Fifteen American Wars

About the Book

Eugene G. Windchy, author of Tonkin Gulf, investigates how fifteen wars began and how they might have been avoided. Among his surprising conclusions: Russia started World War I by killing the Archduke Ferdinand.

The assassination of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia, triggered World War I, an unprecedented catastrophe which led to Fascist and Communist states, World War II, anti-Communist wars in Korea and Vietnam, and a world bristling with nuclear missiles.

Textbooks tell us very little about the triggering event. Some do not mention the assassination. Others read as if the killer was a lone wolf. Disputing the lone wolf theory Windchy reports that sixteen men were convicted at trial, and he presents evidence that Russia was behind the operation. To gain territory, Russia in 1914 was trying to undermine the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. This led to World War I in 1914 and to the Armenian genocide in 1915.

Wars often begin in ways unknown to the public. The American Civil War began when the Confederates fired upon Fort Sumter. But did you know the fort was trying to surrender? Why was it fired upon?

Did a “policy coup” in Washington demand that the United States change the governments of seven foreign countries? This was alleged by retired General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, after a series of informal visits to the Pentagon beginning in 1991.

About the Author

Eugene G. Windchy in 1967 left his position as the U.S. Information Agency's Assistant Science Adviser to investigate the origin of the Vietnam War. He later wrote Tonkin Gulf, which was reviewed in the New York Times as "superb investigative reporting" (September 26, 1971). Windchy wrote the New Republic's analysis of the Pentagon Papers (August 7, 1971) and has written other articles for the Nation, Saturday Review, Atlantic, and the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. Another New Republic article (January 29, 1972) contested the settled academic opinion, among both historians and political scientists, that the president has constitutional authority to initiate armed conflict in the absence of the nation's being attacked. In that article Windchy drew upon James Madison's notes concerning the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He also debunked a State Department document which purported to show that on 125 occasions presidents had exercised the war power on their own initiative. These were insignificant incidents that often involved pirates, and on one listed occasion the U.S. Navy actually fired on a U.S. Consulate. After the 1983 shootdown of the Korean Airliner 007, Windchy wrote for the Washington Post an op-ed (October 19, 1983) that disputed the explanation accepted by the major American media and a book based on interviews with high Soviet officials. According to that explanation, the Soviets mistook the Boeing airliner for an Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance plane. Windchy's op-ed gave reasons for why the Soviets must have known the target was a commercial airliner, and years later this opinion was justified when an interview with the attacking pilot appeared in the New York Times. The pilot told of how surprised he was when ordered to shoot down an airliner. When in Japan with the U.S. Information Agency, Windchy wrote a booklet on atomic energy that sold one million copies. Later he assisted Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer in his relations with left wing magazines and often placed in them articles by the ambassador. In Washington he served as the USIA's Assistant Science Adviser stationed at NASA headquarters. In private life he engaged in the study of evolutionary biology and wrote the The End of Darwinism. Windchy is a graduate of the University of Illinois and a veteran of U.S. Army service in Korea.. A widower, he resides in Centreville, Virginia.