Williams-Ford Texas a&M University Military History Series – serie

The sectional conflict between North and South was different in Indian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma). There, the Civil War was only a veneer over the competition among the United States, the Confederacy, and sovereign Indian Nations known as the Five Civilized Tribes whose citizens, in turn, had multiple motives that drove divided loyalties.Historians have long recognized the Battle of Honey Springs on July 17, 1863, for its unusual makeup of Black, Indian, and White combatants and as the most significant battle of the Civil War in Indian Territory. Honey Springs, Oklahoma: Historical Archaeology of a Civil War Battlefield is the first book to focus solely on this event. It is unique in that its discourse and conclusions flow from the convergence of three lines of evidence: written history (memory), scientific archaeological findings, and military terrain analysis of the landscape. This triangulation of sources offers a place for long overlooked perspectives and returns an otherwise missing voice to Native American and Black participants.One of the synthesizing questions addressed by author William B. Lees is how to explain rebel loss. Given the participants’ cultural diversity, the question has many answers; victory and defeat are, after all, in the eye of the beholder. Honey Springs, Oklahoma makes clear the location of skirmishing, the lopsided attack of Union troops on the right of the Confederate line, and precise locations of fighting during the rebel retreat. This analysis is the fulcrum in the re-envisioning of the agency of Native American participants. This groundbreaking study will provide new insights for students and scholars of historical archaeology, and military historians and general readers with an interest in the Civil War and its archaeological record will also benefit from Lees’s research into this important but heretofore little-studied engagement.

For decades before the Civil War, Southern writers and warriors had been urging the occupation and development of the American Southwest. When the rift between North and South had been finalized in secession, the Confederacy moved to extend their traditions to the west–a long-sought goal that had been frustrated by northern states. It was a common sentiment among Southerners and especially Texans that Mexico must be rescued from indolent inhabitants and granted the benefits of American civilization. Blood and Treasure , written in a readable narrative style that belies the rigorous research behind it, tells the story of the Confederacy's ambitious plan to extend a Confederate empire across the continent. Led by Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor, later a governor of Arizona, and General H. H. Sibley, Texan soldiers trekked from San Antonio to Fort Bliss in El Paso, then north along the Rio Grande to Santa Fe. Fighting both Apaches and Federal troops, the half-trained, undisciplined army met success at the Battle of Val Verde and defeat at the Battle of Apache Canyon. Finally, the Texans won the Battle of Glorieta Pass, only to lose their supply train--and eventually the campaign. Pursued and dispirited, the Confederates abandoned their dream of empire and retreated to El Paso and San Antonio. Frazier has made use of previously untapped primary sources, allowing him to present new interpretations of the famous Civil War battles in the Southwest. Using narratives of veterans of the campaign and official Confederate and Union documents, the author explains how this seemingly far-fetched fantasy of building a Confederate empire was an essential part of the Confederate strategy. Military historians will be challenged to modify traditional views of Confederate imperial ambitions. Generalists will be drawn into the fascinating saga of the soldiers' fears, despair, and struggles to survive.

On the morning of March 26, 1862, Confederate and Union armies met in Glorieta Pass in the southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. A series of skirmishes, jockeying for position, and a pitched battle on March 28 took a heavy toll on both sides and left the Rebels under Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley apparently victorious over Gen. John P. Slough's troops. However, the tide turned when Union soldiers under Col. John Chivington located the Confederate supply train and destroyed it. Without supplies, replacement arms, and ammunition, the Rebel troops could not maintain themselves against the still strong Federal forces in the area. After a few additional skirmishes, the dispirited and disorganized Rebels straggled back to Texas. The Confederate quest for expansion into the Southwest was abandoned. The Battle of Glorieta, some twenty miles southeast of Santa Fe, marked the Rebels' farthest advance northward in the Far West, just as the encounter at Gettysburg the following year would define their farthest significant northward penetration in the eastern theater. The Battle of Glorieta: Union Victory in the West offers the first full, detailed, and accurate history of this blind, groping struggle in the smoke-filled Glorieta valley. The definitive work on the battle, it includes not only the Confederate organization and approach to the key battle, but also that of the Federal military units as they organized within New Mexico and Colorado Territories. It incorporates for the first time under one cover all the known Union participant accounts, including a number never before published. Based on his own research on the battlefield, Don E. Alberts also presents a thorough understanding of the deployment of troops and their actions. Alberts reveals, with rigorous supporting evidence, a whole new site for the Battle of Apache Canyon, miles from that previously described. From his field research and discovery of artifacts, he details the exact complement of both Confederate and Federal artillery. Finally, he marshals evidence to reach the startling, yet now inevitable, conclusion that the Battle of Glorieta was indeed a clear and significant Union victory.

