Minister Of War Research Articles

A. I. Chernyshev: A Russian Lycurgus

If it can be said that the Cossacks of nineteenthand twentieth-century Russia owed the shape and scale of their existence to the designs of any individual, then that individual was Prince Aleksandr Ivanovich Chernyshev (1785-1857). In successive capacities as cavalry commander, aidede-camp to two tsars, military reformer, and war minister, he led Cossacks into battle, stressed their continuing importance in the post-Napoleonic military order, presided over a local reform effort within the Don Cossack Host, then bore responsibility for imposing the Don pattern on the other Cossack hosts of the Russian Empire. Thanks largely to Chernyshev, those Cossacks who no longer formed the cutting edge of the colonization effort survived the passing of the frontier to become a special military class. Within a continuum of Cossack development, Chernyshev's contribution represented a culmination of policies, the origins of which are usually identified with another prince and military reformer, G. A. Potemkin.1 Despite Chernyshev's importance both to the Cossacks and to a larger world of military administration, he remains a neglected figure in the historical studies of pre-reform Russia. No satisfactory biography exists of the man who remained a confidant of two Emperors of quite different temperament, who rose to head simultaneously the State Council and the Committee of Ministers, and who for a quarter century (1827-1852)

Two War Ministers: A Reassessment of Duff Cooper and Hore-Belisha

Two War Ministers: A Reassessment of Duff Cooper and Hore-Belisha

The Memory of Burke and the Memory of Pitt: English Conservatism Confronts its past, 1806–1829

On 27 January 1806, in a house of commons newly integrating the momentous events of Trafalgar, Nelson's death, and Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz, the obsequies of William Pitt commenced. Lord Lascelles proposed that the late prime minister be honoured as had been his father twenty-eight years before, with a public funeral. The motion eventually passed but the inter-party wrangle that it caused was unseemly. William Windham, who had served as Pitt's Secretary at War between 1794 and 1801, wondered why such unusual honours were proposed for Pitt, given both the precarious situation of the current war (so unlike the Great Commoner's contribution to British glory) and the fact that Edmund Burke's death in 1797 had elicited no such designs. ‘In every point of comparison that could be made,’ said Windham, ‘Mr Burke stood upon the same level with Mr Pitt, and I do not see the reason for the difference.’ In retrospect, it may appear odd that any leading politician thought Burke was entitled to a state funeral. He had been neither war leader nor prime minister, the usual recipients of public funerals. Few others in the political nation in 1797, whig or Pittite, shared Windham's judgement on this matter. That Windham thought the Pittitesshouldhave shared his judgement was the source of his bitterness in his speech to the House. If Burke's acknowledged enemies, the Foxite whigs, had opposed public honours for Burke, Windham would not have been surprised,But that was not the case; it was not from them that the objection came, but from gentlemen on the other side of the house [Pittites], who took Mr Burke as the leader of their opinions, who cried him up to the skies, who founded themselves upon what he had done, but who were afraid, that if they consented to such honours, it would appear as if they approved of all the sentiments of that great man some of which were, perhaps, of too high a tone for them to relish.

Oleg Alexander Kerensky, 16 April 1905 - 25 June 1984

Oleg Alexander Kerensky was born in St Petersburg on 16 April 1905 into a well-to-do middle-class family. His father was the Alexander Kerensky who, after the February 1917 revolution in Russia, became a member of the Provisional Government formed by the Duma, first as Minister of Justice, then as Minister of War and of the Navy. In July of that year he headed the reorganized government as Prime Minister until the Bolsheviks took over power in the October Revolution. Before then Alexander Kerensky had been a barrister and, from 1912, a member of the Duma, where he had become leader of the Trudoviki group, the moderately left opposition to the Tsarist régime. In the male line, Oleg’s great-grandfather was an orthodox priest. Oleg’s paternal grandfather, Feodor M. Kerensky, not wishing to follow the family tradition of becoming a priest, went to the University of Kazan and became first a teacher, then a school inspector, and then headmaster of two high schools in Simbirsk, one for boys and the other for girls. Feodor’s wife was a general’s daughter and the niece of a professor of divinity in the University of Kazan. When Alexander Oleg’s father, was nine years old, Feodor was further promoted to be the Inspector of Education for the then very recently acquired province of Turkestan, so the family went to live in Tashkent and the children did not see European Russia again until the time came to go to university in St Petersburg.

