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Thousands of wounded servicemen returned to Japan following the escalation of Japanese military aggression in China in July 1937. Tens of thousands would return home after Japan widened its war effort in 1939. This book relates the experiences of Japanese wounded soldiers and disabled veterans of Japan's “long” Second World War (from 1937 to 1945). It maps the terrain of Japanese military medicine and social welfare practices and establishes the similarities and differences that existed between Japanese and Western physical, occupational, and spiritual rehabilitation programs for war-wounded servicemen, notably amputees. To exemplify the experience of these wounded soldiers, the book draws on the memoir of a Japanese soldier who describes in gripping detail his medical evacuation from a casualty clearing station on the front lines and his medical convalescence at a military hospital. Moving from the hospital to the home front, the book documents the prominent roles adopted by disabled veterans in mobilization campaigns designed to rally popular support for the war effort. Following Japan's defeat in August 1945, U.S. Occupation forces dismantled the social welfare services designed specifically for disabled military personnel, which brought profound consequences for veterans and their dependents. The book gives us a uniquely Japanese version of the all-too-familiar story of soldiers who return home to find their lives (and bodies) remade by combat.

At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming “evacuations.” Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of this book. The same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, persecution under Hitler. They upheld the ideal of the German fighting man, embraced the fatherland, and cherished the bonds that had developed in military service. Through their diaries and private letters, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving family members and records from the police, Gestapo, and military, this book challenges the prevailing view that Jewish veterans were left isolated, neighborless, and having suffered a social death by 1938. Tracing the path from the trenches of the Great War to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, the book exposes a painful dichotomy: while many Jewish former combatants believed that Germany would never betray them, the Holocaust was nonetheless a horrific reality. In chronicling Jewish veterans' appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, the book forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.

Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for blindly following orders, and their enemies in the Pacific War derided them as “cattle to the slaughter.” But, in fact, the Imperial Japanese Army had a long history as one of the most disobedient armies in the world. Officers repeatedly staged coups d'états, violent insurrections, and political assassinations; their associates defied orders given by both the government and the general staff, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders despite direct orders to the contrary. This book explains the culture of rebellion in the Japanese armed forces. The consequences were dire, as the armed forces dragged the government into more and more of China across the 1930s—a culture of rebellion that made the Pacific War possible. This book argues that brazen defiance, rather than blind obedience, was the motive force of modern Japanese history. The book follows a series of dramatic events: assassinations in the dark corners of Tokyo, the famous rebellion of Saigō Takamori, the “accidental” invasion of Taiwan, the Japanese ambassador's plot to murder the queen of Korea, and the military–political crisis in which the Japanese prime minister “changed colors.” Finally, through the sinister plots of the clandestine Cherry Blossom Society, we follow the deterioration of Japan into chaos, fascism, and world war.

This book explores why, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, we initially mopped the floor with our enemies only to discover we had no coherent plan to manage the “day after.” The ensuing postwar debacles had staggering consequences that continue to reverberate today. How did this happen? This book argues there is a tension between our desire to create a democracy and our competing desire to pullout as soon as possible. Our leaders often use magical thinking to try to accomplish both aims and keep everyone happy – but such an incoherent approach is likely to sow chaos. This book incorporates new interviews with dozens of civilian and military officials, ranging from U.S. cabinet secretaries to four-star generals. It also sheds light on how, in Kosovo, we lowered our postwar aims to quietly achieve a surprising partial success. Overall, this book seeks to help us learn from our recent past, and thereby avoid further disasters.

This book reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. The book draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated “performative masculinity,” expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. Such inebriated exhibitions extended from meetings of top Nazi officials to the rank and file, celebrating at the grave sites of their victims. The book argues that, contrary to the common misconception of the SS and police as stone-cold killers, they were, in fact, intoxicated with the act of murder itself. The book highlights the intersections of masculinity, drinking ritual, sexual violence, and mass murder to expose the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Its surprising and disturbing findings offer a new perspective on the mindset, motivation, and mentality of killers as they prepared for, and participated in, mass extermination.

