On Jan. 30, 1968, all U.S. combat units in Vietnam went to alert status when the Viet Cong violated the Tet Cease-fire by attacking Da Nang and eleven other cities in the center of the country. The 9th Infantry Division’s 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry (Mechanized) deployed to overwatch positions around the sprawling American logistics base at Long Binh, which was also the headquarters of U.S. II Field Forces. Early the following morning, Jan. 31, the rest of the coordinated VC/NVA attacks erupted countrywide. The 2-47’s B Company, along with the Battalion Scout Platoon, led by 1st Lt. Brice Barnes, moved into the Long Binh base perimeter when it came under direct attack. Just after they arrived, VC sappers using satchel charges blew part of the American ammo dump.  

Widows’ Village, located directly across Highway 15 from II Field Forces headquarters, was a motley collection of shacks occupied by the widows and families of ARVN soldiers. When a company-sized VC unit attacked through the hamlet on their way to assault the II Field Forces compound, a platoon of four M-113 armored personnel carriers (APC) from B Company was sent across the road to block the attack. But the American platoon immediately ran into fierce resistance. The platoon lost two of its APCs and took heavy casualties, including the platoon leader. Ordered forward by the 2-47th’s battalion commander, Barnes left two of his APCs to provide security for the battalion command post and took his other eight M-113s across the road and into the village. Assuming command of all the American troops in Widows’ Village, he organized and led the counterattack.  

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According to his Distinguished Service Cross citation: “Repeatedly disregarding his safety, [Barnes] braved withering fire to direct civilians in the battle area to safety. Bullets struck all around him, but he refused to take cover and led a house-to-house sweep, personally destroying a recoilless rifle and an automatic weapon position.” In the course of the battle the scouts rescued more than 50 civilians and led them to safety. At one point Barnes himself ran directly into enemy fire to rescue an old woman and two small children. As the heavy fighting progressed and the scouts were starting to run low on ammo, Barnes was able to attract the attention of two AH-1 Cobra gunships orbiting low overhead. Since he did not have the radio frequencies or call signs for the gunships, he had to stand exposed on top of one of his APCs and use hand-and-arm signals to direct the gunship fire against the dug-in VC positions.  

After Widows’ Village was secured and the Scout Platoon was resupplied with ammo, the platoon was ordered to proceed two miles west to Bien Hoa City, where the 2-47th’s C Company had been heavily engaged all day. But they never got there. The Scout Platoon ran into a heavy ambush while passing through the village of Ho Nai on Highway 1. The murderous crossfire by heavy machine guns and RPGs broke Barnes’ column of eight APCs into three groups. During the fighting Barnes was hit by fragmentation from an RPG round that struck close by. Meanwhile, he was able to call in support from two UH-1B gunships to finally clear the ambush.  

For the combined fights at Widows’ Village and Ho Nai, Brice Barnes was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Later during his first tour in Vietnam Barnes commanded Headquarters Company of the 2-47th. During his second tour in Vietnam he commanded Company A, 5th Battalion, 12th Infantry, 199th Infantry Brigade. After he left active duty, Barnes continued to serve in the Texas Army National Guard, where in later years he commanded a mechanized infantry battalion. He finished his military career as a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. From 2010 to 2012 he served as the Honorary Colonel of the 47th Infantry Regiment.  

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of Vietnam magazine.

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British naval historian and geostrategist Sir Julian Corbett (1854–1922) was a contemporary of renowned American naval strategist Rear Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914). Unlike Mahan, Corbett had no personal military or naval experience, which prompted many senior officers in the Admiralty to view him and his theories with skepticism. A misconception persists that the ideas of Mahan and Corbett are in opposition, that one must accept one or the other. But that is an oversimplification. There is much to be learned by a comparison of the two.  

In developing a set of principles for naval warfare, Corbett drew from the theories of land warfare developed by Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. On the relationship between war and politics he echoed Clausewitz: “Military action must still be regarded only as a manifestation of policy. It must never supersede policy. The policy is always the object; war is only the means by which we obtain the object, and the means must always keep the end in view.”  

In defining essential differences between the respective physical operating environments of land and sea, however, Corbett departed from Clausewitz on key points, particularly the importance of concentration and the decisive battle. Control and security of communications, for example, is far more difficult at sea. Communications on land are largely limited to known roads, rail lines and rivers and channelized by mountains, forests and other no-go terrain. Predicting communications and movement on a vast, flat ocean is an entirely different matter. “At sea the communications are, for the most part, common to both belligerents,” Corbett noted, “whereas ashore each possess his own on his own territory.” Thus, he concluded, only relative command of the sea was possible at any given place and time.  

Corbett departed from both Mahan’s and Clausewitz’s argument for the primacy of destroying the enemy’s main force. Rather, the British strategist argued, controlling the lines of communications, both friendly and enemy, should be the main objective of naval warfare. Two ways to do that were through naval blockade or by capturing or sinking enemy warships and merchant ships. Corbett’s departure from the decisive battle principle prompted pushback from many of the Royal Navy’s more traditional admirals. Yet he enjoyed the backing of reform-minded First Sea Lord and Admiral of the Fleet Sir John “Jacky” Fisher.  

In 1911 Corbett published Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. He wrote during a period of sweeping technological changes. Steam had already replaced wind and sail as the fleet’s primary motive power; steel hulls had replaced wooden ones; and naval guns were acquiring greater range, accuracy and hitting power. While there was no way Corbett could have foreseen certain technologies, he knew change was imminent and ongoing. That’s why he called his book Some Principles, rather than The Principles. His intent was to produce a living document to or from which future generations of naval thinkers could add or subtract.    

Lessons

Determine the mutual relations of your army and navy in a plan of war. Only when this is done can one develop a plan for the fleet to best execute its assigned mission.

Offense and defense are not mutually exclusive. All war and every form of it must include contingencies for both.

The object of naval warfare is the control of communications. Naval operations in both world wars proved Corbett right.

The most pressing problem to solve is not how to increase the power of a fleet for attack, but how to defend it. Though Corbett wrote long before the advent of naval aviation, this remains the central difficulty of the aircraft carrier.

War Movie: The American Battle in Cinema (on DVD and Blu-ray, five-part documentary, 315 minutes), Cantilever Films, written and directed by Steve Summers, $24.99–$34.99, 2023

What is a war movie? Is it a faithful restaging of an actual historical event? Or is it a fictional morality play set against a well-known historical background? Is it solely a story of a battle, of soldiers in combat? Or can it portray wider themes of war, such as the home front; veterans returning to the real world; or higher-level commanders far from the front lines wrestling with excruciating strategic and leadership decisions? Is a classic John Ford cavalry picture a Western, or a war movie, or both? What about war comedies? POW films? Science fiction films like Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers? As this fascinating five-part documentary series makes clear, a war movie can be all these things.

War films cast a long shadow over American popular culture of the last 100 years. Nineteen of the 95 Oscars awarded for best picture have gone to war movies, starting with the first such award, the 1927 silent movie Wings, and followed closely by All Quiet on the Western Front, in 1930. War Movie explores this film genre, starting with the earliest-known example, Tearing Down the Spanish Flag. This rather primitive and short silent movie made in 1898 was the start of the long line that runs in a very wide pattern, but straight to 2014’s American Sniper and 2019’s The Outpost.

The five-part series is organized chronologically: 1. “The Camera and the Gun, 1900–1938”; 2. “The ‘Good’ War, 1939–1949”; 3. “The Shifting Tide, 1950–1975”; 4. “Into the Jungle, 1976–2000”; and 5. “Brave New World, 2001–2020.” Interspaced between clips from many of the most influential war movies, the series offers commentary from noted film critics, film historians, and most important, technical advisers who have been real soldiers. Those advisers who know war up close and personal include retired Navy SEAL Kevin Kent and the legendary former U.S. Marine Corps Captain Dale Dye.

This compelling series ends with just as many questions as it answers: Can a soldier’s story be heard as a life of lived experience and not just another plot device? We can learn about what happened in the war; but then once we step out of the movie theater, what do we do about that? As viewers can we transcend these repeated storylines of conflict and violence and try to evolve beyond our own repeated history? Questions to ponder, indeed.

Ludwig August Theodor Beck was the Third Reich’s most enigmatic and tragic senior general. As the first chief of the resurrected German Army General Staff in 1935, he played a leading role in building the post-World War I rump-Reichswehr into the Wehrmacht of World War II. He was a brilliant military thinker and the primary author of the 1933 operations manual Truppenführung (Unit Command), which remained the foundation of Germany’s war-fighting doctrine until 1945—and beyond. Yet Beck became a staunch anti-Nazi who opposed the politicization of the army and many of Hitler’s plans for large-scale wars of conquest. After retiring in protest in 1938, Beck became one of the leaders of the Widerstand—the German resistance. 

He was born in a suburb of Wiesbaden, Germany, on June 29, 1880, a descendent from an old Hessian officer family. In 1898 he joined a Prussian field artillery regiment based in Strasbourg as anofficer candidate and received his commission as a 2nd lieutenant the following year. From 1908 to 1911 he attended the highly selective Kriegsakademie (War College), where General Carl von Clausewitz once served as the director. In 1913 he became a full-fledged member of the General Staff. During World War I he served as the General Staff Officer Ia (operations officer) of two different divisions. From 1916 to 1918 he was assigned to the General Staff of Army Group German Crown Prince on the Western Front. When the Armistice went into effect in November 1918, Beck was responsible for planning the orderly and controlled withdrawal of some 90 German divisions back across the Rhine. It was an overwhelming responsibility for a 38-year-old major.

Beck was a cultured man with an intellectual bent. He spoke French and English; he played the violin; and he was an expert equestrian. But he did not have very much of a private life. He married in 1916; but he had to return to the front after the briefest of honeymoons. His daughter was born the following year; but then his wife died late in 1917. Much like Britain’s Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, whose wife also died young, Beck withdrew into his profession. The introverted officer also remained increasingly aloof from the bonhomie social life of the traditional officers’ messes. 

Following the war, Beck was one of the only 3,718 officers out of 227,081 selected for retention in the 100,000-man Reichswehr that Germany was allowed under the draconian terms of the Versailles Treaty. The treaty restrictions also prohibited Germany from having a General Staff. The Germans circumvented that restriction by camouflaging the Reichswehr’s General Staff as an innocuous-sounding organization called the Truppenamt (Troop Office). The treaty also forbade Germany from even training General Staff officers, forcing the closing of the Kriegs-akademie. The Reichswehr circumvented that by conducting decentralized leadership training in the military districts. The successful graduates were designated a Führerstabsoffizier (Leader Staff Officer), the cover term for a General Staff officer. 

During the 1920s Beck rotated between troop commands as an artillery officer and assignments in the Truppenamt. From 1919 to 1922 he was assigned to special duties, working personally for Colonel General Hans von Seeckt, the first chief of the Truppenamt and later the Chief of the Army Command. Seeckt was the key architect of the small Reichswehr as an elite Führerheer (Leaders’ Army), the foundation for the army’s rapid expansion at some point in the future.

Of the many wide-ranging reforms carried out under Seeckt, one of the most important was a new manual for tactical doctrine published in 1922. H.Dv.487 Führung und Gefecht der verbundenen Waffen (Command and Combat of the Combined Arms), was widely called “Das FuG.” Unlike the post-World War I operational manuals of almost every other Western army, Das FuG abandoned the concept of trench warfare. Instead, it emphasized mobile warfare while also adopting many of the offensive and defensive technical and tactical innovations that evolved during the First World War. Das FuG stressed the primacy of the offensive, with encirclement combined with a frontal or flank holding action as the preferred tactical maneuver in most cases. The defensive was purely a temporary economy of force measure in preparation for going on the offensive.

In 1931 and 1932, Beck had been the lead author of a revision of Das FuG to bring the doctrine up to date with the rapidly emerging potentials of motorized warfare, aviation, and electronic communications. His editorial assistants were Generals Werner von Fritsch and Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel. Published in 1933, H.Dv.300 Truppenführung (Unit Command), continued Das FuG’s focus on mobile and offensive operations, with entire paragraphs from Das FuG carried over verbatim into Truppenführung. One very significant addition to the new manual, however, was the introduction. In 15 elegantly phrased and highly philosophical paragraphs, Beck set the manual’s tone. Among his observations were that the conduct of war is subject to continual development, with new weapons dictating new forms of warfare; regulations alone aren’t enough to fight a war and such principles must conform to the situation at hand; military command requires leaders capable of judgment, with clear vision and foresight, and the ability to make independent decisions, and to carry them out unwaveringly and positively; and that every man, from the youngest soldier upward, must commit his whole mental, spiritual, and physical strength to his unit.

Truppenführung is the key to understanding the psychology, philosophy, and social values of the Wehrmacht at the start of World War II. Tragically, too many of those principles were perverted by the Nazism of the Third Reich as the war progressed. Nonetheless, Truppenführung remains essential to understanding German military operations until the end of the war. In many of its passages Truppenführung was a like a modern version of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. According to historian Williamson Murray, Truppenführung “remains the most influential doctrinal manual ever written” as well as “one of the most thoughtful examinations of the conduct of operations and leadership.” Murray did not exaggerate. The primary operations manual of the German Bundeswehr today is still called Truppenführung, and it is heavily influenced by many of the concepts in the original 1933 edition. Likewise, when the U.S. Army introduced its AirLand Battle doctrine during the 1980s, the authors of the 1986 edition of Field Manual 100-5, Operations studied the original Truppenführung closely.

Another important principle that emerged from the pages of Truppenführung is what is now called Auftragstaktik (Mission Command Tactics), the idea that senior commanders should tell their subordinate commanders what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and when it needs to be done—but then give the junior commanders the flexibility to figure out the best way possible to achieve the senior commander’s intent. Although traditional German deference to higher authority and close adherence to established procedures would seem to be the very antithesis of Auftragstaktik, the Wehrmacht made it work to a degree unsurpassed by any other army in history to that point. Oddly enough, the term itself never appears in print in Truppenführung; but the concept comes through clearly in the pages of the manual.

German tactical thinking, however, continued to evolve after the publication of Truppenführung. As General Friedrich-Wilhelm von Mellenthin noted in his classic 1956 book Panzer Battles, the Army General Staff had a series of very intense internal debates between 1935 and 1937 over the use of tanks. Beck at that point tended to subscribe to the then-current French doctrine of committing tanks to close support of the infantry. Generals Werner von Fritsch and Heinz Guderian were among those who argued instead for independent Panzer operations. In his post-war memoirs, Guderian painted Beck—who by then was dead and unable to defend himself—as a narrow-minded defeatist with no operational understanding who even opposed the formation of the Panzer divisions. Various passages in Truppenführung do cover infantry and armor actions that are coordinated, but not combined. The true integration of infantry and armor tactics in the German Army did not take place until after the 1940 campaign in France, when Colonel Hermann Balck recommended the formation of combined infantry-armor teams.

