Amateur history for (a) future historian(s)
I feel that the intelligence work at Bletchley Park was more important to the U.K. success during 1940 than radar was. Essentially, I feel this way because radar, while certainly helpful, could only provide so much of an advantage. For instance, although Murray and Millett indicate an advantage for the U.K., at least in submarine …
Continue reading “Radar vs. Signals Intelligence in British Successes”
Understanding why the first nine months of the war went so well for Germany has to be broken down into constituent parts. The victories of the period are essentially three: over Poland, over Scandinavia, and over France and the Low Countries. The evidence suggests that the reasons for each of these three victories were quite …
First discussion post for HIS-241: World War II — several to follow. ==== I’ve been lucky to have come into this course having just finished HIS-240: World War I and HIS-220: Modern Europe before that. Therefore, I’ve considered the matters of WWI and appeasement fairly intensively and quite recently. Much of the discussion of appeasement …
In 1996, Gregory H. Stanton, a law professor, former Fulbright scholar, and employee of the United States Department of State, presented a briefing paper in which he promulgated his theory of genocide, which encompassed eight stages. Regarding the eighth stage, Stanton wrote that “every genocide is followed by denial,” and its characteristics range from getting …
My post for this week is inspired by the following quotation, which I read only two days ago for the first time. It surprised me at first and then struck me as somewhat perceptive. Now, however, I see the authors as having emphasized Germany’s “victory” too much: In strategic terms Germany had won the Great …
It is axiomatic that World War I had tremendous impacts on Germany, and these effects were political, economic, and social. These effects were, to a very large extent, interrelated, since economic causes often underpin political and social changes. However, in terms of the long-term effects of the changes wrought by Germany’s involved in WWI, I …
In a country like the United States, where the Constitution states that the President is the commander in chief of the armed forces but that person is by definition a civilian, conflicts can arise between members of the military and the President. The disagreement between President Harry S. Truman and General Douglas Macarthur during the …
Several political, social, and economic realities impacted the home fronts in the nations engaged in World War I. For Austria-Hungary, perhaps the most substantive political event was the death of Emperor Franz Josef on November 21, 1916, after a reign of almost 68 years. The Emperor was quite old by the time the world broke …
Of the many inhumane phenomena to arise from the inherent inhumane experience of war, the most inhumane is genocide. At least as understood since the 20th century, genocide is thankfully an infrequent occurrence. The first genocide of the 20th century was that of the Ottoman Armenian population of eastern Anatolia at the hands of the …
For Germany, a hard-learned lesson of the first year of the war was that how it interpreted the act of military mobilization was not the same as other nations’ interpretations. As a result of this assumption, Germany declared war on Russia although it is not clear that Russia undertook mobilization for reasons other than preparedness …
Inevitable Historicity