred times.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What do you like to do when you aren’t writing?
[Anne Elizabeth] I love adventures! Kayaking on the ocean, biking or hiking in the mountains with my husband and our dog, cooking for family and friends, flying, or reading a book—these are some of my favorite activities.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] How can readers connect with you?
[Anne Elizabeth] Fans can contact me through my website and I’m on facebook and twitter, too.
I have a monthly column in RT BOOK REVIEWS magazine on comics, manga, and graphic novels. I also attend the Comic Cons in New York and San Diego as well as the RT BOOK LOVERS CONVENTION.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] Thank you!
GIVEAWAY TIME!!!
Ready to enter for a chance to win SEAL at Heart? Just fill out the widget below for your chance to win! Earn extra entries for following.
You can order SEAL at Heart from your favorite bookseller or by clicking the covers below. Available in print and digital.
About the book:
Being a SEAL means everything to Petty Officer First Class John Roaker. So when a head injury coupled with a bout of amnesia makes him undeployable, he has to find a way to heal from his wounds and recover his lost memories. Enlisting the help of beautiful psychoanalyst Laurie Smith, he discovers his unlocked memories hold a dangerous secret about his last mission that threatens his life, his country, and the woman he’s starting to fall in love with.
When her father goes soldiering for a year, a girl decides that without Dad at home, it’s not a family photo album. Though her beloved Nanny is in charge of the album that year, the girl makes sure that photographs of her never turn out well. Photos are blurred, wind blows hair in her face. April rains bring umbrellas to hide behind. Halloween means a mask. This poignant, yet funny family story, expresses a child’s anger and grief for a Dad whose work takes him away for long periods of time. It’s a tribute to the sacrifices made by military families and to those who care for children when a family needs support.
THIS STORY IS A WINNER!
In conjunction with “The Help” movie (www.thehelpmovie.com), TakePart.com (www.takepart.com/thehelp) recently sponsored three writing contests: a recipe contest, an inspirational story contest and a children’s story contest. TakePart is the digital division of Participant Media which aims to bolster a movie’s audience with a message of social change. THE HELP movie campaign emphasized the role of stories in people’s lives.
Notice: This site and the story are not endorsed by or affiliated with TakePart, LLC or the motion picture “The Help” and or its distributors.
READ THE BOOK!
Darcy Pattison’s story, “11 Ways to Ruin a Photograph” is the winning children’s story. It is a free download at www.takepart.com/thehelp, or download it here (pdf download).
Read more at www.11WaystoRuinaPhotograph.
PLEASE pass this along to anyone who might know a military family or to anyone in the military that you know.
In July 1917, after three years of bloody war, anti-German feeling in Britain was reaching a feverish peak. Xenophobic mutterings about the suitability of having a German on the throne had been heard since 1914. The fact that the Royal family shared part of its name, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, with the Gotha bombers responsible for the devastating recent raids on London turned these whispers into open cries.
In response, King George V – resenting any aspersions on his patriotism – changed the name of the British Royal family to the impeccably English-sounding Windsor. This act signalled the power of names in a society heavy with newly coined, derogatory labels for the enemy: from Jerry to Fritz, through the Krauts, the Boche, and the Hun, you needed to know who you were fighting, and why, it was felt.
But jingoism was not the only source of linguistic creativity in the period. The circumstances of the First World War were so horrific, so extraordinary, and involving so many millions of people that a new language was almost essential. Many words which emerged at the time have clear associations with the conflict, such as camouflage, blimp, aerobatics, demob, and shell shock. Others have a more complex history, emerging from soldiers’ slang; itself a product of the increased cosmopolitanism ushered in by the war.
Take me back to dear old Blighty
Before the war, many of the young Tommies (a term deriving from ‘Thomas Atkins’, which was used on specimen army documents from 1815 as the name of a typical private soldier) who were shipped abroad to fight had probably never ventured far beyond the villages in which they were born. Suddenly immersed in exotic, unfamiliar cultures, both their longing for home and their assimilation of their new surroundings are summed up in one word: Blighty.
