… last week we noted how the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West did not destroy the Roman cultural sphere so much as accelerate its transformation (albeit into a collection of fragmented fusion cultures which were part “Roman” mixed with other things), it did bring an end to the Roman state in the west (but not the east) and an end to Roman governance. But here too, we have to be careful in defining what that governance meant, because the Roman Empire of August, 378 AD was not the Roman Empire of August, 14 AD. This is a point that is going to come up again and again because how one views the decline of the fifth and sixth centuries depends in part on what the benchmark is: are we comparing it to the empire of Hadrian (r. 117-138) or the empire of Valentinian (r. 364-375)? Because most students are generally more familiar with the former (because it tends to be get focused on in teaching), there is a tendency to compare 476 directly with Rome under the Nervan-Antonines (96-192) without taking into account the events of the third and early fourth century.
Roman rule as effectively codified under the first emperor, Augustus (r. 31BC – 14AD) was relatively limited and indirect, not because the Romans believed in something called “limited government” but because the aims of the Roman state were very limited (secure territory, collect taxes) and the administrative apparatus for doing those things was also very limited. The whole of the central Roman bureaucracy in the first century probably consisted of just a few hundred senatorial and equestrian officials (supported, of course, by the army and also several thousand enslaved workers employed either by the state directly or in the households of those officials) – this for an empire of around 50 million people. Instead, day to day affairs in the provinces – public works, the administration of justice, the regulation of local markets, etc. – were handled by local governments, typically centered in cities (we’ll come back to them in a moment). Where there were no cities, the Romans tended to make new ones for this purpose. Roman officials could then interact with the city elites (they preferred oligarchic city governments because they were easier to control) and so avoid having to interact directly with the populace in a more granular way unless there was a crisis.
By contrast, the Roman governance system that emerges during the reigns of Diocletian (r. 284-305) and Constantine (r. 306-337) was centralized and direct. The process of centralizing governance had been going on for some time, really since the beginning of the empire, albeit slowly. The Constitutio Antoniniana (212), which extended Roman citizenship to all free persons in the empire, in turn had the effect of wiping out all of the local law codes and instead extending Roman law to cover everyone and so doubtless accelerated the process.
During the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284) this trend accelerates substantially; the sources for this period are relatively poor, making it hard to see this process clearly. Nevertheless, the chaotic security situation led Roman generals and usurpers to make much greater demands of whatever local communities were in their reach, while at the same time once in power, emperors sought to draw a clearer distinction between their power and that of their subordinates in an effort to “coup proof” their regimes. That new form of Roman rule was both completed and then codified by Diocletian (r. 284-305): the emperor was set visually apart, ruling from palaces in special regalia and wearing crowns, while at the same time the provinces were reorganized into smaller units that could be ruled much more directly.
Diocletian intervened in the daily life of the empire in a way that emperors before largely had not. When his plan to reform the Roman currency failed, sparking hyper-inflation (whoops!), Diocletian responded with his Edict on Maximum Prices, an effort to fix the prices of many goods empire wide. Now previous emperors were not averse to price fixing, mind you, but such efforts had almost always been restricted to staple goods (mostly wheat) in Rome itself or in Italy (typically in response to food shortages). Diocletian attempted to enforce religious unity by persecuting Christians; his successors by the end of the century would be attempting to enforce religious unity by persecuting non-Christians. Whereas before taxes had been assessed on communities, Diocletian planned a tax system based on assessments of individual landholders based on a regular census; when actually performing a regular census proved difficult, Constantine responded by mandating that coloni – the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the empire – must stay on the land they had been farming so that their landlords would be able to pay the taxes, casually abrogating a traditional freedom of Roman citizens for millions of farmers out of administrative convenience. Of course all of this centralized direction demanded bureaucrats and the bureaucracy during this period swelled to probably around 35,000 officials (compared to the few hundred under Augustus!).
All of this matters here because it is this kind of government – centralized, bureaucratic, religiously framed and interventionist, which the new rulers of the fifth century break-away kingdoms will attempt to emulate. They will mostly fail, leading to a precipitous decline in state capacity. This process worked differently in different areas: in Britain, the Roman government largely withered away from neglect and was effectively gone before the arrival of the Saxons and Angles, a point made quite well by Robin Flemming in the first chapter of Britain after Rome (2010), while in Spain, Gaul, Italy and even to an extent North Africa, the new “barbarian” rulers attempted to maintain Roman systems of rule.
This is thus an odd point where the “change and continuity” and “decline and fall” camps can both be right at the same time. There is continuity here, as new kings mostly established regimes that used the visual language, court procedure and to a degree legal and bureaucratic frameworks of Late Roman imperial rule. On the other hand, those new kingdoms fairly clearly lacked the resources, even with respect to their smaller territories, to engage in the kind of state activity that the Late Roman state had, for instance, towards the end of the fourth century. Instead, central administration largely failed in the West, with the countryside gradually becoming subject to local rural magnates (who might then be attached to the king) rather than civic or central government.
The problem rulers faced was two-fold: first that the Late Roman system, in contrast to its earlier form, demanded a large, literate bureaucracy, but the economic decline of the fifth century (which we’ll get to next time) came with a marked decline in literacy, which in turn meant that the supply of literate elites to staff those positions was itself shrinking (while at the same time secular rulers found themselves competing with the institutional Church for those very same literate elites). Second – and we’ll deal with this in more depth in just a moment – Roman rule had worked through cities, but all over the Roman Empire (but most especially in the West), cities were in decline and the population was both shrinking and ruralizing.
