Quotulatiousness

June 2, 2025

Fighting at Yenangyaung, 17-19 April 1942

Filed under: Britain, China, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 31 May 2025

May 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
(more…)

May 30, 2025

QotD: “Have fun storming the castle!”

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the expected threat is going to shape the calculation of what margin of security is acceptable, which brings us back to our besieger’s playbook. You may recall when we looked at the Assyrian siege toolkit, that many of the most effective techniques assumed a large, well-coordinated army which could dispose of a lot of labor (from the soldiers) on many different projects at once while also having enough troops ready to fight to keep the enemy bottled up and enough logistic support to keep the army in the field for however long all of that took. In short, this is a playbook that strong, well-organized states (with strong, well-organized armies) are going to excel at. But, as we’ve just noted, the castle emerges in the context of fragmentation which produces a lot of little polities (it would be premature to call them states) with generally quite limited administrative and military capacity; the “big army” siege playbook which demands a lot of coordination, labor and expertise is, for the most part, out of reach.

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 15, 2025

Inventing “American Bushido“

Filed under: History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Secretary of Defense Rock identifies where this new military cult came from:

In the decades since the end of the Cold War, the United States military has undergone a cultural transformation — not merely in terms of technology, doctrine, or geopolitical posture, but in its self-conception. What has emerged is a new martial identity, one that fuses an idealized warrior code with fetishized notions of lethality and tactical superiority. This identity, what might be termed an “American Bushido“, is not merely a rhetorical or symbolic phenomenon. It is an ideological formation with material consequences for how wars are planned, how personnel are trained and selected, and how national security strategy is interpreted through the narrow prism of combat prowess. At its core, this American Bushido enshrines tactical skill and lethal capacity as ends in themselves, rather than as tools in service of coherent political objectives. But has also branched out more broadly into American society in unhealthy ways, corroding civic culture. This elevation of the warrior ethos risks distorting strategic judgment, encouraging a professional military caste isolated from civilian oversight, and glorifying violence as the central expression of national power at home and abroad.

The concept of Bushido, the feudal Japanese code of honor among the samurai, was historically a synthesis of martial discipline, spiritual rectitude, and absolute loyalty.1 In the twentieth century, however, Imperial Japan weaponized Bushido as state propaganda stripping it of nuance and repurposing it to justify fanatical nationalism, unquestioning obedience, and mass sacrifice in the service of empire leaving a trail of destruction and war crimes that rivaled Nazi Germany in World War II.2 On the tactical level, that meant banzai charges into machine gun fire and kamikaze missions that turned pilots into human-guided cruise missiles. On the strategic level, that meant one decisive battle that would single-handedly win the war in an era of mass mobilization. In the American context, however, Bushido has been appropriated and reimagined as a branding tool and cultural phenomenon: a way to market military service as a modern warrior whose path translates to all walks of life, stripped of its philosophical depth but saturated with over-the-top aggression.

[…]

In this context, the move toward an AVF, formalized by President Nixon in 1973 and championed by the Gates Commission in 1970, was seen as a political necessity and a strategic recalibration.3 The commission drew a sharp analogy between military service and public infrastructure, framing the draft as a form of taxation in service of national needs. As they put it, “It can expropriate the required tools and compel construction men and others to work until the job is finished or it can purchase the goods and manpower necessary to complete the job.”4 In this view, conscription was not a moral aberration but a practical mechanism through which the state could marshal resources, including human labor, to fulfill collective obligations.5 But this collective obligation had been pushed to the brink, and an all-volunteer force offered a path to professionalize the force, improve quality and morale, and insulate the military from the social upheavals tearing through the nation. Voluntarism was framed as a means of restoring legitimacy and operational effectiveness, ensuring that those who served did so by choice, not coercion. In many ways, voluntarism was a return to the American tradition but did so embracing the concept of the professional soldier and not the citizen soldier. While this shift solved many short-term problems, it also began a long-term process of separating the military from the broader public, contributing to the rise of a distinct warrior class and the cultural isolation of the armed forces from civilian society.

