Volume 88, Number 4 · October 2024

During the American Civil War, many Union volunteers occupied Southern towns after conquering them through active military campaigns, but the 90th and 91st New York, 47th Pennsylvania, and 7th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry occupied Key West and Fort Jefferson (Dry Tortugas), Florida as their first assignment prior to experiencing combat. Though they were stationed in the most remote locations that the U.S. held in the South, these volunteers felt connected to the Union war effort and to the issues that it inspired. The New York, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire soldiers revered commanding officers of the Regular Army and believed that their assignment to garrison these strategic military and economic points was compatible with the American conceptualization of the citizen-soldier and integral to the Union cause.

In the late-nineteenth century, U.S. “navalist” historians reinterpreted defeat in the War of 1812 as an argument for an ocean-going battlefleet. Something similar is underway in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as historians and propogandists reimagine the Qing Dynasty’s defeats in the Sino-French (1883–1885) and Sino-Japanese Wars (1894–1895) as sources of naval heritage. Discarding Mao-era orthodoxies, the navalist reinterpretation rescues an origin story for Chinese sea power from the “century of national humiliation.” As in the nineteenth-century United States, historical example and myth stress China’s identity as a maritime state and contextualize the ongoing modernization of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). By highlighting these parallel revisionist efforts, this article draws attention to the instrumentalization of historical memory in the service of navalism as well as the comparative history of the United States and China: two continental empires that justified battlefleet navies.

Specially modified fighter-director destroyers were critical to amphibious air defense against Japanese suicide air attacks during the Battle of Okinawa from April to June 1945. They suffered extremely high and unanticipated losses, especially during the first month of the battle. This paper analyzes the operational and strategic impacts of insufficient initial resourcing and the high losses. Insufficient numbers of fighter-director-equipped destroyers forced ad hoc assignment of available ships incapable of adequately defending themselves. This prevented the development of effective doctrine and degraded fleet readiness, affecting future operations in the summer of 1945.

In 1948, the United States military government (OMGUS) played a crucial but invisible role in helping Germans in the western zones of occupation celebrate the centennial of the German Revolution of 1848. American officials viewed these celebrations as an important component in the democratization of Germany and as a means of demonstrating German-American cultural reconciliation in a highly public manner. Caught in an ambiguous, transitional period between punitive occupation and full civilian control, OMGUS pursued cultural diplomacy in the hopes that concretizing an ideological and cultural relationship based on history and shared values would help reorient German democracy and create a stable partner in central Europe, thereby serving long-term strategic goals in the Cold War.

In 1948 and again in 1950, Congress made significant changes to the military criminal legal system in the U.S. armed forces. It abolished the army’s Articles of War (and the navy’s counterpart) and created a new criminal code that was uniformly applicable to all the services, including the newly created air force. This article examines the social and cultural factors that were the impetus for congressional reform and demonstrates that there was a definite link between the post-World War II changes to military criminal law and earlier reform efforts that occurred after World War I.

Confrontation on Borneo tests a thesis on counterinsurgency: winning hearts and minds succeeds if object place/people win over the hearts and minds of subject counterinsurgency soldiers. This psychological transformation depends on fixed objects that counterinsurgency cannot easily change: the counterinsurgency destination and the counterinsurgents’ place of origin that formed soldiers’ unconscious selves. Soldiers encountered on Borneo a transformative, attractive, alien destination that changed their behavior. Soldiers then ratified unconscious behavior by asserting that the cause was their innate decency and official hearts and minds policy. But Borneo had formed the unconscious self that gave form to hearts and minds. This article argues that altered states of being shape counterinsurgency.

Adams Center 2023 Cold War Essay Contest Winner

This article examines two pairs of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) exercises—Teamwork/Bonded Item 76 and Northern Wedding/Bold Guard 78—that had a significant impact on the United States Marine Corps of the late Cold War. These exercises reversed the service’s previous ineptitude, repairing its reputation in NATO and helping to quiet U.S. critics of the corps. More importantly, they spurred innovation and boosted deterrence, inspiring enduring changes in service training, equipment, and doctrine while also increasing Soviet perceptions of the conventional threat posed to their flanks. This article adds both to the study of peacetime military change and the historiography of the late Cold War.