Military History 2017-01

Yank in the SS Maori Warriors Revolution Prequel War on the Great Wall Over by Christmas? Rangel on Vets HistoryNet.com

THE FACE OF EVIL?

MASSACRE AT BATAK EXPOSES OTTOMAN BARBARISM

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Letters 6 News 10 Reviews 68

Features

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‘Nor Prayers for Mercy’

Last Battle on the Great Wall

In 1876 an American reporter revealed a Muslim massacre of Christians in Ottoman Bulgaria By Richard Selcer

The ancient fortification saw fighting in the lead-up to the Second Sino-Japanese War By Jiaxin Du

Departments

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Interview Congressman Charles Rangel

Valor Remarkable Exploits

On the cover: French painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme painted this bashi-bazouk portrait in 1869. Known for their brutality, bashi-bazouks served as irregulars in the Ottoman forces. PHOTO: Jean-Léon Gérôme/Wikiart.org

War Games 78 Captured! 80

40 A Yank in the SS In 1944 U.S. pilot Martin Monti stole a reconnaissance plane and defected to the reeling Nazi cause—but why? By Ron Soodalter

54 Over by Christmas? New weapons and tactics put the lie to estimates of an early end to World War I By James Simms

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Maori Martial Arts

Prelude to Revolution

New Zealand’s early Polynesians took pride in their warrior culture By Jon Guttman

In 1774 a British earl took credit for an Indian war he didn’t fight, earning Virginia militiamen’s ire By John Bertrand

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What We Learned From... The Battle of Franklin, 1864

Hardware Type 94 Infantry Mortar

Hallowed Ground Fort Necessity National Battlefield

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JEAN-LEON GEROME/WIKIART.ORG; SUEDDEUTSCH ZEITING/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; RANDY GLASS STUDIO. THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: REX HARDY JR./THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/ GETTY IMAGES; INTERIM ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES; ROBERT GRIFFING; NVG 54 INFANTRY MORTARS OF WORLD WAR II/OSPREY PUBLISHING LTD.; GOTTFRIED LINDAUER/AUCKLAND ART MUSEUM

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Join the discussion at militaryhistory.com MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

JANUARY 2017 VOL. 33, NO. 5

The suicide truck bomb attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut killed 241 U.S. service members and presaged a vicious new era in terrorism By Richard Ernsberger Jr.

IN T H E A RCHIVES :

Forbes Expedition

STEPHEN HARDING EDITOR DAVID LAUTERBORN MANAGING EDITOR DEBORAH STADTLER SENIOR EDITOR JON GUTTMAN RESEARCH DIRECTOR DAVID T. ZABECKI CHIEF MILITARY HISTORIAN STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR PAUL FISHER ART DIRECTOR DREW FRITZ SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR CORPORATE ROB WILKINS Director of Partnership Marketing MICHAEL ZATULOV Finance DIGITAL JOSH SCIORTINO Associate Editor

In 1758, late in the French and Indian War, British Brig. Gen. John Forbes marched on the Forks of the Ohio By Michael D. Hull

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of the World War I Centennial Commission, discusses memorial events here and abroad

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Tools Japan’s World War II–era Type B-1 I-boat was meant to support the imperial fleet in its “decisive battle” against the Allies

Reviews In Honor Before Glory author Scott McGaugh notes the contribution of JapaneseAmerican troops to the World War II Allied effort Digital Subscription Did you know Military History is available in digital format? Visit historynet.com for info

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1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing

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Letters

Was the 1983 Beirut bombing legitimate warfare or terrorism?

I read with interest your November article “The BLT Building Is Gone,” by Richard Ernsberger Jr., about the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. Why does the author refer to this action as terrorism? As he acknowledges, the United States was not neutral; it was providing military help to the enemies of the Shiite militias. This made the Marines enemies of the militias. Attacking enemy soldiers in uniform is not terrorism— it is just an act of war. Rick Kirkham BELLEVUE, WASH. Editor responds: MerriamWebster defines terrorism as “the use of violent acts to

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frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal.” Under that definition, the attacks on the U.S. and French compounds in Beirut certainly qualify. The attacks could also be defined as fourth-generation warfare, conflict in which participants carrying out such violent acts do not represent a nation-state. The victims in Beirut were uniformed soldiers, but the suicide bombers were not, making them unlawful combatants in violation of the laws of war— i.e., terrorists.

Japanese I-Boats There are two conspicuous omissions from Liesl Brad-

from Japanese submarines. This opinion probably added to Californians’ fears of imminent invasion. I provide further details of the World War II service of the U.S. Coast Artillery in my book Delaware’s Ghost Towers: The Coast Artillery’s Forgotten Last Stand During the Darkest Days of World War II. William C. Grayson BOWIE, MD. I enjoyed “The Battle That Never Was,” by Liesl Bradner. But the description of Commander Kozo Nishino, captain of the Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-17, as a tanker skipper who had previously visited Ellwood, Calif., is wrong. Nishino was a 1920 graduate of the Japanese Naval Academy at Etajima. Three years after his graduation he was admitted to the Imperial Japanese Navy submarine school and remained in the submarine service throughout his career. In December 1931 he assumed his first of nine submarine commands. I-17 was his eighth ship, which he commanded from Jan. 24, 1941, to July 15, 1942. As in the U.S. Navy, major warship captains were career naval officers, not retrained tanker skippers. Samuel W. Fordyce SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. Editor responds: In her article Liesl Bradner respectfully describes Nishino as “a skilled and experienced captain… [and] career naval officer” and mentions his graduation from the IJN submarine school.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Terrorism— or War?

ner’s November article “The Battle That Never Was.” Missing from the accompanying graphic, “West Coast Attacks,” is the June 21, 1942, shelling by the Japanese sub I-25 of Fort Stevens, Ore. What makes this attack ironically important is that Fort Stevens, the base of the U.S. Army’s 18th Coast Artillery Regiment, was equipped with both 10- and 12-inch guns, which considerably outranged I-25’s single 5.5-inch deck gun. Although I-25 fired 17 rounds at the fort, Major Robert Huston [senior duty officer at Fire Control Hill, of which Fort Stevens’ Battery Russell was a part] did not order fire returned. Debate continues over whether Battery Russell had erroneously calculated the sub was out of range or Huston held fire lest the sub’s gunners use the coast artillery muzzle flashes as aiming points. The June 21 attack was the first against a military installation in the contiguous United States since the War of 1812. No coast artillery battery in the contiguous United States fired a shot in anger in World War II. Fort Stevens had a chance but let it pass. The second omission is a press release by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson following the furious February 24–25, 1942, anti-aircraft incident around Los Angeles. Stimson was quoted as believing that one to five aircraft actually had been over Los Angeles, and that they had taken off from secret airfields in Mexico or California or may have been launched

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Letters

The author’s source for Nishino’s prewar visit to Ellwood as a tanker captain was The Military History of California, by Justin M. Ruhge. Similar and supporting anecdotes appear in other sources, one speculating Nishino may have captained tankers to the West Coast in an intelligence capacity—as had other Japanese submarine officers, such as I-26’s Minoru Yokota. However, we can find no official record of Nishino in connection with such service, and the account related by Jones certainly sounds like a bit of wartime propaganda. Thanks for the Hardware profile [November 2016, by Jon Guttman] of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Type B1 submarine and for “The Battle That Never Was,” outlining the role the I-boats played in attacks off and on the U.S. and Canadian West Coast in early World War II. Most scholars have dismissed the role of the I-boats in the war, but in fact they had a far superior shooting year to the U.S. Navy’s “Silent Service” in 1942, before the IJN largely turned its sub service into a submersible supply

8 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2017

fleet for Japanese garrisons on bypassed islands. That year alone IJN submarines sank two U.S. fleet carriers —Wasp and Yorktown, onethird of our available carrier force at that time—as well as the light cruiser Juneau and several destroyers. They damaged the carrier Saratoga twice, knocking it out of the war for extended periods, as well as damaging the battleship North Carolina, knocking her out of the war at a crucial period. In 1942 IJN submarine service commander Vice Adm. Mitsumi Shimizu pressed Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto to allow him to use aircraft from a number of B1s to destroy locks on the Panama Canal, following the anticipated Japanese victory at Midway. The operation was not pursued following the Japanese defeat. Had the attack been undertaken, and the Western approaches of the canal blockaded by I-boats and IJN air units operating from island bases west of South America, we would have seen a vastly different war, possibly with a follow-on submarine cam-

paign on our West Coast to match the German “Happy Times” U-boat campaign on our East Coast. As it was, the Japanese did not contemplate such an operation again until late 1944, and the bulk of U.S. combat power had already passed through the canal to the Pacific—thus too little too late. Wayne Long CHESTER, MD.

Papal Bull? Your November 2016 issue includes a very good article [Valor] by David T. Zabecki about Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The article is well researched, very well written and interesting. There is, however, one glaring error: Pope Benedict XVI is not and never was a Jesuit. That honor belongs to his successor, Pope Francis. He is not only the first Jesuit pope but also the first from the Americas. Given their widely divergent personalities and religious worldviews, to say nothing of their ideas of faith and the apostolate, I hasten to point out the error. Carl E. Quesnell VERO BEACH, FLA.

Tarawa Star [Re. “Stars Who Served,” by Roger Di Silvestro, September 2016:] In this interesting article you failed to mention Eddie Albert, who received the Bronze Star with combat “V” for his extremely heroic actions at Tarawa. He piloted his landing craft on multiple trips through heavy gunfire

and rescued many wounded Marines stranded offshore. I enjoy reading your magazine and pass it on to others with similar interests. I am an Army veteran (no combat duty) and have three sons who served—two as Navy flight surgeons and one in the Marines. Lloyd Johnson SLEEPY HOLLOW, ILL.

Medal of Honor I really enjoyed the Valor article [“Scaling the Wall,” by John Bertrand] in the July 2016 issue of Military History. The bit about cadet Douglas MacArthur examining the Medal of Honor worn by cadet Calvin Titus was interesting. I’m sure MacArthur was familiar with the medal, since his father, Arthur MacArthur Jr., had previously received an MOH. Douglas, too, later received one, making them the first father/son pair to have received the medal. Another father-son pair received the MOH: Theodore Roosevelt and his son Theodore Jr. And President Roosevelt personally pinned the MOH on Titus’ uniform. The incident seems like something right out of The Twilight Zone. Karl T. Weber Jr. U.S. Navy (Ret.) HIXSON, TENN. Send letters to Editor, Military History HistoryNet 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400 Vienna, VA 22182-4038 or via e-mail to

[email protected] Please include name, address and phone number

JOHN GEOGHEGAN COLLECTION

Japanese submarines struck targets along the U.S. and Canadian West Coasts.

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

The Noose at Korsun McClellan’s Big Miss

THE ART OF WAR How America’s greatest artists saw the Great War

WINTER 2016

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9/23/16 7:05 AM

...the latest issue of Military History Quarterly features the art of WWI, Nazis vs. Soviets, and more! Now available at SHOP.HISTORYNET.COM and your local newsstand

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News

By Brendan Manley

Pokémon Go Skips Hallowed Grounds Niantic [nianticlabs.com], developer of the GPS-linked “augmented reality” mobile game Pokémon Go, is removing war memorials, cemeteries and other such sacrosanct landmarks from its content after complaints of player intrusion. Off-limits locations include Arlington National

CLUES SURFACE TO LOCATION OF ILL-FATED INDIANAPOLIS The U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command [history.navy.mil] has pieced together new clues in the sinking of USS Indianapolis in the Philippine Sea on July 30, 1945, four days after it had delivered parts for Little Boy, the first atomic bomb, to Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands. The information may help researchers pinpoint the wreckage of the 610-foot-3-inch Portland-class heavy cruiser. Two search expeditions, in 2001 and 2005, failed to locate the ship. After completing its top-secret mission to Tinian, Indianapolis was bound for Leyte in the Philippines when struck by two torpedoes fired by the Japanese submarine I-58. The cruiser sank within 12 minutes, taking roughly 300 of its 1,196-man crew down with it. Due to communications failures on all levels, the nearly 900 men who went into the water spent four days adrift, suffering from dehydration, hunger, exposure and shark attacks. On Aug. 2, 1945, a Navy patrol

plane happened across the survivors and directed rescuers to the site. Only 316 crewmen survived, including Indianapolis Captain Charles McVay III, who was court-martialed for “hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag.” On Memorial Day 2015 a blog post paid tribute to a sailor on an LST (landing ship, tank) who recalled being passed by Indianapolis 11 hours before its sinking, an account consistent with McVay’s testimony. NHHC historians searched wartime records and found the sailor had been a passenger on LST-779. That ship’s logs in turn placed Indianapolis more than 40 miles southsouthwest of its previously assumed course. To aid future search efforts, NHHC has posted online [go.usa.gov/xr57m] all of its records regarding the sinking of Indianapolis, including official records, oral histories and photographs. National Geographic has already announced plans to search for the wreck in the summer of 2017.

‘Maybe the sharks were satisfied with the dead; they didn’t have to bite the living’ —Lt. Cmdr. Lewis L. Haynes, chief medical officer, USS Indianapolis 10 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2017

Cemetery in Virginia; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York; Japan’s Hiroshima Peace Memorial; Sydney’s ANZAC War Memorial; and Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Niantic invites all such sites to request removal.

New App Reveals Los Alamos Secrets New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory [lanl.gov] has released the free mobile app Los Alamos: Secret City of the Manhattan Project, granting users “virtual tours” of bygone buildings as they appeared during the research facility’s 1940s

heyday. Developers drew on period film to re-create the former home of the Manhattan Project, which developed the world’s first nuclear weapons. Available through iTunes [itunes.apple.com] and Google Play [play.google.com], the app educates users about the project as they navigate the facilities.

FROM TOP LEFT: ARTHUR BEAUMONT/NAVAL WAR COLLEGE FOUNDATION; MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES; LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

A recent blog post suggests the heavy cruiser was miles off course when sunk by a Japanese submarine.

WAR RECORD Air Force to Use Enlisted Pilots For the first time since World War II the U.S. Air Force [af.mil] has selected enlisted airmen for training as pilots—not of manned aircraft, but of the Northrop Grum-

man RQ-4 Global Hawk [northrop grumman.com/globalhawk], an unmanned surveillance aircraft. The move comes as the Air Force ramps up its use of remotely piloted aircraft in support of joint combatant operations. By 2020 it expects enlisted airmen to fly 70 percent of all Global Hawk missions.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NORTHROP GRUMMAN; STAFF SERGEANT LOUIS R. LOWERY, USMC; U.S. ARMY; HIROSHIMA ARCHIVE

Hiroshima Archive Maps Eyewitnesses

MARINES REVIEW FIRST IWO JIMA FLAG RAISING Weeks after clarifying the identities of participants in the Feb. 23, 1945, second flag-raising atop Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi— captured in Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s iconic image —the U.S. Marine Corps [marines.mil] has acknowledged having misidentified two men credited with raising the first flag. Though they didn’t actually hold the flagstaff, Pfc. Louis Charlo was part of the recon team that summited Suribachi, while Pfc. James R. Michels (pictured holding a carbine in the foreground) provided security. For the record, those who raised the first flag were 1st Lt. Harold Schrier, PhM2c John Bradley, Sergeant Ernest “Boots” Thomas Jr., Sergeant Henry “Hank” Hansen, Corporal Charles Lindberg and Private Philip Ward.

ARMY DEVELOPING NEW MULTIPURPOSE GRENADE

Creators of the interactive Hiroshima Archive website [hiroshima. archiving.jp]—which overlays photos and eyewitness accounts of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing on a 3D period map of the city—have released an English translation of the site. Users can toggle to an aerial photo of present-day Hiroshima to see how much the city has changed. The site joins the existing Nagasaki Archive [n.mapping.jp], which has yet to be fully translated.

Engineers at the U.S. Army’s Picatinny Arsenal, in Morris County, N.J., are working on a replacement for the M67 primary fragmentation grenade, which has been in service since 1968. The enhanced tactical multipurpose (ET-MP) grenade features a more reliable electronic fuze and a switch that will allow users to adjust the device to detonate in either a fragmentation or concussive mode, granting soldiers greater situational flexibility without requiring them to carry additional grenades. The ET-MP is also ambidextrous, whereas the M67 requires left-handed users to adopt an awkward alternative arming procedure. The Army has budgeted $1.1 million toward development of the ET-MP in fiscal year 2017 and hopes to adopt the new grenade for field use within a few years.

Dec. 25, 1914 At the July 1914 outbreak of World War I most military analysts predicted it would be over by Christmas (see P. 54). It lasts nearly four years longer, ending with the Armistice on Nov. 11, 1918.

January 1827 Hongi Hika, famed Maori chieftain and warrior (see P. 48), is shot through the chest during a clash in the Hokianga on New Zealand’s North Island. He lingers 14 months before dying of a bacterial infection on March 6, 1828.

Jan. 1, 1933 The commander of the Japanese garrison at Shanhaiguan, on the east end of China’s Great Wall (see P. 30), stages a grenade attack to justify launching the Battle of Shanhai Pass. After a day of house-to-house fighting the outgunned Chinese withdraw.

Jan. 17, 1949 U.S. Army Air Forces pilot turned Axis defector Martin Monti (see P. 40) pleads guilty to treason. He is sentenced to 25 years in prison, fined $10,000 and jailed in Leavenworth Penitentiary, Kan., until granted parole in 1960.

Jan. 26, 1970 The National Park Service adds West Virginia’s Point Pleasant Battleground to the National Register of Historic Places. On Oct. 10, 1774, during Lord Dunmore’s War (see P. 60), Virginia militiamen clashed at the site with Shawnee and Mingo Indians.

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News

Joan faced heresy charges over voices researchers suggest were epilepsy-related.