Meaning Britain or England, but especially ‘home’, Blighty originated in the Indian army, as an anglicization of the Hindustani bilāyatī, wilāyatī meaning ‘foreign, European’. First recorded in print in 1915, Blighty was an ideal place of comfort, love, and security, sharply contrasting with the hideous discomfort, harsh discipline, and constant danger of the front, and remains a popular term amongst Brits for their homeland to this day. Less familiar is the word’s extended use, which popped up on the television programme Downton Abbey recently, when the conniving footman Thomas Barrow deliberately injures his hand in order to escape the trenches. In the programme, this war wound is referred to as a ‘Blighty’ – a popular term at the time for any injury serious enough to get its victim sent back home, hopefully for good.
Less extreme than a Blighty was a cushy wound – one which was not serious enough to get you sent home permanently, but which would usually buy some time away from the trenches. Deriving from the Hindu for ‘pleasure’, ḵushī, the word’s more familiar sense of ‘undemanding, easy, or secure’ developed at the same time. This has stuck in the language to this day, with ‘cushy job’ a particularly popular phrase in the Oxford English Corpus. In North America cushy is now also used to refer to a particularly comfy sofa or other piece of furniture – far removed, one might think, from its starting point in the mud and gore of battle.
From the trenches to the street
British soldiers adopted the language of their enemies just
0 Comments on Our words remember them: the language of the First World War as of 1/1/1900
On 15 May 1941, two Englishmen flew from London to Lisbon, at the start of a ten-day wartime journey to New York City. Though they wore civilian clothes they were, in fact, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming RNVR, the future author of the James Bond novels. What followed was to change American intelligence forever.
Until December 1941, the United States of America was neutral in the Second World War. In two years of open blitzkrieg, the Nazis had conquered much of Europe; Britain stood alone and broke, summoning aid from its overseas dominions and colonies. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill remembered well that industrial America’s entry into the Great War in 1917 had assured victory. He needed a repeat, but the US President F.D. Roosevelt proceeded cautiously.
The first American aid to the Allied cause was spun as protecting an isolationist nation. In return for 50 old American destroyers for the Royal Navy, the USA obtained from the British Empire 99-year leases on a chain of strategic Atlantic bases: in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Antigua, St Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana. Between January and March 1941, there were also secret military and naval staff talks codenamed ABC – the American-British Conversations. Following these, the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee in London sent the two men to Washington DC to help ‘set up a combined intelligence organisation on a 100 per cent co-operative basis’.
The relationship of Admiral John Godfrey to Ian Fleming was like that of ‘M’ and James Bond, but also father/son. Fifty-three-year-old Godfrey had three daughters but no son; thirty-three- year- old Fleming had three brothers but no father. (Major Valentine Fleming DSO had been killed in the Great War just before Ian’s ninth birthday.) Admiral Godfrey had a brilliant mind but a volcanic temper; Ian Fleming was imaginative and imperturbable. He was a good fixer and drafted swift, crisp memos.
The two men flew KLM to Lisbon and then took the Pan Am Boeing 314 seaplane via the Azores to the British colony of Bermuda, 600 miles east of North Carolina, where the first American garrisons were building a base to help protect what President Roosevelt called ‘the Western Hemisphere’. Hamilton, Bermuda was where the British had set up the Imperial Censorship and Contraband Control Office to read the world’s mail, taken off transatlantic ships and planes. Fifteen hundred British ‘examiners’, also known as ‘censorettes’ because most were women, worked in the waterfront Princess Hotel, processing 100 bags of mail a day – around 200,000 letters – and testing 15,000 for microdots and secret ink messages, before sending on the bags on the next plane or ship. At first the USA objected to this infringement of liberty, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon realised how useful the system was when it began to reveal foreign enemy agents on US soil.
Godfrey and Fleming arrived in New York City on 25 May 1941. They stayed at the St Regis Hotel on 55th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan and soon went to meet ‘Little Bill’, the Canadian businessman William Stephenson, and his American friend and ally ‘Wild Bill’, Colonel William J. Donovan.
The bullish Bill Donovan (a WW1 Medal of Honor winner and New York lawyer) had twice travelled to the war-zone on unofficial inquiry missions for the US president. All doors had been opened for him: Winston Churchill was eager for American help. Donovan had got on well with Admiral Godfrey in London in July 1940 and had met Fleming in Gibraltar in February 1941.
