Volume 86, Number 4 · October 2022

Despite their importance, the role of pikemen in battle and the mechanics of pike combat during the seventeenth century have not received proper attention. Taking English armies of the period as a case study, this article uses contemporary sources and recent research on the warfare of other periods with the goal of redressing this. It examines several seventeenth-century battles involving English armies and concludes that pikemen played a far more critical part than previously assumed. It examines the limitations of previous models used to explain how pikemen actually fought and suggests a new model, based on a close reading of the sources.

The genesis of U.S. Army counterinsurgency doctrine was the work of Major General Winfield Scott and officer and scholar Henry Halleck, whom he sent to Europe prior to the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) in part to study Napoleon’s failed occupation of Spain during the Peninsular War (1808–1814). The novel occupation program that Scott called “measures of conciliation” aimed to forestall insurgency and win compliance among the Mexican people. While many historians are familiar with Scott’s military-legal codes enacted in Mexico, Halleck’s role in the development of U.S. Army COIN doctrine and its direct influence on the formation of the Lieber Code during the U.S. Civil War and thence the Geneva Convention articles has been overlooked. This article reviews the war and explores the collaboration between Scott and Halleck and its historic influence.

During the First World War, American War Department officials and their welfare affiliates (including the YMCA, Knights of Columbus, and American Library Association) provided servicemen with an unprecedented scale and scope of leisure activities by embracing new distribution and management approaches. Historians examining troops’ leisure have focused on bureaucrats’ coercive actions restricting access to vice districts, but progressive authorities also hired staffers who could identify individual soldiers’ preferences and construct complex distribution networks on both sides of the Atlantic. By examining the military’s role in blurring public–private boundaries in welfare work, administrators’ postwar careers, and veterans’ expectations, this article illustrates wartime recreation programs’ impact on the development of mass culture.

For decades, authors of World War II have labeled Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley a failed commander in chief of the South Pacific Area during 1942. They have portrayed him as an overly cautious, pessimistic, and even defeatist leader whom Admiral Chester Nimitz, fortunately, replaced with the more aggressive and successful Vice Admiral William F. Halsey in October 1942. Yet Ghormley performed well as South Pacific commander under difficult circumstances, and his actions compare favorably with those of his more venerated successor.

The Pacific theater of World War II represents a turning point in the history of navigation: whether a ship’s commander should entrust the safety of his vessel to his own judgment based on years of practical experience at sea or rely instead on radio broadcasts, the beginnings of “big data,” and the output of detection systems, including radar. U.S. naval campaigns in the Northwest Pacific during World War II, when some of the largest armadas of naval vessels ever assembled were continuously at sea in a relatively restricted maritime area for months at a time, provide notable occasions when the old and the new knowledge were tested under extreme weather conditions and the exigencies of wartime operations. This article examines the role of typhoons and the science of their prediction in relation to U.S. naval operations in the Pacific theater in 1944–1945.