Cambridge Military Histories
Series · 26
books · 2004-2025
Books in series
#1
Thailand's Secret War
OSS, SOE and the Free Thai Underground During World War II
2004
Despite its 1941 alliance with Japan, Thai leaders managed to establish clandestine relations with China, Britain and the United States, each of which had ambitions for postwar influence in Bangkok. Based largely on recently declassified intelligence records, this narrative history thoroughly explores these relations, details Allied secret operations and sheds new light on the intense rivalry between the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
#2
Victory through Coalition
Britain and France during the First World War
2005
Germany's invasion of France in August 1914 represented a threat to the great power status of both Britain and France. The countries had no history of cooperation, yet the entente they had created in 1904 proceeded by trial and error, via recriminations, to win a war of unprecedented scale and ferocity. Elizabeth Greenhalgh details the civil-military relations on each side, the political and military relations between the two powers, the maritime and industrial collaboration that were indispensable to an industrialized war effort and the Allied prosecution of war on the western front.
#3
Arms, Economics and British Strategy
From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs
2007
This book integrates strategy, technology and economics and presents a new way of looking at twentieth-century military history and Britain's decline as a great power. G. C. Peden explores how from the Edwardian era to the 1960s warfare was transformed by a series of innovations, including dreadnoughts, submarines, aircraft, tanks, radar, nuclear weapons and guided missiles. He shows that the cost of these new weapons tended to rise more quickly than national income and argues that strategy had to be adapted to take account of both the increased potency of new weapons and the economy's diminishing ability to sustain armed forces of a given size. Prior to the development of nuclear weapons, British strategy was based on an ability to wear down an enemy through blockade, attrition (in the First World War) and strategic bombing (in the Second), and therefore power rested as much on economic strength as on armaments.
#8
The Foundations of British Maritime Ascendancy
Resources, Logistics and the State, 1755–1815
2010
British power and global expansion between 1755 and 1815 have mainly been attributed to the fiscal-military state and the achievements of the Royal navy at sea. Roger Morriss here sheds new light on the broader range of developments in the infrastructure of the state needed to extend British power at sea and overseas. He demonstrates how developments in culture, experience and control in central government affected the supply of ships, manpower, food, transport and ordnance as well as the support of the army, permitting the maintenance of armed forces of unprecedented size and their projection to distant stations. He reveals how the British state, although dependent on the private sector, built a partnership with it based on trust, ethics and the law. This book argues that Britain's military bureaucracy, traditionally regarded as inferior to the fighting services, was in fact the keystone of the nation's maritime ascendancy.
#9
The Making of the Modern Admiralty
British Naval Policy-Making, 1805–1927
2011
This is an important new history of decision-making and policy-making in the British Admiralty from Trafalgar to the aftermath of Jutland. C. I. Hamilton explores the role of technological change, the global balance of power and, in particular, of finance and the First World War in shaping decision-making and organisational development within the Admiralty. He shows that decision-making was found not so much in the hands of the Board but at first largely in the hands of individuals, then groups or committees, and finally certain permanent bureaucracies. The latter bodies, such as the Naval Staff, were crucial to the development of policy-making as was the civil service Secretariat under the Permanent Secretary. By the 1920s the Admiralty had become not just a proper policy-making organisation, but for the first time a thoroughly civil-military one.
#10
Combat and Morale in the North African Campaign
The Eighth Army and the Path to El Alamein
2011
Military professionals and theorists have long understood the relevance of morale in war. Montgomery, the victor at El Alamein, said, following the battle, that 'the more fighting I see, the more I am convinced that the big thing in war is morale'. Jonathan Fennell, in examining the North African campaign through the lens of morale, challenges conventional explanations for Allied success in one of the most important and controversial campaigns in British and Commonwealth history. He introduces new sources, notably censorship summaries of soldiers' mail, and an innovative methodology that assesses troop morale not only on the evidence of personal observations and official reports but also on contemporaneously recorded rates of psychological breakdown, sickness, desertion and surrender. He shows for the first time that a major morale crisis and stunning recovery decisively affected Eighth Army's performance during the critical battles on the Gazala and El Alamein lines in 1942.
