Category: interview

WWII history book – “The General Who Wore Six Stars” (Potomac Books, 2018) – Hank Cox interview

 

Hank Cox has been writing in various capacities for many years. He’s written a book on the Sioux Uprising of 1862 and now on General JCH Lee of WWII.

1:39 – Hank Cox discusses how he got into writing history. He first wrote “Lincoln and the Sioux Uprising of 1862”. There hadn’t been much written on the subject in many decades.

3:27 – He’s also a big WWII fan and wanted to write about Lt. Gen. John C.H. Lee. Many of his colleagues didn’t like him though he was very successful being in charge of Army supplies in Europe.

5:03 – Lee did have unusual characteristics. He was very military and something of a martinet.

6:24 – The book goes into Lee’s pre WWII life. He fought in WWI and then joined the Corps of Engineers. He worked on the great Vicksburg flood of 1927. He developed many contacts that helped dictate what he ended up doing during WWII.

9:38 – Lee was put in charge of the great buildup of supplies in Great Britain for the invasion of Europe. One of the big issues was the train Lee wanted.

12:09 – Lee was also criticized heavily for being very religious and going to church often and his staff had to attend with him. He also didn’t have drinking buddies.

14:28 – He was also a strong advocate of African-American soldiers and thought they should be put to better use.

15:19 – Many of the US Generals in Europe also refused to be part of a centralized supply effort controlled by Lee.

16:42 – By the time of the Battle of the Bulge, the US was running out of troops and Lee changed the rules to allow black soldiers into combat. This bothered a lot of US Army leaders but Lee didn’t back down. White troops in the field accepted them at the time of combat.

18:38 – When Patton raced across Europe, the US supply lines weren’t in place to properly support him with fuel, food and ammo. Lee created the Red Ball Express – trucks driven mostly by black drivers racing across Europe to supply Patton.

20:26 – Lee moved his command into Paris when it was liberated. But Eisenhower had said Paris should only be for soldiers on leave. Lee argued that Paris was the central communications point across Europe and he had to put his headquarters there. Troops resented the great accommodations Lee and his staff had in Paris.

24:22 – Near the end of the war. Bradley and others refused to report how many supplies they had to Lee. The Germans also tried to attack US supply depots around Europe and Lee worked on removing all these supplies and out of the hands of the Germans.

26:33 – When Lee allowed black soldiers into combat, they had to lose rank to do that but thousands went into combat roles anyway.

27:40 – After the war, Lee was put in charge of Italy despite all the negative comments made about him.

31:18 – Lee has been unfairly criticized by historians as well. After the war he joined the Episcopalian group the Brotherhood of Saint Andrew.

33:08 – Benjamin Davis was sent over to allay fears of black soldiers and he became good friends with Lee.

34:30 – Lee had a large staff to run his operations. Twenty-five percent of US forces were in Lee’s command. But many of the combat forces refused to let supply people inventory their supplies.

37:03 – US generals were constantly stabbing each other in the back politically speaking.

38:49 – Lee was in charge of building air bases and supplying them but air force supply control was held by others. Lee requisitioned many air force personnel at times.

40:47 – Hank went to Carlisle for some historical records and also used Lee’s memoirs.

44:10 – Keeping track of and sourcing all the information in the book was the hardest part of writing it.

47:47 – Learning about the hardships the soldiers went through was the hardest thing to study while writing the book. Lee tried his hardest to get winter clothing to the soldiers in Bastogne and other areas. There was a lot of chaos in supplying soldiers.

51:03 – Omar Bradley was much more petty than Hank had expected and that bothered him. Omar Bradley has always been known as the GI’s General.

54:43 – Hank’s website is http://www.hankhcox.com/

 

Links

http://www.hankhcox.com/

For more “Military History Inside Out” please follow me on Facebook at warscholar, on twitter at Warscholar, on youtube at warscholar1945 and on Instagram @crisalvarezswarscholar

 

Guests: Hank Cox

Host: Cris Alvarez

 

WWII history book – “No Forgotten Fronts” (Naval Institute Press, 2018) – Lisa Shapiro interview

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Professor Lisa Shapiro holds masters degrees in literature and management and teaches at San Diego Mesa College. She has previously taught creative writing. She’s written a book based on thousands of archived letters sent by San Diego State students who were in WWII to their professor Dr. Post. I interviewed Professor Shapiro about the book titled “No Forgotten Fronts.”