That decline in state capacity is visible in a number of different contexts. Bryan Ward-Perkins (Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), 148ff) notes for instance a sharp decline in the size of Churches, which for Christian rulers (both the post-Constantine emperors and the new “barbarian” kings) were major state building projects meant to display either royal or local noble wealth and power; Church size really only reaches Late Roman equivalent in the west (an important caveat here, to be sure) in the ninth century. In this kind of context it is hard to say that Visigothic or Merovingian rulers are actually just doing a different form of rulership because they’re fairly clearly not – they just don’t have the resources to throw at expensive building projects, even when you adjust for their smaller realms.
Nor is it merely building projects. Under Constantine, the Romans had maintained a professional army of around 400,000 troops. Much of the success of the Roman Empire had been its ability to provide “public peace” within its borders (at least by the relatively low standards of the ancient world). While the third century had seen quite a lot of civil war and the in the fourth century the Roman frontiers were cracking, for much of the empire the legions continued to do their job: war remained something that happened far away. This was a substantial change from the pre-Roman norm where war was a regular occurrence basically everywhere.
The kingdoms that emerged from the collapse of Roman rule proved incapable of either maintaining a meaningful professional army or provisioning much of that public peace (though of course the Roman state in the west had also proved incapable of doing this during the fifth century). Instead those kingdoms increasingly relied on armies led by (frequently mounted) warrior-aristocrats, composed of a general levy of the landholding population. We’ve actually discussed some of the later forms of this system – the Anglo-Saxon fyrd and the Carolingian levy system – already; those systems are useful reference points because they’re quite a bit better attested in our evidence and reflect many of the general principles of how we suppose earlier armies to have been organized.
The shift to a militia army isn’t necessarily a step backwards – the army of the Middle Roman Republic had also been a landholder’s militia – except that in this case it also marked a substantial decrease in scale. Major Merovingian armies – like the one that fought at Tours in 732 – tended to be around 10,000-20,000 men (mostly amateurs), compared to Late Roman field armies frequently around 40,000 professional soldiers or the astounding mobilizations of the Roman Republic (putting around 225,000 – that is not a typo – citizen-soldiers in the field in 214BC, for instance). Compared to the armies of the Hellenistic Period (323-31BC) or the Roman Empire, the ability of the post-Roman kingdoms to mobilize force was surprisingly limited and the armies they fielded also declined noticeably in sophistication, especially when it came to siege warfare (which of course also required highly trained, often literate engineers and experts).
That said, it cannot be argued that the decline of “public peace” had merely begun in the fifth century. One useful barometer of the civilian sense of security is the construction of city walls well within the empire: for the first two centuries, many Roman cities were left unwalled. But fresh wall construction within the Empire in places like Northern Spain or Southern France begins in earnest in the third century (presumably in response to the Crisis) and then intensifies through the fifth century, suggesting that rather than a sudden collapse of security, there had been a steady but significant decline (though again this would thus place the nadir of security somewhere in the early Middle Ages), partially abated in the fourth century but then resumed with a vengeance in the fifth.
Consequently the political story in the West is one of an effort to maintain some of the institutions of Roman governance which largely fails, leading to the progressive fragmentation and localization of power. Precisely because the late Roman system was so top-heavy and centralized, the collapse of central Roman rule mortally wounded it and left the successor states of Rome with much more limited resources and administration to try to achieve their aims.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-28.
June 5, 2025
QotD: Political institutions of the late western Roman Empire
June 4, 2025
“Asshole Britain”
In The Line, Greg Quinn indulges in a bit of struggle sessioning about his earlier disagreements with the editors of The Line about Britain and Canada (protip: don’t search for images to go along with that particular headline, especially if you have “safe search” filters turned off):
Yeah, let’s go with an inoffensive photo of His Royal Majesty and his Canadian First Minister chatting in the Senate chamber, rather than anything remotely to do with the headline of this post.
Photo by Paul Wells from his Substack
On February 12th of this year, I wrote in The Line about how my country, the United Kingdom, had “ghosted” Canada by refusing to come out strongly in reaction to U.S. President Donald Trump’s egregious attacks on the country and his calls for it to become the 51st state. In writing that piece, I didn’t beat around the bush — I called the U.K.’s actions what they were at the time: cowardice and sycophancy.
Since February, there have been a few (many?!) developments in Canada’s — and the world’s — relationship with President Trump.
Not least among these are Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson’s depiction (or technically, implication) of the U.K. as “Asshole Britain”. As other regular Line readers will know, “Asshole Canada” or “Maximum Canada” is an idea the editors floated here some months ago, where they asserted that Canada should abandon its typical desire to be seen as a global do-gooder and simply assert its national interests, vigorously and unapologetically, and if other countries, even allies, object, well, to hell with them. Editor Gurney, in a recent podcast, cited the just-concluded visit of His Majesty the King to Canada to deliver the Throne Speech — the first time a monarch has done so since 1977 — as an example of that. Prime Minister Mark Carney issued the invite to the King despite obvious discomfort with the idea among senior officials in my government.
Carney didn’t care. The King is the sovereign of Canada, too, and Carney didn’t let British discomfort deter him.
I have to say that HM the King’s speech was a blinder and (in its own royal diplomatic way) left no doubt as to where His Majesty’s sympathies lie and how he supports Canada’s sovereignty and independence. Whether you are a royalist or a republican, the fact that HM the King made the trip and read the speech should be welcomed. And I entirely agree with the editors here — Canadians should and must ignore the comments from the U.K. Who cares? HM the King was acting in his capacity as Canada‘s monarch — the views of anyone in the U.K. (government or otherwise) are irrelevant.
I wish I could condemn Jen and Matt for their (again, implied) characterization of the U.K. — Britain has needed no urging to unapologetically assert its own interests in this revived era of Trump. But I can’t. They are absolutely correct. And every day that passes, I’m sorry to say that the U.K. becomes more and more “Asshole Britain” when it comes to its relationship with Canada and the U.S.
