Jon Guttman, Author at HistoryNet

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The SVD Dragunov Rifle Was a Deadly Menace in Vietnam

Jon Guttman — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 14:25:04 +0000

Although its initials brand it as a sniper rifle, the Snayperskaya Vintovka sistemy Dragunova that Evgeni F. Dragunov developed in 1963 falls short of the chilling precision and range of a current state-of-the-art, bolt-action weapon for the specialized sniper in the appraisal of weapons expert Chris McNab in his latest Osprey offering. Most rifle aficionados class it as a designated marksman rifle (DMR), offering talented soldiers within standard infantry units good intermediary range, durable simplicity, and the ability to get off multiple shots because of its rare semiautomatic capability.

Since its introduction into the Soviet armed forces, the SVD has found its way into fighting forces around the world and killed untold thousands. That apparently began with a slow trickle into the People’s Army of Vietnam around 1972, and U.S. intelligence agencies allegedly placed a $25,000 reward for any captured intact. One Soviet-made SVD-63 captured from the PAVN is shown in the book, but the weapon’s expense seems to have limited its introduction at a time when North Vietnam was going to prevail with or without semiautomatic sniper rifles. There were to be a lot more sniper duels in 1979, however, when China launched its invasion of Vietnam with its infantry units equipped with reverse-engineered 7.62mm Dragunovs, designated Type 79s, joined in later border incidents by improved Type 85s.

Ironic though it may have seemed back then, Vietnam was by no means the only occasion in which marksmen wielding SVDs traded shots with one another. The author’s comprehensive rundown of the many conflicts in which the SVD played vital roles lists many fighters, including Afghans, Chechens, and Ukrainians, whose targets were—and are—Russian. The SVD Dragunov Rifle offers an in-depth look at the technology and history of a weapon which retains its importance on the battlefield after 60 years.

The SVD Dragunov Rifle

By Chris McNab. Osprey Publishing, 2023, $23

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

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Unpacking the Myths Of the F-8 Crusader in Vietnam

Jon Guttman — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 18:42:13 +0000

Among the many myths and legends to emerge from the Vietnam War was that the U.S. Navy’s Vought F-8 Crusader was “the last of the gunfighters” and the only air superiority fighter of its time. Although the Crusader did pack four Colt-Browning Mark 12 20mm cannons at a time when other American fighters were relying on air-to-air missiles, its cannons were unreliable and virtually all Crusader victories over its Mikoyan-Gurevich-designed opposition were achieved using AIM-9 heat-seeking missiles.

It is true, however, that the Crusader established the highest kill-to-loss ratio over Vietnam, destroying 14 MiG-17s and four MiG-21s for the loss of three F-8s—all to the older but agile MiG-17s. The second of the downed Crusader pilots, Cdr. Dick Bellinger of fighter squadron VF-162 off the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany, was credited to Ngo Duc Mai on July 14, 1966, but the American survived and on Oct. 9 gained a unique revenge when he shot down Nguyen Van Minh, who also ejected just before his plane crashed, the third MiG-21 downed in Vietnam and the first credited to a U.S. Navy fighter.

Lt. Jack Terhune ejects from his F-8 Crusader after it flamed out over the South China Sea in 1965. He was rescued uninjured.

Straddling truth and myth on the other side is Vietnam’s crediting of an F-8E to Pham Ngoc Lan as Vietnam’s first air-to-air victory on April 3, 1965. That date is still celebrated as Vietnam People’s Air Force Day, in spite of the documented fact that Lt. Cmdr. Spence Thomas of USS Hancock’s VF-211 managed to get his damaged Crusader to Da Nang, where it was repaired and returned to service.

In the seventh in Osprey’s “Dogfight” series, F-8 Crusader, Vietnam, Peter E. Davies combines his extensive research, including interviews and combat reports, to give the reader an in-cockpit glimpse of what it was like to fly and fight in the plane. For all the successes described within its niche of aerial combat, however, the author does not shy away from including the wider, deadlier world in which the plane operated, harboring the dangers of surface-to-air missiles and ground fire, which added up to the highest operational loss rate of any U.S. tactical aircraft.

F-8 Crusader, Vietnam 1963-1973

By Peter E. Davies, Osprey Publishing, 2023, $23

If you buy something through our site, we might earn a commission.

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

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

Top 10 Game-Changing Weapons That Debuted In the 19th Century

Jon Guttman — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 16:59:42 +0000

Colt-Paterson Model 1836 Revolver

Patented on Feb. 25, 1836, Samuel Colt’s five-shooter—the world’s first commercially practical revolver—took its name from the factory where it was mass produced, the Patent Arms Co. in Paterson, New Jersey. It met with a lukewarm reception until 1839, when Colt added an integral loading lever and capping window that made reloading far easier and faster.

The U.S. Army purchased a limited number of Colt’s revolving pistols, rifles and shotguns for field testing in Florida during the 1835–42 Second Seminole War, but rejected them as too fragile and prone to malfunction. Colt improved the breed. By 1843 the Republic of Texas Navy had bought 180 rifles and shotguns and a roughly equal number of revolvers. When the Texas Army and Navy were disbanded that year, the republic’s remaining armed force, the 40 men of the Texas Ranger Company, bought up the surplus revolvers.

Ranger Capt. John Coffee Hays heaped praise on the weapons for their relative ease in loading from virtually any position and their effectiveness against larger numbers of Indians. By 1861 Colt’s continually improving revolvers had won their way back into the U.S. military, whose officers would soon be trading shots with each other.

Minié Bullet

In 1847 French armorer Claude-Étienne Minié developed a conical bullet with cannelures around the sides that would expand upon firing. This feature allowed a line infantryman to quickly secure the round within a musket barrel—even one with rifling—after which the hot gasses of the powder explosion caused the bullet to expand as it spun out the rifled barrel. This gave the bullet or “Minié ball” greater speed, range and accuracy than the older musket ball yet could be loaded/reloaded just as fast.

A further refinement was introduced by Capt. James H. Burton of the Harpers Ferry Armory in western Virginia, in the form of a conical concavity at the rear, aiding the bullet’s expansion. Britain’s army first took full advantage of the Minié bullet with its Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle, which entered service during the Crimean War. The American variant was incorporated into the Model 1855, whose Maynard tape primer was replaced by a copper cap in the Model 1861 Springfield, so named because most (but by no means all) were produced in that Massachusetts town. The rifled Minié bullets were devastating in both wars. Their users still clung to Napoleonic Era century doctrine, facing off in lines and at distances for which casualties to more efficient rifles increased exponentially.

Dévastation Class Ironclad Floating Batteries

The ironclad warship harkens back to the Korean “turtle ships” that helped defeat the Japanese navy during the latter’s invasion attempt of 1592 to 1598. The concept was revived when France deployed three floating batteries of the Dévastation class to the Crimean War. With their 4.3-inch-thick iron sides, 16 50-pounder smoothbore and two 12-pounder guns, the vessels weighed more than 1,600 tons each and although powered by a 150-hp Le Creuzot steam engine each or the wind against three auxiliary sails, the best speed they could produce was 4 knots. Consequently, in practice the vessels had to be towed to their targets by sidewheeler steam frigates: L’Albatros for Dévastation, Darien for Tonnante and Magellan towing Lave. The trio had their combat debut against the Russian fortress of Kinburn on the Black Sea on Oct. 17, 1855, performing well as Dévastation hurled 1,265 projectiles on the fort (82 of them shells) in four hours, sustaining 72 hits, 31 of which struck its armor and suffering the only fatalities of the three: two crewmen—plus 12 wounded. All three batteries saw further service against the Austrians in the Adriatic Sea in 1859.

That year the French commissioned Gloire, the first seagoing ironclad, ushering in a new era in warship design, which would next see practice in earnest when the Confederate ironclad ram Manassas defended New Orleans on Oct. 12, 1861 and—vainly—on April 24, 1862.

USS George Washington Parke Custis

In August 1861 Col. Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe, self-styled master of balloons, purchased a coal barge which he, in collaboration with John A. Dahlgren, commander of the Washington Navy Yard and chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, modified with a flat deck, 120 feet long and 14 feet, 6 inches in beam, capable of accommodating an observation balloon, hydrogen-generating apparatus, related equipment and tools and crewmen drawn from the Army. Although previous ships had carried balloons, Lowe’s vessel, christened USS George Washington Parke Custis, was the first designed from the hull up to maintain and launch them.

