War is a compelling subject. It is common to almost all known societies and periods of history. This history of warfare provides a detailed account of war in the West from antiquity to the present day.
\IThis section includes text from The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare.\i
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"Contents of The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare",2,0,0,0
\BChapter 1\b - \JIntroduction: The Western Way of War\j
by Geoffrey Parker
\BChapter 2\b - \JGenesis of the Infantry 600-350 BC\j
by Victor Davis Hanson
\BChapter 3\b - \JFrom Phalanx to Legion 350-250 BC\j
by Victor Davis Hanson
\BChapter 4\b - \JRoman Way of War 250 BC-AD 300\j
by Victor Davis Hanson
\BChapter 5\b - \JOn Roman Ramparts 300-1300\j
by Bernard S. Bachrach
\BChapter 6\b - \JNew Weapons, New Tactics 1300-1500\j
\BChapter 9\b - \JConquest of the Americas 1500-1650\j
by Patricia Seed
\BChapter 10\b - \JDynastic War 1494-1660\j
by Geoffrey Parker
\BChapter 11\b - \JStates in Conflict 1661-1763\j
by John A. Lynn
\BChapter 12\b - \JNations in Arms 1763-1815\j
by John A. Lynn
\BChapter 13\b - \JIndustrialization of War 1815-71\j
by Williamson A. Murray
\BChapter 14\b - \JTowards World War 1871-1914\j
by Williamson A. Murray
\BChapter 15\b - \JWest at War 1914-18\j
by Williamson A. Murray
\BChapter 16\b - \JWorld in Conflict 1919-41\j
by Williamson A. Murray
\BChapter 17\b - \JWorld at War 1941-45\j
by Williamson A. Murray
\BChapter 18\b - \JPost-War World 1945-95\j
by Williamson A. Murray
\BGlossary\b - \JWarfare Glossary\j
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"Introduction: The Western Way of War",3,0,0,0
\BChapter 1 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
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"Western Way of War (Introduction)",4,0,0,0
Every culture develops its own way of war. Societies where land is plentiful but manpower scarce tend to favour a ritualized conflict in which only a few 'champions' actually fight but their fate decides that of everyone. The 'flower wars' of the \JAztecs\j and the 'amok' combats of the Indonesian islanders caused relatively little bloodshed because they aimed to seize people rather than territory, to increase each warlord's available manpower rather than waste it in bloody battles.
In China, too, strategy aimed to achieve victory without battle: according to the most revered military theorist, Sun-Tzu (writing in the fourth century BC), 'To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill' (although the rest of his book in fact deals with how to win by fighting).
Many non-western military traditions have displayed great continuity over time: thus even in the 1960s anthropologists could study the wars of the highland peoples of Irian Jaya in \JIndonesia\j who still settled their disputes in the same ritualized way as their ancestors. By then, however, most other military cultures had been transformed by that of the West-of Europe and the former European colonies in the Americas.
The western way of war, which also boasts great antiquity, rests upon five principal foundations. First, the armed forces of the West have always placed heavy reliance on superior technology, usually to compensate for inferior numbers.
That is not to say that the West enjoyed \Iuniversal\i technological superiority-until the advent of musketry volleys and field artillery in the early seventeenth century, the recurved bow used by horse archers all over Asia proved far more effective than any western weaponry-but, with few exceptions, the horse archers of Asia did not directly threaten the West and, when they did, the threat was not sustained.
Nor did all the advanced technology originate in the West: many vital innovations, including the stirrup and \Jgunpowder\j, came from eastern adversaries.
Now military technology is usually the first to be borrowed by every society, because the penalty for failing to do so can be immediate and fatal; but the West seems to have been particularly receptive to new technology, whether from its own inventors or from outside.
Technological innovation, and the equally vital ability to respond to it, soon became an established feature of western warfare. Indeed, since the Persian wars in the fifth century BC, few periods can be found during which the West proved unable to muster forces with a fighting potential superior to that of its immediate adversaries.
\BThe Primacy Of Technology And Discipline\b
A 'technological edge', however, has rarely been sufficient in itself to ensure victory. As the Swiss military writer Antoine-Henri Jomini wrote in the early nineteenth century: 'The superiority of armament may increase the chances of success in war, but it does not of itself win battles.
'Even in the twentieth century, the outcome of wars has been determined less by technology than by better war plans, the achievement of surprise, greater economic strength and, above all, superior discipline.
Western military practice has always exalted discipline - rather than kinship, religion or patriotism - as the primary instrument that turns bands of men fighting as individuals into soldiers fighting as part of organized units.
Naturally the other factors play their part: many military formations, even in the eighteenth century, came from the same area and served under their local leaders almost as an extended family; the 'Protestant cause' proved a potent rallying cry for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in northern Europe; and 'Your country needs you,' and similar slogans, have assisted recruiting down to our own days.
Nevertheless, these elements have always been eclipsed in the West by the primacy of discipline, in the twin forms of drill and long-term service.
Even the hoplites of fifth-century \JGreece\j, who were farmers first and soldiers second, turned out so regularly for battle in their phalanxes that they perfected a high degree of combat effectiveness. For the critical element of discipline is the ability of a formation to stand fast in the face of the enemy, whether attacking or being attacked, without giving way to the natural impulses of fear and panic.
Repeated group activities, whether directly related to combat (firing practice) or not (drill), all have the effect of creating artificial kinship groups - some of them, like the cohort, the company and the platoon, further reinforced by the creation of small fellowships within the unit in order to increase cohesion and therefore combat efficiency even further.
Once again, the crucial advantage lay in the ability to compensate for numerical inferiority, for whether defending Europe from invasion (as at \JPlataea\j in 479 BC, at the Lechfeld in AD 955 and at Vienna in AD 1683), or in subduing the Aztec, Inca and Mughal empires, the western forces have always been outnumbered by at least two to one and often by far more.
Without superb discipline as well as advanced technology, these odds would have proved overwhelming. Even Alexander the Great and his 60,000 Greek and Macedonian troops could scarcely have destroyed the forces of the Persian empire in the fourth century BC without superior discipline, since his adversaries probably numbered more Greek soldiers (fighting with much the same equipment) in their own armies!
Discipline proved particularly important for western armies in another way because, with surprisingly few exceptions, their wars were normally won by infantry. The long reign of the hoplites and the legionaries was followed by a millennium in which men fighting on foot won most of the battles (and of course bore the brunt of the more numerous sieges).
The rise of missile weapons - first bows and then \Jfirearms\j - only served to reinforce the trend. However, withstanding a full cavalry charge without flinching always required arduous training, strong unit cohesion, and superb self-control. The same was true of war at sea: whether resisting boarding parties on a galley or enduring a cannonade aboard a ship-of-the-line, discipline and training proved essential.
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"Military Tradition, Western",5,0,0,0
Reinforcing these elements, and indeed refining them, is a remarkable continuity in military theory. The history of \IConcerning Military Matters,\i a compendium of Roman military practice first composed by Flavius Renatus Vegetius around the year AD 390 (and revised into its final form about fifty years later), offers perhaps the most remarkable example.
In the early eighth century the Northumbrian scholar Bede, on the north-western fringe of the former Roman world, possessed a copy; in the ninth, the Carolingian ruler Lothar I commissioned an abridgement of the work to help him devise a successful strategy for resisting the Scandinavian invasions; while in 1147, when Count Geoffrey Plantagenet of \JAnjou\j was engaged in a siege, an incendiary device was constructed and used thanks to a reading of Vegetius.
Translated into many vernacular languages (French, Italian, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and even Hebrew) between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, the sustained popularity of \IConcerning Military Matters\i is further attested by the number of surviving medieval manuscripts, some of them reduced to pocket size for use in the field.
Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the young George Washington possessed and annotated his own copy.
Other classical works on military affairs also enjoyed continuing popularity and influence. In AD 1594 Maurice of Nassau and his cousins in the Netherlands devised the crucial innovation of volley fire for muskets after reading the account in Aelian's \ITactics\i (written c.AD 100) of the techniques employed by the javelin-and-sling-shot throwers of the Roman army, and spent the next decade introducing to their troops the drills practised by the legions.
In the nineteenth century Napoleon III and Helmut von Moltke both translated the campaign histories of Julius Caesar, written almost 2,000 years earlier, while Count Alfred von Schlieffen and his successors in the Prussian general staff expressly modelled their strategy for destroying \JFrance\j in the 'next war' upon the stunningly successful tactic of encirclement attributed by Roman writers to Hannibal at the battle of Cannae in 216 BC.
In AD 1914 it came within an ace of success. More recently still, General George C. Marshall argued that a soldier should begin his military education by reading Thucydides' \IHistory of the Peloponnesian War,\i written almost 2,500 years before.
These striking continuities derive from the fact that ancient theorists and modern practitioners of war shared not only a love of precedent, and a conviction that past examples could and should influence present practice, but also a willingness to accept ideas from all quarters. Religious and ideological constraints have seldom interfered with either the discussion or the conduct of war in the West.
On the one hand, the 'laws of war' have (until the nineteenth century) been drawn in the most general terms and normally lacked any effective machinery of enforcement. On the other, from \JPlato\j's Academy down to the modern war colleges, \Jcensorship\j - both religious and secular - has been generally absent, allowing the full systematization of knowledge.
Certain core ideas have therefore remained remarkably constant. These include not only the constant emphasis on the need for superior technology and discipline, but also a vision of war centred on winning a decisive victory that brought about the enemy's unconditional surrender.
As Carl von Clausewitz put it in his early nineteenth-century treatise \IOn War:\i 'The direct annihilation of the enemy's forces must always be the dominant consideration' because 'Destruction of the enemy forces is the overriding principle of war.'
Other theorists, however, stressed an alternative strategy for achieving total victory, attrition, of which the military history of the West also offers abundant examples: Fabius Cunctator ('the Delayer') of \JRome\j, whose reliance on time, the 'friction' of campaigning and the superior marshalling of resources eventually reversed the verdict of Cannae: the duke of Alba in the service of sixteenth-century \JSpain\j; even Ulysses S. Grant against Robert E. Lee during the last phase of the American Civil War (1864-65).
Yet the overall aim of western strategy, whether by battle, siege or attrition, almost always remained the total defeat and destruction of the enemy, and this contrasted starkly with the military practice of many other societies.
Many classical writers commented on the utter ruthlessness of hoplites and legionaries, and in the early modern period the phrase \Ibellum romanum\i acquired the sense of 'war without mercy' and became the standard military technique of Europeans abroad.
Thus the Naragansetts of southern New England strongly disapproved of the western way of war: 'It was too furious.' one brave told an English captain in 1638, 'and [it] slays too many men.' The captain did not deny it: the Indians, he speculated, 'might fight seven years and not kill seven men.'
In 1788, warfare in West Africa seemed much the same to European observers and the local warlords confirmed 'that the sole object of their wars was to procure slaves, as they could not obtain European goods without slaves, and they could not get slaves without fighting for them.'
Clearly peoples who fought to enslave rather than to exterminate their enemies would, like the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, Southeast Asia, and \JSiberia\j before them, prove ill-prepared to withstand the unfamiliar tactics of destruction employed against them by the Europeans.
\BThe Challenge-and-Response Dynamic\b
But the steady spread of western military power rested on far more than the triad of technology, discipline and an aggressive military tradition. Many other military cultures (such as those of China and Japan) also placed a high premium on technology and discipline, and the teachings of Sun Tzu strikingly anticipated many positions later developed by Clausewitz and Jomini.
However, the West differed in two crucial respects: first, in its unique ability to change as well as to conserve its military practices as need arose; second, in its power to finance those changes.
Areas dominated by a single hegemonic power, such as Tokugawa \JJapan\j or Mughal India, faced relatively few life-threatening challenges and so military traditions changed slowly if at all; but in areas contested by multiple polities the need for military innovation could become extremely strong.
Admittedly, when the states remained relatively underdeveloped, with backward political and economic institutions and infrastructures, the tension between challenge and response seldom resulted in rapid and significant change.
But where the major competing states were both numerous and institutionally strong, the challenge and response dynamic could become self-sustaining, with growth (in effect) begetting growth.
This mechanism has been compared to the biological model known as 'punctuated equilibrium', in which development proceeds by short bursts of rapid change interspersed with longer periods of slower, incremental alteration.
Thus, in the fourteenth century, after a long period in which infantry had slowly but steadily increased in importance, Swiss pikemen and English archers suddenly and dramatically enhanced its role; then, after about a century of experiment, gun-powder artillery began in the 1430s to revolutionize siegecraft; and about a century after that, following constant (and extremely expensive) experiment, a new defensive technique known as the artillery fortress brought positional warfare back into balance.
Each innovation broke the prevailing equilibrium and provoked a phase of rapid transformation and adjustment.
However, the ability to reproduce unfamiliar military techniques and strategies required more than changes in the art of war.
Above all, a military system based on maintaining a technological edge is, by definition, expensive: \Ilabour\i-intensive systems, which rely for their impact upon concentrating an overwhelming number of men, may only require a society to mobilize its adult males - probably only for a brief period - equipped with traditional weapons (sometimes, as in the case of Japanese or early medieval European swords, weapons of considerable antiquity that could, like Excalibur, be re-used again and again).
The financial burden of fighting may therefore be spread over a wide social group and even over several generations. A capital-intensive military system, by contrast, requires the stock-piling of a wide panoply of weapons that, although extremely expensive, may soon become outdated.
Its attraction, however, lay precisely in the combination of high initial cost with low maintenance: thus Harlech castle, one of Edward I's magnificent fortifications in Wales, cost almost an entire year's revenue to build, but in 1294 its garrison of only thirty-seven soldiers successfully defended it against attack.
The king's strategic vision anticipated that of the 'Manhattan Project', which spent millions of dollars on the production of nuclear devices which, delivered on two August mornings in 1945 by just two airplanes, precipitated the unconditional surrender of Imperial \JJapan\j and the millions of her troops still in arms all over southeast Asia.
After the introduction of \Jgunpowder\j weapons and defences, the cost of each war proved significantly higher than that of the last, while the cost of military hardware rose to such a degree that only a centralized state could afford to buy.
Creating the means to fund such an expensive form of warfare clearly served to enhance the power of the state in the West, with each change in the size or equipment of armed forces requiring both new efforts to extract resources from the subject population and an expanded bureaucratic structure to handle them.
Naturally, prolonged financial pressure often provoked opposition among those required to pay; but that, too, could lead to increased control - and therefore increased internal power - by the state over its subjects, making possible further military innovations and developments.
This proved particularly true of wars waged to gain or extend hegemony, which required the steady transfer of centrally raised money and munitions to distant theatres, since this simultaneously promoted higher taxes, greater borrowing and increased \Jintegration\j.
Military activity and state formation in the West therefore became inextricably linked: states made war but wars also made states. To use another biological analogy, one is reminded of the 'double helix' structure of the DNA molecule, with two complex spirals interacting at various discrete points.
The complexity of this image serves as a reminder that imitating the western way of war involved adaptation at many levels. Simply copying weapons picked up on the battlefield could never suffice; it also required the 'replication' of the whole social and economic structure that underpinned the capacity to innovate and respond swiftly.
'Westernizing war' depended upon the ability of warriors, traditionally one of the most conservative groups, to accept both the need for change and the need for instruction from 'inventors' from a different (and normally inferior) social background.
It also presupposed an ability on the part of the state to mobilize resources rapidly, in large quantities, and often for long periods so that any technological inferiorities revealed in the course of a conflict could be remedied swiftly.
Naturally, the less developed the economy, the less easily the cost of military preparedness could be absorbed - even within the West. Thus in 1904, \JFrance\j spent 36 per cent of her budget on the army whereas \JGermany\j spent only 20 per cent; however, in real terms this meant that \JFrance\j spent only thirty-eight million francs as against ninety-nine million for \JGermany\j.
Thus \JFrance\j devoted twice as much of her budget in order to spend only half as much as her major rival. The continuation of this pattern for much of the next decade helps to explain why \JFrance\j found herself at such a disadvantage, especially in artillery, when war broke out in 1914.
However, the introduction of ingenious new taxes and other means of 'instant' wealth extraction proved far less important for feeding Mars than the development, from the sixteenth century onwards, of new techniques for mobilizing credit - such as national banks, banknotes, letters of credit and bonds - because few states ever manage to finance a major war out of current income.
But creating and (even more) conserving an adequate credit base proved highly elusive. In the evocative phrase of the eighteenth-century English political economist, Charles Davenant:
Of all beings that have existence only in the minds of men, nothing is more fantastical and nice than credit. It is never to be forced: it hangs upon mere opinion. It depends upon our passions of hope and fear: it comes many By times unsought for, and often goes away without reason; and when once lost, is hardly to be quite recovered.
Nevertheless, in eighteenth-century England at least, credit seemed to exist everywhere. Contemporaries estimated that two-thirds of all commercial transactions involved credit rather than cash and by 1782 the Bank of England alone handled bills of exchange worth a total of over ú2 million annually - a stunning extension of the available monetary stock.
However, mobilizing credit to finance wars rests not only upon the existence of extensive private credit, but also upon a convergence of interest between those who make money and those who make war, for public loans depend both on finding borrowers willing to lend as well as taxpayers willing and able to provide ultimate repayment. In England, tax revenues increased sixfold in the century following 1689. As an alarmed member of parliament exclaimed:
Let any gentleman but look into the statute books lying upon our table, he will there see to what a vast bulk, to what a number of volumes, our statutes relating to taxes have swelled...It is monstrous, it is even frightful to look into the Indexes, where for several columns together we see nothing but Taxes, Taxes, Taxes.
And yet most Members, who paid the taxes themselves, accepted their necessity; and so did the majority of the political nation. By 1783, when the unsuccessful American War came to an end. Great Britain's national debt stood at ú245 million, equivalent to more than twenty years' revenue; yet many of the loans had been contracted at just 3 per cent interest.
'Who pays and why' is as important, in the western way of war, as 'Who fights and why', and the ability to organize long-term credit (and therefore the existence of a secure and sophisticated capital market) to fund public borrowing in wartime represented a crucial 'secret weapon' of the West.
It also served to define which states could adopt the 'western way of war'. Mainly because of the cost of keeping abreast of changing technology and of maintaining the resources to deploy it effectively, relatively few states proved able to remain in the race for long.
Some (like Denmark after 1660) proved too small or (like \JPoland\j after 1667) too fragmented; others (like Sweden, \JSwitzerland\j or - with less success - Belgium) chose \Jneutrality\j. Others still, particularly in regions with less developed economies, directed the energies of their armed forces towards containing and combating internal threats.
Conversely, although not all western states proved able to fight in the western way, certain other countries did. \JJapan\j offers the classic example, thanks to the vital combination of discipline, doctrinal flexibility and a sophisticated financial structure which, in the sixteenth and again in the nineteenth century, permitted both the acquisition of expensive military technology and the equally expensive successive adaptations required in order to keep abreast if not ahead of all rivals.
\BThe Dominant Military Tradition\b
These various developments possessed a significance far beyond the region of their origin, because aggression - the 'export of violence' - played a central role in the 'rise of the West'.
For most of the past 2,500 years, military and naval superiority rather than better resources, greater moral rectitude, irresistible commercial acumen or, until the nineteenth century, advanced economic organization underpinned western expansion.
This military edge meant that the West seldom suffered successful invasion itself. Armies from Asia and Africa rarely marched into Europe and many of the exceptions - Xerxes, Hannibal, \JAttila\j, the \JArabs\j and the Turks - achieved only short-term success.
None encompassed the total destruction of their foe. Conversely, western forces, although numerically inferior, not only defeated the Persian and Carthaginian invaders but managed to extirpate the states that sent them.
Even the forces of \JIslam\j never succeeded in partitioning Europe into 'spheres of influence' in the western manner. On the other hand, however, time and again a favourable balance of military power critically advanced western expansion. As Jan Pieterzoon Coen, one of the founders of Dutch power in \JIndonesia\j, observed in 1614,
Trade in Asia should be conducted and maintained under the protection and with the aid of our own weapons, and those weapons must be wielded with the profits gained by trade. So trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.
By 1650, a generation after these words were written, the West had already achieved military - and therefore economic - mastery in four separate areas: south, central and northeast America; \JSiberia\j; some coastal areas of sub-Saharan Africa; and much of the \JPhilippines\j.
In addition its ships sailed at will all over the seven seas and, in most of them, managed to regulate and in some cases to control the seaborne trade of commercial rivals.
By 1800 western states controlled some 35 per cent of the world's land surface; by 1914 they had increased that total to almost 85 per cent - acquiring 10 million square miles between 1878 and 1914 alone.
Even in the 1990s, although the area under their direct control has shrunk dramatically, the ability of western armed forces to intervene directly and decisively by land and sea more or less wherever they choose serves to safeguard the economic interests of its component states and to perpetuate a favourable balance of global power.
The military abilities that preserved the West at Salamis (480 BC) and the Lechfeld (AD 955), and expanded its dominance at Tenochtitlßn (1519-21) and Plassey (1757), for better or worse still sustain its preponderant role in the world today. The rise of the West is inconceivable without them.
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"Genesis of the Infantry 600-350 BC",6,0,0,0
\BChapter 2 of the History of Warfare\b
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"Warfare in the Third Millenium BC",7,0,0,0
At the beginning of the third millennium BC, the success of intensive, irrigated agriculture on the plains of \JEgypt\j and the Near East changed the culture of organized war-making, which had previously consisted of small skirmishes between rival groups of nomadic tribesmen.
Hydraulic projects, improved agronomic techniques, and planned economies at \JSumer\j, Ur, \JBabylon\j, Assur, Nimrud, and \JEgypt\j created the necessary capital to support armies, logistics, and fortifications.
Far more important, sophisticated agriculture instilled an overriding territorial impulse: growing but stationary populations sought ever more effective ways to defend and to acquire productive farmland. Furthermore, the Near East provided the ideal arena for large, mobile armies: warm weather during a long growing season, coupled with extensive plains, broken by accessible rivers.
Rugged mountains, swamps, snow, ice, and sudden rain - the banes of large-scale and decisive military operations - were all but absent.
The agricultural surpluses of the Sumerians, \JHittites\j, and Egyptians freed a sizeable minority of those peoples from the daily burden of producing food; they could instead fabricate metals for weapons and raise horses to draw war chariots.
Yet complex warfare was not merely the consequence of new bronze metals, edged weapons, or increases in the numbers of ponies, dramatic as these new developments were. Just as important was a novel social and economic complexity centring around the 'palace', an institution that created underlords with specialized military, political, and religious responsibilities - precisely those disciplines prerequisite for war on any large scale.
The \JHittites\j, Egyptians, and Assyrians for the first time possessed the capability to muster enormous armies. They were able and willing to extinguish thousands of combatants in a single battle, obliterating entire cultures through the directives and sanction of powerful religious and political palace officials. Thus the early Assyrian ruler Tiglath-Pileser (c. 1100 BC) in near epic terms bragged of his destruction of Hunusa:
Their fighting men I cast down in the midst of the hills, like a gust of wind. I cut off their heads like lambs; their blood I caused to flow in the valleys and on the high places of the mountains...That city I captured; their gods I carried away; I brought out their goods and their possessions, and I burned the city with fire.
The three great walls of their city which were strongly built of burnt brick, and the whole of the city I laid waste, I destroyed, I turned into heaps and ruins and I sowed crops thereon.
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"Warfare in the Bronze Age",8,0,0,0
Although Bronze Age and (later) Assyrian and Persian military forces constituted ferocious killing systems - usually unmatched in lethality throughout Greek, Roman, and even modern times - there were inherent limitations to the organization of these military societies.
The reliance on the bow and the sling, the horse and the chariot, for example, required some expertise and so the creation of specialized military castes. The Near Eastern propensity for the construction - and destruction - of extensive fortifications also depleted resources to an astonishing degree. The familiar Biblical account of Joshua's destruction of Jericho provides some idea of the potential for carnage:
...the people shouted with a great shout, and the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, both young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
Most important, Bronze-Age societies were authoritarian and very narrowly hierarchical: the power to initiate, to manage, and to terminate wars lay in the hands of only the very privileged few. Often a single ruler might claim to have enslaved thousands.
The death of a strong-man, subsequent fights over his royal succession, feuds between rival dynasts, could all provoke the mobilization - and annihilation or enslavement - of thousands, even when few economic or social advantages resulted for the majority of the combatants.
In similar fashion, the loss or removal of those select few with the expertise and authority to conduct wars, often necessary wars, might severely curtail the military potential of an entire society and thus call into question its survival. No wonder that the capture, torture, or execution of a rival potentate, followed by the subsequent destruction of his fortress, appear so frequently in the dynastic annals, hieroglyphs, and stone reliefs of the Near East.
There were no military rules, no common protocols of war in the ancient Near East that might have limited war to the combatants themselves and so moderated the destructive tendencies of these regimes.
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"Warfare: Early Greek History",9,0,0,0
Warfare underwent a second transformation in \JGreece\j, again as a consequence of evolving agricultural practice. In the second and third millennia BC farming in \JGreece\j remained a bureaucratic enterprise along Near Eastern lines.
Mycenean society on the Greek mainland (1600-1200 BC) was largely analogous to other Mediterranean and Asian palace monarchies - therefore offering very little chance for military experimentation, much less the dissemination of military planning and responsibility beyond the very few. But once warfare was 'liberated' - if we dare use that word in a context of organized slaughter - from centralized palatial control to the power of individuals, battle was left to evolve in a manner previously unknown.
For the origins of western warfare, for the geneses of sophisticated \Jmetallurgy\j and technology, superior discipline, ingenuity in challenge and response, and the creation of a broad, shared military tradition among the majority of the population, one should look to the collapse of the Mycenean palaces on the Greek mainland and the ensuing Dark Ages (1100-800 BC).
There arose in the eighth century BC communities of equal property owners: the emerging culture of the Greek \Ipolis\i (city state). With the \Ipolis\i began western military practice as we now recognize it - a practice at its birth largely at odds with moral fervour, immune from religious interference, and centred around decisive confrontation in pitched battle rather than the comfort of bellicose posturing and sheer numbers, or the expertise of engineers and logisticians.
Early on, the Greeks quite chauvinistically recognized that their city-state constituted a unique institution, in sharp contrast to the palace-based cultures of past ages. The early Greek poet Phocylides confidently wrote, 'A small \Ipolis\i on a headland is superior to senseless \JNineveh\j if its affairs are conducted in an orderly fashion.'
Another sixth-century BC poet, Alcaeus, sounded a similar populist theme: 'Not finely roofed houses, nor the stones of well-built walls, nor even canals or dockyards make the \Ipolis,\i but rather men of the type able meet the challenge at hand.'
The key to the Greek cultural renaissance of the eighth and seventh centuries BC, to the move from the collective towards the individual, lay in a radical change in agricultural production, and concurrently in the manner of waging war.
Under the pressure of population growth, the Greeks turned to family-operated, privately owned farms, where intensive practices ensured food surpluses, and yet allowed agricultural bounty to be free from bureaucratic interference at the top.
In short, there was now to be no 'top'. Instead, to protect and empower this new group of rising farmers, there arose broad-based oligarchies and a cultural ethos of property egalitarianism among a privileged yeomanry. Farmers formed the voting citizenry of more than a thousand small city-states throughout the Greek-speaking world.
In this climate of agrarianism appeared the 'hoplite' fighter or heavy infantry-man. The fourth-century BC historian Xenophon (see \JXenophon: the beginnings of strategic theory\j) stressed in his \IOeconomicus\i just this connection between yeomanry and group fighting in the phalanx: 'Farming teaches one to help others. So, too, in fighting one's enemies, just as in working the earth, it is necessary to have the help of other people.'
Small farmers alone, not leisured aristocrats, not hereditary monarchs, not hired thugs or cabals, in most regions of \JGreece\j in the seventh and sixth centuries BC increasingly made the laws, grew the food, and fought the wars of their cities.
For two centuries (700-500 BC), Greek warfare remained static, in the sense that hoplite battle followed extensive agrarian custom and contrived military protocol, deliberately limiting an entire conflict to a single afternoon's collision between columns of spearmen encased in bronze.
When conflict arose - almost exclusively, before the fifth century BC, over disputed, often marginal, border territory - city-states agreed to decide the issue through one sudden collision of armoured columns. Each warrior-landowner purchased his own armour, which could weigh a punishing seventy-five pounds of wood and metal: greaves (bronze shin protectors), helmet, concave round shield, breastplate, double-pointed spear and short secondary sword.
Singly and in isolation the Greek agrarian hoplite presented a plodding, helpless target. He could easily be outmanoeuvred. He could be cut off, especially if he ventured onto rough terrain in mountain passes, or, worse, became caught in the open by horsemen or lightly clad missile troops.
In a sense, therefore, the infantryman was intrinsically ill-suited to the natural relief and terrain of \JGreece\j. But most Greek farmers had no intention of fighting either alone, or far away from their favoured flat cropland, much less against mounted magnificoes or in the hills against their clear social inferiors, the landless skirmishers.
Instead, arrayed in the packed ranks of the phalanx, they chose agricultural warfare on their own predominantly agrarian terms: farmers fighting farmers on farmland over farmland. The accumulation of raised shields across the armoured columns, the protruding spears of the first three ranks made the serried files of the phalanx invincible to either light-armed or mounted attack.
'It was a sight at once awesome and terrifying', remarked the first-century AD biographer \JPlutarch\j of the Spartan phalanx, drawing his description from centuries-old sources, 'as they marched in step to the pipe, leaving no gap in their line of battle and with no confusion in their hearts, calmly and cheerfully advancing into danger.'
Once Greek warfare was redefined solely as hoplite battle, both the affluent and the impoverished were relegated to secondary status on the battlefield - the growing yeoman class of independent property-owners had crafted fighting to reflect their own political and economic agenda.
If the countryside was to be a patchwork of roughly similar farms worked by leather-clad yeomen, so, too, the phalanx was an analogous grid of identically armoured fighters. Just as intensive agriculture in \JGreece\j of the \Ipolis\i had swallowed the horse's domain of open range land, so too the hoplite now displaced the mounted fighter.
Xenophon reflected the dominant hoplite \Jideology\j of the seventh to fifth centuries BC when he scoffed that 'only the weakest in strength and the least eager for glory' mounted horses.
'No one', Xenophon on another occasion reminded his 10,000 mercenary hoplites, 'has ever lost his life in battle from the bite or kick of a horse, but it is men who do whatever is done in battle.' In a very real sense, for a thousand years to come, in western warfare the cavalry grandee was ancillary to the infantry.
When Greek property-owners voted to march beyond their borders to fight, local hamlets and kin-groups quickly mustered into the ranks of their city-state's phalanx. The trek over the mountains, the fight, and the return home, usually required no more than a three-day excursion.
Until the fifth century BC little attention was given to logistics. Fighting itself was equally economical. After the attackers provoked the enemy to march out - often by cutting down a few trees and vines - both sides squared off. 'Battle-leader' is a better term than 'general' for an officer, who was posted in the front rank, with responsibility only to lead by example, and thus to fight and to die in front of his men.
The poet Archilochus remarked in the seventh-century BC, 'I don't like the towering captain with the spraddly length of leg, one who swaggers in his lovelocks and clean shaves beneath his chin. Give me instead a man short and squarely set upon his legs, a man full of heart, not to be shaken from the place he plants his feet.'
After such a commander gave a brief harangue, and the seer sanctioned the pre-battle sacrifice of a ram or \Jgoat\j in front of the phalanx, the two columns would collide (in the words of the poet Tyrtaeus): 'toe to toe, shield against shield hard driven, crest against crest, and helmet on helmet'.
The key in this peculiar fighting was for the farmer-hoplite to make some gap in the enemy's line. Such a disruption would allow his armoured comrades to be pushed on through behind him, sowing disorder within the belligerents' interior, thus creating panic among the mass of enemy hoplites who could not hear, and scarcely see.
Ancient authors emphasize the dust, the confusion, and the gore of the phalanx melee, and there is good reason to agree that a Greek battle of this era was a horrific scene, not an ordered pushing-match between squared columns. Indeed at the battle of Delium in 424 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides says that the Athenians became 'confused in their encirclement, mistook and thus killed one another'.
Later, in \JSicily\j, 'they were thrown into disorder until they finally came into collision with each other in many places on the field, friends with friends, citizens with citizens, and not only terrified one another, but even began fighting and could be separated only with difficulty.'
\BSolidarity And Discipline\b
In the tumult of the hoplite battlefield, tactics and strategy meant nothing; solidarity and discipline were everything. Fighting aimed deliberately to eliminate entirely the need for reserves, articulation, stratagems and manoeuvre.
Even in the fourth century BC, Xenophon could still rightly remark that 'Tactics form only a small part of army command.' Instead, in the heyday of the hoplite, an agrarian code prevailed that discouraged ruse or even individual heroics outside the ranks of the phalanx.
Under this system of open battle before the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), internecine fighting could be very frequent among the Greek city-states, but their defence expenditures remained small. Arms were the same in all camps, nearly uniform, and thus recyclable, as well as both durable and repairable. No rarefied officer corps existed.
Battle fatalities in a single pitched battle were kept to around ten per cent of the respective armies, as extensive pursuit was impracticable and often discouraged. Military training and time lost to campaigning were similarly negligible. Pay, protracted sieges, and the extensive fortifications characteristic of later Greek warfare were still sporadic.
Historians sometimes seem reluctant to appreciate the consciously agrarian nature of this fighting: the astonishing degree to which farming protocol and the rural sociology of the \Ipolis\i defined warfare across the variegated landscape of the emerging Greek communities.
Nevertheless, the Greeks themselves continually reinforced these practices through their literature, philosophy, vase-painting, sculpture, and public commemoration - all incessantly stressing the hoplite's bravery and cohesion, glorifying his arms and armour, and exalting his final battle sacrifice before the eyes of friends and family - all to the implicit diminution of the missilemen, the light-armed, and even the wealthier horsemen.
These warriors did not necessarily share the hoplite's peculiar notions of agrarian exclusivity. They were not committed, as the hoplite was, to preserving the existing structures of property ownership, landed control of voting councils and assemblies, and reliance on local produce.
Rather than fight for all that, the poor and the elite preferred missile weaponry and horses, ambush and pursuit, skirmishing and siegecraft - where military prowess was not simplistically predicated on an hour's exhibition of muscular strength and steely nerve.
But these non-hoplites formed a despised minority. In the first century AD the geographer Strabo claimed he had seen an inscription on an ancient pillar that forbade missiles altogether in early Greek warfare.
Of his fatal wounding by a rare arrow, a Spartan hoplite made the famous complaint that 'death was of no concern, except that it was caused by a cowardly archer.' 'The Greeks of the past', wrote the historian Polybius nostalgically in the second century BC:
\Idid not even choose to defeat their adversaries through deceit, thinking instead that there was nothing glorious or even secure in military successes unless one side killed the enemy drawn up in open battle.
Therefore, there was an agreement not to employ unseen weapons or missiles against one another, but they decided that only hand-to-hand fighting in massed column was the true arbiter of events. For that very reason, they made public announcements to each other about wars and battles in advance, when they would decide to enter them, and even concerning the places where they were to meet and draw up their lines.\i
In the classic age of hoplite battle, 700-431 BC, the overall material prosperity and steady cultural evolution of the Greek city-states stemmed in large part from the careful \Irestrictions\i on fighting. Citizens sought no utopian (and hence doomed) effort to end warfare.
Rather, they crafted rituals that allowed for frequent, inevitable conflict and battlefield heroics - all without real cost to the \Jinfrastructure\j of Greek society, which in the first two to three centuries of the \Ipolis\i remained emphatically agrarian.
In sum, the culture of the Greek \Ipolis,\i in contrast to the ancient Near East, flourished precisely because organized killing and defence expenditure remained within 'reasonable' limits. The historian Thucydides, writing at the end of the fifth century BC, remarked of earlier times:
There was no war by land, at least not by which any hegemony was acquired; there were many border contests, but of foreign expeditions designed for conquest there were none among the Greeks. Indeed, no subject city-states fell under the control of the great city-states, thus these Greek communities did not unite as equals for allied expeditions. Instead, fighting at this time consisted merely of local warring between rival neighbours.
The fifth century BC changed all that.
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"Greek Warfare: East Meets West",10,0,0,0
Knowledge about Greek warfare before the Persian wars (490, 480-478 BC) is sketchy. It has to be pieced together from lyric and elegiac poetry, later speculation of historians, philosophers and antiquarians, and the physical remains of arms and armour.
In contrast, the infantry and naval fighting of the fifth and fourth centuries BC are well documented in the great histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. And it is from Herodotus' history, for example, that the Persian invasions appear momentous, unlike anything in the past Greek experience of the prior two centuries.
A preliminary Persian probe of 490 BC under an expansion-minded King Darius I, was decisively checked by the Athenians at Marathon, where the Persians unwisely staked the outcome on a single infantry clash upon the enclosed Attic seaside plain.
The Greeks' victory there set a pattern of East-West confrontation that remained virtually unaltered for the next three centuries: if at any time, at any locale, or in any number, eastern infantry were foolish enough to charge the disciplined ranks of western armoured pikemen, they inevitably crumbled. And yet, despite the later glorification and exaltation of the heroic 'Marathon men' in Athenian literature, their victory merely postponed the Eastern onslaught for a decade.
When the Persians returned in 480 BC under Darius' son and heir, Xerxes, the military situation was entirely altered, the challenge unique, the invaders far more sophisticated and better prepared. As the contemporary dramatist Aeschylus put it, the Easterners sought no single pitched battle, but rather they now planned 'to yoke Hellas in servitude'.
Xerxes' assault on \JGreece\j in 480 BC was no expeditionary brigade, but a veritable travelling polyglot city of thousands, slowly inching its way southward into \JGreece\j, gobbling up city-states by capitulation or accommodation as it progressed. Accompanied by a prodigious fleet, the Persians had no intention of fighting a single infantry battle.
Indeed, they scoffed at the so-called 'laws of the Greeks', which restricted Hellenic warfare to a single land battle. 'These Greeks', mused Mardonius the Persian general, 'are accustomed to wage their wars amongst each other in the most senseless way, for as soon as they declare war on each other they seek out the fairest and most level ground, and then go down there to do battle on it.
Consequently, even the winner leaves with extreme losses; I need not mention the conquered since they are annihilated. Clearly since they all speak Greek, they should rather exchange heralds and negotiators and thereby settle differences by any means rather than battle.'
The Persians, by contrast, came bent on outright conquest, and their challenge was clear to the Greek city-states: numbers, sailors, tactics, fortification, evacuation, trickery, subterfuge, and generalship were all needed, and quickly. Overnight they entered the mainstream practice of Greek warfare.
An advance Spartan contingent was mowed down in glorious annihilation defending the high frontier pass up north at Thermopylae (480 BC), its king Leonidas decapitated, his head impaled on a pole. An Athenian-led fleet shadowed the approaching eastern ships, as Xerxes made his way through central \JGreece\j and on into a deserted \JAthens\j.
In this new world of total war, some Greeks were forced not merely to redefine their traditional way of fighting, but to change their concept of the city-state itself. Not a mere physical entity of walls, an acropolis, and the surrounding fields of its farmers, the \Ipolis\i (the city-state) was, after all, 'people'. People were all that mattered: the native-born residents of all classes who could be saved through evacuation to return as avengers on either land or sea.
Landed conservatives at \JAthens\j calling on farmers for a single hoplite conflict of the old style to protect the city proper and the agrarian prestige of the countryside were not merely misguided, but nearly lunatic as well. The Athenians therefore left their \Ipolis\i to the invader's torch, evacuating to nearby free territory, relying on the 'wooden walls' of their ships to defeat the Persians off the adjacent island of Salamis.
Whatever the later complaints of reactionary Athenian philosophers that sea-power was unheroic (the anti-democrat \JPlato\j, a century after Salamis, felt the Athenian victory there had made Greeks 'worse' as a people), all Greeks knew that the destruction of Xerxes' armada at Salamis had ruined the morale of the Persians and set the stage for a final fight at \JPlataea\j the next spring.
Suddenly, without their fleet, the haughty Persian invaders in the spring of 479 BC found themselves cut off. They were in an increasingly untenable position, as hoplites from all over central and southern \JGreece\j flocked to form a grand army of last resistance near the small village of \JPlataea\j on the Athenian-Boeotian border.
Spartan discipline and, in the words of the playwright Aeschylus, the power of 'the Dorian spear' that 'poured blood in unmeasurable sacrifice', backed by Athenian enthusiasm and the sheer mass of Greek infantry (never again would classical \JGreece\j field a force approaching 70,000 combatants) broke the Persian army, and then slaughtered the fleeing survivors.
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"Persian Wars, The Aftermath",11,0,0,0
In the aftermath of the Persian invasion and defeat, as is common after any great social and cultural upheaval, a conscious return to normality occurred in Greek warfare. Once more we hear for a time of a series of infantry 'wars' over borders among the city-states decided in the old way: traditional one-hour stand-offs at the battles of Dipaea (471 BC), Tanagra and Oinophyta (457 BC), and Coroneia (447 BC).
But stones were thrown into the hoplite pond by the Persian experience, as the multifarious lessons of the victories over Xerxes rippled slowly throughout Greek city-states. Chief among the new realities were two phenomena that help explain the sharp break with the \Ipolis\i warfare of the past.
First, the victory left two city-states, Sparta and \JAthens\j, alone prestigious and pre-eminent. Both were unusually powerful, atypical - and antithetical - Greek city-states, which could afford to ignore the old rules of agrarian warfare.
Supported by nearly 200,000 helots, or indentured servants, who worked the farms of \JMessenia\j and \JLaconia\j, the Spartans fielded professional hoplites, year-round infantry not subject to the normal restrictions that free agriculture placed on yeomanry in infantry battle. The Spartan King Agesilaus once asked his allied Peloponnesian army to stand up by profession - potters, smiths, carpenters, builders, and all the others.
At last only the minority of his Spartiates remained seated, those few who did nothing other than make war. 'You see, men', Agesilaus scoffed, 'how many more soldiers we send out to fight than you do,' \JPlutarch\j records that the Spartans could boast: 'Not by caring for the fields, but rather by caring for ourselves did we come to own those fields.'
Nor were the increasingly democratic Athenians comfortable to carry on simply with the traditional artificial collision between oligarchical, armoured farmers. In the wake of the Persian withdrawal (479 BC), \JAthens\j' fleet continued to increase.
Nurtured on the tribute of \Jvassal\j states in the Aegean, Athenian triremes were not mothballed, but became instead a 'benign' police force of sorts for her Greek subject allies overseas.
Like the Spartans, imperial \JAthens\j too saw little need to limit warfare to a single summer afternoon, or indeed, given the success of her evacuation before Xerxes and subsequent naval response, to risk at all her infantry in defence of the farmland of Attica.
Second, the success of the non-hoplite forces in the Persian wars left a marked impression on the Greeks. Ships, light-armed troops, and cavalry had been present in a variety of theatres and terrains, underscoring how vulnerable and how inadequate the hoplite phalanx might become before any adversary who was (wisely) unwilling to face it in a single pitched battle.
The problem for the Greek \Ipolis\i was not merely fielding such diverse contingents, but rather coping with the inevitable social challenges that the use of such forces posed. Give rowers, skirmishers, or cavalry, military importance and the old agrarian exclusivity of the \Ipolis\i - the very fabric and \Jideology\j of the Greek city-state - was compromised.
Farmers with heavy armour and spear no longer warranted privileged social and political status. As Aristotle once observed in his \IPolitics,\i 'In a \Ipolis,\i the ones who fight have the supreme power, and those who possess the armament are the citizens.'
The ensuing Peloponnesian War between \JAthens\j and Sparta was not decided in an afternoon, nor even in the space of a summer or two. The killing dragged on for twenty-seven years. It is easy to see why, Abandoning her countryside to Spartan invaders, \JAthens\j refused pitched battle with the crack hoplites of Sparta.
Of the hoplite farmers who were obliged to trek into the city walls, Thucydides movingly remarked. 'Most Athenians still lived on their farms with their families and households, and were consequently not at all inclined to move now, especially as they had only just restored their establishments after the Persian invasion. Deep was their discontent and unhappiness at leaving behind their homes.'
Instead \JAthens\j, once besieged, increasingly imported food and material into her port at \JPiraeus\j, all the while sending out her magnificent fleet to stabilize her maritime empire and to prevent Peloponnesian infiltrations.
Sparta, for her part, found the old strategy of ravaging cropland discomfitingly ineffective: her hoplites in Attica could neither draw the Athenian army out nor reduce the city economically. Consequently, both belligerents turned to a variety of secondary theatres throughout the Aegean world and Asia Minor.
In these latter proxy wars between 421 and 404 BC, \JAthens\j ironically used her hoplites in combined maritime operations, whereas Sparta and her allies in time developed a competent fleet. During the entire course of the Peloponnesian War there were not more than three or four battles of the old style. Mercenaries, light-armed skirmishers, sailors, and siege engineers filled the void.
All were expensive, and - disastrously for both sides - all apparently were incapable in themselves of ending an engagement decisively through the destruction or humiliation of an enemy's forces in the field.
Strategy became prominent, as the Athenians made inconsequential probes into Spartan territory and, most tragically, lost an entire expedition of forty thousand a thousand miles distant in repeated defeats before Syracuse in \JSicily\j (415-413 BC).
Thucydides summarized that novel Greek experience of outright military extermination. 'The Athenians', he wrote, 'were beaten in all areas and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were annihilated, as the saying goes, with a total annihilation, their fleet, their army - everything was annihilated, and few out of many returned home.'
Sparta, for her part, more pragmatically, systematically garrisoned Attica to encourage desertions and local disruptions in commerce, all the while applying steady pressure to pry away tribute-paying Athenian allies in the Aegean, the life-blood of the city's capital and military reserves.
No wonder that, after nearly three decades, at war's end in 404 BC \JAthens\j was left bankrupt, exhausted, and demoralized. But Sparta and her allies were in no position to assume lasting hegemony of \JGreece\j. In the detritus of the Peloponnesian War, agrarian fighting of the old \IPolis\i was ended, as warfare now meant expansion of conflict onto a variety of costly and deadly new horizons.
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"Greek Warfare: Into the Fourth Century",12,0,0,0
Fondness for the collision of infantry columns was not entirely forgotten in the next century. Despite attempts by modern scholars to detect tactical evolution in fourth-century BC hoplite phalanxes - reserves, feints, manoeuvre - crashes between columns in themselves really changed little, as the reactionary battles between hoplite dinosaurs at Nemea (394 BC), Coroneia (394 BC), Leuctra (371 BC) and Mantineia (362 BC) attest.
Indeed, even a hoplite at Leuctra (371 BC), supposedly the most revolutionary of fourth-century BC battles, would have felt at home - in armament, fighting practice, and spirit - among the ranks of his ancestors battling three hundred years earlier at Hysiae (669 BC).
And of the horrific old-style struggle between Spartan and Theban hoplites at the second battle of Coroneia, the contemporary witness Xenophon dryly concluded of its predictability, 'They collided, pushed, fought, killed, and died.'
What was transformed, and transformed very radically, was not battle, but war. Fighting now consisted of skirmishing, garrisoning high passes, mercenary raiding, marine assaults, sieges, and counter-fortifications.
Plunder and the search for captives reflected new economic realities, as war came to be a source of state capital, a line item on state budgets. And this confusion was as it should be, for once \JGreece\j re-entered the main fabric of Mediterranean history in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, its wonderful absurdity, the city-state - dominated by an exclusive trinity: small-holder food-producer/hoplite infantryman/maker of laws - was shown to be a \Iclosed\i system.
It had no will to assimilate non-landed wealth, gifted foreigners, and those who fought outside the agrarian phalanx. The \Jgenie\j was now out of the bottle: western warfare, created as a protective mechanism for their agrarian city-state, had entered a new, far more sophisticated, far more lethal phase, one divorced from social constraint, but still fuelled by the Greek genius for innovation and response.
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"Military Casualties in the Classical Age",13,0,0,0
The lethal effect of ancient weapons - the spear, sword, javelin, arrow, and sling - derived from their rapid rates of fire, their durability, and the ease with which they entered unprotected flesh. Until the late seventeenth century, for example, Near-Eastern archers were more deadly than European soldiers using \Jfirearms\j, and iron-tipped pikes were more likely to find and to penetrate their targets than early musketry.
Yet hoplite fatalities were usually only ten per cent of the total force assembled (fifteen per cent dead for the defeated, five per cent for the victors). The explanation rests with hoplite bronze armour.
Favoured over stronger, heavier iron because of its greater malleability, ease in casting, and resistance to rust, bronze armour offered a quarter to half an inch of protection. The impact energy required to pierce breast-plates and helmets made of this material - when worn by a man who was still on his feet - was beyond all ancient weaponry.
If an infantryman could stay standing in battle (with twenty-pound shield, thirty - to forty-pound breastplate, and ten to twenty pounds in his helmet, greaves, sword, and spear, often a difficult task), he rarely risked any grave wound to the head or the chest.
The great three-foot shield that he held above and in front of him often blunted a weapon's impact before it met metal. But casualties could result from attacks on exposed flesh, specifically the groin, and face, and to a lesser extent arms and legs.
Both poetry and Greek vase-painting seem to concentrate on just those targets. The downward thrust of the spear could sever a major artery, bleeding the hoplite to death in seconds, or at least opening a gaping flesh wound in the limbs, with the spectre of sepsis and infection.
Finally, repeated two-handed thrusts with a sword or the bronze butt-spike of a spear on a fallen warrior could tear through armour, as holes in surviving breastplates and helmets attest.
But the most significant cause of death was trampling. Most casualties on ancient battlefields probably resulted from compound fractures, as the skulls, chests, and limbs of fallen and stunned warriors were smashed underfoot by advancing and retreating infantry.
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"Greek Victories, the",14,0,0,0
In 499 BC \JAthens\j and Eretria gave support to Greek-speaking cities of Asia Minor in revolt against Persian rule, provoking the Persian king Darius I to send expeditionary forces into mainland \JGreece\j.
The Persians landed at Marathon, and could not advance by road to \JAthens\j, for the Athenians and their allies, holding the high ground, blocked the way. The Persians instead planned to send a strike-force against \JAthens\j by sea - with most of their cavalry and some infantry. The bulk of the Persian infantry attacked the Greeks to prevent them from returning to the defence of their city.
The outnumbered Greeks left their centre thin in order to match their line in length to the Persians', but they kept their wings deep. When they came within range of the archers in the advancing Persian line, the Greeks charged. They overwhelmed the Persian wings, made up mainly of conscripts, who fled towards their camp.
Instead of pursuing them, the Greek wings turned on the Persian centre, which crumbled. Only 192 Athenians died, but the Persians lost about 6,400: many drowned in the escape to the ships. Seven ships were captured. The Athenians marched back to their city in time to prevent the Persian strike-force from landing.
Ten years later Darius' son Xerxes led a second Persian invasion, one which needed to dispose of an allied Greek fleet by now at sea under the leadership of Themistocles of \JAthens\j. The Persians found the Greek fleet enclosed in narrow straits at the Athenian island of Salamis.
By night they blocked the entrances of both the eastern and western channels. Next day, as the main Persian force advanced into the neck of the eastern strait, the combined navies of \JAthens\j, her Peloponnesian allies, and Aegina and Megara, cities of the Saronic Gulf, attacked vigorously and broke the advancing line.
In the confines of the straits, the Persians could not take advantage of their superior numbers. They retreated after several hours of fighting and the loss of 200 ships. The Greeks had lost only 40.
Without their fleet, the invaders were cut off, but the Persian general Mardonius, occupying Thessaly, brought 25,000 Asian infantry and 5,000 Asian cavalry south in the spring.
His Greek allies, notably Thebes, supplied an additional 13,000 infantry and 5,000 horsemen. An army of more than 40,000 hoplites, supported by 70,000 light-armed troops, confronted them at \JPlataea\j.
After several days in which each side manoeuvred for position and harassed supply lines, Mardonius made an all-out assault. The gains of his cavalry in the early stages of the battle could not be sustained by his foot-soldiers, overwhelmed by heavy Spartan infantry. Only 3,000 of Mardonius' command survived the rout.
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"Cost of Naval Power, the",15,0,0,0
Military ships brought extraordinary advantages to the very few Greek city states, for example, \JAthens\j, \JCorinth\j, Syracuse, and Corcyra, wealthy and innovative enough to master their use. Triremes could transport and disembark hoplites behind enemy lines, and attack or protect trade as the situation required.
Rich but defenceless communities across the water, especially in the late fifth and fourth centuries BC, were raided, plundered, and sometimes conquered, their wealth extracted in the form of annual tribute. Yet social, financial, and technological considerations ensured that naval forces were subservient to infantry throughout all of Greek warfare.
In most Greek city-states, landed citizenry composed the prestigious ranks of the phalanx. The poor, relegated to skirmishing and missile-firing, remained on the peripheries.
However, when extensive navies were developed in the fifth century BC, freemen without property were recruited to row merchant vessels and triremes. The crews were often highly trained, dependable, and courageous, as the stunning Greek victory over the Persians at Salamis and the Greek dismantling of the overseas Persian empire in the following decades attest.
By the late fifth century BC \JAthens\j had more than 40,000 rowers in a fleet of more than 200 triremes. The poor of \JAthens\j gained enormous influence and steady pay from this naval expansion, and they expected to be better represented in the politics of the city-state. This tension at \JAthens\j evolved into radical democracy.
The abolition of the property qualification guaranteed civic participation for the \Ithetes,\i or landless sailors, an extension of the franchise bitterly resented by philosophical conservatives such as \JPlato\j and Aristotle, who saw the legacy of the Greek naval victory over the Persians at Salamis as the beginning of demagoguery, cultural degeneracy, and erosion of infantry morale.
Greek fleets were enormously expensive, and not at all subject to the agrarian constraints on landed expenditures. Pay, constant upkeep of the ships, and the construction of dockyards demanded that a Greek navy justify its existence by scouring out new sources of income.
However, commercial activity was antithetical to the original agrarian geneses of the \Ipolis,\i and few states could stand the burden of a navy. After the long tribulations and heavy expenditures of the Peloponnesian war and the dismantling of the Athenian empire no Greek \Ipolis\i resurrected a large fleet. The arming of ships, unlike citizen armies, required state spending, and represented the intrusion of government into a traditional private, civilian domain.
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"Xenophon: The Beginnings of Strategic Theory",16,0,0,0
The superiority of western military practice derives in part from its tradition of free speech, unbridled investigation, and continual controversy, relatively free from state \Jcensorship\j or religious stricture. The legacy of independent military science begins in \JGreece\j.
Agrarian hoplite thinking from the seventh to the fifth centuries BC had tended to stifle military innovation completely, but during the latter part of the fifth century warfare became more complicated, and the 'science' of killing soldiers in their thousands came into the mainstream of the Greek intellectual tradition.
Erosion of the old agrarian city-state in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War allowed a variety of new forces and technologies to emerge - all free from sanctimonious agricultural stricture. Logistics, encampment, siege-craft, and the permanent occupation and administration of captured land became part of Greek warfare.
Greek intellectual fervour in the late fifth century was dominated by philosophers and rhetoricians who were singularly pedagogical and utilitarian, seeking concretely to apply dialectic, language, and induction to practical topics: agriculture, medicine, natural science, politics - and, of course, war. Military affairs became a category of this systematized and rational approach to learning.
Xenophon (428-354 BC) offers the best example of battlefield experience mixed with philosophical training. In some sense, he stands as the founder of the military intellectual tradition in the West.
Veteran of a wide variety of campaigns and a follower of \JSocrates\j, Xenophon wrote handbooks such as \IThe Cavalry Commander\i and \IOn Horsemanship,\i and he discussed generalship, tactics, and strategy in his \IMemorabilia, Oeconomicus,\i and \IEducation of Cyrus.\i
The moral element is present throughout his work; criticism of current Greek warmaking is implicit; original and sometimes radical innovation advised. Xenophon himself was not widely read by the general public, but his work suggests that the topics he discusses were the rage in the fourth-century BC both for city-state leaders and for professional mercenary captains.
Xenophon's contemporary, the pragmatic \JAeneas\j the Tactician (c.360 BC), also left his mark. His \IMilitary Preparations,\i which according to tradition formed a vast work, is lost; but an extant chapter, \IHow to Survive Under Siege,\i covers everything from the mundane (passwords, reveille, codes, tunnelling, fire-signals) to the broader questions of how to employ mercenaries effectively, how to conduct sorties, and how to make and carry out plans of evacuation.
Unfortunately, almost all the later Greek military thinkers are mere names. Their numerous pragmatic treatments of phalanx tactics, ballistics, fortification, and siegecraft are now lost. However, they founded a vibrant body of practical, hands-on military research.
More pedantic writers on military theory followed during the Roman and medieval periods. For many, the Greek texts and Latin copies of Greek texts to which they had access were their closest personal experience of military planning and organization, and it is only in their scholarly tomes that any trace of most of the original Greek work now survives.
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"Gods and Heroes as Citizen Warriors",17,0,0,0
The exclusivity of hoplite warfare was reinforced within Greek society through an array of symbols, images, and rhetorical flourishes. Nearly every Greek temple, for example, cloaked mythical fighting in expressions of contemporary phalanx warfare.
Pedimental sculpture, friezes, and dedicatory statues were all media in which infantrymen appeared in the guise of demi-gods or Olympian deities. The same is true of Greek ceramic art: only rarely were archers or rowers depicted on vases.
Nearly all portrayals of epic heroes were translated into conventional hoplitic imagery, albeit with occasional licence to heroic nudity. Markets and stores similarly might offer sweeping panoramas such as the victory of Marathon, where the shopper was reminded of the prominent role of Athenian infantry.
Hoplites reappeared at panhellenic sanctuaries such as Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea; there the great majority of votive offerings comprised captured infantry arms and armour. Even a walk through the Greek countryside could present trophies of past battles, prominent displays in stone of captured hoplite weapons.
Almost all funeral orations focused on the infantry dead. Even at \JAthens\j, the most democratic and maritime of the city-states, orators through \Jmetaphor\j and explicit allusion often transformed the fallen warriors of the city-state - horsemen, skirmishers, rowers - into martyred hoplites. Drama and comedy also depicted battle scenarios with phalanx and hoplite, often disparaging all other modes of fighting.
The result was a veritable saturation of pictorial and verbal images that bombarded the Greek citizen each time he shopped, sacrificed, glanced at public monuments, picked up fine wares, went to the assembly, or sat in the theatre, reminding him constantly, continuously, that it was the phalanx, not the cavalry, not the fleet, not the rag-tag skirmisher, that preserved the Greek city-state.
Consequently, for nearly three centuries, the peculiar 'rules' of hoplite warfare, and its accompanying agrarian agenda, went largely unchallenged by the citizens of the Greek \Ipolis,\i landed and landless alike.
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"From Phalanx to Legion 350-250 BC",18,0,0,0
\BChapter 3 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
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"Greek Warfare: From Phalanx to Legion",19,0,0,0
The waning Greek city-states attempted valiantly - but more often tragically - to incorporate new methods of fighting, even though they were antithetical to the old amateur hoplite battle and the traditional etiquette of agrarian warfare. Nostalgia about the old ways continued, but political leaders were forced to confront the new military realities.
'Nothing', the orator Demosthenes warned his fourth-century BC audience of complacent Athenians, 'has been more revolutionized and improved than the art of war. I know that in the old times', he continued, 'the Spartans, like everyone else, would devote four or five months in the summer to invading and ravaging the enemy's territory with hoplites and citizen militia, and then would go home again.
And they were so old-fashioned - or such good citizens - that they never used money to buy advantage from anyone, but their fighting was fair and open.'
Social status was now largely divorced from the battlefield. Wealthy, middling, and poor Greeks could all ride horses, throw javelins, or wield spears, either as hired killers or as reluctant militiamen. The exclusive equation of farmer and infantryman disappeared.
Xenophon complained in his \IWays and Means\i that at \JAthens\j the phalanx was losing esteem by recruiting the city's resident aliens into the ranks of the infantry. 'The \Ipolis\i also would be helped', he advised, 'if our citizens served alongside one other, and no longer found themselves mixed together with Lydians, Phrygians, Syrians, and barbarians of every type, who form a large portion of our resident alien population.'
The chief problem in this expansive, brave new world of fourth-century BC Greek warfare was its cost. Torsion catapults, mercenary skirmishers, permanent navies, skilled archers, slingers, and stone-throwers, the ability to confront all sorts of military challenges at any time, required capital.
Yet, paradoxically, the move towards year-round confrontation in all theatres of the Mediterranean also ensured that the vital sources of Greek military revenue - commerce, agriculture, and calm in the countryside - would be continually disrupted.
\BWar Becomes Too Expensive\b
Many city states, then, found themselves in a dilemma: they could neither endure provocation and plundering of their territory, nor afford the necessary permanent force to ensure tranquillity. Xenophon saw that the complex warfare between the squabbling city-states had become too expensive for most \Ipolis\i treasuries, and so belligerency sometimes demanded a pragmatic, rather than a heroic, posture: 'Someone might ask me', he speculated, 'that even if a \Ipolis\i is wronged, should she then remain at peace with the aggressor? No, of course not. But I do say that we should have better luck against an enemy, if we first of all provoke no one by doing wrong ourselves.'
Few hoplite militias after the indecisive battle of Mantineia (362 BC, between Thebes and Sparta) fought decisive pitched engagements - and even then phalanx collision no longer determined the outcome of wars.
Indeed, the last hoplite standoff, between the Spartans and the Thebans at Mantineia, solved nothing: Xenophon claimed in the last pages of his history of \JGreece\j that after the battle 'neither side turned out to be any better off, to have any additional territory, any additional \Ipolis\i , or any more influence. In fact, even more confusion and disorder occurred in \JGreece\j after the battle than before'.
After all, once stripped of its surrounding and protective agrarian protocol, by itself the phalanx was tactically problematic: a clumsy instrument of pursuit, poorly adapted to destroy the increasingly multifarious forces in the field. If it could no longer achieve decisive results, other forces hired by the state could.
So the old set-piece battle was replaced by the daring and braggadocio of mercenary captains and itinerant condottieri, \Jbuccaneers\j who ignored the protocol of the old Greek city-states. Isocrates, a fourth-century BC Athenian orator, complained that his compatriots no longer selected military commanders from among their amateur politicians, but turned instead to shady professionals: 'The men whose advice we follow in areas of the greatest importance we do not elect to be our generals, as if we distrusted their intelligence.
But those whose advice no one would want either for his own business or for that of the \Ipolis\i , these we now send into the field with unchecked authority.' Employing alliance, counter-alliance, subterfuge, and plotting, the major players - \JAthens\j, Sparta, Thebes, \JArgos\j, \JCorinth\j, Thessaly, and \JSicily\j - used all forces at their disposal to maintain an exhausting, but nevertheless rough balance of power for the first half of the fourth century BC, all while apprehensively eyeing the new threat of Macedon to the north.
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"Greek Warfare: Phalanx Reinvented",20,0,0,0
Unfortunately for the Greek city-states, Philip II of Macedon was no mere hoplite battle-leader of the old style. Much less was he simply a crafty, underpowered brigand, who could carve out or extort a few years' hegemony over Greek communities.
Instead, meticulously, insidiously, for more than twenty years (359-338 BC) Philip crafted a grand new army, supplied, led, and organized quite differently from anything in past Greek practice.
To his phalanx (see \JMacedonian phalanx\j) of grim, professional 'foot-companions' \I(pezetairoi)\i - 'the biggest and strongest of all the Macedonians', according to a contemporary commentatary - Philip added the 'companion cavalry' \I(hetairoi),\i an elite body of aristocratic horsemen, heavily armoured on strong mounts.
Another contingent of infantry, with perhaps less armour, the 'shield bearers' (hypaspists), occupied the centre of the Macedonian line, beside the phalanx. The hypaspists were usually the first infantry forces to follow behind the cavalry onslaught, thereby providing a crucial link between the initial mounted attack and the subsequent follow-up by the phalanx proper.
Professional corps of light infantry, slingers, archers, and javelin men rounded out the composite army group, supplying both preliminary bombardment and crucial reserve support.
These Macedonian contingents were not a fragmentation of forces, but rather a diversification and sophistication in arms: they were a symphony, not a cacophony, of professionally equipped men. The phalanx was thoroughly rehabilitated by Philip, and it gained fresh importance; but with him the evolution away from its agrarian roots accelerated.
The fourth-century BC Athenian general Iphicrates had foreseen these multifaceted military innovations when, in typically Greek fashion, he compared the new army to a human organism: light-armed troops as hands, the cavalry as feet, the infantry phalanx proper as chest and breast-plate, and the general as head.
Philip's contribution to the history of western warfare was as much organizational as tactical. At first, the equipment and tactics of his Macedonian phalanx did not differ considerably from the traditional hoplite columns of the Greek city-states.
The spear (sarissa), for example, was retained, but it was lengthened from eight to nearly fourteen feet. It now required both hands for adequate control and handling. The round shield shrank, as greaves, most breastplates, and heavy head-gear were replaced with leather or composite materials, or abandoned.
But the central idea of the fighting mass remained predominant. Writing in the Roman era, the military theorist Onasander remarked of the Macedonian phalanx that 'the advancing formations appear more dangerous through the splendour of their equipment, and that terrible sight frightens the very souls of the enemy.'
Indeed, integrated with, and protected by, such variegated forces, Philip's phalanx of pike-men was both more lethal and more versatile than the traditional hoplite columns. Now the first five, not merely the initial three, ranks could strike at the enemy.
The second-century BC Greek historian Polybius knew that infantry who faced such a 'storm of spears' might have as many as ten iron points concentrated on each man. 'Nothing', Polybius simply concluded, 'can stand up to the phalanx. The Roman by himself with his sword can neither slash down nor break through the ten spears that all at once press against him.'
The men of the Macedonian phalanx, after all, could turn their attention exclusively to thrusting their dreadful spears, without the cumbersome weight of the old hoplite panoply, or the need to protect with an enormous shield their immediate comrades on the right.
Offence, pikes, and motion forward, now counted for everything; defence, large shields, and worry over covering neighbours meant little.
The Macedonians aimed at advance and annexation, not the preservation of their borders. Used with great precision and power, the new Macedonian phalanx usually delivered a knock-out blow, once the target had been sighted and then left vulnerable by the work of cavalry and ancillary contingents.
Hammer-like cavalry attacks battered the enemy back onto the clumsy mile-long anvil of the spear-bristling phalanx (although this infantry mass, as the Greek historian Polybius explained, always had to be careful to stay on 'clear ground, free of ditches, ravines, trees, ridges, and water courses, all of which can stop and break up such a formation').
Such co-ordination between infantry and horsemen was an entirely new development in the history of western warfare, far beyond the tactical capacity or vision of even the most militarily innovative fourth-century BC Greeks.
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"Macedonian Mastery",21,0,0,0
Philip also brought to western warfare an entirely new \Jideology\j of battle. True, the actual stand-up fighting still involved frontal assaults and so continued to be every bit as gallant as in the old Greek phalanxes of the past.
The running collision of massed infantry, the spear-tip to the face of the enemy, were still the preferred creed of any Macedonian phalangite who lined up in column. But war-making had become much more than personal courage, nerve, and physical strength.
Nor did the grim-faced Macedonians just kill for territorial gain. Rather, battle was designed predominantly as an instrument of ambitious state policy. Philip's destructive mechanism for conquest and annexation was radical source of social unrest and cultural upheaval, not a conservative Greek institution to preserve the existing agrarian community.
His men, too, were a completely different breed from the hoplites of the past. In his comedy \Iphilip\i , the playwright Mnesimachus (c.350 BC) makes his characteristic Macedonian phalangites boast:
Do you know against what type of men you'll have to fight?
We dine on sharpened swords,
and drink down blazing torches as our wine.
Then for dessert they bring us broken Cretan darts
and splintered pike shafts. Our pillows are shields
and breastplates, and beside our feet lie bows and slings.
We crown ourselves with catapult garlands.
Philip's known hostility towards independent city-states composed of yeoman hoplites explains his exaggerated portrayal in the conservative fourth-century BC oratory of the Greek \Ipolis.\i
Demosthenes described him as a limping, one-eyed monster 'so fond of danger...that in order to make his empire greater, he has been wounded in every part of his body whilst fighting his enemies' - a terrible superman who would fight at any time, in any and all manners. Demosthenes warned the Athenians:
You hear that Philip marches unchecked not because he leads a phalanx of hoplites, but rather because he is accompanied by skirmishers, cavalry, archers, mercenaries, and similar troops.
When relying on these forces, he attacks a people that is at odds with itself, and when through distrust no one goes forth to fight for his country, he next brings up his artillery and lays siege. I need hardly tell you that Philip makes no difference between summer and winter, and has no season set apart for inaction.
At Chaeroneia (338 BC) Philip and his eighteen-year-old son Alexander shattered the phalanx of the Thebans and Athenians, and with it they broke the national resistance of \JGreece\j. Beware of attributing the causes of that watershed victory to superior Macedonian technology, skill, or tactical innovation alone: it was the panic and collapse of the advancing, wild-eyed Athenians on the left that fatally weakened the cohesion of the Greek line.
The Athenian infantry nearly swarmed through the ranks of the Macedonians, as their allied Thebans across the plain on the right wing held out stubbornly against the attack of the young mounted Alexander.
In contrast, Macedonian discipline, superb \Jintegration\j of horse and infantry-man, complete battlefield command and control of all contingents - rather than the lengths of their pikes or Philip's feigned withdrawal - explain the Northerners' triumph.
In the battle's aftermath the Thebans lay annihilated on the field. The elite corps, their 'Sacred Band' of 150 pairs of homosexual lovers, had gone down like some magnificent wounded stag, later to be interred under the stone lion, which still stands beside the modern roadway. Of the slain Athenians at Chaeroneia, the last generation of free hoplite infantry, a poignant epitaph recorded:
Time, the all-surveying deity of all kinds of affairs
Be a messenger to all men of our sufferings
How striving to save the sacred land of \JGreece\j
We died on the famed plains of \JBoeotia\j.
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"Alexander the Great (Warfare)",22,0,0,0
From the experience of the battles of Marathon and \JPlataea\j (see \JGreek Warfare: East Meets West\j), the Greeks had known that \JPersia\j was vulnerable. In 401 BC, the gallant '10,000', a Greek mercenary force hired by Cyrus II to reclaim the throne of \JPersia\j, discovered the same, though forced to retreat after the death of their employer at the battle of Cunaxa.
The Spartans sent to drive the Persians out of Asia Minor in the 390s BC found that Greek infantry could experience little difficulty in breaking apart any infantry corps the Persians might field. Ironically, the chief worry for a Greek expeditionary army in the East was facing the ubiquitous Persian-bought, mercenary hoplites from their own country.
For example, on his return from a visit to Asia (367 BC), Antiochus, the ambassador of a Greek city-state, scoffed that he had seen the Persian king's, 'bakers, cooks, wine-pourers, and door-keepers in vast numbers, but as for men of the type who could fight with Greeks, he had looked carefully, but could not find any.'
Conquest in the East, then, had been in the mind of some Greeks for generations. After all, the enormous wealth of the Persian empire was especially tempting to Greek politicians, given their own growing economic difficulties, and the accelerating erosion of imperial control across the Aegean in Asia. But the trick had always been to give up the old idea of a hoplite militia, devising in its place a logistical system and a loyal, unified army from all Greek city-states, a social and military amalgam that could be supplied over the great distances, whilst confronting a variety of enemy troops, on any terrain.
For just that reason, the fourth-century BC Spartan king, Agesilaus, was supposed to have deplored the continual infighting of the Greeks while their enemy, the Persians, remained unattacked: 'If we are to continue to destroy those Greeks we find at fault, we had better be careful that we still have enough men to conqueror the Barbarians.'
After the assassination of Philip (336 BC), the twenty-year-old Alexander began his deceased father's planned Persian invasion with a victory at the Granicus River near the \JHellespont\j (334 BC). No 'typical' Alexandrian battle exists; no exact blueprint explains the young general's tactical victories. But in his first savage onslaught at the Granicus, Alexander established a pattern that was to distinguish his next three major battle triumphs: at Issus (333 BC), Gaugamela (331 BC), and the Hydaspes (326 BC).
The pattern consisted of: (1) brilliant adaptation to local, often unfavourable, terrain (all his battles were fought on or near rivers); (2) generalship, by several frightful examples of personal - always nearly fatal - courage at the head of the companion cavalry; (3) stunning cavalry charges focused on a concentrated spot in the enemy line that aimed to turn the dazed enemy onto the spears of the advancing phalanx; (4) the assignment of specialized units for initial feints or to fill in sudden trouble-spots; and (5) the subsequent pursuit or destruction of enemy forces in the field, reflecting Alexander's impulse to eliminate, not merely to defeat, hostile armies.
At the Granicus, for example, Alexander shrugged off the ostensible disadvantage in crossing the swollen stream, once he discovered that the Persians had unwisely placed light cavalry in front of their Greek mercenary phalanx. He focused on the left-centre of their line for his main strike.
To prevent the enemy from massing at just that point of attack, Alexander dispatched an initial - sacrificial - Macedonian cavalry charge further to the left of the Persian line, where the enemy instinctively, mistakenly, sent reinforcements. Suddenly, Alexander himself emerged out of the Granicus, driving on an oblique onslaught of heavy horsemen.
The enemy cavalry reeled, then slowly gave way in the ferocious melee. \JPlutarch\j relates that in the hand-to-hand fighting Alexander nearly perished, his gaudy shield and white plume drawing the fire of numerous missiles. A javelin caught in his breastplate; a battle-axe nearly cleaved his helmet.
Immediately, the Macedonian phalanx and hypaspists came on, ploughing into the water, clambering up the banks, demolishing - as pike-carrying columns historically do - the confused enemy cavalry. With the Persian cavalry front shattered, the enemy Greek phalanx in the rear was quickly encircled by the left and right wing of the victorious Macedonian horse.
It only remained to channel the doomed Hellenic mercenaries into the advancing infantry. The entire mass of hired Greeks either perished or surrendered. Less than 200 Macedonians fell; perhaps 10,000 Persians and Greek mercenaries died. No wonder Alexander's Macedonians - nobles, peasants, and thugs alike - would follow a commander like this deep into the rich interior of Asia.
Yet dramatic as these battlefield masterpieces were, decisive as his 'battle strategy' of seeking out enemy forces rather than mere territory was, major pitched confrontation still totalled no more than a week's work out of nearly 3,600 days of constant campaigning. And so it is wise to remember as well the less heralded sieges, marches, and skirmishes, operations that were equally a part of the Macedonians' remarkable decade-long destruction of Asian civilization.
The personal courage of Alexander, including his magnificent - nearly suicidal - dives into the enemy line is rather deceptive: far from being a hothead, he was a calculating, master logistician. With an uncanny skill at recruiting innovative engineers, efficient quartermasters, and sound strategists, Alexander essentially invented the main disciplines of western military organization, and so systematically, methodically, dismantled the empire to the east.
Macedonians, unlike earlier Greeks or contemporary Persians, usually carried their own provisions and equipment. There was no long baggage train of wagons, women, and livestock. 'When Philip organized his first army', wrote Frontinus, the Roman military compiler, 400 years later, 'he ordered that no one was to use a wagon.
The horsemen he allowed one servant each, but for the infantry he permitted for every ten men one attendant only, who was charged with carrying milling equipment and ropes. When the army went out during the summer, each man was ordered to carry thirty days' provisions on his back.'
Usually, local officials were forced to supply caches of food in advance, allowing Alexander's sleek army to hop from one depot to another. 'Philip', wrote the military rhetorician Polyaenus of the Roman era, 'made the Macedonians march 300 stadia [about 34 miles], bearing their arms, and carrying as well helmets, greaves, spears, provisions, and their daily utensils.'
Without reconnaissance and promised food, there was simply no campaign. The enormous apparatus of travelling markets was inimical to the Macedonian's prime directive of speed, rapid onslaught, and decisive quick blows. In short, the Macedonian army travelled in exactly the same manner in which it attacked.
This same logistical organization of war was, ironically, also applied to sedentary operations; bureaucratization was clearly evident in the Macedonian mastery of \Ipoliorcetics\i or '\Ipolis\i-works'. Alexander stormed three great cities: \JHalicarnassus\j (334 BC), Tyre (332 BC), and Gaza (332 BC).
All these citadels were thought to be nearly impregnable; all were reduced by \Jengineering\j mastery, patience, and use of missile-troops, naval contingents, and innovative artillery. Likewise, he conducted a number of smaller raiding and punishment expeditions against irregular contingents of mountaineers and mounted rebels in the mountains of \JBactria\j, Scythia, and \JAfghanistan\j.
In these campaigns, he organized a series of frontier forts from which heavier armed Macedonian cavalry could sortie out, holding the insurrection at bay until Alexander, through cash and promises of allegiance, could buy off rebellious satraps on the fringe of the Persian empire.
Such versatility, although reminiscent of the march of the desperate Ten Thousand through \JPersia\j seventy-five years earlier (see \JAlexander the Great (Warfare)\j), was beyond the resources and imagination of any Greek \Ipolis\i of the previous two centuries.
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"Alexander's Legacy (Warfare)",23,0,0,0
When Alexander died, an exhausted alcoholic of 33, in 323 BC, the lands he had inherited and conquered were divided among the senior Macedonian commanders in the field and back at home in \JGreece\j.
Very quickly the old-guard generals, Perdiccas, Craterus, and Eumenes, were eliminated and instead spheres of influence were tentatively allotted to the other surviving underlings: Antipater controlled Macedonia and \JGreece\j; Ptolemy received \JEgypt\j; Antigonus occupied Asia Minor; Seleucus inherited \JMesopotamia\j and the East as far as India; Lysimachus retained Thrace and the lands around the Black Sea.
Seleucus' subsequent victory at Ipsus (301 BC) over Antigonus proved that no lesser individual would inherit Alexander's legacy and so, for the next century and a half, rival Macedonian dynasts fought a series of inconclusive wars throughout the Greek and Asiatic world in futile attempts to reconstitute Alexander's brief empire.
For the military historian the battles of the 'Successors' exercise an undeniable fascination: pikes lengthen to more than 20 feet, elephants make routine appearances, enormous and garish siege-engines assault cities. The treasures and other capital that flowed from the disruption of Persian hegemony made an arms race inevitable.
Once unlimited money was devoted to war-making, and the technical and philosophical genius of the Greeks was applied to the new military science, organized killing became a Greek art form in itself. Throughout the Hellenistic period, continual technological sophistication refined both fortification and artillery, while ongoing debate redefined the proper role of the phalanx.
In both cases, tradition always yielded to innovation. When Antigonus Gonatas (320-239 BC), for example, was asked how one should attack the enemy, he simply gave the utilitarian reply, 'In any way that seems useful.'
Nothing could ever match the sheer terror of a Macedonian phalanx. The Roman general Aemilius Paulus, who faced phalangites at Pydna in 168 BC, was left with a life-long image of terror: 'He considered the formidable appearance of their front, bristling with arms, and was taken with fear and alarm,' says \JPlutarch\j: 'nothing he had ever seen before was its equal.
Much later he often used to recall that sight and his own reaction to it.' Nor could any enemy neglect the wide arsenal - heavy and light cavalry, light infantry, skirmishers, slingers, bowmen, and elephants - that megalomaniac Hellenistic commanders theoretically might bring onto the battlefield. Nevertheless, there were inherent weaknesses in Hellenistic military practice on both a tactical and a strategic level.
By the third century BC, most phalangites were exclusively hired mercenaries. Gone was any vestigial sense of agrarian solidarity and elan of the old Greek armies. King \JPyrrhus\j of the Epirus (d.272 BC), for example, reportedly told his officers, 'You pick out the big men; I will make them brave.' But unlike the lean forces of Philip and Alexander of even a few decades past, these much larger hired forces of the Successors required enormous non-combatant support: baggage carriers, engineers, wives, children, slaves, and markets.
Such logistical and social dependence was often only haphazard and inefficiently organized. This relative sloppiness limited both the range and strategic options of large Hellenistic armies, as the occupation and control of conquered ground was increasingly a question only of cash, not of national interest, courage, or the patriotism of local citizenry. Much less was there to be lasting loyalty to either an idea or a man.
More important, the phalanx itself had grown unwieldy when heavy pikes approached twenty or more feet in length - an armchair tactician's fascinating nightmare. But the tradition of cavalry symphony under Alexander was neglected at just the period when cumbersome Macedonian infantry needed even greater \Jintegration\j; its flanks more, not less, protection by horsemen.
Elephants and local mercenary cavalry were not the answer, as the successor generals simplistically tried to match the lost genius of Alexander with bought manpower and brute force of arms.
Increased power without grace simply made the phalanx more vulnerable than ever: 'The Macedonian formation' wrote Polybius 'is sometimes of little use, and at others of none whatsoever, since a phalangite is unable to operate either in smaller units or by himself - while the Roman formation is especially well rounded.'
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"Roman Warfare: Legionary Genesis",24,0,0,0
The emerging Roman way of war thus stood in stark contrast to the chaos of the Hellenistic military style. On a tactical level, the parochial Romans for centuries on the Italian peninsula had incorporated the old Etruscan phalanx, an institution itself borrowed from the Greeks.
Indeed, throughout its later history \JRome\j retained a fascination with the phalanx, at times under duress bunching its legions together to seek the greater thrust of massed columns. But mobility and fluidity, not naked force, and the short sword, not the pike, gave new-found lethality to Roman infantry.
In comparing legion with phalanx, Polybius simply concluded: 'The Roman legionary is adaptable to any place at any time and for any purpose'.
It is difficult to talk in any meaningful way of the 'Roman army'. After all, the Roman military evolved steadily over nearly a millennium, from an instrument of republican government in the fourth century BC to authoritarian \Jimperialism\j eight centuries later; from a nucleus of Italian yeomanry to hired professionals drawn from the entire Mediterranean.
The genesis of the legion, however, occurred in \JItaly\j during the fourth and third centuries BC. The limitations of the Roman phalanx were ever more apparent as \JRome\j slowly expanded through the Italian peninsula, finding a need to adapt its forces to a wide variety of different armies to its north, east, and south.
As an example of the scope of Roman campaigning, and the wide-ranging experiences of her legionaries, Livy reports the often quoted example of the Roman citizen-soldier Spurius Ligustinus.
In his twenty-two-year career in the army (200-168 BC), the fifty-year-old recruit, father of eight, fought against Macedonian phalanxes in \JGreece\j, battled in \JSpain\j, returned to \JGreece\j to fight the Aetolians, then was back on duty in \JItaly\j, and then off again to \JSpain\j.
'On four occasions within a few years'. Spurius claimed in Livy's highly rhetorical account, 'I was chief centurion. Thirty-four times I was commended for bravery by my commanders; I received six civic crowns (for saving the life of a fellow soldier).'
The columnar formation of the Roman phalanx was gradually broken up into smaller tactical units, called maniples ('handfuls').
In line with this new move to quickness and fluidity, Roman infantrymen abandoned the spear and large round shield in favour of the curved, rectangular \Iscutum,\i the throwing-javelin \I(pilum),\i and the short, double-edged thrusting sword \I(gladius)\i - 'excellent for thrusting, both of its edges cutting effectively, as the blade is very strong and firm', said Polybius.
By the second century BC when the Romans met the Hellenistic Greeks, a legion of men like Spurius was composed of about 4,200 infantry and 300 cavalry, divided into three successive lines of ten maniples, each maniple separated from its like counterpart by about the width of its own formation.
So the ten independent maniples of each line - at least before they crashed against the enemy - had free space on both sides, as well as to the front and rear. On an organizational level, Roman infantry were recruited into the legion by 'centuries', groups of about sixty to seventy Italian farmers led by a skilled centurion.
Two centuries fought together in a maniple, one stacked behind the other. In conventional Roman battlefield order \I(triplex acies),\i imagine three successive lines of stacked infantry rectangles, a mile - or two-long checkerboard \I(quincunx),\i each maniple positioned in the gap of the line ahead.
After initial skirmishing between light-armed troops and horsemen \I(velites),\i the first line of ten maniples, the so-called \Ihastati\i (anachronistically called 'spearmen'), approached to within about fifty to a hundred yards of the enemy, then ran and flung their javelins when about thirty yards distant.
With sword and shield, the \Ihastati\i followed their missiles and banged into the stunned enemy line, searching for pockets of collapsed men whom their \Ipila\i had just wounded or disarmed. The initial aerial barrage of \Ipila\i achieved about the same terror as the traditional collision of hoplite spears, but the shorter \Igladius\i allowed the pikeless legionary far greater manoeuvrability to get inside the enemy formation with his sword, and to carve at exposed limbs.
At this point, the second line of Roman swordsmen, the \Iprincipes\i ('leaders'), followed up. They either pushed their advancing \Ihastati\i on through the opponents' line, or - if the enemy proved formidable - served as a separate reserve, a second wave, battering the enemy with a fresh assault of more slashing and thrusting blades, as the exhausted first line of \Ihastati\i retreated back through the gaps in their own advancing maniples.
This second line of \Iprincipes,\i the most rugged and skilled swordsmen of the legion, usually broke the enemy's cohesion. But failing that, the third and last manipular row, the \Itriarii\i ('third-liners'), were waiting to the rear on their knees, covering with shields, spears extended.
Rock-like, these ten maniples were on the look-out for any wavering of the first two lines, giving rise to the dire proverb 'matters have come down to the \Itriarii.\i If the legion was in real trouble, desperate maniples of defeated and dejected \Ihastati\i and \Iprincipes\i could separate from each other to filter back through these protective rectangles of \Itriarii\i to the palisaded camp - 'a resting-place for the victor, a refuge for the loser'.
More often, however, given the frequency of Roman legionary success, in the swell of victory, the \Itriarii\i also advanced cautiously, and applied the \Icoup de grace\i to any battlefield stragglers or crumbling formations, the enemy now seeing with the greatest terror that a new line suddenly had risen up with increased numbers'. As with the phalanx, auxiliary cavalry and light-armed allies covered the flanks.
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"Roman Legion: An Army for All Seasons",25,0,0,0
Obviously, the key to the legion's early success was co-ordination and adaptability, all made possible by reserves and the sheer diversity of forces \IPila\i gave Roman infantry an offensive reach unknown to a phalanx, its deadly shower of javelins superior in lethality to the slinger's projectiles or the archer's arrows.
Once inside the stunned enemy mass, the \Igladius\i could make short work of phalangites, and the tall, ovoid \Iscutum\i was handy for pushing in the manner of the phalanx, if maniples - once bunched together at impact - needed group thrusting power to break the solid enemy line. Spearmen to the rear prevented collapse. In a pinch, they could overwhelm confused and disorganized opposition.
On a tactical level, time and space were well under control in the hands of subordinate officers, military men of education and training who could co-ordinate the waves of their three assaulting lines, arranging the thirty maniples of each legion to achieve either greater density or flexibility along the line as the situation required.
And with so many smaller and mobile units, real articulation became possible. Holding actions in the middle, flank attack, feints, retreats, and encirclements were all tactical options. At the most extreme, all maniples of the legion could coalesce horizontally, their three lines joined vertically as well, the legion now forming an enormous quasi-phalanx to achieve greater striking power through accumulated, pushing shields.
Flat, unbroken terrain was not, as in the case of the phalanx, so absolutely crucial to legion cohesion, since maniples could just as easily create distance between one another, in order to advance around obstacles. Indeed, rough ground that might thwart a clumsier enemy column was often welcomed.
Consequently, the great variety of Roman weaponry and potential formations facilitated prompt response against tactical challenges of almost any armed enemy.
Only two environments proved lethal to a Roman legion. First, under \Ino\i circumstance must it become caught on narrow, flat terrain so that it might find itself - as happened at Cannae (see \JBattle of Cannae 216 BC\j) - trapped and squeezed between flanking enemy pincers. In these natural or man-made valleys and canyons, maniples had no chance to flow independently, but rather tended to conglomerate.
And with no room to the side, individual legionaries lost their open space and the crucial ability to use their swords with advantage. Instead, like underpowered phalangites, they were funnelled \Ien masse\i against columns of heavier enemy spearmen, legionaries waiting in line as it were, helpless to prevent their predictable annihilation at the fore.
Just as fatal was the situation of nearly the opposite degree: unending and open treeless plains. With no real heavy cavalry and unreliable light horse. Roman legions might then become swallowed up by the sheer expanse of the terrain, harassed and goaded endlessly by mounted nomads and archers, who could not be caught, much less targeted by the maniples.
Under those conditions - Crassus at Carrhae (53 BC) provides a good example - \Jextinction\j by endless aerial bombardment was slower than pulverization before a column, but just as ineluctable.
The legion, then, represented the perfect culmination of existing western military prowess. Drawing on an early Greek battle tradition of shock and decisive confrontation, coupled with the Macedonian legacy of \Jintegration\j and diversity of force, the pragmatic Romans achieved a marvellous balance between power and grace.
With the aid of their unmatched and elaborate governmental organization, and the capital of an expanding market economy, Romans surrounded the legionary with a rich \Jinfrastructure\j of war-making - roads, camps, hospitals, arms and armour, support services, pensions, salaries, medical corps, officers - and so crafted warfare as an enormous bureaucratic enterprise, its legions designed, if need be, to cope with challenges far beyond the boundaries of \JItaly\j.
That their creation lasted for half a millenium is a testament to the vision and imagination of the last generation of the Roman republic.
#
"Macedonian Phalanx",26,0,0,0
Macedonian shields were less than two feet in diameter, about a foot smaller than the hoplite version, and hung from the neck. This allowed infantrymen to hold a massive pike with both hands, and crowd closer to each other.
Usually, each soldier in rank had three feet in which to manoeuvre. Standard column depth was usually either eight or sixteen shields. The hoplite's cumbersome equipment put a high price on mutual protection, but Macedonians opted strictly for offence. The key to staying alive was not their equipment (reduced in size and weight considerably), nor comrades to their right.
Rather, safety lay in the vast array of spears that kept any enemy from breaking into the ranks. The Macedonian phalanx was a more vulnerable formation than its Greek predecessor, but it had far more offensive power.
The first five rows of pikes all reached targets in the initial collision, their wall of jostling spears harpooning attackers, and - like bristles - bouncing back the pressure of the enemy advance. Men in the middle and rear, too, kept busy, warding off arrows with raised pikes, stabbing the enemy wounded on the ground with their butt-spikes, pushing on with their shoulders into the men ahead.
Accidental casualties from a swarm of bobbing spear-butts in the faces of the men behind must have been severe. And at the front of the killing, as Livy saw when he wrote that each Roman was targeted by ten pikes, the 'demand' of the crowded spearheads was greater than the 'supply' of available enemy targets, so it became crucial for each Macedonian pikeman to keep his weapon level, jabbing back and forth to occupy critical empty space should an attacker try to find a wedge between the tips.
Exhaustion came in minutes, given the weight of the pike and the pressure of the pushing ranks. Few soldiers had any idea whom or how many - if any - of their opponents they had in fact speared. Success was gauged simply by motion forward, defeat felt through stasis and paralysis reverberating in a growing panic back through the ranks.
If a row of pikes went down, if enemy swordsmen were catapulted into the interior, or, worse, crashed in from the naked sides of the phalanx, disaster was immediate, death assured. The secondary dagger - as ridiculously small as the pike was absurdly big - offered little protection for the Macedonian.
And the pike itself was, of course, impossible to wield against the face of an immediate intruder. But for the phalangite to throw the spear down, to run unheroically to the rear, would only open the breach even wider; while ignominious flight was impossible anyway given the compression of bodies.
Once inside the columns, enemy swordsmen carved at the bellies, groins, and limbs of stunned and trapped phalangites with abandon, until the entire mass of the phalanx simply disintegrated, men frozen, trying to hold their pikes firm as they were in fact disembowelled.
The phalangite often had little warning of his approaching extermination. After all, his sense of battle depended primarily on touch, feel, pressure, as well as shouts and rumour, for a sea of dust, blood, and whirling bodies soon blinded the interior and prevented accurate vision or acoustics.
Yet if brave men could just keep their pikes intact as a group, spear-tips wall-like in unison, whilst their comrades to the rear pushed them on, then the butchery was all on the other side.
Indeed, once phalanx momentum was achieved and the pikes began their advance, nothing could withstand the terrifying force of oncoming Greek iron.
Imagine the enemy unfortunates simply shredded by repeated stabbing. The chief problem for the victorious executioners was to keep spearheads free of the debris of ruined enemy equipment and the weight of mutilated corpses.
No wonder, for this horrific phalanx-killing, that it was not sleek youth, not elegant muscle, that a commander sought, but stout, grubby old veterans, with the nerve and experience not to flinch from the task at hand.
#
"Ships of the Hellenistic Age",27,0,0,0
In the Hellenistic period, ostentation and gigantism dominated the design of military equipment, and ships as well grew to enormous size. By the late fourth century BC quinqueremes (ships with five banks of oars) were common, and we even hear of seven-, eight-, all the way up to forty-oared ships, where two or three banks of rowers might be made up of anywhere from two to ten men sharing an oar.
These frightening, and thus prestigious, dreadnoughts were almost worthless in combined operations, and valuable only for massive sea battles in enclosed harbours or for attacking the seaward side of peninsular fortifications.
Almost simultaneous with this move to enormous battleships, a far more effective trend developed in exactly the opposite direction. Lighter craft manned by pairs of only fifty oarsmen or fewer, the so-called 'sharks' and 'one-and-a-halfs' (ships relying on both sail and oarsmen, with a portion of the crew doubling as infantry boarders), proved far more versatile in pursuing the Mediterranean's pirates and in protecting merchant ships.
Centres of seaborne commerce, such as the island of Rhodes, effectively mastered hybrid designs that allowed oarsmen to become marines as occasion demanded.
In the general stalemate of the Hellenistic period before the coming of \JRome\j, small island polities could thus protect themselves from pirates and would-be tyrants by their versatile fleets, and so they often carved out lucrative autonomies.
#
"Battle of Cannae 216 BC",28,0,0,0
For two millennia, no battle has exerted such a narcotic spell on western military thinking as Cannae, the Carthaginians' most devastating victory during Hannibal's invasion of \JItaly\j (218-203 BC). Century after century military theorists and military planners who want to understand how it is possible to encircle and destroy entire armies have studied this battle intently.
The fascination with Cannae lies in the annihilation of the enemy through a single hammer-like stroke. It was accomplished by the masterful diversity of Hannibal's tactics, his deft use of incongruous light-armed soldiers, horsemen, missile troops, and infantry from all over the Mediterranean world, and by his daring decision to weaken the centre of his outnumbered army, so that his wings might then lengthen and swallow the stunned Romans.
After a series of disastrous and cumulative defeats at Ticinus (218 BC), Trebia (218 BC), and Trasimene (217 BC), the Roman senate desperately searched for ways to extinguish Hannibal before northern and western Europeans and local Italians - flocked to his army. But the Romans now faced an anomaly in their military experience, an authentic tactical genius whose use of ambush, ruse, and simple battlefield articulation could nullify in a single afternoon all \JRome\j's numerical and organizational superiority.
Worse, Hannibal had little respect for legionary repute, but instead was one of the few foreigners in the entire history of the ancient world who actually welcomed a frontal assault against western armies. Hannibal wanted to break Roman legions outright in the field, as part of his plan to discredit the notion of Roman military invincibility and so systematically uncouple the Italian allies.
On the morning of the battle, the Romans unwisely - and uncharacteristically - sought to stack their maniples deep, almost phalanx-like, on the narrow plain of Cannae, hoping on this occasion that the sheer force of their enormous army (80,000 men) might simply drive through the Carthaginian centre.
Shell-shocked after a string of defeats, Roman commanders gambled that this time overwhelming force could not be finessed by mere military profundity.
In short, Cannae was an abject reversal of the usual military paradigm of the ancient world: now a western army outnumbered its foe, relying on unintelligently deployed, but savage power - the non-western enemy in contrast seeking protection for its outnumbered forces by co-ordination and strategy.
Hannibal adapted his battle plan brilliantly - and precisely - to facilitate the brutishness of Roman tactics. He and his brother Mago stationed themselves with suspect Gauls and Spaniards right at the acme of the Roman attack, hoping their presence could steady their unreliable troops long enough to conduct a gradual withdrawal, to backpedal slowly, sucking in the oncoming Roman weight.
The key for Hannibal and his allies was to survive long enough to allow the Carthaginian infantry on the wings, and cavalry streaking to rear and sides, to enclose the enormous legionary mass, thereby deflating its forward pressure before it blew away the core of their army.
Charges by Hannibal's horsemen at the flanks and at the back, a barrage of missiles from all sides, and the sheer confusion of seeing enemies in all directions stalled the Roman advance just in time. The planned envelopment was soon completed, as Hannibal's thin wall of North African and European irregulars held tight a surging throng of Roman infantry.
