06 - Handouts (Military History Evolution) 43 Pages

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ATS/3 Date Updated: 01 January 2021
STUDENT HANDOUTS References: ST – Military History & Evolution
MILITARY HISTORY
Military of Ancient Rome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_ancient_Rome
The military of ancient Rome, according to Titus Livius, one of the more illustrious
historians of Rome over the centuries, was a key element in the rise of Rome over
“above seven hundred years”[1] from a small settlement in Latium to the capital of an
empire governing a wide region around the shores of the Mediterranean, or, as the
Romans themselves said, ‘’mare nostrum’’, “our sea". Livy asserts:
”... if any people ought to be allowed to consecrate their origins and refer them to a
divine source, so great is the military glory of the Roman People that when they profess
that their Father and the Father of their Founder was none other than Mars, the
nations of the earth may well submit to this also with as good a grace as they submit to
Rome's dominion.”
Titus Flavius Josephus, a contemporary historian, sometime high-ranking officer in the

Roman army, and commander of the rebels in the Jewish revolt describes the Roman
people as if they were "born readily armed."[2] At the time of the two historians,
Roman society had already evolved an effective military and had used it to defend itself
against the Etruscans, the Italics, the Greeks, the Gauls, the maritime empire of
Carthage, and the Macedonian kingdoms. In each war, it acquired more territory until,
when the civil war ended the Roman Republic, nothing was left for the first emperor,
Augustus, to do except declare it an empire and defend it.
The role and structure of the military were then altered during the empire. It became
less Roman; the duties of border protection and territorial administration being more
and more taken by foreign mercenaries officered by Romans. When they divided at last
into warring factions the empire fell, unable to keep out invading armies.
Army Core Purpose: Serving the people, Securing the land Page 1 of 44
During the Roman Republic, the function of the military was defined as service to the
‘’Senatus Populusque Romanus’’ - an agency designated by 'SPQR' on public
inscriptions. Its main body was the senate, which met in a building still extant in the
forum of Rome. Its decrees were handed off to the two chief officers of the state, the
consuls. They could levy from the citizens whatever military force they judged was
necessary to execute such decree.
This conscription was executed through a draft of male citizens assembled by age class.
The officers of the legion were tasked with selecting men for the ranks. The will of the
SPQR was binding on the consuls and the men, with the death penalty often assigned
for disobedience or failure. The men were under a rigorous code, known now for its
punitive crucifixion.
The consular duties were of any type whatever: military defense, police work, public
hygiene, assistance in a civil disaster, health work, agriculture, and especially the
construction of public roads, bridges, aqueducts, buildings, and the maintenance of
such. The soldiers were kept busy doing whatever service needed to be done: soldiering,
manning vessels, carpentry, blacksmithing, clerking, etc. They were trained as required,
but also previous skills, such as a trade, were exploited. They brought to the task and
were protected by the authority of the state.
The military's campaign history stretched over 1300 years and saw Roman armies
campaigning as far east as Parthia (modern-day Iran), as far south as Africa (modern-
day Tunisia) and Aegyptus (modern-day Egypt) and as far north as Britannia (modern-
day England, south Scotland, and Wales). The makeup of the Roman military changed
substantially over its history, from its early history as an unsalaried citizen militia to a
later professional force, the Imperial Roman army. The equipment used by the military
altered greatly in type over time, though there were very few technological
improvements in weapons manufacture, in common with the rest of the classical world.
For much of its history, the vast majority of Rome's forces were maintained at or
beyond the limits of its territory, to either expand Rome's domain or protect its existing
borders. Expansions were infrequent, as the emperors, adopting a strategy of fixed lines
of defense, had determined to maintain existing borders. For that purpose, they
constructed extensive walls and created permanent stations that became cities.
Population Base of the Early Empire:
At its territorial height, the Roman Empire may have contained between 45 million and
120 million people.[3] Historian Edward Gibbon estimated that the size of the Roman
army "most probably formed a standing force of three hundred and seventy-five
thousand men"[4] at the Empire's territorial peak in the time of the Roman Emperor
Hadrian (117 − 138CE). This estimate probably included only legionary and auxiliary
troops of the Roman army.[4] However, Gibbon states that it is "not... easy to define the
size of the Roman military with any tolerable accuracy." In the late Imperial period,
when vast numbers of foederati were employed by the Romans, Antonio Santosuosso
estimated the combined number of men in arms of the two Roman empires numbered
closer to 700,000 in total (not all members of a standing army), drawing on data from
the Notitia Dignitatum. However, he notes that these figures were probably subject to
inflation due to the practice of leaving dead soldiers "on the books" to continue to draw
their wages and ration. Furthermore, it is irrespective of whether the troops were raised
by the Romans or simply hired by them to fight on their behalf.[5]
Recruitment:
Initially, Rome's military consisted of an annual citizen levy performing military service
as part of their duty to the state. During this period, the Roman army would prosecute
seasonal campaigns against largely local adversaries. As the extent of the territories
falling under Roman suzerainty expanded, and the size of the city's forces increased, the
soldiery of ancient Rome became increasingly professional and salaried. As a
consequence, military service at the lower (non-staff) levels became progressively
longer-term. Roman military units of the period were largely homogeneous and highly
regulated. The army consisted of units of citizen infantry known as legions (Latin: legio)
as well as non-legionary allied troops known as auxiliary. The latter were most
commonly called upon to provide light infantry or cavalry support.
Military service in the later empire continued to be salaried yearly and professionally
for Rome's regular troops. However, the trend of employing allied or mercenary troops
was expanded such that these troops came to represent a substantial proportion of
Rome's forces. At the same time, the uniformity of structure found in Rome's earlier
military forces disappeared. The soldiery of the era ranged from lightly armed mounted
archers to heavy infantry, in regiments of varying size and quality. This was
accompanied by a trend in the late empire of an increasing predominance of cavalry
rather than infantry troops, as well as an emphasis on more mobile operations.
Military Subculture:
The British historian Peter Heather describes Roman military culture as being "just
like the Marines, but much nastier".[6] The army did not provide much social mobility,
and it also took quite some time to complete one's service. The pay was not the best for
the time but could be remedied by advance in rank, loot from wars, and additional pay
from emperors. Also, the army did provide a guaranteed supply of food (many times
soldiers had to pay for food and supplies), doctors, and stability. In the legions of the
Republic, discipline was fierce and training harsh, all intended to instill a group
cohesion or esprit de corps that could bind the men together into effective fighting units.
Unlike opponents such as the Gauls, who were fierce individual warriors, Roman
military training concentrated on instilling teamwork and maintaining a level head over
individual bravery − troops were to maintain exact formations in battle and "despise
wild swinging blows"[7] in favor of sheltering behind one's shield and delivering
efficient stabs when an opponent made himself vulnerable.
Loyalty was to the Roman state but pride was based in the soldier's unit, to which was
attached a military standard − in the case of the legions a legionary eagle. Successful
units were awarded accolades that became part of their official name, such as the 20th
legion, which became the XX Valeria Victrix (the "Valiant and Victorious 20th").
Of the martial culture of less valued units such as sailors, and light infantry, less is
known, but it is doubtful that its training was as intense or its esprit de corps as strong
as in the legions.
Literacy was highly valued in the Roman military, and literacy rates in the military far
exceeded that of the Roman society as a whole.[8]
Capabilities:
The military capability of Rome – its preparedness or readiness – was always primarily
based upon the maintenance of an active fighting force acting either at or beyond its
military frontiers, something that historian Luttwak refers to as a "thin linear
perimeter.[23] This is best illustrated by showing the dispositions of the Roman legions,
the backbone of the Roman army. (see right). Because of these deployments, the Roman
military kept a central strategic reserve after the Social War. Such reserves were only
re-established during the late Empire when the army was split into a border defense
force and mobile response field units.
The Empire's system of building an extensive and well-maintained road network, as

well as its absolute command of the Mediterranean for much of its history, enabled a
primitive form of rapid reaction, also stressed in modern military doctrine, although
because there was no real strategic reserve, this often entailed the raising of fresh troops
or the withdrawing of troops from other parts of the border. However, border troops
were usually very capable of handling enemies before they could penetrate far into the
Roman hinterland.
The Roman military had an extensive logistical supply chain. There was no specialized
branch of the military devoted to logistics and transportation, although this was to a
great extent carried out by the Roman Navy due to the ease and low costs of
transporting goods via sea and river compared to overland.[25] There is archaeological
evidence that Roman armies campaigning in Germania were supplied by a logistical
supply chain beginning in Italy and Gaul, then transported by sea to the northern coast
of Germania, and finally penetrating Germania via barges on inland waterways. Forces
were routinely supplied via fixed supply chains, and although Roman armies in enemy
territory would often supplement or replace this by foraging for food or purchasing
food locally, this was often insufficient for their needs: Heather states that a single
legion would have required 13.5 tons of food per month, and that it would have proved
impossible to source this locally.[26]
The Roman military readily adopted types of arms and armor that were effectively used
against them by their enemies. Initially, Roman troops were armed after Greek and
Etruscan models, using large oval shields and long pikes. On encountering the Celts
they adopted much Celtic equipment and again later adopted items such as the
"gladius" from Iberian peoples. Later in
Rome's history, it adopted practices such as arming its cavalry with bows in the
Parthian style and even experimented briefly with niche weaponry such as elephants
and camel-troops. Besides personal weaponry, the Roman military adopted team
weaponry such as the ballista and developed a naval weapon known as the Corvus
weapon Corvus, a spiked plank used for affixing and boarding enemy ships.
Romans received their medical knowledge largely from the Greeks that came before
them. As Rome started to expand, it slowly embraced the Greek culture, causing an
influx of medicinal information in Roman society.[42] Because of this influx, it allowed
this knowledge to become the foundation of all western medical tradition. The Greek
theories were kept alive and their practices continued well into the future.[42] This
knowledge was also the foundation used in military medicine since it contained the
overarching ideas of their medical knowledge. As time progressed these medical texts
would be translated into Arabic and then back into Latin as the flow of information
changed. Based on this, we can presume that some of the information in these texts has
been lost in translation. Despite this, we are still able to illustrate a clear picture of what
military medicine was like during the reign of the Roman Empire.
THE CRUSADES: CONSEQUENCES & EFFECTS

By Mark Cartwright
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1273/the-crusades-consequences--effects/
The crusades of the 11th to 15th century CE have become one of the defining events of
the Middle Ages in both Europe and the Middle East. The campaigns brought
significant consequences wherever they occurred but also pushed changes within the
states that organized and fought them. Even when the crusades had ended, their
influence continued through literature and other cultural means and, resurrected as an
idea in more modern times, they continue today to color international relations.
Many exaggerated claims have been made concerning the effects and consequences of
the crusades on life in the Middle Ages and later. There were, undoubtedly, momentous
changes in life, politics and religion from the 11th to 14th centuries CE, but it is perhaps
prudent to heed the words of historian and acclaimed Crusades expert T. Asbridge:
The precise role of the Crusades remains debatable. Any attempt to pinpoint the effect
of this movement is fraught with difficulty, because it demands the tracing and isolation
of one single thread within the weave of history - and the hypothetical reconstruction of
the world, were that strand to be removed. Some impacts are relatively clear, but many
observations must, perforce, be confined to broad generalizations. (664-5)
The impact of the Crusades may thus be summarized in general terms as:
an increased presence of Christians in the Levant during the Middle Ages.