As early as 1934 Beck, in fact, wrote a lengthy cover memo to an extensive report on British Army armored maneuvers, stressing the need for continued evaluation and assessment of evolving armored warfare. And as historian Robert Citino pointed out, the first Panzer divisions started forming in 1935, less than two years after Beck became the chief of the Truppenamt. General Staff exercises that Beck planned that year included notional Panzer divisions and even corps, well before Germany had hardly any tanks at all. Thus, Guderian’s claim to have waged a “long, drawn-out fight” with Beck over the creation of the Panzer divisions can only be overstatement at best.

Hitler’s National Socialist movement gained traction during the late 1920s and early 1930s, but Beck never became a member of the Nazi Party, although he continued his rise in the military. He assumed command of the 1st Cavalry Division in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1932 with a promotion to lieutenant general (two stars) and became chief of the Truppenamt on October 1, 1933. Like Hitler, he supported the repudiation of the Versailles Treaty because he believed that Germany had both the need and the right to rearm. In early 1933 Beck naively wrote of Nazism; “I have wished for years for the political revolution, and now my wishes have come true. It is the first ray of hope since 1918.” His optimism, however, did not last long.

After President Paul von Hindenburg died in office on August 2, 1934, Hitler grabbed total power in Germany by combining the offices of president and chancellor, styling himself as the new Führer. Eighteen days later, all German officers were required to swear an oath of fealty to Hitler personally. Beck had serious misgivings, but he failed to raise objections because he believed that Hitler could provide the strong government that Germany needed, while the army’s traditional elements could keep him under reasonable control. It was a Hobson’s Choice, preferable to the paramilitary thugs of the Sturmabteilungen (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) becoming the dominant power force in the country. Tragically, that is exactly what happened.

Once Hitler had all the reins of power in hand, he progressively threw off the Versailles Treaty restrictions, first clandestinely, and then openly. On March 16, 1935, he had the Reichswehr renamed the Wehrmacht. Simultaneously, the Truppenamt was re-designated the General Staff of the Army (Generalstab des Heeres), with Beck as its first chief. The so-called “Leader Staff Officers” were redesignated General Staff Officers and authorized to append the traditional “i.G.” (im Generalstab) after their rank titles. That May, Beck was promoted to General of Artillery (three stars). He set to work managing the expansion of the resurrected General Staff. One of his first acts was to re-open the Kriegsakademie as the central point for General Staff Officer training.

Beck adhered to a traditional German militarist worldview. He believed that German military power had to be restored to its pre-1919 levels, and he advocated increasingly greater levels of military spending. His war plans for Germany were initially based on a defensive strategy. He clearly understood that any future large-scale war could all too easily become another multi-front conflict that Germany could not win. Once Germany was sufficiently rearmed, Beck thought that the Reich should conduct a progressive series of limited wars that would establish Germany as Europe’s foremost power and place all of Central and Eastern Europe within the German sphere of influence. Nonetheless, in 1936 he fully supported Hitler during the remilitarization of the German Rhineland—as opposed to many of the other generals who feared the possible French reaction.

Beck’s close ally was General Werner von Fritsch, the commander-in-chief of the German Army. The two saw their primary task as one of rebuilding the army on the old apolitical traditional model, rather than as an appendage of the Nazi Party. This ultimately put them on a collision course with War Minister General Werner von Blomberg, who intended to remake the army as a mirror of National Socialist ideology. Fritsch and Beck continued to resist the politicization of the army, but Hitler and his key henchmen progressively tightened the political cordon. In January 1938 Blomberg was forced out of office when it was revealed that his new second wife had a lengthy criminal record. Hitler then personally assumed the War Ministry portfolio, making him the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht. The following month Fritsch was forced to resign after he was falsely accused of being a homosexual. Fritsch was replaced as army commander-in-chief by the more pliable Colonel General Walther von Brauchitsch. Beck was now politically isolated. 

In May 1937, Beck initially resisted issuing the orders for the German invasion of Austria. He apparently had no deep-seated moral objection to the idea of a war of aggression, but he believed that such a move might trigger a world war before Germany had rearmed enough for a major conflict. He believed that the earliest date Germany could risk a war was 1940. Most of the generals also believed that starting a war in 1938 was highly risky; but none of them dared to confront Hitler directly on the issue. Beck issued the orders for the Wehrmacht to march into Austria in March 1938, an invasion that was unopposed.

Beck continued to cling to the belief that the German officer corps could keep the National Socialists under control. But as Hitler pushed to invade Czechoslovakia in 1938, Beck began to oppose him openly, writing a series of memoranda describing the inherent dangers in a premature major military operation. Beck attempted to mobilize other generals to resist what he saw as Hitler’s strategic crapshoot; but he failed to gain the backing of army commander-in-chief Brauchitsch. Increasingly frustrated over Germany’s course, Beck established his own personal intelligence network of German military attachés, which he used both to collect and to leak information. He also reached out to key civilians for his network, with the most notable being Carl Goerdeler, an anti-Nazi and former mayor of Leipzig.

In August 1938, Beck retired from the army in protest. He was promoted to colonel general (four stars) on the retired list. In retirement, Beck organized a covert opposition group of active and retired officers and other conservatives, including Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the anti-Nazi head of German Military Intelligence (Abwehr).

By the start of 1940, before the German invasion of France and the Low Countries, Beck had reached the conclusion that the only plausible way to overthrow the Nazi regime was to remove Hitler from power. Beck’s group even went so far as to reach out to the Vatican to request help in mediating with the Western Allies. At that point, however, the plotters naively believed that they could negotiate a peace settlement with Britain and France that would allow Germany to keep most of its recent conquests—including Austria, western Poland, and the occupied Czechoslovakian provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. A skeptical Britain remained noncommittal. Shortly before the 1940 invasion of Belgium and France, Beck’s group tried to warn the Belgians of the imminent attack.

By 1943, Beck had become convinced that the only way to save Germany was to assassinate Hitler. His group tried several times, culminating in Colonel i.G. Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to kill Hitler with a bomb on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg managed to place the explosive, hidden in a briefcase, beneath a table in a room where Hitler was leading a military conference. The bomb exploded, but another officer had unwittingly pushed the briefcase behind a heavy table leg, shielding Hitler from the full blast and saving his life.

Had Stauffenberg succeeded, the conspirators planned to establish martial law, seize radio stations, and arrest key Nazi and SS leaders. (Beck did refuse to approve their summary execution.) Pending free elections, Beck would have become the acting head of state of the interim government, with Carl Goerdeler as chancellor.

When the conspirators learned that Stauffenberg had failed, Beck insisted on continuing the putsch, called Operation Valkyrie. He believed that Germany deserved the attempt. But the effort failed. Arrested with other key conspirators and taken into custody at the army’s headquarters on Bendler Strasse in Berlin, Beck was offered the privilege of shooting himself to avoid death by torture by the Gestapo. On the night of July 20-21, Beck managed to wound himself. A sergeant then shot the unconscious Beck in the neck, killing him. Having started out in a somewhat loose league with the devil, Colonel General Ludwig Beck died on the right side of history—a German patriot, but one with a clouded legacy.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Battlefields are where history happened—for better or for worse. As Winston Churchill once observed, “Battles are the punctuation marks in history.” Battles, however, are very complex events. You can read many books and look at countless maps and still not have the gut-level understanding of what really happened and why it happened that way. Thus, the classic military adage, “See the ground.” That’s sage advice whether you are planning to fight a battle or trying to understand it long after the fact. No two battles are the same—even battles fought on the same piece of ground at different points in history. The compositions of the opposing forces, the contemporary weapons technologies, the tactics of the period, and the weather the day the battle was fought are never the same. The ground, however, changes very little, and the terrain can often be the dominating factor in the battle. Broken and compartmentalized ground usually favors the defender, wide-open terrain habitually favors the attacker, and gravity always confers an advantage on the side that holds the high ground. Very little in the brave new world of cyber operations will help a military force conduct an opposed river crossing. Kinetic energy still counts. No two historical battlefields are alike. Some have been almost completely built over, while others have changed relatively little since the swords were sheathed or the guns fell silent. Fortunately, there are many excellent battlefields that are historically significant, comprehensible, visitor friendly and (mostly) easy to reach. On the following pages are photos of Military History’s top recommended sites for any battlefield enthusiast’s bucket list.

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No general, the old saying goes, ever wakes up in the morning and decides he is going to lose a battle. Yet for every general who loses a battle, there is an opposite number who wins the fight. This has been a constant of warfare for as long as man has kept historical records. World War I, however, has been recorded somewhat differently by history, or at least by popular history. Given the four years of carnage in the trenches, the likes of which the world had never seen, the myth of “lions led by donkeys” still holds great sway a century later.

Yet, despite the appeal and apparent clarity of such a view, the truth on the ground was nowhere near as simplistic. World War I was a war unlike any other ever fought. It was a war of future shock. Newly emerging technologies in weaponry, communications and, later, mobility rendered all the old tactics and mechanics of warfighting obsolete. Nor did the new dynamics of warfighting remain static between 1914 and ’18. They evolved rapidly, constantly changing the harsh realities of the battlefield. Thus, the senior military leaders on all sides spent most of the first three years of the war trying to keep up with and come to terms with the new technologies. Unfortunately, when you are in the middle of fighting a war, trial and error is the only viable mechanism for such a process. Thus, World War I was a 20th century war fought by 19th century soldiers. From the most senior field marshal to the most junior platoon leader to the privates on the front lines, all faced a steep learning curve, and they had to climb it rapidly. The starting point for any analysis of senior-level military leadership must be a working definition of generalship itself. The art of generalship—and it is very much an art, rather than a science—involves far more than the command of large formations of troops. It also comprises the formation, organization, equipment and training of an army; the transportation of forces to a theater of operations; the logistical sustainment of troops throughout their deployment; the collection, processing and analysis of intelligence on the enemy; the planning of operations and committal of forces to battle; and the direction and coordination of their actions once committed. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz grouped these diverse activities of generalship into two primary categories—preparation for war and the conduct of war proper—and argued that precious few commanders are equally skilled in both categories. History bears him out.

Do generals single-handedly win battles? Of course not. But they can single-handedly lose them. During World War I Britain’s then First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill referred to Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, the commander of Britain’s Grand Fleet, as “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.” Any close analysis of the battles of 1914–18 clearly demonstrates that a great deal turned on the planning and execution decisions made by the senior-most commanders. There is much to learn from the study of those decisions, the men who made them and the conditions under which they carried out their duties as they saw them.

There is no such thing as a wartime general who does everything perfectly all the time. All are flesh-and-blood human beings. All at one point or another rate some degree of legitimate criticism for their actions and decisions. But by necessity such judgments always come after the fact. Most of us cannot possibly imagine what it is like to be responsible for the lives of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of one’s own countrymen; having to make decisions under extreme pressure, in the environment of the fog and friction of war; and with partial, incorrect and even intentionally deceptive information on which to base those decisions. Even if the general does everything right, his troops still wind up suffering casualties while killing and wounding huge numbers of the enemy. It is just this mass expenditure of human life in war that results in the tendency to classify generals into neatly self-contained categories: heroes (cult icons such as World War II German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel), villains (World War I’s butchers and bunglers) or fools (World War I’s donkeys). In modern-day estimation virtually no World War I general ranks in the hero class, yet to one degree or another every battlefield commander in history can be included simultaneously in all three categories. The following analysis will focus on the six senior-most Western Front battlefield commanders of 1918, namely:  

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, chief of the General Staff of the German field army (Feldheer)

General of the Infantry Erich Ludendorff, first quartermaster general of the German army

Marshal of France Ferdinand Foch, general in chief of the Allied armies

General of Division Philippe Pétain, commander in chief of French armies on the Western Front

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force

General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Forces  

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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Despite broad rejection today in most academic circles of the “great man theory” of history, these six generals had the major influence on the outcome of the campaigns of 1918 and, ultimately, the war. It was these senior-most commanders who made the decisions, and it is impossible to understand the Western Front in 1918 without studying them.

The judgment of history still has not been settled on these six warlords. Judgment rests far more heavily on three of the six than the records of their wartime commands merit. Pétain is rightly remembered as the savior of France on two separate occasions—at Verdun in 1916 and again in the spring of 1917 after mutinies threatened his ranks. But he is better remembered as the man who as chief of state of Vichy France from 1940 to ’44 sold out his country to the Third Reich. Hindenburg was the “Wooden Titan” (der Nagelsäulen), Germany’s only true national hero during the war. He was also the last president of the doomed Weimar Republic and the man who appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany in January 1933. The debate continues on Ludendorff. He was either the greatest military genius of the war, or he was the man whose strategic ineptitude and personal military and political overreach resulted in a complete loss of focus that cost Germany the war. He also was an early supporter of the Nazis, later tried along with Hitler for the infamous Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. Of the six, Haig is the one most often branded today as a “château general,” or one who led from the rear. Foch had a reputation as a fighter, while every frontline poilu knew that Pétain, more than anyone else, would be more careful with their lives. Pershing had comparatively little experience commanding in combat, certainly not enough to acquire any significant negative repute among doughboys.

Unfortunately, space limitations restrict the following assessment. For more detail see my 2018 book The Generals’ War: Operational Level Command on the Western Front in 1918.  

Paul von Hindenburg

Hindenburg is the most enigmatic of the war’s senior commanders, certainly more than the mere figurehead he appears today. The German command system was significantly different than those of the Allies. The relationship between a German commander and his chief of staff (Ludendorff’s de facto role by war’s end) was a far closer partnership. Thus, it is impossible to consider one or the other alone. Although by the last year of the war Hindenburg appeared to be little more than Ludendorff’s political top cover, one can never forget that, unlike many other German senior commanders, he was a fully qualified General Staff officer, one who had graduated with honors from the Kriegsakademie. The field marshal’s principal British biographer, John W. Wheeler-Bennett, said Hindenburg’s greatest contribution was his “never-failing capacity and willingness to accept responsibility, a feature of his character which became less apparent in his later life.” Those cracks in his armor began to show as early as October 1918.  

Erich Ludendorff

Although Ludendorff arguably was the most brilliant tactician of the war, he had a blind spot for the operational level and virtually no understanding of the strategic. The five German offensives of 1918 did not constitute a coordinated, integrated and sequentially phased operational campaign, but rather five huge, costly and largely unconnected tactical actions. After the failure of the first offensive in March 1918, each subsequent offensive was a reaction to the failure of the one before it. As British historian David Stevenson has argued, rail lines were the key to the 1918 campaigns. The Allies, especially Foch, continually targeted the German rail network. The Germans, though sensitive to the security of their own network, failed to focus sufficiently on the significant vulnerabilities of the shallow and fragile Allied rail system. Rather than attacking vital Allied vulnerabilities, like the BEF’s key rail nodes of Amiens and Hazebrouck, Ludendorff repeatedly tried to win with force-on-force attacks. While the Germans did have a fleeting force superiority early in 1918, it was not large enough for that kind of strategy. And in May, when the third German offensive pushed from the Chemin des Dames ridge south to the Marne River, the Germans were left holding a large and ultimately indefensible salient that had no major rail lines leading into it. The outcome was inevitable. By then many of the staff officers at Oberste Heeresleitung (supreme army command) and subordinate headquarters were complaining that Ludendorff combined total strategic indecision with endless interference over minor tactical details.  

