Warships and Fleets Transformed
The principal navies could not avoid taking a lead in modernization after Hampton Roads and Lissa. The majority of warships in commission were out of date and virtually defenceless against any minor naval power which equipped itself with a mere handful of modern warships. Now that steam propulsion of screw-driven ships was established, sails could be abolished and full attention…
Referenced by West Point, Wikipedia, Army University Press (army.mil), Library of Congress (loc.gov), Encyclopedia Britannica and more.
Newsletter
Get the latest from Weapons and Warfare right to your inbox.
Follow Us
SIZE AND TONNAGE
In assessing the capabilities of warships, the most basic parameter is size, usually given in tons. Unfortunately, pre-modern usage was…
COMMANDO RAIDS ONÂ NORWAY
A Commando points to the destruction of a village during a daytime attack on Norway. After the small scale raids…
Byzantine and Sicily
Following the disaster at Manzikert Byzantium lost its main Anatolian recruiting grounds and so, under the Comnenid dynasty, Byzantine forces…
Most Recent
What were the South’s two main military strategies at the beginning of the war?
When the Civil War began, leaders in both the North and the South thought that it would be a short war, but the two sides had very different military strategies regarding how to bring about…
The Anaconda Plan
Following the attack on Fort Sumter and the secession by the Confederacy the Union devised a strategy to limit the length of the war. Lincoln had no desire for further bloodshed and thus wanted a…
George Washington and The American Revolution War “Grand Strategy”
The entire goal of the American Revolution including the penning of the Declaration of Independence was to gain the colonists and the newly formed American nation legitimacy internationally. The Declaration of Independence was written to…
Popular Categories
Random Reads
Schlieffen [Moltke] Plan
Germany’s infamous military deployment plan of 1914, named after Alfred Count von Schlieffen, chief of the Prussian general staff from…
Japan Approves Plans to Convert Izumo-Class Into F-35-Carrying Aircraft Carriers
JS Kaga (DDH 184) JS Izumo (DDH-183) Japan’s two largest warships will be converted into aircraft carriers over the next…
The AK-100 and Beyond
The AK-74M is the basis for the new Russian AK-100 family of Kalashnikov firearms: the 5.56Ă—45mm AK-101 assault rifle and…
Meaux Falls 1422 Part II
He was employing more cannon than ever before – bombards, culverins and serpentines – more guns of all shapes and…
More Stories
Modern Yemeni Army I
Following the unification of North Yemen (a traditional tribal based state) and South Yemen (a former Marxist secular state) in 1990 many in the South felt their oil reserves were being usurped by the North, the situation went from bad to worse. In 1994 a civil war erupted as Northern…
A Retrospective of the Somme 1916
Progress of the Battle of the Somme between 1 July and 18 November 1916. Although further attacks were planned, the weather again intervened and on 19 November it unexpectedly turned milder, which heralded a rapid thaw that soon turned the entire battlefield into an impenetrable quagmire. It was beyond the…
Collaboration with Nazi Germany – The Soviet Union
Many inhabitants of the eastern portions of the Soviet Union, such as the Baltic States and Ukraine, openly welcomed the German army as their liberator and collaborated fully with it, until they discovered that German occupation policies were even more repressive than Soviet rule had been. In 1943 alone, as…
Towards D-Day
Of all the seas in Europe, none was busier during the first five months of the year than the English Channel. Here there were almost daily sorties carried out by flotillas of MTBs and other torpedo boats in which the Germans were well to the fore, mining harbours, attacking convoys…
Kriegsmarine Cruiser Warfare
Hipper As Operation Sealion petered out during the autumn of 1940, Admiral Raeder and his colleagues in the Kriegsmarine began to focus on the kind of warfare they believed in. Following the damage sustained in the spring of 1940, a sense of optimism was renewed when many ships returned from…
December 1941 East Front
On the Russian front, the Germans had been so close to Moscow on the morning of December 2 that they thought they could see the towers of the Kremlin through their field glasses. Some of them were convinced that they had seen movement in the streets as well. But that…
German in Signals Intelligence Russia II
The German invasion of southern Russia in 1941. German signals and listening network was extensive due to the need to communicate over the huge distances involved. Their signals intelligence war was as complicated as the rest of this huge military campaign. Counter intelligence radio played a major part in directing…
German and Italian Forces – Sicily
Knocked out Mk VI Tiger tank at Belpasso, Sicily, 1943. A German Tiger tank in Sicily, 1943. German troops of the Hermann Göring Division. Sicily 1943. Although Allied planners opted to concentrate their ground forces in the anticipation of tough Axis resistance, the actual combat capability of Axis troops deployed…