April 2016 Ɩ Issue 67 Ɩ £4.50 www.military-history.org
DARK ART Illustrating PoW life
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Ɩ%DWWOHƭHOGDUFKDHRORJ\ Ɩ7KH)O\LQJ'XWFKPDQ Anton Fokker ƖƖDrawing Drawing Little Bighorn
ZULU WAR The 17th Lancers at Ulundi, 1879
Could the
ER RISING 1 have succeeded RENAISSANCE NAVAL WARFARE Ottoman defeat at Lepanto, 1571
SIEGE OF KUT The forgotten British disaster in Iraq, 1916
MHM
MILITARY
April 2016 Ɩ Issue 67 Ɩ £4.50
DARK ART
kkk
Illustrating PoW life
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Ɩ %DWWOHƭHOG DUFKDHRORJ\ WH H \ Ɩ 7KHH )O\LQJ O LQ 'XWFKPDQ W P Q Anton o Fokker F er Ɩ Drawing w g Little i l Bighorn i rn
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD: Martin Brown Archaeological Advisor, Defence Estates, Ministry of Defence
Mark Corby Military historian, lecturer, and broadcaster
Paul Cornish Curator, Imperial War Museum
Gary Gibbs Assistant Curator, The Guards Museum
Angus Hay Former Army Oicer, military historian, and lecturer
Nick Hewitt Historian, National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth
Nigel Jones Historian, biographer, and journalist
Alastair Massie Head of Archives, Photos, Film, and Sound, National Army Museum
Gabriel Moshenska Research Fellow, Institute of Archaeology, UCL
Colin Pomeroy Squadron Leader, Royal Air Force (Ret.), and historian
Michael Prestwich Emeritus Professor of History, University of Durham
Nick Saunders Senior Lecturer, University of Bristol
Guy Taylor Military archivist, and archaeologist
Julian Thompson
ZULU WAR The 17th Lancers at Ulundi, 1879
Could the
J
utland, the Somme, Lawrence of Arabia: 2016 is a year of centenaries. Among others – and of huge significance in Ireland – is the centenary of the Easter Rising. This is perhaps the most controversial of all the events to be remembered this year. Deeply divisive at the time, the memory of it remains fiercely contested today. For Irish Republicans, the Rising represents the beginning of the final struggle for independence. For many others, it appears premature and doomed – a nationalist rebellion by an armed minority without the support of the wider nation. In our special feature this issue, we sidestep the political controversies to examine the Irish resistance between 1916 and 1921 from a military perspective. Chris Bambery argues against the grain that the Easter Rising was well planned, in many respects well executed, and might have succeeded. Two further articles tend to support this view, revealing the subsequent War of Independence to have been an exemplar of successful guerrilla warfare, in which small numbers of armed combatants were able to achieve victory against a far more powerful opponent. Also in this issue, we have a focus on the beginning and the end of the Ottoman Empire, with Jules Stewart’s account of the great Renaissance naval battle at Lepanto in 1571, and Patrick Crowley’s analysis of the British disaster at Kut in 1916. To finish, our Regiment series continues with a look at one of the last great cavalry charges of British history: that of the 17th Lancers at Ulundi in 1879.
Major-General, Visiting Professor at London University
Dominic Tweddle
ER RISING 1 have succeeded RENAISSANCE NAVAL WARFARE Ottoman defeat at Lepanto, 1571
SIEGE S E OF O KUT U The forgotten te British i disaster di te in i Iraq, a , 1916 9
ON THE COVER: Extras playing British soldiers from the Sherwood Foresters regiment, in a scene from the drama series Insurrection (1966), during location ilming of the Battle of Mount Street Bridge at 25 Northumberland Road, Dublin. Image: © RTÉ Stills Archive
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CONTRIBUTORS THIS MONTH’S EXPERTS CHRIS BAMBERY is a TV producer and presenter, author, and journalist. His books include A People’s History of Scotland and his article on Scottish involvement in the Easter Rising is forthcoming.
PATRICK CROWLEY is recently retired from the Army ater 34 years’ service across the world. The 2nd edition of his book Kut 1916: courage and failure in Iraq was published in February 2016.
JULES STEWART has spent most of his professional life in journalism, reporting from more than 30 countries. He has published nine books to date, mainly on Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier.
TAYLOR DOWNING is a regular contributor to Military History Monthly, an historian, a best-selling author, and an award-winning television producer.
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MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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April 2016 | ISSUE 67
ON THE COVER
Irish War of Independence This month, Chris Bambery analyses the Easter Rising of 1916, while Neil Faulkner looks at the character of the subsequent War of Independence with a general article on Michael Collins’ strategy, and a detailed piece on the Kilmichael Ambush of 1920.
26 Welcome
3
Letters
7
Notes from the Frontline
8 10
MHM looks at a drawing of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Conlict Scientists
18 The Battle of Lepanto Defeat of a 16th-century superpower Jules Stewart examines the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Holy League at Lepanto in 1571.
12
Patrick Boniface on Anton Fokker’s airborne innovations.
War Culture
Background Easter Rising Michael Collins Kilmichael Ambush Battle map
FEATURES
UPFRONT
Behind the Image
INCLUDES:
14
MHM examines the extraordinary art of PoW Philip Dark.
Kut, 1916 44 The forgotten British disaster in Iraq Patrick Crowley recalls the 143-day siege that ended a century ago this month.
52 REGIMENT The 17th Lancers
14 4
MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
The Battle of Ulundi, 4 July 1879
April 2016
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MHM VISITS Museum | 70 Hazel Blair explores HMS Belfast.
MHM REVIEWS War on Film | 60
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Taylor Downing reviews The Captive Heart.
The best military history events.
Book of the Month | 64 Jeremy Black reviews The Battle of Britain, 1945-1965 by Garry Campion.
B oks | 66 Jules Stewart eviews The US Navy by Craig L Symonds; David Flintham reviews Ghost Patrol by ohn Sadler; and Francesca Robinson eviews Nagasaki by Susan Southard.
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TWITTER @MilHistMonthly @MilHistMonthly 5 Feb 2016 #DadsArmy film out today: did you know that Arnold Ridley, Pte Godfrey in the TV series, served in both world wars? http:// www.bbc.com/news/ uk-england-35491036
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@MilHistMonthly 22 Feb 2016 The Battle of Fishguard (the ‘last invasion of Britain’) began #OnThisDay in 1797.
FACEBOOK www.facebook.com/ MilitaryHistoryMonthly 2 Feb 2016 UK at risk of losing Lawrence of Arabia’s robes and dagger https:// www.gov.uk/ government/news/ uk-risks-losing-lawrenceof-arabias-iconic-robesand-dagger
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Many thanks for Jefrey James’s excellent romp across the important historical territory of the 9th century, which, along with many others, the English seem to have forgotten. That century’s repulse of the pagan Danes led to a signiicant shit in the balance of power in the West, which, over the next 200 years, was to prove pivotal. A small point. Undoubtedly the Battle of Edington (Ethandune in Old English) was the strategic epicentre of Alfred’s resistance. But its site has never been deinitively established. I, and the majority of those interested in this age, are happy to accept the current location just west of Westbury – indeed, almost within sight of Alfred’s tower, the 1772-built, 160t climbable monument standing close to Ecgbert’s Stone, where the royal battle standard was raised. But the arguments for other Edingtons are as many as they are complicated. As John Peddie says in his excellent Alfred the Good Soldier (1989), 800 years later James I sat on his own King’s Bench to hear the arguments, only to give up in despair! The battle had far-reaching signiicance. By the time of their defeat, the Danes had already secured
NAVY RIG NITPICK The evocative picture illustrating ‘Battle of the Atlantic, 1940’ (MHM 66) cannot, as MHM describes it, ‘date from 1940’. The sailor looking seaward is in a US Navy rig (and the picture is credited to Library of Congress). The US Navy did not start escorting vessels across the North Atlantic until the summer of 1941, and the calibre of the triple turret-guns seen here is too large to have been fitted to a destroyer, the initial class of vessel used by the US Navy in the escort role. The type of vessel being escorted on this occasion would appear to be large passenger-carrying ships, so I would date the picture as probably being from 1943, when the troop convoys were at their peak as the buildup continued prior to Operation Overlord; or possibly from late 1942, prior to Operation Torch.
large tracts of the north of England and Scotland, and were spread across the whole of Ireland. A victory at Ethandune would have meant that their steady east/ west expansion would have been accelerated. They were already in the Orkneys and Greenland. And while their Scandinavian cousins in Sweden were pushing eastward into Russia, settling in modern-day Moscow, the Danes of Britain would have explored and perhaps colonised the Americas far more switly and successfully than they, in fact, ever did. Such a powerful empire across the northern oceans would almost certainly have resisted subsequent attacks from the much less powerful Normans, whose victory over England in 1066 was largely down to the English – probably for the irst, but not the last, time in their history – having to ight a major war on two fronts: the Normans (themselves ethnically Danes who had settled in Normandy) from the south, and their Viking cousins from the north. As a result of that Norman victory, Scandinavian expansionism was halted and English interests were redirected southwards. Only defeat in the Hundred Years War re-awakened a long-lost interest in empire to the west, and then to the east.
Jack Leatherhead, North London
Just a small point regarding yet another excellent edition of the magazine! Colin Pomeroy Woolsery, Devon
SPEER’S UNIFORM Robert Carver states in his review of Speer: Hitler’s architect that ‘[p]revious books by and on Speer have avoided showing photos of him in Nazi uniform’. The 1999 biography by Joachim Fest certainly does not – there are around a dozen photos of Speer in uniform, although I do not know of any others. Michael Corgan Bridport
Please note: letters may be edited for length; views expressed here are those of our readers, and do not necessarily relect those of the magazine.
MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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Our round-up of this month’s military history news
THE ETHICS OF BATTLEFIELD ARCHAEOLOGY
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Aware that some viewers might disapprove of the show, producers attempted to dispel criticism in advance. Each episode is preceded with an onscreen message that reads: ‘The stories ilmed for this series portray elements of excavations undertaken over several weeks. ‘The team was supervised at all times by internationally recognised, licensed organisations working in accordance with local laws, landowner permissions, and government permits. ‘This work is not archaeology. It is battleield recovery. All inds were documented, preserved, and ofered to local museums. Recovered combatants were buried with due honour by war graves commissions.’ But the series continues to show the group apparently endangering themselves on the battleield. Ater the diggers are seen crouching over a part-buried, unexploded shell, the episode cuts to Rodgers, who admits, ‘I don’t know anything about bombs, but this thing looks like it could go bang.’ ‘This place is dangerous,’ says Taylor, who is inexplicably kitted out in full camoulage. Viewers are informed that Legenda have called in Explosive Ordnance Disposal, who excavate the shell, before the episode cuts to footage of it exploding. Another scene shows the group as they discover a German stick grenade, and an onscreen message reads, ‘Ordnance was conirmed to be inert before ilming continued.’ But the show’s statements do not exempt the show from its apparent disregard for standard archaeological procedure and its careless cutting of scenes, which in the end serves to promote unsafe and unregulated practice. A letter issued by the Society of Antiquaries of London to Ben Frow, Channel 5’s Director of Programming, stated, ‘Our criticism focuses on the
ABOVE Professor Nick Saunders, a leading modern conflict archaeologist at Bristol University, is one of many academics to have condemned Battlefield Recovery. Saunders said: ‘Modern conflict archaeology is a serious field activity with high standards of recovery, recording, and respect for the dead. Its purpose is to increase understanding of war and its many effects and legacies. This programme, in my opinion, is mere looting and sensationalism.’
careless, insensitive, and unethical treatment of the human remains, but also the mistreatment of other inds, the inept standards of excavation, and the shocking disregard for safe systems of working.’ Responding on Frow’s behalf, a Viewer Advisor replied, ‘We are satisied that the programme, a sensitively produced documentary series made with the support of the relevant local authorities and with an ambition to help protect the history of World War II’s Eastern Front, was fully compliant with the Ofcom Broadcasting Code.’ Nevertheless, several viewers have agreed that the show’s cavalier approach amounts to disrespectful treatment of the dead. Informing viewers that the conlict in this area resulted in many deaths during WWII, the team explicitly go searching for bodies. On inding a deceased German soldier, Gottlieb tips the man’s skull from his helmet, into Taylor’s hands. In this grotesque sequence, no member of Legenda is included in the shot, and the team does not appear
to record any information relating to the ind (although yet another onscreen message reads: ‘These sequences relect longer excavations within the permit boundaries. Data on inds and position have been recorded and protected.’). As the soldier’s skull is held up to the camera, Rodgers is heard relecting on the emotional signiicance of digging up a deceased human being. But several critics have noted the show’s hypocritical broadcasting of footage of foreign soldiers’ remains. Under Ministry of Defence and Commonwealth War Graves Commission rules for showing images of injured and deceased personnel, Channel 5 could not have broadcast these images if the remains found were those of a British soldier, lest this should ofend any of his living relatives. Battleield Recovery thus shows little respect for the families of those German and Russian soldiers who died ighting along the Eastern Front. The series has been cancelled by broadcasters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.
April 2016
Image: John Winterburn/GARP
A
controversial amateur archaeology programme has aired on Channel 5, despite widespread condemnation from archaeologists, academics, and heritage professionals across the UK and abroad. Battleield Recovery, produced by London-based ClearStory Ltd, features four self-styled ‘diggers’: British metal-detectorists Steven Taylor, Kris Rodgers, and Adrian Kostromski, and American dealer in Nazi memorabilia Craig Gottlieb. The series is a repackaged version of Nazi War Diggers, which the National Geographic Channel planned to show in May 2014, but was forced to cancel ater heavy criticism. It follows the group as they roam the battleields of World War II’s Eastern Front, searching for relics of the conlict, under the pretext of historical investigation. The show’s sensationalist tone aside, critics have complained of its apparent emphasis on the inancial rewards of unearthing historic items from the battleields. ‘We’re like kids in a candy shop. There are relics everywhere. You don’t even have to dig,’ claims Gottlieb, excitedly, in the fourth and inal episode of the series. When they come across a heap of discarded WWII objects, the group take great pains to deine themselves against unlicensed so-called ‘black diggers’. ‘These are people who just go in and are looking for things that are worth something,’ says Rodgers. ‘They’re not really bothered about the historical aspect of things, like we are.’ In the same episode, however, the group visit a storage facility where professional Latvian recovery team Legenda (the team reportedly supervising the diggers) preserve their inds, and memorabilia dealer Gottlieb proceeds to state the market values of some of the many items on display.
T E Lawrence’s white silk robes and steel-and-silver dagger are at risk of being exported from the UK. Culture Minister Ed Vaizey has placed two separate temporary export bans on the items, which were sold to overseas buyers at auction last year. It is hoped the export bans will provide an opportunity to keep these national treasures in the UK, provided someone can meet the asking prices of £122,500 for the dagger and £12,500 for the robes. Lawrence is considered one of the most recognisable figures of the First World War, following his work in the Middle East and his involvement in the Arab Revolt. The archaeologist and wartime intelligence and liaison officer worked closely with numerous Arab leaders, and was usually seen wearing traditional Arab dress. Commenting on his choice of attire in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence wrote, ‘The army uniform was abominable when camel-riding or when sitting on the ground; and Arab things, which I learned to manage before the war, were cleaner and more decent in the desert.’
Lawrence was presented with his steel-and-silver curved dagger – called a jambiya – by Sherif Nasir in 1917, after the capture of Aqaba in Jordan. The items are an important part of Lawrence’s history and British heritage. The decision to defer the export licences follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA), administered by Arts Council England. RCEWA Chairman Hayden Phillips said, ‘Although the depiction, in the film Lawrence of Arabia, of Lawrence leading a sweeping camel charge across the desert into Aqaba in 1917 is probably a Romantic exaggeration – stunning though it is – the taking of Aqaba from the landward side, with the help of Auda Abu Tayi, leader of the northern Howeitat, was an extraordinary feat and marked a crucial turning-point in the campaign.’ The decisions on the export licence applications for the robes and dagger will be deferred until 1 April 2016.
VIRTUALLY INSIDE HMS CAVALIER Game developers Wargaming have ilmed the interior of retired C-class destroyer HMS Cavalier, for their new 360° virtual-reality video series, Virtually Inside Warships. Historian and TV presenter Dan Snow will host the series, with ex-Army co-host Richard Cutland. It is designed to give anyone with an internet connection the ability to explore the insides of some of the last surviving warships of the Second World War. HMS Cavalier was commissioned in November 1944, and served in icy Arctic waters as well as the heat of the Far East. She is now preserved as a museum ship at Chatham Historic Dockyard. But people will soon be able to ‘visit’ HMS Cavalier without leaving home, by using Google Cardboard – a cheap and surprisingly simple virtualreality viewing device for use with smartphones. Looking through the device’s lenses at a smartphone playing ilm of the ship’s interior, users will be able to interact with the inside of the virtual warship illing their ield of vision.
g p otion-sensors, users ill be able to control the amera angle from which hey view the footage, iving them the opportunity to pick up on details outside the initial shot. This means that ‘on board’ HMS Cavalier, users will be able to focus on particular parts of the ship’s interior at will, while watching and listening to the hosts talk about the areas of the ship depicted in the virtual landscape. The series and its use of new technology will also allow users to explore areas of historic warships that are currently inaccessible to the public. Commenting on the project, Dan Snow said, ‘I’ve no doubt it’s the future, and it’s exciting to play a small part in that.’
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:RXOG\RXƭJKWLQ::,,," Nearly 100 years ater the introduction of conscription in Britain, a new survey has revealed that 57% of people would protest the prospect of conscription if it were discussed in Parliament in 2016, while 95% of respondents said they would not sign up before a bill was passed. The Military Service Act came into efect on 10 February 1916, during World War I. It imposed compulsory military conscription on all single men aged 18 to 41. Only those in essential wartime employment, the medically unit, religious ministers, and conscientious objectors were exempt from service. But when asked whether civilians today would be better mentally prepared than those in the 1910s, 69% of respondents answered ‘no’. The survey was carried out to mark the launch of The Sins of Soldiers, a historical novel set during WWI, by author and researcher S J Hardman Lea.
WWI U-boat discovered Wind-farm developers have discovered the wreck of a WWI submarine, missing in action since 1915, at a depth of 30m, 90km of the East Anglian coast. The wreck, which remained undetected for over 100 years, has been oicially identiied as German submarine Type U-31, which let for patrol on 13 January 1915, never to return. Mark Dunkley, marine archaeologist at Historic England, said, ‘SM U-31 was commissioned into the Imperial German Navy in September 1914. On 13 January 1915, the U-31 slipped its mooring and sailed north-west from Wilhelmshaven for a routine patrol and disappeared. It is thought that U-31 had struck a mine of England’s east coast and sank with the loss of its entire complement of 4 oicers, 31 men.’ As an oicial military maritime grave, the wreck will remain undisturbed in its inal resting place.
Wartime love letters Austrian historians have reconstructed ‘100 years of love in letters’, ofering new insights into the relationship between love and conlict in the 20th century. Analysing love letters written between 1870 and the 1970s, Christa Hämmerle, from the University of Vienna, and Ingrid Bauer, from the University of Salzburg, have investigated a range of subjects relating to gender, culture, and social history. But the project also used the love letters to consider topics that are rarely dealt with by scholars, such as wartime jealousy and idelity. The researchers discovered a correlation between love and violence in letters written by men during the two world wars: for soldiers, love letters served as mental support, helping them to come to terms with their daily experience of war and bloodshed. The Austrian Science Fund supported the project, the results of which will be published in the autumn.
MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
Image: private collection
Images: Department for Culture, Media, and Sport
Fight to keep Lawrence of Arabia’s robes and dagger in UK
MHM FRONTLINE
NEWS IN BRIEF
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In the valley of the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana, 140 years ago this summer, around 700 men of the US 7th Cavalry led by LieutenantColonel George Armstrong Custer were engaged and overwhelmed by members of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes in a gruesome military encounter that to this day occupies a unique place in American history – and in the American imagination. Countless narratives have tried to unpick the bloody events of 25-26 June 1876, and generations have grown up on the many Hollywood versions of ‘Custer’s Last Stand’. But none of these retellings has the power and immediacy of this remarkable image of the frenetic height of the ighting, made by the Minneconjou Lakota Sioux warrior and artist Red Horse, who participated in the battle and ive years later recorded many of its details in a series of 42 pen and pencil drawings. In contrast to the hyperbole and myth-making of some later accounts, the direct simplicity of Red Horse’s eye-witness recollection opens perhaps a clearer window on events. The drawings depict the heat and movement of a frenzied action fought out on horseback – as here, with soldiers falling to their deaths and warriors thrusting forward to plant spears into the bodies of their enemies – but they also show the terrible atermath of battle, with dismembered corpses, both human and animal, littering the ield in the immobility of death. Some have compared the scenes to the Bayeux Tapestry – and indeed Red Horse’s representations have much of the same tremendous force of repetition: in another of the drawings, the outlines of dead horses are repeated in the same rigid position, each with identical fountains of red blood spouting vertically from wounds that vividly convey the horror of the slaughter. Today, Red Horse’s drawings are regarded as important and dramatic expressions of the Native American experience – with even the recently introduced ‘ledger paper’ on which they are depicted telling its story of a fast-changing land. Previously, of course, such artworks would have been recorded on animal hide or on rock walls. Twelve ledger drawings by Red Horse are on show at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University until 9 May 2016 (for details, see www. museum.stanford.edu/news_room/red-horse.htm). MHM will be marking the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn with a full analysis next issue.
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MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
Text: Maria Earle
Image: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
WARRIOR WITNESS
MHM BEHIND THE IMAGE
THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN 1876, LEDGER DRAWING (DATED 1881) BY RED HORSE
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Patrick Boniface considers the inluence of science on warfare
On Tuesday evening, they gave me a Parabellum machine-gun, with which I returned to Schwerin. That Friday, I had the working synchronised machine-gun ready for inspection. The invention and construction had taken 48 hours.
