Fulda Gap PDF Download

Author: Dieter Krüger
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498569498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
This edited collection examines the role of the Fulda Gap—located at the border between East and West Germany—in Cold War politics and military strategy. The contributors analyze the strategic deliberations of the Warsaw Pact and NATO, the balance of forces, the role of the local peace movement, and various other topics, while weaving together the history of the Cold War at local, European, and global levels.

Author: Stephen P. Gehring
Publisher: Government Printing Office
ISBN:
Category : Fulda (Germany : Landkreis)
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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CMH Publication 70-56-1. This study describes how the United States Army, Europe (USAREUR), under the command of General Crosbie E. Saint, supported the armed response of the United States and the United Nations to Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait at the very time it was managing a fundamental transition in its fifty-year history of defending Central Europe. Discusses the complicated planning for the deployment and the rapid-fire implementation.

Author: Dennis M. Keating
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781635380033
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
A Cold War story. The Fulda Gap was ground zero of the Cold War. For fifty years, American G.I.'s stood down Soviet tanks. The soviet tanks had rolled over Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Now their gun turrets were aligned at the Fulda Gap and ready to attack West Germany. Unfortunately for the Russkies, the Fulda Gap was being guarded by the US Army 3rd Armored Division and the Third Herd was there to make sure that planned attack would never happen. Finally, one hundred miles to the East the Berlin Wall cracked open and the world changed. This is the story of the Cold War; a time in history every American should know.

Author: Circe Olson Woessner
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 9781678021351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
On Freedom's Frontier offers a personal look at what it was like to live along Germany's East-West border during the Cold War. Over forty men and women who lived and worked along the Fulda Gap contributed their memories to paint a vivid picture of every day life during this interesting time in history. This is one of several anthologies compiled by the Museum of the American Military Family as part of its mission to show history from many perspectives. Proceeds from Freedom's Frontier will help the museum further its work and its writer-in-residence program. Freedom's Frontier was funded, in part, by a generous grant from Bernalillo County, New Mexico.

Author: Brad Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781733104104
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Storming the Gap First Strike reveals the explosive origins of the Third World War and delves into the opening salvos of the conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in a world where the Cold War turns hot in 1985. This epic story is told from a range of viewpoints - through the eyes of the decision-makers in Washington as well as the tankers and infantry fighting through hills and towns of southern Germany. Based partly on the scenarios from the smash-hit game by Lock 'n Load Publishing World At War 85, each tale is a pulse-pounding narrative of intense Armor clashes that will help determine the fate of the most valuable piece of real estate this side of the Inner German border - the Fulda Gap. Caught by a surprise Soviet attack, NATO hastily deploys its men and tanks on the first day of the war. Their mission: protect the bridges over the Fulda River in a desperate bid to halt the onslaught of Soviet Armor before it can strike west and bring the Western alliance to its knees. As the first volume of a series that tells one version of the war's progress, First Strike can be enjoyed as a companion to the platoon-scale wargame or by casual readers as a close-up view of mechanized combat in a war that never was. "The M1's round carved into the hull deck of the rear tank. A bright emerald glow filled the thermal sight. When, at last, it dissipated, the T-80 was nothing but a heap of smoldering steel. The remaining enemy tank was caught between the two dead T-80s. It pivoted left and right, but the thick woods on either side blocked its progress."

Author: Marc Ambinder
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1476760381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
“An informative and often enthralling book…in the appealing style of Tom Clancy” (Kirkus Reviews) about the 1983 war game that triggered a tense, brittle period of nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the former Soviet Union. What happened in 1983 to make the Soviet Union so afraid of a potential nuclear strike from the United States that they sent mobile ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) into the field, placing them on a three-minute alert Marc Ambinder explains the anxious period between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984, with the “Able Archer ’83” war game at the center of the tension. With astonishing and clarifying new details, he recounts the scary series of the close encounters that tested the limits of ordinary humans and powerful leaders alike. Ambinder provides a comprehensive and chilling account of the nuclear command and control process, from intelligence warnings to the composition of the nuclear codes themselves. And he affords glimpses into the secret world of a preemptive electronic attack that scared the Soviet Union into action. Ambinder’s account reads like a thriller, recounting the spy-versus-spy games that kept both countries—and the world—in check. From geopolitics in Moscow and Washington, to sweat-caked soldiers fighting in the trenches of the Cold War, to high-stakes war games across NATO and the Warsaw Pact, “Ambinder’s account of a serious threat of global annihilation…is spellbinding…a masterpiece of recent history” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). The Brink serves as the definitive intelligence, nuclear, and national security history of one of the most precarious times in recent memory and “shows the consequences of nuclear buildups, sometimes-careless language, and nervous leaders. Now, more than ever, those consequences matter” (USA TODAY).

