Artillery Unit Research Articles

Уродженець Сіверщини В. М. Сварика: портрет в контексті просопографії

The paper deals with the experience of shaping by means of prosopography of the UPR Army general-lieutenant V.M.Svaryka’s (1875-1865) prosopography portray on the background of his personal participation and participation of military units he managed in 1917-1921 national liberation competitions of Ukrainian people. To achieve the aim the author used theoretical and methodological achievements of famous Ukrainian scholar Yaroslav Dashkevych. The author emphasizes that general-lieutenant V.M.Svaryka transition to the service to Ukrainian state was conscious and balanced. Number of factors promoted that, such as home education in Ukrainian family (from Cossack starshyna) was the ground and further helped to produce stable national priorities. Study at the Cadet corps, later on in the military school allowed him to shape personal qualities of professional military man, to develop commander skills and personal understanding of the Southern Europe peoples’ life during Russian military Mediterranean campaign, to apply his skills in artillery unit managing. Most of all his ethno-national and religious-psychological qualities were realized during his service as the officer-educator and squadron commander of Volodymyr Kyiv Cadet Corps, his disciples took part at the battle near Kruty. The colonel V.M.Svaryka conscious transition, his activities as the commander promoted to resolve headquarters tasks. He felt all bitterness of defeats, emigration, but he believed in final victory.

26 dywizjon artylerii ciężkiej w latach 1937–1939

Artykuł opisuje historię mało znanej jednostki artylerii Wojska Polskiego z okresu międzywojennego – 26 dywizjonu artylerii ciężkiej. Jednostka ta powstała jesienią 1937 r. w Skierniewicach na obszarze Okręgu Korpusu nr IV Łódź i została bezpośrednio podporządkowana dowódcy 26 Dywizji Piechoty. Powstanie 26 dywizjonu artylerii ciężkiej było jednym z elementów zwiększania siły ogniowej związków taktycznych piechoty polskiej. Jednak braki w sprzęcie artyleryjskim spowodowały, że do 1939 r. dywizjony artylerii ciężkiej sformowano jedynie w kilku dywizjach piechoty, w tym w 26 Dywizji Piechoty. Zamiast planowanych trzech baterii 26 dywizjon artylerii ciężkiej miał jedynie dwie baterie liczące po trzy działa (w pierwszej baterii armaty 105 mm, a w drugiej baterii haubice 155 mm). Omawiana jednostka została zmobilizowana w marcu 1939 r. Pomimo wielu trudności i braków w wyposażeniu mobilizacja odbyła się sprawnie, a braki uzupełniano w kolejnych tygodniach. W maju 1939 r. 26 dywizjon artylerii ciężkiej został przewieziony koleją do Wielkopolski (wraz z całą 26 Dywizją Piechoty) i podporządkowany dowództwu Armii „Poznań”. W wojnie polsko-niemieckiej wspierał ogniem oddziały własnej dywizji w czasie walk nad Bzurą. W ich trakcie jednostka została rozbita, a większość żołnierzy dostała się do niewoli niemieckiej.

Deterministic and Robust Optimization Approach for Single Artillery Unit Fire Scheduling Problem

In this study, deterministic and robust optimization models for single artillery unit fire scheduling are developed to minimize the total enemy threat to friendly forces by considering the enemy target threat level, enemy target destruction time, and target firing preparation time simultaneously. Many factors in war environments are uncertain. In particular, it is difficult to evaluate the threat levels of enemy targets definitively. We consider the threat level of an enemy target to be an uncertain parameter and propose a robust optimization model that minimizes the total enemy threat to friendly forces. The robust optimization model represents a semi-infinite problem that has infinitely many constraints. Therefore, we reformulate the robust optimization model into a tractable robust counterpart formulation with a finite number of constraints. In the robust counterpart formulation with cardinality-constrained uncertainty, the conservativeness and robustness of the solution can be adjusted with an uncertainty degree, Γ. Further, numerical experiments are conducted to verify that the robust counterpart formulation with cardinality-constrained uncertainty can be made equivalent to the deterministic optimization model and the robust counterpart formulation with box uncertainty by setting Γ accordingly.

Wordsworth and the "Great Terror" of 1803-05

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth and the "Great Terror" of 1803-05Richard MatlakRichard Matlak Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 46, Number 1Winter 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24888099 Views: 19Total views on this site © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The error estimation of the height finding with external target designation in the artillery unit with the aid of flying platform

The algorithm of the target height finding with the aid of the flying platform has been offered in the article. Analysis of errors when defining it has been undertaken. Dependencies of target defining errors on the positional relationship of the observation point, platform, and target have been examined.

