November 2015 Ɩ Issue 62 Ɩ £4.50 www.military-history.org
PUNCH PERFECT
Partridge’s best war art
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the UNITED IN WAR, DIVIDED BACK HOME
The Irish at Messines, 1917
RISE OF THE ROMAN NAVY
The First Punic War
MHM
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November 2015 Ɩ Issue 62 Ɩ £4.50
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PUNCH PERFECT
Partridge’s best war art
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD: Martin Brown Archaeological Advisor, Defence Estates, Ministry of Defence
Mark Corby Military historian, lecturer, and broadcaster
Paul Cornish Curator, Imperial War Museum
Gary Gibbs Assistant Curator, The Guards Museum
Angus Hay Former Army Officer, military historian, and lecturer
Nick Hewitt Historian, National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth
Nigel Jones Historian, biographer, and journalist
Alastair Massie Head of Archives, Photos, Film, and Sound, National Army Museum
Gabriel Moshenska Research Fellow, Institute of Archaeology, UCL
Colin Pomeroy Squadron Leader, Royal Air Force (Ret.), and historian
Michael Prestwich Emeritus Professor of History, University of Durham
Nick Saunders Senior Lecturer, University of Bristol
Guy Taylor Military archivist, and archaeologist
M
ilitary power sometimes works simply by virtue of its existence. It has its effect without being used. This is especially true of naval power. If maritime supremacy goes unchallenged, there are no big battles to report. Because of this, naval power is often invisible, or at least little noticed. The Roman Empire provides a clear example. Everyone knows about the legions – the kit, the training, the discipline, the professionalism, their role in creating and defending the Empire. But what about the fleet? In our special this issue, Marc DeSantis, author of a new book on the subject, argues that the founding of the Roman Navy, in the context of the mid 3rd century First Punic War, was a decisive event in Rome’s ascent to imperial greatness. The war lasted a quarter of a century. The combined losses are estimated at 300,000 men and 1,200 ships. It was one of the greatest wars in Roman history, and the only one fought as much at sea as on land. And it launched Rome on its career of overseas conquest – a career underwritten by the maritime supremacy wrested from the Carthaginians between 264 and 241 BC. Also this issue, we have Chris Bambery’s account of Prestonpans, the forgotten Jacobite victory of September 1745, Tom Farrell on Ireland’s divided loyalties during the First World War, and Sarah De Nardi’s analysis of the Italian Resistance in 1943-1945.
Julian Thompson Major-General, Visiting Professor at London University
Dominic Tweddle
ROUTIN the REDCOAT
the Jacobites won at Prestonpans, 1745
UNITED IN WAR, DIVIDED BACK HOME
The Irish I i att Messines, i 1917 1 7
RISE OF THE ROMAN NAVY O NAV
The First Fi t Punic P War W
ON THE COVER: Prince Charles Edward Stuart, known as the ‘Young Pretender’. The background is part of The Dawn March through the Riggonhead Defile by Andrew Hillhouse. Image: The Battle of Prestonpans (1745) Heritage Trust.
WHAT DO YOU THINK? Now you can have your opinions on everything MHM heard online as well as in print. Follow us on Twitter @MilHistMonthly, or take a look at our Facebook page for daily news, books, and article updates at www.facebook.com/ MilitaryHistoryMonthly. Think you have spotted an error? Disagree with a viewpoint? Enjoying the mag? Visit www.militaryhistory.org to post your comments on a wide range of different articles. Alternatively, send an email to
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CONTRIBUTORS THIS MONTH’S EXPERTS TOM FARRELL is a freelance journalist interested in military history and the evolution of conflicts. He has been published in the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Guardian and Jane’s Intelligence Review.
MARC DeSANTIS CHRIS BAMBERY is an historian is a TV producer and attorney who and presenter, writes extensively an author, and on military historia journalist. His cal subjects. books include His book about A People’s History naval warfare in the Punic Wars, Rome of Scotland and The Second World War: Seizes the Trident, is published this year. A Marxist History.
DR SARAH DE NARDI is a landscape archaeologist, oral historian, and anthropologist. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Durham.
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November 2015 | ISSUE 62
The First Punic War at Sea INCLUDES: This month MHM focuses on Rome’s naval battles with the Carthaginians, and explains how the Roman navy emerged as the supreme force in the Mediterranean during the 3rd century BC.
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FEATURES
UPFRONT Welcome
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Letters
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Notes from the Frontline
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Behind the Image
10
MHM looks at a photograph of the masses of artillery shells that were produced during WWI.
Conflict Scientists
18 ON THE COVER Prestonpans
The forgotten Jacobite victory of 1745 Chris Bambery describes how an army of Highland Scots outmanoeuvred the Redcoats at the marshes of the Firth of Forth.
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Patrick Boniface assesses the work of German chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein.
War Culture
Background Timeline The fleet The battle Battle maps
42 The Irish at Messines 14
Mark Bryant examines the war cartoons of Punch cartoonist Sir Bernard Partridge.
How soldiers from North and South fought together in WWI
Tom Farrell explores the issues that split a nation in an already divided world between 1914 and 1918.
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50 Resistenza Italiana The Italian Resistance of 1943-1945 Sarah De Nardi uncovers the hidden history of the mass anti-Fascist resistance movement that defeated the Nazi occupation after the fall of Mussolini.
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November 2015
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IN THE FIELD | MHM VISITS Museum | 68 BACK AT BASE | MHM REVIEWS War on Film | 58
Stephen Miles travels to Poland to visit the Museum of the Second World War in Westerplatte.
Taylor Downing reviews the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
Listings | 72
Book of the Month | 62 Jan Woolf reviews The Show Must Go On: Popular Song in Britain during the First World War by John Mullen.
Books | 64 David Flintham reviews Attrition: Fighting the First World War by William Philpott and The Eyes of the Desert Rats by David Syrett, while rancesca Trowse examines Agincourt by Anne Curry.
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© Current Publishing Ltd 2015 All rights reserved. Text and pictures are copyright restricted and must not be reproduced without permission of the publishers. The publishers, editors and authors accept no responsibility in respect of any goods, promotions or services which may be advertised or referred to in this magazine. Every effort has been made to secure permission for copyright material. In the event of any material being used inadvertently or where it has been impossible to contact the copyright owner, acknowledgement will be made in a future issue. All liability for loss, disappointment, negligence or damage caused by reliance on the information contained within this publication is hereby excluded. The opinions expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of the publisher.
MHM CONTENTS
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TWITTER @MilHistMonthly @MilHistMonthly 1 Sept 2015 Open to the public today: The Sinews of War: Arms and Armour from the Age of Agincourt exhibition @WallaceMuseum
@MilHistMonthly 3 Sept 2015 #OnThisDay in 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The Battle of the Atlantic began hours later, with the sinking of SS Athenia
@MilHistMonthly 22 Sept 2015 Yorkists & Lancastrians fought #OnThisDay in 1459 at Blore Heath. Do you know your WoTR? www. militaryhistory.org/ articles/ 5-mythsabout-thewars-of-theroses.htm
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L E T T ER OF T HE MON T H DAD’S ARMY WITH GRIT Many congratulations on a fine article by Mike Relph (MHM 61), detailing the WWII defence of southern England. Articles like this will help younger readers get behind the stereotypification of life on the Second World War Home Front. The reality lived by Captain Mainwaring’s Home Guard platoon would have been a lot grimmer and grittier than the humorous TV series made out. The terrific use of contemporary and original photographs showing the same village scenes really brought home exactly what was being defended, how, and why. Virtually every walk we take into a local town’s high street or village green is a walk through an intense period of this country’s very recent history. Such a great pity then that, for obvious security reasons, only too few pictures of the WWII local defences were taken, or have survived.
Jack Leatherhead FACEBOOK www.facebook.com/ MilitaryHistoryMonthly 22 Sept 2015 The Battle of Bannockburn has been voted Britain’s most decisive battle in a new BBC poll. Do you agree?
24 Sept 2015 The Siege of Przemys´l began #OnThisDay in 1914. Read our special feature on the Eastern Front, published in issue 49 of MHM.
25 Sept 2015 Harald Hardrada died #OnThisDay in 1066 at #StamfordBridge. Is he one of your top 5 Vikings?
London
SICILIAN REVELATION Thank you for your excellent new ‘Briefing Room’ back page (MHM 58). I was captivated by the lowdown on the Roman Imperial Carroballista – the giant catapult or crossbow mounted on a cart. I had no idea that artillery was invented by the Greeks, let alone that it first appears at the Sicilian city of Syracuse in 399 BC. We have just returned from a blissfully (undramatic!) summer holiday there. Thanks for the good read, Penny Deanna Harrow
FRENCH PERSPECTIVE I read your recent features on Agincourt (MHM 61) and found them incredibly enjoyable, well thought out, and very insightful about the lessons that could be learned about English society of the ‘middling sort’. There was, I feel, only one deficiency in that more attention could and, indeed, should have been paid to French society and the major agents that opposed Henry. Two other marvellous articles on the French military (‘The Defence of Camerone’ and ‘Behind the Image’) appeared in the issue, so it was frustrating to have the French reduced to cardboard antagonists. An opportunity was missed to examine Azincourt from a perspective that would be novel to many of your readers. Alex Mee London
Please note: letters may be edited for length; views expressed here are those of our readers, and do not necessarily reflect those of the magazine.
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Our round-up of this month’s military history news
CROMWELL’S CAPTIVES REVEALED Skeletons discovered in two 17thcentury mass graves in Durham are the remains of Scottish prisoners captured after the Battle of Dunbar, according to new analysis. The Battle of Dunbar in 1650 – between the English Parliamentarian army under Oliver Cromwell and the Scottish Covenanting army supporting Charles II – was one of the shortest and bloodiest battles of the Civil War. After having been defeated, thousands of Scottish soldiers were taken prisoner and marched over 100 miles to Durham. Many died from malnutrition, disease, and cold during the long trek from Scotland and during imprisonment in the Cathedral
and Castle of the city, these buildings having been taken out of the hands of the Church of England in 1645. The skeletons were uncovered during construction work in Durham city centre in 2013. They were not buried in a traditional Christian arrangement but carelessly thrown into mass graves. Quick burials like this are often associated with plaque pits. However, historically, plague pits in Durham were buried outside the city centre and contained a mixture of men and women of all ages. They were also covered quickly to prevent further spread of the disease. These bones, discovered on Palace Green close to the Castle
and Cathedral, were all from men, most aged between 13 and 25 years old. Some bones showed signs of scratching and gnawing from small animals – suggesting they were left without a covering of soil for a time. This pointed to a darker period in Durham’s past - the soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar who were imprisoned here. Further analysis confirmed this - isotopic analyses suggest many of the individuals were of Scottish origin. There were no indications of healed trauma or
wounds such as might have been received in battle, which implies the soldiers were relatively new recruits rather than seasoned campaigners. It seems that the centuries-old mystery of what happened to the bodies of the Scottish Covenanting army can now be laid to rest.
New funding for IWM Holocaust displays The famous Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London is to be completely updated and renewed alongside the development of the WWII galleries, thanks to a £5m gift from the Pears Foundation. Research and development is already under way, and the new exhibition should be open in 2021. Between 1933 and 1945, Jews were targeted, segregated, and exterminated. The Holocaust saw the Nazis murder millions
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MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
of Jewish and non-Jewish people. Since opening in 2000, the Holocaust exhibition has seen more than 1m people visit every year to explore the photographs, documents, newspapers, artefacts, posters, and films shown in its galleries. At the heart of the new exhibition will be personal stories and survivor testimonies, which will be surrounded by an array of objects, artefacts, and material to help visitors consider the causes and consequences of the Holocaust. The exhibition is a vital resource for students, 21,000 of whom visit every year to take part in learning sessions at the museum. The IWM will also bid to be the site of the new Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre,
led by the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. Diane Lees, Director-General of Imperial War Museums, said, ‘We wish to play our part to
ensure that Britain has a permanent fitting memorial and meaningful educational resources for generations to come.’ November 2015
The Black Book The Black Book, a ‘wanted list’ of prominent British residents who were to be arrested on the successful invasion of Britain by Nazi Germany, has been translated into English
FINAL FLIGHT OF HALIFAX LV881 Aircraft wreckage and personal items belonging to the aircrew of a WWII RAF bomber have been uncovered in Germany, helping to piece together the account of its last journey. The work concerns the RAF 10 Squadron Halifax LV881, which was taking part in the Nuremberg Raid on the night of 30-31 March 1944 when it was shot down by a night fighter on the approach to Nuremberg. During the attack, a fuel tank burst open and caught fire. Three airmen managed to escape the burning aircraft, but were captured as prisoners of war. The other four crewmen were killed during the crash. The pilot, Walter Regan, stayed at the aircraft controls until the end, in order to give his comrades the best chance of survival. The Allied aircraft exploded onto a hilltop near the village of Steinheim in the Hesse region, and this site has been under
investigation by the regional archaeological authority, hessenARCHÄOLOGIE, alongside staff and students from the University of Winchester and Saxion University, Deventer, from the Neatherlands. The site is now largely covered by trees, and though this has helped to preserve the original resting place of the wreckage, it has complicated the work of locating the remains. Systematic metal-detector survey was used to identify scatters of material across the hilltop in the hope of understanding more about the aircraft’s final moments. Excavation then focused on the site where the fuselage is believed to have landed. Some of the artefacts found include a penknife, Perspex from windows, remains of instrument dials, cabling and switches, a lens of the bomb sight, and an RAF cap badge. Taken together, this information has shone new light on events surrounding the crash. A memorial service for relatives of the aircrew was held at the site in September.
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Band of Brothers A mural depicting the exploits during the Battle of Britain of Polish airmen who were subsequently stationed in Northern Ireland was unveiled on the International Wall in Belfast on the 75th anniversary of the battle in September. This unique painting was made to capture the public’s attention and remind them of the exploits of Polish 303 Squadron, which moved to Northern Ireland later in the war, and to help tell the story of the Polish community’s contribution throughout the war. The launch of Band of Brothers also saw young people from the Shankill and from Polish communities across the city come together to take part in a series of workshops led by artist Ross Wilson.
MHM FRONTLINE
NEWS IN BRIEF and digitised for the first time. The list, compiled by SS-Oberführer Walter Schellenberg (shown right), documents 2,820 of the Reich’s most wanted people, described as ‘enemies of the state, traitors and undesirables, marked for punishment or death’. It includes notable names including politicians, authors, journalists, actors, scientists, musicians, heads of industry, and religious leaders. Noël Coward, Virginia Woolf, and H G Wells are all on the list, as well as Conrad Fulke Thomond O’Brien-ffrench, the British Secret Intelligence Officer who was the inspiration for the character of James Bond. Researchers from Forces War Records have created an extensive database that the public can access. The entire digital Black Book can be seen and searched for free on www.forces-war-records.co.uk
Age of Empires A new exhibition, Artist and Empire, is to open to the public at Tate Britain Image: Essex Regiment Museum, Chelm sford on the 25 November, running until 10 April 2016. The exhibition addresses the sometimes provocative term ‘Empire’ by examining how artists have looked at war, conquest, and slavery over the years. It will show work from people who helped create, promote, or confront the British Empire. The exhibition includes around 200 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, and artefacts from staged paintings, international conquests, treaties, and ‘last stands’ around the globe, among them The Last Stand of the 44th Foot at Gundermuck by William Barnes Wollen (shown above). The exhibition will describe how artists through the ages mapped the world and its resources.
Poppy apparel Also to mark the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the Royal British Legion has designed special jewe made from authentic parts of the Spitfires that fought in the battle. A set of cufflinks, made in the shape of poppies, have been crafted from bits of Spitfire P7350 as a means of celebrating the pilots who flew these aircraft in 1940. Poppy pins, lapel pins, and necklaces are also available in the provenance metal, with all profits going to the Royal British Legion. You can buy them from www.poppyshop.org.uk
MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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No precise details survive of where or when this picture was taken, though we know it dates from the final year of the First World War. The photographer, Tom Aitken, was originally from Glasgow, where he worked in newspapers. He was assigned as a war photographer in December 1917, bearing witness only to the conflict’s final bloody months. By then, ‘total-war’ mass production had reached a crescendo of industrialised killing. The demand was always for more artillery, more shells, more firepower. The original caption reads, ‘Some shell cases on the roadside in the front area, the contents of which have been despatched over into the German lines’ – matter-of-fact, official war-speak that belies the meaning of this vast heap of metal cylinders. A lone soldier stands knee deep, but even these thousands of cases represent only a tiny fraction of the millions of tons of ammunition manufactured and used during the war. The volume of artillery-fire deployed against human flesh is shocking. A river of metal cylinders flows far into the haze of the distance, contrasting with the elegant avenue of trees behind. The shiny geometric shapes of the shell cases recall the contorted geometric landscape compositions of the painter David Bomberg, their shattered arrangement serving as a metaphor for the industrialised destruction wrought by the war. The shells, we can assume, are in transit: they have been collected to be refilled. They may have killed already. They are being made ready to kill again. Between 1914 and 1918, an estimated 1.45 billion shells were fired by the opposing armies, the majority along a relatively small area of the Western Front. Before each major attack there would be days of heavy shelling: in just one week in advance of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, 1,700,000 shells were fired. It is not surprising, then, that artillery caused more casualties than any other weapon – and the fatalities continue to increase. As the landscape was churned up by the heavy bombardment, many shells (perhaps one in four) failed to explode in the soft mud and were buried. As such, since the end of the war, in France, some 360 people have been killed and 500 wounded as a result of unexploded ordnance, known by local farmers as ‘the Iron Harvest’.
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MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
Text: Maria Earle
Image: Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland.
ON THE WESTERN FRONT, 1918
MHM BEHIND THE IMAGE
THE IRON HARVEST
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Patrick Boniface considers the influence of science on warfare
C
hristian Friedrich Schönbein was always seen as a bright boy in the neighbourhood. Born in the town of Metzingen in the German Duchy of Württemberg, he excelled at schoolwork and showed a particular aptitude for chemistry. At the tender age of 13, the young man became an apprentice to a leading local chemical and pharmaceutical company in the neighbouring town of Böblingen. His work ethic saw him asking questions and amassing a sound scientific knowledge of the processes involved in manufacturing chemicals and drugs. Schönbein’s experience at the firm of Metzger and Kaiser led him to seek permission to take an examination to test his abilities. His superiors at first questioned the need, but Schönbein insisted that he take the exam, set by Dr Kielmeyer of Stuttgart, which he duly passed. He served briefly in the army as a conscript, before taking up a position at the Augsburg chemical firm of Dr J G Dingler. He soon
moved again to study at Tübingen and Erlangen Universities. After 1826, he travelled to Scotland and London, where he developed lifelong friendships with many of the leading scientific minds of the era, including Michael Faraday and Thomas Graham. Schönbein’s intimate knowledge of how various chemicals react
The year 1845 proved to be explosive. He had been forbidden by his wife Emilie to conduct his experiments in the family kitchen. He did not, however, always do as he was told BIOGRAPHY Born: 8 October 1799 in Metzingen, Germany Married: Emilie Benz in July 1835 Died: 29 August 1868; buried in Basel Known for: inventing the fuel cell and guncotton
RIGHT The aftermath of an explosion in a guncotton factory in England.
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“
CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH SCHÖNBEIN
MHM CONFLICT SCIENTISTS
QUOTES FROM SCHÖNBEIN
Oxigen [Oxygen], as you well know, is my hero as well as my foe, and being not only strong but inexhaustible in strategies and full of tricks, I was obliged to call up all my forces to lay hold of him, and make the subtle Being my prisoner.“ ABOVE Dipping cotton in nitrating troughs in a guncotton factory, c.1900.
with each other led him through a number of studies, and eventually to a position at the University of Basel in 1828. Seven years later, he was promoted to full professor, a role in which he remained for the rest of his life. In July 1835, and back in Germany, he married Emilie Benz, with whom he had four daughters. During this period, he discovered the basic properties of the fuel cell, whereby electricity could be generated using hydrogen and oxygen. Schönbein is also noted for his discovery of ozone in 1840, found by its unique odour when he was conducting experiments with electrolysis of water. Schönbein called it ‘ozone’ from the Greek word ozein, meaning ‘to smell’. The year 1845 proved to be explosive in more ways than one. He
had been forbidden by his wife to conduct experiments in the family kitchen. He did not, however, always do as he was told. One afternoon, while Emilie was away, he accidentally spilled two chemicals – two bottles of nitric acid and a bottle containing sulphuric acid – on the kitchen table. The two chemicals mixed, and, perhaps fearing his wife’s temper, Schönbein tried to soak up the mess with one of her cotton aprons. As he put the apron over the stove to dry, it spontaneously combusted in a bright flame, and almost instantaneously was gone. What Schönbein had done was to mix the cellulose of the apron with the nitro groups from the nitric acid, add oxygen, and apply heat, thus suddenly oxidising the whole garment. As is so often the way, he had made an important invention – entirely by accident. For centuries, gunpowder manufacturers had been trying
IN CONTEXT: SCHÖNBEIN
Creating cordite
Without the work of German chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein in the early 1800s, it is unlikely that many of today’s military technologies would exist. Put simply, Schönbein created a more powerful propellant than simple gunpowder. His new invention was more explosive, more powerful, and created a whole new direction for firearms and explosives. He set a course of development which continues to this day when he first developed a new process that ultimately gave the world guncotton, also later known as cordite.
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to find ways of making powder burn more quickly and efficiently. With a simple mistake in a family kitchen in Germany, Schönbein had achieved this. Furthermore, gunpowder gave off thick black smoke when burned, whereas his invention was smokeless – and would thus prove ideal for use as a propellant in artillery shells. Soon it had been christened ‘guncotton’. Although the possible uses for guncotton seemed extremely broad, manufacturing the product was also highly dangerous. A single stray spark could ignite whole batches, and many factories were burnt to the ground by accidental explosions. Guncotton’s intrinsic disadvantage was that its burning speed was far too high to be usefully exploited for military use – at first. It would take another 39 years before inventor Paul Vieille managed to control guncotton, when he made it into a progressive smokeless gunpowder called Poudre B. Christian Friedrich Schönbein’s original discovery would then, in 1891, be transformed by the use of a gelatinised compound devised by James Dewar and Frederick Augustus Abel. In this form, the guncotton could be extruded from manufacturing plants, formed into long thin cords, and dried. In this form, guncotton became known as ‘cordite’, a vitally important component in naval gunnery and artillery right up to the modern day. æ
The phosphorous smell which is developed when electricity (to speak the profane language) is passing from the points of a conductor into air, or when lightning happens to fall upon some terrestrial object, or when water is electrolysed, has been engaging my attention the last couple of years, and induced me to make many attempts at clearing up that mysterious phenomenon. Though baffled for a long time, at last I think I have succeeded so far as to have got the clue which will lead to the discovery of the true causes of the smell in question.”
