War Battle Research Articles

Entertainment and fun in the service of survival: Theatre of the People’s Liberation in the battles of Neretva and Sutjeska

Using the accounts of the participants in the battles of Neretva and Sutjeska, particularly the members of the Theatre of the People’s Liberation (Kazalište narodnog oslobođenja, KNO), this article focuses on ways of having fun as well as its functions among soldiers and civilians who were primarily busy with escaping enemy encirclements. It reveals the range of experiences and the accompanying emotional registers they were exposed to in everyday life while pondering the role of pleasure in the biggest battles of the Second World War in Yugoslavia.

«Матч должен состояться при любой погоде» (к 95-летнему юбилею Давида Израилевича Дубровского)

The life path of the domestic philosopher David Izrailevich Dubrovsky, whose 95th anniversary we celebrated in March 2024, allows us today to return to Russian philosophy in its history and trace how intellectual discussions on the “psychophysiological problem” evolved among psychologists, physiologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers (including “analysts”) working both in our country and abroad. The scientific biography of the jubilarian demonstrates the main qualities of his personality – constancy and perseverance in achieving goals. These qualities accompanied him in the battles of the Great Patriotic War and today help him defend his conceptual positions in scientific and philosophical discussions. His major monographs, “Psychic Phenomena and the Brain. A Philosophical Analysis of the Problem in Connection with Some Current Tasks of Neurophysiology, Psychology, and Cybernetics” (1971), “Information, Consciousness, Brain” (1980), “The Problem of the Ideal” (1983; 2nd ed. 2002), “The Problem of ‘Consciousness and Brain’: Theoretical Solution” (2015), demonstrate that for the last 60 years he has been studying the connection between phenomena of subjective reality and physiological processes occurring in the brain. In addition to presenting the main stages of D.I. Dubrovsky’s intellectual movement, the article highlights his role as a scientific organizer in the creation and work of the Scientific Council under the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the methodology of artificial intelligence and cognitive research

The Devil’s outriders: a LiDAR and KOCOA investigation of the battle of Buckhead Creek, 1864

ABSTRACT Funded by an American Battlefield Protection Program grant, LiDAR and KOCOA, guided a systematic metal detector survey to identify, and evaluate levels of preservation and battle pattern signatures from the Battle of Buckhead Creek, the largest American Civil War battle site in Southeast Georgia untouched by development. In November 1864, during Sherman’s March to the Sea, Confederate and Union cavalry forces waged a running battle across Jenkins and Burke County, Georgia. These actions were ephemeral events in an archaeological sense, in time-depth and their impact on the archaeological record. However, this paper demonstrates that the application of conflict archaeology methodologies can identify and evaluate these sites, despite their wide-ranging geographical context, short-time spans, and the impacts of illicit metal detecting on the battle site.

REGIONAL AND CENTRAL DIMENSION OF STATE POLICY OF MEMORY IN THE LATE SOVIET PERIOD

The two major late-Soviet memorial policy projects, “Hero Cities” and “Golden Ring”, had many differences as well as points of intersection in terms of their emergence and development. Each of them appealed to a specific sample of regions, and the struggle for inclusion in the projects was fought at the union, republican, and regional levels. Both were “showcase” destinations for domestic and foreign tourism. E.M. Boltunova and G.S. Yegorova’s monograph “Territory and History: Late Soviet Projects Hero Cities and Golden Ring” makes a significant contribution to the study of two memorial projects of late Soviet society, which provided for it more than new places of memory and tourist routes: they formed alternative foundation myths that competed with the underlying Soviet narrative. The novelty of the monograph is the task of finding points of intersection in the history of seemingly completely unrelated projects: E.M. Boltunova and G.S. Yegorova’s work is about how society and power searched for and created new national meanings and reference points. The cities marked with the title of “Hero Cities” began to be gradually correlated in public historical memory with the territories of the most important battles of the Great Patriotic War, while a number of cities and regions that “fell out” of this project found themselves outside the program of state memorialization of the war 1941-1945. The issue of composition and boundaries also became one of the key aspects of the Golden Ring route development. Representatives of each region tried to justify as convincingly as possible the necessity to pay attention to this or that city or district when implementing the project, as the inclusion of a city in the route would allow the corresponding region to get additional resources for development. The authors of the monograph dwell in detail on the mutual influence of the projects at the level of narratives and visual components, as well as on the self-positioning of the territories included in the projects and their perception.

