MHQ Vol.27 No.4 - 2015 Summer

Summer 2015

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Waterloo’s Decisive Hour Caesar’s Rise to Power High Tide for Highlanders

ANN 70th IVER SAR E

The Quarterly Journal of Military History

Battle for Hitler’s Berlin How the Red Army crushed the capital of the Third Reich by Robert M. Citino

MHQmag.com

Y nd o f W in Eu WII rope

“The nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” —arthur wellesley, 1st duke of wellington, on the battle of waterloo, page 68

The Quarterly Journal of Military History summer 2015 volume 27, number 4

Contents THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY Summer 2015, Volume 27, Number 4

Features 28 Last Days in Berlin

68 Holding the Farm

by Robert M. Citino

by Brendan Simms

The bitter end for Nazi Germany was an apocalyptic high-casualty street fight. The Red Army won

Napoleon’s main frontal attack at Waterloo was stalled by a single rifle battalion

40 Steeplechase in the Carolinas, 1781

78 G-2 From the Ground Up

by Noah Andre Trudeau

by Mark Stout

When Nathanael Greene and Charles Cornwallis finally clashed at Guilford Courthouse, Cornwallis had bayonets and discipline. Greene had a surprise—and a war-winning strategy

How U.S. Army Intelligence was created by General John J. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force in World War I

PORTFOLIO

Subscriber-Only Bonus Special

48 Waterloo: Remains of the Day

98 Days of Thunder

Relics from the battlefield

by C. G. Sweeting The making of Dora, the world’s biggest gun

54 Scots Peak at Prestonpans by Ron Soodalter The legendary defeat of a British army in 1745 was the high point for the doomed Bonnie Prince Charlie, his Jacobite Rebellion, and the Highland way of life

62 How Julius Caesar Conquered Gaul— and Rome by Barry Strauss The ambitious general’s win over Celtic barbarians at Sabis in 57 bc proved less important than his own glorified tale of the battle

97 Extra Round

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Departments 5 Letter From MHQ 6 Flashback 12 Comments 14 Ask MHQ U.S. invades the Dominican Republic

20 Behind the Lines Integrating the U.S. Navy

24 HistoryNet Reader Excerpts from our sister magazines

25 Experience Facing Pickett’s Charge

At the Front 15 The War List The plagues of war

17 Weapons Check Medieval crossbow

18 Battle Schemes Mapping the Cold War, 1953

Culture of War 83 Museum Watch

48

84 Artists Gettysburg Cyclorama

88 Classic Dispatches Stephen Crane at Velestino

92 Reviews George Washington’s leadership, weapons of the Great War, the fall of the Ottomans, and the stars of World War II

ABOVE: Our portfolio (p. 48) includes a bicorne hat looted from Napoleon’s baggage at Waterloo. Such hats were typically worn with peaks front to back, but Napoleon wore his sideways, which he believed made him readily identifiable. (Antoine Jean Gros/by kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London/Art Resource, New York)

MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History (ISSN 1040-5992) is published quarterly by World History Group, LLC, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176-6500. Periodical postage paid at Leesburg, Va., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send subscription information and address changes to: MHQ, P.O. Box 422224, Palm Coast, FL 32142-2224. Single copies: $19.95. Yearly subscriptions in U.S.: $74.95; Canada: $99.95; Foreign: $99.95 (in U.S. funds only). Copyright 2015 by World History Group, LLC, all rights reserved. The contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in whole or in part without consent of the copyright owner. MHQ is a registered trademark of World HistoryGroup, LLC.

COVER: This iconic shot of a Red Army soldier waving a Soviet flag atop the gutted Reichstag in Berlin on May 2, 1945, unmistakably symbolizes the defeat of the Third Reich (p. 28). (Yevgeny Khaldei/AKGImages/Voller Ernst)

© 2015 World History Group, LLC

BACK COVER: A German cipher disk used to encode and decode messages early in World War I (p. 78) (AKG-Images/Lindau/Hütter Collection)

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PIPES OF THE PRETENDER, this French musette bagpipe is believed to have been owned by Bonnie Prince Charlie, who returned from France in 1745 to wage war on King George II and return the Catholic Stuarts to the throne. Musettes are considerably smaller than the Great Highland pipes that marched Charles’s Scottish allies to war and death during the Jacobite uprising he incited. For more on that, see page 54. (National Museums of Scotland)

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Letter From MHQ On This Date

A

nniversaries have value. Years pass rapidly and memories fade, even collective memories of events laden with watershed cultural or national importance. It is commonly understood, especially where published histories are involved, that anniversaries of certain numbers of years—10, 20, 25, 50, 75, and most of all, 100—carry more weight than seemingly random numbers of years. Not that certain events are more important just because they occurred 50 years ago rather than 46 years ago or 53 years ago. But such numbers as 100 provide a handy common reference point for everyone to turn attention to a past event. The year 2015 happens to be a big anniversary for some world-changing historic events, many of them military. This issue of MHQ reaches readers in the anniversary months of some of those years. The final defeat of Nazi Germany occurred exactly 70 years ago this May. That complex event, a triumph aswirl in tragedy, may now—depending on one’s age—seem to belong firmly to the category of recorded history or may still lie within living memory. Either way, that climactic battle in Berlin marked the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. Similarly, a single afternoon in June 200 years ago marked the end of Europe’s Napoleonic nightmare, when in 1815 the resurgent emperor’s loyal veteran infantry, artillery, and cavalry failed to overcome stubborn allied resistance and could not finally crack the enemy’s line at Waterloo. Again, one era perished on a single small battlefield, and a radically changed world came into being. Memory and history are fickle. Some events, even some mere moments, seem to claim eternal life, while many others of great gravity inexplicably fade from common awareness. Historian Edward Lengel introduces To Conquer Hell, his comprehensive 2008 history of the epic Meuse-Argonne Battle of 1918, the bloodiest battle in American history, with a brilliant meditation on how “within a few years of its end, nobody seemed to realize that it had taken place.” The value of those round-number anniversaries is that they do provide a logical cultural occasion for realizing what took place, for remembering, honoring, reconsidering, and perhaps learning from what happened 50 or 70 or 200 years ago.

—Michael W. Robbins [email protected]

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Flashback

FRANCE 1918 Nicknamed “Bruno,” this 28cm German naval cannon was removed from a pre-dreadnought battleship and used in coastal defense or as a railway gun. TODAY The U.S. Navy announces a “game-changing” weapon—a high-powered electromagnetic railgun that uses electricity rather than chemical propellants to launch projectiles, greatly increasing their range and speed—100 nautical miles at speeds exceeding Mach 6. AKG-Images/Picture-Alliance/WZ-Bilddienst

YEMEN 1964 Yemenis welcome Egyptian president Gamal Adbel Nasser after his forces moved in to shore up a republican coup thwarted by Saudi involvement. TODAY As Yemen becomes increasingly contested ground between the larger regional forces of Iran and Saudi Arabia, Egypt again contemplates joining the fighting in Yemen, this time on the side of the Saudi coalition. Bettmann/Corbis

ISRAEL 1981 In an Israeli airstrike code-named Operation Opera, eight F-16As, including No. 107, destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor outside Baghdad. TODAY Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu, opposed to current negotiations between the United States and Iran concerning Iran’s nuclear capabilities, warns that “Israel will not accept an agreement which allows a country that vows to annihilate us to develop nuclear weapons, period.“ Yin Dongxun/Xinhua/Landov

Comments Groundbreaking Code Breakers

Although Britain’s Bletchley Park operation was indeed “brilliant,” it’s important to remember other contributions to this code-breaking success, including

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Cryptographer Alan Turing’s World War II bombe in Bletchley Park, as rebuilt in 2008

by the Poles. In his book Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II, author Stephen Budiansky recounts a story from summer 1939, when a contingent of French and British cryptanalysts traveled to Poland to discuss Enigma. The Poles astounded their visitors by unveiling the Enigma machines they had built from scratch. David Gonnerman Northfield, Minnesota Winners and losers In response to the coverline—“The Man Who Won the War of 1812”—for your Spring 2015 story about John Quincy Adams’s role in brokering the Treaty of Ghent, I have to say that I rather doubt he did. Not a single aspect of America’s declaration of war was met, leaving status quo and victory to Britain and Canada, who also liberated 3,000 slaves, sent them to freedom, and then paid for them at top dollar rather than return them to slavery. In all, a military, political, and moral victory for Britain and Canada. Ricky Phillips via Facebook

More lessons of the Vendée Anthony Brandt’s article “Lessons of the Vendée,” [Spring 2015] deals with a “lost cause” that in terms of historical memory, interpretation, and commemoration exceeds even those of Scotland and the American South. Napoleon would refer to the events in the Vendée—the most serious internal challenge faced by the newborn French Republic—as a guerre de géants (a “war of giants”) and he studied the Catholic and Royal Grand Army of the Vendée’s crossing of the Loire River in October 1793 as an example of tactical brilliance under fire. War in the Vendée also presaged the type of guerrilla war French forces would face in Haiti, Southern Italy, and Spain. Lenin studied the Republic’s response to dealing with recalcitrant peasants, clergy, and nobles for useful lessons in dealing with his own revolutionary problems. A small group of modern French writers, historians, and politicians is campaigning to have the victims of the Vendée recognized as “the first victims of genocide in modern history,” although the American historian David A. Bell has categorically stated: “The war in the Vendée was

KAREN FULLER/ALAMY

With regard to your Winter 2015 Weapons Check, “Bombe vs. Enigma,” I would like to note that the foundation for cracking Enigma machine ciphers was laid by Polish cryptographers, who invented the first so-called “cryptologic bombe”— ahead of the outbreak of World War II. They were Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski, and the mechanical-electrical tool they designed automatically broke cables encrypted with the Enigma. It was unique because it used mechanical ciphers as well as a special mathematical equation the cryptographers devised. Rejewski, a civilian mathematician working at the Polish General Staff’s Cipher Bureau in Warsaw, took advantage of a weakness in the German encryption procedures: The encrypted key for the message was included at the beginning of a message. Initially, Rejewski applied a manually created directory containing all possible rotor settings. Later, when the Germans made a minor change in the encryption system and the directory became obsolete, he came up with the idea of using data from a particular day to reproduce initial rotor settings. Polish intelligence first revealed the bombe to the Brits and the French on July 26, 1939, at a meeting in Warsaw. Its detailed plans and two Enigma replicas were then sent through Paris to London. In the autumn of 1939, the cryptographers from Bletchley Park managed to construct a sufficient number of bombes and make them more effective, thanks to the most important contribution by brilliant Alan Turing. Mateusz Sakowicz Permanent Mission of Poland to the United Nations

Contributors Roger L. Vance Editor in Chief

Thomas Fleming considers his decision to join the United States Navy in the spring of 1945 as a turning point in his life. Fleming sees his navy experience as “a bridge” he had to cross to become an American rather than an Irish-Catholic writer. His bestselling novel about the navy, Time and Tide, sums up what he sees as the essence of the American experience, a sometimes confusing clash between soaring idealism and brutal realism. In this issue, he deals with his own experience of racial issues in the World War II navy (page 20). Fleming’s latest book, The

Fleming

Strauss

Great Divide: The Conflict between Washington and Jefferson that Defined a Nation, is his 51st in a career that has spanned more than 60 years. Mark Stout has had a long and unusually varied career in the intelligence field. For 13 years he was an intelligence analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and at the CIA. He also did a stint at the Institute for Defense Analyses before his three years as historian at the popular International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

Stout focuses on military and intelligence history, strategic studies, and irregular warfare. He details the World War I origins of modern American military intelligence on page 78. Barry Strauss’s “How Julius Caesar Conquered Gaul—and Rome” (page 62) is much more than an account of the seesaw battle on the River Sabis in 57 bc between the Belgic Gauls and Caesar’s legions. Strauss describes what is known about this important battle and goes on to examine Caesar’s account of it in his Commentaries and the political effects of that story—events that led to the most famous assassination in Western history, the stabbing of Caesar in 44 bc. A history professor at Cornell University and author of five well-received books on the military history of the ancient world, Strauss can walk the walk and talk the talk: He has walked the ground of all of Caesar’s battles, and he has read in Latin the Commentaries, letters, and surviving accounts of Caesar’s military and political life. Strauss sees Caesar as a skilled, courageous, and brilliant military leader, unique among Roman generals in his literary abilities. Only Caesar achieved durable fame with his Commentaries. But Strauss adds a cautionary note: Caesar was hugely ambitious, and his writing is relentlessly self-promoting: “Caesar was not telling the truth. He wrote propaganda,” Strauss says.

Michael A. Reinstein Chairman & Publisher Dionisio Lucchesi President William Koneval Associate Publisher

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY Michael W. Robbins Editor Barbara Sutliff

Art Director K. M. Kostyal

Senior Editor Elizabeth G. Howard

Managing Editor Jennifer E. Berry

Senior Picture Editor Jon Guttman Research Director David T. Zabecki Chief Military Historian Contributing Editors O’Brien Browne, Thomas Fleming, Adrian Goldsworthy, Victor Davis Hanson, Alistair Horne, David Kahn, John A. Lynn, Allan R. Millett, Williamson Murray, Robert L. O’Connell, Geoffrey Parker, Douglas Porch, John Prados, Willard Sterne Randall, Elihu Rose, Stephen W. Sears, Dennis E. Showalter, Ronald H. Spector, Barry Strauss, John M. Taylor, Noah Andre Trudeau Online/Digital

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Comments not a genocide. That, however, is probably the only positive thing that can be said about it.” The best English-language summary of the wars of the Vendée can be found in “The Exterminating Angels,” chapter 5 of Bell’s The First Total War (2007). Two 19th-century novels also provide interesting insights into the Vendée.

While a bit thin on plot, Victor Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three (1874) does convey excellent descriptions of war in the bocage, village life, and Vendéan leaders. Anthony Trollope’s La Vendée (1850) is remarkably perceptive about the problems of peasant soldiery and the military odds against the Vendéans, yet his Brit-

ish views and background are also readily apparent. Emory Earl Toops Fort Wayne, Indiana We welcome your comments. Visit MHQmag.com or e-mail [email protected]. Letters are edited for length and clarity.

■ Ask MHQ

Marines in the Dominican Republic? Q

I was part of the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 by the 82nd Airborne Division and the 5th Marines. I know there were more than 40,000 American troops there, including several thousand from the Organization of American States, and we had more than 120 people killed. But when I mention the operation, most people have never heard of it. One teacher of American history at our local college flatly stated the whole thing was a fabrication; that we invaded the Dominican Republic in 1918 or so, but not since then. Can you recommend some sources? M. C. “Bud” Himes CWO, U.S. Army (ret)

A

Two good sources that tell the story in detail are Rag-Tags, Scum, Riff-Raff and Commies, by Eric Thomas Chester, and Military Crisis Manage-

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ment, by Herbert G. Schoonmaker. I too remember the events of 1965 in Santo Domingo, though Vietnam seems to have eclipsed them in most Americans’ minds. On December 20, 1962, Juan Bosch became the first elected president of the Dominican Republic—after some 25 years of dictatorship—and tried to establish a democratic, secular constitution. Conservative landowners, the military, and the clergy found it unacceptable, however, and on September 25, 1963, a military coup overthrew Bosch and replaced him with a junta led by Donald Reid Cabral. On April 24, 1965, the Constitutionalists, militarily led by Francisco Caamaño Deñó, revolted in Santo Domingo and overthrew the junta, only to be opposed by the Dominican military under General Elías Wessen y Wessin. On April 28 Lyndon B.

Johnson’s administration, believing the junta’s claims that the Constitutionalists were Communistinfluenced and would turn the Dominican Republic into another Cuba, committed what came to total 42,000 American troops, supplemented by an Inter-American Peace Force (2,200 troops drawn from Brazil, Honduras, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and El Salvador) representing the Organization of American States; they were to restore stability and “protect American lives.” Fighting continued until September 3, when a provisional presidency was established under Héctor García-Godoy. The American occupation officially lasted until July 6, 1966, although some troops remained for months thereafter. Elections in 1966 placed Joaquín Balaguer Ricardo in power…for the next 12 years.

Official American casualties came to 44 dead (27 killed in action) and 172 wounded, along with six Brazilians and five Paraguayans wounded. More than 2,000 Dominicans were killed, 1,000 of them civilians. From the American standpoint, the Dominican intervention was a success, especially compared with the ultimate outcome of the Indochina wars, but another perspective on it was expressed in Tom Lehrer’s satiric song of that year, “Send the Marines”: “They’ve got to be protected, all their rights respected, ’til someone we like can be elected….” Jon Guttman, HistoryNet’s research director, is the author of many military histories. Something about military history you’ve always wanted to know? Send your question to [email protected], and we’ll have an expert answer it.

At the Front ■ The War List 15 ■ Drawn and Quartered 16 ■ Weapons Check 17

■ The War List

The Plagues of War Marc G. DeSantis examines the history of some epic diseases that impacted empires, armies, and the outcomes of wars.

The Athenian Plague 430 BC A terrifying disease spread through Athens at the outset of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta. Athens became a city of corpses and lawlessness as a plague, as yet unidentified by modern science, devastated its citizenry. When it finally abated in 427, it had taken 4,400 hoplite infantry, 300 cavalrymen, and up to a third of the city’s people, including Athens’s brilliant leader, Pericles.

■ Battle Schemes 18

Caffa, a Genoese trading port on the Black Sea, Yanibeg had corpses infected with Yrsenia pestis hurled over the city walls. From Caffa, the plague traveled by ship across the Mediterranean and Europe. As much as one-third of the population of Europe perished as a result of the extraordinarily lethal disease known to history as the Black Death.

Naples 1495 In 1494 King Charles VIII of France marched into Italy to secure his claim to the throne of Naples. Though he captured the city in 1495, many of his soldiers contracted syphilis. Charles was soon forced out of Italy by an anti-French coalition, and his troops spread the disease through the rest of Europe. Conquest of Mexico 1520 When Spanish conquistadors brought smallpox to central Mexico, the disease took

The Antonine Plague AD 165 Another unidentified plague mauled the Roman Empire during the reign of philosopheremperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Brought home by legionaries returning from war with the Parthians in Mesopotamia, this plague recurred in cities throughout the empire, resulting in a loss of population and a reduction in tax monies going to the imperial treasury, and with that, fewer funds to pay for soldiers. Rome began its long slide to ruin, as civil wars, rebellious soldiers, and political fragmentation weakened the empire.

The Plague of Justinian 541 Emperor Justinian’s wish to reunite the empire’s lost western territories with those of the east fell victim to the Yrsenia pestis microbe—the first appearance of the bubonic plague in the Western world. Millions died, including 230,000 in Constantinople alone. Justinian did eventually regain Italy, but his dream of restoring the other lands of the west to the empire would never be realized.

The Black Death 1346 Mongol Khan Yanibeg of the Golden

GRANGER, NYC

Horde used the plague to his strategic advantage. Besieging

[

■ Supply Lines

The grisly task of burying victims of the Black Death is detailed in a 14th-century illuminated manuscript from Tournai, Flanders.

During the American Civil War, the Confederacy, with its limited industry, had to import most of its rifles, but the Union, with a far larger industrial base, manufactured almost 1.7 million.

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At the Front the lives of 40 percent of the native population in less than a year. While the Aztecs died in huge numbers, the Spaniards were immune, having experienced the disease as children. The disease wrought such havoc that it demoralized the Aztecs and helped Hernán Cortés conquer their empire.

The Great Plague 1665 The bubonic plague broke out again in the midst of England’s second naval war with the Netherlands. As the Dutch impudently sailed along the mouth of the Thames, the Royal Navy struggled to find crews for its ships, in part because so many men had died of the disease and

■ Drawn and Quartered

because naval captains were unwilling to recruit sailors who had once been sick or who came from places hit by the plague. The fact that tax revenues were sharply down, leading in turn to a lack of funds for the Royal Navy, only exacerbated matters.

Smallpox in America 1775 A well-known smallpox epidemic swept America during the Revolutionary War. Most British soldiers had previously encountered the disease as children and were immune, whereas most American soldiers were not. In 1777 George Washington ordered that his troops be inoculated against the disease. (He himself had had a mild case as a young man, while on a trip to Barbados.) When the war later moved to the southern colonies, where smallpox was still prevalent, the inoculations proved their worth and helped make victory at Yorktown possible. Cholera Pandemic 1826 Chol-

Bugling a dirge for Nazi Germany, a skeletal soldier of the Reich stands amid the ruins of Berlin in this American cartoon. Rather than “Taps,” he would probably have trumpeted “Ich Hatt’ einen Kameraden” (“I Had a Comrade”), played at German military funerals.

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Influenza Pandemic 1918 The First World War was history’s deadliest conflict to that time, but the flu pandemic that broke out in the war’s last year actually killed more people. The United States Army saw 35 percent of its soldiers debilitated by an especially lethal variant of the H1N1 inf luenza virus, and the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet was stuck in port for three weeks in May because of the illness. General Erich Ludendorff blamed it for the defeat of the German offensive that July. Around the world, influenza caused an estimated 20 to 100 million deaths. MHQ

COURTESY WARREN BERNARD

era, the result of the Vibrio cholerae bacterium, frequently spreads through contaminated water or poor sanitation. The first documented appearance of the disease was in India in the early 19th century. In 1826 a cholera epidemic that began in Bengal traveled with the movement of armies during Russia’s wars with Persia, Turkey, and Poland. By 1831 it had reached the Baltic Sea. From there it eventually spread to England and Ireland, then crossed the Atlantic to North America. Tens of thousands lost their lives on several continents.

■ Weapons Check

Medieval Crossbow by Chris McNab

Dating to roughly the sixth century bc, the crossbow was, in one sense, the first small arms for the regular soldier. Powered by a sprung wooden “prod” with a bowstring made from a twisted cord, such as hemp, these hand-held weapons could deliver a killing bolt (or quarrel) at low-trajectory ranges of about 70 yards. The revolution in crossbow power came in the Middle Ages, with the introduction of far stronger prods, at first of composite wood, horn, and sinew, later of mild steel. The best of these weapons had lethal ranges that exceeded 400 yards. Bolt heads were typically pyramidal or lancet shaped, which deepened the penetration—some bolts were even capable of penetrating plate and mail armor. During its heyday, from approximately the 11th to the 15th centuries, the crossbow changed the face of warfare. Using a conventional bow and arrow took years of training and muscle development to master, but as long as a man could pick up, cock, and aim a crossbow, he was a force to be reckoned with.

AKG-IMAGES/INTERFOTO

The bolt channel stabilized the bolt as it was launched, assisting accurate flight.

The crossbow was the firepower of the common man and was feared as such; in 1139 Pope Innocent II even banned the use of crossbows against Christians, referring to crossbowmen as “hated of God.” Only with the advent of firearms did the crossbow lose its place as the weapon of choice. Chris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. His latest work is The Book of the Poppy (History Press, 2014), commemorating the recent centenary of the onset of World War I.

The stock, or tiller, enabled the bowman to mount the weapon on the shoulder, under the armpit, or on the hip.

A windlass was used to pull back the string on very powerful bows. It took about 12 seconds to cock and load the weapon. The trigger was a critical invention, as it allowed the operator to take aim accurately, free from muscle tension.

The bowman pressed the foot stirrup into the ground to securely anchor the bow while he drew back the string.

The prod varied in draw weight from about 150 pounds for hand-cocked versions to more than 700 pounds for mechanically cranked crossbows.

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At the Front ■ Battle Schemes

Mapping the Cold War

RICHARD ERDOES, “HOW STRATEGIC MATERIAL CIRCULATES,” LIFE, 1953

As the Cold War came to dominate international politics, mapmakers for major American magazines turned to visual metaphors. In a 1953 issue of Life, illustrator Richard Erdoes’s “How Strategic Material Circulates” featured a tentacled pump sucking in the ships, planes, and rockets produced by the Western military-industrial complex and depositing them in the Soviet bloc, as shady fedora-wearing men appear to hatch clandestine deals. The image (republished in Timothy Barney’s new book, Mapping the Cold War, University of North Carolina Press, May 2015), symbolized how the complex intermeshing of Cold War interests sometimes belied ideological rhetoric. As governments turned a blind eye, the nefarious “sixth column” continued an illicit, freewheeling trade in crucial supplies between Iron Curtain countries and the West, all to line the pockets of capitalists loudly opposed to the communist countries with whom they’re shown trading here. The pump is situated in Antwerp, a free port where questionable materials could circulate with very little regulation.

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Behind the Lines From Separate and Unequal to Shipmates The U.S. Navy’s surprise steps toward desegregation in World War II by Thomas Fleming

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LEFT: LT. WAYNE MILLER/U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

I

n spring 1945, at age 17, I volunteered equal. As I sat down on my lower bunk, ligious heritages: Almost all blacks were for the U.S. Navy. Nazi Germany had I saw that I had black sailors sleeping on Protestants and went to public schools. surrendered, but World War II was my right and left and in the bunk above In Jersey City blacks lived in a broad still raging in the Pacific as the me. We all gazed at each other, trying swath of housing in the center of the Americans closed in on Japan’s home city. They worked in factories alongside to figure out what to say or do next. I islands. Kamikaze planes were diving whites. Blacks voted in all the elections. asked myself what my politician father into ships, killing sailors by the dozens. My father had 5,000 black voters in his would do—and held out my hand. “I’m Most of my thoughts and feelings were ward. He did favors for them without Tom Fleming from Jersey City. Where with those embattled men 5,000 miles the slightest hesitation. That was how are you guys from?” We shook hands and away. When I enlisted, I had no idea I the Democratic Party worked. introduced ourselves. Around me other was about to participate in a historic exBut relations between black and white recruits were doing the same thing. So perience that in some ways would prove began our historic experiment. teenagers were not friendly. One of my more momentous than the final struggle As a Catholic, I had been taught to bemore vivid memories was the night the against the Axis powers. lieve in racial equality, even though the sound of thudding feet in the street outOrders from the navy directed me to Catholic schools in which I was educated side my home drew me to a window. I report to New York’s Pennsylvania Stahad very few blacks. Our teachers said saw about 20 black teens running as fast tion, where I boarded a train with other that this was because of our differing reas possible down the center of the street. new recruits that took us After them came at least 40 upstate to boot camp at the white teens, members of a Sampson Naval Training gang called the Rangers. Station. Soon after we arI had no illusions about rived, we were divided into race relations. But I knew our companies and marched country would be better if we to our barracks, as Seneca could improve them. Yet there Lake gleamed in the disin boot camp on Seneca Lake, tance. A chief boatswain’s no one preached a sermon mate led me and some 150 to us about the importance other would-be swabbies to of our integrated group. In our barracks and checked retrospect, I see that this off our names as we hefted omission was clever rather seabags and settled into the than careless: It was more spartan interior—where effective to imply there was everyone got a shock. We nothing strange or unusual were an integrated comabout integrating the navy. pany—a third black, twoBut we understood how sigthirds white. nificant it was. That may Without announcing it, explain why we all tried to the navy was launching a get along with each other. program to upend the preOver the next eight weeks, I vailing race-relations fordid not hear—or hear about— mula in the United States— a single hostile or acrimoniCook Petty Officer 3rd Class Richard Salter served as a gun station separate but (supposedly) ous exchange. talker on USS Tulagi (CVE-72) off southern France in August 1944.