Although far advanced in the career of life, I nevertheless feel still rather youthly and have not yet lost to a perceptible degree my ancient love for science and philosophical research.” MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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This year marks the 70th anniversary of the death of Sir Bernard Partridge (1861-1945), one of the best known Punch cartoonists, who worked for the magazine for more than 50 years and drew powerful images throughout the Boer War and both World Wars. Born in London on 11 October 1861, he was the youngest son and sixth child of Professor Richard Partridge FRS, President of the Royal College of Surgeons (and Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy), and Fanny Turner. His uncle was John Partridge, Portrait Painter Extraordinary to Queen Victoria. Educated at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire (with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), he worked at first in the offices of the architect Henry Hansom, the son of the inventor of the Hansom cab, and then with a firm of ecclesiastical designers, before attending Heatherley’s art school and the West London School of Art. Then, after working as a decorator of church interiors, he became a professional actor, under the pseudonym ‘Bernard Gould’. One of his early appearances was in the original production of George Bernard Shaw’s first successful West End play, Arms and the Man (1894), which was set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War. After contributing to a number of publications throughout the 1880s, Partridge started drawing for Punch in February 1891. By 1892 he had joined the magazine’s staff, and in 1899, the year he also seems to have ceased professional acting, he became Second Cartoonist, drawing a number of whole-page political cartoons during the Boer War.
His most famous First World War cartoons included The Triumph of Kultur (Punch, 26 August 1914) – published shortly after the invasion of Belgium, and showing a German soldier standing over a dead mother and her daughter in the ruins of their house – and Unconquerable (Punch, 21 October 1914), featuring a victorious Kaiser and a defiant Albert I, King of the Belgians. He also drew a striking colour cover for the Punch Almanack for 1916 (1915). A number of his wartime drawings were reproduced as postcards, and he also designed postcards for London’s Blue Cross Quarantine Kennels, for soldiers bringing their pet dogs home from the Front. In addition, he drew posters for the all-party Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, notably Take Up the Sword of Justice (No.105, 1915), in which the figure of Justice floats above a seascape littered with bodies from the sinking Lusitania. He was knighted in 1925. Partridge continued to draw cartoons for Punch during the Spanish Civil War and, despite being nearly 80 years old when it started, was still able to produce powerful work during the Second World War. He died in London on 9 August 1945, the same day an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. He was succeeded as Punch’s main artist by E H Shepard, illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh. In 1951, by a strange quirk of fate, another cartoonist, John Gilroy – who had copied Partridge’s cartoons as a child and became best known for his Guinness advertisements – moved into his old house.
1 1. JOHN BULL’S WAR AIM Punch, 18 October 1939
2. A SELF-PORTRAIT 3. ‘HAIL KITCHENER! VICTOR AND PEACEMAKER!’
Punch, 9 July 1902
4. THE LAST WICKET
‘He has kept us in the field a deuce of a time, but we’ll get him now we’ve closed in for catches.’ Punch, 15 May 1901
5. COVER OF THE PUNCH ALMANACK FOR 1916 (1915) 14
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MHM WAR CULTURE
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6. THE WOODEN DOVE
‘It came to me in a nightmare, Hermann – my secret weapon against the Allies for next year’s campaign.’ Punch, 27 December 1939
7. FROM NIGHT TO DAY Punch, 9 July 1941
8. ‘AND HOW ARE WE FEELING TO-DAY?’
Punch, 21 February 1945
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GO FURTHER Mark Bryant is the author of World War I in Cartoons and World War II in Cartoons, both of which have recently appeared in paperback. 16
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WATERLOO 1815
The British Monarchy and the Defeat of Napoleon A one-day Conference at Windsor Castle Saturday 14 November 2015,10:00 am - 6:30 pm
A major international conference marking the 200th anniversary of the battle, with debate among the leading scholars of the period on the battle’s origins, conduct, and consequences. Speakers include: Roger Knight on the military background, Tim Clayton on the fighting at Quatre Bras, Brendan Simms on whether it was the German troops that carried the day, Tim Blanning on how Waterloo was commemorated, Saul David on Wellington at Waterloo, and Adam Zamoyski on the consequences for post-Napoleonic Europe. The conference concludes with a private tour given by curators of Royal Collection Trust’s exhibition, Waterloo at Windsor:1815-2015, in the State Apartments of Windsor Castle, including documents, silver, furniture and works of art — and Napoleon’s magnificent scarlet battlefield cloak. Tickets for the conference, which include the private tour of the exhibition, are £55 (or £49.50 concession). To book online Google ‘Royal Collection Waterloo Conference’ or call 020 7766 7340. ‘Waterloo 1815’ is a collaboration between Royal Collection Trust, History Today, and the Humanities Research Institute, University of Buckingham.
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PRESTONPANS
Prestonpans 1745
THE FORGOTTEN JACOBITE VICTORY
ABOVE The Dawn March through the Riggonhead Defile, 21 September 1745 by Andrew Hillhouse. The Jacobite army is seen on the move in the foreground. Note the Hanoverian army in the background, holding a strong defensive position protected by marshland plus the buildings and walls of two farms. The Jacobites were able to outflank the Hanoverian position when told of a path through the marsh that brought them onto the enemy’s eastern flank on the morning of the battle.
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Image: The Battle of Prestonpans (1745) Heritage Trust
Overshadowed by Culloden the following year – the battle that finally terminated the century-old Jacobite cause – Prestonpans is little known. Chris Bambery researches the story.
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PRESTONPANS OPPOSITE PAGE The Battle of Prestonpans, 21 September 1745, showing the route of the Jacobite night march, the realignment of the armies, and the deployment of units prior to the Jacobite charge.
The Redcoats regarded the Highland Scots, from the mountainous north of Britain, as savages.
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n September 1745, an army of British regulars mustered near the village of Prestonpans on the shores of the Firth of Forth, ready to battle an enemy whom they regarded as savages. The Redcoats saw the Highland Scots, from the mountainous north of Britain, as little better than the indigenous natives whom some had encountered while campaigning in North America. The commander of the Redcoats was Sir John Cope. He was supremely confident of victory. Although the two sides were equal in number, Cope had more cavalry and artillery, and his infantry was trained to deliver well-aimed volleys. Facing west, moreover – towards Edinburgh, from which his opponents had marched – there were the walls and dykes of two grand houses providing protection for his men. Cope’s opponents were the Jacobite army raised in rebellion some weeks before by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the ‘Young Pretender’; he was the son of James Edward Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender’, who was in turn the son of King James II, ousted in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. Charles’s shock troops were Scottish Highland clansman,
most of whom spoke Gaelic, and were regarded as barbarians by most Lowland Scots and the English. What was to happen at Prestonpans on 21 September 1745, however, was a signal humiliation for the British Army.
THE JACOBITE ARMY On 19 August, Charles had raised the Jacobite standard at Glenfinnan in Lochaber in the Western Highlands. Some 1,500 Highlanders had mustered in his support, mainly from Clans Cameron, MacDonald, and MacDonnell. The latter had already fought a skirmish with Government forces near Spean Bridge to the east (where today a monument stands to the Commandos of the Second World War who trained there). A hundred men of the BELOW LEFT Prince Charles Edward Stuart (17201788), the Jacobite ‘Young Pretender’, aka ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. His father, James Edward Stuart (1688-1766), the ‘Old Pretender’, was still alive at the time of the Forty-Five, so it was in his name that the rebellion was raised. BELOW The Old Pretender is proclaimed King James III at Edinburgh Cross after the Jacobites capture the city in September 1745.
November 2015
Images: Ian Bull
Image: WIPL
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A HIGHLAND ARMY? The Jacobite army reached its greatest strength, some 9,000 men, at the beginning of 1746. Figures suggest less than 50% of the Jacobite army in 1745 came from the Highlands, whereas 17-24% came from Moray, Aberdeen, and Banff, and between 17% and 20% came from Perthshire. The areas where Jacobite support was strongest coincide with those parts of Scotland where Episcopalianism retained a powerful hold over the local population, and most of those areas were to be found north of the Tay in the north-eastern Lowlands – a strong recruiting-ground for Charles in 1745. Episcopalianism had been associated with the Stuarts since the 17th century. The hierarchical structure of the church, with bishops directly appointed by the monarch, dovetailed neatly with Stuart theories of absolute monarchy and ‘the divine right of kings’. Both James and Charles had been raised in the Catholic faith, and this fact undoubtedly attracted a number of Scottish Catholics to their cause in 1745 – notably the Glengarry and Clanranald MacDonalds. A number of clan chiefs whose support Charles had hoped for failed to stir, however, most notably Lord Seaforth, head of the Mackenzies, Macleod of Macleod, and Sir Archibald Macdonald of Sleat. The latter raised two independent companies for the London Government, though these numbered just 200 men. Macleod of Macleod raised 450 (when he requested Government funds afterwards, he claimed it had been 1,400). A majority of the population opposed Prince Charles, largely for religious reasons. The pro-Government side was demilitarised in the main, but it began to train and arm forces against the Jacobites as the rising got under way. The Government also benefitted from a chain of forts in the Highlands, control of major strongholds like Edinburgh, Dumbarton, and Stirling castles, and the presence of the Royal Navy off the coast, which made a French landing highly problematic (though many blockade-runners got through).
Royal Scots sent to reinforce the garrison at Fort William had been ambushed en route and forced to surrender. The commander of Government forces in Scotland, Cope had advanced north into the Highlands, but had chosen not to fight Charles’s army as it headed towards Perth, marched on to Inverness, and then passed down the coast to Aberdeen, where it took ship to Dunbar on the Firth of Forth, arriving there on 17 September. The Jacobites had taken Edinburgh virtually unopposed, though the Castle had refused to surrender. The Jacobite army, supplied with 1,000 muskets found in the city’s magazines, mustered at Duddingston, then a village outside Edinburgh. The total number of men was 2,500, with just 50 cavalry and one artillery piece, too old to be of much use but kept to bolster morale. They also had an able commander in Lord George Murray. Sir John Cope had roughly the same number of men, but, with more cavalry and six artillery pieces, was confident of victory.
Images: WIPL
THE JACOBITE FLANK MARCH As the Jacobite army marched eastwards, Cope ordered his men into a line running north to south, from the Firth of Forth to the edge of high ground, with cavalry and artillery on each flank and infantry in the centre. The Jacobites positioned themselves on the high ground to the south, but discovered that a bog lay between them and the enemy. A council of war failed to come up with an attack plan, and Charles and his men lay down to sleep in the open. During the night, a local man serving as an officer in the Jacobite army, Anderson of Whitburgh, came to Murray to tell him of a path through the bog. At 3am, the Jacobite army filed along the narrow path. It brought them to a position east of Cope’s army, with firm ground between the two forces. On the morning of 21 September, the Jacobite army lined up facing the enemy flank. The Redcoats were forced to redeploy to meet the threat. Cope ordered his artillery to open
fire, but the effect was to trigger an immediate full-scale charge by the Jacobite army. The pace of this caught the Hanoverian troops by surprise, and gave them little time to reload their muskets after the first discharge.
THE JACOBITE ATTACK The centre of the Jacobite line was slowed by soft ground, but the contingents on either flank surged forwards. They attacked Cope’s dragoons, who fled – first to Edinburgh, where the governor of the Castle refused to admit them, threatening to open fire on them for their cowardice. Back on the battlefield, the Hanoverian infantry found themselves pinned by the advance of the Jacobite centre and under heavy attack on both the left and right flanks. Resistance began to crumble. Most of the Government losses occurred as the troops tried to flee the battlefield, and found themselves trapped between the walls of Preston and Bankton Houses. Just 170 of the infantry escaped, with 400 killed and the rest taken prisoner. A mere 30 Jacobites were killed and 70 were wounded. The Jacobites captured Cope’s artillery, supplies, and treasure chest. Cope and the Earls of Loudon and Home fled first to Coldstream and, on the following day, to Berwick-upon-Tweed. Cope was ridiculed as the commander who brought the news of his own defeat. A Jacobite song made fun of his flight:
Cope ordered his artillery to open fire, but the effect was to trigger an immediate full-scale charge by the Jacobite army.
Hey! Johnnie Cope are ye waukin’ yet? Or are your drums a-beating yet? If ye were waukin’ I wad wait, Tae gang tae the coals in the morning. King George II was left with no sizeable force in Scotland, and in Edinburgh Prince Charles was left celebrating a stunning victory.
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Chris Bambery is a TV producer and presenter, a journalist, and an author. His books include A People’s History of Scotland and The Second World War: a Marxist history.
BELOW & ABOVE A Highland army on the march in the 1740s. The scene had been witnessed in Flanders, and this series of engravings is captioned in French and German, but it presumably provides a fair impression of the appearance of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army.
PRESTONPANS
A JACOBITE GENERAL
Lord George Murray was born the sixth son of the Duke of Atholl in 1694. As a young man, he joined the Jacobite army during the 1715 uprising. His elder brother, William, Marquis of Tullibardine, commanded the Atholl Brigade, with his younger brother serving as battalion commander. Lord George missed the major military encounter of the rising, the Battle of Sheriffmuir, because he was in Fife attempting to raise more men for the Stuart cause. After the collapse of the rising, William and George fled first to South Uist in the Hebrides, then on to Bordeaux in France. In 1719 Lord George accompanied a small Spanish force that landed in Lochalsh in the Western Highlands, along with his brother and other Jacobite exiles. Joined by several hundred Highlanders, the Jacobite force set off towards Inverness, but were intercepted by Government troops at Glen Shiel. Despite holding the high ground, the Jacobites were exposed to artillery fire, the Hanoverian troops attacked resolutely, and at 9pm the Spanish surrendered and the Highlanders fled into the fog coming down over the mountains. Lord George Murray, who had commanded the Jacobite right wing, had been wounded in the battle but succeeded in escaping, eventually reaching Rotterdam. It is widely believed that, while in exile, he served in the army of the House of Savoy, rulers of Piedmont and Sardinia. The Government in London determined to strengthen their hold on the Highlands by creating a stronger chain of forts connected by military roads (built by General George Wade), but at the same time attempted to detach some of the prominent Jacobite nobles through a policy of clemency. Thus, when the Duke of Atholl died, Lord George Murray was pardoned and allowed to return, having taken the oath of allegiance to George II in 1739.
General John Cope, who appointed Murray Deputy Sheriff of Perthshire. Yet, when Prince Charles arrived at Blair Castle, ancestral home of the Murray family, Lord George joined the Jacobite army, saying his conscience allowed him to do no other. His brother, the Duke of Atholl, stayed loyal to King George, however. Lord George Murray was made Lieutenant-General of the Jacobite army, along with the Duke of Perth, and his brother, Tullibardine. But Murray was the real commander, taking charge of the army at Prestonpans. After that victory, he opposed any advance into England, arguing the French would not be able to land an army in support, and that few English Jacobites would join the venture; but he was overruled by the Prince, who won a majority of the Jacobite council. Murray did succeed in defeating Charles’s proposal for an advance down the east coast to Newcastle, where General Wade had based a Hanoverian army. Instead, the Jacobites used the western route, leaving Wade in their wake.
INVADING ENGLAND The Jacobites took Carlisle after a two-day siege, and then marched south through Preston and Manchester before reaching Derby. There Lord George Murray argued for a retreat, pointing to the fact that Wade was to the north, Cumberland was in the Midlands, and that militia had been raised to defend London. The Jacobites could not defeat three armies, and they were too weak to hold London even if they took it. Few English Jacobites had joined the rising, and the French had no plans to land in the south-east. Charles argued passionately, but did not prevail, and the army turned north. At Clifton in Cumberland, Murray defeated elements of the Duke of Cumberland’s force which had caught up with them (this was the last battle on English soil), and the retreat continued to Glasgow. At Falkirk on 17 January 1746, Lord George Murray attacked and defeated a Government force of 6,000 led by Lieutenant-General Henry Hawley.
Hawley had ordered his dragoons to attack, but they were met with heavy musket-fire, and those riders who reached the enemy line found that the Jacobites ignored them and struck at their horses instead. The dragoons retreated, and the Jacobites charged, routing Hawley’s centre and left flank. The Hanoverians then retreated south to Linlithgow, leaving over 300 dead on the battlefield.
LOST CAUSE Despite their victory, the Jacobites continued to retreat north, Charles marching from Perth to Inverness directly, while Murray marched up the east coast via Dundee and Aberdeen. But with Cumberland in pursuit, the Jacobite army had no choice but to turn and face him. After an abortive night march in the failed hope of launching a surprise attack, the tired and hungry Jacobite army lined up on Culloden Moor east of Inverness. Murray opposed this choice of ground, preferring high ground to the south, pointing out that the flat ground benefitted Cumberland’s artillery and cavalry. He was overruled, but proved right. The result is well known. The Jacobite attack was delayed, failed to break through, and then retreated under attack from Cumberland’s cavalry, who were ordered to take no prisoners. Murray eventually succeeded, in December 1746, in escaping, making his way to Rome. There he was received by Charles’s father, James the Old Pretender, and awarded a pension. But when he visited Paris the following year, Charles refused to see him. Lord George Murray settled in Holland, dying aged 66 in 1760. He was buried in the church at Medemblik, where his grave can still be found, marked with a stone laid by the 7th Duke of Atholl. TOP LEFT Lord George Murray (1694-1760). BELOW The Battle of Culloden, 16 April 1746. David Morier’s famous painting captures the ‘asymmetrical’ character of the clash between Highland clansmen and Hanoverian regulars.
A SCEPTICAL ‘FORTY-FIVER’ When Prince Charles Stuart landed in 1745, Lord George Murray was sceptical about the chances of Jacobite success, despite the fact his brother, the Marquis of Tullibardine, was with the Prince. Indeed, Murray accompanied his other brother, now the Earl of Atholl (William had forfeited his inheritance because of his loyalty to the Stuarts), to visit the Government commander in Scotland,
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the first
Punic
wa r
at s e a
Introduction BELOW When the Romans first built a fleet, they attempted to turn naval battles into land battles. The corvus – shown here in Peter Connolly’s dramatic reconstruction – was a combined grappling hook and boarding bridge. It allowed Rome’s first-class infantry to get to grips with their Carthaginian opponents before the Roman vessels could be out-manoeuvred and rammed.
hen we think of the Romans, we think of the legions. Between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC, the legions conquered Italy. Between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, they conquered first the western, then the eastern Mediterranean. For the next half millennium, under the Caesars, they controlled an empire that stretched from Scotland to Syria, from the Caucasus to the Sahara. The Roman Imperial Army was, quite simply, the finest fighting machine of antiquity. But Europe is almost completely surrounded by water, has an exceptionally long coastline, and is bisected by numerous navigable rivers. No other continent is so watery. Socrates thought the Greeks were like ‘frogs around a pond’. The same could be said for most Europeans. That is why naval power has often been decisive in the continent’s geopolitics. The Romans later spoke of the Mediterranean as ‘our sea’ (mare nostrum). But in 264 BC it was not ‘their’ sea. The maritime superpower of the age was Carthage, the great Phoenician merchant city on the North African coast. And because of this, when Rome embarked on its first overseas adventure – the invasion of Sicily – it found itself bogged down in an unwinnable war. It was a war of the elephant and the whale. Rome (the elephant) quickly established dominance on land, its citizen legions far superior to the polyglot armies of mercenaries raised by Carthage. But Carthage (the whale) could use its naval supremacy to raid the coast, intimidate Rome’s allies, and keep supplied the garrisons holding its main fortified bases in western Sicily. Rome was forced to build a navy. They used a captured Carthaginian ship as a design model. Lacking seafaring skills, they fitted their ships with a combined grappling hook and boarding bridge of their own invention, and set out to turn naval battles into a matter of the hand-to-hand fighting at which they excelled. Later, with experience, they abandoned artifice, having become as adept at naval manoeuvre as their enemies. And, finally, they crushed the Carthaginian maritime supremacy for good, and made themselves masters of the Mediterranean. In our special this issue, Marc DeSantis charts Rome’s rise to naval power through the long, hard, brutal war against Carthage for control of Sicily in the mid 3rd century BC. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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Image: AKG/Peter Connolly
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256 ROMAN VICTORY AT BATTLE OF ECNOMUS
TIMELINE
Lilybaeum, the great Carthaginian fortress city on the west coast of Sicily, symbolised the intractable nature of the First Punic War. Rome was dominant on land, but could not capture major coastal fortresses. Even when successful at sea, she could not establish an effective naval blockade. The Carthaginians could continue the war even when defeated on both land and sea, so long as they could maintain a sufficient flow of supplies into Lilybaeum.
264-261: ROMAN VICTORY ON LAND A Roman army crosses from Italy to Sicily and takes possession of Messana, beginning a war with the Carthaginians for possession of the west of the island. The Romans capture a Carthaginian war-galley, of the type known as a ‘quinquereme’, when it founders on the coast in 264. In 263, 40,000 Roman soldiers are sent to Sicily, where they capture many towns. The same year, King Hiero of Syracuse becomes an ally of Rome, providing her legions with crucial supplies. The Carthaginians set about recruiting MAMERTINES REQUEST HELP FROM large numbers of mercenaries from BOTH ROME AND across the Mediterranean. The Punic CARTHAGE stronghold of Agrigentum is taken by the Romans in 261.
264
272 BC
250: SIEGE OF LILYBAEUM
255 ROMAN INVASION OF AFRICA
FALL OF TARENTUM
Between 282 and 272 BC, Rome was at war with Tarentum. This key Greek city was the focus of resistance to Roman domination of Magna Graecia, ‘Great Greece’, the Greek settlements in southern Italy and Sicily. The war sucked in the general-adventurer King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army won two battles, but lost the third and last (the Battle of Beneventum) in 275 BC. The fall of Tarentum three years ter finally nded Greek esistance o Roman ule. The omans ontinued o fear a evolt of heir subjecteoples in taly, however.
260: BATTLE OF MYLAE
255 AND 253 ROMAN FLEETS DESTROYED IN STORMS WITH MASSIVE LOSS OF LIFE
Though dominant on land, the Romans realise they will need a fleet of their own if they are to win the war. For the first time ever, the Romans build a large fleet, with 120 war-galleys constructed in just 60 days. Most of the galleys are quinqueremes, copied from the captured Carthaginian ship that ran aground in 264. Because their ships are sluggish and their oarsmen inexperienced, the Romans design the corvus boarding bridge, placing one on each Roman quinquereme. At the Battle of Mylae, the Romans win a crushing victory.
