War, Peace, and International Relations. An Introduction to Strategic History

The war did not give birth directly to Nazi Germany and its malevolent leader, but Adolf Hitler and his party were the results o ...

more agreeable watering holes on Lake Geneva or one of the Italian lakes. A notable high point of the decade was the signing of ...

The strategic context of the 1920s could hardly have been more different from the perspective of French security. No longer was ...

history was not going to permit that. Genuine or illusory, the progress achieved in the 1920s towards international reconciliati ...

source of some useful pretexts for aggression. Until 1939, all of Germany’s forward strategic moves were ethically and political ...

catastrophic drop, while Hitler realized that Paris lacked the will to resist his designs. This was taken as definitive evidence ...

was any more ready for war with Germany than was British. In the 1930s, therefore, the French Army placed its confidence in its ...

Hitler believed that they were preventing another great war, and could point to some recent successes in that area, one must add ...

S. Marks The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918–1933, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). J ...

9 The mechanization of war Introduction: revolution in military affairs (RMA) The principal weapon for war-making in 1914–1 8 wa ...

build whatever they chose, given the fairly well-understood technical constraints (e.g., attainable engine power) of the time. S ...

interested foreigners. Unfortunately, the brigade, encouragingly renamed the Experi- mental Armoured Force, was precipitately di ...

battle’. They envisaged tank-heavy striking forces moving far and fast into the enemy’s rear. Alas, Stalin’s purge of the office ...

for an armistice. Douhet, though, was theorizing prior to the appearance of radar. He assumed that air defence was futile, that ...

came in 1939 and the operational limitations of sonar were revealed, there was an international consensus among naval experts th ...

such second-tier naval powers as France and Italy. Although the Washington treaty system may have helped head off an impending A ...

superiority had been gained. However, these two fundamental principles were by no means self-evident truths to military experts ...

E. Goldstein and J. Maurer (eds) The Washington Conference 1921–22: Naval Rivalry, East Asian Stability and the Road to Pearl Ha ...

10 World War II in Europe, I The structure and course of total war Introduction: total war The actuality or the threat of war wa ...

were not yet under German control, but that situation had changed dramatically by early The Holocaust was a crime waiting to be ...