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15418 results in Military history

Page 309 of 771

  • 12 - Operations on the Eastern Front, 1941–1945

  • from Part II - Campaigns
  • Edited by John Ferris, University of Calgary, Evan Mawdsley, University of Glasgow
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Second World War
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    23 April 2015, pp 331-357

  • Summary

    In a conflict as massive as the Second World War, no theatre can claim absolute centrality to the war's outcome. If any campaign comes close, however, it is the Soviet-German struggle on the Eastern Front. As a result of German tactical and operational superiority, combined with surprise, the first days and weeks of the invasion were a Soviet disaster. Germany fell far short of the human, industrial and raw material resources of the Soviet Union and the British Empire, to say nothing of the United States. Stalingrad is glibly portrayed in popular accounts of the war as a battle dictated by propaganda. As the Soviet offensives of early 1943 slowly ended, they left a front line dominated by an enormous salient around the city of Kursk, ninety miles north to south and sixty miles in depth. In the aftermath of the war, the Soviet Union's triumph over Nazi Germany became the central mobilizing myth of society.

  • 15 - Wartime occupation by Germany

  • from Part III - Occupation, Collaboration, Resistance and Liberation
  • Edited by Richard Bosworth, Jesus College, Oxford, Joseph Maiolo, King's College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Second World War
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    23 April 2015, pp 385-411

  • Summary

    The dynamic tension between collaboration and resistance inevitably shaped the experience of liberation, when the resistance forces and governments-in-exile sought to settle scores with their domestic enemies and shape the post-war political order. There is a reason that historians of the Second World War keep turning back to France: the baffling complexities of the French response to occupation, from obsequious collaboration to heroic resistance, provide a window into the turmoil of a continent. The most influential historian of the dark years of occupation, Robert Paxton, has written that 'collaboration was a French proposal that Hitler ultimately rejected'. Resistance provided a foundation on which a story of national resilience and defiance could be based. Old elites fairly rapidly returned to positions of influence in post-war Western Europe, and their interests lay in a restoration of stability, economic reconstruction and a turning away from the bitter divisions of the war years.

  • 11 - The war in the West, 1939–1940

  • from Part II - Campaigns
  • Edited by John Ferris, University of Calgary, Evan Mawdsley, University of Glasgow
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Second World War
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    23 April 2015, pp 315-330

  • Summary

    The summer of 1940 is hallowed in the memory of the English-speaking peoples. The BEF returned, alive but beaten, leaving its kit behind. On 30 June, when victory over France was sure, Adolf Hitler received a proposal about how to beat Britain, from his chief advisor in the OKW, General Jodl. Although Jodl combined the efforts of the three Wehrmacht services, his emphasis was on shattering Britain's air force and economy. The Luftwaffe was excellent at ground support and air superiority. Its fighter aircraft matched British ones, its pilots initially were better, and their tactics remained so. The Luftwaffe was most effective between 24 August and 5 September 1940, when it attacked forward RAF airbases and their C3I systems. Even then, it caused too little damage to approach victory, and could not sustain its losses. Hitler had greater ambitions than Britain could tolerate: his terms must wreck British independence and integrity, and leave it completely at his mercy.

  • 26 - The Second World War in global memory space

  • from Part IV - In the Aftermath of Catastrophic Destruction
  • Edited by Michael Geyer, University of Chicago, Adam Tooze, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Second World War
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    23 April 2015, pp 698-724

  • Summary

    The Second World War was clearly one of the most extravagantly violent events in human history. Pacifists in occupied countries faced particular challenges, since under occupation pacifism could function as either resistance or collaboration. In France, for instance, there was a notable strand of pacifism among French collaborationists, many of whom had been opponents of a French war against Germany in the first place. One German lexicon published during the Third Reich defined pacifism as 'fundamental opposition to war, which easily leads to treason, especially as a result of international cooperation; adherents of pacifism in Germany in particular were for the most part traitors. The wartime insignificance of pacifism was particularly striking in Britain, where pacifism and conscientious objection had been an especially brisant issue during the First World War. The most obvious legacy of wartime pacifism was the way it fed directly and influentially into the emergence of post-war reform movements, most obviously the Civil Rights movement.

  • 27 - Landscapes of destruction

  • from Part IV - In the Aftermath of Catastrophic Destruction
  • Edited by Michael Geyer, University of Chicago, Adam Tooze, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Second World War
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    23 April 2015, pp 725-748

  • Summary

    The human toll of the Second World War dwarfed the combined efforts of states and civil society entities to ameliorate that suffering. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the massive humanitarian operations directed by Herbert Hoover during the First World War and its aftermath had become mythologized in large reservoirs of popular memory. The transition of international refugee management responsibilities to the International Refugee Organization opens a window onto some wider geopolitical and institutional legacies that United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) bequeathed to the post-war international order. The massive state-directed aid programmes of the Second World War created unprecedentedly vast opportunities for civil society organizations to engage in international humanitarian endeavours, even as the nature of those opportunities were regulated by governments. The issue of human rights and its ideological cousin, humanitarianism, invites a concluding reflection on that blend of compassion and cold calculation that produced the moral economy of the Second World War.

  • 24 - Guerrillas and counter-insurgency

  • from Part III - Fighting Forces
  • Edited by John Ferris, University of Calgary, Evan Mawdsley, University of Glasgow
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Second World War
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    23 April 2015, pp 690-715

  • Summary

    This chapter surveys military and operational aspects of the main guerrilla and counter-insurgency campaigns across Axis-occupied Europe and Asia. It emphasizes historical precedents, concepts of insurgency and counterinsurgency, and how far expectations for such warfare were met. Special Operations Executive initially sought to optimize the use of resistance through the detonator strategy: building, supplying and training vast numbers of fifth columnists. Between summer 1943 and spring 1944, waning Axis military fortunes not only benefited guerrilla movements. In the Soviet Union, the military shift against Germany following the end of the Battle of Stalingrad in February burgeoned in the months after the July Battle of Kursk. During that battle, moreover, guerrillas carried out extensive sabotage against German supplies and reinforcements, the first significant example of guerrillas working as an adjunct to conventional operations during the Second World War.

  • 10 - Wars of displacement

  • from Part II - The Social Practice of Peoples’ War, 1939–1945
  • Edited by Michael Geyer, University of Chicago, Adam Tooze, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Second World War
    Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    23 April 2015, pp 277-297

  • Summary

    Issues of war finance engaged Japan, republican or nationalist China and the Chinese Communists throughout all fourteen years, and for the Japanese also included Southeast Asia between 1941 and 1945. This chapter shows that long periods of war and occupation in Asia could be financed by printing money because the demand for it held up sufficiently well that hyperinflation was largely avoided and confidence in money was not entirely destroyed. Japan, although its mobilization for war was badly managed and often poorly executed, never had any difficulty in financing war, starting with the so-called Peking Incident in 1937 and continuing until the Pacific War ended in 1945. Finance for both the Sino-Japanese and the Pacific War was at the expense of much higher inflation than for other major combatants, drastic cuts in civilian consumption, and considerable repressed inflation. In China and Southeast Asia, the financial techniques Japan adopted to finance occupation avoided any real payment.

Page 309 of 771