Category: Military
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AW186 – The Biggest Recent Developments in Ancient Warfare
We regularly receive emails for Jasper and Murray with suggestions for Ancient Warfare Answers. Greg asked ‘what have been the biggest developments or changes in the past 15-20 years in our understanding of ancient warfare?’ It is too good of a question for just Murray and Jasper, so in this episode of the Ancient Warfare…
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3110 – The American Airborne Landings during D-Day
??The Allied landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944 were the largest amphibious operation ever undertaken in military history. Across five separate beaches, over 150,000 men made up the landing forces from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. To protect the men on the beaches, a massive bombardment of naval gunfire and aerial bombs…
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3109 – Lord Dunmore’s War
‘At the end of the Seven Years War, the Proclamation of 1763 was issued by the British, which granted any lands west of the Appalachian Mountains in the Ohio Valley of North America to the Native Americans. American colonists could not settle any of these lands and would be forcibly removed by British forces if…
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3108 – The Armenian Genocide, part 2
In his 1944 book ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe’, Raphaël Lemkin says that “genocide is composite and manifold, and that it signifies a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of life of a [specific] group.” Collective dispossession, including plunder and spoliation, is only one of the many crimes…
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3107 – The Armenian Genocide, part 1
Agitation from the Armenian community for political reform and autonomy, brewing since the 1870s, was further intensified by large-scale massacres that occurred across the empire in 1894–1897 and in Cilicia in 1909; additionally, the more seemingly benign expressions of oppression and discrimination faced by Armenians, which had increased throughout the second half of the nineteenth…
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3106 – The Battle of Königgrätz, 3 July 1866
The battle of Königgrätz (also known as the battle of Sadowa or the battle of Chlum) was the most decisive clash between the armies of Prussia and those of Austria and her allies during the short, seven-week long, Austro-Prussian War in 1866. The war itself is also known under several different titles. Königgrätz was also…
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3105 – War in the Philippines
At the end of the 19th century tensions had been high between the United States and Spain, the point of friction being Spanish colonial rule specifically in Cuba. When the USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana harbour, it pushed the American President McKinley into war with Spain. Ostensibly the war was to support rebels fighting…
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3104 – Thomas Henry Kavanagh – The ‘First’ Civilian Victoria Cross
When the Indian Mutiny broke out in May 1857, members of the Honourable East India Company became involved. Soon, several outstandingly brave deeds by them and other volunteer civilians were reported back in England but there was no official way to recognise civilian valour in times of armed conflict. It became clear that the warrant…
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3103 – Interwar Naval Treaties and Battleship Development
At the end of the First World War France and Italy had wanted the German High Seas Fleet divided between them, Britain and the USA wanted it scuttled, which Germany did anyway without permission. The resulting Treaty of Versailles imposed strict limits on size and number of warships the newly constituted German government was allowed…
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3102 – The Battle of Marathon, part 2
On the field of Marathon, the Persians and Athenians faced off against each other for days on end. Finally, when it was the strategos Miltiades’ day of command, the Athenians took action. Herodotus tells us that: ‘The Athenian army moved into position for the coming struggle. The right wing was commanded by Callimachus – for…