- Hardcover: 496 pages
- Publisher: Random House (Sep 6 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0375509100
- ISBN-13: 978-0375509100
- Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 16.3 x 4.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 748 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #997,204 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
The period from 1946 until the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 is usually interpreted in ideological, political and cultural contexts. But the two dozen essays included in this anthology by Cowley (the founding editor of Military History Quarterly and the editor of two previous MHQ anthologies) show that while the superpowers may never have measured strengths on a large scale, armed encounters between them occurred regularly. Even during the Cold War's alleged waning years, the U.S. and the Soviet Union came close to the edge of nuclear exchange—without U.S. policymakers really being aware of it. Cowley's contributors, including such outstanding military historians as John Guilmartin, Victor Davis Hanson and Williamson Murray, demonstrate how the Cold War's military history was directly shaped by patterns of provocation and misunderstanding. In a general context, the controlling factor was the Soviet Union's continued inability to achieve its primary strategic objective, the conquest of Western Europe, without initiating a nuclear exchange that would destroy the U.S.S.R. Soviet plans thus became self-deterring, and ultimately self-defeating. But Cowley's selections also show that this process was neither automatic nor predictable, and his anthology is a correspondingly thought-provoking read. (Sept. 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Taking a page from Cowley's three well--received anthologies, on World War II (No End Save Victory, 2001), World War I (The Great War, 2003), and the Civil War (With My Face to the Enemy, 2001), his latest deploys a platoon of military historians to narrate both the archetypical and the nearly forgotten moments of a world-defining conflict. In folding cold war classics like the Berlin Airlift and U-2 spy-plane intrigue into one volume with substantial treatments of Korea and Vietnam, however, this book may be the most ambitious collection so far; each major conflict probably could have supported its own volume. Nevertheless, most of the essays in this collection are excellent: Simon Winchester's discussion of the Amethyst incident in China and John Prados' essay on the near-Armageddon of 1983 are particularly noteworthy in capturing their close scrapes with grace and perspective. Although the devout may be disappointed that some prominent contributors' essays are reprints from familiar sources--David McCullough's excellent section on Truman and MacArthur culled from Truman, for example--librarians should expect high demand for this broad and weighty selection. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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3.9 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent but Incomplete, Oct 19 2005
By R. W. Levesque - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Cold War: A Military History (Hardcover)
The book is a series of articles by many prominent modern historians and it begins at the beginning (a very good place to start) of the Cold War with an article entitled, "The Day the War Started."Unfortunately, the book essentially ends in the early 1980s with, "The War Scare of 1983." What this means is the book does not consider the last years of the Cold War or how it ended. Another missing piece is that, other than the first series of articles on the war's beginnings and the more well known aspects of the Cold War such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and Berlin, the focus of the book is on the Korean and Vietnam Wars. It ignores other aspects of the Cold War such as our military involvement in Central America throughout the 1980s, the whole issue of brush fire wars in Europe's former colonies in which one side or the other was supported by the US or USSR, and the bipolarization of mid-level conflicts, such as in the Middle East, where, again, the US and USSR supported opposing sides. These missing aspects are not trivial in the context of the Cold War.
Having said that, I'm glad I bought the book, and I've already recommended it to others. It's impossible to not get a lot out of a book that includes articles by the likes of Williamson Murray, John F. Guilmartin, Jr., Douglas Porch, Stephen E. Ambrose, Victor David Hanson, and far more. But, in the end, it is incomplete - hence the three stars.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Treasure Trove of Cold War Experiences, Sep 11 2005
By Steve Iaco - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Cold War: A Military History (Hardcover)
This is a fascinating anthology of essays, a rich treasure trove of Cold War experiences told by leading historians. Some events chronicled here are well known -- the Berlin Airlift, Cuban Missile Crisis, Truman's cashiering of MacArthur, Dien Bien Phu, etc. -- while others this reader learned about for the first time. For example, an uprising of North Korean and Chinese POWs at Koje-do; the Chinese Communist assault on the British frigate Amethyst in 1949, or CIA efforts -- soon compromised -- to tap Soviet telephone lines by digging a tunnel in East Berlin.The collection of 27 essays begins with the 1946 showdown with the Soviets over their ambitions in Turkey. James Chace contends the Cold War started on August 19 of that year, when Truman sent a naval task force to Istanbul in response to Stalin's attempt to establish naval bases in the Dardanelles Strait. In the final essay, Williamson Murray examines Soviet military planners' strategy for invading central Europe, which came to light after the Berlin Wall's collapse. Instead of sending their tanks through the Fulda Gap and into West Germany, as widely anticipated, Soviet planners envisioned unleashing 300 to 400 nuclear missiles on Western Europe as a prelude to a ground assault. Only the prospect of massive nuclear retaliation from the U.S., Murray says, dissuaded the Kremlin from acting on its generals' invasion plans.
Readers will draw their own conclusions about which essays are the most intriguing. Personally, I especially liked Tom Fleming's account of Matthew Ridgway Herculean efforts to turn the tide in North Korea, and Victor Davis Hanson's "revisionist" account of Curtis LeMay's career and contributions.
Whatever your personal preference, this anthology will prove satisfying for any reader with an interest in recent American history.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Military History of a Time of Peace, Unless You Were There, Oct 12 2005
By John Matlock "Gunny" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Cold War: A Military History (Hardcover)
From the end of the Second World War until the collapse of the Soviet Union almost a half century later the two major powers in the world faced a kind of war. It was called the cold war because not much fighting occurred. To be sure, there was some in places like Korea, Viet Nam and Afghanistan. And there were some time where the two superpowers faced each other over loaded weapons such as Berlin and Cuba. But all in all, this was the longest time since the Roman Empire that the two strongest countries on the globe didn't go to war.During much of this time the Military History Quarterly has provided a venue for the most prominent historians of our time to present articles on points of history as it was being lived. Robert Cowley is the founding editor of MHQ. In this volume he has selected articles from the Cold War period that serve to be a history of the Cold War written as it happened. The authors include some of the most prominent historians of that time, and some others that are not so well known but who provide an insight into the times.
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