The United States Army of the Second World War faced a shortage of manpower after two decades of budgetary and organizational neglect following the post-First World. According to the Chief of Staff, George C. Marshall, this period of mobilization, between 1939 and 1941, was the most crucial of the entire war. In this period, the United States Army pursued large-scale peacetime mobilization, breaking from eighty years of traditional policy. As such, the effort to increase allocations for armaments, industrial expansion, tactical reorganization of the ground forces, mobilizing the National Guard, and the implementation of a peacetime draft all faced an uphill political battle to accomplish, reflecting the complicated political factionalism of the late New-Deal United States. Between the outbreak of hostilities in Europe in 1939 and December 1941, the United States Army grew from less than 150,000 men to more than 1 million personnel, incorporating the National Guard and inductees while also adopting many of the weapon systems it would use throughout the conflict. By mobilizing a usable core for a wartime army and vetting its general tactics and doctrine in peacetime, the Army leadership provided a cadre capable of responding to some of the Allied powers' strategic requirements during the critical year of 1942.

The United States entered World War I without a policy governing the burial of its overseas dead. Armed only with institutional knowledge from the Spanish-American War twenty years prior, the Army struggled to create a policy amidst social turmoil in the United States and political tension between France and the United States.

In 1793, the British government embarked on a war against Revolutionary France that few expected would last twenty-five years and engulf all of Europe. Radical French policies provided an opportunity for William Pitt, the British prime minister, to endeavor to cobble a European alliance, including a number of Mediterranean states. These efforts never progressed beyond theory and negotiations because of conflicted policy and tension between the British diplomatic corps and Royal Navy over the strategic goals in the region. With diplomats focused on coalition building and military commanders focused on national objectives, British efforts never congealed into a unified effort to defeat Revolutionary France.

The Macedonian Campaign of World War I (October 1915-November 1918) traditionally remains one of the understudied theatres of the historiography of the conflict. Despite its vital importance in the outcome of the war, it is still considered as a mere sideshow compared to the Western Front and the Gallipoli Campaign. This dissertation presents a much-needed re-evaluation of the Macedonian Campaign's diplomatic and political origins within the war's early context. In doing so, this study first concentrates on a longue durée perspective and assesses the main historical events in the Balkans and Central Europe from the end of the French Revolution to World War I. In a perspective running throughout the entire nineteenth century, this dissertation integrates the importance of nascent nationalism in the Balkans and examine the Austro-Hungarian Empire's steady decline and subsequent diplomatic realignment toward the Balkans. Similarly, this work depicts the intense power struggle in Southeastern Europe between some of this story's main protagonists, namely the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires. This dissertation also evaluates the rise of new regional powers such as Bulgaria and Serbia and examines their connection to the European balance of power and general diplomatic equilibrium. In the first half of this dissertation, I present an overview of some of the most crucial episodes that paved the way to the onset of World War I and the inception of the Macedonian Campaign: The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, the Congress of Berlin of 1878, The Bosnian Crisis of 1908-1909, the Italo-Ottoman War of 1911-1912, and the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. In the second part of this study, the main thread of the analysis is the crucial Anglo-French relations that took place between the end of the nineteenth century and World War I. This study describes the importance of Anglo-French relations regarding the Macedonian Campaign's inception and highlights the fragile nature of the Entente Cordiale and some of the fundamental issues that affected the Anglo-French conduct of military operations on the Western Front as well as in the Balkans. Therefore, this study underlines why the Macedonian Campaign, suffered so much from a lack of care, preparation, and a much-needed strategic insight and leadership that could have decisively influenced the campaign and potentially have altered the outcome of an eventually successful Allied endeavor in the Balkans.

No description available.

This thesis examines the political, social and, in particular, military conditions that influenced the allegiance of the men and women of the political community of Lothian, that is to say those people with personal landholding, legal and military obligations whose services were crucial to the efficient administration of the sheriffdom and whose support was courted by kings and magnates alike. The key issue is the high degree of survival among these minor landed families. The upper strata of Scottish political society underwent considerable changes in the early to middle fourteenth century through the fortunes of war, in particular through the disinheritance of the Comyn family and their allies early in the reign of Robert I. Some families lost their Scottish properties, such as the Balliols and the Comyns. Others grew in stature; notably the Douglases and, in Lothian specifically, the Setons and the Lauders. Most landholders would probably have been content to retain their inheritances, and indeed, virtually all of the Lothian landed families of the late thirteenth century would seem to have managed to do just that. A high rate of success is not necessarily evidence that something is easily achieved; the retention of family properties was a complex business in wartime. In the period 1296-1314 the political community had to discharge their financial, legal and military burdens to the party currently in charge, but without permanently compromising themselves with the opposition, who might, after all, be in a position to exert lordship themselves at some point in the future. The military burdens are central to this thesis. Army service was a very obvious indication of allegiance. Given the nature of the normal practice of war in thirteenth and fourteenth century Europe, it is inevitable that this study examines the nature and incidence of armoured cavalry service in Lothian. The overwhelming majority of that service was performed by minor landholders. Records of their service in garrisons or their forfeiture as rebels provide us with a guide to the rate and incidence of defections from one party to another and therefore some guide to the degree to which a particular party was able to impose their lordship. The thesis explores the various challenges that faced the lesser landholders and more prosperous tenants and burgesses who lived through the Wars of Independence from the campaign of 1296 which ended the reign of King John and imposed the rule of Edward I, until 1341 when Edinburgh castle was recovered by the Scots from the forces of Edward III. It also questions the extent to which Edward III was able to impose his lordship in Lothian, considers the nature of the forces ranged against him and challenges the perception that only the outbreak of the Hundred Years War prevented the operational defeat of the Bruce party. The siege of Edinburgh castle in 1341 marked the end of the last attempt by an English medieval king to provide Lothian with a government. Naturally this would not have been abundantly apparent at the time; however subsequent English invasions, though they might attack Edinburgh, were not designed to bring about the conquest of Lothian. The political environment of Lothian landholders therefore differed substantially in 1296-41 compared to the century either side of the Wars of Independence in that the minor nobility faced difficult decisions which had to be made on assessments of the likely eventual success of the Balliol, Plantagenet and Bruce parties.

