2,304 research outputs found
'All Pretty Well Fed Up and Worn Out'? Morale, Combat Motivation , and the 'Marshall Effect' in VIII Corps at Gallipoli
This article explores the morale of the troops of British VIII Corps on Gallipoli in 1915-16, using Anthony Kingâs recent work on combat motivation in infantry platoons as a tool of analysis. King, partially rehabilitating the controversial work of S.L.A. Marshall, argues that left to themselves, the citizen armies of the early twentieth century tended to passivity. Officers resorted to a range of strategies to overcome this âMarshall Effectâ, including appeals to patriotism and masculinity, mass tactics, and heroic leadership. It is contended that Kingâs model works well when applied to this case study â such methods were indeed employed by officers of VIII Corps - but the jury is out on its wider applicability, pending detailed case studies of other campaigns. As this article demonstrates, the morale of the troops of VIII Corps was severely tested throughout the Gallipoli campaign, as a rash of
short-lived âpanicsâ demonstrated. There was a distinct downturn in August 1915, which was marked by an increase in rates of sickness and self-inflicted wounds, and a âstrikeâ, when a sub-unit simply refused to carry out an attack. Despite this,
there was no general and permanent breakdown of morale, in the sense of unwillingness to obey the orders of higher command. VIII Corpsâ morale was characterised by stoicism and resilience in the face of adverse conditions
Shaping British and Anzac soldiersâ experience of Gallipoli: environmental and medical factors, and the development of trench warfare
Works discussing the experience of combatants, based on their writings or on oral testimony, are a well-established genre of military history. However, it is rare to find authors explicitly analysing the various influences that shaped the soldierâs experience in any era. This article, which forms part of a wider study of British and Dominion soldiers in the two world wars, attempts to fill this gap by using the Gallipoli campaign as a vehicle to examine some of the factors that shaped the experience of British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers that served at the Dardanelles. Here, âexperienceâ is defined as âthe process or an instance of undergoing and being affected by an event or a series of connected eventsâ. Such an exploration helps to reveal the extent to which individuals in war have âagencyâ, the ability to determine their own fate, or are limited by external factors (in sociological terms, âstructural constraintsâ). Such external factors could stem from apparently trivial things, which nevertheless determined a manâs fate. In September 1914 Philip Ibbetson and his mate Jack tried to join the Royal Australian Navy in Brisbane, but Jack was rejected because of hammer toes. Both men then enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), which was evidently less fussy about recruitsâ feet. They eventually found themselves at Gallipoli, rather than experiencing a rather different war at sea. In their case, agency was noticeably absent
Ignition of thermally sensitive explosives between a contact surface and a shock
The dynamics of ignition between a contact surface and a shock wave is investigated using a
one-step reaction model with Arrhenius kinetics. Both large activation energy asymptotics and
high-resolution finite activation energy numerical simulations are employed. Emphasis is on comparing
and contrasting the solutions with those of the ignition process between a piston and a shock,
considered previously. The large activation energy asymptotic solutions are found to be qualitatively
different from the piston driven shock case, in that thermal runaway first occurs ahead of
the contact surface, and both forward and backward moving reaction waves emerge. These waves
take the form of quasi-steady weak detonations that may later transition into strong detonation
waves. For the finite activation energies considered in the numerical simulations, the results are
qualitatively different to the asymptotic predictions in that no backward weak detonation wave
forms, and there is only a weak dependence of the evolutionary events on the acoustic impedance
of the contact surface. The above conclusions are relevant to gas phase equation of state models.
However, when a large polytropic index more representative of condensed phase explosives is used,
the large activation energy asymptotic and finite activation energy numerical results are found to
be in quantitative agreement
The British Army, information management and the First World War revolution in military affairs
Information Management (IM) â the systematic ordering, processing and channelling of information within organisations â forms a critical component of modern military command and control systems. As a subject of scholarly enquiry, however, the history of military IM has been relatively poorly served. Employing new
and under-utilised archival sources, this article takes the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of the First World War as its case study and assesses the extent to which its IM system contributed to the emergence of the modern battlefield in 1918. It argues that the
demands of fighting a modern war resulted in a general, but not universal, improvement in the BEFâs IM techniques, which in turn laid the groundwork, albeit in embryonic form, for the IM systems of modern armies.
KEY WORDS: British Army, Information Management, First World War, Revolution in Military Affairs, Adaptatio
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