With the Romans' forward assault nullified - legionary cohesion collapsed into terror. Eighty thousand men were surrounded, a trapped, but formidable and extremely well-armed beast, itself larger than nearly all the cities of the time in \JItaly\j. Most, hemmed in by their own comrades, were unable even to get at the enemy to use their weapons.
For the rest of that August day Cannae became an abject slaughter, a battlefield Armageddon unrivalled until the twentieth century. The destruction of some 50,000 snared Italians in a single afternoon - more than 100 men killed each minute - was in itself a vast problem in the logistics of killing.
Our written sources (Appian, Livy, \JPlutarch\j, and Polybius) depicted the long afternoon as horrific butchery. Never had so many Romans - consuls, ex-consuls, quaestors, tribunes (after the battle Hannibal would collect their gold rings by the bushel) - been trapped on the battlefield with no chance of escape.
In the dust of thousands of shod feet on the summer plain, in the continual shower of missiles on the stationary target, with thousands of plumed legionary heads bobbing in the strong summer winds, no wonder Appian recorded that the Romans simply 'could not see the enemy'.
Nor could they hear amid the wild shrieking of wounded men within and the cacophony of dozens of strange dialects without.
To have any notion of what it was like for the Romans, we must examine briefly the postmortem accounts of the battle. Livy says that corpses were discovered 'with their heads buried in the earth.
Apparently they had dug holes for themselves and then, by smothering their mouths in the dirt, had choked themselves to death.' Yet, he also records examples of extraordinary Roman courage, of a Numidian who had been brought alive out of the pile from beneath a dead Roman legionary, his ears and nose gnawed away by the raging Roman infantryman who had lost the use of everything but his teeth - and his will to resist.
Hannibal, in the ancient tradition of victorious military commanders, grandly inspected the battlefield dead. He was said to have been shocked at the sheer carnage - even as he gave his surviving troops free rein to loot the corpses and execute the wounded. (The August heat made it imperative to strip promptly the bloated bodies and dispose quickly of the stinking flesh.)
All this, however, was an eerie premonition of Hannibal's own impending catastrophe. Fourteen years later at Zama (202 BC), another young military prodigy, this time a Roman, Scipio, would create a ring of his own around the Carthaginians, manned by the Roman orphans of Cannae, and kill 20,000 Carthaginians in the process.
#
"Roman Way of War 250 BC-AD 300",29,0,0,0
\BChapter 4 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
#
"Roman Way of War",30,0,0,0
Incredibly enough, in the third century AD, \JRome\j expanded simultaneously eastwards against the Greeks and Macedonians and west and south against \JCarthage\j, the great commercial and military power that had grown out of a \JPhoenician\j colony in present-day \JTunisia\j.
The three Punic wars (264-241 BC, for \JSicily\j; 218-201 BC, for \JItaly\j and \JSpain\j; and 149-146 BC, for \JCarthage\j itself) were a struggle for the central Mediterranean which culminated in the abject destruction of \JCarthage\j.
Throughout these conflicts, superior Roman military organization and \Jinfrastructure\j repeatedly demonstrated that the smallholders who made up the legions - as long as they fought in or near \JItaly\j - could overcome poor generalship and poor tactics, winning wars even when they lost major battles.
\BThe Emergence Of A Mediterranean Army\b
By the late second and early first century BC, however, the Roman military faced a dilemma: overseas expansion was outstripping traditional military capability. Near-constant fighting to the north and west against the Germanic tribes (the Cimbri and Ambrones, 113-102 BC), to the south against the African Jugurtha in \JNumidia\j (112-106 BC), and to the east against Mithridates of the Black Sea region (96-82 BC) demanded either restructuring of the republican legions or the cessation of further such intervention altogether.
Roman campaigning now typically spanned the entire Mediterranean and the whole year, with little chance for legionaries to return home and farm after a series of summer battles. Garrisoning walls, forts, harbours, and entire frontiers required permanent, professional troops who could master skills beyond those of mere battlefield combat, such as construction, siegecraft, and local policing.
The historian Tacitus later remarked of legionary activity on the German frontier in the early first century AD: 'They complained about the difficulty of the work, and particularly about building ramparts, digging ditches, foraging, collecting lumber and firewood, and all the other camp tasks that are either necessary or else invented to keep the men busy.'
Often, the legions would be called on to create real \Jinfrastructure\j in the provinces from virtually nothing.
Of their later activity as permanent garrison troops in \JEgypt\j, an anonymous Roman historian of the fourth century AD observed: 'There are still to be viewed in very many parts of the Egyptian cities, public works of the emperor Probus [AD 276-82], which he had constructed by military labour...He built bridges, temples, porticoes, and basilicas, all by the labour of the soldiers, and he dredged many river-mouths, drained a large number of marshes and converted this into good agricultural land.'
If Roman soldiers were to take on the combined roles of professional killers, construction workers, and occupational guards, they needed a much higher degree of training and organization.
In short, by the late republican era the whole centuries-long tradition of amateur Roman yeoman farmers providing their own arms and armour, organized by region, and led by local officers, had become completely inadequate.
Native smallholders suffered enormously in the third and second centuries BC during the extended military absences from their farms, and yet continual overseas Roman annexation - the fruit of the legionaries own labours - led to massive importation into \JItaly\j of non-landed capital such as slaves, cash, food, and luxury items.
This plunder usually accrued to the already affluent Roman senatorial and equestrian elites, men who increasingly invested their profits in larger, more specialized, and often absentee estates: prestigious Italian manors now worked by slave gangs and managed by bailiffs.
In this circular, cause-and-effect relationship, the rise of corporate agriculture \I(latifundia),\i financed by expropriated foreign capital, led to a gradual depopulation of the Italian countryside - the very recruitment ground of the old Roman army whose manpower had secured overseas lucre in the first place.
Appian, a Roman historian of the second century AD, gave a rhetorical, but accurate, portrayal of the dilemma of the late republic. The wealthy, he claimed: were obtaining possession of the greater part of the undistributed lands. Emboldened by the lapse of time to believe that they would never be dispossessed, absorbing any adjacent strips and their poor neighbours' allotments, partly by purchase under persuasion, partly by force, they came to cultivate vast tracts instead of single estates, using slaves as workers and herdsmen, lest free labourers be recruited into the army.
At the same time, the ownership of slaves brought them great gain from the number of their offspring, who in turn multiplied because they were exempt from military service. So, certain powerful men became extremely rich and the group of servile workers grew throughout the country, all the while the Italian people dwindled in numbers and strength, being oppressed by poverty, taxes, and military service.
And if any small farmers had respite from such evils, they spent their time in idleness, because the land was held by the rich, who employed slaves as their cultivators instead of free men.
This paradox somewhat resembled that facing the mature Greek city-states of the fourth century BC, when a high profile in the Mediterranean had exposed the limitations of the conventional Greek idea of restricting citizenship to its local farmers, of constructing war solely around a dominant infantry of landed yeomanry.
True, the move to a professional legion and a cosmopolitan nation of assimilated peoples was a prerequisite for the sophisticated economic and military conduct of Roman \Jimperialism\j: but it predictably also spelled the end of the old insular Roman agricultural state, the fountainhead of all Roman military and civic tradition.
And in an even larger sense, this socio-military predicament has plagued the West repeatedly ever since: the success of dynamic armies abroad calls into question - and sometimes undermines - the ideological and political premises of the established social order at home.
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"Marius, Gaius and the Roman Legionary",31,0,0,0
The final transition in the Roman military from yeoman infantryman to professional legionary is well illustrated by the career of the Roman general Gaius Marius (157-86 BC). During the pursuit of Jugurtha (107-105 BC) in North Africa, Marius apparently bypassed the property qualification for Roman infantry service and, in a quest for greater manpower, equipped his legions at state expense.
He also gradually normalized a sixteen-year, rather than an indefinite, term of service. Now military recruitment of Roman citizens, as in the Hellenistic army, was to be largely separated from status or wealth. This ensured a much larger pool of potential soldiers, an army that could look exclusively to the 'government' for both its livelihood and its retirement.
Consequently, a professional legionary ostensibly welcomed, rather than disdained, continued 'work' overseas in the legions. Vegetius remarked that recruits now needed only 'keen eyes, an erect head, broad chest, muscular shoulders, strong arms, long fingers, modest belly, thin buttocks, and tough, not fat, calves'.
But Marius also set a dangerous precedent in curtailing the agrarian tradition of Roman amateur militias. Professional armies - as subsequent centuries attest - could easily transfer their 'state' allegiance to the particular general who led them, who distributed their pay, who provided their equipment, who allowed them to plunder, and (above all) who pledged them retirement benefits.
Demobilization during peace soon did not mean a return to agricultural work for growing hordes of Romans, but instead no work at all and the spectre of urban unemployment and sure impoverishment. Instead of a shared rural background, much less a belief in protecting the territory of \JItaly\j, the common bond in the legions became simply the job itself - and the accompanying baser desires for cash, glory, and adventure.
The emperor Severus Alexander (AD 222-35) supposedly summed up later Roman legionary \Jideology\j: 'One should not fear the soldier provided he is properly clothed and well armed, and has a stout pair of boots, a full belly, and something in his money belt.'
To meet new military challenges in various terrains and local environments, Marius also inaugurated a series of overdue (in the strictly military sense) logistical and tactical reforms. Cohorts (usually formed of about 480 men, three times larger than the maniple of about 160) gradually evolved as the fundamental tactical unit of the legion, which was thus largely now to be defined as ten cohorts of 4,800 soldiers.
In the past, a cohort had been not much more than a loosely defined administrative organization of three distinct maniples, each drawn from the three lines of the \Itriplex acies.\i After Marius's reforms, however, each cohort became in some sense a mini-legion in its own right, a real fighting formation, not a mere rubric for recruitment and record-keeping.
Its three maniples coalesced one behind another, or side by side, and so fought as a single mass: the old first-line \Ihastati,\i the second-row \Iprincipes,\i and the rearward \Itriarii\i each giving up one maniple to be integrated together into the new cohort. In turn, individual cohorts, not maniples, now reconstituted the new \Itriplex acies,\i four in front, three in the middle and three to the rear.
With this newly constructed cohort, the ten (rather than the previous thirty) tactical segments of the legions were both more powerful and more versatile. They were better able to concentrate on specific points in the enemy line.
Legionary reformation ensured greater flexibility, and so a Roman general did not necessarily need to follow the standard triple (and predictable) sequence of assault throughout the entire legion, but instead could diversify his attack, by directing cohorts to the wings and rear where they could proceed with a phased charge on their own.
And legionary commanders could now have much more confidence that such independently operating corps would not, as in the case of the older and smaller maniples, be isolated and overwhelmed at one stroke.
In line with this growing military sophistication, Marius tried to standardize in every respect the newly professional legions. Men (now dubbed 'Marius's mules') were to carry their own equipment and arms.
Like Philip's Macedonian phalangites more than two centuries earlier, legionaries marched several miles daily, independent of auxiliary food and baggage support. More important still the skirmishers (the \Ivelites:\i the Roman poor armed with a rag-tag assortment of light armament), were given standard gear and brought into the formal apparatus of the legion; any non-legionary light and missile troops, when needed, were now to be composed exclusively of allies.
In this move towards cohesion and uniformity, the third-rank \Itriarii\i also gave up their \Ihasta\i (lance) and were issued the standard sword \I(gladius)\i and javelin \I(pilum).\i The latter weapon took on increased military efficacy when Marius had one of the rivets connecting its iron head to the shaft replaced by a wooden pin.
Now the javelin simply broke or was unusable once it hit either the ground or its target, preventing enemy troops from picking it up and hurling it back. The first-century AD historian Valerius Maximus credits Marius with introducing uniform methods of weapon handling and technique:
No general before him had done this, but he summoned the masters of the \Jgladiators\j from Gaius Aurelius Scaurus' school and introduced to our legions a more accurate way of parrying and inflicting blows. He consequently produced a combination of courage and skill in such a way that the one reinforced the other, with courage supplementing skill with all its zeal, and skill teaching courage how to safeguard itself.
In a more symbolic gesture, though one emblematic of the entire transformation of the Roman army, Marius reconstituted the legionary standards, uniformly giving primacy to the martial eagle \I(aquila),\i abolishing the old agricultural banners of the wolf, horse, boar and \Jminotaur\j - confirming, in other words, the mercenary rather than the agrarian nature of the new legions.
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"Roman Warfare: Rise of the Hired Armies",32,0,0,0
Sulla, a junior officer under Marius in the war against Jugurtha, combined with his old mentor (and now bitter rival) in bringing to an end the so-called Social War (90-89 BC) against \JRome\j's allied Italian states (the \Isocii),\i who now received formal rights of Roman citizenship, with equal opportunity to join the Roman army.
The prestige of that successful campaign, and the growing practice of allotting the newly professional legions to an individual general for foreign commands, gave Sulla enormous influence and an army of thousands loyal not to the senate, but to his own person.
From 88 BC until his death in 78 BC. Sulla systematically devastated much of \JGreece\j and Asia Minor and, with six legions, marched on \JRome\j itself in order to destroy popular domestic opposition to traditional aristocratic interests.
Consequently, thanks to both Marius and Sulla, by the seventies of the first century BC the Roman army had become both entirely professional and firmly embedded within domestic politics. This dangerous combination would remain mostly unchanged for the next 500 years.
Both the military advantages and predictable drawbacks of such a transformation emerged in a series of subsequent challenges to Roman rule by rebellious legions under Sertorius in \JSpain\j (80-72 BC).
Slave uprisings led by \JSpartacus\j (73-71 BC) and the activities of freelance pirates (67 BC) called for extraordinary measures, as did renewed assaults by Mithridates in Asia (74-63 BC), and the final conquest of Gaul (58-51 BC).
In each theatre, Roman military prowess - essentially the professionalism and training of the legions - overcame numerical superiority, tactical cunning, and a wide array of difficult terrains.
Only Crassus's unfortunate and unwise move against the \JParthians\j ended in disaster at Carrhae (53 BC) - a catastrophe not repeated until the slaughter of Varus's legions (AD 9) in the forests of \JGermany\j.
In the near-constant fighting of the first century BC, whether Roman soldiers battled against trained \Jgladiators\j, rebel legionaries, seaborne mercenaries, eastern phalangites, or northern European tribal irregulars, the result was almost always the same: eventual battlefield victory, slaughter of enemy combatants, absolute elimination of gifted adversaries.
Yet paradoxically, the prestige and plunder that accrued from the skill and constancy of the Roman soldier in these decades did not enhance the republican government, much less the individual legionary himself.
Instead, generals like Metellus, Lucullus, Pompey, Julius Caesar, and Crassus used their provincial commands to extort state capital, which in turn subsidized their growing private armies, and thus ensured their own further consolidation of personal power.
The relative success of each of these grandees depended solely on his own degree of military acumen and his relative daring in subverting entirely any vestigial republican notion of public service, which might check military command and the appropriation of foreign capital.
Thus three centuries of continual Roman military advancement culminated in the first century BC with a military apparatus that steam-rollered both foreign and domestic opposition. After gobbling up most of the Mediterranean, the legions proceeded to devour the very constitution that had spawned them.
The two decades that followed Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC saw legion pitted against legion in almost continuous fighting. It is difficult to detect qualitative military superiority among the respective armies of Caesar, Pompey, and their successors; although the veterans of Caesar's harsh campaigns in Gaul (58-51 BC) perhaps proved the most seasoned (if not the most spirited).
His battle-hardened corps of staff officers and legionaries contributed mightily to the string of infantry victories at Pharsalus in \JGreece\j (48 BC, over Pompey), Zela in Anatolia (site of Caesar's famous claim: 'Came, Saw, Conquered' in 47 BC, when he overcame Pharnaces, son of Mithridates), Thapsus in Tunisa (46 BC, over generals who had followed the now-dead Pompey), and Munda (45 BC, in \JSpain\j, where he destroyed the last resistance of Pompey's partisans).
Yet Caesar's victory proved only temporary: after the dictator's assassination in 44 BC the killing continued in a renewed round of fighting between the next generation of Pompey's surviving offspring and Caesar's heir and eventual winner, Octavian, who assumed the title Augustus Caesar in 27 BC, the first Roman emperor.
Military success in the civil wars usually centred on logistics, recruitment and political propaganda, and thus ultimately hinged on control of the largest reservoir of capital. In this sense, Octavian, more than any other contemporary usurper, realized the importance of the psychological element, the value of championing traditional (and mostly lost) Roman values in \JItaly\j in an effort to depict his adversaries as enemies of the Roman order and thuggish collaborators with foreign dynasts attempting to undermine the Italian state.
The result was that eventually the Roman aristocracy, and especially the recently enriched commercial interests, welcomed Octavian's steady pragmatism and so lent him their support. His partisans saw correctly that, of the entire confused pantheon of would-be tyrants, Octavian was the most successful and single-minded in his effort to consolidate financial support, muster armies, and end the last vestiges of republicanism.
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"Augustus and the Bureaucracy of War",33,0,0,0
On his accession to imperial power, the newly proclaimed Augustus was beset with an array of military problems that went far beyond the slaughter and financial exhaustion of two decades of war. The fractious Roman army needed to be regrouped under a central command and paid regularly through state funds. But throughout the preceding century, generals had found that surrendering their legionary commands to the government meant an end to their ambitions and often exile or proscription.
Therefore, in a series of complex legislative manoeuvres, Augustus nominally gave power to a newly constituted, hand-picked senate from which he in turn received consulships, tribunal power, and provincial command. The legions now swore personal fealty to Augustus himself, and therein ostensibly expressed their loyalty to the Roman state.
Thus the military-political problem abated, but it was never really solved: future \Jbuccaneers\j would still battle their way to \JRome\j, gain governmental 'authorization', and then get their hands on state treasuries to pay their troops for support, ratified by the personal oaths of legionaries in the ranks.
The historian Dio Cassius (c. AD 230) described the ultimate and logical development of the new system. On the death of the emperor Pertinax in AD 193: there ensued a most disgraceful business and one unworthy of \JRome\j. For just as if it had been in some market or auction room, both the city and the entire empire were auctioned off.
The sellers were the ones who had killed their emperor, and the would-be buyers were Sulpicianus and Julianus who gradually raised their bids to 20,000 sesterces per soldier...Sulpicianus would have been the first to name the figure 20,000, had not Julianus raised his bid no longer by a small amount, but by 5,000 at one time, shouting it in a loud voice, and also indicating the amount with his fingers.
So the soldiers, captivated by the extravagant bid and at the same time fearing that Sulpicianus might avenge Pertinax - an idea Julianus put into their heads - received Julianus and declared him emperor.
The exorbitant cost of bribing the legions, continues Dio Cassius, meant that 'it was impossible to give them their pay in full in addition to the donatives they were receiving - and impossible not to give it.'
Under Augustus, the enormous resources of the Roman principate and its ever masterful system of judicial and civil administration ensured a quick return to an overwhelming military presence after the devastation of the civil wars.
For the next two centuries the army deployed roughly twenty-five to thirty legions, some 125,000-150,000 legionaries, on constant garrison duty in the provinces, supported by perhaps another 350,000-375,000 cavalry, light-armed troops, and infantry irregulars, totalling perhaps a half million paid soldiers under arms. From Scotland to \JSyria\j they dressed alike, marched in the same way, and defended similar walls.
However all this created a new, difficult, and ambiguous role for the enormous Roman imperial army, a problem quite separate from the legions' propensity to meddle in politics. Expansion was stopped in the north at the Rhine and the Danube, in the east with the annexation of Judaea (AD 6) and agreements with Parthia, and in the west with the pacification of \JSpain\j and Gaul, and an uneasy presence in Britain.
The formal incorporation of \JEgypt\j as an imperial province secured the coast of northern Africa. Consequently, the legions, especially in the east, turned from the aggressive warriors of the past three centuries into an enormous - and very expensive - police force. At Antioch, for example, the Roman rhetorician Fronto complained that the legionaries now 'spent their time applauding actors, and were more often in the nearest tavern than in the ranks.
Horses were shaggy from neglect, but every hair was plucked from their riders, a rare sight was a soldier with a hairy arm or leg.' The inevitable entropy that set in when troops were in the barracks, rather than on the move, undermined morale, as the legionaries, often with unofficial but numerous dependants, immersed themselves in local administration and frequent extortion.
Hadrian reportedly once concluded of this legionary dilemma simply that 'inactivity is fatal'. And letters from imperial soldiers sometimes reflected more the social than the bellicose aspects of Roman military service in the provinces:
Julianus Apollinarius to his father Sabenus, 26 March [AD 107]: Things are going well for me here, thanks to Sarapis. I got here quite safely, and although others the whole day long are gathering stones and are engaged on other tasks. I so far have suffered none of this. I asked Claudius Severus, the governor, to appoint me as a clerk on the governor's staff.
#
"Roman Army: Legions on the Frontier",34,0,0,0
Because of the vast size of the empire, regionalism also soon set in: the Roman professional army was as a whole multicultural, but more and more provincial legions might never see \JItaly\j or any other area of the empire. Thus, they recruited men and officers from local residents and sought stability within their own immediate domain.
This practice explains why later revolutionary insurrection usually originated on the frontier, and why the Romans for centuries remained reluctant to create a large central reserve that could marshal the empire's entire resources against a single flash-point.
Nevertheless, despite the increasing bureaucratization of daily garrison routine and the politicization of the army, despite the spectre of killing other Romans at a moment's notice, and despite the increasing obsession with pay and retirement, most of the legions themselves continued somehow to fight superbly on the battlefield during the first three centuries of the empire.
Josephus, the Jewish-Roman historian of the early first century AD, in a famous and often quoted observation, remarked of Roman battlefield superiority,
If one looks at the Roman military, it is seen that the Empire came into their hands as the result of their valour, not as a gift of fortune. For they do not wait for the outbreak of war to practise with weapons nor do they sit idle in peace mobilizing themselves only in time of need.
Instead, they seem to have been born with weapons in their hands; never do they take a break from training or wait for emergencies to arise...One would not be incorrect in saying that their manoeuvres are like bloodless battles, and their battles bloody manoeuvres.
Nearly four hundred years later, Vegetius, the fifth-century author of a manual on Roman military institutions, still saw such training and organization at the root of Roman battle success: 'Victory was granted not by mere numbers and innate courage, but by skill and training.
We see that the Roman people owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than military training, discipline in their camps, and practice in warfare.'
How did such skilled forces meet the challenges on the vast Roman frontier? What was the empire's strategy of defence, and the imperial policy towards client states and peoples on or at the border during the nearly five centuries of Roman defence until the fifth century AD?
Some historians have seen constant preparedness against foreign attack as an overreaction: simply men and material substituting for a sophisticated and flexible military strategy.
Others even interpret the half millennium of border service as one huge phony 'cold war', the existence of massive armies on the frontier no more than the exploitative arm of the Roman economy, the means to draw capital from foreign barbarians into the empire, while justifying their own increasing militarization of Latinized society.
Although there may never have been a formal Roman 'war college' of strategic planners, the threat of invasion was nevertheless real, the provisions for imperial defence intricate, and the deployment of soldiers and bases sophisticated.
From the end of the first century AD onwards, a succession of Roman emperors \Iwere\i military strategists and increasingly \Idid\i seek to envision one vast, but static, circuit of Roman civilization, within which all would possess citizenship and follow Roman custom and practice.
The strategy of the Julio-Claudian emperors (27 BC-AD 68) - acquiring client kings and taking punitive offensive action into hostile territory - gave way, beginning with \JVespasian\j (AD 69-79), to a more entrenched defence, a policy of avoiding expeditionary campaigning, one characterized more by permanent fortifications - walls, camps, and forts.
And after Diocletian (AD 284-305) instituted a programme of frontier construction, more mobile reserves finally appeared. Under Constantine and his successors, frontier ground could be ceded and re-acquired, as defence in depth, rather than adherence to a single - and increasingly expensive - line in the sand, made more and more sense.
In short, despite the interference by the legions in Roman politics, and despite the vast territory to be covered, the enormous taxes to be raised, the growing corruption and disorder inherent within permanent military garrisoning, the imperial legions for nearly five centuries managed to preserve the tradition of rigid discipline and sterling technology so characteristic of Graeco-Roman battlefield superiority.
Even in the eighth century the army of the East Roman (or Byzantine) empire, although now using the Greek language, still employed the commands and signals created to control 'Marius's mules' almost a thousand years before; while, in the West, \JRome\j's military legacy would prevail for a further eight hundred years.
#
"Cohort, the Rise of",35,0,0,0
After Marius's reform, the cohort, not the maniple, served as the chief tactical and administrative unit of the legion. Some idea of the Roman army's new organizational flexibility can be seen from the battle plan of Julius Caesar's early army in Gaul (58 BC).
Four legions (about 20,000 men) formed the corps of the army, flanked by 2,000 Spanish and Gallic cavalry on the wings, and 2,000-3,000 light-armed skirmishers and missile troops in the front. Legions drew up alongside one another, each arranged in the now familiar \Itriplex acies\i formation.
Four frontline cohorts of centuries eight men deep were followed by two consecutive lines of three cohorts each, with their centuries six men deep. Thus two eighty-man centuries stacked back-to-back formed a maniple, and three such maniples constituted each cohort of the legion.
All cohorts were armed identically with \Ipila,\i \Igladius\i and \Iscutum\i as the old \Itriarii\i essentially disappeared as a unique corps. Commanders now dealt with ten uniform and quite large companies (480 men to a cohort), which could be arranged in the familiar three-line order or formed in any manner a commander felt necessary given the terrain and nature of the enemy.
#
"Roman Infrastructure of War",36,0,0,0
Rome inherited the Greek genius for technology, military innovation and response, as well as the notion of decisive and heroic assault, and then applied to it standardization and bureaucratization through constant training and rigid discipline.
There had been, for example, no standard depth to a Hellenistic phalanx, no uniform chain of command, no regulation for recruitment, length of service, and retirement among the Greeks. Much less was there a system of military decorations, punishments, and rationale for military advancement through the ranks.
In contrast, in the Roman army, legions were generally kept at steady strength. Recruitment followed careful procedures governing civic and social status, health, height, and weight. Centurions, tribunes, and quaestors knew their precise role and limits of military responsibility.
Whether a Roman army fought on the Danube or in North Africa, its camp would be constructed about the same, the legionaries armed in roughly uniform arms and armour. Rations, mail service, sanitation - all the apparently inconsequential and often forgotten aspects of military life - were also carefully systematized and therefore usually ample.
Roman roads facilitated the easy transportation of even large armies; local port garrisons and a merchant marine assisted in lengthy sea transport.
Consequently, both planners at \JRome\j and commanders in the field had precise knowledge of the time, the expense, and the effort required for moving the legions throughout the provinces.
Such a vast supporting \Jinfrastructure\j naturally resulted in increased military efficacy. Most legionaries were better fed, better housed, better armed and indeed healthier, than almost all enemy troops, giving the legions qualitatively superior manpower at the instant of collision with almost any enemy in the Mediterranean world.
Such an omnipresent military foundation ensured that mere numbers of combatants were not paramount, as Caesar's remarkable victories over the numerically dominant armies he met in Gaul attest.
The psychological element proved crucial. Roman infantrymen always knew exactly the standard Roman sequence of battle, knew which troops were ahead of them, which to the rear, knew how they would attack, knew what advance or retreat meant to the overall outcome of the battle.
In addition, most Roman soldiers took for granted what and when they would eat, where they would sleep, and how they would be cared for should they fall sick, be wounded, or die.
The frightening look of naked Germans, the harsh snows of the northern frontier, the peculiar armament of African cavalry could not startle Roman armies, so confident were individual legionaries that their Roman way of war had prepared them in advance for all exigencies.
On a strategic level, bureaucratization also meant that individual setbacks rarely spelled theatre catastrophe. The bloodbath at Cannae (216 BC), the destruction of Varus in \JGermany\j (AD 9), even Crassus' disaster at Carrhae (53 BC), neither caused a collective loss of nerve nor extinguished Roman battle strength.
Instead, in the wake of horrific defeat, Roman war machinery instantly swung into operation, calling for new levies, gearing up armouries, reassigning trained veteran centurions to oversee new conscripts. Such efficiency almost always ensured that lapses in generalship - and there were many in the Roman army, given the political nature of such appointments - were not necessarily fatal.
Almost as if by automation, the centurion-based legions needed little direction from the top to feed and house themselves, to march in formation, to line up for battle.
Unfortunately, as the empire spread in the second and first centuries BC, lines of communication thinned and defence responsibilities grew, so that this \Jinfrastructure\j became nearly insupportable by the first century AD, and finally unsustainable by the third and fourth. Roman military systemization also became increasingly problematic once Italian manpower alone was unable to fill the ranks.
Non-Latin speakers were gradually recruited, and local practices applied to meet various regional needs throughout the Empire, resulting in an insidious, steady balkanization of the legions as a whole. Veterans needed cash and land when they retired. But on the cessation of Roman expansion in the early Empire, land became a finite commodity, one increasingly scarce after centuries of retirement grants to superannuated troops.
Road construction and upkeep were also expensive. Standing armies of professional legionaries, along with engineers, auxiliaries, and support personnel, demanded increased salaries to meet growing \Jinflation\j.
By the second and third centuries AD, the price of Roman defence was increased taxation levied on an already hard-pressed and diminishing rural populace. By the fourth and fifth centuries AD, the peasantry was completely exhausted, and the source of funding thus finally ran dry.
And so the once vast Roman machinery of war slowly ground to a halt, its visible \Jinfrastructure\j still intact, but its lifeblood of capital and manpower drained for good.
#
"On Roman Ramparts 300-1300",37,0,0,0
\BChapter 5 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
#
"Roman Military Strategy, Continuity of",38,0,0,0
From the reign of the emperor Diocletian (AD 285-305) until the development of \Jfirearms\j in the fourteenth century, the essentials of military organization, strategy, and tactics in Europe display a startling continuity. This reflects in part the enduring dominance of Roman military \Jtopography\j - the surviving \Jinfrastructure\j of fortified cities, fortresses, ports, and roads created in the third to fifth centuries.
After the gradual dissolution of imperial power in the western half of the empire during the fifth century, those responsible for military decision-making in \JRome\j's successor states had neither the inclination nor the resources to eliminate Roman walls. Like Byzantine emperors in the East, the Romano-German rulers differed little from the later Roman emperors in the means they used to control and make effective use of these assets.
Continuity also reflects the unchallenged superiority of ancient military science, which decision-makers could find in books such as Vegetius's \IConcerning Military Matters\i (see \JMilitary Tradition, Western\j) and the substantial contact between the West and Byzantium which stimulated the exchange and study of ancient military techniques.
#
"Roman Strategy, the Siege",39,0,0,0
Late Roman grand strategy revolved around holding the urban centres of administration, religious organization, manufacture, and population, which had been fortified or rebuilt in the wake of the invasions and civil wars of the third century.
This network of self-sustaining fortifications - the earliest example of a defence-in-depth strategy in the West - served two purposes. First, each stronghold sheltered mobile field forces which could threaten an invader's movement and lines of supply. Second, if an enemy chose to lay siege to one of the defended towns, it could become an anvil against which the main field army could crush the invader.
The quality of the Roman fortifications - and their strategic locations - made their capture very difficult. Large armies were required, well-supplied not only with siege machines but also with the means to maintain them while deployed in static encampments for months.
Attila's failed invasion of Gaul in 451 provides an excellent example of the success of \JRome\j's defence-in-depth strategy. For several months the \JHuns\j and their allies exhausted their resources in attacking fortified cities, enjoying only limited success despite the absence of a Roman relief force.
Then, while \JAttila\j besieged the city of Orleans, the Roman general Aetius approached with an army raised largely in Gaul. The \JHuns\j withdrew with the Romans in pursuit. At ChΓlons, half way across Gaul, \JAttila\j decided to stand and fight.
The Hunnic army was defeated. It retreated, without making any territorial conquests, much poorer in both men and treasure than when the campaign began.
This pattern of siege, relief (most sieges failed with or without a relief force), and either a battle or more likely a phased withdrawal by the besieging force, dominated western warfare for a thousand years.
The siege became by far the most common form of military encounter and the techniques and tactics of both defence and offence became widely disseminated. Flavius Merobaudes, a fifth-century Roman general and writer of Frankish origin, noted that the \JVisigoths\j had learned a great deal about the conduct of war during the two generations following their flight from their homeland beyond the Danube in 376.
According to Merobaudes, the 'Teutons' whom Caesar had fought possessed only a 'crude command of warfare and were inexperienced in its developed art', but the \JVisigoths\j were no longer 'a race from a barbarian land'.
They were 'enemies equal [to the Romans] in war' who had acquired the ability to defend the fortified towns of the Roman empire, and the citadels within them. Indeed, he claimed, they had even learned something of the art of constructing fortifications as well.
Increasing the size of the imperial army enabled the later Roman emperors to defend the massive stone fortifications that dotted the landscape, while maintaining a reserve of troops to meet any major invasion. Far more men served under arms during the later Roman empire than in the days of Julius Caesar and Augustus.
By AD 300 Diocletian commanded a regular army that numbered over 435,000 men and the combined forces for both the eastern and western divisions reached a peak of perhaps 645,000 around 430. In addition to 'Roman' military personnel, the various groups of Germans and other settlers within the western empire could also muster large military forces.
For example, the \JVisigoths\j, who were established in \JAquitaine\j by the imperial government, could mobilize some 20,000-25,000 men; so could the \JOstrogoths\j who came to dominate \JItaly\j under their king, Theodoric the Great (who also served as Roman governor of the region), the Vandals in north Africa, and the various Frankish rulers in Gaul whose combined forces matched those of the \JVisigoths\j in strength. Field armies were also quite large.
For example, the emperor Julian led an army of some 65,000 men on the Persian campaign of 357; Valens at the battle of Adrianople in 378 commanded a force of 30,000-40,000 men; and Aetius's army at ChΓlons, which was raised largely in Gaul, numbered between 40,000 and 50,000 men.
#
"Military Organization, Late Roman",40,0,0,0
The later Roman empire saw two major developments in military organization. While the army became integrated into the non-military institutions of society, largely as soldier-farmers but also as soldier-townsmen, the civilian population gradually became militarized.
The 'domestication' of the military was well in train by the late fourth century when the anonymous author of the \IHistoria Augusta\i quoted an edict issued by the emperor Severus Alexander (AD 222-35):
The lands taken from the enemy were presented to the leaders and soldiers of the auxiliary troops, with the provision that they should continue to belong to them only if their heirs entered military service, and that they should never belong to civilians, for he [the emperor] said that men serve with greater enthusiasm if they are defending their own lands...He added to these lands, of course, both animals and slaves, so that the soldiers would be able to cultivate what they had been given.
Soldiers became more like farmers, and civilians more like soldiers: in an act of 406, the emperor Honorius ordered that, 'Slaves shall offer themselves for war...Of course, we especially encourage the slaves belonging to men who are in the imperial armed service, and also the slaves of allies and of free foreigners, because it is clear that these slaves are making war alongside their owners.'
A generation later even free civilians who lacked any regular connection with the military were called up for local defence. In 440, neither Roman citizens nor the members of \Jguilds\j living in a city could be compelled to undertake regular military service in the field.
However, emperor Valentinian ordered that even these relatively privileged groups were liable for militia service, 'defending the walls and the gates of the city when necessity demanded'. Conscription as traditionally practised had by then ended in the western half of the Roman empire - presumably because sufficient forces could be recruited on a voluntary basis.
Even in the eastern half of the empire, armies comprised volunteers mustered for specific field operations, the personal armed followings of the generals, and foreigners recruited from beyond the frontiers as mercenaries (federates).
This major shift in imperial policy came about not only through the militarization of the civilian population but also by recruitment from outside the empire. Various groups from beyond - often far beyond - the imperial frontiers were encouraged to settle within the western part of the empire: Germans, Alans (a nomadic people from south \JRussia\j between the Don and the Dnieper), Sarmatians (a semi-nomadic or perhaps pastoral people from south Russia) and others provided military services in Britain, Gaul, \JItaly\j, and \JSpain\j during the later fourth and fifth centuries.
Normally, imperial officials provided these immigrants with homesteads and one third of the tax revenues, usually in places that had been deserted by their owners.
Thus, for example, Pactus Drepanius, a late fourth-century court poet, praised Theodosius I for his treaty of 383 which settled the \JVisigoths\j in Thrace because 'You received into your service \JGoths\j to provide soldiers for your army...and cultivators for the land.'
A more select group of fighting men served in the armed followings of the great men - high imperial officials, such as dukes and counts, as well as magnates with no specific governmental position.
Although from time to time the imperial government strove to limit those who might employ such an army, personal armed followings became ubiquitous in late Roman and medieval society.
The men who served in these units, whether in direct attendance upon their leader or in some form of encampment, were ostensibly professional fighting men, in contrast to the farmer-soldiers and urban militiamen who served on a part-time basis.
The Roman army in the West did not simply pack and leave when the formal organs of imperial conscription ceased to function in the middle of the fifth century. Indeed, early in the sixth century units identifiable by their uniforms and banners as 'Roman' still operated in the region west of OrlΘans, for example, under local political leadership.
But the rank and file of the erstwhile imperial military establishment, as well as the greater part of the fighting forces of the so-called 'barbarian' peoples, became absorbed into the military organization of the Romano-German kingdoms and over time the vast majority of their descendants - like those of the indigenous rural population, whether free or unfree - became farmer-soldiers.
The Visigothic kings of \JSpain\j, for example, called up laymen and \Jclergy\j, regardless of either social or legal status, for military service whenever they organized a major campaign, and also used slaves extensively in these efforts.
Roman settlers proved particularly important in the manning and commanding of Visigothic and Vandal naval operations, forming a crucial part of (for example) the Vandal expedition from north Africa that culminated in the sack of \JRome\j in 455.
Elsewhere, for offensive purposes, a select group of both rural and urban inhabitants - the 'select levy' - was required to perform military service beyond the demands of local defence in order to participate in extended offensive military operations. These soldiers, drawn from towns and villages, comprised the rank and file of field armies.
In the regular campaign armies of the Romano-German successor states, they served alongside the personal armed followers of the magnates, and especially those of the king. In Merovingian Gaul, and no doubt elsewhere, adult males also had to serve in a general levy for the defence of the region in which they lived.
This service was a 'public duty' from which neither the poor nor even the unfree dependents of ecclesiastical establishments enjoyed exemption, while the able-bodied inhabitants of the walled cities and fortified towns were required to man the defences, just as had been the case under imperial rule.
Any attempt to estimate the militarized rural population leaves much room for speculation since it depends in large part upon calculating the size of the able-bodied adult male population living in the countryside.
Thus, between one and two million males of fifteen to fifty-five years of age probably lived in sixth-century Gaul and were available for some type of service under arms. More accurate estimates can be advanced for the urban militias, however.
For example, approximately 100 walled towns can be identified in Gaul, with fortified perimeters averaging some 1,500 yards. Given the available technology, it required one man to defend approximately four feet of wall, and thus simply to defend the towns - let alone other smaller fortified centres - required an aggregate urban militia force in Gaul of approximately 100,000 men.
The great difficulties experienced by besieging forces in capturing the massively fortified cities of the former western empire indicates that urban militias were kept up to strength and in good fighting form.
Field armies could on occasion be large. For example, when in 585 King Guntram of Burgundy (561-92) set in motion both the standing army of his realm as well as almost all of his select militia in order to crush the usurper Gundovald, his army probably reached 20,000 men.
A generation earlier, the Ostrogothic kings in \JItaly\j frequently deployed forces in excess of 10,000 against the forces of the Byzantine empire in a war that lasted for more than two decades, while the Vandals in north Africa could on very short notice put 15,000 men into the field.
The Byzantines, by contrast, controlled much larger areas which on the whole were more densely populated than the Romano-German kingdoms.
Thus, the army of 52,000 which the eastern emperor Anastasius mustered for a war against \JPersia\j in 503 was surely consistent in order of magnitude with those led by his predecessors and, despite the plague epidemics which struck the empire intermittently during the next generation, the combined field armies of the emperor \JJustinian\j (527-65) probably approached the 170,000 men available for the defence of the same area a century before.
For example, during the 530s and 540s, Belisarius and Narses, two of Byzantium's most successful generals, commanded a series of armies averaging about 20,000 men. In the seventh century the reforms carried out in the wake of the Muslim invasions left the emperor with a field army based in and around Constantinople of about 25,000 men.
#
"Byzantine Armies",42,0,0,0
The Romano-German kingdoms established in Gaul, \JItaly\j, \JSpain\j, North Africa, and Britain during the fifth century engaged in intermittent warfare, prompting the Byzantine emperor \JJustinian\j to attempt to reassert direct imperial control over the western half of the empire. Byzantine plans for the reconquest of the West focused upon the fortified cities and towns of Africa, \JItaly\j, and \JSpain\j.
It was assumed at Constantinople that the Roman populations in these regions, far outnumbering their Vandal, Ostrogothic, and Visigothic rulers, would prefer to be reintegrated into the empire and would fight for the privilege.
It was believed that the urban militias, composed in large part of 'Romans', would overpower, where necessary, the German garrisons stationed within the walls and turn over their cities to the Byzantine armies as they approached.
Deprived of their military \Jinfrastructure\j, and cut off from their sources of supply, the forces which remained loyal to the German rulers would thus ostensibly become 'strangers' in their own kingdoms and would either have to fight the Byzantines in the open field or make some sort of accommodation.
At first Byzantium's strategy seemed to work well: when Belisarius defeated the Vandals at the battle of Tricameron (535) both king and kingdom fell into imperial hands and it proved unnecessary to mount elaborate sieges in order to reduce the many fortified cities of North Africa.
By contrast, the effort to impose direct imperial control in \JItaly\j involved a war of sieges during which, over twenty years, the Byzantines captured the major cities of \JItaly\j. However, gaining possession of the cities was not in the end sufficient.
Narses, Belisarius's successor, found it necessary to defeat the Ostrogothic army in a series of battles culminating in the Byzantine victory at Taginae in 552 where the greater part of the enemy force was annihilated. Thereafter Byzantine military efforts turned eastward to the Persian empire, which finally fell in 628.
#
"Muslim Conquest of Eastern Roman Empire",43,0,0,0
This century of warfare by Byzantium in both the West and the East, although successful, weakened the eastern empire dramatically and thus facilitated the Muslim conquest of much of the eastern Roman empire during the seventh and early eighth centuries.
The military map of western civilization was radically redrawn. The Byzantine state was irreparably weakened by the loss of its most populous and richest provinces: \JSyria\j, the Holy Land, and \JEgypt\j. It also lost North Africa and most of \JItaly\j, where the fruits of \JJustinian\j's reconquest soon dwindled to a few strategic locations in \JItaly\j.
In addition, the Visigothic kingdom in \JSpain\j was destroyed in 711 and replaced by a Muslim state, while southern Gaul was ravaged until the Carolingians, during the later eighth and early ninth centuries, extended their rule into \JAquitaine\j. They then pushed beyond the Elbe, conquered the Lombard kingdom of northern \JItaly\j, and advanced into \JSpain\j as far as \JBarcelona\j.
Western warfare for most of the seventh and early eighth centuries remained largely local. However, the Frankish leaders Charles Martel (d.742), Pepin (d.768), and Charlemagne (d.814) resuscitated central control of the military system in the West.
From time to time they and their successors tinkered with various aspects of it in order to better sustain lengthy operations far from home. The county (the \Icivitas\i of the Roman empire, not unlike the \Ipolis\i of classical Greece) continued under the military and civil administration of a count, and various formulae were developed by the central government to ensure sufficient forces.
The select levies provided the rank and file of Carolingian armies for offensive operations. Rich men owning twelve estates or more were required to muster with horse and armour. Men
owning five estates generally owed service on campaign, but with less armament.
Someone living close to the theatre of operations could be called up with only three or four manors; while landholders possessing as little as a half an estate were formed into partnerships with a total wealth of five estates and ordered to provide a soldier for the select levy.
Like their Merovingian predecessors, the Carolingians required all free men to take an oath of fidelity to the king and to be registered on the rolls of the county in which they lived. This was done not only to identify those eligible for service in the local defence forces and the select levy but also to gain direct central control of the many thousands of highly professionalized fighting men who served in the personal armed followings of the lay and secular magnates.
When it became clear, around 750, that many local leaders recruited unfree men for their retinues, the oath was demanded of all followers who had been honoured with 'vassal' status.
Charlemagne ruled a much larger area than the Byzantine state, now truncated by the Muslim conquests, and he could muster for simultaneous major campaigns perhaps 150,000 men, of whom at least 35,000 were heavily armed mounted troops.
Individual armies of 35,000 to 40,000, though hardly common, were not unknown. Charles Martel, Pepin, and Charlemagne, progressively projected larger and larger expeditionary forces further and further from their home bases.
By contrast, Charlemagne's grandsons Lothair I, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald, among whom the empire was divided in 843 by the treaty of \JVerdun\j, tended to deploy smaller armies numbering from 8,000 to 10,000 men in comparatively restricted theatres of operation.
Strategy in the Carolingian period centred on holding the cities already within the realm and acquiring those of neighbours. Thus Pepin I's conquest of \JAquitaine\j rested on his capture of Bourges in 762 and his adversaries' recognition of the effectiveness of his siege train.
The Lombard kingdom fell to Charlemagne when \JPavia\j surrendered after a lengthy siege in 774; and the Spanish march was established with the fall of \JBarcelona\j, after an investment lasting almost two years, in 801. Since fortified cities and their surrounding counties constituted the principal prizes, campaign strategy, and to a lesser extent battle tactics, recognized the need to minimize the destruction.
The strategic implications of these aims emerge clearly from Gregory of Tours' account of a putative conversation between the Gallo-Roman magnate Aridius and the Merovingian king Clovis (d.511) while the latter was laying siege to the massively fortified city of Avignon:
O king, if the glory of your highness deigns to hear from me a few words of humble advice...it will be useful to you in general and to the districts through which you intend to pass. Why...do you keep this army in the field when your enemy sits in this exceptionally strong place?
You depopulate the fields, you consume the meadows, you hack down the vines, you fell the olive trees, and all the fruits of this region you completely destroy. Yet you do not prevail against your enemy. Rather send an envoy to him and impose on him a yearly tribute that he will pay to you so that this region may be saved. You will be lord and the tribute will be paid perpetually.
The advice given by Aridius neatly encapsulates the differences between 'barbarian' warfare and the teachings of ancient military science. His advice echoed the views of Alexander the Great, who told his army as they entered Asia that 'they ought not destroy what they were fighting to possess.'
#
"Warfare: Western Europe (Ninth Century)",44,0,0,0
In the turbulent dissolution of the Carolingian empire, the roots of western Europe's emerging nation-states lay exposed to attack. The treaty of \JVerdun\j between Charlemagne's grandsons in 843 created the base for \JFrance\j and \JGermany\j, along with an indefensible middle kingdom stretching from Frisia to \JRome\j over which its neighbours to the east and west would fight for a thousand years.
England was forged in the crucible of the Viking invasions, and the various kingdoms on the Iberian peninsula gradually coalesced in a haphazard series of campaigns against the Muslims. Only \JItaly\j remained a mere geographical expression.
The western European states, as well as Byzantium, stood on the defensive. This created a wide variety of organizational problems. A society in offensive mode could muster its troops each year for the campaigning season and then send them home when operations had been completed.
In a defensive mode, by contrast, highly trained mobile troops needed to be mustered and ready to respond at all times. The means had to be found to maintain a constant state of readiness, and the economic advantages of a successful offensive posture were not available.
Resourceful leaders, however, found the means to spread the burdens and to build afresh on old defensive foundations. They refurbished Roman fortifications - and Roman ideas about defence - until the costs of a siege became prohibitive.
#
"Alfred the Great and Military Organization",45,0,0,0
Alfred the Great of \JWessex\j defended his realm against the Vikings with forces structured like those of the earlier Romano-German kingdoms (see \JWarfare: Romano-German Armies (Fifth Century)\j). A general levy manned local defence, while a select levy provided the rank and file of field armies, serving alongside an elite drawn from the retinues of military magnates, the nobles.
Alfred solved the problem of constant readiness for defence by dividing his select levies into two sections: one in the field, prepared for a rapid response to enemy attacks, and the second at home. These forces rotated regularly.
He apparently mobilized the personal armed followings of the magnates according to a similar pattern. Alfred also established a quota of paid garrison troops in each of the thirty-three burgs established for the defence of \JWessex\j.
These men served alongside the local inhabitants who were detailed to defend the town or stronghold in which they lived and shared responsibility for keeping the walls in repair.
In addition, local defence in rural areas continued to be sustained by the members of the general levy and of the select levy who were not on active service with the king.
This continuation of Romano-German military organization was common all over the medieval West.
The general population in arms provided the manpower for local defence; a selection of the more highly militarized civilian population formed the rank and file of the government's expeditionary forces; and the elite troops came largely from the personal armed followings of the more important lay and secular magnates, including the kings and their highest nobility.
In great empires and small states, these basic units of military organization remained constant down to the thirteenth century and sometimes beyond. Even the city-states of early Renaissance \JItaly\j had a select levy of fighting men for offensive operations and called upon able-bodied men to defend the state in a general levy; in Florence the upper limit stood at seventy years of age. City authorities mobilized men not only from within the urban precincts, but also from the countryside.
Alfred augmented his naval forces, by building special warships, in order to resist the Vikings on the sea as well as on land. Ships with sixty oars were the norm. He also accomplished considerable building, rebuilding, and repair of fortifications.
A document called the \IBurghal Hidage,\i drawn up in England at some point between 899 (when Alfred died) and 914 lists thirty-three fortifications. It provides a glimpse of the sophistication of \JAnglo-Saxon\j military administration. The perimeter defences of the thirty-three fortifications were measured or surveyed.
Then income-producing landed resources were listed and assessed so that the returns from one 'hide' of land - the amount of land required to support a family - went to maintain each member of the garrison. Each member in turn was required to defend and keep in repair one quarter-pole (4.25 feet) of the wall.
The high quality of this administrative work is illustrated, for example, at the old Roman city of Winchester where 2,400 hides were allocated for the support of the garrison required to defend a perimeter wall that measured 9,954 feet.
The margin of error in providing the resources to sustain a force of 2,400 fighting men was less than one per cent. The \IBurghal Hidage\i also suggests that the men who orchestrated \JAnglo-Saxon\j military policy possessed a well-developed sense of strategy.
This can best be illustrated on the ground itself. No burg was more than twenty miles - a day's march - from at least one other burg. Thus, relief forces and columns of supplies enjoyed the advantage of a defended line of march, since no unit en route from one burg to another had to encamp in the open at night where it might be surprised by an enemy attack.
In addition, units from one burg could be rapidly deployed to relieve forces at another nearby burg that came under siege.
King Henry the Fowler of \JGermany\j (d.936) also strove to build a coherent system of fortifications, endowed with regular garrisons and efficient supply based on service by landholders and a tax on their produce.
His endeavours bear more than a passing resemblance to those made slightly earlier in \JAnglo-Saxon\j England. According to the chronicler Widukind, Henry provided for the garrisoning of fortifications in \JSaxony\j by choosing:
One from every nine farmer-soldiers and requiring that they live in burgs in order to build small dwelling places [within the fortifications] for the other eight members of the unit and in order to receive a third part of their produce and keep it in the burg.
The eight men were to sow and to harvest the grain [from the land] of the ninth man [stationed in the burg].
Both the German and the English systems probably owed much to the Roman principle of defence in depth (see \JRoman Military Strategy, Continuity of\j), known from earlier unrecorded imitations of this model, from surviving records, or from its uninterrupted use in Byzantium.
#
"Byzantine Military Defence",46,0,0,0
The eastern Roman empire had to defend itself against \JArabs\j, Persians, \JKurds\j, Turks, and Khazars from the east. Its security, especially the security of its capital at Constantinople, depended, in large part, upon the effectiveness of the fleet.
The Byzantine navy was successful for four centuries in maintaining the empire's interests not only in the Mediterranean but also in the Black Sea and on the Danube. The standard Byzantine warship was the dromon, with two banks of rowers: 100 men, two men to a bench.
The bow of each dromon carried a syphon-like device that produced a spray of Greek fire at enemy ships. Hand-held weapons also sprayed Greek fire. Surviving descriptions of many devices are vague. One shot a package of small arrows which broke apart before reaching the enemy, perhaps like a modern cluster bomb.
Breakable containers, probably clay jugs, containing incendiaries were thrown onto the enemy ships. The 100 oarsmen on the dromon were also soldiers, expected to fight. The fifty men on the benches below deck had no armour but those above wore the finest, as did the 'marines' on deck.
In 911 and 949 the Byzantine fleet carried out substantial amphibious operations against the Muslim forces holding \JCrete\j, and finally regained the island in 961. In the eleventh century numerous attacks were launched against Muslim \JSicily\j.
In these operations the Byzantines demonstrated a consummate ability to ship horses over relatively long distances and land them in battle-ready condition. Towards the middle of the eleventh century, the Normans in southern \JItaly\j also learned their secrets of horse transport and ultimately passed this information along to Duke William, whose successful invasion of England in 1066 was made possible by horse transports of Byzantine design.
The Byzantines continually strove to improve their naval technology. For example, they pioneered skeletal construction of ships. Protecting military secrets was a high priority and their intelligence and counter-intelligence were well organized.
Due in part at least to the effectiveness of Byzantine security, the Muslims always lagged behind their Christian neighbours. The nomad horsemen of \JArabia\j lacked a naval tradition and so they used Christians, some of whom converted to \JIslam\j, to build and man their ships.
Some of the most important Muslim naval commanders, such as Leo of Tripoli and Damian of \JTarsus\j, were deserters from the Byzantine empire. However, by the second half of the eleventh century the fleet was in relative decline as the Italian city-states, particularly Venice, began to build more and more ships with better designs.
In 1204 the crusaders sacked Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, in order to loot its great treasures and to make the Byzantine empire part of the West by ending the schism between the pope and the \Jpatriarch\j. They established a Roman Christian in Constantinople as head of the eastern church, and installed a westerner as emperor.
#
"Warfare in Ninth Century Europe",47,0,0,0
Truncation of the eastern Roman empire through Muslim conquest, and fragmentation of the Carolingian empire into a great many states, meant that the size of armies mustered for offensive operations in both East and West fell far below those fielded by the later Roman emperors and by Charlemagne.
Nevertheless, by the middle of the ninth century Byzantium was again able to support a regular army of some 120,000 men, with a field army of about 25,000 men and the provincial army of 95,000 distributed in twenty themes (military districts) throughout the empire. A population base of some eight million sustained this force.
The small states which emerged in the western half of the erstwhile Carolingian empire in the tenth and eleventh centuries had to make do with smaller expeditionary forces. This diminution in the size of field armies, however, did not necessarily result from a noteworthy decline in the number of soldiers: rather, rulers proved unable to exercise effective command over the various magnates who administered the counties and were responsible for bringing their contingents to the muster
Likewise, the townsmen who manned the walls of their cities and the militarized rural population do not appear to have substantially decreased in number, but some population redistribution must have occurred in the period of the Viking invasions.
In England during the later ninth and tenth centuries, foreign invasions and civil wars also took their toll upon the military. However, soldiers were not lacking. Alfred the Great's burgs were garrisoned by 28,000 paid troops in addition to the local militiamen, while the five-hide system of military recruitment for the select levy provided a further 20,000 well-trained troops for campaigns.
In addition to these forces, the \JAnglo-Saxon\j kings could draw upon their own personal armed followings and those of their magnates for offensive operations. At the battle of Hastings, King Harold mustered some 8,000 soldiers, mostly of the select levy, but this constituted only a fragment of the \JAnglo-Saxon\j troops available for campaigning.
Across the Channel, Hugh Capet of \JFrance\j (d.996) could raise a force of 6,000 men, both infantry and cavalry, from the small nucleus of territories around Paris under his direct control, while one of his more successful magnates, Count Fulk Nerra of \JAnjou\j (987-1040), could also muster a force of about 6,000 men for offensive operations.
In 1067, the city of Angers alone provided about 1,000 men for the select levy, while the walls of the town required some 1,500 urban militiamen for its defence. Duke William of Normandy, Fulk's younger contemporary, managed to gather a force of about 14,000 men, including mercenaries and some 2,000 to 3,000 mounted troops, for his invasion of England in 1066.
Across the Rhine, by the middle of the tenth century the German kings commanded the service of some 15,000 heavily armed mounted troops, a force proportionally consistent, in light of economic and demographic growth, with the territory's obligations under Charlemagne.
At the battle of the Lechfeld in 955, against the Magyars, Otto the Great's force of 8,000 to 10,000 constituted only a part of the campaign forces available in the German kingdom: at the same time another major army raised largely in \JSaxony\j attacked the \JSlavs\j.
For his unsuccessful Italian invasion in 982, Otto II probably led an army that exceeded 20,000 men and included some 10,000 heavily armed horsemen.
#
"Crusade, First (Warfare)",48,0,0,0
Between 1096 and 1099 an army recruited throughout much of western Europe for the First Crusade, led by Bishop AdhΘmar of Le Puy, the papal legate, and estimated at some 60,000 men, marched into the Middle East.
This force was thus double the order of magnitude of those raised by Charlemagne, and its logistic range was considerably greater because various Christian naval powers, including both Byzantium and \JGenoa\j provided supplies.
Along the route from Constantinople to the Holy Land, the crusaders, often aided by specialized Byzantine units - from lightly armed horsemen to engineers and naval personnel - defeated several large Muslim armies. The First Crusade arguably constituted the most complex and difficult campaign conducted by a western army during the middle ages.
The siege and capture of great fortified cities such as Antioch (1098) and \JJerusalem\j (1099) constituted the key victories in the First Crusade, making possible the foundation of the Crusader kingdoms in Palestine and \JSyria\j. The Crusaders worked diligently to protect these states with a defence in depth based on castles which could be used as bases for offensive operations against enemy territory and supply lines.
#
"Infantry Against Cavalry: Medieval Tactics",49,0,0,0
It is difficult to find medieval battles where men fighting on horseback formed the tactically dominant element. In most campaigns, men on foot far outnumbered those with horses: ratios of 5:1 or 6:1 seem to have been normal in the West, while the Byzantines operated closer to 4:1.
Moreover, in the majority of the most significant medieval battles most and sometimes all of those with horses dismounted and fought on foot. Mounted attacks, especially when unsupported by archers, crossbowmen, or other troops fighting on foot, rarely succeeded.
Foot soldiers who stood their ground could not only repel a mounted charge but, if the charge were poorly executed, also destroy the attacking force. However, disaster could arise when foot soldiers failed to follow orders.
The feigned retreat by mounted troops often served to lure an emplaced force on foot from its position in an undisciplined manner, and thus permit the horsemen to wheel and counter-attack, engaging individual foot soldiers in open terrain. The feigned retreats executed by William the Conqueror's forces at Hastings were undoubtedly of great importance to his ultimate victory.
Such tactics could also be used effectively against mounted troops as at Cap Colonna in 982 where a force of lightly armed Muslim horsemen decoyed Emperor Otto II's heavy cavalry into a lengthy pursuit. It ended in the ambush of the Christian forces, after their horses had been worn down, chased in flank attacks by a pre-positioned reserve.
The quality of infantry training could be very uneven. Abbot Regino of Prⁿm's condemnation of the local levy of his part of the Rhineland in 882 is often cited:
There approached an innumerable multitude of men on foot, banded together from the fields and the villas into one mass...When the Northmen understood that [the weakness of] this ignoble crowd was not so much that it was lacking in defensive armour as that it was lacking in military discipline, they rushed upon them with a shout, and cut them down in so great a slaughter, that they did not seem to be slaying men but dumb animals.
At the other end of the scale, in 955, the spectacular victory won by Otto the Great over the Magyars at the battle of the Lechfeld near Augsburg revealed remarkable discipline. The vast majority of Otto's men fought on foot and thus their victory over mounted archers seems even more remarkable.
Contemporary observers identify by their approval and disapproval what might be considered 'the medieval doctrine' of mounted combat. William the Conqueror followed established doctrine at Hastings when he refused to permit his mounted troops to charge head on against an emplaced enemy until he had softened them up with barrages of arrows and attacks by his foot soldiers.
Indeed, against an entrenched enemy, the only real option was for horsemen to dismount and fight on foot.
Commanders of mounted troops often found themselves in difficulty when they ignored established doctrine and charged emplaced enemies without support or in a frontal assault.
Charlemagne's biographer Einhard describes a disaster that took place in the Sⁿntal mountains in 782 when the Franks attacked their Saxon foes:
Not as though they were intending to attack a prepared battle line but as if they were chasing down fugitives from behind and gathering up booty. The Saxons stood in their battle line in front of their encampment and each and every one of them [the Franks] rode at them as fast as possible.
Once the fighting began the attackers were surrounded by the Saxons and almost all of the Franks were killed.
Cavalry doctrine also called for mounted troops to be deployed against the enemy in flank attacks. At Dorylaeum on the First Crusade in 1097, when one half of the army was attacked by the Muslims, the horsemen dismounted and fought on foot.
The other half of the army rode to the rescue and attacked on the flank. The enemy was crushed between hammer and anvil as though the battle strategy had been worked out in advance. A planned surprise attack of this kind was executed in 933 at Riade by Henry the Fowler of \JGermany\j against a \JMagyar\j force of mounted archers.
He used a decoy force of lightly armed horsemen to lure the enemy into position; then his heavily armed cavalry using sword and lance made contact before the mounted archers could launch more than one volley of arrows.
Some medieval texts suggest that cavalry played a far more important role on the battlefield than the facts warrant. Thus, Anna Comnena, daughter of the Byzantine emperor Alexius, writes that the charge of the Frankish horsemen was so vigorous it could break through the walls of \JBabylon\j. She says her father's experience of fighting heavily armed Norman horsemen convinced him that cavalry charges were irresistible.
More notoriously, medieval romances portray the mounted knight as dominating warfare. In fact, Alexius easily nullified the advantages enjoyed by the Norman horsemen.
Their frontal assaults were rendered useless by caltrops (iron balls with protruding spikes, scattered on the ground) and other simple devices. And the romances are no more accurate.
Medieval military decision-makers and fighting men knew the realities. They invested vast resources in building and keeping in repair city walls and fortresses, artillery, sophisticated siege towers, and battering rams, all manned by footsoldiers.
Great effort was dedicated to the proper training and recruitment of local militia and the common footsoldier. The most frequently copied, translated, and consulted secular prose work of the early middle ages was Vegetius's \IConcerning Military Matters,\i a handbook for infantry training which devoted very little attention to cavalry (see \JRoman Drills for Medieval Horsemen\j).
#
"Fortifications in Western Europe",50,0,0,0
Many of the fortifications built in western Europe after the dissolution of the Carolingian empire were put together by local magnates to protect a small region from their enemies. These constructions were of limited military importance, even though they were extremely numerous: there are 400 in County Wexford, Ireland, alone, and so many upon the central Spanish plateau that they gave their name to a major state, Castile.
Networked fortifications were the ones that mattered. The defence-in-depth strategy developed by Alfred in \JWessex\j, Henry the Fowler in \JGermany\j, and Fulk Nerra in \JAnjou\j remained fundamental throughout the middle ages.
It is also seen, for example, in William the Conqueror's disposition of many scores of strongholds throughout England after 1066 and in the assertion of control by the Capet dynasty over the Ile de \JFrance\j during the twelfth century.
Thanks to so much building, siege warfare continued to dominate military activity and great battles in the field remained few by comparison, except when fought between besiegers and a relief army.
However, despite striking developments in artillery, with the introduction first of the traction trebuchet and then with the invention of counter-weight technology (which far surpassed ancient machines in power and operational efficiency), sieges from the twelfth century onwards generally proved less successful and more costly.
The art of defence, as evidenced by increasingly elaborately articulated fortifications, more than kept pace with the technology. The growing political strength of the major states, such as \JFrance\j and England, also made it less likely that a successful siege would bring down a dynasty.
Strenuous training and high levels of unit cohesion were essential. A crew of fifty sappers digging a mine only a hundred yards in length at a depth of thirty feet beneath the walls of a city required levels of expertise, training, and cohesion which rivalled those of submariners liable to depth charge attack by an enemy destroyer.
The combat team operating a battering ram under enemy fire, or a catapult crew keeping their weapon in operation day and night, certainly required the same training and unit cohesion as modern tank or mortar crews.
Even the dozen men assigned to carry each forty-five foot long scaling ladder across a hundred-yard killing ground, place and secure it against the wall, and then climb it in a prescribed order while under withering enemy fire required far more than 'dumb courage'.
During the two centuries following the First Crusade the armies of many western states increased. This reflected growth in Europe's population and wealth as well as the expansion of a few states and the elimination or absorption of a great many others.
In England, for example, monarchs in the late twelfth century could raise some 20,000 mounted troops, while at the battle of Bouvines in 1214 the opposing armies may have reached a combined total of 40,000 men.
Towards the end of the thirteenth century, Edward I (d.1307) mustered some 25,000 infantry and 5,000 horsemen on a recurring basis for his wars in Wales and Scotland; and French royal forces probably reached the same order of magnitude, with the south of the kingdom alone able to provide Philip the Fair (d.1314) with 20,000 men.
The military forces available to the Italian city-states in the thirteenth century, both for defensive operations and for offensive efforts against nearby adversaries, seem immense. Milan, perhaps with some exaggeration by its propagandists, is said to have been able to raise 10,000 cavalry and 40,000 infantry from the 200,000 people dwelling in the city itself - that is, one quarter of the total urban population - with another 30,000 men drawn from its 600 dependent communities.
The figures for Florence appear more realistic, with 2,000 horsemen and 15,000 infantry drawn from a total population of 400,000.
#
"Medieval Warfare: Myth",51,0,0,0
There was a romantic time not long ago when it was generally believed that medieval warfare consisted of undisciplined fief-holding warriors, irrationally driven by their chivalric ethic, fighting an individualistic style of combat dominated by battles between single knights who engaged in mounted shock combat. This view is false.
Three basic reasons account for the discrepancy between the medieval military record and such flawed interpretations. First, the fief has played a very important role in European property law (in contrast to its relative unimportance in military affairs) and thus has rightly garnered considerable attention from scholars who focus upon legal and institutional history.
Second, most fief-holders in western Europe were nobles, and they have left a substantial 'parchment trail' of documents to be studied. Finally, and most important in creating a highly misleading picture of the medieval military in all its aspects, the romantic epics known as the \Ichansons de geste\i portrayed the mounted knight as dominating medieval warfare and more particularly the battlefields of Europe - much as the 'Westerns' of the American cinema show the cowboy conquering the frontier with his six-gun.
Neither image is true. Medieval literary entertainment and medieval games popularized and magnified the importance of the man on horseback, and their posterity has for too long accepted fiction and play as reality.
The willingness of those men in the middle ages, who saw themselves as the military elite, to propagate the myth that they were the essential feature of a medieval army through song and story, and even through the patronage of 'historians' and artists, is noteworthy.
Nevertheless, the 'feudal host' of 'knights' serving their lords for forty days in return for fiefs was, in general, of relatively little importance in medieval military organization. The limitations imposed upon the formulation of strategy and the prosecution of extended campaigns by a term of service lasting less than two months undermined whatever value feudal rulers may have envisioned in such a system.
Thus it is not surprising that references to the 'feudal host' appear more frequently in the works of modern writers than in the medieval sources. Furthermore, the training of militias for local defence, together with the support of levies of foot soldiers and substantial numbers of archers and crossbowmen for offensive military operations throughout medieval Europe, clearly indicate the importance accorded to such units by those who formulated military policy or grand strategy.
Finally, the training of mounted troops to fight on foot and the dominance of siege warfare provide more than a subtle hint regarding the multifaceted nature of medieval warfare in which sieges dominated and the knight of romantic literature was but one figure in a very complex equation.
#
"New Weapons, New Tactics 1300-1500",52,0,0,0
\BChapter 6 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
#
"Roman Drills for Medieval Horsemen",53,0,0,0
Although siege warfare had enjoyed primacy in the later Roman empire, field forces were not neglected. Horsemen with lances were trained to dismount rapidly, so that they could fight on foot as 'pikemen', and to vault into the saddle when the time came to fight on horseback.
The infantry carried less body armour than the legionaries of earlier days and could deploy more rapidly. Major battles of the later fourth and fifth centuries illustrate the flexibility of late Roman battle tactics - for example, Mursa (in 351, fought against Magnentius, who had usurped the imperial title from the emperor Constans), where lancers dismounted to fight on foot, or ChΓlons (451, against the Huns), where imperial infantry fought in concert with allied Visigothic and Alan horsemen.
Ammianus Marcellinus, a professional soldier and the leading Roman historian of his day, paid tribute to this flexibility in his description of the emperor Constantius (d.361): 'He was especially able in riding, in hurling the javelin and in the use of the bow. In addition, he was very knowledgeable with regard to all the tactics and armament of foot-soldiers.'
Throughout the early middle ages, troop training programmes provide considerable insight into prevailing tactics. In both East and West, revised versions of Vegetius's \IConcerning Military Matters,\i based upon the earliest surviving revision which was done at Constantinople in AD 450, abounded.
Although he focused on the training of infantry (he believed that the mounted arm needed little reform), Vegetius did devote special attention to the need for tactical flexibility among mounted troops.
This flexibility was pursued throughout the middle ages and ultimately it became institutionalized in the 'dragoon', a term which originally, in the sixteenth century, applied to a mounted soldier trained to fight on foot.
The following passage was copied and edited by Rabanus Maurus, a cleric and scholar at the court of the Carolingian king Lothair Il, who provided an epitome of Vegetius's work which included only those things which were of importance 'in modern times'. Rabanus selected, among other chapters, a key element in the training regime for cavalry recruits:
Wooden horses are placed during the winter under a roof and in summer in a field. The recruits at first try to mount unarmed, then they mount carrying shields and swords, and finally with very large pole weapons.
And this practice was so thorough that they were forced to learn how to jump on and off their horses not only from the right but from the left and from the rear and in addition they learned to jump on and off their horses even with an unsheathed sword.
Mounted troops also trained to fight on horseback and no less importantly trained their horses for combat. These training exercises of the early middle ages anticipate the spectacle of the tournament. Nithard, a grandson of Charlemagne, described a particularly impressive (but hardly isolated) practice session carried out near \JVerdun\j in 842:
For purposes of training, games were often arranged in the following manner. Fighting men would be deployed in a place where they could be observed. The entire group...divided into two units of equal size. They charged forward from both sides and came towards each other at full speed.
Then [before contact was made] one side turned its back and under the protection of their shields pretended to be trying to escape. Then those who had been engaged in the feigned retreat counter-attacked and the pursuers simulated flight.
Then both kings [Louis the German and Charles the Bald] and all of the young men, raising a great yell, charged forward brandishing their spear shafts. Now one group feigned retreat and then the other. It was a spectacle worthy of being seen as much because of its nobility as because of its discipline.
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"Siege Warfare, Medieval Techniques",54,0,0,0
Siege warfare dominated military life, and medieval soldiers placed a high premium on its technology. The stone-throwing 'engine' most commonly used throughout late antiquity and the early middle ages for the defence of fortifications against a besieging force was the heavy onager, a type of one-armed catapult weighing some two tons, which could hurl an 8-pound stone 500 yards.
Heavier machines threw heavier loads even further - however, the most likely type to be transported in the baggage train of a besieging force was the light version of the onager. This engine, weighing no more than about 1,000 pounds, the maximum carrying capacity for vehicles of the period, could hurl a 3 - or 4-pound stone about 100 yards, once unloaded from its transport vehicle and placed on solid level ground.
Heavier machines of this type had to be constructed on the site of the siege or assembled from parts brought along in the baggage train.
Battering rams were not any less important to a besieging army than stone-throwing machines. The \IMappae Clavicula,\i a technical treatise written in the eighth century, described the type of battering ram in use from late antiquity until the eleventh century in the following terms:
Make the three front feet five cubits long, the middle ones four cubits, and the rear one three cubits. And there should be wheels one and one half spans high, and four inches thick. Make them round and make a hole in the centre; cut columns, and insert them four inches deep into the wheels. Cover the wheel and make a joint on top and fix it tightly with a wedge.
Bind the rams and wind ropes around them. Shield with leather, and cover on top with pieces of felt, and over the felt, put pieces of leather; and over the leather four inches of sand, and over the sand, wool, so that the sand cannot move, and on top more pieces of leather. The columns themselves should have hinges such that when it walks you may turn it where you wish.
This preoccupation with protecting the ram against incendiary devices was thoroughly justified, since several formulae for the production of incendiaries existed in the West. The authors of the \IMappae Clavicula\i themselves identified one which was particularly suited for destruction of the roof of a battering ram.
However, by far the most famous incendiary agent of the middle ages was 'Greek fire' (see \JByzantine Military Defence\j), probably made from some combination of \Jpetroleum\j and \Jresin\j. The Byzantines used it with great effect against Arab ships during the siege of Constantinople in the 670s.
The technology of siege warfare was not monopolized by \JRome\j's successor states. In 451, for example, battering rams employed by the forces of \JAttila\j the Hun came near to breaking through the wall of OrlΘans, while in 626 the Avars from the Danube basin not only used battering rams when they besieged Constantinople, but built wooden towers, to assault the top of the walls.
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"Medieval Military Earthworks",55,0,0,0
The early eighth-century historian Bede believed \JHadrian\j's wall in northern England and the Antonine wall in southern Scotland had been built during the early fifth century, the first without any aid from \JRome\j. His confidence in the ability of early medieval rulers to undertake and accomplish such major projects probably stemmed in part from his knowledge of the Danewirke completed in 737.
The sophisticated logistics which could be mounted for early medieval military construction projects are perhaps best illustrated, however, by Charlemagne's efforts in 793 to build a canal connecting the Rhine and Danube rivers.
Charlemagne's waterway would have made it possible to deploy military forces from the North Sea to the Black Sea and to supply them by water. (Throughout the middle ages, water transport was the fastest and most efficient way of conveying large amounts of equipment and supplies over long distances.)
It would have given Charlemagne not only the upper hand in the Balkans but also the capacity to project his power around the coast of the Black Sea to the gates of Constantinople.
Although Charlemagne's Rhine-Danube project ultimately failed, and the linking of the North Sea to the Black Sea by a continuous water route was not to be realized until 1846, the emperor's strategic vision, logistic \Jinfrastructure\j, and skilled resources to sustain such a monumental task command respect.
Written sources, as well as archaeological, topographical, geodetic, and hydrographic research, indicate that, during a period of about ten weeks in the autumn of 793, Charlemagne set a minimum of 6,000 workers to dig a carefully laid out trench - Roman surveying manuals and other valuable technical handbooks of the ancient world were available throughout the middle ages.
It was to connect the Rezat, a navigable affluent of the Regnitz-Main-Rhine river network, with the Altmⁿhl, an affluent of the Danube in the neighbourhood of Weissenburg about equidistant (45 miles) from the old Roman cities of \JRegensburg\j to the east and Augsburg to the south.
The remains indicate that the entire project was to be about a mile long, more than ninety feet wide and up to twenty feet deep in the centre of the channel. The workers were expected to move just over one million cubic yards of earth at a rate of 0.4 cubic yards per manhour.
Modern estimates, which may be too high, suggest that the work-site had to be supplied with some 1,200-1,500 tons of grain, about 1,000-1,200 oxen and 2,000 to 3,000 pigs to provide approximately 4,000 calories per day for each worker over the course of the ten week period of labour.
The 6,000 workers constituted only part of the resources which had to be mobilized for the project. For example, 1,500 tons of grain would fill thirty wagon loads drawn by sixty oxen. Each ox required fifty pounds of fodder per day.
A herd of 1,000 oxen on the hoof and of 3,000 pigs had to be levied through the tax system and these herds had to be driven to the work site, corralled, and fed until ready for use. Field kitchens had to be established and staffed with butchers, cooks, bakers, and other support personnel.
Wood cutters were needed not only to bring in fuel for the cooking fires but also for lumber to shore up the sides of the canal. This lumber had to be prepared for use by carpenters. Smiths were needed to keep the tools in repair and they too needed either wood or charcoal for their fires.
The wood-cutters and carpenters were also no doubt required to build huts for the workers and outbuildings for the kitchens and smithies.
Even the 6,000 largely unskilled labourers had to be spared that autumn from work on the harvest; and even where slaves or serfs were used, a system had to be in place for taking these workers from their usual obligations and detailing them for public service.
In the end, the canal project did not fail for lack of workers or supplies but because the autumn of 793 was exceptionally rainy, undermining the sides of the canal and making it often difficult if not impossible to dig. It nevertheless offers a glimpse of Carolingian grand strategy in action.
#
"Fulk Nerra's Net of Stone Castles",56,0,0,0
Fulk Nerra (987-1040), count of the \JAngevins\j, built a state which dominated the west of \JFrance\j and served as the base upon which his descendants, Geoffrey Plantagenet (d.1151) and Henry II (d.1189), built an empire that stretched from the \JPyrenees\j in the south to Scotland in the north.
Fulk's frontiers were defended by a chain of stone castles - an innovation at that time - situated about twenty miles apart. Within these borders, Fulk either built or took control of more than twenty additional strongholds which created a defence in depth. Raiders in search of booty no longer enjoyed easy entrance and exit from the Angevin heartland.
Although men stationed in towers could not block roads or fords by massive fire power, like defenders of an eighteenth century fortress, archers and crossbowmen could still force detours and take a toll among raiders careless enough to come within range.
More importantly, mounted forces from the stronghold could be deployed as far as twenty miles beyond the walls to harass the enemy, and these horsemen could obtain supplies and camp securely at night at nearby fortifications. Fulk's strongholds could not have stopped an invasion, if one had occurred, but they would have severely impeded it.
Invaders who stopped to capture a fortification would give Fulk the time to gather a large army to repel them, while each stronghold the enemy bypassed left a base behind their lines with a protected mobile force able to harass the march and cut off supplies and communications.
Any invader who chose to detail separate units to besiege each stronghold that posed a danger risked reducing the size of the main force and abandoning the deployed units to sustain themselves in hostile territory.
#
"Battle of Hastings 1066, The",57,0,0,0
On the death of the English king Edward the Confessor in January 1066, Harold Godwinson, Earl of \JWessex\j, who had been Edward's right-hand man, was hurriedly crowned. If Edward's kinsman, Duke William of Normandy, were to make good his own claim to the throne, an invasion of England had to be launched before the campaigning season came to an end and the new monarch was firmly established.
In early 1066, however, William had no fleet, and no experience in, nor technology for, the transport of large numbers of war horses in battle-ready condition across the Channel. He had insufficient trained manpower within Normandy.
However, William solved all of these problems and met Harold in the longest major battle in medieval history (nine hours), winning by a combination of Norman firepower and brief - but fatal - lapses in \JAnglo-Saxon\j discipline.
William garnered support from the great Norman magnates and recruited specialists from Norman enclaves in southern \JItaly\j and \JSicily\j to design horse transports. He recruited his partly mercenary army largely from other areas of northern and western \JFrance\j.
By the beginning of August, his army and ships lay ready at Dives-sur-Mer. Sophisticated logistics sustained the encampment, which included some 14,000 men and between 2,000 and 3,000 war horses, for more than a month.
When the \JAnglo-Saxon\j war fleet returned to the Thames estuary for refitting, he sailed across the Channel to Pevensey, the old Roman port of Anderita, where proper disembarkation facilities existed for the horses, and landed unopposed. William dispatched his fleet carrying his foot soldiers and supplies to Hastings - the mounted troops travelled overland.
Fortuitously, Harold was preoccupied at York, 190 miles from London, with a Viking invasion which he decisively defeated, with great losses, just five days before learning of the Norman landing. He ordered the mobilization of his southern levies and hurried to London with those of his professional troops who remained fit for service.
His strategy was to blockade the invaders on the Hastings peninsula. By the time Harold reached Hastings a force of some 8,000 men was gathered, the vast majority local levies called up from the area between London and Hastings.
They had been instructed to muster about seven miles north-northwest of Hastings, at a place now called Battle. Perhaps 1,000 or so of Harold's troops were highly trained professional fighting men and the personal armed followings of his brothers and other important \JAnglo-Saxon\j magnates.
Of the 14,000 men William had gathered at Saint ValΘry, probably only 10,000 were with him as the day for battle drew near, between 2,000-3,000 of them heavily armed horsemen. About 1,000 men had been left to garrison the fortifications at Pevensey and another 1,000 were needed to garrison the defences at Hastings.
Though William had a noteworthy contingent of archers and crossbowmen, the \JAnglo-Saxons\j were seriously lacking in 'fire power' - the ability to inflict damage upon the enemy at a distance.
William could not permit himself to be blockaded. He had to provoke Harold to engage as soon as possible, and so he harried the parts of Sussex where a substantial portion of Harold's own estates were located.
Since Harold was not eager to engage William, he took up an extremely strong defensive position on a ridge some 880 yards in length, rising in places 275 feet above the marshy plain below. He deployed his militiamen in a deep phalanx, placing the professionals in the front ranks to stiffen both the line and morale.
William could thus have his battle, but first he would have to march his army at dawn some seven miles, establish a base camp below Harold and then drive up the hill against showers of spears, which would begin hitting their targets at a range of about fifty yards.
William advanced to battle on the morning of 14 October. His archers and crossbowmen loosed volley after volley to soften up the \JAnglo-Saxon\j phalanx, and then a combined force of foot and horse attacked the \JAnglo-Saxon\j lines. These held like a stone wall.
A pattern of combined attacks covered by barrages of arrows and bolts was repeated into the afternoon, when William decided to try a feigned retreat on his left flank with his Breton horsemen, experts in this tactic. The ruse worked, and a portion of the right flank of the \JAnglo-Saxon\j line broke in hot pursuit of the 'fleeing' Bretons.
At a prearranged signal these horsemen wheeled their mounts and easily rode down the scattered foot soldiers, outmatched on open ground and tired from their pursuit. A second feigned retreat, now by William's right, had the same effect. The \JAnglo-Saxon\j phalanx was weakened and morale undermined as Harold's brothers, his two ablest commanders, died.
Towards dusk, William's forces were gaining ground on the ridge in vigorous hand-to-hand combat when Harold was seriously wounded. With Harold's position in the centre of the line overrun, the king himself finally hacked down, and the standard thrown to the ground (the normal signal for retreat), the \JAnglo-Saxon\j phalanx finally broke, and a rout followed.
#
"Fortified Towns in Europe (12th Century)",58,0,0,0
In the late twelfth century cities in the West began the lengthy, laborious and expensive process of increasing the perimeter of their defensive walls. These programmes, which could be completed only with great expenditure of both material and human resources, indicate the immense importance which contemporary military thinkers, like their predecessors, attributed to the fortress city.
In England, the number of fortified towns doubled to around 200, most of their new walls measuring six feet in width and twenty to thirty feet high. Many of them deliberately included uninhabited areas to accommodate refugees and to allow for future growth, to allow cultivation and grazing within the walls, and to provide some shelter to the town centre from bombardment. Some new fortifications became very large indeed: at York, for example, they extended for more than two miles.
When an old Roman city with a circuit wall of 2,000 yards received a new wall of 4,000 yards, the defensive perimeter merely doubled, but the area enclosed quadrupled from 250,000 square yards to 1,000,000. Demands made upon the urban militia in turn doubled, but four times as many people could now live in the space they defended.
Besieging forces were thus thwarted in two ways by the newly extended walls. The increase in the physical object to be overcome greatly increased the numbers of troops required for an effective siege. But the percentage of the protected population now required for defence now fell.
Substantial numbers of city and town dwellers throughout western Europe were demilitarized as a result, just when the population as a whole was rapidly increasing.
#
"Western Warfare in the Thirteenth Century",59,0,0,0
Although men had fought on foot throughout the middle ages, in the course of the thirteenth century infantry began to assume an increasingly significant role in western warfare. The \Jcrossbow\j, albeit condemned by the Church, appeared in action with greater frequency, posing a considerable threat to the mounted warrior and his horse; the longbow, which could discharge arrows at the rate of about ten a minute (in contrast to the much slower rate of two bolts from the crossbow), could penetrate chain-mail armour with ease.
The gradual introduction of plate armour from around 1250, to reinforce chain mail, reflects the recognized need to respond to the development of the bow which would continue to influence the way war was fought for a century and a half.
Self-protection against the 'new' missile was necessary; but it inevitably turned the cavalry into a much heavier and less flexible 'fighting machine'. It also made war more expensive.
For reasons that were largely economic, the nobleman, who traditionally formed the basis of the feudal cavalry, found it increasingly difficult to support his military role and fulfil the obligation to fight which arose from his status and his allegiance because estate revenues, diminishing at the very time when the costs of war were rising, affected both his ability and his willingness to fight.
Political factors also influenced combat in the West. The last centuries of the middle ages saw a widespread growth in the ambition of societies to govern themselves and to throw off their dependence on others. In the early fourteenth century the communes of Flanders moved against the feudal domination of the crown of \JFrance\j; in Scotland, the 'imperial' power of the king of England met with fierce resistance in the War of Independence; while in \JSwitzerland\j, several cantons rose against Austrian overlordship.
Towards the end of the same century the Portuguese confirmed their independence on the battlefield at Aljubarrota (1385), while the next century saw successful wars in \JBohemia\j against German domination. These conflicts, pursued with great intensity, involved armies drawn increasingly from the general population concerned.
#
"Warfare and Weapons in the Middle Ages",60,0,0,0
In Flanders, economic and political control was passing to the townsmen who now formed the backbone of the armies with which they sought their independence. In Scotland, Robert Bruce (Robert I) fought his war against England with what was essentially a 'popular' army, using guerrilla tactics incompatible with the war of the mounted horseman associated with aristocracy.
In \JSwitzerland\j (like Scotland, a largely mountainous country unsuitable for the use of heavy cavalry) the ordinary foot soldier had more of a future than the mounted unit, especially when used as part of an aggressive tactic. Furthermore, weapons in keeping with the much more modest social background of such armies came into play.
The spear, the halberd, the pike, the club, and the axe were relatively cheap to produce; the halberd, in particular, with its hook capable of pulling a cavalryman off his horse, proved to be a suitably 'democratic' weapon.
Above all, the longbow, a cheap and 'popular' weapon could, when drawn vertically over the shoulder, project arrows much further and with greater accuracy than the small bow, held and drawn horizontally, had ever done. Used \Ien masse,\i the longbow became a weapon of very great effectiveness. The English also learned to develop its potential to the full in conjunction with mounted men-at-arms (using the lance and sword) and, increasingly, with those same men-at-arms fighting on foot alongside the archers.
The tactic possessed great advantages. It preserved some continuity with the past, in that it gave the man-at-arms (a person of a certain social standing) a new, indeed vital, role to play in war, including the leadership of those around him; and it also helped to create and develop a bond among the different elements in the army which, in its turn, contributed towards its success.
When Edward I of England invaded Wales in the final quarter of the thirteenth century, he did so at the head of armies which included ten or fifteen foot soldiers to every cavalry man, with the aim of using mounted men-at-arms in conjunction with archers and crossbowmen in set battles.
The system worked, both against the Welsh and, very soon afterwards, against the Scots. Archers and cavalry now combined to provide a new tactical system: arrows disrupted the enemy before the cavalry moved in against him. In the company of (and reinforced by) the man-at-arms, the archer could now stand his ground; he had less reason than his predecessors to flee before the menace of advancing cavalry.
Events in the early years of the fourteenth century underlined the vulnerability of unsupported cavalry. In July 1302 an army of Flemings, drawn from local militias and burgher forces, using pike and spear, routed an army of French knights (killing almost 1,000 of them) at Courtrai near the French border.
Although this defeat of cavalry with unusually heavy losses was important, it served only as a portent: before long the French cavalry had defeated the Flemings at Mons-en-PΘvΦle (1304) and at Cassel (1328), and the Flemish communes would suffer crushing humiliation at Roosebeek in 1382.
Yet Courtrai was more than a freak victory. In June 1314, at Bannockburn near Stirling, Edward II of England, although accompanied by an army of more than 21,000 infantry, allowed the Scots, well led by Robert Bruce and in a state of good morale, to defeat his cavalry, the English infantry playing only a minor role in the battle. In this decisive encounter [the Scots] issued from the woods in three battalions on foot, boldly holding their course direct for the English army, which had been under arms all night, with their horses bitted. The English, who were not accustomed to fight on foot, mounted with much alarm; whereas the Scots had taken the example of the Flemings who earlier at Courtrai had, on foot, defeated the forces of \JFrance\j.
The aforesaid Scots came all in a line in schiltrons [clusters of spearmen] and attacked the English formations, which were jammed together and could do nothing against them because their horses were impaled on the pikes. The men at the English rear recoiled into the ravine of the Bannockburn, each falling over the others.
The same point was underlined in 1315 when a force of knights and footmen serving Leopold of \JAustria\j was defeated at Morgarten by mountaineers drawn from Schwyz and Uri in \JSwitzerland\j, while in 1319, at Dithmarschen in \JSaxony\j, peasants scored another victory over the knights.
The success achieved by the Scottish, Swiss, and Saxon militias represented the development of a new tactic: the aggressive rush by massed infantry who, by making the best use of a site, caught the knights unawares in a confined space.
The future lay increasingly with those able and willing to fight in mass or large groups, a style which would prove successful both in attack and defence.
Yet these developments did not prevail everywhere. In \JItaly\j, mounted knights achieved a brief period of dominance, and until 1450 large bodies of even highly trained infantry seldom challenged their supremacy on the field.
Between 1320 and 1360, for example, about 700 cavalry leaders (most of them Germans) are known to have been active in \JItaly\j, leading 'free companies' of veteran troops, at first as temporary associations to extort booty from civilian populations but later as permanent military formations which spent most of their time in the pay of one or other of the numerous Italian states.
The 'Great Company' led by the Provencal knight MontrΘal d'Albarno (called by the Italians Fra Moriale) in the 1350s numbered about 10,000 fighting men and 20,000 camp followers; its 'reign of terror' only ended with the arrival of the White Company, consisting of some 6,000 veterans of the wars in \JFrance\j invited into \JItaly\j by the marquis of Montferrat.
In a battle at the bridge of Canturino, west of Milan, the White Company (so called because its members wore more plate armour, kept brightly burnished by their pages, than was then customary in Italy) defeated its rival in 1363 and soon, led by Sir John Hawkwood, passed into the service first of Pisa, then of the papacy, and finally of Florence - which Hawkwood served as captain-general until his death in 1394.
State service did not preclude extortion and booty, however: thus the republic of Siena suffered thirty-seven visitations from free companies between 1342 and 1399, the city fathers often deciding that appeasing the experienced professionals would prove less costly and disruptive than mobilizing to fight them.
#
"Hundred Years War, Tactics",61,0,0,0
In the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) - the dominant conflict of the period because of its length, and a war of conquest for the English but a war of self-defence and self-assertion for the French - the battles at CrΘcy (1346) and Poitiers (1356) demonstrated French determination to maintain tactics that relied heavily on the shock which they hoped their cavalry would achieve.
As the defenders, the English mostly dismounted to absorb the attack when it came, and in the ensuing hand-to-hand fighting the men on foot enjoyed a considerable advantage. Likewise at Agincourt (1415) the English king, Henry V, facing a numerically superior enemy, waited for the French to attack him.
Once again, many of the advancing cavalry and infantry were brought down by arrows (clouds of them, we are told by an eyewitness) before they could even reach the English line.
If the defenders were well-trained, well-armed, and well-disciplined, it proved increasingly difficult for attackers to defeat them. Having absorbed an assault already much weakened by the massive use of arrows, a defending army stood ready to take the initiative against a demoralized enemy, cavalry being on hand to pursue those who might flee the battlefield.
Yet, while the Hundred Years War witnessed some important battles, the main tactic of English aggression in the fourteenth century remained the raid - or \Ichevauch\da\ee\i - carried into French territory by relatively small armies sometimes only two or three thousand strong.
The principal aim was to weaken the enemy's morale and his ability to pay taxes, and to break his resolve to resist through a form of war whose prime targets were population, economy, and social \Jinfrastructure\j rather than armies. In the words of the Italian poet \JPetrarch\j (born in 1309):
In my youth the...English were taken to be the meekest of the barbarians. Today they are a fiercely bellicose nation. They have overturned the ancient military glory of the French by victories so numerous that they, who once were inferior to the wretched Scots, have reduced the entire kingdom of \JFrance\j by fire and sword to such a state that I, who had traversed it lately on business, had to force myself to believe that it was the same country I had seen before. Outside the walls of towns there was not, as it were, one building left standing.
In such a war of intimidation great sophistication of armour and weaponry were not required; nor were the traditional virtues and skills of the military aristocracy. The horse used on such raids could be small and of cheap breed, while the common soldier was as good as his social superior at setting fire to a village or to a farmer's barn.
They moved fast - sometimes, as on the great raid from \JAquitaine\j led by the Black Prince in 1355, covering ten miles a day - with the troops spread out in parallel columns in order to devastate as much enemy territory as possible, hoping either to force the French to fight (and lose) or to flee and lay the kingdom open to further devastation.
In 1346 (at CrΘcy) and 1356 (at Poitiers) the English achieved the former, in 1355 (the Carcassone raid) and 1359 (the Rheims campaign) the latter. And in 1360, thanks to his strategic flexibility, the treaty of BrΘtigny conferred upon Edward III in full sovereignty territories comprising one-third of \JFrance\j, together with a huge ransom for King John, taken prisoner at Poitiers.
\BSieges And Artillery\b
Damaging as it proved both to the French economy and to the reputation of \JFrance\j's nobility, however, this style of war could scarcely force a total surrender. Consequently, in 1415 the English turned to a war of conquest in the hope, partially fulfilled by 1420, that such a method might bring overall victory.
The new objective required the use of other, older methods, in particular the siege, since capture of a castle or fortified town could lead to the military control of the country round about, and sometimes even to a measure of political and administrative control.
If Henry V's victory at Agincourt stands out, so did his successful sieges of Harfleur. Falaise, \JCherbourg\j, and \JRouen\j, which gave the English control of Normandy and the ability to extend their territorial ambition further.
The siege was a slow and relatively undramatic way of making progress. It demanded specialists, in particular miners and men who would work the artillery - the traditional trebuchet and other tension and leverage weapons, still in use in the early fifteenth century, alongside (if not always in conjunction with) the new \Jgunpowder\j artillery.
The new weapons certainly enlivened a siege, as contemporary descriptions testify, life became much more dangerous for the defenders. Walled towns in \JFrance\j greatly increased in number during the fourteenth century in order to deter those who rode out on \Ichevauch\da\ees.\i
To the attacker with artillery, however, they constituted a sitting target, provided he could approach close enough to bring them within effective range. Range was crucial: it often gave the besiegers, with larger artillery pieces, the advantage over the defenders whose cannon were frequently smaller.
To the besieged facing an army well provided with artillery, it was not a question of whether, but of how long, they could hold out.
In the mid-fifteenth century, as contemporary evidence makes clear, it was the threat posed by his artillery that enabled King Charles VII of \JFrance\j to recover in a few months those fortified places which, a generation earlier, had withstood the English for far longer. The cannon caused fear as well as destruction.
#
"Military Tactics of the West, Fifteenth Century",62,0,0,0
The increased use of artillery and the need to build defences added considerably to the cost of war. But not all innovations proved exorbitantly expensive. For example, total disregard for cavalry and cheapness characterized the army and style of fighting adopted by the Bohemian Hussites in their war of independence during the first quarter of the fifteenth century.
Motivated by \Jnationalism\j, religion, and social egalitarianism, the followers of John Huss, executed for heresy in 1415, sought to establish a state which reflected their radical political, social, and religious ideas.
In so doing they introduced innovative methods of waging war which would prove influential for a long time. Under John Zizka, a leader of military genius, they developed a style of fighting peculiar to themselves.
New, for example, was the use of the \Iwagenburgen,\i or mobile wagon fortresses made up of carts, to create what was at first a defensive unit to be used against cavalry attacks but which later came to be employed offensively - almost like a tank - to break up and dislodge the enemy and drive him back, as Zizka did when he and his army were all but encircled at Kutnß Hora, in \JBohemia\j, in December 1421.
Zizka owed his fame and his success at least in part to his resourcefulness: the wagon was essentially a peasant's instrument, as were the flail (manufactured in large numbers for war) and the pike which his supporters used. But the Hussite army was successful for other reasons, not least because it was among the very first to make use of artillery in the field, the wagons being used to convey cannon from place to place.
Elsewhere, heavy cannon and mortars travelled from one place to another laid on four-wheeled carts: at the point of use, they were taken down and set up on frames ready for firing. Not until the mid-fifteenth century - surprisingly late - do sources mention carriages borne on only two wheels, with 'trunnions' (stumps mounted on either side of the barrel to pivot the angle at which the gun should be set).
The degree of mobility and greater speed of action thus achieved gave the artillery an increasingly integral role in tactical warfare, especially against slow-moving targets such as troops trying to scale fieldworks or advance in close formation over difficult terrain.
Nevertheless, the slow rate of fire and the danger of explosion meant that \Jgunpowder\j artillery, at least in numbers, constituted a weapon whose day had yet to come.