The reasons remain much the same as I identified before: cowardice and sycophancy. To that, I’d now like to add venality. We think we have a special relationship with the U.S., as demonstrated by our recent trade agreement — except the impact of that agreement is open to some question. We seem to be afraid of saying anything that might upset President Trump, in case he reacts. Although we fail to understand that upsetting the President does not follow a rational process. He could (and does) get upset and react extremely easily at the simplest and most unexpected of things.
The President continues to make unacceptable claims against Canada, including reiterating his call for it to become the 51st state shortly after the King’s visit concluded. His latest iteration of this includes claims that Canada could save U.S.$61 billion it “should” be charged for the so-called Golden Dome (what is it with adjectives and this President?) if it joins the U.S. This, of course, fails to grasp the simple strategic fact that if you want a defence shield like this over North America, then you’re going to have to use sensors and other infrastructure on Canadian soil. Is he expecting to be provided that land for free?
By continuing to refuse to stand up to President Trump and clearly express our support for Canada, we are submitting to his attempts to divide and rule those of us who remain like-minded. At its worst, we are now venal — selling out to the president.
Instead, we should be standing true to our roots — as defenders of the free market and democracy. We should be leading the way, and we should be building an alliance of those who continue to share our values.
That is what we should be doing. That we aren’t is nothing short of a disgrace.
Update: Fixed broken link to Greg Quinn’s article. Doh!
The Korean War Week 50 – Trapped in the Triangle: Korea’s Killing Zone – June 3, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 3 Jun 2025The MacArthur Senate Hearings continue this week, with US Secretary of State Dean Acheson now in the hot seat. He takes a rather confusing barrage of questions, and yet manages to signal to the world at large, i.e. the Chinese, that the US is open to negotiations to end the war. The war still continues in the field, of course, with the UN forces’ Operation Piledriver in action, driving into the “Iron Triangle” and trying to trap as much of the enemy as possible.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:07 Recap
01:35 Acheson Speaks
05:44 Operation Piledriver
09:10 Attacks Begin
10:53 A Unifying JCS Directive
16:54 Summary
(more…)
Remarkable Victory – The Bomber War Episode 5 – Jan to June 1944
HardThrasher
Published 28 Feb 2024In which the USAAF and RAF finally start to Get Good at their jobs and tie up their respective campaigns for literally the first time.
00:00 – 04:01 – Introduction
04:06 – 08:12 – Forward Operating Base
08:15 – 11:30 – Changes in Command
11:32 – 16:16 – Doolittle’s Plan
16:20 – 22:25 – Big Week
22:34 – 29:32 – Aftermath
29:35 – 32:06 – Berlin
32:09 – 33:59 – Overlord
34:02 – Survivor’s Club
(more…)
QotD: Conquest empires
Specifically, metal.
Soft metals are not for conquest empire. Gold, silver, copper, tin, etc, may be used for plates or posts or jewellery or skin scrapers, but they are not war fighting metals. Even the lightest leather armour or layers of feather padding makes them practically valueless for war fighting. Metal only becomes an imperial material when it can be made hard enough for combat purposes.
The first such metal is Bronze, which is made by combining different metals in compounds. Copper compounded with enough tin (usually 5-10 percent) makes Bronze. Bronze can make armour and weapons and even axles and bearings. But copper (mined in mountains) and tin (usually from swamps) and the charcoal needed to melt them (from forests) combined in sufficient quantities for mass production (cities supported by taxed farmers), require extensive trade routes, and probably a stable currency of some sort. But once these elements can be combined, empires can give up on mere Security, and enter Conquest.
All the early Sumerian, Egyptian, Hittite, Persian, Greek, Roman, Indian and Chinese empires that we now scrawl across maps with lines to show how they conquered the territories of other empires are based on this simple concept. The Hittites with their Bronze, Egyptians with their chariots, and Romans with their Steel: being only different developments from the same basic “metal technology” roots.
Yet this is where motive becomes uncertain. All these empires got into conquest, but in many cases they did it either to continue their security (by pushing the dangerous boundaries ever further), or to protect the trade that made their system work. Conquest for the sake of conquest was certainly an element — particularly with rulers like Alexander the Great — but the original reason why Phillip of Macedon and his predecessors had developed the world’s most efficient fighting machine had more to do with constant threats from Persians and Greeks and other “barbarians” than with any desire to get into the conquest game itself. Sometimes things done for security lead to expanded boundaries for security, which then lead to expanding further for conquest. (Often because the system developed for paying those fighting for security requires conquest to pay them off … see Julius and many later Caesars!)
Nigel Davies, “Types of Empires: Security, Conquest, and Trade”, rethinking history, 2020-05-02.
June 3, 2025
Ukraine’s strategic strikes against Russian airbases
CDR Salamander on the lessons to be learned from the latest dramatic turn in the Russo-Ukrainian war with Ukraine carefully avoiding letting their American supporters know about the attack before it went in:
[This] picture from 2012 of Norfolk is what I want you to think about.
We talked about the superbly executed Ukrainian attack on Russian bomber bases for most of yesterday’s Midrats, and what keeps coming to mind for me is not the details of that attack, but the stark warning it is giving us.
The threat of drone strikes isn’t a new warning, but in my mind it intersect almost perfectly with the self-inflicted vulnerability of the US Navy’s fleet — its concentration.
The growing utility of attack drones isn’t an insight that is unique to the Russo-Ukrainian War. The topic has come up here and on Midrats for almost two decades. We’re not alone. Heck, broad thinking people like our friend Matt Hipple was pondering it over at CIMSEC thirteen years ago a few months before the picture at the top of the post was made.
