Military History July 2014

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HEW STRACHAN
The leading historian discusses WWI
D-DAY
Strategy
Equipment
Landings
Aftermath
How a divided nation

rallied round the flag
on the eve of WWI
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FORGING FRANCE
Bouvines, 1214: the greatest

medieval French victory
IRISH BRIGADES
The global fight for Irelands

independence 200 years ago
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D-DAY
Strategy
Equipment
Landings
Aftermath
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD:

Martin Brown
Archaeological Advisor, Defence
Estates, Ministry of Defence
Mark Corby
former Army Officer, military
historian, lecturer, and broadcaster
Paul Cornish
Curator, Imperial War Museum
Gary Gibbs
Assistant Curator, The Guards Museum
Angus Hay
historian, and lecturer
Nick Hewitt
historian, Research and Information
Office, 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
archivist, and archaeologist
HEW STRACHAN
The leading historian discusses WWI
MHM WELCOME
0,/,7$5<
How a divided nation

rallied round the flag
on the eve of WWI
his month we mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day. This

remains, as Churchill said at the time, the most complicated and difficult military operation ever undertaken.
The scale of it still breaks all records: 5,000 vessels,

9,000 aircraft, and 175,000 troops. The airborne operation alone was the greatest ever mounted, with three
divisions numbering almost 20,000 men landing by parachute or glider in the early hours of 6 June 1944.
We focus on three aspects of the operation landingcraft, beach management, and aerial interdiction to
illustrate the extraordinary complexity and technical
sophistication of what happened on that day.
Another anniversary article this issue is Jack Watkins
analysis of the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 the great victory of Philip Augustus over the German Emperor that
established the French monarchy.
Also this issue, Stephen McGarry reports on the long
18th century tradition of Irish Wild Geese serving in
foreign armies against the British, and, as our cover this
issue reveals, we complete our survey of the great powers
of 1914 with an in-depth look at Britain on the eve of war.
Finally, a word of thanks to all our readers who commented so positively on our new look. Our aim was twofold: to make the magazine easier to navigate with better
defined and more clearly marked sections; and to create
a new format for looking at one particular conflict, campaign, or battle in much greater detail than is possible in
a standard feature. We were pleased with the result. We
are delighted our readers are too.
Julian Thompson
Major-General, and Visiting
Professor, Department of War
Studies, London University
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IRISH BRIGADES
FORGING FRANCE
Bouvines, 1214: the greatest

medieval French victory
The global fight for Irelands

independence 200 years ago
ON THE COVER: A poster showing Britannia holding the Union Jack, standing on a
bluff and pointing toward Europe. A throng
of shirt-sleeved men gather around her.
Image: Library of Congress
WHAT DO
YOU THINK?
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MilitaryHistoryMonthly.
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ADD US NOW
and have your say
Dominic Tweddle
Director-General, National Museum
of the Royal Navy
CONTRIBUTORS THIS MONTHS EXPERTS

NICK HEWITT
is a naval historian and Strategic
Development
Executive at the
National Museum
of the Royal Navy
in Portsmouth. He is leading the
project to save LCT 7074.
NIGEL SALE
served for
twelve years in
the 1st Green
Jackets, 43rd and
52nd and is the
author of The
Lie at the Heart of Waterloo, to be
published in November 2014.
THOMAS
WITHINGTON
is a military history
and defence journalist based in France.
He specialises in
radar and electronic
warfare, contemporary and modern air
power, and the RAF during WWII.
JACK WATKINS
is a writer on
history, heritage,
and conservation, and the
general editor of
the Encyclopedia
of Classic Warfare (1457BC-AD1815)
published by Amber.
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MILITARYHISTORYMONTHLY
D-Day
Historys
most complex
operation
MHM explores the

technicalities of the
intricate coordination
between air, land, and sea
forces on D-Day as we mark the
70th anniversary of the largest
amphibious landing in the
history of war.
28
FEATURES
UPFRONT
Letters
Notes from the Frontline
Behind the Image
10
MHM analyses an intriguing

photograph of French Spahis resting
after battle in 1914.
Thinkers at War
12
Iain King investigates the life and

career of US soldier and political
philosopher John Rawls.
War Culture
Mark Corby travels to Oxford to talk to

leading WWI historian Hew Strachan.
20 ON THE COVER
Perfidious Albion
Britain goes to war
MHM Editor Neil Faulkner evaluates
Britains internal conflicts as war was
declared in 1914.
46 Irish Brigades Abroad

14
MHM looks at a selection from the

thousands of items of matriel which
contributed to the Normandy Landings.
MHM Interview
STRATEGY ANALYSIS
LANDING CRAFT
BEACH GROUPS
AERIAL INTERDICTION
BATTLE MAP
TIMELINE
18
From the Wild Geese to the

Napoleonic Wars
Stephen McGarry investigates the
soldiers who battled for the freedom of
Ireland by fighting for the enemies of
Britain throughout history.
52 The Battle that made France

Bouvines, 1214
10
4
Marking the anniversary of the battle, Jack

Watkins recalls one of the greatest victories of
Frances medieval kings.
July 2014
EDITORIAL
Editor: Neil Faulkner
neil@military-history.org
Deputy Editor: George Clode
george@military-history.org
Editor-at-large: Andrew Selkirk
andrew@military-history.org
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Art Editor: Mark Edwards
mark@currentpublishing.com
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Managing Director: Rob Selkirk
Lamb House, Church Street, London, W4 2PD
Tel: 020 8819 5580
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SUBSCRIPTIONS
62
BACK AT BASE | MHM REVIEWS
War on Film | 62
Taylor Downing revisits the film

adaptation of satirical WWI musical
Oh! What a Lovely War.
Book of the Month | 66
Bijan Omrani recommends Jerry Whites

Zeppelin Nights: London in the First
World War.
Books | 69
Jules Stewart on Hew

Strachans The Direction of
War: contemporary strategy
in historical perspective, and
David Flintham on Taylor
Downings Secret Warriors.
UK: 41.95 (12 issues) RoW: 51.95 (12 issues)

Back issues: 5 each / 6 non-UK (inc p&p)
Binders: (hold 12 copies) 15 / 20
Slip Cases: (hold 12 copies) 15 / 20
IN THE FIELD | MHM VISITS

Museum | 72
Jules Stewart reports from the Spanish

Army Musem in Toledo.
Listings | 74
MHM brings you

the best military
history events
for July.
INTELLIGENCE | MHM OFF DUTY

Competition | 80
Win two new D-Day
history titles.
Top Five | 82
This month,
unsung heroes.
Military History Monthly Subscriptions

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All rights reserved. Text and pictures are copyright restricted and must
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within this publication is hereby excluded. The opinions expressed by
contributors are not necessarily those of the publisher.
MHM CONTENTS
Military History Monthly
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denitely an improvement.
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BEST OF THE CHURCHILLS

In his excellent review of Rory Muirs Wellington: the path to victory 1794-1814 (MHM 43),
Jules Stewart asks the question: if Wellington was not the greatest and most successful British
soldier ever, then who was?
The answer, surely, is John Churchill (1650-1722), the first Duke of Marlborough. Unlike nearly
all other Churchills, he was a thoroughly likeable individual, being known affectionately to his men
as Corporal John. His three stunning victories at Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), and Oudenaarde
(1708), together with his brilliant
penetration of the Non Plus
Ultra lines and the subsequent
capture of Bouchain in 1711,
must place him top of the
pantheon of British generals.
Unlike Wellington, his campaigns were waged at the very
centre of the European stage,
and against the finest army
France and her allies could field.
Mark Corby, London
CLASSMATE MIX-UP
I will always be the first to compliment you on the choice of the
American Civil War as a topic
for your magazine. In a crowded
market, these are the stories that
attract the interest of myself and
my membership. However, in the
recent article on Divided Loyalties
(MHM 44), numerous errors occur.
First of all, Lee and Meade were
not classmates at West Point. Lee
was a graduate of the Class of 1829,
and Meade of 1835. They did not
attend at the same time.
A further error appears when
discussing the Class of 1846.
George McClellan did graduate
second, but Thomas Jackson only
managed 17th. The first-ranked
student was Charles Seaforth
Stewart, who became an engineering officer in the Union Army.
Greg Bayne
American Civil War Round Table
of the United Kingdom
WAS KEITH THE GREATEST?
PRAISE, INDEED
I note your recent article awarding

the Marquis of Montrose the accolade of Scotlands greatest general.
Would anyone considerFieldMarshalJames Francis Edward
Keith, a general under Catherine
the Great of Russia and
then Frederick the Great of
Prussia, a leading if somewhat
neglected candidate?
The Keiths are the Earls
Marischal of the Scottish Crown.
They were proscribed after the
1715 Jacobite Rebellion, and
James made his way as a soldier of
fortune, serving in the armies of
foreign monarchs, while his elder
brother George was an ambassador for the exiled Stuarts.
John Withill
Leeds
I am nearly 70 years old, and

have spent my life hating war, warmongers, and generally everything
to do with war. I am, by nature, a
pacifist. However, I am interested
in history, and by pure chance I
started reading an issue of your
magazine on my iPad.
What an excellent magazine you
produce! It has taught me that just
as there are many evil people in
the world, there are many more
wonderful human beings.
Thank you. Your articles on
The Cruel Sea and the Siege of
Leningrad were truly marvellous; everyone, including todays
children, should be encouraged
to read them.
James Walker
North Yorkshire
Our round-up of this months military history news.
WATERLOO ANTHOLOGY RELEASED

Specialist publishers Extraordinary
Editions Ltd are bringing out an
anthology of rare and hitherto
unpublished texts, maps, and
images. Having so far covered
the SAS War Diaries and won

awards with other unique
publications, they now turn
their attention to the Battle
of Waterloo in advance of the
anniversary next
year.
The anthology,
produced and
designed by leading
craftsmen, is
available in different
editions, each with
its own authentic
twist. The Exemplary
edition, for example,
will consist of a book
block gilded on all
three sides before
being fully bound ,by
hand, in chocolate
calf, with raised bands
and gold lettering to
the spine. The cover
design is embroidered
in coloured thread
with gold and silver highlights. In

addition, the map portfolio will
be hand crafted in a full leather
binding, blocked in gold with the
design of the Waterloo medal, and
lined in scarlet cloth.
The text within these editions is
based around three of the great
Waterloo texts, one British, one
Prussian, and one French. Each
offers a very different perspective
on the battle and, intercut, they
combine to give the reader a
fascinating overview of the
campaign. Interspersed throughout
the text are the letters, reports
and recollections from men of both

sides and all nationalities, some
famous, many obscure, but all
writing with the visceral voice of a
frontline participant.
The publishers have scoured
nationwide libraries, archives, and
private collections to assemble a
wealth of original sources which
will bring the battle to life and
place the reader at the centre
of the action. These books will
be an important addition to the
battles commemoration next
year. For more information visit
waterloobook.co.uk
a VC for his bravery when he

held up a German counter-attack,
stubbornly sticking to his post on
20 September 1944.
The coach party will also visit
Dunkirk, scene of the mass evacu-
ation of the British Expeditionary

Force in May 1940.
The trip will take place on
19-23 September. The website
www.battlefieldmemorialtours.co.uk
has further details.
Return to Arnhem
The organisers of a research
group are appealing for people to
accompany them on a pilgrimage
to the site of a pivotal Second
World War battle.
Operation Market Garden was
aimed at cutting the war short
by achieving a swift crossing of
the Rhine, and capturing Berlin
by the end of 1944. However,
the plan failed when the Allies
encountered stiffer resistance
than expected. Many men were
killed in the ensuing struggle.
This September, exactly 70
years later, Battlefield Memorial
Tours is to visit Arnhem, Holland,
the scene of so much sacrifice
and suffering. Press spokesman
John Philpott said, The Allies
8
were pinning their hopes

on a speedy conclusion to
the war, but a combination
of bad luck and other
crucial factors were to
prove otherwise.
A number of British
regiments fought with
astounding bravery, among
them the Worcestershire
Regiment. This was some
of the fiercest combat the
regiment had experienced,
and in the fighting round
the Nederijn, three of its company commanders were killed.
Lance Sergeant John Daniel
Baskeyfield, of the South
Staffordshire Regiment, 1st
Airborne Division, was awarded
July 2014
Napoleons child?
A rare and beautiful Svres biscuit
figure of a seated cupid will be
offered for sale by W. W. Warner
Antiques at the Masterpiece
Fair 2014. The charming figure
is seated on what is, in fact, a
apoleonic- tyle throne, complete with swans
head arms. The Cupid is believed to represent the
long-awaited first child to Napoleon I and his second
wife, Marie-Louise, Duchess of Parma. Napoleon
Franois Joseph Charles Bonaparte was born at the
Tuileries Palace on 20 March 1811. He was known as
Franz, Duke of Reichstadt, King of Rome, and died at
the age of 21 in Shnbrunn palace in Vienna.
The piece was modelled by Jacques-Jean Oger,
and is inscribed around the base with the artists
characteristic initials, OG, alongside other numbers
and letters which state the year, month, and day the
figure was made: 3 October 1811.
Last of the Liberators

As part of their commemoration of the
70th anniversary of D-Day, IWM Duxford
presents D-Day: the last of the Liberators,
a collection of photographic portraits
featuring some of the last surviving British
Normandy veterans. This poignant exhibition
records the stories of remarkable individuals,
and marks the emotional but dignified
return they each made to locations tied
to their most profound personal memories
of the campaign. These are places in
many cases, the exact spot where they
saw action or were wounded, where they
experienced instances of miraculous chance
in the field or witnessed the loss of friends
in the horror of battle.
FLYING
LEGENDS
The Flying Legends Air
Show is famous the world
over for its exhilarating presentation of historic
piston-engined aircraft in rare combinations
and performing remarkable flying acrobatics.
Complementing the spectacular displays in
the air this July will be the authentic 1940s
atmosphere, which can be experienced across
IWM Duxford, especially in the Vintage Village.
The Manhattan Dolls make a welcome return
to the show, jetting across the Atlantic from
New York to thrill the crowds with memorable
1930s and 1940s songs. Their first-class 1940s
style and uncannily accurate Andrews Sisters
GOT A STORY?
Let us know!
The 15 photographs in the exhibition

are a selection from a new book of the same
name. They were taken in Normandy during
the 68th and 69th anniversaries of the D-Day
Landings by photographer Robin Savage,
and record of some of the final visits these
brave men and women will make to places
that imprinted themselves indelibly on
their lives.
The IWM Duxford exhibition will run
until December 2014.
vocals will bring a Home Front flavour

back to the historic hangar base. The
Winslow Concert Band will also be on
hand, performing swing and big-band hits
of the period.
The fly n display promises a fusion of power,
noise, excitement, and nostalgia as pistonengined aircraft from across the globe make
breathtaking passes over IWM Duxfords airfield.
The show will run on the 12 and 13 July; visit
www.iwm.org.uk for more information.
Military History Monthly, Lamb House,

020 8819 5580
editorial@military-history.org
MHM FRONTLINE
NEWS IN BRIEF
Operation War Diary

The National Archives is making a second batch
of 3,987 digitised First World War unit war-diaries
from France and Flanders available online via its
First World War 100 portal.
The unit war-diaries reveal the use of simple
yet effective tactics such as dummy soldiers
operated by strings alongside the introduction of
more advanced 20th-century technologies such
as the first (German) flamethrowers and the first
(British) gas attacks. In the face of these advances
in technology and increasing threat, suspicions
were heightened, even extending to cats and dogs
that were believed to be working for the Germans.
The National Archives are encouraging
more people to take part in Operation War Diary
to enable this innovative project to proceed.
Volunteers wishing to take part can join the project
on the website www.operationwardiary.org
Illustrating
La Grande Guerre
The first seven months
of WWI will be dramatically
illustrated at the Fitzwilliam
Museum in Cambridge
through the colour
lithographs and woodcuts
of the print series La
Grande Guerre.
Scenes of action in the form of battles,
sieges, and airstrikes are punctuated by moments
of relative repose, including commemorations,
award ceremonies, and depictions of the Allied
forces taking five oclock tea or Indian soldiers
at prayer. The exhibition is the first in a series
of displays at the Fitzwilliam, running from 2014
to 2018, to commemorate the WWI centenary.
La Grande Guerre is at the Fitzwilliam until
28 September 2014. Admission is free.
1914
REST FROM
BATTLE
This intriguing photograph shows Moroccan French Spahis gathered around a fire
in Ribcourt, France, during WWI. Their
horses, ribs prominent, graze hungrily in
the background as the Spahis themselves encircle steaming pots of food
for warmth and sustenance following a
battle. The regiment was formed after the
1830 French occupation of Algiers, when
groups of local horsemen were gathered
together and attached to light cavalry
regiments in North Africa.
Three separate Spahi regiments were
formed in 1845, the first of Algiers, the
second of Oran, and the third of Constantine. These regiments were involved
in a number of campaigns including the
Franco-Prussian War, the Occupation of
Morocco and Syria, and both World Wars.
They acted as the personal guard and
escort of Marshal Jacques Leroy de Saint
Arnaud during the Crimean War, where
they were also photographed extensively
by one of the first war photographers,
Roger Fenton.
Before the outbreak of WWI, the
Spahis were made up of Arab and Berber
soldiers under the command of French
officers, with a few French volunteers
also in the ranks. As the regiment was
increasingly mechanised, more and more
Frenchmen joined.
They saw service during the First World
War predominantly at the opening and
through the war-of-movement phase,
but, as the war ground to a stalemate
and the belligerents took to the trenches,
the need for mounted troops died out.
By the wars end, all seven existing Spahi
regiments had been involved in the fighting on the Western Front. They had also
fought against the Ottoman Empire in
Palestine, with their numbers increasing
with the formation of the Moroccan
Spahi regiments.
During the Second World War, although
most Spahi regiments were mechanised,
a few remained mounted in order to carry
out patrols in North Africa. They also
took part French parades, including the
Bastille Day Parade in Paris, wearing
traditional dress.
The French Army still has one armoured
unit of Spahis, who served in the Gulf War
and who uphold Spahi traditions.
MHM BEHIND THE IMAGE
SPAHIS IN CAMP
AT ARSY
11
Iain King examines the relationship between war and thought
To each according to his threat

advantage does not count
as a principle of justice.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 1971
RAWLS
political philosopher
John Rawls is commonly described as the
most important political philosopher of the
20th century. The work of this reclusive
Harvard academic has become a mainstay of
undergraduate courses, and his ideas have
influenced Western and international institutions, most notably the EU and the UN.
Rawls defining idea was an argument in
favour of helping the least well-off. To eliminate the bias of self-interest, he imagined
forcing people to choose how society should
be governed without letting them know
where in society they would be. People in this
hypothetical scenario, he said, would act to
protect the weakest in society, just in case it
was them. Hence, he concluded, helping the
least well-off person was the right thing to do.
It is no coincidence that Rawls became famous
during the Vietnam War a conflict that
rocked American society.
Rawls arguments presented a uniquely
American account of why US involvement in
South-east Asia was un-American.
His fame and influence, and the strength of
his argument, was sufficient to rejuvenate the
whole topic of ethics. Ever since Wittgensteins
clever arguments in the 1920s, the field had
been left barren. Many wondered whether
concepts of right and wrong really meant
anything. Rawls put Wittgenstein in his place:
logic was only part of the answer; our instincts
mattered, too, he said. Right and wrong were
important because each person was important.
It was a heartfelt argument from a quiet man
determined to save humanity from another
battlefield hell.
12
nthusiastic and patriotic, John

Rawls enlisted in the US Army
in the middle of World War II
as soon as he had finished his
BA degree. It was February 1943
and, after some basic training, he
was assigned to the Pacific theatre.
His first experience of combat was in
New Guinea a country which saw
fighting for almost the whole duration of the Pacific campaign where
he won a Bronze Star.
He was then redeployed to the
Philippines, and served in the
trenches under constant fire for
many days. The experience seemed
particularly terrible to Rawls and his
fellow servicemen, the philosopher
confided many years later, because
they knew the Japanese would
neither surrender nor take prisoners.
That meant that unless he and his
comrades killed all the enemy, some
Americans would inevitably die.
One soldier in a dugout close to
Rawls stood up and deliberately
removed his helmet to take a bullet to
the head, choosing to die rather than
endure the constant barrage.
But Rawls survived unscathed and
was later deployed to Japan, where he
became part of the 350,000-strong
US military force which occupied
the country after the surrender of
August 1945.
It was a curious time: the Japanese surrender had signed away
legal authority to General Douglas
MacArthurs Supreme Allied Command, and Americans were designing
new institutions for the country. But
Rawls was too junior to have much
decision-making authority himself: as
a sergeant, he spent most of his time
dealing with other US servicemen.
BIOGRAPHY
Birth: 21 February 1921
Nationality: American
Profession: Academic
philosopher
University: Harvard and
Oxford
Death: 24 November 2002
HIROSHIMA
A capable infantryman, Rawls seems
to have impressed his superiors. He
had already been promoted from a
private, and would have gone on to
become an officer were it not for two
events in late 1945 events which
turned the future theorist against the
military for good.
The first came in the autumn of
1945, when Rawls passed through
Hiroshima after it had been destroyed
by an atomic bomb. The total obliteration of physical infrastructure, and the
even more horrific human toll, affected
him deeply. The scale of the tragedy,
and the fact that the destruction had
been deliberately inflicted by his own
side, was profoundly unsettling. He
wrote that the scenes still haunted him
50 years later.
The second incident was more personal. Sergeant Rawls was instructed
by a first lieutenant to discipline a
fellow soldier. Rawls refused, believing
no punishment was justified. This act
of insubordination resulted in Rawls
being demoted back to a private.
By January 1946, Rawls was as
disenchanted with the Army as it
was with him, and they parted ways.
Rawls was soon back in Ivy League
academia, where he would spend rest
of his working life.
ANTI-MILITARISM
The two incidents illustrate Rawls
ideas succinctly. The desolation of
post-atomic Hiroshima was not only
horrific; it was also a city where the
rich fabric of social institutions, laid
down over many generations, had
been wiped out. The challenge was to
ensure that a better society emerged
in its place.
Deciding what this new society
should look like was the task of the
Supreme Command for the Allied
Powers, and Rawls took this question
what should the rules of a society
be back to the US. But only in 1971
did he come up with a comprehensive
answer. His theory starts by imagining
away all that had gone before, just as
the past had been erased in Hiroshima.
The disciplinary incident is even
more revealing. Sergeants are required
to uphold military rules it is one
of their principal functions and
their failure to do so can undermine
the cohesion on which armies rely.
Yet Rawls put aside this large-scale
consideration to ensure that justice
was applied to a single individual. His
action foreshadows Rawls main intellectual battle against the philosophy
of Utilitarianism.
Utilitarians argued that the greatest
good of the greatest number should
direct policy, but Rawls contended that
this permitted the individuals concerns
to be overridden by the mass. The
integrity of each person had to be protected, he said. This principle became
the basis for his whole philosophy.
ANTI-RELIGION
Before the war, Rawls had been a
committed Episcopalian. His undergraduate thesis had been about Sin
July 2014
MHM THINKERS AT WAR
IN CONTEXT: Rawls
The Pacific War

US engagement in the Pacific War began following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii,
on 7 December 1941 famously described by US
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a date that
will live in infamy.
Japan had invaded Manchuria a decade earlier,
and, less successfully, pushed into Soviet Russia
in 1939. But it was American involvement which
transformed the conflict. Once Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy confirmed their support for Japanese
aggression, the Pacific theatre became part of
World War II with action across an even greater
area than the war in Europe.
Japan followed their Hawaii attack by sinking two
British warships, forcing the surrender of Thailand
and capturing Hong Kong, Guam, and Wake
Island all within a single month. Then, at the
start of 1942, they invaded Burma and drove south
in a rapid advance, taking vast swathes of territory
and thousands of Allied prisoners, reaching as far
as the Philippines by May. They even bombed the
Australian mainland.
But fateful Japanese miscalculations in the
Battle of Midway of June 1942 left their carrier
fleet crippled; and from then until their surrender,
and Faith, and the young Rawls had
even considered joining the priesthood. But his experiences in the Pacific and in post-war Japan shattered his
cosy certainties.
As an old man, he mused that if
ever he needed evidence that God
was not enough, he remembered
the words of a military chaplain who
had told the American soldiers that
God would shield them but not the
Japanese (Rawls later wrote that he
upbraided the pastor for distorting
the Bible).
three years later, the story was the same fierce

attrition, hard-won Allied victories, an ever diminishing Japanese domain, and ever-more desperate
Japanese defence.
The first successful Allied counter-offensive was
in New Guinea, followed by a very bloody victory in
Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands early in 1943.
From there, the Americans adopted an island hopping strategy, using each new territorial gain to
launch an assault on the next. This approach took
them to Saipan, Tarawa, the Philippines, Iwo Jima,
and eventually Okinawa.
Meanwhile, Japanese forces were pushed back
from India and Burma, while the US Navy in
particular their submarines backed up by USAAF
Flying Fortress bombers deprived Japan of the
resources needed to sustain an industrial war.
Anticipating the bloodiest battle of all on the
Japanese home islands, President Truman ordered
the use of atomic bombs a decision which may
have saved the lives of many thousands of US servicemen, but at the cost of approximately a quarter
of a million Japanese civilians.
The Soviets re-entered the war on the same day
as the second bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki,
and less than 24 hours later, on 10 August 1945, the
Japanese Cabinet decided to surrender.
Then he would recall what he

had seen in Hiroshima, the news he
had heard about Auschwitz while
travelling on a train in 1945, and the
arbitrariness with which several of his
fellow soldiers had been killed, one
of the them dying in his arms. God, it
seemed, had been absent.
Demobilised from the Pacific in
1946 to start a doctorate in moral
philosophy back at Princeton, Rawls
was a very different person to the
God-fearing optimist who had volunteered for service. Religion and the
Army had failed him. In their place, he

had developed a thirst for justice or,
more accurately, a thirst to discover
what justice was.
His worldview had been shaped by
a collection of vivid, shocking, and
deeply personal experiences, all of
them from his wartime service. The
course of the rest of his life was set.
BELOW Marines fire a captured

mountain gun during the attack on
Garapan, Saipan, 21 June 1944.
RAWLS
QUOTES
Justice is the first
virtue of social institutions, as truth is of
systems of thought.
Each person possesses an inviolability
founded on justice
that even the welfare
of society as a whole
cannot override. For
this reason justice
denies that the loss
of freedom for some
is made right by a
greater good shared
by others.
The suppression of
liberty is always likely
to be irrational.
Many conservative
writers have contended that the tendency
to equality in modern
social movements
is the expression of
envy. In this way they
seek to discredit this
trend, attributing it to
collectively harmful
impulses.
Justice as fairness
provides what we
want.
13
STOLE AND BIBLE
A poignant reminder of the terrible events

on Omaha, this US Army chaplains stole
and service bible were found on the beach
7 June by Stoker James Cook, a crewman of
Royal Navy LST 367. Four chaplains served
with the US 1st Infantry Division on the
beach that day, ministering to the wounded
and dying. One chaplain on Omaha,
Father Joe Lacy, was even awarded
the Distinguished Service Cross for
his heroic and dauntless actions.
UNITED STATES NAVY (USN)

UNIFORMS AND EQUIPMENT
Clockwise from top left: M1 steel helmet in USN grey with

added combat-art; dungaree work-uniform with M1943
service shoes, and the earphones, microphone, and steel
talkers helmet used by a guncrew chief; M1938 leggings and
ID tags of a member of the 28th USN Construction Battalion
the famous CBs or Seabees as worn at Cherbourg; and an
M1 helmet and an M1936 pistol belt with M1910 canteen and
cover and USN M1 knife and sheath.
14
July 2014
MHM WAR CULTURE

WEAPONS FOR SILENT
KILLING SUPPLIED BY
THE OSS AND SOE
Clockwise from the left: Liberator .45 single-shot

smoothbore pistol with case, instructions, and
wooden ejector-rod; Welrod 9mm single-shot silenced
pistol; High Standard Model H-D .22 semi-automatic
pistol; and High Standard B .22 semi-automatic pistol.
As soon as the dust settled after the Dunkirk evacuation in

1940, Britains strategists agreed that in order for Germany to
be defeated, Europe would have to be invaded. The objective of
Operation Overlord, as the invasion would be codenamed, was not
just to assault but to secure a lodgement area on the Continent
from which further offensive operations can be developed, as
defined by Lieutenant-General Frederick Morgan.
Launching a full-blown Allied invasion from Britain would,
however, depend on a build-up of men, matriel, and supplies.
Here, MHM looks at a selection from the thousands of uniforms
and objects that would be transported across the sea and
contribute to the largest amphibious invasion in history.
BRITISH MORTAR
A British 3in mortar with base plate,

bipod with elevating and traversing screw,
leather tube cover (on the bipod), and
a leather sight case, to the left of the
metal box for 3in mortar ammunition.
Of the two projectiles, the right-hand
one has the fuse-cap removed.
k
15
RUPERT
This type of quarter-size dummy

parachutist, known as a Rupert,
was intended to sow confusion when dropped over
Occupied France. It carried
with it two types of gunfire
simulator. Ruperts
were dropped by
the thousand across
northern France during
Operation Titanic to
coincide with the real
airborne drop.
EXTRACT FROM
The D-Day Kit-Bag:
the ultimate guide
to the Allied assault
on Europe
Martin Robson
Conway,
16.99
ISBN 978-1844862320
RESISTANCE RADIO
British-made Resistance case radio.