The first U.S. Navy ship in World War II with a predominately African-American crew was USS Mason (DE-529), commissioned at the Boston Navy Yard in March 1944. Mason escorted convoys across the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean.

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Behind the Lines I became particularly friendly with Jefferson Jackson, who, like the other two black men in bunks near mine, was from Detroit. Tall and thin, Jeff was a little older than the rest of us. He told me that his father, an undertaker, had kept him out of the draft for two years by pleading that his help was needed in the funeral home. But Jeff disliked people calling him a draft dodger, and he eventually persuaded his father to let him volunteer for the navy. Jeff was fascinated when I told him

possible. When we had extinguished the blaze deep in the compartment, they set another fire between us and the entering hatch. That second blaze was frequently a cause of panic among trainees. But we met the challenge so well, wheeling quickly and covering the flames with a layer of smothering foam, that our trainers shouted their congratulations. All of our training assignments went well. We were a team. Off duty after dinner, we played softball on an improvised field near the barracks. One burly black

No one in Washington thought whites and blacks could get along in the close quarters of a ship about the prejudice my Irish grandfather had encountered when he came to America in the 1880s—not many people wanted to give jobs to Irish immigrants at that time. Jeff described a similar problem his grandfather had encountered in Atlanta, Georgia, after the Civil War freed him and his family from slavery. Then, when the family moved north to escape Southern prejudice, they found that even in the North, a lot of jobs were closed to blacks or were segregated by position, with blacks mostly in the lower paid ranks. He added somewhat wryly that there was still a lot of prejudice around—more subtle and sometimes invisible but still there, barring blacks from good jobs and promotions. Meanwhile, boot camp went on. Among our tougher assignments was learning how to put out a fire on the lower decks of a warship. Replicas of ship compartments in our training area were flooded with knee-high water, then oil was spread on the water and set afire. I still remember the day we had to wade into one of those infernos with a huge hose. Jeff Jackson was at the nozzle, I was behind him, and four other sailors were behind me, two white, two black. The men in charge made it as realistic as

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sailor, whom everyone called Babe, was a slugger of the first order. He repeatedly belted the ball out of sight. We all wanted him on our team. Soon our boot camp days were over. After a brief visit home, I joined about a hundred other sailors on a train headed to Portland, Oregon, where I became a fire-control man aboard the light cruiser USS Topeka. I noticed that none of our black barracks mates accompanied us. But there were hundreds of ships in the wartime navy, and I assumed they had gone elsewhere. Then I realized there were no black sailors at all aboard the Topeka, except for the 40 or so stewards who served as waiters in the officers’ mess. When I asked one of the officers in command of the fire control division about this, he told me that most black men in the navy were assigned to work at shore bases. No one in Washington, D.C., it seemed, thought whites and blacks could get along in the close quarters of a ship.

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he Topeka steamed to Long Beach, California, where it joined the Seventh Fleet. By that time the atomic bomb had ended the war with Japan, and the Seventh Fleet had orders to become part

of the American occupying force. About a week before we sailed, news raced through the Topeka about an extraordinary sight in the harbor. “There’s a landing craft heading for the USS Alabama with 50 black sailors in it,” one excited petty officer told me. We watched as the stubby boat pulled alongside the huge battleship, and the black seamen ascended a ladder to the deck. For the next hour, the Topeka vibrated with speculation about the possibility that the navy was going to integrate ships at sea as well as bases on land. Then, new scuttlebutt rang through the ship that the black sailors were going back to land. Once more, we rushed to the Topeka’s main deck, where we saw the same landing craft plowing steadily away from the Alabama and back toward the Long Beach docks. It was full of the black sailors. The tilt of their white hats seemed downward, as if a blow had bent their heads. The admiral in command of the USS Alabama, it turned out, was from Alabama, and when he saw the black sailors coming up the ladder, he had roared that no black seamen were coming aboard his battleship unless they were mess stewards. I wondered if my friend Jeff Jackson had been among those black men. I felt ashamed for my country. There would be no black seamen for a long time to come. Even after President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981 in 1948, integrating all branches of the U.S. military, every ship of the line remained white. But the navy had heard Truman’s order loud and clear, and it accelerated the integration process in certain training programs, particularly the one for aviation machinists. Still, a 1949 congressional committee report revealed that the admirals had work to do. Of the meager 17,000 blacks in the navy, only 19 were officers and two of those were nurses, while a total of 10,000 were in racially segregated assignments. The Marine Corps had an even more dismal record—a total of 2,190 enlisted black men and no black officers. Instead of issuing denunciations, various congress-

U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

These survivors of an October 1944 kamikaze attack on USS Intrepid in the Philippines were awarded Bronze Stars for valor. As combat volunteers manning an antiaircraft gun tub, they shot off the enemy plane’s left wing and kept firing until it crashed into the tub, killing 10 men.

men chose to praise the “progress” made and to express confidence that integration would gradually become a reality. Eventually, that happened, with the navy leading the way. It steadily increased the number of black sailors aboard its ships, and black officers were added through a special NROTC program. The other services were slower and more reluctant to follow suit. General Omar Bradley, army chief of staff in 1948–1949, declared that soldiers could not be expected to integrate as long as segregation was the rule in civilian society. But the need for manpower in the Korean War overcame such objections and changed a lot of generals’ minds, especially when they saw that integrated companies fought as well or better than the rest of the men in the front lines. The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision integrating the nation’s schools and the 1964 Civil Rights

Act banning segregation in other parts of American society also became motivating forces for all the military services. In 2008 America’s soldiers, sailors, and airmen celebrated the 60th anniversary of President Truman’s Executive Order 9981 by proudly declaring themselves the best-integrated organization in the nation. Seventeen percent of the active duty force was black (two years later, in the 2010 census, blacks accounted for 13.6 of the total U.S. population). While just under 6 percent of the admirals and generals were black in 2008, talented young black officers were emerging from the service academies in a steady stream, and black women were being accepted in the ranks as readily as men. I have been a pleased observer of this rarely discussed story of race in the military. When I wrote Time and Tide, a novel about the navy in the World War II Pacific, one of my characters was a black

water tender first class named Amos Cartwright. Thanks to his mechanical abilities, he had managed to talk his way out of being a mess steward, and he reigned as the virtual ruler of the engine room aboard the fictional USS Jefferson City. In one of the sea battles off Guadalcanal, Cartwight dies heroically, saving everyone else in the engine room from agonizing death after a steam valve ruptures. Amos was my tribute to those days in 1945, when I discussed race and ethnic prejudice with my friend Jeff Jackson in our barracks at Sampson Naval Training Station. Today there are thousands of Amos Cartwrights in our fleet, all proud sharers of the navy word for brother: shipmate. MHQ Thomas Fleming’s latest history is The Great Divide: The Conflict between Washington and Jefferson that Defined a Nation.

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HistoryNet Reader

A sampling of decisive moments, remarkable adventures, memorable characters, surprising encounters, and great ideas from our sister publications

Cobham’s Flying Circus

America’s First Civil War

Aviation pioneer and visionary Alan Cobham inspired thousands to take to the skies. The RAF Museum at Hendon honors the aviator in an exhibition through September 11, 2015.

In 1778 it was clear to the British that three years of fighting in New England and the MidAtlantic had settled nothing. Loyalist uprisings that were expected in the Mid-Atlantic never materialized, but they did in the South.

Cheered by thousands of spectators, the de Havilland 50J floatplane swooped low over London’s Westminster Bridge to alight gracefully on the River Thames, close to the Houses of Parliament. It was October 1, 1926, and 32-year-old Alan Cobham had just made aviation history, flying more than 27,000 miles to complete the first flight from Great Britain to Australia—and back. Apart from the sheer visual impact of setting down in front of Parliament, it was a shrewd political gesture by Cobham, one intended to alert the government and the public to the growing potential of long-distance air travel. Cobham was already an accomplished long-distance flier when he established the Australian record. Yet his route to a career in aviation was unorthodox. As a young apprentice in London’s garment industry, Cobham became fascinated by airships and man-carrying kites. A visit to an aerodrome in 1910 inspired him and a friend to build an aviette—“a kind of bicycle with wings, the pedals driving an enormous propeller.” Unsurprisingly, their machine never flew. But later, as patriot, pathfinder, test pilot, flight refueling pioneer, aviation crusader, and showman, the charming and persuasive Cobham inspired thousands of young men who volunteered for the RAF during WWII. From “Cobham’s Flying Circus,” by Derek O’Connor, Aviation History, May 2015

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As the British probed for American weaknesses elsewhere, they thought they had discovered the soft underbelly in the South, where loyalist sentiments were strong and patriot military forces were weak and scattered. In December a British expedition captured Savannah, Georgia. It was to be the first step in a campaign to conquer the entire region. Instead, it touched off America’s first civil war, as patriot and loyalist militias squared off against each other. Militiamen rarely wore uniforms, and their rationales for fighting could be obscure. True, many fought because they disagreed over whether to form a new nation independent from Great Britain. But some fought because they had personal, social, or economic grievances or because they had private scores to settle. Others sought to protect their families and homes. More than a few probably just aimed for plunder. Whatever the motivation, the results were tragic. British redcoats weren’t the worst perpetrators of violence in the Southern war. Most atrocities there were committed by Americans against Americans.

Fight in the Falklands Thirty-three years ago this spring, Argentina and Britain waged war over a contested patch of tundra in the stormy South Atlantic— many still wonder why. The conditions were hellish. For weeks the soldiers of Britain’s famed Scots Guards regiment had snatched sleep amid bone-chilling winds in holes that repeatedly filled with freezing water. Men were suffering from frostbite and trench foot, and rations were running low. Adding to their miseries, on this particular day they had come under intense artillery shelling. While this might well describe a scenario from World War I, the date was in fact June 13, 1982, and the trenches in which the British troops huddled were carved not across some stretch of French countryside but into near-frozen tundra by the base of Mount Tumbledown in the subarctic Falkland Islands. Despite the challenges, morale was high, for the British troops were preparing to end their misery by driving Argentine forces from the rugged escarpment before them. The guardsmen had been told the enemy force comprised young, ill-equipped conscripts who would scurry at the first muzzle flash. They had been grievously misinformed. From “The Crags of Tumbledown,” by Ron Soodalter, Military History, May 2015.

From “Southern Showdown,” by Edward G. Lengel, American History, June 2015

For more about HistoryNet magazines, go to HistoryNet.com.

Experience Facing Pickett’s Charge A just published journal by a young officer of the 20th Indiana Regiment provides fresh firsthand observations of many Civil War battles and actions by Erasmus C. Gilbreath

THE PRITZKER MILITARY LIBRARY & MUSEUM ARCHIVES, GILBREATH COLLECTION

On the morning of July 3, 1863, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Erasmus C. Gilbreath received his commission as major in the 20th Indiana Regiment. Gilbreath, then 21, had joined as one of the 20th’s original volunteers when the unit was formed in his hometown of Valparaiso, Indiana, in 1861. Before his regiment mustered out in 1864, he fought in 26 engagements and major battles of the Civil War and was severely wounded at Fredericksburg. During that time, he wrote a journal that is distinguished by perspicacity and a reporter’s eye for detail. It chronicles not only what Gilbreath did and witnessed but also his maturation from a young would-be law student to a capable, courageous, and respected army officer. Gilbreath was justly proud of his hard-fighting regiment and this bravadofree account of his experience at Gettysburg typifies his perceptive observations on combat and other aspects of American military life.

in 30 hours and arrived about 4:30 p.m. The 12th Corps was placed at Culp’s Hill and the [1st] Corps near them. The 3rd Corps was left of the 2nd facing west, and the majority of the Corps was about Peach Orchard and extended from there to the Devil’s Den near Little Round Top. The Regiment occupied a place facing west at the edge of Plum Run and the Devil’s Den. Plum Run was a small ravine running in the front of Round Top and 500 yards away. Its winding through the rocks is called Devil’s Den. Genl. Lee decided to attack our left and ordered Longstreet to make the attack on the 2nd of July. This attack was so long

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e, of the 20th Indiana, were camped at Bridgeport and Taneytown on the 30th of June and 1st of July. In the afternoon of the latter day, our Division, commanded by Genl. Birney, was ordered to the front and to march rapidly. We had about 12½ miles to march and arrived on the grounds near the Cemetery at about 10 o’clock the night of the 30th of June. The other Divisions of the 3rd Corps did not arrive until 8 or 9 o’clock, July 2nd. The other Corps of the Army arrived at Cemetery Ridge during the 1st, the last to get there being the 6th Corps, which marched 32 miles

Erasmus C. Gilbreath rose through the ranks in the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Indian Wars, and the Spanish-American War.

delayed that all the Federal Army had arrived on the ground. It did not begin until 4 p.m. The first point of contact was near the Peach Orchard, but the host advancing toward Little Round Top soon came upon our Brigade line at the Devil’s Den, and we were very hotly engaged. Our Brigade was composed of the 20th Indiana, the 86th New York, 124th New York, 99th Pennsylvania, 4th Maine, and the 2nd United States Sharpshooters. The line of the 99th Pennsylvania was on our right until the battle begun, when they were taken to the left. To fill the space occupied by the 99th Pennsylvania, two of our Companies under Capt. Bell were extended from our right flank as skirmishers. Capt. Bell had under his command Company B, his own Company, and Company H, Capt. Meikel’s Company. Capt. Meikel was absent from the fight. Capt. Bell handled his men well. He had no breastworks or protection of any kind, our men standing up, loading and firing as cool as possible to imagine. The Rebels advanced against us over a slight ridge about 600 yards away, then down into a ravine and up against our line. We did not fire from either side till they were about 200 yards away, when both began to fire at once. We had 268 men in line of battle, and in 25 minutes we lost, killed and wounded, 146. Ten men were missing after the battle making our total loss 156. Over one half of all we had were killed and wounded. The Brigade lost 490, killed and wounded, and 119 missing. Many of the latter were wounded. The Rebel Troops opposed to our Brigade were the 7th, 8th, 9th, 11th and 59th

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Experience Georgia Regts., and their loss was 663 killed and wounded. Amongst our killed was Col. John Wheeler, who was shot by a sharpshooter through the right temple. He was a fine Officer and a brave man. He was killed early in the action, and rather before the Regiment had had much firing. His death was noticed in the most complimentory [sic] way by his superiors. At the time of his death the Regiment was in line and he was riding behind it. Soon after he fell, the Major named Taylor came up to me and said, “Gil you will have to take charge of the line, as I am wounded.” With that he rode off. I was senior present so took charge of the Regiment and commanded it through the severe firing which followed the absence of Taylor and until the close of the fighting at this point. On looking about, I found that the Adjutant John E. Luther had left the field with the body of Col. Wheeler. I at first mounted Col. Wheeler’s horse but as he became so restive, I could not hold him. I dismounted and let him go. I sent someone, I do not know who, back to Genl. Ward to request ammunition and with the notice of Col. Wheeler’s death. Soon Capt. Alfred M. Raphall, an Aide of Genl. Ward, came to me on the gallop, and as he rode up behind the line firing fast as it could, he said, “Hello Gilbreath, I am sorry Wheeler is gone,

blanket, I sent him to the rear to a Hospital. Raphall had his arm taken off, and later was appointed to the Regular Army. In the changes of the Regiments, he was finally assigned to the 11th Infantry and to my Company. Twenty-one years after the battle, I was in Chicago one day and picking up the Chicago Tribune found that Raphall was stopping at the Palmer House [Hotel]. I went to see him, and we had our first meeting since I lifted him off his horse at Gettysburg.

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mong those mortally wounded was Lieut. Ezra B. Robbins. He was shot fairly in the breast. I was just behind him and helped him to the rear to a tree about 10 feet away and left him behind it. The enemy had begun firing at about 200 yards from us and kept moving slowly forward, checked by our fire. As our losses were so heavy and ammunition gone, I ordered the men to fall back and follow the flag closely. The Rebels laughed at us as we marched back, and their fire was concentrated on our color. Sgt. William I. Horine, the Colorbearer, was shot through the right leg and fell. As he did so, the flag went down when it was seized by a boyish Corporal who carried it to the rear. As the flag fell, the Rebels laughed out again and

You must hold this line long as you can using ammunition of the killed and wounded but as you are in command, Genl. Ward directs me to say that you must hold this line long as you can using ammunition of the killed and wounded, and when you can stay no longer, fall back toward the small cabin we passed coming in.” Capt. Raphall had no more than completed this instruction when a ball from a Rebel rifle struck him in the left arm. He asked me to help him off his horse, which I did, and putting [him] in my

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thought they had it, but we soon met the 5th New Hampshire Regiment and the Regulars and stopped behind their line to collect our men. The Rebels advanced no further then. We stopped at the edge of the woods to collect the men and call the rolls of the Companies. This was being quietly done when Capt. Bell came to us. He ranked me and so took command. His first act was to seize the Color and try to

sing “Rally round the Flag Boys,” & etc. Now Bell was a fine man, and a brave one, but he could not sing at all, so his music had no effect. He rushed to the rear with the flag in his hand, and waving it hard as he could and trying to sing, made an amusing sight. The men seeing him run back with the flag, not understanding that his efforts were the most patriotic possible, they started themselves to the rear. We collected then, and the sorrowful little band went to a rocky prominence a little north of Little Round Top and were there placed for the night. This prominence was not so high as Round Top, but was on the line from the latter to Cemetery Ridge, and gave a good view in all the northern direction. Thus ended the second day of July for us. The Rebels, 18,000 strong, had driven off Sickles’ 3rd Corps of 10,000 men, but were stopped soon as they reached a stronger force. After dark, while at the rocks, the mail was brought up to us. There was for us a whole wagonload, and on opening mine I found my Commission as Major of the 20th Indiana. During the battle described, Meikel’s Company H was on the right; Bell’s Company B was on the left; and my Company I,

EDWIN FORBES/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Battle’s end: The view from the summit of Little Round Top on the evening of July 3, 1863, near the position held earlier by Gilbreath’s 20th Indiana Regiment

in the center. My Company was thus the Color Company. It lost all but 11 men of the 27 in it on going into the battle. Capt. Meikel was acting on the Staff of Genl. Ward, and Capt. Bell was detached with skirmishers. The 3rd of July dawned with a glaring sun, and we were left alone in our rocky bivouac. From our position, we being considerably above the ridge on which our general line was formed, had an unobstructed view clear off to the Seminary and up our line to the Cemetery. Our men and our batteries were moving about and into position. We could also see that on Seminary Ridge from 1000 to 1400 yards from our line, the Rebels were active to a degree. Dust arose as their column or batteries moved about, and there was only an occasional shot as if to get the range from either side. At 10 a.m. all sounds seemed to cease, and a calm almost appalling enwrapped the two armies. We could not rest since the dawn. The tension was too great, and

several hours of this silence passed to be broken at 1:00 p.m. by two signal guns way off to the left. At once all the batteries on the Rebel side, 150 guns in one long line, opened and sent a continuous stream of shot and shell against our line ½-mile from us toward the Cemetery. Our 80 guns in the position assailed, replied, and the sight was one never to be forgotten. So mighty an artillery contest had never before been waged. For two hours all the Rebel batteries continued this fire. Our batteries gradually ceased firing. Finally, at 3 p.m., and soon as their firing ceased, we could see the Rebel column form for attack and Pickett’s Charge began and our batteries at once begun firing again. Pickett’s column for the attack was about 200 yards wide, and 700 yards deep. They marched slowly, deliberately and seemingly indifferent to the fire of our artillery. The shot and shell from our batteries tore great gaps in their ranks and still they bore on. From where we were, we could see that far, full 1400 yards, they made no halt at all. Up the slight raise to the Emmitsburg Road, they walked down the little declevity on

the east side of the road and on to our batteries. Many fell, of course, some fell away and returned to their rear. They had almost reached our guns when an Aide called us to attention and our Brigade under command of Col. Berdan faced to the right and started on the run for the batteries. At the end of one half mile, the command was given by the left flank, march, and into the batteries we flew. As we approached, we saw our main line broken, Rebels were all in and around the guns. A Rebel flag was being waved by a man on a gun. There were men mingled in every sort of confusion firing, yelling, cheering, and the ground was covered with every sort of debris to be found on a battlefield. The Rebels threw down their arms, and were prisoners. Pickett’s Charge had passed into history. Our Regiment was placed into position at a stone fence in front of our batteries and there remained till dark. MHQ Excerpted with permission from Dignity of Duty: The Journals of Erasmus Corwin Gilbreath, published by Pritzker Military Museum & Library, copyright 2015.

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April 30, 1945: Soviet troops storm the ruined but heavily defended Reichstag, symbol of Germany. That afternoon, with Berlin and his thousand-year Reich lost, Hitler takes his own life.

BILDARCHIV PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

Last Days in Berlin The bitter end for Nazi Germany was an apocalyptic high-casualty street fight. The Red Army won by Robert M. Citino

battle of berlin april–may 1945

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passed since the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, waging the most brutal war in history, murdering, starving, and enslaving millions of Soviet civilians. The distant din of battle was an omen. A great reckoning was at hand. The Battle of Berlin was not only a savage fight on its own terms but the climax of one of history’s greatest role reversals. While the Wehrmacht dominated the early years of the war with its lightning mechanized operations, its panzers and Stuka dive-bombers, those days were long gone. The Red Army had survived the initial onslaught in 1941, and since then had gone from victory to victory, encircling a German army at Stalingrad in 1942, clearing Soviet soil of the invader, and smashing an entire army group in Belorussia in 1944. Now, with Berlin in its sights, the Red Army was about to crown the transformation, end the war, and take revenge on its hated adversary. As 1945 began, powerful Soviet offensives smashed into the Reich itself, overrunning the exposed provinces of East Prussia and Pomerania and coming to rest on the line of the Oder and Neisse Rivers, 50 miles east of Berlin. While the Soviets thrust into Germany from the east, the Western Allies were doing the same from the west, driving over the German border and crossing the Rhine at Remagen in March 1945. The Reich’s military nightmare, a war on two fronts, had come home with a vengeance. We often speak of a race for Berlin between the Soviets and the Western Allies, but that’s a misconception. The Allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, had no desire to waste time and men on a purely political objective that might cost him thousands of Allied casualties. In late March Ike’s forces were still 300 miles from Berlin, a lot farther away than the Russians; seizing the German capital would have required a risky operation that was foreign to his Stalin set up Marshals I. S. Konev (top left) and G. K. Zhukov (top right) as rivals in a race to Berlin. sober sense of strategy. British prime minister Winston ChurZhukov’s First Belorussian Front began pressing west toward the Reich’s capital in mid-April, while chill exploded when he heard Konev and the First Ukrainian Front pushed in from the southeast. Zhukov arrived first, and Konev of Ike’s decision. To the British, struck west to join U.S. forces at the Elbe.

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TOP: LEFT: AKG-IMAGES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/SOVFOTO; RIGHT: AKG-IMAGES; MAP: JANET NORQUIST/REPRESENTED BY CREATIVE FREELANCERS INC.

ver the centuries, humanity has amassed a great deal of folk wisdom about vengeance. “Revenge is sweet,” we claim, or “What goes around comes around.” We even have a contemporary version, a crude saying about the nature of “payback.” The masters of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler and his minions, might have been pondering such notions early on the morning of April 16, 1945, as the sprawling city of Berlin awakened to an ominous rumble from the east. It was the sound of artillery fire. The Red Army had shaken off its slumber along the Oder River and was once again on the march. Four long years had

April 16: Marshal Zhukov’s forces begin the Berlin offensive, crossing the Oder east of the city and blasting the Germans with the most intense barrage of the war. But on the river’s west side, German forces on Seelow Heights blast back as the Soviets cross the Oder floodplain.

renouncing Berlin was yet another sign of American strategic naiveté. There was little Churchill could do, however, with British strength waning and the United States firmly in control of the Western coalition.

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talin knew all these things. Indeed, on March 28 he had received a personal note from Eisenhower on the very subject, telling him that Allied forces would drive east toward the Elbe River, with the aim of cutting Germany in half, rather than detouring northeast to Berlin. But Stalin was suspicious, as always. With inter-Allied relations already falling apart on a number of issues, especially the disposition of postwar Poland, he was certain the Western Allies would take Berlin if they spotted an opening. On April 1 Stalin convened a planning session in the Kremlin with Marshals Georgy K. Zhukov and Ivan S. Konev (commanding First Belorussian and First Ukrainian Fronts, respec-

tively—the Russian equivalent of army groups), along with General Aleksei I. Antonov (newly appointed chief of the Soviet General Staff) and General Sergei M. Shtemenko, Antonov’s operations chief. The plan they drew up called for both army groups to launch simultaneous offensives, Zhukov driving out of his bridgeheads across the Oder at Küstrin, Konev crossing the Neisse River to the south. Standing due east of Berlin and having the shorter route to the objective, Zhukov’s front was the logical main effort. From his starting point on the Neisse, Konev was much farther from Berlin, and with his front still embroiled in the fighting for the German province of Silesia, would need to regroup for the new operation. In the course of the discussion, however, Stalin leaned over the map and erased the sector line between the two fronts just west of Lübben, 35 miles southeast of Berlin. In case the Germans managed to parry Zhukov’s blow, Stalin ordered, Konev had to be ready to attack Berlin from the south. It was

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battle of berlin april–may 1945

The generals from the Reich’s glory days— Manstein, Rommel, Hoth—were gone a not very subtle attempt to stoke a rivalry between his two commanders and get both of them moving with maximum dispatch. Stalin wanted speed, setting April 16 as the start date for the Berlin operation. In the next 15 days, the Soviets assembled no fewer than 18 field armies—2.5 million men; 41,600 guns; 6,250 tanks; and 7,500 aircraft—for the assault, the most prodigious feat of Soviet logistics in the entire war.