The other Bill, ‘the quiet Canadian’ Bill Stephenson, had been sent to the USA in June 1940 by the British Secret Service with the mission of improving relations with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. President Roosevelt recommended ‘t
0 Comments on Ian Fleming and American intelligence (Part 1) as of 1/1/1900
In May 1941, Ian Fleming and his boss, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, were touching base in New York City with William Stephenson, the British Secret Service’s representative in North America as head of British Security Co-Ordination, whose headquarters occupied the 34th and 35th floors of the Rockefeller Center. The place later went into Fleming’s fiction. In chapter 20 of the very first Bond book, Casino Royale, James Bond confesses to the assassination of a Japanese cipher expert cracking British codes on the 36th floor of that building – it was the first of the two wartime cold-blooded killings that led to Bond’s Double O number.
On 28 May 1941, Ian Fleming celebrated his 32nd birthday in New York City with the good news that the Royal Navy had sunk Germany’s greatest battleship, the 42,000-ton Bismarck. Then he and Godfrey travelled by train to Washington DC on their mission to persuade the American authorities that they needed to create a unified American secret service. Intelligent combination in the USA would be an improvement on the system in the UK, which had evolved four different bodies with overlapping functions and competing masters: the blockaders of the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW), the propagandists in the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), the saboteurs in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the spies of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6).
Before WW2, the United States of America had similarly left foreign intelligence variously to the diplomats of the State Department, the Military Intelligence Division (or G-2) of the War Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence. No-one below the White House was collating intelligence and no-one was taking the big strategic view. Although Admiral Godfrey found all three US departments polite and friendly towards him, he was surprised to discover how much the US Army and US Navy loathed and detested each other and what a snakepit bureaucratic Washington could be, like Whitehall at its very worst.
The only man who could knock heads together was the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States. Admiral Godfrey was invited to dine at the White House on 10th June 1941, and given an hour with the President afterwards in the Oval Office. According to Godfrey, after watching ‘a rather creepy crawly film of snake worship’, FDR drawlingly recounted his reminiscences of British Admiral Reginald Hall’s brilliance as Director of Naval Intelligence in the Great War, while Godfrey himself reiterated three times the need for the Americans to have ‘one intelligence security boss, not three or four.’
That very same day, 10th June 1941, William J. Donovan, (the American ‘Bill’ of the previous blog), had submitted a memorandum to the President recommending the establishment of ‘a central enemy intelligence organization’ to analyze and appraise all information on enemy intentions and resources, both military and economic, and to determine the best methods of waging economic and psychological warfare.
A week later, on 18th June 1941, President Roosevelt accepted Donovan’s proposal and appointed Donovan himself as Coordinator of Information (COI). His job was to ‘collect and analyze all information and data which may bear upon national security: to correlate such information and data, and to make such information and data available to the President…’ Roosevelt scrawled a note on the memo’s coversheet, ‘Please set this up confidentially … Military – not O.E.M. [Office of Emergency Management].’ The CIA historian Thomas F. Troy glosses ‘confidentially’ to mean there would be access to the President’s secret funds and ‘Military’ to denote ‘by virtue of the President’s authority as commander in chief’. William Stephenson, the Canadian ‘Bill’ was jubilant. He cable
0 Comments on Ian Fleming and American intelligence (Part 2) as of 1/1/1900
On 27th June 1941, in Washington D.C., Lt-Commander Ian Fleming RNVR drafted a short ‘Memorandum to Colonel Donovan’ on how to structure and staff the headquarters of his new American intelligence agency, COI, to be set up by Christmas 1941. Fleming suggested taking over a section of the FBI building and liaising closely with the Attorney-General and J. Edgar Hoover; Donovan would need to make friends with both the State Department and the FBI and enlist their full help ‘by cajolery and other means’. As Co-ordinator of Information, Donovan would have to ‘dragoon’ the War and Navy Departments into co-operation and be ‘prepared to take action quickly if they don’t help.’ Fleming recommended that Henry Luce of TIME magazine be asked to run Foreign Intelligence, a good “sapper” or military engineer should run Sabotage (a practical problem where romantics should not be encouraged), and Edgar Hoover should nominate someone to run Counter-espionage. Ian Fleming, who had a background as a Reuters news agency correspondent, thought Donovan would need a ‘Managing Editor with staff from a news agency foreign desk to receive and disseminate intelligence from a central office at GHQ’. He suggested consulting the head of Associated Press and getting staff from only one news agency to avoid jealousies and friction. There would have to be heads of country sections, liaison officers with other government departments, someone in charge of communications (‘A good Fleet Signals Officer’), someone to run matériel and transport (‘Consult American Express’) and many Field Officers (‘Pool the files of the State Department, Navy and Army, and pick the best. Appoint talent scouts to find more if necessary.’) Whoever recruited personnel should be a ‘thoroughly critical and sceptical man’. To liaise with the British Secret Service in London, Ian Fleming with his naval background naturally suggested people he knew through the Naval Intelligence Division: Commander Christopher Arnold-Foster and Captain Eddie Hastings. He wanted the closest cooperation between Britain and America: ‘Request CSS [the head of MI6] to allow your men in the field to work closely with ours’, and he advised judicious punishment pour encourager les autres: ‘Make an example of someone at an early date for indiscretion and continue to act ruthlessly where lack of security is concerned.’
