World War Two
Published 27 May 2023After four months, the Allies breakout from their bridgehead at Anzio and meet with the advancing troops heading north after the fall of Monte Cassino last week. The Japanese begin phase two of their big operation in China, and both the Soviets and the Western Allies continue making plans for their massive June offensives to squeeze the Axis from both sides of Europe.
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May 28, 2023
Breakout from Anzio! – WW2 – Week 248 – May 27, 1944
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May 27, 2023
QotD: The war elephant’s primary weapon was psychological, not physical
The Battle of the Hydaspes (326 BC), which I’ve discussed here is instructive. Porus’ army deployed elephants against Alexander’s infantry – what is useful to note here is that Alexander’s high quality infantry has minimal experience fighting elephants and no special tactics for them. Alexander’s troops remained in close formation (in the Macedonian sarissa phalanx, with supporting light troops) and advanced into the elephant charge (Arr. Anab. 5.17.3) – this is, as we’ll see next time, hardly the right way to fight elephants. And yet – the Macedonian phalanx holds together and triumphs, eventually driving the elephants back into Porus’ infantry (Arr. Anab. 5.17.6-7).
So it is possible – even without special anti-elephant weapons or tactics – for very high quality infantry (and we should be clear about this: Alexander’s phalanx was as battle hardened as troops come) to resist the charge of elephants. Nevertheless, the terror element of the onrush of elephants must be stressed: if being charged by a horse is scary, being charged by a 9ft tall, 4-ton war beast must be truly terrifying.
Yet – in the Mediterranean at least – stories of elephants smashing infantry lines through the pure terror of their onset are actually rare. This point is often obscured by modern treatments of some of the key Romans vs. Elephants battles (Heraclea, Bagradas, etc), which often describe elephants crashing through Roman lines when, in fact, the ancient sources offer a somewhat more careful picture. It also tends to get lost on video-games where the key use of elephants is to rout enemy units through some “terror” ability (as in Rome II: Total War) or to actually massacre the entire force (as in Age of Empires).
At Bagradas (255 B.C. – a rare Carthaginian victory on land in the First Punic War), for instance, Polybius (Plb. 1.34) is clear that the onset of the elephants does not break the Roman lines – if for no other reason than the Romans were ordered quite deep (read: the usual triple Roman infantry line). Instead, the elephants disorder the Roman line. In the spaces between the elephants, the Romans slipped through, but encountered a Carthaginian phalanx still in good order advancing a safe distance behind the elephants and were cut down by the infantry, while those caught in front of the elephants were encircled and routed by the Carthaginian cavalry. What the elephants accomplished was throwing out the Roman fighting formation, leaving the Roman infantry confused and vulnerable to the other arms of the Carthaginian army.
So the value of elephants is less in the shock of their charge as in the disorder that they promote among infantry. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, heavy infantry rely on dense formations to be effective. Elephants, as a weapon-system, break up that formation, forcing infantry to scatter out of the way or separating supporting units, thus rendering the infantry vulnerable. The charge of elephants doesn’t wipe out the infantry, but it renders them vulnerable to other forces – supporting infantry, cavalry – which do.
Elephants could also be used as area denial weapons. One reading of the (admittedly somewhat poor) evidence suggests that this is how Pyrrhus of Epirus used his elephants – to great effect – against the Romans. It is sometimes argued that Pyrrhus essentially created an “articulated phalanx” using lighter infantry and elephants to cover gaps – effectively joints – in his main heavy pike phalanx line. This allowed his phalanx – normally a relatively inflexible formation – to pivot.
This area denial effect was far stronger with cavalry because of how elephants interact with horses. Horses in general – especially horses unfamiliar with elephants – are terrified of the creatures and will generally refuse to go near them. Thus at Ipsus (301 B.C.; Plut. Demetrius 29.3), Demetrius’ Macedonian cavalry is cut off from the battle by Seleucus’ elephants, essentially walled off by the refusal of the horses to advance. This effect can resolved for horses familiarized with elephants prior to battle (something Caesar did prior to the Battle of Thapsus, 46 B.C.), but the concern seems never to totally go away. I don’t think I fully endorse Peter Connolly’s judgment in Greece and Rome At War (1981) that Hellenistic armies (read: post-Alexander armies) used elephants “almost exclusively” for this purpose (elephants often seem positioned against infantry in Hellenistic battle orders), but spoiling enemy cavalry attacks this way was a core use of elephants, if not the primary one.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part I: Battle Pachyderms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-26.
