The Power of FORCE.As June June: see month. 6, 1944, dawned, a German artillery artillery, originally meant any large weaponry (including such ancient engines of war as catapults and battering rams) or war material, but later applied only to heavy firearms as opposed to small arms. major scanning the English Channel English Channel, Fr. La Manche [the sleeve], arm of the Atlantic Ocean, c.350 (560 km) long, between France and Great Britain. It is 112 mi (180 km) wide at its west entrance, between Land's End, England, and Ushant, France. Its greatest width, c. from Normandy could not believe his eyes: "I picked up my artillery binoculars binoculars Optical instrument for providing a magnified view of distant objects, consisting of two similar telescopes, one for each eye, mounted on a single frame. In most binoculars, each telescope has two prisms, which reinvert the inverted image provided by the eyepiece and stepped back with amazement when I saw that the horizon was literally filling with ships." Many nations took part in the landings on the French coast that day--D-Day--but it was American might that made the landings happen. They led to the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. And that decisive U.S. role, along with the U.S. atom-bomb attack that helped break the war-making will of Japan, marked the rise of a superpower. It didn't happen overnight. Growing U.S. industry and the increasing importance of trade had led the nation to build a modern navy. In 1898, the U.S. won the Spanish-American War Spanish-American War, 1898, brief conflict between Spain and the United States arising out of Spanish policies in Cuba. It was, to a large degree, brought about by the efforts of U.S. expansionists. , spreading U.S. influence from the Caribbean to the Pacific. Still, Americans tried to stay out of great powers' quarrels rather than win them. In World War I (1914-1918) and again in World War II (1939-1945), the nation was a reluctant, late-coming warrior--but one that helped to turn the tide. After 1945, the U.S. was the only country with armed forces capable of defending democracy on a global scale against the new threat of Communist aggression aggression, a form of behavior characterized by physical or verbal attack. It may appear either appropriate and self-protective, even constructive, as in healthy self-assertiveness, or inappropriate and destructive. from the Soviet Union and China. That role brought new duties--and new doubts. Two costly regional wars, in Korea from 1950 to 1953 and in Vietnam from 1963 to 1975, made many Americans realize that military power alone could not be the answer to all the world's complex problems. But arms were still necessary. And after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, the world looked to the U.S., now the world's only superpower, to solve problems like Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and Serbian atrocities in Kosovo. As the new millennium dawns, unfortunately the U.S. can count on new military challenges ahead. |
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