Joan of Arc, French-born heroine of the Hundred Years’ War, went to her death insisting she received “revelations from God” in the form of recurring supernatural voices and visions. But Italian neurological researchers suggest the voices she heard were in fact symptoms of epilepsy. The proof, they claim, may rest in a yet undiscovered strand of Joan’s hair. Joan rose to prominence in the spring of 1429 when she inspired French troops to repel the English siege of Orléans and clinch other victories that propelled Charles

VII to the throne. A year later she was captured, then tried and convicted of heresy by English-aligned Bishop Pierre Cauchon. On May 30, 1431, her accusers burned the 19-year-old at the stake in Rouen. Writing in the journal Epilepsy & Behavior [epilepsy behavior.com], neurologist Dr. Guiseppe d’Orsi and neuromotor science professor Paola Tinuper speculate Joan may have suffered from idiopathic partial epilepsy with auditory features (IPEAF), which affects the part of the brain that processes sound. They note that the sound of church bells often preceded her voices, a trigger reportedly consistent with IPEAF. Joan also heard voices while asleep, a symptom in some 40 percent of sufferers. To prove their hypothesis, the pair hopes to conduct DNA analysis on a strand of Joan’s hair, perhaps from one of her letters, which she is known to have sealed with red wax, a fingerprint and a hair for identification. For a decade they have searched in vain for such a missive. Other neurological experts suggest the frequency and clarity of voices Joan described rule out a diagnosis of IPEAF. Whatever the findings, the Roman Catholic Church will likely ignore them. At a 1456 posthumous retrial church officials proclaimed the “Maid of Orléans” innocent of heresy, and in 1920 the church canonized her St. Joan of Arc.

‘Everything I have done is at God’s command’ —Joan of Arc 12 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2017

Chatbot Resurrects ANZAC Figures To honor the 1914–16 service of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, News Corp.’s social media project ANZAC Live [anzaclive.com. au] has posted the real-time recollections of nine ANZAC members,

even allowing users to “converse” with them on Facebook. Developers sourced diaries and other period writings to create the posts, while a chatbot feature proffers computergenerated responses to user questions. The site also features a wealth of wartime images.

Red Baron’s Family, Victims Toast 100th On September 17 the families of German ace-of-aces Manfred von Richthofen (aka the “Red Baron”) and the victims of his first official

aerial victory—Royal Flying Corps 2nd Lt. Lionel Morris and Captain Tom Rees—met in Croydon, England, for a toast of reconciliation on the centennial of the engagement. The descendants drank from a replica silver schnapps cup of the sort Richthofen used to toast his victims. Credited with 80 kills, the Red Baron was shot down on April 21, 1918.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS/ARTRENEWAL.ORG; ANZACLIVE.COM.AU; NATIONAL ARCHIVES

JOAN OF ARC’S ‘VOICES’: INSPIRED OR EPILEPTIC?

NAZIS SELL Napoléon’s Horse Gets a Grooming

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: AFP PHOTO/FRANCOIS GUILLOT/GETTY IMAGES; CHRISTOF STACHE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; JACQUES MAYDOL/DE AGOSTINI PICTURE LIBRARY/AKG-IMAGES; NOAA

Taxidermists at the Army Museum [musee-armee.fr] in Paris have re-stuffed and restored Vizier, a white Arabian stallion owned by

French Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte. The 1802 gift of an Ottoman sultan, Vizier was the last of Napoléon’s estimated 130 steeds and also a favorite, bearing the emperor to victory at Jena and Eylau and joining his master in exile on Elba. Vizier outlived Napoléon by five years, dying in 1826.

NOAA Visits U-576 and Its Last Victim

GOEBBELS’ SECRETARY: ‘I KNEW NOTHING’

Argentine Connection:

Echoing the words of the character Sergeant Schultz from the 1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, Brunhilde Pomsel, 105, wartime secretary to Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, insists she “knew nothing” of Nazi atrocities, which were “all kept well secret.” She relates her story in the documentary A German Life [a-german-life.com], which premiered at this summer’s Munich Film Festival. Pomsel worked for Goebbels from 1942 through the final days in the Berlin Führerbunker. On May 1, 1945, as Soviet troops closed in, Goebbels and wife Magda anesthetized and then killed their six children with cyanide before taking their own lives. Captured and imprisoned, Pomsel spent five years shuttling among various former German concentration camps.

DNA PROVES BELGIUM’S ALBERT I DIED FROM FALL Using manned submersibles, researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [noaa.gov] recently visited the wrecks of the German submarine U-576 and freighter Bluefields for the first time since their deadly World War II encounter. On July 15, 1942, U-576 sank Bluefields before a sub-hunting floatplane sank the U-boat. NOAA pinpointed the site, 30 miles off Cape Hatteras, N.C., in 2014 and is using remote sensing technology to map the wrecks and surrounding seafloor.

Despite protests, the buying and selling of Nazi memorabilia remains lucrative. Reich relics recently hitting the auction block include:

Forensic researchers from Belgium’s University of Leuven [kuleuven.be/ english] confirm that blood found on leaves taken from the scene of King Albert I’s Feb. 17, 1934, death from an apparent mountaineering accident is in fact the monarch’s blood. Speculation had swirled that Albert—praised for refusing to allow German troops to march through Belgium to attack France at the outset of World War I— had been assassinated elsewhere and later moved to the spot at Marche-les-Dames where his body was found. The bloody leaves—collected by a relic hunter and purchased at auction by an investigative journalist in 2013— may finally dispel such conspiracy theories.

An anonymous Argentinean dropped more than €600,000 at a controversial Munich auction by Hermann Historica [hermann-historica.com], picking up such items as Hitler’s socks, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring’s underwear and the brass case that held the cyanide capsule Göring used to kill himself on Oct. 15, 1946.

The Golden Gun: At press time Rock Island [rockislandauction.com] was set to sell Göring’s engraved, gold-plated 1939 Walther PPK, which bears his monogram and family crest on the grips. The lot included a matching ring and cuff links (estimated value: $250,000–$400,000).

Nuremberg Album: C&T [candtauctions.co.uk] of Ashford, England, sold the one-of-a-kind black book Nazi Cavalcade, compiled by U.S. Army interrogator Hank Schardt, for £22,000. The album features photos and signatures of 230 individuals Schardt questioned in advance of the postwar Nuremberg Trials.

Rearguard Action: Whyte’s [whytes.ie] in Dublin recently auctioned an unopened roll of Edelweiss brand Klosettpapier (toilet paper) issued to Wehrmacht troops (estimated value: £67–£100).

13

Interview Veterans Advocate Congressman Charles Rangel

14 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2017

How did the G.I. Bill change your postwar future? I have been reflecting on my life lately. One of the questions I’ve asked myself is: What was it that took a young combat veteran who was a high school dropout and allowed him to serve in

the House of Representatives, even rising to become chairman of the most powerful committee in the Congress? And the answer is abundantly clear— the G.I. Bill. I had no idea when I went to the Veterans Administration that the services they provided and the scholarships I was able to get would allow me to succeed politically and professionally. In fact, I want to continue in that vein. Education is critical for children to make a contribution and keep our country competitive. What are the most pressing issues for our veterans? Our government is not ready to take care of the emotional needs of our returning military veterans. It’s a complex issue. In this country, unfortunately, you can talk about all types of illnesses, as long as they are physical, and people have compassion and understanding. But once you start talking about emotional illnesses and mental setbacks, then the response changes. As a soldier you’re trained to have more self-esteem than you need, because you’re fighting an enemy. To return home and admit you need help is inconsistent with the training you received. If we have the best fighting organization in the world, why can’t we also assist those soldiers to be prepared to enter the civilian world? When I was discharged, the only thing I could say that made me feel proud was how many people I’d killed, how many medals I had or how efficient I was with a rifle. Not recognizing the stigma associated with mental illness has caused us more problems and more expense than if we could move forward and say any illness, mental or physical, has to be recognized and treated.

RANDY GLASS STUDIO

Charles B. Rangel [rangel.house.gov] grew up in Harlem and volunteered for the U.S. Army after dropping out of high school. While serving in the Korean War he was wounded during a rearguard action against communist Chinese troops. For subsequently leading fellow soldiers from behind enemy lines, he was awarded the Bronze Star for valor and also received a Purple Heart. Through the G.I. Bill, Rangel earned his law degree and entered public service. Rising from New York state assemblyman to become a 23-term U.S. Congressman, he was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus and the first black to lead the House Ways and Means Committee. A staunch supporter of veterans’ causes, Rangel— along with fellow Korean War veterans Reps. John Conyers Jr. and Sam Johnson—introduced a resolution in June 2016 to resume talks with North Korea to locate and recover U.S. POW/MIA remains from that country.

Describe your experiences in the Korean War. I served from 1948 to 1952, and I was not in a segregated army. Everyone was excited that President Harry Truman had “desegregated” the military by executive order, but the truth of the matter is that I went overseas in an all-black field artillery unit in the all-white 2nd Infantry Division. We were the first ones to go to Korea. We were proud of being in the military and being in the 2nd Division. The first time our unit was hit badly by the Chinese, we suffered terrible casualties. The battalion commander called to the rear for reinforcements. He said that unless we got reinforcements immediately, we were going to have to retreat or withdraw. Word came back that they did not have any “colored” soldiers to replace our casualties. He replied, “I don’t give a damn what color they are—you send us somebody!” They sent up a National Guard unit from a Southern state, and at first there were major problems working together…until the Chinese hit us again. That’s when all [racial issues] went out of the window, rank went out of the window—survival and the flag prevailed. As a combat veteran, no matter which war you’re talking about, when you have a common enemy, someone who threatens your unit and your country, you somehow are able to overcome your prejudices.

Korean War combat veteran and U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) is a staunch advocate for those who have served the nation in uniform.

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

Would you recommend a military career to young people? This is a question I faced with my own son. He was being recruited to attend a military academy and to join the Marines. I was frustrated at not being involved in this huge decision, and I contacted the recruiting officer. I asked him how [the service] could recruit young people on campus without dealing with their parents—who need to be sold on the military. My son later confronted me, asking where the congressman stopped and where his dad began. We [talked further], and he ultimately went into the Marines and served in the Persian Gulf. He, too, enjoyed the benefits of the G.I. Bill. I think [his service] made him a better person. But had I lost my son in combat, I would be cursing in the darkness today that I ever agreed to allow him to go. Why do you advocate for the return of the military draft? It’s not to give young people a military experience. I advocate for the draft so that whenever we have a national secu-

rity situation, and we’re voting to put our men and women in harm’s way, we [stop to think] about declaring and supporting a war in terms of what it’s going to mean to the families and their communities. We have people talking about “putting boots on the ground,” but they’re not talking about people they actually know who are going to be wearing those boots. My brother enlisted in the military before World War II to try to help my mom, who was without our father. I enlisted before the Korean War to be employed and have a paycheck. If you look at a number of people who volunteer, some want to become American citizens, some want to get off the street, some are avoiding jail time. It’s not a purely patriotic act to enlist. [Military service offers] good training—if you survive. There’s nothing wrong with having mandatory government service, because you don’t have to carry a weapon. You can serve in hospitals, in schools, in seaports, in airports. You can be a veteran of government service.

Do you think women should be drafted? I think anybody that enjoys being American should be prepared to serve America. I cannot think of any reason, nor has anyone given me a reason, why we should be prejudiced and deny women the opportunity to serve if they are mentally and physically able to. How have blacks faced discrimination in the military? I had an uncle who was angry that America was not sending him overseas to fight the Germans. There were many black men his age who felt hurt, not because they wanted—like me—to get a paycheck, but because they wanted to fight for this country. My uncle told me stories of African-American men carrying broomsticks and marching in front of their local National Guard armory, begging to be enlisted to fight. Racism still existed for those who wanted to protect democracy. Black Americans have repeatedly had to struggle for the right to help defend this nation. And, gradually, we’ve overcome the obstacles. MH

15

Valor Remarkable Exploits New Zealander Charles Upham was the most highly decorated British Commonwealth soldier of World War II and remains the only combat soldier to have received the VC and bar.

Charles Upham 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force Victoria Cross and Bar 1941–42

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ith typical British understatement the citation for New Zealander Charles Upham’s Victoria Cross termed his actions “a series of remarkable exploits.” Those May 1941 exploits in Crete included the single-handed destruction of enemy machine gun nests with hand grenades, the rescue of wounded men under fire and the retrieval of stranded friendly units from behind enemy lines. A year later Upham earned a bar to his Victoria Cross, the equivalent of a second award. He remains the only combat soldier to have received a VC and bar—the other two double recipients were British army doctors. He was also the most highly decorated British Commonwealth soldier of World War II. Born in Christchurch in 1908, Upham enlisted in the 2nd New Zealand

16 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2017

Expeditionary Force in September 1939 and soon sailed for Egypt to complete his training. By May 1941 he was a second lieutenant serving in Crete. Over nine days of fighting that month, though suffering from dysentery and wounds, Upham pulled off his “remarkable exploits,” in addition to leading his platoon in ambush attacks on enemy positions, one of which killed 22 Germans and another more than 40. His VC citation noted his “superb coolness, great skill and dash, and complete disregard of danger.” In the summer of 1942 Upham, by then a captain, earned the bar to his VC at the First Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, during which the 2nd New Zealand Division was assigned to clear enemy positions on Ruweisat Ridge. Earlier in the operation Upham had been twice wounded; regardless, he insisted on leading his men in the final assault in mid-July. On the night of July 14 he was on his way forward in a jeep when his driver unwittingly entered an enemy sector and promptly bogged down in the sand.

Betraying no fear, Upham hopped out amid the passing enemy infantrymen to shoulder the vehicle free. At dawn the next morning Upham led his company in an assault on two enemy strongpoints, during which he personally took out a German tank, several guns and assorted vehicles with grenades. Despite having his arm shattered by a machinegun bullet, he again pressed forward to retrieve stranded men, then consolidated his position. Pausing only long enough to have the wound dressed, Upham returned to his besieged company, which had come under intense enemy artillery and mortar fire. Though severely wounded in the legs by shrapnel, Upham continued to lead his handful of surviving men until overrun and captured. “Captain Upham’s complete indifference to danger and his personal bravery,” noted the citation for his second VC, “have become a byword in the whole of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.” After several brazen but unsuccessful attempts to escape from various POW camps, Upham was sent to the forbidding —and reputedly escape-proof— Colditz Castle in Saxony, where he sat out the rest of the war. Liberated by U.S. troops in 1945, Upham married his longtime fiancée—who, coincidentally, was a distant relative of Noel Chavasse, one of the other double VC recipients—and settled down in New Zealand as a farmer. Though he shunned publicity, he was said never to allow any German-manufactured automobiles or machinery on his farm. Some years later, as Britain deliberated entry into the European Union, he reportedly warned, “They’ll cheat you yet, those Germans.” On his death in 1994 Upham, 86, was buried with full military honors. MH

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM (2)

By Chuck Lyons

L I M I T E D

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Flying Over the Hump Opium Wars Hot Day at Monmouth, 1778

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What We Learned From... The Battle of Franklin, 1864 By James Byrne

O

utfought and outmaneuvered by Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman in Atlanta, Confederate General John Bell Hood evacuated the city in early September 1864 with his beaten but intact Army of Tennessee. Hoping to disrupt Sherman’s lines of supply and communication and lure him out of Georgia, Hood marched west into Alabama and then north to challenge Union forces in Tennessee. Sherman didn’t take the bait. Instead, he sent reinforcements to Nashville to block any Confederate push north, then drove south on his march to the sea. Hood got off to a good start. Marching into Tennessee with nearly 40,000 men, he trapped and nearly destroyed a Union force of 28,000 under Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield at Columbia. Unfortunately for Hood, at the critical juncture he went to bed, his subordinates stumbled around in the dark and Schofield managed to retreat north. The next morning the Union force was strongly entrenched at Franklin and preparing to withdraw the final 20 miles to Nashville.

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On waking, an apoplectic Hood drove his army north in pursuit, reaching the Union fortifications in front of Franklin late in the afternoon of November 30. Without waiting for his entire force to arrive, without the bulk of his artillery and without conducting an effective reconnaissance, Hood ordered a frontal assault on the enemy position. The Union defense, a 2-milewide arc anchored at each flank on the Harpeth River, comprised ditches, log abatis and breastworks with strong artillery support. More than 20,000 Rebel infantrymen launched successive attacks against an evenly matched Union force that waited behind the virtually impregnable works. The actions of a well-placed Union reserve managed to repulse an early Confederate breakthrough, and Schofield’s lines held as Hood’s forces hurled themselves against the defenses late into the evening. Under cover of darkness the Union force evacuated its positions and crossed the river, reaching the fortifications around Nashville the next morning.

Hood’s 6,200-plus casualties (almost three times those of Schofield’s force) included more than 12 generals and nearly half of the regimental commanders involved. His crushing losses at Franklin were double those suffered by Maj. Gen. George Pickett during his illfated 1863 charge at Gettysburg. Moreover, the battle sealed the fate of Confederate forces in the western theater of the Civil War. Hood dutifully marched to the outskirts of Nashville with his remaining 30,000 men. But time and the odds were against him, and on December 15-16 Union Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas slammed into Hood with 55,000 troops, routing what remained of the Army of Tennessee and eliminating it as an effective fighting force.

Lessons: Fail to manage the battlefield at your own risk. Hood came to the fight with just two-thirds of his force and scant artillery support then launched his attack across a 2-milewide open field into the strongest part of the Union defense. You can overdo leading from the front. The Confederate officers at Franklin certainly led by example —but the foolhardy frontal assault cost Hood most of his senior leadership, destroying morale and crippling command and control. Don’t forget the reserve. Hood managed to breach the Union line at Franklin, but he lacked a reserve force to exploit that success. Schofield did hold men in reserve, and they contained the Confederate breakthrough. Some honors you can do without. Contribute significantly to an adversary’s victory, and he might name a military installation after you—in this case, Fort Hood, Texas. MH

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

John Bell Hood’s losses at Franklin sealed the fate of Confederate forces in the western theater of the war.