The one thing it lacked was its own means of propulsion. After trials on the Potomac River, on Dec. 10 the balloon carrier was towed downriver by the steamer Coeur de Lion, accompanied by Dahlgren and a detachment of troops led by Brig. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, anchoring at Mattawomen Creek. The next day Lowe ascended to observe Confederate activity in Virginia, three miles away, reporting on enemy batteries at Freestone Point and counting their campfires. George Washington Parke Custis accompanied the Army of the Potomac up the York and James rivers in spring 1862. Modest though its achievements were—limited by dependance on external propulsion—it was the first aircraft carrier.

Gatling Gun

The American Civil War coincided with the development of several automatic weapon designs, of which that of Dr. Richard Gatling, involving six rotating barrels cranked by hand, proved to be the most effective. Although patented on Nov. 4, 1862, the Gatling gun was not officially adopted by the U.S. Army until 1866…which is not to say it saw no action until then. On July 17, 1863 city authorities purchased some Gatlings to intimidate anti-draft rioters in New York. During the siege of Petersburg (June 1864-April 1865) Union officers bought 12 Gatling guns with their own money to install in the trenches facing the Confederate defenses, while another eight were mounted aboard gunboats.

Although large and heavy, Gatlings made a growing post-Civil War presence in Japan’s Boshin War of 1877, the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War and the American charge up San Juan Hill in 1898. Eclipsed by gas-operated machine guns like the Maxim by the end of the century, the Gatling gun’s principle was revived in the late 20th century in electrically operated weapons such as the Vulcan minigun.

Spencer Repeating Rifle

In 1860 Christopher Miner Spencer patented the world’s first bullet contained in a metallic .56-56 rimfire cartridge. Using a lever action and a falling breechblock, it could quickly fire off seven rounds from a tubular magazine within the buttstock. The Union Army was hesitant to adopt the Spencer because of the logistic headaches entailed in supplying weapons that virtually invited rapid, potentially wasteful firing, but eventually Spencer persuaded President Abraham Lincoln that the advantages outweighed the problems. Its earliest appearance was with Col. John T. Wilder’s “Lightning Brigade” of mounted infantry, whose privately-purchased Spencer rifles were a factor in the Army of the Cumberland’s victory at Hoover’s Gap on June 26-28, 1863.

Back East, Brig. Gen. George A. Custer equipped half of his Michigan Brigade with Spencer rifles in time for the battles of Hanover on June 30 and Gettysburg’s East Cavalry Field on July 3. The first of the shorter, handier Spencer carbines appeared in August and made an immediate hit among the cavalrymen. If logistics constituted a problem for the Union troops, it was worse among the Confederates whenever they obtained stocks of what they called “that damn Yankee gun that could be loaded on Sunday and fired all week.” Their shortages of copper and overall industrial capacity for reverse engineering rendered the captured Spencers a limited asset at best. A total of 200,000 Spencer rifles and carbines were produced before the state of the rifleman’s art advanced ahead.

Submarine H.L. Hunley

On Sept. 7, 1776 a curious little vessel called “Turtle,” designed by David Bushnell and manned by Continental Army Sergeant Ezra Lee, made history’s first submarine attack on the British 64-gun Eagle. The attempt failed and the next submarine attack on a warship had to wait until 1864. Under siege by land and by sea, Confederate-ruled Charleston, South Carolina used all manner of ingenious inventions to counter the overwhelming numbers of U.S. Navy blockaders, including the ironclad casemate rams Chicora and Palmetto State, small semisubmersible torpedo boats called Davids and a fully submersible vessel designed by Horace Lawson Hunley.

Propelled by a screw propeller turned by an eight-man crew and armed with a spar torpedo (explosive mine mounted at the end of a wooden pole), the latter was built in Mobile, Al. and shipped by rail to Charleston on Aug. 12, 1863. During testing on Aug. 29, the vessel, named H.L. Hunley for its inventor, swamped, drowning five of the crew. Raised and tested further, it sank again on Oct. 15, killing all eight crewmen including Hunley himself. Raised again, H.L. Hunley set out on its first operational sortie on Feb. 17, 1864 and detonated its spar torpedo against the side of the 1,260-ton screw sloop of war USS Housatonic, which sank. H.L. Hunley did not return, but in 1995 its remains were found and in 2000 it was raised, revealing it had ventured closer to its target than intended and swamped for the last time.

Although it took a heavier toll on its crews than on the enemy—a total of 21 killed compared to two officers and three crewmen slain aboard Housatonic—the precedent had been set by the world’s first successful submarine attack. The ill-starred H.L. Hunley is on display at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center on the Cooper River.

Dreyse Needle Gun

Developed by Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse and patented in 1840, the first breech-loading bolt-action rifle used a needle-like firing pin to pierce through a paper cartridge to strike a percussion cap at the base of the bullet. British testers were impressed by its accuracy at 800 to 1,200 yards, but dismissed it as “too complicated and delicate” to stand up to battle use—and in fact many Prussian infantrymen carried extra “needles” in case they broke. Despite the critics, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV ordered 60,000 for his army.

The Dreyse needle gun proved its mettle in the German wars of reunification, while evolving from paper to metal cartridges in 1862. The rifle was first used against fellow Prussians in the May uprising in Dresden during the Revolution of 1848, but truly proved itself against Danish muzzle-loaders in the Second Schleswig-Holstein War of 1864. The Prussians had 270,000 Dreyses for the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, where the average Prussian infantryman could get five shots off lying prone in the time it took an Austrian standing to reload his Lorenz rifle musket. The Dreyse met its match in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 against the superior French Chassepot, but with 1,150,000 needle guns, the better-led Prussian forces prevailed.

Whitehead Locomotive Torpedo

In the Austrian port of Trieste in 1860, naval engineer Robert Whitehead, was inspired by Fiume-based engineer Giovanni Luppis’ “coast savior,” a small self-propelled vessel run on compressed air. He designed a compressed air-powered “Minenschiff” also called a “locomotive torpedo,” patented on Dec. 21, 1866. Unlike previous stationary torpedoes, Whitehead’s was not only self-propelled, but had a self-regulating depth device and a gyroscopic stabilizer. Equally important, Whitehead devised a launching barrel, making his invention not a merely a weapon, but a weapons system. After being test mounted on the gunboat Gemse, Whitehead’s torpedo was purchased or licensed by 16 naval powers, undergoing constant refinement.

Its essential nature in one role was expressed by Adm. Henry John May in 1904 when he declared, “but for Whitehead the submarine would remain an interesting toy and little more.” The first wartime torpedo attack allegedly occurred during the Russo-Turkish War on Jan. 16, 1878 when torpedo boats from the Russian tender Velikiy Knyaz Konstantin captained by Stepan Osipovich Makarov sank the Ottoman steamer Intibah. After all the improvements the original underwent, its last combat use came in Drobak Sound, Norway on April 9, 1940 when two Whitehead torpedoes from a Norwegian coastal battery struck the shell-damaged German heavy cruiser Blücher and sank it.

Maxim Machine Gun

Prolific polymath inventor Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim is best remembered for a three-year project begun in 1882 that led to a machine gun with a recoil-operated firing system that fired 250 .303-inch rounds at a rate the Gatling could not match, plus a water-cooling system to allow sustained fire. Its durability and murderous efficiency led to its use by 29 countries between 1886 and 1959. It also earned American-born Maxim a British knighthood. The Maxims’ effect on history first manifested itself in Africa, where the British used them in their 1887 expedition against rebellious Yoni in Sierra Leone and the Germans used them against the Abushiri of their East African colony in 1888.

