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  3. Cambridge Military Histories

The aim of this series is to publish outstanding works of research on warfare throughout the ages and throughout the world. Books in the series take a broad approach to military history, examining war in all its military, strategic, political and economic aspects. The series complements Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare by focusing on the 'hard' military history of armies, tactics, strategy and warfare. Books in the series consist mainly of single author works - academically rigorous and groundbreaking - which are accessible to both academics and the interested general reader.

  • General Editors: Gregory Daddis, Chapman University, California, Hew Strachan, University of St Andrews, Geoffrey Wawro, University of North Texas

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49 results in Cambridge Military Histories

Page 1 of 3

The Generalissimo
  • Luigi Cadorna and the Italian Army, 1850–1928
  • Marco Mondini
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2025
    Print publication:
    31 August 2025
  • Luigi Cardorna remains one of the most controversial generals in Italian history. Appointed chief of the armed forces in 1914, he led the Italian army in the field from May 1915 until the aftermath of their calamitous defeat at Caporetto in 1917. In this major new biography, Marco Mondini traces Cardorna's rise, the nature of his command, the course of the Isonzo campaign, and the battles over his post-war reputation. He brings a new cultural perspective to Cardorna's life, demonstrating the role of Italy's military and national culture, the myths of the Risorgimento, and the mobilization of propaganda in creating an effective cult of personality. Utilizing ego-documents, memoirs, letters and public writings, Mondini delves into the ideology and psychology that combined to create such an untouchable autocrat, arguing that the history of fascism in Italy cannot be fully understood without appreciating Cardorna's role in the First World War.

The Colonial Way of War
  • Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c.1890–1914
  • Tom Menger
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2025
  • The violence of colonial wars between 1890 and 1914 is often thought to have been uniquely shaped by the nature of each of the European empires. This book argues instead that these wars' extreme violence was part of a shared 'Colonial Way of War'. Through detailed study of British, German and Dutch colonial wars, Tom Menger reveals the transimperial connectivity of fin-de-siècle colonial violence, including practices of scorched earth and extermination, such as the Herero Genocide (1904-1908). He explores how shared thought and practices arose from exchanges and transfers between actors of different empires, both Europeans and non-Europeans. These transfers can be traced in military manuals and other literature, but most notably in the transimperial mobility of military attachés, regular soldiers, settlers or 'adventurers'. Pioneering in its scope, Menger's work re-thinks the supposed exceptionality of standout cases of colonial violence, and more broadly challenges conceptions we have of imperial connectivity.

Moshe Dayan
  • The Making of a Strategist
  • Eitan Shamir
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2025
    Print publication:
    31 March 2025
  • In this major re-evaluation of Moshe Dayan's life and career, Eitan Shamir examines one of the most influential individuals in the history of modern Israel. As IDF Chief of Staff, theatre commander during the Sinai campaign and defence minister during the Six Days and Yom Kippur Wars, Dayan shaped Israeli history as well as the principles of Israel's security and foreign affairs. Eitan Shamir explores the basis and justification for Dayan's reputation as a strategist and what made his command and leadership unique. He reveals the ways in which Moshe Dayan led and planned his campaigns, how he made his decisions and his style as a general and a strategist. His findings shed important new light on broader issues of military command and culture, political-military relations, insurgency and counterinsurgency and the relations between small states and large powers, drawing lasting lessons for strategy today.

Leaving the Fight
  • Surrender, Prisoners of War, and Detainees in Western Warfare
  • John A. Lynn II
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • Surrender in warfare has determined the fate of governments, states, and nations. It has reduced powerful commanders to powerless captives and inflicted submission, degradation, and even death on common soldiers held as prisoners of war. It has also led to civilian detainees being grossly mistreated and murdered. However, surrender, prisoners of war, and detainees have rarely been addressed as general phenomena in warfare. Leaving the Fight is then an essential history of the evolution of surrender from the Middle Ages to the present day. John A. Lynn II explores the different forms taken by surrender, from the abject capitulation of armies and states to the withdrawal of forces from military interventions deemed to be unwinnable, such as in Vietnam and Afghanistan. He also considers the fates of prisoners of war and civilians detained by military forces from harsh treatment intended to intimidate foes to attempts to win over hearts and minds.