This book brings us back to the post-Vietnam era, when the US Air Force launched two new, state-of-the-art fighter aircraft: the F-15 Eagle and the F-16 Fighting Falcon. It was an era when debates about aircraft superiority went public — and these were not uncontested discussions. This book delves deep into the fighter pilot culture that gave rise to both designs, showing how a small but vocal group of pilots, engineers, and analysts in the Department of Defense weaponized their own culture to affect technological development and larger political change. The design and advancement of the F-15 and F-16 reflected this group's nostalgic desire to recapture the best of World War I air combat. Known as the “Fighter Mafia,” and later growing into the media-savvy political powerhouse “Reform Movement,” it believed that American weapons systems were too complicated and expensive, and thus vulnerable. The group's leader was Colonel John Boyd, a contentious former fighter pilot heralded as a messianic figure by many in its ranks. He and his group advocated for a shift in focus from the multi-role interceptors the Air Force had designed in the early Cold War towards specialized air-to-air combat dogfighters. Their influence stretched beyond design and into larger politicized debates about US national security, debates that still resonate today. A biography of fighter pilot culture and the nostalgia that drove decision-making, the book deftly engages both popular culture and archives to animate the movement that shook the foundations of the Pentagon and Congress.

This book assesses the nature and broader significance of warfare in the mountains of classical Greece. Based on detailed reconstructions of four unconventional military encounters, the book argues that the upland Greeks of the classical mainland developed defensive strategies to guard against external aggression. These strategies enabled wide-scale, sophisticated actions in response to invasions, but they did not require the direction of a central, federal government. The book brings these strategies to the forefront by driving ancient Greek military history and ancient Greek scholarship “beyond the polis” into dialogue with each other. As it contends, beyond-the-polis scholarship has done much to expand and refine our understanding of the ancient Greek world, but it has overemphasized the importance of political institutions in emergent federal states and has yet to treat warfare involving upland Greeks systematically or in depth. In contrast, the book scrutinizes the sociopolitical roots of warfare from beyond the polis, which are often neglected in military histories of the Greek city-state. By focusing on the significance of warfare vis-à-vis the sociopolitical development of upland polities, the book shows that although the more powerful states of the classical Greek world were dismissive or ignorant of the military capabilities of upland Greeks, the reverse was not the case. The Phocians, Aetolians, Acarnanians, and Arcadians in circa 490–362 BCE were well aware of the arrogant attitudes of their aggressive neighbors, and as highly efficient political entities, they exploited these attitudes to great effect.

This book is the real story of how George W. Bush came to double-down on Iraq in the highest stakes gamble of his entire presidency. It offers an unprecedented look into the process by which Bush overruled much of the military leadership and many of his trusted advisors to authorize the deployment of roughly 30,000 additional troops to the warzone in a bid to save Iraq from collapse in 2007. The adoption of a new counterinsurgency strategy and surge of new troops into Iraq altered the American posture in the Middle East for a decade to come. The book provides access to the deliberations among the decision-makers on Bush's national security team as they embarked on that course. In their own words, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice, Joshua Bolten, Robert Gates, and others, recount the debates and disputes that informed the process as Bush weighed the historical lessons of Vietnam against the perceived strategic imperatives in the Middle East. For a president who had earlier vowed never to dictate military strategy to generals, the deliberations in the Oval Office and Situation Room in 2006 constituted a trying and fateful moment. Bush risked losing public esteem and courted political ruin by refusing to disengage from the costly war in Iraq. The book is a portrait of leadership in the Bush White House. The personal perspectives are complemented by critical assessments. Taken together, they are a first draft of the history of the surge and new chapter in the history of the American presidency.

General Douglas MacArthur's storied career is inextricably linked to Asia. His father, Arthur, served as Military Governor of the Philippines while Douglas was a student at West Point, and the younger MacArthur would serve several tours of duty in that country over the next four decades, becoming friends with several influential Filipinos, including the country's future president, Emanuel L. Quezon. In 1935, he became Quezon's military advisor, a post he held after retiring from the U.S. Army and at the time of Japan's invasion of 1941. As Supreme Commander for the Southwest Pacific, MacArthur led American forces throughout the Pacific War. He officially accepted Japan's surrender in 1945 and later oversaw the Allied occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1951. He then led the UN Command in the Korean War from 1950 to 1951, until he was dismissed from his post by President Truman. This book offers a new perspective on the American icon, focusing on his experiences in the Philippines, Japan, and Korea and highlighting the importance of the general's staff to both MacArthur's and the region's history. MacArthur implemented far-reaching democratic reforms under the Occupation. Translated into English for the first time, this book uses a wide range of sources—American and Japanese, official records and oral histories—to present a complex view of MacArthur, one that illuminates his military decisions during the Pacific campaign and his administration of the Japanese Occupation.