Further Letters of Blanco White to Robert Southey

Further Letters of Blanco White to Robert Southey

Putna's Letter to Frunze on Relations with Feng Yü-hsiang

This interesting document is a letter dated May 22, 1925, addressed to Mikhail V. Frunze, minister of war of the USSR, from "Jen Techiang"—V. K. Putna—who headed the Soviet advisory group attached to General Feng Yü-hsiang. This is our translation of the Peking Commission's translation from the Russian, with the title "A Letter from Jen Te-chiang to Frunze, Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Soviet Union on Liaison with Feng Yü-hsiang and Various Observations, with a Copy to Voronin," in SLYM, III, "KMC," pp. 23-29. The letter was marked "Most Secret." N. M. Voronin, to whom the copy was sent, became Soviet military attaché in Peking in late May 1925, replacing A. I. Gecker. M. V. Frunze died in late October 1925.

Duff Cooper and Western European union, 1944–47.

Duff Cooper fell in love with France during his first visit to Paris in 1900 and he remained faithful to her for the rest of his life. The fact that Paris in 1900 was deeply Anglophobic, because of the Boer war, had no effect upon Cooper's feelings for the city. His affection for France was no fair-weather plant. It was deepened by the experience of nine months in the trenches in the Great War and was, thereafter, proof against all discouragements. As a young Foreign Office clerk in 1923 he did not join in the fashionable disparagement of France inspired by the French occupation of the Ruhr. As Minister of War from 1935 to 1937 he fought for the creation of a British army which would be large enough to play a continental role and later, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he was a leading advocate of Anglo-French co-operation. After his resignation in protest against the Munich agreement, Cooper spent his time fostering the idea of an Anglo-French alliance as the corner-stone of a European combination against Hitler's Germany. His love for France even survived the fall of France in June 1940 and, at a time when many francophiles were repenting of their former faith. Cooper renewed his pledges of devotion. Speaking on the wireless as Minister of Information on the eve of the Franco-German armistice, he declared his faith that France would rise again: ‘This is not the first time that a great nation has been defeated and has recovered from defeat. They have fought with heroism against superior numbers and superior weapons; their losses have been terrible.’ At the Ministry of Information Cooper was one of the earliest patrons of General de Gaulle and his Free French Movement. Given such a long history of Francophilia what could have been more natural than that he should have been appointed as Britain's first post-war ambassador to France. It was not, however, quite so simple as that.

Reform in the Russian Army, 1856–1861

Historians of imperial Russia have agreed unanimously and confidently that Russia's humiliation in the Crimean War (1853-1856) led directly to the emancipation of the serfs and to wide-ranging social, economic, political, and military changes of enormous historical significance. In addition, whether liberal interpreters were waxing eloquent about a so-called epoch of great or Marxists were emphasizing pressures of a revolutionary situation in a country in transition from feudalism to capitalism, the reforms of the Russian army introduced by D. A. Miliutin, war minister throughout most of Alexander II's quarter-century long reign, have been acclaimed unanimously as one of the most successful and lasting attempts at modernization in this period of considerable change. Miliutin was appointed war minister only in November 1861, however, more than six and one half years after Alexander II acceded to the imperial throne, leaving an apparent gap at a time when preparations for reform were begun in most other spheres of government and society. Indeed, the period after the Crimean War is so well known as a time of change of enormous historical significance for the future of Russia that inactivity in the military seems remarkable, especially in the aftermath of military defeat. For a long time this period was examined only in official or semi-official Russian military histories, for example M. I. Bogdanovich's six-volume Istoricheskii ocherk deiatel'nosti voennago upravleniia v Rossii (1855-1880) and N. A. Danilov's similarly titled Istoricheskii ocherk razvitiia voennago upralNeniia v Rossii, volume 1 of the massive Stoletie voennago mninisterstva, 1802-1902 produced by the war ministry at the beginning of this century.' When considering military affairs, survey histories ignored the period between 1856 and 1861 or stated that General N. 0. Sukhozanet, the war minister during this time, failed to understand the need for the reforms subsequently proposed and introduced by Miliutin.2 Even the Soviet scholar P. A. Zaionchkovskii in his classic study of the military reforms during the reign of Alexander II was satisfied simply to castigate Sukhozanet for incompetence. Western historiography has followed Zaionchkovskii closely.3 There are no specialized studies of this period. Receritly,