Review

140 The Michigan Historical Review Richard Paul Liblong. Answering the Call to Duty: Saving Custer, Heroism at Gettysburg, POWs and other Stories of Michigan’s Small Town Soldiers in the Civil War. Traverse City, Mich.: Arbutus Press, 2011. Pp. 192. Illustrations. Index. Photographs. Sources. Paper, $17.95. Though today’s Michigan is quite different from the predominantly rural society that confronted the Civil War in 1861, the notion of community remains relevant. Sending 90,000 of Michigan’s sons (and a few daughters) off to fight for Union and liberty required a multitude of small towns, villages, and farms all across both peninsulas to endure steep sacrifices. Soldiers from these communities volunteered to risk their lives and forsake the security of home; while those who were left behind coped with major disruptions to the everyday social fabric and an uncertain future. Rick Liblong’s paean to his Michigan hometown seeks to preserve rural stories of those who answered the call to duty on behalf of their country. Their service deserves the remembrance. Of the book’s eight chapters, the first five set the stage by discussing Lapeer County, the town of Almont, and the broader context of the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history. The final two chapters center on the war memorial erected at the town’s main intersection in 1865—one of the earliest in Michigan, if not the nation— and life in Almont once the victors came home. Sandwiched between is the great substance of the work, a lengthy chapter in which Liblong recounts some two dozen memorable stories of individual soldiers. The book, then, is largely anecdotal. We learn of the five Austin brothers from St. Clair, including ten-year-old George, who served in an artillery unit as a drummer boy. Levi Clark was a 38-year-old farmer from Almont who enlisted late (1864) and participated in both the siege of Atlanta and Sherman’s renowned March to the Sea. In recounting a long-forgotten act of heroism by his own great-grandfather, Norvell Churchill, Liblong proves how one individual’s actions can change the course of history. Near the raging battle of Gettysburg, Churchill’s cavalry unit went into action under its new general, George Armstrong Custer, at the Pennsylvania hamlet of Hunterstown. Custer faced capture or death when his mount went down in front of enemy lines. The Almont lad bravely rode into hostile fire, hoisted his commander aboard his horse, and raced back to safety. William Hamilton, who was a teacher, was less fortunate. He spent 17 months in Confederate prisons, surviving despite the odds and returning home, where he later became a physician and one of Almont’s leading citizens. Book Reviews 141 This eminently readable effort by first-time author Liblong contributes to our knowledge of Michigan’s participation in America’s largest crisis. The key role played by Michiganders in preserving the Union deserves a fuller telling and a larger audience. Answering the Call to Duty shows how history is frequently comprised of inspiring accounts from small-town America that enrich understanding and increase appreciation for our rural heritage. Jack Dempsey, President Michigan Historical Commission Joseph M. Lubig. Maltese in Michigan. “Discovering the Peoples of Michigan” series. Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011. Pp. 100. Appendices. For further reference. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper, $12.95. This booklet is the latest disappointing publication in the “Discovering the Peoples of Michigan” series. At its core is an illustrated 28-page essay (32 pages minus the blank pages numbered 18, 28, 34, and 38), which can be summarized briefly as follows: Attracted by jobs in the automobile industry, a wave of 5,000 Maltese came to the Detroit area in the 1910s and 1920s. This made Detroit home to the largest Maltese community in the United States. We read that these were hardworking people who migrated as families. This latter claim contrasts, however, with a statement on page 37 that the gender imbalance of Maltese in America in the 1920s was 1,000 (yes, 1,000) women for every 38 men! If the statistic is genuine, I imagine historians of gender would be fascinated to hear more...

Korea on the Brink: Reading theYŏnp'yŏngShelling and its Aftermath

By late December 2010, the truculence of brinkmanship between the two Koreas made it easy to forget that more auspicious signs of compromise had come as recently as this past autumn. The resumption of reunions among separated Korean families in late October and early November appeared to signal a modest improvement in inter-Korean cooperation, raising hopes that a program of cross-border family meetings would not only continue, but also expand. Yet, those hopes were dashed only weeks later when a military crisis escalated off the west coast of the Korean peninsula. On November 23 in a contested maritime zone, a South Korean military exercise was challenged by a North Korean artillery unit, which escalated the confrontation by shelling a South Korean island—killing four South Koreans including two civilians. In the artillery exchange that followed between the two sides, five North Korean soldiers were killed. The stark contrast between the pathos of the tearful family reunions and the panic and anger following the shelling of Yŏnp'yŏng Island, illustrated how quickly the inter-Korean situation had deteriorated. During the same month when South Korea hosted world leaders at the G-20 summit in Seoul to discuss the state of the global economy and the risks of a brewing “currency war,” the family reunions and deadly artillery attack served as sobering reminders that the Korean War, never formally ended, still continues.