The Defense of Vicksburg: A Louisiana Chronicle is the story of the Louisiana soldiers who fought at Vicksburg, as told through their letters, diaries, and remembrances. Most histories of this famous Civil War siege have been written by the victors; this one presents a day-by-day account from the Confederate vantage point. Indeed, these long-dead men come to life as we read their experiences and perceptions told in their own voices, which ring clear and without apology. In 1862 the Dixie Rebels of DeSoto Parish left for New Orleans. They and other Louisianians were formed into regiments and dispatched for Vicksburg. In the year that followed, the troops witnessed the shelling of Vicksburg by Union gunboats, the outbreak of disease, the lonely heroics of the Confederate ironclad Arkansas , the daily drudgery of camp life, and Jeff Davis’s visit to the beleaguered city. With immediacy and in intriguing detail several correspondents describe daily life in the trenches from their individual perspectives during each of the forty-seven days of the siege. Yet their stories do not end with the capitulation of the city, but continue in an epilogue as the troops return home and then continue their service for the balance of the war. Their experiences transcended their own worlds. These young men of Louisiana still have something important to tell us.

In my year in Vietnam, I walked the booby-trapped rice paddies of the Delta, searching for the elusive Viet Cong, and later macheted my way through the triple-canopy jungle, fighting the North Vietnamese Regulars...I sweated, thirsted, hunted, killed. Somewhere in all my experiences, I overlapped the situations of nearly every infantryman and many others who served. Michael Lee Lanning's journal of his first tour of duty in Vietnam provides an unvarnished daily account of life in the field - the blood, fear, camaraderie, and tedium of combat and maneuver. Fleshed out with narrative and detail years later, the pages of this memorable book, first published in 1987, show an eager young recruit growing before the reader's eyes into a proud but bloodied combat veteran. Subsequent volumes in his ""Vietnam Trilogy"" will detail Lanning's tour as a company commander and his postwar investigation into the mind of the enemy. Through his eyes, readers see the reality of a war that did not always receive glory but was, in his words, ""the only war we had.

"America had a secret weapon," writes Steve Call of the period immediately following September 11, 2001, as planners contemplated the invasion of Afghanistan. This weapon consisted of small teams of Special Forces operatives trained in close air support (CAS) who, in cooperation with the loose federation of Afghan rebels opposed to the Taliban regime, soon began achieving impressive - and unexpected - military victories over Taliban forces and the al-Qaeda terrorists they had sponsored. The astounding success of CAS tactics coupled with ground operations in Afghanistan soon drew the attention of military decision makers and would eventually factor into the planning for another campaign: Operation Iraqi Freedom. But who, exactly, are these air power experts and what is the function of the TACPs (Tactical Air Control Parties) in which they operate? "Danger Close" provides a fascinating look at a dedicated, courageous, innovative, and often misunderstood and misused group of military professionals. Drawing on the gripping first-hand accounts of their battlefield experiences, Steve Call allows the TACPs to speak for themselves.He accompanies their narratives with informed analysis of the development of CAS strategy, including potentially controversial aspects of the interservice rivalries between the air force and the army which have at times complicated and even obstructed the optimal employment of TACP assets. "Danger Close" makes clear, however, that the systematic coordination of air power and ground forces played an invaluable supporting role in the initial military victories in both Afghanistan and Iraq. This first-ever examination of the intense, life-and-death world of the close air support specialist will introduce readers to a crucial but little-known aspect of contemporary warfare and add a needed chapter in American military history studies.

If the costs of the Vietnam War were great to Americans and staggering to the South Vietnamese, they were even worse for the North. And those costs were borne largely by the individual soldiers - the soldiers who won the war.Based on interviews, soldiers' diaries, letters, and government documents, this book, first published in 1992, gives a classic, soldier's-eye account of the war that our opponents fought and the men who fought it.

