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British troops rush to aid mortally wounded Major Francis Peirson during the Battle of Jersey NOVEMBER 2017
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Features
Letters 6 News 8
30 When France Defied Hitler’s Panzers Charles de Gaulle championed his nation’s armored forces By John Koster
22 The French Are Coming! The American Revolutionary War sparked a French-British fight for a tiny European island By David T. Zabecki
Departments
2 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
14
16
Interview Jane Doyle
Valor The Fighting Parson
Reviews 70 War Games 78 Captured! 80
62 Queen’s Ransom Hawaii’s indebted last queen lost her throne to avaricious sugar barons and America’s headlong rush to empire By Paul X. Rutz
38
48
Forlorn Victory
Hearts and Minds in Mindanao
The costly 1917 Battle of Passchendaele was a threemonth slog through hell By Ron Soodalter
John J. Pershing honed his skills defeating a Muslim insurgency By Paul Maggioni
56 The Peril of War Renowned American artist Thomas Hart Benton depicted the U.S. Navy during both world wars
18
20
76
What We Learned From... Nagashino, 1575
Hardware Char B1 bis
Hallowed Ground Bosworth Field, England
On the cover: Despite urging from his troops to assume a less conspicuous position, Major Francis Peirson took a fatal musket ball to the chest in the Battle of Jersey, as depicted in John Singleton Copley’s 1783 painting. PHOTO: Jersey Museum and Art Gallery
3
Join the discussion at militaryhistory.com
Camelback Colonialism
MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER DOUG NEIMAN ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF
The Somaliland Camel Corps mopped up a Mad Mullah and policed the British protectorate through both world wars By Nicholas Smith
NOVEMBER 2017 VOL. 34, NO. 4
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Pershing Makes an Army General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing established an Army that would fight under its own commanders in Europe By Edward G. Lengel
Interview U.S. Army medevac pilot Major Mary Jennings Hegar received the DFC and Hollywood notice for her actions in Afghanistan
Tools Its speed, agility and destructive potential made the tracked, multigun M50 Ontos an ideal infantry support weapon in Vietnam
Reviews In Grunt Mary Roach takes a fascinating, witty look at the R&D process behind cutting-edge military technology
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Letters
Khomeini
Tokyo Bay Great article by Michael D. Hull [“Payoff in Tokyo Bay,” September 2017]. However, the last sentence, in which he states that visitors to Missouri can stand on “the same teak-covered quarterdeck” where World War II ended, is somewhat misleading. The original planking from the deck where the surrender of Japan took place was cut from Missouri and is displayed on the wall at the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Va. James R. Recker INDIANAPOLIS, IND. Editor responds: In 1999 USS Missouri opened as a museum ship [ussmissouri. org] at Ford Island, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, within sight of the USS Arizona Memorial. A plaque marks the spot on the surrender deck atop which Allied and Japanese representatives signed the surrender documents, ending World War II. While the MacArthur Memorial [macarthur memorial.org] proudly displays a replica of the plaque
6 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
and planking, Missouri retains “the same teak-covered quarterdeck” from that historic Sunday, Sept. 2, 1945.
American Sieges Interesting article on sieges in American history [“On the Inside Under Fire,” by Ron Soodalter, July 2017]. Putting the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga on display around the port of Boston was a brilliant maneuver, but the author failed to disclose there was absolutely no shot or powder available for those cannons. In other words, it was a gargantuan bluff. Richard Gearon TUCSON, ARIZ. Editor responds: You’re absolutely right about the gunpowder shortage in Boston, a crisis precipitated in part by British Lt. Gen. Thomas Gage’s confiscation of supplies from a powder house in Charlestown prior to the outbreak of hostilities. But part of the brilliance of Colonel Henry Knox’s retrieval of can-
[Re. “444 Days in Hell, March 2017:] Ron Soodalter describes Ayatollah Khomeini as a “scholarly, charismatic individual who combined an appreciation of ancient Persian poetry with a thorough knowledge of, and devotion to, the Quran.” Quoting writer Eugene Solomon, he continues the description of Khomeini’s personality as exuding “a captivating moral urgency and prophetic power.” This is quite a benign description for an individual who imposed an 8th century theocracy on a modern nation. The entire world now sees the morality of his vision. Oren Johnson DECATUR, GA.
Yank in the SS When I picked up the January 2017 issue and read the article “A Yank in the SS,” by Ron Soodalter, it literally sent a cold shiver down my spine. It is the first time I had ever seen a public acknowledgement of my father’s World War II outfit, the U.S. Army Air Forces 354th Air Service Squadron, a small and very specified unit of 385 men. Any mention of the organization
typically eludes most common web searches. Your article helped me understand more clearly the 354th’s role in the war. It’s unfortunate, however, the information received comes in the context of a person (Martin Monti does not deserve the word American, soldier or man) defecting to the Nazis. Having met a number of the 354th servicemen through multiple war reunions, I am positive each and every one of them would have stopped this perpetrator through whatever means possible had they known his intentions. That said, my father once shared a story about lack of security: He had suffered a broken bone in an air raid in North Africa. Before rejoining his unit, he was well enough to walk with crutches and attended the Casablanca Conference. Needless to say, an enlisted man’s presence shows a certain laxness, but he recalled that at least one local man with camel in tow pretty much walked right up to the high-ranking participants. I remember him saying, “Now if that guy was a German, history would have been changed.” Douglas Holste GREENDALE, WIS. Send letters to Editor, Military History HistoryNet 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400 Vienna, VA 22182-4038 or via e-mail to
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nons from Ticonderoga was his simultaneous transport of the powder and shot to arm the guns. Thus a very willing George Washington was finally able to threaten the British with actual action, albeit limited to the supplies he had on hand.
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News
By Brendan Manley
ASSOCIATED PRESS ADMITS WARTIME DEAL WITH NAZIS The Associated Press [ap.org] acknowledges having struck a deal with a Nazi-run picture agency during World War II to distribute images taken by German photographers to American newspapers and in turn provide its photos to German media. At the time U.S. counterintelligence agents explored the arrangement as a possible violation of the 1917 Trading With the Enemy Act, but their Washington superiors closed the case. The revelation comes months after German historian Norman Domeier discovered a letter detailing the sharing agreement, which began in 1942 and was authorized by U.S. Office of Censorship Director Byron Price, a former AP editor hired by and reporting to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among other images, AP shared photos of U.S. wartime operations and Allied advances, copies of which Adolf Hitler and SS officials reviewed. Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry compelled German publications to run the images with pro-Nazi captions.
John Daniszewski, AP’s current vice president and editor at large for standards, defends its use of Nazi-supplied images, insisting they were newsworthy, the agency had conducted business through neutral countries, and AP’s captions clearly stated their origin. An internal review of published wartime images, however, reveals AP often concealed their origin, identifying them only as “wirephotos” or “radiophotos.” Domeier turned up the incriminating letter at the Wisconsin Historical Society [wisconsinhistory.org], which houses the papers of Louis P. Lochner, Pulitzer Prize– winning prewar chief of AP’s Berlin bureau, who twice interviewed Hitler. Lochner approved the arrangement with photographer and Waffen SS 2nd Lt. Helmut Laux, who ran the Nazi-confiscated AP picture service in Germany as the private Bureau Laux. AP and Bureau Laux swapped some 10,000 photos via diplomatic pouch, first through Lisbon and later Sweden. Lochner himself personally met with Laux and shared AP contacts with him.
‘We’d be in a pretty mess… if suddenly we had difficulties with the propaganda ministry’ —Louis Lochner, AP’s prewar Berlin bureau chief 8 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, at left, has a prewar chat with AP’s Berlin bureau chief Louis Lochner.
WAR RECORD
Series Reveals WWII Secrets
October 1903
The Hidden Side of WW2 [vimeo.com/ ondemand/hiddensides ofworldwar2], a five-part documentary exploring lesser-known facts, figures, people and events of the European Theater, is now available via Vimeo on Demand (download per episode: $3.99; 48-hour rental: $1.49). The Vivendi Entertainment series comprises five chronological segments: “The Rise of Hitler,” “The Holocaust,” “D-Day,” “The French Liberation” and “Last Secrets of the Nazis.”
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM; STAFF SGT. KEN SCAR/US ARMY
CMP to Sell M1 Garands The Civilian Marksmanship Program [thecmp. org] will soon take delivery of 86,000 vintage M1 Garand rifles—workhorse of U.S. infantrymen during World War II and the Korean War. Originally loaned to the Philippine government through a U.S. military assistance program, these rifles will be available for purchase by eligible U.S. citizens age 19 or older who belong to a CMP-affiliated marksmanship club. Buyers must also demonstrate familiarity with firearm safety and range procedures.
NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM EXPANDS The National WWII Museum [nationalww2museum.org] in New Orleans has opened its long-anticipated permanent exhibition “The Arsenal of Democracy,” conveying the realities of life on the home front through personal narratives, period artifacts, multimedia and interactive displays. The space features nine immersive galleries: “Gathering Storm,” exploring prewar tensions; “A House Divided,” relating the isolationist/interventionist divide; “America Besieged,” which projects the chaotic Pearl Harbor attack on a 50-foot wraparound screen; “America Responds,” presenting wartime propaganda; “War Affects Every Home,” immersing visitors in a 1942-style home; “United but Unequal,” shedding light on issues of national loyalty and race; “Citizens to Warriors,” spotlighting efforts to train and mobilize troops; “Manufacturing Victory,” focusing on industrial efforts; and “Manhattan Project,” bringing visitors into the Atomic Age.
MARCH RECALLS BATAAN A record 7,200 retired and active-duty military personnel and civilians recently turned out for the annual 26.2-mile Bataan Memorial Death March [bataanmarch. com] through the high desert of White Sands Missile Range, N.M. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the brutal forced march of some 60,000 Filipino and 15,000 U.S. prisoners of war in the Philippines. After the April 9, 1942, Allied surrender, Japanese guards forced the POWs to walk more than 65 miles across the steamy Bataan Peninsula, denying them food or water, torturing many and wantonly killing scores. An estimated 9,000 Filipinos and 1,000 Americans died.
Datu Hassan, Muslim chieftain on the Philippine island of Jolo, leads followers in an uprising amid the Moro Rebellion (see P. 48). Troops under U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Leonard Wood quash Hassan’s revolt in March 1904, killing him in battle at Bud Bagsak.
Oct. 7, 1944 Led by General Charles de Gaulle, the Free French Forces re-form the 13th Dragoon Regiment as an armored unit, including a company of 19 Char B1 bis tanks (see PP. 20 and 30) used in the siege of La Rochelle at war’s end.
Oct. 12, 1943 Weeks after serving as the subject of a series of paintings by Thomas Hart Benton (see P. 56), the 312-foot Gato-class submarine USS Dorado sinks off Panama with all hands, possibly after striking a German mine.
Nov. 10, 1917 In the final action of the costly Third Battle of Ypres, aka Battle of Passchendaele (see P. 38), the Canadian Corps captures the final German-held ridge north of the namesake village.
Nov. 3, 1896
Expansionist-minded Republican candidate William McKinley is elected 25th president of the United States, paving the way for the 1898 annexation of Hawaii (see P. 62) and control of the coveted strategic port of Pearl Harbor.
9
News
Six months after Pearl Harbor the U.S. Navy turned the tide of the Pacific War.
On June 5 veterans, relatives and representatives of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gathered on Midway Atoll to mark the 75th anniversary of the June 4–7, 1942, naval clash that turned the tide of the Pacific War. Naval History and Heritage Command [history.navy.mil] Director Sam Cox and Fish and Wildlife Service Acting Director Jim Kurth each gave remarks, as the atoll is both a national memorial and wildlife refuge [fws.gov/refuge/midway_atoll]. Just six months after the 1941 Japanese attack on Hawaii an outnumbered and outgunned U.S. Navy fleet—forewarned by Allied cryptanalysts able to decode enemy radio traffic—decisively defeated an attacking Japanese fleet off Midway, sinking four carriers and a heavy cruiser, destroying 248 aircraft and killing 3,057 Japanese in the battle, which cost the Americans one carrier, one destroyer, 150 aircraft and 307 dead. The victory paved the way for the landings on Guadalcanal, the first large-scale offensive in the island-hopping campaign aimed at Japan. Midway veterans laid wreaths for the fallen as a bugler played “Taps,” followed by a moment of silence and a rendition of the first stanza of the maritime service hymn “Eternal Father,” which ends with the apt verses, Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee / For those in peril on the sea! Broadcast live, the event was incorporated into ceremonies held at the World War II Valor in the Pacific Park [nps.gov/valr] in Honolulu and Mokupapapa Discovery Center [papahanaumokuakea. gov/education/center.html] in Hilo; the USS Midway Museum [midway.org] in San Diego; the U.S. Navy Memorial [navymemorial.org] in Washington, D.C.; the National WWII Museum [nationalww2museum.org] in New Orleans; and the National Navy Aviation Museum [naval aviationmuseum.org] in Pensacola, Fla.
‘Our citizens can now rejoice that a momentous victory is in the making’ —Admiral Chester Nimitz 10 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
The Library Co. of Philadelphia has launched an online version of its exhibition “Together We Win: The Philadelphia Home Front During the First World War” [together wewin.librarycompany. org], which merges rich historical information with period photos, posters, music and recipes. The virtual exhibit covers such wartime topics as food conservation, rationing and war bonds and highlights homegrown groups like the National League for Woman’s Service.
Pershing Home Opens Museum Missouri State Parks is set to open a museum [pershingmuseum.com] at the General John J. Pershing Boyhood Home State Historic Site in Laclede, Mo., which centers on the childhood house of the famed commander of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. The 7,800square-foot museum features archives, an exhibit gallery and interactive displays, while poppies out front grow in soil donated by the eight World War I American cemeteries in Europe.
PHOTOGRAPHER 2ND CLASS WILLIAM G. ROY/NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
NAVY MARKS 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF PIVOTAL BATTLE OF MIDWAY
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News Calendar Depicts CIA Spec Ops
Bragg Honors Green Berets The Special Forces Association [specialforces association.org] will honor the U.S. Army Special Forces, aka Green Berets, with a granite and bronze memorial at Fort Bragg, N.C. [bragg.army.mil], headquarters of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and home of the 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne). Designed by Dallas-based artist Rebecca Clark, the National Green Beret Memorial will feature action scenes in relief and more than two-dozen heroic-scale bronze figures. Unveiling will begin in 2019 with completion slated for 2024.
In this age of remote drone warfare it’s easy to forget a time when even kings put their lives on the line. Monarchs who gave their “last full measure of devotion” include:
Last Anglo-Saxon During the Oct. 14, 1066, Battle of Hastings AngloSaxon King Harold II is brutally slain by invading Norman knights under William the Conqueror. Period accounts say Harold took an arrow to the eye and was then dismembered.
Bard’s Bunch-back
VIETNAM MEDIC RECEIVES MOH Nearly a half-century after the fact Jim McCloughan, 71, a former U.S. Army combat medic with Company C, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, has received the Medal of Honor for his selfless actions during the May 13–15, 1969, Battle of Nui Yon Hill, Vietnam. During the two-day battle McCloughan repeatedly braved enemy small arms and RPG fire to rescue 10 wounded fellow soldiers, in the process sustaining his own serious wounds. McCloughan was originally awarded a Bronze Star to wear alongside his Purple Hearts. But in 2009 his former platoon leader revived a Distinguished Service Cross nomination, which the DOD saw fit to upgrade to the MOH.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES EXHIBIT HONORS VIETNAM VETERANS
12 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
In time for Veterans Day, on November 10 the National Archives [archives.gov] in Washington, D.C., is opening “Remembering Vietnam: Twelve Critical Episodes in the Vietnam War,” an exhibition of period documents, artifacts and film footage that explore the policies and decisions behind the war. It runs through Jan. 6, 2019. In conjunction with “Remembering Vietnam” the archives will provide honor flights to bring veterans to D.C. and will host events nationwide, including a traveling gallery of Vietnam War images, a virtual reality exhibition and other events.
In a moment immortalized by Shakespeare, a knight under Welsh claimant to the throne Henry Tudor bashes in Richard III’s skull during the Aug. 22, 1485, Battle of Bosworth Field (see P. 76). He is the last English king slain on home soil.
By His Own Gun During the Aug. 3, 1460, siege of Roxburgh Castle, as he sought to retake Scotland’s keeps from England, James II was nearing victory when a cannon exploded and killed the Scottish monarch. The castle still fell, and James’ widow, Queen Consort Mary of Guelders, had it destroyed.
African King During the March 9–10, 1889, Battle of Gallabat defending Mahdist Sudanese riflemen mortally wound Ethiopian Emperor Yohannes IV. His dispirited men melt away, while the victorious Mahdists parade the emperor’s head on a pike. It was the last time a monarch was killed in battle.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: INTERNATIONAL SPY MUSEUM; JAMES C. MCCLOUGHAN/US ARMY; NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
The 2018 Secret Ops of the CIA calendar, depicting events from World War II through Operation Enduring Freedom, is now available. The project stems from a gallery of paintings Erik Kirzinger, the nephew of a CIA contract pilot killed in action, commissioned for the agency headquarters in Langley, Va. The calendar is available at the International Spy Museum [spymuseum. org] in Washington, D.C., or from Kirzinger’s website [cia-art.com].
