Marc Milner – författare

This volume examines the state of the art in modern military history, and the utility of the subject as a training, educational, and policy-relevant tool for professional armed forces. Part 1 explores the state of military historical writing in Britain and the United States, and on specific topics, such as air warfare, naval warfare, intelligence, low-intensity conflict, and the most recent trends in the New Military History. Part 2 illustrates the utility of the historical method in analyzing command decisions, providing an institutional memory for a wide range of policy, command, and operational problems, and its application in specific subjects such as naval strategy, and by certain countries (the US, Germany, and the Soviet Union) in the search for lessons and fundamental principles. The contributing authors represent an impressive cross-section of prominent academic and official historians recognized as leading scholars in the study of military history. The Foreword is written by Anne N. Foreman, Undersecretary of the United States Air Force.This book will be of interest to the academic and the official historian (and their students) and to military professionals.

A revelatory new account of the Second World War—and how bitter competition between the Allies would shape the postwar world  In June 1944, an Allied army of British, American, and Canadian troops sought to open up a Second Front in Normandy. But they were not only fighting to bring the Second World War to an end. After decades of Anglo-American struggle for dominance, they were also contending with one another—to determine who would ascend to global hegemony once Hitler’s armies fell.  Marc Milner traces this bitter rivalry as it emerged after the First World War and evolved during the fragile peace which led to the Second. American media and domestic politics dominated the Allied powers’ military strategy, overshadowing the contributions of Britain and the remarkably critical role played by Canada in establishing this Second Front.  Culminating in the decisive Normandy campaign, Milner shows how the struggle for supremacy between Churchill and Roosevelt changed the course of the Second World War—and how their rivalry shaped our understanding of the Normandy campaign, and the war itself.

Brigadier General James L. Collins Jr. Book PrizeIn the narrative of D-Day the Canadians figure chiefly—if at all—as an ineffective force bungling their part in the early phase of Operation Overlord. The reality is quite another story. As both the Allies and the Germans knew, only Germany’s Panzers could crush Overlord in its tracks. The Canadians’ job was to stop the Panzers—which, as this book finally makes clear, is precisely what they did. Rescuing from obscurity one of the least understood and most important chapters in the history of D-Day, Stopping the Panzers is the first full account of how the Allies planned for and met the Panzer threat to Operation Overlord. As such, this book marks nothing less than a paradigm shift in our understanding of the Normandy campaign.Beginning with the Allied planning for Operation Overlord in 1943, historian Marc Milner tracks changing and expanding assessments of the Panzer threat, and the preparations of the men and units tasked with handling that threat. Featured in this was the 3rd Canadian Division, which, treated so dismissively by history, was actually the most powerful Allied formation to land on D-Day, with a full armored brigade and nearly 300 artillery and antitank guns under command. Milner describes how, over four days of intense and often brutal battle, the Canadians fought to a literal standstill the 1st SS Panzer Corps—which included the Wehrmacht’s 21st Panzer Division; its vaunted elite Panzer Lehr Division; and the rabidly zealous 12th SS Hitler Youth Panzer Division, whose murder of 157 Canadian POWs accounted for nearly a quarter of Canadian fatalities during the fighting.Stopping the Panzers sets this murderous battle within the wider context of the Overlord assault, offering a perspective that challenges the conventional wisdom about Allied and German combat efficiency, and leads to one of the freshest assessments of the D-Day landings and their pre-attack planning in more than a decade.

World War II was only a few hours old when the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest campaign of the Second World War and the most complex submarine war in history, began with the sinking of the unarmed passenger liner Athenia by the German submarine U30. Based on the mastery of the latest research and written from a mid-Atlantic – rather than the traditional Anglo-centric – perspective, Marc Milner focuses on the confrontation between opposing forces and the attacks on Allied shipping that lay at the heart of the six-year struggle. Against the backdrop of the battle for the Atlantic lifeline he charts the fascinating development of U-boats and the techniques used by the Allies to suppress and destroy these stealth weapons.

From its eighteenth-century roots in exploration and trade, to the major conflicts of the First and Second World Wars, through to current roles in multinational operations with United Nations and NATO forces, Canada's navy - now celebrating its one hundredth anniversary - has been an expression of Canadian nationhood and a catalyst in the complex process of national unity.In the second edition of Canada's Navy, Marc Milner brings his classic work up to date and looks back at one hundred years of the Navy in Canada. With supplementary photos, updated sources, a new preface and epilogue, and an additional chapter on the Navy's global reach from 1991 to 2010, this edition carries Canadian Naval history into the twenty-first century. Milner brings effortless prose and exacting attention to detail to his comprehensive and accessible examination of this fascinating Canadian organization. This much-needed update of Canada's Navy will continue to provoke discussion about the past and future of the country's naval forces and their evolving role in the interwoven issues of maritime politics and economics, defence and strategy, and national and foreign policy.

