Very few of the battles in which I have participated were fought as described in European text-books, viz., in great masses, in perfect order, manœuvring by corps, divisions, and brigades. We were generally in a wooded country, and, though our lines were deployed according to tactics, the men generally fought in strong skirmish-lines, taking advantage of the shape of ground, and of every cover. We were generally the assailants, and in wooded and broken countries the “defensive” had a positive advantage over us, for they were always ready, had cover, and always knew the ground to their immediate front; whereas we, their assailants, had to grope our way over unknown ground, and generally found a cleared field or prepared entanglements that held us for a time under a close and withering fire.
Rarely did the opposing lines in compact order come into actual contact, but when, as at Peach-Tree Creek and Atlanta, the lines did become commingled, the men fought individually in every possible style, more frequently with the musket clubbed than with the bayonet, and in some instances the men clinched like wrestlers, and went to the ground together. Europeans frequently criticized our war, because we did not always take full advantage of a victory; the true reason was, that habitually the woods served as a screen, and we often did not realize the fact that our enemy had retreated till he was already miles away and was again intrenched, having left a mere shirmish-line to cover the movement, in turn to fall back to the new position.
Our war was fought with the muzzle-loading rifle. Toward the close I had one brigade (Walcutt’s) armed with breech-loading “Spencer’s”. The cavalry generally had breach-loading carbines: “Spencer’s” and “Sharp’s”, both of which were good arms.
The only change that breech-loading arms will probably make in the art and practice of war will be to increase the amount of ammunition to be expended, and necessarily to be carried along; to still further “thin out” the lines of attack, and to reduce battles to short, quick, decisive conflicts. It does not in the least affect the grand strategy, or the necessity for perfect organization, drill, and discipline. The companies and battalions will be more dispersed, and the men will be less under the immediate eye of their officers, and therefore a higher order of intelligence and courage on the part of the individual soldier will be an element of strength.
When a regiment is deployed as skirmishers, and crosses an open field or woods, under heavy fire, if each man runs forward from tree to tree, or stump to stump, and yet preserves a good general alignment, it gives great confidence to the men themselves, for they always keep their eyes well to the right and left, and watch their comrades; but when some few hold back, stick too close or too long to a comfortable log, it often stops the line and defeats the whole object. Therefore, the more we improve the fire-arm the more will be the necessity for good organization, good discipline and intelligence on the part of the individual soldier and officer.
There is, of course, such a thing as individual courage, which has a value in war, but familiarity with danger, experience in war and its common attendants, and personal habit, are equally valuable traits, and these are the qualities with which we usually have to deal in war. All men naturally shrink from pain and danger, and only incur their risk from some higher motive, or from habit; so that I would define true courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to incur it, rather than that insensibility to danger of which I have heard far more than I have seen.
The most courageous men are generally unconscious of possessing the quality; therefore, when one professes it too openly, by words or bearing, there is reason to mistrust it. I would further illustrate my meaning by describing a man of true courage to be one who possesses all his faculties and senses perfectly when serious danger is actually present.
Modern wars have not materially changed the relative values or proportions of the several arms of service: infantry, artillery, cavalry, and engineers. If any thing, the infantry has been increased in value. The danger of cavalry attempting to charge infantry armed with breech-loading rifles was fully illustrated at Sedan, and with us very frequently.
So improbable has such a thing become that we have omitted the infantry-square from our recent tactics. Still, cavalry against cavalry, and as auxiliary to infantry, will always be valuable, while all great wars will, as heretofore, depend chiefly on the infantry. Artillery is more valuable with new and inexperienced troops than with veterans. In the early stages of the war the field-guns often bore the proportion of six to a thousand men; but toward the close of the war one gun, or at most two, to a thousand men, was deemed enough.
[…]
It was one of Professor (Dennis Hart) Mahan’s maxims that the spade was as useful in war as the musket, and to this I will add the axe. The habit of intrenching certainly does have the effect of making new troops timid. When a line of battle is once covered by a good parapet, made by the engineers or by the labor of the men themselves, it does require an effort to make them leave it in the face of danger; but when the enemy is intrenched, it becomes absolutely necessary to permit each brigade and division of the troops immediately opposed to throw up a corresponding trench for their own protection in case of a sudden sally. We invariably did this in all our recent campaigns, and it had no ill effect, though sometimes our troops were a little too slow in leaving their well-covered lines to assail the enemy in position or on retreat.
Even our skirmishers were in the habit of rolling logs together, or of making a lunette of rails, with dirt in front, to cover their bodies; and, though it revealed their position, I cannot say that it worked a bad effect; so that, as a rule, it may safely be left to the men themselves. On the “defensive”, there is no doubt of the propriety of fortifying; but in the assailing army the general must watch closely to see that his men do not neglect an opportunity to drop his precautionary defenses, and act promptly on the “offensive” at every chance.
