History

After signing an armistice agreement on 22 June 1940, Adolf Hitler placed the German army in charge of occupied France and ordered the military government to supervise the Vichy regime and maintain security. Viewing World War II as a struggle between nation‐states, the military commander in France, Otto von Stülpnagel, cultivated French support, placed industrial resources at the disposal of the German war effort, and maintained ‘security’ by capturing enemy soldiers and Allied spies. Initially barred from the Hexagon, Göring's Office of the Four Year Plan, Himmler's SS, and Ribbentrop's Foreign Office adopted an expanded definition of security, argued that the Reich had to combat the so‐called Jewish conspiracy to maintain order, and secured Hitler's favor. In conjunction with Alfred Rosenberg and the French government, they launched an anti‐Semitic campaign of defamation, discrimination, and despoliation. Hitler used assassinations as a pretext for genocide and ordered subordinates to answer resistance activity with deadly reprisals and massive deportations that focused on Jews. Stülpnagel condemned anti‐Semitic measures and disproportionate hostage executions as impolitic distractions and resigned his command. Astute political tactics helped the Himmler seize control of German security forces but alienated the military government and, later, the Vichy regime. With limited support from French and German colleagues, the SS could only deport 75,000 French Jews: Fritz Sauckel's labor organization impressed approximately 850,000 workers into the German war economy by cooperating with French and German colleagues. Accommodation explains divergent results of select German policies, clarifies the inner workings of the Nazi regime, and elucidates decisions made by Prime Ministers Pierre Laval and François Darlan.

From 1649–1660 England was ruled by a standing army for the only time in its history. The nature of that military rule was far more complex and nuanced than has traditionally been appreciated. This is the first book to describe the nature of that rule, both for members of the army and for civilian society. The first part of the book describes the character of the army by looking at the life that officers and soldiers led, the promotion structure, and the ways in which political engagement changed to provide a sense of the day-to-day reality of being part of a standing army. The second part of the book considers the impact of the military presence on society by establishing where soldiers were quartered, how they were paid, the material burden that they represented, the divisive effect of the army's patronage of religious radicals, and the extensive involvement of army officers in the government of the localities. The final part of the book re-evaluates the army's role in the political events from Cromwell's death to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, and explains why the army crumbled so pitifully in the last months of the Commonwealth. The book casts new light on: the changes in the army between 1649–60; Cromwell's control of the army; the co-existence of political ideals and a professional ethos among army officers; the place of the major-generals in English history; the attitude of the political nation to a standing army; the army's support of religious radicals; the reasons for the fall of the Commonwealth.

The veterans of the Fourteenth Army who fought in Burma between 1942 and 1945 called themselves ‘the forgotten army’. But that appellation could equally well be applied to the whole of the British army after 1945. Histories of Britain's post‐war defence policy have usually focused on how and why Britain acquired a nuclear deterrent. This book takes a new look at it by placing the army centre‐stage. Drawing on archival sources that have hardly been used by historians, it shows how British governments tried to create an army that would enable them to maintain their position as a major world power at a time when their economy struggled to foot the bill. The result was a growing mismatch between the military resources that the government thought it could afford on the one hand, and a long list of overseas commitments, in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East, that it was reluctant to surrender. The result was that the British created a Potemkin army, a force that had an outwardly impressive facade, but that in reality had only very limited war‐fighting capabilities.

This is the story of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries--the most notorious police forces in the history of the British Isles. During the Irish War of Independence (1920–1), the British government recruited thousands of ex-soldiers to serve as constables in the Royal Irish Constabulary—the Black and Tans—while also raising a paramilitary raiding force of ex-officers—the Auxiliary Division. From the summer of 1920 to the summer of 1921, these forces became the focus of bitter controversy. As the struggle for Irish independence intensified, the police responded to ambushes and assassinations by the guerrillas with reprisals and extrajudicial killings. Prisoners and suspects were abused and shot, the homes and shops of their families and supporters were burned, and the British government was accused of imposing a reign of terror on Ireland. This book, based on extensive archival research, is the first serious study of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries and the part they played in the Irish War of Independence. It examines the organization and recruitment of the British police, the social origins of police recruits, and the conditions in which they lived and worked, along with their conduct and misconduct once they joined the force, and their experiences and states of mind. For the first time, it tells the story of the Irish conflict from the police perspective, while casting new light on the British government’s responsibility for reprisals, the problems of using police to combat insurgents, and the causes of atrocities in revolutionary wars.

