Modern Military History Research Articles

A Reassessment of the Military Careers and Writings of Sir John Peyton (1579–1635) and Sir Henry Peyton (c.1580–1623)

AbstractThis research note shines new light on previously misinterpreted and incorrectly catalogued key information about the role‐holder of the Lieutenant‐Governor of Brill in 1612. It identifies that a source for this information previously attributed to Sir John Peyton (1579–1635) was actually written by Sir Henry Peyton (c.1580–1623) and discusses the significance and impact of the newly discovered identification. It reveals Henry Peyton to be a prolific letter writer and collector of military maps and shows how he shared his research with Sir Robert Cotton. It also identifies that further research is needed into the military career of Henry Peyton and the significant role he played in early modern military history, with particular attention to be given to his martial reports from Venice and the Low Countries.

The Tratado de las campañas of Martin García Cerezeda: military life writing and self-advancement in the memoirs of a sixteenth-century Spanish veteran

ABSTRACT The memoirs of the Spanish arquebusier Martin García Cerezeda, who served in the Spanish army during the Italian Wars (1494–1559), were employed several times in studies on early modern military and intellectual history and the experience of soldiering and warfare. Using Cerezeda’s Tratado de las campañas as an exhaustive narrative full of instructive and significant information is indeed understandacle, but very little was written on Cerezeda’s potential motivation to write his recollections of his long and arduous military service in the larger context of the writing of autobiographies and memoirs, whether military or otherwise, in early modern Europe. While returning to the original manuscript in the library of the Escorial produced more questions than answers on Cerezeda and his work, this paper nevertheless demonstrates that the veteran Cerezeda was carefully and meticulously attempting to present himself as worthy of the patronship or assistance of the ascending noble and soldier Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, 3rd Duke of Sessa (d.1578), the grandson of the famous Gran Capitán. By placing himself in several key events, alongside several central figures of his time, and especially the Emperor Charles V, and presenting himself as a zealous and principled Christian soldier, Cerezeda was attempting to press the specific buttons that could more easily caught the eye of a sixteenth century Spanish nobleman who was steeped in a mixed cultural environment of humanistic stylistic preferences and a traditional chivalric ethos.

Ottoman Historical Documents: The Institutions of an Empire By V. L. Ménage, edited by Colin Imber

V. L. Ménage, who died in 2015, was Lecturer and then Professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental & African Studies from 1955 until 1983, and one of the pioneers of Ottoman history in the United Kingdom. When he began teaching it, the subject, at least in the UK, was just beginning to emerge from being an afterthought in Oriental Studies departments that focused on the so-called golden age of Islamic civilization in the medieval period, while playing cameos in early modern European diplomatic and military history. Along with his SOAS colleague Bernard Lewis, V. L. Ménage played a key role in bringing Ottoman history to greater prominence in the UK. While Lewis focused on the modern period and developments in political ideas associated with the Tanzimat, Ménage focused on the period of the empire’s expansion and consolidation of its rule between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, teaching a long-standing course called ‘Ottoman Institutions.’ As few published primary sources were available at the time, at least in English, Ménage created his own set of translated sources for the course. This collection is published for the first time in this book, edited and augmented by Colin Imber, Reader in Turkish at the University of Manchester until his retirement. He has added introductions to the chapters and subsections explaining the historical context of each set of documents. The great majority of the translated sources are as Ménage wrote them, although in a few cases Imber has provided new translations where the original was missing, or replaced one of Ménage’s sources with a more suitable alternative.

