Résultats Éditeur "Charles River Editors" dans Militaire

The most iconic images of the First World War are of the war on land. But part of that same generation faced a very different war, one that was just as important in deciding the fate of Europe. This was the war at sea. Here, events took place that would draw America into the war, providing the Allies with a new pool of manpower and so ensuring that the scales of the conflict tipped in their favor. At sea just as much as on land, this was a war that would shape the future of the world.

A swift, sudden attack from the ocean, putting soldiers ashore on a hostile coast at some point weakly defended by the enemy, has been a powerful tactical and strategic tool since the late Bronze Age. Utilized by the Sea Peoples against New Kingdom Egypt and the Greek city-states in their internecine wars, amphibious warfare combined high mobility with a strong chance of complete surprise. World War II, however, witnessed a sudden explosion in the scope and metamorphosis in the methods of amphibious warfare.

He was recognized by many as a curious scholar and archaeologist, brilliant linguist, British soldier, extraordinary adventurer, and avid writer, though he called himself an "ordinary man". T. E. Lawrence, more popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia, was a seminal figure in the shaping and reshaping of the politics of Arabia in the early 20th century, serving as an expert in Arab affairs in the British military and playing a key role in the Great Arab Revolt of 1916-1918.

To possess and develop western North America became a high priority for the United States government even before its Constitution had been complete. Railroads were still some decades off, and passable roads were all but nonexistent. No familiar institutions of power were suitable for creating a foothold in the continent's interior, especially in the Rocky Mountain region. The US Army eventually made inroads to the Great Plains and beyond, but the first true explorers of the far west’s interior arose from within a relatively small culture embodied by the American mountain man.

The rugged island of Sicily, dominated in the east by the snow-crowned eminence of the active volcano Mount Etna (which rises to a height of 11,000 feet), lies in the ocean just off the "toe" of the "boot" of Italy. This spectacular setting witnessed one of 1943's pivotal battles as the theater of Allied operations shifted from North Africa to Europe - Operation Husky, a mixed victory wresting control of Sicily from the Axis.

The first aircraft to appear in the skies over the battlefields of World War I showed few signs of the dominant future of airplanes in warfare. Small, fragile, and slow, they provided no hint of the sleek jet fighters that would one day slash across the skies of Earth faster than sound. The Dogfights of the World Wars: The Evolution and History of the Fight in the Skies During World War I and World War II looks at how technology and tactics evolved during the wars.

Like lethal insects undergoing a series of metamorphoses into ever more mature and dangerous forms, military aircraft moved rapidly from stage to stage of their development as the 20th century progressed. The catalyst of war provided the swiftest impetus to this evolution. The new mechanized armies existing from the later period of World War I onward seized on the fresh technology and sought to squeeze every possible drop of advantage from it that the limits of science and the era's materials would allow.

World War II was an entirely different story. The Germans were angry after the First World War, and using public sway and anger, Adolf Hitler took power in the 1930s. Unlike the earlier army, the German Army of the Second World War committed some of the most grotesque and unforgivable atrocities in the history of mankind. This isn't to say that the German commanders and soldiers were all bad, and of all the men who fought for the Reich, the one with the most sterling reputation is Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox. Rommel rose through the ranks of the German Army in the years preceding the outbreak of World War II, and he proved to be a cunning and insinuative soldier who was one of the most brilliant cavalry commanders in the history of warfare. Eventually, the evil that surrounded him engulfed him, and his pure brilliance went untapped.

Among the proponents and practitioners of armored warfare, the brash, bold, arrogant, and eccentric George S. Patton remains the world's greatest armored commander by the one yardstick that really counts: the battlefield. Patton was a fascinating, complicated and controversial man whose life story ranges between genius, folly, and tragedy, with absolute determination the one constant theme.

East Germany: The History and Legacy of the Soviet Satellite State Established after World War II examines the controversial country and its place in the Cold War. The history of East Germany was a remarkable one, from its chaotic origins through its ossification as a Stalinist regime, until the country collapsed with the Berlin Wall. Not only is Germany still marked by the division, but the old frontier still represents different expectations, social conditions, and worldviews.