Though Jimmy Carter is widely viewed as one of the least effective modern presidents, the human rights agenda for which his administration is known remains high in the national awareness and continues to provide important justifications for presidential and congressional action a quarter-century later. The very elements of Carter's communications on human rights that engendered obstacles to the formation of a coherent and consistent policy - the term's vagueness, the difficulties of applying it, its uneasy relationship with national security interests, and the divergence between Democratic and Republican understandings - allowed 'human rights' to become a useful rubric for presidents, both Democratic and Republican, who followed Carter. Stuckey discusses the key elements of how human rights came to the nation's attention.

In "Selling Air Power", Steve Call provides the first comprehensive study of the efforts of post-war air power advocates to harness popular culture in support of their agenda. In the 1940s and much of the 1950s, hardly a month went by without at least one blatantly pro - air power article appearing in general interest magazines. Public fascination with flight helped create and sustain exaggerated expectations for air power in the minds of both its official proponents and the American public. Articles in the "Saturday Evening Post", "Reader's Digest", and "Life" trumpeted the secure future assured by American air superiority. Military figures like Henry H. 'Hap' Arnold and Curtis E. LeMay, radio-television personalities such as Arthur Godfrey, cartoon figures like Steve Canyon, and actors like Jimmy Stewart played key roles in the unfolding campaign. Movies like "Twelve O'Clock High!", "The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell", and "A Gathering of Eagles" projected onto the public imagination vivid images confirming what was coming to be the accepted wisdom: that America's safety against the Soviet threat could best be guaranteed by air power, coupled with nuclear capability.But as the Cold War continued and the specter of the mushroom cloud grew more prominent in American minds, another, more sinister interpretation began to take hold. Call chronicles the shift away from the heroic, patriotic posture of the years just after World War II, toward the threatening, even bizarre imagery of books and movies like Catch-22, On the Beach, and Dr. Strangelove. Call's careful analysis goes beyond the public relations campaigns to probe the intellectual climate that shaped them and gave them power. "Selling Air Power" adds a critical layer of understanding to studies in military and aviation history, as well as American popular culture.

In "Selling Air Power", Steve Call provides the first comprehensive study of the efforts of post-war air power advocates to harness popular culture in support of their agenda. In the 1940s and much of the 1950s, hardly a month went by without at least one blatantly pro - air power article appearing in general interest magazines. Public fascination with flight helped create and sustain exaggerated expectations for air power in the minds of both its official proponents and the American public. Articles in the "Saturday Evening Post", "Reader's Digest", and "Life" trumpeted the secure future assured by American air superiority. Military figures like Henry H. 'Hap' Arnold and Curtis E. LeMay, radio-television personalities such as Arthur Godfrey, cartoon figures like Steve Canyon, and actors like Jimmy Stewart played key roles in the unfolding campaign. Movies like "Twelve O'Clock High!", "The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell", and "A Gathering of Eagles" projected onto the public imagination vivid images confirming what was coming to be the accepted wisdom: that America's safety against the Soviet threat could best be guaranteed by air power, coupled with nuclear capability.But as the Cold War continued and the specter of the mushroom cloud grew more prominent in American minds, another, more sinister interpretation began to take hold. Call chronicles the shift away from the heroic, patriotic posture of the years just after World War II, toward the threatening, even bizarre imagery of books and movies like Catch-22, On the Beach, and Dr. Strangelove. Call's careful analysis goes beyond the public relations campaigns to probe the intellectual climate that shaped them and gave them power. "Selling Air Power" adds a critical layer of understanding to studies in military and aviation history, as well as American popular culture.

In recent times, the devastation occurring in places like Darfur has focused the world's attention on the intertwined relationship of military conflict and the environment - and the attendant human suffering. In ""War and the Environment"", eleven scholars explore, among other topics, the environmental ravages of trench warfare in World War I, the exploitation of Philippine forests for military purposes from the Spanish colonial period through 1945, William Tecumseh Sherman's scorched-earth tactics during his 1864-65 March to the Sea, and the effects of wartime policy upon U.S. and German conservation practices during World War II.

Between 1945 and 1947, the United States sought an imperial solution to its security problems in the Pacific Basin. Faced with fears of a future Pearl Harbor-style attack by a potentially resurgent Japan, and facing an even more realistic confrontation with the Soviet Union, American policymakers, planners, and strategic analysts saw the creation of an “American lake” in the postwar Pacific as the best means by which to guarantee U.S. security interests with regard to East Asia. Because of policy differences among the executive branch departments that had responsibilities in the area, the vision proved difficult to achieve. Hal M. Friedman analyzes the major issues concerning the Pacific Basin that confronted the four departments between 1945 and 1947. Helping to fill a regional gap in Cold War historiography, Arguing over the American Lake will be of great interest to military and political historians, those interested in strategic studies, and students and scholars of foreign relations policy and history.