The “forgotten” branch of the Russian legal system “The Law of armed conflicts” is being revived with the release of the fundamental scientific work of the three-volume monograph “Military Law” (Some comments in connection with the publication of the three-volume monograph “Military Law”)

The article is a review of the three-volume scientific work “Military Law”, published in 2021 - 2022. The role and significance of the conducted research for the development of Military Law science are revealed, proposals for further promising research in the field of Military Law on topical issues of modern political and military history are formulated. The necessity of developing educational publications for military educational organizations on the basis of this monograph, the introduction of mandatory military legal training of military personnel into the system of military education is substantiated

The tragedy of the South-Western Front: Kyiv disaster of 1941

One of the most terrible and difficult to understand pages of the Second World War history is the death of the Red Army South-Western Front in the second half of September 1941. An attempt has been made to answer the question why the largest group of Soviet troops (the South-Western Front), not inferior to Army Group “South” in number and having a complete advantage in tanks, aviation and artillery, was defeated in defensive battles and encircled. The largest was the “cauldron” near Kyiv. The Red Army suffered gigantic losses: 665,000 soldiers and officers, the entire material and technical base of the front ended up in the Kiev “cauldron”. After the defeat near Kyiv, the way to Eastern Ukraine, Azov and Donbas was open. Scientific analysis of the events and understanding of the causes of the Kyiv disaster of 1941, their generalized, comprehensive assessment are relevant for the study of modern military history.
 There were many reasons for the tragedy of the South-Western Front. Among the main ones, the following have been highlighted: incorrect assessment of Germany’s strategic priorities at the initial stage of the war; unpreparedness for a defensive war on one’s own territory; the advantage of the enemy in the tactics of fighting; lack of coordination of actions between military branches; loss of command of troops at all levels, from the General Staff to corps and division commanders; wrong personnel policy, as a result of which unprofessional persons who met the “main” criterion, such as personal loyalty to Stalin, came to the leadership of the Red Army; gross mistakes of the command, incompetence and voluntarism in setting tasks on the part of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command (the highest military leadership of the country), etc.

Freigeister und Pragmatiker. Die preußischen Feldprediger 1750–1806

Strauß’s declared aim in this book, based on her 2019 PhD thesis in modern history at the University of Tübingen, is to challenge the narrative—still dominant in scholarship—that Prussian military chaplains played an essential part in creating ‘a “religious bond” between soldiers and the authorities’, epitomized by the infamous slogan ‘For God, King and Fatherland’ (p. 11). While Strauß does not neglect that military chaplains were indeed concerned with matters of war, she argues that in the second half of the eighteenth century military chaplains’ work also comprised engagement in general theological debates, soldiers’ and commoners’ education, and entailed ‘a claim for having a political effect’ (p. 12). Based on these assumptions she concludes that military chaplains were a ‘special group among early modern clergymen’ (p. 17). The book addresses three questions. Firstly, how ‘did military chaplains understand their role in the military and society’, and did experiences of war bind the clergymen closer to the Prussian monarchy or rather strengthen a process of ‘self- and group consciousness’ formation (p. 17)? What function did religion fulfil in the military, especially with regards to ‘social and mental binding forces’ (p. 18)? And finally, in what way did clergymen’s consciousness and behaviour alter in the period of the late Enlightenment (Spätaufklärung), and did this result in a change in the concept of religion in the military (p. 18)? Combining previous research on military chaplains within Prussian studies with approaches such as ‘the social history of the Enlightenment’, ‘modern military history’ and ‘the history of religion’, Strauß seeks to contribute to a ‘social history of religion’ (Gesellschaftsgeschichte der Religion) which combines ‘the history of ideas and discourse, the history of eighteenth-century religion and reflections on change in the early modern period’ (p. 29). In methodological terms, the book combines the approach of collective biography, by analysing the biographies of 800 Lutheran clergymen between the years 1750 and 1806, with conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) in the tradition of Rolf Reinhardt, Pasi Ihalainen and Kari Palonen (pp. 31–2).

Introduction

Abstract While lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people have always served in militaries, military organizations and leaders have managed the presence of sexual gender minorities in the ranks in complicated ways that were influenced by regulation, military culture, social and cultural norms, and perceptions of military effectiveness. The history of lgbt soldiers in modern western military history reveals important ways that various military organizations have addressed the question and challenges of open service by lgbt people. While many states have incorporated lgbt people into their organizations, it is not the case globally, and policies continue to change. The five essays in this collection explore various aspects of lgbt military history in West Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, the United States, and Israel and explore themes including the importance of comparative history; the differences between de jure and de facto integration; the effects of both regulation and culture on lgbtq inclusion; and the experience of lgbt people in uniform.