I’ll tie in the picture a bit, but let’s take a moment to give the Ukrainians credit where credit is due. They executed precision strikes against the RUS bomber fleet across the entire two-thirds of the Euro-Asian landmass.
We will find out more details, a dozen or 40+ high-demand/low-density strategic bombers were taken off the battle line. RUS is not building any more of them. As missile carriers, they have been a cornerstone of the city terrors for most of the last four years. You would be hard-pressed to find a more honorable, or legitimate target.
Streiff over at Red State has a good summary with what we think we know as of Sunday afternoon:
The airbases are the home to Russia’s fleet of Tu-22, Tu-95M, and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers as well as AS-50 battle management aircraft. They were located from the Siberian Far East to the Arctic Circle. The furthest target, Belaya Airbase in Irkutsk, is over 2700 miles from Ukraine.
Reports indicate that at least 41 aircraft were hit. The unofficial tally indicates 24 Tu-22, 8 Tu-95MS, and 5 Tu-16 were hit. MiG-31 fighters and Il-76 transports were also hit. To put this in context, open-source data says Russia’s bomber inventory is about 58 Tu-22, 47 Tu-95MS, and 15 Tu-160. These planes are the ones used to launch most of the missiles fired at Ukrainian cities.
By any standard, this was a devastating attack. Nearly half of the Tu-22, a quarter of the Tu-95MS, and a third of the Tu-160 fleet, representing just over 30 percent of Russia’s strategic bomber force, were damaged or destroyed in one attack. When you consider the operational readiness rate, Russia probably has less than 50 aircraft capable of flying … on the bright side, they have plenty of aircraft to cannibalize for parts. The Tu-22 and Tu-95MS production lines are closed, and the Tu-160 production is one, yes, one per year. For all intents and purposes, this represents a permanent decrease in the size of the Russian strategic bomber fleet.
Before we discuss what the USA needs to take away, let’s look at the top-4 primary and second-order effects this will have on the Russian Federation.
First Order Effects
- Fewer raiding assets to use against UKR.
- The weakest leg of their nuclear triad (bombers are dual use) is even weaker.
- PSYOP defeat as RUS now know even their most valuable weapons, stationed deep into RUS rear, are vulnerable.
- Paranoia elevated into an already paranoid national psyche under duress of year four of a grinding war.
Second Order Effects
- Inefficiencies in both civilian logistics and manpower are the natural response to every tractor-trailer being a weapons delivery vehicle at range … and the need to defend important bases as a result, sinks into an already stressed nation.
- Loss of face. RUS launched a war of choice against nation 1/4th its size and much weaker than it from any measure, and four years on, still has only made marginal progress. Now that nation proved it can operate with impunity anywhere inside RUS. The “R” in BRICS is not impressing its friends.
- It shouldn’t, but this is going to get the nuclear autists the jitters. All theory, but yes, UKR took out one-third or more of the fully mission capable nuclear capable bombers that form one leg — but as mentioned above the weakest leg — of RUS’s nuclear deterrence. Those who work in the theory-dominated nuclear world will have all their gauges twitching, yes, but in the end analysis, it won’t matter.
- UKR morale just got a big boost. Wars of attrition usually last until one side or the other loses either the material ability or the will to fight. At least from the “will” line of operation, that decisive point just shifted to the right.
Simply a superb operation. How do you defend against weapons like this disguised in a trailer’s false roof?
Exercise Tiger: The WW2 Cover-Up Before D Day
The History Chap
Published 23 May 2024Exercise Tiger 1944, was a large-scale dress rehearsal for the D-Day landings, off the Slapton Sands in England, that went horribly wrong. Over 700 US servicemen were killed, more than were killed on Utah beach on D-Day itself! With D-Day imminent, Allied Supreme Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, ordered the disaster to be hushed up.
Following a friendly fire incident on Slapton Sands on the 27th April 1944, a convoy carrying US troops was attacked in the early hours of the 28th by German E-Boats. In what is called the Battle of Lyme Bay, two ships in the convoy were sunk resulting in the loss of over 700 US servicemen. Whilst rumours suggest that there were many casualties resulting from the friendly fire on Slapton Sands, the US Army has always remained tight-lipped. To this day, the mystery remains as to what extent the casualty figures were covered up.
In the 1980’s, a Sherman tank was raised from the seabed. It now stands at the end of Slapton Sands (near the village of Torcross) as a memorial to the young men who died 6 weeks before D-Day during Exercise Tiger.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:42 D-Day 1944
1:40 Slapton Sands
2:30 Civilian Evacuation
3:22 Military Build-up
4:58 Exercise Tiger
6:07 Live Fire Disaster
7:37 Convoy T-4
9:15 Spotted by Germans
10:03 E-boat attack
11:41 Battle of Lyme Bay
14:06 Casualty Figures
14:43 D-Day Compromised?
15:37 Cover-up?
17:00 D-Day Success
18:08 Exercise Tiger Remembered
(more…)
June 2, 2025
Fighting at Yenangyaung, 17-19 April 1942
Dr. Robert Lyman on the battle at Yenangyaung between 17-19 April 1942 early in the Burma campaign:
… the Yenangyaung battle is a fascinating one, with its own small degree of controversy, I decided to lay it out in this post. A mystery of the battle is the differing accounts of the Chinese attacks on the 19th April. In the British accounts (including Bill Slim’s in Defeat into Victory) the Chinese are blamed for failing to attack in the morning as they had promised, adding further jeopardy to the fate of the encircled 1st Burma Division. But was this true? The Japanese, Chinese and American accounts differ, so I thought I’d lay out the story to allow you, dear reader, to come to your own conclusion.
