This chapter presents the five major colonial wars that figure as the main case studies of this book: the 1896–1897 war against the Ndebele and Shona in Rhodesia (also known as First Chimurenga or Second Matabele War), the so-called ‘Hut Tax War’ in Sierra Leone (1898), the German–Herero and German–Nama War as well as genocide in German South West Africa (1904–1908), the Maji Maji War in German East Africa (1905–1907), and finally the Aceh War in the Netherlands East Indies (1873–ca. 1914). Their specifics notwithstanding, all these cases are typical to an extent for the large-scale ‘wars of colonial penetration’ that increasingly came to the fore around 1900. The empirical descriptions of these cases give an impression of the practice of colonial war, as well as provide the necessary background for the following chapters. A summary at the end highlights the practices and discursive patterns that connect all these cases and leads towards the analysis of these phenomena in the coming chapters.

This chapter charts how the rise of modern racism came to racialize colonial warfare over the nineteenth century, and touches on the role of imperial anxiety and colonial masculinity in such warfare. The extreme violence that was part of colonial warfare might once have rested on structural circumstances, but constant explanation and justification of such violence through racial categories meant that over time racialized notions came to precede the event, becoming generators of violence themselves. The chapter also offers general observations on the nature of colonial war and colonial armies and on the relationship between knowledge and Western militaries. The main point is that detailed knowledge on colonial warfare was largely absent in formal military education at the time, and that such knowledge was largely gathered through (practical) experience and remained concentrated in relatively small groups of ‘experts’. The chapter closes with a description of the manuals of colonial warfare published between 1829 and 1920 in the Dutch, British and German empires, presenting their general characteristics and a chronology and briefly discussing their use as historical sources.

A constructed racial otherness of the enemy distinguished colonial warfare from other modes of fin-de-siècle warfare, while it constituted at the same time a unifying element across different empires. It gave rise to a general culture of permissiveness and the fashioning of an imagined ‘native mind’, two preconditions for a specific body of knowledge on colonial warfare to emerge. This featured specific prescriptions as to what colonial warfare was to do, denoted here as the five ‘basic imperatives’: colonial warfare had to generate a ‘moral effect’ on the opponent, it had to be ‘bold and offensive’, it had to create a ‘lasting peace’ by using heavy force first, it had to ‘punish’ and, increasingly, it had to produce high death tolls (the ‘big bag’). The chapter explains how all these imperatives pushed towards extreme violence and demonstrates how all were present in very similar forms in the British, German and Dutch empires. For each, the origins, development and empire-specific appearance are discussed. With a transimperial corpus of colonial manuals as main source base, it is also shown that there was a further convergence in this body of knowledge around 1900.

Clearing the Central and Southern Philippines would liberate millions of Filipinos from Japanese occupation and eliminate the last bastions of Japanese resistance in the islands. MacArthur was willing to undertake these operations for the sake of the larger political, military, and humanitarian objectives at stake. MacArthur assigned this mission – the Victor series of operations in the Musketeer Operations Plan – to Lt. Gen. Robert Eichelberger’s Eighth Army, which was already engaged in clearing the remaining Japanese forces from Leyte. MacArthur was determined to extend the Philippines campaign beyond Luzon, despite lack of specific authorization from the JCS, which had counted on Filipino guerrillas to liberate the remainder of the Philippines south of Leyte, Samar, Mindoro, and Luzon. The Visayan–Mindanao campaign was an amphibious blitzkrieg, with Eighth Army conducting thirty-eight amphibious landings in forty-four days – nearly one a day – from February 19 to April 3, 1945, earning for it the nickname “Amphibious Eighth.”

The surest way of shaping the loyalist war effort in the International Brigadesߣ own image was by assimilating masses of Spaniards into their ranks. Although these native soldiers have been sidelined within the academic literature and popular imagination alike, chapter two shows that they were central to both the running and imagining of the transnational fighting force from early 1937 onwards. By inducting thousands of conscripts into the same military culture outlined in chapter one, the commissars hoped that they would become conscious citizen-soldiers of the Spanish Republic. The creative and sustained methods they used to pursue this objective ߝ literacy drives, the trench press and training included ߝ render the International Brigades an unexpected example of modern armies behaving as ߢschools for the nationߣ. Although the commissars did not always succeed in their antifascist socialising mission, their Spanish subordinates were crucial in enabling them to justify the International Brigadesߣ ongoing existence in the face of massive foreign losses as well as continue the important business of frontline fighting.

