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- Editorial
Authors: Sam Edwards, Andrew Saunders
Pages: 1 - 1
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1869
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- ‘The Presiding Spirit of this Tempest’: A Profile of General Sir James
Leith (1763–1816)
Authors: Paul Thompson
Pages: 2 - 27
Abstract: This article assesses the life, career, and character of Peninsular War General Sir James Leith (1763–1816). Compared with many of his peers, Leith is an overlooked figure, whose episodes in the forefront of events are punctuated by periods of obscurity. Hitherto he has been portrayed without depth, complexity, or nuance solely as an archetypal Napoleonic-era warrior. The latter part of General Leith’s career, however, found him in a more equivocal situation, that of soldier-turned-colonial administrator. Recent scholarship has begun to pursue a more comprehensive approach to figures of Leith’s ilk. Nevertheless, a narrowly myopic, or ‘Victorian’, approach to military historiography has died hard. Numerous Wellingtonian lieutenants who evolved into architects of empire, including Benjamin D’Urban, John Colborne, Harry Smith, and Stapleton Cotton, to name just a few, lack modern, multi-dimensional reassessments, and James Leith is of their number. This article aims to bring facets of both General Leith’s soldiering and his colonial governing into clearer, contemporary focus.
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1870
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- Two Hundred Years of British Army Casualties and Statistics
Authors: Martin Bricknell, Beverly Bergman
Pages: 28 - 56
Abstract: This paper covers the evolution of medical statistics on the Army from the early nineteenth Century to the present day. Although several policies during this period described the importance of medical statistics for the planning and management of military health services, there have been problems with collecting and analysing medical data at the beginning of the First World War, the Second World War, and the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. The paper considers the key features and analytical reports that have been shown necessary to report on the health of the Army and activities of the medical services in peace and war.
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1871
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- Professionalism and Ethics in Military Leadership: Lessons from
Pre-colonial Africa
Authors: Esson Alumbugu
Pages: 57 - 71
Abstract: This paper examines the role of professionalism and ethics in military leadership using examples from pre-colonial Africa. The Maasai warriors of East Africa provided professional military service to their society which rose to the position of hegemony in the region. Shaka developed a professional army which, through military might, placed the Zulu in a position of hegemony in Southern Africa. However, the undermining of military ethics resulted in the decline of professionalism and eventual failure in both the Maasai military and in Shaka’s military leadership. The paper concludes that military ethics must be consistently upheld to ensure professionalism and successful military leadership.
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1872
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- Using archival sources to identify battlefield sites and the fates of the
missing: The First Battle of Bullecourt 1917 as a case history
Authors: Brenton J Brooks
Pages: 72 - 93
Abstract: The First Battle of Bullecourt took place in April 1917 and two study cases of the Australian missing from that event have been investigated. Firstly, the fate of Captain Allan Edwin Leane, and secondly the fate of an unaccounted group of wounded last seen in a German dugout. Australian and German unit diaries were used in conjunction with mapping and aerial photography to determine what happened and where.
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1873
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- The Social Life of an Artillery Battery: A Historical Anthropology of
Malta’s Heavy Anti-Aircraft Defence
Authors: Nikolai Debono
Pages: 94 - 116
Abstract: Eighty years after the Second World War ‘Siege of Malta’ memories of air-raid shelters and wartime hunger live on. All of Malta’s war museums are related to authentic sites from the conflict, and commemorations often take place at specific monuments and historical locations. However, other sites linked to the war remain discarded in public memory. Anti-aircraft batteries are a case in point: a network of concrete structures and guns built to hit back at Malta’s aerial attackers. This article explores the origins of these sites and, much more importantly, the social life that blossomed within them as a unique way of being. It examines the close connections forged between gunners and their guns, and it explores how anti-aircraft sites have been both memorialised and forgotten.
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1874
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- Novel Arrangement: The Belgian National Branch of the Royal Navy 1940
– 1946
Authors: Mark C Jones
Pages: 117 - 140
Abstract: After Germany occupied Belgium in 1940, Belgian mariners interested in continuing the war at sea joined a specially formed Belgian national branch of the British navy, the Royal Navy (Section Belge) or RNSB. The article reviews Belgian naval forces before the Second World War, explains the reasons for the creation of this unusual force, details the ships and personnel involved, and argues that the British decision to incorporate Belgians into the Royal Navy benefitted both Britain and Belgium.