Reform in the Russian Army, 1856–1861

Historians of imperial Russia have agreed unanimously and confidently that Russia's humiliation in the Crimean War (1853–1856) led directly to the emancipation of the serfs and to wide-ranging social, economic, political, and military changes of enormous historical significance. In addition, whether liberal interpreters were waxing eloquent about a so-called “epoch of great reforms” or Marxists were emphasizing pressures of a “revolutionary situation” in a country in transition from feudalism to capitalism, the reforms of the Russian army introduced by D. A. Miliutin, war minister throughout most of Alexander II's quarter-century long reign, have been acclaimed unanimously as one of the most successful and lasting attempts at modernization in this period of considerable change. Miliutin was appointed war minister only in November 1861, however, more than six and one half years after Alexander II acceded to the imperial throne, leaving an apparent gap at a time when preparations for reform were begun in most other spheres of government and society. Indeed, the period after the Crimean War is so well known as a time of change of enormous historical significance for the future of Russia that inactivity in the military seems remarkable, especially in the aftermath of military defeat.

The Russian ruling elite under Nicholas II [Career patterns

Dominic Lieven, The Russian ruling elite under Nicholas II. Career patterns. The article studies the route taken to high governmental office by members of the Russian ruling elite under Nicholas II. Specifically, it looks at the career patterns of the 215 men appointed to the State Council in the first twenty years of Nicholas II's reign. The article is based on the service records of these 215 men in the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad. It shows that by 1894-1914 those holding top governmental positions were almost always career civil servants. The only major exception to this was the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where senior posts were sometimes filled by members of the landowning gentry who had formerly served as marshals of the nobility, or by generals. Officials of the domestic departments very seldom transferred into the "organs of national security" (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, War and Marine). The domestic government and senior civil service was dominated in particular by jurists (i.e. by men with a legal education who had served in the judicial department), who very often held the top posts not only in the Ministries of Justice and Internal Affairs, but also in the State Chancellery and Chancellery of the Committee/Council of Ministers. The departments of education, control, agriculture and state properties, communications, Synod, and Emperor's Own Personal Chancellery were of very little importance as breeding grounds for the bureaucratic elite. The article shows that each department had its own typical career patterns and that these differed greatly from ministry to ministry. It also contrasts the careers of "generalists" and "specialists", and illustrates how differing social origins and educations can be closely linked to different types and patterns of careers.

The National Press during the First World War: Ownership and Circulation

It is now a truism that the British press reached an unprecedented level of importance during the First World War, never to attain such heights again. Among political leaders of the time David Lloyd George appreciated this phenomenon earlier than most. This is easily illustrated. On the evening of 6 December 1916 he was invited by King George V to form a government in succession to the fallen Herbert Henry Asquith, his old chief, who had been prime minister since 1908 and head of a coalition war ministry since May 1915. From Buckingham Palace Lloyd George proceeded, not to a meeting with political advisers, but rather to dinner with two great newspaper proprietors at No. 20 Queen Anne's Gate in the City of Westminster. One of these men was his host, Sir George (later Lord) Riddell, owner of the mass circulation Sunday paper News of the World, while the other was Lord Burnham of the smaller but more prestigious Daily Telegraph. In such circumstances almost any other statesman would have expressed his regrets to Riddell and at once got on with the business of cabinet-making. The fact that Lloyd George chose not to do so is of great significance. More clearly than any of his contemporaries, possibly excepting Clemenceau, he recognized almost intuitively the role the press must play in the kind of total war that now engaged the nation. Further, it was most essential for his own future as prime minister that newspaper owners and editors should be given high priority, since he had no political party or machine of his own to call upon for steady support. The events of the next two years were to