The two key French generals of 1918, Foch and Pétain, were very different men. Pétain was by far the better tactician, but he was overcautious and pessimistic at the operational level. Foch had serious shortcomings as a tactician, but at the operational level he was the best general of the war. Fortunately for the Allies, they were the two right generals in the right positions at the right time—Foch as the overall Allied commander, and Pétain as commander of the French army. A similar division of duties existed between Generals Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton in 1944–45. Neither could have done the other’s job half as well.

Ferdinand Foch

Foch remains largely underrated. As Australian historian Elizabeth Greenhalgh noted, “Most historians dismiss the First World War version of supreme command as of little value, and Foch’s role in the victory as minimal.” But, Greenhalgh argued, Foch’s role in the Allies’ final victory was anything but minimal, and the precedent of his appointment to the supreme command and the lessons derived therefrom proved the essential foundation for the successful British-American combined command of World War II. Foch’s operational strategy of concentric attacks across a broad front between August and November 1918 essentially broke the German army. Unlike the uncoordinated and piecemeal German offenses during the first half of 1918, the Allied attacks during the second half were focused, synchronized and systematically timed.

From July 18 through war’s end Hindenburg and Ludendorff were forced to react to Foch, rather than the other way around. Perhaps his old friend and sometime critic General Sir Henry Wilson summed up the generalissimo best when after the war he observed, “[Foch] jumps over hills and valleys, but he always lands in the right place.”  

Philippe Pétain

As British historian Sir Alistair Horne wrote, “Pétain may not have had any original concepts on how the Great War should have been fought, but he understood better than either his colleagues or his opponents how it should not have been fought.” Actually, Horne’s assessment is somewhat parsimonious, for Pétain’s overhaul of French army tactics in 1917 was every bit the equal of Ludendorff’s initiatives.  

Sir Douglas Haig

Much criticism, fair and unfair, has been heaped upon Haig over the last eight decades. For almost 20 years following the war the British public held him largely in high esteem. That changed radically in the mid-1930s, when wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George started publishing his war memoirs. As American General William Westmoreland would experience in the wake of the Vietnam War, Haig became a lightning rod for almost everything that had gone wrong during World War I, including things over which he really had no control. Haig was hardly a stellar battlefield general, and he was a rather unimaginative tactician; but by the second half of 1918 he had become a reasonably competent and effective operational-level commander. Haig also had significant input on Foch’s concept for the Allied general offensive of the final two months of the war. There can be little doubt the key to the final Allied success was the difficult but ultimately effective partnership between Haig and Foch. The two met some 60 times between April and November 1918. It was Haig who convinced Foch the AEF’s main effort in late 1918 should be toward Mézières rather than Metz, as Pershing wanted, turning the Allied offensive into a gigantic, sequential pincer attack.

While assessments of Haig have become more nuanced over the last 30 years, British historians remain divided. In 2008 Paul Harris wrote of Haig during the Hundred Days that despite his shortcomings, “He commanded the most combat effective of the Allied armies at this period in the war, and there were few, if any, others who had the authority and determination to use the instrument with such vigor.”  

John J. Pershing

Though “Black Jack” Pershing has long held a reputation as one of the United States’ greatest generals, his reputation abroad was somewhat lower and admittedly closer to the mark. Pershing was a brilliant organizer of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). He also was an efficient trainer—but not an effective one, as he trained his troops for the wrong things. Pershing came late to the war, infused with a belief in American exceptionalism and an unstinting faith in superior marksmanship and the power of the bayonet. Ignoring the experiences of the previous three years, he believed that the tired and dispirited enemy troops cowering in their trenches could never stand up to his robust and fresh doughboys. Accordingly, he discounted the effects of new weapons like machine guns, trench mortars, artillery and aircraft, pushing his troops forward in relentless frontal attacks. Pershing’s misreading of the World War I battlefield was a major contributor to the U.S. Army having suffered a staggering 117,000 dead and 204,000 wounded in little more than six months of major combat operations. Despite Pershing’s serious tactical shortcomings, the AEF most likely would never have made it to the European battlefields of 1918 without him. He was a tireless organizer and had a talent for overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Regardless, his prejudices against modern weapons and lack of understanding of their firepower meant his AEF units were trained and equipped inadequately for the war they had to fight.  

A century after the outset of World War I there remains much to learn from a study of it, especially the last year of the war. Its conduct changed the way wars have been fought ever since. The basic outlines of the warfighting mechanics it introduced are still valid. A general of 1918 would recognize many of the basic challenges facing a general of 2018. As retired British Maj. Gen. Jonathan B.A. Bailey has observed, “The new thinking of 1917–18 formed the seedbed for the new techniques of fire and manoeuver practiced in the Second World War.” Indeed, and far beyond. 

Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. David T. Zabecki is HistoryNet’s chief military historian. For further reading he suggests his own The Generals’ War: Operational Level Command on the Western Front in 1918, which shared the 2018 Tomlinson Book Prize from the World War I Historical Association. Zabecki also recommends Reputations: Ten Years After, by B.H. Liddell Hart.

This story appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Military History magazine.

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Land mines were used by all sides during the Vietnam War and caused significant casualties. In 1965 alone, more than one-third of U.S. Marine Corps casualties were caused by mines and explosive booby traps. A modern land mine is a concealed explosive device emplaced under, on, or even above the ground to kill or wound enemy troops, or destroy or disable vehicles.

The land mines of the Vietnam era were triggered by direct contact or command-detonated by wire. The most common contact triggers were pressure or pull (tripwire). Anti-personnel mines used a combination of blast and fragmentation effects. Most anti-vehicular mines used blast effect. Land mines are most effectively used in fixed defenses or for “area denial.” Rather than serving as a barrier to enemy movement, the purpose of a defensive minefield is to disrupt and slow an enemy’s advance and channelize him into pre-planned fields of fire and kill-zones.  

Why Land Mines?

Land mines were used by both sides in contested and remote areas. The U.S. deployed millions of air-dropped small anti-personnel “button mines” as part of the McNamara Line strategy to deter NVA infiltration into South Vietnam from North Vietnam and Laos. The explosive charge in the button mines decomposed quickly. Only slightly more effective were the BLU-43/B and BLU-44/B “Dragontooth” mines. The VC made extensive use of anti-personnel mines and booby traps in likely American/ARVN assembly areas, high ground, hedgerows, tree lines, shady areas, trail junctions, and fence lines and gates.

The VC normally did not have enough material to mine an entire fence line. U.S. troops quickly learned to bypass the gates and batter down the fence at some distance from the gate. Yet all too often a later patrol would assume that an already battered-down section of the fence was clear.

The VC, however, were highly disciplined about keeping their mines under surveillance. As soon as one patrol passed through a cleared area, the VC would move in and mine the gap. The VC were methodical about marking their mines so that their troops or local villagers would not walk into them. The markers were cleverly concealed, but known to locals. American and South Vietnamese patrols generally tried to secure cooperation of one or more locals before initiating an area sweep. That was not easy. Villagers might be VC sympathizers or intimidated by other sympathizers who would hold them accountable later.  

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Types of Land Mines

Command-detonated anti-personnel directional mines were widely used. The U.S. M-18 “Claymore” mine blasted 700 steel balls in a 60-degree arc, 6-feet high, out to a range of about 150 feet. The Claymore was triggered by an electrical blasting cap via a wire with a hand generator.

The VC used any Claymore they captured. The VC and NVA were also supplied with the Chinese-made DH-10 Directional Mine, known as the “ChiCom Claymore.” Crudely made but larger and more powerful than the U.S. M-18, it was devastatingly effective when emplaced in a tree, pointed down a jungle trail. The VC also used the DH-10 to mine anticipated helicopter landing zones.  

The standard U.S. anti-personnel mines were the M-14 and M-16. Called the “Toe Popper,” the M-14 was a pressure-triggered blast mine with a relatively small charge. The M-16 was a fragmentation mine designed after the World War II German S-mine, called a “Bouncing Betty.” When triggered, either by stepping on one of the exposed pressure prongs or pulling a tripwire, a short delay fuze detonated a secondary charge which blew the main body of the mine 5 to 6 feet into the air. A second, slightly longer-delayed fuze then detonated the main charge, spraying fragmentation out to 25 meters.  

An Enduring Menace

Anti-vehicular mines were used to destroy or disable trucks, armored personnel carriers, and sometimes tanks. They were either pressure- or command-detonated by wire. Road-clearing became an almost daily ritual, especially around major bases. Sweep teams of combat engineers with mine detectors worked the roads each morning, while flank security teams screened both sides of the roads looking for evidence of digging, detonating wires, and even ambushes. It was slow and tedious.  

Although North Vietnam manufactured mines and some were supplied by China, the majority of mines used by communist forces in Vietnam were improvised. Enemy forces in Vietnam were exceptionally innovative at turning anything into a mine—including captured or unexploded ordnance such as hand grenades and mortar and artillery shells; ammunition cans; oil drums; beer and soda cans; and even bicycle frames. Triggering devices included flashlight batteries, wristwatches, field telephone hand cranks, and mousetraps.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of Vietnam magazine.

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Riverine warfare was a central element of combat in Vietnam. The French and Viet Minh struggled for control of the Red and Black Rivers. Later, the South Vietnamese and Americans contested with the Viet Cong for the lower Mekong and its tributaries. With 15,600 square miles of land and more than 15,000 miles of waterways, the Mekong Delta was of vital strategic importance. Producing some 16 million tons of rice per year, the Delta was the foundation of the Republic of Vietnam’s economy. For the communists, the Mekong River running south from Cambodia was the southernmost branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, bringing vital support to 28 VC battalions and 69 separate companies in the Delta, totaling some 82,500 troops.

By 1966 the communists controlled almost 25 percent of the Delta’s population, and their primary objective was to cut off the South’s rice supply. The twofold objective of the allies was to sever the flow of supplies to the VC, and eliminate VC forces and infrastructure. The U.S. Navy’s lighter patrol forces of Task Forces 115 and 116 patrolled the Mekong, Co Chien, Long Tau, and Bassac Rivers and their tributaries to deny the use of those waters to the VC.

Army-Navy Patrols

TF 117, also known as the Mobile Riverine Force (MRF), was the striking arm of the joint Army-Navy riverine warfare campaign. Established in late 1966, the MRF was based closely on the French Dinassauts (Divisions Navales d’Assaut), integrated units of naval and army forces established for riverine warfare in the late 1940s. The MRF’s ground combat element would have been a natural mission for the U.S. Marine Corps, but all the Marines in South Vietnam were deployed in the north.

The mission fell to the 9th Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade. Initially, TF 117 only had capacity to maintain and transport two battalions at any time. The battalions rotated, with one maintaining security for their base camp at Dong Tam. The Navy component of the MRF was River Assault Flotilla 1, initially consisting of the 9th and 11th River Assault Squadrons.

Each squadron could carry a battalion. Many of TF 117’s boats were modified conversions of World War II-era Landing Craft Mechanized-6 (LCM-6), and included armored troop carriers, heavily armed monitors for fire support, and radar-equipped command boats.

An important innovation was mounted field artillery on barges, increasing the mobility and operational range of the artillery battalion. Each barge carried two 105mm howitzers, crews, and ammunition. Field artillery requires stationary firing platforms and fixed aiming points, which meant that the barges had to be beached and secured along a waterway bank to fire effectively.

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The most significant riverine operations were the CORONADO I through XI series from June 1967 to July 1968. Initially the MRF’s tactics surprised the VC. Accustomed to defending against attacks from land and air, VC defenses initially faced away from water. But the VC adapted quickly. While underway, principal security threats to the MRF came from command-detonated mines in the centers of the channels.

Mines and Suicide Boats

Hugging shorelines brought boats closer to land ambushes with heavy fire from recoilless rifles and B-40 rockets. While anchored, the most critical threats were from floating mines, swimmer saboteurs, and suicide attack boats.

The 2nd Brigade had to operate with only two battalions instead of three, depriving the brigade commander of the ability to attack with the standard one-third of his force in reserve. It also took time to get the attack force in position to make the landings. The afloat force could only move at a speed of 6 to 10 knots, indicating to the VC that an attack was coming. Typical operations lasted two to four days. Once ashore, the main tactical problem was to seal off the objective area to prevent VC from escaping.

When the troops disembarked, the boats moved to blocking positions along nearby waterways to prevent VC from using them to withdraw. But the VC quickly learned the drafts of TF 117’s various boats and took up positions secured partially by streams too shallow for the boats to navigate. That made it almost impossible for the assault force to encircle the objective completely.

Marshy ground and numerous intersecting waterways made it difficult to move fast on foot. Helicopters solved that problem, with part of the assault force landing in the VC rear. Helicopter assets were always at a premium, however; forces north of the Delta often had higher priority. As time went on, the VC became more elusive and difficult to engage decisively.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of Vietnam magazine.

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Military history has given us some great teams of commanders and their chiefs of staff. Napoleon had Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier; Dwight D. Eisenhower had Walter Bedell Smith; and Bernard Law Montgomery had Francis Wilfred de Guingand. Fortunately for the Allies in World War II, Bedell Smith and de Guingand served not only in that same war, but also in the same theater starting in 1943. Together they forged a personal and professional partnership that was a vital element in the unprecedented success of the Grand Alliance. “Beetle” Smith is fairly well remembered today, but “Freddie” de Guingand remains largely forgotten outside of British circles.

He deserves better. The ultimate team player, de Guingand was the most-respected and best-liked British officer among the Americans. After the war Smith wrote of him: “General de Guingand is the best staff officer I have ever seen regardless of nationality… and I do not know of any man in whom I have more confidence and for whom I have greater affection.” In his book A Soldier’s Story, General Omar Bradley wrote of de Guingand’s “patience, modesty, and understanding which helped to forge the Allied armies into a single fighting machine. Somewhere in almost every critical Allied decision of the war in Europe, you will find the anonymous but masterful handiwork of this British soldier.” 

During the war, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery wrote of de Guingand to General Sir Alan Brooke (later Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke), Britain’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). He said, “I do not know what I should do without him as he is quite 1st class.” And after the war Montgomery wrote, “Anything I have been able to achieve during the late war could not have been done if he had not been at my side.” Unfortunately, Montgomery’s fine words all too often failed to live up to his treatment of his former chief of staff, especially after the war ended.

De Guingand was born  in Acton, west London, in 1900. His mother was from a family of Yorkshire bankers; his father was the son of a man who left France for England after the overthrow of King Louis Philippe in 1848. In 1918 Francis had planned to enter the Royal Navy as a midshipman, but he was medically rejected for color blindness. Instead, he entered the Royal Military College at Sandhurst as a gentleman cadet, where his French surname earned him the lifelong sobriquet of “Freddie.” (Despite his family’s Gallic background, he was never completely comfortable speaking French.) Although he was exceptionally bright, the fun-loving Freddie’s record at Sandhurst was less than impressive. 