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cross the Oder sat an enemy who was no longer up to the challenge. Years of defeat had bled the German army dry; loss of territory had led to diminished resources, especially oil; and the entire organization was looking threadbare from top to bottom. The response of the German High Command to the pounding of the past three years was simple: It ordered the army to stand fast wherever it was. The time for large-scale campaigns of maneuver, “operations in the classic style,” had come and gone. The Wehrmacht no longer had the matériel, fuel, or training for such demanding campaigns. The generals from the Reich’s glory days—Erich von Manstein, Erwin Rommel, Hermann Hoth—were gone. Replacing them were names history has all but forgotten, like Walther Model and Ferdinand Schörner. They became Hitler’s favorites, not because of any special brilliance but because they were “standers,” men who would stay put where he told them to, and because they would do anything, even shoot their own soldiers, to ensure that

discipline was maintained at the front. But standers were no replacement for well-supplied armies, factories, and productive oilfields. Inside Berlin (actually, under Berlin, in the so-called Führerbunker), Hitler and his brain trust—Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, General Alfred Jodl, and Chief of the Army Staff General Hans Krebs—were fighting a poor man’s war. They spent their days in a desperate search for enough live bodies to man the front: boys in the Hitler Youth; air force mechanics serving as infantry (and dubbed paratroopers); and Volkssturm units, old men and teenage boys with hasty training and inadequate weapons. The German position facing Zhukov on the Oderbruch, the floodplain of the Oder, was no better or worse than any other. Army Group Vistula held a line from Frankfurt an der Oder to the Baltic Sea. Its commander, General Gotthard Heinrici, was a skilled defensive specialist—“Old Hard as Bones,” his men called him. He had Third Panzer Army deployed on his left (north) and Ninth Army on his right, with LVI Panzer Corps in reserve. A cohesive line, a wide river, the backing of strong reserve—it seemed like a textbook defensive position. Closer inspection showed the flaws, however. Not one of Heinrici’s units was at approved strength, and his divisions were little more than battalion-size battle groups. His guns had only a few dozen rounds, and his reserves were a motley crew: Waffen-SS divisions like Nordland (made up of Norwegian, Danish, and French personnel), Nederland (largely Dutch), and a Panzer division, Müncheberg, that could barely scrounge up 50 operational tanks. No one on his staff expected the line to hold against a major Soviet assault, and fatalism was taking root. One German colonel told his officers: “If a few soldiers start to run away, then you must shoot them. If you see many soldiers taking off...then you’d better shoot yourself.”

The führer with his Hitlerjugend. “Boys did not volunteer, but had no choice,“ one Berliner reported. “[Those] found hiding were hanged as traitors by the SS as a warning.”

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he Battle of Berlin unfolded in three distinct phases. The first, the Soviet offensive along the Oder and Neisse, started on April 16. Zhukov led things off at 3 a.m. with a furious bombardment by 9,000 guns that left his own crews bleeding from the ears. Channeling Stalin, the marshal based his plan on speed and shock—stunning the defenders with a quick 30-minute hurricane of fire, bursting out of the Küstrin bridgehead with his infantry while hundreds of searchlights blinded the defenders, then inserting his mobile reserves (First and Second Guards Tank Armies) for the pursuit to Berlin. Despite Zhukov’s overwhelming strength, the plan fell apart early. The bombardment was too short, and Heinrici had pulled back his frontline troops so they could avoid the initial storm. He had worked out the tactic in previous battles, even

HILMAR PABEL/BILDARCHIV PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

Hitler’s Volkssturm, civilian militia between the ages of 16 and 60, was unofficially called Eintopf—casserole—a mix of “old meat and green vegetables.” Their uniforms no more than armbands, their weapons often old, the recruits were ordered to dig in and defend Berlin.

though he often had to explain himself to Hitler, who saw it as a form of retreat. Once the bombardment lifted, Zhukov’s infantry had an uphill fight against German forces on the Seelow Heights, the high ground on the Oder’s west bank. The heights gave the Germans an advantage in observation, and they used it to call down a killing fire on the advancing Soviets below. The searchlights also misfired, as smoke from Soviet artillery reflected the light back into the eyes of the attackers. Losses were heavy, and Zhukov later admitted that he had underestimated the strength of the German position. Knowing that no plan survives contact with the enemy, Zhukov changed the operation on the fly. He inserted his two tank armies into the fray as breakthrough elements, rather than holding them back for the pursuit. In the short term, the tanks only increased the congestion on a very crowded battlefield, however, and Zhukov’s day ended on a frustrating note. He had failed to secure the Seelow Heights on the first day, and that led to a testy midnight phone call from Stalin—rarely good news for a Soviet commander in the field. Konev, by contrast, slashed through German defenses with ease. Lacking a bridgehead, he planned crossings at multiple sites across the Neisse, over 130 in all. While military dispersion is usually unwise, it was just the ticket against a German force spread so thinly. Just to make sure, Konev also bombarded the defenders for a full two and a half hours. With 150 guns per mile, the fire vaporized the defensive position, killing thousands of Germans and leaving others “speechless with terror.” Once the bombardment lifted, the lead units spilled into their assault boats and paddled across the river behind a thick smokescreen laid down by the Red Air Force. The Soviets soon had bridgeheads on the far bank and were marking landing zones for the follow-on waves. Within hours,

sappers had lashed cables over the river, the first ferries were in operation, and T-34 tanks were crossing the Neisse. By noon Konev’s two tank armies, the Third and Fourth Guards, were across the Neisse and by nightfall heading at speed for the next river line, the Spree. It was a classic river crossing, as smooth and seamless as any in the entire war, and Konev’s phone call with Stalin that night could not have been warmer. “Zhukov is not getting on very well,” the boss stated gravely, before ordering Konev to wheel his tank armies to the right and race directly for Berlin. The next few days saw the Soviets demolish Army Group Vistula. Zhukov faced more slow going on April 17. The Germans still held the Seelow Heights, reinforced by units from Heinrici’s reserve—Divisions Nordland and Nederland. Zhukov’s superiority in artillery, aircraft, and tanks gradually began to tell, however, and by dawn on April 18 he had broken through at Diedersdorf and was heading west on Highway 1. Zhukov had taken heavy losses on the heights, some 30,000 killed, but he was now in the clear and there was no force able to stop him. On April 21 he had the honor of being the first to bombard Berlin, with his 152mm and 203mm howitzers firing at extreme range. Konev, meanwhile, was embarked on a wild ride of his own, with two tank armies motoring in the clear, angling to the right, and coming up on Berlin from the south. The advance guard of Third Guards Tank Army crossed the Spree River without even slowing down and penetrated 20 miles, still without meeting any serious resistance. On April 21 Konev’s tanks actually overran the huge underground bunker at Zossen, the headquarters and nerve center of the German General Staff, a mere 12 miles from Berlin. The twin Soviet breakthroughs were decisive to the battle

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battle of berlin april–may 1945

Weidling had to rely on a patchwork of manpower: cadets, postmen, utility workers, and Volkssturm up near Potsdam, closing the trap around Berlin. Weidling and LVI Panzer Corps also managed to reach the city, slipping in just ahead of the Soviets on the night of April 23. In a classic example of the toxic nature of Nazi command, Hitler summoned Weidling to the Führerbunker to have him arrested and executed for carrying out an unauthorized retreat. Ignoring his staff’s advice to flee, Weidling responded to the summons in person. His forceful presentation of the dire situation at the front impressed Hitler, who instead appointed him commander of the Berlin Defense Area. Weidling later said he wished he’d been shot. The city’s defenses were a mess. On paper, Berlin had eight defensive sectors, A through H, labeled clockwise starting in the northeast. The city perimeter and suburbs formed the first defensive position. The inner circle of the S-Bahn line formed the second defensive ring farther inside the city proper, while the inner citadel known as Sector Z (for zentrum, “center”) formed the third and final defensive position. Z was the heart of the city, bounded by the Spree River in the north and the Landwehr Canal in the south and containing the government sector, the Reichstag and the chancellery. Finally, dominating the landscape were three gargantuan flak towers, at the Berlin Zoo, Humboldthain, and Friedrichshain, made of reinforced concrete and nearly indestructible. Weidling had nowhere near enough troops to man these positions. A city the size of Berlin required at least eight divisions—a field army in other words. But with Ninth Army dying in the Halbe pocket, Weidling had to rely on a patchwork of second-rate manGerman general Gotthard Heinrici, “Old Hard as Bones,” was a defensive tactician of the first power: emergency units (alarmorder, but he lacked the men and armament to stop the Soviet advance on the Oder. einheiten) made up of unassigned brought up his Fourth Guards Tank Army, Third Guards replacements, cadets from the various military schools, armed Tank Army, and Twenty-eighth Army from the south, while postmen and utility workers, and the usual coterie of Hitler an unchained Zhukov drove on the eastern approaches to Youth and Volkssturm. Weidling brought with him the battered the city (Fifth Shock Army, Eighth Guards Army, and First remnants of five divisions and deployed them as logically as he Guards Tank Army), lapped around it to the north (Second could: 20th Panzergrenadier Division in the southwest, near the Guards Tank Army and Third Shock Army), and came down Wannsee; 9th Parachute in the north; Division Müncheberg in its western side toward Spandau and Potsdam (Forty-seventh the south; Nordland in the East; and 18th Panzergrenadier in Army). On April 23 Konev’s and Zhukov’s spearheads linked Sector Z. The array was shaky and Weidling knew it. He had

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BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK/ARCHIV HEINRICH HOFFMANN/BILDARCHIV PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

of Berlin. The converging drives by Zhukov and Konev had broken through both flanks of German Ninth Army (General Theodor Busse), trapping the army’s mass in a pocket near Halbe in the Spreewald, the deep forest southeast of Berlin. Logically, a beaten Ninth Army might have retreated to Berlin and formed the kernel of the city’s defenses. But most of Busse’s men were now hors de combat, herded into a shrinking pocket under constant Soviet bombardment and suffering an enormous slaughter. Only LVI Panzer Corps under General Helmuth Weidling managed to escape the trap, carrying out a skillful but costly fighting retreat to Berlin against direct orders from Hitler, who had ordered Ninth Army to hold its (now broken) positions along the Oder. From April 22 through 24 the armies from both sides converged on Berlin, marking the second phase of the battle. Konev

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April 27: After days of pounding the city, Red Army armor rolls through Berlin’s streets, past German dead and a disabled selfpropelled gun.

no faith at all in his Hitler Youth battalions, 16-year-old boys their vehicles with mattresses or bedsprings to disrupt the on bicycles, armed only with a single-shot antitank weapon, geometry of the warhead and thus disperse the blast. Soviet the Panzerfaust. Nor could his mood have brightened at the infantry also found that a captured Panzerfaust made an ideal news that one of the German divisional commanders, General blockbuster, a quick way to blast a hole in a brick wall and Georg Scholze of 20th Panzergrenadier, killed himself upon obliterate the defenders inside. entering the city. Scholze had recently heard that his wife and By April 28 all that was left of Berlin, and by extension of four of their five children had died in an Allied bombing raid the Third Reich, was Sector Z, the citadel. The Battle of Berlin on Potsdam. His suicide was a reminder to Weidling that even now shifted into its third and final phase. The German fightif the Berlin battle went well, they were all probably doomed. ers in Berlin are often called fanatics, but up to this point in For all these reasons, Weidling the battle they had been anything never formed a firm defensive pebut. They fought hard, certainly, rimeter. The Soviets arrived at the but they never held a position for city hard on his heels, and often long and retreated as soon as Sohis weary soldiers were taking up viet infantry began to work around positions in a building or block only their flanks. moments before it came under atIn the citadel, things changed. tack. Konev blasted his way into Retreat was no longer an option, south Berlin on April 24, with Third and it was time to do or die. It Guards Tank Army crossing the Telwould be interesting to interview tow Canal after a 3,000-gun bomWeidling’s men today: a seemingly bardment on a three-mile sector arbitrary collection of old men who vaporized the hapless Volkssturm had last seen action in World War I, defenders opposite. Zhukov’s forces boys who were barely shaving, reached the southeastern perimegrizzled noncoms fighting their ter that same day, with Fifth Shock 50th battle, and a large contingent Army fighting its way into Treptow of non-German fighters (idealists Park and driving up to the inner enlisted in the anti-Bolshevik cruring of the S-Bahn. From April 24 sade, Scandinavians in Nordland, a through 28 the Red Army overran battalion of right-wing Frenchmen 90 percent of Berlin, and while the from the SS-Charlemagne Division, battles were horrendously bloody Latvian infantry). The defenders of for both sides, Soviet momentum the island were a polyglot crosswas unrelenting. section of the 1945 Wehrmacht, Riding point for the Soviets by pulled into this final battle by the this time was the Eighth Guards luck of the historical draw. An experienced veteran of urban fighting in Stalingrad, Army. The commander, General Still, enough men had crowded Vasily I. Chuikov, had defended into Sector Z that the Germans for Soviet general Vasily T. Chuikov commanded the Eighth Stalingrad in 1942 and knew urban once had sufficient manpower, with Guards Army as it rolled through Berlin’s city center. combat as well as any man alive. 10,000 packed into an area three by Careful reconnaissance, combined arms, avoiding the middle nine miles across. In such close quarters the Soviets could no of the streets, and spraying every window and doorway in his longer employ their entire strength. Stalin had already pulled path with automatic weapons fire—this was Chuikovian warKonev’s front out of the battle, sending it west to meet the U.S. fare. His battle cycle ran 24 hours, launching night attacks to Army on the Elbe River, and only two of Zhukov’s 10 armies rob the defenders of rest. In daylight he made prodigious use were still active in the struggle: Third Shock Army (General of smoke, covering his assault groups until they were within Vassily I. Kuznetsov) coming down from the northern front 30 yards of the objective. Chuikov understood that the deon the Spree and Chuikov’s Eighth Guards coming up from fender held all the trumps in a city fight—terrain, protection, the south, across the Landwehr Canal. invisibility—and that the only way to overcome them was to he final five days from April 28 through May 2 have accept massive friendly casualties. Finally, if the Germans did fixed the Battle of Berlin in our historical memory. try to make a stand, Chuikov would simply wheel up his big Stark images come to mind: the murderous buildingguns and blast away over open sights. by-building fight, with no quarter granted by either side; the Chuikov’s men also knew how to improvise. Tank losses to bodies of German deserters hanging from the lampposts; SS the German Panzerfaust were heavy in the early going, and squads prowling the streets, shooting anyone unlucky enough Soviet crews worked out a number of expedients, festooning

T

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AKG-IMAGES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/SOVFOTO

battle of berlin april–may 1945

In the citadel, things changed. Retreat was no longer an option, and it was time to do or die

JANET NORQUIST/REPRESENTED BY CREATIVE FREELANCERS INC.

to be caught flying a white surrender flag in a window; the desperate slogans chalked on the walls of a dying city (Berlin bleibt deutsch! “Berlin stays German!”); and of course millions of miserable civilians huddling in air-raid shelters, underground stations, or flak towers, awaiting their fate. On April 28 Chuikov’s Eighth Guards Army crossed the Landwehr Canal near the park called the Tiergarten, while Third Shock lunged across the Spree directly into the government district. The by-now standard blizzard of fire preceded each attack, howitzers and siege guns and Katyusha rocket launchers, and the defenders had to give way. By the end of the day the two Soviet spearheads were less than one mile apart. Incredibly, it would take the Soviets four full days of fierce fighting to cross that final mile. The assault on the Reichstag was the signature moment of the battle. Crossing the Spree over the Moltke Bridge, which the Germans had tried but failed to blow up, elements of Third Shock Army came under heavy fire from the ministry of the interior building. Soviet assault teams stormed the ministry with heavy losses, along

with the nearby Swiss Embassy. From here, they could see the Reichstag just a few hundred yards across the open Königsplatz. Flanking fire from the Kroll Opera House to the south held up the advance, however, as did a collapsed tunnel traversing the Königsplatz. Flooded with water seeping in from the Spree, it formed a protective moat. The 150th Rifle Division spent April 30 fighting across the Königsplatz, by now a killing ground. The first assault teams crossing the open space ran into a vicious crossfire that shot them to pieces. As always, Soviet tactical solutions were brutal and effective. The commander of the 150th, General Vasily M. Shatilov, wheeled up 90 guns on a 400-meter front and started blasting away: at the Kroll, the Reichstag, and anything that moved. Slowly, with progress measured in yards (and casualties), Shatilov’s men fought their way into the Reichstag building, defended by a melange of sailors, SS, and Hitler Youth. The Soviets would need yet another day, May 1, to smash resistance in the basement, secure the prize, and plant the red flag on the Reichstag dome. Weidling surrendered the Berlin garrison on

The Germans failed to firm up their planned defensive sectors (A through H) and perimeters around Berlin’s city center (Z). Soviet forces punched in from the north at the Moltke Bridge and the south at the Tiergarten, enduring four days of fierce counterfire before taking the Reichstag.

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battle of berlin april–may 1945

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April 28 to May 2 marked the final desperate days of the battle, as building by building Soviet troops break through German resistance.

May 2, although it took another day or two for resistance in the city to cease altogether. For the soldiers of the Red Army, it was a sweet hour of revenge. They had, in the words of Soviet propaganda, “slain the Fascist beast in its own lair,” at a cost of 350,000 casualties. They promptly sullied themselves by a rampage of looting and killing inside the city, not to mention the rape of every German woman or girl they could get their hands on. No explanation will ever suffice for the horror, nor will stammering tu quoque rationalizations that “the Germans did it too” in the Soviet Union. Historians have fixated on the mass rapes, for good reason. In terms of impact on world opinion, the Soviets may well have lost the Cold War the week after they seized Berlin. One other fixation is more misguided, however, and that is our lurid obsession with Hitler’s last days in the bunker: the ranting and raving, the nonsensical orders, and the death sentences against those deemed disloyal. The bunker is a distorting lens, given how little control Hitler actually exerted over the battle. He spent most of his last days ordering chimerical relief operations from outside the city: from General Walther Wenck’s newly formed Twelfth Army to the west; SSObergruppenführer Felix Steiner’s weak “army detachment” to the north; and Busse’s Ninth Army trapped in the Halbe pocket to the southeast. Not one had a chance of reaching Berlin (Steiner, for example, had just three understrength divisions and mocked the attack order as “senseless”), and none obeyed the call. Indeed, Hitler’s communications with the outside world were so sporadic that his staff had to resort to bizarre improvisations to gain even basic intelligence on the fighting, among them dialing random phone numbers near the front to see whether a German or Russian voice picked up. Hitler was a passive observer in Berlin, and no wonder. He had long ago decided to kill himself when the end was near, and he did just that on April 30, with Soviet infantry barely a mile away. The real driver of the battle was not Hitler but the Red Army. By 1945 the Soviets had forged a highly effective doctrine for mechanized war, refining it through trial and error and waging it on a scale of men and matériel that most other armies could scarcely imagine. Their field commanders—Zhukov and Konev on the front level, army chiefs like Kuznetsov and Chuikov—had long ago surpassed their German rivals in the use of combined arms and the precise balance between fire, movement, and logistics. Their equipment was often superb, and their soldiers yielded to no one in terms of tactical acumen, valor, or willingness to die for their cause and comrades. The Battle of Berlin was not only the death of the Third Reich but the birth of the new Soviet superpower in Central Europe. MHQ Robert M. Citino, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, has written numerous histories, including The German Way of War, Death of the Wehrmacht, and Quest for Decisive Victory. RIA NOVOSTI/THE IMAGE WORKS

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Steeplechase in the When Nathanael Greene and Charles Cornwallis finally clashed at Guilford Courthouse, Cornwallis had bayonets and discipline. Greene had a surprise—and a war-winning strategy By Noah Andre Trudeau

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n June 2, 1791, an impressive American arrived in Martinville, North Carolina, site of one of the Revolutionary War’s most important battles. Pres-

ident George Washington was nearing the end of a three-month southern-states tour, during which he met veterans and visited sites where British and Americans had clashed. Slightly more than a decade earlier there had been a small administrative settlement in the area that gave this battle its name— Guilford Courthouse. Here, British troops had fought Americans led by Major General Nathanael

overlooking fields cleared as they had been when the British had initially advanced. Despite enjoying a hindsight view of the battle’s short- and long-term results, Washington had to admit, as he gazed across that natural killing field, that he would have fought the battle in a very different way. 40 mhq | summer 2015

HOSKINS HOUSE BY DALE GALLON, WWW.GALLON.COM

Greene. ✭ Washington was taken to a ridgeline

Carolinas, 1781 The British used the open ground of Hoskins farmstead as a staging area for the battle to come, while the Americans protected their flanks in the dense surrounding woodlands to the east.

FOR THREE MONTHS in early 1781 a high-stakes military campaign played out in the Carolinas. Nathanael Greene’s Department of the South army and a British one under Lieutenant General Charles, 2nd Earl Cornwallis engaged in a series of marches and maneuvers with Georgia and the Carolinas as prize. Cornwallis needed a decisive victory that would sweep the Americans from the field and animate loyalist elements to flock to his standard. Greene had to maintain a firm American military presence to suppress royalist sentiment and encourage the patriots. Above all, he had been charged by Washington to preserve his core professional army, something his two predecessors had failed to do. The 38-year-old Greene, manager of a family forge in prewar Rhode Island, had been Washington’s pick for this challenging assignment. Starting out in 1775 as the Continental Army’s youngest brigadier general, he had earned Washington’s respect both as a man of arms and as a military administrator. By the time Greene was tapped for the Carolinas assignment he had acquired a remarkable skillset. He knew how an army operated, how it moved, how it lived from day to day, and how it fought. He understood the troublesome necessity of melding a small cadre of trained regulars with often prickly local militias. He had a knack for planning ahead and accepted the challenge of managing subordinates and allies whose commitment to the cause was often secondary to personal ambitions or regional animosities. Perhaps most important, he had found within himself the ability to analyze a situation and to generate a flexible plan of action firmly guided by strategic objectives but always open to shortterm opportunities. Cornwallis’s military experience in North America tracked back to 1776. He was 41 years old in early 1780 when he assumed command of British and loyalist forces in the Carolinas, where he was charged with solidifying Royal control over a region that the Crown had essentially ignored until Cornwallis fought in every major campaign of the Revolution, except Saratoga. The Guilford Courthouse “victory” spelled the beginning of the end for him—and the British. “Another such Victory,” one observer opined, “would destroy the British Army.”

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France allied with the Americans. Cornwallis got off to a great start when he smashed the American southern army at Camden, South Carolina, on August 16, 1780. (Its predecessor had surrendered en masse when Charleston fell in May 1780.) But two serious setbacks followed: a substantial loss of loyalist troops in October at King’s Mountain, on the border with North Carolina, and on January 17, 1781, the near obliteration of a column of his regulars at Cowpens. Coincident with the latter defeat was the appearance of yet another American southern army under Greene’s leadership. The two reverses sucked the wind out of loyalist activism, and Cornwallis believed that the British could never reset their rule on firm ground as long as Greene’s army operated freely, so he aimed to destroy it. There followed a stern chase that took the British around and about the Carolinas, on hard marches through difficult terrain, never close enough to grapple with Greene’s men. Cornwallis stripped his army to the bare essentials so it could move faster, but Greene remained a step ahead and foraged food and supplies as he passed, leaving only crumbs for the trailing British. Their chase carried them into central North Carolina, near the Virginia border. By March Cornwallis’s army was, according to one of his senior officers, “completely worn out.” Despairing of ever catching the Americans, Cornwallis entertained the faint hope that the enemy might attack him. Then everything changed on the evening of March 14, 1781, when scouts reported that Greene’s army was encamped a short march away at Guilford Courthouse. The battle Cornwallis had been earnestly seeking beckoned. His weary soldiers were roused and prepped for combat. “I know the People have been in anxious suspence waiting the event of a general action,” Nathanael Greene acknowledged, but he continued to evade Cornwallis until three conditions were met. He wanted the British soldiers to be very tired and hungry, he needed his small Continental core reinforced by enough militia to enjoy numerical superiority, and he desired ground over which he could fight his kind of battle. It all came together in early March, and after spending two days assembling his force, Greene brought his 4,000-man army to

DANIEL GARDNER/PRIVATE COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

battle of guilford courthouse 1781

THOMAS STOTHARD/PRIVATE COLLECTION/PHOTO: CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

Guilford Courthouse to fight. Cornwallis’s column (some 2,000 strong) began moving at 5:30 a.m., following the Great Salisbury Road (today’s New Garden Road). It was a heavily forested route ideal for ambuscades, so Cornwallis kept his columns tight. This didn’t prevent his mounted screening force, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, from tangling with American cavalry and light infantry soon after 7 a.m. There were three distinct encounters as the Americans under Lieutenant Colonel Henry “LightHorse Harry” Lee successfully probed and skirmished. Both sides took losses but the British pressed on. About 11 a.m. Cornwallis reached the edge of a tree line bordering upwardsloping cultivated farmland. Perhaps 400 yards in front he could see a line of battle stretching across the road. Sections in the center were on open ground, but both flanks disappeared into the woods. It appeared that the Americans were indeed making a stand. Cornwallis knew little of the terrain, but his fear that the militiamen (no uniformed Continentals were visible) would scatter before engaging made him anxious to close on them right away. He would rely on a frontal assault, trusting to British discipline and bayonets. Two regiments of foot (the 33rd and 23rd under the well-regarded Lieutenant Colonel James Webster, some 580 men) came forward and filed off to the left (north), while another 565 soldiers (71st Foot and the German mercenary Von Bose Regiment Nathanael Greene began his military career in 1774 as a private in a colonial militia. By under Major General Alexander Leslie) 1776 he was a major general and one of Washington’s most trusted commanders. Greene moved right (south), going from column lost an opportunity to destroy the British at Guilford Courthouse, but the battle helped into line. The instant the various sections force Cornwallis out of the Carolinas and into Virginia. hove into the enemy’s view, they were pecked with solid shot by a pair of patriot 6-pounder cannons. Three was to “fire two volleys and then retire.” Now they waited British guns were hurried up to engage the American gunners in a position that angled out onto the hill’s forward slope (who remained steadfast until the enemy infantry reached following a fence line. musket range). Behind them Cornwallis placed his reserves. To add spine and support to their position, Greene had posted All was ready by noon, when Webster and Leslie advanced. some of his more reliable elements (cavalry and infantry) on The troops facing Cornwallis were predominantly North Caeither flank. Once the militia line collapsed, these troops were rolina militia, a designation implying a uniformity that did not to hook up with the first of two surprises awaiting Cornwallis exist. The 1,200 men (in two brigades) hailed from 17 counties this day. Greene was long gone before the British appeared, and were grouped into 14 sub-units. They varied in everything leaving the civilian-soldiers to their thoughts and fears. “It is important this day: training, weapons, leadership. Greene had scarcely possible to paint the agitations of my mind,” wrote considered them the most expendable, not expecting them to a militia officer to his pregnant wife, “struggling with two of stand before British bayonets. He had ridden along the almost the greatest events that are in nature at the same time: the fate three-quarter-mile line, reminding them that their mission of my Nancy and my country.”

