Volume 88, Number 1 · January 2024

This paper discusses the transformation of the Polish medieval army into a modern one based on the war with the Teutonic Order from 1519–1521. The Kingdom of Poland was ill-prepared for this conflict, and achieved no spectacular victories in battle. Comparing data from treasury materials with documents calling the units to service, we argue that the Teutonic Order was defeated thanks to Poland’s much more efficient system of rebuilding military potential; the Order did not have such a system. The Polish could also recruit men from the monarchies ruled by the Jagiellons at the time—Poland, Lithuania, Czechia, and Hungary. The waterway on and along the Vistula River enabled efficient replenishment of military manpower and supplies. We call this internal transportation route of the Jagiellonian states the “Jagiellonian Trail.”

The historiography of the American effort in World War I describes an American unwillingness to learn from the Allies. However true that may be for the combat arms, it was untrue for the Army Medical Department (AMEDD). The AMEDD sought a wide range of information from the beginning of the war, and through multiple channels that expand substantially and systematically once the U.S. entered the war. The information was also disseminated through multiple channels and made significant impacts on medical care in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) during the Great War. Historians should be more cautious about assuming that all parts of the AEF were resistant to foreign information.

The cross-Atlantic tensions between the British and American militaries throughout the nineteenth century resulted in their cultures being defined in opposition to each other. For the United States, it was the American experiences of frontier conflict, the Civil War, and republican-style imperialism that inspired the nation’s military strategy, including the principles of foreign occupation. This article asserts that, on the contrary, the U.S. approach to occupation governance was greatly informed by a British model from the early twentieth century on. We contend that American failures in the occupation of the Rhineland after World War I prompted the interwar development of new strategies based on the British example. While this strategy may have been borrowed from the British, it was also subject to a retrospective myth-building that selected examples from American history that conformed to the new model, affording it a greater degree of subcultural legitimacy.

The Infantry’s “Problem of Quality”: Classification and Assignment to MOS 745, Rifleman, 1942–1945, by John S. Reed, 83–116

This article examines the classification and assignment of U.S. Army inductees to military occupational specialty (MOS) 745, rifleman, between 1942 and 1945. Before fall 1944, “high-quality” inductees were primarily sent into the Army Service Forces or Army Air Forces, while “low-quality” men were channeled into the ground combat arms, in particular the infantry. This was a utilitarian error that led to poor combat performance in early deploying divisions and a social inequity that imposed a higher burden of lethal risk on less-privileged men. Only out of dire necessity, late in the war, did high-quality inductees become riflemen in significant numbers.

“An Island of Integration in a Sea of Segregation”: Maxwell Air Force Base and Civil Rights from the 1940s to the 1960s, by Robert B. Kane and Jerome Ennels, 117–38

On 26 July 1948, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, directing the integration of U.S. military forces. Earlier publications on this topic generally covered the origins, proclamation, and implementation of the executive order, and the actions of senior military officers in the Pentagon down to commanders of military installations from mid-1948 to the early 1960s. While these works use specific events at specific installations in specific time frames, none tell the complete story of integration at a specific military installation over time. This article details the actions of installation commanders at Maxwell Air Force Base near Montgomery, Alabama, a central focus of the civil rights movement, from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Under Prime Minister Olof Palme, Sweden worked as a neutral country to bring American prisoners-of-war home from North Vietnam in September 1972. Though the group was small, their release was significant at a time when formal Paris peace talks were stalled. For Sweden, it was a paradoxical success, as Stockholm sought to balance its relationship with the Nixon administration while pursuing a humanitarian effort and supporting the American antiwar movement. Palme’s strong antiwar stand earned the lasting rancor of the Nixon White House and led to a diplomatic break between the two nations from December 1972 until the spring of 1974.