I have many a time crept forward to the skirmish line to avail myself of the cover of the pickets’ “little fort”, to observe more closely some expected result; and always talked familiarly with the men, and was astonished to see how well they comprehended the general object, and how accurately they were informed of the state of facts existing miles away from their particular corps. Soldiers are very quick to catch the general drift and purpose of a campaign, and are always sensible when they are well commanded or well cared for. Once impressed with this fact, and that they are making progress, they bear cheerfully any amount of labor and privation.
William Tecumseh Sherman, “Sherman on Tactics”, Tactical Notebook, 2026-06-10. (Selection from Memoirs of William T. Sherman (1875) by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, minus an observation that sieges were now unimportant which was disproved in 1914.)
September 11, 2026
QotD: Sherman on some military lessons learned during the American Civil War
September 3, 2026
QotD: Combined arms
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
September 1, 2026
St. Chamond 75mm field gun: From Mondragon to WW1 tanks to Israel
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Apr 2026The design for the St Chamond 75mm field gun was initially created by Mexican small arms designer Manual Mondragon, who worked extensively in artillery as well as small arms. As Mexico had no domestic artillery production capability, he worked with the engineering team at St Chamond under Emile Rimailho to complete the design, and Mexico purchased 100 of these guns by 1910, forming the backbone of Mexican Army artillery during the period. The gun is a screw breech rapid fire piece, using fully self-contained ammunition (both shrapnel and HE projectiles). It fires a 12-16 pound shell at about 1650 fps, with a range of about 6500 meters.
In September 1914 the French government panic-ordered a batch of these guns, but then reconsidered and cancelled its order in favor of simplifying logistics with just the more common Mle 1897 75mm guns. That decision changed again in 1915, with an order for 200. These were not formally classified by the French Army, but St Chamond called them the Mle 1915. The gun was identical to the original Mexican pattern except revised to use the same ammunition as the Mle 1897 (the classic “French 75”) instead of its original slightly different cartridge. These guns were initially used for general field service, but pulled off the line when it became apparent that their recoil systems were not really able to handle the stresses of the constant firing required. Instead, they were used as the main armament for the initial 210 St Chamond heavy tanks (less the first 48 that did not receive main guns). After these were used up, the Mle 1897 was used instead.
One final element of combat service for the guns took place in 1948, when Mexico sold 32 of them to Israel, where they were used in Israel’s war of independence. Three examples remain on display in Israeli museums today, more than anywhere else. The one I am looking at today is a Mexican contract piece made in 1904, registered in the US as a live and transferrable Destructive Device.
(more…)
August 19, 2026
Why The Allied Western Front Offensives in 1915 Failed
The Great War
Published 13 Mar 2026By the spring of 1915, the Western Front had bogged down into trench warfare. Allied offensives tried to break the deadlock in spring and fall 1915. The fall offensives were among the bloodiest of the war. After unprecedented bloodletting and use of munitions, the Western Front was still locked in a stalemate at the end of 1915.
(more…)
July 17, 2026
QotD: Catapults in pre-gunpowder armies
The very oldest catapults, first invented by the Greeks were tension catapults (the gastrophetes and oxybeles), which functioned like large bows, with a bow-staff being bent backwards to store and then release the launching energy. This sort of design, common in pop-cultural depictions of catapults, is actually quite limited as with the materials available, there is a real limit to how much energy can be stored via tension. Fortunately for the Greeks, by the early fourth century, they had developed a better method.
Instead, the Greeks, Macedonians and Romans began using torsion catapults (where the energy is stored in wound-up sinews like a spring). While the devices used in field battles (and for city defense) were often smaller, arrow-launching devices, siege catapults could be very large; the standard engine for the purpose could fling a 1 talent stone (26.2kg) about 400m (though effectiveness was far higher if you could get closer to the wall, which as we’ll see will be a trend for most of this post); much larger engines did exist as well. That said, Roman catapults were mostly not for collapsing walls but for destroying towers and suppressing defenders in order to aid in escalade (usually by mole, rather than ladders or towers, though the Romans used those too).
And here once again the distinction between the “big army siege package” and the “small army siege package” matters quite a bit. Roman torsion artillery was complex, expensive and required lots of technical skill, and so sees far diminished use in the early Middle Ages where that technical skill is hard to come by. Vespasian, we are told, brought 160 torsion catapults to besiege Jotapata in 67 (Josephus BJ 3.166) while Titus brings a stunning 340 to besiege Jerusalem in 70 (Josephus BJ 5.356). By contrast, the construction of a single catapult is often a major event in a medieval siege (see Rogers, op. cit. 121-3 for some examples) and while later medieval catapults were often more powerful than the earlier Roman torsion devices, they were not that much more powerful.