On Charles V

Biographies of great men are often undertaken by amateurs. Professional historians prefer to focus on collective institutions that are thought to be the theater of history properly understood. Geoffrey Parker has been a key figure in developing the “military revolution” hypothesis that has guided a good deal of recent work in early modern military history; he understands the perils of a biography better than most. But, having spent years amid the stacks of paperwork left by Spanish-Habsburg rulers, he also knows that the personal decisions of a Charles V (1500–58) made a difference. Charles signed more than 100,000 state documents, many of them with annotations in a distinctive hand that (one might say) only a mother could love.

Digging the frontier, tackling the epidemics. Researches on Bran Pass

The area next to the village Fundata, the former frontier between the Romanian Kingdom and Austria-Hungary, is located on the Rucăr-Bran corridor, between Piatra Craiului and Bucegi Mountains. Due to the configuration of the terrain, it was a good place to try an archaeological excavation in quest for the Roman road of <em>Limes Transalutanus</em>. Looking at the LiDAR based terrain-model I found yet the ruins of an unknown frontier checkpoint from modern times. That was only the first step towards a complex research, involving archives, modern history of mass epidemics, quarantine facilities and legislation, the rebirth of the Romanian Army, in the 19th century, cartography, but also landscape archaeology and the test excavations. The research was accomplished with the financial and logistic support of the HiLands Project, committed to mountain archaeology, but also a cherished backup of friends with certain knowledge in modern military history, modern architecture, or archival research. The test digging have intersected a group of buildings, very likely a frontier checkpoint operative between 1850-1880, preceding the later and better known frontier station from the Mount Giuvala, before the First World War. I would be pleased if the effort done within this research, as well as its publication in an archaeological periodical as this, would be a stimulus for Romanian archaeologists to look with more consideration to both mountain archaeology and modern archaeological sites which escaped till now to the radar of science, which are plenty.

Zrínyi VII. Miklós részvétele a harmincéves háborúban (1642‒1644)

The estates of the Hungarian-Croatian Kingdom, as it is well known, took an active role in the struggles of the Thirty years’ War (1618‒1648) on the Habsburg dynasty’s side. At the request of the monarch, many aristocrats and wealthy noblemen, who had been trained in the so-called small wars (German Kleinkriege) practised along the Ottoman border, raised especially light cavalry units and conducted them to the territory of the Holy Roman Empire. Nicholas VII. Zrínyi/Zrinski (1620‒1664) the Croatian-Slavonian ban-to-be (1647–1664) himself recruited cavalry companies in three successive years (1642–1644), at the head of which he fought in Bohemia and Moravia against the Swedes as well as in upper Hungary against the troops of George I. Rákóczi, the Prince of Transylvania (1630–1648). Moreover, he was appointed as the supreme commander of the Croatian-type cavalry two times. The present gap-fi lling paper primarily aims to clear the chronology of Zrínyi’s field operations in these years. It also reveals his probable motives, the characteristics of the negotiations with the imperial high command as well as the gathering of the troops. The case study will enable us to draw conclusions about the military entrepreneurship of this kind, giving an impetus to the research of this neglected field of early modern military history.

Naval Advising and Assistance. History, Challenges, and Analysis. Ed. by Donald Stoker and Michael T. McMaster, Solihull: Helion 2017, XII, 304 S. (= Modern Military History Series, 2), £ 35.00 [ISBN 978‑1‑911512‑82‑0

Article Naval Advising and Assistance. History, Challenges, and Analysis. Ed. by Donald Stoker and Michael T. McMaster, Solihull: Helion 2017, XII, 304 S. (= Modern Military History Series, 2), £ 35.00 [ISBN 978‑1‑911512‑82‑0] was published on November 20, 2020 in the journal Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift (volume 79, issue 2).