Author: Timothy Andrews Sayle
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501735527
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
Sayle's book is a remarkably well-documented history of the NATO alliance. This is a worthwhile addition to the growing literature on NATO and a foundation for understanding its current challenges and prospects.― Choice Born from necessity, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has always seemed on the verge of collapse. Even now, some seventy years after its inception, some consider its foundation uncertain and its structure weak. At this moment of incipient strategic crisis, Timothy A. Sayle offers a sweeping history of the most critical alliance in the post-World War II era. In Enduring Alliance, Sayle recounts how the western European powers, along with the United States and Canada, developed a treaty to prevent encroachments by the Soviet Union and to serve as a first defense in any future military conflict. As the growing and unruly hodgepodge of countries, councils, commands, and committees inflated NATO during the Cold War, Sayle shows that the work of executive leaders, high-level diplomats, and institutional functionaries within NATO kept the alliance alive and strong in the face of changing administrations, various crises, and the flux of geopolitical maneuverings. Resilience and flexibility have been the true hallmarks of NATO. As Enduring Alliance deftly shows, the history of NATO is organized around the balance of power, preponderant military forces, and plans for nuclear war. But it is also the history riven by generational change, the introduction of new approaches to conceiving international affairs, and the difficulty of diplomacy for democracies. As NATO celebrates its seventieth anniversary, the alliance once again faces challenges to its very existence even as it maintains its place firmly at the center of western hemisphere and global affairs.

Author: Rosemarie Skaine
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786481730
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
The Persian Gulf War changed the face of combat. It brought women’s military roles into the spotlight, in large part via the mass media, and showed that many women performed combat roles similar to those of men during the conflict. The war was thus an impetus for changes in laws that had prevented women from serving in combat assignments. In past centuries, because it was not culturally acceptable for women to serve in combat, surprising numbers joined secretly under assumed male names. After defining exactly what is meant by “war” and “combat,” this work presents historical and present-day views of the involvement of women in the military. The impact of regulations on women in combat is analyzed, as is the role of the American public in the controversy. Female combat is put into context with sociological theory; also discussed are readiness, cohesion, ability, sexuality, equal opportunity and family issues.

Author: Max Boot
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465038662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
"Anyone who wants to understand why America has permanently entered a new era in international relations must read [this book] . . . Vividly written and thoroughly researched." -- Los Angeles Times America's "small wars," "imperial war," or, as the Pentagon now terms them, "low-intensity conflicts," have played an essential but little-appreciated role in its growth as a world power. Beginning with Jefferson's expedition against the Barbary pirates, Max Boot tells the exciting stories of our sometimes minor but often bloody landings in Samoa, the Philippines, China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. Along the way he sketches colorful portraits of little-known military heroes such as Stephen Decatur, "Fighting Fred" Funston, and Smedly Butler. This revised and updated edition of Boot's compellingly readable history of the forgotten wars that helped promote America's rise in the lst two centuries includes a wealth of new material, including a chapter on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a new afterword on the lessons of the post-9/11 world.

Author: Michael Meyer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439100497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
ON THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL, MICHAEL MEYER PROVIDES A RIVETING EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM IN EASTERN EUROPE THAT BRILLIANTLY REWRITES OUR CONVENTIONAL UNDERSTANDING OF HOW THE COLD WAR CAME TO AN END AND HOLDS IMPORTANT LESSONS FOR AMERICA'S CURRENT GEOPOLITICAL CHALLENGES. " Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" President Ronald Reagan's famous exhortation when visiting Berlin in 1987 has long been widely cited as the clarion call that brought the Cold War to an end. The United States won, so this version of history goes, because Ronald Reagan stood firm against the USSR; American resoluteness brought the evil empire to its knees. Michael Meyer, who was there at the time as a Newsweek bureau chief, begs to differ. In this extraordinarily compelling account of the revolutions that roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, he shows that American intransigence was only one of many factors that provoked world-shaking change. Meyer draws together breathtakingly vivid, on-the-ground accounts of the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, the stealth opening of the Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague and the collapse of the infamous wall in Berlin. But the most important events, Meyer contends, occurred secretly, in the heroic stands taken by individuals in the thick of the struggle, leaders such as poet and playwright Vaclav Havel in Prague; the Baltic shipwright Lech Walesa; the quietly determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos Nemeth; and the man who privately realized that his empire was already lost, and decided -- with courage and intelligence -- to let it go in peace,Soviet general secretary of the communist party, Mikhail Gorbachev. Reporting for Newsweek from the frontlines in Eastern Europe, Meyer spoke to these players and countless others. Alongside their deliberate interventions were also the happenstance and human error of history that are always present when events accelerate to breakneck speed. Meyer captures these heady days in all of their rich drama and unpredictability. In doing so he provides not just a thrilling chronicle of the most important year of the twentieth century but also a crucial refutation of American political mythology and a triumphal misunderstanding of history that seduced the United States into many of the intractable conflicts it faces today. The Year That Changed the World will change not only how we see the past, but also our understanding of America's future.