Traditionally there has been much cheap sniping at Italy’s strategic planning in 1915: unduly ambitious, naïve, megalomaniacal. Staff plans for warfare were undeniably disconcerting. The prime peculiarity was a lack of precise planning or analysis. In the first draft of plans for war against Austria-Hungary, a mere 8-page summary that Cadorna presented in August 1914, the strategic objectives of the future campaign were sketchily alluded to; there was no trace of any precise schedule. In other respects, Cadorna was much more acute. He rightly predicted a long and expensive war and did his utmost to persuade ministers to mobilize Italian industry forthwith and bring it under state control. His intuitions were frustrated, however, by the civilians’ total aloofness from military matters. Never as in the period of Italy’s neutrality was the absence of a coordination mechanism between politicians and generals felt so disastrously. Roberto Bencivenga, at that time already attached to Cadorna’s secretariat, eloquently testified to the lack of any collaboration between cabinet and army Staff. Worse, the top military brass were deliberately kept in the dark about political decisions.

Around 1900, scholars commonly marked modern history from the French invasion of Italy in 1494. The size of the army that crossed the Alps – about 30,000 men – and its use of field artillery to batter down the curtain walls of ancient towns was, supposedly, unprecedented. As France’s claims in Italy were subsequently challenged by Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, the duchy of Milan and other Italian states collapsed, or changed hands, with astonishing abruptness. Today, it is no longer clear that the campaigns of the Wars of Italy (1494–1559) were so sharply differentiated from those of the last phase of the Hundred Years’ War (1415–53). But the political cataclysms of our own time seem to confirm Niccolò Machiavelli’s insights into the precariousness of power at the turn of the sixteenth century. No boundary was sacred, and no government lacked a portfolio of ideas for expansion, to be tested if circumstances seemed ripe. Since a power dominant in a given region often worked to keep things as they were, one might distinguish between ambitious governments eager for war and cautious governments concerned to preserve what they had. Any move by a hegemonic power was taken by its rivals as an attempt to reduce them to abject servitude.

Ottoman wars from the mid-fifteenth century through the end of the eighteenth century fundamentally changed the geopolitics of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and the Middle East. The Ottomans emerged in West Asia Minor toward the end of the thirteenth century. Known as “Turks” in contemporaneous Europe, the Ottoman ruling elite incorporated people of a wide variety of ethnic origins who considered themselves the followers and descendants of Osman (d. 1324?), the dynasty’s founder. Those loyal to the dynasty of Osman used the Turkish designation of “Osmanlı” (Turkish, “of Osman”), which over time came to be rendered in English as “Ottoman.” Within three generations after Osman’s death, the Ottomans had either conquered or subjugated into vassalage most of the preexisting polities and rival dynasties in the Balkans and Asia Minor. Timur Lenk’s victory over the Ottomans near Ankara in 1402 temporarily checked Ottoman expansion. Still, the dynasty recovered, and by 1453 Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444–46, 1451–81) sealed the Ottomans’ status as a formidable military power by conquering Constantinople, the capital of the thousand-year-old Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire. Expansion through conquest continued well into the sixteenth century. Ottoman battlefield victories under Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) against the Safavids of Persia (Chaldiran in 1514) and the Mamluks of Syria and Egypt (Marj Dabiq in 1516 and Raydaniyya in 1517) and under Sultan Süleyman (r. 1520–66) against the Hungarians (Mohács in 1526) resulted in spectacular Ottoman territorial gains in eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan, Syria, Egypt, and Hungary.

This chapter studies the history of European expansion in the oceans and the seas stretching east from the Cape of Good Hope. It aims to look at European violent activity here within the broader context of the history of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the South Chinese Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. In this short chapter, only a few major developments can be traced. Roughly three phases can be distinguished: first, armed vessels – sea power – opened the door for later European success. Then overseas bases – factories – were consolidated by the construction of fortresses. Finally, the Europeans – the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and the French – became drawn into military enterprises inland. This chapter, though, focuses on the naval aspects of European expansion, more specifically on the use of warfare to support overseas trade or to prevent competitors from trading.