By contrast, the Swiss forces which served in both French and Burgundian armies in the second half of the fifteenth century consisted largely of pikemen and handgunners. Their tactical style favoured collective aggression, thanks to the high proportion of the population with military experience and the general absence of social differentiation.
Faced with a siege, the Swiss normally opted for rapid action, such as the storming of defences; and they seldom took prisoners (the common practice among aristocratic societies where the lure of capturing rich prisoners acted as an incentive in war).
Furthermore, their habit of challenging the enemy to battle stood in broad contrast to the widely accepted practice of avoiding battle (and thus the consequences of defeat). Hardly surprisingly, then, the Swiss became popular as mercenaries, prepared by training and tradition to face the cavalry charge which, at the close of the fifteenth century, was still the most dangerous manoeuvre to be used against them.
\BThe Survival Of Cavalry\b
For it would be wrong to say that the day of the cavalry was over. Although few areas were as dominated by mounted forces as \JItaly\j, the fifteenth-century French army included many mounted men, heavy cavalry as well as infantry on light horses, while the rival army of the dukes of Burgundy also incorporated heavy cavalry.
This situation reflected a number of factors. One was the survival of the traditional social order, feudalism, in \JFrance\j and Burgundy; the mounted warrior, perhaps a knight or a member of the nobility, mirrored the persistent influence of that order.
Burgundy, too, preserved the influential chivalric tradition which had been deliberately fostered and encouraged during the long reign of Duke Philip the Good (1419-61). The second half of the fifteenth century witnessed the beginning of a revival of the battle, of which there had been relatively few during the previous hundred years, thanks to the new territorial ambitions of the French crown (now recovered from the long war with England).
In this regard the Franco-Burgundian wars, involving the active participation of the Swiss, are particularly instructive with regard to how war was fought, and with what forces, in the third quarter of the fifteenth century.
With the protection of both horse and rider now better assured through the development of increasingly sophisticated plate armour (which meant that the rider could dispense with a shield), cavalry staged something of a comeback. While cannon and, in particular, portable \Jfirearms\j were being used on an increasing scale, their rate of fire was still slow.
The battles of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy (1467-77), at Grandson (March 1476), Morat (June 1476), and, finally, Nancy (January 1477), all testify to the practical use of cavalry: whether used for attack or defence, a fifteenth-century army was unlikely to achieve a decisive victory on the field of battle without it, particularly if the enemy lacked effective artillery.
This, then, was a period of change caused not merely by technical factors but, more importantly, by social, political, and economic realities.
#
"Medieval Army",63,0,0,0
Duke Charles of Burgundy may not have been the Alexander or the Caesar with whom he compared himself, yet he was imaginative and experienced enough to recognize the necessity of including a variety of weapons, both traditional and new, in his armies.
That of 1472, the product of major reforms introduced in the previous year, consisted of heavy cavalry (some 15 per cent), archers supplied with mounts for transport (some 50 per cent), pikemen (some 15 per cent), handgunners (10 per cent) and foot archers (10 per cent). Although only approximate, such figures underline the importance of the horse in battle. Its role must be neither ignored nor forgotten.
Nevertheless, the armies of Charles the Bold, and others, remained dominated by infantry. In fourteenth-century England the normal ratio in recruiting cavalry (men-at-arms) and infantry was 1:2. Under Henry V, in the early fifteenth century, the figure was normally 1:3, rising as high as 1:10 in the 1440s when recruiting became very difficult.
Significantly, the change to greater numbers of infantry took place far more slowly in \JFrance\j than in England: as late as the beginning of the fifteenth century the ratio stood at two men-at-arms to one foot soldier, changing to 1:2 and then to 1:5 or 1:6 in the 1440s and 1450s when the English were expelled first from Normandy and finally from \JAquitaine\j.
In \JSpain\j, the army that reconquered \JGranada\j a generation later consisted of one cavalry trooper to every three or four infantryman. Only in a country such as \JBohemia\j, where the wars αrose from socio-religious factors, did the ratio differ significantly. The army sent by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund against the Hussites in 1422 totalled 1,656 horsemen and 31,000 infantry, a ratio of 1:19.
Armies naturally varied greatly in size, depending on circumstances, military objectives, and the availability of money. At the end of the thirteenth century many armies manned by those obliged to give military service were large.
In 1298 Edward I of England had with him almost 30,000 men (in a ratio of one cavalryman to about eight infantry) on his expedition into Scotland. In the late summer of 1340 Philip VI of \JFrance\j may have had at his disposal, in all theatres, as many as 100,000 men, either paid directly or financed by his cities and nobles, while his adversaries, Edward III of England and his allies, maintained perhaps 50,000.
These, however, probably constituted the largest military establishments of the later middle ages. The development of paid armies, coupled with the adverse effects of the Black Death after 1348, soon brought down army sizes.
The average French army towards the end of the fourteenth century comprised some 5,000 men, although Henry V had about twice that number with him in 1417, and the Venetian army in about 1430 might have numbered some 7,000 men.
#
"Medieval Warfare at Sea",64,0,0,0
Hostilities did not take place on land alone. The long conflict between England and \JFrance\j saw a growing appreciation of the role of the sea in war. In order to fight on the mainland of Europe, the English had to take to the sea to transport personnel and horses (in their thousands), as well as all forms of armaments, provisions, and equipment.
Ships had to be found for this purpose, and to secure these when they were needed (a need that might last for months) merchant fleets were plundered through commandeering carried out by royal officers. The system was slow, and caused much resentment among the communities of merchants and fishermen whose activities suffered from the military needs of the kingdom.
Meanwhile, in \JFrance\j, late in the thirteenth century, King Philip IV caused a shipyard, the Clos des GalΘes, to be built at \JRouen\j on the river Seine. The intention was to give the French crown the opportunity to construct ships of its own (ships which could be brought quickly into service), as well as to provide facilities for their repair.
In June 1340, in the first (and perhaps the bloodiest) battle of the Hundred Years War, Edward III led a powerful expeditionary force across the Channel to the Flemish port of Sluys. There he found the French fleet drawn up before the port, determined to impede his landing. In the words of the chronicler Jean Froissart.
'This battle of which I am speaking was very foul and very horrible, because battles and assaults on the sea are both harder fought and more cruel than those on land, for one cannot flee or retreat.' As the English chronicler, Geoffrey Le Baker, wrote:
An iron cloud of bolts from crossbows, and arrows from bows, fell upon [the French] bringing death to thousands. Then those who wished, or were daring enough, came to blows at close quarters with spears, pikes, and swords; stones, thrown from the ships' castles, also killed many.
In brief, this was without a doubt an important and terrible battle which a coward would not have dared to observe even from afar off.
Contemporary estimates of the French losses varied from 20,000 to 55,000 (and modern ones from 16,000 to 18,000), including both commanders, together with most of their ships. The defeat at Sluys dealt a heavy blow to French pretensions to exercise any control over the seas.
Henry V also appreciated the importance of maintaining naval mastery, maintaining his military ambitions in \JFrance\j with a fleet of some thirty-nine vessels, some accumulated by inheritance, capture or purchase, others built at the new shipyard which he established at \JSouthampton\j (see \JCapital Ship (Warfare)\j).
The typical high-sided vessel of northern waters needed port facilities (or at least a quayside) to discharge its cargo and its men; but galleys, shallow-keeled and propelled by either sails or oars, could make a landing on a beach.
Castile and \JGenoa\j were the main suppliers of such ships throughout the middle ages, and their importance can be judged by the diplomatic efforts made by both England and \JFrance\j to secure their support during the Hundred Years War.
Thus, on a calm day in the summer of 1372, a Castilian galley fleet destroyed an English squadron off La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay; and the ships either sunk or taken in the mouth of the river Seine on 15 August 1416 by an English squadron included a number of Genoese vessels which had assisted the French in a land and sea blockade of the town of Harfleur, won by the English in the previous year.
War on land and war at sea coalesced in such blockades. In 1346-47 the English had forced the surrender of \JCalais\j through a long siege on land sustained by a blockade at sea, gaining a valuable bridgehead on the European continent (held until 1558).
Ports, and the control of ports, were essential both for the defence of a long coast line (such as that of France) and for purposes of attack.
Ports were the places where fleets tended to gather, and where they could be destroyed, so that naval actions normally took place near the coast, in shallow waters, rather than out at sea. Ports situated on estuaries also controlled access to rivers.
The capture of Harfleur in 1415 gave the English the chance to ship men, artillery, and siege engines up the Seine to \JRouen\j for the long blockade which led to the capture of that city four years later. Rivers proved particularly useful in conveying cannon and other heavy equipment within a country.
Access to rivers, as the English understood, would have to be gained and maintained from the sea. A measure of 'control' over the sea was something which, by the fifteenth century, was becoming increasingly important.
It could not be achieved, however, without some sort of navy, among whose tasks would be included the protection of a country's legitimate trading interests.
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"Indenture, Origins of",65,0,0,0
As Jean de Bueil wrote in his military treatise of 1466, \ILe Jouvencel,\i 'All empires and all lordships find their origin in war', and the later middle ages were no exception. But state-formation, like state-preservation, depended upon maintaining access to soldiers.
Already in 1300 this could mean hiring mercenaries, usually for short-term service. The growing Italian city-states did this, while the great kingdoms of northern Europe, England, and \JFrance\j, remained largely dependent on their traditional social system to provide the men needed for war.
But the decline of feudal obligation to serve in war, the prolongation of conflicts, and the unwillingness of men pressed by economic necessity to fight for anything other than financial reward led inevitably to the practice of paying all troops for their military service.
The increasingly widespread development of this practice from the late thirteenth century onwards had certain important consequences. Since huge sums of money were involved, only the central authority (the king, the prince, the 'state') possessed the ability to provide funds which could not be raised except through taxation, thereby sharing responsibility for making war between those who fought and those who paid.
As a consequence the ruler, as the paymaster, became the employer, making terms with those who served him through a military contract, known variously as the 'indenture' (England), the \Ilettre de retenue\i (France), and the \Icondotta\i (Italy).
The indenture was a document of both practical and symbolic importance. It presupposed the right of a society's leaders to decide on war and peace. Equally, it claimed the explicit right to appoint men to lead armies in time of war. (How these should be chosen and on what principles, was another question.)
Finally it gave the right to insist on standards which would lead to efficiency: those receiving pay had the obligation to train, to serve out their length of agreed service (desertion became a crime of importance), and to be properly provided with arms according to their position in the army, as agreed in the contract.
The need to apply discipline, which owed much to Roman tradition as well as to the revival of the Aristotelian idea that any society should be ready to defend itself, lay at the root of such thinking. For some, the jousts or combats between two opponents, usually mounted, and the tournaments in which team skills were practised, seemed appropriate.
Yet the need for others to practise was also clearly recognized. In England the Assize of Arms (1181) and the Statute of Winchester (1285) initiated a series of measures, inspired by the crown, emphasizing the obligation of able-bodied male adults to prepare themselves for war.
The following centuries witnessed the renewal of such measures all over Europe. Regular \Jarchery\j practice was demanded in England in 1363; the Scots were urged to renounce football and golf for the same end in 1456; while in 1473 those serving in the Burgundian army received orders to prepare themselves both for individual combat and for fighting in formation.
Discipline was also enforced through the system of regular inspection known as 'muster and review' which, largely based on English practice, developed during the Hundred Years War.
Here the emphasis lay not only on the counting of numbers (in order to prevent unit leaders from seeking money to pay soldiers who had deserted or, worse, never served) but on ensuring that minimum standards of dress and armament were maintained.
In this way, two requirements were met: the contractor knew that he was receiving value for money, while at the same time the standards of military efficiency were maintained.
The ruler could expect certain things of those whom he employed to fight, but he likewise had obligations towards them, two of which possessed particular importance. One was to provide the army with the weapons, equipment (including expensive cannon), and provisions which it would need on campaign.
This required not only money; military organization and administration had to be developed so that armies could be supplied properly and regularly with these material requirements. The second was to provide pay, normally in cash, for the army.
This was often even more difficult to achieve and caused frequent indiscipline among soldiers who, unrewarded, might turn on 'soft' targets in attempts to make up what was owed to them. Such activity alienated civilian populations (and potential 'political' support) and earned the criticism of commentators who, in these years, became increasingly aware of the plight of the victims of action of this kind.
Perhaps more important still, such undisciplined behaviour quickly led to a decline in military efficiency and effectiveness. No wonder, then, that the need for armies to act in orderly fashion was well understood, and the supposed strict discipline of the Roman army became widely admired.
English, French, Bohemian, Swiss, and Burgundian commanders issued ordinances aimed at controlling soldiers' activities, while the development of the military office of constable reflected realization of the need to establish order within an army.
\BThe Example Of The Ancients\b
The thinking behind such developments went back a long way. The classical (in particular the Roman) tradition in the waging of war was well known and its chief lessons understood. A man such as Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy was much aware of the successes of the great soldiers of history; he had tapestries of Alexander and Hannibal hung in the great hall of his palace in Brussels, while 'he took pleasure in the deeds of Julius Caesar, of Pompey, of Hannibal, of Alexander the Great, and of other great and famous men whom he wished to follow and imitate.
' Likewise he had a translation of Caesar's \IDe Bello Gallico\i made for him. In this respect, history was useful for its didactic value. Equally so were the military authors of ancient times. The literature favoured by the military aristocracy of the fifteenth century was not that of the traditional chivalric background but, rather, one based upon a growing appreciation of the military values of \JRome\j (in particular) and of what these had to offer.
Although copies of the \IStratagemata\i of Sextus Julius Frontinus circulated widely, Vegetius's \IConcerning Military Matters\i remained, a millennium after it was written, the most cited work on the military art to be bequeathed by the ancient world (see \JMilitary Tradition, Western\j).
His teaching, in diluted form, was also handed down in works such as the \ISiete Partidas\i of King Alfonso X of Castile and the \IDe Regimine Principum\i of Giles of \JRome\j, both written in the second half of the thirteenth century, and, more than a century later, in \ILes Faits d'Armes et de Chevalerie\i of Christine de Pisan, which formed the basis of the \IFayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye\i which William Caxton compiled and printed in England in 1490. In this way the ideas of the classical tradition became more diffused than ever in the new age.
It was to that same tradition that men looked for inspiration in creating a permanent army. Founded upon the practice of providing a king or prince with a personal bodyguard, it soon grew into something bigger.
It also developed from the practice of calling upon a largely, but not solely, indigenous force (shades of the tradition of the 'citizen' army of the ancient world) which was being developed in the kingdom of Naples, as well as in the republic of Venice and in Milan, by the middle years of the fifteenth century.
Particular military needs and the growing reluctance to rely solely on costly mercenaries both lay behind such advances in organization. In \JFrance\j, the foundations of the permanent army had been laid through the creation of the \ICompagnies d'Ordonnance\i by Charles VII in 1445; his successor, Louis XI, greatly increased the number of soldiers in royal pay after 1470, by which time his arch-rival, Duke Charles of Burgundy, was doing much the same.
The final stage in the Christian reconquest of \JSpain\j - the recovery of Moorish \JGranada\j in 1492 - was only achieved by maintaining up to 80,000 men through ten hard-fought annual campaigns.
The spread of mass-produced \Jgunpowder\j weapons, however, swiftly transformed the nature of warfare in the West.
Although Charles the Bold would have had little difficulty in understanding the military world of his great-grandfather, Philip the Bold, who had fought at Poitiers in 1356, thanks to the \Jgunpowder\j revolution he would have been totally baffled by that of his great-grandson, the emperor Charles V, who in 1552 maintained an army of perhaps 150,000 men fighting in five separate theatres on land as well as in the Mediterranean and in the North Atlantic.
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"Gunpowder Revolution 1300-1500",66,0,0,0
\BChapter 7 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
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"Gunpowder Revolution (Warfare)",67,0,0,0
In Robert Barret's military treatise of 1598, \IThe Theory and Practice of Modern Wars,\i 'a gentleman' pointed out to 'a captain' that Englishmen in the past had performed wonders with longbows rather than \Jfirearms\j; to which the captain witheringly replied, 'Sir, then was then, and now is now. The wars are much altered since the fiery weapons first came up.'
Most professional soldiers of the day agreed. According to Sir Roger Williams, another English veteran writing in 1590: 'We must confess Alexander, Caesar, Scipio and Hannibal, to be the worthiest and most famous warriors that ever were; notwithstanding, assure yourself...they would never have...conquered countries so easily, had they been fortified as \JGermany\j, \JFrance\j, and the Low Countries, with others, have been since their days.'
Such recognition of innovation and change was unusual in an age which prided itself on classical precedents and continuity, but the facts were unanswerable. The introduction of 'the fiery weapons', especially artillery, and of new systems of fortifications, had revolutionized the conduct of war.
\BThe Rise Of The 'Fiery Weapons'\b
The correct formula for making \Jgunpowder\j - from saltpeter, sulphur, and charcoal - was first discovered in China, perhaps as early as the ninth century AD; and by the twelfth century Sung armies used both metal bombards and grenades.
The new technology gradually spread westwards until by the early fourteenth century several Arabic and European sources mention iron artillery and the first known illustration of a bombard in Europe (dated 1327) bears a striking resemblance to the earliest picture from China (dated 1128).
It is significant that the first western pictures of guns showed them in action against wooden castle gates, because for at least another century \Jgunpowder\j weapons in Europe were used mainly against 'soft' targets such as gateways or houses.
According to a contemporary chronicle, when the English laid siege to Berwick-upon-Tweed (then just over the Scottish border) in 1333:
They made many assaults with guns and with other [siege] engines to the town, wherewith they destroyed many a fair house; and churches also were beaten down unto the earth, with great stones that pitilessly came out of [the] guns and of other [siege] engines.
And nonetheless the Scots kept well the town...[so that the English] might not come therein...[But they] abided there so long, till those that were in the town failed victuals; and also they were so weary of waking that they knew not what to do.
This account makes clear, on the one hand, that early artillery was used in just the same way as traditional siege engines, such as catapults and trebuchets, to lob missiles into the town in order to damage houses and churches (rather than to batter down walls); and, on the other, that its impact remained limited - although it may have made the defenders 'weary' by keeping them awake, the town still had to be starved out.
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"Cannon and Gunpowder in Warfare",68,0,0,0
Stone-throwing trebuchets and other 'engines' continued to play their part in sieges well into the fifteenth century. Christine de Pisan's 1409 treatise on military practice considered them to be as essential as iron guns for a successful siege; and they saw action in \JFrance\j on several occasions during the 1420s. But ten years later the bombard at last came into its own.
During the second phase of the Hundred Years War in \JFrance\j (see \JHundred Years War, Tactics\j), at a siege in 1430 big guns did 'so much damage to the walls of the castle that the garrison capitulated'; at another in 1433 artillery 'pointed against the gates and walls...damaged them greatly, breaches being made in diverse parts'; while at a third in 1437 gunfire left 'a great part of the walls...thrown to the ground so that [the town] was in no way defensible.'
Although fortresses could still resist if \Jtopography\j placed them beyond the range of the guns, or if the besiegers' artillery proved inadequate, from the 1430s onwards the cannon deployed by the major states of western Europe could successfully reduce most traditional vertical defences to rubble within a matter of days.
Harfleur, which had resisted a siege for six weeks in 1415, and for six months in 1440, fell to Charles VII of \JFrance\j in December 1449 after only seventeen days thanks to the damage inflicted by the sixteen bombards founded specially for the task. And Harfleur was just one of over seventy English strongholds in Normandy to be regained by the French between May 1449 and August 1450.
Not all were subdued by bombardment - some of them were abandoned because they were deemed indefensible while a surprising number fell through treachery - but most surrendered because the French siege train made further resistance impossible.
The rapid conquest of Brittany by \JFrance\j and of \JGranada\j by Castile, both in the 1480s, were likewise achieved largely by the superior firepower of the victors' cannon.
These striking successes reflected important technological innovations. Early artillery had a limited range, for in order to make an impact firing horizontally the guns needed to be placed close up; yet if they came too near they could be captured or damaged by an enemy sortie.
Even in the sixteenth century experts considered less than 100 yards too close to be safe yet more than 300 yards too distant to be effective. The short-barreled gun of the 1320s clearly lacked the power to penetrate reinforced walls even at 100 yards, and the same remained true in the early fifteenth century when the ratio of barrel length to shot size still rarely exceeded 1.5:1.
By 1430, however, the ratio had doubled to 3:1, which increased not only accuracy but also muzzle velocity and therefore range. Both of the latter were further enhanced by the discovery at about the same time that, on the one hand, \Jgunpowder\j prepared in small granules ('corned' powder) was far more effective (some contemporaries reckoned three times more effective) than before; and that, on the other hand, iron or lead projectiles did far more damage to a target than stone shot.
Finally, improvements in \Jmetallurgy\j made it possible to cast guns of unprecedented size and impact: among the surviving examples from the earlier fifteenth century, the smallest bombard fired a 5-inch shot and the largest discharged a ball 30 inches in diameter weighing more than 1,500 pounds.
Nevertheless, these monsters were still manufactured in much the same way as a beer barrel, with forged iron staves kept in place by hoops, and this could easily cause disaster.
Thus a large Burgundian piece used against the Turks in 1445 blew up when it was fired too often - first it burst two hoops and at the next round two more hoops and a stave - while in 1460 James II of Scotland died when he stood too close to a gun whose staves exploded when it fired. But other pieces in the Scottish king's siege train, such as 'Mons Meg', proved more durable and effective.
Although casting in bronze rather than iron reduced the weight of big guns significantly, nevertheless only large calibre weapons proved truly effective against reinforced walls. Even two centuries later, just after the outbreak of a major rebellion in 1641, the governors of Ireland saw clearly that:
Besides the walled towns revolted, there will be very many castles to be gained by no other means than battery; and if we have no other ordnance than culverins the service will be much the more difficult...by reason of the many shots that culverins are forced to make before they can make a breach, whereas cannon clears and rents the walls at first and leaves them so shaken as a few shots afterwards from the culverin breaks down all that the cannon has shaken.
But moving such massive guns to their designated target required a safe route, which usually involved securing the protection of either an army or a navy. In effect this meant that, until the defeat of the enemy's main forces, heavy artillery could only be used either against seaports, as at Constantinople in 1453, or as part of a major campaign in which the field army and the siege train moved together at a snail's pace.
For this reason, artillery seldom played a decisive role in medieval battles, being fired at first rather to intimidate than to harm the enemy: at CrΘcy (1346) for example, according to a contemporary, the English 'fired off some cannons they had brought to the battle in order to frighten the Genoese [crossbowmen]'.
A century later, however, the range of artillery exceeded that of archers, while improvements in design - above all the combination of trunnions with two-wheeled carriages - made it possible to aim individual pieces relatively rapidly (see \JMilitary Tactics of the West, Fifteenth Century\j).
The first known reference to special hand-held \Jfirearms\j in Europe dates from 1364, when an inventory of the arsenal at \JPerugia\j in \JItaly\j recorded '500 bombards, one span long, which are held in the hand: very handsome and able to pierce any armour'.
The earliest illustrations, from around 1400, still show a miniature 'bombard' mounted on a wooden firing frame, and hand-held weapons only seem to have been fired from the chest or the shoulder around 1450.
However, for some time portable \Jfirearms\j remained just one weapon among many, far outnumbered in action by bows, crossbows, partisans, and pikes. Even Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy, who fully appreciated the importance of missile weapons in battle, still trusted in the 1470s to archers rather than to gunners (see \JMedieval Army\j).
Although it took far less time to train men to fire an arquebus than to pull a bow, so that far more infantry could be mobilized, another century elapsed before \Jfirearms\j became the arbiter of battle in Europe.
By then, \Jgunpowder\j had already transformed siege warfare. 'Great towns that once could have held out for a year against all foes but hunger now fell within a month,' noted one chronicler about the artillery that secured the rapid conquest of the Moorish kingdom of \JGranada\j in southern \JSpain\j during the 1480s.
'When brought up to the walls they were set up with unbelievable rapidity. With only the briefest interval between shots they fired so rapidly and powerfully that they could do in a few hours what in \JItaly\j used to take days,' echoed a contemporary historian, describing the guns which the French introduced into \JItaly\j after 1494.
According to the military commentator Niccol≥ Machiavelli, writing in 1519, 'No wall exists, however thick, that artillery cannot destroy in a few days.'
The defenders' problem after the \Jgunpowder\j revolution, therefore, was how to keep the enemy's heavy guns at bay and, failing that, how to limit the damage they could do.
By the 1360s many fortified places had installed cannon of their own in order to pick off or keep out of range those of the enemy: \JBologna\j in central \JItaly\j had 35 artillery pieces on its walls in 1381; Mechelen in the Netherlands increased its arsenal by an average of fourteen cannon per year between 1372 and 1382; while Dijon in Burgundy possessed thirteen cannon in 1417 and ninety-two in 1445.
The 1360s also saw the appearance of gunports (sometimes merely an enlargement of existing arrow-slits), particularly in towers and gatehouses where they could harass an enemy attack.
Somewhat later, new towers were added to existing fortifications in order to increase such flanking fire, while both towers and walls were reinforced and thickened so as to withstand the weight and the recoil of the heavy guns placed upon them and to absorb the impact of incoming shots. But these measures, since they remained within the framework of the traditional vertical defences, could only delay the deadly onset of an artillery barrage; they could not avert it.
The Italian architect and humanist, Leon Battista Alberti, first divined the correct response to the bombard. His essay \IOn the Art of Building,\i composed in the 1440s, argued that defensive fortifications would be more effective if 'built in uneven lines, like the teeth of a saw', and speculated that a star-shaped configuration might be best because it would provide interlocking fields of fire.
Several other Italian military writers later in the century also argued for polygonal, angled defences; but at first few rulers paid heed and these treatises long remained unpublished. In the last decades of the century, however, although most new fortifications continued to be built according to the traditional design, a few fortresses in central \JItaly\j included huge angled bastions at regular intervals in order both to keep away the enemy's artillery and to produce a lethal flanking fire on any attempt at assault.
Then, in 1515, the papal port of Civitavecchia received a full circuit of quadrilateral bastions in order to create a complete defensive system of supporting fields of fire. The 'artillery fortress' was born.
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"Artillery Fortress: Italian Style Defence",69,0,0,0
Contemporaries immediately recognized the bastion system - known in \JItaly\j as the 'modern style' \I(alla moderna)\i and elsewhere as 'the Italian style' \I(trace italienne)\i - as the only fully effective defence against the \Jgunpowder\j revolution.
In the succinct phrase of the military architect Francesco Laparelli: 'It is impossible to defend a place against an army with artillery without bastions', while the French military expert Raymond de Beccarie, lord of Fourquevaux, held that only fortifications constructed since the year 1510 presented a serious obstacle to a well-armed aggressor:
Because those fortified before that date cannot be called strong, seeing that the art of making bastions came to light only a short while ago. But those which have received ramparts since then, or in our own day, must (provided they were constructed at leisure and not in haste) be held extremely difficult to capture.
The distinction between speedy and systematic construction was important because building a 'modern' defensive system represented a major undertaking - indeed perhaps the greatest \Jengineering\j venture of the age.
Thus the pentagonal citadel at Antwerp, commissioned in 1567, involved the removal of 650,000 cubic yards of earth and the construction of 221,000 cubic yards of masonry at the record speed of 6,000 cubic yards per month - but even so it took over three years to complete.
Clearly such a lengthy venture, especially when applied to an entire city, could only be undertaken in anticipation of a threat, not in response to one.
Niccol≥ Machiavelli, writing in 1526, perceived three distinct ways of turning a town into an artillery fortress. Two involved starting from scratch: tearing down the existing walls and either building a new defensive system beyond them, so as to include all suburbs and all points (such as neighbouring high ground) from which an enemy might threaten; or else building a smaller circuit than before, abandoning (and levelling) all areas deemed indefensible.
However, both these methods involved colossal expense: thus the papacy abandoned its scheme to surround \JRome\j with a belt of eighteen powerful bastions in 1542 when the bills for constructing just the first one came in; and in the 1590s the Venetians resolved to reduce the size of their projected fortress at Palmanova from twelve bastions to nine in order to economize.
But creating an artillery fortress also involved high social costs for it affected, by definition, far larger areas than before - particularly the suburbs lying just beyond the medieval walls which often included important buildings such as hospitals, religious houses, and industrial plant (mills and furnaces).
Machiavelli's report of 1526 therefore admitted a third technique of installing modern fortifications which, although inferior to the others, proved both far quicker and far cheaper: a drastic modification of the existing defences, reducing the height and increasing the depth of the existing walls, redesigning the towers and gateways into bastions, and creating an escarpment to give a proper field of fire.
Of course earthen ramparts, when unprotected by brick or stone, would not last for long (contemporary estimates ranged from four years, with minimal maintenance, up to ten) before the weather eroded them. But they proved relatively fast and cheap to erect; they could absorb incoming fire effectively; and, with enough determined defenders, they could defy even the largest armies of the day.
Thus in 1552 the city of Metz in Lorraine (eastern France) managed to resist a siege mounted by 55,000 men - probably the largest western field army of the century - despite its lack of a full 'modern' defensive system.
The French had taken the city in May, but five months later the huge force assembled by the emperor Charles V arrived to recapture it. Nevertheless the 5,800-man French garrison worked day and night to strengthen the existing fortifications, erecting 'boulevards' (sixteen feet thick in places), with 'flanks' on either side of them, at precisely the most vulnerable places, and backing all walls with ramparts of earth and bales of wool.
And so when, on 27 November, having fired over 7,000 rounds against a sector of the curtain wall, the besiegers finally brought some seventy feet of it crashing down, they still dared not launch an assault because it proved impossible to silence the guns on the flanks.
Later in the century, as both the power of artillery and the techniques of siege-craft improved, such \Iad hoc\i additions to medieval defences became inadequate. Only the angled bastion offered security, and so the artillery fortress invented in central \JItaly\j steadily spread all over Europe.
By 1550 the new style predominated in the Italian peninsula and along the Franco-Netherlands and the Habsburg-Ottoman borders. The years between 1529 and 1572 saw the construction of some twenty-six miles of bastioned defences in the Netherlands alone: four citadels, twelve entirely new circuits of walls, and eighteen substantially new circuits.
By 1610 fifty artillery fortresses studded \JFrance\j's 600-mile land frontier between \JCalais\j and \JToulon\j, while others defended strategic sectors of \JGermany\j, England, Ireland, Denmark, \JPoland\j, and \JRussia\j, as well as colonial outposts such as \JHavana\j and Cartagena in the Caribbean, \JMombasa\j, Diu, and Malacca around the Indian Ocean, and Manila, \JMacao\j, and Callao on the shores of the Pacific.
The impact of these developments made itself felt in several ways. First, sieges now took far longer. Gone were the days when seventy and more strongpoints could be wrested from an enemy in a couple of campaigning seasons (see \JGunpowder Revolution (Warfare)\j) for, wherever bastions existed, one or at most two fortresses now represented the maximum attainable gain.
The capture of each stronghold defended by the \Itrace italienne\i required months if not years. Indeed, laying siege to an artillery fortress could prove almost as arduous as constructing one: a chain of siegeworks had to be built and manned until either the defenders surrendered through starvation or, alternatively, trenches could be advanced far enough to permit either close-range bombardment of the walls or else the sinking of \Jgunpowder\j mines under a bastion.
However, taking an artillery fortress did not merely take longer; it also involved far more troops. On the one hand, manning the siegeworks required a larger besieging army: SΘbastien le Prestre de Vauban, the leading military engineer of the seventeenth century, considered a ratio of ten besiegers to every defender, with a minimum of 20,000 men, essential for success.
On the other hand, offensive action represented only one aspect of each campaign, for it was also necessary to defend one's own territory against possible enemy aggression, both by maintaining adequate garrisons and by keeping a potential relief army in reserve.
At one level, the \Itrace italienne\i proved labour efficient: Szigeth in \JHungary\j, defended by a complete circuit of modern walls, successfully defied the Turks in 1566 with a garrison of only 800 men. But with multiple fortresses to defend, even relatively small garrisons could - cumulatively - tie down between 40 and 50 per cent of each state's forces.
For its 1640 campaign, the high command of the Spanish Army of Flanders planned to man 208 separate places in the South Netherlands, accounting for 33,399 soldiers at a time when the total strength envisaged for the army stood at only 77,000.
Somewhat later, Louis XIV of \JFrance\j also found it prudent to commit almost half his army to manning the bastions of his realm's 'iron frontier': 166,000 men in 221 strongholds in 1688, rising to 173,000 men in 297 fortresses in 1705.
Naturally, effective defence called for more than men alone; it also required guns and ammunition. In the 1440s, the French army had needed only 20 tons of powder and forty qualified gunners for its artillery, but by 1500 the equivalent figures were 100 tons and 100 gunners, and, by 1540, 500 tons and 275 gunners.
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"Gunpowder Revolution and Strategy",70,0,0,0
The diffusion and multiplication of military resources - both human and material - on this scale created critical new strategic problems.
The nineteenth-century German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, in his influential work \IOn War,\i borrowed from physics the concept of a 'centre of gravity' to explain what seemed to him the essential aim of strategy: 'A theatre of war, be it large or small, and the forces stationed there, no matter what their size, represent the sort of unity in which a single centre of gravity can be identified. That is the place where the decision should be reached.'
Clausewitz drew upon his direct experience of the spectacular French victories of the period 1792-1812, and his extensive reading of military history, to conclude that: 'For Alexander, Gustavus Adolphus, Charles XII, and Frederick the Great, the centre of gravity was their army.
If their army had been destroyed, they would all have gone down in history as failures.' But his analysis ignored the fact that the army of Gustavus Adolphus did in fact meet with a major defeat, at N÷rdlingen in 1634 (two years after the king's death at the indecisive battle of Lⁿtzen), and yet this did not lead Sweden to 'fail'.
On the contrary, when the war eventually ended with the Peace of \JWestphalia\j in 1648. Sweden achieved all her major war aims: extensive territorial gains, adequate guarantees for her future security, and a substantial war indemnity.
The contradiction between the defeat at N÷rdlingen and the gains at \JWestphalia\j stemmed from Sweden's control of numerous artillery fortresses which held steady even after the defeat of the main army.
In 1648 the Swedish forces in \JGermany\j still numbered 70,000 troops, of whom almost half garrisoned 127 strategically located strongpoints: they thus presented no 'centre of gravity' that an adversary could destroy with a single blow.
Other theatres of war dominated by the \Itrace italienne\i in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries proved equally resistant to the knock-out blows advocated by Clausewitz. The problem was memorably summarized by Don Luis de RequesΘns, commander of the Spanish forces striving to suppress the Dutch Revolt.
'There would not be time or money enough in the world,' he warned his master, Philip II, in 1574, 'to reduce by force the twenty-four towns which have rebelled in Holland if we are to spend as long in reducing each one of them as we have taken over similar ones so far.' Or again, slightly later:
Many towns and a battle have been won, each of them a success enough in itself to bring peace and even to win an entire new kingdom elsewhere; but here they have been to no avail...I believe that God for my sins has chosen to show me so many times the Promised Land here, as he did to Moses, but that someone else is to be the Joshua who will enter therein.
But no Spanish Joshua appeared: instead, the artillery fortresses of Holland and \JZeeland\j defied all of Philip II's efforts at reconquest until his treasury declared \Jbankruptcy\j in 1575 and his army mutinied and abandoned its posts in 1576.
A pattern of warfare in which sieges eclipsed battles in importance and wars eternalized themselves prevailed throughout much of Europe until the eighteenth century.
\BGunpowder Revolution And Cost Of War\b
The proliferation of artillery fortresses enhanced the cost of war in two crucial respects: by increasing the longevity (and decreasing the gains) of each military operation, and by driving up the number of troops and the amount of equipment required to fight wars.
Spain's expenditure on war escalated five-fold during the later sixteenth century, an experience shared by other smaller states: in 1565 England's chief minister petulantly complained about 'the uncertainty of the charge of the war, as at this day it is seen that all wars are treble more chargeable than they were wont to be'.
However, the rapidly spiralling burden of war in the sixteenth century stemmed from more than just technology. First, the 'price revolution' of the period increased the cost of everything - whether or not it had to do with war. Foodstuffs, for example, cost on average 4 per cent more each year, and the price of clothes, weapons and other equipment rose accordingly.
This relentless price \Jinflation\j was, however, associated with a dramatic and sustained expansion in economic activity. Between 1450 and 1580, the population of western Europe almost doubled, steadily augmenting domestic demand so that land cultivation, agricultural output, industrial production, and trade all burgeoned.
This in turn made additional resources (whether raised through loans, taxes, or both) available to the states to support war. To be sure, as in the middle ages, many items of military expenditure were offloaded. Above all, towns often had to pay for their own defence.
Thus the city of Antwerp financed its splendid new walls (with nine bastions and five monumental gateways), completed between 1542 and 1557, and later its citadel, entirely from loans secured by local taxes on property and foodstuffs (the 'fortification fund' thus created had still not been paid off two centuries later!).
Moreover the recurring costs of local defence also normally fell upon individual communities - standard responsibilities included maintaining and manning the walls, as well as lodging and feeding the garrison - so that between 50 and 75 per cent of many municipal budgets went on defence.
However, a fortuitous political development during the period forced most states in western Europe to commit an unprecedented share of their resources to defence, leading to heavy taxation, heavier borrowing, and (ultimately) constitutional crisis if not revolution.
The marriage of Maximilian of Habsburg to Mary of Burgundy (the heiress of Duke Charles the Bold) in 1477 began the rapid rise of a minor south German dynasty to European prominence: through a series of further judicious unions and unexpected deaths, their grandson Charles V became first ruler of the Burgundian Netherlands (1506), then king of \JSpain\j and Spanish \JItaly\j (1516), and finally Holy Roman Emperor (1519).
France, once the most powerful state in western Europe, now felt encircled by the territories of a single ruler and for over a century successive French monarchs struggled to break the perceived Habsburg stranglehold.
They gradually realized that this could not be achieved by fighting in only one or two theatres at a time. Thus in the autumn of 1552, while Charles V besieged Metz in Lorraine, Henry II maintained one army of observation in Champagne, in case Metz needed to be relieved; another on the northern frontier, where in December it seized Hesdin (thus forcing the emperor to abandon the siege of Metz); and a third in \JItaly\j, at first in defence of Parma and then to garrison the rebellious republic of Siena.
France thus fought on three fronts at once - four, if one counts the garrisons on other frontiers and the forces occupying Savoy; five if one counts the French navy, operating off the Italian coast in conjunction with the Turks. The French state had never before intervened simultaneously in so many different theatres (although she repeatedly did so in the future).
The combination of the \Jgunpowder\j revolution, strong price \Jinflation\j, and Habsburg hegemony in Europe had created a new and costly mould for major international conflicts. The principal motive for fighting remained dynastic rivalry; but, whereas the various conflicts of the middle ages often took place in isolation, after 1500 they frequently became linked.
Moreover the simultaneous development of new technology in naval warfare extended hostilities to the high seas, as well as to parts of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, so that henceforth the major European powers also had to maintain expensive navies.
#
"Ships of the Line 1500-1650",71,0,0,0
\BChapter 8 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
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"Ships of the Line, Gunpowder at Sea",72,0,0,0
Naval warfare in the West has been dominated for the last three centuries by large warships ('capital ships'), using heavy artillery as their principal weapon, often drawn up in a single line of battle so that their big guns could fire broadsides.
The rival fleets at Jutland in 1916, in the age of steam (see \JWWI: The War at Sea, 1914-1918\j), deployed in much the same way as the sailing warships of the Anglo-Dutch wars, fought in much the same location, in the mid-seventeenth century.
It is hard, however, to date with confidence the emergence of this dominant and durable tactic. For example, much uncertainty surrounds the first effective use of \Jgunpowder\j artillery at sea.
Some surviving Chinese bronze and cast-iron naval guns date from the fourteenth century, but all are relatively small. The inscription on a gun dating from the year 1372 reads:
Left naval guard squadron, Chin division, no 42. Fire-barrel with large bowlshaped muzzle, weight 26 catties. Cast on a fortunate day in the twelfth month of the fifth year of the Hung-Wu reign by the Imperial Foundry Office.
The number '42' proves that a regular programme of naval gun-casting existed during the reign of the first Ming emperor (Hung-Wu, 1368-98), but weapons with a total length of 1 foot 5 inches and weighing barely 35 pounds could only harm people; they could not sink ships.
Even in the seventeenth century Chinese war junks still deployed only anti-personnel weapons. A large imperial warship sketched off Canton in 1637 by the English traveller Peter Mundy showed 'doores [i.e. gunports] in their broadsides', but noted that the guns were only light cast-iron pieces weighing 'near 4 or 5 hundredweight each', with a calibre of about 1 inch and firing a ball of about 1 pound.
Such weapons could do no structural harm to other ships. According to Mundy, the junks could not carry heavier guns because they were 'so weakly plancked and timbred'.
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"Galleys and Gunpowder",73,0,0,0
The earliest references to the shipboard use of heavy artillery comes not from China but from Europe. Jean Froissart's chronicle of the Hundred Years War, written about 1400, mentions that some Spanish vessels about fifty years earlier carried 'everything necessary for their defence' such as 'crossbows, iron cannon, and culverins' (a culverin was a gun able to fire a smaller ball for a longer distance), and in due course such armament became standard.
Thus a century later, according to the records of the ordnance office of the dukes of Burgundy, each galley in the ducal fleet carried (at least in theory) five heavy guns 4 feet long, 'each firing a [stone] shot of 4 inches diameter' and 'each [was] provided with three chambers, each chamber capable of being used for all guns', together with two lighter pieces also supplied with interchangeable chambers.
Now the galley - long, shallow, and propelled primarily by oars - had already served for centuries as the premier warship in European waters. But the introduction of heavy artillery precipitated major design changes: the ram gave way to a special artillery platform at the prow carrying one heavy cannon in the centre flanked by some lighter pieces.
The largest Spanish galley in 1506, for example, carried a 'bombard of iron' weighing about 4 tons as a centreline gun, together with two others half its size and one more weighing just over a ton. These weapons all fired stone projectiles but by the 1530s bronze ordnance, throwing metal shot, had replaced them: a centreline cannon, flanked by either two or four other heavy pieces and a number of lighter anti-personnel weapons, became standard.
The centreline guns aboard galleys were unquestionably the most powerful \Jgunpowder\j weapons afloat: although 50-pounders predominated, some Venetian galleys in the mid-sixteenth century carried 60-pounder (7-inch calibre) and even 100-and 120-pounder weapons.
The detailed records of the Republic's test-firing programme, as well as contemporary chronicles, suggest that these cannon possessed an effective range of up to 1,000 yards and a maximum range of 2 miles.
From the 1540s, an even more powerful oared fighting ship appeared: the galeass, propelled by sails as well as by oars, carried eight or more heavy guns (divided between the poop and the prow) together with an appropriate complement of lighter, anti-personnel weapons.
The Neapolitan galeass \ISan Lorenzo,\i which sailed with the Spanish Armada in 1588, boasted some fifty guns, including ten cannon and culverins.
In the 1550s, the design of Mediterranean galleys changed again as vessels propelled by banks of three oars, each pulled by one man, gave way to others in which three or more men worked a single enormous oar.
This development permitted a modest increase in the size of galleys, and a substantial rise in the number of oarsmen - from a total of 144 to 180 or even 200 per galley - and in the complement of fighting personnel.
Some vessels now carried 400 men, a population larger than that of many European villages, so that (as one seventeenth-century galley captain commented) 'When every man is at his post, only heads can be seen from prow to stern.' This numerical increase produced two further consequences. First, adding more men significantly reduced the provisions per man that could be carried.
The situation proved particularly serious with water: since each man consumed at least half a gallon a day, each galley now needed to cram 200 gallons of water into its limited storage space for each day at sea. Every increase in the ship's company thus reduced the distance at which a vessel could operate away from its home base.
Second, even though the cost of maintaining each galley tripled between 1520 and 1590, the increasing ability of European states to mobilize resources for war led to ever-larger galley fleets. Charles V had fought his Mediterranean campaigns with under 100 galleys, but his son Philip II of \JSpain\j mobilized almost 200.
Taken together, these four developments - galleys that were larger, more heavily manned, more powerfully gunned, and more numerous - transformed the nature of naval warfare under oars. On the one hand, the effective range of the major fleets became severely curtailed; on the other, the number of ports and anchorages capable of serving as effective bases dwindled.
Galley warfare in the Mediterranean turned increasingly into a series of huge frontal assaults on heavily fortified positions (Djerba 1560; Malta 1565; Cyprus 1570-71; \JTunis\j 1573-74) while the rare major battles (Prevesa 1538; Lepanto 1571) occurred at or near the major fleet anchorages.
By 1600, except for coastal defence and for piracy, in most of Europe the galley had fallen into disuse because the cost of maintaining a force of oared fighting vessels capable of achieving major strategic goals had grown prohibitively high.
Galley fleets continued to operate only in the Baltic, where the small rocky islands fringing the coasts complicated navigation by sail: the Russians used galleys to raid the Swedish coast in 1719-21, and the Swedes destroyed most of the Russian navy at Svensksund in 1790 thanks to the imaginative use of heavily gunned galleys. Elsewhere, however, they collapsed under the burden of their own weight.
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"Capital Ship (Warfare)",74,0,0,0
The origins of the capital ship, which replaced the galley as Europe's premier warship, lie in the fifteenth century. The medieval shipwrights of the Atlantic ports specialized in producing sailing vessels built 'clinker' style, with caulked overlapping planking around a simple shell.
Some were very large and could be adapted to military use. Thus Henry V of England (1413-22) possessed several great warships of traditional design: one, the \IGracedieu\i of 1418, built with two layers of planking and (probably) two masts, measured perhaps 80 feet from stem to stern, weighed 1,400 tons and carried four cannon (albeit all of them small and fired from the upper deck).
Soon afterwards, however, starting in \JSpain\j and \JPortugal\j, shipwrights along Europe's Atlantic seaboard began to build their vessels around a complete skeleton, with ribs and braces, fitting the planks 'carvel' style, without any overlap.
The added strength conferred by this technique made possible a more complex rig: now three and sometimes four masts carried a variety of sails, some square to provide motive power and some triangular to assist lateral movement.
By 1500 the 'full-rigged ship' - one of the greatest technological inventions of medieval Europe - had become the most important sailing vessel in the Atlantic. With its great holds, it served the needs of the burgeoning European economy; with its superb sailing qualities, it facilitated voyages of discovery and overseas colonization; with its powerful construction, capable of absorbing the recoil of outgoing gunfire as well as the impact of incoming rounds, it opened the way for the shipsmashing broadside.
The broadside, however, also required the invention of hinged gunports in the hull, for heavy artillery could only be safely deployed along the sides of a ship's lower decks.
Although visual evidence reveals the existence of gunports as early as the 1470s, the first true sailing warship capable of firing broadsides seems to have been the 1,000-ton \IGreat Michael,\i launched in Scotland in 1511, which carried twelve cannon on each side as well as three 'grete basilisks' at the bow and stern and some 300 smaller pieces.
She served as the flagship of a Scottish navy of at least eleven vessels. The fleet scarcely survived the death of its creator, King James IV, in 1513 - the \IGreat Michael\i was sold to \JFrance\j the following year to save money (her running costs alone absorbed 10 per cent of the total state income!).
However it endured long enough to provoke Henry VIII of England to commence a rival and longer-lasting programme of naval construction. The \IGreat Harry,\i launched a year after the Scottish flagship and possibly built in imitation of her, also displaced 1,000 tons and carried forty-three heavy and 141 light guns, with a combined weight of 100 tons (the largest piece, of 12-inch calibre, measured 18 feet).
When Henry died in 1547, having defeated a major French invasion force in the Solent two years previously, his navy consisted of fifty-three well-armed warships with a total displacement of some 10,000 tons.
This fleet, like that of James IV of Scotland, also proved too expensive to last. By 1555 it had dwindled to only thirty vessels, and the capital ships had declined from twelve to three. By 1588, however, although the Royal Navy still included only thirty-four fighting ships, eighteen of them exceeded 300 tons and the total displacement of the fleet exceeded 12,000 tons.
All vessels were mobilized in that year against the Armada sent by Philip II against England, and the surviving Spanish accounts remarked on the constant artillery barrage maintained by the queen's ships: some claimed that the English seemed able to fire four or five rounds in the time it took the Armada to fire once, while veterans of Lepanto considered that, in comparison, the cannonading they experienced in the Channel and the North Sea in 1588 was twenty times more furious.
This is surprising, because the technique of long range naval battery, like the full-rigged ship, originated in \JSpain\j and \JPortugal\j. The \IInstructions\i provided in 1500 by the king of \JPortugal\j to the commander of a fleet dispatched to the Indian Ocean specified that, when he met any hostile ships, 'you are not to come to close quarters with them if you can avoid it, but only with your artillery are you to compel them to strike sail...so that this war may be waged with greater safety, and so that less loss may result to the people of your ships.'
The precision of these orders suggests that they were not new in 1500. In any case they came into immediate use, with Portuguese fleets overseas deployed in line ahead to engage their enemies, firing one broadside and then putting about in order to return and discharge the other (see \JSeaborne Empires, Europe's First\j). But the Portuguese failed to maintain their technological edge in naval warfare.
In his treatise of 1555, \IThe Art of War at Sea,\i Fernando Oliveira recognized that 'at sea we fight at a distance, as if from walls or fortresses, and we seldom come close enough to fight hand-to-hand.' He too recommended the single line ahead as the ideal combat formation, but he advised captains to carry heavy weapons only at the prow, like a galley, with lighter pieces, mostly muzzle-loaders, on the broadsides.
'Do not place heavy artillery on small ships,' he warned, 'because the recoil will pull them apart.' Even in 1588, the armament aboard the Portuguese galleons that led the Spanish Armada remained relatively light: although each vessel carried up to fifty guns, most appear to have been 14-pounders or less.
By this time all the galleons of the English navy carried three or four 30-pounders, as well as a broadside of twenty 17-and 14-pounders. So the Royal Navy could fire heavier guns, as well as fire them more often.
Although English gunfire sank only one Armada ship outright in 1588, several others suffered such damage from artillery bombardment that they failed to survive the journey back to \JSpain\j. Even the flagship, the 1,000-ton Portuguese \Jgalleon\j \ISan Martin,\i only made it home thanks to two great hawsers tied around her damaged sides.
English operational records for 1588 have been lost, precluding greater precision on the navy's achievement against the Armada. However the surviving documents for the 1596 raid on Cadiz carried out by sixteen of the queen's ships, the cutting edge of a fleet of over 120 English and Dutch vessels, shed more light.
Thus the 400-ton \IDreadnought\i carried thirty-five guns, of which seventeen fired heavy calibre ammunition. She left England with 576 iron roundshot for these seventeen guns and fired 353 (or 61 per cent) of them. Meanwhile the 500-ton \IRainbow\i carried twenty-six guns, of which no less than twenty-five fired heavy calibre ammunition.
She left England with 670 iron roundshot for these weapons and fired 392 (or 58 per cent) of them. Now discharging almost 400 heavy calibre rounds per ship in a single campaign - many of them on a single day (21 June 1596) when, according to a contemporary account, 'infinite store of shot was spent between our ships, the town and galleys, much to their damage and nothing to our loss' - marked an entirely new style of naval warfare.
The Armada campaign and the Cadiz raid had significant consequences. First, they demonstrated \JSpain\j's weakness at sea, leading on the one hand to more aggressive and confident English attacks on the possessions of Philip II and, on the other, to the creation, for the first time, of a Spanish High Seas fleet to parry the new threat.
Second it encouraged others to try their luck against the demonstrated vulnerability of Philip II's global empire. The Dutch, like the Spaniards, began to build a proper navy. At first their ships were intended primarily for coastal defence and remained relatively small, but from 1596 larger vessels capable of carrying war to the enemy were laid down. By 1621 the Dutch navy included nine capital ships of 500 tons or more.
A naval arms race now began, with all the major Atlantic powers vying to produce more and bigger warships. The 1,200-ton \IPrince Royal,\i launched in England in 1610, was probably the largest warship in the world; she was certainly the most heavily armed, with fifty-five guns weighing just over 83 tons.
The same was true of the 1,500-ton \ISovereign of the Seas,\i launched in 1637, with 104 guns weighing over 153 tons. Measuring 127 feet long by 43 feet wide, she was in fact only one-third smaller than the \IVictory\i (measuring 170 by 53 feet), the British flagship at Trafalgar in 1805.
These warships, and dozens more like them, all exceeded the size of the average country house and carried more artillery than many fortresses of the day.
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"Naval Strategy: The Line of Battle",75,0,0,0
However, seventeenth-century capital ships carried less than half the sail of an equivalent vessel of the Nelsonian era, making them unwieldy to handle (the more so since the steering wheel did not replace the tiller until the early eighteenth century); and it was in part their cumbersome character that made fighting in a single line ahead so attractive.
Precisely the same tactic laid down for the Portuguese fleet in Asia in 1500 was echoed in the 'Instructions for the better ordering of the fleet in fighting' issued to the English navy in the North Sea in 1653:
As soon as they see the \IGeneral\i [the flagship] engage...then each squadron shall take the best advantage they can to engage with the enemy next unto them; and in order thereunto the ships of every squadron shall endeavour to keep in line with the chief.
The Dutch already favoured the same tactic, and so the battles of the Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652-54, 1665-67, and 1672-74) saw two giant fleets of capital ships, strung out in a single line for 5 miles or more, locked in a deadly artillery duel that could last for days.
The three naval battles fought in the North Sea during the summer of 1673 between the Dutch and English fleets, for example, each involved between 130 and 150 capital ships - now known as 'ships of the line' - with a combined firepower of between 9,000 and 10,000 guns.
Although these ships bristled with artillery, cannon balls alone rarely sank them. Even a 32-pound shot, usually the heaviest fired by a ship of the line, did not make much of a hole as it pierced a ship. The oak splinters that exploded from the point of entry wounded and killed the crew, but left the structural integrity of the ship largely intact.
Captains most commonly struck their colours only when fire threatened to destroy their vessel, when casualties among the crew reached unacceptable levels, or when the ship could no longer manoeuvre.
The naval arms race therefore continued. By 1688, the Dutch navy numbered 102 warships (including sixty-nine ships of the line), the English 173 (including 100 ships of the line), and the French 221 (including ninety-three ships of the line).
Almost all the capital ships were two - or three-deckers carrying between fifty and 100 heavy guns - indeed their basic similarity gave rise to a common deception: flying false colours in order to deceive enemy shipping - and they proved fairly evenly matched.
Thus although William III's daring descent on England in November 1688 (see \JArmadas of 1588 and 1688\j) took the French by surprise, Louis XIV's navy secured command of the Channel the following year, permitting a major invasion of Ireland, and in 1690 it defeated the combined Anglo-Dutch battlefleet off Beachy Head (a headland on the Sussex coast).
As with Lepanto, however, a single naval victory did not suffice if the vanquished retained formidable strength at sea. In the words of the defeated English admiral: 'Most men were in fear that the French would invade, but I was always of another opinion, for I always said that whilst we had a fleet in being, they would not make the attempt.'
He was right, and after Beachy Head England's 'fleet in being' steadily increased in size: from 173 ships with 6,930 guns and a total displacement of almost 102,000 tons in 1688 to 323 ships with 9,912 guns and a total displacement of 160,000 tons by the end of the century. Of the new vessels, seventy-one were ships of the line.
Few, however, were 'first rates': the huge men-of-war, burdened with 90-100 guns, proved too expensive to build and too unwieldy to operate except in a flat calm. Gradually, the weight of guns relative to the hull size declined, and rigging steadily improved thanks to the addition of more sails, of reef points for shortening sail, and of foot ropes to allow sailors a more secure hold on the yards.
In the eighteenth century the French, who had developed a more scientific school of ship design (in which each dockyard had a 'construction council' consisting of senior serving officers and chief shipwrights), pioneered two new influential warship designs: the two-decked seventy-four-gun capital ship, the most versatile and seaworthy of all ships of the line, from 1719; and the lighter \Jfrigate\j, with twenty-six guns deployed on a single deck, from 1744.
Other naval powers soon followed suit, so that the 'seventy-four' and the \Jfrigate\j became standard; but French warships continued throughout the eighteenth century to include innovations that revealed their builders to be in the forefront of naval design and construction - so much so that British admirals sometimes converted French prizes into their flagships!
\BNaval Arms Race\b
The cost of the naval arms race proved crippling, however. The expense of building a capital ship, which stood at only ú2,500 in 1588, had soared to ú13,000 a century later; by then, with over 4,000 workers, the naval dockyards formed by far the largest industrial enterprise in Britain.
Moreover, while less than 16,000 men manned the fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, Cromwell's navy in the 1650s included up to 30,000 and William III's in the 1690s numbered 45,000. Where were these men found?
Only the merchant fleet could supply the trained sailors necessary to man a navy in wartime, and so an important relationship existed between the size of the merchant marine and the battle fleet. Here England reaped the benefits of her island status, which meant that all foreign trade must by definition be seaborne, for even when half the crews aboard her warships were 'pressed' men, taken into state service by force, most of them were used to managing ships at sea.
Finding a suitable and sufficient officer corps to command the ships proved somewhat more difficult, but gradually the permanence of the naval establishment began to attract men of substance to serve as professional officers.
England's navy consumed ú1.5 million during the war against \JSpain\j between 1585 and 1604, ú9 million during the period 1648-60, and almost ú19 million during William III's War (1689-97). No other European state could match this level of spending, for the simple reason that all except England were continental powers obliged to maintain a large land army.
This did not mean that the French and the Dutch could no longer compete at sea - on a number of occasions in the later seventeenth century, and again around 1780, they did (with some success); but so long as England could count on continental allies to threaten its enemies by land, they could not destroy England's supremacy at sea.
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"Seaborne Empires, Europe's First",76,0,0,0
The naval arms race in the North Atlantic thus culminated in a costly stalemate in home waters. It had, however, created fleets capable of pursuing strategic objectives far from home. Once again, the Portuguese showed the way.
In 1502, for example, a squadron of five small caravels (small warships), three large carracks (larger, armed merchant vessels), and ten other craft met with an Indian fleet of some twenty large and sixty small ships off the Malabar coast.
The Indians, encouraged by their numerical superiority, closed for battle, whereupon the Portuguese commander ordered the caravels to come one astern of the other in a line and to run under all the sail they could carry, firing their guns whenever they could, and he did the same with the carracks to their rear.
Each of the caravels carried thirty men, with four heavy guns below, and above six falconets, and ten light pieces placed on the quarter deck and in the bows... The carracks carried six guns on each side, with two smaller ones at the poop and the prow, and eight falconets and many smaller guns.
As they sailed among the Malabar fleet, each vessel fired its broadside and 'made haste to load again, loading the guns with bags of powder which they had measured out ready for this purpose so that they could load again very rapidly.'
Then, 'having passed through, they turned about' and did the same again. According to this account, their big guns aimed at the waterline while the smaller ones concentrated on the masts, the rigging, and the people thronging the deck. Several enemy vessels sank, others suffered extensive damage, and the loss of life was appalling.
But the Portuguese emerged more or less unscathed for, although the Indian ships 'fired the many guns that they carried, they were all small' and did no structural damage; moreover the Europeans kept mainly below the decks, so that neither bullets nor arrows harmed them. The shattered remnants of the Malabar fleet fled.
Other naval encounters between the Portuguese and their adversaries resulted in similar victories, making possible the creation of a chain of forts and trading posts around the shores of the Indian Ocean and into the China Sea, and the regulation of most seaborne commerce in south Asian waters.
The Europeans had taken with them the adage, proven time after time in the middle ages, that they could not have trade without war or war without trade.
Perhaps, however, the naval gun and the line of battle made the acquisition of empire too easy. In the words of a disillusioned Portuguese writer in the later seventeenth century:
From the Cape of Good Hope onwards, we were unwilling to leave anything outside our control. We were anxious to lay our hands on everything in that huge stretch of over 5,000 leagues from Sofala to \JJapan\j. And what was worse...we set about this without calculating our strength, or thinking that...this conquest could not last for ever.
In the 1590s, both English and Dutch fleets entered the Indian Ocean and began to challenge Portuguese control of trade. In 1602, for example, the fleet sent by the Dutch East India Company comprised fourteen ships, of which nine exceeded 400 tons, while the fleet sent in 1603 included the 900-ton capital ship \IDordrecht,\i armed with six 24-pounder and eighteen 8 - or 9-pounder guns.
Between 1602 and 1619 the Company had established fortresses and major trading posts in thirteen places, and sent out 246 ships to Asia; by contrast only seventy-nine Portuguese vessels, albeit some of them very large, reached their destination in India. Only forty-three returned.
The balance of power in the Americas did not tip so far against the Iberian powers - but, then, the Iberians had managed to establish their power there far more effectively.
Within a generation of Columbus's fortuitous Caribbean landfall in 1492, by a combination of force, treachery, and luck, a small number of Spaniards had established effective control over 750,000 square miles of the New World, an area four times as large as the peninsula of the Old World from which they came, and over a population of some twenty million souls, seven times that of \JSpain\j.
In addition, and equally remarkably, thanks to the superior sailing qualities and armament of their vessels, they had turned the ocean connecting southern Europe with the Caribbean into a Spanish lake.
The next generation of invaders and explorers did almost as well: the frontiers of European occupation were steadily advanced, even though the native population contained within them inexorably declined, and in the wake of Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe, the Pacific too became a Spanish lake.
It seems ironic that, just as the West faced its most serious challenge by land for several centuries (in the shape of the Ottoman Turks), by sea it commenced a period of unprecedented expansion, for the sixteenth century was not only an era of military and naval revolution: it was also the golden age of the conquistador.
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"Battle of Lepanto 1571",77,0,0,0
The battle of Lepanto on 7 October 1571 (below) was both the largest European engagement of the sixteenth century, involving perhaps 170,000 men, and the first major battle at sea to be decided by firepower.
The 208 galleys and six galeasses of the Christian navy mounted some 1,815 pieces of artillery, as against only 750 on the 230 Turkish galleys, and their impact proved devastating. Shortly before the battle, Don John of \JAustria\j (commander-in-chief of the Christian forces) asked a senior adviser about the best moment to discharge his ships' artillery.
'Fire when you are so close to the enemy that you are covered with his blood,' came the chilling response; 'The sound of the galleys colliding and of the artillery discharging should occur at the same time.' As a result, after the Christian assault, broken and sinking ships 'lay scattered over about eight miles of water.
The sea was entirely covered, not just with masts, spars, oars, and broken wood, but with an innumerable quantity of corpses that turned the water as red as blood.' In all, the Ottoman fleet lost some 200 galleys, together with their artillery, stores, and some 30,000 men.
In addition, the resounding defeat sparked off several risings in \JGreece\j and \JAlbania\j which seemed, for a time, to herald the collapse of Ottoman rule in the entire Balkan peninsula. It appeared to be one of the decisive battles of the century.
But it was not. Galleys could be built with relative ease, and the Mediterranean coasts under Ottoman control boasted numerous boat-builders with the necessary experience, shipyards, and stocks of raw material to start work immediately on replacing the vessels lost at Lepanto.
Some reserve galleys may also have been ready in the imperial arsenals of Sinop and \JIstanbul\j, where (in any case) a massive building programme began as soon as news of the defeat arrived. By April 1572, a mere six months after the defeat, some 200 galleys and five galeasses stood ready for service.
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"Armadas of 1588 and 1688",78,0,0,0
In 1688, just a century after the Spanish Armada of 130 vessels and 30,000 men set forth on its disastrous attempt to invade England, a Dutch Armada under the command of Prince William of Orange, with some 463 vessels and 40,000 men, succeeded.
The contrasts between the two enterprises could hardly have been greater: the Spaniards had taken almost three years to prepare their expedition, the Dutch took just three months; the former tied down almost all the naval resources of its creator, the latter absorbed only a fraction; the first never managed to land its assault troops, the second captured London and established a new government within a month and William of Orange became William III of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
His success, however, provoked a declaration of war by Louis XIV of \JFrance\j that plunged Britain, the Dutch Republic, and \JFrance\j into a war that lasted, with one brief intermission, until 1713 (see \JPeter The Great (Warfare)\j).
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"Conquest of the Americas 1500-1650",79,0,0,0
\BChapter 9 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
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"Conquest of the Americas",80,0,0,0
'They bear no arms, nor know thereof; for I showed them swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron.' Thus wrote Christopher Columbus of the first natives he encountered in the New World on 12 October 1492.
Arriving in the \JBahamas\j on board one of three lightly armed ships widely used in voyages of exploration, Columbus reached a part of the world unknown to the ancients.
While wrong about so many things, about this Columbus was right: the native peoples of the New World used no iron. Most indigenous Americans employed only stone age technologies, encountering iron weapons and even iron tools for the first time only after Columbus's arrival.
In their previous voyages of exploration to Africa and Asia Europeans had encountered people who, like themselves, used iron weapons and tools. When the natives on San Salvador in 1492 'cut themselves through ignorance' they showed themselves to be completely unfamiliar with the sharp cutting edge that only iron can hold.
This iron edge would be central to the conquest, for iron (sometimes in its purer form, as steel) formed the principal component of powerful swords, knives, daggers, and lances, and a crucial element in crossbows, all of which could be used to inflict deadly injury; it was also the central component of \Jfirearms\j, the arquebus and the cannon.
Finally it constituted the key element of the defensive devices, helmets and cuirasses (metal vests and shoulder protectors), by which Europeans would shield themselves from native weapons.
According to Columbus, the natives carried bows of the same size as those used in Europe, but with longer arrows made of a cane or a reed of sharp wood, sometimes with a fish's tooth at the end.
Indeed, hunting and fishing tools throughout the Americas comprised rods, bones, or teeth; hence iron hooks for hunting and fishing, iron tips for arrows, iron hatchets for cutting timber and iron knives for carving soon became the most sought after trade-goods everywhere in the Americas since they made hunting and fishing for food so much easier than before.
Seventeenth-century Mohawks near Albany, New York, even nicknamed Europeans 'the iron-workers' for this reason. But iron tips for arrows, and iron knives for carving or hatchets for wood cutting could also be used as weapons, eventually changing for ever the way that natives fought wars in the Americas.
At first the Caribbean peoples Columbus met showed greater interest in those weapons most like their own, particularly the iron-reinforced \Jcrossbow\j that shot arrows further and penetrated a target more deeply than conventional bows and arrows. But the advantages of the unfamiliar steel swords were not so immediately apparent.
Upon seeing the Tainos' interest in the \Jcrossbow\j, Columbus drew his sword from the scabbard and showed it to them, saying that it was as powerful as the \Jcrossbow\j. And these two - the sword and \Jcrossbow\j - would be the only weapons used in the Europeans' first military encounters in the Caribbean.
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"Cannon, Use in the New World",81,0,0,0
The most impressive tools of war that the westerners brought with them to the New World were their latest technological inventions - their arquebuses, and more importantly their cannon: cast iron and bronze weapons that had already begun to change the shape of European warfare. Europeans throughout the Americas were anxious to show off their newest and most powerful weapons to the peoples of the New World, who were suitably impressed.
After ordering the firing of a Turkish bow on Santo Domingo on 26 December 1492, Columbus ordered two \Jgunpowder\j weapons, a large cannon and a spingard (forerunner of the arquebus), to be fired and 'when the king [chief] saw the effect of their force and what they penetrated he was astonished. And when his people heard the shots they all fell to the ground.' The natives then gave Columbus a large mask decorated with considerable quantities of gold.
While not every conqueror received gold for demonstrating his weapons, countless Europeans ordered their cannon to be fired in order to impress the natives with their military capabilities. In 1536, on his second voyage up the Saint Lawrence, Jacques Cartier had a dozen small shipboard artillery pieces fired into woods opposite the ships.
The Algonkian were, according to Cartier, 'so much astonished as if the heavens had fallen upon them and began to howl and to shriek in such a very loud manner that one would have thought hell had emptied itself there.'
Cases of mistaken identification also occurred. Thus on 29 August 1564 a \Jlightning\j bolt hit near the French settlement on the \JFlorida\j coast causing a fire that consumed over 500 acres. As soon as the fire had burned itself out, six Indians went to the leader of the French expedition.
After presenting him with several baskets full of grain, pumpkins, and raisins the Timucua chief said that 'he found the cannon shot that I had fired towards his settlement very strange. It had caused an infinity of green prairies to burn...and he thought he would see his home on fire.'
Realizing that the Timucua had seen the giant flash of \Jlightning\j and believed that it had come from a cannon rather than being an act of nature the French commander, LaudonniΦre, in his own words 'dissembled'. He told the leader that he had fired the cannon to indicate his displeasure and that he had spared the Indians homes even though he could have just as easily ordered their destruction. He had fired the weapon 'in order for him to recognize my power'.
For similar reasons, Hernßn CortΘs in Mexico ordered a demonstration of cannon fire before a native scribe who drew his impressions on bark paper to be carried to the emperor Montezuma. Indians throughout the Americas had no trouble recognizing the degree of destruction possible with cannon.
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"Conquest of the Americas: Stone and Bronze Weapons",82,0,0,0
Nevertheless, the ability of the \JAztecs\j and their allies not merely to halt, but occasionally to defeat and inflict substantial casualties on Spanish troops suggest not only a powerful and highly motivated fighting force, but also effective weapons.
In three regions the indigenous technologies had moved from the stone age into the first metal age (the bronze): the central Andean highlands, a northern spur of the \JAndes\j (present-day Colombia), and highland Mexico. Of the three bronze-age peoples only those of highland Mexico had developed significant military uses for metal.
The copper-tipped arrows and javelins the Spaniards first encountered among the Tlaxcalans so impressed CortΘs that he ordered surrounding villages to make tens of thousands of them to re-arm his Spanish crossbowmen for the final assault on Tenochtitlßn. While the force of the \Jcrossbow\j arrows was still generated by an iron mechanism, their tips were now made of copper.
To counter these new metal weapons, warriors of highland Mexico developed specialized protective clothing for warfare, two-inch-thick cotton vests and padded shields. Both were also later adopted by the Spaniards throughout the Americas since they proved sufficient defence against indigenous copper and bronze weapons, weighing far less (and rusting far less) than the traditional iron body armour.
Apart from the conquest of Tenochtitlßn, artillery was scarcely needed since all Europeans initially enjoyed a tremendous technological advantage. While some warriors of highland Mexico and \JPeru\j wielded bronze weapons, most had only bows and arrows, shields made from local animal skins, and wooden clubs.
While arrows were sometimes tipped with poison and clubs studded with obsidian glass, these were still only wooden weapons, slowly and painstakingly crafted with stone or wooden tools. Even obsidian, a glass-like substance formed by volcanic eruptions, breaks easily on contact with metal.
Elsewhere, \JIroquois\j weapons were originally bows and arrows with a shield made of elk's hide, while Tupi warriors (inhabiting the coastal areas of present-day Brazil) fought using flat, broad sticks and maces hewn usually from a very hard black wood from the heart of a palm-like tree or an equally hard red wood.
Their arrows were sometimes also made from this wood, with tips from reeds and canes. Often not specialized or differentiated, offensive indigenous weapons remained ordinary hunting tools.
In time of war, shields and sometimes helmets were added, necessary for self-defence when fighting a human rather than an animal adversary.
The types of weapons that most natives used - together with their lack of protective clothing or armour - suggest, as do many of the early European narratives, that their warfare often aimed either to wound the enemy or else to render him temporarily unconscious in order to be able to capture him.
Moreover, among most native societies of the New World, warfare aimed either at revenge or at the replacement of lost labour. If the former, captives were ritually beaten or devoured; if the latter, they were commonly enslaved or even adopted by the other tribe.
In either case, enemies were frequently known, even by name, and indigenous battles often targeted specific members of rival tribes. By contrast, European warfare was far less personalized: indigenous enemies were rarely known to the Europeans and appeared more frequently as categories rather than persons with identities.
The differences in the manner of carrying out warfare - killing rather than capturing - and the enormous technological advantage of iron weapons made European attacks on indigenous peoples seem particularly brutal.
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"Spaniard Conquest of the Incas",83,0,0,0
However, the two biggest empires in the Americas - the Incas centred in \JPeru\j, and the Triple Alliance led by the \JAztecs\j on the central plateau of Mexico - possessed more specialized warriors and weapons. Of the two, the Incas had less deadly metal weapons, using clubs with semi-circular bronze ends that lacked a sharp edge and bent easily when striking iron.
Nevertheless, although largely dependent upon stone weapons, the Incas made excellent use of these technologies in combination with the strategic advantages offered by their region. Residing in a mountainous terrain that yielded little wood, the Incas' most effective weapons were stones, rolled down hills or hurled from slingshots.
But while the stones that Inca warriors hurled could kill as well as stun, Spanish iron helmets and mail or iron vests normally deflected the missiles of stone and rendered them incapable of deadly harm. How ineffective stone age weapons proved against iron age ones can be seen in the Inca siege of Cuzco in 1536 where 190 soldiers wearing steel helmets and vests defeated 200,000 people armed with stones.
The lone Spanish casualty was a soldier who failed to wear his helmet. Gonzalo Pizarro claimed to have cut off the hands of two hundred Inca warriors with his steel-edged sword in a single afternoon during the battle for Cuzco.
The Incas could do nothing comparable against the Spaniards except occasionally fell their horses by using a local lasso - three stones twirled on a string (a technique still used to round up \Jcattle\j on the Argentine pampas). But they could rarely get close enough to follow up the advantage.
While stone-age weapons afforded little help against slashing steel swords in pitched battle, the dizzyingly vertical terrain of the \JAndes\j sometimes provided Inca fighters with a tactical advantage which they soon learned to use.
Exploiting their topographical advantage to lure Spaniards into narrow passes provided the Incas with their only opportunities to inflict heavy casualties. Unlike most of the rest of the Americas.
Inca warriors historically fought to kill rather than merely capture and so, after blockading the exit of a pass and occupying the high ground above the Spanish soldiers, the Incas rolled huge stone boulders down into the pass, killing and maiming both horses and men.
Three such attacks occurred in 1536. Seventy Spanish soldiers under Gonzalo de Tapia were trapped and nearly all killed near Huaitarß; fifty-seven out of sixty men under Diego Pizarro were killed near Parcos; and a further thirty under Morgovejo de Qui±ones suffered a similar fate descending the Chocorvo range to the coast. After that, Spanish soldiers travelled far more cautiously through mountain passes.
In addition to inflicting casualties, the Incas' effective use of the \JAndes\j' vertiginous terrain forced Spanish troops to fight differently than elsewhere in the Americas. During the first major battles near Cuzco (1536-37), a major contingent of Incas occupied two nearly inaccessible stone fortresses: Sacsahuaman above Cuzco and mountaintop Ollantaytambo.
Artillery would have been forced to fire at such a steep angle that the recoil of the cannon might have shot the cannon back down the slope. In the siege of Sacsahuaman the Pizarro brothers therefore had to employ traditional siege techniques, scaling the walls with ladders.
While the Incas exploited their steep terrain to stage two major rebellions against the Spaniards, however, the odds were ultimately against them. Both uprisings were defeated by a substantial inflow of men and material from throughout the Americas and \JSpain\j.
Over a thousand men, hundreds of horses, and thousands of weapons poured into \JPeru\j in 1536 and 1537. By November 1539, the second great Inca rebellion was over. Even so a final victory in this terrain eluded the Spaniards for decades.
It was forty years after the capture of Atahualpa on the plains of Cajamarca in 1532 before the last Inca military leader, Tupac Amaru, was killed. He held out by using the tactical advantage of a nearly inaccessible location: Vilcabamba, his last stronghold, could only be reached by crossing through mountain passes 12,000 feet above sea level and then descending across narrow rope bridges into Amazonian rain forest.
\BStrategic Alliances\b
While iron-based weapons gave the Europeans a decisive technological edge in the New World, even in difficult terrain, part of the reason for their successes was strategic: they also successfully exploited native conflicts.
Arriving at first in relatively small groups, not massive armies, skill in acquiring alliances with natives or in deploying traditional hatreds for their own ends proved critical. From the outset the Spanish, French, and Portuguese invaders vigorously pursued policies of allying themselves with one group of indigenous peoples or another.
The Portuguese and Spaniards did so by design, searching for traditional enemies who might be looking for new allies. CortΘs joined with the Tlaxcalans - who hated the \JAztecs\j - in order to gain needed warriors and supplies for the attack on Tenochtitlßn. Diego de Almagro, one of the leaders of the Spanish forces, managed to force Manco Inca to withdraw from the steep hillside of Ollantaytambo late in 1537 by persuading Manco's brother Paullu and his followers to defect to the Spanish side and reveal his brother's strengths and weaknesses.
The Pizarro brothers and Almagro could always find an Inca leader with some claim to rule who, in return for substantial privileges and honours within Spanish society, would ensure that the Inca empire would remain divided and some portion of it loyal to \JSpain\j.
The Portuguese also made effective use of local alliances, joining with the Tupi to fight the Ayamores in \JBrazil\j; while the French under Champlain allied successfully with the Algonkians and Hurons in Canada only to find themselves embroiled in fighting the \JIroquois\j.
Even the Dutch and English, who initially resisted 'entangling alliances' with native peoples, found eventually that they could not survive without utilizing native rivalries and relying upon such alliances for support.
But indigenous enemies were not the only ones Europeans had to fight in the Americas. Spanish troops - even at the height of the conquests of Mexico and \JPeru\j - were also busy fighting and killing each other. In the middle of the campaign against Tenochtitlßn in 1520, CortΘs had to retrace his steps in order to launch an attack against 900 Spanish troops sent to unseat him.
The hatreds between the principal leaders of the conquest of \JPeru\j (the Pizarro brothers and Almagro) were legendary - erupting in a civil war in which they (or their followers) killed each other in the midst of major Inca uprisings. Fellow soldiers were more than willing to resort to arms against each other in battles over control of military leadership and economic rewards.
However, even these squabbles failed to break the European stranglehold. Had the natives known how to exploit those divisions and rivalries as successfully as the Spaniards exploited their own, the outcome would have been in greater doubt.
\BIron Weapons\b
Beyond \JPeru\j's mountainous terrain and Mexico's copper-tipped arrows and javelins, the only other potent danger Europeans encountered came from poison darts and arrows. Most widely used by inhabitants of the Caribbean and the eastern seaboard of South America, poison darts were principally used to paralyse large game or fish.
Wars had customarily been fought with clubs but, after the arrival of the technologically superior Europeans, poison darts and arrows were turned against human prey. For protection, the Portuguese turned to the cotton-padded armour that they had begun to adopt in Africa during the 1440s in response to warriors who fired poisoned arrows.
After 1548 every Portuguese settler in America was required to own a layer of cotton padding, preferably covered by a leather cuirass vest, and owners of sugar mills were required to store at least twenty of these on their property.
Thus both Spanish and Portuguese troops in the Americas would adopt cotton vests: the Spaniards having learned it from the Tlaxcalans, the Portuguese seventy years before from the Africans.
Enemies at war the world over learn quickly from each other. Just as the Portuguese and Spaniards had learned from their enemies, so the New World peoples learned from theirs.
Throughout the Americas all kinds of iron technology were speedily adapted: iron tools for hunting and fishing obtained from Europeans were rapidly taken up everywhere they were introduced; iron hinges changed the construction of \JIroquois\j longhouses and altered their patterns of hunting.
In 1492 Columbus may have found that the natives were 'very naive about weapons', but they would not remain naive for long. Eighteen months after Pizarro captured the Inca prince Atahualpa, a warrior under his successor had acquired a Spanish sword, axe, helmet, and shield and used them to defend the fortress above Cuzco.
Within approximately fifty years, the natives of the New World both mastered and acquired sufficient numbers of iron and steel weapons to mount an effective response; unfortunately for them, by then it was too late.
This fifty-year interval before natives acquired both stockpiles and mastery of iron weapons accounts for the relatively few fatalities suffered by the Spaniards in their early conquests, since all their major victories occurred before the indigenous peoples became proficient with the deadly iron weapons.
And whenever Europeans made war on natives throughout the Americas, for the first fifty years the pattern resembled the early years of the Spanish conquest: the occasional surprise attack with heavier losses, but more commonly few European deaths against heavy indigenous casualties.
Jean de Forest, a French Huguenot fighting in \JGuyana\j in 1624, reported 'more than 120 enemy [Indian] dead and more wounded. Among ourselves there was one death and fifty injured.' Similar results characterized the Pequot War in New England (1638-39) where Indian casualties were high at the final engagement - 400 to 500 - whereas the Europeans suffered no fatalities and few wounded.
Likewise a Dutch attack by 140 men on an Indian village at Greenwich, Connecticut, in February 1644 killed 500 to 700 Indians, but resulted in no fatalities among the Dutch soldiers and only fifteen wounded.
But even in the seventeenth century, the possession of iron conferred only an initial advantage in the New World. By the 1670s, \JMassachusetts\j Indians were able to manufacture shot and build tools to repair muskets.
The nomadic Mapuche of southern \JChile\j adopted both the horse and the pike and proved able to hold off well-armed Spanish troops for decades. Once equipped with iron age technology, indigenous peoples became far better able to defend themselves, and the contest between the natives and the Europeans much less one-sided.
Once the European edge was gone, fatalities increased dramatically - 3,000 English casualties in King Philip's war with the Indians 1675-76 - and the ability to conquer large inland empires vanished along with it.
Of all the New World powers, the Spaniards exploited the iron edge to its limit - using their swords, crossbows and muskets, as well as their helmets and vests to conquer indigenous societies rapidly, before iron weapons could fall into their hands.
The Spaniards also managed to keep control of their vast conquests by continuing to maintain a monopoly of iron weapons.
While both English and Dutch authorities eventually issued laws forbidding any trade in arms with the natives, once they realized the dangers to themselves, their fellow countrymen were often more eager to make a profit by trading prohibited weapons than to participate in a ban. But Spanish soldiers and settlers came from a different cultural background.
Bearing arms, which in this case meant iron weapons, was traditionally associated with aristocratic privilege: keeping arms out of Indians' hands was thus in part a matter of maintaining social distinction. Moreover, Spanish officials were following a practice originally pursued by the Muslims in the Iberian peninsula - prohibiting the ownership of iron weapons by conquered peoples.
In the middle ages, defeated Jews and Christians had been forbidden to own iron weapons, including knives. Reconquering Spaniards imposed the same restrictions upon the defeated Moors as had been imposed upon them: no iron weapons, and restrictions on ownership of iron tools, such as knives, that might be used as weapons.
Shortly after 1492 such conditions were imposed upon the Moors of \JGranada\j. Hence widespread co-operation with a ban on iron weapons or potential weapons made both social and strategic sense. By the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century, laws still forbade the ownership and use of \Jfirearms\j by Indians.
Historically and culturally, therefore, the Spaniards were ready to exploit the technological advantages of iron. But other European powers were not similarly prepared. Over a hundred years after the Spaniards had so successfully overthrown major empires in the New World, Dutch officials initially considered it more important to keep horses out of Indian hands than either guns or iron weapons.
The first Dutch colonists in New York could sell Indians iron-based weapons, even guns, but they could not either let Indians ride or teach them to ride horses without losing all their property and wages, and being permanently expelled from the colony.
Only later did Dutch officials realize that it was iron-based weapons rather than horses that were crucial, and tried to ban them instead. But by then it was too late: the natives were already armed, often by the Dutch themselves.
Portuguese traders had initially provided the Brazilian natives with iron hatchets and knives since it made their task of felling Brazilwood trees so much faster and more efficient. But nearly twenty years after the start of settlement, the colonists realized their mistake.
The first governor-general was given draconian powers to halt the further sale of arms as well as of heavy knives to the natives. Where the penalty was once excommunication, it now became death - with an incentive for mutual spying, for those who denounced someone for selling arms to the natives would receive half of their estate.
\BHorses In Battle\b
A final subsidiary advantage enjoyed by the Europeans was the use of domesticated animals for warfare, particularly horses. The domestic animals of the New World were few - wild beasts such as bears were occasionally kept in pens and fattened until eaten, and llamas and vicu±as (bad-tempered relatives of the legendarily bad-tempered camel) served principally as pack animals.
While less crucial to the initial European victories than iron, the speed of the European horse in attack, combined with the iron-sharp points on lances and swords, increased the force with which the blows from iron weapons were delivered. But there were difficulties. Although initially men mounted on horseback were perceived as a single, frightening being, that original shock soon wore off.
Cavalry charges were most effective in regions of vast open plains; but most of Central and South America was mountainous terrain, and a great deal of the rest was rain forest and swamp. Neither environment lent itself to mounted action.
Only in the \JAndes\j region, much of it covered with well-maintained roads, could horsemen travel fast, bringing a vanguard of troops that could both strike and retreat quickly. And during the Inca siege of Cuzco (1536-37) when the Spanish conquest of \JPeru\j hung in the balance, it was \Jlightning\j horseback raids for food in the surrounding regions that kept the Spaniards alive until strategic manipulation of leadership rivalries within the Inca forces, and a massive inflow of Spanish arms, lifted the siege.
Such cavalry raids were successful in part because the Incas had neither cavalry nor anti-cavalry weapons to counter them. In the \JAndes\j sometimes as many as one-third of the troops were mounted - as opposed to at most 10 per cent of CortΘs's army.
Much later, horses and cavalry tactics would become important on the plains of \JChile\j, Argentina and, eventually, North America. Like other areas of the world in the sixteenth century, with the exception of the \JAndes\j, it was principally infantry and infantry weapons - arquebuses, crossbows, swords and occasionally field artillery - that constituted the key to success.
\BIntroduction Of Disease\b
A final unwitting weapon brought by the Europeans that contributed to their victories were epidemic diseases previously unknown on the American continent: smallpox, \Jmeasles\j, typhoid, \Jtyphus\j, influenza. These diseases demonstrated an organizational weakness in the large-scale indigenous militaries in the New World.
Shortly before Pizarro arrived in \JPeru\j, for example, an epidemic swept the Inca capital killing the heir apparent and reopening succession struggles. The result was an empire divided against itself, and at first far more concerned with its own conflicts than with a handful of foreigners.
Among the \JAztecs\j of Tenochtitlßn a decade before, the first devastating epidemic of smallpox hit after CortΘs's retreat, and functioned as a kind of Trojan horse. In addition to debilitating the population, including the warriors, it also illuminated succession problems in military leadership.
Lacking any tradition of replacing slain leaders on the battlefield (since the \JAztecs\j fought wars principally to capture, not to kill) major epidemics left wholly unexpected power vacuums in the military command structure. The resulting confusion over replacements (and replacement strategies) limited the ability of even this major military machine to regroup effectively and counterattack.
\BFortifications\b
Once entrenched in the New World after their initial victories, the Europeans engaged in long-term low-intensity warfare with the indigenous populations. The native peoples of America successfully appropriated European technology (knives, swords, \Jfirearms\j, and horses) and adapted them to their own tactical and strategic traditions (ambush, hit-and-run raids, night attacks); and in this they proved as successful at keeping European advances slow and difficult as in any other place on the globe.
In both North and South America, therefore, the Europeans adopted defensive strategies against long-term warfare by building fortified settlements. In areas of Spanish conquest where policies forbidding arming indigenous peoples operated effectively, the settlers needed no such fortifications: only on the northern frontiers were such defensive techniques necessary.
Elsewhere in the Americas, however, some form of fortification was needed for protection against native enemies. The French initially constructed forts in \JBrazil\j, \JFlorida\j, and Canada; the Portuguese required agricultural settlements to have military features.
Each sugar mill owner had to build a fortified house complete with an outside rampart and watch tower. By contrast, in New England, village sites were initially selected a safe distance away from indigenous habitation (and the possibility of surprise attack).
Hence their settlements were less heavily armed and equipped. Arquebuses and muskets were their weapons. In Virginia, however, where European settlements lay somewhat closer to native ones, towns often boasted wooden walls as protection against indigenous weapons.
But indigenous enemies were not the only ones against whom defensive fortifications proved necessary. Just as Spanish soldiers had squabbled among themselves over the conquests of \JPeru\j and Mexico, so the various European groups soon fell out.
The riches captured by Spaniards and the opportunity offered by new lands led every major European power to attempt to conquer the Americas. Arriving in disputed or potentially disputed territory, the first step of new arrivals was to fortify themselves against the other Westerners already established on the continent.
After 1550 this included the construction of the newest European fortifications - broad walls and earth fortifications to withstand cannon blasts. In 1607 the first permanent English settlers under George Percy erected a fort which was 'triangle-wise, having three Bulwarks at every corner like a half moon, and four or five pieces of artillery mounted in them.'
The initial action of the French \JHuguenots\j in \JFlorida\j was to construct a bastioned citadel because they were aware of its importance in contemporary warfare. These fortifications were not designed for defence against natives: rather the location and the European-style fortifications grew up where the most likely targets or aggressors were other Europeans.
Since assaults by artillery-bearing European ships were bound to come from the sea, all New World coastal fortifications were carefully constructed against seaward attacks. The Dutch constructed defences on Manhattan island designed to catch ships travelling up the East River in cross fire.
The Spanish city of Santo Domingo on the Caribbean island of \JHispaniola\j took advantage of the massive cliffs to mount cannon that would prevent a direct landing on the beaches.
However, since the indigenous peoples of the island had been exterminated, the Spaniards left the rear of the fort open and in 1585 Francis Drake followed the simple expedient (there and elsewhere) of landing out of range of the artillery and attacking from behind the fortress. He then sacked and looted the city.
After Drake's devastating raid in the Caribbean in 1585-86, military engineers built and refurbished fortifications around the coasts of Spanish America to prevent such assaults in the future. Massive walls were henceforth carefully constructed around the cities.
These Spanish fortifications still exist throughout the Caribbean: the walls at San Juan del Morro in Puerto Rico, at \JHavana\j (Cuba), and at Cartagena (Colombia) can still be admired today. But there is a more famous fort that can no longer be seen: the palisade and breastwork wall erected to strengthen one side of the Dutch fort at the southern tip of Manhattan island.
The passageway or street across the breastworks was named for the ramparts or wall. The most famous street in the United States, synonymous with American \Jcapitalism\j - Wall Street - is named for the ramparts, the pre-eminent symbol of the western way of war, constructed by the Dutch in 1652 to maintain their foothold on the American continent.
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"Bombardment of Tenochtitlan",84,0,0,0
Cannon were useful in shows of strength during the conquest of the New World, but they were not usually needed in the fighting. The most famous exception was the siege of Tenochtitlßn, the Aztec capital at the heart of present-day Mexico City.
The Spaniards reached the capital on 8 November 1519, and immediately seized the Aztec leader Montezuma as a hostage. Nearly six months later they massacred a group of native lords at a dinner and provoked an explosive response.
Despite their cannon and arquebuses, and tens of thousands of native allies, Spanish soldiers suffered their greatest defeat and heaviest casualties in the first fifty years of conquest.
Hundreds of them were killed - perhaps as many as 450 Spaniards, along with 4,000 of their Indian allies - and the remainder had to retreat from the capital on 1 July 1520. To avenge the defeat CortΘs returned and adopted standard European tactics of siege warfare.
Tenochtitlßn was an island in the middle of a lake, tethered to the mainland by three causeways. After militarily severing the capital from its lakefront allies, and then stationing three armies of 200 Spaniard and 25,000 Indian troops at the entrance to each causeway, CortΘs managed to isolate the city.
He then attacked the city's \Jaqueduct\j and destroyed its fresh water supply. With the city thus isolated, mounting his artillery on each of thirteen brigantines specially constructed to carry the weight of men and armament, CortΘs began to bombard the city in mid-May 1521.
But while he handily dominated the water around the city, and captured the three causeways, he could not force its surrender, on one occasion barely escaping capture and execution himself.
He was forced to land his cannon and destroy the city building by building, stone by stone. When the siege ended three months later, not a single building remained intact. A new city had to be constructed on the site of the old.
#
"Dynastic War 1494-1660",85,0,0,0
\BChapter 10 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
#
"Western Way of War (16th-17th Century)",86,0,0,0
The revolution in fortress design, the greater reliance on firepower in battle, and the increases in army size during the century 1530-1630 transformed the western way of war. On the one hand, hostilities now affected more people (both directly, as the number of soldiers grew, and indirectly, as the impact of war on society augmented); on the other, sieges far outnumbered battles.
According to the experienced French soldier Blaise de Monluc, writing in the mid-sixteenth century, siegecraft constituted 'the most difficult and the most important' aspect of warfare; while in the words of Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, a century later: 'Battles do not now decide national quarrels, and expose countries to the pillage of the conquerors as formerly. For we make war more like foxes than like lions and you will have twenty sieges for one battle.'
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"Armies, Rise of Professional",87,0,0,0
In addition, wars now occurred more often, lasted far longer, and involved far more men. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw more belligerence than almost any other period of European history, registering a grand total of only ten years of total peace across the continent.
During the sixteenth century, \JSpain\j and \JFrance\j were almost constantly at war; while during the seventeenth, the Ottoman empire, the Austrian \JHabsburgs\j and Sweden were at war for two years out of every three, \JSpain\j for three years out of every four, and \JPoland\j and \JRussia\j for four years out of every five.
'This,' as the Italian poet Fulvio Testi wrote in 1641, 'is the century of the soldier.' Certainly, every state maintained far more of them. Charles the Rash of Burgundy had created an army in the Netherlands which scarcely numbered 15,000 men in the 1470s but a century later his descendant Philip II supported 86,000 there.
In 1640 the Spanish army in the Low Countries still exceeded 88,000 troops. The same trend occurred almost everywhere else, and in the course of the seventeenth century, between ten and twelve million Europeans became soldiers.
Most of these armies consisted overwhelmingly of infantry: when Francis I of \JFrance\j invaded \JItaly\j in 1525, the 32,000-man French army included only 6,000 cavalry; and when \JFrance\j went to war against the \JHabsburgs\j in 1635, orders went out to raise 132,000 infantry but only 12,400 cavalry.
In wars dominated by sieges and skirmishes, in which the principal military targets comprised fortified cities rather than field armies, recruiting infantry rather than cavalry made perfect sense.
Whether in the trenches or on the ramparts, foot soldiers - and especially musketeers - were at a premium, whereas horses seemed more vulnerable to gunfire than their armoured riders (many men lost several mounts in a single engagement).
Financially, too, the shift brought advantages since many footsoldiers could be recruited, equipped, and maintained for the same outlay as a single trooper and his chargers. But the transition also generated serious problems.
Most serious, the administrative system responsible for the new larger armies and the increased areas of operation remained relatively static, while the military bureaucracy (like other departments of state) suffered from overlapping jurisdictions, gross irresponsibility, and disabling conflicts between rival groups of administrators.
Moreover, governments knowingly recruited far more troops at the beginning of each campaigning season than they could pay or even feed. This combination of insufficient control and inadequate resources produced serious problems of discipline.
Cavalry normally came from the elite of society, its members trained for combat since childhood, and so might be expected to tolerate great hardships; but infantry, drafted at short notice and sometimes unwillingly from civilian roles, often took poorly to the military and expressed their disapproval either through desertion or mutiny.
Two solutions were widely adopted: resort to foreign professional soldiers, hired under contract; and a programme of discipline and training for native recruits. The first predominated in the sixteenth century, only gradually giving way to the second.
The use of mercenaries became common in the middle ages, with entire military formations hiring themselves out to any state that would pay them, and the practice continued in the early modern period. Swiss and south German military entrepreneurs, in particular, maintained cadres of trained troops who could be mobilized at short notice.
At the first sign of trouble, governments issued a contract to an
entrepreneur of proven ability, specifying the number of troops to be raised and armed, the wages to be paid, and the place and date of the first muster.
Sometimes, in anticipation of danger (or simply to prevent the troops from being recruited by another warlord), a 'retainer' \I(Wartgelt\i in German: waiting money) would be paid until either full mobilization took place or else the crisis passed; but, mostly, entrepreneurs were expected to produce their men 'on demand'.
The system worked because able and willing entrepreneurs abounded. Thus the German knight, G÷tz von Berlichingen (1480-1562), specialized in fighting feuds - either his own or (in return for one third of the gains) on behalf of others - and his memoirs, entitled \IMy Feuds and Disputes,\i listed thirty of them, fought with the bands he recruited (numbering up to 150 men) all over western \JGermany\j.
Noble contemporaries able to command greater resources could recruit larger forces than G÷tz - a regiment, perhaps even two or three - and by the early seventeenth century a few proved able to mobilize an entire army. During the Thirty Years War (1618-48) at least 100 military entrepreneurs operated at any one time in \JGermany\j, increasing to perhaps 300 in the 1630s.
Albert of Wallenstein recruited an army of some 25,000 men for the Holy Roman Emperor on two separate occasions (in 1625 and 1631-32); while Bernard of Saxe-Weimar brought his personal army of 18,000 men into French service in 1635.
