When World War II began, the Wehrmacht had fifteen mountain divisions and a multitude of small units, including some Austrian units that had been incorporated into the German army after the ...Anschluss. These mountain units would operate in hostile environments on all fronts during World War II. Due to their training, equipment and adaptability, the Gebirgstruppen would be deployed to fight in almost every theater. In the last years of the war they would see action in North Africa, Italy, the Balkans, Norway and Finland, and in the West as the Allies pushed German forces back toward Berlin. This book, the culmination of four decades of research and the support of many veterans and collectors, describes the uniform, equipment, and operations of these specialist units during the later years of World War II. The text is complemented by period photographs taken at the front, including many color photographs, and modern photographs of uniform details.
Since 1984 the Indian and Pakistani armies have been locked in the world's highest war on Siachen Glacier in the Karakoram Himalaya. This remote location is the world's only nuclear trijunction as ...well as a source of drinking water for significant portions of India and Pakistan, and its possession is considered by both governments to be key to their national security. In the past, alpine battles were fought predominantly on glaciers with a precipitation-dominated accumulation type; Siachen, however, gains most of its new ice mass from avalanches and icefalls. This has presented unique challenges in tactics and logistics, rendering many of the strategies of modern conventional warfare useless, and the style of mountain warfare these challenges have produced has impacted both the combatants and the glacier itself. Existing literature on Siachen, while it discusses the verticality of the conflict, has done little to analyze the singular nature of warfare on a high-altitude glacier with an avalanche-heavy accumulation type. This paper draws on USGS Landsat data, glaciological mass balance studies, hydrological studies, firsthand combat accounts and historical reviews of the region to examine the unique tactics, logistics and impact of warfare on Siachen Glacier.
Abstract
Mountainous terrain has distinctly influenced combat operations throughout history. Warfare at high altitude often takes place in extreme weather conditions and over difficult terrain, which ...is largely considered to be inaccessible, inhospitable, and at times lacking any apparent strategic or operational value. As a result, combat operations at high altitudes are traditionally infantry affairs. The South African deployment to East Africa during the Second World War was for the most part characterised by highly mobile operations, across deserts and scrubland, where infantry, armour and artillery deployed in a mutually supportive role. The penultimate battles of the East African campaign were, however, fought in extremely severe terrain, where the South African troops would experience the harsh realities of mountain warfare for the first time during the war. This article broadly investigates the exigencies of mountain warfare, and critically reflects on the South African wartime experience of mountain warfare in East Africa.
Current prolonged field care (PFC) training routinely occurs in simulated physical locations that force providers to continue care until evacuation to definitive care, as based on the staged ...Ruck-Truck-House-Plane model. As PFC-capable teams move further forward into austere environments in support of the fight, they are in physical locations that do not fit this staged model and may require teams to execute their own casualty evacuation through rough terrain. The physical constraints that come specifically with austere, mountainous terrain can challenge PFC providers to initiate resuscitative interventions and challenge their ability to sustain these interventions during lengthy, dismounted movement over unimproved terrain. In this brief report, we describe our experience with a novel training course designed for PFC-capable medical teams to integrate their level of advanced resuscitative care within a mountainous, rough terrain evacuation-training program. Our goals were to identify training gaps for Special Operations Forces medical units tasked to operate in a cold-weather, mountain environment with limited evacuation resources and the challenges related to maintaining PFC interventions during dismounted casualty movement.
Security is the obligation of the state toward its citizens, and part of security is the defense for which the Armed Forces develop and improve their capabilities. A significant increase in the ...popularity of mountain warfare reveals the potential lack of capabilities of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Croatia related to the conduct of operations in mountainous areas. Although the geographical analysis shows that the share of mountainous areas in the total area of the Republic of Croatia is 21%, which does not make it a mountainous country, due to further strategic implications, recent events in the region and the experience of the Croatian Homeland War, capability for conducting operations in mountainous area may be more needed than in countries with a nominally higher percentage of mountainous area. To solve the defined problem, three possibilities are proposed, the opening of a school of mountain warfare, the organization of a light infantry battalion and the organization of a mountain infantry battalion, with possible results shown. In the end, it is clear that such a move would give great importance to the Armed Forces of the Republic of Croatia, as a modern and professional organization ready to act both in the context of its own state and in the regional and international context.
Chapter five describes the invasion of Italy, specifically Operation Avalanche, the US Fifth Army landings at Salerno. The chapter starts with details on the planning and mounting of the operation, ...followed by the invasion. Allied landings are the most effective to date, showing clear evidence of improvement compared to North Africa and Sicily. The clearing of Naples port is intriguing story that is vital to Allied logistical support. As the campaign continues, the Allies have to transition to supporting mountain and winter warfare; leading to the use of large numbers of pack animals. Support of the civil population becomes a major task. The Allies begin developing a significant support base, to include establishment of the Peninsular Base Section and repair of civilian rail transport. The chapter concludes by detailing implications with the arrival of the French Expeditionary Corps and continuation of combat in the winter of 1943.
During the World War I conflict between the Austrian and Italian army, Austrian engineer units constructed hallways in the karst region of Soča river. Those hallways, karst phenomena (caverns, caves) ...and other fortifications, gave the Austrian army a tactical advantage. The construction principle of caverns is the consequence of the geological structure of the terrain. We are watching another military conflict in Afghanistan. In country where many armies in history have been defeated, where the terrain morphology condition a guerilla tactic, where the function effect of modern military technology is limited by battlefield configuration and with low military value of individual target, we are creating a "picture" of the possible view of the future battlefield. Al-Qai'da operatives in east Afghanistan take advantage of the opportunity of geological structure of the terrain and construct tunnel network across natural caves. Although the tunnel network in Afghanistan is constructed mostly in sandstones and metamorphic rocks, we may partly compare it with Austrian hallways. In that sense this work shows the influence of geological structure of the terrain on the effect of military operations in mountains and karst regions, and the analogy between military operations on the Soča river and military operations in Afghanistan.