Hardware Type 94 Infantry Mortar

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By Jon Guttman Illustration by Robert Calow 11 Weight: 350 pounds Barrel length: 4 feet 2 inches Caliber: 90 mm Traverse: 10 degrees from centerline Elevation: 45–80 degrees Maximum recoil stroke: 5.75 inches Muzzle velocity: 745 feet per second Effective range: 4,150 yards

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Bore Yoke Plunger Recoil cylinder Yoke slide Baseplate Traversing knob Mounting Adjustable leg Elevating screw Elevating crank Traversing screw

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77 10

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ccepted in 1934 (the year 2594 on Japanese imperial calendars) and entering service the next year, the Type 94 mortar, with its 90 mm bore, fell between the medium and heavy classes of mortar. Certainly the weapon was hefty and cumbersome, tipping the scales at 350 pounds with a U-shaped hydropneumatic recoil system itself weighing 104 pounds. Although it was a mainstay of infantry support during the 1937 invasion of China and saw use in the subsequent Philippine and Guadalcanal campaigns, the Type 94 was declared obsolete in 1940 following the introduction of the Type 97. The latter, though using a similar recoil system, weighed just 145 pounds, making it far more preferable for mobile jungle operations in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Both mortars fired the same 11.5-pound high-explosive bomb, however, and as the Type 94 remained an effective weapon, the Japanese army continued using it in the open terrain of China for the duration of the war. In addition to the HE round, the Japanese developed an incendiary projectile that on detonation scattered 40 pellets filled with white phosphorus and carbon disulfide to ignite such soft targets as unarmored vehicles and ammunition dumps. It proved especially devastating to densely packed Chinese villages. The closest the Chinese National Revolutionary Army could come to matching the Japanese 90 mm mortars from its mixed bag of imports was the Brandt Mle 27/31, an 81 mm design by Edgar Brandt that was standard for the French army, and the Sovietproduced 82-BM-37 batalionniy minomet (battalion mortar), an improvement on the Brandt design that fired an 82 mm round. Although both were good weapons, their Japanese counterparts outclassed them in the field. Later in the war, however, a handful of captured Type 94 and Type 97 mortars also found their way into Chinese use. MH

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‘NOR PRAYERS FOR MERCY’ Januarius MacGahan’s dispatches from the 1876 April Uprising in Bulgaria horrified Europe with reports of an Ottoman massacre of Orthodox Christians in Batak By Richard Selcer

DIMITAR CAVRA

The remains of Christians killed by Muslim bashi-bazouk militiamen litter the floor of Batak’s St. Nedelya Church, which attackers set afire with townspeople trapped inside.

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Despite containing all the elements of present-day headline stories—political repression, religious persecution, crimes against humanity, etc.—the Batak Massacre remains almost unheard of for three reasons. First, the Iron Curtain cloaked the records of Eastern Europe from the prying eyes of the West for much of the 20th century. Second, the timing remained murky, as events from that period in that part of the

24 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2017

world bear two dates, Old Style and New Style, referring respectively to the earlier Julian and modern Gregorian calendars. And third, the principal sites bear names in two languages, Turkish and Bulgarian. The historical roots of the conflict date from the late 14th century, when the Ottomans conquered the region and sought to render it Turkish in all things—including religion. Meanwhile, czarist Russia assumed the role of protector of the Balkan people for religious, ethnic and political reasons. The April Uprising owed much, philosophically and politically, to Greece’s revolt against Turkish domination five decades earlier. In the years leading up to the Bulgarian uprising, exiles planted the seeds of revolt during clandestine meetings in Bucharest, capital of the autonomous Ottoman region of Romania. In May 1872—with Moscow’s blessing and tacit support—exiles formed the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee (BRCC) as a government in exile. They ultimately selected Hristo Botev their voivoda (revolutionary leader). Botev, an adherent of Marxism, was more of an intellectual than a fanatical revolutionary. The BRCC set up its headquarters in Giurgiu (Giurgevo), a river town on the Romanian side of the Danube, connected by ferry to Ruschuk (Ruse) on the Bulgarian side. The central committee members lacked organizational skills, which became apparent in the plans they made for a popular uprising in 1875. Their first effort that September fizzled embarrassingly. Undeterred, they planned a follow-up revolt for the spring of 1876, first dividing the country into four revolutionary districts with cells in all major cities. The leaders of each district and cell called themselves “apostles,” in deference to founding revolutionary leader Vasil Levski (aka the “Apostle of Freedom”), a onetime Orthodox monk whom the Ottomans had captured and executed in 1873. Among the more practical-minded apostles was Georgi Benkovski. Meanwhile, the Ottoman government in Istanbul (Constantinople) had no desire to commit precious military assets to a low-grade insurgency; it left that job up to detachments of local Muslim militiamen with no military training, no logistical support and no formal structure. The Bulgarians called them bashi-bazouks (literally “disturbed heads”). They were not part of the regular Ottoman military; they just did the empire’s dirty work. Many were Muslim converts (pomaks) recruited from the Ottomans’ subject peoples, including Bulgarians, Circassians (from the Caucasus region) and Albanians. In this period drawing They furnished their own arms and Muslim militiamen horses and lived off what they looted. herd the Christians of Batak into confinement Their favorite weapon was the yatabefore beginning their gan, a curved, single-edged saber orgy of looting, rape with Mongol origins. Brutal and unand mass murder. disciplined, the bashi-bazouks were

EDMUND OLLIER/THE BRITISH LIBRARY

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omicide on a grand scale used to be termed a “massacre,” and some still prefer that unambiguous term, though in the 20th century we learned more diplomatic turns of phrase, such as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” By whatever name you call it, mass murder has been around at least since the Israelites staked their claim to Canaan. The modern era of genocide began in a forgotten corner of the Ottoman empire—not in Armenia in 1915, as many people believe, but in a small Bulgarian village in 1876. That event—the massacre of the residents of Batak—was part of the April Uprising against Ottoman rule in Bulgaria. Today it is a mere footnote in history. The Ottoman Turks were Muslims, and their Bulgarian subjects were Eastern Orthodox Christians, so what began as a war of independence quickly escalated into holy war. During the uprising, while the Western world expressed outrage and issued strongly worded denunciations, the forces of Sultan Abdülaziz slaughtered upward of 15,000 Bulgarians. As horrific as events in Bulgaria were, Americans would have taken scant notice—in 1876 the only “massacre” the nation cared about was the one on the banks of the Little Bighorn River on June 25—but for the fact that an Ohioborn journalist, Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, first reported details of the slaughter in Batak. The 32-year-old correspondent for London’s Daily News is justly recalled as one of the first investigative journalists in history.

Bulgarians fortunate enough to have escaped Batak before the bashi-bazouks’ arrival watch as their town goes up in flames.

ANTONI PIOTROWSKI

more than willing to wipe their Christian countrymen off the face of the earth. The BRCC revolutionaries made a series of amateurish mistakes from the outset. For one, they invited anyone interested in independence to attend their “secret meetings,” and at those meetings they spent more time debating philosophy than making plans. They also failed to establish a formal military chain of command, instead relying on the apostles to serve as both commissars and commanders. From its headquarters in Giurgiu the BRCC exercised only nominal control over local cells in Bulgaria, leading to the biggest mistake of all: a decision to allow each cell to choose whether it would rise up on the appointed day, May 13, 1876 (May 1, according to the Julian calendar the planners used). The date was the only thing the leadership could agree on.

Any veteran of Europe’s 19th century uprisings could have told the Bulgarian revolutionaries they were ill prepared to take on the bashi-bazouks, that patriotic fervor was no substitute for modern arms and artillery. The revolutionary troops comprised peasants, teachers and priests. In lieu of formal uniforms, they wore the traditional Bulgarian short jacket, baggy pantaloons, peasant blouse, waist sashes and leggings bound with leather thongs. On their heads they wore fez-style felt hats, just like the bashi-bazouks. The only trappings that distinguished them from their countrymen were a peacock feather and the emblem of a lion worn on the hat. A far more serious short-

coming was their lack of a war chest to fund the revolution. They lived from hand to mouth, taking up a collection whenever they needed something. They could not even count on foreign aid from the Serbs and Russians, who, while sympathetic, largely remained on the sidelines. The BRCC’s basic fighting unit was the cheta (cohort), composed of volunteers called chetniks (rebels). Each chetnik was to arm himself with a rifle, a sword or dagger, a pair of revolvers and all the bullets he could carry. Some men fresh off the farm showed up at musters with scythes, literally to be hammered into swords, plus whatever bits of lead they could scrounge to mold into bullets. The committee sought

The bashi-bazouks were not part of the regular Ottoman military; they just did the empire’s dirty work in vain to purchase artillery on the black market, which would have given them a big advantage over the bashibazouks. Instead, they had to make their own. Lacking both foundries and ironworking skills, they fashioned improvised cannons out of cherry wood and lined the barrels with copper sheathing reinforced with iron bands. The results were not encouraging: The wooden guns were good for only two or three shots before bursting, in the process sometimes

25

A bashi-bazouk irregular poses for a circa 1880 portrait.

Daily News reporters Januarius MacGahan, at left, and Francis Millet followed up initial news of the Batak massacre with in-depth coverage.

Hristo Botev

taking out the crew. The rebels’ search for a flag met with better luck, however. Approached by the apostles, Rayna Knyaginya, a schoolteacher in the town of Panagyurishte, stitched together a banner out of scraps of velvet, red on one side and green on the other, emblazoned with a rearing lion and the motto “Liberty or Death.” As rallying points the BRCC selected two fortified mountain camps, one in Bulgaria’s northern range and the other in the south. Planners expected that after the initial uprising volunteers from Serbia and Romania would pour into these camps. Meanwhile, the committee’s vague military strategy was to sever railroad and telegraph links to Istanbul and drive the enemy from the towns into open country. The cells in villages with a Turkish garrison were ordered to burn the entire town to the ground—a tactic guaranteed to be deeply unpopular with the mass of Bulgarians. BRCC leaders hoped for a lightning revolution, as with no war chest, no fortified base of operations and no safe haven to which they might retreat, they could not carry on a prolonged war.

Ottoman authorities got wind of the uprising—including the identities of its leaders—long before May 13. On May 2 (April 20 by the Julian calendar, hence the term April Uprising) a detachment of mounted rural police commanded by Captain Nedjib Aga arrived in the town of Koprivshtitsa to arrest local organizers. At that point Todor Kableshkov, head of the local cell, made the fateful decision not to wait for the agreed-on date but to launch the uprising immediately. He and his chetniks reduced the Koprivshtitsa police station and then clashed with police at a stone bridge leading into town. 26 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2017

Kableshkov dashed off a letter to district leaders, proclaiming the day of deliverance had come. Legend has it he signed the proclamation using the blood of a dead policeman. The “Bloody Letter” soon arrived in the hands of apostle Georgi Benkovski, head of the revolutionary district, based in Panagyurishte—hometown of rebel flag seamstress Knyaginya. Benkovski, a man with natural military talent, rallied his chetniks, who promptly hacked to death every Turk they could get their hands on. Benkovski then formed a “flying band” of 200 horsemen to ride to the aid of other villages. The unit left Panagyurishte on the night of May 3 with only the vaguest idea of where they were going. As word of the rebel victories spread, Bulgarians nationwide openly feted the news, but their celebrations were premature. Having started the revolution more than 10 days before Turkish authorities had expected it, the chetniks had caught their enemy unprepared, but the population at large remained uncommitted, many waiting to see how things played out before rising up. Moreover, modern arms the rebels had purchased on the black market had not yet arrived, nor had the expected flood of foreign volunteers—in part because Ottoman authorities controlled all the main roads into the country. The best fighters in the revolutionary ranks were in Benkovski’s flying band, but they were few in number and lacked a system to field replacements when the inevitable casualties began to mount. Though taken by surprise, the Ottomans were quick to recover. The bashi-bazouks took to the field, while Istanbul, which had re-established telegraph communication, mobilized the regular army. The chetniks were simply no match for

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: P. AITKEN; SOCIJALISTICKI.COM; BATAK HISTORISCHESE MUSEUM; SOCIJALISTICKI.COM

Georgi Benkovski

FROM TOP: BRIAN WALKER; THINKSTOCK

the better-organized, better-armed Ottoman troops, not even for the bashi-bazouks, and were soon on the run. Nature itself seemed to conspire against the revolutionaries as torrential spring rains ruined much of their powder and supplies. The bashi-bazouks relied on terrorism as their primary tactic, for which the chetniks had no military answer. Refugees and fighters alike fled to Mount Eledjik in the northern mountains, hoping to find refuge. But the bashi-bazouks tracked them down, surrounded the camp, and killed or captured almost everyone. The valiant fight put up by defenders holds an honored spot in national history as Bulgaria’s Alamo. Batak was quite another matter.

Tucked into a valley of the northern mountains, Batak was a midsize village of some 900 buildings and fewer than 9,000 men, women and children. Thanks to a thriving timber industry, it was the most prosperous town in the region. At the heart of town was the Orthodox Church of St. Nedelya, constructed in 1813. There was nothing architecturally impressive about the church; it was made of rough-hewn stone, windowless, and topped by a low-pitched slate roof. Surrounding it was a 6-foot-high stone wall entered by a single narrow gate. Though no basilica, St. Nedelya might well have been St. Peter’s in the hearts of its congregants, functioning as both a house of worship and a community center. Batak itself was no revolutionary hotbed, but when the call came, virtually its entire male population took up the cause. That said, their collective arsenal comprised little more than pitchforks and old smoothbore muskets. Adding to their woes, the nearest villages—Dospat, Nevrokop and Chepino—were overwhelmingly Muslim and hostile to the residents of Batak. When the bashi-bazouks came calling, these villages did nothing to help their Christian neighbors. Indeed, leading the force against Batak was Ahmed Aga, a bashi-bazouk captain from Dospat, described by a contemporary historian as a “low, ignorant brute, who can neither read nor write”—not that book learning was a requirement to join the bashi-bazouks. On May 9 Ahmed approached Batak at the head of some 5,000 men, surrounded the town and issued an ultimatum—surrender or face annihilation. Though lacking any means to resist a siege, residents were divided on what action to take. At a hastily convened meeting in St. Nedelya, those who wanted to fight decided to slip out of town that night under cover of darkness, while those choosing to surrender—mostly women, children and old men—resolved to throw themselves on Aga’s mercy. The next morning the holdouts sent envoys to seek terms with the bashi-bazouk captain, who gave his solemn promise that if the villagers offered no resistance, no one would be harmed. Aga then led his men into town without a shot being fired. The townspeople had made a deal with the devil, as Aga promptly broke his promise, putting the town to the torch and the sword. In an orgy of murder, rape and pillage that lasted three days the bashi-bazouks cast aside all rules of civilized warfare and concern for noncombatants, turning Batak

RO MANIA SERBIA

GIURGIU DANUBE

B U L G A R I A

BLACK SEA

KOPRIVSHTITSA

BATAK

MOUNT ELEDJIK

CONSTANTINOPLE (ISTANBUL)

into a charnel house occupied only by the dead. Respecting neither age nor gender, they hunted down every living being, setting fire to houses to drive out any who tried to hide. Aga, the only man who might have stopped the carnage, chose to make an example of Batak. Despite their shared nationality, he had no mercy for these people of a different religion and culture. He did not even recognize the sanctity of holy ground. At the outset of the massacre a number of townspeople took refuge inside St. Nedelya. When they refused to emerge, Aga ordered his men to block the only entrance and kill all those inside. After rolling carts up against the outer walls, the bashi-bazouks clambered up onto the roof, ripped off the slates and fired into the panic-stricken mass of humanity below. Tiring of that sport, they hurled down oil-soaked rags and pieces of burning wood on the heads of the trapped townspeople. Within moments flames blazed up through the gaps in the roof, the crackle of flames punctuated by the screams of those trapped inside. The victims shoved frantically against the blocked doors, but there was no escape. After a while the Amid the massacre screams died down and everything went silent in Batak the bashiexcept for the hiss and crackle of the fire. bazouks set fire to the Other residents who had sought refuge in the interior of St. Nedelya schoolhouse and several larger homes were also Church, burning alive subjected to a fiery death unless they chose to Christians who had taken refuge inside. come out, only to be cut down with yatagans and The surviving stone knives. Those who died on the spot were the structure served as fortunate ones. Many of Batak’s women and girls an ossuary before did not die so quickly; they were kept alive for being turned into hours to amuse their captors. a state museum in After three days the bashi-bazouks ran out of 1955. In 1977 it was villagers to kill, leaving only mutilated and named a Bulgarian charred corpses. Scores of headless remains national monument. gave mute testimony that decapitation had been a favorite sport. The last insult came when Aga ordered the town razed—a final punishment that also helped cover up the atrocities committed there.

Massacre Memorial

Elsewhere, rebel bands that had fled into the mountains were left to starve, while those who emerged in search of food were

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In this 1920s postcard image bones recovered from St. Nedelya Church serve as a macabre early monument to victims of the Batak massacre.

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to endure show trials before being hanged, while tens of thousands of Bulgarians who had not joined the uprising were either killed or suffered in its aftermath. Meanwhile, Istanbul rewarded the “protectors of the empire,” including Ahmed Aga, the “Butcher of Batak,” who was advanced two ranks in the bashi-bazouk hierarchy and decorated by the sultan.

