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Playing to Win: Sports and the American Military, 1898-1945. By Wanda Ellen Wakefield. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. x, 216 pp. Cloth, $59.50, ISBN 0-79143313-7. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-7914-3314-5.)
Those expecting to read about the great athletes produced by the United States Army and the military academies will not find them in this book. George S. Patton, Felix "Doc" Blanchard and Glenn Davis, the 1944 and 1945 Army national champion football teams of Coach Earl "Red" Blaik, and the Iowa Pre-Flight and other military teams that dominated the top-ten national football rankings in 1943 and 1944 are not the subjects of this narrower study.
Wanda Ellen Wakefield documents how with the slow expansion of the regular army starting in 1898 and with the first of a series of postwar periods abroad...