War in History

By 1060 the Normans of Melfi had greatly expanded their dominions in Apulia and Calabria. The next step in their ambitious plans in the Italian peninsula, the invasion of Sicily, took place in 1061: it was not completed before 1091, mostly owing to a combination of political setbacks in the mainland, along with several inefficiencies in Norman military organization. No comprehensive study of the military aspects of the Norman conquest of Sicily has been written, and this paper intends to cover this specific gap. It deals with the first two stages of the Sicilian conquest, the period between the first invasion of 1061 and the first unsuccessful siege of Palermo in 1064, and the second period, which is marked by the five-month siege and capture of the Muslim capital in 1072. It examines the composition of the Norman and Muslim armies, in terms not only of numbers but also of the ration of cavalry, infantry and auxiliary units. It also considers how far the Normans had been willing to adapt to the Mediterranean reality of warfare, more specifically the construction of siege engines and of a navy capable of imposing a blockade and transporting troops and horses from the Italian mainland to Sicily; the Norman fighting tactics used in the field of battle against the Muslims; and whether those tactics changed during the several stages of the Sicilian conquest.

The paper aims to illustrate the debate regarding the Italian air force in the period from 1910 to 1918. On the one hand, a vast front began to form, including a large part of public opinion and a number of members of parliament, which called for the need to strengthen the wartime use of aviation. On the other hand, the strongest resistance against strengthening Italian aviation, at least up to the outbreak of the First World War, came from military and governmental circles. The army chief of staff, Alberto Pollio, and many generals did not realize the devastating wartime capabilities of aviation; the top military ranks always considered aviation to be an auxiliary force, a means of support for infantry, artillery or engineers. Italy, at a government level, did not have the raw materials or finance available to such countries as France, Britain, and Germany. If the limited budget influenced wartime aviation production, it was the scepticism of the top military ranks, from Pollio to Cadorna and in the end Diaz, that prevented the creation of an autonomous aeronautic arm that, following the example set by Britain and France, was provided with its own officer corps, its own structures and adequate financing to favour its development.

This article examines the British treatment of German prisoners of war on the Western Front during the First World War. Although historians have largely overlooked crimes against prisoners of war, it argues that British soldiers, like other combatants, sometimes pillaged, physically abused, or even murdered German prisoners following surrender. The British higher command issued orders against prisoner mistreatment, but the perpetration of war crimes against German prisoners was often tolerated, and sometimes encouraged, at the front. Only a fraction of British troops participated in prisoner killings, but their crimes demand that historians re-evaluate the nature of the captor—prisoner relationship.

This paper examines British combined arms tactics in the last three months of 1918, via a case study of Third Army. It argues that, although some formations were capable of using sophisticated combined arms tactics well, others were not, and the application of such methods remained more diverse than some recent research has suggested. The diversity of approach was rooted not only in objective external factors, but also in the fact that pre-war regular officers continued to dominate the army of 1918. Their culture, rooted in the attitudes of the nineteenth century or even earlier, militated against the coherent dissemination and application of a single doctrine.

This article examines the ideas that underpinned American psychological war (psywar) in the Pacific. While we cannot precisely measure its effects, we can trace its intellectual history with more confidence. US psywar was a combination of scientific method and myth-making. Assessments of the Imperial Japanese Army tended to be careful, discriminating, and increasingly sophisticated, if not uniformly accurate. At the level of the battle front, practitioners of the ‘mind war’ strove to overcome stereotypes and refine and complexify their view of the enemy.The further they moved from the battlefield towards assessments of Japanese military leadership, society, and high politics, the more they became myth-makers, projecting onto Japan a powerful set of preconceived ideas. These included notions of the superstitious and malleable Japanese mind, the suicidal military elite, and the innocent symbol emperor. In their analysis two models of culture evolved. Their approach to the IJA mostly presented culture as dynamic, layered, and conflicted, whereas their view of Japanese society was monolithic, bounded, and timeless. This contradictory pattern can be explained by different levels of exposure to the subject, the practice of filling ‘knowledge gaps’ with preconceptions, and by American policymaking interests.

Terence Holmes, by far my most competent opponent in the ‘Schlieffen plan’ debate, now agrees with me that the Schlieffen plan was not the German war plan, either in 1906/07 (when the plan was supposedly first implemented) or in 1914, because new documentation conclusively proves that the German army never had the number of divisions that the plan required. However, Holmes still insists that, given the chance, Schlieffen could have raised the necessary number of divisions in 1906. I show that this was most unlikely.