Setting the Record Straight: Scharnhorst and the Origins of the Nineteenth-Century Prussian General Staff

Scharnhorst established the modern general staff. He was among the first anywhere to comprehend the transformation of war wrought by the citizen armies of the French Revolution. As early as 1793, then a captain in the Hanoverian army, Scharnhorst recommended combining organization and intellect into a collective or corporate genius called the General Staff with Troops. After Prussia’s defeat in 1806, he was able to lay the foundations of the modern general staff. Using primary and secondary source material, this article analyses the tremendous contribution of Gerhard von Scharnhorst to modern military history.

Implementing sustainable mission command in the Hellenic Army

The modern Mission Command philosophy in military operations originated with the German concept of Auftragstaktik (mission tactics). It emphasizes in general terms the exercise of disciplined initiatives by subordinates during the execution of mission-type orders in the course of military operations that are conducted within the overall intent of a commander. The present paper contains an overview of the historical evolution of the mission command concept and its application. The paper compares the mission command concept with the detailed or linear method of command. This paper focuses on the relevance of the mission command concept for the Hellenic Land Forces (HLF) in Greece. The paper provides a historical account on when and where mission command was successfully exercised by the Hellenic Armed Forces in the modern military history of Greece. The authors support the premise that the mission command concept is essential for safeguarding Greek national security in the current environment of evolving symmetric and asymmetric threats, and in meeting operational challenges in a diverse and difficult terrain. The paper examines the cultural reasons that have impeded the adoption of the mission command concept within the HLF and recommends a three-phase model for its permanent implementation.

Tonio Andrade. The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History.

Over the past three decades, the production of historical scholarship on non-European world regions has shown that history’s global turn allows us to place the histories of Europe and its white settler societies into a revised frame of reference. We no longer privilege the traits distinctive to those countries as the sole indicators for what to expect to happen in other places as cultural, economic, political, and social connections become thicker and more entwined across the world. The importance of Europeans teaching others all that is needed to become modern has also been qualified by the discovery in other world regions of practices and sensibilities once thought to be unique to Europeans. Chinese history has been one site where efforts at reframing Europe’s economic rise have been mounted through what Kenneth Pomeranz famously labeled the “Great Divergence” (The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy [2000]). Tonio Andrade’s The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History is an engaging recent contribution to this literature. Andrade’s focus is on China’s military history. His book is organized into four parts framed by an introduction and a conclusion. The four chapters of part I, “Chinese Beginnings,” situate the development and uses of gunpowder in Chinese history; the five chapters of part II, “Europe Gets the Gun,” shift the focus to Europe and the development of gunpowder technologies, ending with the confrontations between Chinese and Portuguese forces in 1521–1522. Part III, “An Age of Parity,” moves in six chapters from the developments of European cannon and military organization through drill and discipline to the use of muskets in East Asia. Part IV, “The Great Military Divergence,” opens with a chapter on the Opium War, which is followed by separate chapters considering different nineteenth-century periods of Chinese military modernization. This richly researched analysis begins with a discussion of early modern Chinese military history with key contrasts to European practices. This prepares the reader for the author’s account of China’s nineteenth-century military reform efforts, his assessment of their successes and limitations, and his concluding ruminations on the possible future of military conflict between China and the West.