John Grehan, Great Naval Battles of the Pacific War. The Official Admiralty Accounts: Midway, Coral Sea, Java Sea, Guadalcanal and Leyte Gulf by Michael Razer

John Grehan, Great Naval Battles of the Pacific War. The Official Admiralty Accounts: Midway, Coral Sea, Java Sea, Guadalcanal and Leyte Gulf by Michael Razer

A review of electrochemical cells and liquid metal battery (LMB) parameter development

Liquid Metal Battery (LMB) technology is a new research area born from a different economic and political climate that has the ability to address the deficiencies of a society where electrical energy storage alternative are lacking. The United States government has begun to fund scholarly research work at its top industrial and national laboratories. This was to develop liquid metal battery cells for energy storage solutions. This research was encouraged during the Cold War battle for scientific superiority. Intensive research then drifted towards high energy rechargeable batteries, which work better for automobiles and other applications. Intensive research has been carried out on the development of electrochemical rechargeable all-liquid energy storage batteries. The recent request for green energy transfer and storage for various applications, ranging from small-scale to large-scale power storage, has increased energy storage advancements and explorations. The criteria of high energy density, low cost, and extensive energy storage provision have been met through lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries, and Liquid Metal Battery development. The objective of this research is to establish that liquid metal battery technology could provide research concepts that give projections of the probable electrode metals that could be harnessed for LMB development. Thus, at the end of this research, it was discovered that the parameter estimation of the Li//Cd-Sb combination is most viable for LMB production when compared with Li//Cd-Bi, Li-Bi, and Li-Cd constituents. This unique constituent of the LMB parameter estimation would yield a better outcome for LMB development.

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

ДІЯЛЬНІСТЬ ШОТЛАНДЦЯ ПАТРІКА ГОРДОНА У КИЄВІ (ЗА МАТЕРІАЛАМИ ЩОДЕННИКА 1684–1685 рр.)

Patrick Gordon entered the history of Eastern Europe as a companion of Peter I, commander of the Chyhyryn campaign of 1678, one of many foreign officers who formed regiments of foreign troops in the Muscovite state. Patrick Gordon came from a wealthy family in Aberdeen County, Scotland. Patrick’s childhood took place during the Civil War in England 1642–1651, so at the age of 16, Gordon’s parents sent Patrick to study at the Jesuit college in Braunsberg (now the city of Braniewo, Poland). Later, Patrick Gordon began his military career in the Swedish and then in the Polish armies and distinguished himself in important battles of the Northern War of 1655–1660. After the end of the hostilities, he received an offer from the Moscow envoy Vasyl Leontiev to serve in the Moscow army. Patrick Gordon agreed and, starting in 1661, served in Muscovy. The period of the 70s – 80s of the 17th century. in the life of Patrick Gordon is closely connected with the Ukrainian lands and the city of Kyiv. Patrick Gordon’s Ukrainian period is poorly researched, and most of the records representing the Scotsman’s stay in Ukrainian lands in 1667–1677 and 1678–1684 have been lost. The main source in the study of the biography of Patrick Gordon and the history of Eastern Europe is the unique diaries written by him. Volume 1 (1635–1659), Volume 2 (1659–1667), Volume 3 (1677–1678), Volume 4 (1684–1689), Volume 5 (1690–1695) have been preserved and published, Volume 6 (1695–1698). The diaries cover his entire life, from childhood to the beginning of 1699, a few months before his death. Volume 4 (1684–1689) testifies to Patrick Gordon’s stay in Kyiv. This scientific article aims to investigate and reveal Patrick Gordon’s stay in Kyiv during 1678–1684, his role in the construction of new defensive fortifications in the city based on the materials of the preserved diaries. As an engineer, P. Gordon organized the construction of a system of ramparts around Pechersk, Upper Town and Podil. At the end of the long work, in 1695, Colonel Ivan Ushakov compiled a map of the renewed Kyiv fortifications, the main role in the construction of which was played by Patrick Gordon. The article highlights the main districts of Kyiv at that time, explores the social topography and stratification of the city, highlights important events in the life of Patrick Gordon, presents events from the history of the Kyiv Metropolis and its annexation by the Moscow Patriarchate. The article is based on the materials of diaries that were published by historians during the 19th – 21st centuries.