“
Anton Fokker
Born: 6 April 1890, Kediri, East Java Married: Sophie Marie Elisabeth von Morgen (1919-1923) and Violet Eastman (1927-1929)
ANTON FOKKER
T
his Dutch aviation legend was a complex and charismatic man, but also a bad-tempered one who would claim credit for other people’s achievements. Anton Fokker, who gave his name to the aircrat company behind some of the world’s best military aircrat during the two world wars, was born a long way from his native Netherlands, in the hot and humid environment of Kediri in East Java, where his parents ran a cofee plantation. Aged four, he returned to Haarlem with his family. At school, Fokker was not academic, but he did show a great interest in mechanics. He enjoyed making things and seeing how they worked; he fashioned
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MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
Died: 23 December 1939, New York City Known for: designing warplanes and perfecting the synchronised machine-gun
BELOW The Fokker DrI Triplane flown by Manfred von Richthofen (nicknamed the ‘Red Baron’) in March 1918, one month before his death.
steam engines, model trains, and, above all else, he experimented with model aeroplanes.
in subsequent aircrat, he moved to Johannisthal in Berlin and founded Fokker Aeroplanbau. Ater a further move to facilities at Schwerin, the
company’s name was eventually shortened to Fokker Werke GmbH. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the Fokker company was
‘THE FLYING DUTCHMAN’ His interest in aviation stemmed from an exhibition light by Wilbur Wright in France in 1908. Two years later, the young Fokker received automobile mechanical training in Germany at Bingen Technical School, before transferring to the Erste Deutsche Automobil-Fachschule in Mainz, where he developed his passion for lying. In 1910, Fokker built his irst aircrat, De Spin ( The Spider). This plane was later destroyed by a business partner, who lew it into a tree. In 1912, ater successful lights
Image: Alamy
Image: Library of Congress
BIOGRAPHY
April 2016
taken over by the German government, and established an enviable reputation for excellent warplanes, including the Fokker Eindecker and the Fokker DrI Dreidecker (the latter made famous by Manfred von Richthofen). Around 700 aircrat were produced for the Imperial German Army Air Service up to the end of the war. Being a Dutchman, Fokker could not oicially ight for the Germans, although he blurred the lines when, on 13 June 1915, he demonstrated the new monoplane Eindecker at Stenay in front of the German Crown Prince. His lying skills were remarked on by none other than lying ace Max Immelmann, who said, ‘Fokker, especially, amazed us with his skill.’ Despite this praise, Fokker himself was known to be irascible and distrustful of qualiied engineers. Such was Fokker’s legendary insensitivity that when one pilot, Martin Kreuzer, crashed a prototype aircrat on 27 June 1916, he rushed over to the crash site to obtain a verbal report from the engineer before he died. ‘Fokker hurried to the scene and shouted reproaches at the mortally wounded injured man,’ said Reinhold Platz, the man who replaced the pilot.
QUOTES FROM FOKKER Without the help of others, I learned to fly it [his invention]. But I never became a hero.” this allowed forward-iring machineguns to be operated by the pilot. Garros tried to destroy the device by burning his aircrat ater the crash, but his attempt was unsuccessful. The Germans handed the delector over to Fokker, who later commented:
Garros had mounted a machinegun in front of his cockpit, pointing forward. Very cunningly he had itted a wedge-shaped piece of steel at the back of the propeller to prevent it from being shot to splinters. He had shot down a few German pilots with it before he had to force-land behind German lines, and his secret was out.
The reliability of this statement has been questioned, because Fokker had been working on a similar system for six months prior to Garros’s crash landing. But the end result, ater some aerial mishaps, was a game-changer, allowing pilots to ire straight ahead, between the propeller blades. Fokker’s solution was to use the aircrat engine:
The way around the problem is to let the propeller ire the gun. The propeller turns at 1,200rpm, and the gun ires 600 times a minute. Put a cam on the shat and let it ire the gun every other turn. Then no bullet will ever hit the prop.
CONTRABAND GARROS’ SECRET Fokker’s involvement in the development of the synchronised machine-gun started when French pilot Roland Garros was shot down on 18 April 1915. His aircrat had been itted with a delector device that involved metal wedges itted to the airscrew. This device meant that bullets ired through the turning blades were delected away; crucially,
Fokker set to work immediately, and is oten quoted as having said:
On Tuesday evening, they gave me a Parabellum machine-gun, with which I returned to Schwerin. That Friday, I had the working synchronised machine-gun ready for inspection. The invention and construction had taken 48 hours.
IN CONTEXT: FOKKER
Airborne innovations The 20th century was only a few years old when Wilbur and Orville Wright took to the skies above Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their achievement stimulated innovative young minds around the world, and all too soon the aeroplane was being used as a weapon above the trenches of the First World War. These flimsy aircraft were equipped with ill-suited weaponry, but Anton Fokker and a few other pioneers worked hard to make them more effective. During the first few years of WWI, aircraft were equipped with machine-guns in their rear cockpits or on their wings. These were hard to aim with any degree of accuracy, but with the introduction of the first synchronised machine-gun, developed by Anton Fokker, aircraft could fire straight ahead at the target through their propeller blades, without damaging them in the process, and their accuracy was vastly improved.
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When the First World War ended, the terms of the Versailles Treaty saw the destruction of German air power. But this did not stop Anton Fokker loading six goods-trains’ worth of DVII and CI aircrat parts, and taking them across the German–Dutch border to re-establish his aircrat business in Holland. Such contraband was illegal to transport, but Fokker is said to have bribed oicials with 20,000 Dutch guilders. In total, 200 aeroplanes and more than 400 aero-engines were smuggled out of Germany in this way. On 25 March 1919, he married Sophie Marie Elisabeth von Morgen, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1923. In 1927, Fokker moved to the United States to pursue his business interests, and established the Atlantic Aircrat Corporation. He remarried in the same year, wedding Canadian Violet Eastman, who died under suspicious circumstances when she fell from their hotel suite on 8 February 1929. The oicial police report stated that she was a ‘vertigo victim’. In 1931, Anton Fokker sold his interests to General Motors, and these
MHM CONFLICT SCIENTISTS
RIGHT Anton Fokker sitting in De Spin, around 1911.
I have always understood aeroplanes much better than women. I had more love affairs in my life, and they ended just like the first one, really, because I thought there was nothing that could be more important than my aeroplanes… I have now learned, by bitter experience, that one must give a little too; in love one has to use one’s brain just as much as in business, and perhaps even more.” Every time I revved the engine, we made a small jump into the air. First 3m and 6m, then 30m and 60m jumps. When I made a jump of a few hundred metres, I felt like a bird.” subsequently became the General Aviation Division. For the last eight years of his life, Fokker lived quietly in and around New York, where he died of pneumococcal meningitis on 23 December 1939, aged 49. His ashes were taken to Westerveld Cemetery in Driehuis, Holland, and buried in the family plot. æ MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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He had little artistic training, and studied medicine before the outbreak of the Second World War, but the Royal Navy’s Philip Dark found comfort in his own creativity during his three-year detention in Germany as a prisoner of war. Relecting on the personal signiicance of his art, he wrote, ‘Colour became very important to me in a world that was largely colourless.’ The Germans captured Lieutenant Dark on 28 March 1942 when HMS Campbeltown, laden with explosives, rammed the gates of Normandie dry dock in Nazi-occupied France. Targeted in this way by the Allies because it was the only dock of its kind capable of servicing the German battleship Tirpitz, the successful British raid rendered the area unusable for the remainder of the conlict. Dark spent most of his imprisonment in Marlag O, a PoW camp in the village of Westertimke, near Bremen. When the camp was evacuated towards the end of the war, he let his paintings behind, stored in canisters that had contained KLIM powdered milk. Labelled with his name, these found their way to England six months ater his release, and Dark’s works are now up for sale at the Abbott and Holder gallery in London. Many of his pictures depict lurid scenes of confusion and coninement, and almost all of them include barbed-wire fences. Several pieces portray the drudgery of forced labour, others the horrors of war. But some relect the small ways in which the prisoners occupied themselves during captivity, showing the men in conversation, relaxing, and reading in their bunks. Collectively, Dark’s images ofer a vivid and immediate insight into the tedious reality of wartime internment.
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1. ‘FORCED LABOUR II’, INK AND PASTEL. UNDATED After a series of attempted tunnel escapes in 1943, the Germans forced the prisoners to dig a moat around three sides of the camp.
All images: courtesy of Abbott and Holder Ltd
2. ‘BARBED-WIRE-ITIS’, GOUACHE. 1944 Around the time he painted this gouache, Dark commented in his diary, ‘I was discussing with Guy Morgan, the other day, how oblivious one becomes to being surrounded by barbed wire. He pointed out that its frequent occurrence in one’s paintings shows, at any rate, it must be fully present in the subconscious!’
3. ‘AGONY’ (‘CONFINEMENT’), GOUACHE. 1944 Dark wrote that the prisoners soon became accustomed to the barbed wire penning them in, ‘as one would the walls of neighbouring buildings in a narrow city street’. This painting, depicting human bodies writhing in pain, seems to suggest the opposite.
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4. ‘SEARCHLIGHTS OVER BREMEN FROM MARLAG O’, GOUACHE. 1944
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The otherworldliness of life behind the fence is captured fully in this stunning piece of art. Garish tones trace the beams emitted from German searchlights on the lookout for enemy aircraft.
5. ‘DIANA IN WARDROOMLAND’, GOUACHE. 1943 A poster for the Marlag O pantomime. Occasionally the monotony of routine was broken when a concert or play was put on in the camp’s theatre block. Germans and prisoners alike attended these events.
6. ‘THE FRUITS OF WAR ARE DEATH’, GOUACHE. 1944 This bleak portrayal of the impact of war is powerful in its simplicity. Unlike most of Dark’s other paintings, it employs a strikingly sombre colour palette.
7. ‘P.O.W. CONVERSATION PIECE’, GOUACHE. UNDATED Prisoners of war learned to adapt to even the most extreme circumstances, although in Dark’s representation this ‘normality’ is portrayed in an almost surrealist style.
8. ‘THE RUSSIAN FRONT’, GOUACHE. 1944 The Eastern Front of the Second World War was well known for its ferocity and immense loss of life.
9. ‘JUST BEFORE LIGHTS OUT’, GOUACHE. 1944 Books sent from home, and those provided by the Red Cross, provided the prisoners with keenly devoured reading material. Dark noted that he read an average of two-and-a-half books per week during his confinement.
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GO FURTHER Philip Dark’s artwork can be purchased from the Abbott and Holder gallery in London. Abbott and Holder Ltd, 30 Museum Street, London, WC1A 1LH Tel: 020 7637 3981 Website: www.abbottandholder-thelist.co.uk
April 2016
Image: WIPL
The Battle of Lepanto
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April 2016
The Ottoman Empire was the superpower of the 16th-century Mediterranean. People wondered whether it might eventually engulf the whole of Europe. Then came the Western Christian naval victory at Lepanto. Jules Stewart tells the story.
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he great battle of 1571 between the fleets of the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe has been hailed as ‘the most important naval battle of the firearms era’ and ‘the battle that saved Europe’. Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery described it as a land battle fought at sea, given the great number of men who met in arms off the Greek coast on that 7 October morning. Yet, in spite of a decisive victory by Europe’s Holy League over the Sultan’s fleet, Lepanto can be considered at best only a holding action.
THE OTTOMAN SURGE By the late 15th century, after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 and the extinction of the last vestiges of Imperial Rome, Christian Europe lived under the shadow of an imminent struggle to halt the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. The Turks, ruled by Sultan Mehmed II – ‘Mehmed the Conqueror’ – had their sights set on three objectives: central Europe, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. In 1456, the Sultan’s army fought its way to the very walls of Belgrade, where it was repulsed by Hungarian and Germanic Crusaders. Undeterred, the Turks battled on to overrun Serbia two years later, then Bosnia in 1463, the Black Sea coast, Romanian Wallachia, and, finally, Albania in 1479. Mehmed II’s hosts now stood poised at the gateway to Western Europe. But to continue their westward thrust, the Ottomans needed a powerful fleet to gain mastery of the Mediterranean. Mehmed’s father, Murad II, had provided the Ottomans with considerable sea power in the early years of the 15th century. His son would now place the empire’s shipyards and arsenals on a war footing, refitting his fleet of galleys. These were soon put to effective use, driving the Genoese and Venetians from key Mediterranean strongholds.
SULEIMAN THE MAGNIFICENT Mehmed II’s great-grandson, Suleiman I, the then Ottoman Sultan, presided over the zenith of the empire’s political and military www.military-history.org
BELOW LEFT A contemporary painting of the Battle of Lepanto. The battle was a common subject of Renaissance art. The form of the vessels and the character of the fighting are well represented in this example: Lepanto was essentially a close-quarters struggle between floating platforms of soldiers and cannon.
Mehmed II’s hosts now stood poised at the gateway to Western Europe. power. His conquests earned him the title ‘Suleiman the Magnificent’ Yet, in the last decade of his life, the Sultan became what would today be characterised as a reactionary ayatollah. He devoted his life to the study of the Koran, esteeming himself a champion of Sunni orthodoxy and the upholder of Islamic justice. Suleiman called for a jihad against Christendom, a holy war which he would personally direct as army commander. In the spring of 1566, the 70-year-old Sultan ordered his army to prepare to march west. But Suleiman did not live to see the great Ottoman victory in Hungary, and the partial annexation of that country. And his successor, his son Selim II, found himself presiding over a depleted treasury – much to the disgust of his unpaid troops. The army, in particular the elite corps of Janissaries, was still smarting from the Ottoman rout at the Siege of Malta in 1565, when they were repulsed by a small contingent of crack troops raised by the Knights Hospitaller. Malta was a strategic outpost, commanding the western and eastern reaches of the Mediterranean, and also linking the Italian peninsula with North Africa. Whoever held the island controlled access to the coastlines of Europe’s major powers.
THE SIEGE OF MALTA For the attack on Malta, the Ottomans assembled a fleet of 225 vessels and 64 artillery pieces, including four enormous guns firing 170lb shells. The Maltese counted in their ranks 5,000 professional soldiers supported by fewer than 7,000 hastily armed militiamen and Muslim MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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ABOVE Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566), the greatest of the Ottoman sultans. He led his armies into the heart of Europe and looked poised to overwhelm Western Christendom.
THE JANISSARIES The Janissaries (derived from the Turkish word for ‘new soldier’) formed an elite unit of the Ottoman army. They were recruited from forced levies of Christian youths and war captives, who were trained under the strictest discipline, which included a vow of celibacy. The corps was originally raised in the 14th century by the Ottoman ruler Orkhan, the conqueror of large parts of Asia Minor. Highly respected for their military prowess in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Janissaries became a powerful political force within the Ottoman state as the Sultan’s household troops and bodyguards. As quasi-oicial protectors of the throne, the Janissaries were oten instrumental in palace coups during the 17th and 18th centuries. By 1600, Muslims had begun to enter the ranks, oten through bribery, and in the 17th century membership of the corps became largely hereditary, while the conscription of Christians gradually ceased. The Janissaries’ end came in June 1826 in the so-called ‘Auspicious Incident’. On learning of the formation of new, Western-style units, the Janissaries revolted. Sultan Mahmud II declared war on the rebels and, on their refusal to surrender, had cannon ire directed on their barracks. Most of the Janissaries were killed, and those who were taken prisoner were executed. All that is let of their history is their music – which now exists in the form of modern mehter marching bands.
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A large number of Algerian and Turkish jihadist volunteers managed to penetrate the Spanish lines. galley slaves. The Turkish attackers numbered almost 40,000, and few would have given odds on a Christian victory. But, on 18 May 1565, the Sultan committed the tactical error of splitting his forces between two rival commanders. Admiral Piyale Pasha wanted to take Fort St Elmo, the point that commands the island’s two principal harbours. General Mustafa Pasha’s plan was to lay siege to Borgo, the walled residence of the Grand Master. A concerted effort by both forces would almost certainly have enabled the Turks to conquer the island. As it was, after the capture of St Elmo, no one expected the Maltese to hold out for long, but their spirited defence cost the Ottomans 6,000 casualties. By the time the Ottomans had gathered strength for a renewed offensive, they were confronted by newly arrived Spanish and Venetian reinforcements. An Ottoman attempt to regain the initiative met with furious resistance and caused further heavy losses. More than 4,000 Turks fell on 20 August alone during an attack
ABOVE LEFT Don John of Austria (1547-1578), the young admiral who led the Holy League fleet to victory at Lepanto. ABOVE Ali Pasha (died 1571), the Ottoman admiral who perished at the moment of his fleet’s defeat at Lepanto.
on Fort St Michael. When, in October, the Ottomans abandoned the siege and sailed for the Bosphorus, total casualties were estimated at 30,000 men.
THE ASSAULT ON CYPRUS ‘It seemed obvious to even the non-military minded Selim that he must win the obedience of his army,’ says historian Barnaby Rogerson. ‘This, he felt, could best be achieved by a dramatic new venture: the conquest of a new province for the empire.’ After the Malta debacle, Cyprus became this target for annexation. In 1568, an Ottoman admiral led a ‘friendly’ visit to the Venetian possession, which was in reality a recce to observe the island’s defences. In 1569, military and naval preparations got under way, and the following year the Cypriots found some 70,000 Turks camped below the battlements of Nicosia. The besiegers began a ferocious artillery barrage, followed by days of bitter fighting at close quarters, until the city was finally captured. Famagusta was the Ottomans’ next objective. General Mustafa Pasha sent a silver platter to the city’s Venetian commander, adorned with the head of the Governor of Cyprus Nicolo Dandolo. The Famagusta garrison had fewer than 7,000 men at its disposal and was outnumbered seven to one. Unperturbed, the city’s Governor Marc Antonio Bragadino refused to surrender. There followed 13 months of April 2016
Maps: Ian Bull
TOP Map showing the voyage to Greece of the Holy League fleet. BOTTOM Map showing the final approach to battle of the opposing fleets.
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BELOW This detail from a wider canvas shows the character of the galleys of the late 16thcentury Ottoman fleet. Note the way they are packed with soldiers (or marines as they would later be called). The Ottomans placed too much reliance on manpower, not enough on cannon: they were heavily outgunned at Lepanto.
A running battle continued for hours between Don John’s boarding parties and the Turks.
relentless bombardment, which eventually brought the city’s defenders to their knees, and left the last Venetian stronghold in Turkish hands.
THE MORISCO REBELLION A sense of urgency took hold in the great Mediterranean powers of the day, namely Imperial Spain, Venice, and the Papacy. It was becoming increasingly clear to the Christian states with a Mediterranean coastline that the Turks needed to be stopped. Then, over Christmas 1568, in the region of southern Spain known as Las Alpujarras, Spanish Muslims, known as ‘Moriscos’, rose up in sympathy with their Ottoman brethren. Madrid at first attached little importance to what was seen as a minor incident. But when the disturbances turned into a full-scale uprising, King Philip II sent his 20-year-old half-brother Don John of Austria – later to lead the fleet at Lepanto – to crush the insurgents. Regular troops were seconded from Spain’s Italian possessions and the confrontation swiftly turned into a full-fledged guerrilla war. The fate of the Moriscos was sealed when they failed to take any of Spain’s Mediterranean ports, which would have provided access to Ottoman reinforcements, though a large number of Algerian and Turkish ‘jihadist’ volunteers managed to penetrate the Spanish lines. The Morisco rebellion and the fall of Cyprus came as a wake-up call for Spain and her allies. In the spring of 1571, Spain, Venice, and the Pope formed the Holy League, an alliance that pooled vessels and fighting men for a showdown with the Ottoman Empire. The summer months saw Spain engaged in assembling its warships, which were to seek out the enemy berthed in the Gulf of Patras, a branch of the Ionian Sea. The Christian fleet found its enemy waiting at Lepanto on the northern edge of the Gulf of Corinth.
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Image: WIPL
THE FLEETS The two fleets were almost evenly matched in number. The Holy League had 206 galleys and six galleasses (powerful, though cumbersome, fighting vessels). The Turkish armada consisted of 208 galleys, supported by smaller craft known as ‘galiots’ and ‘fusta’. The Christian flotilla, apart from wielding superior firepower, possessed the advantage of heading into battle fresh and eager for a fight, unlike the Turks, who were war-weary after the Malta and Cyprus campaigns, which had taken a heavy toll in ships and men. Shortly after dawn on 7 October, the watch on the Spanish flagship reported two strange sails to the east, and shortly thereafter eight
GALLEYS
more on the horizon. Soon the whole Turkish fleet came into view. ‘Don John immediately ordered his foresail to be hauled to the wind,’ says historian Sir Charles Petrie, ‘a square green ensign to be run up to the peak, a gun to be fired, and the standard of the League to be displayed from the maintop.’ The two fleets came upon each other at first light, in two long lines abreast, spread across the Gulf of Lepanto, a long inlet of irregular shape, bounded on the north by the coast of Albania and on the south by that of the Peloponnese. At the sound of the signal gun, each captain in the League began to prepare his ship for action. The Ottoman admiral Ali Pasha commanded a force of 40,000 soldiers, including the www.military-history.org
seasoned Janissaries, some 15,000 sailors, and 50,000 rowers. The Christian forces numbered 30,000 troops, 10,000 sailors, and 34,000 rowers. Despite the disparity in the number of fighting men, morale was high in the fleet of the Holy League.
BATTLE JOINED
ABOVE A contemporary plan of the Battle of Lepanto. The Holy League fleet is on the left, the Ottoman on the right. The basic form of the battle is implicit in this. The Ottomans had intended using their flank flotillas to encircle the opposing fleet, but the gulf was too narrow. The Christians were relying on the power of a central punch at the opposing line, especially given their superiority in artillery.
Image: WIPL
The galleys were the most efective vessel in Mediterranean naval warfare during the 16th century. This was the Indian summer of an ancient warship that gave primacy to oars over sails and, in a Renaissance context, a level cannon-bearing platform over a rounded keel – thus, in efect, turning sea battles into land battles. The galley’s shallow drat and the primary use of human muscle-power to propel the crat enabled the galley to move independently of winds and currents, and to outmanoeuvre other types of vessels. One of the keys to the galley’s success was the construction, from 1500 onwards, of platforms solid enough to support the weight of cannon. A full battery of cannon would typically weigh from 4,000 to 7,000lbs, exclusive of the mount, and ire a cast-iron cannonball of from 40 to 50lbs. The galley’s size, structure, and oar-based propulsion varied from one country’s leet to another, but they all shared certain characteristics. All had hulls about 136 feet long by about 17 or 18 feet wide, topped by an outrigger assembly. They were deceptively long and light, and they were capable of transporting large numbers of soldiers, who could be rapidly disembarked to storm a fortress or engage an enemy force. In the 17th century, the galley, a vessel with more than 2,000 years of service in naval engagements, was gradually replaced by heavily armed sailing ships, which began to transform the nature of naval warfare.
Both sides began beating the kettle drums that would signal the opening of hostilities. The first devastating salvoes were fired from the ponderous Venetian galleasses, which were MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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Map: Ian Bull
BATTLE OF LEPANTO
fitted with 50 guns each, and had been towed by galleys to within range of the Ottoman fleet. The Turks’ strategy was to send two wings from the main body of its fleet to encircle the enemy, while moving the powerful centre forward to meet the Christian armada head-on. The tactic failed. The Ottoman command neglected to take account of the narrowness of the Gulf of Lepanto, which made the surround-and-strangle manoeuvre impossible to execute. Don John, meanwhile, deployed his galleys in position for a frontal attack, taking advantage of his superiority in artillery. The Holy League’s vessels were equipped with five guns each, compared with only three mounted on the Turkish galleys. 24
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ABOVE A modern diagram of the battle as it played out. There was little finesse: it was essentially a frontal collision and then a ferocious slugging match.
A fierce battle for the centre broke out between the fleet admirals Don John and Ali Pasha, each commanding his respective flagship. The Spanish commander’s ship was invested by six Ottoman galleys and smaller galiots, but the greater height and weight of his galley ultimately saved him.