Tilford exposes the generals' tunnel-vision. . . . He demolishes the myth that the 1972 ‘Christmas bombing' brought Hanoi to its knees . . . . His controversial thesis is that the bombing of the North and the interdiction campaign against the Ho Chi Minh Trail were in no way decisive and that USAF leadership obtusely failed to perceive that North Vietnam, an agricultural nation, was simply not susceptible to strategic bombing.— Publishers Weekly "". . . . hard hitting study on the failure of American air power in the Vietnam War . . . . The acute intellectual content of the book and the author's engaging writing style make the book easy to recommend.""— Armed Forces Journal International

Tells the story of General MacArthur's November 1950 attack to the Yalu River, an attack that was repulsed by 200,000 Chinese 'volunteer' infantry.

A surge of immigrant draftees in the US Army permanently challenged the way military leaders approached citizenship training.

In the decades since the “forgotten war' in Korea, conventional wisdom has held that the Eighth Army consisted largely of poorly trained, undisciplined troops who fled in terror from the onslaught of the Communist forces. Now, military historian Thomas E. Hanson argues that the generalizations historians and fellow soldiers have used regarding these troops do little justice to the tens of thousands of soldiers who worked to make themselves and their army ready for war.In Hanson's careful study of combat preparedness in the Eighth Army from 1949 to the outbreak of hostilities in 1950, he concedes that the U.S. soldiers sent to Korea suffered gaps in their professional preparation, from missing and broken equipment to unevenly trained leaders at every level of command. But after a year of progressive, focused, and developmental collective training—based largely on the lessons of combat in World War II—these soldiers expected to defeat the Communist enemy.By recognizing the constraints under which the Eighth Army operated, Hanson asserts that scholars and soldiers will be able to discard what Douglas Macarthur called the ""pernicious myth"" of the Eighth Army's professional, physical, and moral ineffectiveness.

On May 12, 1975, less than two weeks after the fall of Saigon, Khmer Rouge naval forces seized the S.S. Mayaguez , an American container ship, off the Cambodian coast in the Gulf of Siam. The swift military response ordered by President Gerald Ford was designed to recapture the Mayaguez , held at anchor off the island of Koh Tang, to liberate her crew, and to demonstrate U.S. strength and resolve in the immediate aftermath of America's most humiliating defeat. Guilmartin, a former air rescue helicopter pilot stationed in Thailand, provides a unique and compelling account of the Mayaguez–Koh Tang crisis, shedding new light on the politics, the tactics, the orders, the high-level decision makers, and the fighting men entangled in a crucial military action that nearly ended in disaster for U.S. forces. "". . . a brilliant and exceptionally clear tactical study that offers a point of departure for broader reflections on the nature of contingency and uncertainty in all military operations.""-- Foreign Affairs ""This is an exceptional book. . . [Guilmartin's] work transcends the events themselves, illustrating numerous aspects of men in war. His insights and observations are compelling.""-- Journal of Military History "". . . written with the flair and excitement of an adventure novel. Even those who know the outcome and the lessons of the Mayaguez incident will find this book hard to put down until finished.""-- Proceedings

'Our mission continues . . . Until They Are Home!' - Motto of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting CommandAt the end of the Vietnam War - or American War, as it is called in Hanoi - 2,585 Americans were unaccounted for in Southeast Asia. In 1992, a joint task force was established to continue the work of recovery, and its members became the first U.S. government representatives to return full-time to Vietnam.Army Lt. Col. Thomas ('Ty') Smith arrived in Hanoi a decade later, in 2003. Until They Are Home is both a heartfelt memoir and a fascinating inside look at his tour of duty in Vietnam, 'a place of shadows within shadows, secrets within secrets."Smith takes the reader on an extraordinary personal voyage from the shaded French boulevards of Hanoi to the remotest jungle trails of the border highlands. Written with a keen eye andtouches of humor, Until They Are Home recounts life in the very heart of the mission to find and return to the families the remains of their loved ones. It offers equal parts historical context, political insight, social commentary, travelogue, and adventure chronicle.From describingeverything from his diplomatic negotationsbetweenthe Vietnamese andAmerican governments to presentinghis view of commanding a remarkably complex mission in an unforgiving environment, Smith draws on memory, e-mails, letters, and journal entries to recreate the story of his mission in Vietnam. Smith and the forces serving under him found the remains of fourteenlost American servicemen - including two graduates of Texas A&M University.The gripping, intensely personalnarrative of Until They Are Home will fascinate general readers interested in the Vietnam War and its aftermath and will prove helpful to historians seeking primary information. It will also have great appeal to those with continuing involvement in POW/MIA issues and concerns.

