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15418 results in Military history

Page 313 of 771

  • 2 - China's long war with Japan

  • from Part I - Grand Strategies
  • 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 51-77

  • Summary

    In 1895, Japan's rise in industrial and military power first found its imperial destiny in its war on decadent China, with its seizure of Taiwan and effective hegemony over Korea. In October 1938, after the fall of Wuhan, Chiang Kai-shek told senior commanders that his initial strategy of aggressive defence had been successfully concluded. In February and then in April 1941, Chiang informed the Americans about operation BARBAROSSA. The Combined Chiefs of Staff of the American and British armed forces would determine worldwide war strategy, except in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but also, in effect, in China. On 7 December 1941, at Pearl Harbor, Japan struck the famous first blow. For Chiang Kai-shek, the threat to China's interests posed by the strategy of Europe first confirmed the value of a Soviet Red Army attack on Japanese forces in China. The civilian economy of Nationalist China was under near-blockade even before the Japanese took Rangoon.

  • 17 - Wartime occupation by Italy

  • 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 436-460

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the stories of Second World War resistance, collaboration and liberation in Greece and Yugoslavia. The rise of the resistance was, in part, an attempt to fill the vacuum of political representation, to speak for Yugoslavs and Greeks. The organized state, including its most recent interwar Greek and Yugoslav manifestations, had always had a weak impact on the impoverished rural and mountainous Balkan interior. Axis occupation policies did not appear to be any different. Following their lightning invasion in April, elite German units were promptly withdrawn to take part in Operation Barbarossa. Collaboration is ultimately an 'occupier-driven phenomenon', as historian Jan Gross described it. The willingness of the occupiers to permit collaboration in Greece and Yugoslavia was also, to a certain extent, 'resistance-driven', and herein lies the amplified contribution of the harried resisters to Axis occupational policies in the Balkans.

  • 11 - The war of the cities

  • 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 298-328

  • Summary

    The war of the factories was essential to the outcome of the war. The Second World War represented a repurposed, albeit temporary, redirection of the international economy for military and industrial purposes. The Soviet Union had made itself into the world's third leading heavy industrial power behind the USA and Germany and its emphasis was emphatically military. If one accepts the default definition of globalization as an increase in cross-border flows of goods and services, capital and labour, then the mobilization for war initiated a sort of militarized, non-market globalization process that remarkably bears many of the hallmarks of the post-1980s second wave of globalization. The statistical volumes of trade, capital or labour flows are indeed trenchant indicators of globalization, but qualitative alterations in the organization of production, the exchange of knowledge, relationships between producers, subcontractors and suppliers were also highly significant, many of which started during the Second World War and had a significant impact on the post-war period.

  • 23 - Prisoners of war

  • 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 664-689

  • Summary

    The numbers of prisoners of war captured during the conflicts that make up the Second World War runs into millions, even if the military personnel that were interned at the end of hostilities are excluded. German treatment of Polish prisoners in captivity was governed by the racial assumptions of the Nazi state and the economic necessities of the regime. Relatively few prisoners were taken on the Western Front by either the British or the Germans, until the defeat of Axis forces in North Africa in the winter of 1942-43. Repatriations from the Soviet Union began after the war ended, but even in 1949, the Russians retained around 85,000 prisoners reclassified as war criminals, sentenced to long periods of incarceration and hard labour. On the Eastern Front in Europe and in the Pacific War, the decisions made not to adhere to the conventions meant untold misery and often death for the millions taken prisoner in these conflicts.

  • 13 - The Mediterranean and North Africa, 1940–1944

  • 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 358-388

  • Summary

    The distinctive character of the war in the Mediterranean was shaped by the existence of four strategic dispositions. Fighting for territory around the Mediterranean was the preserve of those called as dominators, fighting to get through the Mediterranean, voyagers, and fighting to get out of the Mediterranean, escapers. A hostile Italy made it hard to imagine the artery as a centrepiece of strategy. The Royal Navy used a friendly defence correspondent, Hector Bywater, subsequently famous as the man who predicted Pearl Harbor, to put its doubts into the public domain. The 'arterial strategy' made the most sense of the North African campaigns. Winston Churchill came close to suggesting that not only the British Army but the Royal Navy needed to deliver a blood sacrifice to prove it could face the Germans. The failure to concentrate resources in the Mediterranean was the fundamental mistake identified by the German Commander Marshal Kesselring.

