The Yeomanry Cavalry And Military Identities In Rural Britain 1815 1914

This volume represents the first dedicated study of the British Yeomanry Cavalry, delving into the institution’s history from the cessation of hostilities with France in 1815 through to the eve of the First World War in 1914. This social history explores the Yeomanry’s composition and place within British society, as well as its controversial role in policing before and after Peterloo, and its unique contribution to the war in South Africa. Overturning or challenging many enduring myths and accepted truths, this book breaks new ground not just in our understanding of the Yeomanry, but the wider amateur military tradition.

An examination of the lifecycle of soldiers, including enlistment, experiences of military life, the soldier's place in society and in politics, and military identity, memory and representation.

On 18 July 1981, a Canadair CL-44D Swingtail cargo aircraft of the Argentine company Transporte Aéreo Rioplatense mysteriously disappeared over the Soviet Republic of Armenia while on a flight from Iran via Turkey in the direction of Cyprus. Four days later, on 22 July 1981, the Vremya TV broadcast in Moscow forwarded a report from the Soviet TASS news agency which stated that an aircraft of unidentified origin had entered Soviet territory in the vicinity of the Armenian city of Yerevan. According to the same release, the aircraft had ignored all calls from air traffic control and ended up crashing and burning after colliding with another Soviet aircraft. With this cryptic information began one of the most impressive and least known stories of Argentine civil aviation: the shooting down of the freighter registered as LV-JTN by the Soviet Air Defence Force (V-PVO). The episode, heavily covered up by Moscow, was part of a much larger geopolitical scenario: the clandestine transport of US-made weapons and spare parts that was taking place between Tel Aviv and Tehran by virtue of a secret agreement between the Iranian and Israeli governments. All this at a time when the former was subjected to an arms embargo in revenge for the hostage-taking that occurred in 1979 at the US Embassy in Tehran. The Islamic Republic of Iran, formed as a result of the Islamic Revolution that had broken out that same year, was an avowed enemy of Israel, whom it considered a mere Zionist regime that imposed itself in the occupation of Palestine. The Iranian religious leader Ruhollah Khomeini did not recognise the State of Israel, which he referred to simply as ‘Little Satan’. However, the Iranians desperately needed supplies of US weapons as a few months earlier, on 22 September 1980, they had been invaded by Iraq. The Israelis saw the possibility of carrying out a sideline business and thus embarked on a clandestine supply operation. The intelligence services of the Soviet Union soon became aware of the secret arms trafficking and decided to divert one of the involved aircraft into their airspace then force it to land in their territory with the aim of exposing the operation and all its protagonists. By interfering with radio communications and manipulating navigational aids, the KGB managed to divert the Argentine CL-44D from its route, with it ending up inside Soviet airspace. However, the Sukhoi Su-15TM interceptors of the V-PVO failed in their mission, and thus their ground control ordered the destruction of the target. The Soviet conspiracy of silence began after discovering that its Air Defence Force had destroyed an Argentine-flagged civil plane, with an Argentine crew, which was flying empty. Juliet Tango November explores this incident in detail and is richly illustrated with colour images and previously unseen photographs.

The story of the British army, from its inception in the late seventeenth century to the present. This new concise history by one of Britain's leading military historians explores the British army from the creation of a permanent standing army in the seventeenth century to the present. It sets the institutional development of the British army, and its often ambiguous relationship with state and society, as well as the army's wider political, social, economic, and cultural role within international, imperial, national, regional, and local contexts. An army exists to fight, however, and the British army's story cannot be separated from those wars and conflicts that have punctuated its evolution. Consequently, attention is also paid to the army's commanders, operations, and battlefields from the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the seventeenth century to Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty-first. Beckett traces the army's evolution through five chronological phases: the standing army of the seventeenth century and its antecedents, the national army of the eighteenth century, the imperial army of the nineteenth century, the people's army of the two world wars, the era of national service, and the return to a small professional army fulfilling a global role envisaged by successive governments in the twenty-first century at a time of rapidly changing social attitudes towards the utility of force, that pose a challenge to the army's traditional core values.

During the First World War approximately 200,000 Irish men and 5,000 Irish women served in the British armed forces. All were volunteers and a very high proportion were from Catholic and Nationalist communities. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Irish recruitment between 1914 and 1918 for the island of Ireland as a whole. It makes extensive use of previously neglected internal British army recruiting returns held at The National Archives, Kew, along with other valuable archival and newspaper sources. There has been a tendency to discount the importance of political factors in Irish recruitment, but this book demonstrates that recruitment campaigns organised under the auspices of the Irish National Volunteers and Ulster Volunteer Force were the earliest and some of the most effective campaigns run throughout the war. The British government conspicuously failed to create an effective recruiting organisation or to mobilise civic society in Ireland. While the military mobilisation which occurred between 1914 and 1918 was the largest in Irish history, British officials persistently characterised it as inadequate, threatening to introduce conscription in 1918. This book also reflects on the disparity of sacrifice between North-East Ulster and the rest of Ireland, urban and rural Ireland, and Ireland and Great Britain.

What is the role of a soldier at the end of war, when either victory or defeat is inevitable? This book delves into that question, exploring how the military and soldiers on the ground have contributed to the transition to peace. With case studies from 1800 to the present day, Soldiers in Peace-making offers a historical overview of the part military men and women have played in the aftermath of war. From UN peacekeeping in Cambodia to military observers in former Yugoslavia, the post-Cold War US Army and more, the essays in this collection map the strategy, politics and practicalities involved in the transition from war to postwar. Analyzing the legitimacy of each 'peace' and the military's approach to them, the chapters explore how soldiers have engaged with politics and political leaders, interacted with civil populations, and called upon their own expertise to enable the peace-making process. In exploring the hybrid role of military men and women as diplomats, peacemakers, negotiators and fighters this book reveals the crucial part they have played as conflicts come to a close.

On 16 August, 1819, at St Peter's Field, Manchester, armed cavalry attacked a peaceful rally of some 50,000 pro-democracy reformers. Under the eyes of the national press, 18 people were killed and some 700 injured, many of them by sabres, many of them women, some of them children. The 'Peterloo massacre', the subject of a recent feature film and a major commemoration in 2019, is famous as the central episode in Edward Thompsons Making of the English Working Class. It also marked the rise of a new English radical populism as the British state, recently victorious at Waterloo, was challenged by a pro-democracy movement centred on the industrial north. Why did the cavalry attack? Who ordered them in? What was the radical strategy? Why were there women on the platform, and why were they so ferociously attacked? Using an immense range of sources, and many new maps and illustrations, Robert Poole tells for the first time the full extraordinary story of Peterloo: the English Uprising.

This book offers the first encounter between labour history and military history, with an analysis of the working lives of nineteenth British rank and file soldiers in the context of a developing working class industrial culture and in its interaction with British society.