North Korea would be horrific enough if it was a fictional place, but its nuclear weapons program is all too real. Meanwhile, rumors regarding Iran's nuclear capabilities have understandably left many nations on the edges of their seats. Experts insist that the Iranian propaganda program is chiefly responsible for entrenching into its masses a resentment of the West, unlike North Korea, which proudly walls itself off from the rest of civilization.

When people think about the Second World War, they seldom think in terms of silence and small acts. This was a war in which the industry of entire nations was rearranged to feed fighting, and it was fought on a scale in which battles could include hundreds of thousands of combatants. Whole cities and populations were destroyed, with millions of casualties occurring at places like Leningrad.

The experience that everyone associates with World War I is not commonly that of the Ottoman Empire. But in the Middle Eastern Front, the British and their allies fought the Ottoman Turkish Empire under harsh desert conditions hundreds of miles from home, struggling for possession of places most people only knew from the Bible and the Koran. The fall of the Ottoman Empire would set the geopolitical scene of the new Middle East.

The ‘60s closely reflected the glossy, idealistic portrayal of John F. Kennedy. But the idealism and optimism of the decade was quickly shattered, starting with Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. By the time Bobby Kennedy was killed, references to the infamous “Kennedy Curse” became more common. But if such a curse did truly exist, it originated with the oldest brother and the one originally expected to achieve a preeminent place in politics, Joseph Kennedy, Jr.

In the years preceding the height of the European Holocaust’s worst atrocities, Adolf Hitler, the new Chancellor of Germany, confronted the world with a moral test. His early experiment of allowing Jews to seek homelands elsewhere came to define his future course of action toward the Jewish population of the continent. The acidic hatred he bore for the Jewish presence in European society was clear enough, but the leader of the Nazi Party could not precisely gauge the international community’s likely response to a campaign of extreme abuse directed against his own citizens.

In 1934, a pair of teenagers from Baltimore by the names of Theodore Jones and Henry Grob embarked on what they thought would be another lazy summer afternoon. They popped in at the soda shop and idly browsed through the aisles of few local mom-and-pop stores, but when they could not kill their boredom, they decided to return to Grob's place for an impromptu treasure hunt. Clunky metal detectors in hand, they roamed around the backyard, discovering and delighting in odd metal knickknacks along the way. What started out as just another slow-moving summer's day turned out to be anything but when one of the detectors began to go off.

Ernie Pyle's life is like a 1950s movie script. Born the beloved and only child of hardscrabble American farmers, he made good grades in school, graduated, and went off to college at "State", in his case the University of Indiana. Overcoming his shyness, he studied journalism and wrote stories for the school paper that earned him a position of esteem among his fellow students. He partied hard but kept his grades up, and then married a girl as high spirited as he was. Together, they left school early and made their way to the nation's capital, where the farm boy got a job with a big city paper. In the years that followed, they traveled the country, meeting the great and the simple alike, and writing stories that made them the envy of the common man.

The French Army crumbled swiftly under the powerful blows delivered to it in 1940 by Nazi Germany's confident Wehrmacht. Launching a massive feint into Belgium to lure mobile French armies and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) away from the actual point of attack, the weakly protected Ardennes Forest, the Germans struck past the Maginot Line. In a lightning campaign, Heinz Guderian's panzers punched through to the coast, dividing Allied forces with a steel cordon across France and forcing the evacuation of the BEF from the port of Dunkirk.

One of the most important breakthroughs in military technology associated with World War I, and certainly the one that continues to capture the public imagination, was the use of airplanes, which were a virtual novelty a decade before. While the war quickly ground to a halt in its first few months, the skies above the Western Front became increasingly busy. The great powers had already been acquiring aircraft for potential uses, but aerial warfare had never been a major component of any conflict.

Spartacus is the world’s most famous slave, and one of the most notorious figures of Ancient Rome. A slave enamored of freedom and willing to fight and die for it, he became especially popular in the years following the Enlightenment, after which he was widely viewed as a poignant champion of liberty in the 18th and 19th centuries. As a result, he became a symbol during struggles like the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, and the struggle for emancipation.