Its first major battle was during the First Matabele War in what is now Zimbabwe. At Shangani on Oct. 25, 1893, 700 British and South African troops, backed by Maxims, took a fearsome toll on 5,000 Matabele enemies. In 1898 the weapon’s role in European and American imperialism was archly summed up by Hilaire Belloc in The Modern Traveler: “Whatever happens, we have got, the Maxim gun, and they have not.” The European powers would be forced to revise their view in 1914, however, when they had to face the consequences of using Maxim’s invention against one another.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

This Ornery Knight Inspired Shakespeare’s Falstaff

Jon Guttman — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 19:44:02 +0000

Even though it officially lasted 116 years, the Hundred Years War was really just part of a long-running rivalry over land, power and inheritance between England and France that one may say, allowing for interruptions, raged from the Norman invasion of 1066 to Emperor Napoleon’s downfall in 1815. In the course of multiple reigns, the Hundred Years War was, as with its predecessors, replete with major and minor players, including such national heroes as England’s Henry V and France’s Maid of Orleans.

One of the war’s most intriguing characters, however, was not exactly heroic… but then again, he did not really exist. Or did he? At least in part?

Enter Shakespeare

In 1597 William Shakespeare published Henry IV Part 1, and with it introduced a corpulent, boastful knight who when not performing feats of extreme self-preservation on the battlefield, where he states “the better part of valor is discretion,” is carousing on borrowed or stolen money at the Boar’s Head Inn. Such is the perverse charisma of this “villainous, abominable misleader of youth” that he spends much of the play leading the young Prince Hal down a primrose path of self-indulgent dissolution. In the sequel, Henry IV Part 2, the old king dies and Hal assumes not only the throne but the responsibilities that it requires—and in so doing, puts aside “childish things,” starting with Sir John Falstaff.

Although Falstaff does not appear in Henry V, his death is mentioned, heralding an essential final step in the new king’s maturity. Such was the popularity of this outrageous but amiable reprobate, however, that one of Shakespeare’s most avid fans, Queen Elizabeth I, allegedly (though not confirmed for certain) suggested that he turn him loose once more, this time in the realm of romantic farce, a request that the bard brought to the stage in 1602 as The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Although no knight of the Hundred Years War quite matched the girth or gall of Sir John Falstaff, the evolution of his name includes an intriguing element of reality. Initially, Shakespeare was going to name the character Sir John Oldcastle, who really existed as a leader of the Lollards, a proto-Protestant sect—and a friend of Prince Hal’s until even that proved insufficient to prevent his being burned at the stake on Dec. 14, 1417.

When one of Oldcastle’s descendants, Henry Brooke, 11th Earl Cobham, learned of Shakespeare’s latest play and its intended comic lead, he bitterly objected. Deciding, like his character, that “the better part of valor is discretion,” Shakespeare switched to another name from the era, only this time altering it somewhat—from Sir John Fastolf to Sir John Falstaff.

The rest was theatrical history… or was it? It turns out that Falstaff’s faux namesake had a cloud of disgrace hanging over his own head for more than a decade—and for Fastolf, it was no laughing matter.

The Real ‘Falstaff’

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Sir John Fastolf was born on Nov. 6, 1380 in Caister Hall, Norfolk, to minor gentry. His father, also John Fastolf, died in 1383 and his mother, Mary Park, on May 2, 1406. Amid his education he claimed to have made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1392-93, and also served as squire to Sir Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. In 1401 he joined the retinue of King Henry IV’s second son, Thomas of Lancaster (later Duke of Clarence), with whom his first military duty was to keep the peace in the parts of Ireland ruled by the English. While there he met Millicent Tibetot, heiress of Robert, Lord Tiptoft, whose first husband, Sir Stephen Scrope, had died in 1408. At age 40, she was a dozen years Fastolf’s senior, but that did not stop their being wed on Jan. 13, 1409.

Whatever else Millicent had to offer, the marriage increased John’s assets five times over, with land holdings in Castle Combe and Bathampton in Wiltshire, Oxtenton in Gloucestershire and plots in Somerset and Yorkshire. He was entitled to 240 pounds per year, 100 of which he gave his wife but none to his stepson by her previous marriage, Stephen Scrope. John and Millicent had no children. To paraphrase The Taming of the Shrew, Fastolf had “wived it wealthfully,” a not uncommon factor in medieval weddings. In so doing, by funny coincidence, he handily achieved with one widow what his semi-namesake, Falstaff, failed to do with two in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

In 1415 Fastolf sailed to northern France to take part in King Henry V’s invasion, under the direct command of John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford. A surviving warrant from the Exchequer dated June 18 noted payment due Fastolf and the 10 men-at-arms and 30 archers who came with him.

To Battle

On Aug. 18 he and his men were among the 2,300 men-at-arms and 9,000 archers under the Duke of Clarence, investing the Norman port of Harfleur. Although the ensuring siege featured a dozen large cannons—their first use by the English—Harfleur’s fortifications made it possible for a 100-man garrison under Jean, Sieur de’Estouteville to hold out long enough for 300 reinforcements to arrive under Raoul, Sieur de Gaucourt, who took charge of the defense.

The French stated that if their army did not come to their relief by Sept. 23, they would surrender. They capitulated a day earlier, leaving it to the paroled knights to collect their own ransom while townsfolk willing to swear fealty to King Henry were allowed to return home and others were ordered to depart.

This illustration of men-at-arms who fought during Henry V’s campaign shows, from left to right, a crossbowman, an English archer, and a French infantryman. More troops however fell to dysentery than to enemies in combat.

The heaviest losses in the Siege of Harfleur were due to dysentery rather than combat. Many of Henry’s 5,000 casualties fell victim to the “bloody flux,” with at least 39 dead and 1,330 sent back to England to convalesce. Among its victims was Fastolf, who consequently was absent from the “band of brothers” who slaughtered the French at Agincourt on Oct. 25. He returned to Harfleur that winter, however, to help fend off a French attempt to retake the town.

Fastolf’s fortunes rose significantly thereafter, when he was formally dubbed a knight in January 1416. In 1420 King Henry compelled the French to sign the Treaty of Troyes, naming him regent to King Charles VI, a deal sealed by his marriage to the king’s daughter, Catherine, while the king’s son, the dauphin Charles, was disinherited. In the wake of this event, Fastolf was made Master of the Household to the Duke of Bedford, governor of Maine and Anjou, and when the English occupied Paris in 1421, he was appointed “governor” of the Bastille.

Scotland had entered the conflict on France’s side in 1419, and on March 22, 1421, the French, bolstered by the Army of Scotland, won a major victory at Baugé, in which the Duke of Clarence was killed. Worse for the English, Henry V died of a sudden bout of illness on Aug. 31 that same year. That left the English crown sitting unsteadily on the 9-year-old head of Henry VI, with the Duke of Bedford serving as his regent. On Oct. 21, 1422, King Charles VI died and Dauphin Charles set out to regain his throne. The Hundred Years War resumed.

The Battle of the Herrings

Fastolf was in Bedford’s army at the Battle of Verneuil-sur-Avre on Aug. 17, 1424, in which the again-outnumbered English turned the tables on the French, Scots and Milanese mercenaries after a climactic 45-minute struggle on foot. For the loss of 1,600 Englishmen, 6,000 of the enemy were killed. Most of the dead were Scots, for whom the English declared no quarter, including John Stewart, Duke of Buchan, Archibald, Earl of Douglas, and Sir Alexander Buchanan, the last of whom had been credited with slaying Clarence at Baugé.

The 200 French nobles taken prisoner and then ransomed included Jean II, duc d’Alençon and Gilbert Motier, Maréchal de La Fayette. Touted at the time as a second Agincourt, Verneuil crippled the Army of Scotland for the rest of the war. On Feb. 5, 1426, Fastolf’s cumulative battlefield exploits reached an apex when he was made a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. A few years later, however, the veteran knight faced an unlikely nemesis in his most controversial battle.

On Oct. 12, 1428, the English invested the city of Orléans, opening more than six months of siege punctuated by numerous sallies, battles and supply attempts. One of the more prominent examples of the latter involved a convoy of 300 carts and wagons, carrying crossbow shafts, cannons, cannonballs and barrels of herring for the coming Lenten holiday. These departed Paris with a 1,600-man escort commanded by Fastolf. At the same time, Charles de Bourbon, comte de Clermont was leading a Franco-Scottish force he’d assembled to relieve Orléans while the commander of the city’s defenders, Jean de Dunois, led a force out to intercept the English convoy.