The development of the AVF worked about as one could expect through the 1980s, eventually culminating in the 100-hour war in the Persian Gulf, a campaign that showcased overwhelming American technological and tactical superiority with just 63 American dead.6 In the aftermath, President George H. W. Bush famously proclaimed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!“7 But while the battlefield triumph seemed to bury the ghosts of Vietnam, the underlying mentality never truly died; it was only displaced. What had definitively died was the draft, and with it, the citizen-soldier model that had once anchored the American military to broader society. In its place emerged an increasingly professionalized force, insulated from the public and shaped by the lessons and traumas of a war that continued to cast a long shadow over American strategy, civil-military relations, and the political appetite for sustained conflict.

GWOT has accelerated American Bushido

The U.S. military’s post-9/11 transformation unwittingly accelerated this. Terms like “warfighter”, “operator”, and “lethality” replaced earlier bureaucratic or strategic vocabulary. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, nicknamed “Mad Dog” and revered for his battle-hardened persona, became the symbolic vanguard of this transformation. Phrases such as “unleash lethality” began appearing in speeches, documents, and strategic vision statements.8 Underlying all of this was a single premise: that the decisive instrument of American power was the warrior, and that the ultimate measure of military effectiveness is the capacity to kill.9

There is no doubt that tactical excellence is a prerequisite for military success, and nobody has done it better than the modern American military. But the rise of American Bushido has elevated tactical proficiency to the level of doctrine itself, often at the expense of strategic clarity. This phenomenon is not unique to the U.S., but it is particularly acute within a military-industrial ecosystem flush with funding, prestige, and cultural deference. The result has been a proliferation of elite units, special operations forces, and kinetic capabilities, often deployed with great fanfare but little discernible strategic gain, as given by the recent two-billion-dollar campaign attempting to pound the Houthis into submission in Yemen from the air.

[…]

Even still, it’s a bizarre framing because there never was a “warrior ethos” in the American tradition to nostalgically return to, at least not in the mythologized sense currently being invoked. The foundational ideal of national defense was not the professional warrior, but the citizen-soldier: an ordinary individual who took up arms out of civic duty, served for a finite period, and then returned to civilian life. Soldiering, in this tradition, was a temporary obligation, not a permanent identity. It was a job — necessary and honorable, but not meant to confer moral superiority or define a lifelong caste. Only a small number of officers and NCOs were considered to be professionals who led a variety of militia and volunteers in American conflicts.

One might mistake the famous Call of Duty tagline “there’s a soldier in all of us”, as a manifestation of American Bushido. But in truth, it gestures toward the opposite. The commercial depicts ordinary people stepping briefly into a role demanded by extraordinary circumstances, the very ethos of the citizen-soldier tradition. However stylized or commercialized, the message remains: soldiering is not a sacred vocation reserved for an elite few, but a responsibility that can emerge from within the ordinary citizen. In that sense, there is a soldier in all of us.

    1. See Inazō Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), Cameron Hurst, “Death, Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushidō Ideal”. Philosophy East and West 40, no. 4 (1990): 511–27. Tasuke Kawakami, “BUSHIDŌ IN ITS FORMATIVE PERIOD”. The Annals of the Hitotsubashi Academy 3, no. 1 (1952): 65–83, Karl F. Friday, “Bushidō or Bull? A Medieval Historian’s Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition”. The History Teacher 27, no. 3 (1994): 339–49, and Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai and the Sacred (Osprey Publishing: Oxford, 1999).

    2. For Bushido in the Imperial Japanese context, see John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon Books: New York, 1986), Edward J. Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall (University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, 2016, S. C. M. Paine, The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2017) The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2012), and Robert Edgerton, Warriors Of The Rising Sun: A History Of The Japanese Military (Basic Books: New York, 1999).

