Beginning in 1898, a secret society in northern China known as the I‑ho ch’uan, the “Boxers,” turned from frustration with the Qing dynasty to violent opposition to foreigners and Chinese Christians, eventually winning support from the Empress Dowager Cixi. When the movement reached Peking in 1900, the United States, Britain, Germany, Russia, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan deployed forces as the Eight-Nation Alliance. Mark R. Froom measures their cooperation against the principles of Joint Publication 3-16, Multinational Operations, weighing national interests, command relationships, trust, and interoperability. The councils of senior naval commanders met regularly and functioned much like a modern coordination center, while coordination among the land forces was confined largely to critical moments, such as a meeting of commanders before the assault on Tientsin. Froom closes by proposing further study of each nation’s joint operations before such concepts entered doctrine.
John Pezzola recounts the destruction of Colonel William Hicks Pasha’s Egyptian army at Shaykan, near El Obeid in Kordofan, from November 3 to 5, 1883. Since 1881 the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, had been building an army in Kordofan and Darfur, and an earlier Egyptian force of 4,000 men sent to arrest him had been ambushed and its weapons captured. Hicks, a former British Army officer, led roughly 9,000 infantry away from the Nile in pursuit, through country where temperatures reached 125 degrees, water ran short, intelligence proved unreliable, and morale steadily declined. In the wooded ground at Shaykan the Mahdists overwhelmed the expedition. Only about 500 Egyptian soldiers escaped to Khartoum, every officer was killed, and the journalists Edmund O’Donovan and Frank Vizetelly died with the column. Pezzola weighs the differing accounts of how Hicks himself fell and shows how the victory brought the Mahdi new followers, delegations from across the Islamic world, and control of most of Sudan, setting the course of the conflict until Omdurman in 1898.
Robert Shawlinski argues that General Winfield Scott’s Mexico City Campaign of 1847 ranks among the most operationally sophisticated undertakings in American military history. Sent by President James K. Polk with an expeditionary force of about 10,000 troops, Scott landed at Veracruz in March 1847 and fought his way inland to capture the Mexican capital on September 14. The article examines the campaign through four lenses drawn from current U.S. Army doctrine: mission command and commander’s intent, combined arms and unified action, offensive operations and tempo, and consolidating gains. Battles from Cerro Gordo to Chapultepec illustrate both Scott’s skill and the friction created by uncoordinated subordinates. Shawlinski shows how clear intent, disciplined initiative, synchronized combined arms, relentless tempo, and deliberate consolidation produced a decisive result in a war that reshaped North America. Modern doctrine, he concludes, inherited these principles rather than inventing them.
John Pezzola describes the Battle of the Atbara, fought on April 8, 1898, at the confluence of the Nile and Atbara Rivers during the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of Sudan. Major General Horatio Herbert Kitchener’s army confronted the Mahdist forces of Mahmoud Ahmad and Osman Digna, entrenched behind a thorn zeriba. The attack began at 06:20 when, after a brief artillery bombardment, the British Brigade under Lieutenant General Sir William Gatacre and two brigades of Major General Archibald Hunter’s Egyptian Division advanced on the camp. The attackers were soon inside, often fighting hand-to-hand. Osman Digna escaped south with a few thousand warriors, while Mahmoud was captured by loyal Sudanese troops. More than 2,000 Mahdist dead were found inside the zeriba, and many prisoners were later enlisted in Kitchener’s Sudanese battalions. Pezzola details the cost to the attackers and explains how the victory opened the way for Kitchener’s advance on Khartoum and the final defeat of the Khalifa.
SGM Lusiani, Mr. Shawlinski, and Mr. Yates tell the story of the El Paso Salt War of 1877, a violent clash rooted in competing ideas about who owned a vital resource. For generations, the Hispanic communities of the El Paso valley had treated the salt deposits, or salinas, near the Guadalupe Mountains as common property, traveling long distances to gather “white gold” essential to daily life and trade. In the 1870s Anglo-American entrepreneurs sought to claim the salt beds as private property and charge for access. When politician and speculator Charles Howard laid claim to the salt lakes and the activist Louis Cardis was murdered, the unrest escalated into an uprising and the siege of San Elizario, where the Texas Rangers ultimately surrendered their arms. The authors trace the lasting consequences: the county seat moved to El Paso, Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th Cavalry were stationed at a re-established Fort Bliss, and the railroad bypassed San Elizario, accelerating the marginalization of the region’s Tejano community.
Dave McCormick recovers a little-known episode in which Kentuckians tried to change the future of Cuba. In 1850, General Narciso López organized an expedition to overthrow Spanish colonial rule, and its vanguard was the Kentucky Regiment under Colonel Theodore O’Hara. These “Kentucky Filibusters” came from every walk of life, including laborers, tradesmen, clerks, lawyers, and physicians. They were the first to land, led the attack on Cárdenas, and suffered about a third of the expedition’s casualties. As they entered Quintayros Plaza, a Spanish sentinel’s shot alerted the jail’s defenders, whose volley wounded several men, including O’Hara. McCormick follows the capture of the town, the collapse of the venture, and its legal aftermath in the United States, where the leaders were indicted for violating the Neutrality Act. Three trials in New Orleans ended in hung juries before the government dropped the charges. The article also weighs differing accounts of the rewards promised to the volunteers and the Louisville monuments that have honored them.
