Hamburg is perhaps South Carolina's most famous ghost town. Founded in 1821, it grew to four thousand residents before transportation advances led to decline. During Reconstruction, recently freed slaves reshaped Hamburg into a freedmen's village, where residents held local, county and state offices. These gains were wiped away after the Hamburg Massacre in 1876, a watershed event that left seven African Americans dead, most of them executed in cold blood. Yet more than a century after Ham...

The Japanese called it the centipede. The northern part of Lunga Ridge, a narrow grass-covered rise that looked like an insect from the air, overlooked a coastal plain. In the center of that plain was Henderson Field, the vital home of the Cactus Air Force and the prize of the Guadalcanal campaign. Whoever commanded the ridge commanded the airstrip. In September 1942, the ridge was the scene of a bloody, three-day battle for control of Henderson Field.In Bloody Ridge, the ...

SOLDIERS OF $$Privateers, contract killers,corporate warriors. Contract soldiers go by many names, but they all have one thing in common: They fight for money and plunder rather than liberty, God, or country. Now acclaimed author and war vet Michael Lee Lanning traces the compelling history of these fighting machines–from the “Sea Peoples” who fought for the pharaohs’ greater glory to today’s soldiers for hire from private military companies (PMCs) in Iraq and Afghanistan.W...

In The Lessons of Terror, novelist and military historian Caleb Carr examines terrorism throughout history and the roots of our present crisis and reaches a provocative set of conclusions: the practice of targeting enemy civilians is as old as warfare itself; it has always failed as a military and political tactic; and despite the dramatic increases in its scope and range of weapons, it will continue to fail in the future.International terrorism—the victimization o...

"Inside the Nazi War Machine vividly recounts how Rommel, von Manstein and Guderian turned the Blitzkrieg into a fearsome weapon of war in France in 1940, and how Hitler botched his best opportunity to have defeated the BEF, and perhaps defeated Britain.”—Carlo D’Este, author of Patton: A Genius For WarIn 1940, as Hitler plotted to conquer Europe, only one nation posed a serious threat to the Third Reich's domination: France. The German command wa...

Extrait :"How the Brigadier Came to the Castle of GloomYou do very well, my friends, to treat me with some little reverence, for in honouring me you are honouring both France and yourselves. It is not merely an old, grey-moustached officer whom you see eating his omelette or draining his glass, but it is a fragment of history. In me you see one of the last of those wonderful men, the men who were veterans when they were yet boys, who learned to use a sword earlier t...

Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1584-1645) is the most revered and celebrated swordsman in Japanese history; unfortunately, our modern portrait of this folk hero is derived mainly from popular books, comics, and film, with little heed paid to the early records by men who knew Musashi, practiced with Musashi, and went into battle with Musashi.Spanning a period of more than a decade, the author set out to translate all surviving records on Musashi. The result is a body of text ...

In the opening years of the Vietnam War, a small group of American military advisors and their South Vietnamese allies were facing down the Viet Cong. The confident Americans were there to do what seemed elementary: help the South Vietnamese army defeat a ragtag guerrilla enemy. They were assured of swift success. But one officer, John Paul Vann, saw darker omens for the future—and in the Battle of Ap Bac, the Viet Cong proved him correct.Encapsulating the great terrors, mistakes, ...

Frontinus, (40 103 A.D.) was a Roman aristocrat and author. His most famous works were on aqueducts (De Aquaeductu), and a military treatise (Stratagemata). Stratagemata discusses military tactics, using examples of Greek and Roman generals. The book was intended to be used by Roman generals, and draws upon Frontinus experience as a general in Germany under Emperor Domitian.

John Boyd was arguably the greatest American military theorist since the sea power strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan at the turn of the 20th Century. Best known for his formulation of the OODA Loop as a model for competitive decision making, Colonel Boyd was also an original thinker in developing tactics for air-to-air combat, designing warplanes, and the fluid, mobile warfare known to the Germans as blitzkrieg and to modern armies as "maneuver warfare." As much as anyone, John Boyd was the a...

One of the key objectives of British forces on D-Day was the capture of the strategically vital city of Caen.General Montgomery saw Caen as the key to Normandy and the springboard for the Allied breakout, but so did the Germans and the city did not fall. It took three major offensives and more than 30 bloody days of struggle to finally take Caen. In the process the city was controversially devastated and its civilian population decimated. The Allies paid a high pri...

On Lüneberg Heath in 1945, the German High Command surrendered to Field Marshall Montgomery; in 2015, seventy years after this historic triumph, the last units of the British Army finally left their garrisons next to Lüneberg Heath.Boots on the Ground is the story of those years, following the British Army against the backdrop of Britain's shifting security and defence policies. From the decolonisation of India to the two invasions of Iraq, and, of course, Ireland, the boo...