Strategy
The Seven Years’ War: Why Frederick Won I
Leibgarde battalion at Kolin, 1757. Contemporary painting of the Battle of Rossbach. Frederick may not have been triumphalist after the Treaty of Hubertusburg, but everyone else in Europe knew that he had every right to be. As the French Foreign Office conceded when sending a new envoy to Prussia in 1772, for Frederick the Peace of Hubertusburg had been “glorieuse.”…
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The Western Front: Lions Led by Donkeys?
Blackadder Goes Forth is the fourth and final series of the BBC sitcom Blackadder, written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, which aired from 28 September to 2 November 1989 on BBC One. The series placed the recurring characters of Blackadder, Baldrick and George in a trench in Flanders during…
New Strategies of the Third Century Roman Empire I
‘Posterity, which experienced the fatal effects of his maxims and example, justly considered as the principle author of the decline of the Roman Empire.’ Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Historians have argued for decades that Septimius Severus not only contributed to the decline of the…
Memorandum Dictated in 1946 by General Alfred Jodl on Hitler’s Military Leadership
[General Alfred Jodl, former Chief of the Operations Staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, dictated this memoir, which he entitled “The Influence of Hitler on the Leadership of the War (Brief Reflections on Hitler as a Strategist),” to the wife of his defense counsel while he was a…
THE HINDENBURG PROGRAMME
The appointments of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg to command of the German army and his Chief of Staff, Erich Ludendorff, as the force’s First Quartermaster General on 29 August 1916 opened a new phase of the Central Powers’ war. The two soldiers had reached the apex of their profession…
Japan at Bay
No one—and especially not the members of Japanese Imperial General Headquarters or the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff—expected Okinawa to be the last battle of World War II. Why the surprise? The Joint Chiefs, having woefully underestimated enemy striking power at the beginning of the Pacific War, had just…
Star Wars and Tank Wars
On the evening of March 23, 1983, a long black limousine pulled up to the south gate of Ronald Reagan’s White House. In the back sat Edward Teller, now seventy-five years old. Teller was not exactly sure why he was here. He had just flown in from California, where he…