Consequently, Hellenistic and Roman fortifications (especially city walls, like the Theodosian Walls we discussed last time) were designed with massed catapults in mind. As noted, the multiple walls ensured that the main curtain wall, the inner wall, was extremely difficult to target with catapults or indeed any kind of artillery: even if you knocked down the low wall and the outer wall, their rubble would mostly block shots at the base of the inner wall. Meanwhile, the inner wall was built to be practically immune to catapult fire anyway: up to 6m thick without any internal passages (the outer wall was much thinner, only 2m). That was more than enough to render the walls effectively immune to anything catapults can do; the walls in many places still stood up to Ottoman cannon in 1453. Finally, ancient city defenses were built assuming they’d often have their own stone and arrow throwing torsion artillery set up on the towers to return “counter-battery” fire. Not every city had the “complete package” that Constantinople, as the imperial capital head, of course, but some mix of thick walls, low out-walls and catapults designed for counter-battery fire were fairly standard defensive arrangements for Roman cities that could afford them and felt sufficiently threatened to invest the resources.
As we move into the Middle Ages, two paradoxical things happen. On the one hand, the ability for societies in Europe to deploy large numbers of finicky, high-tech torsion artillery decreases dramatically (and the machines that we do see tend to be the simpler, less accurate single-armed variety, what the Romans called the onager or “wild ass” because it kicked like one when it fired). On the other hand, by the sixth century, we start to see a clever new design of catapult, the traction trebuchet.
Originating in China in the 4th century BC, the traction catapult used muscle power directly to swing a long pole around a central frame. In terms of engineering complexity, it was a simpler device, and could be scaled up quite large so long as one could add more pullers (around 100 seems to have been normal for a large engine), but the range and power it offered as a result of the mechanical advantage offered by the long throwing arm were considerable. Given the number of pullers required, it is little surprise these were generally only used in small numbers in medieval Europe (again, often in reports it is merely a single device, described as a mangonel or a fenevol), but on the other hand, as I understand the physics, the range and striking power had the potential to be superior to a torsion catapult. Nevertheless, if we look at the kinds of fortifications emerging during this period, it certainly seems like in Europe, the concern that artillery might produce a breach in the wall (as opposed to merely degrading towers and the wall-walk) was fairly low.
Just to throw down a note here because we’ll come back to it, it is striking that while the small numbers of traction trebuchets in Europe seem to have represented a decline in the “catapult threat” to walls (recall last week’s contrast between castle walls and the much older Theodosian Walls), that was not the case in China, where walls continued to be made very thick – a design quirk that will matter quite a lot in a moment. I am not an expert on ancient and medieval Chinese siege tactics, alas, but my brief encounters with accounts of them often seem to describe traction catapults used en masse, in dozens or even hundreds, much more the way that the Romans used massed siege artillery. Likewise, Michael Fulton (Artillery in the Era of the Crusades (2018)) notes nearly a hundred Mamluk trebuchets (a mix of counter-weight and traction) at the Siege of Acre (1291); my sense is that such large siege trains were very rare within Europe. Presumably the ability to deploy so many engines was a consequence of greater state capacity in China and the Near East during this period as compared to fragmented, decentralized medieval Europe.
The late 12th century sees a major variation on the trebuchet design: the use of a counter-weight, instead of traction to provide the force; this innovation seems to have emerged in the West broadly defined, though it isn’t clear if that means in Europe or the Middle East (in any event both Christian and Muslim armies start using them at almost exactly the same time). This allows for much more energy to put into the shot, as the counter-weight can be very heavy and only slowly winched into place, allowing the work crew to spend more time “storing” energy in the counter-weight than they could with the quick pull of a traction trebuchet. Larger counter-weight trebuchets could also make use of animals to provide the power, or large wheels to make it easier to raise the counter-weight. The upper-limits on the size of projectiles were very high: Warwolf is thought to be the largest such trebuchet known, and threw a nearly 300lbs shot. That said, while counter-weight trebuchets hit harder (but fired slower), in function they do not seem to have been meaningfully different from traction trebuchets; they were used the same way in sieges.
What’s really striking is not the vast impact of catapults, but the muted impact of catapults. The counter-weight trebuchet was clearly good: the innovation makes its way all the way back to China, carried by the Mongols who presumably picked it up in the Middle East (ironically moving the opposite direction but at the same time as gunpowder, suggesting that at this point in the 13th century the two technologies were not considered mutually exclusive). Castle design does respond to catapults, but only in relatively modest ways: walls get somewhat thicker, but as Fulton (op cit.) notes, only by about half a meter or so (leaving even the newly thickened medieval castle walls somewhat thinner than the best old Roman defenses). In at least some areas, towers and keeps become more frequently rounded in shape, to resist catapult fire.