 Commissioned into the West Yorkshire Regiment in December 1919, de Guingand served briefly in India and then in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence. In 1924 he was posted to his regiment’s depot in York, where he met Major Bernard Montgomery, who was then a general staff officer assigned to the 49th (West Riding) Division. As bachelor officers, they both lived in the same mess, shared common enthusiasms for golf and bridge, and become fast friends. It was an odd-couple relationship on several levels. Montgomery was 13 years older than de Guingand, and was austere, arrogant, blunt, and utterly lacking in diplomacy and tact. De Guingand had a buoyant and charming personality, and was passionate about wine, women, and gambling. Nonetheless, Montgomery, recognizing de Guingand’s intellect and the value of his organizational and diplomatic skills, became his mentor.

With Montgomery’s endorsement, de Guingand was accepted at the highly competitive Staff College at Camberley, graduating in 1935. In 1939 he was assigned as the military aide to Leslie Hore-Belisha, Britain’s reformist but controversial secretary of state for war. While serving as Hore-Belisha’s close confidant, de Guingand honed his negotiating and diplomatic skills as he dealt personally with most of the senior officers in the British Army. A month after Hore-Belisha was fired from the War Office in January 1940, de Guingand was posted as an instructor to the Middle East Command’s new staff college at Haifa in Palestine. The commandant of the college was Brigadier Eric Dorman-Smith, who had been one of de Guingand’s instructors at Camberley. De Guingand quickly became the chief instructor of the college. 

That December he was reassigned to the Middle East Command’s Joint Planning Staff in Cairo. Now a major-general, Dorman-Smith had become the Middle East Command’s Deputy Chief of the General Staff, and he recommended de Guingand for the post of Director of Military Intelligence, Middle East, with the rank of brigadier. Although he had no previous training or experience in the intelligence field, de Guingand proved very skillful at the job. He used the famous Long Range Desert Group to analyze the many differing reports that came in from various sources. When the intelligence indicated that Axis troops under Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel were massing to attack at Gazala in Libya in May 1942, de Guingand was able to issue an advanced warning. He also correctly forecast the Axis capture of Tobruk in June 1942. That July, after the First Battle of El Alamein (also known as the Battle of Ruweisat Ridge), de Guingand was reassigned as the Eighth Army’s Brigadier, General Staff (Operations). 

When Montgomery assumed command of the Eighth Army the following month, he broke with British military tradition by completely but unofficially changing the organization of his staff. Without seeking approval from London, he consolidated responsibility by making his chief of staff his primary adviser and the absolute master of all staff work, much as the Americans and French did, instead of separating it across three different branches (the general staff for planning, operations, and intelligence; the adjutant general’s staff for personnel and administration; and the quartermaster general’s staff for supply and transportation). As Montgomery wrote in his post-war memoirs: “The magnitude of the task in front of me was beginning to be apparent. I must have someone to help me, a man with a quick and clear brain, who would accept responsibility, and who would work out the details and leave me free to concentrate on the major issues—in fact, a Chief of Staff who could handle all the details and the intricate staff side of the business and leave me free to command…. Before we arrived at Eighth Army HQ I had decided that de Guingand was the man; I would make him chief of staff with full powers and together we would do the job…. I never regretted the decision.”

Freddie de Guingand thus became the British Army’s first modern, comprehensive chief of staff. Montgomery made his intentions crystal clear when he told his assembled senior officers, “I want to tell you that I work on the Chief-of-Staff system. I have nominated Brigadier de Guingand as Chief-of-Staff Eighth Army. I will issue orders through him. Whatever he says will be taken as coming from me and will be acted on at once.” Thus, once Montgomery made his decisions, he left de Guingand with a free hand to manage the staff to work out all the details necessary to execute the commander’s intent. De Guingand functioned in all but name as Montgomery’s deputy commander. 

Once Montgomery assumed command,  he started strengthening the British defences on Alam el Halfa ridge in Egypt. He also pulled the Eighth Army’s main command post to Borg el Arab on the Mediterranean coast from its location on Ruweisat Ridge. There the Eighth Army co-located with the headquarters of the Western Desert Air Force, commanded by Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham. One of the RAF’s most brilliant tactical air commanders, Coningham had a highly competitive personality that clashed with Montgomery’s. De Guingand quickly became the primary operations coordinator between the RAF and the Eighth Army. The synchronization of close air support for Montgomery’s ground forces remained one of de Guingand’s key responsibilities for the remainder of the war.

Rommel attacked at Alam el Halfa on August 30. When the British defences held, the Axis finally lost the initiative in Africa. De Guingand recommended an immediate counterattack, but Montgomery decided to reconstitute his forces in preparation for a set-piece break-out battle.

De Guingand’s usual practice was to operate from the main command post, while Montgomery directed the battle from a forward tactical command post—“Tac CP”—with his chief of staff making daily visits to Montgomery. Just before the British started their breakout at El Alamein on October 23, de Guingand established a forward satellite of the Main CP on the coast close to Montgomery’s Tac CP and the CPs of the two attacking corps. 

By the early hours of October 25, reports indicated that the southern arm of the British attack was faltering. After assessing the situation, de Guingand concluded that the situation was reaching a crisis that only the army commander could resolve. He asked the commanders of X and XXX Corps to meet him at the Tac CP at 3:30 a.m. He then drove to the Tac CP, woke Montgomery, and briefed him on the situation. After the meeting with the corps commanders, Montgomery agreed with his chief of staff’s recommendation to suspend the attack along the southern corridor and to shift the effort to the northern thrust. That, however, required de Guingand to make a complete revision of the battle plan on the fly. He later received the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for his role at El Alamein. 

After El Alamein, Rommel withdrew 1,300 miles westward along the Mediterranean coast of Africa, eventually linking up with Axis forces in Tunisia. Montgomery followed in what can only be termed a “slack pursuit.” On March 29, 1943, the Eighth Army breached the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia, bringing it under control of General Sir Harold Alexander’s 18th Army Group. The Allied theatre commander was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, with whom Montgomery already had a strained relationship. When they met for the first time in England at the end of May 1942, Montgomery had brusquely told Eisenhower to put out his cigarette. “I don’t permit smoking in my office,” he said. Ike complied but was quietly furious. Montgomery later told de Guingand his impression of Eisenhower: “Nice chap. No soldier.” However, when de Guingand and Walter Bedell Smith met for the first time, they hit it off immediately, and the relationship would help de Guingand navigate the contentious Eisenhower-Montgomery relationship for the rest of the war.

In mid-April Montgomery sent de Guingand, now promoted to the temporary wartime rank of major-general, to Cairo as his deputy to take over the planning for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Several days later, while flying back to Algiers for a planning conference, de Guingand’s plane crashed at El Adem in Libya and he was forced to spend several weeks in the hospital with a concussion and multiple fractures. Nonetheless, he was back in action on July 10, sorting out landing operation problems in Sicily. 

In late 1943 Eisenhower and Montgomery both relinquished their commands in the Mediterranean and transferred to London to assume their new positions for the invasion of Europe—Operation Overlord. Eisenhower was Supreme Allied Commander, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), and Montgomery became commander of the 21st Army Group, and also overall commander of land forces during initial operations in Normandy. Both of their chiefs of staff came with them. Bedell Smith and de Guingand continued to build on the solid professional relationship they already had established. De Guingand retained his temporary wartime rank of major-general, although the position was really authorized for a lieutenant-general. Montgomery asked him to accept the lower rank on the odd rationale that many of the brigadiers assigned to the staff would then push for promotions to major-general. De Guingand acquiesced to his boss’s wishes, but that would come back to haunt him in just a few years. 

The staff of Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Morgan, the designated chief of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, had already done a great amount of detail work on the invasion plan, but when Beetle and Freddie got their first look at the plan in January 1944, they quickly recognized that the invasion sector was too narrow and the assigned troops too few. Together, they briefed Montgomery, who agreed with them immediately. Then they convinced Eisenhower, who finally persuaded the Combined Chiefs of Staff to allocate more forces. From that point on they had only 22 weeks to re-work the basic plan and all the detail work to support it. Montgomery, as usual, gave de Guingand a free hand. 

Once the Allies landed in France on D-Day, the friction between Eisenhower and Montgomery only grew worse. But it was not only Americans that Montgomery alienated. Many of his fellow British senior officers also considered him insufferable, especially Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s Deputy Supreme Commander at SHAEF. De Guingand increasingly found himself intervening with his fellow countrymen on Montgomery’s behalf. More and more Montgomery refused to participate in meetings at SHAEF headquarters, sending de Guingand as his representative instead. Although de Guingand always supported his boss’s positions on operational matters, he also managed to serve as an effective peacemaker and intermediary. 

The running Ike-Monty feud took a turn for the worse on September 1, 1944, when Eisenhower assumed the role of combined ground forces commander. Montgomery, who believed he should retain that position, took it personally and continued to agitate for the role until the end of the war. Another source of friction was Ike’s strategy of attacking Germany across a broad front; Montgomery insisted they should put all the Allied weight into a single rapier-like thrust into northern Germany—commanded by himself, of course. At one point, Eisenhower partially gave in, authorizing Montgomery to launch Operation Market Garden in September 1944 to push through the Netherlands into Germany and seize the Rhine bridges. De Guingand, however, had serious reservations about the operation and tried to convince Montgomery that the Germans would almost certainly be able to defeat it. Montgomery dismissed the concerns, but subsequent events proved de Guingand all too right when the Germans blocked the British advance at the Rhine.

The final crisis between Ike and Monty came in late December 1944, during Germany’s offensive in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge. True to form, Montgomery refused to attend Eisenhower’s senior leaders’ emergency meeting at Verdun on December 19, 1944. Tedder, Omar Bradley, Third Army commander George S. Patton, Bedell Smith, and 6th Army Group commander Lt. Gen. Jacob L. Devers were all there. Montgomery sent de Guingand. Eisenhower made the correct decision to place U.S. First and Ninth Armies temporarily under the operational control of Montgomery’s 21st Army Group to fight the German penetration north of the Bulge shoulder. Montgomery, however, became openly very critical of American performance during the battle. The British press echoed the criticisms, suggesting that Montgomery had “saved the bacon” for the Americans, and demanding that Monty be made overall land forces commander for the rest of the war. 

That was the final straw for Eisenhower. On December 30 Ike decided to tell British prime minister Winston Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff that either he or Montgomery had to go. When de Guingand saw the draft of Eisenhower’s letter, he had no doubt which way the decision would fall. But he persuaded Eisenhower to postpone sending the letter until he could talk to Montgomery. At first, Montgomery refused to accept the seriousness of the situation, believing that there was no other British general who could replace him. He was shocked when de Guingand told him that Eisenhower was prepared to recommend Sir Harold Alexander, now a field marshal, as the replacement. 

Montgomery finally understood the gravity of his position. He asked de Guingand to draft an abject letter of apology to Eisenhower in an effort to defuse the situation. A very uncharacteristically humble-sounding Montgomery wrote, “Have seen Freddie and understand you are greatly worried by many considerations in these difficult days.” And, “Whatever your decision may be, you can rely upon me one hundred percent to make it work.” He signed the letter, “Your very devoted subordinate, Monty.” It worked. Eisenhower was mollified. But of course, after the war and to the end of his life Montgomery never missed an opportunity to snipe at Ike.

In 1946 MONTGOMERY was selected to succeed Alanbrooke as CIGS, the professional head of the British Army. Monty had already told de Guingand that he wanted him as his vice chief, and he arranged his assignment as Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office in London as a preparatory position. At the last minute, however, the outgoing Alanbrooke raised objections, citing de Guingand’s health as the reason. Almost as soon as he took office, Montgomery summarily told de Guingand, “I’ve decided not to have you for my Vice.” Stunned, de Guingand asked why, Montgomery callously answered, “Because it would not do me any good.” End of discussion. 

De Guingand realized he no longer had a role in the British Army. His only option was to retire, but he was still only a temporary wartime major-general. He could not afford to retire at his substantive rank of colonel. De Guingand appealed to his old boss for help, but Montgomery declined to get involved in what he considered a petty administrative detail far beneath the level of a great commander. Bedell Smith, however, was outraged by de Guingand’s situation and he brought it to Ike’s attention. After Eisenhower intervened personally at the highest levels of the British government, de Guingand finally received promotion to the substantive rank of major-general on September 10, 1946. He retired five months later. 

The United States recognized de Giungand’s value. In April 1945 the U.S. awarded him the Legion of Merit in the degree of Commander, and in January 1948 the U.S. Army presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal. After the war de Guingand became a successful businessman in South Africa. But as Montgomery’s vitriolic pot shots at Eisenhower continued throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, de Guingand increasingly leaned toward sympathizing with Ike, who cited him no fewer than 15 times in the endnotes of his 1948 book, Crusade in Europe. That book infuriated Montgomery, which naturally increased the growing separation between de Guingand and his former boss. Nonetheless, de Guingand was one of the eight official pallbearers at Montgomery’s state funeral on April 1, 1976.

Sir Francis Wilfred de Guingand died at Cannes, France, on June 29, 1979. His place in the history of World War II is best summed up by what Eisenhower wrote in Crusade in Europe about the chief of staff of the 21st Army Group: “He was Major-General Francis de Guingand, ‘Freddy’ to all his associates in SHAEF and in other high headquarters. He lived the code of the Allies and his tremendous capacity, ability, and energy were devoted to the co-ordination of plan and detail that was absolutely essential to victory.”

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U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Adelbert F. Waldron III was the highest-scoring American sniper of the Vietnam War, with 109 confirmed kills. He was also the most highly decorated, earning the Distinguished Service Cross twice, the Silver Star, and three Bronze Star Medals. Born in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1933, Waldron served in the U.S. Navy from 1953 to 1965, leaving the service as a petty officer 2nd class. In 1968 he enlisted in the U.S. Army and at age 35 completed airborne school to earn his jump wings. In late 1968 he was assigned to the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta. Upon arriving in-country, Waldron attended the 9th Infantry Division’s sniper school, established by the division’s legendary commander, Maj. Gen. Julian J. Ewell.

Waldron was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 60th Infantry Regiment (3-60), part of the Mobile Riverine Force (MRF) operating on the waterways of the Mekong Delta. Waldron’s better-known U.S. Marine sniper counterparts, Carlos Hathcock (93 confirmed kills), Eric R. England (98), and Charles Mawhinney (103), used bolt-action rifles. Waldron, however, used the semiautomatic M-21 sniper rifle—a 7.62mm M-14 rifle fitted with an optical scope and accurized by the Rock Island Arsenal. He frequently operated at night using a starlight scope. On several occasions he made his kills from a moving boat platform, in one case at a range of more than 900 meters.

As a Specialist 4, Waldron earned the Silver Star in January 1969 while on a reconnaissance mission in Kien Hoa Province. After establishing a night outpost, Waldron spotted enemy movement to his front. For more than three hours he engaged the VC force from his concealed position, killing 11. He withdrew only after the enemy finally detected his firing position.

As a sergeant, Waldron earned his first DSC for a combined series of 14 sniper missions during the period from Jan. 16 to Feb. 4, 1969, while serving with Company B, 3rd Battalion, 60th Infantry. On Jan. 19, while his company was being resupplied near Ap Hoa, Kien Hoa Province, they were attacked by a force of some 40 VC. Under a heavy barrage of small arms and automatic weapons fire, Waldron engaged the attacking force from an exposed position, killing a number of the VC and forcing them to break contact.

