Abstract The French Foreign Legion underwent a significant transformation, expansion, and reorganisation between 1919 and 1939. Amidst geopolitical unrest, economic hardships, and mass migrations, French foreign regiments managed to rebuild and expand their structures during and after the First World War. Italian Legionnaires have been among the protagonists of this process since 1914, serving as heirs to a Garibaldian tradition of transnational volunteerism. They represented a group of volunteers through which it is possible to observe the changing political relations between Fascist Italy and France. This article analyses the changes that occurred in the Foreign Legion during the 1920s and early 1930s, adopting a dual approach that examines both its structural and cultural reforms and the individual and collective experiences of Italian legionnaires. We aim to explore the motivations, practices, and discharge conditions of Italian citizens who served in the Legion to assess Italy’s challenges during the interwar period.
Abstract This article investigates the commonly accepted view that the hagiography associated with the German General Erwin Rommel, often known as the “Desert Fox,” was rooted in British wartime propaganda that sought to praise Rommel’s generalship in order to excuse their defeats in North Africa. The research presented closely examines how Allied contemporaries perceived and portrayed Rommel in hundreds of news articles, editorials, and other biographical assessments. These sources reveal a very different story, whereby Allied commentators in the main represented Rommel as a disreputable Nazi and brutish “Hitler favourite,” while seeking to diminish his military reputation. Projecting the hagiographies of the “Desert Fox,” created in the 1950s during an era in which West Germany and its military were important NATO allies, distorts the attitudes and beliefs of wartime contemporaries. Rommel was represented as a “Hitler favourite” because that reflected the prevailing attitudes Americans and Britons had of their wartime enemy.
For some of the Yugoslav participants of the complex, extremely bloody, and violent Second World War, May 1945 did not mark the end of their war path. A wave of Red Terror between 1945 and 1948 represented the final act of the bloody civil war and socialist revolution that had gone hand in hand with the resistance against the occupation forces of the Axis. This Red Terror, epitomised in mass and often brutal liquidations, claimed the lives of thousands of Serbian and Montenegrin chetniks , Croatian ustashe , Slovenian Home Guard, and members of other anti-communist and Quisling units that, during the Second World War, used to operate throughout the occupied and dismembered Yugoslav Kingdom. Many chetniks , ustashe , and Slovenian and Albanian nationalists who avoided capture or surrender continued to wage war in somewhat altered circumstances. Forced to change their modus operandi, they began to adapt to new international realities. This meant that some of these units started to enjoy the support of Western intelligence communities due to their altered status. Instead of fascist collaborators, they had become victims of communist oppression. Nonetheless, most of these remaining fighters entered a period of extreme hardship marked by constant scarcity and the prospect of annihilation. This paper presents various violent practices used by both sides. These practices were designed to intimidate opponents and encourage supporters. However, the determination of the Yugoslav communist regime to quell any form of opposition led to the gradual violent suppression of all anti-Yugoslav and anti-communist armed formations.
After 1945, the risk associated with nuclear war demanded new ways of thinking about victory and defeat on the modern battlefield. President Eisenhower’s strategy of massive retaliation had the paradoxical effect of increasing the need for limitations on the means employed and the objectives pursued in war to avoid escalation to an existential conflict. Scholarship on the theory of limited war in U.S. history has varied over the last eight decades, but the term remains as poorly understood as it is widely used. The tendency to frame limited war in isolation from the political realities of the early nuclear age has led to revisions of its meaning that associate the concept with strategic failure. This perception is detached from the origins of limited war in modern history and deserves reconsideration in scholarly debates about the means, ends, and scope of wars.
Czech Television, the leading public news broadcaster in the Czech Republic, has partnered with the Ministry of Defence and its expert institution, the Military History Institute Prague (VHÚ Praha), to produce and broadcast an eight-part series about contemporary military reenactment in the Czech Republic. Entitled Present – Arms! , the series, which aired in early 2024, was billed as a documentary and went well beyond the usual features of such programmes. The author argues that the series presents a discourse on war and warfare that differs significantly from the official version publicly professed by the state’s military institutions that co-sponsored the series. The series is based on the so-called revelatory concept of military culture, which emphasises the ultimate nature of direct combat experience and its epistemological benefits, allegedly providing deep insight into human nature and soldier identity. Other underlying concepts characterised in the programme include the Czech nation as a primordial martial race that exists beyond the constraints of time and space and is bound by a Totenkult -style cult of the dead. By contrast, the current official Czech discourse on war and warfare adheres to the so-called honorary concept of military culture, insisting that waging war and engaging in combat are meaningful and praiseworthy only if these acts conform to certain cultural values, such as defending and promoting democracy, human rights, and humanitarian concerns. The following article analyses and interprets the new concept presented in the TV series in question and highlights its potential sociocultural consequences.
