War in History

In this article the author models the Iranian military tradition of west Asia on the basis of the Roman literature of the early Byzantine period and the Arabic and Persian literature of the Muslim period.

Europe and the United States saw the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 as an important moment in history, with several nations sending press correspondents and military observers to East Asia to extract lessons from the war. However, the influence of Orientalism, particularly among British war correspondents, hindered this objective. Attempting to explain the results of the war in cultural terms, these correspondents revealed in their post-war accounts a sense that Japan, Russia, and the war itself were alien in nature and therefore offered cultural and military lessons incompatible with British needs.

This article re-examines the thesis proposed by Norman Stone in his book The Eastern Front regarding the pre-war origins of Russia’s defeats in 1914 and 1915. The article concludes that, contrary to Stone’s thesis, the pre-war split between Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and General V.A. Sukhomlinov had little impact on Russian military operations in the First World War. The Russian army was not as rigidly divided into factions as Stone suggests, nor were the factions divided on class grounds. The grand duke and his associates were not determined supporters of the fortresses in Poland, and the decision to defend Poland in summer 1915 was not related to pre-war debates about the fortresses.

Most studies of Irish recruitment to the British forces during the Second World War have identified a desire for adventure as one of the principal motives. While this motive has existed throughout history, this article argues that its prominence among Irish recruits was due to the image of war that was diffused in independent Ireland. The interwar market for children’s literature and cinema was dominated by British boys’ weeklies and war films, which portrayed British soldiers as glamorous heroes participating in wars that were exciting and just. For some Irish youths this influenced their perception of British military service.

Katō Tetsutarō was a suspected Japanese war criminal tried by US military commissions in Yokohama after the Second World War. He was convicted of murdering an escaped American prisoner of war, and was originally sentenced to death. In a highly unusual move, however, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, ordered a retrial, in which Katō received a sentence of 30 years. He was ultimately released in March 1958. Katō’s case provides an especially effective illustration of the tension in Allied thinking about war crimes trials between a desire for justice or vengeance, on the one hand, and recognition of the political pressures of the Cold War on the other, and of the varied forms this tension took as prosecutions progressed.