The Sassanids engaged in a series of conflicts with the Hephthalites between 474 and 484; the most significant culminated at the Battle of Merv in 484 with the death of King Peroz I on the field of battle, plunging the Sassanid Empire into a protracted political crisis. This paper reconsiders Peroz's generalship and the tactics at the Battle of Merv, focusing on the use of the battlefield trench by the Hephthalite Huns. By building up a picture of how accurate our primary sources are in their description of the battlefield and how detailed are the accounts about the preparations for the battle by the Hephthalite troops, it explains King Peroz's decision to ignore lessons from previous battles against steppe armies and order a full-scale charge against the Hephthalite army.
This article explains the first stage of a two-stage process by which Ferdinand Foch, France's pre-eminent pre-war military theorist, mastered the First World War's static industrialized battlefield and delivered victory by rethinking warfare from first principles. At the emergent operational level of war, battle had to be appropriate to the forces, abilities, and objectives of armies. Evaluating his early operational command experience in 1914 and 1915 in the light of his pre-war thought, Foch advocated a new "scientific" battle operational method attuned to battlefield realities. The scientific method ensured appropriate command and control and the integration of material and manpower that restored operational effectiveness by the late 1916 Battle of the Somme.
Historians have generally presented the wartime alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as one of incoherence that followed a broadly linear path of decline until its violent denouement. While true for many aspects of the war, there were some exceptions. This article focuses on the Mediterranean war (1940-1943), examining it at different levels. It demonstrates that there, the relationship both declined and improved simultaneously. While Italo-German command relationships in the Mediterranean became increasingly toxic, tactical and technical coordination became closer and more effective. It is too simplistic to view the Italo-German wartime military relationship as one solely characterized by incoherence, decline, mistrust, and rivalry.
While the lack of propellants as factor in the strategic defeat of the Luftwaffe in WWII has been well documented, the centrality of liquid oxygen to the German rocket program has been overlooked. Based on new archival research of surviving V-2 files, this study argues that building and protecting the liquid oxygen supply network, given the "use it or lose it" characteristics of the substance, became the overriding operational focus of military program leadership. The scope of oxygen supply was neither reduced nor challenged throughout the war, suggesting the Reich saw a strategic role for the weapon.
Lieutenant Colonel (acting) Elbert E. Farman Jr., the first U.S. military attach to Poland, arrived at his new post as the war with the Russian Soviet Republic got underway. His reports and dispatches to the Military Intelligence Division (MID) offered the War Department and other agencies essential data and analysis on not only Poland's war effort but also Soviet capabilities and operations. This accounting later became the basis of the first English-language monograph treating the 1920 campaign. Farman's contributions, taken together, offer a picture of uncertain governments, rude conditions, and ragged armies. Despite the conditions, in this fight over lands and peoples, the two sides waged guerre a outrance. Political violence was a feature, and noncombatants paid a heavy price. The contest presented operational changes from the Great War, and Farman analyzed mobile warfare in the region. Farman's reports illuminate a critical episode in miliary and diplomatic history the reconstruction of East Central Europe. Analysis offers insight into the attach, his role, and the problem of attach intelligence.
This article explores the strategic alliance between the Italian Royal Navy and the Jewish Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine after World War II. It highlights two main contributions: facilitating Aliyah Bet, the clandestine immigration of thousands of Holocaust survivors to Palestine by sea, and training recruits for the nascent Israeli navy. These efforts, the article argues, were instrumental in the eventual establishment of the State of Israel. While Aliyah Bet has received considerable scholarly attention, the Italian navy's involvement in supporting and shaping Israel's maritime forces remains largely overlooked. This study seeks to illuminate that crucial yet understudied dimension.
This paper surveys the progressive integration of women into the military and women's compensation and benefits during and after their service. The study traces the historical milestones of women's military participation, highlighting differences in military status, compensation and benefits. Over time, the need for larger forces led to the expansion of women's roles and movement towards equality in military status, pay and rank. Once women secured equality in these areas, however, differences in benefits and healthcare remained. Today, women veterans represent a rapidly growing demographic, yet inequities persist.
