Military History Blogs

The musings of an Air Power and Military Historian on his journey through his PhD (by Ross)

The American plan for the Niagara Front in 1813 was to recapture Detroit and invade Canada. In order to do so they had to control Lake Erie, which in turn depended on conquering Ontario. The British were forced onto the defensive by lack of resources. The Americans captured Fort George on 27 May.

One of the many problems with concentrating only on big battles is that it distracts attention from small-scale operations that were more common and can tell us interesting things about how war worked in practice. But studying small wars for their own sake can also obscure links with bigger issues.

While working feverishly to complete an 8,000-word (ok, more like 8,600) chapter narrating the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) - a part of West Point's massive new e-textbook for their History of Warfare survey course - I got to talking with another author.

In this post, we offer some reflections about the use of water as a weapon during the Second World War, and specifically its use in the southern Netherlands. The battle for the Scheldt, which took place between October and November 1944, began by flooding large swathes of Dutch territory in an attempt to dislodge Nazi occupying forces.

Airminded is the research blog of Dr. Brett Holman, an independent historian from Melbourne, Australia.

A group of UK based scholars writing and researching the operational military history of the Second World War

In the course of any project, you accumulate all kinds of material that will never form part of the narrative proper, but you hang on to just in case. For a proposed series of maps, I wanted to locate the airfields used by French squadrons during the battles of Verdun and the Somme.

This poem appeared in The Times on April 23, 1885, and was concurrently printed in the Pall Mall Gazette. Written by the Poet Laureate, it appears to have been largely forgotten (if a Google search can be taken as evidence).

I have just returned from a fascinating and moving two weeks following the trail of the Holocaust across Europe from Holland into Germany, and then on into Poland and the Czech Republic.

Welcome to the blog of the postgraduate students at the Centre for War Studies, University of Birmingham

Enhancing history and the web with an Arc Light raid on ignorance