A LAND BATTLE AT SEA A running battle continued for hours between Don John’s boarding parties and the Turks, who were fed with reinforcements from the galiots astern. The same took place on the Spanish
side, with Christian galleys from the reserve pouring men into Don John’s flagship Real. The Muslims finally broke. Ali Pasha was killed by a musket ball fired from a Spanish boarding party. The defeat of the Ottoman centre formation filled the rest of their flotilla with despair. The Turks broke formation and many galleys attempted to flee, though few made it to safety. By afternoon, after five hours of relentless fighting, 117 Ottoman galleys and 13 galiots had been captured, along with 400 guns and 3,500 prisoners. The Ottomans had suffered 30,000 casualties, nearly four times the number of Christian dead and wounded. One of the hardest blows was the loss of thousands of Janissaries, the backbone of the Ottoman army. April 2016
RIGHT This Venetian fresco gives an accurate impression of the fierce hand-to-hand fighting on board ships that dominated the battle. Both sides fed men forward from ships backed up behind those in the front-line.
‘The Christian fleet achieved a crushing victory at Lepanto, in no small measure due to Pope Pius V’s powers of persuasion to unite the Spanish and Venetians in the Holy League, and also thanks to Don John’s brilliant leadership,’ says Spanish infantry colonel and military historian José Antonio Crespo-Francés. ‘The Spanish admiral had successfully brought together the fleets of several nationalities in a joint effort which avoided any unilateral decision to abandon the battle. Then, too, the galleasses had performed remarkably well, despite their relative lack of manoeuvrability. The Holy League’s superiority in artillery was another decisive factor, but so too was their skill with musket and harquebus, both of which had become mainstays of the Spanish infantry.’
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The musket and harquebus had become mainstays of the Spanish infantry.
Lepanto, the last of the great galley battles, set the Ottoman Empire on a path to decadence as a sea power, but likewise the failure of the Christian powers to consolidate their victory left the door open to a conflict which, under different guises, endures to our day.
Image: WIPL
A DECISIVE BATTLE? With the campaign officially over, the Holy League fleet sailed for home, turning their backs on the chance to exploit their triumph. ‘Sadly, the Holy League failed to follow up by pursuing and effectively destroying the remnants of the Turkish fleet,’ says CrespoFrancés. ‘The Turks quickly constructed a new fleet of 2,000 galleys, and in 1572, the year after Lepanto, Don John was unable to dislodge the Ottomans from Greek waters.’ Bickering erupted among the Holy League partners. Don John later managed to capture Tunis, only to lose it the following year to the Turks. The Venetians signed a unilateral peace treaty with the Ottomans in 1573, and within a few months the League was disbanded. The Ottomans formed an alliance with the French, and thanks to this the Turks were able to resume naval activities in the western Mediterranean. The Ottomans captured Fez, thereby securing a foothold in Morocco. Eventually almost the entire southern coast of the Mediterranean, from the Straits of Gibraltar to Greece, fell under Ottoman suzerainty. ‘We can affirm that from a military and naval history standpoint, Lepanto marked the end of an era,’ says Crespo-Francés. ‘Lepanto ended forever the naval hegemony which the Ottoman Empire had enjoyed after the Battle of Preveza in 1538, off the coast of north-western Greece, when the Turks inflicted a decisive defeat on a Christian fleet.’ The Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes, who fought at Lepanto and lost the use of his left arm to a musket ball, put these words into the mouth of his immortal knight errant Don Quixote: ‘The world and all nations learnt of their error in believing that the Turks were invincible on the high seas.’
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Jules Stewart is a historian specialising in Spanish and Afghan warfare – not such unlikely bedfellows according to the 1965 edition of The Oxford History of India, which defines Afghanistan as ‘the Spain of Asia’. His latest book, The Kaiser’s Mission to Kabul (I B Tauris, 2015), tells the story of a secret German mission to Afghanistan during the First World War. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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the war of independence
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epublican Ireland is this year celebrating the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916. The event has always been controversial. For some – the British and the Unionists – it was rank treachery, coming, as it did, in the middle of World War I. But even many Irish Catholics, following the
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lead of moderate nationalists like John Redmond, saw loyal service as a way of ‘earning’ independence. Many of these, moreover, had brothers, husbands, and sons serving in the trenches. Even some hard-line nationalists were unsure: were the people ready for revolution; was now really the time?
When the Rising went down to defeat, everyone with reservations felt vindicated: the people as a whole, whatever their sympathies, had remained mere bystanders, leaving a relatively small British force free to crush the isolated rebels. Had the nationalist movement not therefore been decapitated by this premature armed insurrection? Many thought so. April 2016
In this issue’s special feature, we analyse the Easter Rising from a military perspective. First, Chris Bambery discusses the 1916 fighting in Dublin, arguing that it was close-run, that a different strategy might have been more effective, and that the possibility was there of it turning into a national uprising. www.military-history.org
Then Neil Faulkner looks at the character of the subsequent War of Independence, with a general piece on Michael Collins’ guerrilla strategy, and a look in detail at the Kilmichael Ambush. He argues, first, that events between 1919 and 1921 can be seen as blowback from British action in the aftermath of
the Easter Rising, and, second, that the armed independence struggle shows the potential of very small numbers of guerrilla combatants, provided they are deeply embedded within, and strongly supported by, the general population – implying that the outcome of Easter 1916 might, indeed, have been very different. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
Image: Topfoto
ireland: introduction
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The Easter rising: DOOMED FROM THE START? Chris Bambery challenges the traditional view that the Irish nationalist uprising of 1916 was hopelessly premature.
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he centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising will be marked by major celebrations across Ireland. But history is always a battleground, and the Rising is no exception. In reaction to the military campaign of the Provisional IRA, which began in earnest in 1971, there was a rejection by many Irish historians of the nationalist narrative of 1916. A near
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flood of revisionist historians took up the argument that 1916 was a ‘blood sacrifice’, a hopeless, narrow nationalist outburst that cemented the division of two Irelands – one Catholic and nationalist, the other Protestant and Unionist. The revisionist argument was well put by Dennis Kennedy, former Deputy Editor of The Irish Times, in that paper last January,
when he described the Rising’s leaders as: ‘Ideologues with no electoral support, prepared to kill and destroy in pursuit of their political aims.’ He added that: ‘The long shadow of the gunman of 1916 has helped inspire BELOW The ruins of the General Post Office after the Easter Rising.
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IRELAND: easter rising
ABOVE Padraig Pearse (1879-1916), the teacher, lawyer, poet, and writer who read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic during the Easter Rising.
IRA campaigns in practically every decade since 1922, and still does today.’ Republican accounts of the Rising had a tendency to mirror the ‘blood sacrifice’ argument by stressing that the Rising was the act of a small, dedicated minority of the Irish people whose actions shifted public opinion decisively towards separation from Britain. In reality, the Easter Rising was a serious military operation that involved painstaking planning and training. Further, the dynamic of the situation was already flowing the way of the Republicans prior to the Rising, so that the forces which went into action in fact had the sympathy of much of the working and middle classes.
THE ARMING OF IRELAND The failure of the pre-war Liberal Government to deliver on its pledge of Irish Home Rule had already eroded support for the moderate, constitutional Irish National Party. The formation in the north-east of Ireland of Unionist militias committed to resisting Home Rule had radicalised Irish politics. www.military-history.org
In response, the Irish Volunteers had been formed and had begun arming. The gun was firmly in place by 1914. Then, in 1914, the leader of the Irish National Party committed it to support Britain as the First World War began. At first, opposition to Irish participation in the war was muted. In August 1914, the Irish Volunteers could boast 150,000 members, and most supported their leader’s backing for the British war-effort. Just 13,500 men – 8% of the total – left to form the republican Irish National Volunteers, while 18,613 volunteered for service with the British Army. The majority of Irish recruits joined up in the first two years of the war. Altogether, 44,000 Irishmen enlisted in 1914 and 45,000 in 1915, but this slumped to just 18,000 in 1916. The National Volunteers (henceforward simply ‘the Volunteers’) grew, gaining 15,200 members by April 1916. The extension of conscription to Ireland – it had been introduced in Britain in January 1916 – was strongly resisted. In addition, membership of the Irish National Party was falling. The man proclaimed President of the Irish Republic in Easter Week 1916, Padraig Pearse, had been a supporter of the Irish National Party until the sheer strength of Ulster Unionist reaction to the prospect
ABOVE James Connolly (1868-1916), the trade unionist, socialist, and republican who studied guerrilla warfare in preparation for the Easter Rising.
The Irish volunteers had been formed and had begun arming. The gun was firmly in place by 1914. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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and then vanish into the backstreets or countryside they knew so well. The eventual decision to concentrate rebel forces in Dublin city centre was sensible, as street fighting gave advantage to lightly armed forces who had a detailed knowledge of the area. The plan was to secure a perimeter of fixed defensive positions, and to have a reserve force to be used to reinforce those under attack. This reflected the widespread view, based on the experience of the First World War, that the advantage lay with the defenders of fixed positions. The Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers had 3,000 members, and the Irish Citizen Army 200. British forces in the Dublin area totalled 2,500. So the odds, on paper, were not unfavourable.
AN ABORTIVE RISING IN THE SOUTH-WEST ABOVE Defenders of the General Post Office. Most attention focuses on the siege of the GPO. In fact, small units of Volunteers held a number of posts constituting a defended perimeter around central Dublin. Their relative success may imply that dispersal was the correct strategy, and had it been applied more consistently, the outcome might have been different.
of devolution led him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and then the Irish Volunteers.
CONNOLLY AND THE ART OF INSURRECTION Many have seized on statements in Pearse’s writings such as ‘bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing’ to argue that his aim in 1916 was a blood sacrifice that might somehow advance the fight for Irish freedom. Yet this is to ignore the sheer scale of planning for the Rising. Pearse was inspired primarily by the belief that ‘action was preferable to inaction’. One of the other main leaders of the Rising, James Connolly, a socialist and trade-union leader, had been scathing about statements glorifying death, calling Pearse ‘a blithering idiot’. But the two worked closely in planning the Rising. In January 1916, Connolly brought his smaller Irish Citizen Army into an alliance with the IRB, and joined their military council. Connolly had studied the Moscow insurrection of 1905, the Brussels and Paris revolts of 1830, and the Battle of Lexington in 1776, the opening clash of the American War of Independence. The lesson he drew was that paramilitary forces could succeed against regular ones only if they got so close to them that the use of artillery was ruled out, and the rebel forces were able to carry out attacks 30
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Paramilitary forces could succeed against regular ones only if they got so close that the use of artillery was ruled out.
There was one major flaw in the plan. It depended on the Volunteers’ commander, Eoin MacNeill, ordering a national mobilisation on Easter Sunday. The clandestine Irish Republican Brotherhood was important within the Volunteers, but MacNeill was not a member. To gain his assent, he was presented with forged documents purporting to show the British Government ordering mass arrests. MacNeill was also told that the Rising’s leaders were expecting arms from Germany. The Irish Volunteers in Kerry had been put on alert for the arrival of a German vessel, the Aud, carrying rifles and ammunition. The organiser of the gun-running, Sir Roger Casement, was to be landed in advance by U-boat. Armed with German rifles, the Volunteers of Kerry, Cork, and Limerick were to seize the south-west and send columns through Athlone to assist the Dublin rebels. The Rising’s leaders hoped that British forces would be trapped between the anvil of the fixed positions in Dublin and the hammer of the Volunteers advancing from the west. But the Aud was intercepted by the Royal Navy, the captain scuttled the ship, and Casement was arrested. By then, MacNeill had discovered that he had been deceived and cancelled mobilisation orders, putting adverts in the newspapers to this effect. The rebel Army Council decided they had to proceed, but postponed the Rising 24 hours to Easter Monday.
THE STRUGGLE FOR DUBLIN On Easter Monday, just 1,000 volunteers responded to the call to arms (though another 800 came in over the coming days). At noon, the rebels seized the General Post Office and set up headquarters there. Pearse read out the proclamation of the Irish April 2016
IRELAND: easter rising Republic. Rebel units moved into their allotted positions across the city. Dublin is bisected by the River Liffey, running eastwards towards the Irish Sea. To the north, the Royal Canal runs almost parallel, and to the South, the Grand Canal. Both formed ideal defence lines, the key being to maintain control of the bridges. South of the Liffey, the rebels took up six positions. North of the Liffey, in addition to the GPO, they garrisoned the Four Courts on the riverside. The Republicans thus held a perimeter defence of the city centre overlooking the main approaches from the north, the south, and the west – the directions from which they expected the British to attack, coming from their main military bases in Dublin and elsewhere. There were no positions to the east of the GPO. This allowed the British to bring in troops from the docks and from Amiens Street Station (now Connolly Station). The plan was also to seize Dublin Castle, headquarters of the British administration in Ireland. On that Easter Monday it was defended by some 25 men. At noon, 50
www.military-history.org
The Republicans held a perimeter defence of the city centre overlooking the main approaches.
members of the ICA stormed and took the Upper Castle Yard Gate and the guardroom, but then withdrew. Failure to capture the communications centre of British operations was a costly failure. Some have argued that Connolly did not believe the British would bombard Dublin City because of the damage to property. This is hard to believe, because he had studied a number of insurrections and knew that artillery had been used to suppress them.
MOUNT STREET BRIDGE AND NORTH KING STREET The military ability of the rebels was demonstrated at Mount Street Bridge on the Wednesday, when two battalions of the Sherwood Foresters marching into the city from Ballsbridge were pinned down for nine hours by 13 volunteers. The British commanders ordered a series of charges across the bridge, leading to BELOW British troops defend an improvised street barricade against Irish rebels during the Easter Rising.
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ABOVE A British firing line closes a street during the Easter Rising fighting in Dublin.
appalling losses in what was the bloodiest fighting of Easter week. Eventually, on the Thursday, the British used explosives and machine-guns to take the bridge. They lost 234 men killed or wounded in the struggle for Mount Street Bridge. Another major engagement which saw the British Army involved in house-to-house searches – one of its first experiences of this – was in the North King Street area to the north of the Four Courts, a maze of narrow streets and high tenements, where the Volunteers had built barricades and placed riflemen on the roofs and in upper storeys. The approach used by the British was to tunnel through the houses, but one Captain Sheppard of the South Staffordshires ordered a full frontal attack on the barricade between Linenhall and Coleraine Street. The attackers lost 15 men, including Sheppard, who was badly wounded. They were forced to take cover in nearby houses. The Volunteers took the arms and ammunition of the fallen. One Volunteer, Frank Shouldice, recalled, ‘one by one we knocked them all over. It was a terrible slaughter and to this day I can’t understand why they tried to rush things.’ Another recorded, ‘some officer… lost his head and sent those lads out to their deaths’. By the end of the week, the South Staffordshires had advanced 150 yards down North King Street in two days of fighting, losing 14 men killed and 32 wounded. Eventually they brought in an armoured 32
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The British lost 234 men killed or wounded in the struggle for Mount Street Bridge.
car, which the infantry used as cover, while a local school was taken and snipers placed on the roof, which overlooked the area. Even then, the rate of advance was slow. After North King Street was cleared, 15 civilians were killed in the North King Street area following house-to-house searches. The officer in charge, General Lowe, had ordered that no prisoners were to be taken. The military inquest into the killings found that the soldiers had murdered civilians, but the findings were kept secret (‘there are many points that could be used for hostile propaganda’).
SOUTH DUBLIN UNION What the experience of Mount Street Bridge and North King Street implies is that the rebels might have done better if they had remained more dispersed, contesting key crossroads and bridges with small units, rather than concentrating their main forces in a handful of large buildings. Nevertheless, the rebels held strong positions, and their outposts allowed for good communication on British movements. The training and planning for the operation meant that the rebels maintained discipline until the end, and gave a consistently good account of themselves in the fighting. On Easter Monday, Volunteers had occupied the South Dublin Union, a sprawling hospital. Almost immediately they came under attack from men of the Royal Irish Regiment, and a battle for the buildings and grounds of the complex followed, before the Regulars were inexplicably ordered to withdraw. The Volunteers then decided April 2016
IRELAND: easter rising to concentrate their forces in the Nurses Home, which they fortified. On Thursday, the Sherwood Foresters were charged with taking a convoy of ammunition from Kingstown to Kilmainham Barracks, crossing the Liffey via the Rialto Bridge. There they came under fire from outposts of the South Dublin Union garrison. The Sherwood Foresters’ commander ordered his men to secure the bridge and clear the area of snipers. What followed was an attack on the South Dublin Union. As they came into view of the Nurses Home, they were met by a hail of fire. A machine-gun post on the roof of the nearby Royal Hospital returned fire, allowing the Sherwood Foresters to access a hospital ward next door to the Nurses Home. A frontal attack on the rebels’ position failed, so the Sherwood Foresters found their way through a maze of corridors to the wall separating them from the Nurses Home. Covered by the noise of battle, they were able to smash a narrow opening, through which two soldiers crawled, the first being shot dead as he emerged into the Home. Dragging the body out of the way, two officers crawled through the gap and found themselves in the lobby of the Home, facing a barricade reaching almost to the ceiling. A battle began, with the British Regulars trying to throw grenades over the barricade and the Volunteers replying with homemade bombs. The Vice Commander of the Volunteers, Cathal Brugha, was badly wounded by a grenade, but intense fire was maintained. As casualties mounted, the British ordered a withdrawal to the Royal Hospital, and the battle ebbed away.
The rebels anticipated their signal action triggering a nationwide rising, particularly in Munster and Connacht, where the German weapons were expected. Volunteers mustered in Galway, Cork, Wexford, Louth, and Tipperary, but confusion reigned and no action was taken. What might have been possible was shown at Ashbourne in County Meath, on Dublin’s outskirts.
ASHBOURNE
The Volunteers had built barricades and placed riflemen on the roofs and in upper storeys.
Thomas Ashe, at the head of 50 Volunteers, seized two barracks with caches of valuable weapons on the Wednesday of Easter Week. On the Friday, they attacked the barracks at Ashbourne and a fierce fight began which lasted all day. Police reinforcements arrived, but were engaged by Ashe’s men, divided into five units, which allowed them great mobility and flexibility. The commander of the reinforcements was killed, and some 80 police surrendered, as did the barracks. Flushed with success, Ashe’s volunteers were shocked when orders to surrender arrived from Dublin. Their victory was the model for the mobile guerrilla warfare of the Irish War of Independence to come. The Easter Rising kick-started the national revolt, which began less than three years later. The week-long resistance of the Dublin Volunteers, coupled with the spectacular success at Ashbourne, showed the potential. The British were lucky. Matters could have turned out very differently.
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Chris Bambery is a TV producer and presenter, and author of Ireland’s Permanent Revolution, A People’s History of Scotland, and The Second World War: a Marxist history. His forthcoming article on Scottish involvement in the Easter Rising will appear in The National.
LACK OF MANPOWER But there were not enough Volunteers to man the 11km perimeter around the city, as had been called for in the original plan. Nor were there sufficient to form the reserve the rebel leaders had envisaged. In all of this, it is important to recall that the hopes of the Rising’s leaders did not rest on purely military calculations, but also on political ones. By taking control of the centre of the capital of British Ireland, the Republicans were striking a deliberate blow against imperial rule, one they hoped would echo across Ireland and the world. An analogy might be the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which was a military defeat for the Vietnamese, but a political triumph, as it convinced America’s leaders and the American people that the war was unwinnable. RIGHT The ruins of the Metropole Hotel in central Dublin testify to the scale of the fighting during the Easter Rising. www.military-history.org
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Michael el C Collins:
guerrilla g rr war r mastermind IRISH WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
MHM analyses the astonishingly successful guerrilla struggle waged by the Irish Republican Army between 1919 and 1921.
‘I
rishmen and Irishwomen, in the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.’ It was 24 April 1916 – Easter Monday – and the speaker, standing on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin, was a 37-year-old lawyer, teacher, and writer called Padraig Pearse. ‘In this supreme hour, the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.’ Pearse, a leading member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a veteran nationalist activist with a well-deserved reputation for powerful oratory, had been chosen as the main spokesman for ‘the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic’. For now, though, the Provisional Government was only an aspiration. The armed forces of the ‘Government’ amounted to just 1,500 part-time militiamen, members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army. Everything hinged on whether armed action by this vanguard succeeded in triggering a general rising. It did not. The startled citizens of Dublin remained anxious spectators during the six days of fighting that followed. The moderate nationalist leader John Redmond had pledged his country’s support to Britain for the duration of the First World War. Some 60,000 Irishmen were serving in the trenches on the Western Front – 40 times the number of the Easter Rising rebels. The British were taken by surprise, but Dublin was soon flooded with troops and the revolt crushed. Hundreds were arrested.
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The Irish national movement seemed to have launched a premature insurrection and isolated itself from the people. Had this given the imperial power the opportunity to decapitate the nationalist movement? BELOW Michael Collins (1890-1922), the dominant military figure of the Irish War of Independence, seen here wearing the Free State uniform of the Civil War period. (The Republican movement was split between ‘Free State’ and ‘anti-Treaty’ factions after Collins agreed to the partition of Ireland to secure peace at the end of the War of Independence.)
It is not clear. It will never be clear. Because the British committed a massive blunder that nullified any moral advantage they may or may not have secured.
for stripping away the radical façade of the regime and exposing its reactionary core – the trade unions, the Suffragettes, and the Irish nationalists. In each case, demands for reform met with violent repression. As Ireland edged towards Home Rule in 1914, the Liberal Government was increasingly marginalised by a ‘militarisation of politics’, as Protestant Unionists in the north of Ireland prepared armed resistance, and British officers at the Curragh Barracks, the Army’s main base in Ireland, refused to enforce government policy. In the south, in response, the nationalists were also arming. Ireland had been on brink of civil war in July 1914. Then had come a bombshell from within the heart of Europe: the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia of 23 July. Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, describes the effect on a meeting of Asquith’s Cabinet when the quiet tones of Sir Edward Grey’s voice were heard, reading a document which had just been brought to him from the Foreign Office… He had been reading or speaking for several minutes before I could separate my mind from the tedious and bewildering debate which had just closed… but gradually, as the sentences followed one another, impressions of a wholly different character began to form in my mind… The parishes of Tyrone and Fermanagh faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.
HOME RULE STALLED
It was part of a Europe-wide pattern. A continent on the brink of revolution – liberal,
In his classic study of the decay of the Liberal Government elected in 1906, The Strange Death of Liberal England, George Dangerfield identifies three major social movements responsible
OPPOSITE A rare photograph of what appears to be an IRA Flying Column on the move through the streets of a major city. April 2016
ABOVE Wanted: Dan Breen (1894-1969), the man who fired the opening shots of the Irish War of Independence at the Soloheadbeg Ambush.
nationalist, peasant, proletarian – was suddenly transformed into a continent on the brink of war. The barricades came down, the militias demobilised, the slogans of popular revolt were replaced by icons depicting Tsar, Kaiser, and King. Home Rule was on hold.
MAKING MARTYRS Less than two years later was too soon to unfurl again the banner of national revolt.