the development of military orders.
a polarization of the East and West based on religious differences. ✓ the specific
application of religious goals to warfare in the Levant, Iberian peninsula, and Baltic
region, in particular.
the increased role and prestige of the popes and the Catholic Church in secular affairs.
the souring of relations between the West and the Byzantine Empire leading, ultimately,
to the latter’s destruction.
an increase in the power of the royal houses of Europe.
a stronger collective cultural identity in Europe.
an increase in xenophobia and intolerance between Christians and Muslims, and
between Christians and Jews, heretics and pagans.
an increase in international trade and exchange of ideas and technology.
an increase in the power of such Italian states as Venice, Genoa, and
Pisa.
the appropriation of many Christian relics to Europe.
the use of a religious historical precedent to justify colonialism, warfare and terrorism.
Middle East & Muslim World
The immediate geopolitical results of the crusades was the recapture of Jerusalem on 15
July 1099 CE, but to ensure the Holy City stayed in Christian hands it was necessary
that various western settlements were established in the Levant (collectively known as
the Latin East, the Crusader States or Outremer). For their defense, a steady supply of
new crusaders would be needed in the coming decades and military orders of
professional knights were created there such as the Knights Templar and Knights
Hospitaller. These, in turn, inspired the formation of chivalric orders like the Order of
the Garter in England (founded 1348 CE) which advocated the benefits of crusading on
their members.
Despite the militarized presence in the Holy Land, the continued recruitment drive in
Europe, and increased involvement of kings and emperors, it proved impossible to hold
on to the gains of the First Crusade and more campaigns were required to recapture
such cities as Edessa and Jerusalem itself after its fall again in 1187 CE. There would be
eight official crusades and several other unofficial ones throughout the 12th and 13th
centuries CE, which all met with more failure than success, and in 1291 CE the
Crusader States were absorbed into the Mamluk Sultanate.
TRAVEL BECAME MORE COMMON, INITIALLY IN THE FORM OF

PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOLY LAND & THERE DEVELOPED A THIRST TO
READ ABOUT SUCH JOURNEYS WHICH WERE WIDELY PUBLISHED.
The Muslim world had, prior to the crusades, already embarked on jihad - often
translated as 'holy war’ but meaning, more accurately, a ‘striving’ to both defend and
expand Islam and Islamic territories. Despite the religious significance of Jerusalem to
Muslims, the coastal Levant area was only of minor economic and political importance
to the caliphates of Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. The Muslim world was itself
divided into various Muslim sects and beset by political rivalries and competition
between cities and regions. The crusades did provide an opportunity for greater unity in
order to face this new threat from the West, but it was not always an opportunity taken.
Some rulers, most famously Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria (r. 11741193 CE), did
employ the propaganda of religious warfare to present themselves as the chosen leader
of the Muslim world to help them gain supremacy within it.
The Spread of The Crusades
The crusader movement spread to Spain where, in the 11th-13th century CE, attacks
were made against the Muslim Moors there, the so-called Reconquista (Reconquest).
Prussia and the Baltic (the Northern Crusades), North Africa, and Poland, amongst
many other places, would also witness crusading armies from the 12th up to the 15th
century CE as the crusading ideal, despite the dubious military successes, continued to
appeal to leaders, soldiers, and ordinary people in the West. Finally, the crusades as an
idea would have reached just about everyone in Europe by the 14th century CE, and the
majority of people would have sat through at least one sermon preaching their merits
and heard the need for recruitment and material support. Indeed, very few people’s
pockets would have remained untouched by the state and church taxes which were
regularly imposed to pay for the crusades.
The success of the First Crusade and the image that popes directed the affairs of the
whole Christian world helped the Papacy gain supremacy over the Hohenstaufen
emperors. The Catholic Church had also created a new fast-track entry into heaven
with the promise that crusaders would enjoy an immediate remission of their sins -
military service and penance were intermixed so that crusading became an act of
devotion. However, with each new failed campaign, papal prestige declined, although in
Spain and north-east Europe the territorial successes did promote the Papacy. Another
negative consequence for many was the Church’s official sanction of the possibility to
purchase indulgences. That is if one could not or did not want to go on a crusade in
person, giving material aid to others who did so reaped the same spiritual benefits. This
idea was extended by the Catholic Church to create a whole system of paid indulgences,
a situation which contributed to the emergence of the Reformation of the 16th century
CE.
Byzantine Empire
The crusades caused a rupture in western-Byzantine relations. First, there was the
Byzantine’s horror at unruly groups of warriors causing havoc in their territory.
Outbreaks of fighting between crusaders and Byzantine forces were common, and the
mistrust and suspicion of their intentions grew. It was a troublesome relationship that
only got worse, with accusations of neither party trying very hard to defend the
interests of the other. The situation culminated in the shocking sacking of
Constantinople on 1204 CE during the Fourth Crusade, which also saw the
appropriation of art and religious relics by European powers. The Empire became so
debilitated it could offer little resistance to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE.
Europe
The power of the royal houses of Europe and the centralization of government increased
thanks to an increase in taxes, the acquisition of wealth in the Middle East, and the
imposition of tariffs on trade. The death of many nobles during crusades and the fact
that many mortgaged their land to the crown in order to pay for their campaigns and
those of their followers also increased royal power. There was a decline in the system of
feudalism, too, as many nobles sold their lands to fund their travels, freeing their serfs
in the process.
The Sack of Constantinople in 1204 CE

By Palma Le Jeune (Public Domain)
The conquest of the Muslim-held territories in southern Italy, Sicily, and the Iberian
peninsula gave access to new knowledge, the so-called ‘New Logic’. There was also a
greater feeling of being ‘European’, that despite differences between states, the people
of Europe did share a common identity and cultural heritage (although crusading
would be incorporated into ideals of chivalry which widened the gulf between those who
were and those who were not members of the knightly class). The other side of the
cultural coin was an increase in xenophobia. Religious intolerance manifested itself in
many ways, but most brutally in the pogroms against the Jews (notably in northern
France and the Rhineland in 1096-1097 CE) and violent attacks on pagans, schismatics
and heretics across Europe.
TRADE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST GREATLY INCREASED. MORE EXOTIC