Balancing Strategy
  • Sea Power, Neutrality, and Prize Law in the Seven Years' War
  • Anna Brinkman
  • Published online:
    25 April 2024
    Print publication:
    02 May 2024
  • What is the relationship between seapower, law, and strategy? Anna Brinkman uses in-depth analysis of cases brought before the Court of Prize Appeal during the Seven Years' War to explore how Britain worked to shape maritime international law to its strategic advantage. Within the court, government officials and naval and legal minds came together to shape legal decisions from the perspectives of both legal philosophy and maritime strategic aims. As a result, neutrality and the negotiation of rights became critical to maritime warfare. Balancing Strategy unpicks a complex web of competing priorities: deals struck with the Dutch Republic and Spain; imperial rivalry; mercantilism; colonial trade; and the relationships between metropoles and colonies, trade, and the navy. Ultimately, influencing and shaping international law of the sea allows a nation to create the norms and rules that constrain or enable the use of seapower during war.

Tactical Air Power and the Vietnam War
  • Explaining Effectiveness in Modern Air Warfare
  • Phil Haun
  • Published online:
    04 January 2024
    Print publication:
    18 January 2024
  • This book introduces a much-needed theory of tactical air power to explain air power effectiveness in modern warfare with a particular focus on the Vietnam War as the first and largest modern air war. Phil Haun shows how in the Rolling Thunder, Commando Hunt, and Linebacker air campaigns, independently air power repeatedly failed to achieve US military and political objectives. In contrast, air forces in combined arms operations succeeded more often than not. In addition to predicting how armies will react to a lethal air threat, he identifies operational factors of air superiority, air-to-ground capabilities, and friendly ground force capabilities, along with environmental factors of weather, lighting, geography and terrain, and cover and concealment in order to explain air power effectiveness. The book concludes with analysis of modern air warfare since Vietnam along with an assessment of tactical air power relevance now and for the future.

Uncivil War
  • The British Army and the Troubles, 1966–1975
  • Huw Bennett
  • Published online:
    03 August 2023
    Print publication:
    05 October 2023
  • When Operation Banner was launched in 1969 civil war threatened to break out in Northern Ireland and spread over the Irish Sea. Uncivil War reveals the full story of how the British army acted to save Great Britain from disaster during the most violent phase of the Troubles but, in so doing, condemned the people of Northern Ireland to protracted, grinding conflict. Huw Bennett shows how the army's ambivalent response to loyalist violence undermined the prospects for peace and heightened Catholic distrust in the state. British strategy consistently underestimated community defence as a reason for people joining or supporting the IRA whilst senior commanders allowed the army to turn in on itself, hardening soldiers to the suffering of ordinary people. By 1975 military strategists considered the conflict unresolvable: the army could not convince Catholics or Protestants that it was there to protect them and settled instead for an unending war.

Holding Out
  • The German Army and Operational Command in 1917
  • Tony Cowan
  • Published online:
    31 March 2023
    Print publication:
    20 April 2023
  • This is a ground-breaking study of German operational command during a critical phase of the First World War from November 1916 to the eve of the third battle of Ypres. The situation faced by the German army on the Western Front in 1917 was very different from the one anticipated in pre-war doctrine and Holding Out examines how German commanders and staff officers adapted.  Tony Cowan analyses key command tasks to get under the skin of the army's command culture, internal politics and battle management systems from co-ordinating the troops, matériel and different levels of command needed to fight a modern battle to continuously learning and applying lessons from the ever-changing Western Front. His detailed analysis of the German defeat of the 1917 Entente spring offensive sheds new light on how the army and Germany were able to hold out so long during the war against increasing odds.

On a Knife Edge
  • How Germany Lost the First World War
  • Holger Afflerbach
  • Published online:
    20 October 2022
    Print publication:
    20 October 2022
  • Was the outcome of the First World War on a knife edge? In this major new account of German wartime politics and strategy Holger Afflerbach argues that the outcome of the war was actually in the balance until relatively late in the war. Using new evidence from diaries, letters and memoirs, he fundamentally revises our understanding of German strategy from the decision to go to war and the failure of the western offensive to the radicalisation of Germany's war effort under Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the ultimate collapse of the Central Powers. He uncovers the struggles in wartime Germany between supporters of peace and hardliners who wanted to fight to the finish. He suggests that Germany was not nearly as committed to all-out conquest as previous accounts argue. Numerous German peace advances could have offered the opportunity to end the war before it dragged Europe into the abyss.