The world first learned of the Batak Massacre not from onscene reports but from rumors circulating in Istanbul’s foreign community based on letters written by imprisoned Orthodox Father Georgi Tilev and slipped out of Bulgaria by sympathizers. Tilev’s letters came into the hands of two American missionaries in Istanbul, who translated them into English and tried to find someone to sound the alarm about the atrocities described therein. Receiving no cooperation from the British diplomatic mission, they took their story to the British press, which is how they met Daily News correspondent Edwin Pears and Times correspondent Antonio Carlo Napoleone Gallenga. Both men filed dispatches, but only Pears’ made it into the pages of the Daily News, on June 23. Although the Daily News had scooped both the European and American press with the biggest international story of the day, Tilev’s accounts required confirmation. While the British government dithered, paralyzed by the political ramifications of what the press had dubbed the “Bulgarian Horrors,” the Western newspapers ran with the story, driven by equal parts conscience and concern over circulation. The whole episode might have died a quiet death had Januarius MacGahan not arrived in Istanbul at the precise moment Horace Maynard, the American minister to Ottoman Turkey, was assembling an investigative team to travel

BATAK HISTORISCHESE MUSEUM

cut down where they stood. Even as Batak was under siege, the nearby villages of Peroushtitsa and Bratsigovo also fell to combined forces of bashi-bazouks and Ottoman regulars. Peroushtitsa’s defenders initially repelled the bashi-bazouks, but Ottoman artillery smashed their defenses. Rather than surrender, the last holdouts followed the example of Masada’s defenders in the year 73—they locked themselves and their families inside the church and committed mass suicide. The fall of Peroushtitsa and Bratsigovo ended effective resistance. Ottoman forces soon cornered Benkovski, the hard-riding apostle. Refusing to surrender, he tried to escape across the Serbian border but was betrayed by a Bulgarian herdsman. Ambushed on May 24, he died in a hail of bullets. His last recorded words: “In the heart of the tyrant I have opened a bitter wound that will never heal!” Perhaps not on par with Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” but nonetheless a martyr’s death. The uprising was almost over before its nominal leader, Botev, got into the fight. On May 16 he and 200 followers left Giurgiu, intending to cross the Danube and invade Bulgaria. Hijacking an Austrian steamer, they landed without opposition at Kozloduy, where they formed up and set off for Vratsa. Before they had gotten very far, they ran into a combined force of Turkish cavalry and bashi-bazouks, which gave pursuit, hammering the chetniks with concentrated rifle and artillery fire. Botev fought in the front ranks with his men, holding out until June 1. As dusk fell that day, he foolishly stood up to survey their position, and a Turkish sniper shot him dead. Less than three weeks after it had started, the April Uprising was over. Some 8,000 Bulgarians had taken up arms, and most had died. A handful of captured leaders were forced

ILLUSTRATED PAPERS COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

to Bulgaria. Among the best-known journalists of his era, MacGahan was also a champion of human rights. Heading up the team was Maynard’s consul-general, Eugene Schuyler, who happened to be a friend of MacGahan’s. When the story broke, the veteran reporter was working in London as a correspondent for The New York Herald. When the Herald rejected his pitch about the uprising, however, he convinced Pears’ Daily News to send him to Istanbul. On landing, he found the Ottoman capital in turmoil under would-be reformist Sultan Mehmed Murad V. Taking advantage of the chaos, Schuyler, MacGahan and other team members set out for Bulgaria on July 23. With a translator in tow, they reached Batak on August 2. The stories circulating in London and Istanbul had not prepared the men for what they found in the ravaged village. Even three months after the massacre bones and putrefying corpses lined the streets and littered the ground, while wild dogs, fat and unafraid, nosed around the ruins. MacGahan took copious notes from interviews with refugees, as well as documenting what he saw with his own eyes. How he managed to get his dispatches out of the country remains a mystery, but his stories began appearing in the London papers within a week after landing in Bulgaria. What his London readers—and soon readers across Europe and America—learned was the shocking tale of what MacGahan unhesitatingly labeled “atrocities.” He refused to tone down the stomach-churning details of his dispatches to spare the Victorian sensibilities of his readers. His outrage was so great, he wholly forgot his professional objectivity and pointed an accusing finger directly at the Ottoman government. MacGahan estimated that of Batak’s original 9,000 residents, only about 1,200 had survived. Published in the August 7 issue of the Daily News, his were the first hard numbers to come out of Bulgaria. MacGahan’s final dispatch from Batak reads like a dirge: “There are no tears nor cries, no weeping, no shrieks of terror, nor prayers for mercy. The harvests are rotting in the fields, and the reapers are rotting here in the churchyard.” What Pears and MacGahan had started, others in the European press kept alive. There were rallies in Britain and France against Ottoman barbarity, while petitions in both countries demanded the expulsion of Turkey from the family of nations. But in the end the two governments let diplomatic caution trump moral outrage. Still, the shocking events in Bulgaria reverberated through the Ottoman capital. On August 31 conservative ministers deposed Mehmed Murad V in favor of Abdülhamid II. Amid the uproar Russia invaded the Ottoman empire— ostensibly for humanitarian reasons in the wake of the uprising, but in reality because Czar Alexander II saw an opportunity to outflank the Habsburgs and possibly even knock off the doddering Ottoman empire. The 1877 invasion prompted this sardonic comment from MacGahan: “I can safely say I have done more to smash up the Turkish empire than anybody else…except the Turks themselves.”

Assigned by the Daily News to cover the con- Bashi-bazouks await flict, the correspondent attached himself to trial for the Batak the Russian army, and his dispatches from massacre. Ottoman the front were the capstone of a distinguished officials acquitted career. In little over a year, however, he fell ringleader Ahmed Aga victim to the same typhus epidemic that but hanged leaders of the April Uprising. killed thousands of soldiers on both sides. After Bulgaria gained its independence in the peace settlement of 1878, MacGahan became one of its first national heroes. Six years later the American government repatriated his remains, burying them with honors in his hometown of New Lexington, Ohio. In 1901 a monument was placed over his grave bearing his surname and the inscription LIBERATOR OF BULGARIA. Although he is little known in America today,

Putrefying corpses littered the ground, while wild dogs, fat and unafraid, nosed around the ruins the Bulgarian people have never forgotten him. In 1978, at the height of the Cold War, the citizens of Batak erected a bust of MacGahan, recalling this exchange between an American sightseer and a Bulgarian official at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893: The American innocently asked the Bulgarian if he had ever heard of Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, to which the Bulgarian replied incredulously, “Have you ever heard of Washington, Lincoln or Grant?! Well, what you think of these immortal heroes, we think of MacGahan.” MH Richard Selcer is a professor of history at Weatherford College in Texas and an author with 10 books to his credit. For further reading he recommends The Balkans: A Short History, by Mark Mazowser; Januarius MacGahan: The Life and Campaigns of an American War Correspondent, by Dale L. Walker; and The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920, by Charles and Barbara Jelavich.

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LAST BATTLE ON THE GREAT WALL

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In 1933, in a surreal clash of ancient and modern weaponry, Chinese troops sought to defend the Great Wall from the combined forces of the Imperial Japanese Army By Jiaxin Du

A Chinese-language propaganda poster, rendered in the wake of Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, extols the benefits of Japanese “protection.”

ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGES

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Japan’s March 12, 1933, capture of Gubeikou Castle on the Great Wall opened that pass through to the North China Plain.

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a state of disrepair since the 1644 Manchu invasion, the obsolescent Great Wall was granted a new lease on life in the 20th century—only this time from the north came not nomadic tribal warriors but the industrialized juggernaut of Japan’s elite Kwantung army. In a poignant twist of fate the Great Wall, that ancient masterpiece of military fortification, saw its last action at the dawn of World War II in Asia.

The Second Sino-Japanese War—World War II’s often overlooked “missing section of the jigsaw,” as British historian Antony Beevor puts it—took root long before Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland. Indeed, by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, which gripped the Western world’s attention, China had been embroiled for five years in an even bloodier military conflict with Japan. By the early 1930s the Kwantung army—garrisoned on Manchuria’s Liaodong Peninsula since shortly after the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War—had evolved into a totalitarian militarist faction within the greater Japanese army that favored expansionism on the Asian mainland. On Sept. 18, 1931, taking advantage of Japan’s turbulent political environment, the Kwantung army independently orches-

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN/GETTY IMAGES

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eneath the heatless winter sun, soldiers sprint across hastily constructed pontoon bridges spanning a 55-foot-wide moat, their war cries drowned out by a deafening artillery barrage. Raising improvised bamboo ladders against the walls of the enemy fort, the attackers scramble up even as defenders on the battlements above unleash a shower of hand grenades. The explosives detonate in mid-air, snapping ladders in half and sending dozens of screaming men to their deaths 45 feet below. As surviving attackers clamber over the rim of the forbidding wall, the fight degenerates into a series of brutal hand-to-hand melees, with steel broadswords and shorter but no less lethal bayonets drawn for the close-quarters slaughter, as commanders astride Mongolian warhorses ride from section to section, desperately trying to organize their scattered forces atop China’s fabled Great Wall. Though such images might seem representative of one of the many ancient battles that swirled around China’s most famous fortification, the fight described above actually took place on the chilly morning of Jan. 3, 1933, at the outpost of Shanhaiguan. Long abandoned and left in

HULTON ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES; DRAGONSPORTS

Among the weapons Chinese soldiers wielded in close combat against the advancing Japanese were outmoded —yet still decidedly deadly—swords.

trated the Mukden Incident (a staged bombing against a Japanese-owned rail line) and the subsequent invasion of Manchuria in a shocking act of insubordination against the Tokyo civilian government’s anti-expansionist policy. On the Chinese side, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang central government was distracted by its ongoing civil war against Mao Zedong’s Chinese communists, as well as by warlord factionalism within the Kuomintang’s own National Revolutionary Army (NRA). Although an ardent nationalist, Chiang was convinced China was not ready for full-scale war against Japan and adopted the controversial policy of “first internal pacification, then external resistance.” Hence Chinese forces in Manchuria put up virtually no resistance against the Japanese invasion. Predictably, it wasn’t long before the Kwantung army aspired to further conquests and turned its sights southwest to the Chinese provinces of Hebei and Rehe (pronounced RUH-huh). Rehe—described by a postwar correspondent as “full of tumbling mountains, violent rivers and trouble” —immediately bordered Manchukuo, Japan’s puppet state in conquered Man-

A Sharp Response

churia. Less mountainous Hebei lay south of Rehe, the Great Wall serving as a rough border between the two. Behind the Great Wall lay the bustling metropolises of Beijing (officially Peiping at the time) and Tianjin and then the vast expanse of the North China Plain. After failing to secure Rehe-Hebei as a buffer zone by appealing to a corrupt local warlord, the Japanese decided to take more direct action. The Kwantung army’s first move was a powerful preliminary attack on the fortified Chinese garrison at Shanhaiguan, on the easternmost end of the main stretch of the Great Wall. Shanhaiguan (“Pass of Mountain and Sea” in traditional Chinese) was named for its strategic position on the narrow corridor leading from Manchuria into China proper. On the evening of Jan. 1, 1933, after staging

The traditional Chinese two-handed dadaoo broadsword—issued in large numbers for use against the Japanese—had a large, heavy forged blade of steel and carbon alloy.

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Japan vs. China, 1931–41

I

n September 1931, taking advantage of both political dissent back home in Japan and the ongoing chaotic civil war between multiple rival factions within China, the totalitarian and expansionist-minded Kwantung army garrisoned on Manchuria’s Liaodong Peninsula moved to solidify Japan’s grip on the Chinese mainland. Using the orchestrated Mukden Incident (the staged bombing of a Japanese-owned rail line) as a pretext, Kwangtung units invaded Manchuria. Knowing his own split forces were ill prepared to engage in a full-scale war against Japan, Chiang Kai-shek put up virtually no resistance. Rebelling warlords and communists had committed him to a policy of “first internal pacification, then external resistance.” The continuing unrest and that policy would enable the Japanese to make further gains. On Jan. 2, 1933, again on the back of a staged incident, the Kwangtung garrison commander at Shanhai Pass, on the easternmost end of China’s Great Wall, launched a combined arms attack on the Chinese defenders. The fighting was over within hours. The Japanese followed up the next month with Operation Nekka, the planned occupation of neighboring Rehe province. This time the fighting stretched more than a week, but the result was the same. The Japanese occupation of Rehe and neighboring sections of the Great Wall set the stage for further “incidents” and the inevitable Second Sino-Japanese War.

1933 Defense of the Great Wall In a sorry state of neglect three centuries after its Ming Dynasty heyday, the Great Wall regardless posed a formidable obstacle to Japanese ambitions. Following the March 4 fall of Chengde, the Kwangtung commander wasted no time in ordering his troops to secure the key passes through to the North China Plain. By mid-April the Chinese were in retreat. Only international intervention prevented the Japanese from taking Beijing. MAPS BY STEVE WALKOWIAK/SWMAPS.COM

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Shanhai Pass and Rehe The forced battle at Shanhai Pass was the opening shot in the Kwangtung army’s orchestrated campaign to extend the Japanese occupation from Manchuria into neighboring Rehe. It succeeded in less than four months.

From ‘Incidents’ to War As they had used staged incidents to invade both Manchuria and Rehe, so the Japanese used the manufactured July 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident to launch the Second Sino-Japanese War, which morphed into World War II.

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house fighting. The Japanese had “cracked” the easternmost tip of the Great Wall. But instead of advancing toward Beijing, the Kwantung army shifted its focus westward, away from the Bohai Sea, to the mountains of Rehe.

Chiang Kai-shek

Zhang Xueliang

Nobuyoshi Mut¯o

a grenade attack, the neighboring Japanese garrison commander brazenly labeled the Chinese defenders “terrorists” and ordered them from the pass. When they refused, the Japanese launched a combined arms attack on the garrison the next morning. Compared to their adversaries in the Kwantung army’s 8th Division, the ill-prepared Chinese defenders had little to offer. Other than a handful of Maxim guns and light mortars, their only noteworthy defenses were the centuries-old Ming Dynasty ramparts and watchtowers. Tanks, armored trains, a squadron of Kwantung army bombers and inshore warships from the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 2nd Expeditionary Fleet pummeled China’s ancient fortifications. Despite a heroic stand by the Chinese defenders, the Shanhaiguan garrison fell after a day of brutal house-to-

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mander in chief of the Kwantung army, and his chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Kuniaki Koiso, revealed the plan for Operation Nekka, whose strategic objective was the complete eradication of Chinese military forces in Rehe. Although Japanese units had already broken through the Great Wall at Shanhaiguan, a rash advance toward Beijing along the coastline would expose a long and vulnerable right flank to the Chinese. Although it was doubtful the hard-pressed defenders could or would take advantage of the opening, Muto¯ did not want to take chances. The Kwantung army would first clear out all areas north of the Great Wall in guanwai (“outside the wall,” as the Chinese termed it) before crossing into guannei (“inside the wall”). Muto¯ launched Operation Nekka on February 23 and within hours received news of Japan’s censure by, and subsequent dramatic walkout from, the League of Nations. The bold offensive called for two divisions and three independent brigades to advance on Rehe along three main southwestward axes, sweeping across the province to deliver a powerful knockout blow to Chengde, the provincial capital just north of the Great Wall. If all went as planned, the nearly 100,000-strong combined force of Kwantung and Manchukuo soldiers would secure the province before Chinese reinforcements arrived. In fact, the plan went far too well, certainly beyond Muto’s ¯ and Koiso’s most optimistic expectations. But it was the Chinese themselves who in large part facilitated the dramatic Japanese victory. As proven in previous battles, Chiang’s National Revolutionary Army, though poorly trained and equipped, did not lack brave soldiers and capable field commanders. But the NRA command, from the presiding Military Affairs Commission down to the divisional level, was beset by fierce warlord factionalism. Though roughly equal in number to the invading force, the ill-prepared Northeastern Army, commanded by playboy warlord Zhang Xueliang, collapsed like a house of cards before the Japanese onslaught. As Lt. Gen. Yoshikazu Nishi’s 8th Division marched into Chengde on March 4, the dilapidated remains of the Great Wall along the border between Rehe and Hebei provinces became the last line of strategic defense for Beijing, Hebei and the entire North China Plain.

Contrary to popular belief, the Great Wall is not one contiguous fortification spanning China. It is, in fact, an intricate network of defensive walls, forts, trenches, bunkers and natural barriers built, rebuilt and relocated over the centuries by successive Chinese dynasties as their territories expanded or contracted. The majority of the surviving

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: CARL MYDANS/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; GALLICA PHOTO ARCHIVES; CHINA GUARDIAN AUCTIONS

On February 11 Governor-General Nobuyoshi Muto, ¯ com-

Even with the benefit of aircraft—such as this biplane bomber preparing for a mission—the Japanese still had to directly assault the Great Wall forts.

Lost in Translation

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

A R M Y

army had no alternative but to assault these fortresses head on with uphill charges against enemy fire from embrasures and arrow slits—just as Chinese engineers had intended when they designed the fortifications centuries earlier. While the pace of victory in Rehe took even the Japanese by surprise, Muto¯ knew better than to bask in success. When word reached him on March 4 of the fall of Chengde, the Japanese commander immediately ordered all units to disregard their original orders and move south to secure the key passes along the Great Wall before the Chinese could organize effective resistance and block the route to Beijing. Unfortunately for the Japanese, they had advanced so rapidly that their motorized spearhead was compelled to wait for the bulk of their slowly marching infantry to catch up. That left the Chinese an opening. After warlord Zhang’s humiliating performance in Rehe and his subsequent resignation, Chiang placed forces in the region under the command of General He Yingqin and a contingent of staff that answered directly to the Chinese chairman. Unlike his ignominious predecessor, He realized the gravity of the situation and immediately ordered the battered Northeastern Army’s remaining divisions to mount an emergency defense centered on the four major Great Wall passes. While anticipating reinforcements from

In discussions of the Sino-Japanese conflict, confusion often arises regarding the sizes of the opposing forces’ military units. For example, official Chinese documents often translate the National Revolutionary Army formation of jun as “army.” However, in practice a Chinese jun was equivalent to a Western corps—consisting of several brigades or divisions and totaling about 20,000 men. The Japanese, on the other hand, did not have any corps-level formations. In the 1930s a Chinese division, or shi, on average comprised some 7,000 soldiers, while a Japanese division, or shidan, had 25,000 to 28,000 men. Thus it is common to find multiple Chinese “corps” or even “armies” fighting a single Japanese “division.” In this article the Chinese junn is translated as corps.

sections of the Great Wall date from the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), among the most ardent wall-building dynasties of imperial China. Under continual threat of Mongol, Jurchen and Manchu invasion from the north, the Ming constructed multiple layers of both temporary and permanent walls that ran a remarkable 5,500 miles from the Korean Peninsula west to the Taklamakan Desert. Although by 1933, almost three centuries after the fall of the Ming Dynasty, the majority of the Great Wall in ReheHebei was in a sorry state of neglect, the vast stretches still standing posed a serious obstacle to any attacker. Following natural contours, the serpentine barrier effectively sealed off most passages through the mountains to the North China Plain, leaving only a handful of heavily fortified passes—Gubeikou on the western edge of Rehe, Xifengkou at the center, Lengkou and Jielingkou on the eastern end—through which an army might maneuver. Even with aircraft and armored cars, Japan’s 20th-century

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farther south around Beijing-Tianjin, the general would not wait on them. He understood the Great Wall constituted but a single line of defense with no depth, and while the Chinese had the advantage of terrain, they would be unable to hold in the face of overwhelming Japanese firepower. Thus his plan called for Chinese forces along the Great Wall to delay the Japanese as long as possible, buying time for He to set up a perimeter defense on the outskirts of Beijing and Tianjin. He also re-

The traditional Chinese dadao saber proved especially effective in the bloody melees atop the ramparts quested additional reinforcements from the elite Central Army. Chiang promptly approved. Realizing the extent of the Japanese incursion in Rehe-Hebei, the Chinese commander in chief had called off his thus far unsuccessful Fourth Encirclement Campaign against communist forces in Jiangxi. Great Wall fortifications at the four key passes feature successive gatehouses that create consecutive barbicans in

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the narrow pass. Long stretches of the wall descend precipitous slopes to link up with these fortresses, effectively thwarting any possible enemy flanking maneuvers. When the main force of the Japanese 14th Mixed Brigade and 8th Division finally arrived at Xifengkou on March 10 to launch their assault, the bulk of the reinforcing Chinese 29th Corps was there to meet them. Fierce fighting ensued as the Japanese launched wave after wave of attacks. Under Lt. Gen. Song Zheyuan’s astute command, soldiers of the poorly equipped 29th avoided long-range firefights, which obviously would have given the enemy an advantage. Instead, they let the Japanese approach within 300 feet before rushing out to engage them, thus negating the attackers’ superior firepower by forcing them into close-quarters combat, at which the 29th was highly adept. Many of the Chinese wielded a traditional saber known as the dadao, which proved especially effective in the bloody, medievalstyle melees atop the ramparts. Over two days of fighting the high ground and sections of the Great Wall around the fortified pass changed hands multiple times. More than once the Japanese managed to break into and briefly occupy the first of Xifengkou’s two barbicans, only to be driven back by the resolute Chinese defenders.

SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Deployed in a bamboo grove, members of a Kwantung army infantry squad pose before an assault in Rehe-Hebei.

On the night of March 11–12 the 29th Corps launched a counteroffensive, led by its best swordsmen and martial artists, who used woodcutters’ trails to infiltrate the Japanese positions. Their superiors specifically instructed the raiders to avoid using firearms and instead rely on the dadao as much as possible. When these elite fighters stumbled on the Japanese 14th Brigade’s artillery positions, they wreaked havoc on the unsuspecting enemy, slaying scores of soldiers in their barracks, destroying artillery pieces with grenades and setting ammunition dumps afire. Seeking to take advantage of the enemy’s disarray in the rear, the main Chinese forces mounted an ultimately unsuccessful frontal assault against Japanese positions. After ransacking as much as they could, the Chinese raiders vanished into the predawn mist as the disciplined Japanese overcame their initial shock and Chinese casualties began to mount. Though strategically insignificant, the daring raid delivered a blow to the morale of the overconfident Japanese. In its wake Muto¯ grudgingly called off his attack on Xifengkou, gaining the ragtag 29th Corps lasting fame in Chinese military history.

Beijing. By late May Chiang also seemed willing to finally step up to protect his northern metropolis, allotting He one cavalry brigade, two independent artillery regiments and 11 additional infantry divisions from the Central Army, including the German-trained and -equipped 88th Division. Then the fighting stopped. With Rehe and northern Hebei firmly in Japanese hands, the Kwantung army had accomplished its goal of securing the southern border of Manchukuo. Facing mounting pressure from both the international community and antimilitarist politicians at home, Muto¯ ultimately decided to bring an end to his grand invasion, halting his forces just shy of Beijing’s city walls. Terms of the Japanese-proposed cease-fire, which became known as the Tanggu Truce, naturally did not favor the Chinese, but Chiang acquiesced

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

In late March and early April 1933 the Japanese launched probing attacks on Luowenyu, about 35 miles northeast of Xifengkou, but the 29th Corps held firm. At the same time fierce battles raged at the other passes along the Great Wall in Rehe-Hebei, and the results for the Chinese were often less favorable. After switching hands three times, Lengkou—on the eastern flank of Xifengkou—finally fell to the Kwantung army’s 6th Division on April 11. As soon as the Japanese achieved that significant breakthrough, the entire Chinese defense along the Great Wall began to crumble. Exploiting its success, the 6th advanced farther south toward Qian’an, threatening to encircle Chinese positions at Xifengkou and Jielingkou. On April 13 He ordered defenders at the two passes to retreat, by which time the 29th Corps, originally 15,000 strong, had suffered more than 5,000 casualties. At Gubeikou the Chinese Central Army’s 17th Corps, which had marched up from southern China, fought a more modern but by no means less savage battle against the spearhead of the Kwantung army’s 8th Division. While the Chinese lost the actual fortification at Gubeikou on March 12, they managed to put up a successful elastic defense to prevent the Japanese from exploiting their breakthrough. The 17th also mounted a number of night raids and counterattacks similar to those conducted by the 29th but using German-supplied Bergmann MP 18 submachine guns instead of cold steel. By May 15 the 17th had suffered more than 4,000 casualties in its fighting retreat toward Miyun and had to be replaced by the Central Army’s newly arrived 26th Corps. By that point Japanese bombers were already circling over Beijing and Tianjin. Having foreseen the collapse of the Great Wall defenses, He swiftly regrouped his forces for a last-ditch defense at

regardless, setting the stage for the July 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident and subsequent 1937–45 Second Sino-Japanese War. In the meantime, as the “Rehe Incident” came to its tentative conclusion, a false peace returned. The 1933 Battle of Rehe was peculiar to early 20th century Asia, where full-scale Westernization was slowly but surely supplanting traditional ways of life. Just like everything else from that turbulent time of revolutionary changes, the military—for a brief moment—also endured a shaky coexistence of the old and the new. As defenders set up their machine guns behind stone battlements, and attackers employed both bamboo siege ladders and aircraft, such surreal scenes of anachronism were unique among the battlefields of World War II. It was in this almost fantastical setting the last major engagement on the Great Wall unfolded, virtually unseen by the rest of the world. MH Japanese Maj. Gen. Yasuji Okamura shakes hands with his Chinese counterpart He Yingqin after signing a June 1933 armistice to end the “Rehe Incident.”

Freelance writer Jiaxin Du contributes to both Chineseand English-language periodicals. For further reading he recommends Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945, by Rana Mitter, and The Second World War, by Antony Beevor, which includes a general account of China’s participation in World War II.

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In late 1944 U.S. Army Air Forces Lieutenant Martin James Monti stole a reconnaissance plane and defected to the failing Nazi cause—but why? By Ron Soodalter

USAAF 1st Lt. Martin Monti’s flight to Axis-occupied Milan was a propaganda coup for the Germans and provided them with a pristine Lockheed F-5E Lightning reconnaissance plane, photographed here with newly applied German markings.

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A YANK IN THE SS

U.S. AIR FORCE

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purposes, some Americans did serve Nazi Germany in uniform. Owing to poor records and scant postwar investigation, it is impossible to pinpoint an exact number. Of the handful of known individuals, however, none is more infamous than U.S. Army Air Forces fighter pilot turned SS officer Martin James Monti.

Born on Oct. 24, 1921, in Florissant, Mo.—a suburb of St. Louis—Monti was one of seven children born to secondgeneration Americans of Swiss-Italian and German descent. By all accounts an average kid, he was raised in an environment later described as fervently religious, strongly anti-

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communist, laced with isolationist sentiments and opposed to the tenets of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the 1930s Monti—who had topped out at a strapping 6 feet 2 inches—became a devotee of suburban Detroitbased Roman Catholic clergyman Charles Coughlin, aka the “Radio Priest.” A bigot and zealot of the first order, Father Coughlin broadcast weekly sermons—railing alternately against communism, capitalism, Jews and Roosevelt while praising the national socialist regime of Germany’s Adolf Hitler and the fascist regime of Italy’s Benito Mussolini—to a listening audience that numbered in the tens of millions. So venomous were Coughlin’s broadcasts that the Roosevelt administration forced him off the air in September 1940, more than a year before the United States entered World War II. But the Radio Priest’s sympathy for fascism was not unusual in prewar America. In early 1936 several small proNazi organizations were subsumed into the newly created German American Bund, whose membership comprised mainly ethnic Germans living in the United States. The Bund was virulently anti-communist, anti-Semitic, opposed to Roosevelt’s policies and deterThe encounter between a GI mined to keep America neutral and a U.S.-born Wehrmacht in what was widely perceived to soldier dramatized in Band of be a coming world war. Brothers actually occurred. The group’s führer was an Some Americans did serve outspoken German-born hateNazi Germany in uniform. monger named Fritz Julius Kuhn, who emulated Hitler’s frenetic style when addressing his minions. At its peak the Bund comprised an estimated 25,000 dues-paying members, some 8,000 of whom belonged to a subsect known as Sturmabteilungen, or Storm Troopers, whose uniformed ranks goose-stepped on parade through a number of major American cities, waving swastika flags, right arms extended in the Nazi salute. The Bund staged several demonstrations and rallies, one of which— held on Feb. 20, 1939, in New York City’s Madison Square Garden—drew some 20,000 attendees. Emulating Germany’s Hitler Youth movement, Bund leaders created indoctrination camps for white, non-Jewish and preferably “Aryan” children and adolescents. The Bund also published magazines, pamphlets and posters reflective in style and content of contemporary Third Reich propaganda. Not surprising, a federal investigation—followed by a series of hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee—revealed a strong connection between the

DREAMWORKS TELEVISION HBO; OPPOSITE: UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

I

n the second episode of the acclaimed HBO miniseries Band of Brothers Pfc. Donald Malarkey questions a captured German sergeant in the liberated French village of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. Malarkey is stunned to learn the enemy prisoner hails from a town in Oregon less than 100 miles from the GI’s own hometown. When asked how he ended up wearing a Wehrmacht uniform, the young POW replies that before America’s entry into the war his German-born parents had “answered the call” for “all true Aryans” to return to the Fatherland. The encounter dramatized in the series actually took place and was not all that unusual. In fact, many Germanborn Americans returned to the Old Country in the years immediately preceding the 1939 outbreak of World War II— and more often than not the returnees took their Americanborn children with them. After the war a folktale persisted that an entire unit in the German army—the so-called George Washington Brigade—comprised American defectors. While the brigade was a fiction created by the Waffen-SS for propaganda

Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels hoped radio broadcasts by defectors such as Howard Marggraff, Mildred Gillars and Monti would help undermine Allied morale.

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Reflecting the style of contemporary Third Reich propaganda but using U.S.-specific images and touting “true Americanism,” a poster, top, announces the German American Bund’s 1939 mass rally at Madison Square Garden—an event that drew some 20,000 people. The flags of the national organization, middle, and of its New Jersey chapter, bottom, also closely mimic Nazi designs of the era.

On Oct. 1, 1944 —a few weeks shy of his 23rd birthday —Monti awoke, donned his uniform and initiated his complex plan to defect to the Germans. What followed was an odyssey of clever subterfuge on his part and a pattern of incredible gullibility and laxness on the part of the American military personnel with whom he came in contact. Monti’s first step: to get to the European theater and acquire a plane. Though he carried no official travel orders, the young pilot first hitched a ride from India to Cairo aboard a Curtiss C-46 Commando transport, then caught a follow-on flight to Tripoli and, finally, talked himself aboard a plane bound for Naples, by then in Allied hands. On October 10, after

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hitching his way east from Naples, Monti arrived at the Foggia Airfield Complex, home to the USAAF’s 82nd Fighter Group, whose pilots included friends from flight school. Presenting himself to the commanding officer, he requested transfer and a combat assignment but was turned down. Undeterred, Monti worked his way back west to Pomigliano Airfield, north of Naples, home to the 354th Air Service Squadron. It was that unit’s job to repair and test aircraft before shipment to various combat squadrons. On October 13, still lacking papers of any kind, Monti managed to pass himself off as a fighter pilot from the 82nd and requisition a Lockheed F-5E Lightning—the photo reconnaissance version of the P-38—for what he termed a “test flight.” As soon as he was airborne, Monti set a course north for Axis-occupied Milan. There he turned over the plane and himself to the Germans, declaring his desire to serve the Third Reich and delighting his new hosts with the unexpected gift of an American Lightning in pristine condition. The Luftwaffe promptly replaced the aircraft’s U.S. markings with swastikas and a new call sign and sent it to Germany, where it served its new owners through war’s end. Local German commanders were at a loss, however, about what to do with the Yank who had presented them with the Lightning. After briefly interrogating the young American, they sent him to a nearby POW camp. But an intercepted broadcast ordering Monti’s arrest soon convinced the Germans he was a legitimate defector. In November they sent him to Berlin, where SS-Haupsturmführer (Captain) Peter Delaney, an American defector from Louisiana, arranged for him to be enrolled in the SS-Standarte Kurt Eggers, a propaganda unit. The Germans initially sought to use Monti as a radio propagandist. Milwaukee-born defector Howard Marggraff had successfully broadcast the Nazi party line for two years, and the Germans doubtless hoped the turncoat lieutenant would prove as gifted a speaker. Using an inflated rank and his mother’s maiden name, Monti began broadcasting as Captain Martin Wiethaupt. “Such material,” The New York Times later reported, “was…transmitted over the facilities of the German Radio Corporation to this country and to American combat troops in the European theater.” Monti’s rants, stemming from his youthful indoctrination and vetted by his handlers, centered on the theme that the United States should be fighting alongside Germany against Soviet Russia, the “true enemy of world peace.” During the same period and from the same Berlin studio Portland-born defector Mildred Gillars was also spewing proNazi propaganda. Gillars was a frustrated actress who made her way to Europe after failing to establish a theatrical career stateside. Arriving in Germany, she worked a brief stint as a language instructor before landing a job with Radio Berlin as an actress and announcer. After America entered the war, Gillars became something of a celebrity with her own propaganda show, Home Sweet Home. Directing her broadcasts at GIs, she tormented them with thoughts of the home front

FROM TOP: REX HARDY JR./THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Symbols of Prewar Hate

Bund’s leadership and the government of Nazi Germany. Investigators also discovered Kuhn had been embezzling funds from his organization, a crime for which he was indicted, convicted and imprisoned. Authorities later stripped him of his citizenship, detained him as an enemy agent and then deported him. The organization continued to function, albeit in a diminished capacity, until December 1941, when the United States entered the war and immediately outlawed the Bund. Regardless, it is clear the sympathies of untold thousands of U.S. residents—both immigrants and native born—lay with Germany at the outset of hostilities. Monti registered for the draft in June 1942, six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and shortly thereafter traveled to Detroit to visit with his idol, Coughlin. While their conversation went unrecorded, it would not be far-fetched to presume that the Radio Priest, ever critical of the Roosevelt administration, encouraged his young acolyte to give his support to Germany. In late November, however, Monti enlisted as an aviation cadet in the U.S. Army Air Forces. By the summer of 1944 he had qualified as a fighter pilot in both the Lockheed P-38 Lightning and Bell P-39 Airacobra and risen to second lieutenant. That August the USAAF assigned Monti to the 126th Replacement Depot in Karachi, India (present-day Pakistan), where he soon earned promotion to first lieutenant. His next assignment would have been to a combat squadron had he remained in uniform. That is, an American uniform.

Monti’s infatuation with Nazism was not unusual in prewar America. The German American Bund staged events ranging from small-town parades to national rallies that filled such mainstream venues as Madison Square Garden, below.

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Monti and Mildred “Axis Sally” Gillars loathed one another, while Bund führer Fritz Kuhn, right, loathed virtually all “non-Aryans.”

On the opening day of his 1949 trial for treason Monti surprised everyone by pleading guilty to all charges the air. Monti’s handlers were apparently more concerned with his dearth of talent, for after a handful of broadcasts they pulled him off the air and assigned him to write propaganda pamphlets distributed to American POWs. By April 1945, with Nazi Germany on its heels and needing all available fighting men, SS-Untersturmführer (2nd Lt.) Monti was ordered to join his unit on the front in northern Italy. Shortly after his arrival in early May the

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American-born Waffen-SS officer in German uniform surrendered to the U.S. Fifth Army in Milan.

During his initial post-surrender interrogation Monti managed to convince his captors that although he had indeed gone AWOL and taken the plane, he had done so in order to wage a one-man war against the Germans, until being shot down. As for the Waffen-SS uniform, he claimed Italian partisans had given it to him to facilitate his passage back to Allied lines. His story ultimately fell apart, however, following his transfer to the custody of a military intelligence unit. In August he was court-martialed for being AWOL and for “misappropriation” of the F-5E Lightning, found guilty and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. At that early stage prosecutors knew nothing of his defection or his propaganda activities on behalf of the Third Reich. In early February 1946 President Harry S. Truman commuted Monti’s sentence to time served, contingent—in no small irony—on his re-enlistment in the Army Air Forces as a private. He did so and within two years had climbed to the rank of sergeant. Meanwhile, Army intelligence officials poring over captured records in Germany uncovered evidence of Monti’s contribution to the Nazi war effort. On Nov. 1, 1947, a Washington Post reporter broke the story, and

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; FPG/ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES

and family and scolded them in the sexiest of tones that they were fighting on the wrong side. Allied troops called her “Axis Sally,” among other less flattering names. (After the war she was arrested, charged with treason, tried in a U.S. court, convicted and sentenced to a long prison term.) From the outset Gillars loathed Monti, voicing suspicion about the deserter’s loyalties and risking the wrath of the Gestapo by refusing to work as long as he remained on

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Monti, photographed in U.S. custody after the war, initially concealed his pro-Nazi activities but ultimately served 11 years in prison for treason.

military authorities detained Monti, although he remained in uniform. On Jan. 26, 1948, minutes after the Army granted Monti an honorable discharge at New York’s Mitchel Field, the FBI arrested him. After psychiatrists deemed Monti fit to stand trial, a federal grand jury indicted him for 21 overt acts of treason. The minimum penalty was a five-year prison term and a $10,000 fine; the maximum was death. Monti’s trial was set to begin on Jan. 17, 1949, at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. In preparation prosecutors flew in “several score” witnesses from Europe to testify. But on that opening day of his trial Monti surprised virtually everyone by pleading guilty to all charges. Judge Robert Alexander Inch balked at accepting his confession without further evidence and required that either two witnesses corroborate the charges or the defendant himself confess in open court. Monti willingly took the stand and, according to The New York Times, answered all the prosecutor’s questions “calmly in the affirmative.” Judge Inch then asked the defendant if he had acted voluntarily, and when Monti responded he had, the judge said, “That’s enough for me.” Monti’s defense attorney then launched into a 20-minute plea for leniency. When asked by Inch if he wished to make any sentencing recommendations, the prosecutor simply stated he would “rely upon

the judgment” of the court, then reminded Inch, “This man did everything he could to commit treason; he left no stone unturned.” The judge agreed and imposed a prison sentence of 25 years and a fine of $10,000. Jailers returned Monti to the Manhattan House of Detention, from which authorities soon transferred him to the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., to serve his sentence. In 1951 Monti appealed the verdict, claiming, among other grounds, he had not acted with “treasonable intent,” his attorney had coerced him into confessing, and the trial itself represented double jeopardy. The court found otherwise and reaffirmed the sentence. He appealed again in 1958, this time contending that “the court which pronounced the sentence which the defendant is now serving was without jurisdiction.” The court again denied his appeal, and Monti returned to Leavenworth. He was ultimately paroled in 1960, after serving only 11 years of his 25-year sentence. He returned to Missouri, where he kept out of trouble until his death on Sept. 11, 2000.