From the seafaring battles between the British and the French of the 1640s to the privateers of the War of 1812, from the merchant ships of the Second World War to the construction of the corvettes and frigates in the 20th century, New Brunswick has played an important role in Canada's naval history. In 1881, the new Dominion of Canada chose New Brunswick as the base for its naval operations. Three decades later, New Brunswick MP Sir George Foster initiated Parliamentary debates that led to the founding of the modern Canadian Navy.In this fact-filled volume, Marc Milner and Glenn Leonard tell the story of New Brunswick's contribution to Canada's storied naval heritage.New Brunswick and the Navy is volume 16 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

From its eighteenth-century roots in exploration and trade, to the major conflicts of the First and Second World Wars, through to current roles in multinational operations with United Nations and NATO forces, Canada's navy - now celebrating its one hundredth anniversary - has been an expression of Canadian nationhood and a catalyst in the complex process of national unity.In the second edition of Canada's Navy, Marc Milner brings his classic work up to date and looks back at one hundred years of the Navy in Canada. With supplementary photos, updated sources, a new preface and epilogue, and an additional chapter on the Navy's global reach from 1991 to 2010, this edition carries Canadian Naval history into the twenty-first century. Milner brings effortless prose and exacting attention to detail to his comprehensive and accessible examination of this fascinating Canadian organization. This much-needed update of Canada's Navy will continue to provoke discussion about the past and future of the country's naval forces and their evolving role in the interwoven issues of maritime politics and economics, defence and strategy, and national and foreign policy.

The Royal Canadian Navy is best known for its role in the defence of convoys against attacks by U-boats, particularly those in the mid-Atlantic from 1941--1943. Marc Milner's 1985 book, North Atlantic Run: The Royal Canadian Navy and the Battle for the Convoys, was the first scholarly analysis of those crucial defensive operations. The U-Boat Hunters takes up the story for the last two years of the war, when the measurement of operational effectiveness at sea shifted from success in defending convoys to the ability to hunt down and sink U-Boats. The U-Boat Hunters begins with a thorough re-evaluation of the RCN's role in the decisive Allied Atlantic victory over the U-boats in 1943. It presents some startling new conclusions about why the Canadians were marginalized in this the greatest of all anti-submarine offensives. Most studies of the Atlantic war end at this point, but 1943 is just the prologue to Milner's new book. Historians have ignored anti-submarine warfare in 1944-5 because it was highly technical, undramatic end of no consequence to the outcome of the war itself. But the war against the U-boat was unrelenting. Schnorkels, improved batteries, radar detectors, and complex inshore water conditions made it difficult to find and sink late-war U-boats. By 1944 the Germans were building new, high-speed true submarines, against which the Allies had no effective countermeasures. This book is the story of how it fought to master the basics of modern anti-submarine warfare, and how its efforts fit into the larger Allied campaign. The U-Boat Hunters, which completes Milner's analysis of the RCN's battle with Germany's submarines, is a pioneering study of the final years of the Atlantic war and a landmark work in both Canadian and modern naval history.

In a stretch of the North Atlantic known as the Black Pit, far from land-based air cover, escorted convoys travelling the main trade routes between Newfoundland and Ireland were regularly besieged by marauding U-boats in classical naval confrontations. The Royal Canadian Navy's escort operations proved to be one of Canada's most important contributions to Allied victory in the Second World War. They were also one of the most controversial. The story of those operations and of Canada's wartime navy is now told in full detail for the first time. Milner focuses primarily on the series of bitter and tragic battles fought by the RCN in the mid-Atlantic during the latter half of 1942. Events of those six months constituted the crisis of Canada's naval war. The fall-out from this crisis, its impact on the operational deployment of the fleet, and the violent upheaval it caused it Ottawa are key parts of the story. The drama at sea was played out against a backgroup of bitter controversy at home, as the navy struggled to balance its operational commitments with the urgent need to confront and defeat a deadly enemy. North Atlantic Run fills an important gap in the historiography of wartime Canada and the war at sea, and finally portrays both Canada and the RCN, for better or worse, as dynamic elements in the struggle for the convoys.