War in History

The Irish Brigade in the British service, formed in the 1790s, was composed of Irish Catholic soldiers, who had recently regained official permission to serve in the British armed forces, and Franco-Irish émigré officers. The British government believed that the brigade offered Catholics a ‘fair chance’ to participate in the armed forces, but the reality was quite different. This paper examines the brigade’s origins, difficult formation, and arduous service in the West Indies and Nova Scotia, where it was consigned because of Irish Protestant distrust and political manoeuvring, and explores the changing nature of Irish military identity.

Between 1904 and 1914 the British army underwent significant reform to redress deficiencies that had been exposed during the South African War. It established a general staff, it reorganized the Regular Army for expeditionary operations, and it created a Territorial Force for home defence that could also provide force for overseas deployment. The War Office also took measures to prepare the dominion armies for an imperial war effort. It needed their men. So with the approval of the governments concerned, it sent scores of imperial officers overseas to organize and train dominion armies. This article examines what these officers accomplished in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Discussions on learning in the British army of the First World War centre on the Western Front with a focus on the outcome rather than the process. This article redresses this imbalance by examining how the British army shared knowledge between its operational theatres. It illustrates that, as the British army expanded and its commitments increased, it could no longer rely on purely ad hoc methods for learning. Instead, it had to adopt increasingly bureaucratic methods when sharing knowledge across tactical and geographic boundaries, which forced it to realign its pre-war learning ethos to accommodate the challenges of modern war.

This article argues that the post-war military thought of Field Marshal Montgomery was much more progressive than is suggested by his biographers or by the literature on British military thought after 1945. A closer inspection of Montgomery’s official, public, and private writings reveals that the Field Marshal was quick to acknowledge the rapidly changing character of land warfare. It is maintained that important considerations pertaining to the size and composition of land forces, tactical doctrine, command and control, and battlefield technique were reconceptualized by Montgomery against the new background of nuclear land combat.

Articles by Dr Brian Hall in War in History and the Journal of Military History cavalierly dismiss the book Missed Signals on the Western Front: How the Slow Adoption of Wireless Restricted British Strategy and Operations in World War I. This rebuttal questions his understanding of continuous wave technology and points out that, in contrast to the British effort, the Americans provided their forces with modern wireless communications. Hall chose to dismiss rather than engage with the book’s disagreement with his assertion that the British army was remarkably successful at recognizing the utility of wireless and exploiting its full military potential.