Three weeks later, Fleming sent his boss Admiral John Godfrey, now back in London, a MOST SECRET cable about Donovan’s progress to date as Coordinator of Information.
1) Initial grant of ten million dollars placed at his disposal.
2) Washington personnel will be housed in Library of Congress and New York office will be at No. 2, Wall Street.
3) Skeleton staff should be at work by August 15th.
4) Information from Colonel Donovan will go direct to the President.
5) Emphasis has shifted towards strategical, economic and psychological research work and planning.
6) Propaganda in enemy countries will have a considerable role under ROBERT SHERWOOD, dramatist, working with radio corporations and Federal Communications Committee.
7) Geographical sections containing one naval, one military, one flying officer with civilian experts will be created. They will report to a Joint Intelligence Committee which will include Director of Naval Intelligence, Director of Military Intelligence, State Department. Their sources of information will be Service Intelligence departments supplemented by any fields they may be able to develop. These sections will also nominally repeat nominally be charged with Secret Intelligence Service, Special Operations 1 [propaganda] and Special Operations 2 [active operations] work
0 Comments on Ian Fleming and American intelligence (Part 3) as of 1/1/1900
Early in November was the 200th anniversary of a disaster.
The weather in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, played along and delivered a dreary, wet morning—just as it had on November 7, 1811, when a hodgepodge collection of frontier whites exchanged fire with Native American forces. The Americans “won” the Battle of Tippecanoe when the Indian soldiers retreated, but U.S. forces under William Henry Harrison had to evacuate their position the next day. What’s worse, they were only in the area to enforce the Treaty of Fort Wayne—a land seizure of questionable legality that Harrison himself had crafted by haranguing reluctant Native American leaders and, when necessary, plying them with alcohol. In addition, Tippecanoe touched off a long campaign of guerilla warfare between Native Americans and whites on the frontier that literally bled into the War of 1812.
An unnecessary war based on questionable treaties with an ambiguous result: not the finest hour for America.
The organizers of the 200th were well aware of Tippecanoe’s dubious history, and were adamant that this year’s gathering was a commemoration, not a celebration. The service included prayers from both a Christian clergyman and a Wea chief. The featured speaker was Governor George Blanchard of the Absentee Shawnee, the same tribe who provided the Indian leadership (Tecumseh and his brother, the Shawnee Prophet) that frustrated Harrison two hundred years ago. Reenactors portrayed both white militiamen and Indian soldiers.
Not everyone wanted such a dour memorial, however. One reenactor whipped up an enthusiastic crowd by praising the patriotism of white forces who had fought at Tippecanoe for “liberty.” A sharp-eyed gentleman told me (politely) that people who didn’t like Harrison’s little war of 1811 might as well leave Indiana of 2011. One invited speaker solemnly requested listeners to remember the blood of “two nations” that had watered the battlefield—and then proceeded to give a triumphal account of his own (white) ancestors who patriotically settled the land after the Indians had been forcibly removed.