In their pretrial mental health evaluation of Monti the team of psychiatrists from Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn determined he possessed above-average intelligence, with an IQ of 131. They also found him to be narcissistic and immature with obsessive-compulsive and paranoid tendencies. But, they maintained, he was legally sane. That leaves one nagging question: What would compel a bright and reportedly sane young U.S. Army Air Forces pilot to defect to the Germans at a point in the war when their defeat seemed all but imminent? Admittedly, in late 1944 Germany did manage to mount one last desperate offensive in the Battle of the Bulge, but by that juncture few savvy students of the war would have given the Nazis favorable odds on ultimate victory. Perhaps Monti’s warped ideology overshadowed his common sense, or perhaps serving the Nazi cause had been a long-standing dream he simply couldn’t give up. Whatever the reason, the man who had “left no stone unturned” in betrayal of his country became one of the most notorious of America’s World War II traitors. MH Ron Soodalter is a regular contributor to Military History. For further reading he recommends Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing, by Horst J.P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz; Berlin Calling: American Broadcasters in Service to the Third Reich, by John Carver Edwards; and American Swastika, by Charles Higham.

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Polynesian people who arrived in New Zealand by canoe between 1250 and 1300, the Maoris had developed a complex culture and mythology by the time Dutch explorer Abel Tasman “discovered” the islands in 1642. Theirs was a warrior culture that recognized tribal ownership of land, the use of which could be temporarily sold to outsiders. When British settlers arrived en masse in the early 19th century and began staking permanent land claims, it provoked a series of escalating clashes between 1843 and 1872 the Maoris termed Te Riri Pakeha (“White Man’s Anger”). Although the Maoris had no unified army and fielded no more than 1,500 warriors at a time, every man was raised to be a toa (warrior), with a code of conduct that allowed for everything from cannibalism to acquire a slain foe’s mana (power or prestige) to seemingly contradictory acts of chivalry. When entering battle, warriors would perform a haka peruperu, or war dance, in sight of the enemy, chanting and bearing fearsome expressions with tongues extended to signify quite literally, “We are going to kill and eat you!” When battling the British, the Maoris erected formidable pas—earthwork forts with interlinked trenches and wooden screens draped with flax as a buffer against artillery—and by the 1860s they had adopted European firearms and battle flags, believing the latter to have mana. The British ultimately prevailed on the battlefield, but as the Maori assimilated, they continued the land wars in the courts. Meanwhile, they and their onetime adversaries developed a mutual respect, and today the Maori warrior culture influences the traditions and ceremonies of the present-day New Zealand Defense Force [nzdf.mil.nz]. MH

British sailors acquired this maripi tuatini, or shark-tooth knife, in Queen Charlotte Sound during Captain James Cook’s 1769 voyage. Maoris used the maripi tuatinii for the ceremonial cutting of human flesh, either in post-battle butchery or as an expression of grief.

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New Zealand’s Polynesian people took pride in their warrior culture By Jon Guttman

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: THE BRITISH LIBRARY; GOTTFRIED LINDAUER/AUCKLAND ART GALLERY (2)

Maoris aboard a war canoe proclaim their defiance to Captain James Cook, who in 1769 mapped the entire New Zealand coastline with remarkable accuracy. Below left: In 1885 Bohemian-born artist Gottfried Lindauer painted this portrait of a Maori landowner, presumed to be Paramena Haereiti. Lindauer immigrated to New Zealand in 1874 and developed a lifelong fascination with the Maoris. Below right: Lindauer rendered this 1890 portrait of war chief Tamati Waka Nene, who holds a tewhatewha, a wooden club whose feather plume was meant to distract the enemy.

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ALINARI VIA GETTY IMAGES

Photographed around 1886, this Maori sports elaborate moku, traditional raised scars tinted with natural pigments that swirl around his face, enhancing his features and relating his social status. No two moku were alike, and the pain required to endure their application contributed to a warrior’s mana.

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GOTTFRIED LINDAUER/AUCKLAND ART GALLERY

Prominent Maori woman Pare Watene, painted by Lindauer in 1878, wears a flax cloak decorated with thongs and holds a patu pounamuu, or greenstone club. Both a symbol of prestige and a deadly close-quarters weapon, the patuu or meree is now a unique folk art item made primarily for tourists.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; MARTIN HUNTER/GETTY IMAGES; GOTTFRIED LINDAUER/AUCKLAND ART GALLERY; FLORIAN ZENZ/ARTSTATION.COM

Clockwise from top left: Photographed in 1903, an elderly chief with facial moku wears a kahu kiwi (kiwi feather cloak). A patuwielding member of the Te Tu Mataora dance team from Manawatu performs during the biennial Te Matatini performing arts festival [tematatini.co.nz], held in Christchurch in 2015. Chief Paora Tuhaere sat for this Lindauer portrait in 1895. The toki poutangata, a ceremonial adze with a greenstone blade lashed to a wooden handle adorned with bird feathers and dog hair, was a symbol of high rank, carried by someone with exceptional mana and leadership qualities.

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Crowds cheer on a Prussian heavy cavalry regiment as it passes through Berlin on the way to the front lines in August 1914.

OVER BY CHRISTMAS? Military analysts led people to believe World War I would be over by Christmas 1914—but new tactics and weapons proved that estimate wrong By James Simms

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In retrospect it is not difficult to understand why both the military and civilian intelligentsia of the early 20th century held the strong conviction any future war would be relatively short in duration. The continent’s recent experience seemed to support the notion. 56 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2017

In the mid-19th century Prussia had provoked three wars—the five-week German-Danish War of 1864, the six-week Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War, which ran some nine months but involved only eight weeks of fighting—that ultimately led

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

y January 1915 World War I was five months old, and the major European powers were entrenched in increasingly savage warfare. The battles at Liège and Ypres in Belgium, at Tannenberg in East Prussia, along the Marne in France and in Austro-Hungarian Galicia had already demonstrated the war was likely to be calamitous for all participants. The level of destruction, alarmingly high casualty rates and combatants’ growing reliance on extensive trench systems that discouraged maneuver warfare all indicated the conflict would be long, brutal and expensive in both blood and treasure. This reality not only stunned the people of the warring nations but also contradicted the expectations of the vast majority of generals, government officials and military analysts of the time. In the opening weeks of the conflict—that all too brief period marked by patriotic parades, rousing speeches and dashing cavalry charges—“experts” on all sides of the conflict had predicted it would be over by Christmas. While their assumption seemed logical enough in light of Europe’s recent military history, the advent of modern weaponry and widespread acceptance of the concept of total war soon proved the phrase “over by Christmas” both ridiculously optimistic and cruelly inaccurate.

CLOCKWISE, FROM LEFT: GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE/GETTY IMAGES; POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES

Opposite: German soldiers pose with some of the tools of modern warfare, including a “potato masher” grenade, a machine gun and a gas mask canister. Above: Different eras seemingly collide as saberbearing French cavalrymen gaze up at a passing airplane. Top right: Soldiers of the 5th London Rifle Brigade enjoy moments of peace with German Saxon troops during the 1914 Christmas Truce. Bottom right: A British crew at the front prepares to load a heavy artillery piece.

to the formation of the German empire. Prussia’s string of brilliant and seemingly effortless military victories impressed the period’s “thought leaders,” who assumed any subsequent conflict would follow the same pattern. This expectation was so ingrained in the minds of the generals and statesmen of Western and Central Europe that they completely ignored the implications of the 1861–65 American Civil War, the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War and the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War, each of which ushered in modern tactics and generated massive casualties. Another factor causing military leaders to tragically misjudge the nature and length of a future war was their

fundamental misunderstanding of how such technologically enhanced weapons as rifled artillery, magazine-fed rifles, machine guns, aircraft and more powerful explosives had forever altered the nature of combat. These newer, more lethal weapons had industrialized the practice of war, expanding the relatively compact battlefields of earlier ages into vast killing fields, across which massed formations marching in impressive and colorful array were quickly and efficiently reduced to shattered equipment and scattered corpses. Ironically, the few military leaders who took into account the advances in weaponry drew entirely incorrect conclusions. They assumed such weapons would allow an army to quickly overwhelm an enemy’s defenses, making offense the preferred tactic. This attitude took graphic expression in the strategy developed by Louis Loyzeau de Grandmaison, chief of operations of the French General Staff, who proclaimed that the army, “returning to its traditions, recognizes no law save that of the offensive.” Unfortunately for millions of soldiers, this reliance on a primarily

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Casualties incurred by year’s end indicated the struggle would be far longer and bloodier than imagined conflict. Those who considered the issue at all were essentially unanimous in their assumption that even the most financially robust nations could not long sustain the enormous expenditures modern war would entail. After all, the new military technologies would consume vast amounts of money and resources, as would the need to maintain large standing armies and navies. The assumption that no economy could sustain an extended conflict was ref lected in the early stages of the war when both

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Britain and Russia optimistically proclaimed they would conduct “business as usual,” neither restructuring its economy to finance a lengthy war. Yet as the war dragged on into 1915, London and St. Petersburg joined most other belligerent nations in putting their economies on a “war footing,” mobilizing their markets and means of production and distribution in order to maintain its armies in the field. Finally, the conviction regarding the brevity of modern war arose from a prevailing contemporary belief that armed conflict was an acceptable means of solving international disputes. In general the leaders and people of the soon-to-be combatant states agreed with Clausewitz that war is simply the continuation of politics through other means. In 1914 war was, therefore, seen as a viable instrument of international policy, participants assuming their political goals justified the expenditure of relatively few lives. Had Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II and the heads of state of England, France and Italy had any idea of the ultimate human and financial cost of the war, they almost certainly would have avoided entering into such an enterprise. In the end, victors and vanquished suffered equally. Ironically, the horror of the conflict made most subsequent European leaders and their people staunchly anti-war—a sentiment that informed British and French responses to

CLOCKWISE, FROM LEFT: PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES; AGENCE ROL/GALLICA; SUDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

offensive strategy wholly ignored the dictum of Prussian general and strategist Carl von Clausewitz that a defensive strategy is the stronger form of modern warfare. As it turned out, the advent of advanced weaponry made the defense supreme on the Western Front, prompting four years of costly, fruitless stalemate. Another rationale for the belief modern wars were destined to be short centered on the economics of armed

Opposite left: A soldier unearths bodies from the battlefield at Ypres, Belgium, where the Germans first employed mass poison gas attacks. Opposite, top right: A civilian strolls past the ruins of St. Martin’s Cathedral in Ypres. Opposite, bottom right: Soldiers advance during the 1914 First Battle of the Marne, which dashed German hopes for a short war. Above: Mounds of spent Allied artillery casings near the front speak to the massive number of rounds fired at German lines.

Adolf Hitler and the rise of Nazism and, in a sense, made World War II inevitable.

drink toasts, exchange gifts and even play a little soccer. When appalled superior officers put a stop to the informal truce, the soldiers returned to their respective trenches and resumed the fight. As the war dragged on the embittered opponents met any attempts at similar fraternization with artillery or machine gun fire. Anyone still foolish enough to believe that a mass-scale modern war can be handily won “by Christmas” should recall the carnage of World War I and thoughtfully recite the closing stanza of Scottish-born poet Frederick Niven’s “A Carol From Flanders”:

TOM AITKEN/NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

World War I was far from over by Christmas 1914, of course. Indeed, casualties incurred by year’s end indicated all too clearly the struggle would be far longer and bloodier than analysts had imagined. By December 31 France had suffered some 995,000 total casualties; Russia, about the same; Germany, nearly 700,000; and Britain, just shy of 100,000, representing some 63 percent of its committed manpower. While the conflict was not over by Dec. 25, 1914, the holiday did engender one of the most poignant and touching episodes of the war. On the first Christmas Eve of the conflict, in various sectors along the Western Front, German troops began singing carols and putting up decorations, and British and French troops did likewise. On Christmas Day emboldened troops met in no man’s land to

O ye who read this truthful rime From Flanders, kneel and say: God speed the time when every day Shall be as Christmas Day. MH James Y. Simms Jr., a former U.S. Marine Corps rifle platoon leader, is a professor emeritus of Russian and modern European history at Virginia’s Hampden-Sydney College. For further reading he recommends The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War, edited by Hew Strachan; The First World War: A Very Short Introduction, by Michael Howard; and The Pity of War: Explaining World War I, by Niall Ferguson.

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PRELUDE TO REVOLUTION

ROBERT GRIFFING

The Earl of Dunmore stamped his name on a 1774 Indian war and took credit for its success, earning the lasting enmity of the Virginia militiamen who actually fought By John Bertrand

The fearsome warriors of the Shawnee people and other Ohio tribes sought to prevent British expansion of its Virginia colony west of the Allegheny Mountains.

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John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, received his baptism by fire long before the engagement at Point Pleasant. Born in 1730 in Tymouth, Scotland, Murray at the tender age of 15 became a page to Charles Edward Stuart, “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” and was present at the Jacobite pretender’s crushing defeat by the British at Culloden in 1746. After that historic battle Murray’s immediate family was put under house arrest, his father, William, imprisoned in the Tower of London. In 1750 William Murray received a con-

Dunmore declared war to ‘pacify the hostile Indian war bands’ opposed to Virginia’s expansion ditional pardon, and son John, 20, joined the British army. In 1756, after the deaths of both his uncle and father, John Murray became the fourth Earl of Dunmore. In the late 1760s he moved his young family to the American colonies and in 1770 was appointed governor of New York. When the governor of Virginia died the following year, Dunmore—who had excellent connections in London through brother-in-law Granville Leveson-Gower, the second Earl of Gower—was appointed to replace him. The Virginia Dunmore inherited was the largest and most populous British colony in North America, its 600,000 residents (40 percent of whom were slaves) spread from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean across vast tracts of rich farmland to the west of the Allegheny Mountains, the latter region

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purchased under treaty in 1768 from the Cherokee Nation and the Iroquois Confederacy. Dunmore himself was looking to get rich and shortly after his arrival used his privileged position to acquire 100,000 acres of the former Indian land. Expansion of the Virginia colony west of the Alleghenies sparked conflict with the Ohio Indians—especially the Shawnee, who had repeatedly sought to unite the Ohio tribes against the encroaching whites. Mutual hostility presaged several violent confrontations, the most infamous occurring in 1773 when then obscure frontiersman Daniel Boone and some 50 other settlers sought to create the first permanent settlement in Kentucky. That October a supply party of eight men and boys was en route to meet up with Boone’s main group when ambushed by a band of Delawares, Shawnees and Cherokees. Two of the party managed to escape. The others—including Boone’s eldest son, 17-year-old James—were tortured to death. That and similar incidents led Dunmore to declare war in May 1774 “to pacify the hostile Indian war bands.” The Virginia governor’s main opponent was Chalakatha Shawnee Chief Hokelesqua, or Cornstalk. In his mid-50s, Cornstalk was an experienced warrior who had led his braves to victory over British Maj. Gen. Edward Braddock’s troops at the 1755 Battle of the Monongahela during the French and Indian War. Cornstalk had also fought at Bushy Run in 1763 and led numerous other raids on hunting parties and settlements during Pontiac’s Rebellion. In the coming clash at Point Pleasant he would command an estimated 425 Shawnees, 150 Mingos and 125 warriors from other bands and again prove himself a highly competent combat leader.

For a soldier steeped in European military tradition, Dunmore showed unusual foresight in his plans for a campaign in the American wilderness—a campaign in which he was determined not to repeat the mistakes that had plagued British forces in the early years of the French and Indian War. Unable to use regular troops, Dunmore recruited two separate militia forces, dubbed the Northern and Southern armies. The 1,200-man Northern army, under his personal command, consisted of militiamen already west of the Alleghenies, while those of the 1,100-man Southern army hailed from southwestern Virginia—a logical choice, as established trails led from there directly to the Ohio Valley. Dunmore had also arranged for well-organized supply trains, each army driving cattle, to be slaughtered on the march, while flour and other staples were to be toted in by packhorse and canoe.

VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY/SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY

W

hat could be considered the opening shots of the American Revolution came not at Lexington and Concord, Mass., in April 1775 but six months earlier and 750 miles southwest at a spot called Point Pleasant, at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers (in presentday West Virginia). The only battle in a five-month conflict known as Lord Dunmore’s War saw besieged Virginia militiamen drive off a combined force of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandotte and Cayuga Indians. In one of those fateful ironies of history the nominal commander of the Virginians, a man who stamped his name on the conflict, would become their bitter enemy less than a year later.

Scottish-born John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, joined the British army at 20 and became Virginia’s colonial governor at age 41.

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Dunmore’s subordinates were largely experienced officers, many veterans of the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s Rebellion, and included such future Revolutionary War notables as Daniel Morgan and George Rodgers Clark. Moreover, the majority of Dunmore’s men were well versed in backwoods survival skills, wore suitable gear for the rough terrain and supplied their own weapons and ammunition. Despite his thorough planning, however, Dunmore made a potentially disastrous decision at the outset of the campaign. Believing the mere presence of a large body of armed men would compel the Indians to seek peace terms, he chose en route to redirect his Northern army and encamp on the Ohio at the mouth of the Hocking (present-day Hockingport, Ohio), a site suitable for a peace conference. Meanwhile, the Southern army commander, Colonel Andrew Lewis, naturally assuming the objective was to engage and decisively defeat the largest possible number of Indians, marched his men toward his enemies’ main villages and encamped at the agreed-on rendezvous spot at Point Pleasant, at the junction of the Kanawha and Ohio—two days’ canoe ride downriver from Dunmore’s new endpoint. Why Dunmore failed to convey his intentions to Lewis remains unknown. One theory suggests he deliberately left the Irish-born Virginian to his own devices. Tensions between Britain and the colonies were on the rise at the time, and Dunmore may have considered that allowing the Indians to wipe out Lewis’ force would be an effective way of eliminat-

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ing a large number of would-be enemies—men whose experience would make them indispensable to a rebel army. Rumor had it the British commander also may have been courting Indian allies along the Ohio, allies on whom Britain could rely to help put down any subsequent colonial rebellion.

