Kirjahaku

For General George S. Patton, Jr., the battle for Lorraine during the fall and winter of 1944 was a frustrating and grueling experience of static warfare. Plagued by supply shortages, critical interference from superiors, flooded rivers, fortified cities, and the highly-determined German army, Patton had little opportunity to wage a fast armored campaign. Rickard examines Patton's generalship during these bitter battles and suggests that Patton was unable to adapt to the new realities of the campaign, thereby failing to wage the most effective warfare possible. By the beginning of the Ardennes offensive, Patton had crippled his worthy opponent, but had suffered the highest casualties of any campaign that he conducted during the war. Until now, his better known exploits in Sicily and Normandy have overshadowed this campaign. Relying on a broad range of sources, this treatment of Patton's operational performance in Lorraine goes beyond the official history. It describes Patton's philosophy of war and explains why it essentially failed in Lorraine. Supplemented by full orders of battle, casualty and equipment losses, and excellent maps, Patton at Bay is a penetrating study of America's best fighting general.

This is the companion volume in the author's deep dive into the major operations fought by the II Canadian Corps in the Normandy campaign. II Canadian Corps was at the epicenter of the action on the eastern flank where the vaunted I SS Panzer Corps struggled mightily to hold the critical Caen anchor. The Canadians faced the very best of the Waffen SS including the Hitler Youth 12th SS Panzer Division. The book covers the last two major British and Canadian joint operations including TOTALIZE and TRACTABLE and the battle for the Falaise Pocket. The book explores both the corps commander’s actions (Simonds) and that of Army commander (Montgomery) and places them in relation to American operations.

The first of two volumes, Monty’s Normandy Hammer traces the major operations fought by Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds’ II Canadian Corps in July 1944. Thrust into the epicentre of the action on the eastern flank, II Canadian Corps planned and executed two major operations to expand Second British Army’s elbow room in the bridgehead even while holding the panzer divisions of the vaunted I SS Panzer Corps in place near Caen. Operation ATLANTIC, tied in with Operation GOODWOOD, completed the clearance of Caen and established bridgeheads over the Orne. Operation SPRING was a great holding attack to support Montgomery’s main effort of the entire campaign, the breakout launched by the Americans codenamed COBRA. Rickard goes into exceptional detail and paints a fresh picture of Simonds as a corps commander and his role in achieving Montgomery’s army group strategy. Monty’ Normandy Hammer is an insightful study of command at various levels. The follow-on volume will trace the fortunes of II Canadian Corps in the climatic battles in August.

This brief history puts into the public domain, as has not been done previously, the circumstances leading to the formation of the Air Safety Group in 1964. It continues by describing the Group's subsequent history emphasising its remit embracing almost every issue of safety which surfaced during the period under consideration. While some such items are touched upon in the main text, the reader is referred to the Group's website for fuller information, although some issues current at the time of the 45th anniversary in 2009 are discussed in an Appendix. Written by John Rickard, one of the Group's founder members, the account includes an overview of some of the other non-statutory organisations promoting safety. As an independent monitoring body, working with others when appropriate, the Group feels assured of a continuing role.

John Rickard's Australia: A Cultural History, first published in 1988, is still the only short history of Australia from a cultural perspective. It has also acquired a unique reputation as an introduction to the development of Australian society and was listed by the historian and public intellectual John Hirst in his 'First XI: The best Australian history books'. Although arranged chronologically, this book is not a chronicle, still less a laborious detailing of governors and governments: rather, it focuses on the transmission of values, beliefs and customs amongst the diverse mix of peoples who are today's Australians. The story begins with the sixty thousand years of the Aboriginal presence and their continuing material and spiritual relationship with the land, and takes the reader through the turbulent years of British colonisation and the emergence, through prosperity, war and depression, of the cultural accommodations which have been distinctively Australian. This Third Edition concludes with a critical review of the challenges facing contemporary Australia and warns that 'we may get the future we deserve'. 'A perceptive, balanced, wide-ranging interpretation of the evolution of modern Australia which is both erudite and well-written'. Duncan Bythell John Rickard is the author of H B Higgins: The Rebel as Judge (Age non-fiction Book of the Year 1984), Australia: A Cultural History (1988, 1996, new edition in preparation) and A Family Romance: The Deakins at Home (1996) and has published widely on Australian cultural history and biography. From 1997 to 1998 he was the visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University and in 2007 the Monash Visiting Fellow of Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He is currently an adjunct professor at Monash University. In his youth John Rickard worked as an actor and singer.

Written by award-winning author John Rickard, An Imperial Affair takes us into the marriage of an Australian couple during a time when private lives were properly private, and when divorce was a scandal. The book shines a light on the family values and sexual dynamics of this period, conditioned as they were by the imperial relationship and cultural dependence on 'the mother country, ' which inevitably helped shape hopes, fear, and desires. This is also a beautifully told story of the author's sensitive and courageous quest to understand his parents Philip and Pearl, and the world he came from and grew up in, its fragile reality filtered through the prism of memory. Part biography, part autobiography, part social history, An Imperial Affair is also a complex, quintessentially Australian meditation on the nature of love. *** "This book is a rich social history that sheds much light on how Australian men experienced the Second World War in ways that were not strictly related to military matters, and it shows vividly how, because of Australia's affiliation with Britain, the ordinary became imperial." -- Australian Historical Studies, 45, 2014 *** "This is a fine, moving book - the book of an historian, a writer, a loyal but troubled son and a wise man. The love, compassion and delicacy, evident throughout, offers its reader a deepened and more sympathetic understanding of the values that defined times to which we are now inclined to condescend." -- Raimond Gaita, Australian philosopher and author of "Romulus My Father" ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?