=D-E@EC
,/#
,!
FLAG PIN FREE MEMORIAL WITH EVERY ORDER
!)2+ ,#6'2/!)(2
&6 ,!262,/ 26+ 26/) +6+&62,/ &/6'2(),6'2/!)(26,+(
&/6,'+2'+6'2/!)(26(,6+&6/226+&6&/2/ #.-%36640%364.636662'+6 3 56(45%016(34%6453%6"5-6.4%540-
.E@ECD;
,)/6&/(2
#,/) 26(&/'
FK$PBNL?PIF*
GKM>LIPGNK>*
/MH0 LP#=<1P@APAC4ECPDP90H0PB=8=@DC5P J=1@P6D@CA8 PID,@=,D8P:8D,P+D@,1$P &EC
GG * OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
>LN?PG7FLGM*
9HBGP+DCPBE-AC=D8P%@1PN;;= EC
MJ)KN.LJ)*
LJLILN?HP * OOOOOOOOPPPPOOOOOOOOPPPPOOOOOOOO
6C=;@P,8EDC85
KNJ(* OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO /MNKHPHMK.M>* OOOOOOOOOOP@APOOOOOOOOOO
LP+LH7PIFP6N/PNHP2F??F+H* M;,8A
.LHNPPP
BNHIMKPGNK>PPP
NBM PPP
>LHGF.MKPPPPPPM&0OOOOO OOOOOO
GHGP OOOOOOOOOOOOPPH=;D@'CE*OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
) (2'6 , ' +) 6 )+6 &6)+ 6 &/ ,/6&/6'2/!)(262# 2#
H7L66LJ)PN>>KMHH +EPGNJJFIP<1=&P@AP60F0P:AE< PN88A#P P#EE
M-D=8* OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HAP@1D@P#EP-D5P;A@=5P5A'PDA'@P5A'CPAC4ECP<@D@'<
% "PLGBPPPPP.J6+NI B7B %" "
! " 6 ! # ' " 6 * ' 6 # ' % 6 " * % 6 6 ! ' ! " # * ' % 6 * % * # 6 % 6 / 0 . 2 0 4 6 53 6 ) ) )( 4 3 - / & - / &
Valor Honors for Mercy By Jon Guttman
TOP: ARNOLD MONDADORI/AGE FOTOSTOCK; BOTTOM: COURTESY OF THE EMBASSY OF ROMANIA
Mariana Dragescu Royal Romanian Air Force Order of the Star of Romania Eastern Front 1941–45
D
uring World War II the warring air arms generally used women in auxiliary roles, in their most active roles serving as test or ferry pilots. A notable exception was the Soviet air force, which fielded three all-female combat regiments: one of fighters, one of dive-bombers and, perhaps best known, one of night bombers, 23 members of which received the Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. Less publicized until recent years were several Romanian volunteers who flew in and out of combat zones to evacuate wounded troops. It took the fall of Romania’s commu-
Stalingrad campaign. For their work Dragescu, Russo and Thomas received the Order of the German Eagle—Germany’s highest decoration for foreign combatants. The following summer the unit, re-designated the 108th Light Transport Squadron, flew rescue misnist government and the longevity of one of the country’s wartime pilots sions out of Simferopol, Crimea, to and from the collapsing front. for the deeds of the White Squadron With the war going badly for the to come to light. Axis, Romanian officials staged a coup Marie Ana Aurelia Dragescu was born on Sept. 7, 1912, in the southern in August 1944, signed an armistice and went over to the Allies. Through Romanian town of Craiova, the daughMay 8, 1945—war’s end in Europe— ter of an army officer and a music Dragescu continued to support the Roteacher. Mariana, as she was known, manian army as a liaison pilot. By then chose an avocation entirely her own. she had personally flown more than In 1935 she was among the first Ro1,500 wounded men from battlefronts manian women to graduate from avito medical facilities. ation school, and in 1938 she joined Dragescu worked as a civil aviator the Royal Aero Club. Later that year and flight instructor in Romania until aviatrix Marina Stirbey convinced the 1955, when she was suddenly fired Romanian military to form an all—ostensibly a victim of postwar refemale aeromedical evacuation unit. pression by communist dictaStirbey, Dragescu and fellow tor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, pioneers Nadia Russo, Virginia whose puppet Romanian govThomas, Virginia Dutescu and ernment was a Warsaw Pact Irina Burnaia performed well ally of the Soviet Union. Drain military maneuvers, and in gescu’s “crime”? Her service— 1940 they formed a squadron initially, anyway—with the equipped with Polish-built Axis (the “wrong side”) in RWD-13S high-wing monoWorld War II. planes, painted white with red Grounded, Dragescu worked crosses. The unit came to be in obscurity as a secretary until known as the Escadrila Albà her retirement in 1967, though (White Squadron). she lived to see the overthrow When Romania joined Opof Nicolae Ceausescu’s comeration Barbarossa, Nazi Germunist regime in 1989. Since many’s 1941 invasion of the then Romania has been reSoviet Union, 2nd Lt. Dragescu and her colleagues acdiscovering its history and For her service companied the Romanian as a rescue pilot honoring those who served in in World War II, its armed forces during the war. army. From August through Dragescu received In 2003 Dragescu was made a November 1941 they transported wounded during op- the Order of the knight of the Order of the Star erations at Odessa, for which Star of Romania of Romania and promoted to in 2003. the rank of air commander (reDragescu received the Rotired). She also served as a manian Order of Aeronautical consultant for a 2004 film about the Virtue. Moving up to airfields inside White Squadron. Pioneering aviatrix Russia in 1942, the White Squadron Mariana Dragescu died in Bucharest on flew intensive sorties from August March 24, 2013, at the age of 100. MH through October during the pivotal
19
ADVERTISEMENT
Enjoy a bath again… Safely and affordably
FREE $200 Gift
Why the Jacuzzi® Hydrotherapy Walk-In Tub is the Best…
FRE
E
SPECIAL REPORT
TIPS ON LIVING TO BE 100 Including the Secret Benefits of Hydrotherapy
For your FREE special report and details on a FREE $200 gift Call Toll-Free Today
1-877-645-9143 Please mention promotional code 60009
Relax Fully - All controls are within easy reach. Personalized Massage - New adjustable jet placement for pinpoint control. This tub is the first to offer a specialized foot massage experience. Its unique spinning motion provides optimal therapy to feet and legs. Best of all, you get it at no additional charge. No Hassle Installation - Designed to fit in your existing tub space.
$
1000 OFF when you mention this ad for a limited time only
Call Us Toll Free 1-877-645-9143
81356
Easy and Safe Entry - Low entry, double sealed leak-proof door that is easy to open and close. Durable and Easy to Clean - State-of-the-art acrylic surface. Comfortable Seating - Convenient 17-inch raised seat. Worry Free Enjoyment - Thanks to Jacuzzi Inc.’s Lifetime Limited Warranty. Maximum Pain Relief - Therapeutic water AND air jets to help you feel your best.
What We Learned... From Crac des Chevaliers By Richard Tada
Defended by the Knights Hospitaller in the 13th century, the fortress recently sheltered opposing fighters in the Syrian Civil War.
TRANS-WORLD PHOTOS/AGE FOTOSTOCK
C
rac des Chevaliers (in present-day Syria) remains a standout among surviving Crusader castles. In 1142 the Knights Hospitaller occupied the hilltop fortress, which protected the southeastern frontier of the County of Tripoli. In the early 13th century the Hospitallers added a 30-foothigh outer wall with projecting towers. At the time the military order was strong, boasting a garrison of 2,000 soldiers, though most were local auxiliaries or mercenaries paid from the order’s treasury. With steel to back its rule, the order collected tribute from neighboring Muslim states. But with the 1250 rise of the Egyptbased Mamluk sultanate, which fielded an army far dwarfing those of the Crusader states, the balance of power ultimately shifted in favor of the Muslims. In 1268 Sultan Baybars captured Crusader-held Antioch, killing its men and enslaving its women and children. Then he targeted Crac des Chevaliers. The ground around the hilltop fortress drops sharply from the walls on three sides. To the south, however, is a slight rise, and on that side of the outer
wall the Hospitallers had neglected to build a tower capable of supporting a counterweight trebuchet—the heavy artillery of the time. The Crusaders tried to compensate by building a makeshift wedge-shaped outwork, but that side remained vulnerable to attack. Baybars noted the opening. On March 3, 1271, the sultan arrived to prepare his siege, first erecting massive siege engines to the south of the triangular outwork. On March 21 the Mamluks stormed the outwork, forcing the Hospitallers to withdraw within the outer wall. The Mamluks then set up their artillery on the captured outwork and bombarded the castle. Baybars’ next move was to undermine the outer wall. Here the Mamluks’ numerical advantage came into play: Miners started digging along the foot of the southwestern tower wall, shielded by a movable timber palisade others dragged up while absorbing casualties from the defenders’ fire. The tower fell on March 29, and Mamluks surged through the breach, killing the handful of defenders they encountered. Training their siege engines on the inner defenses, where the bulk of the
garrison had taken refuge, the Mamluks knew it was just a matter of time before Crac des Chevaliers fell. But Baybars wanted to accelerate matters. Two Muslim sources claim the sultan sent the Hospitallers a forged letter, supposedly from the grand master of their order, permitting the defenders to surrender. The trick worked: The garrison yielded on April 8, and Baybars allowed them to flee to the coastal fortress of Tripoli. With Crac in his possession, he ordered construction of a massive square tower to safeguard the south wall. The fall of Crac des Chevaliers marked the beginning of the end for the Crusader states. Within 20 years the Mamluks had seized the remaining Crusader strongholds on the coast.
Lessons: Hit your opponent in the purse.
From 1268–71 Baybars raided the countryside around Crac des Chevaliers, carrying off many of the local peasants and destroying their crops. These raids dried up the Hospitallers’ primary revenue source. Don’t leave your enemy an opening.
The Hospitallers’ failure to complete a fortified outwork on Crac’s south side left it vulnerable to attack. Honor motivates. Knowing no relief force would come to their aid, the Hospitallers fought with stubborn determination—for honor and not victory—once the outwork fell. Deception greases the skids.
Baybars’ forged letter, “authorizing” the Hospitallers to surrender, enabled them to lay down their arms and later claim to have been deceived—a semihonorable resolution to the siege. Location, location, location. Site a fortress in a strategically decisive location and its military import can last centuries. Opposing forces in the ongoing Syrian Civil War have battled for control of Crac des Chevaliers. MH
21
Hardware
By Jon Guttman / Illustration by Peter Sarson
FV101 Scorpion KEEPING THE LIGHT TANK RELEVANT
M AY 2 015
C
22
ontracted by the British army in 1967 to develop a tracked reconnaissance combat vehicle, Alvis Ltd. (since absorbed by BAE Systems) delivered the first FV101 Scorpion prototype in January 1969. After rigorous testing in a range of climates, conditions and terrain, the army accepted the vehicle in May 1970 and fielded it in January 1972. Originally powered by a Jaguar J60 4.2liter gasoline engine (replaced by diesel engines in 1980), the Scorpion holds the Guinness world record for fastest production tank, with a max speed of 51 mph. Transported to combat zones by seagoing ship or in pairs by a C-130 Hercules, the Scorpion is capable of making an amphibious landing or water crossing using a flotation screen. The Scorpion is armed with a 76mm cannon, but variants built atop its versatile chassis include the FV102 Striker antitank guided missile launcher, FV103 Spartan armored personnel carrier, FV104 Samaritan armored ambulance, FV105 Sultan command vehicle, FV106 Samson armored recovery vehicle and FV107 Scimitar recon vehicle with a 30mm L21A1 RARDEN cannon. During the 1982 Falklands War (see P. 26) four Scorpions, four Scimitars and a Samson of B Squadron, Blues and Royals, saw action on East Falkland Island, supporting 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment, on Wireless Ridge and the Scots Guards on Mount Tumbledown. Iran used Scorpion variants during its war with Iraq in the 1980s, and Britain used them again during the Gulf War in 1991 and in Bosnia-Herzegovina the following year. The United Kingdom retired its Scorpions in 1994, but it still uses Scimitars. A total of 3,362 Scorpions have served, or are still serving, in 21 countries. MH
MILITARY HISTORY
Crew: Three Battle weight: 7.8 tons Length: 14 feet 4.75 inches Height: 6 feet 10.5 inches Ground clearance: 14 inches Engine: Jaguar J60 4.2-liter gasoline, dual overhead camshaft military version, six-cylinder Power/weight ratio: 24.96 bhp/ton Full capacity: 88 gallons Ground pressure: 5 psi Maximum speed: 51 mph Acceleration: 0–30 mph in 16 seconds Braking distance: 50 feet from 30 mph Fuel consumption: 5 mpg at 30 mph Range: More than 370 miles Obstacle clearance: 20 inches Trench crossing: 6.75 feet Fording: 3 feet 6 inches (without flotation screen) Water speed: 4 mph (tracks), 6 mph (propellers) Gearbox: TN 15Z Crossdrive, semiautomatic seven-speed Main armament: 76mm L23 gun Elevation: 35 to -10 degrees Range: 3.1 miles (indirect fire), 1.35 miles (direct fire) Ammunition: 40 rounds (HE, HESH, HE&SH/practice, smoke cannister and illuminating) Secondary armament: Coaxial 7.62mm general-purpose machine gun (3,000 rounds) Smoke dischargers: Two triple-barreled; also carries 18 smoke grenades Radio sets: Types C42/B47, C13/B47, C13/42 or Clansman
1. 76mm main armament 2. Night sight balance weight (fitted in lieu of night sight) 3. 7.62mm machine gun 4. Multibarreled smoke dischargers 5. Gunner’s night sight
6. Traverse indicator 7. Commander’s sight mounting ring 8. Gunner’s sight 9. Turret services box 10. Antenna tuning unit 11. Intercom control box 12. Gun guard
41 40
39 38
37
36
13. Gunner’s hatch 14. Radio F/T 15. Commander’s hatch 16. Radio antenna 17. Unity vision periscope 18. Storage bins 19. Flotation screen platform (screen absent)
IMAGE FROM NEW VANGUARD NO. 13, SCORPION RECONNAISSANCE VEHICLE 1972–1994, BY CHRIS FOSS AND SIMON DUNSTAN, © OSPREY PUBLISHING, LTD.
8 7
13
10
6 9
11
16
15
12
14 17
5
3
18 4
2 1
47
45
19
46
43 44 42
20
21
23
24
25
27
22
26
28 35
29
34
30
33 32
20. Idler wheel 21. Commander’s seat (and commode) 22. Ready round storage 23. Interior light 24. Engine bay fire extinguisher (piped to compartment)
31
25. Driver’s NBC air outlet 26. Gear indicator 27. Electrical fuses 28. Steering tillers 29. Gear change pedal 30. Damper linage 31. Bump stop 32. Drive sprocket
33. Central warning light 34. Radiator trunnion 35. Generator panel 36. Engine/driver bulkhead 37. Radiator 38. Fan bulkhead 39. Recovery eyes 40. Transmission breather
41. Engine air intake 42. Generator 43. Battery breather 44. Air filter (engine air) 45. Jaguar 4.2-liter engine 46. Cooling air outlet louvers 47. Driver’s periscope
23
W!* O N s g a T lized Dog
!
AY DON’T DEL
sona r e P E E R F Get Your
Customize your Dog Tags with your last name, first name, serial or other number, blood type and religious preference or any other unique phrase — up to 5-lines and 15 characters each.
IN THIS FREE OFFER, YOU GET: TWO stainless steel authentic military dog tags with FREE personalized embossing ONE 30” stainless steel beaded necklace chain ONE 4” stainless steel beaded ball chain TWO silicone rubber silencers
Place your order and get your FREE dog tags — personalized the way you want!
This exclusive FREE offer can’t last forever. ACT NOW before this limited-time offer ends! *Pay only $2.95 shipping & processing ORDER BY PHONE, WEB, OR MAIL:
1-800-989-1945
▪
MilitaryIssue.com
Please use Offer Code: DT24
Pay only $2.95 shipping & processing! 1st LINE
CHECK OR MONEY ORDER
CREDIT CARD
Card No.
Exp. Date________/______
2nd LINE
3rd LINE
Name _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Address ________________________________________________________________________ Apt# _____________
4th LINE
City __________________________________________________ State ___________ Zip ________________________ 5th LINE
E-Mail _____________________________________________________________________________________________
Call now or visit us online for faster service: 1-800-989-1945 ▪ MilitaryIssue.com Please use Offer Code: DT24 Pay only $2.95 shipping & processing. Please allow 2-3 weeks for processing and delivery. Orders accepted on a strict first-come, first-served basis. This offer is limited to one FREE set per household. Limited time only. Not valid with other offers and only while supplies last. Void where prohibited or restricted by law.
Military Issue Dog Tag Offer Or, complete this order form and mail 640 Taft Street NE with your check or money order to: Minneapolis, MN 55413
If ordering by phone, please complete the template before calling to ensure accuracy.