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May 23, 2023
Mustard: A Spicy History
The History Guy: History Deserves to be Remembered
Published 15 Feb 2023In 2018 The Atlantic observed “For some Americans, a trip to the ballpark isn’t complete without the bright-yellow squiggle of French’s mustard atop a hot dog … Yet few realize that this condiment has been equally essential — maybe more so — for the past 6,000 years.”
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May 21, 2023
The Fall of Monte Cassino – WW2 – Week 247 – May 20, 1944
World War Two
Published 20 May 2023In Italy, the Allies finally overcome Monte Cassino and break through the Gustav Line; in Burma Merrill’s Marauders surprise the Japanese and take Myitkyina Airfield; in China, it’s the Japanese who are playing offense, as Operation Ichi Go and the siege of Luoyang continue. That’s the field action, but there’s big planning behind the scenes for major June offensives going on by both the Western Allies and the Soviets.
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May 14, 2023
Victory at Sevastopol! – WW2 – Week 246 – May 13, 1944
World War Two
Published 13 May 2023The Soviets push the Axis out of the Crimea this week once and for all. In Italy, the Allies launch a major offensive, and the French make a breakthrough there by week’s end. In China, the Japanese are aiming at Luoyang, but in India at Kohima they’re slowly being pushed back.
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May 7, 2023
Total Chaos on the Chinese Front! – WW2 – Week 245 – May 6, 1944
World War Two
Published 6 May 2023A command crisis in the Chinese Nationalist Army benefits the Japanese invaders, in Italy, Mark Clark spends his birthday planning new offensives, the Japanese are pushing for Imphal, and the Soviets for Sevastopol — another busy week of the war!
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May 1, 2023
Britain’s first embassy to India
In The Critic, C.C. Corn reviews Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das, a look at the first, halting steps of the East India Company at the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir early in the seventeenth century:
The late Sir Christopher Meyer, the closest thing modern British diplomacy has produced to a public figure, enjoyed comparing his trade to prostitution. Both are ancient trades, and neither enjoys a wholly favourable reputation. Any modern diplomat will discreetly confirm that the profession is far from the anodyne, flag-emoji civility and coyly embarrassed glamour they project on Twitter.
Whilst none of our modern representatives are working in quite the same conditions as their predecessor Sir Thomas Roe, they may well find uncanny parallels with his unfortunate mission.
The fledgling and precarious East India Company, founded in 1600, had sent representatives to the Mughal court before, but they were mere merchants and messengers. The stern rebuff they received called for a formal representative of the King.
After the company persuaded James I of the necessity, Thomas Roe (a well-connected MP, friend to John Donne and Ben Jonson, and already an experienced traveller after an attempt to reach the legendary El Dorado) was dispatched to the court of Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1615. He remained there until 1619, in an embassy that the cultural historian, Nandini Das, describes in Courting India as “infuriatingly unproductive”.
The company kept rigorous records, and Roe meticulously kept a daily diary. Professor Das uses these and the reports of other English travellers to narrate Roe’s journey, as well as contemporary literature and, more importantly, their Indian equivalents. It is not so much the diplomatic success that fascinates Das about Roe’s embassy, but the mindset of the early modern encounter between England and India.
In a boom time for histories of British colonialism, this is an intelligent and gripping book with a thoughtful awareness of human relationships and frailties, and a model approach to early modern cross-cultural encounters.
The privations suffered by Roe’s embassy are striking. Only three in ten people had a chance of coming home alive from the voyage to India. Das’s recreation of the journey out is as intense and claustrophobic as Das Boot, with rotten medicine, cruel maritime punishments and untrained boys acting as surgeons. Dead bodies onboard would have their toes gnawed off by rats within hours.
In India, the English sailors excelled themselves as uncouth Brits abroad: drinking, fighting and baiting local customs, such as killing a calf. A chaplain was notorious for “drunkenly dodging brothel-keepers and engaging in half-naked brawls”. For most of his time, Roe — seeking to keep costs down — lived with merchants and factors already in India, in a cramped, filthy, dangerous house.