257 ROMAN FLEET DEFEATS CARTHAGINIAN NAVAL FORCE OFF TYNDARIS
TIMELINE
249 BATTLE OF DREPANA
237: CARTHAGINIAN EMPIRE FOUNDED IN SPAIN
218-202: SECOND PUNIC WAR
The Barca amily became the adership of a faction The second f hawks arguing for war was war of revanche fought almost gainst Rome. entirely on Hamilar Barca, the land. Hannibal eteran Carthaginian invaded Italy, ommander in but was western Sicily, unable ounded a to destroy the alliance of Romans, new empire Latins, and Italian allies on which HAMILCAR BARCA n Spain, Roman power in the peninsula WAGES GUERRILLA WAR IN WESTERN ntending rested. Scipio (later known as SICILY t to provide ‘Africanus’) first destroyed the the resources Carthaginian empire in Spain, and to rebuild the was then allowed to mount an invasion power and wealth of Africa. This triggered Hannibal’s recall. of Carthage. His son, He was then defeated at the Battle of Hannibal, became Zama. The Romans imposed a victor’s the leader of the Carthaginian peace that destroyed Carthaginian power army in Spain in 221 BC, following the death of and reduced the city to third-class status both his father and his brother-in-law.
247-243
149-146: THIRD PUNIC WAR
240-237: MERCENARY WAR
241 BATTLE OF THE AEGATES ISLANDS
After the First Punic War, Carthage faced a massive revolt of its own mercenaries. While the city was preoccupied with the defence of the homeland, the mercenaries also revolted on Sardinia, and the Romans sensed an opportunity. They quashed the mercenaries and seized Sardinia for themselves. They justified their action by claiming that the Carthaginian naval expedition then fitting out to retake Sardinia was going to be used to attack Italy. The normally pro-Roman historian Polybius does not hesitate to call the Roman move ‘an act of sheer injustice’. The seizure of Sardinia contributed to the outbreak of a second war.
Carthage recovered somewhat from the disaster of the Second Punic War: the indemnity was paid off, and the city’s trade prospered again. Rome found a pretext to launch a new war when Carthage attempted to defend her territory against encroachments by Rome’s Numidian ally. Carthage made desperate attempts to secure peace, but Rome demanded the abandonment of the city, and the Carthaginians were forced to fight for their very existence. The war took the form of a gruelling four-year siege, culminating in the destruction of the city.
146 BC
The fleet
Image: AKG
The Roman Navy
Sea power brought Rome victory in the First Punic War and set it on the course to empire. Marc DeSantis describes the building of the first Roman fleet. he First Punic War (264-241 BC) began over a single city in Sicily. In the 280s BC, the Mamertines, a group of Campanian mercenaries, tempted by the wealth and luxury of the city of Messana (modern Messina) that they had been hired to defend, seized control of it for themselves. Hiero, tyrant of the nearby Sicilian Greek city of Syracuse, moved against them, seeking to reclaim Messana. The Mamertines made appeals for aid to both Rome and Carthage. As repugnant as they found the mercenaries, the Romans decided to send help. The Carthaginians were dominant in western Sicily. The Romans feared that if the
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Carthaginians answered the Mamertines’ call and took Messana – just across the Strait of Messina from the city of Rhegium at the toe of Italy – they might eventually come to control the whole of the island. They might then use it as a springboard for a future invasion of the Italian peninsula. The Greek cities of the Italian south had only recently come under Roman control, and the city of Tarentum had been the focal point of Italo-Greek resistance to Rome. Further, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, proclaiming himself champion of Greek freedom, had invaded Italy and fought a major war against the Romans in 280-275 BC. The danger of disaffected states in Italy making common cause with an outside power, such
ABOVE The Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus shown here depicts Middle Republican legionaries. Roman supremacy in land warfare enabled them to make rapid gains when war with Carthage erupted in 264 BC over the control of Sicily. But with no fleet and no naval experience, the Romans were unable to reduce the Carthaginian coastal fortresses. To win the war, the Romans were forced to become a naval power.
as Carthage, was very real. Rome decided to go to war to foreclose any such possibility.
THE ROMAN INVASION OF SICILY The Roman crossing to Sicily in 264 BC was accomplished in the face of Carthaginian naval opposition, during which a November 2015
The fleet
Image: AKG
LEFT Naval warship design changed dramatically between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC, but relatively little in later antiquity. This bas-relief sculpture is a Roman depiction from Praeneste that dates to the late 1st century BC; it nonetheless gives a fair impression of a quinquereme of the mid 3rd century.
Carthaginian quinquereme (war-galley) ran aground and was captured. The Romans took possession of Messana, but Carthaginian and Syracusan armies stood outside the city. The Romans defeated both enemies, and enlarged their offensive in Sicily in succeeding years. In 263 BC, a massive army of 40,000 was sent to Sicily to drive out the Carthaginians completely. By 261 BC, the city of Agrigentum on the south coast had fallen to the Romans, and Hiero of Syracuse shrewdly switched sides. He agreed to provide the Romans with supplies. Even with his aid, the Sicilian campaign turned out to be far more arduous than Rome had envisaged. The Romans took the inland cities, but found it difficult to maintain the loyalties of cities on the coast. Once the legions had marched away, a Carthaginian fleet would soon appear, cruise menacingly offshore, and intimidate the coastal cities back into the Carthaginian orbit. Rome had no counter to the naval power of its enemy. Stalemate was the result. Carthaginian ships were even mounting raids against the shores of Italy, causing Rome
BELOW In 1969 the wreck of a Carthaginian quinquereme was found just off the coast of Marsala (ancient Lilybaeum). Excavated from the seabed and conserved in a local museum, it is the single most important archaeological evidence we have for the form of an ancient warship of the First Punic War. As well as reconstructions of the Marsala quinquereme, shown here are illustrations of the crucial evidence: a Carthaginian coin of c.225 BC, a Carthaginian bas-relief sculpture depicting a war galley, and the actual wreck.
no small embarrassment before her allies. Ultimate success depended on the neutralisation of the Carthaginian fleet. The Romans decided to build a fleet of their own. This was a momentous decision, with great implications for Rome’s imperial future. The Greek historian Polybius would later write that ‘It was this factor among others that persuaded me to describe the war at greater length than I would otherwise have done. I was anxious that my readers should not remain ignorant of an important initiative of this kind: that is, how and when and for what reasons the Romans first ventured upon the sea.’
THE FLEET TAKES SHAPE For the most part Rome had been content to rely on her socii navales, or naval allies, among the Italian Greeks to provide her with naval forces in wartime. These naval allies had made the crossing to Sicily in 264 BC possible.
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Images: AKG/Peter Connolly
The Carthaginians constructed their ships in ‘kit’ form, with all pieces made according to precise specifications. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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Images: AKG/Peter Connolly
ABOVE & BELOW The corvus – Rome’s secret weapon at sea. The corvus combined grappling hook (like a raven’s claw – corvus is Latin for ‘raven’) and boarding bridge. It was mounted at the bow end, and could be used without tactical finesse: no manoeuvring was necessary, just a headlong charge at the enemy line. The near end was firmly gripped by an upright pole to prevent the enemy pulling it away; the far end crashed down under its own momentum to bury itself in the planking of the enemy deck and hold fast. The Romans would then storm across to capture the enemy vessel.
The new force now contemplated was one of unprecedented size in comparison with the small allied squadrons previously deployed. Polybius says that the Romans used the Carthaginian quinquereme captured in 264 BC as the model for their own, and, says Polybius, ‘built their whole fleet according to its specifications’. The quinquereme war-galley would be the workhorse of the Roman fleets for the duration of the war. In 260 BC, according to Polybius, a fleet of 120 ships was built in just 60 days. Of this total, 100 were quinqueremes, meaning ‘five-oars’, while the remaining 20 were smaller triremes (‘three-oars’). Five, in the case of the quinquereme, referred not to the number of banks of oars, which remained three, as in the trireme, but to the number of men assigned to each group of three oars when viewed in cross-section. This has been proven to be a workable design, as demonstrated by the modern 32
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Athenian replica trireme Olympias, built in the 1980s. A quinquereme was a substantially larger craft, and worked in the same way, though it needed many more men at the oars. Two of the oars, when viewed in cross-section, would have two men apiece pulling them, while the third and lowest oar would have just one. Such a prodigious output of 120 ships in a mere two months is fully plausible. A wrecked Carthaginian warship dating to the later years of the First Punic War was found in 1969 just off the Sicilian city of Marsala (ancient Lilybaeum). Though the ship was much decayed, the recovered timbers showed carpenter’s marks that indicate where the pieces were supposed to go. The Carthaginians, it appears, constructed their ships in ‘kit’ form, with all pieces made according to precise specifications. This made for very rapid assembly, since the various parts could be shaped and
stockpiled to await fitting into a ship as it was being put together. As the Romans copied their own design from a Carthaginian original, it seems reasonable to assume that they, too, would have adopted the ‘kit’ approach, maximising the speed with which they could build and launch a fleet.
THE ANCIENT BATTLESHIP No ancient treatise on how galleys were built survives, so we are forced to rely on conjecture and pictorial and archaeological evidence to reconstruct a war-galley of this period. On a trireme, there were three banks, or levels, of oars, one above another, with one rower pulling on one oar at a time, and a total of 170 oarsmen. The beefier Carthaginian/ Roman quinquereme required 300 oarsmen. Simply crewing the new fleet was troublesome, and the demands on Rome’s manpower November 2015
The fleet were extraordinary. She trained her own youths on benches to get them used to moving their oars in unison with other rowers, and also relied heavily on allied communities from the Greek cities of southern Italy to provide additional oarsmen. In such a crash programme, though the Romans managed to create a fleet that was able to move itself about well enough, their rowers’ skills in naval manoeuvre left much to be desired. The Carthaginians, on the other hand – a trading people with a strong maritime tradition – were talented practitioners of the demanding art of rowing a ship, ramming an opponent, and slipping away before another enemy vessel could strike. War-galleys were not particularly fast. Sustained speeds of five or six knots were feasible, with sprints at up to ten knots for very short periods. Galleys also utilised masts (a mainmast and a smaller boatmast set ahead of the mainmast), but these were used only for cruising, to spare the crew’s strength. The masts were removed when battle was imminent, and sometimes even left onshore.
NAVAL TACTICS Galleys did not need much speed to be effective. The great mass and momentum of the galley was what powered the heavy bronze ram at its prow through the timbers of an enemy vessel. Once accomplished, the oarsmen aboard the attacking ship would back-water – that is, row backwards – to extract it from the holed, flooding, and perhaps sinking enemy vessel. Some of these rams were tremendous. Many have been recovered from the depths, including the 2.26m-long, 476kg-weight ram found in the waters off Athlit, Israel, in 1980. The Athlit ram was once mounted on a quadrereme, or ‘fouroar’, and rams on the bigger quinqueremes may have been even more substantial. Apart from ramming, the most widely used naval tactic was boarding. This involved getting close to an opposing galley and sending marines over to seize possession of it. This was a crude but effective form of naval warfare, typically adopted by people lacking the necessary rowing skills to outmanoeuvre an enemy fleet. The Romans, fully aware of their skills deficit, were eager to close with the Carthaginians and board.
CARTHAGE: NAVAL SUPERPOWER The challenge that Rome faced at sea was enormous. Carthage was a formidable foe, with a naval heritage that extended back several centuries. Carthage – or Qart Hadasht, meaning ‘New City’ – had been founded in the 9th century BC by semitic migrants and colonisers from Tyre (in Lebanon). These early settlers had inherited the naval aptitudes of their Phoenician ancestors. (The Romans called www.military-history.org
the Carthaginians Poeni, and our own adjective ‘Punic’ is derived from this.) When Tyre came under Babylonian domination, Carthage took over her position as overlord of the numerous Phoenician colonies and trading-posts in the central and western Mediterranean. She had grown very wealthy by dominating the cargo-carrying trade, and had developed extensive holdings in North Africa and Sicily. The wealth flowing into the city allowed the Carthaginians to fund the creation of a large fleet and, when needed, large mercenary armies.
FIRST BLOOD AT SEA Though the Romans had prepared themselves as well as they might, their first foray at sea did not go well. The two consuls for the year 260 BC were Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio and Gaius Duilius. Scipio was tricked into sailing his squadron of 17 ships into the harbour of Lipara on Lipari Island, and was trapped
The attacking ship would back-water to extract it from the holed, flooding, and perhaps sinking enemy vessel. within it by a Carthaginian flotilla. The green Roman crews escaped ashore, but their ships were taken as prizes, and Scipio was captured. The rest of the Roman fleet, which was still fitting out at Rome, sailed south. Polybius says that a few days later this fleet, presumably of 103 ships (the original construction of 120 minus the 17 lost at Lipara) met a Carthaginian force of 50 ships under the command of an admiral named Hannibal near ‘the Cape of Italy’, possibly Cape Vaticano, close to the toe of the peninsula. The Romans were cruising in formation, while the Carthaginians, probably still sailing in line of column, with one ship ahead of the one behind it, blundered into the Romans with no inkling of their approach. The Romans had the better of the encounter. The Carthaginians lost most of their ships, Polybius says, which must be taken to mean 26 or more, and there seem to have been no Roman losses. Hannibal fled with what
remained of his fleet. The first battle of the Roman navy with its Carthaginian enemy had been a clear-cut victory. While Scipio was losing his squadron at Lipara and the rest of the fleet was fighting the Carthaginians near the cape, consul Gaius Duilius was directing Rome’s legions in Sicily. On learning of Scipio’s capture, he hastened to join the Roman fleet, which had probably put in at Messana. While waiting for the consul to arrive, the Roman sailors, disappointed with the handling of their ships during the battle at the cape, which they considered clumsy, sought a means to even the odds against the faster and more manoeuverable Carthaginian ships. Their solution was the corvus.
THE CORVUS Few weapons of the ancient world were more significant than the corvus, yet few remain more wrapped in mystery. Polybius’ description of the machine is extremely brief, and precisely how the device functioned in battle has no definitive answer. The basic components of the corvus were few. Mounted at the bow of a Roman warship was a 24ft-high pole of approximately 10in in diameter. At the top of the pole was a pulley. A rope was run through the pulley, and then tied to a ring atop a downward-pointing iron spike at the far end of a 36ft-long wooden bridge. The spike, the length of which is unknown, was probably the source of the boarding bridge’s nickname. Corvus is Latin slang for ‘raven’, and the name was perhaps bestowed because the spike reminded the Romans of a raven’s beak. The gangplank was 4ft wide, and had a kneehigh railing on either side of it. The gangplank also had an oblong slot cut within it, and through this hole emerged the wooden pole. When the Romans pulled on the rope, the bridge could be lifted, lowered, and rotated in an arc around the bow of the galley. How this rotational movement was achieved is not known, but it is probable that Roman marines helped lift and turn the plank, while others pulled the far end upward with the rope. When they let go of the rope, the corvus plunged. The iron spike would pierce the deck of a Punic warship and stop it from getting away. The hole in the gangplank, attached as it was to the ship via the pole, prevented the bridge from being pulled off the Roman galley as the ships bobbed and jostled. The corvus let the Romans hold a Carthaginian warship in place while their legionaries rushed across to fight the enemy hand-to-hand. The boarding bridge evened the odds in a sea fight by letting the Romans bring their excellent heavy infantry to bear against the handier Punic ships – thus, as Polybius explains, turning a naval engagement into something that more resembled a battle on land.
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The Roman Victory
The Battles
HOW THE LEGIONS BECAME MASTERS OF THE SEA
Marc DeSantis describes the long, hard, but ultimately victorious campaign that turned the Romans from an Italian land-based power into a Mediterranean-wide naval power.
The Battles
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THE BATTLE OF MYLAE, 260 BC Once engaged, the corvus made all the difference. The Romans dropped the boarding bridges down on the unsuspecting Punic warships, which were held tight. After the bridges had been laid, Roman marines sped over the gangplank two-abreast, their shields held to the front and sides, and battled the Carthaginians on the decks of their immobilised ships. The first 30 Punic galleys that had unwisely rushed the Romans were captured. One of these was the gigantic septireme (or ‘sevenoar’) flagship galley of Hannibal, who fled from the disastrous encounter in a small boat. Soon afterwards, the remainder of the Punic fleet caught up, but these ships could do little to alter the outcome. The fighting ships would by this stage have been in a disordered mess, with galleys pointing this way and that, and the chaos must have hampered the Carthaginians. When they attempted to ram the Roman galleys in their sterns, steering clear of the prow-mounted boarding bridges, they made themselves vulnerable to other Roman ships, which attacked their own exposed flanks and sterns in turn. The Carthaginians lost 50 galleys at Mylae. Polybius does not report any losses for the LEFT An imaginative reconstruction of the Battle of Mylae in 260 BC. Note the (badly represented) corvus, which Polybius, the Greek historian of the war, tells us was the decisive weapon. It took the Carthaginians – who were used to manoeuvring, ramming, and then back-watering – completely by surprise. www.military-history.org
Romans. Though outnumbered, the Romans had won a great victory over the Carthaginian navy, despite its incomparably longer naval heritage. Duilius was allowed to hold the first-ever naval triumph for a Roman commander. In his own honour, he erected the columna rostrata on the speaker’s platform in the Roman Forum. Its inscription described, among other things, his famous exploit against the Carthaginian fleet. The column was adorned with several of the bronze rams pried loose from captured Punic warships. Lest there be any doubt as to the magnitude of his victory, Duilius built a temple to Janus to commemorate the occasion; or so the later Roman historian Tacitus records in his Annals. Hannibal, on the other hand, decided it would be best not to return home. Carthage had a draconian policy of crucifying failed commanders. The Sicilian Greek historian Diodorus Siculus preserves a story in which, after the battle, Hannibal sent a friend to ask the
The Carthaginian captains ‘all sailed straight for the enemy, like predators after easy prey’. Carthaginian senate what he should do if he encountered a Roman fleet, asking the senators if he should do battle with 200 ships against a Roman force of 120. The senators responded strongly in the affirmative. ‘Very well,’ Hannibal’s friend said in reply, ‘that is just why Hannibal did fight, and we have been beaten. But since you commanded it, he is relieved of the blame.’
THE ROMAN INVASION OF AFRICA Though the Romans had won a great victory at Mylae, the war for Sicily seemed set to grind on for an eternity. Such was the Carthaginians’ staying power that, ensconced in their nearly invulnerable western fortress ports at Lilybaeum, Panormus, and Drepana, they were able to carry on the war despite Rome’s numerical advantage and the blunting of their naval supremacy. The ensuing years of the First Punic War saw a return to the see-saw match of the early Roman foray into Sicily, with the Romans winning some great victories, but then suffering extraordinary setbacks.
The siege warfare of the period after Mylae suited the Carthaginians well, because they were adept at defending fortified cities. Though the Romans would win again at sea in battles off Sulci in 258 BC and Tyndaris in 257 BC – with the help of the corvus – their fleets could not eject the Carthaginians from their coastal bases. The Romans therefore decided to take the war to Africa in 256 BC. A massive invasion was planned, for which 330 galleys were made ready. Polybius writes that each Roman quinquereme, in addition to its 300 oarsmen, also embarked 120 marines. Along with a handful of sailors and officers, each Roman ship probably had upwards of 420 men aboard. So the Roman fleet had about 140,000 men on its ships: an astonishing number. For their part, the Carthaginians knew that the Romans were coming, and readied a tremendous fleet of their own. It numbered 350 ships, and Polybius says that the Punic ships embarked 150,000 men all told. Both Rome and Carthage were prepared for a climactic battle. This they got.
THE BATTLE OF ECNOMUS, 256 BC The Roman fleet was coasting along with the Sicilian shore to starboard to pick up Roman soldiers at Ecnomus (Poggio Di Sant’Angelo) when a Carthaginian fleet appeared and anchored nearby at Heraclea Minoa. The Romans embarked their best legionaries, in preparation for battle. The Roman fleet was divided into four divisions. Two of these formed an ‘arrowhead’ front, with the consuls Lucius Manlius Vulso commanding the First Squadron on the right, and Marcus Attilius Regulus the Second Squadron on the left. The Third Squadron formed the base of the arrowhead, sailing in line-abreast, towing the horse-transport ships, while the Fourth Squadron brought up the rear. The Carthaginians, when they saw the Romans coming, arrayed their fleet in a long, thin line. Three-quarters of the Carthaginian fleet was in line-abreast, each ship sailing alongside its neighbour, extending far out to sea. The remainder, on the left, also in line-abreast, was advanced slightly and at an angle to the Sicilian shore. Hanno was in command of the right wing, while Hamilcar, from his position in the centre of the line, led the left wing. The Romans dashed straight for the centre of the thin Punic line, which they saw was only one ship deep, and thus weak. As the Romans closed, Hamilcar’s centre ships hastily retreated. They were not in flight, however: Hamilcar’s plan was to lure the Roman ships out of formation so that they could be attacked and rammed without them being able to use their prow-mounted boarding bridges. As the First and Second Squadrons under the consuls pursued Hamilcar, Hanno’s MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
Image: Alamy
onsul Gaius Duilius joined the Roman fleet and took up command in late 260 BC. The work to place the boarding bridges on the decks of the quinqueremes was already under way. When they were installed, Duilius took the ships out to confront the Carthaginian fleet, which was operating off the Sicilian coast around Mylae (modern Milazzo). The Punic fleet of 130 ships was under the command of Hannibal, the same admiral who had escaped the earlier battle at the Cape of Italy. The Romans, with their 103 ships, were badly outnumbered, and Polybius writes of the Carthaginian captains that once contact was made ‘they all sailed straight for the enemy, like predators after easy prey’. Their overconfidence proved their undoing. The leading flotilla of 30 Carthaginian quinqueremes engaged the Romans without making any attempt to array itself in proper battle formation. They thereby sacrificed the support of their fellows, who could have provided protection for their flanks and the extra numbers to hit the Romans harder. The Carthaginians were contemptuous of Roman ability, and saw no need to treat Rome’s navy with respect.
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The MAPS
CAMPAIGN MAP, BATTLE PLAN A AND BATTLE PLAN B Our Campaign Map (BELOW) shows the landmark events of the First Punic War (264-241 BC). Battle Plan A (OPPOSITE PAGE – TOP) shows the three main phases in the Battle of Ecnomus, possibly the largest naval battle of all time, involving almost 700 warships and 300,000 men. Phase 1 shows the very different opposing formations in the approach to battle.