In February 1945, some 80,000 U.S. Marines attacked the heavily defended fortress that the Japanese had constructed on the tiny Pacific island of Iwo Jima. Leaders of the Army Air Forces said they needed the airfields there to provide fighter escort for their B-29 bombers. At the cost of 28,000 American casualties, the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions dutifully conquered this desolate piece of hell with a determination and sacrifice that have become legendary in the annals of war, immortalized in the photograph of six Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi.But the Army Air Forces' fighter operations on Iwo Jima subsequently proved both unproductive and unnecessary. After the fact, a number of other justifications were generated to rationalize this tragically expensive battle. Ultimately, misleading statistics were presented to contend that the number of lives saved by B-29 emergency landings on Iwo Jima outweighed the cost of its capture.In The Ghosts of Iwo Jima, Captain Robert S. Burrell masterfully reconsiders the costs of taking Iwo Jima and its role in the war effort. His thought-provoking analysis also highlights the greater contribution of Iwo Jima's valiant dead: They inspired a reverence for the Marine Corps that proved critical to its institutional survival and its embodiment of American national spirit. From the 7th War Loan Campaign of 1945 through the flag-raising at Ground Zero in 2001, the immortal image of Iwo Jima has become a symbol of American patriotism itself.Burrell's searching account of this fabled island conflict will advance our understanding of World War II and its continuing legacy for the twenty-first century. At last, the battle's ghosts may unveil its ultimate, and most crucial, lessons.

A member of the famed Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division, Donald J. Rich went ashore on D-Day at Utah Beach, was wounded in the bloody conflict at Carentan, landed in a flimsy plywood-and-canvas glider on the battlefields of Holland, and survived the grim siege with the ""Battling Bastards of Bastogne"" during the Battle of the Bulge. Glider Infantryman is his eyewitness account of how he, along with thousands of other young men from farms, small towns, and cities across the United States, came together to answer the call of their nation. It is also a heartfelt tribute to the many thousands who gave their lives in this struggle.Coauthored by Kevin Brooks, the son of Rich's best friend and World War II comrade, Glider Infantryman covers a span of nearly three years; his return home, five months after the war's end, as a toughened bazooka gunner and veteran of five campaigns. Rich's first-person narrative includes vivid coverage of the action, featuring an especially rare account of arriving on a combat landing zone by glider. Detailed, day-to-day depiction of some of the heaviest fighting in Holland follows, including the action at Opheusden, the centre of the infamous ""Island."" Later highlights include the Battle of the Bulge, where Rich recounts his experiences in some of the hottest defensive fighting of the European Theatre, including the epic tank battles at Marvie, Champs, and Foy.

The Pacific Theatre in World War II depended on American sea power. This power was refined between 1923 and 1940, when the U.S. Navy held twenty-one major fleet exercises designed to develop strategy and allow officers to enact plans in an operational setting.Prior to 1923, naval officers relied heavily on the theories of Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan, who argued that sea control was vital to military victory, best attained through use of the battleship. Fleet exercises, however, allowed valuable practice with other military resources and theories.As a direct result of these exercises, the navy incorporated different technologies and updated its own outdated strategies. Although World War II brought unforeseen challenges and the disadvantages of simulation exercises quickly became apparent, fleet ""problems"" may have opened the door to different ideas that allowed the U.S Navy ultimately to succeed.Testing American Sea Power challenges the conventional wisdom that Mahanian theory held the American Navy in a steel grip. Felker's research and analysis, the first to concentrate on the navy's interwar exercises, will make a valuable contribution to naval history for historians, military professionals, and naval instructors.