The Russian Officer Corps and Military Efficiency, 1800–1914

Dmitrii Nikolaevich Kopelev, Na sluzhbe Imperii: Nemtsy i Rossiiskii flot v pervoipolovine XIX veka (Serving the Empire: Germans and the Russian Fleet in the First Half of the 19th Century). 338 pp. St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5943800962. Gudrun Persson, Learning from Foreign Wars: Russian Military Thinking, 1859-1873. iv + 208 pp. Solihull, UK: Helion, 2010. ISBN-13 978-1906033613. 25.00 [pounds sterling]. John W. Steinberg, All the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914. xvii + 384 pp. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0801895456. $60.00. It is widely acknowledged that war is a continuation of politics other means, to borrow one of Carl Clausewitz's well-known sayings. Recent developments, such as changes in the Russian political environment, together with anniversaries and commemorations of past great wars, including the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, have helped revive interest in such politics by other means. Still, Russian military history--when judged against the overwhelming proportion of the research devoted to varied political, social, and cultural issues--has been extremely unfashionable among Russian and Western scholars for decades. (1) Now it is regaining its positions. The three books under review here mark this emerging shift in historiography. The authors examine the Russian army--and furthermore address the issue of military professionalism, more specifically its origin and functioning. The book Dmitrii Kopelev, a scholar known for his works on pirates of the 16th-18th centuries, takes on a rather conventional topic for early modern Russian military history: the German officer corps in the early 19th-century Russian navy. (2) However, this is not yet another attempt to rethink the degree of foreign influence on Russia's domestic development. Nor is it just an echo of the old debates about foreign domination (zasil'e) in Russian governmental structures. Rather, Kopelev's book reaches toward modern cultural anthropology in an attempt to gain an understanding of the Russian self observing the other. Kopelev focuses on German professional and family clans in the Russian navy and demonstrates that the idea of German domination was not a stereotype. According to his analysis, German origin truly did provide certain social and career advantages for naval officers who achieved the highest ranks more often and faster than Russians through nepotism and a patronage system that Kopelev defines as networks of trust (seti doveriia). It was a well-built scheme of integration based on sophisticated family networks, the widespread support of the German community and particular marital strategies. The system ultimately created influential circles that involved navy commanders and members of the imperial court. Kopelev draws on specific cases such as the admirals Ivan Krusenstern and Fedor Litke to show that even such outstanding naval careers were not based entirely on exceptional merits and personal abilities. Kopelev places great emphasis on the methods of social integration, such as education at the Naval Cadet Corps (Morskoi kadetskii korpus) in Kronstadt. He explores patterns of assimilation, such as name changes, Russian-language usage, and conversion to Orthodoxy. It was common for people of German origin to alter their names according to Russian standards. In Russian service, Adam Johann von Krusenstern became Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenstern, Friedrich Benjamin Liitke adopted the name Fedor Petrovich Litke, and Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen came to be known as Faddei Faddeevich Bellinsgauzen. The religious identities of these naval officers of German origin varied; for example, in 1828 nearly a third of ethnic German officers were Orthodox. Despite their social and professional unity, German seamen in Russian service were not a fully homogeneous group but formed a complex intermixing community. …

New Achievements in WWII Military Historical Reconstruction with GIS

Recently geoinformatics has become a well–known and widely applied discipline in different human sciences. There are several interesting examples of applying geographical information systems to manage the information of various time periods in military history and archaeology. Our research topic covers modern age military history, and so it is a very sensitive topic because of the recent dates. Therefore we always used objective data acquisition techniques and an applied engineering approach. The military historical GIS database, which was created in this way, can be handled as an objective and reliable basis for further research by scientists in object or even in event reconstructions. Firstly, we had to define a strategy, a methodology, which is suitable to achieve our aims — a uniform GIS database — considering the existing and currently accessible data sources. This methodology consists of three main parts: the reconstruction of the period’s environment, the military objects and finally the military historical events. According to this methodology we reconstructed particular sectors of the two major World War II defense lines (Attila– and Margit–line) in Hungary. Beside the GIS based reconstructions of the environment, the military objects and the events, we investigated further analytical and representational functions, which can also support these kinds of applications. The methods enable various spatial and attribute queries and animation possibilities that are also useful and sometimes necessary. The typical examples of these functions are also discussed in the paper.