This S-type portable radio was dropped
onto Epaney, Normandy, on the night of
17 September 1943, and was just one of
many different types of suitcase radio designed for
clandestine broadcast and reception of radio communications by the French Resistance and Allied agents.
16
July 2014
With the start of its centenary in view, Mark Corby travelled to Oxford
to talk to Hew Strachan, a leading historian of the First World War, and
Chichele Professor of the History of War, All Souls College.
ou went to Rugby and then on to

Cambridge, where I gather you
served in the Officer Training
Corps. How did you become
interested in military history, and did
you ever consider a military career?
The interest in military history has absolutely
nothing to do with either Rugby or Cambridge,
both of which were pretty unsupportive. When
I went up to Cambridge in 1968, there was no
military history in the Tripos.
In fact, my interest had started much earlier,
initially by collecting toy soldiers. My parents,
recognising my curiosity, had introduced me as
a 13-year-old to Nick Norman, then the Assistant
Curator of the Scottish United Services Museum
based in Edinburgh Castle, and he pointed me in
the direction of the library and the relevant books.
I did consider a three-year short commission,
but in those days there were few graduate officers,
and I would have been about 25 before I started my
chosen career. I was very conscious that if I wished
to be a military historian, I had better get on with it
and not get left behind.
In your most recent book, The

Direction of War, you make frequent
mention of Carl von Clausewitz.
How relevant is Clausewitz to the
study of war today?
contention that we should have

avoided the war, if at all possible.
Controversy is potentially the best educational tool
we have. It puts questions into the public domain
and, by putting them there, seeks engagement. So
that is the upside. The downside is that if we are
going to have controversies that are as stereotypical as the ones we have had so far, which rework
arguments we have been having since the 1960s,
then, quite frankly, it is going to be sterile. If we
have yet more focus on the Western Front, British
generalship, whether Britain was right or wrong to
enter the war, then we are not getting much closer
to a proper understanding.
Niall Ferguson is going back to an argument
that he produced in The Pity of War, which I think
is inherently wrong. Wrong in an historical sense.
He argues that counterfactual history is helpful in
illuminating a sense of what might have been, and
therefore helps us understand what did happen.
I think this profoundly wrong, and in fact question
the whole notion of the relevance of counterfactual
history. As Michael Howard has said, if you move
one block, a whole lot of other blocks then come in.
If Britain hadnt entered the war in August 1914,
and France had been overrun by Germany, Britain
would still have been forced into the war later
that year but under much worse circumstances,
18
Hew Strachan
without being able to establish a secure foothold
on the Continent.
I also find it very strange that Niall sees the war
above all as an Anglo-German conflict. If you read
The Pity of War, it is as though countries like Russia,
France, Austria-Hungary the original belligerents
just have walk-on parts, and thats just nonsense.
Do you think a study of the First

World War will enable us to understand war any better, and perhaps
even guide us as to when and when
not to fight?
Very, for two reasons. First, because he uses

a dialectical method that creates an answer
for every question asked. Clausewitz provides
a narrative that doesnt age as many more
didactic works have done.
Second, Clausewitz was very conscious that
not all war would be like his own experience, and
in order to widen his research and think outside
his own period, he identified political and social
factors as being crucial to the study of war rather
than being bound by technological factors or by
certain specific circumstances. This approach
ensures that his work is still relevant when
trying to understand war today.
You are currently working on a

magnum opus on the First World
War. Are you encouraged by the
controversies the centenary
celebrations have provoked? For
example, it is Niall Fergusons
If Britain hadnt
entered the war
in August 1914, and
France had been
overrun by Germany,
Britain would still have
been forced into the
war later that year.
ABOVE Carl von Clausewitz, to whom Strachan makes a

number of references in his new book. Clausewitzs work
is still relevant when trying to understand war today.
Historian friends of mine say to me that the purpose

of the centenary for us, as historians, is to get people
to understand that actually the arguments about
the First World War have moved on from those that
Niall Ferguson and Gary Sheffield promote. There
is a whole raft of new research that isnt in the
public consciousness, yet should be, and I would
say absolutely, amen to that if it can be achieved.
I would also ask and this is where they would
say Im sort of breaking caste why are people
interested? The answer is, in part, because of
their own preoccupation with their own condition
in todays world.
How we looked at war in the 1960s on the 50th
anniversary reflected the preoccupations of the
1960s generation. I would therefore argue that now,
July 2014
MHM INTERVIEW
to run out? You think about where Israel is on Iran

and where Obama is on Iran, and they are in very
different places. Obama is certainly not encouraging the Israelis to act against Iran, and he imagines
he can negotiate a deal with Iran; most Britons,
I think, would be with him on that.
But what that is doing, of course, is leaving
Israel much less certain about the US relationship
than they have been for a very long time. More
ominously, Israel has the capacity to trigger a US
response that the US might not want to take.
In recent years the British

Government has been rather
fond of apologising for various
historical incidents. Should we
now apologise to the Iraqi people
over the Second Gulf War?
ABOVE A car bombing in Iraq, 2005. According to
Strachan, we simply didnt sit down and think through
coherently what we were getting into.
as Britain prepares to withdraw from Afghanistan,

as we have serious debates about whether Britain
will be prepared to use military force again, and
when we are also debating when is war of utility
rather than unhelpful, these are exactly the arguments people have had about the First World War.
To that extent, it is a very instructive tool.
In July 2012, you were quoted in The

Guardian as saying the momentum
has swung away from the Taliban,
and the Coalition leaders and their
electorates need to wake up if they
dont want to lose a war that is there
to be won.
Wonderful fighting talk, isnt it! Well, I think it is
over: we have given up absolutely. There is clearly
no appetite, most importantly in Washington, and
if there is no appetite in Washington, there will be
no appetite in London or any other capital, because
we are not capable of doing this on our own.
When I wrote that, I had just come back from
Afghanistan. Sure, I had been with NATO, and, sure,
NATO wanted me to see the upside of the story, and
of course it is difficult when you are in that sort of
company not to be swept away with the power of
their argument. I had seen some very impressive
results from what previously in Iraq had been called
the surge, and I had met some very impressive
Afghan senior commanders.
However, any success depended on continual NATO
support. One of the reasons I wrote that was that, at
the time, it appeared that NATO was disengaging at
the point where it should have been engaging.
You are a frequent lecturer in the US.

It is reported that the US now regards
the UK as a freeloader on NATO.
Does this really matter, and surely
the mighty USA can do without us?
I am a very struck when I go to the US how much
discussions simply assume the US is acting on its
own. When you push Americans and say Youve

got some allies, they will immediately because
they are a very polite people say Of course we
have allies, and stress how important they are, and
every American when asked will tend to say how
important the Special Relationship is, and how
wonderful Britain is.
Privately, though, I hear plenty of Americans
expressing concerns about British capability.
Its a twofold argument, this. We are not clear
where our principal geopolitical focus should be.
The US is making its principal geopolitical focus
Asia-Pacific, and the question for us, given
the fact we have constructed a defence policy
essentially around our alliance with the US, is:
are we following them there?
Or are we taking on responsibility for the
areas they no longer want, predominantly the
Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Gulf. The
logic suggests that this is what we should do. But
are we then generating the capability to do it?
I find it very striking and I didnt think a
month ago I would be saying this but here
we are with a situation where France is choosing
its wars in Africa with common sense and much
more savvy than we seem to be capable of. In
other words, they are choosing Francophone
countries where they are welcomed and they
can make a difference, and where they can
therefore deliver a narrative of success.
There is no such narrative at the moment coming
out of Britain, and we have a national-security
strategy that talks about no global shrinkage, but
at the same time we are not prepared to produce
the armed forces to reflect that aspiration. So I
think we are in a very confused position.
For decades, US foreign policy in

the Middle East and elsewhere has
been predicated on the defence of
Israel, pretty much to the exclusion
of all else. Why, and is it healthy?
The Jewish lobby is very important, but of course
the big question-mark is over whether there really
is still a key US-Israeli interest here. Has it begun
I dont think its our job to apologise to the Iraqi

people for the Second Gulf War partly because,
though we may have gone to war in dodgy circumstances, and we probably shouldnt have gone to
war at all, there was a large Iraqi lobby outside
Iraq Iraqi exiles who had an interest in pushing
this agenda. So the Iraqis themselves are complicit
in some of this.
Second, of course, we were not the prime
movers: the prime movers were the US. It was the
US that made the quite extraordinary connection
between the 9/11 attacks and Iraq when there
was no connection.
Our failure was a failure of omission rather
than commission, I would say. Blair obviously
committed a sin of commission, but the omission
was the failure to think through suffi ciently
independently what our position and our
interests were.
This is where much of my concern about the
UKs failure to make strategy comes from, as it
does for many other people. I mean we simply
didnt sit down and think through coherently
what we were getting into.
We seem to have forgotten that back in the
1960s we were quite capable of pushing the
Special Relationship to the limits when Harold
Wilson refused to get involved in Vietnam. In other
words, I think if we had said no over Iraq we would
not have broken the Anglo-American relationship.
I am also fond of saying that if you read any of
the recent American memoirs that have come out of
these conflicts Woodwards
book on Obama, or the new
Gates memoir Duty just have
a look and see how much reference there is to Britain in either
of those books. The short
answer is effectively zilch.
To read Jules Stewarts

review of Hew Strachans
new book, The Direction
of War, turn to page 69.
19
Britain
PERFIDIOUS ALBION
In his final article about the Great Powers of Europe on the eve of war,
Neil Faulkner reveals a deeply divided Britain.
20
July 2014
The Irish Nationalists

Bonar Laws speech was an open incitement to
mutiny. But his historical analogy was awry. In
1688, the British Army had mutinied and joined
William of Oranges rebels. James had lacked
any other forces with which to contest the coup:
so there was no civil war. But by autumn 1913,
Carsons Ulster Volunteers were not the only
other military force in play.
The Irish supporters of Home Rule had

formed the Nationalist Volunteers, and a separate Citizen Army had also been recruited in
Dublin from the ranks of the militants involved
in a wave of strikes that had rocked the capital
that summer. Ireland was, without question,
on the brink of war.
This was the deepening crisis with which
the Liberal Cabinet was grappling in July 1914.
Nationalist hopes had risen higher as the
Home Rule Bill slowly made its way through
Parliament. The political fortunes of moderate
nationalists like John Redmond hinged on the
success of constitutional reform. Now its implementation had been blocked by a military revolt.
The argument that only the gun could free
Ireland seemed unanswerable. The Nationalist
Volunteers swelled from 10,000 to 100,000; one
third of them were Ulster Catholics. What was
to prevent war between the rival militias?
So preoccupied had the British been with
the Home Rule crisis that few politicians had
spared much thought for events in the distant
Balkans until that meeting on 24 July. The
Foreign Secretary had just received news of the
Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Churchill later
recalled the impact when he communicated
it to his assembled Cabinet colleagues:
the quiet grave tones of Sir Edward Greys voice
were heard, reading a document which had just
been brought him from the Foreign Office He
had been reading or speaking for several minutes
before I could separate my mind from the tedious
and bewildering debate which had just closed
but gradually as the sentences followed one another,
impressions of a wholly different character began
to form in my mind The parishes of Tyrone and
Fermanagh faded back into the mists and squalls
of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately,
but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow
upon the map of Europe.
Image: WIPL
King James had behind him the letter of the

law just as completely as Mr Asquith does
now. He made sure of it. He got the judges
on his side by methods not dissimilar from
those by which Mr Asquith has a majority
in the House of Commons on his side
In order to carry out his despotic intention,
the King had the largest army which had
ever been seen in England. What happened?
There was no civil war. Why? Because his
own army refused to fight for him?
ABOVE Ireland prepares for war civil war. Both

(Protestant) Loyalists and (Catholic) Nationalists
had formed armed militias. When the British Army
mutinied against the Liberal Governments Home
Rule Bill, Ireland was brought to the brink of war.
Shown here are men of the Citizen Army, formed
mainly of working-class militants from Dublin.
Home Rule was not the only intractable issue

confronting the Liberal Government in 1914.
Two others, womens suffrage and industrial
militancy, also contributed to the impression
of a government under siege in a society
racked by division.
The Womens Social and Political Union
(WSPU) was a mass movement. A rally in
Hyde Park in 1908 had attracted a quarter of
a million demonstrators. At first, the Liberal
Government had made sympathetic noises, but
when its support for the Conciliation Bill
which would have enfranchised about a million
women faded away, the Suffragettes became
more militant, the authorities more repressive.
On 18 November 1910 Black Friday
Suffragette demonstrators attempted to march
into Parliament Square. They were blocked,
and then attacked by the police. A further
demonstration the following day, this time in
Downing Street, also turned violent. A total
of 280 women were arrested. The struggle for
womens emancipation entered a new phase.
Between 1910 and the outbreak of war,
the Suffragettes were constantly in the
news holding meetings, marching through
the streets, harassing government ministers,
smashing windows, setting fire to letter-boxes.
Suffragette prisoners went on hunger strike
and were tortured in the jails by forced
feeding. Working-class women joined the
struggle, and the movement developed a
socialist wing that sought alliances with the
male-dominated unions.k
Image: WIPL
The Suffragettes
ll of the Great Powers

were embroiled in domestic
political and social crises
in the summer of 1914. War
may have been triggered
by the rising tension between them; but
equally, across Europe, governments and
right-wing forces saw the jingoism of war
as an alternative to the growing forces of
socialism and revolutionary nationalism.
Britain was no exception. In July 1914, it
was on the brink of civil war.
Winston Churchill, First Lord of the
Admiralty in the Liberal Government, was
present at a crisis meeting of the Cabinet
on the afternoon of 24 July. He and his
colleagues were debating Irish Home Rule.
Four months earlier, parliamentary
government had effectively broken down
when senior officers of the British Army
stationed at Curragh Camp in County
Kildare in southern Ireland had mutinied
against the Government, refusing to take
military action against Loyalist politician
Edward Carsons Ulster Volunteers.
They had not acted alone. The Curragh
Mutiny was a coup by one section of the
British state against another. It represented
an alliance between Andrew Bonar Laws
Tory Party, the Tory-dominated House of
Lords, Carsons Loyalist militia, and the
British Army high command. It was directed
against the beleaguered Liberal Government
of Herbert Henry Asquith and the supporters
of Irish Home Rule.
In late 1913, Bonar Law, speaking
in Dublin, had made open comparison
between the Ulster crisis and the Glorious
Revolution of 1688 when the senior
officers of the British Army had mutinied
against King James II and thereby brought
him down.
ABOVE Liberal democracy in action: two

large policemen arrest a small Suffragette.
The struggle for womens rights turned
ugly after the Liberal Government
backtracked on limited reform in 1910.
21
THE GREAT POWERS

imprisoned Irish trade-union leader
James Larkin.
The period 1910 to 1914 was that of
the Great Unrest, when wave after wave
of mass strikes rolled across Britain, involving
millions of workers in the mines, the docks,
the railways, and other major industries. Much
of it was wildcat action, out of the control of
more conservative union leaders, and many
militants were influenced by radical syndicalist
ideas advocating the use of industrial action to
bring about socialist revolution.
At the end of 1913, three powerful unions
the Miners Federation of Great Britain,
the National Union of Railwaymen, and the
National Transport Workers Federation
formed a Triple Alliance. They would
henceforward present their grievances
together, and take united action to win
redress. The threat of a general strike hung
over the Liberal Government in 1914.
The strange death of Liberal England

ABOVE The Dublin lockout of 1913 was one
event in a wave of industrial strife which
swept the British Isles in the Great Unrest
of 1910-1914. Events seemed to be moving
towards a general strike when war broke out.
The Unions
That the multi-faceted opposition to the
Liberal Government was fusing was evident
at a mass meeting held in the Albert Hall
on 1 November 1913, when Irish nationalists,
militant Suffragettes, and trade unionists
shared a common platform. It had been
organised by Sylvia Pankhurst, the left-wing
daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, the
WSPU leader, to demand the release of
ABOVE The British Empire was

the largest in the world in 1914.
Here the cover of a musical score
celebrates another annexation.
But the industrial power to sustain
it was waning. Germany was
out-producing Britain. The Krupp
armaments factory of Essen.
Images: WIPL
22
The Liberals had won a landslide in 1906

by offering a programme of radical reform.
Their 1909 Peoples Budget driven through
Parliament by Chancellor of the Exchequer
Lloyd George in the face of entrenched resistance from the Tories and the House of Lords
is widely regarded as having laid the foundation
stones of the welfare state.
But the Liberal Party was an unstable alliance of very different political forces. It was,
according to historian George Dangerfield,
author of the seminal study The Strange Death of
Liberal England (1935), an irrational mixture
of Whig aristocrats, industrialists, dissenters,
reformers, trade unionists, quacks, and Mr
Lloyd George: it preserved itself from the
destructive contradictions of daily reality by an
almost mystical communion with the doctrine
of laissez-faire and a profound belief in the

English virtue of compromise.
Unfortunately, the big questions
agitating belle poque Britain did not allow
of compromise: whether the Irish got home
rule, women the vote, and workers higher
wages turned out to be matters that had to
be resolved on the streets. In response, the
Government became increasingly conservative, opportunistic, and repressive.
Behind the scenes, moreover, the traditional reluctance of the Liberals to engage
in foreign military adventures was being
undermined by a bloc of hard-nosed Liberal
Imperialists inside the Cabinet. These were
Asquith, Grey, Haldane, Churchill, and
Lloyd George the latter two, relatively late
converts to the Liberal Imperialist view.
Of particular significance was a series of
Anglo-French staff talks beginning in late
1911. These were orchestrated by General
Henry Wilson, Britains Director of Military
Operations, and amounted to a programme
of joint planning for war on the assumption
that Britain and France would be active allies
against Germany. The five Cabinet hawks
were aware of the talks; most of the rest of the
Cabinet was not. Yet the effect was to create
LEFT for example, employed

70,000 workers in 1914.
July 2014
a diplomatic situation in which British

good faith came to depend on a decision
to go to war should Belgium be attacked
and France threatened.
The slow decline of the

British Empire
The mutual understanding arising from the
staff talks was that a British expeditionary force
would form the left of the French line in the
event of war. This, in turn, can be regarded as
a logical military consequence of the end of
Britains century of splendid isolation with
the formation of the Triple Entente.
The British had made an agreement first
with the French in 1904, and then with the
Russians in 1907. In both cases, ancient feuds
were set aside the French, of course, had been
traditional enemies since Medieval times, and
more recently colonial rivals in Africa, while
the Russians had been considered a threat to
British interests in the Near East and Central
Asia throughout much of the 19th century. By
the turn of the century, however, these tensions
had come to matter less than mutual concern
over the rising power of Imperial Germany.
Anglo-German competition was, in fact,
the central axis of the First World War. Other
European and global rivalries revolved around
this axis. The reason, quite simply, was that
Britain was a declining imperial hegemon and
Germany a rising aspirant to world power in
the first part of the 20th century.
Britain had outfought the French in the
18th century to grab North America and India,
and establish the greatest maritime empire in
the world. The profits of empire especially
from the slave-based triangular trade linking
Britain, West Africa, and the Caribbean
The struggle for supremacy in Europe

The threat posed by Germany to British
imperial interests was visceral. The exponential
growth of German industry was pushing
through the barriers of the existing nationstate. Germany needed raw materials, markets,
and investment opportunities.
This is the reason for the Mitteleuropa
(Middle Europe) and Weltpolitik (World
Policy) stances being taken by German
statesmen: they expressed German capitals
need for expansion beyond German territory.
This necessarily took a militarised form, since
the world had already been carved up by the
established Great Powers. Germany came late to
the game of empire, and therefore had to fight
for its place in the sun (as the Kaiser put it).
The greatest obstacle was the British Empire,
so Weltpolitik gave rise to a naval arms-race with
Britain an attempt to outbuild the British, and
create a navy powerful enough to challenge the
maritime supremacy of the Royal Navy. The
British were forced to respond, and, being
ABOVE A German view of the Triple Entente:

an attempt at encirclement designed to deny
Germany her place in the sun.
Image: WIPL
Image: WIPL
ABOVE Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928),

Liberal Prime Minister of Britain from
1908 to 1916.
sugar islands funded

the Industrial Revolution,
which was pioneered in
Britain and made her the
workshop of the world.
But Britain was now
slipping behind. In the
mid 19th century, Britain
had been the only industrial
superpower, producing 50%
of the worlds cotton goods,
60% of its coal, and 70% of
its steel. By 1914, Britains
shares in these industries
had fallen to 20% for cotton,
20% for coal, and just 10%
for steel. Both Germany and
the US had overtaken Britain
as industrial powers. Britain
still had the largest empire.
It peaked in the early 20th
century, when Britain held authority over onefifth of the worlds land-mass and one-quarter
of its people. But the industrial power needed
to sustain global hegemony was waning.
ABOVE Seapower: the Royal Navys Grand

Fleet puts on a show of force shortly before
the outbreak of war. The British had won the
naval arms-race with Germany by 1914.
a naval power without land frontiers and only

a small professional army, they easily kept their
lead over the Germans. Britain increased the
size of its fleet from 29 battleships in 1899 to
49 in 1914 by which time, the Germans had
effectively abandoned the race.
Britains alliances with France and Russia
were also direct responses to the perceived
German menace. The Triple Entente imposed
an unsustainable military burden on Germany.
The French and Russian armies were growing at
the same time as the Royal Navy, and Germany
a continental power with enemies on two sides
was forced to switch resources to the further
enlargement of its own army. Germany could
not simultaneously defend itself in Europe and
challenge Britain at sea.
Poor Little Belgium

The notion maintained by British statesmen
at the time that Germany was exceptionally
aggressive or expansionist is absurd. German
leaders were participants in a European-wide
conflict for empire and security. Britains dreadnoughts and Britains alliance with France and
Russia were as aggressive and expansionist
as anything done by the Kaisers Government.
Indeed, it was the perception of German
leaders that they were losing the arms-race
and that the balance of power was tipping
against them that made them more willing
to go to war in 1914 than their enemies.
Britain was in a strong position in 1914.
It enjoyed global maritime supremacy and
belonged to the dominant coalition inside
Europe. Germany went to war in 1914 to try
to break that position. Britain went to war
to maintain it. The prize was empire.k
23
THE GREAT POWERS
Britain in 1914
CHIEF OF THE
GENERAL STAFF
(de facto Army C-in-C)
Field-Marshal Lord
Kitchener, Secretary
of State for War
HEAD OF STATE
King
George V
WAR INDUSTRIES
VICKERS LTD, SHEFFIELD,
ERITH, CRAYFORD,
DARTFORD, and BARROWIN-FURNESS a major
supplier of artillery, smallarms, warships, merchant
vessels, and aircraft .
JOHN BROWN & COMPANY, SHIPBUILDERS,
CLYDEBANK, GLASGOW
naval and merchant vessels.
SIR W G ARMSTRONG
WHITWORTH & CO LTD,
ELSWICK, NEWCASTLE
UPON TYNE another
major supplier of artillery,
small-arms, warships, merchant vessels, and aircraft .
ROYAL DOCKYARDS,
PEMBROKE, DEVONPORT,
PORTSMOUTH, and
CHATHAM construction
of naval vessels.
24
POPULATION
By 1914 the Empires railway network had a total of
32,265km
(20,053 miles) of track
The railway companies
held a total of 23,000
locomotives, almost 73,000
carriages, and 1,400,000
goods wagons
46,089,000
ARMY STRENGTH:
247,500 RISING TO
661,500
ON MOBILISATION
COVENTRY ORDNANCE
WORKS LTD, COVENTRY
artillery.
SOPWITH AVIATION
COMPANY, KINGSTON
UPON THAMES;
SHORT BROTHERS,
EASTCHURCH, ISLE
OF SHEPPEY; and A V
ROE & COMPANY, MANCHESTER military and
civilian aircraft .
MILITARY EFFECTIVENESS
As a maritime empire, Britain had traditionally given priority to maintaining a
powerful navy and regarded the army as force primarily for imperial policing.
Humiliating defeats in the early stages of the Boer War and increasing German
millitarisation forced the rapid modernisation of the army in the decade before
the outbreak of the First World War. Although it was tiny in comparison to the
vast conscript forces of continental Europe, the armys all-volunteer, long-service
personnel were well-equipped and trained to an exceptionally high standard.
Intensive musketry training meant that both infantry and cavalry operating in
the dismounted role could easily fire 15 aimed rounds a minute, firepower which
shot flat many German attacks in the first months of the war.
July 2014
HEAVY ARTILLERY
FIELD ARTILLERY
RIFLE
MACHINE-GUN
O.303in Vickers
.303in Short
Magazine
Lee-Enfield
(SMLE)
Mark III
.303in Lewis
O
9.2in Howitzer Mark I
O
BL 60pdr Mark I
Field Gun
OOrdnance QF 4.7in Gun
OOrdnance QF 4.5in
Howitzer Mark I
OOrdnance QF 18pdr
Gun Mark I
OOrdnance QF 13pdr Gun
O
MEDIUM ARTILLERY
6in 30cwt Howitzer
O
MOUNTAIN ARTILLERY
ANTI-AIRCRAFT ARTILLERY
Ordnance BL 2.75in
Mountain Gun
OOrdnance BL 10pdr
Mountain Gun
O
AIR FORCE STRENGTH
RFC: 179 aircraft