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Interview Jane Doyle y Recognizing WASPs
14 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
You were 18 at the time? Yes. I got my private license then. They had started the Civilian Pilot Training Program at the end of 1938, because Germany was building up its air force, and we only had a few planes. I got into the Civil Air Patrol so I could keep up my license. In 1942 the famous female aviator Jacqueline Cochran had gone through the records and found every woman pilot in the United States. I got a telegram asking if I was interested in joining the WASP program, and I replied that I was. On November 1 I got a notice that I’d been accepted into the class of 1943.
Was there any pushback from male pilots? At that time there wasn’t, but it started to develop when pilots were coming back from overseas, and they wanted the flying jobs. General [Henry H.] Arnold [USAAF commander] wanted us to be part of the military, and Cochran did too, but if we weren’t accepted as members of the military, they would have to disband the program. Congress rejected the bill twice. They were getting too much pressure from male pilots, so the program was disbanded in 1944. Did you want to fly in combat? Not really—I just liked flying. Though I felt, If men can do it, women can do it, too, I had reservations about women flying in combat. I think it’s harder for a family to lose a mother than a father, really. We made a big advancement, but sometimes things go too far. Did you have a favorite aircraft? Yes, the AT-6. That was a nice one to fly —I loved that little plane. (I had flown a little Piper Cub before that.) I got down in that cockpit with the helmet and the goggles, and I said, “Oh, boy! This is it.” What was your most challenging flight? There was one particular cross-country trip—a 2,000-mile journey from Texas to Oklahoma to Louisiana to Arkansas and then all the way over to Alabama and then back. At that time there was no radio communication for navigation. They had beams across the country, and you flew on one side or
RANDY GLASS STUDIOS
Little more than 1,000 of the more than 25,000 women who volunteered for the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) organization during World War II made the cut. Jane Doyle was one of the lucky few. Almost all of those chosen were already qualified civilian pilots, and their mission was to operate U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) aircraft in noncombat roles, thus freeing male pilots for frontline duty. Born in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 1921, Doyle had earned her pilot’s license while in college and entered the WASP program with more flying experience than many male cadets at the time. WASPs logged more than 60 million miles before the USAAF disbanded the program in December 1944. Despite having flown U.S. military aircraft during wartime, the female pilots were not granted veteran status until 1977. In 2009 Congress collectively awarded the WASPs a Congressional Gold Medal.
What drew you to flying? When Charles Lindbergh came to Grand Rapids, my mother took me out to the airport to see him, and we saw the Spirit of St. Louis. I was 6 years old, but I remember it really well. While in junior college I was taking an engineering drafting course. The instructor said they were going to start the Civilian Pilot Training Program, and they’d let one woman in for every 10 men. I thought that sounded interesting. I was the only girl in that engineering drawing class, so I sat back in the corner, but after class I went up to the instructor and said, “Can I apply for that?” He said, “Sure, but you have to take the physical.” He said, “You have to be 5 feet 4 inches.” I was 5 feet 2 inches—5 feet 2½ if I stretched. I thought, Well, I guess that takes care of that. However, later he said, “No, they changed it for women, it’s 5 feet 2½ inches.” So I took the physical, passed and got accepted that summer.
Doyle received her private pilot’s license at 18 and by 1943 was flying military aircraft as a WASP.
down there and have to turn around and come home again, so I resigned. How did it feel to finally be classified as military veterans in 1977? I hadn’t thought about it for years. We had reunions every five years, and I went to most of them—but it was just to get together. It wasn’t until an article came out in the paper about the first woman to graduate from the U.S. Air Force Academy and fly military planes. That stirred things up, and we started circulating petitions then asking for recognition. Senator Barry Goldwater and General Arnold’s son [Colonel Bruce Arnold, U.S. Air Force, Ret.] were very active in supporting that effort.
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO
other of the beam and got a Morse code signal. If you were right on course, you got a solid signal. That was our navigation. How dangerous was it for WASPs? Well, 38 got killed during their service. Two weeks before graduation from WASP training one girl was coming in for a landing, and one of the new students who had just arrived came in from the opposite direction —which she shouldn’t have—and they had a midair collision that killed both of them. We weren’t authorized
funeral expenses. If someone was killed, we took up a collection, then someone went home with the body. But those who died weren’t allowed a military funeral. Why did you decide to leave the program? I was sent to a base for twin-engine training, because I was supposed to fly B-26 Marauder medium bombers in the target-towing role. I got the notice the program was being disbanded, and two weeks later I got notice that I was to be transferred to Panama City, Fla. I thought I’d just get
What do you want people to remember about your service and the WASP program? I want them to know we existed and were there to help during the war when needed. When we weren’t needed anymore, they just sent us home. The way the situation was handled wasn’t really fair. We were hired as civilians, and we knew it when we went in. But when we went in, we were more or less promised we would be taken into the military. It left a bitter taste. During a recent talk I said, “When you say the word wasp, people think of an insect.” Now I’d like to get the word out in small groups, to let them know we did exist. We weren’t combat heroes or anything, but we were part of the war effort. How do you feel about women serving in the military? I think there’s a place for them in the military, and I think they should be treated with respect for the job that they’re doing. And I am glad they are accepted now as much as they are. MH
15
Valor The Fighting Parson
The Rev. James Adams British Army Victoria Cross Afghanistan Dec. 11, 1879
The Rev. James Adams is the only clergyman and the last of just five civilians to have received the Victoria Cross—Britain’s highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy. It was a singular honor for a man who spent his life serving others in the name of God. James William Adams was born on Nov. 24, 1839, in County Cork, Ireland, attended Trinity College, Dublin, and was ordained an Anglican minister in 1863. Three years later he joined the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment as a military chaplain, a post he retained for the next 20 years. Described as a “muscular, fresh-complexioned gentleman and a keen sportsman,” the padre was said to be “one of the most deservedly popular chaplains that ever accompanied a British force into action.” Adams traveled with a portable altar to conduct services for men in the field and won acclaim for his selfless work treating victims of smallpox and an 1868 cholera outbreak in Peshawar. In 1879 the 40-year-old chaplain accompanied Maj. Gen. Sir Frederick Roberts as part of the British and Indian army column dispatched to avenge the assassination of military envoy Sir Louis Cavagnari and his staff in Kabul, Afghanistan. At Kila Kazi on December 11 an army of 10,000 Afghans ambushed an advance detachment of the 9th (Queen’s Royal) Lancers. Roberts arrived on scene—accompanied by Adams—and gave the rash order to 170 men of both the 9th Lancers and 14th Bengal Lancers to charge the overwhelming foe. As the move only briefly checked the Afghans, Roberts ordered a second charge. Nine officers and 55 rank and file fell dead or wounded in the desperate actions. As the lancers fought to escape annihilation following the shattered charges, Adams encountered a wounded trooper and leaped from his horse to assist. He
16 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
tried to hoist the man atop his own horse, but the charger bolted, leaving both men afoot. Stumbling toward the rear, Adams supported the lancer until delivering him to friendly troopers. Amid the chaos Adams spotted two more lancers trapped beneath their dead horses in a water-filled ditch. Without a thought for his own safety, the unarmed chaplain plunged into the water. He struggled to free the first man he reached, grabbing hold of his uniform or whatever he could. All the time fanatical Afghans with unsheathed knives, curved talwars and Snider and Enfield rifles rode by within yards of the conspicuous trio, “so close to the ditch,” Roberts recalled, “that I thought my friend the padre could not possibly escape.” But through brute strength and a refusal to give up, Adams managed to yank both men from beneath their dead mounts and haul their exhausted frames up the slippery ditch out of harm’s way. In the wake of the battle Roberts appropriately dubbed Adams the “Fighting Parson,” noting his faithful aide had “behaved in this particular place with conspicuous gallantry.” The general also granted the civilian chaplain the rare honor of a recommendation for the VC. On Dec. 1, 1881, Queen Victoria herself presented Adams with the medal at Windsor Castle. The “Fighting Parson” continued to serve in India and Burma until retiring in 1886. Returning to England, he served as a rector and later as a chaplain to King Edward VII. Adams died on Oct. 20, 1903, at age 64, one lancer memorializing him as “a great and good man grown old with other people’s sorrows.” His widow presented his portable altar to the civilian congregation he had served until his death. In 2007 his gravestone was restored and a bronze plaque erected to commemorate the deeds of the great and good man. MH
THE ROYAL MINT MUSEUM/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES (2)
By Frank Jastrzembski
What We Learned From... Nagashino, 1575 By Chuck Lyons
18 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
Lessons: Overconfidence kills. Had Katsuyori Takeda heeded his experienced generals and withdrawn before the far larger enemy force, his army would have lived to fight another day. Never assume—verify. Takeda had assumed rain had fouled Nobunaga Oda’s matchlocks—with disastrous results. It’s not so much what you use as how you use it. Both sides had matchlock firearms, but Oda’s innovative use of a palisade and reliance on disciplined samurai officers made the difference. MH
MCLA COLLECTION/ALAM Y STOCK PHOTO
O
n June 28, 1575, in central Honshu, Japan, war- Cavalrymen of lord Nobunaga Oda led a force of 38,000 Oda and Katsuyori Takeda’s Tokugawa clan troops to break Katsuyori Takeda’s force fall victim siege of Nagashino Castle, defended by Tokugawa to matchlock rifle warrior Sadamasa Okudaira. With his tactics fire at the Battle of Nagashino. Oda changed the face of Japanese warfare. Head of the Takeda clan, known for its mounted samurai and fierce cavalry charges, Takeda had besieged the castle with 15,000 troops, onethird of whom were cavalrymen. The rest were lower-ranking foot soldiers (ashigaru), mostly armed with long spears, though some bore crude matchlock guns. (Portuguese traders had introduced firearms to Japan a few decades earlier.) Of the 38,000 men Oda fielded, about 3,000 were ashigaru armed with matchlocks. When a scout alerted Takeda to the approaching relief force, his generals counseled the warlord to either withdraw or launch one last all-out attack on the castle. Were such an attack successful, they argued, the Takeda troops could then meet the larger relief force from behind the castle walls. Takeda instead sided with his younger generals, who urged him to meet Oda in open battle. Oda, who had endured Takeda cavalry charges in the past, positioned his men across a plain from the castle, just behind the Rengogawa, a stream whose high banks would break up a cavalry charge. He also ordered construction of a wooden palisade, behind which he placed his matchlock gunners, given their vulnerability during long loading times. By dividing them into ranks, Oda ensured a steady volume of fire. He placed the 3,000 gunners under disciplined samurai officers—a revolutionary command decision, as high-ranking samurai seldom interacted with the lowly ashigaru. He also ordered gaps left in the palisade through which to mount counterattacks. Takeda sent 12,000 of his 15,000-man force to face Oda’s force, retaining the remaining 3,000 to keep the castle garrison from sallying out in relief. Believing an overnight rain had rendered Oda’s guns ineffective, Takeda quickly launched the anticipated cavalry charge. Restrained by their samurai officers,
Oda’s matchlock gunners—who had kept their powder dry—held their fire as the Takeda cavalry charged across the plain. When the horsemen closed within 150 feet and slowed to cross the Rengogawa, Oda’s gunners fired in ranks, one shooting for every two reloading. His spearmen stabbed through the loose palisade at any enemy cavalry that made it past the initial volleys. Finally, Oda’s samurai fought man to man with any surviving Takeda warriors who penetrated the line. Concentrated forces at the ends of the palisade prevented any flanking. The battle settled into an eighthour grind before the Takeda force broke and fled with Oda’s men in pursuit. When it was over, Takeda had lost 10,000 men—fully one-third of the force he’d brought to the field. Oda’s defeat of the formidable Takeda cavalry marked a sea change in Japanese warfare, in which rivals eschewed traditional cavalry matchups and melee infantry charges in favor of disciplined combat with firearms discharged from behind cover.
THE Q QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY
Miracle on the Vistula The Two Horsemen of the Revolution The Kaiser’s Grim Reaper
DUNKIRK In 1940 more than 300,000 British soldiers were trapped in France. This man got them out.
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Hardware Char B1 bis By Jon Guttman Illustration by Ian Palmer
A
fter World War I France continued development of its proven light and heavy tanks to serve as armored cavalry and infantry support, but in 1920 it also began conceiving a battle tank with the armament, armor and mobility to engage the enemy independently. The revolutionary weapon underwent protracted development before finally entering service in 1936 as the Char B1, with an armor-piercing 47 mm cannon mounted in a one-man turret and a 75 mm howitzer in the hull. As the B1’s 40 mm armor proved inadequate against Germany’s 37 mm Pak 36 anti-tank gun, designers thickened the armor to 60 mm in the Char B1 bis. They also fitted the new variant with a second carburetor to raise the horsepower from 272 to 307, though the increased weight reduced its range and running time. By the time of the German invasion of the Low Countries and France in May 1940, Renault and associated manufacturers had delivered nearly 400 Char B1 bis heavy tanks to eight battalions, including those attached to Colonel Charles de Gaulle’s 4th Armored Division. Although the most powerful tank of its day, the Char B1 bis had been designed around an obsolete tactical doctrine. The layout put extraordinary responsibilities on two of its four-man crew—the commander also having to load, aim and fire the 47 mm turret gun, the driver having to deliberately steer the tank to line up and fire the fixed 75 mm cannon. (The Char B1 ter variant, with improved armor and limited traverse for the 75, was in the prototype stage when the German offensive began.) The Char B1 bis also suffered disproportionately from mechanical breakdowns, which accounted for more than half its losses. Nothing, however, could slow the German juggernaut. MH
20 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
Length: 20 feet 11 inches Width: 8 feet 1 inch Height: 9 feet 2 inches Weight: 34 tons Crew: Four Armament: One 75 mm SA35 ABS howitzer (74 rounds); one 47 mm SA35 L/32 gun (62–72 rounds); two 7.5 mm Châtellerault M1931 machine guns Armor: Front and turret, 60 mm; sides, 55 mm Power: Renault inline six-cylinder, 16.5-liter engine (307 hp) Suspension: Bogies with a mix of vertical coil and leaf springs Maximum speed (road): 17 mph Range: 112 miles
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1. Engine transmission 2. Muffler 3. Naeder steering system 4. Insulated radio antenna 5. Engine radiator 6. Guard to prevent 47 mm gun from striking rear 7. 47 mm ammunition stowage 8. Commander’s vision cupola 9. Turret traverse 10. Driver’s station 11. 47 mm SA35 gun 12. Driver’s controls 13. 75 mm SA35 gun 14. Mud chute 15. 75 mm gun breech 16. Slide access door 17. Engine firewall/bulkhead 18. Renault engine 19. Attachment for jack extension for track repair 20. Drive sprocket
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Though the 1781 French landing on Jersey isolated the British garrison manning Elizabeth Castle (subject of this 1905 postcard), the fortress did not surrender to the invaders.
22 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
DETROIT PUBLISHING CO./LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
23
ust before midnight on Jan. 5, 1781, a flotilla of French warships arrived off La Rocque, a craggy point on the southeast tip of the Channel Island of Jersey. Though only 14 miles off the Normandy coast of France, the island and its neighbors—Guernsey, Alderney, Sark and several smaller isles—had come under English rule in 1066. On this cold and fog-shrouded night seven centuries later a Flemish soldier of fortune named Philippe-Charles-Félix Macquart, the self-styled Baron de Rullecourt, would lead several hundred French troops ashore, intending to wrest control of Jersey from the British. Rullecourt’s invasion was not simply an act of territorial reclamation, however. The French landing was part of a larger international conflict that had grown out of an April 19, 1775, skirmish between British troops and colonial militiamen on Lexington Green in the New England Province of Massachusetts Bay. After the fledgling Continental Army’s decisive defeat of the British at Saratoga, New York, on Oct. 7, 1777, France and then Spain and the Dutch Republic had entered the war, looking to settle old scores. The British soon found themselves fighting not only in North America, but also in the West Indies, India, Gibraltar, the Mediterranean and the English Channel. The Battle of Jersey held a singular distinction as the only land battle of the American Revolutionary War fought on British soil.
Once part of the Duchy of Normandy, the Channel the hours ticked by, units of the Royal Jersey Artillery Islands fell under Anglo-Norman rule in 1066 when William, Duke of Normandy, became king of England. In 1204 King John lost Normandy to Philip II of France, but England retained possession of the islands. Though Jersey comprises just 46 square miles, its proximity to the maritime approaches to Brest—long a key French naval base—ensured it remained strategically important to both London and Paris. As soon as France joined the “American Rebellion,” the British government authorized Jersey-based privateers to prey on French shipping—which they did, even raiding along the American coast. It was a threat France could not ignore. The first wartime attempt to invade Jersey was a 1779 operation led by French fortune-seeker and second-rate naval commander Charles-Henry, putative Prince of Nassau-Siegen. On April 30 Nassau-Siegen and some 5,000 troops under Rullecourt sailed from Saint-Malo in nearly 50 flat-bottomed boats, supported by five French
Though vastly outnumbered by the British, Rullecourt thought he could bluff his way through warships and a 20-gun privateer. Their objective was St. Ouen’s Bay, on Jersey’s west coast. But torrential rain and stiff headwinds stalled the fleet in view of land at dawn, giving the island’s lieutenant governor, Major Moses Corbet, plenty of forewarning to call out the Jersey Militia and the regular 78th Regiment of Foot (Seaforth Highlanders). Deploying along the dunes flanking the bay, the British forces tracked the snail’s progress of the French fleet. As
24 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
brought up their guns (each of the island’s 12 parishes was responsible for maintaining and manning two field pieces) and emplaced them on the beach. When Rullecourt finally tried to land his troops around 3 p.m., the Jersey gunners opened up with grapeshot. Few transports were willing to brave the hailstorm. Some 18 French troops drowned in the attempt. Twenty others reached the beach—where they promptly surrendered. The only British casualty was gunner Thomas Picot, who was mortally wounded when his cannon burst. As the invasion force limped back to Saint-Malo, a Royal Navy task force surprised them, destroying one French warship and capturing another.