Certainly it was possible for catapults to open breaches in weaker walls to enable assault. The aforementioned Warwolf opened large breaches in the stone walls of Stirling Castle in 1304. But I note both Rogers (op. cit.) and Fulton (op. cit.) seem to confirm that while true breaches from trebuchets could happen, it was far more common that walls resisted trebuchet strikes and that the real work of the machines was degrading the wall defenses by striking off battlements and smashing towers, in order to enable escalade. Which is little surprise: that’s precisely what the Romans used catapults for too. While there is still some argument about the degree to which the counter-weight trebuchet was a revolutionary military technology, on the balance, the siege playbook changed only modestly to accommodate it, and castle design likewise shifted only in degrees.
And then Charles VIII of France (r. 1483-1498) decided to take a holiday on the Bay of Naples.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part IV: French Guns and Italian Lines”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-17.
June 17, 2026
QotD: The artillery
Combat Boot, “So, ‘capbadges’, what’s that all about then?”, combatboot.co.uk, 2020-11-13.
June 8, 2026
A Brief History of Nuclear Weapons in Canada
Polyus
Published 6 Jun 2026 #aviationlovers #canadianaerospace #PolyusStudiosCanadians themselves were largely opposed to nuclear weapons but their utility in a full out conflict was impossible to ignore. And so up until fairly recently the Canadian government’s position on the matter was deliberately ambiguous. Promoting peace while supplying the means of war. Now with the luxury of hindsight we can see the true extent to which these weapons played a central role in the defense of this country during the Cold War.
Like it or not, Canada was a threatening and potent nuclear-armed force during a 9 year period between 1963 and 1972. The posturing was offensive in Europe, and defensive on Canadian soil. The last defensive weapons were relinquished in 1984. Nuclear weapons were adopted as part of its network of alliances, when it became obvious that the Soviet missile threat could only be defeated by deterrence. Politically the nuclear question was a hot potato, John Diefenbaker tried to keep the weapons out, Lester Pearson let them in, and Pierre Trudeau kicked them back out again.
This video was made without the use of Artificial Intelligence (No AI). Long live people power!
0:00 Introduction
1:20 Uranium mining in the North
2:31 Tube Alloys and the Manhattan Project
4:10 Post war fears of Soviet army and Canadian build up in Europe
6:04 Air threat from Soviet bombers
8:05 The case for nuclear weapons
9:28 Cancellation of the Arrow in favour of nuclear weapons
10:55 Defensive nukes
13:39 Offensive nukes
16:15 Nuclear capable platforms
16:59 Types and numbers of deployed weapons
18:30 Legacy and impact of these weapons
19:55 ConclusionSupport me on Patreon – / polyusstudios
Music:
Denmark – Portland Cello Project
Your Suggestions – Unicorn Heads
February 19, 2026
Hotchkiss Model 1886 3-pounder Quick Firing Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 26 Sept 2025Small fast boats with torpedos (or other explosives) have always been a threat to large warships. One of the weapons the British Royal Navy adopted to counter that threat was the Hotchkiss Model 1886 “Quick Fire” gun. This meant that it was a breech-loaded gun that used self-contained cartridge ammunition, instead of separate powder bags and projectiles. Mounted on a recoil-adsorbing soft mount with a wide range of movement and steep depression angle, guns like this could fire at small mobile torpedo boats that a capital ship’s main armament couldn’t handle.
This particular model is a 47mm bore, or 3-pounder as described in British service. It uses a vertically-traveling breech block, and more than 3,000 or them were acquired by the British. Two of them were employed as part of the Falkland Islands coastal defenses at one time. This example is one of two brought down from Gibraltar fairly recently and refurbished for ceremonial use on the Islands. Thanks to the FIDF for setting it up on its mount so I could film it for you!
(more…)
November 15, 2025
QotD: The innovation of infiltration tactics in trench warfare
The mature form of this tactical framework is often called “Hutier” tactics, after German general Oskar Emil von Hutier, though he was hardly the sole or even chief inventor of the method. In its mature form, the technique went thusly: instead of attacking with large waves of infantry which cleared each objective in sequential order, attacks ought to be proceeded by smaller units, carefully trained with the layout of the enemy positions. Those units, rather than having a very rigid plan of attack, would be given those general objectives and left to figure for themselves how to accomplish them (“mission tactics” or Auftragstaktik)1, giving them more freedom to make decisions based on local conditions and the ground.
