Product Description
National Archives War Histories is a new series of official accounts of famous campaigns and units in British military history. The histories were written by official historians who had access to all the original sources and often interviewed the leading surviving participants. This is the official account of revolutionary new warfare as practised by the famous 'irregular' units in the Desert campaign and is an authoritative official source book. This history includes stirring narratives of daring raids miles behind enemy lines. It features such famous characters as Ord Wingate, David Stirling and Lt. Col. Keyes VC, recounting the establishment and role of the forces within the 8th Army and Allied campaign. It includes photographs, maps, a list of officers serving and the awards received by members of the Long Range Desert Group. The book features the following units: The SAS Long Range Desert Group 'Layforce' Special Boat Squadron Long Range Boat Patrol Middle East Commandos Special Boat Squadron Indian Long Range Squadron Free French Commandos
Product Description
The hiring of a new secretary shouldn't be a big deal--just a slight a change in the office environment. But for the protagonist of this novel, it is a declaration of war, a call to arms: "The new secretary has only been here two days," she says, "and I'm already talking about evil, a word I shouldn't even be using--arming myself for battle and choosing my weapons." Her quiet life of sacrifice and service has been rudely disrupted by the new hire, and she is not--despite the advice of her doctor, her neighbors, and her daughter--about to leave it at that. Instead, sabotage, alcohol, and kindness become the arsenal in a conflict fought across copy rooms and office parties. But the humor is undercut by a sadness, a sense of defeat that makes this slim novel resonate with the injustice of our increasingly impersonal, corporate world.
Customer Reviews:
Meet Literature's Greatest Unreliable Narrator.......2007-01-29
Madame Suzanne tells us about the difficulties of her daily life. This is a short novel, but in a way that is a blessing. After all how long can the reader let this obnoxious woman bend our ear? Suzanne seems to live in Plato's cave where she sees her fellow humans as shadows that she has great difficulty in interpreting. She continually shares her philosophy of life with us. At one point she says:
"I don't go out of my way to find friendly people. Friendliness disgusts me. Wearing the mask of a smile, friendly people insinuate themselves into your life. They pry and wreak havoc."
You can imagine what happens when a new secretary joins the office staff. We have learned enough by now that when Suzanne describes her as a fat woman with disgusting bulbous breasts, the new secretary must be an attractive, sexy lady. Suzanne never seems to have met a human being that she liked, except, as she says for her father and her boss Mr. Mayer. She pointedly omits her daughter and son-in-law.
Periodically those around her manage to spark a flame of warmth in her cold heart, but she generally manages to douse it before it spreads too far. Her paranoia knows no bounds. Everyone is out to destroy her, to spread malicious tales about her. She retreats further into her dark psychic tunnel.
Why should we care about all this? Why should we let Suzanne go through this wailing and gnashing of teeth in our presence? Because, in a morbid sense, she is quite amusing. After all we don't have to live with her; we just have to listen for awhile. It's rather refreshing to pick up a novel as unusual as this one. Does Suzanne ever see the world in a better light? Possibly. Read it and find out. I say read it, because I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the movie to appear. It would be a little too frightening to watch.
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- Fun reading
- Lest we forget...
- A Classic Personal Narrative
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American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines (Memories of War)
Roger Hilsman
Manufacturer: Potomac Books Inc.
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ASIN: 1574886916 |
Book Description
During World War II, Roger Hilsman fought in Burma with the legendary Merrill’s Marauders until he was machine-gunned. Then, at age twenty-five, he led a battalion of indigenous troops behind Japanese lines. At the war’s end, he headed a POW rescue mission to Manchuria, where the prisoners included his own father. An exciting, unusual coming-of-age story, American Guerrilla concludes with reflections on how Hilsman’s wartime experiences influenced his involvement in early Vietnam War policymaking when he served in the Kennedy administration.
