Texas a & M University Military History – serie

During the first three days of the Japanese assault on American Pacific bases in December of 1941, the 24th Pursuit Group, the only unit of interceptor aircraft in the Philippine Islands, was almost destroyed as an effective force. Yet the group’s pilots, doomed from the start by their limited training, an inadequate air warning system, and lack of familiarity with the few flyable pursuit aircraft they had left, fought on against immensely superior number of Japanese army and navy fighters.

The Korean War was a pivotal event in China's modern military history. The fighting in Korea constituted an important experience for the newly formed People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), not only as a test case for this fledgling service but also in the later development of Chinese air power. Xiaoming Zhang fills the gaps in the history of this conflict by basing his research on declassified Chinese and Russian archival materials and interviews with Chinese participants in the air war over Korea. Zhang's findings challenge conventional wisdom as he compares kill ratios and performance by all sides involved in the war. Zhang also addresses the broader issues of the Korean War, such as how air power affected Beijing's decision to intervene. He touches on ground operations and truce negotiations during the conflict. Chinese leaders, he concludes, placed great emphasis on the supremacy of human will over modern weaponry, but they were far from oblivious to the advantages of the latter and to China's technological limitations. Developments in China's own air power were critical during this era. Zhang offers considerable materials on the training of Chinese aviators and the Soviet role in that training, on Soviet and Chinese air operations in Korea, and on diplomatic exchanges over Soviet military assistance to China. He probes the impact of the war on China's conception of the role of air power, arguing that it was not until the Gulf War of the early 1990s that Chinese leaders engaged in a broad reassessment of the strategy they adopted during the Korean War. Military historians and scholars interested in aviation and foreign affairs should find this volume of special interest. In presenting the Chinese point of view, it stands as both a complement and a corrective to previous accounts of the conflict.

When Nazi Germany began bearing down on Europe in the late 1930s, Herman Bodson was a student intellectual and pacifist at the University of Brussels. As the reality of eventual invasion sank into his soul, however, his passion for freedom overcame his pacifism and with a group of friends he entered the resistance and five years of dangerous work as, in his words, ""a fighter and a killer"". With his background in chemistry, Bodson became an expert in explosives and sabotage, leading a group of fighters that blew up military trains and installations (including a bridge whose destruction killed some 600 German soldiers), cut German communication lines, and rescued downed American fliers. He also served as an aide to an American military doctor during the Battle of the Bulge. Bodson concludes his account of freedom fighting by telling of his role in bringing traitors to justice at war's end. This story of the Belgian underground provides insight into the intellectual and emotional responses that have led to the birth of such movement in many nations.

The Korean conflict was a pivotal event in China's modern military History, constituting an important experience for the newly formed People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), not only as a test case for this fledgling service but also in the later development of Chinese air power. Xiaoming Zhang fills the gaps in the history of this conflict by basing his research on recently declassified Chinese and Russian archival materials and interviews with Chinese participants in the air war over Korea. Zhang's findings challenge conventional wisdom as he compares kill ratios and performance by all sides involved in the war, addresses how air power affected Beijing's decision to intervene, and touches on ground operations and truce negotiations during the conflict. Zhang also offers considerable materials on the training of Chinese aviators and the Soviet role in that training, on Soviet and Chinese air operations in Korea, and on diplomatic exchanges over Soviet military assistance to China.

The U.S. military has historically believed itself to be the institution best suited to develop the character, spiritual values, and patriotism of American youth. Here, author Lori Bogle investigates how the armed forces assigned themselves this role and why they sought to create ""ideologically sound Americans capable of defeating communism and assuring the victory of democracy at home and abroad."" Bogle shows that this view of America's civil religion predated tension with the Soviet Union. She traces this trend from the Progressive Era though the early Cold War, when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations formulated plans that promised to prepare the American public morally and spiritually for confrontation with the evils of communism. Bogle's analysis suggests that cooperation among the military, evangelical right wing groups, and government was considered both necessary and normal. The Boy Scouts pushed a narrow vision of American democracy, and Joe McCarthy's chauvinism was less an aberration than a noxious manifestation of a widespread attitude. To combat communism, America and its armed forces embraced a narrow moral education that attacked everyone and everything not consonant with their view of the world order. Exposure of this alliance ultimately dissolved it.