These elite spearhead units, called Stoßtruppen or “Stormtroopers” were well equipped (in particular with a higher amount of automatic firearms and hand grenades, along with flamethrowers). Importantly, they were directed to bypass enemy strong-points and keep moving forward to meet their objectives. The idea here was that the follow-up waves of normal infantry could do the slow work of clearing out points where enemy resistance was strong, but the stormtroopers should aim to push as deeply as possible as rapidly as possible to disorient the defenders and rapidly envelop what defenses remained.2
These sets of infantry tactics were in turn combined with the hurricane barrage, a style of artillery use which focused on much shorter but more intense artillery barrages, particularly associated with Colonel Georg “Breakthrough” Bruchmüller. Rather than attempting to pulverize defenses out of existence, the hurricane barrage was designed merely to force enemies into their dugouts and disorient the defenders; much of the fire was directed at longer ranges to disrupt roads and artillery in the enemy rear. The short barrage left the ground relatively more intact. Meanwhile, those elite infiltration units could be trained to follow the creeping barrage very closely (being instructed, for instance, to run into the shell explosions, since as the barrage advantages, no gun should ever strike the same spot twice; a fresh shell-hole was, in theory, safe). Attentive readers will recognize the basic foundations of the “move fast, disorient the enemy” methods of the “modern system” here.
So did infiltration tactics break the trench stalemate? No.
First, it is necessary to note that while infiltration tactics were perhaps most fully developed by the Germans, they were not unique to them. The French were experimenting with many of the same ideas at the same time. For instance, basic principles of infiltration were being published by the French General Headquarters as early as April, 1915. André Laffargue, a French infantry captain, actually published a pamphlet, which was fairly widely distributed in both the French and British armies by the end of 1915 and in the American army in 1916, on exactly this sort of method. In many cases, like at the Second Battle of Artois, these French tactics bore significant fruit with big advances, but ran into the problem that the gains were almost invariably lost in the face of German counter-attacks. The Russians, particularly under Aleksei Brusilov, also started using some of these techniques, although Brusilov was as much making a virtue of necessity as the Russians just didn’t have that much artillery or shells and had to make do with less and Russian commanders (including Brusilov!) seem to have only unevenly taken the lessons of his successes.
The problem here is speed: infiltration tactics could absolutely more efficiently overrun the front enemy lines and even potentially defeat multiple layers of a defense-in-depth. But after that was done and the shock of the initial push wore off, you were still facing the same calculus: the attacker’s reinforcements, shells, artillery and supplies had to cross broken ground to reach the new front lines, while the defender’s counter-attack could ride railways, move over undamaged roads and then through prepared communications trenches. In the race between leg infantry and trains, the trains always won. On the Eastern Front or against the Italians fighting under the Worst General In History at Caporetto (1917), the already badly weakened enemy might simply collapse, producing massive gains (but even at Caporetto, no breakthrough – shoving the enemy is not a breakthrough, to qualify as a breakthrough, you need to get to the “green fields beyond” that is open ground undefended by the enemy), but against a determined foe, as with the 1918 Spring Offensives, these tactics, absent any other factor, simply knocked big salients3 in the line. Salients which were, in the event, harder to defend and brought the Germans no closer to victory. Eventually – often quite rapidly – the front stabilized again and the deadlock reasserted itself. Restoring maneuver, the actual end-goal of these tactics, remained out of reach.
None of this is to say that infiltration tactics were useless. They represented a real improvement on pre-war infantry tactics and continue to serve as the basis for modern infantry tactics. But they could not break the trench stalemate or restore maneuver.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
- Because it doesn’t fit anywhere else, I want to make a rather long note here. There is an odd tendency which I find quite frustrating, in which military concepts, unit designations and terminology from other languages are all translated into English when used, except for German terms. I suspect this has to do with the high reputation German military thinking holds in among the general public and some military practitioners. I do not share this view; both the German Imperial Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht (another term we never translated yet we feel no need to call the French army l’armée de terre) managed to lose the only major wars they were in, leading to the end of the states they served. Both armies were capable at some things and failed at others; their record certainly does not make German some sort of Holy Language of War. Nevertheless, where German technical terms are notable, I will include them so that the reader will know, should they encounter them elsewhere, that this is a term they are already familiar with, albeit in translation.
- It should be noted that the emphasis here remained on envelopment and destruction rather than on disorientation. The latter is a feature of subsequent systems based on German maneuver warfare, but was not a goal of the doctrine itself initially.
- A salient is a bulge in the line such that your position is bordered by the enemy on three sides. Such positions are very vulnerable, since they can be attacked from multiple directions and potentially “pinched off” at the base.