Military History at the Operational Level: An Interview with Robert M. Citino

Military History at the Operational Level: An Interview with Robert M. Citino Donald A. Yerxa ROBERT CITINO, WHOSE ESSAY ON THE GERMAN WAY OF war appeared in the November 2010 issue of Historically Speaking, is one of the most perceptive military historians writing today. In the last decade he has a written a number of important books on modern military history, particularly the German military experience. These include: Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stalemate to Blitzkrieg in Europe, 1899–1940 (University Press of Kansas, 2002); Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare (University Press of Kansas, 2004), winner of both the American Historical Association’s Paul Birdsall Prize in European Military and Strategic History and the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award; The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (University Press of Kansas, 2005); and Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (University Press of Kansas, 2007). In 2007 Citino was named the best university teacher in the U.S. in a RateMyProfessors.com poll. After reading all the books listed above, senior editor Donald Yerxa interviewed Citino in March 2011. Donald A. Yerxa : What prompted you to become a military historian? Robert M. Citino : I always like to answer this question by saying that my father fought in World War II. Of course, that’s no answer at all, because in the time and place I grew up (born on the West Side of Cleveland in 1958), everybody’s father had fought in World War II. When we played in the neighborhood, we played “army,” and the war we fought out was World War II. I guess I just took it a little farther than most of my friends—and for that I blame my parents, who gave all of their children a love of reading. I started reading books on World War II as a child and I have never stopped. So parents, if your child is reading too much, beware! Yerxa : Why did you focus on German military history? Citino : I didn’t go to college to be a military historian. I wanted to be a historian of the Weimar Republic, and was especially enthralled by its culture—Brecht and Zuckmayer and the great filmmakers and musicians. That’s why I decided to learn German. As my scholarly interest in military questions grew, I found myself turning more and more toward German military history, and realized that there was a vast literature auf deutsch that most military historians were not using at all. It seemed like a natural fit. Yerxa : Would it be fair to say that the single most important theme common to all your recent books is the value of appreciating military history at the operational level? And if so, how is operational military history distinguished from other genres of analysis? Citino : Yes, that’s a fair statement. The middle ground between low-level tactics and high-level strategy, what we call the operational level of war, is what my books emphasize. If “tactics” discusses battles, and “strategy” analyzes the war, “operations” refers to the campaign, a series of maneuvers and battles involving big units: divisions, corps, and armies. Click for larger view View full resolution From Friedrich August Dressler, Moltke in his Home (John Murray, 1907). Yerxa : What insights emerge when you look at military history at the operational level? Citino : I don’t make any special claim for operational-level analysis. It isn’t a magic key to understanding warfare, but it has traditionally been underserved in the literature, especially the English-language literature. The Wehrmacht’s signal victory in France in 1940, Case Yellow, for example, is pretty hard to understand if you just look at tactics. French tanks and British aircraft were for the most part superior to the German machines they were facing. Strategically, Germany was in a nearly hopeless situation; without a fleet, Germany had embarked on a long war against the world’s great naval powers. In that middle “operational” ground, however, the Germans came up with a daring campaign plan (sending their panzers though the Ardennes forest) that completely flustered their enemies, a victory...

Say Who Made Her So: Breaker Morant and British Empire

In the early morning of February 27, 1902, on a windy, barren hill in the Transvaal region of South Africa, Lieutenants Harry Morant and Peter J. Handcock, serving in what is now known as the South African War,1 were shot by a British firing squad. The third convict, Lieutenant George Witton, was also sentenced to die, but he was given a last-minute commutation to life imprisonment and was then released five years later. What reads like fiction accurately describes the historical military execution of Morant and Handcock, officers in the British Imperial fighting unit known as the Bushveldt Carbineers. Less than 24 hours earlier, the officers had been found guilty by the British Military court of fatally shooting 14 Boer prisoners. Over the last century, the court-martial2 many people know today simply as the case of Breaker Morant has become one of the most contested in modern military history, despite its having occurred in a remote area of Africa during the tail end of a mostly unremembered war. This relatively insignificant episode has inspired more than a dozen books and articles, and served as the subject of a play and of Bruce Beresford's 1980 docu-drama classic, Breaker Morant. Why do historians and other interested parties continue to challenge the facts and issues of this case? Most likely because the courts -marti al of Morant and two of his fellow Carbineers remain compelling detective stories, full of lingering questions concerning the true identities of the parties involved, the guilt of the accused, and the conduct and motives of British officialdom in the case. Moreover, national identities on several sides play a significant part in the complex scenario. The most cogent, accurate, and wide-ranging article on the subject is Hallman B. Bryant's 'Breaker Morant' in Fact, Fiction and Film. But in the more than 12 years since research for Bryant's article was completed, new and important scholarship on Breaker has appeared, by Elizabeth J. Birmingham, Larry Bridges, and Adam Henry, in addition to several documents issued by the Australian War Memorial and the premier booklength treatment of the subject, Arthur Davey's Breaker Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers. The twists and turns of the labyrinthine case prove too numerous to encapsulate within a single article. But, using the most recent scholarship, this article offers a new synthesis of the available historical data, explaining how and why the events unfolded as they did. The article also explains why Beresford's film continues to present a relevant and compelling portrait of the perennial challenges of leadership in counter-guerrilla warfare. To some degree, the intrigue and the cloudiness of the event stem from the conflicting portrayals of Morant and the Boer War. Beresford, perhaps not wanting to deal with thorny character issues, skips over Morant's earliest roots and begins the story in media res, just as the court martial opens. The director then flashes back to incidents pertinent to the trial. But Morant's background is more relevant than the film suggests. Harry Morant - nicknamed in Australia because of his preWar reputation for breaking wild horses - proved in life to be as mysterious as he has become since his death. He was born Edwin Harry Murrant, the son of a workhouse master, in Bridgewater, Somerset, England.3 Yet neither a birth certificate nor baptismal records of Morant in and around Devon, where Breaker claims to have been born, can be located. Of course, the county holds no records of concealed births (if the birth had been illegitimate, for example), and Morant may not have been baptized. In any case, Morant's writings, as well as several other narrative accounts, reveal a man who, at minimum, possessed enough formal education to have elevated his mannerisms, language, and stature. Kit Denton, in his book Closed File, notes that Morant's poetry, letters, and other writings show a command of the language which surely. …