The fabulous map of Yenangyaung produced by the late Ian Lyall Grant.
The scrap at Yenangyaung was the final Corps-sized battle before the order to evacuate Burma Corps was given in early May. The Japanese had pushed out of Rangoon in mid-March, driving up the Irrawaddy on the left and against Toungoo on the right. Allied plans for the defence of Burma were inadequate, both Chinese (on the right) and Slim’s Burcorps (on the left) effectively fighting separate battles. Attempts by General Harold Alexander, the Army Commander, to control the battle and constrain the advancing Japanese ultimately came to naught. Alexander, Slim and Lieutenant General Joe Stilwell, nominally commanding the Chinese 5th Army, tried every trick in the tactical rule book to bring a halt to the relentless Japanese advance, and to destroy them in battle. After a month of fighting in which the Chinese were pushed out of Toungoo, the British lost control of Prome and an attempt to consolidate a defensive line across the country failed, the Japanese moved up the Irrawaddy in an attempt to turn the British flank, breaking in at the oilfield town of Yenangyaung on 17 April. At the time Slim’s Burma Corps was attempting to withdraw to the north from Allamyo. The Japanese infiltration into Yenangyaung cut the British in half. The 1st Burma Division was now cut off in Yenangyaung. The battle by the already weakened division (amounting to probably no more than 4,000 troops) into the Yenangyaung pocket over the period 17 and 19 April proved to be the severest trial yet faced by British troops in the short Burma campaign, the pressure applied by the Japanese exacerbated by the intense heat and the lack of water.
It was critical that Slim defeated this Japanese infiltration, rescue the 1st Burma Division from encirclement and retain the integrity of his Corps. If Yenangyaung were lost the Japanese would be free to sweep north to threaten Mandalay. It was crucial therefore that the divisional commander – Major General Bruce Scott – held on for as long as he could. But Slim had no reserve. The only hope of relief lay in assistance from the Chinese far to his right. He concluded that if he could engineer a attack into the pocket by the Chinese, across the Pin Chaung, combined with a breakout attack by 1st Burma Division, they might have a chance of escape. Nothing else looked likely to succeed.
When asked, Stilwell agreed to Alexander’s request for help to be provided to Slim, and gave him Lieutenant General Sun Lijen’s 38th Division – responsible for the defence of Mandalay – for the task. Chiang Kai-shek had given Sun responsibility for defending Mandalay. At midnight on 16 April Sun received an order from General Lo Cho-yin, “to dispatch his 113th Regiment to Kyaukpadaung, there to be commanded by the British General Slim …” Sun’s friend, Dr Ho Yungchi, recorded that by 3 a.m. he had arrived at Lo’s HQ at Pyawbe to discuss the order. Lo explained that the British were in serious trouble “in the oil town of Yenangyaung and had sent repeated requests for help”. By 6.30 a.m. it was agreed that Sun would personally take command of the 113th Regiment, while the two remaining regiments stayed to defend Mandalay. Sun and 1,121 men of 113th Regiment (commanded by Colonel Liu Fang-wu) arrived at Kyaukpadaung on the morning of 17 April.
Slim recalled: “The situation was not encouraging, and I was greatly relieved to hear that 113 Regiment of the Chinese 38th Division was just arriving at Kyaukpadaung. I dashed off in my jeep to meet their commander and give him his orders … this was the first time I had had Chinese troops under me … I got to like all, or almost all, my Chinese very much. They are a likeable people and as soldiers they have in a high degree the fighting man’s basic qualities – courage, endurance, cheerfulness, and an eye for country.”1
At Yenangyaung, Slim’s plan was for Sun’s 38th Division to attack from the north on the morning of 18th April while the 1st Burma Division, within the pocket, fought its way out. As Slim and Sun Lijen talked, discussing the details of the attack planned for the following morning Slim decided that he would place the Stuart tanks of the 7th Armoured Brigade directly under Sun’s command. It was only a move a man confident in the capabilities of his allies could make. Slim commented that “I was impressed by Sun and it was essential to gain his confidence. His division had no artillery or tanks of its own, and I was therefore arranging that all the artillery we had this side of the Pin Chaung and all available tanks should support his attack.” The commander of the British armoured brigade – Brigadier John Anstice – accepted this arrangement and according to Slim “he and Sun got on famously together”. What’s more, the soldiers worked well together too, Slim recording that the “gunners and tank crews, as is the way of British soldiers, soon got on good terms with their new comrades, and, in spite of language difficulties of an extreme kind, co-operation was, I was assured by both sides, not only close but mostly friendly.”2 Accordingly, at 6.15 a.m. on 18 April, Major Mark Rudkin of 2nd Royal Tank Regiment (2RTR) reported as instructed by Anstice to 38th Division HQ:
There was little activity except for the cooking of breakfast and it seemed most unlikely that the attack could start on time. I asked the British liaison officer with the Chinese what was happening and he informed me that as the Chinese realized that they would not be ready to attack at 0630 hours, they had put their watches back one hour, so that officially they were still attacking at 0630 though the time would in reality be 0730. They had, therefore, not lost “face” by being late.
The plan was that a troop of tanks would follow the leading troops of the leading Chinese battalion and give what support it could. Another troop was to follow the leading infantry battalion and assist the leading troop if required. The tanks would be almost entirely road bound owing to the going off the road.
At 0730 the assaulting Chinese moved forward off the ridge on a front of about four hundred yards, the leading troop keeping very close behind on the road. On foot near the tanks was a Chinese interpreter who carried out liaison between the tanks and infantry.