It’s an understandable urge to want all American military exploits to be the story of a successful quest for liberty. And there is a lot to admire about the American past. But to assume that Americans always fought for good causes—to assume every war is just and every commander selfless—is bad history. It’s true that the American forces fought hard at Tippecanoe, and that there was bravery on both sides. It’s also true that the battle was probably a huge mistake. Harrison’s bungling at the battle, the subsequent success of Native American forces, and the near-destruction of the United States in the War of 1812 should make any patriot pause before celebrating the events at Tippecanoe—leaving aside the question of whether Americans should take pride in the duplicitous nineteenth-century land treaties with Native Americans. And whatever else the battle was, it was not about liberty: no American freedoms (such as they were in 1811) were at stake at Tippecanoe—only the refusal of a collection of Indians to recognize a treaty brokered under bad faith. In fact, the Indians who fought under the Shawnee Prophet had a better claim to be fighting for liberty—many of the warriors who battled Harrison’s men had left their own families to join the Prophet’s struggle to prevent white expansion at Indian expense.
Telling the story of Tippecanoe as a battle of American liberty against Native American tyranny is an imagined past. This imagined past yields an imaginary present—one where “patriotism” solves everything. Our ancestors, we are told, loved liberty, and had patriotism, and they won. Presumably, if we had patriotism and loved liberty, we too would easily
0 Comments on Commemorating Tippecanoe: The start of an American holy war as of 1/1/1900
During last night's latest organizing/cleaning mission, I rediscovered some old letters that my Mom let me keep while she was going through her own organizing/cleaning mission last year. They are from my great-great-uncle Bob, to his sister and his mother.
Bob was in the US Navy in World War One (we think the photo, below, is him in uniform). I was so touched by one of the letters that I am including it in this post. It reminds me of how when soldiers go to war, they worry very much about the people they are leaving behind at home. It's not just their loved ones worrying about them. War and worry is a two-way street for military families.
I will admit I've cleaned up Bob's spelling and typos, but I kept the sentence construction the same.
Here it is:
Mother,
I sent you a letter Thursday and suppose you have it by this time. Mother, did you say that you sent me a box of eats? Well I hope I get it Sunday or before we leave. The cake that Florence sent me and the cake that Mrs. Berdick sent in the box will be good while I am at sea and I will enjoy it. Hope this trip is as nice as the last one and the sea is calm and I will enjoy it very much.
Mother, I am feeling fine and getting fat. You know that. And it is fine out in the air and I want you to go out as often as you can and go to the show and get the girls to go out with you.
Mother, after you receive the money from Washington on the 5th of July, why don't you go down in the country for a week or a few days, for I will not be back til around the 15th of July and then you will be home. Go down to Kinderhook, NY for a visit, go somewhere and don't stay in the house all the time.
Mother, tell Pa-Pa that I am going to leave on another trip across the Atlantic and that I am feeling OK. Mother, write to me once a week, say on each Sunday and when I come back I will receive all your letters and you tell me each week how you are and all the rest. You be sure and tell me how you are for I want to know.
Mother, tell me all the news if any thing happens around Rensselaer, NY.
Mother, this will be all and will say "Good Afternoon" and also a "Goodnight, Mother," and don't worry over me and I will sail the seas safe and the USS Columbia will bring me and my shipmates back to the US OK.
Rachel Maddow's first book, Drift, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. This isn't terribly surprising. Not only is Maddow the host of the top-rated liberal television show in the country, MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, but also in our current, highly polarized political climate, books by partisan pundits are invariably reliable [...]
0 Comments on Rachel Maddow: The Powells.com Interview as of 4/6/2012 3:27:00 PM
Cover Shot! is a regular feature here at the Café. I love discovering new covers, and when I find them, I like to share. More than anything else, I am consumed with the mystery that each new discovery represents. There is an allure to a beautiful cover. Will the story contained under the pages live up to promise of the gorgeous cover art?
Yum! I love this cover for I Own the Dawn by M L Buchman! I hope none of those guns are loaded!
Kee Smith battled through a difficult childhood to work her way up the ranks of the U.S. Army. When she finally makes it into the elite Night Stalkers, she feels thrilled, honored, and vindicated…until she finds out she’s been assigned to the “girlie-chopper” piloted by the only other woman in the regiment.
Kee is determined to show Lt. Archie Stevenson, one of the male co-pilots, that she is just as tough as the guys. Throughout their special mission, Archie doesn’t know whether to make love to her or plant her face-first into the dirt. But he’ll do whatever it takes to break through that shield Kee wears around her heart.