By the time of Bernard's death in 1639, foreign troops raised abroad by entrepreneurs made up 20 per cent of the French army (which numbered roughly 125,000 men); while in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years War, the 60,000-man army maintained by Sweden in \JGermany\j included only 18,000 Swedes.
The great advantage of hiring mercenaries was, of course, that they already knew how to use their weapons and how to fight in formation. Foreign mercenaries, as a French military writer observed in the 1540s, were 'those whom one trusts more than anyone and without whom we would not have the courage to undertake the least thing.'
Nevertheless, they could prove unreliable at critical moments, refusing to fight if they were led too far afield, if they found compatriots among the forces ranged against them, or (above all) if their pay fell into arrears. Moreover, their edge of experience soon crumbled as hostilities continued, since not only did their numbers diminish through casualties but the calibre of the native levies improved with the passage of time.
Several developments assisted the growing professionalism of local recruits. Most governments introduced prophylactics against fear such as uniforms, martial music, and permanent regiments with their own focuses of loyalties.
Thus in 1534 Charles V organized a permanent regiment of Spaniards (called a \Itercio)\i in three of his Italian possessions: Naples, \JSicily\j, and Lombardy. Each boasted its own insignia and colours, its own chaplains and law officers, as well as its own musical and medical support teams (the former outnumbering the latter by twenty-five to three!), with the express intention of stimulating the same enduring martial traditions and fierce unit loyalties as the legions of the Roman empire.
The ploy succeeded. When the \Itercio\i of Lombardy, then serving in the Netherlands, was dissolved in 1589 for insubordination, and the officers ceremonially destroyed their badges of rank and tore up their colours 'which, since they no longer represented His Majesty the King, no longer demanded the veneration and care in which they had been held,' the whole Spanish army felt stunned because the \Itercio\i enjoyed the reputation of being 'the father of the other regiments and the seminary of the best soldiers who have been seen in Europe in our time'.
Other states soon followed the \JHabsburgs\j' lead and created their own semi-permanent regiments, proud of their corporate insignia.
#
"Armies: 16th Century Uniforms and Equipment",88,0,0,0
By the later sixteenth century, most military commentators measured the outcome of an encounter not by the numbers slain but by the number of colours that changed hands.
However, as yet no effort was made to regulate dress. Some felt that uniforms resembled a servant's livery and so might 'remove the spirit and fire which is necessary in a soldier.'
Others cited the example of Don Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, third duke of Alba and perhaps the most famous general of the sixteenth century, 'who whenever he was on active service clothed his entire person in bright blue,' and held that 10,000 soldiers refulgently attired in contrasting colours would look more dangerous than 20,000 all dressed in black 'as if they were townsmen and shopkeepers'.
However, no army in Alba's day possessed the ability to clothe 20,000 men all in one colour, let alone in a single style, for mass production of uniform apparel was impossible. Furthermore, even if men began a campaign in clothes of the same colour and design, few would still be wearing them at the end.
Robert Monro, colonel of a Scottish regiment serving in \JGermany\j, marched (by his own reckoning) a total of 3,000 miles between 1629 and 1633. During the English civil wars, between April and November 1644 King Charles I travelled almost 1,000 miles with his army; while in the three years following September 1642 his nephew and principal commander, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, changed his army's location 152 times, marched all night on nine occasions, slept out in the open seven nights, and fought eleven battles and sixty-two skirmishes.
In such conditions it did not take long to ruin coats, boots, and breeches - as an English soldier who fought in the Netherlands discovered one night in 1633:
I had nothing to keep me from the cold, wet ground but a little bundle of wet dried flax...And so with my boots full of water, and wrapped up in my wet cloak, I lay as round as a \Jhedgehog\j, and at peep of day looked like a drowned rat.
Men wearing worn-out or damaged clothes like these needed to replace them from any and all available sources - from fallen comrades, from civilians (whether by purchase or plunder), even from the enemy.
Thus in 1651 orders went out that a regiment of Scottish lifeguards 'might all of them have coats of one colour'; but when a supply ship bearing replacement uniforms for their English adversaries was blown off course and captured, the Scots gladly made use of them!
It was therefore imperative for commanders to issue distinguishing marks to their \Jharlequin\j troops - usually a coloured sash, a ribbon, or a plume. Thus the soldiers of the \JHabsburgs\j, whether Spanish or Austrian, always wore a red token, while those of \JFrance\j wore blue, those of Sweden wore yellow, and those of the Dutch Republic wore orange.
When the troops of more than one army combined, some additional common denominator was needed: at the battle of Breitenfeld (1631) the allied Saxons and Swedes all plucked a leafy branch or fern from a forest through which they passed on their way to the battle and placed the token in their hats, while at Marston Moor (1644) the united Parliamentary and Scottish troops received orders to wear something white about their person. But the situation soon changed.
When in 1645 the commander-in-chief of the imperial armies placed an order with Austrian clothiers to supply outfits for 600 of his men, he attached a sample of the exact material and specified the colour to be copied. He also sent samples of powder-horns and cartridge belts to be manufactured en masse by local suppliers. Once permanent regiments existed, creating a constant and predictable demand, uniform dress at last became possible.
The same process affected the supply of weapons. Although exact standardization mattered relatively little with sword or bow, it was essential for the effective use of \Jfirearms\j. Roger Boyle complained that his musketeers in Ireland during the 1640s almost lost one battle because the shot supplied proved too large for the weapons available, so that some men 'were forced to gnaw off much of the lead [while] others cut their bullets, in which much time was lost [and] the bullets flew a less way.'
Part of the problem, as with clothes, was the need to ensure that replacements as well as initial supplies all corresponded to a single standard; and again, as with clothes, the need for replacements could be high. Sir Ralph Hopton, a royalist commander in the English Civil War, complained petulantly in 1643 that 'It is inconceivable what these fellows were always doing with their arms; they appear to be expended as fast as their ammunition.'
He soon had cause for further complaint when a cargo of 1,000 muskets imported from \JFrance\j for his troops was found to contain 'three or four score sundry bores - some \Jpistol\j bores, some carbine bores, some little fowling pieces, and all the old trash that can be rapt together.'
Clearly this situation could not be tolerated and gradually, as in other wars of the period, a steady and substantial demand led to the production and distribution of standardized arms.
#
"Infantry Formations, 16th Century",89,0,0,0
But \Jfirearms\j, whether standardized or not, could not be used to maximum effect without drastic changes in the method of deploying infantry in action. Pictures of sixteenth-century battles, as well as surviving muster rolls, clearly show a transition.
Compact infantry formations composed largely of pikemen fighting in 'squares' (not unlike a Greek phalanx), with a few files of marksmen milling about the periphery until it came to the 'push of pike', gave way to linear formations composed largely of musketeers protected by a few files of pikemen. The change sounds simple, but it transformed the life of the infantryman.
At the battle of Fornovo in July 1495, for example, some 10,000 soldiers (plus some 6,000 camp followers) under the personal command of Charles VIII of \JFrance\j, forced their way past an Italian army at least twice as large, drawn up in a defile on the \JTaro\j River.
Over half of each army consisted of mounted knights. The action commenced at around 8 a.m. with an artillery duel, cut short when rain dampened the powder, and continued about two hours later with Italian cavalry delivering charges in two places.
Both failed, mainly because the rain turned the \JTaro\j into a raging torrent and the surrounding terrain into a slippery morass ill-suited to mounted manoeuvres. As the Italian horse fell back, the French advanced in close order, giving no quarter and killing everyone they found in their path.
The fallen knights lay imprisoned and helpless in their armour as the victors moved around the battlefield, breaking their visors with hatchets and either splitting their heads open or cutting their throats: those who later visited the battlefield noted that most corpses had a stab wound in the throat or the face.
Perhaps 3,000 Italian and 200 French soldiers perished, and Charles VIII led his troops back to \JFrance\j in safety.
Apart from the larger numbers involved, and the enhanced role of the infantry, most battles of the earlier sixteenth century resembled Fornovo. At Marignano (1515), Mⁿhlberg (1546), and St Quentin (1557) the outcome was decided relatively swiftly; firepower played little part in the outcome; and each man chose his adversaries more or less at will.
Even though at Bicocca (1522) and \JPavia\j (1525) infantry firepower played a key role in defeating Swiss pike formations, broken ground and field fortifications provided essential support: the use of \Jfirearms\j in the field remained in its infancy throughout the first half of the sixteenth century.
The major war of the succeeding period - the conflict that ravaged and eventually partitioned the Netherlands between 1568 and 1648 - included scarcely any battles.
Instead, the commanders of the government's forces, beginning with the duke of Alba, adopted a 'steamroller strategy' towards the rebels, led by the prince of Orange, and sought to outmanoeuvre them without resort to battle. In the words of a theatre commander. Don Sancho de Londono:
The duke [of Alba] has laboured specifically to avoid fighting a battle, despite pressure from those who forget that victory is a gift of Fortune, which can favour the Bad as well as the Good.
If Orange were a powerful monarch who could maintain a mighty army for longer, I would be in favour of fighting a battle; but since it is certain that shortage of money will cause his forces to crumble, and that he will not then be able to regroup, I am against it.
But time was of the essence: unless the enemy could be defeated within a single campaign, serious problems developed. Thus in 1572, Orange mounted a major invasion of the Netherlands which aroused widespread popular support; and despite a successful campaign that recaptured either by force or by fear nine-tenths of the area in rebellion, by the end of the year twenty-four fortified towns in the maritime provinces of Holland and Zealand remained in revolt.
As Alba bitterly complained, although he commanded some 60,000 men, 'a sufficient number to conquer many kingdoms, it does not suffice here' - for many recaptured towns had required garrisons; Alba's campaign army had declined to a mere 12,000 men (not enough to lay siege to one town, let alone twenty-four); and, after nine months of continuous service in the field without pay, the morale of those men verged on mutiny.
Worst of all, the cost of Alba's huge military machine far exceeded the income of his master, Philip II - an income that had to support many other enterprises (including a full-scale naval offensive against the Turks in the Mediterranean) besides the war in Holland.
Not surprisingly, in July 1573 the Spanish infantry, which had been in constant action for fifteen months, mutinied for their unpaid wages (totalling two whole years). The Dutch Revolt continued.
#
"Musket, The Rise of",90,0,0,0
One of Alba's most important innovations in response to this style of attritional warfare was to increase the firepower of his troops.
In the 1550s, in \JItaly\j, he had added to each company a number of men equipped with muskets, a weapon so heavy that it could only be fired using a forked rest but delivering a ball with such force that (according to the English military writer Humphrey Barwick) it could penetrate plate armour at 200 yards (although most weapons probably did little damage beyond 80 yards).
The \Jmusket\j thus offered great advantages both in skirmishing and, even more, in the trench warfare around besieged towns that dominated the Low Countries' wars. Alba therefore further enhanced the firepower of his infantry by adding to each \Itercio\i two companies armed entirely with \Jfirearms\j: in 1571 a muster of the Spanish \Itercios\i in the Netherlands, with a total strength of 7,509 men, revealed 450 officers, 596 musketeers, 1,505 men armed with the lighter arquebus, and the rest with pikes - a ratio of two 'shot' to every five pikes.
However, just thirty years later, in 1601, a muster of the Spanish \Itercios\i in the Netherlands, with a total strength of 6,001 men, revealed 646 officers, 1,237 musketeers, 2,117 men with arquebuses, and the rest with pikes - a ratio of three 'shot' to every pike.
This dramatic shift in weaponry accompanied equally dramatic changes in tactics. Several Spanish commanders experimented with tactical systems designed to make optimum use of firepower, but none worked as well as the innovations of Maurice of Nassau, son of the prince of Orange defeated by Alba in 1568, who during the 1590s began to introduce his troops to 'exercises' - forming and reforming ranks, drilling, and parading - in the manner advocated by Roman writers.
It was while reading Aelian's \ITactics\i in 1594 that Maurice's cousin, William Louis of Nassau, realized that rotating ranks of musketeers could replicate the continuous hail of fire achieved by the javelin and sling-shot throwers of the legions.
This device overcame the basic weakness of the muzzle-loading \Jmusket\j - its slow rate of fire - because an infantry formation deployed in a series of ranks the first firing together and then retiring to reload while the others did the same, would produce a continuous hail of lethal fire.
The development of volley fire had a critical impact upon battle tactics. To begin with, armies now had to spread out during battle, both to maximize the effect of outgoing fire and to minimize the target for incoming missiles.
This achieved a significant 'economy of scale', because the linear deployment of troops placed far more soldiers in a position to kill enemy troops.
This, too, had important consequences. First, changing a pike square perhaps fifty deep into a musketry line ten deep (or less) inevitably exposed far more men to the terror of face-to-face combat, calling for superior courage, proficiency, and discipline in each individual soldier.
Second, it placed great emphasis on the ability of entire tactical units to perform the motions necessary for volley-firing both swiftly and in unison.
The solution to both problems was, of course, practice: troops had to be trained to fire, countermarch, load, and manoeuvre all together. The counts of Nassau therefore divided their army into far smaller formations - companies shrank from 250 men with eleven officers to 120 men with twelve officers; regiments of 2,000 and more gave way to battalions of 580 - and taught them to drill.
Another of Maurice's cousins, Count John of Nassau, developed a crucial new tool of military training - the drill book - and in 1616 opened the first true military academy in Europe, the \ISchola Militaris,\i at his capital of Siegen in western \JGermany\j, to educate young gentlemen in the art of war.
Training took six months, with arms, armour, maps, relief models, and other instructional aids provided by the school. The first director, Johan Jakob von Wallhausen, published several manuals of warfare, all of them explicitly based on Dutch practice (the only system taught at Siegen).
The Nassau 'exercises' rapidly spread over Europe - especially Protestant Europe - thanks to the innumerable foreigners who came to serve in the Dutch army, the various authors of military treatises who described (and sometimes illustrated) them, and the supply of Dutch military instructors to friendly foreign states (Count John himself paid a brief visit to Sweden).
Their fame spread even to the New World, where George Yardly, governor of Virginia (1616-17) and a former volunteer in the Dutch army, sported a medallion of Count Maurice.
The full value of the Nassau family's military reformation remained unrealized in the Netherlands, however, since the Dutch army seldom exposed itself to the supreme test of battle.
Admittedly Maurice and his cousins showed great interest in combat tactics - Count William Louis wrote a treatise on the battle of Cannae in 216 BC (see \JBattle of Cannae 216 BC\j) and the linear battle order was partially designed to imitate Hannibal's outflanking manoeuvre - but the ambiguous outcome of their two pitched encounters (at Turnhout in 1597 and at Nieuwpoort in 1600) suggests that the formula for total victory had not entirely been mastered.
Even the early battles of the Thirty Years War (1618-48) resembled those of the previous century fairly closely, with large phalanxes of infantry and cavalry arranged in a chess-board pattern. In 1631, however, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden demonstrated the full potential of volley fire and linear formations.
In the first place, thanks to constant drill and practice, in the course of the 1620s he improved reloading speeds among his musketeers to the point where only six ranks (instead of the ten required in the Dutch army) could maintain an effective continuous barrage.
So strongly did the king feel about the matter that he even gave personal demonstrations to freshly recruited units of how to fire a \Jmusket\j standing, kneeling, even lying down.
Second, Swedish firepower was greatly increased by the addition of field artillery. Whereas the Dutch army at Turnhout had deployed a mere four field guns, and at Nieuwpoort only eight, Gustavus Adolphus took eighty with him when he invaded \JGermany\j in 1630.
All guns belonged to one of only three calibres (24-, 12-, and 3-pounders) and some came supplied with cartridges already attached, for speedier loading. The 3-pounders could therefore fire up to twenty rounds an hour - not much slower than a musketeer.
Finally, Gustavus also trained his cavalry to charge home with swords drawn, rather than to skirmish with pistols and carbines (as most German horsemen preferred to do).
\BThe Battle Of Breitenfeld\b
The battle of Breitenfeld, fought just outside \JLeipzig\j on 17 September 1631, convincingly demonstrated the superiority of the new military system. A veteran army in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor, numbering 10,000 horse and 21,400 foot and commanded by an experienced and previously successful general (Count Tilly), deployed in squares thirty deep and fifty wide, supported by twenty-seven field guns.
The Swedes and their Protestant allies, however, boasted fifty-one heavy guns, while every Swedish regiment included a battery of four light field pieces. Their 28,000 foot stood in six ranks, covered by 13,000 cavalry.
In the event, the German troops fighting with Gustavus broke after the first hour, but the Swedish reserve marched across in perfect order and took their places. In the second hour's fighting, almost 8,000 imperialist troops died (most of them killed by Swedish gunfire) and a further 9,000 fell prisoner or else deserted; still more fell in the headlong retreat that followed.
In all, two-thirds of the imperial army, 120 of its regimental and company standards, and all of its guns were lost. Tilly, the defeated commander, lost his nerve and moped about his headquarters, 'Wholly perplexed and seemingly cast down, wholly irresolute in council, not knowing how to save himself, abandoning one proposal after another, deciding nothing, seeing only great difficulties and dangers.'
With no enemy army to stand in their way, in the course of the next six months almost all of \JGermany\j fell to Gustavus and his allies, and in 1632 the Swedish king directed the operations of six separate armies totalling 183,000 men.
The contrast with Fornovo (see \JInfantry Formations, 16th Century\j) was clear. Breitenfeld, although fought between armies of unequal size, lasted far longer (about seven hours), and the outcome was decided by infantry, discipline, and firepower: the Swedish musketeers formed the decisive element, sometimes firing a lethal 'double salvo', with the men crammed into just three lines - one rank kneeling, the second crouching, the third upright - in order to 'pour as much lead into your enemy's bosom at one time [as possible]...and thereby you do them more mischief...for one long and continuated crack of thunder is more terrible and dreadful to mortals than ten interrupted and several ones.'
Consequently, far more men died at Breitenfeld, partly because gunfire is more murderous than sword and pike thrust, since gunshots wounds could more easily smash a bone or rupture a vital organ, creating wounds that (given the limited medical knowledge of the age) would prove fatal.
The tactical and strategic impact of Breitenfeld proved immense. Other armies hastened to copy the Swedish system: at Lⁿtzen, the following year, the imperialist army led by Wallenstein possessed sufficient firepower and flexibility to hold the field. Gustavus himself died in a furious but indecisive charge. Within a short time all major armies in western Europe fought in long thin lines, dominated by musketeers.
\BBig Battles And Small Wars\b
And yet few of these spectacular battles proved 'decisive': like the much-studied Cannae, most of them brought the campaign to a victorious conclusion, but they did not win the war. Breitenfeld was offset by Lⁿtzen and, in 1634, by a major Habsburg victory over the main Swedish army at N÷rdlingen.
The battles of Jankow and Allerheim in 1645, although they destroyed the armed forces of the emperor and his Catholic allies, weakening their negotiating position, were followed by three more years of ceaseless hostilities before peace finally ended the Thirty Years War.
The problem was partly military and partly political. On the one hand, maintaining large armies in the field year after year, as well as the need to garrison all strategic defences, placed an intolerable strain on every state. Transporting the vital artillery alone posed major logistical problems.
The emperor Charles V's military advisers in the 1550s calculated that moving just one large siege gun required thirty-nine horses, plus 156 more for a week's supply of powder and shot; a century later, their successors reckoned that 1,849 pair of oxen and 753 vehicles would be required to move and serve a train of ten siege guns and ten mortars.
Feeding the oxen and the other draught animals, along with the cavalry's mounts (and replacements), presented another headache, because 20,000 horses required ninety tons of fodder (or 400 acres of grazing) each and every day.
Victualling the troops presented even more of a headache because, as Cardinal Richelieu noted, 'One finds in the history books that many more armies perished through lack of food and lack of order than through enemy action.'
An army of 30,000 men, properly fed, required daily 45,000 lbs (20 tons) of bread - that is, over 100,000 lbs of flour plus the ovens to bake it - and 30,000 lbs of meat (equivalent to 1,500 sheep or 150 bullocks).
Moreover, although the livestock could be transported 'on the hoof' until required, a week's supply of flour and its ovens required 250 carts and a corresponding number of draught animals. Then came the camp followers, whose numbers could sometimes equal and occasionally exceed the total of combatants.
When the Spanish army laid siege to Bergen-op-Zoom in the Netherlands in 1622, the Calvinist pastors in the beleaguered town virtuously recorded that 'such a long tail on such a small body never was seen:...such a small army with so many carts, baggage horse, nags, sutlers, lackeys, women, children, and a rabble which numbered far more than the army itself.'
Not surprisingly, therefore, field armies remained relatively small. To take a single example, in November 1632, when Gustavus Adolphus directed the activities of 183,000 soldiers, 62,000 were scattered over northern \JGermany\j in ninety-eight garrisons; 34,000 guarded Sweden, \JFinland\j, and the Baltic provinces; and 66,000 more operated as quasi-autonomous, regional forces in the Holy Roman Empire. The king therefore fought and died at Lⁿtzen at the head of a mere 20,000 men.
'War' in 1632, as in every other year of hostilities in early modern Europe, meant skirmishes and surprises far more than it meant full-scale sieges and battles, and the verdict of the latter could swiftly be offset by the debilitating drain of the former, prolonging the conflict. Thus, during the civil wars in England and Wales, between 1642 and 1648 over 600 engagements occurred.
However, only nine encounters involved the death of more than 1,000 men: the rest of the 80,000 or so fatal casualties of the wars fell in comparatively minor hostilities - almost half of them in engagements where fewer than 250 died.
In addition, of course, many soldiers either perished or left the service through disease or accident. 'We bury more toes and fingers than we do men,' lamented one royalist officer.
But politics proved equally important in eternalizing war. Above all, many of the issues for which early modern wars were fought defied any easy solution. In the sixteenth century, wars tended to be fought for dynastic rights (Charles VIII of \JFrance\j invaded \JItaly\j in 1494, for example, in order to assert his claim to the kingdom of Naples) whereas in the seventeenth they more often concerned the control of adjacent territory.
Increasingly, rulers seem to have pursued a more pragmatic approach to asserting their rights - fighting only for lands and titles that represented genuine strategic or economic benefits - and even took to occupying by force convenient lands to which they had no claim (the Swedes lacked any title at all to \JPomerania\j and Mecklenburg, which they demanded as part of any peace settlement: they merely insisted that possession of the duchies had become essential to Sweden's national security and kept on fighting until everyone else agreed).
However, dynastic pretension also made way between 1530 and 1650 for a far more potent ideological justification for waging war: religion. Not that the two were mutually exclusive. Robert Monro, a Scotsman who served first Denmark and then Sweden during the Thirty Years War (and wrote the first regimental history in English: \IMonro His Expedition with the Worthy Scots Regiment Called Mackays.\i London 1637) gave as his principal reasons for fighting the defence of the Protestant faith and the claims and honour of Elizabeth Stuart, his king's sister, who had been deprived of her lands and titles by the Holy Roman Emperor.
'The Protestant cause' mobilized many: it justified England's decision to assist the Dutch Republic after 1585, as well as the intervention of Denmark and Sweden in the Thirty Years War. An apparent threat to the Catholic faith proved equally powerful among the rulers of \JSpain\j and \JItaly\j.
In 1591, one of Philip II of \JSpain\j's ministers became so exasperated by his master's support for deserving Catholic causes everywhere, plunging his country into war with \JFrance\j and England as well as the Dutch, that he chided the king:
If God had intended Your Majesty to heal all the lame who come to you for cure, He would have given you the power to do so; and if He had wished to oblige Your Majesty to remedy all the troubles of the world, He would have given you the money and the strength to do so.
The king, however, did not listen and \JSpain\j's war with \JFrance\j continued until 1598, with England until 1604, and with the Dutch until 1609 (only to resume again in 1621).
#
"Religion and Early Modern War",91,0,0,0
The religious overtones of many early modern conflicts seem to have caused not only greater longevity but also an increase in brutality. Admittedly this was also an age when warfare was dominated by sieges, which in all ages have tended towards savagery; but many soldiers seem to have displayed an unusual harshness towards their foes because they believed they were punishing the enemies of God.
Thus the Catholic army commanded by Count Tilly in 1631, shortly before meeting its \Jnemesis\j at Breitenfeld, sacked Protestant \JMagdeburg\j in a three-day orgy of killing - ranked by other Protestants at the time as a 'memorable catastrophe' similar to the fall of Troy or Noah's flood, but justified by Catholics as the chastening of unbelievers enjoined in the Old Testament.
The \Jrhetoric\j of churchmen at this time did little to encourage restraint. A sermon preached in 1645 to the soldiers of the English Parliament just before they stormed Basing House, the stronghold of a Catholic peer, for example, condemned those within as 'open enemies of God', 'bloody papists', and 'vermin', calling for their extermination.
Here, as on other occasions, military chaplins acted almost as political commissars, maintaining ideological fervour and repressing any sense of pity among their troops. Small wonder, then, that few of the defeated defenders of Basing House received quarter.
More remarkably, in the age of religious wars the same blinkered intransigence also affected strategic decisions. Thus in 1571, when his plan for an invasion of England in support of a Catholic rising began to unravel because of the arrest of the chief conspirators. Philip II of \JSpain\j nevertheless insisted upon going ahead:
I am so keen to achieve the consummation of this enterprise, I am so attached to it in my heart, and I am so convinced that God our Saviour must embrace it as His own cause, that I cannot be dissuaded. Nor can I accept or believe the contrary.
The king only agreed to cancel the project two months later. Likewise in 1586, when Philip II decided to sanction Spanish intervention in \JFrance\j in support of the Catholic party, he noted:
Truly, I have only agreed to this because it seems to be the only way available to remedy the religious state of that kingdom. It may well mean that we shall encounter other difficulties arising from what we are doing, but the cause of religion is the most important thing of all.
Similar statements from this period abound: most rulers equated their own interests, and those of the lands they ruled with God (as Philip II once put it to a dispirited subordinate: 'You are engaged in God's service and in mine - which is the same thing'); and most nations regarded themselves as the new 'Chosen People', granted a direct warrant by God to resist and defeat those who did not share their \Jideology\j.
The confessional ferment unleashed by the Reformation intensified diplomatic intercourse as well as war: co-religionists exchanged ambassadors, visited each other's capitals and signed mutual defence pacts.
Periods of relative peace, such as the decade before 1618 (rather like the years before 1914), saw frenzied attempts to create international alignments that would guarantee support in case of attack: while, in wartime, governments sought to counter the effects of military defeat by enlisting further allies against their temporarily victorious foes.
As an experienced ambassador observed in 1619, just as the Thirty Years War got under way: 'The wars of mankind today are not limited to a trial of natural strength, like a bull-fight, nor even to mere battles. Rather they depend on losing or gaining friends and allies. 'But on what criteria should these 'friends and allies' be chosen?
It was here that the polarization of Europe into separate religious camps between the 1530s and the 1640s proved so destabalizing, for confessional and political advantage seldom coincided, creating a seemingly endless cycle of uncontrollable conflict.
By the mid-seventeenth century many observers feared that war had brought Europe perilously close to self-destruction. 'Oh come on!' ran one of the hymns written by the German pastor Paul Gerhardt, 'Wake up, wake up you hard world, open your eyes before terror comes upon you in swift sudden surprise.'
A desperate entry in a Swabian peasant family's \JBible\j from 1647 reads: 'We live like animals, eating bark and grass. No one could imagine that anything like this could happen to us. Many people say that there is no God.'
A little later in England, writing a few months after the end of the Civil War, John Locke regretted 'all those flames that have made such havoc and desolation in Europe and have not been quenched but with the blood of so many millions.'
Political leaders, as well as writers, artists, and ordinary people, began to feel revulsion towards the excesses of the preceding period and harboured a fervent hope that it should never happen again. As in the aftermath of World War I, the slaughter had been so great, the spectre of chaos so terrifying, that 'no more war' attitudes became current.
Some have detected in these sentiments a climate favourable to the development of absolute states, for certainly political elites throughout western Europe recognized that armies needed to be better controlled, and that this control should be exercised by the state.
They also acknowledged that paying heavy taxes to a monarch who (although he might claim absolute power) lay subject to certain restraints, was preferable to providing endless contributions to a mercenary army subject to none.
Political elites in the West also began to favour a measure of 'deconfessionalization' in order to reduce the risk of conflicts spiralling out of control. Of course religion continued to influence war and politics - for example it helped William III to unseat the Catholic James II in 1688, while fear of Louis XIV's anti-Protestant policies after 1685 certainly played a part in unifying his northern enemies. But after the 1640s religion, like dynastic interest, ceased to dominate international relations.
Thus Calvinist William's staunchest ally in the wars against Louis XIV was the Catholic Prince Eugene of Savoy, who served the no less Catholic Austrian \JHabsburgs\j; while in the Great Northern War (1700-21), Lutheran Sweden eventually collapsed before a coalition of Lutheran Denmark, Calvinist Brandenburg, Catholic \JPoland\j, and Orthodox \JRussia\j.
In the later seventeenth century, although wars continued to be fought in much the same way, they were waged for very different causes and with a far greater degree of state control.
#
"Military Medicine and Care for Veterans",92,0,0,0
Knowledge of how the human body worked was rudimentary in the sixteenth century, but soldiers could at least take comfort in the fact that army doctors and surgeons were the most experienced medical practitioners available.
New techniques such as amputation were developed to deal with limbs crushed in combat or by stone or metal shot from \Jgunpowder\j weapons. In a \Jwoodcut\j from Hans von Gersdorff's \IManual of Military Surgery\i (1517), the first illustrated treatise on surgery ever published, one patient holds the bound off stump of a successfully amputated hand, while another loses his right leg.
Pressed back in a chair, wounded leg crossed over good and gripping his knee for support, the patient is blindfolded to shield him from what is going on.
The surgeon's tools varied little between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries: saws, a brace-and-bit, and a large number of instruments long, sharp, and thin. An incision with a knife and a few strokes of the saw were enough: a tub underneath caught the blood.
To stop the bleeding and prevent infection, most doctors believed the only solution - despite the agonizing pain and shock it caused the patient in the era before anaesthetics - was to cauterize (burn) the flesh around the amputation. Only in the sixteenth century was it found that if the wound was painted with thick animal fat it healed just as well and much less painfully.
If the patient avoided death from his injuries, shock, or infection, and was wealthy enough to afford them, artificial limbs were available. A whole series of designs for false legs was developed by the foremost military doctor of the later sixteenth century, Ambroise Par, to alleviate the disabilities of amputees.
Combat injuries often needed to be dealt with on or near the field of battle. Military hospitals were few and far between, and only \JSpain\j tried to care properly for her wounded soldiers. Her armies were served by teams of trained doctors and surgeons, and the forces continuously at war in the Netherlands between 1572 and 1659 were provided with the first military \Jhospital\j in Europe, at Mechelen in Brabant (now Malines, Belgium).
This eventually had 330 beds and a staff of between sixty and a hundred, ranging from the chief doctor to the women who did the laundry. Soldiers were treated, with remarkable success, for everything from \Jdysentery\j and \Jmalaria\j through psychological disorders and battle trauma, to severe combat injuries.
Treatment was free but one \Ireal\i of each soldier's basic monthly wage of thirty \Ireales\i was kept back to be put towards the cost of running the \Jhospital\j.
Infectious diseases were as much of a problem as injuries, and \Jsyphilis\j was so common - affecting about a quarter of the Spanish soldiers in the Netherlands at any one time - that the Mechelen \Jhospital\j received a government grant specifically to treat it.
No other country cared for its wounded soldiers so well. England's Queen Elizabeth I had a markedly different way with her troops, and after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 refused all requests to provide veterans with money.
Eventually disability pensions were paid. As the Act of Parliament of 1593 authorizing them belatedly decreed, 'It is agreeable with Christian charity, policy, and the honour of our nation that such as have since the 25th day of May 1588 adventured their lives and lost their limbs or disabled their bodies, or shall hereafter adventure their lives, lose their limbs or disable their bodies in the defence and service of her majesty and the state, should at their return be relieved and rewarded to the end [that] they may reap the fruit of their good deserving, and others may be encouraged to perform the like endeavours.'
Despite the Act's fine sentiments, however, for five years previously those crippled in the Armada action had been left to starve to death or beg in Channel ports. The belated pensions benefited only the survivors.
#
"Pike to Musket",93,0,0,0
The military innovations pioneered by the Dutch in the first decade of the seventeenth century did not immediately pass into practice. Battles such as White Mountain (1620), fought between the Bohemians and a combined Habsburg-Bavarian army, saw huge phalanxes of pikemen pushing at each other, with relatively few musketeers and little artillery support.
However at the battle of Jankow Jin 1645, fought between the \JHabsburgs\j and the Swedes, the two sides deployed in thinner, longer lines, with more field artillery and more musketeers. While White Mountain was decided by cavalry and 'push of pike', Jankow was won by firepower.
Both battles proved important: the first abruptly terminated the revolt of \JBohemia\j which began the Thirty Years War; the second forced the \JHabsburgs\j to begin serious negotiations with the victorious Swedish forces and opened the way to a final settlement to the war.
#
"Atrocity in War",94,0,0,0
A certain amount of brutality is probably inevitable in all conflicts, given that the business of the military in war is killing people and breaking things. Moreover, many 'atrocities' take place in certain circumstances that have produced similar results in almost all societies, above all when the sudden collapse of an enemy force turns one army into a cowardly crowd and the other into a murderous mob.
This happens most often after an adversary is completely broken in battle, for whereas in close combat, in the midst of a press of men, it might be difficult to deal deadly blows, it is very different when the victors can ride down individual fugitives.
Carnage occurred even more frequently when a town was taken by storm. Sieges have always been treated as 'total war', because soldiers who seek a civilian shelter and civilians who militarize their homes by accepting a garrison in effect present an undifferentiated target to the besiegers.
Military and civilian personnel and property could be hard to distinguish during the battery, the assault, and the sack that normally followed a successful storm. Moreover, the catharsis of passing through the breach and emerging unscathed has spurred many victors on to indiscriminate violence.
Some conflicts, however, seem to have been waged with greater brutality than others. Wars fought against rebels, or against followers of a different religious creed, normally involved far more savagery - or so it seemed to contemporaries.
An English booklet of 1638, entitled \IThe Lamentations of Germany,\i provided a long and harrowing report on the misery created by the Thirty Years War, divided into chapters with titles such as 'Of tortures and torments', 'Of rape and ravishing', and 'Of bloodshed and killing' - all accompanied by chilling illustrations to emphasize man's inhumanity in time of war.
#
"States in Conflict 1661-1763",95,0,0,0
\BChapter 11 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
#
"European States in Conflict",96,0,0,0
With her victory over \JSpain\j in 1659, \JFrance\j seized the high ground as the pre-eminent land power in Europe and transformed the face of Mars. The \JBourbons\j expanded wartime forces, improved military administration, and created a powerful standing army, and in doing so set a new pattern for Europe.
Prussia and \JRussia\j imported this design and found that it required governmental as well as military reform. Through warfare, these two new powers carved out a place beside the other European states. At sea the British dominated, shouldering aside the Spanish, Dutch, and French to expand British colonial holdings.
Finally, western powers put warfare on a truly global stage in the Seven Years War, as they contested dominion in Europe, America, and India. The period from 1661 to 1763 provided a historical theatre for the ambitions of powerful statesmen who both refashioned their military instruments and wielded them in a series of wars for glory and empire.
#
"Louis XIV in Arms",97,0,0,0
France, more than any other state, provided the paradigm for western armies early in this period. The French army grew to unprecedented size during the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715), who came to the throne as a boy but only assumed full authority in 1661.
During the long war with \JSpain\j, 1635-59, actual army size peaked at about 125,000 men. Such numbers doubled the size of the army maintained by the preceding generation, but growth did not end there.
Peacetime forces, which had remained in the range of 10,000-20,000 since 1500, reached 150,000 in the 1680s, while by the 1690s wartime levels topped 400,000 on paper and 335,000 in reality. This increase in numbers probably constituted the most important change in seventeenth-century land warfare.
During the war that ended in 1659, increased forces overtaxed military administration and the resources of the state so dramatically that unpaid and unfed troops all too frequently ravaged the French population around them.
These excesses cried out for reform. While the talented secretary of state for war, Michel Le Tellier, drafted the ordinances that redefined military administration, he could not put his plan into effect until peace returned. The actual work of reform therefore fell more to his capable but brutal son, the marquis de Louvois, who first served conjointly with his father and then as secretary of war in his own right until his death in 1691.
Under Louis XIV, the war department tightened its control over supply, operations and personnel. Central to this task were the military intendants, civil officials attached to each army to handle the mundane administrative duties that maintained an army in the field: thanks to their efforts, the mechanisms of supply though still subject to irregularity during times of crisis, functioned on a more effective level than ever before, allowing both better discipline and the maintenance of huge armies in the field.
To accomplish this reformation, Louis and Louvois tamed the officer corps. Before Louvois' administration, officers had enjoyed surprising independence but, with the backing of the king, Louvois circumscribed their judgements and actions.
He insisted that officers attend their troops rather than lounging at court, and he exerted much greater control over the financial abuses they committed. Moreover, in 1675 the \Iordre de tableau\i (Table of Ranks) firmly established that seniority, not birth and status, would determine rank.
The single greatest failure of French military institutions as a whole was not strictly military: Louis XIV never overhauled the way in which the monarchy financed war, so that the kind of low-cost, long-term credit mobilized by the English and the Dutch proved beyond his means.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis' finance minister between 1661 and 1683, tried to put French fiscal policy on a more rational basis, but Louis' lust for war undercut his efforts. In November 1671 Colbert, who had resolutely opposed the king's plan to launch a surprise invasion of the Dutch Republic, made a final attempt to dissuade his master: during an interview Colbert claimed that he could not see how to finance the proposed war.
'Think about it' the king retorted icily. 'If you can't do it, there will always be somebody who can.' Colbert agonized for a week (during which his voluminous correspondence came to a total halt) but then capitulated and developed a fiscal policy based on expensive short-term credit secured by mortgaging future revenues.
However, Louis resorted as much as he could to other financial means besides taxation and credit. In two notable ways, war could partially pay for itself. First, troops holding foreign territory demanded that the occupied population hand over 'contributions': \Iad hoc\i payments in money and in kind.
At times the French rationalized the exaction of contributions to such a degree that they seemed more like regular taxation than pillage, yet the threat of violence remained central. As Louis XIV himself once mused in 1691, 'It is terrible to be obliged to burn villages in order to bring people to pay contributions, but since neither menace nor sweetness makes them pay, it is necessary to continue to use these rigours.'
Second, Louis also made eager French aristocrats pay for the right to command regiments or companies of their own. It was necessary for aspirants to purchase commissions as colonels or captains, but the purchase price was just the first in a series of expenses.
Colonels often paid the costs of creating their regiments and, in addition, should food, equipment, or pay not arrive, or should the amount allotted for recruitment bounties prove insufficient, commanders were expected to draw on their own resources to make good the shortfall.
\BBattle And Siege\b
The army of Louis XIV experienced no great tactical revolution, merely a continuation of earlier trends. Between 1660 and 1715 infantry formations continued to become thinner and longer in a steady progression, reducing from a battle order six deep at the beginning of this period down to four or even three.
Pikemen, who had composed a third of an infantry battalion in 1660, made up only a fifth of it, at the most, by 1700. The matchlock \Jmusket\j, dominant in 1660, gradually disappeared in the French army until entirely replaced by the handier - but more expensive - flintlock \Jmusket\j in 1699.
In 1703 the French also abandoned the pike altogether, in favour of the socket bayonet which at the end of a flintlock \Jmusket\j sufficed to make it an effective short pike as well as a firearm. The adoption of the flintlock and bayonet brought with it no radical transformation of tactics, however, just one more step in a direction long followed.
Cavalry and artillery enjoyed modest advances too. Cavalry regiments added picked companies of carabiniers (troopers armed with rifled carbines) while Louis multiplied the number of his dragoon regiments (mounted soldiers trained to fight both on horseback and on foot).
French artillerists standardized cannon and increased the number of mortars used in siege warfare. The disposition of a field army for battle also remained much as it had evolved by 1660, with the entire force deployed in two or three lines, infantry in the centre, cavalry on the wings, and artillery parceled out across the front.
Operations in the field became more and more dependent upon supplies brought up from the rear, even though the green, or fresh, fodder used to feed horses during the campaign season still had to be gathered in the immediate area occupied by an army, because it would have been too heavy to haul overland.
However, the standard daily ration of 1.5 pounds of bread distributed to each man on campaign could be and was carted: bread was too important an item to be left to chance, since troops left unfed or unpaid in the seventeenth century deserted, marauded, or mutinied.
Since the only guarantee against such fates was regular supply, armies were bound by their commissaries - not because generals were unimaginative, but because they justifiably feared the consequences if they outran their supplies.
The dependence on regular supply added to the importance of fortresses which served as magazines, guarded lines of communication, and shielded resource areas from the imposition of contributions by the enemy.
Louis' pre-eminent military engineer, SΘbastien Le Prestre de Vauban, improved both the design of fortresses and the techniques used to attack them. His monuments of military \Jarchitecture\j can be seen today in the \Iplans en relief,\i models once displayed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and still preserved in the MusΘe de l'ArmΘe in Paris.
Not only did he design individual forts, but he arrayed them in the \Ipr\da\e carr\da\e,\i a double line of fortresses that buttressed the vulnerable northeast frontier of \JFrance\j. As a result, in the second half of the seventeenth century, warfare in and around \JFrance\j revolved around sieges, not battles.
As the German military writer Johann Behr stated in 1677, 'Field battles are in comparison scarcely a topic of conversation...Indeed...the whole art of war seems to come down to shrewd attacks and artful fortifications.
Louis XIV fought his first wars in the name of glory, which he sought through military victory and territorial conquest. Not long after assuming power in 1661. Louis asserted flimsy claims based on the inheritance of his Spanish wife and ordered his armies to invade the Spanish Netherlands in 1667.
Although he thought that the Dutch and English would allow his assault on their traditional enemy, instead they joined with Sweden to force Louis to stop this 'War of \JDevolution\j' in 1668. Louis regarded this as betrayal, and accused the Dutch of 'ingratitude, bad faith, and insupportable vanity.'
It comes as little surprise that Louis directed his next war against the Dutch Republic itself, so as to eliminate their opposition to his conquest of the Spanish Netherlands in the future. He bought English support by secret payments to Charles II, and attacked the isolated Dutch in May 1672.
At first, French forces under command of the prince de CondΘ and Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne, met with success; however, ten days after the French crossed the Rhine on 12 June, the resolute Dutch cut the dikes and stalled Louis' armies.
Alarmed by Louis' appetite for conquest, \JSpain\j, the Empire, and Brandenburg rallied to the Dutch, while England made a separate peace in 1674. In the face of such opposition, Louis withdrew his forces from Dutch territory, only to continue fighting on other fronts.
Nevertheless, the treaty of Nijmegen that ended the Dutch War in 1678 gave Louis impressive new lands, particularly Franche ComtΘ, so he had won some glory.
In fact, Louis' policies had changed by 1678. In 1675 Turenne died and CondΘ retired, and with the passing of these bellicose generals. Louis listened to the more cautious Louvois and his protΘgΘ Vauban.
The king became obsessed with protecting what was his, and this meant shoring up his frontiers. As Clausewitz later observed, 'It had become almost a question of honour for Louis XIV to defend the frontiers of the kingdom from any threat, however insignificant.'
To seal off his German frontier, in 1681 he seized \JStrasbourg\j, and in 1684 he took Luxembourg. But if Louis regarded these land grabs, christened 'Reunions,' as defensive. Europe understandably viewed them as naked aggression.
#
"Louis XIV and the Habsburg Victories",98,0,0,0
As Louis buttressed his Rhine frontier in the 1680s, the potential foe that he feared most was neither the Spaniards nor the Dutch, but the Austrian \JHabsburgs\j, whose power grew as they began to push back the Turks.
On their southeastern border, the \JHabsburgs\j had duelled with the Ottoman Turks for generations, but the climax came when the Ottoman Empire launched its final major assault on the West, in 1678-83. The Turks' first target was \JUkraine\j, but in 1681 they gave up their claims to that area.
Instead, when a rebellion threatened the Habsburg hold on \JHungary\j two years later, the Turks marched into \JAustria\j with a large army of about 90,000 men. The Habsburg field army of 33,000 withdrew before them, leaving a garrison of 12,000 in Vienna, and the Turks laid siege to the city in mid-July.
The engineer Georg Rimpler had reinforced Vienna's walls and bastions in anticipation of a siege, and the defenders had a marked superiority in artillery - 312 cannon to 112 - but the odds were still against them. Using mines more than artillery, the Turks concentrated their attack on two bastions.
The long siege wore down the garrison until only 4,000 troops remained by September, when mines destroyed the main bastion and the Turks seemed poised to storm the city. However, signal rockets illuminated the sky over the Vienna woods on the night of 7-8 September, a sign that a relief army had arrived.
King Jan Sobieski of \JPoland\j had brought a Polish army of 21,000 troops south from Warsaw, a journey of 220 miles, in only fifteen days - a rapid march indeed. With the Poles and several German contingents, the Christian field army now totalled 68,000 - large enough to take on the Turks.
On 12 September this force charged out of the Vienna woods, 'like a herd of maddened swine' according to the Ottoman commander, and destroyed the Turkish host. Austrian forces pursued the retreating Ottomans, expelling them from \JHungary\j, and an Austrian victory at Mohacs (1687) drove the Turks east of the Danube.
Certainly, the surge of the Habsburg forces against the Ottomans constituted one aspect of the growing western military domination of the globe. It was almost another great crusade. Still Louis XIV feared that with the Ottoman threat in decline and Austrian armies advancing, the emperor would turn his increased resources against Christian \JFrance\j, and in this he was right.
Habsburg victories won for them more territory, population, and resources so that, even stripped of the Spanish holdings that had once benefited Charles V, and devoid of much of the old imperial authority since the peace of \JWestphalia\j, the Austrian \JHabsburgs\j stood poised to reassert their status as major players in European affairs.
Actually, by the late seventeenth century, Europe had split into two primary power systems: \JFrance\j, England, \JSpain\j, and the Dutch Netherlands in the west and \JAustria\j, Brandenburg-Prussia, Sweden and \JRussia\j in the east.
On the whole, these two systems compartmentalized European international relations. However, they were linked by diplomacy and interest at times. \JAustria\j more than any other power exerted her influence both in the east and the west.
#
"Peter The Great (Warfare)",99,0,0,0
The other state to benefit from the faltering Ottoman Empire, \JRussia\j, underwent a military and political transformation under Peter I, the Great (1689-1725). Imperial \JRussia\j, long isolated in the east, had already begun to play a role in the struggles of central Europe and to reform its forces along western lines before Peter's accession to the throne, but he accelerated and accentuated both trends to such a degree that his accomplishments can truly be called revolutionary.
Reshaped by Peter's work, \JRussia\j replaced Sweden as the most significant military force in the north and began a course of expansion.
Traditional Russian forces consisted of cavalry composed primarily of petty nobles, the Middle Service Class, who enjoyed land holdings and fought as horse archers. Along with this force served a body of infantry known as the Streltsy, created in 1550 and armed with muskets and halberds.
Both kinds of traditional troops had once been potent, but could no longer match \JRussia\j's foes. The Middle Service Class cavalry were mounted poorly and carried obsolete weapons, while the Streltsy suffered from poor leadership and had become more interested in their peacetime trades than in their wartime duties.
In the seventeenth-century the tsars therefore recruited foreign mercenaries to stiffen their armies. At first entire foreign regiments fought for the tsar, but by mid-century the pattern shifted to hiring only individual foreign officers to train and lead Russian-born troops.
These foreign officers imported the military models pioneered in the West, creating Russian 'new formation regiments' in imitation of western armies. The Thirteen Years War (1654-67) against
Poland confirmed the triumph of \Jgunpowder\j weapons, and in the last years of this struggle the Russians created a strong base of new formation regiments; however, with the return of peace, the tsar discharged his western-style units in the interests of economy, and traditional forces still constituted the vast majority of the Russian army when Peter came to the throne.
Even as a boy, Peter displayed a taste for western military styles and organized two regiments of youths that he drilled and commanded. After the young Peter acceded to his troubled throne in 1689, he seemed more concerned with this small army than with the more mundane duties of government.
However, his military expeditions against the Crimean Tatars in 1695 and 1696 both spurred his ambition for conquest and heightened his resolve to westernize his army and his state. In 1697-98 he journeyed through western Europe, learning what he could and paying special attention to military and naval matters.
Peter next took on Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700-21). During the first year of the war, he led an army of 40,000 troops to besiege Narva, where he met defeat at the hands of a mere 8,000 Swedes under Charles XII (1697-1718), and this humiliation drove Peter to overhaul his army completely.
After 1705 he instituted a system of conscription, which yielded 337,000 men by 1713. Peter not only increased the size of his army but also re-equipped his entire infantry with modern flintlock muskets and socket bayonets, trained it in western tactics, and hardened it through constant, though limited, military engagements.
At first he continued to rely upon mercenary officers hired from abroad, but he also forced Russian men of land and wealth into the army to supply a corps of capable native-born officers. An edict of 1725 stipulated that foreigners could make up no more than one third of all officer cadres.
Peter did even more for the Russian navy. At the start of his reign no navy existed and Russians showed little interest in going to sea. The Tsar accomplished miracles, building naval yards, establishing ports - St Petersburg being only the most famous - and even creating an academy for naval officers.
By the end of the Great Northern War, his Baltic fleet alone numbered 124 Russian-built sailing vessels, in addition to ships captured from the Swedes. Peter also constructed hundreds of shallow-draft galleys for use in the Baltic and the Black Sea.
While he imported western experts to design and command vessels, he also trained Russians who would eventually fill these roles themselves. All this Peter accomplished without the benefit of a merchant fleet to supply skilled sailors and seasoned captains, as was the case in Britain, the Dutch Republic, and \JFrance\j.
The course of reform initiated by Peter demonstrated what other countries would later also discover: that it was impossible to westernize the tools of war without transforming government and society as well.
Peter overhauled government administration to supply the resources needed by his army and created a poll tax that, along with other fiscal devices, doubled state revenue. He also promoted education for the landed classes in order to produce a more effective officer corps, and rationalized the pattern of the social elite in the Table of Ranks of 1722.
Peter even ordered his aristocracy to cut off their beards and adopt western styles of dress. Nor was the economy immune from his actions: to supply his troops with weapons. Peter expanded an already productive metals industry, while he also encouraged other forms of manufacture, including the woollens industry, to make his army self-sufficient.
It is true that Peter's actions were so revolutionary that they generated a reaction that eliminated some reforms after his death; but he still succeeded in launching \JRussia\j as a major western power with formidable armed forces.
By 1708-09 he was ready to contest Charles XII on far better terms, and the rash Swedish king gave Peter his chance by advancing deep into \JUkraine\j during 1708. In the autumn. Peter mauled a Swedish force sent to reinforce Charles, who could not properly supply his army during the winter of 1708-09, and it dwindled.
In the spring of 1709, the already overwrought Swedes besieged \JPoltava\j. With new confidence in his army Peter resolved to 'seek our luck in combat with the enemy' and closed in to relieve the siege. Once near the Swedes, the Russians erected an impressive series of redoubts and entrenched their camp. Charles decided to attack before things became worse; therefore, early in the morning of 8 July Charles led 25,000 troops against Peter's camp, but in the first phase of the battle the Russian redoubts broke up their advance and inflicted serious losses.
Then Peter's army of 45,000 sallied forth from its entrenched camp. In the ensuing struggle the numerous Russian cannon cut swathes through Swedish ranks, and when the Russians advanced, the Swedes bolted for the rear.
At the battle itself and in the abortive retreat the Russians killed or captured nearly the entire Swedish army; their performance clearly announced \JRussia\j's arrival as a major military power. The war would drag on an additional twelve years, and Peter would continue his course of reform, but Europe had already seen the eclipse of one great power, Sweden, by another, \JRussia\j.
\BThe Great Wars Of Louis XIV\b
While Peter pursued his work of reform, Louis XIV engaged in his last two conflicts, the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). These long and costly struggles encompassed both the old and new worlds, since each European contest projected its image on North America, the first as King William's War and the second as Queen Anne's War.
However, since the south Asian subcontinent remained relatively unaffected, these struggles lacked the truly global character of those of the mid-eighteenth century.
In 1688, Louis demanded permanent guarantees that no one would challenge the lands he had annexed during the Reunions and, failing to receive such assurances, he launched upon what he believed would be a short war against the Habsburg empire.
In October his troops seized the fortress of Philippsburg, the last bridgehead on the Rhine that threatened \JAlsace\j. Next, his troops devastated the Palatinate in order to safeguard \JFrance\j from any attack across the Rhine by denying supplies to an enemy approaching the river.
But French aggression and cruelty galvanized Europe into a new league against Louis; this Grand Alliance included the Habsburg empire, the Dutch Republic, \JSpain\j, Savoy, Brandenburg, and Great Britain (now ruled by the Dutch leader, William III).
Faced by such a mighty coalition, Louis mustered the largest army of his reign. Led by the able marshal Luxembourg in the field and directed by Vauban in siege warfare, the French won a series of victories with few outright defeats.
The size of armies engaged in battle increased considerably: at the Battle of Neerwinden on 29 July 1693, 80,000 French troops under Luxembourg defeated 50,000 allies under William III. Despite such victories, however, this war so consumed Louis' resources and undermined his credit that he concluded a peace of exhaustion at Ryswick, where he gave up much that he had gained since 1678.
Europe might now have enjoyed peace but for the complications of the Spanish succession. The sickly and impotent King Carlos II died in 1700 without issue. Both French and Habsburg candidates vied for the throne, and attempts to hammer out a compromise partition failed when Carlos bequeathed all his domains to the French candidate.
Louis grandson, Philip of \JAnjou\j. The War of the Spanish Succession broke out in 1701, and while the French began resolutely enough, the strains caused by the previous conflict soon showed. They fought much like a tired and bruised boxer, hoping simply to stay on his feet until the bell. Again a powerful coalition faced off against \JFrance\j, now fighting with \JSpain\j as an ally.
During this war, the English produced one of their greatest captains, the duke of Marlborough, who was ably seconded by Eugene of Savoy in command of the Imperial forces. In 1704 they triumphed at Blenheim, the most notable battle of the war.
French fortunes did not improve after Blenheim. If anything, 1706 brought even worst disasters: Marlborough defeated the French at the battle of Ramillies and thus won the Spanish Netherlands for the allies, while south of the Alps, Eugene routed another French army at Turin and thus drove them from \JItaly\j.
For the French defeat followed defeat, and Louis XIV seemed unable to find a winning general until he placed Marshal Claude de Villars in command of his main forces in 1709. Although Marlborough and Eugene, again working in concert, drove Villars from the battle-field of Malplaquet on 11 September, it proved a Pyrrhic victory since the French retired in good order, ready to fight again.
Both sides mustered as many as 90,000 troops that day, and the killed and wounded totalled over 30,000, making it the bloodiest battle of Louis' wars. The French held on until 1712 when, with Marlborough relieved of command for political reasons, Villars met and defeated the allied army at Denain.
This French victory prepared the way for a final French offensive in the Spanish Netherlands which resulted in the peace treaties of 1713 and 1714 that maintained French borders and preserved the Spanish crown for the Bourbon dynasty. \JFrance\j was at last secure all along her southern frontier, although, in North America, the British took \JAcadia\j from the French forever.
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"Frederick The Great (Warfare)",100,0,0,0
Louis XIV died in 1715, and with him died an era. He had fought for glory and for high stakes; but between 1715 and 1789 states fought for discrete advantages more than for hegemony. Never has war been based so much on rational economic calculation.
Military historians describe this period as an age of limited warfare; and with some exception, this label holds true. This is not to say that states had not fought for economic gain before - certainly the Dutch and the increasingly commercial English had struggled over wealth and commercial advantage in the seventeenth century - but during the eighteenth century, economic conceptions lay at the heart of political plans across Europe.
Those notions can be summed up in the term 'mercantilism', which posited a finite wealth in the world, stressed the need for economic self-sufficiency, and insisted on the desirability of selling to your rivals without purchasing as much in return, so as to accumulate treasure and fill up the war chest.
By this formula, for one state to gain, another must lose; it was a zero-sum game in which warfare was a fair means to an end. Of course, if a state fought for limited goals, it made little sense for that state to ruin itself in the process, so that limited goals called forth limited efforts.
Thus, \JFrance\j and England struggled over the sugar islands of the Caribbean, the fur-rich trade of Canada, and the jewelled spoils of India, while on the continent of Europe the king of \JPrussia\j dreamed of stimulating new manufactures to make his domains self-sufficient and of seizing the province of \JSilesia\j to make them richer and stronger.
The \JPrussia\j of Frederick II, the Great (1740-86), was the newest and the most unlikely of Europe's major powers. It was very much the product of policies followed by its talented ruling family, the \JHohenzollerns\j.
When Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg (1640-88) came to power, his domains of Brandenburg, East \JPrussia\j, and assorted small parcels scattered across northern \JGermany\j lacked political \Jintegration\j; only the accidents of inheritance and succession had placed them all in his hands. Each territory boasted its own institutions and privileges, and none felt constrained to provide for the defence of any other.
Yet the weakness of the elector's lands brought them calamity. Fortune had placed them between the warring parties of the Thirty Years War - Sweden to the north and Habsburg \JAustria\j to the south - and Brandenburg suffered severe devastation by campaign armies and forces of occupation from 1630 onwards.
Frederick William resolved that only a considerable army of his own would allow him to defend his inheritance. But to establish and support a single army from the resources of his fragmented domains, he would have to forge those separate and distinct domains into a single polity. \JPrussia\j was thus a state created to support an army.
Through both argument and naked military force, Frederick William wrung concessions from his territories that allowed him to collect taxes from each to support a single army and to recruit that force in all his lands. To gain such privileges in East \JPrussia\j he even besieged K÷nigsberg, his own capital there.
His successors carried on the work. Frederick (1688-1713) won the title of Frederick I, king \Iin\i \JPrussia\j, from the Emperor in exchange for allying with him against Louis XIV. The 'in' soon turned to 'of,' and the \JHohenzollerns\j were accepted as true European monarchs.
Frederick I showed an un-Prussian interest in luxury and display, but his son Frederick William I (1713-40) returned to more Spartan ways and, by rigorous economies and strenuous efforts, doubled the army he inherited into a force of 80,000, a standing army fully half the size of the French, even though the Prussian population numbered only 2.5 million (against over 20 million in France).
The son of Frederick William I, Frederick the Great, almost immediately invested this asset so painstakingly created by his ancestors in a bid to seize the rich duchy of \JSilesia\j and thus make \JPrussia\j a German power to rival the \JHabsburgs\j.
Frederick and his army epitomized the style of warfare that had emerged in the seventeenth century. At base, this style built on the assumption that the common soldier could be trained but not trusted: whether a volunteer or a product of the rudimentary conscription schemes of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, the soldier was regarded as a potential deserter.
According to the count of St Germain, French secretary of state for war in 1775-77: 'In the present state of things, armies can only be composed of the slime of the nation and of all that is useless to society.'
Such men had to be employed in formations that allowed close control and constant supervision, emphasizing heavy infantry and cavalry tactics that marshalled men in straight lines in the open field.
Commanders disdained the tactics of the skirmisher, seeking his own cover, and fighting on his own initiative, as dangerous and ineffective. Given the chance to take cover away from the watchful eyes of officer and sergeant, what would keep the soldier from deserting?
Harsh discipline and constant practice alone allowed manoeuvre in the brittle line of battle, now thinner than before as infantry exploited volley fire by standing only three men deep with hardly any interval between ranks. Fear was essential to the smooth operation of Frederician tactics; as the king himself asserted, 'An army is composed for the most part of idle and inactive men.
Unless the general keeps a constant eye over them...this machine...will soon disintegrate.' And '[the soldier] must be more afraid of his officers than of the dangers to which he is exposed.' Given the limitations of this system, Frederick raised it to its peak. He inherited the best drilled infantry in Europe, and when his cavalry failed to match the standards of his infantry, by ruthless training he whipped it into shape as well.
The key to making this system function was the Prussian officer corps, the most professional in Europe. Frederick compelled his young aristocrats to serve as officers, and once they joined the army only debility or death could release them.
French officers acted as fairly independent aristocrats and spent much of their time away from their regiments, but Prussian officers stayed with their units, because they, not their sergeants, supervised training and administration.
Prussian officers also led from the front. In order to honour his officers, Frederick also carefully crafted a social hierarchy in which soldiers dominated; even a mere lieutenant or captain took precedence over a senior civilian official.
With his magnificent army, Frederick seized the Habsburg province of \JSilesia\j in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48). As Emperor Charles VI (1711-40) neared death, he struck many bargains to ensure the succession of his daughter.
Maria Theresa. All of them fell through, and she had to fight off ambitious neighbours, including \JBavaria\j, \JSaxony\j, \JFrance\j, and \JPrussia\j. In the war that ensued. Frederick won \JSilesia\j but also the undying enmity of Maria Theresa. His goals and gains had been limited, but her hatred was not.
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"Colonial Conquest, 18th Century",101,0,0,0
The struggle between Frederick and Maria Theresa also pitted the French against the British, with the former supporting \JPrussia\j and the latter backing the beleaguered empress.
One of the constants of international politics after 1688 was the rivalry between \JFrance\j and Great Britain, locked in a series of conflicts sometimes termed a second Hundred Years War. During the middle decades of the eighteenth century, French and British forces clashed around the globe in commercial and military battles for high stakes.
Conflict across the seas proved to be an unequal contest, however, owing to British naval pre-eminence. Great Britain enjoyed a key advantage over \JFrance\j for, try as she might to maintain a navy, \JFrance\j remained essentially a land power requiring a large continental army.
In long and costly wars of attrition, the French could not afford to maintain both a great army and a powerful navy. Yet command of the sea allowed the British to win the economic struggles of the eighteenth century, since the ruler of the seas also ruled overseas commerce.
In the eighteenth century, the British followed a set pattern in European warfare, committing only a small army to fight on the Continent, turning her commercial wealth into subsidies for continental allies instead, and using her naval advantage to control the waters around Europe and to win the struggle for colonies and maritime trade.
In turn, colonial power further increased Britain's financial strength. If money be the sinews of war, Britain possessed a strength none could match. At the heart of her ability to conduct successful wars lay the state's ability to raise the necessary funds rationally, through long-term credit at low interest rates.
The most apparent evidence of this capacity was the Bank of England, founded in 1694; but the real sources of strength were more basic - commerce and politics. Parliament controlled government finances, and Parliament represented the very classes of men made wealthy by land and commerce who financed the state and its wars.
Whereas kings were famous for reneging on their debts. Parliament would not defraud its own. And since it honoured its debts meticulously, terms were reasonable, interest was low, and investments even flowed in from abroad.
By contrast, an absolute monarch like Louis XIV refused to abdicate his power over taxes and finance, and thus could not command the confidence of creditors as could Parliament. At base, Britain's military and naval strength grew out of her political system as much as it did from her commercial wealth or the bravery of her sailors and soldiers.
The British used their naval and financial strength to become the great colonial power of the age, replacing the Spanish, Dutch, and French. In South America and the Caribbean, a declining \JSpain\j granted increasing commercial privileges to Britain; in India and North America, the major theatres of eighteenth-century colonial warfare, \JFrance\j put up a desperate but unsuccessful fight to retain her hard-won colonies.
India contained strong local states with advanced cultures, long military traditions, and large populations, so that any European power hoping to dominate the subcontinent had to ally with local rulers in order to expel European competitors and to take advantage of local conflicts in order to divide and conquer indigenous rulers.
European warfare in India must, therefore, be placed in the context not only of western struggles, but also of Indian wars and rivalries. British success in India would be as much a victory of local diplomacy as a feat of arms.
The Europeans had long enjoyed a great advantage at sea, where their broadside-firing warships dominated the waves, particularly when the Dutch, English and French replaced the Portuguese as the pre-eminent European traders. But power at sea did not easily convert into power on land and, in any case, at first the European trading companies in India interested themselves in commerce, not conquest.
The directors of the English East India Company calculated success on the basis of profit and loss, and insisted in 1677, 'Our business is trade not war.' However, successful trade required trading stations on shore, and the security of those stations required modern fortifications and soldiers to defend them.
Eventually, Europeans fought to dominate territory as well as commerce, and the English East India Company profited from tribute in addition to trade. In order to fight both local rulers and European foes, westerners had to create their own armies in India.
Since shipping European soldiers to India proved too difficult and expensive, sepoys - hired Indian troops armed and trained in European fashion (see \JSepoys, the Conquest of India\j) - provided the answer. Once adequately trained and led, sepoys proved their worth against both native Indian and European troops. While not the first to employ them, the English East India Company ultimately enjoyed the greatest success with sepoys.
The wars between the French and English East India companies began in earnest in 1744 with the First Carnatic War (1744-48) and, once begun, drew in regular European military and naval forces. In 1746, the able French governor, Joseph Dupleix, aided by a French fleet, besieged and took the main British base at Madras.
However, even though a British siege of the French base at Pondichery failed, the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle handed Madras back to the British. The Second Carnatic War (1749-54) followed close on the heels of the first, as the French and British embroiled themselves in local Indian conflicts.
Again Dupleix displayed his talents at diplomacy and war, and French-backed aspirants established themselves as Nawabs of the Carnatic, making the French the virtual rulers of southeast India. So the opening round went to the French, but their success would not endure.
European warfare in America during the eighteenth century was quite different. While both the British and the French made much use of native Americans as allies, they played only a secondary role in the fighting.
This helped to render indecisive the struggle between the Europeans for control of the Americas. Thus the French lost \JAcadia\j to Britain in the War of the Spanish Succession, although they maintained their hold along the St Lawrence and the Mississippi.
The next conflict, King George's War (1743-48) - the American phase of the War of the Austrian Succession - saw British and colonial forces from New England take the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1745.
However, the same treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle that handed Madras back to Britain also returned all conquests in the New World to their original owners, and the contest over Canada had yet to be resolved.
The campaigns waged against the native Americans proved far more decisive, however. Technology, disease and increasing numbers (by 1700 at least one million people of European descent lived in the Americas) gave the settlers great advantages.
By the eighteenth century, only along the frontier fringes of European settlements could the native Americans hold their own-and not for long even there. The fights were bitter and the conduct of war brutal on both sides, but the result was a foregone conclusion.
So long as the French and British battled between themselves, the natives could find allies on one side or the other, but the elimination of New \JFrance\j in 1763 (see \JFrench and Indian War\j) closed this option. The independence of the United States hurt the native Americans even more, since the British had in some degree respected Indian lands west of the Appalachian Mountains whereas the new state was from its inception hostile to native populations.
The Declaration of Independence itself condemned the native Americans as, 'merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.' With attitudes such as this, the hounding of native tribes by the United States during its first century of existence comes as little surprise.
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"Seven Years War (1756-63)",102,0,0,0
This age of mercantilist warfare reached its climax in the Seven Years War (1756-63), a truly global conflict with enduring consequences in Europe, North America, and South Asia. In Europe, Frederick, now allied with the British, sought only to keep \JSilesia\j; his goal was limited, and it would have suited him to tailor the effort to the intent.
However, Maria Theresa resolved to punish Frederick at almost any cost for his 'theft' of \JSilesia\j and, with \JRussia\j and \JFrance\j as allies, she came close to crushing the Prussian monarch. This forced him to commit an unlimited effort to his limited cause.
The year 1757 witnessed Frederick's greatest feats of arms. A major French offensive against him met with disaster on 5 November at Rossbach, where Frederick destroyed a Franco-German army twice the size of his own. But while he dealt with his enemy to the west, the Austrians invaded \JSilesia\j, so just one week later his troops left \JLeipzig\j and covered the nearly 200 miles to Parchwitz in sixteen days.
From Parchwitz he advanced with 36,000 troops toward the Austrian army of about 80,000 led by Charles of Lorraine. When Charles learned that Frederick was on the march close by, he assumed a defensive position around the town of Leuthen, but wooded hills masked his five-mile-long line running north to south.
On the morning of 5 December Frederick marched toward the Austrian position: then, using the hills to hide his columns, he veered south and concentrated his smaller army against the left flank of the Austrian line.
His men moved so rapidly and deployed from marching column into line of battle with such precision that they caught the Austrian flank completely off guard. With strong artillery support. Frederick's troops ploughed into the Austrian flank at about 1 p.m. and then drove north, rolling up the opposition. Some of his musketeers fired off 180 rounds.
By the end of the day, the Austrians had lost 10,000 killed and wounded and 21,000 prisoners, a total casualty list roughly equal to the size of Frederick's entire army. Napoleon said of this engagement: 'The battle of Leuthen is a masterpiece of movements, manoeuvres, and resolution. Alone it is sufficient to immortalize Frederick, and place him in the rank of the greatest generals.'
Rossbach and Leuthen may have rescued \JPrussia\j, but the war dragged on for six more years. Beginning in the late 1740s and continuing until the Seven Years War, Frederick's enemies improved their weapons, tactics, and administration.
Thus the Russian Infantry Code of 1755 openly aped Prussian tactics; her artillery improved speed and accuracy by adopting better guns and holding prolonged exercises; and the adoption of a better supply system helped to reduce the army's baggage train, making it more mobile and less like an oriental host.
Of even greater significance, \JAustria\j reformed her armed forces after her defeat in the War of the Austrian Succession: the infantry adopted a standard drill manual; training and equipment improved; a military academy opened at Wiener Neustadt; the artillery underwent extensive overhaul, including redesigned cannon which equalled or exceeded Prussian standards; the officer corps was opened to commoners; and a general staff was established in 1758.
Eventually, the leading Austrian commander, Marshal Leopold von Daun, realized (in the words of one of his aides-de-camp) that the king of \JPrussia\j 'always launches his attack against one of the two wings of the army he attacks, [so] it is necessary simply to plan a suitable response.'
And so, eventually overmatched by the resources and ingenuity of his powerful enemies despite his genius in the field, Frederick very nearly met destruction. By the end of 1761, he could see no escape and retreated to Berlin where he sank into despair, but the death of his inveterate foe, Elizabeth of \JRussia\j, in January 1762 saved him, since her successor, Peter III, favoured the Prussians. \JPrussia\j emerged from the war exhausted but intact.
For \JFrance\j, linked in an unusual alliance with her traditional enemy, Habsburg \JAustria\j, the European phase of the Seven Years War was an odd struggle fought without much determination and without much success. But if the French had little to lose or win on the Continent, Louis XV (1715-74) played for high stakes overseas.
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"French and Indian War (warfare)",103,0,0,0
In North America, the long-standing animosity between French and British led to a final confrontation, the French and Indian War (1754-63). With the arrival of a British force under generals Jeffrey Amherst and James Wolfe before Louisbourg in June 1758, British victory was not far away. After taking that fortress, Wolfe attacked Quebec.
With 9,000 British regulars and 500 colonials, Wolfe landed at the ╬le d'OrlΘans, just downstream from Quebec on 26-27 June and began a duel of three months with the French governor Marquis Louis Joseph de Montcalm. Wolfe tried several avenues of attack, only to be parried by Montcalm.
By September, with winter approaching, the commander of the British fleet worried about getting his ships back down the St Lawrence before it froze and so Wolfe and his brigadiers resorted to a dangerous gambit, ascending a narrow trail leading up the cliffs from the river to the Plains of Abraham, just to the southwest of the city.
So rugged was this path that the French though it impassable and left it lightly guarded. Through a combination of skill and luck the British accomplished this feat on the night of 12-13 September 1759. The next morning Wolfe marshalled 4,800 troops on the plain.
Montcalm now decided to offer battle with 4,500 troops, since Quebec held only two days' provisions and could hardly withstand a siege. After both armies arrayed for battle, the French advanced at 10 a.m. Wolfe, who had ordered his troops to lie down in order to spare them from French skirmishers, now commanded his men to rise and march forward.
At a range of 40 yards they poured volley after volley into the French, who broke. The disciplined fire of the British decided the brief battle in fifteen minutes. The British pursued as the French withdrew into the city.
In the fighting, Wolfe was hit three times, the last ball ending his life; Montcalm also died that evening from a gunshot wound received during the French retreat. Lacking supplies, the French surrendered Quebec on 18 September and, after provisioning the town, the Royal Navy withdrew.
In spring 1760, the French besieged Quebec, but the timely arrival of another British squadron in the St Lawrence saved the garrison and won Canada for the British. They now held all of North America, from Georgia to Newfoundland to the Illinois country along the Mississippi.
Meanwhile, in India, the English East India Company ousted the French \ICompagnie des Indes.\i Just as in North America, the war in India had its own momentum, only partially dependent on European events.
In 1756, the Nawab of Bengal seized the British trading base at \JCalcutta\j, condemning survivors to the infamous cramped prison known as 'the Black Hole'. Early the next year, Robert Clive retook the town, and then drove inland with 1,100 European troops and 2,100 sepoys to defeat the Nawab's army of 50,000 men at Plassey on 23 June.
Clive won the battle that day more because the Nawab's allies and generals deserted him than because of superior fighting on the part of Clive's army. In 1760 the French surrendered Pondichery, and although the treaty of Paris returned it to them, they never regained their overall position.
Finally, a Company army under Hector Munro defeated another Indian force at Buxar on 23 October 1764. This hard-fought battle won for the East India Company the rich provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, the fulcrum from which it would lever itself into control of the subcontinent.
The Company now formed a great sepoy army, recruited among the large population under its control and paid from the princely revenues taken as tribute by the Company from native populations.
To a large degree, the Seven Years War epitomized an age, an age in which military necessities shaped governments and war determined the fate of states in Europe, while spreading and defining western dominion across the globe.
After 1763, however, the nature of European conflict would change: wars of dynastic states would give way to wars of nations fought with more intense commitment and with new military instruments.
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"Louis XIV's Supply Logistics",104,0,0,0
These passages from Franτcois Nodot (one of the contractors who supplied food to Louis XIV's troops) in his \ILe munitionnaire des arm\da\ees de France\i \I(The Supply Contractor of the Armies of France,\i Paris, 1697) illustrate the regularity and rationality achieved in French logistics by the 1690s.
Here he discusses the transport of bread in specially designed caissons, or coffers, mounted on wagons, and grouped in \I\da\equipages,\i or company-sized transportation units.
France, where good order reigns during wartime as well as during peace... today has this advantage over its enemies, that its troops are well served for their subsistence; other nations... do not enjoy the use of caissons, a practice regularly established by the French, nor do other nations have well-placed magazines stocked with everything that is necessary to allow their armies to subsist...
The secretary of state for war sets the number of \Iaequipages\i according to that of the troops who are to go on campaign: ordinarily one creates four times as many \Iaequipages\i as would be necessary to carry subsistence for one day, since food is often furnished only every four days to the troops...that is to say [at the most, bread stays] four days in the soldiers' haversacks, and four days in the caissons.
Each \Iaequipage\i is of 100 horses; there are four of them for each caisson, driven by a teamster, thus there are 25 caissons for each \Iaequipage.\i
The caisson is in the shape of a great chest, the cover of which is raised a bit in the centre...so that the rain flows off... The caisson will be 8 feet 4 inches long...3 feet 4 inches high from the bottom to the crest of the cover, [tapering from] 2 feet 5 inches at the bottom [to] 2 feet 9 inches wide at the top...The tops will be covered with waxed cloth...The caisson will be painted with at least two coats of red oil paint.
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"Battle of Blenheim 1704",105,0,0,0
In 1704, the French, together with their Bavarian allies, marched into the heart of \JGermany\j to drive the Austrian \JHabsburgs\j out of the war. In a remarkable march, the duke of Marlborough rushed south from the Netherlands with 21,000 troops to assist the Austrians.
By arranging with local authorities to supply him en route, he covered 250 miles in five weeks during May and June. He even provided new shoes to his footsore troops at Heidelberg. By the time of his arrival, his army had grown to 40,000.
Once on the Danube he combined with an Austrian army led by Prince Eugene of Savoy, and on 13 August they faced 56,000 Franco-Bavarian troops at Blenheim. Marlborough and Eugene commanded 52,000. Marlborough, on the left squared off against a French army commanded by Tallard, while Eugene on the right faced Marsin and the Elector of \JBavaria\j with a Franco-Bavarian force.
Marlborough seized the offensive by attacking the villages of Blenheim on his left and Oberglau on his right. His army suffered high casualties, but by drawing off French troops to each flank, Marlborough weakened Tallard's centre.
At the crucial moment, he smashed through, precipitating the disintegration and destruction of the Franco-Bavarian forces, which suffered 38,600 killed, wounded, and captured for a loss of 12,000 killed and wounded among the forces commanded by Marlborough and Eugene.
A contemporary British memoirist, Captain Robert Parker, wrote of Louis' shock at learning of Blenheim: '[I]t being the first blow of any fatal consequence, his armies had received, during his long reign. And he said in passion, he had often heard of armies being beaten, but never of one taken.' Louis XIV would threaten the heart of \JGermany\j no more.
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"Sepoys, the Conquest of India",106,0,0,0
For Europeans to control areas of India beyond the range of their broadside-firing vessels, they had to develop and exploit the potential of Asian populations to use western military practices. It was not just a question of placing European weapons in Indian hands; in fact, Europeans enjoyed precious little technological superiority when they left their ships.
Native princes had long employed muskets, and their armouries bristled with cannon. The key lay not in the possession of modern arms, but in their disciplined use. In 1749, John Grant, a British officer serving in India, reported that the armies of Indian rulers were hardly armies at all, 'having no regularity or Discipline amongst them.'
Such European critics may have been too willing to overlook the military value of native forces, but they make clear that Indian forces were fundamentally different from western armies.
Geography limited the manpower resources commanded by Europeans in India, since importing large bodies of troops from Europe was impossible. Hiring local bands or contracting local alliances enhanced numbers, but the core of European forces could not equal the princely armies in size.
The French seem to have been the first to solve this problem by adding Indian troops trained strictly in western ways - discipline and drill that allowed tightly controlled and cohesive manoeuvre under fire. In 1746 Joseph Dupleix, governor of French India, joined 700 sepoys to his force of 300 Europeans to defeat the Nawab of the Carnatic.
Stringer Lawrence, who arrived to command the army of the English East India Company in 1748, adopted the same innovation. Henceforth, East India Company sepoys served under the immediate command of Indian officers, and a sepoy battalion had few European officers.
By 1766 this number had increased to eight, five of whom bore the title of sergeant major, which may reflect the emphasis placed on drill.
Robert Clive, Lawrence's eager protΘgΘ, won his battles with very small armies, usually outnumbered ten to one by his Indian foes. He triumphed as much by diplomacy as by military action. But when the Company gained Bengal, its rich reserves of wealth and manpower changed the balance of power on the subcontinent.
Already in 1767, Hydar Ali of \JMysore\j faced an army of 800 Europeans and 5,000 sepoys. By 1782 the East India Company maintained an army of 115,000 men, 90 per cent of them sepoys, mostly from Bengal. Now the British could hope to dominate India by force of arms, aided by their talent at subterfuge and diplomacy.
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"Nations in Arms 1763-1815",107,0,0,0
\BChapter 12 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
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"Nations in Arms (1763-1815)",108,0,0,0
Between 1763 and 1815 revolution and war changed the face and the heart of the Western world. In 1763, at the end of the Seven Years War, the British settlements along the Atlantic coast of North America were still colonies, dependent upon Britain.
Across the sea in \JFrance\j, a monarchy that could trace its roots back over eight hundred years ruled over a privileged aristocratic society, while serfs still worked the fields of their lords. The American and French Revolutions not only stand out as paramount events in the history of those two countries, but went on to influence every corner of the western world.
The revolutionary tide that began in the United States eventually swept through Latin America as well. The transformation of French society that followed the fall of the Bastille to a Parisian crowd in 1789 changed not only \JFrance\j but Europe for ever.
Warfare too was transformed. The French Revolution realized the ideal of the nation in arms, and so \Jnationalism\j added its force to the western emphasis on discipline. Common soldiers were now expected to display the same kind of commitment once reserved only to officers, and the new loyalties of the rank and file influenced tactics, logistics, and strategy.
Eventually, Napoleon demonstrated the potential implicit in the new form of warfare and thus altered the conduct of military operations forever.
#
"Revolutionary War in America",109,0,0,0
Revolution came first to America. After driving the French from Canada and the lands west of the Mississippi by 1763, the British authorities attempted to place greater burdens upon, and exert greater control over, the Atlantic colonies.
The process of demand, resistance, and repression finally led to war in April 1775 when the British governor of \JMassachusetts\j dispatched troops to seize arms and ammunition stored by the colonials at Concord, and the local militia resisted.
The War of American Independence that began that day with 'the shot heard round the world' was a small-scale conflict by European standards; significant actions often involved no more than a few battalions.
Both sides, but particularly the rebel Americans, committed militia to battle, often with disappointing results, but in addition to militia the Americans fashioned a force of regulars, or 'Continentals'. Skirmishers and sharpshooters mattered in the war, albeit not as much as legend would have it, and key battles were fought very much in traditional European style.
Yet even though the number of troops remained small and their style of fighting essentially traditional, nonetheless the war decided great issues. Moreover, in their battle to win independence, American patriots upheld the ideal of a people's government defended by a people's army fourteen years before the outbreak of the French Revolution.
Soon after the fighting around \JLexington\j and Concord, a force of 15,000 colonials besieged \JBoston\j, garrisoned by 7,000 British troops. The American Continental Congress chose George Washington to command the forces encircling the city, and history would justify their confidence in this Virginian planter and veteran of the Seven Years War - a man of great judgment and political virtue.
At the battle of Bunker hill (actually fought on Breeds hill), on 17 June 1775, 1,500 entrenched colonials beat back two assaults by superior numbers of British, only to succumb when ammunition ran out. While a British victory, this battle gave the Revolutionary soldiers confidence that they could stand up to the redcoats.
After abandoning \JBoston\j in March 1776, the British directed their efforts to taking New York. Expecting that this would be the next flash point, Washington had already marched his army there, planning to resist by entrenching his troops, the tactic that had shown such promise at Bunker hill; but British forces under the command of Sir William Howe outmanoeuvred and outfought the Americans on Long Island, forcing Washington to abandon the city on 12 September and to retreat across New Jersey and into \JPennsylvania\j, vigorously pursued by the British.
'The chain [of garrisons], I own, is rather extensive', General Howe presciently admitted on 20 December, but only a miracle seemed likely to save Washington's bedraggled army. Christmas Day brought it. Crossing the \JDelaware\j River with 2,400 men, Washington overwhelmed a surprised garrison of Hessians in British pay at Trenton the next morning.
Nine days later he defeated a British detachment at Princeton. Small triumphs though they were, the battles of Trenton and Princeton gave back some measure of confidence to his bruised army.
The fighting around New York taught Washington that he could probably not match the British in open battle. It also showed him that he did not have to; he need only keep his army in being, restrict the area controlled by the British, and wait for the right opportunity.
Apart from a futile attempt to derail the British assault on Philadelphia in 1777, Washington generally avoided battle and conducted a war of attrition. And while his troops suffered terribly, most infamously during the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge, he somehow managed to keep his meagre forces together, and in that achievement lay the seeds of victory.
All this time Washington tried to transform his troops into an army capable of disciplined combat in the European style, an effort assisted by Augustus von Steuben, an officer with experience in the army of Frederick the Great.
Von Steuben fashioned a new and simplified drill for Washington's army and taught it effectively, so by 1779 Washington's regulars came to rival the British in battlefield drill; but there were never enough of them.
After the British drove Washington from New York, the main fighting shifted to other fronts. Howe conceived an ambitious strategy for the 1777 campaign 'in order, if possible, to finish the war in one year by an extensive and rigorous exertion of His Majesty's armies'.
Ten thousand men were to capture Providence and then (if possible) \JBoston\j; 10,000 more were to move up the Hudson from New York to Albany; while a further 8,000 would defend New Jersey and threaten Philadelphia. Another column of British, \JIroquois\j, and loyalists would advance down the Mohawk Valley.
Finally, a force from Canada, following first Lake Champlain and then the Hudson, would march south towards the army advancing northwards from New York. New England would thus be split off from the rest of the rebellious states.
It was a good plan, but it depended for success upon the arrival of 15,000 reinforcements (which Howe ingeniously suggested might be raised in \JRussia\j as well as in \JGermany\j and Britain) and an artillery battalion.
However the government in London absolutely refused to commit further resources, so in April 1777 Howe decided to abandon his ambitious strategy - 'My hopes of terminating the war this year are vanished,' he complained - and instead concentrate his forces in an attack on Philadelphia.
Nevertheless, the army from Canada set forth for the Hudson under the command of General John Burgoyne. At first his campaign went well, but as the summer wore on he moved more slowly and suffered supply problems.
Howe, as he had warned London (and Canada), moved with his main forces against Philadelphia and sent only a small army of 4,000 under Sir Henry Clinton in a half-hearted effort to link up with Burgoyne. After minor victories, Clinton turned back. Finally at the end of a long tether, Burgoyne met stiffening resistance, and in two battles near Saratoga, an army under General Horatio Gates defeated Burgoyne, who surrendered his troops on 17 October.
Heartened by this American victory, \JFrance\j entered the war in February 1778 and two years later 6,000 French soldiers, who would do much to win the last great battle of the war, arrived at Newport, Rhode Island.
\BThe War In The South\b
The years 1778-81 remained relatively quiet in the north. In June 1778, Clinton, who replaced Howe in command, withdrew from Philadelphia to New York. Washington resumed his waiting game, and the action moved south.
With the exception of an unsuccessful attempt by Clinton to seize Charleston, South Carolina, in 1776, the southern states had witnessed relatively little fighting before the redcoats took Savannah, Georgia, in December 1778.
The next fall, a major French and American expedition tried to retake Savannah, but failed. In 1780 Clinton undertook another siege of Charleston, which fell in May. He then sailed back to New York but left an army of 8,000 behind to conquer the rest of the south.
At the head of this force, Charles Cornwallis smashed an army under Gates at the battle of Camden. South Carolina, on 16 August 1780. Having defeated the victor of Saratoga, Cornwallis expected to win the war, but this was not to be the case.
The agent of this reversal of fortune, Nathanael Greene, took command of 3,000 Continentals and militia at Charlotte, North Carolina, to face Cornwallis's army of 4,000 regulars. In an amazing campaign, during which Greene won not a single battle, he so wore down the British that Cornwallis abandoned the Carolinas and led his army to Virginia by May 1781.
In Virginia he sparred with another American force under the command of the marquis de Lafayette but, unable to bring him to battle, Cornwallis withdrew to \JYorktown\j with 7,000 troops. Cornwallis had failed at being the cat; he was about to become the mouse.
Learning that Cornwallis had taken refuge at \JYorktown\j, Washington sprang into action and rapidly marched his army south, accompanied by the newly arrived French troops under Jean-Baptiste Rochambeau.
Meanwhile, at the battle of the Virginia Capes on 5-9 September, a French fleet stood off a British force, which sailed back to New York, sealing Cornwallis's fate. By late September 9,000 American and 7,800 French troops surrounded Cornwallis's 7,000 soldiers; the formal siege works were directed by French engineers under the command of Washington.
Without hope of relief, Cornwallis surrendered on 19 October. This victory ended the major campaigns of the war in North America, and negotiations for peace soon began that resulted in the Treaty of Paris (1783), recognizing the independence of the United States of America.
#
"Tactics of the French Army, 18th Century",110,0,0,0
American victory gave \JFrance\j a sweet taste of revenge. Moreover, the French part in beating their British rivals to some extent legitimized the reform movement that had improved the French army after the humiliation of the Seven Years War.
At the heart of this movement lay a tactical debate between proponents of columns and lines. The supporters of deep column formations, the \Iordre profond,\i based their conclusions on time-honoured notions that the French were better at spirited assault than at stolid defence.
No less an authority than \JVoltaire\j agreed that the French nation attacks with the greatest impetuosity and that it is extremely difficult to resist its shock.' Advocates of line tactics, the \Iordre mince,\i took heart from the success of Frederick the Great, however, and for a time French drill books aped the Prussians.
Recognizing the advantages of the two basic formations, Count Jacques de Guibert published his \IEssai gΘnΘral de tactique\i in 1772. His solution was to use both in battle, in what can be called the \Iordre mixte.\i The tactical controversy finally produced the drill manual of August 1791 which did not force any single solution, but offered a menu of formations and evolutions that could be served up according to a commander's taste.
As the French engaged in a war of words over the best tactics for heavy infantry, they also experimented with greater numbers of light infantry. Owing to the fear of desertion, at mid-century few commanders employed open order infantry which sought cover and targets at will (see \JFrederick The Great (Warfare)\j).
However, all major European armies returned to the use of light infantry on a limited basis during the second half of the eighteenth century. Combat in the New World during the Seven Years War and the War of American Independence exerted only a tangential influence on this movement, but nevertheless by 1789 French infantry regiments included a light company, and the army boasted twelve entire battalions of \Ichasseurs α pied.\i
This development was not tied to any improved technology, such as the rifle, since the French continued to arm their light infantry with smooth-bore muskets; however, if infantry weapons did not change much, artillery did.
The Gribeauval system, adopted in 1774, significantly improved French cannon. Jean Vacquette de Gribeauval, who rose to supreme command of French artillery after the Seven Years War, changed the manufacture of guns: instead of casting the bore into cannon as before, cannon were now cast solid and then bored out, a process that resulted in much closer tolerances, permitting greater range with smaller powder charges.
The Gribeauval system also brought in shorter, lighter and, therefore, more mobile field pieces. Along with the new materiel went improved training for artillery officers.
As well as proposing tactical and technological improvements, reformers spoke of a new kind of soldier and even of a new kind of society. Guibert wrote in his \IEssai:\i
Imagine that there arose in Europe a people who united austere virtues with a national militia and a fixed plan of expansion, who did not lose sight of their system, who, knowing how to make war cheaply and to live by their victories, were not reduced to putting their arms aside because of financial calculations.
One would see this people subjugate its neighbours, and overturn feeble constitutions like the wind bends over fragile reeds.
Others, including that influential intellectual Montesquieu, heaped similar praise upon the ideal of the citizen soldier.
Yet this does not mean that the reformers were revolutionaries; on the contrary, the reform movement as a whole exhibited profound social \Jconservatism\j. A dominant theme was the demand for a strongly professional but exclusively aristocratic officer corps.
As Maurice de Saxe claimed, 'Truly the only good officers are the poor gentlemen who have nothing but their sword and their cape,' and reformers condemned the purchase of commissions because it benefited rich aristocratic dilettantes of only recent noble origins and wealthy non-nobles.
As a response to this criticism, the French began to phase out the purchase of commissions in 1776. The French also improved the professional education of officers by founding new cadet schools after 1750; however, admission to them soon required aristocratic status.
As the crowning effort of this brand of reform, the Segur law of 1781 denied a direct commission to any aspirant who could not demonstrate four generations of nobility in his paternal line. So while the French army made important changes before 1789, some of them were such that the Revolution could only reject them and fashion its own unique military institutions.
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"French Revolution, Citizen Soldiers",111,0,0,0
The Revolution that struck \JFrance\j in July 1789 shook the army almost as much as it shook the monarchy. When Louis XVI (1774-93) tried to use his soldiers against the crowds during the first year of the Revolution, the troops proved ineffective, reluctant, even rebellious.
The year 1790 witnessed a series of revolutionary mutinies among regiments all over \JFrance\j, the worst breaking out at Nancy in Lorraine. Later, after the king tried to flee \JFrance\j in June 1791, mass resignations eviscerated the officer corps. The army of the \Iancien rΘgime dissolved;\i \JFrance\j would need a very different force when war came again, as it did in April 1792.
The army first reconstituted its ranks through voluntary enlistments. As early as the summer of 1791 the government ordered the expansion of the line army; however, the revolutionaries did not want to rely exclusively upon it, since they saw it as a potential political threat.
Therefore, at the same time, Paris issued a call for 100,000 volunteers to come from the recently-formed citizen militia, the National Guard. These Volunteers of 1791 grouped in their own battalions were later joined by the Volunteers of 1792, called up in July of that year.
Yet by 1793 volunteerism could not fill the massive manpower needs of the war, so in August the revolutionary government decreed the \IlevΘe en masse,\i or the total levy of the French people, something even more extreme than universal conscription:
Young men will go to battle; married men will forge arms and transport supplies; women will make tents, uniforms, and serve in the hospitals; children will pick rags; old men will have themselves carried to public squares, to inspire the courage of the warriors, and to preach the hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.
By the summer of 1794 the revolutionary army listed a million men on its rolls, of whom 750,000 were present under arms - a great force which, in terms of social class, occupation, and geographical origin, accurately reflected French society. It was the nation in arms composed of the best young men that \JFrance\j could offer.
To lead these troops the French created a radically new officer corps. The flight of officers from the old royal army left so many vacancies that they could only be filled by rapidly promoting non-commissioned officers into the commissioned ranks.
Volunteer battalions elected their own officers. Some officers rose with meteoric speed but, on the whole, the officer corps became more and more professional, as seniority and talent determined promotion.
Before the Revolution, aristocrats constituted about 85 per cent of army officers, but by the summer of 1794 they composed under 3 per cent. Yet even though the officer corps did not represent the old privileged classes, the revolutionary government never really trusted its commanders. In order to monitor them, Paris dispatched the famous 'Representatives on Mission' and the less well known but far more numerous commissars.
At the front, these agents scrutinized the actions and sentiments of officers; to earn their disapproval could mean the \Jguillotine\j. In order to insure proper opinions among the rank and file, the revolutionary government also engaged in a campaign of political education, distributing millions of copies of official bulletins, radical newspapers, and even patriotic song-sheets to the troops.
With the 1791 drill book as a guide, this citizen army evolved an effective tactical system, although the new levies may never have mastered the minutiae of parade ground drill. Battalions still stood in line to mass firepower, but they also exploited the advantages of the battalion attack column, a new formation which stood twelve ranks deep and about sixty men across.
This compact formation manoeuvred adroitly, deployed into line easily, and charged the enemy rapidly. In front of the main line, the French dispersed crowds of skirmishers to unsettle the enemy in preparation for assault. The greatest advantage enjoyed by revolutionary infantry lay not in any one element, but in its flexible combination of tactics that could match the style of fighting to terrain and circumstance.
French cavalrymen exercised only a minor influence on the battlefield, since they were few in number and deficient in ability for the first several years of the war, but artillery proved invaluable.
The French devoted more and more of their resources to horse artillery, mobile guns pulled by larger teams of horses and served by crewmen who were mounted in order to keep up with the guns. Such batteries could gallop forward, unlimber, fire, limber again, and dash off to the next critical position to provide powerful support for the infantry.
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"French Revolution, the Battlefield",112,0,0,0
When war began in April 1792, the half-trained troops of the French army met repeated disasters, particularly on the key northeast frontier.
After a succession of unsuccessful generals, Charles Dumouriez finally assumed command there, with Franτois Kellermann leading the army just to the south. In the late summer, an invasion by Prussian and Austrian troops under the command of the duke of \JBrunswick\j - who five years earlier had carried out a strikingly successful invasion of the Dutch Republic - pierced the French frontier at Longwy, took \JVerdun\j, and threatened to march all the way to Paris. Dumouriez manoeuvred brilliantly to frustrate \JBrunswick\j's plans, and at Valmy on 20 September Kellermann with 36,000 troops stood off \JBrunswick\j with 30,000-34,000.
Valmy was little more than an artillery duel, but when the French gunners had the best of it and Kellermann's infantry stood firm, \JBrunswick\j called off his attacks. This unspectacular victory secured the Revolution. The great German poet Goethe witnessed the battle and prophesied to his comrades that evening: 'From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world's history, and you were there at its birth.'
After Valmy, the French army went over to the offensive, winning triumphs in the Austrian Netherlands and along the Rhine before the end of the year.
However, 1793 began badly for the French. Dumouriez lost the Austrian Netherlands to a counter-offensive; but, instead of advancing, the allies, who now included the British, stopped to lay siege to frontier fortresses, Vauban's legacy to the Revolution.
Defeat, coupled with the outbreak of a counter-revolutionary rebellion in the VendΘe, shook the revolutionary government, which now created the dictatorial Committee of Public Safety and ruthlessly mobilized for war.
Lazare Carnot, an experienced military engineer who came to be hailed as the 'Organizer of Victory,' stepped forward as the Committee's most able military authority. More than any other individual he drove war production, logistics, and strategy.
By the autumn of 1793 the French had stabilized the front in the north. Meanwhile, on the shores of the Mediterranean, owing to the effective use of artillery commanded by young Napoleon Bonaparte, the French successfully retook \JToulon\j, previously seized by the British.
Again the revolutionary armies surged forward. On 17-18 May 1794 around Tourcoing a French army of 60,000 defeated an encircling manoeuvre by six columns totalling 73,000 Austrian, British and Hanoverian troops.
This French victory paved the way for the better-known triumph at Fleurus on 26 June, when 75,000 French troops fought a successful defensive action against 52,000 troops under the prince of Saxe-Coburg. Marshal Nicolas Soult later said that it was the most desperate fighting he had ever seen.
