Kronologikus hadtörténet 4 – Újkor 1900-tól – Könyvek

SMYTHE : Guerrilla warrior (fülszöveg)

 

Square-jawed, stern, even grim, the face of General John J. Pershing typified all the military virtues for most Americans who came to maturity during the first quarter of the 20th Century. In 1917, he moved on to the world stage as commander of land forces in France – the American Expeditionary Force in the first World War – and won national acclaim as much for his stubborn insistence that the men of his command should be kept together as a fighting force within their own formations as for his decisive part in the final campaigns of the war. Efficient, unspectacular, aloof, he surrounded himself with staff and field subordinates who were later to win fame in the larger context of World War II.

In Guerrilla Warrior, we retrace the long apprenticeship during which Pershing had prepared himself for high command. We see him as an ambitious young man of farming stock, a superb horseman and dogged student; and as a West Point cadet, rugged in exterior but with a deep vein of sentiment and a human warmth that were revealed to but few. We follow his early career as a lieutenant of cavalry, ripening the skills of his profession as he rode after Apaches and Sioux, and experiencing at once humiliation and success as a trainer of cadets. Assigned to counter-insurgency operations against the Moro tribesmen in the Philippines, he drew official notice when he won the respect and submission of those fierce warriors by a notable display of fearlessness, diplomacy, and – only if necessary – force. The book ends with an account of the inconclusive, frustrating episode which closed Pershing's career as a "Guerrilla Warrior" – the pursuit into Mexico after Pancho Villa; and with a summary of the man on the eve of his appointment to lead the A.E.F.

The product of twelve years of research in public manuscript repositories and private collections, and of correspondence and interviews with hundreds of men and women who had known the General in all of his relationships, plus wide reading in secondary sources, Guerrilla Warrior may claim with justice to be the first objective study in depth of its subject. The apparently cold and forbidding Pershing is here revealed as a complete man – complex, very human, even sensitive, and admirable.

 

Katalógus Smythe Tartalom
KATALÓGUS TARTALOM

 


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