Strategy
A SECOND BEF
Soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force fire at low flying German aircraft during the Dunkirk evacuation. Lieutenant General Alan Brooke, who had commanded II Corps of the British Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium, returned from Dunkirk on 30 May and on 2 June he was summoned to a meeting at the War Office in London. He met with the…
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The Master of the Battlefield Part II
Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz by François GĂ©rard One suspects that Bonaparte would have subscribed to the modern American adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” What he inherited, he improved and built upon, but he was disinclined to change a military apparatus that worked well for him.…
D-Day June 6, 1944
The most famous D-Day of the war was June 6, 1944, marking the invasion of France and breaking into Festung Europa by the Western Allies. The term was permanently attached to that extraordinary day after the Western Allies disembarked five infantry divisions and three British armoured brigades onto five beaches…
Kursk: Planning and Preparation – The German Perspective
Soldiers of the Waffen-SS Division “Das Reich” advance alongside a Panzer VI (Tiger I) tank at Kursk in Operation Citadel. As Hitler reviewed Germany’s position in April 1943, the picture was not very bright. Wartime-related economic problems had begun to create discontent in Germany. In addition to Stalingrad, German forces…
1942 the German armed forces were on the offensive once more.
To be sure, the German army’s defeat before Moscow meant that Hitler’s belief in the fragility of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union had been proved decisively wrong. Operation Barbarossa had signally failed to achieve the aims with which it had set out in the confident days of June…
Naval Strategy, U.S.
The U.S. Navy armored cruiser New York, flasghip of Rear Admiral William T. Sampson’s North Atlantic Squadron. (Photographic History of the Spanish- American War, 1898) Beginning in the mid-1880s, the U.S. Navy had undergone a dramatic transformation. Although still small by European standards, the navy began receiving modern steam-driven steel…
Naval Strategy, Spanish-American War
The Spanish Navy protected cruiser Alfonso XIII. (Photographic History of the Spanish-American War, 1898) When news of the American blockade of Cuba reached Madrid, large numbers of Spaniards clamored to enlist in the navy. Convinced of Spanish naval strength following more than a decade of showy reconstruction and foreign purchases,…