After Fleurus, the Austrians abandoned the Netherlands. Victories continued: the French forced the allies back across the Rhine, met success in Savoy and, early in 1795, conquered the Dutch Republic (restyling it the 'Batavian Republic').
After this last success, however, the war bogged down in \JGermany\j, partly because \Jtreason\j by a French general placed the Republic's invasion plans in the hands of the enemy. In \JItaly\j the French held on to the coast around \JGenoa\j but made little progress.
The army's first victories of 1792 and later triumphs in 1794 carried the Revolution beyond the borders of \JFrance\j. But if the tactical abilities of French troops raised the possibility of sparking sympathetic revolutions among oppressed peoples across Europe, the behaviour of those troops in occupied territories turned populations against their liberators.
Poorly supported by an inefficient and corrupt supply service, French soldiers turned to pillage in order to survive. It was not what they wanted to do; it is what they had to do. In 1795 the Directory replaced earlier revolutionary regimes, and it became increasingly corrupt as it neglected the army while lining the pockets of war profiteers.
However, the Parisian government would eventually pay for its neglect of the army. At the height of revolutionary fervour, soldiers had been treated as heroes; but as time passed the army began to see itself as neglected and victimized.
Casualties and desertion drastically reduced the number of troops - from 750,000 men in the summer of 1794, to about 480,000 a year later and about 400,000 in 1796, little larger than it had been under Louis XIV.
With good cause, the army believed that it represented the highest ideals of the Revolution: sacrifice for the common good, careers open to talent, and fraternity among equals. In contrast, the Directory seemed to have abandoned not only the army but the Revolution itself. Such a disaffected army could eventually be turned against that government, and Napoleon Bonaparte came to realize this.
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"Bonaparte's Tools of War (French Revolution)",113,0,0,0
On 27 March 1796 the 26-year-old general took command of the Army of \JItaly\j, a rag-tag force clinging to the Mediterranean coast between the French border and \JGenoa\j. Bonaparte promised them food and fame, even if he put little stock in Revolutionary ideals.
Soldiers! You are hungry and naked; the government owes you much but can give you nothing. The patience and courage which you have displayed among these rocks are admirable; but they bring you no glory - not a glimmer falls upon you. I will lead you into the most fertile plains on earth.
Rich provinces, opulent towns, all shall be at your disposal; there you will find honour, glory and riches. Soldiers of Italy! Will you be lacking in courage or endurance?
In this, his first great campaign, Bonaparte faced and defeated combined Piedmontese and Austrian forces through a series of brilliant manoeuvres and hard fighting. He first split the Piedmontese from the Austrians by beating both in turn and driving them back on their diverging lines of communication.
Then he pounced on the Piedmontese, forcing them out of the war on 28 April. Bonaparte next outmanoeuvred and outfought his Austrian opponent, Beaulieu, forcing him to abandon Lombardy to the French.
Bonaparte's success, only six weeks after taking command, was truly astounding. Driving the Austrians from the rest of northern \JItaly\j took longer, since they held on to \JMantua\j and repeatedly sent armies to relieve that beleaguered fortress. However, he defeated each in turn, and on 18 April 1797 the Austrians agreed to an armistice, later formalized as the Treaty of Campo Formio.
In 1798, the victorious Bonaparte led an expedition against \JEgypt\j, since he believed that control of \JEgypt\j would open the door to India - a romantic notion at best. After avoiding Admiral Horatio Nelson, who prowled the Mediterranean, Bonaparte landed his army of almost 40,000 near Alexandria on 1-3 July and stormed the city.
On 21 July he destroyed a large Mameluke army at the battle of the Pyramids. However, all of this counted for naught, because at the battle of the Nile on 1 August Nelson smashed the French fleet - only two of the thirteen ships of the line escaped - and marooned Bonaparte's army.
Bonaparte put a brave face on the disaster by campaigning into \JSyria\j, but after failing to take Acre he was forced to turn back. Taking what glory he could from his Egyptian expedition, the frustrated but ambitious general deserted his army, boarded a \Jfrigate\j, and landed at \JToulon\j on 9 October.
When he arrived in \JFrance\j, Bonaparte converted his military credit into political capital and, with the support of troops around Paris, overthrew the Directory on 9-10 November. Proclaimed First Consul, Bonaparte now ruled \JFrance\j, but he soon marched off to drive back the Austrians who had reconquered much of northern \JItaly\j during his Egyptian gambit.
At Marengo on 14 June 1800 he won a narrow victory and this, combined with Jean Moreau's triumph at Hohenlinden on 3 December, compelled \JAustria\j to accept French terms once more. The British too signed a treaty with the French in 1802, and \JFrance\j was at peace. In 1804. Bonaparte assumed even greater office by crowning himself Emperor Napoleon.
Why had Napoleon won so many battles and risen to such heights in such a short period? There is no question that he inherited the legacy of the revolutionary army, including a dedicated soldiery, an officer corps based on talent, generals proven in battle, and a flexible tactical system superior to those of \JFrance\j's enemies.
Napoleonic troops were no longer the revolutionaries of 1793-94, but they were still Frenchmen, sons of their nation, dedicated to it, and inspired by its leader. The Jourdan law of 1798 established a new system of universal conscription that required all young men to register, and each year the government set a quota of conscripts to be drawn from those eligible for the draft.
This new conscription law provided the soldiers for Napoleon's army - more than two million by 1815 - and served as the model for conscription laws throughout western and central Europe.
Napoleon continued and refined a method of warfare suitable to his army. Often he simply adapted what he found, such as his tactical emphasis on a form of the \Iordre mixte\i that combined battalions in column and line.
In addition, he benefited from the resurgence of French cavalry, which had slowly re-established itself in the late 1790s. He also appreciated the importance of artillery and increased its numbers.
Beyond this, he improved the organizational structure of the revolutionary army. In 1792 and 1793 the French had pioneered the use of the combat division, combining infantry, cavalry, and artillery to create a small army of a few thousand men which could operate either independently or in conjunction with other divisions.
Before he undertook his 1805 campaign, Napoleon extended this organizational concept by combining divisions into corps, which varied a great deal in size, from less than 10,000 to nearly 30,000. The corps functioned even better than divisions as independent formations co-ordinated with other corps under the supreme command of Napoleon.
Corps organization eased problems of command and supply. The new field forces that Napoleon committed to battle were simply too large to be controlled effectively by one man, and by subdividing his army into corps, Napoleon enhanced command and control (although nothing could entirely eliminate confusion from the battlefield).
Corps also improved logistics, since several corps operating along separate lines of advance could supply themselves more easily than could a single large army operating along a single route.
Nevertheless, Napoleonic mobility demanded a more flexible and improvised supply system. Commanders of the \Iancien rΘgime\i tied themselves to cumbrous supply lines out of fear that hungry troops would either desert or mutiny; the soldiers of the French Revolution, by contrast, were expected to forage for their food if need be, yet still retain their integrity as fighting units.
Living off the country made rapid movement possible at key times on campaign, but it proved no panacea because, although foraging could maintain an army on the move through rich country, it could not sustain an army stopped for long in one place or one that had to move through poor or denuded terrain (as Napoleon would find in Russia).
No analysis of his success can avoid Napoleon's genius. A superb master of tactics and operations, he aimed not simply at defeating an enemy army, but at destroying it. His classic manner of accomplishing this was through a \Imanoeuvre sur les derriΦries,\i designed to threaten the flank and rear of an opponent.
He held the attention of his enemy with part of his own army while directing another element, usually a corps, to march around the enemy's flank. This could turn a field defeat into annihilation, because Napoleon's army now commanded the enemy's line of retreat.
When possible, an active pursuit finished off the work completed in battle, as when Napoleon bagged nearly the entire Prussian army after its defeat at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806.
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"Napoleon's Grande ArmΘe",114,0,0,0
Napoleon displayed his genius to best effect in his masterpiece, the campaign of 1805. \JFrance\j and Britain went to war again in May 1803, but at first the two opponents could not really come to grips; the French encamped at Boulogne and threatened an invasion that never came.
But when the Austrians and Russians joined Britain to form the Third Coalition in 1805, Napoleon put aside any invasion plans and moved against \JAustria\j with all haste in August.
The Grande ArmΘe that Napoleon shifted down to the Rhine now totalled about 210,000 troops. He left an additional 50,000 troops in his Kingdom of \JItaly\j under Marshal AndrΘ MassΘna. Against this latter force, the Austrians concentrated their main effort, with 95,000 men under Archduke Charles.
This meant that the Austrians could station only about 72,000 troops at Ulm and 22,000 in the Tyrol, linking Ulm with \JItaly\j.
Unlike his previous campaigns against the Austrians, this time Napoleon intended to march directly down the Danube. In the manoeuvre warfare now practised by the French, fortresses had lost the dominant role they had enjoyed in the seventeenth century, but Napoleon could still not advance down the Danube with Ulm threatening the rear of his army.
Living by foraging, the Grande ArmΘe crossed the Rhine on 26 September and rapidly swung down to the east of Ulm, cutting the Austrians off from their lines of communications, and bagged nearly the entire Austrian force.
Next, Napoleon moved on Vienna. Russian troops committed to the war provided the main opposition to his advance but, in spite of their efforts, Napoleon occupied the Austrian capital by 14 November.
Yet Vienna too was not his ultimate goal, since he knew that only by defeating the main forces of the enemy could he drive \JAustria\j out of the war. This needed to be done soon, because the Prussians threatened too to enter the war (and this would have made Napoleon's task far more difficult).
So Napoleon conspired to force battle on the combined Austrian and Russian army hovering north of Vienna. He lured the Allies forward by feigning disorder and by assuming what appeared to be an exposed position. Tsar Alexander and his general Mikhail Kutusov in command of the allied force took the bait, but even this was not enough for Napoleon's plans.
He also had to entice the allies to attack him in such a way that they would expose themselves to destruction. He did this by presenting what appeared to be a weak right flank to Kutusov at Austerlitz on 2 December. The Russian obligingly sent the bulk of his army on a lateral manoeuvre to envelop the French, but the flank that appeared so weak had been reinforced by the arrival of Davout's corps which made a forced march during the night to arrive on the battlefield.
Through heroic combat, Louis Nicholas Davout stopped the head of the oncoming Russian columns. Meanwhile, Kutusov had weakened his centre by drawing troops from it for his flanking manoeuvre. This is what Napoleon had hoped for and, at the proper moment, he hurled Soult's large corps into the Russian centre, shattering it, and then wheeling right to come down on the rear of the Russian flanking columns.
The centre and left wing of the Allied army dissolved. Only the Russian right was able to withdraw in good order. Two days later the Austrians surrendered. No Napoleonic victory changed the map of Europe more than did Austerlitz for, as a result of it, in 1806 the Holy Roman Empire, a creation of the tenth century, ceased to exist, and the Habsburg ruler now simply styled himself emperor of \JAustria\j.
Austerlitz alone would have gained Napoleon fame as one of the greatest commanders of all time, yet despite his undeniable genius he ultimately met defeat. Four reasons explain his downfall: strategic greed, increasing local resentment towards French occupation, marked improvements and reforms among the armies that faced him, and the continued opposition of the world's dominant naval and commercial power, Britain.
For all his tactical and operational abilities, Napoleon fell victim to a fatal strategic flaw: he neither knew what was enough nor when to stop. As such, he was doomed to fail sooner or later. In the narrow sense of knowing how to defeat one opponent at a time on campaign, Napoleon showed great talent: he devised campaigns in 1805, 1806, and 1807 which effectively imposed peace first upon \JAustria\j, then \JPrussia\j, and finally \JRussia\j.
But Napoleon never seems to have had a final goal that would satisfy him and guarantee a lasting stability to Europe. In contrast, Frederick the Great said after he had seized \JSilesia\j, the object of his ambition. 'Henceforth I would not attack a cat except to defend myself.'
In a very real sense, the Seven Years War (see \JSeven Years War (1756-63)\j) was forced upon Frederick; he would have preferred continued peace. Napoleon by contrast, seemed to be all ambition and very little restraint.
As part of his grand vision of victory against his long-standing enemy, Napoleon tried to organize the entire European continent in an economic war against Britain. In fact, the British had blockaded French ports since 1803; now Napoleon retaliated with his Continental System, designed to exclude all British goods from Europe.
He first fashioned the System in the Berlin Decree of 1806 and then expanded it to include Russian participation by the Treaty of Tilsit the next year. While this was certainly not the first instance when one power exerted economic pressure during wartime in hopes of defeating its enemy, it was the grandest to date.
However, Napoleon did not combine all the continental European states in a single free trade zone, but instead rigged tariffs to benefit \JFrance\j; consequently the Continental System represented French domination more than simply a common front against the British.
With time, the exclusion of British goods was modified by various exceptions and a strong black market trade. Nevertheless, extension or preservation of the Continental System served as a \Icasus belli\i as early as 1807 when the French invaded \JPortugal\j; moreover, when in December 1810 Tsar Alexander pulled away from Napoleon by declaring Russian ports open to neutral shipping carrying British goods, war between the two emperors became virtually inevitable.
#
"France's 'Spanish Ulcer' (Warfare)",115,0,0,0
When he set up his brother Joseph as king of \JSpain\j in 1808, Napoleon opened a constant lesion which drained French blood and resources for five years. The first British expedition landed in \JPortugal\j in 1808 and held on there, although it was pushed out of \JSpain\j. From his base in \JPortugal\j, Arthur Wellesley moved his forces into \JSpain\j again in mid-1809, only to be driven back once again.
However, Wellesley, now Viscount Wellington, conducted a masterly defence of \JPortugal\j in 1810, exhausting the French army which stalled and starved before the fortified lines of Torres Vedras outside \JLisbon\j.
In 1812 Wellington took the offensive again and, although his forces suffered some setbacks, achieved great success in 1813. At the climactic battle of Vitoria on 21 June, Wellington with 80,000 men defeated an army of 65,000 commanded by Joseph Bonaparte.
Throughout the Peninsular War Spanish guerrillas terrorized the French and limited their ability to live off the country. The French staff officer Pelet described how guerrillas 'attempted-to destroy us in detail, falling upon small detachments, massacring sick and isolated men, destroying convoys, and kidnapping messengers.'
Just like the partisans during the War of American Independence, Spanish partisans confronted their enemies with a dilemma. The presence of British, Portuguese, and Spanish regular forces prohibited the French from dispersing to fight the guerrillas; but when the French did not disperse they found it difficult either to deal with guerrilla bands or to supply themselves by foraging.
If the role of guerrillas was similar in \JSpain\j and in America, however, the brutal intensity of the Spanish war set it apart. Spanish guerrillas gave no quarter to Frenchmen who fell into their grasp, and French troops countered with brutal reprisals.
While the 'Spanish \Julcer\j' slowly bled \JFrance\j, she suffered a massive haemorrhage in \JRussia\j. When he invaded \JRussia\j in June 1812, Napoleon massed a combined army of over 600,000 French and allied troops, but by the most generous estimate he returned with only 93,000 in December.
He undertook this invasion, the greatest Napoleonic catastrophe, in the hopes of forcing the independent Russians back into the French orbit and of reasserting his faltering Continental System.
The Russians realized that their strengths lay in a stout army and in the ability to trade space for time, so after the French won indecisive battles at \JSmolensk\j and Valutino, General Kutusov refused Napoleon the great battle he desired until Borodino, just 60 miles from Moscow, on 7 September.
Napoleon addressed his troops that day: 'Soldiers! Here is the battle you have so long desired! Henceforth, victory depends on you; we have need of it. 'In fact, it was the Emperor who desired and needed battle, but he did not make the best of his opportunity; he simply hurled his corps directly at the Russian position, and while he eventually won the day, he did so at great cost.
With a total butcher's bill of 68,000 killed and wounded, Borodino produced the greatest blood-letting of the Napoleonic wars to date.
After the battle Kutusov simply stayed a tempting step ahead of Napoleon, and the French entered Moscow on 14 September. Rather than defend their capital, the Russians burned it, so Napoleon succeeded only in conquering its ashes and, failing to bring the Russians to terms, began his withdrawal a month later.
With its logistics in a shambles and incapable of living off the barren winter landscape, Napoleon's massive army disintegrated in a retreat which ended in a desperate crossing of the Berezina River at the end of November.
His losses in \JSpain\j and \JRussia\j, coupled with his continued unwillingness to pare down his strategic goals, doomed his attempts to hold on to \JGermany\j in 1813 and then to save his throne in 1814. But in these last campaigns the third factor also came into play: the improved abilities of his enemies.
Napoleon had benefited from the transition from dynastic to national warfare. The French Revolution had realized the ideal of the citizen soldier, committed to the cause and the people for which he fought. Napoleon exploited the \Jnationalism\j of his own troops, but was taken aback when French conquest kindled opposing national sentiments in those peoples he had subjugated or humiliated.
Spanish resentment against the French spawned the most bitter and brutal fighting of the Napoleonic wars. Russian resistance in 1812 proved to be unrelenting as well and, once pushed back into \JGermany\j, Napoleon faced a German uprising.
The German armies that fought to overturn French dominance over central Europe in 1813-14 were now motivated both by resentment, even hatred, towards the French and by an early form of German \Jnationalism\j.
In other ways as well, they were tougher opponents. German military reformers had imposed institutional and tactical changes since the humiliations of 1805-09. Moreover, Napoleon had taught Europe a new style of warfare, and, unfortunately for him, his enemies were excellent students.
Thus the vanquished Archduke Charles spearheaded a reform of the Austrian army after 1805. He tried to create as national a force as he could in the multinational Austrian domains. In 1808 the Austrians created a \ILandwehr,\i or popular militia which eventually produced 240,000 troops, although these were best suited to rear echelon duties.
Charles also borrowed the corps system of organization from the French. The new drill book incorporated skirmishing tactics, and light infantry battalions appeared on the army list. He also laboured to improve cavalry and, especially, artillery.
However the new army had not yet time to gel before the Austrians took on Napoleon in 1809. And while they handed the emperor a setback at the battle of Aspern-Essling on 21-22 May 1809, Napoleon defeated them once again at Wagram on 5-6 July.
#
"Prussian Army Reform (1808)",117,0,0,0
A more profound and effective series of reforms transformed the Prussian army after the defeat at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806. The leading reformer, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, wished to create an army which could benefit from the dedication of the common soldier.
He wrote, 'We shall be victorious when one learns to appeal, like the Jacobins, to the spirit of the people.' This would require more than simply military action and so, on 9 October 1807, the Prussian government issued an Edict of Emancipation to eliminate serfdom, much as the French had done in their Revolution.
Scharnhorst also insisted upon a professional, educated officer class open to all without regard to aristocratic status. In 1808 an order redefined the officer corps as one based on talent and not on birth:
From the whole nation, therefore, all individuals who possess these qualities can lay title to the highest positions of honour in the military establishment.
All social preference which has hitherto existed is herewith terminated in the military establishment and everyone, without regard for his background has the same duties and the same rights.
To instruct this more inclusive officer corps, Prussian reformers established institutions for officer education superior to any others found in Europe, including a war college to train staff officers. Scharnhorst also laid the foundations of the Prussian General Staff that would become such an influence in nineteenth century warfare.
Prussian reform aimed at creating a people's army. The Treaty of Tilsit (1807) limited the regular army to only 42,000 men; however, the Prussians did what they could to circumvent these restrictions, creating a trained reserve of 33,600 additional men.
Once war became likely with \JFrance\j in 1813, the Prussians expanded the regular army and created new forces. \IJΣger,\i volunteer riflemen of largely middle-class origins, displayed their patriotism; royal decrees called up the \ILandwehr,\i a militia of all men aged between seventeen and forty not enrolled in other forms of military service; the \ILandsturm\i (composed of all other men) served as a last line of defence. By August 1813, \JPrussia\j's fighting forces had climbed to 280,000 troops.
#
"Waterloo",118,0,0,0
Napoleon's foes in 1813 adopted his own operational principles and turned them against their creator. His enemies became more aggressive, and they sought not to defeat him but to destroy his major forces. The niceties of eighteenth-century combat and manoeuvre became a thing of the past.
The allies struggled not to be defeated in detail as they had so often been before, but to unite for battle and march to the sound of guns. In 1813 at the climactic battle of \JLeipzig\j, the combined armies of \JAustria\j, \JPrussia\j, \JRussia\j, and Sweden, totalling 340,000 allied soldiers, defeated Napoleon's army of nearly 200,000 and ended his dominion in \JGermany\j.
Napoleon showed something of his old brilliance in the defensive campaign of 1814, although he was assailed by Wellington's army - fresh from its victories in the Peninsular War - in the south while several armies in the east and north converged upon Paris.
But when Napoleon manoeuvred to threaten Prussian and Austrian lines of communication in order to force a withdrawal in late March, they demonstrated that they had mastered the essentials of Napoleonic warfare by ignoring the threat and marching on Paris. With the allies in Paris, Napoleon abdicated.
Vanquished, the unhappy emperor retired to exile on the island of \JElba\j, but soon conspired to retake his throne. On 1 March 1815 he landed at \JCannes\j to begin the ill-starred Hundred Days. The outcome was never really in doubt:
European governments knew him too well to trust his pledge that he only wished to rule \JFrance\j in peace, and once the fighting commenced, his opponents had learned his art of war too well to fall victim to it.
At Waterloo, Wellington and Blⁿcher joined forces to defeat him once again on 18 June, and even had Napoleon won that day, he would surely have fallen before the massive armies of \JAustria\j and \JRussia\j, which had already put 450,000 troops in the field between them to finish the job.
In any case, it is doubtful whether \JFrance\j could have continued to field armies on the same scale. Of the two million Frenchmen who served in Napoleon's armies between 1806 and 1814, almost 15,000 officers were killed or wounded, 90,000 enlisted men died in battle and a further 300,000 in \Jhospital\j, while no less than 625,000 others were recorded as either 'prisoners' or 'disappeared' when the conscription lists were closed in 1814.
Of the dead, 84,000 met their end in \JSpain\j and \JPortugal\j, 171,000 in \JRussia\j, and 181,000 in \JGermany\j. In all, the wars of Napoleon killed 20 per cent - one in five - of all Frenchmen born between 1790 and 1795 (compared with the 25 per cent, or one in four, Frenchmen born between 1891 and 1895 killed in World War I).
The opposite side of the coin to French defeat was British victory. Britain had opposed \JFrance\j from 1793 to the final exile of Napoleon on St Helena, with only a brief respite in 1802-03.
Britain remained the mistress of the seas throughout, and her naval pre-eminence won for her commercial and colonial wealth that allowed her to bankroll the continental wars against Napoleon.
While \JFrance\j had enjoyed a brief naval renaissance during the War of American Independence, her own Revolution hurt her navy badly. Revolutionary enthusiasm could not accomplish at sea what it could on land.
Skilled aristocratic naval captains lost through emigration or purged by revolutionary action could not be replaced with the same facility as could infantry officers. Moreover ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity were probably less congenial to the duties and discipline of life at sea than they were to life in the camps.
#
"Nelson's Naval Tactics",119,0,0,0
While the French periodically confronted the British on the seas during the wars of the French Revolution, it was to little avail. Admiral Richard Howe won the first major naval action of this long era of warfare on 29 May-1 June 1794, the battle of the Glorious First of June, when he defeated a fleet of French escort vessels, although the merchant vessels they were escorting managed to slip safely into the French port of Brest.
The next major action saw the French try and fail to land 13,000 troops at Bantry Bay (in southwest Ireland) in 1796; but this effort came to nothing, as much because of bad weather as because of British fleet action.
The Royal Navy tangled with some of \JFrance\j's new allies in 1797. In February a British fleet under Admiral John Jervis, with Commodore Horatio Nelson as one of his subordinates, smashed a Spanish fleet at the battle of Cape St Vincent; while Admiral Adam Duncan ended Dutch naval competition with Britain for good at the battle of Camperdown on 11 October.
But mutinies aboard British ships rivalled these victories in importance; during the spring and summer, the home fleet mutinied at Spithead and the Nore. In the first case the navy accommodated the mutineers, and in the second it suppressed them, but as a result of this turmoil life at sea for the common sailor improved.
The year 1798 proved to be particularly decisive, as the British dealt with two French amphibious operations. The French succeeded in landing a small force in Ireland, but it was soon captured by the British, and this led to still one more British victory over a French fleet sent to reinforce the effort.
Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean, Nelson utterly destroyed the French fleet at the battle of the Nile (see \JBonaparte's Tools of War (French Revolution)\j).
Nelson and Britain's other admirals transformed the character of naval combat in less than a decade. The standard naval tactic of the eighteenth century had been the line ahead which required that a fleet fight as a unit, with one ship of the line after the other discharging its broadside in neat procession.
This tactic put a premium on order and stressed maximum control by a fleet admiral over his subordinates; however, time and again line ahead tactics resulted in indecisive battles during which both sides battered each other but won or lost little advantage.
Fighting instructions insisted that commanders rigidly apply the line ahead, and at times they seemed more intent on doing so than on defeating the enemy. This seems to have been the case for the unfortunate Admiral John Byng, who was shot after a court martial found him guilty of having failed to do his utmost in a losing fight off \JMinorca\j in 1756.
In contrast to the line ahead, mΩlΘe tactics turned a fleet action into a series of ship-to-ship battles by breaking up the enemy's formation. This meant sacrificing the order of the attacking fleet and relying on the skill and initiative of individual captains.
Ideally there was some method to the \Jmayhem\j of the mΩlΘe, as the attacking fleet attempted to turn superior numbers or position to advantage before hurling itself upon its enemy.
Historians have long criticized the dead hand of line ahead tactics and praised the mΩlΘe as Nelson applied it, particularly at his masterpiece, Trafalgar. But mΩlΘe tactics only held the promise of victory to the fleet with the better captains and crews, since so much depended on the superiority of one fleet's ships over the other's.
By the late eighteenth century, the British simply outstripped their Continental rivals in the quality of captains and crews; they needed little else to win but a chance to get at their foes.
Nelson recognized this and brought the matter to a head, but he was neither the only nor the first British admiral to do so. Howe imposed a mΩlΘe on the French at the Glorious First of June in 1794, as did Jervis at Cape St Vincent in 1797.
At Trafalgar, Nelson relied upon mΩlΘe tactics to his great renown. During that campaign in 1805 Nelson consulted regularly with his captains until that 'band of brothers' understood his goals and methods. He reported one of the conferences with his captains:
[W]hen I came to explain to them the 'Nelson Touch', it was like an electric shock. Some shed tears, all approved...and from Admirals downwards, it was repeated - 'It must succeed, if ever they will allow us to get at them! You are, my Lord, surrounded by friends whom you inspire with confidence.'
Nelson could rely on his captains' abilities, and those of British tars in the rigging and at the guns, to win a great battle if brought head to head with the French. After what seemed like a wild goose chase to the West Indies in search of the French fleet, he finally encountered the combined French and Spanish fleet under Pierre Villeneuve off Cape Trafalgar on 21 October, as it tried to regain the safety of Cadiz.
Nelson instructed his captains that he intended to attack in two divisions, led by himself and Cuthbert Collingwood. At 11:48 am, just as the two fleets were about to collide, Nelson ordered the signal: 'England expects that every man will do his duty.'
The two British divisions then broke through the enemy line, Nelson toward the van of the allies and Collingwood about midway through their line. When the \IVictory,\i Nelson's flagship, smashed through the enemy fleet, it became ensnared with a French '74', the \IRedoutable.\i \JMusket\j fire from the \IRedoutable\i brought down many of the \IVictory's\i crew and mortally wounded Nelson.
But as the dying admiral had planned, once the British had broken the allied line a huge mΩlΘe resulted which yielded victory. British seamanship enabled Nelson's ships to outmanoeuvre the allies and concentrate superior gunpower against isolated allied vessels. At the end of the day the British had sunk one enemy ship and captured seventeen others.
While the British continued a wary watch to seaward after 1805 and continued to augment their fleet, never again did the French contest British naval mastery in blue water fleet action. The British did conduct a series of amphibious operations against various French islands, \JCopenhagen\j, and Antwerp, not to mention Washington and New Orleans in the War of 1812 against the new United States.
The most successful amphibious operation of the war, however, was the British effort in the Iberian Peninsula, 1808-13 (see \JFrance's 'Spanish Ulcer' (Warfare)\j). Obviously without command of the sea, the greatest British land campaign of the war would have been inconceivable.
#
"Britannia: Mistress of Commerce and Empire",120,0,0,0
However, perhaps the major advantages won by the exercise of British naval power were colonial and commercial. With \JFrance\j eliminated as a naval power and \JSpain\j reduced to impotence - and often on the 'wrong side' of the struggle - Britain enjoyed a virtually free hand overseas and in world trade.
Over the course of the war, the British deprived the French of much of their colonial empire. (In addition, Napoleon wisely jettisoned Louisiana, the last French holding in North America and one he could not defend, by selling it to the United States.)
The British swept the seas of French merchant vessels, and all the French could do in reprisal was to build powerful raiders capable of operating independently against British commerce, seizing or destroying what ships they could.
Other states that opposed Britain also put their colonies and trade at risk. Thus in 1795 the British seized the Dutch Cape Colony, restored it in the Treaty of \JAmiens\j (1802), but then retook it in 1806, this time not to relinquish it again until the twentieth century.
The most important colonial acquisitions garnered by the British during the long struggle with \JFrance\j came not in the Americas or Africa but in India. As was the case before, warfare in India followed its own logic and timetable.
Once possessed of the large sepoy armies that the conquest of Bengal had made possible (see \JSepoys, the Conquest of India\j), the British East India company took on two major opponents. \JMysore\j and the Marathas, in a series of conflicts that lasted from 1766 to 1805.
The south Indian state of \JMysore\j confronted the British East India Company's new military power in four wars. In the first, 1766-69, Haider Ali fought the Company's armies effectively, but he fared worse in the second, 1780-83, although aided by a French naval squadron operating in the Indian Ocean.
The Third \JMysore\j War, 1789-92, was the most important of the struggles, and although the British experienced great difficulties in dealing with the \JMysore\j light cavalry, they triumphed by enlisting the aid of Maratha light horse.
In order to buy peace, Haider Ali's successor, Tippoo Sultan, ceded his most lucrative and populous territories to the Company, so he could not put up effective resistance in a final struggle in 1799, when he died fighting to defend his capital. In this brief war, Arthur Wellesley, the future duke of Wellington, saw his first action.
Wellesley played a key role in the next colonial drama, as the East India Company took advantage of civil war among the Marathas to challenge their erstwhile allies in the Second Maratha War, 1803-05. Although weakened by internal dissension, the Marathas put up a good fight; Wellesley later stated that his victory at Assaye on 23 September 1803 was the hardest-fought battle of his entire career.
Victories against \JMysore\j and the Marathas won the East India Company control over the Deccan to match its mastery of Bengal. During these conflicts, the East India Company accomplished its goals as much by learning the value of native Indian methods of warfare and by exploiting the political weaknesses of its Indian enemies as it did by deploying the superior fighting qualities of Company armies.
In the commercial and colonial phases of her struggle with Revolutionary and Napoleonic \JFrance\j. Britain rose as a colossus over world trade. She took full advantage of the first stages of the Industrial Revolution that magnified Britain's traditional commercial prowess.
While the Industrial Revolution had yet to transform the weapons actually employed on the battlefield, it influenced the course of war by adding to Britain's coffers during her struggle with \JFrance\j. The eighteenth century produced a number of basic inventions that would eventually transform the textile industry, and these were linked to improvements in water and steam power.
Between 1740 and 1806 British iron production grew from 17,000 tons to 260,000 tons and by 1813, the year of Vitoria, there were 3,000 power looms in use in Britain. It was production and trade that gave her the riches to finance her own efforts against Napoleon and to offer subsidies to the continental states that braved the French in the field.
The British possessed the most rational and effective system of war finance in Europe. To pay the costs of his armies and wars. Napoleon pillaged Europe - a method that, even when it produced adequate funds, alienated subject peoples and reluctant allies, thus preparing the way for his downfall.
In contrast, Britain based her capacity to produce the sinews of war upon her government and credit institutions and upon her commerce. The Bank of England repeatedly proved its ability to mobilize credit at low rates, and Parliament built up an admirable record of paying off its debts.
As workshop and entrepot for the world, particularly in the midst of war, Britain benefited from levies on trade that no other state could match - although, to be sure, tax rates also soared to foot the bill.
Britain's wealth allowed her to subsidize coalition after coalition against the French. Major opponents of Napoleonic \JFrance\j could count on payments, but it would be incorrect to argue that Britain carried the greatest burden of the effort.
When in 1805 Britain promised support to members of the Third Coalition, she pledged to pay ú1,250,000 pounds annually for every 100,000 men raised, but this sum would, according to Austrian estimates, pay only a quarter of the cost of \JAustria\j's war effort.
The subsidies thus seem to have functioned as incentive as well as actual aid. Britain also supplied arms to her allies: for example, in 1813 the bulk of the weapons that re-equipped the Prussian Army came from England.
Ultimately Napoleon could not carry the war to Britain, guarded as she was by her navy, while the British could find continental allies to carry the war to \JFrance\j; so that, unless Napoleon agreed to limitations on his empire that the commercial giant could accept, he could not escape frustration and failure.
The American and French Revolutions changed the nature of warfare forever. Before these revolutions, international conflict had been a dynastic affair between kings and princes, although the Dutch and the British cases modified this picture to some degree.
When revolution or reform transformed a population from subjects to citizens by giving them more of a stake in society and more of a say in government, those citizens saw the struggles of the state as their own. As such, wars became contests between nations in arms.
Radical changes in government, society, and (consequently) motivation did not sweep through all of the western world at the same moment, or even in the same decade. In the late eighteenth century, their revolutions and representative institutions put the United States and \JFrance\j in the lead of this trend.
Even earlier the British too had developed their own sense of identity and brand of \Jnationalism\j based on their insular history and the triumph of Parliament over the monarchy in the seventeenth century.
While \Jnationalism\j may only have permeated the masses in \JItaly\j and \JGermany\j later in the nineteenth century, by 1813 the concept had taken hold among the literate elites and had become a factor in policy and war. The future would see all Europe engulfed in strong currents of \Jnationalism\j with unforeseen and bloody results.
#
"Nathanael Greene's South Carolina Campaign",121,0,0,0
The Napoleonic battle of annihilation was not the only style of fighting to prove decisive in the period 1763-1815. In contrast, American General Nathanael Greene combined regular forces with guerrilla bands to exhaust and defeat an enemy army in a way that foreshadowed the tactics of twentieth-century wars of national liberation.
When Greene, a self-taught soldier, arrived in the south in December 1780, the British had essentially destroyed the American army in the Carolinas. Greene assembled a small army in South Carolina with the intention of working in conjunction with the established partisan bands to wear down Cornwallis.
Greene opened the campaign by splitting his small army of 3,000 troops, and Daniel Morgan in command of 1,000 of them smashed a British force at the battle of the Cowpens. The bait was set, and Cornwallis rose to take it.
He rushed to the Cowpens where he burned his stores in order to free his column from impediment in their pursuit of the brash Americans. When news that Cornwallis had destroyed his own supplies reached Greene, he proclaimed 'Then, he is ours!' Greene realized that partisan bands nipping at Cornwallis's army would keep it from supplying itself on the march: his men would have only what was on their backs, and that would not be enough.
So Greene ran fast and hard to the River Dan, Virginia, and safety; Cornwallis obliged by following. It was all Greene's men could do to keep out of the grasp of Cornwallis, but they won the race. In the chase, Cornwallis lost 500 of his 2,500 men to hunger and exhaustion.
After a brief pause, Greene re-crossed the Dan, pursuing Cornwallis to Guilford Courthouse, where Greene offered Cornwallis the battle he had always wanted. Greene knew that he could win even if he lost, and while Cornwallis gained the day, he lost an additional 530 casualties.
With his battered survivors he now felt compelled to retreat to Cape Fear. From there he abandoned the Carolinas and marched to his rendezvous with defeat at \JYorktown\j.
Greene lost two more battles against other British forces, but again the victors suffered so much that they withdrew into Charleston and left the rest of the Carolinas to Greene. Greene commented:
There are few generals that has run oftener, or more lustily than I have done...But I have taken care not to run too far and commonly have run as fast forward as backward, to convince our Enemy that we were like a Crab, that could run either way.
One hundred and fifty years later Mao Tse Tung echoed Greene's tactics, 'enemy advances, we retreat; enemy halts, we harass; enemy tires, we attack; enemy retreats, we pursue.'
#
"Industrialization of War 1815-71",122,0,0,0
\BChapter 13 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
#
"War, the Industrialization of",123,0,0,0
The settlement of twenty-five years of war between the European powers in 1815 represented no easy task. But the victors agreed that they possessed certain interests in common; in particular they aimed to control the nationalistic emotions that had swept Europe.
Perhaps even more critical to European peace, however, was the general exhaustion: none were willing to resort to war to settle territorial disputes or to consider hegemonic ambitions.
Although the industrial revolution occurring in Britain before and during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had provided the British with unheard of wealth and economic power, they were content to maintain a balance of power on the continent while controlling the world's commerce.
The victors also agreed to grant the French an easy peace; they restored the Bourbon monarchy and the frontiers of 1792. The settlement in eastern Europe and 'the Germanies', however, proved more difficult than the problem of what to do with defeated \JFrance\j, for the impact of French conquest had so disturbed the fabric of German life that no settlement could possibly have turned the clock in central Europe back to 1789.
Moreover, the Russians had considerable ambitions in eastern Europe, particularly with regard to \JPoland\j.
In the end the statesmen hammered out an acceptable settlement. The Russians received virtually all of \JPoland\j; in return the Prussians received territories along the Rhine on the French frontier, in order to prevent a resurgent \JFrance\j from moving into western \JGermany\j.
These acquisitions conferred two important advantages upon \JPrussia\j: first, by trading most of its Polish lands for German territories, it became a state with a relatively homogenous population; equally important, it gained control of an obscure river valley, the Ruhr, which was to become the second great centre of the industrial revolution.
By accommodating the interests of all the major powers, the Congress of Vienna proved to be one of the most successful negotiated treaties in the history of western civilization. It did possess a number of weaknesses - the growing threat of \Jnationalism\j being the most obvious - but on the whole the Congress provided the major powers with a rationale for upholding the balance of power among themselves, reinforced by memories of the catastrophic wars of 1792 to 1815 (which helped dampen down the ambitious, until another generation had come to power).
After 1815 Europe therefore settled into an unprecedented period of peaceful development. There were, of course, political difficulties. In 1830 a revolution in \JFrance\j tumbled the Bourbon monarchy for good, although the result only led to a dynastic change, while rioting in Brussels provoked partition of the Low Countries.
In 1848 a more serious challenge to order occurred with trouble again starting in \JFrance\j. But this time it did not stop at the French frontier; instead it spread to central Europe. The system of control created by the Congress of Vienna, which aimed at throttling \Jnationalism\j throughout the Habsburg and German lands, collapsed in a matter of weeks.
In the end, only Russian intervention helped to crush rebel Hungarian nationalists and keep the Habsburg monarchy together.
In \JPrussia\j, the conservatives initially did little better against the revolutionary forces, but an assembly of representatives in Frankfurt proved incapable of putting together a new German state in the revolutionary situation.
After a desperate struggle, the conservatives regained control of the situation. The Prussian king refused the offer of the Frankfurt assembly for the crown of a new German state with the derisory comment that he would not accept a crown from the gutter. Even though it failed in the most general of terms, however, the revolution of 1848 underlined the depths of \Jnationalism\j underlying the European equilibrium.
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"Crimean War (warfare)",124,0,0,0
Russia's success both in avoiding revolution in 1848 and in putting down Hungarian nationalists encouraged the Tsar to pursue a more aggressive policy in the Balkans. The Ottoman Empire was already a decrepit, weak state, incapable of adapting to the industrial and technological challenge of the West; yet, it possessed an almost inexhaustible capacity to survive its disasters.
The Russians hoped to take advantage of Ottoman weaknesses; the British and French demurred. They could not allow \JRussia\j to pick up the pieces from Turkey's collapse and the British, in particular, wished to prevent the Russians from gaining direct access to the Mediterranean.
In 1854, a Russian army crossed the Danube and invaded Ottoman territory; the British and French declared war and sent armies to Constantinople to defend the Turks. Even before fighting could occur south of the Danube, the Austrians stepped in and displayed astonishing ingratitude for \JRussia\j's aid in 1849: they demanded that the Tsar withdraw his forces from Ottoman territory.
The Russians complied, thereby removing the \Icasus belli,\i but British and French leaders determined to teach \JRussia\j a lesson. The result was the Crimean War.
In some respects the conflict represents a crucial watershed in the history of war; in others it was a throwback to the 'limited wars' of the eighteenth century. For the first time, the fighting saw the direct impact of science and technology on the battlefield.
The invention of the 'miniΘ' bullet for rifled muskets (muskets with spiral groves cut into the barrel) allowed infantrymen to reach out and hit opponents at ranges of upwards of 300 yards. (This lead bullet was hollowed at the bottom, which allowed the explosive charge to push out the flanges and make a tight enough fit that the rifling imparted spin and direction.
It thus tripled the \Jmusket\j's killing range.) Of equal importance was the appearance of steamships in navies: the British and French could transport and supply their forces in Turkey and the \JCrimea\j with remarkable ease.
Finally, the telegraph allowed governments in Paris and London to communicate with commanders in the field; moreover, newspaper correspondents got their stories to their editors in a matter of days rather than weeks. But despite technological advances, the governments waging the war never mobilized popular enthusiasm and \Jnationalism\j for a total war.
Rather, the Crimean War remained a conflict fought over obscure issues, none essential to the participants' survival.
With the Russian withdrawal north of the Danube, Anglo-French commanders determined to invade the \JCrimea\j and attack the Russian naval base at \JSebastopol\j. In September 1854 the allied fleet landed Anglo-French troops haphazardly on the Crimean coast: luckily no Russians opposed them.
The combined army then marched south towards \JSebastopol\j. On the way, they encountered a Russian army on the heights overlooking the Alma river. A British attack on the left overwhelmed the defenders; well-aimed fire from rifled muskets slaughtered the Russians, massed in columns, well before the advancing 'thin red line' came within range of enemy muskets. Victory at Alma reflected superior allied technology rather than training or discipline.
The allies then marched on \JSebastopol\j. An immediate assault might have taken the port, but the French were cautious, and preparations for a siege allowed the Russians to complete their defences. Before winter terminated military operations, the Russians made two attempts to break through to the besieged garrison.
At Balaclava, through a muddle of conflicting conceptions and misunderstandings, British cavalry attacked Russian artillery positions at the end of a long valley. It was all gloriously hopeless, and the 'Charge of the Light Brigade' added to the long list of heroic British failures.
Nevertheless, by day's end the allies still remained between the Russians and \JSebastopol\j. A second attempt to relieve the port was no more successful: at the battle of Inkerman, the rifled muskets of the allied troops completely dominated the battlefield and the Russians suffered 12,000 casualties, the allies only 3,000.
Then winter settled over the region, and the British army was not prepared. Its supply system broke down: conditions in the front lines and hospitals were soon appalling; some commanders wintered in their yachts. But for nations possessing representative governments, the time when senior officers could ignore the plight of common soldiers had passed.
British correspondents reported the dreadful conditions under which the army was suffering, and the public outcry resulted in substantial reforms that began the process of modernizing the British army.
In the short term, however, the Crimean winter ruined the British forces, and the French and the Piedmontese had to bear the bulk of the fighting in 1855. The Russians made further attempts to relieve \JSebastopol\j, but again technology told against them.
In their last relief attempt, in mid-August, the Russians suffered over 8,000 casualties, the allies fewer than 2,000. On 8 September the French stormed the fortress at Malakoff. For the first time in history, the officers leading the assault columns synchronized watches. The attack succeeded, making further defence of the port impossible.
In the end, the Crimean War had little impact. It only temporarily halted Russian ambitions in the Balkans and put off to another century Turkey's collapse. Nevertheless, advances in weaponry that had marked the war's conduct at the tactical level underlined that technology and science were now crucial to battlefield success.
The side that recognized and utilized such changes in its military forces would enjoy an important advantage over its opponents.
#
"American Civil War (warfare)",125,0,0,0
The American Civil War ranks as the most important conflict of the nineteenth century because, for the first time, opposing governments harnessed the popular enthusiasm of the French Revolution to the industrial technology that was sweeping the West.
From the first, the contending sides staked out positions that brooked no compromise: for the North there would be no peace without restoration of union; for the South there would be no peace without independence.
Yet both sides initially underestimated their opponent's political will. Most southerners believed that a few quick successes against the cowardly Yankees would guarantee victory, while most northerners believed that the South's population opposed secession and a few victories would lead to the collapse of the secessionist conspiracy.
The North certainly enjoyed significant advantages. Its population numbered nearly 25 million, while the South had barely 9 million people (of whom 3 million were slaves). Nearly all major industrial concerns and the majority of the nation's railways lay in the North.
Moreover the Federal government controlled the navy and the army, as well as the bulk of the nation's bureaucratic machinery. But the South possessed other advantages, beginning with \Jgeography\j. The distance from central Georgia to northern Virginia is approximately the distance from East \JPrussia\j to Moscow; the distance from Baton Rouge in Louisiana to Richmond exceeds the distance from the Franco-German border to the eastern frontier of \JPoland\j.
Exacerbating the challenge posed in launching military operations against the South was the fact that primeval wilderness covered many portions of the region, particularly in the west. While the eastern theatre lay relatively close to centres of northern industrial power, the starting point for the Union's western armies, \JCairo\j, Illinois, was over a thousand miles from the North's industrial heart.
Without railways and steamships, the North could not have brought its economic potential to bear and probably would have lost the war. The South also possessed the advantage that it did not have to 'win': it would achieve its aims by merely thwarting northern military efforts.
Both sides faced daunting problems in creating effective military forces out of nothing. The regular army was little more than a constabulary designed to overawe Indians; none of its officers had received the training or preparation to lead large armies.
As with much of American military history, the Civil War was the story of military improvisation and learning on the battlefield. If the officers knew little about war, the politicians knew nothing; Abraham Lincoln was desperate enough to have the Library of Congress send over to the White House the classic works of military history.
In the end, he proved an eminently successful wartime strategist and political leader, but almost entirely due to native intuition and guile - not to any serious intellectual preparation.
The first problem confronting both sides was gathering, training, and supplying large military forces. Ironically, the South again enjoyed an important advantage.
Since it possessed no regular army, those who resigned their Federal commissions to fight for the Confederacy were spread throughout the various state militia regiments, where their experience provided a modicum of basic knowledge. In the North, however, the regular army remained in existence and refused to part with its officers for training volunteer regiments.
The armies themselves retained a fundamentally civilian character. Photographs of even the Army of the Potomac, supposedly the most 'spit-and-polish' of Civil War armies, suggest a general casualness towards the niceties of uniform.
When properly led, however, these troops endured sacrifices that few units in American military history have equalled. The performance of the 1st \JMinnesota\j regiment at Gettysburg is a case in point. On 2 July 1863, it sustained over 80 per cent casualties; yet its few survivors were back in the line receiving Pickett's charge on the next afternoon.
The war's opening year, 1861, displayed Lincoln's extraordinary political talents: the North's successes in that year stand in stark contrast to mistakes in southern policy. The crucial strategic issue was who would control the border states.
In Maryland a policy of direct military intervention by federal authorities overawed secessionists in \JAnnapolis\j. In Missouri, local politicians and soldiers loyal to the Union seized control of the state and drove off rebel supporters, although in the back country a vicious guerrilla war began.
The prize was Kentucky, where the state legislature and populace remained loyal but the governor favoured secession. In the impasse the state declared \Jneutrality\j, but southern troops invaded and forced the pro-Unionists in the state to support the North.
Beside losing the border states, southern leaders made the mistake of embargoing cotton shipments to pressure European states into intervening in the conflict. Such hopes proved illusory: substantial portions of British and French populations were pro-union, while Britain always confronted the problem of how to defend Canada from a northern invasion.
In the end, the cotton embargo robbed the South of substantial earnings and the opportunity to import sizeable amounts of weapons and ammunition while the federal blockade was still in its infancy.
#
"American Civil War in the East",126,0,0,0
Military action in 1861 underlined how ill-prepared both sides were for war. Under pressure to 'thrash the rebs' and facing the fact that most ninety-day volunteer regiments would soon return home, the federal high command marched its forces out of Washington to Manassas.
The resulting battle of Bull Run, with everything from heroism to comedy - a number of congressmen brought ladies out to watch the spectacle - saw southern troops win a closely fought struggle. After fighting with considerable heroism, the Union army collapsed in late afternoon before a rebel counter-attack in a panic that did not stop until the troops got to Washington.
Defeat at Bull Run underlined how idle had been Union hopes that a single victory could end the Civil War. Lincoln recognized the need for long-term enlistments and appointed a bright young general to command the army, George McClellan.
'Little Mac', as his troops affectionately called him, was a great trainer and self-propagandizer. However, his talents went no further. He rated himself as the successor to Napoleon and referred to Lincoln as 'that ape', but displayed little capacity on the battlefield to provide either leadership or guidance.
He was a man afraid of the unknown; consequently, he consistently estimated his opponents as possessing numbers that were impossibly larger. Almost anything served to excuse inaction.
Despite political pressure to use the army he was training, McClellan refused to launch a major military operation for the rest of 1861. In 1862 he planned to move his Army of the Potomac up the James river against Richmond, now the Confederate capital; in spring McClellan made his move and achieved general surprise.
Admittedly, he failed to receive all of the troops he requested for the attack, since Lincoln wished to protect Washington from the Confederates and kept one corps back. Nevertheless, McClellan enjoyed considerable superiority over his opponents.
The advance on the James peninsula was a slow, tortuous movement in which outnumbered Confederates consistently baffled the over-cautious Union commander. By the end of May McClellan was at the gates of Richmond and preparing for an extended siege. But the Confederates were also ready.
Under the inspired leadership of General Robert E. Lee, they launched a series of savage counter-attacks which drove McClellan and his army back to their supply ships. Not all the Confederate attacks were successful - the battle of Malvern Hill was a disaster - but Lee achieved a complete dominance over his opponent, a dominance from which the Army of the Potomac never fully recovered.
McClellan's ineptitude, rudeness, and arrogance eventually led Lincoln to remove him as the army's overall commander before the James peninsula expedition had ended. Now defeats in front of Richmond pushed Lincoln to appoint a new commander in Northern Virginia, John Pope, a successful and aggressive general from the west.
Upon taking command, Pope announced to his new troops that soldiers in the west had never been accustomed to display their backs to the enemy; he soon antagonized his corps and division commanders as well.
The result was another disastrous defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run, where Lee used his subordinates, Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson and James Longstreet, to confuse and eventually smash Pope's forces. With McClellan straggling back from the James peninsula and Pope in general disarray, Lee invaded the North. The Army of Northern Virginia marched into Maryland, while Jackson destroyed a Federal force at Harper's Ferry, Virginia.
Threatened by Lee's move, Lincoln reappointed McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Fortunately for the Union, Lee's plans for the campaign fell into Union hands, but even then, McClellan moved with an excruciating caution that allowed the Confederates to concentrate their forces at the last moment.
The result was Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American military history, with the combined casualties well over 20,000. McClellan launched three great attacks on a thin line of Confederates; each came within a whisker of success, but the Confederates held and McClellan refused to commit his reserves despite the fact that the enemy was on the brink of collapse.
McClellan claimed victory, though at best he had gained a draw. Nevertheless, Lincoln seized the opportunity of a battlefield 'success' to issue the Emancipation Proclamation; as of 1 January 1863 the slaves would be free in all territories that remained in rebellion. Lincoln's proclamation represented a direct attack on the social structure and culture of the South; few illusions remained about what would be required to win the war.
McClellan, who strongly objected to freeing the slaves, talked loudly about how he had saved the North, but he displayed no inclination to confront Lee again.
Disgusted, Lincoln fired 'Little Mac' for good and appointed Ambrose Burnside commander of the Army of the Potomac. Burnside proved more aggressive but even less competent. In December he launched his troops against an impregnable southern position at Fredricksburg; the ensuing slaughter led to his replacement.
#
"American Civil War in the West",127,0,0,0
Events in the west in 1862 proved more propitious for the Union. In early 1862 an obscure Union general. Ulysses S. Grant moved against the two forts guarding the entrances to the Cumberland and \JTennessee\j rivers, Forts Henry and Donelson.
Their seizure opened up the two rivers, secured Kentucky for the Union, and allowed Union gun boats to proceed up the \JTennessee\j all the way to Mussell Shoals in \JAlabama\j where they cut the only east-west railroad in the Confederacy.
Grant's army then moved up the \JTennessee\j to Shiloh, where in April he busily engaged in training his troops, while awaiting arrival of General Carlos Buell's army General Albert Sydney Johnston's Confederate army arrived first and caught Grant by surprise.
For a time it seemed that the Confederates might drive Grant's army into the \JTennessee\j, but night and Buell arrived in time after a day of slaughter. On the second day, Grant and Buell drove the Confederates entirely off the field, and the North gained its second significant victory of the war.
The two days at Shiloh saw terrible casualties on both sides. Infantry formations, using rifled muskets, stood their ground and blasted away at each other. Napoleonic tactics proved incapable of accommodating the technological advances of the day.
The results were to be repeated on numerous occasions in 1862, but the heavy losses at Shiloh did Grant's reputation considerable harm; public opinion in the North still had no idea of how costly the war would prove. Still Shiloh underlined the extent of southern resistance to the Union. As Grant commented in his memoirs:
Up to the battle of Shiloh, I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse suddenly and soon, if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies.
Donelson and Henry were such victories...But when Confederate armies were collected which not only attempted to hold a line further south...but assumed the offensive and made such a gallant effort to regain what had been lost, then, indeed, I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.
After Shiloh and Antietam the defence resorted increasingly to building protected emplacements or digging trenches, while the attackers confronted the problem of crossing the killing zone - a problem that offered no solution until the end of World War I.
Union victory at Shiloh opened the way for an advance on \JCorinth\j, Mississippi, and perhaps the opening of the great river. The US navy had already seized New Orleans, and Confederate positions along the river were open to attack. But the Union commander in the west, General Henry Halleck, assumed direct command of Grant's and Buell's armies.
Halleck's advance on \JCorinth\j made McClellan's moves look like \Jblitzkrieg\j, and the remainder of 1862 saw Union efforts in the west fragment. In \JTennessee\j and Kentucky the Confederates counter-attacked and almost reached the Ohio river before their advance collapsed. Along the Mississippi, Grant began his advance on \JVicksburg\j, the key to control of the river, but substantial failures dogged his opening moves.
#
"American Civil War: Chancellorsville and Gettysburg",128,0,0,0
The campaigning in the east in 1863 saw few changes in the balance between the contenders. In the east General Joseph Hooker, like McClellan, a man with an enormous regard for himself, took over from Burnside at the beginning of the year.
In his appointment letter to Hooker, Lincoln specifically noted rumours circulating in Washington that the new commander had declaimed on the need for a military dictatorship. Lincoln dryly reminded the general that the prime requirement for such a coup was success on the battlefield. 'What I ask now of you is military success,' Lincoln observed, 'and I will risk the dictatorship.'
In early May 1863 Hooker moved against the Army of Northern Virginia, and for one of the rare times in the Civil War, a northern commander caught Lee by surprise. But on the far side of the Wilderness (an area of virgin forest in central Virginia), Hooker froze.
Lee recovered, divided his army, and sent 'Stonewall' Jackson on a march that hit Hooker's flank at Chancellorsville with devastating effect. Only evening saved the entire Union right from collapse. The greatest impact of the flank attack, however, was on the mind of the Union commander; as Lincoln noted, from that point on Hooker acted like a duck hit on the head by a board.
Despite the fact that his corps commanders wanted to remain on the field and continue the fight, Hooker ordered a retreat.
The crucial question confronting the southern leadership was what to do next. Lee argued for an invasion of the North in pursuit of a decisive victory to end the war; others argued that Lee's victory at Chancellorsville should allow the South to stand on the defensive in the east, while reinforcing the west, where Grant had just trapped a Confederate army in \JVicksburg\j.
There, the South confronted the possible loss of both the Mississippi river and a major army. Thanks to his prestige, Lee won the argument: in mid-June the Army of Northern Virginia began its march towards \JPennsylvania\j.
The Army of the Potomac and its new commander, General George Meade, known as 'old snapping turtle' to his staff, set out in pursuit. In a classic encounter battle, fought on ground that neither side chose, a \Jtitanic\j three-day struggle occurred at the little college town of Gettysburg. The Confederates won the first day handily and drove three Union corps pell-mell back through the town.
The second day was a draw, but barely. Only the courage and toughness of Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, the commander of the 20th Maine - who, when outnumbered three to one and out of ammunition, ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge - saved the Union left flank. On the third day, Lee launched a massive corps attack on the Union centre.
Union soldiers chanted 'Fredricksburg, Fredricksburg', as the Confederates emerged from the woods to begin a mile and a half walk up the slope towards Cemetery ridge. The result was a slaughter of General George Pickett's attacking force, as decisive as the one that had occurred below Mayre's Heights at Fredricksburg six months before. With his army shattered and almost out of ammunition, Lee withdrew.
Gettysburg was more than a tactical defeat for the Confederacy. By invading \JPennsylvania\j Lee set the stage for catastrophic defeat in the west, a defeat that lost the Confederates control of the Mississippi and opened up \JTennessee\j to Union invasion.
In fact, his pursuit of a decisive victory accorded with neither the tactical realities of the war nor the South's strategic situation, given the crisis at \JVicksburg\j. The rest of the year in the east saw desultory fighting.
Lee sent Longstreet's corps out west and was hardly in a position to wage aggressive operations, while Meade recognized Lee's competence and proved unwilling to involve his forces in a war of manoeuvre against so talented an opponent.
#
"American Civil War: Grant Takes Charge",129,0,0,0
In 1863 the weight of the war shifted west. After a dismal winter trying to get through the swamps north of \JVicksburg\j Grant began his spring campaign with a stunning move: in May, he sailed his army down the Mississippi past \JVicksburg\j and thereby cut his lines of communications to the north.
Then, in perhaps the most impressive campaign of manoeuvre in the war, he separated the two southern armies in the region and shut one up in \JVicksburg\j. Thus began a major siege that culminated in the surrender of the city and its Confederate army on 4 July 1863 and opened up the Mississippi.
Grant then suggested to his superiors that his army move against the crucial port of Mobile, but Halleck, jealous of his subordinate, demurred and divided Grant's forces among other commands.
As a result, the Union advance into central \JTennessee\j under General Rosecrans lacked support from other operations in the west. Rosecrans, however, was up against one of the least capable southern commanders of the war, General Braxton Bragg.
By late August, Rosecrans had manoeuvred Bragg out of \JTennessee\j; but in Georgia the Confederates, reinforced by Longstreet's corps from the Army of Northern Virginia, counter-attacked.
At the battle of Chickamauga, Longstreets attack on the second day pushed through a gap in the centre of the Union line - a hole caused by the incompetence of staff officers and Rosecrans's inability to get along with his subordinates.
The result was a great southern victory, although Bragg bungled the pursuit. The survivors of the Union defeat made their way back to Chattanooga, where the Confederates besieged them.
Lincoln responded with vigour. He gave Grant command of the entire western theatre and ordered deployment of two corps from the Army of the Potomac to reinforce the west.
The Union logistical system moved 25,000 men with all their horses and artillery 1,200 miles in less than two weeks. Grant, displaying his usual aplomb, concentrated Union forces on Chattanooga. First, he opened up supply lines to the city, where troops were already on short rations.
Once communications were open, Grant attacked Bragg. Flanking attacks had some success, but did not dislodge the defenders from positions overlooking the city.
Grant then ordered General George Thomas, who had saved Rosecrans's army from complete collapse at Chickamauga, to launch a probe against Confederate positions overlooking Chattanooga. The probe turned into a full scale assault that succeeded in the face of seemingly impossible odds.
Grant's success restored the situation in the west. The Union now controlled the Mississippi river; moreover, its forces had driven through \JTennessee\j to the gates of Georgia, the economic heart of the South.
The contrast between Union successes in the west and failures in the east were marked. At this point, Lincoln, recognizing Grant's worth, appointed him Commander-in-Chief of all Union forces: Congress added to his honours by making him a Lieutenant General.
Grant now assumed control of Union operational strategy to end the destructive war that had already lasted three years.
In 1862 Lincoln had suggested to McClellan that it might be good strategy for the North to pressure the South by offensive operations in all theatres. In letters to his wife McClellan expressed contempt for such an approach. But Lincoln had been right; the North with its superior resources and manpower could break the South by pressuring it concurrently from different directions.
That was precisely what Grant intended to do. As he told his subordinate commanders: 'It is my design, if the enemy keep quiet and allow me to take the initiative...to work all parts of the army together, and somewhat toward a common centre.'
In the east the Army of the Potomac would attack the Army of Northern Virginia, while the Army of the James struck south of Richmond to cut Lee off from supplies. Another Union army would move down the Shenandoah and deny the South the agricultural riches of that region. In the west, Sherman would move against General Joe Johnston's Army of \JTennessee\j, while Banks moved against Mobile and forced Johnston to divide his forces.
Had these pieces moved in the fashion that Grant directed, the Civil War would have ended in 1864, but Banks went up the Red river instead of against Mobile; Siegel proved a dismal failure; and (in Grant's words) Butler got his army 'corked' in the James peninsula.
Thus, everything fell on the backs of Sherman and Grant. Part of the problem was the fact that the subordinate players - Banks, Butler, and Siegel - were political generals without the competence to play their parts properly.
But Grant never complained about their lack of performance or blamed them for the failure to achieve victory in 1864 for, alone among the North's senior generals, he recognized their political importance to Lincoln's bid for re-election in November 1864.
Grant placed himself with the Army of the Potomac. He recognized the lack of drive in both the army and its commander: while he admired Meade for his honesty and integrity, Grant also recognized Meade's sense of inferiority against Lee.
Throughout the rest of the war Grant remained with the Army of the Potomac and assumed responsibility for its actions as it grappled with Lee. But the army and officer corps that McClellan had trained proved as flawed a military instrument as their former commander.
No army in American military history has had a more dismal record; no US army has suffered more nobly in the pursuit of victory; and no army has missed more chances in its operations. Not until the Battle of Five Forks in April 1865 did it finally win a battle while on the offensive.
#
"American Civil War: Defeat of the South",130,0,0,0
The Army of the Potomac fought its spring and summer battles of 1864 at an appallingly high cost to itself and the nation. In the horrific battle of the Wilderness, it barely survived a savage Confederate flank attack.
Then, by a swift shift to the left. Grant attempted to outflank the Confederates and place his forces in a position where Lee would have to attack. But by the narrowest of margins the Confederates reached Spottsylvania Courthouse.
A second terrible killing battle ensued as, protected by entrenchments, the Confederates took a heavy toll of attacking Federal troops. Bad luck continued to dog the Army of the Potomac.
To encourage his troops General John Sedgwick, one of the more competent corps commanders, stood on an earthwork and announced that the Confederates could not hit an elephant at that distance; a rebel sharpshooter put a bullet through Sedgwick's head.
After a week of savage killing that bled both armies white, Grant again shifted south; at North Anna and Cold Harbor he launched direct assaults on Lee's position. Even by the standards of this war, these were dark days.
A brigadier in the Army of the Potomac wrote to his wife: 'For thirty days it has been one funeral procession past me, and it has been too much.' Grant then slipped around Lee to the James river. There, he placed his army in position to capture Petersburg and break the southern lines of supply.
Had Petersburg fallen, Lee would have had to abandon Virginia and Richmond and retreat to North Carolina. But once again the Army of the Potomac's corps commanders missed the opportunity, and Lee got sufficient troops to Petersburg to man its defences.
By this time both armies were exhausted, incapable of further offensive operations - although Grant had at least succeeded in his objective of drawing Lee's sting: the Army of Northern Virginia was no longer capable of offensive warfare.
So everything came down to what Sherman could achieve against Johnston. Sherman began his offensive against \JAtlanta\j in early May. The two armies fenced and, although he manoeuvred Johnston out of one position after another, he failed to achieve significant military success.
By July, Johnston had retreated to defensive works in front of \JAtlanta\j. At that point the Confederate government, frustrated by retreat, replaced Johnston with a corps commander, General John Bell Hood. Hood had been a brilliant divisional commander under 'Stonewall' Jackson; he had also proven his bravery on many battlefields and had lost both an arm and a leg in battle.
But Hood had also been a divisive and argumentative corps commander, and he proved to be as bad a choice for senior command as Bragg had been.
Hood's explanation for the troubles confronting the Confederacy in 1864 was that southern troops had lost the offensive edge they had enjoyed in 1862. As army commander in front of \JAtlanta\j, he determined to regain that offensive spirit.
Over the course of the next month, he launched three savage attacks on Sherman, but experienced Union soldiers destroyed each strike, inflicted horrendous casualties on the attackers, and eventually forced Hood to abandon \JAtlanta\j.
To the end, he blamed his failure on a lack of offensive spirit in his troops; he entirely missed the fact that the face of battle had changed in fundamental ways. Nevertheless, the casualties suffered by his attacks underlined that the South was still willing to suffer terrible losses in pursuit of independence.
Sherman's capture of \JAtlanta\j was crucial to Lincoln's re-election. Now Hood moved north to threaten Sherman's lines of communications in \JTennessee\j, but Sherman persuaded Grant to allow him to pursue one of the most innovative operational concepts of the Civil War: while a part of his army under George Thomas fell back to cover central \JTennessee\j, Sherman cut loose from his supply lines and marched into the heart of Georgia on the way to the sea.
Grant eventually approved the move. Hood pursued Thomas's forces first to Franklin where, after accusing his general officers of cowardice, he launched his troops against well-entrenched Federals. The result was a slaughter in which many of his generals died. Unrepentant to the end, Hood advanced to Nashville, where Thomas destroyed the remnants of an army the Confederate commander had begun wrecking at \JAtlanta\j.
Meanwhile, Sherman marched through Georgia. The war had taken a vicious turn, as troops carried the war to the South's heartland. While Sherman did not aim his campaign directly at civilians, its 'collateral' effects - wrecking habitations, destroying the crops, stealing the farm animals - underlined how far the Federal government was willing to go to destroy the Confederacy.
Sherman's troops took great delight in the 'Chimneyvilles' that remained in the wake of their march. As Sherman warned the citizens of northern \JAlabama\j:
The government of the United States has in North \JAlabama\j any and all rights which [it chooses] to enforce in war, to take [Confederate] lives, their houses, their lands, their everything, because they cannot deny that war exists there, and war is simply power unconstrained by constitution or compact.
If they want eternal warfare, well and good. We will accept the issue and dispossess them and put our friends in possession...[T]o the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better. Satan and the rebellious saint[s] of heaven were allowed a continuance of existence in hell merely to swell their just punishment.
The destruction wrought in Georgia and in South Carolina represented a portion of a larger policy aimed at breaking the southern will to continue the war. It served a clear warning to Confederate soldiers that they could no longer protect even their homes from the war.
As Sherman was driving to the sea. Grant unleashed General Philip Sheridan on the Shenandoah valley. Sheridan was one of the most competent battlefield commanders of the war; he was also, like Jackson, one of the most ferocious.
Grant's instructions underline that what Sheridan did to the Shenandoah was the general policy of the Union high command; he ordered Sheridan to turn the Shenandoah into 'a barren waste... so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them.'
Sheridan enthusiastically executed his orders. A remark to his Prussian hosts in 1870 when he toured the battles of the Franco-Prussian War suggests how far the Union's strategy had become a relentless war against the South's popular resistance: Sheridan noted that the Prussians were being far too 'humanitarian' in their treatment of the French and added for the benefit of his avid German listeners that 'The people should be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war!'
Admittedly, neither Sherman nor Sheridan achieved the level of Bomber Command's 'dehousing' campaign in World War II, but northern military forces fought only on the ground: they could thus spare the wretched inhabitants their lives while destroying the South's economic \Jinfrastructure\j, homes, foodstuffs, and farm animals.
And everywhere that they moved they destroyed the institution of \Jslavery\j, the heart of the South's cultural and political identity.
By early 1865 the Confederacy's position was hopeless. Re-election of Lincoln in autumn 1864 had removed its last hope; the great emancipator would see the war through to its conclusion. Through every Confederate state Union armies moved at will. Lee's army was gradually disappearing through desertion; Sherman was destroying South Carolina.
His troops revelled in wrecking the state that had led the move towards secession and which had begun the conflict four years earlier by firing on Fort Sumter. North Carolina soon felt the weight of Union armies and the Confederates' last port, Fort Fisher, fell to a combined navy-army operation.
\BThe Costs Of 'The Late Unpleasantness'\b
In April Lee's position at Petersburg collapsed as the Army of the Potomac won its first offensive victory at Five Forks. A rapid pursuit with Sheridan in the lead eventually caught Lee at Appomattox. Recognizing the inevitable, Lee surrendered. He then took on the mantle of one of the great statesmen in American history by spending his last years urging his countrymen to accept the results.
Unfortunately, the destructive war waged by Union armies in the conflict's last year, the problems of race relations in a defeated country, and the bitterness of the lost cause perpetuated the division between North and South for well over a hundred years. But a simple grammatical change underlined the transformation wrought by the Civil War.
Before 1861 Americans said 'the United States are'; after 1865 they said the United States is. 'The North's victory had important consequences for the twentieth century. The maintenance of a united nation in North America with its immense industrial and agricultural power was to play a crucial role in winning both world wars against \JGermany\j; a fragmented sub-continent would have played little role in such a conflict.
The Civil War was the first modern war: one in which military power, built on popular support and industrialization, and projected by the railroad and steamship over hundreds of miles, approached the boundaries of total war.
Neither strategic vision nor military capabilities to wage a great war existed at the beginning: the mere creation of military force and its requisite support created problems that were not readily apparent nor easily solved.
Nevertheless the Union's political and military leadership eventually evolved a strategy that brought victory, a strategy of attrition rather than decisive battle. Along with the general assault on the South in 1864 went a war to break the popular will of the southern population. But the cost of such a war was appalling: around 625,000 soldiers died in the war on both sides, a figure equal to the total of all other American wars up to and including most of the Vietnam conflict.
A comparable level of losses for the United States in World War I would have been about 2.1 million lives (instead of 115,000). The Civil War indicated that the new technological battlefield would take a heavy toll in lives, and that the capacity of the modern state to mobilize its human and industrial resources could feed that technological battlefield almost indefinitely. And those resources, both human and industrial, were growing by leaps and bounds as western civilization entered the twentieth century.
#
"Bismarck's Wars",131,0,0,0
However, at approximately the same time, the Europeans learned different lessons about modern war. Almost concurrently with the American Civil War a series of wars achieved the unification of \JGermany\j under Prussian leadership.
These successes involved a series of short, triumphant wars, but they did not rest on the tactical or technological superiority of \JPrussia\j's armies; rather they reflected the brilliance of its statesmanship and the professionalization of its officer corps.
The latter arose in part from the reaction to the devastating defeat of Jena-Auerstadt in 1806. The creation of a \IKriegsakademie\i (war college) to produce trained staff officers allowed the Prussians to establish the nucleus of an effective staff system in time for the War of Liberation against the French in 1813 and its success in managing the myriad details involved in fighting Napoleon prevented the retrenchments of the post-war period from dismantling the \IKriegsakademie\i and a nascent general staff.
In the period leading up to the 1860s a small, elite general staff pushed the Prussian army towards a recognition of the advantages that railways and changing weapons technology would provide in the next war.
The appointment of Helmut von Moltke as the chief of the general staff in 1858 accelerated the process, for Moltke encouraged the construction of strategic railways throughout \JGermany\j, arguing that they would prove more valuable in future wars than fortresses.
The rate of railway expansion in \JGermany\j was over twice the rate in \JFrance\j during the 1840s, and by 1854 the German Confederation possessed nearly 7,500 miles of railways. By 1860 \JPrussia\j itself possessed 3,500 miles of railways (and Moltke had grown rich from his investment in railway stock).
The crucial point was that the Prussian general staff, unlike other military organizations in Europe, systematically thought through how best to exploit this expanding potential for mobilization and deployment of military forces.
However, \JPrussia\j's advantage lay not only in its capacity to mobilize, deploy, and support its forces. The Prussian army was also first in Europe to adopt a breech-loading rifle, the needlegun, which allowed its soldiers to reload three to four times faster than their opponents - and to do so while lying down, an obvious advantage in any firefight.
But such changes represented only potential: it took skilful strategic and political moves to turn this military potential into strategic reality.
In the early 1860s the Prussian state had come to a constitutional impasse between the king's demand that the legislature support a three-year term of military service and the legislature's refusal to provide the funding. In desperation Wilhelm I turned to an aristocrat of the old school, Otto von \JBismarck\j, to break the deadlock.
Bismarck was an extraordinary character. He had enjoyed little success in a short army career, while he had spent his days in university drinking and wenching. His diplomatic service won him few friends. But he did have qualities that few recognized at the time.
He possessed an extraordinary capacity to size up his opponents: and he was a first-class politician with a gambler's instinct of when to play and when to leave the table. Unlike most Prussian conservatives, he understood the strength of German \Jnationalism\j and saw that \JPrussia\j must either swim with the tide or be swamped by it.
Bismarck's greatest advantage lay in the weaknesses in the European system. Few in Europe recognized \JPrussia\j's latent strengths with its ongoing industrial revolution; equally important, most Europeans regarded the Prussian army as one of the least effective on the continent.
Moreover, after the Crimean War Britain had largely removed itself from continental affairs; \JFrance\j had no effective focus to its strategic policy; and \JAustria\j and \JRussia\j were at odds due to \JAustria\j's behaviour during the Crimean War.
In this vacuum the new Prussian chancellor moved to make his mark. As he had warned the Prussian assembly: 'The great questions of our day are not decided through speeches and majority votes - that was the great error of 1848 and 1849 - but through iron and blood.' The first opportunity came with Denmark.
When the Danish king died without a male heir it made no difference for the throne of Denmark, but for the German duchies of Schleswig-Holstein, it did. In 1864, the German Confederation, led by \JPrussia\j and \JAustria\j, refused to recognize Danish claims to the duchies.
The allied armies of the German states then made short work of the Danes, but the question of what to do with the liberated provinces remained. \JBismarck\j welcomed the confusion, since the Austrians received territories to administer but the lines of communications to them ran entirely through Prussian territory. The chances for misunderstanding were numerous and \JBismarck\j was only too glad to maximize them.
It appears that \JBismarck\j hoped to negotiate a deal with the Austrians whereby \JPrussia\j would control northern \JGermany\j, while \JAustria\j controlled the south. But the Austrians displayed no appreciation of the altered balance in \JGermany\j.
Not only did they refuse to recognize \JPrussia\j as an equal, they actively courted war. The other European states, except for \JFrance\j, displayed scant interest in the brewing conflict in central Europe; the French for their part believed that the war between \JAustria\j and \JPrussia\j would be a prolonged affair in which they could intervene to advantage.
Prussia did suffer from some significant disadvantages: the other German states rallied to \JAustria\j; \JPrussia\j's territory was divided in two; and \JBohemia\j offered an easy launching pad for an Austrian attack on Berlin. But Moltke and the general staff capitalized upon these challenges.
A Prussian army swiftly disposed of \JHanover\j, and thereby united Prussian territory. Meanwhile in June 1866, utilizing the north German railroad system, Moltke rapidly deployed three armies on the Austrian frontier with the intention of uniting them in \JBohemia\j.
Austrian staff work was abominable, reflecting the casual approach to the profession of arms that the Austrians had displayed throughout the preceding decades. Consequently, the Austrian armies gathered slowly in central \JBohemia\j, while the westernmost Prussian army overran \JSaxony\j, and three other Prussian armies moved swiftly into \JBohemia\j.
The needle gun gave the Prussians an overwhelming tactical advantage, which the initial skirmishes confirmed - casualty exchange ratios were on the order of one Prussian for four or five Austrians. Even more important, the early defeats sapped Austrian morale.
Surprised by the speed of the enemy's advance, the Austrian commander. Prince Benedek, fell back on a series of low hills just north of the town of K÷niggrΣtz. The Austrian army numbered 190,000 men with 25,000 Saxons in support. The Prussian forces exceeded 200,000 men, but only two of their armies were on the field (and Moltke's telegraph system had broken down) when the battle of K÷niggrΣtz began on 3 July.
By this point Benedek had a keen appreciation of the danger that needle guns posed to his troops; he ordered his subordinates to hold their troops back and rely on their artillery, which was generally superior to that of the Prussians. But Austrian senior officers displayed a cavalier disregard for their orders.
As a result, when the 7th Prussian Division gained a local success in a small wooded area, the Swiewald, on the Austrian right, Austrian commanders threw in counter-attack after counter-attack. All withered before Prussian firepower.
Out of fifty-nine battalions in the area, the Austrians committed forty-nine in the firefight in the Swiewald, twenty-eight of which simply disappeared. In effect this wrecked the entire Austrian right wing. The difficulties on the right turned into a catastrophe when the third Prussian army, commanded by the Prussian Crown Prince, arrived on the battlefield.
Meanwhile the Prussians managed to work the Elbe army around the enemy's left flank. Only the most desperate efforts by Austrian artillery and cavalry prevented the Prussians from surrounding Benedek's entire force.
What survived was a wreck; in one day's fighting the Austrians had lost 40,000 men killed or wounded, with a further 20,000 prisoners of war. The road to Vienna lay open, and the complete destruction of the Habsburg state seemed imminent. The Prussian generals. Moltke included, were champing at the bit to acquire the laurels of their great victory.
But \JBismarck\j would have none of it. He persuaded his king to halt the Prussian advance and open negotiations with the Austrians, for the saw that only \JFrance\j and \JRussia\j would benefit from the war's continuation.
If, however, \JPrussia\j offered generous terms, it would persuade \JAustria\j to accept a long-term settlement. \JPrussia\j should limit its territorial gains to northern \JGermany\j; the south German states would merely come under its sphere of interest. Such a peace would be most attractive to the Austrians, since they would lose no territory themselves.
Bismarck's settlement represented inspired statesmanship. \JPrussia\j absorbed the north German states; it controlled the military and foreign policies of the south Germans; the peace placated \JAustria\j; and \JBismarck\j had entirely excluded the French.
The Austrians accepted with alacrity. But such strategic wisdom did not find favour with \JPrussia\j's soldiers; to them, \JBismarck\j's manoeuvres had robbed them of their chance to pursue a beaten foe to his capital.
#
"Franco-Prussian War (warfare)",132,0,0,0
For the immediate future \JBismarck\j wanted to consolidate his gains. He felt no great desire to create a united \JGermany\j; after all, southern \JGermany\j was the bastion of two of his great hates: liberalism and catholicism. But the French refused to accept the results of 1866.
The following year they attempted to buy the duchy of Luxembourg, but backed down before a storm of British and German protests. That diplomatic setback did not end French interference in southern \JGermany\j and, in the end, French intransigence persuaded \JBismarck\j that he must risk another war in order to stabilize his gains.
The French accommodated him. The empire of Napoleon III had come under increasing political pressure at home to liberalize the constitution, while setbacks in foreign policy had steadily eroded the regime's popularity. Therefore, the emperor sought relief in foreign policy or military success.
The military balance favoured \JPrussia\j even more than it had in 1866. The Prussian general staff had honed its administrative and organizational skills to a new pitch.
Staff work allowed the Prussians to utilize further the enormous potential of railroads, while the general staff system provided a means to convey orders and ensure their obedience; the Prussians would find it relatively easy to manage the deployment and operations of the great armies they mobilized in 1870. Without such a system, the French did not.
Ironically, the Prussians lacked the technological edge they had enjoyed in 1866 - the French \Ichassepot\i rifle was superior to the needlegun - but the Prussians had rectified their weakness in artillery: their new steel breach-loading cannon gave them an advantage over the French in both rapidity and accuracy of artillery fire.
Nevertheless the French possessed another weapon that might have provided them a great a advantage - the \Imitrailleuse,\i the first machine gun - but the Ministry of War had kept the weapon so secret that few French commanders even knew of its existence.
Beyond their staff system, the Prussians enjoyed other advantages. They possessed an effective reserve system; two wars had blooded their senior officers; and Moltke was an outstanding operational commander.
Most importantly, in \JBismarck\j they possessed a brilliant strategist whose policies ensured that the other European powers remained outside the conflict. The French had no reserve system, a weak staff, and no general of particular competence.
Seriously miscalculating the balance, Napoleon III challenged the Prussians. The all-too-clever \JBismarck\j edited the account of a minor confrontation between his king and the French ambassador in Berlin into a dispatch where Prussians believed their king insulted and Frenchmen their honour impugned.
France declared war and both sides mobilized and deployed, the French believing that war would begin with their invasion of the Rhineland - to what purpose was unclear - and with their army in firm control of the initiative as at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806.
Despite the fact that the Prussians deployed over greater distances, their effective staff work and reserve system allowed them to put 380,000 men on the French frontier while, at the same time, they deployed 95,000 men to watch \JAustria\j.
By 31 July 1870, by contrast, the French had only 224,000 soldiers on the frontier. Napoleon III established two provisional armies under marshals who had never held such responsibilities before, and neither French army possessed a staff to control the operational and logistical movements of its component corps.
The three Prussian armies, on the other hand, had effective staffs to co-ordinate their operational and logistic movements; and they were led by commanders who had won their spurs in the wars of 1864 and 1866.
The opening skirmishes displayed a pattern that would hold throughout the fighting between the Prussian and French imperial field armies. The French displayed considerable competence on the tactical battlefield, while the \Ichassepot\i proved its worth again and again. But French ineptitude at the operational level more than counter-balanced successes on the tactical battlefield.
On 6 August the Crown Prince of \JPrussia\j's army bested its French opponents at Weissenburg; both sides suffered approximately 6,000 casualties, but the Prussians also captured 6,000 Frenchmen. Even more important than the local success was the fact that the Crown Prince succeeded in getting around Marshal MacMahon's army and forced a general retreat of French forces from \JAlsace\j.
Meanwhile, the main French army under Marshal Bazaine also came under attack. On the heights of Spickern, vastly superior Prussian forces attacked the French II Corps. The French inflicted over 5,000 casualties on the attackers, while suffering barely 3,000 casualties themselves, but Bazaine failed to support his corps commander (not the last occasion in which he remained mired in inaction while subordinates fought for their lives).
However, the significance of Spickern lay in the fact that Moltke interposed his First and Second Armies between the two French armies, while the Crown Prince's Third Army was outflanking MacMahon's forces on the Prussian left.
On 16 August Moltke, controlling the movements of First and Second Armies, brought Bazaine to battle. By this point the Prussians were close to enveloping their opponent. That day a massive encounter battle took place at Mars-la-Tour.
The French suffered 16,000 casualties, the Prussians 17,000. Significantly, Bazaine retreated northwards instead of to the west, further increasing the chances that the Prussians would encircle his forces.
Two days later the armies tangled again and the French came close to scoring a major victory that might have reversed the course of the Franco-Prussian War. At St Privat, Bazaine's VI Corps of 23,000 men held off nearly 100,000 Prussians for an entire day; reinforced, the VI Corps might have turned a local tactical success into something of operational significance.
Meanwhile, at Gravelotte, two Prussian corps achieved initial success, but as they advanced they became entangled. They then launched a series of confused attacks that only added to their losses. French defenders smashed the last German attack so decisively that the attacking units entirely collapsed: any French counter-attack at this point would have resulted in a serious operational reverse for the Prussians. But the French commander on the scene refused to take independent action, while Bazaine, like McClellan at Antietam, again refused to intervene in the battle.
Casualties were heavy on both sides, but the balance in favour of the French suggest how close they were to success: the Germans lost 20,163 men, the French only 12,273. In the end, Bazaine pulled back into Metz and thereby allowed the Prussians to entrap his entire force.
The encirclement of one French army at Metz constituted a political disaster for Napoleon III - one that threatened his political survival. The French therefore gathered together all the remaining forces of their professional army: Marshal MacMahon led the expedition and the emperor himself accompanied the troops in a desperate bid to win back his waning prestige.
However, the French approached Metz by manoeuvring along the Belgian frontier; they could have chosen no more unfortunate route of approach. The result was predictable: Moltke manoeuvred around MacMahon's flank, in order to trap and then destroy a second French army at Sedan.
The Prussians had learned from their bloody experiences at St Privat and Gravelotte and battered the surrounded French into surrender with their artillery. This marked the end of the Second Empire.
\BGermany Triumphant\b
In Paris the French declared a republic and its new leaders proclaimed a \IlevΘe en masse.\i The war had unleashed the full flood of nationalist feeling on both sides. The problem for the French was that as thousands flocked to the colours, the trained professionals were all in Prussian prisoner-of-war camps.
Thus, the new republic was in the same situation as the contending sides in the American Civil War in 1861; it had to create military organizations out of the fabric of civilian society with little professional expertise available.
The Prussians of course did not face that problem. In October, with the destruction of the Metz pocket completed, Moltke moved on Paris. The French desperately prepared to withstand a siege; at the same time they attempted to put their army back together.
As soon as the siege of Paris began, \JBismarck\j demanded that the Prussian generals open a bombardment to force the republic to the peace table. While siege and bombardment proceeded, the French launched a series of efforts to relieve the capital and a guerrilla war against Prussian lines of communication through northern \JFrance\j.
The relief efforts failed with heavy casualties, while attacks on supply lines angered the Prussians and further embittered the war, but failed to achieve their objective. The French Republic eventually surrendered to the logic of its situation, undoubtedly assisted by the growing threat of revolution in Paris.
The peace that resulted had a number of unfortunate repercussions on the history of the twentieth century. First, acquisition of \JAlsace\j and Lorraine by the Germans created a permanent rift between the two powers.
Secondly, the short, swift nature of \JPrussia\j's victories in 1866 and 1870 convinced most of Europe's statesmen and generals that wars in the modern age would be brief and relatively painless. By and large, analysts of these conflicts missed the extraordinary nature of \JBismarck\j's statesmanship as well as the gross incompetence of \JPrussia\j's opponents on both the strategic and operational levels.
The most dangerous result of these wars was their impact on the Germans, who believed that they had won because of their prowess on the battlefield. Their military performance had of course played a role, but the crucial component had been \JBismarck\j's political and strategic realism and restraint.
The victories of 1866 and 1870, however, seduced German statesmen, soldiers, and intellectuals into believing that military and operational concerns should always outweigh strategic and political factors. The new German Empire, proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, carried the military glory of that founding to its death in 1918.
And the new state enshrined the principle on which \JBismarck\j had come to power: namely that the Prussian military would remain independent of constitutional constraints. That had not mattered in a state where a statesman such as \JBismarck\j, with direct access to and great influence with the emperor, remained in control; but in post-Bismarckian \JGermany\j, the political sphere would lose all control over the state's military institutions.
#
"Chamberlain, Joshua, Brevet Major General, US Volunteers",133,0,0,0
By the time of the battle of Gettysburg, Joshua Chamberlain, former professor of \Jrhetoric\j at Bowdoin College, had served in the army for less than a year. Appointed second-in-command of the 20th Maine, Chamberlain and his fellow Mainers had enlisted in summer 1862.
They received their \Jbaptism\j of fire four months later at Antietam (the worst day for casualties in American military history). In June 1863 Chamberlain became the 20th's commander; on the second day at Gettysburg his brigade was rushed into the line to defend the crucial position of Little Round Top on the left of the Union line.
In late afternoon a massive southern attack threatened to engulf Little Round Top. Intense fighting used up virtually all of the 20th's ammunition; with the enemy coming on again, Chamberlain ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge the enemy. This action broke the Confederate attack and saved the Army of the Potomac from defeat.
For his bravery and skill, Chamberlain received the Medal of Honor, and by the end of the war he was a brevet major general. Grant considered him the finest combat brigade commander in the Army of the Potomac and picked him to receive the southern surrender at Appomattox.
Chamberlain returned to Maine to become the state's governor and president of Bowdoin. He died in 1914 of the effects of a wound he had received in 1864.
\BThe changing face of war\b
The period between 1815 and 1871 saw unprecedented economic, social, and political change. The military changes were as dramatic, but perhaps less obvious to the Europeans of the time. With hindsight, however, the impact of technology and the industrial revolution on warfare is clear.
Advances in weapons rapidly increased the lethality of the battlefield, while the steam engine enabled military organizations to project and supply forces over greater and greater distances. The American Civil War underlined the direction in which modern war was moving; both the North and the South combined the mobilization of economic strength and manpower with political will, as had been the case during the French Revolution, and utilized the changing technology of war to make conflict even more lethal.
Only the brilliance of \JBismarck\j's statesmanship and the operational skill of the Prussian general staff prevented the Europeans from experiencing the same harsh lessons. But they would get their opportunity to experience modern war in full measure in the first half of the twentieth century.
#
"Towards World War 1871-1914",134,0,0,0
\BChapter 14 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
#
"Towards World War 1",135,0,0,0
The forty-three years between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I (1871-1914) constituted an unprecedented period of peace in Europe. This partially resulted from a common interest among the European powers in seizing those areas of the world still independent from western control.
Expansion of western influence in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific did cause considerable tension, but pursuit of empire remained sufficiently distant to prevent a major European war over imperialistic competition.
The late nineteenth century saw an acceleration of industrialization in the United States and \JGermany\j, while \JFrance\j, Austria-Hungary, and even Tsarist \JRussia\j participated in the expansion of the western world's economic power.
This growth in turn fuelled a world economy that showed every prospect of spreading wealth beyond the narrow band of upper classes. In the end, the West's economic power provided the resources for the catastrophic wars of the twentieth century; but for the time being Europeans drew the comforting illusion from their prosperity that they alone possessed the key to the future.
There was a darker side to progress. The western system rested on competition between distinct national states (with the exception of Austria-Hungary): as long as that competition remained confined to seeking economic and diplomatic advantage, it did not threaten the structure's basic stability. But economic expansion placed enormous military power in the hands of these states and in the long run made war both inevitable and disastrous.
Western political sophistication failed to keep pace with its burgeoning military and economic power. Above all, \Jnationalism\j drove statesmen and generals to pursue policies that raised the stakes and made war seem an increasingly acceptable alternative, while public opinion accepted careless notions of national rights and aspirations, regardless of their political or strategic consequences. The result was a mix of unprecedented power with general irresponsibility.
#
"WWI: Pre-war Technology",136,0,0,0
The decades of \Jimperialism\j also saw a revolution in military and naval technology, as well as an increasing professionalism in the officer corps. But that process of professionalism provided Europe's military leaders with a narrowing view of the world.
The contrast between the broad sophistication of Prussian officers in 1813 - men like August von Gneisenau, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and Carl von Clausewitz - with the narrow, parochial pedants of 1900 - Alfred von Schlieffen. Theodor von Bernhardi, and Erich Ludendorff - could not be more graphic; and the same process was at work in other nations.
There were two causes: the increasing complexity of societies and military organizations during the nineteenth century, and a technological revolution that altered and extended the nature of war as well as society's capacity to support conflict.
In response, European armies increasingly turned to the German general staff and its emphasis on serious study as a model for professionalizing the careers of their officers. But even the German officer corps proved resistant to the general staff's ideal, while the creation of staff colleges at Camberley (Britain) and Leavenworth (United States) was fraught with difficulty.
Navies resisted professionalization even more: the Royal Navy lacked a staff college and a proper naval staff until 1911.
One must not underestimate the complexity of the problems confronting generals before World War I. To do so is to miss the real reasons for the blood bath. The fact that there had been no major wars between the great powers since 1871 added to the uncertainties.
Moreover, the military had to rely on civilian estimates of the economic and political stability of European society, and that advice proved wildly inaccurate.
In the military sphere, technology moved at a dizzying rate and the adjustment to technological changes sufficed to occupy the time of most officers. The admirals who led the fleets into battle in 1914 had entered navies in the 1880s whose traditions and technology were closer to Nelson's day than to the twentieth century.
From primitive steam-driven and partially metalled ships of 1880, many still possessing sails, navies had progressed to great oil-powered dreadnoughts with weapons that could throw projectiles over twenty miles and could move at speeds of over twenty knots (cruisers and destroyers could reach speeds of thirty knots).
With radio, navies could control and deploy ships around the world. By the end of World War I the introduction of submarines, \Jaircraft\j, and \Jaircraft\j carriers underlined the extraordinary technological changes that affected the conduct of naval war.
The impact of technology on armies was somewhat less dramatic, but World War I still represented a watershed. The armies of 1914 retained the tactical and operational concepts of those of the nineteenth century. But the harsh realities of combat in an era of bolt action rifles, machine guns, and howitzers rendered obsolete virtually every tactical conception with which the armies went to war.
Smokeless powder allowed riflemen to remain concealed from their opponents, and - because it also provided higher velocity - to hit targets at great distances, while the creation of \Jnitrate\j explosives made possible shells with great destructive potential.
Finally, recoil-absorbing gun carriages allowed artillerymen to fire shells over great distances and to do so at greater rates because they did not have to resight their weapons after each firing.
Yet, if such changes seem obvious to us at the end of the twentieth century, they were not so obvious in July 1914. Military organizations rarely have the opportunity to conduct the dirty business of war. In times of peace they cannot replicate wartime conditions; thus they find it difficult to evaluate the implications of technological and doctrinal changes.
It is as if surgeons did not perform surgery for decades and then had to execute thousands of operations in cold, damp operating rooms, without food or sleep, and with rivals shooting at them from the balconies of operating theatres. The generation of peace before 1914 prevented European generals from fully understanding the implications of the murderous combination of technology and conscription.
Moreover, the wars waged on the periphery, mostly against the hapless natives of Africa, Asia, the American west, and central Asia, provided the illusion for many that war still remained a simple, easy matter.
Such wars involved a relatively small commitment from the European powers, because they were mostly waged against indigenous frontier peoples who had minimal capacity to mobilize economic or technological support in their own defence.
These small wars consequently pitted well-trained, disciplined, and organized military forces against tribesmen who, whatever their bravery, had no capacity for sustained resistance.
As the greatest colonial power in the world. Britain was involved in the largest number of conflicts with non-Europeans. The construction of the Suez Canal gave \JEgypt\j a central position in the British Empire because of the importance of the lines of communication to India.
In 1882 severe anti-western rioting in Alexandria resulted in British intervention. In September a British army under Sir Garnet Wolseley launched a surprise night attack that crushed the Egyptian army at Tel-el-Kebir; an immediate pursuit finished off the war and placed \JEgypt\j under British domination for the next seventy-four years.
Troubles in \JSudan\j then pulled the British into involvement at the headwaters of the Nile. In 1883 followers of the Islamic fundamentalist ruler, the \JMahdi\j, wiped out an Egyptian army of 10,000 men and preserved the independence of the \JSudan\j for another decade.
In 1896, however, the British under General Horatio Kitchener began a systematic conquest of the region. Supported by a railroad constructed as his advance proceeded, Kitchener brought modern military power to bear on his opponents.
At Omdurman, an army of 40,000 Dervishes struck Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army of 26,000 troops, but commitment was not proof against rapid-fire weapons and artillery. The high point of the battle saw the 21st Lancers launch one of the last cavalry charges in history to crush a final Dervish attack. When it was over the British had suffered fewer than 500 casualties (only fifty dead), while 30,000 Sudanese lay dead and wounded.
Further south on the continent, the British regarded South Africa as of great importance for its links to India until construction of the Suez Canal. Here they encountered hostility not only from the original Dutch settlers, the \JBoers\j, but also from native Blacks, in particular the Zulus.
With construction of the Canal the British might have let South Africa slide into oblivion, but for the fact that the world's greatest lode of diamonds was discovered along the Orange River; further discoveries of South Africa's mineral worth only fuelled British ambitions.
In April 1877, the British annexed the \JTransvaal\j, a Boer stronghold, and thereby acquired the locals' problem with their Zulu neighbours. The Zulu king in the early nineteenth century, Shaka, had created an extraordinary military system that could deploy 40,000 well-trained, highly disciplined warriors; yet one that possessed the arms and tactical capabilities of the primitive Romans.
Fighting with shields and short spears, Zulu formations (impis) displayed extraordinary fortitude, as well as an amazing capacity to move great distances on foot and camouflage themselves when need arose. Nevertheless, the British underestimated their opponents.
The leader of the expedition to punish the Zulus in 1879, Lord Chelmsford, split his forces, and the Zulus moved around his advance troops unseen. On 22 January they smashed into the British base camp at Isandhlwana; there, because of serious tactical errors by British officers on the spot and the imbecility of a supply system that required written receipts from the defenders for ammunition as it was being used, the Zulus slaughtered almost everyone.
Later that day and night, victorious Zulus struck the small outpost of Rorke's Drift, defended by barely 100 soldiers - including the sick. In an epic defence, the British fought off waves of Zulus; the killing power of rifles devastated the attackers.