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Despite heavy casualties, high taxes, and other wartime measures, Easter 1916 was not yet the moment to challenge 700 years of imperial rule. But Asquith the Liberal was now Asquith the Reactionary, the old instinct for conciliation and compromise worn down by years of power and years of revolt. The Prime Minister ordered military court-martials of the leadership of the Easter Rising, and 15 Irishmen were executed by firing squad in the first two weeks of May. George Bernard Shaw, the Anglo-Irish playwright, warned that the executions would ‘canonise the prisoners’. Churchill thought so too, writing ‘the grass soon grows over a battlefield, but never over a scaffold.’ They were right: Britain’s rulers had transformed the leaders of the Easter Rising from marginal fanatics into the heroes of an incipient national liberation struggle. The British compounded the error by announcing a plan to extend conscription to Ireland in 1918. It was one thing to live under colonial rule, quite another to be conscripted to fight a foreign war for one’s imperial masters. The wave of protest that greeted the announcement forced the Government to back down, while funnelling a surge of support to the radical nationalists of Sinn Féin (‘We Ourselves’) – ‘the Shinners’ as the British called them – a surge which the arrest of some of its leaders did nothing to assuage. In the General Election that was held on 14 December 1918, the moderate nationalists were crushed and Sinn Féin won a landslide, taking 73 out of 105 Irish seats.
‘The parishes of Tyrone and Fermanagh faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland...’ Winston Churchill The Shinners had stood on a platform of Irish independence, making plain that they would not take their seats at Westminster. On 21 January 1919, they met in the Dublin Mansion House as the Dáil – or rather, the 27 Sinn Féin MPs not in prison did so – and proclaimed themselves the new governing assembly of an independent Ireland. By coincidence – for such it was – on the very same day, around a hundred miles to the south-west in County Tipperary, nine local IRA men had carried out the first military operation of the Irish War of Independence. BELOW The South Tipperary Flying Column. The IRA military structure was a pyramid of about 100,000 reliable sympathisers (who might, for example, provide food and shelter when needed), 15,000 active supporters (who might carry out reconnaissance missions, convey munitions, act as couriers, and so on), and 3,000 actual combatants. The latter were organised in flying columns when conducting combat missions.
April 2016
ireland: war of independence SOLOHEADBEG QUARRY The attackers had spent five miserable days waiting at the ambush site on the approach road to Soloheadbeg Quarry, to which, they had been told by an informant, a consignment of blasting gelignite was due for delivery. The ambushers wanted the gelignite, but they also wanted to make a statement: the plan was shoot down the escort and start a war against ‘the Peelers’ – the Royal Irish Constabulary, a paramilitary police force that was Britain’s front-line security apparatus in occupied Ireland. Eventually it appeared: a horse-drawn cart carrying 100lbs of gelignite, guided by two workers and escorted by two dark-green uniformed RIC constables. As with so many of the swift, brutal, miniature battles of the two-and-a-half year guerrilla war now beginning, accounts of exactly what followed differ. Some say the policemen were asked to surrender, went for their rifles, and were gunned down; others say they were simply gunned down. Either way, both men died in a hail of IRA gunfire. Dan Breen, one of the IRA men at the Soloheadbeg Quarry that day, was sorry it had been only two: ‘If there had to be dead Peelers at all, six would have created a better impression than a mere two.’ There was a brutal logic to this. The guerrillas were out to destroy the British security apparatus. The first job was to break the RIC, which was locally recruited, by making it clear that membership would be regarded as collaboration, that RIC men would be shunned by their own people, and that officers who did not resign would henceforward be military targets. As the chalked slogans on Dublin walls put it: ‘Join the RAF and see the world. Join the RIC and see the next.’
MICHAEL COLLINS One leading Republican who was never in any doubt that the struggle would be vicious was 30-year-old Michael Collins. Elected to the Dáil in the Sinn Féin landslide, Collins had been made Minister of Finance. This, though, obscured his real importance: though he worked to raise money for the cause, his real role was more accurately reflected in the fact that he was also both the Irish Republican Army Director of Intelligence and the Irish Republican Brotherhood President. More simply, as one IRA officer explained, Collins was ‘virtually commander-in-chief, in fact if not in name’. A big, broad-shouldered, athletic man of good looks, great charm, and real charisma, he was possessed of exceptional energy and a serious intelligence honed by study – not least, study of war. Like all nationalist Irishmen, he knew the stories of the Fenian fighters of the past. But www.military-history.org
he had also studied the Boer War, notably the campaigns of Christiaan De Wet, author of the memoir Three Years War, a guerrilla leader whom Collins later described as his ‘earliest inspiration’. (Though C E Callwell’s Small Wars – a late Victorian manual of colonial counterinsurgency written for the edification of British officers – was also on the IRA reading list.)
THE BALANCE OF FORCES Collins needed inspiration. The balance of forces – assessed in conventional terms – seemed overwhelmingly unfavourable. The IRA probably never had more than 3,000 actual combatants in the field. These were sustained by some 15,000 active supporters, and a wider network of about 100,000 committed sympathisers. Given that Ireland had a population at the time of about 3 million, this meant that only one Irishman in a thousand was actually in arms during the War of Independence. The resources of the British Empire in manpower and matériel were, of course, infinitely greater. Though only a fraction of these were deployed, that still amounted to 50,000 trained men at the height of the war, most of them motorised, all of them heavily armed. As guerrilla war historian Robert Asprey explains, the IRA was, by contrast, a ragtag army of high-spirited volunteers with little military training, no uniforms, and a wild assortment of weapons – Hotchkiss machine-guns, Lewis guns, German Mausers, Mannlichers, Winchester repeaters, British Army Lee-Enfields, sporting rifles and shotguns, hand-grenades and mines – mostly stolen from legal authority. Of these weapons, there were always too few. This is one reason for the small number of combatants. IRA practice was to create small ‘flying columns’ of up to 30 men in each locality. These men were more intensively trained, though there was also some rotation in the composition of the columns. The men forming the column at any moment would hold the limited supply of arms and ammunition. Tom Barry, who commanded the famous West Cork Flying Column, favoured action at point-blank range. Poor-quality weapons and lack of training meant that his men would inevitably be disadvantaged in a longrange firefight. They had to get close, kill quickly, and then withdraw before security forces had time to seal off the area.
DUBLIN: THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE G-MEN Collins himself was based in Dublin throughout the conflict. Here, in this capital city of a quarter of a million people, were the grand offices of the British imperial administration, the plush Georgian terraces of the Anglo-
ABOVE British security forces. With the virtual collapse of the locally recruited RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary), the British relied almost entirely on forces imported from the mainland. These were of three kinds: the Auxiliaries or ‘Auxies’ [BOTTOM] were elite counter-insurgency shock troops, mainly ex-officers; the Black and Tans [MIDDLE] were essentially paramilitary replacements for the police, mainly ex-soldiers; and Regular soldiers [TOP], who, by the end, formed the great majority of the British forces in Ireland, but whose reliability was in question.
Irish elite, and the slum tenements of the militant Irish-Catholic working class. The aim here was to paralyse the security apparatus in its main command-and-control centre. A primary target was the secret police – that is, the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s G Division. Four senior G-men were, in fact, part of Collins’ network of spies. Because of this, on one occasion, Collins himself was MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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ABOVE A British armoured car during the Irish War of Independence. Exceptionally effective weapons of counter-insurgency, there were too few of them to make a decisive difference. Churchill estimated that thousands would be needed to turn the war around.
able to spend five hours inside G Division’s headquarters reading secret files. Once identities were established, G-men would be warned against harassing IRA operations. If they persisted, they were targeted for assassination by ‘the Squad’, a specialised flying column, originally of a dozen men, later more, which carried out assassinations using powerful Webley .455-calibre revolvers. By the spring of 1920, the Squad had eliminated 12 Dublin police officers who had, in the words of one IRA man, been ‘making themselves frightfully obnoxious’, including the head of G Division. As the existing security infrastructure collapsed, the British recruited a new corps of intelligence agents from among retired army officers: the ‘hush-hush men’. Collins – as well informed as ever by his spy network – decided to take them out in one go.
BLOODY SUNDAY Dozens of gunmen were assembled at various rendezvous across Dublin on the morning of Sunday 21 November 1920. There were 20 targets in all, at eight separate locations. Vincent Byrne led one of the hit squads. Ten IRA men under his command entered a lodging-house in Upper Mount Street. Told where the two British officers’ bedrooms were, they burst in on them. Both surrendered, but both were killed. The IRA had no means of taking prisoners – no way of spiriting them away, no place in 38
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‘The grass soon grows over a battlefield, but never over a scaffold.’ Winston Churchill which to hold them. The savage logic of the war was that, to destroy the British security apparatus, they had to kill its personnel until they broke their will. Fourteen men were killed that morning, a further five wounded. Most were shot in cold blood, often in front of terrified wives or girlfriends. But ‘Bloody Sunday’ was not over. The IRA had smashed the ‘hush-hush’ infrastructure. Vengeance was immediate and violent. That very afternoon, the crowd at a Gaelic football match at Dublin’s Croke Park was surrounded by ‘Auxies’ and ‘Black and Tans’, who then opened fire, killing 14 and wounding 60. In the evening, three IRA suspects being held in Dublin Castle were beaten to death by their captors.
THE COUNTRYSIDE: THE RIC, THE BLACK AND TANS, AND THE AUXIES A week later, Tom Barry’s West Cork Flying Column ambushed two lorry-loads of Auxiliaries on a remote country road near Kilmichael and killed all 17 of them.
These two events – Bloody Sunday and the Kilmichael Ambush – marked a turning-point in the war. Like the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, they demonstrated that the British were losing – or at least, that they were not winning, and perhaps could never win. This was despite a military ‘surge’ in the second year of the war, as RIC recruitment began to collapse under the impact of the IRA campaign against its members. In some remote areas, indeed, the RIC had already ceased to function at all, replaced by Sinn Féin police and courts. The British filled the gap with two new forces recruited on the mainland. One was a large force, eventually about 12,000 men, recruited from former soldiers. They wore khaki uniforms, large tam-o’-shanter bonnets, and belts, bandoliers, and holsters of black leather: thus they became known to the Irish as ‘the Black and Tans’. The other force was the Auxiliary Division – ‘the Auxies’ – who numbered up to 3,000 men and were mainly ex-officers. They wore Glengarry caps, dark green and khaki uniforms, and fought in 100-strong ‘shock companies’. The Black and Tans were first-line replacements for the disintegrating native Irish RIC. The Auxies were a kind of paramilitary elite for deployment to areas of intensive IRA activity. Tom Barry despised the Auxies: Of all the ruthless forces that occupied Ireland through the centuries, those Auxiliaries were surely the worst. They were recruited from exBritish officers who had held commissioned rank and had had active service on one or more fronts during the 1914-18 war. They were openly established as a terrorist body, with the avowed object of breaking by armed force Ireland’s continued resistance to British rule. Their war ranks ranged from lieutenant to brigadier-general, and they were publicised as the very pick of Britain’s best fighters. Highly paid and with no bothersome discipline, they were habitual looters. They were even dressed in a special uniform calculated to cow their opponents. Each carried a rifle, two revolvers, one strapped to each thigh, and two Mills bombs hung at the waist from their Sam Browne belts. It should be said in all fairness to the better type of British officer that they had refused to join this force.
DIRTY WAR The surge proved to be petrol on the flames. The British had recruited the unemployed and the maladjusted of the post-war world as an improvised counter-insurgency army, and the Black and Tans and the Auxies, finding themselves at war with an entire people, behaved as might have been anticipated. The stories of murder, rape, torture, robbery, April 2016
ireland: war of independence and everyday bullying and harassment were relayed to every corner of Ireland. It was the rerunning of an old film. The guerrillas were a tiny minority, but they had the active support of a large minority, and the general sympathy of almost everyone else. Even when people disagreed with the tactics, even when they disagreed with any sort of armed struggle, they knew the difference between ‘our boys’ and the enemy. The IRA men were therefore ‘invisible in plain view’: so embedded in the local population that they were indistinguishable from it. There are three main kinds of counterinsurgency: targeted, specialised, intelligenceled operations; ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns to marginalise, isolate, and flush out the guerrillas within the wider population; and mass corralling of populations and general sweeps of disaffected areas. Collins had destroyed any possibility of the first: his Dublin spy network and his Squad’s selective assassinations had effectively blinded the British security apparatus. The Easter Rising executions and the Sinn Féin landslide had destroyed the legitimacy of the colonial administration; the behaviour of the Black and Tans and the Auxies then destroyed any chance of getting it back.
THE END OF BRITISH RULE
‘If there had to be dead Peelers at all, six would have created a better impression than a mere two.’ Dan Breen Churchill again: [The Cabinet concluded] that the only way to make sure of winning the Irish war was to raise an additional 100,000 troops and special police, together with thousands of armoured cars, and then to cover the whole of southern Ireland with blockhouses and barbed wire, so that great drives on the Boer War model could be made to round up the whole IRA.
This was impossible. Ireland was not Iraq or India. It was a vicious colonial war on Britain’s doorstep, waged against people whose relatives lived in the East End and worked on the London docks. It was being fought at a time when Europe was awash with revolutionary sentiment, with demonstrations, strikes, and mutinies. There were worries about the reliability of British soldiers (this had been one reason for the recruitment of the Black and Tans and the Auxies), and worries, too, about the tolerance of a home population embittered by wartime losses and post-war unemployment – not least because the Irish war was so clearly a violation of the ‘democracy’ and ‘self-determination’ proclaimed by liberal statesmen. The imperial power lacked the ability to win the war on the cheap, and it lacked the will to win it through overwhelming force. On 11 July 1921, an Anglo-Irish Truce was agreed, and on 6 December 1921 an Anglo-Irish Treaty signed, creating an independent southern Irish state. Collins and his 3,000 IRA men had defeated the world’s greatest empire in its own backyard.
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BELOW British artillery in action during the Irish War of Independence – not the best way to fight a guerrilla insurgency.
Image: Alamy
What of option three? By the third year of the war, the British had surged again: in
addition to the Black and Tans and the Auxies, by May 1921 they also had 35,000 Regulars in Ireland. It was nowhere near enough: they were still losing the war. The British Cabinet faced a stark choice.
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The
Kilmichael Ambush It was a tiny skirmish on a remote country road. But the impact was out of all proportion to the scale. MHM analyses the single most deadly IRA attack of the War of Independence.
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ireland: KILMICHAEL ambush would provide firing positions for the ambushers, while the double dog-leg would ensure that the approaching vehicles would be forced to slow sufficiently to be attacked. But there was no escape-route.
The Auxiliary force had been allowed to bluster through the country for four or five months killing, beating, terrorising, and burning factories and homes. Strange as it may appear, not a single shot had been fired at them up to this by the IRA in any part of Ireland to halt their terror campaign. This fact had a very serious effect on the morale of the whole people as well as on the IRA. Stories were current that the Auxies were super-fighters and all but invincible.
The Column had set out on its final march to the ambush site in the early hours of Sunday 28 November. They had paused while a local priest heard confessions, and then pushed on through lashing rain. They arrived at 8.15am, near dawn. The Command Post was established at the eastern entrance to the ambush site, where it would face the oncoming lorries, arriving from Macroom to the north but turning west to travel along the short stretch of road between the two dog-legs. Three men were stationed here behind a flimsy dry-stone wall that jutted out on the northern side of the road. They were to begin the action. No.1 Section of ten riflemen was positioned about 150 yards north of the Command Post on a large, rocky, heather-covered eminence which commanded the road. No.2 Section, also of ten riflemen, occupied another rocky eminence, about 200 yards from the first, and also on the northern side of the road. This commanded the western entrance to the ambush site. Two lorries were expected. No.1 Section was to the engage the first, No.2 the second. Depending on the distance between them, it was possible that the second lorry would come to a halt before passing the western entrance once the occupants heard the sounds of firing ahead. Against this possibility, while seven men of No.2 Section were deployed to fire southwards, three were deployed to fire if the lorry stopped before coming round the bend. No.3 Section was divided in two. Seven men were deployed on yet another rocky eminence, this one about 50 yards south of the road. Their job was to prevent the Auxies from reaching covered firing positions from which to engage Nos.1 and 2 Sections. The other six men of the Section were ‘an insurance group’, against the possibility of three or more lorries. These were deployed about 60 yards north of the
Image: © Crawford Art Gallery, Cork / © DACS 2016
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est Cork was a rural stronghold of the Irish Republican Army in 1920. It was for that reason that 150 men of the new Auxiliary Division were deployed to Macroom in August of that year. They commandeered Macroom Castle as their headquarters, and from there they dispatched motorised patrols across the countryside. Fast lorries would ‘jump’ a village, the Auxies would pile out, and men, women, and children would be lined up against the walls to be searched and interrogated. Usually there was violence: strip searches, beatings with belts, rifles, and the butt ends of revolvers, sometimes cold-blooded murder. The terror – and the apparent inability of the local IRA to protect the population – had an impact. Tom Barry, the commander of the West Cork Flying Column, recalled:
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Before being posted, the whole Column was paraded and informed of the plan of attack. They were also told that the positions they were to occupy allowed of no retreat, that the fight could only end in the smashing of the Auxiliaries or the destruction of the Flying Column. There was no plan for a retirement until the Column marched away victoriously. This would be a fight to the end, and would be vital not only for West Cork, but for the whole nation… The Auxiliaries were killers without mercy. If they won, no prisoners would be brought back to Macroom. The alternative now was to kill or be killed…
SETTING THE AMBUSH
Barry concluded that the local IRA would have to take action against the Macroom Auxies.
THE FLYING COLUMN On 21 November 1920, a new flying column of 36 riflemen was assembled for a week’s secret military training. Apart from Barry, only one was a combat veteran, and only three of the others had previously undergone training: the great majority were new men. Towards the end of the week, Barry and another IRA officer headed out to select an ambush position. They chose a place where the road between Macroom and Dunmanway did a double dog-leg. They knew that the Auxies never failed to come this way, but it was sufficiently far from Macroom to allow time to escape before reinforcements could arrive. Even so, it was far from ideal. The ambush area was in the centre of a bleak and barren countryside, a bogland interspersed with heather and rocks. It was bad terrain for an ambushing unit because of the lack of roadside ditches and cover… What made it viable was the presence of several rocky eminences close to the road. These LEFT Sean Keating’s impression of an IRA flying column in Men of the South. ABOVE Tom Barry, commander of the West Cork Flying Column. www.military-history.org
Map: Ian Bull
ambush position, and about 20 yards from the approach road beyond the eastern entrance. Finally, there were three scouts, two posted well to the north to give warning of the Auxies’ approach, one to the south, lest the Column be surprised by a force arriving unexpectedly from the opposite direction.
THE LONG WAIT The IRA men had marched through a wet night, and the day was now bitterly cold. Their sodden clothes never dried, and they shivered as they waited. They were also hungry. There was one house nearby, and the people there brought
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a bucket of tea and such food as they had to spare, but it was not enough. Time passed slowly, and by four o’clock the light was dimming across the bleak moorland south of the little village of Kilmichael where Barry’s men had taken station. Then, a comic opera event. The scouts reported the enemy approaching, but ahead of them around the bend, unaware of the Auxies behind, came five fully armed IRA men in a horse-drawn vehicle. It turned out they had received the mobilisation order late and were now rushing to join the action, but ‘as well as endangering their own lives,
ABOVE The Kilmichael Ambush, 28 November 1920, showing IRA ambush positions, and the locations of the two lorries and the dead Auxiliaries at the end of the action.
BELOW LEFT The view of the road looking east, as it would have been seen from the British lorries as they entered the ambush site. The Flying Column’s No.2 Section position was on the left in the foreground, and its No.1 Section position was part hidden in the middle distance behind the memorial. BELOW RIGHT The view of the road looking west – towards where the British lorries appeared round the bend – from the Flying Column’s No.1 Section position.
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ireland: KILMICHAEL ambush RIGHT The Flying Column’s No.3 position, as viewed from the Command Post. The job of the men stationed here was to prevent the Auxies moving south off the road and improvising a firing line in the rough ground.
they very nearly upset the operation, and endangered the whole Column’. The latecomers had no sooner been galloped down the lane leading to the house and out of sight than the first of the lorries swung into view. To slow the approach, Barry, wearing a new IRA officer’s tunic, had walked out into the middle of the road. He figured that this behaviour, by a man wearing unfamiliar uniform, would be almost guaranteed to cause the Auxies to halt so as to investigate. The first lorry, which had come through the western entrance at speed, did indeed slow. Then, when it was about 35 yards from the Command Post, a Mills bomb was thrown. This landed in the driver’s seat and exploded. At the same time, the first rifle shots rang out. The battle had begun.
THE FIREFIGHT With the driver dead, the first lorry lurched forwards and ditched a few yards from the stone wall of the Command Post. The Auxies had started firing their revolvers from the lorry, but they now piled out and sought whatever cover they could, replying to the IRA fire with both rifles and revolvers. The shooting was at point-blank range, and the fighting occasionally hand-to-hand. One IRA man was hit in the mouth by a spurt of blood from an Auxie’s severed artery before the victim hit the ground. Another bayoneted an Auxie who had shot at Barry and missed at four yards’ range. ‘The Auxiliaries were cursing and yelling as they fought,’ Barry recalled, but the IRA men were tight-lipped, as ruthlessly and coldly they outfought them… There was no surrender called by those Auxiliaries, and in less than five minutes they had been exterminated. All nine Auxiliaries were dead or dying, sprawled around the road near the stone wall, except the driver and another, who with the life smashed out of them were huddled in the front of the lorry. The second lorry, meantime, had come around the bend and halted immediately abreast of the No.2 Section men. They were lying in small groups on the road firing back at the ambushers at a range of about 25 yards. Barry and the three men of the Command Post detachment moved along the road to engage them in the rear. Barry heard the call ‘We surrender’, and saw some Auxies throw away their weapons. The firing stopped, and three men of No.2 Section stood up. In an instant, some of the www.military-history.org
Auxies were firing revolvers, and two IRA men immediately went down. Barry’s section had approached unobserved. It immediately dropped down, receiving the order ‘Rapid fire and do not stop until I tell you!’. Several Auxies were hit before they realised they were under attack from the rear. The No.2 Section men resumed firing. A couple of Auxies tried to run for it and were shot down. Further cries of ‘We surrender’ were heard and ignored. The firing continued as the IRA group on the road stood up and advanced to within ten yards of the Auxies’ position. Only then, when
‘Stories were current that the Auxies were super-fighters and all but invincible.’ Tom Barry all of the enemy were dead, did Barry give the order to cease fire.
THE ACCOUNTING Three IRA men had been hit, two of them killed, one mortally wounded. Two of these were victims of an old ruse – the fake surrender – and Barry was angry with himself for not having warned his men against it. But for this, the victory would have been almost bloodless. But it was decisive enough. Seventeen Auxies were killed: there were no British survivors of the Kilmichael Ambush. The two lorries were set on fire before the Flying Column made off, and as they did so, they carried with them 18 rifles, 30 revolvers, a cache of Mills bombs, and 1,800 rifle rounds.
