"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2002" Tami Davis Biddle is Associate Professor of National Security and Strategy at the United States Army War College. She teaches military and diplomatic history, national security policy, and grand strategy. Her research focuses on the evolution of military ideas, and their implementation as strategies for national defense and methods of warfighting. A major revision of our understanding of long-range...

A history of the Allied bombing campaigns of World War II questions the morality of British and American attacks on occupied European cities while offering insight into the course of the civilian front line of the Allied air war as it was shaped by political strategies.

The Blitz Companion offers a unique overview of a century of aerial warfare, its impact on cities and the people who lived in them. It tells the story of aerial warfare from the earliest bombing raids and in World War 1 through to the London Blitz and Allied bombings of Europe and Japan. These are compared with more recent American air campaigns over Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, the NATO bombings during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s...

Describes how the United States Army Air Forces recruited, trained, and chose those few who would undertake the most demanding and dangerous jobs of World War II. Among them was future Sen. George McGovern, who flew thirty-five combat missions and won the Distinguished Flying Cross.

"Engineers of Victory" is a new account of how the tide was turned against the Nazis by the Allies in the Second World War, the focus being on the problem-solvers: Major-General Perry Hobart, who invented the "funny tanks" which flattened the curve on the D-Day beaches; Flight Lieutenant Ronnie Harker "the man who put the Merlin in the Mustang"; and Captain "Johnny" Walker, the convoy captain who worked out how to sink U-boats with a "creeping barrage"....

"Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists had a different view. This 'Bomber Mafia' asked:...

During the Second World War, Allied air forces dropped nearly two million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying some 60 cities, killing more than half a million German citizens, and leaving 80,000 pilots dead. But the terrible truth is that much of the bombing was carried out against the expressed demands of the Allied military leadership, leading to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Focusing on the crucial period from 1942...