Naval warfare changed out of all recognition from the late sixteenth century onwards through the rapid development of large square-rigged warships carrying heavy broadside gun batteries. A whole series of developments followed, with a long (if far from smooth) evolution in ships, equipment, strategy, and tactics continuing down to the last sailing navies of the early nineteenth century. It was clearly no accident that this naval revolution coincided with a great age of global European empires, which would have been impossible to create or maintain without effective naval power. Galleys and other oared craft became largely obsolete, except for some amphibious operations in the Mediterranean and for use in shallow waters around the innumerable Baltic islands. The crushing Dutch victory over a Spanish fleet at the battle of the Downs (1639) marked the first occasion when the full power of broadside gunnery became evident. Then the three Anglo-Dutch wars between the 1650s and 1670s saw a series of savage and bloody engagements between the fleets of two nations that were coming to be known as the Maritime Powers. The combination of imperial and trading ambitions, new financial arrangements, and relatively open societies enabled first the Dutch, and then the British, to develop naval power to new heights, in turn allowing them to punch well above their weight on the international stage. Under Louis XIV, France did mount a serious challenge to the Dutch and English, and for a time possessed the largest navy in the Western world. However, by the 1690s the French, and more gradually the Dutch, were finding the costs of maintaining this level of power at sea, as well as on land, to be too great.

US forces invaded Mindoro on December 15, 1944, to establish airfields that could support an invasion of Luzon. On January 9, 1945, Sixth Army invaded Luzon at Lingayen Gulf. Once ashore, US forces gained access to the northern end of the central plain, an optimal avenue of approach leading to Manila, with its vital docks area that could support US forces on Luzon and serve as a base for the invasion of Japan. The invasion was unopposed, as Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita had withdrawn his forces to fight in the mountainous interior of the island. Subsequent landings near Bataan and south of Manila augmented Sixth Army’s drive to Manila. By February 5, MacArthur’s forces had conducted three amphibious landings on Luzon, created a massive logistical base at Lingayen Gulf, built or rehabilitated numerous airfields, and advanced to Manila in dramatic fashion, liberating hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and American detainees along the way. The 1st Cavalry and 37th Infantry Divisions had penned in Japanese forces in the heart of Manila south of the Pasig River, while the 11th Airborne Division was closing in from the south.

From May 1915 till the end of 1917, 200 generals commanding the major fighting units and at least 600 senior officers were sacked by Cadorna’s direct order or authorization. Though not only an Italian phenomenon, the degree of that officer purge is puzzling. Cadorna always inflexibly defended his absolutist (pre-modern) handling of the officer cadres: he would weed out any commander rumoured to be weak or cowardly, but likewise anyone who contradicted a superior or voiced doubts as to the certainty of victory, or the infallibility of the Chief. Still more draconian were his disciplinary measures against the troops. Cadorna set out to eliminate three great enemies within his army: the soldiers’ indiscipline and cowardice, indecision by the officers, and leniency by the courts. These he pursued by dint of special tribunals and ordering an extraordinarily high number of executions. ‘Discipline is the spiritual flame of victory’, ran one of his best-known circulars, issued in the first September of the war. And, particularly revealing of the supreme commander’s inflation of the discipline factor: ‘the most disciplined troops win, not the best trained’.

In the course of its civil war of 1936-9, Spain hosted thousands of foreign soldiers from across the world. Amongst them were the approximately 35,000 volunteers of the International Brigades, the likes of whom identified General Francoߣs rebellious Nationalists with a global fascist offensive and rallied to the defence of the embattled Republic. The introduction to Making Antifascist War argues that their encounters with the people, places and politics of Spain were not an incidental sideshow to the more important business of fighting fascism, but a key component of their transnational military service. Cross-cultural contact was not only more diverse than often assumed, but also more consequential ߝ not least by feeding into the motivations, identities and actions of thousands of soldiers. After establishing the nature of that contact, the introduction argues that it enabled the foreign fighters to engage in a creative process of defining the Spanish Civil War in their own partisan terms. It does so by engaging with sources, methodologies and questions pertinent to the cultural history of war, with a particular emphasis on the role of transnationalism.

Before returning to the Philippines, MacArthur and his subordinates first had to forge the instrument that would propel the Allies along the road to Tokyo. These forces next had to learn how to survive in a forbidding and alien environment. Then they had to learn how to fight and coordinate their efforts among the various arms and services. By the end of the New Guinea campaign, MacArthur’s forces had honed their capabilities in amphibious operations and island warfare. MacArthur found commanders of his air, naval, and ground forces who were competent and loyal. MacArthur and his subordinate commanders created the powerful joint team that would propel US forces back to the Philippines. With the Bataan Gang at its core, SWPA headquarters had grown from scratch to become a robust theater staff. Also built from humble beginnings, the Central Bureau had cracked Japanese codes, providing MacArthur and his key subordinate leaders with invaluable intelligence. SWPA had created a logistics structure that could support operations over oceanic distances. Allied medical personnel had largely eliminated malaria as an impediment to future operations.