On Feb. 12, 1429, the two French forces met, totaling 4,000 men, and fell upon the convoy in a wide field at Rouvray-Sainte-Croix, about 10 miles north of Orléans. Fastolf ordered the wagons into a circular defensive laager. Clermont responded by deploying his cannons, which began inflicting casualties. At that point, the Scots’ leader, John Stewart of Darnley, ran too quickly out of patience and led a cavalry charge on the laager that forced the startled French to hold their fire rather than cannonade their allies. While the main French force hesitated, English bowmen rained arrows and crossbow bolts on the Scots. Then Fastolf unleashed his own cavalry, which overwhelmed the Scots, then lapped around the French flanks and rear, and drove them off in a disorganized rout. Darnley was among the 500 to 600 dead and Dunois was wounded.

Joan of Arc

Because of the special provisions Fastolf had been defending, his victory entered the history books as the Battle of the Herrings. On that same day, however, a teenage girl was trying to convince Robert de Baudricourt, the Dauphinois captain of Vaucouleurs, to let her confer with the Dauphin so that she could carry out her divinely ordained mission of saving France. She informed Baudricourt that the Dauphinois forces had just suffered a stinging defeat near Orléans, and that more would follow unless she was granted an audience with the Dauphin. Shortly after that, word arrived about the debacle at Rouvray and Baudricourt arranged the meeting that led to Joan of Arc taking a place alongside the hardened warriors defending Orléans—and contributing to the lifting of the siege on May 8, 1429.

Whatever direct role she had in raising the siege of Orléans, “la Pucelle” (the maid) indisputably elevated French morale. As the English forces withdrew to garrisons in the Loire River region, the veteran knights surrounding her were keen to make the most of it while they could. Jean II, duc d’Alençon, ransomed from English captivity, set his eyes on the Loire bridges. On June 12, French forces stormed Jargeau and captured the bridge at Meung-sur-Loire.

On the 15th they besieged Beaugency. Fastolf left Paris with reinforcements, which reached Meung to join forces with some of Orléans’ besiegers, led by John, 1st Earl of Talbot, and Thomas, 7th Baron Scales. With a total of 3,100 men at their disposal on June 18, Talbot urged an immediate attack on the French at Beaugency, but Fastolf recommended more caution in the face of a much larger enemy army. The defenders were unaware of the relief force’s proximity, but learned that a Breton contingent under Arthur de Richemont had just joined the French besiegers. The discouraged garrison surrendered.

Fastolf faced off against unlikely French military leader Joan of Arc, shown rallying her troops at Orleans. Inspired by visions, Joan led a series of victories against English forces who remained in France after the death of King Henry V.

Learning of Beaugency’s capitulation, Talbot agreed with Fastolf’s proposal that they withdraw to Paris. The French knew of the English presence, however, and being of no mind to call it a day, hastened off in pursuit, headed by a 180-knight vanguard under Etienne de Vignolles, nicknamed “La Hire” (the wrath), one of the first to accept Joan’s claims to divine inspiration. Close at hand were Jean de Xaintrailles, Antoine de Chabannes, Hugh Kennedy of Ardstinshar at the head of 800 Scots and the Maid herself. They caught up with their quarry near the village of Patay.

Fastolf’s Retreat

Since most of his army were archers, Talbot tried to engage the French using roughly the same tactics that had succeeded at Crécy in 1346 and at Agincourt in 1415, with most of his bowmen lined up behind a row of sharpened stakes. He also ordered 500 of them to take up ambush positions in the woods along the road. As they made their preparations, however, a stag ventured out in the field and one of the bowmen, thinking the French were still far away, gave a hunting cry.

The French vanguard was, in fact, close enough to hear that indiscreet call and, worse for the English, their archers had not yet fully deployed. Sending couriers to report the situation to the rest of their men-at-arms but not waiting for them to arrive, La Hire, Xaintrailles, Chabannes, Kennedy and Joan led a head-on charge that crashed into the English positions and exposed their flanks. Soon after that, 1,300 more mounted French men-at-arms advanced along a ridge south of the action, then deployed behind the English rear. As they began their charge, Fastolf led his contingent to join up with the mounted men-at-arms in the English vanguard, only to see them already quitting the field in disorder. Misinterpreting an order, his own men began to scatter, at which point he saw no alternative but to join them in retreat.

The rest of the battle amounted to a mopping-up operation for the French horsemen against little organized resistance. In the worst English defeat since Baugé in 1421, an estimated 2,500 were killed or captured, while the French only lost 100 (20 of whom were Scottish). The captured nobility included Talbot, Scales and Sir Thomas Rempston II, with only one knight of note escaping the debacle: Fastolf. Patay went down in history as Joan of Arc’s first victory in open battle. It also heralded a general French resurgence that led to the dauphin’s coronation as King Charles VII of France at Reims on July 17. For Sir John Fastolf, the engagement held different consequences.

Cowardice?

In 1431 another of Joan of Arc’s retinue, Jean Paton de Xaintrailles, was taken prisoner by Richard Beauchamp 13th Earl of Warwick, in a minor skirmish at Savignies. In 1433 a prisoner exchange returned Poton and Talbot to their respective armies. No sooner did Talbot return than he accused Fastolf of deserting him on the field at Patay. Fastolf, of course, hotly denied the charge, but by that time the Plantagenet aristocracy was starting to choose sides in regard to Henry VI’s fitness for the throne and as to who should succeed him.

Caister Castle shown here in modern times, was commissioned by Fastolf in 1432, based on French designs and served as his residence in Norfolk.

Though nobody knew it at the time, the Hundred Years’ War for France was winding down and as the English soil was being furrowed for the War of the Roses, Fastolf found his protestations accepted by friends, such as Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and disbelieved by political enemies such as William de la Pole, 1st Earl of Suffolk. In between the Duke of Bedford accepted Talbot’s version of the battle but forgave Fastolf and continued to trust him.

The Order of the Garter conducted an enquiry on Fastolf and concluded that he had done his best at Patay, showing prudence rather than cowardice. Yet Suffolk and others persisted in questioning his honor and Fastolf spent over a decade defending himself. Such is the closest parallel history can find between Fastolf the tarnished warlord and Falstaff, Shakespeare’s unapologetic slacker.

Fastolf lost a friend when Bedford died in 1435. He himself retired from military service in 1440. He lost a powerful enemy a decade later when the Earl of Suffolk was condemned in Parliament for maladministration and banished from England for five years, only to be intercepted in the Channel by his own enemies while enroute to Calais and beheaded on May 2, 1450. Fastolf himself subsequently was almost convicted of treason for his association with the Duke of York, who would later make a direct bid for the Crown.

Where Fact Meets Fiction

While hostility grew within the Plantagenet family, England’s century-old effort in France officially ended when Talbot was defeated and killed at Castillon-sur-Dordogne, July 17, 1453. Less than two years later the eruption of hostilities at St. Albans on May 22, 1455, launched what amounted to civil war as the royal houses of Lancaster and York fell upon each other.

By then Fastolf’s ambitions were limited to keeping and administering his land holdings, which may explain his death on Nov. 5, 1459, at the exceptional old age of 78. His neighbor and close friend, John Paston, wrote the most detailed account of Fastolf, describing him in his last years as “an irascible, acquisitive old man, ruthless in his business dealings.” Buried at Saint Benet’s Abbey in the Broads, Norfolk, he bequeathed some of his possessions toward pious works, such as New Magdelen College at University of Oxford, but most went to Paston.

A unique aspect of Henry VI Part 1 is the appearance of both the real Fastolf and the fictional Falstaff—neither flattering. Despite the Order of the Garter’s decree, Shakespeare’s Fastolf appears as a cowardly antithesis to Talbot’s sometimes reckless bravery, deserting his comrade-in-arms not only at Patay, but at Rouen. The fictional Falstaff takes over from there for more serious frivolity.

Another intriguing coincidence lies in the place where Prince Hal, Falstaff and their retinue of ne’er-do-wells spend their mostly leisure time. Among the properties that John Fastolf is said to have owned as part-time proprietor was a tavern in Southwark, London called the Boar’s Head Inn.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

Mystery Ship: Can You Identify This Dutch Reaper?

