Volume 72, Number 4 · October 2008

Frontiers provide a way to approach not only the narrative of military histories, but also key concepts in military history. This essay investigates each of these perspectives, indicating as it does key dynamics of change.

Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg provides one of the most informed assessments of the military organization of the Ottonian kingdom of Germany during the tenth and early eleventh centuries. He describes a tripartite, Carolingian-type military system that consists of the professional soldiers serving in the military households of the king and major magnates, and of two types of militia forces. The first of these consists of the select levy, which served on military campaigns. The second militia force is the general levy that served the needs of local defense. Throughout his discussion of Ottonian military affairs, Thietmar places his heaviest emphasis on siege warfare.

A dispute arose during the 1864 Battle of Spotsylvania Court House over who had captured three flags from Union forces, Virginians of William Mahone’s division or North Carolinians under the command of James Henry Lane. Over the next four decades, Lane defended his men’s claims with increasingly personal attacks on Mahone. His efforts succeeded only after U.S. Senator Mahone made common cause with Republicans. This article maintains that Lane’s actions can only be understood fully within the context of postwar politics and especially the culture of honor, considerations that must be applied to all post-Civil War sources.

The role that Admiralty communications intelligence played in the Battle of Jutland has been given mixed reviews in histories of the battle. Historians acknowledge the superb performance of the Admiralty’s cryptographic organization in efficiently decrypting German naval communications before and during the battle, yet the fact that communications intelligence did not reach Admiral Jellicoe in usable or recognizable form had led historians to judge this a failure. This article argues that contrary to the accepted history, the dissemination system performed as planned, since the Admiralty placed a higher premium on the security of the intelligence source over its operational use by the fleet at sea.

The Royal Air Force (RAF) is generally considered to have had a monolithic approach to its early doctrine, driven by the beliefs of its first leader, Lord Trenchard, with regard to the strategic use of air power. However, a careful examination of the actual content of initial RAF doctrine reveals a far more complicated picture, with a nuanced approach that balanced the need to justify the maintenance of an independent air force with the more prosaic requirement to instruct its officers in the “bread and butter” activity of air policing. This essay explores the complexity of RAF doctrine during the first five years of its existence, 1918-1923.

Multinational naval operations have become almost routine for western navies, but little is known about how navies came to work together cohesively. This article suggests that the naval cooperation formalized by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after World War II had its roots in the wartime experience of the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy (RN), which incorporated the remnants of European navies driven from the continent by Germany. In particular, the article analyzes the RN’s 9th Submarine Flotilla based at Dundee, Scotland (1940­45), which comprised British, Polish, Free French, Norwegian, and Dutch submarines, for lessons concerning successful multinational naval operations.

Historians have often used a 1966 Army report nicknamed PROVN either to cast aspersions on the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam between 1964 and 1968, General William C. Westmoreland, or to praise his successor, General Creighton Abrams. This interpretation is simplistic and inaccurate. Although the report criticized aspects of the war under Westmoreland, its target was really the U.S. and Vietnamese governments. Moreover, PROVN’s conclusions were less radical and its remedies less novel than observers have tended to admit. A fresh look at PROVN reveals significant continuities in thought between Westmoreland, the report, and Abrams.

Studies of war published in the last twenty years by distinguished historians who are not military specialists represent a call to military historians to engage these studies on the common ground of war itself, in effect working to bridge the gulf that has kept military historians on the margins of the historical profession. None of these studies is flawless, but at the same time their great value calls for constructive help from military historians who study the same wars, and who can build on these works to achieve more satisfactory syntheses.

Keynote Address, 2008 SMH Conference, Ogden, Utah

As historians opt ever more for the easy path of abstract theorization, Niccolò Capponi remains an unrepentant advocate of factual reconstruction. In this short piece he gives some tongue-in-cheek (akin to when one has a toothache) advice to those bona fide historians brave enough to try their hand with Italian archives and libraries, also believing it to be his duty to save as many as possible from committing suicide or living a life of permanent mental derangement.

This note describes the rivalry, including unfriendly “friendly fire” between the Navy and Marine Corps, that manifested itself during the landing of the first American airplane on Guam after the recapture of the island from the Japanese in World War II. Ed Terrar, a naval pilot, was the first to land his plane on Guam on 30 July 1944, an honor the Marines had planned to claim. The article also relates the amiable resolution of the Navy-Marine conflict years later.