By 1781 an awakened Jersey had become a heavily armed fortress, with guardhouses and round towers commanding most of its coastline. More than 2,500 inhabitants were organized into five militia regiments, spread around the island. Five companies of the 78th Foot were garrisoned at the General Hospital barracks, just north of St. Helier, Jersey’s capital and main port. Protecting the harbor were the guns of Elizabeth Castle, a fortress on an islet fronting the southwest entrance to the anchorage. More guns covered St. Helier from Mont Patibulaire, a half-mile north of town. Additional regular troops on Jersey included five companies of the 83rd Regiment of Foot (Royal Glasgow Volunteers), based at Fort Conway, overlooking the Bay of Grouville on the east coast; and all 10 companies of the newly raised 95th Regiment of Foot (Reid’s), garrisoned at La Hougue in St. Peter’s Parish, on the west side. Determined to eliminate the operating base for the Jersey privateers, the French decided to try again and authorized Rullecourt to organize a second invasion force. By then the Flemish mercenary held a commission as a French lieutenant colonel, and King Louis XVI promised
CLASSIC IMAGE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
him a promotion to general as soon as he had control of St. Helier. Rullecourt selected La Rocque, 4 miles east of town, for the landing. On Dec. 27, 1780, the presumptive baron and his 1,200-plus handpicked troops sailed from the port of Granville. Learning from his prior misadventure, Rullecourt sat out bad weather a week at Chausey, an island group south of the Channel Islands. On January 5 the transports, supported by several warships, set out for Jersey, leaving at 3 p.m. and arriving off La Rocque by 11 p.m. This time Rullecourt also maintained the element of surprise. Almost every senior officer from the three regular British regiments on the island was back home on Christmas leave, and most of the troops in the fortresses and towers were celebrating the Christian festival of Twelfth Night. A French advance party came ashore about 1:30 a.m. on January 6 and quickly captured the guardhouse and battery at La Rocque without resistance. The main landing force comprised four echelons. Rullecourt and the first echelon of about 500 troops started coming ashore at 2 a.m., though the operation immediately ran into trouble. While attempting to cover the landing, the warship Renard grounded on the rocks off the treacherous coast and broke up. The winds and strong currents then defeated the second and third landing echelons, sweeping them back out to sea with all of Rullecourt’s cannons, shot and extra ammunition.
Taking advantage of low tide, French troops advance across St. Aubin’s Bay toward Elizabeth Castle. When presented with the order to surrender, the castle’s British commander tersely replied he did not speak French.
The fourth echelon of 200 troops made it ashore, but that left the French commander only about 700 troops, fewer than half of those he’d set out with.
Though vastly outnumbered by the British forces on Jersey, Rullecourt thought he could bluff his way through. Leaving a rear guard of 100 men at La Rocque, he set out with the main body of his troops around 4 a.m., marching east toward St. Helier. Sticking to back roads to avoid detection, the French reached St. Helier’s Royal Square a little after 6 a.m., surprising and overpowering all but one of the British sentries. The lone escapee made his way to the General Hospital Barracks of the 78th Foot and raised the alarm. By 7 a.m. peeling church bells and warning shots from British cannons had cued islanders to the invasion. Rullecourt’s forces, meanwhile, stormed the main government buildings on the southern side of the square. Just ahead of them, two alert British captains made their way to Government House to warn Corbet, the senior commander on the island. Seemingly prepared for just such an eventuality, the lieutenant governor immediately dispatched one of the captains by horseback west to alert the 78th and 95th Foot, the other east to alert the 83rd 25
NORTH SEA B R I TA I N LONDON
ALDERNEY
GUERNSEY SARK
ENLARGED AREA
PARIS FRANCE
26 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
JERSEY
FRANCE
PHILIP JOHN OULESS/ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY; MAP: JACQUES NICOLAS BELLIN/DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION
LA ROCQUE ST. HELIER
Foot at Fort Conway in Grouville, scarcely 2 miles north of the French landing site at La Rocque. They rode off just as enemy troops converged on the house. The French escorted Corbet back to the Court House at Royal Square, where Rullecourt demanded the lieutenant governor sign a prepared capitulation order, ceding control of all military installations and requiring islanders to surrender all small arms and ammunition at the Court House. When Corbet resisted, the French commander threatened to start pillaging the town. Playing his bluff to the hilt, Rullecourt told Corbet he already had 4,000 troops on island and another 10,000 preparing to land. Setting his pocket watch on the table, he gave Corbet 30 minutes to sign. At about 8 a.m., while Rullecourt was pressuring Corbet, a French officer arrived to report that French sentries posted in the tower of the Town Church could see British troops mustering atop Mont Patibulaire. These were the men of the 78th Foot, who had moved up into their assembly areas. Rullecourt accused Corbet of stalling for time and insisted that unless he signed the surrender order immediately, the French would put St. Helier to
Captain William Campbell’s British grenadiers converge on the retreating French as the invaders scramble to reach a boat sent to transport them to the fleet waiting offshore.
the torch. Corbet finally signed, and a messenger carried a copy of the order to the 78th’s headquarters. Meanwhile, alerted by one the captains sent by Corbet, the 83rd Foot at Fort Conway and militia units on the east end of the island prepared to move against the French rear guard at La Rocque. Having heard the alarm bells and cannons, the Rev. François Le Couteur, rector of St. Martin Parish, had escorted the parish guns to Fort Conway. Captain William Campbell, commander of the 83rd’s grenadiers, was the senior officer present. After refusing a French demand to surrender, he sent a scout to reconnoiter Rullecourt’s rear guard, then advanced his men and Le Couteur’s guns toward La Rocque. Arriving around 10 a.m., Campbell deployed his force in two elements to catch the French in a crossfire. Moving one element in front of the French to form an anvil, he sent the second element under Lieutenant James Robertson to hammer the French from the flank. Once in position Robertson advanced his men within hailing distance and demanded the French surrender. They refused and opened fire. Robertson’s men returned fire and then charged with bayonets. During the brief action 20 French soldiers and seven
Playing his bluff to the hilt, Rullecourt told Corbet he had 4,000 troops on the island British grenadiers were killed. The British took some 30 prisoners. Others fled down to the rocks in the surf, but as a French boat came in to attempt a rescue, Le Couteur’s guns opened up, driving them off. Earlier that morning back in St. Helier, after cowing Corbet, Rullecourt had sent a copy of the capitulation order out to Elizabeth Castle under a flag of truce. Captain Frederick Mulcaster, the engineer officer then in command of the fortification, stuffed the order in a pocket and tersely informed the emissary he did not read French. Rullecourt then sent a body of French troops out across the sands at low tide to take the castle by force, only to be driven back by cannon fire. By then it was approaching 11 a.m. Certain a British counterattack was imminent, Rullecourt pulled in his forces to fortify Royal Square.
27
Baron de Rullecourt
Francis Peirson
Moses Corbet
its officers were divided on what to do. Some thought their duty lay in obeying the lieutenant governor’s directive, while others believed they should resist the invasion. The senior captain finally resolved to take up position on Mont Patibulaire and sent a rider to inform the 95th Foot. Alerted by Corbet’s rider, Major Francis Peirson, the senior officer of the 95th, had already started marching toward St. Helier and linked up with the 78th at Mont Patibulaire around 10 a.m. Though barely 24 years old, Peirson was the second-highest ranking officer on Jersey that morning. When he learned of Corbet’s capture, he promptly assumed overall command. Peirson had no doubt about where his duty lay and issued orders to prepare for attack. From his vantage he could see the French commander had committed a major blunder by failing to secure Mont de la Ville, which commanded St. Helier from the south. The major immediately put Captain Hugh Fraser of the 78th Foot over the North Militia Regiment and the light companies of both the 78th and 95th and ordered him to take the high ground and be ready to support the attack into St. Helier. Peirson then led the remaining British forces down from Mont Patibulaire toward town. At the base of the hill Peirson was met by a French officer carrying a flag of truce and the surrender order signed by Corbet. Reading the directive, the major reportedly replied, “Yes, we will carry our arms to the Court House, but with the bayonet at the end of the musket.” When the French officer requested an hour to report back, Peirson consented. He also had two of his own officers accompany the Frenchman to demand Corbet’s release. Rullecourt was present when the message was delivered. Placing Corbet under parole, he sent the lieutenant governor and the two British officers back to Peirson with the French envoy. When the senior-most British officers met, Corbet, who remained convinced the French boasted overwhelming superiority, urged Peirson to surrender. Peirson asked Corbet what proof he had of the French numbers. Putting his hand to his breast, Corbet replied, “I have the French general’s word and honor that it is so.” Peirson knew better. Informing the lieutenant general that neither the regulars nor the militiamen had any intention of surrendering, he told Corbet to return and tell Rullecourt the British attack would start in 10 minutes. The major kept to schedule.
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When Peirson reached a fork in the road a few blocks west of Royal Square (present-day Charing Cross), he split his force into two columns. The first, commanded by the 78th’s Captain Robert Lumsdaine, marched straight down La Grande Rue (Broad Street) toward the square, while from horseback Peirson led the 95th along La Rue de Derrière (King Street) and then down the small Avenue du Marché to hit the French from the flank. At noon Lumsdaine’s column caught sight of the square and came under immediate fire from a captured field piece Rullecourt had positioned in the approach. But the French gunners were inexperienced, and the round went high. British gunners returned fire with their own six-pounder, tearing holes in the French lines with grape. Following up with a musket volley, Lumsdaine’s men then charged with fixed bayonets. As Peirson’s column closed on the French, subordinates pleaded with him to assume a less exposed position. Brushing them off, the young officer emerged in the square and promptly took a musket ball to the chest. He died instantly. Rullecourt fared no better—as the French commander escorted Corbet from the Court House, likely to surrender, he fell mortally wounded by four shots. The lieutenant governor was uninjured. As soon as the shooting started, Fraser left the militia units atop Mont de la Ville and led the regular light companies down into town. Meanwhile, with both Peirson and Rullecourt down, the surviving French officers withdrew inside the Court House and pleaded with Corbet to resume command of the British forces and stop the fighting. The lieutenant governor had difficultly reasserting his authority, but he finally managed to stop the shooting about 15 minutes after it started.
As the firing ceased in Royal Square, the British rounded up some 400 French prisoners, capturing several dozen stragglers over the next few days. Guards ultimately loaded 456 French officers and men onto a prison ship bound for Britain. While Corbet had ostensibly resumed command, Jersey’s other British officers were openly critical of his actions, some even alleging he was a French collaborator. The tensions proved poisonous, and on January 25 the Crown sent orders to place the lieutenant governor under arrest. Recalled to London, Corbet stood court-martial at the Horse Guards in Whitehall, starting on May 1. The trial lasted five days. Corbet was charged not with treason but dereliction of duty for signing and seeking to enforce the capitulation order. Prosecutors pointed out he had surrendered to the French when they held only the central section of St. Helier, while all major military installations on Jersey remained under British control. In his defense Corbet argued he had signed the order to spare the town, knowing the other officers on Jersey would ignore it. By signing the order, Corbet argued, he also had given Peirson time to mount a counterattack.
FROM TOP: FRENCH SCHOOL/THE JERSEY MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY; ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
When Corbet’s capitulation order reached the 78th Foot,
EDWARD FRANCIS BURNEY/THE JERSEY MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY
As Major Peirson drops with a mortal wound at left, Rullecourt (with sword) and fellow French officers at right prepare to release Lt. Gov. Corbet (in sash). Moments later Rullecourt himself falls mortally wounded.
Though Jersey Governor General Sir Henry Conway— who, ironically, had been absent from the island during the battle—did not testify, Corbet entered into evidence an effusive personal letter from Conway stating his unequivocal approval of the lieutenant governor’s actions. The support of Conway, who within a year would become Britain’s military commander in chief, likely tipped the balance in Corbet’s favor. Although summarily removed from his post as lieutenant governor, he was not convicted of any wrongdoing or punished in any other way. Indeed, he was allowed to retire from the army with 32 years of service and granted the rather generous annual pension of £250. While 1781 marked the last time France tried to invade Jersey, it was not the last time the island was used as a staging ground from which to attack France. German forces occupied the Channel Islands in 1940 and held them until May 9, 1945, the day after the formal Nazi surrender. On the night of March 8–9 the Germans
Escorting Corbet from the Court House, Rullecourt fell mortally wounded by four shots on Jersey launched their final—and ultimately futile— raid of World War II against Allied shipping in France. Their objective was the small logistics base at Granville, the same port from which Rullecourt had launched his abortive invasion 164 years before. MH Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. David T. Zabecki is HistoryNet’s chief military historian. For further reading he recommends Balleine’s History of Jersey, by Marguerite Syvret and Joan Stevens, and History of the Channel Islands, by Raoul Lemprière. For more on the storied history of the Channel Islands visit theislandwiki.org.
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WHEN FRANCE DEFIED HITLER’S PANZERS Its Char B1 tanks proved too much for the Wehrmacht’s armor—but even they couldn’t withstand irresolute Allied leadership By John Koster
Though in many ways superior to Germany’s vaunted panzers, the French Char B1 tank achieved only a glimmer of glory in 1940.
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“Caught up as they fled by the enemy’s mechanized detachments, they had been ordered to throw away their arms and make off to the south so as not to clutter up the roads,” de Gaulle recalled in his war memoirs. “‘We haven’t time,’ [the Germans] cried, ‘to make you prisoners!’” French troops relished a brief moment of glory before the country’s total collapse, when three armored divisions, notably those units equipped with relatively capable Char B1 tanks, thwarted—and in places even routed —Adolf Hitler’s panzers during a decisive week of intense fighting along the French-Belgian border. FROM TOP: ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES; ROGER VIOLLET/GETTY IMAGES
“
e are on the edge of the abyss,” a desperate Brig. Gen. Charles de Gaulle wrote to French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud on June 3, 1940. “Our first defeat stems from the application by the enemy of my conceptions and the refusal of our command to apply the same conceptions.” De Gaulle’s plea to Reynaud had come too late to stave off the debacle of May 1940, when German armored units raced across France to the English Channel within three weeks. The British put a bright face on an awful month by couching the June 4 evacuation at Dunkirk as a moral victory, while leaving their disgusted French allies to fight the Germans (and Italians after June 10) for two more weeks. The British and French commanders had quietly hoped to avoid another Western Front. Diffuse strategies suggested attacks via the German-allied Soviet Union, through Finland and Norway, or into the Soviet oil fields at Baku, Azerbaijan, through French-occupied Syria. But the Germans struck first, conquered the Netherlands in five days and swung around France’s vaunted Maginot Line into the Ardennes forests. While the line held, third-rate French troops deployed in the “impassable” Ardennes broke and ran.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
As de Gaulle recalled in his war memoirs, “‘We haven’t time,’ [the Germans] cried, ‘to make you prisoners!’”
At the outbreak of World War II the weapon of choice among French armored divisions was the Char B1 bis, the heaviest standard tank of its time. Designed by committee over the better part of two decades and manufactured by Renault and other firms, the vehicle carried a 75 mm howitzer and a 7.5 mm machine gun mounted in the hull, both aimed largely by steering the vehicle, as well as a 47 mm anti-tank cannon and second 7.5 mm machine gun in a one-man turret. The Char B1 bis boasted armor 60 mm thick on its front and turret, 55 mm on its sides. Each tank bore the name of either a French region or national hero. By June 1940 French factories had rolled out nearly 400 of them. Char B1 bis crews first proved themselves during the German advance into Belgium, as British and French divisions covered the unprotected flank of the Maginot Line. On May 15, 1940, Captain Pierre Gilbert in Adour attacked a German armored formation north of Flavion and knocked out three enemy vehicles with his turret gun. Incoming tank rounds soon disabled Adour, leaving three of its six-man crew injured. The wounded Gilbert sent crewman Daniel Legac to inform Lieutenant Louis Bounaix, the commander of Guynemer, that he was now in charge of the threetank formation.
Germans inspect an abandoned Char B1 bis (opposite, top). Though less formidable than the Char B1, German light tanks (above) were able to move rapidly across France. De Gaulle explains mechanized warfare to President Albert François Lebrun in 1939 (opposite, bottom).
Soon after seeking concealment in a thicket, Gilbert and Chief Sgt. Joseph Baur were killed by enemy fire. The surviving crewmen surrendered. Smoke billowed up from Adour, and through its open side hatch approaching Germans could just make out a painted message bestowed by actress and later resistance agent Jeanne Boitel on the day the tank was christened: M Y WISHES ACCOMPANY THE ADOUR, CAPTAIN GILBERT AND HIS MEN. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Bounaix and crew in Guynemer and Lieutenant Pierre Lelong and crew in Gard fought on. Bounaix left a particularly vivid account of the fighting: I looked over the terrain and spotted an immobile Char B. I was a little annoyed, as I thought the 28th BCC [Battalion de Chars de Combat] held the ridge, the first phase of combat was already over, and that we, the second wave, would have nothing to do. At that moment we took a blow to our left side armor. I looked down the road, and a red flash lit up from a hedge at about 800 meters. Another blow to our armor!