1:54 – Professor Shapiro talks about her first historical project. It dealt with European medieval historical fiction. Her interest in WWII came out of her work with community college students in San Diego.

3:57 – She began studying war literature and got a second degree in that subject. In the school archives she found letters written to a professor during WWII.

5:46 – Professor Shapiro explains the basis and details of the book. It’s a collection of student letters written to their professor, Dr. Post. He turned the letters into a regular newsletter. He did this through the entire war.

10:16 – Several hundred students participated in writing to Dr. Post. This includes men and women and many wrote repeatedly. People also provided funds to support him. The original documents are in the San Diego State college archives.

12:16 – Professor Shapiro discusses how the US military censors worked with Dr. Post. He took care to keep out sensitive information out of his newsletters.

16:35 – Sometimes students wrote things only for Dr. Post and not the newsletter.

17:16 – Dr. Post was also able to connect two brothers, one of whom was a prisoner of war during the war. Dr. Post even visited their mother to provide reassurance about her sons. One student who was at Anzio wrote that he had lost his marbles and Dr. Post knew he needed some mental comfort. Dr. Post notified a nearby chaplain in Europe from San Diego State to visit this soldier and also gave comfort to the student’s father.

22:54 – Professor Shapiro explains how Dr. Post got information on killed or injured students and how he dealt with that information. Dr. Post would also update information he had published.

27:57 – Dr. Post didn’t have any children. Professor Shapiro discusses how Dr. Post met his wife in college. But both were active in the lives of their students. He also did trick roping and performed for his students. His wife was a singer. Dr. Post did have a nephew in the Marines who would write to Dr. Post.

30:36 – There don’t seem to have been any other people who collected letters from specific groups during WWII. Others have created letter collections after wars.

34:43 – The students loved getting the newsletters.

36:07 – Professor Shapiro focused on the letters that captivated her. The emotion of the letters touched her. She was able to track the stories of specific individuals.

40:28 – Professor Shapiro reads a letter from Herman Adelson who nicknamed himself Little Geronimo since he was a paratrooper. He and the others really believed in what they were fighting for. For good, freedom and democracy.

43:22 – A letter arrived for Dr. Post saying that Herman had died during D-Day and included a eulogy for him. San Diego State lost three members of their championship basketball team during the war. But the community found comfort in knowing what their loved ones had been doing.

48:29 – Professor Shapiro did a lot of reading to brush up on her knowledge of WWII and current events at the time the letters were written. She used Anthony Deevers’ history. She also read a lot of San Diego history. San Diego had a lot of women participate in the war. A lot of San Diego State students became pilots.

53:40 – Professor Shapiro had few problems getting the book published. She had to shorten the book since it was very long at first.

55:02 – Grif Williams was one of the students and was famous for being on the Doolittle Raid. He was taken prisoner eventually and he was eventually a cellmate with another San Diego State student who had been captured in Germany.

59:26 – The website for the book is NoForgottenFronts.com.

 

For more “Military History Inside Out” please follow me on Facebook at warscholar, on twitter at Warscholar, on youtube at warscholar1945 and on Instagram @crisalvarezswarscholar

 

Guests: Lisa Shapiro

Host: Cris Alvarez

Tags: war, military, WWII, WWII history, san diego, san diego state, pacific war, d-day, north africa, europe, germany, doolittle raid, anzio

Chinese 17th C military history book – “On The Trail of the Yellow Tiger” (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) – Dr. Ken Swope interview

https://youtu.be/4fgBFYKX12o

Dr. Ken Swope is a history professor at the University of Southern Mississippi. He studies and writes on the imperial and military history of East Asia. In this podcast, I interview him about his upcoming book On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger: War, Trauma, and Social Dislocation in Southwest China During the Ming-Qing Transition.

1:27 – Dr. Ken Swope discusses how he started writing history. He studied Chinese history from the 16th and 17th century and has mainly written on that period.