RNAS: 91 aircraft and
seaplanes PLUS 7 airships
Ordnance QF 3in 20-cwt

Mark I
O
NAVAL STRENGTH
Until about 1900, France and Russia were
regarded as posing the greatest threat to British
maritime supremacy. The situation then changed
radically with the rapid expansion of the Imperial
German Navy, which drove Britain into a naval
arms-race and de facto alliances with France and
Russia. In response to the German threat, the
Royal Navy deployed the bulk of its strength (the
Grand Fleet) to northern bases, primarily Scapa
Flow and Rosyth.
battleships
18 dreadnought
6 under construction
PLUS
29
74 submarines
pre-dreadnought
battleships
PLUS 31 under construction
270
destroyers
seaplane carriers (all under construction

or conversion from merchant vessels)
52 protected cruisers
8 battlecruisers (1 under construction)
32 armoured cruisers
25
Image : WIPL
THE GREAT POWERS

The crisis turned on the fate of Belgium.
Facing a war on two fronts against superior
force, Germanys Schlieffen Plan envisaged
a lightning six-week war to crush France,
before shifting the bulk of German forces
to the east to deal with the slower-moving
Russians. The plan was inoperable without
violation of Belgian neutrality to allow
rapid passage of German troops through
the open country north and west of the
Ardennes. This, however, virtually guaranteed British military intervention.
This was not because it was a British principle to defend small nations. The claims
of the Liberal Imperialists to this effect were
laughable hypocrisy in 1914 if you were Irish.
What is true is that the violation of Belgian
neutrality supplied the hawks with invaluable
war propaganda, allowing them to swing a
majority in favour of war, first in the Cabinet
(there were only two resignations), then in
the Commons (war backed by acclamation),
and finally in the country as a whole (where
recruiting stations were overwhelmed by
the number of volunteers).
But behind the rhetoric, Belgium had
real strategic significance. The British had
helped to create the country in the 1830s,
providing a guarantee of its neutrality at
the Treaty of London in 1839. This reflected
traditional British policy with regard to Europe:
that it should be divided into competing states,
not united under a single hegemon; and, in
particular, that the Channel ports should
not be under the control of a hostile power,
such as might challenge British naval
supremacy. The creation of a small independent state on the Channel coast was, for the
British, an ideal security measure.
The issues in 1914 were, therefore, from
Britains point of view, not radically different
from those of 1588, 1704, 1815, and 1940.
In each case, a would-be European hegemon
Philip IIs Spain, Louis XIVs France,
Napoleonic France, and Nazi Germany
threatened the security of Britain, her
empire, and her sea-power.
The Kaisers invasion of Belgium in August
1914 was the same: it crossed Britains red line,
and triggered her entry into the war. The five
Liberal Imperialists in the Cabinet had seen it
coming. So had General Henry Wilson in his
secret staff talks with
the French.
By the beginning of
August 1914, eastern
Europe was at war. The
process was completed
on 1 August when
Germany both a
western and an eastern
26
European power declared war on Russia. This,

of course, started the clock of the Schlieffen
Plan ticking, for Germany was committed to
neutralising France before confronting Russia.
The French sent panicky messages to London
seeking clarification of the British position.
On 2 August, however, the British
Government felt unable to promise more than
action to prevent the German High Seas Fleet
sailing through the North Sea to attack the
French ports. The Liberal Imperialists did not
yet have clear backing from the Cabinet and
Parliament for war. But it was on this day that
Germany demanded unrestricted passage for
her armies through Belgium, and sent troops
into Poland, Luxembourg, and France.
France and Germany declared war on
each other on 3 August. On that same day, Sir
Edward Grey addressed the House of Commons
for nearly an hour. It was the most important
speech of his life: the Cabinet had made its decision, and he was presenting the Governments
case for war, not only to Parliament, but to the
country at large the speech was as much for
The Times next day as for the Commons.
On 4 August, the Germans

declared war on Belgium, and
German troops crossed the frontier.
Britain ordered mobilisation, and
issued an ultimatum saying that if
German troops were not withdrawn
from Belgium within 12 hours the
two countries would be at war.
Just for a scrap of paper Great
Britain is going to make war on a
kindred nation: that was German
Chancellor Bethmann-Hollwegs
bitter comment to the British
Ambassador in Berlin. It was a
curiously nave remark. Kinship
counted for nothing in Great Power
politics. Treaties (scraps of paper)
counted for little any more, except in
so far as they reflected Great Power
interests. Britain, as BethmannHollweg surely knew, went to war to
protect the British Empire. The German invasion of Belgium was merely the tipping-point.
The ultimatum expired at midnight.
Patriotic crowds sang the national anthem
outside Buckingham Palace. Moderate
Irish nationalists, Suffragettes, and Labour
leaders proclaimed their support for
war. And Sir Edward Grey, watching the
gas-lamps being lit from a Foreign Office
window, said to a friend: The lamps are
going out all over Europe; we shall not see
them lit again in our lifetime. r
BELOW Sir Edward Grey (1862-1933), Liberal
Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916.
The lamps are going out all

over Europe; we shall not see
them lit again in our lifetime.
Image: WIPL
The August Crisis
LEFT The Daily Mirror expresses

the national mood.
Sir Edward Grey (1862-1933)

July 2014
D-Day
D-Day involved detailed co-ordination between air, land, and sea
forces. We mark the 70th anniversary with detailed analysis of key
aspects of the planning and technology of what remains the most
complex combined-arms operation in the history of war.
ow were tens of thousands of infantry landed on the Normandy

beaches on 6 June 1944? How was the supply of ammo, fuel,
water, rations, and everything else required by an army of
invasion managed on crowded beaches under heavy fire
from artillery and machine-guns? How were the beachheads
protected from counter-attack, and given time to consolidate?
Our D-Day anniversary special looks at the overall strategy and tactics, and
then focuses on three components of the logistical and military framing
of the Normandy Landings: the projection of combat elements to the battle
zone; the organisation of supply on contested beaches; and the aerial interdiction of enemy communications.k
D-DAY
Strategy
and tactics
Most accounts of D-Day focus on the high drama of the actual landings whether by airborne
forces on either flank of the beaches, or by armour and infantry on the beaches themselves.
Yet, with the major exception of Omaha, the actual combat on the beaches was relatively brief.
t is not that everything went according

to plan. Thousands of men on the
morning of 6 June 1944 found themselves air-dropped or beach-landed
in the wrong place. Thousands were
unable to carry out their orders. Thousands
became lost on a chaotic, crowded, fastchanging battlefield.
Never was the Napoleonic dictum that
no plan survives first contact with the enemy
more fully confirmed than on D-Day, as
countless junior officers and NCOs, finding
themselves at the head of small groups of men,
improvised ways to neutralise and penetrate
the German defences that had little to do with
any pre-operation planning or training.
Senior officers played only a small part,
and the supreme commander none at all.
Eisenhower later admitted that there was
nothing for him to do once he had made

the decision to go. He had launched a soldiers
battle, and all he could do was to wait for
news. According to an aide, when his soldiers
first stormed ashore, he was in bed reading
a cowboy story.
But it did not matter that much of the
plan came apart in the execution. Other
factors were decisive. As well as the courage,
resolve, and quick-wittedness of the men on
the ground, there was the sheer preponderance of mass and firepower deployed in
support of the landings. And this, in turn,
enabled Allied commanders to eliminate all
avoidable risk by taking action to neutralise
all conceivable enemy resistance.
Rommel, in charge of Hitlers Atlantic Wall
defences, had predicted the massive scale and
significance of the coming battle. The first 24
ABOVE British Commandos assemble at
a coastal port in England on 4 June 1944,

in readiness for sailing to France for the
liberation of Europe.
IN DETAIL
The US 82nd Airborne Division took heavy

losses during the invasion, with 16% of its
troops killed on the 6 June alone. The main
reason for their premature deaths were the
buckled chute-harnesses, which were difficult
to remove after landing. The extra time it
took to disengage from their parachutes was
long enough for them to be picked off by the
defending gunners. After this disastrous day,
the American troops started using Britishdesigned quick-release buckles.
hours of the invasion will be decisive, he said.

For the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be
the longest day.
Churchill echoed this sense of the historical
gravity of the moment: the D-Day operation
was, in his view, the most complicated and
difficult that has ever taken place.
THE ATLANTIC WALL
ABOVE General Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the order of the day, Full victory nothing else,
to paratroopers somewhere in England, just before they boarded their aeroplanes to participate
in the first assault in the invasion of the Continent. According to an aide, when his soldiers first
stormed ashore, he was in bed reading a cowboy story.
30
Yet, when all is said and done, the landing

beaches did not become the terrible killingground that Hitler hoped for and Rommel
planned for. The greatest amphibious assault
of all time the assault on the western wall of
the impregnable fortress of Nazi-occupied
Europe was accomplished with comparatively modest loss. The Allies suffered about
10,000 casualties, around a quarter of whom
were killed. The British Armys loss of about
3,000 men on 6 June 1944 was a mere twentieth of what it had suffered on 1 July 1916.
How come? The Atlantic Wall defences
were incomplete and poorly garrisoned. Elite
reserve formations mainly panzer divisions
were held back too far from the beaches to
intervene on the first day (Rommel knew the
July 2014
risk and was, in fact, on his way to visit

Hitler to get the policy changed when the
Allies landed). But the terrible dangers
should not be underestimated.
A contested landing from the sea is an
immensely complex, difficult, and risky
operation, in which the odds are heavily
stacked in the defenders favour. Since
Rommels arrival in France in November
1943 and his discovery that the muchvaunted Atlantic Wall was largely a figment
of Hitlers Cloud-cuckoo-land the Desert
Fox had worked marvels. Half a million
men had been set to work. Millions of tons
of concrete had been poured into emplacements. Mile upon mile of Medieval-style
beach obstacles had been sown between
high and low water jagged structures of
steel and concrete laced with high explosive.
Five million mines had been laid.
Covering the beaches were bunkers, pillboxes, and artillery emplacements designed
to withstand naval and aerial bombardment,
and to enfilade the beaches from end to end
as men and machines struggled in the mesh
of obstacles, like flies in a web. Where there
were gaps because of lack of guns, Rommel
improvised by emplacing rocket-launchers,
multiple mortars, flamethrowers,
and even miniature robot tanks
carrying high explosive that
could be detonated remotely.
IN DETAIL
On the scramble
up the beaches,
the Allies faced
concentrated heavy
machine-gun fire
from the defending
Germans. Among
the weapons
providing that fire
was the German
MG 42, which had
the fastest rate of
fire of all the World
War II machine-guns,
and is still widely
regarded as the
wars finest heavy
machine-gun.
the force for breakout. That is why the

whole of Allied planning had focused on
the longest day. The rest of the battle for
Normandy and Europe was lost in the
mists of the future. Getting ashore and
securing a toehold was everything.
GERMANYS
STRATEGIC DILEMMA
Rommel and his nominal
superior, von Rundstedt, overall
commander in the West, were at
loggerheads over strategy. Von
Rundstedt wanted to hold the
panzers and other reserves back
for a decisive counter-attack.
Rommel wanted to fight on the
beaches. Here, he believed, the
Allies would be at their most vulnerable. They could deploy only
a fraction of their strength in the
initial assault waves, and if these
could be scythed by concentrated
ABOVE One of Major-General Percy Hobarts Specialised
fire and then counter-attacked by
Armour vehicles, this flail tank was used to clear away the
armoured formations, the whole
mines laid by the Germans. Some five million of them had
invasion might be thrown back
been laid on the beaches.
into the sea. Once in possession of
secure beachheads, a steady accumulation of overwhelming force would begin.
The scale of the operation broke all
The war will be won or lost on the beaches,
records. The fleet of more than 5,000 vessels
he said. Well have only one chance to stop
was the greatest ever assembled. The naval
the enemy, and thats while hes in the water
operation orders were, at three inches thick,
struggling to get ashore.
the fattest ever compiled. The bomber formaRommel, surely, was right. Despite the
tions were so massive they took two and a half
subsequent stalemate around Caen, after
hours to pass over London; there were to be
D-Day itself there was never any real doubt
over 9,000 Allied aircraft in action on 6 July.
that the Allies would hold their beachheads
The bombardment planned for D-Day was
and, as the build-up continued, accumulate
the heaviest in the history of war.
OVERWHELMING FORCE
Dozens of new inventions had been massproduced artificial harbours, swimming
tanks, specialised landing-craft, midget
submarines, and much else. Major-General
Percy Hobart had devised a range of Funnies
(officially, Specialised Armour) that included
flail tanks to clear minefields, bobbin and
roly-poly tanks to lay roadways, tanks carrying
fascines or bridges for passing ditches, others
that could turn themselves into ramps for
others to climb, and yet more armed with
mortars (petard tanks) or flamethrowers
(crocodile tanks) for crushing enemy bunkers.
Massive firepower. Ingenuity, enterprise,
and raw courage in the drop-zones and on
the beaches. The fastest possible accumulation of reserves and supplies to sustain the
offensive as the front-line pushed into the
dunes, marshes, and seaside villages beyond.
D-Day was about air, sea, and land co-ordination;
it was about planning and logistics; it was
about hundreds of thousands of army, navy,
and airforce personnel forming the tail
working effectively to enable the few tens
of thousands at the sharp end to maintain
forward momentum.
We look in detail at three aspects of the
operation. Nick Hewitt (p.34) discusses the
evolving technology of specialist amphibious
vessels landing-craft and thus offers a naval
perspective on the challenges of D-Day. Nigel
Sale (p.38) reveals the vital work of beach
management immediately after the first landings without which there would have been
chaos and a rapid collapse of the front-line
through lack of supply and support. Thomas
Withington (p.41) considers one of the many
roles of airpower: the interdiction of enemy
communications to isolate the German forces
near the beaches from reinforcement and
delay large-scale counter-attack. r
31
D-DAY
MHM places D-Day within the context of Operation Overlord,
picking out some of the most brutal clashes and key events,
from the huge-scale preparations to the Liberation of Paris.
JUN 06: 7.25AM

BRITISH AND FREE FRENCH FORCES LAND
AT SWORD BEACH IN OPERATION OVERLORD
JUN 10
Stretching 8km from Ouistreham to Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer,

Sword Beach was the farthest east of the landing points
during the operation, and around 15km from Caen. The
initial landings were achieved with low casualties, but the
British forces ran into heavily defended areas behind the
beachhead. These were the only Allied landings that faced
attack by German Panzer Divisions on 6 June 1944.
RAF SUCCESSFULLY KNOCKS

OUT PANZER GROUP WESTS
LA CAINE HEADQUARTERS
JUN 06:
6.30AM
AMERICAN FORCES
LAND AT
OMAHA BEACH
Three days after the Normandy landings, the new

location of Panzer Group Wests headquarters
was revealed to British Intelligence, who had
deciphered German signals traffic. On 10 June
1944, aircraft of the Second Tactical Air Force
bombed the village. The raid was carried out by
40 rocket-armed Typhoons in three waves from
low altitude, and by 61 Mitchells, which dropped
500lb bombs from 12,000ft.
JUN 11
BATTLE OF
LE MESNILPATRY
APR
1944
APR 22
ALLIED FORCES
BEGIN EXERCISE
TIGER, A REHEARSAL
FOR THE D-DAY
INVASION

JUN 07
JUN 06:
7.35AM
BRITISH FORCES
LAND AT GOLD
BEACH
JUN 13
BATTLE OF
BLOODY
GULCH

JUN 13
BATTLE OF VILLERS-BOCAGE
JUN 06:
7.55AM
CANADIAN AND
BRITISH FORCES
LAND AT JUNO
BEACH
JUN 06:
8.30AM
BRCOURT
MANOR
ASSAULT
32
THE BRITISH FORCES INITIATE

OPERATION PERCH TO CAPTURE
GERMAN-OCCUPIED CAEN
The intention of Operation Perch was to encircle
and seize the German-occupied city of Caen, a
major Allied objective in the early stages of the
invasion of north-west Europe. Fierce German
resistance and miscommunication among the
British top-brass inhibited the operation, before
its objectives were finally achieved.
During Operation Perch, a Brigade

group of the 7th Armoured Division
attempted to exploit a gap in the
German defences to the west of the
city. The British bypassed the frontline, and reached the small town of
Villers-Bocage, but the Germans
had anticipated the thrust and
hastily repositioned their reserves
to cover their open flank. As the
Brigade group advanced beyond the
town, it was ambushed by German
heavy tanks, which forced the
British to abandon Villers-Bocage
for a more defensible position. The
Brigade group was withdrawn
during the night of 14-15 June.
July 2014
JUL 19-25
BATTLE OF
VERRIRES
RIDGE
JUN 28
MAIN ATTACK OF OPERATION EPSOM
Operation Epsom was plagued by bad weather
on 26 June, both at the battlefield itself, where
rain had made the ground boggy and there was a
heavy mist, and over the United Kingdom during
the early hours of the morning, resulting in aircraft
being grounded and the planned bombing missions
being called off. However, No.83 Group RAF, already
based in Normandy, were able to provide air support
throughout the operation.
The 49th (West Riding) Infantry Division resumed
Operation Martlet at 0650, although without
significant artillery support as this was diverted to
the main operation. The Germans were able to slow
the British advance, and then launched an armoured
counter. This in turn was halted after a strong start,
when British armour moved up, and the two sides
engaged in a tank battle in the confined terrain.
However, informed during the afternoon that a
major British offensive was under way further east,
SS-Standartenfhrer Kurt Meyer of 12th SS Panzer
called off the counter-attack, and ordered his tank
companies to return to their initial positions south of
Rauray. During the rest of the day, the 49th Division
was able to make progress, halting just north of Rauray.

JUL 18
JUN 23
BRITISH FORCES
LAUNCH
OPERATION
MARTLET
JUL 25-27
OPERATION
SPRING
AUG 07
GERMANS LAUNCH A COUNTER-ATTACK
Operation Lttich was intended to break the Allied offensive in

Normandy, and allow the Germans to destroy the Allied forces there.
The operation was code-named Lttich (Lige), the point at which
Ludendorff had opened the way for the great German march of
encirclement across the rear of the French army exactly 30 years before.
AUG 21
GERMAN POSITION IN NORMANDY COLLAPSES
AFTER FIERCE FIGHTING AT HILL 262
Hill 262 or Mont Ormel ridge, nicknamed The Mace (elevation 262m),
was the location of a pivotal engagement fought as part of the wider
battle of the Falaise Pocket during the Normandy Campaign. The
German Seventh Army had found itself surrounded by the Allies near
the town of Falaise, and the Mont Ormel ridge, with its commanding
view of the area, sat astride the Germans only escape route. Polish
forces seized the ridges northern height on 19 August 1944, and,
despite being isolated and coming under sustained attack, held it
until noon on 21 August, contributing greatly to the decisive Allied
victory that followed.
JUL 18-20

OPERATION
GOODWOOD
AUG
1944
JUL 10-12
OPERATION
JUPITER
AUG
14-21
OPERATION
TRACTABLE
AUG 25
LIBERATION
OF PARIS
LIBERATION OF CAEN
By the end of D-Day, the Allies had achieved their main
goal of carving out a beachhead along the Normandy
coast. They were then to move inland, with the
Canadians and the British pushing south towards Caen.
Caen was not to be an easy prize. From 7-12 June, the
3rd Canadian Division would encounter well-led and
effective German troops, including an SS Panzer Division.
Caen saw intense combat between Allied and Axis forces.
British and Canadian forces finally captured the city on
9 July 1944. After the war, rebuilding took 14 years.
33
D-DAY
Landing-craft
D-Day could not have happened without landing-craft.
Efforts are under way to save one of the last known survivors.
Nick Hewitt of the National Museum of the Royal Navy reports
on their vital role in modern amphibious warfare.
mphibious warfare is as old

as war itself: assault landings
have been recorded on ancient
Egyptian relief panels, and the
Persian landings at Marathon
in 490 BC were the largest-scale amphibious
operation in history until Gallipoli in 1915.
Nevertheless, an opposed assault landing
across open water was and remains the most
complex, difficult, and potentially dangerous
type of military operation. The enemy enjoys
all the advantages: secure land-based lines of
communication to reinforce and supply the
frontline troops; fixed defences protected by
geographical features like hills, settlements,
and rivers; and, in the 20th century, the
ability to deploy powerful assets like armoured
vehicles and heavy artillery against the invader.
Even as confident and aggressive a war
leader as Winston Churchill, never a man to
shy away from offensive operations, wrote of
the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944 that I was
not convinced that this was the only way of
winning the war, and I knew it would be a
very heavy and hazardous adventure.
Only hindsight allows us to be confident
about Overlord and the other great Allied
assault landings of the Second World War.
At the time, they were viewed with trepidation, and undertaken reluctantly and only
out of necessity.
34
The invaders were dependent on vulnerable

maritime communications, were often operating far from home, and, crucially, the
quantity and types of troops they could deploy
were limited by the numbers and types of
specialist ships they had to deliver them ashore.
GETTING ASHORE
Meeting the challenge of a successful assault
from the sea has exercised the minds of planners for centuries, but there were few options
available to alter the balance in favour of the
invader. If a port could not be immediately
seized, then everything guns and
horses, wagons and men had to be
landed from open boats or, at best,
adapted lighters and river barges.
If the landing was opposed, this was
an incredibly dangerous procedure.
Even though most landings were carried out by armed sailors and marines
essentially reasonably unencumbered

light infantry they still had to climb over
the bulwarks, exposed and vulnerable, while
they heaved themselves and their equipment
down onto the beach.
If they planned to land guns and other
heavy equipment, these often had to be dismantled, and the clumsy, weighty parts could
take a terrifyingly long time to manhandle
onto the beach, the unfortunate gunners
exposed to hostile fire all the while.
Even in the First World War, supposedly the
first technological war in history, assault landing
techniques had evolved little from those used
during the Napoleonic Wars 100 years before. At
Gallipoli in April 1915, the British and ANZAC
assault troops were packed into open rowingboats or forced to clamber down precarious
ladders fixed to the sides of improvised assault
ships, including, famously, the collier River
Clyde; casualties were horrendous.
RIGHT Churchill reviews American troops

at a base in England on the eve of D-Day.
The rebus visible on the side of each of
their steel helmets stands for Anywhere,
Anytime, Anyhow, Bar Nothing. Even the
famously confident and aggressive Churchill
harboured grave doubts about the outcome
of the landings, describing D-Day as a
very heavy and hazardous adventure.
July 2014
Image: AP Photo
LEFT An LCVP from the USS Samuel Chase,

manned by the US Coast Guard, disembarks
troops of Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st
Infantry Division (the Big Red One) on the
morning of 6 June 1944. They are wading
onto the Fox Green section of Omaha Beach.
LANDING-CRAFT
THE X-LIGHTER
Ironically, British planners had foreseen the
problem, and had already come up with a
design for a primitive landing-craft, known
as an X-Lighter, for use in the Baltic.
Based on a Thames barge, X-Lighters were
powered, flat-bottomed vessels with a ramp
and a spoon-shaped bow. But they did not
enter service until August 1915, just in time to
take part in the secondary landings at Suvla
Bay. Although they proved a success, the April
landings haunted the memories of British
decision-makers, and perhaps did more than
anything to ensure that the key planners
of the Second World War, notably Winston
Churchill, viewed the prospect of assault
landings with a distinctly wary eye.
Unfortunately, after the fall of France in
June 1940, Germany secured control over an
unbroken line of coast stretching from the
Spanish frontier to Arctic Norway, and along
the Mediterranean from the French Riviera
to the Dardanelles. If the Allied cause was
to triumph and Europe be liberated, assault
landings were inevitable.
I was not convinced that this was the only

way of winning the war, and I knew it would
be a very heavy and hazardous adventure.
Winston Churchill on the D-Day landings
PROTOTYPES
Most of the major maritime powers
experimented with designs for specialised
landing-craft during the 1920s and 30s.
Knowing that amphibious warfare was going
to be an essential skill for a remote island
nation with expansionist plans, the Japanese
were far ahead of their rivals, designing and
mass-producing a small assault landing-craft
known as a Dai-Hatsu, and during the war
with China deploying the worlds first
specialised landing-ship, the Shinsu Maru,
for an amphibious landing at Tientsin.
The British entered the war with a primitive
Mechanised Landing Craft capable of putting
a tank ashore, and a Landing Craft (Assault)
for safely delivering infantry.
Similar progress had been made in
the United States, although Germany, as a
primarily military rather than naval power,
never truly got to grips with the challenges
of assault landings, which is why the proposed
invasion of Great Britain in 1940, Operation
Sealion, would have been carried out using
an impractical and dangerous assortment of
converted coasters and Rhine barges.
From 1940 onwards, the British, first
alone and later in concert with their American
allies, were forced by circumstances to carry
out a series of increasingly complicated
assault landings: first the early commando
raids and the disastrous attempt on Dieppe
in 1942, then the invasions of Madagascar
(Operation Ironclad), North Africa
(Operation Torch), Sicily (Operation Husky),
and mainland Italy (Operation Avalanche).
Similar steep learning-curves were followed
in the Pacific, where United States forces
island-hopped their way to Tokyo. Each time,
ABOVE An artists impression of the Allied invasion of Sicily, for which the Allies were forced to carry out a dangerous assault
landing using the same craft as they would later use for the invasion of Europe. It was an experience they would learn from
when it came to the D-Day Landings.
NAVAL VESSELS

Naval combat ships

1,213
Landing-ships and landing-craft 4,126
Ancillary craft
736
Merchant vessels
864
TOTAL = 6,939
they were able to learn lessons and refine

techniques and tactics in preparation for
what would be the greatest challenge of all:
Operation Overlord, the invasion of occupied
France in June 1944. Amid all the extraordinary innovation that preceded Overlord, the
design and production of an enormous range
of specialist assault-shipping stands out.
LANDING TANKS
Some experts have identified as many as
60 different types of landing-craft used in
Overlord. By far the biggest were the famous
Landing Ships (Tank).
The British first deployed tank landingships in the Mediterranean, hastily con-
verting three oil tankers into crude assault

ships able to carry 18 Churchill tanks. By
Overlord, they had evolved into 4,080-tonne
ocean-going ships with a flat forward end
and massive clamshell doors that opened
to let down a ramp, across which tanks and
other vehicles could rumble.
Once empty, the LST could either float
clear on the next high tide, or winch itself
off using stern anchors.
Although LSTs had the enormous advantage of being able to discharge cargo straight
onto the beach, they were huge slab-sided
ships, slow and unarmoured. Nicknamed
Large Slow Targets by the sailors who crewed
them, they were too vulnerable to be used in
the first wave, when they would be an obvious
target for enemy gunners.
There were never enough LSTs to meet
every requirement, and it is remarkable
how often Allied grand strategy turned
on the need to shuffle small numbers
of these ugly, unglamorous workhorses
halfway around the world.k
35
D-DAY
LANDING INFANTRY
At the other end of the scale were the tiny
infantry landing-craft, the British-designed
and built Landing Craft (Assault), and the
famous American Landing Craft (Vehicle
and Personnel), originally conceived as a
workboat for the swampy inshore waters
of Louisiana by Andrew Higgins of New
Orleans, and thereafter known to history
as the Higgins Boat.
Each craft could carry a platoon of
fully equipped infantry straight into battle.
In between were literally dozens of other
specialist types, each carefully designed to
fulfil a specific function. Most numerous were
the Landing Craft (Tank), scaled-up versions
of an assault craft which still essentially
resembled an overgrown steel shoe-box,
with rudimentary machinery spaces and
crew accommodation crammed in aft.
More than 800 LCTs took part in Overlord,
each capable of carrying ten tanks or other
heavy armour into battle. As far as can be
established, just one of these remarkable
craft, LCT 7074, still exists (see box below).
CLOSE SUPPORT
Some LCTs were adapted to provide closerange fire-support to the assault infantry,
avoiding risking warships, which were in short
supply and were costly assets.
Perhaps the most memorable participants in
Overlord were the extraordinary Landing Craft
Tank (Rocket), which could plaster the beaches
with over a thousand 5in explosive rockets immediately before the landings. According to some
sources, their actual impact did not live up to the
undoubtedly terrifying visual impression they
made despite the noise and pyrotechnics which
accompanied their firings, they were inaccurate
and took as long as six hours to reload.
LCT 7074:
THE LAST D-DAY
LANDING-CRAFT
LCT 7074 is a Landing Craft
(Tank) Mk III, built by Hawthorn,
Leslie, and originally powered
by American Sterling Admiral
petrol engines. She was launched
without ceremony on 4 April 1944,
then completed and commissioned shortly afterwards. She
joined the 17th LCT Flotilla, part of
Assault Group L2, LCT Squadron
H of the Eastern Naval Task Force,
which supported the British
landings (made up of two British
divisions, one Canadian division,
plus two Army and one Royal
36
Marine Commando unit) on Gold,