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

Female agents of Hell, Stoic luxury, and failing leaders: Erictho, Tisiphone, and the female gaze in Lucan, Statius, Dante, and Boccaccio

Abstract The Underworld imagery developed by Lucan (BC 6.507–830), Statius (Th. 4.345–645), Valerius Flaccus (Arg. 1.827–50), and Silius Italicus (Pun. 2 and 13) to reprove Rome’s power-hungry leaders, accused of the death of thousands in civil war battles, excited the imagination of Christian writers such as Lactantius, Ausonius, Jerome, and the Spanish Presbyter Iuvencus. The article explores the investment of this imagery with the Stoic notion of excess (luxury) and its impact on defining the Christian concept of sin as received and further developed by Dante and Boccaccio. So far, scholarly discussion has tended to focus on the Homeric overcoat of pietas and its opposite furor, which under the influence of Posidonius (135–51 BCE), came to be associated with traditional Roman virtues. Instead, I here focus on Erictho (Lucan) and Tisiphone (Statius) as symbols of sinful temptation and effeminizing excess (luxury), typically gripping its victims through the eyes. In response to these infernal female figures, Dante and Boccaccio attributed epic proportions to ethical life, turning it into a canvas on which they debated the Christian moral code of their times. The gendered principles underpinning sinful excess in both pagan and Christian authors are discussed, alongside the role of poetry in counter-proposing the figures of Piety and Clemency.

Korennoj perelom v hode Vtoroj mirovoj vojny v kitajskoj istoriografii: pravda i vymysel

This article examines the opinions of Chinese historians of the second half of the 20th early 21st centuries about the fundamental turning point of the Second World War. The study revealed that Chinese historians have their own view on the course, stages and main battles of the Second World War, where the victory of the Chinese in the Sino-Japanese War occupies a central place. Some Chinese historians propose to revise both the date of the beginning of the Second World War and its history itself, trying to emphasize the importance of China in the victory over fascism and militarism during the Second World War.

The effect of "memory aberration" in M.T. Kalashnikov's memoirs about the Great Patriotic War.

The object of the work is the memoirs of the famous Russian designer-gunsmith M. T. Kalashnikov about his participation in the battles of the Great Patriotic War in 1941. The author subjects fragments of M. T. Kalashnikov's memoirs of various publications to comparative analysis. The key publications are "Notes of the designer-gunsmith" in 1992 and "Kalashnikov: the Trajectory of Fate", published in 2007. In addition, the text of the designer's memoirs is compared with documentary sources: combat documents of the 108 tank division, in which M.T. Kalashnikov served at the time of his participation in the battles. The author also provides a review of literature and research on the military biography of M.T. Kalashnikov. The author concludes about the serious chronological distortion that M. T. Kalashnikov made when describing his participation in the battles. The designer himself clearly indicated in his memoirs that he spent at least several weeks at the front in September and October 1941. The analysis of the documents clearly shows that the participation of M.T. Kalashnikov in the battles was actually reduced to two days of fighting: August 30 and 31, 1941. In addition, a comparison of the texts of memoirs of different publications revealed noticeable discrepancies between them. Some of these discrepancies could only have been made deliberately. In addition, the historiographical review revealed the following: the authors who worked on the biography of M.T. Kalashnikov earlier were aware of this phenomenon. However, no one carried out a detailed source analysis of the designer's memoirs, and no attempts were made to explain these distortions. At the same time, the author of the work notes that a detailed analysis of the memoirs of M.T. Kalashnikov has yet to be carried out and the information potential of this source cannot be considered exhausted.