2:47 – He discusses the origination of the current book which grew out of his research on previous books on Chinese history. He’s used obscure materials for research that not many people know about.

4:32 – The subject of this book is a person nicknamed the Yellow Tiger, a legendary figure associated with peasant rebellions against the Ming Dynasty. Follow on rebellions were very bloody. His own adopted sons become the defenders of the Ming Dynasty against the Manchus.

7:32 – Ken Swope then discusses what made the Ming Dynasty weak and susceptible to rebellion. Much was written in his previous books. Court intrigue contributed to the weakness. At the same time the Manchus were on the rise in the early 1600s. They also suffered climate change that caused epidemics and famine. Many rebels had been part of the postal service and when they were laid off they became bandits.

11:47 – Many of the peasant rebels were literate. China had very high literacy rates in this historical period. Silver from the Americas helped feed Chinese trade.

13:50 – Communications at the time was weak and the rebels could hide in places the government couldn’t reach. The Mings also had been involved in many wars and were taxing people too much. But they still had a huge army in comparison to the rebels. They also used eunuchs to collect taxes for the Emperor.

17:13 – Ken Swope says that the main theme of the book is the effects of war on society. The trauma and changes it creates. Uprisings in the southwest area of China are common and they experience lots of conflict and disruption.

19:12 – He had many resources to go to for research. There were many collected records for the period. Many people wrote things down at the time. Memoirs, diaries, battlefield reports, imperial proclamations, foreign accounts, “wild” histories, and family chronicles.

Lots of the materials were compiled during the Ching period. Other items were compiled in the 19th and 20th centuries.

22:47 – He came across some interesting artifacts. He found an interesting [tomb] grave in an obscure area. He found a public park with steles that had pictures of old heroes and their execution sites. He found the spot where the last Ming Emperor was executed. There was also a big naval battle in 1647 and many artifacts, maybe 30,000, have been found in the river where it happened. Ken Swope did a paper on this find.

27:32 – The old documents are written in classical Chinese. Taiwan and Hong Kong still use traditional characters. It’s a difficult form of Chinese to read. Some of the manuscripts are handwritten which makes them more difficult to read.

30: 10 – Ken Swope most enjoyed looking at documents that only a handful of people have ever read in 400 years. The battlefield sites were also very interesting to see including a famous pass to Chongching. The weapons and historic homes were interesting to see. But there’s not a lot of battlefield preservation in China.

32:18 – He was most surprised by the frank discussions that people had at the time about life in China. People were worried about the poor and being away from home. There were also many rural folk tales about ghosts and evil spirits.   During times of chaos people say the spirit world is out of hand too.

37:00 – Both armies created and read omens during fighting. For example, before Chungdu fell, they claimed all the turtles left the city. But the government also tried to discourage belief in omens.

38:45 – The Jesuit accounts often tried to put a positive spin on the events they were witnessing. Taoism was prominent in this time too. But the people accepted all thoughts and religions together.

40:53 – The biggest challenge he had in researching was figuring out motivations and keeping all the people straight. There were dozens of major players involved in the events he wrote about.

42:42 – He was impressed by how many people thought in terms of a national or regional context and were fighting for something bigger than themselves. Characters will fight to the death for an ideal. This includes female warriors.

44:29 – he wants this book to connect China to the global problems happening in the 17th century. He also wants to increase knowledge about figures who are heroes and famous in China today. China also has more sources for 17th century warfare than anywhere else in the world.

46:30 – Ken Swope didn’t have big problems getting the book published. His success with previous books helped get this one published. Getting your name out there will help get your work published.

48:35 – The next book is a biography of General Zuo. He was a 19th century general who fought the rebellions during this period. He crushed many massive Muslim rebellions and modern people are curious how he accomplished this.

51:23 – His works can be found on Amazon. He’s on Nebraska Press, Oklahoma Press and Routledge. British bookstores carry is books too and so does the British Museum. There’s a lot of interesting Chinese military history to study.

 

Links

http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803249950/

For more “Military History Inside Out” please follow me on Facebook at warscholar, on twitter at Warscholar, on youtube at warscholar1945 and on Instagram @crisalvarezswarscholar

Guests: Ken Swope

Host: Cris Alvarez