#11
Foch in Command
The Forging of a First World War General
2011
Ferdinand Foch ended the First World War as Marshal of France and supreme commander of the Allied armies on the Western Front. Foch in Command is a pioneering study of his contribution to the Allied victory. Elizabeth Greenhalgh uses contemporary notebooks, letters and documents from previously under-studied archives to chart how the artillery officer, who had never commanded troops in battle when the war began, learned to fight the enemy, to cope with difficult colleagues and Allies, and to manoeuvre through the political minefield of civil-military relations. She offers valuable insights into neglected the contribution of unified command to the Allied victory; the role of a commander's general staff; and the mechanisms of command at corps and army level. She demonstrates how an energetic Foch developed war-winning strategies for a modern industrial war, and how political realities contributed to his losing the peace.
#15
Bombing the People
Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air-Power Strategy, 1884–1939
2013
Giulio Douhet was one of the world's most important early air power strategists. This book offers the first comprehensive interpretation of Douhet's strategic thinking and its broader context. It charts the development of the strategy of targeting civilian populations from colonial warfare to the wake of World War II.
#17
The Indian Army on the Western Front
India's Expeditionary Force to France and Belgium in the First World War
2014
The Indian army fought on the western front with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from 1914 to 1918. The traditional interpretations of its performance have been dominated by ideas that it was a failure. This book offers a radical reconsideration by revealing new answers to the debate's central questions, such as whether the Indian army 'saved' the BEF from defeat in 1914, or whether Indian troops were particularly prone to self-inflicting wounds and fleeing the trenches. It looks at the Indian army from top to bottom, from generals at headquarters to snipers in no man's land. It takes a global approach, exploring the links between the Indian army's 1914–18 campaigning in France and Belgium and its pre-1914 small wars in Asia and Africa, and comparing the performance of the Indian regiments on the western front to those in China, East Africa, Mesopotamia and elsewhere.
#22
Reporting the First World War
Charles Repington, The Times and the Great War
2015
Charles Repington was Britain's most influential military correspondent during the first two decades of the twentieth century. From 1914 to 1918, Repington's commentary in The Times, 'The War Day by Day', was read and discussed by opinion-shapers and decision-makers worldwide who sought to better understand the momentous events happening around them, and his subsequently published diaries offered a compelling portrait of England's governing class at war. This is the first major study of Repington's life and career from the Boer War to the end of the Great War. A. J. A. Morris presents unique insights into the conduct of the First World War and into leading figures in the British high command: French, Haig, Robertson, Wilson. The book offers modern readers a rewardingly fresh understanding of the conflict, and will appeal to scholars of the First World War and British political and military history of the period.
#24
Morale and the Italian Army during the First World War
2016
Italian performance in the First World War has been generally disparaged or ignored compared to that of the armies on the Western Front, and troop morale in particular has been seen as a major weakness of the Italian army. In this first book-length study of Italian morale in any language, Vanda Wilcox reassesses Italian policy and performance from the perspective both of the army as an institution and of the ordinary soldiers who found themselves fighting a brutally hard war. Wilcox analyses and contextualises Italy's notoriously hard military discipline along with leadership, training methods and logistics before considering the reactions of the troops and tracing the interactions between institutions and individuals. Restoring historical agency to soldiers often considered passive and indifferent, Wilcox illustrates how and why Italians complied, endured or resisted the army's demands through balancing their civilian and military identities.