Jon Guttman — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 18:21:25 +0000

The concept of the general-purpose fighter—a long-range, heavily armed airplane capable of achieving air superiority while at the same time shouldering other tasks, such as bombing and reconnaissance—came into vogue with the development of the twin-engine Polish PZL P.38 Wilk (wolf) in 1934. Over the next few years, that design would inspire a variety of twin-engine fighter designs in other countries, such as the French Potez 63 series, the German Messerschmitt Me-110, the British Westland Whirlwind, Japan’s Nakajima J1N and Kawasaki Ki-45, and the American Bell YFM-1 Airacuda and Lockheed P-38 Lightning.

If the versatility of a multi-role fighter seemed attractive to the major powers, it was even more so to small or intermediate powers such as the Netherlands, offering the prospect of wringing more usefulness per airplane from their limited defense budgets. When the prototype of the Dutch-built Fokker G.I twin-engine fighter was first unveiled at the 1936 Paris Salon, however, it caused an international sensation.

Conceived in 1934 by Fokker’s chief designer, Dr. Erich Schatzki, as a twin-boom heavy fighter with a central nacelle that could be modified to fulfill a variety of tasks, the G.I made its first flight on March 16, 1937, and entered service with the Dutch air force in 1938. Powered by two 825-hp Bristol Mercury VIII nine-cylinder radial engines, the G.1, as the air force designated it, had no fewer than eight 7.9-millimeter FN-Browning M36 machine guns in the nose of the nacelle, as well as a ninth gun in a rotating tail cone. In addition, it could carry an internal bomb load of 880 pounds. Fokker also produced 12 somewhat smaller G.1s to be powered by two 750-hp Pratt & Whitney R-1535-SB4-G Twin Wasp Junior 14-cylinder radials and packing a nose armament of two 23-millimeter Madsen cannons and two 7.9-millimeter FN-Brownings for Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War.

Fokker negotiated sales to Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Hungary and war-torn Spain, but none of them panned out before World War II broke out, leaving all the G.Is built to guard the Netherlands’ neutrality. The Reaper’s first victim was British: a Whitworth Whitley Mark V of No. 77 Squadron, Royal Air Force, that strayed into Dutch airspace on the night of March 27, 1940, and was brought down by a Fokker G.IA flown by First Lieutenant Piet Noomen, of the 3rd JachtVliegtuig Afdeling (fighter squadron), or JaVA.

A total of 62 Fokker G.1s are believed to have been built to one degree of completion or another, but only 23 were available to the Dutch—11 with the 3rd JaVA at Waalhaven and 12 with the 4th JaVAat Bergen—when the Germans invaded. Considering the circumstances, they gave an outstanding account of themselves, shooting down at least 13 German aircraft in their first chaotic two hours of combat. Heavily armed and easy to fly, though too slow to compete with single-engine fighters, the G.1 lived up to its nickname of Le Faucheur (‘the reaper’), but it only had five days in which to do its reaping before the Germans overran the Netherlands. After that, most surviving G.1s—including 12 Twin Wasp powered versions still under construction for possible export to Finland, which the Germans completed for their own use—became part of a growing trove of war booty serving the Luftwaffe as twin-engine fighter trainers. No Fokker G.Is survive today, but a replica can be seen on display at the Nationaal Militair Museum in Soesterberg.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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A Closer Look at the U.S. Navy’s ‘Mighty Midget’

Jon Guttman — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Specifications

Propulsion: Eight Gray Marine 6-71 or two General Motors 6051 Series 71 diesel engines totaling 1,600 hp and driving twin variable-pitch propellers
Length: 158 feet 6 inches
Beam: 23 feet 3 inches
Maximum draft: 5 feet 8 inches Displacement (unladen): 250 tons
Displacement (fully loaded): 387 tons
Complement: Six officers, 65 enlisted
Maximum speed: 16.5 knots Range: 5,500 miles at 12 knots
Armament: One Mark 22 3-inch/50-caliber gun; two twin Bofors 40 mm L/60 antiaircraft guns; four Oerlikon L70 20 mm antiaircraft guns; four .50-caliber machine guns; 10 Mark 7 rocket launchers

Among the bitter lessons learned during the costly American seizure of Japanese-occupied Tarawa in November 1943 was the need for ship-based close support in the interval between bombardment and a landing. Using the hull of the LCI (landing craft infantry) as a basis, the Navy devised the Landing Craft Support (Large) (Mark 3), or simply LCS. Entering service in 1944 and combat at Iwo Jima in February 1945, it packed the heaviest armament per ton of any warship, earning the sobriquet “Mighty Midget”. British Commonwealth forces also used it in Borneo, at Tarakan and Balikpapan.

Of the 130 built, only five were lost—three sunk by Japanese Shinyo suicide motorboats in the Philippines and two falling victim to kamikaze aircraft off Okinawa. After supporting the Okinawa landings, the LCSs were fitted with radar and joined destroyers on picket duty against kamikaze attacks. It was while so engaged that Lieutenant Richard Miles McCool Jr., commander of LCS-122, saw the destroyer William D. Porter mortally stricken on June 10, 1945, by an Aichi D3A2, yet managed to rescue its crew without loss. The next evening two D3As hit LCS-122, but the seriously wounded McCool rallied his men to save their vessel and was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor. In 1949 the LCS was reclassified the LSSL (landing ship support large), and it continued to serve in Korea, Vietnam and other conflicts in foreign hands until 2007. One of two survivors discovered in Thailand is undergoing restoration to its World War II configuration at the Landing Craft Support Museum [usslcs102.org] in Vallejo, Calif.

Fitted from stem to stern with guns, the LCS would precede landing craft to the invasion beaches, softening up enemy defenses with its guns and barrages of 4.5-inch rockets.

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

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The Project That Puts U.S. Veterans First

Jon Guttman — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Monica Mohindra.

Monica Mohindra On July 27, 1953, the Korean War ended with an armistice but no official treaty, technically meaning a state of war still exists between the combatant nations. Among the multinational participants in that significant flare-up in the Cold War were nearly 7 million U.S. military service personnel, of whom more than 1 million are still living. The 70th anniversary of the armistice spurred the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project to redouble its efforts to record for posterity the memories of those participants while it still can. Military History recently interviewed Veterans History Project director Monica Mohindra about its collection, the pressure of time and ongoing initiatives to honor veterans of that “Forgotten War” and all other American conflicts.

What is the central mission of the Veterans History Project?

Our mission is to collect, preserve and make accessible the first-person remembrances of U.S. veterans who served from World War I through the more recent conflicts. We want all stories, not just those from the foxhole or the battlefronts, but from all veterans who served the United States in uniform. The idea, developed by Congress in October 2000, was to ensure we would all be able to hear directly from veterans about their lived experience, their service, their sacrifice and what they felt on a human scale about their participation in service and/or conflict.

Is your recent emphasis on the ‘forgotten’ Korean War mainly due to the anniversary?

Correct. But there is so much to share from the history of the Korean War that is relevant. We’re also marking the 75th anniversary of the desegregation of the U.S. military, and researchers have been using our collections to understand, for instance, nurses’ perspectives on what it was like to serve in a desegregated military. Our collection speaks to what it was like prior to and after desegregation.

To what extent do memories tied to both anniversaries overlap?

One of the real strengths of the Veterans History Project, and of oral history projects in general, is that one can pull generalized opinions from a multiplicity of voices. For example, there’s a story about a veteran named James Allen who “escaped” racially charged Florida to join the military. Serving in Korea in various administrative tasks, he experienced a taste of what life could be like under desegregation. When he returned to the United States, he moved back to Florida, the very place he’d escaped, to help veterans and advance such notions.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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You’re the spouse of a Navy veteran. Does that shape your perspective on history overall and the project you’ve taken up?

It absolutely adds another layer to the Veterans History Project and what it means on a human scale. This is personal. My husband’s experience, just like each veteran’s, is unique. He’s not ready to share his story—maybe not with me ever. His father, who also served, is not ready to share his story—maybe not with me, maybe not ever. Both of his grandfathers served. My grandfather served, too. So, I feel a personal imperative to help those veterans who are ready to share their stories.

It’s that seriousness of purpose, to create a private resource for future use, the Veterans History Project offers individuals around the country. We already have more than 115,000 such individual perspectives, and that gives us the opportunity to share the wealth of these collections.

Their 1950 introduction to combat was a shock for the Borinqueneers, many of whom had never seen snow.