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NORTH SEA
GERMANY
BELGIUM DUNKIRK ARDENNES
MONTCORNET LAON
STONNE
PARIS
MAGINOT LINE
F R A N C E Pierre Billotte
M I L E S 40
I hesitated to withdraw, as I thought a friend had made an error. I refused to believe the Boches could have arrived. Corporal Le Bris, the assistant driver, announced: ‘Popped armor bolts, left side.’ I then turned my turret toward the intermittent flashes and expended four of five explosive shells from the 47 mm. The enemy fire continued. I checked the range and asked Millard for explosive shells. Two projectiles, and the enemy fire ceased. I resumed my course and accelerated to catch up with Adour and Gard, which had never slowed down. A hundred meters farther there was another red flash on my left. We fired the 75 this time, and the enemy fire stopped. Resuming course, I arrived at the woods between the second ridge and the edge of the plateau. These wooden tongues determined the fire corridors, and hits soon rang on the left side armor. Having steered the tank east and looked southeast, at first I couldn’t spot the enemy. Then the driver cried out, ‘A tank in front of us!’ It was, indeed, a Boche—a Panzerkampfwagen IV. I felt great joy, mixed with a bit of anxiety, as when a hunter spots game, but what formidable game. I adjusted the fire of the 75. ‘Range 450 —short!’ ‘Range 500—short!’ “Range 550…’ I can still hear the cry of the driver: ‘I got it!’ Two or three men jumped from the Boche tank, as an enormous red glow burst Though heavily armored, from the front of the enemy machine. I then French Char B1 tanks noticed that our left flank was lined with were susceptible to the large German tanks.…They were camou7.5 cm (75 mm) highflaged and immobile, but red flashes lit up, explosive (left) and and we took hits. The word ‘hail’ is far too armor-piercing (right) weak to describe the noise inside the turret rounds fired by German Panzerkampfwagenn IVs. from all the projectiles. We took a hit on
Tank Busters
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the bottom of the side door, which unhinged it, leaving it half open. Millard jumped up, grabbed it and held it shut for the duration of the fight. Edging up a bit, I noticed at the edge of the woods Gard, its turret open. At the side door was Sergeant Waslet, the radioman, pistol in hand. We could only guess what had happened. The door may have been smashed in, wounding tank commander Lieutenant Lelong. Was that it? Looking around, I spotted Ourcq and Isère, all that remained of our first section. They’d done wonders, struggling, shooting. With them at my side we formed a section. Hits on the right increased in intensity, as our right flank was filled with Boche tanks, lined up as if on parade and firing at us. But their hits sounded weak, and they barely accepted combat, withdrawing into the woods as soon as taken to task.…I had the consolation of demolishing one. At that point my right tread was snarling in a disquieting manner, my 47 had fired too much, and my brake fluid was leaking at the cylinder head. Only the 47 of Ourcq was still speaking. Radio orders came through—“Rally!” Ourcq and Isère obeyed by forging a path. I followed and in passing saw Hérault in flames. Arriving at our starting point, the three tanks were out of steam. Its motor ravaged, Ourcq stopped cold. Guynemer’s right track broke, and Isère experienced the same accident a hundred meters farther on. Exiting the tank, I made a tour of Guynemer.… Its hull had absorbed more than 50 hits. Yet on the front, miraculously intact, the banner of Sacré-Coeur still fluttered. I retrieved it. Guynemer was credited with destroying three Panzerkampfwagen IVs and one Panzerkampfwagen III. Ourcq had destroyed four enemy tanks, Isère three. Gard, on the
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other hand, had been destroyed with the loss of five crewmen, while Hérault had taken a disabling shell hit to its track drive sprocket, forcing the crew to scuttle it.
While the clash in Belgium proved the French Char B1s could give much better than they got, it also suggested their mechanical issues might negate at least a measure of their crews’ fighting ability. Captain Pierre Billotte, the 34-year-old son of French 1st Army commander General Gaston-Henri Billotte, was a standout commander in the May 16 seesaw tank battle between French and German forces over the tiny village of Stonne in northeast France. Colonel Michel Malaguti commanded the 41st BCC from the Char B1 bis Vienne, while Billotte represented the tip of the spear in Eure. Leading the French attack, Billotte had taken a sharp turn in the village when he came face to face with a column of tanks and other armored vehicles of the 10th Panzer Division. Billotte immediately ordered his driver, Sergeant Durupt, to fire Eure’s 75 mm hull gun at the lead tank in the German column, while he himself used the 47 mm turret gun to take out the trailing tank. With both enemy tanks disabled and ablaze, the others were trapped. Billotte and Durupt then rumbled through the village at will in their heavy tank, systematically knocking out 11 other German tanks and two anti-tank guns. The tanker and his crewmen later counted some 140 enemy hits on Eure’s hull. The ability of the Char B1 bis to absorb punishment made a daunting impression on Wehrmacht tankers yet to be convinced of their own invincibility. When two French crewmen from Lieutenant Jacques Hachet’s Vertus roamed the forest at Stonne looking for spare parts after the tank suffered an engine failure, they routed a nervous German patrol, captured a prisoner and discovered hundreds of enemy graves and discarded packs. They also recovered an abandoned, intact Panzerkampfwagen III.
Highly maneuverable despite its size and weight, the Char B1 bis was also able to withstand repeated punishment, though shell damage to its tracks (as in the photo above left) could stop it cold. Once French armor had been neutralized, German infantrymen (above) moved in to secure any gains.
Over three days of bitter fighting Stonne changed hands 17 times. The French deployed 130 tanks and lost 33, mostly to mechanical failure, while the Germans deployed 300 tanks and lost 24, primarily to battle damage. The Germans, however, suffered some 26,500 casualties to 7,500 for the French. Germans who fought both at Stonne and later at Stalingrad insisted Stonne was worse.
When the Germans ultimately secured Stonne, de Gaulle moved his forces east to the village of Montcornet, the target of General Heinz Guderian’s next armored thrust. De Gaulle ordered his tanks to deploy on either side of the road between Montcornet and Laon, which ran through the forest of Samossy, thus providing the tanks cover from the air. Colonel Aimé Sudre’s armored half-brigade, including a battalion with a number of Char B1s, came up as reinforcements for de Gaulle’s 4th Armored Division, which was still forming. Major Jean-Yves-Marie Bescond, a foremost expert on big tanks, led the Char B1 battalion. “You are the champion of the Char B,” de Gaulle told Bescond. “Show what it is worth.” Bescond returned to his tank crews and made a dour prediction: “This will be my Reichshoffen.” It was a reference to the Aug. 6, 1870, clash during the Franco-Prussian War in which some 700 of Napoléon III’s elite mounted cuirassiers became bottlenecked near the Alsatian village of Reichshoffen and were cut to pieces by Prussian infantry firing from cover. At 4:30 a.m. on May 19 de Gaulle’s 4th Armored Division attacked with more than 100 tanks. Leading the charge from his Char B1 bis Berry-au-Bac was Bescond.
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Adolf Hitler (at far left) listens as General Wilhelm Keitel reads surrender terms to French emissaries in a railway car at Compiègne on June 22, 1940.
Much to the Germans’ astonishment, the Char B1’s turrets and frontal armor proved impenetrable to standard anti-tank guns—a fact that enabled the French tanks to cross the Serre, capture Montcornet and threaten Guderian’s lines of communication. The German commander later admitted the Char B1s had given him some very bad moments. But the French assault ultimately faltered under withering fire from emplaced German 88 mm guns. Bescond, as he had feared, was among the casualties. Berry-au-Bac had broken down, and Bescond had transferred to Sampiero Corso. As he followed orders to withdraw, panzers semi-concealed in the forest opened fire, and an incoming round bounced harmlessly off Sampiero Corso’s hull. Then a shell from a German 88 penetrated the Char B1’s side door and detonated inside, killing Bescond and his crew. Sampiero Corso remained
Despite stubborn resistance and the magnificent stand at Stonne, the French cause was doomed largely intact, and the Germans set up a marker so the French could later identify the bodies for proper burial. During the fight for Montcornet 6-foot-5 de Gaulle strode around upright, ignoring bullets and shell bursts to inspire his men, who remained tenacious. Regardless, the French high command unilaterally halted the attack. The division managed to pull back in good order, suffering just 25 casualties, though it lost 23 of 85 tanks engaged to land mines and Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers. Still, though Montcornet went down as a tactical German victory, de Gaulle
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The French, still in command of 100 divisions and some 6 million men in late May, had expected the 200,000 men of 10 British divisions then on the Continent to advance on Arras. The British instead opted to escape and evade. The French themselves were appalled when thousands of their reserve infantrymen broke under German air attack and tried to surrender without much of a fight— and without much interest from the onrushing Germans. Britain and France blamed one another for their mutual collapse. Tanker Pierre Billotte’s father, the decorated World War I veteran General Gaston-Henri Billotte, was written off as a hopeless coward by British General Edmund Ironside, chief of the Imperial General Staff. The elder Billotte did not long have to suffer the opprobrium of his British counterparts, however—he was fatally injured on May 21 when his car struck a military truck during a wild midnight ride to organize another counterattack. Ironside assumed command of the British, French and Belgian forces in the Battle of Belgium—and lost. Ironside also wrote off General Georges-Maurice-Jean Blanchard as another hopeless coward, though Blanchard was later decorated for his valorous rearguard action that enabled the British withdrawal from Dunkirk. While the Char B1 bises acquitted themselves well, they continued to suffer mechanical problems, and when the French and British fought side by side at Abbeville starting on May 27, poor coordination led to needless losses. On June 4 a late-arriving column of Char B1s approaching town from the south stumbled into a minefield zeroed in by German artillery and anti-tank guns and took heavy losses. Of the 30 Char B1s engaged in combat that same day at Dunkirk—in the closing hours of the evacuation—only seven made it back to their jump-off positions. Some French units fought better after the British left, but the Char B1s could not compensate for poor communication and morale in second-echelon units elsewhere. “We were the bosses, and we lost the battle, and this gave a good excuse for the British to be selfish,” French strategist and General André Beaufre later observed in an episode of the popular British documentary series The World at War. “Anyway, they were very selfish.” MH A frequent contributor to Military History, John Koster is the author of Custer Survivor and the forthcoming Hitler’s Nemesis: Hermann Ehrhardt. For further reading he recommends The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved, by Jonathan Fenby, and De Gaulle: The Rebel, 1890–1944, by Jean Lacouture.
MONDADORI PORTFOLIO VIA GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE FROM TOP: CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; SERGE DE SAZO/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES
had captured 130 enemy soldiers and inflicted four times as many casualties on the Germans. Despite continuing stubborn resistance and the magnificent stand at Stonne—house-to-house fighting continued until May 25—the French cause was doomed.
German tanks roll through a city in northern France following the surrender. De Gaulle (below) escaped to England, spearheaded the Free French government and was later elected president of France.
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The 1917 Battle of Passchendaele was a three-month slog through mud, blood, guts, rats and raining death By Ron Soodalter
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Fred Leist’s Attack in Polygon Wood depicts the moment in September 1917 when Australian troops assaulted a line of German pillboxes—one of many small clashes that comprised the drawn-out Battle of Passchendaele.
FRED LEIST/AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL
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T
he history of warfare is rife with accounts of battles that took a terrible human toll and others fought to no viable end. A student of military history would have to go to great lengths, however, to find a conflict that accomplished less at such a staggering cost in life than did the three-month 1917 engagement known officially as the Third Battle of Ypres but to history as Passchendaele, the name of the small Flemish village around which the battle raged. During the war British soldiers phonetically translated Passchendaele as “Passion Dale”—a reference to Christ’s suffering on the cross. A later chronicler dubbed it the “Valley Where God Died.” Either sets the proper mood, for the battle has come to epitomize the suffering, futility and mindless slaughter that characterized World War I.
By the spring of 1917 the “war to end war,” as H.G. Wells termed it, was going badly for the Allies. Tens of thousands of French soldiers on the Western Front had mutinied or deserted in the wake of a failed offensive, the Russians’ attention was consumed by the communist revolution riving their nation, and the United States would not land troops in Europe until summer. In the interim Britain bore much of the military burden.
Allied troops had been bogged down in the trenches for years, unable to dislodge the enemy Further exacerbating the situation, Germany had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. Sailing out of captured Belgian ports along the English Channel, its U-boats again systematically stalked and sank merchant vessels in international waters. The toll on Allied shipping proved devastating, and on June 19 Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, presented the War Cabinet in London a plan to eliminate the threat. Haig’s plan centered on a long-contested salient— a bulge in the Allied front lines roughly the size of Man-
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hattan—backed by the small town of Ypres, within 25 miles of the coast in the Flanders region of Belgium. British forces had recently won two victories within the salient, at Vimy in April and Messines in early June. In the mistaken belief the German army was on the brink of collapse, Haig reasoned signs were propitious for a major campaign. As he saw it, by launching a massive offensive against the Germans from Ypres, combined with an amphibious attack along the coast, he could drive his forces through the salient, liberate northern Belgium and seize the coastal cities that harbored the German submarines. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had serious misgivings about Haig’s plan. First and foremost, Allied troops had been bogged down in the trenches of the salient for years, unable to dislodge the enemy. The Allies maintained only a slim advantage over the Germans in manpower (perhaps 15 percent) and no advantage in firepower. The British could not count on full French support. Finally, even if Haig were able to reach the coast, there was no certainty of capturing the ports. All that was guaranteed was a massive loss of life. Ultimately, however, advised by First Sea Lord Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Rushworth Jellicoe that Britain could not survive another year of unchecked U-boat warfare, Lloyd George reluctantly gave his approval.
Haig could hardly have chosen less hospitable ground for a major offensive. The opposing armies had hotly disputed the Ypres salient since 1914, and by the summer of 1917 it had been degraded beyond the realm of imagination. The battles in 1914 and 1915 had reduced the once quaint medieval market town of Ypres to rubble. On its outskirts shellfire had rendered apocalyptic what had once been lush fields of crops bounded by gentle, tree-lined slopes. In their place was a barren expanse of water-filled craters and blackened, wraithlike stumps. From a tactical perspective, the Germans retained the high ground, and their artillery and machine gun nests commanded the no-man’s-land between the opposing trenches. The dominant elevation was the ridge on which stood the remnants of Passchendaele, largely pulverized to dust and broken bricks by the earlier fighting.
CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM; OPPOSITE: CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: POWER H. SEPTIMUS/AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL; NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY (U.K.); CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM (2)
The identity discs of Canadian Field Artillery Driver George Ransom, one of a quarter-million Allied casualties at Passchendaele.
Australian artillerymen struggle to move their 18-pounder gun through the morass of mud and shell craters that constituted the battlefield.
Sir Douglas Haig
Sir Arthur William Currie
For nearly three years the armies had alternately advanced and withdrawn over the same ground, their gains and losses measured in yards. Interlaced fields of heavy fire made the salient a literal deathtrap, what author Winston Groom has termed a “giant corpse factory,” on which such innovative tools of war as tanks, flamethrowers and biplane bombers wreaked havoc on the landscape and men. Yet Haig saw an opportunity to turn stalemate and attrition into victory.
David Lloyd George
The British general launched his offensive on July 31. The Allied force comprised more than a half-million men in 30 British and Commonwealth divisions, six Belgian divisions and, belatedly, six French divisions, all supported by 168 tanks and more than 3,000 artillery pieces. It was by any calculation an impressive assemblage. By then the planned amphibious assault along the Belgian coast had run into logistical obstacles and been postponed (it was ultimately cancelled), but Haig assured Lloyd George’s War Cabinet the delay would in 41
YARD BY YARD TO PASSCHENDAELE
F
ield Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, had a plan. Recognizing the threat posed by Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and needing a decisive offensive to break the three-year stalemate, he proposed a two-pronged attack to accomplish both aims. Haig planned a large-scale offensive in the Ypres salient combined with an amphibious assault on the U-boat bases along the Belgian coast. Success hinged on operational coordination and good weather. Neither was forthcoming, and the amphibious assault was canceled. The target of his armies was Passchendaele, a wrecked village atop the dominant ridge east of Ypres. Stepping off on July 31 after a massive 10-day artillery barrage, a half-million British, Belgian and French troops soon bogged down in the morass wrought by their own shells. Australian and New Zealand troops fared little better. Not until Haig sent in four Canadian divisions that fall did the momentum shift. The Allies finally took the ridge on November 6. To gain 5 miles of ground, Haig had sacrificed some 250,000 men.
DISTANCE: YPRES TO PASSCHENDAELE 7 MILES/11 KM
Stalemate on the Western Front By the time Haig launched his drive toward Passchendaele, the opposing armies on the Western Front had been largely deadlocked for three years. Offensives had prompted counteroffensives, with thousands of lives purchasing mere yards of gain. Little changed until the Americans arrived in divisional strength in the fall of 1917. MAPS BY STEVE WALKOWIAK/SWMAPS.COM
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PHOTO: GEORGE METCALF ARCHIVAL COLLECTION/CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM
Water, Mud, Bodies and Blood Soldiers on either side of no-man’s-land had a hard enough time simply surviving amid, let alone advancing across, the moonscape that was the Western Front. If shells, bullets or poison gas didn’t get them, rampant disease very well might.
