War in History

The Spanish defeat in the Seven Years War led to a reassessment of the overseas fortification system. This paper analyses the role played by military engineers in the debate over the reconstruction of fortresses in Havana and Manila, and the influence of French discussions on the topic. The results were the product of Franco-Spanish cooperation that improved formal education. The conclusion is that the combined Bourbon response substantially advanced the science of siege craft and significantly improved the status of military engineers in Spain.

This article explores Anglophobia as a topic in German wartime propaganda aimed at military and civilian communities of France. Anti-British topics were at the centre of a large campaign of propaganda designed to undermine French morale during the two world wars. This study will investigate the goals, the content, and the effects of Anglophobia in France to determine the relation between these two campaigns of psychological warfare. It will be argued that the Nazis and the Vichy regime almost entirely replicated the original production of Anglophobic propaganda in the occupied territories of France during the First World War. This article will also show that Anglophobia almost invariably failed to convince the French population.

This paper will examine decision making at GHQ during the planning for the landing of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford’s IX Corps at Suvla Bay during the MEF’s August offensive. It will show how Hamilton’s expectation that IX Corps would combine closely with ANZAC in a decisive offensive was at odds with the more discreet and limited role for IX Corps expected by his operations staff. This divergence of views at GHQ and Hamilton’s subsequent remoteness from Stopford ensured that it was his staff’s defensive interpretation that was passed on to Stopford and IX Corps.

In March and December 1917 the British Empire won two much-needed victories in Mesopotamia and Palestine: Baghdad and Jerusalem. Both cities were steeped in biblical and oriental lore and both victories happened in a year that had been otherwise disastrous. Throughout the British Empire the press, public, and politicians debated the importance of the two successes, focusing on the effect they would have on the empire’s prestige, the Allies’ war strategy, and the post-war Middle East. Far from being overwhelmed by the ‘romance’ of the fighting in the Middle East, the press’s and public’s response reveals a remarkably well-informed, sophisticated, and occasionally combative debate about the empire’s Middle Eastern war effort.

From 1963 to 1966 Britain fought an undeclared war against Indonesia in the jungles of Borneo. Existing accounts of the tactical outcomes of this campaign take at face value the comments produced after the event by such key individuals as Sir Walter Walker, until March 1965 the British Director of Borneo Operations, who regarded the campaign as ‘a complete success’. This article demonstrates that this narrative is a retrospective judgement and that senior British officers at the time regarded the conclusion of the campaign as a success for Indonesia.