How does the project handle contributions?

Individuals may want to start by conversing with the veterans in their lives or by finding the collection of a veteran.

To what use does the project put such memories?

People use the Veterans History Project—often online and sometimes in person here at the Folklife Center Reading Room—for a variety of reasons. More than 70 percent of our materials (letters, photographs, audio and video interviews, etc.) are digitized, and more than 3 million annual visitors come to the website. They’re using our materials for everything from school projects to enlivening curricula. Recently researchers have conducted postdoctoral research on desegregation during the Korean War. The project is also useful for beginning deeper conversations among friends and family members.

In this time of AI [artificial intelligence], the collection is a primary resource from those who had the lived experience. What did they hear? What did they see? How did they keep in touch with loved ones? These are the kind of questions we pose.

What was unique about the Korean War experience?

Perhaps the extraordinary scope of injuries service members suffered because of the cold. Consider the Borinqueneers [65th U.S. Infantry Regiment], out of Puerto Rico, many of whom had never seen snow. On crossing the seas, they arrived in these extreme conditions, and it’s all so foreign. They received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2014, and we are fortunate to have memories from 20 Borinqueneers in our collection.

Recently, the last American fighter ace of the Korean War died. Are you concerned about the time constraints you face?

Yes. The weight of that actuarial reality was quite heavy on World War I veterans. We had the pleasure to work with Frank Buckles [see “Frank Buckles, 110, Last of the Doughboys,” by David Lauterborn, on HistoryNet.com] several times, and he became sort of an emblem of his cohort, if you will. That was a heavy weight on him, one that he did not shy from.

The burden now is on people like me, you, your readers, to make sure we do sit down with the veterans in our lives. We want people 15 and up to think about doing that.

Frank Buckles, the last surviving doughboy of World War I, worked with the Veterans History Project to honor his generation.

What about the memories of U.N. personnel from other nations who served in Korea?

The legislation for the Veterans History Project is very clear. It limits our mission to those who served the U.S. military in uniform. That does include commissioned officers of the U.S. Public Health Service, an often forgotten uniformed service. We cannot accept the collections of Allies who served alongside U.S. troops. However, we do collaborate with other organizations within our sphere. For instance, in cooperation with the Korean Library Association we held an adjunct activity at the Library of Congress, a two-day symposium.

Do you accept contributions from Gold Star families?

We do. The legislation for the Veterans History Project was amended in 2016 with a new piece of legislation called the Gold Star Families Voices Act. Before that we accepted collections of certain deceased members, including photographs or a journal, diary or unpublished memoir that could capture the first-person perspective.

However, the 2016 legislation put a fine point on a definition for Gold Star families to contribute. Under the Gold Star Family Voices Act, those participating as either interviewers or interviewees must be 18 or older, as one is speaking about a situation that involves trauma. Our definition calls for collections of 10 or more photographs or 20 or more pages of letters or a journal or unpublished memoir. The other way to start a collection is to submit 30 or more minutes of audio or video interviews. This enables us to gain a full perspective of a veterans’ experience, whether they are living or deceased.

Where can an interested veteran or family member get more information?

There is all sorts of information on our website [loc.gov/vets]. They should also feel free to come to our information center at the Library of Congress [101 Independence Ave. SW, Washington, D.C.], with extended hours on Thursdays until 8 p.m.

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

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Top 10 Commanders Who Became Unlikely Stars of Military History

Jon Guttman — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 16:37:10 +0000

Judas Maccabeus (190-160 bce)

The third of five sons born to Mattathias of the Hasmonean family, priest (cohen) of Modein—the others being Eleazar, Simon, John and Jonathan—the man more widely known by his Greek name was known in Hebrew as Yehuda HaMakab, or Judah the Hammer. Judas was a cohen in his own right and would have remained so had his Seleucid overlord, Antiochus IV Epiphanes (“God Manifest”), not sought to promote homogeneity in his multi-ethnic kingdom by imposing Hellenic culture and religion on all his subjects in 168 bce. That included installing images of Hellenic gods in the Second Temple of Jerusalem, provoking a revolt by Mattathias, his sons and other Jewish pietists.

During this war for control over Judea, Judas came to the fore. After winning a string of victories, he led his makeshift army into Jerusalem on the 25th day in the Hebrew month of Kislev (approximately December), 164 bce. In the course of cleansing the Temple, tradition has it that there was only enough oil to light it for a single day, but it burned through eight nights until more oil was found.

The fighting was far from over, however. Eleazar was killed in 161 and at Elasa in 160. Judas was outgeneraled by Bacchides and died fighting. His burial ended with a quotation from King David’s lament to King Saul: “How the mighty have fallen!” Jonathan and Simon subsequently died, leaving John the last Maccabee standing by 142 bce, when Judea finally won autonomy within the Seleucid kingdom and independence in 141.

Narses (c.ad 478-568)

The exact dates of Narses’ birth and death are uncertain, as is how he came to be castrated. What is known is that he was a Romanized Armenian who served as steward, chief treasurer and grand chamber of the court to the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I.

He played a vital role in putting down the Nika riots on 532, but there is no evidence of military training leading to Justinian’s ordering him in 538 to Italy, where Count Flavius Belisarius, after having conquered the Vandals in North Africa in 533, was trying to wrest the Western Roman Empire from the Ostrogoths. Although Narses demonstrated a surprising grasp of command, he and Belisarius did not trust one another and Justinian recalled Narses. Working with minimal resources, Belisarius conduced a brilliant defense of Rome in 538, but in 541 Justinian, suspecting his loyalty, reassigned him to fight the Sassanians in Mesopotamia. Narses took Belisarius’ place in Italy and by June 551 was the supreme commander at age 73 with a string of victories. In 554 the undersized eunuch was feted to the first Triumph held in Rome in 150 years—and the last. On Nov. 14, 565, Justinian died and the new emperor, Justin II, recalled Narses to Constantinople in 567. Some accounts claim he died enroute in April 568, but others describe his death in peaceful retirement in 574 at what might have been age 96—itself an achievement in the treacherous cauldron of Byzantine politics.

Genghis Khan (c. 1162-1227)

Born to a Mongol chieftain of the Borjigin clan, Temujin was eight when his father died. Certainly he would have learned the standard Mongol mounted warrior repertoire, but his accomplishments had gone far beyond that by 1206, when a kurultai of his peers elected him their first khagan, under the name of Genghis Khan. Among the most intriguing mysteries surrounding his rise to power is how he learned, hands-on, to forge alliances, turn an unwieldy collection of steppe warriors into a vast, well-disciplined army capable of conquering continents and, while he was at it, create a political entity of unprecedented scope to administer his holdings, complete with a codified legal system—all conceived virtually from scratch.

Although the victims of his ruthless expansion of empire have been estimated as high as 17 million—one-fifth the earth’s population at the time—Genghis Khan conquered the largest contiguous land mass in history and laid the foundation for a meritocracy allowing universal religious tolerance, which in times of peace connected the western world by pan-Eurasian trade. All this was without precedent in the Mongol world, but it lasted a quarter of a millennium. Is it any wonder that, however controversial he is elsewhere, Genghis Khan is still at the top of Mongolia’s hierarchy of national heroes?

Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly (1559-1632)

Born in the Brabant in the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium), Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly attended Jesuit school in Cologne, but at age 15 enlisted as a soldier in the Spanish army against the Dutch in the Eighty Years War. In 1600 he served in a mercenary unit with the Holy Roman Empire fighting Ottoman forces in Hungary and Transylvania. It was not uncommon for professional soldiers to learn hands-on as they rose in the ranks in the 17th century, but Tilly was exceptional in that he ascended from private to field marshal in just five years. In 1610 Duke Maximilian I gave him command of the Catholic League.

When the Thirty Years War broke out in Bohemia in 1618, Tilly’s victory at White Mountain in 1620 knocked Bohemia out of the conflict at almost the beginning. As other Protestant countries rose against the Empire, Tilly defeated each in turn, seeming to be invincible.

