War in History

In the literature on the emergence of the principles of war in British military thought there has been a failure to examine the reaction of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force to the appearance of the first list of principles in the army’s 1920 Field Service Regulations. By considering correspondence, articles, books, field manuals, and staff college lecture scripts, this article demonstrates that there was a debate on the principles of war between the world wars which involved all three armed services. The acceptance of the principles into the doctrine of each of the services represented a fundamental shift away from Jomini and the final acceptance of Clausewitzian approaches to the theory of war. The debate also contributed significantly to the emergence of a ‘common language’ between the services, thus laying the basis for a tri-service ‘strategic culture’ which was attuned to the challenges of joint operations.

As the US Army drove deep into Germany in early 1945, American soldiers looted civilian possessions on a large scale. While GIs did take items in Allied countries, what occurred in Germany was different and more extensive. Servicemen justified their actions by claiming wartime necessity, opportunities for profit or trade, keepsakes, and revenge for Nazi atrocities. Researching Americans looting in Germany provides the full narrative of war’s end, and troops’ interaction with a public that was still considered the enemy. Drawing on memoirs, journals, letters, interviews, and official US Army documents, this work seeks to extrapolate the reasons why GIs looted, while outlining the motivations of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force to stop such actions.

The origin site for the 1918 influenza pandemic which killed more than 50 million people worldwide has been hotly debated. While the mid-western United States, France, and China have all been identified as potential candidates by medical researchers, the military context for the pandemic has been all but ignored. Conversely, military historians have paid little attention to a deadly disease which underlines the reciprocal relationship between battlefield and home front. This paper re-examines the debate about the origins and diffusion of the 1918 flu within the context of global war, bridging gaps between social, medical, and military history in the process. A multidisciplinary perspective combined with new research in British and Canadian archives reveals that the 1918 flu most likely emerged first in China in the winter of 1917–18, diffusing across the world as previously isolated populations came into contact with one another on the battlefields of Europe. Ethnocentric fears – both official and popular – facilitated its spread along military pathways that had been carved out across the globe to sustain the war effort on the Western Front.

This article analyses the function of political commissars in the Republican Popular Army during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9. It evaluates the commissariat’s role in fostering soldiers’ political engagement with the war, as well as the challenges maintaining morale and discipline in a revolutionary army. It also examines the complex relationship between commissars and Republican soldiers, and considers political divisions within the commissariat, particularly the rise and domination of delegates affiliated to the Communist Party of Spain. The article argues that commissars were a central component of the Republic’s relatively successful, and heavily improvised, politicized wartime mobilization in the face of considerable challenges.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, historians and doctors have claimed that the ‘army disease’ of both the Union and the Confederate armies was morphine addiction. But since drug addiction was not yet fully understood in medical texts of the mid-1860s, addiction as the army disease could have been perceived only in hindsight. Whether addiction was prevalent among veteran troops or not, one thing can be firmly ascertained: after the Civil War, every other war in American history has brought with it a drug problem, whether real or imagined.