A series of desperate engagements then occurred that allowed substantial reinforcements to arrive. On July 4, 1879, Chelmsford, leading 4,200 European and 1,000 native troops, reached the Zulu capital; despite coming under attack from Zulu impis of over 10,000 soldiers, the Europeans slaughtered the attackers and broke the back of Zulu power.
But Britain's troubles in South Africa were far from over. In late 1880 the \JBoers\j rose in the \JTransvaal\j. Within a month they had invaded Natal and defeated British forces that - as with the Zulus - thoroughly underestimated their opponents.
In February 1881 the \JBoers\j again caught the British in the open and with superior use of cover and rifle fire inflicted a second defeat, this time killing the general officer commanding. The British government, deciding that the \JBoers\j were not worth the effort, recognized their independent republic; but the two battles should have underlined the fact that the \JBoers\j were formidable opponents.
#
"Colonial Wars",138,0,0,0
While the British waged wars against Blacks and \JBoers\j in Africa, the Americans, fresh from the Civil War, completed the solution of their own 'native problem', in effect ending the frontier in the west and bringing 'civilization' to the entire area ruled by the United States.
General Philip Sheridan's memorable comment, that 'the only good Indians I ever saw were dead' sums up the attitudes of all too many of those charged with the 'police actions' in the west. The Indians proved to be skilled fighters and tenacious opponents, but they lacked the organizational skills and the capacity to sustain a conflict.
Once they became isolated from their hunting grounds and access to weapons and ammunition, their defeat was a foregone conclusion.
The largest Indian war occurred in the mid-1870s against the Sioux. In June 1876 one column of US troops fought a pitched battle with Sioux warriors led by Crazy Horse. Both sides pulled away, but a second column continued its advance, and sent the 7th Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer ahead to cut off the Sioux.
Custer, however, disobeyed his orders. With golden curls and buckskin jacket, the colourful Custer led a portion of his regiment directly against the main Indian camp, while the remainder, led by men less hungry for glory, followed the precept that discretion is the better part of valour.
Custer and his troops went down to complete destruction, a defeat immortalized in paintings on the walls of every saloon west of the Missouri.
For the next several months, the victorious Sioux eluded US troops, but those charged with the campaign continued their pursuit into the winter.
In November 1876 the regulars discovered one of the main Indian encampments and, in a surprise night attack, destroyed most of its inhabitants. In early January 1877 US troops caught up with Crazy Horse; by shelling his camp they stampeded the Indians, and Sioux resistance collapsed.
Even more impressive than Sioux resistance was that of the Nez Perce. The tribe had defied orders to abandon tribal lands in Oregon; fighting then broke out; and the Nez Perce leader, Chief Joseph, led 300 warriors and 700 tribesmen eastwards.
In summer 1877 Joseph fought his way through superior numbers of white soldiers in \JIdaho\j and reached Montana. His warriors displayed extraordinary discipline on the battlefield, besides the natural skills of their warrior-hunting society.
The Nez Perce continued their march through Montana and had almost reached sanctuary in Canada when US forces, outnumbering them by ten to one, finally brought them to bay at Eagle Creek and forced their surrender.
Ten years later US troops found themselves waging a guerrilla war against the Apaches in \JArizona\j and New Mexico who, led by \JGeronimo\j, waged an effective hit-and-run war.
What made the war particularly frustrating was the Apaches' ability to cover great distances on foot. Only by massing enormous forces in the region's arid deserts was the regular army able to bring them to heel.
While Americans and British waged particular colonial wars, a number of similar conflicts occurred elsewhere. The Russians waged campaigns in central Asia; the French, having brought \JAlgeria\j under their control by 1847, expanded their empire to include Indo-China and substantial territories in central Africa. Everywhere the West was on the advance while other centres of civilization, if they survived, stood on the defensive.
For the Ottoman empire the long decline towards \Jextinction\j in World War I continued. In 1876, with the enthusiastic help of local Muslims, the Turks put down a rebellion by Christians in Bosnia. The Serbs came to the help of their brothers and themselves suffered another thrashing at Turkish hands.
At this point, in early 1877, the Russians intervened. A Russian army, with naval support, seized the mouth of the Danube. The Russians then won a series of victories over the Turks, and their rapid advance threatened to destroy Turkish control in the southern Balkans. But the Russians halted to attack the fortress at Plevna which, five months later, they gained; then, in December they carried their campaign to the gates of Constantinople.
However, by this point the other major powers intervened to prevent \JRussia\j from gaining the fruits of its victory. The Treaty of San Stefano (1878) recognized the independence of \JSerbia\j, \JMontenegro\j, and Rumania, while \JBulgaria\j became autonomous.
The Turks still maintained a presence in Europe as well as control over the Middle East: the Europeans, although highly successful, remained too fragmented to complete the destruction of the Ottoman state.
#
"Isandhlwana 1879",139,0,0,0
Early in 1879 British forces in South Africa invaded Zulu territory after the Zulu king had rejected British demands for a protectorate. The British deployed approximately 5,000 white troops and 8,000 native levies; the Zulus 40,000.
The Zulus, unlike many of those who were to go down before western \Jimperialism\j in the late nineteenth century, possessed a highly disciplined and effective army capable of great flexibility on the battlefield; but they were equipped with spears, not rifles.
Lord Chelmsford, the British commander, launched his forces into Zululand in three widely dispersed columns. The Zulus caught the main camp at Isandhlwana by surprise and launched a series of savage attacks which inflicted terrible losses; then the British supply system broke down at a critical point when those in charge of handing out ammunition demanded receipts.
Finally, as ammunition ran out, the Zulus' numerical superiority told. Only a few survivors escaped from the camp and got away. Nevertheless, the Zulus lost the war.
#
"Boer War",140,0,0,0
The discovery of gold in the \JWitwatersrand\j (Transvaal) in 1886 added to the known mineral worth of the Boer republics. By now, through annexation of Zulu territory in 1887, the British were cutting the \JBoers\j' access to the ocean. Ambitions in both the Cape Colony and London exacerbated tensions in South Africa.
Thousands of adventurers flocked to the \JTransvaal\j to seek their fortune; not surprisingly, tensions between outsiders and \JBoers\j rapidly rose.
The Boer republics lacked a military force in the conventional sense; rather they possessed a militia loosely grouped in commandos. Their leaders possessed a coherent grasp of neither strategy nor tactics, while the commandos at the best of times held to the loosest of discipline. But the \JBoers\j did have modern rifles, and their men were marvellous marksmen.
They knew the veld and had the toughness born of struggling to farm a harsh and forbidding land. The British army that fought against them was well-disciplined and organized, but few of its generals understood South African conditions, and officers as well as men were generally contemptuous of the farmers against whom they would fight.
The \JBoers\j, recognizing that the British were assembling superior military forces, initiated hostilities with an invasion of Natal in October 1899. By so doing, they forfeited the possibility of manipulating British public opinion in their favour.
Nevertheless, most Europeans saw British preparations as indicating hostile intent and, throughout the war, European sympathies consequently lay with the \JBoers\j, although the Royal Navy made it impossible to translate that sympathy into meaningful support. Nevertheless, fast-moving Boer columns soon isolated both Mafeking and Kimberley, and within a month had trapped a third force at Ladysmith.
The British hastened to relieve the besieged towns. At the end of November a column of 10,000 troops under General Paul Methuen fought their way to the Modder River in an effort to reach Kimberley, but suffered nearly 500 casualties while the \JBoers\j scarcely lost a man.
With smokeless powder and bolt action rifles, the \JBoers\j put down a murderous fire. Neither British troops nor their artillery could see the enemy; yet any movement across the killing zone covered by unseen \JBoers\j resulted in unacceptable casualties.
Worse was to come. In the second week of December 1899, the British suffered a series of defeats that became known collectively as 'Black Week'. On 10 December, a column under Sir William Gatacre got lost; the \JBoers\j ambushed the muddled advance near Stormberg and inflicted heavy casualties. On the same day, at Magersfontein, Methuen launched heavy attacks on firmly entrenched Boer positions: his troops achieved nothing, but again suffered heavy losses (210 dead and 675 wounded).
Since the British soldiers and gunners hardly ever saw the defenders, the \JBoers\j again suffered few casualties. Five days later the commander-in-chief in South Africa, General Redvers Buller, attempted to turn the flank of Boer forces after crossing the Tugela River. But the British got entangled in difficult country, while Boer riflemen devastated their columns.
British artillery once more failed to make out the defensive positions, and the \JBoers\j killed most of the gun crews. The attackers lost 143 dead, 756 wounded, and 220 missing. The \JBoers\j gained eleven guns, while losing barely fifty men.
If the \JBoers\j had been a well-disciplined force, they could have turned their victories into a genuine success. But they were not, and the British withdrew. The Boer commanders now found it difficult to keep their men in the field since most viewed the war as already won: their lack of discipline caused the commandos to melt away and then reform as the individual soldiers addressed their own needs.
On the other hand, the British refused to allow themselves to be humiliated. The four corners of the empire rallied to the Union Jack, as substantial forces moved from Britain, Canada, \JAustralia\j, and New Zealand to South Africa.
The resources of the Empire made the final result inevitable, no matter how poor the preparation of generals and soldiers for the first clash. But things did not turn around quickly. Buller made two more - and larger - attempts to break through the Boer positions, but at Spion Kop and Vaal Kranz his troops suffered even heavier casualties and achieved nothing.
Total losses for the two battles were 408 killed, 1,390 wounded and 311 captured, against under a hundred Boer casualties.
A new commander assumed control of the campaign, General Lord Roberts, with Kitchener as his chief of staff. Roberts introduced movement into the campaign by using cavalry to outflank Boer positions, and in February 1900, the British relieved Kimberley and broke the major Boer force in front of Magersfontein.
With Roberts temporarily sick, however, Kitchener launched a direct attack on the enemy laager at Paardeberg with the usual results: 320 British soldiers killed and nearly 1,000 wounded. The \JBoers\j might have made good their escape, but their commander, Piet Cronje, refused to abandon his wounded.
By the end of the month Roberts had captured Cronje's \JBoers\j, and the British enjoyed their first major victory. More victories followed as the empire's military forces placed overwhelming pressure on the enemy. As Cronje's force surrendered, Buller broke across the Tugela River and drove on to relieve Ladysmith.
The British soon finished off the Boer republics, and annexed the Orange Free State in May and the \JTransvaal\j in September 1900.
In conventional terms the war was over, but in reality it had only just begun. The \JBoers\j returned to their homes as conventional resistance collapsed, but refused to accept the result that brought their country under British colonial administration.
They turned to guerrilla warfare, in which raiding parties wrecked British communications and supply lines, while the local population provided hiding places, food, and intelligence on British movements. Well-informed about the enemy, the \JBoers\j were able to hit and run without suffering significant casualties. On the other hand, the British operated almost totally in the dark.
To meet a deteriorating situation, the British erected a series of blockhouses and fences to protect their supply and communication lines. When this failed to break Boer resistance, they attacked the civilian support on which Boer guerrillas depended, rounding up the civilian population and placing some 120,000 Boer women and children in camps.
Indifferent care led to the death of perhaps 20,000 from disease and hunger. The British also used large numbers of irregulars to track Boer guerrillas and carry the war into the countryside. Consequently, a number of unsavoury incidents occurred in which civilians were mistreated and in some cases murdered.
'Beastliness' eventually broke the guerrillas: in May 1902 the \JBoers\j accepted British sovereignty and the British 'won' the war. But the sad history of South Africa since 1902 suggests that no one won: not the British, not the \JBoers\j, and certainly not the Blacks, who at best were observers of the contest for their lands between the whites.
The British had won because of their superiority in resources and manpower - by war's end they had assembled 300,000 troops there - and their willingness to concentrate their power in South Africa. The Boer War had considerable impact on the British army: above all it resulted in an emphasis on infantry training which created the best soldiers, man for man, in 1914.
But it did little to change basic attitudes in the officer corps. Historians have harped on the inability of British generals to learn the lessons of the Boer War. In fact, they did recognize the killing power of modern weapons, but against a better-armed foe in Europe British generals would not find it so easy to adapt to the conditions of war, or to innovate.
#
"Russo-Japanese War (warfare)",141,0,0,0
Of the non-western civilizations, only the Japanese displayed the ability to adopt the weapons of the West and turn them against their developers. Few would have predicted it. From the early seventeenth century the Tokugawa shoguns, having destroyed their rivals, sought to demilitarize Japanese society by restricting possession of \Jfirearms\j (indeed, of any arms) and destroying all but one castle on each noble estate.
They also discouraged contact with the outside world, censored all foreign books (especially those concerning military affairs), and concentrated foreign trade in the remote port of \JNagasaki\j. On the other hand, thanks in part to an unprecedented two centuries of peace, \JJapan\j prospered: agricultural production, internal trade, manufacture, and credit all developed rapidly; by 1800 as much as 20 per cent of the population lived in towns; and by 1850 perhaps 40 per cent of all Japanese males could read.
The country may have lacked the power-driven machines and the scientific knowledge of the West, but it possessed superbly skilled craftsmen, an efficient commercial and financial network, and a sufficient degree of prosperity in both town and country to respond successfully to the pressure, first exerted by the United States in 1853, to 'open' \JJapan\j to western trade.
The Tokugawa regime fell in 1868, delivering power to leaders who recognized that \JJapan\j must either adapt or succumb. Within a quarter of a century, the country had modernized so effectively that it was able to deploy its new-style armed forces on the Asian mainland - the navy trained by the British, the army by the Germans - and rout the Chinese (1894-95). The Japanese acquired Formosa, and lost direct control over Korea only because of Russian interference.
Over the next decade, \JJapan\j and Tsarist \JRussia\j moved towards conflict. Most Europeans believed that the Russians would easily defeat the Japanese in war (racial \Jprejudice\j would lead the West to underestimate \JJapan\j's military capabilities right down to Pearl Harbor in 1941); and, indeed, in terms of military and economic power, the Russo-Japanese War was a conflict \JRussia\j should have won.
But two problems confronted the Tsarist regime. On the one hand, it could only deploy a limited portion of its military power across \JSiberia\j. The Trans-Siberian railroad was a single track line which stopped on each side of Lake Baikal, where everything had to be unloaded, transported across the lake, and then loaded up again.
On the other hand, and far more serious, Tsar Nicholas II brought a facile naivetΘ to the problems of government and tended to pick irresponsible and corrupt councillors who precipitated \JRussia\j into revolution.
Both sides courted confrontation because each aimed to control Korea and Manchuria. The Russians, however, possessed barely 100,000 troops east of Baikal and could only laboriously build up and supply that force.
The Japanese, by contrast, could immediately throw a standing army of 250,000 men onto the Asian mainland, while their reserves would double those forces. On the naval side, the Japanese fleet was superior in Asian waters, while the Russian Baltic fleet faced an extraordinarily difficult journey across thousands of miles to reach the Pacific.
Moreover, the conclusion of a defensive alliance with Britain provided security for \JJapan\j: \JRussia\j could not receive direct help from its French allies without bringing Britain into the war.
In February 1904, Japanese \Jtorpedo\j boats attacked the Russian fleet in Port Arthur before the declaration of war. The attackers sank a few vessels and bottled the Russians up.
Ironically, the British and American press, largely pro-Japanese, saluted the attackers for their daring (an interesting contrast to their response to Pearl Harbor thirty-seven years later). The Japanese also attacked Russian ships at Inchon; a week later their First Army landed and seized Seoul.
With a secure base in Korea, the Japanese moved north to the Yalu and towards direct military action against Russian forces in Manchuria.
The Russian commander, General Alexei Kuropatkin, planned to withdraw into the depths of Manchuria and allow Port Arthur to withstand a siege, while he awaited reinforcements across \JSiberia\j.
Such an approach made considerable sense, but the Tsar's viceroy ordered an immediate offensive and, as a result, the Japanese First Army inflicted a major defeat on the Russians defending the Yalu. Meanwhile, the Japanese navy landed a second army northeast of Port Arthur on the Liaotung Peninsula.
A third army landed west of the Yalu, and Japanese troops moved to lay siege to Port Arthur, while other units screened the siege from the Russians in central Manchuria. In operational terms the situation resembled the siege of \JSebastopol\j in 1854-55 (see \JCrimean War\j), where those conducting the siege also had to prevent Russian armies from breaking through to the besieged port.
In late May, the Japanese launched their first attack on the outposts surrounding Port Arthur: they drove Russian troops off the heights at Nanshan, but suffered over three times the casualties of their opponent.
With sufficient stocks to last over the summer the Russians possessed a strong position, and inconclusive skirmishing both by land and sea characterized the fighting in early summer.
In mid-August, however, the Japanese launched a massive assault that eventually captured crucial Russian positions, although machine guns and artillery inflicted 15,000 casualties on closely packed Japanese assault columns. Russian losses were only 3,000.
At the end of September the Japanese resumed the offensive. This time they suffered even heavier casualties and made no important gains. A fourth offensive at the end of October and a fifth at the end of November only added to their losses without significant results.
The Japanese then concentrated their whole effort at capturing 203 Metre Hill, the lynch pin of Russian defences. By 5 December they finally pushed the defenders out of the position, but suffered 11,000 casualties in the process.
Possession of Hill 203 allowed Japanese artillery to destroy the remnants of \JRussia\j's Far Eastern Fleet, but not until January 1905 could they force the Russians to surrender. Ironically, the Japanese discovered that, despite the garrison's state of starvation, substantial food dumps still existed within the fortress.
While the Japanese attacked Port Arthur, major fighting also took place in central Manchuria. Beginning in June 1904, the two sides moved towards a major military confrontation. In late August the two armies clashed in the battle of Liaoyang, where the Japanese numbered 125,000 and the Russians, with the first reinforcements from Europe, 158,000.
The Russians attacked first, but aggressive Japanese counter-attacks persuaded the Russian generals that their enemy possessed greater strength. Losses were approximately equal, with 23,000 Japanese casualties against nearly 20,000 Russians, but the Russians conceded defeat and pulled back.
Reinforced by a steady flow of troops from Europe, Kuropatkin's forces increased to 200,000 while Japanese reinforcements raised their totals to 170,000. In early October at Sha-Ho the Russians attacked the Japanese right wing to cut their lines of communications; however, the Japanese counter-attacked the Russian centre and almost broke through. Kuropatkin stopped his attack and desperately shored up his centre. This time, the Russians lost more heavily: 40,000 against 20,000.
The strength of both armies continued to accelerate despite the rigours of the Manchurian winter. By mid-January the Russians had 300,000 men, while Japanese strength reached 220,000.
On 26 and 27 January 1905, the Russians again attacked and came close to breaking their opponents; had they pushed their advantage, they might have broken through Japanese lines. But the fighting occurred during a snowstorm and the resulting confusion and uncertainty led the Russian generals to miss their opportunity. The front again returned to stability.
By the end of February the Japanese, reinforced by troops from Port Arthur, finally gained parity with their opponents: both sides now possessed approximately 310,000 men. On 21 February the battle of Mukden began. Field Marshal Iwao Oyama launched his Third Army to outflank the Russian right wing.
While both sides focused on outflanking their opponents throughout the campaign, the speed of advancing troops and the lethality of weapons made it inevitable that such attempts would fail. The Japanese put the Russians in desperate straits - only the movement of reserves from the rest of the front prevented a collapse - and, although their advance did not envelop the Russians, after two weeks of fighting the Japanese entered Mukden.
Three more days of heavy fighting forced the Russians into a general retreat. They had been thoroughly defeated and suffered over 100,000 casualties. The Japanese lost 70,000 men.
While the fighting was occurring in Manchuria, the Russian Baltic fleet embarked on a round-the-world expedition to relieve pressure on Port Arthur. This fleet, an odd conglomeration of obsolete vessels, lacked both the training and the material preparations for such a journey, much less for a major fleet action, and it received little help along the way.
After an epic 20,000-mile journey the thirty-two Russian vessels eventually reached East Asian waters, only to find themselves outranged and outmanoeuvred by their opponents in the Tsushima Straits, on 27 May 1905. The fleet action lasted through the night when Japanese superiority was even more pronounced. Although a few Russian vessels escaped, the Baltic fleet had ceased to exist.
Tsushima represented \JRussia\j's last gasp. Revolution had already broken out in most urban centres in Tsarist \JRussia\j, for the humiliation of their military forces represented the last straw to many Russians who had watched Nicholas and his advisers botch every major internal and external decision.
For a time, it appeared the regime might fall, but it did not. But while \JRussia\j seethed with discontent, the Japanese had also suffered heavy casualties in the war and stood on the brink of financial collapse. In SeptembΦr 1905, both sides consequently accepted a compromise peace brokered by the American president. Theodore Roosevelt.
The Russians abandoned Port Arthur, Korea, and Manchuria; the Japanese gained a decisive interest in the first two but would not gain complete control of Manchuria until 1931. Ironically, defeat in Asia focused Russian attention on European aspirations once more, particularly in the Balkans.
In retrospect, the war in Manchuria anticipated much of what became all too familiar on World War I battlefields. Everywhere, firepower dominated and killed soldiers in huge quantities, a fact recognized by most of Europe's military establishments, some of whose most sophisticated soldiers were on the scene - for the British, Sir Ian Hamilton and, for the Germans, the brilliant and acerbic Max von Hoffman (among others). But the war also confirmed the belief of economists and politicians that nations could not long withstand the economic and political pressures that would come in a major conflict.
After all, had not \JRussia\j collapsed into anarchy and revolution after less than eighteen months of war? And was not \JJapan\j on the brink of bankruptcy? The lesson, then, seemed obvious: nations must win a major war at the outset, using every ounce of military power they could muster.
Some analysts believed victory would require the sacrifice of the last battalions in their armies, fighting with the same desperate, suicidal spirit the Japanese had displayed in attacking Port Arthur. It was the wrong lesson.
#
"WWI, Towards Armageddon",142,0,0,0
Few have portrayed the outbreak of World War I better than Winston Churchill. In his account of the war he comments that:
One rises from the study of the causes of the Great War with a prevailing sense of the defective control of individuals upon world fortunes. It has been well said, 'there is always more error than design in human affairs.'
The limited minds even of the ablest men, their disputed authority, the climate of opinion in which they dwell, their transient and partial contributions to the mighty problem, that problem itself so far beyond their compass, so vast in scale and detail, so changing in its aspect...Events...got on to certain lines, and no one could get them off again.
Germany clanked obstinately, recklessly, awkwardly towards the crater and dragged us all in with her.
Bismarck's strategic triumphs in the wars of unification, and his skilful diplomatic policies afterwards, had guided the new \JReich\j to a unique position in Europe (see \JFranco-Prussian War\j). But his successors failed to see the advantage of \JGermany\j's position or that any attempt to make \JGermany\j the hegemon of Europe would lead the other powers to band together against the threat.
Some of this was \JBismarck\j's fault: he never clarified his policies, and he created a state with no constitutional controls over its military instruments. \JBismarck\j's dismissal by the young Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890 brought a new generation of Germans to power, a generation that felt few of \JBismarck\j's inhibitions about the use of force.
They worshipped the military, whereas \JBismarck\j had merely regarded it as a tool. Above all, they believed that \JGermany\j possessed infinite potential and the \Iright\i (because of \JGermany\j's culture and civilization) to translate that potential into a 'place in the sun'.
Making the situation more dangerous was the fact that \JGermany\j's senior military leaders had dispensed with Clausewitz's belief in the primacy of strategy; to German generals of the new century what mattered was military and operational necessity alone.
Almost immediately after \JBismarck\j's removal, the experts in the German Foreign Office, relieved of the chancellor's interference, persuaded Wilhelm to dispense with the 'Reinsurance Treaty' with \JRussia\j, signed in 1887 and promising \Jneutrality\j should either power become engaged in war with a third party.
They believed that republican \JFrance\j and Tsarist \JRussia\j could never ally; yet in 1891 the Tsar was standing bareheaded at the playing of \JFrance\j's revolutionary anthem the \IMarseillaise,\i and one year later the two powers had become allies. \JGermany\j now confronted the likelihood of a two-front war, should conflict break out among the major powers.
It is hard to see much purpose in the policies pursued by \JGermany\j over the next two decades. In 1894 the Kaiser read the work of the American \Jprophet\j of naval power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and immediately concluded that \JGermany\j's rise to the status of a world power could only occur through creation of a great fleet.
The Kaiser's enthusiasm was undoubtedly fuelled by his love-hate relationship with his British cousins. Not until 1897 did he find an admiral, Alfred von Tirpitz, who possessed both the ambition and political acumen to carry out his dreams.
Tirpitz created an effective political coalition of landed aristocracy and industrialists to secure resources for the naval build-up.
He argued both that construction of a great fleet would force Britain to respect the \JReich\j's worldwide interests and that, because Britain and the Franco-Russian alliance held mutually hostile interests, \JGermany\j could create such a fleet without fear of British interference. Moreover, Tirpitz held to a number of other assumptions: that the cost of battleships would remain stable; that Britain as a liberal state could not stay the course in a major arms race; and that the British would never make agreements with their ancient rivals, the Russians and French. Finally, at the heart of Tirpitz's strategy lay the assumption that the German fleet would eventually reach sufficient strength to defeat the Royal Navy in battle and that in a single afternoon his fleet would wrest control of the world's oceans and empires away from the British.
Ironically, however, right down to the outbreak of war in 1914 the Germans never devised a plan for how they would use their navy if the British did not launch a close blockade of \JGermany\j's ports.
Tirpitz's greatest mistake lay in his failure to recognize that \Jgeography\j had given Britain an almost unassailable naval position: the British Isles lay astride \JGermany\j's path to the Atlantic, and it would be an easy matter for the Royal Navy to block \JGermany\j in the English Channel and across the exits from the North Sea, whilst Britain's position also shielded its own trade routes. But nothing deterred the Germans from their course.
#
"WWI: The Arms Race Begins",143,0,0,0
In 1906 Admiral Sir John Fisher, the reforming head of the British Admiralty, introduced a revolutionary class of \Jbattleship\j, the \IDreadnought,\i an all-big-gun, heavily armoured vessel that rendered all previous battleships obsolete.
With that technological lead the British laid down battleships as fast as they could. Although the change in ship design doubled costs for the short run and raised them even higher over the long run, the threat to British naval mastery posed by the German build-up spurred Parliament to match - and in fact exceed - every step in Tirpitz's programme.
As Churchill characterized the situation in one year: 'the Admiralty asked for six [battleships], the Cabinet proposed four, and we compromised on eight.' Moreover a series of diplomatic agreements (starting with an alliance with \JJapan\j in 1902) allowed the British to concentrate their fleet in the North Sea against the German menace.
The continuing German naval build-up prompted Britain to form an entente with \JFrance\j in 1904 that resolved outstanding disagreements between the two countries. The Germans replied by causing a major diplomatic crisis over Morocco, intended to break up the growing Anglo-French friendship; instead, they only drove the two powers more closely together.
In 1907, the British and Russians responded to German policy with a similar entente that also resolved outstanding differences. While these agreements did not create formal alliances between Britain and the continental powers, they created a community of interests that the Germans correctly perceived as hostile.
In succeeding years Britain strengthened its ties to \JFrance\j with military agreements and in 1912 even pulled its Mediterranean fleet into the North Sea: in return for Britain's promise to protect French interests in the Atlantic, \JFrance\j agreed to protect British interests in the Mediterranean. But the largest commitment - not reported to the whole cabinet - was that a British Expeditionary Force should be sent to the continent in defence of \JFrance\j, if the need arose.
None of this caused the Germans to desist from an armaments programme that endangered the \JReich\j's long-range strategic interests, but the increasingly tense European situation did lead in 1912 to a change in emphasis.
Up to that point, the German army had undergone no major expansion of active or reserve components since 1900. Such a state of affairs is extraordinary when one considers that German strategy in case of war rested almost entirely on the Schlieffen plan (see \JWWI: Warplans of the Great Powers\j) and that until 1913 the army lacked the necessary troops to execute that operational plan on which \JGermany\j's fate would rest.
This shortage of troops resulted from two facts: first, until 1912, the general staff failed to give the war ministry a complete picture of its grand strategy; second, the war ministry, a haven for conservatives, consistently opposed expansion of troop strengths because such a step would increase the number of middle-class officers and thereby dilute aristocratic control over the officer corps.
Since the Kaiser lacked a central authority to run the army - over forty general officers possessed the right of direct access to him - a variety of powers squabbled and argued, but essential questions remained unanswered.
In 1912 the general staff, led by Colonel Erich Ludendorff, among others, finally broke war-ministry opposition to a major increase in army authorizations. As a result the Reichstag increased spending levels for the army to support 165,000 more men in 1912 and 1913, as part of a programme to increase peacetime strength from 544,000 to 877,000 men.
Thus, the army would just have sufficient troops in 1914 to execute the Schlieffen plan. In revenge the conservatives had Ludendorff removed from the general staff and sent to an obscure troop command; but he would be back.
#
"WWI: The Gathering Storm",144,0,0,0
A series of crises in the Balkans provided tinder for the impending European conflagration. The weakness of the Ottoman empire combined with Austrian and Russian ambitions to exacerbate the situation.
Moreover, each of the eastern empires felt threatened by internal political developments and therefore sought to escape their domestic dilemmas through foreign policy successes - starting in the Balkans. In 1903 a group of radical nationalist officers seized power in \JSerbia\j and pursued a fiercely anti-Austrian policy.
The Austrians increasingly regarded \JSerbia\j, which \JFrance\j and \JRussia\j supported, as a direct threat to their existence. In 1908, motivated by a desire to separate \JSerbia\j and \JRussia\j, they made a deal with the Russians by which \JAustria\j would acquire title to Bosnia-Herzegovina in return for helping \JRussia\j open the Bosporus to its warships.
In the event, the Austrians annexed Bosnia, but the Russians got nothing (because the other powers objected). The Germans played an active role in humiliating the Russians, the Kaiser portraying himself as a knight riding to \JAustria\j's rescue.
The next round of Balkan troubles began in September 1911 when the Italians attacked the Turkish province of \JLibya\j in North Africa and followed up by seizing the \JDodecanese\j islands. These Italian moves led the Balkan states to jump on the prostrate Turks; \JSerbia\j, \JBulgaria\j, \JGreece\j, and \JMontenegro\j all participated. But the thieves immediately fell out over the spoils. \JSerbia\j, \JGreece\j, \JMontenegro\j, and then Rumania banded together to pummel \JBulgaria\j.
Even the Turks joined in. While the Serbs gained much from the war, doubling the size of their state, the Austrians prevented them from gaining access to the Adriatic and the world's oceans: once again the Germans deterred the Russians from supporting the Serbs, and before the united might of \JAustria\j and \JGermany\j, \JSerbia\j conceded.
In the nineteenth century \JBismarck\j had stated that the Balkans were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian \Jgrenadier\j. What had changed to alter German policy? Most notably the Germans, for all their bluster, believed they stood in terrible danger.
Internally, the Social Democrats, a party which had only recently abandoned its revolutionary Marxist platform, had steadily enlarged its share of the votes in recent elections. By this point it was the largest party in the \JReich\j.
In external terms, the naval race with Britain, despite expenditure of huge sums, was no closer to resolution; and the British seemed to have allied themselves with \JGermany\j's continental enemies. Moreover, those enemies, \JRussia\j and \JFrance\j, were steadily improving the strength of their ground forces on the continent.
Russia had already cast a defence programme for completion in 1917 that would radically improve its ability to project military power into central Europe. Consequently, \JAustria\j was \JGermany\j's last significant ally; and if the \JReich\j did not support Vienna, was it not possible that \JAustria\j might also turn away, leaving \JGermany\j alone on a continent of enemies?
While \JGermany\j's leaders viewed the international environment with gloom, \JAustria\j was desperate. The Habsburg monarchy was the only power in Europe that did not base its legitimacy on \Jnationalism\j. Internally, Czechs, Poles, and Slovaks all clamoured for autonomy; even the Hungarians were not entirely reliable; and on the frontiers, Italians, Serbs, and Rumanians demanded freedom for their brothers living under 'the Habsburg yoke'.
With enemies everywhere, was not war the only option? As the chilling German phrase went: 'Better a terrible end than endless terror.' Eventually, it was \JGermany\j that grasped most eagerly at war. In a 1912 conference between the Kaiser and his military leaders, the chief of the general staff, Count Helmuth von Moltke, urged a preventative war, 'the sooner the better'.
The others enthusiastically agreed. Significantly, the German leadership failed to make coherent preparations for war over the next two years, but its mood was clear: at the first opportunity it would push Europe over the precipice.
On 28 June 1914 the chance occurred. A group of young terrorists, trained, supported, and organized by the Serbian government, assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne as he visited the newly annexed Bosnia. The event outraged Europe. But \JAustria\j hesitated, while its police investigated the affair in the best traditions of Austrian incompetence.
For most of July the Austrians dithered and lost much of Europe's support; when they acted, the assassination was on the back pages of European newspapers. Meanwhile, the British made desperate efforts to defuse the crisis, in the belief that they were acting in concert with the Germans; but the Kaiser and his government were playing a double game.
Germany gave overt support to British initiatives, but privately urged the Austrians to act as decisively against \JSerbia\j as possible.
In fact, the Germans issued the Austrians a 'blank cheque' which they expected and \Iwanted\i their allies to use. On 23 July the Austrians therefore issued an ultimatum to \JSerbia\j that allowed no room for negotiations.
Despite a conciliatory answer from the Serbs, \JAustria\j declared war on 28 July. Ironically, Austrian incompetence prevented substantial military action for the next two weeks: but to ensure that the Rubicon remained crossed, the Austrians immediately shelled \JBelgrade\j.
Consequently, the Russians confronted a situation where surrender to German and Austrian pressure again would do irremediable harm to their interests in the Balkans.
#
"WWI: Warplans of the Great Powers",145,0,0,0
By this point, military planning had made war almost inevitable. Of all the plans for war that European armies cast before 1914, only Britain did not expect their army to achieve decisive results - although that merely reflected the size and strength of a British army prepared to play an ancillary role on the continent.
Yet even the British army possessed a mission that foresaw it supporting in a decisive French offensive to defeat the German army in the Rhineland.
In understanding these plans, the historian must bear in mind that military planning reflected the best estimates of economists and politicians as well as soldiers. European general staffs fully understood that modern battlefields would be terrible killing grounds. But civilian experts believed the modern state to be a fragile edifice with neither staying power in economic terms nor stability in political terms.
Few believed that a major war could last more than a year before political and financial collapse occurred. Even fewer believed that a great struggle could last a second year. There had been a few prophets in the wilderness: the elder Moltke had warned that the next European war might last thirty years. (He was closer than one might think.
If one considers World War I and World War II as a single great struggle - as Thucydides thought about the Peloponnesian War - then Moltke was exactly on target.) The Polish entrepreneur, Ivan Bloch, issued a similar warning in his book \IIs War Impossible\i? (1899), which predicted that 'Everybody will be entrenched in the next war'; but such estimates were very much the exception.
All the recent wars involving European powers had been relatively short, and in the case of \JRussia\j, revolution had broken out and political and economic stability had collapsed. Thus, the principal strategic requirement seemingly confronting Europe's militaries was to win the next war quickly before financial and political collapse ensued.
The foremost example of how political assumptions combined with military perceptions to produce strategic disaster is \JGermany\j's Schlieffen plan. The German mistakes were similar to those of their military opponents, except on a grander scale and with greater impact on the course of the war.
The Schlieffen plan reflected the strengths and weaknesses of the German 'way of war'. Since that 'way of war' would dominate the first half of the twentieth century, it is particularly useful to examine the plan in detail.
Count Alfred von Schlieffen had become chief of the general staff in 1891; as such his primary responsibility lay in establishing plans to deal with potential conflicts. By 1891 the German nightmare of facing a two-front war with \JFrance\j and \JRussia\j in case of hostilities had turned into reality.
In such a situation Schlieffen's predecessors had thought in terms of defending Alsace-Lorraine in the west, and assuming the offensive against \JRussia\j; but Schlieffen believed that \JRussia\j's vast expanses would prevent the achievement of a decisive victory.
France, however, confronted \JGermany\j with a solid barrier of fortresses along its frontier so that a quick victory in the west seemed equally problematic. But Schlieffen was a student of military history; as such he had drawn the conclusion from his studies, particularly Hannibal's victory at Cannae (see \JBattle of Cannae 216 BC\j), that envelopment was the only route to decisive victory.
He now proposed to sweep around the French fortifications by invading \JBelgium\j. Once deployed in the Low Countries. German armies could outflank French defences and destroy the French army in a gigantic envelopment east of Paris. With \JFrance\j eliminated, \JGermany\j could deal with \JRussia\j in a more leisurely campaign.
In every respect, the Schlieffen plan seemed to represent a brilliant operational solution to \JGermany\j's strategic problems. But on the political level it had extraordinary weaknesses that resulted from both its narrow definition of the problem and its faulty operational assumptions.
Its most obvious weakness lay in the strategic realm: by violating Belgian \Jneutrality\j, the Germans guaranteed that Britain would enter the war at \JFrance\j's side. If \JGermany\j won quickly, such interference would count for little; in Schlieffen's words, it would allow the Germans to sweep the British army up along with the French. But if the war were long, Britain represented a serious threat to \JGermany\j's conduct of the conflict, while German violation of Belgian \Jneutrality\j would also have considerable impact on American attitudes.
However, because of the 'short-war scenario' (see \JRusso-Japanese War\j, \JWWI: Warplans of the Great Powers\j), such considerations did not overly concern Schlieffen or his successors.
In fact the Schlieffen plan held the seeds of its own operational failure. It depended on the French doing everything expected of them - namely committing their forces to an invasion of \JAlsace\j and Lorraine - and on \JBelgium\j acceding to a German invasion of its territory.
Any serious Belgian resistance would confront German forces with enormous logistic difficulties, particularly if the Belgians sabotaged the railroad tunnels and bridges.
Moreover, Schlieffen and his planners never came to terms with the problem represented by Paris. Where would the troops to blockade the city come from, if the German right wing proceeded on its march to envelop French forces deep within France? And if \JGermany\j's forces stopped to eliminate the French troops in Paris, would not the French army have sufficient time to redeploy?
In effect, like other grand strategies in Europe, the Schlieffen plan existed in a realm of pure, intellectual war, in which each opponent followed the moves choreographed for him and in which no mistakes or faulty assumptions delayed the onward sweep to military victory.
The new chief of the general staff, the younger Moltke, modified the Schlieffen plan by adding troops to the centre and left wing, but he left the right wing as strong as Schlieffen had intended. (Logistically, it is doubtful whether the Germans could have pushed more troops out on the right and supplied them.) Ironically, the most disastrous tinkering that occurred in the last years of peace had to do with military options, for in 1913 Moltke and Ludendorff discarded the alternate plan for an offensive deployment against \JRussia\j.
Thus, however the war might begin. \JGermany\j's opening move would have to be made in the west. In addition, Moltke and Ludendorff decided that military operations would begin, immediately upon notification of mobilization, with movement into neutral Luxembourg and \JBelgium\j to prevent last minute second thoughts by the Emperor or his diplomats.
Military plans of other states reflected the same 'short-war scenario' that \JGermany\j's military and civilian leaders had cast. They also reflected the fact that few planners had experienced war, and none had experienced war on the scale of what was to come in 1914.
As a result, their efforts appear generally unrealistic, but in the circumstances they reflected attempts to analyse realistically the military, political, and economic realities. They were, however, wrong in almost all of their assumptions.
#
"WWI: Count-Down to War",146,0,0,0
Austria's declaration of war on \JSerbia\j on 28 July started the clock ticking on the time bomb; there was no way now to stop the bomb from going off. Twice in the previous decade \JRussia\j had backed down before Austro-German challenges.
They would not do so again. The Tsar made a half-hearted effort to mobilize only the Russian forces facing \JAustria\j, but not those facing East \JPrussia\j. However, his generals persuaded him that such a deployment could not work and would give the advantage to the Germans.
Once the Russians decreed full mobilization on 30 July, the Germans acted. The Kaiser, after assuring his advisers throughout July that he would not 'chicken out', got cold feet at the last moment. He asked an appalled Moltke whether the army could mobilize against \JRussia\j, while remaining on the defensive in the west.
A shattered chief of staff, almost reduced to tears, replied that there was only one option, the Schlieffen plan. The Kaiser's devastating rejoinder was that Moltke's uncle - the great Moltke - would have given a different answer. Nevertheless, on 1 August the Kaiser authorized mobilization and therefore - given the exigencies of the Schlieffen plan - war.
The same day the French also mobilized, but announced to the German ambassador that their troops would remain well behind the frontier. It did not matter: when \JGermany\j declared war on \JFrance\j on 3 August, her troops were already in Luxembourg and \JBelgium\j. \JGermany\j, in support of \JAustria\j's claims against \JSerbia\j, was now invading Luxembourg, \JBelgium\j, and \JFrance\j.
When the British ambassador suggested to the German chancellor that \JGermany\j had treaty obligations to respect the \Jneutrality\j of the Low Countries, Bethmann-Hollweg replied that the treaty was only a 'scrap of paper'.
It did not take much more to persuade the British cabinet that their country must side with \JFrance\j and \JRussia\j. It had taken only a week from \JAustria\j's declaration of war on \JSerbia\j to bring the major European powers into a disastrous conflict.
As Viscount Grey, the British foreign minister suggested: 'the lamps are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.' He was right: they would not be relit across the whole continent until 1989.
#
"West at War 1914-18",147,0,0,0
\BChapter 15 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
#
"WWI: The West at War",148,0,0,0
The failure of diplomacy in July 1914 brought on the great conflict feared by some and welcomed by many. Throughout Europe, while reservists flocked to the colours, crowds acclaimed the declarations of war. The hostilities, however, failed to live up to expectations of a short, decisive, conflict; rather, a terrible, seemingly endless struggle ensued.
From our vantage point it is difficult to see how the Germans lasted as long as they did: after all, they went to war with three of the greatest powers in the world, Britain, \JFrance\j, and \JRussia\j, a coalition backed by the United States, a power that German efforts would eventually enlist in the roll of their enemies. But last they did, and in 1918 they finally achieved total victory in the east, and at one point seemed close to it in the west as well.
Nevertheless, in the end, despite their tactical and operational skills, they could not overcome their fundamentally flawed strategy and the weight of the coalition ranged against them.
In 1914 European armies confronted a technological revolution on the battlefield. The weapons developed over the previous decades-bolt-action rifles, machine guns, modern howitzers - provided firepower in unprecedented measure and presented insoluble problems to western military organizations.
Modern weapons allowed armies to set up impregnable defensive positions, and neither the officer corps nor the general staffs worked out how to use modern technology, or evolved tactical concepts to break through such defences, until 1918.
Moreover, during the course of the war, gas, tanks, \Jaircraft\j, and a panoply of new infantry weapons made tactical problems daunting and solutions elusive, while battlefield doctrines grew ever more complex.
The front lines - at least in the west - remained relatively stable, but conditions within the battle zone underwent enormous changes, while military forces had to adapt and innovate in accordance with developments on the other side of the hill.
The armies moved forward towards the first clash in 1914 on the basis of carefully laid plans. Most senior officers recognized the lethality of modern weapons, but generals, as well as politicians and economists, believed that modern societies could not support the cost of a prolonged struggle.
Consequently, they planned to launch a knock-out blow that would win quickly, whatever the cost. The Russians aimed to grab East \JPrussia\j as well as deal \JAustria\j a crushing blow. The French hoped to slice behind German forces with a drive through Alsace-Lorraine to the Rhineland.
However, as in 1870, they miscalculated by estimating that \JGermany\j would not use reserve forces; therefore, while the French recognized that the Germans might launch their main attack through \JBelgium\j, they miscalculated its size and power.
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"WWI: The Opening Moves",149,0,0,0
The German plan, named after its designer Count Schlieffen, assumed that the \JReich\j could only win a two-front war by crushing \JFrance\j before \JRussia\j could mobilize (see \JWWI: Warplans of the Great Powers\j). Since French frontier fortifications presented a major problem, Schlieffen called for the invasion of \JBelgium\j, thus outflanking \JFrance\j's defences and allowing German forces to sweep south, mask Paris, and envelop French armies from the west.
Germany would not attempt a minor violation of Belgian territory; rather, it would use the country as a launching pad to hurl three armies of thirty-two divisions at the French left. Accordingly, on 4 August 1914 one million German troops began the invasion of \JBelgium\j, a move that sufficed to end the political debate in Britain on whether to honour informal military commitments made in the previous decade to \JFrance\j: the British immediately declared war.
First of all; the Germans had to gain LiΦge and its gap in order to deploy the forces necessary to execute their plan. Great mortars, manufactured by Krupp and Skoda, wrecked the Belgian fortresses, while Colonel Erich Ludendorff, already a figure of note in the German army, drove into LiΦge and then demanded and received the citadel's surrender.
His success led to his appointment as chief of staff to German forces in East \JPrussia\j. Belgian resistance at LiΦge did little to detain the Germans, although it caused annoyance, while the withdrawal of the Belgian army to Antwerp threatened the German flank.
To cover that threat, the Germans had to detach two corps. Elsewhere the Belgians sabotaged roads, wrecked communications, blew up railway tunnels and bridges, and sniped at the enemy. In fury, the Germans retaliated.
They bombarded the university town of \JLouvain\j and in places that resisted shot civilian hostages: 664 hostages executed at Dinant and 150 at Aerschot set the tone - small change to later generations, but enough to outrage the world of 1914.
While the Germans moved into \JBelgium\j according to the Schlieffen Plan, the French followed their own strategy - 'Plan XVII', prepared by Joseph Joffre, chief of their general staff. Just as Schlieffen had anticipated, in massed brigades, with officers wearing white gloves, the French First and Second Armies moved into Alsace-Lorraine in mid-August, where German defenders under Crown Prince Rupprecht of \JBavaria\j slaughtered them.
Shaken, the French reeled back; Rupprecht requested permission to pursue and Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of staff, acquiesced in the hope that his armies could execute a double envelopment - even though by so doing he violated Schlieffen's basic conception, which was to roll the French up from the west.
French attacks now shifted to the Ardennes but once again they ran into numerous German forces which drove them back. Here too German troops pressed forward, although their action again pushed the French out of the trap that Schlieffen had hoped to set.
By now the German right wing had completed its deployment in \JBelgium\j and was moving forward. Initially, the French high command failed to recognize the growing threat to its position, but the Fifth Army commander, Charles Lanrezac, acted on his own: with his troops battered in the Ardennes he ordered a timely withdrawal.
On the far left of the Allied line the newly arrived British Expeditionary Force, badly mauled at Mons on 23 August, also retreated. At this point, the German right wing was positioned to envelop the entire Allied left, but Karl von Bⁿlow, commander of the right, refused Alexander von Kluck, First Army commander, permission to swing west to envelop the British Expeditionary Force.
The French high command finally recognized the danger. 'Papa' Joffre did not panic: instead he desperately reshuffled French forces to his left wing. The German advance and Allied retreat, both moving at approximately 20 miles a day, set in motion a race towards Paris, but the Allies held the advantage in that they were falling back on their supply dumps.
The Germans, short of resources, were soon exhausted. Moreover, the German high command chose this moment to pull two more corps off the right wing because of the Russian threat to East \JPrussia\j (see \JWWI: German Victory in the East\j).
At this point, mounting losses combined with Schlieffen's miscalculations to confront German commanders with a difficult choice: what to do about Paris.
With insufficient troops either to attack or screen the capital, the Germans swung east on 1 September intending to by-pass Paris and finish off the French army. But Joffre had rushed reinforcements into the capital and, when aerial reconnaissance revealed the German move to the east of Paris, he struck.
The battle of the Marne, between 5 and 10 September, involved over two million soldiers - perhaps the largest encounter ever fought to that date - and began with a French attack which forced Kluck's First Army to face west, in the opposite direction from Bⁿlow's Second Army, which was facing almost due east.
A gap opened between the two forces which the British Expeditionary Force stood poised to exploit; had it moved with dispatch the Allies might have destroyed the German right wing.
In fact, the British moved too slowly, but the Germans remained in serious straits: their right wing had fragmented and possessed no clear focus, while their logistical system was near collapse - its railheads lay deep in \JBelgium\j - and their troops were exhausted.
As one officer noted: We can do no more. The men fall in the ditches and lie there just to breathe. . . The order comes to mount. I ride bent over with my head on the horse's mane. We are thirsty and hungry. Indifference overcomes us.'
The general staff's representative, Colonel Richard Hentsch, sent to assess the situation, recognized the makings of a disaster; in Moltke's name, he ordered a retreat to the Aisne. The Schlieffen plan had failed; \JFrance\j had survived.
The pursuit by Allied forces, however, was hesitant. Once on the Aisne, the front stabilized and the opposing armies attempted to regain freedom of manoeuvre by outflanking their opponents. But the ensuing 'race to the sea' only extended a ragged line of trenches to the Channel.
In October, the new chief of the German general staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, ordered an offensive in Flanders to drive the Allies from Antwerp and the Channel ports. The German cupboard, however, was so bare that he threw in a corps of inexperienced university students who had begun training only in August.
The Germans took Antwerp, but of 36,000 in the university reserve corps, only 6,000 survived unscathed. One of them was Adolf Hitler. By November the opposing armies had become locked in a tight embrace on a 500-mile front running from \JSwitzerland\j to the Channel.
The four months of fighting had resulted in a general stalemate, while nearly half a million French, British, and German soldiers lay dead. The battle lines would change but minimally over the next three years despite horrendous casualties.
#
"WWI: German Victory in the East",150,0,0,0
In the east equally significant battles occurred, also involving terrible casualties, stalemate, and the collapse of pre-war plans. Schlieffen had accepted the possibility of the temporary loss of East \JPrussia\j while \JGermany\j committed her main forces in the west; but by 1914 \JRussia\j's military organization had improved significantly and it managed to mobilize and deploy its forces far more quickly than expected.
Two armies, under Paul Rennenkampf and Alexander Samsonov, struck East \JPrussia\j. Rennenkampf's forces moved from Russian territory to attack K÷nigsberg from the east, while Samsonov's army attacked from \JPoland\j and struck north.
Had the Russians co-ordinated these movements, they had some prospect of capturing East \JPrussia\j and destroying the German Eighth Army. But little co-ordination occurred; the two commanders hated each other, and the Russians' uncoded messages gave the Germans an accurate picture of their intentions.
Rennenkampf moved first. At Gumbinnen, a small town in East \JPrussia\j, his forces defeated the Germans on 19-20 August; had he followed up his initial victory, he could have placed the Germans in desperate straits: as it was, the German commander in East \JPrussia\j panicked and urged abandonment of the whole province.
Moltke and the Kaiser demurred, sacked the commander, and replaced him with a retired general, Paul von Hindenburg, together with Ludendorff as his chief of staff. Even before the new team arrived in East \JPrussia\j, the general staff officer on the scene, Max von Hoffman, had laid the basis for victory.
Signals intelligence had made it clear that Rennenkampf planned to remain stationary, so that the Germans possessed a brief window of opportunity to isolate and destroy Samsonov, whose army was advancing north from \JPoland\j. Hoffman withdrew most of the forces facing Rennenkampf by rail and concentrated them instead at Tannenberg against Samsonov.
By 26 August, Samsonov recognized that his army was in serious trouble, but he determined to stay and fight in the belief that Rennenkampf would move rapidly to his rescue. Rennenkampf, however, failed to advance and on that day German attacks overwhelmed both of Samsonov's flanks; a moderately successful Russian attack in the centre only moved their forces deeper into the net.
By 30 August the Germans had destroyed Samsonov's army and captured 92,000 Russians and 400 guns. They now moved east and by mid-September the Eighth Army had chased Rennenkampf out of East \JPrussia\j and inflicted heavy casualties on his army as well. The victories established Ludendorff and Hindenburg as national heroes.
Since the Germans wrote the history of the Eastern Front, \JRussia\j's defeat in East \JPrussia\j has largely obscured its successes elsewhere. In fact, the major Russian effort of 1914 was not directed against East \JPrussia\j, but rather against the Austro-Hungarian empire in \JGalicia\j.
In the south, the Austrians had struck first. Conrad von H÷tzendorf, their chief of staff, launched three armies on divergent lines of advance into \JPoland\j, where they quickly ran into trouble. The Third Army fell back to its starting point, while the Russians almost cut off the Fourth Army by severing its lines of communication for a time; and although the Austrians eventually fought their way out, they retired in complete shambles to their territory - a retreat that continued across \JGalicia\j.
In late September, the Russians almost broke onto the Hungarian plain, which might have led to \JAustria\j's collapse in 1914, but their advance eventually faltered from logistical difficulties and heavy losses.
Fighting continued on the Eastern Front - which extended for twice the length of the Western Front - through the autumn, as the opposing sides attempted to pick up the wreckage of their failed war plans.
By pushing their reserves of equipment and ammunition forward, the Russians posed a significant threat to Austria-Hungary; but in so doing they mortgaged their future, because Russian industry, incompetently mobilized by Nicholas II's bizarre autocracy, proved incapable of restocking what the army expended in its operations.
Nevertheless, the autumn campaign was a close-run thing for the Central Powers. \JGermany\j had to bolster the Austrians with eighteen divisions and only after desperate efforts were the combined forces of the Central Powers able to fight their adversaries to a standstill in the early winter.
Even then, the stinging defeat suffered by Austria-Hungary in autumn 1914 removed its army as a major player on the Eastern Front for the remainder of the war. But the Russians themselves were thoroughly weakened too; they had exhausted their armies and, even more dangerously, their logistical structure. The Ottoman decision to attack \JRussia\j in October 1914, with offensives in the Caucasus and raids in the Black Sea, increased the strains even further.
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"WWI: 1915, Year of Allied Failure",151,0,0,0
At the end of 1914 Winston Churchill, First Lord of the British Admiralty, wrote a sharply perceptive memorandum for the British cabinet. He warned that the war had settled into a stalemate with little prospect of a breakthrough by either side: the generals would of course try, but would only add to the huge casualties suffered thus far.
Churchill suggested that only mechanical means held the prospect for breaking the tactical deadlock, but development of such means would take months if not years. The fighting in 1915 mirrored Churchill's expectations.
For the British, the Western Front involved several attacks that extended the heavy casualties suffered by their regular army in 1914; but the volunteers who flocked to the colours at the war's onset were not yet ready, so the French had to shoulder the bulk of fighting in the west in 1915.
French doctrine still emphasized morale as the most important factor in battle. In the larger sense they were right, but their troops lacked the technology, artillery support, and tactical conceptions necessary to break into and through German defences.
In both March and May, the French launched major attacks on the Champagne front, while the British attacked further north. Both offensives caused excruciatingly heavy losses and, in any case, the Germans had constructed secondline defences behind the most important segments of their front.
Allied commanders believed that the only path to mobile warfare lay in massive artillery bombardments that would saturate enemy defences and allow attackers to cross the killing zone. What they missed was that lengthy bombardments served to alert the Germans, who then had time to move reserves to threatened sectors.
At Loos, in September, the British actually broke through German defences but Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, had placed his reserves too far in the rear and the Germans closed the gap before reinforcements could arrive.
Further French attacks only added to the casualties: in the course of 1915 over a million Frenchmen were killed or wounded, in return for no significant success.
In the east the situation proved even gloomier for the Allies. In view of Austrian weakness, Falkenhayn decided early in 1915 that \JGermany\j must assume the offensive. His aim was not a massive invasion of \JRussia\j, as Hindenburg and Ludendorff urged, but rather a limited campaign to damage the Russian army and push the Russians back, so that they would no longer pose a strategic threat to \JAustria\j.
Along with this limited campaign, the Germans embarked on a sophisticated effort to undermine popular Russian political and military morale (an effort that culminated in revolution in 1917).
By making minimal incursions into Russian territory, the Germans did not threaten 'Mother \JRussia\j' directly; rather, they exacerbated their opponents' difficulties by forcing the Russian High Command to fight at the end of long and inadequate lines of communication.
The initial German offensive came in \JGalicia\j. On 2 May 1915, General August von Mackensen attacked Russian positions between Gorlice and Tarnow. catching them by surprise. Within two weeks the advancing Germans had driven their opponents from \JGalicia\j.
Russian forces were desperately short of everything; as a Tsarist officer despairingly noted: 'At the beginning of the war, when we had guns, ammunition, and rifles, we were victorious. When the supply of munitions and arms began to give out, we still fought brilliantly.
Today, with its artillery and infantry dumb, our army is drowning in its own blood.' In one month, the Germans had advanced almost 100 miles and captured 400,000 Russians.
In July, Falkenhayn ordered Hindenburg from the north and Mackensen from the south to drive Russian forces out of \JPoland\j. Ludendorff argued that greater reinforcements would enable him to destroy more Russians, but Falkenhayn refused because of the situation in other theatres.
In particular, he wanted to eliminate \JSerbia\j - where repeated Austrian efforts to take \JBelgrade\j had failed - while the British assault on the Dardanelles posed a considerable threat to the position of the Central Powers in the Balkans and made it advisable to hold back substantial reserves in case of an Ottoman collapse.
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"WWI: Gallipoli Campaign",152,0,0,0
The attack on the Dardanelles represented the one strategic masterstroke of the war. It was Churchill's brain-child: the First Lord argued that a successful attack there would force Turkey from the war, open up crucial supply lines to \JRussia\j, bring \JRomania\j and \JBulgaria\j into the war on the Allied side, provide direct support to \JSerbia\j, and create a third front against Austria-Hungary.
None of these possibilities came to pass because, whatever the campaign's strategic merits, the operational and tactical execution of the venture was abysmal.
First, at Churchill's urging, and over the admirals' objection, the Royal Navy tried to force its way through the forts protecting the Dardanelles into the Sea of \JMarmara\j in the hope that, once the obsolete Allied battleships had got through, they could attack Constantinople and cause Turkey's collapse. But stiff resistance from Turkish shore batteries combined with mines to thwart the attempt.
Now the war office agreed to support the attack with ground forces - the 29th Regular Division and Imperial troops in \JEgypt\j - under Sir Ian Hamilton; but planning remained haphazard and the landing forces detailed for \JGallipoli\j received no training in amphibious warfare.
Moreover the simplest of questions remained unanswered: was there water ashore? were there roads? what sort of fighting would occur? what were the strengths and weaknesses of Turkish defences?
The campaign began on 25 April 1915, when Allied forces struggled ashore on the \JGallipoli\j peninsula. At the tip. Turkish machine gunners slaughtered British troops attacking from the steamer \IRiver Clyde.\i Just up the coast British troops made successful landings against no enemy resistance, but the commanders on the spot had no idea of what to do and displayed no initiative.
Their troops gained a foothold but not the heights. Further along the coast, \JAnzac\j (Australian and New Zealand) troops mistakenly landed in an area later called \JAnzac\j Cove. No Turks confronted them, but the Anzacs advanced too slowly towards the heights looming above.
Before they reached the ridge, an obscure Turkish colonel, Mustafa Kemal, arrived; he immediately recognized the position's critical importance and rushed reinforcements to hold the heights. As Churchill noted in his history of the war: 'The terrible ''ifs'' accumulate.'
The landing settled into a murderous stalemate in which the killing power of modern weapons made it impossible for either side to break the deadlock. The Turks held the heights, Imperial troops the shore, and neither could shake the other from their defensive positions.
In August, the British raised the stakes. After receiving reinforcements, Hamilton's staff planned an impossible night attack from \JAnzac\j Cove against the heights, in which Australian and New Zealand troops suffered severe losses, while at Suvla Bay new divisions commanded by General Stopford, who had not led troops since 1882, successfully landed but then sat down in general disorganization to await the Turks.
Stopford had not been informed that the heights 4 miles east of Suvla were his objective and by the time he moved, three days later, the Turks were ready. These failures sealed the fate of the \JGallipoli\j campaign and, in the winter, the British withdrew.
Nearly half a million Allied troops had fought in the area; approximately half became casualties. As a result of the failure, \JBulgaria\j joined the Central Powers and, in conjunction with German and Austrian troops, eliminated \JSerbia\j by the end of the year. The Central Powers thus established a stranglehold over the Balkans.
However, another significant front opened in 1915. The \JGallipoli\j expedition, as well as their own miscalculations, led Italian leaders to believe that the war was almost over and that the Allies would win. In May 1915 they therefore joined the war against \JAustria\j.
The Italians confronted the problem of breaking Austrian positions in the Alps - one that no army in World War I could have solved - but proved successful only in dragooning large numbers of peasants and throwing the poorest of Italian society into endless unsuccessful offensives against Austrian positions along the Isonzo river.
These offences, as much as any in the war, underlined the inadequacies of Europe's military organizations. By November 1918, the Italians had lost over 500,000 dead merely to pin down for three years considerable Austro-Hungarian forces that might otherwise have served on the Eastern Front.
#
"WWI: 1916, The Killing War",153,0,0,0
At the end of 1915 Falkenhayn presented the Kaiser with a strategic memorandum. He indicated that the \JReich\j confronted a massive struggle of attrition against opponents with greater resources and manpower; after surveying the various war zones, he argued that no possibility for a decisive victory existed anywhere.
Britain clearly remained the \JReich\j's greatest opponent, but \JGermany\j lacked the means to strike at it directly; the French, however, represented Britain's continental sword. Therefore, Falkenhayn proposed a battle of attrition to break French morale, with the fortress city of \JVerdun\j as his target. The general staff set in motion plans for the battle, but Falkenhayn did not inform the local commander, \JGermany\j's crown prince, that the assault on \JVerdun\j was only to lead to attrition.
Moreover, Falkenhayn as chief of staff controlled the reserves, and by having the attack move down the right bank of the Meuse, he ensured that the crown prince's forces would not capture \JVerdun\j by surprise.
Falkenhayn believed that an unprecedented heavy use of artillery would allow the Germans first to make substantial initial gains at minimal cost and then slaughter all French counter-attacks; he also mistakenly assumed that his forces would be able to maintain their superiority in artillery.
Even so, the initial attack came close to success. French commanders had long neglected the sector; only at the last moment did they react to intelligence warnings of a major German offensive.
Four days after the opening hurricane bombardment, on 21 February 1916 the Germans captured Douaumont, one of the outer ring of defences, with few losses and for a moment it appeared they might force the French out of \JVerdun\j. But the Germans suffered heavier casualties than expected; reserves failed to arrive in timely fashion due to Falkenhayn's cautious policies; and French defenders on the left bank of the Meuse imposed increasingly heavy losses on advancing German troops.
Nevertheless, as in August 1914, the French did exactly what the Germans wanted: they decided to defend \JVerdun\j at all costs. The day after Douaumont fell, they also brought in their best general, Philippe PΘtain.
At the beginning of the war PΘtain had been a colonel with little prospect of promotion, for he had espoused the power of defensive war in the modern age, becoming an expert in what most French officers regarded as an arcane art. But after August 1914, PΘtain's rise had been meteoric.
He arrived at \JVerdun\j to find everything in shambles, but commented acidly, on seeing that the Germans had attacked only on the right bank. '[Those gentlemen] don't know their business.' He reinforced French artillery on the left bank, restored shattered morale, and conducted an effective defence of \JVerdun\j from his bed as he recovered from \Jpneumonia\j.
The battle resulted in a gigantic slaughter, with artillery the butcher and infantry the \Jcattle\j. A French captain reported after service on Le Mort Homme (high ground west of Verdun) in April 1916:
I have returned from the toughest trial that I have ever seen. . . four days and four nights - ninety-six hours - the last two days soaked in icy mud - under terrible bombardment, without any shelter other than the narrowness of the trench, which even seemed to be too wide.
The Boche did not attack, naturally: it would have been too stupid. It was much more convenient to carry out a fine firing exercise on our backs. . . result: I arrived there with 175 men, I returned with thirty-four, several half mad. And a platoon of little chasseurs is in our place. It's the next course; there will be another to serve before long, for the appetite of the ogre is insatiable.
A lieutenant wrote:
First came the skeletons of companies occasionally led by a wounded officer, leaning on a stick. All marched or rather advanced in small steps, zigzagging as if intoxicated. . . It seemed as if these mute faces were crying something terrible, the unbelievable horror of their martyrdom. Two territorials who watched us return wept in silence.
By 1 April German losses reached the point where the Crown Prince recommended that Falkenhayn shut the battle down; misled by optimistic intelligence reports of heavy French casualties, however, the chief of staff declined and instead ordered a last attempt to capture the city.
On 7 June the Germans took Fort Vaux, after desperate resistance by its garrison of 100 had inflicted nearly 3,000 casualties on the attackers, and seemed on the brink of breaking through to \JVerdun\j. At this point Russian success against the Austrians (see \JWWI: 1916, Russian Offensive\j) and the British offensive on the Somme forced Falkenhayn to disengage and rush reinforcements to other fronts, but the battle did not end.
With the Germans only 6 miles from \JVerdun\j, the French counter-attacked. Using tactics developed by Captain AndrΘ Laffargue that emphasized small units and decentralized leadership, French forces under General Robert Nivelle recaptured Douaumont and Vaux and almost drove the Germans back to their original starting positions. \JVerdun\j had cost the two sides over 400,000 killed and 800,000 wounded - split almost evenly between the opponents.
#
"WWI: The Somme",154,0,0,0
As the German attack on \JVerdun\j ended, the British army made its debut as a major player on the Western Front. At a conference in December 1915, Allied leaders had selected the Somme for their major effort in 1916, but \JVerdun\j limited French involvement.
Now, Sir Douglas Haig, the British Expeditionary Force's new commander, confronted two major problems: on the one hand, the German defences with deep dugouts and barbed-wire entanglements represented a serious impediment to any attack; on the other hand, the British troops who had volunteered in 1914 and 1915, while filled with enthusiasm, were still amateurs in the business of war.
One of Haig's chief subordinates, Sir Henry Rawlinson, argued that, in view of British tactical weaknesses, the British Expeditionary Force should treat its operations on the Western Front as a gigantic siege: by launching a series of distinct, small attacks, British troops would gain experience while using their nation's industrial strength, now fully mobilized, to hammer the Germans. But Haig would have none of it: instead he settled on a great artillery bombardment followed by a massive, tightly controlled infantry attack, advancing at a walk against the wrecked German positions.
British artillery preparations lasted a week; 1,437 artillery pieces fired a million and a half shells on German positions. Then, on 1 July, after reaching its climax, the bombardment halted; along an 18-mile front fourteen British divisions came on in waves.
However, the bombardment failed to do what Haig expected: much of the barbed wire remained intact and the German infantry moved smartly out of their dugouts and on a bright, clear day slaughtered the attackers. A German observer reported:
As soon as the men were in position, a series of extended lines of infantry were seen moving forward from the British trenches. . . [W]hen the leading British line was within a hundred yards, the rattle of machine gun and rifle broke out along the whole line. . . Some fired kneeling so as to get a better target over the broken ground, whilst others, in the excitement of the moment stood up regardless of their own safety, to fire into the crowd of men in front of them.
Red rockets went up into the blue sky as a signal to the artillery, and immediately afterwards a mass of shells from the German batteries in the rear tore through the air and burst among the advancing lines. Whole sections seemed to fall, and the rear formations. . . crumbled under this hail of shells. . . With all this were mingled the moans and groans of the wounded, the cries of help and the last screams of death. . . [T]he extended lines of British infantry broke. . . like waves against a cliff, only to be beaten back.
On 1 July 1916, some 120,000 British infantry went over the top; of those 19,240 were killed, 35,493 wounded, 2,152 missing, and 585 prisoners. Close to 50 per cent of the attackers were casualties - yet in only a few spots did the British gain the first-line enemy trenches.
Quite understandably, but mistakenly, British historiography has focused on the first day's tragedy and ignored the remainder of the battle. The British did not repeat their mistakes, but rather concentrated on more limited attacks that emphasized their artillery superiority.
On the other hand, the Germans fought according to Falkenhayn's demands that they hold on to every foot of French territory, counter-attack all British gains, and dominate the forward edge of the battlefield. As a result, German infantry were consistently exposed to the full weight of British bombardments, while their counter-attacks added to a spiralling level of casualties.
From 2 July the British inflicted a ratio of casualties close to what they suffered and in some cases they even achieved major successes. On 14 July, a dawn assault by 22,000 men of Rawlinson's First Army punched a hole 6,000 yards wide in German defences; only the failure of their reserves to move quickly prevented a breakthrough.
Given Allied superiority in men and material, such levels of attrition represented a serious drain on \JGermany\j's overall position. The \IMaterialschlacht\i - battle of resources - which typified both the Somme and \JVerdun\j slowly but steadily drove the German army towards defeat.
At the end of August, under intense political pressure caused by military failures, the Kaiser dismissed Falkenhayn and replaced him with Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the latter clearly in the dominant position.
#
"WWI: 1916, New German Battle Strategy",155,0,0,0
Historians have correctly emphasized the misshapen industrial and political policies that Ludendorff would impose on the \JReich\j as contributing significantly to the final collapse, but they have overlooked Ludendorff's recasting of German battle doctrine.
In effect the Germans invented the modern battlefield and that invention prolonged the war into 1918. Upon assuming control, Ludendorff recognized that German troops were receiving a terrible beating on the Somme. Unlike most other World War I commanders, he went out to the front to discover at first hand what was actually happening.
His memoirs noted that 'it was my duty to adapt myself to [actual conditions]' and, in his fact-finding tour, he demanded that soldiers and staff officers speak their minds and not pass along something 'made to order'. What he learned confirmed his worst fears; the army's tactical approach was maximizing German casualties.
Ludendorff turned the problem over to a group of expert general staff officers with recent battle experience. That group evolved a new doctrine encapsulated in the manual, \IConduct of the Defensive Battle,\i completed in autumn 1916.
The changes came too late to affect the Somme, but the new doctrine transformed how the Germans fought in 1917 and 1918. Instead of packing masses of infantry into the front lines, only a thin screen of machine gunners would man forward positions.
Then, a series of strong points, increasingly dense the deeper one advanced into the system, would inflict heavier losses on the attacker. Meanwhile, the bulk of the infantry remained out of enemy artillery range to launch local and general counter-attacks on any penetrations.
Above all, the new doctrine devolved authority for tactical decisions down the chain of command. Lieutenants and captains on the scene would now make the critical decisions as to whether to retreat, hold, or counter-attack.
#
"WWI: 1916, Russian Offensive",156,0,0,0
Meanwhile, in the east, things had gone relatively well for the Central Powers. After the successes of 1915, Falkenhayn saw no reason to pursue the beaten Russians into the depths of their country. However, his contempt for the Austrians created a dangerous situation.
In early 1916 Conrad suggested that the Central Powers knock the Italians out of the war; Falkenhayn turned the proposal down but, without telling the Germans, the Austrians went ahead anyway and siphoned their best troops off from the Eastern Front to attack the Italians just before, in response to desperate French appeals, the Russians launched a major offensive.
Under new leadership, the Tsar's war ministry had finally mobilized \JRussia\j's industry, and equipment and supplies began to flow to the front. Now, after successful operations against the Turks in the Caucasus, the STAVKA - the Russian high command - determined on a series of limited offensives, beginning with General Alexei Brussilov's army in the south which would set the stage for larger offensives in the north against the Germans.
Brussilov himself was a cut above other Tsarist generals. He planned the attack in great detail and emphasized thorough preparations to his subordinates. They in turn were thoroughly familiar with the Austrian defences, weakened by Conrad's decision to withdraw troops for the attack on \JItaly\j.
On 4 June 1916 Brussilov's offensive began, and the Austrians collapsed. Within two weeks the Russians had captured 200,000 prisoners and advanced over 40 miles; \JAustria\j again appeared on the brink of defeat.
Only by shutting down \JVerdun\j could Falkenhayn assemble sufficient reinforcements to bolster his ailing ally, although in fact subsequent attacks by the Tsar's commanders displayed the same lack of preparation that had characterized previous Russian operations.
Nevertheless, Brussilov's success convinced the Romanians that Austria-Hungary was collapsing and in August they rashly declared war on the Central Powers. By then, \JGermany\j and \JAustria\j possessed sufficient forces to smash \JRomania\j and gain control of its valuable resources - wheat and oil.
Thus, the only strategic result of \JRomania\j's entrance into the war was to extend the length of front that the exhausted Russian army had to defend.
1916 had brought success to none of the participants. \JVerdun\j had hurt the French severely; the British had failed to make significant gains on the Somme; the Russians were on the brink of a revolution.
On the other side, \JAustria\j had suffered new defeats and the Germans had experienced a rate of attrition they could not afford. Like punch-drunk fighters, the opponents entered 1917 in a state of exhaustion; but no one could discern an end to the interminable slaughter.
#
"WWI: 1917, the Darkest Year",157,0,0,0
At the end of 1916 the French replaced Joffre, whose lack of success had destroyed his prestige, with Robert Nivelle. Nivelle had achieved a reputation as an innovator, especially at \JVerdun\j, where his success in regaining the territory lost in the first stages of that battle had given him great prestige.
Now in charge of the army, Nivelle set about changing its battle doctrine in early 1917, based upon a tactical pamphlet written by Andre Laffarge (which had also profoundly influenced the Germans). Laffarge's approach aimed at developing decentralized manoeuvre tactics that would allow troops to break into and through the heavy defences of the opposing front line trenches, and the successes at \JVerdun\j suggested that he was on the right track.
Nivelle proposed a great offensive thrust in spring 1917, using this new tactical doctrine to break through German lines at the base of the great bulge formed by the enemy's positions in \JFrance\j.
However, all these assumptions proved faulty because in mid-winter Ludendorff ordered a withdrawal from much of the bulge. Several reasons explain this decision. Although some saw the abandonment of French territory as a sign of weakness, the shortened front provided the Germans with a substantial bonus of troops, and enabled them to site their new defences with great care, utilizing terrain to support new doctrinal concepts.
Finally, the Germans created a desert in the abandoned areas, quite accurately giving their retreat the code name 'Alberich' after the vicious dwarf of the Niebelungen sagas. Ludendorff's retreat removed the operational rationale for Nivelle's offensive. Moreover, the new German system of defence in depth (see \JWWI: 1916, New German Battle Strategy\j) undercut the offensive tactical innovations that the French had made.
In any case, the French army of 1917 was a brittle instrument. Interminable attacks and bloodletting had exhausted French troops as well as the nation. Moreover, the French army had taken execrable care of its soldiers throughout the war: its medical services were an outrage; French generals had been profligate with their soldiers' lives; food was a travesty; and leaves for soldiers were entirely inadequate.
Nivelle, perhaps sensing these weaknesses, promised that the coming offensive would break the German army. It did not. Admittedly, the French experienced little difficulty in getting through first line positions but, just as Ludendorff had intended, the deeper they drove, the higher their casualties became.
By the end of the second day, 120,000 French soldiers lay dead or wounded and there was little evidence that the survivors had any prospect of breaking through German defences. To complete the disaster, Nivelle refused to halt the offensive once it had failed: like his predecessor, he continued the slaughter.
In response the troops mutinied. At first, a few regiments refused to attack: but soon disorder spread throughout the army and, within a week, large numbers of regiments were displaying the red flag.
For the most part the mutineers simply wanted decent treatment - in some cases mutinous troops even continued to man front line trenches - but disorders also occurred in rear areas and, in several cases, drunken soldiers attacked staff officers while others beat up members of the medical service. In Paris defeatists became vocal in their demands for peace.
France trembled on the brink of collapse. Desperate, French politicians turned to Georges Clemenceau, the one politician with the ruthlessness to see the crisis through. In turn, he appointed PΘtain to rebuild the army. Clemenceau brought order to Paris and PΘtain brought discipline to the army.
At least twenty-three mutineers were shot and a further 250 were marched out into no-man's land and annihilated by artillery. But, besides such measures, PΘtain visited virtually every division to hear complaints and implemented a thorough-going reform of medical treatment, leave policies, and other causes of grievance.
Above all, he made clear that he would husband the lives of his soldiers. Nevertheless, the French army remained incapable of major military operations for the remainder of 1917. With revolution in \JRussia\j, and America only beginning its mobilization, the burden of the fighting therefore fell on the British Expeditionary Force.
Little in the historical record suggests that Haig had come to grips with the failures of 1916. The British High Command had left the development of tactics to the various armies that served under it on the Western Front. Consequently, no coherent effort to introduce new approaches, as in the German army, had evolved.
Instead, each British army attacked the problem of tactical innovation in its own idiosyncratic fashion; in some cases, in particular Rawlinson's and Plumer's armies, the measures adopted were both realistic and innovative, emphasizing careful preparation, surprise, and deception as well as the considerable artillery strengths of the British army.
An attack by Plumer's troops took Messines Ridge in June 1917 through careful operational planning that effectively co-ordinated artillery with the infantry attack and destroyed the German positions in exchange for only light casualties.
This success suggests how much the British might have achieved in 1917. However, such an approach would not have resulted in a brilliant breakthrough on the Western Front, which was what Haig desired. Hence he preferred the bold and unrealistic proposals of his fellow cavalryman Hubert Gough.
Since his first days in command, Flanders had interested Haig as a site for a possible offensive but in 1916 the French pushed the British into the Somme offensive; in 1917 Haig could pick his own ground, however, and he chose Flanders.
A sound strategic rationale lay behind the choice, for the \JU-boat\j bases in occupied \JBelgium\j represented a significant threat to Allied shipping; nevertheless, Haig's plans, like those of 1916, rested in a dream world of Napoleonic war - he expected artillery to pound German front-line forces into submission, then the infantry would create a breakthrough for the cavalry, which would execute a vigorous pursuit of the beaten enemy.
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"WWI: Passchendaele, Battle of",158,0,0,0
Flanders had been a great primeval swamp until, in the middle ages, its inhabitants had dug a complex maze of canals for draining. August brings considerable rain to the region every year; yet it was precisely this time, and this area, that Haig selected for his great offensive.
On 15 July 1917 the British bombardment began and continued for the next sixteen days, wrecking the drainage system completely. On 31 July the infantry went over the top at Passchendaele, near Ypres, and on the next day the rains began. Bombardment and rain soon turned the countryside into a morass of glutinous mud.
Moreover, the bombardment fell most heavily on German outposts and left the major defensive positions in the rear largely untouched, so that the initial British attacks gained minimal ground. Nevertheless, Haig, bolstered by his optimistic staff, reported to London that all was well.
His chief of intelligence, General Charteris, and chief of staff, Launcelot Kiggell, were particularly willful tools of such deceptions; when the battle had ended and Kiggell was returning to London, he visited the front line for the first time. His mournful comment - 'Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?' - speaks volumes on the leadership of the British Expeditionary Force.
As with the Somme, Passchendaele turned into another grim battle of attrition. On 13 September Sir Herbert Plumer's army attacked on a front of 4,000 yards with a pre-attack bombardment of 3,500,000 shells. But much of the German infantry waited out of artillery range, and their losses dropped significantly compared with the Somme.
Nevertheless, Passchendaele was a terrible experience for all concerned. An Australian officer noted after a reconnaissance patrol:
The slope was littered with dead, both theirs and ours. I got to one pill box to find it just a mass of dead so I passed on carefully to the one ahead. Here I found about fifty men alive, of the Manchesters. Never have I seen men so broken or so demoralized.
They were huddled up close behind the box in the last stages of exhaustion and fear. Fritz had been sniping them off all day and had accounted for fifty-seven that day - the dead and dying lay in piles. The wounded were numerous, unattended and so weak they groaned, some had been there four days already.
When Haig finally called off the Passchendaele offensive at the end of October, British casualties had reached nearly 300,000; with French and Imperial casualties included, the allies had lost over 400,000 men, the Germans 270,000.
One might argue that the Germans could afford their casualties even less; but such reasoning hardly excuses the unimaginative leadership that sent so many soldiers to their deaths in such conditions.
In November 1917, the British showed that an alternative existed to Haig's leaden approach. Tanks had first appeared on the Somme but, like all new weapons, they had teething troubles. As the battle in Flanders ground to a halt, however, the tank corps commander, General Elles, suggested that a tank raid on German positions away from Flanders might achieve a success.
Under political pressure from Lloyd George because of the heavy casualties in Flanders, Haig agreed. On 20 November, after a brief preliminary bombardment, British tanks attacked German positions in front of Cambrai.
The defenders had no reserves available and the defending divisions were 'Class B', the weakest in the German army. The position collapsed; in one day, at a cost of less than 5,000 casualties, British tanks and supporting infantry gained more territory than the Passchendaele offensive had gained in three months. But there were no reserves available, and efforts to prepare defences were inadequate.
Within the week a murderous German counter-attack hit the British positions around Cambrai, for the first time using a new offensive doctrine prepared by Ludendorff and his planners (see \JWWI: 1918, The Year of Decision\j), and drove the British back beyond their start line. Haig as well as Ludendorff concluded that the tank was a flash in the pan.
#
"WWI: 1917, Collapse of Russia",159,0,0,0
While grinding battles continued in the west, momentous events occurred in \JRussia\j. In February 1917, the Tsarist government collapsed; in a matter of days all vestiges of the regime disappeared and, in its place, a hodgepodge of ill-prepared political parties established a provisional republic.
To add to the confusion, the Germans allowed the outlawed revolutionary leader, Vlamidir Ilyich Lenin, to cross their territory in a sealed train from \JSwitzerland\j so that he could return to \JRussia\j.
Over 1917 and 1918 they kept him and his Bolshevik party well supplied with gold to run a campaign of subversion against what remained of the Russian war effort, for alone among Russian politicians Lenin urged an immediate end to war; he propagated the \JBolsheviks\j' slogan of 'peace and bread', a stance that reflected the needs of his German paymasters as well as his own instincts.
With their well-financed propaganda the \JBolsheviks\j undermined the provisional republic and significantly affected the army's morale, while a badly prepared offensive in July fuelled the collapse of discipline among Russian units.
That month saw a Bolshevik coup in St Petersburg fail, but four months later a general collapse of the army and civil government allowed Lenin to seize power.
With the discipline and stamina of the Russian army destroyed, and faced now with German and Austrian demands, the new regime could only follow a path of craven submission. Initial negotiations failed, but a rapid German advance quickly persuaded Lenin that revolutionary \Jrhetoric\j could not halt military power.
In March 1918, with the Germans only 100 miles from their capital, the \JBolsheviks\j made peace at Brest-Litovsk and surrendered the Baltic states, \JPoland\j, \JFinland\j, and much of the \JUkraine\j. But German ambitions were almost limitless; instead of transferring troops to the west, Ludendorff left substantial forces in the east to grab further territory.
By early May the Germans had occupied the rest of the \JUkraine\j, the \JCrimea\j, and \JFinland\j, and Ludendorff dreamed of a Teutonic empire running all the way to the Urals. The treaty of Brest, and its aftermath, underlined the extent of \JGermany\j's territorial ambitions and gave a hollow ring to her subsequent protests about the injustice of the Versailles settlement.
As \JRussia\j collapsed, the Germans provided a small group of elite divisions to the Austrians for a new attack on \JItaly\j. On 24 October 1917 an Austro-German offensive struck an Italian army already in desperate shape: sustained military failure, the dismal treatment of the troops, and a collapse of national morale had created a situation ripe for disaster.
Within a day the front line collapsed in the Isonzo valley at Caporetto, and in some areas the Austro-German advance carried the unheard-of distance - at least in the west - of 10 miles. One German officer (Erwin Rommel) with a reinforced company captured nearly 10,000 Italians over the course of the day.
For a while it appeared that \JItaly\j would have to sue for peace, but the Germans were incapable of a sustained effort in the theatre, while \JAustria\j alone did not possess the strength to knock \JItaly\j out of the war.
With considerable help from Anglo-French forces, the Italians halted the enemy's advance on the Piave. But the Caporetto dΘbacle provided one more sign of the desperate straits the Allied cause was now in.
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"WWI: 1918, The Year of Decision",160,0,0,0
By autumn 1917 Ludendorff's tactical experts had created a new offensive doctrine - an 'attack in depth' to parallel its successful 'defence in depth' - and over the following winter the Germans intensively reorganized and retrained a small group of elite divisions in these new tactics.
Approximately forty 'storm troop' divisions received new equipment, the best NCOs and officers, and a solid dose of training in new concepts. Significantly, all officers, including division commanders, went through the training schools to provide a thorough understanding of the doctrine at all levels.
The new approach emphasized delegation of authority all the way down to NCOs and reintroduced manoeuvre on the battlefield, but manoeuvre that remained closely tied and co-ordinated with firepower.
Moreover, the new doctrine demanded that German troops gain and maintain the initiative by exploiting breaks in the enemy's line; they must drive as quickly and ruthlessly as possible into rear areas. Tempo was key.
Nevertheless, considerable weaknesses undermined the German position. Outside elite storm troop units, the remainder of the army lacked the equipment, human material, and training to conduct the new form of war. Moreover, the concentration of better NCOs and officers in the storm troops ensured that other units declined precipitously in combat potential.
Ludendorff would have to win the war with his few elite divisions before the Americans arrived; if not, the rest of the army could not hold out for long. Finally, while the Germans had admirably thought through the tactical problems of the battlefield, they had little conception of how tactical successes might translate into victory.
As Ludendorff replied to Crown Prince Rupprecht, when the latter asked about the operational goals for the spring offensive: 'I object to the word ''operation''. We will punch a hole into [their line]. For the rest we shall see.' Ludendorff decided to aim the first great blow against Gough's Fifth Army and Plumer's Third Army.
Over the winter of 1917-18 Haig also announced a policy of defence in depth but his headquarters proved incapable of promulgating a consistent doctrine throughout the British Expeditionary Force.
In most British defensive positions, infantry still lay in forward positions within range of enemy artillery fire; co-ordination between artillery and infantry remained lackadaisical; and few officers had the training to operate independently once the command structure broke down.
Haig and his staff, however, were oblivious to such weaknesses. On 2 March, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force recorded in his diary:
I . . . told the army commanders that I was very pleased at all I had seen in the fronts of the three armies. Plans were sound and much work had already been done. I was only afraid that the enemy would find our front so very strong that he will hesitate to commit his army to the attack with the almost certainty of losing very heavily.
At 5 am on 21 March 1918 the German offensive began; 6,473 howitzers opened up on a 40-mile front with a bombardment that saturated every trench, battery position, and supply dump. At 9.35 am, 3,500 trench mortars added their voice to the bombardment; 5 minutes later, thirty-two divisions advanced; thirty-nine divisions stood in reserve.
The Germans launched over a million men in the 'Michael' offensive. Almost immediately the British defences unraveled. By the second day, German attacks had shattered Gough's Fifth Army, although in the north Plumer's forces held more effectively in an area where the Germans aimed to achieve major gains.
At this point, Ludendorff threw away his last chance to win the war. Despite the fact that the advance in the south was threatening to split the British and French apart, he decided to reinforce the northern drive that had achieved little.
There were also upsetting incidents during the German advance: even the highly disciplined storm troops displayed a propensity to loot Allied supply dumps in their path. Even among the best, the bonds of discipline were loosening.
For a time Haig prepared to fall back on the Channel and cut his links with the French, but two crucial things happened. First, PΘtain intervened admirably to rush reinforcements from the south; second, the Allied governments, confronting defeat, established a supreme command to control and co-ordinate the overall effort.
Ferdinand Foch, a brilliant military teacher and leader, became commander-in-chief of all Allied forces. Within a week his troops had halted the offensive.
However impressive their advance, the Germans were the real losers from 'Michael': the new tactics were not cheap, for the attackers suffered heavy casualties: moreover, the Germans gained nothing of strategic or operational significance. Finally, the new lines established after the offensive ended proved harder to defend and required more troops.
Nevertheless, Ludendorff next turned his attention to the northern portion of the British line. He had intended to attack there all along, but because of heavy losses had only eleven divisions available. Again the Germans achieved an impressive tactical success that led nowhere.
Helped by the collapse of some Portuguese units, the storm troopers surged forward; but they lacked the ability to exploit breakthroughs on the operational level, while Haig had sufficient reserves in the area, and after heavy losses the advance stopped short of significant gains.
With Allied reserves concentrated in the north, Ludendorff now decided to attack the French on the Aisne. By the end of May, he had concentrated forty-four divisions along the Chemin des Dames.
Ironically, three of the British divisions badly mauled in March had arrived in the area for rest and refit. PΘtain ordered French commanders to prepare defences in depth, but General Duchesne, First Army commander, disobeyed and so even the British, who knew better, had to pack the front line trenches with infantry.
On 27 May a massive bombardment by 4,000 guns began, with liberal dosages of gas shells intermingled with high explosive. Three hours later German infantry went over the top.
The Allied line collapsed and in one day the German Seventh Army crossed two - in some places three - rivers and created a salient with a base of 25 miles and extending 12 miles into Allied lines. The attackers destroyed four divisions holding the line and another four moving up, and their advance continued unabated the next day.
Ludendorff had only intended the attack on the Chemin des Dames to pull Allied reserves from the north before a final assault in Flanders. However, success went to his head and he gave the commanders carte blanche, and rushed in reserves to continue the advance despite the lack of a discernible goal.
Nevertheless, on the afternoon of 30 May 1918, the Germans reached the Marne, less than 40 miles from Paris. National panic occurred in \JFrance\j as the government again prepared to decamp to \JBordeaux\j.
PΘtain, however, refused to panic. Within a day of the start of the battle, he had sixteen divisions moving towards the Marne. He made clear to subordinates and politicians that Anglo-French forces had only to hold for a few more months before the flood of Americans arrived and, indeed, the United States now began to provide substantial aid to their hard-pressed allies.
At ChΓteau-Thierry on 4 June, US troops gave a good account of themselves and managed, with French support, to halt the German advance. While the Americans proved tactically inept, their enthusiasm and vigour provided a crucial uplift to French morale.
Meanwhile, the Germans prepared to launch their fourth offensive. This time they targeted the French to iron out the gap between the salients formed by the spring offensives, but preparations were so badly managed that their opponents had plenty of warning.
French commanders in this sector still packed their front line trenches with infantry, where the artillery bombardment could butcher many of them; but at least they were prepared. German casualties were again high with few gains.
It was a battered and weary German army that now prepared for its last great offensive of the war. Out of ideas and almost out of manpower. Ludendorff aimed his last blow at Rheims. He still believed that he could launch a great blow to break the British; nevertheless, for purposes of morale, he code-named his coming strike \IFriedensturm\i - peace offensive.
Forewarned again, the Allies finally prepared a defence in depth and Foch provided eleven divisions as reinforcement. The last German assault proved even more disastrous to the attackers than the Nivelle spring offensive of 1917 had been to the French.
The Germans barely got a foothold in the front line trenches, although suffering extraordinarily high casualties, and German morale hit rock bottom. Since launching 'Michael' one million German soldiers had been killed or wounded, the storm troop divisions suffering particularly heavily; and, after four years of slaughter, these losses proved irreplaceable.
Morale fell so low that more than half a million German troops deserted. Ludendorff's incessant attacks had ruined the army and brought it to the breaking point, while Allied strength was on a rapid upswing with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The French attacked first. On 18 July their Tenth Army struck the western side of the Marne salient. Within the first hours the attack threatened Soissons, on which German forces in the salient depended for their supplies.
In the end, the Germans escaped, but they had suffered their first significant defeat of 1918. Foch now ordered his subordinates to launch a series of attacks to keep constant pressure on the exhausted Germans. The next blow fell in the north.
On 8 August 1918 Imperial troops, Australians and Canadians, supported by large numbers of British tanks, struck an unprepared opponent near \JAmiens\j. British artillery suppressed enemy artillery, while tanks covered the infantry crossing the killing zone.
Six German divisions collapsed - in fact, their collapse was so complete that retreating troops attempted to prevent reserves from restoring the front. British armoured cars got into German rear areas and wrecked reserves' preparations to counter-attack.
More than two-thirds of German losses were POWs - a dangerous sign. Ludendorff admitted after the war that 8 August was the 'black day of the war for the German army'.
This stunning British success came with minimal casualties. The tanks were a war winner and, although there were still relatively few, the British could nevertheless have launched at least one and probably two more attacks utilizing the tank force as the linchpin: but the senior leadership of the British Expeditionary Force failed to recognize the potential of the weapon.
Instead, Haig used tanks in small packets and relied as usual on a combination of artillery and infantry for succeeding offensive operations. Nevertheless, by September the British Expeditionary Force had broken the main German defences in the west, the Siegfried Line, pushed the enemy away from the Belgian coast and almost recaptured Brussels.
But they achieved these successes at great cost: ironically, British casualties from August to November 1918 exceeded those suffered at Passchendaele the year before, although the gains were of course on an entirely different level.
As the British drove the Germans back, the French launched carefully controlled assaults in the centre that battered their adversaries, but caused relatively few casualties to the attackers. The first major American offensive came against the Saint-Mihiel salient, southeast of \JVerdun\j. US preparations were so inept that the Germans believed that it was all a deception effort; nevertheless they were withdrawing in order to shorten their lines at the moment the Americans struck, supported by a force of over 1,000 planes.
The salient was recaptured. After Saint-Mihiel, the growing US forces moved against more forbidding enemy positions in the Meuse-Argonne sector, where they ran into formidable opposition: the blood-letting, exacerbated by inadequacies in training, was terrible - albeit no worse than the experience of their Allies earlier in the war.
On the Western Front, defeat stalked the Germans. Virtually nothing remained of the storm troops; defensive divisions fell to 20 per cent of their table of organization; only the machine gunners put up sustained resistance. But the situation in the west was by now the least of German worries.
Famine stalked the homeland, while strikes and worker unrest seriously jeopardized industrial production. In September and October \JGermany\j's allies, \JBulgaria\j and Turkey, exhausted by four years of war, made peace; by November Allied troops from Salonika had reached the Hungarian plain; while Italian and British troops crossed the Piave and moved on \JAustria\j, which signed an armistice on 3 November.
A desperate Ludendorff asked the politicians to secure a cease-fire in order to stabilize the deteriorating military situation, but it was too late; \JGermany\j had no cards left to play. The appointment of a liberal chancellor, Prince Max of \JBaden\j, could not soften Allied demands that \JGermany\j abandon the struggle, and the high command's confession that the war was lost unleashed revolution at home.
The navy added to the \JReich\j's troubles by deciding to take the High Seas Fleet into the North Sea for a 'death ride' to maintain its honour. The enlisted men, however, brutalized by four years of bad treatment and wretched food, had no intention of dying for the navy's honour.
They raised the red flag, and revolution, with the collapse of \JBismarck\j's empire, followed. The emperor abdicated and, choosing dishonour over death, fled to Holland; Ludendorff, disguised by a fake beard, fled to Sweden. Hostilities ceased on the Western Front on 11 November 1918.
\BThe War At Home\b
The war's conduct at political and strategic levels left much to be desired. If Europe's generals had difficulty in adapting to the challenges of war, politicians proved little better. The French government fled Paris for \JBordeaux\j at the German approach in 1914, and remained there for much of the next year.
Their pusillanimity hardly placed them in a position to challenge Joffre's strategy. In Britain, Prime Minister Asquith confronted crisis in 1915 due to the difficulties at \JGallipoli\j - Churchill fell from power, while the Conservatives joined the government to form a coalition - but national government did not alter the \Jlaissez-faire\j approach.
Only severe national dissatisfaction combined with the escalation of the war brought change in Britain: in December 1916 David Lloyd George executed a palace coup and replaced Asquith, but in the process destroyed his own party and undermined the government's ability to control Haig.
In \JFrance\j the army's collapse in 1917 and a weak government finally brought the ferocious Clemenceau to power. In part these political difficulties reflected the pressures placed on societies by the war as well as the tension between generals and civilian leaders.
The Germans selected a different path. Instead of placing direction of the war under a strong political leader, they turned it over to the generals. The rise of Hindenburg and Ludendorff to virtual dictatorship elevated military expediency in every case above political wisdom.
The declaration of war on the United States offered the most egregious example of the deficiencies of military rule. But the so-called Hindenburg plan, with its crippling demands on German industry, wrecked a tenuous national unity and eventually the economy.
From beginning to end, the German military doubled its bets with no sense of the relationship between means and ends. They aimed at \IWeltmacht oder Niedergang\i - world power or defeat - and eventually got the latter.
In the east, the two great autocratic empires, Austria-Hungary and \JRussia\j, adapted least successfully. Tsarist \JRussia\j extended its people to the breaking point by the amateur decisions of its rulers, until military collapse brought down the edifice of civil government and turned the nation over to radical revolutionaries who soon made many Russians long for the ineptitudes of the former regime.
The Austrians muddled through the war to the end, undoubtedly surprising themselves as well as their opponents, but their multi-national state then splintered and the fragments still plague the world in places like Bosnia.
The human cost of the war is almost unimaginable to those living at the end of the twentieth century. Over 70 million men were mobilized, over nine million of whom died in service, the great majority of them still in their teens and twenties.
Perhaps 700,000 British soldiers perished; the Dominions lost another 250,000. The Italians lost over 500,000 men, \JAustria\j 1.1 million. \JFrance\j 1.3 million, and \JGermany\j 2 million. The impact of these losses was unequal.