Indian scouts shadowed both militia armies as they moved west, and Cornstalk surely realized Dunmore’s decision to divide his command—by chance or design—offered the outnumbered Indian force an opportunity to defeat the interlopers. Cornstalk and his fellow leaders decided to strike Lewis’ smaller Southern army at Point Pleasant before Dunmore could reinforce him. After a well-organized march of 160 miles in just 19 days, Lewis and his militiamen went into camp at Point Pleasant. The Southern army commander and Dunmore had been in contact through couriers since starting the campaign, but because they’d begun their marches at different times and were moving toward different objectives, neither was certain where the other was at any given time. On October 9 Lewis received a dispatch from Dunmore instructing him to rendezvous at Pickaway Plains, deep in the Ohio wilderness some 80 miles north of Point Pleasant. Insisting his packhorses needed rest, Lewis replied he would not be able to meet up by the date specified. He did not seem overly concerned at being so far from any reinforcement, a confidence rooted in the knowledge he occupied a strong position—buffered to the south by the Kanawha and to the west by the Ohio—and his belief the majority of hostile Indians were closer to Dunmore than they were to him. His latter assumption was misplaced, for a few miles upriver Cornstalk was preparing to attack.

NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES (2)

was often characterized by bloody, small-scale raids (above and center), Shawnee Chief Hokelesqua, or Cornstalk (opposite, right), was a capable and experienced veteran of two major wars and numerous smaller encounters.

Chief Cornstalk

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

The Indian leader actually had little enthusiasm for the coming battle. While certain of his warriors’ courage, he realized victory would be a long shot. His force remained outnumbered, and even if his men were able to wipe out Lewis’ force, they would still have to contend with Dunmore’s larger Northern army. With no hope of significant reinforcement, he worried his men would be unable to fight another battle in quick succession. Not wanting to dampen his warriors’ morale, on the night of October 9 Cornstalk led them in war dances. The next morning, an hour before sunrise, he led his force in a long, snakelike column toward the enemy camp.

Though stealthy, Cornstalk’s war party did not go unnoticed—one of Lewis’ pickets spotted the approaching Indians and ran to warn the camp. Cornstalk noticed. Seeking to retain a measure of surprise, he ordered his men to halt in place and prepare to ambush the militiamen he was certain would march out to verify the sentry’s sighting. He deployed the warriors along a narrow front between the Ohio to the west and a 250-foot-high west-facing ridge some 600 yards to the east. Cornstalk knew whichever side reached the top first could dominate the terrain below. As Cornstalk predicted, two 150-man detachments under Colonels William Fleming and Charles Lewis (Andrew Lewis’ brother) soon marched out to the place where the picket had spotted the Indians. Suddenly, the woods erupted in fire, smoke and singing musket balls. The opening volley killed the detachments’ scouts, wounded Lewis in the chest and felled many of those standing near him. Fleming, too, took a ball to the chest, and both colonels stumbled back to camp. While some of the Virginians broke and ran under

the initial onslaught, battle-tested men found cover and fought back the best they could. The few remaining unwounded officers managed to organize a defense, thus preventing the battle from becoming a rout. As hysterical men streamed back into camp, Southern army commander Andrew Lewis acted with cool determination. He first ordered his remaining 800 militiamen to form companies and march in turn to the relief of the advance troops. He then directed those who had retreated to fell trees and use them to build breastworks. Although buoyed by their initial success, the Indians lost momentum as militiamen poured to the front. Cornstalk soon realized he faced a battle of attrition he could not possibly win, nor could he turn either of Lewis’ flanks and exploit his warriors’ superior maneuverability. He would have to find another way to break their line. As the battle wore on, the Virginians found themselves in an unusual position. Long accustomed to war parties that made hit-and-run attacks before melting back into the wilderness, Lewis’ men found themselves fighting a setpiece battle against an Indian adversary who stood his ground. What’s more, Cornstalk and his warriors shouted

For War and Peace English soldiers and colonial settlers were so impressed by the tomahawks wielded by Indian warriors that both sides in the American Revolution carried custom-made versions of the weapon, like this one crafted in the early 1770s by armorer and trader Richard Butler. Many were richly decorated and included a pipe bowl for smoking the peace.

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Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, composed of escaped slaves, fought Virginia militiamen during the American Revolution.

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encouragement to one another and hurled insults in English, calling the militiamen “white dogs” and “sons of bitches.” The seesaw battle, marked by hand-to-hand single combat, raged into the early afternoon, neither side able to gain the advantage. The tide finally turned, howOHIO Indian ever, when a company of militiamen worked its way OHIO camp RIVER along the Kanawha to outflank the Indians and POINT pour heavy fire into their ranks. This proved the PLEASANT WEST VIRGINIA final straw for Cornstalk, who ordered a rearguard to keep the Virginians occupied while his main KANAWHA RIVER force withdrew. It was impossible to determine the CROOKED CREEK number of Indian casualties, as the survivors dumped many of their dead into the Ohio and carried off the OHIO wounded on makeshift litters. RIVER While Lewis’ Southern army suffered some 80 dead— including his brother and Colonel Fleming—and 140 Southern wounded, the Virginians had driven off their attackers. army Cornstalk and his allies fled north to their home village camp near Pickaway Plains. A week later, after making provision for the wounded KANAWHA and leaving 300 men to safeguard them, Lewis and his reRIVER maining militiamen crossed the Ohio to keep their rendezvous with Dunmore. En route a messenger arrived with a dispatch from the earl, informing Lewis treaty negotiations freedom to all slaves who abandoned their Patriot masters were in progress and ordering his return to Point Pleasant. to join the British. The move prompted tens of thousands of The indignant Virginian pressed on and was within sight Virginia slaves to escape, an estimated 800 to 2,000 seeking of Cornstalk’s village when Dunmore himself ventured out refuge with the “hero” of Point Pleasant. Dunmore promptly to meet him and reiterate his orders. Only then did Lewis organized several hundred of them into his own Ethioreluctantly turn his men around and march back to the pian Regiment. Though he led the unit to victory at Kemp’s Kanawha. Within a few weeks the Southern army disbanded. Landing, Va., that November 17, the regiment lost decisively On October 19 Dunmore and his officers, who had taken at Great Bridge, south of Norfolk, on December 9. Patriot forces subsequently seized Norfolk, while Dunno part in the fighting, met with Cornstalk to sign the Treaty of Camp Charlotte, the terms of which stated the more, his troops and panicked Virginia Loyalists sought Shawnee would cease hunting south of the Ohio and stop refuge aboard British ships in the harbor. After a smallpox harassing settlers along the river. That in turn opened the outbreak wiped out most of his regiment, Dunmore formally door to settlement on lands that ultimately encompassed the states of Kentucky and Ohio.

Battle of Point Pleasant

OPPOSITE: JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY; BRIAN WALKER

After three months in the field Dunmore returned to Williamsburg, claiming the mantle of victory, while colonists in the know held their tongues in the interest of peace. Within months, however, the gloves came off as tensions escalated between Britain and the colonies. Before marching from the city, Dunmore had dissolved the disaffected Virginia House of Burgesses. In his absence the burgesses had elected delegates to the First Continental Congress, and though Dunmore railed against the rising tide of revolution, he took no decisive action to stop the colony’s rift toward independence. Patrick Henry’s March 1775 “Give me liberty, or give me death!” speech—delivered to Virginians at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Richmond— helped convince colonial officials to approve a resolution calling for armed resistance to British rule. In November 1775 Dunmore cemented his standing as an enemy of the state by proclaiming martial law and offering

Indian survivors dumped many of their dead into the Ohio and carried off the wounded on litters

disbanded its few survivors. On New Year’s Day 1776 the British bombarded the town in retribution before sailing away. Dunmore briefly set up operations at Portsmouth, but events in his lost colony ultimately prompted him to concede defeat and return to Britain. Regardless, he continued to draw his pay as governor until war’s end in 1783. The ever-proud earl sat in the House of Lords and turned a stint as governor of the Bahamas before dying in his late 70s in 1809. MH Virginia educator John Bertrand has written for numerous publications. For further reading he recommends Point Pleasant, 1774: Prelude to the American Revolution, by John F. Winkler.

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Reviews

The Man Who Captured Washington: Major General Robert Ross and the War of 1812, by John McCavitt and Christopher T. George, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2016, $29.95

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What Americans know as the War of 1812 and the British simply call the American War had other names in its time. Among President James Madison’s detractors, it was “Mr. Madison’s War,” while his supporters called it the “Second War of Independence.” For too many present-day Americans it may as well be called the “Forgotten War.” But this sideshow to the Napoleonic wars had its share of dramatic crises, not least of which was the only time the U.S. capital fell into enemy hands. The commander of the small British expeditionary force that briefly occupied Washington after defeating the U.S. Army at Bladensburg, Md., on Aug. 24, 1814, was Irishborn Maj. Gen. Robert Ross.

In Vol. 53 of the University of Oklahoma’s Campaigns and Commanders series, authors McCavitt and George examine the life of this career officer who had performed admirably in service against Napoléon Bonaparte before his reassignment across the Atlantic. Despite his notoriety in American history for burning such notable buildings as the Capitol and the White House, Ross reportedly treated Washington’s citizens with humanitarian regard. Nonetheless, the authors lament his failure to spare the Library of Congress—actually housed in the Capitol at the time—suggesting he could have ordered its 3,000 books transferred elsewhere.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The Forgotten War

A period illustration depicts the Aug. 24, 1814, burning of Washington, D.C., by British troops under Maj. Gen. Robert Ross, mounted at upper right.

According to the authors, the primary reason for Washington’s fall was the U.S. Army’s complete underestimation of the danger the enemy posed. Secretary of War John Armstrong said the following of the British state of readiness: “Have they artillery? No. Have they cavalry? No. Then don’t tell an old soldier that any regular army will or can come.” One challenge that took the British by surprise was the terrible summer heat the soldiers endured during their rapid march to Bladensburg (similar to the heat that bedeviled Confederates troops as they approached Washington in July 1864). The capture of Washington put a strain on both the U.S. government and economy. Congress even discussed the possibility of choosing another city as capital. Had Ross heeded his orders and burned Washington to the ground, its days might well have been numbered—and had Ross, marching with equal determination on Baltimore, not fallen mortally wounded just before the September 12 Battle of North Point, the same might have been said of the United States. An impressive granite obelisk dedicated to Ross’ memory stands in his native village of Rostrevor, Ireland. This biography will also preserve the memory of the dynamic if largely forgotten general of a forgotten war. —Mike Oppenheim The Campaigns of Sargon II, King of Assyria, 721–705 BC, by Sarah C. Melville, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2016, $32.95 In this Neo-Assyrian history Clarkson University professor Sarah Melville presents a critical interpretation of available sources for Sargon II’s reign, using military, political, economic and cultural context to shed light on the methods of Assyrian imperialism and contemporary geopolitics. “Above all,” the author notes, “it establishes Sar-

gon II as an exceptional military leader and visionary ruler.” Although Melville uses the chronology of Sargon’s campaigns as a means of organizing the book’s material, the work itself is more a political, cultural, economic and diplomatic history of the Sargonid dynasty than pure military history, as its title implies. Drawing on surviving original written sources, palace reliefs and archaeological finds, she offers an insightful, multifaceted analysis of the period. The recent establishment of large academic repositories for Assyriological materials, many of which are searchable online, afforded the author access to materials that would have been impossible for almost any scholar to reference a decade ago. Melville has made good use of these materials, as her extensive bibliography bears witness. For the military historian, however, this is somewhat of a disappointment, as it offers little new material about the Assyrian military or its field operations. The author’s strict reliance on original sources may have led her to ignore previous histories that offered important insights into Sargon’s army and his mil-

itary operations. That said, the military historian has much to gain from reading Melville’s book, in that it provides the all-important broader context in which military events must always be understood, especially in the ancient period. The work is well written, well organized and strongly footnoted, the latter always an important factor among dedicated readers and researchers. Unfortunately, the publisher chose to place Melville’s illuminating footnotes at the back of the book instead of at the bottom of each relevant page and to group maps in one folio rather than inserting them where relevant. The need for the reader to switch back and forth is a disservice to a very competent author and her fine book. Highly recommended. —Richard A. Gabriel The Boy in the Mask: The Hidden World of Lawrence of Arabia, by Dick Benson-Gyles, The Lilliput Press, Dublin, Ireland, 2016, $30 Author Benson-Gyles has written the latest in a long line of biographies of this most enigmatic of heroes, a man who once said his “self-distrusting shyness held a mask, often a mask of indifference or flippancy before my face, and puzzled me.” The author experienced his own watershed Lawrence moment in 1962 while watching David Lean’s epic film Lawrence of Arabia. So began a quest, beginning in Dublin and followed by visits to the heart of Ireland to throw further light on Lawrence’s origins. Lawrence’s father, Anglo-Irish aristocrat Thomas Tighe Chapman, deserted his wife and four daughters to elope with their governess, Sarah Lawrence, who was to bear him five sons. Their second, Thomas Edward— known to the family as Ned and decades later to the world as Lawrence of Arabia—was born in Wales in 1888.

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Reviews The growing family subsequently moved about to avoid discovery before finally settling in Oxford, the children largely ignorant of their parents’ scandalous secret. His illegitimacy increasingly tormented young Lawrence, as did his name. He felt he was a man without roots who should simply have been a Chapman, like his father. Behind the heroic facade, then, was a man of many parts, a mystery in many ways, who with his dedication in Seven Pillars of Wisdom created yet another. “To S.A.,” it commences, “I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars.…” Who was S.A.? Biographers have put forward several possibilities. Benson-Gyles, who spent long years researching his identity and, indeed, eventually met S.A., reveals the answer in this fine biography of a most extraordinary military commander and complex man. —David Saunders Consequence: A Memoir, by Eric Fair, Henry Holt & Co., New York, N.Y., 2016, $26 Eric Fair was an interrogator at central Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison. In this splendid memoir he emphasizes he was not among those whose 2003 photographs of prisoner abuse scandalized the world. Those were guards. He was an interrogator, who strictly adhered to guidelines in the field manual (yes, there is a manual on interrogation) and the advice of superiors. Fair was raised in a churchgoing Presbyterian family and never lost his faith. After college he aced the police civil service exam but lost out to applicants with “preference points,” so he joined the Army to earn a veteran’s preference. As the Army was oversupplied with military police officers at the time, the recruiter suggested Fair

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apply to the elite Defense Language Institute. He passed the entrance test and after more than a year of intense study emerged as an Arabic linguist. Discharged in 2001, he became a civilian police officer and then applied to the DEA. To his dismay he was rejected when the pre-employment physical revealed a rare, severe heart condition. Confined to a desk yet yearning to join the war, he learned that private contractors were snapping up people with his skills. Hired with no background check or exam, he was sent to Iraq and assigned to Abu Ghraib. Fair had no training and scant experience in interrogation, but his language skills and experience as a police officer placed him far ahead of many veteran interrogators who had learned on the job. In the Hollywood film of this book there would be bad Americans, who thrive on torturing suspects, and good Americans, who object. According to Fair, however, everyone at Abu Ghraib abused the prisoners. Interrogators, civilian and military, were overwhelmed. Under pressure to get useful information, Fair says, superiors urged them to be creative, and his colleagues showed him the ropes. Interrogators beat, humiliated

and starved prisoners. Others were tied in excruciating positions to a device Fair calls the “Palestine chair” (reportedly out of acknowledgment that Israelis were masters when it came to interrogating Arabs). Such techniques produced useful information, but Fair grew to hate his job. Some colleagues shared his feelings. As civilians they had the option to quit, but as that would demonstrate lack of moral fiber, few did. Fair began drinking heavily. He transferred to Baghdad and Fallujah to work with fighting units, but matters there were hardly better, as ground forces often mistreated captured Iraqis. Fair did ultimately quit and return stateside, but he was plagued by alcoholism, emotional outbursts and nightmares that suggested post-traumatic stress disorder. His heart failed, ultimately requiring a transplant, but gradually, with the help of a spectacularly supportive wife and his Christian faith, he recovered, wrote about his experiences and eventually produced this memoir. The writing is witty and eloquent. Cynics might suggest Fair mulled over his life and wrote about it so repeatedly that he finally got it right. Perhaps that is what happened, but literary brilliance aside, it rings uncomfortably true. —Mike Oppenheim Victoria’s Scottish Lion: The Life of Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde, by Adrian Greenwood, Trafalgar Square, Chicago, Ill., 2015, $49.95 Victoria’s Scottish Lion is the biography of one of the most remarkable fighting men of the 19th century, one who managed to stand out in an era and an army distinguished by remarkable soldiers. From his commissioning as a teenage ensign in the British army, Colin Campbell attained the rank of field marshal and a peerage