#26
Communications and British Operations on the Western Front, 1914-1918
2017
This is an important new study examining the military operations of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914–18 through the lens of its communications system. Brian Hall charts how new communications technology such as wireless, telephone and telegraph were used alongside visual signalling, carrier pigeons and runners as the British army struggled to develop a communication system adequate enough to wage modern warfare. He reveals how tenuous communications added to the difficulties of command and control during the war's early years, and examines their role during the major battles of the Somme, Arras, Ypres and Cambrai. It was only in 1918 that the British army would finally develop a flexible and sophisticated communications system capable of effectively coordinating infantry, artillery, tanks and aeroplanes. This is a major contribution to our understanding of British military operations during the First World War, the learning processes of armies and the revolution in military affairs
#28
At War's Summit
The Red Army and the Struggle for the Caucasus Mountains in World War II
2018
This is the story of the highest battlefield of World War Two, which brings to life the extremes endured during this harsh mountain warfare. When the German war machine began faltering from a shortage of oil after the failed Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Edelweiss in the summer of 1942, a bold attempt to capture the Soviet oilfields of Grozny and Baku and open the way to securing the vast reserves of Middle Eastern oil. Hitler viewed this campaign as the key to victory in World War Two. Mountain warfare requires unique skills: climbing and survival techniques, unconventional logistical and medical arrangements and knowledge of ballistics at high altitudes. The Main Caucasus Ridge became the battleground that saw the elite German mountain divisions clash with the untrained soldiers of the Red Army, as they fought each other, the weather and the terrain.
#29
الاستعمار البريطاني وإجهاض الثورة العربية الكبرى في فلسطين، 1936-1939
2019
In this complete military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine, Matthew Hughes shows how the British Army was so devastatingly effective against colonial rebellion. The Army had a long tradition of pacification to draw upon to support operations, underpinned by the creation of an emergency colonial state in Palestine. After conquering Palestine in 1917, the British established a civil Government that ruled by proclamation and, without any local legislature, the colonial authorities codified in law norms of collective punishment that the Army used in 1936. The Army used 'lawfare', emergency legislation enabled by the colonial state, to grind out the rebellion. Soldiers with support from the RAF launched kinetic operations to search and destroy rebel bands, alongside which the villagers on whom the rebels depended were subjected to curfews, fines, detention, punitive searches, demolitions and reprisals. Rebels were disorganised and unable to withstand the power of such pacification measures.
#31
Revolutionary France's War of Conquest in the Rhineland
Conquering the Natural Frontier, 1792-1797
2019
In May 1790, the French National Assembly renounced wars of conquest. Two years later, France declared war on Austria and invaded Belgium and the Rhineland, claiming it was to spread the benefits of the Revolution. Soon, however, military and economic crises drove a shift in the nature of France's war effort. What started as a war for liberty became a war for conquest, one that brought devastating exploitation to the Rhineland. It was during this time that French foreign policy became influenced by the idea of attaining the natural frontiers – the Alps, the Pyrenees, and, most significantly, the Rhine. Although often portrayed as a diplomatic tradition of the French monarchy, Jordan R. Hayworth shows how the natural frontiers policy was born during the Revolution. In addition, he examines the intense and consequential debates that arose over the policy, which caused much confusion in the war and helped to undermine France's democratic experiment.
#33
Strangling the Axis
The Fight for Control of the Mediterranean during the Second World War
2020
This is a major reassessment of the causes of Allied victory in the Second World War in the Mediterranean region. Drawing on a unique range of multinational source material, Richard Hammond demonstrates how the Allies' ability to gain control of the key routes across the sea and sink large quantities of enemy shipping denied the Axis forces in North Africa crucial supplies and proved vital to securing ultimate victory there. Furthermore, the sheer scale of attrition to Axis shipping outstripped their industrial capacity to compensate, leading to the collapse of the Axis position across key territories maintained by seaborne supply, such as Sardinia, Corsica and the Aegean islands. As such, Hammond demonstrates how the anti-shipping campaign in the Mediterranean was the fulcrum about which strategy in the theatre pivoted, and the vital enabling factor ultimately leading to Allied victory in the region.
