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Colonel Red Reeder (1902-1998) was a child of the military, in the sense that his father was an officer in the military, so he grew up “in the Army.” Reeder went to West Point, commanded the 12th Infantry Regiment at D-Day, where he was wounded severely and lost part of a leg. He retired on disability soon after. He then worked at West Point for many years, until finally turning to full-time, mostly non-fiction with some fiction, writing in the 1960s. He wrote Medal of Honor Heroes and The West Point Story for the American Landmark series. He was married for many years to his wife, Dorothea, who died before he did.
Perhaps Reeder’s greatest work was his nine-part series chronicling the major wars in American history, up to the Second World War, written at the upper middle to high school level. The history of our country is defined by our wars, for better or for worse. Each war has had an effect on our people, our country, and the world around us. The same can probably be said for anywhere in the world. In that case, it behooves us to understand these wars so that we can understand our country’s history. Just a note – it is interesting to see how the British were our enemies in the Revolution and the War of 1812, then becoming uneasy neutrals in our Civil War, and finally becoming our close allies in the two World Wars. Great Britain is still our closest ally today.
Colonel Reeder takes the reader through each war in detail, focusing on the historical context of why the war started and the military details of how the war progressed and how it ended. He has one book each on: the French-Indian War, which happened before we became a country, the American Revolutionary War, which made us the United States of American, the War of 1812, which was something like the “aftershock” of the Revolutionary earthquake, the Mexican War, which followed Texas independence from Mexico, the tragedy of the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the First World War, which changed the face of Europe and our own country forever. Reeder finally devoted two books to the greatest of all wars, the Second World War, which had an even more profound effect on the world and on our own country. As far as I know, Reeder did not write any non-fiction books on the Korean War or the Vietnam War, although he did set one of his juvenile novels, Clint Lane in Korea, in the Korean conflict. Each volume in his War Story book series is well-written by a very knowledgeable author who had the resources of the U.S. Army records to draw upon for his narrative.