After advancing about half a mile the leading tank was hit by a Japanese 75-mm gun situated on the road just north of the Pin Chaung which was firing straight up 300 yards of road. The tank was disabled but there were no casualties.
The Chinese advance continued and by afternoon had almost reached the line of the ford on the Pin Chaung which was still held by the enemy. The Chinese had had heavy casualties, especially amongst officers, as it was the custom for Chinese officers to lead, whatever their rank. It was finally decided to hold positions about half a mile north of the crossing and continue the attack next day.3
With the first attack a failure, the Japanese retained their grip on both the ford and the village of Twingon. The situation for the surrounded remnants of the 1st Burma Division was desperate; the Japanese close to achieving a complete victory. Slim and Sun then worked through a plan for another attempt to be made the following morning, 19th April. This day also began badly, however. The Chinese attack was scheduled to begin at 7 a.m. British accounts subsequently recorded that a Chinese attack did not materialise at this time. Slim subsequently recorded in Defeat into Victory that the failure to attack must have been a function of the administrative difficulties faced by the Chinese. He wrote that with the Chinese “lack of signalling equipment, of means of evacuating wounded and of replenishing ammunition, and their paucity of trained junior leaders it was not surprising that to sort themselves out, reform, and start a fresh attack took time”.4 Slim was invariably impressed with what he saw of the Chinese soldier in action, but considered their support and command functions to be shockingly poor and a source of constant frustration to themselves, and to all who had occasion to operate with them.
Slim, and most other British published accounts, including the Indian and British Official Histories, record that the attack finally went in at 3 p.m., when Colonel Liu’s 113th Regiment successfully captured the ford and penetrated into Yenangyaung.5 “When the Chinese did attack they went in splendidly” wrote Slim in admiration. “They were thrilled at the tank and artillery support they were getting and showed real dash. They took Twingon, rescuing some two hundred of our prisoners and wounded. Next day, 20th April, the 38th Division attacked again and with tanks penetrated into Yenangyaung itself, repulsing a Japanese counter-attack. The fighting was severe and the Chinese acquitted themselves well, inflicting heavy losses, vouched for by our own officers.”
1. Slim, Defeat into Victory (1956), p. 63.
2. Ibid., p. 65.
3. Bryan Perrett, Tank Tracks to Rangoon: The Story of British Armour in Burma (London: Robert Hale, 1978)
4. Slim, op. cit., p. 70.
5. Bisheshwar Prasad (ed,) The Retreat from Burma 1941 – 42 (Calcutta, Combined Inter-Service Historical Section, 1954), p. 296.
June 1, 2025
Panzers Attack! – Ten Days in Sedan
World War Two
Published 31 May 2025May 10, 1940. A new kind of warfare comes to the fore as a German Panzer Group rumbles through the Ardennes towards Sedan. Heinz Guderian has one goal in mind — Get to the Meuse! If he can manage that, then the Battle of France may be over before it even begins. Can the Allies hold back the armoured armada?
Chapters
01:05 German Forces
04:13 Blitzkrieg Theory, Applied
07:37 The Advance Begins
14:50 The Allied Plan
17:59 A Tight Schedule
20:57 Summary
21:16 Conclusion
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Ted Gioia on stopping AI cheating in academia
I’ve never been to Oxford, either as a student or as a tourist, but I believe Ted Gioia‘s description of his experiences there and how they can be used to disrupt the steady take-over of modern education by artificial intelligence cheats:
How would the Oxford system kill AI?
Once again, where do I begin?
There were so many oddities in Oxford education. Medical students complained to me that they were forced to draw every organ in the human body. I came here to be a doctor, not a bloody artist.
When they griped to their teachers, they were given the usual response: This is how we’ve always done things.
I knew a woman who wanted to study modern drama, but she was forced to decipher handwriting from 13th century manuscripts as preparatory training.
This is how we’ve always done things.
Americans who studied modern history were dismayed to learn that the modern world at Oxford begins in the year 284 A.D. But I guess that makes sense when you consider that Oxford was founded two centuries before the rise of the Aztec Empire.
My experience was less extreme. But every aspect of it was impervious to automation and digitization — let alone AI (which didn’t exist back then).
If implemented today, the Oxford system would totally elminate AI cheating — in these five ways:
(1) EVERYTHING WAS HANDWRITTEN — WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TYPEWRITERS.
All my high school term papers were typewritten — that was a requirement. And when I attended Stanford, I brought a Smith-Corona electric typewriter with me from home. I used it constantly. Even in those pre-computer days, we relied on machines at every stage of an American education.
When I returned from Oxford to attend Stanford Business School, computers were beginning to intrude on education. I was even forced (unwillingly) to learn computer programming as a requirement for entering the MBA program.
But during my time at Oxford, I never owned a typewriter. I never touched a typewriter. I never even saw a typewriter. Every paper, every exam answer, every text whatsoever was handwritten—and for exams, they were handwritten under the supervision of proctors.
When I got my exam results from the college, the grades were handwritten in ancient Greek characters. (I’m not making this up.)
Even if ChatGPT had existed back then, you couldn’t have relied on it in these settings.
(2) MY PROFESSORS TAUGHT ME AT TUTORIALS IN THEIR OFFICES. THEY WOULD GRILL ME VERBALLY — AND I WAS EXPECTED TO HAVE IMMEDIATE RESPONSES TO ALL THEIR QUESTIONS.
The Oxford education is based on the tutorial system. It’s a conversation in the don’s office. This was often one-on-one. Sometimes two students would share a tutorial with a single tutor. But I never had a tutorial with more than three people in the room.
I was expected to show up with a handwritten essay. But I wouldn’t hand it in for grading — I read it aloud in front of the scholar. He would constantly interrupt me with questions, and I was expected to have smart answers.