Almost half of \JAustralia\j's eligible men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five volunteered to fight in the war, of whom over one-third were wounded or maimed and almost one-sixth were killed. Almost 40 per cent of all Serbs who served were killed, as were about 30 per cent of all Turks and 25 per cent of all Romanians and Bulgarians.
France, \JRussia\j, Britain and her Dominions. Austria-Hungary and \JGermany\j all lost between 11 and 17 per cent of their soldiers, sailors and airmen. Only United States forces could boast a death rate of under 5 per cent.
In order to fight a war of such duration and intensity, the combatants had to mobilize not only manpower, but also economic resources and financial strength to an extent unprecedented in the history of war.
With so many men at the front, nations brought women into the factories and the workplace to an extent previously unseen, and that in turn produced massive social changes throughout Europe in everything from morals to the position of women in society.
The granting of women's suffrage in Britain and the United States was but one small indication of the social changes occasioned by the conflict.
But the war's greatest impact concerned the death of the belief in progress that had marked western civilization before June 1914. Nothing indicated this collapse in Europe's morale more clearly than the triumph of radical ideologies - poisons of both left and right - in the post-war world.
Quite literally, the war led Europe's intellectual elites into a desperate search for simple, clear answers in the grim shadows left by war. Perhaps poetry best suggests the journey that Europe travelled. In 1915, Rupert Brooke, a young British poet, soon to die, penned the following lines:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust conceal'd
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air.
Wash'd by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Three years later Siegfried Sassoon, another British officer, penned a very different poem about the Western Front:
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glowering sun
Smouldering through pouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in the mud.
O Jesu, make it stop!
The journey that western civilization had travelled over those three years was indeed terrifying. It is not yet over.
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"WWI: Mobilizing Industry",161,0,0,0
The failure of the offensives in 1914 resulted in a military stalemate that only sustained attrition could break. Thus the war came to turn, as had the American Civil War, on industrial power and on access to raw materials and the world economy.
The Germans possessed an advantage at the beginning in the military potential of their industry, but the Allied blockade denied them access to world markets.
As the fighting increased in intensity, the battlefields required ever greater amounts of weapons and the ammunition to supply the guns, not to mention food, clothing, barbed wire, and soldiers. But the battle fronts caused a steady drain on national manpower at a time when requirements for agricultural and military production demanded increasing numbers of workers.
As a result, both sides resorted to the widespread use of women in factories and in professions which would never have considered such employment before the war. By 1918 60 per cent of the workers in British munitions factories consisted of women and virtually every sector in the economies of the democracies as well as the autocracies had come under some form of government control.
In the long run the Allied blockade exercised its greatest influence by putting the American economy at the disposal of the Allies and limiting the Germans to the resources of Central Europe alone.
American loans and then entrance into the war furthered that access; German efforts under Ludendorff at the end of 1916 to increase German war production drastically, by contrast, eventually wrecked the economy and contributed to the collapse in 1918. In the end, to paraphrase Napoleon, God was on the side of the bigger industry.
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"WWI: The War at Sea, 1914-1918",162,0,0,0
The opposing navies entered the war with the belief that a massive naval battle would determine the command of the seas. The German High Seas Fleet expected the Royal Navy to establish a close blockade in the \JHeligoland\j Bight, where mines, submarines, and \Jtorpedo\j boats could inflict heavy casualties; then the German battle fleet would sortie and destroy the remnants. But the British failed to establish a close blockade.
Instead, the Grand Fleet moved to Scapa Flow in the Orkneys and from that base maintained a distant blockade. Smaller units of the Allied navies closed the Channel. In effect, this excluded \JGermany\j from world commerce and, as the war continued, the British imposed more stringent limitations on neutral trade.
Meanwhile, in the war's first months the Royal Navy cleaned up the fragments of the German navy on foreign station and swept the seas of enemy commerce.
This depressing situation led the Germans to undertake a series of naval raids on the east coast of England. However, by late 1914 the Royal Navy was able to read much of their opponents' ciphered signal traffic and in January 1915 the British battlecruisers caught German raiders at the battle of Dogger Bank.
Through a series of mistakes the British allowed the enemy's main force to escape, but they did sink the battlecruiser \IBlⁿu\ucher.\i
In May 1916, the Germans again put to sea, this time in full force. Admiral Reinhard Scheer brought out the High Seas Fleet, including a squadron of pre-dreadnought battleships which slowed the rest. He hoped to catch a portion of the Royal Navy, destroy what he found, and return to safety before the main British forces came up.
However, since the British were still reading German signals, they sortied while the High Seas Fleet was making steam. The German scouting force consisted of five battlecruisers under Admiral Hipper; Scheer had sixteen dreadnoughts and six pre-dreadnoughts.
The British had overwhelming superiority: Sir David Beatty, commander of the scouting forces, had six battlecruisers and four super-dreadnoughts, while the main fleet under Sir John Jellicoe consisted of twenty-four battleships and three battlecruisers.
The screening forces encountered each other first on 31 May. Hipper turned south towards the High Seas Fleet, and Beatty pursued. A running fight ensued in which the British battlecruiser \IIndefatigable\i blew up, followed by the \IQueen Mary.\i
Shortly thereafter, the High Seas Fleet appeared on the horizon. Beatty turned back north on a course straight toward \JNorway\j. Instead of recognizing that the British battlecruisers were moving towards a rendezvous with another force - the only explanation for Beatty's course - the Germans pursued.
At approximately 6 pm, the Germans sighted the Grand Fleet and, at precisely the right moment, Jellicoe deployed his battle squadrons from column into line. A terrifying weight of shells fell on the High Seas Fleet and only the desperate expedient of turning his entire battle line at the same time saved Scheer from destruction.
The Germans misread the situation and turned back in an attempt to reach their bases, and an hour later once more ran into the massed firepower of the British fleet. Scheer again ordered his ships to flee west, this time in greater confusion.
As evening fell, the British had the prospect of repeating the 'Glorious First of June' (see \JNelson's Naval Tactics\j): they lay between the Germans and their bases, had battered the enemy severely, and had excellent intelligence. But the British failed to utilize their advantages.
The Admiralty did not pass its information to Jellicoe and the captains of the Grand Fleet displayed little initiative - in some cases British battleships allowed German vessels to sail right past them. On the next morning the Grand Fleet rode alone in the North Sea.
In percentage terms, the tonnages lost by both fleets were roughly equal, while two German battlecruisers crept back into Kiel with their forward decks awash; what mattered was that the British maintained control over the North Sea.
But if the German High Seas Fleet achieved little, German submarines posed a lethal threat. In November 1914, in response to the British blockade of the Central Powers, Tirpitz announced a submarine blockade of Britain even though the navy had only twenty-nine U-boats in service. A year later that number had reached fifty-four, but due to \Jengineering\j difficulties the Germans averaged only 1.3 U-boats on station for every one in dock.
Even more astonishingly, \JGermany\j undertook its submarine campaign as if the military and economic potential of the United States counted for nothing. In spring 1915 the German consul announced on the front page of the \INew York Times\i that his country was going to attack and sink the Cunard liner \ILusitania\i as it sailed to Britain; it did, killing 1,198 passengers.
That action almost brought the United States into the war despite the isolationism of much of the country. Only president Woodrow Wilson's perseverance cooled the crisis until the Kaiser, at least, had the sense to recognize that it was not in the \JReich\j's interest to add the United States to \JGermany\j's enemies and announced an end to unrestricted submarine warfare.
Nevertheless, for the remainder of 1915 and 1916 the German naval leadership waged an intense campaign to resume such attacks and, with no thought to US potential, the army's leaders lent their support. At the beginning of 1917 Hindenburg and Ludendorff forced the issue, and the Kaiser caved in.
As Ludendorff remarked: 'The United States does not bother me. . . in the least; I look upon a declaration of war by the United States with indifference!' \JGermany\j resumed unrestricted submarine attacks in February 1917 and the United States declared war in April.
Ironically, the Germans had done little to prepare their navy for the campaign; its construction programme continued to favour capital ships. Nevertheless, U-boats represented a greater threat in 1917 than two years earlier.
The British Admiralty remained adamantly opposed to convoys to protect Allied commerce until, in spring 1917, losses of merchant vessels began to threaten Britain's economic survival and the prime minister, David Lloyd George, demanded that the Royal Navy introduce convoys.
In April 1917 U-boats sank 841,118 tons of Allied merchant shipping; with the introduction of convoys that total fell to 365,000 tons in July and to 200,000 tons in September.
By now the threat had returned to manageable levels. Of the great troop convoys that carried a quarter of a million American soldiers to Europe each and every month in the summer of 1918, the Germans hardly damaged a ship.
#
"WWI: Battlefield Tactics",163,0,0,0
The World War I battlefield required that the opposing sides develop a number of complex, interwoven tactical schemes before their troops could successfully break through the enemy's defensive positions.
The foremost requirement was to develop artillery tactics that could hit targets precisely without 'pre-registration', since any registration fire would only serve to alert the enemy that a major offensive was imminent.
Such capabilities needed detailed aerial photography, a thorough knowledge of artillery ballistics, an ability to forecast reliably the impact of weather conditions on the flight of shells, and an accurate estimate of the nature of the enemy's defensive system.
At the same time that the armies were experimenting with artillery tactics they also had to develop decentralized infantry tactics that would allow junior officers and non-commissioned officers to make decisions on the battlefield on their own authority.
This was not an easy process, particularly given the strongly hierarchical nature of military organizations. Moreover, the opponents developed increasingly sophisticated weapons that often increased the firepower of the infantry and the artillery and hence made the defence even stronger.
Thus tactics underwent radical changes throughout the war as the opposing sides attempted to gain an advantage over their opponents. The development of new offensive tactics could be negated by a defence in depth, increasingly dense the deeper one advanced into the system, which inflicted heavy losses on the attacker.
This happened to the French during their ill-fated offensive in April 1917. By 1918 the Germans had developed offensive tactics that finally allowed them to break the deadlock on the Western Front - but at such catastrophic costs in casualties that military collapse soon followed.
#
"World in Conflict 1919-41",164,0,0,0
\BChapter 16 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
#
"Post WWI: The World in Conflict",165,0,0,0
In early 1919 the victorious leaders met at Versailles to settle the enormous issues raised by \JGermany\j's defeat, the collapse of Austria-Hungary, \JRussia\j, and Turkey, and the spectre of left-wing revolution. In retrospect, they had little chance of constructing a lasting peace, for the fashion in which the conflict had ended ensured the inevitability of another great struggle.
Allied troops remained outside German territory at the signing of the armistice, while \JGermany\j still ranked as the most powerful European nation in terms of both economic and political potential.
Messianic Marxists had seized power in \JRussia\j; their \Jideology\j removed that nation from European discourse for the next seventy years. Finally, in eastern Europe, a plethora of weak states emerged to replace the great empires. The success of the settlement therefore depended on the willingness of the western democracies to defend its provisions. But the United States withdrew from world affairs after 1920, and Britain displayed a decreasing willingness to involve itself in Europe.
This left \JFrance\j to contain a \JGermany\j furious at having to abide by the treaty's humiliating provisions; \JFrance\j responded by constructing a massive fortified barrier along its eastern frontier, the Maginot Line.
By the early 1920s many Germans believed that their defeat in 1918 had resulted from political sabotage by Jews and communists within the \JReich\j, while the surrender of territory to \JPoland\j, Denmark, and \JBelgium\j, the requirement to pay huge \Jreparations\j, as well as the confiscation of both the overseas empire and the navy, exacerbated a national mood of outrage.
The military and political elite responsible for defeat therefore settled the blame for their own errors on the shoulders of the new Weimar Republic, which had accepted the peace terms imposed by the victors.
Meanwhile, French pressure increased the weakness of the new democracy: in 1923, with \JGermany\j lagging behind in its reparation payments, French troops occupied the Ruhr. The German leaders replied by committing economic suicide; deliberate inflationary policies destroyed the savings of the middle class as well as the trust on which the republic depended for its stability.
\BPreparing For The Next War\b
After 1923, however, Europe enjoyed an illusory stability dependent on loans from an unreliable United States, and the major powers reduced their armaments. But everything depended on mutual good will and the collapse of the Wall Street stock market in October 1929 heralded grimmer times.
American banks called in their loans, causing the collapse of the Central European economy and, as unemployment reached tens of millions, the Weimar Republic dissolved. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of \JGermany\j; he joined Benito Mussolini in \JItaly\j. Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, and militarists in \JTokyo\j in a common desire to overturn the world order.
Meanwhile Europe's military grappled with the lessons of the Great War. They confronted rapidly changing technology in an era of reduced budgets, as well as the fact that the skies now represented as distinct an arena for operations as the land and sea.
The key decisions that determined the course of ground conflict in World War II occurred in the 1920s. The crucial element in German innovation was the appointment of General Hans von Seeckt as commander-in-chief of the army.
Confronted with the Allied demand for a reduction of the German army to 100,000 men and 4,000 officers, Seeckt placed the general staff in control of the army and its officer corps. Largely as a result of this, the \IReichswehr\i (as the new German army was known) became the only European force to undertake a ruthless, clear-headed analysis of recent military experience.
Historians like to argue that generals always prepare to refight the last war. In fact, they rarely do; but \JGermany\j between the wars offers the exception. Seeckt established no less than fifty-seven committees to re-examine World War I, with general staff officers chairing committees composed largely of the men who had developed the offensive and defensive doctrines that proved so effective in 1917 and 1918.
Consequently, the German army developed a coherent picture of the 1918 battlefield and by 1924 had published a doctrinal manual - \IDie Truppenfⁿhrung\i (Troop Leadership) - based upon a thorough and complete assessment of the last war.
On this solid foundation, the Germans innovated during the interwar period: their doctrine emphasized flexibility, initiative at all levels, exploitation, and leadership from the front. This approach was common to German combat officers whatever their branch.
As a result, those who developed the armoured force in the 1930s built on a coherent operational and tactical framework and created a conception of armoured warfare that represented a crucial evolutionary development in military capabilities.
In 1933 Hitler initiated a massive rearmament programme. At this stage, however, he did not interfere with the tactical or operational decisions of his army commanders: the crucial players in rearming \JGermany\j remained the army's commander-in-chief. Werner von Fritsch, and the chief of the general staff, Ludwig Beck.
Looking at \JGermany\j's strategic situation in 1933 both came to the conclusion that the \JReich\j required an army consisting largely of infantry divisions, for it lacked the resources, technology, and expertise to gamble on the creation of an all mechanized or motorized force.
Nevertheless, the Germans did conduct armoured experiments with enthusiasm. They already possessed two solid assets - a coherent doctrine and knowledge of British experiments in the late 1920s and early 1930s - and as early as 1934 Beck conducted general staff exercises to examine the potential of panzer corps and armies, well before authorization of such formations.
The German army boasted three panzer divisions in 1935, six by 1939, and ten by 1940. These developments took place within a framework in which the Germans thoroughly examined the lessons of peacetime exercises as well as combat experience.
For the proposed invasion of \JCzechoslovakia\j in 1938, panzer forces were to operate only as divisions; but in \JPoland\j and \JFrance\j they functioned as corps and finally in 1941 as panzer groups, armies in everything but name.
Development of army doctrine in the rest of Europe was not so smooth. The British failed to examine the lessons of World War I until 1932 and then, when presented with a highly critical document, the chief of the imperial general staff, Montgomery-Massingberd, buried the findings.
Nevertheless, there was considerable intellectual ferment in the British officer corps, with a group of innovative commanders pushing for development of armoured warfare. Two pundits, J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddell Hart, provided intellectual justification for new approaches as well as pressure for reform, and they received a sympathetic hearing from many officers.
Even more important, one chief of the imperial general staff, Lord Milne, supported experimentation in mechanized warfare: at a time of financial constraints, he expended scarce resources that made extensive experiments possible.
But in 1934 British advances ran into a dead end. Two things militated against a coherent programme of innovation. First, politicians as well as public opinion resolutely opposed the commitment of British forces to the continent: as a result, up to 1939, British governments provided minimal funding to the army.
Second, most officers remained enamoured of traditional regimental soldiering; they regarded officership as a comfortable position rather than as a profession demanding serious study, and regimental tradition combined with the narrow perspectives of the various combat branches to prevent the development of coherent doctrine.
Consequently, sports, pig sticking, and fox hunting remained more important to most regimental officers than serious study in preparing for war.
The French devoted some study to the last war, but over their efforts hung the grim experiences of 1914-17, which pushed their planners towards a carefully controlled approach to battle.
Termed the 'methodical battle', the doctrine evolved by a small group in the \I╔cole supΘrieur de guerre\i (the French war college) seemed to offer an escape from the terrifying casualties of the last war; but it drew upon the experience of only a few carefully selected battles in 1918.
Worse still, the army's senior commanders, led by Maurice Gamelin, refused to countenance dissent or new ideas. In the end the French high command proved incapable of imagining or preparing for possibilities beyond its own narrow conceptions.
The case of the Soviet army was perhaps the most tragic. In the 1920s and 1930s - well before any significant threat existed - the regime lavished production from its ruthless programme of industrialization on Soviet military forces.
By the mid-1930s the Red Army had evolved into two distinct forces: a mass army of peasants, the traditional form of Russian military power, and an emerging mechanized force, well-equipped and partially trained to execute wide-ranging movement. But in May 1937 Stalin began to purge the Soviet military.
Those who supported innovation and change went before NKVD (Stalin's secret police) firing squads, and tens of thousands of officers were, in the euphemism of the time, 'liquidated'.
\BAir And Sea Power\b
By the end of World War I, \Jaircraft\j had appeared in every role that delineates air war today: close air support, reconnaissance, interdiction, air defence, air superiority, and strategic bombing.
Ironically, postwar air power prophets displayed little interest in the experiences of the past; rather, they centred their arguments on its future potential. Two schools emerged.
In Europe, Italian general Giulio Douhet, and the first postwar commander of the RAF, Lord Trenchard, argued that the strategic bombing of population centres would win the next war.
Civilian centres, they believed, were particularly vulnerable: aerial bombardment would soon result in mass rioting, collapse of civil authority, and revolution.
Both argued that other forms of air power represented a misuse of its potential. They also believed that armies and navies would prove irrelevant to the conduct of war in the future.
Before World War II, Douhet exercised little influence outside \JItaly\j; Trenchard, however, played a crucial role in forming the RAF and provided that service with a doctrinal justification that does much to explain Arthur Harris's intransigent leadership of Bomber Command during World War II - although in fairness, Trenchard also cultivated a number of officers who were not fanatical exponents of his views (such as Hugh Dowding and Arthur Tedder).
Another approach, however, evolved in the United States, where Congress would not have permitted the development of a bomber force whose primary target was civilian population centres. The Air Corps Tactical School evolved a concept of air power that aimed at disabling the enemy's economic system.
By targeting and destroying crucial industries such as electric power or ball bearings, it was argued, aerial bombardment could bring its enemy's industrial effort to a halt. The theory depended on bombers flying great distances through enemy air defences without suffering serious losses, as well as the ability to hit targets with pinpoint accuracy.
All exponents of air power assumed that the bomber would always get through, so that air defence did not represent a viable alternative. However, the Chamberlain government in the late 1930s forced the RAF to devote significant resources to creating a defensive system based on radar and fighter \Jaircraft\j.
The officer in charge of developing Fighter Command was Hugh Dowding, who possessed a clear understanding of the technology and the organizational requirements to make an air defence system work.
In \JGermany\j the \JLuftwaffe\j recognized early on that, however well it might perform, the fate of the army would prove decisive for national survival. Consequently, it developed a broadly based doctrine that emphasized co-operation with other services. But the Germans were also interested in strategic bombing.
There was nothing inimical in Nazi \Jideology\j to attacks on an enemy's population or economy - indeed, the Nazis believed that their values would provide a substantial edge in a conflict involving strategic bombing by assisting the German population to withstand the pressures of such attacks better than any other nation.
Significantly, they developed sophisticated navigation and blind bombing devices to identify targets under night-time or bad weather conditions - capabilities the RAF did not possess until 1942 - and only technological difficulties in engine development and mistakes in the He 177 programme prevented the Nazis from producing an effective strategic bomber.
\BNavies\b
Navies paid the least attention to the lessons of World War 1. The Royal Navy spent the interwar years preparing for a replay of Jutland.
Despite the fact that U-boats had come perilously close to winning the last war, the British devoted little time and fewer resources to countering the submarine menace: the appearance of Sonar ('Asdic' in the Royal Navy), which used sound waves to identify and track submarines, misled British admirals into believing that U-Boats no longer represented a significant threat.
The German navy differed little from its rival. German admirals believed British claims to have mastered the submarine, and when rearmament began they set out to create a great battle fleet and undertook minimal steps to build up their submarine force for an assault on North Atlantic trade.
The Japanese and the Americans were more innovative. Both centred their preparations on the Pacific and both thought in terms of a climactic battle between their fleets. While the emphasis in both navies centred on battleships, they also developed fleet carriers and naval \Jaircraft\j to extend the fleet's hitting range.
While \Jbattleship\j admirals still ruled in the Pacific, a new generation of naval airmen, some promoted to admiral, had already gained positions of influence by 1941. They would take naval operations in radical new directions on the outbreak of the Pacific war.
#
"WWII: The Road to War",166,0,0,0
Hitler's appointment as German chancellor on 30 January 1933 set in motion forces that resulted in a new world war.
Hitler had a coherent and terrifying \Jideology\j that identified the enemies of civilization in terms of race (unlike Marxists who identified their enemies in terms of class) and believed that Germans formed the foremost \JAryan\j race, the creator of the world's greatest civilizations.
Germany, Hitler argued, must either seize the territory and resources required for its world-historical mission or sink into insignificance. To the east the spaces of \JRussia\j and the \JUkraine\j beckoned; there \JGermany\j would realize its destiny by dispossessing the Slavic 'sub-humans'.
But above all, Germans, according to Hitler, must beware the insidious danger of Jews and their twin creations: \Jcapitalism\j and \Jcommunism\j.
Germany must eliminate Jews and their influence from Europe, if the \JAryan\j race were to realize its full potential. Hitler had no intention of restoring the 1914 frontier of \JGermany\j, but rather intended a fundamental restructuring of the entire continent.
He immediately proceeded to dismantle the Versailles settlement and not surprisingly, given his goals, began a massive programme of rearmament in 1933.
In 1935 he concluded a naval agreement with Britain that legitimized his efforts at rearmament and in 1936, despite army fears that \JFrance\j might act, ordered remilitarization of the Rhineland.
Europe, however, shifted its attention away from this provocative move. In 1935 Mussolini attacked \JEthiopia\j: under doses of mustard gas Ethiopian resistance collapsed and the country was annexed by \JItaly\j.
In 1936 a revolt by Spanish generals under Francisco Franco began a vicious three-year civil war and added another distraction. The European Left feared \JFascism\j as an internal political threat, a belief which the insurrection in \JSpain\j only exacerbated; but although British and French socialists vigorously supported the Spanish Republic, they consistently attacked defence spending by their own governments.
Meanwhile, in \JGermany\j, the heavy rearmament programmes strained the economy and occasioned tensions between Hitler and his advisers.
As a result, Hitler replaced his senior generals and ministers early in 1938 with individuals more amenable to risks, and within a month he invaded \JAustria\j. The British looked on; the French government resigned in protest.
The lack of international pressure convinced Hitler that he could also destroy \JCzechoslovakia\j, now surrounded on three sides by the \JReich\j, and over the summer of 1938 he manufactured a crisis to destabilize the Czech Republic and indicated his intention to destroy it.
To the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, it was inconceivable that anyone would court another European conflict after the slaughter of World War I.
He therefore set out to appease Hitler - a policy which, ironically, involved Britain more and more deeply in European affairs - and made three personal trips to \JGermany\j in September 1938.
On Chamberlain's last visit, he, Hitler, Mussolini, and the French premier, Edouard Daladier, dismembered \JCzechoslovakia\j to \JGermany\j's advantage: despite a generally favourable military situation, Britain surrendered \JFrance\j's most important eastern ally in return for promises of good behaviour from Hitler.
Chamberlain defended his policy towards \JCzechoslovakia\j on the basis that appeasement of \JGermany\j would work and that Britain's deficient defences - for which he held considerable responsibility - demanded a peaceful settlement.
But \JCzechoslovakia\j's surrender opened up the flood gates. Over the next six months, the British and French did little to repair their perilous position; the Germans, on the other hand, made major advances in their rearmament efforts while the economic and financial gains from \JAustria\j and \JCzechoslovakia\j aided their strategic position.
In March 1939 Hitler annexed the remains of \JCzechoslovakia\j. The \Jlightning\j German occupation of \JPrague\j finally awoke British leaders to the extent of the German threat, and under intense political pressure, Chamberlain attempted to isolate \JGermany\j by creating a diplomatic bloc based on the surviving smaller nations of eastern Europe.
Because he refused to recognize the inevitability of war, however, he failed to approach the Soviets. It was probably too late in any case; for by inclination Stalin favoured a deal with Hitler, and he now stood to gain far more from the Nazis than from the western Allies.
When Britain guaranteed \JPoland\j's independence in March 1939, Hitler was furious. As a result, he underestimated both the political pressures under which the British government now operated and Chamberlain's moral strength; he declared to his entourage: 'I saw my enemies at Munich and they are worms!'.
So German political and diplomatic pressure accompanied a massive military build-up on the Polish frontier until on 23 August Hitler and Stalin agreed to a non-aggression pact that made their nations partners in crime.
Germany would have its war against \JPoland\j, and possibly against the western powers, undisturbed by the threat or reality of Soviet intervention; in return, Stalin would gain eastern \JPoland\j, the Baltic states.
Finland, and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. Assured of Soviet \Jneutrality\j. Hitler took the plunge: on 1 September 1939 German troops invaded \JPoland\j. Two days later the unwilling British and French governments declared war on \JGermany\j.
#
"WWII: Germany's Easy War",167,0,0,0
German planning for the attack on \JPoland\j had begun in April 1939. The high command designated two army groups with a total of 1.5 million men to annihilate the Poles. Army Group North, under Fedor von Bock, would destroy enemy forces in the 'Polish Corridor' that separated the two parts of \JGermany\j; its armoured forces would then drive deep behind the Polish front while the main attack would come from Army Group South under Gerd von Rundstedt.
Containing three armies, it would strike into the heart of \JPoland\j to reach Warsaw as quickly as possible. The Poles had no clear idea where the main German blow would fall, so instead of defending their heartland they attempted to defend everything and deployed their army in loose formations all along their extensive frontiers.
In a matter of days, German panzer units had broken loose and were approaching Warsaw while, with a combination of interdiction strikes and attacks on the Polish capital, the \JLuftwaffe\j made the difficult Polish situation impossible.
Within a week the Germans had broken Polish resistance except in Warsaw and chopped the Polish army up into encircled pockets that had little choice but surrender. On 29 September, Stalin (whose forces had invaded just before the Polish collapse) and Hitler partitioned the country.
During the whirlwind campaign the Poles had lost 70,000 killed, 133,000 wounded, and 700,000 captured; the Germans only 11,000 dead, 30,000 wounded, and 3,400 missing.
On the surface, the victory over \JPoland\j appeared a stunning success. In less than a month, the Wehrmacht had crushed enemy resistance, and by every measurable factor the army had excelled.
However, the German army's higher leadership did not estimate the performance of its units as being equal to its standards. For the next several months the high command waged a furious row with Hitler, its leaders arguing that German troops were not ready for major offensive action against the West and that only a massive training programme could correct the deficiencies that had appeared in \JPoland\j.
Hitler, on the other hand, confronted an economic situation that placed the \JReich\j in a dangerous position. Not only did the Anglo-French blockade, imposed immediately after the declaration of war, drastically reduce imports, but \JGermany\j's oil position showed serious strain.
In fact, throughout the war \JGermany\j's synthetic oil factories, in combination with Romanian oil imports, barely kept up with the wartime demands of the economy and the military: the loss of either would threaten the \JReich\j's strategic stability.
In 1939 imports from \JRomania\j dried up and, as a result, \JGermany\j's oil reserves dropped dangerously low. Consequently, Hitler pushed his generals to launch an immediate offensive in the west before economic difficulties compromised \JGermany\j's ability to conduct the war, although in the end bad weather and Allied inaction allowed the Germans to delay their attack until spring.
\BSoviets Attack Finland\b
Meanwhile the Soviets, having occupied eastern \JPoland\j and the Baltic states according to plan, attacked \JFinland\j in November 1939; but their preparations were poor. Finnish workers did not rally to join the workers' and peasants' paradise, as Stalin expected, but fought furiously at the side of their middle-class brethren.
Eventually, although the Finns inflicted heavy casualties on the attackers, the Soviets brought sufficient power to break Finnish defences and force an armistice in March 1940; but the Winter War did serious damage to the reputation of the Red Army, which lost some 200,000 men against only 24,000 Finns - a factor that would figure in Hitler's calculations later on.
\BScandinavian Camapign\b
Worried by indications of an Allied move to aid the Finns and thereby block export of Swedish iron ore, essential to the German war economy, Hitler decided on a pre-emptive strike against Scandinavia. In April his forces attacked Denmark and \JNorway\j.
The former fell with hardly a shot. Further north, screened by their battle fleet and aided by \Jtreason\j and incompetence in the Norwegian government, the Germans seized the key Norwegian harbours; at the same time, paratroopers grabbed the major airfields.
Only in Oslo fjord did the Norwegians mount a successful defence, where their reservists sank the new heavy cruiser, \IBlⁿcher,\i and stalled the Germans long enough for the government to escape.
The Royal Navy's response was hesitant except at \JNarvik\j, where British warships surprised the Germans, sinking ten destroyers and isolating the mountain troops from reinforcement. Elsewhere the Allies moved too slowly.
In the short run, the Scandinavian campaign was a disaster, but it had two results that benefited the Allied cause. First, the political crisis occasioned by Allied reverses in \JNorway\j resulted in Chamberlain's fall from power.
On 10 May 1940 Winston Churchill became Britain's prime minister. Second, the campaign in \JNorway\j crippled the German navy. On 1 July 1940 the German navy had only one heavy cruiser and four destroyers - a force entirely insufficient to cover a cross-channel invasion.
#
"WWII: Fall of France",168,0,0,0
In early October 1939 Hitler ordered the army high command to draw up plans to seize the Netherlands, \JBelgium\j, Luxembourg, and northern \JFrance\j to the Somme.
While the Fⁿhrer and the army high command quarrelled about when and whether to launch 'Yellow' (the plan for a western offensive), Hitler, urged on by Army Group A's chief of staff, Erich von Manstein, pushed for redeployment of several panzer divisions to the Ardennes whence they could bypass the Maginot line and make a \Jlightning\j attack upon Allied defences along the river Meuse.
In February 1940 the chief of the general staff, Franz Halder, though still sceptical about an Ardennes drive, duly placed virtually all the German armour in this area. He and most senior officers also doubted whether mechanized forces alone could achieve a breakthrough on the Meuse.
As a result, infantry divisions were ordered to follow up the armoured units. But the panzer commanders retained the authority to act on their own: if they did reach the Meuse and cross it, they could then exploit their success.
The new plan envisaged the panzers driving to the Channel coast at Abbeville and trapping the French, British, and Belgian forces with their backs to the sea, while airborne and ground forces overwhelmed the Netherlands, the main army fell on \JBelgium\j, and a smaller force (with no armour) engaged the garrison of the Maginot Line.
The Allied conception for the campaign played directly into German hands. Gamelin, the French commander-in-chief, magnified Allied tactical weaknesses by relying on the Maginot line to hold the right and centre, and by shifting Seventh Army, his only reserves, to the far left of the Allied line to link up with the Dutch. He thus removed \JFrance\j's entire operational reserves from the board.
On 10 May 1940 the Germans moved. In the north paratroopers took the key bridges reaching into Holland, so that 9th Panzer Division could break into the heart of the country; airborne troops also attempted to seize the main airfield at the Hague and capture the Dutch government.
Although this \Icoup de main\i failed, the rest of the German plan succeeded. With Dutch defences crumbling, the Germans blasted Rotterdam, causing 3,000 civilian casualties, and threatened the Dutch with more such attacks.
The Dutch army, which had not fought since 1830, capitulated on 14 May. Meanwhile Bock's Army Group B, consisting of infantry formations, kept up a hammering advance against the Belgians. The seizure of the 'impregnable' Fort Eben Emael by glider-borne infantry added to the sense of bewilderment on the Allied side.
Nevertheless, the best units in the French army and the British Expeditionary Force rushed to the rescue: Bock's advance confirmed their assumption that the Germans would replay the Schlieffen plan (see \JWWI: Warplans of the Great Powers\j).
They did not. Unhindered by Allied \Jaircraft\j, nine panzer divisions in three corps advanced through the Ardennes. French and Belgian troops put up minimal resistance and by the evening of 12 May all three corps had reached the Meuse.
On the next morning, the northernmost attempted a crossing at Dinant. Seventh Panzer's rifle regiment, led by its commander, Erwin Rommel, established a foothold and, as division engineers bridged the river to get the tanks across, Rommel led his infantry with machine guns to fend off French tanks.
By evening, 7th Panzer's infantry regiment had suffered nearly 70 per cent casualties, but the tanks were over, and French defences crumbled. Rommel's success allowed the rest of the panzer corps to cross and exploit a collapsing enemy situation.
In the centre, the panzers failed to achieve a breakthrough and in the south, at Sedan, the force commanded by Heinz Guderian also ran into tenacious resistance.
Tenth Panzer Division only got a company across the Meuse with the loss of forty-eight out of fifty assault boats; 2nd Panzer Division failed to get across at all. But 1st Panzer Division's rifle regiment, aided by an infantry regiment, broke French defences and by early evening had gained the western heights overlooking the Meuse.
Over the next three days. Guderian expanded his bridgehead and rapidly thrust a knife into the Allied defensive positions. The race to the Channel was soon on. As the panzers reached deeper into French territory the German high command \I(Oberkommando der Wehrmacht)\i and the army high command \I(Oberkommando des Heeres)\i became deeply nervous.
Nevertheless, on the 17th Guderian subverted an order for only a 'reconnaissance in force' by turning off his radio as the tanks raced westward down the Somme valley and, on 20 May, reached Abbeville on the coast just as Bock's army took Brussels - all exactly according to plan.
The initial Allied response was at first lethargic but soon turned into panic and collapse. The French government sacked Gamelin, but his replacement, Maxime Weygand, arrived with the battle all but over.
For the Germans the success seemed too good to be true; as Guderian commented, the battle was 'almost a miracle'. As its troops captured the French ports, nagging doubts tugged at Hitler, the German high command, and the army high command: might not the panzers lose heavily among the numerous water obstacles of Flanders; might not the French recover when the battle turned to France?
Consequently, the German army high command halted the panzers after the capture of Boulogne on the 26th and the capitulation of \JBelgium\j on the 28th; senior generals deemed infantry and \JLuftwaffe\j sufficient to finish off the broken allied forces in the north.
At this point, however, with the German command structure in a jumble, the Royal Navy brought its skill into play to withdraw the British Expeditionary Force, and in skies obscured by smoke over \JDunkirk\j, the \JLuftwaffe\j ran into tenacious resistance from Spitfires flying from Britain.
By the end of operation 'Dynamo' on 3 June, Allied ships had brought out nearly 350,000 Allied troops - not enough to save \JFrance\j, but enough to allow Britain to fight on.
The rest of the campaign was a smooth ride for the Germans. After initial tenacious resistance, the French collapsed and the Germans flooded south. A few French wished to continue the struggle, but most were eager for peace.
Verdun's aged defender, Marshal PΘtain, emerged to sign an armistice with the victors on 22 June. Thus began the long, dark chapter of French collaboration with the Nazi conquerors.
#
"WWII: Battle of Britain",169,0,0,0
For most Germans, including Hitler, victory over \JFrance\j spelled the end of the war in the west. In euphoria, they eagerly awaited peace overtures from Britain, but the placatory days of appeasement had ended.
Despite opposition from some Chamberlain supporters, Churchill steeled the nation to stand; he calculated that the United States could not indefinitely remain aloof and that \JGermany\j and the Soviet Union would not long remain allies.
He received confirmation from President Franklin D. Roosevelt in June that the United States would provide weapons and economic support - for a price - and refused to countenance any negotiations with Hitler.
Not until the end of July did the Germans awake to the fact that Britain was still in the war. They then cobbled together an air offensive against the British Isles. If that did not break British will-power they proposed, as a last resort, a cross-channel invasion, operation 'Sealion'.
The latter never had the slightest chance of success: the German navy had virtually nothing left after \JNorway\j, and neither army nor navy had examined the problems involved in a major amphibious operation. The plans for 'Sealion' called for Rhine River barges to transport the army across the Channel; one can imagine their chances in such waters against British destroyers.
The \JLuftwaffe\j faced daunting problems in attacking the centres of British power. No one had ever undertaken a major air campaign and, to add to uncertainties. \JLuftwaffe\j intelligence proved wrong in almost every respect about Royal Air Force strengths and weaknesses.
Moreover, the \JLuftwaffe\j had suffered heavy casualties in \JFrance\j, while the surviving \Jaircraft\j and pilots had undergone great strain. By contrast, the British possessed an effective force of fighters, the first early warning system, based on radar, and a first-class leader in Sir Hugh Dowding.
Dowding deployed his forces to protect all of Britain, while also providing locations in the north where squadrons could refit. He aimed to fight a battle of attrition until autumn's bad weather brought relief. For the first time, the British also enjoyed an advantage they would possess for the rest of the war: the ability to decipher many of the top secret transmissions of the German high command.
Based on extensive radio interception capabilities, an intimate knowledge of how the main German encryption devices worked (provided by the Polish secret service), and a careful study of German radio procedures, the British built up an increasing ability to look into the enemy's conduct of the war.
They also proved capable of getting 'Ultra' messages (the intelligence based on this deciphering) out to commanders in the field without compromise.
The initial German air offensive drove the RAF back from the Channel, but provided the British with useful experience of \JLuftwaffe\j tactics and operations. On 13 August, the Germans began their duel with the RAF: attacks in the north failed with heavy losses, but in the south savage assaults rocked Fighter Command's bases and squadrons.
German losses proved devastating, however, and British resistance remained tenacious. In September, under great pressure to knock the British out before the weather broke, the Germans switched their attention to London, a decision that allowed Fighter Command time to recover. British fighters decimated a massive raid on 15 September so effectively that the \JLuftwaffe\j's daytime offensive ended.
The Germans continued bombing at night, however, and, with their blind bombing system, might have brought Britain to defeat during the Blitz had British scientific intelligence not discovered the system and devised countermeasures.
Thus ended the war's first strategic bombing offensive; Anglo-American air forces absorbed few of its lessons.
#
"WWII: War in the Balkans",170,0,0,0
On 10 June 1940 Benito Mussolini declared war on Britain and \JFrance\j. He entered the conflict with no clear strategic or operational conceptions, except that \JItaly\j must regain \JRome\j's ancient patrimony in the Mediterranean, and with a military establishment unprepared both intellectually and professionally for modern war.
Throughout the summer the Italians dithered, thwarted both by their own indecision and by prohibitions imposed by the Germans, until in September Mussolini forced Marshall Graziani in \JLibya\j to move against \JEgypt\j.
His forces reached Sidi Barrani where they entrenched themselves in a series of isolated defensive positions.
In the Balkans, also in September, Hitler moved to secure \JRomania\j and its oil by sending as military 'advisers' a panzer and a motorized infantry division, two flak regiments, and two fighter squadrons, without informing his Italian allies.
In retaliation, in October, Mussolini attacked \JGreece\j without informing Hitler. But the Italian army had just demobilized its reserves and there were only enough Italians in \JAlbania\j - the launching pad for the attack on \JGreece\j - to achieve a one-to-one ratio even before Greek mobilization.
Moreover, the ports of \JAlbania\j proved insufficient to support major military operations as well as the build-up of Italian forces. Within a week, the Greeks had driven the Italians back in disorderly retreat into \JAlbania\j, and British forces began to arrive in both \JCrete\j and \JGreece\j. Mussolini had thoroughly upset the stability of the Balkans.
Further Italian disasters followed. In November 1940 a handful of British \Jtorpedo\j \Jaircraft\j struck the Italian battle fleet at Taranto, sinking three Italian battleships and permanently altering the naval balance in the Mediterranean.
In December British forces from \JEgypt\j raided Italian positions in front of Sidi Barrani. They achieved total success and almost drove the Italians out of \JLibya\j. Meanwhile other Commonwealth troops invaded Italian Somaliland, Eritrea and finally \JEthiopia\j: all had fallen by May 1941.
At first, the Germans displayed considerable glee at \JItaly\j's difficulties. But as Italian disasters threatened to unravel the Axis position in the Mediterranean and Balkans, and perhaps even drive \JItaly\j from the war, \JGermany\j acted.
In February 1941 Rommel led the advance guard of the Afrika Corps to Tripoli. Contrary to his orders, he attacked immediately and soon began to drive the British - weakened by the departure of 60,000 men to \JGreece\j - back to \JEgypt\j.
To restore the Balkan situation, however, required more considerable effort. To get at the Greeks and relieve pressure on the Italians in \JAlbania\j, the Germans negotiated deals with the Hungarians, Romanians, and Bulgarians.
In March 1941, Yugoslav envoys also signed a treaty of alliance with the Axis, but then a coup by Serb officers overthrew their government. Hitler was furious, and in response ordered the Wehrmacht to beat the Yugoslavs 'down as quickly as possible'.
He also ordered the \JLuftwaffe\j to wipe \JBelgrade\j off the face of the earth. Two weeks later the \JLuftwaffe\j complied: round the clock bombing wrecked the Yugoslav capital and killed 17,000 of its citizens. Meanwhile the panzers destroyed Yugoslav defences and overwhelmed the country within twelve days.
So swift and stunning was their success that almost immediately the Germans began withdrawing troops for the coming invasion of the Soviet Union. This left thousands of Yugoslav soldiers in mountain areas.
Within a matter of months a ferocious guerrilla war flared up that would eventually cost the Germans dearly.
The campaign against \JGreece\j also proceeded smoothly. The Greek high command had placed its forces on the Bulgarian border, so the Germans easily outflanked Greek defences through Yugoslavia while the British scurried to escape before the Germans cut their lines of retreat.
Most Commonwealth troops got away, albeit without their equipment, but the Greeks facing \JBulgaria\j and those in \JAlbania\j fighting the Italians went into Axis prisoner-of-war camps.
The fall of mainland \JGreece\j still left the British in control of \JCrete\j, from which the RAF could threaten \JRomania\j's oil wells, as Hitler recognized.
Since the British had blown three Italian heavy cruisers out of the water at Cape Matapan, thus eroding what little self-confidence remained in the Italian navy, any assault on \JCrete\j would have to come by air. The \JLuftwaffe\j's 7th Airborne, the world's first paratroop division, backed by 5th Mountain, executed the attack.
The Germans faced considerable odds: not only did the British have nearly twice as many troops on \JCrete\j as German intelligence estimated, but the intercepted information from 'Ultra' gave advance warning of a major airborne attack against \JCrete\j's three airfields. But British commanders on the scene disregarded this intelligence and deployed their troops to meet an amphibious attack. Nevertheless, it proved a close call for the Germans.
The defenders butchered most of the first day's airborne drop on 20 May 1941; only at Maleme did the Germans establish a precarious toehold. However, once the paratroopers won control of that field and the \JLuftwaffe\j was able to fly in reinforcements, the balance slowly shifted.
The Royal Navy again executed a successful withdrawal, but the Germans gained \JCrete\j and the Allies would not be able to attack the vital Romanian oil fields until early 1944 (from bases in Italy).
In achieving their victory the Germans had suffered grievously, losing nearly 60 per cent of their transport \Jaircraft\j, while their paratroopers had taken such heavy casualties that Hitler refused to authorize further airborne attacks.
The British and Americans, however, impressed by the German attack, created airborne units that would play a major role in their later assaults on the continent.
#
"WWII: Barbarossa",171,0,0,0
At the end of July 1940, immediately after the fall of \JFrance\j, Hitler determined to invade the Soviet Union. Strategic as well as ideological reasons pushed him east, but the latter dominated his approach to the coming campaign and coloured his assessment of the Soviet Union.
The Germans came as conquerors, not as liberators. Hitler aimed to destroy eastern Europe's Jewry as the advance progressed, and to enslave the Slavic peoples; 'special action' commandos \I(Einsatzgruppen)\i therefore accompanied each invading army group specifically charged to liquidate Jews, communist officials, and other undesirables.
Hitler made all of this crystal clear to the senior army leaders, and most of them willingly complied. 'Barbarossa - as the invasion was known, after a famous medieval German emperor - unleashed an ideological conflict, the ferocity of which Europe had not seen since the religious wars of the seventeenth century.
German military planning for Barbarossa was a mixture of tactical and operational genius with woolly-headed political optimism and logistical imbecility. It was clear that a major factor in the campaign would be \JRussia\j's sheer size and that it would be difficult to support advances beyond Riga, \JSmolensk\j, and \JKiev\j.
Since the Germans had become intimately acquainted with conditions in \JRussia\j during World War I, they should also have had few illusions about the weather. Nevertheless Hitler leaned towards attacking the \JUkraine\j and \JLeningrad\j while the army high command targeted Moscow in the belief that its fall would automatically result in the Soviet Union's collapse.
The high command planners aimed to destroy the Red Army in the border areas, to prevent them withdrawing to the interior, and then (like Hitler) expected the enemy to fold 'like a house of cards'.
The German army was by now a formidable instrument. Two years of unbroken success had honed its generals, unit commanders, officers, and non-commissioned officers. But there were also weaknesses.
Only by scraping together military equipment from all over Europe, including Czech tanks, Norwegian mountain artillery, and Belgian, French and British trucks, could the Germans launch an invasion. Moreover, the armoured forces moved almost twice as fast as the infantry, and so repeatedly had to wait - both for fuel and for reinforcements.
Finally the Germans embarked on Barbarossa with virtually no reserves. On the other hand, Stalin's actions magnified the German advantages. Purges had decimated his officer corps; pervasive fear hampered initiative at every level; and a cloying belief in 'Comrade Stalin' magnified the unreality of preparations.
To the end Stalin believed that Hitler would stick to their 1939 non-aggression pact (see \JWWII: The Road to War\j) and, fearful of his political vulnerability, packed frontier districts with Red Army regular divisions and demanded that his commanders never retreat.
At 1.30 a.m. on 22 June 1941 the last goods train, one of literally thousands that spring, all filled with raw materials from neutral \JRussia\j to feed the Nazi war machine, crossed into German territory at Brest Litovsk.
Two hours later German artillery on a 2,000-mile front from the North Cape to the Black Sea opened fire, a shattering series of air attacks began, and over three million Axis troops rolled east. Everywhere they caught the Soviets by surprise.
One front line Soviet unit plaintively inquired from its superiors: 'What should we do? We are being attacked.' The reply was: 'You must be insane, and why is your signal not in code?' Later that morning, when the German ambassador presented the \JReich\j's declaration of war, the Soviet Foreign Minister equally plaintively asked: 'What have we done to deserve this?'
Within four days, the Soviets had lost over 3,000 \Jaircraft\j. On every front. German armour drove deep into Soviet rear areas: Manstein's panzer corps in the north covered 200 miles and reached the Dvina River at Dvinsk in four days.
In Army Group Centre's sector, panzer groups under Hoth and Guderian encircled a significant body of Soviet troops at Minsk in the first week (324,000 prisoners with 3,300 tanks destroyed or knocked out); they then swept out to entrap an equally large body of troops near \JSmolensk\j by mid-July (another 300,000 prisoners and 3,000 tanks).
German successes led Halder to exclaim in his diary in early July: 'It is, therefore, truly not claiming too much when I assert that the campaign against \JRussia\j has been won in fourteen days'. Only in the south did the Germans encounter effective resistance; nevertheless, even there, they had neared the gates of \JKiev\j by mid-July.
But by the end of July the advance ground to a halt. The Nazi logistical system could barely provide panzer and motorized infantry divisions with enough supplies to defend themselves, since the lead formations had used up most of their reserves of ammunition and fuel and nothing remained for a push further east.
Infantry divisions, slogging forward on foot, lagged well to the rear. Moreover, while the advance had destroyed many of the regular units of the Red Army, waves of Soviet reserve formations hit the spearhead troops. Halder commented despairingly in his diary at the beginning of August:
The whole situation shows more and more clearly that we have underestimated the colossus of \JRussia\j. . . This conclusion is shown above all in infantry divisions. We have already identified 360.
These divisions are admittedly not armed and equipped in our sense, and tactically they are badly led. But there they are; and when we destroy a dozen the Russians simply add another dozen.
During August the forward units of the German army fought to survive; logisticians struggled to control the desperate supply situation; and the infantry marched to catch up. Although they had worked wonders, the field armies had suffered substantial casualties: almost 400,000 by mid-August, over 10 per cent of its total strength.
The army high command, the German high command, and Hitler again quarrelled, with the generals urging a drive on Moscow while Hitler wanted to capture the \JUkraine\j, with its grain, and \JLeningrad\j, where revolution had originated.
As usual, Hitler won the argument and when in late August the Germans finally amassed sufficient supplies to resume their advance, Army Group North surrounded \JLeningrad\j, where Stalin's henchman refused either to move civilians to safety or to provision the city for a siege - for to do either would suggest defeatism.
Deaths in \JLeningrad\j as a result of starvation and disease would eventually exceed one million. Meanwhile in the centre, Guderian's panzer group drove south into the \JUkraine\j. Stalin again refused to countenance any withdrawal; 600,000 Soviet soldiers in the \JKiev\j pocket went into German prisoner-of-war cages. Few survived.
Despite the lateness of the year, these successes at \JKiev\j and \JLeningrad\j led Hitler and his senior commanders to throw everything into a massive assault on Moscow. The logistical alternatives were clear: either remain in position on an arbitrary line stretching from \JLeningrad\j to the \JCrimea\j and prepare for winter, or drive to Moscow and arrive at the Soviet capital with no thermal clothing and no supply dumps. The generals enthusiastically signed on for Moscow.
'Operation Typhoon' began in late September with Guderian's panzer group moving first. The two other panzer groups followed with attacks on 1 October. Within one week, the Germans had completed two more massive encirclements at Bryansk and Vyazma; within two, they had another 600,000 prisoners of war, and a yawning gap existed in front of the Soviet capital. But autumn rains slowed the advance to a crawl and allowed the Soviets to scrape together a last ditch stand.
In November, cold weather froze the mud and returned movement to the battlefield, allowing the Germans to make a final attempt to encircle Moscow. Some units came within sight of the \JKremlin\j spires in early December, but the Germans had shot their bolt.
Their tanks and other equipment ceased to operate in the extreme cold; front line units were exhausted, fought out, and completely unprepared for winter conditions; and the Germans had no stockpiles. On 6 December, the day before \JJapan\j attacked the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Red Army counter-attacked and relieved the pressure on Moscow. Hitler's gamble to conquer the Soviet Union in a single campaign had failed.
#
"Spanish Civil War and Terror Bombing",172,0,0,0
When the Germans intervened in the Spanish Civil War they determined to keep their commitment small and not deploy regular units of the \JLuftwaffe\j or the army. Nevertheless they set out to learn from their experiences in the Spanish fighting and consequently were most interested in testing such things as the impact of terror bombing on civilian morale: hence the attack on Guernica - a small town in the Basque country - in April 1937.
The attack levelled much of the town, but the international outcry, enthusiastically taken up and fanned by Soviet propagandists, was disproportionate - especially in comparison with what would come in World War II - and the strategic benefits minimal.
Nevertheless, the Germans learned a great deal from the air war in \JSpain\j beyond the fact that terror bombing would not necessarily change the military equation to any great extent. They discovered that finding and then hitting targets accurately would be no easy task.
They also learned a great deal about how to provide close air support for the army - a very important lesson that they would take into World War II. Most importantly they mastered the 'finger four' tactics of air-to-air combat.
The result was that the \JLuftwaffe\j was able to take a broad range of capabilities into the coming war, capabilities that allowed them to influence the course of the ground battle as well as the war in the air.
#
"Battle of Moscow",173,0,0,0
The German victory over the Soviet armies in the \JKiev\j pocket - with well over 600,000 prisoners along with immense amounts of material - brought a feeling of euphoria to the German high command. But even as the \JKiev\j battle burned to its conclusion, Hitler set in motion the next major operation: an offensive against the forces defending Moscow in an all-out attempt to capture the Soviet capital and destroy Stalin's regime before winter closed in.
Hitler's decision received the enthusiastic support of the senior German commanders on the Eastern Front. Field Marshal Bock of Army Group Centre and the army high command were particularly supportive, for they had been arguing since before the campaign began that Moscow was the decisive objective, the capture of which would bring victory.
Only the logisticians had some doubts: they were barely able by this point in the campaign to begin building up supply dumps for the winter. Another major drive forward would not only prevent the establishment of stockpiles for winter but also prevent them from bringing up winter fuels and especially winter clothes.
Given German disdain for logistics the choice was simple: advance. At the end of September Guderian, hurrying back from the \JUkraine\j, launched his panzer group against the southern flank of the Soviet armies defending Moscow. On 1 October two other panzer groups jumped off in what the Germans code-named 'Typhoon'.
Within the first days German armour had gained operational freedom. So successful was the German offensive that the Soviets only realized that their forces lying to the east of \JSmolensk\j had come under attack through British queries (on the basis of 'Ultra' intelligence) and Hitler's announcement in Berlin that the Wehrmacht had launched a great offensive on the Eastern Front.
Soviet reconnaissance \Jaircraft\j soon confirmed that German columns were deep behind the front lines at the same time that communication lines went dead with all of the troops lying in front of Moscow.
The Germans were on the way to a devastating double victory at Bryansk and Vyazma that would see over 600,000 more Soviet troops captured, hundreds of thousands killed, and masses of military equipment captured.
But as the Germans were finishing off the twin pockets in mid-October, the weather broke and the annual torrential rains of autumn began. Despite the fact little lay between the Germans and Moscow, the glutinous mud stuck the German armour and motorized infantry in a quagmire.
That respite gave the Soviets sufficient time to bring up reinforcements and to appoint one of the few competent general officers to survive the purges, Georgi Zhukov, to command the defences of Moscow. Zhukov hustled forward enough troops to hold off the attackers in the mud and began to assemble a substantial reserve for the climactic point in the battle.
In November the weather began to turn again; cold weather began to freeze the mud and snow replaced the rain. Once again the German high command confronted the problem of whether it should resume the advance on Moscow.
The logistical situation carried even more dangerous consequences for the German advance: winter was on the doorstep yet no winter clothes and few supply dumps were available for the troops. Senior German commanders, however, locked in their belief that the failure to continue the battle on the Marne in 1914 had cost them the war, believed that one final push would gain them Moscow and topple the Soviet regime.
They once again discounted the logistical situation and ordered the advance on Moscow to continue. As General Franz Halder, the chief of the general staff, suggested, perhaps the freeze would allow renewed mobility and just possibly it would not snow until mid-January.
The senior commanders, and particularly the high command, had clearly lost touch with how rapidly conditions on the front were deteriorating. By mid-November the really cold weather had arrived.
German tank crews discovered that the oil in the crank cases of their vehicles had solidified; the only way they could warm their vehicles sufficiently to start the engines was to light tank-fuel fires under the engines, often with spectacular, though unwished for, results.
Exhausted by five months of heavy fighting, with their logistic system collapsing, and with precipitous drops in the temperatures, the German troops struggled towards Moscow.
Zhukov refused to commit his reserves until the attackers had shot their bolt. As the German advance ground to a halt within sight of the Russian capital in early December, in heavy snow and temperatures below zero Fahrenheit, the Soviets finally counter-attacked. Everywhere on the Eastern Front Hitler's forces lay in desperate straits - straits that threatened to destroy the entire invading army.
#
"World at War 1941-45",174,0,0,0
\BChapter 17 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
#
"WWII: The World at War",175,0,0,0
In December 1941 and January 1942 the German army in the east lay marooned in a series of fortified areas, nicknamed 'hedgehogs', around the main centres of communication and teetered on the brink of collapse. Nevertheless, upon hearing of \JJapan\j's entry into the war (see \JWWII: War in the Pacific\j) Hitler rashly declared war on the United States on 11 December, a decision that sealed \JGermany\j's fate.
The navy actively encouraged the move while the army and air force displayed little interest in the issue, since their attention remained absorbed on the Eastern Front, where Soviet armies had just begun a powerful counter-attack against Army Group Centre.
The Soviets eventually fell short of a major success, because Stalin refused the advice of his most successful general, Georgi Zhukov, to concentrate on a single front. Consequently the Red Army sought victory in all sectors, and failed.
When the fighting died down in mid-March the two sides were completely fought out, but Hitler believed that \JGermany\j must finish off the Soviet Union before America's potential told. By this point, he had assumed direct command of the German armies and most of the senior officers who had won the victories of 1939-41 had retired.
In April 1942 Hitler decided that his forces would stand on the defensive in the north and centre while in the south they would launch an offensive to gain the oil of the Caucasus.
However, he remained unclear about whether the troops should drive into the Caucasus to capture the oil or whether they should capture Stalingrad on the Volga to block the northward movement of that oil. Throughout the campaign he was to vacillate between these two approaches.
#
"WWII: Battle of Stalingrad",176,0,0,0
The Soviets moved first, but their attack on \JKharkov\j in May turned into a disaster, destroying all reserves on the southern front. The Germans then attacked in the \JCrimea\j, where Manstein's Eleventh Army broke all remaining Soviet positions.
The main offensive began on 27 June: striking west at \JVoronezh\j, the Germans established a blocking position and swung down the Don. This time Soviet forces gave way - there would be no more encirclement battles - and behind the panzers, Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian troops moved forward to guard Army Group South's lengthening flank, since the Germans lacked sufficient troops of their own for the task.
By late July, German forces had swept forward to the Don and a month later had reached the Volga. On 13 September a ferocious assault hit Stalingrad, which sprawled for 12 miles along the west bank of the river, and for the next two months the city became the \JVerdun\j of World War II.
Block by block German troops of Sixth Army drove the Soviets back towards the Volga and by mid-November had taken most of the city, albeit with huge losses in men and material.
Meanwhile the Red Army fed enough fresh troops into Stalingrad to keep the fighting going, but kept most of the reinforcements flowing into the theatre in reserve for a great counter-attack. Unlike Soviet offensives the previous year, Stalin aimed for a limited goal: the destruction of Sixth Army.
Hitler was trying to deal with the Axis collapse in the Mediterranean (see \JStrategy, Mediterranean and Allied\j) when the massive Soviet counter-attack, 'Operation Uranus' with 1 million soldiers, 13,000 guns and almost 900 tanks, caught the Sixth Army by surprise.
Launched on 19 November 1942, the spearheads met behind Stalingrad four days later, trapping over 200,000 men in a classic 'Cannae' manoeuvre (see \JBattle of Cannae 216 BC\j) that (in other circumstances) would have appealed to the Prussian general staff.
Reassured by G÷ring that the \JLuftwaffe\j could supply Sixth Army, Hitler ordered General Friedrich Paulus to hold and await relief while Erich von Manstein, promoted to field marshal for his victories in the \JCrimea\j, assumed control of relief efforts.
The German counter-attack came close to Stalingrad, but Paulus declined Manstein's order to break out without Hitler's concurrence, and the Fⁿhrer refused.
In December the Soviets launched another attack, underlining how much the balance in the east had shifted. A massive offensive against Italian and Hungarian armies along the Upper Don caused their complete collapse.
This Soviet success shut down the airlift to Stalingrad and Paulus surrendered on 31 January 1943. In all, the battle of Stalingrad may have cost the Germans more than a million men killed, wounded, missing, and captured - nearly one-quarter of their strength on the eastern front.
It also threatened all of Army Group South. Throughout January and February Manstein confronted catastrophe: he barely got First Panzer Army out of the Caucasus, while Seventeenth Army remained on the Kuban Peninsula because Hitler demanded a launching pad for the 1943 summer offensive.
The Soviets continued their advance and threatened to cut Army Group South off by reaching the Black Sea west of the \JCrimea\j but, lacking a coherent focus to their advance, they overextended themselves.
Manstein quickly perceived the Soviets' vulnerability and in late February and early March dealt them a devastating counter-thrust, inflicting heavy casualties on their forces and even regaining \JKharkov\j before the spring rains caused a temporary halt.
#
"Strategy, Mediterranean and Allied",177,0,0,0
While millions of Nazi and Soviet troops fought on the Eastern Front, in North Africa the British faced only a few demoralized Italian units (see \JWWII: War in the Balkans\j) reinforced by a German corps commanded by Erwin Rommel.
Although consistently outnumbering their adversaries, the British suffered a series of humiliating defeats that reflected an army that learned too little and too late from its battlefield experiences.
Rommel by contrast displayed a coherent and effective approach that emphasized initiative, speed, and exploitation until in July 1942 his troops reached El Alamein, only 70 miles from Alexandria.
Anglo-American strategic planners, like their Soviet counterparts, had come to recognize the crucial importance of industrial production. From summer 1940 the British and Americans emphasized the mobilization of industry, manpower, and resources to prosecute the war; the Germans, on the other hand, maintained a 'guns and butter' economy until 1942.
By then, they were well behind in harnessing all available resources for war, as well as being vastly outranked by the industrial capability of the Allies. Hitler's armaments minister, Albert Speer, performed miracles in the second half of the war, but by 1942 the Germans had lost the race: the American economy was coming on line and undreamed of production levels would soon flow from US factories.
As a British historian of the Combined Bomber Offensive has noted, by 1944 American factories were turning out four-engine bombers 'like candy bars', while by 1944 the main US battle fleet in the Pacific was larger than all the other navies of the world combined.
Faced with declarations of war by both \JJapan\j and \JGermany\j in December 1941, President Roosevelt and his advisors chose a 'Germany first' strategy and called for a cross-channel invasion in 1943 to attack Hitler's empire directly.
The British chiefs of staff argued that sufficient forces were not yet available and that the western powers should allow another year of war in the Mediterranean and in \JRussia\j to grind German power down. Such differences threatened to unravel Anglo-American strategy, but Roosevelt stepped in and ordered his commanders to co-operate with the British in a major operation in the western Mediterranean.
The ensuing operation, code-named 'Torch', targeted Morocco and \JAlgeria\j to squeeze Axis forces from the west; but just before 'Torch' began the British attacked Rommel at El Alamein. Churchill had responded to earlier defeats in North Africa by replacing most of the senior commanders in the Mediterranean, and entrusting Eighth Army to Bernard Law Montgomery.
Whatever his faults, Montgomery was a great motivator, trainer, and realist. However, unlike William Slim in \JBurma\j (see \JV-1 and V-2: The Vengeance Weapons\j), he never possessed the time to correct the tactical deficiencies of the troops he commanded, and he therefore determined to make the Germans fight a battle that played to Eighth Army's strengths: as a result, El Alamein was a battle of attrition rather than movement.
Moreover, he displayed a considerable ability to adapt to actual battle conditions until his superiority in men and equipment told. On 23 October, with some 230,000 men and 1,030 tanks, Montgomery attacked the 100,000 men and 500 tanks commanded by Rommel. On 3 November the Afrika Corps began its retreat and did not stop until it reached \JTunisia\j.
As Montgomery pursued the Germans, on 8 November American and British forces landed simultaneously at several points in French Morocco and \JAlgeria\j. The French put up considerable resistance but eventually surrendered, and the Germans decided to create a fortified redoubt in \JTunisia\j.
The decision to reinforce North Africa was one of the worst of Hitler's blunders: admittedly, it kept the Mediterranean closed for six more months, with a negative impact on the Allied shipping situation, but it placed some of \JGermany\j's best troops in an indefensible position from which, like Stalingrad, there would be no escape.
Moreover Hitler committed the \JLuftwaffe\j to fight a battle of attrition under unfavourable conditions, and it suffered losses that it could not afford.
The North African campaign, which lasted to May 1943, had important consequences for the Allies too. On the one hand a tactical defeat at Kasserine Pass provided the US army with a grim warning about its deficiencies; on the other, as the US military had feared, it prevented a cross-channel invasion in 1943.
Instead a conference of senior Anglo-American political and military leaders at \JCasablanca\j in January 1943 determined that \JSicily\j should be the next objective. Allied forces landed successfully there on 10 July and by 17 August had overrun the entire island, although the German forces opposing them managed to escape.
The invasion of \JSicily\j finally energized the Italian king to remove Mussolini. Marshal Badoglio, a man notable for his military incompetence, attempted to negotiate \JItaly\j's way out of the war, but his lack of resolve allowed the Germans to strengthen their forces in the peninsula.
The Allies failed to cross over to the mainland until early September. After a few nasty moments at Salerno, they drove north to Naples where their advance came to a glutinous stop in the mud of the \JApennines\j, but most of \JItaly\j remained in German hands.
The inability of Allied forces to dislodge German forces south of \JRome\j caused severe disappointment. In February 1944 the Allies got amphibious forces ashore at Anzio, catching the Germans by surprise, but failed to take advantage of the situation.
As Churchill put it, the Allies had expected to throw a wildcat ashore but instead had come up with a beached whale. Only in May did the Allies break the stalemate in \JItaly\j: spearheaded by Free French infantry who crossed terrain that the Germans regarded as impassable, they closed on \JRome\j and threatened the German Tenth Army. But the US commander, General Mark Clark, decided that the glory of \JRome\j's capture should go to American troops, and the Germans escaped.
The Allies next drove the Germans north of Florence over the summer, but \JItaly\j had by then become a backwater theatre.
#
"WWII: Battle of the Atlantic",178,0,0,0
The successful defence of the sea lines of communications on which Britain and the United States depended for the projection of military power as well as for economic production constituted the most important victory of World War II in the west.
In 1939 neither the Royal Navy nor the \IKriegsmarine\i had expected a great \JU-boat\j war against commerce: a minuscule \JU-boat\j fleet - never more than fifty - inflicted heavy, but not significant losses on British convoys in the war's first year.
Control of French and Norwegian naval bases after 1940 greatly aided the Germans, but still the \JU-boat\j fleet grew only gradually, partially due to the \IKriegsmarine's\i continuing emphasis on \Jbattleship\j construction.
Moreover, during this period the Royal Navy gained the cypher keys that enabled British signal intelligence to break German naval codes on a continuing basis. Consequently, the rising tide of merchant losses to U-boats in the first half of 1941 dropped dramatically in the second half.
At the end of 1941, the Germans introduced a new complexity into the encoding system, depriving their intended prey of vital intelligence, while Hitler's declaration of war on the US led U-boats to strike at commerce along the east coast of the United States.
Inexcusably, the Americans refused British advice and repeated every mistake their Allies had made; no convoys, no black-outs, no radio silence. The result was a slaughter. In spring 1942, after the Americans introduced proper procedures on the east coast, Admiral Karl D÷nitz, commander of the U-boats, switched his attacks to the Caribbean where defences were just as lax.
The Germans, however, made crucial errors. Hitler kept many boats in a defensive role to protect \JNorway\j and North Africa and to operate against Allied shipping in the Mediterranean; D÷nitz overcontrolled the boats on station, thereby robbing his subordinates of flexibility and increasing the risk that plans would be intercepted; and the German staff was so small that it eventually lost contact with the larger picture.
As one opponent remarked, D÷nitz pursued 'an eighteenth century way of war in a twentieth century age of technology'.
Despite the fact that hundreds of U-boats now operated in the Atlantic, the situation in 1943 swung to the Allies' advantage. Production of merchant vessels and escort ships in American dockyards surpassed losses, while Allied defences improved.
Long-range \Jaircraft\j reached out deep into the Atlantic, leaving few areas untouched by aerial surveillance, while the tactics and technology available to defenders advanced significantly. Finally, at the beginning of 1943, the British regained the ability to penetrate the \JU-boat\j message traffic. The battle of the Atlantic culminated in spring 1943.
In March U-boats sank 627,000 tons of merchant shipping; in attacks on convoys SC122 and HX229 by forty submarines, the Germans sank twenty-one vessels for the loss of one \JU-boat\j. But in the last week of April, when forty-one U-boats assaulted convoy ONS5, the attackers sank twelve merchant ships but lost seven submarines with another five severely damaged.
In May the Germans lost forty-one U-boats with hardly any successes, leading D÷nitz to pull his boats from the Atlantic. The Allies had won the battle.
#
"WWII: Combined Bomber Offensive",179,0,0,0
No other aspect of the Allied war effort has occasioned more controversy than the Combined Bomber Offensive. Until February 1942, when Arthur Harris took over Bomber Command. British efforts to attack the \JReich\j's economy and cities proved a dismal failure. His \Jaircraft\j devastated Cologne in a thousand-bomber raid in May, but enjoyed few successes over the remainder of the year.
Nevertheless, Harris provided strong leadership and a steadfast belief that area bombing would eventually break enemy morale. In 1943 Bomber Command nearly lived up to Harris's expectations: in the spring it blasted the Ruhr and at the end of July it destroyed \JHamburg\j, killing 40,000 of the city's population.
Speer warned Hitler that if Bomber Command achieved similar effects on five or six other cities, German morale would entirely collapse.
However, Harris's forces failed to achieve another \JHamburg\j for the rest of 1943 and in late autumn they turned on Berlin. That campaign came close to wrecking Bomber Command because German defences, particularly night fighters, proved increasingly effective and the length of the flight to targets deep inside \JGermany\j magnified the vulnerability of British bombers.
The disastrous raid against Nuremberg in late March 1944, where the attackers lost 105 \Jaircraft\j, mostly to enemy fighters, forced Harris to abandon attacks against remote targets.
While the British bombarded the \JReich\j at night, in June 1943 the Americans began daylight attacks on German industrial targets. American air strategists believed that large formations of well-armed B-17s could fight their way through German defences without heavy casualties. But the German fighter force represented a far more formidable opponent than the Americans had calculated: in August sixty bombers were lost in attacks on Schweinfurt and \JRegensburg\j, and sixty more two months later in another raid against the ball-bearing factories of Schweinfurt.
Throughout the summer and autumn the Americans lost 30 per cent of their crews every month and, although they also imposed heavy losses on the \JLuftwaffe\j's fighters, the second Schweinfurt catastrophe forced the Americans to abandon unescorted raids deep into the \JReich\j.
However, early in 1944 a true long-range escort fighter, the P-51 'Mustang', became available and the US Eighth Air Force again struck targets in the heart of \JGermany\j and began a terrifying war of attrition against the \JLuftwaffe\j until, in May, the German fighter force finally broke.
By themselves, the 2.6 million tons of bombs dropped on 'Fortress Europe' did not win the war. Nevertheless, they had a significant impact on German morale, and that impact in turn explains why the Germans expended so many resources on the \JV-1\j and \JV-2\j programmes; resources that the Strategic Bombing Survey estimated would have allowed production of 24,000 more fighter \Jaircraft\j in 1944 alone.
Furthermore, approximately 12,000 heavy anti-aircraft guns and half a million soldiers participated in the task of throwing huge numbers of badly-aimed shells into the skies night after night, all to reassure the \JReich\j's population.
Most important of all, the daylight air offensive gained air superiority over Europe, a prerequisite for a successful cross-channel invasion. The attack on the French roads and railways proved crucial for the ground battle in Normandy, while destruction of the \JReich\j's synthetic oil production further lamed both the Wehrmacht and the \JLuftwaffe\j.
Finally, the systematic bombardment of the transportation network over the winter of 1944-45 (see \JWWII: The End in Europe\j) broke the German war economy and explains why there was no last ditch defence of the \JReich\j.
Purchased with the lives of 158,000 flying personnel (and of perhaps 650,000 civilians), the Combined Bomber Offensive made an essential contribution to Allied victory.
#
"WWII: Eastern Front",180,0,0,0
Soviet successes and German counter-attacks in early 1943 (see \JStrategy, Mediterranean and Allied \j) had left a great bulge or salient around Kursk, between Orel and \JKharkov\j, and Manstein convinced Hitler that destruction of Soviet units in the Kursk salient would stabilize the front.
However, the Fⁿhrer delayed the start of the offensive until German forces reached peak strength. North of Kursk Model's Ninth Army eventually possessed three panzer corps with 900 tanks; in the south Manstein held four panzer corps with over 1,000 tanks; and the \JLuftwaffe\j concentrated 2,500 \Jaircraft\j for the offensive, code-named '\IZitadelle\i'.
But when ready, the Germans ran into a fully prepared opponent. The Soviets intended to catch the German assault in a colossal web of defensive positions, stretching up to 200 miles, and only then launch their armour.
Moreover, their intelligence sources picked up both the day and the hour of the intended German attack - dawn on 5 July 1943 - and so allowed Soviet artillery to fire the greatest pre-emptive barrage in the history of warfare: hundreds of guns and mortars pounded the German forces as they prepared to advance.
Within two days the German efforts had stalled and the Soviets now committed their tank armies. At Prokhorovka, to the south, on 12 July over 1,000 tanks clashed and a massive Soviet counter-attack followed.
Kursk proved that the Red Army had acquired formidable skills at the operational level of war. They had also mastered deception - \Imaskirovka\i - so that, from the end of 1942, every major Soviet offensive took the Germans by surprise.
After the victory at Kursk, Stalin committed 2.6 million men, over 51,000 guns and mortars, 2,400 tanks and assault guns, and 2,850 combat \Jaircraft\j on a 400-mile front between the Pripet Marshes and the Sea of Azov.
They first retook \JKharkov\j and then at the end of September, as Army Group South's left flank unravelled, entered a desperate race with the Germans for the Dneiper. The Soviets thus regained the critical agricultural and industrial portions of the \JUkraine\j.
To complete the catalogue of German disasters, the Red Army also reached the Black Sea and isolated Seventeenth Army in the \JCrimea\j.
The arrival of the October rains gave the Germans a respite, but winter allowed the Red Army to operate again, this time with 4 million troops and over 4,000 tanks, with US four-wheel and six-wheel trucks aiding the advance by providing logistical support.
By May 1944 they had reached the Carpathians as well as the frontiers of \JHungary\j and \JRomania\j, while attacks elsewhere pried the Germans from their positions around \JLeningrad\j and recaptured the \JCrimea\j (destroying the German Seventeenth Army).
In late spring the Soviets fed the Germans bogus intelligence indicating that the next major Soviet attack would come against Army Group South in preparation for a drive into the Balkans, while in fact the Red Army built up its forces opposite Army Group Centre.
Stalin bided his time until after the Anglo-American landings in Normandy and then, on 22 June 1944, just three years after the launching of 'Barbarossa' (see \JWWII: Barbarossa\j), Operation 'Bagration' (named after one of the heroes of 1812-13) began, aimed at the heart of the German line around Minsk.
Hitler ordered his troops to hold out to the last round and the last man, and so they did: by 20 July Army Group Centre had been totally destroyed, with seventeen divisions annihilated and fifty losing half or more of their strength. On that day a group of German officers, dismayed by Hitler's conduct of the war, made an attempt on his life.
It failed, and the Red Army kept on for another month to reach the Vistula near Warsaw. There, on 29 August 1944, Stalin called a halt. The Polish underground - thoroughly anti-Communist as well as anti-Nazi - had risen, and it made excellent sense in Stalin's eyes to allow the Germans to destroy his enemies in \JPoland\j before he moved in.
Soviet armies had advanced far enough west so that they could participate in the kill, should Anglo-American forces win an overwhelming victory that carried them into \JGermany\j.
In the meantime, Stalin set about achieving his strategic aims in the Balkans. On 20 August 1944 Soviet artillery pounded German and Romanian positions north of the Danube delta, the latter crumbling immediately.
It was more than a military collapse, for three days later the Romanians abandoned the German alliance and within a week most of \JRomania\j was under Soviet control with Romanian forces now attacking the Germans. Hard on the heels of \JRomania\j, \JBulgaria\j quit.
Nevertheless, German troops in \JGreece\j and Macedonia had time to escape and reknit a front in \JHungary\j. But even the Hungarians were desperately trying to abandon the sinking ship; though the Nazis nipped an anti-German coup in the bud, by November the Germans and the remnants of the Hungarian army were fighting in the suburbs of Budapest. The Soviets had now gained territorial control over much of what became their empire during the Cold War.
#
"WWII: Allied Landing in France, 1944",181,0,0,0
The most complex military operation of the war was the Allied landing in \JFrance\j in 1944. The failure of a seaborne raid on Dieppe in 1942 demonstrated that seizing a port at the start of the invasion would prove almost impossible; the invaders would need to bring all their landing gear with them.
The venture would therefore require not only air superiority, but also the controlled movement of troops, equipment, and supplies ashore over beaches. Only in 1944 did the Allies possess enough landing craft and logistical support to make such an operation possible.
By January 1944 the high command for Normandy was in place, with the American Dwight Eisenhower in overall charge and the British Bernard Montgomery commanding the ground forces during the initial phase. Upon arrival in England.
Eisenhower and Montgomery recognized the inadequacy of the proposed landing force of one paratroop and three infantry divisions: those numbers were increased to three paratroop and five infantry divisions. The former would guard the invasion's flanks while the infantry seized the shoreline over which the great logistical build-up would proceed.
In \JFrance\j, Rommel put his restless energy to work in preparing the defences. Unlike other German commanders, he recognized that the invaders must be stopped on the beaches or the war was lost. But considerable confusion existed among the Germans: Gerd von Rundstedt, in overall command of western Europe, adopted a fundamentally different approach from Rommel, while Hitler retained personal control over the deployment of the armoured reserves.
At dawn on 6 June 1944 a force of some 6,500 naval and transport vessels, protected by 12,000 \Jaircraft\j, brought the invaders to Normandy. Only at 'Omaha' beach did the defences seriously delay the attackers; elsewhere the Germans reacted slowly and hesitantly.
For much of the battle. Hitler and the German high command remained convinced that further landings would occur around Pas de \JCalais\j - another victory for Allied deception efforts - and on the first day, the Allies got 177,000 men ashore. But now local German forces proved grimly tenacious and atrocities occurred: on 7 June, for example, troops of the Waffen SS division \IHitlerjugend\i massacred nearly a hundred Canadian prisoners of war and drove their tanks over the bodies.
On the eastern side of the battle the British and Canadians failed to break the outnumbered enemy or gain access to the plains beyond Normandy. In the west the Americans captured \JCherbourg\j, but then bogged down in the bocage country.
During June and July a massive battle of attrition, reminiscent of World War I, consumed vast quantities of men, equipment, and ammunition. But eventually, while Montgomery's persistent attacks pinned German armour in the east, the Americans levered the enemy away from the coast and on 31 July captured Avranches.
From there, they could have enveloped the entire German line; instead they headed west into Brittany. Hitler, however, played into the Allies' hands by ordering a counter-attack at Mortain. 'Ultra' (see \JWWII: War in the Balkans\j) warned the Allies, and their air and ground forces stopped the Germans cold, while American armoured forces finally turned east to threaten the whole German position in Normandy.
Meanwhile, on 15 August, Allied forces effected another successful landing on the Mediterranean coast of occupied \JFrance\j.
The campaign now turned into a wild pursuit to the German frontier. Montgomery argued for a narrow advance into the \JReich\j - under his command, naturally - but Eisenhower pursued a broad front strategy, although he provided Montgomery with most of the necessary supplies.
On 2 September the British liberated Brussels; two days later they captured Antwerp with its dockyards undamaged. But then Montgomery stopped the advance in preparation for operation 'Market Garden', designed to outflank the German defences by an attack through the Netherlands and capture of the bridges across the Rhine at \JArnhem\j.
As a result, the Germans recovered, their Fifteenth Army escaped into Holland and managed to close off access to Antwerp. Nearly two weeks later, 'Market-Garden' began. However, the British 1st Airborne failed to secure \JArnhem\j; supporting armour advanced lethargically; and the plans fell into German hands in the first hours of the attack.
This failure ensured that the Germans would be able to hold on to their western borders until the winter, and it confronted the American and Commonwealth forces with the unpleasant prospect of dislodging the Germans from difficult terrain and prepared positions at a time when their own formations had suffered heavy casualties and lacked the reserves to allow burnt-out divisions time for rest and refit.
Moreover, the destructive power of the Allied air forces had wrecked \JFrance\j's logistical \Jinfrastructure\j and road network, making the supply of Allied forces on the German frontier difficult until access to Antwerp was restored in late November.
#
"WWII: The End in Europe",182,0,0,0
Nevertheless, by autumn 1944 \JGermany\j stood on the defensive on all fronts. Its enemies menaced the gates of the \JReich\j while air attacks pounded German industry and cities. Yet the Germans hung on in a mood somewhere between fanatic determination and desperate resignation. As many put it: 'Enjoy the war, for the peace will be hell.'
The Germans had indeed much to fear: the extermination camps continued their grim work largely undisturbed until the autumn of 1944 and most Germans realized that their country had committed unspeakable crimes for which they would be called to account. For the time being, however, tenacious resistance combined with appalling weather to keep the Allies at bay.
Then on 16 December the Germans struck at weakly held US defences in the Ardennes; they aimed to separate the British and Canadian forces in the north from the Americans in the south, and to recapture and destroy Antwerp.
The American line buckled and in some areas collapsed; moreover, the only reserves available were two airborne divisions. They were immediately rushed to shore up the flanks - the 82nd to the north side of the growing German bulge, the 101st to Bastogne.
There, the 101st put up an epic resistance: for a time the Germans surrounded the town, but the 101st's control of the crucial road junction added to their problems because they had only enough fuel to get half way to Antwerp. They never came close.
The Allied high command of 1944 was not that of 1940; its response was smooth and swift. Patton's Third Army was on the road north even before its commander received orders to support US forces in the Ardennes.
Bad weather had played a major role in the initial German successes, but when it cleared, Allied tactical air forces inflicted heavy casualties and by the end of December the Germans had been stopped and began to fall back. The battle of the Bulge destroyed the \JReich\j's last operational reserve.
Meanwhile, Allied air forces, strategic as well as tactical, registered notable successes against the German transportation network. By December railroad loadings had fallen to 60 per cent of normal and by February 1945 the capacity of marshalling yards was down to 20 per cent of normal.
As a result, production of military equipment and ammunition almost completely ceased. There would be no 'Twilight of the Gods' death struggle for, without the tools of war, the Germans had no capacity to resist.
The end was not slow in coming. In mid-January 1945 Russian armies attacked in the east. East \JPrussia\j, \JPomerania\j, and \JSilesia\j fell to a hurricane of violence and revenge; terrible killing and suffering occurred wherever Soviet soldiers trod.
The Germans now reaped the whirlwind of the ideological war they had sown in 1941. The Red Army closed on the Oder and its commanders halted for the last push on Berlin. Meanwhile, the western Allies finally broke loose.
In the north, British and Canadians moved to the Rhine and prepared a carefully planned blow across the river. In early March, the Americans reached the Rhine and German resistance collapsed: at Remagen they captured the Ludendorff bridge intact, rushed as many troops over the Rhine as possible, and joked about Montgomery's apparently superfluous preparations.
By April, in the west, Allied armies could drive where they wanted: over the north German plain, the Ruhr, \JBavaria\j, even into \JAustria\j. In the south, the German forces in \JItaly\j surrendered.
In the east, the Soviets slammed across the Oder and into Berlin. In his wretched bunker, one of Europe's nightmares ended as Hitler blew out the roof of his mouth on 30 April. His commanders surrendered unconditionally a week later.
#
"WWII: Japan's Expansion",183,0,0,0
Perhaps the greatest indication of America's strength was that, besides its role in Africa and Europe, it also conducted a relentless struggle against \JJapan\j. \JJapan\j and the United States had been on a collision course from the early decades of the twentieth century, but American \Jimmigration\j and tariff policies combined with \JJapan\j's ruthless conquest of China to create tensions that worsened throughout the 1930s.
By closing their markets during the depression, the western powers encouraged aggressive Japanese policies towards the Asian mainland and helped Japanese militarists to gain power. In 1931 Japanese army units seized Manchuria without \JTokyo\j's authorization.
Six years later that army initiated an undeclared war against China, and Japanese troops soon controlled China's coastal regions and most of the important Chinese cities, leaving a trail of atrocities in their wake.
Japanese ambitions, in spite of limited resources, proved almost boundless Ever since her great victory in 1905 (see \JRusso-Japanese War\j), \JJapan\j's Imperial Defence Plan had identified \JRussia\j as the major threat. Now, even as the war in China sucked in its forces ever more deeply, the Japanese army also initiated a series of incidents along the Manchurian frontier to test the Red Army, until in August 1939 Soviet forces commanded by Georgi Zhukov annihilated a reinforced Japanese division at Kalkhin Gol on the Mongolian border.
This resounding defeat persuaded the Japanese that the Red Army was not an easy mark. But \JFrance\j's collapse the following year offered new prospects, although US forces in the \JPhilippines\j represented a great question mark. Could \JJapan\j risk moving against the European colonies in Southeast Asia, while leaving a major American base on the flank of the advance?
In June 1940 the Japanese occupied the northern portion of French Indo-China and in September signed a ten-year treaty of military and economic co-operation with \JGermany\j and \JItaly\j. On 13 April 1941, however, to protect its northern flank during the anticipated war with the western powers, \JJapan\j also signed a non-aggression pact with \JRussia\j.
The United States made no response, but when the Japanese extended their control to the southern provinces of Indo-China in July 1941, President Roosevelt acted. Moved by China's plight and fearful of Japanese designs, the US declared a general embargo on trade with \JJapan\j, which was immediately supported by the British and the Dutch.
Dependent on the US for 80 per cent of its oil imports, \JJapan\j faced an intolerable choice: either war, or the surrender of all its mainland gains since 1931 (America's terms for the resumption of trade). So the Japanese leaders devised a plan to conquer Southeast Asia and thereafter establish a defensive perimeter around their gains which would bring any counter-attack to a standstill.
Aware that inferior resources precluded any chance of outright victory against the US, they nevertheless hoped that a long and costly war would sap American will and facilitate a compromise peace.
#
"WWII: War in the Pacific",184,0,0,0
The Americans, unaware of all this, confronted the possibility of war with equanimity. As \ITime Magazine\i suggested shortly before the outbreak of hostilities: 'A vast array of armies, of navies, of air fleets were stretched now in the position of track runners, in the tension of the moment before the starter's gun.
In the early morning hours of 7 December 1941 such comfortable assumptions came crashing down at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, headquarters of the US Pacific fleet. A Japanese air attack, launched entirely from carriers, sank five US battleships, damaged a sixth, and destroyed three cruisers and nearly 200 \Jaircraft\j.
Nevertheless, the Japanese made a number of mistakes. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor united Americans as no other action could have done. Moreover while loss of the battleships appeared devastating, these ships were of World War I vintage, while no carriers were in harbour.
Finally and most seriously, the Japanese failed to drop a single bomb on the power stations and great oil storage tanks that surrounded the harbour. Had they also concentrated on these targets, they would have forced the US navy to base its ships in San Diego for the next year and a half.
Pearl Harbor was a harbinger of the disasters that soon befell the colonial powers in southeast Asia. America's defence of the \JPhilippines\j was a disgrace: the British did no better in Malaya, where they lost two capital ships in December 1941 and 130,000 troops at \JSingapore\j in February 1942; and the Dutch had lost their empire in \JIndonesia\j by March.
Burma was occupied between January and May, driving British-empire forces back to the borders of India. In the first sixth months of war, \JJapan\j achieved its goals even faster and at less cost than its most optimistic plans had estimated, with a minimum commitment of ground troops and minimal losses.
Japan's luck began to run out in May 1942. In the \JCoral\j Sea, the first battle in which opposing surface fleets never sighted each other, the Americans sank one carrier, damaged another, inflicted heavy casualties on the Japanese air groups and prevented the Japanese from landing on the southern shore of New Guinea, meanwhile the Americans had managed to break the Japanese navy's codes, and their intelligence (known as 'Magic', and as useful as the 'Ultra' information intercepted from the Germans - see \JWWII: Battle of Britain\j) revealed that the Japanese were trying to create their strategic perimeter with dangerously dispersed forces.
While one force sought to attack and occupy certain Aleutian islands off \JAlaska\j, another - with four \Jaircraft\j carriers - aimed to take Kure and Midway islands in the central Pacific, while a third patrolled the waters between as a strategic reserve.
The Japanese had devised an intricate plan to mislead the Americans, but 'Magic' revealed the truth. The climactic moment in the Pacific war saw American dive bombers arrive over the three Japanese carriers near Midway at the precise moment the latter turned into the wind to launch decks full of loaded and fuelled \Jaircraft\j.
Combat air patrols of 'Zero' fighters were at deck level and anti-aircraft guns depressed to handle a \Jtorpedo\j \Jaircraft\j attack. In moments, the Japanese carriers were seas of flames, and all had to be abandoned. By the battle's end they had lost a fourth carrier. The balance in the Pacific irrevocably shifted to the Americans.
In August 1942, the United States made its first offensive move in the Pacific. The 1st Marine Division landed on \JGuadalcanal\j, an island in the Solomons. Despite a devastating setback at the battle of Savo Island, where the Japanese sank four heavy cruisers at night, the Americans hung on.
For the next nine months fighting raged on \JGuadalcanal\j and in the waters of the Solomons; major hostilities also occurred in New Guinea as Australian and American troops slogged through the jungle to drive the Japanese back from Port Moresby.
In both campaigns the Allies failed to win a decisive victory, but slowly and steadily ground the Japanese down.
In Europe the Americans had often minimized the political factors in Allied strategy. In the Pacific, however, US domestic politics resulted in a division of the offensive against the Japanese empire.
General Douglas MacArthur's record in defending the \JPhilippines\j had not been impressive; yet his political connections were such that Roosevelt dared not bring him back to Washington to conspire with the Hearst Press and Republican Party.
Consequently, it seemed safer to leave him in the Pacific. As the senior American officer, he could claim command in a unified theatre, but the navy was not about to put MacArthur in charge of its forces.
The result was a compromise: MacArthur would direct the southwest Pacific theatre and Admiral Chester Nimitz, the senior naval commander, ran the central Pacific theatre.
While MacArthur drove the Japanese back in New Guinea in late summer and autumn 1943, the navy launched its drive across the central Pacific. By this point new Essex class carriers began arriving at Pearl Harbor; at 27,000 tons, with a top speed of 32 knots and 100 \Jaircraft\j, they represented a major increase in hitting power.
Moreover, US shipyards were producing them at the rate of nearly one a month, as well as turning out Independence class light carriers (11,000 tons) almost as fast. These vessels supported the F6F 'Hellcat' fighter, which finally proved superior to the 'Zero', ensuring that \JJapan\j could not defeat the Americans either at sea or in the air.
#
"WWII: Japan's Defeat",185,0,0,0
Nimitz's first move came against \JTarawa\j in the Gilbert Islands. There, the navy and marines made a number of mistakes; the bombardment was too short, the marines misestimated the tides over the barrier reef so that assault troops had to cross 700 yards of open water under fire, and communications broke down.
Tarawa was a bloody shambles, leaving 1,000 marines dead and 2,000 wounded; but the experience taught the Americans a great deal. In early 1944, when the next blow fell upon the Marshalls, Nimitz forced his fleet commanders to attack the centre of the island chain and to rely on the carriers to neutralize enemy air power.
The Japanese were building formidable defences, but they were not yet ready. As a result, Kwajalein fell at a fraction of \JTarawa\j's cost. One month later, the Americans jumped to the northern side of the Marshalls by seizing Eniwetok, while neutralizing the great naval base at Truk with air strikes.
These island hopping' moves left considerable Japanese garrisons isolated on the other atolls; without air or sea power these positions became strategically useless.
Not to be outdone by navy and marines, MacArthur moved on the Admiralty Islands. Backed up by General George Keaney's highly effective tactical air units, MacArthur's forces attacked Biak, a small island 300 miles west of New Guinea.
By mid-May 1944 the Americans had captured it, putting the \JPhilippines\j within reach of long-range air attacks. In reply the Japanese resolved to launch their fleet against the exposed forces on Biak.
The situation underlines the high risks that the separate American drives involved, but just as the Japanese were about to move, Nimitz attacked Saipan in the Marianas, control of which place American air power within range of the Home Islands.
The conquest of Saipan was no easy matter against stiff resistance: US soldiers and marines suffered no fewer than 14,000 casualties. As fighting continued on Saipan, the Japanese navy sortied against the Marianas, instead of Biak, and a huge air battle ensued, called by the Americans the 'great Marianas turkey shoot'.
US \Jaircraft\j managed to sink three enemy carriers - two by submarines - but the crucial result was the destruction of the Japanese naval air forces, with few American losses. The taking of Biak and Saipan positioned the Americans to invade the \JPhilippines\j.
Ironically, by this point even if the Americans had done nothing for the remainder of the war, the Japanese had already lost. US submarines, hindered at first by defective torpedoes and weak leadership, had eventually swung into high gear.
Their opponents had made no preparations to defend their sea lines of communications against attack, so that by the end of 1943 American submarines, aided by extensive 'Magic' intelligence, could savage Japanese commerce.
By the end of the war they had sunk half of the Japanese merchant fleet and two-thirds of the tankers. Movement of oil from the Dutch East Indies stopped, while shipments of raw materials to the Home Islands slowed to a trickle.
In October MacArthur and Nimitz attacked the \JPhilippines\j. As infantry landed on Leyte, the Japanese again sortied. Their fleet took three separate tracks: from the north came a force of carriers - with virtually no \Jaircraft\j on board due to losses in the Marianas - in order to draw off the main US fleet.
Meanwhile, two small task forces moved through the Surigao Straits, while the main battle fleet drove through the San Bernardino Straits to attack the invasion fleet off Leyte. The plan almost worked. While the older US battlewagons (several refloated and repaired after being damaged at Pearl Harbor) destroyed the Japanese vessels in the Surigao Straits, the Americans took the bait and went north after the enemy's carriers.
The main Japanese force, after initial losses to American carrier \Jaircraft\j and submarines, made it through the San Bernardino Straits and ran into a weak force of escort carriers and destroyers; but a heroic defence by these outnumbered and outclassed ships eventually persuaded the Japanese admiral to withdraw, despite explicit orders to use and lose his fleet. US victory at Leyte Gulf ended the ability of the Japanese navy to fight a major naval action.
Yet the Japanese fought on. They held \JBurma\j until May 1945, when Commonwealth forces under William Slim recaptured \JRangoon\j. In the \JPhilippines\j under the skilled leadership of General Yamashita, the conqueror of Malaya and \JSingapore\j, the Japanese did a better job of defending the islands than had MacArthur in 1942 and resistance there continued to the war's end.
However, by early 1945 the strategic portions of the islands were in American hands. Meanwhile, in autumn 1944 B-29s based in the Marianas began operations against the Home Islands. To provide an emergency landing strip for damaged bombers and to capture Japanese radar installations, the marines attacked Iwo Jima in February 1945.
A preparatory bombardment of only four days, instead of ten as requested by the marines, left most of the Japanese defences intact. Two marine divisions were bled white in wresting Iwo's volcanic ash and rubble from the Japanese, and when it was over 6,821 marines were dead and nearly 20,000 wounded. Few from the Japanese garrison of 21,000 survived.
\BKamikaze Aircraft\b
Next came \JOkinawa\j where, for the first time, the Americans ran into Japanese forces in formations larger than a division: an army of over 70,000 troops waited on the southern portion of the island in well-prepared positions.
On 1 April the invasion force began to discharge its soldiers and marines. On 6 April the Japanese replied with assaults of 'kamikaze' \Jaircraft\j, loaded with explosives and flown in suicide missions against American targets. On that day alone 700 \Jaircraft\j, over half of them suicide planes, struck the US fleet.
Attacks continued throughout the invasion period; kamikazes sank thirty ships and damaged another 368; 5,000 American sailors died, with another 5,000 wounded. The conquest of \JOkinawa\j formed the bloodiest chapter in the Pacific war.
As one weary marine exclaimed: 'They send you up to a place . . . and you get shot to hell . . . But then they send you right back up again and then you get murdered. God, you stay there until you get killed or you can't stand it any more.' In the end the Americans destroyed all 70,000 troops, while well over 100,000 civilians died as a direct or indirect result of combat.
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"WWII: Dropping the Bomb",186,0,0,0
The conquest of \JOkinawa\j had cost the Americans 65,631 casualties - a frightening foretaste of what an attack on the Home Islands might involve. Thus far, the Americans and Japanese had fought a vicious war on small atolls and islands, which limited the numbers of troops involved; but for the coming invasion of \JJapan\j the full weight of US ground forces would make contact with the massed Japanese army.
The American high command had selected 1 November 1945 as the date for 'Operation Olympic', the invasion of \JJapan\j: it would involve a great attack on the island of \JKyushu\j in an operation approximately twice the size of \JD-Day\j. Unlike the Germans in Normandy, however, the Japanese expected the American landing precisely where it was to have taken place. As a staff officer testified after the war:
We expected an Allied invasion of southern \JKyushu\j and a later invasion of the \JTokyo\j plain. The entire army and naval air forces had volunteered for an all-out kamikaze defence, and each had from four to five thousand planes. . . We planned to send over waves from 3-400 at a rate of one wave per hour. On the basis of Leyte and \JOkinawa\j we expected about one out of four planes to hit a target.