    3. Thomas S. Gates, The Report of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970).

    4. Ibid., 23.

    5. Milton Friedman, the 1976 Nobel Prize-winning economist, played a pivotal role on the Commission, where his influential intellectual arguments helped overcome the significant institutional resistance.

    6. For scholarship on the military’s post-Vietnam recovery and AVF transition, see James F. Dunnigan, Raymond M. Macedonia, Getting It Right: American Military Reforms After Vietnam to the Gulf War and Beyond (William Morrow & Co: New York, 1993) and Suzanne C. Nielsen Lieutenant Colonel, An Army Transformed: The U.S. Army’s Post-Vietnam Recovery and the Dynamics of Change in Military Organizations (US Army War College Press: Carlisle, 2010).

    7. Quoted from Maureen Dowd, “After the War: White House Memo; War Introduces a Tougher Bush to Nation”, New York Times, March 2, 1991.

    8. U.S. Department of Defense, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: DoD, 2018), 1.

    9. The emphasis on the warrior ethos was set in motion in part because the events of March 23, 2003, when an 18-vehicle convoy from the 507th Maintenance Company took a wrong turn and was ambushed by insurgents in Nasiriyah, southern Iraq. See Vernon Loeb, “Army Plans Steps to Heighten ‘Warrior Ethos'”, Washington Post, September 8, 2003.

May 14, 2025

The Bomber Mafia & The Norden Bombsight – What The Heck Happened? The Bomber War Episode 2

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published 28 Oct 2023

Selected Internet Sources
Target for Today (1944) – Target For Today (1944)
https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Warf… – LTE Thompson, first lead scientist at Dahlgren
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scientist-Ex… – Donald Jacobs
The Fairey Battle – Light Bomber, Hea…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casab…
https://discovery.nationalarchives.go… – Western War Plan W5a and W6

Selected Bibliography
America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing 1910-1945 – McFarland et al.
Dresden – Sinclair McKay
Dresden; Tuesday … – Fredrick Taylor
Absolute War – The Firebombing of Tokyo – Chris Bellamy
Black Snow –
Bomber Command – Max Hastings
Bomber Command’s War Against Germany, An Official History – Nobel Franklin et al.
The Bomber Mafia – Malcolm Gladwell
Undaunted and Through Adversity (Vol 1 &2) – Ben Kite
United States Strategic Bombing Survey (European War) (USSBS) Sept 1945 – Var. – https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catal…
America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing 1910-1945, McFarland
Big Week – James Holland

May 12, 2025

(A Few of) The Many Faces of the Dutch M95 Carbine

Filed under: Asia, Europe, History, Military, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Jun 2015

When the Dutch military adopted the M95 Mannlicher rifle, they made a rifle for standard infantry, and a variety of carbines for specialist troops. These included artillery, cavalry, bicycle, engineers, and colonial service carbines. During World War I they attempted to standardize these and reduce the number of different designs, but met with only limited success. By the time World War II began, there were at least 13 different variants of M95 carbine in service with the Dutch military.

May 6, 2025

QotD: World War I shattered the European notion of what “war” actually was

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Echoes of those views continue to appear in western literature until the impersonal carnage of the Western Front seem to finally snuff them out. But it isn’t that the generations and generations before 1914 had never experienced war, but that war had changed.

We’ve actually talked before about just how profoundly our modern view of war and battle (and battlefields) is conditioned by the experience of the first world war and the vast literary production of the generation that went through those trenches. Certainly for English (and German and French, etc.) literature, World War I seems to almost snap the tradition in half, making everything before it feel trite and washing the whole of war literature in grim tones of field grey.

And, of course, that is the point. World War I was a new kind of war that shattered the old certainties born out of the old kinds of war. It is often a mistake to assume those old certainties had been born out of some eternal peace, but while the 1800s had not seen a general European war, they had seen many wars, in the many imperial possessions of European countries, on the edges of what the British or French considered “Europe” and also in the heart of Europe itself (not to mention a few dust–ups in the Americas). These were not peaceful societies confronting their first war and shocked by the experience, but very bellicose societies encountering for the first time a new sort of war and being stunned at how different it was from what they had expected, from the wars of their (recent!) past.