Determining Victory
W
hether the conflicts are cataclysmic world wars, counterrevolutions or post-colonial comic-opera skirmishes that turn out deadlier than expected, a range of factors determine the outcome. First are the political and moral contexts. Is the fight necessary for national or cultural survival, or is the goal simply to gain territory, depose a rival or even eradicate one’s fellow citizens for their religious or ideological beliefs? Do those sent into battle believe in the cause, or are they reluctant participants in a conflict they do not consider their own? History proves that armies of the unwilling rarely emerge victorious. Then come the material concerns. How many troops, guns, trucks, tanks, ships or aircraft does each side have? How well supplied are the combatant forces with ammunition, food and fuel, and how far from home is each able to operate effectively? And what of each side’s financial resources? Sustaining troops in the field is an expensive business, whether those troops are fighting or not, and deep pockets are a necessity for anyone seeking victory in any armed conflict. How well led are the opposing forces? Martial success is seldom possible without competent, experienced and reliable leaders at every level of command. Nor are battles often won without a coherent strategy and flexible and adaptive tactics that take full account of the terrain, the enemy’s actions and one’s own capabilities. Luck can also be a determining factor in warfare. Countless battles seemingly already won were instead lost due to the chance removal of a senior commander, a breakdown in communication caused by the death of a messenger or an inoperative radio, or even a sudden and unexpected change in the weather. As important as these factors are, another attribute has directed the course of many battles throughout human history. That is determination—whether that of a nation responding in unity to the seizure of its territory by a corrupt and illegitimate power, of a famous commander continuing to fight for his sovereign despite all odds, of a decorated hero taking to the streets to help prevent the destructive radicalization of his country, or even of an individual willing to defy the social norms of her time to bring the realities of war home to her people in images and words. MH
25
PRIVATE COLLECTION/PETER NEWARK PICTURES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Royal Marines man a trench along the shore of San Carlos Water, on East Falkland Island. British troops landed in the Falklands seven weeks after Argentina’s April 2, 1982, invasion.
By Ron Soodalter
CRAGS OF TUMBLEDOWN Thirty-three years ago this spring Argentina and Britain waged war over a contested patch of tundra in the bitter South Atlantic—and many still wonder why
27
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.
M AY 2 015
T
28
he fight for Mount Tumbledown was the last battle in a conflict that was, by modern standards, a “small war”—and to many an unnecessary one. In the words of one veteran of Britain’s elite 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment (2 PARA), the war was “short, sharp and very nasty” and, often fought at close quarters with bayonets and grenades, “like something out of World War I.” Soldiers on both sides had little understanding of, or appreciation for, either the causes or the stakes; regardless, the battles were no less fierce, the deaths no less senseless, than those suffered in conflicts of greater global import. The actual fighting lasted only a matter of weeks but claimed more than 900 lives. It was fought over a territory whose ownership had been in dispute for more than two centuries. The Falkland Islands—an archipelago in the South Atlantic comprising two large islands and 776 smaller ones— lie a few hundred miles off the coast of Argentina and nearly 8,000 miles from the United Kingdom. After colonial conflicts with France and Spain over the islands, Britain claimed sovereignty in 1774, landed troops to reassert its dominion in 1833 and formally established the Falklands as a Crown colony in 1840. The successive governments of Argentina had felt the islands to be theirs, however, and over the decades had lodged a series of formal—and wholly ineffectual—protests. In 1982 the notoriously oppressive and much-beleaguered military junta that governed Argentina saw the seizure of the
MILITARY HISTORY
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: RAFAEL WOLLMANN/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES; STUART FRANKLIN/MAGNUM PHOTOS; MARY EVANS/DAVID KIRBY/THE IMAGE WORKS; MARTIN CLEAVER/PA ARCHIVE/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES
THE CONDITIONS WERE HELLISH.
Falklands as an opportunity to distract its citizens from the many economic and human rights issues plaguing the country and to unite Argentines behind a self-justifying campaign. Thus on April 2—trumpeting the rationale that British control of the Falklands (or Malvinas, as they are known in Argentina) represented a throwback to the days of empire—commander in chief and de facto President Leopoldo Galtieri landed occupying forces in the Falklands’ capital, Port Stanley, and the next day on South Georgia in the South Sandwich Islands. Galtieri and his most vocal war hawk, Admiral Jorge Anaya, were correct in their expectation of a patriotic surge; Argentines momentarily forgot the wildly inflated peso and the junta’s harsh policies to rally behind the occupation. But Galtieri was also gambling the British had long since lost interest in the Falkland and South Sandwich Islands and would look the other way. He could not have more completely misread the situation or the resolve of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Ironically, many Britons at the time had no idea where the Falkland Islands were, let alone that they were part of the United Kingdom. Secretary of State for Defence Sir John Nott himself later wrote, “I must confess that I wasn’t much aware of the Falkland Islands before the invasion…[and] was a bit horrified to see how far away they were.” Regardless, although the distant Falklands and South Georgia had long since ceased to be of commercial interest to the United Kingdom, they remained British dependencies, and the Ministry of Defence began immediate preparations for an all-out response to the invasion of the South Atlantic islands. Within days of the Argentine occupation the Thatcher government—declaring the 1,800 Falkland residents to be “of British tradition and stock”—had established a war cabinet and begun to assemble a naval armada. Ultimately, the British task force grew to more than 100 ships ferrying 8,000 ground troops to face Argentina’s invasion force of some 14,000 soldiers. While the British boasted nearly three times as many ships, the Argentines held a 3-to-1 advantage in combat aircraft. Meanwhile, the United States, concerned Argentina might draw the Soviet Union into the fight as an ally, tried to stem the conflict diplomatically. When these efforts failed, and it became obvious war was unavoidable, Washington announced an embargo on arms sales to Argentina, while providing Britain with war materiel. Europe largely supported the British action; most of Latin America sided with the Argentines. Two Royal Navy submarines soon surfaced off the Falklands, while other warships sailed out of various British ports, and requisitioned civilian transport vessels—including the Cunard Line flagship Queen Elizabeth 2—ferried ground forces to the islands. Due to the call for a swift response, transporta-
Outnumbered and outgunned, the Royal Marine garrison in the Falklands capital of Port Stanley surrendered to the Argentines on April 2 after a sharp, short fight.
Within days of Argentina’s invasion the British government began to assemble a task force that ultimately numbered more than 100 ships, 8,000 ground troops and 42 aircraft.
Sea Harrier FRS1
FV101 Scorpion
HMS Invincible
tion of troops to the war zone was, in some instances, haphazard at best. According to Lieutenant Robert Lawrence of the Scots Guards, QE2, which left Southampton on May 12, was “heavily overcrowded with the whole of 5 Brigade, Scots and Welsh Guards, Gurkhas and a lot of support units.…Every inch of space was used.” Two-person cabins housed four to five men, unit commanders utilized every stairway landing for training purposes, and soldiers regularly ran circuits of the liner’s top deck for exercise. By the time QE2 arrived off South Georgia two weeks later, a strike force of British Special Air Service (SAS) commandos and Royal Marines had already secured the island. The Falklands presented a more daunting challenge.
To reach their objectives on East Falkland, British troops made arduous cross-country marches with full packs— “yomps” in Royal Marine lingo.
T
30
MILITARY HISTORY
SOU T H ATL ANT IC O CEAN
North Falkland Sound
Port San Carlos
l an
d
WEST FALKLAND
u So
nd
EAST FALKLAND
Area Enlarged
Darwin Bluff Goose Cove Green SOUTH AMERICA
0 0
20 mi 20 km
Mount Longdon o Tw
rs Ridge Siste
Mount Harriet
William Por t
Wireless Ridge Mount Tumbledown Mount William
Stanley
Sapper Hill
0 0
2 mi 2 km
TOP: PETE HOLDGATE/CROWN COPYRIGHT, IWM VIA GETTY IMAGES; MAPS: MARTIN WALZ, PEGMOTIONS GROUP (2)
M AY 2 015
O
n the morning of June 13 helicopters flew the men of the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards, from Bluff Cove to a staging area near Goat Ridge, where they soon began to take heavy artillery and mortar fire. While awaiting orders, some of the guardsmen—many fresh from ceremonial duty in London and new to combat— asked a few of the elite PARAs, who had recently captured Goose Green, how the Argentines had performed in combat. One replied, “Get within 200 meters of them, and they’ll
FALKLAND ISLANDS
Fa lk
he fight for the Falklands officially commenced on May 1, when a long-range Royal Air Force Vulcan bomber dropped its payload on Port Stanley Airport, and Royal Navy Sea Harrier FRS1s shot down three Argentine aircraft. Nightly naval and aerial bombardment followed. Initially, naval action accounted for the greatest number of casualties, with heavy losses of ships and lives on both sides. The sustained landing of British ground forces began on May 21—seven weeks after the Argentine invasion— at San Carlos Water, an inlet on the west coast of East Falkland Island. From there 2 PARA was ordered to attack the Argentines at the Goose Green settlement. Once they had secured the western side of the island, the British would fight their way east to seize Port Stanley and effectively end the conflict. The fight for Goose Green was a bloody affair. The 1,000man Argentine defending force, though comprising largely untested conscripts, outnumbered the British paratroopers nearly 2-to-1. Both sides took casualties, with the PARAs giving much worse than they received. The battle seesawed for a full day and a night. Finally, the PARAs—despite the death of their charismatic commander, Lt. Col. Herbert “H” Jones—gained the upper hand. Cold, exhausted and running low on ammunition, the Argentines finally surrendered. By mid-June, after grueling cross-country marches (“yomps,” in Royal Marine lingo) with full packs in bitter temps across the pitted Falklands tundra, British forces were within striking distance of Port Stanley, but they faced a strong defensive perimeter—a ring of hills occupied by dug-in Argentine army and marine units. At 750 feet, the most challenging objective was Mount Tumbledown, a collection of crags, slabs and boulders that constituted an ideal defensive position.
TOP TO BOTTOM: ALAIN NOGUES/SYGMA/CORBIS; CARLOS CARRION/SYGMA/CORBIS; BETTMANN/CORBIS; MARION S. TRIKOSKO/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; DAILY MAIL/REX/ALAMY
run away.” Only later did the guardsmen learn the PARAs had faced mainly poorly outfitted and trained teenage conscripts. The Argentine force that waited on Tumbledown was another breed entirely. Mostly in their 20s, they were the men of the 5th Marine Battalion—highly trained and motivated troops with combat experience in the recent Argentine civil war. They were well provisioned, outfitted for the frigid weather and, in some instances, better equipped than the British. They also had been trained in night fighting—and despite the assurances of the British PARAs, they didn’t run. “They had had years of aggression,” Lawrence wrote. “They were well used to it. People like me, on the other hand, only weeks previously had been doing the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace; not exactly the greatest experience for fighting a war on some godforsaken island in the middle of nowhere.” In preparing for the British attack, the Argentine marines had dug an intricate system of bunkers, familiarized themselves with the terrain and established a plan for coordinated fire support. Backing them were six 81mm mortars, six 106mm mortars, a howitzer battery and two army artillery groups. The British battle plan was straightforward and hinged on Scots Guards rifle units divided into three companies. First into the fight, G Company was to seize the western flank of the mountain. That done, Left Flank Company was to pass through the captured area and take the summit. Right Flank Company was then to advance through Left Flank’s zone and secure Tumbledown’s eastern flank. Two Royal Navy frigates—Yarmouth and Active—lay offshore to provide naval gunfire support. The operation was initially planned as a daytime assault, but the climb was long and steep, over and around treacherous escarpments, and the soldiers would have made easy targets. Wiser minds prevailed, and battalion commander Lt. Col. Michael Scott set the assault on Tumbledown for shortly after dusk on the 13th. By that time British forces had taken nearby Mount Harriet, Two Sisters Ridge and—despite prolonged Argentine artillery fire and heavy casualties—Mount Longdon. The first phase of the plan featured a diversionary maneuver. In the gathering gloom a force of some 30 Scots Guards of Headquarters Company, supported by four light tanks of the Blues and Royals, moved south toward nearby Mount William in a bid to draw the enemy’s attention. They soon stumbled upon Argentine trenches, and after an intense firefight in which two guardsmen were killed and four wounded, they withdrew—straight into an undetected minefield. Four more men were wounded when they set off mines, in turn giving the Argentines a clear target for mortars and artillery. Fortunately for the British, the shells nearly all landed in soft peat, which absorbed the blasts; otherwise, the result would have been catastrophic. Its mission completed, the diversionary force withdrew, in the process losing one of its tanks to a booby trap. A half-hour into the engagement, shortly after 10 p.m., G Company commenced the assault on Tumbledown. To its great surprise the company met with practically no resistance and quickly secured its objective. Moving up, the men of Left
Leopoldo Galtieri The Argentine general and president pressed for invasion of the lightly defended Falklands to settle Argentina’s territorial claim, but more so to distract his own citizens from economic and human-rights issues at home.
Jorge Anaya Commander in chief of the Argentine navy, junta member and mastermind of the Falklands invasion, Anaya gambled that his plan would create a patriotic surge, and that the British had long since forgotten the islands.
Basilio Lami Dozo Commander of the Argentine air force and third arm of the ruling junta, Lami Dozo boasted a 3-to-1 advantage in combat aircraft, though maintaining technical superiority over the British was his biggest challenge.
Margaret Thatcher In response to the Argentine invasion, British Prime Minister Thatcher quickly appointed a war cabinet to assemble a naval armada. The Falklands victory sent her approval rating soaring.
Sandy Woodward Rear Adm. Woodward led the British naval task force during the war and made waves with a controversial decision to sink the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano, though it was outside the Maritime Exclusion Zone.
31
M AY 2 015
The British fired antitank rockets at enemy positions, but the Argentines held, raining down mortar and machine-gun fire
32
Flank, however, soon found themselves engaged in hand-tohand fighting with fixed bayonets. In the most ferocious fighting of the battle, seven guardsmen died while trying for the summit. The British fired antitank rockets at enemy positions, but the Argentines held, raining down mortar and machine-gun fire on the guardsmen. It was, Lawrence wrote, “out-and-out battle, the fullest possible fighting.” Throwing himself into the thick of the fight, Major John Kiszely, Left Flank’s commander, shot two enemy soldiers and bayoneted a third. Though repeatedly targeted, he miraculously suffered only a bullet strike to his compass. Kiszely was later awarded the Military Cross for his actions that night. When a strategically placed machine-gun post stopped Left Flank cold, Right Flank Company made its way up the mountain in support. It was rugged going, over scree that gave way under the soldiers’ boots. As they climbed, they came upon unoccupied Argentine tents that contained boxes of highly sophisticated IWS (individual weapon sight) night scopes—“the absolute top grade,” recalled Lawrence, “more advanced than the ones we had ourselves. It made us wonder…what lay ahead.” What lay immediately ahead for Right Flank was intense enemy fire. As the guardsmen attempted a flank attack on the Argentine machine-gun position, the enemy gun crew immediately shifted its attention from Left Flank to them. Danger came from all quarters, as the surrounding rocks ricocheted rounds in all directions. At the head of his platoon Lawrence “tried to make myself disappear into the ground, face down in the dirt.” Ultimately, he threw a phosphorous grenade directly into the enemy machine-gun position, halting the fire and netting the British several prisoners. This gave the guardsmen their first up-close look at their foes. The Argentine marines, noted Lawrence, “were wearing Americanstyle uniform: big green parkas with webbing over the top.” Throughout the fight the mountain was bathed in unearthly light as star shell illumination rounds fired by British naval vessels fell slowly to earth on parachutes, casting long, eerie shadows over the craggy landscape. Adding to the otherworldliness of the scene was a surprise blizzard that sent snow swirling around the silhouetted fighting figures. As they struggled to regain their momentum and continue the ascent, the Scots Guards encountered sniper fire from Argentine soldiers concealed on the highest crags. One guardsman sought to scale a rock shielding an enemy sniper and was shot off it. In the face of such punishing fire, explosions and booby traps, the guardsmen struggled on toward the summit,
MILITARY HISTORY
one man advancing while another covered him. “I remember thinking,” wrote Lawrence, “that this was just like the movies.” Around 2 a.m., after pausing again to regroup, the Scots Guards lashed out at the 5th Marines’ positions from several directions, overcoming them one at a time. Over the next three hours they captured all but three of the enemy foxholes. The action continued through the night, and by the time the sky began to lighten, some of the guardsmen had run out of ammunition. Among them was Lawrence. Seeing an enemy soldier on the ground to his front, he bayoneted the man, later noting, “He spun wildly…and my bayonet snapped.” Using the only weapon he had, Lawrence recalled, “I stabbed him and I stabbed him, again and again, in the mouth, in the face, in the guts, with a snapped bayonet. It was absolutely horrific. Stabbing a man to death is not a clean way to kill somebody.” Lawrence then picked up the dead man’s rifle, and using its IWS to enhance his night vision, shot a sniper and took that man’s weapon as well. By this time Lawrence was near the summit, desperately looking for an enemy administration and supply area. “Once we had taken that, we would have taken the whole mountain.” As Lawrence reached the summit, other guardsmen from various platoons closed up behind and around him. As he gazed down at the lights of Port Stanley some 4 miles distant, an enemy rifle in each hand, a 7.62mm high-velocity armorpiercing round slammed into his head at 3,800 feet per second, destroying nearly 45 percent of his brain. Lawrence lay on the frigid ground for hours before a helicopter arrived to evacuate him and the other wounded. On returning to England, his first words on seeing his father, a retired Royal Air Force wing commander, were, “Oh, Daddy…it wasn’t worth it.” Singly and in small contingents, the rest of the Scots Guards clawed their way to the summit. By 8 a.m., after what one British soldier referred to as “hours of struggle inch by inch up the rocks, using phosphorous grenades and automatic weapons,” Tumbledown was, for the most part, in the hands of the guardsmen. Fighting continued on the eastern flank of the mountain, but—low on ammunition and denied reinforcements—the Argentine 5th Marine Battalion was ultimately forced to surrender. By 9:45 a.m., some 12 hours after the first shot rang out, the firing ceased. Meanwhile, the 7th Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Rifles had bypassed Tumbledown to capture Mount William to the south, while the Welsh Guards seized Sapper Hill, and 2 PARA took Wireless Ridge. The road to the capital was open, the war virtually over. Still, the commander of the Royal Marines’ 42 Commando unit praised the beaten Argentine marines: “[They] marched smartly, holding their regimental colors high as they marched along the streets of Port Stanley.” The British coveted the enemy’s regimental flags, but to their disappointment the Argentines doused their banners with gasoline and burned them to ashes as their enemies watched. Miraculously, Robert Lawrence survived but with permanent physical damage that includes partial paralysis. He was
A memorial atop Tumbledown commemorates the Scots Guards’ tough victory. The Falklands War claimed 907 lives yet ended in status quo.
one of 43 British soldiers wounded on Tumbledown; nine had been killed. The Argentine marines had suffered at least 30 killed and 100 wounded. London’s Sunday Times later shared with its readers that on Mount Tumbledown “the Scots Guards were to face the toughest action of all. There a well-trained Argentine marine battalion was heavily dug into a series of intricate bunkers, cut in the rock.…The firepower of the marines was intense and impressive.” For their performance in the battle, men of the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards, received two Distinguished Conduct Medals (one posthumously), two Military Medals, one Distinguished Service Order and two Military Crosses, one of which went to Lawrence. Two members of 9 PARA Squadron, Royal Engineers, received Military Medals, and a helicopter pilot who repeatedly risked his life to transport wounded from the mountain during combat received the Distinguished Flying Cross.