#34
Britain and Italy in the Era of the Great War
Defending and Forging Empires
2020
This is an important reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Stefano Marcuzzi sheds new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defence and Italy's ambition for imperial expansion. Taking Anglo-Italian bilateral relations as a special lens through which to understand the workings of the Entente in World War I, he reveals how the ups-and-downs of that relationship influenced and shaped Allied grand strategy. Marcuzzi considers three main issues – war aims, war strategy and peace-making – and examines how, under the pressure of divergent interests and wartime events, the Anglo-Italian 'traditional friendship' turned increasingly into competition by the end of the war, casting a shadow on Anglo-Italian relations both at the Peace Conference and in the interwar period.
#36
War's Logic
Strategic Thought and the American Way of War
2021
Antulio J. Echevarria II reveals how successive generations of American strategic theorists have thought about war. Analyzing the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Billy Mitchell, Bernard Brodie, Robert Osgood, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, Henry Eccles, Joseph Wiley, Harry Summers, John Boyd, William Lind, and John Warden, he uncovers the logic that underpinned each theorist's critical concepts, core principles, and basic assumptions about the nature and character of war. In so doing, he identifies four paradigms of war's nature - traditional, modern, political, and materialist - that have shaped American strategic thought. If war's logic is political, as Carl von Clausewitz said, then so too is thinking about war.
#37
Violence in Defeat
The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944–1945
2021
In the final year of the Second World War, as bitter defensive fighting moved to German soil, a wave of intra-ethnic violence engulfed the country. Bastiaan Willems offers the first study into the impact and behaviour of the Wehrmacht on its own territory, focusing on the German units fighting in East Prussia and its capital Königsberg. He shows that the Wehrmacht's retreat into Germany, after three years of brutal fighting on the Eastern Front, contributed significantly to the spike of violence which occurred throughout the country immediately prior to defeat. Soldiers arriving with an ingrained barbarised mindset, developed on the Eastern Front, shaped the immediate environment of the area of operations, and of Nazi Germany as a whole. Willems establishes how the norms of the Wehrmacht as a retreating army impacted behavioural patterns on the home front, arguing that its presence increased the propensity to carry out violence in Germany.
#38
America's Wars
Interventions, Regime Change, and Insurgencies after the Cold War
2022
The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in American global hegemony in world affairs. In the post-Cold War period, both Democrat and Republican governments intervened, fought insurgencies, and changed regimes. In America's Wars, Thomas Henriksen explores how America tried to remake the world by militarily invading a host of nations beset with civil wars, ethnic cleansing, brutal dictators, and devastating humanitarian conditions. The immediate post-Cold War years saw the United States carrying out interventions in the name of Western-style democracy, humanitarianism, and liberal internationalism in Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. Later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks led America into larger-scale military incursions to defend itself from further assaults by al Qaeda in Afghanistan and from perceived nuclear arms in Iraq, while fighting small-footprint conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Arabia. This era is coming to an end with the resurgence of great power rivalry and rising threats from China and Russia.
#39
The Malayan Emergency
Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire
2022
The Malayan Emergency of 1948–1960 has been scrutinised for 'lessons' about how to win counterinsurgencies from the Vietnam War to twenty-first century Afghanistan. This book brings our understanding of the conflict up to date by interweaving government and insurgent accounts and looking at how they played out at local level. Drawing on oral history, recent memoirs and declassified archival material from the UK and Asia, Karl Hack offers a comprehensive, multi-perspective account of the Malayan Emergency and its impact on Malaysia. He sheds new light on questions about terror and violence against civilians, how insurgency and decolonisation interacted and how revolution was defeated. He considers how government policies such as pressurising villagers, resettlement and winning 'hearts and minds' can be judged from the perspective of insurgents and civilians. This timely book is the first truly multi-perspective and in-depth study of anti-colonial resistance and counterinsurgency in the Malayan Emergency.