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Three nights later, on the night of Jan. 22, Waldron’s unit was moving through an area heavily infested with booby traps. Pinpointing a VC probing force, Waldron engaged them, moving through open rice paddies from one firing position to another. By skillfully deceiving the communists as to the actual strength of the American unit, Waldron prevented a night assault by the main enemy element. Eleven days later, on the night of Feb. 3, a nearby South Vietnamese Army unit came under attack. Moving to the sound of the guns, Waldron spotted a VC element attempting to flank the ARVN soldiers. He broke up the attack with deadly accurate fire. Later that night he killed a VC who was collecting the weapons of his dead comrades.

Waldron received his second DSC for another combined series of 18 sniper missions in Kien Hoa Province from Feb. 5 to March 29, 1969. On Feb. 14, while his squad was on a night patrol near Ap Phu Thuan, Waldron observed a numerically superior VC force maneuvering to assault a nearby friendly unit. Moving rapidly from one position to another to deceive the enemy as to the strength of his squad, Waldron killed several VC and broke up their attack. On Feb. 26, near Phu Tuc, Waldron killed a VC rocket team preparing to fire on MRF boats. At Ap Luong Long Noi on March 8, when his company was attacked by a large VC force, Waldron killed many of the attackers and forced them to withdraw. As the official citation for his second DSC reads, “Despite adverse weather conditions, poor illumination and the pressure of arduous missions night after night, he repeatedly located and engaged many hostile elements, killing a number of the enemy.”

After returning from Vietnam Waldron served briefly as an instructor for the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit. He left the Army in 1970 and worked as a firearms instructor at a private paramilitary training school operated by former Office of Strategic Services operative and mercenary Mitchell WerBell. Waldron died in 1995 and is buried in Riverside National Cemetery in Riverside, California.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of Vietnam magazine.

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The pages of the great Roman historians—Livy, Tacitus, Sallust—are replete with stories of the triumphs and foibles of the commanders of the legions. But seldom are common soldiers mentioned by name. Spurius Ligustinus is an exception. A legionary of the Roman Republic, Ligustinus served in five major wars and several smaller campaigns during his 32-year military career (200–168 bc). Over the years he received an extraordinary six Civic Crowns—the Roman equivalent of a Medal of Honor—conferred for having saved the lives of fellow citizens in battle. He also received 34 armillae and torques, gold or silver armbands and neck rings awarded to recognize other acts of valor in battle.

Five times during his career Ligustinus held the rank of primus pilus, or first centurion, of a legion. Centurions were the junior and mid-ranking officers of the Roman armies. Unlike senior legates and tribunes, who mostly came from higher social orders, centurions generally came from the plebeian general populace and rose through the ranks. The centurion commanded a sub-unit called a century, which by Ligustinus’ day had been reduced from 100 to around 80 men.

As they led their troops by example from the front, centurions experienced high casualty rates. Transverse horse-hair crests atop their helmets made them easy to identify in battle. The primus pilus commanded the first century of a legion’s rightmost cohort. He was the ninth senior ranking officer in a legion, directly behind the commanding legate, the six military tribunes and the camp prefect. The primus pilus was the only centurion who sat in the legion’s war councils.

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Ligustinus was born into a poor family of Sabine origin. Enlisting in the Roman army in 200 bc, he served in the Second Macedonian War (200–197 bc). By his third year of service he’d been promoted to the centurion ranks. He next fought against the Lusitanians (194 bc) in Hispania (the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula), where he first attained the rank of primus pilus. He subsequently served in the Aetolian War (191–189 bc), in Greece, and the First Celtiberian War (181–179 bc), in Hispania.

By the outset of the Third Macedonian War (171–168 bc) Ligustinus was over age 50, living on a half acre of land and had eight children. When the Senate authorized the raising of two additional legions to send to Macedonia, Ligustinus volunteered once again, as did more veteran centurions than there were available slots. Twenty-three former first centurions, including Ligustinus, were assigned to the ranks. They protested the demotion and appealed to the tribunes of the plebs. During the subsequent public hearing Ligustinus requested and was granted permission to address the assembly.

“As long as anyone who is enrolling armies considers me fit for service,” said Ligustinus, according to Livy, “I will never beg off. Of what rank the military tribunes think me worthy is for them to decide; I shall see to it that no one in the army surpasses me in bravery.” He then told his fellow protesting first centurions to “think every post honorable in which you will be defending the state.”

When Ligustinus finished speaking, Consul Publius Licinius Crassus brought him before the Senate, whose members gave the centurion a vote of thanks for his past service. The military tribunes then appointed Ligustinus primus pilus of the 1st Legion, his fifth assignment in that rank. Withdrawing their protests, the other former first centurions accepted assignments in the ranks—though many, no doubt, moved up quickly.

This story appeared in the Autumn 2023 issue of Military History magazine.

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On the strategic level the Battle of Riga, fought in Latvia on Sept. 1–5, 1917, effectively knocked Russia out of World War I. On the tactical level, however, Riga was even more significant. It marked one of the turning points in the history of warfare. The innovative offensive tactics tested by the Germans in that battle proved the key to breaking the long stalemate of trench warfare. After Riga no attack—or at least no successful attack—would ever again be conducted without some variation on those tactics.

It was a lightning offensive. On Sept. 1, 1917, the German Eighth Army, commanded by General of the Infantry Oskar von Hutier, made an assault crossing of the Dvina River (present-day Daugava) some 15 miles east of the city. The Russian Twelfth Army, commanded by General Dmitri Parsky, collapsed in short order. On September 3 German troops marched into the city, and by September 5 little stood between Hutier’s troops and the Russian capital at Petrograd (present-day St. Petersburg), 300 miles to the northeast.

The empire of Tsar Nicholas II had been on the verge of collapse ever since Russia’s humiliating defeat in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War, and in March 1917 the provisional government of Georgy Lvov (succeeded in July by Alexander Kerensky) finally did replace the 370-year tsarist regime. Ober Ost, the German military command on the Eastern Front, sensed Russia was ripe for the kill. Ober Ost was then under the nominal command of Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria; but the real command was exercised by his chief of staff, the brilliant Maj. Gen. Max Hoffmann, the General Staff officer who had been the brains behind the German victory at Tannenberg in 1914. Hoffmann resolved to accelerate Russia’s collapse by striking at the old Hanseatic League port of Riga, on a namesake gulf of the Baltic Sea.

Hoffmann’s first move was to order his resident artillery expert, Lt. Col. Georg Bruchmüller, to conduct the preliminary reconnaissance and start fire-support planning for the crossing of the Dvina. In his memoirs Hoffmann deemed Bruchmüller an “artillery genius.” That may have been an understatement. By war’s end Bruchmüller proved central to the development of almost every tactical concept of modern fire support still practiced today.

Bruchmüller’s greatest innovation was the shift from artillery destruction fire to neutralization fire. Rather than trying to destroy everything in the path of the attacking infantry, Bruchmüller focused on tightly synchronizing the fire support and the infantry scheme of maneuver to neutralize the enemy defense just long enough for the attacking infantry to overrun it. He was especially innovative in the way he used combinations of persistent and nonpersistent gas to neutralize selected targets. Thus, while the typical artillery preparation in 1917 lasted a week or even two weeks, Bruchmüller’s preparations lasted only a matter of hours, with far better effect.

The Eighth Army’s infantry, meanwhile, was trained in an experimental attack doctrine the Germans would officially adopt in January 1918, itself a large-scale application of small-unit tactics that had been under development since late 1915. Captain Willy Rohr, the commander of Germany’s first unit of storm troops, was among its proponents and pioneers. Rather than advancing in the rigid, linear attack formations so characteristic of World War I, Hutier’s infantry was trained to advance using fluid infiltration tactics. The infantry companies were organized into small, highly trained combined-arms assault elements. Advancing leapfrog fashion, the small assault teams probed for weak spots and bypassed enemy strongpoints, leaving them for heavier follow-on forces to reduce. Reserves were committed to reinforce success rather than being thrown in where the attack had stalled. The assault teams pushed deep into the defender’s position, threatening his artillery and disrupting his communications systems. Rather than blind conformance with an established plan, the attackers down to the lowest-level leaders and even the individual soldiers were trained to use imagination and initiative to accomplish their missions.

By the standards of World War I, these were radical innovations. At Riga the German army would conduct the first large-scale test of these “infiltration tactics,” often referred to incorrectly as “Hutier tactics” or “storm troop tactics.” Riga was also the first clash in which the new infantry assault tactics and Bruchmüller’s artillery tactics were combined and synchronized.

Defending the Riga sector were the Russian Twelfth Army’s 15 infantry divisions and single cavalry division, a force numbering some 192,000 troops. Russian defenses north of the Dvina were organized in two parallel positions. The first position comprised three, and in some places four, successive trench lines dug into the dunes along the river. The second position consisted of two sets of trench lines anchored along a smaller river the Germans called the Kleine Jägel (the present-day Maza Jugla), a few miles northeast of the Dvina. (The five-day clash is sometimes referred to as the Battle of Jugla.)

Facing the Russians opposite Riga, deployed along the south bank of the river, Hutier initially fielded just over seven divisions along an 80-mile front running from the coast southeast to Jakobstadt (present-day Jekabpils). Ober Ost reinforced the Eighth Army with an additional eight infantry and two cavalry divisions. That gave Hutier sufficient strength to make his main effort, conduct holding attacks against the front of the city and secure the rest of his line along the Dvina. Hutier planned to make his main effort a crossing of the Dvina near Üxküll (present-day Ikskile), some 15 miles downriver from the city. He committed 10 divisions of about 60,000 troops to the crossing. Once across the Germans could maneuver around to the rear of the city and cut off the Russian garrison.

Hutier prepared for the offensive by assembling his attack divisions some 80 miles behind his front lines, where they trained and rehearsed for 10 days. The attacking divisions did not move up into their jump-off positions until the night before the attack. At 0910 hours on September 1 three divisions of Hutier’s LI Corps spearheaded the attack on a 10,000-yard front. The 19th Reserve Division, on the right, and the 2nd Guards Division, on the left, forced a crossing of the Dvina with assault boats and pontoon bridges. The 14th Bavarian Division in the center had to take heavily fortified Borkum Island as an intermediate objective. Once across the river the three divisions quickly overran the Russians’ first defensive positions and moved on toward the second. While the lead German elements were advancing on the second position, German pioneers started building fixed bridges across the river in each of the three divisional attack sectors. Once the bridges were up a second division crossed behind each first echelon division and prepared to exploit the breakout from the Russians’ second defensive positions.

In addition to the extra infantry divisions, Ober Ost had given the Eighth Army massive artillery reinforcements by stripping the Eastern Front of everything but the minimum number of guns necessary to hold the line in the other sectors. Some guns were even transferred in from the Western Front. With painstaking secrecy Bruchmüller supervised the movement of 615 guns (including 251 heavy guns) and 544 trench mortars into the 5-mile-wide penetration zone prior to the attack, achieving a density of 68 guns and 60 trench mortars per thousand yards. He also stockpiled 650,000 rounds of ammunition at the battery positions.

Once they moved into position, the newly arrived batteries refrained from giving themselves away by firing registrations before the start of the attack. Instead, they fired abbreviated registrations on preplanned points during the first two hours of the preparatory barrage, then quickly shifted fire onto their scheduled targets. While not the most accurate method of firing, it worked. The German artillery achieved total surprise against the Russians. Stunned Western Allies who later analyzed the battle concluded incorrectly the Germans had perfected an accurate technique for delivering unobserved fire without prior registration. (Bruchmüller would manage to do exactly that in March 1918.)

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One reason accuracy was not quite so important was the unprecedented high number of chemical rounds fired. Rather than attempting to blanket the Russian line with gas, the Germans fired specific types of chemical munitions at selected targets to achieve precise results. Throughout the entire length of the fire the German guns and mortars fired an average of 500 gas rounds per minute on key targets in the penetration zone.

Bruchmüller’s preparatory barrage lasted five hours and 10 minutes. Though short by World War I standards, it was incredibly violent. At 0400 hours all 615 German guns opened up against the Russian artillery positions, firing 75 percent gas to 25 percent high explosive. After two hours of this reinforced counterbattery fire those German firing units with a specific counterbattery mission continued to pound the Russian artillery, while the rest of the German guns shifted to Russian infantry targets and started firing 20 percent gas to 80 percent high explosive. At that point the short-range trench mortars joined in, concentrating their fire on the Russian frontline positions.

The fire against infantry targets lasted three hours and 10 minutes and was divided into four phases. At 0850 hours, 30 minutes into the last phase, the counterbattery guns also shifted to the Russian infantry positions, leaving only one gun per battery to continue stoking the gas clouds enveloping the Russian guns. This final 20 minutes of the preparation was a saturation of the Russian front lines, with all guns and trench mortars firing at their maximum rates of fire. Although gas had been used on the World War I battlefields as early as January 1915, it had never been used with such precision and exacting effect. As British strategist Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller later wrote in The Conduct of War, 1789-1961, “The first skillful use of gas to effect a penetration was made in General von Hutier’s attack on the Riga front.”

At 0910 hours the German infantry surged across the river. Forward observers accompanying the assault elements crossed with the first wave after tying down their phone lines to prepositioned stakes at the ferry points. Once they were across, the assault from the north bank was preceded by a carefully orchestrated creeping barrage. With the exception of the one gun per battery still firing on the Russian gun positions, the German counterbattery guns continued to fire on deeper infantry targets during the first two phases of the creeping barrage.

As soon as the first wave of German infantry had firmly established itself on the north shore, the counterbattery guns turned their attention back to the Russian batteries. About that time the Germans put a number of light field guns across the river on rafts. In the days prior to the attack Bruchmüller’s gunners had rehearsed this technique on the lakes in the Eighth Army’s rear area. Meanwhile, specially trained detachments of gunners from the heavy artillery units crossed the river to take over any abandoned Russian guns in the forward positions. The bulk of the heavier German guns remained throughout the first day on the south bank of the river, having sufficient range to engage the Russian second positions.

Once the Russians’ second defensive positions were overrun, the Germans executed three successive programs of planned defensive fires. The first program provided cover from the time the Russian second defensive position fell until the completion of the fixed bridges over the Dvina. Once those bridges were completed, the Germans moved more artillery across. The second program of defensive fires ran from the completion of the bridges until the artillery that moved across got into position and registered. Once that was accomplished, those guns took over the third set of defensive fires that lasted until everything was ready for the start of the exploitation phase from the Russian second position.

The effects of the German fire were devastating. During the slightly more than five hours of the preparation alone the German gunners hit the Twelfth Army with more than 560,000 rounds—an average of 480 rounds per tube. Any artillery crewman who has ever manhandled ammunition will testify to the backbreaking nature of such a sustained rate of fire. Some 27 percent of the total rounds fired were gas, the highest proportion of such rounds fired in any battle of the war to that time. The total weight of the high explosive shells fired came to approximately 10,500 tons—the equivalent of the armament payload of 300 present-day Boeing B-52H Stratofortress bombers.