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April 30, 2023
David Howarth’s history of the East India Company
Robert Lyman reviews David Howarth’s recent work Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company:
It is the human detail of the EIC and the ultimate triumph of its trading endeavours despite the best efforts of Portugal, the Dutch Republic and of the vicissitudes of Neptune that holds great fascination for me, and which is the triumph of Howarth’s intimate and intricate portrayal of the EIC in the first century of its existence. His great achievement is both to bring the dusty tomes of the Company back to life, not just to humanise one of the greatest trading ventures of all of human history, but to interpret the early years of the Company (his book spans 1600 to 1688, though most of the narrative is pre-1650) as a peculiarly human rather than an institutional endeavour. Is this important? Yes. Humans have agency; institutions consume or act upon the determining agency of human beings, not the other way around. Too much of modern (post 1880) history is based upon determining the perspective of organisations and movements (as interpreted by later historians, many with their own ideological baggage) rather than of actual, real live people making decisions for themselves in the peculiar and particular context of their lives and times.
The means through which Howarth paints his story is by the decisions, actions and activities of actual people, some influential decision-makers and many others who were not, all of which makes up a remarkably vivid tapestry of human intercourse. Each chapter, for instance, is constructed around a person or group of people. One powerfully tells the story of the men of the Peppercorn, an EIC East Indiaman, as it seeks out the riches of a world on the extreme periphery of the consciousness of most Europeans. The ultimate triumph of European expansion into Asia is not difficult to comprehend. Europe was pursuing an adventure, aggressively, relentlessly and determinedly, to bring the riches of the world back to its own shores. At no time did the Chinese, Japanese, Indians or inhabitants of the Spice Islands return the favour. The energetic persistence of Sir Thomas Roe, for instance, the Company’s ambassador to the Mughal court (1615-1619), is easily compared to the intellectual (and alcoholic) indolence of the Great Mughal with whom Roe was attempting to interact. Roe was there, in India: Europeans were interested in the “East” and with travelling to the other side of the world for purposes of human engagement, adventure, patriotism and, yes, greed and selfish self-interest. The Great Mughal, by contrast, was also driven by greed and self-interest, but he just wasn’t interested in exploring. He certainly wasn’t interested in Europe. He was already, in his view, at the top of the human tree and had no need for either the ideas or the money of the red-haired barbarians who came from across the sea, a sea that incidentally few Mughal emperors had (amazingly) ever even seen. Fascinatingly, the Mughal shared with King James I an abhorrence with “trade”, though James knew he needed grubby merchants like Sir John Lyman [the reviewer’s ancestor] as they gave him coin. It wasn’t just about the merchants: Kings and governments needed the money that the merchants delivered by the bucket load because they couldn’t create it themselves. Howarth astutely observes that the “EIC belonged to the globe of politics as much as it did to the sphere of commerce”. Indeed, something of a symbiosis between the two in Tudor and Stewart England created a sense of nationhood – in the face of the resistance of others, in Europe and further afield – for the first time. The Mughal Empire was ultimately swallowed up as a result of a dynamism by European politicians and merchants working in unison which it never bothered to replicate by undergoing the reverse journey.
And power? No. Howarth is remarkably clear that the primary task of the EIC was to make money, not to accrue territory, create power in foreign territories or aggrandise native populations. The role of the executive arm of the EIC (its ships, sailors and factors) was to make money for its investors, many of whom were the very merchant adventurers in the little ships travelling east over vast oceans. The great game of mercantile expansion took place because those who had most to lose were also sailing the ships, negotiating with foreign emissaries, fighting the Portuguese and the Dutch and placing their lives on the line. Amazingly, in 1570 England had only 58,000 tons of marine tonnage compared with Spain’s 300,000, and was very definitely the minnow in the rush to conquer the seas. The men who built and sailed its boats came from a long way behind, and yet in time were to build a seagoing commercial empire which more than rivalled all its competition. Its early growth was fuelled by the wealth provided by spice rather than slaves and, in contradistinction to what some modern historical moralists are keen to tell us, by a “reluctance to use violence and vigilance to avoid land commitments”. Indeed, unlike that of the Dutch, and despite what one might assume if we were to read the British national anthem back into history, “expansion in England happened with no appeal whatever to national glory”.
