This thesis analyses the logistics behind the expansion and operations of the Royal Naval Air Service and the Fleet Air Ann during the two World Wars. The logistics of British naval aviation has largely been a peripheral topic compared with operational issues. Studies of aviation during both World Wars are also unusual. The aim is to study this topic largely through the available original material, both official and unofficial, and thereby to provide a new focus for the analysis ofnaval aviation. Both organisations had to expand from a small base under the exigencies of wartime conditions, in 1914 when aviation was in its infancy and in 1939 just after the Navy had regained full control over naval aviation. This thesis will investigate the relationship between naval air logistics and strategy, national economics, operations and tactics and therefore is organised under five main themes. Firstly, to examine the naval air expansion programmes, especially in the Second World War, from which other requirements stemmed. Secondly, to relate naval strategy to the needs for naval air stations, a topic frequently ignored by many authors who give more consideration to aircraft carriers. Thirdly, to address how successful was aircraft production in meeting the requirements laid down in the expansion programmes. Fourthly, the coordination of resources, be they ships or squadrons, for operations and fifthly, from the tactical perspective the difficulties of maintaining aircraft in the front line. The conclusion includes an appreciation of comparisons between naval aviation during the two World Wars and a summary of the air logistics of the British Pacific Fleet in 1945 when many earlier developments came to fruition.

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This thesis examines the organization and education of military engineers in the `long eighteenth century'. The period from 1789 to 1815 is addressed in particular detail, as it encompasses the creation of the Ecole Polytechnique, the Royal Military College, Royal Engineer Establishment, and other important changes driven by wartime expediency. A modern definition of military engineering is used to develop a wideranging analysis of the entire discipline, rather than the activities of particular military units. Austrian, British and French methods are compared to assess the influence of alliance and enmity in the context of both continental and maritime strategy. The extent to which imitation and innovation were employed is used to establish processes of knowledge acquisition in technical corps in order to see if one state led the field. The growth of corps of engineer officers and their progress towards military status in the first half of the century is examined alongside their relationships with various other corps contributing to engineering capability and the need for engineering knowledge within army staff structures. The employment of both officers and soldiers in departments of Quartermasters General is explained to correct previous misconceptions about Britain's Royal Staff Corps and the different titles used to define the roles of soldier engineers. Civilian education and military training systems are analysed in terms of their immediate practical value to the military capability of each state rather than against a theoretical knowledge-base advocated by authors of pedagogical texts. France, although widely accepted as the leading exponent of military engineering and state-organized education, was not widely imitated by Austria and Britain who, largely independently, developed organizational models to meet their own specific sociological and geo-strategical requirements. Austria made particular advances in bridging and mobility whereas Britain developed a strong staff system, supported by sound technical training, which gave their engineer departments particular strengths. This study makes important contributions to understanding the role of organization and training in developing military power in the eighteenth century.

This thesis sets out to shed light on the contribution of the Jesuit Order, often known as the Society of Jesus, to the dissemination of ideas about military architecture in the Baroque age. In the first chapter, it is shown that the Jesuits developed an extraordinarily militant form of religious expression that included in its agenda their involvement in 'just wars' against Protestant 'heretics' or Turkish infidels, these being considered to be the two prime enemies of the Catholic Church. The 'military mind' of St Ignatius of Loyola, the preaching, confessional and wider educational ministries of his Order and the compilation of early Jesuit books on war ethics are all addressed together with the relationship that quickly evolved between the mathematical disciplines entrenched in the Jesuit curriculum of studies known as the Ratio Studiorum and the geometry of war. In the context of the great religious divides and numerous wars that characterized early modem Europe, it is shown in the second and third chapters how the Jesuits assisted Catholic leaders by using the mathematical faculties attached to many of their colleges and seminaries for nobles to disseminate knowledge on fortification matters. This was achieved through teaching (both classroom and private), writing (treatises in manuscript or book form), consultations (letters and reports) and, at times, even active service in the field by Jesuit fortification experts attached to Catholic armies. Such military activity was by no means restricted to the European continent. In SQuth America. the Philippines and China, the Jesuits formed armies, built fortresses and manufactured cannons to protect and propagate their missionary work Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam. The involvement of Jesuits in military matters and their many fortification treatises, not surprisingly, sometimes provoked a negative reactiQn from Generals of the Order who saw them running counter to Loyola's religious vision of world evangelization. But the expertise was real and recognized as such by contemporaries. By examining a late seventeenth-century Spanish treatise on military architecture entitled Escuela de Palas, the third chapter confirms that Jesuit mathematicians who taught and wrote on fortification (sometimes using pseudonyms to protect their identity) were often regarded as experts in military architecture, rivalling the achievements in this field of knowledge of leading military engineers such as Vauban. In the fourth chapter, the career of the Sicilian Jesuit mathematicus Giacomo Maso has been examined in depth because it provides a good case study of the controversy and crisis of conscience that Jesuits contributing to the dissemination of fortification knowledge often had to face. In conclusion, it has been shown in the fifth and final chapter that the interest of several Jesuits in the subject of military architecture remained strong in the 1773-1814 suppression period, after which, however, it was discontinued.

For the last 50 years, the historiography of the conflict has taken its defining military feature to be the coincidence, and interplay, of what were seen to be recognisably 'modern' strategic and tactical technologies - most important among them the railway and telegraph, and rifled firearms - alongside the persistence of strategic and tactical models which, in the main, were held to conform to variously defined notions of 'traditionally'. The principal exceptions were Sherman's operations in Georgia and the Carolinas, which some commentators viewed as the progenitor of, or the first major pointer to, twentieth-century patterns of 'total' war. In consequence, writing on the interrelationship between technology, strategy and tactics has been preoccupied - invariably to the exclusion of virtually all other concerns - with how far the conflict can be regarded as either the first modern or (as the revisionist case would have it) the last Napoleonic war - or as an amalgam of each. This study bypasses - as far as possible - that increasingly sterile debate, first by setting the war in the wider context of the historic development of Western warfare as a whole, then proceeding via case-by-case examination of each of the principal technologies in question and how far their respective capabilities and limitations affected - in the sense of facilitating and constraining - the formulation and implementation of the belligerents' strategies and tactics. It also seeks to rank, and to question, the importance of technology as a determinant on both the conduct and outcome of the war, and concludes that it was but one of a series of interlocking elements at work in the battle zones in 1861-5. Of these, other factors - political, environmental, logistical and psychological - repeatedly loomed much larger in particular strategic and tactical situations.

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