The Politics of Iranian Place-Names

Modern history is replete with examples of the creation of a new set of state symbols by postrevolutionary regimes. The purpose of the new symbols is at once to remove evidence of the deposed regime and to establish an identity for the usurper. The deposing of the Pahlavi regime in Iran offers a unique opportunity to study the use and the creation of state symbols, with a particular focus on place-names. The now-deposed Pahlavi dynasty was once the usurper. In the final years of the decadent Qajar dynasty, whose principal foreign supporter oscillated between imperial Russia and the United Kingdom, Reza Khan, the Russian-trained leader of a Cossack brigade, emerged as the strongman in Persia. He first became minister of war in a new cabinet that was installed

L'enseignement de l'écriture en Belgique 1830-1980

In 1830 and for generations afterwards the script commonly used for administrative and commercial purposes in Belgium was 'L'anglaise'. Its legibility and speed of writing, together with the prestige of the British Empire, led to its adoption in America and throughout the industrialized world. The best teaching method was that of Carstairs (b. 1783). This was further propagated by acknowledged pupils of his, but it was also plagiarized. It was introduced into the Belgian provinces by a French plagiarist who presented it as an American method. After the Revolution of 1830 a Belgian plagiarist presented it as the Belgian national script. A royal decree of 7 June 1849 instituted a competition with a medal and 500 Belgian francs as the prize for the best writing method, i.e. one suitable for bringing uniformity to the army's bookkeeping. The winner was Jean Dierckx, an official at the Ministry of War, and his method became the official Belgian national script, being taught as such at regimental colleges, in prisons and in state schools until the eve of the First World War. The post-war period, in Belgium as elsewhere, was characterized by the intervention of medical men in the teaching of handwriting. The typewriter and duplicating machine displaced handwriting in the civil service and commerce, just as printing had ousted it from publishing. This does not mean, however, that data communications will eliminate handwriting entirely and rob it of all value and use in public and private life.

The Decline of Military Values: The Theme of the Deserter in Eighteenth-Century French Literature

The Decline of Military Values: The Theme of the Deserter in Eighteenth-Century French Literature ADRIENNE D. HYTIER The Prince de Ligne once said, "Il y a bien peu de soldats qui dans le cours de leur terme n'aient pas eu envie de deserter. Ils me l'avouent tres souvent,"1 and he adds that it is "une chose impossible" not to have desert­ ers in ones army. The fact is that desertion has always been an important military problem. It was prevalent in the French Revolution and under Napoleon; it was rampant in the American Revolution and during the Civil War, and, as is well known, it was considerable in all the armies of the eighteenth century. "La vraie plaie des armees d autrefois c est la deser­ tion,"2 wrote Leon Mention in LArmee de I'Ancien Regime. Colonel Reboul , in his volume on the French army in the eighteenth century, called it "la principale plaie de ce temps."3 Ludovic Jablonski, in LArmee frangaise a travers les ages, declared, "L'armee etait . . . rongee par un mal terrible: la desertion . . . etait un mal endemique dans les armees du 18e siecle."4 Capitaine Bacquet, in L'Infanterie au XVIIIe siecle, deplored the "deser­ tion chronique, mal incurable qui mine l'armee."5 Contemporaries were fully conscious of the problem, as is well shown by Eleazar de Mauvillon, who discussed repeatedly the "frequente desertion"6 of French soldiers in his Lettres frangoises et germaniques. Exactly how extensive a problem is, however, hard to tell. Statistics are usually lacking and those which are available are often unreliable. Keep­ ing this in mind, a few specific examples are revealing. In the milice de­ 147 148 / H Y T I E R tachment going to Italy in 1705, it is known that, between March 17 and May 19, out of 13,929 men 3,071 deserted.7 A memorandum sent to Choiseul estimated that, between 1748 and 1757, the French army lost 90,000 men through desertion. Deserters constituted "l'elite des corps etrangers des armees espagnoles, italiennes, piemontaises, allemandes et hollandaises ."8 Andre Corvisier, in his monumental study of the French army during the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, estimated that "un homme sur quatre ou cinq aurait deserte pendant la periode 1716-1763 et au moins un homme sur quatre pendant la guerre de succession d'Espagne ."9 This is a conservative estimate, which, for all practical purposes, can be adopted. In order to understand the problem of desertion in the eighteenth cen­ tury, it might be well to remember the system of recruitment.10 In the first place, there was no real conscription anywhere. The closest to a citizen army was the French milice, but only peasants served in it and they were selected by drawing lots. If they got the "mauvais numero" and they had a little money, they could always buy a replacement. Service in the milice was dreaded and abominated. The Cahiers de doleances in 1789 are full of complaints about it. The regular army was theoretically made of volun­ teers. In peacetime, particularly during economic crises, most were prob­ ably really volunteers, often from the dregs of society, and, in any case, without family or social ties. During prosperous years and in wartime, volunteers were scarce, so trickery and even violence were used to per­ suade the men to join. The "fours" in which they were locked up have re­ mained famous. The officer corps was an entirely separate class. Its members were all volunteers, most of them noble or bourgeois "vivant noblement" and most of them had bought their commissions. Rising through the ranks was extremely rare. Officers, like their men, changed camp, although the word desertion was hardly ever applied to them. There were a few spec­ tacular cases like the Comte de Bonneval, who first served France, quar­ relled with the War Minister, joined the Austrian forces in wartime, served with Prince Eugene, quarrelled with the Austrians, fled, became a Moslem, reorganized the Turkish army and became a three-tail Pasha. The numbers of such cases, however, are even harder to estimate than those of the soldiers. Peasants impressed into...