Jeanette Murray is the author of The Officer Says “I Do.” She dropped by the virtual offices to introduce herself and chat about her new book.
[Manga Maniac Café] Describe yourself in 140 characters or less.
[Jeanette Murray] Mother, military wife, Goldendoodle owner, romance writer, hopeless romantic against all odds.
[Manga Maniac Café] Can you tell us a little about The Officer Says “I Do?”
[Jeanette Murray] Tim and Skye are two opposites who didn’t just attract, they caused a flash fire. They end up in a quickie Vegas wedding, though Tim can’t remember a thing the next morning. Whoops! He’s ready to admit fault and quietly annul the whole thing, but Sky isn’t ready to give up their marriage so fast. She believes in fate, you see, and thinks this marriage was meant to be. So she’s ready to fight for their relationship.
[Manga Maniac Café] How did you come up with the concept and the characters for the story?
[Jeanette Murray] The concept was simple enough. As a military wife, it wasn’t a huge stretch to come up with three Marines and the women who fall in love with them. The characters took a bit more work, but in the end each of them came to me with their flaws and high points, fully developed, and just in need of a little polishing.
[Manga Maniac Café] What three words best describe Skye?
[Manga Maniac Café] What are three things Tim would never have in his pocket?
[Jeanette Murray] Cigarettes, parking ticket, cocktail napkin with another woman’s phone number on it
[Manga Maniac Café] What is Tim’s single most prized possession?
[Jeanette Murray] I would say his photos. He’s a total family guy, and so if he could only save one “thing” from a fire he’d take the photos with him.
[Manga Maniac Café] What are your greatest creative influences?
[Jeanette Murray] Other great authors. There are so many I couldn’t begin to list them all. But other authors are always great encouragements for me.
[Manga Maniac Café] What three things do you need in order to write?
[Jeanette Murray] Need? My laptop, quiet, and a locked door. Want? Route 44 Sonic diet vanilla Coke.
[Manga Maniac Café] What is the last book that you read that knocked your socks off?
[Jeanette Murray] Catherine Mann’s Under Fire. Read the whole thing in two days. I’d been waiting for this couple through the first two books of her pararescuejumper series and we finally got to Liam McCabe’s story. Highly recommend it.
[Manga Maniac Café] If you had to pick one book that turned you on to reading, what would it be?
[Jeanette Murray] The Boxcar Children series. All of them. I LOOOOOVED those books as a child. They were truly the opening for me to start in on chapter books.
[Manga Maniac Café] . What do you like to do when you aren’t writing?
[Jeanette Murray] Craft, repurpose old things I pick up from different places, read (of course!), watch good/bad TV, spend time with my family.
[Manga Maniac Café] How can readers connect with you?
M L Buchman is the author of I Own the Dawn. This is the second book in his Night Stalkers series. I love the covers for both books; they are so intense! I was thrilled when ML dropped by the virtual offices for a chat. After the interview, stick around for your chance to win a copy of I Own The Dawn!
[Manga Maniac Cafe] Describe yourself in 140 characters or less.
[ML Buchman] Introvert Type A+, pedaled a bicycle around world, built houses, designed IT systems, crazy in love with wife, oh, and writes romance novels.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] Can you tell us a little about I Own the Dawn?
[ML Buchman] Real-life Army secret helicopters. Pig-headed, kick-butt sniper—she’s from wrong side of tracks. Refined copilot from the right side. They help start a war and now must end it. But first they have to survive each other.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] How did you come up with the concept and the characters for the story?
[ML Buchman] A crazy bit of serendipitous research while writing a foodie thriller, Swap Out! (the U.S. Army 160th is a really cool, secret helicopter regiment). A what if question (“What if the first women showed up and were assigned to the nastiest helicopter ever put in the night sky because they were just that good?”) And a goal (to write a romance that would be hard for anyone to put down, especially my wife). And Dilya, a Uzbekistani orphan, just showed up on the page one day and refused to go away. She stole Kee’s heart and mine.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What three words best describe Kee?
[ML Buchman] Kick-ass, stubborn, loyal
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What are three things Archie would never have in his bedroom?
[ML Buchman] Kee’s rifle, cracker crumbs, a TV
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What is Kee’s single most prized possession?