The Column evaded the massive manhunt mounted by the British in the wake of the attack. Instead, vengeance was taken on the local population, with homes, farms, and shops destroyed in the nearby villages. But this was the indiscriminate violence of embittered soldiers in a failed counter-insurgency war. Whatever the retribution, Kilmichael had been a decisive battle. As Barry mused: The Auxiliaries had had it. They were looking for it for a long time. But they were now smashed, and their reign of terror against West Cork men and women was ended. The IRA had outfought them, and not more than 15 or 16 of our riflemen had had the opportunity to fire at them because of their dispositions. The ‘super’ force! Who was this Colonel Crake who had commanded them and who now lay dead on the road? Close-quarter fighting did not suit them… Keep close to them should be our motto, for generally they are better shots than us, because of their opportunities for practice and war experience. There are no good or bad shots at ten yards’ range. The war continued, but the British position, in West Cork and across Ireland, continued to deteriorate. Seven weeks before the Truce in July 1921, the British military presence in County Cork was 8,800 Regulars, 1,150 Black and Tans, 540 Auxiliaries, and 2,080 machine-gun, artillery, and armoured-car personnel – a total of over 12,500 men. The total strength of the West Cork Flying Column never exceeded 110 riflemen (the number engaged at the Battle of Crossbarry on 19 March 1921). Such disparity of force is testimony to the extraordinary power of guerrilla insurgency based on strong popular support.
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FURTHER READING Tom Barry’s Guerrilla Days in Ireland, first published in 1949, is available from Anvil Books. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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Kut1916
Image: WIPL
THE FORGOTTEN BRITISH DISASTER IN IRAQ
Image: WIPL
It was probably Britain’s worst military defeat since Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown in 1781. But it was overshadowed by the carnage on the Western Front at the time, and has remained ever since a relatively obscure event. Patrick Crowley recalls the 143-day Siege of Kut that ended a century ago this month.
A
s the third year of First World War centenaries arrives, Britain will commemorate the land battle on the Somme and the maritime clash at Jutland. Concurrently, the French will mourn their losses at Verdun, and the British Isles will remember the Easter Rising in Dublin. Less attention will be paid to a littleknown British and Indian Army disaster in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) on 29 April 1916, when 13,000 soldiers were taken into Turkish captivity after a nearly five-month siege in the town of Kut-el-Amara. A third of these men would die as prisoners. A further 23,000 men had already been killed or wounded during a succession of failed relief attempts. www.military-history.org
The scale of this disaster is overshadowed by the horrendous casualties of the Somme, yet it was, arguably, Britain’s worst military defeat since Yorktown. It came, moreover, only a few months after the end of the Gallipoli debacle.
SETTING THE SCENE The opening of the Mesopotamia campaign will sound familiar: the Abadan oilfields were secured by India Expedition Force ‘D’ in November 1914 when they landed on the Fao Peninsula, thereby securing fuel for the Royal Navy. A mix of British, Indian, and Royal Navy troops had executed a very successful operation against the Ottoman Empire, and, within the next two weeks, secured the town of Basra. As Sir Arthur Hirtzel, Political Secretary to the India Office, stated:
ABOVE Map of Mesopotamia (‘the land between the rivers’). In the searing summer heat of 1915, the British dispatched two columns upriver, one under General Gorringe up the Euphrates to Nasiriya, the other under General Townshend up the Tigris, with Baghdad as the ultimate object. Townshend reached Ctesiphon, but then had to retreat, taking refuge in Kut. INSET Major-General Sir Charles Townshend (1861-1924). OPPOSITE PAGE The Dorsets charge at the Battle of Kut on 28 September 1915. A British victory, it encouraged Townshend to advance further. It was a trap: the Turks were luring the British forward, weakening them by attrition, stretching their supply-lines. After a bloody victory at Ctesiphon in November, Townshend was forced to fall back to recuperate. He was soon under siege at the little riverside town of Kut-el-Amara.
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KUT because of the region’s proximity to India. This was despite the priority given to the Western Front. Unfortunately, the rapid success of the initial operation encouraged the formulation of new objectives and a process of ‘mission creep’ – at all levels: strategic, operational, and tactical. Henceforward, Anglo-Indian forces would be overambitious, while underestimating the Ottoman enemy. This combination would lead eventually to the Kut disaster.
ABOVE British 60-pdr heavy guns in action in Mesopotamia.
It was Britain’s worst military defeat since Yorktown.
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The political effect in the Persian Gulf and in India of leaving the head of the Gulf derelict will be disastrous, and we cannot afford, politically, to acquiesce in such a thing for an indefinite period while the main issues are being settled elsewhere. The British Empire had to protect the Persian Gulf, secure its oil, and limit the threat posed by German-backed Turkey, particularly BELOW Sikh soldiers cleaning their weapons and firing rifle grenades from a trench. The Mesopotamia campaign was an Indian Army operation under the authority of the Government of India. London and Simla did not always see eye to eye – especially when things went wrong.
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Images: WIPL
Image: Patrick Crowley
ON TO BAGHDAD The Ottomans had recently withdrawn the bulk of their forces from Mesopotamia, mainly in order to stem the Russian threat in the Caucasus, leaving only a weak infantry division there. This seemed an ideal opportunity for the recently arrived Anglo-Indian force to exploit. The contingent’s political officer, Sir Percy Cox, recommended an advance to Baghdad. He described the Turkish troops as ‘panic stricken and very unlikely to oppose us again’, and claimed that ‘Baghdad will in all probability fall into our hands very easily’. There were mixed views about this in both India and the India Office in London. However, following a great success at Qurna in early December 1914, when 1,000 Turks and seven guns were captured by a brigade, it seemed that further significant gains might easily be made. The force was expanded during the next few months to corps level, under the command, from April 1915, of General Sir John Nixon. It consisted of:
‘The men were continually in a state of dripping perspiration, and the air was full of dust and thick with flies.’ r UI%JWJTJPO VOEFS.BKPS(FOFSBM Charles Townshend, who would end up surrendering his besieged force at Kut. r 5IFOFXMZGPSNFEUI%JWJTJPO VOEFS Major-General George Gorringe, who would later attempt to relieve Townshend at Kut. r UI$BWBMSZ#SJHBEF DPNNBOEFECZ Major-General Sir Charles Mellis, who was also to be besieged in the town. Confidence grew as Turkish attempts to undermine the Basra encroachment led to small-scale Anglo-Indian victories at Shaiba and Ahwaz. Once again, General Nixon had apparent confirmation that the enemy was weak. The next move was an advance inland from Qurna, with Amara on the Tigris as Townshend’s objective at the end of May 1915, then Nasiriya on the Euphrates as Gorringe’s goal in mid July. The aim was to consolidate the position in Mesopotamia – though there was some debate in India and London about the value of this advance.
THE ADVANCE FROM QURNA Townshend discovered that outflanking movements were impossible with the River Tigris as the axis. The open country meant that surprise was difficult to achieve, and boats were essential for transporting troops and for providing platforms for artillery pieces and logistical support. The desert flank was too forbidding an environment through which to move large bodies of men. Flooding became a hazard. Conditions were debilitating. As one participant recalled, ‘In the stifling heat the men were continually in a state of dripping perspiration, and had no means of keeping cool or clean, for the air was full of dust and thick with flies.’ At Amara, Townshend’s 6th Division, led by the 17th Infantry Brigade’s 1st Battalion, The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, and the 22nd Punjabis, broke www.military-history.org
through on 31 May, taking 2,000 prisoners with relatively few casualties. Nasiriya, however, was a bloodier affair. There, Gorringe had a difficult time moving his force up the Euphrates, facing worse conditions and a longer march than Townshend had done. Casualties were heavy on 14 July. As one officer wrote, ‘Probably seldom before have British, or for that matter native, troops been required to fight under such terrible conditions of weather and climate, in a difficult country, against a resolute enemy.’ In a further attack on 24 July, 2nd Battalion, The Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment suffered 33% casualties.
ABOVE Sketch plan of the defences of Kut in late 1915.
Critically, medical and evacuation provision was wanting – an ongoing weakness that would be a key factor in the disaster at Kut and the failures of the Relief Force. The Indian Army was not designed for expeditionary warfare involving long lines of communication. Gorringe’s division moved no further up the Euphrates.
TOWNSHEND PUSHES ON Meanwhile, Townshend’s 6th Division continued with its successes as it progressed along the MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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KUT LEFT Map showing the successive Turkish lines of defence against the advance of General Aylmer’s Relief Force in early 1916.
Division for nearly five months: 14,000 AngloIndian troops joined the population of 7,000. The Turks rapidly isolated the garrison, as it dug in. One officer of 1st Battalion, The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry commented: Of the next few weeks the chief memory that remains is one of digging. We seem to have dug all day and every day – in the glare of the sun, in the darkness of the night, and in the moonlight. We commenced these labours on our first afternoon, for although we were not technically surrounded for another three or four days, we prepared for the siege, which was known to be inevitable.
Tigris, though there was still tension between London and Simla (as the Government of India was often known) concerning the value and risk of the advance. On 28 September, the Battle of Kut was won, fought a few miles east of the town and only 200 miles from Baghdad. The temptation was to continue towards the fabled Islamic city, and Nixon encouraged his subordinate, despite concerns raised by Townshend. The result was a culminating advance and battle – at Ctesiphon on 22 November 1915 – where Townshend achieved a pyrrhic victory in the face of an increasingly capable Ottoman enemy. As the senior military intelligence officer wrote, ‘The strengths of these newly arrived formations were much in excess of those of their predecessors and the personnel of almost immeasurably greater individual value.’ The 6th Division had won a battle, but at great cost, and it was now forced to withdraw. It successfully attacked the Turkish pursuing force at Umm el-Tabal, but again suffered heavy casualties. Medical support was poor, and a tired, hungry, thirsty 6th Division, which had now received a total of 55% casualties, needed respite. The location chosen for a pause was, of course, the little riverside town of Kut.
44 miles in 36 hours, there were supplies in the town, and both he and Nixon were convinced that other friendly forces would marry up with them quite quickly. They did not appreciate the quality of the Turkish opposition and the relative weakness of what became the Relief Force. The former British commander of the town later commented, ‘It can never be sound to shut oneself up in a tight hole, when any other course is available, even though the most definite promise of relief has been received.’ Morale was high, however, and optimism reigned. The town was to be home for the 6th
‘It can never be sound to shut oneself up in a tight hole.’
Thirty miles of trench were dug. The regimental history of the 4th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment recorded: It is interesting to recall that A Company lived underground in open trenches and dug-outs throughout the whole period of the siege, a total of 145 consecutive days and nights; this was the experience of other infantry units. To the credit of the garrison, despite a concerted Turkish attack on the Mud Fort on Christmas Eve, the horrendous living conditions, the enemy artillery and sniper fire, and the inevitable disease, the garrison was not taken by direct force, and morale remained relatively high until the bitter end. Food was the challenge.
THE FOOD CRISIS Decision-making by the garrison, by the Relief Force, and by the besieging Turks was dominated by the food-supply situation throughout the siege. Townshend believed that he had plenty in the early stages, as he expected relief quickly, so, at first, accurate accounting did not take place.
THE SIEGE BEGINS Kut was a nondescript town in a bend of the River Tigris, about a mile wide and two miles long. The river provided some protection from attack, on three sides, but the area was flat and exposed. Townshend could have withdrawn further downriver, but his division had just marched RIGHT British soldiers are led into captivity by Turkish soldiers after their surrender at Kut – officers riding, rank and file on foot.
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The troops were becoming weaker as some of the last animals were slaughtered for food.
In January, attacks occurred at Shaikh Saad, the Wadi, and Hanna. Ground was gained, but at great loss of life, and only limited progress made. The Turkish soldier was an expert in defensive warfare, fighting doggedly, inflicting casualties, and then disengaging from each battle. Nixon was replaced by General Sir Percy Lake. February became a month of uncertainty and routine for the Kut garrison, disappointed that Aylmer, nicknamed ‘Faylmer’, could not break through to them. Some Relief Force units had been so decimated that they had to be joined together, so that the 4th Buffs and 4th Hampshires became the ‘Territorial Composite Battalion’, or, more popularly, ‘The Huffs’. Food became scarcer and disease spread. London, alarmed, attempted to direct strategy.
Images: Patrick Crowley
FURTHER ATTEMPTS TO REACH KUT
Lieutenant-General Sir Fenton Aylmer, who commanded the Relief Force from mid-January, was told by Townshend that he had only 22 days of food left, but three days later was told it was 84. This caused Aylmer to conduct premature battles to try to relieve Kut when he did not have the combat power necessary. Another challenge was the initial refusal of the Indian troops to eat readily available horseflesh, for religious reasons. After special religious concessions were made, this situation partly improved. Ultimately, though, the decision to surrender in late April 1916 was governed by the lack of food and the debilitated state of the garrison. By the end of December 1915, morale was still high, as the main Turkish attack had been driven off and the Relief Force was expected soon. However, there were still 150-200 casualties a day from shell- and rifle-fire, as 12,000 Turks with 33 guns of the Sixth Army tightened the noose around the town. Aylmer’s Relief Force began their advance on 4 January 1916, but the prospect of imminent rescue proved a false hope. www.military-history.org
AYLMER’S FIRST ATTEMPT It was relatively easy for the enemy to block Aylmer’s advance: the axis of the River Tigris was predictable, and it was impossible to outflank the Turkish positions because of marshes to the north and south of the river. The ground was flat, and it was extremely difficult to gather intelligence on Turkish dispositions. There were a handful of aircraft for spotting, but they were unreliable. In addition, the logistical ‘tail’ from Basra to the front-line was weak, the medical provision, as ever in Mesopotamia, inadequate, the headquarters staff inexperienced, and the communications poor. The Official History recorded that: It is thus sufficiently clear that General Aylmer’s force lacked at this period the standard of organisation and cohesion which is desirable for a body of troops undertaking an offensive in a difficult country against an entrenched and determined enemy, operations which would depend primarily upon combination and unity of effort.
A second attempt to relieve the town was made in March 1916. Despite more troops, it also failed. At the Battle of Dujaila Redoubt, sound tactics had been employed with a good deception plan and an efficient night march, but surprise had been lost in the last few hours due to the failure of commanders to seize the initiative. Halil Pasha, the Turkish commander, offered the garrison surrender. This was refused. In the town, the troops were becoming weaker as some of the last animals were slaughtered for food. Aylmer was replaced by LieutenantGeneral Gorringe. Hopes were raised in April when LieutenantGeneral Sir Stanley Maude’s all-British 13th Division was deployed to Mesopotamia, providing more combat power in the Relief Force. But further bloody attacks at Hanna, Fallahiya, Beit Aiessa, and Sannaiyat all failed to break the Turkish line, despite heavy losses. In desperation and in the face of military failure, other ideas to relieve the town were now tried. The few aircraft improvised and dropped stores, perhaps the first recorded resupply by air. A river boat, the SS Julnar, was loaded up with 250 tons of supplies and sailed upriver. It lacked any element of surprise, its route was predictable, and it was quickly captured. One officer in the garrison recorded, ‘It appears that this tragic but obvious end of so glorious an enterprise is a last hope. We have scarcely rations for tomorrow.’ The last bizarre attempt involved the future Lawrence of Arabia, Captain T E Lawrence. He joined two more senior officers in an effort to negotiate the besieged garrison’s release. The idea was to allow the garrison parole in exchange for a million pounds. The deal was rejected by the Turks. ABOVE LEFT Regimental Sergeant-Major Billy Leach was one of the many victims of Kut. He worked tirelessly to give succour to his fellows in captivity, but died eventually of typhus. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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KUT The exhausted and starving garrison of Kut capitulated on 29 April 1916.
CAPTIVITY
ABOVE Another victim of Kut: an emaciated Indian soldier.
‘If a sick man lagged under the burning sun, he was either clubbed mercilessly on the head or left to die slowly by the wayside.’ 50
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The human stories of captivity are now all but forgotten. A third of the 13,000 British and Indian troops who surrendered to the Turks were to die, many of them in appalling conditions. Townshend was treated royally and transported to an island cottage off Constantinople, where he lived until the end of the war. Up to the time of Kut, he had been a lucky general, and was still being cheered as he departed his men. Most other senior officers were transported to a camp at Broussa, where they were looked after, and their greatest challenge for the rest of the war was boredom. The story was different for the other ranks. Initially, the soldiers were marched a few miles upriver to the Shumran Bend, a senior NCO of The Dorsetshire Regiment commenting, ‘Although only a short distance, all ranks were greatly fatigued due to their starved condition.’ Sergeant Munn of The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry recorded that each of his soldiers received six biscuits, but eight of his men died in the first night. Meanwhile, Sergeant Coombes of The Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment wrote, ‘Disease started at Shumran. First cholera, then dysentery, and enteritis.’ Fifty percent of the 76th Punjabis were suffering from diarrhoea, and many men were left dead at Shumran. In all, 300 British and Indian soldiers died there. The weak and emaciated survivors thus far were then forced to march hundreds of miles into the heart of the Ottoman Empire. The first 24 hours was spent marching eight miles to the next town, in the heat of the day, Lieutenant Elton of the 4th Hampshires recording that: As soon as they were out of sight of Shumran, their Arab guards had begun to steal boots, helmets, and water bottles. If a sick man lagged under the burning sun, he was either clubbed mercilessly on the head or left to die slowly by the wayside. Private Hughes commented: With great shouts of ‘Yellah! Yellah!’ (‘Move along!’), as the men fell out wholesale, the Arabs came up, knocking them about awfully. Many would get up and plod along through fear, but kept falling out on the roadside and were left to die… Then the clothes were taken off the corpses, which were left absolutely naked to make food for the vultures.
DEATH MARCH It was left to the Senior NCOs, like Regimental Sergeant-Major Love of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire group, and Regimental Sergeant-Major Leach of the Hampshire contingent, to keep their soldiers together. As they moved towards Baghdad,
Flight-Sergeant Long remembered: No words can describe the appalling misery of that scene. Here were men who had suffered and fought through the long months of the siege, although they were gradually starved, and were not fit for a day’s march, yet they were being driven across the pitiless wastes under a scorching sun, herded along by a callous escort of Arab conscripts. At Mosul, Staff-Sergeant Bird recorded: A large percentage of the men were quite done for and could not possibly march another inch. They were lying on the ground suffering from high fever and dysentery, and, needless to say, were smothered from head to foot in filth and covered with flies. The officers were generally transported by rail and eventually placed in open camps in what is today Turkey. They kept themselves busy, playing sports, laying on theatrical plays, and continually attempting to improve their lot. Some plotted escapes, leading to a large ‘breakout’ from Yozgad and other smaller escape attempts at Kastamuni. A few made it home, but the majority remained in captivity, surviving to be repatriated at the end of the war. Conditions for the soldiers, particularly the British and Indian non-Muslims, were harsh. The Turkish Army had few luxuries, so prisoners were never going to be comfortable. Most were put to work on the railways, scattered around in locations many miles from civilisation. In their weakened state, placed in isolated camps, often flogged, there was little opportunity or capacity for escape. Casualties were high. Major-General Melliss, himself a prisoner from the siege, did his best to help the men, but there is no evidence to suggest that Townshend made any attempt to assist. As Regimental-Quartermaster-Sergeant Harvey of the Dorsets wrote, ‘No one will ever know how many were left on the side of the road to die.’
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Patrick Crowley is recently retired from the Army after 34 years’ service in the Queen’s Regiment, Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, and various staff appointments. He is currently Chief Executive of the South-East Reserve Forces’ and Cadets’ Association. He has served in England, Northern Ireland, Belize, Gibraltar, Zimbabwe, and Iraq (where he was awarded the American Meritorious Service Medal). He is currently Deputy Colonel of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment. His other works include A Guide to the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, Afghanistan: the three wars, The Infantry Regiments of Surrey, and Loyal to Empire: the life of General Sir Charles Monro, 1860-1929. Crowley’s book, Kut 1916: courage and failure in Iraq, was published in 2009. The 2nd edition, in paperback, was published in February 2016 to mark the cententary of the disaster at Kut and is available from Spellmount/The History Press, price £18.99. April 2016
REGIMENT. REGIMENT. REGIMENT. REGIMENT.
The 17th Lancers at Ulundi 4 July 1879 MHM Editor Neil Faulkner recalls a classic charge of British cavalry on a late 19th-century battlefield.
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avalry regiments were the pride of 19th-century European armies. They were, however, increasingly anachronistic, with battlefield opportunities for the unleashing of the arme blanche (the sabre) becoming ever more rare in an age of magazine rifles, machine-guns, and quickfiring artillery. Many cavalrymen trained, exercised, and served through long careers without ever participating in that ultimate experience: the mounted charge to contact. Despite the huge expense of cavalry regiments, despite the bling and braggadocio of the regimental messes, virtually all the serious fighting was a matter of infantry and guns. Yet, when the opportunity arose, the ‘shock and awe’ of a mounted charge could be shattering and decisive, turning a faltering in the opposing line into full-scale rout. The 17th Lancers had last charged as part of the famous Light Brigade at Balaklava in the Crimea on 25 October 1854. Of 147 men who charged with the regiment that day, only 38 were present at roll-call the following morning. It was a quarter of a century before the 17th charged again: a quarter of a century preparing and waiting for ten minutes of thunder, adrenalin, and blood to justify the regiment’s continued existence. 52
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FALSE START The British authorities in South Africa had provoked the Zulu War by issuing an ultimatum to King Cetshwayo demanding that he disband his army of 50,000 warriors. The British, based in Cape Colony, had annexed Natal in 1843, and then the Transvaal in 1877. Zululand was a wedge of territory on the east coast of southern Africa, bordering both Natal and Transvaal. The British regarded the independent and heavily militarised blackruled Zulu state as a threat to the security of the growing numbers of white settlers. When Cetshwayo rejected the ultimatum, as he was bound to do, Lieutenant-General Lord Chelmsford invaded Zululand. Confident that his infantry – armed with breech-loading Martini-Henry rifles – would easily crush the Zulus on the battlefield, he divided his army into three widely separated columns, which were to converge on the enemy capital at Ulundi. Chelmsford himself marched with the central column, but, without knowing the location of the enemy, this he further divided, leaving 1,700 men at his base-camp at Isandhlwana. This force was attacked and annihilated on 22 January 1879. Chelmsford retreated to Natal. London, appalled by the news, appointed Garnet Wolseley, to replace him. But Chelmsford, heavily reinforced and determined to salvage
his reputation, launched a second invasion of Zululand on 31 May – before his rival for the command arrived.
