US assessments of Japanese ground warfare tactics and the Army’s campaigns in the Pacific theaters, 1943-45: lessons learned and methods applied

The article examines the evolution of US intelligence assessments of the Imperial Japanese Army's tactical methods during the Pacific War, and explains how the resulting perceptions influenced the development of American doctrine for fighting the Japanese. It argues that US evaluations of the Japanese were characterized primarily by the need to gain a realistic understanding of enemy fighting capabilities, coupled with a realization of the need to improve the army's techniques for fighting a successful campaign

Fetters of Debt, Deposit, or Gold during the Great Depression? The International Propagation of the Banking Crisis of 1931

A banking crisis began in Austria in May 1931 and intensified in July, when runs struck banks throughout Germany. In September, the crisis compelled Britain to quit the gold standard. Newly discovered data shows that failure rates rose for banks in New York City, at the center of the United States money market, in July and August 1931, before Britain abandoned the gold standard and before financial outflows compelled the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Banks in New York City had large exposures to foreign deposits and German debt. This paper tests to see whether the foreign exposure of money center banks linked the financial crises on the two sides of the Atlantic.

A Military Engima: The Canadian Air Service Company, 1948-1949

The Canadian Special Air Service (SAS) Company is truly a military enigma. Very few people are aware of its short-lived existence. Those who are normally have a misunderstanding of its origins and role, a misconception largely reinforced by the sparse and largely inaccurate material that has been written on the subject. For example, most believe that it was raised specifically to provide a commando capability within the Canadian Army immediately after the Second World War. The story of the Canadian SAS Company is actually surreptitious. The army originally packaged the sub-unit as a very benevolent organization, centred on aid to the civil authority and assistance to the general public. Once established, however, a fundamental and contentious shift in its orientation became evident—one that was never fully resolved prior to the sub-unit’s demise. With time, myths, often enough repeated, took on the essence of fact

The Spanish savings banks and the competitive cooperation model (1928-2002)

This paper explores the relationship between the nature of Spanish Savings banks and the extent of their market success during the twentieth century. It deals with the key factors that have made so good a performance possible, such as: their ability to promote private saving, to cooperate with government economic policy, to adapt to changing circumstances, to operate in particular geographical areas, and to cooperate with one another. Finally, the paper deals with this last factor in depth. The competitive cooperation model is used to explain the outstanding role of the Spanish Confederation of Savings Banks in making the strategic alliance among the Spanish savings banks possible

Area Bombing by Day: Bomber Command and the Daylight Offensive, 1944–1945

This article will examine an important but neglected phase of the Allied strategic bomber offensive in the Second World War. Given the very rich literature on the bombing war it is surprising to discover that litle attention has been paid to the daylight attacks undertaken by Royal Air Force (RAF) Bomber Command in the fall and winter of 1944–1945. Nowhere in the existing literature is there a systematic analysis of this period of operations when the RAF and Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) carried out 153 daylight raids between 27 August 1944 and 24 April 1945. Two primary issues will be addressed. The first concerns the accuracy achieved by Bomber Command in its daylight missions. The second is to determine if the reintroduction of daylight attacks resulted in Bomber Command carrying out a different and more selective targeting policy. Both of these issues are related to the more general question of the role played by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris in shaping the policy of Bomber Command. Harris’s name is usually associated with doctrinaire commitment to area bombing in general and the destruction of German civilian housing in particular. The evidence presented in this essay will allow the reader to form a more complete picture of Harris’s repsonse to the changing circumstances of the war

On limiting distributions of quantum Markov chains

In a quantum Markov chain, the temporal succession of states is modeled by the repeated action of a "bistochastic quantum operation" on the density matrix of a quantum system. Based on this conceptual framework, we derive some new results concerning the evolution of a quantum system, including its long-term behavior. Among our findings is the fact that the Ces$\grave{a}$ro limit of any quantum Markov chain always exists and equals the orthogonal projection of the initial state upon the eigenspace of the unit eigenvalue of the bistochastic quantum operation. Moreover, if the unit eigenvalue is the only eigenvalue on the unit circle, then the quantum Markov chain converges in the conventional sense to the said orthogonal projection. As a corollary, we offer a new derivation of the classic result describing limiting distributions of unitary quantum walks on finite graphs \cite{AAKV01}