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On the afternoon of March 8, 1862, the Confederate ironclad ram Virginia, built upon the burned-out hulk of the steam screw frigate Merrimack, crawled slowly into Hampton Roads to challenge the Union blockade of the Confederate coastline. Before nightfall, the Virginia had wreaked havoc upon the Union blockading fleet: the USS Cumberland lay at the bottom of the Roads, her flags still defiantly flying while the surrendered USS Congress blazed ominously in the harbor until exploding spectacularly in the early morning hours of March 9.;The USS Monitor---a vessel of a radical new design and completely untried in battle---arrived too late to make a difference on the 8th, but met the Virginia on the morning of the 9th in a contest that signaled the first time ironclad had met ironclad in combat. While their four-and-a-half-hour battle ended in a draw, it changed much of the future course of naval warfare. Within days of the engagement, navies around the world were declaring an end to wooden construction and moving forward with their own ironclad building programs--many of which predated both the Monitor and the Virginia. Furthermore, the Monitor's rotating gun turret design freed vessels from the strictures of broadside tactics by allowing the guns, rather than the entire vessel, to be turned, and ushered in a new element of battleship design.;Neither the Virginia nor the Monitor lived out that year, however. The Virginia was destroyed in May of 1862 by her own crew to keep her from enemy hands, while the Monitor succumbed to a nor'easter on New Year's Eve off the coast of Cape Hatteras.;Discovered in 1973, the Monitor was designated a National Marine Sanctuary in 1975 under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Since 1987, The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, VA has served as the principal repository for artifacts recovered from the wrecksite and is currently conserving over 210 tons of the Union ironclad in the Batten Conservation Complex.;This dissertation serves as the text for the catalogue of the award-winning exhibition, Ironclad Revolution, which opened at The Mariners' Museum in 2007. The author serves as curator of the USS Monitor Center. Drawing from artwork, archival material and the recovered artifacts themselves, this work seeks to tell the full story of the Monitor: her history, discovery, recovery, and conservation.

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The German Army, also known as the Wehrmacht, fought a brutal war on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. These soldiers, under the command of military officials of the Nazi state, vowed to destroy Bolshevism and Jewish populations. By examining letters from soldiers to family members on the German home front as well as letters from families to the men on the front lines, a better understanding of the motivations of war is revealed. Letters of these men and family members present insight into a vast area of research in German twentieth century history. An estimated 20 to 40 billion letters circulated throughout the German armed forces from 1939 until 1945. In addition to letters, Nazi propaganda and the Hitler Youth greatly contributed to the influx of anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik mindsets throughout the military ranks. Due to the events surrounding the end of the First World War, Hitler was successful in creating a vendetta against his European neighbors who betrayed Germany in 1918-1919. Revenge against Germany's enemies was constantly preached to the German population as well as soldiers serving in the Wehrmacht. These individuals would take their revenge against civilian populations and prisoners of war. The majority of German atrocities took place on the Eastern Front in Russia after the launch of operation Barbarossa in June 1941. The following research does not attempt to describe every German veteran of the Second World War; rather, it is important to realize that war is horrendous under any circumstance and the Second World War proved no different. Additional research, namely in Germany, is necessary in order to develop an even more detailed perspective of the average soldier of the Wehrmacht.

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Thesis (M.S. in Defense Analysis)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2009. / Thesis Advisor(s): Arquilla, John. "June 2009." Description based on title screen as viewed on July 13, 2009. DTIC Identifiers: Principles of war, information age, contemporary militaries. Author(s) subject terms: Principles of war, Information Age, military history, military doctrine, military strategy. Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-130). Also available in print.