War was a regular feature and, at times, a dominant characteristic of international relations between the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the beginning of monarchical Europe’s struggle with Revolutionary France in 1792. At least until the Enlightenment, contemporaries viewed it not merely as an acceptable way of pursuing international rivalries, but as a more normal and natural state of affairs than peace. Periods of open conflict, during which diplomatic representatives would usually be withdrawn, were assumed to be inevitable and, indeed, were frequently the anticipated outcome of the policies adopted by rulers and their advisers. The eighteenth century was significantly more pacific than its seventeenth-century predecessor had been, though in turn much more bellicose than its nineteenth-century successor. According to one calculation, the European ‘great powers’ were engaged in warfare for eighty-eight years of the century 1600–1700, sixty-four years from 1700–1800, and twenty-four years from 1800–1900. During the shorter period between 1700 and 1790, Russia was at war at some point during all nine decades; Austria, France, and Britain during eight; Spain and Sweden during seven; Prussia during six; and the Ottoman Empire during five: figures which underline the ubiquity of armed struggle even during the less bellicose eighteenth century.

While the Japanese and American fleets were fighting in the seas surrounding the Philippine Islands, MacArthur’s forces were expanding the beachhead and seizing the high ground leading to Leyte Valley. The campaign on Leyte would last for two and a half rain-soaked months and mop up operations several months longer. Japanese Imperial General Headquarters decided to put forth a determined effort to defend Leyte, realizing that an American victory there would inevitably lead to the projection of American power onto Luzon and the ultimate fall of the Philippines. American submarines and aircraft based in the Philippines would sever the Japanese lines of communication to the Dutch East Indies – and thus drain the lifeblood of raw materials upon which the Japanese war economy depended. But by pouring reinforcements into Leyte, the Japanese high command made the defense of Luzon impossible. The troops fighting through the swamps and over the tortuous mountains of Leyte did not know it, but they were fighting in the decisive battle of the Philippines campaign.

The presentation of the Commission on Caporetto final report to Parliament, in 1919, marked the end of Cadorna’s career and public life. But not the end of a new battle for his reputation. His monumental account of his own performance as commander, published in 1921 (War on the Italian Front), was a first rejoinder to what he saw as a campaign of vituperation with the blessing and backing of governments in Rome. This quarrelsome, bitter struggle was ended by Fascism. The regime was eager to patch up the old rifts of civil war (meaning 1914, but also 1919–1922); above all, it sought to gather as much consensus as it could. The time had come, it decided, to quell all controversy surrounding the ‘Cadorna affair’. On 4th November 1924 the former Chief was raised to the new top rank in the army. It must be said that the aged general keenly appreciated the honours bestowed on him by the new war-mongering fascist Italy. But the long civil war, setting in on the heels of world conflict, triggered a process of hypostatization, turning him into an icon, a paladin, or an insensitive, blood-thirsty criminal.

In early summer 1914 many thought the Italian army grossly unsuited to modern warfare. Cadorna himself complained that it was on the brink of collapse. The barracks were nearly deserted, the store-rooms empty, the regiments so understaffed they could not even put on basic training, while for want of officers whole companies were being placed under newly promoted sergeants. But there was another problem: the commander-in-chief’s utter distrust of his own men, and all his fellow countrymen, come to that. It was a deep-seated conviction. Italy was too liberal and permissive, lacked ‘social discipline’ (as he called a people’s propensity for strict respect of the law, social hierarchies and institutions), and this caused an unhealthy situation which inevitably corrupted the national servicemen. Unsurprisingly, his first act as head of the army in wartime was to announce implacable iron disciplinary measures to be applied with brutal severity so as to bring the unwarlike rebellious Italian people to heel.

The US invasion of Leyte on October 20, 1944, prompted the Japanese to activate plan Shō-1, the defense of the Philippines. The Imperial Japanese Navy would seek a decisive battle in Leyte Gulf, while the Imperial Japanese Army would significantly reinforce its forces on Leyte to fight a decisive battle with the Sixth US Army on the island. American troops invaded the beaches south of Tacloban with limited resistance from the Japanese defenders, allowing MacArthur to make good his promise to return with an iconic photo of him wading ashore alongside Philippine President Sergio Osmeña and members of the SWPA staff. The US and Japanese navies then fought a decisive four-day battle for supremacy in the waters surrounding the Philippines, which the US Third and Seventh Fleets won after some anxious moments in the fighting off the coast of Samar. Japanese kamikazes made their appearance on the final day of the battle, and they would bedevil the US Pacific Fleet from that point onward until the end of the war. After the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the remaining elements of the Imperial Japanese Navy would never again contest the Pacific Ocean.

Blame for the pointless attacks and scorn for men’s lives that the Italian commanders were so often prone to is usually set down to the evil doctrines of Luigi Cadorna’s notorious libretto rosso, probably the war’s most execrated book of regulations. Yet the red booklet was no eccentric anomaly in the prevailing military climate of Europe. Cadorna’s recommendations were consistent with the cult of the offensive, faith in the bayonet charge, and harping on moral principles as the key to victory that could be found in all international military teaching in summer 1914. The real problem was that the commander of the Italian army then proved unable to adapt to the disquieting novelties of a war based on materials and trench combat. More and more problematically, Italy’s Supreme Command went on issuing orders designed for a quite different war than was actually being experienced by the frontline troops.