TOP TO BOTTOM: JOHN WARBURTON LEE/SUPERSTOCK; BETTMANN/CORBIS; PAUL HALEY/CROWN COPYRIGHT, IWM VIA GETTY IMAGES
A
fter the battle Pipe Maj. James Riddell of the 2nd Scots Guards stood near the rocky crest of Tumbledown, cradling his bagpipes to play a haunting quick-march he had composed to commemorate his regiment’s actions. He called it “The Crags of Tumbledown Mountain,” and it would become a staple at events featuring pipe music. His was not the only tune written about the Falklands campaign. Pink Floyd, Dire Straits and Elvis Costello, among others, also weighed in—but far from memorializing the war, their songs were an indictment of Britain’s actions. Nor were they alone in their disapproval. Although Margaret Thatcher’s government rode a wave of popular sentiment into another term of office, many Britons continued to question the necessity of an armed conflict that had claimed the lives of 649 Argentine and 255 British servicemen, as well as three Falkland Islanders, and left thousands more wounded over an ancient possession of questionable worth, thousands of miles distant, that few of their countrymen had even known existed. In a sense the casualty figures are misleading. According to the South Atlantic Medal Association (SAMA), a nongovernmental organization representing and supporting Falklands veterans, within 20 years of the end of the fighting an estimated 264 British veterans—more than had been killed in combat—had committed suicide, possibly as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder. There’s been no update to these figures over the last 13 years, or assessments of the numbers of Argentine veterans who took their own lives over what combat veteran Robert Lawrence remembers as a “short, bloody, wet and dirty” war, fought “on the edge of the world.” MH
After facing dug-in Argentine forces backed by mortars and howitzers during a June 13 night assault on Tumbledown, men of the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards, middle, rejoice at reaching the summit. Following the Argentine surrender, Royal Marines, bottom, run up the Union Jack.
Ron Soodalter has written for America’s Civil War, Civil War Times, Wild West and Smithsonian. For further reading he recommends Tumbledown: When the Fighting Is Over, by John Lawrence and Robert Lawrence; “Reassessing the Fighting Performance of Conscript Soldiers During the Malvinas/ Falklands War (1982),” by Alejandro L. Corbacho; and The Battle for the Falklands, by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins.
33
In 1918 Woodrow Wilson committed to an Allied intervention in a reeling Russia —but instead of repelling the Germans, U.S. troops clashed with communists on their home turf By Anthony Brandt
The Red Army marches to civil war in 1919. The chaos in Russia prompted the Allies to send a coalition force, both to repel the Germans and to reopen an Eastern Front. But instead of keeping a lid on the waning war, the intervention initiated the Cold War. FINE ART IMAGES/HERITAGE IMAGES/THE IMAGE WORKS
Edmund Ironside
The roads ran through forests and swamps so dense a man could not see more than 20 feet in any direction, and in the swamps the water was hip-deep. Get lost in them, and one’s body would never be found. In winter storms the snow quickly reached 2 or 3 feet deep, while temperatures dropped to 30, 40 even 50 below. Some idiot on the British general staff had decreed his troops use water-cooled machine guns; to keep them from freezing, some gunners slept with the weapons beside them. Frostbite was common. Everyone—including the French and Americans—was under British command, and even the lowliest Tommies perceived the incompetence of many of their commanders. Units sent on flanking maneuvers through the forests and swamps never found their targets, got lost and then needed rescuing. Maps, when available, were sketchy. Communications were poor or nonexistent. And among soldiers was the building refrain—What are we doing here? Why are we here, in north Russia, fighting Bolos (Bolsheviks)? The stated Allied objective was the town of Vologda, some 300 miles south of their position at the junction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and lines leading south to Moscow and north to Arkhangelsk. But as the inept Bolshevik forces the Allies had faced in the fall of 1918 stiffened into the stronger, better-trained Sixth Army over the winter, it became obvious Vologda was out of reach. Why were they there? On taking over in November 1918
M AY 2 0 1 5
North Russia, 1919
36
MILITARY HISTORY
Brig. Gen. Edmund Ironside had bluntly explained to his officers and troops they were there fighting for their lives. It was true. By December the ice that gave the White Sea its name was closing the port of Arkhangelsk. Thanks to the warm waters of the North Atlantic Current, the port at Murmansk, on the Barents Sea, remained open, but to reach it would have meant crossing hundreds of miles of roadless swamp and forest in the winter. There was no escape, then. They had no choice but to hold their ground. But what were they doing there? Why, in the opening stages of the Russian Civil War, were American troops being sent not only to Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in far western Russia but also to Vladivostok and up into Siberia in extreme eastern Russia? What business was it of the United States that the Bolsheviks had seized control, or that forces were gathering within Russia to try to reclaim the country? President Woodrow Wilson had insisted that, while he wanted to make the world safe for democracy, it was American policy not to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Yet that was exactly what he was doing. What had changed his mind? The intervention would turn out to be one of the notable missteps of Wilson’s career, and the world is still living with its consequences. It would turn communist Russia, whose rulers were already hostile to Western powers—though indeed willing to exploit their technical know-how and personnel to organize their railroads and help them industrialize—into a permanent enemy. The late diplomat and historian George Kennan wrote that U.S. military intervention killed whatever germ of hope existed for a better relationship
LEFT TO RIGHT: TOPHAM/TOPHAM PICTUREPOINT/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES; KONSTANTIN IVANOVICH MAXIMOV/ MUSEUM OF HISTORY, MOSCOW/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
British Brig. Gen. Ironside arrived in Arkhangelsk in November 1918 to command Allied forces in north Russia. Right, the Bolsheviks seized Moscow in 1917 but controlled little outside the major cities in the early days of the civil war.
Vladimir Lenin
Left, Bolshevik leader Lenin opposed any form of intervention by the Allies. Red Army forces, above, and their opponents knew that command of the rails was central to controlling Russia.
between the two countries. “It was precisely this possibility [of some level of cooperation and understanding]—the most important that could be imagined from the standpoint of the long-term future of both the Russian and American peoples and indeed of mankind generally—that was sacrificed to the slender and evanescent baubles of the military intervention.”
LEFT TO RIGHT: HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD/ALAMY; MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY
That intervention took shape late in World War I after the Bolsheviks rose up in October 1917 and promptly sued for a separate peace with Germany and the Central Powers. Even before the Bolsheviks took over, the Russian army had been falling apart. Major campaigns had failed spectacularly; morale had collapsed; there were mutinies in Ukraine. Many Russians, regardless of ideology, were fed up. The effect was to essentially close the Eastern Front. Suddenly, vast numbers of battle-hardened German troops—more than 40 divisions—could be transferred to the Western Front, enough of them, Germany believed and the Allies feared, to break the four-year stalemate the war had become. The United States had officially entered the war in April 1917, but not until the spring of 1918 did American troops began to arrive in Europe in significant numbers, and they were untested in combat. By then the governments of Russia and the Central Powers had signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which officially ended Russian participation in the war and also put large swaths of western Russian territory (present-day Eastern Europe) into German hands. For the Allies these developments were disastrous. They saw the Russian collapse not only as a defeat and a possible
deathblow to the Allied war effort in the west, but also as a chance for Germany to extend its power, not to mention its territory, even farther east than the boundary designated by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. This fear was not unreasonable; even as the treaty was under negotiation, German forces pushed deeper into Ukraine. Finland was embroiled in a civil war, with Germany supporting the White side against the Bolshevik-backed Reds, and the Allies worried Germany would move its own troops toward Murmansk and Arkhangelsk under cover of this support. In 1917 the Allies had sent Russia thousands of tons of military supplies, which sat on docks in Arkhangelsk, Murmansk and Vladivostok, free for whoever could take them. To complicate matters, the treaty freed thousands of prisoners of war from camps in Siberia, which placed Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and a half-dozen other nationalities on the railroads inside Russia, making the situation inside the sprawling and fractured nation yet more volatile. Bolshevik control of the country was at best tenuous and concentrated in the cities. Open civil war had not broken out, but dozens of what came to be known as White Russian —primarily nationalist and anti-Bolshevik—forces were quietly gathering throughout Russia, waiting for the right moment to strike. On March 21, 1918, using forces beefed up by the troops transferred from the Eastern Front, Germany launched an offensive against the exhausted Allied armies on a 50-mile front in France and penetrated farther than they had at any other time in the war. German forces advanced to within
37
Allied Intervention W
oodrow Wilson had kept the United States out of the war in Europe through April 1917. And even after the Bolsheviks made peace with the Central Powers, freeing whole German divisions to fight the Allies on the Western Front, Wilson resisted calls from France and Britain to protect Russian resources and reopen the Eastern Front. Only when the crisis in Russia grew dire did he send troops. The move did little more than deepen the ideological divide.
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk The revolting Bolsheviks capitalized on widespread unrest in Russia caused by long years of war and economic strain. Among their first acts was to sue for peace with Germany and the Central Powers.
Russian Civil War Resistance to the Bolsheviks and their Red Army coalesced into the anti-communist White coalition and its White Army. When the Allies left, however, the overmatched Whites soon folded and fled Russia.
Revolt of the Czech Legion The Czechs and Slovaks were determined to stay in the war and win their independence from AustriaHungary. When Germany pressured the Bolsheviks to disarm the legion, the legion seized the railways.
38
The European Theater, 1917 By 1917 the war on the Eastern Front had ground to a halt, while near economic collapse, starvation and political strife within Russia were threatening to tear it apart. When the Bolsheviks made their power grab that October, they quickly sued for peace, in return ceding much of western Russia to the Central Powers. The treaty enabled Germany to shift more than 40 divisions to the Western Front and launch its massive Spring Offensive into France. Germany also threatened to make further incursions into Russia.
Battle of Romanovka The intervention in Siberia flashed hot in the spring of 1919 when the Reds hit Allied troops at Suchan. The later attack at Romanovka marked the last major clash before the April 1920 American withdrawal.
DISTANCE: Moscow to Vladivostok, 4,000 miles/6,437km MAPS BY STEVE WALKOWIAK/SWMAPS.COM
39
The French and British were desperate to reopen a front in the east. And they wanted to include the Americans 60 miles of Paris, putting the City of Light within range of their new long-range superguns (see P. 58). The French and British were desperate to reopen a front in the east. And they wanted to include the Americans. But Wilson would have none of it. In his “Fourteen Points” speech, delivered on Jan. 8, 1918, the president had made his support for the self-determination of nations quite clear, and he had no wish and saw no reason to interfere in Russian internal affairs. Such an intervention went against his own idealistic policy and had little support in the U.S. War Department, which thought it wildly impractical. The British and French did all they could to persuade Wilson to change his mind, but he would not budge. Military intervention seemed a bad idea on many levels. No invading army since the Mongols in the 13th century had ever fared well on the Russian steppes, and the Allies did not intend to send an army, only a small force to keep the military stockpiles out of hostile hands, rouse the Russians to resist German domination and persuade the new Soviet leaders they stood to lose more under German hegemony than they had to gain. “It was not our business to determine whether the Bolshevik or the anti-Bolshevik sections of the Russian peoples would ultimately dominate,” insisted British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. “Our one concern was to prevent the vast and productive area of the Russian empire from becoming subject to the Central
In the unfolding civil war the Red Army, below, clashed with White, Czechoslovak and Allied forces. President Wilson committed U.S. troops to defend against possible German and Finnish encroachment. The Americans arrived in Vladivostok, right, in the latter half of 1918.
Powers and a source of supply for them in the war.” To do so, the Allies would reopen the Eastern Front, in turn taking pressure off the Western Front. Was it a reasonable idea? Not in the chaotic, highly unpredictable situation that prevailed in Russia at the time. The Bolsheviks were weaker than they themselves knew and were laboring under the profound delusion that their takeover of the Russian government would spark a global revolution of the proletariat, who would throw off the yoke of capitalist servitude, refuse to continue fighting the world war and forever end imperialism. But on the tactical level the Bolsheviks were divided among themselves. Leon Trotsky, then minister of war, welcomed Allied intervention in the north to keep the Finns and/or Germans out of Murmansk, while Vladimir Lenin wanted no Allied help of any kind. The Russian revolution, meanwhile, was not liberating the proletariat from any chains. If it was having an international effect at all, it was among Russia’s neighbors, where long pent-up nationalistic feelings among Poles, Ukrainians and Latvians as well as other ethnic groups in the Russian south were bursting forth. To make the situation even more complex, an entire foreign army—the Czechoslovak Legion, with some 60,000 armed men—was moving east inside Russia toward Vladivostok. The Czechs and Slovaks, then part of the AustroHungarian empire, were among those nationalistic groups
LEFT TO RIGHT: INTERFOTO/ALAMY; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; HARRIS & EWING/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
who sought independence and had joined the Allied cause when the war began in 1914 in hopes of winning it. They had fought, very effectively, alongside the Russians. Russia may have left the war, but the Czechs and Slovaks had not. Since there was no exit from Russia to the west, the Allies planned to send them east on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok, then take them to Europe by sea to help rescue the Allies from the German Spring Offensive—a move that, of course, required the cooperation of the Bolsheviks. Chaos and confusion were the order of the day—and it would get worse. On May 14, 1918, at a siding in central Russia, a westbound train carrying released Hungarian prisoners pulled alongside an eastbound train carrying Czechoslovak legionaries to Vladivostok. The occupants of the trains taunted one another. Then one of the Hungarians threw a chunk of scrap metal through an open train window, mortally wounding one of the legionaries. Infuriated, the legionaries pulled the Hungarian from the car and killed him on the spot. The legionaries were armed; the Hungarians were not. One can imagine the uproar. When Trotsky heard about it, he ordered Soviet units up and down the line to disarm the legionaries. He seemed to have forgotten he did not have much of an army. Nowhere in the Russia’s vast interior were Soviet enclaves up to this task. The Czechs fought their way to Vladivostok and by the end of the summer controlled most of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, including Vladivostok itself. This was enough to bring White Russian resistance to the Bolsheviks into the open. The civil war was on. It would last until 1921 and claim more than 7 million Russian lives—“five times as many,”
wrote military historian John Keegan, “as had been killed in the fighting of 1914–17.”
This was the context that finally changed Woodrow Wilson’s mind. He knew it was a mistake, his own War Department knew it was a mistake, but the Allies had pressed him so hard for so long that he began to feel they would lose all confidence in him if he didn’t accede. The irony is that by July 1918, when he made his decision, American soldiers were beginning to make a difference on the Western Front. Germany’s Spring Offensive had ultimately come to grief. The Allies were counterattacking, and American soldiers were demonstrating an enthusiasm for action that astonished the war-weary French and British. The offensive had cost Germany dearly—300,000 casualties in March, 120,000 in April—leaving it with no further manpower reserves. The first Americans sent to north Russia arrived in late summer. In Murmansk the governing Soviet was happy to see them; officials perceived the threat from the Germans and Finns on their border, and they knew Moscow cared nothing about the local situation. Trotsky had acted alone when he invited the Allies to help defend the north against German or Finnish encroachment. Lenin hated all the Western powers, and believing worldwide revolution was coming, he countermanded Trotsky’s orders, but it was too late. In increasingly bitter exchanges between Murmansk and Moscow, the local Soviet in effect declared its independence from Moscow. Allied forces landed, took over the railroad and began to move south. In Arkhangelsk, a couple hundred miles away, officials were hostile, but by the time Under pressure from the Allies, and against his own policy, Wilson finally sent troops to Russia in 1918. General Graves led U.S. forces in Siberia and was told to keep out of the civil war.
