Volume 73, Number 4 · October 2009

In 55 B.C. Julius Caesar crossed into Britain and was immediately engaged in a unique style of warfare. The Iron Age Britons used sturdy and fast two-horse chariots to respond to Roman invasion. This article looks at the tactics of and analyzes aspects of the battle chariot. It assesses the capabilities of the people who fielded the chariot and the means used to sustain their resources and gauge their capabilities. Drawing on both classical and archaeological sources, this article presents a fuller account of Caesar’s two trips to Britain in 55–54 B.C. and the British warfare he encountered.

Waging the War of American Independence (1775–83) required massive numbers of troops, weapons, and supplies in quantities most states could not readily provide. Meeting these needs were persistent challenges for the nascent state governments, all of which lacked a financial foundation, manufacturing base, and logistical network to sustain a concerted war effort. North Carolina was particularly beset by these challenges, which led state officials to adopt two of the most burdensome intrusions into the wartime routines of Carolinians: impressment and conscription. Both of these expedients produced antipathy and resistance to Patriot authorities, undermined support for the new state, and added to the disorders within the state during most of the war years.

Current scholarship on the feud between American generals John J. Pershing and Peyton C. March during the First World War has generally argued that the dispute was overly exaggerated by contemporaries, with most of the conflict developing in the postwar era. The present study challenges this interpretation, arguing that the wartime conflict between March and Pershing was more severe than previously thought, and was founded upon the lack of a clearly defined command structure within the American Army as opposed to a collision of strong personalities.

In the early period after World War II, Cyprus became useful to Britain both for the military projection of British power in the Middle East, and for the planning of an air campaign against the Soviet Union itself. At the same time, the mounting British difficulties in the Middle East, especially the loss of the Suez base in 1954, meant that Cyprus, under full British sovereignty, was the most “secure” British position in the region. Thus, strategic and military needs were important in the British decision to retain the island. Even after Cypriot independence in 1960, London retained two large sovereign bases in Cyprus.

New evidence reveals that some African soldiers in Britain’s Central African Federation―today’s Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe ―developed African nationalist sympathies in the 1950s and early 1960s because of nationalist infiltration and the increasing unpopularity of colonialism. Discontent was also linked to participation in British counter-insurgency in Malaya, and news of Kenya’s Mau Mau Uprising and the Congo Crisis. African soldiers questioned European officers, demanded commissions, wrote complaint letters, met secretly, circulated nationalist propaganda, joined nationalist organizations, made abortive plots and engaged in “subversive talk.” With independence for Zambia and Malawi, white officers in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) doubted black soldiers’ dependability in future operations against nationalist insurgents but had to rely on them because of limited white manpower.

This article examines Operation Washington Green, conducted by the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Binh Dinh province, South Vietnam. It was a model operation that tested the ability of a regular U.S. Army unit to execute a sophisticated counterinsurgency mission that required the brigade to deploy in static detachments to secure rural hamlets and train co-located South Vietnamese Territorial units, and to strictly limit its use of indirect firepower. Because the operation closely matched recommendations made by many critics of U.S. military operations in Vietnam, it offers insights into the likely effectiveness of their recommended alternative strategy focusing on population control.

This article examines the controversial Strategic Withdrawal of Eritrean fighters (EPLF) in the face of Soviet-backed Ethiopian offensives during the Eritrean War of Independence of 1961-91. It highlights the long-term effects of these decisive battles and argues that despite immediate Eritrean setbacks and Ethiopian successes in these encounters, the ultimate strengths and weaknesses of the two adversaries first became apparent during the Withdrawal. Eventually, the Eritrean independence fighters decisively won the war because, as a guerrilla army, they were more adaptable to the fast changing conditions on the ground. Blinded by their belief in armaments and numbers, their far superior foe neglected to correctly appraise the situation and improvise strategy accordingly. This article stops in 1980 when the EPLF went over to the tactical offensive.

FORUM: Confederate Military Strategy in the U.S. Civil War - Revisited, Stephen Badsey, Donald Stoker, Joseph G. Dawson III, 1273-1287