Robert F. Williams examines British strategy in the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1838–1842, a campaign shaped by the nineteenth-century “Great Game” between Britain and Russia for influence in Central Asia. Anxious to shield India, the “crown jewel” of the Empire, British leaders acted on faulty assumptions about the Russian threat and about their ability to pacify a politically fractured country. They chose to replace Dost Mohammed with the unpopular Shah Shuja and tried to build a strong central government where power had traditionally been local. Williams argues that Britain had the means to invade but failed to match its military strength to realistic political ends, a mismatch that led to the destruction of the Kabul garrison under Major General William Elphinstone. Yet Britain later achieved a broader goal: a friendly Afghanistan serving as a buffer against Russian and Persian influence. The article closes by tracing the war’s legacy, from the Durand Line to the Soviet and American interventions that repeated the same misjudgments.
Walt Giersbach tells the remarkable story of Robert Smalls, an enslaved South Carolinian who stole a Confederate vessel, carried his family to freedom, and within a decade won election to Congress. Born in Beaufort in 1839, Smalls was hired out in Charleston as a longshoreman, rigger, sailmaker, and finally wheelman aboard the cotton steamer Planter, becoming its pilot in all but name. His intimate knowledge of Charleston harbor made his escape possible. Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, with the white officers ashore, Smalls and an enslaved crew took the Planter past the harbor defenses to the Union blockading fleet. Giersbach follows his later life as a newspaper publisher, state legislator, and member of the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as his bitter experience of watching South Carolina’s 1895 constitution strip Black citizens of the vote. Smalls died in 1915 in the Beaufort house where he had been born enslaved, insisting that his people needed only “an equal chance in the battle of life.”
Larry Parker brings the 1898 Omdurman campaign to life through a series of dated, eyewitness-style entries written from inside Kitchener’s army. Thirteen years after Gordon’s death at Khartoum, the Anglo-Egyptian force has advanced more than 1,000 miles from Cairo, building a 400-mile railroad across the Nubian desert from Wadi Halfa to Abu Hamed and hauling gunboats and supply vessels through the Nile cataracts to sustain 25,000 men. The narrative follows the great Mahdist assault against the army’s defenses, Kitchener’s premature advance on Omdurman, and the second charge that fell on General Hector Macdonald’s Sudanese brigade, which held its ground with disciplined fire and the support of the gunboats. Parker also recounts the charge of the 21st Lancers, in which 400 horsemen, Winston Churchill among them, crashed into some 2,000 warriors concealed in a wadi. He closes by reflecting on how Churchill survived Omdurman, the Boer War, and the trenches of the First World War to lead Britain in 1940.
Robert Shawlinski and Vernon Yates compare the French and Prussian approaches to strategy in the Franco-Prussian War. For centuries, they argue, European wars had been fought with strategy as an afterthought, until Prussia began to treat strategy as both a science and an art. Under Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck, whose power overshadowed even the Prussian monarch, Prussia pursued two clear goals: uniting all Germans under one flag and eliminating the threat France posed on its western frontier. France, led by Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, still relied on élan, the aggressive spirit that had served its armies in earlier wars, rather than on systematic planning. The authors trace how Prussian preparation and coordination overwhelmed the French in the field, culminating in the fall of Sedan, where Napoleon III himself was taken prisoner. Bismarck then dictated a peace that cost France Alsace-Lorraine and five billion francs. The war, they conclude, created the German Empire and showed the price France paid for neglecting strategic planning.
Dr. Andrew McGregor examines the campaign of Romolo Gessi Pasha, an Italian soldier of fortune who served Charles “Chinese” Gordon in the Sudan, as an early case study in counterinsurgency. In Bahr al-Ghazal, Gessi faced Arab traders and slavers led by Sulayman Bey Zubayr, a force larger than his own, equipped with similar weapons, experienced in both irregular and conventional warfare, entrenched in fortified positions, at home in the terrain, and backed by influential parts of Sudanese society. McGregor follows Gessi from his early service as an interpreter in the Crimean War through a hard-fought campaign that broke the slavers’ power. He then assesses why the campaign attracted little attention in European military academies, leaving lessons to be relearned by Belgian forces in the Congo and later by French theorists such as Roger Trinquier and David Galula. Gessi’s military success proved incomplete, McGregor concludes, because broken promises to his Arab allies fed the discontent that soon erupted in the Mahdist rebellion.
