Wars
Swedish Operations in the later Thirty Years War
LENNART TORSTENSSON AS SUPREME COMMANDER The brief review of Swedish operations in the Thirty Years War after the death of Gustav Adolf would be incomplete without some mention of the lightning operations carried out by Field Marshal Lennart Torstensson (1603–1651). He took over operations in Germany after the death of Johan BanĂ©r on 10 May 1641, and his campaigns resulted…
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BATTLE OF SANTA CATARINA, 1777
Portuguese two decker ship of the line in the late 18th century. Longstanding Portuguese-Spanish tensions over the area of modern Uruguay (notably the Portuguese base at Sacramento), led to a major Spanish naval expedition that attacked Santa Catarina island. The map shows this expedition, with the ships, which included troop…
BYZANTINE CAMPAIGNS: THE VANDALÂ WAR
In 406 the East Germanic Vandals and their tribal confederates, including Germanic Suebi and Iranian Alans, crossed the Rhine. After an initial defeat at the hands of the Franks, the Vandals enlisted Alan support and smashed their way into Gaul, plundering the countryside mercilessly as they advanced into the south.…
THE FIRST RAIDERS
Painting depicting the battle between Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and HMS Highflyer in August 1914. In as much as Germany was inferior to Britain in nominal naval strength, but owned so many ocean liners, she foresaw that in the event of hostilities there was a large potential fleet of fine…
Jameson Raid, Origins of South African War:Â 1895-1899
The nineteenth-century struggle for supremacy in South Africa between British imperialists and Boer republicans culminated on October 11, 1899, with the outbreak of the South African War (Second Anglo Boer War). British suzerainty over the landlocked, impoverished Boer republic of the Transvaal had seemed reasonably in hand until September 1886,…
The Smolensk War (1632–1634)
Surrender of Mikhail Shein at Smolensk, painted by Christian Melich, 1640s Smolensk Voivodeship, showing in red the disputed territory. This unsuccessful campaign to recover the western border regions lost to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the Time of Troubles marked Muscovy’s first major experiment with the new Western…
Chamberlain-Prudent Appeasement I
In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was highly criticized by Winston Churchill and others for his “appeasement policy” regarding Nazi Germany’s threatened annexation of the Sudetenland, a border area of northern Czechoslovakia mostly inhabited by ethnic Germans. The truth was that Britain lacked the military might to meaningfully challenge…