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Phase 2 shows the attack of the Roman First 1 and Second 2 Squadrons on the centre of the Carthaginian line, and the corresponding attack of the Carthaginian wings on the Roman Third 3 Squadron (with the transports) and Fourth 4 Squadron (labelled Triarii), which turned the battle into three separate engagements. Phase 3 shows the victorious Roman First and Second Squadrons returning from defeating the Carthaginian
centre to rescue their Third and Fourth Squadrons. Battle Plan B (OPPOSITE PAGE – BOTTOM) shows the Battle of Drepana, during which the Carthaginians slipped out of the northern side of their harbour to pin the approaching Roman fleet against the coast, where it was defeated in large part due to its inability to manoeuvre.
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The Battles
PHASE 2
PHASE 3
Images: Ian Bull
PHASE 1
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right-wing galleys struck at the gap that opened between them and the two trailing squadrons to strike at Fourth Squadron. The ships on the left of the Punic battleline then turned to starboard to attack the Third Squadron and the horse transports. Hamilcar at this moment raised a single flag, and his ‘fleeing’ ships turned about and struck at the pursuing Romans of the consular squadrons. The horse transports were quickly cut loose, but the Third Squadron found itself bunched up along the Sicilian coast and in danger of being forced to beach. Luckily for them, the corvus boarding bridges kept the Carthaginian ships from approaching too close. Meanwhile, Hamilcar’s ships were overcome by the First and Second Squadrons, and he fled with his surviving galleys. The consuls then turned and went to the aid of the other squadrons. Hanno’s ships, which were harrying the Fourth Squadron, departed when Regulus’ ships arrived. Regulus, along with Vulso, then rescued the Third Squadron and captured the 50 Carthaginian galleys that had cornered it.
SQUANDERED VICTORY The Battle of Ecnomus was a tremendous Roman victory, by any measure. A total of 64 Punic ships were captured. Additionally, the Romans sank 30 enemy galleys for a loss of only 24 of their own. The corvus had shown its worth once more, by keeping the Punic ships at bay when the Third Squadron was trapped against the coast. The way to Africa was now wide open. Unfortunately for the Romans, the followup campaign in Africa was badly bungled by the consul Marcus Attilus Regulus. The Carthaginians requested peace, but Regulus’s terms were so harsh that they decided to continue fighting. They hired a Spartan mercenary general called Xanthippus, and placed him in command of the home army during the national crisis. Xanthippus retrained the demoralised Carthaginian army, and restored its confidence. The following year, 255 BC, he crushed the Roman legions in a battle outside Tunis, not far from Carthage, captured the overconfident Regulus, and put an end to the invasion of Africa. The Roman defeat in Africa pointed up the limitations of sea power in that or any other age. Final victory had to be won on land. Regulus had squandered the chance for a negotiated peace agreement and then lost. The clear-cut Roman victory at Ecnomus – perhaps the largest naval battle, in terms of the numbers of men involved, ever fought – was anything but conclusive. Carthage was still defiant, and willing to continue the war with renewed vigour. 38
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THE GREAT STORMS In the summer of 255 BC, a rescue fleet of 350 Roman ships went to Africa to retrieve the Roman survivors who had taken refuge in the North African city of Aspis. The Romans were met by a Punic fleet of 200 ships off Cape Hermaeum (Cape Bon). The Romans shattered the Carthaginian fleet, capturing 114 galleys in the course of the battle. Whatever satisfaction the Romans might have felt after Hermaeum vanished on the return voyage to Italy. As the fleet, numbering now 364 ships and carrying the legionaries picked up at Aspis, was close to Camarina on Sicily’s southern shore, it was hit by a ferocious storm. The result was a catastrophe, with the Romans losing all but 80 of their ships. This translates into the loss of an estimated 85,000 oarsmen and perhaps 120,000 men in total: a greater loss than any suffered in any battle in Roman history. The Romans were determined to retain the initiative at sea, however, and built a new
Both Rome and Carthage were prepared for a climactic battle. This they got. fleet of 220 ships in just three months. In 254 BC this fleet made for Messana, where it picked up 80 additional ships, and helped to seize Panormus. The next year, 253 BC, the Romans made another expedition to Africa, which accomplished little. The fleet went back to Panormus, and then made for Rome, but along the way was hit by a storm that destroyed more than 150 ships. The loss of life was again calamitous, with perhaps 60,000 men drowning. The Romans at last had had their fill of the sea, and decided to build no more ships. Their naval efforts had resulted in no appreciable gains and hecatombs of dead. Instead, they would concentrate all their military energies on winning the ground-war in Sicily. But success eluded the Romans even on land. The years 252 and 251 BC passed with little gain. The Carthaginians were adept at hanging on by their fingernails in the two fortress-seaports that they still possessed. The Siege of Lilybaeum (modern Marsala) continued, bitter and protracted.
In 250 BC, the Romans managed to advance their siegeworks to within the city walls, but the Carthaginians, under their resourceful commander Himilco, stymied further efforts to take the city. When a strong wind arose that knocked down the Roman siege-towers, Himilco ordered an attack on the enemy siege-lines, and his men set fire to the bone-dry wooden equipment there. Rome’s patiently built siege-works went up in the resulting conflagration, and thousands of men were killed, including many oarsmen who had left their ships to help in the assault.
DISASTER AT DREPANA, 249 BC Appius Claudius Pulcher, an arrogant scion of the noble clan of the Claudii, became consul in 249 BC. He was determined to make his mark. ‘The distinction of his clan and the reputation of his family had so spoiled him’, Diodorus said of him, ‘that he was supercilious and looked down on everyone.’ He was a martinet, and flogged transgressors against military discipline ruthlessly. Diodorus did not hesitate to call him ‘mentally unstable’. Pulcher had a plan, and convinced his officers to follow it. The consul had brought with him a fresh draft of replacement rowers for the fleet, about 10,000 men, and, he reasoned, a surprise attack on the nearby port of Drepana (Trapani), Carthage’s only other Sicilian fortress, could succeed. The Carthaginians knew that the Roman fleet’s crews had taken heavy casualties in the Lilybaeum fiasco, but they did not know that Pulcher had come with reinforcements. As far as the Carthaginians were concerned, Pulcher argued, the Roman fleet was out of commission. Pulcher’s officers liked what they heard and agreed to the daring plan. The best legionaries from what remained of the army, fired up by the prospect of booty to be had at Drepana, were put aboard ship to serve as marines. The consul led his fleet of about 123 ships out at night, with the northward voyage timed so that it would arrive at Drepana by morning. The ships appeared off the city at dawn, but the operation immediately went wrong. The vanguard Roman galleys sailed into Drepana’s harbour along its southern approach, but the Carthaginians spotted them coming. Their admiral, Adherbal, reacted at once. His men hurried aboard their ships and raced westward out of the harbour along its northern edge, steering clear of the dawdling Romans, who were bunching up inside it. Pulcher was not at the front of his fleet, but at its rear, possibly because he had been more worried about rounding up straggling Roman ships that had fallen behind in the dark than what the Carthaginians might do once his fleet showed up. This was a terrible misjudgement. By the time Pulcher himself reached Drepana, the entire Carthaginian fleet had November 2015
Image: AKG/Peter Connolly
The Battles
pulled clear of the harbour and was formed in a line at sea, while the Roman galleys had collected inside it. Pulcher frantically pulled out his ships and put them into a ragged battle-line, but the initiative had been completely lost, and the Carthaginians held the tactically superior position. The Romans had the shore right at their backs, while the Carthaginians had only open sea behind them. In the ensuing battle, when the Carthaginians were hard-pressed, they retreated out to sea, while the Romans could not manoeuvre at all, either to get away or to go to the aid of a friendly ship under attack.
‘LET THEM DRINK!’ The fight off Drepana was a fearsome debacle for Rome. Pulcher escaped with around 30 galleys, but 93 ships and their crews were captured, a loss of about 39,000 oarsmen and marines. Polybius writes that in Rome Pulcher ‘was attacked on all sides for his conduct of the battle’, was put on trial, and hit with a hefty fine. www.military-history.org
What had happened? A (doubtful) story about the battle holds that Pulcher had been hanging back at the rear of his fleet waiting for the auspices to be taken. For Roman armies and fleets, auspices were had by watching sacred chickens eat some food placed before them. If the chickens ate hungrily, the auspices, and thus the prospects for battle, were good; if the chickens would not eat, then the auspices were bad. At Drepana, the chickens refused to peck, and a frustrated and impious Pulcher had seized the chickens and tossed them overboard. ‘If they will not eat,’ he is said to have roared, ‘let them drink!’ To pious Romans, the calamity at Drepana would have been a punishment from the gods for this sacrilege. There might be another explanation besides Pulcher’s dunking of the sacred chickens. What about the corvus? Why had this battle-winning device failed to win the battle as it had at Mylae and Ecnomus? The corvus is not mentioned
ABOVE As the war progressed, the Romans became increasingly skilled at sea – less reliant on crude corvus tactics, more on manoeuvre and the ram. This cutaway shows the five-man sections that gave the quinquereme its name (‘five-oars’) – that is, two men on each of the upper and middle oars, and one man on the shorter, lower one.
Carthage had a draconian policy of crucifying failed commanders. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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Image: AKG
again by Polybius after its use at Ecnomus in 256. In fact, it is never again mentioned by any ancient historian. The supposition of many modern historians is that the boarding bridge had made the Roman galleys top-heavy, and that this was a factor in the terrible losses that the Romans suffered in storms in 255 and 253 BC. It is assumed that the corvus was removed and never put back because it constituted a danger to the stability of a Roman quinquereme greater than any benefit it might bring in battle. Without the corvus, the Romans were not the equals of the Carthaginians at sea, especially when the Carthaginians could manoeuvre freely.
HAMILCAR BARCA The Romans again gave up trying to win control of the sea, and concentrated on fighting on land. Yet the 240s BC in Sicily were not easy for the Romans. In 247 BC, a bold and resourceful Carthaginian general, Hamilcar Barca, arrived on the island. He conducted a hard-hitting campaign of raids and ambushes from his bases at Hiercte and then Eryx.
Rome’s navy was just as important to the building of the Roman Empire as her legions. 40
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At their wits’ end after several years of costly stalemate, in 242 BC the Romans decided to make another major effort at sea to end the war. The state treasury was empty, and ships cost money to build. The solution was to rely on subscription by private citizens to fund the construction. One or maybe several Romans together would contribute the money to build a single quinquereme, with only the promise of a share of any booty recovered as compensation. In this way, a fleet of 200 quinqueremes was produced. When it was fitted out, it sailed to Sicily under the command of consul Gaius Lutatius Catulus. The Carthaginians were caught flat-footed by Rome’s renewed naval challenge, and took many months to respond with a fleet of their own. It seems that the Punic navy had been allowed to decay while the war in Sicily was confined to land operations, and Catulus used the extra time to drill his men relentlessly. The Carthaginians were faced with an acute problem. Hamilcar Barca’s men at Eryx were in need of resupply, but to reach them their relief fleet under Hanno would have to get past Catulus’s fast ships, offload their supplies for the Eryx garrison, and then take on board Hamilcar’s soldiers to be able to fight a proper sea battle with the Romans. This was a tall order, and the Romans caught the Carthaginian ships before they could get into Eryx.
THE BATTLE OF THE AEGATES ISLANDS, 10 MARCH 241 BC Off the Aegates Islands, the Romans, now trained to a pitch of perfection, trounced the Punic fleet, sinking 50 galleys and capturing 70. With the failure of the resupply mission and total Roman control of the sea, Carthage’s few remaining positions in Sicily were bound to collapse, and she sued for peace.
ABOVE The Roman Navy: mistress of the Mediterranean, which the Romans came to know as mare nostrum (‘our sea’). This is one of a number of bas-relief depictions of Roman quinqueremes, the dreadnoughts of their age, a combination of muscle-powered ram and heavily armed marines.
Sea power had at last brought Rome victory after 23 expensive, exhausting, bloody years. It is thought that Rome lost some 700 warships during the war, many more to storms than to Carthaginian action. Rome’s bid for mastery of the sea had won it a new province in Sicily, but the peace agreement that concluded the war left so much bitterness that it, along with Rome’s high-handed seizure of Sardinia in 239 BC, laid the groundwork for the Second Punic War (218-201 BC). That second war with Carthage might have turned out very differently had Rome not wrested control of the seas from Carthage in the first. Though sea power could not win Rome the war, it did prevent it from losing it, and allowed her greater flexibility when moving her armies around. Carthage never seriously challenged Rome again for naval dominance, not even when Hannibal Barca, Hamilcar’s son, had humbled several Roman armies in quick succession, and was devastating Italy almost at will. When Rome emerged triumphant at the end of that conflict, her powerful and well-trained navy was at the forefront of her campaigns against the Hellenistic monarchies of the eastern Mediterranean, which she defeated in turn. Rome’s navy was thus just as important to the building of the Roman Empire as her legions. Marc G DeSantis is an historian and attorney. His book about naval warfare in the Punic Wars, Rome Seizes the Trident, will be published in late 2015.
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November 2015
The Irish at Messines HOW SOLDIERS FROM NORTH AND SOUTH FOUGHT TOGETHER IN WWI
It was a divided country in a divided world. Ireland’s contribution to the Great War was bitterly contested by Irish men and women. With his focus on the Battles of Messines, Tom Farrell explores the issues that split a nation between 1914 and 1918.
I Men from both sides of Ireland’s sectarian divide waited for the massive underground detonations that would begin the attack. 42
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t would be a fine memorial to the men who have died so splendidly, if we could, over their graves, build a bridge between north and south.
The sentiments in the letter sent to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in December 1916 were genuine, and its author would pay for them with his life. In the early hours of 7 June 1917, as troops moved into their assembly positions near Messines Ridge, Conan Doyle’s friend Major Willie Redmond was commanding A Company of the 6th Royal Irish Regiment, 47th Brigade. Men from both sides of Ireland’s sectarian divide waited for the massive underground detonations that would begin the attack. The 16th Irish and 36th Ulster Divisions of the IX Corps were essential to Field-Marshal Haig’s plans to capture Messines Ridge, as the prelude to a new Ypres offensive. Since the attack had been conceived in early 1916, 24 tunnels had been tortuously dug under enemy lines by special mining companies that were attached to the Royal Engineers. By the following June, one had been discovered, while four came outside the eventual sphere of operation; the rest were set to blow a series of gigantic holes in the German front-line.
PLANS Once the ammonal in the shafts had been detonated, the planned attack was to be
carried out along a broad from St Yves to Mount Sorel by three corps. The ANZAC Corps were to assault in a north-east direction and capture the southern shoulder of the ridge, including Messines. In the centre, IX Corps, including the Irishmen, would advance east astride the Spanbroekmolen saddle and the heights of Kemmel and Wytschaete villages. The X Corps would assault south-east to capture the northern part of the ridge, between St Eloi-Oosttaverne and Mount Sorel. The XIV Corps was to be held in reserve at GHQ. Before the battle, 2,266 guns, including 756 heavy and medium weapons, had been November 2015
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the line facing German-occupied Wytschaete. The Irish were now part of the Second Army, under the command of General Sir Herbert Charles Onslow Plumer, known to his men as ‘Daddy Plum’. The 36th Ulster Division was led by MajorGeneral Oliver Stewart Nugent, and the 16th Irish by Major-General William Bernard Hickie, both graduates of Sandhurst, and both veterans of the Boer War. Hickie had served with distinction at Bothaville in November 1900. Nugent had been taken prisoner after the Battle of Talana Hill the previous year. The former was later elected a senator in the Irish Free State’s upper house
ABOVE Men of the Royal Irish Rifles photographed on the Somme on 1 July 1916. They were troubled men in more ways than one: many of their countrymen considered them traitors.
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Image: Alamy
assembled. Approximately 144,000 tonnes of ammunition was located in dumps behind the line, with 1,000 rounds positioned in each gun-pit. The Germans had captured the high ground in October 1914, preventing the British Army from seeing beyond the German front, except for observation carried out from the air. Messines was a strategically vital objective in the Ypres sector of the Western Front. Both Irish divisions had incurred terrible casualties on the Somme the previous year. They had left the sector by September, moving north to the relative calm of the Flanders line. They relieved Canadian troops who had held
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MESSINES of parliament, chalking up a record number of votes in the 1925 session.
PREPARATIONS
ABOVE On 7 June 1917, 19 mines were successfully detonated along the Messines Ridge. An estimated 10,000 German soldiers were killed in history’s most devastating non-nuclear explosion.
‘We may not change history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change geography.’ General Plumer 44
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For the men they led, the winter of 1916/1917 had been brutal in western Flanders. There were not enough billets, so many men had been forced to sleep in tents. The calamities of the Somme had taught the generals the necessity of massive infrastructural work ahead of an attack. New roads were built behind the front, and light-gauge railways laid in order to ferry supplies to the fighting and the wounded out of it. Both Irish divisions underwent intense training. Ground and air reconnaissance missions behind German lines gathered intelligence. Ahead of the attack, the men of the 16th Irish Division enjoyed their longest phases out of active combat since arriving in France. When not engaged in training exercises, they played games of rugby and soccer. Given the rising tensions at home, it was reported that there seemed to be relatively little sectarian tension among the men – although many Ulstermen were taken aback by the Catholicism of their French allies. Many of these men, some from Belfast’s shipyards, others from Queen’s University Officers Training Corps, had begun the war digging practice trenches in the countryside south of Lough Neagh. In the south, labour disputes immediately before the war had thrown thousands of men out of work. Even though Ireland was exempted from conscription, introduced by the wartime Coalition in March 1916, poverty had compelled many men to join up in the first two years of the war. Known as ‘National Volunteers’, they had heeded the call of the moderate leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) – the ‘Nationalists’ – who peddled the line that Home Rule would be granted after the war in return for loyal service. It was at the end of 1915 that the 16th Division had reached Flanders. Tom Kettle, the Nationalist MP for East Tyrone, recorded: ‘There are two sinister fences of barbed wire on the barbs of which blood-stained strips of uniform and fragments more sinister have been known to hang… a figure in khaki stands as he peers through the night towards the German lines. His watch is over. The trench has not fallen. As for him, he has carried his pack for Ireland and Europe and now packcarrying is over. He has held the line.’
THE MINES EXPLODE At 3.10am, nearly one million pounds of explosive detonated in the most devastating non-nuclear explosion in any war to date. Four mines exploded in front of the men of the 36th Division and four in front of the men of the 16th.
The men had been briefed on what was coming, but the actual explosions were far more ferocious than expected. Later it would be estimated that 10,000 German soldiers had perished in the blast. On the eve of the attack, General Plumer had remarked, ‘We may not change history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change geography.’ All of the men had lain down to receive the shockwave. As they glanced up, they could see rippling multi-coloured columns of smoke pushing up into the night. Then debris began raining down, claiming casualties. Lieutenant T Witherow of the 8th Royal Irish Rifles recorded: ‘When the debris fell, the L/CPL, one of my best section commanders, was killed by a stone.’ Officers and NCOs began shaking the prostrate soldiers to their feet, but in the dust and fumes many men were disorientated and lost direction. ‘In fact, if we had not the German SOS lights to show us their positions,’ recalled Witherow, ‘it might have been as easy to go right or left as ahead.’ Units and sub-units skirted around the vast smoking craters. For both the 16th and 36th Divisions, the leading battalions had two companies up and two behind. At a designated ‘Red’ line, the leading companies would pause. Those in the rear were then to leapfrog and take the lead in the advance to the ‘Blue’ Line, with ‘mop-up’ operations the responsibility of a supporting battalion. The follow-up battalions, having passed through the Blue line, would then cross two other lines, ‘Green’ and ‘Black’, before halting at the latter for the final mop up.
THE INFANTRY ADVANCE Both divisions encountered heavy fire as they went forward. The men of the 16th (47th Brigade) then found themselves involved in hand-to-hand fighting between Petit Bois and Wytschaete village. But the men of the Leinster Regiment reached the edge of the Wytschaete at zero plus three hours and 40 minutes, even without their supporting tanks, which had broken down. The 49th Brigade followed up, encountering resistance at L’Hospice, Sonen Farm, and along the Red Line. After A Company of the 7th Inniskilling Fusiliers overcame resistance along the Red Line, they took many German prisoners; in the empty dugouts they found breakfast and bottles of beer. Plumer planned the second phase of the Messines attack for 15.00 hours. By then, the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles had taken L’Hospice, with the loss of one officer RIGHT The Battle of Messines, 7-14 June 1917, showing the mine blasts, the British attack, and the major gains made during the week-long battle. November 2015
Map: Ian Bull
MESSINES LEFT & BELOW Two British recruitment posters aimed at Irish Catholics, one inviting them to fight in defence of their Belgian coreligionists, the other calling for revenge for Irish lives lost in the sinking of the Lusitania.
ABOVE John Redmond (1856-1918), the moderate nationalist politician who advocated Irish support for Britain during the First World War in return for Home Rule afterwards.
One sergeant managed to attract the attention of a tank by banging on its hull with a grenade. 46
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and 17 soldiers killed, along with 130 men wounded. The two brigades were relieved on the night of 8-9 June, and four days later the 16th Division marched off to the Merris area for training. Meanwhile, the 107th and 109th Brigades of the 36th Division got to the Red Line, but encountered serious resistance from two German machine-guns, until relieved by the 9th and 14th Rifles. Then, after crossing the Blue and Black Lines, they encountered further fire on the Messines-Wytschaete road. When the 9th Inniskillings were halted by a machine-gun, one sergeant managed to attract the attention of a tank by banging on its hull with a grenade. Around 200 yards short of the road, the men were fired on from two concrete pillboxes, one on either flank. Both were destroyed by platoon bombing attacks, supported by Lewis guns. By nightfall on 7 June, the 108th Brigade had relieved the 107th and 109th Brigades by moving its two mop-up battalions forward, and by the following day the last elements of the 36th Division had retreated to the slopes of Mount Kemmel. The Messines Ridge attack, which began the Third Battle of Ypres, was a spectacular military success. But the brutal campaign
that followed, culminating in the capture of Passchendaele village in November, would be hampered by torrential rain and strategic hubris. Both divisions would suffer thousands of casualties. Messines itself had cost the 16th Division 748 dead, the 36th 700. Among them was Major Willie Redmond MP. He had been hit in the wrist within minutes of going over the top, but had continued forward until hit in the leg. Men from the 36th Ulster Division then bore his stretcher to a field hospital, where he died some hours later. Redmond was posthumously awarded the Legion of Honour by the French.
