Search results for ""Author Michael Lee Lanning""

Had Lieutenant George S. Patton not served on the southern border during the Mexican Expedition of 1916, there might never have been a General George S. Patton who took the world by storm as a bold and daring commander during World War II. Relying on Patton’s detailed personal journals of his eight months in Mexico, Michael Lee Lanning describes the young officer’s exploits during the hunt for Pancho Villa. As an aide to General John Pershing, Patton learned leadership and logistics from the man who would soon command American forces in World War I. Begging for a field command, he received it—and led the first motorized attack in U.S. military history and may or may not have killed two of Villa’s lieutenants. The press ate it up, and Patton learned not only how much he loved attention, but how to promote himself.In Mexico are the roots of Patton the World War II general, and Lanning tells the story deftly, focusing on Patton the man as well Patton the commander, and always casting an eye forward to Patton’s future career. This is how Patton became Patton.

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When Dwight Eisenhower graduated from West Point in 1915, few would have predicted he was destined for greatness. A middling student, he was denied his first choice of posting, missed overseas service in World War I, spent a dozen years as a major, and never commanded a unit larger than a battalion. Yet the young officer made the most of the opportunities he was given, made a lasting impression on superiors including George Marshall, and eventually gained a reputation as an excellent staff officer with a knack for administration, loyalty, and getting along. Eisenhower was promoted to colonel in March 1941 and, sixteen months later, was a lieutenant general in command of the European Theater of Operations. His rise through the ranks was first painfully slow, then meteoric. It is one of the great, and most important, stories in military history, and Michael Lee Lanning tells it vividly, with an eye for the dramatic turning points in Eisenhower's rise.The West Point class of 191

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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.

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From the War for Independence to the War on Terror, American military intelligence has often failed, costing needless casualties and squandering money and materiel as well as prestige – and all too often it has failed to learn from its mistakes. Senseless Secrets covers more than 200 years of intelligence breakdowns in every American war, including not only how intelligence has been wrong, but also how good intel has failed to make it to battlefield commanders, how spies and traitors have infiltrated the military intelligence community, and more. Here are stories of Benedict Arnold’s turn in the Revolution, George McClellan’s reliance on the Pinkertons’ inflated estimates of enemy strengths in the Civil War, Custer’s flawed intelligence prior to the Little Bighorn, the controversy over Pearl Harbor, the surprise German attack that started the Battle of the Bulge, the failure to convey useful intelligence to small-unit commanders in Vietnam, overestimates of Iraqi strength during Operation Desert Storm, the bad intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear arsenal in 2002-03, and the chaos surrounding the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.Senseless Secrets is a military history of the United States through its intelligence operations. It should be required reading inside the U.S. military and beyond.

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During World War II, some 10,000 American bombers and fighters were shot down over Europe. Of the crews aboard, 26,000 men were killed, while 30,000 survived being shot down only to be captured and made prisoners of war. Against the longest of odds, nearly 3,000 airmen made it to the ground alive, evaded capture, and escaped to safety. These men proudly called themselves the Blister Club.Drawing on tens of thousands of pages of mostly untapped documents in the National Archives, Michael Lee Lanning tells the story of these courageous airmen. They had received escape-and-evasion (E & E) training, and some were lucky enough to land with their E-&-E kits—but all bets were off once they hit the ground. They landed after an air catastrophe. The geography was usually unfamiliar. Civilians might or might not be trustworthy. German soldiers and Gestapo agents hunted down airmen as well as civilians who dared help them. If an airman abandoned his uniform for civilian garb, he forfeited Geneva Convention protections. Most faced the daunting task of escaping on foot across hundreds of miles. The fortunate connected with one of the established escape routes to Spain or Switzerland or across the English Channel, or they hooked up with the underground resistance or friendly civilians. Upon return to friendly lines, these men were often able to provide valuable intelligence about enemy troop dispositions and civilian morale. Many volunteered to fly again even though regulations prohibited it.The Blister Club is history with a punch. With a historian’s eye, Lanning covers the hows and whys of escape-and-evasion and aerial combat in the European theater, but the book also vividly captures the stories of the airmen who did the escaping and evading, including that of a young pilot named Chuck Yeager, who, during his own escape, aided the French Resistance and helped another downed airman to safety—and then begged to fly again, eventually securing Eisenhower’s approval to return to the air, where he achieved ace status. Stories of escape are popular, especially those set during World War II, as are stories of the war in the air. Combining both of these, The Blister Club should find an enthusiastic audience.

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