Grimm, Lalande et le quart de cercle de l'École militaire

Jean-Claude David : Grimm, Lalande and the École militaire's quadrant. One letter from Grimm and three from Lalande (1785-6) are published here for the first time. They concern the sale in Paris of a quadrant of a hitherto unknown precision, unique in France. Lalande wished to acquire it for the Royal Military Academy, while Grimm was trying to buy it for the Duke of Saxe-Gotha whose dream was to build an observatory. Lalande managed to defeat Grimm's secret negotiations and persuaded the War Ministry to finance the purchase of the instrument, without which a chapter in the history of astronomy would doubtless never have been written.

Albert Speer: How To Manage an Atrocity

Albert Speer as democratic manager? Seems absurd on the surface, even outrageous. Hitler's right-hand-man practiced a rather bizarre form of hu manistic management in the Ministry of Armaments and War while "suc cessfully" managing an atrocity. His legacy to history, particularly manage ment history, is one of the most fascinating cases for raising the ethical issues facing the management community today. Values and ethics are at the core of democratic thought, and the way they are distorted in the arenas of manage ment is crucial to understand for those concerned with linking the ethics of democracy to the process of managing democratic institutions. Much of this article is based on an interview with Speer in which he discussed his role as a key policy maker in the Third Reich. He has now begun to recount the danger inherent in a system whose mentality is one of amoral functionalism—one essentially devoid of morals and ethics in its decision- making processes and one concerned only with how things get done and not whether they should be done. Few people have any real need to relive the events of that era. But the activities of Albert Speer are as relevant to our present era as any behavior in history can be.

Nicknaming in Bigăr: A Contribution to the Anthroponymy of a Czech-Speaking Village in the Southern Romanian Banat

The available sources are not in full agreement concerning the circumstances under which the Czech-speaking villages in the southern Romanian Banat were established. According to archival records of the imperial war ministry in Vienna, the first two settlements came into existence in the early I820s in response to the request of one Georg Magyarly to be allowed to bring in laborers from Bohemia for his extensive lumbering enterprise. Of these two villages, founded in the hills east of the present Moldova Noua, only one remains today-Sf. Elena. The second wave of migration of Bohemian families to the southern Banat began several years later with the encouragement of the administration of the Banat Military Frontier. Some of the migrants were settled in the hills northeast of Moldova, establishing the village of Weitzenried, known today as Girnic. Others were taken further northeast toward Lapu§nicel, near which