During the Korean War nearly a thousand British servicemen, along with a handful of British civilians, were captured by North Korean and Red Chinese forces. In various camps in the vicinity of Pyongyang and villages along the Yalu River these men found themselves subjected to a prolonged effort by the enemy to undermine their allegiance to the Crown and enlist them in various propaganda campaigns directed against the UN war effort. This is the first academic study to examine in detail exactly what happened to the major groups of British military and civilian prisoners held in different locations at various junctures between 1950 and 1953. It explores the extent to which factors such as exposure to the actions of the North Koreans as against the Red Chinese, evolving physical conditions, enemy re-education efforts, communist attempts at blackmail, British attitudes towards the Americans, and personal background and leadership qualities among captives themselves influenced the willingness and ability of the British prisoners to collaborate or resist. Thanks to the availability of hitherto classified or underutilized source materials, it is now possible to test the common popular assumption—based on official accounts and memoirs from the 1950s—that, in marked contrast to their American cousins, British captives in the Korean War were pretty much immune to communist efforts at subverting their loyalty. The results suggest that British attitudes and actions while in enemy hands were rather more nuanced and varied than previously assumed.

‘The experience of numerous small wars has provided the British Army with a unique insight into this demanding form of conflict.’ (Ministry of Defence, 2001). Over the next decade these claims unravelled spectacularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this book suggests that one reason for that was because contemporary British counter-insurgency doctrine was based upon a serious mis-reading of the past. Many observers believed that during their wars of decolonisation in the two decades after 1945 the British had discovered how western liberal notions of right and wrong could be made compatible with the imperatives of waging war amongst the people, that force could be used effectively but with care, and that a more just and prosperous society could emerge from these struggles. By using only the minimum necessary force, and doing so with the utmost discrimination, the British were able to win by securing the 'hearts and minds' of the people. But this was a serious distortion of actual British practice on the ground. The main contention of this book is that the British hid their use of naked force behind a carefully constructed veneer of legality. In reality they commonly used wholesale coercion, including cordon and search operations, mass detention without trial, forcible population resettlement, and the creation of free-fire zones, to intimidate and lock-down the civilian population. They were nasty, not nice, to the people amongst whom they were operating.

Though only one among hundreds of prison camps in which British servicemen were held between 1939 and 1945, Colditz enjoys unparalleled name recognition both in Britain and in other parts of the English-speaking world. Made famous in print, on film, and through television, Colditz remains a potent symbol of key virtues-including ingenuity and perseverance against apparently overwhelming odds-that form part of the popular mythology surrounding the British war effort in World War II. Colditz has played a major role in shaping perceptions of the prisoner-of-war experience in Nazi Germany, an experience in which escaping is assumed to be paramount and ‘Outwitting the Hun’ a universal sport. This book chronicles the development of the Colditz myth and puts what happened inside the castle in the context of British and Commonwealth POW life in Germany as a whole. Being a captive of the Third Reich-from the moment of surrender down to the day of liberation and repatriation-was more complicated and a good deal tougher than the popular myth would suggest. The physical and mental demands of survival far outweighed escaping activity in order of importance in most camps almost all of the time, and even in Colditz the reality was in some respects very different from the almost Boy's Own caricature that developed during the post-war decades. This book seeks to place Colditz-both the camp and the legend-in a wider historical context.

The period 1902–14 was one of great change for the British army. The experience of the South African War (1899–1902) had been a profound shock to the army and it led to a period of intense introspection in order to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the force. As a result of a series of investigations and government-led reorganization, the army embarked on a series of reforms to improve its recruitment, standards of professionalism, training, and preparation for war. Until now many of the studies covering this period have tended to look at the army in a top-down manner and have often concluded that the process was extremely beneficial to the army, leading it to be the most efficient force in Europe by the outbreak of war in 1914. This study takes a different approach. It takes a bottom-up perspective and examines the many difficulties the army experienced trying to incorporate the reforms demanded by government and the army’s high command. It reveals that although many good ideas were devised, the severely overstretched army was never in a position whereby it could act on them, and that few regimental officers had the opportunity, or even the desire, to change their approach. Unable to shake off the feeling that the army’s primary purpose was to garrison and police the British Empire, it was by no means as well prepared for European continental warfare as many have presumed.