Alexander Guthrie Denniston was an expert in German literature teaching at the British Navy’s Osborne prep school when the First World War broke out. Offering his services to the Admiralty, he was swiftly enrolled in a new, secret program directed by the First Lord himself, Winston Churchill. Housed in Room 40 of the Old Building at Whitehall, the proje…

The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy. Osprey Publishing, 2021. 615 pages. Above: the Chigi vase, which depicts Spartans that look very unlike our modern filmic ones. “One on one,” author Myke Cole tells us of the Spartans, “they weren’t particularly tough, but…their ability to fight together as a disciplined unit far exceeded t…

Most people have never heard of Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia. Born about 1500 in Venice, right when gunpowder artillery was becoming prominent on land and sea, he was a poor man’s son that died wealthy in 1557, a prominent expert in all forms of gunpowder artillery. Tartaglia was the very model of the modern, self-made man, someone whose unique understandi…

It sounds like a fantasy combat video game scenario. At the Battle of Asal Uttar, Pakistan had American M-47 and M-48 Patton tanks, while India had British Centurion tanks and some French AMX-13s, but both sides also used American Sherman tanks as well (see photo). Facing the superior Centurions, Pakistani infantry tried out the very first European-made…

“The only map our battalion had was a little hashered map about six inches square and very inaccurate,” Lt. Col. James McBrayer Sellers, USMC, wrote of the battle at Belleau Wood. Even this was unavailable to him. “Our company commander did not even have a map.” Like much else the Americans had to work with, the quality of the cartography that France su…

The best novelists of seafaring history can make us feel the groan of the ship in storm swells and the lashing of the wind while accurately describing the work of seafaring in a historical milieu. C.S. Forester, author of the famous novel series centered on the career of his original character Horatio Hornblower in the Napoleonic era Royal Navy, fills h…

Pigafetta, Antonio. The First Voyage Around the World (1519-1522): An Account of Magellan's Expedition. University of Toronto Press, 2019. Born to a noble family in Vicenza, Italy, Antonio Pigafetta was a proud Knight of Rhodes who joined Captain-General Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage and kept meticulous records at the prompting of Philippe Villiers de l…

Fire for Effect: Field Artillery and Close Air Support in the US Army. John J. McGrath, USAR, retired. Combat Studies Institute Press, 2010. 178 pages. Calls for fire became a defining feature of American land arms in the 20th Century. In Fire for Effect: Field Artillery and Close Air Support in the US Army…

Preparing for War: The Making of the 1949 Geneva Conventions by Boyd van Dijk. Oxford University Press, 2022. 376 pages. Dispelling what he calls the “foundation myth” that the atrocities of the Second World War motivated the postwar powers to a rare show of unity in 1949, Boyd van Dijk argues that the Third Geneva Convention was in fact a fraught proce…

Mike Martin, Why We Fight. C Hurst & Company, 2018. 278 pages. “Fighting, when you and a small group of humans are trying to out-shoot and out-maneuver another group of humans, and they you, is the ultimate team sport,” Mike Martin writes. “War is exciting because our ancestors received an …