Juno, and Sword beaches.
After the war she was re-named
NSC L (19), and work was started
to convert her into an emergencyrepairs ship for service in the Far
East. But when hostilities in the
Pacific ended, this was abandoned.
Later de-commissioned, she
was presented in 1948 to the
Master Mariners Club of Liverpool and adapted to become their
club ship. With her name changed
again, this time to Landfall, she
occupied a prominent position on
the Liverpool waterfront before
being purchased by commercial
interests to be turned into a
riverfront nightclub.
In January 2014, the 70th

anniversary year of D-Day, the
National Museum of the Royal
Navy began to investigate the
feasibility of salvaging and
restoring LCT 7074, moving her to
Portsmouth, and putting her on
permanent display ashore. The
project is being carried out in
partnership with the Portsmouth
D-Day Museum and National Historic Ships, who have judged 7074
significant enough to be included
in the National Historic Fleet.
Funding for this project has
been sought from the National
Heritage Memorial Fund, and
the bid was being considered
at the time of writing.
More effective were the Landing Craft

(Gun), LCTs turned into small warships with
the addition of two 4.7in naval guns or a
pair of Army 25-pdr gun-howitzers and
Oerlikon quick-firers mounted on a false
deck built over the tank hold.
Landing Craft (Flak) carried anti-aircraft
guns to fend off a threat from the Luftwaffe
that ultimately proved illusory.
Other specialist ships were less martial
in their function, like the Landing Barge
(Kitchen) and Landing Barge (Bakery),
designed to provide catering services afloat
to the thousands of soldiers and sailors
marooned in tiny assault craft with little or
no onboard facilities. Still others provided
floating repair or medical facilities.
DUKW
The Pacific war involved enormous distances,
which led to yet more ambitious and capable
types of assault shipping. The United States
July 2014
LANDING-CRAFT
The extraordinary
Landing Craft
Tank (Rocket)
could plaster the
beaches with over
a thousand 5in
explosive rockets
immediately before
the landings.
LEFT Plan of operations on D-Day, 6 June 1944, showing
British and American air-drop zones, the five landing
beaches, and the gains made on the first day. Note
especially the greater difficulties of the US forces as
reflected in their more limited first-day gains.
BELOW LEFT This amphibious DUKW was used to carry
US wounded to ships for transport back to England.
Navy developed Auxiliary Personnel Attack

Ships (APAs) and Attack Cargo Ships (AKAs)
to support their island-hopping campaign,
along with the innovative Landing Ship
(Dock), an assault ship whose hold could be
flooded to discharge smaller landing craft

too small and underpowered to make an
open ocean crossing under their own steam.
As well as ships that intentionally ground
themselves, vehicles that could swim became
a vital weapon in the arsenal of the Allied

amphibious warfare machine. As well as
the famous DUKWs, or Ducks which were
essentially standard GMC six-wheeled military
trucks, with a watertight hull and a propeller
miniature Ducks were designed using
similarly adapted jeeps.
The United States also introduced a wide
range of Landing Vehicles (Tracked), or
amtraks fully tracked, lightly armoured
vehicles that could bring troops from ship
to shore in relative security. Descendants
of the wartime LVTs are still in service with
many of the worlds militaries today.
The Second World War was the heyday
of the landing-craft, with the British and
Americans alone building nearly 50,000
vessels of all types. Although they would
never again be produced in such numbers,
landing-craft had become firmly established
as an essential requirement for any balanced
navy wishing to retain an amphibious warfare
capability, and they remain in the order of
battle of even the smallest of the worlds
navies; indeed, the modern Landing Craft
Mechanised and Landing Craft Utility are
essentially visually identical to their Second
World War predecessors.
Perhaps the greatest innovation has been
the introduction of what the US Navy has
dubbed LCACs, Landing Craft Air Cushion
basically small hovercraft capable of carrying
troops and equipment, formidably armed
with grenade-launchers, machine-guns, and
other heavy weapons. r
37
D-DAY
n 11 March 1943, LieutenantColonel Ronald Sale told

his men that the 1st Bucks
Battalion had been chosen
to form the nucleus of a
beach group. This was to be a new formation,
designed to land men, vehicles, and stores
across open beaches in the early stages of a
seaborne landing.
The need for specialist groups to provide
a trained and disciplined interface between
sea and land operations was one of the
crucial lessons learned from the otherwise
disastrous Dieppe raid.
From now on, he said, we have a seat in
the front row of the stalls.
Colonel Sale commanded 850 Light
Infantrymen, but the infantry element of
the beach group was only about a quarter
of its strength, which eventually reached
3,298 officers and men. A brief list of the
units under command gives a flavour of the

various skills required, and hints at the skill
demanded to lead such a diverse team (see
box Composition of a beach group).
Beach groups, their men distinguished by
white bands round their helmets, were established for all three of the British and Canadian
invasion beaches Juno, Gold, and Sword but
they have been air-brushed out of history. Was
this because their roles were not as spectacular
as that of the assault forces, or was it because
they were so successful, their contribution to
the landings so seamless, that there has been
nothing of interest to say about them?
In fact, the experiences of Nos.5 and 6 Beach
Groups could hardly have been more dramatic.
SWORD BEACH
The task of the two beach groups No.5
based on 5th Kings, and No.6 on 1st Bucks,
both originally Territorial battalions
was to land two divisions in the first 48 hours

and maintain them, and thereafter to land up
to 4,000 tons of stores per day. The prime role
of the infantry was to clear and defend the
beaches from counter-attack.
The task may have seemed simple, but
achieving it involved working in two dimensions. The physical dimension involved an area,
defended from both ground- and air-attack,
divided into two parts the first being the
beach itself up to the lateral road, the second
the hinterland beyond the lateral road (the
beach maintenance area). Both areas were
bisected by beach exits.
The dynamic dimension involved taking
account of the effect of the tide on the size
BELOW Having landed on French shores, these
British troops wait for the signal to move forward
during initial Allied landing operations in Normandy
on 6 June 1944.
Beach groups
Recalling his own fathers role on D-Day, military historian
Nigel Sale argues that beach groups played a vital and
largely ignored part in the success of the landings.
BEACH GROUPS
LEFT British troops of the Suffolk Regiment under
heavy fire at the Coleville end of Sword Beach. Even
today, it is clear that the underwater topography in
all three sectors of Sword Beach is far from ideal.
of the beach, while achieving a controlled

process of offloading and storage of a wide
variety of stores (and then being able to
find them again when required). Any
problems were compounded by casualties,
broken-down or drowned vehicles, demands
from the fighting troops, and the considerable enemy activity.
COMPOSITION OF
A BEACH GROUP
In addition to the core infantry battalion,

a D-Day beach group comprised:
Military Landing Officers party
Field Company, Royal Engineers
Mechanical Equipment Platoon,
Royal Engineers
Port Operating Company, Royal Engineers
Petrol Depot, Royal Army Service Corps
Detail Issue Depot, Royal Army
Service Corps
Two Field Dressing Stations, Royal Army
Medical Corps
Two Field Surgical Units, Royal Army
Medical Corps
Field Hygiene Section, Royal Army
Medical Corps
Ordnance Beach Detachment, Royal
Army Ordnance Corps
Provost Company, Corps of Military Police
Beach Recovery Section, Royal Electrical
and Mechanical Engineers
Two companies, Pioneer Corps
R AF Beach Section
Royal Navy Beach Signal Section
R Commando, Royal Navy
Stores Section, Royal Engineers
Field Transfusion Unit, Royal Army
Medical Corps
Beach Balloon Unit
Sword Beach was not a continuous strip

of sand, but comprised a series of beaches.
It was therefore known as a sector and was
subdivided into sub-sectors, which were of
varying lengths between landmarks.
These sub-sectors were code-named using
the letters of the phonetic alphabet Peter,
Queen, and Roger, from west to east. These
were further subdivided into beaches e.g.
Queen Red, Queen White, and Queen Green.
A visitor today can clearly see that the
underwater topography in all three sectors
is far from ideal, with rocks and sandbanks
ruling out the use of any beaches except Queen
White and Queen Red, a total breadth on this
part of the Allied line of only 1,500 yards.
DIVISIONS OF LABOUR
The Canadian and British divisions assaulting
Juno and Gold Beaches both attacked with two
brigades up and two beach groups per division,
whereas 3rd British Division attacked Sword
Beach on a one brigade front (because of lack
of adequate beach breadth) and logically might
have employed only one beach group. But two
had been allocated and two were employed.
Rather than have two beach groups duplicating all tasks, and because elements of each
group had trained for specific purposes, the
plan agreed between the two commanding
officers was to split the operation into two
parts, one unit to work the beach, the other
the beach maintenance area. Thus No.5
Beach Group would run the beaches with
elements of No.6 under command, while
No.6 would work the maintenance area
with elements of No.5 under command.
On D-Day, needless to say, little went
according to plan. Although the assault
troops had swept in ahead, a number of
enemy positions had been by-passed or
had not been cleared effectively. German
snipers and machine-gunners were still

active, and intermittent shells were coming
in from the left flank.
The commanding officer of 5th Kings/
No.5 Beach Group, Lieutenant-Colonel Broad,
was killed by a sniper shortly after landing.
Most unfortunate of all, a major German
strong-point at Lion-sur-Mer (code-named
Trout; see box on p.40) held out, in spite of
two attacks by 41 Royal Marine Commando.
This strong-point enfiladed the deadstraight lateral road between the beaches
and the beach maintenance area, so the
latter could not be used. This was a serious
problem. The sector stores-dumps at the top
of the beaches were intended (and only large
enough) to hold ammunition and petrol for
3rd Divisions immediate needs. The bulk of
the supplies were supposed to be stacked in
the beach maintenance area. From exercise
experience, it was apparent that the most
vital commodity was ammunition.
SALES COMMAND
Ronald Sale, commanding No.6 Beach Group,
landed on the second tide, and was immediately
ordered to assume command of No.5 Beach
Group. His command now totalled 7,000 men.
The tactical situation as darkness fell was
not all bad. Although Caen itself had not been
taken, and no link with the Canadian divisionk
BELOW The crew of a Junkers Ju 88. Several were
shot down by beach groups during the last daylight
attack by massed aircraft on D+1.
39
D-DAY
to the west had yet been made, the division
had a bridgehead three miles deep, and its
left flank had been secured by the 52nd Light
Infantrys brilliant glider-borne coup-de-main
capture of the bridges over the River Orne and
the Caen Canal at Bnouville. But on arrival,
No.6 Beach Group saw only a disorganised
beach, and the failure of the well-practised
plan. An uneasy night was spent.
During D+1, the military flow over the
beach increased dramatically, and so did
enemy retaliation. At 1100 hours a flight of
eight Junkers Ju 88s flew in low from the east.
Several were hit by the beach groups Bofors
and Oerlikons, and one fell near the sub-area
command post. Another Ju 88 dropped its
cluster bombs onto the main sub-area headquarters, killing three officers and three men.
This was the last daylight attack by massed
aircraft, but raids by individual aircraft continued, and so did massed attacks under cover
of darkness. On the night of D+1, a direct hit on
the DUKW post killed the officer commanding
229 General Transport Company of No.6 Beach
Group and his second-in-command.
PETROL FIRE
At 1200 hours on D+2, as the sounds of the
attack on Trout died away, a lone German
aircraft, chased by Spitfires, flew over and
dropped a single bomb on a DUKW carrying
petrol. This fire ignited the ammunition dump.
Stack after stack began to explode with
deafening reverberations into showers of lethal
fragments and burning material. This, in turn,
set fire to the nearby petrol dump.
Consider: 3rd Infantry Divisions operation
was stalled inland, and success was far from
assured. Had all the ammunition been lost,
and demands from the frontline not been met,
the division might have been forced back into
the sea, with unthinkable consequences for
the invasion as a whole.
40
TO BURN OR NOT TO BURN
For nearly an hour, the party worked in this

blazing inferno, until Colonel Sale was hit in
the stomach by a British shell fragment and
carried off unconscious. His place was taken
by the 1st Bucks second-in-command, Major
Carse, and, after a further two hours work, the
seemingly impossible had been achieved: half
the dump had been saved and, when an urgent
call for anti-tank ammunition was received
from division, the ammunition was supplied.
Some 400 tons of precious ammunition and
hundreds of tons of petrol had been lost. But
enough had survived to sustain operations,
and Sale and six others were awarded the
George Medal for gallantry.
The dumps reopened on D+3 in the beach
maintenance area on the sites allotted in the
original plan. On the same day, LieutenantColonel Wreford-Brown arrived to take over
command of No.5 Beach Group, and the two
Beach Groups were finally able to operate to the
original plan: No.5 running the beaches, No.6
responsible for the beach maintenance area.
Beach groups had originally been planned
to operate for a period of two months, but so
successful had the invasion been that, once
the Mulberry Harbours were in place, after
only 12 days in Normandy, 1st Bucks was
moved to Ouistreham and Riva Bella to guard
the strategically vital Caen Canal locks.
Ronald Sales No.6 Beach Group, for
practical purposes, ceased to exist (although
it continued on paper for another three weeks).
So ended the 1st Buckinghamshire Battalions
major contribution to the success of the largest
seaborne invasion ever mounted. r
Despite this, recognising the vital importance

of the ammunition dump, Lieutenant-Colonel
Sale rallied a small party to drag burning camouflage nets from the stacks, beat out blazing
grass, drive out abandoned lorries, and eventually demolish the stacks nearest to the seat of
the fire so as to create a fire-break.
BELOW A Mulberry Harbour, assembled in

preparation for the invasion of Normandy, with
military vehicles crossing a floating road. The
beach groups were so successful that, once
these temporary harbours were in place, they
were moved to guard the locks of Caen Canal.
TROUT
The strong-point at Lion-sur-Mer was

codenamed Trout. 41 Commando Royal
Marines had been tasked with taking Trout,
which contained one 75mm gun and two
50mm anti-tank guns, as well as machineguns, flame-throwers, and mortars.
The first assault had been repulsed,
and when three AVREs (anti-emplacement
mortar-firing tanks another of General
Hobarts funnies) were called up to support
the next attempt, all three were knocked out.
Then 41 Commando was itself attacked
by one of only two German counter-attacks
mounted on Sword on D-Day.
Trout was eventually captured about
midday on D+2, but it succumbed only to
a set-piece attack by 9th Infantry Brigade,
fully supported by tanks, artillery, and fire
from a destroyer.
6th Airborne Division would have been

hard-pressed to keep its grip on the vital Orne
and Caen Canal bridges. If they had been lost,
21st Panzer Division could have crossed the
river and rolled up Sword (possibly the entire
invasion coast) from the flank.
Many ordnance experts held the opinion,
however, that once an ammunition dump
caught fire, the only practicable thing was to
let it burn out and then to start stacking elsewhere. In this case, they were strongly of this
opinion, as the stacks were so close together.
July 2014
AERIAL INTERDICTION
Aerial
interdiction
G
Military historian Thomas Withington analyses the Allied air attacks
that severed German communications on D-Day.
eography had been kind to the
Allied military commanders
tasked with planning the
Operation Overlord landings
on the Normandy coast on 6
June 1944. The invasion area was flanked by
two of Frances greatest rivers, the Seine and
the Loire. The Seine takes a roughly northwesterly course from Paris to the port of Le
Harve on the English Channel. The Loire, on
the other hand, follows a westerly course from
the city of Orlans around 70 miles south
of Paris, to the port of Saint-Nazaire on the
Atlantic Coast.
These two rivers formed the southern
(Loire) and northern (Seine) edges of a
box that hemmed in the area where Allied
troops and their equipment would land.
Reinforcements for German forces opposing
the landing would have to traverse these
two rivers.
Neither the Seine nor the Loire is small,
their respective courses progressively widening
as they reach their estuaries. Allied military
planners quickly realised that to destroy the
bridges across each of these rivers west of Paris
would be to isolate much of the battlefield
from the rest of Occupied France, and cut off
the flow of enemy reinforcements.
TEDDER AND ZUCKERMAN

The plan to destroy the bridges over the Seine
and Loire were part of a wider Allied air
campaign known as the Transportation Plan,
designed to wreck the French rail network
to prevent its use for the movement of
German forces.
The Transportation Plan was conceived

by two men: the Royal Air Forces Air ChiefMarshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Deputy Supreme
Allied Commander for Operation Overlord,
and second-in-command to Supreme Allied
Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower;
and Professor Solly Zuckerman, Scientific
Director of the British Bombing Survey
Unit (BBSU).
In the words of the official BBSU report
on the strategic air war against Germany, the
objective of the attacks on the bridges, along
with the wider Transportation Plan, was
to dislocate enemy lines of communication
so as to impede the build-up of the enemys
forces once a lodgement had been achieved by
[Allied] troops in Normandy.
Eisenhower would issue his directive in
mid-April 1944 governing how Allied airpower
would be used to support Overlord. The
Transportation Plan formed a key part of this
directive, requiring the destruction of all rail
bridges along selected interdiction lines to
prevent through military movement by rail
An average of 200
heavy-bomber
sorties were
required to destroy
a single bridge.
ABOVE A USAAF B17 bomber on an airfield

in England in the lead-up to D-Day.
and the destruction of road bridges along

the SeineLoire interdiction lines, especially
the Seine River, to reduce enemy ability to
transport matriel and troops.
The task of destroying the bridges was given
to the RAF and the United States Army Air
Force (USAAF). The RAF would use a variety
of aircraft from Bomber Command and from
its 2 and 83 Groups.
The USAAFs 9th Air Force were given the
task of attacking bridges over the Seine and all
bridges over the Loire from the town of Blois,
34 miles south-west of Orlans, to Nantes at
the mouth of the rivers estuary. The 8th Air
Force was tasked with attacking bridges along
the northsouth ParisOrlans axis, so as to
isolate the battlefield from the east.
MODUS OPERANDI
Yet attacking bridges is easier said than done.
At altitudes of 20,000 feet, such structures
resemble little more than a thin grey line
crossing the landscape. They are therefore
usually attacked along their length (as
opposed to their width), to give aircrews more
time to get a bomb onto the bridge span.
In addition, steel and concrete make
bridges strong structures. The Germans,
moreover, realised that the bridges were vital
assets and defended them accordingly with
anti-aircraft guns.
These three factors made the bridges over
the Seine and Loire particularly tricky targets.
The challenge was summarised in the BBSUs
report, which noted that an average of 200
heavy-bomber sorties were required to destroy
a single bridge. Another estimate spoke of
4,400 tons of bombs being needed per bridge.
The 9th Air Force commenced its bridge
attacks on 7 May, hitting four Seine river
crossings using Republic P-47 Thunderbolt
fighter-bombers. However, attacks against
bridges across the Loire were postponed until
the commencement of the invasion, so as not
to alert the Germans to its location. Instead,k
41
D-DAY
ABOVE RAF Spitfire fighters escorting

Lancaster heavy bombers on a daylight
operation over Occupied France after D-Day.
bridges across the River Oise, running from

the Franco-Belgian border to the north-west of
Paris, were attacked, to deceive the Germans
into thinking that the Allied invasion would
fall on the Pas-de-Calais.
As a translated contemporary situation
report from German Army commanders in
Normandy illustrated, the deception operation had the desired effect: Concentration
of air attacks on coastal batteries between
Dunkirk and Dieppe and on the Seine-Oise
bridges confirm the presumed focal point of a
large-scale landing.
PRECISION TECHNOLOGY
The challenges involved in hitting a bridge
caused the 458th Bomb Group, part of the
8th Air Force, to equip its Consolidated
B-24 Liberator heavy bombers with
VB-1 Azon 1,000lb (450kg) radiocontrolled bombs.
While acknowledged as one of the
worlds first precision-guided bombs, the
first use of these weapons on 31 May
against a railway bridge crossing the Oise
21 miles north of Paris was a disappointment: all 14 bombs failed to hit their target.
That said, this was thought to be the result
of inadequate operator-training rather
than any fault with the weapon.
Yet the VB-1 bought more disappointment on 22 June, when it was deployed by
B-24s against the bridge at Saumur on the
Loire River, failing once again to destroy
its target. The bridge was attacked again by
USAAF Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses two
days later.
42
The USAAF was not the only force applying

technology to its bridge-busting efforts. The
RAF utilised new weapons in the form of the
colossal 12,000lb (5,455kg) Tallboy bomb
designed by Barnes Wallis.
Wallis was the engineering genius who
had devised the famous Vickers Type-464
bouncing bomb used against the Mhne,
Edersee, and Sorpe Dams in Germanys Ruhr
Valley on the night of 16/17 May 1943. The
Tallboy was designed to be used against fortified targets, penetrating the earth and then
exploding, causing a significant ground shock
hence its earthquake bomb nickname.
617 SQUADRON
This weapon was deployed for the first time
on the night of 8/9 June 1944, during which
Barnes Wallis, designer
of the famous
bouncing bomb and
the Tallboy bomb.
Avro Lancaster-I/III bombers from the famous

617 Dambusters Squadron were tasked with
attacking the rail tunnel at Saumur with the
intention of cutting the only north-south rail
line in the Loire Valley.
For the operation, 617 Squadron deployed
28 Lancaster-I/IIIs with three DeHavilland
Mosquito-IVs acting as pathfinders. Nineteen
of the Lancasters carried Tallboy bombs.
617 Squadrons aircraft were joined by four
Lancaster-I/IIIs from 83 Squadron.
Unfortunately, the bridge was left undamaged. Radar equipment on board the aircraft
intended to improve bombing accuracy failed,
causing flares marking the target to land
wide of the bridge, so that the bombs missed
their aimpoints.
Nevertheless, the Tallboy bombs dropped by
617 Squadron successfully blocked the tunnel,
severing the rail line. The raid, commanded
by legendary pilot Group Captain Leonard
Cheshire, was a success, being conducted
without the loss of any of the RAFs participating aircraft.
THE IMPACT
The impact of the bridge campaign by the
RAF and the USAAF can be judged by its
effect on German attempts to reinforce their
forces in Normandy.
For example, on 6 June, the day of the invasion, the 2nd SS Panzer Division, which was
located in the vicinity of the city of Toulouse
in south-western France, was ordered to
reinforce troops opposing the invasion. It
immediately began its long journey by road
and rail.
Rail-borne units were transported on the
line stretching from Toulouse northwards
via the city of Limoges in central France, and
then north-east to Chteauroux, before
turning north-west to Tours in the Loire
Valley. From Tours, the units would travel
towards Normandy.
Normally, the railway wagons carrying
the divisions equipment would have
crossed the Loire using the bridge at
Port-Boulet, 27 miles south-west of Tours.
However, this bridge had been destroyed
by air attack on 14 June. The only other
available bridge was in the city of Tours,
although serious bomb damage meant
that it could no longer support the weight
of a locomotive, requiring the individual
wagons to be pushed manually over the
bridge one-by-one.
Not before 23 June did the 2nd SS Panzer
Division arrive in Normandy. The destruction of the bridges, and the general attacks
on the French rail network as part of the
Transportation Plan, had caused a 450-mile
journey, which should have been completed
by the division in five days, to take no less
than 17 days.
July 2014
AERIAL INTERDICTION
SUPPORTING THE OFFENSIVE
RAF attacks against bridges in the invasion
area continued once the invasion had got
under way, so as to continue to frustrate
German attempts at reinforcement and
counter-attack.
On the night of 12/13 June, RAF Bomber
Command deployed 100 aircraft to attack
bridges across the River Orne in Normandy
during Operation Perch, the second abortive attempt (following Operation Neptune
launched on D-Day itself) by the Allies to
liberate Caen.
According to the official RAF narrative, The
Liberation of North West Europe, photographic
reconnaissance flown on the following day
showed two road bridges badly damaged
[along with] the railway bridge across the river
[Orne]. The attempt to liberate the city may
have foundered, but the attacks against the
bridges were considered a success.
Bridge attacks were performed by a wide
variety of aircraft. The RAFs 2 and 83
Groups operated by day and by night, flying
DeHavilland Mosquito-VI fighter-bombers
(2 Group), Hawker Typhoon-IB (83 Group),
and North American Mustang-III (83 Group)
fighter-bombers to this end.
According to the BBSU report, the combined efforts of the USAAF and RAF to hit the
bridges across the Seine and the Loire were a
success: in the fortnight preceding D-Day, all
the Seine road and rail bridges below Paris
were successfully destroyed in a variety of
attacks by fighter-bombers, medium bombers,
and heavy bombers.
EPSOM AND CHARNWOOD

Aircraft from 83 Group continued their
attacks against bridges on 27 June in support
of Operation Epsom, a British armoured
thrust intended to outflank and liberate Caen.
Two days later, additional bridge strikes
occurred in support of Operation Epsom with
Typhoons attacking crossings over the Odon
River. In fact, the aircraft from 83 Group
flew over 650 sorties according to the RAF
narrative, against the usual variety of tactical
targets, including bridges.
Such targets would again fall under the
remit of 2 and 83 Groups on 30 June, when
bridges were once again struck in support
of Operation Epsom, with the RAF this time
joined by aircraft from the 9th Air Force.
A further Allied attempt to capture Caen
was made on 8 July: Operation Charnwood.
On this occasion, 2 Group was deployed to hit
transportation targets in and around Caen.
The narrative states once again that many
trains, bridges, and moving targets were
attacked, with the intention of interfering
with enemy rail movement over a wide area
of France.
Charnwood was a partial success, with both

British and Canadian troops breaking into
the northern part of the city on 9 July, though
capture of the entire city would not be
accomplished before 20 July, following
Operation Goodwood.
BREAKOUT
No sooner had Caen been liberated than
planning commenced on the Allied breakout
from Normandy. Once again, transportation
targets were to be an important part of easing
the Allied path eastwards. The 8th Air Force
was earmarked to hit bridges, with a particular emphasis on those crossing the Loire.
Of special concern to Allied commanders
were German efforts to reinforce their units
in Normandy with the 271st and 272nd
Infantry Divisions, which had commenced
their deployment from the south of France.
To this end, Allied commanders found it
particularly desirable to block northsouth
and eastwest [railway] lines leading through
Paris to Normandy.
In addition to railway centres such as
marshalling yards and junctions to the south
and east of Paris, all of the bridges over the
Lower Loire were now to be attacked by
2nd SS Panzer
Division took 17
days to complete
its journey to
Normandy.
ABOVE Attacking bridges is a difficult manoeuvre

for ground-attack aircraft, involving the targeting
of a heavily defended target, which furthermore
presents a small target when seen from above.
aircraft from the 8th Air Force.