William Graves Woodrow Wilson
42
Allied ships arrived in August, a coup had replaced the local government, and the troops landed without any loss of life. The plan was to advance south in a multipronged movement toward the railway intersection at Vologda in order to link up with the Czechoslovak Legion—which had supposedly been diverted from its drive toward Vladivostok and turned back to the north—and form a new Eastern Front. The possibility of such a hookup was evaporating even as the need for such a front was vanishing. In north Russia some 7,000 British and Commonwealth troops, 5,000 Americans, 2,000 French, 1,000 Serbians and Poles, and several thousand White Russians ended up facing not Germans but the increasingly powerful and capable Red Army. All the elements were in place for a fiasco. To cap it off the indomitable Ironside was told only when he took command that the Supreme War Council had decided to continue fighting in north Russia even if the Germans gave up—a decision his superiors had not bothered to communicate or explain to the Allied officers in the Russian north. It was a small war, but a very real one. There were many separate fronts, and the action in places was very intense. The Red Army enjoyed artillery superiority; it had longerrange guns—and more of them. The sides fought each other all through the fall, into late December and in some spots even later. In the snow and intense cold, frostbite multiplied the usual agonies of combat. The Americans, who called themselves the Polar Bears, fought well but chafed under British command. The war was over in Europe, but they continued to fight, and no one could tell them why. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, were fighting for their ideology on Russian soil, and getting better at it. All winter long there were artillery duels but little infantry action. Everyone had dug in. In February 1919
MILITARY HISTORY
troops of a Yorkshire battalion ordered to the front refused to move, only relenting after their colonel put them through rigorous exercises and wore down their resistance. Then a French battalion flatly refused to fight. They were sent home. The message was clear: The war on the Western Front is over. Why are we still fighting? At one contested bridge crossing the Bolsheviks routinely propagandized the Americans, even sending a subaltern to stand on the bridge at night to harangue them. The Americans were pawns of the British, he claimed. Why were they fighting Russians? In mid-March the fed-up men of a U.S. company on the Dvina Front signed a formal petition announcing they would “refuse to advance on the Bolo lines, including patrols.” The war was over, they insisted, the Germans had been defeated, and what they were doing now was against the announced policy of their own government. They were threatened with hanging, but ultimately nothing came of it. Regardless, in February, Wilson had changed his mind again. He had never explained to the American people, much less to the men themselves, what U.S. troops were doing in Russia. And he didn’t explain why he was bringing them home. In June the bulk of the American force left Arkhangelsk. Half of the bodies of their 235 dead were never recovered. They still didn’t understand why they had fought and died in north Russia. The British left in August, leaving the campaign against Soviet forces in the far north to the White Russians. Over the following year some 30,000 of those outmatched men died before the guns of the Red Army.
The American intervention in Siberia was just as futile. Eight thousand Americans, drawn largely from units trained on the West Coast, landed in Vladivostok in the summer
LEFT TO RIGHT: HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS; MARY EVANS/PHARCIDE/THE IMAGE WORKS
M AY 2 015
The Allies were also tasked with helping the Czechoslovak Legion, above, leave Russia. Though the Allies, right, were instructed not to take sides in the Russian Civil War, this ultimately proved impossible, as Bolsheviks continued to raid the rail lines and directly attacked their camps.
General Graves kept his troops, left, out of combat until 1919, when Bolshevik forces attacked U.S. and Japanese units guarding the Suchan coal mines. Above, Americans awaiting a transport ship cheer their pending departure. The last Allied troops left in 1920.
LEFT TO RIGHT: MARY EVANS/ROBERT HUNT COLLECTION/THE IMAGE WORKS; NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Whatever slim chance there might have been for a dialogue between communist Russia and the United States was gone and fall of 1918. There they joined British and Commonwealth troops, the Czechoslovak Legion and various other foreign contingents, including some 70,000 Japanese. Tokyo meant to use the chaos in Russia to seize as much of Siberia and the Russian islands off its coast as possible, not to mention a large bite of Manchuria. The Japanese troops in Russia were as arrogant as they would prove to be in World War II, and tension between them and the Americans became endemic. U.S. units landed with the same confusing mandate they had been given in north Russia: Don’t take sides in what was by then a full-blown civil war; at the same time help the Czechoslovak Legion and protect the railroads. American engineers were already in place, trying to maintain the railroads and not take sides, but how were they supposed to do that? Control of the railroads meant control of the country. The Bolsheviks raided railroad stations, killed personnel, tore up tracks and cut telegraph lines, while White Russian and Cossack units rode the rails in armored trains and attacked villages suspected of aligning with the Bolsheviks, each side committing barbarous atrocities. Overseeing this mess was the U.S. commander Maj. Gen. William S. Graves, who stuck rigidly to his orders not to interfere in Russia’s internal affairs. He managed to keep his men out of combat until the spring of 1919, when Bolshevik units attacked U.S. and Japanese troops guarding the Suchan coal mines, which were crucial to the operation of
the railroads. The Bolsheviks struck again in the town of Romanovka, where partisans surprised a sleeping unit of Americans in their tents and killed 24 men. The survivors drove them off, but it was clear the Americans would have to take sides. Graves reinforced all units stationed along the railroads. Skirmishes between the Bolsheviks and U.S. units continued through the summer, then dropped off. In early October 1919 Wilson suffered the stroke that effectively ended his presidency. Whatever explanation he might ultimately have given the forces he sent to Russia would never materialize. The last American forces left Vladivostok on April Fools’ Day 1920, and what survived of the Czechoslovak Legion left by year’s end. U.S. Secretary of War Newton Baker called the Allied expedition “nonsense from the beginning,” while Army Chief of Staff General Peyton C. March deemed it a “complete failure.” Whatever slim chance there might have been for a dialogue between communist Russia and the United States, as George Kennan noted, was forever gone. MH A frequent contributor to Military History, Anthony Brandt is the author of The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage. For further reading he suggests George F. Kennan’s The Decision to Intervene: Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920 and Robert L. Willet’s Russian Sideshow: America’s Undeclared War, 1918–1920.
43
44
JEAN LOUIS ERNEST MEISSONIER/AKG-IMAGES/LAURENT LECAT
Napoléon’s beloved Marshal Michel Ney went down swinging a broken sword for France—only to face a firing squad of his countrymen By Robert Bruce
Ney rides immediately behind Napoléon in Ernest Meissonier’s depiction of the 1814 French campaign. When the emperor escaped from exile the following year, Ney risked all to return Napoléon to the French throne.
46
apoléon Bonaparte called him “a lion” and amid an army of heroes singled him out as “the bravest of the brave.” One of his fellow French marshals perhaps said it best: “We are soldiers, but Ney is a knight.” Marshal Michel Ney exemplified all these characteristics, and so it was in 1815 he abandoned titles, lands and family to fight once more at the side of Napoléon in defense of France in the final campaign of the Napoleonic wars. Ney joined the French army as a 19-year-old private. He displayed such daring and skill during the wars of the French Revolution that he rose meteorically in rank, becoming a general at age 27 and a marshal of France at 35. Tall, muscular and possessed of great courage, Ney always gravitated to the hottest part of the battlefield, often fighting more like a captain than a marshal. “He had only to give an order for you to feel brave,” an aide recalled. “Ney’s genius only awakened in the face of the enemy and at the great voice of the guns. Even under grapeshot his laughter and pleasantries seemed to defy the death all around him.” The troops idol-
MILITARY HISTORY
ized Ney and nicknamed him le Rougeaud (“the Ruddy”), because his complexion turned deep red in the heat of battle. Ney became one of Napoléon’s best marshals, and he played a critical role in nearly all of the emperor’s greatest victories. Yet it was in defeat Ney achieved immortality, during his command of the rear guard during the agonizing French retreat from Moscow in 1812. Napoléon relied heavily on Ney during the final campaigns of the Napoleonic wars, but when Paris fell in April 1814, Ney joined the other marshals in forcing Napoléon to abdicate and accept exile in order to secure peace. But it was a peace that would not last.
With Napoléon gone calm returned to France, and with it the deposed Bourbon dynasty. King Louis XVIII sought to win Ney’s support by retaining him as a marshal of France and recognizing his imperial titles of prince and duke. Yet while Ney retained his noble status, he was the son of a cooper, and his wife, Aglaè, a former washerwoman. The haughty émigré aristocrats scarcely concealed their contempt for Ney, and the women at court routinely insulted his wife.
CARL VON STEUBEN/AKG-IMAGES
M AY 2 0 1 5
Napoléon’s escape from Elba and sudden arrival in France on March 1, 1815, sent shock waves through Europe, prompting entire French regiments to defect and rally behind the emperor’s claim to the throne.
AFTER JEROME-MARTIN LANGLOIS/AKG-IMAGES/DE AGOSTINI PICTURE LIBRARY
Of his many stalwart officers, Napoléon considered Ney “the bravest of the brave.”
The Bourbons also mistreated Ney’s beloved army, purging the veteran officer corps and placing aristocratic fops in senior command positions. They discharged enlisted men on halfpay, outlawed their medals and cancelled the stipends they were due from those decorations. Still more galling to Ney was how the Bourbons cavorted with the enemies of France whose bayonets had placed the dynasty back on the throne over the corpses of his soldiers. Ney began to doubt his decision to force Napoléon’s abdication, and he was not alone, as discontent grew rapidly throughout France. Then on March 1, 1815, came the electrifying news that Napoléon had escaped from exile and landed in France to reclaim the throne. Napoléon’s return shocked all of Europe, while the people and army of France began to rally to the emperor’s standard in large numbers. As Napoléon marched toward Paris, entire regiments defected en masse to his cause, and his “invasion” took on the air of a triumphal procession. In desperation Louis XVIII ordered Ney to gather troops and intercept Napoléon before he reached the capital. Ney feared the emperor’s return would provoke civil war and declared he would bring Napoléon back to Paris “in an iron cage” if necessary.
Yet within days of this bombastic statement Ney’s doubts returned. He detested the aristocrats and remarked, “By comparison with [Napoléon] these Bourbons are pygmies! No wonder I nearly died for him so many times in battle.” He knew that to support Napoléon would mean risking all he had, but it was the emperor who had given him the titles and lands, and the bonds of loyalty forged in the flames of battle were strong. As Ney’s force drew close to Napoléon’s, he received a message from the emperor, urging Ney to join him once more. Napoléon declared, “I shall receive you as I did after the Battle of the Moskowa.” The reference was to an action during the 1812 Battle of Borodino, in which Ney had led the great attacks that captured the Russian defensive works and for which Napoléon awarded Ney the title Prince de la Moskowa. For the teetering marshal the remark was a tipping point. The following morning Ney addressed his command: “Officers, sub-officers and soldiers, the cause of the Bourbons is lost forever! The legitimate dynasty that the French nation has adopted is about to remount the throne. It is the Emperor Napoléon, our sovereign, who alone has the right to rule over our beautiful country!” The troops exploded with excitement, crying out “Vive l’Empereur!” as they tore from their uniforms the white cockades symbolizing loyalty to the Bourbons and hurled them into the dust. Ney raised his sword and shouted, “Soldiers! I have often led you to victory. Now I lead you to join that immortal phalanx with which Emperor Napoléon approaches Paris!” Chaos ensued as the soldiers broke ranks and surged towards Ney, rending the air with shouts of joy. Ney embraced them, laughing, crying and joining in the wild jubilation. On March 18, 1815, Ney met with Napoléon for the first time since the abdication. The marshal attempted to explain his previous actions, but the emperor interrupted, saying there was no need. Napoléon later recalled, “I threw my arms round his neck, calling him the bravest of the brave, and from that moment all was as it used to be.” Ney’s declaration for Napoléon unleashed a tidal wave of support for the returned emperor, and just two days later Napoléon entered Paris without firing a shot.
The United Kingdom, Prussia, Austria and Russia were aghast at Napoléon’s return and mobilized their armies for an invasion of France. As Napoléon worked feverishly to prepare for war, he kept Ney, whose talents lay on the battlefield, in the background. Outnumbered and facing invasion from multiple directions, Napoléon decided to seize the initiative and hit the Allies first by striking into Belgium (then part of the Netherlands) against the Anglo-allied army led by Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and the Prussian Army of the Lower Rhine under Field Marshal Gebhard von Blücher. Napoléon concentrated his main army on the Belgian frontier and then, with the winds of war blowing strong and the eagles on the march, summoned Ney to battle.
47
48
The charismatic marshal was ecstatic to finally receive his orders and rushed to join the emperor. He made his way to Napoléon’s headquarters along roads filled with immense columns of French troops. The soldiers recognized him and broke out in raucous cheers as he passed. One veteran pointed out Ney to his comrades and shouted, “There is le Rougeaud—things will pick up now!” At 5 p.m. on June 15 Napoléon assigned Ney to command the left wing of the army, which comprised General Honoré Reille’s II Corps, General Jean-Baptiste Drouet, compte d’Erlon’s I Corps and General François Étienne de Kellermann’s III Cavalry Corps, which was scheduled to arrive the following day. The emperor placed Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy in command of the right wing, while Napoléon retained overall command and handled the reserve. Ney’s orders were to “push the enemy” up the main Brussels road and take the village of Quatre Bras, whose road junction connected the Anglo-allied and Prussian armies. It was vital Napoléon keep those armies separated, as combined they would overwhelm him. Ney at last had his command, but his aide-de-camp dourly noted, “There is nothing worse for a general than to take command of an army on the eve of a battle.” On arrival at his new headquarters Ney found that Reille’s II Corps had just captured the village of Gosselies from a Prussian rear guard. Ney sent one of Reille’s divisions in pursuit of the Prussians and then resumed the advance north, only to run into a Dutch detachment from Wellington’s Anglo-allied army. The Dutch withdrew after a sharp skirmish, but with only a few hours of daylight remaining, Ney hesitated to continue the advance. He did not have his full command available for action, and the units on hand had
MILITARY HISTORY
been marching and skirmishing since 2 o’clock that morning. He therefore ordered a halt for the night. The next morning, June 16, Ney was slow to advance. French scouts reported Wellington had only 10 battalions in front of him, but Ney remained cautious. He had faced the “Iron Duke” during the 1807–14 Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal and knew Wellington’s tactic of concentrating his main force out of view. Ney therefore preferred to delay his advance until he had his whole command with him. In fact, Wellington had only a small contingent of troops at Quatre Bras that morning, putting up a bold front while awaiting the arrival of his own forces. Meanwhile, 4 miles to the east of Ney’s position Napoléon and Grouchy, with the bulk of the French army, found Blücher’s Prussians deployed near the village of Ligny. Napoléon informed Ney he was going to attack Blücher that afternoon and directed Ney to immediately take Quatre Bras in order to isolate the Prussians from Wellington. Although he only had 18,000 of his 48,000 infantrymen on hand, Ney believed he could wait no longer and at 2 in the afternoon attacked with two divisions of Reille’s II Corps. The French skirmishers easily pushed back the forward elements of Wellington’s army and steadily advanced on Quatre Bras. However, Ney allowed the attack to develop slowly, wary of Wellington’s strength and still hoping for more of his own forces to arrive before making a full-scale assault. By 3 p.m. the Anglo-allied forces had suffered heavy casualties and lost ground, but at this critical moment Wellington received reinforcements, and the battle intensified dramatically. At that point Ney abandoned his cautious approach. He formed the infantry battalions of Reille’s divisions into attack columns and then drew his sword and galloped along their front shout-
ADOLPHE YVON/MANCHESTER ART GALLERY, UK/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
M AY 2 015
Ney proved himself by leading France’s rear guard during the 1812 retreat from Moscow. Though wounded, he managed to hold off the Russians and rejoin the remnants of Napoléon’s Grande Armée.
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and Ney had faced off in the 1807–14 Peninsular War and studied each other’s field tactics.
turned irrevocably against Ney. Wellington went over to the attack, but Ney rose to the occasion, riding into the hottest sectors of the fight to rally his battalions and lead a stubborn defense that bled the British for every step they advanced. As darkness fell over the battlefield, the lines stood essentially where they had when the fight began. The Anglo-allied army had lost some 4,800 men, and Ney 4,100. Though the French marshal had not captured Quatre Bras, he had accomplished his mission of preventing Wellington from joining up with Blücher. Napoléon was thus able to use his main army to fight the Prussians in isolation and win the Battle of Ligny.