Customer Reviews:
Fun reading.......2006-01-14
Mr. Hilsman's story begins with his life prior to enlisting and moves a little slowly to finally reach the action portion of the book. Still, the story is quite entertaining. The early background of his family and experiences of youth are good character-building for what follows. I had expected more action earlier on in the book and I thought it took a while to get to that part of the book but overall it was a good story. If you are looking for the action, skip the first few chapters and get right to the part where he joins the OSS. If you enjoy getting to know your character, stick with it through the beginning and you will be rewarded with sharing his adventures in the end.
Lest we forget..........2004-12-09
there are books like this one, perhaps now merely for those who are academically interested in the subject of the World War.
Hilsman has a casual and elegant style of writing, his narrative is filled with marvelous details, he has an unerring memory (how I wonder, this book was written many years after his war experience). Here you meet some of the characters from your history books, and learn how they were viewed by their men and their soliders (Stillwell, Seagrave, Merrill).
It's a forgotten part of WWII history, and the American soldiers who sweated and steamed in the tropical jungles of Burma find little acknowledgement in any contemporary war talk. So here is an exquisite reminder.
Hilsman writes with heart too--he reminds us that even armies defending or attacking each other in foreign lands have to behave with dignity and respect toward those who are native to the land.
The book is in many ways an intensely personal narrative, but it's strength and beauty lies in the retelling of a part of the war not often remembered today. Good job, Mr. Hilsman!
A Classic Personal Narrative.......2001-12-27
The author went on to have a long and noted career as an academic and government official. He was chief of the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and the Assistant Secretary of State during the Johnson administration.
Roger Hilsman graduated from The US Military Academy in 1944 and was assigned to the OSS, Sent to Burma, the author commanded a guerrilla battalion, ambushing Japanese patrols, blowing up bridges, spying on the enemy, and slipping back into the teeming jungle. later he went to the prison camp in Manchuria where the Japanese had held his father and helped liberate him.
This is an articulate and informative memoir. In the course of his career the author has written many political and policy books. This gives a sense of the man behind the job.
Book Description
In this impressive book Maochun Yu tells the dramatic story of the intelligence activities of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in China during World War II. Yu draws on recently released classified materials from the U.S. National Archives and on previously unopened Chinese documents to reveal the immense and complex challenges the agency and its director, General William Donovan, confronted in China.
Customer Reviews:
Why the OSS failed in China.......2002-11-23
To begin this review, here are 3 brief instances that exemplify why the OSS failed in China. General Donovan's chief of Far East projects, Carl Hoffman, had little or no knowledge of that part of the world, nor any military experience. In his book A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAR, former SACO / U.S. Naval Group China commander, VADM Milton Miles relates his first encounter with Hoffman, who was on the phone, cancelling a requisition Miles had authorized. Not only was he violating the chain of command, Miles noticed that his military insignia was on upside down. A visit with Donovan settled the matter, but, as Miles realized later "I won that battle, but the victory was a costly one for I thereby made an enemy."
One of SACO's young naval officers was in the field with his Chinese guerrillas on a mission when they spotted some coolies carrying what they assumed to be a local warlord inside a shoulder-borne sedan chair. They walked over to investigate. The coolies put down their burden, the curtains parted and out stepped a perfectly uniformed man who informed them that he was the OSS officer in charge of the area.
Richard Heppner was Donovan's man in the CBI so Miles invited him to his HQs near Chungking for a meal. As Miles says in his book: "He refused my invitation because he was 'not going to eat with chopsticks like a god-damned Chinese.'"
These examples of what author Maochun Yu calls the "OSS culture" encapsulate the arrogant, ethnocemtric attitude of Donovan's organization. It ought to be the mission of intelligence services to provide military commanders with timely information on enemy intentions, movements, etc. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was supreme and theater commander in China. General Tai Li was his intelligence chief and Director of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO). Captain Milton Miles was SACO's Deputy Director. Besides coastwatchers, weather stations, intelligence networks and mine warfare units, SACO operated far-flung camps where US Navy and Marine personnel helped train Chinese guerrillas for missions against Japanese forces. Tai Li and Miles worked together on a cooperative basis. Miles had served in China before the war; had traveled the land and learned the language. He and Tai Li were an effective team and their men were effective against the enemy.