THE SECOND INVASION Chelmsford again divided his army into three main columns, but each was now twice the strength of its predecessor. The Zulus had suffered heavy casualties in a series of murderous battles during the first invasion – as well as Isandhlwana, there had been major engagements at Nyezane Drift, Rorke’s Drift, Eshowe, Gingindlovu, Hlobane, and Kambula. Consequently, resistance was muted, and the Zulu king sued for peace. Chelmsford, however, was set on exacting bloody revenge. With Crealock’s central and Wood’s flying columns linked up, he continued his advance towards Ulundi. Reaching the Royal Kraal, which the Zulus were bound to defend, he formed his 5,000 men into a massive square on the morning of 4 July for the final approach. Donald Morris, in The Washing of the Spears, describes it thus: Five companies of the 80th Regiment formed a line abreast four ranks deep, with… two Gatling guns in the centre. Eight companies of the 90th Light Infantry and four of the 94th formed a column of twos behind the left end of the 80th, and eight companies of the 13th and four of April 2016
BELOW Cavalryman of the 17th Lancers during the Anglo-Zulu War.
Lance This comprised a bamboo pole, a forged steel triangular point, and a red-and-white pennon. The lance was a fearsome weapon when used at the charge, for the point would be driven forward with the force of a galloping horse. It was equally effective in pursuit, since it could be used to ‘pig-stick’ fugitives, even if they went to ground. The moral effect of lancers was very great.
Helmet The traditional ‘lance cap’ – a two-part headdress comprising round leather skull surmounted by square leather top, complete with elaborate plume – had been discarded in favour of the more practical ‘pith helmet’ of cork covered in buff-coloured leather.
Uniform Though red was almost universal among British infantry between the early 18th and late 19th centuries, many cavalry regiments wore Frenchstyle dark blue, in this case a short, tight-fitting, double-breasted coatee with breeches tucked inside knee-high boots. Facings were white.
Equipment This comprised bedroll, haversack, waterbottle, and ammo pouches, some carried on the saddle, some suspended from white leather cross-belts.
Sabre Carbine (out of view)
Image: Tim Sanders
Troopers were armed with cavalry carbines, which were slung in long leather holsters carried on the back of the saddle, on the right-hand side.
All lancers were equipped with cavalry sabres, the steel blade slightly curved, sharp on the outer edge, and pointed at the end. The weapon was essential in any charge to contact, for lances became too unwieldy in a close-quarters melee.
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Maps: Ian Bull
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the 58th formed behind the right. Two companies of the 94th and two of the 21st closed the rear. The lines were carefully dressed, and 12 fieldpieces… studded the corners and sides.
Image: WIPL
Inside the square marched a company of Royal Engineers, a battalion of Natal Native Contingent, and 50 ox-wagons and mule-carts. Riding ahead and on the flanks were various units of mounted volunteers (Frontier Light Horse, Transvaal Rangers, Natal Light Horse, the Edendale Contingent), a squadron of 17th Lancers, and a troop of the 1st Dragoon Guards.
FIREPOWER ABOVE The first phase: the Zulu impis are broken during a succession of brave but hopeless charges against the British square. RIGHT Frederic Thesiger, Lord Chelmsford (1827-1905) – a man in a hurry to win the Zulu War before his replacement arrived. BELOW The second phase: the charge of the 17th Lancers completes the destruction of the Zulu army.
How to prevent gaps from occurring in a square is a question which is easily answered in theory. It is simply a matter of careful supervision and of constantly halting the front face to enable the sides and rear to catch up. But in practice these intervals occur in spite of the most strenuous exertions… That it is a matter of supreme
Image: WIPL
OPPOSITE PAGE Plan of the Battle of Ulundi, 4 July 1879, showing the successive Zulu attacks on the British square [TOP], and a detailed plan of Chelmsford’s square [BOTTOM].
It is impossible to advance in square at any speed. The formation must move slowly to ensure that it does not come apart, leaving gaps that might be rushed by the enemy, an eventuality liable to result in a catastrophic disaster. As Callwell explains in his classic monograph Small Wars:
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THE 17TH LANCERS Origins The regiment was raised in Hertfordshire by Colonel John Hale, a veteran of Quebec, in 1759, though it was first known as the 18th Regiment of Light Dragoons, only finally becoming the 17th Lancers while serving in India in 1822. Exactly a century later, in 1922, it was merged with the 21st Lancers, becoming part of the 17th/21st Lancers.
History The regiment’s battle honours include Bunker Hill (1775) and Cowpens (1781) during the American Revolutionary War, and the Alma (1854), Balaklava (1854), and Inkerman (1854) during the Crimean War. As well as serving in the Zulu War, other colonial commitments included the Indian Mutiny (1857) and the Boer War (1900-1902). The latter, a protracted guerrilla insurgency of mounted riflemen, afforded ample opportunity for cavalry operations. Opportunities were fewer in the First World War, though the regiment did serve in a conventional cavalry role at Cambrai (1917) and Amiens (1918) during its long service on the Western Front. Interestingly, it also saw service against the Irish Republican Army in County Cork in 1921.
Key facts Ï The regiment’s most famous commanding officer was Douglas Haig, who later became commander of the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. (Service in prestigious cavalry regiments was, at the time, often a passport to a successful military career. Haig was one of many colonial cavalry officers who become senior officers in the First World War.) Ï The motto of the 17th Lancers was ‘Death or Glory’, their cap badge showed a skull-and-crossbones supporting a banner inscribed ‘Or Glory’, and one of their nicknames was ‘the Death and Glory Boys’. Ï The 17th/21st Lancers was mechanised in 1938. Following a series of post-war amalgamations, the regiment became part of the Royal Lancers in 2015.
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importance to prevent the square from being broken stands to reason. Once the enemy penetrates it, it becomes a thoroughly bad formation. So Chelmsford’s advance was ponderous. And, at first, there was no sign of the Zulu. Some men thought there would be no battle after all. But as the square ascended a gentle knoll, the waiting Zulu impis stirred into motion, rising out of the grass of the plain, or streaming down the surrounding slopes – a dozen or so regiments, each with its distinctive shield designs, up to 20,000 warriors in all. As they came on, they merged into a vast semicircle, and the British cavalry and South African mounted volunteers fled before them, racing for the safety of the square. The square halted. Lines were dressed, guns unlimbered, bayonets fixed, cartridge boxes opened. The infantry were ranked four deep, two kneeling in front, two standing behind. There was open ground around the square where the advance had flattened the grass, but beyond that the Zulu warriors had cover in the scrub as they gathered themselves for their charges. But still the distance was too great, and as regiment after regiment hurled itself into the storm of rifle, machine-gun, and artillery , men were scythed until the ground was ithing, no Zulu ever getting closer than 0 yards from the British line. Succeeding waves charged over the contorted bodies that littered the grass, and the shining faces of the warriors, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, bobbed up and down over the rims of their shields. Raw courage had brought them that far, but bravery alone could not force a way through the crescendo of fire, and warriors sank to their knees to crash full-length in the dust or tumble head over heels in mid-stride. (Morris)
THE CHARGE OF THE LANCERS It lasted for about half an hour. Then, with hundreds dead or stricken, the attacks petered out. Some wounded were trying to drag themselves away. Other Zulus were shrieking defiance from the long grass. But the spirit of resistance, already weaker than at Isandhlwana before the battle began, was ebbing away. Chelmsford sensed it was the end. He had already once ordered the cavalry to mount for a charge, misjudging the moment. But this time he was sure. He waved his helmet at the commander of the 17th Lancers and called out ‘Go at them, Lowe!’. The redcoats made way and, in column of fours, the lancers moved out of the square, followed by the dragoons and the mounted volunteers. Once clear, the 17th Lancers
The waiting Zulu impis stirred into motion, rising out of the grass of the plain... reformed into line, two deep. Then, lowering lances, they broke from a trot into a canter and then a charge, amid cheers from the watching infantry. It was a riding-school exercise. Hardly breaking formation, the lancers rode down the slope through the retreating Zulus, picking their men from the ruck. The momentum of the horses spitted the warriors on the points, and as they passed, a strong outward flick of the wrist cleared the weapon, which swung back, up, and forward again to point, with stained tip and dyed pennon, at the next victim. (Morris) Cavalry charges are soon spent. They fast lose momentum as horses become winded, the formation extended, the fighting dissolving into myriad personal encounters. Some of the braver Zulus recovered their nerve and made a stand here and there, grabbing at the lances, jumping out of the grass to stab with assegais, attempting to pull down horses and riders by yanking at their reins. Others brought firearms to bear. A formed group of 500 or so rose from concealment in the grass and delivered a volley. Some of the horsemen went down, including Captain the Honourable Edmond Verney, shot dead in the saddle. Even so, with close to a thousand mounted men in action against regiments of spearmen broken by a storm of fire – the square had fired 35,000 rounds, most of them at close range – there was no doubt about the final outcome. With lance and sabre, carbine and revolver, the British and South African horse completed the destruction of the last Zulu army in history. The battle had been tragically one-sided. Men armed mainly with spears (assegais) and clubs (knobkerries) had been defeated by a quarter of their number armed with modern weapons. More than a thousand Zulus lay on the field, and many more may have crept away unseen: no accurate count was ever made of their army’s losses. What is certain is that Chelmsford had 10 killed and 69 wounded: a paltry number to achieve the destruction of the greatest black kingdom in southern Africa.
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April 2016
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M H M re n ds
APRIL Each month, the Debrief brings you the very best in ilm and book reviews, along with suggested historical events and must-see museums. Whether you plan to be at home or out in the ield, our team of expert reviewers deliver the best recommendations to keep military-history enthusiasts entertained.
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MHM REVIEWS The US Navy by Craig Symonds, Ghost Patrol by John Sadler, and Nagasaki by Susan Southard. Taylor Downing reviews classic PoW movie The Captive Heart.
BOOKS
RECOMMENDED The Battle of Britain, 1945-1965 by Garry Campion
WAR ON FILM
MHM VISITS Hazel Blair reviews HMS Belfast. HIGHLIGHT Tiger Day at the Tank Museum, Bovington
MUSEUM
MHM OFF DUTY Test your problem-solving skills and win great prizes! Two commemorative stamp folders are up for grabs.
LISTINGS
WIN beautifully designed commemorative stamps CAPTION COMPETITION
BRIEFING ROOM
O TAYLOR DOWNING REVIEWS A CLASSIC WAR MOVIE battle honours. They had no combat to be proud of, nor campaign medals to show of. It was not diicult for people at home to imagine that they had had an easy time of it, loaing around in a camp while others fought and won the war. The propaganda purpose of The Captive Heart was to show the extent of the loss sufered and the sacriices made by these men, too. The initial idea for the ilm had come from the wife of Michael Balcon, the legendary boss at Ealing Studios in west London. Aileen Balcon was a senior igure in the British Red Cross, and in early 1945 was involved in the repatriation of prisoners of war. She was very taken by the extraordinary stories told by former prisoners on their return, and asked her husband, ‘Why don’t you make a ilm about them?’ The result was The Captive Heart. Balcon brought in Guy Morgan to write the script, alongside Ealing regular Angus MacPhail. Morgan had been a PoW and was repatriated in 1944, publishing one of the irst post-war accounts of life as a prisoner in Only Ghosts Can Live (1945). Morgan was obsessed with the daily drudgery of life as a PoW, but realised that memory would only recall the peaks of an otherwise dreadfully monotonous existence. He wrote:
FILM | CLASSIC
THE CAPTIVE HEART StudioCanal £12.99
D
irected by Basil Dearden, The Captive Heart (1946) was the irst of the PoW ilms, beginning a genre that went on to lourish with The Wooden Horse (1950) and The Colditz Story (1955), before coming to a peak with The Great Escape (1963). Production began before the end of the Second World War, but the ilm was not released until March 1946.
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LOSS AND SACRIFICE The Captive Heart had a clear message that the producers wanted to convey. It painted a realistic portrait of the harsh destructiveness of life in the PoW camps at a time when the tens of thousands of men who had seen out the war incarcerated in prison camps were inally returning home. There was a tendency to dismiss their wartime experience. They had not seen action since they had been captured. They were not likely to have won any
We will remember the comradeship, the freedom of mind, the rare moments of community spirit; we will forget the wet days, the wet weeks, the days when it was an efort to do anything, the days when it was an efort to do nothing, and our bunks seemed the only escape. The military adviser on the ilm was Major Guy Adams, who had been a prisoner of war for four years. A team from Ealing travelled to the British occupation zone in Germany to recce locations in July 1945. They selected a former PoW camp at Westertimke, near Bremen, that was still pretty much intact. Filming the camp scenes in a recently vacated PoW camp, with a scriptwriter
and an adviser who had themselves been prisoners just months before, ensured that The Captive Heart was very realistic in its depiction of the lives of the men the Germans captured.
MORAL VICTORY The ilm opens with a commentary that makes its principal message clear:
This ilm is dedicated to prisoners of war. Their unbroken spirit is the symbol of a moral victory for which no bells have pealed… It was a war in which no decorations could be given, but to have come out of it with a whole spirit is the highest honour. Accompanying this statement are shots of a long column of men who have surrendered in the Battle of France in June 1940. These opening scenes vividly portray a sense of defeat – a crushed army; wounded, exhausted men; supplies of water running out; broken soldiers forcemarched across a parched and dusty countryside into captivity. But when the men arrive at their newly built camp, they march in, past watchtowers and barbed-wire fences, whistling ‘There’ll Always be an England’. As the camera picks up the ilm’s leading characters, we see lashbacks to their lives at home. Corporal Ted Horsfall and Private Dai Evans (movingly played by Jack Warner and Mervyn Johns, respectively) ran a building and odd-job company together in Hammersmith before the war. We see them with their wives. Lieutenant David Lennox (a young Gordon Jackson) is a quiet, unassuming type. He inally proposes to his girlfriend Elspeth as the train taking him of to war pulls out of the station. Lieutenant Stephen Harley (Derek Bond) comes from a middle-class background, and has fallen in love with Caroline. All these life stories are interrupted by the war. As they settle into camp life as PoWs, the men rely on letters from home for snippets of information to feed their longing for life back in Britain. April 2016
The central narrative of the ilm is hat of a Czech army oicer, Captain Karel Hasek (superbly played by Michael Redgrave), who escaped om Dachau and had somehow ecome embroiled with the retreat rom Dunkirk. Facing capture, he inds he dead body of an English oicer, aptain Geofrey Mitchell, and takes is papers to assume his identity. In the PoW camp, the other oicers row suspicious: Hasek speaks luent erman, and never talks about home. hey think he is a German who has een planted to spy on them. They hreaten to lynch him, and ind it diiult to believe his story. But a Gestapo icial who visits the camp, and who ad also been imprisoned in Dachau, aguely recognises Hasek. The PoWs ealise he is telling the truth.
ETTERS HOME etters to and from the camp play a entral role in the ilm. While the others end endless letters home, Hasek does ot, and this time it is the Germans who row suspicious. So the Czech starts writing to Captain Mitchell’s widow, elia (played by Rachel Kempson,
Redgrave’s actual wife). She lives in a very grand home with her two children and her father. It appears that she was estranged from her husband (who was something of a good-for-nothing) before the war. She is surprised and startled to receive letters that appear to come from her husband. Moreover, the letters have an uncharacteristic poetic quality about them. The Czech asks her to describe herself and her life, and writes vivid accounts of life as a PoW. Celia inds her love is rekindled by the correspondence, and starts wanting to begin anew with her husband when he returns. The Captive Heart is oten seen as having two contrasting angles: realistic PoW scenes on the one hand, but rather melodramatic scenes of life at home on the other. This is to misunderstand the whole point of the movie, which is to show how the memories of home can enliven but also torment the men cut-of from all that is dear to them. The sense of abandonment among PoWs was known to be very strong, which was why letters and parcels from home were much anticipated and devoured enthusiastically when they MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
All images: courtesy of StudioCanal Ltd
At the end of the war in Europe, many released PoWs returned quickly to Britain. About 135,000 had arrived back by the end of May 1945, of whom approximately 40,000 had been in captivity for nearly five years. The experience of those captured in the Far East by the Japanese was very different. They had a much worse time of it, with many of them used for slave labour. The death-rate in Japanese PoW camps was five times higher than in German camps, and it took months after the end of the war for transport to be provided for many of these poor souls to travel home from the other side of the world. Physically, many of the returning prisoners were in a very poor state. Undernourished for months or even years, with thousands having endured forced marches at the end of their captivity, they were prone to illness and serious disease. But the most enduring problems were mental rather than physical. Tens of thousands suffered from what was called ‘barbed-wire disease’. After years of boredom and frustration, and being almost completely cut off from the outside world, the trauma they suffered manifested itself in disillusionment, apathy, fatigue, and strong feelings of anger. Many suffered from nightmares and a deep sense of alienation, of being an outsider in the post-war world. Recognising the emotional problems of the returnees, the War Office set up 20 Civil Rehabilitation Units to aid men in their transition from imprisonment to civilian life. By the time The Captive Heart was released, about 15,000 men had been through these units. They clearly did a lot of good, but thousands more suffered an emotional rollercoaster on returning, from elation at arriving home to the dark depression of feeling cut-off and isolated from their families, friends, and colleagues. Many got over this in time, and picked up their lives again, but some continued to suffer emotional problems for many years after their homecoming.
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at Ealing. In the prison camp, as the years pass and one season follows another, the PoWs build up this sense Basil Dearden’s father died in the First World War. His family was of community. We see them growing thrown into poverty, and Dearden himself grew up in an orphanage. fruit and vegetables, looking ater pets, He received relatively little education, but went into the theatre, dressing up, and putting on shows before joining Ealing Studios in 1937. Dearden did a variety of jobs, (everyone roars with laughter except including work as co-director of many of the George Formby films for the German commandant). that were the staple of the studio output at that time. All the skills the men had before When Michael Balcon took over the studios, Dearden prospered. In the war are put to use in the camp: 1943, he directed his first feature, The Bells Go Down. Dearden became tailors mend clothes, musicians crat known, unfairly, as a jobbing director who would take on any project. their own instruments, and teachers Over the years, however, he addressed many controversial subjects gather books from Red Cross parcels in films that were immensely popular, like youth crime in The Blue Lamp to run a camp library. (1950) and, after the demise of Ealing, issues like racism in Sapphire And social hierarchy still prevails. (1959) and homosexuality in Victim (1961). He directed many large-scale The most senior oicer in the camp features in the 1960s, including Khartoum (1966). Dearden died in 1971. is Major Dalrymple (beautifully Dearden’s associate producer on The Captive Heart was Michael Relph, portrayed with shabby elegance by who was an established Art Director at Ealing. Relph would continue Basil Redford). He keeps his command to work closely with Dearden on dozens of successful films over the throughout, and calls the men to order ensuing decades, and the creative partnership between Dearden and when on parade. The oicers support Relph has recently been compared to the far better known and celhim, and the ‘other ranks’ know their ebrated partnership between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, place. Even the petty criminal in the whose many successful collaborations included The Life and Death of camp turns out to have a heart of gold. Colonel Blimp (see MHM 66). But the other sense of community is that of England – or, rather, Britain, spouse tells him of the death of his best arrived. Every word in a letter could be as there are also Welsh and Scottish friend’s wife. He has to break the news studied and analysed by men faced by to Dai, who carries on with stoic fortitude. soldiers in the camp. In the letters hours and days of nothingness. from Celia to the man she thinks Lieutenant Lennox was wounded When Lieutenant Harley receives is her husband, she describes how in the eyes before his capture, but a letter telling him that his iancée village life has been little changed believes that he will recover. Finally, a Caroline has been unfaithful, he is griefby the war. People still go to church stricken. In fact, she was true to him, but German eye-specialist treats him, and and gather in the pub, and cricket is he is told he will remain blind. Again, of course Harley believes it all. It was played on the green on Sundays. It is he is uncomplaining, but decides he is one of the worst fears of men in PoW all a bit surreal, but then so it would no longer worthy of Elspeth, and writes camps, that their wives or girlfriends at have been when imagined by men to break of their engagement. home would forget them and move on. remote from all this in the dreary On the other hand, Corporal Horsfall A CAGED COMMUNITY conines of their prison. receives news of a diferent sort. His The denouement of the ilm comes At the core of The Captive Heart is a when some of the men are freed strong sense of community, typical of BELOW Michael Redgrave as Captain under a repatriation scheme organised many of the ilms of this era produced Karel Hasek. through Switzerland. Horsfall and Evans are among those selected for release. The Czech is rejected, and it seems the Germans are growing suspicious of his origins. So he is smuggled out with the rest. The men return to homes scarred by war. But many of the narratives are rather too neatly tied up. Steven Horley is reconciled with Caroline. The blind Lennox returns home (saying, movingly, ‘It still smells the same’) and Elspeth is there, waiting for him. The Czech meets
BASIL DEARDEN
Celia and explains her husband died ive years ago. She rejects him at irst, but re-reads his letters and realises that it is the writer of the letters with whom she is now in love. As victory is celebrated, he calls and she is happy.
THE CAST The casting of The Captive Heart is particularly interesting. Michael Redgrave was already a star, and would have brought in many to see the ilm. Basil Radford usually played a comic igure, but brought great pathos to his role as the senior oicer in the camp. This was also the irst appearance in an Ealing ilm for Jack Warner: he would become a central, solid igure in the Ealing repertory and, with the same actress playing his wife Flo (Gladys Henson), he appeared in one of Ealing’s best-known ilms, The Blue Lamp (1950). Of course, Warner also went on to become the avuncular Sergeant Dixon in Dixon of Dock Green, a staple of Saturday evening BBC television from 1955 to 1976. The Captive Heart was the irst PoW-camp ilm. It was made with such a determined attempt to be realistic, so soon ater the war had ended, that we must accept its portrayal as truthful. It is fascinating that the ilm features only one, short escape sequence – an attempt to dig a tunnel from one of the huts is discovered by the Germans. Everyone in the camp has his privileges taken away as a collective punishment. The tunnel is forgotten, and so too is the idea of escape. Camp life returns to its norm of boredom and drudgery. In the genre of heroic PoW ilms that became so popular in the following decades, escape became a dominant theme. There was tunnelling in The Wooden Horse, an escape from a high-security castle in The Colditz Story, and a mass escape from Stalag Lut III in The Great Escape. It seems that these later ilms celebrated the determination of the few, while this irst ilm captured the dreadful endurance and sacriice of the many, forced to live behind German barbed wire for years on end.
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THE CAPTIVE HEART (1943) An Ealing Studios production. Producer: Michael Balcon. Director: Basil Dearden. Associate Producer: Michael Relph. Photography: Douglas Slocombe. Starring: Michael Redgrave, Rachel Kempson, Basil Radford, and Jack Warner. StudioCanal have recently issued a beautifully restored version on DVD.