November 11, 2025
Four battles of the Canadian Corps
Following on from part one (excerpted here), The Black Horse outlines four major battles that the Canadians fought on the western front during the First World War:
Sir Arthur Currie
Portrait by William Orpen, 1919.
The first part of the series was a political biography of Currie; the second part attempts to tell the story of the Canadian Corps at war through somewhat detailed account of four important battles. The piece is only partly biographical, it partly tells the story of Currie’s war, and partly tells the story the Canadian men who fought for the British Empire in the Great War. It’s a story of incredible martial prowess, but the careful reader will also observe a story of warring duties placed upon the leader of a colonial army; duty to his men, duty to the political leadership of his colonial people and the future of that nation, duty to the objectives of the imperial power on whose behalf he fought, and finally duty to glorious Victory. Currie ended his life understood by those with eyes to see as a great warrior and a military genius; but disliked by his men and hated by the leadership of his people because he prioritized the needs to the Empire and of Victory; but after the war the Empire was of limited service to Currie and to the Canadian people. I leave to the reader, to history, and to God, to decide the value of Victory.
[…]
2nd Battle of Ypres
In the spring of 1915 the early dynamic advances of the German army were a distant memory faded behind the great defeat at the First Battle of the Marne. Through the winter both sides had dug in; and many German troops were redeployed to the Russian front. German chemists Walther Nernst and Fritz Haber brought forward the idea of using heavier-than-air Chlorine gas, carried on the wind, to overcome the mathematical impossibility of conventional attack. On April 22, 1915, Albrecht of Württemberg led 7 German divisions to attack 8 Allied divisions, including the 1st Canadian Division under the command of Sir Edwin Alfred Hervey Alderson. The attack began with the release of 168 tons of chlorine gas at about 1700h along a 4 mile stretch of the front around Langemark.
[…]
Vimy Ridge
For a year and a half after Ypres, Currie & the Canadian Corps continued to fight desperate engagements along the Western front with no clear strategic conclusion. After heavy losses and a lot of hard-learned lessons at the Somme from Sept 1915-Sept 1916, the Canadian Corps and Currie with them had become both hardened by bitter experience, and desperate to find better ways to prosecute the war. In September 1915 he was recorded to have said “I did not care what happened to me, but to my men, to their wives, their mothers, their children and to Canada I owed a duty which I wanted to fulfill to the very best of my ability”. Later that year as the division struggled with desertion, he ordered the execution of a deserter despite a three hour plea for clemency by the divisional cleric. The decision restored discipline, but haunted Currie’s dreams long afterwards.
In May 1916 Julian Byng took command of the Canadian Corps, replacing Sir Edwin Alderson. In the fall of that year, after heavy losses in a series of engagements at the Somme, Byng was given the opportunity to reorganize and refit the Canadian Corps; he looked to Currie as a key partner in the effort. They replaced the ineffective Ross Rifle with the Lee Enfield, reorganized the platoon structure to include heavy weapons within each platoon [machine guns, mortars, etc.], and implemented new training and tactics like rehearsals for advances, and the “creeping barrage”, carefully coordinated intended to keep artillery shells landing slightly ahead of advancing men.
[…]
Hill 70
After Vimy, Julian Byng was promoted. Currie was promoted in turn to lead the Canadian Corps. He would lead the Corps that he and Byng had made into one of the most effective fighting forces on any side of the conflict and lead it to bloody victory again and again. There is perhaps no better example of the mastery of the Canadian Corps, from top to bottom, than the battle of Hill 70. “Hill 70 was as close to a perfect battle as was ever fought on the Western Front” wrote historian Tim Cook.
[…]
The Hundred Days Offensive & the Pursuit to Mons
As the winter of 1917-18 passed, a new set of highly political decisions concerning whether and how to reorganize the Canadian Corps for the next round of fighting were taken. As noted in part one, Currie opted to split up the newly formed 5th division to reinforce the four divisions of the Canadian Corps and triple the size of the field engineering element. The decision optimized the Canadian Corps as an attacking force; and when they returned to the front that’s exactly how they would be used. Between August 8th and November 11th, 1918, the Canadian Corps fought nine major battles advancing 86 miles, and suffering 45,835 casualties [The force that began the offensive was ~100,000]. By comparison, the substantially larger American Expeditionary Force, over this same period, advanced only 34 miles while capturing only half the number of prisoners, suffering roughly twice the casualties per German division defeated.
November 9, 2025
Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the famous Canadian Corps in WW1
As a counterpoint to the OTT summary of Sir Arthur posted last week, here’s The Black Horse with part one of a two-part look at the man’s early career before joining the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Europe:
Sir Arthur Currie with Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, February 1918.
Libraries and Archives Canada item ID number 3404878.