GOODS ENTERED EUROPE THAN EVER BEFORE, SUCH AS SPICES.
Trade between East and West greatly increased. More exotic goods entered Europe
than ever before, such as spices (especially pepper and cinnamon), sugar, dates,
pistachio nuts, watermelons, and lemons. Cotton cloth, Persian carpets, and eastern
clothing came, too. The Italian states of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa grew rich through
their control of the Middle East and Byzantine trade routes, which was in addition to
the money they raked in from transporting crusader armies and their supplies. This
was happening anyway, but the crusades probably accelerated the process of
international trade across the Mediterranean.
Travel became more common, initially in the form of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and
there also developed a thirst to read about such journeys which were widely published.
The age of exploration had begun and would lead to the discovery of the New World
where the concept of a crusade against non-believers was once more applied. Hernán
Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztecs, claimed his followers were milites Christi or
‘Knights of Christ’ waging a guerra santa or ‘Holy War’.
Into the Modern Era
The crusades cast a very long shadow indeed, with works of art, literature and even
wars endlessly recalling the imagery, ideals, successes and disasters of the holy wars into
the 21st century CE. There was a process of hero-worship, even in medieval times, of
such figures as Saladin and Richard the
Lionhearted who were praised not only for their military skills but, above all, for their
chivalry. Following the Reformation, the opposite happened and the crusades were
brushed under the historical carpet as a brutal and undesirable aspect of our past that
was best forgotten.
Napoleonic Wars
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Napoleonic Wars were wars which were fought during the rule of Napoleon
Bonaparte over France. They started after the French Revolution ended and Napoleon
Bonaparte became powerful in France in November 1799. War began between the
United Kingdom and France in 1803. This happened when the Treaty of Amiens ended
in 1802.
These wars changed European military systems. Cannons became lighter and moved
faster. Armies were much larger yet had better food and supplies. They were very big
and destructive, mainly because of compulsory conscription. The French became
powerful very fast and conquered most of Europe. The French then lost quickly. The
French invasion of Russia failed. The
Napoleonic Wars ended with the Second Treaty of Paris on 20 November 1815. This was
just after the Battle of Waterloo, a big battle that Napoleon lost. Napoleon's empire lost
the wars. The Bourbon Dynasty ruled France again.
Some people call the time between April 20 1792 and November 20 1815 "the Great
French War". On one side was the First Empire of France, Kingdom of Italy, and
others. On the other side was Great Britain, Prussia, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Portugal,
Spain, Sicily, and others.
1805-1812: Napoleonic Conquest of Europe
On 18 May 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of the French at Notre
Dame de Paris. The following year, the Third Coalition started. In response, Napoleon
crowned himself King of Italy. The Austrian Emperor, Franz I, angrily declared war on
Napoleon, beginning the War of the Third
Coalition. The British destroyed the French navy at the Battle of Trafalgar in October.
In December the Austrians and the Russians allied, and fought the French at the Battle
of Austerlitz. The Russo-Austrian army suffered a devastating defeat and had to sign a
treaty with Napoleon.
In 1806, the War of the Fourth Coalition started. The Kingdom of Prussia declared war
on France first but was crushed by Napoleon's troops at the Battle of Jena. Napoleon
captured Berlin before the Russians could help. In 1807, Napoleon defeated the Russian
army at the Battle of Friedland, ending the Fourth Coalition.
In 1809, the War of the Fifth Coalition began when Austria declared war on Napoleon.
In the early phases of the war, the Austrians had advantage of the war, but later the
French captured Vienna, ending the Fifth Coalition. At the height of his power in 1810,
Napoleon had controlled France, Spain, northern Italy, Germany, all the way to Russia.
In 1808, the Peninsular War began when Napoleon crowned his brother Joseph
Bonaparte as King of Spain and fought British, Spanish, and Portuguese troops. In
1809, the Finnish War began between Russia and Sweden when Sweden and Portugal
did make peace with France. This led to the annexation of Finland by Russia and
decisive failure for Sweden. In 1811, France and Russia made disagreements again and
Napoleon allied with Prussia and Austria and invaded Russia.
1812: Invasion of Russia/The War of 1812
Napoleon staged a French invasion of Russia in 1812 just as the United States and
Britain started the War of 1812. It was in Russia that Napoleon was first checked in his
conquest of Europe, at the huge Battle of Borodino. However, the Russians had to
retreat and abandon the capital, Moscow, to the advancing French troops. Napoleon
found Moscow empty and burning. The cold winter along with starvation from
scorched earth tactics devastated Napoleon's army.
Napoleon's weakened ''Grande Armee'' had to retreat to Paris through the Russian
freezing winter but was finally defeated by the Russians. Prussia and Austria declared
war after Napoleon's failure, beginning the War of the Sixth Coalition. In the latter
19th century, Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's music
piece 1812 Overture depicted the Patriotic war and celebrated the resistance and
liberation of Russia.
Meanwhile, the much smaller War of 1812 started between Britain and the United
States over maritime issues. It continued until 1815, neither side gaining anything.
Revolutions in Latin America made independent states of most of the Spanish Empire
in America.
1813-1814: Battle of Leipzig and First Restoration
The British, Spanish, and Portuguese had pushed Napoleon's forces out of
Spain following the Battle of Vitoria. The Allies (consisting of Great Britain, Russia,
Prussia, and Austria) defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig and captured Paris in
1814. The brother of King Louis XVI had already proclaimed himself French king,
Louis XVIII, and was sent by the Prussian forces to Paris and crowned Bourbon king.
Napoleon was forced to abdicate.
1815: Battle of Waterloo and Hundred Days
Napoleon was later exiled to Elba and was nearly assassinated. But then he and 200
other men escaped back to Paris and forced Louis XVIII off the throne, beginning
Hundred Days. The former Coalition members formed the Seventh Coalition and the
Duke of Wellington of Great Britain defeated Napoleon again at the Battle of Waterloo
with the help of the Prussians in 1815. Louis XVIII was returned to the throne again,
and the Second Restoration began.
SUN TZU
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sun Tzu (Chinese: 孫子; pinyin: Sūnzǐ) was a Chinese general, military strategist,
writer and philosopher who lived in the Eastern Zhou period of ancient China. Sun Tzu
is traditionally credited as the author of The Art of War, an influential work of military
strategy that has affected both Western and East Asian philosophy and military
thinking. His works focus much more on alternatives to battle, such as stratagem, delay,
the use of spies and alternatives to war itself, the making and keeping of alliances, the
uses of deceit and a willingness to submit, at least temporarily, to more powerful foes.[3]
Sun Tzu is revered in Chinese and East Asian culture as a legendary historical and
military figure. His birth name was Sun Wu (Chinese: 孫武) and he was known outside
of his family by his courtesy name Changqing (Chinese: 長卿). The name Sun Tzu by
which he is best known in the Western World is an honorific which means "Master
Sun".
Sun Tzu's historicity is uncertain. The Han dynasty historian Sima Qian and other
traditional Chinese historians placed him as a minister to King Helü of Wu and dated
his lifetime to 544–496 BC. Modern scholars accepting his historicity place the extant
text of The Art of War in the later Warring States period based on its style of
composition and its descriptions of warfare.[4] Traditional accounts state that the
general's descendant Sun Bin wrote a treatise on military tactics, also titled The Art of
War. Since Sun Wu and Sun Bin were referred to as Sun Tzu in classical Chinese texts,
some historians believed them identical, prior to the rediscovery of Sun Bin's treatise in
1972.
Sun Tzu's work has been praised and employed in East Asian warfare since its
composition. During the twentieth century, The Art of War grew in popularity and saw
practical use in Western society as well. It continues to influence many competitive
endeavors in the world, including culture, politics, business and sports, as well as
modern warfare.
Life
The Yinqueshan Han Slips unearthed in 1972 include Sun Tzu's Art of War, collection
of Shandong Museum.
The oldest available sources disagree as to where Sun Tzu was born. The Spring and
Autumn Annals and Sima Qian's later Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) state that
Sun Tzu was born in Qi.[9] Both sources also agree that Sun Tzu was born in the late
Spring and Autumn period and that he was active as a general and strategist, serving
king Helü of Wu in the late sixth century BC, beginning around 512 BC. Sun Tzu's
victories then inspired him to write The Art of War. The Art of War was one of the
most widely read military treatises in the subsequent Warring States period, a time of
constant war among seven ancient Chinese states – Zhao, Qi, Qin, Chu, Han, Wei, and
Yan – who fought to control the vast expanse of fertile territory in Eastern
China.[10]
One of the better-known stories about Sun Tzu, taken from Sima Qian, illustrates Sun
Tzu's temperament as follows: Before hiring Sun Tzu, the King of Wu tested Sun Tzu's
skills by commanding him to train a harem of 360 concubines into soldiers. Sun Tzu
divided them into two companies, appointing the two concubines most favored by the
king as the company commanders. When Sun Tzu first ordered the concubines to face
right, they giggled. In response, Sun Tzu said that the general, in this case himself, was
responsible for ensuring that soldiers understood the commands given to them. Then,
he reiterated the command, and again the concubines giggled. Sun Tzu then ordered the
execution of the king's two favored concubines, to the king's protests. He explained that
if the general's soldiers understood their commands but did not obey, it was the fault of
the officers. Sun Tzu also said that, once a general was appointed, it was his duty to
carry out his mission, even if the king protested. After both concubines were killed, new
officers were chosen to replace them. Afterwards, both companies, now well aware of
the costs of further frivolity, performed their maneuvers flawlessly.[11]
Sima Qian claimed that Sun Tzu later proved on the battlefield that his theories were
effective (for example, at the Battle of Boju), that he had a successful military career,
and that he wrote The Art of War based on his tested expertise.[11] However, the
Zuozhuan, a historical text written centuries earlier than the Shiji, provides a much
more detailed account of the Battle of Boju, but does not mention Sun Tzu at all.[12]
Historicity
Around the 12th century AD, some Chinese scholars began to doubt the historical
existence of Sun Tzu, primarily on the grounds that he is not mentioned in the historical
classic Zuo zhuan, which mentions most of the notable figures from the Spring and
Autumn period.[13] The name "Sun Wu" ( 孫武) does not appear in any text prior to
the Records of the Grand Historian,[14] and may have been a made-up descriptive
cognomen meaning "the fugitive warrior"—the surname "Sun" can be glossed as the
related term "fugitive" (xùn 遜), while "Wu" is the ancient Chinese virtue of "martial,
valiant" (wǔ 武), which corresponds to Sun Tzu's role as the hero's doppelgänger in the
story of Wu Zixu.[15] The only historical battle attributed to Sun Tzu, the Battle of
Boju, has no record of him fighting in that battle.[16]
Situation during the Battle of Boju
Skeptics cite possible historical inaccuracies and anachronisms in the text, and that the
book was actually a compilation from different authors and military strategists.
Attribution of the authorship of The Art of War varies among scholars and has
included people and movements including Sun; Chu scholar Wu Zixu; an anonymous
author; a school of theorists in Qi or Wu; Sun Bin; and others.[17] Sun Bin appears to
have been an actual person who was a genuine authority on military matters, and may
have been the inspiration for the creation of the historical figure "Sun Tzu" through a
form of euhemerism.[15] The name Sun Wu does appear in later sources such as the
Shiji and the Wu Yue Chunqiu, but were written centuries after Sun Tzu's era.[18]
The use of the strips in other works however, such as The Methods of the Sima is
considered proof of Sun Tzu's historical priority.[19] According to Ralph Sawyer, it is
very likely Sun Tzu did exist and not only served as a general but also wrote the core of
the book that bears his name.[20] It is argued that there is a disparity between the
large-scale wars and sophisticated techniques detailed in the text and the more
primitive small-scale battles that many believe predominated in China during the 6th
century BC. Against this, Sawyer argues that the teachings of Sun Wu were probably
taught to succeeding generations in his family or a small school of disciples, which
eventually included Sun Bin. These descendants or students may have revised or
expanded upon certain points in the original text.[20]
Skeptics who identify issues with the traditionalist view point to possible anachronisms
in The Art of War including terms, technology (such as anachronistic crossbows and the
unmentioned cavalry), philosophical ideas, events, and military techniques that should
not have been available to Sun Wu.[21][22] Additionally, there are no records of
professional generals during the Spring and Autumn period; these are only extant from
the Warring States period, so there is doubt as to Sun Tzu's rank and generalship.[22]
This caused much confusion as to when The Art of War was actually written. The first
traditional view is that it was written in 512 BC by the historical Sun Wu, active in the
last years of the Spring and Autumn period (c. 722–481 BC). A second view, held by
scholars such as Samuel Griffith, places The Art of War during the middle to late
Warring States period (c. 481–221 BC). Finally, a third school claims that the slips were
published in the last half of the 5th century BC; this is based on how its adherents
interpret the bamboo slips discovered at Yinque Shan in 1972 AD.[23]
The Art of War
The Art of War is traditionally ascribed to Sun Tzu. It presents a philosophy of war for
managing conflicts and winning battles. It is accepted as a masterpiece on strategy and
has been frequently cited and referred to by generals and theorists since it was first
published, translated, and distributed internationally.[24]
There are numerous theories concerning when the text was completed and concerning
the identity of the author or authors, but archeological recoveries show The Art of War
had taken roughly its current form by at least the early Han.[25] Because it is
impossible to prove definitively when the Art of War was completed before this date,
the differing theories concerning the work's author or authors and date of completion
are unlikely to be completely resolved.[26] Some modern scholars believe that it
contains not only the thoughts of its original author but also commentary and
clarifications from later military theorists, such as Li Quan and Du Mu.
Of the military texts written before the unification of China and Shi Huangdi's
subsequent book burning in the second century BC, six major works have survived.
During the much later Song dynasty, these six works were combined with a Tang text
into a collection called the Seven Military Classics. As a central part of that compilation,
The Art of War formed the foundations of orthodox military theory in early modern
China. Illustrating this point, the book was required reading to pass the tests for
imperial appointment to military positions.[27]
Sun Tzu's The Art of War uses language that may be unusual in a Western text on
warfare and strategy.[28] For example, the eleventh chapter states that a leader must be
"serene and inscrutable" and capable of comprehending "unfathomable plans". The
text contains many similar remarks that have long confused Western readers lacking an
awareness of the East Asian context. The meanings of such statements are clearer when
interpreted in the context of Taoist thought and practice. Sun Tzu viewed the ideal
general as an enlightened Taoist master, which has led to The Art of War being
considered a prime example of Taoist strategy. [citation needed]
The book has also become popular among political leaders and those in business
management. Despite its title, The Art of War addresses strategy in a broad fashion,
touching upon public administration and planning. The text outlines theories of battle,
but also advocates diplomacy and the cultivation of relationships with other nations as
essential to the health of a state.[24]
On 10 April 1972, the Yinqueshan Han Tombs were accidentally unearthed by

construction workers in Shandong.[29][30] Scholars uncovered a collection of ancient
texts written on unusually well-preserved bamboo slips. Among them were The Art of
War and Sun Bin's Military Methods.[30] Although Han dynasty bibliographies noted
the latter publication as extant and written by a descendant of Sun, it had previously
been lost. The rediscovery of Sun Bin's work is regarded as extremely important by
scholars, both because of Sun Bin's relationship to Sun Tzu and because of the work's
addition to the body of military thought in Chinese late antiquity.[31] The discovery as
a whole significantly expanded the body of surviving Warring States military theory.
Sun Bin's treatise is the only known military text surviving from the Warring States
period discovered in the twentieth century and bears the closest similarity to The Art of
War of all surviving texts.
Legacy
Sun Tzu's Art of War has influenced many notable figures. The Chinese historian Sima
Qian recounted that China's first historical emperor, Qin's Shi Huangdi, considered the
book invaluable in ending the time of the Warring States. In the 20th century, the
Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong partially credited his 1949 victory over Chiang
Kai-shek and the Kuomintang to The Art of War. The work strongly influenced Mao's
writings about guerrilla warfare, which further influenced communist insurgencies
around the world.[32]
The Art of War was introduced into Japan c. AD 760 and the book quickly became
popular among Japanese generals. Through its later influence on Oda Nobunaga,
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu,[32] it significantly affected the unification
of Japan in the early modern era. Before the Meiji Restoration, mastery of its teachings
was honored among the samurai and its teachings were both exhorted and exemplified
by influential daimyōs and shōguns. It remained popular among the Imperial Japanese
armed forces. The Admiral of the Fleet Tōgō Heihachirō, who led Japan's forces to
victory in the Russo-Japanese War, was an avid reader of Sun
Tzu.[33]
Ho Chi Minh translated the work for his Vietnamese officers to study. His general Võ
Nguyên Giáp, the strategist behind victories over French and American forces in
Vietnam, was likewise an avid student and practitioner of Sun Tzu's ideas.[34][35][36]
America's Asian conflicts against Japan, North Korea, and North Vietnam brought Sun
Tzu to the attention of American military leaders. The Department of the Army in the
United States, through its Command and General Staff College, has directed all units to
maintain libraries within their respective headquarters for the continuing education of
personnel in the art of war. The Art of War is mentioned as an example of works to be
maintained at each facility, and staff duty officers are obliged to prepare short papers
for presentation to other officers on their readings.[37] Similarly, Sun Tzu's Art of War
is listed on the Marine Corps Professional Reading Program.[38] During the Gulf War
in the 1990s, both Generals Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. and Colin Powell employed
principles from Sun Tzu related to deception, speed, and striking one's enemy's weak
points.[32] However, the United States and other Western countries have been criticised
for not truly understanding Sun Tzu's work and not appreciating The Art of War
within the wider context of Chinese society.[39]
Daoist rhetoric is a component incorporated in the Art of War. According to Steven C.