The amazing thing about the EIC was just how chaotic and disorganised it was. There was nothing inevitable about its rise as a monolithic mercantile overlord destined for instance, in the due course of time, to rule India. Second guessing history is only possible for historians able to look backwards and identify trends and features, convictions that didn’t exist for those when history was happening trying to make their way through the fog of an uncertain and troublesome future. The EIC proved simply to be better organised than the Portuguese, and not distracted as the Dutch were in their long war against Spain. Luck and serendipity played as much a role on the eventual survival of the EIC as did its ability to raise massive amounts of money from venturers in England (every raise or round of financing was heavily over-subscribed) for its adventures and to recruit adventurers to take its ships to sea. The EIC was phenomenally successful in raising voluntary capital to fund its ventures relative to other European states. By comparison, “although Iberian barns might have looked well built and better stocked, once they were given a good kick the rusted hinges flew off”.
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Germany’s Existential Crisis – WW2 – Week 244 – April 29, 1944
World War Two
Published 29 Apr 2023The fighting at Kohima is up close, personal, and vicious, as it is at Imphal. The Allies consolidate their gains at Hollandia, the Japanese are advancing in Central China, and it seems like the Chinese Nationalist Army has lost the support of the civilian population. This might not surprise you when we take a closer look.
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April 29, 2023
QotD: The problem of war-elephants
On the other hand, the Romans spend about 200 years (from c. 264 to 46 B.C.) mopping the floor with armies supported by war elephants – Carthaginian, Seleucid, even Roman ones during the civil wars (Thapsus, 46 B.C.). And before someone asks about Hannibal, remember that while the army Hannibal won with in Italy had almost no war elephants (nearly all of them having been lost in the Alps), the army he lost with at Zama had 80 of them. Romans looking back from the later Imperial period seemed to classify war elephants with scythed chariots and other failed Hellenistic “gimmick” weapons (e.g. Q. Curtius Rufus 9.2.19). Arrian (a Roman general writing in the second century A.D.) dismisses the entire branch as obsolete (Arr. Tact. 19.6) and leaves it out of his tactical manual entirely on those grounds.
This negative opinion in turn seeps into the scholarship on the matter. This is in no small part because the study of Indian history (where war elephants remained common) is so under-served in western academia compared to the study of the Greek and Roman world (where the Romans functionally ended the use of war elephants on the conclusion that they were useless). Trautmann, (2015) notes the almost pathetic under-engagement of classical scholars with this fighting system. Scullard’s The elephant in the Greek and Roman World (1974) remains the standard text in English on the topic some 45 years later, despite fairly huge changes in the study of the Achaemenids, Seleucids, and Carthaginians in that period.
All of which actually makes finding good information on war elephants quite difficult – the cheap sensational stuff often fills in the gaps left by a lack of scholarship. The handful of books on the topic vary significantly in terms of seriousness and reliability.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part I: Battle Pachyderms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-26.
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April 28, 2023
Field Marshal Slim’s secret vice – he also wrote articles and short stories under pseudonym
It’s no secret that I have a very high regard for Field Marshal William Slim, so I’m quite looking forward to reading some of Slim’s pre-WW2 writings that have just been gathered together by Dr. Robert Lyman in a three-volume set:
Few people during his lifetime, and even fewer now, know that the man who was to become one of the greatest British generals of all time – and I’m not exaggerating – was in fact a secret scribbler. Now, many people know that he was the author of at least two best selling books. In 1956 he wrote his account of the Burma campaign, Defeat into Victory, described by one reviewer, quite rightly in my view, as “the best general’s book of World War II”. Then, in 1959, he published, under the title of Unofficial History, a series of articles about his military experience, some of which had been published previously as articles in Blackwood’s magazine. This was the first indication that there was an unknown literary side to Slim. The fact that he was a secret scribbler, or at least had been one once, was only publicly revealed on the publication of his biography in 1976 by Ronald Lewin – Slim, The Standard Bearer – which incidentally won the W.H. Smith Literary Award that same year. Lewin explained that Slim had written material for publication long before the war. In fact, between 1931 and 1940 he wrote a total of 44 articles, extending in length between two and eight thousand words – a total of 122,000 words in all – for a range of newspapers and magazines, including Blackwood’s Magazine, the Daily Mail, the Evening Express and the Illustrated Weekly of India. According to Lewin, he did this to supplement his earnings as an officer of the Indian Army. He didn’t do it to create a name for himself as a writer, or because he had pretensions to the artistic life, but because he needed the money. As with all other officers at the time who did not have the benefit of what was described euphemistically as “private means” he struggled to live off his army salary, especially to pay school fees for his children, John (born 1927) and Una (born 1930). Accordingly, he turned his hand to writing articles under a pseudonym, mainly of Anthony Mills (Mills being Slim spelt backwards) and, in one instance, that of Judy O’Grady.