In the first and only examination of how the British Empire and Commonwealth sustained its soldiers before, during, and after both world wars, this book explores how the empire mobilized manpower to recruit workers, care for veterans, and transform factory workers and farmers into riflemen. Raising armies is more than counting people, putting them in uniform, and assigning them to formations. It demands efficient measures for recruitment, registration, and assignment. It requires processes for transforming common people into soldiers and then producing officers, staffs, and commanders to lead them. It necessitates balancing the needs of the armed services with industry and agriculture. And, often overlooked but illuminated incisively here, raising armies relies on medical services for mending wounded soldiers and programs and pensions to look after them when demobilized. The book is a transnational look at how the empire did not always get these things right. But through trial, error, analysis, and introspection, it levied the large armies needed to prosecute both wars.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and Germany emerged as the two most rapidly developing industrial nation-states of the Atlantic world. The elites and intelligentsias of both countries staked out claims to dominance in the twentieth century. This book explores the far-reaching ambitions of naval officers before World War I as they advanced navalism, a particular brand of modern militarism that stressed the paramount importance of sea power as a historical determinant. Aspiring to make their own countries into self-reliant world powers in an age of global empire and commerce, officers viewed the causes of the industrial nation, global influence, elite rule, and naval power as inseparable. Characterized by both transnational exchanges and national competition, the new maritime militarism was technocratic in its impulses; its makers cast themselves as members of a professional elite that served the nation with its expert knowledge of maritime and global affairs. American and German navalist projects differed less in their principal features than in their eventual trajectories. Over time, the pursuits of these projects channeled the two naval elites in different directions as they developed contrasting outlooks on their bids for world power and maritime force. This book challenges traditional, exceptionalist assumptions about militarism and national identity in Germany and the United States in its exploration of empire and geopolitics, warfare and military-operational imaginations, state formation and national governance, and expertise and professionalism.

The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon, tells a new story of enlightenment happening in what seems the least likely of spaces: those of war, martial culture, and the French armed forces on the continent and in the colonies. Based on extensive archival research on military sources in combination with analyses of canonical texts by Rousseau, Voltaire, Guibert and others, The Military Enlightenment shows how French monarchs, royal mistresses, government ministers, military officers, and medical personnel participated in advancing ideas of human and political rights, military psychology, war trauma, and social justice in terms of race, class, and gender. The book constitutes an essential and missing link in scholarship on the long eighteenth century since the military was one of the few institutions of the Old Regime to transform progressive theories into practice. The book elucidates the genesis and unfolding of the Military Enlightenment in terms of people, places, and processes in France, the French Atlantic, and French India. Analyses examine discourses through which military thinkers apprehended and realized the Military Enlightenment from Louis XIV to Napoleon through to modern times: l’esprit philosophique, sociability, sensibility and humanity, and a militaristic and socially democratized patriotic and heroic imaginary.

This book explores the social and cultural history of Warsaw's “forgotten war” of 1914–1918. Beginning with the bank panic that accompanied the outbreak of the Great War, the book guides readers through spy scares, bombardments, mass migratory movements, and the Russian evacuation of 1915. Industrial collapse marked only the opening phase of Warsaw's wartime economic crisis, which grew steadily worse during the German occupation. Requisitioning and strict control of supplies entering the city resulted in scarcity amid growing corruption, rapidly declining living standards, and major public health emergencies. The book shows how conflicts over distribution of and access to resources led to social divisions, a sharp deterioration in Polish–Jewish relations, and general distrust in public institutions. Women's public visibility, demands for political representation, and perceived threats to the patriarchal order during the war years sustained one arena of cultural debate. New modes of popular entertainment, including cinema, cabaret, and variety shows, created another, particularly as they challenged elite notions of propriety. The book presents these themes in comparative context, not only with other major European cities during the Great War but also with Warsaw under Nazi German occupation a generation later.

Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered. This book illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement. Chapters consider theft and pillaging as strategies of conquest; soldiers' relationships with their weapons; and the use of clothing and domestic goods by prisoners of war, extermination camp inmates, freed people, and refugees to make claims and to create a kind of normalcy. While studies of migration and material culture have proliferated in recent years, as have histories of the Napoleonic, colonial, World Wars, and postcolonial wars, few have focused on the movement of people and things in times of war across two centuries. This focus, in combination with a broad temporal canvas, serves historians and others well as they seek to push beyond the written word.

