Great Armies from Napoleon to the Second World War

Start with the force that set the pattern. It was organized in 1804 at Boulogne as the Army of the Ocean Coasts for a planned invasion of Britain, then redesignated for the 1805 campaign that ended at Austerlitz. Built around Napoleon's corps system, it grew into a multinational force of roughly 685,000 troops at its peak before the 1812 invasion of Russia.

Austria carried the main burden of resistance to revolutionary and Napoleonic France for nearly a decade after Prussia made peace in 1795. British subsidies overcame its unwillingness to join the Third Coalition, and its defeat at Austerlitz in 1805 forced the Treaty of Pressburg.

The Royal Prussian Army was so central to Prussian identity that one observer called Prussia not a country with an army but an army with a country. Crushed at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, it was rebuilt through Gerhard von Scharnhorst's reforms, and Prussian troops under Blucher and Gneisenau proved decisive at Waterloo in 1815.

The standing army of the Russian Empire, founded on November 2, 1721, mixed regular troops with Cossack and Muslim auxiliary forces. It bore the brunt of Napoleon's 1812 invasion and, under Nicholas I, numbered over 1.1 million troops at the start of the Crimean War, before dissolving with the empire in 1917.

The British Army traces to the 1707 union that joined the English and Scottish armies into one force. It fought the Continental Army to a standstill at Yorktown in 1781 and, four decades later, helped defeat Napoleon at Waterloo alongside the Prussian Army.

The Ottoman Army served the empire from its founding in 1299 to 1922. Sultan Mahmud II disbanded the Janissary corps in 1826 and rebuilt a European-modeled standing force, which fought as Britain and France's ally against Russia in the Crimean War.

Under Napoleon III the Second Empire's army was among the first in the world issued Minie rifles, deployed in time for the Crimean War. Its performance there was judged more experienced at mass maneuver and war fighting than its British ally, which greatly enhanced French military prestige.

Established on February 28, 1861, when the Provisional Confederate Congress created a provisional volunteer army under President Jefferson Davis, it fought United States forces in support of the seceding Southern states until its surrender in 1865.

Created by act of the Confederate Congress on February 21, 1861, this navy faced a much larger Union Navy and turned to ironclads, submarines and naval mines. It is best remembered for the ironclad CSS Virginia's fight with the USS Monitor at the Battle of Hampton Roads.

Brought into being by the Compromise of 1867, the Imperial and Royal Army had three parts: the Common Army, the Austrian Landwehr and the Royal Hungarian Honved with the Croatian Home Guard. Common Army units were often poorly trained and equipped because each half of the empire preferred to fund its own, and the army ceased to exist when Austria-Hungary dissolved in 1918.

The unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945 combined the army, navy and air force under one high command answering to Hitler. About 18 million men served in it during the Second World War.

Germany's earlier flying services were disbanded in 1920 under the Treaty of Versailles, and pilots were trained in secret in the Soviet Union. The Luftwaffe was officially established on 26 February 1935, and its Condor Legion tested aircraft and tactics in the Spanish Civil War, leaving it among the best combat-tested air forces by September 1939.