American Soldiers
Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam
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Narrated by:
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Joshua Swanson
About this listen
Some warriors are drawn to the thrill of combat and find it the defining moment of their lives. Others fall victim to fear, exhaustion, impaired reasoning, and despair. This was certainly true for 20th-century American ground troops. Whether embracing or being demoralized by war, these men risked their lives for causes larger than themselves with no promise of safe return.
Focusing on both soldiers and marines, Peter S. Kindsvatter draws on histories and memoirs, oral histories, psychological and sociological studies, and even fiction to show that their experiences remain fundamentally the same, regardless of the enemy, terrain, training, or weaponry.
Kindsvatter gets inside the minds of American soldiers to reveal what motivated them to serve and how they were turned into soldiers. He re-creates the physical and emotional aspects of war to tell how fighting men dealt with danger and hardship, and he explores the roles of comradeship, leadership, and the sustaining beliefs in cause and country. And he tells why some broke down under fire while others excelled.
Here are the first tastes of battle, as when a green recruit reported that "for the first time I realized that the people over the ridge wanted to kill me," while another was befuddled by the unfamiliar sound of bullets whizzing overhead. Here are soldiers struggling to cope with war's stress by seeking solace from local women or simply smoking cigarettes. And here are tales of combat avoidance and fraggings not unique to Vietnam, of soldiers in Korea disgruntled over home-front indifference, and of the unique experiences of African American soldiers in the Jim Crow Army. By capturing the core "band of brothers" experience across several generations of warfare, Kindsvatter celebrates the American soldier while helping us to better understand war's lethal reality - and why soldiers persevere.
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Story
From Paul Ham, winner of the NSW Premier's Prize for Australian History, comes the story of ordinary men in the grip of a political and military power struggle that determined their fate and has foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century. Passchendaele epitomises everything that was most terrible about the Western Front. The photographs never sleep of this four-month battle, fought from July to November 1917, the worst year of the war.
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Very compelling - good story, good narration
- By DPM on 11-25-16
By: Paul Ham
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My Fellow Soldiers
- General John Pershing and the Americans Who Helped Win the Great War
- By: Andrew Carroll
- Narrated by: Andrew Carroll
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Andrew Carroll's intimate portrait of General Pershing, who led all of the American troops in Europe during World War I, is a revelation. Given a military force that on the eve of its entry into the war was downright primitive compared to the European combatants, the general surmounted enormous obstacles to build an army and ultimately command millions of US soldiers. But Pershing himself - often perceived as a harsh, humorless, and wooden leader - concealed inner agony from those around him.
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Don’t pass this up
- By PineappleSmoothy on 03-29-18
By: Andrew Carroll
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The Lions of Iwo Jima
- The Story of Combat Team 28 and the Bloodiest Battle in Marine Corps History
- By: Major General Fred Haynes (USMC-Ret.), James A. Warren
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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It was the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history, claiming a third of all marines killed in World War II. The relentless fighting on Iwo Jima lasted for 36 days, but most of us only know the iconic photo of five soldiers raising the American flag on Mount Surabachi. For Fred Haynes, a young captain in Combat Team 28, Surabachi was one marker in a ferocious blood-letting against an enemy of 22,000 warriors who were dug into caves and tunnels.
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Excellent Account of the Battle
- By Jesse on 11-25-11
By: Major General Fred Haynes (USMC-Ret.), and others
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This Kind of War
- The Classic Korean War History
- By: T. R. Fehrenbach
- Narrated by: Kevin Foley
- Length: 24 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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This Kind of War is a monumental study of the conflict that began in June 1950. Successive generations of U.S. military officers have considered this book an indispensable part of their education. T. R. Fehrenbach's narrative brings to life the harrowing and bloody battles that were fought up and down the Korean Peninsula.