What happened to veterans of the nations involved in the world wars? How did they fare when they returned home and needed benefits? How were they recognized — or not — by their governments and fellow citizens? Where and under what circumstances did they obtain an elevated postwar status? This book examines veterans' struggles for entitlements and benefits in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, the Soviet Union, China, Germany, and Australia after both global conflicts. It illuminates how veterans' success or failure in winning benefits were affected by a range of factors that shaped their ability to exert political influence. Some veterans' groups fought politicians for improvements to their postwar lives; this lobbying, the book shows, could set the foundation for beneficial veteran treatment regimes or weaken the political forces proposing unfavorable policies. The book highlights cases of veterans who secured (and in some cases failed to secure) benefits and status after wars both won and lost; within both democratic and authoritarian polities; under liberal, conservative, and even Leninist governments; after wars fought by volunteers or conscripts, at home or abroad, and for legitimate or subsequently discredited causes. Veterans who succeeded did so, for the most part, by forcing their agendas through lobbying, protesting, and mobilizing public support. The book provides a large-scale map for a research field with a future: comparative veteran studies.

This book explores the gossip and innuendo, the dissonant reactions and perceptions of Germans to the violent dissolution of the Third Reich. Mobilized for total war, soldiers and citizens alike experienced an unprecedented convergence of military, economic, social, and political crises. But even in retreat, the militarized national community unleashed ferocious energies, staving off defeat for over two years and continuing a systematic murder campaign against European Jews and others. Was its faith in the Führer never shaken by the prospect of ultimate defeat? This book uncovers how Germans experienced life and death, investigates how mounting emergency conditions affected their understanding of the nature and purpose of the conflagration, and shows how these factors influenced the people's relationship with the Nazi regime. The book draws on Nazi morale and censorship reports, features citizens' private letters and diaries, and incorporates a large body of Allied intelligence, including several thousand transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations among German prisoners of war in Western Allied captivity. The book's historical reconstruction helps us understand how ordinary Germans interpreted their experiences as both the victims and perpetrators of extreme violence. We are drawn into their desolate landscape: walking through bombed-out streets, scrounging for food, burning furniture, listening furtively to Allied broadcasts, unsure where the truth lies. The book is about the stories that Germans told themselves to make sense of this world in crisis.

This book examines the quartering of British soldiers in North America in the eighteenth century, using ideas of place to understand the political and social history of quartering. In colonial America, quartering in houses was common, but this practice was challenged with the arrival of the British army during the French and Indian War. Eager to keep British regulars out of private homes, the colonists built barracks and planted military geography in the heart of their cities. The Quartering Act emerged after the war as an attempt to extend British rights and responsibilities to the colonies, but the size and diversity of British North America inhibited this effort and fractured the empire. As quartering in Canada and the backcountry diverged from that in the American colonies, friction emerged between the colonists and the British army. Following the Boston Massacre, quartering became a divisive issue that encouraged the Americans to contemplate forming their own nation.

This book rights the widespread myth that Romania was a reluctant member of the Axis during World War II. In correcting this fallacy, the book shows that, of an estimated 300,000 Jews who perished in Romania and Romanian-occupied Ukraine, more than 64,000 were, in fact, killed by Romanian soldiers. Moreover, the Romanian Army conducted a brutal campaign in German-occupied Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, and civilians. Investigating why Romanian soldiers fought and committed such atrocities, the book argues that strong ideology—a cocktail of nationalism, religion, antisemitism, and anticommunism—undergirded their motivation. The book integrates the Holocaust into the narrative of military operations to show that most soldiers fully supported the wartime dictator, General Ion Antonescu, and his regime’s holy war against “Judeo-Bolshevism.” The army perpetrated mass reprisals, targeting Jews in liberated Romanian territory; supported the deportation and concentration of Jews in camps or ghettos in Romanian-occupied Soviet territory; and played a key supporting role in S.S. efforts to exterminate Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory. The book proves that Romania became Nazi Germany’s most important ally in the war against the U.S.S.R. because its soldiers were highly motivated, thus overturning much of what we thought we knew about this theater of war. The book provides the first complete history of why Romanian soldiers fought on the Eastern Front.

This book argues that policy makers’ idealized conceptions of middle-class masculinity directly affected who they targeted for conscription during the Cold War. Along with much of the American population, federal officials, including those within the Selective Service System, believed college educated men could better protect the nation from the threat of communism as civilians than as soldiers. The availability of deferments for these men grew rapidly between 1945 and 1965, militarizing their occupations and making it less and less likely that middle-class white men would serve in the Cold War military. Meanwhile, officials used the War on Poverty to target poorer men for conscription in the hopes that military service would offer them skills they could use in civilian life. Therefore, while some men resisted military service in Vietnam for reasons of political conscience, most of those who avoided military service did so because manpower polices made it possible. By protecting middle-class breadwinners in the name of national security, policy planners militarized certain civilian roles, a move that, ironically, separated military service from the obligations of masculine citizenship and, ultimately, helped kill the draft in the United States.