A DIVIDED ISLAND As MP for East Clare, the 56 year old Willie Redmond must have seemed unlikely material for the Western Front. A veteran nationalist since the days of Charles Stewart Parnell, he was said to be more volatile, spontaneous, and passionate than his older brother John, now leading the IPP. He had condemned the Boer War in the Commons in 1899, and was associated with the emerging generation of more forthright nationalists like Arthur Griffiths and Maude Gonne. More radical than his brother on many issues, including female suffrage, Willie Redmond had travelled widely in the 1900s, and admired the dominion status of Australia and Canada. But on the outbreak of the Great War, he was among thousands of southern Irishmen who joined the newly formed 10th and 16th (Irish) Divisions at the behest of his brother. November 2015
THE ULSTER VOLUNTEER FORCE Unionist Orange and Nationalist Green had been on the brink of a bloody showdown in 1914. Not for the first or last time, Ulster Protestants were prepared to resort to arms to resist the bogey of absorption by the ‘Papist’ hordes to the south. Incipient Home Rule alarmed and outraged Unionists. Like their descendents over half a century later, confronted by a resurgent Republicanism, the Unionists, led by James Craig and Edward Carson, sought to stymie the efforts of Herbert Asquith’s government to negotiate some form of power-sharing deal.
province had been thrown into mourning by the events of that day. The vast artillery barrage that began on 24 June had failed to soften the German positions when the men of the 36th Division scrambled past sandbags and coils of barbed wire near Thiepval, at the heart of the 30-mile front. Unlike most of the British troops that day, the Ulstermen stormed forward to take five lines of German trenches and establish a foothold in the still-intact German citadel of Schwaben Redoubt. But in the process they BELOW A consignment of German guns is smuggled into Ireland. BOTTOM The famous proclamation of an Irish Republic, made during the Easter Rising in 1916.
1916: THE DEFINING YEAR Redmond’s letter to Conan Doyle seems all the more poignant given how events earlier that same year would soon catalyse into oppositional Great War narratives, both of which have echoed down the decades since. A painting by James Beadle, donated by the UVF to Belfast City Hall, depicts the slaughter of the Somme on 1 July. It still appears on Orange murals and sashes. A year before Messines, whole towns and streets in the
Image: WIPL
BELOW James Connolly’s Citizen Army parades outside Liberty Hall in Dublin, the headquarters of the Transport and General Workers Union and the Irish Labour Party. The banner above proclaims a very different allegiance from that of Irishmen fighting on the Western Front.
Craig, who stage-managed the Ulster Covenant Day of 28 September 1912, was enthusiastic about the looming partition of the island. The Dublin-born Carson was more resigned, and notably uneasy about the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in January 1913, tasked with armed resistance to Home Rule. The formation of the UVF was reciprocated when a meeting in Dublin on 25 November 1913 resulted in the Irish Volunteers forming their own paramilitary wing. The mutiny of 20 March 1914 – when a majority of British officers stationed in the Curragh, County Kildare, Ireland’s largest military camp, signalled their collective refusal to implement the Government’s Home Rule policy – revealed to Ireland’s Nationalists that they would need military muscle to back their political demands. The following month, the UVF covertly landed 24,000 rifles in Larne, County Antrim, under cover of darkness. Once again, the move was reciprocated: in July, the Irish Volunteers landed weapons at Howth, north of Dublin. In short, without the intervention of Gavrilo Princip in faraway Sarajevo, Ireland might have descended into civil war in late 1914.
Image: WIPL
John Redmond argued that, with thousands of Ulster Unionists flocking to the recruiting stations in the north, abstention would weaken the cause of the Third Home Rule Bill, introduced in 1912 but postponed until after the war. The IPP split over the war: most supported Redmond, but the dissenting factions coalesced around a more radical nationalist current, whose leaders would soon attempt a major armed uprising in Dublin. There is little reason to doubt that, had a General Election been called in 1915, the IPP, whose support was crucial to the governing Liberals at Westminster, would have secured a major victory. But the long-term perspective is another matter. Willie Redmond’s letter to Conan Doyle seems, in that light, naïve, even delusional.
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Image: WIPL
MESSINES
ABOVE Dublin during the Easter Rising, showing the major military clashes. It was a hopelessly onesided struggle. The Irish people remained passive, the armed vanguard isolated. Outnumbered two to one at the beginning of the Rising, by the end, a week later, the odds had increased to five to one as the British rushed in reinforcements.
Without the intervention of Gavrilo Princip in faraway Sarajevo, Ireland might have descended into civil war in late 1914. 48
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were exposed to machine-gun fire on both flanks. Later, forced to withdraw, they suffered heavily from shellfire in no-man’s land. By the end of the day they had suffered 5,200 casualties, including over 2,000 dead. The 16th Division also suffered on the Somme, particularly at Guillemont and Ginchy. On 27 April, two brigades lost 463 men when chlorine gas drifted across no-man’s land at Hulloch. Many of the deaths were attributed to poorly designed gas helmets. One witness described finding corpses ‘in all kinds of tragic attitudes, some of them holding hands like children in the dark’. But such tragedies found very different interpretations, north and south. For the Unionists, descendents of 17th-century Scots Calvinist settlers, the trenches could be seen as a latter-day Exodus or Calvary, testing and validating the mettle of the elect. For many Nationalists, the Great War embodied British imperialism at its most duplicitous and cruel, snuffing out the lives of 30,000 Irishmen on a promise of Home Rule that seemed increasingly derisory as the Unionists armed for rebellion to prevent it.
BELOW The General Post Office in Dublin after the Rising. It was largely destroyed during the fighting, but was completely rebuilt afterwards.
THE EASTER RISING Crucially, not all Nationalists had endorsed the Redmondite line. A dissenting rump of Irish Volunteers joined forces with other November 2015
ABOVE A Sinn Féin election poster from 1918. The radical nationalist party won a landslide. The British were defeated in the subsequent Irish War of Independence (1919-1921). The executed rebels of 1916 were thus the posthumous victors.
factions who sought to establish a 32-county Republic by an armed uprising supported by German arms. The Easter Rising began on 24 April 1916. Having issued a proclamation outside the cavernous General Post Office in Dublin, the Irish Brotherhood seized key points around the city and elsewhere across the country. The Rising lasted six days, during which the hoped-for island-wide revolt failed to materialise. British forces shelled the centre of Dublin, and by the time the Rising’s leaders surrendered, 446 people, soldiers and civilians, were dead, and over 2,000 wounded. Unsurprisingly, Unionist troops on the Western Front were unreservedly contemptuous of the Rising. But among the National Volunteers, reactions were distinctly mixed. Some enraged troops burned an effigy of Sir Roger Casement, who had unsuccessfully tried to land German arms in Ireland. But others were appalled on hearing reports of martial law and shelling. Many soldiers reacted much like civilians back home: initial apathy or animus towards the Rising changed to outrage when its leaders were court-martialled and executed. Sergeant John Lucy of the 16th Division probably expressed a common sentiment when he wrote: ‘I experienced a cold fury, because I would rather see the whole of the British Empire damned sooner than hear of an Irishman being killed in his own country by any intruding stranger.’
THE SINN FÉIN LANDSLIDE This shift in attitudes, combined with attempts to introduce conscription in Ireland in early 1918, tied to the implementation of Home Rule, drastically eroded support for the IPP. Within nine months of Messines Ridge, John Redmond, who had received hundreds of messages of condolence on his brother’s death, including one from Edward Carson, was dead. He reportedly told a Jesuit priest who administered the last rites, ‘I’m a broken-hearted man.’ It was perhaps a mercy that he did not survive long enough to see his party virtually obliterated in the 1918 General Election, when the Republican movement’s political wing, known as Sinn Féin, took 73 of 105 seats. Among them was Willie Redmond’s East Clare seat, taken by one of the Rising’s senior figures, spared execution and later amnestied: Éamon de Valera. When another war erupted in Europe in 1939, de Valera – by then Taoiseach (Prime Minister) – would refuse Winston Churchill’s offer of Irish reunification in exchange for Éire’s entry into the war. Although this decision was underscored by myriad considerations, de Valera undoubtedly had Redmond’s fate in mind. His predecessor had been destroyed by the Great War. And yet he had seemed like a prime minister in waiting in the summer of 1914. Tom Farrell is a freelance writer and journalist whose work has featured in numerous newspapers and magazines in Britain and Ireland.
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ROUND TOWER MEMORIAL At Messines Peace Park, a round tower rises 110 feet above the bucolic farmland. It is almost impossible to reconcile today’s expanse of green fields and grazing cattle with the wasteland of mud and flooded craters that existed nearly a century ago. The Park was opened on 11 November 1998 in a ceremony attended by Ireland’s President Mary MacAleese, Queen Elizabeth II, and King Albert II of Belgium. When the 16th and 36th Divisions fought alongside each other on the embattled Messines Ridges in June 1917, it represented, not even the end of an era, but an aberration. The defining events of the previous year, for north and south, ultimately led to partition and separate parliaments in Dublin and Stormont. More violence followed: a remorseless War of Independence (1919-1921) and then Civil War (1922-1923) in the south; and, of course, more recently, the long-running ‘Troubles’ (1969-1998) in the north. Tom Kettle MP had already fallen at Ginchy by the time of Messines. But his reflections on his and his compatriots’ experiences are inscribed on one of the nine stone slabs surrounding the tower: ‘So here, while the mad guns curse overhead, and tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor, know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, died not for Flag, nor King, nor Emperors, but for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed, and the secret scripture of the poor.’
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Photo: PA Photo
Resistenza Italiana
HOW THE ITALIAN RESISTANCE DEFEATED THE NAZIS Sarah De Nardi uncovers the hidden history of the mass anti-Fascist movement that defeated the German occupation of Italy after the fall of Mussolini.
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November 2015
LEFT Hitler and Mussolini parade in Berlin in 1937.
Anglo-American forces. The request was granted. Consequently, any act of hostility against the Anglo-American forces must cease by the Italian forces everywhere. However, they will react to attacks from any other source. This meant the Germans. And the Germans were, predictably, livid about the ultimate betrayal.
WHO WERE THE PARTISANS? With the south of the peninsula in Allied hands, the collapse of the Fascist regime left a political vacuum in northern and central Italy. This was filled by a Nazi occupation, which began as early as 9 September, the day after Armistice Day. On 12 September, specialist SS forces launched Operation Eiche, and sprung Mussolini from captivity. Hitler installed him as head of the Italian Social Republic (RSI, or Salò Republic) in the occupied north, on the shores of Lake Garda. The different groups that constituted the Resistance – and particularly the armed guerrilla bands known as the Partisans – were henceforward engaged against the occupation of northern and central Italy by German Nazi forces and their Italian Fascist allies of the Salò Republic. The Resistance was significant in both military and political terms. Estimates of the numbers involved vary, but journalist and ex-Partisan Giorgio Bocca reckoned that as many as 300,000 Italians were involved in direct action against the Nazi-Fascist regime by April 1945. Many more supported the Partisans with food, provisions, intelligence, shelter, and other assistance.
T
he Italian Resistance of 1943-1945 was an iconic episode. Its legacy has had a profound impact on political and intellectual discussion in the post-war period. It is still a topic of heated debate today. The Resistance originated amid the tumult of the Second World War, and the collapse of Italy’s Fascist regime. Various forms of military and civil resistance emerged between September 1943 and April 1945.
ARMISTICE DAY Italy joined in the war on the German side on 10 June 1940 – the southern end of the Berlin–Rome Axis. After a disastrous war effort in which their German allies often ignored or exploited the Italians, the King and the (outlawed) opposition parties decided they www.military-history.org
THE RESISTANCE GROWS had had enough. More importantly, the non-Fascist majority of the population wanted an end to the war. Prime Minister Benito Mussolini was dismissed from office by King Emmanuel III on 25 July 1943. The result was chaos. British and American forces had landed in Sicily on 9/10 July (Operation Husky). A radio announcement by the King on 8 September 1943 – one heard in every Italian home with a wireless – proclaimed the following: The Italian government, having recognised the impossibility of continuing the unequal struggle against the overwhelming power of the opponent, and in order to prevent more and more serious disasters to the nation, has pleaded for an armistice with General Eisenhower, supreme commander of allied
The rank and file of the Resistance grew substantially through to 1945. From an original base of around 9,000 in late 1943, historian Paul Ginsborg estimates numbers rising to 20,000-30,000 in the spring of 1944, and perhaps 100,000 later that year, before explosive growth in the last few months of the war. This rapid rise in the number of Resisters was due to more and more ex-Fascists and Wehrmacht deserters joining Partisan bands. SOE Special Forces expert Lawrence Lewis claims that up to 70,000 of the armed Partisans were killed, and 40,000 wounded. Bocca estimates 35,000 fatalities. The Italian historian and former Partisan Claudio Pavone FAR LEFT A detachment of Italian guerrillas enter Cesena on 20 October 1944. From September 1943 onwards, the Partisans were engaged against the occupation of northern and central Italy by German Nazi forces and their Italian Fascist allies. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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ITALIAN RESISTANCE LEFT Partisans posted on a spur of rock. Many Resisters based themselves in the higher, less accessible mountains. BELOW LEFT A gathering of Partisans among the mountains of Piedmont in 1943. These mobile bands would need support from many civilians to provide food, shelter, supplies, and information.
offers precise figures of 44,720 dead and 9,980 killed in reprisals.
THE CIVILIAN ROLE Overall, all experts agree the Resistance recruited significantly, and that these fighters also relied on extensive support networks. One estimate is that each Partisan in the field (or mountain) needed 10-15 civilian supporters to sustain their efforts with food, shelter, supplies, and information. These large support networks also increased risks, however: shifting ideological allegiances and the coercion of individuals to feed the Partisans meant that betrayals and reprisals were frequent. Given the large numbers involved, and the wider context of what was, in fact, an Italian civil war, it is unsurprising that the Resistance tradition has played a key role in subsequent national memory and debate. What is also clear – in the judgement of the Allies at the time and many historians since – is that the Resistance played a central role in defeating the Nazis. Like the French Maquis, the Resistenza Italiana was a major fighting force shaping the outcome of the Second World War.
Photo: Alamy
Photo: Topfoto
THE RESISTANCE: A GAMECHANGING ITALIAN PHENOMENON
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Throughout Europe, the Second World War was fought with savagery. Italy was no exception. The people of central and northern Italy found themselves surrounded by warring foreign armies as the Allies fought their way northwards, and the Nazi-Fascist forces sometimes applied a scorched-earth policy as they retreated. At the same time, while German troops (with enlisted Italians) and Salò-Fascist forces battled with the Partisans, Italians often found themselves fighting each other, some from conviction, others because they were coerced. Civilians faced demands for supplies and support from all sides in the conflict, and many non-combatants were subject to random violence – be it Allied bombing or massacre by retreating Nazis, such as those at Civitella and Sant’Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany. As a result, in the aftermath of these punishing episodes, the Resistance – and particularly the Partisans – became increasingly symbolic for post-war Italy, and the ‘Resistance tradition’ came to dominate the decades following the war. November 2015
The Resistance was fractured. It seldom meant the same thing to different participants, let alone to Italians as a whole. It was formed from a shifting mixture of men and women from different Italian regions, of various political allegiance, with Allied officers from overseas adding to the cocktail. The Resisters soon formed into small, mobile units, and often based themselves in the higher, less accessible mountains. Class and political divisions differentiated the brigades: Communist Garibaldi formations constituted the majority in most regions, but liberal and Catholic units also existed, and most brigades established their own territories.
PARTISAN ACTIVITIES The Partisans employed guerrilla tactics. These included sabotage of power lines and power stations, and the destruction of bridges and roadways used by the Germans to transfer livestock and other war necessities to Germany. The Partisans excelled at ambushes. They would take the enemy by surprise, capture soldiers or foodstuffs, and then retreat back into their hidden mountain bases. Some Partisans were based in local communities, where they liaised with civilians and passed on looted German supplies. Community-based Partisans did not usually take part in active fighting, but rather sought to further the cause of the Resistance by disrupting normal life and spreading propaganda – pro-Allied material in the case of the moderate and Catholic Partisans, or pro-Communist material in the case of the hardnosed Garibaldi brigades. Sometimes, after carrying out their propaganda work, these ‘diplomatic’ Partisans, too, retreated to inaccessible higher ground.
A DIRTY WAR Fratricidal conflict was frequent and, on occasion, bloody. On 7 February 1945, Garibaldini Partisans massacred a group of Catholic Osoppo Partisans (the ‘Porzus Bloodshed’). But it was the continuous cat-and-mouse game between Fascists and Partisans that was truly lethal. Mario, a witness who was part of the Communist 18th Garibaldi Brigade in Forlì (central Italy), recalls: The thought that it was enough to wear a uniform to turn your neighbour into your tormentor is still hard to accept. We [the Partisans] were dying of hunger, typhus, and fear. They [the Fascists] were laughing and enjoying themselves. I still remember the face of a little guy, half my size, who was hitting me while I was tied to a chair. If only I could www.military-history.org
move I would have beaten him to death. Their laughter was for us the worst torture, like when they lined us up in front of the wall and told us it was our final hour, and then a shooter fired blanks, only to terrorise us. Our hearts jumped out of our chests.
WHERE DID THE PARTISANS OPERATE? The intensity of Resistance activity varied greatly by region. The movement was especially strong in the north, the old industrial region where the unions and the left parties had traditionally been strong, and where the Nazi-Fascist occupation was now entrenched. The Resistance was, to a large degree, a ‘wind from the north’ that left much of the south of the country untouched. Books, articles, and films routinely locate the Resistance in upland areas, and the otherwise precise and detailed Resistance literature often notes the ‘retreat to the hills’. The mountaindwelling Partisans have become noble, almost Romantic figures – hiding in pristine upland forests before attacking the foreign invaders occupying the cities and the plains. In these generalised accounts, Partisans are represented as being militarily, politically, and geographically separate from the occupied, perhaps compromised, lowland areas, and from the lowland Italians enlisted in the Salò Republic’s forces. These idealised Partisans offer a vision of a purer Resistance – untainted by the necessities of compromise, consensus, co-existence, and even collaboration that were everyday realities for Italians living under the Nazi-Fascist boot in urban and lowland areas.
HEROES IN THE MOUNTAINS The image of the mountain Partisan is not without controversy. Individuals who resisted in the cities, the plains, or without taking up arms often point out that their stories are told less frequently than those of the mountain brigades. Oral historian Luisa Passerini has questioned the simplistic narrative of the noble mountain guerrilla. The Resistance was, she argues, diverse, fractured, and often deeply rooted in the heavily populated – and heavily occupied – cities and plains. Indeed, former Partisans sometimes invoked the mountains as spaces of purer, untarnished Resistance – especially by contrast with the fraught, complex political negotiations after the war between 1945 and 1947 to construct a new Italian republic. Sometimes the mountain-hero imagery was mobilised when former Partisans felt their position in the post-war world was being marginalised. In the ‘rebellion’ of Santa Libera, Piedmont, in August 1946, for example, former Partisans returned to the hills, refusing to come down for a week until a delegation of politicians climbed uphill to listen to their grievances.
ABOVE Partisan hanged in the town of Bassano del Grappa, Vicenza. The number of armed Partisans killed has been estimated at up to 70,000.
This ‘secession’ by former Partisans was intended to reclaim the moral high ground and regain some political visibility – best achieved by evoking the endurance and sacrifice implied by guerrilla warfare in the mountains. Little wonder that neo-Fascists claimed that former Partisans raised themselves onto a pedestal of ‘mud and blood’.
PARTISAN EXPERIENCES Danger was ever-present in Resistance activity. Taking part in, or supporting in any way, the the activities of the rebels might be punished by summary execution. Rosetta Banchieri recalls: We soon learn how to dodge German and Blackshirt [Fascist] reconnaissance patrols, and thus learn to fight against fear, tiredness, the cold, the fog. For a long time I have lingered on the memory of the relief when we reached the peak [where the Partisan brigade’s HQ was located]; we often lost our way, missed the right path, and lost our sense of direction because of the fog… like in a nightmare, we could often hear voices but not figure out where they came from. I still remember the joyous welcome, the bread and butter and jam awaiting us when we reached our destination, and then the well-deserved rest under warm sheepskin rugs, and early in the morning down we went back into the plains. Rosetta, a young girl at the time, displayed great bravery in enlisting as a messenger MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
Photo: ISTREVI
MYRIAD POLITICAL VIEWS AND IDEALS
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ITALIAN RESISTANCE LEFT Italian Partisans in the Belluno province with SOE men Captain Paul Brietsche (front) and Richard Tolson (top right, with the hat). BELOW Italian Partisans armed with rifles force a man to crawl out from behind a steel gate, as they conduct a search for Fascists throughout Rome after the city had fallen to Allied troops on 17 June 1944.
Photo: Private archive of Richard Tolson
and Commonwealth prisoners-of-war who escaped the former Italian enemy’s camps and joined Partisan bands, recall with great gratitude the bravery and compassion of humble Italian families who took them in, protected them, and fed them whenever they needed it. Members of the British Intelligence services also remember civilians fondly, and acknowledge the great risks they ran in order to help out. Richard Tolson, an Englishman attached to an SOE mission in the mountains of north-east Italy, who lived and fought with the Partisans, recalls:
and courier for the local Partisan brigade. Like many girls, she would look inconspicuous during her missions, as the patrols would seldom suspect a cheery, rosy-cheeked young lass of concealing secret messages in the hem of her dress and ammunition, even explosives, in her bike’s basket, underneath eggs and jars of marmalade.
A DIFFICULT EXISTENCE Most Resistance veterans, including several I have interviewed personally, speak with great pathos of the places where they were active and the experiences shaping their lives as combatants, helpers, or intelligence personnel during those momentous years. Veterans speak with emotional intensity of the events they remember most fondly. They recall not only favourite places but also locales in nature so inhospitable that they were forced to reshape and reinvent them to make them suitable for temporary human occupation. In return, they gained secrecy, quiet, and safety: and it was this that made them so ‘special’. As in most guerrilla warfare, an experience of forced nomadism, impermanence, precariousness, and instability emerges from all Resistance accounts. Communist Partisan Giorgio Vicchi wrote about the great strains of
our guide, who, owing to bad visibility, led us on a course that lasted three hours when it should have taken one, and along difficult, perilous tracks… provoked strong resentment and anger in the Garibaldi brigades, leading to an outburst of harsh criticism against the Comandante. It was not just the fighters and their direct helpers who found the Resistance experience exhausting and perilous. The Italian population, in the north especially, was, as a rule, sympathetic to the cause of the anti-Fascists (but not always) and helped in whatever ways they could.