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German prisoners carry wounded Canadians to the rear as their captors bring up wooden duckboards to deal with the mud. Allied infantrymen await the next German counterattack (center). British troops don respirators during an enemy gas attack (opposite).
Gas Attack!
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Allies advanced, seizing small portions of muddy ground, only to be forced back by German counteroffensives. On October 4 the Allies managed to wrest control of one of the ridges east of Ypres, encouraging Haig to attempt yet another assault on Passchendaele Ridge. In the second week of October he launched two indecisive attacks, gaining little ground and losing another 20,000 men. Despite growing resistance from London, difficult terrain, poor weather and the increasingly debilitating conditions under which his exhausted army was living, Haig persisted.
Not all the deaths within the Ypres salient were the result of gunshot or shrapnel. Scores of wounded, careless and simply unlucky men—as well as countless army horses and mules—fell into water-filled shell holes and drowned. Mud, however, was the soldiers’ deadliest obstacle. “The moment you set off, you felt that dreadful suction,” recalled Private Charles Miles of the 10th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. “It was forever pulling you down.” It also clogged the muzzles and breeches of firearms, rendering them useless. Men mired in the mud became stationary targets for German rifles, machine guns and artillery, dying in the slime and sinking anonymously into it. And horrible though the mud was for the advancing soldiers to negotiate, there were worse things underfoot. “When it yielded under your feet,” recalled Private Miles, “you knew that it was a body you were treading on. It was terrifying.
FROM LEFT: GEORGE METCALF COLLECTION/CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM; BRITISH NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM (3)
no way jeopardize the success of his battle plan at Ypres. Over the first 10 days the Allied big guns fired some four and a quarter million rounds, further churning the soil and destroying Flanders’ centuries-old drainage system, which had held back the waters of local creeks. Meanwhile, a long period of torrential rains—the heaviest in memory —struck the region, flooding the creeks and turning the fields to thick, deep mud. Over the weeks that followed, countless more artillery shells from both sides, as well as 60-pound bombs from German heavy bombers, churned the muddy Chemical weapons were ground into porridge. an ever-present threat at Passchendaele, so officers The line of the salient remained virtucarried brass whistles like ally unaltered, as men, animals, tanks and this one to quickly warn guns wallowed in the mire. The all-buttheir troops to “mask up” before the clouds of deadly impassable expanse over which Haig proposed to send hundreds of thousands of gas descended on them. troops had become, in the words of Canadian historian Tim Cook, “a battlefield of despair, the place where soldiers went to die in the mud.” Stymied by the impossible conditions that his own guns had in large measure created, Haig did not resume his attack until mid-August—again with practically no effect. In September he sent in reinforcements from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) to support the spent British forces. Nothing changed—the
You’d tread on one on the stomach, perhaps, and it would grunt all the air out of its body. It made your hair stand on end. The smell could make you vomit.” During their constant artillery barrages, whenever winds allowed, the Germans mixed in rounds containing poison gas. The Germans first introduced chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. Even in small doses it induced coughing and vomiting. In concentration it could destroy lung tissues, causing death by asphyxiation. By the time of Haig’s offensive the Germans had introduced the even more horrifying mustard gas. Although not always lethal, the sulfur-based agent could cause blindness, blistering burns and permanent damage to the respiratory and digestive systems. The threat of contamination persisted even after the gas cloud dissipated, as its residue saturated uniforms and settled on the ground and in the water, remaining toxic for days or weeks. In the event of an attack, officers ordered their men to immediately don their gas masks. The clunky, illfitting masks formed a poor seal, and improved respirators were not available until late in the war. If the men lost or left behind their masks during an assault, they could counter the respiratory effects by urinating into a rag or handkerchief and covering their faces with the urea-soaked cloth. There was little protection for the rest of the body, as chemical suits had yet to be invented, and the penetrating gas could blister and peel off skin beneath one’s uniform. Generally, the best way to determine the type of gas being used was by its smell. By this point in the cam-
The constant shelling cast up the corpses of men who had died days, weeks or months before paign, however, competing odors were an ever-present problem. There were no latrines on the front lines; for safety reasons men were instructed to use crude waste pits carved from the mud of the trenches, then toss in lime to combat odor. An exercise in futility if there ever was one, as there were also no bathing facilities, and the unwashed soldiers, living day and night in perpetually wet wool uniforms, reeked. Worst of all, the constant shelling frequently cast up from their nameless muddy graves the rotting corpses of men who had died days, weeks or months before. “There were bodies rotting everywhere,” one Western Front survivor recalled. “Nothing could be done about them. You could throw a shovel full of quick lime on them to take some of the smell away, but the odor of the trenches was appalling.” Rats flourished in such conditions. Disease was also rampant. The unsanitary water supply made cholera a real and terrifying threat. In the ankledeep mire trench foot was a common affliction. Left untreated, the affected appendage could become gangrenous and require amputation. Trench fever, transmitted by body lice, brought on a high temperature, muscular pain and a month-long recovery. Living conditions were
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so abysmal, soldiers were almost relieved when ordered “over the top.”
By mid-October Haig had pursued his offensive for nearly three months, with little to show for it other than a casualty list approaching 250,000—half his original troop strength. Despite the desperate efforts of the British troops, followed by those of the resolute Australians and New Zealanders, the Germans still held Passchendaele Ridge. If Haig had any hope of salvaging his military career, he needed a tangible victory. The headstrong general turned to the 100,000-man Canadian Corps, whose actions had factored significantly in the April victory at Vimy Ridge. He ordered its notably competent commander, Lt. Gen. Sir Arthur William Currie, to cross Ravebeek stream and take Passchendaele Ridge. Currie estimated the cost of such an assault at 16,000 dead and wounded—as events would prove, an uncannily accurate calculation. But he didn’t balk. After assuring Haig his Canadians could and would take the ridge, Currie set about making preparations for the offensive. His men spent the next two rainy weeks under fire as they completed the treacherous work of repairing and extending boardwalks, plank roads and tramlines over the muddy ground to allow for the movement Chemically treated hoods of troops, munitions and supplies. By the like the example above time Currie was ready to advance on Passwere uncomfortable, chendaele, shelling had dammed the Raveimpeded one’s vision beek, flooding the crossing. Undeterred, and offered scant the adaptable Currie split his attacking protection against German gas attacks. force, sending one division up Bellevue
Masked Men of Ypres
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FROM TOP: AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL; CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM
Australian troops marching toward front lines at Passchendaele pass Ypres’ landmark 13th-century Cloth Hall, reduced to rubble by shellfire.
Spur to the north and another up Passchendaele Ridge to the south. He ultimately sent all four Canadian divisions up the ridge, initially supported to the north by the British Fifth Army and to the south by I ANZAC Corps. Taking the mud into account, Currie executed his twopronged attack in four bite-and-hold stages supported by creeping barrages and broken by multiday intervals. By the end of the first day, October 26, his units had advanced only a few hundred yards, at a cost of 2,500 casualties. German resistance was formidable. Major Talbot Papineau of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI) offhandedly remarked to fellow Major Hugh Niven shortly before advancing, “You know, Hughie, this is suicide.” Moments later an artillery shell struck Papineau in the midriff, obliterating all tissue above his beltline. Only his legs were left intact, protruding grotesquely from the mud. The second assault went off four days later, the reserve divisions leapfrogging past the first two. “If human endurance can stand it,” wrote Lt. Col. Agar Adamson, commander of the PPCLI, to his wife back home in Ontario, “we should be successful.” His men slogged through the mud and barbed wire through a hailstorm of machine-gun fire, gaining 550 yards at a cost of 360 of their 600 men. After tallying the casualties, Adamson again wrote home: “My dear Mabel, I am still alright and hanging on.…I cannot help wondering if the position gained was worth the awful sacrifice of life.” Meanwhile, within minutes of stepping off the line, the 85th Battalion (Nova Scotia Highlanders) lost most of its 12 officers and more than 425 other ranks. By the end of the second day the Canadians had incurred 2,300 additional casualties, including 900 killed, with a gain of slightly more than 900 yards—an average of nearly one dead man per yard. Another 1,000 yards remained. The next assault was planned for November 6. During the tactical pause the German army Haig still believed to be on its last legs received a steady stream of reinforcements from the Eastern Front. The Germans, many of whom rode out the Allied artillery barrages in thick-walled concrete pillboxes, were determined to hold the ridge at all costs. Meanwhile, Currie used pack trains to quietly move up ammunition and supplies and ordered night raids to eliminate obstacles and wreak whatever havoc possible. The Canadian commander was as determined to take the ridge. The third assault up Bellevue Spur and Passchendaele Ridge began at dawn. Supported by a creeping barrage by every gun in Currie’s battery, the Canadians mounted a series of short, desperate fights. By 8:45 a.m., as historian Groom put it, “They were bayoneting Germans in the rubble that had once been Passchendaele.” They had taken the ridge, as Currie had promised, at a cost of nearly 16,000 casualties, as the general had predicted. For their heroism nine Canadians received the Victoria Cross, the highest British and Commonwealth award for gallantry in the face of the enemy.
An Australian soldier escorts four German POWs carrying a wounded man across duckboards amid the muddy moonscape at Passchendaele.
FRED LEIST/AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL
The day Currie’s men took Passchendaele, Haig’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Sir Launcelot Kiggell, viewed the detritusstrewn battleground in front of Ypres for the first time. Horrified, he reportedly broke down, exclaiming, “Good God! Did we really send men to fight in that?” The officer with him replied, “It’s worse further on up.”
After more than three desperate months the Battle of Passchendaele was over. Though touted as a victory, the Allied forces had suffered a quarter-million casualties (a toll nearly matched by the Germans) to capture just 5 miles of ground. Of these some 90,000 were reported missing. Many lie in nameless graves, while 42,000 bodies were never recovered. Though the capture of Passchendaele Ridge had saved Haig’s career, it brought down on him a rain of both popular and official criticism. The field marshal had failed to accomplish the ambitious objectives he had so confidently set forth in the War Cabinet meeting of June 19—his 56th birthday. Faced with the massive losses his army had incurred, as well as the intervening cancellation of the amphibious operation, he did not pursue a course to the coast. The channel ports remained in German control, and within six months Passchendaele Ridge itself would once again fall into enemy hands, abandoned by the army that had sacrificed so much to gain so little.
Churchill deemed Passchendaele ‘a forlorn expenditure of valor and life without equal in futility’ In the end the fight at the Ypres salient represented, in the estimation of one Canadian chronicler, “the Great War’s low point for the Allies, clouded in controversy and mired in seemingly useless death.” As author Will Bird, a veteran of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), wrote, “Every man who had endured Passchendaele would never be the same again, was more or less a stranger to himself.” British Prime Minister Lloyd George bemoaned the battle as “one of the greatest disasters of the war,” while Western Front veteran and future Prime Minister Winston Churchill deemed Passchendaele “a forlorn expenditure of valor and life without equal in futility.” Few who have studied it, and none who experienced it, would disagree. MH Frequent contributor Ron Soodalter is the author of Hanging Captain Gordon and The Slave Next Door. For further reading he recommends Passchendaele, by Peter Barton; A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914–1918, by Winston Groom; and Passchendaele: The Lost Victory of World War I, by Nick Lloyd.
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Mounted U.S. troops reconnoiter the Bayang rancheria on Mindanao.
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HEARTS AND MINDS IN MINDANAO A century ago American officers Frank Baldwin and John J. Pershing battled a Muslim Filipino insurgency —with strikingly different methods and results By Paul Maggioni
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY
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Maj. Gen. Adna Chaffee, the military governor of the Philippines, had his hands full with the ongoing insurrection in the north but reluctantly approved Baldwin’s expedition. However, he told Davis, “I prefer lots of talking to shooting,” and Davis in turn urged Baldwin to fight only if fired on first. Baldwin then sent an ultimatum to the Maranao datus, demanding they hand over those who had killed the soldiers. After receiving their scornful reply on April 9, he telegraphed for 1,000 men
Would Mindanao flare into rebellion due to Baldwin’s prodding? It seemed probable to assemble at Malabang in preparation for the march on Lanao. The move stunned Pershing and surprised Chaffee and Davis, who had heard nothing from Baldwin about the expedition since March 18. Without consultation the colonel had grabbed half the Mindanao garrison for the expedition against the enemy. But who were the enemy? Baldwin knew the names of individuals who had ambushed the soldiers, and he had identified hostile Maranao rancherias (tribal settlements)
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along the Lanao shore, such as Bacolod, Bayang, Butig, Masiu and Taraca. But the rancherias were independent fiefdoms, and Baldwin did not know the extent of each rancheria’s responsibility for the attacks. Davis and Chaffee, concerned the situation might deteriorate into a general conflict between the 2,000 U.S. Army troops on Mindanao and the 100,000-strong Maranaos, journeyed down the Ganassi trail to meet with the Maranao datus. The Moros expressed their fear and anger over the forming expedition, and in response Chaffee issued another proclamation, disclaiming any intent to conquer the Maranaos but giving them a deadline of April 27 to surrender the killers. Baldwin decided to force the issue. On April 18, after Davis and Chaffee had left and without their approval, the colonel marched his expeditionary force from Malabang some miles up the trail, ostensibly to open the road to Ganassi. The advance sparked two minor skirmishes with the Maranaos, increasing the likelihood of full-scale conflict with the Moros. Only after the fact did Baldwin wire Davis at Zamboanga with a report of his impetuous, insubordinate actions, word of which reverberated through the highest corridors of power in Washington. Considering the state of ongoing insurrection on other Philippine islands, no one in President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration wanted a war with the Moros. Secretary of War Elihu Root himself angrily ordered Baldwin back to the coast, an order seconded by Chaffee. Davis, however, backed Baldwin, insisting a withdrawal would weaken tenuous U.S. authority on the island. Accepting Davis’ advice, Chaffee directed him to accompany Baldwin. Back at Iligan on the north coast of Mindanao, Pershing realized Baldwin’s thrust north from Malabang had riled the previously neutral northern Maranaos. Would Mindanao flare into rebellion due to Baldwin’s prodding? It seemed probable. To reassure the Muslim tribesmen that conquest was not the intended purpose of the U.S. expedition into the heart of their territory, Pershing realized he must venture a second time into Lanao country, again unarmed. It could help prevent a general war. Or it could mean his death.
The doughboys had arrived in the Philippines four years earlier during the Spanish-American War. When the United States assumed what was essentially colonial rule over the islands, an insurrection broke out, centered in the north. However, Moroland—comprising Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago in the south—had remained quiet. In 1899 U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John C. Bates had negotiated an agreement with the sultan of Sulu, who had nominal authority over the fractious Moros. The sultan acknowledged U.S. sovereignty and pledged neutrality, while Washington promised to keep largely out of Moro affairs. For some six centuries the Muslim Moros of Mindanao had farmed, fished and fought—battling Christian
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; GAMMA-KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (4)
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n April 26, 1902, U.S. Army Captain John J. Pershing sat in his office at the old Spanish garrison in Iligan on the north coast of the Philippine island of Mindanao, reflecting on the brewing Moro Rebellion, months of wasted diplomatic outreach and the catalyst of much of the trouble—his immediate superior, Colonel Frank Baldwin. Ten weeks earlier Pershing had journeyed unarmed with an interpreter and three native scouts into the heart of hostile Moro country around Lake Lanao. He’d managed to gain the respect of the Muslim datus (chiefs) and establish cordial relations with Manabilang, the most influential datu on the north shore. Pershing had returned triumphant to Iligan only to find he no longer reported to Brig. Gen. George W. Davis (commanding the 7th Separate Brigade), but to Davis’ newly arrived deputy, Baldwin, a veteran of the Civil, Indian and Spanish-American wars and a two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor. “Few doubted Frank Baldwin’s courage or pugnacity,” historian Robert A. Fulton notes, “but while a fighting man’s fighting man, at age 60 he was known to be somewhat to the right of the ShermanSheridan doctrine of ‘the only good Indian is a dead one.’” Within weeks the Lake Lanao Moros (aka Maranaos) had ambushed and killed two soldiers. To Pershing’s dismay Baldwin began organizing a punitive expedition to Lanao, a potential trigger for a full-scale Maranao revolt.
In a rare contemporary photo 42-year-old Captain John J. Pershing stands tall during the April 1903 American advance on the Moro cotta at Bacolod.
Pershing
Adna Chaffee
Elihu Root
Frank Baldwin
Hugh Drum
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Filipinos, the Spanish and each other with equal fervor. An insular cultural and religious minority disliked and mistrusted by the majority Christian populace, they lived within the hundreds of independent rancherias ruled by the datus. In his posthumously published memoir Kris and Krag: Adventures Among the Moros of the Southern Philippine Islands Colonel Horace Potts Hobbs offered this general description: The individual Moro is, on the average, from 5 to 5 feet 7 inches tall, solidly built, erect of carriage, with redbrown complexion, straight black hair, front teeth ground concave and polished black from chewing buyo, or betel nuts.…The Moro dress is colorful and picturesque: bright colored turbans, embroidered jackets leaving the broad and often scarred chest bare, tight-fitting trousers and yards of colored sash around the waist in which is carried the brass buyo box and the razor-sharp kris, or barong.…Don’t try to bluff him or push him around, or that kris will cut you down in a flash. I have seen it done. A year after U.S. representatives signed the Bates agreement, infantry units stationed on Mindanao violated its terms. Taking sides in a long-standing rivalry between Rio Grande Moros and the dominant Maranaos, the Americans engaged in several sharp skirmishes with the latter. The Maranaos remained hostile to the troops until Pershing’s September 1901 arrival at Iligan and subsequent diplomatic outreach. Pershing’s efforts had
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shown promise by early 1902, but when Baldwin landed on Mindanao in March with the newly formed 27th U.S. Infantry, he had orders to explore and improve roads into the interior—setting the stage for conflict.