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The center pair of advancing British regiments encountered fields mushy from recent rains and sturdy fences that bedeviled formations. At the same time, their flanking partners strained to keep pace, struggling through undergrowth and around trees. The Americans were armed with a collection of short-range muskets (firing a mix of buckshot and musket balls) as well as longer-range rifles. The riflemen drew first blood, followed by the musket men, some of whom fired early, wasting their shot. Like a levee breached by a swollen river, sections of the North Carolina line collapsed while others held, but eventually all the militiamen were retreating, some running. Although Greene’s report faulted these troops for failing to deliver the requested two volleys, more reliable evidence indicates that some did what was asked, a few even more—clubbing their muskets to fight hand to hand. Several British units were hard hit. “What showers of mortal hail!” declared a participant, while another likened the clumps of bodies in their wake to “the scattering stalks of a wheat field when the harvest man has passed over it with his cradle.” When the advance of the 23rd Foot stalled before an ominous line of leveled rifles, Colonel Webster reanimated the movement, yelling, “Come on my brave fusiliers!” As Cornwallis’s men surged through the first American position, some wounded colonials were bayoneted by British veterans not wishing a shot in the back. A thousand yards to the rear, Greene followed the fighting by ear and occasional reports, taking no action. The story on the flanks was different. The Americans posted there remained unseen until they fired on the enemy’s exposed line. The targeted British formations quickly reoriented to confront the threat. On Cornwallis’s left, Colonel Webster called up some German Jägers and British light infantry, who combined with elements of the 33rd Foot to combat the pesky Americans. After the North Carolinians broke, these units pulled back to the next defensive position, allowing the British to claim they had “attacked and routed” them. On the southern end some of the German mercenaries reinforced by a battalion of the elite Brigade of Guards took on the American flankers, here consisting of Virginia riflemen and Henry Lee’s mounted legion. The thick woods limited Lee’s troopers to the only available access road, which herded the fighting south, away from the principal combat. While this prevented those Americans from rejoining the main battle, it also siphoned off the opposing units engaged. There was a pause in the center as the British ranks were dressed and reserves brought forward to close gaps caused by the attenuated formations. Cornwallis was now all in, with no assets remaining, and he had yet to face the Continentals.

He promptly ordered this new line forward, harder to do now because all of his units were operating in rough, forested ground that made holding formation impossible. It was in this claustrophobic environment that the British troops came up against Greene’s second battle line, some 400 yards distant from the first and nearly as long. Perhaps 1,350 Virginia riflemen stood waiting, posted along a slight rise. The right wing (north) was under Brigadier General Robert Lawson and the left (south) commanded by Brigadier General Edward Stevens. Helping their right were the separate flanking units, while their left was in the air—the flankers supposed to be there were fighting elsewhere. Their entire position was in an old-growth forest, so the Virginians had tracked the action by sounds, glimpses of fleeing North Carolinians, and the occasional bounding round shot. As a British line of battle materialized through the wooded gloom, General Lawson spotted an opportunity. The left flank of the approaching 23rd Regiment of Foot was unprotected, so Lawson ordered two of his regiments to swing out to enfilade it. The problem was that there was support on hand in the form of late arriving British reserves who caught the Virginians with their flank exposed. The surprised militiamen fought in confusion for a few minutes before they “dispersed like a flock of sheep frightened by dogs,” according to Lawson’s brigade major. Even though a substantial portion of the American line was wrecked and rolled up, scattered groups of Virginians continued to resist, forcing the British to deal with them. An American officer standing farther back thought that the “roar of musquetry and cracking of rifles were…as heavy as any I ever heard.” According to one of the redcoats, it was a time when “battalion maneuvering and excellency of exercise were found of little value.” What tipped the balance in most cases was the sight of British steel, since few of the militia had bayonets. The Americans off the northern flank stubbornly held their ground for a while before peeling off to join Greene’s final defensive position. Cornwallis’s horse was shot out from under him as he rode into the chaos to revivify his attack (still no Continental sightings!). He went blundering on toward an enemy party on a new horse, until a friendly infantryman grabbed the reins from him and led him to safety. Cornwallis’s work was cut out for him as the hitherto victorious British line of battle was in terrible shape—greatly disordered, low on ammunition, few officers still standing, and lots of wounded and killed. The routines of discipline exerted themselves as units were re-formed, reoriented, and once again ordered forward. Awaiting them some 600 yards distant was Nathanael Greene’s final surprise for Cornwallis this day—a phalanx

Cornwallis’s horse was shot out from under him as he rode into the chaos

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HENRY BEEBEE CARRINGTON. BATTLES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 1775-1781: HISTORICAL AND MILITARY CRITICISM, WITH TOPOGRAPHICAL ILLUSTRATION. NEW YORK: A.S. BARNES & CO, 1876

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Cornfields, forests, fence lines, and a major road cluttered the fighting field as Cornwallis’s army of some 2,000 well-trained men pushed east on Greene’s force of about 4,400, many of them poorly disciplined militiamen. (Carrington’s original map mistakenly reversed the positions of Lawson and Stevens, corrected here.)

battle of guilford courthouse 1781

of his best troops, fresh and ready. On wooded high ground fronted by open slopes near the Great Salisbury Road, the general had placed most of his Continental units—two Maryland regiments, two Virginia units, joined by a miscellany of small bands from the northern flanking force, and handfuls of regrouped militia from the first two lines. Also present were the cannons that had opened the engagement. There were some 1,400 men all told, facing a much diminished and exhausted enemy. ALTHOUGH HIS DEFENSEINDEPTH scheme had seriously weakened the British, Nathanael Greene still anticipated retreating. Speaking afterward to Colonel Daniel Morgan, who had executed the earlier American victory at Cowpens, Greene admitted that he was “content at the flogging at Guilford” and had always “consider[e]d victory as doubtful.” Yet at first it seemed his plan had exceeded expectations when the British attacked his powerful third line piecemeal instead of as a whole. First on the scene was the 33rd Regiment of Foot led by Colonel Webster. The relatively quick collapse of the Virginia line’s right wing gave the 33rd a fairly unimpeded passage, and these troops arrived alone at Greene’s final position. The foliage along the ridge concealed the Continentals, so when

Colonel Webster sighted the American cannons near the road, they seemed ripe for the taking. His regulars charged across the open field and were halfway to their goal when they were staggered from front and flank by massed musketry and case shot that forced Webster, who was mortally wounded in the encounter, to retreat. Next to arrive were the 300 muskets of the elite 2nd Guards Battalion, led by Brigadier General Charles O’Hara (already once wounded, soon to be hit again). They too charged the cannons, which were supported by Greene’s newest Continental regiment, the 400-strong 2nd Maryland. These infantrymen, to the amazement of all, dissolved before the British attack. Their original officers had been recently replaced; the unit’s right angle position induced great confusion when everyone had to face in the same direction, and the men had endured a nerve-racking wait while the unseen conflict roiled in their front. The sight of the disciplined scarlet lines, bayonets leveled, was the proverbial last straw. The collapse of the 2nd Maryland was not necessarily a fatal blow. The officer commanding the 1st Maryland (next on the right) promptly reoriented his Continentals to charge into the guards’ open flank with their bayonets leveled. The impact of this counterattack was amplified when, roughly simultane-

In a decisive moment in the fighting, the 1st Maryland wheels and counterattacks to take back cannons that had been lost when the 2nd Maryland line collapsed.

ously, the guardsmen were hit on their other flank by American cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel William Washington. Washington’s men had fought with the northern flankers until reaching the third line, when they providentially swung around to strike the guards after their breakthrough. It was combat up close and personal, with Continental infantry stabbing in from the north and cavalry slashing up from the south. All of this occurred under the direct observation of Cornwallis, and until recently, the traditional story told was that the desperate officer ordered his artillery to fire indiscriminately into the mass of men and horses. That description of the incident, supplied by an American participant not on this part of the field, is supplanted by eyewitness testimony indicating that Cornwallis’s mounted command group was targeted by American cavalry at the fringe of the fighting, and in ordering his cannons to fire on those riders (with imprecise grapeshot), infantry in the melee became collateral damage. What ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory was Greene’s perception of where matters stood. After trying to rally the panicked 2nd Marylanders (and nearly being captured himself), he believed that the regiment’s collapse signaled that his final line had been turned and that his irreplaceable Continentals were about to be overrun, so he acted to save his core force. Organizing a withdrawal was something he did well and had anticipated in his planning. As the Continentals retreated, some wounded British were bayoneted by Americans; this time they were the ones not wanting to be shot in the back. By the time Cornwallis advanced his hastily re-formed army for a final push, it encountered only American rear guards. Once again the great prize had escaped him. A pursuit was ordered, but his exhausted and combat-drained men had little left to give, so it was called off after a face-saving distance had been logged. This was not the end, for well to the southwest the combat continued as American left-wing flankers entangled with the British. For most of the engagement the honors had been about even, but as the main fight was ending, Colonel Lee abruptly took his mounted legion over to the final line, leaving the American infantrymen to fend for themselves. Shortly after Lee left, a British cavalry detachment under Colonel Tarleton (sent by Cornwallis) arrived to savage the American foot soldiers. The Battle of Guilford Courthouse was over. It had lasted some two hours, and Cornwallis held the battlefield—a traditional measure of victory. But the ground itself meant nothing in the overall picture. For the critical spoils of war were the American cannons, 1,300 muskets, and hundreds of wounded from both sides. As rain and temperatures fell, Greene’s army

gathered at the prepared rally point. They had some shelter and some food, while the British had little of either. The loss to Cornwallis’s army—and to his ambitions—was substantial, with 28 percent of his men killed, wounded, or missing. Included were several key officers, headlined by Colonel Webster, who lingered for two weeks before he died. Greene’s army was noticeably diminished, though many of the absent were the fleet-footed militia who would fight another day. In terms of battlefield deaths, Nathanael Greene lost 7 percent of his force. Equally significant, his army remained operational. After dealing with the wounded (which often meant parking them with sympathetic civilians), Cornwallis marched east to his Wilmington supply base. There he rethought the strategy to solidify British control over the region and convinced himself that his next best move was to take his army into Virginia, where he could interrupt Greene’s supply line and link up with friendly units to isolate the American South. In time this campaign led his army to Yorktown and the defeat that convinced Britain the American war was unwinnable. Cornwallis hoped that his opponent would follow him, but Greene stayed true to his primary mission by remaining in the Carolinas. There followed a campaign with a familiar refrain: no decisive American victories but the gradual erosion of British presence and control. In Nathanael Greene, the nation-to-be had a leader dedicated to a future that looked beyond the war’s divisiveness to a time of shared aspirations. Time and again Greene intervened when vengeance-seeking patriots sought to even the score with neutrals and loyalists through property confiscations and corporal punishment. Greene did not heal all the partisan wounds during his southern tenure, but his efforts helped ensure that an American nation would emerge from the conflict. This may well be the most important legacy of Guilford Courthouse.

NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY

Cornwallis held the battlefield, but the ground itself meant nothing

WHEN PRESIDENT WASHINGTON visited the Guilford Courthouse battlefield, he never forgot the view down that cleared slope from the first line. While Greene had undertaken the battle to make a point, Washington would have fought it to win. He would have put his best troops and most powerful weapons in that opening position, confident that the attacking British “must have been torn all to pieces.” Had he been in command, Washington told Thomas Jefferson, he “would have hardly let a single man get through that field.” MHQ Noah Andre Trudeau, a producer and writer, is currently working on a book about Abraham Lincoln’s visit to the war front in March– April 1865 and developing a multimedia work about Lincoln’s life.

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PORTFOLIO

Waterloo Remains of the Day ▼ Amputations were common in the Napoleonic Wars. This saw was used to cut off the leg of Lieutenant General Henry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge, commander of the Allied Cavalry Corps, after his knee was smashed near the end of the battle.

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the term Waterloo has come to mean any careerending defeat, and this was indeed the battle that, on June 18, 1815, signified the end of Napoleon Bonaparte’s reign as emperor of France. ✭ It was typical of the Napoleonic Wars: large numbers of men on the field (72,000 French and 68,000 on the allied side), artillery duels, cavalry charges, flanking attacks, and repeated French assaults— with hard fighting and high casualties. There were mistakes and mishaps on the French side, but this was not a blowout. It was, as the Duke of Wellington called it, “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” ✭ Fought on just two and a half square miles of farmland—dotted with strongpoint farm buildings along the roads to Brussels—this battleground of muddy, bloody fields was afterward strewn with dead and dying men and horses and every kind of castoff and wrecked gear. One macabre statistic suggests the extent of the carnage: A story in the London Observer, November 18, 1822, noted that over a million bushels of bones, human and horse, were removed from the major battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars in 1821 and shipped to the port of Hull, where they were ground down and sold to farmers as fertilizer. ✭ Other types of relics survived the battles, including these items from the blood-drenched fields of Waterloo.

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Insufficient protection evidently was provided by this cuirass, or brass breastplate, worn by a soldier of the French army’s 2nd Regiment of Carabiniers.

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A highly ornate bit was worn by Napoleon’s horse during the Battle of Waterloo. The identity of the horse that used it is conjectural, as Napoleon had many horses; it may have been Desirée or the near-mythic Marengo.

Napoleon is believed to have worn this black hat at Waterloo, one of the many bicorne-style black felt hats that he owned and favored. Roughly 20 have survived.

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This Legion of Honor, Chevalier 5th class, badge was reportedly taken from the body of a colonel in the Imperial Guard at Hougoumont, one of the bitterly contested farmhouse strongpoints near Waterloo. The national order of the Legion of Honor was established by Napoleon in 1802.

▼ Black powder was the explosive propellant used in Napoleonic muskets and rifles. It was often carried in an animal horn capped at one end and fitted with a nozzle that dispensed a measured quantity. This example was recovered at Waterloo.

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▲ Among the items taken from Napoleon’s baggage after Waterloo was a flintlock pistol with gold and silver metalwork, including a symbolic silver eagle–motif butt cap. It was probably the work of arms maker Freconnet et Roule of Saint-Étienne.

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Lieutenant Henry Anderson of the 2nd Battalion, South Lincolnshire Regiment, wore this short-tailed coatee in the Waterloo campaign. His unit fought French cavalry at Quatre Bras and at Hougoumont. Anderson was wounded at the battle’s finale, while fighting off the French Imperial Guard. A side drum that was reputedly used by a battalion of British foot guards at Waterloo was repainted some 10 years later.

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Scots Peak at

The legendary defeat of a British army in 1745 was the high point for the doomed Bonnie Prince Charlie, his Jacobite Rebellion, and the Highland way of life by Ron Soodalter

LITHOGRAPH BY ADOLPH MOUILLERON AFTER WILLIAM ALLAN, 1852/NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM/THE ART ARCHIVE AT ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

Prestonpans

In the bloodbath that was Prestonpans, Colonel James Gardiner famously fell to the Highlanders’ blade as he tried to rally British foot soldiers after his own dragoons deserted the field.

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eptember 21, 1745: From night to early morning, a thick mist continued to rise from the dank fields and marsh, shrouding the British army. Its commander, Lieutenant General Sir John Cope, belatedly discovered that the Highland clansmen had silently approached to within yards of his forces, and as the mist dissolved, the redcoats were stunned by the vision of some 2,500 kilted warriors, swinging broadswords and long-bladed axes, bearing down on them to the savage screams of Gaelic war cries and the unearthly skirling of the pipes. In minutes, the field at Prestonpans was littered with severed heads and limbs. It was a taste of hell the survivors would never forget. First blood had gone to the Scots, and other victories lay ahead. Inevitably, however, the full force of English might would stop the rebellion, and in the process, put an end to a centuries-old way of life.

France, in the War of the Austrian Succession. It was not going well. In May, England, along with its allies, had suffered a demoralizing drubbing in the Low Countries, at the Battle of Fontenoy. While Britain was weak, the young grandson of the last Stuart king of England seized the opportunity provided by Britain’s weakened state to launch a rebellion on behalf of his exiled father, James Francis Edward Stuart, who had been living under the Pope’s patronage in Rome. Charles Edward Stuart—24 years old, vain, ambitious, and limited—set a course to align the Scottish Highland clans under his banner and restore the Catholic Stuart line to the thrones of England and Scotland. “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” as he would come to be known, arrived in Scotland in late July, along with seven followers. He was brought ashore at Moidart, in the ancestral lands of the Macdonald of Clanranald, where he was greeted, not with boundless enthusiasm for his cause, but with hard, practical Scots logic. After hearing Charles’s pitch, Alexander Macdonald bluntly advised the young prince to return home—to which the youth reportedly replied, “I am come home, sir….I am persuaded that my faithful Highlanders will stand by me.” The Scottish Highlands were “home” to an ancient feudal society. To most Lowland Scots of the 18th century, the land to the north was a cold, craggy, numbingly unpleasant region, peopled by barbarians who found honor in murder and the reaving—stealing—of cattle, and who presented a constant threat to Lowland tranquility. To the English, these mountain people seemed little more than bearded, unwashed savages, who skirted themselves in bolts of particolored cloth (and little else!) and spoke an obscure and unrefined tongue. While there was an element of truth in these observations, to so dismiss the Highlanders was to discount centuries of loyalty to clan and kin, fierce pride in ancestry, epic sagas and bagpipe tunes, called pibrochs, played and sung in tribute to heroes long dead—persuasive elements of a national character. Before 1745 the Highlanders had acknowledged no formal laws save those of the individual clan chiefs. The word and

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Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender, was the grandson of James II, who fled Britain in the Glorious Revolution. Charles hoped to reclaim the throne for the House of Stuart.

authority of those powerful men, to whom each member of their respective clans claimed blood ties and owed total allegiance, was indisputable. Over their people they possessed what was called “the power of pit and gallows”—or corporal punishment. An order from a clan chief would also send every man of his clan able to carry a sword, ax, or pitchfork on a cattle raid against a neighboring farm, on a bloody foray below the border, or on a march into England itself in support of a member of the House of Stuart. When a clan chief died, the title passed to his eldest son or closest male relation, along with the responsibility of maintaining the welfare of the entire clan. The harsh geography of the Highlands defined the lives of its people. The rocky, sparsely covered soil made farming difficult at best; consequently, the earliest clansmen became tribal herdsmen. They took up the sword to protect their small herds of shaggy cattle and in the process became warriors as much

JOHN PETTIE/ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST © HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II, 2015/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

In early 1745 Great Britain was battling its traditional enemy,

as stockmen. Over time, raids on neighbors’ herds came to be viewed as affairs of honor, as clan bards composed rants memorializing these nocturnal forays. Honor, in fact, played a major part in Highland life. Should insults be exchanged by members of different clans, the matter might be settled by a dirk thrust in the night, by single combat, or by the mobilization of both clans. Each clansman could trace his origins back hundreds of years, and time seemed to have no significant impact on the Highlands. Life in the early 18th century was little different from feudal life. The clan chief might well live in a castle, drink the finest wines, and send his sons to Paris to be educated, while his lowliest subtenant subsisted on the meanest fare. But their bond was unbreakable, and when the chief ordered his clansmen to arm and follow, they did so without question. As the number of clan heroes grew over the centuries, so too did the poems and songs about them, until ultimately, the clans marched to battle singing ballads of contemporary champions and of heroes long dead. It was on this time-tested sense of loyalty that Prince Charles was relying when he brought his cause to the Highland clan chiefs.

WILLIAM AIKMAN/BLICKLING HALL, NORFOLK, UK/NATIONAL TRUST PHOTOGRAPHIC LIBRARY/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

The clans had turned out for Charles’s father 30 years before, in a pro-Royalist Jacobite “rising” that had ended in disaster. When Queen Anne died without heirs in 1714, George, ruler of Hanover in Germany, was invited to succeed her, prompting a wave of discontent and opposition in Scotland. In September 1715, supported by the major clans and with an army of some 10,000 men, the Scottish Earl of Mar staged a Jacobite rebellion with the intention of replacing George with James, son of the late exiled king. The rising lasted only months and fell apart after the Jacobite defeat at the Battle of Sheriffmuir. Now, the clans were being asked to fight for James yet again. This time, the prospect of risking their people, homes, and lands in what might well be another doomed endeavor caused some of the more significant clan chiefs to hesitate. Macdonald of Sleat, Macleod of Dunvegan, and the old Macdonald of Clanranald refused to come out. Undaunted, Charles pressed his suit, even managing to enlist Clanranald’s son, who swore allegiance to the young prince after hearing another young Highlander declare that he would join the cause, “though not another man in Scotland should befriend you.” Charles’s cause was advanced significantly by the presence of Donald Cameron of Lochiel. He was widely respected as an honorable and intelligent man, and his willingness to join the fight won over other chiefs. “The Gentle Lochiel,” as he came to be known, sent several of his clansmen “to intimate to all the Camerons that if they did not forthwith go with them, they would instantly proceed to burn all their houses and hough their cattle,” according to one witness. Seven hundred clansmen responded, nearly all wearing the white cockade—a rosette of ribbons—in their bonnets, signifying allegiance to the cause. With the Jacobite ranks swelling, their red-andwhite standard was raised at Glenfinnan on August 19. Charles proclaimed his father King James III of England and VIII of

General John Cope attempted to stem the Jacobite tide, but the public came to believe he had fled the battlefield at Prestonpans, thanks in part to the popular ballad “Hey, Johnny Cope.”

Scotland—and himself as prince regent. Then, with a fair number of the Scottish clans at his back, he marched south toward Edinburgh. Word traveled fast. The London Gazette of August 3 had announced the posting of a £30,000 bounty on Charles’s head, and on August 20 Bonnie Prince Charlie responded by placing a like reward on the head of King George II. Meanwhile, the British army in Scotland, under the command of General John Cope, was dispatched to put a swift end to the rebellion. The 55-year-old Cope, a member of Parliament and career soldier, had established a solid if uninspiring record during the wars of the Spanish and Austrian Succession. However, with most of the British army committed on the Continent, he commanded fewer than 4,000 men scattered throughout the country—nearly all of whom were poorly trained and had never seen combat.

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Cope resupplied his forces and marched them to Aberdeen, where they boarded ships south to Dunbar. On September 19, at the head of some 2,300 foot soldiers and dragoons, six 1½-pounder “galloper” guns, and six mortars, he marched west toward Edinburgh—too late to prevent Charles from entering the city. The Scots had swept south weeks earlier, securing Perth and Dunblane; on September 17, as Cope’s forces were setting out, they had captured Edinburgh without firing a shot. The city’s two regiments of royal dragoons had fled at their approach, in what has gone down infamously in British military history as the “Canter of Coltbrigg.” The Scots’ army, under the command of the able Lord George Murray, had grown as it marched and now totaled some 2,500 men divided into clan regiments. They carried a motley collection of arms, which included some farm tools but few muskets and no artillery. But what the Scots lacked in firepower they more than made up for in passion and skill with the blade. Their traditional edged weapons were deadly,

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and in the clansmen’s practiced hands, capable of inflicting frightful damage. The claymore—Scottish Gaelic for “great sword”—was a large, double-edged broadsword wielded in great sweeping arcs as its owner charged into the foe. The Lochaber ax was a long-handled halberd-style weapon, with a long, curved blade at its business end. Both weapons were designed to separate heads and limbs from bodies. Each man also carried a small, round, cowhide-covered and embossed shield, known as a targe. When they could approach within striking distance, the Highlanders were nearly unstoppable. Conversely, although Cope possessed a far more sophisticated arsenal, few of his troops had fired a musket in battle, and reportedly only one—an “aged gunner”—had any familiarity with artillery.

At midafternoon on September 20, the two armies sighted one another near the East Lothian town of Prestonpans, east of Edinburgh. Cope placed his forces in what he felt to be

J. COLLYER/NATIONAL MUSEUMS SCOTLAND, T.2003.309.7

Cope’s British forces and the Highlanders, led by Lord George Murray, faced off in the small coastal town of Prestonpans, on the Firth of Forth in northeastern Scotland. As dawn broke on September 21, 1745, the Highlanders E attacked the British F in a fierce fight that lasted only minutes.