고려 후기 忠州城의 신지견

This article examines the consistency of the location of Chungjuseong [meaning Chungju Fortress and in other words, Chungju Sanseong meaning Chungju Mountain Fortress], the site of one of the most dramatic battles of the Goryeo-Mongol War(1231-1273), through the perspective of a new discovery. Various hypotheses related to Chungjuseong Fortress have emerged so far, such as Nam Sanseong, Daerim Sanseong, Chungju Eupseong, Deokju Sanseong, etc. Among them, Chungju Eupseong as the fortress of the province and Daerim Sanseong as the mountain fortress have been regarded as persuasive. However, serving as a mountain fortress for defense and protection was done at high and rugged mountain fortresses such as Yang sanseong, Yanggeunseong, Cheonryong Sanseong, and Ibam Sanseong, which are recorded in the literature. In line with this, the fortress site of Gyejoksan Mountain in Chungju proved to have conformity with Chungju Fortress [Chungju Sanseong]. Until now, the fortress site of Gyeyoksan Mountain has been recognized as an extension of the territorial range of Simhanghyeon in the Joseon Dynasty. Thus, the walls were thought to be not related to Chungju Sanseong during the Goryeo-Mongol War. However, Mt. Gyejoksan (now Mt. Gyemyungsan) is the main mountain of Chungju and shows a rugged mountainous position for a fortress site. In addition, based on the main defense direction toward Chungju Town, construction technique of the Goryeo Dynasty, and excavated artifacts, the site was judged to be highly likely to be related to Geum Yun-hu, who was a defense official of Chungju Sanseong. In other words, it was the site of battles such as the 1st(1231),5th(1253), and6th (1256) Mongol invasions. In between, the battles of Geumdanggyeop (1253), Daincheolso (1254), Daewonryeong (1255), and Parkdalhyeon (1258) are also believed to have occurred around this place. The Mongolian method of warfare in the Goryeo-Mongol War was to use local forces that had surrendered to the Mongols. This has the vulnerability of exposing internal information in the battles to defense the capital. In other words, a Goryeo army had to fight against another Goryeo people combined with Mongolian army. The Battle of Chungju Sanseong (1253) had significance in that it provided the opportunity to overcome and recover the asymmetry of this strategy through tripod-shaped terrain site, the high and rugged location, and the guerrilla warfare. This is the first time the outline of the fortress site of Gyejoksan Mountain has been identified. We hope that it will shed new light on the location of Chungjuseong [Chungju Sanseong] in the late Goryeo Dynasty and its historical development. It is also hoped that academic research on the Gyeyoksan fortress site will be conducted in a systematic manner so that the overall status, structure, and consecration techniques of the fortress can be clarified.

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

Heather L. Dichter. Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO.

Journal Article Heather L. Dichter. Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO. Get access Heather L. Dichter. Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. Pp. xi, 276. Paper $29.95. Linda Risso Linda Risso Centre for Army Leadership, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, England Email: linda.risso@sas.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 1020–1021, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad181 Published: 22 June 2023

Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus

Reviewed by: Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus Erin Krutko Devlin (bio) Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. By Jill Ogline Titus. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 264. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $27.95.) As Jill Ogline Titus reminds readers in Gettysburg 1963, newspaper coverage of the Civil War centennial was distributed alongside stories about the burgeoning Black freedom struggle and debates about Cold War politics and policies. Gettysburg 1963 strives to help readers understand how these threads of American cultural and political life converged on the Gettysburg battlefield, illuminating a contested landscape in which commemorative rhetoric was shaped by a desire to forge a memory of 1863 that could be mobilized in service of a wide range of social and political aims one hundred years later. Titus notes that formal commemorative bodies, such as the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, often sought to mobilize a reconciliation-ist vision of the war that emphasized military valor, technological progress, and reunification, which served the broader purpose of reanimating American patriotism and encouraging heritage tourism in the midst of the Cold War. Yet Titus also notes that this narrative was never unchallenged in the commemorative activity surrounding the centennial. She illustrates how an emancipatory memory of the war as a “new birth of freedom” sought to frame the conflict through the lens of racial justice during the civil rights movement, while Lost Cause rhetoric was mobilized to recast resistance to desegregation as the preservation of states’ rights. As Titus demonstrates, both of these alternative strands of memory also sought to tether their memorial claims to the politics of the Cold War, with those promoting an emancipationist vision arguing that the failure to address racial injustice undercut the nation’s position as a beacon of democracy, and those promoting the Lost Cause narrative contending that opposition to civil rights legislation served as a bulwark against government overreach and totalitarianism. Titus argues that these divergent and diverse approaches to memorializing Gettysburg meant that commemorative activities at the battlefield in 1963 “were employed simultaneously to champion racial equality, legitimize midcentury anti-government sentiments and activities, and strengthen the U.S. position internationally” (5). Gettysburg 1963 is focused on official commemorative activity— speeches, pageants, exhibits, and battlefield reenactments—but Titus evocatively notes that participants and visitors exposed to these divergent [End Page 274] interpretations of the war were not passive spectators. “Participants,” she writes, “did not simply absorb the commemoration’s messaging wholesale, but rather made decisions about where and how to participate (and what ideas to embrace) that ensured a variety of different takeaways about the connections between 1863 and 1963” (84). Indeed, Titus concludes that the divergent commemorative narratives presented during the centennial substantially disrupted the reconciliationist rhetoric promoted by the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission and Gettysburg National Military Park in 1963, with both emancipationist and Lost Cause narratives rising in prominence in the years that followed. Titus explores public reception of these competing strands of memory most directly in her discussion of audience attendance at or reaction to various pageants, roundtables, and public addresses. She is particularly attentive to local participation in commemorative activities on the battlefield’s national stage. Indeed, Gettysburg 1963 examines how national debate about the meaning and memory of the Civil War battle played out locally in the community of Gettysburg itself and nearby Gettysburg College, where Titus currently serves as associate director of the Civil War Institute. Titus notes that local residents had a particular stake in the way the centennial was positioned in relation to heritage tourism and were invested in debates about the appropriate balance between commercialization and battlefield preservation as they sought to harness the economic potential of the centennial. Titus also demonstrates how the borough struggled with its own history of racial segregation and discrimination. The international attention focused on Gettysburg in 1963 provided the local Black community with the leverage needed to push white business owners toward the meaningful desegregation of public accommodations. Gettysburg 1963 will resonate most powerfully for...