The presence of American GIs in Cold War Taiwan was a double-edged sword for Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist government. He needed American military aid to sustain his regime, so he granted American GIs diplomatic immunity. This posed a challenge, however, as it evoked memories of extraterritoriality that contradicted the official historical narrative and thus undermined the regime's attempt to transform Taiwan's population into Chinese citizens. This embarrassing situation forced Chiang to initiate negotiations with the U.S. This paper demonstrates that the negotiations resulted in a win win outcome. The U.S. maintained partial jurisdiction, while the KMT struck a balance between its relationship with the U.S. and its governance over Taiwan.
In the modem era, it was common for military contingents defending a territory to be quartered among the local population, until authorities recognized the importance of keeping the military physically separated from civilians. In early seventeenth-century Palermo, the quartering of troops shared both similarities and differences with other Italian cities. The viceregal authorities' aim to separate soldiers from the population unfolded within a complex historical, political, and economic context. Accustomed and at times compelled to live in private homes through a rental system that left both soldiers and civilians dissatisfied, the troops frequently clashed with the city's inhabitants, leading to brawls and various forms of violence. The viceregal government, which spearheaded the quartering process in response to the impossibility of peaceful coexistence, faced institutional and social obstacles that curtailed its plans. These challenges were further compounded by the plague of 1624, which halted all efforts to establish proper garrisons. This article examines the entire process of garrisoning in Palermo, from the initial recognition of its necessity to the construction, reform, and formal establishment of barracks by 1650.
POW/MIA campaigns have motivated the U.S. military to repatriate servicemembers' remains from overseas battlefields for decades. Although scholars tend to regard them as a product of the Vietnam War, this study argues their birth should be traced to the Korean War. The limitation of its military power during the Cold War prompted the United States to open a new front against the communist bloc. During and after the Korean War, China and North Korea accused the U.S. of preventing their prisoners from returning home under the pretext of voluntary repatriation; the U.S. countered that those states detained missing U.S. personnel in secret camps. U.S. officials used this to further an anti-communist agenda and mobilize a population upset by military setbacks and allegations of domestic subversion. The politicization of the missing prisoners after the Korean War was a harbinger of the post-Vietnam campaigns.
When Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed that the American "frontier has gone" in 1893, he did more than impose an ethnocentric history on land that had never been "open" in the first place. He also forgot to look up. In the century following Robert P. Porter's 1890 Census Bulletin and Turner's seminal musings, middle- and upper-class EuroAmericans increasingly turned to vertical landscapes in response to the socioeconomic and cultural shifts of modernity, thereby claiming new frontier space for their discovery. This paper situates the U.S. Army's Tenth Mountain Division at the center of that story, arguing that the narrative of America's "ski troopers" captures the enduring potency of the frontier for modern Americans. By writing their pioneering narrative into the peaks they trained and fought in, the Tenth helped establish the mountains as purportedly open space into which Americans could expand and in which they could reimagine their freedom.
Previous scholarship has focused on why kamikaze pilots accepted their one-way missions, typically drawing on notions of an essentialized Japanese culture or modern state-nationalism. This article brings the invention of kamikaze tactics into the 1940s by excavating examples of dissent and resistance in the Japanese military. It argues that since many people articulated opposition by citing their own understandings of Japanese culture, kamikaze tactics cannot be explained as predetermined by traditional culture or modern ideological indoctrination. This article emphasizes the viewpoints of working-class soldiers who comprised the majority of kamikaze squadrons, as well mid-ranking career officers representing an earlier Japanese military tradition.
Early in the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force's Strategic Air Command (SAC) used strategic bombing tactics from World War II, despite growing evidence that high-altitude formation bombing was vulnerable to Soviet air defenses. From 1960 through 1963, SAC took part in largescale air defense exercises with the North American Airspace Defense Command (NORAD) called Operation Sky Shield. These exercises revealed weaknesses in SAC tactics, prompting SAC to make significant changes, such as adopting low-altitude single-sortie flights, passive radar jamming, structural modifications to existing bombers, and canceling planned high altitude bomber designs. These changes increased SAC bomber survivability.
