Volume 85, Number 2 · April 2021

The Livonian War was typical of early modern conflicts; the most widespread forms of violence were associated with raiding, pillaging, and plundering. Drawing upon wartime correspondences, chronicles, and archival records, this article explores the characteristics and consequences of those activities as practiced by both foreign invaders and hired mercenaries. Raiding and pillaging often have been treated as merely symptomatic of early modern warfare. This article demonstrates how their pervasiveness dictated tactical and strategic considerations, influenced military policy, and shaped civil-military relations. It also argues that prolonged exposure to wartime brutality could play a significant part in breaking down longstanding social mores, transforming societies, and normalizing violence.

In the cemeteries and monuments that the United States established in France after World War I, the American Battle Monuments Commission included maps and summaries documenting the operations of the American Expeditionary Forces. Etched into stone, these displays were based on research conducted by the commission’s historical section, a long-term project that led to the multivolume summaries that the commission published in the 1940s. Although the commission worked to shape memory and affect public opinion of the United States’ contributions to the war, the following analysis shows that it also strived to develop an accurate historical record of American military operations.

Until the United States entered World War II, Britain’s isolation left it vulnerable to U-boats. Yet even when the campaign appeared to be going well, the German Naval War Staff worried that it was likely to be unsuccessful. The staff’s pessimism has been largely absent from the Anglophone historiography. The fundamental problem was that the Germans needed to secure a decisive result quickly, before the full weight of U.S. industrial might could be felt, but they were deploying a weapon designed for a long war. This article calls attention not only to this dilemma, but to the German awareness of it.

The Royal Netherlands Navy (Koninklijke Marine, KM), after being driven from the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) by the Japanese, stationed forces in Australia from 1942 to 1947. The article addresses prewar naval contacts between the KM and Australia, activities of KM ships and aircraft stationed in Australia during the war, and the KM’s postwar efforts to increase its forces and return to the NEI. The article argues that the KM presence in Australia was more important than is conveyed by the extant literature, because of Australia’s role as a wartime refuge, administration and training center, and supply source for the NEI.

The experience of Marine battalions rotated through the Mediterranean in the early Cold War illustrates the challenges of forward deployment, which became an increasingly common experience for the American military due to the militarization of containment. Examining the first ten years of these deployments shows how the Marine Corps worked to overcome some of these challenges while others remained intractable. The deployments reflected the broader contours of American defense policy: growing forward deployments as Truman’s containment of the Soviet Union came to rely more on military power, the novel operational demands of regularly training with allies, the subordination of secondary activities to support operations in Korea, and the economizing effects of the New Look.

For over seventy years, the continued belief in the efficacy of strategic bombing has dominated United States Air Force thinking in times of war and peace. In addition, the core principles of air power articulated by the Air Corps Tactical School continue to reside in USAF doctrine. Despite the outcomes of the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, which have all demonstrated the effectiveness of joint operations and the limitations of strategic bombing, the ACTS tenets remain embedded in the very DNA of airmen and continue to influence how the United States Air Force views the modern air, space, and cyber domains.