From Hot War to Cold The U.S. Navy and National Security Affairs, 1945-1955 [Hardcover]

This book discusses the role of the U.S. Navy within the country's national security structure during the first decade of the Cold War from the perspective of the service's senior uniformed officer, the Chief of Naval Operations, and his staff. It examines a variety of important issues of the period, including the Army-Navy fight over unification that led to the creation of the National Security Act of 1947, the early postwar fighting in China between the Nationalists and the Communists, the formation of NATO, the outbreak of the Korean War, the decision of the Eisenhower Administration not to intervene in the Viet Minh troops' siege of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, and the initiation of the Eisenhower New Look defense policy. The author relies upon information obtained from a wide range of primary sources and personal interviews with important, senior Navy and Army officers. The result is a book that provides the reader with a new way of looking at these pivotal events.

This thorough study by one of the top scholars in the field of contemporary naval history presents a revealing analysis of the U.S. Navy's role in the nation's defense during the decade just after World War II, when the leaders of the world's most powerful fleets had to retool from conducting all-out war to the delicate and dangerous business of preventing it. A thickly researched narrative of the early national security state...the book should prove especially interesting to contemporary historians of strategy. Jeffrey G. Barlow has been a historian in the Contemporary History Branch of the Naval Historical Center since 1987. He is the author ofRevolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945-1950, co-winner of the John Lyman Book Award for Naval History from the North American Society for Oceanic History in 1995. With strong evidentiary base drawn from extensive primary source material, Barlow's text offers a fascinating and important examination of organizationls3