[ML Buchman] Her Heckler & Koch MSG-90A1 sniper rifle.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What are your greatest creative influences?
[ML Buchman] My wife (so much of what I write is to make her laugh or smile), my travels (I’ve met amazing people in wonderful places), and the written words of others that have shaped my life, my thinking, and my heart most of all.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What three things do you need in order to write?
[ML Buchman] Rock n’ roll (except opera on Sundays), a “What if?” or “What’s next?” question, any stretch of time over about 10 minutes.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What is the last book that you read that knocked your socks off?
[ML Buchman] Karen L. McKee’s romances. I just can’t get enough of them. Nor her science fiction as Karen L. Abrahamson.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] If you had to pick one book that turned you on to reading, which would it be?
[ML Buchman] Arthur C Clarke’s The City and the Stars. At 8 years old it took me from rereading Winnie the Pooh to devouring novels and I never looked back.
[Manga Maniac Cafe] What do you like to do when you aren’t writing?
[ML Buchman] walking in new places with my wife (we hold hands a lot), watching movies (romances and B-grade science fiction mostly), teasing my step-kid
[Manga Maniac Cafe] How can readers connect with you?
[ML Buchman] http://www.mlbuchman.com. And please check out the contest page on my website: by following along my blog tour for
Thanks to Random House, here is an excerpt from Jessica Scott’s Until There Was You. If you enjoy military romances, this one is right up your alley. You can order the book from your favorite bookseller, or by clicking here: Until There Was You: A Loveswept Contemporary Military Romance
There is a plot description:
From the author of Because of You comes an all-new contemporary eBook romance. He plays by the rules, she’s not afraid to break them. Now these two strong-willed Army captains will prove that opposites attract . . .
A by-the-book captain with a West Point background, Captain Evan Loehr refuses to mix business with pleasure–except for an unguarded instance years ago when he succumbed to the deep sensuality of redheaded beauty Claire Montoya. From that moment on, though, Evan has been at odds with her, through two deployments to Iraq and back again. But when he is asked to train a team prepping for combat alongside Claire, battle-worn Evan is in for the fight of his life. Strong, gutsy, and loyal, Captain Claire Montoya has worked hard to earn the rank on her chest. In Evan, Claire sees a rigid officer who puts the rules before everything else–including his people. When the mission forces them together, Claire soon discovers that there is more to Evan than meets the eye. He’s more than the rank on his chest; he’s a man with dark secrets and deep longings. For all their differences, Evan and Claire share two crucial passions: their country and each other.
Includes a special message from the editor, as well as excerpts from these Loveswept titles: Blaze of Winter, The Devil’s Thief, and Santerra’s Sin.
There are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway. At dawn of June 4, 1942, a rampaging Japanese navy ruled the Pacific. By sunset, their vaunted carrier force (the Kido Butai) had been sunk and their grip on the Pacific had been loosened forever.
0 Comments on The Battle of Midway: a slideshow as of 1/1/1900
As head of the SS, chief of police, 'Reichskommissar for the Consolidation of Germanness', and Reich Interior Minister, Heinrich Himmler enjoyed a position of almost unparalleled power and responsibility in Nazi Germany. Perhaps more than any other single Nazi leader aside from Hitler, his name has become a byword for the terror, persecution, and destruction that characterized the Third Reich.
0 Comments on How Himmler’s personality shaped the SS as of 1/1/1900
Outdated goals of war in the 21st century
By Louis René Beres
Even now, when the “fog of war” in Iraq and Afghanistan is likely at its thickest point, our leaders and military commanders still speak in starkly traditional terms. Such ordinary emphases on “victory” and “defeat” belie the profound and critically-nuanced transformations of war presently [...]
0 Comments on “We are in this to win” as of 1/1/1900
The United States, preemption, and international law
By Professor Louis René Beres
Admiral Leon “Bud” Edney
General Thomas G. McInerney
For now, the “Arab Spring” and its aftermath still occupy center-stage in the Middle East and North Africa. Nonetheless, from a regional and perhaps even global security perspective, the genuinely core threat to peace and stability remains Iran. Whatever else might determinably shape ongoing transformations of power and authority in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Saudi Arabia, it is apt to pale in urgency beside the steadily expanding prospect of a nuclear Iran.