TOP: EUGENE CHAPERON/PRIVATE COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; MAP: SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER. A SCHOOL ATLAS OF ENGLISH HISTORY. LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO, 1905
Early on June 17 Napoléon dispatched Grouchy with
ing, “The Emperor rewards those who advance!” The French soldiers roared back “Vive l’Empereur!” and surged forward. Ney’s attack made excellent progress at first, but the British doggedly held their ground. The fighting was vicious and at close quarters. By sheer force of will the French managed to dent Wellington’s line, but failed to break it. Ney still remained confident of success, for he expected the imminent arrival of d’Erlon’s I Corps, and he would use it to deliver the coup de grâce to Wellington. Then a messenger arrived informing the marshal that Napoléon had ordered d’Erlon’s I Corps to reinforce him at Ligny instead of Ney at Quatre Bras. Almost simultaneously another messenger arrived with an order from Napoléon telling Ney to wrap up things at Quatre Bras and also assist at Ligny. In a rage Ney sent a messenger to d’Erlon, ordering him to immediately turn back toward Quatre Bras. Unfortunately, the contradictory orders soon had d’Erlon marching in circles between his two commanders without assisting either one. Increasingly desperate to break the impasse at Quatre Bras, Ney ordered Kellermann, who had arrived with a brigade of mounted cuirassiers, to charge and break through the British center. Kellermann protested, reminding Ney he had only a single brigade and not his whole corps. “The fate of France is in your hands!” Ney replied in a broken voice. “Crush them. Ride over their bodies.” Kellermann launched a desperate charge with his cuirassiers and, amazingly, tore through the mass of British and Dutch troops in front of them, wreaking havoc on the ill-formed infantry and penetrating all the way to Quatre Bras—before close-range artillery and musket fire drove them back with heavy losses. British reinforcements continued to arrive at Quatre Bras, and by early evening the numerical balance had
33,000 men to pursue the beaten Prussians while he moved his remaining 40,000 men toward Quatre Bras to link up with Ney and strike the Anglo-allied army a decisive blow. Ney remained outnumbered in front of Quatre Bras and decided to stay on the defensive until Napoléon arrived. Wellington saw the blow coming, however, and deftly broke contact with Ney, retreating north toward Brussels. Ney and Napoléon joined forces and pursued but were slowed by torrential rains and did not catch up with Wellington until he had once more reformed his army for battle near a small town in what was then the Kingdom of the Netherlands—Waterloo. On the morning of June 18 Napoléon awoke to find Wellington deployed on a low ridge and willing to give battle. The emperor ordered an immediate assault, and Ney enthusiastically approved. Napoléon’s chief of artillery suggested the attack be delayed so the ground could dry, however, allowing his guns to be moved and sited more effectively. Napoléon reluctantly agreed and delayed the opening of the battle until 11:30 a.m.
49
M AY 2 015
50
The assault began with a diversionary attack against the British right. Then at 1 p.m. the French artillery opened a thunderous bombardment against Wellington’s center in preparation for a powerful attack by the whole of d’Erlon’s I Corps. But just before the attack began Napoléon received information that Prussian troops, who had apparently eluded Grouchy’s pursuit, were closing on the French right flank. The emperor believed he still had time to defeat the British before the Prussians arrived and deployed reserves to meet the new threat while also ordering his “lion” to launch the main assault. Ney was eager to attack and swung d’Erlon’s corps like a sledgehammer against the British center, anchored on the ridge and the fortified farmhouse of La Haye Sainte in front of it. The assault made solid gains and appeared to be breaking through the outer crust of Wellington’s defenses, though the farmhouse remained in British hands. Then Wellington halted the French advance with a ferocious counterattack and followed up with a cavalry charge. The British horsemen wreaked havoc for a time, but they overextended themselves and fell victim to a countercharge by French cavalry. Nevertheless, they had stopped the main French thrust, allowing more time for the Prussians to arrive and tip the balance. Ney, true to form, galloped about the battlefield, rallying his infantry and regrouping them for a fresh attack. The new assault hit the same area as the first, and some of Wellington’s allied troops broke under the impact of the French onslaught, while his British regiments took a heavy pounding. Under heavy pressure Wellington decided to execute a tactical withdrawal to preserve his troops from the devastating French artillery fire. At the forward edge of the battle Ney saw British troops falling back, some apparently in disarray. He knew his two attacks had done considerable damage to the enemy and believed that what he was seeing indicated a general retreat, or at the very least a sign the British were on the verge of breaking. Ney returned to the main French position and swiftly organized a powerful cavalry charge to break through the weakened British forces. Ney took position at the head of more than 9,000 cavalrymen and led them in a thunderous charge against Wellington’s battered center. The French horsemen swept up and over the ridge, overrunning several British artillery batteries. But as they galloped onto the reverse slope they encountered not a broken army but British infantry battalions in square formation, prepared to repel their attack. The French cavalry surged against these sturdy blocks of men but could not break them. Ney himself fought with saber against the out-
MILITARY HISTORY
stretched bayonets, slashing and taking down several of the enemy. The French cavalry fell back, but Ney regrouped them at the foot of the ridge and again led them forward. Napoléon, engrossed in meeting the oncoming Prussian threat, learned of Ney’s charge and shook his head, saying it was an hour too soon for such a move. Yet seeing through his telescope that Ney’s attack had pierced the British gun line, the emperor ordered more cavalry poured into the fight to support him. Ney led these reinforcements forward as well, but the British would not break. During the fight the marshal’s horse was shot from beneath him—one of five mounts that died beneath him this day—and when Ney regained his feet amid the British guns, he swore profusely as he watched his cavalry once more falling back. Ney leapt atop a riderless horse and led the remnants of the French cavalry back to their original position. There Napoléon informed him the Prussians had arrived in force and had engaged the French reserves. The emperor told Ney to take La Haye Sainte “at all costs” so the French formations could turn their full strength against the onrushing Prussians. Ney immediately launched a well-coordinated attack against the weakened British lines and captured the farmhouse. At that point the British truly began to waver, and Ney felt he had them. He sent his aide-de-camp to ask Napoléon to commit the Imperial Guard, the last remain-
Late in the battle, with broken sword in hand, Ney tries to rally the French infantry at Waterloo. By that point the Duke of Wellington had the upper hand, and Napoléon had fled.
THOMAS PHILLIPS/ALBUM/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK
Napoléon fled in his carriage, but Ney remained in the fight, his face blackened by powder smoke, his sword broken
JEAN LEON GEROME/SHEFFIELD GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS TRUST, UK/PHOTO © MUSEUMS SHEFFIELD/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
ing reserves, to finish off Wellington. Napoléon initially refused, not wanting to risk the last of his fresh troops, but as the Prussians steadily pushed in his flank and threatened to get behind him, he realized his only hope was to finish off the British so his army could focus on Blücher. More than an hour had passed since Ney’s request, however, and Napoléon’s hesitation had allowed Wellington to once more close up his lines and restore order. Even at this late hour Napoléon committed just four battalions of Imperial Guard grenadiers, rather than the entire reserve. Ney led them forward as the spearhead of some 15,000 attacking troops, but it was a futile gesture. They were met by more than 20,000 British infantrymen concealed in the wheat fields; on command these men rose and unleashed disciplined close-range volleys of musketry into the French. The vaunted Imperial Guard faltered and then fell back in disorder. By that time Blücher’s Prussians had turned Napoléon’s right flank and fallen on the rear of the French army, which began to rapidly fall apart. Napoléon fled the battlefield in his carriage, but Ney remained in the fight, his face blackened by powder smoke, his sword broken and an epaulet from his bulletriddled uniform hanging loose from an enemy saber stroke. He rallied individual battalions and small groups of men, calling out to them, “Come and see how a marshal of France dies!” as he led them into hopeless attacks.
He sought death but could not find it even as men fell all around him. As night fell, he abandoned his suicidal ambition, and an Imperial Guard battalion escorted him to safety. It was to be his final campaign.
After the debacle at Waterloo, Napoléon abdicated yet again and went into exile. Ney remained in France, but Louis XVIII charged him with treason. The accusation infuriated Ney, who believed everything he had done in his life had been for France. Refusing to flee, he instead stood trial. A military tribunal found him innocent, but the Bourbons retried him, declared him guilty and sentenced him to death. When the day for his execution arrived, Ney told the firing squad, “I have fought a hundred battles for France and not one against her,” and then gave them the command to fire. MH Robert B. Bruce is a former professor of military history at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College. A noted authority on the French army, he is a fellow of the International Napoleonic Society. His numerous books include A Fraternity of Arms: America & France in the Great War (2003) and Pétain: Verdun to Vichy (2008). For further reading Bruce recommends Raymond Horricks’ Marshal Ney: The Romance and the Real, A.H. Atteridge’s Marshal Ney: The Bravest of the Brave and Andrew W. Field’s Prelude to Waterloo: Quatre Bras, the French Perspective.
Though he tempted death at Waterloo once it was clear the British would prevail, Ney would survive to face charges of treason, trial and execution at the hands of a French firing squad.
DURING WORLD WAR II MOST FEMALE CORRESPONDENTS WERE ASSIGNED NONCOMBAT STORIES, BUT LEE MILLER FLOUTED CONVENTION TO DIRECTLY COVER NAZI GERMANY’S DOWNFALL BY SARAH R. COKELEY
52
ALL IMAGES UNLESS NOTED OTHERWISE: © LEE MILLER ARCHIVES, ENGLAND 2014. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
A WAR STRIKES A POSE
t the height of World War II nearly every American magazine, newspaper and media outlet had a dedicated war correspondent on the front lines—even Vogue. Lee Miller, a onetime model, wrote and shot photos for the fashion magazine, becoming one of the few female combat photographers accredited by the U.S. War Department. Born in 1907 in small-town Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Miller left at age 19 for New York City. A chance meeting with publisher Condé Nast launched her modeling career, leading to her first Vogue cover appearance in March 1927. Though sought-after in front of the camera, Miller wanted to learn the art of photography and moved to Paris in 1929 to study under the famed Man Ray. She returned to New York in the 1930s to open her own studio but was soon lured back to Paris, immersing herself in the fashion, art and political scenes. At the outset of the war in 1939 Miller moved to London to work for British Vogue. She covered the typical fashion stories and documented domestic war efforts and the destruction from the London Blitz. But Miller wanted even closer to the action, so weeks after D-Day she flew to France and went straight to the front. Teaming up with Life photographer David Scherman, she shadowed U.S. Army units, covering the siege of Saint-Malo, the liberation of Paris, the Ardennes campaign, the horrors of the death camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, and the city-by-city surrender of Germany. At war’s end Miller returned to England and continued contributing to Vogue, though her wartime experiences had fueled a spiraling depression. She died of cancer at her English farmhouse in 1977. MH
In Dinard, France, civilians waved handmade flags to greet American military police. Though the town had been cleared, the shops and restaurants remained boarded up and were considered out of bounds to passing troops.
‘I’m mixed up in the siege of Saint-Malo....Naturally, I’m a bit nervous, as it’ll be 200 pounders from the air’
The U.S. Army mistakenly reported the battle at Saint-Malo over and the city “captured but not occupied,” permitting Miller to enter to report on recovery efforts. This put her in the center of the action as a witness to the bombardment of the citadel. Miller’s photos from the siege recorded one of the first uses of napalm, though she was unaware of it at the time.
TOP: Miller went to Paris days after its liberation in August 1944, noting that “Paris had gone mad.” Excited crowds claimed anything left behind in the wake of the German retreat, such as this derelict car mobbed by celebrating children. BOTTOM: Pablo Picasso, a friend of Miller’s before the war, kept his Paris studio and sculpted and painted right through the German occupation.
BOOK COVER: COURTESY OF THAMES & HUDSON
Miller’s wartime photos, letters and dispatches appear in Lee Miller’s War: Beyond D-Day, released in paperback in 2014 to mark the 70th anniversary of her World War II coverage for Vogue.
55
TOP LEFT: Arriving at Dachau on April 30 —hours after the U.S. 45th and 42nd Infantry Divisions liberated the death camp—Miller photographed hungry survivors awaiting bread rations. TOP RIGHT: Miller photographed the body of an SS guard in a stream near Dachau. She later wrote the camp had “everything you’ll ever hear or close your ears to about a concentration camp.”
OPPOSITE: DAVID E. SCHERMAN
BOTTOM: GIs examine a boxcar loaded with corpses from Dachau. Railcars filled with such grisly discoveries extended beyond the village, making it clear German residents must have known of the camp.
56
Life photographer David Scherman took this photo of Miller bathing in Adolf Hitler’s Munich apartment soon after his suicide. She found Hitler’s residence underwhelming, commenting, “Almost anyone with a medium income...could have been the proprietor.”
‘Scherman and I took off from Dachau to go look for the war front, which seemed a mirage of cleanliness and humanity’
M AY 2 015
D WAR I L R O W 8 1 9 BY 1 UT ON O D E Y A L P HAD NT FAR O R F T N A T A DIS FRENCH E H T M O R F NTIL A U — L A T I P A C MAN R E G F O Y R BATTE ANGED H C S N U G SUPER ARFARE W F O S E L U THE R CKI E B A Z . T D I BY DAV
58
MILITARY HISTORY
PRIVATE COLLECTION/PETER NEWARK MILITARY PICTURES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
With an estimated maximum range of 82 miles, the Germanengineered Paris Guns seemed to defy the laws of physics and terrified Parisians, who had felt safe so far from the front.
The conclusion was the Germans had secretly developed and fielded a supergun. In fact, they had fielded three
LEFT: TOPFOTO/THE IMAGE WORKS; RIGHT: DIZ MUENCHEN GMBH, SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY
The barrel of each gun exceeded 110 feet in length and required an external truss to control the droop of the tube due to gravity.
W
hen a large explosion rocked the Quai de la Seine in northeast Paris at 7:18 on the morning of March 23, 1918, no one at first knew what had caused it. No German aircraft were visible, and although Germany had initiated its great Spring Offensive of 1918 just two days earlier, enemy ground forces remained well over 60 miles north of the French capital. No known artillery piece could fire a projectile even half that distance. The preliminary conclusion was that some sort of new highaltitude airship had dropped a large bomb. But then, about 15 minutes after the first explosion, there followed a second one, then another 15 minutes after that. By day’s end Parisians had counted 21 similar explosions. Within hours ordnance experts had recovered enough ballistic evidence from the various impact sites to determine that Paris was in fact being shelled by a gun or guns firing approximately 8-inch rounds. But that seemed impossible. One working hypothesis surmised the Germans had somehow infiltrated a gun far behind French lines, perhaps into
the forests just outside Paris. By the next day, however, the French had gathered enough additional evidence to prove conclusively the shells had come from behind German lines, specifically from somewhere in the Forest of Saint-Gobain near Crépy, just northwest of Laon. But that was nearly 80 miles away. The only logical conclusion was the Germans had secretly developed and fielded a supergun. In fact, they had fielded three.
T
he Germans had two names for the long-range artillery pieces bombarding Paris: Wilhelmgeschützen (“Wilhelm Guns”), in honor of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Pariskanonen (“Paris Guns”). But for many years after World War I the British and American press, and even many historians, mistakenly called them “Big Berthas.” The Dicke Bertha, however, was a completely different gun—a siege howitzer that fired 420mm concrete-piercing shells the Germans used to demolish Belgian fortresses in 1914. The Paris Guns are among the most remarkable artillery pieces in military history. Their estimated maximum range
61
M AY 2 015
of 82 miles far exceeded that of any operational gun built up to that time or since. Even today the Russian 203mm 2S7 Pion can achieve its maximum range of 34.5 miles only when employing a rocket-assisted projectile. In 1918 the Germans used conventional ammunition. The ordnance engineer who designed the Paris Guns was the brilliant Fritz Rausenberger, a director of the German arms-manufacturing giant Krupp AG. He had also designed the Big Bertha. Krupp had a long tradition of ordnance research and development. Rausenberger for some time had worked through the problems of achieving ranges in excess of 60 miles. In 1916 he approached Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL), the German army High Command, seeking official support for a gun specifically designed to bombard Paris. Colonel Max Bauer, one of the more influential General Staff officers at OHL, convinced both Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg—chief of the General Staff—and his able deputy General Erich Ludendorff to support the project. By late 1917 Krupp had a working prototype, and it successfully fired the first gun on November 20 at the Altenwalde test range near Cuxhaven on the North Sea coast. After additional experimentation with propellant and projectile combinations, the Krupp engineers achieved a range of just over 78 miles on Jan. 30, 1918. Krupp immediately started manufacturing additional carriages and at least seven barrels. Krupp assembled the barrel of each Paris Gun by inserting a 210mm liner tube into a bored-out 56-foot 380mm SK L/45 “Long Max” naval gun barrel. The liner extended 36 feet
62
Fritz Rausenberger had a working prototype of his gun within a year of obtaining approval.
beyond the muzzle of the main barrel. A 20- to 30-foot smoothbore extension was then attached to the front of the protruding liner, resulting in a composite barrel with an overall length exceeding 110 feet. An external truss system clamped atop the barrel reduced the droop of the tube caused by gravity. Krupp engineers had to mount a massive counterweight on the breech in order to elevate the gun for firing and depress it for loading. The carriage was a steel box assembly, with a pivot in the front and wheels in the rear that ran on a circular track. The gun could only be moved to its firing position by rail, assembled in place and fired from a prepared concrete firing platform. The barrel alone weighed some 140 tons, the carriage 250 tons, and the turntable-type firing platform 300 tons. As might be expected, a Paris Gun was not easy to operate. Weighing either side of 400 pounds, the propellant charge could produce a chamber pressure of 69,600 pounds per square inch and a bore temperature in excess of 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. The corrosive propellant composition eroded several centimeters of steel from the barrel with each shot fired, thus increasing the volume of the firing chamber. After loading the next round, the gun crew had to measure the firing chamber volume and then increase the subsequent propellant charge accordingly. In early test firings the extreme temperatures and pressures tore the traditional copper rotating bands right off the projectile body, preventing the round from spinning properly in flight. The solution was to machine rifling grooves with a
While the guns had a fair chance of hitting the city, just where in the city was anybody’s guess MILITARY HISTORY
LEFT TO RIGHT: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS, Q 87935; PRIVATE COLLECTION/© LOOK AND LEARN/ELGAR COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
A gun crew prepares to load one of the shells, which averaged 234 pounds. The complexity and sheer weight of each supergun’s assemblage required a massive concrete platform with access to a railway.