Napoleon’s First Sword?

In the corner of a display cabinet in the War Gallery at the Royal Armouries in Leeds stands a sword. The style is best described as a small sword and in France would be regarded as an epee. It is neither elaborate nor particularly decorative. It is not of an unusual pattern, indeed it is of a type for issue to offi cers of artillery in France during the reign of Louis XVI. What makes this sword interesting is the owner and the circumstances in which the sword came into his possession. The record held by the Royal Armouries (IX.908, record 15108) indicates that the sword was presented to the young Napoleon Bonaparte by a young artillery offi cer by the name of Alexandre Desmazis.1 The sword bears a date of 1780 which itself may be controversial but also has an inscription indicating that the sword was given to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1786 as a souvenir of his posting to an artillery unit in Valence. The Royal Armouries records contain a good deal of correspondence about the sword and its journey from Valence to its current resting place in the War Gallery (Dufty 1974). The sword itself is of the 1767/1775 pattern offi cer’s epee of the type purchased by offi cers of artillery and carried as part of their walking out dress (L’Hoste 2003: 188). The sword is described in the records as:

The Tsar’s Last Philosopher on the Method of Architectural History: Orthodox Theology versus Geistesgeschichte

A photograph dating from the years of the Russian Civil War shows Vasiliy Pavlovich Zubov in the uniform of the Red Army: an unlikely conscript to it, given his poor eyesight (as betrayed by his thick glasses), but in fact one who served as a scribe in an artillery unit located near Moscow (Fig. 1). Another photograph, taken not long before his death in 1963, shows him in the greyish suit of the Khrushchev years: a survivor who, by becoming Russia’s greatest intellectual historian, managed to avoid playing any active part in political history (Fig. 2).Zubov is the towering figure of Russian architectural history in the twentieth century. The most pertinent way to introduce him here is as the Russian translator of Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (Fig. 3) and as one of the two co-translators of Daniele Barbara’s commentary on Vitruvius. The former treatise is notorious for the complexities of its text, and it took a team of three scholars to produce the most recent English translation. Understanding of the latter work demands such an extensive knowledge of both Renaissance and Roman intellectual history that it is considered virtually untranslatable, and the translation on which Zubov collaborated is the only one ever published in any living language. He was also the author of an extensive commentary on Alberti’s architectural treatise (Fig. 4), much praised by those Renaissance scholars who can read Russian, while those few of his articles on Leon Battista Alberti that were published in French or Italian during his lifetime are still widely cited today.

A Confederate Chronicle: The Life of a Civil War Survivor, and: Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia: Survival in a Civil War Regiment (review)

Reviewed by: A Confederate Chronicle: The Life of a Civil War Survivor, and: Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia: Survival in a Civil War Regiment Brian Craig Miller A Confederate Chronicle: The Life of a Civil War Survivor. By Pamela Chase Hain. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005. Pp. 273. Cloth, $39.95.) Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia: Survival in a Civil War Regiment. By Scott Walker. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Pp. 311. Cloth, $39.95.) Throughout the course of the last decade, historians have produced a plethora of published collections of letters and diaries from soldiers and civilians who lived through the experience of the American Civil War. Both Pamela Hain and Scott Walker place a rich body of primary sources into a narrative in order to shed light on their respective subject's experience during the war. Pamela Hain's compelling narrative examines the life of Thomas Lowndes Wragg, a son of privilege who joined the 8th Georgia Volunteers in the late spring of 1861. Hain weaves Wragg's letters into a cultural narrative, examining everything from the battlefield and camp conditions of the war to the experience onboard naval ships and within the walls of a prison. After a year of serving with the infantry, Thomas Wragg joined the Confederate Navy in December 1862, where he served on both the CSS Georgia and the CSS Atlanta. Hain includes Wragg's naval notebook, which provides a wealth of specific details on how a gunboat operated. On June 17, 1863, during the maiden voyage of the Atlanta, the ship failed to escape from a Union gunboat. During his subsequent imprisonment, Wragg continued to write to his father and expressed his feelings of abandonment. Following his prison ordeal, Master Wragg was paroled and exchanged and served the final years of the war onboard the CSS Fredericksburg and the CSS Richmond. When Petersburg [End Page 323] fell in April 1865, Wragg to set off on foot to North Carolina with Admiral Raphael Semmes's artillery unit and eventually returned to Georgia. Upon his return home, Wragg spent a limited amount of time in Savannah before moving to Thomasville, Georgia, where he met his future wife. Hain includes the correspondence between the two and also several of Wragg's poems in an appendix. Following his marriage in 1868, Wragg worked as a bookkeeper, a railroad conductor, a farmer, and a store owner, and he eventually studied medicine and moved to Florida with his wife and children. However, Wragg's life came to a tragic end on April 10, 1889, when he was shot three times in broad daylight on the streets of Quincy, Florida. Wragg's assailant, Charles DuPont, shot the doctor because he believed him to be the father of his sister's child, who had been born out of wedlock a few years earlier. Hain reveals that the actual father, as well as the DuPont family, had enough political clout in the community to prevent Mrs. Wragg from ever bringing her husband's killer to justice. Hain ultimately provides enough rich detail to show that Wragg's experience in battle, in prison, on a ship, and in dealing with the aftermath of war represents that of many who shared the incommunicable experience of war. Scott Walker's Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia examines not one individual, but a whole regiment, the 57th Georgia, and traces its experience throughout the war in the West by making use of a rich body of letters and diary entries. Throughout the narrative, Walker examines camp life, the bonds between soldiers, the physical and emotional strain of the war on both the soldiers and their families, and how the actions of the 57th Georgia fit into the larger military narrative of the war. Walker's book is strongest when he utilizes the letters and diary entries of the 57th to paint a rich portrait of the horrific experience that soldiers, as well as their families, faced on a daily basis. Walker admits in his introduction, however, that his work is a "narrative history," which allowed him to "describe thoughts or emotions" that the soldier "probably had but are not made explicit...