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WARHISTORY 1944 Founded 19 years ago, we have been taking small numbers of people on informative tours examining in detail the battlefields of Normandy and the rest of Europe, including Berlin, Italy, Crete, and Sicily-Tunisia, 1869-1945 including the Holocaust. You tell us where you want to go, and the time you wish to stay there – we will meet you on the battlefield and show you what happened. We will recommend hotels, and even which car hire company is good. We tour 12 months of the year! Our normal tour size is 4 people, but with a larger car, 6. WE go where YOU want, and for HOW LONG! Being senior soldiers we have experienced war. Telephone: +44 1297 639 873 E-mail:
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n the latest Star Wars ilm, the theme of air power is a constant. The Empire’s military technology, including the ability to direct a sun’s energy as a weapon, gives it unimaginable power. Yet civilisation is saved by the traditional means of manned warplanes. With language and tactics familiar to viewers of World War II ilms, intrepid ighters rely on their determination and skill to survive dog-ights and to target their enemies. In an age of cruise missiles, drones, and electromagnetic pulses, it is the rocket plane lown by Battle of Britain-style pilots that prevails. This vision of humans wrestling with their destiny is a seductive image drawn from the dawn of light. During World War I, in a reaction to the misery of the trenches, the war in the air was portrayed as one of individual heroism, personiied by ighter aces such as Manfred von Richthofen, Georges Guynemer, and Eddie Rickenbacker. This image relected the novelty of aerial combat, and served as a contrast to the intractable nature of land warfare. It did not, however, capture the reality of aircrat that could be diicult to ly, of men’s exposure to the elements, nor of deadly combat.
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Garry Campion Palgrave, £63 (hbk) ISBN 978-1137316264
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THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN, 1945-1965: THE AIR MINISTRY AND THE FEW
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Neither did it relect the degree to which reconnaissance, and especially aerial photography, was actually the greatest contribution of air forces to the war. By enabling accurate accounts of the opposing front-line to be created, the fog of war could be lited a little.
BY AIR AND SEA The Second World War saw a similar emphasis on air combat, most particularly with reference to the Battle of Britain. There is no doubt of the great heroism of the British ighter pilots and of the fortitude of all involved, including the ground crew, as, from the late summer of 1940, they fought back against successive Lutwafe assaults. What is less clear is how far it is appropriate to focus on Fighter Command as the key to stopping the Germans from launching Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of Britain. It has, for example, been argued by Anthony Cumming that the Royal Navy’s command of the sea was crucial to the defence of Britain, and helped to shape German invasion plans. The Royal Navy had inlicted heavy losses on German naval forces earlier in the year during the Norway campaign. Thus the German Navy’s ability to support an
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invasion had been badly compromised, ensuring that in any attempted invasion it would require protection against the Royal Navy. Moreover, there was scant doubt that the Royal Navy would put up a formidable ight. Certainly its crat were vulnerable to German divebombers, but these bombers were themselves vulnerable to British air interceptors and to anti-aircrat guns. Moreover, the Germans lacked the torpedo-bomber capability that the Japanese were to efectively display at the expense of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse in December 1941 of Malaya.
The Lutwafe could only try to prevent British naval interference in daylight. This meant that the German invasion leet, which could not cross the Channel and return in daylight, could be attacked at night even more efectively than it would have been attacked during the day.
OPERATIONAL FLAWS The viability of Sea Lion before the onset of the winter weather was dubious, anyway, even had the Germans achieved air superiority. The operation lacked adequate planning, preparation, and resources, not least proper landing-crat. April 2016
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The improvised nature of the German plans contrasted greatly with the detailed Allied preparations for the invasion of France in 1944. Britain was a less vulnerable target than Norway had been, and was better prepared to resist invasion. The element of surprise the Germans had enjoyed against Norway was also lacking. Garry Campion points out that both RAF Bomber and Coastal Commands played their, oten undervalued, role by launching efective attacks on German invasion preparations. Indeed, the concentrations of barges required for any invasion proved highly vulnerable to attack and thereby provided a viable, as well as an obvious, target.
AIR-WAR PROPAGANDA An invasion entails a preliminary defensive stage, and the Germans were not properly prepared for this.
They lacked air cover or anti-aircrat preparations to protect their invasion build-up. Attacking Britain by air assisted, but did not overcome this issue. Fighter Command itself was helped by the repeated spoiling raids against German airields mounted by Bomber Command, raids made more efective because the German airields were not protected by radar. ‘We were very young in those days’ is the most weighty phrase near the beginning of The Case of the Constant Suicides, a novel by the major Anglo-American detective writer John Dickson Carr. Published in 1941, this novel begins in London on 1 September 1940, before the Blitz had started: ‘An air-raid alert meant merely inconvenience, with perhaps one lone raider droning elsewhere’. In contrast, by 1942, Carl Schmidt could argue in Land and Sea that the recent demonstration of air power
BELOW Bf 110s from II/ZG 76 ‘Haifischgruppe’.
Image: WIPL
RIGHT Aerial photograph showing the concentration of barges at Boulogne for Operation Sea Lion, 1940.
challenged the traditional geopolitical dichotomy between land and sea. In part, this demonstration was of defensive air power, and the best example so far was by Britain in 1940-1941. Campion’s book takes forward the argument begun in his excellent The Good Fight: Battle of Britain propaganda and ‘The Few’ (2008). He shows how the wartime accounts were both leshed out during the war, for domestic and foreign audiences, and then rapidly taken into the post-war world. Although the Air Ministry had doubts about the accuracy of claimedkill igures, these were quickly accepted as fact. As a result, the release in 1947 of actual Lutwafe losses was no longer of any consequence.
COLD WAR STRATEGY
Image: WIPL
Churchill’s own reputation and his championing of the Battle of Britain ighter pilots is seen by Campion as a powerful force in the idealisation of ‘The Few’. This iconic status was underscored by their repeated presence in public memorialisation, for example on stamps. Moreover, the Battle of Britain served as a lasting account of valorous air combat and of the crucial role of air power. It did this not only for the RAF but also for other air forces. Ironically, the post-war years were those of the ‘bomber barons’, both in the United States and in Britain. Bombers were crucial as a deterrent against the possibility of a Soviet ground ofensive in Western Europe. Initially, this deterrent was very much dependent on the Americans. B-29s capable of dropping atomic bombs, together with bomb components, www.military-history.org
were deployed in Britain from 1950 in response to the Berlin Crisis of 1948-1949. The Americans could bomb the Soviet Union from Britain, whereas the United States was out of range of Soviet nuclear attack. In one respect, the emphasis on the Battle of Britain during this period was an assertion of British status as an air power. Its heroic aura also provided a more attractive model of air power than the plans for nuclear bombing or the use of the RAF in counterinsurgency operations in Malaya or Kenya. In time, ighters were embedded in Western Europe in a NATO Air Defence Ground Environment, an early-warning system that layered ighters, long-range nuclear missiles, and short-range tactical surface-to-air missiles. Alongside defensive operations, ighter-bombers, equipped with atomic bombs, were deployed that could attack Soviet air bases, logistics, and ground forces. Yet from the late 1950s, air power, in the shape of manned light, risked the fate of obsolescence. In 1957 a British defence review, Defence: outline of future policy, had proposed the ending of manned aircrat as the potential of missiles was increasingly realised. In this context it is not surprising that an emphasis was placed on the Battle of Britain by those keen to support a traditional air force. ‘The Few’ were an important icon of the recent past, but also represented a protective talisman against a more troubling present.
JEREMY BLACK is author of Air Power: a global history (Rowman and Littleield, 2016). MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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O S THE BEST NEW MILITARY HISTORY TITLES THIS MONTH
THE US NAVY Craig L Symonds Oxford University Press, £12.99 (hbk) ISBN 978-0199394944
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he general reader will be grateful for Craig L Symonds’ account of the US Navy, for he has successfully distilled nearly 250 years of history into a book of 116 highly readable pages. The story begins on 13 October 1775, during the American War of Independence, when the Continental Congress agreed to purchase two armed merchantmen to attack British supply ships. Less than two decades ater overthrowing British colonial rule, the US took its irst steps towards establishing a global presence on the seas. This came in the form of a national naval force raised by Congress to protect American commerce, and challenge those who threatened it. What triggered this initiative were the repeated attacks by Algerianbased raiders on American shipping in the Mediterranean and, as previously, the idea was to put together a force with a ‘one-of’ situation in mind, not to create a permanent naval establishment. ‘The speciic proposal’, the author explains, ‘was for the construction of six large frigates, a decision that essentially founded the US Navy, though only a few of those who supported the bill conceived of it in those terms.’
The book’s fast-paced narrative traces the emergence of the US Navy as a global force. It is a navy that can lay claim to having the world’s second-largest air force: only the US Air Force is larger. By the early 19th century, the country’s ledgling naval force had acquired enough self-conidence to take on challengers with a far stronger leet and an established tradition of sea power. The War of 1812 was an early example of America’s deployment of Palmerston-style gunboat diplomacy. When an American merchant ship of the coast of New Jersey was stopped by a British frigate, and one sailor was removed and pressed into service, the American captain gave chase and opened ire on the British warship. The badly damaged vessel turned out to be the wrong ship, but the point had been made. This signalled the road to war, covered in a chapter entitled ‘An American Navy Conirmed’. The US victory in this conlict, albeit a Pyrrhic one, was determined largely by freshwater battles, on Lake Eire and Lake Champlain, in which British squadrons were defeated. This had a strategic signiicance far beyond the modest number of vessels involved, salvaging what might otherwise have been a
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disastrous campaign along America’s northern border. By now, the Navy had become an integral part of the US military establishment, relected in the creation of naval uniforms for enlisted men as well as oicers. Later there came the Civil War, which saw the irst naval battle between ironclads, an engagement that made it clear the wooden warship was all but consigned to history. It was the US Navy that prevailed in the 1861-1865 war, largely thanks to the efective blockade of the Confederate coast, which put a stranglehold on imports of food and war supplies from friendly European powers. Years later, by attacking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese tacitly acknowledged that America’s battleship leet was the
most serious threat to their conquest of South Asia. Throughout the Second World War, the US Navy played a key role in helping to achieve an Allied victory. This was particularly the case in landing US Marines on Guadalcanal, an action that led to a series of ferocious battles that wreaked havoc on Japan’s naval capacity. The landings on Iwo Jima and Okinawa rendered Japan virtually defenceless, and it was itting that Tokyo’s surrender took place aboard the US battleship Missouri. Today, the author points out, the US Navy remains a potent instrument of American foreign policy. The presence of aircrat carriers gives a clear signal America is ‘paying attention’ to its national interests anywhere in the world. JULES STEWART April 2016
John Sadler Casemate, £19.99 (hbk) ISBN 978-1612003368
MHM REVIEWS
GHOST PATROL: A HISTORY OF THE LONG RANGE DESERT GROUP, 1940-1945
he past two years has seen three separate histories of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). The most recent to hit the shelves is John Sadler’s Ghost Patrol. Given the competition, it is unfortunate I encountered a glaring error on the very irst page: the name of the 1958 ilm was Sea of Sand (not Long Range Desert Group as erroneously stated). But things immediately improve, and the irst chapter is an excellent appraisal of the Desert War and why it was fought. One question always lies behind an analysis of the activities of the special forces in the desert: what was more valuable to the Eighth Army, reconnaissance by the LRDG or sabotage by the SAS? Certainly raids by the SAS, such as that on Tamet airield in December 1941, caught the public’s imagination – though Sadler writes of a ‘jeep-mounted’ operation, when the SAS did not acquire jeeps until July 1942! Such raids did, however, ‘stir up a hornets’ nest’, making it harder for the LRDG to pursue their own missions. The author sees the LRDG as the outstanding special force in North Africa, though he concedes that their efectiveness in the eastern Mediterranean during 1943-1945 is less easy to gauge. A solid account of the LRDG in the Dodecanese, Italy, and the Balkans demonstrates this, leaving the reader to reach their own conclusion about their signiicance. The inal chapter is as impressive as the irst, and here the author considers the legacy of the LRDG, both in the post-war world and the ongoing ‘War on Terror’. While the SAS continues to dominate public attention, the activities of the LRDG are shrouded in the mists of history. Yet the importance of reconnaissance ‘behind enemy lines’ is even more important today than it was 75 years ago, and it is here that the spirit of the LRDG lives on. The handful of oversights aside, this is a well written and highly entertaining history, and it is a good introduction to the Long Range Desert Group. DAVID FLINTHAM
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NAGASAKI: LIFE AFTER NUCLEAR WAR Susan Southard Souvenir Press, £20 (hbk) ISBN 978-0285643277 ollowing the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the United States imposed a total news blackout on Japan. No information about the bombs or their efects could be reported or transmitted to the outside world. By late August 1945, however, the US and world media began picking up stories about mysterious and deadly illnesses being sufered by people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. These stories were dismissed by US authorities as Japanese propaganda, claiming they were unsubstantiated by US scientiic studies – even though no US scientiic studies had been undertaken. Japanese journalists and media organisations were ordered to abide by strict mandates covering what they could and could not report: all books, textbooks, ilms, and letters going in and out of the country were scrutinised, and no one was allowed to mention the fact that censorship was in place. Foreign journalists were also subject to these restrictions. Two writers, however, managed to evade the strict limits on foreign journalists travelling to the bomb sites. One, from the US, sent all his work to the censor in Tokyo, but mislaid his own copy for 60 years. The other was an Australian, Wilfred Burchett, who sent his report in Morse code to London, from where it was published worldwide to public horror and outrage. This embargo on publishing severely hampered those doctors who were trying to deal with, and treat, people sufering from the efects of high-dosage radiation. They found it dii cult to comprehend the numerous radiation-related conditions, and were not able to share research so that any successes or failures could be made known to other doctors. This obviously slowed the development of efective treatments, making doctors’ eforts piecemeal and isolated, and hampering the recovery of survivors. Southard follows ive survivors from before the bombs dropped. She relates where they were when the bomb fell, and tells the story of their days, months, and years following the bombing. She details their injuries, their long and isolating stays in hospital, their recovery, and the dozens of radiationrelated cancers and illnesses they have sufered since. This book brings home the realities of nuclear war, and the unimaginable sufering and long-term pain that comes with it. A timely work, readable and informative, based on oral history and meticulous research. FRANCESCA ROBINSON
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MHM ’S ROUND-UP OF THE BEST MILITARY HISTORY TITLES
ILLUSTRATED BOOK Bletchley Park: the secret archives Sinclair McKay Aurum Press, £30 (hbk) ISBN 978-1781315347 Less a book than an adventure, this publication has pockets containing fascimile documents from the period, as well as lots of contemporary photographs. Even better, the book covers not only the wartime life of Bletchley Park, but also brings the story right up to date with material on the renovation of the buildings and on famous visitors to the site.
The Wars of the Roses John Ashdown-Hill Amberley Publishing, £20 (hbk) ISBN 978-1445645247
John Ashdown-Hill was a key igure in the discovery of the remains of Richard III in Leicester, so it can be assumed he knows something about the period. Treachery and deceit, bloody battles, Princes in the Tower: the Wars of the Roses have them all, and this book attempts to bring clarity to the confusions and myths which surround the period and its colourful cast of characters.
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Putty: from Tel-El-Kebir to Cambrai – the life and letters of Lieutenant General Sir William Pulteney (1861-1941) Anthony Leask Helion and Company, £35 (hbk) ISBN 978-1910294956
Described as ‘the most completely ignorant general I served’ by one subordinate, the career of William Pulteney took him to Egypt, Uganda, Congo, South Africa, France, and Japan. In WWI, he led III Corps from the retreat from Mons, through the Marne and the Somme, to the Battle of Cambrai.
Queen of Spies: Daphne Park – Britain’s Cold War spy master Paddy Hayes Duckworth Overlook, £20 (hbk) ISBN 978-0715650431
From SOE in the Second World War to the most senior rank in MI6, Daphne Park led an extraordinary life. Her career followed the evolution of the secret services from wartime to Cold War. This account relates the extraordinary achievements of a woman in the maledominated and secretive world that was MI6 from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Great Battles: Hattin John France Oxford University Press, £18.99 (hbk)
Death Zones Simon Pasternak Harvill Secker, £16.99 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0199646951
Set on the Eastern Front in 1943, with the tide of the war turning against the Germans, this novel describes a Nazi detective who is charged with inding the killer of a visiting general and his wife. In the manhunt that follows, Heinrich Hofmann struggles to retain his humanity in the face of shiting loyalties, violence, and deadly SS politics in the wild bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow.
In 1187, the Muslim leader Saladin destroyed the Crusader army with a terrible slaughter at the Battle of Hattin, and went on to restore Jerusalem to Islamic rule. So important was this victory for Muslims that, in the 20th century, its memory was revived as a symbol of Arab hope for liberation from ‘crusader imperialism’, while in the 21st century it has become a rallying cry for Muslim fundamentalists.
ISBN 978-1846558504
April 2016
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REVIEWING THE BEST MILITARY HISTORY EXHIBITIONS WITH HAZEL BLAIR 01
£16 ADULT
£8 CHILD VISIT 03
HMS BELFAST The Queen’s Walk, London, SE1 2JH 020 7940 6300 www.iwm.org.uk/visits/hms-belfast Open Mar-Oct 10am-6pm daily; Nov-Feb 10am-5pm daily. Last entry 1hr before closing
Images: © IWM
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oored on the River Thames, with spectacular views of the Tower of London and Tower Bridge, HMS Belfast ofers an immersive visitor experience and is a must-see attraction for any military-history enthusiast exploring the capital. One of ten Town-class cruisers built just before the outbreak of WWII, HMS Belfast is the only surviving member of her class. While her sister-ships were either sunk during the war or later sold for scrap, HMS Belfast has been preserved for the nation as a loating museum operated by the Imperial War Museum. But she is also a historic object in her own right, and a colossal witness to Britain’s 20th-century naval heritage. HMS Belfast ’s construction was completed in her namesake city in 1936. She was launched in 1938, and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 5 August 1939, just a few weeks prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland. She was decommissioned in 1963, and opened to the public for the irst time in 1971. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
Leaving the riverbank, visitors can board this historic warship via a gangway. Cleverly designed, its walls are studded with yellow panels forming a timeline that marks key moments in the ship’s history: it’s immediately apparent that this gargantuan vessel has seen plenty of action.
IN DEEP WATER Early in her career, HMS Belfast participated in the naval blockade of Germany, patrolling the icy waters of the North Sea and northern Atlantic Ocean. But on 21 November, ater just two months’ service, she was damaged by a German mine, which rendered her inactive until 1942. Ater signiicant repairs, she returned to service escorting Arctic convoys delivering supplies to the Soviet Union. And having assisted with the sinking of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst at the Battle of North Cape in 1943, she went on to support the D-Day landings, and then the American efort in Korea.
Stepping onto the quarterdeck and bearing her historical context in mind, visitors are ready to learn more through their own exploration of the ship. Free to roam HMS Belfast’s nine decks (with the option of a complimentary audio guide), they are invited to peer through portholes, scale turrets, and climb down hatches, uncovering the stories of the sailors who once lived, worked, and fought aboard this 11,550-ton armoured cruiser.
GUN TURRET EXPERIENCE During WWII, HMS Belfast was equipped with a main armament of 12 six-inch guns in four triple turrets, and one particular on-board highlight is the ‘Gun Turret Experience’, located in Y-turret. This interactive, multisensory
spectacle, developed with the help of Royal Navy veterans and eye-witness accounts from the IWM archive, simulates the iring of HMS Belfast’s guns during the Battle of North Cape. Entering the darkened turret, visitors are greeted by the voice of a member of the gun crew, who describes what it was like to work there, and remarks: ‘We fought the ship, not the sailors.’ Shells and cordite charges were stored below deck, and were delivered to the turrets via hoists and conveyor belts. As a projector plays ilm of HMS Belfast in action, the middle gun ‘shoots’, the loor begins to shake, and the sound of gunire ills the room. The experience makes the pressures of working in the gun turret palpable for visitors engulfed in the ensuing cloud April 2016
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PICTURED ON BOTH PAGES: 1. HMS Belfast on the Thames. 2. St Patrick’s Day launch, 1938. 3. Exploring below deck. 4. The ship’s silver bell. 5. An engine order telegraph. 6. Shell room aboard the ship.
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of smoke, as lights lash and the ‘stench of cordite’ ills the air.
LIFE AT SEA Leaving Y-turret, visitors are invited to make their way inside the ship, where a 21-inch Mark IX torpedo is displayed alongside an audio-visual introduction to the cruiser’s use of these missiles. The real-life simulation continues, albeit without so much drama, as a blast of heat issues forth from the laundry opposite, built during the ship’s 1950s reit. Further along the corridor, there is a series of rooms displaying life-size dioramas of sailors working on various tasks. Visitors can peer into the shipwrights’ workshop, post room, chapel, sound room, bakery, storerooms, and NAAFI. The sick bay, complete with www.military-history.org
operating theatre, is particularly well presented, featuring a ‘patient’ wearing a working oxygen mask. The ‘Arctic’ messdeck has been restored to its former WWII appearance, when it housed the communal living, eating, and sleeping spaces of the ship’s ratings. Hammocks are suspended from the ceiling, and dioramas bring history to life, showing sailors conversing and playing cards. As visitors make their way through the ship’s galley, which also dates from the reit, they pass several dioramas in which chefs are seen to be preparing food. Industrial cookers are illed with staple vegetables, and the exquisite attention to detail here, as elsewhere, makes for an utterly captivating visit.
BELOW DECK Exiting the galley opposite a small library, visitors are invited to roll up their sleeves and descend into the bowels of the ship. Climbing down a set of ladders to reach the boiler and forward engine rooms, visitors enter a small space in which bunches of wires snake round the walls and grasp at the ceiling. From here, visitors can explore a labyrinthine network of rooms and
passageways, beginning with the boiler room. Access is through an airlock, and visitors are met with an impressive tangle of machinery. Sound efects are pumped into the space, and the volume of these periodically increased to give a good impression of how noisy the area was when HMS Belfast was at sea. Supported by a series of narrow walkways, visitors are invited to investigate every inch at close quarters. They are able to examine a generator, as well as the many taps, pipes, and pressure gauges in the surrounding area. The forward engine room was the powerhouse of the ship, which could travel at a maximum speed of 32 knots. It is illed with machinery that can be studied from ininite angles. And the interactive experience continues: at the press of a button, visitors can see the rotors of the cruising turbine move.
RADAR On the upper decks of the ship, visitors can look through the sights on the gundirection platform, which are strong enough to make out the features of people walking across London Bridge. But one of the highlights up here has to be the operations room (‘the
7. Diorama of a sailor at the dentist.
nerve centre of the ship’), where radar, sonar, and intelligence reports were compiled and analysed. Speakers play conversations between sailors discussing the information they have gathered on the 1950s equipment, and touch-screen panels challenge visitors to complete missions directing ships to their targets. The upper decks also house the admiral’s and captain’s cabins, and visitors can look out at the Thames from the admiral’s bridge. The boat deck is littered with ittings from boat cradles, and a video relays the history of the two ‘Walrus’ lying boats that HMS Belfast carried during WWII.
A WORKING VESSEL As if all this was not enough, there are two permanent exhibitions on board the ship. Visitors can hear irst-hand accounts from veterans in ‘Life at Sea’, where they can also test their skills in Morse code and tying knots. ‘War and Peace’ details the various engagements in which HMS Belfast was involved, and a number of objects, model ships, and documents can be seen on display. HMS Belfast is a fascinating museum, which houses items and ittings from various eras. While some readers might prefer to see her fully restored, the amalgamation of diferent fragments of her history reveals the organic development of the ship as a working vessel over 24 years of service. Some areas of the ship remain inaccessible to those less able to walk, and to very young visitors, but all guests can explore the deck, quarterdeck, and boat deck. Taking the audio tour, you should allocate two to three hours for your visit, though you will almost certainly want to stick around longer.
