Hello everyone. I'm writing a dissertation on Austria-Hungary's "mixed" regiments, i.e. regiments containing soldiers of two or more nationalities. My particular interest is in the twenty or so Czech-German regiments raised in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia under the Habsburg monarchy.
I'm looking for any comparative cases that might be helpful in conceptualizing the "problem." So in your area/period of expertise, do you know of any military units that featured soldiers of two or more ethnic/national/racial/religious/linguistic groups? I would especially appreciate reading recommendations. I've thought of a few potential examples:
If you know something about these examples or any others, I'd love to hear about it. Most importantly, if you know of any books or articles on these topics, I'd LOVE to know.
Thanks for the help!
The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War are perhaps exceptional in this regard - some 32,000 volunteers from 50-60 countries, speaking a huge array of languages with a diverse array of national customs, habits, diets and so on. Annoyingly, these kind of questions are treated fairly superficially in existing literature (it doesn't help that a lot of studies taken a 'national' approach - looking only at specific national groupings, which never really actually existed in complete isolation from each other). It's an area I'm looking to publish in at some point, but that's no use to you at all really...
That said, there's an excellent new article that just came out looking specifically at languages: Jorge Marco and Maria Thomas, '"Mucho malo for fascisti": Languages and Transnational Soldiers in the Spanish Civil War', War & Society 38 (2019), pp. 139-61. You probably already know it, but in the context of the First World War there's an edited collection on languages: Julian Walker and Christophe Declerc (eds.), Languages and the First World War: Communicating in a Transnational War (London, 2016). I've only used Krista Cowman's chapter on 'Trench French' in my own work, but I'm sure the other chapters would also be of interest.
A big one that I see omitted from your list is The French Foreign Legion. u/Georgy_K_Zhukov wrote quite a bit on it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b0tw8s/the_french_foreign_legion/
He gives a reading list that I imagine might come in handy.
Look into the integration and cooperation of black and white Africans in the South African Defense Force/Special Forces. I just finished the book Recce: Small Team Missions Behind Enemy Lines which actually (albeit limited to one point of view) discusses how the different groups worked together, some of the challenges of the cooperation, some of the successes, etc).
It very gingerly touches on some of the racism (this is Apartheid South Africa...), so you have to take some of what's said with a grain of salt and understand that it was written well outside of Apartheid times so it's not going to very directly confront race, but you can still pick up a bit by reading between the lines.
Living arrangements and expectations of training and professionalism were different between groups. Many of the bushmen (check the link: despite that term sounding bad to highly race-conscious Americans, it's the most widely used and accepted term to represent the varied tribal/local groups of Africans) were married living with wife/children on or near base, while white soldiers/officers usually move to support/command roles when they get married. Bushmen were trained to a much lower standard, but were more heavily relied on for local/cultural/physical knowledge. In some senses you can think of the relationship as soldier/contractor.
I'm glossing quite a bit, but you should check out the book... the "I grew up..." part is a bit dry, but once it gets going it's a really fascinating read that (at least for me) provided a lot of interesting background for a time/part of the world that doesn't get a lot of attention.