One of the harshest criticisms the Court of Enquiry made of Cadorna was his organization at Udine which figured as some kind of feudal court cut off from the world outside. Inhabited by a circle of the faithful few whose privilege it was to live in daily contact with the overlord (Chief of Staff) and rigorously policing the coveted access to his person, it also housed a large population of ill-organized employees and heads of office, as well as an intermittent throng of postulants seeking audience (generals of combatant units, the occasional envoy from a foreign army, or delegates from the government in Rome). Decidedly, the Supreme Command was anything but a modern centralized command structure catering swiftly to the needs of a mass army.

After the conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru, Spanish dominance in the Americas was maintained through a combination of “soft” and “hard” power: a mixture of armed coercion and an elaborate legal-administrative apparatus which ensured that tension rarely escalated into full-blown conflict. The sturdiness of Spain’s empire may also be attributed to other significant factors, including epidemiology (differential immunity), topography, and the avoidance of certain types of military engagement, all of which tended to intersect with or reinforce the deployment of “soft” and “hard” power. There were at least three broad threats to Spain’s dominance: external enemies, particularly rival European states covetous of the economic advantages Spain obtained from its New World dominions; unsubdued Amerindians on the fringes of Spanish settlement, who clung to their autonomy and effectively controlled vast swathes of territory through to the end of the colonial period; and an internal, heterogeneous group from all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, from wealthy, privileged merchants to mistreated African slaves. At some point or other from 1521 until 1808, an internal challenge to Spanish dominance emerged from every sector of colonial society. Whether by design or felicitous coincidence, external and internal threats to Spanish dominance were rarely coterminous, which may help to explain the empire’s resilience and longevity.

The Filipino people struggled for three years to free their land from Japanese occupation. Hundreds of thousands resisted, while most did their best to just survive, providing what support they could to the resistance. A few Americans, civilian and military, also remained behind and formed a leadership cadre around which Filipinos could coalesce. Theirs was a lonely existence until the first fragile contact was established with Allied forces in Australia. First, they fought to survive. Next, they fought for recognition from MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area headquarters, which would bring with it legal protection, promotions, supplies, arms, equipment, money, and prestige. Finally, they often fought one another, sometimes as a matter of ideology but more often for power. The resistance grew on the back of Japanese atrocities that turned the Filipino people firmly against the occupation of their homeland. Slowly, steadily, inexorably, American and Filipino leaders formed the framework for a robust guerrilla struggle against Japanese occupation that morphed into one of the great resistance movements of World War II.

In just nine months, the Philippines campaign isolated the Japanese homeland from its conquered empire to the south, made possible an air and sea blockade to prevent the resources of the Netherlands East Indies from reaching Japan, gained a base equivalent to the British Isles in preparation for the invasion of Japan, liberated the Philippines and its people from Japanese occupation, freed Allied prisoners of war and civilian detainees held in camps, destroyed the majority of the remaining Japanese fleet, and destroyed several thousand aircraft. SWPA undertook eighty-seven amphibious landings – more than in any other theater. SWPA logisticians performed legendary feats of improvisation on a shoestring budget. Air support was crucial to the effectiveness of operations in the Philippines. Japanese atrocities convinced MacArthur to charge Yamashita with war crimes on the basis of command responsibility, for which the Japanese general was tried and executed. Civil affairs units and engineers were crucial to rehabilitating the Philippines, which had been devastated by three years of Japanese occupation and nine months of combat operations.

With the seizure of Manila and its nearby ports and airfields, Sixth Army had gained control over a vital logistical hub required for SWPA forces to participate in the anticipated invasion of Japan. But MacArthur was not satisfied with this achievement; he would settle for nothing less than the complete liberation of the Philippines from Japanese control. Although there was no military necessity for clearing the rest of Luzon and the few towns still occupied by Japanese forces, it was American territory, and thus leaving it under Japanese control would have been an afront to American (and MacArthur’s) honor. MacArthur also directed the Eighth Army under Lt. Gen. Robert Eichelberger to liberate the Central and Southern Philippines, using several divisions and regimental combat teams allocated for that purpose. Sixth Army would make do with the nine divisions and two separate regimental combat teams left at its disposal. Prolonged combat would steadily erode the combat effectiveness of those forces, even as they strove to clear Luzon, the largest and most important of the islands in the Philippine Archipelago, of Japanese forces.