Search results for ""Author Jonathan M. House""

For centuries, the world has witnessed the development and use of increasingly complex and powerful military systems and technologies. In the process, the ""art of war"" has truly become the art of combined arms warfare, in which infantry, artillery, air support, intelligence, and other key elements are all coordinated for maximum effect. Nowhere has this trend been more visible than in the history of twentieth-century warfare. This title covers among other things Desert Storm, the war in Chechnya, and the rise of ""smart weapons"" and related technologies. It traces the evolution of tactics, weapons, and organization in five major militaries, American, British, German, Russian, and French, over 100 years of warfare. Revealing both continuities and contrasts within and between these fighting forces, he also provides illuminating glimpses of Israeli and Japanese contributions to combined arms doctrine. Expanding his analysis of the world wars and the wars in Korea and Vietnam, House also offers much new material focused on the post-Vietnam period. Throughout, he analyzes such issues as command-and-control, problems of highly centralized organizations, the development of special operations forces, advances in weapons technology- including ballistic and anti-ballistic missile systems- the trade-offs involved in using ""heavy"" versus ""light"" armed forces, and the enduring obstacles to effective cooperation between air and land forces.

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The long awaited one-volume campaign history from the leading experts of the decisive clash of Nazi and Soviet forces at Stalingrad; an abridged edition of the five volume Stalingrad TrilogyPraise for The Stalingrad Trilogy:David Glantz has done something that very few historians achieve. He has redefined an entire major Subject: The Russo-German War of 1941—1945. His exploration of newly available Russian archive records has made him an unrivaled master of Soviet sources. His command of German material is no less comprehensive. Add to this perceptive insight and balanced judgment, and the result is a Series of seminal and massive volumes that come as close as possible to ‘telling it like it was.&’ Glantz has done some of his best work with Jonathan House. The Stalingrad Trilogy is the definitive account of World War II’s turning point."* - World War II"Undoubtedly, the best researched narrative of Soviet-German battle during the period. . . . Thorough, informative, scrupulously accurate, and told with remarkable precision and reliability." - Journal of Military HistoryGlantz and House have produced seminal studies of major events on the Eastern Front. In terms of research, insight, and revision, this is their best yet [reflecting] an unrivalled access to and mastery of written and human Russian sources on the Great Patriotic War." - Slavic Review"No literature review of the Nazi-Soviet war could be complete without the outstanding work done by David Glantz and Jonathan House. What they have done is illustrate how much more there is to the Battle of Stalingrad and why their more comprehensive account changes our understanding of the campaign. The late John Erickson wrote that the research of Glantz and House reflected an ‘encyclopedic knowledge’ of the Nazi-Soviet war and constituted a benchmark for excellence in the field." - War in History"Glantz and House [have written] the definitive history of the Stalingrad campaign. Their trilogy, backed by meticulous scholarship and refreshingly fair-minded, significantly alters long-accepted views of several important aspects of the campaign. . . . A monumental work that is unlikely to be surpassed as an account of the most important single campaign of the Second World War." - Ewan Mawdlsey, author of Thunder in the East: the Nazi-Soviet War, 1941—1945

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Midway through 1942, Japanese and Allied forces found themselves fighting on two fronts—in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. These concurrent campaigns, conducted between July 1942 and February 1943, proved a critical turning point in the war being waged in the Pacific, as the advantage definitively shifted from the Japanese to the Americans. Key to this shift was the Allies seizing of the strategic initiative—a concept that Sean Judge examines in this book, particularly in the context of the Pacific War.The concept of strategic initiative, in this analysis, helps to explain why and how contending powers design campaigns and use military forces to alter the trajectory of war. Judge identifies five factors that come into play in capturing and maintaining the initiative: resources, intelligence, strategic acumen, combat effectiveness, and chance, all of which are affected by political will. His book uses the dual campaigns in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands as a case study in strategic initiative by reconstructing the organizations, decisions, and events that influenced the shift of initiative from one adversary to the other. Perhaps the most critical factor in this case is strategic acumen, without which the other advantages are easily squandered. Specifically, Judge details how General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, in designing and executing these campaigns, provided the strategic leadership essential to reversing the tide of war—whose outcome, Judge contends, was not as inevitable as conventional wisdom tells us.The strategic initiative, once passed to American and Allied forces in the Pacific, would never be relinquished. In its explanation of how and why this happened, The Turn of the Tide in the Pacific War holds important lessons for students of military history and for future strategic leaders.

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The German offensive on Stalingrad was originally intended to secure the Wehrmacht's flanks, but it stalled dramatically in the face of Stalin's order: ""Not a Step Back!"" The Soviets' resulting tenacious defense of the city led to urban warfare for which the Germans were totally unprepared, depriving them of their accustomed maneuverability, overwhelming artillery fire, and air support—and setting the stage for debacle.Armageddon in Stalingrad continues David Glantz and Jonathan House's bold new look at this most iconic military campaign of the Eastern Front and Hitler's first great strategic defeat. While the first volume in their trilogy described battles that took the German army to the gates of Stalingrad, this next one focuses on the inferno of combat that decimated the city itself.Previous accounts of the battle are far less accurate, having relied on Soviet military memoirs plagued by error and cloaked in secrecy. Glantz and House have plumbed previously unexploited sources—including the archives of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the records of the Soviet 62nd and German Sixth Armies—to provide unprecedented detail and fresh interpretations of this apocalyptic campaign. They allow the authors to reconstruct the fighting hour by hour, street by street, and even building by building and reveal how Soviet defenders established killing zones throughout the city and repeatedly ambushed German spearheads.The authors set these accounts of action within the contexts of decisions made by Hitler and Stalin, their high commands, and generals on the ground and of the larger war on the Eastern Front. They show the Germans weaker than has been supposed, losing what had become a war of attrition that forced them to employ fewer and greener troops to make up for earlier losses and to conduct war on an ever-lengthening logistics line.Written with the narrative force of a great war novel, this new volume supersedes all previous accounts and forms the centerpiece of the Stalingrad Trilogy, with the upcoming final volume focusing on the Red Army's counteroffensive.

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