In February 1971, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) launched an incursion into Laos in an attempt to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and destroy North Vietnamese Army (NVA) base areas along the border. This movement would be the first real test of Vietnamization, Pres. Richard Nixon’s program to turn the fighting over to South Vietnamese forces as US combat troops were withdrawn. US ground forces would support the operation from within South Vietnam and would pave the way to the border for ARVN troops, and US air support would cover the South Vietnamese forces once they entered Laos, but the South Vietnamese forces would attack on the ground alone. The operation, dubbed Lam Son 719, went very well for the first few days, but as movement became bogged down the NVA rushed reinforcements to the battle and the ARVN forces found themselves under heavy attack. US airpower wreaked havoc on the North Vietnamese troops, but the South Vietnamese never regained momentum and ultimately began to withdraw back into their own country under heavy enemy pressure. In this first in-depth study of this operation, military historian and Vietnam veteran James H. Willbanks traces the details of battle, analyzes what went wrong, and suggests insights into the difficulties currently being incurred with the training of indigenous forces.

Martial experiences and the mythologies that surround them have profoundly affected the ways in which Americans think of themselves. Wars identify the heroes who help define national character, provide the stories for the grand narratives of belonging and sacrifice, and serve as markers for essential moments of transformation.However, only in the last several years have scholars begun using the term “cultural history of American warfare” to identify the study of how public discourse formulates these defining myths and narratives. This volume brings together scholarship from diverse fields in a common mission to demonstrate the usefulness and significance of studying the cultural history of American warfare.The Martial Imagination: Cultural Aspects of American Warfare canvasses the American war experience from the Revolution to the War on Terror, examining how it infuses legitimacy and conformity with an urgency that contorts ideas of citizenship, nationhood, gender, and other pliable categories. The multidisciplinary scholarship in this volume represents the varied perspectives of cultural history, American studies, literary criticism, war and society, media studies, and public culture analysis, illustrating the rich dialogues that epitomize the cultural history of American warfare.Bringing together both recognised and emerging scholars, this book is the first anthology to feature essays on this topic, comprising research from twelve authors who represent a wide range of experiences and disciplines. Their work uncovers new and surprising understandings of the American war experience that reveal the ways in which culture makers have grappled with the trauma of war, salvaged meaning from the meaningless, or advanced some ulterior agenda.

“Execute against Japan should be required reading for naval officers (especially in submarine wardrooms), as well as for anyone interested in history, policy, or international law.” - Adm. James P. Wisecup, President, US Naval War College (for Naval War College Review)

Beginning in 1943, US Army leaders such as John M. Palmer, Walter L. Weible, George C. Marshall, and John J. McCloy mounted a sustained and vigorous campaign to establish a system of universal military training (UMT) in America. Fearful of repeating the rapid demobilization and severe budget cuts that had accompanied peace following World War I, these leaders saw UMT as the basis for their postwar plans. As a result, they promoted UMT extensively and aggressively.In Every Citizen a Soldier: The Campaign for Universal Military Training after World War II, William A. Taylor illustrates how army leaders failed to adapt their strategy to the political realities of the day and underscores the delicate balance in American democracy between civilian and military control of strategy. This story is vital because of the ultimate outcome of the failure of the UMT initiative: the birth of the Cold War draft.

A privileged, hell-raising youth who had greatly embarrassed his family—and especially his war-hero father—by being dismissed from West Point, Michael J. Daly would go on to display selfless courage and heroic leadership on the battlefields of Europe during World War II. Starting as an enlisted man and rising through the ranks to become a captain and company commander, Daly’s devotion to his men and his determination to live up to the ideals taught to him by his father led him to extraordinary acts of bravery on behalf of others, resulting in three Silver Stars, a Bronze Star with “V” attachment for valor, two Purple Hearts, and finally, the Medal of Honor. Historian Stephen J. Ochs mined archives and special collections and conducted numerous personal interviews with Daly, his family and friends, and the men whom he commanded and with whom he served. The result is a carefully constructed, in-depth portrait of a warrior-hero who found his life’s deepest purpose, both during and after the war, in selfless service to others. After a period of post-war drift, Daly finally escaped the “hero’s cage” and found renewed purpose through family and service. He became a board member at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he again assumed the role of defender and guardian by championing the cause of the indigent poor and the terminally ill, earning the sobriquet, “conscience of the hospital.” A Cause Greater than Self: The Journey of Captain Michael J. Daly, World War II Medal of Honor Recipient is at once a unique, father-son wartime saga, a coming-of-age narrative, and the tale of a heroic man’s struggle to forge a new and meaningful postwar life. Daly’s story also highlights the crucial role played by platoon and company infantry officers in winning both major battles like those on D-Day and in lesser-known campaigns such as those of the Colmar Pocket and in south-central Germany, further reinforcing the debt that Americans owe to them—especially those whose selfless courage merited the Medal of Honor.