Quatre lettres négligées de J.-B. Suard à Julie de Lespinasse

Four neglected letters of suard to Julie de Lespinasse. The four letters written by the writer Jean-Baptiste Suard (1732-1817) to Julie de Lespinasse, which are lodged at the Bibliothèque Nationale, demonstrate the friendly relations between the two correspondents. Of these four letters, three are unpublished. The first, dated from London, comes from Suard's second visit to England (1773), the two following, dated from La Source, allude to the deterioration in Julie's health, much affected by the marriage of her lover, the comte de Guibert, in 1775. The last — already published in 1927 — is dated from Montigny, where the government had met, in October 1775, to choose a new Minister of War.

Enver Pasha: the formative years

In the summer of 1908, Enver, an Ottoman army officer serving in Macedonia, became a hero of the Young Turk revolution. At that time his daring moves in the Balkans against the despotism of Sultan Abdulhamid II attracted the attention of an international audience. His exploits also earned and the Middle East in the early 1900s, he nevertheless became and has remained an enigma in history. Enver was born in Istanbul in 1881. At the age of six, Enver accompanied his father, a civil engineer, to Monastir (Bitolj), an important administrative center for Ottoman rule in Macedonia. After attending the elementary and military preparatory schools in Monastir, Enver returned to Istanbul and entered the elite imperial academy of military science, the Harbiye.' Enver excelled in both the regular cadet and advanced general staff educational programs and graduated in 1902, second in the class of twelve general staff officers.2 He was ordered to field duty in the Balkans, where he obtained experience in each of the combat branches: artillery, cavalry and infantry. He skirmished with guerrillas, became familiar with the terrain of European Turkey, and involved himself in the anti-Hamidian Union and Progress movement that culminated in the Young Turk revolution of 1908. In April 1909 he hurried from his military attache's post in Berlin to help suppress a revolt of political, military and religious dissidents in Istanbul; in late 1911 and most of 1912, he directed Arab-Turk resistance against the Italian occupation of Ottoman territory in North Africa. During the Balkan Wars, Enver participated in the Unionist coup d'etat of January 1913 in Istanbul and, later that year, led victorious Ottoman troops into the city of Edirne (Adrianople), which had been held for a short time by the Bulgarians. In 1914, as minister of war, Enver helped guide the Ottoman empire into the First World War on the side of the central powers. Although the catastrophe that war brought to Turkey did force Enver to flee his homeland, he continued to flirt with danger and with elusive goals until his death in 1922 at the hands of Bolsheviks operating in Turkestan.3 The above highlights of Enver's career reflect what Enver did; but they do not explain why Enver acted as he did. In order to understand Enver's actions, we must turn to his formative years and consider the influences upon

Politics versus Patriotism: Alexandre Millerand as French Minister of War

Alexandre Millerand was French minister of war for over two years at a crucial moment in French history. His first tenure, January 14, 1912 to January 12, 1913, followed the Agadir crisis and coincided with augmented French anxiety about and preparation for war. His second stay, August 26, 1914 to October 29, 1915, placed him in a vital position during the crucial first year of World War I. Despite a chronological separation of a year and a half and the vast difference between wartime and peacetime, Millerand's ministries reflected surprising consistency of attitudes and policies. This article presents a reassessment of Millerand as war minister, which furthers our understanding of such significant aspects of modern French history as the prewar nationalist revival and the wartime struggle between the high command and parliament. Until now, information about Millerand has been drawn largely from his critics, contemporaries from the political world who attacked him for his excessive devotion to the high command or faulted his naive lack of political acumen, or from excessively loyal supporters who lacked objectivity. This article relies primarily on the unpublished memoirs of Millerand and the large collection of his papers recently opened to scholars by the Bibliotheque Nationale. Thus far this material has been virtually untouched, nor has any attempt been made to reassess Millerand's contribution as war minister. While the charges levelled against Millerand contain considerable validity, the excessively negative view of his performance should be tempered by a positive consideration of his role and accomplishments.