Volume 84, Number 2 · April 2020

It is widely accepted that there is no tradition of protest resignations in American military history. This article argues that rejection of such a practice was far from foreordained, and officers in the early American navy had no qualms about resigning their commissions, or using the threat to do so, as a bargaining tactic with the Navy Department. Changing cultural norms within the officer corps, along with firm opposition to protest resignations by early secretaries of the navy, had almost entirely eliminated the practice by the end of the War of 1812, thus establishing the absolute respect for civilian control that remains a cornerstone of the modern U.S. military.

Following World War I, the U.S. Army began drafting a comprehensive history of its wartime activities, including a section on chaplains, but by 1920 the project had fallen victim to a wave of budget cuts. What remained of the chaplain’s portion was an incredibly rich collection of letters, photos, and documents compiled by a group of chaplains tasked with writing the section. The author came across these little-used files, and he has used them as the basis to tell a part of the story of the priests, reverends, and rabbis who decided to serve both their nation and denominations in the war.

While there have been numerous comparative case studies involving airlift-dependent situations, this study takes a novel approach and assesses the available evidence supporting six unique airlift anecdotes in military history. The case studies analyzed are either moments for celebration or moments for pause and reflection on the role moral hazard plays in airlift operations.

This paper examines how fighter aircraft shortages affected the Royal Air Force’s ability to contest control of the air over the island of Crete in 1941. It shows how dysfunctional personal relations and extended lines of communication combined to obscure decisions, and it unpicks the claim that the loss of Crete was a function of the British army’s inability to protect the airfields required to sustain viable fighter defenses. Instead, it shows that the key decision-makers in London knew that the fighter aircraft destined for the region would arrive too late to affect the course of events.

General Haywood Hansell has received praise for his contributions to planning the U.S. Army Air Forces’ (AAF’s) strategic bombardment campaigns during World War II. But he also has been panned for purportedly lacking important leadership traits while in command and being dogmatically committed to prewar doctrine he had helped shape. Yet when commanding in the Eighth Air Force, Hansell demonstrated ingenuity while carefully seeking to balance the doctrine he had helped devise in peacetime with the realities of wartime missions as he helped pioneer operations for a young AAF.

This article discusses Portugal’s defeat in the Portuguese-Dutch war in Asia during the first quarter of the 17th Century, focusing on the much-debated issue of whether a military revolution in Europe produced a military exceptionalism that made Europeans militarily superior to non-Europeans in the Early Modern period. The view that Asian military influence on the Portuguese in the 16th Century made them militarily inferior to European enemies like the Dutch remains prevalent in Portuguese historiography. However, such influence appeared to occur only in certain areas of naval warfare, in a way that does not corroborate claims for an extensive Early Modern Western military exceptionalism.

This essay considers several recent publications in the history of sexual violence and World War II with a view to working through some of the issues currently shaping the field, including difficulties in using fragmentary sources, quantitative approaches to understanding sexual violence in war, and the inclusion of marginalized voices. Blending analysis of secondary works with insights from research conducted in national and regional archives across Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, it reflects on themes of race, gender, and nation, and concludes by offering some thoughts on the direction future scholarship on this subject may take.