Gunpowder, Explosives, and the State: A Technological History (review)

Reviewed by: Gunpowder, Explosives, and the State: A Technological History David Stewart Bachrach (bio) Gunpowder, Explosives, and the State: A Technological History Edited by Brenda J. Buchanan. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. xxiii+425. $99.95. This volume, the second collection of its type, had its origins in four gatherings of historians of gunpowder that met between 1996 and 2002 under the auspices of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC). As is true of many collections of this type, the implicit argument of the volume as a whole is that the material under consideration is vital to a fuller understanding of a wide range of historical fields. But here it is more than implicit. In the foreword, the eminent historian of military technology Bert Hall accurately and succinctly describes the history of gunpowder as standing “at the crossroads of history of technology, of science, of economics and trade, and of politics” (p. xxiii). The twenty essays are divided into five sections: Perceptions and Ancient Knowledge, The Production of Saltpetre and Gunpowder in Europe, The Overseas Transfer of Technology from Europe, Military Technicalities, and Modern Developments. A valuable introduction by the editor, Brenda J. Buchanan, helps to orient the reader, tying together the wide range of focused studies through a survey of the role of the state, mercantalist theory, chartered trading companies, and scientific practice in establishing gunpowder as a dominant element in warfare, industry, and commerce over the course of the early modern and modern periods. Each of the essays has a full scholarly apparatus, and the volume as a whole is provided with scores of beautiful images and illustrations, as well as a useful index. The individual essays cover a very broad geographical and chronological range, including ancient China and India, early modern India, Venice, Iberia, Sweden, and Egypt, the Portuguese maritime empire, and the nineteenth-century United States. Thematically, the volume is equally diverse, considering the origins of gunpowder, its production and storage, the development of gunpowder technology, the transfer of gunpowder technology across cultures, the technology of gunpowder weapons, the place of research and development of gunpowder within the broader compass of the development of European science, and the development of new types of explosive technologies within the context of modern commercial and military competition. Many of the focused studies provide insight into broader questions of economic and technological development. In their discussion of “Breachloading Guns with Removable Powder Chambers,” for example, Kelly DeVries and Robert Douglas Smith make clear that older technologies continued to be deployed for decades, and even centuries, after “improvements” in design were developed. This insight, which has important implications for historians of technology, parallels similar conclusions drawn by [End Page 785] military historians in other periods as well, including the European Middle Ages and the Roman Empire. Addressing the equally important question regarding means by which technology undergoes substantial geographic diffusion, José Manuel de Mascarenhas’s study of overseas Portuguese gunpowder factories during the period of empire demonstrates ways in which gunpowder, as well as industrial processes and infrastructure, made their way from Europe to Asia and Latin America. In sum, this volume is a welcome addition to the history of technology, early-modern and modern military history, and the history of industry and science, as well as to the more focused area of gunpowder studies. These essays will be of considerable value to scholars and graduate students in many fields of European, Asian, and U.S. history. David Stewart Bachrach Dr. Bachrach is assistant professor of medieval history at the University of New Hampshire. Copyright © 2008 The Society for the History of Technology

