Red Arrow Across The Pacific: The Thirty-Second Infantry Division During World War II

“Red Arrow Across The Pacific” is a detailed, but engaging account of the Thirty-Second Division’s World War II service, featuring training in the United States and Australia followed by intense combat in New Guinea and the Philippines and occupation duty in Japan.   Consisting of National Guard units from Wisconsin and Michigan, the Thirty-Second could be considered the spiritual successor of the Iron Brigade of Civil War fame.  Its Red Arrow name and insignia, a vertical red arrow pointing…

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Blue Helmet: My Year As A UN Peacekeeper In South Sudan by Edward H. Carpenter

War history’s tales include not only those of the warriors, but also those of the peacemakers.  “Blue Helmet: My Year As A UN Peacekeeper in South Sudan” is cuch a tale. The scene is South Sudan, a country torn by civil war, ethnic violence and crushed by poverty.  The main character is the author, Edwar H. Carpenter, a career USMC officer.    The format can be described as a day-by-day journal, a diary directed to the reader, not for introspective reflection.  The first of 72 entries is 10…

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Ski Climb Fight

 Watching the 1968 film Where Eagles Dare, with Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton, stoked my interest as a young boy in a subset of World War II that has seldom seen inclusion as a part of popular culture…mountain warfare. For those who have seen Where Eagles Dare, it would be difficult to forget the daring fight scenes atop cable cars with breathtaking shots of snow-covered peaks in the background. My palms get sweaty just recalling those scenes.While it is not a fictional account of Special…

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FAR FROM SUITABLE? HAIG, GOUGH AND PASSCHENDAELE: A REAPPRAISAL. by Nicholas Ridley

Far From Suitable? Haig, Gough and Passchendaele: A Reappraisal is an in-depth study of responsibility for the battle of Passchendaele and its legacy in Great War memory.  The principal contenders are Field Marshall, Sir Douglas Haig, Commander of British Armies on the Western Front and overall commander of the campaign, Gen, Sir Hubert Gough, commander of the Fifth Army, the motor of the Battle during its first month, and General Sir Herbert Plumer, commander of the Second Army, positioned to…

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The Coldest Winter: America And The Korean War by David Halberstam

I read “The Coldest Winter” in preparation of a one-night continuing education class I was teaching.  In my reading, in breadth, length and detail, it is the magnus opus of American Korean War literature.  Neither a commendation nor a condemnation of what has been characterized as “The century’s nastiest little war”, it tells the whole story, good, bad and ugly.  It begins with the mistakes and miscalculations that set the stage for North Korean aggression.  Before the National Press Club on…

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"The Tokyo Sixteen: The Heroes of Doolittle’s Raid on Japan in April 1942" by Geert Rottiers

The Tokyo Sixteen is a personalized, human-focused narrative of the pilots who flew the Doolittle Raid on April 18, 1942. This U.S. air raid launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet bombed Tokyo and other Japanese cities just 4 months after the devastating attack at Pearl Harbor.  Instead of a broad strategic history, Rottiers structures the book around the individual stories of the sixteen pilots who undertook this high-risk mission, discussing their motivations, training, combat…

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The Pusan Perimeter by Edwin P. Hoyt

“The Pusan Perimeter” is an chronicle of the desperate defense of the Korean Peninsula from the North Korean attack of June 1950 through the days of the stable defensive line behind which the Inchon landings, that were to reverse the tide of the Korean War, we being prepped.   The narrative is very much in journalistic style with detailed accounts of units and personnel involved, in keeping with the author Edwin Hoyt’s background.  The text is supplemented to advantage by and black and white…

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Trust and Leadership: The Australian Army Approach to Mission Command

“Trust and Leadership” consists of thirteen chronologically sequenced chapters, each being an essay on Mission Command as demonstrated in the operation covered from World War I to the Queensland National Emergency of 2010-2011 and extending from Gallipoli to the Southwest Pacific, Korea, Malaya, Borneo, Vietnam, Somali, East Timor, the Solomon Islands, Iraq, Afghanistan and domestic disaster relief and recovery.  Each chapter concludes with endnotes.  “Mission command is the practice of…

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"Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany" by Donald L. Miller - The Story of the 8th Air Force in WWII

Donald L. Miller's, Masters of the Air, is a widely acclaimed and bestselling story of the American Eighth Air Force (The Mighty Eighth) during World War II. Using interviews, oral histories, and other archives, it’s considered an authoritative account of USAAF bomber crews in World War II and the strategy and decision-making process behind the scenes of senior Allied leaders. Donald L. Miller delivers a definitive, epic account that interweaves the strategic, political, and moral complexities…

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Light Horse Harry: A Biography of Washington's great cavalryman, General Henry Lee by Noel Garson

