This short essay provides a concise top-down picture of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945. It looks at not only its leadership and command (including the State Defence Committee, Stavka, and General Staff) but also size and structure, political supervision, mobilisation and training, and military equipment. When looking at mobilisation and training, it briefly considers not only wider issues but also the mobilisation of specific national groups and women. When considering equipment it identifies some key pieces of equipment that the Soviet Union was able to produce in large numbers, and that proved to be not only relatively easy to manufacture but also rugged and effective.

As soon as Italy entered the war, mobilisation orders were issued, from which emigrants were not exempted. From May–December 1915, two-thirds of the 300,000 emigrant soldiers would depart from their adopted homelands. Their passage was paid by the Italian government, but transporting thousands of reservists across the Atlantic was a formidable logistical challenge. This chapter examines the initial mobilisation of the reservists, their motivations for enlisting and their journeys to Italy in 1915. Their decisions to depart rested on many factors, including country of emigration, family situation, economic considerations, the length of time a man had spent abroad, degree of adherence to a sense of Italian national identity and political beliefs. Youthful naivety and a desire for adventure were also common motivators and the dangers of submarine attack when crossing the Atlantic a significant deterrent. Despite the mobilisation orders to emigrants, the Italian government had limited power to compel them to return from abroad to serve. The main incentive was a negative one: if reservists did not respond to the draft, they would be subject to severe penalties at a later date if they were to return to Italy.

This chapter explores the experiences of Italian emigrant veterans during the Fascist regime (1922–1943) and the Second World War. There were many contradictions in the Fascist treatment of emigrant veterans. On some occasions, they were fêted and lauded for their service. Unlike the Liberal state, Mussolini’s government highlighted the contribution of the emigrant soldiers during the Great War as exceptional and worthy of recognition, most notably at the landmark Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, held in Rome in 1932. However, on the whole, emigrant veterans did not become politically active once they returned abroad and were not the dominant standard-bearers for Fascism, and were often badly treated or ignored by the regime. Most of the Fascist government’s attention to the emigrants and the war surrounded the issue of wartime draft evaders, and new laws were passed in the 1920s to permit them to travel to Italy for short periods without being inducted into the Italian Army or otherwise punished. The outbreak of the Second World War upended the emigrant veterans’ lives once more, resulting in experiences of occupation, internment as enemy aliens or mobilization in the Italian or other armies.

In 1911, Italians living abroad constituted one-sixth of Italy’s population, numbering roughly five million people. However, the experiences of emigrant communities have not been incorporated into the narrative of Italy’s war. This chapter discusses the place of migration within the historiography of the First World War and of the war within migration history. It introduces the cohort of 300,000 emigrant soldiers who returned to Italy to complete their conscripted military service during the war, a mass mobilisation which was a uniquely Italian phenomenon. Scholars are divided as to whether this should be regarded as a success or a failure: I argue it is remarkable that so many made the journey considering that, in most locations, there were no coercive measures obliging them to do so. The chapter lays out the global micro-history approach adopted in the book and the decision to focus on four emigrant soldiers, each typical and atypical in different respects: Americo Orlando in São Paulo, Esterino Alessandro Tarasca in New York, Cesare Bianchi in London and Lazzaro Ponticelli in Paris.

This compendium of essential works clarifies that the Australian Army’s force structure is organic and constantly changing. It provides a starting point for quickly acquiring new capabilities at short notice when required to meet emerging threats and challenges. The Army’s response to realising government direction and investment in new capabilities is being examined via a series of options under the Army Objective Force. It involves a careful and deliberate program of analysis that will provide a framework to develop the Army of the future. Readers can be assured that the Australian Army’s future is informed through understanding of its past – understanding that is provided to the Army’s planners today through contributions such as this.

This chapter describes and analyses national force projection rehearsals called the Kangaroo series of joint exercises, conducted in 1989, 1992 and 1995. These exercises measured Australia’s military proficiency in defending the homeland. The chapter finds that the major challenge during these early post–Cold War years involved synchronising Australian maritime, land and air power under joint command and control arrangements. Despite not stress testing other force projection functions, the ADF struggled for military self-reliance on home soil.