When I finished reading my paper, he would have more follow-up questions. The whole process resembled a police interrogation from a BBC crime show.
There’s no way to cheat in this setting. You either back up what you’re saying on the spot — or you look like a fool. Hey, that’s just like real life.
(3) ACADEMIC RESULTS WERE BASED ENTIRELY ON HANDWRITTEN AND ORAL EXAMS. YOU EITHER PASSED OR FAILED — AND MANY FAILED.
The Oxford system was brutal. Your future depended on your performance at grueling multi-day examinations. Everything was handwritten or oral, all done in a totally contained and supervised environment.
Cheating was impossible. And behind-the-scenes influence peddling was prevented — my exams were judged anonymously by professors who weren’t my tutors. They didn’t know anything about me, except what was written in the exam booklets.
I did well and thus got exempted from the dreaded viva voce — the intense oral exam that (for many students) serves as follow-up to the written exams.
That was a relief, because the viva voce is even less susceptible to bluffing or games-playing than tutorials. You are now defending yourself in front of a panel of esteemed scholars, and they love tightening the screws on poorly prepared students.
(4) THE SYSTEM WAS TOUGH AND UNFORGIVING — BUT THIS WAS INTENTIONAL. OTHERWISE THE CREDENTIAL GOT DEVALUED.
I was shocked at how many smart Oxford students left without earning a degree. This was a huge change from my experience in the US — where faculty and administration do a lot of hand-holding and forgiving in order to boost graduation rates.
There were no participation trophies at Oxford. You sank or swam — and it was easy to sink.
That’s why many well-known people — I won’t name names, but some are world famous — can tell you that they studied at Oxford, but they can’t claim that they got a degree at Oxford. Even elite Rhodes Scholars fail the exams, or fear them so much that they leave without taking them.
I feel sorry for my friends who didn’t fare well in this system. But in a world of rampant AI cheating, this kind of bullet-proof credentialing will return by necessity — or the credentials will get devalued.
(5) EVEN THE INFORMAL WAYS OF BUILDING YOUR REPUTATION WERE DONE FACE-TO-FACE — WITH NO TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED
Exams weren’t the only way to build a reputation at Oxford. I also saw people rise in stature because of their conversational or debating or politicking or interpersonal skills.
I’ve never been anywhere in my life where so much depended on your ability at informal speaking. You could actually gain renown by your witty and intelligent dinner conversation. Even better, if you had solid public speaking skills you could flourish at the Oxford Union — and maybe end up as Prime Minister some day.
All of this was done face-to-face. Even if a time traveler had given you a smartphone with a chatbot, you would never have been able to use it. You had to think on your feet, and deliver the goods with lots of people watching.
Maybe that’s not for everybody. But the people who survived and flourished in this environment were impressive individuals who, even at a young age, were already battle tested.
Praga I: A Blow-Forward Bullpup Semi-Auto-Selectable Vickers Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Jan 2025The Praga I was the first machine gun design from noted Czech arms designed Vaclav Holek. Three examples were made for Czech military testing in 1922, but they were not acceptable. Instead, this design served as the first stepping stone to the eventual development of the ZB-26, perhaps the best of the interwar light machine guns.
Mechanically, the Praga I is largely based on the Vickers/Maxim system except with a locking wedge instead of a toggle joint. It also uses a forward-moving gas trap sort of action instead of recoil operation like the Maxim/Vickers. The fire control mechanism is essentially a Vickers lock, just built into the receiver of the gun instead of in a moving bolt or lock. It is a truly fascinating system!
Many thanks to the VHU — the Czech Military History Institute — for giving me access to this fantastic prototype to film for you. The Army Museum Žižkov is a part of the Institute, and they have a three-story museum full of cool exhibits open to the public in Prague. If you have a chance to visit, it’s definitely worth the time! You can find all of their details (including their aviation and armor museums) here:
May 31, 2025
Social Hierarchy in the Early Roman Empire
seangabb
Published 31 Dec 2024The second lecture in the series – an exploration of social divisions within the Early Roman Empire. Contents include:
00:00:00 – Introduction
00:05:37 – The Roman Social Structure
00:09:02 – The Position of the Emperor
00:11:49 – Perception and Role of the Emperor
00:19:24 – Evolution of the Imperial Senate
00:22:19 – What Kind of Men became Senators?
00:25:34 – The Functions of Senators
00:27:41 – The Equestrian Order
00:30:56 – Local Government
00:35:49 – The Imperial Bureaucracy
00:37:16 – Narcissus, Pallas, Felix
00:42:12 – Ordinary People
00:43:06 – Roman Citizenship
00:45:15 – How to Become a Citizen?
00:47:21 – Justice According to Class
00:51:34 – How was Status Legally Determined?
00:59:44 – Patron and Client
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May 30, 2025
Was Germany Really Starved Into Surrender in WW1?
The Great War
Published 10 Jan 2025From 1914 to 1919, Allied warships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean controlled maritime trade to and from the Central Powers – stopping shipments of weapons and raw materials, but also food, from reaching their enemies. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of German civilians died of hunger-related causes. Often, these deaths and even the outcome of the war are attributed to the naval blockade – but did the British really starve Germany into surrender in WW1?
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QotD: “Have fun storming the castle!”
Clifford Rogers has already laid out a pretty lay-person accessible account of the medieval siege playbook (in Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages (2007), 111-143; the book is pricey, so consider your local library), so I won’t re-invent the wheel here but merely note some general features. Rogers distinguishes between hasty assaults using mostly ladders launched as soon as possible as a gamble with a small number of troops to try to avoid a long siege, and deliberate assaults made after considerable preparation, often using towers, sapping, moveable shelters designed to resist arrow fire and possibly even catapults. We’ve already discussed hasty assaults here, so let’s focus on deliberate assaults.
