Concrete Hell
Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Throughout history cities have been at the center of warfare, from sieges to street-fighting, from peace-keeping to coups de mains. Sun Tzu admonished his readers of The Art of War that the lowest realization of warfare was to attack a fortified city. Indeed, although strategists have advised against it across the millennia, armies and generals have been forced nonetheless to attack and defend cities, and victory has required that they do it well. In Concrete Hell Louis DiMarco has provided a masterful study of the brutal realities of urban warfare, of what it means to seize and hold a city literally block by block. Such a study could not be more timely. We live in an increasingly urbanizing world, a military unprepared for urban operations is unprepared for tomorrow. Di Marco masterfully studies the successes and failures of past battles in order to provide lessons for today's tacticians.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cities will be the battlefields of the 21st century, argues military historian DiMarco (War Horse: A History of the Military Horse and Rider), an instructor at the U.S. Army Command and Staff College. As his study explains, the previous major shift in warfare was to the countryside during the age of Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Major population centers like Paris, Rome, and Moscow, however, have always presented key targets for military commanders. WWII triggered urban warfare's resurgence, as new tactics geared toward densely packed and populated neighborhoods became the norm. The battle for Stalingrad demonstrated that as formidable a fighting machine as the German Army can eventually be undone by a combination of poor leadership and the guerilla tactics of an apparently lesser force fighting on its own turf, like the Soviet Red Army. While the U.S. repelled a North Vietnamese attack during Vietnam but in the process suffered a psychological blow that shattered American political resolve. DiMarco's work also explores recent urban conflicts in Chechnya, on the West Bank, and in Iraq. Heavy on descriptions of battle tactics down to the efforts of individual soldiers, this book is best appreciated by readers with a keen interest in military strategy.
