Analysis Of George Douglas Haig 's ' The Cold War '

Some people have the view that British generals such as Haig were useless leaders. Famous sources like ‘O What a lovely War’, ‘Blackadder’ and ‘The Trench’ support this. However from the 1980s many military historians have challenged this interpretation and states that under Haigs leadership, Britain and her allies won the war from encouraging new weapons and military tactics. After Haigs death in 1918, historians blamed him for needless laughter of nearly 750,000 British soldiers on the Western Front and biographers pilloned him for his overconfidence, insensitivity and logical

The topic of war is hard to imagine from the perspective of one who hasn't experienced it. Literature makes it accessible for the reader to explore the themes of war. Owen and Remarque both dipcik what war was like for one who has never gone through it. Men in both All Quiet on the Western Front and “Dulce Et Decorum” experience betrayal of youth, horrors of war and feelings of camaraderie.

In 1975 the Oxford University Press published the first edition of The Great War and Modern Memory written by Paul Fussell. As Fussell states in the opening line, “this book is about the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918.” In this paper I will argue, that despite the numerous literary awards this book has won, it contains historical inaccuracies and shortcomings in relation to the accurate information provided that takes away from the prestige of the book. Despite the numerous negative aspects of the book, this paper will also briefly highlight the few positive areas of the book, therefore providing an in-depth analysis of the book.

John Lewis Gaddis, is a leading American Historian of the Cold War. He is the Professor of history at Yale University. He is already the author of six books on the same subject. The Cold War: A New History, however, has been written on a less cosmic level. He has distilled a life time of research into this short but comprehensive book. He has given new avenues to old controversies in worldly and stylish, yet direct and plain-spoken manner. The book offers a lot of summaries to intricate historical issues and provides new avenues of thinking about conflict which arose out of pre-emption and ended in the hope for the world.

In 1961 President John F Kennedy put together a doctrine, which altered from President Eisenhower’s one. It was to “Respond flexibly to communist expansion, especially guerrilla warfare.” (Roskin & Berry, 2010, p. 58) It was a time when the Cold War was at its height and nuclear weapons a mass threat and source of power. This doctrine was aimed at using alternative means before opening into combat. This, in light of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, it succeeded in doing.

In The Cold War: A New History, John L. Gaddis creates a thorough timeline of the events stretching from the end of World War II through the fall of the USSR which helps newer generations understand the gravity of the situation. As Michael Bechloss said “By 2006, Americans too young to have lived through the era of duck-and-cover drills require a scholar of extraordinary gifts to tell why nine presidents deployed our national treasure against an empire that broke apart so clumsily in the end.” This quote does an excellent job explaining how my generation and the ones following will have a limited understanding of the events surrounding the cold war and their role in shaping the world we know today. As Gaddis himself said in a NPR interview;

For my response, I have chosen to focus in on some of the statements provided by the Nussbaum reading as well as JFK’s “City Upon a Hill” speech. As the group’s Devil’s Advocate, I will strive to make logical and realistic counterpoints to some of the information from the readings that I found either unseemly, disingenuous, or unrealistic as it relates to our modern world.

In his book, The Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis succeeds in relaying a comprehensive summary of The Cold War in such a way that the reader is unable to put the book down. The book itself can be said to be an irrefutable source of knowledge, helpful insight, and even entertainment. John Gaddis relays accurate information in an unbiased manner, while at the same time holding the reader’s interest. The Cold War is a florid convergence of both Gaddis’s cognizance and his ability to engross his audience. Undeniably, Gaddis is an author who is gifted with the ability to give a historical text the intrigue of an adventure novel.

With this book, a major element of American history was analyzed. The Cold War is rampant with American foreign policy and influential in shaping the modern world. Strategies of Containment outlines American policy from the end of World War II until present day. Gaddis outlines the policies of presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, including policies influenced by others such as George Kennan, John Dulles, and Henry Kissinger. The author, John Lewis Gaddis has written many books on the Cold War and is an avid researcher in the field. Some of his other works include: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War

While the individual documents that are a part of this week’s reading are insightful, particularly the grubby Lee Atwater article and Ronald Reagan’s manichean moral vision of America in his 1983 speech at the annual convention of the National Association of American Evangelicals, Robert McMahon in his book The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction shows the importance of broad overviews in accurately analyzing history. If overviews are skipped, historical analysis can get bogged down in details, which can potentially lead to seeing the forest for the trees. Although almost exclusively focused on foreign policy, McMahon reveals a president that is able to change with the times. Even before Gorbachev, Reagan was willing to adjust his actual policy positions in the face of political and public pressure as seen during

A statue of Field Marshall Haig was crafted in 1936; a total of eighteen years after the ‘Great War’ had ended. This caused controversy with people across Britain, as some believed that his ‘leadership skills’ were lacking and that his ‘crucial decisions’ were not the right ones. But others say that although there were huge losses, these were the necessary decisions needed to win such an aggressive war. I will assess both arguments of Historians.

The Cold War: A New History written by John Lewis Gaddis (a professor at Yale University who wrote other books such as The United States and the Origins of the Cold War and Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security) delivers a summarized, yet skewed interpretation of what had happened during the era known as the Cold War. Throughout the book, the author attempts to provide history of the Cold War, while adding in generalizations, incomplete facts, as well as flat out bias.

I consider the field marshal as a butcher and a hero for numerous reasons. While the insinuation of Haig as a butcher ignores many positives that he possessed, the implication of him being a hero also neglects negatives that the field marshal obtains. Although the winning of the war had come at the sacrifice of a vast number of soldiers, we must not forget that the general had achieved his primary objective even if it had been accomplished in the most gruesome ways. This essay will examine reasons which voice out opinions that support both arguments as well as my own.

There have been many attempts to explain the origins of the Cold War that developed between the capitalist West and the communist East after the Second World War. Indeed, there is great disagreement in explaining the source for the Cold War; some explanations draw on events pre-1945; some draw only on issues of ideology; others look to economics; security concerns dominate some arguments; personalities are seen as the root cause for some historians. So wide is the range of the historiography of the origins of the Cold War that is has been said "the Cold War has also spawned a war among historians, a controversy over how the Cold War got started, whether or not it was inevitable, and

The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted in major shift in United States foreign policy. For years, the United States supported tyrannical dictators in return for stable anti-communist government receptive to United States interests. The Cold War resulted in a new world order with the United States as the lone global hegemonic power. In Eastern Europe in particular, the end of the Cold War ushered in an era of economic growth and a large increase in the number of liberal democracies. Although the world saw a large increase in liberal democracies, a new regime type referred to as competitive authoritarianism began to emerge. According to Levitsky and Way, “In competitive authoritarian regimes, formal