Even fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is still hard to grasp that we no longer live under its immense specter. For nearly half a century, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, all world events hung in the balance of a simmering dispute between two of the greatest military powers in history. Hundreds of millions of people held their collective breath as the United States and the Soviet Union, two national ideological entities, waged proxy wars to determine spheres of influence-and millions of others perished in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Angola, where this cold war flared hot.
Such a consideration of the Cold War-as a military event with sociopolitical and economic overtones-is the crux of this stellar collection of twenty-six essays compiled and edited by Robert Cowley, the longtime editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Befitting such a complex and far-ranging period, the volume's contributing writers cover myriad angles. John Prados, in "The War Scare of 1983," shows just how close we were to escalating a war of words into a nuclear holocaust. Victor Davis Hanson offers "The Right Man," his pungent reassessment of the bellicose air-power zealot Curtis LeMay as a man whose words were judged more critically than his actions.
The secret war also gets its due in George Feiffer's "The Berlin Tunnel," which details the charismatic C.I.A. operative "Big Bill" Harvey's effort to tunnel under East Berlin and tap Soviet phone lines-and the Soviets' equally audacious reaction to the plan; while "The Truth About Overflights," by R. Cargill Hall, sheds light on some of the Cold War's best-kept secrets.
The often overlooked human cost of fighting the Cold War finds a clear voice in "MIA" by Marilyn Elkins, the widow of a Navy airman, who details the struggle to learn the truth about her husband, Lt. Frank C. Elkins, whose A-4 Skyhawk disappeared over Vietnam in 1966. In addition there are profiles of the war's "front lines"-Dien Bien Phu, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs-as well as of prominent military and civil leaders from both sides, including Harry S. Truman, Nikita Khrushchev, Dean Acheson, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Richard M. Nixon, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, and others.
Encompassing so many perspectives and events, The Cold War succeeds at an impossible task: illuminating and explaining the history of an undeclared shadow war that threatened the very existence of humankind.
Robert Cowley is the founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. He has edited three other anthologies-The Great War; No End Save Victory, about World War II; and With My Face to the Enemy, about the Civil War-as well as several volumes in the popular What If? series. He lives in Connecticut.
From the Hardcover edition.
Even fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is still hard to grasp that we no longer live under its immense specter. For nearly half a century, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, all world events hung in the balance of a simmering dispute between two of the greatest military powers in history. Hundreds of millions of people held their collective breath as the United States and the Soviet Union, two national ideological entities, waged proxy wars to determine spheres of influence-and millions of others perished in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Angola, where this cold war flared hot.
Such a consideration of the Cold War-as a military event with sociopolitical and economic overtones-is the crux of this stellar collection of twenty-six essays compiled and edited by Robert Cowley, the longtime editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Befitting such a complex and far-ranging period, the volume's contributing writers cover myriad angles. John Prados, in "The War Scare of 1983," shows just how close we were to escalating a war of words into a nuclear holocaust. Victor Davis Hanson offers "The Right Man," his pungent reassessment of the bellicose air-power zealot Curtis LeMay as a man whose words were judged more critically than his actions.
The secret war also gets its due in George Feiffer's "The Berlin Tunnel," which details the charismatic C.I.A. operative "Big Bill" Harvey's effort to tunnel under East Berlin and tap Soviet phone lines-and the Soviets' equally audacious reaction to the plan; while "The Truth About Overflights," by R. Cargill Hall, sheds light on some of the Cold War's best-kept secrets.
The often overlooked human cost of fighting the Cold War finds a clear voice in "MIA" by Marilyn Elkins, the widow of a Navy airman, who details the struggle to learn the truth about her husband, Lt. Frank C. Elkins, whose A-4 Skyhawk disappeared over Vietnam in 1966. In addition there are profiles of the war's "front lines"-Dien Bien Phu, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs-as well as of prominent military and civil leaders from both sides, including Harry S. Truman, Nikita Khrushchev, Dean Acheson, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Richard M. Nixon, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, and others.
Encompassing so many perspectives and events, The Cold War succeeds at an impossible task: illuminating and explaining the history of an undeclared shadow war that threatened the very existence of humankind.
Robert Cowley is the founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. He has edited three other anthologies-The Great War; No End Save Victory, about World War II; and With My Face to the Enemy, about the Civil War-as well as several volumes in the popular What If? series. He lives in Connecticut.
From the Hardcover edition.
Robert Cowley is the founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. He has edited three other anthologies–The Great War; No End Save Victory, about World War II; and With My Face to the Enemy, about the Civil War–as well as several volumes in the popular What If? series. He lives in Connecticut.
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 exchangeAwithout 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 2005 Reed Business Information.
Both of these books treat the Cold War without stepping on each other's toes. Gaddis (history, Yale Univ.; Surprise, Security, and the American Experience) is one of the foremost scholars on the Cold War, having written a number of seminal treatments of the frigid conflict. In this new synthesis he brings to bear over 30 years of thinking and writing about the Cold War and presents the reader, general and specialist alike, with an outstanding and tightly written account of the titanic struggle between the two major world powers that arose after World War II. Gaddis has a sure understanding of the topic that has consumed his scholarly life and we all benefit from his learned insights, drawn not only from his own expertise, but from newly available information from Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese archives. Cowley, founding editor of Military History Quarterly, where most of the pieces in this anthology were first published, brings together the writings of a number of prominent contemporary historians and authors, whose narratives remind us that although the "Big One" never happened, there were still many occasions when the situation became rather "hot." Dino Bugioni recounts his personal experience of being the one who first discovered the missiles in Cuba. David McCullough excerpts from his Truman biography his description of the issues surrounding Truman's decision to fire Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The Berlin Wall, Korea, and the Vietnam War get their share of consideration as sustained points of tension. Both of these books provide solid contributions to the ongoing scholarly reassessment of the 40-plus year struggle that we call the Cold War. And both are recommended for all collections.-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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