Spartacus Review

Volume 3: 15th October, 2007

Military History

Title: The My Lai Massacre

Author: Kendrick Oliver

Editor:

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Price: £16.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: My Lai

Category:

The first comprehensive study of the massacre's reception in the United States and its place in American memory Contrary to common interpretations of the Vietnam conflict as an unhealed national wound or trauma, it argues that, if anything, Americans have assimilated the war and its violence rather too well and that they were able to do so even when the war was at its height Incorporates a wealth of different source materials - government papers, military records and legal papers, newspapers and television, opinion polls, memoirs, psychological studies and philosophical reflections, interviews, film, art, novels, poetry and popular song, as well as a visit to the site of the massacre itself Attempts to restore the perspectives of the Vietnamese victims, neglected in most American accounts, to the written record of the massacre.

Title: Healing the Nation

Author: Jeffrey S. Reznick

Editor:

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Price: £35.00

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Women and the First World War

Category:

Healing the Nation is a study of caregiving during the Great War, looking anew at life behind the lines for ordinary British soldiers who served on the Western Front. Using a variety of literary, artistic, and architectural evidence, this study draws connections between the war machine and the wartime culture of caregiving: the product of medical knowledge and procedure, social relationships, matériel, institutions and physical environments that informed experiences of rest, recovery and rehabilitation in sites administered by military and voluntary-aid authorities. Rest huts, hospitals, and rehabilitation centers served not only as means to sustain manpower and support for the war but also as distinctive sites where soldiers, their caregivers and the public attempted to make sense of the conflict, and the unprecedented change it wrought, within traditional frames of reference. Revealing many aspects of wartime life that have received limited, if any attention, including the phenomenon of rest huts as ‘homes away from home’ and the notion of ‘convalescent blues’, this study shows that Britain’s ‘generation of 1914’ was a group bound as much by comradeship of healing as by comradeship of the trenches.

Title: Liberation or Catastrophe

Author: Michael Howard

Editor:

Publisher: Continuum

Price: £25.00

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Military History

Category:

After a brief discussion about the meaning of 'modern' history, Michael Howard presents a fascinating analysis of the history of the 20th Century - laying much emphasis on the USA, where the author has spent much time as a Professor at Yale. It was Michael Howard who brought the study of military history into the mainstream of historical research and his readers will expect this as an emphasis in his analysis. They will expect less about suffragettes, human rights and the role of women. Howard's concern is substantially with the role of the military in the developing story of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, nostalgia for a lost past seems to have permeated the whole of European culture. This was the time of bucolic idylls of English musicians and poets of the Edwardian age with revivals of folk music and yearning for blue remembered hills. But thirteen million men died in the First World War and an entire world died with them. By then only rational, bureaucratic, effectively modernized states could fight such wars, with weapons designed to inflict maximum destruction. The tone for a new century was set. For if the old order died with the First World War, something else far more powerful and sinister was born, the 'rough beast' of Yeats' apocalyptic poem, that was to dominates Europe for the rest of the century. In spite of the peace of 1945, it remains alive and flourishing in many parts of the world. Such in part is the thesis of this powerfully argued book but its sub themes are skilfully interwoven and propounded.

Title: Main Battle Tank T-80

Author: Mikhail Baryatinskiy

Editor:

Publisher: Ian Allan Publishing

Price: £14.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Military History

Category:

Aimed at the modeller historian and wargamer, this latest title examines in detail the T-80, which was developed from the late 1970s onwards and represents the final phase of Soviet tank development in the era before the break-up of the Soviet Union. Amongst the most technologically advanced of all the armoured vehicles to have emerged from the old Soviet Union the T-80 and its later variants, such as the T-90 'Black Eagle' still is a major part of the inventories of the Russian army's armoured units as well as those of several of the ex-Soviet states such as the Ukraine.