There are dark histories in every nation's past, stories that for one reason or another are best left out of official narratives. World War II is full of such "uncomfortable" histories. The political context in Southeast Asia, however, was more complicated than in Europe, the only other major world region almost entirely under the control of an occupying power during the war. Here collaboration involved "defecting" from one colonial power to another. In the Philippines, there has been limited scholarship on the many individuals accused of "treason" during Japan's occupation of that country between 1942 and 1945. Only the activities of the national and regional elites have received serious consideration, and scant attention has been given to what life was like in rural areas, to the people living in the thousands of villages or barrios across the archipelago. Their lost stories, however, can still be recovered from the previously inaccessible records of the Historical Data Papers, the village histories mandated by President Quirino in 1951. The more than fortyeight thousand pages of this unique source offer a grassroots account of the Japanese occupation told from the viewpoint of the barrio residents that challenges the previous wartime historiography of the islands.
During the Korean War, a doctrinal interservice debate within the armed forces over "close air support [CAS]"-the use of aircraft closely coordinated with ground personnel to attack enemy forces in dose contact with friendly troops spilled over into the popular press and congressional debates. While the U.S. Marine Corps emphasized CAS during World War II and the post-war period, the army and army air forces considered it far less important. Between 1945 and the end of the Korean War, this debate played out amidst the much larger "unification" struggle, in which the marine corps faced the very real threat of being reduced to a tiny branch of regimental-sized units with no combined arms capability. The public and Congress showed only a vague awareness of the differences between the marines' and the air force's use of airpower until they read frontline reporters' praise for the marines' use of CAS during the Korean War. The marines' alleged prowess in this use of airpower entered congressional debates and bolstered efforts by the corps' supporters to guarantee a minimum force structure for the marine corps in the Douglas Mansfield Act of 1952, making the U.S. Marine Corps the world's only marine corps with substantial organic air forces.
This article investigates the disputed location of the Battle of Cynoscephalae, fought between the Romans and the Macedonians in 197 BCE, to suggest that the battle took place on a type of middle ground between flat plains and rugged heights. This middle ground, consisting of rolling hills and parallel ridges of modest height and steepness, proved to be the ideal terrain on which the flexible manipular legion could defeat the dense Macedonian phalanx. While the ancient literary sources suggest that the battle developed out of a chance encounter between the two forces, this article argues that the Roman commander, Titus Flamininus, deliberately chose the spot because of its topographical characteristics.
Following the rise of an insurgency in Iraq, a struggling U.S. military eventually turned to counterinsurgency. In doing so, it focused on cultural awareness as one of the tools necessary for soldiers and marines to achieve their mission more effectively. To develop such cultural awareness, the military sought the insight and expertise of anthropologists, unwittingly lighting a spark that set the whole discipline ablaze and triggered the field's most volatile controversy since the 1970s. While many anthropologists believed that they had moved beyond their previous- and what most of them considered questionable association with the national security establishment, issues that had been put to rest since the end of the Vietnam War suddenly resurfaced, more contentious than ever, revealing a deep academic-military gap.
Traditional accounts of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu focused on the clash of French and Vietnamese forces at the close of the Indochina War. They emphasize the local learning by the two combatants. This article examines the neglected role of the two great power sponsors of the Indochina War, the United States. and the People's Republic of China. Both sought to transfer operational concepts developed while fighting in Korea. While the French and the Viet Minh adopted much of the hardware and doctrine, the terms of this technology transfer and the local conditions favored the Vietnamese. Chinese advisors offered the Vietnamese a more effective combination of advice and assistance than the U.S. offered to the French.
In Kentucky during the Civil War, African Americans served as coerced laborers in the U.S. Army before they were embraced as free people or soldiers. Authorities impressed over 1,900 Black people to conduct hard labor for the military in direct opposition to the hopes and pursuits of African Americans seeking emancipation, civil rights, and racial equality. Kentucky thus demonstrates the army's conflicting roles as liberator and racially oppressive. The U.S. Army made use of Black Kentuckians throughout the Civil War, but whether these men found themselves impressed enslaved laborers or free soldiers was shaped by the shifting calculus of military necessity.
