The American army between world wars after World War I had virtually disintegrated. It was a very small force, given largely to practicing cavalry charges on western outposts.

There were almost 11,000 American soldiers killed in Germany in April of 1945, the last full month of the war. That’s almost as many as died in June, 1944. Right to the very end, it...

It’s my belief that by demonizing Saddam, by raising the stakes in this war to the point where we’re talking about a great moral crusade, that Bush in fact planted the seeds of discontent in...

I think I may try and write something about my pretty extraordinary experience with the 101st in Iraq.

American audiences tend to underappreciate the British, but 240 years ago they were us: They were the most powerful nation on Earth. Their mercantile empire spanned the planet. They had the most potent and experienced...

I was a foreign correspondent in Berlin in the mid-’90s.

The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now...

If I’ve vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

Global war is a clash of systems, not just battalions biffing one another in some godforsaken forest.

I’m going to leave WWII. I considered and rejected doing something on the Pacific. Fourteen years is enough. I’d like to take on a different challenge and probably a different era. But it will be...

I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I’m looking...

That was a pretty fine Army that we had in 1965. By 1973, it was in tatters. It was a disgrace to the country and to itself, to its own heritage, really. So it’s, you...

The spring of 1942 was given over to a very impassioned, strategic debate about where we should first attack in counterpunching against the Germans and Italians. The British argued very persuasively on the part of...

The people who write official histories for the Army believe that a generation needs to pass before you can tackle the official history. It’s useful to have some distance. Sources become available. Passions cool. It...

I think the Bush Administration had basically inherited a policy toward Iraq from the Reagan/Bush Administration that saw Iraq as a kind of fire wall against Iranian fundamentalism. And as it developed over the 1980s,...

Almost everything about American society is affected by World War II: our feelings about race; our feelings about gender and the empowerment of women, moving women into the workplace; our feelings about our role in...

I was born in Munich, and my father was stationed in Salzburg. For the first three years of my life, I lived in Austria back when the American Army was still in Austria. I grew...

Hitler had a police state of the first order. And those who showed any sign of being weak-kneed faced prison or often summary execution. That prevented a lot of people who knew that the war...

I was with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, really in the middle of nowhere, about 80 miles south of Baghdad. And it was almost midnight, and I got a computer message from the home...

In searching for a rationale to go to war, Bush settled on the notion of Saddam as an incarnation of evil, basically, and convinced himself that Saddam was fundamentally Adolf Hitler reborn. I think his...

There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I...