Bøker i Cambridge Military Histories-serien

This book presents a new way of looking at twentieth-century military history and Britain's decline as a great power. G. C. Peden explores how from the Edwardian era to the 1960s warfare was transformed by a series of innovations, including dreadnoughts, submarines, aircraft, tanks, radar, nuclear weapons and guided missiles.

The Indian army fought on the western front with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from 1914 to 1918. The traditional interpretations of its performance have been dominated by ideas that it was a failure. This book offers a radical reconsideration by revealing new answers to the debate's central questions, such as whether the Indian army 'saved' the BEF from defeat in 1914, or whether Indian troops were particularly prone to self-inflicting wounds and fleeing the trenches. It looks at the Indian army from top to bottom, from generals at headquarters to snipers in no man's land. It takes a global approach, exploring the links between the Indian army's 1914-18 campaigning in France and Belgium and its pre-1914 small wars in Asia and Africa, and comparing the performance of the Indian regiments on the western front to those in China, East Africa, Mesopotamia and elsewhere.

Why was the German army defeated on the Western Front? Did its morale collapse? Or was it beaten by the improved military effectiveness of the British army? Jonathan Boff offers an innovative, comparative analysis of these key issues during the 'Hundred Days' campaign of 1918 which challenges existing interpretations.

Giulio Douhet is generally considered the world's most important air-power theorist and this book offers the first comprehensive account of his air-power concepts. It ranges from 1884 when an air service was first implemented within the Italian military to the outbreak of the Second World War, and explores the evolution and dissemination of Douhet's ideas in an international context. It examines the impact of the Libyan war, the First World War and Ethiopian war on the development of Italian air-power strategy. It also addresses the issue of Douhet's advocacy of strategic bombing, exploring why it was that Douhet became an advocate of city bombing; the meaning and the limits of his core concept of 'command of the air'; and the mutual impact of air power, military and naval thought. It also takes into account alternatives to Douhetism such as the theories developed by Amedeo Mecozzi and others.

Drawing upon archival research in four continents, Timothy C. Winegard delivers the first comprehensive comparative history of how the indigenous peoples of Canada, Australia, Newfoundland, New Zealand and South Africa experienced the Great War. He also explores the current and evolving socio-economic and political ramifications of their service and sacrifice.

Haig's Intelligence is an important study of Douglas Haig's controversial command during the First World War. Based on extensive new research, it addresses a perennial question about the British army on the Western Front between 1916 and 1918: why did they think they were winning? Jim Beach reveals how the British perceived the German army through a study of the development of the British intelligence system, its personnel and the ways in which intelligence was gathered. He also examines how intelligence shaped strategy and operations by exploring the influence of intelligence in creating perceptions of the enemy. He shows for the first time exactly what the British knew about their opponent, when and how and, in so doing, sheds significant new light on continuing controversies about the British army's conduct of operations in France and Belgium and the relationship between Haig and his chief intelligence officer, John Charteris.

This is an important new history of decision- and policy-making in the British Admiralty from Trafalgar to the aftermath of Jutland. The author explores the role of technological change, the global balance of power, and finance and the First World War, in shaping decision-making and organisational development within the Admiralty.

This book comprehensively revises our understanding of the development of military theory and doctrine in the German army between the wars. It shows that military planning concentrated primarily on a defensive war against superior enemies with the German army too weak for most of the period to effectively repel invaders.

This book is an absorbing account of secret operations and political intrigue in wartime Thailand. It sheds light on Thailand's clandestine relations with Britain, the United States and China, each of which had ambitions for post-war influence in Bangkok, and on the rivalry between the SOE and the OSS.

This is the first study in English of the French general who led the Allies to victory in 1918. Elizabeth Greenhalgh sheds new light on how Foch grappled with the enemy, with his allies and with his political masters, and how he learned to wage modern industrial war.

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began the largest and most costly campaign in military history. Its failure was a key turning point of the Second World War. The operation was planned as a Blitzkrieg to win Germany its Lebensraum in the east, and the summer of 1941 is well-known for the German army's unprecedented victories and advances. Yet the German Blitzkrieg depended almost entirely upon the motorised Panzer groups, particularly those of Army Group Centre. Using archival records, in this book David Stahel presents a history of Germany's summer campaign from the perspective of the two largest and most powerful Panzer groups on the Eastern front. Stahel's research provides a fundamental reassessment of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, highlighting the prodigious internal problems of the vital Panzer forces and revealing that their demise in the earliest phase of the war undermined the whole German invasion.

This book examines the Habsburg Army's occupation of Serbia from 1914 through 1918, arguing that it was different from other great power colonial projects.