Three hours after the first assault wave crossed the river, the Russians started to break. Late that afternoon Twelfth Army commander Parsky ordered his XLIII Corps to counterattack with four divisions and the Latvian 2nd Rifle Brigade. By nightfall, however, the Germans had six divisions across the Dvina, with a bridgehead 8 miles wide. Early on September 2 the Russian counterattack force took up positions along the Little Jägel. The Germans responded with a heavy artillery barrage followed by an attack supported by flamethrowers and ground attack aircraft. The Russians and Latvians managed to hold out for about 24 hours, while the remainder of the Twelfth Army started evacuating Riga.

After the Germans fought their way across the Little Jägel, one part of the attack force broke off to the west and advanced on Riga itself. They entered the city with relatively little opposition in the afternoon of September 3. Simultaneously a German naval force broke through a Russian minefield at the mouth of the Dvina and approached the city from the river. The remainder of Hutier’s force kept pressing northeast, reaching the Grosse Jägel (the present-day Liela Jugla) by day’s end. Neither arm of the German advance, however, managed to prevent the bulk of the Twelfth Army from escaping.

The German attack ended on September 5. The operation had cost the Germans 4,200 casualties to Russia’s 25,000. The Russians also lost some 180 guns and 200 machine guns. After Riga fell, Russia also lost whatever stomach it had for staying in the war. The Bolshevik revolution overthrew Russia’s provisional government on November 7 (October 25 on the traditional Russian calendar). Four days earlier Leon Trotsky had issued a series of demands in the name of the Petrograd Soviet, which included “immediate armistice on all fronts.”

With Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin in Petrograd, and things destabilizing very nicely, Germany had no real incentive to continue large-scale military operations against Russia. It had bigger fish to fry. Thus, most of Ober Ost’s effective combat forces were transferred to the Western Front, where General Erich Ludendorff was planning his grand 1918 spring offensive, which he was convinced could still win the war for Germany.

The transfers to the Western Front included Hutier and Bruchmüller and their staffs. Hutier assumed command of the newly established Eighteenth Army, one of three armies that launched the massive Operation Michael on March 21, 1918. All the German forces in that operation employed the tactics that had proved so successful at Riga, and Bruchmüller planned and oversaw the greatest artillery barrage in the history of warfare to that point. Hutier was awarded the Pour le Mérite for his capture of Riga. Bruchmüller had already received the decoration for previous service on the Eastern Front. Both would receive the higher-level Pour le Mérite with oak leaves for their roles in Operation Michael. (The Pour le Mérite with oak leaves was awarded only 122 times during World War I.)

Like the Battle of Riga, Operation Michael was an overwhelming tactical success, but unlike Riga, Michael was a strategic failure. All the battlefield virtuosity the Germans could muster was not enough to overcome the decisive strategic advantages of the Western Allies. The Germans were simply out of manpower. The Americans had just entered the war, and by March 1918 they were pouring more than 100,000 troops per month into Europe. The French and British, however, did receive a bloody nose in March 1918, as the Germans took more ground in less time than almost all of the previous Western Front battles combined. The Germans followed up with similar massive offensives in April, May and July. But though they kept taking ground and inflicting high casualties, it was not enough to tip the balance in the bloody calculus of World War I.

The Allies, meanwhile, learned their lesson quickly. By July 1918 they too were using the same sort of flexible combined-arms tactics the Germans had pioneered at Riga. The stalemate of trench warfare was finally broken. The Russians learned the lessons of Riga as well, but too late to do them any good in World War I. Between the world wars, however, Soviet military theorists scrutinized German military operations during World War I and developed their own tactical techniques and procedures based on the same fundamental principles. They paid special attention to Bruchmüller, who in the 1920s wrote two books about his experiences, which included detailed information about the fire planning for Riga. Lieutenant General Yuri Sheydeman, chief of the Red Army’s artillery from 1921 to ’37, personally translated one of Bruchmüller’s books from German into Russian. Most of Bruchmüller’s fire-support principles and techniques were echoed in the 1937 edition of Artillery Training Regulations of the Red Army, the basic manual of Soviet artillery doctrine for World War II. Between 1941 and ’45 the Soviets on a hundred battlefields paid back the Germans for Riga in their own coin.

Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. David T. Zabecki is Historynet’s chief military historian. For further reading he recommends his own Steel Wind: Colonel Georg Bruchmüller and the Birth of Modern Artillery, as well as Russia’s Last Gasp: The Eastern Front 1916–17, by Prit Buttar.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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Canyon de Chelly, in the Four Corners region of northeastern Arizona, is among the most spectacular natural wonders of the American Southwest. It is also one of the longest continuously inhabited places in North America. Archaeologists estimate humans have lived in the canyon for more than four millennia. By the late 17th century Navajos had made their home there, and in the 19th century they waged two battles in Canyon de Chelly central to tribal history.

The canyon floor is anywhere from 100 to 300 yards wide and flanked by sheer red rock walls up to 1,000 feet high. About 3 miles from its east entrance the canyon splits into two main branches, with Canyon del Muerto running off to the northeast. Five miles up Canyon del Muerto is another junction at a prominence called Fortress Rock. Black Rock Canyon splits off due east, while Canyon del Muerto courses another 15 miles northeast.

In January 1805 a force of 500 Spanish soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Antonio Narbona entered Canyon de Chelly in response to a Navajo raid against the Spanish military post at Cebolletta. In the resulting battle near the northeast end of Canyon del Muerto the Spanish claimed to have killed 115 Navajos, including 90 warriors, while taking 33 women and children as slaves. Navajo tradition relates a different story—that most of the warriors were away hunting that day, and almost all of those killed were women and children. As the Spanish troops approached, the Navajos sheltered in a cliff dwelling high on the canyon wall, where they were trapped and picked off by Narbona’s marksmen. The only Spanish casualty was a soldier tackled by a Navajo woman while he was scaling the cliff. Both fell to their deaths. Narbona ended his career as the fifth Mexican governor of New Mexico.

Fifty-nine years later the Navajo fought another battle in Canyon de Chelly, this time against the United States. While the Civil War was raging east of the Mississippi, the U.S. government sent troops to the Southwest to put an end to persistent raids by emboldened Navajos. In 1864 Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, commander of the military Department of New Mexico (which spanned what today comprises New Mexico and Arizona), ordered Lt. Col. Kit Carson of the 1st New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry to clear the canyon of Navajos and relocate them to a reservation at Bosque Redondo, nearly 400 miles southeast at Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory.

That January 12, in the face of a blinding snowstorm, Carson led 389 troopers into Canyon de Chelly. The Navajos, under the leadership of Chiefs Barboncito and Manuelito, skillfully used skirmishing parties to fight delaying actions while their main body withdrew into Canyon del Muerto. On reaching the junction with Black Rock Canyon, they scaled Fortress Rock with the help of ladders prepared ahead of time. By the time Carson’s force reached the far end of Canyon del Muerto, it had destroyed the tribe’s camps, crops and supplies and taken more than 200 captives. But more than 1,000 Navajos had evaded to the top of Fortress Rock, where they had stockpiled food. It wouldn’t be enough.

Biding his time, Carson withdrew from the canyon to wait out the Navajos, who were bereft of the necessities to survive winter. The strategy worked. By that summer Carson had accepted the surrender of some 8,000 Navajos, the largest such capitulation in American Indian history. In its wake the Navajos were forced to make what they recall as the “Long Walk” to Bosque Redondo. But the tactical success for the U.S. government turned out to be a strategic failure in the end. Some 3,000 Navajos died at the meagerly supplied reservation before they were finally allowed in 1868 to return to their homeland in the Four Corners region.

Present-day Canyon de Chelly (pronounced “de SHAY”) National Monument lies entirely within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation, thus all visitors to the canyon floor must be accompanied by a licensed Navajo guide. Its sheer walls are pocked with the ruins of centuries-old cliff dwellings and etched with pictographs. A particularly striking 200-year-old pictograph on the wall below Massacre Cave depicts the invading Spanish cavalry force, replete with lances and cross-bearing tunics. The North Rim Drive provides a number of spectacular overlooks, including Antelope House Overlook (directly across from Fortress Rock) and Massacre Cave Overlook, while the South Rim Drive ends at an overlook of the 750-foot sandstone spire known as Spider Rock. There is just no substitute, however, for exploring the canyon floor with a knowledgeable guide, one for whom it is especially personal hallowed ground.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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Kevin “Dasher” Wheatley was the first Australian soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross during the Vietnam War. Born in a suburb of Sydney in 1937, he enlisted in the Australian Army at age 19. He trained as an infantryman and served a combat tour with the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment in Malaya between 1957 and early 1959. Advancing through the ranks to Warrant Officer Class 2, he deployed to South Vietnam in 1965, assigned to the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam. Wheatley earned the nickname “Dasher” due to his rugby skills and was known for his compassionate streak. He was once punished for going AWOL to save a stray dog and gave treats to local children in Vietnam. “He was a hard man, but there was a big soft side to him, too,” his son George later recalled.

During one of his first actions with ARVN regular troops in Quang Tri Province, Wheatley rescued a 3-year-old Vietnamese child who had wandered into the crossfire, running into the line of fire to shield her with his own body. In August 1965, Wheatley was working with U.S. advisors to coordinate an ARVN attack on a VC-held village. As the VC defenders faltered, Wheatley launched a one-man assault up a steep slope that finally broke the position. The senior U.S. advisor recommended Wheatley for the Silver Star, but the paperwork went into bureaucratic limbo because of Australian policies regarding the acceptance of foreign awards.

That September, Wheatley was assigned to a team under Capt. Felix Fazekas operating in coordination with U.S. 5th Special Forces Group in the Tra Bong District of Quang Ngai Province. On Nov. 13, Fazekas, Wheatley, and Warrant Officer Class 2 Ron Swanton were advising a Vietnamese Civil Irregular Defense Group company conducting a search and destroy sweep 15 kilometers east of the Tra Bong Special Forces Camp. Fazekas accompanied the CIDG platoon on the left flank. Wheatley and Swanton accompanied the platoon on the right. At about 1:30 p.m. Fazekas’ platoon drew fire from a small VC detachment that fell back. The right flank platoon ran into a well dug-in company-sized force. Swanton was hit immediately in the chest. The CIDG platoon on the right started taking heavy casualties and scattered.

Calling for medical evacuation for Swanton, Wheatley half-carried, half-dragged his wounded comrade under heavy automatic weapons fire across 200 meters of open rice paddies into a safer area. He was accompanied only by a CIDG medic, Pvt. Dinh Do, who told Wheatley that Swanton was dying and had no chance of recovery. As the VC closed in, Wheatley ran out of ammunition. The CIDG medic withdrew as the VC closed to within 10 meters, urging Wheatley to do likewise. Refusing to leave Swanton, Wheatley held a grenade in each hand. As he retreated, the medic heard both grenades go off. The bodies of Wheatley and Swanton were recovered the next morning. Both men had died of gunshot wounds; Fazekas later wrote in his after-action report that both had been shot several times at close range.

When Wheatley initially was recommended for the Victoria Cross, it generated a certain amount of controversy. Australia at that time was still under the system of British imperial military awards, which required final approval of the British government. But Britain had refused to support America’s war in Vietnam, and there was some opposition to the award of Britain’s most prestigious decoration. In the end, Wheatley’s magnificent heroism and sacrifice overcame all bureaucratic resistance.

After his remains were repatriated, Wheatley was buried with full military honors at Sydney’s Pinegrove Memorial Park. The South Vietnamese Government awarded Wheatley the National Order of the Republic of Vietnam, Knight’s Degree; the Military Merit Medal; and the Gallantry Cross with Palm.

Miraculously, Wheatley’s U.S. Silver Star recommendation finally emerged from the bureaucratic maze. It was presented to his son, George, in December 2021.

Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. David T. Zabecki is Vietnam magazine’s editor emeritus.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Vietnam magazine.

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Vietnam was a non-linear war. There were no front lines with enemies on one side and friendlies on the other. Tactical problems could become very complex, with the enemy potentially in any or all directions. It was vital to be able to observe and fire 360 degrees all-around.

Although atypical of most 20th-century warfare, those conditions were not necessarily unique to military history. Perhaps the closest American experience was the Indian Wars of the 19th century—with isolated forts established to control certain areas and provide security to overland travel routes and civilian settlements in the sector.

One solution to the Vietnam War tactical problem was the fire support base (or firebase). Most 19th-century forts were isolated and had to be self-sufficient. Thanks to 20th-century technology, the firebases used by the allies in Vietnam could communicate with each other instantly and could be resupplied and reinforced by air.

What Was A Firebase?

The fire support base was a combined infantry-artillery position that sometimes included armor. Depending on the planned duration of the position, firebases could be dug-in heavily and reinforced with engineer assets. Perhaps the greatest strength of the firebases was their ability to cover each other with mutually supporting fires over great distances. It is a long-standing principle of firepower that massing fires is the most effective way to use artillery.

Through the 19th century, the only way to mass fires was to physically group the guns together on the ground. Between World Wars I and II, improved communications combined with innovative advances in fire direction control techniques made it possible to mass fires instantly on enemy targets from many widely-dispersed guns.

Firebases could reinforce the fires of their own internal guns with the guns of any or all other firebases within artillery range. It was a powerful multiplier effect.

How Were Firebases Set Up?

The size, composition, and positional duration of a firebase depended on the planning factors of mission, enemy, terrain, and troop availability. Some firebases were very large and held positions for months or longer. Other firebases were relatively small and remained in position for days or weeks. A smaller firebase might consist of a company of infantry with a two-gun artillery platoon in the center of the position. A larger firebase might consist of two or three infantry companies, or possibly an entire battalion.

The artillery would consist of an entire six-gun battery. Instead of being positioned in the normal staggered line, the guns were deployed in a star position, with the base piece at the center and the other five guns forming the points of the star to provide rapid and effective fire in any direction. Smaller firebases with two or four howitzers deployed their guns when possible in square or triangle formations.

Firebases on flatter terrain were usually round, and those on ridges generally were rectangular due to terrain. Most larger firebases contained a helicopter landing pad for resupply and medical evacuation. When a firebase deployed forward, the guns often were moved by air.

Firebases Used in Attack and Defense

The firebases were not merely passive defensive positions. Infantry patrols aggressively pushed out from the perimeter, day and night, but usually stayed within the guns’ maximum effective range fan—roughly 11,000 meters for 105mm howitzers and 14,000 meters for 155mm howitzers. When a patrol made contact, it could call for fire support not only from the guns of its own firebase but those of any other firebase in range.  

The firebases, of course, invited attack. One gun inside the firebase usually fired illumination rounds to deprive attackers of the cover of darkness. Other guns delivered fires where needed outward from the perimeter. Firing close to friendly troops could be complex because of the large bursting radius of HE ammunition. The solution to that problem was the M-546 Antipersonnel Round for the 105mm howitzer. Popularly called the “Beehive Round,” it fired 8,000 steel flechettes, triggered by a time fuze set to detonate just outside the perimeter. A green star cluster hand flare fired just before the Beehive warned troops on the perimeter to take cover.