'Olympic' would have involved a level of casualties that would have been devastating for both \JJapan\j and the United States.
'Olympic' never occurred, however, because of scientific developments. The American strategic bombing campaign against \JJapan\j achieved little before spring 1945, for precision bombing had not been able to reach the dispersed economy of the Home Islands. But then the B-29s began replicating the area bombing that had characterized Bomber Command's efforts in Europe.
On the night of 8 March, the B-29s destroyed much of \JTokyo\j in a firestorm: by morning 83,000 Japanese had died, with 41,000 more injured. The Americans then proceeded to destroy the other major Japanese cities one by one.
By summer \JJapan\j was totally isolated; its fleet sunk; its air force helpless; its industry dead. But the Japanese high command showed little interest in ending the war, preferring to concentrate on achieving an honourable death for its officers and men.
On 6 August, however, three B-29s flew over \JHiroshima\j; one dropped the first atomic bomb and 90,000 died in a flash brighter than the sun. Two days later the Red Army broke the 1941 non-aggression pact and rolled across the Manchurian frontier and through Japanese defences.
Then on 9 August a second atomic bomb fell on \JNagasaki\j and another 35,000 Japanese died. At this point, the emperor stepped into the political process to resolve a deadlock among his advisers. He ordered a general surrender, a decision of great moral and physical courage; for several weeks it was touch and go whether the military, particularly the junior officers, would obey his command.
In the end they did, and on 2 September representatives of the Japanese government signed the terms of surrender on the deck of the \Jbattleship\j \IMissouri.\i The war was over. \JJapan\j, like \JGermany\j, came under Allied occupation.
World War II had ripped across the planet and involved by its end in one fashion or another virtually everyone. When it was over it had killed tens of millions, wrecked virtually every major city in Europe, ravaged China and \JJapan\j, and caused mass migrations, untold misery and limitless destruction. Was the victory worth the cost in treasure, lives, and destruction?
It is perhaps only by looking at the reverse scenario - the alternative to fighting the war through to unconditional surrender - that one can judge the measures taken to achieve total victory. And the consequences of either an Axis victory or a survival of the Axis powers explains why the Allies felt it necessary to fight the war to the end.
The catalogue of crimes committed by the Italians (Somalia, \JEthiopia\j, Libya) or the Japanese (China, Korea, Manchuria) suggests what these two powers would have been capable of in a world unrestrained by peacetime conventions or the pressures of war.
As for the Germans, not only their list of crimes but their megalomaniac desire to remake the continents along the lines of biological-racial 'science' suggests an almost unimaginable world had they succeeded.
As Churchill had warned in a speech calling upon Britain to resist to the last in June 1940: 'if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science.'
Indeed it would. And that vision accounts for the insistence of the Allies on the unconditional surrender of their enemies, and their single-minded determination in securing it.
#
"V-1 and V-2: The Vengeance Weapons",187,0,0,0
Although it was clear by the late 1930s that the project to develop long-range rockets would prove inordinately expensive - and produce weapons of no great accuracy - the German army funded the effort. By 1942, as British bombers began to inflict serious damage on German cities, the \JV-2\j (for 'vengeance weapon') became a crash programme; at the same time the \JLuftwaffe\j came up with the \JV-1\j, a pilotless \Jaircraft\j powered by a \Jramjet\j.
However, neither system possessed any degree of accuracy: hitting an area the size of southern England was the best they could do. The cost of the 'vengeance weapon' programmes approached one quarter of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb - an enormous outlay considering that the payload was less than a fifth of that carried by a Lancaster bomber.
\BSlim's \JBurma\j campaign\b
Field Marshal the Viscount William Slim (1891-1970) is perhaps the only premier commander of World War II whose reputation has remained intact.
Slim came from a lower middle class background and without World War I would have had little chance of becoming an officer. But he volunteered for service in 1914, soon gained his commission and served with distinction. He then moved to the Indian Army.
At the outbreak of World War II, Slim served with Indian units in East Africa and the Middle East before arriving in \JBurma\j in 1942, where he extricated his Commonwealth forces to India relatively intact. Because the \JBurma\j theatre was regarded as a backwater by Allied strategists, Slim's Fourteenth Army received few resources, but he used the opportunity to retrain his troops for jungle conditions before beginning operations to regain \JBurma\j.
In 1944 the Japanese moved first, but in the brilliantly conducted defensive battle of Imphal, Slim's troops first broke the Japanese and then pursued them all the way to \JRangoon\j - the most successful exploitation campaign conducted by a British general in World War II.
#
"Post-War World 1945-95",188,0,0,0
\BChapter 18 of the History of Warfare\b
Click on the \INext Page\i button to begin reading this chapter.
#
"Post-War World",189,0,0,0
The end of World War II ushered in forty-five years of uneasy peace known as the 'Cold War'. In the wreckage of the Axis collapse, two superpowers emerged to contest worldwide hegemony, their forms of government representing vastly different political and economic systems. In any other period, such differences and suspicions would have resulted in another great war; but over this contest hung the shadow of nuclear weapons whose destructive potential was such that in the end neither side dared resort to a direct military challenge to its opponent.
After \JHiroshima\j some predicted that nuclear \Jdeterrence\j would eliminate war and, in the sense that the United States and the Soviet Union never directly engaged each other in war, they were right.
Hostilities still occurred, but for the most part they reflected the collapse of the colonial empires of the West in the aftermath of the world wars; and, while both the United States and the Soviet Union dabbled in these conflicts, they remained peripheral to the larger interests of the superpowers.
In retrospect, one of the Cold War's great ironies was that it brought an unparalleled time of stability during which the contestants deterred each other from going over the brink.
World War II also heralded the arrival of science as the dominant theme in warfare. The extraordinary development of technologies to support strategic nuclear weapons represented a quantum change in the capabilities which the opposing sides in the post-war world deployed. Yet, as Vietnam underlined, technology alone could not compensate for defects in policy, strategy, or even tactics.
Finally, the post-World-War-II era encompassed the destruction of the colonial empires that had formed in the nineteenth century. The humiliation of European armed forces at the hands of the Japanese destroyed whatever legitimacy remained for western domination of Southeast Asia, although it took a number of costly wars to underline that point; and once the tide of liberation had spread through Asia. Africa soon followed. The last colonial empire, \JRussia\j's, would not dissolve until the early 1990s.
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"WWII: The Aftermath",190,0,0,0
As the Japanese surrendered on the \Jbattleship\j \IMissouri\i in \JTokyo\j Bay, the great imponderable was how long the United States would involve itself in affairs outside the western hemisphere.
During the war Roosevelt had suggested to Stalin that American troops would stay in Europe no longer than three years after the wars end and, certainly, America's flight from responsibility in 1920 did little to suggest a long American commitment to Europe.
However, even more than after World War I, in 1945 America bestrode the world with its economic power, since only the western hemisphere had remained untouched by the catastrophic destructiveness of modern weapons.
The Combined Bomber Offensive had wrecked \JGermany\j from one end to the other, while the remainder of central Europe lay prostrate after Axis and Allied armies had finished fighting back and forth across the scarred landscape.
France, torn by \JVichy\j and occupation experiences, as well as by the fighting, was a shadow. Britain itself was hardly poised to resume its position as a world power, while India, the crown jewel of Britain's empire, stood on the brink of independence.
In the east, the Soviet Union had emerged victorious from its great ideological war against Nazi \JGermany\j, but that victory had come at almost unimaginable cost; somewhere over twenty-five million Soviet soldiers and civilians had perished.
Even more serious from Stalin's point of view was the economic damage inflicted on the Soviet economy. While the Soviets had gained a great empire, the battles marking their advance (coming after four years of Nazi exploitation) hardly rendered eastern Europe an economic plum.
Allied air attacks had also brought \JJapan\j to the edge of starvation: by summer 1945, the Americans had turned \JJapan\j's cities and industries into smoking ruins, sunk its merchant fleet, and reduced the Japanese economy to subsistence level.
Moreover, the Japanese had destroyed China from north to south and, in the destruction, the nationalists and the communists began to fight over the bones of a broken nation.
As the new president, Harry S. Truman, and his advisers surveyed the world in 1945, they recognized the damage that US withdrawal had occasioned in 1920. While some understood the menace of Stalin's Soviet Union, most hoped to live harmoniously with \JRussia\j and so the initial steps of US foreign policy after World War II combined preparation for confrontation with efforts at accommodation.
The Americans offered to extend the Marshall Plan, the aid package that assisted western Europe's recovery, to the Soviet Union and eastern Europe; an offer the Soviets considered but rejected for fear that prying American eyes would discern the weaknesses of their shattered economy.
On the other hand, the Americans did send their armed forces to \JGreece\j and Turkey in 1947 when economic weakness forced Britain to withdraw. Even more important was American sponsorship in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which signalled continuing US military and political commitment to western Europe.
Nevertheless, the Americans hoped that their possession of atomic weapons would allow them to maintain their responsibilities cheaply and, until summer 1950, they stripped their conventional military forces to minimal levels. Without the Korean War, these reductions in military strength would have probably forced an eventual withdrawal of America's commitments in much of Asia and Europe.
Instead, that war stimulated a major US rearmament effort aimed at maintaining nuclear superiority and the defence of western Europe. In the first year of the Korean War (1950-51), the Truman administration drafted 585,000 men and recalled 806,000 reservists and national guardsmen.
In retrospect, the Americans appear to have overestimated Soviet capabilities and intentions, but then the Soviets - certainly down to the death of Stalin in 1953 - gave every indication that they represented a direct challenge to western values.
From the late 1940s, American foreign policy therefore aimed at deterring the Soviet Union and containing the communist world, including China, within the territories it then held. That policy led the United States to fight two wars in Asia and commit substantial forces to the defence of Europe.
It also involved massive outlays on increasingly complex technologies to upgrade nuclear and conventional weapons and delivery systems. For much of the Cold War the United States relied on the United States Air Force (USAF) to deter the Soviets, although with the appearance of Polaris submarines in the mid-1960s the navy played an increasingly important role in \Jdeterrence\j.
As a result, until the late 1980s, the focus of the USAF remained on the nuclear mission. Admittedly that emphasis achieved its aim of deterring the Soviets; but it also ended serious thinking within the air force about how the changing technological capabilities of air power could affect the military balance in conventional conflicts.
Most air force officers saw their mission as \Jdeterrence\j; if they failed in that, war would simply become a matter of laying down vast numbers of nuclear weapons. A saying in the 1960s summed up this state of mind: 'Nuke them till they glow in the dark.'
The technological revolution executed by the US in support of its military build-up had an enormous impact on the world. From miniaturization of nuclear weapons, to jet \Jaircraft\j and ballistic missiles that could cross continental distances, to cruise missiles that could hit targets with incredible accuracy, the Americans drove technology to the limits.
This effort did not always come at the expense of the civilian economy: the computer revolution of the 1980s stemmed entirely from the miniaturization efforts that the space and military programmes demanded. But, for the Soviets, the technological revolution proved a nightmare since none of its aspects played to the strengths of their centrally planned economy.
Throughout the Cold War Soviet factories ground out tens of thousands of tanks, artillery pieces, armoured personnel carriers, and even jet \Jaircraft\j. But problems existed here too, since technology increasingly affected the capabilities even of ground weapons, and rendered vast numbers of them obsolete.
The Gulf War of 1991 would underline how far the Soviets had fallen behind in the race, and yet the competition to keep up with the US in complex areas such as nuclear submarines, guided missiles, and space-based capabilities eventually broke both the morale and the economy of the Soviet Union.
#
"Korean War (warfare)",191,0,0,0
As a result of casual decisions made by US and Soviet leaders in 1945 to disarm surrendering Japanese forces in Korea, two separate states appeared in the peninsula. In the North, a regime based on xenophobic \Jnationalism\j and Stalinist \Jcommunism\j established itself under Kim Il-Sung.
In the South, Syngman Rhee created a dictatorship as xenophobic as that in the North, but without the \Jcommunism\j. By early 1950 the South had run into trouble both economically and politically; communist guerrillas enjoyed some success, while American military and economic aid remained at minimal levels.
Misled by US pronouncements, Stalin allowed Kim Il-Sung to invade the South. It was one of the worst mistakes the Soviet dictator made.
In June 1950 North Korean armies swept aside ill-equipped South Koreans and, in their wake, began a murderous effort to cleanse South Korea of its incorrect class structure. However, communist savagery rallied South Koreans to their regime and undercut whatever chances existed for a peaceful reunification of Korea for generations.
The invasion also brought an unexpected American reaction: President Truman committed the US military to the defence of South Korea. So unexpected was his action that the Soviets, boycotting meetings of the United Nations Security Council, were not present for the debate over Korea; consequently, the Americans were able to cloak their rescue efforts under the United Nations flag.
From \JJapan\j, General Douglas MacArthur rushed his ill-trained and ill-prepared garrison troops to Korea. A series of humiliating defeats followed, and by August the North Koreans had driven the Americans and the remaining South Korean forces back to a small perimeter around the port of Pusan in the south-east.
There the front stabilized, as US firepower and \Jaircraft\j took a terrible toll on the attackers and interdicted supply routes running the entire length of the peninsula.
As savage battles enveloped Pusan, MacArthur launched one of the master-strokes of his career: husbanding his reinforcements, in September 1950 he threw a combined marine and army force ashore at Inchon, near Seoul.
Tidal conditions at Inchon represented a nightmare for planning the landing, and MacArthur's military advisers along with the US joint chiefs of staff advised against the operation. But MacArthur was right; the North Koreans were not ready and Inchon fell, soon followed by Seoul. With the capture of the South Korean capital, through which North Korean supply lines ran, the enemy's position around Pusan collapsed. Those not taken prisoner fled in disorder to the North.
For the Americans the question was 'what next?' At the beginning of the war, MacArthur had argued for the rearmament of the Chinese Nationalists in order to launch them back against the mainland from which the communists had driven them in 1949.
Truman answered with a resounding no. Now, with victory at Inchon, MacArthur urged pursuit across the 38th parallel into North Korea; here Truman agreed. But MacArthur's towering ego led him to discount warnings emanating from communist China that it would not tolerate a US advance to the Yalu river, Korea's frontier with China.
The Americans therefore continued their advance in two separate pushes to the North and in late autumn the Chinese intervened. Some American units collapsed under their attacks: in the west, the army fell back pell-mell to the south; in the east, the marines and accompanying soldiers fought through the encircling Chinese armies and even brought out their dead in an epic retreat.
The advancing Chinese, honed by years of struggle against the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists, endured enormous hardships with minimal logistical support; they moved with speed over the mountainous terrain of North Korea, around and through blocking positions established by United Nations forces.
As Chinese forces drove south of Seoul, MacArthur suggested extreme options ranging from nuclear attacks to the abandonment of the peninsula. Not surprisingly, a growing estrangement marked relations between Truman and his general.
As the chairman of the American joint chiefs of staff, Omar Bradley, noted about MacArthur's suggestion that the United States wage an all-out war on communist China: it would be 'the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy'.
In early January 1951 the situation stabilized south of Seoul as UN forces under the command of the best US combat general of World War II, Matthew B. Ridgway, solved serious morale problems and developed tactical solutions that emphasized firepower to deal with massed Chinese attacks.
At this point the long supply lines supporting Chinese troops came under heavy air bombardment, while Ridgway's forces counter-attacked and shortly afterwards regained Seoul. In April the communists tried but failed to recapture what was left of the South Korean capital.
This time, United Nations forces did not collapse but instead resumed their offensive after the Chinese had exhausted themselves. In the face of overwhelming American firepower, the communists took appalling casualties and appeared to be on the brink of collapse; certainly their desperate appeals for talks suggested the serious straits in which they found themselves.
The US then made one of its most serious mistakes of the Cold War: it agreed to halt the advance and begin peace talks. There was of course nothing wrong with beginning talks, but halting the United Nations troops allowed the enemy to regroup and so ended their need for an armistice.
The American decision to move as quickly as possible to the peace table reflected a number of factors. First, Truman had found it necessary in April to dismiss MacArthur because of the general's insistence that the United States follow an 'Asia first' strategy - one that would have carried the war to Manchuria and perhaps even mainland China.
By challenging the president, MacArthur left Truman no alternative. Truman and his advisers recognized that Korea represented only a pawn in a larger geopolitical match between the Soviet Union and United States: they wanted peace in Asia in order to concentrate on what they regarded as the Cold War's crucial theatre - western Europe.
Undoubtedly, in summer 1951 neither the US nor China desired to see the Korean War continue; but Stalin did, since he perceived that the war was placing considerable strain on the United States. Consequently, armistice talks dragged on for two more years, while the killing continued on a battlefront that resembled the trench lines of World War I.
For strategic reasons, the Americans never increased their forces sufficiently to break the stalemate, while massive interdiction efforts by the US air force limited the extent to which the Chinese could support their ground forces. The stalemate pitted western firepower against the masses of China's revolutionary soldiery.
The length of the war and its lack of results - as MacArthur commented when he resigned: 'there is no substitute for victory' - made Truman highly unpopular to Americans, and in November 1952 they elected Dwight D. Eisenhower as president. His electoral success reflected not only his popularity, but also his promise to end an interminable struggle.
He made it clear to the communists that unless they made real moves towards peace, he might consider using nuclear weapons. However, the armistice of summer 1953 resulted largely from Stalin's death the previous March, because the new Russian leaders did not look on escalation of the war with the same cynicism as the dictator - especially since a succession crisis was brewing in the Soviet Union.
In retrospect Korea was the crucial turning point in the Cold War. It brought the United States and its full potential back into the contest. It stabilized the situation in East Asia and, with the infusion of massive American resources to fight the war, began the process by which \JJapan\j ascended to the status of an economic super-power.
It also created an atmosphere in the United States where the commitment of conventional forces to the defence of western Europe became possible. However, the Korean War also fanned the flames of an anti-communist witch hunt in America and ended whatever possibility might have existed for substantive accommodation with the Soviet Union in the post-Stalin period.
#
"Vietnam, Part 1: The Thirty Years War",192,0,0,0
In the nineteenth century the French expanded into an area that they misnamed Indo-China which included three distinct peoples: Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese. The last had waged a tenacious and successful effort to avoid the snares, cultural as well as political, of Chinese civilization to the north, only to succumb to French technology and organization in the nineteenth century. But the Vietnamese only grudgingly accepted French overlordship.
By the early twentieth century French education in Vietnam was turning out voracious nationalists prepared to challenge \JFrance\j on its own terms. In particular, a Vietnamese who eventually settled on the \Inom de plume\i of Ho Chi Minh set in motion a revolution that defeated first the French and eventually the Americans.
As a young man he journeyed to Europe and there became one of the founders of the French Communist party. In the 1920s and 1930s, he continued his education by working for the \JComintern\j in Moscow and eventually for the Chinese communists. But whatever his politics or his location. Ho remained a fervid Vietnamese nationalist.
In March 1945, the Japanese destroyed the last vestiges of French military and colonial power in Vietnam. Ironically, the United States refused any support for the French as they went down to defeat. Six months later the Japanese surrendered: Nationalist Chinese troops occupied the North while the British moved into the South to disarm the defeated forces, since the French, recovering from occupation, were not yet prepared to return.
In the vacuum the only disciplined local forces were those of Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh. At first the French recognized Ho's regime, but the new Fourth Republic could not enforce its political decision: French commanders on the scene committed their forces to re-establishing French rule and, given Ho's intransigence, war was the only outcome.
The French quickly re-established control of the cities, but Vietnamese resistance did not collapse; rather Viet Minh guerrillas gained effective control over the countryside and waged a bloody hit-and-run war against French troops. In 1949, the victory of the communists in China altered the balance.
Their leader, Mao Tse-tung, provided substantial weaponry and training to the Viet Minh and in October 1950 Ho's forces dealt the French a series of devastating blows along the frontier. The French position in northern Vietnam collapsed.
Hitherto, the Americans had taken a decidedly hostile position towards French attempts to re-establish their colony in Southeast Asia, but with the Korean War in progress, the US sent substantial military aid which allowed the French to make a stand in the Red River Valley.
In early 1951 Vo Nguyen Giap, a former history teacher and now Ho's military commander, threw Viet Minh forces against the French in a savage offensive. Overwhelming French firepower and first-class leadership taught Giap and his commanders a grim lesson: they could not beat their enemy in the open.
The war therefore became a stalemate. The Vietnamese controlled the areas around the Red River Valley and the countryside throughout much of the rest of the country, especially at night. The French launched sweeps to catch and destroy guerrilla forces in the open, where French firepower and training would prevail, but their operations mostly fell on thin air: the Viet Minh fought only when it was to their advantage.
Although mounting losses made the war increasingly unpopular in \JFrance\j, the stalemate held as long as the Korean War continued; but when that conflict ended in 1953, the Chinese were able to provide increasing aid. To forestall a worsening situation, the French baited a trap for Giap; they aimed to pull the Viet Minh into a battle where superior French firepower would tell.
Late in 1953 an airborne attack captured Dien Bien Phu, a position that the French believed critical to Giap's logistics, hoping that the Viet Minh would appear in strength so that their elite troops could deal them a devastating blow.
However, the French had greatly underestimated the sophistication, dedication, and capabilities of their opponents. In March 1954 Giap struck. Viet Minh attacks overwhelmed the outer defence redoubts at Dien Bien Phu while their artillery dominated the main French positions.
Airborne re-supply proved extraordinarily difficult since the Viet Minh soon rendered the airfield unusable. By early April, only US intervention could have restored the situation.
Policy debates in the United States revolved around the issues of the strategic cost, significance, and burden that such a war might involve, and eventually concluded that the benefits of holding Vietnam for French \Jcolonialism\j were not worth the expense. And so the Americans watched while Dien Bien Phu and its garrison went down to defeat.
The refusal of American aid thoroughly soured Franco-American relations, while Dien Bien Phu sealed the fate of French \Jcolonialism\j in Southeast Asia. The Americans did establish an anti-communist regime in South Vietnam as a result of the peace accords signed in Geneva (July 1954); but how they thought such a regime would survive when even its leaders recognized that they owed their independence to Ho's Viet Minh remains one of the tragic, unanswered questions of the 1950s.
#
"Algerian War",193,0,0,0
Few bands turned out to welcome the French troops returning from their Asian defeat. Instead, \JFrance\j plunged into another war. On 1 November 1954, Algerian rebels attacked French positions across North Africa and initiated a struggle for national liberation.
Their opening assaults failed to win outright victory, but they achieved the larger aim of mobilizing Arab sentiment against the French. Complicating the situation was the fact that the large European population in \JAlgeria\j adamantly refused to countenance any change in \JAlgeria\j's status as in integral part of \JFrance\j.
Escalating guerrilla activity confronted the French with problems similar to those they had faced in Vietnam, but in \JAlgeria\j the FLN - \IFront de Liberation Nationale\i - could also strike at the European population. This resulted in harsh responses that only exacerbated the war and turned it into a conflict between hostile nationalities and religions.
French officers had returned from Asia determined not to repeat the mistakes they had made in Vietnam. They exhibited a coherent understanding of revolutionary war and the nature of their opponents, but their desire to make the Algerians citizens of \JFrance\j flew in the face of French as well as Algerian political realities.
The year 1956 marked the turning-point. The French introduced conscripts to the fighting, which they had never done in Vietnam, and almost immediately these inexperienced troops ran into difficulty. In September the FLN brought the war into the cities by directly attacking French civilians, increasing the war's rising cost as well as its savagery.
Even more destructive to the French position was the failure of Anglo-French operations against the Suez Canal in early November (see \JArab-Israeli Wars\j), because the collapse of that effort heavily reinforced the suspicions of many French officers concerning the competence of their political leaders.
By late 1956, the FLN controlled the Arab quarters of the major cities, while its terror attacks had brought European \JAlgeria\j to a virtual halt. Up to this point urban security had rested on the police; the army had been responsible for the war in the \Ibled\i - the back country.
Now, with control in the cities collapsing, French authorities sent in the army. In January 1957, General Jacques Massu's paratroopers took control of \JAlgiers\j and immediately instituted a ruthless, no-holds-barred war against the FLN's cadres. Massu used preventive detention, ruthless searches, constant patrolling of the Casbah, a general disregard for civil rights, and even torture against the FLN.
It was a war of the dirtiest kind - unflinchingly portrayed in the film \IThe Battle of Algiers\i - and in the end it broke the FLN; but its methods did nothing to improve Algerian attitudes towards French rule. Even more important, the use of torture eroded support for the conflict in Metropolitan \JFrance\j.
The French government proved incapable of handling the complex issues raised by \JAlgeria\j and on 15 April 1958 it fell. No politician proved able to put together a replacement administration for the next thirty-seven days and in \JAlgeria\j the army's fury mounted at the lack of political leadership in Paris.
The officer corps refused to lose another war because of what it regarded as cowardly behaviour on the part of the politicians, so in mid-May a mob in \JAlgiers\j, supported by the army, seized the government buildings and demanded that Charles de Gaulle, leader of the French government-in-exile in World War II, take over a bankrupt state.
By 1 June 1958 de Gaulle was in power in Paris and, over the next four years, conducted a difficult and often contradictory policy towards \JAlgeria\j. It is not clear when he made the decision to abandon the conflict, but by September 1959 he was offering 'self-determination'.
Meanwhile, he allowed the French military to continue its skilful campaign. By isolating the FLN from its bases in \JTunisia\j and Morocco and by sophisticated use of helicopters and mobile formations, the French army destroyed their opponents in the field. Despite the military success, however, de Gaulle prepared to withdraw.
He faced a significant challenge from many French officers, some of whom went so far as to join a terrorist organization, the OAS \I(Organisation de l'ArmΘe SecrΦte),\i which plotted his assassination; but de Gaulle survived, and extricated \JFrance\j from \JAlgeria\j without a civil war.
The generals could boast that they had won the military conflict, but this ignored the crucial fact that they had lost the political war. In 1962 \JAlgeria\j became independent.
#
"Decolonization: The British Experience",194,0,0,0
Where the French fought and lost two disastrous wars, the British came through the process of decolonization relatively unscathed. The great challenge was that of freeing India, which Britain overcame by a combination of statesmanship at home and stable and responsible military leadership on the scene. But the British also confronted serious military challenges elsewhere.
Some they defeated; others they finessed. In February 1948, communist guerrillas in Malaya began a well-run campaign to terminate British rule and create a communist dictatorship.
Over the next four years, they gained strength and improved their position. But in February 1952 the British began an effective drive against the insurgents with several factors favouring the effort. Malaya had two main ethnic communities, Malays and Chinese; the communists drew their support almost entirely from the latter.
Moreover, Malaya had no frontier with a communist nation; consequently, the insurgents found it increasingly difficult to import arms and munitions.
The British recognized that the insurgency was a political problem and, as they embarked on their campaign to suppress the guerrillas, announced their intention to grant Malaya independence in the immediate future. Thus, they encouraged Malay \Jnationalism\j while splitting the Chinese community from both the Malays and the guerrillas by careful police measures.
Finally, the military effort rested on soldiers who knew the jungle better than the enemy. Conditions of guerrilla war in Malaya led the British to recreate several special units that had done so well in World War II - particularly the Special Air Services Regiment (SAS) - and this ability to fight unconventional war would pay the British armed forces big dividends in a number of future conflicts from \JKenya\j and Aden to Ulster and the Falklands.
By 1954 the communist high command in Malaya had withdrawn to \JThailand\j and the war sputtered out. The British had won the political as well as the military struggle.
#
"Vietnam, Part 2: The Thirty Years War",195,0,0,0
In 1954 President Eisenhower and his advisers had decided that Vietnam was not worth the blood and treasure that it would take to defeat the Viet Minh. However, the American bureaucracy failed to translate that decision into policy and the United States slipped slowly towards involvement through half-measures.
The Geneva Peace Accords of 1954 established an anti-communist regime in South Vietnam, led by the autocratic Ngo Dinh Diem, which combined the worst aspects of French \Jcolonialism\j with mandarin rule.
It possessed little legitimacy in the countryside, while Diem and his family remained firmly wedded to the idea that only loyalty to the regime really mattered. Because \JSaigon\j remained low among American strategic priorities until 1961, military and civilian advisers from the bottom levels of American bureaucracy, most of whom knew neither French nor Vietnamese, influenced policy inordinately and, using Korea as a paradigm, laboured to establish a conventional army to defeat a conventional invasion.
Meanwhile, Ho and his cohorts laboured to establish their version of Stalin's socialist paradise in the North and eventually provoked rebellion among peasants in the Red River Valley, which they put down with enthusiastic ruthlessness.
Then in 1959, recognizing Diem's weakness, they launched a campaign of infiltration, political action, and military and logistical support for an insurrection to overthrow the regime in South Vietnam. They began to construct a road through Laos and \JCambodia\j that the Americans eventually named the 'Ho Chi Minh Trail'.
Against an unpopular regime with little sense of what was happening in the countryside, the insurgency spread rapidly until, by the time John F. Kennedy became president in 1961 and announced that America would 'pay any price, bear any burden to defeat \Jcommunism\j, the situation in South Vietnam had disintegrated alarmingly.
The American response, however, was to provide more of the same: more advisers, more conventional arms, and more social science nostrums.
The US military were hardly prepared to meet the challenge posed by the 'Viet Cong' (the derogatory name for the Viet Minh). Senior commanders and staffs took the conceptions within which the US army had trained - namely preparation for massive conventional or nuclear war against the Soviet Union - to the highly politicized guerrilla war in the difficult terrain of Southeast Asia and, throughout their involvement, proved incapable of absorbing the lessons of the conflict.
A system of one-year tours of duty, combined with a general lack of knowledge of Vietnamese culture and language, only reinforced such weaknesses.
Kennedy selected the president of the Ford Motor Company as his secretary of defense. Robert Strange McNamara brought to the job a punctilious accountant's mind and a firm belief that there were few problems that systems analysis could not solve.
McNamara did ensure that the Defense Department held the services to higher accountability in spending their funds; however, he possessed a totally unrealistic desire to eliminate all ambiguities and uncertainties from defence analysis as well as from the conduct of war.
Under his tutelage the American military would fight the war in Vietnam entirely on the basis of statistical indices: numbers of enemy dead and wounded, numbers of battalion-days in combat, tons of bombs dropped, tons of cargo moved through the ports.
The lists seemed endless, and all proved essentially meaningless in judging the progress of the war. Yet, in the long run, McNamara forced the US military to think within his mental framework and only in the 1980s did his influence in the Pentagon begin to wane.
From his first days in office to his assassination in November 1963, Kennedy pursued an active, aggressive policy in Vietnam that steadily raised the stakes. Enthusiastic about meeting Ho's challenge, the president and his advisers underestimated their opponents and overestimated their \JSaigon\j allies.
As American aid and advisers poured into the South, the political and military situation grew darker. Newspaper reporters noted the deterioration, but the commander of the advisory effort, General Paul Harkins, depicted the war in rosy terms to Washington while contemptuously dismissing the press.
Only in autumn 1962 did the Americans finally recognize that Diem was a loser. Threats of US withdrawal eventually led to a coup by the Vietnamese military that overthrew the regime and assassinated the dictator and his brother.
But the coterie of generals who succeeded Diem proved even more inept than their predecessor, and by summer 1964 resistance in the South was collapsing. The new American president, Lyndon Johnson, had little desire to involve the United States in war in Southeast Asia, but he refused to admit defeat at the hands of what he termed a 'pass-ant country'.
In summer 1964 he therefore launched a series of air raids against the North Vietnamese navy, supposedly in response to attacks on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson and his advisers hoped that such strikes would persuade the North Vietnamese to desist. Ho and his colleagues, however, had no intention of desisting.
As they told Bernard Fall, a noted western expert on Vietnam, they had no fear of American firepower; after all they had already beaten the French. Nevertheless, Johnson campaigned for re-election on a platform that portrayed his opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, as a warmonger.
Johnson won but, as one voter later commented, 'I was told that if I voted for Goldwater, I would get war, and I voted for Goldwater and got war.'
In early 1965 Johnson authorized a bombing campaign against the North, code-named 'Rolling Thunder', which severely limited targets that US \Jaircraft\j could attack.
In retrospect no American actions could have forced the North Vietnamese to stop their war against the South at this stage, even if the American military had possessed free rein to attack everything; but 'Rolling Thunder' was a totally misconceived effort with no chance of success.
Johnson therefore tipped American ground forces directly into the struggle for South Vietnam. The conduct of the war now fell to General William Westmoreland.
Westmoreland shared with most other American military leaders a contempt for past experience. For example, in 1964 the French, recognizing that it was increasingly probable that the United States would embroil itself in Vietnam, made available to the American government the after-action study of their defeat in Vietnam: it still sits in the classified library of the National Defense University, in the original French, and there is little evidence that senior military or political leaders in the Pentagon studied the volume.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the American military repeated every mistake the French had made. They also refused to learn. Confronted in the la Drang Valley battles with serious tactical and operational problems, including the destruction of a battalion of the 1st Air Cavalry at 'Landing Zone Albany', Westmoreland denied the corps commander's request that Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) set up a 'lessons learned board' to examine the tactical and operational weaknesses of US forces. Instead, throughout the war, firepower-heavy American military units blundered around the countryside wrecking everything.
Westmoreland also displayed little interest in reforming the South Vietnamese military, and at least until 1967 pacification remained at the bottom of his priorities. MACV emphasized search and destroy missions, in which American units sought to find, fix, and then liquidate main-force enemy units; it actively discouraged participation by its troops in the political war in the countryside.
When marine commanders initiated a small-unit, civil action strategy to protect the population in their area, MACV placed severe limits on the effort. Statistical indices, beloved by McNamara, dominated the American approach.
What counted were battalion days in action and the justly infamous body counts. One result of this score-card approach was the My Lai massacre in which American soldiers slaughtered Vietnamese peasants; MACV then covered up the incident until it exploded in the American press.
Besides search and destroy missions, the Americans cleared whole areas of the country to deny Viet Cong and North Vietnamese the support of the peasants and then dumped the transplanted civilian population into the hands of a government that lacked any facilities, resources, or interest in resettlement programmes.
Elsewhere, free-fire zones allowed American artillery and \Jaircraft\j to destroy the landscape and impose a terrible toll on civilians as well as the enemy. The approach was even less imaginative than the French effort had been, but the awesome fire-power that the Americans deployed allowed them the illusion of 'military victory'.
The American people had greeted the introduction of US troops into Vietnam with enthusiasm, and in summer 1964 the Senate passed the 'Gulf of Tonkin Resolution', authorizing air raids on North Vietnamese targets, by a margin of eighty-eight to two. In October 1965 \ITime\i magazine enthusiastically crowed in its lead article about the American buildup:
It was only three months ago that the lethal little men in black pajamas roamed the length and breadth of South Vietnam, marauding, maiming and killing with impunity. . . Today South Vietnam throbs with a pride and power, above all an esprit, scarcely credible against the summer's somber vista. . . The remarkable turnabout in the war is the result of one of the swiftest, biggest military buildups in the history of warfare. . . Wave upon wave of combat-booted Americans - lean, laconic and looking for a fight - pour ashore from armadas of troopships.
Day and night, screaming jets and prowling helicopters seek out the enemy from their swampy strongholds. . . The Viet Cong's once-cocky hunters have become the cowering hunted as the cutting edge of US firepower slashes into the thickets of communist strength.
Johnson laboured mightily to keep the war popular with the American people. He refused to call up either National Guard or reserves; the government provided bodies for the war through the draft, but a draft that allowed the 'best and the brightest' to escape military service entirely.
The government issued exemptions to the male children of the upper and educated classes, who carefully ensured that their exemptions remained in place before joining demonstrations against the war.
The burden of the conflict continued to fall on the shoulders of poor black and white Americans. In addition, Johnson and McNamara, in glaring contrast to Truman's actions during the Korean War, stripped the American military throughout the rest of the world to fight in Asia.
#
"Battle of Dien Bien Phu",196,0,0,0
By late 1953, the French position in Indo-China showed serious signs of deterioration. The armistice in Korea allowed the Chinese and Soviets to increase significantly their aid to the Viet Minh; moreover, French efforts to inflict defeats on Vietnamese forces by launching raids into enemy territory had failed dismally.
At this point, the French decided to undertake a high risk strategy. They would launch their airborne forces in a deep raid to seize the town of Dien Bien Phu, which lay on the supply routes to Laos.
The French high command gambled; first, that they could tempt the Vietnamese leaders to move significant forces into the area around the town and, second, that French superiority in firepower, discipline, and training would allow the defending force to decimate Viet Minh attackers (as had happened in fighting along the Red River in 1951.)
But the French assumptions were dangerously flawed. First, the North Vietnamese proved able to deploy far more forces and firepower than the French expected; second, they were able to supply those forces over the course of a prolonged engagement.
The battle began in March 1954, as Viet Minh elite units stormed the outlying positions that protected Dien Bien Phu and particularly its airfield. With their artillery on the heights the Viet Minh possessed a bird's-eye view of the valley of Dien Bien Phu below: almost immediately, the airfield became unusable.
The French air force proved incapable of suppressing either Viet Minh howitzers or supply lines, and the Viet Minh infantry, as the Americans would find out a decade later, were ruthless, well-trained, and disciplined.
Despite the hopeless situation, French paratroopers continued to drop into the beleaguered compound until the last days. The garrison, for the most part, fought with extra-ordinary courage but by May the Viet Minh had overrun the entire position. The French lost both the battle and the colony.
#
"Vietnam: Tet and After",197,0,0,0
Nevertheless, the American soldiers and marines staved off the South's defeat in 1965-66, imposing terrible casualties on their adversaries. In 1967 the North Vietnamese changed their strategy of direct military confrontation by targeting marine units in the northern part of the country, which possessed less firepower.
In 1968 they changed the game again by launching a massive assault, the Tet Offensive, on South Vietnam's cities. As in his attacks on the Red River Valley in 1951, Giap calculated that such an operation would result in widespread popular uprisings and the collapse of his opponents; but he was wrong. In a military sense, the Tet offensive and its ancillary operations proved disasters for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops.
The South Vietnamese military, to the surprise of even their American advisers, fought tenaciously; the country did not rise in rebellion; and American firepower devastated the attackers. Giap reinforced failure by launching continued offensives throughout 1968 that failed even more decisively and at greater cost, while the Americans and their allies eliminated all the communist sympathizers in the South who, in responding to Ho's call, had shown their hand.
War, however, consists of far more than totalling up statistics. The savagery of Tet brought home to the American people the seriousness of the conflict, while their government offered no convincing strategic or political explanations for what it was doing.
Johnson withdrew from the presidential race and ended the misbegotten and badly executed air campaign against the North. Westmoreland, like a broken record, could only ask for more of everything until his promotion to chief of staff of the army finally removed him from \JSaigon\j.
Westmoreland's replacement, General Creighton Abrams, displayed more imagination and political sense in fighting the war. MACV now emphasized 'Vietnamization', and the Vietnamese forces received attention, arms, and comprehensive training. But it was too late, for domestic pressure had reached the point where the United States simply had to pull out of Vietnam.
At least the savage blood-letting inflicted on the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong in 1968 created some breathing space, and the new administration of Richard M. Nixon carried out both open and secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese.
Nevertheless, while he removed American troops, Nixon continued to provide massive military and political aid to the South and carried out operations to improve the military situation. For example, in May 1970 the Americans launched a major invasion of \JCambodia\j to destroy the logistical bases of the North Vietnamese.
The action achieved its military objectives, but a storm of political protests at home underlined how little time remained for the Americans to escape from the war.
In 1972, as the last American combat troops made their exit, the North Vietnamese launched a massive conventional invasion to destroy South Vietnam. Their aim was to humiliate the United States and not just beat what the North Vietnamese termed its 'lackeys'.
Again they made a terrible miscalculation: American air power inflicted horrendous casualties on the advancing North Vietnamese while Nixon was so angered that he ordered the air force and the navy to launch a great air campaign against the North itself.
Equipped with precision-guided munitions, US fighter bombers destroyed all the important bridges in North Vietnam and much of the enemy's economic \Jinfrastructure\j in a matter of weeks.
The collapse of the ground offensive and the destruction of much of their homeland brought the North Vietnamese back to negotiations. By autumn the opposing sides had hammered out a peace agreement that allowed the United States to withdraw with some dignity.
Once again, however, the North Vietnamese attempted to humiliate the Americans by pulling out of the deal at the last moment. Buoyed by his overwhelming victory in the 1972 presidential elections, Nixon again unleashed US air power.
This time even B-52s participated and, surveying the wreck of their country, the North Vietnamese finally decided that humiliation of the United States by a third-rate power was not an achievable objective.
Nevertheless, the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 failed to end the war in Vietnam. The \JWatergate\j affair limited Nixon's ability to support South Vietnam, while Congress, in full cry of self-righteousness, did everything possible to undercut South Vietnam.
In 1975 the North Vietnamese therefore launched yet another conventional offensive against the South and this time, without American supplies or air power, it collapsed - although the millions of South Vietnamese refugees who took flight from their 'liberators' suggested that \Jcommunism\j hardly enjoyed unanimous support in the South.
But the American performance in 1975 was a disgrace: the \JCIA\j failed even to destroy its intelligence files in \JSaigon\j and thereby compromised nearly all of the South Vietnamese who had co-operated with the United States.
The Vietnam War was a sobering experience for most Americans. For the first time since 1812 an opponent had defeated the United States. The US had floundered into the war with half measures.
Never did its military or political leaders undertake a serious strategic assessment of their opponent or of the war's possible political or military costs. From the beginning, the American military underestimated the ideological commitment of their adversaries, while McNamara and those who thought like him contemptuously rejected such intangibles.
In the end, the United States managed to extricate itself; but the cost to American values and self-esteem was devastating. Conversely, the North Vietnamese achieved their objective of unifying Vietnam under their control, but in so doing they sacrificed whole generations of their people, as well as the economic potential of their nation.
Indeed, their victory looks hollow today when one considers that Vietnam is one of the poorest nations in the world - in a region dominated by \JTaiwan\j, \JJapan\j, South Korea, \JSingapore\j, Malaya, and Hong Kong - thanks to its intransigent political system and the fanatical war of national liberation that it waged.
#
"Arab-Israeli Wars (warfare)",198,0,0,0
During World War I the British promised both the Arab peoples of the Near East independence from Ottoman rule and the Zionist movement a national home in Palestine. Few decisions by great powers have resulted in more potential for conflict.
By the 1930s Jewish \Jimmigration\j into Palestine - much of it due to events in Nazi \JGermany\j - created conflict between Arab and Jew. An obscure British captain, Orde Wingate, who achieved fame in World War II in special operations, played an important role in providing Jewish settlers with innovative approaches to war, while the participation of Jewish volunteers in the British armed forces during World War II further broadened military knowledge among Palestinian Jews.
In 1948, with communal fighting on the upswing and their resources and patience exhausted, the British withdrew from the area. The United Nations declared partition between the communities, but the local \JArabs\j as well as the neighbouring Arab nations rejected a peaceful settlement and launched military operations against the new state of Israel.
However, the \JArabs\j failed to co-ordinate their offensives, while local Arab leaders possessed neither political wisdom nor military ability. The Israelis broke the back of both local resistance and invading armies and, as a result of the 1948-49 war, acquired considerable territory that the United Nations settlement had assigned to Palestinian \JArabs\j.
The \JArabs\j displayed no desire to come to terms with the new Israeli state. Instead most Arab nations expelled their Jewish minorities to Israel at the same time that they proclaimed their aim to destroy the new state and its population.
After the Nazi experience, the Jews could not afford to take such threats lightly. In the early 1950s they faced a rising tide of \Jterrorism\j on their frontiers while the Egyptians, by purchasing arms from the Soviet Union, appeared to represent a direct threat to Israel's survival.
Consequently, when in 1956 the British and French invited the Israelis to participate in military action against \JEgypt\j, which had just unilaterally seized the Suez Canal, they delightedly agreed. The efficiency of Israeli military operations in 1956 stood in stark contrast to that of the French and British.
Using a combination of paratroopers and armour, the Israelis first blocked the Mitla Pass in the \JSinai\j and then chopped the Egyptians to pieces. A high level of training, doctrinal cohesion, and moral determination provided the Israelis with a highly effective military system; Arab armies drawn from stratified class systems, with soldiers and officers who lacked solid grounding in the military profession, proved incapable of facing them on the modern battlefield.
Within a week, the Israelis were close enough to the Suez Canal to watch their European allies attack Egyptian forces in the Canal Zone. But as these operations unfolded, the Soviet Union and the United States stepped in and ended the war.
Ironically, the Egyptian dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had lost the war in every military sense, won it in political terms: his prestige soared throughout the Middle East. The Israelis surrendered their conquests in the \JSinai\j to a United Nations peacekeeping force in return for promises that the Egyptians would allow transit through the straits of Tiran.
For the next eleven years Nasser basked in the glory of Suez Crisis and attempted to spread his influence throughout the Arab world. He found the Soviet Union a willing supporter of his designs and a provider of up-to-date military equipment, but for a decade Nasser also recognized the reality of the balance between his forces and those of Israel.
For reasons that remain obscure, peace in the Middle East collapsed in 1967. In May Nasser came to believe that the Israelis were about to attack; he then asked the UN to leave the \JSinai\j, deployed Egyptian troops into the area, and declared a blockade of the straits of Tiran.
Jordan and \JSyria\j made common cause with the Egyptians, and most military analysts believed the Jewish state stood little chance against Arab military might. Israel mobilized while the United States, thoroughly mired in Vietnam, abdicated its responsibilities to maintain the 1956 settlement.
On 5 June 1967 the Israelis struck. Flying out into the Mediterranean and then coming into \JEgypt\j at low level to avoid detection, Israeli fighter bombers wrecked the Egyptian air force in a series of morning raids.
With enemy air power shattered, Israeli \Jaircraft\j turned to supporting the ground forces. Against the Egyptians, Israeli armour cut off the Gaza strip, while other units crossed into \JSinai\j where, consistently displaying an extraordinary willingness to take risks, the Israelis broke into, over, and then through Egyptian positions.
The Egyptians, though often fighting bravely, proved incapable of adapting to the tempo of Israeli operations. Their collapse soon followed and, as Egyptian tanks and vehicles fled towards the canal through the Mitla Pass, Israeli \Jaircraft\j completed the killing. Within four days, the Israelis had reached the Suez Canal, with all \JSinai\j in their hands.
Shortly after Israel attacked \JEgypt\j, the Jordanians joined the conflict. Like the Soviets, they were misled by Egyptian claims that their \Jaircraft\j had destroyed the Israeli air force. Not until the third day did the extent of \JEgypt\j's defeat become clear, and by then it was too late for the Jordanians, who had suffered their own defeat.
Fighting began in \JJerusalem\j where the Israelis had placed three brigades. The Jordanians fought well in small units, but were no match for the Israelis on the operational level. By 7 June the Israelis controlled the West Bank of the river Jordan.
With \JEgypt\j and Jordan defeated, the Israelis turned against \JSyria\j. Thus far, the Syrians had limited their military actions to shelling Israeli settlements lying below the Golan heights. On 9 June the Israelis, having redeployed, attacked the heights and in three days of furious fighting they seized Golan and the region behind.
A wrecked Syrian army pulled back to Damascus and the Six Day War was over. In less than a week the Israelis had humiliated three Arab armies and air forces of much greater strength. Their success rested on the creation of a truly western army: one in which soldiers and officers worked as part of a closely integrated team with implicit trust between different levels of command.
Above all the Israelis recognized that war requires serious professionals - individuals who not only train hard but who devote serious intellectual study to their career - as well as the latest technology.
However, the Six Day War led the Israelis to overestimate their strategic advantage as well as the significance of their operational and tactical victories. Unlike 1956, they held on to all the conquered territories in the belief that the \JArabs\j would not dare unleash another war for the foreseeable future.
Israeli intransigence also mirrored Arab intransigence. The Egyptians embarked on a war of attrition along the Canal, which hardly put Israelis in a mood to negotiate, while a series of terrorist outrages around the world angered the Israelis even more.
The Israelis therefore took a hard line toward the \JArabs\j and, with little prospect of negotiations, the Egyptians had no choice but to think in terms of further military action. A new Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, possessed little of the self indulgent mood that so characterized his predecessor and other Arab leaders.
In 1973 \JEgypt\j and \JSyria\j agreed to launch a surprise attack on Israeli positions; this time they would provide as little advanced warning as possible. Ironically, US and Israeli intelligence services picked up many signals that indicated an Arab attack, but remained firmly convinced that such action was inconceivable.
On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, 6 October 1973, the Israelis finally recognized what was about to occur, but they could only begin mobilization and hope that the troops in forward positions could hold for a few days.
At 2.05 p.m. that same day a massive Egyptian air strike and artillery bombardment hit Israeli forward positions on the Suez Canal. The Egyptians then launched an all-out attack to regain the Canal and push the Israelis into the desert: their operation, rehearsed in minute detail, broke through the Bar Lev line and isolated the Israeli strong points.
The reserve Israeli armoured brigade on the Canal counter-attacked without infantry or artillery support and suffered devastating casualties. Israeli \Jaircraft\j attempted to intervene, but the Israelis had paid little attention to American experience with sophisticated Soviet-designed air defences in Vietnam and, lacking electronic equipment to counteract Soviet systems, their attacking \Jaircraft\j also suffered heavy losses.
The Israelis had drawn the mistaken lesson from the Six Day War that armour could operate alone rather than as part of a combined arms team. The first days of the Yom Kippur War underlined the errors of such an approach.
The Israelis quickly returned to a more coherent form of warfare in the midst of the conflict, but they paid a heavy penalty for misreading the lessons of the last war.
The one defensive measure the Israelis had taken before the war was to move another reserve armoured brigade onto the Golan heights. In the northern Golan, the Israelis lost their outpost on Mount Hermon, but the 7th Armoured Brigade shattered the attack of two Syrian divisions.
In the south, the Syrians almost regained the heights but Israeli success in the north allowed them to concentrate reserves on the threatened southern sector and hold the Syrians. A general counter-attack then drove the Syrians beyond the start line and opened up the possibility of an advance to Damascus.
This forced the Egyptians to come out from behind their anti-aircraft and antitank defences and engage the Israelis in mobile warfare. In an open tank battle, the largest since Kursk thirty years before, the Israelis devastated the attackers.
Taking enormous risks, they then counter-attacked. Driving across the canal they eventually gained a bridgehead on the western bank; from there they unleashed their armour. Driving south, Israeli tanks eliminated the Egyptian anti-aircraft missile sites and almost surrounded the Egyptian Third Army.
At this point, the war ended; both sides could claim victory and on that basis, through American good offices, an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was eventually signed.
The Yom Kippur War had taken the Israelis, whose overconfidence and underestimation of their opponents had placed their nation in an extraordinarily dangerous position, by surprise; but once they regained equilibrium, they proved adept at adapting capabilities and doctrine to combat realities.
The \JArabs\j fought courageously; but since combat organizations reflect the societies that spawn them, their forces displayed considerable weaknesses on the modern, technological battlefield. The fault lines between classes, the lack of educational and technological skills and weaknesses in professional military culture resulted in significant failures.
The greatest impact of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, however, arose from the decision of the Organization of \JPetroleum\j Exporting Countries (OPEC) to support the Arab military effort by first halting oil production and then increasing its price by 250 per cent.
The aim was to discourage western support for Israel; the effect was to trigger a major worldwide recession while at the same time increasing dramatically both the revenues and the political influence of the member states - especially the major oil producers around the shores of the Persian Gulf.
#
"Gulf Wars",199,0,0,0
The reaction of the American military to defeat in Vietnam was sullen disbelief. A widespread use of drugs and near collapse into open racial conflict within the US services exacerbated the dark mood and it took the rest of the 1970s to restore the situation. But in the 1980s a number of factors contributed to a rebirth of American military power.
After the bruises subsided, much of the American officer corps examined the lessons of the lost war, while publication of a superb translation of Clausewitz's \IOn War\i fuelled a serious mood of self-examination. Moreover, a massive American military build-up unleashed by President Ronald Reagan after 1981 brought a revolution in technology to the battlefield.
Finally, a small operation against a radical movement in the Caribbean island of \JGrenada\j pointed out major weaknesses in American military forces, particularly in the realm of interservice co-operation.
The Reagan buildup aimed at preparing American forces to confront the Soviets on both conventional and nuclear battlefields. Such a war never occurred, and the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1989 initiated a policy of military reductions; but the new policy had hardly begun before those forces found employment in the Persian Gulf.
Even after the Soviet collapse, other states possessed immense ambitions and believed that the end of the Cold War brought with it auspicious opportunities.
Saddam Hussein began his rise to power in \JIraq\j as an activist in the right-wing Ba'ath Party; he survived in the bloody world of Iraqi politics to become the ferocious dictator of a nation torn by insecurities.
When \JIran\j collapsed into seeming anarchy after religious ideologues seized power in 1979, Saddam invaded his neighbour in order to take advantage of the situation. Under ferocious Iranian counter-attacks, however, \JIraq\j's military forces fell back to their own territory.
A savage, seemingly unending war ensued in which two implacable tyrannies, one reinforced by Ba'athist \Jideology\j, the other by Islamic \Jfundamentalism\j, aimed to break their opponents. The Iraqis bought great amounts of Soviet and western weapons and technology; the Iranians counted on religious enthusiasm and sent their youth in tens of thousands to clear minefields with their feet.
In 1988 a series of carefully planned Iraqi attacks finally broke the Iranians, but while the Iraqis had bought technology from the Soviets and the West, their success reflected the weaknesses of their opponents rather than their own military competence.
To Saddam, 'victory' over \JIran\j opened up the possibility of economic and political control of the Middle East. As leader of the Ba'ath Party he aimed to redress the ancient wrongs inflicted on the Arab and Islamic worlds by western interlopers over the previous five centuries.
Burdened with debts from the war with \JIran\j and believing it inconceivable that the US would use its military power. Saddam struck the small but oil-rich adjoining state of \JKuwait\j in summer 1990. His invasion moved like clockwork and in less than a day Kuwaiti resistance collapsed.
In response, the United States and its western allies deployed massive military forces into the Gulf. Little of this impressed the Iraqis. To the end they did not believe that the US would dare strike the victors of the Iran-Iraq War.
As Saddam bluntly told the American ambassador in July 1990: 'Yours is a society which cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle.' Above all, the Iraqis heaped scorn on the notion that technology might play any significant role in the war.
In fact, technology destroyed the Iraqis. In the first ten hours of the war in January 1991 a combination of Stealth \Jaircraft\j, cruise missiles, electronic warfare, and precision-guided munitions took apart \JIraq\j's complicated air defence system.
Over succeeding weeks an aerial offensive battered \JIraq\j's military \Jinfrastructure\j, wrecked Iraqi ground forces and inflicted minimal damage on civilian populations. Considerable squabbling between coalition commanders occurred over the level of damage that air attacks achieved, but in the end quantifiable measures proved meaningless: when Allied ground forces rolled into \JIraq\j, the enemy surrendered with minimal resistance because the air attacks had shattered their morale.
Some air force planners argued that there was no need for a ground campaign, but they overlooked the political necessity for Allied ground forces to defeat the Iraqis and prevent the possibility that Saddam might claim that his army had remained unbeaten and unbroken in the field.
Nevertheless, as a retired marine general noted after the war: 'This was the first time in history when the ground campaign supported the air campaign.' For many analysts the war simply demonstrated once again the technological superiority of western military power over that of third world nations.
Yet technological superiority still only constitutes a portion of the equation; the course of hostilities since 1945 suggests that significant additional factors continue to affect the outcome of modern wars.
Above all, training, discipline, and organization must undergird the efforts of military forces. That has been the essence of the western way of war since the time of the Greeks. In \JIraq\j the Coalition forces possessed those advantages. Their opponents did not.
#
"Gulf War: Iraq's Air Defences",200,0,0,0
Helped by French and Soviet technology, the Iraqis had by 1990 developed a highly sophisticated, integrated air defence system. But it possessed major weaknesses, particularly since the Iraqis underestimated the skills and technological sophistication of their opponents.
The initial strikes by 'stealth' F-117 bombers and cruise missiles in January 1991 attacked the heart of the Iraqi air defence system, particularly the various command nodes, communication centres, and \JIraq\j's main electrical system.
The next stage in the Allied plan sent two massive packages of \Jaircraft\j, combining jammers, drones, and \Jaircraft\j carrying anti-radiation missiles, to strike any Iraqi radar installations that still functioned. By then, half an hour into the Allied attack, the Iraqis realized that a major attack was in progress; but breakdowns caused by the initial strikes were already causing them considerable difficulties.
At this point what appeared to be a massive two-pronged bombing strike aimed at \JBaghdad\j appeared on those radar screens still operating - but simply by 'tuning in' these installations attracted a large number of anti-radiation missiles. The Iraqi air defences failed to function in a coherent fashion for the rest of the war.
#
"Falklands War (warfare)",201,0,0,0
A series of miscalculations by the British Foreign Office persuaded the military leaders of Argentina that they could get away with an invasion and seizure of the Falkland Islands. Not only did they believe that Britain no longer possessed the military capabilities or will to regain the Falklands but they regarded Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as merely a member of the 'weaker sex.' In both respects they made a costly mistake.
Despite considerable efforts at mediation by the United States, the Argentineans refused to take three-quarters of a loaf and the British therefore sent a 'Task Force' to the South Atlantic. The Argentinean fleet came out, but the British high command authorized a \Jtorpedo\j attack on the cruiser \IBelgrano,\i and its sinking removed the Argentinean Navy from the war.
As British troops landed on the archipelago, the Argentineans launched a series of air raids on British ships sheltering in the waters around San Carlos. Argentinean air losses were heavy, as were British losses of ships; but Margaret Thatcher remained resolute.
Once ashore, the British paratroopers and marines, although outnumbered by their Argentinean opponents, overwhelmed the defenders, first at Goose Green and then in the advance on Port Stanley.
British troops displayed once again the values of discipline, training, and preparation when pitted against opponents whose officer corps possessed more experience in torturing and murdering opponents of the regime in basements than in preparing for war, and enlisted ranks which consisted entirely of untrained conscripts.
Not long after the surrender of the Argentinean forces on the Falklands, the government that sent them fell.
#
"Western Warfare, the Future of",202,0,0,0
From the Greek hoplites to the Harrier jet, war has served as the driving force behind the West's rise to world domination. The history of the West, both at home and overseas, has centred around a ferocious competition for mastery among uncompromisingly ambitious powers, in which the ruthless, the innovative, and the decisive displaced the complacent, the imitative, and the irresolute.
\BWars Past\b
The western way of war has always involved high costs, however. On the one hand, the death and suffering caused in acquiring global dominion defy description: the invasion and conquest of the New World after 1492, in particular, exacted a terrible toll, causing not only the destruction of entire native American cultures and peoples, but also the forced displacement of millions of Africans to serve the needs of the victors in the New World.
On the other hand, the endemic struggles between the western states seemed at times to banish peace entirely: the Thirty Years War (1618-48) devastated most of \JGermany\j and many of its neighbours: the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) ravaged Europe from \JLisbon\j to Moscow; the two world wars of the twentieth century all but destroyed the civilizations that spawned them.
This dark side has attracted trenchant condemnation. Homer's \IIliad,\i first written down in the eighth century BC but composed long before, already shows a commander (Achilles) agonizing over the costs of the military action he is about to take; the Athenian assembly in the fifth century BC, according to Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War, likewise weighed the possible gains of their proposed Sicilian expedition against the probable losses.
The history of \JRome\j written by Tacitus bristles with vainglorious and ineffective leaders who squandered men and material for the wrong cause, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and exudes a dry cynicism in describing the pitiless brutality which accompanied victory.
Western poets, playwrights, and novelists have also regularly subjected the deeds of warriors to scrutiny and (on occasion) ridicule, from \JEuripides\j' \ITrojan Women\i and Aristophanes' \ILysistrata,\i through the searing poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, or war-novels such as \ISimplicissimus. War and Peace, Fields of Fire,\i or \ICatch\i-22, down to films like \ILa Grande Illusion\i and \IApocalypse Now,\i or personal memoirs like \IStorm of Steel\i and \IBorn on the Fourth of July.\i
In addition, from AD 390, when \JArchbishop\j Ambrose of Milan forced Emperor Theodosius to do penance for slaughtering 7,000 people in reprisals, the Christian church has also called for responsible conduct both in declaring and in waging war - at least between Christians.
Making western war-makers the target of artistic, literary, and religious criticism has constantly provoked discussions of both the aims and the procedures of belligerents.
Ironically, however, the ongoing debate often refined and ratified - rather than hindered - western aggression, for the need to justify each offensive act led to careful campaigns of propaganda that inflamed public opinion and increased support for hostilities, thus rendering wars more rather than less widespread and destructive.
The western way of war has exhibited some other remarkable consistencies over time. In most of the periods covered by this \IHistory,\i from the hoplites of Ancient \JGreece\j to the 'grunts' of Vietnam, the primacy of soldiers fighting on foot stands out: admittedly artillery, tanks, and \Jaircraft\j have now somewhat eclipsed the foot soldier, but even during the Gulf War of 1991 infantry remained essential.
Furthermore, in most periods since the Greeks, the infantry's most common activity has been the siege. The West has shown an extraordinary predilection for complex defensive fortifications, from Jericho (the first walled city in the world) in 8500 BC to the trenches of the Western Front during World War I; and the requirement that armies capture fortified centres, whether castles or cities, before they advance has normally dominated military operations.
Moreover, not only have sieges been numerous, they have also been prolonged: Paris in the fifth century resisted the Franks commanded by Clovis for five years, and both \JOstend\j in the seventeenth century and \JLeningrad\j in the twentieth held out for three years, while countless other places resisted for an entire campaign.
The logistical ability to maintain armed forces in action for protracted periods forms another constant feature of western warfare. Other military traditions also included sieges. Chinese armies, for example, regularly attempted to take fortified towns; but their enormous size (often exceeding 100,000) made it imperative to reach a decision swiftly for, with so many mouths to feed, no time could be spent on the arduous preparatory bombardment, trench-work, and mining favoured by European commanders.
Most Chinese sieges therefore ended with a massed assault. In the West, by contrast, field armies above 100,000 remained rare until the eighteenth century; instead, the various states concentrated on military programmes that were capital - rather than labour-intensive.
To this end, as noted in the Introduction, more resources normally went into the development of technology, discipline, and staying-power than into augmenting numbers. Once the West began to harness industrial power to its military endeavours in the eighteenth century, this strategy proved overwhelming.
Thus, involvement in World War II caused the economy of the United States to undergo the largest, fastest, and most sustained expansion ever recorded: between 1941 and 1945 its gross national product increased by 50 per cent, steel output doubled, ship-building grew tenfold and \Jaircraft\j production elevenfold.
In concrete terms, the United States launched 51 million tons of merchant shipping during these years at the rate of three ships a day, with some vessels (at least for demonstration purposes) moving from start to launch in four and a half days; at the same time, it also produced a total of 300,000 \Jaircraft\j, at a peak rate in 1944 of 250 per day.
The strategic decision taken by America's leaders - and by others in different times and places - to mobilize prodigious resources for war played an essential role in matching the successful innovations, both tactical and technological, made by adversaries.
Examples of rapid invention followed by equally rapid imitation abound throughout the twentieth century, perhaps most spectacularly in the field of atomic technology (where the nuclear monopoly of the United States lasted just four years, 1945-49); but the same process of replication also occurred in earlier periods.
Thus in 1314 at the battle of Bannockburn in Scotland, the troops of Robert the Bruce deliberately adopted the same technique of infantry combat against English knights that infantry at Courtrai in Flanders had successful deployed against French forces twelve years before (see \JWarfare and Weapons in the Middle Ages\j). Likewise, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries each development in \Jgunpowder\j weaponry and in fortifications passed rapidly from one state to another.
Although most if not all societies have displayed some ability to learn from defeat and imitate the military methods of successful adversaries, the West remained unusual in four respects.
First, the almost permanent political fragmentation of Europe, coupled with the aggressiveness inculcated by its warrior values, produced prolonged and intense competition which placed a high premium on rapid adaptation and innovation within enduring institutional structures.
Second, thanks in part to the high cost of military changes, the West developed not only a broad tax base but also an extensive network of credit which made possible both a host of expensive inventions and also the distribution of their costs over a far longer period.
For these reasons a series of expensive technological and tactical revolutions have punctuated the military history of the West, especially since 1400: \Jgunpowder\j weapons, the artillery fortress, the 'ironclad' \Jbattleship\j, the panzer division, nuclear weapons, 'smart' bombs. And each revolution has called forth rapid responses from other powers capable of mobilizing the necessary financial resources and of restructuring their economy so that military technology could receive sufficient support.
Third, the West normally judged military innovations on simple criteria of effectivenss. Some civilizations elsewhere rejected on cultural or religious grounds tactics or technology that were demonstrably superior: thus the military aristocracy of Mamluk \JEgypt\j refused to use \Jfirearms\j in battle, on the grounds that they did not fit their traditional way of war, leading directly to the Mamluks' overthrow by the Ottoman Turks in 1517. European warriors, by contrast, were always prepared to embrace any weapon or tactic that seemed to offer an advantage.
Fourth and finally, although China also developed close-order drill for infantry, both in classical times and again in the sixteenth century, western soldiers proved uniquely sensitive to the advantages of 'keeping together in time' (in the felicitous phrase of William McNeill) through drill. Thucydides described the Spartans marching into combat at the battle of Mantineia in 418 BC 'slowly and to the music of many fluteplayers in their ranks. . . to make them keep in step and move forward steadily without breaking their ranks'.
The drill of the Macedonian army, recorded somewhat later by Aelian, became the basis of that adopted by the Dutch - and later by all other western armies - in the seventeenth century. The manoeuvres in formation of the Roman army, as described by Vegetius, likewise inspired subsequent imitations (see \JMilitary Tradition, Western\j and \JRoman Drills for Medieval Horsemen\j).
The long-standing western tradition of popular participation in war may well explain this sustained importance of drill. The citizen armies of Ancient \JGreece\j and Republican \JRome\j, the militias of the middle ages, the conscript armies of Europe and the United States since the nineteenth century: all needed to be rapidly 'broken in' to the military life - as professional soldiers did not - and, for this, precision manoeuvres in unison proved an ideal mechanism.
But during the seventeenth century another benefit accrued: the combination of drill with the use of \Jfirearms\j to produce volley fire, perfected through constant practice, proved the mainstay of western warfare - and the key to western expansion - for the next three centuries.
This emphasis on finance, technology, eclecticism, and discipline has conferred a unique resilience and lethality upon western warfare. On the one hand, wars among western states have tended toward costly stalemate: the Peloponnesian War of classical \JGreece\j, the Hundred Years War of the middle ages, the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century, the American Civil War, and the two world wars, all saw states fighting on for far longer than most observers (and participants) had believed possible.
On the other hand, wars fought by the West against other societies have generally proved short and relatively cheap, because the western formula provided a decisive advantage. Far more Greeks perished in the Peloponnesian War than in halting the Persian invasions (almost 40,000 Athenians died on the single expedition against \JSicily\j in 415-413 BC, against only 192 at Marathon in 490 BC); far more Roman legionaries met their deaths in the civil wars between 43 and 31 BC than in all the celebrated disasters in \JGermany\j and Parthia.
And, on the other hand, small bands of western warriors achieved remarkable results abroad. Alexander the Great's army of fewer than 50,000 marched from \JGreece\j to the Indus and destroyed an empire of millions between 334 and 323 BC, western forces had by AD 1650 gained control over \JSiberia\j, most of the Americas, parts of the \JPhilippines\j, and several other islands and archipelagoes off south and southeast Asia, as well as a necklace of fortified trading posts and cities around the coasts of Asia and Africa.
By 1850, almost all of India and \JAustralasia\j had been added; and by 1914 so had Africa and much of southeast and central Asia. Almost all of these additions came through the exercise of military power in a series of short, decisive wars.
\BWars Present\b
Will this pattern endure? The striking success of British forces in the Falklands (1982) and Coalition forces in the Gulf War (1991) might suggest continuance; but both conflicts were fought in the precise way for which western forces had trained - to defend or recapture territory against a conventionally armed aggressor.
They merely needed to relocate themselves to the South Atlantic or the Near East and fight there rather than in Europe. Moreover the West has always excelled in its ability to project military force to distant theatres: the campaigns of Alexander and Caesar; the \JCrusades\j and the conquest of the western hemisphere: the suppression of the Indian Mutiny and the \JBoers\j; the Pacific War; the Gulf.
However no guarantee exists that future challenges will continue to confront western military might on its own terms.
In fact few recent hostilities have been waged by sovereign powers using high technology arsenals: on the contrary, 90 per cent of all conflicts since 1945 have been civil wars fought with relatively simple weapons - a pattern likely to continue into the twenty-first century because high-technology wars, with their emphasis on arduous training, massive logistical backup, and copious state-of-the-art weaponry, make demands that few societies can meet.
Regrettably, wars fought with less advanced weaponry, and especially civil wars, tend to be more brutal and to involve far higher civilian casualties. In the wars fought in Europe during the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries between 70 and 80 per cent of the casualties were military.
By contrast, since 1945, the majority of the approximately fifty million people killed in war have been civilians - rising to 70 per cent or more in Vietnam. Moreover, almost all of them died from wounds inflicted by cheap, mass-produced weapons and small-calibre ammunition.
The link between civil war, low technology, and brutality is not unbreakable. George Grivas's justification of the guerrilla tactics he employed against the British in Cyprus in the 1950s makes a valid point:
\B\Ifor more information click on \b\i\JWestern Warfare, the Future of (continued)\j
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"Western Warfare, the Future of (continued)",203,0,0,0
Our form of war, in which a few hundred fell in four years, was far more selective than most, and I speak as one who has seen battlefields covered with dead. We did not strike, like the bomber, at random. We shot only British servicemen who would have killed us if they could have fired first, and civilians who were traitors or intelligence agents.
But in most civil wars little attempt has been made to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative warfare, for political objectives may lead the forces of one side to attempt the extermination, rather than merely the defeat, of the other. Scholars have marshalled considerable evidence to suggest that Francisco Franco, leader of the Nationalist insurrection in \JSpain\j after 1936, deliberately rejected any option that might have brought a swift end to the Civil War in the interests of killing as many Republicans as possible.
Much the same pattern has characterized civil wars in southeast Asia, Africa, Central America, and Yugoslavia - as well as to a lesser extent in Northern Ireland and \JLebanon\j - for savagery provokes reprisals and so becomes institutionalized, leading to a downward spiral of atrocity that rules out political compromise.
Nor are these conflicts normally capable of resolution by the use of sophisticated weaponry, since such weaponry requires delivery from the air. \JRussia\j's experience in \JAfghanistan\j during the 1980s confirmed that of America in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973: it is almost impossible to eradicate guerrilla forces from 10,000 feet with conventional weapons.
Indeed it is hard to resolve civil wars at all, except by the total defeat of one side. The problem lies in the need for the warring parties to reach an agreement that will allow them to live together again in a single community.
Since political power is hard to divide, and power-sharing arrangements normally remain brief, the weaker faction often does not dare to lay down its arms for fear of subsequent reprisals. Only the intervention of an outside power, capable of brokering a settlement and then of enforcing its provisions, tends to produce a compromise peace; but, as in the case of Sri Lanka or \JLebanon\j, the cease-fire tends to last only as long as the broker's forces remain on the scene in strength.
Conventional wars between sovereign states have not ceased, however - witness the Indo-Pakistan wars, the Arab-Israeli wars, \JIraq\j's attacks on \JIran\j and then \JKuwait\j, and the Falklands conflict. Moreover, the heavy military investment of so many governments in conventional weaponry continues: the Middle East and North Africa probably contain more soldiers, \Jaircraft\j, missiles, and other weaponry than any other part of the globe, while the developing countries as a whole spent almost $150 billion on weapons and armies in 1988 alone, suggesting that more conflicts lie in the future.
Conventional wars, too, prove hard to end, short of the unconditional surrender of one side. Few governments conduct serious negotiations while fighting, because to do so might imply weakness, provoke internal pressures to settle, or cause dissension with allies. Instead they escalate the conflict - either through the use of new weapons and new resources, or through attacks on new targets or new fronts - and thus prolong it. The Iran-Iraq war, which lasted eight years and caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, offers a terrible warning of the possible cost of inter-state wars to come.
\BWars Future\b
Since 1945 no one has been deliberately killed by a nuclear bomb. Although from the 1940s to the 1980s the superpowers built up massive arsenals, and although the initial response of \JNATO\j forces in the 1970s and 1980s to a Soviet attack on Europe called for the release of tactical nuclear weapons, both sides regarded nuclear war a 'worst case' catastrophe. The two or three other states possessing an atomic capacity felt the same.
In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the world entered an age of greater nuclear proliferation in which perhaps two, three, or four states in each major region will acquire atomic weapons. Some of these states will control their armed forces closely and govern a densely populated country: they too may well regard nuclear power as an 'ultimate deterrent'.
But other states, some with a widely dispersed population, others with armed forces under looser control, may see matters in a different light. Moreover, nuclear weapons will not remain the only agents of mass destruction. Several aggressive states have shown interest in developing chemical and biological weapons, which are less expensive and easier to deliver.
In military terms, the world after the Cold War resembles the situation following other major conflicts that resulted in resounding victory: with the demise of the 'evil empire', a sense of euphoria creates pressure for a 'peace dividend'.
After World War I, the British government declared that 'It should be assumed for the purpose of framing the estimates of the fighting services, that at any given date there will be no major war for ten years'; and this 'ten-year rule' was not rescinded until 1932 and not superseded until 1937.
It would be rash for western leaders to assume that, a decade or so after the Cold War, another major challenge will not arise, just as both Nazi \JGermany\j and imperial \JJapan\j arose in the 1930s. The possibility that the West may face another major military threat may not be imminent, but it cannot be ruled out permanently.
Furthermore, the number and the nature of threats to international security facing the West are growing. On the one hand, the traditional causes of war - such as disputed boundaries and struggles for independence - remain.
In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where colonial boundaries were drawn with insufficient regard for the enduring hostility of different tribes, governments rarely serve as the focus of loyalty and ethnic tensions have produced innumerable civil wars in most of the forty-five states of the region, both large (like \JNigeria\j, with its Biafran war in 1967-70) and relatively small (like Ruanda, with Hutu and Tutsi at each other's throats and perhaps 1 million killed in the course of 1994).
On the other hand, new threats have emerged: international \Jterrorism\j (which has already occasioned a United States military strike against one state suspected of complicity - Libya), the drug trade, and a growing pressure for land and sea resources caused by uncontrolled demographic growth combined with shrinking crop yields in many areas of the world.
Anything that challenges a country's health, prosperity, social stability, and political peace may soon come to be seen as a threat to national security, and therefore as a potential cause of war.
Admittedly, even in this complex scenario, certain considerations favour western planners (apart from their possession of a huge nuclear arsenal). First, as John Keegan has pointed out, past encounters have tended to occur within a relatively limited compass, and may well continue to do so. For example, water, most of it ocean, covers approximately 70 per cent of the world's surface; yet almost all important naval engagements have taken place in a small fraction of that area, and usually within a few miles of land.
Certain locations have been fought over repeatedly - such as the North Sea (site of the battles of Sluis in 1340, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, around twenty engagements in the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century, Camperdown in 1797, and Jutland in 1916) or the narrows of the Central Mediterranean (Actium in 31 BC was fought remarkably close to the site of Lepanto in 1571 - itself the exact site of the battle of Naupactus, the first real sea-fight of the Peloponnesian War). Similarly, of the world's dry land, some 70 per cent is normally either too high, too cold, or too arid for the conduct of military operations; these areas therefore boast little or no military history.
Instead, as with naval engagements, a disproportionate amount of military activity has occurred in a small fraction of the globe. Armies have fought over some places again and again: the vale of Boetia near Thebes in \JGreece\j, site of nine battles between \JPlataea\j in 479 BC and Chaeroneia in 338 BC; the Low Countries; the Lombard plain; \JSaxony\j.
Edirne, formerly Adrianople in European Turkey, which saw fifteen battles or sieges between 323 and 1913, apparently holds the record. The explanation for such frequency is often geographical: Edirne lies in the last plain of Europe, so that invaders from both directions needed to secure it, and its resources, before resuming their advance.
Other sites frequently visited by armies include other fertile plains surrounded by mountains, forests or desert, and the narrow avenues leading to them. Nature has also exerted a heavy influence on military activity through climate.
Until recently, successful operations seldom occurred in the winter months; and even in World War II, the annual rains in March and October, accurately referred to by the Russians as the \Irasputitsa\i or 'roadless period', regularly caused all military movement to cease on the Eastern Front and proved and even greater hindrance than the more famous Russian winter (see \JWWII: Eastern Front\j).
Despite continuing improvements in military technology, conventional forces seem likely to operate at much the same times and in many of the same places as before (although both the Falklands and the Gulf War demonstrate that, when necessary, even inhospitable climes can become theatres of operations); and such geographical concentration dramatically simplifies the task of planning for war. Moreover, the surveillance systems currently available to support western forces present an unprecedented insurance against such threats materializing unexpectedly.
During the Gulf War, reconnaissance satellites monitored the movement of enemy forces, pinpointed the location of military installations, and indicated the scale of the damage inflicted; early warning satellites gave advance notice of incoming attacks; communications satellites allowed continuous communications between headquarters and units in action; and weather satellites predicted the optimum conditions for every initiative.
Although the 'friction', 'fog', and ambiguities of war can always jeopardize the proper use of this mass of data, the panoply of surveillance has substantially reduced the chances of strategic surprise against those who possess it.
But these sophisticated systems, like the weaponry they complement, require enormous expenditure. The future of the western way of war, and so of the western way of life that it protects, ultimately depends on two things: a sustained ability to manage international crises and prevent them from turning into armed conflicts, the outcome of which is always unpredictable; and the continued willingness to pay for defence against perils that are not immediately apparent.
Concerning the first, the principal danger remains that western (or westernized) states will repeat the mistake made so often in the past - twice this century - and engage in mutual hostilities, inflicting their awesome capacity for destruction upon each other. Concerning the second, the western way of war has come to rest upon two things.
On the one hand, there must be a willingness to use force, even though it inevitably involves losses. United States intervention in Vietnam (1965-73) and even more in \JSomalia\j (1993-94) became seriously compromised by public reluctance to accept casualties.
Under these constraints even the most powerful and well-equipped military apparatus represents no more than empty bluff. On the other hand, there must also be a willingness to finance an effective and adequate defence establishment. John Hampden, an English political writer, pithily expressed this point in 1692:
Great sums of money . . . are the sinews of war, and all other business. Our dear-bought experience has taught us what vast taxes are absolutely necessary to maintain the armies and fleets, which are requisite for our security; and for the defence of our religious and civil rights; and provided we attain those ends, it will not be thought, at [the] long run, we have bought them too dear.
In the 1990s, as in the 1690s, it remains true that who pays and why is almost as important, for western societies, as who fights and why; and that a \Jcongruence\j of outlook between the two is perhaps the most important of all. The future of the West depends, at least in part, upon this too continuing.
#
"Warfare Glossary",204,0,0,0
\BA\b
\Bamok combat\b military engagement in \JIndonesia\j in which a few warriors decide the outcome of a battle by a single desperate charge.
\Barmada\b a fleet of warships.
\Barmistice\b suspension of hostilities, truce.
\Barmy group\b the headquarters used to control armies, particularly during World War II by the British, Americans, and Germans. These multi-army, multicorps, and multi-divisional headquarters were essential to provide operational-level direction in the conduct of major campaigns.
\Barquebus\b fifteenth - and sixteenth - century hand-held firearm smaller than a \Jmusket\j.
\Bartillery\b (especially cannons, field guns) weapons for firing missiles.
\Battack in depth\b attack which disrupts defences, causing systematic collapse.
\Battrition\b continued attacks designed to wear down an opponent.
\BAxis powers\b Nazi \JGermany\j and Fascist \JItaly\j in alliance from 1936, joined by \JJapan\j in 1940, then by \JHungary\j, \JRomania\j, \JBulgaria\j, \JSlovakia\j, and \JCroatia\j.
\BB\b
\BB52 bomber\b the American bomber designed in the 1950s and built into the 1960s to execute a strategic nuclear war against the Soviet Union: enormously effective in the conventional wars against North Vietnam and \JIraq\j.
\Bballistic missile\b missile guided on its ascent but with a free-falling descent.
\Bballistics\b the science of weapons trajectories.
\BBar Lev Line\b a line of fortifications built by Israel along the Suez Canal after the Six Day Arab-Israeli War in 1967 to protect its hold on the \JSinai\j peninsula: notably ineffective in the Yom Kippur Arab-Israeli War of 1973.
\Bbastion\b quadrilateral projection from a defensive wall or fortification.
\Bbattalion\b body of soldiers made up of several companies.
\Bbattlecruiser\b armoured, fast warship displacing 25,000-35,000 tons.
\Bbattleship\b largest and most heavily armed of naval vessels.
\Bbayonet\b pointed blade that fits onto the muzzle end of a rifle or \Jmusket\j, for use in hand-to-hand combat.
\BBEF\b (British Expeditionary Force) units of the British army in \JFrance\j at the outset of World Wars I and II.
\BBf 109\b the main German fighter \Jaircraft\j of World War II, designed by Messerschmitt.
\Bblockade\b closing off a strategic site such as a harbour or supply route.
\Bbombard\b an early large-calibre \Jgunpowder\j cannon.
\Bbomber Command\b RAF command, led by Sir Arthur Harris, that conducted Britain's strategic bombing campaign against \JGermany\j in World War II.
\Bbrevet major general\b a temporary rank with full command authority during the American Civil War; after the conflict Union officers reverted to their regular army rank.
\Bbrigade\b group of regiments or battalions.
\Bbrigadier\b officer in charge of a brigade.
\Bbroadside\b all the guns on one side of a warship firing in unison.
\Bburg\b medieval fortress or walled town.
\BC\b
\Bcaisson\b large watertight chest for ammunition or other supplies.
\Bcalibre\b diameter of the bore of a gun or of a shell or bullet.
\Bcantle\b the raised back of a saddle.
\Bcaravel\b large sailing \Jgalleon\j of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
\Bcarbine\b light firearm with a short barrel, used by cavalry.
\Bcarrack\b large Mediterranean sailing \Jgalleon\j of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
\B\Icasus belli\i\b justification for war.
\Bcatapult\b engine of war for throwing projectiles.
\Bcattie\b a Chinese measure of weight of about one and a third pounds.
\Bcavalry\b mounted soldiers.
\Bcenturion\b the leader of a century.
\Bcentury\b the basic building block of the Roman legion (60-70 men).
\BCIA\b Central Intelligence Agency, established in 1947 with responsibility for all United States foreign intelligence operations.
\B\Ichassepot\i\b a bolt-action French rifle of the late nineteenth century.
\B\Ichasseur\i\b French infantryman or cavalryman trained to move swiftly.
\B\Ichasseur a pied\i \b a soldier of the French light infantry.
\B\Ichevauchee\i\b a raid on horseback.
\B\Ichevaux-de-frises\i \b defensive poles with rows of pointed metal spikes protruding outwards at right angles, used in trench warfare before the introduction of barbed wire.
\Bcohort\b after the late second century BC, the chief tactical and administrative unit of the Roman legion, comprising three maniples - about 480 men.
\BCombined Bomber Offensive \b a plan for combined strategic bombing favoured by the Allied high command in World War II, but with which Sir Arthur Harris refused to co-operate; designed to integrate the efforts of RAF Bomber Command and the US Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces.
\BComintern\b the Communist (Third) International, an association of communist parties dominated by the Soviet Union and dissolved by Stalin in 1943 as a gesture of good will towards non-communist allies in World War II.
\Bcommission\b the warrant which confers authority on an officer.
\Bcluster bomb \b bomb which releases several smaller bombs on impact.
\Bcommando unit \b a military unit dedicated for raids into enemy territory.
\Bcompany\b a unit of soldiers consisting of two or more platoons.
\B\Icondottiere\i\b the leader of a band of mercenary soldiers.
\Bconscription\b compulsory enrolment in the armed forces.
\Bcorned \Jgunpowder\j \b \Jgunpowder\j prepared in small granules, to prevent its components from separating (invented in Europe c.1430).
\Bcorps\b typically two or more divisions forming a tactical unit.
\Bcruise missile \b highly accurate computer-guided missile that follows the terrain on pre-planned routes to the target; highly successful in the Gulf War of 1991.
\Bcuirassier\b heavily armed French cavalry soldier wearing a cuirass (armoured breastplate).
\Bculverin\b small, narrow-bore cannon, able to fire small shot at great distance.
\BD\b
\Bdefence in depth \b a network of interdependent defensive strongpoints, increasingly densely placed the further an attacker advances.
\Bdepth charge \b explosive anti-submarine charge dropped in sea.
\Bdivision\b a tactical unit of three to five brigades with a headquarters.
\Bdragoon\b heavily armed mounted soldier; in the sixteenth century, a mounted soldier trained to fight on foot.
\Bdreadnought\b a large \Jbattleship\j on the model of HMS \IDreadnought\i (1906) armed with big guns of a uniform calibre.
\Bdrill\b the exercise in unison of military skills and formations.
\Bdromon\b standard Byzantine warship with two banks of rowers.
\BF\b
\Bfalconet\b small artillery piece.
\Bfeint\b a feigned attack.
\Bfief\b land given in return for military service.
\Bfirestorm\b a fire encompassing a large section of a bombed city in which the conflagration fans itself by creating a vacuum which draws in air.
\Bflak\b shrapnel from bursting anti-aircraft shells.
\Bflintlock \Jmusket\j \b firearm which uses a flint to ignite the charge.
\BFLN\b \I(Front de Liberation Nationale)\i the Algerian National Liberation Front, which waged a war to oust \JFrance\j from \JAlgeria\j in 1954-62.
\Bflower wars \b ritual conflict between the \JAztecs\j and their neighbours in the valley of Mexico in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries aimed at securing captives for enslavement or sacrifice.
\Bfree-fire zone \b(Vietnam War) zone cleared of most South Vietnamese population and declared to be an area where all human movement was presumed hostile.
\Bfrigate\b the vessel next lower in size to a ship of the line.
\Bfull-rigged ship \b a large wooden sailing ship with three or four masts carrying a combination of square sails to provide motive power and triangular ('lateen') sails to assist lateral movement (first developed in fifteenth-century Europe).
\BG\b
\Bgaleass a\b sixteenth-century oared vessel larger and heavier than a galley.
\Bgalley\b long, low warship with single deck, propelled by both oars and a sail.
\Bgarrison\b the troops stationed in a military installation.
\B\Igladius\i\b the short, thrusting sword of the Romans, with a strong, firm blade sharpened on both edges.
\Bgrapeshot\b a cluster of iron balls which scatter when they are fired.
\Bgrapnel\b a grappling iron, small metal anchor with metal claws.
\Bgreave\b an armoured shin pad worn by Greek and Roman infantry.
\Bguerrilla\b a member of an irregular militia using harassing tactics.
\BH\b
\Bhalberd\b a long-shafted weapon topped with an axe head and a spike, used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
\BHarrier jet\b vertical-take-off-and-landing fighter \Jaircraft\j used by British forces in the Falklands War and US marines in the Gulf War.
\B\Ihastati\i\b 'spearmen' - the first line of maniples in the Roman legion, armed with javelins and the \Igladius.\i\b
\Bhegemony\b the dominance of one nation over others.
\BHellcat F6F fighter\b American naval fighter \Jaircraft\j of World War II that won air superiority in the Pacific over its Japanese opponents.
\B\Ihetairoi\i\b 'companion cavalry' - an elite body of aristocratic Macedonians of the fourth century BC, heavily armed on strong mounts.
\Bho Chi Minh Trail\b (so called by Americans after the leader of North Vietnam) a road built through Laos \JCambodia\j by North Vietnam to facilitate infiltration of South Vietnam.
\Bhoplite\b a warrior-farmer of classical \JGreece\j, practised in phalanx fighting.
\Bhowitzer\b a short cannon firing shells at a steep angle, with sharp ascent and descent.
\BHurricane\b one of two fighters built for the RAF in the late 1930s that proved crucial in winning the Battle of Britain.
\Bhypaspists\b 'shield bearers' - in the fourth century BC, the Macedonian infantry which occupied the centre of the line and usually followed behind the cavalry.
\BI\b
\Bimpi\b a body of Zulu warriors making up a military formation.
\Binfantry\b soldiers fighting on foot.
\Bintelligence\b information about an enemy or potential conflict, collected for the sake of military advantage.
\BJ\b
\BJ\du\ager\b Prussian light infantry.
\Bjavelin\b light slender spear.
\BK\b
\Bkamikaze\b 'divine wind' - a member of a World War II Japanese suicide air attack corps which crashed its bomb-laden \Jaircraft\j into US navy ships.
\Bkeep\b a stronghold or fortified tower.
\B\IKriegsmarine\i\b the German navy in World War II.
\BL\b
\Blance\b steel-tipped wooden pole held pointed at adversaries in combat on horseback.
\B\ILandwehr\i\b Prussian militia of all men aged seventeen to forty not enrolled in other military service.
\Blegion\b major unit of the Roman army, consisting of 5,000 to 6,000 soldiers and divided into ten cohorts.
\Bline ahead\b naval combat formation in which all warships engage the enemy arranged in a line one behind the other.
\Blogistics\b the task of moving and supplying armies.
\B\ILuftwaffe\i\b the German air force.
\BM\b
\Bmachine gun\b a gun capable of firing bullets rapidly and continuously.
\BMACV\b (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) - the command group for American forces in Vietnam.
\B'Magic' \b code-name for Japanese naval signals intercepted and decoded by the United States during World War II.
\BMaginot Line \b a system of fortifications built by the French to prevent the Germans from invading \JFrance\j, but outflanked in 1940.
\Bman-at-arms\b a heavily armed, usually mounted soldier of the late middle ages.
\Bmaniple\b a small tactical subunit (a 'handful'), comprising two centuries, first of the Roman phalanx and eventually of the Roman legion.
\Bmarines\b naval troops trained and equipped to fight their way ashore.
\Bmatchlock musket\b gun fired by a slow-burning match which is positioned over a hole in the breach.
\Bm\dc\el\da\ee tactics\b a series of ship-to-ship battles (cf. the 'line ahead').
\Bmercenary\b a soldier fighting for pay alone.
\Bmilitia\b a military force made up of citizens called into service, or liable to be called into service.
\B\IminiΘ\i bullet\b lead bullet, hollowed at the bottom, allowing the explosive charge to push out the flanges causing a tight fit in a rifled barrel, giving spin and direction, thus increasing accuracy.
\Bmortar\b a short artillery piece which fires bombs or heavy shells.
\Bmusket\b heavy, smooth-bore, long-barrelled firearm, fired from the shoulder; common from sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
\BN\b
\BNATO\b (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) a joint anti-Soviet defence force established in 1952 by the United States, Britain, Canada, \JFrance\j, \JBelgium\j, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, \JNorway\j, \JIceland\j, \JItaly\j, and \JPortugal\j, with the addition of \JGreece\j and Turkey in 1952 and of West \JGermany\j in 1954.
\BNCO\b non-commissioned officer, e.g. sergeant, corporal, bombadier.
\Bneedlegun\b breach-loading rifle that allowed fast reloading, first adopted by the Prussian army.
\BO\b
\BOAS\b \I(Organisation de l'ArmΘe SecrΦte) a terrorist organization dedicated to keeping \JAlgeria\j French.
\Bonager\b a one-armed catapult, powered by the tortion of twisted hair or rope, capable of throwing an 8-pound stone 500 yards (used in ancient and medieval warfare).
\B\Iordre mince\i\b the Prussian shallow line formations imitated by French infantry in the eighteenth century.
\B\Iordre profonde\i\b the deep column formations used by French infantry in the eighteenth century.
\BP\b
\Bpanoply\b a full set of armour.
\Bpanzer division\b a German armoured division.
\B\Ipezetairoi\i\b 'foot companions' - Macedonian professional infantry of the fourth century BC.
\Bphalangite\b a member of a phalanx.
\Bphalanx\b a solid column of foot soldiers, especially when armed with pikes.
\Bpike\b a large, often unwieldy, wooden shaft with an iron or steel point, used by foot soldiers.
\B\Ipilum\i\b the Roman javelin.
\Bpistol\b a small handgun.
\Bplatoon\b a small body of soldiers.
\B\Ipolis\i\b the city-state of ancient \JGreece\j.
\B\Iprincipes\i\b the second line of maniples in the Roman legion, armed with the \Igladius\i and javelins.
\BPyrrhic victory \b a victory gained at too high a cost (named after the victory of \JPyrrhus\j, king of Epirus, over the Romans at Heraclea).
\BQ\b
\Bquartermaster\b the staff-officer responsible for transporting, quartering, and supplying the troops.
\BR\b
\BRAF\b (Royal Air Force) the airborne forces of Great Britain.
\Bredoubt\b a small defended position.
\Bregiment\b large army unit under the command of a colonel.
\B\IReichswehr\i\b the German army (1920s).
\Brifled \Jmusket\j \b a \Jmusket\j with spiralled grooves cut into the barrel to give the bullet spin and thus better direction.
\BS\b
\Bsalient\b an outward-pointing angle in a military front.
\Bsapper\b a soldier who digs trenches or tunnels to give access to the enemy, undermine defences, or lay mines.
\BSAS\b (Special Air Services Regiment) a British unit formed by Colonel David Sterling in 1941 that emphasized stealth, surprise, intelligence gathering, and attacks on enemy rear areas.
\Bsatrap\b the governor of a province of \JPersia\j in ancient times.
\Bschiltron\b a cluster of spearmen in Scottish medieval combat.
\B\Iscutum\i\b the curved, rectangular Roman shield.
\Bsepoy\b an Indian soldier trained to fight in European fashion (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries).
\Bship of the line\b man-of-war large enough to take its place in line of battle.
\Bsortie\b a raid.
\BSpitfire\b the main British fighter \Jaircraft\j of World War II.
\BSS\b \I(die Schutzstaffel\i - 'defence corps') Nazi elite corps.
\Bstealth bomber\b \Jaircraft\j that uses complex technologies, in terms of design, computers, special materials, and routing, to render enemy radar systems ineffective.
\Bstorm troops \b elite German combat troops trained in 1917-18; the term was applied later to the para-military units of the Nazi party (1920s-30s).
\BStrategic Bombing Survey \b an extensive analysis of the effectiveness during World War II of Allied strategic bombing on the German war economy.
\BT\b
\B\Itercios\i\b permanent infantry regiments in Spanish service, first created in 1534.
\B\Ithetes\i\b the landless poor of the Greek city-states.
\Btorpedo\b a weapon which propels itself through water, after release from an \Jaircraft\j, ship or submarine, and explodes on impact.
\Btorsion catapult \b a catapult which propels its missiles by the force created when ropes or other materials untwist.
\B\Itrace italienne\i\b fortifications designed in geometrical form with quadrilateral bastions projecting from the line of the walls at regular intervals; invented in \JItaly\j, where it became known as 'the modern style', c.1500.
\Btrebuchet\b medieval stone thrower.
\B\Itriplex acies\i \b conventional Roman battlefield order consisting of three successive lines of ten maniples, each comprising two centuries of 70-80 men.
\B\Itrirari\i\b 'third liners' - the third line of maniples in the Roman legion, armed with spears.
\Btrireme\b Greek or Roman galley with three tiers of oars; capable of high speed and equipped for ramming.
\Btrunnions\b pivots on which a cannon can be tilted.
\BU\b
\BU-boat \b\I(Unterseeboot)\i a German submarine.
\B'Ultra' \b code-name for the Allied intelligence in World War II based on decrypted German high-level message traffic.
\BUSAF\b United States Air Force.
\BV\b
\BV-1\b German World War II flying bomb.
\BV-2 \b German World War II rocket.
\B\Ivelites\i\b light-armed skirmishers (including troops and horsemen) of the Roman legion.
\BViet Cong\b derogatory name for the Viet Minh.
\BViet Minh \b communist military force which fought a guerrilla war against the French in Vietnam in the 1950s.
\BW\b
\B\IWaffen SS\i\b (the armed SS) elite divisions raised and trained by Heinrich Himmler's SS; highly effective on the battlefield but instigators of innumerable atrocities due to their fanatical contempt for their opponents.
\B\IWagenburgen\i\b mobile fortresses made from farm wagons, used in the fifteenth century by the Hussites of \JBohemia\j.
\B\IWehrmacht\i\b the German armed forces.
\BZ\b
\B'Zero' fighter \bJapanese fighter \Jaircraft\j at the beginning of World War II whose range and flying capabilities provided a surprise for the Allies.
