In July 1994, Thomas P. Odom was part of the U.S. Embassy team that responded to the Goma refugee crisis. He witnessed the deaths of 70,000 refugees in a single week. In the previous three months of escalating violence, the Rwandan genocide had claimed 800,000 dead. Now, in this vivid and unsettling new book, Odom offers the first insider look at these devastating events before, during, and after the genocide. Odom draws on his years of experience as a Defense Attaché and foreign area specialist in the United States Army to offer a complete picture of the situation in Zaire and Rwanda, focusing on two U.S. embassies, intelligence operations, U.N. peacekeeping efforts, and regional reactions. His team attempted to slow the death by cholera of refugees in Goma, guiding in a U.S. Joint Task Force and Operation Support Hope and remaining until the United States withdrew its forces forty days later. After U.S. forces departed, Odom crossed into Rwanda to spend the next eighteen months reestablishing the embassy, working with the Rwandan government, and creating the U.S.-Rwandan Demining office. Odom assisted the U.S. Ambassador and served as the principal military advisor on Rwanda to the U.S. Department of Defense and National Security Council throughout his time in Rwanda. His book candidly reveals Odom's frustration with Washington as his predictions that a larger war was coming were ignored. Unfortunately, he was proven the current death toll in that unfortunate country is close to three million. Odom's account of the events in Rwanda illustrate not only illustrate how failures in intelligence and policy happen, but also show that a human context is necessary to comprehend these political decisions.

Chronicling the most ambitious airlift in history . . . Carried out over arguably the world’s most rugged terrain, in its most inhospitable weather system, and under the constant threat of enemy attack, the trans-Himalayan airlift of World War II delivered nearly 740,000 tons of cargo to China, making it possible for Chinese forces to wage war against Japan. This operation dwarfed the supply delivery by land over the Burma and Ledo Roads and represented the fullest expression of the U.S. government’s commitment to China. In this groundbreaking work—the first concentrated historical study of the world’s first sustained combat airlift operation—John D. Plating argues that the Hump airlift was initially undertaken to serve as a display of American support for its Chinese ally, which had been at war with Japan since 1937. However, by 1944, with the airlift’s capability gaining momentum, American strategists shifted the purpose of air operations to focus on supplying American forces in China in preparation for the U.S.’s final assault on Japan. From the standpoint of war materiel, the airlift was the precondition that made possible all other allied military action in the China-Burma-India theater, where Allied troops were most commonly inserted, supplied, and extracted by air. Drawing on extensive research that includes Chinese and Japanese archives, Plating tells a spellbinding story in a context that relates it to the larger movements of the war and reveals its significance in terms of the development of military air power. The Hump demonstrates the operation’s far-reaching legacy as it became the example and prototype of the Berlin Airlift, the first air battle of the Cold War. The Hump operation also bore significantly on the initial moves of the Chinese Civil War, when Air Transport Command aircraft moved entire armies of Nationalist troops hundreds of miles in mere days in order to prevent Communist forces from being the ones to accept the Japanese surrender.

Following the North Korean assault on the Republic of Korea in June of 1950, the invaders captured more than a thousand American soldiers and brutally executed hundreds more. American prisoners who survived their initial moments of captivity faced months of neglect, starvation, and brutal treatment as their captors marched them north toward prison camps in the Yalu River Valley. Cold Days in Hell provides a detailed account of their captivity and offers valuable insights into an ongoing the conduct of prisoners in the hands of enemy captors and the rules that should govern their treatment. The book is published by Texas A&M University Press.