Between 1961 and 1973, U.S. and allied forces established more than 8,000 fire support bases in Vietnam; only a small fraction existed at any given time. Some of the war’s fiercest battles were fought over firebases, including Firebase Ripcord in Thua Thien Province (July 1-23, 1970); Firebase Mary Ann in Quang Tin Province (March 28, 1970); and Firebase Gold in Tay Ninh Province (March 21, 1967). Neither the VC nor the NVA ever managed to overrun a U.S. forces firebase.

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Fought on Sept. 17, 1631, the Battle of Breitenfeld was the first major Protestant victory of the Thirty Years’ War. The epic clash pitted the opposing factions’ most outstanding generals against one another. King Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden commanded both his own Swedish forces and those of the Protestant Electorate of Saxony. Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, commanded the combined forces of the Holy Roman empire and the Catholic League. Sparked by the Reformation, the war was among the costliest conflicts in European history, with combat, disease and famine claiming as many as 8 million soldiers and civilians. Neither Gustavus nor Tilly would live to see its conclusion.

Born in 1559 to devoutly Roman Catholic parents in Walloon Brabant (in present-day Belgium), Tilly fought Protestant Dutch rebels during the Eighty Years’ War (c. 1566–1648) and Ottoman Turks in Hungary and Transylvania in 1600. In 1610 Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria appointed the veteran field marshal commander of the Catholic League forces. From the outset of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618 Tilly’s impressive string of victories included the Battle of White Mountain (1620), the Battles of Wimpfen and Höchst (1622), the Siege of Heidelberg (1622), the Capture of Mannheim (1622), the Battle of Stadtlohn (1623), the Battle of Lutter (1626) and the nightmarish Sack of Magdeburg (1631). Tilly’s cavalry commander at both Magdeburg and Breitenfeld, four months later, was the fearsome Gottfried Heinrich, Count of Pappenheim. Together they formed one of the most dominating command combinations in the history of warfare.

Contrary to widespread belief, the Thirty Years’ War was far more complex than a strictly religious struggle between Catholics and Protestants, though it more or less started that way. With the signing of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 subjects of the Holy Roman empire were required to follow the religion of their local princes. Most German princes around the turn of the 17th century were Protestant—either Lutheran or Calvinist—though the Duke of Bavaria was Catholic. Outside of Germany proper, most other members of the loosely knit empire, including Bohemia, much of northern Italy and Austria, were predominantly Catholic. The Austrian capital of Vienna was the seat of the empire.

In theory the emperorship was an elective, rather than a hereditary, position. That said, the Catholic House of Hapsburg had held the imperial throne since 1440 and fully intended to keep it. Whenever an emperor died, seven prince electors (three spiritual and four secular) determined who his successor would be. All three spiritual electors—the archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne—were Catholics loyal to the Hapsburgs. Of the four secular electors—the rulers of Bohemia, Brandenburg, Saxony and the Palatinate—only the king of Bohemia was Catholic, though his realm did have a large and growing Protestant minority. Thus, the Hapsburgs could count on a 4-to-3 majority. The trouble started in 1618 when Ferdinand II, Holy Roman emperor and king of Bohemia, started cracking down on the rise of Protestantism in his kingdom. As it wasn’t part of Germany proper, Bohemia did not fall under the terms of the Peace of Augsburg, thus its citizens were used to considerably more religious freedom. That May a group of angry Bohemian Protestants stormed into the royal palace in Prague and tossed two of the leading Catholic regents and their secretary out of a third-floor window—an act remembered as the “Defenestration of Prague.”

Though the men survived their fall, the incident was too much for Ferdinand. He sent military forces marching toward Prague, and the Thirty Years’ War was on. Everything exploded in August 1619 when Frederick V, the elector Palatine, accepted the throne of Bohemia from the Protestant Bohemian electorate. Thus, Frederick held two electoral seats, giving Protestants the 4-to-3 majority when selecting a future new emperor. Ferdinand was determined to make an example of the Protestant rebels.

On Nov. 8, 1620, Catholic League forces under Tilly crushed the Protestants at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague, and Frederick fled Bohemia. Given his short reign, he’s been known to history ever since as the “Winter King.” Ferdinand later stripped Frederick of his lands in the Palatinate (roughly comprising the present-day German state of Rhineland-Palatinate) and transferred them to Maximillian of Bavaria, along with the electorship. The emperor also had his son, the future Emperor Ferdinand III, installed on the Bohemian throne, shifting the electoral advantage 5-to-2 in favor of the Catholics.

Although Catholic, the ruling Bourbons of France were bitter enemies of the Hapsburgs, who also ruled Spain at the time. Cardinal Armand-Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, was the chief minister of King Louis XIII. Seeing a chance to strike at the Austrian Hapsburgs while they were tied down with the brewing war in Germany, Cardinal Richelieu financed Protestant Swiss mercenaries to fight the German Catholics. When the Spanish Hapsburgs started putting pressure on France from the south, Richelieu made a further alliance with Protestant King Christian IV of Denmark to oppose the combined forces supporting the emperor. Christian was also the Duke of Holstein and, therefore, had a direct stake in any conflict in northern Germany. England and the Dutch Republic also pledged financial support for Denmark.

On the orders of Emperor Ferdinand, Tilly marched his Catholic League army north and crushed the Danes at the Battle of Lutter on Aug. 27, 1626. Meanwhile, Ferdinand’s imperial army, under the command of Bohemian generalissimo Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, started marching to the east along the Baltic coast, threatening to overrun the free port cities of the Hanseatic League. If imperial forces managed to gain control of the south coast, that—in tandem with extant Polish and Russian control of most of the eastern Baltic—would effectively seal off Protestant Sweden from the rest of the world. Of more immediate concern, the Baltic ports could be used by the Holy Roman emperor as a base for an invasion of Sweden.

In mid-May 1628 Wallenstein launched a siege against the strongly fortified Hanseatic port of Stralsund, Pomerania. On concluding an alliance with Stralsund weeks later, Sweden’s King Gustavus sent a small garrison to defend the port. They were the first Swedish soldiers in history to set foot on German soil. Wallenstein conducted a landward siege only, as he lacked the necessary naval forces to blockade the harbor. The local and Swedish forces, with considerable support from Scottish mercenaries and the Danish fleet, held out until Wallenstein gave up and lifted the siege on August 4. It marked Wallenstein’s first defeat in the Thirty Years’ War and contributed to his temporary dismissal from command in 1630. That in turn left Tilly as sole commander of the combined Catholic League and imperial forces, which numbered some 80,000 troops in Germany. The siege of Stralsund also brought Sweden into the war as a full participant.

Gustavus’ first order of business was to control the southern Baltic and thus keep the Catholic powers from severing his lines of communication. A gifted military reformer, he was the greatest commander of the Thirty Years’ War. Though only 35 years old in 1630, he had already been king for 19 years. His well-equipped and -trained army had been honed by decades of fighting in Denmark-Norway, Poland and Russia, during which Gustavus perfected an innovative system of tactics derived from his study of ancient Greek and Roman warfare.

Gustavus reduced the size of the large and unwieldy cavalry squadrons of the period, increasing their speed and mobility, and he widened the intervals between his infantry battalions. Rather than rely on the usual single battle line, he deployed his forces in two echelons, the second line held as a reinforcement for the first. He further reinforced his cavalry by deploying supporting infantry among the horse. In modern parlance his tactical system is known as “combined arms.” Considered the father of modern field artillery, Gustavus employed highly mobile guns with high rates of fire. He excluded anything heavier than a 12-pounder from his field batteries. His bronze 3-pounder regimental gun could be towed by a single horse or three men and boasted a rate of fire half again faster than muskets of the period.

Gustavus was a deeply religious Protestant whose troops went into battle singing hymns. He forbade his troops from pillaging, looting and mistreating civilians, unlike most armies of the medieval period. He also required them to pay for all supplies received from towns and villages along their line of march. As a result, locals generally welcomed, or at least tolerated, the Swedish army wherever it went.

The Swedish king invaded Pomerania with an initial force of 13,000 troops, landing near Peenemünde on July 6, 1630. They were soon reinforced by a follow-on echelon of 5,300 troops from Sweden and Finland. That fall the Swedish king concluded an alliance with Bogislaw XIV, Duke of Pomerania. Recruiting locally, Gustavus was able to assemble a force of 43,000. Seizing the opportunity to strike a further blow against the Hapsburgs, Cardinal Richelieu signed the Treaty of Bärwalde with Gustavus, providing him with financial support of one million livres per year. Richelieu even went so far as to encourage the Ottoman Turks to increase their pressure on Austria from the east.

The imperial court at Vienna initially greatly underestimated the Swedish threat, dismissively calling Gustavus the “Snow King”—held together by the cold of the north, but who inevitably would melt and disappear the farther south he went into Germany. Overconfident of his earlier successes in Germany, Emperor Ferdinand in 1629 had sent a large German army over the Alps to support the Spanish Hapsburgs, who were fighting the French in northern Italy over the succession of the Duchy of Mantua. Gustavus, meanwhile, managed to drive all Catholic forces out of Pomerania, forcing Ferdinand to refocus his attention on the main theater of war, as the Swedish king pushed ever deeper into Germany.

The Saxon city of Magdeburg, on the left bank of the Elbe River, was among the most important commercial centers in medieval Germany. It was also a Protestant stronghold. With a population of more than 35,000, Magdeburg at the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War sought to remain neutral. As imperialist pressures on the town grew, however, the city council entered into an alliance with Gustavus in August 1630. That November, in anticipation of an imperial siege, the Swedish king sent Dietrich von Falkenberg, an experienced Protestant German officer, to Magdeburg to organize its defense and command the garrison, which ultimately numbered 2,400 trained troops and perhaps another 3,000 local militia. Gustavus, meanwhile, continued his operations to clear the Baltic coast and establish a secure base of operations. In April 1631 he captured the key Brandenburg town of Frankfurt an der Oder.

By March 1631, meanwhile, imperial forces under Tilly and Pappenheim, numbering 24,000, had closed in on Magdeburg. When Tilly demanded its capitulation, Falkenberg refused, believing the Swedes would soon come to his relief. Gustavus, however, was well beyond striking distance. Tilly put his artillery into battery and commenced a fierce bombardment of the city, but Falkenberg still refused to surrender. Finally, on May 20 imperial forces assaulted the town, penetrating its defenses in short order. Falkenberg was shot dead while trying to organize a counterattack. Emboldened imperial troops set fire to the town, and many attackers went rogue, looting, raping and massacring civilians over several days. More than 20,000 defenders and inhabitants were killed or died in the spreading fire. In the aftermath, imperial troops had to dump more than 6,000 bodies into the Elbe to clear the streets. At least that many had been consumed by the flames. (A census taken a year later tallied only 449 residents in Magdeburg, and much of the city remained a rubble field into the 1700s.)

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A month later Pope Urban VIII sent Tilly a congratulatory letter, writing, “You have washed your victorious hands in the blood of sinners.” But the Sack of Magdeburg, the single worst atrocity of the Thirty Years’ War, became a cause célèbre for the Protestant princes of Germany, stiffening their resolve to resist the Catholics. Saxony and Brandenburg, whose rulers were both electors, allied with Gustavus. It didn’t hurt that Gustavus was married to the sister of Georg Wilhelm, the elector of Brandenburg. For the first time in the war the Protestants had something close to a unified command, and the combined forces gave the Swedish king the necessary strength to march south into Germany and seek decisive battle with Tilly.

After Johann Georg I, Elector of Saxony, formally allied himself with Gustavus on Sept. 11, 1631, Tilly initiated a punitive campaign, setting out to ravage Saxony with about 36,000 troops. On September 15 he captured Leipzig, which his men looted. But the imperial commander neglected the opportunity to attack the weak Saxon army of 16,000 troops before they managed to link up with Gustavus’ 26,000 Swedes at Düben, some 40 miles north of Leipzig. On the urging of his cavalry commander, Pappenheim, Tilly abandoned town and took up a position at Breitenfeld, 5 miles to the north.

The opposing forces sighted each other early on the morning of September 17. Tilly deployed his single line of infantry in the center with cavalry on the wings. He commanded the center and right, Pappenheim the left. The imperial artillery was massed in the center and center right and emplaced on high ground to the rear. Gustavus deployed his troops in his signature two lines. Rather than the traditional Spanish-designed tercio square formation of massed pikemen with musketeers on its corners, the Swedish infantrymen were grouped in smaller, more mobile formations, with musketeers predominating and pikemen protecting. Throughout the forthcoming battle Gustavus’ lighter and more mobile artillery would exact a heavy toll on the densely packed imperial formations.

Saxon infantry, cavalry and artillery under Elector Johann Georg held the left of the Protestant line, while Swedish and other German infantry units occupied the center and right. Most of the Swedish cavalry deployed on the right wing, opposite Pappenheim. Gustavus’ reserve cavalry was at the center, between the two echelons of infantry. Finnish Field Marshal Count Gustav Horn commanded the Swedish left (the overall Protestant center) directly against Tilly, while the Swedish king positioned himself on the far right, opposite Pappenheim.

Tilly made the opening move. Rather than launch an immediate attack, he resolved to pound the enemy for as long as possible with his heavier, longer-range guns. He ordered the imperial artillery to open up as Gustavus’ force was deploying. The firing continued until midday, prevailing winds blowing the thick gun smoke and dust directly into the faces of the Swedes and Saxons. When the firing ceased, the impetuous Pappenheim, acting without orders, led his cavalry in an attempt to turn the Swedish right flank. In a brilliant move, Gustavus wheeled his reserve horse, catching Pappenheim between his two cavalry forces. The Swedish king also rapidly repositioned his light guns and opened up with grapeshot against the imperial horse. Gustavus’ guns and musketeers easily outranged the pistol fire of the imperial cavalry. Pappenheim hit the Swedish line seven times, and each time he was repulsed with greater losses, finally forcing him to withdraw.

Only then did Tilly advance against the Saxons. The rapid, accurate fire from the Swedish line drove his men increasingly to the right, but ultimately the Saxons broke, Elector Johann Georg himself falling back on Eilenberg, a dozen miles to the east. Messengers prematurely set out toward Munich and Vienna carrying news of the Catholic victory.

Meanwhile, Tilly turned against the exposed Swedish left flank. Gustavus immediately redeployed three regiments from his right to shore up his left. While Horn’s infantry held off Tilly’s attack, Gustavus routed the remainder of the Catholic left wing. With his own right wing freed, the king then advanced against the Catholic guns on the high ground to Tilly’s rear, rolling up Tilly’s left flank in the process. On capturing the imperial guns, Gustavus’ gunners turned them on their former owners from the rear.

After seven hours of fighting, Gustavus’ forces had almost wholly enveloped Tilly’s troops. Protected by four veteran regiments that had never fled from a fight, Tilly fought his way out of the encirclement. Once free of the Swedes, the disciplined imperials formed a defensive perimeter and continued to resist until nightfall, at which point the wounded Tilly had only 600 effectives under his command. The surviving Catholic forces withdrew toward Halle, some 17 miles to the west. On reaching safety, Tilly and Pappenheim were able to muster only about 2,000 men between them. The imperial forces had lost around 7,000 dead, 6,000 captured, 3,000 wounded and 3,400 missing. The Swedes had lost some 2,100 killed, the Saxons 3,000.