TOP: WILLIAM BRASSEY HOLE/© THE DRAMBUIE COLLECTION, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; BOTTOM: PRIVATE COLLECTION/THE STAPLETON COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

an unassailable defensive position, with two stone walls to his right, a seemingly impassable bog on the left, a deep ditch in front, and the sea behind. Meanwhile, a small contingent of Scots from Clan Cameron was ordered to the churchyard in nearby Tranent, but after attracting enemy fire, they withdrew. By nightfall no decisive moves had been made by either side. During the night, a local farmer sympathetic to the Jacobite cause volunteered to guide the Scots along a narrow path through the bog. Moving silently by twos and threes in the dark, the Jacobite force wove its way forward, swinging around Cope’s left in the mist and drawing up for battle. Although they had posted pickets and maintained bonfires through the night, Cope’s men did not become aware of the Highlanders’ maneuver until around 5 a.m., whereupon the general hurriedly wheeled his forces to face the impending attack. He positioned the foot soldiers in the center, the artillery on the right, and the dragoons at either end of the line. As dawn broke, the Highlanders charged out of the mist in two columns, falling in a wave upon the conventional British formation. The men of each clan had their own Gaelic battle cry, just as each clan had its own pibroch, and a deafening cacophony filled the air, along with the terrified screams of the British soldiers. The Scots fired what muskets they had at close range, discarded them, and then surged into the British ranks, literally cutting them to pieces with their terrible blades. They swiftly flanked Cope’s dragoons and foot soldiers, who panicked After their victory at Prestonpans, the Highlanders audaciously marched south into and ran—only to be impeded by the same England, recruiting in towns like Manchester (above) as they moved toward London. The ditch and stone walls to the south and invasion failed, as did Charles’s uprising in general. The victorious British ultimately rounded west that had earlier offered the promise up defeated Highlanders (top), who lost not just a war but a way of life. of victory. Nearly all the British gunners fled before the Highland charge, leaving only two officers to 170 men accompanied General Cope on the flight across the man the six cannons and six mortars, which the clansmen border, to the safety of Berwick. Prestonpans, as one English easily overran. chronicler of the fight dryly affirmed, “is not a battle honour Cope and his officers tried desperately to stem the chaotic for British Regiments.” flight of their troops, in some instances at pistol point, but The Scots suffered around 30 dead, including Major James were forced to watch helplessly as their entire army disinteMacGregor, son of the legendary Rob Roy, and 70 wounded. grated in a rout of stunning proportions. In the short, sharp They captured the British baggage train, which had been left fight, Prince Charles’s forces killed some 300 of the enemy, at nearby Cockenzie, seizing £5,000 and a quantity of muchwounded 500 more, and took 1,500 prisoners. No more than needed muskets, ammunition, and supplies, as well as most of

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General Cope’s personal property. It was a victory that offered much promise of future success.

After tending the wounds of their foes—a courtesy the British never afforded the Scots—the prince’s army returned in triumph to Edinburgh. With this solid victory, several earlier holdouts now rallied to the prince’s standard. The earls of Kelly and Kilmarnock and Lords Nairne, Strathallan and Ogilvie, Elcho, Balmerino, and Pitsligo cast their lot with the Young Pretender. More promising yet, the French signed the Treaty of Fontainebleu, formalizing a military alliance with the Jacobites. With his army swelled to 6,000 men, Prince Charles continued his campaign to seize London. Marching south, the Highlanders captured Carlisle, making them the first army to invade England in a hundred years. They reached Derby in early December, placing themselves some 120 miles from London and between the panicked English capital and the forces of the man newly responsible for protecting it, King George’s son, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. For the moment, at least, no obstacle stood in the Scots’ way. Soon, however, other factors conspired to halt the invasion. Despite Charles’s expectations, few English Jacobites had joined the cause. Worse, away from home and in a strange land, the men of the various clans—many of whom had fallen to quarreling among themselves—began deserting in droves. At the same time, the Duke of Cumberland’s force had grown to twice the size of the Scots’ army. The French, who had been assuring Charles of support since the beginning, failed to make good on their promises. And the towns that the Scots had captured, including Carlisle and Edinburgh, fell back into British hands. The only viable option was retreat. But on the march north, Charles’s force was joined by thousands of fresh Scottish volunteers, increasing it to 8,000 men. The Scots besieged Stirling Castle and roundly defeated Lieutenant General Henry Hawley, Cope’s replacement, at Falkirk. Then, the prince’s luck ran out again. His powder magazine exploded, and the army was plagued by more desertions. Cumberland was drawing inexorably closer, with an army that now outnumbered Charles’s. Listening to bad counsel, and against the advice of Lord Murray, the prince elected to meet the British in open battle on a rain-driven moor at Culloden, outside Inverness. Here, facing British grapeshot and canister with nothing but a few fieldpieces and muskets, their claymores and axes useless against artillery and their numbers severely depleted, the Highlanders stood helpless as the well-trained British artillery devastated their ranks. The clansmen soon ran out of powder and, as the Duke of Cumberland himself later stated with amusement, “they threw stones.” Finally, while some of the clans huddled cold and wet in consternation, others charged the British ranks, screaming in Gaelic and brandishing their fearsome claymores. But this time the troops facing them were battle-hardened veterans who did not run. The Highlanders

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On April 6, 1746, seven months after their great victory at Prestonpans, the Highlander Jacobites faced an experienced and well-armed British force at Culloden. This time the Scottish blade did little but prolong a brutal, final defeat.

got shot to pieces. A dazed Prince Charles Edward Stuart, his face streaked with tears, was led from the field by his clansmen. The Scots’ wounded were bayoneted where they lay. Many of those who fled the field were hunted down and slaughtered. Of the some 3,000 who were captured, many were executed, most of them on charges of treason. The prescribed punishment for this offense entailed hanging, drawing, quartering, and beheading. Hundreds more were transported to America or Canada. Meanwhile, Bonnie Prince Charlie was sheltered repeatedly in the simple crofts of his defeated Highlanders— none of whom succumbed to the temptation of the £30,000 reward. Eventually, he escaped to France, where many years later, in 1788, he died a hopeless alcoholic.

ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST © HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II, 2015/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

After the victory at Culloden, the British enacted a series of laws that irreparably shattered the clan system and with it, the Highland way of life. Among other restrictions, they banned the wearing of the kilt, the playing of the bagpipe, and the carrying of the claymore and targe. They also reduced the status of the hereditary clan chief to that of landlord. Deprived of their ancient rights and privileges, no longer permitted the power of life and death over their people, the old chiefs came to consider themselves property owners rather than leaders of men. Seeing money to be made from large-scale sheep farming, they cleared the lands of their own tenant clansmen, often with the assistance of troops and police, and brought in managers, called factors, from England and the Lowlands, to oversee the raising of the “woolly clansmen,” as the displaced tenants bitterly called sheep. As one Argyllshire man bemoaned, “I have lived in woeful times. When I was young, the only question asked concerning a man of rank was, ‘How many men lived on his estate?’ But now it is, ‘How

many sheep will it carry?’” With the implementation of these so-called Highland clearances, the betrayal was complete. Dazed and displaced Highlanders moved to the Lowlands for factory work, joined the hated British ranks, or sailed across the sea to begin life anew in Canada or the Carolinas or Virginia. Their numbers irreparably thinned, driven from their ancestral homes, and disowned by the very men who had called them forth to battle in the family name, the Highland Scots could take satisfaction in the knowledge that they had briefly defeated the most powerful nation in the world, slaying hundreds of its soldiers and sending thousands running in terror. In memory and in song, they still had their stunning victory at Prestonpans. MHQ Ron Soodalter has written more than 150 articles for publications that included the New York Times, Military History, Wild West, and Smithsonian. His most recent book is The Slave Next Door.

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How

Julius Caesar

Conquered Gaul—and Rome The ambitious general’s win over Celtic barbarians on the Sabis in 57 bc proved less important than his own glorified tale of the battle by Barry Strauss

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or three days the Roman army marched. Julius Caesar led his men over the rolling hill country of northern France, traveling on dusty roads past wheat fields and forests. It was the summer of 57 bc, and eight legions of Roman infantry, along with allied infantry and light cavalry—a total of about 40,000 troops—were heading northeast to a place about 60 miles from the valley of the River Samara (modern Somme). Each legionary carried a 50-pound load of kit and food on his back. The heavier baggage—tents, officers’ belongings, hand mills for grain, additional food, weapons, loot, and money—came after, on pack animals driven by camp followers. Prisoners of war, traders, prostitutes, and soothsayers brought up the rear. ✭ After the Romans made camp, Caesar got some valuable information from captives: A large enemy army, made up of a coalition of tribal forces, was waiting on the other side of the River Sabis, about nine miles away. Caesar decided to force the issue, to go on the attack. It was the second year of the Gallic War, the famous conflict that made his reputation as a commander. ✭ Rome had national security interests in Gaul, a sweeping, turbulent, unconquered region that the Romans called “Long-haired Gaul” (Gallia Comata) after its shaggy and, in Roman eyes, barbaric inhabitants. The tribes of Gaul were warlike Celtic peoples who 300 years before had defeated Rome and invaded Italy. Now, in the first century bc, a short, sharp military campaign would have been enough to

Julius Caesar launched his eight-year campaign to conquer Gaul as much for personal ambition as to expand the empire.

battle of the sabis 57 bc

his fellow elites, who would read hand-copied versions of the Commentaries; and the illiterate masses, who would listen to it at pubic readings. As a victorious general, he would win credit with the voters, the support of his soldiers, new clients abroad, and—if he conquered a wealthy region—great riches. Conquering Gaul would make Julius Caesar the wealthiest man in Rome. But when at age 41 he set out to do that, it was not clear whether he would emerge a conqueror or a forgotten man— or no more than a skull gracing the trophy shelf of a Gallic headhunter. That was all up to the fortunes of war.

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he first year of the war, 58 bc, went well for the Romans, but with the war now in its second year, something completely different lay ahead. All Gaul, as Caesar famously said, was divided into three parts with three peoples: the Celts (central France), the Aquitanians (southwestern France), and the Belgians (northern France, Belgium, part of the Netherlands, and a sliver of Germany). Divided further into dozens of different tribes, these still independent, longhaired Gauls were warlike but disunited and therefore weak. Transalpine Gaul (west of the Alps, in southern France) was already a Roman province and more “civilized,” but in 57 bc, those Gauls awoke to the reality that Caesar was less their ally and more their conqueror. The Belg ia ns were t he first to act. They prepared armies to drive out the Romans, but before they could, Caesar struck. He had great success initially, defeating the various Belgic tribes in the river valleys of what is today north-central France. But he ran into trouble in the wooded and hilly country east of the modern city of Cambrai. The terrain was made for ambush, and the main Belgic tribe there, the Nervians, took full advantage of it. Austere and militaristic, they formed a fighting coalition with their neighbors, the Atrebates, Viromandui, and Aduatuci. Caesar’s prisoners told him that the Nervian alliance had Although some tribes in southern Gaul had accepted Roman hegemony, Belgic tribes united to 75,000 men waiting for him challenge Caesar as he campaigned north, drawing him into ambush country east of Cambrai.

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keep Rome secure. Instead, Caesar fought in Gaul for eight years (58–50 bc) and conquered a vast area that included modern France and Belgium, as well as parts of western Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. He crossed the Rhine into Germany to punish his enemies in 55 bc and twice invaded England in search of loot and glory, in 55 and 54 bc. Caesar’s victories in Gaul did win Rome centuries of peace on its northern frontier, but at great human cost. Probably over a million Gauls were killed or enslaved in the campaign. What motivated Caesar was not so much national security as personal ambition. Single-minded and ruthless on his rise to the top, he was an enormously talented politician and writer as well as a brilliant soldier, and he knew it. He also knew that the key to achieving preeminence in Rome was conquest abroad. The main source of historical information about the Roman conquest of Gaul is Caesar’s own Commentaries. As much a political document as a history, the Commentaries offer a clear message: Each chapter is an episode in a long-running drama in which Caesar is the star. He aimed his book at two audiences:

ERICH LESSING/LOUVRE, PARIS/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

across the River Sabis, but they were probably exaggerating. Some Gauls serving with Caesar slipped away at night to the Nervian camp, where they provided information about his forces. The Nervians responded accordingly: In effect, they dared Caesar to walk into a trap—and he did. When it came to combat operations, he regularly pushed things to the limit. His soldiers knew that and soon all Italy would, too. Caesar made the Battle of the Sabis—as the engagement is known—one of the high points in his Commentaries. Scholars disagree about the identification of the River Sabis. The two main candidates, both in northern France, are the Rivers Sambre and Selle (a small tributary of the Schelde). Advocates of the Sambre place the battle near the modern city of Maubeuge, while advocates of the Selle place it near the French town of Saulzoir (or perhaps one of several other locations in the vicinity). Caesar’s description fits neither river perfectly. It is easier to imagine two armies encamped in the broader valley of the Sambre than in the steeper hills of the Selle valley. Yet many historians today lean toward the River Selle, because its location better suits what we know of Caesar’s marching route. When Caesar got the news of the Nervian-led forces nine miles away, he was determined to fight. He dispatched scouts and centurions (captains) to choose a campsite, then sent his cavalry forward and followed with his infantry. The Romans were no horsemen. Their cavalry consisted mainly of allied riders—in this case, Gauls. The scouts and centurions selected a campsite atop a hill that sloped down gently to the River Sabis. The enemy forces occupied a similar hill on the other side, but they were concealed in the thick woods near the top. The Nervians planned to attack the first legion just as it reached the camp. The heavy baggage between legions would serve as an obstacle, preventing the other legions from coming to its aid. So would the wall of hedges the Nervians had put in place long before in order to protect their territory from raiders. After the first legion was crushed, the Nervians believed, the rest of the Roman army would withdraw. Unfortunately for them, Caesar had moved the baggage far to the rear, so six legions approached the Roman campsite without any impediment separating them. Then came the baggage, followed by the last two legions composed of new recruits. When the first six legions arrived, they measured out the camp and began fortifying it. Caesar sent his cavalry across the river to skirmish, but most of the enemy army was safely out of reach, waiting in the thick woods. The Nervians were already organized in battle ranks, ready to attack as soon as they caught sight of the Romans’ baggage. As the Nervians advanced, they brushed aside the Roman cavalry that had crossed the river. No doubt the terrible sound of the Celtic battle horn echoed in the valley. Six Roman legions were waiting to meet the enemy, stretched out for about two miles. Still, they were unprepared to stop the Nervians. Although standard Roman procedure was to keep some men under arms to protect camp builders, Caesar

Legionaires and barbarians had similar equipment on the Sabis— swords, javelins, armor—but the Gauls’ early attack stunned the Romans.

had let his guard down. He underestimated the enemy and overestimated what his own cavalry could do. In just minutes, the Gauls came into contact with the Romans. They achieved total tactical surprise. Unlike the enemy, the Romans were not lined up in battle order. They weren’t even armed. To make things worse, the hedges made it hard for one legion to see another. Hard fighting followed. On both sides the weapons were similar: javelins to soften up the enemy and swords for hand-to-hand combat. At least some soldiers had daggers for use in close quarters. On both sides men had armor—if they had time to get to it. The Nervians faced a larger army than expected, but they achieved a great deal even so. They captured the Roman camp and baggage train, pushed hard on both flanks and bloodied the Romans’ right flank badly, killing or wounding most of the centurions of the XII Legion. Fortunately for the Romans, the Nervians made a classic mistake: They looted the enemy’s camp before finishing off its army. This gave the Romans time to regroup and launch a counteroffensive. But in Caesar’s telling of the story, the key to victory was Roman courage, not Gallic missteps. His Commentaries offer a thrilling story of the Roman comeback and no mention of Caesar’s failure to prepare adequately for battle. According to him, three things saved the day: the skill and experience of the soldiers, the initiative of the legates (the generals commanding the legions), and, above all, the

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Coins served as miniature Roman triumphs. This first-century denarius shows off Gallic weapons Caesar seized.

and revived their spirits, because when in the commander in chief’s sight, each man was eager to do his best no matter how desperate things were for him—and the enemy’s attack was checked a little.” Then Caesar continued to the next unit, the VII Legion, in trouble at the end of the line. Again, Caesar says nothing about the general, but only that he personally ordered a military tribune (that is, a colonel) to close up the lines gradually and then to wheel about and attack. After that, says Caesar, every soldier supported the man next to him, and they no longer had to worry about the enemy outflanking them and hitting them from the rear. The men began to fight with the two qualities that Caesar prized most: audacity and courage. It was all a sideshow, however. While Caesar put the fight back into the legions on his right flank, his best general, Titus Labienus, actually won the battle. Within a decade Labienus would be Caesar’s bitterest enemy, but first came a long period of collaboration. The two worked closely in Roman politics in the 60s and 50s bc, and from the very beginning of the Gallic Wars, Labienus, a superb field commander, was Caesar’s second in command and his leading general. He earned Caesar’s trust as a man who obeyed orders. While Caesar spent winters south of the Alps in Cisalpine Gaul, he left Labienus in charge of the bulk of the legions in France. At the Battle of the Sabis, Labienus crossed the river with the two legions on the Roman left. They routed the enemy and took its camp. The legions in the center also pushed back the enemy. Labienus saw the disarray on the Roman right and sent the X Legion back across the river to help the Romans there. The arrival of the X Legion invigorated the legionaries on the Roman right. Even the Roman cavalry returned and joined the fight. Caesar says that the Nervians fought bravely, standing on their own corpses as if they were fighting “from a burial mound.” That was probably exaggeration, but the Nervians were in truth wiped out. Though Labienus saved the day, in the Commentaries few of Caesar’s generals come off well. Perhaps most really were second-rate. Roman generals were often junior senators; they had the wealth and clout to win elections, but military skill was optional. So was administrative skill. Humility is not a virtue in a great leader, which makes Caesar’s self-assertions understandable. His egotism was made more bearable by his generosity. He made his officers rich. But he would not The Nervians ceded their early success against the Roman right when greed drew tolerate anyone sharing the limelight with him. them to loot the Roman camp. The X Legion spun south to bring order—and victory.

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TOP: AKG-IMAGES/DE AGOSTINI PICTURE LIBRARY/A. RIZZI; MAP: BAKER VAIL

greatness of Caesar: “Caesar had everything to do at one time: displaying the standard, which was the sign when it was necessary to run to arms; giving the signal by the trumpet; calling the soldiers off from the works;…forming the order of battle; encouraging the soldiers; giving the watchword.” Caesar could not arrange his troops in regular, three-line order, so each legion fought in isolation. It wasn’t possible that one man could have issued all necessary commands. Yet somehow, Caesar, as he recounts it, managed to do just that. After setting things in motion on the Roman left, Caesar made his way along the slope and around thick hedges, through the noise and disorder of a desperate fight. The Nervian commander, Boduognatus, had led the attack with a dense column that hit the front and side of the Roman camp. When Caesar neared the right flank of his army, he found the XII Legion in crisis. The enemy had killed or wounded most of its centurions, including Publius Sextius Baculus, chief centurion of the legion, who had so many wounds that he could no longer stand upright. About the commanding general of the XII Legion, Servius Sulpicius Galba, Caesar says nothing, though a later failure on the general’s part led Caesar to remark that “Galba did not want to test fortune too often.” But Caesar did—and he says that at Sabis he took a shield from a soldier in the rear and went into the first line, calling the centurions by name and ordering the men to advance and spread out, so they would have more room to wield their swords. The response, he writes, was electric: “His [Caesar’s] coming brought hope to the soldiers

GODEFROY LE BATAVE/MUSÉE CONDÉ, CHANTILLY/RMN-GRAND PALAIS/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

The emotional heart of Caesar’s Commentaries is not the senior officer but the centurion, the Roman equivalent of a captain. Caesar depicts the centurions as so brave that they competed for honors, often at the cost of death. Caesar’s flattery was sincere. The centurions were professional officers and represented Roman military wisdom and continuity. Every legion had 60, each commanding a unit called a century—80 men at full strength. They were responsible for administration and discipline, and they kept their legions going on a daily basis. Senior centurions took part in war councils and often gave valuable advice. Caesar needed them in Rome as well, as political allies and supporters. As for Caesar’s men, they quite simply loved him. Not that Caesar responded sentimentally. Power, he once said, depended on two things: soldiers and money. And soldiers had to be fed. That meant their hearts and minds as well as their bellies. Caesar worked magic with the men: He was known as a great swordsman and horseman. He cultivated a reputation for toughness, endurance, and sharing in the men’s sacrifices. He led the army on marches, often bareheaded in the sun and often on foot, and he was courageous. At the start of one engagement, when he sent the officers’ horses away to make clear that the coming battle was a matter of do or die, he sent his own horse away first. He didn’t call his men “soldiers,” as was the usual Roman practice, but always “fellow soldiers.” Whether it was little things (like leaving his hair and beard unshaven as a sign of mourning for heavy casualties) or big ones (like giving out wages, loot, and land), Caesar took care of it all. He made rewards and punishments into an art form, handing out medals for success while ignoring most infractions except desertion or mutiny. The upshot was that Caesar’s men were, in the words of Roman historian Suetonius, “absolutely attached to him and absolutely steadfast.”

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he Battle of the Sabis was, as Plutarch says, an impossible victory. The Romans won it, but it was a near thing. Yet with his Commentaries, Caesar turned it into a public relations triumph for himself. He highlights his own heroism, while brushing off his errors, which a reader has to look between the lines to find. He blames others for what went wrong on the Roman side and downplays the mistakes made by the enemy, thus making Rome’s eventual success look all the more dramatic. His political goal was to build a bond between himself and the Roman people—and he did so. He followed up his victory at the Sabis with a successful campaign in what is now Belgium against the Aduatuci, allies of the Nervians. Northern Gaul then lay at Caesar’s feet, and after his victories, the senate voted an unprecedented 15 days of thanksgiving. Caesar went on to conquer all of Gaul and to invade Britain. In earlier years Caesar had frightened Roman conservatives with his populist political ambitions. Now, with new wealth and glory and victorious armies, Caesar looked even more dangerous. In 50 bc the senate relieved him of his command,

Francis I of France literally and figuratively took a page from Caesar’s book, printing a version of the Commentaries (above) in 1520. Written as if he were in dialog with Caesar, it implied Francis was heir to Gaul.

but Caesar refused to stand down. Instead, he invaded Italy and in January 49 bc started a civil war that lasted four years. The fighting spread from Spain to Egypt and Turkey, with tens of thousands of casualties. In the end Caesar emerged triumphant and was named “dictator for life” in February 44 bc. No Roman had ever before held so much power. On the Ides of March 44 bc at a meeting of the Roman senate, Brutus, Cassius, and 60 other assassins (including the hapless Galba, whom Caesar had accused of not wishing to “test fortune too often”) stabbed Julius Caesar to death. They claimed they were trying to save the Roman Republic from a dictator, but they failed. It took another civil war and heavy fighting before Caesar’s grandnephew, Octavian, emerged as Rome’s first emperor. No one could have foreseen those events on the summer day in 57 bc when Caesar walked into an ambush in the woods of northern Gaul and came out victorious. MHQ Barry Strauss is a contributing editor to MHQ. His latest book is The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination (Simon & Schuster, March 2015).

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Holding the Farm Napoleon’s main frontal attack at Waterloo was stalled by a single rifle battalion by Brendan Simms

Capturing the chaos of hand-to-hand combat in the confines of La Haye Sainte, this painting depicts Hanoverian major Georg Baring rallying units of the King’s German Legion.

ADOLF NORTHEN/NIEDERSAECHSISCHES LANDESMUSEUM, HANNOVER/ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

In what author Brendan Simms rightly calls “an epic defence,” the 400-odd Hanoverian riflemen of the 2nd Light Battalion of the veteran King’s German Legion withstood French artillery barrages, repeated mass charges, cavalry attacks, and relentless sniping to hold the fortified farm at La Haye Sainte. The farm stood at the center of the allied line, at a crucial intersection on the road to Brussels. Taking it was essential to the French effort to crack the line and drive a wedge between the enemy armies. But for the long bloody afternoon of June 18, 1815, the vastly outnumbered Germans defeated all attempts to take their position. Simms’s meticulous research enabled him to deliver an hour-by-hour, yard-by-yard story of the officers and soldiers whose names and backgrounds personalize his account of a do-or-die stand that gives vivid meaning to the old command, “Hold this position.”

battle for la haye sainte 1815

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y early afternoon Napoleon knew that he had a major problem on his hands. First he saw that the smoke was not moving forward around La Haye Sainte, but hung tenaciously like a cloud over the buildings. Then he observed the pellmell flight of most of General Jean-Baptiste Drout, compte d’ Erlon’s I Corps. To make matters worse, Napoleon knew that there were Prussians approaching from the northeast. He therefore dispatched a strong cavalry screen to shield the right flank until Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy, who was now recalled from pursuing the Prussians, arrived. The emperor sent substantial infantry forces to keep the Prussians out of the village of Plancenoit on the eastern edge of the battlefield. His main headache, however, remained the stiff resistance put up by the Germans in La Haye Sainte— Napoleon later estimated their numbers at an entire division, that is, many thousands of men. The buildings formed a breakwater which shattered the cohesion of the French advance, and a bulwark which prevented him from bringing artillery up to blast the allied line at close range. Hippolyte Mauduit, who served as a grenadier in the Old Guard at Waterloo, recalls that it constituted a “veritable outworks.” The emperor needed more information. Perhaps for this reason, a daring lone cuirassier rode up to the barricade across the road which the riflemen had reassembled and reoccupied, peered over it and galloped off before the men manning it—who had assumed they were dealing with a deserter—had time to react effectively. Dodging the bullets they sent after him, the horseman must have reported that the position was still strongly held by the enemy. The emperor’s options were limited. Shelling the garrison into oblivion would take too long, at least with the caliber of guns—6- and 12-pounders and 5.5-inch howitzers—available to him. The sturdy masonry of the farm could withstand most of what the grand battery could throw at it, at least for quite some time. Its walls are so thick that even today a cordless landline phone cannot be used in it. His siege train of larger guns was too far away. Bringing up some light artillery pieces to break down the gate might theoretically have been possible, but would have been extremely risky in the face of unsuppressed rifle fire from the defenders; a similar deployment later in the battle led to the swift death of the gun crews at the hands of marksmen from the main allied line. There was nothing for it. The Germans would have to be dislodged by a direct infantry assault. There was a problem, however. Most of General Honoré Charles, comte Reille’s II Corps was embroiled at Hougoumont; Napoleon could not commit General Jean Mouton, comte de Lobau’s VI Corps or the guard until he

was sure of the Prussians, and much of d’Erlon’s corps would remain a shambles for some time yet. Until they had been rallied, Napoleon could call only on Brigadier General Nicolas, baron Schmitz’s men around the orchard, and bring across some of Major General Pierre François Joseph Durutte’s 4th Division from the right flank. Oddly, the as yet uncommitted division of Reille’s II Corps on the left, Major General Baon Gilbert-Desiré-Joseph Bachelu’s 5th Division, remained, as its chief of staff, Colonel Trefcon, recalls, “l’arme à bras [with ordered arms] in the same position. We were given no orders.” Meanwhile, the French grand battery resumed its cannonade. Wellington, for his part, now focused almost exclusively on his center. He did not neglect Hougoumont, which was again reinforced, but he spent the rest of the battle close to the crossroads. Major General Sir John Lambert’s brigade was now moved up to behind the farm. The Prussians, too, could see the importance of the farmhouse. Count August von Thurn und Taxis, who was serving as the Bavarian liaison officer with Prussian General Field Marshall August Leberecht von Blücher, had a good view from the Prussian advance guard at Fichermont wood. The attack, he writes, “was being made with great violence at La Haye Sainte in an attempt to force the English out by bursting through their center. This would probably make a union of communication between our two armies impossible.” For this reason, Thurn und Taxis recalls, Wellington began to send ever more urgent pleas to Blücher for help.