Czech Literature at the Turn of the Epoch and its International Contexts

The contexts of Czech literature are related to the crisis and revolutionary situation which gradually built up towards the end of the 19th century and reached its peak in the years of World War I and during the attempts at the world revolution. This was manifested by a certain dichotomy of Czech literature after 1918 when Czechoslovakia came into existence as a relatively large state and a strong parliamentary democracy amidst more or less authoritarian countries, a state with the first-rate Czechoslovak legions tested in the battles of World War I, with strong industry and agriculture which had been the nucleus of Austria-Hungary in the past. On the one hand, there was a majority and influential left, on the other were conservative groups often connected with Catholic Church, and in the middle — liberal currents linked with the official policy of the so-called Prague Castle represented by the first president T. G. Masaryk (e g. Karel Čapek). Nevertheless, Czech literature as a whole helped create national and state consciousness, with the currents differing from each other only in their preference for traditions and political and economic systems. The problems of the new state were, of course, not only social, but also national, ethnic and religious and were also reflected in the international arena. Unlike in the other Central European countries, Czech literature exhibited radical leftist tendencies which were realised in the Czech modernist avant-garde, the apex of which was Czech poetism and surrealism (with the corresponding current in Slovakia) and their authors, such as Vítězslav Nezval, František Halas, Josef Hora, Jaroslav Seifert (1984 Nobel Prize winner), and Konstantin Biebl etc., but also the Catholic current which was very impressive from the artistic point of view (Jakub Deml, Jaroslav Durych, Jan Zahradníiek, Jan Čep and others). Both of these tendencies were surprisingly and paradoxically linked with each other, as were their representatives. The drama and the novel (the Brothers Čapek, and Vladislav Vaniura etc.) occupied a prominent place alongside poetry. What shows the mutual relationship between “the building of the state“ (the title of a very important book by the famous Czech journalist and politician Ferdinand Peroutka) and Czech literature is the fact that between 1918 and 1938 Czech literature reached a world level for the first time in modern history. The author defends the thesis that Czech literature connected with the rise of the independent Czechoslovak state regardless of all these problems and idealistic constructs (“Czechoslovakism”), created a specific, original model of the co-existence of various currents of thought and of the relationships between culture in its widest sense and practical politics. This enabled radical artistic innovations anticipating the evolutionary tendencies of world literature (surrealism, anti-utopia/dystopia, baroquizing prose, and experimental novel).

Моряки Усть-Сысольского уезда - участники русско-японской войны 1904-1905 годов

The paper provides biographical and statistical information about the native sons of the Ust-Sysolsk district of the Vologda province - participants in the naval battles of the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-1905. Special attention is paid to the heroes who were awarded the highest military awards (17 of 55 identified personalities) and to the dead sailors. The paper indicates their place of service, circumstances of performed feats. Being residents of the continental region, they successfully mastered complex naval professions and fought bravely against the enemy. There are examples of perpetuating the memory of individual heroes.

Stalingrad: The feat of creation

Based on archival documents introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, the process of postwar restoration of Stalingrad is discussed. During the Battle of Stalingrad, which became one of the key battles of the Second World War, Stalingrad suffered colossal destruction: not a single one of the 126 enterprises survived, while 48 factories were razed to the ground; the civilian population of the city was reduced to 1515 people. Already in December 1942 - January 1943, the city and oblast authorities decided to begin restoration. Although the fighting in the city was still ongoing, on April 4, 1943, a resolution of the State Defense Committee (GKO) was adopted On Priority Measures to Restore the Economy of Stalingrad and Stalingrad Oblast. The process of developing an urban planning concept and searching for an architectural and artistic solution was rather difficult. The best creative forces of the Soviet Union took part in this work: A.V. Shchusev, B.M. Iofan, K.S. Alabyan, E.V. Vuchetich, and others. The final project for the development of the center of Stalingrad was prepared by a group of the Academy of Architecture under the leadership of Alabyan in 1946; however, after the adoption in 1955 of the resolution of the CPSU Central Committee On the Elimination of Excesses in Design and Construction, this project was not implemented in full. An important milestone in the formation of the modern appearance of Stalingrad (Volgograd) was the construction of the memorial ensemble to the heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad on Mamayev Kurgan in 1959−1967 according to the design and under the direct supervision of the sculptor E.V. Vuchetich and engineer N.V. Nikitin.

Mathematical modeling of strategic behavior: the Battle of Midway, 1942

In this paper, an innovative discrete dynamical model is presented, which is used to predict the kind of strategic behavior the participants should adopt to win a battle. For study purposes, a computer model is developed to reveal the most critical factors that strategically affect combat and the relationship of dependence between the warring parties. Besides, it can predict the outcome of a battle under specific scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed dynamical system is applied in Midway’s air–naval battle, which was one of the most decisive battles of World War II (WWII). It was a significant turning point in the history of naval warfare in the Pacific Ocean since the victory of the United States marked an end to Japanese expansionist policy, and these are the reason this battle was chosen. The numerical results of the analysis were presented, and the key factors (e.g., persons, decisions, and weather conditions represented by the critical values of model parameters) were highlighted, defining the outcome of the conflict.