The Uses and Abuses of Austen's "Absolute Historical Pictures"

IN 1833, in response to the reissue of Austen’s fictions in Richard Bentley’s series The Standard Novels, the Literary Gazette recommended Austen’s fictions to the “rising generation.” Noting that “one” particular “merit . . . of these delightful works is every hour increasing,” the Gazette continues somewhat ruefully that Austen’s novels are fast “becoming absolute historical pictures.” Were it not for these works, in other words, younger readers “would have no idea of the animation of going down a country dance, or the delights of a tea-table.” The Gazette’s view of history is both quaint and condescending. Implying that Austen’s writings are a repository not just of information but of values that are fast diminishing, the Gazette projects a new readership, whose ignorance of ephemera bespeaks other deficiencies that reading Austen will not remedy so much as underscore. Reading Austen is not simply educative on this view; it is, in its new capacity as popular history, a steady reminder of how far the “rising generation” has already fallen. The Gazette, it turns out, was not very far off base in its assessment. In fact, it is characteristic of the popular pedagogy in which Austen’s fictions were enlisted throughout much of the nineteenth century (and of her fictions’ ability to enshrine an historical moment or heritage) that their most succinct manifestation may be found among a group of readers who, suffice it to say, are as removed from that historical world as one could possibly be. I’m referring, then, to “the Janeites” memorialized by Rudyard Kipling in his fictional vignette bearing that same title. 1 To those for whom the term “Janeite” is a shorthand for the amateur (and sometimes professional) enthusiast who knows Austen’s novels (and their cinematic adaptations) seemingly by heart, not to mention the various sequels to works such as Pride and Prejudice that have been essayed over the years, the “Janeite” enthusiasm that Kipling explores may prove something of a puzzle. For unlike the members of the Jane Austen Society, who are nothing if not blessed with a fair measure of cultural capital, the visibly traumatized veterans of the World War I artillery unit, to whom the sobriquet was first applied, would seem to be the last readers—if indeed they are readers at all—in whom Austen might strike a responsive chord. This is most evident perhaps in the Janeites’ mode of speaking, where cockneyisms and colloquialisms abound to a degree that is not only at odds with the otherwise normative discourse that we associate with Austen’s writing, but at odds to a

A Measure of Effectiveness (MOE) Method and Software Aid, with a Case Study of a Soviet Artillery Unit

A Measure of Effectiveness (MOE) is a criterion. A system that scores well according to the criterion will be accepted as effective, meaning that it achieves what is intended. This seems simple, but in fact well-meaning managers can fail to find an adequate measure, are unclear about what is intended for the system, and may even misidentify the system. The method described here is a means to help avoid common mistakes. With the method, a manager or analyst (a user) builds a model of his or her own effectiveness assessment strategy using specially designed interactive software. The user enters data prompted by the software and views feedback consisting of graphs and ordered lists describing the user's inputs in various ways. Feedback gives the users alternative viewpoints for their inputs. As a case study, an MOE was constructed for a Soviet artillery unit within an attacking regiment.