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M MUSEUM
RAF AIR DEFENCE RADAR MUSEUM
WELLINGTON MUSEUM
In the Summer of 1940, unknown to almost everyone, radar was playing a vital role in the success of the RAF’s ‘Battle of Britain’ pilots against the Luftwaffe. Established in 1941, the once ‘Top Secret’ base at Neatishead has remained pivotal in Air Defence from WWII, right through to the Cold War, and it still remains an RAF station even today. The museum charts the amazing history of radar from its inception right through to the Cold War. Experience the Operations Rooms, touch the equipment, and feel the fear.
The Wellington Museum is situated in the former stagecoach station in which the Duke of Wellington stayed on the nights of 17 and 18 June 1815. You can still visit the Duke’s bedroom, the office where he wrote his victory report, and his aide-de-camp’s bedroom. Various other rooms have been dedicated to different armies, including authentic documents, etchings, weapons, and souvenirs of the various nations that took part in the combat. There is also an impressive collection of rare weapons, such as La Suffisante, a cannon manufactured in Douai, France in 1813 and abandoned on the battlefield. Each round weighed 6lbs. Your individual ticket for entry into the museum entitles you to an audioguide available in various languages. Duration of the visit is 50 minutes.
ADDRESS: RAF Air Defence Radar Museum, RRH Neatishead, Nr Horning, Norfolk, NR12 8YB TEL: 01692 631 485 EMAIL:
[email protected] WEB: www.radarmuseum.co.uk
OPENING TIMES: Tuesdays and Thursdays, the second Saturday of the month, bank holiday Mondays, and Easter Saturday to end November: 10am-5pm
ADDRESS: Chaussée de Bruxelles 147, 1410 Waterloo, Belgium TEL: +32 (0) 2 357 28 60 EMAIL:
[email protected]
WEB: www.museewellington.be OPENING TIMES: April to September: 9.30am-6pm; October to March: 10am-5pm
SOLDIERS OF OXFORDSHIRE (SOFO) Oxfordshire’s new museum is the only one that deals with the county’s rich military heritage through modern displays and hands-on activities. As the home to the two county regiments’ archives – the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, and the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry – the museum explores how conflict has affected Oxfordshire men and women at home and abroad. Much of the material on display from the archive is being shown for the first time, such as the images and diaries of the men who liberated Bergen-Belsen and the experiences of the 21st-century soldier in Afghanistan. ‘Blood and War’ depicts life on the front line, and shows how the advancements of medicine and technology were hastened by the realities of conflict in both world wars. A changing exhibition programme with accompanying events and talks ensures the museum offers visiting exhibitions, guest curators, and historians an opportunity to be part of its work and engage with the widest possible audience.
ADDRESS: Park Street, Woodstock, OX20 1SN TEL: 01993 810 210
EMAIL:
[email protected] WEB: www. sofo.org.uk
OPENING TIMES: Tuesday-Saturday: 10am-5pm; Sunday: 2pm-5pm
WITH HUNDREDS OF MILITARY MUSEUMS IN THE UK ALONE, HOW DO YOU KNOW WHICH ONE WILL BEST SUIT YOUR INTERESTS? HERE IS A PROMOTION OF SOME OF THE BEST MUSEUMS AND EXHIBITIONS TO VISIT THIS YEAR.
TILBURY FORT Explore English Heritage’s Tilbury Fort on the Thames estuary, protector of London’s seaward approach from the 16th century through to the Second World War. Originally built by Henry VIII, and the spot where Queen Elizabeth I famously rallied her army to face the threat of the Spanish Armada, the present fort is one of the best examples of its type in England. Delve into the magazine houses used to store vast quantities of gunpowder, and enter the underground passages to feel what it was like for the soldiers who lived here. Discover the fort’s colourful past in our exhibition.
ADDRESS: Tilbury Fort, No 2 Office Block, The Fort, Tilbury, Essex, RM18 7NR TEL: 01375 858 489
WEB: www.english-heritage.org.uk OPENING TIMES: See website for details.
THE REGIMENTAL MUSEUM OF THE ROYAL WELSH The Museum tells the fascinating story of The Royal Welsh, one of the British army’s most famous regiments. The Regiment’s long history, dating back to the 1680s, is told through many kinds of objects including uniforms, medals, weapons, and models. The Regiment has seen action in many prominent events, including the British campaign in South Africa (visit us and discover what really happened in the 1879 Zulu War!), and both world wars. In total, 43 of the Regiment’s soldiers have received the Victoria Cross, and we commemorate their sacrifice and heroism as well as that of all the men and women associated with our Regiment who have contributed so much to our country.
ADDRESS: The Barracks, The Watton, Brecon, Powys, LD3 7EB. TEL: 01874 613 310
EMAIL:
[email protected] WEB: www.royalwelsh.org.uk OPENING TIMES: See website for details
DAVIDSTOW AIRFIELD AND CORNWALL AT WAR MUSEUM This extensive museum stretches across 18 buildings in 2 acres. It covers the history of all three services from 1914 to the present. Visit the officers’ site on the WWII airfield, and see aircraft, vehicles, weapons, personal items, and more. Individual buildings have displays and information on every RAF station that existed in Cornwall, together with coverage of the Royal Navy, and the Army.
ADDRESS: Davidstow Airfield and Cornwall at War Museum, Davidstow, Camelford, Cornwall, PL32 9YF TEL: 07799 194 918 EMAIL:
[email protected] WEB: www.cornwallatwarmuseum.co.uk
OPENING TIMES: School and bank holidays; every day in July, August, and September; Wednesday to Saturday in April, May, June, and October: 10am-5pm
ISTI S
EXHIBITION
FREE ENTRY
THE BEST MILITARY HISTORY EVENTS, LECTURES, AND EXHIBITIONS
£10 ENTRY POSTERS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR: PASSION, PROPAGANDA, AND PRINT Image: © Regione Siciliana
6 February-1 May 2016 Amgueddfa Ceredigion Museum, Coliseum, Ffordd y Môr, Aberystwyth, SY23 2AQ www.ceredigion.gov.uk 01970 633 087
EXHIBITION
SICILY: CULTURE AND CONQUEST 21 April-14 August 2016 Room 35, British Museum, Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3DG
www.britishmuseum.org/sicily 020 7323 8181
T
his exhibition will bring together more than 200 objects relating to the ancient and medieval history of Sicily. Sicily is the largest of the Mediterranean islands, and has been settled by Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs, and Normans. The exhibition will feature a recently excavated bronze battering ram from a Roman warship, dating from the inal battle of the Roman conquest of the island on 10 March 241 BC. Also on display will be a rare marble sculpture of a warrior from ancient Akragas (modern Agrigento). Covering a total of 4,000 years of settlement and conquest in Sicily, this will be the UK’s irst exhibition on the subject.
For the First World War, the British propaganda machine expanded on an industrial scale. This powerful selection of original posters from the period illustrates the various ways in which the government communicated with the general public, introducing the idea of sacriice on the Home Front. The exhibition will relect the four main concerns of the government at the time: recruitment, inance, supply, and morale.
EVENT
TIGER DAY 30 April 2016 Tank Museum, Bovington, Dorset, BH20 6JG www.tankmuseum.org 01929 462 359
Tiger 131 (known to the Allies as Tiger I) is a German heavy tank that was captured by the British during the Second
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MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
World War. It is the only operating Tiger tank in the world, and is now preserved at the Tank Museum, Bovington. This event will give you the opportunity to examine the Tiger tank up close. The museum will open at 10am, and the day will include a series of tours and talks. At 1.30pm, the Tiger tank will take part in a half-hour display with other contemporary tanks.
£15
ENTRY
April 2016
DATES TO REMEMBER
MORPETH NORTHUMBRIAN GATHERING 1-3 April 2016 Morpeth Castle, Morpeth, NE61 1NS www.northumbriana.org.uk/gathering 01670 623 455
£10 ENTRY
A three-day festival celebrating Northumbrian heritage, this event will feature music, dance, crating, storytelling, and re-enactments. There will be opportunities to learn about medieval weapons and armour throughout the three days, and a tournament will determine the greatest knight in the land.
EVENT
£7
TOUR
MHM VISITS
FESTIVAL
3 APRIL 2016
Bentwaters Cold War Museum Open Day Bentwaters Cold War Museum, Building 134, Bentwaters Parks, Rendlesham, Woodbridge, Sufolk, IP12 2TW www.bcwm.org.uk 07588 877 020 £5
Based at the United States Air Force command post at the former RAF Bentwaters, this Cold War museum is the only one of its kind in Europe. Several rooms have undergone restoration, while others have been turned into exhibition spaces. Visit the website for opening times.
ENTRY
20 APRIL 2016
WORLD AT WAR LIVING HISTORY DAY 10 April 2016 The Helicopter Museum, The Heliport, Locking Moor Road, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, BS24 8PP www.helicoptermuseum.co.uk 01934 635 227
Meet the troops and Home Guard of the Second World War at the Helicopter Museum in Westonsuper-Mare. This living history event invites visitors to hold authentic period weaponry and to examine rare WWII memorabilia. Helicopter lights will take place from 2pm, and cockpits will be open for investigation. Finally, visitors can see what it was like to ly during the Second World War in the light simulator.
The Royal Pavilion as a Hospital for Limbless Soldiers
PYRONAUT TRIP
Royal Pavilion, Brighton, BN1 1EE www.brightonmuseums.org.uk/ royalpavilion 0300 029 0900
2-3 April 2016 M Shed, Princes Wharf, Wapping Road, Bristol, BS1 4RN www.bristolmuseums.org.uk 0117 352 6600
£6
Take a 30-minute trip aboard the ENTRY WWII ireboat Pyronaut . Built in Bristol in 1934, she worked particularly hard ighting ires during the Bristol Blitz. The trip will take place around the docks Pyronaut was built to protect. Visitors are advised to contact M Shed museum prior to their visit to conirm the boat is active. Further trips will take place throughout the year.
19 March-1 October 2016 National Civil War Centre, 14 Appletongate, Newark, NG24 1JY www.nationalcivilwarcentre.com 01636 655 765
This six-month show is curated by Andrew Hopper, of the University of Leicester, and Eric Gruber Von Arni, once the most senior nurse in the British Army. The exhibition will bring together a collection of objects and instruments relating to medicine and welfare during the British Civil Wars.
www.military-history.org
30 APRIL 2016
How the Girl Guides Won the War
EXHIBITION
BATTLE-SCARRED
This new exhibition looks at the lives of the 6,000 amputee soldiers who received treatment, rehabilitation, and training at the Royal Pavilion during the First World War. Their fascinating stories will be on display from 20 April 2016 until 1 April 2020.
£7 ENTRY Surgical instruments on display will include bullet extractors, bone saws, and skull elevators, together with medical books like Gerard’s Herbal. Replica prosthetics from the period will also be on display, as will the wheelchair used by the Parliamentarian army’s commander-in-chief Sir Thomas Fairfax. Visitors will be challenged to remove a bullet from a dummy using Civil War-era equipment.
RAF Museum Cosford, Shifnal, Shropshire, TF11 8UP www.rafmuseum.org.uk/ cosford 01902 376 200 £5
Janie Hampton will give a talk about her book How the Girl Guides Won the War, which analyses the work of the Girl Guides during WWII. When the Blitz broke out, they knew how to dig bomb shelters and provide first aid. Tickets should be booked in advance.
MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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FAMILYSEARCH INTERNATIONAL
MILITARY AND FAMILY GENEALOGY
FamilySearch International is a nonprofit family history organisation dedicated to connecting families across generations. It has spent more than 100 years actively seeking out and preserving records of historical and genealogical importance, including military records. FamilySearch offers free access to a large and growing collection of British military records, including, among others:
Military & Family Genealogy was formed by Peter Threlfall and Judith Beastall as a natural extension of their interests and hobbies. Jointly, we have over three decades of experience in local, family, and military research. We pride ourselves in offering a friendly, value-for-money service to help trace your relatives’ military records, from the late 19th century to the end of the Second World War . This culminates in a highly readable and interesting biography of your relatives’ service, presented in booklet form for your records. www.militaryandfamilygenealogy.co.uk
r Army soldiers’ documents (before 1882) r World War I service files r Officers’ records of service r Army Lists 1740 to the present r Regimental histories r Continuous service engagement books In addition to online access to military records, familysearch.org offers tools and resources to preserve and share family memories about ancestors who served in the military. Through photos, stories, and documents, users can create memorial pages to share with close and distant relatives to preserve in the FamilySearch archive. www.familysearch.org
CENTRE FOR ARCHIVE AND INFORMATION STUDIES – UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE Would you like to find out more about your family and local history? Enrol for one of our online courses and open up the past. Our short courses will take you beyond the internet and open the world of UK archives to you. You will discover how to use archives and records to find your missing ancestors, learn about the world they lived in, and acquire the skills to read and use the records that will help you. If you are interested in a specific subject, single-course study is available, giving you the chance to focus on areas such as military records and history, house history, and heraldry. If you are experienced or contemplating a career as a professional researcher, why not consider a Postgraduate Certificate or Masters Degree in Family and Local History? Our online courses are written and taught by expert archivists, genealogists, and local historians. Our Virtual Learning Environment creates an interactive, supported experience, and the exchange of ideas between student and tutor is central to our approach to online learning. www.dundee.ac.uk/cais
ANCESTOR NETWORK LTD. Ancestor Network is a collective of Ireland’s most experienced genealogical experts in tracing people of Irish ancestry. Over the years, we have provided flexible, cost effective solutions to individuals, groups, and legal professionals seeking Irish family history research services. We also publish ‘how to’ guides on Irish genealogy under our publishing arm, Flyleaf Press. www.ancestornetwork.ie and www.flyleaf.ie
IN THE NEXT ISSUE ON SALE 14 APRIL
THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN, 1876
ALSO NEXT ISSUE:
What went wrong? It was the US Army’s greatest defeat of the Indian Wars, but 150 years on, much is still hazy about Custer’s last stand at the Little Bighorn. Military historian Fred Chiaventone reconstructs what seems to have happened, based on the latest evidence.
æ æ æ æ
Clausewitz at war Flame weapons: from antiquity to 1900 Air power: a new analysis of its limitations Regiment: The Berkshires at Anzio, 1944
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TITIO S PUT YOUR MILITARY HISTORY KNOWLEDGE TO THE TEST WITH THE MHM QUIZ, CROSSWORD, AND CAPTION COMPETITION
MHM QUIZ The Isle of Man Post Oice is recognised internationally for its innovative, awardwinning stamp designs. These include a number of stamp issues commemorating landmark events in military history, and this month we have two of their commemorative stamp folders to give away, worth £30 each. The WWI Battle Fronts folder includes stamps issued in support of the Royal
This month, two lucky readers have the chance to win a commemorative stamp folder each. British Legion. Using black-and-white photographs taken in the ield, the Battle Fronts stamp set depicts scenes from the First World War in Palestine, Gallipoli, and Italy, and on the Home, Western, and Eastern Fronts. This commemorative folder contains three full and three partial stamp sheets, alongside extracts from Matthew Richardson’s This Terrible
Ordeal, which charts the history of the Isle of Man during the First World War. The Battle of Waterloo anniversary folder contains a set of eight special stamps celebrating the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo. These stamps depict the main features of the battle from both sides, as interpreted by several military artists.
This folder also includes a £1 stamp commemorating the beginning of Napoleon’s 100 Days campaign, a timeline, and supporting material from the oicial Waterloo 200 project.
MHM
CROSSWORD NO 67
ACROSS 8 Japanese admiral who directed the attack on Pearl Harbor (8) 9 British merchant ship sunk in the North Atlantic in August 1941 (6) 10 Military display of music and marching (6) 11 Battle fought in Kentucky in August 1862 (8) 12 Roman emperor who, earlier in his career, had crushed a Dalmatian revolt in 9 BC (8) 13 ___ Green, battle fought near Dudley Castle in 1644 (6) 15 Native American tribe which fought the US army in California and Oregon in 1872/3 (5) 16 ___ Masujiro, soldier regarded as the founder of the modern Japanese army (5) 21 Friedrich ___, commander of the German Sixth Army at the Battle of Stalingrad (6)
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April 2016
CAPTION COMPETITION
MHM OFF DUTY
MHM
Answer online at To be in with a chance of winning, simply answer the following question:
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? Which French award, established by
Napoleon in 1802, was conferred on 55,000 people during WWI?
We continue our caption competition with an image from this month’s ‘War on Film’. Pit your wits against other readers at www.military-history.org/competitions
LAST MONTH’S WINNER ANSWERS
MARCH ISSUE | MHM 66 ACROSS: 8 Grenadier, 9 Ajax, 10 Picton, 11 Cromwell, 12 Johnston, 13 Ernest, 14 Lancers, 16 Assegai, 20 Carlos, 23 Anglesey, 25 Hannibal, 26 Sweats, 27 Tito, 28 Cartagena. DOWN: 1 Agricola, 2 Teutonic, 3 Barnet, 4 Vincent, 5 Troopers, 6 Darwin, 7 Naples, 15 Rossbach, 17 Ebenezer, 18 Aleutian, 19 Tallard, 21 Alaric, 22 London, 24 Gustav.
23 Roman emperor in whose reign three legions were lost at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (8) 24 British light-cruiser sunk in the Mediterranean on 16 June 1942 (8) 26 ___ Halsey, British admiral, appointed Fourth Sea Lord in 1916 (6) 27 Maritime patrol aircrat built by Hawker Siddeley (6) 28 Guy ___, British admiral, governor of Malta from 1959 to 1962 (8)
DOWN 1 Armoured car built by Alvis (7) 2 British town shelled by the German navy in December 1914 (10) 3 Battle fought in Russia on 7 September 1812 (8) 4 Nathan Bedford ___, Confederate general (7) 5 Role in the Irish Guards performed by the Irish Wolfhound, Domnhall (6)
www.military-history.org
6 Paciic island captured by Japan in December 1941 (4) 7 Edward ___, Lord High Admiral from 1550 to 1553 (7) 14 City taken by Parliamentarian forces in September 1642 (10) 17 Portuguese explorer killed in 1521 at the Battle of Mactan (8) 18 Delta-wing jet ighter built by Gloster (7) 19 Battle fought in northern Italy in June 1800 (7) 20 Body of water of southern Scotland once used as a bombing range (4,3) 22 Weapons such as sabres and cutlasses (6) 25 ___-la-Tour, battle of the FrancoPrussian War (4)
WINNER: ‘Don’t worry – with a hat this silly, no one will notice the bandage!’ Jed Roxburgh
RUNNERS-UP ‘Delia sighed; Franz and Colin had been having fun with the dressing-up box again.’ Michael Hawksley ‘No, Pete – you’re meant to look at the woman when you propose!’ Norris Johnson
Think you can do better? Go head-to-head with other MHM readers for the chance to see your caption printed in the next issue. Enter now at www.military-history.org/competitions MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
81
g ro in f ie r B + m o o r g in f om + Brie o r g in f ie r B + m o o r briefing MUSTAFA KEMAL fact file
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT…
Mustafa Kemal
Born: 1881 Nationality: Turkish Occupation(s): army officer, revolutionary, first President of Turkey
Who was he? Mustafa Kemal was a Turkish nationalist leader and military commander. He founded the Republic of Turkey and was the country’s irst president.
A revolutionary! Did he always Break the rules? No, not always. Despite initially opposing the Ottoman Empire’s involvement in WWI, predicting a German defeat, he served his country well when it entered the conlict on the side of the Central Powers, and he was in command at a number of major victories. Nevertheless, Kemal’s revolutionary inclinations were evident from an early age, and he joined the Committee of Union and Progress – ‘the Young Turks’ – a political reform movement that overthrew Sultan Abdülhamid II’s absolute monarchy in 1908, establishing constitutional government and a multi-party parliament. He later developed strong disagreements with the CUP, but many of their policies stuck with him, such as their commitment to social and political reform, and their rejection of monarchy and theocracy.
Key qualities: tactical expertise, intelligence, brav ery Greatest achievement: victory in the Turkish War of Liberation (1919-1923), leading to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 Died: 1938
What did he do during WWI? Having fought in the Italo-Turkish and Balkan Wars, Kemal really made a name for himself as a commander during the First World War, proving his strategic skill and personal bravery in his defence of Ottoman territory. The Entente powers landed on the Gallipoli peninsula in April 1915, having failed to batter a way through the Dardanelles straits using naval power alone. The aim was to relieve the military pressure on Russia and open a supply route across the Black Sea. Kemal led the decisive counterattack against the Anzac landings on the west coast of the peninsula, ordering his 19th Division into action piecemeal as they arrived on the battleield ater forced marches from their base on the straits. Kemal prevented the Anzacs from reaching the Sari Bair heights and breaking out across the peninsula. Later in the year, he organised a successful defence against fresh Entente landings at Suvla Bay, cementing the battle for Gallipoli as the Ottomans’ greatest WWI victory. But Kemal was magnanimous. In 1931, Kemal told Brisbane’s Daily Mail that the Turks ‘will always pay our tribute on the soil where the majority of your dead sleep on the windswept wastes of Gallipoli.’
‘the rights of our Caliphate and Sultanate, the honour of our government, and the dignity of our nation are being subjected to attacks and humiliation…’. Opposing the Sultan also aligned with his anti-monarchical politics. In 1919, he resigned from the army and led a war of independence against the occupying forces. He established the elected Great National Assembly at Ankara to rival the Sultan’s government in Istanbul, and soon ater the GNA raised a National Army. Kemal’s forces won a number of important battles against the foreign powers. But there were atrocities, sometimes amounting to genocide. The Battle of Marash alone saw the massacre of between 5,000 and 12,000 Armenian civilians. The powers were forced to enter negotiations in 1922, and in July 1923 both parties signed the Treaty of Lausanne. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October, with Kemal as its irst president.
Impressive. But why did he seek an independent Turkey?
He sounds intimidating. What was he like in office?
Although the Armistice of Mudros concluded hostilities between the Entente and the Ottomans on 30 October 1918, it granted the former the right to occupy any Ottoman territory if the Allies’ security was thought to be under threat. Taking advantage of the ambiguity inherent in this agreement, Britain, France, Italy, and Greece proceeded to occupy strategic points in the area, including the Dardanelles and Istanbul, with a view to dismembering the defeated empire. Unlike Sultan Mehmed V, who wanted to repair relations with Britain, Kemal condemned the heavy-handed treatment of Turkey by the Versailles powers, saying,
Kemal made a number of social and political reforms during the 15 years of his presidency. He wanted to transform the predominantly Muslim Turkey into a modern, Westernised, secular state. He was a proponent of women’s rights, established a common curriculum for all state schools, introduced laws prescribing Western dress, and closed all Islamic courts But while many of his reforms were progressive, his imposition of single-party rule has been criticised, and some consider him anti-Islamic. He died in 1938 and is still celebrated. Insulting his legacy remains illegal in Turkey.
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