Combs in "Sun-zi and the Art of War: The Rhetoric of Parsimony",[40] warfare is
"used as a metaphor for rhetoric, and that both are philosophically based arts."[40]
Combs writes "Warfare is analogous to persuasion, as a battle for hearts and
minds."[40] The application of The Art of War strategies throughout history is
attributed to its philosophical rhetoric. Daoism is the central principle in the Art of
War. Combs compares ancient Daoist Chinese to traditional Aristotelian rhetoric,
notably for the differences in persuasion. Daoist rhetoric in the art of war warfare
strategies is described as "peaceful and passive, favoring silence over speech".[40] This
form of communication is parsimonious. Parsimonious behavior, which is highly
emphasized in The Art of War as avoiding confrontation and being spiritual in nature,
shapes basic principles in Daoism.[41]
American Civil War

https://www.britannica.com/event/American -Civil-War/The-land-war
American Civil War, also called War Between the States, four-year war (1861– 65)
between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union and
formed the Confederate States of America.
Prelude to War
The secession of the Southern states (in chronological order, South Carolina,
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas,
Tennessee, and North Carolina) in 1860–61 and the ensuing outbreak of armed
hostilities were the culmination of decades of growing sectional friction over slavery.
Between 1815 and 1861 the economy of the Northern states was rapidly modernizing
and diversifying. Although agriculture—mostly smaller farms that relied on free labour
—remained the dominant sector in the North, industrialization had taken root there.
Moreover, Northerners had invested heavily in an expansive and varied transportation
system that included canals, roads, steamboats, and railroads; in financial industries
such as banking and insurance; and in a large communications network that featured
inexpensive, widely available newspapers, magazines, and books, along with the
telegraph.
By contrast, the Southern economy was based principally on large farms (plantations)
that produced commercial crops such as cotton and that relied on slaves as the main
labour force. Rather than invest in factories or railroads as Northerners had done,
Southerners invested their money in slaves—even more than in land; by 1860, 84
percent of the capital invested in manufacturing was invested in the free
(nonslaveholding) states. Yet, to Southerners, as late as 1860, this appeared to be a
sound business decision. The price of cotton, the South’s defining crop, had skyrocketed
in the 1850s, and the value of slaves—who were, after all, property—rose
commensurately.
By 1860 the per capita wealth of Southern whites was twice that of Northerners, and
three-fifths of the wealthiest individuals in the country were Southerners.
The extension of slavery into new territories and states had been an issue as far back as
the Northwest Ordinance of 1784. When the slave territory of Missouri sought
statehood in 1818, Congress debated for two years before arriving upon the Missouri
Compromise of 1820. This was the first of a series of political deals that resulted from
arguments between pro-slavery and antislavery forces over the expansion of the
“peculiar institution,” as it was known, into the West. The end of the Mexican-
American War in 1848 and the roughly 500,000 square miles (1.3 million square km) of
new territory that the United States gained as a result of it added a new sense of
urgency to the dispute. More and more Northerners, driven by a sense of morality or an
interest in protecting free labour, came to believe, in the 1850s, that bondage needed to
be eradicated. White Southerners feared that limiting the expansion of slavery would
consign the institution to certain death. Over the course of the decade, the two sides
became increasingly polarized and politicians less able to contain the dispute through
compromise. When Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the explicitly antislavery
Republican Party, won the 1860 presidential election, seven Southern states (South
Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) carried out
their threat and seceded, organizing as the Confederate States of America.
In the early morning hours of April 12, 1861, rebels opened fire on Fort Sumter, at the
entrance to the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina. Curiously, this first encounter
of what would be the bloodiest war in the history of the United States claimed no
victims. After a 34-hour bombardment, Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered his
command of about 85 soldiers to some 5,500 besieging Confederate troops under P.G.T.
Beauregard. Within weeks, four more Southern states (Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee,
and North Carolina) left the Union to join the Confederacy.
With war upon the land, President Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen to serve for
three months. He proclaimed a naval blockade of the Confederate states, although he
insisted that they did not legally constitute a sovereign country but were instead states
in rebellion. He also directed the secretary of the treasury to advance $2 million to assist
in the raising of troops, and he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, first along the East
Coast and ultimately throughout the country. The Confederate government had
previously authorized a call for 100,000 soldiers for at least six months’ service, and this
figure was soon increased to 400,000.
The Military Background of The War
Comparison of North and South. At first glance it seemed that the 23 states that
remained in the Union after secession were more than a match for the 11 Southern
states. Approximately 21 million people lived in the North, compared with some nine
million in the South of whom about four million were slaves. In addition, the North was
the site of more than 100,000 manufacturing plants, against 18,000 south of the Potomac
River, and more than 70 percent of the railroads were in the Union. Furthermore, the
Federals had at their command a 30-to-1 superiority in arms production, a 2-to-1 edge
in available manpower, and a great preponderance of commercial and financial
resources. The Union also had a functioning government and a small but efficient
regular army and navy.
The Confederacy was not predestined to defeat, however. The Southern armies had the
advantage of fighting on interior lines, and their military tradition had bulked large in
the history of the United States before 1860. Moreover, the long Confederate coastline
of 3,500 miles (5,600 km) seemed to defy blockade, and the Confederate president,
Jefferson Davis, hoped to receive decisive foreign aid and intervention. Confederate
soldiers were fighting to achieve a separate and independent country based on what
they called “Southern institutions,” the chief of which was the institution of slavery. So
the Southern cause was not a lost one; indeed, other countries— most notably the
United States itself in the American Revolution against Britain—had won independence
against equally heavy odds.
The High Commands
Command problems plagued both sides. Of the two rival commanders in chief, most
people in 1861 thought Davis to be abler than Lincoln. Davis was a graduate of the U.S.
Military Academy, a hero of the Mexican-American War, a capable secretary of war
under Pres. Franklin Pierce, and a U.S. representative and senator from Mississippi.
Lincoln—who had served in the Illinois state legislature and as an undistinguished one-
term member of the U.S. House of Representatives—could boast of only a brief period
of military service in the Black Hawk War, in which he saw no action.
As president and commander in chief of the Confederate forces, Davis revealed many
fine qualities, including dignity, firmness, determination, and honesty, but he was
flawed by his excessive pride, hypersensitivity to criticism, poor political skills, and
tendency to micromanage. He engaged in extended petty quarrels with generals and
cabinet members. He also suffered from ill health throughout the conflict. Davis’s
effectiveness was further hampered by a political system that limited him to a single six-
year term—thereby making him a lame duck immediately upon his election—and that
frowned on organized political parties, which Southerners accused of having been at
least partly responsible for the coming of the Civil War. The lack of political parties
meant that Davis could command no loyalty from a broad group of people such as
governors or political appointees when he came under heavy criticism.
To a large extent and by his own preference, Davis was his own secretary of war,
although five different men served in that post during the lifetime of the Confederacy.
Davis himself also filled the position of general in chief of the Confederate armies until
he named Robert E. Lee to that position on February 6, 1865, when the Confederacy
was near collapse. In naval affairs— an area about which he knew little—the
Confederate president seldom intervened directly, allowing the competent secretary of
the navy, Stephen Mallory, to handle the Southern naval buildup and operations on the
water. Although his position was onerous and quite likely could not have been filled as
well by any other Southern political leader—most of them having come to prominence
in a period of growing disinclination to compromise—Davis’s overall performance in
office left something to be desired.
To the astonishment of many, Lincoln grew in stature with time and experience, and by
1864 he had become a consummate politician and war director. Lincoln matured into a
remarkably effective president because of his great intelligence, communication skills,
humility, sense of purpose, sense of humor, fundamentally moderate nature, and ability
to remain focused on the big picture. But he had much to learn at first, especially in
strategic and tactical matters and in his choices of army commanders. With an
ineffective first secretary of war—Simon Cameron—Lincoln unhesitatingly insinuated
himself directly into the planning of military movements. Edwin M. Stanton, a well-
known lawyer appointed to the secretaryship on January 20, 1862, was equally
untutored in military affairs, but he was fully as active a participant as his superior.
Winfield Scott was the Federal general in chief when Lincoln took office. The
75-year-old Scott—a hero of the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War—was a
magnificent and distinguished soldier whose mind was still keen, but he was physically
incapacitated and had to be retired from the service on November 1, 1861. Scott was
replaced by young George B. McClellan, who was an excellent organizer. McClellan,
however, lacked tenacity, persistently overestimated the Confederates’ strength (and
therefore stalled his attacks), and was openly disdainful of the president. Because he
wanted McClellan to focus his attentions on the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln relieved
McClellan as general in chief on March 11, 1862. Henry W. Halleck, who proved to be a
strong administrator but did little in the way of strategic planning, succeeded McClellan
on July 11 and held the position until he was replaced by Ulysses S. Grant on March 9,
1864. Halleck then became chief of staff under Grant in a long-needed streamlining of
the Federal high command. Grant served efficaciously as general in chief throughout
the remainder of the war.
After the initial call by Lincoln and Davis for troops, and as the war lengthened
indeterminately, both sides turned to raising massive armies of volunteers. Local
citizens of prominence and means would organize regiments that were uniformed and
accoutered at first under the aegis of the states and then mustered into the service of the
Union and Confederate governments. On each side, the presidents appointed so-called
“political generals,” men who had little or no military training or experience but had
important political connections (for example, Northern Democrats) or had ties to
immigrant communities. Although successful politically, most of these appointments did
not yield happy military results. As the war dragged on, the two governments had to
resort to conscription to fill the ranks being so swiftly thinned by battle casualties.
Strategic Plans
In the area of grand strategy, Davis persistently adhered to the defensive, permitting
only occasional “spoiling” forays into Northern territory. Perhaps the Confederates’
best chance of winning would have been an early grand offensive into the Union states
before the Lincoln administration could find its ablest generals and bring the
preponderant resources of the North to bear against the South. On the other hand,
protecting the territory the Confederacy already controlled was of paramount
importance, and a defensive position allowed the rebels to husband their resources
somewhat better. To crush the rebellion and reestablish the authority of the Federal
government, Lincoln had to direct his blue-clad armies to invade, capture, and hold
most of the vital areas of the Confederacy. His grand strategy was based on Scott’s so-
called Anaconda Plan, a design that evolved from strategic ideas discussed in messages
between Scott and McClellan on April 27, May 3, and May 21, 1861. It called for a
Union blockade of the Confederacy’s coastline as well as a decisive thrust down the
Mississippi River and an ensuing strangulation of the South by Federal land and naval
forces. But it was to take four years of grim, unrelenting warfare and enormous
casualties and devastation before the Confederates could be defeated and the Union
preserved.
The Land War (The war in 1861)
The first military operations took place in northwestern Virginia, where