Why did the Ottoman Empire enter the First World War, months after the war's devastations had become clear? Mustafa Aksakal's dramatic study demonstrates that responsibility went far beyond the war minister, Enver Pasha, and that the road to war was paved by the demands of a politically interested public.

This unique account of how German and British soldiers endured the horror of the First World War argues that at the heart of armies' robustness lay natural human resilience. It explains why the British outlasted their opponents by examining and comparing German and British soldiers' motivation, morale and coping mechanisms.

This book tells the story of the invasion of France at the twilight of Napoleon's empire. With more than a million men under arms throughout central Europe, Coalition forces poured over the Rhine River to invade France between late November 1813 and early January 1814. Three principal army groups drove across the great German landmark, smashing the exhausted French forces that attempted to defend the eastern frontier. In less than a month, French forces ingloriously retreated from the Rhine to the Marne; Allied forces were within one week of reaching Paris. This book provides the first complete English-language study of the invasion of France along a front that extended from Holland to Switzerland.

The first comprehensive history of the decisive Fall Campaign of 1813 that determined control of Central Europe following Napoleon's catastrophic defeat in Russia the previous year. Michael V. Leggiere reveals how the defeat of Napoleon in Germany was made possible by Prussian victories and highlights the breakdown of his strategy.

Before 1815 Britain established a global empire, achieved naval domination, and laid the foundations of the first industrial revolution. This book explains the central and often underestimated role of the British state in providing the money and infrastructure to support its maritime ascendancy and develop expertise in overseas expansion.

For almost 90 years, the battle of Verdun has been synonymous with senseless slaughter. By examining the development of German military ideas from the Franco-German War in 1871 to the First World War, this book offers an unprecedented understanding of one of the bloodiest battles of the twentieth century.

A biography of Sir Douglas Haig, one of the most controversial commanders in British military history. Paul Harris decisively answers the contested issue of whether Haig's tactics cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers during the First World War or were essential to the Allied victory.

The first comprehensive English-language history of the Axis campaign in North Africa offers an account of the battles of 1941-3, Rommel's generalship, the divisions that undermined the Axis coalition and the place of the campaign within the broader strategic context of the war.

Imperial Germany's invasion of France in August 1914 represented a threat to the great power status of both Britain and France. This book tells the story from both British and French perspectives of how the two countries managed to create a winning coalition relationship.

For the first time Huw Bennett examines the conduct of British Army soldiers during their counterinsurgency activities in Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. He uncovers the uneasy relationship between official notions of minimum force and colonial traditions of using exemplary force to terrorise the civilian population into submission.

Military professionals and theorists have long understood the relevance of morale in war. Montgomery, the victor at El Alamein, said, following the battle, that 'the more fighting I see, the more I am convinced that the big thing in war is morale'. Jonathan Fennell, in examining the North African campaign through the lens of morale, challenges conventional explanations for Allied success in one of the most important and controversial campaigns in British and Commonwealth history. He introduces new sources, notably censorship summaries of soldiers' mail, and an innovative methodology that assesses troop morale not only on the evidence of personal observations and official reports but also on contemporaneously recorded rates of psychological breakdown, sickness, desertion and surrender. He shows for the first time that a major morale crisis and stunning recovery decisively affected Eighth Army's performance during the critical battles on the Gazala and El Alamein lines in 1942.

This book challenges the view that World War II was decided by land battles. It argues that victory was due to the production and allocation of American and British air and sea weaponry that was used to destroy over half of the Axis's equipment before it reached the traditional 'battlefield'.

This is the story of the highest battlefield of World War Two, which brings to life the extremes of mountain warfare. The Caucasus Mountains became the battleground between elite German mountain divisions and the untrained soldiers of the Red Army, as they fought each other, the weather and the terrain.

The first authoritative study of the Italian armed forces and the relationship between the military and foreign policies of Fascist Italy from 1922 to 1940. John Gooch shows that Mussolini's generals and admirals bore a share of the blame for defeat through policies that all too often rested on incompetence.

This is a major reassessment of the role of the war at sea in Allied victory in the Mediterranean. Richard Hammond demonstrates how the anti-shipping campaign was the fulcrum about which strategy in the theatre pivoted, and the vital enabling factor ultimately leading to Allied victory in the region.

Allied political and military leadership had been planning for, and expecting, the First World War to continue into 1919. In this exploration of Allied war plans for 1918-1919, Meighen McCrae uncovers how the Supreme War Council became a successful mechanism for coalition war.

This is a major new study of the role of communications in shaping the outcome of British military operations on the Western Front during World War 1. It argues that communications were not only a leading cause of the trench stalemate of 1915-17, but were also crucial in helping break the deadlock in 1918.