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by the time of his death in 1863 at age 70. It was remarkable that this son of a Glasgow cabinetmaker, neither wealthy nor politically connected, should have risen so high in an officer corps dominated by upper-class elites at a time when high military rank was available for purchase. More remarkable was his mere survival. Campbell fought his first battle at age 15. Over the next half-century, on the Iberian Peninsula and in Canada, Ireland, South America, India, China and the Crimea, Campbell remained at the sharp end, fighting in numerous battles and suffering multiple wounds. While others schemed and bought their way to promotion, Campbell waged and won battles around the globe. When finally given command of a brigade in the Crimean War, Campbell, though by far the oldest and most experienced soldier, was the most junior of the brigadiers —a fact that speaks volumes about the British peerage. Campbell performed with such distinction at the battles of the Alma and Balaclava in that otherwise disastrous campaign that even the British high command could no longer ignore his qualities. Consequently, when the Indian Mutiny broke out three years later, it was Campbell they tapped to command the army sent to suppress it. Once again he completed his mission successfully. The same can be said of Greenwood’s rousing saga of a professional soldier

in an army dominated by aristocratic amateurs. —Robert Guttman

Operation Agreement: Jewish Commandos and the Raid on Tobruk, by John Sadler, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, U.K., 2016, $28 Although the name Operation Agreement may be new to many, it actually furnished the subject for at least one novel and no less than two feature films. Yes, there was a secret unit in the British army known as the Special Interrogation Group, or SIG, comprising German Jewish refugees recruited in Palestine. Furthermore, the German High Command did issue orders that captured members of the SIG were to be shot out of hand. Finally, the SIG did participate in a raid in which its members were to sneak British commandos into Tobruk by masquerading as German soldiers escorting British POWs into captivity. Contrary to the fictionalized versions, however, that raid was not the entire

story. It was one part of a very complex operation that included an amphibious assault on Tobruk carried out by British army and Royal Marine units, some of which were inserted by submarine. Also missing from most accounts are the coordinated attacks by land forces that emerged from the desert to strike other enemy targets, including Benghazi. Where fiction really diverges from fact is that while the filmed depictions of Operation Agreement ended in costly success, the actual operation was a fiasco, claiming the lives of some 800 Allied personnel and capture of another 576. It also cost the Royal Navy one cruiser, two destroyers and four motor torpedo boats. In Operation Agreement Sadler candidly recounts the true story of one of the most disastrous Allied combined operations of World War II. The fault, of course, lay not with the SIG or any of the other military units involved. Indeed, the participants displayed plenty of heroism. The true origin of the disaster lay in the plan itself, which was ill conceived, overly ambitious and hastily arranged. Worst of all, planners wholly disregarded lessons learned from mistakes made on previous raids. As a result, Operation Agreement required the coordinated actions of disparate land, sea and air elements, including naval and amphibious units, all converging from different directions with precise timing to

achieve success. Planners provided insufficient air and naval support, relied too much on diversionary tactics and completely underestimated the enemy’s ability to repel the raid. Worst of all, the plan ignored two basic premises: the KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) principle and Murphy’s Law (Anything that can go wrong, will). The original proposal had called for a surgical strike on Tobruk by a relatively small force of commandos coming out of the desert and then disappearing back into it. As Sadler relates, however, new players modified the plan, adding new objectives and introducing naval and amphibious elements. Operation Agreement is a must-read not only for military historians but also for military officers. It is foremost a cautionary tale for military planners, providing a textbook case of how not to plan and implement a successful combined operation. —Robert Guttman The Defence of Sevastopol, 1941–1942: The Soviet Perspective, by Clayton Donnell, Pen & Sword Military, Barnsley, U.K., 2016, $34.95 Crimea and the naval base of Sevastopol were not among the primary targets for the Wehrmacht’s Army Group South when Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. All that changed when Crimeabased Soviet bombers hit the

oil fields in Ploesti. For their part, the Soviet navy and army at Sebastopol had prepared for a seaborne invasion. Thus both sides were slow to appreciate Crimea’s geostrategic import. Once the Germans did, their decision to task General Erich von Manstein with seizing the peninsula was a classic case of the right man in the right position, right place and right time. Although Donnell claims Manstein underestimated his opponents, he acknowledges the German commander’s decisive role in taking the region in 250 days—far less than the 348 days French, British, Turkish and Sardinian forces needed to occupy Sevastopol in 1854–55. Among the interesting details in this overview of the operation is that the traditional Russian names of Sebastopol’s forts were in fact code names given them by the Germans. Fort Stalin, for example, was just Battery 365 to the Soviets, while Batteries 30 and 35 became Forts Maxim Gorki I and II. A more significant revelation was the utter fail-

ure by the Soviet intelligence services to pinpoint several key German positions, including those of the heavy artillery batteries and the 600 mm Karl mortars, or to notice the arrival of the 800 mm “Dora” gun, the largest mobile artillery piece ever made. Another interesting point Donnell makes is that without air support, a naval base under siege— even if it has underground factories and the strongest fortifications ever made— will ultimately fall. The German Eleventh Army fought its campaign at Sevastopol from early autumn 1941 until mid-summer 1942. On its successful conclusion Manstein was promoted to field marshal. Soon after, however, the German High Command deactivated the Eleventh Army and transferred Manstein to the Leningrad sector. Thus, when General Friedrich Paulus asked for new divisions to support him in Stalingrad, no such reinforcements were available in the region. In that respect readers may find reason to agree with the author that the Crimea-Sebastopol campaign went down as a lost victory. —Thomas Zacharis The Spy in Hitler’s Inner Circle: Hans-Thilo Schmidt and the Intelligence That Decoded Enigma, by Paul Paillole, Casemate Publishers, Havertown, Pa., 2016, $32.95 In The Spy in Hitler’s Inner Circle Paul Paillole, an expe-

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Yenne highlights the 1st American Volunteer Group (aka “Flying Tigers”), whose pilots—dubbed “outlaws” and known for the “shark face” nose art on their Curtiss P-40 Warhawks— skated the razor’s edge of neutrality laws to help China combat Japanese airpower even before the U.S. entry into World War II.

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rienced French officer who served in the Deuxième Bureau (Second Bureau of the General Staff) before and during World War II, profiles Hans-Thilo Schmidt, a German cipher clerk who sold key information to the French intelligence service from 1931 to 1943. Schmidt (code name Asche/H.E.) passed numerous secret plans and projects of the Third Reich to the French, including information received by the agent’s unsuspecting older brother, General Rudolf Schmidt. Perhaps Schmidt’s most important contribution was intelligence that helped Allied cryptanalysts crack the German Enigma machine’s myriad code combinations. The Deuxième Bureau shared that information with the Polish secret service, which in turn passed it to the Polish General Staff’s Cipher Bureau. As Paillole notes, it was that bureau’s technicians and mathematicians who broke Enigma. After the collapse of Poland and France, the data passed to Bletchley Park, England, where physicist Alan Turing modified it. Once unlocked, Enigma provided vital intelligence affecting the outcomes of the Battle of Britain and the Allied landings in Normandy. If the 1944 German offensive in the Ardennes proved an exception, it was largely because the Germans maintained total communications silence for days before their stunning attack. For Paillole, Schmidt was as significant as Richard

Titan: The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoléon, by William R. Nester, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2016, $34.95

Sorge, the Soviet agent whose intelligence from Japan on Oct. 15, 1941, confirmed Japan would not attack the Soviet Union, thus allowing the Russians to rush Siberian garrison troops westward in time to participate in the Battle of Moscow. While making such a comparison, however, it must be noted Sorge was motivated by ideology, whereas Schmidt, of Prussian aristocratic origin, committed treason against the Reich strictly for money. Schmidt seemingly dismissed the possibility the French agent to whom he passed his information, Rodolphe Lemoine (code name Rex, and actually of German origin), would betray him to the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Fortunately for the Allies, even then the Germans didn’t realize the Allies already knew the secrets of Enigma. The Spy in Hitler’s Inner Circle should appeal both to World War II scholars and especially to enthusiasts of the belle époque of espionage. —Thomas Zacharis

In a book that bears close examination in the wake of Britain’s recent secession from the European Union, Nester examines how Britain became Great Britain and a great power by the end of the Napoleonic wars. According to the author, William Pitt— the nation’s youngest and second longest-serving prime minister—was the driver behind Britain’s ultimate defeat of France. Although he died a decade before Waterloo, he was known thereafter as the “savior of Europe.” Pitt arrested and eventually reversed the national debt with a 1786 bill that raised taxes, largely on the wealthy, while streamlining government so it did more and cost less. From 1784 to 1792 he kept the annual national budget steady, with some £1.5 million in civil expenses and £4 million in military expenses. Meanwhile, he increased the Royal Navy’s budget, permitting it to sortie 90 ships of the line in 1793. From 1789 to 1815 British leaders devised and led most of the seven coalitions against the revolutionary and Napoleonic governments of France. This was not without its challenges; for example, all of the Allies favored financing their efforts with silver, not paper promissory notes. The war also multiplied the en-

listed force of the field army, which cost a lot more money. Without the financial transformations achieved under Pitt’s watch, even with the resources and resourcefulness that would soon launch its industrial revolution, Britain could not have afforded the expenses of war. From the apex of Britain’s military contribution the author turns the reader’s attention to Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, the general who never lost a major battle and who considered Salamanca, Vittoria and Waterloo his finest hours. On a more dramatic note, the author credits Horatio Nelson with taking the “total war” concept to sea. Nester also underlines the role played by Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, another great British statesman of the age. Austria’s Klemens von Metternich paid tribute to the latter for being “the most European and the least insular of all the foreign ministers.” A good many readers of this excellent book may agree with the author that present-day Britain is in need of both statesmen and commanders of this bygone caliber. —Thomas Zacharis Betrayal of an Army: Mesopotamia, 1914–1916, by N.S Nash, Pen & Sword Military, Barnsley, U.K., 2016, $44.95 “How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power by the favour and contrivance of their kind?”

pondered Rudyard Kipling in his poem Mesopotamia. Written in July 1917 and published simultaneously in The New York Times and London’s Morning Post, Kipling’s verses were a damning indictment of those who had dragged Great Britain into the Mesopotamian campaign, a military misadventure described at the time as “nobody’s child.”

At stake was oil, of which Great Britain had precious little to fuel its battle fleet, but which was available in vast quantities at the head of the Persian Gulf. With German influence in Turkey growing, British fears about essential oil supplies intensified, and on Nov. 5, 1914, Britain declared war on the Ottoman empire. The subsequent campaign in Mesopotamia—as brilliantly chronicled by Nash—ultimately resulted in “mission creep” of monumental proportions. Those who served in Iraq and Kuwait during the Gulf Wars will readily vouchsafe the old Arab proverb, “When God made Hell he

did not think it bad enough, so he created Mesopotamia, then added flies.” Despite hostile conditions, and buoyed by the initial success of capturing key territory and the oil fields from the Turks, the British advanced upriver along the Tigris River. In April 1915 Maj. Gen. Charles Townshend—“Chitral Charlie,” as he was known, following his 1895 exploits in India’s NorthWest Frontier Province —took command and by November had reached Ctesiphon, just 20 miles from Baghdad. There, over three days, the opposing armies fought to a standstill, neither appreciating the other’s losses. For the British a perilous fighting retreat downriver was the only option. At Kut, described as the most unsanitary place in Mesopotamia, the Turks quickly surrounded the town, trapping 14,586 troops —1,500 of whom were sick or wounded—some 6,200 civilians and 1,500 prisoners. The subsequent siege, which lasted until the garrison’s surrender the following April, proved the worst British military disaster since Yorktown, which had lost them the American colonies. As Nash concludes, Mesopotamia is “an immovable dark blot on Britain’s military history. The hope is that the men who died will not be forgotten, and the men who indirectly caused their deaths will not be forgiven.” —David Saunders

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Profiling seven Canadian soldiers engaged in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province, Fowler highlights one of Canada’s largest military deployments since World War II. Operation Athena was to improve the embattled country’s security and governance, and Fowler details the reality on the ground.

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Hallowed Ground Fort Necessityy National Battlefield

B

y the mid-18th century archrivals Great Britain and France had each laid claim to the Ohio Valley, a swath of fertile bottomland stretching nearly 1,000 miles from the Allegheny Mountains west to the Mississippi River. They based their respective claims on surveys, settlement, land grants, treaties and purchases from various Indian tribes. For the British colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia, as well as the London-based Ohio Co., the river valley represented a natural corridor for westward expansion. The French, on the other hand, envisioned it as a link between the New France colonies of Canada and Louisiana. Seeking to contain British encroachment, French troops garrisoned the valley in 1753, prompting a global conflict known in North America as the French and Indian War and elsewhere as the Seven Years’ War (1754–63). Prompting the conflict in part was the 1748 formation of the Ohio Co., organized by British and Virginian investors who had obtained from the Crown a 200,000-acre land grant in the upper Ohio Valley, provided its directors could settle 100 families in the region within seven years. Tensions mounted in the spring of 1753 when French troops marched south from Fort Niagara on Lake Ontario, driving out British traders and building forts. In 1753 Virginia Lt. Gov. Robert Dinwiddie—an Ohio Co. investor—learning the French had built Fort Presque Isle on Lake Erie and Fort LeBoeuf some 20 miles farther south, sent a militia party under Major George Washington to warn the French to withdraw, a request they politely refused. In January 1754 Dinwiddie sent another force of militiamen to build Fort Prince George at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela (aka the Forks of the Ohio, the site of present-day Pittsburgh). They had barely finished when French troops arrived, expelled the Virginians, razed the fort and built a larger garrison named Fort Duquesne, after the governor-general of New France. In March 1754 Dinwiddie promoted Washington to lieutenant colonel of the newly formed Virginia Regiment and sent him with two companies of militia to defend British claims on the Forks of the Ohio. On May 24 Washington made camp at Great Meadows (present-day Farmington, Pa.),

76 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2017

oddly referring to the marshy ground as “a charming field for an encounter.” Three days later a friendly Mingo chief known as Tanacharison, or Half King, sent word of a French camp in the vicinity, and Washington set out with 40 men to find it. Directed to the site by Half King’s scouts, the party ambushed the camp, killing 10 of the Frenchmen—including their commander, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville—and taking 21 prisoners. The Virginians suffered only one man killed and two wounded. On the accidental death of regimental commander Joshua Fry on May 31, Dinwiddie promoted Washington to colonel and gave him command. Washington promptly fortified Great Meadows with a log stockade he named Fort Necessity. The rest of the regiment, toting supplies and nine small cannons, marched in on June 9, giving Washington about 300 troops. A few days later 100 men of Captain James Mackay’s Independent Company of regular British troops arrived from South Carolina. Unfortunately for Washington, his Indian allies, anticipating a significant French counterattack, bowed out of the coming fight. While the South Carolinians remained at Great Meadows, Washington and the Virginians marched out to resume work on a road to Redstone Creek on the Monongahela, a stepping-stone to the Ohio. But reports of an approaching force of French troops and allied Indians from Fort Duquesne induced Washington to return to Great Meadows on July 1. Early on July 3 the 600 Frenchmen and 100 warriors took up positions in the woods around Fort Necessity. Washington pulled his men back within the stockade and its surrounding entrenchment, a decision that proved ill advised as the day’s fighting progressed. A heavy rain flooded the marshy ground and fouled the militiamen’s powder as French fire from elevated and sheltered positions took a heavy toll. In the early evening the French commander, Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers (half-brother of Jumonville), offered the beleaguered British a truce in order to discuss their surrender. Near midnight, after hours of negotiation, both Washington and Mackay agreed to the French terms. It marked the only time in Washington’s long military career he ever surrendered to an enemy.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: DIGITAL COMMONWEALTH; JEFFREY M. FRANK/SHUTTERSTOCK; NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

By William John Shepherd

A 1930s postcard image depicts Fort Necessity as it may have appeared in 1754. Bottom left: Mingo warriors joined Washington’s preliminary ambush of the French camp near Great Meadows. Bottom right: Present-day Fort Necessity National Battlefield centers on a reconstructed stockade.

The following morning the Virginian-British force—which had suffered 31 dead and 70 wounded—was permitted to withdraw with the honors of war, keeping their baggage and personal weapons but surrendering the cannons. The French, who had lost just three dead, burned Fort Necessity and returned to Fort Duquesne. It took another four years and two additional campaigns—the disastrous Braddock’s Defeat and wildly successful Forbes Expedition (see P. 4)—for the British to finally claim the strategic Forks of the Ohio.

Congress established Fort Necessity National Battlefield [nps.gov/fone] in 1931, and preliminary archaeological excavations prompted construction of a diamond-shaped recreation of Washington’s stockade on the original site the following year. However, a follow-up survey in the early 1950s proved the fortification to have been circular, and work crews modified the structure to its current, more accurate reconstruction. Open daily from sunrise to sunset year-round, the visitor center is off U.S. Highway 40 in Farmington. MH

77

War Games 1

2

3

4

5

Battle of Maldon

Match each of the following selfcontained battles, raids or sacks to the year in which it was fought.

6

7

1. Salado Creek 2. Clontarf 3. Maldon

10

4. Columbus, New Mexico 5. Olompali 6. Camlann

8

7. Glen Shiel

9

8. Wounded Knee 9. Shrewsbury 10. Panama City ____ A. 1890 ____ B. 1719 ____ C. 1671 ____ D. 1014

Two-Timers New Zealander Charles Upham (see P. 16), recipient of the Victoria Cross and bar, is in good company. Can you ID each double recipient of his nation’s highest honor?

____ E. 991

____ A. Smedley Butler, Medal of Honor ____ F. Frank Baldwin, Medal of Honor

____ F. 1916

____ B. Konstantin Rokossovsky,

____ H. 1403 ____ I. 1846 ____ J. 537 Answers: A8, B7, C10, D2, E3, F4, G1, H9, I5, J6

78 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2017

____ C. Noel Chavasse, Victoria Cross

____ G. Amet-khan Sultan,

Hero of the Soviet Union ____ H. Dan Daley, Medal of Honor

____ D. Thomas Custer, Medal of Honor ____ I. Arthur Martin-Leake, Victoria Cross ____ E. Ilmari Juutilainen,

Mannerheim Cross

____ J. Vitaly Popkov,

Hero of the Soviet Union Answers: A10, B3, C6, D9, E7, F4, G8, H5, I2, J1

____ G. 1842

Hero of the Soviet Union

TOP LEFT, BATTLES: JOHN WOOTTON/NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM; TWO-TIMERS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: TASS/GETTY IMAGES; ARTUK.ORG; MARINE CORPS ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS (2); ANOVI.FR; HISTORY OF RUSSIA; RATHBONES REVIEW; PANZERFRONTBIS.NAROD.RU; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; LENTOPOSTI.FI; OPPOSITE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Battles Without a War

A Time to Die Confederate General John Bell Hood (see P. 18) was far from the first to send his men into the jaws of death. General John Bell Hood

THE ORIGINAL TITLE OF THIS NOVEL WAS “THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE” - 1984 - Maigret’s First Case - Last of the Conquerors - The Young Lions

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1984. WRITTEN BY GEORGE ORWELL BETWEEN 1945 AND 1948, THE NOVEL WAS PUBLISHED IN 1949. “THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE” WAS AN EARLY TITLE FOR THE NOVEL, BUT EIGHT MONTHS BEFORE PUBLICATION ORWELL’S PUBLISHER SUGGESTED “1984” AS THE TITLE INSTEAD.

Answers: A, D, C, B

Fall Out Bearskin hat still firmly in place, an enlisted member of Britain’s venerable Coldstream Guards quite literally falls out after succumbing to extreme summer temperatures during a June 1, 1963, rehearsal of the Trooping of the Colour ceremony in London.

80 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2017

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