#40
Storm and Sack
British Sieges, Violence and the Laws of War in the Napoleonic Era, 1799–1815
2022
During the Peninsular War, Wellington's army stormed and sacked three French-held Spanish towns: Ciudad Rodrigo (1812), Badajoz (1812) and San Sebastian (1813). Storm and Sack is the first major study of British soldiers' violence and restraint towards enemy combatants and civilians in the siege warfare of the Napoleonic era. Using soldiers' letters, diaries and memoirs, Gavin Daly compares and contrasts military practices and attitudes across British sieges spanning three continents, from the Peninsular War in Spain, to India and South America. He focuses on siege rituals and laws of war, and uncovering the cultural and emotional history of the storm and sack of towns. This book challenges conventional understandings of the place and nature of sieges in the Napoleonic Wars. It encourages a rethinking of the notorious reputations of the British sacks of this period, and their place within the long-term history of customary laws of war and siege violence. Daly reveals a multi-faceted story of not only rage, enmity, plunder and atrocity, but also of mercy, honour, humanity and moral outrage.
#42
Holding Out
The German Army and Operational Command in 1917
2023
This is a ground-breaking study of German operational command during a critical phase of the First World War from November 1916 to the eve of the third battle of Ypres. The situation faced by the German army on the Western Front in 1917 was very different from the one anticipated in pre-war doctrine and Holding Out examines how German commanders and staff officers adapted. Tony Cowan analyses key command tasks to get under the skin of the army's command culture, internal politics and battle management systems from co-ordinating the troops, matériel and different levels of command needed to fight a modern battle to continuously learning and applying lessons from the ever-changing Western Front. His detailed analysis of the German defeat of the 1917 Entente spring offensive sheds new light on how the army and Germany were able to hold out so long during the war against increasing odds.
#43
Uncivil War
The British Army and the Troubles, 1966–1975
2023
When Operation Banner was launched in 1969 civil war threatened to break out in Northern Ireland and spread over the Irish Sea. Uncivil War reveals the full story of how the British army acted to save Great Britain from disaster during the most violent phase of the Troubles but, in so doing, condemned the people of Northern Ireland to protracted, grinding conflict. Huw Bennett shows how the army's ambivalent response to loyalist violence undermined the prospects for peace and heightened Catholic distrust in the state. British strategy consistently underestimated community defence as a reason for people joining or supporting the IRA whilst senior commanders allowed the army to turn in on itself, hardening soldiers to the suffering of ordinary people. By 1975 military strategists considered the conflict the army could not convince Catholics or Protestants that it was there to protect them and settled instead for an unending war.
#44
Tactical Air Power and the Vietnam War
Explaining Effectiveness in Modern Air Warfare
2024
This book introduces a much-needed theory of tactical air power to explain air power effectiveness in modern warfare with a particular focus on the Vietnam War as the first and largest modern air war. Phil Haun shows how in the Rolling Thunder, Commando Hunt, and Linebacker air campaigns, independently air power repeatedly failed to achieve US military and political objectives. In contrast, air forces in combined arms operations succeeded more often than not. In addition to predicting how armies will react to a lethal air threat, he identifies operational factors of air superiority, air-to-ground capabilities, and friendly ground force capabilities, along with environmental factors of weather, lighting, geography and terrain, and cover and concealment in order to explain air power effectiveness. The book concludes with analysis of modern air warfare since Vietnam along with an assessment of tactical air power relevance now and for the future.
#49
The Generalissimo
Luigi Cadorna and the Italian Army, 1850–1928
2025
Luigi Cardorna remains one of the most controversial generals in Italian history. Appointed chief of the armed forces in 1914, he led the Italian army in the field from May 1915 until the aftermath of their calamitous defeat at Caporetto in 1917. In this major new biography, Marco Mondini traces Cardorna's rise, the nature of his command, the course of the Isonzo campaign, and the battles over his post-war reputation. He brings a new cultural perspective to Cardorna's life, demonstrating the role of Italy's military and national culture, the myths of the Risorgimento, and the mobilization of propaganda in creating an effective cult of personality. Utilizing ego-documents, memoirs, letters and public writings, Mondini delves into the ideology and psychology that combined to create such an untouchable autocrat, arguing that the history of fascism in Italy cannot be fully understood without appreciating Cardorna's role in the First World War.