All of which is to say war, war really does change. And warriors with it.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.

May 2, 2025

The New York Times still values “the narrative” more than the truth

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Alex Berenson on the way the New York Times chose to present the summary of the crash investigation on the fatal collision between a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial passenger aircraft over Washington DC:

The New York Times cannot stop mangling the truth to serve its political goals.

On Sunday, the paper exhaustively examined the collision between an Army Black Hawk and an American Airlines jet that killed 67 people over the Potomac in January.

The massive 4,000-word article claimed the crash had many causes, including an overworked air traffic controller. “Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash“, the Times proclaimed.

Except that’s not really what happened. Or what the Times found.

Yes, the controller was busy. Yes, the Black Hawk pilots wore night-vision goggles that can, ironically, complicate seeing in cities with lots of ambient light.

Those choices and problems raised the risks of an accident.

But despite all the words the Times devoted to explaining the crash, its root cause was simple. The Black Hawk was flying too high. It flew directly into the CRJ700 regional jet. The plane’s pilots and passengers had no chance.

That’s the reality. The second reality is that an inexperienced female Army pilot, Capt. Rebecca Lobach, 28, (CORRECTION: original article said 36) was at the controls of the Black Hawk when it hit the CRJ700, on a training and evaluation mission.

What the Times actually found, the news in the article, is that the Lobach’s copilot repeatedly warned her the helicopter needed to descend in the minutes before the accident. Just seconds before the crash, he suggested she tack left, a path that would likely have avoided the jet.

She didn’t respond.

In other words, the story here is that Lobach — who had never deployed overseas but had volunteered in the Biden White House and whose obituary prominently called her a certified advocate for “sexual harassment” victims — flew her helicopter into a passenger jet and killed 67 people, including herself.

May 1, 2025

Military Tactics In The Falklands

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Pegasus Tests
Published 27 Dec 2024

A discussion with Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons about Argentine and British tactics during the Falklands War.

#forgottenweapons

April 30, 2025

QotD: The experience of the infantryman through the ages

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What about the other common difficulties of soldiering? How universal are those experiences: the bad food, long marches, heavy burdens and difficult labor and toil?

Well, here is where we come back to the note I made earlier about how “warring” and “soldiering” were different verbs with different meanings. After all, while soldiering implies these difficulties, warring doesn’t, necessarily. And it isn’t hard to see why – the warrior classes in these societies, often being aristocrats, generally didn’t do a lot of these things. It is, for instance, noted in the Roman sources when a general chose to eat the same food as his soldiers, because most Roman aristocrats didn’t when they served as generals or military tribunes. The privileges of rank and class applied.

And that’s something we see with medieval aristocrats too. On the one hand, Jean de Bueil talks about the “difficulties and travail” of war, but at the same time, Clifford Rogers notes one (fictional and lavish, but not outrageous) war party “suitable for a baron or banneret” included a chaplain, three heralds, four trumpeters, two drummers, four pages, two varlets (that is, servants for the pages), two cooks, a forager, a farrier, an armorer, twelve more serving men (with horses, presumably both as combatants and as servants), and a majordomo to manage them all – in addition to the one lord, three knights and nine esquires (C. Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives through History: the Middle Ages (2007), 28-9).

Jean le Bel (quoted in Rogers, op. cit.) contrasts the situation of the nobles in Edward III’s army (1327), where “one could see great nobility well served with a great plenty of dishes and sweets – such strange ones that I wouldn’t know to name or describe them. There one could see ladies richly adorned and nobly ornamented” while in the camp proper an open brawl between the regular soldiers from England and Hainault broke out and eventually turned into an open battle in which 316 died, but so segregated was the camp that, “most of the knights and of their masters were then at court, and knew nothing of this” (Rogers, 66-7). Likewise, except in fairly extreme positions, most of the ditch-digging, camp-building duties would fall to the common soldiers (and, as Roel Konijnendijk can quite accurately tell you, ditches are important! When in doubt, dig some ditches – or make others dig ditches for you).