On April 27 Pershing again left Iligan on the road to Marahui (present-day Marawi) rancheria, having arranged a meeting with Manabilang attended by hundreds of other Maranaos—including such diehard datus from the southern shores of Lanao as the sultan of Bayang. The warriors could have killed Pershing on the spot. Instead, they heard out the captain as he spoke through an interpreter of the Army’s intentions to find the killers, explore the lake and open the roads for commerce. Although Pershing left the conference alive and cautiously optimistic, the sultan of Bayang and others declared they would fight any U.S. troops who dared enter their rancherias. Meanwhile, the deadline to surrender the killers came and went. Intelligence indicated the hostile Maranaos were massing at Binadayan and Pandatapan, adjacent cottas (forts) within Bayang rancheria. On April 28 Baldwin duly marched his troops north from camp on the Ganassi trail. The colonel dispersed about half of the soldiers at waypoints along his supply line, and by the time the expedition reached the open highlands at Lake Lanao, he only had 600 available fighting men, a number further reduced by malaria and other maladies. Regardless, shortly after noon on May 2 Baldwin sent 1st Lt. Thomas Vicars’ Company F and Captain Samuel Lyon’s Company H to assault Binadayan at bayonet point. Wearing their trademark felt campaign hats and blue shirts and carrying modern Krag-Jorgensen bolt-action repeating rifles, the men scrambled across defensive ditches—and stopped, stymied by the cotta’s high, thick
PHILIPPINES PRESIDENTIAL MUSEUM AND LIBRARY (2)
A Moro (above) poses in ceremonial attire not usually worn in combat. Moros carried a variety of edged weapons (above right), including the wavy-bladed kalis, straight-bladed kampilan and leaf-shaped barong.
Men of the 27th U.S. Infantry pose atop the walls of Binadayan, on the southern shore of Lake Lanao.
M I N DA N AO ENLARGED AREA
SULU ARCHIPELAGO MILES 0
MARAWI
3
LAKE LANAO BACOLOD
TARACA BINADAYAN & PANDATAPAN
BAYANG
MASIU
GANASSI TRAIL CAMP VICARS
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER
BUTIG
walls. Under point-blank fire from Maranao flintlocks and the odd Remington or Mauser rifle captured from the Spanish, the Americans hoisted one another over the walls and took the position at the cost of a single wounded man. Meanwhile, the surviving Maranaos fled across the shallow valley toward Pandatapan, the stronger cotta, ringed by trenches and foxholes. After fortifying Binadayan hill with artillery and the 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry, Baldwin sent the four companies of 2nd Battalion to assault Pandatapan. From its parapet blood-red battle flags flapped in the breeze coming off Lake Lanao, while inside Maranaos beat gongs and shouted their defiance. As the Americans closed within a few hundred yards, the cotta erupted with the sharp crack of rifles and the roar of lantakas—forged bronze swivel cannons firing rocks, lead balls and anything else that could rend flesh. Nearing its walls, many of the soldiers stumbled into deep pits dug by the Maranaos. As sharpshooters kept the defenders’ heads down, other soldiers maneuvered to enfilade or directly assault the enemy positions. However, the Moros were adept at close combat and charged the Americans with the doubleedged kalis sword, thick, leaf-shaped barong or long, single-edged kampilan. “They fought our officers and enlisted men on the edge of the trenches, in the trenches and everywhere,” a dispatch from the front reported of the fierce fight. “It was shoot, cut, bite, throw rocks and yell for fully 30 minutes. By that time the Moros in the trenches were all dead, but our loss was heavy.” Around dusk Sergeant William Kelleher of Company G became the first American to reach Pandatapan’s 12-foot-high south wall, soon joined by 1st Lt. Hugh Drum. Unable to scale the wall, Kelleher and Drum stood shoulder to shoulder, forming a platform for Corporal
John Ward, who spent the next half-hour shooting down into the cotta at anything that moved as other soldiers handed up freshly loaded rifles. Meanwhile, Company F assaulted the main gate on the north wall, where close-range lantaka fire gruesomely decapitated Lieutenant Vicars, stopping the attack cold. Others tried scaling the wall, but the task proved impossible, and the Americans withdrew a short distance. At nightfall a heavy rain set in. Baldwin rallied his dispirited men, ordering them to maintain a cordon around the wall and build scaling ladders for a final assault in the morning. He vowed to be the first man over the parapet. That night the Moros attempted a desperate sortie, seeking to escape. Drum later recalled the resulting “bitter hand-to-hand fights, the bayonet contesting with the kampilan, knife, sword.” Early on the morning of May 3 the Maranao holdouts cut away the bamboo screen While this ornamented covering the parapet, and the Americans Moro kaliss sword is clearly meant for show, braced for a final suicidal rush. Instead, it bears all the features the Moros dropped their red battle flags of one intended for and raised four white flags. As the beaten combat use—notably defenders emerged from the gate, two the double-edged blade (for slashing) and wavy knife-wielding Moros made a slashing bid lines (for easier removal for freedom and were cut down. The die- from a victim’s body). hards turned out to be the sultan of Bayang and his brother. The Battle of Bayang was over. In a sanguinary postscript that afternoon American guards killed 35 of the 83 prisoners as the Moros attempted a mass breakout. Thirty-nine got away, while soldiers recaptured nine. In all the Americans had killed perhaps 400 Maranaos
Double-Edged Death Dealer
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and obliterated the Bayang rancheria, while U.S. casualties amounted to 10 killed and 40 wounded of some 300 men directly engaged. The next day Baldwin established Camp Vicars—named for the fallen lieutenant— as a permanent U.S. military cantonment at Lanao, a half-mile south of Pandatapan. Chaffee thought the affair had been botched and believed Pershing had saved the Army from disaster by persuading the northern Maranaos to remain neutral. Within days of the battle Chaffee visited Pandatapan, but when Baldwin began describing the clash, Chaffee coldly cut him off, saying, “Baldwin, you have solved the problem.” But what had the fighting colonel really accomplished? Although the Roosevelt administration and Chaffee sang Baldwin’s praises in public, it soon became clear the campaign had solved nothing. The violent incursion and high casualties had only inflamed the Moros of Mindanao, stiffening their resistance against the Americans. Bayang became a rallying cry. Chaffee needed a commander at
Pershing had by 1903 firmly established U.S. sovereignty and won over most of the datus Lanao who could handle the Moros with diplomacy and not the sword, a man with a proven track record. He needed Pershing.
Pershing arrived at Camp Vicars in mid-May. Nominally Baldwin’s intelligence officer, in fact he was the outpost’s acting commandant and reported directly to Chaffee— a rebuke to both Davis and Baldwin. “No move will be made,” Chaffee had assured Pershing, “without your 54 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
Once he’d taken command at Camp Vicars, Pershing sought to regain the trust of the Maranaos by holding formal conferences, developing a rapport with individual datus and establishing economic relationships. The fighting continued, however, as some rancherias proved implacably hostile, and during his 1902–03 tenure Pershing led expeditions to reduce the cottas at Butig, Masiu, Taraca and Bacolod. Unlike Baldwin, however, he sought to minimize casualties. Rather than cordoning off and frontally assaulting hostile cottas, for example, Pershing bombarded them at long range for an extended period, prompting defenders to flee and only sending in troops if necessary. In the Masiu expedition of September–October 1902 U.S. troops destroyed 10 cottas with little loss of life on either side. Pershing followed up by inviting the hostile Maranaos to Camp Vicars to talk peace. By early May 1903 the area had been pacified to the extent Pershing was able to mount an expedition along the lake to an enthusiastic welcome from most Maranaos, with hardly a shot fired in anger. Pershing, a 40-year-old captain with dim career prospects in 1901, had by 1903 fought a successful counterinsurgency around Lake Lanao, firmly established U.S. sovereignty and won over most of the Maranao datus. Recognizing his accomplishments, in the summer of 1906 the Army took the unusual step of promoting Pershing from captain directly to brigadier general. He went on to
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY
Between battles American troops on Mindanao often lived under canvas in less-than-ideal conditions, as in this camp on the trail to Lake Lanao.
approval.” To his credit Baldwin reluctantly accepted the extraordinary arrangement, which violated every Old Army principle of rank, seniority and chain of command. Pershing, for his part, respected the old colonel, recalling him as “a fine soldier with a long experience in handling Indians, but he was inclined to be impetuous.” The hostile Maranaos waylaid patrols sent out from Camp Vicars and even fired directly on the outpost. Casualties mounted from ambushes and increasingly accurate sniper fire. Baldwin boiled with rage, itching to march immediately on the nearby rancherias of Masiu and Bacolod. Pershing disagreed. “To move against those who are so-called enemies,” he insisted, “would force the hand of many who would like to be friends and cause them to take sides against us.” In his own way Baldwin was much like a Moro chieftain—a proud, proven warrior, suspicious of others and quick to pull the trigger. The colonel regarded the Army’s mission on Mindanao as another Indian campaign, a challenge to U.S. authority to be suppressed with absolute force. His superiors, on the other hand, viewed the mission as the slow and peaceful establishment of a government for Moroland, with force withheld as a last resort. The divided command could only last so long, and in June Chaffee kicked Baldwin upstairs, promoting him to brigadier general and shipping him off to the relatively peaceful island of Panay.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY
command the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I and in 1919 was promoted by special act of Congress to the rank of general of the armies, the highest rank in the U.S. armed forces.
Pershing’s local successes did not wholly pacify Moroland. By 1903 the United States had abrogated the Bates agreement and placed the region under direct American civil jurisdiction and governance. Moro risings flared up through the first three decades of the 20th century, while Washington gradually transferred responsibility for garrisoning Moroland from the U.S. Army to the Moro constabulary, a paramilitary colonial force that recruited Moros to fight and police themselves. Even after the Philippines won recognition as an independent republic in 1946, the Moros remained a thorny issue for its majority Christian populace. The lingering tensions ignited in the 1960s with the formation of the militant Moro Islamic Liberation Front. In 2002, at the invitation of the Philippine government, the United States again deployed troops to Mindanao, this time to help the Filipinos fight Moro groups aligned with al-Qaida.
Pershing (standing at center) was ready to fight when necessary, but he also sought to win the Moros’ trust by holding formal talks.
In 2014 government officials and the Moro insurgents signed a peace agreement. The government established the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao—which includes the Lake Lanao region—granting Moros budgetary discretion, a separate police force and enforcement of sharia law for Muslims only. In return the Moros acknowledged government control of national security, foreign policy and other national-level administrative tasks. In 2015 the United States withdrew a task force of some 500 special operations troops from Mindanao. A handful of American advisers remain. Though the troops serve in a noncombat role, their presence is an echo of an earlier chapter in America’s long and convoluted relationship with the Philippines. MH Paul Maggioni is a first-time contributor to Military History. For further reading he recommends Moroland: The History of Uncle Sam and the Moros, 1899–1920, by Robert A. Fulton, and My Life Before the World War, 1860–1917, by John J. Pershing.
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THE PERIL OF WAR Thomas Hart Benton depicted the U.S. Navy during both world wars and captured the human cost of conflict
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Score Another for the Subs (1943)
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THE PERIL OF WAR Embarkation—Prelude to Death (1942)
T Through September 24 the Chrysler Museum of Art [chrysler.org] in Norfolk, Va., presents “Thomas Hart Benton and the Navy,” an exhibit of two-dozen of the artist’s World War II–era paintings and drawings.
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homas Hart Benton launched his art career against the wishes of his father, a Confederate veteran and four-term U.S. congressman from Missouri. Moving to Paris in 1909, Thomas soon adopted his signature Synchromist style. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Benton enlisted in the Navy. He served as a draftsman in Norfolk, Va., assigned to document the camouflage patterns applied to American warships to aid in the identification of any lost vessels. Benton was best known for his paintings of everyday people, particularly in Midwest settings. Often described as brooding and outspoken, he drew ire for his envelope-pushing propaganda works. Shaken by the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Benton set about rendering “The Year of Peril,” a series of eight massive paintings intended to alert Americans to the threat of fascism. He’d planned to hang them in Kansas City’s Union Station, but when his agent saw them in Benton’s studio, he arranged to have them widely reproduced. In 1943 Abbott Laboratories commissioned Benton to paint life aboard U.S. submarines and landing ships. Many of his works depict the submarine USS Dorado, which was lost at sea with all hands during its 1943 maiden voyage. Art historian Henry Adams concedes that while some of Benton’s propaganda works “clearly were in bad taste,” there was a good reason. “He is reminding us that there is a tragic consequence to war, that war itself is bad taste.” MH
U.S. NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (ALL)
Back Him Up! Buy War Bonds (1943)
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THE PERIL OF WAR Cut the Line (1944)
Invasion (1941)
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Up the Hatch (1944)
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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/COLORIZATION BY MARK JAMES MILLER
How Hawaii’s indebted last queen lost her throne to sugar barons and the American rush to empire By Paul X. Rutz
The last monarch of an independent Hawaii, Queen Liliuokalani sought to resist foreign domination of her country but was ultimately deposed in a coup supported by U.S. troops.
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The fall of Hawaii’s last queen and the islands’ subsequent annexation by the United States is best understood as the intersection of two stories: The first explains their strategic value to a U.S. government eager to join the world’s great powers. The second describes the religious, economic and cultural Americanization of the Hawaiian people, which began the moment they encountered Western explorers.
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The islands first dazzled European eyes when British Captain James Cook spotted their lush tropical slopes on Jan. 18, 1778, naming them the Sandwich Islands after First Lord of the Admiralty John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. Careful to keep other European powers in the dark about his actual mission—to search for the fabled Northwest Passage—Cook had sailed his two ships,
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: GRAPHICA ARTIS/GETTY IMAGES; HUGO STANGERWALD/BERNICE P. BISHOP MUSEUM; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
I
n the late afternoon of Jan. 16, 1893, 162 U.S. Marines and sailors disembarked from the armored cruiser Boston, at anchor in Honolulu Bay. Landing at the city wharf, they formed up and marched past Iolani Palace, saluting Hawaii’s reigning monarch as she watched from her second-floor veranda. Towing Gatling guns and field cannons, the troops set up in three positions. One Marine stood guard at the U.S. Consulate, while 40 others secured the minister’s residence. The main contingent of bluejackets, meanwhile, made a show of force and then retired to Arion Hall, then under lease as a Mormon house of worship, adjacent to Aliolani Hale (Government House) and across the street from the palace. After clearing out the pews and unfurling their bedrolls, they waited through a tense night. Hundreds of armed Hawaiians loyal to the queen stood by with orders not to provoke the Americans. Boston’s troops had occupied Honolulu at the request of U.S. Minister John L. Stevens, who claimed the queen’s recent attempt to ratify a new constitution had put American property and lives in danger. In truth, he was facilitating a coup d’état, acting as mouthpiece for the Committee of Safety, a cabal of 13 men who had undermined the monarchy six years earlier and were worried this resurgent queen would harm their business interests— particularly sugar plantations. The next morning these men presented a letter to Queen Liliuokalani, demanding she abdicate. The queen shrewdly drafted her own letter, ceding her authority not to the coup plotters but to the country whose warship and troops threatened her capital. She expressed confidence that once the facts were known, that government would “undo the action of its representatives and reinstate me.” After all, this kind of thing had happened before.
FROM TOP: EDGEWOOD PUBLISHING CO.; BERNICE P. BISHOP MUSEUM
HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery, to Tahiti before heading north across the equator. After crossing roughly 2,700 miles of the Pacific, Cook and John L. his crews encountered a sprawling, Stevens isolated archipelago that both dazzled and terrified them. Jungles teemed with exotic birds and foliage, and ancient stone irrigation ditches funneled water to crops. The Polynesian culture centered on kapu—its version of taboo. Hawaiians practiced human sacrifice to mark the death of a leader or appease Pele, the volcano goddess. Men never swallowed their saliva, instead spitting constantly, and they never ate with women—yet women held important leadership positions. A strict caste system separated the alii, the ruling class, from commoners and governed their interactions. A commoner, for example could be ritually clubbed or strangled to death for letting his shadow fall on the person or house of an alii. Genealogy mattered more than anything. Hoping to have children by the mighty visitors, women aggressively solicited Cook’s sailors, returning to their villages with lice and venereal disease. As he sailed about the islands, observing thousands of canoes paddling out to greet his ships, Cook estimated the total Hawaiian population at 300,000. He continued northeast to map the West Coast of North America. On Cook’s return in Feb-
ruary 1779 during an ill-starred season the superstitious islanders clubbed him to death, baked the flesh from his body and preserved his bones for the spiritual mana the Hawaiians believed they contained. A prominent warrior named Kamehameha had visited Cook’s flagship, HMS Resolution, and fully grasped the value of the British weapons. In the years that followed he traded goods for guns and ultimately convinced two British sailors to teach his men their use, rewarding the pair with high office, wives and land. (Thus began the practice among Hawaiian leaders to appoint Western men to their inner circle.) Using every tool at his disposal—ranks of muskets, artillery mounted on double-hulled canoes, religious edicts and diplomacy—Kamehameha the Great ruthlessly subdued the islands one after another, uniting Hawaii for the first time in 1810.