Le but de ce mémoire est de poser un regard comparatiste sur les conséquences éventuelles de la politique eugénique totalitaire du Troisième Reich, et ce, dans l’optique où ce régime aurait eu la chance de poursuivre ses ambitions à ce niveau. En portant respectivement notre attention sur la structure organisationnelle du NSDAP, de l’État et de l’autorité, sur les étapes spécifiques de l’établissement du totalitarisme hitlérien, sur les diverses techniques de propagande et d’endoctrinement utilisées par les nazis pour accomplir l’unification du peuple allemand, ainsi que sur l’application pratique et le discours relatif à la politique eugénique dans le Reich et sur les territoires occupés, nous comprendrons que le mouvement propre au totalitarisme hitlérien, en changeant constamment sa définition respective de l’« élite » et de l’être « dépravé », n’aurait jamais mis fin à la purge raciale de la population sous son joug. Par conséquent, la place de l’« allemand moyen » aurait été quasi inexistante. Le Troisième Reich, par élimination et élevage social constant, aurait donc créé un « homme nouveau », basé sur l’idéologie arbitraire et instable du régime et pigé dans les peuples occupés à divers degré. Au bout de plusieurs générations, cet être nouveau aurait constitué le « noyau racial » de la population d’une nouvelle Europe aryanisée, construite sur le cadavre de la plus grande partie des anciens peuples du continent, incluant le peuple allemand. / The aim of this memoir is to examine and compare what could have been the consequences of the Third Reich’s totalitarian eugenics, considering the context in which this regime had the opportunity to fulfill its political ambitions. In fact, the NSDAP, the state and the authority’s structure; the various steps that led to the establishment of the Hitlerian totalitarian regime; the numerous propaganda and indoctrination exercises taken on Nazis in order to achieve the german unification; the practical purposes as well as the eugenics related discourse within the Reich and all of the occupied territories, are some of the most important aspects explaining the evolution of the Hitlerian totalitarian movement. These factors clearly demonstrate why a movement that is constantly changing its opinion about the elites and the reprobates could never have put to an end the racial purge that was in place at that time. Consequently, the ordinary German citizen would have been practically nonexistent. The Third Reich would therefore have created a new type of people through elimination and by continuously manipulating the notion of class and social ranking. The nazi conception of power, the state, race, and national unity was based on an arbitrary and erratic ideology that was, to a certain extent, acquired from the invaded people. A great many generations later, this new human being would have represented the main ethnic group of the newly formed Aryan population, a nation built upon the dead bodies of the majority of the ancient people living on the European continent, including the German.

No description available.

No description available.

Le but de ce mémoire est de poser un regard comparatiste sur les conséquences éventuelles de la politique eugénique totalitaire du Troisième Reich, et ce, dans l’optique où ce régime aurait eu la chance de poursuivre ses ambitions à ce niveau. En portant respectivement notre attention sur la structure organisationnelle du NSDAP, de l’État et de l’autorité, sur les étapes spécifiques de l’établissement du totalitarisme hitlérien, sur les diverses techniques de propagande et d’endoctrinement utilisées par les nazis pour accomplir l’unification du peuple allemand, ainsi que sur l’application pratique et le discours relatif à la politique eugénique dans le Reich et sur les territoires occupés, nous comprendrons que le mouvement propre au totalitarisme hitlérien, en changeant constamment sa définition respective de l’« élite » et de l’être « dépravé », n’aurait jamais mis fin à la purge raciale de la population sous son joug. Par conséquent, la place de l’« allemand moyen » aurait été quasi inexistante. Le Troisième Reich, par élimination et élevage social constant, aurait donc créé un « homme nouveau », basé sur l’idéologie arbitraire et instable du régime et pigé dans les peuples occupés à divers degré. Au bout de plusieurs générations, cet être nouveau aurait constitué le « noyau racial » de la population d’une nouvelle Europe aryanisée, construite sur le cadavre de la plus grande partie des anciens peuples du continent, incluant le peuple allemand. / The aim of this memoir is to examine and compare what could have been the consequences of the Third Reich’s totalitarian eugenics, considering the context in which this regime had the opportunity to fulfill its political ambitions. In fact, the NSDAP, the state and the authority’s structure; the various steps that led to the establishment of the Hitlerian totalitarian regime; the numerous propaganda and indoctrination exercises taken on Nazis in order to achieve the german unification; the practical purposes as well as the eugenics related discourse within the Reich and all of the occupied territories, are some of the most important aspects explaining the evolution of the Hitlerian totalitarian movement. These factors clearly demonstrate why a movement that is constantly changing its opinion about the elites and the reprobates could never have put to an end the racial purge that was in place at that time. Consequently, the ordinary German citizen would have been practically nonexistent. The Third Reich would therefore have created a new type of people through elimination and by continuously manipulating the notion of class and social ranking. The nazi conception of power, the state, race, and national unity was based on an arbitrary and erratic ideology that was, to a certain extent, acquired from the invaded people. A great many generations later, this new human being would have represented the main ethnic group of the newly formed Aryan population, a nation built upon the dead bodies of the majority of the ancient people living on the European continent, including the German.