This dissertation uses hydrography as a lens to examine the way the United States Navy has understood, used, and defined the sea during the nineteenth century. It argues, broadly, that naval officers and the charts and texts they produced framed the sea as a commercial space for much of the nineteenth century, proceeding from a scientific ethos that held that the sea could be known, ordered, represented, and that it obeyed certain natural laws and rules. This was a powerful alternative to existing maritime understandings, in which mariners combined navigational science with folkloric ideas about how the sea worked. Hydrography proved an important aspect of the American maritime commercial predominance in the decades before the Civil War. By the end of the century, however, new strategic ideas, technologies, and the imperatives of empire caused naval officers and hydrographers to think about the sea in new ways. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Navy pursued hydrography with increased urgency, faced with defending the waters of a vast new oceanic empire. Surveys, charts, and the language of hydrography became central to the Navy's war planning and war gaming, to the strategic debate over where to establish naval bases, and, ultimately, it figured significantly in determining the geography of the American empire. Throughout, however, the sea continued to be a dynamic, powerful force in itself that flouted hydrographers' and naval officers' attempts to represent and control it. Charts and the cartographic process that produced them are full of meaning. By placing hydrography and the sea environment at the center of the narrative, historians can better understand the role of science, knowledge, and cartographic representations in expanding American commercial and naval power over the ocean. / History

This dissertation examines the latter stages of the Second Indochina War through the lens of geography, spatial contestation, and the environment. The natural and the manmade world were not only central but a decisive factor in the struggle to control the population and territory of South Vietnam. The war was shaped and in many ways determined by spatial / environmental factors. Like other revolutionary civil conflicts, the key to winning political power in South Vietnam was to control both the physical world (territory, population, resources) and the ideational world (the political organization of occupied territory). The means to do so was insurgency and pacification - two approaches that pursued the same goals (population and territory control) and used the same methods (a blend of military force, political violence, and socioeconomic policy) despite their countervailing purposes. The war in South Vietnam, like all armed conflicts, possessed a unique spatiality due to its irregular nature. Although it has often been called a "war without fronts," the reality is that the conflict in South Vietnam was a war with innumerable fronts, as insurgents and counterinsurgents feverishly wrestled to win political power and control of the civilian environment throughout forty-four provinces, 250 districts, and more than 11,000 hamlets. The conflict in South Vietnam was not one geographical war, but many; it was a highly complex politico-military struggle that fragmented space and atomized the battlefield along a million divergent points of conflict. This paper explores the unique spatiality of the Second Indochina War and examines the ways that both sides of the conflict conceptualized and utilized geography and the environment to serve strategic, tactical, and political purposes. / History

A commonplace observation among historians describes one or another historical period as a time of "transition" or a particular person as a "transitional figure." In the history of the United States Army, scholars apply those terms especially to the late- nineteenth century "Old Army." This categorization has helped create a shelf of biographies of some of the transitional figures of the era: Leonard Wood, John J. Pershing, Robert Lee Bullard, William Harding Carter, Henry Tureman Allen, Nelson Appleton Miles and John McCallister Schofield have all been the subject of excellent scholarly works. Tasker Howard Bliss has remained among the missing in that group, in spite of the important activities that marked his career and the wealth of source materials he left behind. Bliss belongs on that list because, like the others, his career demonstrates the changing nature of the U.S. Army between 1871 and 1917. Bliss served for the most part in administrative positions in the United States and in the American overseas empire. Seeing hardly any combat and spending only a few years commanding troops, Bliss contributed instead to the creation and development of the army's post-graduate educational system, and he was deeply involved in the Elihu Root reforms of the army and the War Department. Thus what makes his career especially noteworthy, more than many of the soldiers on that list of biographies, is that Bliss helped to create the changes that laid the foundations for the modern army. During the First World War, Bliss worked more closely with the Allied leadership than any other American with the possible exception of Edward M. House. President Woodrow Wilson named Bliss as one of the five commissioners leading the U.S. delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. In this position he influenced many members of the American delegation who would remain leaders in the foreign policy elite into the 1940s, and he helped to create the Council on Foreign Relations, an important organization for the foreign policy elite. For Frederick Palmer, the author of the family-authorized biography, the Great War and the Peace Conference were the climax of Bliss's career. A substantial modern scholarly literature exists on Bliss's service in the Great War and the Peace Conference, but none of those works present his earlier career in any detail. As a result, when planning this dissertation with the late Professor Russell F. Weigley, we decided to concentrate on Bliss's activities before 1917. Bliss helped shape the institutions the United States needed as it became a world power, and he trained some of the leaders who would exercise that power. He left a legacy of thoughtful consideration of the organizational, political and moral issues that the exercise of power posed for the United States. It was a life that still teaches us how to face the issues involved in the exercise of world power. / History

On 16 December 1941, Adolf Hitler issued his controversial Haltbefehl (halt order). As Germany’s Army Group Center reeled under the Soviet counterattack during the battle for Moscow, the Haltbefehl forbade the army to retreat. Scholars have argued that this order ended the Prussian-German method of command called Auftragstaktik. Under this concept, German field commanders enjoyed wide command discretion within the intent of their superiors. This thesis argues that Auftragstaktik did survive at and below the German Army’s divisional level during its defensive struggles in the battle for Moscow. The case studies illustrate that field commanders kept their command independence and withdrew their units against Hitler’s halt order. / History