Tilly’s career began to tarnish when King Gustavus II Adolphus put the Thirty Years War through a new phase with his innovatively mobile Swedish army. After a 20-day siege, on May 20, 1631 Tilly’s forces stormed Magdeburg and for the first time he lost control over his troops, who butchered 20,000 of the city’s 25,000 population. On Sept. 17, Tilly confronted Gustavus at Breitenfeld and was convincingly outmaneuvered and beaten, suffering 27,000 casualties. Tilly scored a modest victory at Bamberg on March 9, 1632, but at Rain am Lech on April 15 he was struck in the thigh by an arquebus round and died of osteomyelitis in Ingolstadt on the 30th.

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658)

When the English Civil War broke out, its most famous—and notorious—figure was known among the merchant community and had been a member of Parliament for his home county of Huntingdon in 1628-29 and 1640-42. His only military experience had been raising a cavalry troop in Cambridgeshire for the Parliamentarians, which arrived too late to participate in the opening battle at Edgehill on Oct. 23, 1642. Oliver Cromwell proved avid at learning from experience, most notably at Gainesborough on July 23, 1643, at which point he was a colonel. He was involved in redeveloping the Parliamentary forces into a “New Model Army,” which proved its worth in the pivotal battles of Marston Moor in July 1644 and Naseby on June 14, 1645. By 1652 Cromwell’s subsequent campaigns in Scotland and Ireland sealed his place among Britain’s most successful generals. If appraised by his own standard, however—“warts and all”—he is also remembered as a regicide (he was the third of 59 to sign King Charles I’s death warrant), the revolutionary who dissolved Parliament and made himself “Lord Protector,” i.e. dictator, and one of those oppressors the Irish still love to hate.

Nathanael Greene (1742-1786)

Born in Warwick, Rhode Island, Nathanael Greene was running a mill when the American Revolution broke out, but he was an avid reader with—despite being a Quaker—a fascination with military science. That and his advocating the break with Britain led to his being expelled from his congregation, although he still regarded himself as a Quaker. When the battles of Lexington and Concord occurred, Greene’s only contribution was to form a militia unit, the Kentish Guard. On June 14, 1775 Greene met Maj. Gen. George Washington, the new commander of the Continental Army, in Boston, and the two became close friends. Serving as quartermaster-general, Greene distinguished himself in combat at Brandywine Creek, Valley Forge and Monmouth Court House. On Dec. 2, 1780 Washington sent Greene to Charlotte, N.C., where he reorganized the beaten Continental forces in the southern colonies and set out to retake them from British Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis’ army. Greene choreographed an artful campaign of fighting retreats, climaxing at Guilford Court House, N.C., on March 15, 1781. Although Cornwallis ended up holding the ground and technically winning the battle, the 633 casualties he suffered compelled him to disengage and retire to Virginia. While Cornwallis was trapped at Yorktown, Greene took the offensive, driving the last British in the South from Charleston, S.C. on Dec. 14, 1782. Before his death of heatstroke in Georgia on June 19, 1786, Greene summed up how he wore Cornwallis down: “We fight, get beat, rise and fight again.”

Francois-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803)

François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803)

The son of an educated slave on French-owned Saint-Domingue, François-Dominique Toussaint got some education of his own from Jesuit contacts while serving as a livestock handler, herder, coachman and steward until 1776, when he attained freedom. A slave revolt broke out between oppressed blacks and their white and mulatto overseers in August 1791. By 1793 he was leading rebels in a self-developed guerrilla force and had adopted the surname “Louverture” (“opening”). Later that year he and his followers helped a newly-Republican France fight off Spanish and British forces and was encouraged to learn that the French National Assembly ended slavery in May 1794. Over the following years Louverture displayed a remarkable grasp of civil leadership, restoring the economy in 1795 and overrunning Spanish San Domingo in January 1801, declaring the liberation of its white, black and mulatto population. In January 1802, however, Sainte-Domingue was invaded by a French army led by Maj. Gen. Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, brother-in-law of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, with orders to reinstate slavery on the island. Overwhelmed and losing followers, Louverture agreed to lay down his arms in May and retire to his plantation. Instead, Bonaparte ordered his arrest. He died in Fort-de-Joux in the Jura Mountains on April 7, 1803.

Bonaparte’s treachery backfired. Leclerc died of yellow fever in November 1802. On May 18, 1803 Bonaparte made some quick cash for his European operations by approving American President Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, effectively writing off his ambitions in the New World. On Jan. 1, 1804 one of Louverture’s disciples, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, declared himself governor-general of Haiti, the world’s first black republic.

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas-Davy de la Pailleterie (1762-1806)

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas-Davy de la Pailleterie was the issue of Alexandre Davy, Marquis de la Pailleterie, a minor French noble plantation owner in Jérémie, Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), and one of his slaves, Marie-Céssette Dumas (whose surname Thomas-Alexandre adopted). The boy accompanied his father to France, where he could be free and get an education. In 1786, however, he enlisted in the French army’s 5th Dragoon Regiment (Queen). When the French Revolution broke out, he found numerous opportunities to show his military talents. On June 2, 1792 he was promoted to corporal, but over the next few years he was commissioned a lieutenant, then rose to lieutenant colonel and, in July 1793–the first person of African descent in history to attain the rank of brigadier general. Although not the most gifted strategist, he was exceptionally strong and reveled in leading by example. Among others, Dumas commanded the Army of the West in 1796 and the Army of Italy in 1796. On March 25, 1797, during a fighting retreat from Brixen and Botzen in the Tyrol, Dumas held the Brixen bridge against an Austrian cavalry squadron singlehanded. From 1798 to 1799 he served in Napoleon Bonaparte’s Army of the Orient.

Retiring in 1802, Dumas died of stomach cancer in 1806. Undoubtedly his lifetime of adventure inspired his son, Alexandre Dumas Sr., to write adventure novels, such as The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask and The Count of Monte Cristo. His grandson, Alexandre Dumas Jr. also became an esteemed novelist and playwright, best known for La Dame aux Camélias.

Benjamin H. Grierson (1826-1911)

One of the iconic names in American Civil War cavalry had no military training and was afraid of horses. Born in Pittsburgh, Pa. on July 8, 1826, Benjamin Henry Grierson was nearly kicked to death by a horse at age eight and distrusted the beasts ever since. Educated in Ohio, he became a music teacher and shopkeeper in Illinois when war broke out and joined the U.S. Army at Cairo on May 8, 1861, as a volunteer aide to Brig. Gen. Benjamin M. Prentiss. On Oct. 24, however, Grierson was assigned to the 6th Illinois Cavalry and on March 26, 1862 his men elected him colonel.

Mastering his horse problem, Grierson led his troopers on raids and skirmishes throughout Tennessee and Mississippi. This climaxed with a diversionary raid in which Grierson led 1,700 troopers of the 6th and 7th Illinois and 2nd Iowa Cavalry regiments from La Grange, Tenn. on April 17, 1863 600 miles to Baton Rouge, La. on May 2. A step ahead of Confederate pursuers, Grierson’s raiders inflicted 100 casualties, took 500 prisoners, captured 3,000 arms and destroyed 50 to 60 railroad and telegraph lines. Of greatest strategic importance, the raid diverted a division’s worth of Confederate soldiers while Maj. Gen. Ulysses Grant’s forces slipped south of the Mississippi fortress of Vicksburg, leading to its July 4 surrender. After the war, Grierson decided to make a career of Army service, spending most on the frontier, his commands including the 10th U.S. Cavalry Regiment (Colored). On April 5, 1890 he was given a rare promotion to brigadier general in the Regular Army, shortly before retiring on July 8 of that year.

Vo Nguyen Giap (1911-2013)

The son of a well-to-do farmer who died in a French prison, Vo Nguyen Giap attended a Catholic lycée in Hue, joined the Indochinese Communist Party in 1931, gained a law degree in 1938 and worked as a history teacher while self-studying military history. In May 1940 he met Ho Chi Minh in China, where he learned tactics and strategy as practiced by Mao Zedong. By the end of World War II Giap was Minister of Defense for the communist-nationalist People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN).