Donovan had the bizarre notion that he could operate in a foreign, allied country with complete autonomy and he only countenanced Miles as his OSS chief in China until he could manipulate conditions for his ouster, which he did. This was more important to him, seemingly, than defeating the Japanese. Then you had OSS men working directly with Mao's communists in Yenan as part of the Dixie Mission. And of course Donovan didn't know it at the time, but Duncan Lee, his Secret Intelligence chief for Japan & China, was in fact, a Soviet agent as VENONA documents have revealed.
And what happened when OSS finally was able to operate in China per Donovan's desires? They duplicated successful, ongoing SACO operations without the support of the Chinese. Translation: they failed.
This book is a cautionary tale of how not to run intelligence operations in an allied country during wartime.
Superb study of American intelligence in China during WWII.......1997-04-28
Maochun Yu's OSS IN CHINA is both a fascinating and groundbreaking study of intrigue, chaos, and bureaucratic wrangling in the wartime establishment and operation of the United States' first global intelligence organization-The Office of Strategic Services (OSS). During World War II in China, OSS had to creatively deal with a myriad of factors in order to survive and thrive. Using newly opened operational files on OSS, along with recently released documents/memoirs from Communist China, Maochun Yu explores in depth various themes shaping this fledgling intelligence agency.
Prominent are the themes of inter-service rivalry and the question of a central command. In Chungking, China's wartime capital, OSS had to compete with over twenty U.S. bureaucratic agencies, among them the army, navy, Chennault's 14th Air Force, the U.S. embassy, Stilwell's theater command, the Joint Intelligence Collection Agency, the Board of Economic Warfare, Naval Group China, and so forth. William J. Donovan, OSS's colorful and flamboyant director, continually battled with the Joint Chief's of Staff over who would control OSS's intelligence gathering and special operations in China.
In addition to these themes, Maochun Yu also examines little known factors that directly affected OSS' China operations. For one, British influence and manipulation of OSS sought not to help the U.S. and China defeat the Japanese invaders, but rather tried to merely preserve Britain's colonial empire in Asia. Another consideration was the Communists in Yenan and their democratic facade. The CCP's infiltration into Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist intelligence operations and then into OSS, along with the Communist's secret collaboration with puppet controlled areas, hindered KMT-U.S. cooperation and allied war efforts on the mainland. One highlight of OSS IN CHINA is Yu's step by step narrative of the Chinese Communist murder of OSS agent John Birch, an incident some say was the first shot fired in the cold war.
OSS managed to keep afloat and thrive amidst all these difficulties in its China operations. Maochun Yu points out that its trying experiences there were instrumental in the decision to later establish the Central Intelligence Agency. OSS IN CHINA is a major contribution to the ongoing discussion of America's intelligence operations.
Oh What a Tangled Web of Intrigue Was Woven Then!.......1997-03-14
I have had a deep interest for some time in how the US government got sucked into the quagmire of intervention in SE Asia in the fifties. If you read the French sources, they blame the triumph of Ho Chi Minh on the materiel support given him by the OSS missions at the end of the war. If you read the massive work by Archimedes Patti, the support did not make any difference.
But that aside, when one starts pulling on the strings of why the OSS mercy missions of 1945 to Vietnam were sent, it descends from the various US intelligence and special operations agencies working in the area, and a very tangled web leads back to China--with its US Army-Navy rivalries, US- British rivalries, plus the US State Dept vs. many of the others. Then throw in the Free French and the Vichy governments. And some of these folks lost sight of the fact they were guests and not in a conquered country.
