War in History

The framework of casualty care during the Anglo-Dutch Wars has been found severely wanting by historians of naval medicine. This judgement is grounded on the fact that naval hospitals were constructed eventually in the 1750s, and because the hospitalization of sick and hurt mariners conforms better to a Weberian model of state and military modernization. This article argues that the measures for casualty care erected during the Dutch wars adhered to an early modern model of state formation. The framework of care extended the scope and social depth of politically involved people. It failed because the carers were consistently underfunded, not because locally based care was inherently unworkable or insufficiently bureaucratic and centralized.

Culture as an underlying factor in Australian discipline during the Great War deserves further exploration. Most accounts relate a poor disciplinary record compared with Australia’s British and Dominion allies. A new perspective, proposing a different underlying attitude to leadership and service, is offered as one element contributing to the explanation of the different attitudes to discipline. Based on the discourse in one cultural artefact, the prose literature of the war, this paper investigates how Australian egalitarian expectations contrasted with the paternal-deferential relationship between British officers and their men. Three factors in particular contributed to the Anzac attitude to discipline: the explicit egalitarian values of Australian society, the Anzac conception of the war as work rather than a crusade, and the Australians’ persistent citizen self-identity.

This article exploits the previously unused private papers of the General Headquarters doctrine writers to examine the process by which the British Expeditionary Force’s combat doctrine was produced and the influences upon it. It also reveals SS.198, a hitherto unknown manual from the autumn of 1917, which illustrates Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s influence upon doctrine writing at the time of the controversial Third Ypres offensive. It concludes that the doctrinal process raises serious questions about the notion of a consistent ‘learning curve’ within the BEF.

While the Kriegsmarine’s only aircraft carrier, the uncompleted Graf Zeppelin, has attracted considerable interest over the decades, this has been limited to technical histories of the vessel. This article explores the origins of the programme and what the German navy believed it needed such vessels for. It examines the design process and the proposed method of operational employment, and seeks to place them in an international context. To date, German efforts have been considered in isolation from the wider developments in aircraft carrier technology during the interwar period. When these are taken into account a more balanced view of the German enterprise emerges.