Volume 83, Number 4 · October 2019

Although armies grew larger during the seventeenth century, size estimates are often inaccurate. This article uses diverse sources to produce accurate troop counts for Electoral Saxony during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), concluding that its army was large only briefly. It also discusses Saxony’s overlooked role in this war. This research suggests that the military revolution thesis should be revised: army sizes did not necessarily stabilize at higher levels and war did not necessarily “make the modern state.” Saxony went to war using traditional means of raising revenue: different states responded to their challenging environment differently.

Contemporaneous narrative sources described the Mongol conquest of the Hungarian Kingdom in 1241–1242 as extremely devastating, characterized by extensive and indiscriminate massacres. Measuring the reality of any ancient massacre, however, tends to be difficult in the absence of sufficient archaeological or documentary data. This article integrates conquest process theory, literary evidence, and data from substantial new archaeological work to explore the motivation and nature of Mongol invasion and the consequences for rural settlements on the Great Hungarian Plain.

In the late nineteenth century the U.S. Army underwent a prolonged reform movement aimed at professionalizing the army, especially the officer corps. Part of this movement was the beginning of a professional education system for officers, including the Officers’ Lyceum program. This article argues that despite the significant challenges facing the program and its irregular implementation across the far-flung frontier army, the Lyceums were an important and integral part of the greater professionalization of the late nineteenth-century army, furthering professional education within the army officer corps while providing a venue for the incubation of other reform ideas.

This article explores debates over whether Britain could have adopted a more “indirect approach” during the First World War (1914–18). It shows that convincing arguments that British sea power offered a legitimate alternative to the strategy of attrition on the Western Front never received due consideration because of shortcomings in Britain’s strategic decision-making apparatus. Britain might have fought the First World War very differently, and it might have been in its interest to have done so.

After the Revolution of 1905 and defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian government rebuilt its military power by modernizing weaponry, reforming mobilization plans, and expanding the standing force. As part of this effort, the Imperial Army also sought to improve the human material that was the foundation of Russia’s strength. Between 1906 and 1914, army officers introduced initiatives to prepare the population for military service. Through physical education and political lessons in the empire’s schools, as well as anniversary celebrations that glorified Russia’s past, the army hoped to create a population that would assure victory in the next war.

The official historians of the British strategic air offensive described RAF Bomber Command’s development in the spring and summer of 1944 as an operational “revolution.” The present article explores aspects of that development in closer and critical detail, highlighting the organizational change employed to make operational experiments into standard operating procedure, the role of airborne control at the target (the master bomber), and related challenges in signals communication. It also examines closely some of the bombing data compiled and analyzed by the command’s Operational Research Section. The article concludes that the “revolution” produced change sufficient to make the command a more effective bomber force, but a variety of factors limited further progress in the operational environment of 1944–45.

Soviet tribunal records concerning the convictions of German war criminals may provide valuable historical insights into the German army’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union (1941–45) at the grassroots level. This case study investigates a war crime against Soviet civilians under the euphemism of an antipartisan operation by a frontline German army unit in April of 1944. The article pays particular attention to determining the credibility of both perpetrator and eyewitness statements from a historical instead of legal perspective.

Histories of Singapore and Hong Kong have traditionally focused on their role in British defence planning between the World Wars or the 1942 catastrophe. However, attention has recently shifted to their continued importance to Imperial security during the Cold War. This article adds to this by examining how these two fallen fortresses were restored and used to project British naval power into the Korean War. It analyses how their geopolitical conditions and security concerns affected British military power projection. It assesses the value of the fortresses through an operational lens, drawing on Korean War logistical-administrative reports and naval campaign accounts.

This article examines the writing and reception of Sir John Hackett’s bestselling 1978 novel The Third World War. The retired British general and a team of collaborators produced a vision of global conflict that found an enthusiastic audience around the world. I argue that Hackett’s book succeeded in large part because he reflected growing anxieties about the future of the Cold War just as the superpower confrontation entered a period of dangerous instability. This novel also helped to inspire the modern literary genre of the techno-thriller, which remains commercially and intellectually important today.