The 8th Air Force would increase the
volume of its attacks on French rail bridges,
hitting 17 in total on 17 July, causing widespread damage. Their counterparts from the
9th Air Force struck a total of 40 bridges with
P-47 Thunderbolts.
This momentum of air attacks against
bridges and other transportation targets
continued until mid-August, when the Allies
were finally able to breakout of Normandy
and commence their advance towards Paris.
Although the attacks on bridges had a
major impact, the Germans displayed characteristic ingenuity in restoring river crossings,
either by establishing temporary bridges or by
using alternatives such as river barges.
Yet such efforts would often come under
attack from Allied aircraft. Ultimately the
Germans efforts were simply not enough.
The destruction of bridges did not cause
the collapse of German opposition in
Normandy. Nevertheless, when coupled with
other attacks on the French transportation
system, and combined with the sheer weight
of the Allied offensive, the bridge attacks
prevented the Germans from regaining the
initiative and throwing back the invasion.
The destruction of the bridges across the
Seine and Loire Rivers, and across other
waterways in the invasion area, even though
they were at times fiendishly difficult to
attack, greatly eased the Allied advance
towards Paris, and the eventual liberation of
France on 25 August 1944. r
43
D-DAY
D-Day:
the decisive
victory in the West
y the evening of 6 June 1944,

five Allied divisions were ashore
on the Normandy beaches.
Hundreds of thousands of men
and all their equipment and
supplies would quickly follow as the beachheads were consolidated, artificial harbours
constructed, and thousands of ships ferried
men and matriel across the Channel.
The build-up was facilitated by
lingering German uncertainty about
whether Normandy was a feint. A multidimensional deception operation continued
to play on German fears that a landing
at the Pas-de-Calais was yet to come. The
dispatch of panzer divisions was delayed,
and, partly in consequence, German
counter-attacks in Normandy were launched
piecemeal as reserves became available.
The Allies never came close to losing their
toehold after 6 June.
But even if the Germans had played
their hand differently, it seems probable
that victory was beyond them after the
first 24 hours. Rommel was surely right:
once the Allies had secured the landingplaces, an unstoppable build-up towards
overwhelming force would begin, and

Nazi Germany would find itself confronting
enemies of equal power in both East and
West, grinding it to destruction in a relentless
war of attrition on two fronts.
THE BOCAGE
The German Army was a veteran military
machine of consummate professionalism.
It had pioneered mobile offensive warfare
in France in 1940 and in the Western Desert
in 1941. It had since displayed a mastery
of defensive warfare in the rubble of
Stalingrad and the mountains of Italy.
Now, though heavily outnumbered
and outgunned, in the close terrain of the
Normandy bocage a maze of small fields,
sunken lanes, and thick hedgerows it
was to demonstrate phenomenal powers
of resistance. For six weeks, the German
defenders of the ancient Norman city of
Caen, which the Allies had hoped to take
on the very first day, defied every attack
by Montgomerys army.
But this hardly mattered: either the
German Army in the West would be
ground down here, or it would have to
be ground down in another battle somewhere else. Whatever the plan, the grim
fact was that the defeat of Nazi Germany
depended on exhausting the resilience of
its armies in the field. And if Montgomerys
men did the hardest fighting, they tied
down enough German infantry, tanks, and
guns to allow the Americans on their right
to break out of the Cherbourg Peninsula
and begin the roll-up of the enemy line.
The breakout from the beachhead was
then rapid. German counter-attacks henceforward could disrupt and delay the Allied
advance across northern France, but they
could not stop it. Some 50,000 Germans
were captured in the Falaise Pocket. Paris
was liberated on 25 August, Brussels on
3 September, and by the middle of that
month the spearheads of an AngloAmerican army of about 2 million men
had reached the German border.
In the words of American military
historians Ernest and Trevor Dupuy:
The stupendous drive through France
had cost some 40,000 Allied killed, 165,000
wounded, and 20,000 missing. German
losses had been a catastrophic half a million
men in the field forces and an additional
200,000 in the coastal defences. Chewed,
disrupted, and battered, the remnants
now stood behind the dilapidated Siegfried
Line, seemingly vulnerable to an Allied
coup de grce.
The Germans recovered their balance,
rebuilt their strength, and counter-attacked
again. But these efforts could not alter the
outcome of the war; they could only delay it
by a few months. Without doubt, the struggle
waged by a few tens of thousands of men at
the sharp end on the Normandy beaches
of 6 June 1944 was the decisive battle of the
Second World War in Western Europe. r
LEFT A remnant of the Mulberry harbour, built
after the victory at Gold Beach on D-Day.
44
July 2014
FROM THE WILD GEESE

TO THE NAPOLEONIC WARS
In 1814, an Irish battalion served with Napoleon in the
Low Countries. They were among thousands of soldiers who
fought for the freedom of Ireland by taking service with the
enemies of Britain. Stephen McGarry has been investigating.
46
wo hundred years ago, in 1814,

a 500-strong Irish battalion in
Napoleons army garrisoned
the Belgian city of Antwerp,
one of the leading ports in the
First French Empire, when it was besieged by
a British army. This Irish light-infantry unit
was called La Lgion Irlandaise. It held out
for three months, until Napoleon was ousted
from power in April. The Siege of Antwerp
was to be the Legions last major action,
as they were shortly afterwards disbanded,
July 2014
Image: Galleries des Batailles, Palace de Versailles
Irish
Brigades
abroad
Protestant King William III and those of

the deposed Catholic King James II.
That wars repercussions have echoed
loudly down the centuries, most recently
during The Troubles, and to this day triumphal murals of King Billy the champion
of Protestantism in the Glorious Revolution
still adorn gable walls in Ulster.
The Wild Geese

The Flight of the Wild Geese was the
Romantic term given when the 14,000-strong
Irish army withdrew to France in 1691 following their capitulation in Limerick. This
marked the end of the First Jacobite War,
and spearheaded Irish Catholic migration
to the Continent. Many others followed in

their wake to soldier abroad, forced away
by discriminatory penal laws that left few
opportunities at home.
The Irish Brigades in France and Spain
wore red uniforms the colour of the deposed
Catholic king symbolising their allegiance to
the Jacobite cause. They hoped that a Stuart
restoration would finally return lands and
rights back home.
The Wild Geese was the covert name
given to the transportation of recruits who
went to serve abroad. The term has since been
broadened by historians to describe all Irish
people who migrated to the Continent from
the 16th to the 18th centuries.
The Irish Brigade of France was disbanded
in 1792, following the French Revolution, but
they were replaced in 1803 when Napoleon
raised the Irish Legion to spearhead an anticipated invasion of Ireland.
Irish troops proved themselves time and
again to be first-class soldiers. Their background of poverty in a rough climate suited
them well to the hard hand of warfare and
the rigours of military life. They quickly
established themselves as the storm-troopers
of the Continental armies they joined, and
took part in most of the defining battles of the
18th and early 19th centuries. They also served
in Canada and India, in Spanish America, k
Image: Het Leger Museum, Nationale Museum van Nederland
An epic musket
duel was fought
during the Battle
of Malplaquet
between two
Irish regiments.
The Battle of Fontenoy, 11 May 1745. The

Irish Brigade commander, Charles OBrien,
6th Lord Clare, presents a tattered Union
Flag to Louis XV and the Dauphin following
the British defeat in the battle.
ending a 125-year-old tradition of Irish

service in France.
The tradition of Irishmen serving in the
armies of Continental Europe is a very long
one. It dates back to at least 1587, when
Irish regiments were formed in the service
of Spain. Many were forced to seek fame
and fortune abroad after failed rebellions
and in the face of religious discrimination
at home. This was particularly so after the
First Jacobite War (1689-1691), fought mainly
in Ireland between the supporters of the
A trooper of Fitzjames Horse (on the right),

a unit of Irish cavalry in the French service
during the Seven Years War (1756-1763).
47
THE BATTLE OF CREMONA

1 February 1702
War of the Spanish Succession

The Italian campaign of the War of the Spanish
Succession opened in 1701 when the French
commander, Marshal of France the Duke of
Vendme, led his army in an attempt to drive
Prince Eugenes Imperial Austro-German army
out of the country. In early 1702, a French army
of 4,600, which included a 600-strong composite Irish battalion drawn from Dillons, Bourkes,
and Galmoys companies, withdrew into winter
quarters in the fortified town of Cremona.
Eugene commanded 10,000 Austro-German
troops, and had received intelligence that security in the town was poor: the French army
were relaxing following a difficult campaign.
Eugene planned to storm Cremona in a surprise
attack, as it was a strategic prize and its fall
would seriously compromise French control
in northern Italy.
The plan involved a two-pronged night
assault on the town: 4,000 troops were to
gain access through an open sewer leading
inside the towns walls, while a second force
of 2,000 would storm a fortified position
protecting the bridge over the river leading
onto the Po Gate, thereby enabling Eugenes
main force to enter the town.
The first wave successfully entered the town
through the sewer. The difficulty facing Eugene
was that a 50-man detachment drawn from
Dillons under Captain Stuart held his second
attack back at the Po Gate. The Irish took
position behind a palisade and unleashed their
volleys on the attackers. The call to arms was
sounded, and the remaining Irishmen rushed
in their nightshirts to bolster their compatriots,
forcing the enemy to withdraw.
By early morning, the entire town was under
Imperialist control, except the fortress, the Po
Gate, and the convent the latter two places held
by Irish troops. The Baron of Freiburg, lieutenantcolonel of another Wild Geese regiment (that of
Colonel Taafe), was determined to break through
the Irish lines with his Imperial cuirassiers.
The Irish formed square and fierce hand-tohand fighting took place. Freiburg was shot and
killed. The Imperialists were finally driven back,
and by the afternoon the town was secure.
Just under half of the 39 Irish officers were
rewarded for valour, and their defence of the
town sealed their reputation throughout Europe.
The Battle of Cremona was later commemorated with an Irish bagpipe tune (reportedly to
the same Gaelic air played by Irish bagpipers
during the battle) called The Day We Beat
the Germans at Cremona.
48
A soldier of the Regiment

of Lally, a unit of Irish
infantry in the French
service during the Seven
Years War (1756-1763).
and alongside General Washington in the

Revolutionary War.
Storm-troopers
Because of this, the Wild Geese often found
themselves facing their own countrymen on
the field of battle, since many other Irishmen,
of course, took service with the British Army.
During the War of the Spanish Succession
(1701-1714), an epic musket duel was fought
THE BATTLE OF FONTENOY

11 May 1745
War of the Austrian Succession

The Wild Geeses highest battle-honour was
earned at Fontenoy, a defining battle of the
18th century, fought close to Tournai in modernday Belgium. France wanted to secure success in
Flanders, where the renowned military theorist,
Marshal of France General Maurice de Saxe,
assembled his army.
Opposing him was the Duke of Cumberland,
William Augustus, George IIs favourite son,
commander of a 50,000-strong Allied coalition
made up of English, Dutch, and Hanoverian
troops, said to be the finest in Europe.
The skilful de Saxe manoeuvred his 45,000
troops like a master chess-player to the small
hamlet of Fontenoy, where he eagerly awaited
the Allies arrival. There he threw up five gunbatteries, each equipped with four cannon,
as he wanted to channel Cumberlands army
into the open ground between the villages of
Vezon and Fontenoy.
during the Battle of Malplaquet in the Low

Countries between two Irish regiments, one
in the British, the other in the French Army.
In 1744, two battalions of the Spanish Irish
Brigade were nearly wiped out in Velletri,
outside Rome, after clashing with Irishmen
in the Austrian service. On several occasions,
Napoleons Irish Legion crossed swords with
Irish regiments in the British Army.
While the Legion was serving in the
Peninsular War, they faced a formidable
foe, the famous Connaught Rangers (the
Devils Own). One can imagine the scene,
with both regiments belting out the same
regimental airs of St Patricks Day in
the Morning to rally their troops, but
from opposite sides!
Well over 50,000 Irishmen served in the
armies of France, Spain, and Austria. All
over Europe there were Irish generals and
barons, marshals of France, knights of St
Leopold, knights of the Order of St Louis
and Maria Theresa, knights of the Golden
Fleece and the White Eagle honours
awarded by European monarchs to officers
of exceptional merit and bravery.
At any one time in the mid-18th century,
there were over 500 Irish officers serving
on the Continent, and they would have
exerted significant political influence,
especially concerning any plans for an
invasion of Ireland and an attempted
Catholic Stuart restoration.
De Saxes 4,000-plus Irish Brigade was commanded by Charles OBrien, the 6th Lord Clare,
and comprised one battalion each of Dillons,
Clares, Berwicks, Buckeleys, Lallys, and Roths
companies. These were held in reserve on the left
flank beside Barri Wood, while four squadrons
of Fitzjames horse took post in the centre of the
field alongside French cavalry.
As dawn broke on the 11 May 1745, the French
batteries opened up. Cumberlands Dutch allies
recoiled in an attack on the right flank at Antoing,
and 15 squadrons of British horse were thrown
back by ferocious fire. As his initial assaults failed,
Cumberland was forced to march his 15,000
Anglo-Hanoverian infantry through the open
ground between Vezon and Fontenoy, with heavy
enfilade fire cutting swathes through his ranks.
But against de Saxes expectations, the Allied
column continued its dogged half-mile march
into the murderous cross-fire as if on parade,
and at 70 paces unleashed a deadly rolling volley
that cut through the French second line of veteran
Gardes Franaises and Gardes Suisse.
French cannon continued to rake the Allied
column with grapeshot. It had now lost one-third
of its strength. But still the steady advance contin-
July 2014
Image: Vinkhuizen Collection, New York Public Library
IRISH BRIGADES
THE SIEGE OF ASTORGA

21 March-22 April 1810
Peninsular War
The regimental colour of Dillons (Irish)

Regiment of France.
Reformers
Among the Irish officers, there were great
military reformers who helped modernise
some of the Continents antiquated armies.
The battle-scarred Lieutenant-General
Alexander OReilly from Co. Meath played a
major role in transforming the Spanish Army,
ued, with drummers beating the charge and the

sergeants halberds holding their men in line
while they frantically closed the gaps.
The infernal column had now almost reached
the centre of the French position. De Saxe
thought the battle lost. The French King Louis
XV was even urged to leave the field, and could
be observed nervously biting the fleur-de-lis
embroidered in the corner of his handkerchief.
Remember Limerick!
Colonel Thomas Lally of Clares now implored
de Saxe to send in the Irish Brigade to lead one
last charge: On what finer reserves could a
general call in a moment of crisis then six
battalions of the Wild Geese?
The Irish infantry shouted cries of Huzzah!
as they formed into line. Cuimnidh ar Luimneach
agus ar feall na Sasanach! yelled Lally with
drawn sword: Remember Limerick and Saxon
perfidy! This battle-cry was repeated down the
ranks, and was made in reference to the broken
Treaty of Limerick and the mens forced exile.
The French high command held its breath as
the Irish advanced up the incline, their bagpipers
belting out the Jacobite anthem, The White
while Field-Marshal Frank de Lacy played

a comparable role in the Austrian Army.
General Thomas Conway from
Co. Kerry was an Irish Brigade officer
who served as inspector-general in the
American Revolutionary War, before,
infamously, becoming embroiled ink
Cockade, while French cavalry and cannon

attacked the columns front.
The high drama escalated as an unnamed
officer of the British Guards suddenly rushed out
to the front of the Allied column and challenged
Captain Anthony McDonough from Co. Clare
to single combat with swords. The two armies
momentarily froze to witness the fight. The Irishman parried and smashed his adversarys sword
arm, forcing him to the ground, while a thousand
roars of Huzzah! came from behind.
The Irish received a volley, which brought
down their first line, but emerged through the
billowing musket smoke and smashed through
the columns right flank with bayonets. Colonel
Dillon fell mortally wounded, while Sergeant
Wheelock from Buckeleys snatched a colour
from Sempills Regiment of Foot (the forerunner
of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers), the only
flag taken in the battle.
The infernal column was broken into fragments. Cumberland retreated all night to Ath,
and there burst into tears at his defeat. In a few
minutes, the Wild Geese had saved the day for
the French, losing one-quarter of their officers
and 700 men in the process.
In April 1810, Napoleons 13,000-strong 8th Corps,

led by General Jean Junot, advanced to lay siege to the
Spanish-held town of Astorga. As Junot lacked a siege
train, his army was stuck outside the walls for three
weeks, suffering heavy losses without making any
impression. When French guns were finally brought
up from Valladolid, they easily made a breach in the
north-west corner of the city walls. An Irish Legion
detachment was selected to lead the assault battalion.
At around 5pm, a body of troops comprising 150
men of the Irish Legion and a contingent from the 47th
Regiment of the Line advanced to the rum-dum-dum
of the pas de charge and to cries of Vive lEmpereur!
Dubliner Captain John Allen (a veteran of the 1798
Irish Rising) led the forlorn hope, formed of voltigeurs (light riflemen) from his Irish elite company.
They dashed 200 yards under a hail of grapeshot
and close-range musket-fire, until they reached the
ditch in front of the city wall. Strewn with blood and
guts, Sergeant Costello thought he had been hit
by the cannon ball that blasted through a voltigeur
beside him, hurling remnants 20 yards in the air.
Into the breach

Allen was first to climb the breach. He saluted General Junot, raising his sword and flourishing it above
his head, urging his Irish voltigeurs to follow. Good
heavens! I would give 2,000 Napoleons to see that
brave man alive in the morning, the French general
was heard to exclaim, but it is impossible for him to
escape under such a tremendous fire.
The forlorn hope clambered up the wall, through
musket-fire and round shot, and, followed by the assault battalion, took possession of a house just inside.
They suffered heavy losses, but held their position
against constant enemy attacks all through the night.
In the morning, the Spanish low on ammunition
raised the white flag. Allens Irish company were the
talk of the army for their death-defying courage, and
as a reward the Irish 2nd and 3rd Battalions were
given the honour of being the first troops to march
triumphantly through the city gate.
The storming of the breach at Astorga had taken a
heavy toll: 112 killed and 294 wounded. Three Irishmen received the Lgion dHonneur: Captain Allen,
Lieutenant Perry for carrying a scaling ladder to the
breach, and a drummer of Allens company, who,
despite having both legs blown off, continued to
beat the charge. The bearded and weather-beaten
Irish Legionnaires, their uniforms ragged and frayed
(though it was still possible to make out traces of
orange facing on emerald green), exhausted after
weeks in the trenches, were detailed to escort the
5,000 prisoners on their two-day march down the
hot and dusty road to Valladolid.
49
IRISH BRIGADES
Five hundred
pickets drawn
from the French
Irish Brigade
stood alongside
the clansmen
at Culloden.
Irish families established themselves in Cadiz,

La Rochelle, Ostend, and Dunkirk.
Irishmen also used their professional and
commercial success for political purposes,
many of them contributing funds to Bonnie
Prince Charlies campaign to reclaim the
Stuart crown in 1745 and 500 pickets drawn
from the French Irish Brigade stood alongside
the clansmen at Culloden.
The legacy was felt well into the 20th
century. President Charles de Gaulle was
descended from the powerful MacCartan clan,
who had ruled part of Co. Down since the
11th century, before being unseated during
the English Conquest. De Gaulles ancestor
was Captain Anthony MacCartan, who went to
France with the Flight of the Wild Geese.
With so many eminent Irish Catholic families driven away during the long 18th century,
Irelands loss proved to be Europes gain. r
Stephen McGarrys Irish Brigades Abroad was
published by The History Press in Dublin last year.
An officer of Clares Regiment (on the left),

an Irish unit in French service, pictured as
uniformed in 1772.
50
July 2014
Image: Het Leger Museum, Nationale Museum van Nederland
a plot to oust General Washington as

commander of the Continental Army.
There were around a dozen Irish generals in
Napoleons army, and many are immortalised
on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Henry
Clarke was Napoleons Minister of War, and
was central to the creation of La Grand Arme.
Dubliner General Charles Kilmaine was one
of the few senior officers in whom Napoleon
had complete confidence: he commanded the
left wing of the Arme dAngleterre (the army
for the invasion of the British Isles) and of the
Arme dItalie (the French army of Italy).
For in far foreign fields from Dunkirk to
Belgrade, wrote the poet Thomas Davis, lie
the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade.
Some established the wine geese vineyards,
many of which are still operating, such as
Lynchs, MacCarthys, and Bartons. After
successful army careers, many ventured into
business. Richard Hennessy from Co. Cork
founded a famous distillery in Cognac. Other
BOUVINES
The battle that

made France
BOUVINES, 1214
Jack Watkins marks a little-known anniversary by recalling one of the greatest victories
of Frances Medieval kings over Englands hapless King John.
The Kings low

standing as a
fighting man
was evident
in his nickname:
John Softsword.
52
given to him in his lifetime, implied a

parallel with the Roman Caesars.
As the effective founder of a unified
France, his territorial gains increased
the royal domain fourfold. At Bouvines
in 1214 notwithstanding the fact that
he parted company with his steed yet
again he enjoyed his finest military
hour, delivering a knockout blow to
John of Englands hopes of reviving
the Plantagenet empire, inflicting
a catastrophic defeat on the Welf
dynasty of Otto IV of Germany, and
issuing a sharp rap across the knuckles
of the independent-minded Counts of
the Low Countries.
THE CAPETIAN DYNASTY

To appreciate the magnitude of Philips
accomplishments, it is worth winding the
clock back a couple of centuries. The lands
of the first Capetian King, Hugh Capet
(987-996), amounted to no more than the
area around Paris and Orleans, known as
the Ile-de-France. The Dukes of Normandy,
and the Counts of Blois and Anjou, were
bigger players on the scene, operating in
almost complete independence of the King.
While Hugh Capets immediate successors
were unremarkable, the Counts of Anjou
featured among their number notable warriors
like Fulk Nerra builder of some of western
Europes earliest castles Geoffrey Martel, and
Geoffrey Plantagenet. The latter would eventually win control of Normandy, and his son, as
Henry II, gained the crown of England.
All this meant that Philip II, at his coronation in 1180, faced an Angevin empire its
ABOVE Philip II Augustus, King of France

(the first so-called), 1180-1223.
RIGHT The Battle of Bouvines (1214).
dominion reaching to within a menacing

40 miles of Paris itself stretching from
Gascony, through northern France,
across the Channel to England, with
suzerainty also exercised over Scotland,
Ireland, and Wales.
But Philip Augustus was no ordinary
ruler, and, in any case, the French monarch
had certain things in his favour. First, his
right to the throne was uncontested, whereas
the internal feuding of the Plantagenets was
notorious, and the German kingdom was
divided between the factions of the Welf
and Hohenstaufen families.k
July 2014
Images: Bridgeman Art Library; WIPL
hilip II, King of France from

1180 to 1223, did not cut much of
a figure as a soldier. Ruddy-faced
and balding, a sufferer of sweating
sickness with a liking for a hearty
meal and a tipple, there were whispers that his
early return home from the Third Crusade
after the fall of Acre in 1191 was motivated
as much by cowardice and jealousy of the
more glamorous Richard the Lionheart
as by a desire to make mischief during his
rivals absence in the Holy Land. Frequently
unhorsed in battle during his long reign, on
one campaign in Gisors, he even fell into the
water while attempting a river crossing.
Those who regard Philip as the greatest,
certainly the most wily and able, of the
Capetian dynasty which ruled France in
unbroken succession from 987 to 1328 tend
to hail his political and administrative
achievements, and underplay his success
as a war leader. But the epithet Augustus,
k
Images: WIPL
BOUVINES
ABOVE A dysfunctional English royal family.

Philip II of France stirred up bitter rivalries between
father and sons, and between the two brothers.
Clockwise from top left: King Henry II, 1154-1189;
King Richard I, 1189-1199; King John, 1199-1216.
KING PHILIP AUGUSTUS

Philip Augustus once stated that people were
nothing more than dishcloths. English historians
have accepted this as confirmation that one of
Frances outstanding rulers was a cynical,
un-chivalric figure, holding more in common
with the widely loathed King John than with the
flower of knightly valour, Richard the Lionheart.
The French annals offer a more rounded picture,
however, and also suggest that Philips martial
54
Second, the Capetians had long placed

heavy stress on the sacral nature of their kingship. Capetian kings were anointed at coronation with holy oil, which may have stood for
little in the dynastys fledgling days, but royal
propagandists placed increasing emphasis on
it. Philip confidently projected the crown as
the enforcer of law and order, and the bringer
of justice in violent, unstable times.
qualities were under-rated. William the

Breton saw Philip as the invincible prince,
brave in battle, his arm powerful in the
use of weapons.
It is easy to imagine the warlike
Middle Ages as one set-piece battle
after another, but most engagements
were no more than skirmishes. When
Philip led his army at Bouvines, it
was the first time a French king had
gone into pitched battle in France
in nearly a century.
Above all, though like the best of generals

Philip had his share of luck.
FEUDING RIVALS
During the reign of Henry II, Philip had
fomented the bitter rivalries between the old
King and his sons, and then enticed John
to conspire against his elder brother when
Richard succeeded to the throne in 1189. Yet
But he was also a master strategist.