Larry Parker examines the career of Alfred Thayer Mahan and his influence on American naval power. At the end of the Civil War the U.S. Navy mustered some 700 ships and 5,000 guns, yet within five years more than ninety percent of the fleet had been sold, scrapped, or laid up, experienced officers and sailors had left the service, and even the fast steam warship USS Wampanoag was discarded to save money on coal. As the frontier closed and the United States began to look outward, Mahan, invited to lecture at the newly established Naval War College, developed the ideas published in 1890 as The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Parker shows how Mahan connected sea power with national power and prosperity and helped rejuvenate the Navy as the twentieth century began. He closes with a warning for the present: the United States risks repeating the mistakes of 1807, 1865, and 1945 by neglecting its navy, and it needs a modern Mahan to make the case for sea power.
Michael Headley asks why many Americans traveled thousands of miles to fight in the Boer War of 1899–1902, even though their government chose to remain neutral. He shows that they served on both sides and for very different reasons. Some, such as John Blake and many Irish-Americans, joined the Boers out of hatred for British imperialism. Adventurous, liberty-minded volunteers like John Hassell and the American Scouts saw the Boer republics’ struggle as an echo of America’s own fight for independence. Others, like the Detroit-born engineer George Labram, were drawn in by business interests in South Africa and helped the British defend Kimberley. Humanitarian outrage over British conduct moved some Americans, while others, including Major Frederick Russell Burnham, served the British Crown. Headley sets these stories against official American policy, which favored good relations with Britain and economic opportunity, and concludes that the passions of individual citizens made it extremely difficult for the United States to remain detached from European wars.
Dr. Andrew McGregor reveals the uncomfortable story behind France’s 1894 occupation of Timbuktu, the conquest that helped launch the career of Joseph Joffre. Far from a triumph of French policy, the occupation was a deliberate act of insubordination by colonial officers, for France did not want the city. Lieutenant-Colonel Etienne Bonnier devised the plan to seize Timbuktu in defiance of official orders, and Major Joffre, leading a column along the Niger River, became his willing accomplice. McGregor contrasts the dry, economical official report Joffre later published as My March to Timbuctoo with the insubordination, atrocities, and war for its own sake that lay behind it. He follows Joffre from Timbuktu to command of all French armies in 1914, his celebrated victory at the Marne, the costly failures that led to his removal from operational command in December 1916, and his elevation to Marshal of France. In later life, Joffre conceded that Bonnier was the true conqueror of Timbuktu, adding, “as for me, I guarded it.”
Alexander Zakrzewski recounts one of the most spectacular cavalry charges of the Napoleonic Wars. On the foggy morning of November 30, 1808, Napoleon’s Grande Armée stalled before the pass of Somosierra in Spain’s Sierra de Guadarrama, the last obstacle on the road to Madrid, where a small but determined Spanish force held fortified positions covered by cannon and musket fire. Impatient, Napoleon ordered the 3rd Squadron of the Chevau-Légers Polonais of the Imperial Guard, commanded by Jan Kozietulski, to charge straight up the defile. Zakrzewski explains how the French had used war with Portugal as a pretext to send troops into Spain, describes the Spanish defenses, and follows the Polish horsemen as they cleared the pass in about seven minutes and captured its guns and standards. He then traces the regiment’s later history: rearmed as lancers, feared in Spain as “the devil’s lancers,” imitated by other cavalry in Russia, accompanying Napoleon into exile on Elba, and serving him a final time at Waterloo.
Walt Giersbach examines the Fenian Raids, an audacious plan by Irish-American veterans of the Civil War to seize British North America and hold Canada hostage until Britain freed Ireland. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, whose followers were known as Fenians, claimed perhaps 125,000 members in the United States and Canada, and thousands of former Union and Confederate soldiers joined its ranks. Giersbach traces the movement’s leadership quarrels and its plans for a multi-pronged invasion. He follows John O’Neill and his men across the Niagara frontier to the Battle of Ridgeway, and the June 1866 attack in which Brigadier Samuel P. Spear led some 2,000 veterans across the border from St. Albans, Vermont. Throughout, he highlights the political calculations of President Andrew Johnson, who sought reparations from Britain for aiding the Confederacy and may have tolerated the Fenians as a lever before enforcing the neutrality laws. In a later interview, Johnson reportedly told O’Neill that he had given the Fenians five full days before stopping them.
Timothy Neeno examines France’s attempt to build an empire in Mexico while the United States was paralyzed by civil war. Beginning in 1862, Napoleon III sought to rule Mexico through a puppet emperor, the Archduke Maximilian of Austria. Neeno first explains how three centuries of Spanish rule and decades of upheaval after independence left Mexico divided, with the army, wealthy landowners, and the Catholic Church, which controlled nearly half the taxable land, competing for power. He then follows the French intervention, from the defeat at Puebla commemorated as Cinco de Mayo through Marshal François Achille Bazaine’s campaigns to secure the country and the persistence of Benito Juárez’s republican forces, who refused to surrender. In the end Maximilian’s empire collapsed, its final act played out on the Hill of the Bells outside Querétaro. Some 300,000 Mexicans died in the struggle, Neeno concludes, but Mexico emerged with renewed national pride, firm republican institutions, and the freedom to shape its own future.