In the last few years, the issue of mobilisation for war has, in Australia at any rate, shifted from the arcane to the highly pertinent. Concerns publicly manifested in the government’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update, which asserted that the long-held notion of up to 10 years’ warning for a possible conventional attack on Australia had – as 10-year rules tend to eventually do – evaporated. Moreover, it alluded to what was thought to be a remote, but nevertheless alarming, possibility of a ‘high-intensity conflict’ in Australia’s region. Suddenly, generating combat power, perhaps more than what was readily to hand, has taken on some urgency.

This chapter uses three declassified case studies to examine the varying and complex mobilisation processes that led to each of Australia’s major Afghanistan commitments throughout 2005–6. It examines how the Department of Defence implemented its decisions – what it did to organise for operations – up until the point that military forces deployed overseas. Questions of manpower, supply and logistics, force preparation, combined planning with coalition partners, force insertion and policy development were different for each of these deployments. What worked, and what did not? What was done, and what was left undone? And what impact did any of this have on subsequent operations?

What can be said about the operational performance of the Australian Defence Force when federal governments ordered selective mobilisations and projections of land force contingents overseas? This chapter examines force projection functions for six selected overseas ADF operations during the period 1987–2003. It applies a grading matrix to each function to produce an audit report. It then compares the reports to derive observations relating to evident systemic problems with operational performance and mitigation of risk.

This chapter analyses the auction milieu’s cultural responses to war-induced developments. Within societies deeply entrenched in the mentality of mobilisation and sacrifice, the commercialisation of art stirred moral apprehensions, feelings of possession, and envy, both among the general public and within the art industry. Debates on nouveaux riches and profiteers underscored the construction of antagonist figures during the war, highlighting threats to the market from both external and internal forces. The widespread destruction of heritage also catalysed nationalist feelings, deepening the cultural fragmentation of a formerly integrated trade sphere. By scrutinising the biographies of dealers, examining art’s vulnerability in wartime upheaval, and exploring the interplay between art and finance, this chapter also outlines how the war acted on the tensions characteristic of each market and brought them to a conflagration.

Exhibitions suggest a more complicated history than the familiar caricature of early twentieth-century Japan, which sees the country sliding inexorably into authoritarianism from the late 1920s, then embracing peace and democracy in 1945. The military had always been present at exhibitions and became more prominent in the 1930s. Wartime exhibitions did what they could to mobilize the Japanese people for ‘national defense’. Overseas, however, the government continued to use exhibitions to convince the world of its pacific intent. At home, exhibitions testify as much to commercial energy, municipal ambition, and colonial aspirations, as to militarism. This chapter explores the complicated, increasingly contradictory weave of war and peace during the 1930s and 1940s. Exhibitions not only articulated the need to expand empire and mobilize the nation but also continued to insist on the possibility of international amity and modern life, even as Japan descended into total war. Once it was over, peace and democracy became new keynotes, but the sites, protagonists, and ambitions of exhibitions remained much the same.

Chapter 2 traces the emergence of humane literary genealogies and animal-centred literary criticism. These new kinds of writing reveal the movement’s creative efforts to simultaneously draw from and re-imagine the canon in order the present a longstanding accord between literature and animal protectionism. The chapter then argues that reformers such as Frances Power Cobbe, Henry Salt, and Stephen Coleridge tried to establish a connection between aesthetic experience, ethical awareness, and political action; by carefully choreographing the appearance of stories, poems, and literary-criticism, association periodicals played a vital role in managing textual encounters and responses. However, expressions of excessive sentiment often endangered the efficacy, public image, and political legitimacy of the cause. The movement’s efforts to promote literary writing and antivivisectionism as natural bedfellows raised problems as well as opportunities: ‘Dipping’ into literary works and traditions was rarely carefree.