Authors
George C. Peden
Author · 1 book
George Cameron Peden was educated at Grove Academy, Broughty Ferry, and, after a period as a sub-editor on the Dundee Evening Telegraph, he studied as a mature student at the universities of Dundee and Oxford. He taught at the universities of Dundee, Leeds and Bristol before coming to the University Stirling in 1990, where he is currently Emeritus Professor of History.
Matthew Hughes
Author · 1 book
Dr Matthew Hughes is Professor of Military History at Brunel University London, in England. Hughes studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies and at the London School of Economics. He completed his ESRC-funded PhD in 1995 under the supervision of Professors Brian Bond and Brian Holden Reid in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London on the strategy surrounding the British campaign in Palestine in the First World War in Palestine. He has a PGCE in History from Cardiff University. After working as an intern with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Professor Hughes lectured at the universities of Northampton and Salford before coming to Brunel University in 2005. Professor Hughes has been a British Academy funded visiting fellow at the American University in Cairo, the American University in Beirut, and at Tel Aviv University. He spent two years as the Marine Corps University Foundation-funded Maj-Gen Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair in Military Theory at the US Marine Corps University, Quantico, 2008-10. His latest monograph on British counter-insurgency in Palestine in the 1930s entitled Britain's Pacification of Palestine: the British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939 (2019) was published with Cambridge University Press. He was the editor of the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research (2004-8). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a former Chair of Council of the Army Records Society (2014-18), and is a judge for the Society for Army Historical Research's annual Templer Medal prize (2003-4, 2007-8, 2018-). He sits on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Military History and Middle Eastern Studies and is a judge for the latter's annual Elie Kedourie prize. He is currently an external examiner for the Higher Diploma awarded by Maynooth University to the Junior Command and Staff Course with the Military College, Irish Defence Forces, and a Visiting Lecturer and examiner at the University of Buckingham.
Roger Morriss
Author · 2 books
Roger Morriss is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, University of Exeter, and General Editor of the Navy Records Society.
Alexander Statiev
Author · 2 books
Alexander Statiev is Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo.
Huw Bennett
Author · 1 book
Huw Bennett is a Lecturer in Defence Studies at King's College London, teaching at the British Joint Services Command and Staff College.
Stefano Marcuzzi
Author · 1 book
Stefano Marcuzzi took his DPhil in History at the University of Oxford in 2016, and subsequently joined the European University Institute (Florence) as a Max Weber fellow, working on EU-NATO cooperation in the Mediterranean. In 2018-2019, he was a Visiting Scholar at Carnegie Europe, Brussels. Now he is a Marie-Curie fellow at the University College Dublin, an analyst in Emerging Challenges at the NATO Defense College Foundation (Rome) and an external fellow at Boston University (BU).
Andrew James Anthony Morris
Author · 1 book
Andrew James Anthony Morris is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Ulster. He was educated at Aberdare Boys' Grammar School, the London School of Economics and the University of London Institute of Education. In addition to being a Nuffield Research Fellow, he has been a visiting professor in the USA, Canada and South Africa.
C.I. Hamilton
Author · 1 book
A specialist in 19th century naval history, Charles Iain Hamilton teaches modern European history at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Hamilton earned a BA at Keele University, and a Ph.D. at Queens' College, Cambridge in 1974.
George Morton-Jack
Author · 2 books
George Morton-Jack studied history at Oxford University and wrote his first book for Cambridge University Press. He has travelled widely in Asia and Africa, visiting several of the far-flung corners where the Indian soldiers served, from China and Tibet to Kenya and Tanzania. He currently lives in London.
Elizabeth Greenhalgh
Author · 3 books
Elizabeth Greenhalgh graduated from the Victoria University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and arrived in Australia in 1987. She worked as a research assistant in the Department, then School, of History, UNSW @ ADFA and, after completing her PhD, edited the international journal War & Society between 2005 and 2010. She then became a full-time researcher, being awarded a UNSW postdoctoral fellowship and then an Australian Research Coucil Fellowship (2010-2014).