The Germans would have to be dislodged by a direct infantry assault

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RICHARD KNÖTEL/BERLIN, SAMMLUNG ARCHIV FÜR KUNST UND GESCHICHTE/AKG-IMAGES

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he respite in La Haye Sainte did not last long. Ney ordered another attack on the farm with 3,000 men. At around 3 p.m., two French columns appeared and assaulted both sides of the farm buildings at once. As before, the attackers raised a great din, yelling “Vive l’empereur,” “Avant mes enfants,” and other familiar cries. This time, though, they advanced with some hesitation, perhaps unsurprisingly given their previous reception. Observing this, an infuriated Ney sent his aide-de-camp, Octave Levavasseur, forward with orders to tell them to get a move on. He found two companies of sappers taking cover behind a bank. Their captain—who clearly did not expect to survive the assault— handed Levavasseur his card, saying “Monsieur aide de camp, take it, here is my name.” He then ordered the drummer to beat the charge, and the engineers surged forward to shouts of “En avant,” followed by the waiting infantry. Lieutenant Colonel Georg von Baring, commanding the 2nd Light Battalion, recalls that he had never seen such desperate courage and ferocity in the enemy. The Germans behind the barricade kept the enemy skirmishers at bay for a while, but when the French main force appeared they risked being

overwhelmed. Graeme once again led his men back to the farm, telling Private Lindau to close and bar the gate. Some of the riflemen now took it in turns to fire from the loopholes, stepping back quickly after each round to reload and enable another marksman to take aim. Others lined the stand on the courtyard walls and fired on to the road below and into the orchard. Once again, the massed French suffered terribly, but some of them managed to seize hold of the protruding rifles, or to shoot through the gaps in the wall themselves. A number of defenders at the loopholes and in the courtyard were felled this way; more tumbled from the courtyard firing steps above them. At one point, the French temporarily gained control of the loopholes. Five legionnaires drove them off: Corporal Riemstedt and Riflemen Lindhorst and Lindenau were injured in the charge, for which they were later decorated. All the while, the enemy battered their axes furiously at the main gate, but they were unable to penetrate the stout oak.

Baring’s weakest point was on the other side, where the missing door left the barn wide open to the field. Here the French piled in relentlessly, and were repeatedly shot down. Rifleman Ludwig Dahrendorf was one of those defending the barn; despite considerable loss of blood from three bayonet wounds, he refused to leave his post. Riflemen Christoph Beneke, a straggler from the 1st Light Battalion, and Friedrich Hegener tried frantically to maintain the improvised barricade where the barn door had been; the latter suffered a bayonet wound to the leg in the process. He too refused his officers’ entreaties to retire from the fray in order to have his wounds seen to. Baring counted 17 dead enemy bodies, which soon provided a low wall behind which their comrades could shelter from the deadly German rifle fire. Once again, Baring directed operations from horseback, despite the fact that he presented an inviting target in the cramped courtyard. Another horse was shot beneath him, and his orderly—convinced that

Same battle, same bloody afternoon from the French army point of view. One of the many attempts by French infantry to storm the walls and breach the defenses of La Haye Sainte is shown in this watercolor by Richard Knötel.

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The decisive fighting took place south of Waterloo, athwart the road to Brussels. Napoleon directed his main attack at the center of the allied line, but his artillery barrage and cavalry charges failed to break the line.

his master was dead—rode off with the spare horses. Baring simply grabbed one of the many riderless beasts milling around. These struggles along the perimeter lasted about an hour. The Germans held firm, for now, but as the pressure mounted it seemed only a matter of time before the French burst through the gate, or the barn, or surged over the courtyard walls. Once more, it was a cavalry attack which came to the aid of the garrison, this time a French one. At around 4 p.m. Marshal Michel Ney, mistaking the redeployment of the allied main line to escape artillery bombardment as a sign of a general retreat, ordered successive cavalry charges on the allied line between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte to attack the squares on the reverse slopes. Observers describe a “boiling surf” of riders which swirled up the side and around the back of the farmhouse. As Captain William Siborne wrote, “the whole space between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont appeared one moving glittering mass.” Behind La Haye Sainte, the men of the King’s German Legion line battalions were in the thick of it, forming “squares” of about 300 men each. Conditions in these formations—which could be a more or less perfect square of equal sides, or an oblong, or something altogether more ragged—were grim. The sergeants and officers shoved or cuffed the men, some of them mere frightened boys, back into formation each time musket or gunfire had opened the ranks, pausing only to check “deception” or “subterfuge” among those who had fallen to the ground. The dead were thrown out in front, the injured cowered in the center. In the middle of the square of the 5th Line Battalion, surgeon Georg Gerson patiently tended to the wounded, including those of neighboring Hanoverian formations, without regard to his own safety. His dedication and courage drew the admiration of the brigade commander, Colonel Christian Friedrich Wilhelm von Ompteda. Ney’s thousands of cavalrymen never broke any of the allied squares, but the popular image of a futile tide of riders ineffectually lapping at the edge of a solid rock of infantry is misleading. Some of the French cavalrymen tormented the squares by firing pistols into them at close range, while skirmishers on horseback played on them with carbines, trying to tempt them into pointless volleys beyond effective range. The Germans responded by posting sharpshooters to drive them off. In between attacks, Ney’s riders took cover in the many folds in the ground, where they were often invisible from the main allied line. Meanwhile, their commanders took up positions on nearby hillocks in order to observe the enemy and to seize the moment when they could be caught on the move. The result was a deadly game of rock, paper, and scissors played out around the farmhouse throughout the afternoon and early evening. Ompteda’s brigade had to disperse so as to escape the heavy artillery fire. “In order to destroy our squares,” SIR ARCHIBALD ALISON, HISTORY OF EUROPE, NEW YORK: A. S. BARNES & CO, 1857

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Lieutenant Wheatley of the 5th Line Battalion recalled, “the enemy filled the air with shells, howitzers and bombs, so that every five or six minutes the whole battalion lay on its face, then sprang up again” when the danger had passed. In order to confront d’Erlon’s reformed infantry, however, it had to deploy in line. And in order to repel Ney’s cavalry, they had to form square, which in turn rendered them very vulnerable to shelling. Here timing and judgment meant the difference between survival and disaster. Around 3 p.m., as the second French attack began, the 5th King’s German Legion Line Battalion was once again ordered forward to assist the defenders. Once again it was menaced by French cavalry, and it was only with some help from nearby British horsemen that the Germans were able to form square and avoid the fate of the 8th Line Battalion and Lieutenant Colonel August von Klenke’s Lüneburgers. On another occasion, they were rescued by the King’s German Legion hussars. In theory, this pattern could repeat itself indefinitely, but, whereas the Germans had to be lucky all the time, the French cavalry needed to be lucky only once. As the cavalry storm raged around them, the farmhouse and its environs brief ly became a little oasis of calm. Horsemen found it difficult to operate in the quadrilateral bounded by the barricade, sandpit, sunken road and the farm itself. The infantry assaults slackened a little during the charges, as the French foot soldiers made way for the horsemen to deploy. After the first failed assault, they withdrew disheartened along with the returning cavalry, the huzzas and jeers of the Germans ringing in their ears. For some vivid moments, Baring and his men had a ringside seat during the most dramatic events of the battle. He observed four lines of cavalry forming to the right in front of the farm: cuirassiers (heavy cavalry), followed by lancers (armed with long lances, as their name implies), then dragoons (technically mounted infantry but in practice heavy cavalry) and finally hussars (light cavalry). The defenders were not idle spectators, though. They knew that the riders were attacking their own divisional comrades on the reverse slopes, and that if they succeeded in that mission, another attack on the farm would not be long in coming. As the French cavalry passed the buildings, Baring ordered his men to concentrate all their fire on their exposed right flank. They raced out of the farm buildings to the west and poured fire into the enemy, presumably dodging back inside when any of them came too close. Numerous horses and riders were shot down, but “without paying the least heed,” the survivors pressed on towards the allied squares. Sergeant Georg Stockmann distinguished himself by not only shooting a cuirassier officer’s horse from under him, but also vaulting over the courtyard

wall and taking the Frenchman prisoner under the fire and the eyes of the advancing enemy cavalry. It was not long, however, before the French renewed their infantry attacks. The German marksmen on the piggery and the courtyard walls blazed at them to terrible effect, particularly against their conspicuous officers. Private Lindau waged a personal vendetta against one commander, who had been directing the advancing columns. He had the Frenchman in his sights for some time, and eventually felled his horse, burying its rider under it. Not long after, the riflemen made another sally. The enemy nearest to hand were bayoneted; the rest fled. Lindau pursued them for some distance, until he saw the French officer, still pinned beneath his dead horse. The German grabbed his gold watch chain and when the officer raised his sabre to stop him, Lindau brained him with a rifle butt to the middle of his forehead. Swiftly, he cut loose the saddlebag, but when he turned to take his victim’s gold ring events intervened. “Get a move on,” his comrades called, “the cavalry are making a fresh charge.” Lindau ran to the rest of the men, who drove off the enemy with a volley. Looking around the highway, he noticed to his satisfaction that the French dead were piled up “more than a foot high” close to the barricade. In a gesture of mercy he paused to help a wounded man lying in a pool of water, crying out in pain with a bullet in his leg. Lindau grabbed his arms, while another rifleman took his legs, and together the two Germans carried the unfortunate to the courtyard wall, resting his head on the body of a dead comrade. Lindau also managed to relieve an enemy of a purse stuffed with gold coins. When he offered his haul to Baring for safekeeping, however, his commander refused. “Who knows what lies before us today,” he replied. “You must look after the money the best way yourself.” Shortly after, Lindau was shot in the back of the head. He refused Lieutenant Graeme’s order to go back for medical attention. “No,” he answered, “so long as I can stand I stay at my post.” The rifleman soaked his scarf with rum and asked a comrade to pour rum into the wound and tie the scarf around his head. Lindau then attached his cap to his pack, reloaded his rifle and returned to the fray. Despite his injuries, he joshed with Lieutenant Graeme on the platform above, warning him not to expose himself too much. “That doesn’t matter,” Graeme responded, “let the dogs fire.” Not long after, the lieutenant was wounded in the hand, which he bound up with a handkerchief. Lindau called out: “Now Captain [sic] you can go back.” “Nonsense,” Graeme replied, “no going back, that won’t do.” That officer was a mere 18 years of age. In the kitchen garden, the reinforcements from the 1st Light Battalion saw off all French attacks. At the far end, Corporal

They raced out of the farm buildings and poured fire into the enemy

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FRANCISCO JOSE DE GOYA Y LUCIENTES/ NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

Diedrich Schlemm kept up a steady fire until a bullet in the lungs had none to give him, however. The wagon with the battalion forced him to quit the fight. Corporal Henry Müller, one of the reserve had overturned during the retreat the day before, and best marksmen in the battalion, continued his struggle against the field depots had run short of rifle ammunition. Besides, it individual French officers, with the help of the two riflemen was impracticable to move large quantities of cartridges into the who reloaded his weapons between shots. This time he took farm as long as the main gate was exposed to direct French fire. aim at the commander of a column who approached waving Access via the back entrance was also problematic. “Swarms” his sabre and shouting, “Avancez!” When Müller killed the of enemy skirmishers, Sergeant Major Edward Cotton of the officer, his men immediately 7th Hussars recalls, had “estabretired in disorder. Yet another lished themselves immediately corporal, Friedrich Reinecke, under the crest of our position,” was posted with 10 men in a gap where they “cut off the comin the hedge from which he remunication between the farm pelled repeated enemy attacks. and our main line.” The British Though heavily outnumriflemen in the sandpit nearby bered, the rif lemen had the had plenty of cartridges, and advantage that the French line could literally have thrown infantry found it difficult to them into the courtyard, but bring their full volley fire to as they belonged to another bribear on a largely concealed and gade, Baring probably didn’t often prone enemy. They could ask them for any, and it is most often not even shoot unless the unlikely that they were even men in front of them stepped aware of the shortage of bullets aside or were killed. Moreover, in the farmhouse. as light infantry, the men of By now, in any case, Baring Baring’s battalion were in their faced a new problem. Shortly element at La Haye Sainte, often after Graeme was wounded, working in pairs as skirmishers Lindau heard a cry from the had been trained to do. In relabarn: “The enemy mean to get tively open ground, such as in through here.” He took up pothe gardens, the man in front sition at the door, but Lindau took aim and fired, while his had fired no more than a few partner reloaded, or covered shots when he suddenly noticed him with a loaded weapon, thick smoke under the beam. before either moving forward, Despairing of penetrating, the past his partner, or else waitattackers had set fire to the ing for his partner to fall back whole edifice. Luckily most of Commander of the allied armies at Waterloo, Arthur Wellesley, behind him, if the pressure up the straw had been removed Duke of Wellington led from the front and finally bested Napoleon. front was too great. This often for bedding the night before, created a bond between men, which became irrefragable over but the blaze still spread rapidly. There was no shortage of time, and contributed greatly to the cohesion and fighting water in the courtyard pond; the problem was that the Gerpower of light infantrymen. mans had nothing to carry it in. All the vessels and containers Baring was deeply touched by the courage of his men. “Nothhad been either burned overnight or ended up in one of the ing,” he recalled, “could curb the valour of our people,” who various barricades. Riflemen Wilhelm Wiese and Ludwig “laughed” in the face of danger. “These are the moments,” he Dahrendorf immediately tore their caps off their heads, filled wrote, “where one learns to sense what one soldier means to them with water and attempted to put out the fire, but to little another and what the word comrade actually entails.” When avail. If the flames spread to the rest of the buildings, Baring the fighting subsided a little around 5 p.m., however, it became would have to withdraw before his men were burned alive or clear that the garrison was in a parlous situation. Baring franasphyxiated by smoke. tically set the men to work repairing the damage wrought by French artillery and infantry. More critical still was the fact y around 5 p.m., La Haye Sainte was the cause of that the intense fighting had consumed most of the ammuniintense concern. Napoleon was determined to take tion with which the Germans had begun the struggle. Baring the farmhouse and blast his way through the allied therefore dispatched an officer back to his brigade commander center before the Prussians arrived. It must have been urgently requesting a fresh supply of rifle rounds. Ompteda around this time that he ordered Brigadier General Jean Pegot’s

B

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battle for la haye sainte 1815

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The sun sets on La Belle Alliance, Napoleon’s Waterloo headquarters, and on his comeback and imperial ambitions. The crushing defeat spelled the end of France’s long military dominance of Europe.

brigade across from Durutte’s division on his right flank to launch another attack on the buildings. He also sent the Young Guard to throw the Prussians out of Plancenoit. Wellington, too, must have been concerned. Instead of a cascade of Prussians coming to his aid on the allied left wing, he now risked losing the battle in the center while Blücher’s men won it to the east. Conditions within the farm were growing critical. Quite apart from the burning barn, the constant shelling grated on the nerves of the garrison. The smoke, heat, dust, and the constant biting of cartridges must also have made the men very thirsty. For the seriously wounded, the situation must have been little short of hellish, though slightly better than for the enemy casualties crawling or lying outside the farm. Things were no better in the rest of the brigade. The 5th King’s German Legion Line were still formed in square close to the farm, beset alternately by artillery, infantry and cavalry, their situation growing ever more desperate. Ammunition carts blew up nearby, maiming men and beasts. One eyewitness was “shocked at the sight of broken armour, lifeless horses, shattered wheels, caps, helmets, swords, muskets, pistols” scattered about, “still and silent.” Here and there, frightened riderless mounts would rush back and forth, trampling on the dead and dying; some of them stood on only three legs, their shattered limb dangling uselessly. Several of these were shot to put them out of their misery, and Lieutenant Wheatley observed that “it would have been an equal charity to have performed the same operation on the wriggling, feverish, mortally lacerated soldiers as they rolled on the ground.” “Because of the nature of the terrain,” and because it was exposed to diverse threats, the battalion journal records, the 5th Line Battalion “was forced to remain mobile, sometimes forming square and sometimes deploying [in line].” French cavalry charged no fewer than five times, on occasion retiring out of range into a fold in the ground in front of the Germans. Their commander would then take up position on a nearby elevation and order his men forward again whenever he spotted an opportunity to catch the enemy unawares. Ompteda, who had taken refuge with the 5th Line Battalion after his horse was killed, asked several of his men to shoot down the French commander, but none was able to do so. After the fifth charge, he finally turned to Rifleman Johan Milius, a straggler from the 1st Light Battalion, who lay injured in the square, having been hit in the leg by grapeshot. He volunteered to have a crack, and after being carried to a firing position by several comrades, Milius blasted the unfortunate French colonel off his horse with his second shot. MHQ Excerpted from The Longest Afternoon: The 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo, by Brendan Simms. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2015. JOHN LOUIS BROWN/MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS, BORDEAUX/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

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G-2 From the Ground Up How U.S. Army Intelligence was created by General John J. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force in World War I by Mark Stout The most important and rapid developments in the United States’ intelligence apparatus occurred in the American Expeditionary Force in France.

GENERAL JOHN J. PERSHING made good use of a small intelligence staff in the 1916–1917 Punitive Expedition into Mexico. But when the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, the War Department effectively had no military intelligence officer on the general staff in Washington and virtually no doctrine for army intelligence. Almost immediately upon the declaration of war, the United States began preparing a military force to fight in France. Pershing was named the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, and he began putting together his staff. At that time, Army Chief of Staff Major General Hugh Scott was inclined to let the French and British handle intelligence matters for all forces in the field. Pershing thought this was an atrocious idea. Should the AEF suffer a catastrophic setback on the battlefield, he did not want to have to tell the American public that he had left to foreigners the job of collecting the intelligence necessary to protect American troops from surprise attack. Pershing promptly named an intelligence chief: Major (later Brigadier General) Dennis Nolan. Nolan, who looked every inch the professor, had been an outstanding graduate of West Point and had served under Pershing in the Philippines. He had also taught history at West Point before serving in the Intelligence Section on the first War Department General Staff, from 1903 to 1906. This section was abolished not long thereafter, but Nolan’s stint gave him what was by American standards extensive intelligence experience. Nolan was savvy enough to know that he and Pershing had much to learn about intelligence. Even before leaving for Europe with Pershing and the other members of the AEF staff on May 28, 1917, he studied the When General John J. Pershing (first row center) became commander of the AEF in April information about the French and British 1917, he named Major Dennis Nolan (second row, second from right) his intelligence chief.

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U.S. ARMY

Intelligence played a major role in America’s conduct of World War II. Indeed, the successes against Japan’s cipher systems and the exploits of the Office of Strategic Services are the stuff of legend. But the origins of modern American military intelligence during the First World War are scarcely known, even to historians and intelligence practitioners. A former head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center exemplified this view when he wrote, “It is hard to find anything worthy of being called U.S. intelligence” in any of America’s wars from the War of 1812 through World War I. Of course, this comment ignores the effective but temporary intelligence organization of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War and extensive and enduring efforts during World War I. But when the United States entered World War I, it actually had a small intelligence establishment. Over the 19 months of U.S. participation in the war, its capabilities grew dramatically, stretching across government agencies and around the globe.

THE PRINT COLLECTOR/ALAMY

One of the high-priority functions of Nolan’s extensive intelligence operation was learning the German army’s order of battle, identifying and locating enemy units through field interrogation of German prisoners, as shown here, and capture of their letters, pay books, and other documents.

intelligence systems available in War Department files and queried liaison officers. Then in Britain, Pershing and his staff made the rounds of various British naval and military headquarters in London. In his comments on Pershing’s My Experiences in the War, Nolan observed that the “British staff seemed to be sort of stunned that we had brought so few officers with us. They took it to mean that we had a very little comprehension of what we were going up against or else that it would be a very long time before we would be ready for active operations.” After arriving in France, Nolan continued to meet with French and British intelligence staffs to absorb their advice. After extensive research, Nolan decided that the AEF’s intelligence structure should imitate the British system not only at the AEF General Headquarters level but down through the echelons. He recommended that the AEF adapt its first intelligence regulations from those of the British Second Army. Pershing personally reviewed these paragraph by paragraph with Brigadier General John Charteris, the intelligence chief

of the British Expeditionary Force, before approving them. The French exerted influence as well. The AEF applied the moniker G-2, in imitation of the French Deuxième Bureau. In addition, French and British intelligence professionals began to instruct American intelligence personnel. Furthermore, many of the intelligence manuals that the AEF disseminated to the troops were translations of French publications. Nolan established an extensive intelligence system relatively quickly. At the top was the AEF’s G-2 at the general headquarters in Chaumont, France, where Nolan oversaw a staff of about 300. Every echelon down to the battalion level also got an intelligence component. The Services of Supply, as the command in charge of the AEF’s rear area was called, got an intelligence office that largely performed counterintelligence functions. The AEF established an intelligence school at Langres, France, and many of its personnel were trained there. In addition, AEF G-2 was supported by a wide network, including Signal Corps units to intercept German communications, military attachés to conduct espionage in other countries,

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and naval intelligence personnel to help protect French ports of debarkation. The AEF General Headquarters’ intelligence unit comprised four sections. G-2A, the Information Division, was responsible for analysis as well as overseeing signals intelligence and aerial reconnaissance operations. G-2B, the Secret Service Division, conducted espionage and counterespionage operations. G-2C was responsible for mapmaking, while G-2D was in charge of censorship, press affairs, and propaganda. It also established the newspaper Stars and Stripes. G-2A was the largest and to Nolan “the most important” of G-2’s divisions. He placed it in the hands of Colonel Arthur

Like many intelligence units, Pershing’s G-2 soon faced a flood of information, which required analysis and interpretation—often in the form of maps drawn in the field by soldiers of the topographical section.

Conger, a former Fort Leavenworth instructor who had studied in Berlin under the famous military historian Hans Delbrück and had done intelligence work during the Philippine-American War. Conger had a challenging job. G-2A was the central point where information from the division’s collection systems, the espionage operations of G-2B, and the intelligence officers at lower echelons came together. One intelligence officer described the flood of information as a “terrific jumble...concerning so many different subjects and objects, and...some sections of it are always contradictory.” Figuring out what (if anything) it all meant involved “brain-wearing” labor. This analytical work required special people. Nolan thought that the people responsible for “sifting” facts from “the mass of rumors, statements of prisoners, captured documents, broken codes, misleading propaganda, false reports sent by the enemy intelligence to mislead, etc.” should be “the most skeptical in the army, accepting nothing without proof. A gullible mind

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has no place whatever in an intelligence system and should be eliminated at once.” In particular, he thought that “military men trained in historical research, newspaper men of long training who can spot propaganda, and generally the skeptically minded group, have good preliminary training for this work.” There was not only an unprecedented amount of data to process but a wide range of questions that needed to be answered. For instance, one of the first assignments that General Pershing gave to Nolan was to estimate the French coal supply and determine whether a shortage might force France to sue for peace. Bureaucracies in the AEF soon arose to study economics, politics, and developments on military fronts far from Europe, as well as the situation in France and innumerable other topics. By the time the war was over, it seemed to Nolan that there were few topics that were not of interest to the military. Several sections of G-2A performed specific military analytic functions. G-2A-1, which studied the German army’s order of battle, was one of the most important. Pay books and letters taken from prisoners of war and from corpses were particularly useful sources of raw data for this work. So, too, were signals intercepts, direction finding, and interrogations of prisoners and deserters. Espionage reports occasionally were useful, though they were less reliable. In addition, every Allied army, whether in France or elsewhere, exchanged a daily telegram of all unit identifications. The AEF believed that it could list enemy units with almost 100 percent accuracy and know the locations of those units in about 90 percent of all cases. Even losing track of units was significant as a possible harbinger of enemy offensives. In addition, G-2A-1 used an established French methodology for calculating German manpower and combat losses. Meanwhile, G-2A-2, the Enemy Resources Section under the leadership of Captain Ogden Mills, a future U.S. secretary of the Treasury, assessed German industrial and economic capacity and issued reports, such as “Food Conditions in Enemy Countries” and “The Iron Ore Resources of Germany and of France.” G-2A-3 was the Enemy Works Section. It studied the geography of German-held areas and German military engineering work in those areas. This included keeping files on towns, roads, bridges, waterways, and similar features. It also meant tracking the development of German trench and fortification systems, particularly through aerial photography. G-2A-7, the Air Intelligence Section, was an especially important part of G-2, with multiple functions. It oversaw the training and work of branch intelligence officers, whom it started sending to the field in May 1918. The branch officers bore responsibility for interpreting aerial photographs and debriefing aerial observers. They were detailed to observation groups that were attached to each army and corps and to every bombing squadron. They provided intelligence to the fliers and were responsible for seeing that intelligence acquired locally was sent to higher echelons. G-2A-7 also had an analytic function, drawing on reports from the branch officers, data from the British and French, interrogations of German pilots, and

SGT E. R. TRABOLD/U.S. ARMY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

origins of u.s. army intelligence

WAR DEPARTMENT/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Aerial photography made rapid strides in World War I, providing essential current information on enemy fortifications and troop movements. It also delivered stark evidence of battle effects, as seen in this image of the French village of Cunel ruined during the 1918 Meuse-Argonne offensive.

examination of downed German aircraft. It estimated German aircraft production, kept track of enemy air order of battle, force dispositions, airfields, and air activity and put together target folders for bomber squadrons. In fact, some of the first glimmerings of the concept of strategic bombing came out of the AEF’s G-2. In August 1918 Major J. D. Galloway, a military engineer, began to study bombing objectives and turned his attention to the most efficient ways to cripple German industry. He determined that bombers should concentrate on the small percentage of industrial facilities that, if destroyed, would bring German industry to its knees. He was still working on that idea when the armistice was announced in November. The Radio Intelligence Section was almost purely a collection organization. It received intercepted German communications from Signal Corps units and, in close cooperation with the British and French, attempted to decipher them. It also analyzed the flow of enemy radio traffic to help determine the structure and deployment of German forces. The section’s work was particularly useful to tactical commanders, as a forewarning of raids and barrages. German higher-level communications were typically encrypted with cipher systems. The most difficult of these to

break was the so-called ADFGX cipher, which the Germans used to communicate between corps and their subordinate divisions. The French made the initial break into this system and then shared their insights with G-2A-6, which was able to make a few decrypts of its own. The handful of messages that the French and Americans were able to read in these systems did provide valuable intelligence about the Second Battle of the Marne and other military developments. Of course, G-2A-6 knew that if it was able to acquire useful intelligence from German communications, so too must the Germans be able to acquire intelligence from the Allies—which led to a discussion of communication security measures.