Big Gun Ballistics
The Germans emplaced their long-range guns in the woods near Crépy, nearly 80 miles north of Paris. When the first shells struck, Allied ordnance experts thought some sort of high-altitude airship was dropping bombs on the city, but they soon recovered fragments of shells and determined the guns firing them were behind enemy lines. Such ranges were unheard of in existing artillery weapons. Only after the war did the Germans’ ballistic technology come to light.
Vertex 23.9 miles
25 miles
Time of flight: 177 seconds Probable error: Range (distance): +/- 1.49 miles Deflection (lateral): +/- .5 miles
Velocity 2,267 fps
20 Parabolic region of flight 52.5 miles 15 Velocity 3,005 fps
5,0
00
fps
10
Velocity 3,005 fps
ity loc Ve
5
50˚ GUN
BRIAN WALKER, SOURCE: THE FIELD ARTILLERY JOURNAL, VOLUME VIII, NUMBER 3. WASHINGTON, D.C.: UNITED STATES FIELD ARTILLERY ASSOCIATION, JULY-SEPTEMBER 1918
Point of maximum velocity 3,088 fps
Mount Everest: 5.5 miles
Earth’s surface, showing curvature
10
20
30
1-in-35 twist into the steel body of the projectile. Thus, the crew literally “screwed” each round into the chamber on loading. That solution worked, but it also drastically increased the wear on the bore, expanding its internal diameter with each shot. That, in turn, meant each succeeding round had to be slightly larger than the last. Each barrel, therefore, came with its own dedicated set of projectiles, numbered sequentially in exact firing order. Such attention to detail did not eliminate error, however; a mistake in the firing sequence on March 25 caused a tube detonation on the No. 3 gun, killing or wounding 17 men. Each tube had an estimated service life of 60 rounds, with round No. 60 having a diameter of 222mm. After that the crew replaced the barrel and sent back the old tube to the Krupp factory in Essen, where it was re-bored to 224mm and then reissued with a new set of shells. After the second set of 60 rounds the tubes were re-bored a second time, to 238mm.
T
he Paris Guns achieved their startling maximum range by seeming to defy the normal laws of ballistics. All artillery pieces, before and since, fire at their maximum range when the barrel is elevated to an angle of 45 degrees, or 800 mils. Anything over 45 degrees is classified as high-angle fire. As the elevation increases beyond that point, the shell goes higher, but the range decreases. The Paris Guns, however, achieved their maximum range at an elevation of 50 degrees, or 889 mils. Two factors contributed to this phenomenon. The first was the Coriolis effect with regard to the rotation of the earth. The round’s time of flight from the firing point in Crépy to Paris was 177 seconds, almost three minutes. With the gun firing southwest and the earth rotating from west to east, that three minutes of flight added more than 600 meters to the achieved range—and also pushed the shell somewhat to the right.
40
50
60
54˚40´ 70
Velocity at arrival 2,626 fps
76 miles
The more important range factor, however, was what gunners call the maximum ordinate—the height the shell reaches in its trajectory. At 50 degrees elevation the shells from the Paris Guns reached an altitude of 138,800 feet. Reduced air density at higher altitudes causes far less drag on the body of the projectile, which resulted in the greatly increased horizontal range. The shells fired from the Paris Guns were the first man-made objects to reach the stratosphere, an altitude record they held for nearly a quarter century, until the Germans test-fired the first V-2 missiles in late 1942. Despite the Paris Guns’ incredible range, the tactical effect at the target end was less than impressive. The average projectile weighed 234 pounds, but much of that mass was in the body of the shell, which required reinforcement to withstand the massive firing pressures. The explosive charge itself was a mere 33 pounds, only a quarter of the total shell weight. The combination of the low explosive change and the thick shell body produced a small explosion with relatively few, though large, fragments. One shell that landed in Paris’ famed Jardin des Tuileries left a crater just 10 to 12 feet across and 4 feet deep. Nor were the guns accurate. What gunners call the range probable error was plus or minus 1.49 miles at maximum range. The deflection probable error (lateral dispersion) was plus or minus a half-mile. Paris in 1918, with its main administrative districts, was about 7.5 miles across. That meant that while the guns had a fair chance of hitting the city, just where in the city was anybody’s guess. Between March and August the three Paris Guns fired approximately 367 rounds (French records claim 303), but only 183 landed within the city limits. The shells killed 256 Parisians and wounded another 620. The largest casualty count from a single shot happened on the afternoon of Good Friday,
63
M AY 2 015
Canadian engineer Gerald Bull (above left, with Quebec Premier Jean Lesage) used computersimulated models to solve the technological mysteries of the Paris Guns. Bull’s own work on superguns led to his 1990 assassination.
64
March 29, when a round hit the Church of Saint-Gervaiset-Saint-Protais. The explosion and subsequent collapse of the vault killed 88 worshipers and wounded 68. Since the Paris Guns were essentially modified naval weapons, the Imperial German Navy supplied the crews. About 60 to 80 naval gunners and a support team of civilian engineers manned each gun. The three-gun battery initially operated under the direct command of Vice Adm. Maximilian Rogge, chief of the Imperial German Navy’s Ordnance Department. An army infantry battalion provided ground security for the battery, and 10 squadrons of aircraft were assigned the air cover mission. By 1918 both Allied and German sound-ranging systems were technologically sophisticated enough to pinpoint an enemy battery to within 65 feet, under ideal conditions. Thus the Germans positioned 30 army heavy artillery batteries around the Paris Guns, timing their own firing to mask the firing of the main battery. Kaiser Wilhelm II personally visited the firing positions on the first day of operations. Despite the initial French confusion and German efforts to keep the guns hidden, by
MILITARY HISTORY
manuscript, and using the data collected by Miller, he ran computer simulations to finally resolve many of the lingering technological questions about the Paris Guns and their projectiles. His 1988 book, Paris-Kanonen: The Paris Guns and Project HARP, detailed the results of his research and for the first time also reproduced Rausenberger’s manuscript. Bull, unfortunately, came to a tragic end. After the termination of HARP he went on to design the Canadian GC-45 and South African G5 155mm howitzers, still two of the most advanced fieldpieces in service. But Bull also developed the GHN-45 version of the GC-45 for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Lured by unlimited funding for research, Bull agreed to work for Saddam on Project Babylon, the Iraqi supergun that would capitalize on all the technological breakthroughs from the Paris Guns and Project HARP. The Project Babylon gun Bull was developing reportedly would have been capable of firing a 350mm projectile to ranges of up to 625 miles—far enough to hit any target in Israel and many targets in Iran. Project Babylon came to an abrupt end on March 22, 1990, when an assassin gunned down Bull outside his apartment in Brussels, Belgium. The identity of Bull’s killer remains unknown. —D.T.Z.
March 24 the French had a general idea where they were. About noon that day the Paris Guns battery started receiving random French counterfire. Although it was generally inaccurate, one shell hit a tree close to the No. 1 gun, and the resulting air burst wounded a half-dozen crewmen. The following day the No. 3 gun suffered its tube detonation. The battery displaced forward twice during the war. Its second firing position was near Beaumont-en-Beine, the third near Bruyères-sur-Fère, less than 60 miles from Paris. The re-bored tubes, with reduced ranges due to their larger firing chambers, could only be used in these advance positions. Despite the impressive tactical gains the Germans made during their 1918 offensives, they were forced to fall back in the face of the Allied counteroffensive that started on July 18. A German crew fired the last round from a Paris Gun on the afternoon of Aug. 9, 1918, after which the weapons were disassembled and taken back to Germany. As war’s end approached, the Germans destroyed the Paris Guns, and Krupp incinerated most of the research and development records. The only remaining evidence of the guns are the concrete firing emplacements in the woods near Crépy.
MONTREAL STAR/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Legacy of the Paris Guns
In the decades following World War I the Paris Guns continued to fascinate engineers and military theorists, and despite Krupp’s destroyed records the pieces of the puzzle slowly fell into place. Just before Fritz Rausenberger died in 1926, he finished a working draft of his own recollections of the Paris Guns. Rausenberger’s widow asked the German government for permission to publish the manuscript but failed to get approval. Meanwhile, American ordnance expert Lt. Col. Henry W. Miller spent years during the 1920s and ’30s methodically collecting evidence and reconstructing the mathematical model behind the guns. The brilliant Canadian ordnance engineer Gerald V. Bull was also fascinated with the technology of the Paris Guns. With some justification he considered himself Rausenberger’s intellectual successor. Bull’s interest in the Paris Guns was connected directly to his own Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project), the joint U.S.-Canadian effort in the early 1960s to put payloads into earth’s orbit using large-caliber guns. The project was cancelled before it managed to achieve orbit, but on Nov. 18, 1966, a HARP gun fired a round to a record altitude of 590,550 feet. While working on HARP, Bull translated Rausenberger’s original
French civilians gaze skyward during the March 1918 shelling of Paris. While the Paris Guns had a limited impact on the war’s outcome, they proved effective tools of psychological warfare.
© EXCELSIOR – L’EQUIPE/ROGER-VIOLLET/THE IMAGE WORKS
T
hough the Paris Guns were an awesome technological achievement they had no impact on the outcome of World War I. But they could have. The Germans chose to use an advanced technology as a psychological terror weapon, when they could have directed its power against far more militarily significant targets. One of the Allies’ greatest vulnerabilities in 1918 was the fragile and overstressed logistics system of the British Expeditionary Force. The BEF’s communications lifeline to France ran from just a few key ports in Britain to only six main ports in France. Those ports were vital choke points the Germans, inexplicably, never sought to attack. Had they put the Paris Guns into battery in Flanders instead of Picardy, they easily could have bombarded Dover, England, and Boulogne or Calais, France. As early as 1914 Rausenberger himself told OHL he could build a gun capable of hitting Dover. Any degree of pressure on the BEF’s ports would have caused far greater disruption than any sense of terror among the civilian population in the French capital. The Germans made the same sort of strategic mistake again in World War II. This time the wonder weapons were
the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 rocket. But again the Germans targeted the population centers of London and Paris versus, say, critical Allied airfields on the continent. Only during the very last days of the war did the Germans start targeting the key Allied port of Antwerp. By 1944 the Germans should have had enough experience from both world wars to know that long-range terror attacks on civilian population centers not only don’t work but also often produce the opposite of the intended effect—a lesson lost on many present-day military and political leaders. MH Major General David T. Zabecki, U.S. Army (Ret.), is Weider History Group’s chief military historian. He holds a doctorate in military history from Britain’s Royal Military College of Science, and he is an honorary senior research fellow in war studies at Britain’s University of Birmingham. He is the editor of the recently published four-volume encyclopedia Germany at War: 400 Years of Military History. For further reading Zabecki recommends The Paris Gun, by Henry W. Miller, and Paris Kanonen: The Paris Guns (Wilhelmgeschütze) and Project HARP, by Gerald V. Bull and Charles H. Murphy.
65
fought , I r a W ld r o ntry in W u o c is h r o ave it f s t h o t g t u h o f g u t o d f r , a rh war years r e t in Hermann Eh e h t in oster s K t n is h n o u J m y B m o II c orld War W r e t f to save it from a s p e e left it for k n e h t , is z a N from
66
NARODOWE ARCHIWUM CYFROWE, SYGN 2-14889
T S A L E H T L A I R E P M I N A M R E G
in SS uniform Sporting an n n oto, Herma this 1933 ph s scornful Ehrhardt wa ler’s rise to of Adolf Hit ined the SS power and jo d the force an to infiltrate overthrow. organize an
for that reason, at least in the English-speaking world Ehrhardt remains the unknown soldier of the German right.
Young Ehrhardt was a troublemaker who failed to follow in the footsteps of his father, a pastor. Instead, he joined the Imperial German Navy in 1899, advancing to the rank of commander.
O
nce upon a time in Germany a disgruntled World War I veteran organized his own private army, waged a successful war against homegrown communists and Russian-born Bolsheviks, and then was arrested and imprisoned after he staged a putsch against his own government. No, not Adolf Hitler. The man’s name was Hermann Ehrhardt, and after saving the Weimar Republic from communist revolutionaries, he backed or led several attempts to wrest Germany from Hitler, all of which included attempted assassinations. The most implausible aspect of Ehrhardt’s career was neither his lifelong fondness for gunplay nor his impartial hatred for second-rate demagogues but his near indestructibility. After escaping a Nazi purge in 1934 and withstanding a year’s imprisonment following the July 20, 1944, Hitler bomb plot, Ehrhardt made it safely home to second wife Princess Margarethe of Hohenlohe-Oehringen. And perhaps
Ehrhardt backed or led several attempts to wrest Germany from Hitler, all of which included attempted assassinations
DIZ MUENCHEN GMBH, SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY
G
eorg Hermann Ehrhardt was born on Nov. 29, 1881, in Diersburg, Baden, the son of a sixth-generation Lutheran clergyman. “Father and Mother couldn’t foresee that I would not stand in the pulpit, but the dear Lord God gave me the sensibilities of a Lausbub,” Ehrhardt wrote in 1924 in his precocious autobiography, Adventure and Fate. “I bought my first worthless pistol with my school lunch money.” The whole point of being a Lausbub, or “rascal,” is to annoy people and then evade capture. Soon after Pastor Ehrhardt sent his son to study French in a school in Switzerland, young Hermann, to vex one of his loathed teachers, snuck up behind the old grouch and fired his pistol into the air. The bullet ricocheted off a stone building and struck a passing young girl in the ribs. Horrified, Ehrhardt rushed over to examine the girl and found that her steel corset stay had stopped the bullet without bloodshed. To cheer up “the poor creature,” he took her photograph and invited her into his portable darkroom “to see what developed.” The girl soon tattled, however, and young Hermann was asked to leave school. He never learned his lesson though; back in school in Baden a teacher announced before Ehrhardt’s classmates a muffed Latin translation he’d made, and in retaliation Hermann boxed the teacher’s ears and broke his spectacles. Ehrhardt ultimately left school without an Abitur—a recommendation for university or professional school—and his father realized his only son was not cut out for the pastorate. In 1899 the Imperial German Navy began accepting new cadets, and Ehrhardt saw an opportunity. As the son of a clergyman he was exempt from all class distinctions and qualified easily for the navy. In 1904, as a naval lieutenant, he volunteered to fight the Herero wars in German SouthWest Africa (present-day Namibia). During one memorable clash he engaged in a sniper duel with a warrior concealed in a treetop. Ehrhardt noted with approval that the rifle fell from the tree first, then the man, and he claimed the Herero’s decorated Mauser as a trophy. He was appalled when the proud and brave Herero warriors later fled into the Kalahari Desert with their wives and children. Many of the tribesmen were infected with typhus, and Ehrhardt caught the disease himself. But with the help of his Russian orderly and an African porter he recovered and was sent home on convalescent leave.
The 2nd Marine Brigade, a 6,000-man Freikorps unit Ehrhardt formed and led, made its way to Berlin in March 1920 to take part in the Kapp Putsch, which ended in an embarrassing withdrawal.
Ehrhardt impressed Wilhelm II, who awarded him command of his first torpedo boat—a light destroyer much like the ones Japan had used to sink several Russian warships during the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War. The young captain looked almost Eurasian, with slanted dark blue eyes, a big head and chest and rather short legs, a stocky physique he usually concealed beneath a single-breasted greatcoat. He kept his beard and mustache neatly trimmed to accentuate his intimidating Hunnic impression.