nonslaveholding pro-Union Virginians sought to secede from the Confederacy.
McClellan, in command of Federal forces in southern Ohio, advanced on his own
initiative in the early summer of 1861 into western Virginia with about 20,000 men. He
encountered smaller forces sent there by Lee, who was then in Richmond in command
of all Virginia troops. Although showing signs of occasional hesitation, McClellan
quickly won three small but significant battles: on June 3 at Philippi, on July 11 at Rich
Mountain, and on July 13 at Carrick’s (or Corrick’s) Ford (all now in West Virginia).
McClellan’s casualties were light, and his victories went far toward eliminating
Confederate resistance in northwestern Virginia, which had refused to recognize
secession, and toward paving the way for the admittance into the Union of the new state
of West Virginia in 1863.
Meanwhile, sizable armies were gathering around the Federal capital of Washington,
D.C., and the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, which was about 100 miles
(160 km) south of Washington. Federal forces abandoned positions in Virginia,
including, on April 18, Harpers Ferry (now in West Virginia), which was quickly
occupied by Southern forces, who held it for a time, and the naval base at Norfolk,
which was prematurely abandoned to the Confederacy on April 20. On May 6 Lee
ordered a Confederate force— soon to be commanded by P.G.T. Beauregard—
northward to hold the rail hub of Manassas Junction, Virginia, some 26 miles (42 km)
southwest of Washington. With Lincoln’s approval, Scott appointed Irvin McDowell to
command the main Federal army that was being hastily collected near Washington. But
political pressure and Northern public opinion impelled Lincoln, against Scott’s advice,
to order McDowell’s still-untrained army to push the Confederates back from
Manassas. Meanwhile, Federal forces were to hold Confederate soldiers under Joseph
E. Johnston in the Shenandoah Valley near Winchester, Virginia, thus preventing them
from reinforcing Beauregard along the Bull Run near Manassas.
McDowell advanced from Washington on July 16 with some 28,000 men and moved
slowly toward Bull Run. Two days later a reconnaissance in force (an attack by a large
force to determine the size and strength of the enemy) was repulsed by the Confederates
at Mitchell’s Ford and Blackburn’s Ford. When McDowell attacked on July 21 in the
First Battle of Bull Run, he discovered that Johnston had escaped the Federals in the
valley and had joined Beauregard near Manassas just in time, bringing the total
Confederate force to about 32,000. (The battle came to be known in the South as the
Battle of First Manassas. Civil War battles often had one name in North, which was
usually associated with a prominent nearby physical feature, and another name in the
South, usually derived from the town or city closest to the battlefield.) McDowell’s
sharp attacks with green troops forced the equally untrained Southerners back a bit,
but a strong defensive stand by Thomas Jonathan Jackson (who thereby gained the
nickname “Stonewall”) enabled the Confederates to check and finally throw back the
Federals in the afternoon. The Federal retreat to Washington soon became a rout.
McDowell lost 2,896 men—killed, wounded, and missing (including prisoners)—against
a Southern loss of 1,982. Both sides now settled down to a long war, but the First Battle
of Bull Run left a lasting impression on both the Confederacy and the Union.
Confederates took their victory as confirmation of their belief that a single rebel soldier
was worth 10 Yankees, an overconfident and dangerously unrealistic mindset. On the
Union side, the loss seems to have infected the high command of the Army of the
Potomac with both an inferiority complex and a wary fear of Southern military
proficiency. This attitude was in evidence until Grant became the general in charge of
all the armies in the spring of 1864.
The War in 1862
The year 1862 marked a major turning point in the war, especially the war in the East,
as Lee took command of the Confederate army, which he promptly renamed the Army
of Northern Virginia. With Lee’s ascent the Army of the Potomac found itself
repeatedly battered. While the Army of the Potomac was beleaguered by less-than-
visionary leadership, Union forces in the West experienced far greater success under
more-aggressive generals. Paradoxically, Lee kept the Confederate war effort going
long enough for Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which struck at the
very institution the South had gone to war to protect.
The War in the East
Fresh from his victories in western Virginia, McClellan was called to Washington to
replace Scott. There he began to mold the Army of the Potomac into a resolute, effective
shield and sword of the Union. But personality clashes and unrelenting opposition to
McClellan from the Radical Republicans in Congress hampered the sometimes tactless
general, who was a Democrat. It took time to drill, discipline, and equip this force of
considerably more than 100,000 men, but, as fall blended into winter, loud demands
arose that McClellan advance against Johnston’s Confederate forces at Centreville and
Manassas in Virginia. McClellan fell seriously ill with typhoid fever in December, and
when he had recovered weeks later he found that Lincoln, desperately eager for action,
had ordered him to advance on February 22, 1862. Long debates ensued between
president and commander. These disagreements led the obstreperous and balky
McClellan to make statements and take actions that would have been—and indeed were
—considered insubordinate by almost anyone other than the extremely patient Lincoln.
When in March McClellan finally began his Peninsular Campaign, he discovered that
Lincoln and Stanton had withheld large numbers of his command in front of
Washington for the defense of the capital—forces that actually were not needed there.
Upon taking command of the army in the field, McClellan was relieved of his duties as
general in chief.
The Peninsular Campaign
Advancing up the historic peninsula between the York and James rivers in Virginia,
McClellan began a month-long siege of Yorktown and captured that stronghold on May
4, 1862. A Confederate rearguard action at Williamsburg the next day delayed the blue-
clads, who then slowly moved up through heavy rain to within 4 miles (6 km) of
Richmond. Striving to seize the initiative, Johnston attacked McClellan’s left wing at
Seven Pines (Fair Oaks) on May 31 and, after scoring initial gains, was checked.
Johnston was severely wounded, and, in a major though often overlooked development
of the war, Lee, who had been serving as Davis’s military adviser, succeeded him. Lee
promptly renamed the command the Army of Northern Virginia. McClellan
counterattacked on June 1 and forced the Southerners back into the environs of
Richmond. The Federals suffered a total of 5,031 casualties out of a force of nearly
100,000, while the Confederates lost 6,134 of about 74,000 men.
As McClellan inched forward toward Richmond in June, Lee prepared a counterstroke.

He recalled from the Shenandoah Valley Jackson’s forces— which had threatened
Harpers Ferry and had brilliantly defeated several scattered Federal armies—and, with
about 90,000 soldiers, attacked McClellan on June 26 to begin the fighting of the Seven
Days’ Battles (usually dated June 25–July 1). In the ensuing days at Mechanicsville,
Gaines’s Mill,
Savage’s Station, Frayser’s Farm (Glendale), and Malvern Hill, Lee tried unsuccessfully
to crush the Army of the Potomac, which McClellan was moving to another base on the
James River, but the Confederate commander had at least saved Richmond. McClellan
inflicted 20,614 casualties on Lee while suffering 15,849 himself. McClellan felt that he
could not move upon Richmond without considerable reinforcement, and his estimates
of the men he needed went up and up and up. Against his protests his army was
withdrawn from the peninsula to Washington by Lincoln and the new general in chief,
Halleck—a man McClellan scornfully considered to be his inferior. Many of
McClellan’s units were given to a new Federal army commander, John Pope, who was
directed to move overland against Richmond.
Second Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) and Antietam
Pope advanced confidently toward the Rappahannock River with his Army of Virginia
while Lee, once McClellan had been pulled back from near Richmond, moved
northward to confront Pope before he could be joined by all of McClellan’s troops.
Daringly splitting his army, Lee sent Jackson to destroy Pope’s base at Manassas, while
he himself advanced via another route with James Longstreet’s half of the army. Pope
opened the Second Battle of Bull Run (in the South, the Battle of Second Manassas) on
August 29 with heavy but futile attacks on Jackson. The next day Lee arrived and
crushed the Federal left with a massive flank assault by Longstreet, which, combined
with Jackson’s counterattacks, drove the Northerners back in rout upon Washington.
Pope lost 13,824 men out of a force of about 70,000, while Lee lost 8,353 out of about
55,000. With the Federal soldiers now lacking confidence in Pope, Lincoln relieved him
and merged his forces into McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.
Lee followed up his advantage with his first invasion of the North, pushing as far as
Frederick, Maryland. His hope was to bring Maryland (a slave state that had remained
in the Union) into the Confederacy. He also felt that if he could continue to grind down
civilian will on the Union side, the North would grant the Confederacy its independence.
McClellan had to reorganize his army on the march, a task that he performed capably.
But McClellan could not overcome his own worst impulses. He overestimated the size of
Lee’s army by a factor of about two and a half. Worse, he failed to capitalize on an
astonishing stroke of luck: the capture of Lee’s orders, discovered on the ground
wrapped around three cigars. Rather than striking immediately against Lee’s scattered
forces, McClellan waited 18 hours before moving. Finally, McClellan pressed forward
and wrested the initiative from Lee by attacking and defeating a Confederate force at
three gaps of the South Mountain between Frederick and Hagerstown on September 14.
Lee fell back into a cramped defensive position along Antietam Creek, near
Sharpsburg, Maryland, where he was reinforced by Jackson, who had just captured
about 12,000 Federals at Harpers Ferry. After yet another delay, McClellan struck the
Confederates on September 17 in the bloodiest day of the war. Although gaining some
ground, the Federals were unable to drive the Confederate army into the Potomac, but
Lee was compelled to retreat back into Virginia. At Antietam, McClellan lost 12,401 of
some 87,000 engaged, while Lee lost 10,316 of perhaps 45,000. When McClellan did not
pursue Lee as quickly as Lincoln and Halleck thought he should, he was replaced in
command by Ambrose E. Burnside, an acolyte of McClellan who had been an
ineffective corps commander at Antietam.
Fredericksburg
Burnside delayed for a number of weeks before marching his reinforced army of
120,281 men to a point across the Rappahannock River from
Fredericksburg, Virginia. On December 13 he ordered a series of 16 hopeless, piecemeal
frontal assaults across open ground against Lee’s army of 78,513 troops, drawn up in an
impregnable position atop high ground and behind a stone wall. The Federals were
repelled with staggering losses: Burnside lost 12,653 men, compared with Lee’s 5,309.
“If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it,” Lincoln reportedly said. Morale in the
Army of the Potomac fell further in January, when Burnside ordered a flanking
maneuver against rebel forces. After an auspicious start to the march on January 20,
1863, a driving rain began that night. The Yankees quickly bogged down in what
became known as the “Mud March.” Burnside turned back on January 23. As Federal
confidence plunged, desertions rose. On January 25, 1863, Lincoln replaced Burnside
with a proficient corps commander, Joseph (“Fighting Joe”) Hooker, who was a harsh
critic of other generals and even of the president. Both armies went into winter quarters
near Fredericksburg.
The Emancipation Proclamation
Despite its shocking casualty figures, the most important consequence of Antietam was
off the field. From the outset of the war, slaves had been pouring into Federal camps
seeking safety and freedom. Early in the war, Lincoln had slapped the wrists of
commanders who tried to issue emancipation edicts in areas under their control. Trying
to balance political and military necessity against moral imperatives, Lincoln believed
that keeping the slave-owning border states—Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and
particularly Kentucky—in the Union was critical and that making any move toward
freeing slaves could incite those states to secede. Moreover, the Constitution protected
slavery in several ways, most importantly through its defense of property rights.
Finally, Lincoln believed for the first year or so of the war that a significant number of
Unionists existed in the seceded states and that, given time, those people would rise up
and revolt against the Confederate government.
As early as August 1861, though, slaveholders’ claims to property rights had begun to
erode when Congress passed its First Confiscation Act, which allowed Union troops to
seize rebels’ property, including slaves who fought with or worked for the Confederate
military. One Union general, Benjamin Butler, a prominent attorney and politician in
civilian life, read up on military law and used confiscation laws to the Union’s benefit by
turning the slave owner’s claim to property rights on its head. Armies had always been
able to confiscate property of military value, Butler argued, and slaves were
instrumental in supporting the Confederate cause. With so many slaves manning
factories and working fields, about 80 percent of eligible white Southern men wound up
serving in the military. Butler declared slaves who came into his lines to be
“contrabands” of war and therefore not liable for return to their masters. The name
contrabands was used for the remainder of the war to describe slaves who ran from
their masters to the Union army.
In April 1862 Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and paid owners in
the district about $300 on average for each slave. Three months later Congress passed
the Second Confiscation Act, which mandated that any Confederate civilian or military
official who did not surrender within 60 days would have his slaves freed. Two days
after that, Congress banned slavery from the territories.
Lincoln, meanwhile, was meeting with men from the border states, especially Kentucky,
hoping to persuade them to agree to a compensated emancipation. Over the course of
these encounters, it became clear to him that the broad Unionist sentiment he thought
existed in the South was a chimera. When talks with the Kentucky delegates broke off
in July, Lincoln immediately sat down and drafted the Preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation. In its final form, the Emancipation Proclamation would free the slaves in
areas that were not under Union control as of January 1, 1863, when it went into effect.
This meant it did not apply in the border states or places such as New Orleans, which
were already under Union military occupation by that time. Lincoln realized that such a
move would strike a serious blow militarily to the Confederates, who relied on
bondsmen for the bulk of their labor during the war, by both demoralizing white
Southerners and giving additional incentive to slaves to run away.
However, the summer of 1862 had been a bleak one for Federal forces, and Lincoln did
not want to issue the proclamation when the North appeared to be losing. He did not
want other countries to consider it an act of desperation. So he put the document in his
desk drawer and waited for a victory. Antietam, while technically a draw, was close
enough that Lincoln claimed it as a Union win and announced the proclamation. This
was an important turning point. The war was now a contest not just about saving the
Union but also about freeing four million bondsmen and bondswomen. This new moral
element to the war persuaded the British and French to stay out of the conflict and to
never offer the Confederates the diplomatic recognition they desperately sought.
The Emancipation Proclamation also allowed black men to serve in the Union army.
This had been illegal under a federal law enacted in 1792 (although African Americans
had served in the army in the War of 1812 and the law had never applied to the navy).
With their stake in the Civil War now patently obvious, African Americans joined the
service in significant numbers. By the end of the war, about 180,000 African Americans
were in the army, which amounted to about 10 percent of the troops in that branch, and
another 20,000 were serving in the navy.
The Cost and Significance of the Civil War
The triumph of the North, above and beyond its superior naval forces, numbers, and
industrial and financial resources, was partly due to the statesmanship of Lincoln, who
by 1864 had become a masterful political and war leader, to the pervading valor of
Federal soldiers, and to the increasing skill of their officers. The victory can also be
attributed in part to failures of Confederate transportation, matériel, and political
leadership. Only praise can be extended to the continuing bravery of Confederate
soldiers and to the strategic and tactical dexterity of such generals as Robert E. Lee,
Stonewall Jackson, and Joseph E. Johnston.
While desertions plagued both sides, the personal valor and the enormous casualties—
both in absolute numbers and in percentage of numbers engaged—have not yet ceased
to astound scholars and military historians. On the basis of the three-year standard of
enlistment, about 1,556,000 soldiers served in the Federal armies, and about 800,000
men probably served in the Confederate forces, though spotty records make it
impossible to know for sure. Traditionally, historians have put war deaths at about
360,000 for the Union and 260,000 for the Confederates. In the second decade of the
21st century, however, a demographer used better data and more sophisticated tools to
convincingly revise the total death toll upward to 752,000 and indicated that it could be
as high as 851,000.
The enormous death rate—roughly 2 percent of the 1860 population of the U.S. died in
the war—had an enormous impact on American society. Americans were deeply
religious, and they struggled to understand how a benevolent God could allow such
destruction to go on for so long. Understanding of the nature of the afterlife shifted as
Americans, North and South, comforted themselves with the notion that heaven looked
like their front parlors. A new mode of dealing with corpses emerged with the advent of
embalming, an expensive method of preservation that helped wealthier families to bring
their dead sons, brothers, or fathers home. Finally, a network of federal military
cemeteries (and private Confederate cemeteries) grew out of the need to bury the men
in uniform who had succumbed to wounds or disease.
Some have called the American Civil War the last of the old-fashioned wars; others
have termed it the first modern war. Actually, it was a transitional war, and it had a
profound impact, technologically, on the development of modern weapons and
techniques. There were many innovations. It was the first war in history in which
ironclad warships clashed; the first in which the telegraph and railroad played
significant roles; the first to use, extensively, rifled ordnance and shell guns and to
introduce a machine gun (the Gatling gun); the first to have widespread newspaper
coverage, voting by servicemen in the field in national elections, and photographic
recordings; the first to organize medical care of troops systematically; and the first to
use land and water mines and to employ a submarine that could sink a warship. It was
also the first war in which armies widely employed aerial reconnaissance (by means of
balloons).
World War I
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/world-war-i-history
World War I began in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz

Ferdinand and lasted until 1918. During the conflict, Germany, AustriaHungary,
Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain,
France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers).
Thanks to new military technologies and the horrors of trench warfare, World War I
saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction. By the time the war was over and
the Allied Powers claimed victory, more than 16 million people—soldiers and civilians
alike—were dead.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Tensions had been brewing throughout Europe—especially in the troubled Balkan

region of southeast Europe—for years before World War I actually broke out.
A number of alliances involving European powers, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and
other parties had existed for years, but political instability in the Balkans (particularly
Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina) threatened to destroy these agreements.
The spark that ignited World War I was struck in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Archduke
Franz Ferdinand—heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire—was shot to death along with
his wife, Sophie, by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. Princip
and other nationalists were struggling to end AustroHungarian rule over Bosnia and
Herzegovina.
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand set off a rapidly escalating chain of events:
Austria-Hungary, like many countries around the world, blamed the Serbian
government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the
question of Serbian nationalism once and for all.
Kaiser Wilhelm II
Because mighty Russia supported Serbia, Austria-Hungary waited to declare war until
its leaders received assurance from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany
would support their cause. Austro-Hungarian leaders feared that a Russian
intervention would involve Russia’s ally, France, and possibly Great Britain as well.
On July 5, Kaiser Wilhelm secretly pledged his support, giving Austria-Hungary a so-
called carte blanche, or “blank check” assurance of Germany’s backing in the case of
war. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary then sent an ultimatum to Serbia, with
such harsh terms as to make it almost impossible to accept.
World War I Begins
Convinced that Austria-Hungary was readying for war, the Serbian government
ordered the Serbian army to mobilize and appealed to Russia for assistance. On July 28,
Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s
great powers quickly collapsed.
Within a week, Russia, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Serbia had lined up against
Austria-Hungary and Germany, and World War I had begun.
The Western Front
According to an aggressive military strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan (named for its
mastermind, German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen), Germany began fighting
World War I on two fronts, invading France through neutral Belgium in the west and
confronting Russia in the east.
On August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the border into Belgium. In the first battle
of World War I, the Germans assaulted the heavily fortified city of Liege, using the
most powerful weapons in their arsenal—enormous siege cannons—to capture the city
by August 15. The Germans left death and destruction in their wake as they advanced
through Belgium toward France, shooting civilians and executing a Belgian priest they
had accused of inciting civilian resistance.
First Battle of the Marne
In the First Battle of the Marne, fought from September 6-9, 1914, French and British
forces confronted the invading Germany army, which had by then penetrated deep into
northeastern France, within 30 miles of Paris. The Allied troops checked the German
advance and mounted a successful counterattack, driving the Germans back to north of
the Aisne River.
The defeat meant the end of German plans for a quick victory in France. Both sides dug
into trenches, and the Western Front was the setting for a hellish war of attrition that
would last more than three years.
Particularly long and costly battles in this campaign were fought at Verdun (February-
December 1916) and the Battle of the Somme (July-November 1916). German and
French troops suffered close to a million casualties in the Battle of Verdun alone.
Visual artists like Otto Dix of Germany and British painters Wyndham Lewis, Paul
Nash and David Bomberg used their firsthand experience as soldiers in
World War I to create their art, capturing the anguish of trench warfare and exploring
the themes of technology, violence and landscapes decimated by war.
The Eastern Front
On the Eastern Front of World War I, Russian forces invaded the German-held regions
of East Prussia and Poland, but were stopped short by German and Austrian forces at
the Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914.
Despite that victory, Russia’s assault had forced Germany to move two corps from the
Western Front to the Eastern, contributing to the German loss in the Battle of the
Marne.
Combined with the fierce Allied resistance in France, the ability of Russia’s huge war
machine to mobilize relatively quickly in the east ensured a longer, more grueling
conflict instead of the quick victory Germany had hoped to win under the Schlieffen
Plan.
Russian Revolution
From 1914 to 1916, Russia’s army mounted several offensives on World War I’s
Eastern Front, but was unable to break through German lines.
Defeat on the battlefield, combined with economic instability and the scarcity of food
and other essentials, led to mounting discontent among the bulk of Russia’s population,
especially the poverty-stricken workers and peasants. This increased hostility was
directed toward the imperial regime of Czar Nicholas II and his unpopular German-
born wife, Alexandra.
Russia’s simmering instability exploded in the Russian Revolution of 1917, spearheaded

by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which ended czarist rule and brought a halt to
Russian participation in World War I.
Russia reached an armistice with the Central Powers in early December 1917, freeing
German troops to face the remaining Allies on the Western Front.
America Enters World War I
At the outbreak of fighting in 1914, the United States remained on the sidelines of
World War I, adopting the policy of neutrality favored by President Woodrow Wilson
while continuing to engage in commerce and shipping with European countries on both
sides of the conflict.
Neutrality, however, was increasing difficult to maintain in the face of Germany’s

unchecked submarine aggression against neutral ships, including those carrying
passengers. In 1915, Germany declared the waters surrounding the British Isles to be a
war zone, and German U-boats sunk several commercial and passenger vessels,
including some U.S. ships.
Widespread protest over the sinking by U-boat of the British ocean liner Lusitania—
traveling from New York to Liverpool, England with hundreds of American passengers
onboard—in May 1915 helped turn the tide of American public opinion against
Germany. In February 1917, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill
intended to make the United States ready for war.
Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships the following month, and on April 2
Woodrow Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against
Germany.
Gallipoli Campaign
With World War I having effectively settled into a stalemate in Europe, the Allies
attempted to score a victory against the Ottoman Empire, which entered the conflict on
the side of the Central Powers in late 1914.
After a failed attack on the Dardanelles (the strait linking the Sea of Marmara with the
Aegean Sea), Allied forces led by Britain launched a large-scale land invasion of the
Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915. The invasion also proved a dismal failure, and in
January 1916 Allied forces staged a full retreat from the shores of the peninsula after
suffering 250,000 casualties.
Did you know? The young Winston Churchill, then first lord of the British Admiralty,
resigned his command after the failed Gallipoli campaign in 1916, accepting a
commission with an infantry battalion in France.
British-led forces also combated the Ottoman Turks in Egypt and

Mesopotamia, while in northern Italy, Austrian and Italian troops faced off in a series
of 12 battles along the Isonzo River, located at the border between the two nations.
Battle of the Isonzo
The First Battle of the Isonzo took place in the late spring of 1915, soon after Italy’s
entrance into the war on the Allied side. In the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, also known
as the Battle of Caporetto (October 1917), German reinforcements helped Austria-
Hungary win a decisive victory.
After Caporetto, Italy’s allies jumped in to offer increased assistance. British and
French—and later, American—troops arrived in the region, and the Allies began to
take back the Italian Front.
World War I at Sea
In the years before World War I, the superiority of Britain’s Royal Navy was
unchallenged by any other nation’s fleet, but the Imperial German Navy had made
substantial strides in closing the gap between the two naval powers.
Germany’s strength on the high seas was also aided by its lethal fleet of Uboat
submarines.
After the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915, in which the British mounted a
surprise attack on German ships in the North Sea, the German navy chose not to
confront Britain’s mighty Royal Navy in a major battle for more than a year, preferring
to rest the bulk of its naval strategy on its U-boats.
The biggest naval engagement of World War I, the Battle of Jutland (May 1916) left
British naval superiority on the North Sea intact, and Germany would make no further
attempts to break an Allied naval blockade for the remainder of the war.
World War I Planes
World War I was the first major conflict to harness the power of planes. Though not as
impactful as the British Royal Navy or Germany’s U-Boats, the use of planes in World
War I presaged their later, pivotal role in military conflicts around the globe.
At the dawn of World War I, aviation was a relatively new field; the Wright brothers
took their first sustained flight just eleven years before, in 1903. Aircraft were initially
used primarily for reconnaissance missions. During the First Battle of the Marne,
information passed from pilots allowed the allies to exploit weak spots in the German
lines, helping the Allies to push Germany out of France.
The first machine guns were successfully mounted on planes in June of 1912 in the
United States, but were imperfect; if timed incorrectly, a bullet could easily fell the
propeller of the plane it came from. The Morane-Saulnier L, a French plane, provided a
solution: The propeller was armored with deflector wedges that prevented bullets from
hitting it. The Morane-Saulnier Type L was used by the French, the British Royal
Flying Corps (part of the Army), the British Royal Navy Air Service and the Imperial
Russian Air Service. The British Bristol Type 22 was another popular model used for
both reconnaissance work and as a fighter plane.
Dutch inventor Anthony Fokker improved upon the French deflector system in 1915.
His “interrupter” synchronized the firing of the guns with the plane’s propeller to avoid
collisions. Though his most popular plane during WWI was the single-seat Fokker
Eindecker, Fokker created over 40 kinds of airplanes for the Germans.
The Allies debuted the Handley-Page HP O/400, the first two-engine bomber, in 1915.
As aerial technology progressed, long-range heavy bombers like Germany’s Gotha G.V.
(first introduced in 1917) were used to strike cities like London. Their speed and
maneuverability proved to be far deadlier than Germany’s earlier Zeppelin raids.
By war’s end, the Allies were producing five times more aircraft than the Germans. On
April 1, 1918, the British created the Royal Air Force, or RAF, the first air force to be a
separate military branch independent from the navy or army.
Second Battle of the Marne
With Germany able to build up its strength on the Western Front after the armistice
with Russia, Allied troops struggled to hold off another German offensive until
promised reinforcements from the United States were able to arrive.
On July 15, 1918, German troops launched what would become the last German
offensive of the war, attacking French forces (joined by 85,000 American troops as well
as some of the British Expeditionary Force) in the Second Battle of the Marne. The
Allies successfully pushed back the German offensive and launched their own
counteroffensive just three days later.
After suffering massive casualties, Germany was forced to call off a planned offensive
further north, in the Flanders region stretching between France and Belgium, which
was envisioned as Germany’s best hope of victory.
The Second Battle of the Marne turned the tide of war decisively towards the Allies,
who were able to regain much of France and Belgium in the months that followed.
Toward Armistice
By the fall of 1918, the Central Powers were unraveling on all fronts.
Despite the Turkish victory at Gallipoli, later defeats by invading forces and an Arab
revolt had combined to destroy the Ottoman economy and devastate its land, and the
Turks signed a treaty with the Allies in late October 1918.
Austria-Hungary, dissolving from within due to growing nationalist movements among