Until the release of the OSS records to the National Archives a few years ago, much of this was hidden except glimpsed in a few memoirs. But the OSS side and the State Department side and the other US departments ' sides are unavoidably biased views for and against each other and the Chinese sides-the Reds and the Nationalists.
Without seeing from the Chinese side one cannot balance the view point. The author has done this. He has been able to use the memoirs and histories now available from mainland China to develop this history as well as can be expected this close on. Sometimes it takes a hundred years for everyone to finally agree and sometimes there never is a consensus. We have not sorted out our Civil War yet. How can we expect the Chinese to have done so when even the territorial and economic consequences are still being worked out.
This book is an essential tool for beginning that task. It makes clear what all the turf quarrels were between the War Department, the Navy Department, the OSS, the 14th Air Force (Claire Chennault, a profit without honor in his own country, who had to go to China to prove his theories of air combat.), the British and French governments, and the Chinese Nationalists, whose guests they all were.
If you like organizational histories of the sort of who said what when then this is for you. If you want daring tales of dauntless deeds then look elsewhere. This is an extremely well written and thoroughly researched book but it is not a shoot 'em up operational history. There are many good histories and memoirs of those. Stratton's SACO history is still quite useful but hard to find.
(By the way, I'm still looking for that Vietnam history.)
Carter Rila
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Towards a Feminist Christology: Jesus of Nazareth, European Women, and the Christological Crisis
Julie M. Hopkins
Manufacturer: Eerdmans Pub Co
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0802840744 |
Book Description
Surveying the expanding conflict in Europe during one of his famous fireside chats in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt ominously warned that "we know of other methods, new methods of attack. The Trojan horse. The fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new strategy." Having identified a new type of war -- a shadow war -- being perpetrated by Hitler's Germany, FDR decided to fight fire with fire, authorizing the formation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to organize and oversee covert operations. Based on an extensive analysis of OSS records, including the vast trove of records released by the CIA in the 1980s and '90s, as well as a new set of interviews with OSS veterans conducted by the author and a team of American scholars from 1995 to 1997, The Shadow War Against Hitler is the full story of America's far-flung secret intelligence apparatus during World War II.
In addition to its responsibilities generating, processing, and interpreting intelligence information, the OSS orchestrated all manner of dark operations, including extending feelers to anti-Hitler elements, infiltrating spies and sabotage agents behind enemy lines, and implementing propaganda programs. Planned and directed from Washington, the anti-Hitler campaign was largely conducted in Europe, especially through the OSS's foreign outposts in Bern and London. A fascinating cast of characters made the OSS run: William J. Donovan, one of the most decorated individuals in the American military who became the driving force behind the OSS's genesis; Allen Dulles, the future CIA chief who ran the Bern office, which he called "the big window onto the fascist world"; a veritable pantheon of Ivy League academics who were recruited to work for the intelligence services; and, not least, Roosevelt himself. A major contribution of the book is the story of how FDR employed Hitler's former propaganda chief, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstengl, as a private spy.
More than a record of dramatic incidents and daring personalities, this book adds significantly to our understanding of how the United States fought World War II. It demonstrates that the extent, and limitations, of secret intelligence information shaped not only the conduct of the war but also the face of the world that emerged from the shadows.
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The Nazi Party and the German Foreign Office (Routledge Studies in Modern European History)
Arthur L. Smith Jr.
Manufacturer: Routledge
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ASIN: 0415957710 |
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How to Manage Records in the E-Environment (Know How Guides)
Catherine Hare
Manufacturer: Europa Publications
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ASIN: 0851424635 |
Book Description
Providing a practical approach to developing and operating an effective program to manage hybrid records within an organization, this book positions records management as an integral business function linked to the organization's business aims and objectives. This guide also addresses the records' requirements of new and significant pieces of legislation, such as data protection and freedom of information, as well as exploring strategies for managing electronic records. Bullet points, checklists, and examples assist the reader throughout, making this a one-stop resource for information in this area.
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