War in History

During the siege at Quebec, 1759—60, which followed the battle on the Plains of Abraham, high rates of disease contributed to the British defeat by French forces in April 1760. While historians have not previously discussed military medical preventative measures, a detailed examination of the siege demonstrates sophisticated attempts to adapt to a foreign environment and its disease, as well as how disease contributed to the development of American provincial and British antagonism and perceptions of difference.

The article analyses gendered experiences and memories of the German wars against Napoleon by focusing on the port city of Hamburg, the second largest German town, which was occupied by the French army between 1806 and 1814. The case study centres on the `ego-documents' of the renowned bookseller, publisher, and patriot Friedrich Perthes (1770—1843) and his family. The article shows that these first `modern' wars involved civilians — men and women alike — in new ways. The discursively constructed lines between `front' and `home' were blurred, and male and female war experiences were closely intertwined. After the wars, female war experiences were suppressed in collective memory. A wartime gender order was reconstructed in retrospect that distinguished clearly between front and home, and emphasized male heroism and patriotism. This helped to reinforce the gender hierarchy and thereby the postwar social order.

This article explores British visions of Ypres between 1914 and 1940, and concentrates on the work of the crucial interwar remembrance movement, the Ypres League. The city of Ypres became a crucial symbol of all Britain was fighting for during the course of the First World War, and rapidly developed a holy aura. Led by the league, the horrors of industrial warfare were commuted into a spiritual quest in which British and imperial troops were purified by their experiences in the Ypres salient. After the war, British people visited Ypres in large numbers in order to imagine the sufferings of the servicemen and gain a spiritual benefit often with the assistance of the Ypres League and its publications. This reflected a culture of high diction and ritual greatly at odds with the idea that the twenties and thirties saw the dawn of an age disillusioned with the values of 1914. The British also became resident in Ypres in considerable numbers, and the article explores the relationship between the local population and the immigrants. By exploring the nature of war commemoration through the detailed case study of one particular site, it is intended to deepen the historiography of commemoration studies.

This article contributes to greater understanding of the forces that shaped the prosecution of Wehrmacht anti-partisan warfare at the level of divisions in the field. The article explains the approach to anti-partisan warfare of the divisional command of the 369th Infantry Division and compares it with the approach of other divisional commands which operated in the same region of Yugoslavia during early 1943. In doing so, it highlights the particular importance of the troops' level of fighting power, and of the formative life experiences of divisional commanders during the First World War, in shaping conduct.

Despite the recent wave of attacks on his view that `there never was a “Schlieffen plan”', Terence Zuber stands by his `central thesis', which is that the Schlieffen plan called for 96 divisions at a time when the German army could deploy only 72. This article will disprove Zuber's calculations. The Schlieffen plan called for 90 divisions, not 96. The official deployment plans of 1906 involved 78 divisions, including two of the ersatz corps that Zuber says were `non-existent'. From the official discussion about those two ersatz corps we can prove that it would have been perfectly feasible to raise eight of them altogether, as required by the Schlieffen plan.