The Red Ensign is a publication deeply interested in leadership; the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason, this Remembrance Day, I have chosen to draw the audience’s attention to the life and times of Sir Arthur Currie, the first Canadian commander of the Canadian Corps during the Great War. This presents an opportunity to both on honour and reflect upon the courage and sacrifice of the men who have fought under the flag of this great nation, but also offers the language to articulate the task facing any who would attempt to lead Canada today. As Currie’s war was defined by the challenge [of] leadership of Canadians in the context of the shifting priorities of the late British Empire, any who would seek to lead Canadians today face will struggle to harmonize efforts on behalf of the Canadian people and the priorities and policies of the American power block which he cannot eschew.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; but when your country is an Imperial Dominion, who and what is “pro patria“, and how can one spend their life for them?
The Man Before the Great Man:
Arthur Currie was born in 1875 in Napperton, Ontario [50 km West of London], the third of eight children living on a homestead belonging to his grandfather. Raised with a the vigorous discipline of a Methodist home, Currie would remain a convicted Christian for his entire life, though he converted to Anglicanism as an adult. Currie was a good student, intending to pursue a career in law or medicine but dropped out of school twice, first temporarily because of the financial constraints brought on by the death of his father, and then for a second time at 19 because of a quarrel with one of his teachers. After leaving school he went West; after a string of failed efforts to establish himself via entrepreneurship and real-estate speculation he joined the Canadian militia as a gunner in 1897 in Victoria B.C. at the age of 23. A giant man (6’3″ at a time when the average Canadian height was 5’7″) with a noted eye for technical detail and, in the words of his son, a “tremendous command of profanity”, he quickly distinguished himself and was promoted to corporal before earning a commission as an officer in 1900. As an officer in peace time Currie was noted for his detailed inspections and his rapid transformation from “one of the boys”, into a rigid disciplinarian. This duality, an officer raised from the ranks, who could both embody the rigid tradition of the British military and who had an intimate familiarity with the life and ways of the enlisted men would become a defining feature of his career.
During Currie’s peace-time career as an officer he maintained a second career as a real-estate [agent]. After becoming head of Matson Insurance Firm 1904, he and the firm invested aggressively in the Victoria real-estate market. In 1913 Currie’s financial situation began to rapidly deteriorate as a consequence of price declines in the real-estate market. Currie’s financial problems nearly led him to refuse to stand up the 50th Regiment Gordon Highlanders of Canada in 1913. In July 1914 Curry used $10,833.34 of regimental funds intended for the purchase of uniforms and kit to pay his personal debts, and found himself facing forcible retirement just as the Canadian Army was being mobilized for war. At the intervention of one of his subordinates, Major Garnet Hughes, he instead accepted promotion as brigadier-general of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Canadian Division, and ignored correspondence from the new commander of the 50th regiment, Major Cecil Roberts, about the missing funds until he was overseas.
Currie arrived at camp Valcartier on September 1st, 1914 to find himself charged with 10x as many men as he had ever led before, no staff, a shared tent as a command center, and the duty to prepare these men for one of the most difficult theatres of war the world has ever seen. The six months between taking command and the arrival of his brigade in the trenches near Ypres were marked by two mud besotted poorly supplied training camps, shoddy kit, rampant disease, and the company of a certain bear that was to become beloved by children around the world. Through this period Currie was well liked by the men, but known as a disciplinarian with an eye for technical detail. In March 1915 the brigade was deployed to what was expected to be a quiet part of the front with the intent of allowing the men to gain some experience with trench warfare before they were relied upon for action. Nobody anticipated what would happen next.
November 4, 2025
The Bear Who Beat the Nazis | Wojtek
The Rest Is History
Published 29 Jun 2025The story of Wojtek — the bear who took on the Nazis — amidst the death and devastation of the Second World War, and more specifically Poland’s heroic resistance, is a flicker of redemption amidst an otherwise deeply depressing period of history. His is a life that exemplifies not only Poland’s struggle in microcosm, but also the global nature of the war overall. Discovered by a young boy as a tiny cub, his mother dead, he was sold to Polish officers travelling to Palestine in the hills outside Tehran. The soldiers nursed and fed the young bear with milk from a vodka bottle, treating him like one of their own. Later, he was even purported to keep them warm at night, drink beer, delight in wrestling and showers, and both march and salute. When the Polish forces were finally deployed to Europe, “Wojtek” as he had been named, went with them; a mascot and morale booster to the men. There he was given military rank, and actively participated in the Italian campaign, carrying ammunition and artillery crates. But with death and destruction on all sides, what would be his fate?
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Wojtek, one of history’s most extraordinary animals, and his life in the army — an emblem of hope and resilience in the face of the horrors of the Second World War.
