Volume 78, Number 4 · October 2014

The socio-economic composition of the officer corps of the Continental Army has not received as much attention as that of the enlisted soldiers; the officers are generally assumed to have been members of America’s colonial elite. The need for large numbers of men to fill leadership positions in the nation’s first regular army presented an opportunity greater than at any time previous in America for the attainment of rank and status through an officer’s commission. Based upon research on the Maryland Line, this article argues that a larger segment of the Continental Army’s officer corps originated in a “middling” socio-economic range than currently thought.

Liberal victory in the 1880 general election in Britain resulted in the decision to withdraw British and Indian troops from Kandahar following the messy conclusion of the Second Afghan War. An acrimonious public debate resulted on the future of a British presence in Afghanistan. It was not just a question of the assessment of any external Russian threat to British India, and the relationship with a seemingly unstable Afghan neighbour, but also of the security of the North West Frontier against tribal incursions, and the general sense that events beyond the Indus would have an impact on the potentially fragile acquiescence of ordinary Indians in continuing British rule of the sub-continent. In the process, the highly divisive issue of Kandahar also raised fundamental questions about imperial defence, strategic choices, the costs of exercising military options, and the difficulties of disengaging from a conflict that had a lasting impact on the balance of policy calculation in Victorian Britain.

Charles Forrester, “Field Marshal Montgomery’s Role in the Creation of the British 21st Army Group’s Combined Arms Doctrine for the Final Assault on Germany, The Journal of Military History, 78:4 (October 2014): 1295-1320

This article empirically examines how British 21st Army Group produced a functional doctrine by late 1944. How much weight to give Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery in the outcome remains unclear despite significant scholarly literature. This article shows his openness to the “bubbling up” of operational methods from subordinate commanders. He closely managed this process, actively promulgated its output, and determined when he had gleaned sufficient feedback from it. His doctrinal contribution to the British Army’s final push against the Germans developed into British doctrine for many decades, and many Commonwealth countries followed the British lead. This article examines its roots.

From 1945 to 1961, the United States Army Historical Division collaborated with German officers to write a history of the Second World War. As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated and the U.S. Army prepared for a war against the U.S.S.R., the Historical Division and other parties endeavored to exploit the operational knowledge of these German officers while ignoring their attempts at mythologizing the past. This article argues, however, that a substantial intellectual baggage of racist, Social Darwinist, and generally anti-Russian beliefs underpinned even the “purely operational” German lessons that shaped U.S. Army doctrine.

This article challenges the thesis that the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu was decided by the overwhelming firepower of the besieging Vietnamese People’s Army (VPA). This has been the prevailing narrative in Western accounts of the battle, and long went undisputed because Vietnamese historians wrote little on the subject. However, a flood of new Vietnamese works published around the fiftieth anniversary of the siege in 2004 reveal that the VPA had only a modest quantitative advantage in artillery and fired fewer shells than the French. Its victory therefore owed more to superior engineering, innovative tactics, and other factors.

The willingness to take risks made Rear Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, victor at New Orleans in 1862 and Mobile Bay in 1864, the Union’s leading naval commander in the Civil War. Farragut’s boldness contrasted strongly with the lack of decisiveness shown in the failure in April 1863 to seize the port of Charleston, South Carolina, by Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, whose capture of Port Royal Sound in South Carolina in November of 1861 had made him the North’s first naval hero of the war. Du Pont’s indecisiveness at Charleston led to his removal from command and a blighted career, while the risk-taking Farragut went on to become, along with generals U.S. Grant and William T. Sherman, one of the principal architects of Union victory.