Discontent in Britain’s Thirteen Colonies had built to open violence by the mid-1770s, much of it occurring in and around Boston. (See Map 19.) A lack of representation and perceptions that British leaders pursued overbearing policies because they were indifferent or even hostile to the plight of the inhabitants pushed ever more colonists towards open rebellion. In response, the tools Britain possessed to confront its colonial troubles were limited by the nature of its government and the few instruments at its disposal. These included the army and navy, but their use at Boston only exacerbated tensions. Fighting flared on 19 April 1775 when British soldiers attempted to seize munitions at Concord, Massachusetts. Along the way, at Lexington, shots were fired and several colonists were killed. Afterwards, colonists sniped at and harried the British on their return to Boston. In the wake of Lexington and Concord, American militia gathered around Boston, surrounding its British garrison. Nearly two months after the outbreak of hostilities, the Americans seized and fortified the strategic Charlestown Peninsula overlooking Boston harbour. In response, the British stormed the position in what became known as the battle of Bunker Hill: the first major battle of the American Revolution. At the end of the day, the British held the field, but at the cost of nearly a quarter of their army in Boston.

Sub-Saharan Africa was on the threshold of a new and violent era in the second half of the fifteenth century. The ensuing four centuries would see innovative forms of military organisation, novel cultures of militarism underpinning such systems, and new wars, as well as new ways of fighting them. There were often different factors at work in different regions; the presence of external drivers was a key distinction between Atlantic Africa and the rest of the continent, for instance. However, warfare across early modern Africa had much in common, in terms of the aim to control factor endowments, to maximise population, and to construct enduring ideological systems, whether territorially or culturally defined. In some ways – certainly in terms of the underlying trends and broad contours of Africa’s military history – the existence or absence of external intrusion is a distraction, however significant it was in particular places at particular times. The outcome of the processes in motion between c. 1450 and c. 1850 was an expansion in military scale, the professionalisation of soldiery, the adoption of new weaponry, and the militarisation of the polity – whether ‘state-based’ or otherwise. The militarisation of African polities and societies was an ongoing process between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century, a period which in many ways witnessed the laying of the foundations of modern African political systems; this would culminate in a veritable military revolution in the nineteenth century, a transformation in the organisation and culture of violence, without which Europe’s later partition of the continent cannot properly be understood.

MacArthur desired to liberate the Philippines, but the issue would be decided by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. Forces under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz conducted a drive in the Central Pacific that by the summer of 1944 culminated with the seizure of the strategically crucial Mariana Islands. By that time, MacArthur’s forces had taken key points along the northern coast of New Guinea and had conquered the Admiralty Islands, isolating the major Japanese air and naval base at Rabaul. The question for the JCS was what to do once these operations concluded. The major objective would be bounded by Luzon, Formosa, and the China coast, with an invasion of Formosa initially seen as key to the defeat of Japan. MacArthur naturally viewed Luzon as the primary objective, while Admiral Ernest King in Washington and Admiral Nimitz in Hawaii looked towards Formosa. This disparity set off a storm of messages, planning, and controversy from March through September 1944 until the JCS finally decided the issue by deferring the invasion of Formosa and agreeing to allow MacArthur to liberate both Leyte and Luzon and the capital city, Manila.

The nineteenth-century Russian poet Fedor Tiutchev rightly marvelled at his motherland’s remarkable growth: ‘Moscow, and Peter’s town, and Constantine’s city, these are the Russian realm’s cherished capitals … But where is its limit? Where are its borders? The fates will reveal them in times to come …’ Over the past 400 years an obscure principality deep in the forests on Europe’s eastern edge had expanded to become the largest continental empire on Earth – a domain whose immense territory stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean and beyond, covering one-sixth of the planet’s dry surface. Although somewhat diminished in size after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians today still nickname their country ‘the seventh continent’.

For over half a century, discussion of the relationship between military finance, organisation, and state development has been dominated by the contested concept of a ‘military revolution’; the belief that there were one or a few periods of fundamental change that transformed both war and wider European history. More recently, this has been supplemented by the idea of smaller, but more frequent ‘revolutions in military affairs’ (RMAs) as individual military organisations respond to, or anticipate, changes made by their likely opponents. Technology is generally considered to drive both forms of ‘revolution’, as innovative weaponry and institutional practice transform war, rendering older models ineffective and obsolete. Change flows through a series of chain reactions, as states adapt to new conditions, modifying their structures to sustain and direct altered armed forces, and revising their forms of interaction with society both to extract the necessary resources and to legitimate their use in war-making.

Russia emerged as a European power in the early eighteenth century with a suddenness that alarmed its neighbors – and indeed some of its more distant potential supporters. Russia’s newfound prominence was in large part the outcome of a series of international conflicts often referred to as “the Northern Wars.” Conflict over the fate of the eastern Baltic littoral had entered a new phase near the middle of the sixteenth century with the decline of the Livonian Order and the growing territorial ambitions of nearby states. Aside from the crusading Order itself, which had formally disbanded by 1561, the nearby states of Denmark, Sweden, Muscovy, Poland-Lithuania, and Brandenburg persistently battled one another over the fate of the littoral, in varying configurations but with surprisingly few intermissions until 1721. The more important of these multilateral conflicts are conventionally identified as the Livonian War (1558–83), the mid-seventeenth-century conflicts among Sweden, the Commonwealth, Muscovy, Brandenburg, and Denmark that included the Thirteen-Years’ War (1654–67), and finally the “Great Northern War” (1720–21) which ended in Russian victory. While the earlier conflicts remained relatively confined, in diplomatic and military terms, to Northern and Eastern Europe, the outcome of the last Northern War not only established the Russian Empire as the dominant Baltic state; it also led to Russia’s broader recognition as a major force in the broader European diplomatic world.