While sapping (tunneling under and collapsing fortifications) remained in use, apart from filling in ditches, the mole-and-ramp style assaults of the ancient world are far less common, precisely because most armies (due to the aforementioned fragmentation combined with the increasing importance in warfare of a fairly small mounted elite) lacked both the organizational capacity and the raw numbers to do them. The nature of these armies as retinues of retinues also made coordination between army elements difficult. The Siege of Antioch (1097-8) [during] the First Crusade is instructive; though the siege lasted nine months, the crusaders struggled to even effectively blockade the city until a shipment of siege materials (lumber, mostly) arrived in March of 1098 (five months after the beginning of the siege). Meanwhile, coordinating so that part of the army guarded the exits of the city (to prevent raids by the garrison) while the other part of the army foraged supplies had proved mostly too difficult, leading to bitter supply shortages among the crusaders. Even with materials delivered to them, the crusaders used them to build a pair of fortified towers blocking exits from the city, rather than the sort of elaborate sapping and ramps; the city was taken not by assault but by treachery – a very common outcome to a siege! – when Bohemond of Taranto bribed a guard within the city to let the crusaders sneak a small force in. All of this despite the fact that the crusader army was uncommonly large by medieval European standards, numbering perhaps 45,000.
Crucially, in both hasty and deliberate assaults, the emphasis for the small army toolkit tends to be on escalade (going over the walls) using ladders or moveable wooden towers, rather than the complex systems of earthworks favored by the “big army” siege system or breaching – a task which medieval (or ancient!) artillery was generally not capable of. The latter, of course, is a much more certain method of assault – give a Roman army a few months and almost any fortress could be taken with near certainty – but it was a much more demanding method in terms of the required labor and coordination. Thwarting escalade is mostly a question of the height of defenses (because a taller wall requires a taller ladder, tower or ramp) and good fields of fire for the defenders (particularly the ability to fire at attackers directly up against the wall, since that’s where the ladders are likely to be).
The other major threat to castle walls (apart from the ever-present threat of sapping) was catapults, but I want to deal with those next time for reasons that I suspect will make sense then. For now it is worth simply noting that catapults, even the mighty trebuchets of the 14th century were generally used to degrade defenses (smashing towers, destroying crenellation, damaging gatehouses) rather than to produce breaches. They could in some cases do that, but only with tremendous effort and a lot of time (and sometimes not even then). Consequently, for most castles the greatest threat remained escalade, followed by treachery or starvation, followed by sapping, followed by artillery.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-10.
May 29, 2025
Now that a Royal Marine general is head of the Royal Navy, is he the “First Land Lord”?
Sir Humphrey on the appointment of Royal Marine General Sir Gwyn Jenkins as the top flag officer of the Royal Navy — the first RM general officer to hold this position:
Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins in Lympstone, 2022.
Photo credit – LPhot Barry Swainsbury – https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/-/media/royal-navy-responsive/images/news/new/221128-new-commandant-general-royal-marines-appointed/2.jpg, OGL 3, Link
General Sir Gwyn Jenkins has taken over as the professional head of the Royal Navy, the first Royal Marine to occupy the role of “First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff”. This is a move which is to be warmly welcomed, although the General will have many challenges ahead of him during his tenure.
While most have welcomed the move, there has been some mild hysteria on social media at the idea of a General heading the Royal Navy – what madness is this? The argument seems to be that apparently because Royal Marines haven’t commanded ships, they are somehow not able to lead the Royal Navy. Such an argument is fatuous nonsense.
The RN is a surprisingly tribal organisation of roughly 30,000 people, with its regular personnel broadly divided into four fighting arms – the Surface Fleet, the Submarine Service, the Fleet Air Arm and the Royal Marines. The surface fleet is the closest to being a “generalist” branch, although in its own way it is intensely tribal with different branches, organisations and structures. The Submariners and the FAA are unsurprisingly a bit of a closed shop, due to their missions, role and locations – it is not quite a “private navy”, but it would be rare for many personnel to serve at both Faslane supporting submarines and then to Culdrose or Yeovilton supporting aircraft. It is better to think of these fighting arms as smaller versions of the RN, each with its own culture, ethos and experience, and very different ways of bringing the fight to the enemy.
There have been First Sea Lords from the Surface Fleet, Submarine Service and FAA – no one has questioned the ability of an admiral who may have spent large parts of their career within a tribal part of the Service to lead all of it appropriately. Yet some seem to think that the General is somehow unable to do this due to his Royal Marines past. This makes very little sense – surely if this were true, how could any 1SL lead the Royal Marines effectively given they have, to the authors knowledge, never held a green beret?
The role of the 1st Sea Lord is not to stride the bridge in battle and fight wars against the enemy. He (and hopefully soon She) is the professional head of a complex organisation, employing tens of thousands of service personnel, reservists, civil servants and contractors on every continent. There are Royal Navy personnel based around the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and from the depths of the ocean to the skies far above. This role is about leadership, delivering the Government of the day’s desired defence policy outcomes, setting strategic direction for the Service and ensuring that it can deliver on its responsibilities.
The role of 1SL is part CEO, part diplomat, part public engagement and orator, and part politician. They need to be able to set a vision but accept their ability to deliver it is limited due to the time taken for naval procurement – while HMS VENTURER was rolled out of the yard today (27 May) some 10 years after the Type 31 was conceived, there have been no less than five permanent 1SL incumbents in this time. The post holder is also ultimately responsible for the delivery of operations, including the Deterrent, to the Prime Minister, and in providing advice to No10 on naval military matters.