I started “Light Horse Harry” in hopes of learning about a Revolutionary figure of whom I had only a superficial familiarity.  I knew he was the failed father of Robert E. Lee to whom left little other than an historic name.  I found a much more significant figure.  Born in 1756, and the oldest surviving child of his parents, Henry and Lucy Lee of Leesylvania, Virginia, Henry grew up in a busy world of a plantation producing tobacco and corn and his father’s service in the House of Burgesses,…

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18TH AND 19TH CENTURY WAR AND CONFLICT
· The Dawn of Guerrilla Warfare
· The Pirates’ Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship 
· War Along The Wabash

AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
· Appomattox: The Last Days of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia
· Civil War on The Western Border: 1854-1865
· Guerrilla Hunters In Civil War Missouri
· The Last Confederate General: John C. Vaughn and His East Tennessee Cavalry
· A Soldier to the Last: Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler in Blue and Gray
· The Last Confederate General: John C. Vaughn and His East Tennessee Cavalry
· Lost Civil War: The Disappearing Legacy of America's Greatest Conflict
· Make Way For Liberty: Wisconsin African Americans In The Civil War
· The Presidents' War
· This Wicked Rebellion: Wisconsin Civil War Soldiers Write Home
· Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War
· Unlike Anything That Ever Floated: The Monitor and Virginia and the Battle of Hampton Roads, March 8-9, 1862
· War In The Mountains: The Macbeth Light Artillery At Asheville, NC 1864-1865
· Wisconsin Women In The War Between The States

AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY WAR
· Crisis At The Chesapeake: The Royal Navy and the Struggle for America 1775-1783
· George Washington's Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved The American Revolution
· John Hancock: Merchant King and American Patriot
· Morristown: The Darkest Winter of the Revolutionary War and the Plot to Kidnap George Washington
· The Philadelphia Campaign
· Pierre Gibault, Missionary 1737-1802
· Revolutionary War Forts: New York
· Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth
· A Very Fine Regiment: The 47th Foot during the American War of Independence, 1773-1783

ANCIENT, CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WAR
· King John: Treachery and Tyranny in Medieval England; Road to Magna Carta
· Warfare in the Age of Crusades

THE HOLOCAUST
· The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation
· Elie Wiesel’s Night: One Writer’s Voice from the Holocaust
· The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945
·
Tot De Dood Ons Scheidt (Till Death Do Us Part)

MODERN WAR & CONFLICT
· Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
· Future Peace: Technology, Aggression, And The Rush To War
· The Fighters: Americans In Combat In Afghanistan and Iraq
· The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History

VIETNAM WAR
· Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music by John Fogerty
· SOG Kontum: Top Secret Missions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, 1968–1969

WAR OF 1812
· Black Redcoats: The Corps of Colonial Marines 1814-1816
· A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South
· Don't Give Up The Ship: Myths of the War of 1812
· Historical Memoir of the War in West Florida and Louisiana in 1814-15 with an Atlas
· Tohopeka: Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812

WORLD WAR I
· 14-18: Understanding The Great War
· American Journalists In The Great War: Rewriting The Rules Of Reporting
· American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis
· Asleep in the Deep; Nursing Sister Anna Stamers and the First World War
· Botha, Smuts And The Great War
· Curse of the Narrows
· Faith in Conflict: The Impact of the Great War on the faith of the people of Britain
· General Jan Smuts and his First World War in Africa, 1914–1917: Incorporating His German South West and East Africa Campaigns
· The Great Halifax Explosion
· Letters from the Front: 1898-1945
· The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel

WORLD WAR II
· All Behind You, Winston: Churchill's Great Coalition 1940-45
· The Americans on D-Day: A Photographic History of the Normandy Invasion
· The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice
· Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich's Enduring Mystery
· Colditz: The Full Story
· Devil Dogs: King Company, Third Battalion, 5th Marines: From Guadalcanal to the Shores of Japan
· Generals and Admirals of the Third Reich for Country or Fuehrer: Volume 1: A–G
· Hitlerland: American Eyewitness to the Nazi Rise to Power
· How Ike Led
· The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved The Republican Party And His Country, And Conceived A New World Order
· The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945
· The Longest Winter
· Lucky 666: The Impossible Mission
· Nightstalkers: The Wright Project and the 868th Bomb Squadron in World War II
· Red Arrow Across The Pacific: The Thirty-Second Infantry Division During World War II
· Spearhead: An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II
· The Splendid And The Vile
· Three Days At The Brink: FDR's Daring Gamble To Win World War II
· Uniting America: How FDR and Henry Stimson Brought Democrats and Republicans Together to Win World War II
· Warbird Factory: North American Aviation in World War II
· We Band of Angels
· Winning French Minds, Radio Propaganda in Occupied France 1940-42
· Women Remember The War 1941-1945

UNCATEGORIZED
· Commanders In Chief: Presidential Leadership In Modern Wars
· French Republic's Fighting Men: 1880-1914
· The General and the Jaguar
· From Ushant To Gibraltar: The Channel Fleet 1778-1783