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Great narrative, frustrating redundancy
- By Ted on 08-16-10
By: T. R. Fehrenbach
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The Coldest Winter
- America and the Korean War
- By: David Halberstam
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Abridged
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Up until now, the Korean War has been the black hole of modern American history. The Coldest Winter changes that. Halberstam gives us a masterful narrative of the political decisions and miscalculations on both sides. He charts the disastrous path that led to the massive entry of Chinese forces near the Yalu, and that caught Douglas MacArthur and his soldiers by surprise. He provides astonishingly vivid and nuanced portraits of all the major figures.
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Almost as good as The Best and the Brightest
- By Doug on 10-02-07
By: David Halberstam
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Soldaten
- On Fighting, Killing, and Dying
- By: Sonke Neitzel, Harald Welzer, Jefferson Chase - translator
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
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On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sonke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs that had been covertly recorded and recently declassified. Neitzel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington, D.C. These were discoveries that would provide a unique and profoundly important window into the true mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general - almost all of whom had insisted on their own honorable behavior during the war.
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More accounts less analysis please!
- By Tony on 01-14-13
By: Sonke Neitzel, and others
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Brothers in Arms
- The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroes
- By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Anthony Walton
- Narrated by: Richard Allen
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful wartime saga in the best-selling tradition of Flags of Our Fathers, Brothers in Arms recounts the extraordinary story of the 761st Tank Battalion, the first all-Black armored unit to see combat in World War II.
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MAKES ME PROUD TO BE A (BLACK) AMERICAN!!!
- By The Louligan on 04-20-14
By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and others
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What Have We Done
- The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars
- By: David Wood
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Most Americans are now familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its prevalence among troops. In this groundbreaking new audiobook, David Wood examines the far more pervasive yet less understood experience of those we send to war: moral injury, the violation of our fundamental values of right and wrong that so often occurs in the impossible moral dilemmas of modern conflict.
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Excellent introduction to the concepts
- By Seamus on 08-01-17
By: David Wood
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Never in Finer Company
- The Men of the Great War's Lost Battalion
- By: Edward G. Lengel
- Narrated by: James Lurie
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In the first week of October, 1918, six hundred men attacked into Europe's forbidding Argonne Forest. Against all odds, they surged through enemy lines—alone. They were soon surrounded and besieged. As they ran out of ammunition, water, and food, the doughboys withstood constant bombardment and relentless enemy assaults. Seven days later, only 194 soldiers from the original unit walked out of the forest. The stand of the US Army's "Lost Battalion" remains an unprecedented display of heroism under fire.
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An Amazing story
- By Bradley on 11-28-18
By: Edward G. Lengel
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All the Way to Berlin
- A Paratrooper at War in Europe
- By: James Megellas
- Narrated by: Richard M. Davidson
- Length: 2 hrs and 34 mins
- Abridged
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In mid-1943 James Megellas, known as "Maggie" to his fellow paratroopers, joined the 82nd Airborne Division, his new "home" for the duration. His first taste of combat was in the rugged mountains outside Naples.
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Incredible book - narrator was terrible
- By joseph metz on 01-06-22
By: James Megellas
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Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour
- Armistice Day, 1918 World War I and Its Violent Climax
- By: Joseph E. Persico
- Narrated by: Jonathan Marosz
- Length: 17 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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The best-selling author of Roosevelt's Secret War traces the last day of World War I, weaving together the experiences of the famous, such as President Wilson, General Pershing, and Douglas MacArthur, and the unsung and unremembered.
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Beauty amidst savagery
- By Amazon Customer on 12-06-04
What listeners say about American Soldiers
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-23-16
Good information, bad narration
The content is excellent, a lot of worthwhile information especially for military leaders. However, it's clear that the narrator has never served in the military and nobody on the recording staff had either the knowledge or inclination to correct him.
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- Charles
- 08-09-12
American Soldiers.
I found it interesting looking back and comparing soldiers from different wars and how they were viewed and how they viewed the war they were in. I am a Viet Nam Veteran agreed with alot of what was said there was alot of truth with how war was viewed. I would recommend it to anyone who is a history nut. It was interesting.
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1 person found this helpful