its diverse population, reached an armistice on November 4. Facing dwindling resources
on the battlefield, discontent on the homefront and the surrender of its allies, Germany
was finally forced to seek an armistice on November 11, 1918, ending World War I.
Treaty of Versailles
At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Allied leaders stated their desire to build a post-
war world that would safeguard itself against future conflicts of such devastating scale.
Some hopeful participants had even begun calling World War I “the War to End All
Wars.” But the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, would not achieve that
lofty goal.
Saddled with war guilt, heavy reparations and denied entrance into the League of
Nations, Germany felt tricked into signing the treaty, having believed any peace would
be a “peace without victory,” as put forward by Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points
speech of January 1918.
As the years passed, hatred of the Versailles treaty and its authors settled into a
smoldering resentment in Germany that would, two decades later, be counted among
the causes of World War II.
World War I Casualties
World War I took the lives of more than 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were
wounded. Civilian casualties caused indirectly by the war numbered close to 10 million.
The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80
percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle.
The political disruption surrounding World War I also contributed to the fall of four
venerable imperial dynasties: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey.
Legacy of World War I
World War I brought about massive social upheaval, as millions of women entered the
workforce to support men who went to war and to replace those who never came back.
The first global war also helped to spread one of the world’s deadliest global pandemics,
the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people.
World War I has also been referred to as “the first modern war.” Many of the
technologies we now associate with military conflict—machine guns, tanks, aerial
combat and radio communications—were introduced on a massive scale during World
War I.
The severe effects that chemical weapons such as mustard gas and phosgene had on
soldiers and civilians during World War I galvanized public and military attitudes
against their continued use. The Geneva Convention agreements, signed in 1925,
restricted the use of chemical and biological agents in warfare and remains in effect
today.
World War II
https://www.history.com/topics/world -war-ii/world-war-ii-history
The instability created in Europe by the First World War (1914-18) set the stage for
another international conflict–World War II–which broke out two decades later and
would prove even more devastating. Rising to power in an economically and politically
unstable Germany, Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, rearmed the
nation and signed strategic treaties with Italy and Japan to further his ambitions of
world domination. Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 drove Great Britain
and France to declare war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War II. Over
the next six years, the conflict would take more lives and destroy more land and
property around the globe than any previous war. Among the estimated 4560 million
people killed were 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps as part of
Hitler’s diabolical “Final Solution,” now known as the Holocaust.
Leading up to World War II
The devastation of the Great War (as World War I was known at the time) had greatly
destabilized Europe, and in many respects World War II grew out of issues left
unresolved by that earlier conflict. In particular, political and economic instability in
Germany, and lingering resentment over the harsh terms imposed by the Versailles
Treaty, fueled the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and National Socialist German
Workers’ Party, abbreviated as NSDAP in German and the Nazi Party in English.
After becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler swiftly consolidated power,

anointing himself Führer (supreme leader) in 1934. Obsessed with the idea of the
superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” Hitler believed that
war was the only way to gain the necessary
“Lebensraum,” or living space, for the German race to expand. In the mid1930s, he
secretly began the rearmament of Germany, a violation of the Versailles Treaty. After
signing alliances with Italy and Japan against the Soviet Union, Hitler sent troops to
occupy Austria in 1938 and the following year annexed Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s open
aggression went unchecked, as the United States and Soviet Union were concentrated on
internal politics at the time, and neither France nor Britain (the two other nations most
devastated by the Great War) were eager for confrontation.
Outbreak of World War II (1939)
In late August 1939, Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed the GermanSoviet
Nonaggression Pact, which incited a frenzy of worry in London and Paris. Hitler had
long planned an invasion of Poland, a nation to which Great Britain and France had
guaranteed military support if it were attacked by Germany. The pact with Stalin
meant that Hitler would not face a war on two fronts once he invaded Poland and would
have Soviet assistance in conquering and dividing the nation itself. On September 1,
1939, Hitler invaded Poland from the west; two days later, France and Britain declared
war on Germany, beginning World War II.
On September 17, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. Under attack from both
sides, Poland fell quickly, and by early 1940 Germany and the Soviet Union had divided
control over the nation, according to a secret protocol appended to the Nonaggression
Pact. Stalin’s forces then moved to occupy the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania) and defeated a resistant Finland in the Russo-Finish War. During the six
months following the invasion of Poland, the lack of action on the part of Germany and
the Allies in the west led to talk in the news media of a “phony war.” At sea, however,
the British and German navies faced off in heated battle, and lethal German U-boat
submarines struck at merchant shipping bound for Britain, sinking more than 100
vessels in the first four months of World War II.
World War II in the West (1940-41)
On April 9, 1940, Germany simultaneously invaded Norway and occupied Denmark,

and the war began in earnest. On May 10, German forces swept through Belgium and
the Netherlands in what became known as “blitzkrieg,” or lightning war. Three days
later, Hitler’s troops crossed the Meuse River and struck French forces at Sedan,
located at the northern end of the Maginot Line, an elaborate chain of fortifications
constructed after World War I and considered an impenetrable defensive barrier. In
fact, the Germans broke through the line with their tanks and planes and continued to
the rear, rendering it useless. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was evacuated by
sea from Dunkirk in late May, while in the south French forces mounted a doomed
resistance. With France on the verge of collapse, Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini
formed an alliance with Hitler, the Pact of Steel, and Italy declared war against France
and Britain on June 10.
On June 14, German forces entered Paris; a new government formed by Marshal
Philippe Petain (France’s hero of World War I) requested an armistice two nights later.
France was subsequently divided into two zones, one under German military
occupation and the other under Petain’s government, installed at Vichy France. Hitler
now turned his attention to Britain, which had the defensive advantage of being
separated from the Continent by the English Channel.
To pave the way for an amphibious invasion (dubbed Operation Sea Lion), German
planes bombed Britain extensively beginning in September 1940 until May 1941, known
as the Blitz, including night raids on London and other industrial centers that caused
heavy civilian casualties and damage. The Royal Air Force (RAF) eventually defeated
the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) in the Battle of Britain, and Hitler postponed his
plans to invade. With Britain’s defensive resources pushed to the limit, Prime Minister
Winston Churchill began receiving crucial aid from the U.S. under the Lend-Lease Act,
passed by Congress in early 1941.
Hitler vs. Stalin: Operation Barbarossa (1941-42)
By early 1941, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria had joined the Axis, and German
troops overran Yugoslavia and Greece that April. Hitler’s conquest of the Balkans was
a precursor for his real objective: an invasion of the Soviet Union, whose vast territory
would give the German master race the “Lebensraum” it needed. The other half of
Hitler’s strategy was the extermination of the Jews from throughout German-occupied
Europe. Plans for the “Final Solution” were introduced around the time of the Soviet
offensive, and over the next three years more than 4 million Jews would perish in the
death camps established in occupied Poland.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed
Operation Barbarossa. Though Soviet tanks and aircraft greatly outnumbered the
Germans’, Russian aviation technology was largely obsolete, and the impact of the
surprise invasion helped Germans get within 200 miles of Moscow by mid-July.
Arguments between Hitler and his commanders delayed the next German advance until
October, when it was stalled by a Soviet counteroffensive and the onset of harsh winter
weather.
World War II in the Pacific (1941-43)
With Britain facing Germany in Europe, the United States was the only nation capable
of combating Japanese aggression, which by late 1941 included an expansion of its
ongoing war with China and the seizure of European colonial holdings in the Far East.
On December 7, 1941, 360 Japanese aircraft attacked the major U.S. naval base at Pearl
Harbor in Hawaii, taking the Americans completely by surprise and claiming the lives
of more than 2,300 troops. The attack on Pearl Harbor served to unify American public
opinion in favor of entering World War II, and on December 8 Congress declared war
on Japan with only one dissenting vote. Germany and the other Axis Powers promptly
declared war on the United States.
After a long string of Japanese victories, the U.S. Pacific Fleet won the Battle of Midway
in June 1942, which proved to be a turning point in the war. On Guadalcanal, one of the
southern Solomon Islands, the Allies also had success against Japanese forces in a series
of battles from August 1942 to February 1943, helping turn the tide further in the
Pacific. In mid-1943, Allied naval forces began an aggressive counterattack against
Japan, involving a series of amphibious assaults on key Japanese-held islands in the
Pacific. This “island-hopping” strategy proved successful, and Allied forces moved
closer to their ultimate goal of invading the mainland Japan.
Toward Allied Victory in World War II (1943-45)
In North Africa, British and American forces had defeated the Italians and
Germans by 1943. An Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy followed, and Mussolini’s
government fell in July 1943, though Allied fighting against the Germans in Italy would
continue until 1945.
On the Eastern Front, a Soviet counteroffensive launched in November 1942 ended the
bloody Battle of Stalingrad, which had seen some of the fiercest combat of World War
II. The approach of winter, along with dwindling food and medical supplies, spelled the
end for German troops there, and the last of them surrendered on January 31, 1943.
On June 6, 1944–celebrated as “D-Day”–the Allies began a massive invasion of Europe,

landing 156,000 British, Canadian and American soldiers on the beaches of Normandy,
France. In response, Hitler poured all the remaining strength of his army into Western
Europe, ensuring Germany’s defeat in the east. Soviet troops soon advanced into
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, while Hitler gathered his forces to
drive the Americans and British back from Germany in the Battle of the Bulge
(December 1944-January 1945), the last major German offensive of the war.
An intensive aerial bombardment in February 1945 preceded the Allied land invasion of
Germany, and by the time Germany formally surrendered on May 8, Soviet forces had
occupied much of the country. Hitler was already dead, having died by suicide on April
30 in his Berlin bunker.
World War II Ends (1945)
At the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman (who
had taken office after Roosevelt’s death in April), Churchill and Stalin discussed the
ongoing war with Japan as well as the peace settlement with Germany. Post-war
Germany would be divided into four occupation zones, to be controlled by the Soviet
Union, Britain, the United States and France. On the divisive matter of Eastern
Europe’s future, Churchill and Truman acquiesced to Stalin, as they needed Soviet
cooperation in the war against Japan.
Heavy casualties sustained in the campaigns at Iwo Jima (February 1945) and Okinawa
(April-June 1945), and fears of the even costlier land invasion of Japan led Truman to
authorize the use of a new and devastating weapon. Developed during a top-secret
operation code-named The Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb was unleashed on the
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August. On August 15, the Japanese
government issued a statement declaring they would accept the terms of the Potsdam
Declaration, and on September 2, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s
formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
The National Archives
World War II exposed a glaring paradox within the United States Armed Forces.
Although more than 1 million African Americans served in the war to defeat Nazism
and fascism, they did so in segregated units. The same discriminatory Jim Crow policies
that were rampant in American society were reinforced by the U.S. military. Black
servicemen rarely saw combat and were largely relegated to labor and supply units that
were commanded by white officers.
There were several African American units that proved essential in helping to win
World War II, with the Tuskegee Airmen being among the most celebrated. But the
Red Ball Express, the truck convoy of mostly Black drivers were responsible for
delivering essential goods to General George S. Patton’s troops on the front lines in
France. The all-Black 761st Tank Battalion fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and the 92
Infantry Division, fought in fierce ground battles in Italy. Yet, despite their role in
defeating fascism, the fight for equality continued for African American soldiers after
the World War II ended. They remained in segregated units and lower-ranking
positions, well into the Korean War, a few years after President Truman signed an
executive order to desegregate the U.S. military in 1948.
World War II Casualties and Legacy
World War II proved to be the deadliest international conflict in history, taking the
lives of 60 to 80 million people, including 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the
Nazis during the Holocaust. Civilians made up an estimated 5055 million deaths from
the war, while military comprised 21 to 25 million of those lost during the war. Millions
more were injured, and still more lost their homes and property.
The legacy of the war would include the spread of communism from the Soviet Union
into eastern Europe as well as its eventual triumph in China, and the global shift in
power from Europe to two rival superpowers–the United States and the Soviet Union–
that would soon face off against each other in the Cold War.
Cold War Armies

https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union and the
United States and their respective allies, the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc, after
World War II. Historians do not fully agree on the dates, but the period is generally
considered to span the 1947 Truman Doctrine to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet
Union. The term "cold" is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly
between the two superpowers, but they each supported major regional conflicts known
as proxy wars. The conflict was based around the ideological and geopolitical struggle
for global influence by the two powers, following their temporary alliance and victory
against Nazi Germany in 1945.
The doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) discouraged a preemptive attack

