Iowa Department of Public Defense Performance Report, FY2012

Agency Performance Repor

Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies: FY2015 Appropriations

[Excerpt] The Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies appropriations bill provides funding for the planning, design, construction, alteration, and improvement of facilities used by active and reserve military components worldwide. It capitalizes military family housing and the U.S. share of the NATO Security Investment Program and finances the implementation of installation closures and realignments. It underwrites veterans benefit and health care programs administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), provides for the creation and maintenance of U.S. cemeteries and battlefield monuments within the United States and abroad, and supports the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, Armed Forces Retirement Homes, and Arlington National Cemetery. The bill also funds advance appropriations for veterans’ medical services

The First Use of Poison Gase at Ypres, 1915: A Translation from the German Official History

While English-speaking historians know in detail about almost every event on the BEF’s front, the same cannot be said of our knowledge of the German side of the Western Front. This is not surprising, as comparatively few English language books have been written about the German experience on the battlefields of the Great War. Recent English language scholarship by Holger Herwig, Annika Mombauer, and Robert Foley, to name but a few historians, has enriched our understanding of the conflict. However, these works have tended to concentrate on political and diplomatic history, or in the case of Mombaurer and Foley, on high-ranking officers such as Helmuth von Moltke and Erich von Falkenhayn. This means that events at the tactical and operational level remain comparatively unexplored in English. This gap in the historiography has largely been shaped by the absence of primary source materials

Outside the Box: A New Perspective on Operation Windsor—The Rationale Behind the Attack on Carpiquet, 4 July 1944

Operation Windsor never seemed to fit. Why, one asks, would the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division launch a major operation to seize Carpiquet village and airfield a mere four days before I British Corps started the much larger three-division Operation Charnwood to seize Caen? It seemed a distraction from the main effort—a needless diversion of resources. This view was reinforced by the standard interpretations of the battles as reflected in the two introductory quotations: Windsor as a prelude to Charnwood. I had succumbed to what I will call the black box syndrome. I looked only within the analytical framework established by countless historians from C.P. Stacey to Terry Copp3 to John A. English, and, like them, saw Operation Windsor as a precursor to Operation Charnwood. It was upon visiting the battlefield in 1997 and 1998 with the Canadian Battlefields Foundation student study tour that I gained a more complete understanding of the battle. For it is only on the field itself that one can understand that Operation Windsor had very little to do with Operation Charnwood, and so much more to do with Operations Epsom and Jupiter. Epsom is familiar to any scholar of the campaign, but Operation Jupiter, the 43rd Wessex Division attack on Hill 112, is more obscure. It was the ground that showed me the link which was reinforced by a close review of the I British Corps operations log. In this article I will try and show that the traditional interpretation of Operation Windsor has suffered from a “Canada-centric” bias that fails to relate the ground to the battle and assumes that all that precedes Charnwood must be setting the stage for that battle. First a review of the traditional interpretation is required

“The Most Vivifying Influence:” Operation Delta in Preparing the Canadian Corps for the Hundred Days

Preparation and training for Operation Delta in May and June 1918 provided the Canadian Corps with vital experience for the types of operations conducted during the Hundred Days. Delta was a proposed attack on the southern portion of the Lys salient formed by the German April offensive in Flanders. The operation represented a clear break with the operational concepts employed in 1917 prior to Cambrai. It was a difference between seeing a play diagrammed on a blackboard and actually running it in conditions just short of combat. Having a concrete plan to prepare schemes against was an invaluable element in readying the corps for the strains of the Hundred Days. It helped in overcoming the challenges of ridding the corps of old thinking, mastering the new, and at an accelerated tempo. It was also a valuable rehearsal for the circumstances faced by the corps at Amiens. Finally, it demonstrated how the Canadian Corps differed from the British Army in creating and inculcating a corps level doctrine and the mechanisms used by the senior commanders and staff to disseminate, enforce, and practice it

Learning from the Canadian Corps on the Western Front

There is a curious paradox about the Canadian Corps that is summed up in this quotation from Canadian Brass, Stephen J. Harris’s study of the evolution of a professional army in Canada. How did this military organisation become so effective in war, considering the background it had and the structure that supported it for most of its existence? This model of tactical excellence was born amid the chaos of Canadian Minister of Defence Sam Hughes’ egomaniacal control at Valcartier Camp. It was beset by jealousies, political backhanders, corruption and influence peddling, and saddled with favourites as incompetent officers who at best were ’very weak” and had “no power or habit of command.”2 Hughes determined to ensure that no Regular soldier received a command appointment, and instead put in his favourites. These were drawn from the citizen militia, whose ability was summed up by the young iconoclast and future military theorist J.F.C. Fuller, who remarked that the Canadians had potential only “if the officers could all be shot.”3 Yet the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) rose above this administrative nightmare, even if its impact continued to haunt the force for most of its existence

Military newspapers and the Habsburg officers' ideology after 1868

The Habsburg officer corps of the late nineteenth century played a significant role in sustaining the feudal anachronism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Despite its constant appeals to tradition, it was in fact a product of the struggles to reform the army. The tensions that resulted are evident in the military press of the reform period and left their mark on the officers’ ideology