That said, these differences are not merely confined to the high aristocrats. Marching under a heavy load is often given as one example of the quintessential “soldier experience”, but it seems that many Greek hoplites went to war with a personal slave or servant to carry their equipment for them, despite being infantrymen. The Romans carried equipment and supplies something closer to what a modern soldier might (both in terms of weight and also, apart from ammunition, in terms of what was carried), but then non-Roman sources like the Greek writer Polybius (18.18.1-7) or the Jewish writer Josephus (BJ 3.95) appear quite stunned with the amount of tools and equipment the Romans carry (and Polybius, by the by, is writing before Marius’ mules). Evidently the Roman impedementia was quite a bit heavier, though even the Macedonians carried much more than a Greek hoplite army (Note Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, 1978 on this).

Meanwhile, Jonathan Roth is quick to note (in The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (264 B.C. – A.D. 235) (1999)) that despite either bad or insufficient rations being a common complaint of soldiers, such complaints appear absent from Roman sources, even in the context of legionary mutinies. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Roman soldiers ate quite well, with fairly ample rations. In camp the Roman soldier’s diet was not so different from what he might eat in peacetime (especially once we get into the imperial period with legions stationed in semi-permanent bases); on the march they had to make do with bucellatum, a hard biscuit something like hardtack. But for many Italian peasants, the diet doesn’t seem to have been much worse – or much different – from what they ate in peacetime.

By way of sharp contrast to the plodding, heavily loaded but surely very lethal Roman legionary, the impis of the Zulu traveled fast, light and sometimes somewhat hungry. Zulu warriors generally carried only their equipment on the march, while supplies were carried by udibi, boys serving as porters. Even then, such supplies were minimal – the Zulu force that arrived at Rorke’s Drift (1879) had only been out six days, but none of the warriors in it had eaten in two. Such minimally supplied flying columns, moving fast and with considerable stealth (one cannot read anything on the Anglo-Zulu war without noticing how, even with cavalry scouts, Zulu impis seem so often just to appear next to British forces) were the norm for Zulu warfare. And to be clear, this wasn’t some “primitive” or underdeveloped form of war – the light and fast operational movements of the Zulu were intentional (much of it was a product of Shaka’s reforms) and very effective – albeit not so effective as to offset the massive advantages the British possessed in population, economic capacity or military technology. Nevertheless, not even every sort of common soldier was the heavily loaded, slow moving, well-fed ditch-digging sort like the Romans. The “soldier experience” needs to cover the lightly loaded and armed, fast moving, hungry, non-ditch-digging Zulu experience too.

And then of course when we consider nomadic peoples, we find that in many cases their lives on campaign were not that much different from their lives at peacetime, involving many of the same skills and activities.

In short, the experience of the drudgery of war – the bad food, long toil, heavy encumbrance and so on was all still quite contingent (or we might say “dependent”) on the society going to war. Social divisions mattered. Expectations about masculine behavior mattered. Military systems mattered. Yes, modern armies in the European tradition expect their soldiers to do a lot of labor and drudgery, but remember where that military system came from: it was the system of the common soldiers serving under the aristocrats who most certainly did not do those things but who did impose sharp, corporal discipline. Which, to be clear, doesn’t make this system ineffective – it was clearly effective. The point here is that it was socially contingent – a different society would have come up with a different system. And they did! The Early Modern European system is only one way to organize an army and historically speaking not even the most common.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.