His success over John in Normandy
required much advance planning,
and a mastery of siege warfare.
Philip was also a formidable castlebuilder, playing a major role in the
development of the thick-walled
round tower as the most effectively
defensible fortification against
a siege. Examples include the
Medieval Louvre, as well as
Rouen, Gisors, and Falaise.
July 2014
King Philip was

threatened on
two sides by
powerful lions.
his plan to dismember Richards empire foundered on his rivals return from crusading.
The Lionheart was a mighty soldier
his Chteau Gaillard, built utilising all Richards
military experience from the East, towering
formidably on the limestone cliffs above
the Seine at Les Andelys, remains a lasting
monument to his prowess. When Richard
died suddenly in 1199 after being struck by
a lone crossbowman while conducting a
troop inspection, he had virtually restored
the Angevin borders to the state in which he
had inherited them. By his premature death,
wrote the chronicler William the Breton,
God had come to save France.
John, Richards successor, was by no
means the total incompetent he has
sometimes been painted, but his position was undoubtedly weaker, having to
transcend a disputed succession and deal
with unruly barons both resentful of the
tax burden of empire and disinclined
to fight in its defence. John also had
a reputation for treachery, scarcely a
quality to inspire unshrinking loyalty.
Most seriously of all, however, his low
standing as a fighting man was evident
in his nickname: John Softsword.
been an astonishing reversal in the fortunes

of the two kings in the space of three years.
John nursed an ambition to win back the
losses, and by 1213 he was ready for action,
using his still considerable wealth to bankroll a coalition of allies who were nervously
eyeing the growing confidence of their
French neighbour.
A broad plan was hatched, in which John
would launch an invasion from his lands
around Poitou in the west, while the allies,
nominally under the command of Emperor
Otto IV of Germany, would attack from the
north-east, so that (according to William
the Breton) Philip would be enveloped
from all sides by enemy troops.
A FORMIDABLE COALITION
On paper, it was a formidable coalition.
Otto had grown up in the court of Richard
the Lionheart, and was said to resemble
him physically. While his reputation as a
leader did not stand high, Philip had seen
him as a serious-enough threat to oppose
his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor,
writing to Pope Innocent III that, in John
and Otto, he was being threatened on two
sides by powerful lions.
Their alliance was something he had always
feared. When John and Philip had signed a
treaty in 1200, one of its clauses stipulated that
the English King should offer no help to Otto.
Ottos decision to fight Philip was motivated
by his need to offset his domestic weakness.
Johns money brought him some useful
partners, including Ferrand, Count of Flanders
and Hainault; William, Count of Holland; and
Henry, Duke of Brabant the latter an unreliable character, but valued for the quality of the
mercenary troops he could put into the field.
Some French nobles and malcontents also
joined the cause, notably Renaud Dammartin,
the Count of Boulogne.
The problem for the allies was that
they lacked a real leader. Otto IV was the
obvious figurehead, but this was an age
in which contingents fought under nobles
from their immediate clans or principalities, motivated by a sense of honour
and personal loyalty. Injecting unity ofk
KING JOHN
At first, John had held his own against
Philip, even scoring a notable military success over him at Mirebeau, and heading off
the challenge to his inheritance by his own
nephew, Arthur of Brittany, in 1202.
Within a year, however, Philip had
launched a major offensive in Normandy,
the jewel in the Angevin crown, winning
control of castles along the Seine, and
demonstrating his mastery of siege
warfare by taking Chteau Gaillard
once considered so impregnable that
Richard had boasted he could defend it
even if it were made of butter. Support for
John fell away rapidly in Normandy, and
further campaigning by Philip in the Loire
Valley brought similar results there.
In 1206, a treaty between Philip and John
allowed the latter to retain Gascony and
part of Poitou, but, humiliatingly, he had
lost Anjou, the cradle of the Plantagenets,
along with Maine, Touraine, Normandy, and
Poitiers, the old capital of Aquitaine. It had
ABOVE Emperor Otto IV of

Germany, King of the Romans,
1198-1209, Holy Roman
Emperor, 1209-1215.
RIGHT Otto IV meets the Pope.
Relations between the Holy
Roman Empire and the Papacy
were traditionally tense, since
both claimed authority as
champions of the Church, and
both had territorial interests in
Italy. Otto was excommunicated
by the Pope before Bouvines,
and his power in Germany was
crumbling at the time of the battle.
55
BOUVINES
Emperor Otto cut

a striking figure,
regally costumed
and bearing a gold
shield decorated
with a black eagle.
purpose into such an ad-hoc assemblage was
unlikely to prove easy.
By contrast, Philip Augustus, while leading
an army also fighting in contingents under the
control of their own lords there was no such
thing at this time as a national army was an
astute commander, delegated well, and felt able
to trust his advisers. Grasping the point that
his opponents lacked cohesion, and therefore
would want to bring him to battle as soon as
possible, his tactic was to delay a confrontation
as long as he could, allowing time for the
tensions among the allies to trigger splits.
APPROACH TO BATTLE
It was lunchtime on 27 July when the
49-year-old king, weary from hours in the
saddle, and having taken off his armour to
rest under the shade of an ash tree, received
anguished messengers crying out that the
enemy was already advancing on the rearguard.
Now Philip faced a dilemma.
His cavalry had yet to cross the Bouvines
bridge, and with only a few infantry remaining
with them on the east side of the river, they
faced massacre if he ordered the retreat to
continue. But if he hastily recalled the men
who had already crossed the water, they risked
facing their opponents while in disarray.
Philip took the counsel of his barons, who
argued for continuing the retreat, and that
of his most trusted adviser, Brother Gurin, a
veteran of the Knights Hospitallers, who urged
making a stand at Bouvines. According to
William the Breton, an eye-witness to the battle,
he then entered a nearby chapel, made a short
prayer, and, on re-emerging and being quickly

armed, jumped on his horse as lively and in
as great spirits as if he had been on his way
to a wedding or a celebration to which he
had been invited.
Riding to the centre of his troops, he told
the companies of knights to form, and ordered
the recall of the units which had already
crossed the bridge.
Such decisive action seems to have unnerved
the allies, who had counted on catching the
French by surprise. Already there had been
vehement arguments about going into battle
on Sunday a day when Christians were
forbidden to fight and now, in their haste to
catch the French, the allied troops had become
BELOW The early 13th-century battlefield was
dominated by feudal knghts and their retainers.
The equipment depicted here was typical: coat
and leggings of chainmail; steel casket over the
head; shield, lance, and sword.
THE ALLIED OFFENSIVE
56
Image: WIPL
The offensive was launched by John himself,

landing at La Rochelle in February 1214,
at which point Philips attention was
diverted in the north by a Flemish uprising.
But while John enjoyed initial success, he was
undermined by the refusal of the Poitevin
barons to support him in pitched battle.
In June, news that Philip had dispatched
his son Prince Louis to relieve Johns siege
of La Roche-au-Moine forced a hasty retreat
back to the coast. John was thus destined to
play no part in the showdown at Bouvines
though his continuing presence tied down
large numbers of French soldiers, and his
money ensured that his allies would adhere
to the second half of the plan.
In marching towards Flanders to deal with
the northern uprising, Philip had assembled
an army of 1,400 knights and in the region of
6,000 foot. When he reached Tournai in July,
he discovered that he was unintentionally close
to the enemy camp at Mortagne, to the south,
and decided to pull back towards Lille.
At first, progress was swift along the flat,
straight Tournai-to-Lille road, but a major
hurdle lay in the way. The French army column
was strung out over about three miles of road,
leaving it vulnerable as it slowed to file over the
narrow bridge at Bouvines, crossing the River
Marque. News that the allies were mobilising
reached Philip, but he seems to have misread
this as an advance on Tournai, and so pressed
on with the retreat.
July 2014
Map: Ian Bell
ABOVE The Battle of Bouvines, 27 July 1214, in which the army of King Philip II of France confronted
and defeated the army of Emperor Otto IV of Germany. Both armies were dominated by feudal
heavy cavalry, and seem to have formed up in the traditional three battles.
scrambled. They were also weary, having had

to cover more ground than the French in their
march from Mortagne.
With Philips rearguard quickly reinforced
by around 600 to 700 knights under Gurins
command, charged with parrying any
immediate thrust and winning time for the
redeployment of the men returning from
across the Marque, it was the allies who were
forced to hurry into position, and they faced
the prospect of fighting with the western sun
blazing directly into their eyes.
A BEAUTIFUL PLAIN
The battlefield was a beautiful plain,
according to William the Bretons
Philippiad, abloom with Ceres grains,
but bounded to the west by the marshlands
of the Marque. Philips position in front of
it provided protection, but also blocked the
avenue of retreat.
His speech to his troops was a rallying cry,
and while not failing to draw attention to
his reluctance to sully this holy day with the
spilling of blood, he added that God would

not be against them for defending themselves
against attack.
The French line extended for 2,000 paces.
Philips banner, the Oriflame, made of simple
silken cloth, contrasted with the intimidating
splendour of the imperial standard an eagle
atop a dragon, mounted on a four-wheeled
golden chariot. Otto himself cut a striking
figure, regally costumed and bearing a gold
shield decorated with a black eagle. Philip
was noted for his dislike of ostentation, and
preference for plain clothing.
The distance between the two sides was
narrow, yet not so close that the sound of
voices could be heard across the field. The
allies army was probably larger overall, but
such was their disarray, it seems they were
unable to bring all their men into action.
CAVALRY CHARGES
The emperor must have been dismayed to
see how quickly his opponents had been able
to draw up their battle arrays. Sensing thek
KING JOHN SOFTSWORD

My brother John is not the man to subjugate
a country if there is a person able to make the
slightest resistance was the damning verdict
of Richard the Lionheart on his younger brothers
fighting credentials. John was not present on
the battlefield at Bouvines his retreat at
La Roche-au-Moine was seen as an example
of shameful cowardice by many. But it was
his money that made Bouvines possible, and
John, for all his flaws, was capable of the
occasional masterstroke.
In 1203, Philip was besieging Arques, a
massive square keep near Dieppe, held by
John, while Arthur of Brittany besieged Mirebeau,
in which was trapped Johns still formidable
mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, now 80.
John, with a speed that would have done
Richard proud, covered 80 miles in two days
to rescue his mother and capture Arthur. This
surprise attack now exposed Philip to a major
assault by the Plantagenet forces, and forced his
immediate retreat. It was the one time John held
the upper hand over his formidable adversary.
57
Image: WIPL
BOUVINES
ABOVE The Battle of Bouvines was decided by

charges of feudal heavy horse. This contemporary
image depicts the Battle of Gisors in 1198.
initiative was theirs, Gurin in charge of

the French right sent forth a sally of 300
lightly armoured cavalrymen.
Though they were easily repulsed by the
Flemish knights on the allied left, a succession
of charges in echelon by tightly knit cavalry
units, under the command of their individual
lords, had a battering-ram effect, and eventually the Flemish line was breached. The flight
of Henry of Brabant, and the capture of the
gallant Ferrand of Flanders, eventually signalled the allied lefts collapse.
The preponderance of cavalry charges
at Bouvines has led some to dismiss it as
a glorified tilting match, but a further
engagement in the centre, involving the
personal divisions of Otto and Philip, bore
more resemblance to a Medieval mle.
Philip was struck

by a halberd and
fell from his horse,
with the weapon
still hanging from
his chainmail.
The allies did not lack passion Otto had
sworn not to depart the field until he had
sought out and killed Philip himself. But mere
Teutonic rage was insufficient, and once again
the greater discipline of Philips army proved
telling. The king had his echelons put in
CHINON CASTLE
The Tour du Coudray, at the Loire castle of Chinon, is a classic round tower of Philip Augustus.
It is a round keep with stairways along the inside walls, guarded at each turn by machiolations.
The entire complex of Chinon, one of western Europes largest castles, is loaded with historical
associations. Henry II died here in 1189, in Fort-Saint-Georges (which he built), broken by Philip
Augustuss manipulation of his sons to conspire against him. Here too, Joan of Arc met Charles VII
in 1429, persuading him to allow her to lead an army which transformed French fortunes in the
Hundred Years War.
58
formation and they rode forward, recalled the

Bethune Chronicle. the same was true for the
opponents side but they did not ride as well
and in as orderly manner as the French.
VICTORY
When Otto ordered a cavalry charge, it
easily smashed through the French infantry,
but then its elements became hopelessly
separated as Philip launched a counterattack. During the confusion which followed,
Philip was struck by a halberd, only his heavy
armour saving him from a fatal wound as
he fell from his horse with the weapon still
hanging from his chainmail. His household
knights encircled him, enabling him to
remount with surprising agility.
A retaliatory foray led by the French soldier
William des Barres, famed for his jousts with
the Lionheart himself, got close enough to
Otto to unhorse him too, but the emperor was
conveyed to safety. His departure from the
battlefield signalled the effective end of the
conflict, though a brave last stand by Renaud
inflicted heavy losses on the French.
The wagon of Otto was captured, and
subjected to a torrent of axe blows. The
imperial eagle, its wings broken off, was
presented to the victorious Philip.
The battle had lasted three hours. Philip,
re-entering the chapel he had visited in such a
state of uncertainty earlier that day, offered his
thanks to God. Henceforward, he would cede
command of the French army to his son Prince
Louis, but for the rest of his reign he would be
the unchallenged strongman of Europe. r
July 2014
Experience freedom!
The Liberation Museum is set in the beautiful
landscape near Nijmegen, Arnhem and the German
border, a unique location: Operation Market Garden,
the largest airborne operation in history took place
here in September 1944 and Operation Veritable,
the Rhineland Offensive, the final road to freedom in
Europe, started from here in February 1945.
The museum brings the historical events of the
liberation by the American, British, Canadian and
Polish troops back to life. In the museum, you live
through the period preceding the war, experience
the occupation, celebrate the liberation and witness
the rebuilding of the Netherlands and Europe
after the war. Aromas, interactive presentations,
dioramas, models, original films and sound
fragments captivatingly depict the liberation. The
museum shows both young and old the current
value and importance of democracy, freedom and
human rights.
HIGHLIGHTS
Exhibition Freedom on Wings: 750 WW2 model

airplanes
Model of Operation Market Garden
Air-raid shelter and Liberation Street
Diorama of the Waal crossing at Nijmegen
The Rhineland Offensive/Operation Veritable
The Honorary Dome with Roll of Honour
Temporary exhibitions in 2014: present-Aug 25
Rebuilding the Netherlands and Europe after WW2,
Aug-Sept Routes of Liberation and Sept-Dec
Operation Market Garden.
ACTIVITIES AND PROGRAMMES
Guided tours and temporary exhibitions

Educational programmes for children
Battlefield tours and excursions (by bus or bicycle)
Group packages
Yearly events: commemorations in May and Liberation
Festival in Sept
Visit to the Canadian War Cemetery in Groesbeek
and/or the Reichswald Cemetery in Cleves, Germany
For more information and special rates for tour operators please see our website
www.liberationmuseum.com.
The National Liberation Museum 1944-1945

Address: Wylerbaan 4, NL-6561 KR Groesbeek
Tel: + 31 24 397 4404
Website: www.liberationmuseum.com
Email: info@bevrijdingsmuseum.nl
Facebook: National Bevrijdingsmuseum 1944-1945
Twitter: @liberationNL
I 07/14
TA
R
TORY MON
H IS
TH
LY
M
H
M
re
n
ds
JULY Every month, The Debrief will bring you the very best in film and book
reviews, along with suggested military history 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 for keeping military history fans entertained.
MILI
THE
com me
WAR ON FILM
BOOKS
HIGHLIGHT
The Spanish Army Museum in Toledo

with Jules Stewart. We join the tattoo
at the Colchester Military Tournament,
and head to Somerset for the fourth
annual Dig for Victory Show.
CAPTION COMPETITION
TOP 5
RY
TWO NEW
TITLES
TA
LY
WIN!
HLY
NT
TO
Y HIS RY MO
AR
M IL
Test your problem-solving skills and

win great prizes on MHMs puzzle
pages. This month we have two D-Day
themed books to be won.
MUSEUM
WHATS ON
TH
LISTINGS
DIG FOR
VICTORY
SHOW
MIL
IT
The Direction of War: contemporary

strategy in historical perspective by
Hew Strachan, Secret Warriors by
Taylor Downing, and The Siege of
Jellalabad by Edward
Teer. For our War
RECOMMENDED
on Film, we look
Zeppelin
Nights
at the satirical
and emotive Oh! by Jerry White
What a Lovely War.
N
HISTO RY MO
TAYLOR DOWNING REVIEWS A CLASSIC WAR MOVIE.
FILM | CLASSIC
OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR
Paramount Home Entertainment

10.99
ichard Attenboroughs
1969 BAFTA-award-winning
film Oh! What a Lovely
War has many similarities
to the Joan Littlewood Theatre
Workshop musical of 1963. There
is the powerful use of popular
satirical war-songs, the sense
of choreography, the use of
documentary information to
counterpoint the burlesque, and
62
IL
generals and staff officers as a set
of buffoons in the film.
Oh! What a Lovely War is certainly
of its time, and tells us as much about
the 1960s as it does about the First
World War. But just as the original
Theatre Workshop production tried
to explain and understand the war
50 years after its start, it is certainly
worth looking at it again as we run
up to the centenary of the war. It
seems extraordinary that the original
theatre production is as far distant
from today as the declaration of
war in 1914 was when the Theatre
Workshop first staged the musical.
The originator of both stage musical
and film was a BBC radio presenter
and producer. Charles Chilton joined
the BBC as a messenger boy before
the Second World War, and went on
to present Swing Time and a series of
radio documentaries about American
music. He produced episodes of The
Goon Show, and a science-fiction
series called Journey into Space.
Chilton had never known his father,
who died in the First World War, and
in 1961 became fascinated with his
fathers story. He discovered a book
of songs called Tommys Tunes,
published in 1917, in which the
words of popular songs of the day
had been adapted by the soldiers.
From this he produced a radio
programme called The Long, Long
Trail. In 1962, Gerry Raffles, the
partner of Joan Littlewood, heard the
programme and thought there was
the basis of a stage production in it.
GENERALS AS VILLAINS
the passionate anti-war message. But
there are many differences as well.
Littlewood could not bear
the colour khaki, and refused
to have any of her characters
in anything resembling an army
uniform, so all the performers
appeared in Pierrot costumes. The
virulent attack on the class system
in the Theatre Workshop version
becomes a clichd depiction of
Littlewood was not convinced at

first. But, working with a group
of talented young actors, she put
together a script that was highly
satirical, choreographing scenes as
though in a seaside show, connected
by authentic wartime images and
statistics projected onto a screen.
Much of this came from Alan
Clarks recent book The Donkeys,
in which he presented the generals
as the villains of the war, ordering
men to their death by the hundred

thousand, and invented the phrase
lions led by donkeys.
When Oh What a Lovely War (no
exclamation mark) opened in March
1963, it was an instant success. After
a couple of months, it transferred to
the West End, and later to Broadway.
JOAN LITTLEWOOD
Littlewood was a radical theatreproducer and director who had
been under surveillance by MI5
as a suspected Communist for
many years before she founded
the Theatre Workshop at the
Theatre Royal Stratford East
in 1953. The theatre was
falling down when she took
it over, and the actors helped
to paint and restore it
between rehearsals. She put
together an ensemble of young
performers who worked on
new versions of classic plays
and improvised new productions. The actors included
Harry H. Corbett, Richard
Harris, Murray Melvin, Nigel
Hawthorne, Victor Spinetti,
and Barbara Windsor.
In 1955, the Theatre
Workshop mounted the
British premire of Brechts
Mother Courage, and over the
following years staged productions by Brendan Behan and
Shelagh Delaney. Delaneys
A Taste of Honey was turned
into a gritty movie in 1961.
Littlewood had immense
influence, radicalising
both the theatre and British
cinema in the early 1960s, and
training a generation of actors
to portray working people in
what have often been called
kitchen sink dramas. Despite
her initial lack of enthusiasm
for Oh What a Lovely War,
it became the companys
biggest success. She gave up
directing in 1975 and died,
at the age of 87, in 2002.
July 2014
STAR-STUDDED CAST
First to agree was Laurence Olivier.
Then came Ralph Richardson, John
Gielgud, John Mills, and Kenneth More.
With such luminaries committed
to the project, Paramounts
enthusiasm for the venture grew,
and Attenborough was able to raise

a substantial budget for his first film
as director. He decided to shoot
most of the film in Brighton, and
filming began in March 1968.
Following the concept of setting
the stage musical in a seaside
show, much of the film was shot
at Brightons West Pier. This was
taken over, restored, and repainted
(sadly, it is now derelict).
The opening scenes see the
leaders of Europe posing for a
photograph. Ralph Richardson
plays Sir Edward Grey; John Gielgud,
the Austrian Count Berchtold; Ian
Holm, President Poincar; and
Kenneth More, Kaiser Wilhelm.
When the camera shoots the
picture, Archduke Ferdinand and his
wife fall dead. The European leaders
pace around a map of Europe, acting
out the process by which Europe
went to war in a matter of weeks,
partly as a result of political alliances,
and partly because once military
mobilisation had begun it appeared
impossible to stop it.
The film cuts to the Brighton
Promenade, where a band marches
along and enthusiastic crowds flock
into West Pier, where a show is
about to begin, called World War I.
General Haig (played by John
Mills) sells the tickets, and we are
introduced to the many members
of the Smith family, whose story
provides the spine of the film.
What follows is a series of
pantomime sequences on the pier,
intercut with naturalistic scenes from
the trenches. Broadly speaking, the
film moves chronologically through
the war, beginning with dancing
French marionettes, all of whom are
killed by German machine-guns.
Then follows a great satire on the
recruitment process of 1914, with
the Smith family packed into a music
hall, watching a show in which a
group of girl dancers sing, We dont
want to lose you,/But we think you
ought to go. Maggie Smith enters
as the glamorous lead, with her own
recruitment song: On Saturday Im
willing,/If youll only take the shilling,/
To make a man of any one of you.
Next, a recruiting sergeant marches
on stage and calls on young men in
the audience to come forward. All
the males in the Smith family rush
forwards, and Maggie Smith, now in k
MHM REVIEWS
The First World War had been

out of fashion for nearly a quarter
of century since the beginning of
the Second World War. However,
in the late 1950s and early 1960s
there was a rediscovery of the
Great War, with Stanley Kubricks
film Paths of Glory in 1958 (see
MHM 41), Alan Clarks best-selling
book The Donkeys, and then Theatre
Workshops satirical musical. There
was also a major revival of interest
in the wartime poets, particularly
Wilfred Owen, whose poetry became
a central voice for the generation
that fought and fell in the war.
In 1964, the new television channel
BBC2 was launched with the 26-part
series The Great War. This was the
first ever television history series
to feature the voices of ordinary
frontline soldiers. Although not many
people had the new aerials needed to
view it on 625 lines on BBC2, when
it was repeated later in the year on
BBC1, it is said that pubs emptied on
Wednesday nights as men rushed
home to see it.
The First World War was not only
popular once again, but the prevailing
view during the 1960s was that it
had been a futile and worthless
struggle, a tragedy of immense
human proportions, acted out in
the mud and horror of the trenches,
for which stubborn generals were
largely to blame. (It is a view that
has been under sustained attack
by a new generation of revisionist
historians for 20 or 30 years.)
Richard Attenborough is one of the
legendary figures of British cinema,
and had starred in countless popular
movies. Oh! What a Lovely War (with
the exclamation mark after Oh) was
his directorial debut, aged 45.
He got funding from Paramount,
who had just been acquired by Gulf
and Western and who were pumping
money into the company. Being
himself one of the top British movie
stars, he called in favours from many
close friends, who agreed to appear
in his film.
63
close-up looking like a prostitute

in too much make-up, hands them
over to the recruiting sergeant,
who marches them off bawling,
You horrible little men!
We are then in the run-up to the
Battle of Mons, with Laurence Olivier
as Sir John French, the C-in-C of
the British Expeditionary Force, in
the back of a staff car with Michael
Redgrave as Sir Henry Wilson.
Olivier only has a small part in the
film, but he hams it up wildly, in this
scene telling Wilson that they must
not worry about the French generals
as they all come from trade, and
in any case no-one can understand
what they say, as they speak a
strange language.
The Battle of Mons takes place,
the wounded return to Waterloo
station, and there are opportunities
for many memorable songs,
including Were here because
were here and Pack up your
troubles in your old kit bag.
A cheerful nurse tells a horribly
wounded soldier, Dont worry, well
soon have you back at the Front.
CHRISTMAS TRUCE
There is a scene in which war
profiteers are portrayed at a
Christmas party. Were hoping to
get the contract, tin hats you know,
says Dirk Bogarde to Susannah
York. They look at fireworks, which
transition to the trenches, where the
German troops sing Silent Night,
and the Scottish troops respond
with the It was Christmas Day in
the workhouse variant of Tidings
of comfort and joy.
On Christmas Day itself, the
Germans slowly appear in a snowy
no-mans-land. One by one, the
Scottish troops get out of their
trenches too. For a brief moment,
they swap schnapps, whisky,
and cigars, realising they are
all suffering together in the war.
Then a set of shell-bursts send
both sides running back to their
lines. The scene is presented in a
slow, cautious way, and is entirely
believable as a depiction of the
famous Christmas Truce.
Back to the pantomime, with
Bertie Smith (Corin Redgrave) joining
up as an officer, prompting the song
Brother Bertie went away/To do his
bit the other day, performed on a
64
seaside toy train. His mother is left

waiting on a real railway station,
mourning the departure of her fifth
son for the war.
Back in the trenches, the men
are suffering gas attacks, while
senior commanders plot among
themselves, with Haig taking over
from French as commander-in-chief.
John Mills as Haig is one of the
central characters in the film. He is
seen as an idiot, blind to the losses
mounting up at headquarters on a
cricket scoreboard. He is inspired
by a blinkered religious faith, and
a belief that the Allies can win an
attritional war, claiming the loss of
another 300,000 men will lead to
really great results, and in the end
the enemy will have 5,000 men and
we will have 10,000 men, and we
will have won.
Lines like these would certainly
have had a resonance at the height
of the Cold War, when American
generals were occasionally accused
of uttering similar thoughts with
regard to nuclear war.
But there is no historical reality
in this pantomime portrayal of
Sir Douglas Haig, who had a clear
understanding of what it took to
win an industrial war against a
determined and skilled fighting
machine like the German Army.
In one scene, Haig is seen leading
a parade, while his staff officers
gyrate behind him to the song
One staff officer jumped right over
another staff officers back. It is very
amusing, and plays to the lions led
by donkeys approach to WWI, but
whether or not it is valid historical
comment is quite another matter.
SATIRE MEETS EMOTION

There are many other powerful
scenes in the film. Vanessa Redgrave
plays Sylvia Pankhurst addressing
a crowd outside a munitions factory,
calling for the wars end. She is
shouted down.
A chaplain (Gerald Sim) preaches a
sermon for victory on the eve of the
next Big Push, and announces that it
is no sin to soldier on a Sunday. This
provides one of the most poignant
scenes, in which the choir sings the
hymn What a friend we have in Jesus,
while a lone soldier (Maurice Arthur)
sings movingly in counterpoint When
this lousy war is over.
LIGHT-HEARTED SATIRICAL PANTOMIME SEQUENCES

WERE JUXTAPOSED WITH MORE HARD-HITTING
SCENES OF NO-MANS-LAND, SUCH AS THIS, TO
REINFORCE THE FILMS ANTI-WAR MESSAGE.
By this point of both stage musical
and film, there is rarely a dry eye in
the house. Elizabeth Smith, one of
the daughters of the central family,
a nurse beautifully played by Angela
Thorne, now prepares hospital beds
for the arrival of the dreadfully
butchered wounded as soon as
the new offensive starts.
There are many naturalistic scenes
shot in the trenches, all filmed at the
Brighton municipal rubbish dump,
where the smell was horrendous.
It no doubt helped create the right
atmosphere. Men are seen dying in
no-mans-land, while the scoreboard
at GHQ notches up 607,000 losses
on the Somme, with Gains Nil.
There are several more songs,
which get darker, including The bells
of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling and If
you want to find the old battalion,/
I know where they are/Ive seen
em, hanging/On the old barbed wire.
In the final sequence, Jack Smith
(Paul Shelley), the last of the Smith
boys, finds himself back in Mons
in November 1918, right where we
started. Jack follows a red tape
past the European leaders, who
are signing the Armistice, and into
poppy-filled fields.
The famous last scene has the
women of the Smith family in white
dresses, moving through an immense
field of crosses laid out in neat rows
across the South Downs. From a
helicopter, the camera pulls out to
an aerial view of lines of endless

crosses filling the screen, as ghostly
voices sing Well never tell them.
There were 16,000 crosses used
in the shot. It is an appropriately
cinematic ending to the film.
Joan Littlewood apparently never
liked Attenboroughs film. Certainly,
it lacks the bite of the political satire
in the original. The first half of the
Theatre Workshop production was
ebullient and cheery. The second
half was dark, sombre, playing on
the idea of the lost innocence of the
soldiers, and was highly critical of
generals and politicians. The film is
more linear, playing on immediate
contradictions from one scene to the
next, from the jollity of the pier-end
show to the horrors in the trenches.
It still has much to commend it,
but it very much reflects a 1960s
view of the Great War. As it was
being made, the Vietnam War was
escalating. The film capitalises on the
anti-war sentiment that generated,
and a general hostility to senior
military figures in the Cold War.
For anyone unfamiliar with
the First World War, the film still
provides a dramatic, entertaining,
and highly emotive introduction to
the conflict. But it is not real history,
and never pretended to be. Its
strength is in its searing emotional
appeal. And with the appalling scale
of the killing between 1914 and 1918,
there is nothing wrong with that.
OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR

Director: Richard Attenborough. Script by Len Deighton (uncredited) based on Joan Littlewoods Theatre Workshop production
by Charles Chilton and the original cast. Designer: Don Ashton.
Director of Photography: Gerry Turpin. Featuring many British
stars. A Paramount DVD.
July 2014
FOR SALE
WORLD WAR
1914 1918 A PICTURED HISTORY
Originally published by
Amalgamated Press in
55 issues between 1934
and 1935. This set lacks
five issues, and has slight
damage to the covers of
two. It is otherwise in
exceptional condition.
Selling only as
a job lot. Please
submit offers to
robin.forpr@virgin.net,
or call 01526 378703.
WITH BIJAN OMRANI
TA
R
TORY MON
H IS
TH
LY
ds
MILI
M
H
M
re
n
com me
ZEPPELIN NIGHTS:
LONDON IN THE
FIRST WORLD WAR
Jerry White
Bodley Head, 25
ISBN 978-1847921659
ay London at war, and

one immediately thinks
of World War II. Such is
the power of the periods
iconography St Pauls over the Blitz,
Ed Murrows radio broadcasts, the
Doodlebugs that it is diffi cult to
escape the association.
However, this compelling new
book by Jerry White, Professor of
History at Birkbeck and acclaimed
chronicler of Londons history,
urges one to think again. He shows
in this vivid portrait of the city from
1914-1918 how London experienced Total War long before
the age of the Luft waffe.
The First World War, by Whites
account, transformed London into
one of the greatest killing machines
in human history. It was the manufacturing and transport hub of the
nation, from which radiated munitions and war matriel, volunteers
and conscripts. Via London, many
of the troops departed for the Front,
and via London, many of them
returned, wounded or otherwise.
Government, politics, the churches,
public services, society in general
all adapted with their full might

for the fighting of the conflict, or
felt its effect. London and the Front
were intimately entwined, and as
much as London was the mainstay
of the Front, it was also prey to
its dangers.
It was at first the Zeppelin that
brought London into the line of fire.
The raids never reached anything
near the intensity of the Blitz, but
they made up for this through the
fear of their novelty, the drawn-out
length of the air campaign, and the
ineptitude of the official response.
Early in 1915, Winston Churchill
warned the Cabinet of the danger
of attack by a massed fleet of airships. He predicted the first raid
on London would consist of 100
Zeppelins, of which 70 would be
shot down, but the remainder
would still be able to inflict at least
10,000 casualties. All this would
be timed to coincide with the Kaisers birthday on 26 January.
Panic and rumours began to
spread throughout London, and
some even sent their children
to the countryside. As it was,
The Zeppelin drifted

perpendicularly in the
darkened sky, a gigantic
pyramid of flames.
66
O T
aside from a small raid on Great

Yarmouth and Kings Lynn, London
was untouched until the last night
in May. A single Zeppelin, LZ38,
navigating silently by the light of a
full moon, dropped 89 incendiaries
and man-killing grenades across a
swathe of north and east London.
The first victims were two young
girls, Elsie and May Leggatt, who
died in Stoke Newington. In some
places, panic ran rampant, but
when three incendiaries landed
on the roof of the Empire Music
Hall in Shoreditch High Street,
the band played lively airs while
the audience left the house in
an orderly manner.
AIR DEFENCE
The development of Londons
air defences by the end of 1916
led to Gotha bombers, as well as
Giants, generally taking the place

of Zeppelins in air raids. The latter,
driven by up to six engines, had a
wingspan of 138 feet larger than
any bomber attacking London in
the Second World War and could
carry a payload of two tonnes.
Over the last two years of the
war, aside from ample damage to
residential property, Liverpool Street
and Fenchurch Street stations
suffered direct hits. Of particular
horror were attacks on a school in
Poplar 18 children killed and 34
injured and the Odhams Printing
Works in Long Acre, Covent Garden.
With 10-inch thick concrete ceilings,
it was thought safe for use as an
air-raid shelter. However, these
were little protection against the
Giants 300kg bombs. Of the 600
people inside, 38 were killed
and 85 injured, crushed by falling
July 2014
MHM REVIEWS
masonry and rolls of newsprint,

which subsequently went up in
flames from a gas explosion.
Londons air defences were
not without success. White dates
the effective end of the Zeppelin
campaign to the downing of the
German air-ace Heinrich Mathy
in October 1916 over Potters Bar
by 2nd Lieutenant W. J. Tempest.
White quotes a contemporary
observer, Michael MacDonagh,
who watched the Zeppelin drifting
perpendicularly in the darkened
sky, a gigantic pyramid of flames
like a ruined star falling slowly to
earth. After it had fallen, there
arose a shout across the metropolis
the like of which I never heard before
a hoarse shout of mingled execration,
triumph, and joy.
For all this, the capitals air
defences were sorely deficient. Not
only was scanty provision made
for anti-aircraft batteries until
relatively late in the war, but there
was also an official reluctance to
offer air-raid warnings, based on
a belief that the working classes
would be incapable of dealing with
such information without panic.
Knowledge of imminent raids
was passed on haphazardly. Often,
only friends of offi cials would
receive warnings by telephone,
leaving institutions that had to deal
with air raids desperately unprepared. St Bartholomews Hospital,
which took many of the casualties
from the June 1917 attack on
Liverpool Street station, had
only five minutes warning of the

raid. Such was the ensuing chaos
that, when the King made an unannounced visit, he found the floor
of the outpatients department
covered with blood.
It was widely considered, by the
end of the war, that the casualty
figures nearly 700 killed and
2,000 injured could have been
lessened by more competent
handling of the air defences and
official warnings of impending raids.
The governments haughty and
inept handling of the problem did
as much to spread cynicism and
disaffection at home as the conduct
of strategy at the Front.
grinding poverty and unemployment,

frequently resorting to industrial
unrest, benefitted hugely. Wages
rose rapidly. Women found skilled
employment in munitions factories
and offi ces. Society commentators
complained that low-class women
were now parading in furs, and
that their houses were filled with
pianos. Pubs, which before the war
had opened until the early hours,
were compelled to shut early.
Alcohol-related deaths declined, as
did infant mortality. These gains
were never relinquished.
Many of the eras tensions find
parallels today. As now, there was
a squeezed middle class, facing
rising rents and overcrowded housing,
with their incomes under pressure.

London was racked with tensions
over long-standing immigrants
from Germany and Austria. Many of
them faced violence on the streets
and a cruel internment in Olympia
or Alexandra Palace. Violence
was also directed against peace
activists, and moral crusaders
tried to prevent drinking, attendance at music halls, and the
annual calendar of sporting fixtures:
the FA Cup fell victim in 1915.
Churches and spiritualists rushed
to capitalise on the wartime misery
with sances or blood-curdling
sermons though we are unlikely
to hear again such addresses from
the pulpit as that delivered by
Arthur Winnington-Ingram, Bishop
of London, exhorting the faithful
to kill Germans the young men as
well as the old lest the civilisation
of the world should itself be killed.
With the impending commemoration of WWI, much of the attention
will be focused on the battlefields.
Whites panoramic book, however,
reminds us that to understand the
legacy of the war, we should not just
remember the deaths in Flanders,
but look to the Home Front also.
FORTRESS LONDON
Germanys justification for attacks
on London hinged on its absolute
involvement in the war. It was a
fortress that needed to be broken.
Yet those areas that were closely
tied to the war industries suffered
relatively little. White describes
how the war changed much of
the geography of London. The
impact of the conflict is still visible.
New industrial areas, especially in
west London, among them Park
Royal, Perivale, and Greenford,
owed their rapid development
to the war. It was similarly the
case for the aviation hubs of
Hendon, Northolt, and Heathrow.
The impact was not only
seen in development. The
working classes, who just
before the war suffered from
67
The stories of the Unknown Wars of Asia, Africa and The Americas were cataclysmic and
bloody events that took the lives of millions and impact our world to this day. Yet, most of
these wars are hardly mentioned in articles or even textbooks.
Among some of the wars covered are:
The wars that involved the Great Wall of China over its 1,865 year history as a defensive barrier.
The longest war in history which was the 1,049 year long Vietnamese War of Independence from China and the lessons
that should have kept France and the US out of Indo-China.
The wars of the Khmer Empire (802 - 1431) and the unlikely hero that emerged in a time of crisis in 1177.
The Jewish Bar Kokhba Revolt (132 - 136) that caused the Emperor Hadrian to cover up the massacre of two veteran Roman Legions and the truth about how close the revolt came to succeeding.
The wars of the Spanish Conquistadors to conquer the American Southeast and Southwest in the sixteenth century and
the Native American apocalypse in North America that followed.
The Cherokee Wars that came very close to wiping out the colony of South Carolina.
The wars of the Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade that took the lives of more than
12 million Africans and the slave revolts
of the Caribbean and South America.
The Taiping Rebellion (1851 1871) that
was caused by a Confucian scholar
who misunderstood a poorly translated gospel tract and started a rebellion
that led to over 30 million deaths.
The 74 year Mongol conquest of China
and disasters in Syria, Japan, Vietnam,
and Java that led to the breakup of the
Mongol Empire.
Englands Pirate Wars - The French
Conquest of Indo-China 1857 - 1884
The future wars that half of the
worlds population of Jews, Christians,
and Muslims are expecting in the near
future.
Steven Johnson has been a regular
contributing author to Military
Heritage and Strategy & Tactics
Magazines and has taught History at
the college and university level in South
Carolina for more than 20 years.
Steven Johnsons style of narrative
writing of History is as a master
storyteller of true events that are
stranger than fiction that makes
for a riveting reading experience.
Available at amazon.co.uk,
amazon.com (US), and at Alibris.com
THE BEST NEW MILITARY HISTORY TITLES THIS MONTH
THE DIRECTION OF WAR:

CONTEMPORARY STRATEGY
IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Hew Strachan
Cambridge University Press, 18.99
ISBN 978-1107654235
hose who have followed the

resurgence of global violence
ignited by the terrorist attacks
of 11 September 2001 have
focused their thoughts or have
been induced to do so by the media
coverage and political rhetoric
almost exclusively on government
policy and battlefield events in the
hotspots of conflict. Outside the think
tanks, little consideration is given
to strategy, the binding theme of Sir
Hew Strachans exceptional book.
If, by 2006, the coalition forces
in Iraq and Afghanistan were facing
defeat, an almost unthinkable prospect
for the massed might of Western
military power, one of the reasons
was a lack of strategy. The fact that
so many parties to debates on war
are ready to use the word strategy
seems to suggest that they also
understand what strategy is, says
the author. But they dont.
One of the problems is that strategy is often employed as a synonym
for policy. Strachan points out that
the two political leaders who took the
West to war, Tony Blair and George
W. Bush, did so on the back of loudly
trumpeted policies for dealing with
the threat of Islamist terrorism.

But these policies lack any relationship with regional realities or
military capabilities.
So what is strategy, how does
it differ from policy, and what is
its role in warfare? These are the
questions to which Strachan applies
his skills as one of the worlds foremost military academics.
In his opening chapter, which
covers the development of warfare
in the 21st century, the author
makes it clear that strategy serves
to make concrete a set of objectives
through the application of military
force to a particular case. This was
the case, to cite one notorious
example, in Iraq and the 2007 surge,
whose aim was merely to put more
boots on the ground, with scarcely
a thought to any political solution
that the increased number of troops
could achieve.
A central point in Strachans argument is that poor strategy has led
to military failures that could have
been avoided through a proper
reading and application of strategy.
The book tells us that we need to
adopt a more historical approach
If, by 2006, the coalition forces

in Iraq and Afghanistan were
facing defeat... one of the
reasons was lack of strategy.
to contemporary strategy, in order

to identify what is really changing in
how we wage war. In short, we need
to understand war before setting out
to fulfil the aims of strategy.
In clarifying a misreading of Clausewitz, which for several decades had
led military leaders to confuse policy
with strategy, Strachan explains that
the focus of the latter is the nature
of war, which is distinct from policy.
For Clausewitz, strategy was the
use of engagement for the purpose
of war. Strategy drew on previous
military outcomes in order to decide
what to do next. The author explains:
Strategy therefore has to rest on
an understanding of war and wars
nature because it will shape policy.
The book later takes us into the
historical evolution of strategy,
highlighting the crisis it confronts,
as embodied in the 2003 speech in
London by President Bush, which
effectively hijacked the meaning of
the word by linking it to freedom and
security, rather than purely military
means. The same confusion reigns

in Whitehall, where a Foreign Office
White Paper suggested that strategy
was developed to set strategy, rather
than policy to set strategy.
Hence we are not confronted with a
matter of semantics: this confusion can
cost lives and cause defeat. The author
states, The challenge for the United
States and for the United Kingdom
was, and is, the link between the policy
of the administration and the operational design of its military agents.
As we have witnessed since the
declaration of war on terror in 2001,
avoiding a conflation of policy with
strategy is crucial to the Wests military involvement in places of whose
culture, terrain, history, and politics it
has little understanding. The dangers
that confront the best-laid plans of
mice and men that is, policy have
been painfully laid bare over the past
decade in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Politicians ignore this at their
peril and ours, for that matter.
JULES STEWART
69
ON THE HORIZON
D-Day: Minute by Minute:
one historic day, hundreds
of unforgettable stories
Jonathan Mayo
Atria Books, 11.99
SECRET WARRIORS:
key scientists, code breakers and propagandists of the Great War
Taylor Downing
Little Brown, 20
ISBN 978-1408704219
ISBN 978-1476772943
This is the story of D-Day, as seen through

the eyes of people who were there. It is pure
chronological narrative, giving an account of
events that is both intimate and epic.
The Regimental Piano:
a story of war, love and peace
Tim Parker
HOP Publishing, 12.99
ISBN 978-0992784416
The memoirs of Major Bob

Orrell follow a courageous and committed
soldier, a passionate peace campaigner, and
a loyal family man from a D-Day bunker to a
Peace Village in Vietnam.
American Tanks & AFVs
of World War II
Michael Green
Osprey, 30
ISBN 978-1782009313
In this highly illustrated and meticulously

researched study, Green explores the full
range of armoured vehicles that provided
the backbone of the forces that defeated
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
ow scientists, code-breakers, deceivers, and other so-called wizards helped win the Second World War has been
a very popular subject for authors over the last few years. Not so the First World War. Indeed, as a subject, the
secret Great War is a topic seldom touched. Yet the technological advances alone were considerable: for instance,
a decade after Louis Blriot first flew the English Channel in 1909, Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic. So, among
the hundreds of books currently being published to coincide with the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, Taylor
Downings Secret Warriors is unique and timely.
Commencing with the destruction of German communication cables by the CS Alert on 5 August 1914, Secret Warriors
tells how science and intelligence contributed to the ultimate victory in 1918 through advances in aviation, code-breaking,
engineering and chemistry, medicine and surgery, and lastly propaganda the story of the 1916 film, The Battle of the Somme,
is fascinating. The narrative is entwined with a more general history of the war itself which, while aimed at the more general
reader, tends to be something of a distraction.
While the story of developments of the machine-gun, artillery, the tank, and poison gas are told elsewhere, here they are
placed in a more scientific context, although the omission of the development of measures to counter the Zeppelin threat in
1915-1916 is a curious oversight.
Far less well-known is how medicine and surgery developed before and during the Great War, something demonstrated
by two striking statistics: the First World War was the first conflict in history in which fewer men died from related diseases
(Spanish Flu excepted) than from battle wounds; and mortality levels among the wounded dropped from 40% during the
American Civil War to 10% during the First World War.
The author tells well the story of the science and technology that helped win the First World War, pointing out that they
also became the foundations for the developments that would help win the Second, although (as he points out) boffins is
a WWII term. Minor criticisms aside, this is an interesting and useful book.
DAVID FLINTHAM
Embers of War: the fall of

an empire and the making
of Americas Vietnam
Fredrik Logevall
andom House, 25
THE SIEGE OF JELLALABAD
SBN 978-0375504426
Silk Road Books, 15
This eye-opening and compulsively

readable work illuminates the hidden
history of the French and American
experiences in Vietnam.
Engineers of Victory:
the problem solvers who
turned the tide in the
Second World War
Paul Kennedy
Penguin Books, 9.99
ISBN 978-0141036090
Kennedy tells the stories of, among others,

Major-General Perry Hobart, inventor of the
funny tanks, and Captain Johnny Walker,
who sunk U-boats with a creeping barrage.
War in the Crimea
Ian Fletcher and
Natalia Ishchenko
The History Press, 19.99
ISBN 978-0750954587
This interesting pictorial history of the war

places Russian paintings and artwork from
periodicals of the day in historical context.
1841-42
Edward Teer
n October 1841, the Army of the Indus that had taken Kabul felt itself confident enough to send Major-General Robert
Sales brigade back to India. Within weeks, the remnants of the garrison were fighting for their life against a general
rebellion in the city. The enfeebled commander of the British force, General William Elphinstone, sent orders to
Jellalabad for Sales immediate return.
Jellalabad was as far as Sale got on his homeward-bound march. His column had come under relentless attack by tribesmen
along the route, a rain of fire so devastating that one officer was heard to say, The noise of Waterloo was nothing to this.
We entered Jellalabad on 14 of November 1841, closely followed by the Afghans. So begins Colour-Sergeant Edward Teers
account of the siege, which was lifted on 17 April 1842 by General George Pollocks column from Peshawar, who piped into
the city to the tune of Oh! But youve been a long time a-coming.
No sooner had Sale ridden into Jellalabad, than a letter arrived from Elphinstone ordering him to return to Kabul. Sale replied
that the whole of my camp equipage has been destroyed, the wounded and sick have increased to upwards of 300, there is
no longer a single depot of provisions on the route. Furthermore, his ammunition was insufficient to confront the well-armed
tribesmen along the road. In short, Sale refused to lead his men into a death-trap.
Was Sale justified in ignoring orders? In practical terms, he would have faced certain annihilation on the road to Kabul.
At an official level, there was no doubt Sale had made the right decision. He was promoted to Knight Grand Cross, and salutes
were fired at all major cantonments in India; meanwhile, Elphinstones 16,000-strong column was butchered on the retreat.
Through Teer, we hear tales of valour, earthquakes, and, not least of all, an ingenious strategy for replenishing the
depleted supply of ammunition. For fully a week, the garrison was able to deceive the Afghans into firing volley after
volley at a wooden dummy of a sword-wielding officer. By the time the Afghans got wise to the ruse, the British had
gathered enough musket balls to hold off the attackers. When the wooden general appeared, says Teer, they raised
a hearty cheer but we got a good supply of lead.
JULES STEWART
July 2014
02
REVIEWING THE BEST MILITARY HISTORY MUSEUMS

WITH JULES STEWART
01
03
VISIT
SPANISH ARMY MUSEUM

Museo del Ejrcito, Calle Unin s/n,
45001 Toledo
+34 925 238800 www.museo.ejercito.es
10am-5pm Thur-Tue; closed Wed
here could scarcely be a

more appropriate site for
the Spanish Army Museum
than the Alczar of Toledo.
Rising on a hilltop overlooking the
Tagus River and the monumental
city of Toledo, the very name
Alczar derives from the Arabic
for fortress, thus revealing the
citadels antiquity.
But Toledos Alczar pre-dates even
the 711 AD Muslim invasion of the
Iberian Peninsula. Excavation work
carried out 15 years ago beneath the
museums new building, adjoining
the original fort, bears witness to a
human presence as long ago as the
Bronze Age, as well as later Visigoth
and Roman defensive works.
The most celebrated episode in
the Alczars contemporary military
history took place at the outbreak of
the Spanish Civil War in the summer
of 1936. The citadel was garrisoned
by General Francos rebel troops,
72
ENTRY
who came under bombardment

by Republican militias that had
taken Toledo.
The Republicans telephoned the
fortresss commanding officer, Colonel
Jos Moscard, to warn him that his
16-year-old son Luis, whom they held
prisoner, would be shot if the Colonel
failed to surrender the Alczar in ten
minutes. Moscard told his son to
commend his soul to God and to
die crying Long live Christ the King!
(Luis was not in fact executed until a
month later, in reprisal for Nationalist
aerial bombing.)
The present-day museum
is the result of a 19th-century
amalgamation of several military
collections. It was originally founded
to help support officer-training
programmes and to complement
military-academy instruction. Since
1803, the museum has moved
house three times. The first venue
was Madrids Montelen Palace, the
ducal residence of the Montelen

family. The building was badly
damaged during the Peninsular War,
during which it played a key role
as an artillery barracks in the citys
uprising against the French.
THREE FIRES
In 1816, the museum collection was
transferred to the Buenavista Palace,
Spains current army headquarters,
only to be relocated once again in
1841 when Buenavista became the
War Office under the regency of
General Baldomero Espartero.
The army collections last home
in the capital was the Buen Retiro
Palace, behind the Prado Museum.
It was in a royal residence on this
site that the Catholic monarchs
who led the Christian forces to final
victory over the Moorish invaders
in 1492 spent time during their
sojourns in Madrid.
As well as the Civil War siege, the
Alczar has survived the ravages of
three major fires. The first was at the
hands of Austrian and Portuguese
troops during the War of the Spanish
Succession, after which the fortress
lay in ruins until 1773. It was set

ablaze a second time in 1810, during
the retreat of Napoleons troops from
Spain. A third fire, which broke out
in 1887, left much of the Alczar a
smouldering pile of rubble.
The museums move to Toledo in
1999 entailed more than a change
of location. The entire collection
was restructured in line with more
contemporary museum trends.
This involved the transfer of nearly
40,000 exhibits, including such
unique items as the possessions
of Boabdil, the last Moorish ruler
of Granada, who was expelled in
1492. Also on display is the royal
tent in which Charles I, the Holy
Roman Emperor Charles V,
received his guests.
Another highlight is the collection
of 14th- and 15th-century artillery
pieces and a massive array of
suits of armour. This forms part
of the permanent collection, and
until 13 July can be viewed
in a temporary exhibition
commemorating 250 years of
innovation in artillery design and
technology. The exhibit is free of
July 2014
MHM VISITS
05
04
T OL EDO
SPAIN
MORE MILITARY
MUSEUMS IN SPAIN
AVIATION
Museo del Aire
06
07
Located in the outskirts of

Madrid at Cuatro Vientos
Airport, this museum was
founded in 1981. It offers six
exhibition galleries, and has
about 150 aircraft on display.
MILITARY
Museo Histrico Militar
HISTORY AND THEMES

PICTURED ON BOTH PAGES:
1. The display in the Liberals and
Absolutism room
2. Displays from the ducal home
of the House of Medinaceli
3. Spanish Army uniforms
4. History of Artillery exhibits
5. A polychrome wood mask from
Papua New Guinea
6. The museums gardens
7. Gastinne Renette duelling pistols
charge, and was put together to

celebrate the third centenary of
the Royal Artillery School. There
are 120 items on display, tracing
the development of artillery and
its use in warfare.
From 1 July to 13 September this
year, the museum will host a display
of paintings of arms, uniforms, and
other military themes as part of the
fourth centenary commemoration
of the death of Toledos celebrated
painter El Greco.
The museum contains 26,000

square feet of permanent exhibition
space, which has been split into two
itineraries. The historical itinerary
starts at the Plaza de Armas patio
under an imposing statue of the
Emperor Charles V. This consists
of five halls of exhibits, tracing the
history of the Spanish Army from
its origins in the 15th century under
the Trastmara dynasty through
the 20th century.
This itinerary is arranged in four
periods: the Hispanic monarchy of
a united Spain; the Enlightenment
period; Liberals and Absolutism;
and, finally, a look at the imperial
chapel, one of the museums gems,
which belonged to Charles V. There is
an outstanding collection of armour,
uniforms, paintings, and sculpture
depicting Spains military history
from the Reconquest and Expulsion
of the Moors to the introduction of
modern weaponry.
This section of the museum
contains a large display of
miniature tin soldiers, both in

Spanish uniforms and those of
other European countries. Toledo
is the historical home of Spanish
swords, and the historical section
has a collection of bladed weapons
from the 15th century to modern
ceremonial swords.
The thematic itinerary is located
on the Alczars lower-ground and
mezzanine floors. The exhibits,
including a view of the excavations,
are arranged chronologically and
by geographical location, with one
room devoted to the new museums
history, and another covering that
of the old Alczar.
VISITING TOLEDO
The city of Toledo is one of
Spains, if not Europes, major
tourist attractions. There is a highspeed rail service daily from Madrids
Atocha Station. The journey takes
half an hour, and booking several
days in advance is essential,
especially during the busy tourist
season. The Alczar is a 40-minute
(uphill) walk or ten-minute cab ride
from the railway station, in itself
a remarkably restored example of
early 20th-century design.
This museum has probably

the biggest collection of
all Valencian museums.
Everything to do with the
military is on display, from
pistol rounds and tanks to
military dining trucks and
13th-century handguns.
NAVAL
Museo Naval
The Naval Museum traces the
history of the Spanish Navy
from the Catholic Monarchs
in the 15th century up to the
present day. Displays include
weapons, navigation instruments, maps, and paintings.
Toledo in the busiest tourist

months can make Londons Oxford
Street feel like a stroll down a
country lane. A good way to see
the city and the museum, for
visitors with time to spare, is to
plan to arrive late afternoon or
early evening, preferably not on a
weekend, when the tourist coaches
begin to depart. Check into one
of Toledos several fine hotels
(the Parador is outside the town
centre, but offers a breathtaking
view of the city), spend an evening
quietly strolling about, and join the
Spaniards for a late-night dinner.
Then enjoy a relatively quiet visit
to the museum after breakfast the
next day, and head back to Madrid
in the afternoon.
73
LIS I
EXHIBITION
THE BEST MILITARY HISTORY EVENTS, LECTURES AND EXHIBITIONS
COMMON FREE
CAUSE:
COMMONWEALTH
SCOTS AND
THE GREAT WAR
ENTRY
11 July-12 October 2014
National Museum of Scotland

Chambers Street, Edinburgh
EH1 1JF
0300 123 6789
www.nms.ac.uk
15
EVENT
COLCHESTER MILITARY
TOURNAMENT
5-6 July 2014
ENTRY
Abbey Field, Colchester, CO2 7NZ

0844 871 8819
www.colchestermilitarytournament.co.uk
olchester, the oldest garrison town in England, with a history of tattoos and tournaments stretching back
to the Roman era, will once again be the scene of a major event with the arrival of the Colchester Military
Tournament. Staged by ABF The Soldiers Charity, the event will be the largest of its kind in the country.
Featuring a jam-packed performance schedule, along with Army static displays, trade stands, bars, food
stalls, a funfair, zorb balls, bumper boats, and a host of other attractions, it promises to be a great family day out.
PERFORMANCE
MERRY IT WAS
TO LAUGH THERE 13.50
ENTRY
4 July 2014
Chelmsford City Theatres
Fairfield Road, Chelmsford
Essex, CM77 6TB
01245 606505
www.chelmsford.gov.uk/theatres
74
This new show captures the

realities of war through the
words of both the soldiers
and those left to keep the
home fires burning. Weaving
together poetry and letters
with fascinating and poignant
details about the everyday lives
of the men who were fighting
and the women waiting for their
return, Merry It Was is a terrific

evocation of the time, reflecting
on the need to express emotions
and make sense of situations far
beyond anyones control.
In 1914, as the world prepared for

war, thousands of men enlisted
in Scotland. But thousands more
Scots and those of Scottish descent joined up across the world,
and this exhibition will show how
they emphasised, adapted, or in
some cases played down their
Scottish identities within the
context of the armed forces of
their home countries.
The exhibition will be built
around key objects borrowed
from the UK and international
partners in Canada, South
Africa, Australia, and New
Zealand some of the main
destination countries of the
Scottish diaspora.
This exhibition is supported
by the International Division,
Scottish Government, and is
part of the Year of Homecoming
Scotland 2014.
July 2014
DIG FOR
VICTORY SHOW
5-6 July 2014
North Somerset Show Ground