BUNDESARCHIV, BILD 183-H25109, PHOTO: O.ANG
W
hile patrolling the North Sea during World War I, Ehrhardt sank three British destroyers, a submarine and an empty troopship, with the loss of one of his own light destroyers. He penetrated farther up Britain’s Thames River than any hostile mariner since the Anglo-Dutch wars of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. He also lured a Russian cruiser into a U-boat ambush in the Baltic Sea. Ehrhardt was devastated when in November 1918 a mutiny among German battleship crews in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven prompted a broader revolt that led to Wilhelm’s abdication and the Armistice. By then a Korvettenkapitän—equivalent in rank to an Allied naval lieutenant commander or army major—Ehrhardt was ordered to surrender his flotilla at the British naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. The commander of the captured German fleet later ordered the
ships scuttled. While sailing home with other German officers and sailors on a chartered South American freighter, Ehrhardt sank into deep depression, locking himself in his cabin. En route the lubberly crew of communist sailors in charge of the freighter refused to take orders and steered into the outer reaches of a minefield, choosing that exact moment to go on strike and demand extra pay. Ehrhardt, in all his fury, soon charged up on deck, piped his own crew and seized command of the vessel. Ignoring both the striking sailors and their apathetic senior officers, he slipped past the minefield and returned the ship safely to Wilhelmshaven. Hundreds of junior officers who still had some fight left in them soon pledged their allegiance to a new hero—Ehrhardt. Back in Wilhelmshaven the take-charge captain was relieved to learn that his wife, the respectable heiress and widow of a nobleman from the venerable Gilsa family of officers at Waterloo and of the American Civil War, had taken her daughter and their two young sons to her mother’s home in Hamburg for safety. He was incensed, however, to find that the Reds had looted his wine cellar. The next war began almost immediately. “Every sparrow on the roof knew that on January 27, the Kaiser’s birthday, the communists were planning to seize power and set up a ‘Soviet of Wilhelmshaven,’” Ehrhardt wrote. “Now the Social Democrats came to us to see what we could do. The clueless question came to me. I told them
69
M AY 2 015
Hermann Ehrhardt met Adolf Hitler—and immediately disliked him, referring to him as ‘that idiot’ and, obliquely, a psychopath
70
that it would be better to smash [the communists] first.… One bigmouthed deck officer asked, ‘Who’s going to be responsible if blood flows?’” “I will, if I’m placed in command,” Ehrhardt told him. With 300 of his own naval troops and another 300 professional soldiers from the army Ehrhardt surrounded the “Thousand-Man Barracks”—headquarters of the communist revolutionary committee. The Reds fired first before naval gunfire from loyalists in the fleet rained down on and around the barracks. “The whole night was a joke,” Ehrhardt wrote. “Rifles and machine guns cracked from all sides, and the communists lost seven dead, and we lost three, I think from our own gunfire.…Next morning the communists gave themselves up.” The vengeful army troops beat some of the communists half to death, while Ehrhardt himself rescued their leader out of a sense of duty and discipline. He calmly proposed the rightists form a unit under his leadership. “Thank you, sir, but we have the matter in hand, and we can handle it on our own,” one of the civic leaders replied. “Then you can kiss my ass goodbye,” Ehrhardt shot back. Three days later Gustav Noske, the new German defense minister, called Ehrhardt by phone and authorized him to form his own Freikorps paramilitary unit. When World War I ended, the civilian professionals, young men and married men had returned home, leaving behind an undependable regular army. The Social Democrats were thus compelled to fall back on right-wing monarchists who despised them but were eager to fight communists. Ehrhardt’s first challenge was to convince some of his officers to lend any support to the Social Democrats. His second task was to weed out the shirkers who joined up for a new greatcoat and a few meals and then vanished. The assault company formed by Ehrhardt’s deputy commander, Leutnant Eberhard Kautter, comprised 80 men, but “in the first year 320 men went through the company, an indication that 75 percent of the human material we signed up was no good.” Forming the backbone of Ehrhardt’s 2nd Marine Brigade were 300 junior officers or petty officers who had witnessed or heard about his rescue of the rust-bucket freighter and his subsequent exploits in Wilhelmshaven. Among the recruits from the army was Rudolf Mann, who left an account of his service. Early in the revolt Mann had seen a fellow officer cashiered for refusing to cut up an imperial flag to make communist armbands. Planning to resign in protest, Mann checked into the marine brigade. An officer—he later learned it was Ehrhardt himself—greeted him and asked him to write out the oath of allegiance to the Social Democrats in longhand, possibly to check his facial expression as well as his penmanship.
MILITARY HISTORY
“Combat experience?” Ehrhardt asked. “Two years on the Western Front.” “Good, we can use you.” Mann became the brigade quartermaster and a strong admirer of Ehrhardt. The 2nd Marine Brigade marched through the cities of northern Germany, crushing the slapdash communist governments in turn. When the unit arrived outside Braunschweig in April 1919, the two senior communist leaders abandoned their men, the Red troops surrendered, and the middle-class residents of Braunschweig showered Ehrhardt’s men with chocolates and invited them to dances. On April 30 the brigade was on its way to Munich to confront the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Weeks earlier Russian Bolsheviks had seized control of the city after homegrown communists lost their nerve following the assassination of their premier, Kurt Eisner, a Prussian Jewish immigrant from Berlin, by Anton Arco-Valley, an Austrian war veteran who was a quarter Jewish. As the train carrying the brigade approached Munich, the locomotive suddenly screeched to a halt before a barrier of railroad ties. A Bavarian voice came out of the night. “Why are you Saupreussen [“Prussian sows”] coming to Bavaria?” The barricades cost the brigade time but failed to stop it. Ehrhardt and his men were part of an army of some 40,000 Freikorps and Reichswehr (regular army) soldiers that descended on Munich just after Bolsheviks at the Luitpold secondary school had murdered a group of hostages—seven members of the Aryan occultist and anti-communist Thule Society (including Countess Hella von Westarp and Prince Gustav of Thurn and Taxis), two nationalist hussars suspected of spying and a popular Jewish professor who had spontaneously ripped down a Bolshevik poster he found distasteful. In the battle that followed, the Freikorps routed the Reds. Ehrhardt’s brigade lost four dead and six wounded but captured two howitzers, 43 heavy machine guns, 80 light machine guns, 4,000 rifles and 12,000 hand grenades. They also captured the communist playwright and frontline veteran Ernst Toller—whom Ehrhardt’s men found in hiding wearing a nightshirt and a red wig—and Eugen Leviné, a Russian Jewish immigrant and noncombat veteran of the Kaiser’s army. Leviné had earlier removed Toller as military commander for refusing to execute prisoners. Toller was sentenced to eight years in prison, while Leviné got the firing squad. Munich was the 2nd Marine Brigade’s high point. Its downfall came with the March 1920 Kapp Putsch, in which Ehrhardt, under orders, led his men into Berlin to demand that—despite the Treaty of Versailles—the German armed
LEFT TO RIGHT: HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS; HOFFMANN/DPA/CORBIS
Ehrhardt was detained on suspicion in the June 1922 assassination of Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau, above, a Jewish industrialist and German nationalist.
A seemingly unshaken Hitler in the company of his officers moments after the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt at his headquarters in Rastenburg, Germany (present-day Poland). Implicated in the conspiracy, Ehrhardt was again imprisoned, this time through war’s end.
forces not be reduced to 100,000, which would call for disbandment of the Freikorps. Within a week a general strike and political blunders prompted Ehrhardt’s withdrawal. As the 2nd Marine Brigade marched out of Berlin, leftist street types heckled the enlisted men, who fired into the crowd and killed a dozen protesters before Ehrhardt brusquely ordered them to cease firing. In the wake of the June 1922 murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, a Jewish industrialist and German nationalist who supported the postwar treaty terms, Ehrhardt was arrested on suspicion and spent eight months in a Leipzig prison. Three young officers broke him out in a bizarre July 1923 plot after seeking help from a medium and obtaining skeleton keys from a grizzled Hungarian safecracker the psychic saw in a dream. They broke into the prison during Ehrhardt’s weekly bath, and he escaped wearing a towel. Decades later, in the 1960s, surviving members of the Rathenau assassination squad reported that Ehrhardt had had nothing to do with the foreign minister’s murder, though the Freikorps leader had supported a number of other political murders against communists or informers.
B
ack in Munich, Hermann Ehrhardt met Adolf Hitler —and immediately disliked him, referring to him as “that idiot” and, obliquely, a psychopath. Ehrhardt and his deputy, Eberhard Kautter, bluntly refused to back Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923 and rallied their own forces in Nuremberg to finish off Hitler if the power grab succeeded. The putsch flopped in a burst of gunfire, and Hitler went to prison. But the fledgling Führer’s comeback surprised Ehrhardt, by then divorced from his terrified first wife and married to Princess Margarethe.
Ehrhardt had joined the Nazis’ newly organized Schutzstaffel (SS) as a precaution, and the paramilitary force welcomed him for publicity purposes, but his true purpose was to infiltrate the nascent organization. Ehrhardt loyalists soon had 160 gunmen in the SS, but the Gestapo learned of their intentions, and on June 30, 1934—at the outset of a purge since dubbed the Night of the Long Knives—the real SS knocked on Ehrhardt’s front door. Grabbing two shotguns, he melted into the woods behind the house. Ehrhardt hid out in Switzerland and France until Hitler invited him home. Incredibly, he did return, only to become a conspirator in the July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate the Führer. When it failed, Ehrhardt was again arrested and transferred among various prisons until the Nazi defeat. On his release Ehrhardt quietly managed his wife’s estates in Austria, steadfastly refusing all interview requests. He died on Sept. 27, 1971, two months shy of his 90th birthday and, as a Christian in belief if not always in practice, was buried in the shadow of a tall stone cross. “Loyalty is the mark of honor,” Ehrhardt wrote in 1924. “Loyalty is the last sense of morality. Once it disappears, it is no longer possible to renew a people or to establish a new government.” People who recall him may argue whether Hermann Ehrhardt was loyal to his religion, to the Hohenzollern monarchy or to his own best interests. One thing is certain —he was never loyal to Hitler. MH John Koster is the author of Operation Snow (2012) and Custer Survivor (2010). For further reading he suggests Ehrhardt’s 1924 autobiography, Captain Ehrhardt: Adventure and Fate, and Rudolf Mann’s With Ehrhardt Through Germany.
Reviews Henry V and His Band of Brothers Agincourt: Myth & Reality, 1415–2015, by Stephen Cooper, Praetorian Press, an imprint of Pen & Sword Books, Barnsley, U.K., 2014, $32.95
M AY 2 015
The 1415 Battle of Agincourt is among the most celebrated of English victories—highlighted by the drama of two kingdoms’ fates and the heroics of Henry V, whose untimely death in 1422 made him, in the words of author Stephen Cooper, the “James Dean of his age.” It was perhaps the last great victory of the longbow, supplanted over the next century by the Swiss pike and handgun of the German Landsknecht. For the French however, Azincourt (as they call it) is just one among many military disasters they have endured in their long history.
72
What we know of Agincourt comes from 26 unreliable chronicles—10 written in England and 16 in France, and only four of which were written within a decade of the battle. Troop numbers are debatable, though the emerging consensus has 5,000–6,000 well led English (“we happy few”) defeating 12,000–20,000 poorly deployed French. William Shakespeare’s eponymous 1599 play about Henry V, and later movies based upon it, immortalize the king and popularize such bromides as “God is on En-
MILITARY HISTORY
gland’s side” and “one Englishman is worth 10 Frenchmen.” Novels by G.A. Henty (At Agincourt, 1897) and Bernard Cornwell (Azincourt, 2008) reinforce these notions, though historians such as Desmond Seward have been critical of Henry, particularly his execution of prisoners. Unlike recent commemorations at Bannockburn (1314), site of a battle waged to defend and define Scottish identity, marking the 600th anniversary of Agincourt in October will be awkward, as it was an act of English aggression on
French soil that evokes the era of imperial adventuring. Influenced by Ann Curry’s Agincourt: A New History (2005), Cooper has written an accomplished academic work of his own—with impressive illustrations, bibliography and endnotes —that is also accessible to the general reader. Despite minor errors—such as misdating the Battle of Bouvines to 1314 rather than 1214—it is a book well worth reading. —William John Shepherd
Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero, by Damien Lewis, Quercus Editions, New York, 2014, $24.99 World War II’s combatant nations used dogs for various applications, including mine detection, carrying dispatches, and sentry and patrol duty. Dogs also provided soldiers with welcome companionship, relieving boredom during peaceful periods and raising morale among those subjected to the stresses of combat. In this volume Damien Lewis shares the story of one remarkable and inspirational pointer who “served” in the Royal Navy. Born in
a Shanghai kennel in 1936, Judy was the mascot of the China-stationed gunboats HMS Gnat and HMS Grasshopper. At the outbreak of the war her intelligence, empathy and uncanny ability to sense approaching danger proved invaluable. Judy provided early warning of enemies approaching by land, sea or air and bought her crewmates precious time to evade harm. In February 1942, after Japanese aircraft sank Grasshopper, marooning its crew and passengers on an island seemingly without potable water, Judy led them to a concealed spring. The dog’s real value became evident during her stint as a POW with Grasshopper’s crew in Sumatra. Despite inhumane conditions, including starvation and physical and mental torture, Judy inspired her crewmates to stay alive. She scavenged whatever food she could find and distracted the enemy, risking her life on several occasions to save her fellow prisoners. Judy is an interesting account of the practical service dogs provided in World War II. Lewis relates an engaging story interspersed with scientific explanations for Judy’s remarkable wartime behavior. —S.L. Hoffman
Obedient Unto Death: A Panzer-Grenadier of the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf
Hitler Reports, by Werner Kindler, Frontline Books, Barnsley, U.K., 2014, $32.95 Aside from being an unrepentant Nazi and a “gong hunter” (or glory seeker, as explained in Charles Messenger’s astute foreword), author Werner Kindler is severely lacking in literary ability. He repeatedly lists sets of facts and figures— enemy tanks destroyed, prisoners captured and the like—without either descriptive content or a recognizable point of view, and one wonders if his lack of imagination had anything to do with his painstakingly slow promotion (three times in four years of sustained combat). Fortunately, either Kindler or his translator—Geoffrey Brooks—has augmented these skeletal reports with extracts from diaries and interviews of other Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) veterans and war correspondents, as well as from official records. The result is a rigorous and fascinating account of World War II as fought at battalion level, focused on the 3rd Battalion, 2nd SS-Panzer Grenadier Regiment LSSAH, in which Kindler served from May 1941 to May 1945. Until the loss of his arm in August 1944, Obersturmführer Erhard Gührs provides the main narrative voice, with Joachim Peiper and, to a lesser extent, Georg
Preuss emerging as the protagonists of his story. Gührs’ diary offers striking insight into the war from the German perspective, particularly with regard to operations in the Soviet Union, where the LSSAH was deployed successively from June 1941 to July 1942, January to July 1943, and November 1943 to April 1944. Kindler charts the unit’s heavy losses of men and materiel, which began in the east in 1943 and continued in the west, courtesy of Allied air supremacy. By the summer of 1944 the LSSAH armored columns were entirely at the mercy of fog, and the men in them knew that all was lost, even if they were too obedient to admit it. The felonious loyalty of the LSSAH adds a new dimension to Hitler’s iniquity: He was as quick to sacrifice his bodyguard as he was his enemies when it came to delaying his own Götterdämmerung. For the most part this is a gripping— sometimes harrowing—read. —Rafe McGregor
The Longest Afternoon: the 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo, by Brendan Simms, Basic Books, New York, 2015, $25.99 Napoléon Bonaparte blundered by returning from
exile in 1815 after only nine months while four large armies remained camped on France’s borders. Aware of the odds against him, he rushed his hastily assembled forces into Belgium to attack the smallest army opposing him—the Angloallied force under Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington—in the certainly mistaken belief victory would persuade the allies to negotiate. Equally aware of the odds, Wellington made the sensible decision to hold his position and await the arrival of the nearby—and larger— Prussian army. The subsequent victory at Waterloo was a narrow one. British history professor Brendan Simms recounts the fight from a fresh angle, delivering a thoroughly satisfying addition to a vast genre. This is not a general history but a detailed account of the defense of La Haye Sainte, a walled stone farmhouse forward of Wellington’s center. Its defenders were the King’s German Legion, which (despite the British army’s penchant for oddball names) was genu inely German. Britain harbored many German expatriates who detested Napoléon, a number augmented in 1803 when he occupied Hanover and disbanded its army. That very year two ambitious officers recruited the first members of the King’s German
RECOMMENDED
Tanks, by Richard Ogorkiewicz
As the world marks the centennial of both World War I and the rise of armored vehicles, Tanks examines the evolution of their design and their utility in warfare. Ogorkiewicz leads with the tank’s 1916 combat debut and analyzes why Allied tank superiority yielded to German Panzers by World War II.
Hitler’s Warrior, by Danny S. Parker
Widely considered one of Adolf Hitler’s golden boys, Colonel Joachim Peiper quickly rose in the WaffenSS due to his brutal combat tactics. Parker takes an in-depth look at Peiper’s career, leading to his role in spearheading the Battle of the Bulge, with a spotlight on the tragic Malmédy massacre.