Storm and Sack
  • British Sieges, Violence and the Laws of War in the Napoleonic Era, 1799–1815
  • Gavin Daly
  • Published online:
    29 September 2022
    Print publication:
    06 October 2022
  • During the Peninsular War, Wellington's army stormed and sacked three French-held Spanish towns: Ciudad Rodrigo (1812), Badajoz (1812) and San Sebastian (1813). Storm and Sack is the first major study of British soldiers' violence and restraint towards enemy combatants and civilians in the siege warfare of the Napoleonic era. Using soldiers' letters, diaries and memoirs, Gavin Daly compares and contrasts military practices and attitudes across British sieges spanning three continents, from the Peninsular War in Spain to India and South America. He focuses on siege rituals and laws of war, and uncovering the cultural and emotional history of the storm and sack of towns. This book challenges conventional understandings of the place and nature of sieges in the Napoleonic Wars. It encourages a rethinking of the notorious reputations of the British sacks of this period and their place within the long-term history of customary laws of war and siege violence. Daly reveals a multifaceted story not only of rage, enmity, plunder and atrocity but also of mercy, honour, humanity and moral outrage.

The Malayan Emergency
  • Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire
  • Karl Hack
  • Published online:
    16 December 2021
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021
  • The Malayan Emergency of 1948–1960 has been scrutinised for 'lessons' about how to win counterinsurgencies from the Vietnam War to twenty-first century Afghanistan. This book brings our understanding of the conflict up to date by interweaving government and insurgent accounts and looking at how they played out at local level. Drawing on oral history, recent memoirs and declassified archival material from the UK and Asia, Karl Hack offers a comprehensive, multi-perspective account of the Malayan Emergency and its impact on Malaysia. He sheds new light on questions about terror and violence against civilians, how insurgency and decolonisation interacted and how revolution was defeated. He considers how government policies such as pressurising villagers, resettlement and winning 'hearts and minds' can be judged from the perspective of insurgents and civilians. This timely book is the first truly multi-perspective and in-depth study of anti-colonial resistance and counterinsurgency in the Malayan Emergency.

America's Wars
  • Interventions, Regime Change, and Insurgencies after the Cold War
  • Thomas H. Henriksen
  • Published online:
    16 December 2021
    Print publication:
    20 January 2022
  • The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in American global hegemony in world affairs. In the post-Cold War period, both Democrat and Republican governments intervened, fought insurgencies, and changed regimes. In America's Wars, Thomas Henriksen explores how America tried to remake the world by militarily invading a host of nations beset with civil wars, ethnic cleansing, brutal dictators, and devastating humanitarian conditions. The immediate post-Cold War years saw the United States carrying out interventions in the name of Western-style democracy, humanitarianism, and liberal internationalism in Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. Later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks led America into larger-scale military incursions to defend itself from further assaults by al Qaeda in Afghanistan and from perceived nuclear arms in Iraq, while fighting small-footprint conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Arabia. This era is coming to an end with the resurgence of great power rivalry and rising threats from China and Russia.

Violence in Defeat
  • The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944–1945
  • Bastiaan Willems
  • Published online:
    12 February 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • In the final year of the Second World War, as bitter defensive fighting moved to German soil, a wave of intra-ethnic violence engulfed the country. Bastiaan Willems offers the first study into the impact and behaviour of the Wehrmacht on its own territory, focusing on the German units fighting in East Prussia and its capital Königsberg. He shows that the Wehrmacht's retreat into Germany, after three years of brutal fighting on the Eastern Front, contributed significantly to the spike of violence which occurred throughout the country immediately prior to defeat. Soldiers arriving with an ingrained barbarised mindset, developed on the Eastern Front, shaped the immediate environment of the area of operations, and of Nazi Germany as a whole. Willems establishes how the norms of the Wehrmacht as a retreating army impacted behavioural patterns on the home front, arguing that its presence increased the propensity to carry out violence in Germany.

War's Logic
  • Strategic Thought and the American Way of War
  • Antulio J. Echevarria II
  • Published online:
    05 February 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • Antulio J. Echevarria II reveals how successive generations of American strategic theorists have thought about war. Analyzing the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Billy Mitchell, Bernard Brodie, Robert Osgood, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, Henry Eccles, Joseph Wiley, Harry Summers, John Boyd, William Lind, and John Warden, he uncovers the logic that underpinned each theorist's critical concepts, core principles, and basic assumptions about the nature and character of war. In so doing, he identifies four paradigms of war's nature - traditional, modern, political, and materialist - that have shaped American strategic thought. If war's logic is political, as Carl von Clausewitz said, then so too is thinking about war.