HUMBLE HELPERS However, those harbouring ‘rebels’ and Allied officers faced dire consequences if they were detected. Many Allied officers, and British
Sudden interruption – Enemy Cossack Troops are reported to be in San Francesco which is kms away, and held by Garibaldini. We have packed up radio and all kit and are ready, if necessary, to flit. The old woman in whose house I have a room is nearly in tears and thinks it will be burned to the ground. But we will leave no trace of our lodgement. I don’t particularly like the idea of running tonight, it’s started to rain again, and the radio makes it no joke. Oh for arms and ammo. It may not be as bad as we think. Life was hard everywhere behind enemy lines, but especially so for those who did not feel as if fighting and the soldier’s life were for them. A former Partisan I interviewed, Aldo De Bin, remembered how: At night we marched for kilometres on end. During the day we could rest a little. Mostly in foresters’ huts or shepherds’ shelters, if the owners
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Photo: AP Photo
a long and strenuous march… after 13 hours en route, a blizzard catches us out… we carry on regardless in an exhausting march lasting all night… The shattering march had some really difficult moments. The woods, and the snow, in places one and a half metres tall, have hindered recognition of the right path… Already prostrated by the long march in appalling weather, the men of the Garibaldi brigade are at the end of their tether. The error on the part of November 2015
LEFT Italian women Partisans on the Castelluccie front keep their weapons ready as they wait their turn to go on patrol with members of the US 5th Army in November 1944. BELOW Partisans, wearing the star badge of the Communist Garibaldi brigades, celebrate the liberation of Florence in August 1944.
were on our side and willing to run the risk and shelter us… Even so, we were still anxious, on edge… There was so much loneliness, especially at night. You thought of your previous life, how lovely and peaceful and calm and happy it was, you know, being at home.
www.military-history.org
A RESISTANCE TO REMEMBER The duress is hard to imagine. Yet so many chose to fight, or to risk their lives to support those who were fighting. Their memories and their experience are important in assessing Italy’s contribution to
the European victory. The efforts of the Resistance unified Italians and, to an extent, glossed over political and social differences in the face of a common menace. Not only that: they paved the way for the re-establishment of Italian democracy and the creation of the modern Italian republic. But there was a dark side. Italy experienced not only armed occupation by the Nazis, but also a fratricidal civil war, in which Fascists fought Communists, Socialists, Liberals, and Catholics, and, very occasionally, the latter fought each other. These conflicts still inform – and sometimes misinform – political debate in Italy today. Recovering the truth about Italy’s struggle between 1943 and 1945 is one component in building understanding of modern Europe. Knowing the social breadth and depth of the Resistenza Italiana – the number of the participants and the intensity and significance of their experience – is an essential part of any comprehensive study of the Second World War.
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NOVEMBER Each month, the Debrief brings you the very best in film and book reviews, along with suggested historical events and must-see museums. Whether you plan to be at home or out in the field, our team of expert reviewers deliver the best recommendations to keep military-history enthusiasts entertained.
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MHM REVIEWS Attrition: Fighting the First World War by William Philpott, Agincourt by Anne Curry, and The Eyes of the Desert Rats by David Syrett. RECOMMENDED Taylor Downing The Show considers the film Must Go On! of the Nuremberg by John rally of 1934, Triumph Mullen of the Will.
WAR ON FILM BOOKS
MHM VISITS MUSEUM
HIGHLIGHT
The Year of Anniversaries symposium in Lincoln
Westerplatte: Museum of the Second World War, Poland, with Stephen Miles, where the first shots of World War II were fired.
MHM OFF DUTY Test your problem-solving skills and win great prizes! This month there are three copies of a new book to be won.
LISTINGS
CHRISTMAS GIFT GUIDE
WIN
copies of The Cooler King CAPTION COMPETITION
BRIEFING ROOM
O TAYLOR DOWNING REVIEWS A CLASSIC WAR MOVIE Then a copy turned up in the East German film archive in the 1980s, and it is now possible to see that it was in fact a powerful piece of propaganda and a fascinating prelude to her later work. The film was a huge success. It has been estimated that 20 million Germans saw it. Hitler was delighted with her work. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, was put out that Hitler had asked Riefenstahl rather than one of his male cronies in the Propaganda Ministry to make the film. This marked the beginning of a falling out between the two of them that lasted for much of the rest of the Nazi era. By the time of the next party rally in 1934, two major events had transformed the situation. In the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in June 1934, Hitler had Ernst Röhm and the top leadership of the SA Brownshirts murdered. Röhm had been one of Hitler’s closest supporters since the earliest days of the Nazi Party. The Brownshirts had helped the party to victory in the 1932 elections. But Hitler feared him as a rival, and wanted him out of the way. The problem was that Röhm had been a leading figure of the party, appearing alongside Hitler throughout the 1933 rally. Hence, Victory of the Faith was now an embarrassment. It was therefore withdrawn, and copies were destroyed.
FILM | CLASSIC
TRIUMPH OF THE WILL Simply Media £7.99
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eni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) is not just a record of the Nazi Party’s annual rally in Nuremberg in September 1934, but a film that oozes with the ethos of Nazism. The Fascist spirit in which the individual is lost in the mass, united in strict obedience to the leader and the worship of the Führer, is present in almost every frame of the film. It is the ultimate instrument of Nazi propaganda. So not only is it one
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of the most controversial films ever made, but also one of the most evil. One year before, Adolf Hitler, the new, young Chancellor of Germany, personally asked Leni Riefenstahl to make a film of the 1933 party rally in Nuremberg called Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of the Faith). Riefenstahl later claimed that this was a mere newsreel, with no merit, that she had thrown together over a few days. She could say this, because the film had been lost.
A NEW FILM The 1934 rally had to demonstrate the loyalty of the entire Nazi Party structure to Hitler as sole leader. So Hitler requested (or ordered) Riefenstahl to start making preparations for a new rally film that would be twice the length of the previous one and would be made on an epic scale. Then, at the beginning of August, one month before the rally, FieldMarshal Hindenburg, the elderly President of the German Republic,
died. As the nation went into mourning for the great war-hero and elder statesman, Hitler redefined his role as that of Leader, Chancellor, President, and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces all in one. From now on he was to be known as Führer – ‘Leader’ – and the September rally had to express and extol his new position at the head of party and nation. Riefenstahl was given everything she wanted to prepare for making the new film, so important had it become. She eventually assembled a team of 170, including 16 cameramen, nine aerial photographers, a sound crew of 13, a team of production managers, drivers, construction staff, security, and so on. She even had a photographer employed solely to take production stills of her at work. Bridges and towers were built to locate cameras, and tracks were laid so cameras could move in time with marching troops. Such a team would have been excessive even for a grand feature film, but was quite unheard of in the production of a documentary. Goebbels occasionally made life difficult for her, but could not stand in the way of Hitler’s direct wishes, and the Ministry ended up giving her considerable financial support. Filming took place over the six days of the rally in Nuremberg and in the vast arena constructed by Albert Speer just outside the city, known as the Luitpoldarena. Afterwards, Riefenstahl staged a few scenes to add details to the film. In total, her cameramen shot 80 hours of material. She then began to edit the footage into a two-hour cinema film. This she supervised herself, in a suite of modern cutting rooms in Berlin. It took six months. In December, Hitler viewed a rough-cut of the film, and expressed himself delighted. Herbert Windt wrote a score for the film, freely calling on themes from Wagner November 2015
MHM REVIEWS THE YOUNG RIEFENSTAHL Leni Riefenstahl was 32 when she directed Triumph of the Will. She had grown up in an upper-middle-class family in Berlin, and her ambitious mother had encouraged her to take up a career as a dancer. In 1924, she changed direction, persuading Dr Arnold Fanck, a film director, to cast her as the lead in his new movie. Fanck was the most prominent director of the then very popular genre of mountain adventure films, and Riefenstahl, still in her 20s, starred in six of these, including The Holy Mountain (1925), The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), and The White Frenzy (1931). Riefenstahl became obsessed by the mountains, and entranced by film-making. Ever ambitious, she directed her own first mountain film, The Blue Light, in 1932. Hitler saw this film, and was hugely impressed by it. In that same year she attended her first Hitler rally, and was overwhelmed by the impact it had on her. She asked to meet Hitler, and they soon became friends. A year later he asked her to make the film of the 1933 party rally in Nuremberg that became Victory of the Faith (1933) – the film that was later withdrawn. After this, Riefenstahl became Hitler’s favourite film-maker. She was promoted above all the male directors who had been working in the industry for years and had become key players in Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda. Hitler knew what he was doing in picking her out, and in Triumph of the Will (1934) and later in her official film of the Berlin Olympic Games, Olympia (1938), she served Hitler well. It is a measure of her prodigious talent that she ended up as one of the very few women to play an important role in the otherwise exclusively male world of the Nazi leadership. nd Beethoven, along with several azi marching songs. On 28 March 1935 the film had its remiere, with great fanfare, at the fa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin. After he screening was over, amid the esounding cheers of the audience, Hitler presented Riefenstahl with a vish bouquet of lilacs. He had the lm he wanted; Riefenstahl had the ame and recognition she sought. Millions flocked to see the film n every city and town in Germany. was shown in schools, church alls, and barrack rooms across the ountry. At the Venice Film Festival, won several gold medals and, more surprisingly, the Grand Prix t the Paris Film Festival. Riefenstahl always denied that she as political in any of her film-making, sisting that she was never even a member of the Nazi Party. She said
she was only pursuing art. In fact, she had produced one of the most intensely political films ever made.
A NAZI PAGEANT Triumph of the Will begins with a prologue shot in the clouds above Nuremberg. A Junkers Ju-52 descends over the city. Hitler had used this aircraft extensively during his election campaign in 1932 to fly him from one rally to another. When his plane lands in Nuremberg, he steps out like a god descending from the heavens. Vast crowds line the route to his hotel. The image of the outstretched right arms of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of cheering people giving the Hitler salute dominates the film. The film is then broken up into a set of chapters, each of which marks a different phase of the rally itself. MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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LEFT Riefenstahl, with Hitler.
WAS LENI RIEFENSTAHL HITLER’S MISTRESS?
At dawn, tens of thousands of party faithful emerge from hundreds of tents. The militarisation of the newly awoken Germany is another of the themes of the film. Young men, like soldiers, wash, dress, and eat food served from giant army cauldrons. Following this is a sequence representing the medieval history of Germany, as men and women in traditional costume gather to pay obeisance to Hitler. Then, in one of the first of the huge rallies, there is a montage of short statements from many of the Nazi leaders. Most of them praise the Führer. ‘Under your leadership, Germany will achieve its goals,’ we are told. The next chapter foregrounds the workers of the new Germany. Again, with military precision and armed with hammers and spades rather than rifles, the Labour Corps march past Hitler. Workers from all corners of Germany call out. Hitler speaks for the first time in the film, declaring that the workers ‘are the future of Germany’. This is followed by a night rally lit by torches and magnesium flares. The purged SA, now led
by ultra-loyalist Viktor Lutze, swear their allegiance to Hitler. There is no doubt any longer who is the sole leader of the party. In the rally arena, tens of thousands of uniformed Hitler Youth assemble, with drums beating and trumpets playing. Baldur von Schirach, the Reich Youth Leader, pledges their loyalty. Hitler addresses them as the ‘hope for the new Germany’. In a typical outburst of rhetoric, he proclaims, ‘Before us Germany lies; in us Germany burns; and behind us Germany follows.’ He departs through the cheering masses. Next up, it is the turn of the Army. By this point, every soldier had sworn a personal oath of loyalty to their new Führer, and the rally gave the military a chance to display their fidelity. Cavalry, armoured cars, and horsedrawn artillery pass Hitler and the party leadership. They were as much the face of the new Germany as were the party youth.
BLOOD AND SOIL MYSTICISM It was estimated that about 700,000 people attended the 1934 rally. Nuremberg had become the site
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One of the key questions often asked about Leni Riefenstahl is was she Hitler’s lover? Rumours of an affair were common at the time, and were given as the reason for her dramatic promotion by Hitler over so many skilled male directors in Germany. Riefenstahl had acquired a considerable reputation as the leading player in many of the popular mountain films of the late 1920s, as well as further plaudits as the director of her own feature film The Blue Light. It did no harm to the new chancellor for him to be associated with a glamorous young film-star, and it certainly seems as though some of Hitler’s entourage actively encouraged the relationship, hoping that taking a lover would in some way humanise him. Riefenstahl was invited to many party events, and it seems that after one of these in 1932 she did try to seduce Hitler when he visited her sumptuous flat in Berlin. An affair with Hitler would clearly have done her career no harm. If, however, she had tried to start a relationship, it seems very unlikely that she succeeded. Hitler thrived in the all-male atmosphere of the barrack room, the beer cellar, and the Nazi Party. He never felt totally at ease among women, and at the time was still in mourning after the mysterious suicide of his niece Geli Raubal. He liked to surround himself with pretty women like Eva Braun, whom he finally married hours before his death in the bunker in Berlin in April 1945. But there is no evidence that he ever had a sexual relationship with Leni Riefenstahl, although he did admire her greatly for her film-making skills, and at one point called her the ‘perfect German woman’ – a label she found embarrassing to live up to at the time, and impossible to live down afterwards.
of the annual Nazi rally not only because its architecture and history epitomised ‘the German spirit’, but because it was geographically central and relatively easy to get to from all parts of the country. Also, under the local Gauleiter, Julius Streicher, all the resources of the city were turned over to the rally. In one of the central sequences in the film, about 200,000 of the party faithful are gathered in massed ranks in the arena grounds, adorned with gigantic swastika flags. Hitler, flanked by Himmler of the SS and Lutze of the SA, parade through the centre of them. Riefenstahl puts every visual trick into this extraordinary sequence. Cameras are up high, looking down on the vast spectacle; others are down low, capturing Hitler in close-up. One camera is placed on a tiny lift that goes up one of the flag poles.
As in an ancient ritual, Hitler blesses each of the banners of the local Nazi parties, using the bullet-torn flag from the failed 1923 putsch. As the SS march past, Hitler is told, ‘My Führer, we await your orders in the future.’ This is one of the most memorable and haunting sequences in the film. Riefenstahl did not create the event. It was set up by the party managers. But the imaginative positioning of her cameras and the rhythm of her editing, often accompanied by powerful marching songs recorded by Herbert Windt, get inside the very essence of Nazism. It is visually stunning, enormously impressive, and terrifying at the same time. Something that is essentially a pile of semi-mystic nonsense takes on a heroic, awesome quality. The next sequence is set in the city of Nuremberg. People line the streets in their thousands. At every window, men and women are looking November 2015
MHM REVIEWS
RIGHT Riefenstahl, shown filming a difficult scene with the help of two assistants, 1936.
out. Everywhere people strain to get a glimpse of this new god driving through their city in a motorcade. Cameraman Walter Frentz travels in Hitler’s Mercedes, capturing giant close-ups of his right arm and hand outstretched. Women holding babies rush out of the crowds to offer bouquets. In deadly seriousness, Hitler accepts a tribute from a wooden gallery set up in the main square. The Army, the police, the workers, the SA, and the SS all march past in perfect order. It is as though the whole of Germany has assembled to proclaim their obedience to the new leader.
THE LEADER SPEAKS The final ten minutes of the film record Hitler’s speech at the conclusion of the rally. It is a fascinating record of Hitler’s speech-making style. He starts off very slowly and low key, but slowly builds into a frenzy, exciting the audience into feverish support, hanging on his every word. He talks of the struggle of the Nazi Party and of National Socialism to get established. He tells the huge crowd that the party will remain ‘unchanging in its doctrine, as hard as steel in its organisation, supple and adaptable in its tactics’. Amid wild cheers, he struts and postures, announcing that the state and the Reich will last for a thousand years: ‘We can be happy in the knowledge that the future will belong to us totally.’ To rapturous applause, Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s deputy, leaps onto the platform and announces, ‘The party is Hitler. Hitler is Germany. And Germany is Hitler.’ After this climax, the film ends with close-ups of swastikas overlaid with the party faithful marching, cut to Herbert Windt’s bombastic version of the Horst Wessel song.
NAZISM ON FILM Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is made with immense craft and skill. The camera-angles used, the pacing of the music and editing are masterly. It has an almost poetic and heroic quality that is quite unlike any documentary about Nazism that had ever been made before. www.military-history.org
There was never another major Nazi Party rally film. There was no need for one. Triumph of the Will is Nazism on film. But it gives credibility to an evil regime. It celebrates Hitler as the leader of a newly revived nation. It expresses and evokes the militarisation of the German people sought by the new regime. It applauds the unity of the nation behind the cult of the Führer. The party is unified. The nation is one. The leader rules. No one knew in 1934 that this would end in the horrors of Auschwitz and Belsen, in the death of millions on the battlefield, and in the destruction of so much of Europe. But in helping to promote Hitler and the Nazi leadership, in making them acceptable to millions of Germans, Riefenstahl’s propaganda played a crucial role in making the death camps and the mass killings from 1939 to 1945 possible. Riefenstahl presented the Nazi regime exactly as it wanted to be seen. There was never another major Nazi Party rally film. There was no need for one. Triumph of the Will is Nazism on film. In 1945, Leni Riefenstahl was arrested by French and American Intelligence on charges relating to her pro-Nazi activities. But no
prosecution was ever brought, and she was released in 1948. After this, she spent most of the rest of her life trying to distance herself from the Nazi Party and from her close friendship with Hitler. She invented a story of her filmmaking career under the Nazis that differs markedly from the surviving official records. She always denied that she was in any way political, insisting she was merely an artist, one with no awareness of the politics of the subjects she worked on. It is impossible to accept this: Triumph of the Will is such a supreme expression of the Nazi spirit. Through the 1950s and 1960s, she tried to restart her career, but without much success, though in the 1970s she acquired some notoriety for her photos of the African Nuban tribespeople, which, once again, like her Olympia film,
caught her passion for the body beautiful. In her later years, she frequently issued writs against anyone she thought was trying to tarnish her reputation, while continuing to collect sums of money from anyone who used extracts of her films. It has only been possible after her death in 2003 to produce accurate assessments of her achievements. Leni Riefenstahl was an immensely creative film-maker who used cameras and editing in a unique way. But she came to her peak under one of the most criminal regimes in history, and her achievement can never be separated from the politics of the time in which she lived. Triumph of the Will is a great film technically; it is also a supremely powerful piece of political propaganda. Taylor Downing’s book on Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia is available in paperback as a BFI Film Classic.
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TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (1935) Created by: Leni Riefenstahl. Music: Herbert Windt. The film is available in several DVD versions.
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ultimately console. The employers, owners of the theatre chains, were typically attached to King and Empire, and turned many of the music halls into rallying and recruiting centres at the start of the war.
ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS By the turn of the century, Music Hall had all but replaced the more progressive folk song for the working class; yet singing together was still something people did. The church was as important socially as it was as a matter of faith, and formed a vital part of that singing culture. Many soldiers were attached to certain hymns from childhood, and at the start of the war were comforted by chaplain-led services encouraging them to ‘kill the Hun’. The chaplain of the House of Commons, we learn, declared that ‘to kill Germans is a divine service in the fullest acceptance of the word’. Interesting, then, that soldiers’ songs are less often about ‘killing the Hun’ than giving expression to outrage against their superior officers – for example, to the tune of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’:
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John Mullen Ashgate, £18.99 (pbk) ISBN 978-1472441591 ohn Mullen’s history of song in WWI is a bracing read. A throb of anger at what was an international atrocity pulses through this impeccably researched book. During a WWI centenary that has often fixated on victory and nationalism, this is a valuable account for those wanting to understand something of the true suffering and resistance put up by our ancestors, coerced into fighting a war not in their interests. This will also be a valuable resource for filmmakers and playwrights needing period detail and vivid imagery. The aesthetic and musical roots of the popular music of WWI lie in Victorian and early 20th-century Music Hall, and here Mullen presents a thorough overview of that industry, with the developing genres of revue and pantomime. For, just like the factories or railways, an industry it was: the Music Hall had a vast infrastructure of technicians, front-of-house staff, stage managers, and artistes, who engaged in labour relations – strikes by stagehands and performers for better wages and conditions – as they worked to amuse, cheer, entertain, and
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Forward Joe Soap’s army, marching without fear With our old commander, safely in the rear He boasts and skites from morn till night, And thinks he’s very brave, But the men who really did the job Are dead and in their grave There was later (if, indeed, they made it to ‘later’) great resentment against martial hymns, as soldiers were urged to sing them by those who did not fight. Mullen also takes us through the other major events of the time. Spliced into the war are, of course,
the Irish uprising and the suffragette movement. Again, we see the often reactionary nature of Music Hall, with songs either sentimentalising or mocking Irishmen and suffragettes; most of the latter were sung by women. Even though many of its women performers wore male clothing and its men were feminised, Music Hall was essentially about maintaining the status quo, as were many of its stars (Marie Lloyd was a notable exception). Short accounts of the lives of Harry Lauder, Vesta Tilley, Marie Lloyd, and Harry Champion, called ‘Stars in Focus’, act as steppingstones throughout the book. During November 2015
MHM REVIEWS
The troops started to make their own entertainment. ‘The Front’, and ‘The Reserves’ were literally masses of static men waiting for action. LEFT & BELOW LEFT Both Marie Lloyd and Harry Lauder, stars of the Music Hall, entertained the troops at the Front during the early days of the war.
the early days of the war, these stars entertained troops at the Front, but as the losses and suffering hit home, Music Hall shed its jingoism, becoming part of a culture of compensation. The troops started to make their own entertainment: ‘The Front’ and ‘The Reserves’ were literally masses of static men waiting for action – and here a counterculture was emerging with a different (and uncensored) emotional focus.
SOLDIERS’ SONGS The long months of immobility, and a mass army raised on collective singing in the music halls, churches, and schools, produced a rich repertoire that had become somewhat polemical. The earlier flag-waving patriotism of Music Hall had been eroded through suffering, expressed famously through ‘Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire’. The last two chapters, ‘Songs About the War’ and ‘I Want To Go Home’, form the heart of the book. Soldiers’ songs, detached from contemporary Music Hall, were as different as slave songs were from blackface minstrelsy. In this sense, then, the songs were ‘free’. There is fascinating information here, giving context to those songs. A section in the final chapter, ‘Live and Let Live’, gives an account of how ordinary soldiers colluded with the enemy to inflict as few casualties as possible through timed raids. Officers who allowed this would be replaced and punished, yet not as harshly as ordinary Tommys, who could be crucified by being tied to gun wheels www.military-history.org
for indefinite periods. Appalled Australian and Canadian troops would often free them. In a similar vein, although parachutes had been invented by WWI, airmen were not allowed them in case they did not fight hard enough. This culture of cruelty forms an important background to the development of soldiers’ songs.
