Volume 88, Number 3 · July 2024

The British Army struggled to treat shell shock during the First World War. Their poor response is no surprise given the almost complete inability of the army to deal with soldier’s mental health in the previous half-century. The military increasingly sought to discharge “soldier lunatics” back to their families and home parishes. Short-term military hospitals functioned to cure the treatable and identify malingerers. The rest were left to languish in pauper asylums. This article traces shifting regulations around the care of soldiers suffering from severe mental illness; these policies reflect significant Victorian debates about pensions, poor laws, and the duty the state owed to its veterans.

The events that transpired on 7 December 1862 between Corporal John Andrew and Archibald Montgomery demonstrate that New Orleans, Louisiana, was transforming from a slave society to something akin to an equitable society. Thanks to General Benjamin Butler and the Louisiana Native Guards, People of Color living in the city had some hope of a future in the South after the Civil War. While the change was not lasting, this case gives a glimpse of how it might have looked like if the federal government had preserved the rights of all.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Army in India launched several “small wars” (Callwell’s term). Historians have concentrated on the small wars along the North-West Frontier. This article shifts the focus to the east to understand how the Army in India’s troops were supplied and transported while fighting small wars along the North-East Frontier between 1888 and 1892. When colonial troops were deployed in difficult terrain with a hostile climate, proper logistical support was vital for the maintenance of military effectiveness. Callwell rightly noted that small wars are actually campaigns against nature. This article shows that an amalgam of indigenous (South Asian) and imported European elements resulted in the emergence of a hybrid logistical apparatus to sustain the British-Indian forces along the India-Burma Frontier.

This article examines the Royal Netherlands Navy’s (Koninklijke Marine, KM) use of Indonesian personnel. It considers why and how the KM employed indigenous personnel and how this usage impacted the KM’s effectiveness as a military service. The article argues that the decision to use Indonesian personnel in naval forces in the Netherlands East Indies resulted in a peacetime advantage in terms of numbers of sailors on duty but ultimately a disadvantage in times of crisis when Indonesian sailors acted against the interests of the Netherlands state.

The Turks achieved a decisive victory over the Greeks in 1922. Despite the remarkable triumph, the tactical lessons that should have been learned from this victory were mostly ignored. The Turks won the Greek-Turkish War using the new German breakthrough tactics that had been developed during the First World War and unsuccessfully put into use in the Spring Offensives of 1918. Despite their defeat, the Germans never abandoned this concept and further developed it during the interwar era; it eventually became known as Blitzkrieg during the Second World War. Since both German operations in the Second World War and Turkey’s 1922 campaign were based on the same tactical fundamentals, the Great Offensive against Greece resembles the German operations two decades later, especially the Battle of France in 1940.

In response to GIs’ demands during World War II, the U.S. Army permitted widespread souvenir hunting and even looting, although these practices contravened both the Articles of War and, in some cases, international law. This article argues that although the War Department tried to reduce the number of captured guns that entered the United States, it declined to ban them because soldiers and officers disregarded regulations that deprived them of war trophies. This article proves the centrality of material rewards to soldier morale in World War II and establishes the difficulty of regulating the conduct of citizens drafted and sent to fight in foreign countries.