A significant number of Pennsylvanians were not, in any meaningful sense, either revolutionaries or loyalists during the American War for Independence. Rather, they were disaffected from both sides in the imperial dispute, preferring, when possible, to avoid engagement with the Revolution altogether. The British Occupation of Philadelphia in 1777 and 1778 laid bare the extent of this popular disengagement and disinterest, as well as the dire lengths to which the Patriots would go to maintain the appearance of popular unity. Driven by a republican ideology that relied on popular consent in order to legitimate their new governments, American Patriots grew increasingly hostile, intolerant, and coercive toward those who refused to express their support for independence. By eliminating the revolutionaries' monopoly on military force in the region, the occupation triggered a crisis for the Patriots as they saw popular support evaporate. The result was a vicious cycle of increasing alienation as the revolutionaries embraced ever more brutal measures in attempts to secure the political acquiescence and material assistance of an increasingly disaffected population. The British withdrawal in 1778, by abandoning the region's few true loyalists and leaving many convinced that American Independence was now inevitable, shattered what little loyalism remained in the region and left the revolutionaries secure in their control of the state. In time, this allowed them to take a more lenient view of disaffection and move toward modern interpretations of silence as acquiescence and consent for the established government. / History

Airpower developed significantly during the First World War while leaders adapted to integrate it into the constantly evolving combined arms system. First World War airpower is often viewed as insignificant in relation to the wider conflict. This generally stems from the perception that airplanes fought in a parallel air war or failed to achieve "decisive" air-to-ground results. These conceptions oversimplify the impact of pursuit and bomber aviation and ignore the monumental role of aerial observation and overall battlefield integration. The true impact of airpower during the war is revealed through the lens of combined arms operations rather than through the examination of airpower as a singular weapon. This study utilizes a layered approach analyzing the ideas, organization, planning, and battlefield execution to assess the integration of airpower into the combined arms systems for the French, British, and American forces on the Western Front in 1918. Each of these armies led an Allied force in a critical battle during the summer of 1918: the Second Battle of the Marne, the Battle of Amiens, and the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. This study chronologically flows through these three battles and reveals that the air element emerged as increasingly synthesized into the modern combined arms systems of 1918.

During the Revolutionary War, many key Patriot leaders believed that militia were untrustworthy and useless in battle. After the American victory, many of the same men proclaimed their support for the militia as the foundation of the new nation's defense. The debate on the efficacy of Patriot militia continues into modern scholarship; some historians credit the militia with an important strategic role in the war, while others consider them a mere footnote in a conflict that was truly won by the Continental Army. This series of case studies examines four American expeditionary militia units to assess their level of military competence and professionalism. The results show that militia units were far from amateur, and many conducted their operations in a professional military manner. This supports a conclusion that militia both contributed to the American victory and remained a practical means of defense for the young nation.

The Austrian army played a crucial role in Napoleon's decisive defeat during the War of the Sixth Coalition. Often considered a staid, hidebound institution, the army showed considerable adaptation in a time that witnessed a revolution in the art of war. In particular, changes made after defeat in the War of the Fifth Coalition demonstrate the modernity of the army. It embraced the key features of the new revolutionary way of war, including mass mobilization, a strategy of annihilation, and tactics based on deep echelonment, mobility, and the flexible use of varied formations. While the Austrians did not achieve the compromise peace they desired in 1814, this represented a political failing rather than a military one. Nevertheless, the Austrian army was critical in securing the century of general European peace that lasted until the dawn of the Great War.

Many histories written by professional historians discuss the Battle of the Bulge; however, none of them incorporate the growing field of environmental history as a lens of analysis. This paper aims to address that hole in the scholarship by evaluating the impact that environmental factors exerted on the American army's ability to fight in and around Bastogne and St. Vith, Belgium during the first week of the battle. Had it not been for the environmental factors and the Americans' ability to make better use of the natural and manmade conditions than the Germans, the Allies would not have been able to achieve eventual victory. In the historiography of the battle, weather conditions are usually referenced only as the setting in which the fighting occurred. This paper goes further than simply using the environment and climate as a stage set. By looking at the way environmental conditions impacted strategic, operational, and tactical issues, a new perspective is opened up. The role that these environmental factors played is emphasized and shows that they had a greater effect on the outcome than scholars have previously credited. This paper uses first person accounts from participants, from the command level to the soldier in his foxhole, as well as unit histories, oral histories, and the vast amount of secondary sources to focus on and synthesize the effects that the environment had. Without exploiting the environmental factors that existed in the Ardennes, the American army would not have been able to hold off the German offensive.

The history of the United States' occupation and administration of the Philippines is a premiere example of the evolution of the American military's civil administrative approach as it evolved from simple Army security in 1898, through an evolving ‘whole-of-government' method, to what was practically the full military administration of the country by March 1945. The second liberation and subsequent administration of the Philippines by the United States Army was unique, not simply because of the physical characteristics of the operations, but more so because of the theater commander, General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur used a rather self-reliant approach that rejected much of the direction from various authorities in Washington and adopted independently authored local solutions, but he took advantage of external resources when necessary. Ultimately the United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) under his command had to accept external direction to gain external resources. The Army's civil administrative planning and execution in the Philippines in 1944-1945 was the direct result of the social, political, economic, and military relationships between Americans and Filipinos from 1898 to 1944, much of which involved MacArthur, and the institutional changes that developed from these interactions. The result was civil administration that met the local and immediate requirements suitable for the conditions at hand. By August 1945 the Army ended civil affairs operations and transferred responsibility to the Commonwealth government of the Philippines and the Foreign Economic Administration (FEA).