Bathing Pond Fields
Wraxall, BS48 1NE
www.digforvictoryshow.com
The Dig for Victory Show is

a 1940s themed festival being
held at the North Somerset
Show Ground near Bristol. The
organisers vision is to provide
10/18
their local community

with an affordable, familyorientated weekend event
to explore this turbulent
yet thought-provoking
period in recent history.
The event is in its fourth
consecutive year, having
attracted more than 8,000
people in 2013. The organisers work with local schools
and businesses, as well as
supporting the Army Benevolent Fund and the Childrens
Hospice South West.
DAY/WEEKEND
1 JULY
Pain and Passion

the opium poppy
National Roman Legion Museum
Blaenau Gwent
Wales, NP18 1AE
029 2057 3550
www.museumwales.ac.uk
A display telling the story

of the poppy in Roman
times, and how it is linked
to the First World War.
Poppies will be grown in
the National Roman Legion
Museum garden.
EVENT
FAMILY EVENT
WARGAMERS
WEEKEND 12.50
5-6 July 2014
INCL
ADMISSION
The Tank Museum

Bovington, Dorset
BH20 6JG
01929 462359
www.tankmuseum.org
CRACKING
CODES
FREE
ENTRY
12-13 July 2014
HMS Belfast, The Queens

Walk, London, SE1 2JH
020 7940 6300
www.iwm.org.uk
Can you decipher secret messages? Come and join in HMS
Belfasts family activity, intercepting

messages, mapping hazards on
the sea chart, and even making
up your own secret code.
To commemorate the 70th
Anniversary of D-Day, you will
learn about the skills intelligenceofficers had to have, as well
as some of the dangers that
surrounded HMS Belfast at sea
during this important battle of
the Second World War.
Wargaming clubs from across

the country will be exhibiting
different strategy games for
visitors to watch and play.
Specialist traders will also be
dispersed around the Museum,
so gamers can add to their
collections, and novices can
start their own. This is a mustsee event for anyone with an
interest in wargaming, and the
associated hobbies of dioramabuilding, modelling, and playtable making.
WWI POSTCARDS
EXHIBITION
2 July-18 December 2014
As part of a county-wide programme of commemorative activities across

Nottinghamshire, a new exhibition of a variety of WWI postcards from
collections owned by Newark residents will open this July. The exhibition
runs in tandem with a contemporary-art exhibition in the Spotlight Gallery
that will use the idea of embroidered silk postcards in a modern way.
7 JULY
Rival Jihads: Islam

and the Great War
in the Middle East,
1914-1918
British Academy
10-11 Carlton House Terrace
London, SW1Y 5AH
020 7969 5200
www.britac.ac.uk
In this lecture, Dr Eugene

Rogan will look at how Islam
had more impact on European
policies than on the loyalties of
the Muslim peoples caught up
in the First World War.
9 JULY
Dr Brightons War:
hospitals and healing
in Brighton during
World War I
Brighton Seafront,
Brighton, England
0300 029 0900
www.brighton-hove-rpml.org.uk
EXHIBITION
Newark Town Hall, Museum and Art Gallery
Town Hall Market Place, Nottinghamshire
NG24 1DU
01636 680333
www.newarktownhallmuseum.co.uk
DATES TO
REMEMBER
MHM VISITS
EVENT
FREE
ENTRY
This pictorial exhibition on

Brighton seafront, running
from 9 July to 31 August, will
tell how Brighton
and Hove was
transformed by
the presence of the
many military hospitals required to
treat the increasing
number of casualties returning from
t e Front.
75
T
TOURS
GALINA
INTERNATIONAL
BATTLEFIELD
TOURS
WAR RESEARCH
SOCIETY
BATTLEFIELD
TOURS
For more than 30 years our family run
tours have taken many thousands of
veterans, families, and interested parties
to the battlefields, memorials, and cemeteries all over the world, in a relaxed and
compassionate way. Our pre-tour research
enables us to fulfil your wishes in visiting
a particular place wherever it may be.
Our courtesy car that accompanies the
tour will take you to out-of-the-way places
to stand in the footsteps of your ancestors
and have the events of the day explained
to you.
Our guides are all very experienced in
the tours they are leading and we are one
of the oldest established tour leaders in
this profession.
Why not come and join one of our
highly acclaimed tours; we are sure that
you will find it extremely rewarding.
Ian and Jeannie Alexander look forward to welcoming you.
Galina began organising tours to the

battlefields of France, Belgium, and
the Netherlands in 1989. In those days,
20 or 30 people attending the Last Post
Ceremony at the Menin Gate in Ypres
was regarded as a crowd. Times change,
but we remain an independent, familyowned company, offering the same high quality of personal service today as we did then.
Our tours are guided throughout, and our guides have an academic or military background,
great experience of leading battlefield tours, and an enthusiasm for sharing their knowledge.
They are selected and trained by us.
Galina is a member of ABTA. We have also been the Official Tour Operators to the
Normandy Veterans Association since 1992. The coach companies and accommodation we use
are inspected by us to ensure high standards of safety and comfort. Finally, we can offer all our
clients financial security when booking with us.
TEL: 01244 340 777
EMAIL: info@wartours.com
WEB: www.wartours.com
AVAILABLE TOURS:
Mons 100th Anniversary: 22-25 August 2014
Arnhem 70th Anniversary: 18-22 September 2014
GUIDED
BATTLEFIELD TOURS
TEL: 0121 430 5348
Our greatest recommendation is the

number of returning guests on each tour.
We pride ourselves on providing a quality,
personal experience at a reasonable
price, with limited group sizes. You will be
accompanied by a specialist guide and a tour
manager who will ensure your comfort and
the smooth running of the tour. We know
that many people travel on our tours for remembrance of a family member and we are happy to
talk with you about the service of a relative. Your guide will be aware of any special interests you
may have so that your tour is a memorable experience. We offer a wide range of WWI and WWII
tours, and we are marking this years centenary with a number of special tours. The cost of each
tour includes all travel from your pick up point, bed and breakfast accommodation, refreshment
each day, and entry to all museums. There are no hidden costs.
EMAIL: info@battlefieldtours.co.uk
TEL: 01633 258207
WEB: www.battlefieldtours.co.uk
EMAIL: info@guidedbattlefieldtours.co.uk
AVAILABLE TOURS:
Europe: First and Second World War, South Africa,
Zulu, and Boer Wars
Russia: Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk
Asia: Singapore, Thailand
WEB: www.guidedbattlefieldtours.co.uk
AVAILABLE TOURS:
The Retreat from Mons Centenary Tour: 30 August2
September 2014
Ypres One Hundred Years On: 9-12 November 2014
First Day of the Somme Special: 29 June-2 July 2014
The Battle of Arnhem 70th Anniversary

Commemoration: 20-23 September 2014
Normandy and the D Day Landings 70 years on: 2-5
August 2014
THERE ARE A SELECT NUMBER OF BATTLEFIELD

TOURS THAT EVERY MILITARY HISTORY
ENTHUSIAST SHOULD EXPERIENCE. HERE WE
LIST ELEVEN OF THE FINEST, MOST REASONABLY
PRICED, WORLDWIDE TOURS AVAILABLE.
HOLTS BATTLEFIELDS AND HISTORY TOURS

Although much has changed in the world of travel since the first Holts Tour more than 30 years ago, visiting places of historic
interest remains a most rewarding experience. Our 2014 programme is packed with the usual wide variety of tours. As always,
popular regular tours such as Its A Long Way To Tipperary, Zulu War, D-Day and Salerno, Casino, and Anzio are featured, as
well as anniversary tours The Retreat from Mons, Napoleon in France 1814, Vercors & the French Resistance 1944, Arnhem
1944, and the Christmas Truce 1914. These days it is often not clear what you are getting for your money; we have always thought
it important that there are no hidden costs, and so much is included in the price that each tour represents excellent value for money. We are fully bonded
with ABTA and ATOL for your protection. If you would like to receive our 2014 Battlefields and History brochure, please telephone our office or request a
brochure via our website.
TEL: 01293 865000
WEB: www.holts.co.uk
AVAILABLE TOURS:
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7UHQFK:DUIDUH
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Battles
,ULVK5HEHOOLRQV
+DGULDQV:DOO
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Western Front
1RUWKXPEHUODQG%DWWOHV
6WXDUWVLQWKH
West Country
'DPEXVWHUV
/HLJH)RUWV
&ULPHDQ%DWWOHV
6RPPH:DONV
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/HLS]LJ&ROGLW]DQG%HUOLQ
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BIRD
BATTLEFIELD
TOURS
INDUS
EXPERIENCES
MILITARY HISTORY
TOURS
Indus Experiences is an established tour

company specialising in small group
and individually tailor made holidays.
Battlefield Tours are primarily to India
and Burma and each tour is led by
an acclaimed expert in the field, who
brings the past to life with their intimate
knowledge and passion.
Indus has a reputation for attention
to detail, exceptional value for money,
and for listening to their guests. Hence
all travellers have their own dedicated
consultant, who will work with them to
design the journey to see the battlefields
of India and Burma for Remembrance or
for pure interest.
Please call us to discuss your ideas and
we will work together to craft a journey of
a lifetime.
Indus is based in Harrow, London. The
company is fully bonded with ABTA and
ATOL and is the winner of British Travel
Awards 2013.
At Military History Tours (MHT) we

take great pride in what we do. We are
experts in each of our chosen fields
and we wish to share this knowledge
with you. At MHT we encourage
everyone to read and view as much as
possible. But only by walking in the
footsteps of those who were there can
one get a real insight into what went
on. You have to live the history, and
MHT it is all about the experience. We
take care of all local accommodation,
transport, and entrances, but what sets
us aside is our on-the-ground knowledge and contacts established over
many years that enable you to really
get under the surface of your chosen
subject matter. MHT believes this
experience is enhanced by only taking
low group numbers, typically 8-12.
MHT takes guests on trips as diverse as
The Christmas Truce to Colditz Castle,
from Hitlers Eagles Nest to the location of Archduke Franz Ferdinands
assassination in Sarajevo. MHT has a
comprehensive range of 19th and 20th
century trips to enable an experience
of a lifetime for anyone and everyone.
TEL: 020 8901 7320

EMAIL:holidays@indusexperiences.co.uk
WEB:www.indusexperiences.co.uk
AVAILABLE TOURS:
Whether your interest lies in the early years of the
then Arthur Wellesley, the Indian Mutiny, decisive
Battles of Imphal and Kohima during WWII, or the
poignant battles of Burma, Indus will craft a tour to
your specific requirements.
TEL: 0845 8350644

EMAIL: info@militaryhistorytours.co.uk
WEB: www.militaryhistorytours.co.uk
Bird Battlefield Tours is run

and guided by military historians and authors Antony
and Nicholas Bird. Nicholas,
a member of the Guild of Battlefield Guides, was
at the V&A for many years, and also guides art
historical tours. Antony has written on the Battle
of Le Cateau, 1914. They specialise in tours of WWI
and WWII battlefields in small groups, believing
that much can be learned from conversation with
like-minded enthusiasts over lunch and dinner
that war may be hell but battlefield touring should
be both instructive and convivial. They try not to
bang on, but do not always succeed. There are no
lectures after dinner, and no compulsory video on
a coach. Both Birds are interested in the experience of battle, how soldiers at the sharp end fought
and lived, as well as the tactics and strategy that
got them there. They welcome requests for bespoke
tours, from families wishing to see where their
grandfather fought or from groups of friends who
simply want to travel together without the risk of
joining a tour that may contain a bore.
TEL:0208 7520956
EMAIL:nick@nickybirddesign.com
WEB:www.birdbattlefieldtours.com
AVAILABLE TOURS:
Monsand Le Cateau: 13-16 April 2015
D-Day and theBattleofNormandy: 10-14 March 2015, 12-16
September 2015
The Somme andYpres:8-11 May 2015,15-18 July 2015,20-23
September 2015
Art tour of Palladian villas of theVeneto: 2-6 June 2015
Waterloo: 14-17 October
T
TOURS
HERTS AT WAR
Herts at War in association with Battle Honours Ltd are thrilled to announce our latest tour in a series spanning the
centenary of the Great War, which aims to bring the story of Hertfordshires residents in The First World War to life.
Our upcoming tour from 11-13 July will follow in the footsteps of Hertfordshires Victoria Cross recipients on the
Western Front between 1914 and 1918. With published authors and renowned guides Clive Harris and Kevin Brazier
leading the tour, it promises to be an evocative and memorable experience.
Herts for Valour is a three day two night tour with pickups from Ebbsfleet and Dover and two overnight stops in the
historic city of Amiens. Throughout the tour we will visit the infamous battlefields of Cuinchy, High Wood, Aichet le
Grande, Bouzincourt, and Haverincourt.
TEL: 01438 791020
(telephone Battle Honours Ltd for bookings)
EMAIL: info@hertsatwar.co.uk
WEB: www.hertsatwar.co.uk/hertsforvalour
AVAILABLE TOURS:
Herts for Valour; 11-13 July
WESTMINSTER
CLASSIC TOURS
VALOR TOURS
Valor Tours, Ltd has been leading authoritative tours to destinations of military
historic interest for over 30 years. As well
as going to key European battle sites in
the company of WWII veterans, we have
visited every significant island battle site
in the Pacific. Now, as age catches up with
the veterans, our traveling companions
are drawn from a younger generation
of history buffs and family members of
veterans anxious to see the places their
fathers and grandfathers made famous.
Many of the relics of battle the beached
hulks of landing craft, the concrete gun
emplacements, the bullet-pitted strong
points are still visible, and more importantly the memories and the memorials
remain. On these tours we rekindle
and honour the courageous exploits of
Americas fighting men and women who
went off to war 70 years ago.
TEL: 001-415-332-7850
EMAIL: valortours@yahoo.com
WEB: www.valortours.com
AVAILABLE TOURS:
2014 Tours: Return to Guadalcanal, WWI
Centennial series, WWII Poland, 70th Anniversary
return to Peleliu, El Alamein to Tunis Battlefield
Tour, Military History Tour Papua New Guinea,
70th Anniversary Leyte Landings Liberation of
the Philippines
Standing on the Gallipoli peninsula,

undeveloped for very nearly a century
in respect of the fallen of 1915, and
looking out at Asia and the plain of
Troy, and on the line of commerical
shipping that streams through the
Dardanelles, the strategic importance
of this place throughout history
becomes remarkably clear. In November, Westminster Classic Tours will be organising an
eight-day land tour that starts in Istanbul and includes visits to the site of Troy itself; the island
of Bozcaada (Tenedos) where the Greeks prepared their final assault on Troy and where the
Persian Xerxes prepared his invasion of Greece; the battlefield where Alexander the Great
triumphed over the Persians, as well as other little-visited and spectacular classical sites; and
ends with a full day exploring the battlefields and memorials of the Gallipoli campaign.
The tour will feature stimulating and detailed commentary and discussion, and the same
standards of comfort guests have come to expect from WCTs long-running tours in the
Mediterranean by Gulet.
TEL: 0208 785 3191
EMAIL: info@westminsterclassictours.com
WEB: www.westminsterclassictours.com
AVAILABLE TOURS:
The Gallipoli Centenary: From Bosphorus to the
Dardanelles: 1-8 November 2014 with James McKay
LEGER HOLIDAYS
Follow the footsteps of heroes on a Leger
Holidays Battlefield Tour with Specialist
Guides. If you want to understand our
nations and your familys history, there
is no better way than to actually visit the
battlefield sites and the places where history
was made.
Leger is the UK leader in escorted
Battlefield tours with the widest range of
tours, departure dates, and choice of over
510 local coach joining points, plus top-rated specialist guides making it easy for you to get the
full battlefield tour experience.
Choose from more than 35 WWI and WWII, Napoleonic, and American Civil War battlefield
tours including D-Day Landings in Normandy and All Quiet on the Western Front as the perfect
introductory tours, plus special anniversary tours which mark 70 years since D-Day and 100
years since the start of WWI.
Legers Battlefield tours are truly inspirational journeys of remembrance and discovery.
TEL: 0844 846 7919
EMAIL: reservations@leger.co.uk
WEB: www.inspirational-journeys.co.uk
AVAILABLE TOURS:
We offer a choice of WWI, WWII, Napoleonic, and American
Civil War battlefield tours as well as walking and special
anniversary tours with many departure dates throughout
the year.

WAR PLANS, 1914

David Porter compares the
war plans of the Great Powers
as the First World War began.
ON SALE 10 JULY
THE BATTLE OF
THE RIVER PLATE
Patrick Boniface analyses the pursuit and destruction
of German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee.
THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION

Three hundred years after it ended, MHM analyses the first great conflict of
the modern era, with a special feature on the Battle of Malplaquet and the
new paradigm of horse and musket warfare.
THE WARSAW UPRISING

Ian Maycock describes the ill-fated
Polish national revolt against Nazi
occupation in 1944.
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edieval French victory
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TITI S
Put your military history knowledge to the test with the MHM Quiz,
Crossword, and Caption Competition.
MHM QUIZ
This month, MHM has

2 copies of each of the
following books to be won.
The D-Day 70th Anniversary

Collectors Edition: The
Longest Day
Cornelius Ryan
accounts from the men who

were there. This new, illustrated,
unabridged edition makes the
extraordinary heroism of the
participants on both sides of
the war military and civilian
even more immediate through
the publication for the first
time of removable facsimiles
RRP 50
ISBN 978-0233004136
The Longest Day tells the

inside story of the invasion of
Normandy through first-hand
of research documents and

digitally remastered audio
interviews, which until now
have been sequestered in
the Cornelius Ryan Collection
in the United States.
D-Day Remembered
Richard Holmes
RRP 50
ISBN 978-0233004105
Written by one of Britains bestknown and respected military

historians, D-Day Remembered
sheds light on the planning,
execution, and aftermath of the

most momentous event of the
Second World War. It includes
more than 25 facsimile items
of rare memorabilia, such as
maps, diaries, secret memos
and reports, posters, and
logbooks from the collections
of the Imperial War Museum and
other archives around the world.
The book comes with a specially
produced DVD featuring the
documentary D-Day: Assault
on Fortress Europe.
MHM
CROSSWORD
NO 46
ACROSS
6
7
9
10
11
12
13
15
18
20
80
Battle fought in May 1706, a victory

for Marlborough and the Grand
Alliance forces (9)
Ancient Middle Eastern city-state
founded c.2300 BC (5)
Spanish city captured in 1238
by James I of Aragon (8)
US president, served as artillery
captain during World War I (6)
Delta ___, interceptor aircraft built
by Convair (4)
Strait crossed by the Persian army in
480 BC using pontoon bridges (10)
Ancient people of the Middle East,
who founded the kingdoms of Judah
and Israel (7)
Target for ___, 1941 documentary
film about a Wellington bomber
and its crew (7)
English castle besieged by Henry III
in 1266 (10)
Beauchamp ___, British general,
appointed Commander-in-Chief,
India, in March 1914 (4)
July 2014
CAPTION COMPETITION
MHM OFF DUTY
MHM
Answer
online at
www.militaryhistory.org
To be in with a chance of winning, simply answer

the following questions:
? What was the date of the Normandy landings?
? What was the code-name of the landings?
? What was the name given to the system of coastal
fortifications built by Nazi Germany along the western
coast of Europe and Scandinavia?
We continue our caption competition with an image from

our Irish Brigades article. Pit your wit against other
readers at www.military-history.org/competitions.
LAST MONTHS WINNER
ANSWERS
JUNE ISSUE | MHM 45

ACROSS: 6 Stingray, 8 Neagle, 10 Noble, 11 Alemanni,
12 Stratofortress, 13 Dublin, 15 Scrope, 17 Flying Fortress,
20 Iron Duke, 21 Irish, 22 Hector, 23 Halberds.
DOWN: 1 Stansted, 2 Praetorian Guard, 3 Dynamo,
4 Entente Cordiale, 5 Sarajevo, 7 Nubia, 9 Lines, 14 Bayonets,
16 Enschede, 17 Forge, 18 Flche, 19 Rhine.
22 Fyodor ___, Russian general,

killed in 1904 at the Battle of
Motien Pass during the RussoJapanese War (6)
23 Confederation of Native American
tribes that fought English settlers
in Virginia during the early 17th
century (8)
24 Samuel ___, appointed Secretary
to the Admiralty in 1672 (5)
25 Village near Wetherby, site of
a Royal Ordnance Factory from
1940 to 1958 (5,4)
4
5
8
10
14
16
DOWN
1
2
3
Caribbean city captured by a British

expedition in August 1762 (6)
Oxfordshire town, site of a Defence
Storage and Distribution Centre (8)
Brief conflict in 1832 when Native
American tribes attempted to
reclaim land in Illinois (5,4,3)
17
19
21
French company that built the

FT tank (7)
City in the southern US, captured
by British forces in 1778 (8)
German arms manufacturer from
the mid 19th century until World
War II (5)
Actor who played Lord Cardigan
in the 1968 film, The Charge of
the Light Brigade (6,6)
___ Learned, brigadier general in
the Continental Army during the
American War of Independence (8)
East ___, armed merchant ship of
the 16th to the 19th century (8)
Native American tribe of the
Great Plains (7)
Hebridean island where Dunyvaig
Castle was captured by Covenanters
in 1647 (5)
Dictator who graduated from the
Toledo Infantry Academy in 1910 (6)
Hold fast, lads. If those manure bags

fall, theyll split and well be deep in it.
Les Quilter
RUNNERS-UP
Ill just tape this hilarious Shoot Me! sign on Gunters back!
Neil Kahn
Over the bags Potter, and no tricks!
Les Quilter
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
81
RY
UNSUNG HEROES
LY
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MIL
IT
HLY
NT
HISTORY MO
Y
AR
HISTO RY MO
MHM CHOOSES FIVE LESSER-KNOWN PEOPLE WHOSE WAR EFFORTS DESERVE HIGHER PRAISE.
LY
TH
LY
MIL
IT
MIL
IT
RY
TH
LY
TH
MIL
IT
TA
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LIved 1947-1949
TO
Y HIS RY MO
AR
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he volunteered, but was

TO
Y HIS RY MO
refused military service due
AR
to his disability. Undaunted,
he cycled to the frontline,
serving as an unpaid civilian.
TA
Sent home by the military
N
RY
HISTO RY MO
police, Toti returned, attaching himself to a Bersaglieri
Bicycle Battalion, and was fatally wounded in
the Sixth Battle of Isonzo.
Simon
the
Cat
M IL
M IL
HLY
NT
82
LIved 1832-1919
Walker qualified as a doctor in

1855 and is the only woman to
hold the Congressional Medal of
Honor. When Civil War broke out
the Union Army refused to comHISTORY MO
Y
mission
a female surgeon, so she
AR
headed to the frontline in Virginia,
where she was commissioned in
1863. The following year, Walker
strayed into Confederate territory
TA
and was captured. Released on a
N
RY
O
HISTO RY M
prisoner exchange, Mary returned
to duty and was given the Medal of
Honor in 1865. Her award was withdrawn in 1917, because she had not
served in a combat role, but was finally reinstated in 1977.
Lived 1882-1916
Toti is one of the few civilians to receive

Italys highest honour for bravery, the
Gold Medal of Military Valour. Enrico lost
his left leg aged 24, while working on the
railway. He took up cycling, riding as far
as Lapland and Egypt between 1911-1913.
When Italy declared war on Austria in 1914
Mary
Edwards
Walker
M IL
Enrico Toti
LIved 1831-1901
Manley is the only recipient of both the British

Victoria Cross and the German Iron Cross. He
served with distinction as a surgeon with the
Royal Artillery during the Crimean War, but
earned his VC in the Maori Wars of the 1860s,
rescuing troops who were wounded while
storming an enemy stronghold. In the FrancoPrussian War, Manley and his Woolwich ambulance were attached to the German army,
who awarded him the Iron Cross for seeking
out wounded soldiers. At the siege of Paris in
1871, he tended to French casualties and was
decorated by the French Red Cross. He died
peacefully in Cheltenham aged 69.
M IL
William
Manley
LY
Lived 1858-1942
Kuzmin was a Russian peasant who refused to

join a Soviet collective farm and survived by
hunting and fishing. When German troops occupied his region in February 1942, Matvey was
83. The German commander bribed him to guide
his men behind the Soviet lines for a surprise
attack, but Kuzmin sent his grandson ahead
to alert the defenders.

TO
Y HIS RY MO
During the night, he led
AR
the Germans into an
ambush and was shot
by one of the officers,
TA
N
who realised that he
RY
HISTO RY MO
had double-crossed
them. He is the oldest
person to be a Hero of the Soviet Union, the
highest distinction of the Soviet Army.
TH
LY
N
HISTO RY MO
Matvey Kuzmin
MIL
IT
RY
TH
MIL
IT
HLY
NT
M IL
TA
HLY
NT
TO
Y HIS RY MO
AR
N
HISTO RY MO
Simon is the only cat

to receive the Dickin
Medal for animal bravery. Able seacat
Simon served on the sloop HMS Amethyst
when she sailed up the Yangtze river in
1949 to protect British interests during
the Chinese Civil War. Communist artillery
launched an unprovoked attack, killing
the captain and 21 sailors, and forcing her
aground. Suffering burns and shrapnel
wounds, which were treated in the sick bay,
the wounded cat still managed to kill the
king rat that was plaguing the ship while
it was stuck in the mud. After Amethyst
escaped and returned to England, Simon
died from a virus while in quarantine.
July 2014

Military History July 2014

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-XO\,VVXHe

The leading historian discusses WWI

How a divided nation

Bouvines, 1214: the greatest

The global fight for Irelands

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD:

The leading historian discusses WWI

How a divided nation

his month we mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day. This

The scale of it still breaks all records: 5,000 vessels,

Bouvines, 1214: the greatest

The global fight for Irelands

CONTRIBUTORS THIS MONTHS EXPERTS

MHM explores the

Notes from the Frontline

Behind the Image

MHM analyses an intriguing

Iain King investigates the life and

Mark Corby travels to Oxford to talk to

46 Irish Brigades Abroad

MHM looks at a selection from the

From the Wild Geese to the

52 The Battle that made France

Marking the anniversary of the battle, Jack

Advertising Sales: Tiffany Heasman

Taylor Downing revisits the film

Book of the Month | 66

Bijan Omrani recommends Jerry Whites

Jules Stewart on Hew

UK: 41.95 (12 issues) RoW: 51.95 (12 issues)

IN THE FIELD | MHM VISITS

Jules Stewart reports from the Spanish

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WAS KEITH THE GREATEST?

I note your recent article awarding

I am nearly 70 years old, and

Our round-up of this months military history news.

WATERLOO ANTHOLOGY RELEASED

the SAS War Diaries and won

with gold and silver highlights. In

and recollections from men of both

a VC for his bravery when he

ation of the British Expeditionary

were pinning their hopes

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vocals will bring a Home Front flavour

Military History Monthly, Lamb House,

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Iain King examines the relationship between war and thought

To each according to his threat

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