In winter 1981–82, Italy decided to join the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), a peacekeeping force set up by the U.S. Administration to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from the Sinai Peninsula. It was the first time that Italian troops were sent abroad short of UN aegis since 1945. The MFO is, in fact, the first step of Italy’s long-standing commitment towards peacekeeping operations. This article examines the decision-making process that led Italy to such an unprecedented turn, delving into the role of international, regional, and domestic factors.
In the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade and the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, a number of Latin polities were established in former Byzantine territories. Among them, the Principality of Achaea emerged as one of the few Latin states to achieve relative longevity within the fluid and contested geopolitical landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean. Its continued existence, however, increasingly relied on the support of the Angevin monarchy of Sicily. This dependence was, in part, a consequence of the renewed Byzantine efforts to reclaim lost territories – most notably the 1263 campaign initiated by Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, whose objective was the reassertion of imperial authority over the Peloponnese, known in Byzantine sources as the Morea. This study seeks to demonstrate, through close textual analysis and a comparative examination of narrative and documentary sources, that the aforementioned campaign played a decisive role in consolidating the Principality of Achaea’s dependency on Angevin suzerainty.
This article examines one of the key campaigns waged by the British Army during the 1919–22 ‘crisis of empire’. The suppression of the Egyptian Revolution in March-April 1919 witnessed the British employ a number of techniques that would come to characterise interwar colonial policing and post–1945 counter-insurgency, including collective punishment, summary military courts, and repressive violence. The campaign was characterised by a permissive operating environment, underpinned by martial law powers, in which local commanders and military units had considerable freedom to operate. Despite the considerable variation in local practice, the employment of force in Egypt was characterised by the concept of moral effect; violence was intended to psychologically overwhelm the Egyptian population. The suppression of the Egyptian Revolution in 1919 thus highlights the extent to which the crisis of empire both heralded elements of a new 20 th -century colonial policing model and looked back to 19 th -century imperial warfare.
In 1998 following a bitterly contested election in Lesotho, post-apartheid South Africa deployed its army to ostensibly restore peace within the tiny neighbouring country. Yet the intervention did not proceed smoothly, and the resulting public backlash has long tainted the operation. The analysis from academia on the operation has been no less critical. However, the longer period of stabilisation which followed the intervention has not yet been examined to date, which this article attempts to rectify. It will show that while a peace of sorts was restored to the nation, the ill-conduct of some South African soldiers, coupled with the limited mandate emplaced upon the South African army to address crime and the deeper political issues within Lesotho, had left a bitter aftertaste amongst some Basotho towards the intervention.
As a cognitive component of the Verstand (intellect, mind or understanding), coup d'ceil is regarded in Clausewitzian thought as more intuitive than kact of judgement. Although this concept Is not unrelated to the tactical coup d'ceil of 19th-century military writers, it differs in the breadth of the conceptual system into which Clausewitz integrates it. Within this system, the concept also differs from contemporary notions of "strategic intuition" pr "battlefield coup d'ceil".
War contexts can always be analysed from multiple perspectives. One of them refers to the study of war experiences. In fact, this question allows us to delve into the collective and individual subjectivities of people who have participated in war from a sociocultural approach. This work attempts to analyze the construction of the subjectivities of Canarian and Okinawan ex-combatants as a result of their experiences in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. This study also contributes to research on this question, which is absent in the historiography dedicated to the study of these geographical spaces with a comparative approach. For this purpose, this research has made use of several testimonies of ex-combatants. Despite being culturally and geographically distant examples, both island scenarios presented evident similarities in their war experiences.
This article discusses the mobilization, recruitment and wartime experiences of Africans who participated in the Second World War. Centred on the accounts of ex-servicemen, their families, and friends, this article argues that some Africans were either hoodwinked or forced to join the imperial forces. Consequently, they began to question their position as colonial subjects in the war. Their experiences revived anticolonial sentiments and abetted the rise of labour activism and mass nationalism in the colony during the war. The bulk of the material for this article was obtained from written family records, oral histories, and archival sources.
Early on 20 June 1942, Axis forces launched their assault on the port fortress of Tobruk. Defence of the port had been entrusted to Major General H.B. Klopper and his 2na South African Infantry Division. When io,722 Springboks surrendered the following day without many actively participating in the port's defence, families back home in South Africa demanded answers. The aim of this article is to explain the actions of various South African artillery units deployed within the fortress. Sent to assist their comrades in arms, these men were flung into the fight in a desperate attempt to stem the Axis advance, with South Africa suffering 85 dead by the day's end. Utilising these Springbok Gunner's own diaries, letters and reports a new narrative has emerged concerning the South African defence of Tobruk.