Leaving Johann Georg and his Saxon troops to clear Leipzig, Gustavus turned southwest and drove deeper into Germany. After clearing the Palatinate of imperial forces, he established winter quarters near the Rhine. Hoping for a return to his throne, deposed Elector Frederick V met Gustavus at Frankfurt in February 1632. The Swedish king, however, said he would support Frederick only if the latter would hold the Palatinate as a fief of the king of Sweden. Gustavus also insisted that Frederick, a staunch Calvinist, agree to grant equal rights to Lutherans in the Palatinate. Frederick refused, the two parted, and the hapless elector never regained his throne.

That March Gustavus turned west and invaded Bavaria. On April 15 he again faced Tilly at the Battle of Rain, waged over defensive works centered on that town along the River Lech. Outnumbering the Bavarians roughly 37,500 to 22,000, the Swedish king won a decisive victory, thanks largely to his superb artillery. Tilly took a bullet to his thigh and died of infection 15 days later at age 73. On May 17 Gustavus made a triumphal entry into Munich. He then quickly cleared most of Bohemia. On the verge of panic, Emperor Ferdinand recalled Wallenstein from forced retirement and again put him in command of all imperial and Catholic forces.

Gustavus and Wallenstein clashed for the first time that September 3 and 4 at the Battle of the Alte Veste, near Nuremberg. In that largest battle of the war, which pitted nearly 90,000 men against one another, the previously invincible Gustavus suffered his first tactical defeat, though the strategic results were indecisive. The two great commanders met once more, on November 16, at the Battle of Lützen. While this time Wallenstein was soundly defeated, Gustavus was killed after becoming separated from his troops while leading a cavalry charge on his flank. About the time Gustavus fell, Pappenheim, the great imperial cavalry commander, was mortally wounded on another part of the field.

The death of the Swedish king broke the Protestant momentum, and the course of the war waffled back and forth. Unfortunately for the people of central Europe, the Thirty Years’ War ground on another horrific 16 years. After losing to Gustavus, Wallenstein grew increasingly disillusioned with Emperor Ferdinand and opened secret peace negotiations variously with France, Sweden, Saxony and Brandenburg. When the Holy Roman emperor learned of his field marshal’s covert dealings, he charged Wallenstein with treason and issued orders for him to be brought to Vienna—dead or alive. Wallenstein was at his headquarters in Eger (present-day Cheb, Czech Republic), on the Bohemian-Bavarian border, when a group of his own Scottish and Irish mercenary officers assassinated him on Feb. 25, 1634.

Thus, none of the war’s four greatest battlefield commanders lived to see its resolution. Sweden remained in the fight, mostly under the command of Field Marshal Horn, and the Thirty Years’ War finally ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which again allowed rulers of the imperial member states to choose their own religious affiliation.

Gustavus’ remains were eventually repatriated and interred at Stockholm’s Riddarholmen Church on June 22, 1634. His fellow Swedes posthumously granted the warrior-king the title den Store (“the Great”), making him the only Swedish monarch so honored.

Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. David T. Zabecki is History-Net’s chief military historian. For further reading he rec-ommends The Thirty Years’ War, by Geoffrey Parker; and History of the Thirty Years’ War, by Friedrich Schiller.

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Nicknamed “The Galloping Major,” Peter Badcoe was one of only four Australian soldiers to be awarded the Victoria Cross during the Vietnam War. Born in Malvern, South Australia, in 1934, he enlisted in the Australian Army in 1950. After graduating from Officer Cadet School in 1952, he was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant in the Royal Australian Artillery.

In June 1961 Badcoe was assigned to 103 Field Battery, serving a tour in the Federation of Malaya following the conclusion of the 1948-1960 Malayan Emergency, during which Communist insurgents attempted to overthrow British colonial administration. In November 1962 he was sent from Malaya to South Vietnam for a week-long tour of temporary duty to observe operations against Viet Cong insurgents. Aggressively pursuing opportunities to gain combat experience, Badcoe spent five days in the field with an ARVN battalion in Quang Ngai Province and subsequently managed to join an airmobile operation with the ARVN 7th Division in the Mekong Delta.

In 1965 Badcoe branch-transferred to the Royal Australian Infantry Corps. After his request for assignment to Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV) was approved, he completed the adviser course at the Intelligence Centre at Mosman, New South Wales, and the Jungle Training Centre course in Canungra, Queensland. Arriving in South Vietnam in August 1966, Badcoe was assigned as a sub-sector adviser in Thua Thien Hue Province on Vietnam’s central coast, where he was responsible for working with district-level Regional Forces and Popular Forces (RF/PF).

On Feb. 23, 1967, Badcoe was operating with an RF company in the Phu Thu District when he monitored a radio transmission reporting that a nearby American adviser had been killed and another was seriously wounded and pinned down. Going directly into the path of enemy fire, he moved across 600 meters of open ground to secure the wounded American. He then led a platoon-sized counterattack against the VC machine gun, personally killing the gunner.

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Twelve days later on March 7, two VC battalions attacked the Quang Dien District headquarters. When the commander of the RF Reaction Company was killed, Badcoe moved to their position and assumed command. He led a counterattack that beat back the numerically superior VC. On April 7, 1967, Badcoe was the sector headquarters staff duty officer in Huong Tra District when reports came in that the ARVN 1st Division Reaction Company was pinned down under heavy fire near the hamlet of An Thuan. Badcoe and U.S. Army Sgt. Alberto Alvarado immediately got in a jeep and headed for the fight. The ARVN force was falling back as they arrived.

Badcoe rallied the South Vietnamese and led them in a counterattack. Crawling close to a VC machine gun, he made several attempts to take it out with hand grenades. At one point Alvarado had to pull him down out of the line of fire. When Badcoe rose one last time to lob a grenade, he was killed by enemy fire. However, the restored momentum of the ARVN attack ultimately managed to overrun the VC position.

Badcoe was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously for his combined actions of Feb. 23, March 7, and April 7, 1967. The United States awarded him the Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Purple Heart, and the Air Medal. The Republic of Vietnam made Badcoe a Knight of the National Order of Vietnam, and awarded him the Cross of Gallantry with Palm, Gold Star, and Silver Star, and the Armed Forces Honor Medal 1st Class.

Badcoe was buried at the Terendak Garrison Cemetery in Malacca, Malaysia. In 2015 the Australian government repatriated the remains of 22 Australian soldiers from Malaysia, but Badcoe remains at Terendak at the wish of his family. The inscription on his special Victoria Cross headstone reads, “He lived and died a soldier.”

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He was famed among his U.S. Army colleagues and in the press as “Gatling Gun Parker.” John Henry Parker acquired that sobriquet during the Spanish-American War, when as a young first lieutenant he commanded a detachment of three Gatling guns that laid down withering fire support for the U.S. forces that stormed San Juan Heights in Cuba. Firing 18,000 rounds in less than nine minutes, Parker’s gunners killed many of the defenders and suppressed their fire. It marked the first instance in Army history in which machine guns supported infantry in the attack. For his actions on July 1, 1898, Parker received the Silver Star. Then Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, who 103 years after the fact was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor for having led his Rough Riders from horseback up Kettle Hill, noted, “Parker deserved rather more credit than any other one man in the entire [Santiago] campaign.”

By the time of the U.S. entry into World War I Lt. Col. Parker had become the Army’s acknowledged expert in the organization, training and tactics of dismounted machine-gun detachments. He was a member of the staff of the American Expeditionary Forces that sailed for England with Maj. Gen. John J. Pershing aboard RMS Baltic in late May 1917. Sent ahead to the Army Machine Gun School in Langres, France, Parker trained young AEF soldiers on the still relatively new weapon.

Loath to sit out the war in the rear, 51-year-old Parker pushed successfully for assignment to a frontline unit. On April 20, 1918, the colonel was commanding the 26th (Yankee) Division’s 102nd Infantry Regiment when the unit came under German attack at Seicheprey, a supposedly quiet section where green American units were sent to gain experience. In one of the AEF’s first major engagements of the war the Americans suffered some 650 casualties and more than 100 men captured. In the midst of the enemy barrage Parker coolly moved forward to inspect his lines and command the defense. For his actions he was among the first members of the AEF to receive the Distinguished Service Cross—second only to the Medal of Honor for heroism in combat.

Two months later the 26th Division was committed as part of General Jean Degoutte’s French Sixth Army during the massive French counterattack into the Marne salient. Near Trugny on July 21 Parker, who remained in command of the 102nd Infantry, advanced on horseback through heavy enemy artillery and machine-gun fire. Preceding the lead elements of his own troops, he reconnoitered the German positions and the most advantageous avenues of approach for his attacking force. He received his second DSC for that action.

Four days later Parker earned his third DSC while the division was advancing along the road through La Fére Wood. A battalion to his front was halted in the road, awaiting orders, when caught by an enemy artillery barrage with no cover but the shallow roadside ditches. “Immediately appreciating the situation,” read Parker’s DSC citation, the colonel “twice rode down the line and back again at a slow walk, stopping to talk with the men; and thus by his fearless personal exposure to, and disregard of, danger, he promptly steadied the troops and prevented probable disorder at an important juncture.”

By the start of the Allies’ costly Meuse-Argonne campaign on September 26 Parker was in command of the 91st Division’s 362nd Infantry Regiment. During the attack on the village of Gesnes three days later he again led from the front through heavy German machine-gun and artillery fire, including gas, shrapnel and high-explosive shells. Though twice wounded, he remained in command another five hours. Hit a third time, he tumbled into a crater full of other wounded soldiers. The following morning the colonel crawled from the crater and led his surviving men to the rear. While the war was over for Parker, the action at Gesnes brought him his fourth Distinguished Service Cross. He was the only foot soldier of World War I to earn four DSCs.

This story appeared in the 2023 Spring issue of Military History magazine.

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The year AD 9 did not go well for the Roman empire. Three legions, six auxiliary cohorts and attached cavalry—roughly 20,000 troops—under Publius Quinctilius Varus sought to extend Roman control deep into Germany. In the Teutoburg Forest, near present-day Osnabrück, allied Germanic tribes under Arminius ambushed and annihilated the legions. The empire struck back hard between AD 14 and 16. Operating from bases west of the Rhine River, legions under Germanicus Julius Caesar, a nephew of Emperor Tiberius, waged three successful campaigns against the Germanic tribes. But despite various follow-on Roman incursions into Germany, the east-west border of the empire remained the Rhine, the north-south border the Danube, effectively containing most of Germany.

In AD 83 the Romans advanced in force back into the Rhine-Danube corner of southwest Germany, ultimately building a fortified border that followed natural contours from just north of Koblenz on the Rhine to just shy of Regensburg on the Danube. Known today as the Upper Germanic-Rhaetian Limes—limes (pronounced “Lee-mus”) being Latin for “boundary line”—the defensive work was similar to Hadrian’s Wall in Britain but more than four times as long. Running 341 miles, the limes boasted 120 forts and 900 interspersed watchtowers with controlled access gates at various points. 

The second century Roman army comprised some 400,000 troops. The 170,000 troops in the legions were Roman citizens; the 230,000 troops in the auxiliary cohorts were not. The limes was manned entirely by auxiliaries. Each fort on the line was garrisoned by a cohort of about 500 men, while some cohorts had 1,000. Cavalry patrolled between the forts. The strategic reserve comprised three legions garrisoned behind the two big rivers—Legio XXII Primigenia at Mogontiacum (present-day Mainz), Legio VIII Augusta at Argentoratum (Strasbourg) and Legio III Italica at Castra Regina (Regensburg). 

Originally, the limes was intended to regulate commercial traffic with Germany and provide observation points and bases for long-range reconnaissance patrols into the region. By the third century, however, the legions had fought a number of significant military actions along the boundary. In 213 Emperor Caracalla launched a campaign against the Alemanni, allied Germanic tribes north of the limes. The departure portal for the expedition was the monumental Dalkingen Gate, completed that same year. In 233 the Alemanni launched a series of major attacks against various sections of the limes, resulting in the destruction of Dalkingen Gate. In 234–235 Emperor Severus Alexander launched a punitive campaign against the Germans, while from 240 to 250 the Alemanni launched constant raids against the limes. The Romans finally abandoned the limes in 260 and pulled back to the Rhine and the Danube. The German tribes followed, especially the Alemanni, many of whose descendants live in modern-day Baden. 

Not until the late 19th century did historians and archeologists start paying serious attention to the ancient fortification. As recently as 40 years ago there wasn’t much to see, but things have changed substantially since then. In 2005 the Upper Germanic-Rhaetian Limes was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since then, archeological activity has been nonstop. Under the supervision of the German Limes Commission, it has grown into the largest archeological monument in Europe, its footprint hosting some 85 museums and archeological sites. Some of the fort excavations are extensive, and watchtowers have been reconstructed at various points. Most of the sites have information signs in German with English translations. Two museums in particular stand out. 

Adjacent to the museum in Osterbruken is an excavated Roman bath. Nearby Kastell Osterbruken, featuring partially excavated Roman ruins and a reconstructed watchtower, was the encampment of the 500-man Cohors III Aquitanorum. The museum in Aalen is the largest on the German Limes Road. Adjacent is partially excavated Kastell Aalen, which hosted the largest Roman cavalry garrison north of the Alps. The 1,000-man Ala II Flavia was not in the direct chain of command for control of the limes. Rather, its mission was communications and long-range reconnaissance patrols into German territory. The prefect of Ala II Flavia answered directly to the emperor. 

Such stories are part of the rich historic tapestry of the limes, any museum or archeological site of which is well worth a full-day visit.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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One of the U.S. Army’s specialized units in Vietnam was the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, nicknamed the “Blackhorse Regiment.” When deployed in 1966, the regiment was equipped primarily with M113 armored personnel carriers modified with additional guns and shields to become “armored cavalry assault vehicles” for a more offensive role. The ACAV’s basic armament consisted of two 7.62 mm M60 machines guns mounted on either side of the cargo top hatch and a .50-caliber M2 machine gun upfront, protected by a rounded armored collar with armor plates fore and aft to afford more protection for the gunner. Backed by flamethrower-equipped M113s called M132 “Zippos,” M551 Sheridan light tanks and M109 self-propelled howitzers, Blackhorse ACAV crews fought with distinctive aggressiveness in numerous operations in the Saigon area between 1966 and 1972. By mid-1967 mechanized infantry units, which also used M113s, were retrofitting their vehicles to make them similar to ACAVs, but their tactics still differed. Mechanized infantry fought both mounted and dismounted, while the armored cavalry primarily operated mounted and on the move. The Blackhorse Regiment, with three squadrons, was the only full armored cavalry regiment in Vietnam, but most infantry divisions had their own armored cavalry squadrons, adding five to the list: 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division; 1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry, 4th Division; 3rd Squadron, 5th Cavalry, 9th Division; 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry, 23rd Division (Americal); and 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 25th Division.

This article appeared in the Autumn 2022 issue of Vietnam magazine.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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