The dominant interpretation of warfare in the Indian subcontinent before the establishment of British rule is that it was comprised of unorganised melees by forces of undisciplined militia. This stemmed from the fact that pre-British Indian states were weak polities with divisible sovereignty; they were – to use the terminology of Burton Stein – segmentary states, lacking any concept of frontiers and standing armies. The divisive caste system of India further debilitated the pre-British indigenous states and armies. The argument goes that the rise of British power in the second half of the eighteenth century resulted in a sea change in warfare. The British introduced a bureaucratic state with standing armies capable of waging decisive battles and conclusive sieges in India. This interpretation dates back to two nineteenth-century British scholars of colonial India. They argued that Indians were incapable of constructing stable states and structured armies due to their racial failings. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians may have substituted a racial analysis for a cultural one, but otherwise they argue along more or less the same lines, that the limited scale of organised inter-state violence reflected the constraints upon the states of pre-British India.

The years of the French Revolution and First Empire are remembered as much for war and imperial expansion as for the great political and social reforms they introduced. The Revolutionaries saw themselves as sons of the Enlightenment, devoted to ideals of freedom and the betterment of humanity. Yet they unleashed a long period of almost continuous warfare, fought across the European continent and beyond, in North Africa and the Near East, in North America, Asia, and the Caribbean. In Europe, France faced a succession of coalitions of other European powers, from the First Coalition of 1792–7 – an international alliance that included Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, Piedmont, Naples, and Sardinia – through to the final coalition, the Seventh, which wearily regrouped to defeat Napoleon after his ill-judged return to France in 1815. The other governments of Europe feared France’s political ambitions as much as its military might, and they invariably saw themselves as the victims of French aggression, forced to make war to protect their territory from attack. Britain also feared the challenge to its naval and colonial supremacy which a revitalised France would pose; for London the war was as much about Jamaica and India as the balance of power in Continental Europe, about global competition for resources as much as the ideas of the Revolution in France.

Chapter one explores the very specific role the architects, leaders and volunteers of the International Brigades assigned themselves within the wider loyalist war effort, arguing that they became one of many interest groups keen to shape the antifascist struggle in their own image. Their ubiquitous claim to be bringing desperately-needed reserves of unity, order and discipline to the Republican cause owed much to the transnational attitudes of the unitߣs members as well as their more immediate links to the Communist Party and its armed Fifth Regiment. This self-assigned mission was internalised by many of the volunteers on the basis of their military training, trench press and experiences of combat, going on to shape their attitudes towards other groups fighting against Franco. In spite of an underlying rhetoric of antifascist unity, the volunteersߣ understanding of their place in Spain inspired mixed responses from their allies. By uncovering the creation and reception of the International Brigadesߣ military culture, this opening chapter restores the famous fighting force to the wider social, political and military context which underpins the rest of the book.

The Philippines campaign was the largest and costliest waged by the US armed forces in the Pacific during World War II. Central to the campaign is the role played by General Douglas MacArthur, one of the most controversial military leaders in US history. In 1941, Roosevelt needed a commander in the Philippines who could unify the American and Filipino forces and provide the needed energy and strategic acumen to defend the islands against a Japanese invasion. On the same day he signed the embargo against Japan in July 1941, Roosevelt reinstated MacArthur as a general in the US Army and gave him command of a new organization, the US Army Forces in the Far East, which would control all US and Philippine army forces in the region. MacArthur formed a staff, the “Bataan Gang,” that would support him over the long war to come. In the fighting of 1941–1942, MacArthur badly bungled the defense of the Philippines, resulting in the largest mass surrender of forces in US history. MacArthur was able to escape to fight another day in Australia, but, for the troops left behind, three years of desultory and brutal life in Japanese prison camps awaited.

The relationship between the International Brigades and Spain did not end with the volunteersߣ withdrawal from frontline service in late 1938. By way of conclusion, Making Antifascist War considers the post-war trajectories of the antifascist veterans with a particular emphasis on Spainߣs continuing impact on their military activities, political activism and antifascist identities. It then considers the process by which some veterans substituted making antifascist war with writing, speaking and recording it, showing how this process related to the shifting politics of their respective home countries. In the 1990s, the International Brigades came to occupy a particularly contentious place in Spaniardsߣ own memories of their twentieth-century past, with the governmentߣs offer of citizenship to those veterans still alive in 1996 unleashing fresh debates about their relationship to the country. By considering the ongoing role of Spain in the lives of the volunteers, this concluding chapter reaffirms the bookߣs underlying premise that the domestic context of the country is essentially in reaching a full understanding of their transnational military service.