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1875
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- Nigeria: Fifty Years After the Civil War
Authors: Ojong Echum Tangban, Eugene Obiora Eugene
Pages: 141 - 159
Abstract: The thrust of this article is Nigeria: 50 years after the civil war. The end of the war in January 1970 heralded an era of measures by successive governments at re-integrating the Igbo and forging national unity. As laudable as the measures are, there exist gaps in many of them between intent and practice. Many people continue to raise concern as to when the Igbo will be truly integrated into Nigeria and the centrifugal forces of ethnic and religious chauvinism tamed within Nigerian society. Using primary and secondary sources, this article concludes that true re-integration of the Igbo remains a mirage and to avert another civil war, successive leaders need to demonstrate genuine commitment to patriotism and national unity.
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1876
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- Astonishingly Accurate British Intelligence in the American War of
Independence
Authors: Eugene A Procknow
Pages: 160 - 170
Abstract: An unsigned, undated document among the General Sir Henry Clinton Papers at the University of Michigan William C. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan, demonstrates that the British possessed remarkable, accurate intelligence on the Continental Army’s order of battle and command structure. Curiously, Crown officers added derogatory nicknames denoting their understanding of the senior Rebel generals’ predominant character traits. Neither the senior general assessments nor the command structure intelligence led to sustainable battlefield advantages. Still, it aided unit identification during General Howe’s Spring 1777 New Jersey campaign and may have contributed to the British victory at Brandywine later that year.
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1877
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- The Composition of Army Rum, 1917
Authors: Brian Bertosa
Pages: 171 - 178
Abstract: The composition of Royal Navy rum is not only a subject of commercial importance but has been the subject of serious examination both online and in a monograph dealing with the history of rum in that service. The composition of British Army rum, on the other hand, has not been seriously examined due to a lack of suitable source material. Using lists drawn up by the Port of London Authority in 1917, a detailed breakdown of the component rums, by place of origin, of the Army’s blend is now possible, confirming the impressions of contemporaries that it was not the same as that of the Navy.
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1878
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- The Hessian Cloth ‘Parajute’ of the Second World War
Authors: Gerald White
Pages: 179 - 185
Abstract: The Second World war in India and Burma was principally a ground campaign, prosecuted in large part with supply by air, both air landing and air dropping. Distance from the UK and other factors required GHQ India develop domestic capabilities to be partially self-sufficient. The war in India and Burma has received much less coverage than elsewhere and there are gaps in what has been published. Coverage of the supply parachute situation, critical to air dropping, is one of those gaps, with official and personal books and articles mostly focusing attention on a failed substitute, the hessian cloth parachute, at the expense of the locally produced and massively successful cotton cloth parachute.
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1879
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- Rémy Ambühl and Andy King (eds), Documenting Warfare: Records of the
Hundred Years War, Edited and Translated in Honour of Anne Curry
Authors: Simon Egan
Pages: 186 - 188
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1880
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- Lynn MacKay, Women and the British Army, 1815-1880
Authors: Máire MacNeill
Pages: 188 - 190
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1881
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- Stefanie Linden, Beyond the Great Silence: The Legacy of Shell Shock in
Britain and Germany, 1918-1924
Authors: Cameron Telch
Pages: 190 - 192
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1882
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- John Kiszely, General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay: Soldier, Statesman,
Diplomat. A New Biography
Authors: Tony Cowan
Pages: 192 - 194
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1883
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- Tim Cook, The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought
Together to Defeat Fascism During the Second World War
Authors: Cameron Telch
Pages: 194 - 196
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1884
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
- Caitlin Galante DeAngelis, The Caretakers: War Graves Gardeners and the
Secret Battle to Rescue Allied Airmen in World War II
Authors: Timothy Halsted
Pages: 196 - 197
PubDate: 2025-02-28
DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.bjmh.v11i1.1885
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2025)
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