The End of World War II in Asia: An Interview with Sir Max Hastings

July/August 2008 · Historically Speaking 19 The End of World War Il in Asia: An Interview with Sir Max Hastings Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa 7HE WAY THE SECOND IFORLD WAR ENDED HADAN ENORmous impact on the remainderof the 20th century andcontinues toprovide the contextforagooddealof internationalrelationstoday. Itisatopicthatstillattractsmuch attentionfrom historians. One of the keeneststudents of modern military history, Sir MaxHastings, has written a new book on the endof the warinAsia: Retribution: The Batde for Japan, 1944-1945 (Knopf, 2008). It is a companion to his Armageddon : The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 (Knopf, 2004). Likewise, the followinginterview, conductedinApril2008 by Historically Speaking editorDonaldA . Yerxa, isacompaniontohisinterviewwithHastingsaboutArmageddon that ran in ourMarch/April2005 issue. Donald A. Yerxa: How was the ending of World War II in Asia different from the endgame in Europe? Max Hastings: We sometimes make a mistake when we speak of World War II in the singular; in fact, we really should talk about the World Wars II. The war in Asia was fantastically different from the war in Europe. The only people who really regarded both the Asian and the European theaters as an integrated whole were Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and their respective chiefs of staff. For everyone else, if you were fighting in Europe, Asia seemed a very long way away; and if you were fighting in Asia, then Europe seemed incredibly remote . None of the Allies doubted that the only way to win the war was to defeat and occupy Germany. But in Asia, it all looked rather different . There were a lot of Allied leaders who had serious doubts about whether it would be necessary to invade Japan. Churchill suggested at the Cairo conference and later again at Yalta that diere might be a case for modifying the terms with Japan to shorten the war. But British influence on what happened in Asia was always pretty marginal, and first Roosevelt and then Truman slapped him down. The United States decided to fight to the finish against Japan and accept only unconditional surrender. In my view, they were absolutely right to do so. Some historians have argued that die Allies should have considered die self-esteem of the Japanese and offered them terms. If the Allies had done this, diese historians claim, then it wouldn't have been necessary to drop die atomic bomb. I don't buy any of this. The Japanese had launched a war of aggression in Asia, and it failed with hideous cost in life and treasure, not only to the United States but above all to die people of Asia. In the summer in 1945 it was time to pay, and I can't see why die government of the United States should have been expected to humor Japanese sensibilities. Because the war in Asia is much less known in the United States and in Europe than the war in Europe, some people have said, "Hider represented an absolute evil. Surely the Donald Yerxa interviewing Max Hastings in April 2008. Japanese weren't as bad." Well, if you consulted the people of Asia, they would remind you that at least 15 million Chinese died in World War II (against 300,000 Americans and 350,000 Brits). Five million people died in Southeast Asia, many of them in the most horrible circumstances, all to serve the cause of Japanese imperialism. The Japanese to this day are incredibly uninformed about their wartime history. To an extraordinary degree, Japanese thinking today, even among educated Japanese, is dominated by a belief that they were victims because of what happened at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and die fire bombings. It is important to note that if at any time the Japanese had wanted to end the war, stop the fire bombings , and avoid Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all they had to do was surrender. Furthermore, Pearl Harbor , Japanese entry into the war, and die attacks on die Philippines and Burma were vasdy more popular with the Japanese people than Hider's declaration of war and invasion of Poland in September 1939 were in Germany. I've chosen my tide, Retribution, advisedly. I think the Japanese people brought their terrible fate upon themselves. Yerxa: Most accounts of the Pacific War by...