OH! IT’S A LOVELY WAR By 1918, the song ‘Oh! It’s a Lovely War’ had hit the music halls. With its black humour, and anger rather than pathos, this was no part of compensatory culture. Its revival by Joan Littlewood and Attenborough’s film in the 1960s, together with the founding of the Welfare State, were a background to the majority view in Britain that WWI should not have happened. In Mullen’s rich book we have a critique of that war from the grave – ordinary soldiers pointing the finger as surely as the poets did. Their songs call to us with defiant vitality, as in the following verse, which would have been sung to the tune of ‘What a Friend I Have in Jesus’:
When this lousy war is over, No more soldiering for me. When I get my civvy clothes on, Oh, how happy I shall be! No more church parades on Sunday, No more begging for a pass. You can tell the Sergeant-Major To stick his passes up his arse.
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OO S THE BEST NEW MILITARY HISTORY TITLES THIS MONTH
ATTRITION: FIGHTING THE FIRST WORLD WAR William Philpott Abacus, £10.99 (pbk) ISBN 978-0349000077
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he past 18 months has seen an inevitable rush of new books about the First World War, with the result that quality has often been subsumed by quantity. So for any book to rise above the rest, it needs to offer something different – something that author William Philpott sets out to achieve with Attrition: Fighting the First World War.
This publication provides a detailed overview of the whole war, on every front, although for the author these are not the ‘traditional’ Western, Eastern, Middle Eastern, and African Fronts. Instead, he considers five other ‘fronts’: the Land Front, Maritime Front, Home Front, Diplomatic Front, and, finally, the United Front – that
AGINCOURT Anne Curry Oxford University Press, £18.99 (hbk) ISBN 978-0199681013
‘A
gincourt’: 600 years on, the name still resonates with the British public. Indeed, it is one of the few victorious battles in English history whose name is widely known. In her entertaining and readable book, Anne Curry attempts to find out why this should be so, exploring the differing accounts and myths surrounding the battle.
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This is a careful examination of how Agincourt fits into what we now know as the 100 Years War: why Henry V invaded France (he wanted the glory), why the army included so many archers (they were cheap), as well as the story of the battle itself. Part of Agincourt’s appeal lies in its tale of the plucky English heavily outnumbered by the enemy. The battle-plan was decisive in this victory: with Henry’s troops forming a horseshoe shape, the French were funnelled into their centre, and then attacked from three sides. Forced to halt, and hindered by the soft ground, French bodies piled up, many suffocated face down in the unforgiving mud under the weight of their countrymen. As well as the battle itself, Curry looks at how the story has been subtly altered by chroniclers over the centuries. She considers how Shakespeare, in his play Henry V, made a major contribution to the myth. Curry also examines the film of Shakespeare’s play, starring Laurence Olivier, which was released just six months after D-Day. These are examples of how Agincourt has been used over the centuries – exhumed and recast at times of national peril, invoking national identity, and bolstering the image of the superiority of the British. Curry also debunks some of the myths and legends surrounding Agincourt. She tells us that the Welsh did not predominate among Henry’s archers: although figures of 5,000 are often quoted, records show that only 500 archers were raised from Wales. Nor was the ‘V-sign’ invented at Agincourt – there is no evidence that it began in the 15th century, nor that the French cut off the fingers of captured archers – apparently this is just another urban myth! FRANCESCA TROWSE November 2015
MHM REVIEWS
Kitchener had a better grasp of the global nature of the war than anyone else. is, the various alliances between the Great Powers, which he argues prevented war for several decades before 1914. Central to his thesis is the idea that between 1914 and 1918, warfare changed completely in its nature. But the resulting war of attrition was not something new: as the author highlights, attritional warfare existed, for example, in the Classical world, when Sparta ground down Athens in the Peloponnesian Wars or Fabius Maximus wore down Hannibal, to cite but two instances. In the context of the Great War, attrition was not limited to the battlefield but also applied to the Home Front and at sea. This isn’t a military history in its purest sense: it does not go into great detail about the campaigns, the battles, or the formations involved, and, as the author himself points out, there are no maps contained within its
pages. Instead, this is a history of the First World War in its broadest context, one which considers the politics, diplomacy, and economics alongside the fighting. Militarism is also discussed, although in Britain, the author concludes, this took a distinct form: navalism. The author writes that Joffre’s victory on the Marne was not miraculous – ‘it represented the calm, pragmatic utilisation of France’s railways by a man who understood the principles of strategic manoeuvre.’ His analysis of other Allied leaders is equally solid: Kitchener had a better grasp of the global nature of the war than anyone else; Churchill lacked the ability to listen to professional military advice; while even LloydGeorge had to acknowledge Foch as a ‘genius’. Haig, Philpott acknowledges, has been ill-served by history,
THE EYES OF THE DESERT RATS: BRITISH LONG-RANGE RECONNAISSANCE OPERATIONS IN THE NORTH AFRICAN DESERT 1940-42 David Syrett Helion & Company, £35.00 (hbk) ISBN 978-1907677656
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he Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) was a remarkable unit. With the ability to travel thousands of miles and operate for long periods behind enemy lines, it was a force without equal in the North African theatre. The LRDG can trace its roots to the long-range patrols that operated along the Egyptian–Libyan border during the First Word War, although, ultimately, it was the brainchild of Ralph Bagnold who, between the wars, explored
www.military-history.org
which has obscured the steady evolution of warfare and the growing effectiveness of Haig’s command. Lloyd-George’s proposal to defeat Germany by ‘knocking away the props’, completely overlooked the fact that instead of Germany’s allies supporting it, she supported them, and as each surrendered in 1918, Germany was able to concentrate its forces on the Western Front. In addition, he points out that LloydGeorge’s ‘New Eastern Strategy’ had little impact on the fighting in Europe, but rather fomented post-war Imperial problems in the Middle East. It is impossible to fully appreciate the Somme Offensive without an understanding of the Battle of Verdun. In a first-rate chapter, the author looks at both campaigns, as well as events on the Eastern and Italian Fronts, and in so doing provides a
very balanced assessment of Allied strategy in 1916. Arguably, however, the highlight of the entire book is the chapter that discusses the defeat of Germany in the summer and autumn of 1918, a victory spearheaded by the allied armies under Foch, but made possible by the war of attrition waged on land, sea, and at home. Using a vast amount of information from a wide variety of sources, the author has written a clear and readable narrative, explaining in some detail how and why the war was fought as it was. His reassessment challenges many of the myths, revealing the organisation, the determination, and the ambition of the combatant nations. This is a first-class overview of the whole war, and is a useful addition to anyone’s library. DAVID FLINTHAM
great tracts of the Libyan Desert in the company of a few like-minded fellow army officers. The story of Bagnold – adventurer, explorer, scientist, and warrior – would itself make fascinating and inspiring reading. David Syrett’s study outlines these origins, then details the story of the LRDG from its formation in 1940 until the end of the fighting in North Africa in 1942. Principally a reconnaissance unit, it did occasionally perform small-scale raiding (‘piracy on the high desert’). But as was common among British Special Forces, there was a tendency for the LRDG to be misused: Wavell understood the purpose of the LRDG, but, initially at least, Montgomery did not. Arguably, North Africa was the birthplace of British Special Forces during the Second World War, and while the heroics of the Special Air Service tend to grab the headlines, it was the LRDG that was the most effective. Yet the author still manages to devote a number of pages to the exploits of David Stirling’s men. Of course, the two units are very closely linked, but without the LRDG, the SAS probably wouldn’t have existed for more than a few months. So, given what has already been written about the SAS elsewhere, so much detail here seems unnecessary. This, however, is no more than a minor distraction from what is a decent study. This is not a unique book, but what makes it really stand out are the excellent maps: these are a joy to view, and are sure to appeal to anyone with an interest in the topography of war. DAVID FLINTHAM MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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MHM’S PICK OF THE LATEST RELEASES The Battle of Britain: an epic conflict revisited Christer Bergström Casemate Publishers, £35 (hbk) ISBN 978-1612003474 Another book on the Battle of Britain, but one with a difference: it was written by a Swedish author, who balances Allied and Axis accounts of this famous struggle. With testimony from pilots on both sides, the book also challenges several myths – such as Göring’s incompetence as a leader and strategist. For many, though, the book will be most welcome for its inclusion of rare German photographs.
The Fighting 30th Division Martin King, David Hilborn, and Michael Collins Casemate Publishers, £20.99 (hbk) ISBN 978-1612003016
This history is told through the voices of the men who made up the 30th Infantry Division. Their war began four days after D-Day, when they arrived in Normandy to make good losses from Omaha Beach. The story follows them through northern France, the Rhineland, over the Ardennes, and on to victory. The authentic accounts bring out the human face of war.
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Madness in Mogadishu Lt Col Michael Whetstone Stackpole Books, £19.77 (hbk)
Strategy: a history Lawrence Freedman Oxford University Press, £16.99 (pbk)
Scourge of Rome Douglas Jackson Bantam Press, £18.99 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0190229238
ISBN 978-0593070581
This is the paperback version of what is one of the most horough histories of strategic hinking. It is erudite and yet easily accessible to a more general audience interested n strategy. We included a longer review of the hardback edition in MHM 40.
As a light read, this fastpaced yet well-researched novel by Douglas Jackson continues the adventures of his hero Gaius Valerius Verrens. This time the action takes place against the backdrop of the Middle East and the Judaean revolt (AD 66-73).
Life in Napoleon’s Army: The Memoirs of Captain Elzéar Blaze Elzéar Blaze Frontline, £19.99 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0811715737
The Art of Swordsmanship Hans Lecküchner (trans. Jeffrey L Forgeng) Boydell Press, £60 (hbk)
Two Black Hawk helicopters, tasked with capturing advisers to Somali warlords, were shot down over Mogadishu in 1993. The survivors of the crash tried to defend themselves against several thousand approaching militants, while a convoy led by Michael Whetstone attempted to reach them. This real-life thriller tells of the desperate drive to the crash site, under fire, only to find their comrades had already been killed.
ISBN 978-1783270286
Napoleon and the Struggle for Germany, Vol I Michael V Leggiere Cambridge University Press, £24.99 (hbk)
Boydell’s latest offering from their ‘Armour and Weapons’ series. This is a key textbook from the late medieval period. A kind of ‘teach yourself’ manual from the 15th century, it shows you every move you might want to make using a single-edged, one-handed sword, with text and illustrations. A book for the serious student of medieval personal combat.
ISBN 978-1107080515
ISBN 978-1848328228
This is a comprehensive history of the campaign that followed Napoleon’s catastrophic defeat in Russia. Prussia was in alliance with the war-weary Russians, and in spring 1813, in a single campaign, Napoleon drove their army from the Saale to the Öder, where it was saved only by a last-minute armistice. The text includes many maps to clarify battle movements.
Part memoir, part travel book, and part military history, this is the story of an officer in the army of Napoleon, whom he served from 1807 to 1815. From the privations of being in the field, the hazards of the bivouac, the equipment, the food, the battles, the shortcomings of the Spanish – this is an all-encompassing contemporary account of the Napoleonic period.
November 2015
G GENEALOGY
FAMILYSEARCH INTERNATIONAL
MILITARY AND FAMILY GENEALOGY
FamilySearch International is a nonprofit family history organisation dedicated to connecting families across generations. It has spent more than 100 years actively seeking out and preserving records of historical and genealogical importance, including military records. FamilySearch offers free access to a large and growing collection of British military records, including, among others:
Military & Family Genealogy was formed by Peter Threlfall and Judith Beastall as a natural extension of their interests and hobbies. Jointly, we have over three decades of experience in local, family, and military research. We pride ourselves in offering a friendly, value-for-money service to help trace your relatives’ military records, from the late 19th century to the end of the Second World War . This culminates in a highly readable and interesting biography of your relatives’ service, presented in booklet form for your records. www.militaryandfamilygenealogy.co.uk
r Army soldiers’ documents (before 1882) r World War I service files r Officers’ records of service r Army Lists 1740 to the present r Regimental histories r Continuous service engagement books In addition to online access to military records, familysearch.org offers tools and resources to preserve and share family memories about ancestors who served in the military. Through photos, stories, and documents, users can create memorial pages to share with close and distant relatives to preserve in the FamilySearch archive. www.familysearch.org
CENTRE FOR ARCHIVE AND INFORMATION STUDIES – UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE Would you like to find out more about your family and local history? Enrol for one of our online courses and open up the past. Our short courses will take you beyond the internet and open the world of UK archives to you. You will discover how to use archives and records to find your missing ancestors, learn about the world they lived in, and acquire the skills to read and use the records that will help you. If you are interested in a specific subject, single-course study is available, giving you the chance to focus on areas such as military records and history, house history, and heraldry. If you are experienced or contemplating a career as a professional researcher, why not consider a Postgraduate Certificate or Masters Degree in Family and Local History? Our online courses are written and taught by expert archivists, genealogists, and local historians. Our Virtual Learning Environment creates an interactive, supported experience, and the exchange of ideas between student and tutor is central to our approach to online learning. www.dundee.ac.uk/cais
ANCESTOR NETWORK LTD. Ancestor Network is a collective of Ireland’s most experienced genealogical experts in tracing people of Irish ancestry. Over the years, we have provided flexible, cost effective solutions to individuals, groups, and legal professionals seeking Irish family history research services. We also publish ‘how to’ guides on Irish genealogy under our publishing arm, Flyleaf Press. www.ancestornetwork.ie and www.flyleaf.ie
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REVIEWING THE BEST MILITARY HISTORY EXHIBITIONS WITH STEPHEN MILES 01
FREE ENTRY VISIT
WESTERPLATTE: MUSEUM OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR PL 80-831 Gdan´sk, 81-83 Długa Street +48 58 323 75 20 www.muzeum1939.pl Open to visitors all year; there is a charge for the museum, New Port Lighthouse and Post Office Museum Gdan´sk
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udging its way into the Baltic Sea opposite the modern harbour of Gdan´sk in Poland, the Westerplatte peninsula is a slender wooded sand spit only a few kilometres in length, and the site of one of the most momentous military events in 20th-century European history. On 31 August 1939, a faked attack on a German customs post and radio station near the Polish border at Gleiwitz gave the Nazis the excuse for war they sought: the next day German forces fired on the small Polish armaments depot at Westerplatte, the first shots of war, precipitating the conflagration many had expected. This was followed by a wholescale invasion of Poland by German and Soviet forces, and in five weeks the country had been defeated. 68
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Westerplatte is now an openair museum and memorial, and a fascinating place to visit just 7km from the historic centre of Gdan´sk. Buildings damaged in the attack have been left in their ruined state, and a series of information boards provide a moving account of the events and the ground over which they unfolded.
FROM SPA TO MILITARY DEPOT The peninsula was originally a health resort and spa, which by the 1880s and 1890s had over 140,000 visitors annually. It served as a city beach for the large numbers of visitors from the Kingdom of Poland as well as the German Reich. But it had also been involved in earlier wars, and entrenchments from the time of
Frederick the Great and the Napoleonic era can still be seen. After the First World War, Gdan´sk became the Free City of Danzig (its German name) under the protection of the League of Nations. The city comprised a majority German population, with Poles in the minority, and this was to create enormous difficulties with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in the early 1930s – Gdan´sk effectively became a German port. During the Polish-Soviet War (19191921), a neutral Germany forbade the movement of arms to Poland across her territory; this led to intense diplomatic gestures from Poland towards the League to allow her to use Gdan´ sk as a trans-shipment area. On 22 June 1921, the League finally recognised Poland’s right to use the port and to allocate a small military garrison to supervise arms movements; this was in the face of Free City opposition, and a dispute
over the precise location of the depot dragged on until the League ordered it should be located on the Westerplatte peninsula. In August 1924, the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs began to build the depot, which required a new wet dock on the peninsula’s western side, as well as warehouses and barracks. On 31 October 1925, Poland obtained Westerplatte on a perpetual lease, although the site was technically within the territory of the Free City. The building of any kind of fortification was forbidden, and the maximum size of the depot garrison was set at 88 personnel. In 1927 began the first of several ‘courtesy visits’ by German naval vessels to Danzig, which were received with rapturous enthusiasm by the city and its predominantly German population. These military demonstrations were to have tragic consequences for the depot in 1939. The growing menace of a rapidly militarising Germany November 2015
MHM VISITS
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PICTURED ON BOTH PAGES: 1. The former guardhouse now houses the museum of the Westerplatte memorial on the peninsula of the same name in Gdan´sk, Poland. 2. This Nazi propaganda photograph shows the raising of the German flag on the Westerplatte. The original caption reads: ‘The capture of the Westerplatte. The German war flag is raised on the Westerplatte. The bravery of the German troops forced the Polish garrison to give up despite persistant resistence.’ 3. Inside the museum. 4. Inside the museum. 5. Ruined barracks, which were hit in the air raid on 2 September 1939.
in the 1930s and the proximity of the Nazified Free City prompted the Polish government to strengthen its presence at Westerplatte: between 1933 and 1936 guardhouses were clandestinely built at the depot to form a defensive ring against attack. The remains of some of these can still be seen. In the spring of 1939, as tension in Europe grew, the depot’s defences were further augmented with the installation of a new alarm system, total nocturnal black-outs, heavier armaments, trip wires, and the thinning out of the forest to provide a clearer line of fire for machine-guns. Additionally, by September 1939 the garrison had been secretly increased to 176 men and six officers.
THE BATTLE OF WESTERPLATTE On 25 August 1939, the German training battleship Schleswig-Holstein entered Gdan´sk harbour on the www.military-history.org
pretext of a courtesy visit, but with much more sinister intensions. She had 596 men on board, as well as 175 cadets and 60 anti-aircraft gunners, but, more significantly, hidden below were a company of 225 Stormtroopers. The ship was armed with four 280mm cannon, ten medium-sized 150mm cannon, and four anti-aircraft guns. She remained moored near the salt granaries directly opposite Westerplatte, and as her sojourn lengthened the Polish government became increasingly concerned about her intentions. At 04:47 on Friday 1 September, guns from the battleship opened fire on the southern part of the depot in an enormous and sustained cannonade to prepare the ground for an amphibious assault by the Stormtroopers. The first shots of World War II had rung out across the narrow waterway; there had been no warning. As German assault troops
pressed forward, Staff Sergeant Wojciech Najsarek fell under a hail of machine-gun bullets, becoming perhaps the first combat victim of the entire war. The initial assault was thwarted by sustained Polish heavy and light machine-gun fire, and the Stormtroopers eventually fell back leaving numerous dead and wounded. A further attack, just before 09:00, was also repulsed. The Polish commander, Major Henryk Sucharski, realised that no help would come from the Polish Army, and that his small force would have to hold out alone. The battle was to last seven days, drawing in 3,500 German soldiers from the Free City area, as well as repeated naval and field artillery fire. In addition, late on the second day, some 60 Junkers Ju-87B dive-bombers attacked the depot. Its defences were repeatedly hammered with 500kg, 250kg, and 50kg bombs, and strafed with
machine-gun fire. A direct hit demolished Guardhouse Five, with only two defenders surviving, and the barracks building suffered two direct hits, its special construction absorbing the impact, leaving all inside unharmed. The air raid killed ten defenders and wounded six; but its main effect was psychological, and there is every indication that, had the Germans launched a ground offensive soon afterwards, the depot would have fallen. At this point, Sucharski decided to surrender the peninsula, but he was met with vociferous opposition from his second-in-command, Captain Franciszek Da˛browski; the garrison decided to fight on. German attempts to destroy the depot continued with further shelling from two torpedo boats in the Bay of Gdan´ sk on 4 September. On the night of 5/6 September, the attackers tried to set fire to the Westerplatte forest, but the smoke only served to MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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camouflage Polish positions, giving them a perfect field of fire. The depot came under sustained fire again on 7 September from the SchleswigHolstein, as well as artillery in the New Port. By this time, the defenders were in an impossible position – short of food, water, and medical supplies, and with two guardhouses knocked out and another two badly damaged. Considering the depot undefendable, Sucharski decided to surrender. The defence had impressed the Germans so much that he was initially allowed to keep his ceremonial sabre in captivity. The battle left 15 Polish dead and 26 wounded; German losses are thought to have been 50 dead and 121 wounded.
AN OPEN-AIR MUSEUM Like many Second World War sites in what was to become the Soviet sphere 70
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of influence in the post-war era, Westerplatte fell victim to a distorted view of history. The Communists saw September 1939 as a failure of the Polish government at the time, and the only tribute to the defenders of the depot was a simple cross erected in 1946. This was replaced by a Soviet tank in 1962 (it was removed in 2007). In 1966, the huge Monument to the Defenders of the Coast was unveiled, and by the 1970s Westerplatte had become a key symbol of Polish wartime resistance. Since the 1980s, it has been managed by the Historical Museum of Gdan´sk. The most interesting feature of the site is the walking trail, which takes in the main places involved in the battle, following a series of information boards in English. A tiny threeroom museum in Guardhouse 1 is open in season; it contains arma-
ments, uniforms, photographs, and radio equipment. But the most dramatic legacy of the battle is the shattered remains of the barracks destroyed in the air raid. The ordeal of those who hid in its basement as the bombs fell can only be imagined. Westerplatte is open at all times, and admission is free apart from the museum, which has a small charge. The site can be visited in tandem with the New Port Lighthouse (open in season; entry charge) across the channel (some accounts claim the opening salvo came from German troops positioned here) and the Post Office Museum in Gdan´sk (entry charge), which is also a memorial to its defenders, who held out against German attacks on 1 September 1939. A new Museum of the Second World War is due to open in Gdan´sk soon. æ
PICTURED ON THIS PAGE: 6. Information boards in English, explaining the events of September 1939, are positioned on a walking trail. 7. The Westerplatte Monument, in memory of the the Polish defenders of the site of the first battle of World War II. 8. A distinctive sign marking the Westerplatte memorial.
November 2015
ISTI S
SYMPOSIUM
£420 ENTRY
THE BEST MILITARY HISTORY EVENTS, LECTURES, AND EXHIBITIONS
THE YEAR OF ANNIVERSARIES 6-8 November 2015
Image: Royal Armouries
County Assembly Rooms, 76 Baligate, Lincoln, LN1 3AR www.martinrandall.com 020 8742 3355
EXHIBITION
THE BATTLE OF AGINCOURT 23 October 2015-31 January 2016 White Tower, Tower of London, London, EC3N 4AB
www.royalarmouries.org 020 3166 6660
£24.50 ENTRY
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o commemorate the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, a special Royal Armouries’ exhibition will be held in the White Tower at the Tower of London. Bringing together rare objects for the first time, including medieval arms and armour, art, music, sculpture, and manuscripts, the exhibition will reveal the story of the road to battle, the events of 25 October 1415, and the aftermath, while also exploring the popular myths, reality, and legacy of this extraordinary battle.