G2B WAS RESPONSIBLE for “secret service work,” a term that encompassed espionage and counterespionage. Though not disdainful of such work, Nolan found that G-2B was “but a minor part” of the AEF’s intelligence work. The Espionage Section of G-2B fell to Nicholas Campanole, who had been an intelligence officer under Pershing during the Punitive Expedition. The most important espionage operations run by G-2B were the work of Emmanuel Victor Voska, an immigrant from Bohemia. He was a supporter of Czechoslovak independence

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outfit set up by the Czechoslovaks in 1915, which had established a courier service to Prague. Voska also did important work out of Italy, where he took over another preexisting operation: Czechoslovak deserters had set up an intelligence effort with the help of the Italian army. The operation brought out information from sympathetic units of the Austrian army and ran a courier service of Czechoslovak soldiers on leave all the way to Vienna and Prague. Allegedly, Voska himself was sometimes flown into Austro-Hungarian territory to collect intelligence, then flown out again. In addition to running its own espionage operations, the AEF augmented the offices of the U.S. military attachés’ offices in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden and received reporting from them. Four or five officers trained in secret service work were assigned to each of the offices. The attachés were responsible to the War Department in Washington and under orders to cooperate closely with AEF G-2. The military attaché in the Netherlands and his office, for example, ran some important cases. A locally prominent gentleman in western Germany was an important indirect source on German military plans. He had a friend, a German colonel of engineers, who confided in him, providing information on the lines to which the German army planned to withdraw when it began to collapse in the west. From the Netherlands, the British and French also ran a sophisticated cooperative network of train watchers in Germany and Belgium. That network provided valuable tips on impending German offensives. The Americans did not duplicate this work in the NethActive on the home front in World War I, U.S. Army intelligence officers issued erlands, but the U.S. military attaché in Denmark put these ideas to work establishing train-watching posters like this one as reminders of the wartime importance of information. systems at Madgeburg, Cologne, and Frankfurt. from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the American repreG-2B also oversaw a web of counterintelligence personnel sentative of Thomas Masaryk, who ultimately became the first reaching down into to the tactical unit. About one soldier in president of an independent Czechoslovakia. In 1914, under each platoon was recruited to conduct additional counterorders from Masaryk, Voska formed an intelligence network intelligence duty, and the system was considered very secret. based in New York that penetrated Austro-Hungarian and some German operations in the United States and passed its AFTER THE WAR the American Expeditionary Force defindings to the British. mobilized, but the lessons of its G-2 were remembered, in large Once the United States entered the war, Voska turned over part because Pershing served as army chief of staff from 1921 to his domestic operations to the U.S. government and took a 1924. During his tenure, the army’s first postwar Field Service commission in the army. Arriving in France in July 1918, he Regulations was published. It contained a virtual précis of the was assigned to G-2B. There, he took charge of a section colAEF’s intelligence collection, analysis, and counterintelligence lecting military, economic, and political intelligence from efforts, set out prescriptively. These regulations remained in effect Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the occupied parts until 1941, laying the groundwork for the U.S. military’s vastly of France and Italy. He conducted these operations from four expanded intelligence operations in World War II. MHQ locations: the AEF headquarters in France; the Netherlands; Switzerland; and Italy. In the Netherlands, he worked with a Mark Stout, a former intelligence analyst, directs graduate programs in global security studies and intelligence for Johns Hopkins former courier from his New York organization, who led a University’s School of Arts and Sciences. He has written extensively network of agents spying on the munitions factories of western on military intelligence history. Germany. In Switzerland, Voska was able to use a small intelligence

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HERITAGE AUCTION GALLERIES, DALLAS

origins of u.s. army intelligence

Culture of War books | film | new media | artists

QMUSEUM WATCH

Lafayette's Hermione A replica of the wartime frigate that brought the young Marquis de Lafayette back to America in 1780 will tour 12 ports of the American Revolution, June 5 to July 18. COURTESY ASSOCIATION HERMIONE-LA FAYETTE

Culture | artists History in the Round The IMAX of its day, the Gettysburg Cyclorama still takes viewers deep into the action at the great battle by Pamela D. Toler

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n 1880 Chicago businessman Charles Louis Willoughby commissioned a panorama from French artist Paul Philippoteaux, then the most celebrated painter of panoramas in the world. The subject—Major General George Pickett’s disastrous infantry charge against Union troops at the Battle of Gettysburg. Panoramas were the IMAXes of the

19th century. They combined history and landscape painting with techniques of theatrical set design to immerse the audience in the scene, whether a famous battle, a biblical epic, or an exotic travelogue. Viewers stood on a platform in the center of a specially constructed auditorium surrounded by a huge 360-degree painting. A hyperbolic curve put the center of the canvas a foot closer to the

Pickett's Charge is brought to life by the cyclorama's vivid details. This section shows events late in the charge, when Brigadier General Lewis Armistead's brigade (far right) made a momentary breakthrough. Big Round Top looms in the central distance.

COURTESY GETTYSBURG FOUNDATION; TOP: RECORDS OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, GENERAL HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINTS (GETT 41135), 3C-3054

viewer than either the top or bottom, allowing the artist to create an illusion of depth. A canopy hid the painting’s upper edge and the roof; a diorama along the lower edge might feature stone walls, rail fences, muskets, and other threedimensional props that added verisimilitude, blurring the boundaries between the real and created worlds. Willoughby had every reason to be-

lieve a Gettysburg panorama would draw crowds to rival the European enthusiasts who were at that time turning out to view Philippoteaux’s famous panorama, The Siege of Paris. The Battle of Gettysburg was the perfect subject for an American panorama. Fought in July 1863, the three-day battle marked a turning point in the war. Within months, Gettysburg was a pilgrimage site; visitors could buy

French artist Paul Philippoteaux (left) and his team spent over a year creating his masterpiece.

Culture | artists The final painting was enormous: 400 feet long and 50 feet high—longer than a football field—with 20,000 figures, including a self-portrait of Philippoteaux in the uniform of a Union officer.

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printed guidebooks and hire wounded veterans as tour guides. If anything, Willoughby underestimated the subject’s appeal. Philippoteaux spent several weeks at Gettysburg in 1880, researching the battle and documenting the terrain. In addition to making hundreds of sketches, he hired a photographer to take panoramic pictures from Cemetery Ridge; interviewed veterans of the battle, including several generals; toured the battlefield with a Gettysburg veteran turned guide; and studied maps archived at the War Department in Washington, D.C. Back at his studio in Belgium, the hub of the panorama industry, Philippoteaux painted a full-color study of the battle, working on a 1:10 scale. The study was then enlarged and transferred to the blank canvas, which had been stretched into its final shape. A team of five to 20 artists, each with his own specialty— landscape, horses, uniformed figures, portraits, even the sky—painted the panorama under Philippoteaux’s supervision. Because of the size of the canvas, the artists worked on rolling wooden towers, ranging from 10 to 50 feet high.

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A farm behind Union lines is accurately depicted as a field hospital in the cyclorama, but Philippoteaux gave the farm buildings and haystack a distinctly European feel.

truth when I tell you it was difficult to abuse my mind of the impression that I was actually on the [battle]ground.” Gibbon wasn’t the only viewer impressed by Philippoteaux’s masterpiece: more than two million people visited the panorama during the 10 years it was displayed in Chicago. It proved so popular that Willoughby soon commissioned at least one and possibly as many as three additional copies from Philippoteaux for display in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Boston. (American artists also made pirated copies of the

LEFT: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; RIGHT: COURTESY GETTYSBURG FOUNDATION

The cyclorama attracted such large crowds in eastern cities that special venues were built to display it.

he Battle of Gettysburg, now known as the Gett ysburg Cyclorama, opened in a specially designed rotunda in the heart of Chicago in August 1883. Philippoteaux considered it his masterpiece; the public agreed. Chicago newspapers praised it as “a triumph of realistic painting,” “the most extraordinary work of art ever seen in this city,” and even “one of the most realistic and superb battle scenes ever shown in America.” Viewers saw the battlefield from the perspective of Cemetery Ridge, as if they stood slightly behind the Union line during Pickett’s Charge. The landscape seemed to stretch for miles: fields glowed golden in summer sunlight, then faded into distant greens until they reached the horizon and met the sky. Troops moved through the foreground, their progress defined by wooded copses, rail fences, and low stone walls. Flecks of tinsel in the paint caught the light, simulating sunlight flashing off bayonets. As viewers moved around the platform, they saw Pickett’s troops charge the Union position from the west. To the east, Brigadier General Henry Hunt raised field glasses to watch Union reinforcements hurry toward the center from Culp’s Hill and Little Round Top. The line of battle stretched south from Major General Winfield Scott Hancock’s position; in the north, surgeons worked to save the wounded in a shed transformed into a field hospital. Within the larger troop movements, hundreds of small vignettes gave the battle a hundred human faces. The effect was so realistic that Brigadier General John Gibbon, whose division held the center of the ridge against Pickett’s Charge, wrote to a fellow officer: “You look out upon the field of Gettysburg from a point just behind the middle of my Div. The perspective and representation of the landscape is simply perfect, and I say nothing more than the

panorama using photographs of the Chicago original.)

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s in Chicago, the new Gettysburg Cyclorama played to packed houses. In Boston it was displayed in a specially designed rotunda on Tremont Street, now part of the Boston Center of the Arts. To accommodate crowds, it was on view 14 hours a day, seven days a week, from December 1884 until 1891, when the rotunda’s owners loaned it to a Philadelphia venue in exchange for another panorama, Custer’s Last Fight. After being displayed in Philadelphia and several smaller cities, the Gettysburg Cyclorama returned to Boston, where it was rolled up in a wooden crate and stored in a vacant lot behind the auditorium—largely forgotten.

In 1910 department store magnate Albert Hahne bought the battered 377-by-42-foot canvas. He displayed it for a time in his Newark store, then sent it on tour to New York, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore (where it was reportedly viewed with tears by Pickett’s widow), then brought it to a permanent home in Gettysburg, in time to be displayed for the battle’s 50th anniversary celebration. The cyclorama was a popular tourist attraction in Gettysburg from 1913 to 2003, first as a private venture and later as the centerpiece of the Gettysburg National Museum Park. But after 100 years of almost continuous exhibition, the painting showed its age. The canvas had lost a 12-foot strip of sky and a 30foot section of the middle canvas. Roof leaks, soot from the heating system, and

inadequate climate control had contributed to paint loss, discoloration, and distortion of the hyperbolic shape essential to the “you were there” illusion. In 2003 the National Park Service and the Gettysburg National Museum Foundation hired conservation specialists to restore the painting. Five years and $13 million later, the cyclorama’s face-lift was complete. Now installed in a specially designed visitor center and museum, with a sound and light show Philippoteaux and Willoughby could only dream of, The Battle of Gettysburg once again makes visitors feel, like General Gibbon, that they are actually on the battleground. MHQ Pamela D. Toler contributes frequently to MHQ’s Artists department.

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Culture | classic dispatches A Fragment of Velestino, 1897 by Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was an innovative and influential novelist and reporter. He was also precocious, filing stories from the Jersey Shore at 16 and publishing a novel at 20.

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ut on the green plain there was a dark line, heavier than a shadow, and lighter than a hedge. Most of the plain was hidden from this hill by a higher hill forward and to the left, but this dark line afforded the essential interest. It was the Turks. It is a great thing to survey the army of the enemy. Just where and how it takes hold upon the heart is difficult of description. Of course there is all the usual reflection concerning the chances of being killed, but there is another element, important and strong, and at the same time elusive to a degree. It has perhaps something to do with the enemy’s persistent and palpable determination to kill you if possible. Here are a vast number of men convened evidently for this sole purpose. You can repeat to yourself, if you like, the various stated causes of the war, and mouth them over and try to apply them to the situation, but they will fail to answer your vague interrogation. The mind returns to the wonder of why so many people will put themselves to the most incredible labor and inconvenience and danger for the sake of this—this ending of a few lives like yours, or a little better or a little worse. This army on the plain was a majestic thing. It expressed power— power. The force one felt to be in those long dark lines was terrible. It could reach and pull down the clouds, this thing. It could let two seas meet, this thing. A soldier in the trenches suddenly screamed and clasped his hands to his eyes as if he had been struck blind. He rolled to the bottom of the trench, his body turning twice. A comrade, dazed, whistling through his teeth, reached in his pocket and drew out a hunk of bread and a handkerchief. It appeared that he was going to feed this corpse. But he took the handkerchief and pressed it on the wound and then looked about him helplessly. He still held the bread in his other hand, because he could not lay it down in the dirt of the trench. As for most of the men, they accepted this visitation in silence, merely turning their eyes to look at the body, and then perhaps shaking their heads mournfully while a strange wonder and wistful questioning of the future were in some glances. The crest of the hill had been a field of meagre but ripe grain. It had been trampled now until little of it appeared, although a yellow wisp or two might be trying to struggle out from under one of the ammunition boxes of the battery, all painted a light blue and scattered thickly over the field. To the rear lay a dead horse, and a number of bloodred poppies, miraculously preserved from the countless feet, bloomed near it. Continually there was in the air a noise as if someone had

PRIVATE COLLECTION/COURTESY OF SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; OPPOSITE: FRANK DADD/PRIVATE COLLECTION/LOOK AND LEARN ILLUSTRATED PAPERS COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

Renowned for his perceptive 1895 war novel, The Red Badge of Courage—written when he was just 23 years old—Stephen Crane was a dedicated and prolific journalist, and a driven war correspondent. He had a hunger to cover great battles, and his dispatches from Greece to Cuba ran to hundreds of pages and appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines. In a life cut tragically short by tuberculosis at 28, Crane displayed a rare blend of literary gifts, combining in both his dispatches and his fiction a reporter’s eye and ear for descriptive detail and realistic dialogue and a novelist’s understanding of the human heart. In the selections below, Crane reports on a battle between Greek forces and the Turkish army at Velestino in the brief Greco-Turkish War of 1897.

The Greco-Turkish War of 1897, also known as the Thirty Days' War, began with an uprising on the island of Crete against Turkish rule. After Greek forces assaulted the island, the war expanded, and the sharpest fighting occurred at Velestino, in Thessaly, where the Greeks fought Turkish infantry to a standstill before the insurrection ended in defeat.

thrown an empty beer-bottle with marvellous speed at you. This hooting and whistling of some of the shells was like nothing if not like the flight of an empty beer-bottle. Then others just whined and sang in a sort of an arc of sound—an arc both in volume and in key. It was great to hear others go like immense birds flashing across the vision in their swift journey. The rapid flapping of their wings was perfectly obvious. Sometimes the

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Culture | classic dispatches blinding explosions of these shells dug holes on the hill among the trampled grain and the few poppies. There was great trouble on the other hill in front and extending far to the left. Its summit was a long fringe of grey smoke floating backward. The volleys were rattling and crackling from one end of the hill to the other. Sometimes the pattering of individual firing swelled suddenly to one long beautiful crash that had something in it of the fall of a giant pine amid his brethren of the mountain side. It was the thunder of a monstrous breaker against the hard rocks. At times it was these things, and at times it was just the crack-crack-cracketycrackcrackle of burning timbers. Altogether the troops on the

judge whether it was to be well or ill for Turk or Greek in the final measure of the day. People would like to stand in front of the mercury of war and see it rise or fall, and they think they ought to demand it, more or less, in descriptions of battle; but it is an absurd thing for a writer to do if he wishes to reflect in any way the mental condition of the men in the ranks, and the knowledge of a captain is very little better. Perhaps the general ignorance extends to colonels, who in this army command from two to five thousand men. A subordinate commander knows this—he knows he was attacked and that he repulsed the enemy or didn’t repulse the enemy. He knows that he attacked, and won or lost; whether or not this was vitally important to the fortunes of the day he cares to learn, but probably he can’t find out. In the meantime, the men know this or less. On this day in particular there was a rumor through the army that the Turks were attacking in force. This is what was known. The Turks were attacking in force. Stragglers moving toward Volo told many tales. The Greeks were on the edge of a great victory. The Greeks were on the verge of a great defeat. The right flank had been driven back; the right flank had advanced. The centre was crushed; the centre was holding its own. The left flank was turned; the left flank had taken a height in its front. When the battalion came to the top of the ridge it found a great green plain spread out before it, and the plain was ruddy, almost brazen, in the light of the late afternoon sun. The distances here were magnificent. One could see even the long snowy summit of Mount Olympus in the far north, and as for the central plain of Thessaly, it was simply a great map. But these natural splendors did not occupy any serious part of the battalion’s attention. The men had been projected into the middle of a good fight. Obliged to wait for a time, they peered cautiously over the crest of the ridge. Below and in front some yards there was a trench, and in this trench there were perhaps forty Greek soldiers. These soldiers had hollowed little places in the top of the trench, and had added the protection of stones. When a soldier had loaded his rifle, he rested it in this groove, and, taking aim at some tiny black figures on a knoll that arose from the plain half a mile away, he fired. The shiny Gras jumped a trifle with the explosion, and then the soldier rolled half on his back and drew his piece in to be again loaded. They were quite leisurely at this time. To the rear lay the body of a youth who had been killed by a ball through the chest. This youth had not been a regular soldier, evidently; he had been a volunteer. The only things military were the double cartridge belt, the haversack, and the rifle.…

ridge were heavily engaged, and, as if by concert, the plain on the right became dotted with little puffs of smoke. The captain of the battery was furnished with a new and large number of targets. It was during the attendant excitement of this situation that he sent a man to the rear for another pair of field-glasses. His first pair had suffered a rifle-ball wound. The man misunderstood the order, and he came back with a bottle of wine. He stood until the captain should finish talking with a subaltern. There was a look of pious satisfaction on his face at having concluded his errand with wisdom and celerity. Suddenly the captain reached for his field-glasses and got instead a bottle of wine. Astonishment and incredulity mingled on his face. He looked sternly at the soldier and harangued him on the necessity of not being an idiot during battles. His gestures were wild and rapid. Nevertheless, he did not relinquish his fast grip on the bottle of wine. Presently he went along the lines giving an order, and sometimes he absent-mindedly waved the bottle toward the Turks. He looked down at last and saw that he still grasped the bottle. He went then and gave it into the care of the trusty corporal who commanded the horse and mule squad below the hill. When the actors are under fire, small dramas of this kind may be interesting to the spectator.…

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aturally one wants now to be informed of the complexion of the battle. Who was winning? Was victory with the blue field and white cross of the Greeks? Or was it with the crimson banner of the Moslems? If a reader of a casual article of this kind wishes to know who was winning this battle, depend upon it there were men present upon the field who considered the question to be one of surpassing importance. But none knew. How could he know? The battlefield was spread over miles of ground. It had a multitude of phases. No one could

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he fire from the ridge had been undergoing one of the merely crackling periods. Now, however, it blazed up again. These wonderful little figures amid the green and brown fields of the plain had increased vastly in number. Little trick-

FRANK DADD/PRIVATE COLLECTION/LOOK AND LEARN ILLUSTRATED PAPERS COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

Who was winning? Was victory with the blue field and white cross of the Greeks?

In the late 1890s Crane was in a lather to cover combat, and when fighting broke out on Crete, he joined a corps of news correspondents— some shown here accompanying a Greek peace mission after Velestino. Most of his dispatches were published by the New York Journal.

ling streams of them began to flow slowly along the lines of the old hedges and ditches. In one place there was a great long heavy streak of them. It was more than human to see even the color of a fez from the height. As for a gesture, any expression at all, it could not be seen. And this quality provided the picture with its extraordinary mysticism. These little black things streaming from here and there on the plain, what were they? What moved them to this? The power and majesty of this approach was all in its mystery, its inexplicable mystery. What was this thing? And why was it? Of course Turks, Turks, Turks; but then that is a mere name used to describe these creatures who were really hobgoblins

and endowed with hobgoblin motives. In the olden times one could have had a certain advantage of seeing an enemy’s eyes. If one was anxious about the battle, one could have perhaps witnessed the anxiety of the enemy. Anything is better than a fight with an enemy that wears the black velvet mask of distance. The trenches on the left part of the height became tumultuous with smoke and long thin rifle flashes. As the dark streams, rivulets, of the enemy poured along the plain, a large number of batteries opened, and great black shells, whirling and screaming, fled over the heads of the men in the trenches. There was going to be a good tight little fight. MHQ

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Culture | reviews Our Leader’s Learning Curve The Making of America’s First Leader By Robert Middlekauff, 384 pages. Knopf, 2015. $30.

Reviewed by Edward G. Lengel

Washington is often portrayed as a mature, accomplished military leader brimming with confidence. But Middlekauff shows him as ambitious and eager to learn, as both the subject and agent of change.

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istory is about change, but historians struggle to accept this elemental fact when it comes to George Washington. Too often he appears as a monumental figure, immutable as any marble statue. Textbooks depict him as possessed of a number of fixed personal qualities that informed his allegedly steadfast strategic vision during the Revolutionary War. More broadly, he is often said to have seethed with ambition that drove him to seek leadership of the Continental Army in 1775 as avidly as he had striven to distinguish himself on the battlefield as a young man during the French and Indian War. Historian Robert Middlekauff rejects the traditional narrative in his important new work on Washington’s military leadership during the Revolutionary War. He presents Washington as both the subject and agent of change; as a man who melded and was transformed by the struggle for independence. The French and Indian War, summarized in two brief chapters, revealed the young Virginian’s qualities and shortcomings. It also served to solidify his self-confidence, determination, and sense of personal and military honor. By 1758, Middlekauff argues, Washington had become a seasoned and markedly skillful veteran soldier who showed definite promise as a high-ranking leader. Washington accepted command of the Continental Army in 1775 with conflicted feelings that combined duty and trepidation. Attempting to construct an effective army outside Boston and uncertain whether the nation could endure over the long term, he looked for opportunities to bring the war to a quick conclusion. Those opportunities proved elusive. Although the British abandoned Boston under pressure, they returned in force the following summer, drubbing Washington at Long Island and forcing him to retreat across New Jersey to Pennsylvania. Middlekauff deftly summarizes these actions and heralds the Continental victories at Trenton and Princeton as events that honed Washington’s still-emerging leadership skills while also transforming the conflict’s nature. In chronicling the events of the following years, from the Philadelphia campaign of 1777 to the 1778 Battle of Monmouth and the years of promise and frustration that followed, Middlekauff properly highlights Washington’s role as a unifier whose leadership brought focus to a dangerously divided nation. In contrast to other recent historians who have posited British defeat as inevitable, he suggests that patriotic sentiment was far from unshakable and American victory by no means preordained. Washington’s organizational ability underpinned the survival of the Continental Army, which in turn ensured that the American people remained supportive of the cause.

CHARLES WILLSON PEALE/YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY

Washington’s Revolution

The quest for unity informed both Washington’s conduct during the Yorktown campaign and his vision of a postRevolutionary America. His ability as a diplomat ensured active French cooperation during the crucial campaign of 1781. At the same time, he became increasingly convinced of the need for a centralized, efficient government to raise national prosperity from the ashes of war. Middlekauff concludes his narrative by highlighting how Washington’s enduring belief in

A Higher Form of Killing Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare By Diana Preston, 352 pages. Bloomsbury, 2015. $28.

Reviewed by Anthony Brandt

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eapons of mass destruction. The phrase dates to the Spanish Civil War but the reality dates to World War I, when in a six-week period in spring 1915,

civil supremacy inspired his vision for the future of the United States. This fine work suggests that independence was not a certitude but an astonishing achievement that owed much to a man who, like his country, came to maturity in war. Edward G. Lengel is the editor in chief of the Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia. His books on Washington include General George Washington: A Military Life (2005).

the German U-20 torpedoed the SS Lusitania, Zeppelins attacked London from the air, and poison gas was used by the Germans for the first time on the battlefield. Those six weeks, and their aftermath, are the subject of British historian Diana Preston’s fascinating, and horrifying, new book. In the case of the Lusitania—the subject of one of Preston’s previous books— the sinking broke internationally accepted “cruiser rules” against attacking

civilian passenger ships. More than a thousand people died. The Zeppelins killed an equal number of British civilians, including women and children; the dirigibles also dropped incendiary bombs in an attempt to set London afire. After the Allies gained control of the skies, the firebombing of entire cities became common. As for poison gas, it was released from canisters when the wind was right to blow it over enemy trenches. Yet using poison gas in the

HANS ANKER/AKG-IMAGES

German Zeppelins, later famous as transatlantic passenger craft, were first employed as bombers during World War I, conducting aerial raids over London that deliberately targeted civilians.

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Culture | reviews did not attend her funeral. As to the Zeppelin raids, although Londoners panicked and piled into cellars or any safe spot they could find, they were also fascinated by the giant machines floating above them like pink cigars. Wrote the Guardian: “One of the blackest of the many crimes with which Germany has stained herself this past year is that she has introduced this inevitably haphazard murder into warfare.” Near the end of the war, the Germans were building large bombers with enormous wingspans to bring heavier and heavier bombs to England, while the United States was working “on sixty-five gas projects including one gas that would leave soil barren for seven years and a few drops of which would cause a tree ‘to wither in an hour.’” Germany had

opened Pandora’s box. Evil would flow out of it for half a century or more. Anthony Brandt is a frequent contributor to MHQ. His most recent book is The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage.

The Fall of the Ottomans The Great War in the Middle East By Eugene Rogan, 512 pages. Basic Books, 2015. $32.