(more…)
October 9, 2025
Russia’s Great Retreat 1915
The Great War
Published 9 May 2025In May 1915, the Central Powers launched one of the greatest offensive operations of the First World War. The armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary planned to smash their way through Russia lines and tip the strategic balance in their favor. The result was one of the biggest and bloodiest campaigns of the war, known today as the Great Russian Retreat.
(more…)
June 17, 2025
QotD: What is a “tank”?
And we should stop to note that as with any question of definition, this one too is language-sensitive. The exact confines of a term vary from one language to another; kampfpanzer, for instance is not necessarily an exact synonym for “tank”.
In any event, the basic demands of early tanks were dictated by the realities of the Western Front: a tank needed to be able to resist small arms fire (particularly machine guns), deliver direct supporting fire itself, it needed to be able to move on the muddy, artillery-flattened ground and it needed to be able to cross a trench. This last requirement – the need to be able to both climb a parapet (usually c. 4ft) and then cross over an 8ft wide trench – was significant in the design of early tanks.
Those factors in turn dictated a lot of the design of early tanks. The armor demands of resisting small arms fire meant that the vehicle would be heavy (and indeed, as soon as tanks appeared amongst Allied troops, their German opponents began introducing more powerful bullets, like the K bullet and later the 13.2mm anti-tank round fired from the Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr). And here is the first advantage of tracks. The weight of a vehicle is distributed along all of the area of contact it has with the ground; with tires that area is limited to the bottom of the tire so the total area of ground contact is fairly low, which is fine for most vehicles.
But tanks are heavy. Really heavy. Even something like the Renault FT could mass around 7 tons and by later standards that would be classified as a tankette (a “mini-tank” as it were); by WWII, medium tanks often clocked in around 30 tons. If you put a vehicle like that on tires, you are going to create a LOT of pressure on those small points of contact. That might still be OK if you are just going to drive on roads and other firm surfaces which can take the pressure. But remember: tanks were designed for the Western Front, which looks like this.
Fortunately for the landship committee, this wasn’t a new problem: farming tractors were also heavy and also had to operate in churned up (in this case, plowed) soft soil; the heaviest of these vehicles had much the same problem and the solution was continuous tracks or “treads”. When kept properly tensioned – tune in, by the by, to Nicholas “The Chieftain” Moran’s YouTube for more than you ever want to know about track tension – the track distributes the weight of the tank across the entire section of the track touching the ground, which reduces the ground pressure at any given point, allowing a big heavy tank to roll over terrain where even a much lighter wheeled vehicle would get stuck.
This is one of those points where the functionality of a tank (what a tank does) has such a strong influence on design that the design implications of the functionality become part of the definition: a tank has to be heavily armored and has to be able to move off-road and as a result has to be tracked, not wheeled. One might be able to imagine some sort of exotic technology that might make it possible to do all of the things a tank does without tracks, but we don’t have that yet.
The other factor was fire. I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the significant background factors of WWI is that a lot of the belligerents misjudged the kind of artillery they’d need for a general European war. Not to get too deep into the weeds here, but most of the belligerents expected a relatively rapid war of maneuver and so thought that light, direct-fire artillery like the famed French ’75 (the Matériel de 75mm Mle 1897) would be the most useful. Those guns could be moved quickly and could deliver a lot of quick firepower on static or moving formations of enemy infantry in support of friendly infantry.
The problem is that in the conditions of trench warfare, those guns – as they were configured, at least – were far less useful. They were, first off, much shorter in range which meant they had to be brought dangerously far forward to do their direct fire role – often so far forward they could be engaged by enemy rifles and machine guns. This was compounded by the fact that direct fire at range was ineffective against trench works (which are dug down into the earth). But at the same time, the value of rapid firing (because these lighter guns could fire a lot faster than the heavy, indirect fire artillery) direct fire artillery remained high, if only you could get it to the fight.
This was also a problem a tank could solve: as a mobile, armored platform it could move a rapid-firing direct fire gun forward without immediately being knocked out by enemy small arms to support the infantry. There is, I should note, early complexity on this point, with both “male” (heavy direct fire cannon focused) and “female” (machine gun focused) tanks in WWI though in the end “hermaphrodite” designs with both capabilities (but much more focus on the main cannon) triumph, so that’s what we’ll focus on.
And that gets us the fundamental role structure for tanks: enough armor to resist enemy small arms (but with the understanding that some weapons will always be effective against the tank), enough mobility to cross the churned up battlefield and some direct fire capability to support the infantry crossing it at the same time.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: When is a ‘Tank’ Not a Tank?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-05-06.
May 30, 2025
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.
