Us military

In 1941, as it entered the second world war, the US Army barely bested Bulgaria’s for size and combat readiness. Nor did US forces have very much idea of what conditions were like in their new theatres of operation. In the winter of 1942, hot-weather gear and lightweight machinery landed in the deserts of North Africa where hot and dry conditions were assumed to persist throughout the year. Men froze half to death, even as their digging equipment foundered in winter mud. Sand, Snow and Stardust is the story of how the US military shed its ignorance and, by harnessing logistical intelligence and environmental knowledge, turned America into a global

Okinawa is having a moment. Recently a Telegraph travel destination, to many in the west it’s still unfamiliar except as a location of the Pacific theatre. To Elizabeth Miki Brina, the author of Speak, Okinawa, it was also unfamiliar until she was 34 — though her own mother is Okinawan, and she had spent time there as a child. Not until the break up of a relationship which played out the toxicities of her own family relations did she attempt to unravel her mother’s heritage: Okinawa’s brutal history, not Japanese, yet owned by, and at the mercy, of Japan; its persecution by America; its current state of suffering and her