April 14, 2025

Huế: Battle for the Heart of Vietnam

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Army University Press
Published 22 Nov 2024

The Battle of Huế is known for urban combat, destruction, and anguish. The city of Huế mattered to all the combatant forces. The city and its people paid the price. Interviews with noted subject matter experts Drs. Pierre Asselin, Gregory Daddis, James Willbanks, and Cpt. Wyatt Harper are augmented with archival audio and film, and detailed maps. This documentary places the Battle of Huế within the context of Hanoi’s 1968 Tet Offensive. How North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the United States perceived the Vietnam War in 1967 and 1968 are central to this documentary. Covered are the key moments of the battle — including the People’s Armed Forces of Vietnam (PAVN) and People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) planning and assault on Hue. The responses of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), Vietnam Marine Corps (VNMC), the United States Marine Corps (USMC), and the U.S. Army (USA) are addressed to offer insight into an informative example of urban warfare.

0:02:39 – Why the Tet Offensive
0:10:53 – Why Huế
0:15:53 – Military Decision Making Process | Doctrine
0:26:51 – Warfighting Function | Doctrine
0:27:59 – Paralysis by analysis | Doctrine
0:33:15 – Courses of action | Doctrine
0:38:22 – Weather and operations | Doctrine
0:40:52 – Huế Massacre
0:41:18 – My Lai
0:46:05 – Huế and Modern Warfare

April 12, 2025

A Basic Introduction To The Ancient Roman Political System

Filed under: Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

MoAn Inc.
Published 12 Dec 2024
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April 9, 2025

Battle of Saipan 1944: Total War in the Pacific

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 15 Nov 2024

In June 1944, an armada of warships and landing craft is getting ready for D-Day. Thousands of American soldiers are about to attack a prepared enemy with formidable defenses. But this isn’t Normandy, this is the island of Saipan. And the bloody battle there will bring total war to the Pacific.

Chapters:
00:00 Why the US Landed on Saipan
01:46 American Plan for Saipan
03:38 Japanese Defenses on Saipan
05:08 Preparations for D-Day on Saipan
06:39 D-Day on Saipan
08:46 Marine Combat Shotguns on Saipan
14:48 Japanese Counterattack
16:30 D-Day Plus 3 on Saipan
17:01 Battle of the Philippine Sea
20:45 D-Day Plus 7-9 on Saipan
22:33 D-Day Plus 11-15 on Saipan
24:10 Japanese Banzai Charge on Saipan
26:46 Civilian Casualties on Saipan
27:57 End of the Battle of Saipan
28:48 Battles of Tinian and Guam
30:04 Epilogue
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April 7, 2025

Best of American and Europe: the Webley No5 Express New Army

Filed under: History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Dec 2024

Webley introduced their No5 Express New Army model revolver in 1878. This was essentially a ruggedized and scaled up variation on the No5 RIC revolvers that was very popular with police forces. The RIC was chambered for just the .450 Adams cartridge, and its ejection system in particular was not suitable to serious military campaigning. Hoping for a military contract, Webley took that No5 double-action clockwork and put it into a much bigger frame, capable of handling all patterns of British service cartridge as well as the American .45 Colt powerhouse. It then proceeded to lose the military adoption to the Enfield MkI, a frankly not very good design.

However, British officers had their own choice of sidearms, and many opted for the No5 Army Express, as evidenced by significant sales through the Army & Navy CSL catalog. The model was well liked and popular, but only for a fairly brief span. In 1887 the British adopted the top-break Webley MkI, and the development of new technology like smokeless powder and tip-out cylinders quickly rendered the No5 obsolete. But for about a decade, this was a very compelling choice, offering a reliably double action system with a powerful cartridge.
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April 6, 2025

QotD: The basics of army logistics before railways

Filed under: Europe, Food, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We’ve introduced this problem before but we should do so again in more depth. Logistics in modern armies is rather unlike logistics in pre-modern armies; to be exact the break-point here is the development of the railroad. Once armies can be supplied with railroads, their needs shift substantially. In particular, modern armies with rail (or later, truck and air) supply can receive massively more supplies over long distance than pre-railroad armies. That doesn’t make modern logistics trivial, rather armies “consumed” that additional supply by adopting material intensive modes of warfare: machine guns and artillery fire a lot of rounds that need to be shipped from factories to the front while tanks and trucks require a lot of fuel and spare parts. Basics like food and water were no less necessary but became a smaller share of much, much larger logistics chains that are dominated by ammunition and fuel.