This article studies the Self-Defense Forces' (sdf) changing relationship with Japan's security policymakers, reflecting on changing ideas of antimilitarism in the security discourse. For a long time after defeat in the Second World War, the Japanese public was concerned about protection from, not by, the sdf. Accordingly, strict bureaucratic monitoring and control limited the sdf's participation in the policymaking process. Using government resources and personal interviews, this article traces how policymakers' perception and antimilitarist attitude toward the sdf evolved as Japan confronted an increasingly challenging security environment that necessitated the sdf's military expertise to be integrated in the policymaking process. It examines why and how politicians reclaimed civilian control over the military from civil servants and the process by which they granted increasingly more policy influence to uniformed officers. At a time of Japan's militarization, this article contributes to understanding the development and remaining limitations on the sdf's political position and policymaking influence.
This article seeks to understand the changing nature of mercenarism in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that shifts in social norms and politico-legal discourse have influenced attitudes to mercenaries. Where there was once international censure of their use, there is now a growing acceptance thereof. In the pursuit of cost effectiveness and political expediency, the privatisation of state security functions has given rise to a new phenomenon. Private Military Companies (PMCs) are entrusted to exercise force on behalf of or in partnership with the state and so have been accorded legitimacy. These changes will be examined in the light of Africa's experience of mercenaries and private military contractors. It does not propose a singular trajectory of mercenarism but allows for contingency. It suggests that close attention should be paid to the historical context in which these varied forms have appeared.
Seventy-eight officers held senior command positions at army, corps, and divisional level in Britain's three main field armies-the Second (North-West Europe), Eighth (Italy), and Fourteenth (Burma)-at the end of the Second World War. Using a range of source material, including their private papers, this article examines their socioeconomic and family background, education, and early career development and finds that as a group, they were more representative of the middling classes than heretofore depicted. They were also far more diverse in education and place of birth: twenty-one were born outside Britain. As this article argues, the make-up of the three armies also differed, suggesting the formation of a more elite, home-grown, 'first team' for service with the Second Army in North-West Europe.
This article discusses the application of gis in the study of military history, particularly for campaigns in modern Asian history (1800s-1950s), citing the Battle of Hong Kong 1941 Spatial History Project as an example. gis allows researchers to move beyond text-based narratives by visualizing, contextualizing, and explaining the diversity of human experiences that are often overshadowed by frontline actions. This article assesses the use of gis -based interactive maps in visualizing the flow of the battle, reconstructing the battlefield, examining the diverse human experience, and integrating disparate historical data. Reflecting on the research team’s interdisciplinary experience in creating a gis -based interactive map, this article argues that such a method is suitable for military campaigns that took place in a rapidly changing urban environment. It also discusses the limitations of this method and the need to remain critical towards the visualization of data, the use of sources, and interpretation.
This article examines the strategic wall-building policies of two post-Mongol imperial formations: Moscow (c. 1400 to 1700) and the Ming (1368 to 1644). It argues that the Mongols left behind a steppe frontier that was dangerous and difficult to control and, faced with similar geopolitical circumstances, both Russia and China erected walls and defensive fortifications along those frontiers. These walls served similar functions in defending the capital region from nomadic raids, protecting agricultural lands and pastures, controlling interactions with the nomads, and stopping taxpayer flight. However, evolving geopolitical and climate conditions caused Moscow’s policies to begin diverging from the Ming’s. Whereas the Ming continued to utilise their walls for static defence, the Russians turned wall-building into a tool for aggressive expansion and colonisation of the steppes.
Despite requests by nursing leaders, it was some months before the New Zealand government sent nurses to serve in the First World War. Eventually, more than five hundred nurses, approximately twenty per cent of the registered nursing workforce, served. They endured long periods of service, up to five years away, with sixty per cent having documented illnesses, and ten per cent needing to be invalided home. A key finding of this study was the impact on nurses as they battled with poor provision of care and ongoing support, which contrasts with the care provided for returning soldiers. This analysis fills a gap in the knowledge of the impact of war on serving nurses and presents personal tales from official and personal archives, providing a detailed narrative of their experiences.
This article presents in-depth archival research on the military and civilian life of Francis Hall, a lieutenant in the 14th Light Dragoons and Peninsular War veteran. In 1820, Hall volunteered for Simón Bolívar’s wars of independence and travelled to South America. Although his name appears in multiple sources as an author, an adventurer, a politician, a botanist and even a promoter of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy, his experiences after landing on the shores of Venezuela are obscure. The following account will examine mostly primary sources and will explore his motivations for entering the military, arguing that they were significantly intellectual. Ironically, it was politics and not warfare what eventually led to his demise.