Hitler's Fatal Miscalculation
  • Why Germany Declared War on the United States
  • Klaus H. Schmider
  • Published online:
    08 January 2021
    Print publication:
    28 January 2021
  • Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States has baffled generations of historians. In this revisionist new history of those fateful months, Klaus H. Schmider seeks to uncover the chain of events which would incite the German leader to declare war on the United States in December 1941. He provides new insights not just on the problems afflicting German strategy, foreign policy and war production but, crucially, how they were perceived at the time at the top levels of the Third Reich. Schmider sees the declaration of war on the United States not as an admission of defeat or a gesture of solidarity with Japan, but as an opportunistic gamble by the German leader. This move may have appeared an excellent bet at the time, but would ultimately doom the Third Reich.

Britain and Italy in the Era of the Great War
  • Defending and Forging Empires
  • Stefano Marcuzzi
  • Published online:
    08 December 2020
    Print publication:
    10 December 2020
  • This is an important reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Stefano Marcuzzi sheds new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war experiences: the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defence and Italy's ambition for imperial expansion. Taking Anglo-Italian bilateral relations as a special lens through which to understand the workings of the Entente in World War I, he reveals how the ups-and-downs of that relationship influenced and shaped Allied grand strategy. Marcuzzi considers three main issues – war aims, war strategy and peace-making – and examines how, under the pressure of divergent interests and wartime events, the Anglo-Italian 'traditional friendship' turned increasingly into competition by the end of the war, casting a shadow on Anglo-Italian relations both at the Peace Conference and in the interwar period.

Strangling the Axis
  • The Fight for Control of the Mediterranean during the Second World War
  • Richard Hammond
  • Published online:
    04 June 2020
    Print publication:
    25 June 2020
  • This is a major reassessment of the causes of Allied victory in the Second World War in the Mediterranean region. Drawing on a unique range of multinational source material, Richard Hammond demonstrates how the Allies' ability to gain control of the key routes across the sea and sink large quantities of enemy shipping denied the Axis forces in North Africa crucial supplies and proved vital to securing ultimate victory there. Furthermore, the sheer scale of attrition to Axis shipping outstripped their industrial capacity to compensate, leading to the collapse of the Axis position across key territories maintained by seaborne supply, such as Sardinia, Corsica and the Aegean islands. As such, Hammond demonstrates how the anti-shipping campaign in the Mediterranean was the fulcrum about which strategy in the theatre pivoted, and the vital enabling factor ultimately leading to Allied victory in the region.

Charles E. Callwell and the British Way in Warfare
  • Daniel Whittingham
  • Published online:
    19 December 2019
    Print publication:
    16 January 2020
  • Daniel Whittingham presents the first full-length study of one of Britain's most important military thinkers, Major-General Sir Charles E. Callwell (1859–1928). It tells the story of his life, which included service in military intelligence, the South African War, and on the General Staff before and during the First World War. It also presents the first comprehensive analysis of his writing: from his well-known books Small Wars (1896) and Military Operations and Maritime Preponderance (1905), to a host of other books and articles that are presented here for the first time. Through a study of Callwell's life and works, this book offers a new perspective on the nature and study of military history, the character of British strategy, and on the army to which he belonged.

Revolutionary France's War of Conquest in the Rhineland
  • Conquering the Natural Frontier, 1792-1797
  • Jordan R. Hayworth
  • Published online:
    11 February 2019
    Print publication:
    06 February 2019
  • In May 1790, the French National Assembly renounced wars of conquest. Two years later, France declared war on Austria and invaded Belgium and the Rhineland, claiming it was to spread the benefits of the Revolution. Soon, however, military and economic crises drove a shift in the nature of France's war effort. What started as a war for liberty became a war for conquest, one that brought devastating exploitation to the Rhineland. It was during this time that French foreign policy became influenced by the idea of attaining the natural frontiers - the Alps, the Pyrenees, and, most significantly, the Rhine. Although often portrayed as a diplomatic tradition of the French monarchy, Jordan R. Hayworth shows how the natural frontiers policy was born during the Revolution. In addition, he examines the intense and consequential debates that arose over the policy, which caused much confusion in the war and helped to undermine France's democratic experiment.

Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War
  • The Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917–1918
  • Meighen McCrae
  • Published online:
    24 January 2019
    Print publication:
    24 January 2019
  • When the Germans requested an armistice in October 1918, it was a shock to the Allied political and military leadership. They had been expecting, and planning for, the war to continue into 1919, the year they hoped to achieve a complete military victory over the Central Powers. Meighen McCrae illuminates how, throughout this planning process, the Supreme War Council evolved to become the predominant mechanism for coalition war-making. She analyses the Council's role in the formulation of an Allied strategy for 1918–1919 across the various theatres of war and compares the perspectives of the British, French, Americans and Italians. In doing so we learn how, in an early example of modern alliance warfare, the Supreme War Council had to coordinate national needs with coalition ones.

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