But in the pre-railroad era (note: including the early gunpowder era well into the 1800s) that wasn’t the case. Soldiers could carry their own weapons and often their own ammunition (which in turn put significant limits on both). For handheld weapons, the difference gunpowder made here was fairly limited, since muskets were fairly slow firing and soldiers had to carry the ammunition they’d have for a battle in any event. The major difference with gunpowder came with artillery (that is, cannon), which needed the cannon, their powder and shot all moved. The result was a substantial expansion of the “siege train” of the army, which did not change the structure of logistics but did place new and heavy demands on it, because the animals and humans moving all of that needed to be fed. But overwhelming all of that was food and, if necessary, water.

Adult men need anywhere from 2,000 to 3,200 calories per day in order to support their activity; soldiers marching under heavy load will naturally tend towards the higher end of this range. Now, these requirements can be fudged; as John Landers notes, soldiers who are underfed do not immediately shut off. On the other hand, they cannot be ignored for long: no matter the morale an undernourished army will struggle to perform. Starvation is real and does not care how many reps you could do or how motivated you were when the campaign started (in practice, armies that are not fed sufficiently dissolve away as men desert rather than starve).

Different armies and different cultures will meet that nutritional demand in different ways, but staple grains (wheat, barley, corn, rice) dominate rations in part because they also dominated the diet of the peasantry (being the highest calories-per-acre-farmed-and-labor-added foods) and because they were easy to move and store. Fruits and vegetables were, by contrast, always subject to local availability, since without refrigeration they were difficult to keep or move; meat at least could be smoked, salted or made into jerky, but its expense made it an optional bonus to the diet rather than the core of it. So the diet here is mostly bread; many armies reliant on wheat and barley agriculture came up with a fairly similar idea here: a dense but simple flour-and-water (and maybe salt) biscuit or cracker which if kept dry could keep for long periods and be easy to move. The Romans called this buccelatum; today we refer to a very similar modern idea as “hardtack“. However, because these biscuits aren’t very tasty, for morale reasons armies try to acquire actual bread where possible.

In practice the combination of calorie demands with calorie-dense grain-based foods is going to mean that rations tend to cluster in terms of weight, even from different armies. Spartan rations on Sphacteria were two choenikes of barley alphita (a course barley flour) per man per day (Thuc. 4.16.1) which comes out to roughly 1.4kg; Spartan grain contributions to the syssitia (Plut. Lyc. 12.2) were 1 medimnos of barley alphita per month, which comes out to almost exactly 1kg per day (but supplemented with meat and such). Both Roth and Erdkamp (op. cit. for both) try to calculate the weight of Roman rations based on reported grain rations and interpolations for other foodstuffs; Roth suggests a range of 1.1-1.327kg (of which .85kg was grain or bread), while Erdkamp simply notes that they must have been somewhat more than the .85kg grain ration minimum.1 The Army of Flanders was given pan de munición (“munition” or “ration” bread) made of a mix of wheat and rye in loaves of standard size; the absolute minimum ration was 1.5lbs (.68kg) per day (Parker, op. cit. 136), somewhat less than the more logistically capable (as we’ll see) Roman legions, but in the ballpark, especially when we remember that soldiers in the Army of Flanders often supplemented that with purchased or pillaged food. Daily U.S. Army rations during the American Civil War were around 3lbs (1.36kg; statistic via Engels (op. cit.) who inexplicably thinks this is a useful reference for Macedonian rations), but some of the things included (particularly the 1.6oz of coffee) were hardly minimum necessities; the United States much like the Romans has a well-earned reputation for better than average rations, though this is admittedly a low bar.