For six decades the Kamehamehan dynasty adapted to the changes that came with each wave of new arrivals. On the heels of Kamehameha’s death in 1819 his widow Queen Consort Keopuolani broke kapu by permitting men and women to eat together—yet Pele did not erupt in protest. A year later Calvinist missionaries from New England filled the religious void, wisely linking evange-
Kamehameha (opposite left, in cape) subdued all the Hawaiian Islands and ruled them from 1810 until his death in 1819. His second son, Kamehameha III (opposite, top right, at center), took the throne in 1825 after the death of his older brother and ruled nearly 30 years. The protected cruiser USS Boston (opposite, below right) played a key role in the 1893 coup against Liliuokalani. In this period photo the ship’s officers await events at a Honolulu hotel.
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Hawaii’s Banner
K AUAI NI I HAU
OAH U M OLOK A I
HONOLULU MAUI LA N A I K AH OOLA WE
PACIFIC OCEAN HAWAII
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command, the 26-gun frigate HMS Carysfort, to threaten Kamehameha III over a variety of business and diplomatic disputes. Paulet held the islands hostage for five months before the commander of the Pacific Station arrived, reprimanded Paulet and affirmed Kamehameha III as Hawaii’s rightful ruler. In August 1849 a rogue French deputation took a turn, presenting a range of frivolous demands to Kamehameha III. When the king ignored them, French marines seized Honolulu Fort, spiked its cannons and ransacked the area. Negotiations for reparations on the $100,000 in damages dragged on indefinitely while French threats increased. As a British treaty with France kept London from intervening, Kamehameha III put Hawaii under the provisional protection of the United States, tacitly conceding to extend the Monroe Doctrine into the Pacific. American newspapers went wild with speculation Manifest Destiny could soon envelop the islands.
A change to Hawaii’s constitution provided for its first elected king, Lunalilo, to take the throne in 1873. The unmarried monarch died just a year later. Kamehameha IV’s widow, Queen Dowager Emma Kaleleonalani, was the people’s choice to succeed him, but her rival, David Kalakaua, defeated her through a legislative vote, avoiding a popular referendum. At the news a mob rushed the Honolulu Courthouse, killing one representative and wounding a dozen others. In his first act as king-elect Kalakaua asked the commanders of the U.S. sloops of war Tuscarora and Portsmouth and British gunboat Tenedos to help quell the violence. Their collective bluecoats cleared the courthouse and square, then patrolled the streets for eight days. Thus Kalakaua’s 17-year reign began in debt to Western powers, an indebtedness that only grew. By accepting loans from the sugar barons to finance a lavish lifestyle and stumbling into scandal, he made it easy for political opponents to best him. Lorrin A. Thurston, whose ancestors included some of Hawaii’s first missionaries, founded a secret society with other Westerners to press their advantage with Kalakaua. They formed a volunteer militia and on July 6, 1887, stationed 150 uniformed militiamen with fixed bayonets near the palace while coercing the king to sign what became known as the “Bayonet Constitution.” It kept Kalakaua on the throne but made him share power with the legislature and his ministers. He had no role in amending the constitution, and he couldn’t fire the cabinet. Thurston, the new interior minister, packed the cabinet with wealthy Americans and Europeans. By this time the major powers were establishing footholds throughout the Pacific. In 1880 the French made Tahiti a colony. Germany took the Marshall Islands and Micronesia as a protectorate in 1885 and supported a faction struggling for control of Samoa against rival
MAP AND FLAG: ISTOCK; OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; LUCIEN YOUNG; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); HAWAIIAN KINGDOM
lism with education. They invented a Hawaiian alphabet, printed Bibles, opened schools and by 1834 had raised the islands’ literacy rate from essentially zero to one of the highest in the world. Western influence showed in the monAdopted in 1845, the flag archy’s new flag. Laid out like the Ameriof the Hawaiian kingdom can flag, it featured the British Union Jack centered on Britain’s in the upper-left corner. Representing each Union Jack, to which of the main islands, eight horizontal stripes were added eight red, white and blue stripes, alternated white, red and blue. In 1839 symbolizing Hawaii’s Hawaii’s longest-reigning monarch, Kaeight main islands. It mehameha III, adopted a Declaration remains the state flag. of Rights and the next year drafted a constitution establishing a parliament and judiciary. Meanwhile, the sleepy fishing villages of Lahaina and Honolulu grew into multicultural boomtowns, hosting hundreds of whaling and trading vessels, whose sailors clashed with the moralistic missionaries. Influenza, measles and other maladies also visited the islands. By the mid1800s disease and warfare had reduced Hawaii’s population by two-thirds to about 80,000. By 1890 it had fallen to a low of 40,000. To fill the economic gap when whaling and sandalwood sales plummeted, entrepreneurs brought in men from China, Portugal and Japan to work the sugar plantations. Although the Kamehamehas tried to diversify the economy with other exports like coffee and beef, sugar dominated the islands by the mid-1800s. Plantation owners such as German-American industrialist Claus Spreckels bought their own ships, railroads and refineries to streamline operations. They built company towns and diverted huge amounts of water, changing the islands’ ecosystems and topography. The sugar barons also loaned the crown money, then leveraged that indebtedness to secure legislative seats for their favored politicians. Visits by foreign naval vessels periodically made Hawaii the site of intense saber rattling, such as in February 1843 when Britain’s Lord George Paulet used his
King David Kalakaua
Lorrin A. Thurston
Gilbert C. Wiltse
James H. Blount
Alfred T. Mahan
groups funded by the United States and Britain. Japan inquired about Hawaii, but the Americans kept courting the country economically. As early as 1872 naval intelligence had been mapping the Pearl River estuary, the largest and best protected port in the North Pacific, estimating how much dredging would be needed to prepare it for a fleet, while U.S. diplomats spent more than a decade tying a free trade deal for sugar to a lease on the harbor, which they finally secured in 1887. The 1890 publication of U.S. Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 blew the lid off a underway global shift in naval strategy and popularized a national security case for empire. In a nutshell, Mahan advocated moving from coastal defense and commerce protection to offensive sea control, replacing small squadrons with far-ranging battle fleets whose mission would be to concentrate firepower and prevail in a decisive battle, preferably far from the nation’s shores. Since navies of the era relied on steamships, it was vital to have coaling stations around the world to refuel them. This was music to expansionists’ ears, and they showered Mahan with international acclaim and honorary university degrees. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II went so far as to have a translation of the book placed in every German naval library and compel his officers to read it. Kalakaua died in early 1891, and his sister Liliuokalani assumed the throne. Seeking to lower the debts her brother left behind, Liliuokalani entertained proposals to start a lottery and tax the import of opium for the many Chinese workers in Hawaii. She also sought to abrogate the Bayonet Constitution, in part because she wanted to appoint her own cabinet ministers. With the help of Hawaiian legislators she wrote a new constitution and gave advisers a month to comment on it. Incensed at the proposed changes, Thurston’s faction courted American intervention. The stage was set for six crucial days: Jan. 12–17, 1893.
On Thursday, January 12, Liliuokalani successfully lobbied the legislature to vote out the cabinet, allowing her to appoint ministers who shared her way of thinking. On Saturday, January 14, she declared the legislative session closed, then summoned her new cabinet to a meeting at the palace, expecting them to sign the new constitution. Coached by Thurston, they refused, claiming—quite correctly—she was asking them to disobey current law. She furiously argued with them but in the end was forced to admit she had overreached. With memories of the 1874 bloodshed firmly in mind, she backed down, not wanting to give the foreign warships in the harbor any excuse to intervene this time. That afternoon Thurston’s allies set up the 13-member Committee of Safety. They spent Sunday on horseback rounding up support. 67
Liliuokalani called a meeting for noon on Monday, January 16, urging supporters at the palace square to remain calm. Just a few blocks away Thurston’s Committee of Safety was holding its own meeting, denouncing the queen. They had written a letter to Minister Stevens, pleading for help: “We are unable to protect ourselves without aid and, therefore, pray for the protection of the United States forces.” Captain Gilbert C. Wiltse,
‘The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe, and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it’ commanding the 3,240-ton armored cruiser Boston, said Stevens could count on his troops, and at about 5:30 p.m. they occupied the city. Estimates vary, but Liliuokalani had at least double the number of armed men at her disposal to counter the Americans. Given Hawaii’s history with armed occupation, however, she thought it prudent to wait out this latest disturbance. Thurston worked through the night writing a justification for her overthrow, while other members of the Committee of Safety asked Sanford B. Dole, a justice on Hawaii’s Supreme Court, to act as president. On Tuesday, January 17, Dole accepted the presidency, and the Committee of Safety requested Liliuokalani’s
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abdication. She stalled, asking for time to meet with her secretary and compose the appropriate document. In it she wrote, “I yield to the superior force of the United States of America, whose minister plenipotentiary, his excellency John L. Stevens, has caused United States troops to be landed at Honolulu and declared that he would support the said Provisional Government.” Dole endorsed the letter, perhaps not realizing he was agreeing to let the U.S. government decide Hawaii’s fate. President Benjamin Harrison favored the expansion of American interests in the region. But his successor Grover Cleveland, who took office on March 4, grew leery and called for an investigation into the overthrow. President Cleveland immediately sent former U.S. Representative James H. Blount of Georgia to Hawaii as a special commissioner, with orders granting him “paramount” authority over the American civil authorities and troops. Arriving in Honolulu on March 29, the tactful Blount first directed provisional President Dole to lower the American flag over the Government House and ordered the bluecoats to return to Boston. The commissioner stayed for five months, gathering testimony and documents from all sides. Among the documents was an incriminating letter from Minister Stevens to former U.S. Secretary of State John W. Foster, in which Stevens wrote, “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe, and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.” In his final report Blount concluded Stevens had called on Boston’s troops not to protect U.S. property, but rather to back the coup. Cleveland promptly dismissed Stevens.
In mid-November 1893 President Cleveland’s administration offered Liliuokalani a deal: grant amnesty to those who had deposed her, and the United States would restore the monarchy. From the queen’s perspective that
LUCIEN YOUNG/THE BOSTON AT HAWAII; UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
Sanford B. Dole (above) was appointed first president of the Republic of Hawaii. Sailors and Marines from Boston (above right) present arms following the overthrow of the monarchy. The annexation ceremony was held at Iolani Palace (center) on Aug. 12, 1898. Liliuokalani (opposite right) fought for reinstatement as queen until her death on Nov. 11, 1917.
HAWAII STATE ARCHIVES; CORBIS/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES
was impossible. Thurston and the others had committed treason and needed to be punished, or they might try again. She reportedly told Stevens’ replacement, U.S. Minister Albert S. Willis, the coup leaders deserved to be “beheaded.” Whether or not she meant that literally, the idea of the dark-skinned queen bringing back sacrificial practice made the American press howl. On December 18 Liliuokalani finally sent a letter saying she would accept Cleveland’s deal—but it was too late. That same day Cleveland sent her notice he was turning over the matter to Congress. In February 1894 the Senate released its own report, which absolved of all blame everyone involved in the overthrow—Liliuokalani not included. In May the Senate went even further, issuing a resolution opposing the queen’s restoration. The provisional government slammed the door on July 4 by establishing the Republic of Hawaii, with Dole as president. On Jan. 6, 1895, Honolulu police disrupted a plot to overthrow the republic and routed the royalists after three days of skirmishing. After finding weapons and incriminating documents in a search of Liliuokalani’s residence, authorities arrested the deposed queen. Convicted with 192 others by a military tribunal, she abdicated, hoping to save her compatriots’ lives. To avoid creating martyrs, Dole ultimately commuted the sentences of all those convicted and kept Liliuokalani under house arrest for nearly two years before pardoning her. On her release Liliuokalani mortgaged her property and used the money to travel stateside in a last-ditch effort to reclaim her crown. She published her memoirs, detailing the coup from her point of view, and presented the U.S. Senate with the results of a petition against Hawaii’s proposed annexation. Her backers had shuttled between the islands capturing signatures from half of Hawaii’s native population. Their effort helped defeat ratification of an 1897 annexation treaty.
Hawaiian royalists celebrated their victory, but they failed to realize the 1896 U.S. presidential election had shifted the political winds. With the election of William McKinley as president, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge and other expansionists—including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt—finally had a commander in chief who would allow them to implement Mahan’s naval strategy in a deliberate bid for empire. The final blow to Liliuokalani’s efforts came with the Feb. 15, 1898, sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, which made war with Spain inevitable and a coaling station in Hawaii essential. This time annexation threaded the loophole of joint resolution, requiring a simple majority in both houses. The Senate approved the bill on July 4, and McKinley signed it law three days later. The annexation ceremony outside Iolani Palace marked the last step in Hawaii’s Americanization. On August 12 native Hawaiians in Western suits and dresses offered up Christian prayers, read speeches in English and stood alongside American troops from the protected cruiser USS Philadelphia while their flag was lowered. The former Royal Hawaiian band and the ship’s band from Philadelphia together played the Hawaiian anthem, “Hawaii Ponoi,” then struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” as Old Glory rose up the staff and snapped in the breeze. The sight proved too much for the Hawaiian players, who abandoned their instruments and left the ceremony in tears. MH Paul X. Rutz, a 2001 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, is a painter and freelance writer whose articles have been published in the Huffington Post, Army History and other publications. For further reading he recommends Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii, by James L. Haley, and Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, by Liliuokalani.
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Reviews
Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, by Mark Bowden, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2017, $30
Hundreds of battles and thousands of smaller engagements characterized the Vietnam War, but most living Americans can likely name only a few. Notable among those few is the 1968 Tet Offensive, the coordinated series of surprise attacks throughout South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong that eroded U.S. public support for the war and marked the beginning of the end of American involvement. Tactically speaking, the offensive was a disastrous defeat for North Vietnam. It cost the communists as many as a half-million casualties, virtually eradicated homegrown Viet Cong insurgent forces throughout South Vietnam and failed to elicit a popular uprising in the south against the Saigon regime. Tellingly, North Vietnam’s vaunted “architect of victory,” General Vo Nguyen Giap, who planned and carried out the offensive, was effectively sidelined for the rest of the war by Hanoi’s political leadership. Yet the Tet Offensive led to a stunning political about-face that can arguably be
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called the singular turning point of the war. While the battered communists may have lost the military means to win the war on the battlefield, the shock of the attack, its ferocity and press coverage of the offensive brought about a loss of faith in military commanders among politicians and much of the public back home, eroding their will to persevere until final victory. Take, for example, the failed but eminently photogenic attack on the U.S. Embassy in Saigon or the bitter street-by-street, house-to-house slugfest in Vietnam’s ancient imperial capital of Hue, the focus of this book. The press corps presented each battle to American readers and viewers in stark, bloody images that seemed to put the lie to months of optimistic military announcements the war was all but won. Clearly, it wasn’t. But neither was it lost—at least not on the battlefield. Veteran reporter Mark Bowden, acclaimed author of Black Hawk Down, presents a thorough and compelling narrative of the signa-
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
Tet Turnaround
ture battle of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Drawing on more than 50 interviews with participants from all sides of the fight for Hue, the author relates events from the highest level of power to the troops engaged in desperate combat on the ground. The result is a mustread for anyone seeking to understand the battle that, more than any other in the long Vietnam War, ultimately decided its outcome. —Jerry D. Morelock The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, by Victor Davis Hanson, Basic Books, New York, 2017, $35
“Ranger arrived just in time. Read this book to restore your faith in America and bolster your confidence in the future of this great nation.” —H. R. McMaster, National Security Advisor and author of Dereliction of Duty 366 PAGE S | HA R DCOV ER | $50.00
Historians have analyzed and written about World War II in exhaustive detail since the last days of the war itself, all the while debating its root causes and exact starting date. In his latest work, noted military historian Victor Davis Hanson provides an utterly original account of what he terms the “first true global conflict.” Some 60 million people perished during World War II. What began in 1939 as a classical European war had expanded by 1941 into a global conflict, which in turn morphed into total war. Hanson examines the land, sea and air battles across the theaters of war, but the book really shines in his chapters on ideas and people. Hanson argues that the Treaty of Versailles—whose reportedly harsh terms historians have long blamed for the rise of Adolf Hitler and subsequent outbreak of World War II—was not harsh enough. Indeed, it was mild in comparison to the terms Germany had imposed on France in 1871 and on the Soviet Union in 1918. Humiliating perhaps, but not emasculating. Through laxity on the part of the Allies, by 1936 Germany’s military had almost rebounded to full strength. The terms of the armistice had allowed the defeated but not deterred nation to act on its desire for Lebensraum (“living space”).
Hanson lays out the origins of the war—what prompted German aggression; why Great Britain and France initially sought to accommodate the Nazis through diplomacy and deterrence; and, finally, why the Allies ultimately abandoned diplomacy and chose to fight. He argues that World War II was a preventable conflict, that tens of millions of people need not have perished just to confirm the fascist powers were in fact far weaker than the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain—a conclusion he lays at the feet of “British appeasement, American isolationism and Russian collaboration.” No idealist, Hanson also acknowledges postwar calm will forever remain a temporary phenomenon. To quote General George Patton: “Nobody can prevent another war. There will be wars as long as our great-great-grandchildren live. The only thing we can do is to produce a longer peace phase between wars.” That is one of the few sentiments Hanson could not have expressed any better. —Claire Barrett
306 PAGES | H A RD CO V ER | $39.95
American troops advancing through Hue in 1968 use an M48 tank as cover.
Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi, by Thomas Weber, Basic Books, New York, 2017, $35 When and where did Adolf Hitler change from moody loner into messianic Führer? Some scholars maintain the transformative events occurred either during his childhood in Bavaria or during his World War I service on the Western Front. In this intensively researched account author Thomas Weber, a history professor at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen, claims the crossover came between 1918 and 1924 in Munich. Were Hitler elsewhere, Weber argues, he would not have become a Nazi. After Germany’s surrender Hitler traveled to Munich and joined a battalion supporting the newly proclaimed Bavarian Soviet Republic, which had seized power in November 1918. He served it until nationalist Freikorps units overthrew it in May
“This work fills a significant gap in the historiography of the US cavalry in WWII, and makes a significant contribution to understanding the cutting-edge synergy between mass and mobility that defined the US Army’s outstanding combat record in the ETO.”—Dennis Showalter, author of Hitler’s Panzers: The Lightning Attacks That Revolutionized Warfare
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY 800-537-5487 www.kentuckypress.com
Reviews Recommended
Voices From the Easter Rising Joseph McKenna While the world was at war, in 1916 some 2,000 Irish rebels took up arms against the United Kingdom in the infamous Easter Rising. Historian McKenna provides a narrative of the conflict from both sides, delivering stunning personal accounts of the insurrection, as well as the trials and executions that followed.
Grant Ron Chernow Historians alternately stereotype Ulysses S. Grant as either the hapless businessman, the victorious but harsh Union general or the inept president. Chernow provides a balanced biography that reveals all sides of the complex Civil War figure whose fortunes repeatedly rose and fell on the road to the White House.
1919, whereupon Hitler switched sides. In reaction to the victory over the communists, the city became a haven for right-wing political groups from across German-speaking Europe. That September Hitler joined the tiny German Workers’ Party, whose nationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-communist and antiSemitic views appealed to him. His magnetism and oratorical skill quickly made him its leading figure. In 1920 its name changed to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and membership swelled. In 1923 Hitler organized the Beer Hall Putsch, and while the attempted coup flopped, his subsequent trial for treason spread his fame. During the year he spent in prison, he wrote his ideological treatise, Mein Kampf, and resolved that his party would seek power through democratic means. Weber works hard to explain Hitler’s often divergent and bizarre views. As a young man he was a fervent German nationalist. He was also anti-Semitic, but it was the prevailing, socially accepted variety of anti-Semitism; he remained on friendly terms with many Jews right through his war years. By 1921, however, his speeches described a worldwide Jewish cabal that ruled Europe, America and even Soviet Russia. Many early Nazi sympathizers considered such views extreme, but Hitler’s explanation resonated with audiences, providing a satisfying excuse
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for Germany’s defeat. Repeated enough times, it became accepted “fact.” That Aryans were the “master race” had been a widespread and only mildly controversial belief for a century. Anthropologists grew skeptical, but the Holocaust, not science, delivered the kiss of death. Weber never gets inside Hitler’s head, but he speculates well, delivering a satisfying, nuts-and-bolts account of the six-year span during which an obscure ex-soldier became a demagogue the German establishment should have taken more seriously. —Mike Oppenheim The Struggle for Sea Power: A Naval History of the American Revolution, by Sam Willis, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2016, $35 Historians risk conceptualizing naval power in the American Revolution as a sort of deus ex machina, with fleets appearing at the right side of the map and then disappearing just as mysteriously until the next round. Sam Willis capably fills this gap with a history that both
expands to a global scale and zooms to a “barnacular” level of detail. Willis notes that while historians have catalogued many individual elements of naval combat during the conflict, “no attempt has yet been made to unite or combine these many themes into a comprehensive naval history of the war.” He starts by emphasizing the ways in which naval conflict in North America was interlocked with combat—or the mere specter of it—in such distant theaters as the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. He stresses the consequentiality of naval operations within the North American theater in occasionally revelatory ways, with ample attention to combat on rivers and lakes. To give two examples, it was the seemingly puny Pennsylvania Navy’s control of the Delaware that enabled success at Trenton and Princeton, while General John Burgoyne’s turn away from his formidable naval forces on Lake George doomed the British at Saratoga. Among Willis’ emphases is the particular difficulty of maintaining and operating fleets anywhere, given the attendant risks of tides, storms and pestilence, but especially at the month’s remove from home North American operations entailed. Multiple conflicts turned on simple discrepancies of knowledge of local tides and sandbars—more often, though not always,
to the benefit of Americans. Their misplaced faith in the Charleston Harbor sandbar, for instance, proved no protection from a British fleet well aware of how to sail over it. The largest U.S. naval effort during the war, the perhaps deliberately forgotten Penobscot Expedition of 1779, was an utter disaster, but individual American ships soon showed great promise. Even the most famous naval engagement of the war is often misunderstood, Willis stresses. French strategic efforts to bring naval and land strength to bear in one theater while British fleets were
occupied elsewhere finally succeeded at Yorktown, and yet this was not the ironclad trap of popular imagination. Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis had strong prospects for escape and a substantial fleet still at anchor; he chose not to try. —Anthony Paletta Sevastopol’s Wars: Crimea From Potemkin to Putin, by Mungo Melvin, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2017, $38 When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the world was shocked. Yet it wasn’t the first time. Catherine the Great had annexed the stra-
tegic peninsula on the north end of the Black Sea in 1783, immediately following her conquest of the khanate of the Crimean Tatars. In 1954 the Soviet Union transferred Crimea from Russian to Ukrainian authority. It was little more than an administrative procedure, however, as the republic remained within the monolithic USSR. Within a half-century the Soviet Union was no more, and since its dissolution the republics of Russia and Ukraine had been at odds over Crimean autonomy, particularly control of its port city of Sevastopol, historic headquarters of Rus-
sia’s Black Sea Fleet. When Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the annexation, it should not have come as a surprise to anyone. All indicators in Russia’s 200-plus-year history in the region pointed to such a move. Retired British Maj. Gen. Mungo Melvin relates that history admirably in Sevastopol’s Wars. Crimea is one of the most fought-over pieces of ground in recent history. Almost immediately after conquering the peninsula in 1783, the Russians started building the fortress city of Sevastopol, siting it at the head of a magnificent bay that would become home port
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Reviews to a Russian naval squadron. In 1854– 55 the city fell to a 349-day siege by British and French forces, ultimately forcing Russia to sue for peace and end the Crimean War. In 1905 disaffected sailors aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin staged their infamous mutiny just days after it sortied from Sevastopol. The Germans briefly occupied Sevastopol after defeating the Russians in 1918. Almost immediately thereafter Red and White forces battled for control of the city during the Russian Civil War. In 1941–42 German and Romanian forces under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein conquered Crimea and took Sevastopol after a 247-day siege. The Red Army retook the ruins of the destroyed town in May 1944. Designated a Soviet Hero City of the Great Patriotic War, Sevastopol also became one of only three Federal Cities—along with Moscow and St. Petersburg—directly administered from Moscow. There was no way Russia would ever give up Sevastopol or the Black Sea Fleet, which numbers 40 surface warships and six submarines. Russia and Ukraine sparred over those strategic prizes for 23 years following the breakup of the Soviet Union, until the 2013 internal crisis in Ukraine gave Putin the pretext he needed to resolve the problem—at least for the time being. By putting Putin and his actions in context, Melvin is in no way defending the Russian president. Rather, the author clearly traces Sevastopol’s direct geostrategic arc from the days of Catherine the Great’s military commander, Grigory Potemkin, to Putin. It is a story well worth understanding. —David T. Zabecki The Second Anglo-Sikh War, by Amarpal Singh, Amberley Publishing, Stroud, United Kingdom, 2016, $42 Amarpal Singh’s first book, The First Anglo-Sikh War (2010), appeared to
general acclaim. He follows up with this companion volume, described as “the warts-and-all story of the conflict that led to the demise of the Sikh empire,” the last independent power in India. Indeed, the conflict was more than that, for British rule extended all the way to the Khyber Pass. The slaying of two young and supremely inexperienced British officers, Patrick Alexander Vans Agnew and William Andrew Anderson, sent with a pitifully small escort in April 1848 to take possession of the city of Multan, sparked the unexpected war between the East India Co. and the Sikh empire. As the governor general, when writing to the Duke of Wellington in September 1838, related, “These Sikhs fight, as we know, well and long behind walls and guns.” And so it proved. Commanded by Field Marshal Sir Hugh Gough, the British pursued a series of battles in which the outcome was always in doubt. At Ramnuggar in November, Sher Singh, having skillfully used every advantage of ground, kept his main positions intact, boosting the morale of his army. At Chillianwala, where 2,000 years earlier Alexander the Great had faced the Punjab ruler Porus, the opposing
forces met on January 13, at the end of which Gough boasted, “Victory was complete as to the total overthrow of the enemy.” Not quite, for one final, epic victory was required, at Gujrat on February 21. Gough recalled the cannonade there as the most magnificent he had ever witnessed, and as terrible in its effect. One old artilleryman, the sole Sikh survivor of a battery whose eight guns had been destroyed, turned toward the advancing British troops, rendered a profound salaam, then walked away, the cheers of his foes ringing in his ears. It was an epic day, the end to an epic war that decided the near-term future of the Punjab. In its aftermath Sher Singh agreed to British terms for surrender, his army finally laying down its arms and disbanding in mid-March. —David Saunders Blitzkrieg: Myth, Reality and Hitler’s Lightning War—France 1940, by Lloyd Clark, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2016, $27 Even though the bad guys won, everyone agrees that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s May 10, 1940, invasion of France was a brilliant operation, carried out with German efficiency and blessed by good weather, luck and a distracted enemy. British historian Clark begins by emphasizing it was a conventional offensive led by infantry—not, as often described, a signature German blitzkrieg. In recounting the run-up to the invasion, the author reminds readers that almost none of Hitler’s career military leaders liked him. They had opposed his march into the Rhineland in 1936, the Austrian Anschluss in 1938, his eagerness for war with Czechoslovakia and his invasion of Poland in 1939. In return the Führer openly held them in disdain,
and by 1940 the commanders had been burned too often to stand up to him. Still, they remained unhappy with his order to attack France. The Wehrmacht was still a work in progress, and everyone knew France’s army was the world’s best. No less mired in the past than France, Germany’s high command proposed attacking through Belgium. After throwing his usual tantrum, Hitler reminded them France had handled that pretty well in 1914. It took several more tantrums before they produced a suitably imaginative plan. It was not a slam dunk. Though Germany threw its army and the entire Luftwaffe at the main Allied force in Belgium, it pushed back the defenders only after some difficulty. To the south, when German troops emerged from the Ardennes on May 13, they were extraordinarily vulnerable. While the Allied air force remained preoccupied 100 miles away, inferior French forces still managed to inflict heavy casualties as the Germans forced their way across the Meuse. French commander General Maurice Gamelin should have responded more quickly, but Clark insists communications from local units failed to identify the thrust as Germany’s major effort. By the time Gamelin realized his mistake, no response he could have mounted would have made a difference. The bulk of Clark’s narrative is a minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow account of the fighting from May 9 until Vichy Marshall Philippe Pétain took office and signed an armistice on June 22. Readers depressed by the outcome can console themselves with a good read and by remembering that Hitler’s victory in France fed the Führer’s exaggerated confidence in his military acumen and his suicidal taste for risky operations. —Mike Oppenheim
Hallowed Ground Bosworth Field, England
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hen Henry Tudor, Lancastrian claimant to the throne of England, landed with an army in southwest Wales, on Aug. 7, 1485, it was no surprise. Richard III had kept a close eye on his preeminent challenger ever since Tudor had fled to exile in France following the decisive Yorkist victory at Tewkesbury in 1471—a victory that had seemed to all but settle the long-raging Wars of the Roses. Wales, Henry’s birth country, was a suitable landing site for the 28-year-old son of a Welsh knight. He stepped ashore at Milford Haven’s secluded Mill Bay with a patchwork army of several thousand English and Welsh exiles, Scottish soldiers and French mercenaries, the latter described by contemporary French writer Philippe de Commynes as some of “the most unruly men in Normandy.” Their numbers swelled as they marched through the Welsh countryside, Henry benefitting from a series of crucial defections to the Lancastrian side. Richard was also marshaling his forces. Choosing Leicester as a rallying point, he sent the English army to meet those of his allies the Earls of Norfolk and Northumberland. A fourth Yorkist contingent, led by Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, was expected to join the king’s cause, but Lord Stanley was far from a sure thing. A shrewd political operator, he’d curried royal favor through the reigns of three kings yet had recently become Henry’s stepfather. To encourage the mercurial earl to remain Yorkist in his loyalties, Richard had Stanley’s son George, Lord Strange, taken hostage. The king wasn’t being paranoid. As Tudor’s army crossed into England, it slowed to acquire as many recruits as possible—and to allow Stanley and Tudor to meet twice in secret. The armies met on August 22. Richard had deployed his main force atop Ambion Hill, just west of the present-day village of Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire. The king held the summit with 3,000 infantrymen. Northumberland guarded his left flank with 4,000 mounted men, while Norfolk’s vanguard of 3,000 foot soldiers held the right, forming a wall of spears around Richard’s cannons and archers. To the south atop Dadlington Hill waited Stanley’s army of 5,000. As Henry’s 5,000-plus men approached Ambion Hill, the inexperienced Tudor wisely handed over command to renowned war veteran John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, and then retired to the rear with his bodyguards.
76 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
After struggling through a rain of arrows and cannon fire, Oxford’s force charged Richard’s vanguard en masse, the better to offset the Yorkists’ numerical advantage. Seeing Norfolk’s men reeling, Richard signaled Northumberland to ride to their relief. For reasons that remain murky, Northumberland’s horsemen failed to execute the command. Meanwhile, Richard had sent Stanley a royal ultimatum: Charge the Tudor troops, or your son will be executed. “Sire, I have other sons,” Stanley reportedly replied. Incensed, Richard ordered Strange’s execution, but the king’s officers demurred, advising him to wait until after the battle. Perhaps sensing his advantage slipping and suffering from a reported lack of sleep on the eve of battle, Richard resorted to a Hail Mary maneuver. Spotting Henry at the rear of his army, the Yorkist king and a cadre of trusted fighters circled around the melee and crashed into the challenger’s retinue. Reckless though Richard’s charge might have been, reports indicate it caught Henry’s rear guard unaware. Were it not for a body of stalwart pikemen, who managed to slow Richard’s assault, English history might be much changed. At that critical juncture Stanley sent in his men. Slicing into Richard’s force, they pushed back the king, placing Henry out of danger. The last moments of Richard III’s reign—and life—arrived when his horse lost its footing. According to Polydore Vergil, Tudor’s official historian, “King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies.” In the aftermath Tudor was crowned Henry VII, while Richard’s scarred body was publicly exhibited and then consigned to a simple grave. Historians had long placed the site of Richard’s last stand at the foot of Ambion Hill, marked by a present-day visitor center [bosworthbattlefield.org.uk]. But in 2009, after a five-year research project, the nonprofit Battlefields Trust [battlefieldstrust.com] found key artifacts proving the clash ended about a mile farther southwest. In 2012 archaeologists surveying a Leicester parking lot unearthed the skeletal remains of a man with distinctive curvature to his spine and multiple battle wounds. DNA testing confirmed the remains as those of Richard III. He was reinterred in Leicester Cathedral in 2015. On the site where Shakespeare’s crookbacked villain was exhumed stands the multimedia King Richard III Visitor Center [kriii.com], with exhibits about the Wars of the Roses and the birth of the Tudor dynasty, which ruled England for more than a century. MH
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Artist Abraham Cooper’s 19th century illustration of the 1485 battle (above) depicts Richard III, astride the white charger, coming within a sword’s length of killing Henry Tudor. The Bosworth Battlefield Visitor Trail takes in several sites thought to encompass the field of combat.
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War Games 1
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3 Joseph Brant
A Busy Year Can you match each American Revolutionary War commander to the victory he won in 1781?
____ A. ____ B. ____ C. ____ D. ____ E. ____ F. ____ G. ____ H. ____ I. ____ J.
Eutaw Springs Hobkirk’s Hill Ninety-Six Virginia Capes Cowpens Augusta Guilford Court House Fort Watson Groton Heights Lochry’s Defeat
Answers: A8, B6, C5, D9, E10, F3, G2, H1, I4, J7
78 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2017
5
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Wings Over Passchendaele Identify the warplanes that fought far above the Flanders fields in the summer of 1917. ____ A. Royal Aircraft Factory R.E.8 ____ D. SPAD S.XII ____ B. Breguet 14 ____ E. Fokker F.I ____ C. Junkers J.I ____ F. Pfalz D.III Answers: A3, B5, C4, D1, E2, F6
1. Francis Marion and Henry Lee 2. Charles Cornwallis 3. Andrew Pickens and Henry Lee 4. Benedict Arnold 5. John Cruger 6. Francis Rawdon-Hastings 7. Joseph Brant 8. Nathanael Greene 9. François-Joseph-Paul de Grasse 10. Daniel Morgan
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A soldier bearing a rifle and field pack test flies the de Lackner HZ-1 Aerocycle at Brooklyn Army Terminal in 1955. Conceived by the Army as a reconnaissance platform, the HZ-1 was a pioneer of kinesthetic control, the concept behind the present-day Segway scooter. Nonfatal accidents sidelined the Aerocycle.
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