Reviewed by Anthony Paletta

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f the trouble with accounts of most Western Front combat in World War I is a tendency for individual battles and campaigns to get subsumed in the larger

Camels were de rigueur for military transport in the Middle Eastern Theater in World War I. During the campaign against Ottoman forces, Australian soldiers in the Imperial Camel Corps mustered for the fighting near Rafah, Egypt, in early 1918.

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JAMES FRANCIS HURLEY/AKG-IMAGES

trenches was an uncertain gamble, as the wind could change, and sometimes did, blowing the gas back over the very troops who had released it. During the course of the war, Germany first developed chlorine gas, then phosgene, and finally the deadliest, mustard gas, forcing Britain, France, and later, the United States, to develop their own chemical weapons. Preston is an excellent historian who has written a good deal of military history, and she tells the stories behind the new weapons with great skill and detail. As an example, the wife of Fritz Haber, the German chemist who developed the poison gases, hated what her husband was doing, fought to get him to change his mind, and, when she failed to do that, took his pistol and shot herself. Haber

muck and mire of trench warfare, the difficulty with the historiography of the war in the Middle East is exactly the reverse: Two campaigns, Gallipoli and Palestine, occupy a preeminent role in the popular imagination, and the larger Ottoman war is at best an afterthought. Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East commendably fills this void. The Ottoman Empire, shaken by two Balkan wars and reeling from decades of increasing dismemberment, found the Central Powers less eager than the Entente had been to pull apart its remaining limbs. By the time the Great War ignited, the Ottoman state was poorly equipped to function even in peacetime, let alone in war. Its early offensive efforts to take the Suez Canal and to expand into the Russian Caucasus ended in rapid failure. The empire seemed easy prey for the Entente. And yet, somehow it wasn’t. Allied naval efforts to force the Dardanelles were an utter failure, soon complemented by the grinding debacle of the Gallipoli invasion. Precipitous Western advances in Mesopotamia brought about the worst British surrender in its history—13,000 soldiers at Kut-al-Amara. Efforts to advance in Palestine were hampered by resolute Turkish defense, and Russian advances sputtered in the Caucasus. The scale of these battles was often small. Early offensives in the Caucasus pitted about 100,000 Turks against 80,000 Russians—fewer than the number of casualties at the first Battle of Ypres. Even Gallipoli, the largest struggle in the theater, involved trivial numbers of combatants compared to other fronts. These were unusually grim struggles, however; the Caucasus front involved the most forbidding terrain and weather of the war, aside from the Italian Alps. Gallipoli was, in the reckoning of many Entente combatants, a worse experience than the Western front, involving constant combat and no prospect of rotation (Rogan’s great-uncle was a casualty). The theater also featured the most colorful range of combatants, with much of the

Entente war effort borne by French North African, Anzac, and Indian units. As Rogan recounts, conf lict in the theater often turned more on the initiative of individuals than in other theaters. The success of Edmund Allenby and T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt must be contextualized against the nimble local direction of many Turkish fronts and the considerably broader success of the Ottomans at holding their frontiers. The Ottoman frontiers, as broad as they were, involved many intriguing sideshows: naval raiding in the Black Sea, small-scale combat around Aden, guerrilla war against Italy in Libya, and the assorted intrigues preceding the Arab Revolt—as well as the horrifying spectacle of the Armenian genocide. Rogan also covers the details of efforts to raise the banner of Islam against the Entente. Efforts at jihad, largely miserable failures, did manage to induce the defection of some Indian and French North African colonial prisoners of war; separated from other combatants and treated well, they sometimes joined the Ottoman effort. The Ottoman banner, ultimately, was too tattered to inspire much enthusiasm, but, as with many empires, it displayed a final burst of energy amid its last breaths. Anthony Paletta writes the Spaces column for the Wall Street Journal and contributes to Metropolis, The Awl, and The Daily Beast.

American Warlords How Roosevelt’s High Command Led America to Victory in World War II By Jonathan W. Jordan, 624 pages. NAL Caliber, 2015. $28.95.

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estselling author Jonathan Jordan’s reputed purpose in this detailed book is to examine the interplay and effects of four men on the course of war: President Franklin Roosevelt; General George C. Marshall; Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson; and Admiral Ernest J. King, the chief of naval affairs. While Jordan does in fact trace the workings of FDR’s inner circle, he expands the circle

beyond those men and clearly casts Marshall as the savior of the day—a highly moral, confident, unflappable soldier committed to speaking truth to power— be it Roosevelt’s, Stalin’s, or anyone else’s. “I frankly was fearful of Mr. Roosevelt’s

introducing political methods of which he was a genius into a military thing,” Marshall confides to a friend early in the war. Each of Jordan’s two other “warlords” had the same worry as the war progressed, but that is only one piece of the story Jordan tells. As he follows back-room military and political maneuverings from Pearl Harbor to the Big Three conference in Tehran to the preparations for Operation Overlord to Yalta and beyond, Jordan also addresses the problems and problem personalities (Patton and MacArthur particularly, and sometimes Churchill) that Roosevelt’s inner circle, including Eisenhower, had to deal with. Perhaps the most compelling stories here are of the historical turns that almost, but didn’t, happen—Marshall as commander of Overlord, Dewey as president, the Morgenthau Plan (to reduce postwar Germany to a meek agrarian state) rather than the Marshall Plan—each of them near misses that would have recast history.

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Culture | reviews Rescue at Los Baños The Most Daring Prison Camp Raid of Word War II, By Bruce Henderson, 384 pages. William Morrow, 2015. $27.99.

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he Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was as great a shock to Americans stationed or working in the Philippines as it was to the rest of America, but the implications for them were far more immediate. A day later, Japanese bombs were falling on Manila. By Christmas, the U.S. military had withdrawn to the Bataan Peninsula. That left American civilians— and there were a considerable number of them in Manila—to fend for themselves. Henderson profiles some of those civilians—American nurses, doctors, engineers, many of them small-town men and women with ambitions and an urge to see the world—and builds a narrative that weaves their stories into one tale of survival. Five months after Pearl Harbor, most of them, about 2,000 American civilians, found themselves prisoners of war at Los Baños Internment Camp, wedged between Laguna de Bay, the Philippines’ largest lake, and 3,580-foot Mount Makiling. Aside from the Japanese and local Filipinos, no one knew of the Americans’ whereabouts or of the camp itself until the last days of 1944, and even then their ordeal would go on for more than a year.

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Henderson gives a vivid account of the privations and cruelties, valor and sadism of life at Los Baños under its notorious quartermaster, Japanese warrant officer Sadaaki Konishi, who seemed intent on starving his American prisoners. At the same time, Henderson tracks the larger war in the Philippines and the formation, training, and personalities of the 11th Airborne Division. Activated in North Carolina in February 1943, the 11th Airborne was commanded by Major General Joseph Swing, who was “determined to prove that paratroopers were the world’s most elite and versatile fighters.” He did that on February 23, 1945, when he executed what General Colin Powell later called, “a textbook operation for all ages and all armies”— the liberation of Los Baños. Henderson follows the events of that day in detail then follows some of the major players back to the U.S. as they attempt to adjust to life after war.

West Point 1915 Eisenhower, Bradley, and the Class the Stars Fell On, By Michael E. Haskew, 224 pages. Zenith, 2014. $30.

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he men entering West Point in 1911 had no idea what the next 60 years would hold for them or the country, but as with the class of 1846, war would bring some of them a place in history and many of them a successful military career. Of the 164 cadets who graduated from West Point in 1915, 59 became generals, more than any other class before or since. Through the course of two world wars, Korea, and the Cold War, Haskew follows the careers of some of the graduates, most in quick sketches. But, as the title indicates, this book is devoted to Dwight D. Eisenhower, and to a lesser degree, to Omar Bradley. Unlike many of their fellow cadets, who were from well-off families, young Eisenhower and Bradley saw the academy as an opportunity for a free education and a better life—and not insignificantly, as a great place to play sports. A

prankster and rule breaker, Ike earned an impressive number of demerits, but, as Haskew makes clear, Eisenhower’s self-direction and leadership would play to his advantage as his career progressed. After Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower was summoned to the War Department, in part because his old West Point classmate, then Major General Joseph McNarney, had been tasked with reorganizing the army’s command structure and he wanted the best people on the team. When Eisenhower reported to an overtaxed Marshall on a plan for the Philippines, Marshall told him to proceed, saying he was surrounded by “able men who analyze their problems well but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solutions. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me what they have done.” Haskew devotes some time to the Marshall-Eisenhower relationship over the war years, but he also looks at the accomplishments of McNarney, who ultimately took Eisenhower’s place as supreme commander of the European Theater and commander of U.S. Forces of Occupation in Germany; and James Van Fleet, who was so often in the thick of war (Metz, Bastogne, Utah Beach, then Greece and Korea) that Truman called him “the greatest general we have ever had.”

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Vietnam, distant peace: On November 22, 1967, a soldier from the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade waits to be airlifted from Hill 875, a key objective in the Battle of Dak To. Hill 875 was won the next day at great cost to the unit: 115 killed, 253 wounded.

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subscriber bonus special

HEINRICH HOFFMANN/BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK/BILDARCHIV PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

Fully assembled, the massive Krupp-built 80cm gun was so heavy it was transported on two sets of special parallel railroad tracks.

DAYS OF

Thunder The making of Dora, the world’s biggest gun by C. G. Sweeting

Zehn, neun, acht.…The countdown for Dora’s first shot in anger had begun. Sieben, sechs, fünf….Colonel General Erich von Manstein, commander of the German Eleventh Army, accompanied by Marshal Ion Antonescu, Romanian head of state and armed forces commander, checked their earplugs and waited expectantly in the observation post over a mile from the enormous railway gun. Vier, drei, zwei….Silence prevailed. Feuer!….KABOOM! The thunderous roar was followed by a huge cloud of smoke; the air tingled and the earth shook as the 4.8ton projectile whistled in a high trajectory toward its designated target 15.5 miles distant. It may have resembled a fire-breathing monster from Norse mythology, but this was no myth. “Dora” was the biggest gun of all time, and it was firing at the port city of Sevastopol, then the world’s strongest fortress.

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ora’s entry to action on June 5, 1942, marked the culmination of a program that began six years earlier when Adolf Hitler first discussed the construction of a giant cannon with officials of the Krupp factory. Hitler was determined to rearm Germany and establish hegemony over Europe, and he realized that his audacious plan could result in war with France, Germany’s perennial enemy. France was constructing a series of massive fortifications, the Maginot Line, along the Franco-German border, and Hitler wanted extremely heavy artillery capable of destroying even the strongest forts.

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dora railway gun sevastopol 1942

Hitler liked to think big, and he thought a supergun would be an important addition to Germany’s new arsenal. Krupp immediately commenced initial design work on its own initiative. The German Army Ordnance Office (the Heereswaffenamt) issued a development contract to the firm of Friedrich Krupp of Essen in early 1937 calling for the design and development of an enormous 80cm kanone eisenbahngeschütz, or railway gun. The design and production of this gun, carriage, and special ammunition would challenge the state of the art in metallurgy, ballistics, and mechanics, and would require new procedures in the operational use of heavy artillery. Dr. Erich Müller was selected to supervise the construction of the biggest gun ever built. Often called Kanonen-Müller because of his accomplishments in artillery design, he assembled a team of experts, and the entire development and manufacturing program was conducted in secret. The gun was originally called the “Gustav Gerät” (Gustav Equipment) and later “Schwerer Gustav” (Heavy or Fat Gustav) after the former head of the Krupp firm, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. When finally delivered in early 1942, it was given the cover name “Dora,” and was sometimes referred to in documents as the “D-Gerät.” The different names later caused confusion about how many superguns were built and deployed. The gun was planned to weigh approximately 1,170 tons and to have a range of about 25 miles when the barrel was elevated to 45 degrees. First estimates suggested a barrel life of 100 rounds. The special projectiles had to be able to penetrate at least 18 feet of the strongest type of steel-reinforced concrete fortification. Not since the famous 21cm “Paris Gun” that bombarded the French capital in 1918 from a distance of 72 miles had a weapon of this size been planned. A large team of designers, engineers, and technicians were employed not only to research and design the gun and carriage but to develop special cranes for the assembly and disassembly of the gun, special ammunition and equipment, and special rail cars to transport the components. And when loaded, each car had to be light enough to travel over existing bridges. Large steam locomotives could be used for moving the gun over long distances, but a special engine had to be designed and built to maneuver the gun precisely for firing. Conventional electric engines were not powerful enough; regular steam locomotives burned coal and thus would be impractical for maneuvering the gun at the front, since smoke and steam would belch high into the air and invite attack. A special dieselelectric locomotive of about 1,000 horsepower was designed not only to maneuver the gun for aiming but to provide the electrical power needed to elevate the gun barrel and operate the other electric and hydraulic components and accessories. Two engines were ordered for each of the three guns planned, and the design of the engines and the railroad cars had to

be coordinated with the Deutsche Reichsbahn, the national railway system. In 1939 the German ordnance office placed an order with Krupp for three complete guns. Construction began immediately, and detailed progress reports had to be submitted periodically to Hitler. In anticipation of the production contract, Krupp had already begun fabricating components of the gun, its carriage and accessories.

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itler achieved several bloodless political successes in Europe during the 1930s, at the same time building a powerful war machine that threatened and intimidated his neighbors. His most audacious demand was the return of the corridor to the sea that had been given to Poland by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, the swath of land separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany. When Poland refused Hitler’s demand, he invaded on September 1, 1939, and World War II began on September 3, when Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Hitler wanted to attack France immediately, but the redeployment of the Wehrmacht and the onset of winter weather delayed his invasion of the West until the following spring. An army of skilled Krupp workers was already toiling around the clock, producing various weapons of war, but the three giant rail guns were far from completion when the German Blitzkrieg in the west began on May 10, 1940. The Dora guns were not needed for that, because the German army bypassed the Maginot Line fortifications, striking through the rugged Ardennes region. And with the fall of France and Belgium there were no more fortifications in the west to bombard with the powerful new weapon. The construction of the complex components of the Dora gun continued in the cavernous shops of Krupp: the huge steel carriage, the gun cradle, the horizontal sliding breechblock of finest steel, and the massive two-part 80cm barrel, just over 95 feet long. Large hydraulic and electrical systems were also designed and produced. The platform for the crew serving the gun was fitted on the upper portion of the firing carriage. The lower portion of the firing carriage was supported on two twin-bogie units, each fitted with five two-wheeled axles. The gun, when assembled and ready for action, was designed to run on two parallel tracks, or four rails. Two 10-ton cranes were built to assemble the gun in the field. During this time, special railway cars were also developed and built for transporting the entire weapon system. In traveling position, the equipment ran on a normal European gauge railway track. The entire program was a challenging management job even for the experienced Krupp specialists, as well as for ordnance and electrical and railway engineers. Crewmen who had previous railway gun and heavy artillery experience were selected in early 1941 and trained on smaller guns to be

Projectiles had to be able to penetrate 18 feet of concrete

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HEINRICH HOFFMANN/BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK/BILDARCHIV PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

Adolf Hitler—who had sought extremely heavy artillery in the 1930s as part of his buildup of German armed forces—with other top Nazis, pays a visit to a test site in Rügenwalde, Germany, in April, 1943 to inspect the Dora gun and its 4.8-ton explosive projectile.

ready for testing and deploying the superguns. The design and fabrication of the special ammunition proceeded concurrently with the manufacture of the guns and rail cars. The ammunition consisted of a projectile, a shell case with charge, and bagged powder. Two types of shells were developed: A high-explosive projectile weighing 4.8 tons and a special armored shell—a concrete-penetrating projectile of chrome-nickel steel with an especially hard point. It had a streamlined, pointed cover for aerodynamic purposes and contained 550 pounds of high explosive with a base fuze. This shell was designed to pierce fortifications and explode inside. It had a length of 94.5 inches and weighed 7.1 tons—probably the heaviest artillery shell ever built. Initial test firings showed the maximum range with the high-explosive shell to be over 29 miles and a range of about 23.6 miles with the concrete-busting projectile. The range was later improved through continued experiments. A study by the U.S. Army Ordnance Department of shells found on a test range in Bavaria in 1945 states the steel shell had a hollow, thick-walled body 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) long and a diameter of 80 centimeters (31.5 inches). The projectiles were transported in heavy wooden crates in a horizontal position on flat cars or in ammunition cars. The powerful propellant was contained in the metal shell case and two additional propellant charges. The one-piece shell case was made of steel, plated with brass, manufactured in 1942, and marked with the secret manufacturer’s code “bwn,” indicating the firm of Friedrich Krupp A.-G., Essen. The two separate propellant charges in white cylindrical bags were carried in wooden boxes marked with the manufacturer’s

code “dbg,” indicating that they were made by Dynamit A.-G., Alfred Nobel & Co., Werk Düneberg. The weight of the three propellant charges was 2,500 pounds. According to the U.S. Army report, the muzzle velocity of the gun was 2,500 feet per second. Hitler’s main objective at this time was the conquest of the Soviet Union. He meant to invade Russia without warning in the spring of 1941 in order to remove the threat of Soviet attack and to secure for Germany the oil, labor, wheat, and other resources that he hoped would make the Reich invincible. But unexpected fighting in the Balkans delayed his attack on Russia. The German attack finally began on June 22, 1941, when three army groups, with Luftwaffe support, launched Operation Barbarossa. Army Group North fought through the Baltic States toward Leningrad, Army Group Center struck east toward Moscow, while Army Group South, with the Romanian army, headed toward Kiev and across southern Russia. By September the German Eleventh Army, under the command of General Erich von Manstein, part of Army Group South, was battling its way through the heavily defended Perekop Isthmus, the entrance to the Crimean peninsula. The Soviets were driven to the east and off the peninsula, allowing Manstein to begin a siege of the port city of Sevastopol, home of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. The area around Sevastopol was protected by mountains in the south and hills and rough country to the east, with the flatter northern sector the logical area for a major attack. But this sector was heavily defended with concrete forts, some with turrets armed with artillery like that of the Russian battleships offshore. The Germans brought up aircraft and artillery of all types to help soften up

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riedly constructed at the end of a new railway spur behind the northern front near the city of Bakhchisaray. This was the assembly area for Dora, where over 2,500 men began to put the gun together. Its firing position, just south of the assembly area, was created by cutting through a small hill and building a curved section of double track. Two diesel-electric locomotives maneuvered the 25 railcars carrying the compoy the spring of 1942 more German heavy artillery nents of the gun into the assembly area. After the major parts and ammunition were arriving on the railway that were assembled, the accessories were installed: platforms and had been rebuilt to the Sevastopol area. Romanian ladders for the crew and elevators for the projectiles, powder army units were deployed along the eastern side of bags, and shell cases. The gun was almost two stories high the siege perimeter, and although no tanks were provided, when fully assembled, a complex task performed in just over the German infantry divisions were fully equipped with three weeks by about 250 engineers, artillerymen, railway self-propelled assault guns (sturmgeschütz), most armed with troops, and Krupp technicians. Ammunition was brought up 75mm cannons. The VIII Fliegerkorps, the most powerful in the special cars, camouflage nets erected, and antiaircraft ground attack formation in the Luftwaffe, joined the attack. guns positioned. A small detachment from “Harko,” the 306 Höheres Artillerie Kommandeur, the army unit directing the Preparations were intense on both sides of the Sevastopol siege artillery bombardment of Sevastopol, was established near line. The Soviets had used the previous months to bring in Dora. The big gun was ready for action. reinforcements and prepare more field fortifications, includGeneral Manstein gave the order to launch the offensive, and ing trenches, barbed wire entanglements, mines, antitank before dawn on June 2, 1942, the sky lit up and the roar of exploditches, and pillboxes. sions echoed across the area as the German artillery barrage The heavy traffic on the railroad to Sevastopol included struck the Soviet fortifications. The intense bombardment trains with large items of German equipment covered with continued around the clock causing great damage to Soviet tarpaulins. A small rail yard with double tracks was hurdefenses and communications, Ger man infantry and combat engineers, supported by assault guns and dive-bombers, advanced along the northern front in fierce fighting. Early on June 5, the two special locomotives eased Dora onto the newly built, curved section of double track facing Sevastopol. Ammunition was moved forward and everyone, including Manstein and Antonescu, waited impatiently for the order to load and commence firing. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Böhm, the unit commander, whose command post was 1.2 miles from Dora, checked the details of the previously selected targets. Lieutenant Colonel Knoll, the gun captain, and his crew of 450 men, were ready and in place. Because the gun and railway cars remained vulnerable to Soviet attack, flak guns and smoke generators were positioned around the wellguarded area. Harko notified Böhm to prepare for firing, and Knoll began the loading and firing procedure. The targets were a Soviet barracks block and fortified artillery batteries along the coast, some 15.5 miles distant, out of range of other German artillery. At 5:35 a.m. the order to fire was given to the gun captain, who began the countdown on this first shot. First fired in anger in June 1942 during the German siege of Sevastopol, Crimea, Dora targeted Feuer! The bright flash and thunderous otherwise unreachable Soviet fortifications with fearsome power—but middling accuracy. these defenses and support the fierce struggle to break through the fortifications. After significant gains, the siege had to be suspended when the Soviets made a landing in the east of the Crimean Peninsula, resulting in months of battle before the Russians were again defeated and ejected, allowing the siege of Sevastopol to resume.

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BAKER VAIL

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HEINRICH HOFFMANN/BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK/BILDARCHIV PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

Supergun in action: A thunderclap explosion and a cloud of smoke erupt as demonstration and test rounds are fired at the facility at Rügenwalde before an audience of Nazi leaders and other observers.

roar was unlike that produced by any artillery shot Manstein and the other observers could remember. The recoil of the gun shook even its massive carriage, but all components functioned properly. A flight of Luftwaffe observation planes was assigned to cooperate with Dora and report the results of the firing by radio to Harko and Böhm. Tensions mounted as the seconds ticked past. Then—a hit, sending a pillar of smoke and dust climbing high into the morning sky. When the report reached Knoll’s crew, a cheer went up from the men who had spent months training and working for this moment. There was no time to celebrate, because eight more rounds were ordered fired at Soviet coastal batteries and Fort Maxim Gorki I. Those shells reached the targets and did some damage, although most fell short of or beyond the target, destroying field fortifications and hurling mangled bodies high into the air. That afternoon six rounds were fired at another important target, Fort Stalin, again with mixed results. One round was a direct hit, and a 90-foot-wide crater was reported. Other craters observed during the siege were about 50 feet deep and some up to 100 feet, exploding far underground. Manstein, Antonescu, Alfried Krupp, and Dr. Erich Müller of Krupp, witnessed the firing of several rounds. Firing commenced the next morning with seven rounds aimed at Fort Molotov, again with mixed results. An important

new target was selected for that afternoon: A major Soviet underground ammunition storage facility had been identified through aerial reconnaissance and interrogation of prisoners and deserters. Called the Weisse Klippe or Munitionsberg (White Cliff or Ammunition Mountain) by the Germans, it was thought by the Russians to be immune to attack, because it was in a large cavern under a hill facing, and partly under, Severnaya Bay, far inland on the northern shore. Heavy steel doors protected the hillside entrance and it was, in fact, invulnerable to aerial bombardment and conventional artillery. This was a job for Dora. Again, the locomotives positioned Dora to aim at the distant target. Seventeen rounds were fired at the mountain; the first nine rounds of concrete-busting shells struck with great success, including six direct hits. Firing began again on June 7, with more of the huge shells striking the mountainside and throwing up large clouds of dirt and rocks. Three rounds were direct hits, and at least one evidently punched through the last 90 feet of earth and rock and exploded inside the ammunition storage chamber. The result was a tremendous thunderclap blast, with secondary explosions adding to the destruction. Witnesses stated that the explosion was like a volcanic eruption, with a huge plume of smoke soaring high into the sky. It was felt and heard for many miles, especially

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across the bay in Sevastopol. The loss of ammunition at this critical time in the siege weakened the Red Army’s ability to defend Sevastopol. Strangely, though, when Hitler learned of this, he sent an angry message to Manstein directing that Dora be used only against concrete fortresses. On June 11 Dora bombarded another Soviet strongpoint, Fort Siberia, with five rounds, and three direct hits caused massive damage, rendering it vulnerable to ground attack. Dora continued to roar periodically until June 17, targeting several forts, including Fort Maxim Gorki II. The five rounds blasting that modern fort softened it up for the coming ground attack. A total of 48 concrete-penetrating rounds were fired by Dora during the siege, and the gun and its crew performed well, with only minor mechanical problems. Five high-explosive shells were reportedly fired on June 25, the one against Sevastopol itself causing a large column of smoke to rise over the city. The explosion of shells from Dora and other German heavy artillery had a considerable effect on the Russians’ morale, often bursting the soldiers’ blood vessels even if it did not kill them with fragments or flying debris. The drastic changes in air pressure from the explosions also ruptured eardrums and sometimes lungs of soldiers in the concrete chambers and

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corridors. Fear and terror, or panic, often ensued. After the capture of the fortresses and the fall of Sevastopol, Dora was disassembled, loaded on railcars, and, on orders from Hitler, moved to Army Group North for the bombardment of Leningrad. But because of a Soviet offensive, it was instead dismantled and returned to the test range at Rügenwalde, Germany (now Darłowo, Poland). There it was serviced and a new barrel installed. Dora remained under camouflage at Rügenwalde where it was joined by Schwerer Gustav 2, the other completed 80cm railway gun. Both were used for testing and experiments with new longer-range ammunition. Dora and Schwerer Gustav 2 remained ready for action until late in the war but the march of events made their further use impractical. By 1945, Dora was still at the test range, while Schwerer Gustav 2 had been moved to near Chemnitz in eastern Germany, where it was overrun by the advancing Russians. At some point the Germans destroyed Dora and scattered the remains along a rail line near Grafenwöhr, a German training ground in Bavaria, where they were recovered by Allied forces. MHQ C. G. Sweeting is the author of several books, including Hitler’s Personal Pilot: The Life and Times of Hans Bauer.

ARCHIV HEINRICH HOFFMANN/BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK/BILDARCHIV PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

Soviet strongpoints around Sevastopol, such as Fort Maxim Gorki I shown here, were subjected to heavy artillery fire, including rounds from Dora. Aerial bombardment by German Fliegerkorps VIII added to the destruction—a prelude to the ground assault that captured the city on July 1.