by either side. Aside from the nuclear arsenal development and conventional military
deployment, the struggle for dominance was expressed via indirect means such as
psychological warfare, propaganda campaigns, espionage, far-reaching embargoes,
rivalry at sports events and technological competitions such as the Space Race.
The West was led by the United States as well as the other First World nations of the
Western Bloc that were generally liberal democratic but tied to a network of
authoritarian states, most of which were their former colonies.[2][A] The East was led by
the Soviet Union and its Communist Party, which had an influence across the Second
World. The US government supported right-wing governments and uprisings across the
world, while the Soviet government funded communist parties and revolutions around
the world. As nearly all the colonial states achieved independence in the period 1945–
1960, they became Third World battlefields in the Cold War.
The first phase of the Cold War began immediately after the end of the Second World
War in 1945. The United States created the NATO military alliance in 1949 in the
apprehension of a Soviet attack and termed their global policy against Soviet influence
containment. The Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955 in response to NATO.
Major crises of this phase included the 1948–49 Berlin Blockade, the 1927–50 Chinese
Civil War, the 1950–53 Korean War, the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and
the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The USSR and the US competed for influence in Latin
America, the Middle East, and the decolonizing states of Africa and Asia.
Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, a new phase began that saw the SinoSoviet split
between China and the Soviet Union complicate relations within the Communist sphere,
while US ally France began to demand greater autonomy of action. The USSR invaded
Czechoslovakia to suppress the 1968 Prague Spring, while the US experienced internal
turmoil from the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War.
In the 1960s–70s, an international peace movement took root among citizens around the
world. Movements against nuclear arms testing and for nuclear disarmament took
place, with large anti-war protests. By the 1970s, both sides had started making
allowances for peace and security, ushering in a period of détente that saw the Strategic
Arms Limitation Talks and the US opening relations with the People's Republic of
China as a strategic counterweight to the USSR.
Détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War
in 1979. The early 1980s were another period of elevated tension. The United States
increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time
when it was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of glasnost
("openness", c. 1985) and perestroika ("reorganization", 1987) and ended Soviet
involvement in Afghanistan. Pressures for national sovereignty grew stronger in
Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev refused to militarily support their governments any
longer.
In 1989, the fall of the Iron Curtain and a wave of revolutions (with the exception of
Romania) peacefully overthrew all of the communist governments of Central and
Eastern Europe. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control in the
Soviet Union and was banned following an abortive coup attempt in August 1991. This
in turn led to the formal dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, the declaration of
independence of its constituent republics and the collapse of communist governments
across much of Africa and Asia. The United States was left as the world's only
superpower.
The Cold War and its events have left a significant legacy. It is often referred to in
popular culture, especially with themes of espionage and the threat of nuclear warfare.
Contemporary Armies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_history
Modern Era
The post-1989 world saw the end of the totalitarian regimes of the Cold War and the
ending of client state status for many states. The Cold war was effectively ended by the
Revolutions of 1989, and the Malta Summit on 3 December 1989. The Soviet Union was
dissolved on 26 December 1991. Various "post-Cold War regimes" established were
democratic republics, though some were authoritarian/oligarchic republics.[4]
In Latin America, military regimes supported by the CIA, such as that facilitated by the
United States intervention in Chile, also fell (see also Covert United States foreign
regime change actions). The Pinochet regime collapsed in 1990. In Southeast Asia, the
right-wing developmental dictatorships were overthrown by popular uprisings.[5]
Terrorism and Warfare
Major political developments in the 2000s (decade) for the United States and the Middle
East revolved around recent modern terrorism, the War on Terrorism, the Afghanistan
War, and the Iraq War.
The World Trade Center on fire and the Statue of Liberty.
The September 11 attacks – which were described as a "watershed moment" of

contemporary history – were a series of coordinated suicide attacks by AlQaeda upon
the United States on 11 September 2001. On that morning, 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists
hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners.[8][9] The hijackers intentionally
crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New
York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings. Both
buildings collapsed within two hours, destroying nearby buildings and damaging others.
The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just
outside Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville in
rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania, after some of its passengers and flight crew
attempted to retake control of the plane, which the hijackers had redirected toward
Washington, D.C. Major terrorist events after the 11 September 2001 Attacks include
the Moscow Theatre Siege, the 2003 Istanbul bombings, the Madrid train bombings, the
Beslan school hostage crisis, the 2005 London bombings, the October 2005 New Delhi
bombings, and the 2008 Mumbai Hotel Siege .
The United States responded to the 11 September 2001 attacks by launching a "Global
War on Terrorism", invading Afghanistan to depose the Taliban, who had harbored al-
Qaeda terrorists, and enacting the Patriot Act. Many other countries also strengthened
their anti-terrorism legislation and expanded law enforcement powers. The 'Global
War on Terrorism' is the military, political, legal and ideological conflict against Islamic
terrorism and Islamic militants since the 2001 attacks.
The War in Afghanistan began in late 2001 and was launched by the United States with
the United Kingdom, and NATO-led, UN authorized ISAF in response to the 11
September attacks. The aim of the invasion was to find the whereabouts of Osama bin
Laden and other high-ranking al-Qaeda members and put them on trial, to destroy the
whole organization of alQaeda, and to remove the Taliban regime which supported and
gave safe harbor to al-Qaeda.
The Bush administration policy and the Bush Doctrine stated forces would not
distinguish between terrorist organizations and nations or governments that harbor
them. Two military operations in Afghanistan are fighting for control over the country.
Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) is a United States combat operation involving
some coalition partners and operating primarily in the eastern and southern parts of
the country along the Pakistan border. The second operation is the International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which was established by the UN Security Council at
the end of 2001 to secure Kabul and the surrounding areas. NATO assumed control of
ISAF in 2003.
The multinational infantry actions, with additional ground forces supplied by the
Afghan Northern Alliance, and aerial bombing campaign removed the Taliban from
power, but Taliban forces have since regained some strength.[10] The war has been less
successful in achieving the goal of restricting al-Qaeda's movement than anticipated.[11]
Since 2006, Afghanistan has seen threats to its stability from increased Talibanled
insurgent activity, record-high levels of illegal drug production,[12][13] and a fragile
government with limited control outside of Kabul.[14] At the end of 2008, the war had
been unsuccessful in capturing Osama bin Laden and tensions have grown between the
United States and Pakistan due to incidents of Taliban fighters crossing the Pakistan
border while being pursued by coalition troops.
The Second Gulf War began in March 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by a multinational
force.[15] The invasion of Iraq led to an occupation and the eventual capture of Saddam
Hussein, who was later executed by the Iraqi Government. Violence against coalition
forces and among various sectarian groups soon led to asymmetric warfare with the
Iraqi insurgency, strife between many Sunni and Shia Iraqi groups, and al-Qaeda
operations in Iraq.[16][17] Evidence of war crimes committed and sanctioned by the
United States Department of Justice created controversy globally, and helped dispel the
notion of the United States as a liberating force in the War of Terror.[18] Member
nations of the Coalition withdrew their forces as public opinion favoring troop
withdrawals increased and as Iraqi forces began to take responsibility for security.[19][20]
In late 2008, the U.S. and Iraqi governments approved a Status of Forces Agreement
effective through to the end of 2011.[21] The Iraqi Parliament also ratified a Strategic
Framework Agreement with the U.S.,[22][23] aimed at ensuring international cooperation
in constitutional rights, threat deterrence, education,[24] energy development, and other
areas.[25] In 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama announced an 18-month withdrawal
window for "combat forces".
The Obama administration has renamed the War on Terror as the "Overseas
Contingency Operation".[26] Its objectives are to protect US citizens and business
interests worldwide, break up terrorist cells in the US, and disrupt alQaeda and
affiliated groups.[27][28] The administration has re-focused US involvement in the conflict
on the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, the closing of Guantanamo Bay detention
camp, and the surge in Afghanistan. Using information obtained from Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed in 2007, the name and whereabouts of one of Bin Laden's couriers, Abu
Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, was learned, and the courier eventually led U.S. intelligence to the
location of Osama bin Laden, which was located in a large compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan, a suburban area 35 miles from Islamabad.[29] On 1 May 2011, he was killed
and the papers and computer drives and disks from the compound were seized.
In 2011 Europe, the former Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladić, wanted for
genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, is arrested on 26 May in Serbia by
the Military Security Agency.
In 2011, the United States formally declared an end to the Iraq War.[30][31][32][33][34] The
Arab Spring began in earnest in 2010 with antigovernment protests in the Muslim
world, but quickly escalated to full-scale military conflicts in countries like Syria, Libya,
and Yemen and also gave the opportunity for the emergence of various militant groups
including the Islamic State (IS). The IS was able to take advantage of social media
platforms including Twitter to recruit foreign fighters from around the world and
seized significant portions of territory in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and the Sinai
Peninsula of Egypt from 2013 and ongoing.
On the other hand, some violent militant organizations were able to negotiate peace
with governments including the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines in
2014. The presence of IS and the stalemate in the Syrian Civil War created a migration
of refugees to Europe and also galvanized and encouraged high-profile terrorism
attacks and armed conflicts around the world, such as the November 2015 Paris attacks
and the Battle of Marawi in the Philippines in 2017.
In 2014, the United States decided to intervene against the Islamic State in Iraq, with
most IS fighters being driven out by the end of 2018. Russia and Iran also jointly
launched a campaign against IS in Syria, in support of Syrian President Bashar al-
Assad, coming at odds with United States aims.
The Government of Russia, largely led by President Vladimir Putin, have opposed the
enlargement of NATO as encroaching on Russian autonomy. In the last fifteen years,
they have intervened in a variety of military conflicts in its neighboring countries
including Georgia and Ukraine (leading to the annexation of Crimea and an ongoing
war in Eastern Ukraine).
**********End**********

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Army Vision: By 2028, a World-Class Army that is a source of National Pride

ATS/3 Date Updated: 01 January 2021

STUDENT HANDOUTS References: ST – Military History & Evolution

Military of Ancient Rome

Titus Flavius Josephus, a contemporary historian, sometime high-ranking officer in the

Population Base of the Early Empire:

The Empire's system of building an extensive and well-maintained road network, as

THE CRUSADES: CONSEQUENCES & EFFECTS

an increased presence of Christians in the Levant during the Middle Ages.

Middle East & Muslim World

TRAVEL BECAME MORE COMMON, INITIALLY IN THE FORM OF

The Spread of The Crusades

The Sack of Constantinople in 1204 CE

TRADE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST GREATLY INCREASED. MORE EXOTIC

Into the Modern Era

1805-1812: Napoleonic Conquest of Europe

1812: Invasion of Russia/The War of 1812

1813-1814: Battle of Leipzig and First Restoration

1815: Battle of Waterloo and Hundred Days

Situation during the Battle of Boju

The Art of War

On 10 April 1972, the Yinqueshan Han Tombs were accidentally unearthed by

Daoist rhetoric is a component incorporated in the Art of War. According to Steven C.

American Civil War

The Military Background of The War

The High Commands

The Land War (The war in 1861)

The first military operations took place in northwestern Virginia, where

The War in 1862

The War in the East

The Peninsular Campaign

As McClellan inched forward toward Richmond in June, Lee prepared a counterstroke.

Second Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) and Antietam

The Emancipation Proclamation

The Cost and Significance of the Civil War

World War I began in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz

Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Tensions had been brewing throughout Europe—especially in the troubled Balkan

World War I Begins

The Western Front

First Battle of the Marne

The Eastern Front

Russia’s simmering instability exploded in the Russian Revolution of 1917, spearheaded

America Enters World War I

Neutrality, however, was increasing difficult to maintain in the face of Germany’s

British-led forces also combated the Ottoman Turks in Egypt and

Battle of the Isonzo

World War I at Sea

World War I Planes

Second Battle of the Marne

Austria-Hungary, dissolving from within due to growing nationalist movements among

World War I Casualties

Legacy of World War I

Leading up to World War II

After becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler swiftly consolidated power,

Outbreak of World War II (1939)

World War II in the West (1940-41)

On April 9, 1940, Germany simultaneously invaded Norway and occupied Denmark,

Hitler vs. Stalin: Operation Barbarossa (1941-42)

World War II in the Pacific (1941-43)

Toward Allied Victory in World War II (1943-45)

On June 6, 1944–celebrated as “D-Day”–the Allies began a massive invasion of Europe,