The son of a Kentucky tobacco farmer, Raymond Kerns dropped out of high school after the eighth grade to help on the farm. He enlisted in the Army in 1940 and, after training as a radio operator in the artillery, was assigned to Schofield Barracks (Oahu) where he witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and participated in the ensuing battle.
Born in July 1821, Danield Harvey Hill grew up in “genteel poverty” on a large plantation in York District, South Carolina. He entered West Point and graduated in the middle of the renowned Class of 1842. Following garrison duty as a junior lieutenant with the First and Third Artilleries, Hill joined the Fourth Artillery at Fortress Monroe in January 1846. Six months later he was en route to Mexico. Published here for the first time, Hill’s diary vividly recounts the Mexican War experiences of this proud young officer.
The 1952 court-martial of Major General Robert W. Grow, senior U.S. military attaché in Moscow during the Korean War era, involved a general officer who had used questionable judgment in securing a personal diary that contained impolitic statements portions of which had been photocopies by an alleged Soviet agent in Frankfurt, West Germany. This era of Cold War tensions and McCarthyism, Western media sensationalism, and communist propaganda created a cause célèbre and influenced the Army Staff in the Pentagon, led by Lieutenant General Maxwell D. Taylor, to exercise controversial command influence under the aegis of the new Uniform Code of Military Justice.
“In 1941, Frank Kessler, a young accountant in Canton, Ohio, was drafted, assigned to an Army Signal Corps unit, and went away to photograph the war in Europe. In 1945, home again with his wife and children, he stored hundreds of those images of blood and battle in his attic. There they stayed until after his death…”
We Were The Ninth is a translation, carefully edited and thoroughly annotated, of an important Civil War regiment. The Ninth Ohio—composed of Ohio Germans mostly from Cincinnati—saw action at Rich Mountain and Carnifex Ferry in West Virginia, Shiloh, Corinth, Perryville, Hoover’s Gap, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Chickamauga.
Nelson A. Miles began his military service as a volunteer officer in the Civil War. He later earned the appellation “the idol of the Indian fighters” and capped his controversial career by serving as Commanding General of the Army from 1895 to 1903. During his long and distinguished career, Miles made numerous enemies, including Theodore Roosevelt. Peter DeMontravel contends that the comments made by these enemies influenced the way historians have viewed Miles’s career. This reassessment of that career restores him to a degree of prominence.
Julian W. Cummings began flying lightweight Piper Cubs as a young man and was recruited for the experimental and high-risk aerial reconnaissance unit of the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division. In this memoir he chronicles his daring missions from first flights in the North African campaign through the end of the war. He flew 485 missions in both theaters, and for his extraordinary bravery in Sicily he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Grasshopper Pilot gives long-overdue attention and credit to the crucial role these courageous men played in combat and adds valuable information to an understudied dimension of the war.
In Corpsmen: Letters from Korea, the Chappell twins gathered together their letters to chronicle their experiences as medical corpsmen in the First Marine Division during the Korean War. From boot camp to Bethesda Naval Hospital and on the Fleet Marine Force training and eventually the front line, and then in Indochina, the brothers kept in contact with their family in Ohio, offering firsthand narratives of their adventures.
Anton F. Bilek was only twenty-two years old when he was captured in Bataan. No Uncle Sam is his story of survival through the Death March, his imprisonment under horrific conditions in the Philippines and Japan, and his servitude as a slave laborer in the Japanese coal mines. Bilek addresses the frustration, anger, fear, humor, hope, and courage that he and other Americans shared during their captivity and their silence about these experiences for many years after their release from the POW camps. After almost 40 years Bilek decided to write about his experiences, and this memoir is the result. Those who are interested in history and the incredible resilience of human beings must read this tale of survival.
The dispatches from Lord Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, Second Baron, British Envoy Extraordinary in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War offer insight into contemporaneous Anglo–American relations. The five-year period covered in these three volumes witnessed the fierce and deadly battles of the war fought both in the North and in the South, the shifting moods of public opinion and patriotic fervor, the changing economic conditions, and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