TALK
SHOULDER TO SHOULDER: AMERICANS IN BRITAIN DURING WWII who spent the war in London: Edward R 4 November 2015
Staff Restaurant, The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BD www.bl.uk 01937 546546 Author Lynne Olson will discuss the dramatic personal journeys of three American men
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This residential weekend of lectures, held in Lincoln’s County Assembly Rooms, will encompass 13 talks on this year’s anniversary topics: Magna Carta, the first Parliament, Agincourt, Waterloo, Gallipoli, Yalta, and Potsdam. There will be discussion sessions, opportunities to meet and talk to speakers, and a drinks reception in the Chapter House of Lincoln Cathedral. Paul Lay chairs the event, and speakers include Dr Juliet Barker, Professor Jeremy Black, Dr Jonathan Foyle, Keith Lowe, Dr Marc Morris, Professor Nigel Saul, and Professor Gary Sheffield.
£8 ENTRY
Murrow, Averell Harriman, and John G Winant. Determined to save Britain from Hitler, they helped convince a cautious FDR and reluctant American public to back the British at a critical time. Drawing on a variety of primary sources, Olson will explain how these men fought to save Britain in its darkest hour.
November 2015
MAKE A POPPY
ENTRY
7-8 November 2015 Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London, SE1 6HZ www.iwm.org.uk 020 7416 5000
On Remembrance weekend, visit the IWM London to ‘grow’ your own poppy from paper, wire, and recycled military buttons in this family-friendly activity. While making poppies, participants of all ages will discover more about the history and heritage of the poppy, and its association with conflict and memorials.
TOUR
LECTURE
FREE
FREE
ENTRY
ENTRY
DATES TO REMEMBER
MHM VISITS
FREE
ACTIVITY
9-14 NOVEMBER 2015
Conservation Centre Open Week Royal Air Force Museum Cosford, Shropshire, TF11 8UP www.rafmuseum.org.uk
The RAF Museum’s Conservation Centre will be open for behind-the-scenes access for one week only. Visitors will be able to view progress being made on the Handley Page Hampden, Vickers Wellington, and Dornier Do 17 aircraft.
14 NOVEMBER 2015
Night in the Trenches
Image: Tim Green
Staffordshire Regiment Museum, Linchfield, WS14 9PY www.staffordshiregreatwar.com
THE SUEZ CRISIS, 1956 BATTLE OF WAKEFIELD TOUR
10 November 2015 Museum of London, 150 London Wall, ECY 5HN www.gresham.ac.uk 020 7831 0575
28 November 2015 Sandal Castle, Manygates Lane, Wakefield, WF2 7DG
Head to Wakefield for a guided tour of Sandal Castle to explore its role in Richard of York’s catastrophic defeat in December 1460, during the English Civil War. The Castle tour will be followed by a short walk down Manygates Lane to the Duke’s monument and the last surviving fragment of the medieval battlefield, close to the site of his death.
After Egypt’s President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company in 1956, Britain – together with France and Israel – responded by attacking Egypt. The Suez War was opposed by the US and UN, compelling Britain and France to withdraw. The reputation of British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden was severely damaged, while Britain’s stature as a world power was challenged. For a full appraisal of the Suez Crisis, join Professor Bogdanor, Gresham Professor of Law, for this free-entry Gresham College lecture.
EVENT
Experience a soldier’s life as it would have been in the WWI trenches. Re-enactors will evoke the conditions experienced and the life lived by troops, taking you back to the thick of the Great War. Pre-booking is essential.
16 NOVEMBER 2015
The Indian Sepoy in WWI Culture 36-39 Pall Mall, London, SW1Y 5JN www.nam.ac.uk
Dr Santanu Das will explore the war experiences of Indian soldiers by examining trench artefacts, memoirs, photographs, paintings, and original sound recordings from prisoner-ofwar camps in Germany.
£11
MILITARY VEHICLES DAY
ENTRY
15 November 2015 Brooklands Museum, Brooklands Road, Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 0QN
www.brooklandsmuseum.com 01932 857381
Over 80 military vehicles, spanning the decades and from all across the world, are expected at Brooklands’ annual Military Vehicles Day. As well as spectacular displays in the Paddock and around the site, there will be the chance to see some of the machines being put through their paces as they tackle Test Hill and the off-road circuit at Mercedes-Benz World. In addition to the military vehicles, a host of wartime re-enactors will join the event.
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T TOURS
THERE ARE A SELECT NUMBER OF BATTLEFIELD TOURS THAT EVERY MILITARY HISTORY ENTHUSIAST SHOULD EXPERIENCE. HERE WE LIST SOME OF THE FINEST, MOST REASONABLY PRICED WORLDWIDE TOURS AVAILABLE.
GALINA INTERNATIONAL BATTLEFIELD TOURS
KIRKER HOLIDAYS
Galina began organising tours to the battlefields of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1989. In those days, 20 or 30 people at the Last Post Ceremony in Ypres was regarded a crowd. Times change, but we remain an independent and family-owned company, offering the same high quality of personal service today as we did then. Whilst primarily a group travel company, we also arrange tours for individuals wishing to attend major anniversary events, drawing on our long experience as Official Tour Operators to organisations such as the Normandy Veterans Association. Our guides are selected and trained by us and have an academic or military background, great experience, and an enthusiasm for sharing their knowledge. TEL: 01244 340 777 EMAIL:
[email protected] WEB: www.wartours.com
TWITTER: @Wartours SELECTED TOURS: Somme 100th Anniversary, 29 June - 3 July 2016
TEL: 020 7593 2283 WEB: www.kirkerholidays.com SELECTED TOURS: The Battle of Waterloo, 3 nights, departing 8 July and 30 September 2016
GUIDED BATTLEFIELD TOURS We pride ourselves on providing our guests with a quality, personal experience. Our greatest recommendation is the number of returning guests present on our tours. In addition to your expert guide, each tour is accompanied by a tour manager to ensure your comfort and the smooth running of the tour. Our battlefield tours are inspired by both a passion for history and the belief that we must not forget the sacrifice of past generations. Our specialist guides bring the sites to life with the past events that took place there, putting them in their historical context. We offer a comprehensive range of First and Second World War tours in France, Belgium and Holland. The cost of the tours includes all travel from the pickup point, bed and breakfast accommodation in a 3* or 4* hotel, refreshments each day, and entry to all museums. Our tours are protected for you through ABTOT.
TEL: 01633 258207 EMAIL:
[email protected] WEB: www.guidedbattlefieldtours.co.uk SELECTED TOURS: Treading in Tommy’s Footsteps, 29 April - 2nd May 2016 Walking the Somme Battlefields, 20 May 23 May 2016 Dunkirk, 28 May - 31 May 2016
Specialists in high quality escorted tours and tailor-made short breaks, Kirker Holidays provides a range of expert-led itineraries for those with an interest in history, archaeology, art, architecture, and music. As we mark the centenary of the First World War and the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, Kirker has created a selection of carefully crafted itineraries which explore the sites of these influential conflicts in the company of expert historians. During 2015 and 2016, military historians Neil Faulkner and Hugh MacDonald-Buchanan will lead Kirker tours to the battlefields of the Western Front and Waterloo in Flanders, and the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey. In addition, we are looking forward to embarking on a new tour which will trace the Duke of Wellington’s progress in Spain and Portugal during the Peninsular Wars – the campaign which eventually led to Napoleon’s humiliation and exile in Elba.
The Battles of 1917- 1918, 17- 20 June 2016 First Day of the Somme Centenary, 30 June - 4 July 2016 Normandy and the D-Day Landings, 4 August - 7 August 2016
The Duke of Wellington & The Peninsular War, 7 nights, departing 17 April 2016 Istanbul & Gallipoli, 8 nights, departing 28 May 2016
GOLD CREST HOLIDAYS Gold Crest Holidays have been providing specialist and enriching tours for over 20 years, including tours focussing on the Great War, complete with enthusiastic and expert guides. Our highly knowledgeable guides will help you to remember the past and witness the sacrifice made by soldiers and officers. Experience the centenary battle sites and moving war cemeteries with our included guided tours of the Flanders and the Somme battlefields, with visits including Flanders Fields Museum and the Last Post ceremony in Ypres. Our tours provide great value starting from only £199 and offer a memorable experience that can be enjoyed by military enthusiasts, those with family connections, and independent travellers looking to understand this truly memorable and historic conflict.
TEL: 01943 433457 EMAIL:
[email protected] WEB: www.gold-crest.com
SELECTED TOURS: World War One Battlefield tours departing on various dates throughout 2015/16 for 4 days
G GIFTS
WITH CHRISTMAS JUST AROUND THE CORNER, MHM LISTS A SELECTION OF GIFTS TO BUY FOR THE FESTIVE SEASON.
SCRAMBLE: THE DRAMATIC STORY OF A YOUNG FIGHTER PILOT’S EXPERIENCES DURING THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN AND THE SIEGE OF MALTA
EASY COMPANY 506TH PARACHUTE INFANTRY REGIMENT - IN PHOTOGRAPHS
by Tom Neil, with an introduction by James Holland
by The Men of Easy Company
Tom’s memoir of four tumultuous years (1938-1942). The Germans were blitzing their way across France in the spring of 1940 when Tom received his first posting. Nineteen years old and fresh from training, he was soon pitched into the maelstrom of air fighting in the Battle of Britain. By the end of the year, he had shot down 13 enemy aircraft and seen many of his friends killed or injured. From the frying pan and into the fire, he was shipped off to the beleaguered island of Malta to face another Luftwaffe onslaught. Here he shot down another enemy fighter and survived several engine failures and emergencies. Miraculously, he survived two of the biggest ever aerial campaigns. In his 95th year, Tom is one of only 25 Battle of Britain veterans still alive today. This vivid memoir is his last word on his fighter pilot experiences. PUBLISHER: Amberley Publishing PRICE: £25 WHERE TO BUY: www.amberley-books.com/scramble.html
TANKS A LOT This Christmas don’t just buy a gift, buy a memory that will last a lifetime. At Tanks A Lot we have over 20 years of experience in creating unforgettable memories. With over 130 vehicles on 100 acres of ‘playground’, our Full Monty Day is designed to challenge and exhilarate drivers and spectators alike. Six different activities take you through every facet of our military themed day. From tank driving to mortar shooting, our instructors will drive you to excel and achieve the ultimate aim: the honour of driving 56 tonnes of fury, The Chieftain, over what is, normally, a perfectly functioning family car! Our staff will make every effort to ensure you realise the maximum of your potential. Our youngest winner was 12, which means everyone is in with a shout. Our feedback is second to none; but don’t take our word for it, check us out on Trip Advisor.
The ‘Band of Brothers’ who comprised Easy Company (immortalised in Stephen Ambrose’s bestselling book and the celebrated mini-series co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks) will forever be remembered for their audacious acts of bravery throughout the Second World War. For the first time, through an archive of over 400 rare photographs and items of memorabilia – including maps, rosters and diary extracts – together with a 20,000-word original text from surviving company veterans, Genesis Publications presents the history of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne, in an unparalleled, signed, limited edition book. It features a foreword by Tom Hanks and afterwords by Steven Spielberg and James Madio. Each copy is signed by Damian Lewis and at least seven veterans, including: Bill Guarnere, Bill Maynard, Bill Wingett, Buck Compton, Buck Taylor, Clancy Lyall, Don Bond, Don Malarkey, Earl McClung, Ed Joint, Ed Shames, Ed Tipper, and Forrest Guth. PUBLISHER: Genesis Publications Ltd PRICE: £245 WHERE TO BUY: www.BandofBrothersBook.com
GIFT: Tank driving experience PRICE: Gift vouchers available from £199 WHERE TO BUY: Vouchers are available on our website at www. tanks-alot.co.uk/vouchers.htm EMAIL:
[email protected] PHONE: 01295 768 400
attempted, as told by the Sunday Times bestselling author of A Higher Call. Adam Makos takes us right into the cockpit as two bold young aviators – a white New Englander and an African American farmer’s son – cut their teeth on the world’s most dangerous job: landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. When their fierce defence of the Marines against the North Korean invasion ends in one of the d being shot down behind enemy lines, the other faces an unthinkable choice. Devotion reveals the inspirational story of the US Navy’s most famous aviator duo, Lieutenant Tom Hudner and Ensign Jesse Brown, in all its heart-pounding glory. Published 5th November 2015. PUBLISHER: Atlantic Books PRICE: £20 Hardback WHERE TO BUY: All good bookshops and online retailers
THE GREAT WAR: FROM MEMORY TO HISTORY edited by Kellen Kurschinski et al. The Great War: From Memory to History offers a new look at the multiple ways the Great War has been remembered and commemorated since 1918. Drawing on contributions from history, cultural studies, film, and literary studies, this collection offers fresh perspectives on the Great War and its legacy at the local, national, and international levels. More importantly, it showcases exciting new research on the experiences and memories of ‘forgotten’ participants, often excluded from dominant narratives. Ground-breaking new research on the role of Aboriginals, ethnic minorities, women, artists, historians, and writers in shaping these expressions of memory will be of great interest to readers from a variety of national and academic backgrounds. PUBLISHER: Wilfrid Laurier University Press PRICE: £27.99 WHERE TO BUY: www.gazellebookservices.co.uk
MATRIX GAMES Can you balance and prioritise three different Theatres in order to achieve your objective? In Barbarossa: Decisive Campaigns, you are in command of the German or Russian armies in the arduous Eastern Front of World War II. You will set Army postures, assign Theatre based Artillery, allocate Tactical Air Support and order your Theatre Commanders to provide specialised battalions and staff assets to the Panzergruppe or Army of your choice. But don’t be upset if they refuse. Coming with a 300-page, hardbound book, the game is more than a digital strategy experience. If you are a true armchair general, it is a title you don’t want to miss, and a challenging representation of war that you’ve never seen before. It’s this gnarly, gritty experience of frontline Operational Command that the game seeks to capture.
GIFT: Barbarossa: Decisive Campaigns PRICE: $49.99 WHERE TO BUY: www.matrixgames.com EMAIL:
[email protected] PHONE: 01372 898025 ext. 1004
IN THE NEXT ISSUE ON SALE 12 NOVEMBER
AUSTERLITZ: NAPOLEON’S GREATEST BATTLE
ALSO NEXT ISSUE:
In 1815, an ageing Napoleon crashed to defeat at Waterloo. Ten years before, at the height of his powers, he had triumphed in an equally significant battle that had made him master of Europe. Next month’s special provides in-depth analysis of ‘the Battle of Three Emperors’.
æ æ æ
The Tsar’s army: from the Crimea to the World War Hawker Hurricane: the biography of a battle-winning fighter plane Tudor walls: the defence of England under Henry VIII
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TITIO S PUT YOUR MILITARY HISTORY KNOWLEDGE TO THE TEST WITH THE MHM QUIZ, CROSSWORD, AND CAPTION COMPETITION
MHM QUIZ Patrick Bishop’s book, The Cooler King, tells the astonishing story of William Ash. Ash was an American pilot who, having been shot down in his Spitfire over France in early 1942, spent the rest of the war defying the Nazis by striving to escape from every prisoner-of-war camp in which he was incarcerated. It is a narrative full of incident and high drama, ending with a break out
This month we have three copies of The Cooler King to be won, courtesy of Atlantic Books. through the latrines of the Oflag XXIB prison camp in Poland – a great untold episode of the Second World War. The book is populated by a cast of fascinating characters, including Douglas Bader, Roger Bushell (who would go on to lead the Great Escape), and Paddy Barthropp, a dashing Battle of Britain pilot, who, despite his very different background, became
Ash’s best friend and shared many of his adventures. The book weaves together contemporary documents and interviews with Ash’s comrades. The author vividly recreates the multiple escape attempts, and examines the PoW experience, reavealing the passion that drove some prisoners to risk death in repeated bids for freedom.
MHM
CROSSWORD NO 62 ACROSS 7 British tank, in production from 1945 to 1962 (9) 8 Island awarded the George Cross in April 1942 (5) 10 Greek city-state defeated in 371 BC at the Battle of Leuctra (6) 11 City where General Gordon was killed in January 1885 (8) 12 Surname of actor playing Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in the film Valkyrie (6) 13 Tall fur hat normally worn as part of ceremonial dress (8) 14 Defoliant used in great quantities by the United States during the Vietnam War (5,6) 19 Sir ___ , Royal Navy RFA badly damaged during the Falklands War (8) 21 Kurt ___, German general, in command of the XXXVIII Panzerkorps from 1942 to 1945 (6) 22 Japanese company that produced many military aircraft during World War II (8) 24 Wilbraham ___, British general who, as a lieutenant, was awarded the Victoria Cross for action in the Crimea (6)
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MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
November 2015
CAPTION COMPETITION
MHM OFF DUTY
MHM
Answer online at
To be in with a chance of winning, simply answer the following question:
www. military-history.
org
? From which well-known war film does the title ‘Cooler King’ originate?
We continue our caption competition with an image from this month’s feature on the Italian Resistance. Pit your wits against other readers at www.military-history.org/competitions
LAST MONTH’S WINNER ANSWERS
OCTOBER ISSUE | MHM 61 ACROSS: 7 Potomac, 8 Air raid, 10 Drill, 11 Arkansas, 12 Necessary Evil, 14 The Great Artiste, 17 Revolutionary, 21 Canberra, 22 Harjo, 23 Sutlers, 24 Croatia. DOWN: 1 Dordrecht, 2 Mobile, 3 Carlisle, 4 Pinkie, 5 Brindisi, 6 Sinai, 9 Harry Truman, 13 Sturmovik, 15 Goebbels, 16 Reinhard, 18 Orrery, 19 Norway, 20 Padua.
25 Margaret of ___, wife of Henry VI taken prisoner after the Battle of Tewkesbury (5) 26 Battle fought in Maryland during the War of 1812 (9)
DOWN 1 German tank, which entered service in 1965 (7) 2 ___ Bridge, battle fought in Scotland in September 1297 (8) 3 Piece of armour covering the lower leg (6) 4 City three miles north of which the Battle of the Standard was fought in 1138 (4) 5 Edict of ___, signed in 1598 at the end of the French Wars of Religion (6) 6 Kingdom in existence between 1801 and 1807, created following the Treaty of Aranjuez between France and Spain (7) 9 Battle fought in the West Indies in 1748 during the War of Jenkin’s Ear (6)
www.military-history.org
13 ___ & Voss, German company which designed many unusual and asymmetric aircraft during World War II (5) 15 ___ Cota, US general awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for action at Omaha Beach on D-Day (6) 16 Apache leader who surrendered to US forces in September 1886 (8) 17 The ___ Objective, book by Wes Davis about the secret war in Crete against the Nazis (7) 18 The flags of a regiment (7) 20 Israeli Prime Minister who had served as a general during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 (6) 21 Spartan slaves who were sometimes granted their freedom after performing military service (6) 23 ___ Bagramyan, Soviet marshal, commander of the First Baltic Front from 1943 to 1945 (4)
WINNER: Where’s the bloomin’ idiot who said drinks are on the house?! Joe Agius
RUNNERS-UP Sorry Sergeant… I had a night out on the tiles. Stephen Johnson I am gonna kill the SOB who packed my ’chute! Hammerhead
Think you can do better? Go head-to-head with other MHM readers for the chance to see your caption printed in the next issue. Enter now at www.military-history.org/competitions MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
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g ro in f ie r B + m o o r g in f om + Brie o r g in f ie r B + m o o r briefing
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT…
What's that, some kind of canine contraption?
You’re barking up the wrong tree. The Bristol Bloodhound was a British surfaceto-air missile developed during the 1950s as the UK’s main air-defence weapon. The Mark II came into service in 1964.
Sounds like rocket science. How did it work?
It was. Two Bristol Thor ramjet engines provided the main propulsion. To speed acceleration on launch, four Gosling booster-rockets provided additional power. The boosters would fall away after some 3 seconds, when the missile would have achieved a speed around Mach 2.5 (about 1,900mph at sea-level).
Rams, goslings... sounds pretty rustic. What was the upgrade like?
Though similar in appearance to the Mark I, the Mark II was more versatile. A major improvement was to the target-illuminating radar, which was far less susceptible to jamming than its predecessor. It was also given a larger warhead, had greater range, and was able to engage aircraft at higher and lower altitudes. The Mark II was capable of intercepting targets at heights of between 150ft and 65,000ft. It had a maximum range of around 115 miles, with a minimum impact range at low level of 6.9 miles and a maximum impact range at high level of 86.25 miles. As with the Mark I, the missile was kept on track by a receiver dish in the nose cone that picked up a reflected signal from the target aircraft. But commands could also be issued from the launch control post during flight. Detonation was controlled by a proximity fuse.
Explosive. How was it deployed?
The Bloodhound was a relatively large missile, generally limited to stationary defensive roles. When the Bloodhounds were brought back from Germany in 1983, they were stationed at three airfields in East Anglia. Here they were placed in groups of six, on eight-sided pads linked by servicing tracks, while the arming sheds were steel-framed, clad in corrugated sheeting, and surrounded by earthwork revetments. 82
MILITARY HISTORY MONTHLY
Photo: Courtesy of Rolls
-Royce plc
Bristol Bloodhound Mark II Missile System
The Mark II fact file
Mobility: static, though a mobile version was later developed Crew: unmanned Range: for maximum impact at high level around 86 miles, but maximum range was around 115 miles Rate of fire: when it’s gone, it’s gone Complement: missiles were usually placed in group s of six Date: in RAF service 1964-1991
Groundbreaking stuff. Who invented it?
Well, if we ignore the ancient Chinese and their gunpowder, a giant acknowledgement is owed to von Braun and German scientists at work during WWII. But this particular variety of rocket is down to a team at the Bristol Aeroplane Company.
Every dog has his day. How many were used?
Thankfully, none was ever fired in anger.
Then what's all the fuss about? In tests, the Bloodhound scored direct hits on target bombers flying at 50,000ft. Mark II production models were, however, fitted with proximity fuses, increasing their effectiveness by their ability to destroy attacking aircraft without even requiring a direct hit. The missile also had an advanced continuous-wave semi-active radar homing system, offering excellent performance against electronic countermeasures, as well as a digital computer for fire control.
So was it any good?
Fortunately, we will never know.
November 2015