So we can see a pretty tight grouping here around 1kg, especially when we account for some of these ration-packages being supplemented by irregular but meaningful amounts of other foods (especially in the case of the Army of Flanders, where we know this happened). There is some wiggle room here, of course; marching rations like hardtack are going to be lighter per-day than raw grains or good bread (or other, even tastier foods). But once meat, vegetables and fruits – and the diet must be at least sometimes supplemented with non-grain foods for nutritional reasons – are accounted for, you can see how the rule of thumb around 3lbs or 1.36kg forms out of the evidence. Soldiers also need around three liters of water (which is 3kg, God bless the metric system) per day but we are going to operate on the hopeful assumption that water is generally available on the route of our march. If it isn’t our daily load jumps from 1.36kg to 4.36kg and our operational range collapses into basically nothing; in practice this meant that if local water wasn’t available an army simply couldn’t go there.2

Marching loads vary by army and period but generally within a range of 40 to 55kg or so (60 at the absolute upper-end). As you may well imagine, convincing soldiers to carry heavier loads demands a greater degree of discipline and command control, so while a general may well want to push soldier’s marching load up, the soldiers will want to push it down (and of course overloading soldiers is going to eventually have a negative impact on marching speed and movement capabilities). But you may well be thinking that 40-55kg (which is 90-120lbs or so) sounds more than ample – that’s a lot of food!

Except of course they need to carry everything and weapons, armor and (for gunpowder armies) shot are heavy. Roman soldiers were and are famous for having marched heavy, carrying as much of their equipment and supplies as possible in their packs, which the Romans called the sarcina (we’ll see why this could improve an army’s capabilities). This practice is often attributed to Gaius Marius in the last decade of the second century (Plut. Marius 13.1) but care is necessary as this sort of “reform” was a trope of Roman generalship and is used of even earlier generals than Marius (e.g. Plut. Mor. 201BC on Scipio Aemilianus). Various estimates for the marching load of Roman troops exist but the best is probably Marcus Junkelmann’s physical reconstruction (in Die Legionen des Augustus (1986); highly recommended if you can read German; alas for the lack of an English translation!) which recreated all of the Roman kit and measured a marching load of 54.8kg (120.8lbs), with ~43 of the 54.8kg reserved for weapons, armor, entrenching kit and personal equipment, leaving just 11.8kg for food (about ten days worth). Other estimates are somewhat less, but never much less than 40kg for a Roman soldier’s equipment before rations, leaving precious little weight in which to fit a lot of food.

The same exercise can be run for almost any kind of infantryman: while their load is often heavy, after one accounts for weapons, armor and equipment (and for later armies, powder and shot) there is typically little space left for rations, usually amounting to not more than a week or two (ten days is a normal rule of thumb). Since the army obviously has more than two weeks of work to do (and remember it needs to be able to march back to wherever it started at the end), it is going to need to get a lot more food.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-15.

    1. To be clear, we know with some certainty that Roman rations were supplemented, but not by how much. If you read much older scholarship, you will find the notion that Roman soldier’s diet lacked regular meat; both Erdkamp and Roth reject this view decisively and for good reason.

    2. I may return to the logistics of water later, but some range can be extended here by taking advantage of the fact that pack animals, while they need a lot of water per day over a long period, can be marched short periods with basically no water and still function, whereas water deprived humans die very quickly. Consequently an army can do a low-water “lunge” over short distances by loading its pack animals with water, not watering them, having the soldiers drink the water and then abandoning the pack animals as they die (the water they carried having been consumed). This is, to say it least, a very expensive thing to do – animals are not cheap! – but there is some evidence the Romans did this, on this see G. Moss, “Watering the Roman Legion” M.A. Thesis, UNC Chapel Hill (2015).

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