Enter international law. Designed, inter alia, to ensure the survival of states in a persistently anarchic world – a world originally fashioned after the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 – this law includes the “inherent” right of national self-defense. Such right may be exercised not only after an attack has already been suffered, but, sometimes, also, in advance of an expected attack.
What can now be done, lawfully, about relentless Iranian nuclear weapons development? Do individual states, especially those in greatest prospective danger from any expressions of Iranian nuclear aggression, have a legal right to strike first defensively? In short, could such a preemption ever be permissible under international law?
For the United States, preemption remains a part of codified American military doctrine. But is this national doctrine necessarily consistent with the legal and complex international expectations of anticipatory self-defense?
To begin, international law derives from multiple authoritative sources, including international custom. Although written law of the UN Charter (treaty law) reserves the right of self-defense only to those states that have already suffered an attack (Article 51), equally valid customary law still permits a first use of force if the particular danger posed is “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation.” Stemming from an 1837 event in jurisprudential history known as the Caroline, which concerned the unsuccessful rebellion in Upper Canada against British rule, this doctrine builds purposefully upon a seventeenth-century formulation of Hugo Grotius.
Self-defense, says the classical Dutch scholar in, The Law of War and Peace (1625), may be permitted “not only after an attack has already been suffered, but also in advance, where the deed may be anticipated.” In his later text of 1758, The Right of Self-Protection and the Effects of Sovereignty and Independence of Nations, Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel affirmed: “A nation has the right to resist the injury another seeks to inflict upon it, and to use force and every other just means of resistance against the aggressor.”
Article 51 of the UN Charter, limiting self-defense to circumstances following an attack, does not override the customary right of anticipatory self-defense. Interestingly, especially for Americans, the works of Grotius and Vattel were favorite readings of Thomas Jefferson, who relied heavily upon them for crafting the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
We should also recall Article VI of the USConstitution, and assorted US Supreme Court decisions. These proclaim, straightforwardly, that international law is necessarily part of the law of the United States.
The Caroline notes an implicit distinction between preventive war (which is never legal), and preemptive war. The latter is not permitted merely to protect oneself against an emerging threat, but only when the danger posed is “instant” and
0 Comments on Soon facing Iranian nuclear missiles as of 1/1/1900
by Lauren Dane (Sep 4, 2012)
by Catherine Mann (Sep 4, 2012)
by Erin Bates (Sep 4, 2012)
. by Julie Ann Walker (Sep 4, 2012)
by Sandy James (Sep 3, 2012) 
by Bec McMaster (Sep 1, 2012)
by Tammy Falkner (Sep 1, 2012)
by Jo Goodman (Sep 4, 2012)
by Carolyn Jewel (Sep 4, 2012)
by Jaci Burton (Sep 4, 2012) 
by Emma Wildes (Sep 4, 2012)
by Vicky Dreiling (Sep 4, 2012)
by Shana Galen (Sep 1, 2012) 
by Amber Argyle (Sep 5, 2012) 
by Lucy Monroe (Sep 4, 2012) 
by G.A. Aiken (Sep 4, 2012) 
by Linda Grimes (Sep 4, 2012)
by Clay Griffith and Susan Griffith (Sep 4, 2012)
) by Jayne Castle (Sep 4, 2012) 
by Felix J Palma (Sep 4, 2012) 
by Katie Reus (Sep 4, 2012) 
by V. K. Forrest (Sep 4, 2012) 
by Meljean Brook (Sep 4, 2012) 
by Sam Sykes (Sep 4, 2012) 
by Katie MacAlister (Sep 4, 2012)
by Phillipa Bornikova (Sep 4, 2012)
by Kevin Hearne (Sep 4, 2012) (Novella)
by Jennifer Roberson (Sep 4, 2012)
Jessica Scott is the author of Until There Was You, which is the follow-up to her debut title Because of You. Both books are published under one of my favorite imprints, Random House’s Loveswept line. I was delighted when Jessica recently dropped by the virtual offices to chat. She even brought along a present for one of you to win– a digital copy of Until There Was You! 
Jeanette Murray is the author of The Officer Says “I Do.” She dropped by the virtual offices to introduce herself and chat about her new book.
you read that knocked your socks off?