73
M AY 2 014
Reviews
74
Legion, which grew into a corps of some 14,000 men and served with distinction at Copenhagen, Walcheren and in Spain before its apotheosis at Waterloo. On June 18, 1815, Wellington established his position and sent one battalion and part of a second to the farmhouse. Napoléon’s initial attack was a direct assault that surrounded the house and came near to breaking Wellington’s line; but it held, and the legendary charge of two British heavy cavalry brigades drove back the French. Ordered to capture the farmhouse, Marshal Michel Ney— commanding Napoléon’s left wing—obeyed but became preoccupied with his famously unsuccessful cavalry attack (see related story, P. 44). Reminded of the order two hours later, he dispatched infantry that reached the house and set it on fire. The men inside controlled the blaze and continued to fight until Ney took personal charge of a furious assault that succeeded only when the defenders ran out of ammunition and withdrew, having held out for six hours. Napoléon then launched his vaunted Imperial Guard in a final attack, but even if it had succeeded, the nearly simultaneous arrival of the Prussian army would have ensured the emperor’s ultimate defeat. Aided by a surprising number of letters, memoirs and
MILITARY HISTORY
commentaries from participants, Simms writes a vivid account even readers familiar with Waterloo should not pass up. —Mike Oppenheim
The Second Pearl Harbor: The West Loch Disaster, May 21, 1944, by Gene Eric Salecker, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2014, $34.95 Military historian Gene Eric Salecker, author of Disaster on the Mississippi: The Sultana Explosion, April 27, 1865, is no stranger to naval calamities behind the battlefronts. In The Second Pearl Harbor he turns his gaze from the Civil War to World War II. On May 22, 1944, as the U.S. Fifth Fleet was preparing for landings in the Marianas, an explosion rocked a fleet of LSTs and other amphibious assault craft concentrated in the West Loch section of Pearl Harbor, followed by a fire that raged for 24 hours. Eyewitnesses claimed the initial blast came as early as 1 p.m., though the official investigation set the time at 3:08 p.m. Three things are known for certain: 1) The explosion took everyone by surprise, 2) it originated with LST 353, and 3) the resulting fire spread via fuel drums and not ammunition. The firestorm destroyed six LSTs, three LCTs, 17 amphibious tractors and eight 155mm howitzers. As
for the human toll, the numbers finally accepted by the Navy nearly a decade later were 163 killed or missing and 396 injured. The author explains how, despite the disaster, the first landings on Saipan went off as scheduled without a hitch. He also believes that, despite the Japanese origin of many onsite workers, the explosion was accidental, not the result of sabotage. One intriguing question arose as to how Tokyo Rose knew enough about the explosion to mention it on her radio show, even though the Navy had blacked out the incident, even forbidding use of the word “disaster” in reference to it. We will probably never know the answer. In 1994 Hawaiian officials unveiled a plaque to memorialize the victims of that terrible day. For scholars of the Pacific War, The Second Pearl Harbor will draw more attention to yet another secret page in its history. —Thomas Zacharis
Home Squadron: The U.S. Navy on the North Atlantic Station, by James C. Rentfrow, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Md., 2014, $54.95 The U.S. Navy is the largest and most powerful maritime force in the world, capable of performing complex fleet and amphibious operations anywhere on the
globe. Such, of course, was not always the case. True, by the end of the Civil War the Navy had among the world’s largest collections of warships, but in the postwar years the service stagnated as the nation concerned itself with other matters, such as westward expansion and making money. By 1880 the Navy had deteriorated into a fifth-rate collection of old wooden ships and obsolete ironclads. Leadership had also stagnated, with many aging, old-school officers occupying positions at the top, making it difficult for younger, updated officers to be promoted. While the rest of the world’s navies moved on, implementing new technologies and modern tactics, the U.S. Navy remained mired in 1865. The situation began to turn around in 1884, when the government moved to modernize and construction began on four new steel warships. Known as the ABCD ships, the group comprised the cruisers Atlanta, Boston and Chicago and the steel gunboat Dolphin. The first of their kind built for the Navy, the ships represented a revolution in design and armament, requiring new techniques for the fabrication of the materials from which they were constructed. With its new ships, the Navy also had to develop new operating procedures. Till that time the service had
RECOMMENDED
Ring of Steel, by Alexander Watson
Examining World War I from the perspective of the Central Powers, Alexander Watson relates how the Germans and Austro-Hungarians initiated and sustained unprecedented mobilization, with insight into the rationale of heads of state and their people, who were ultimately pushed beyond their militaristic means.
Elephant Company, by Vicki Constantine Croke
During World War II Billy Williams—a member of Force 136, Britain’s “dirty tricks” department—formed a Burma-based unit of elephants. Employing their remarkable strength and intelligence, Williams crossed dangerous terrain to fight the Japanese and evacuate refugees. Croke’s account is a gripping war story.
operated more as an agglomeration of individual ships than a cohesive fleet. When the vessels did cooperate, the senior of the ships’ captains simply assumed command as acting “commodore.” That practice changed in the 1870s with the establishment of the U.S. Naval War College, where for the first time American naval officers would learn to become fleet commanders, thinking in terms of not merely ship vs. ship action but fleet tactics and even global strategy. Home Squadron is the fascinating and little-known story of how the Navy transformed into a modern, integrated fleet whose defeat of Spain’s Pacific Squadron at Manila in 1898 stunned the world and established the United States as a world power. It highlights a period that closed the era of rogue ships under maverick captains, such as Isaac Hull, Stephen Decatur and David Porter, and ushered in a new era of vast fleets commanded by globally focused naval leaders, such as Raymond Spruance, William Halsey and Chester Nimitz. —Robert Guttman
War Planning 1914, edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2014, $29.99 To produce War Planning 1914, first published in 2009 and recently reissued in paperback, editors Richard
Hamilton (emeritus professor of sociology and political science at Ohio State University) and Holger Herwig (research chair in military and strategic studies at Canada’s University of Calgary) coordinated with six contributors to examine the war plans of the six major European participants in World War I: Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Great Britain. All had laid plans for war many years before July 28, 1914, and modified them periodically to a point each thought would bring it victory within months. Thus, France had Plan XVII, while Russia had Schedule 19A and Germany had Alfred von Schlieffen’s plan as modified by Helmuth von Moltke the Younger. All plans failed, and instead of bringing victory after a speedy advance, their mutual failures culminated in trench warfare on the Western Front and bloody stalemates on the Eastern Front and in the Italian Alps. The editors and contributing authors offer many explanations for why all of the plans failed, but their general conclusion is that the political and military elites failed to coordinate their efforts to mobilize and integrate the manpower and industrial capacity necessary to achieve their goals. For that matter the politicians and generals themselves failed to
cooperate sufficiently to assure the best prospect of success. A case in point: The book explores Italy’s initial neutrality, which resulted in the once Triple Alliance starting the war as a dual one. As a consequence the Italian Third Army never reached the Rhine to support the German army in Lorraine as expected. That and the failure of Austro-Hungarian Chief of the General Staff and Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf to swiftly complete his forces’ occupation of Serbia in time to confront the Russian army were two factors in the Central Powers’ overall failure, leaving them in a state of strategic encirclement. The essayists remind readers that the nations in question worked up their war plans at a time when there were neither computers nor particular masterminds to hone them. Communication was poor, and surviving documentation remains far from consistent, given, for example, that the manuscript section of the Russian State Library in Moscow does not permit ready access to the papers of General Mikhail V. Alekseyev, one of imperial Russia’s key war planners. Still, World War I enthusiasts and military analysts will find this book indispensable. —Thomas Zacharis
75
Hallowed Ground Trentino, Italy
W
ith the signing of the Treaty of London on April 26, 1915, Italy entered World War I on the Allied side. The Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia) publicly welcomed Italy but privately besmirched it for the grasping territorial terms it demanded upon victory; Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill disparaged it as “the harlot of Europe.” To AustriaHungary—which with Germany and Italy had till then formed the Triple Alliance—there was only one suitable epithet for its former ally: “the traitor.”
M AY 2 015
Austro-Hungarian soldiers on Mount Adamello lay plans for the next battle on the Italian Front in February 1918.
76
A sticking point in Italian/Austro-Hungarian negotiations—held concurrently while Italy sketched out the Treaty of London with the Allies—concerned Trentino. Amid a swath of mountainous terrain shared by northern Italy and western Austria-Hungary, the region is a blend of nationalities and cultures, where pasta shares a plate with sausage and sauerkraut. When Austria-Hungary demurred on Italy’s
MILITARY HISTORY
insistence for the immediate return of Trentino, rather than postwar as offered, the regional spat gave Italians the added impetus to turn on their northern rivals. The Eastern Front meandered across the soaring peaks and lush Alpine valleys of the disputed territory. While both sides employed the standard trench warfare and frontal attack strategies, the high altitude and harsh weather conditions imposed limitations to which both armies had to adapt. On the Italian Front—popularly known as the White War—specialist soldiers trained in mountain warfare (the Italian Alpini vs. the Austro-Hungarian Kaiserschützen) clashed at altitudes approaching 13,000 feet. The winter of 1916 was one of the harshest on record, the temperature dipping to 22 below zero. That November alone Austro-Hungarian regiments stationed in the mountains reported nearly 500 cases of frostbite. Avalanches and landslides were also a constant threat; in mid-December a series of avalanches claimed the lives of some 10,000 Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops. When the weather cleared and trigger fingers thawed, the fighting was as intense there as anywhere else along the front. Mount Pasubio in particular was witness to the kind of attritional slaughter typical of the conflict. In May 1915 the Italians occupied the Pasubio massif—the last defensible position before the Veneto plain. A year later, during a sweeping enemy offensive, they lost the northern peak, which came to be known as the Dente Austriaco (“Austrian Tooth”). The Italians held the line at Dente Italiano, only a stone’s throw south of Dente Austriaco and separated by an all-too-short saddle. Launching operations to regain the Dente Austriaco in September and October, the Italians ground to a halt in the face of severe snowstorms that heralded the onset of winter. Faced with the daunting task of overcoming reinforced positions on mountain peaks, each army instead tried to
LEFT: AKG-IMAGES/APA/ÖNB, AUSTRIAN NATIONAL LIBRARY COURT LIBRARY; RIGHT: ALBERTO NARDI/AGEFOTOSTOCK
By Chris Allsop
A Cannone da 149/23, an Italian heavy gun used in World War I, remains atop Mount Adamello in the Trentino region. Hikers can take in more than 300 miles of the former front along the Path of Peace.
tunnel beneath its enemy and detonate explosives. This tactic characterized the fighting on Pasubio, and the peak hosted one of the longest running conflicts of its kind during World War I. Over a two-year stretch the combatants dug mines and countermines through the rock, and 10 massive explosions reshaped the massif—the deadliest being a 55-ton Austro-Hungarian device that exploded on March 13, 1918, killing or wounding more than 60 Italian soldiers. The Austro-Hungarians held the Dente Austriaco until Nov. 1, 1918, when ordered to retreat from the mountain that had ultimately claimed tens of thousands of lives. Nearly a century later the sloughing ice at altitude continues to surrender battered, uniformed bodies. In remembrance, officials in Trentino have designated their mountains a vast memorial park [www.museostorico .tn.it]. The Path of Peace allows hikers to trace more than 300 miles of the former front line, from the Passo del Tonale
to Marmolada peak. Along the trail they’ll find abandoned artillery, restored forts and the world’s largest tolling bell, cast from melted down World War I artillery pieces—a memorial that overlooks the province’s second city of Rovereto. Pasubio, designated a sacred area, is reachable via the Road of 52 Tunnels, a supply route carved out by Italian civil engineers over 10 months in 1917. The road stretches some 5 miles, and for nearly half that length it runs beneath the craggy, dripping ceilings of the impressively excavated tunnels. After the war the terms of victory changed, and Italy ended up with less territory than promised in the Treaty of London. A toxic blend of nationalism and victimhood bubbled up, helping to propel Europe’s first fascist dictatorship into power—a tragedy that, post-1945, would force yet another territorial retreat upon the Italians. But they kept the Trentino. MH
77
Wow! A Simple to Use Computer Designed Especially for Seniors! Easy to read. Easy to see. Easy to use. Just plug it in! Call now toll free for the lowest price ever.
1-877-725-6438 80992
Please mention promotional code 48987.
MORE THAN 2,600,000 SOLD! TWO MASTERPIECES OF HUMOR on the fine points of Privy Carpentry by:
“The Specialist” and “I’ll Tell You Why” -Sequel to “The Specialist” Each book is $8.99 including shipping in U.S. & Canada. Send check or money order to: The Specialist Publishing Co. 9152 N. Renaissance Dr. Cedar Hills, UT 84062 1-801-722-9301 [email protected]
www.chicsale.net
Civil War • WWI • WWII Korea • Vietnam & beyond Real War Photos, P.O. Box 414, Somerset Center, MI 49282
TRAVEL/TOURS/VACATION HISTORY FILLED WEEKEND COMMEMORATING the 150th anniversary of the sinking of the Sultana, the largest maritime disaster in U.S. history, April 24-25, 2015. www.sultana150.org For information on placing a Direct Response or Marketplace ad in Print and Online contact us today: Military History (800) 649-9800 • Fax: (800) 649-6712 [email protected] • www.russelljohns.com
War Games South Atlantic Salvos Decades separate two modern-era naval clashes off the Falkland Islands. Can you ID the ships involved in 1914 and 1982? ____ A. HMS Invincible ____ B. ARA San Luis ____ C. ARA General Belgrano
Russian Civil War
____ D. HMS Conqueror
The 1918 Armistice did not end the fighting in Russia, as the Reds and Whites set sights on one another.
____ E. ARA Veinticinco de Mayo ____ F. SMS Scharnhorst ____ G. HMS Ardent
1. Which Russian general fought for the Reds? A. Aleksei Brusilov
Take the High Ground
B. Lavr Kornilov
Match the fighting men with the hill, mountain or fortressed heights they seized and the date they took it.
C. Anton Denikin D. Pyotr Wrangel 2. Bolsheviks attacked an Allied garrison where on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918?
2
1. Gurung Hill, Nov. 18, 1962 2. Mount Hermon, Oct. 6, 1973 3. Lookout Mountain, Nov. 24, 1863 4. Mount Suribachi, Feb. 23, 1945
3
5. Maymundiz, Nov. 19, 1256
A. Kurgomen
B. Tulgas
C. Chamova
D. Arkhangelsk
3. Whose White troops joined the Ukrainians in slaughtering an estimated 100,000 Jews during the civil war?
6. Hill 180, March 10, 1953 7. Dargai Heights, Oct. 20, 1897
A. Nikolai Yudenich
8. Monte Cassino, May 18, 1944
B. Lavr Kornilov
9. Hlobane, March 28, 1879
4
10. Hill 875, Nov. 23, 1967
C. Anton Denikin D. Alexander Kolchak
____ A. U.S. Marines
4. Which airman became an ace after downing five Bolshevik planes?
____ B. Polish II Corps ____ C. U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade ____ D. Syrian commandos
A. Alexander Kazakov
5
B. Raymond Collishaw C. Marion Aten
____ E. Gordon Highlanders
D. Stanley Rosevear
____ F. Zulu impi ____ G. Chinese People’s
6
Liberation Army ____ H. Union Army ____ I. C Company, Colombian
7
Battalion
5. Which White Russian general proclaimed himself “Supreme Ruler” in Omsk, Siberia? A. Pyotr Wrangel B. Anton Denikin C. Nikolai Yudenich
____ J. Mongol army
D. Alexander Kolchak Answers: A, B, C, C, D
Answers: A3, B6, C2, D5, E7, F1, G4
Answers: A4, B8, C10, D2, E7, F9, G1, H3, I6, J5
LEFT TO RIGHT: UNION SOLDIERS AT POINT LOOKOUT: JAMES FULLER QUEEN/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; SHIP SILHOUETTES: BRIAN WALKER; DETAIL OF RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR POSTER: RIA NOVOSTI/ALAMY
1
79
M AY 2 0 1 5
Captured!
80
MILITARY HISTORY
ADVERTISEMENT
The stories of the Unknown Wars of Asia, Africa and The Americas were cataclysmic and bloody events that took the lives of millions and impact our world to this day. Yet, most of these wars are hardly mentioned in articles or even textbooks. Among some of the wars covered are:
s s s s
s
s s s
s s
s s
The wars that involved the Great Wall of China over its’ 1,865 year history as a defensive barrier. The longest war in history which was the 1,049 year long Vietnamese War of Independence from China and the lessons that should have kept France and the US out of Indo-China. The wars of the Khmer Empire (802 – 1431) and the unlikely hero that emerged in a time of crisis in 1177. The Jewish Bar Kokhba Revolt (132 – 136) that caused the Emperor Hadrian to cover up the massacre of two veteran Roman Legions and the truth about how close the revolt came to succeeding. The wars of the Spanish Conquistadors to conquer the American Southeast and Southwest in the sixteenth century and the Native American apocalypse in North America that followed. The Cherokee Wars that came very close to wiping out the colony of South Carolina. The wars of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade that took the lives of more than 12 million Africans and the slave revolts of the Caribbean and South America. The Taiping Rebellion (1851 – 1871) that was caused by a Confucian scholar who misunderstood a poorly translated gospel tract and started a rebellion that led to over 30 million deaths. The 74 year Mongol conquest of China and disasters in Syria, Japan, Vietnam, and Java that led to the breakup of the Mongol Empire. Before the Holocaust of World War II, there was a mutual Christian holocaust that took the lives of close to 8 million lives during the Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648) between Catholics and Protestants. Some of the battles of this war were actually fought in Africa and in the Caribbean. England’s Pirate Wars — The French Conquest of Indo-China 1857 – 1884. The future wars that half of the world’s population of Jews, Christians, and Muslims are expecting in the near future. THIS CHAPTER EXPLAINS HOW THE CURRENT CONFLICTS IN IRAQ, SYRIA, GAZA, AND THE WEST BANK ARE ROOTED IN ISLAMIC LAST DAYS PROPHECIES AND IS A MUST READ FOR ANYONE WANTING TO UNDERSTAND THE CONFLICTS OF THE MIDDLE EAST THAT ARE TAKING PLACE NOW. ORDER
Available at: amazon.com (US)
AMAZONCOUK'REAT"RITAIN sAMAZONCA#ANADA s!LIBRISCOM
your cop y
4/$!9
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and Boyhood Home 200 SE 4th Abilene, Kansas 67410 www.eisenhower.archives.gov 785-263-6700
@Ikelibrary
Experience history.
World War II Remembered:
Exhibits on display through December 2016
Be Ye Men of Valour:
Leaders, Battles & Heroes The Allies of World War II