  • Introduction to Part I

  • from Part I - Ideologies
  • 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 13-20

  • Summary

    In Italian and German propaganda, the 'axis' was celebrated as the joining of forces between two long suppressed but now re-emerging empires, with shared histories and superior cultures, as well as common foes who sought to prevent them from assuming their rightful place among the world's great powers. Against the background of continuing friction and half-hearted coordination between the three major Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, this chapter discusses what it was that actually held the 'axis' together. All three regimes shared a common belief in the superiority of some kind of authoritarianism over liberal democracy and the desire to create new orders, both at home and abroad, notably through an expansionist foreign policy that would revise the Paris Peace system established in 1919. In all three countries between the later 1930s and 1945, 'empire-building' played a significant role, either as a source of radicalization (as in Japan) or the result of it (as in Germany and Italy).

  • 22 - The British Empire, 1939–1945

  • 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 558-580

  • Summary

    When France went to war in September 1939, it did so as a global imperial power. The French Empire emerged from the Second World War mired in crisis, and only partially intact. Between 1939 and 1945, this empire experienced three types of armed conflict, world war, civil war and contested decolonization. Much of this was unanticipated by the empire's rulers before the calamitous French defeat of June 1940. The empire's governing elites were bitterly divided about the causes of France's defeat, about its implications for republican democracy, about the probable outcome of the war. Economic crisis proved no barrier to the embrace of Vichy's 'National Revolution' by colonial regimes. With an empire wracked by violent internal division, the ebullience of French imperialism in 1945 seems puzzling. France moved in rapid succession from a nation defeated and occupied to one liberated and resurgent. A longer wartime constant was the state of undeclared civil war in its colonies.

  • 8 - Soviet strategy

  • from Part I - Grand Strategies
  • 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 213-244

  • Summary

    Any strategic decision according to A.A. Svechin answered three questions: 'Who, Where, and When?' Hence, strategy admitted only three standards of measure: 'Mass, Space, and Time'. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, as Soviet ideologists pondered whether contradictions within the imperialist system might pit the major capitalist powers against each other, RKKA planners gravitated to a scenario for war that was closer to Svechin than to Lenin or Trotsky. Further developments in military art marched in lock-step with enhancements to technology and force structure. A decade later, in 1941, the initial German assault would demonstrate the error in Adolf Hitler's expectation of a quick victory. Until May, pre-emption via a surprise offensive may have been the preferred option, but this assertion rests on scattered evidence. Soviet relations with the Western Allies were seriously strained during this period. For the Soviet leaders, this was as much a matter of status and prestige as it was of actual aid to war-fighting.

  • 23 - Interpretations of catastrophe

  • 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 630-653

  • Summary

    This chapter addresses the various strategies by which European intellectuals, both secular and religious, sought to understand the catastrophic events of mid-twentieth-century Europe. It addresses four distinctive genres in the history of thinking about catastrophe: historical, philosophical, literary and theological. Before turning to the substance of the analysis it may seem fitting to offer some preliminary explanation as to why intellectual responses to the war would merit the historian's attention. In the brief survey of various interpretations of the mid-century catastrophe Jonas's lecture is distinguished by its startling, even extravagant suggestion that the horror of the Nazi extermination camps forces us to consider not only our categories of moral and political judgement but also our understanding of the divine. According to Jonas this task is specifically urgent for the Jew rather than the Christian, since for Christianity 'the world is anyway largely of the devil and always an object of suspicion' given the doctrine of original sin.

  • 17 - Anglo-American strategic bombing, 1940–1945

  • 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 485-526

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the Second World War history of Anglo-American strategic bombardment, explaining it as it was at the time: a crisis-driven effort to overcome battered assumptions and unanticipated problems that, on several occasions, nearly brought the entire enterprise to a crashing halt. In 1936, the Royal Air Force's metropolitan command structure was reorganized around four divisions: Bomber Command, Fighter Command, Coastal Command and Training Command. Sir Arthur Harris was technologically savvy, and had crucial experience as the head of Bomber Command's No. 5 Group. To make a cross-Channel invasion a viable prospect, the Anglo-Americans had to be in a position to gain a reasonable command of the air over the landing zone and the area around it. In January 1945, Arnold opted for a reshuffling of command in the Far East. In the Far Eastern theatre, the Americans followed a path similar to the one the British had followed in Europe.

Page 313 of 771