With the war over, and senior military rank attained, he never again penned stories of this kind for publication. With it died any common remembrance of his pre-war literary activities. Copies of the articles have languished ever since amidst his papers in the Churchill Archives Centre at the University of Cambridge, from where I rescued them last year. They have been republished this week by Richard Foreman of Sharpe Books.
During the time Slim was writing these the pseudonym protected him from the gaze of those in the military who might believe that serious soldiers didn’t write fiction, and certainly not for public consumption via the newspapers. He certainly went to some lengths to ensure that his military friends and colleagues did not know of this unusual extra-curricular activity. In a letter to Mr S. Jepson, editor of the Illustrated Times of India on 26 July 1939 (he was then Commanding Officer of 2/7 Gurkha Rifles in Shillong, Assam) he warned that he needed to use an additional pseudonym to the one he normally used, because that – Anthony Mills – would then be immediately “known to several people and I do not wish them to identify me also as the writer of certain articles in Blackwood’s and Home newspapers. I am supposed to be a serious soldier and I’m afraid Anthony Mills isn’t.”
What do these 44 articles tell us of Slim? He would never have pretended that his writings represented any higher form of literary art. He certainly had no pretensions to a life as a writer. He was, first and foremost, a soldier. His writing was to supplement the family’s income. But, as readers will attest, he was very good at it. They demonstrate his supreme ability with words. As Defeat into Victory was to demonstrate, he was a master of the telling phrase every bit as much as he was a master of the battlefield. He made words work. They were used simply, sparingly, directly. Nothing was wasted; all achieved their purpose.
The articles also show Slim’s propensity for storytelling. Each story has a purpose. Some were simply to provide a picture of some of the characters in his Gurkha battalion, some to tell the story of a battle or of an incident while on military operations. Some are funny, some not. Some are of an entirely different kind, and have no military context whatsoever. These are often short adventure stories, while some can best be described as morality tales. A couple of them warned his readers not to jump to conclusions about a person’s character. Some showed a romantic tendency to his nature.
The stories can be placed into three broad categories. The first comprises seventeen stories about the Indian Army, of which the Gurkha regiments formed an important part. The second group are eleven stories about India, with no or only a passing military reference. The third, much smaller group, contains seventeen stories with no Indian or military dimension.
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April 23, 2023
The Biggest Offensive in Japanese History – WW2 – Week 243 – April 22, 1944
World War Two
Published 22 Apr 2023Japan Launches Operation Ichigo in China, their largest offensive of the war … or ever, but over in India things are not going well for the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima. The Allies also launch attacks on the Japanese at Hollandia, while over in the Crimea, the German defenses at Sevastopol are cracking under Soviet pressure.
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April 16, 2023
4,000 German teens trapped in Tarnopol – WW2 – Week 242 – April 15, 1944
World War Two
Published 15 Apr 2023Thousands of German soldiers, mostly new teenage recruits, are obeying Hitler’s “Fortress Directive” and are surrounded in Tarnopol; it does not go well for them. German forces in Ukraine manage to all pull back across the Dniester, but they are under serious pressure in the Crimea. Meanwhile, in India, the Japanese siege of Kohima continues, and in China they are poised to launch a gigantic offensive.
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April 9, 2023
New Offensive in the Crimea – WW2 – Week 241 – April 8, 1944
World War Two
Published 8 Apr 2023The Soviets are finally going to try and push the Axis out of Sevastopol and the Crimea. They also continue to drive the Axis back in Transnistria. Over in Burma and Northeastern India, the Japanese have the Allies under siege at not one, but two towns, and are also attacking Imphal from several points, but the Japanese have way bigger future plans up their sleeves in China.
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April 3, 2023
Goodbye Manstein… Hello Model – WW2 – Week 240 – April 1, 1944
World War Two
Published 1 Apr 2023As the Allies prepare to close in on Germany from all fronts, a shake up of the German military leadership can only achieve so much…
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