Between 1946 and 1954 Giap blended guerrilla and conventional warfare, winning some campaigns and suffering some stinging defeats but learning from experience. His decisive victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 shocked the Western powers, as did his success in wearing down U.S. forces between 1965 and 1973. Giap viewed himself as more soldier than politician, which may explain his being sidelined by North Vietnamese General Secretary Le Duan, whose “big battle” strategy prevailed over Giap’s during the 1968 Tet and 1972 Easter offensives, resulting in bloody tactical defeats. In the end, the PAVN prevailed over the American-backed Saigon government in 1975. In 1978 Giap oversaw an invasion of Kampuchea that toppled Pol Pot’s radical Maoist Khmer Rouge government. When the Chinese retaliated with a punitive expedition into Vietnam on Feb. 12, 1979, the PAVN’s stout defense convinced the invaders to withdraw on March 16.

Although Vo Nguyen Giap is widely touted as one of the military geniuses of his century, much of his self-taught strategy and tactics could only have worked in Indochina’s unique conditions in the second half of the 20th century.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

The Battle of Surigao Strait: The Last Battleship Duel

Jon Guttman — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 19:03:25 +0000

This story is an updated version of one published in the October 1994 issue of Military History.

A battleship Arms race

The Battle of the Philippine Sea, fought on June 19 and 20, 1944, left Japan with the bulk of its navy intact but no longer able to oppose the U.S. Navy on equal terms. More serious than the sinking of three aircraft carriers in that action was the virtual decimation of the airmen and aircraft of Japan’s carrier air groups. Even so, Japan still possessed some of the most powerful surface warships in the world. The question now was whether they could ever venture close enough to engage their American counterparts.

Then, on October 20, U.S. Army troops landed on the island of Leyte. General Douglas MacArthur was fulfilling his vow to the Philippines—and here a widespread maze of islands provided the Japanese fleet with a final opportunity to strike at the advancing Americans.

Devised by Admiral Soemu Toyoda and his Combined Fleet staff, Operation Sho-I “Victory 1”) was typically Japanese in its complexity. Essentially, three forces of battleships, cruisers and destroyers were to converge on the American landing site in Leyte Gulf, engaging and sinking any enemy ships on their way to shell the beachhead. The “First Diversionary Attack Force”—in reality, the main force—commanded by Vice Adm. Takeo Kurita, would come from the north, through San Bernardino Strait. Joining it from the south, via Surigao Strait, would be two smaller surface forces commanded by Vice Adms. Kiyohide Shima and Shoji Nishimura.

The fast aircraft carriers of Admiral William F. Halsey’s Third Fleet were to be lured away by a fourth Japanese force, commanded by Vice Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa and including the carriers Zuikaku, Zuiho, Chitose and Chiyoda, steaming off the northern Philippines. With only 118 aircraft between them, Ozawa’s carriers were not expected to achieve much, other than to lure Halsey’s Third Fleet away from Leyte, but its task was essentially sacrificial in nature. If the decoy planned worked, the American naval forces left around Leyte Gulf might be sufficiently weakened to be crushed between the two prongs of surface warships.

Speculation about the practicality of Toyoda’s strategy has been debated ever since, but one factor, more than any others, make its innate futility clear. The U.S. Army had already landed and secured a beachhead on Leyte days before the naval operation was launched. Toyoda and his senior officers knew this, but to them it was beside the point. Unable to countenance watching Japan go down in defeat and surrender its high seas fleet the way the Germans had in 1919 and the Italians in 1943, Toyoda was willing to sacrifice his entire navy just to emblazon in history that it went down fighting.

Even by those parameters, Sho-I got off to a poor start. At midnight on October 23, Kurita’s main force was ambushed in. the narrow Palawan passage by two American submarines. Darter sank Kurita’s flagship, the heavy cruiser Atago, and badly damaged its sister ship, Takao, while Dace sank the cruiser Maya. Darter subsequently ran aground and had to be abandoned. Kurita transferred his flag to the giant battleship Yamato, but it had to be unsettling to lose three of his most powerful ships before even reaching the projected combat zone.

No turning back

On October 24, the U.S. Third Fleet’s alerted carriers launched their planes to go after Kurita’s ships, at the same time fighting off an attack by Vice Adm. Shigeru Fukudome’s Second Air Fleet, joined by most of Ozawa’s aircraft. The Americans lost one light carrier, Princeton, while Yamato’s sister, the battleship Musashi, sank after being hit by 15 torpedoes and 16 bombs. Off to the northeast Ozawa’s carriers, now down to a hopeless 29 aircraft, had still gone completely unnoticed.

Shaken, Kurita turned back, but at 6:15 p.m. he received a message from Admiral Toyoda in Japan: “With confidence in heavenly guidance the combined force will attack.” In essence, it was a chiding reminder to Kurita that retreat was not an option. He turned his force eastward again, unaware that his slim chances of success had taken an arbitrary turn for the better.

Just after 4 p.m., it seems, a scouting Curtiss SB2C Helldiver had spotted Ozawa’s force and reported it to Halsey. Convinced that Kurita’s beating in the Sibuyan Sea had eliminated him as a threat, Halsey took all three of his available carrier task groups and steamed north for Ozawa’s carriers—leaving the San Bernardino Strait almost completely unprotected.

What remained adjacent to the beachhead was the naval force delegated to provide direct support for MacArthur’s amphibious operations, the Seventh Fleet under Vice Adm. Thomas Cassin Kincaid. While it lacked any fleet carriers, the Seventh Fleet had 18 small escort carriers led by Rear Am. Thomas L. Sprague’s Task Group 77.4. Its main punch, however, was a sextet of dated but still powerful battleships, commanded by experienced admirals who knew how to make the most of them.

While Kurita vacillated to the north, two smaller approached Leyte Gulf from the south. The first and most powerful of them was Nishimura’s “Force C,” comprised of the World War I-vintage battleships Yamashiro and Fuso, heavy cruiser Mogami and destroyers Michishio, Asagumo, Yamagumo and Shigure. “Number Two Striking Force,” as the other unit was called, was commanded by Shima and consisted of the heavy cruisers Nachi and Ashigawa, light cruiser Abukuma and destroyers Shiranuhi, Kasumi, Ushio and Akebono.

A modern samurai?

In theory the two groups were to go up Surigao Strait and supplement the tremendous firepower of Kurita’s “Force A.” Several factors, however, would prevent their uniting. First, Nishimura was directly under Kurita’s command, whereas Shima, coming down from the Formosa, was answerable to another superior, Vice Adm. Gunichi Mikawa. Although given vague orders to “support and cooperate” with Nishimura, Shima made no serious attempt to join him, choosing instead to follow him at a distance of 30 to 50 miles.

There were serious temperamental differences between the two admirals, though both were too professional for their mutual loathing to have any real bearing on their failure to combine their forces. Both had grave doubts as to their chances of success—Shima approached the mission with caution and expressed his misgivings; Nishimura was more the more reckless, rushing ahead to either victory or a fighting death worthy of a samurai. On a more practical level, Nishimura was anxious to reach Leyte Gulf before dawn, because he was convinced that his chances of outfighting his adversaries would be better at night—a forlorn hope, since by late 1943 the Americans had much-improved radar capability.

Nishimura’s Force C was first spotted in the Sulu Sea by aircraft from carriers Enterprise and Franklin at 9:05 a.m. on October 24. The planes attacked at 9:18, scoring a bomb hit on Fuso’s fantail that destroyed its floatplanes, while another bomb knocked out the destroyer Shigure’s forward gun turret. Neither ship was slowed, however. At 11:55 a bomber from the U.S. Army’s Fifth Air Force found and reported Shima’s force. Admiral Kincaid now knew the enemy’s strength and his probable course. He delegated the job of dealing with the southern threat to the commander of his Fire Support Unit South, Rear Adm. Jesse E. Oldendorf. Flying his pennant aboard the heavy cruiser Louisville, Oldendorf had three battleships, Pennsylvania, California and Tennessee, at his disposal; they were joined by three more “big boys” from Rear Adm. George L. Weyler’s Fire Support Unit North, Mississippi, Maryland and West Virginia.

Under normal circumstances, Oldendorf’s battle group could pulverize both Japanese formations, but his ships had used up most of their ammunition during the shore bombardment. Oldendorf could not afford an extravagant display of firepower—not if he wished to avoid seeing his mighty battlewagons sunk by Nishimura’s antiques simply because they had no shells left. To make every shot count, he would need accurate information on the enemy’s route up Surigao Strait.

The vital role of intelligence-gathering was assigned to the Seventh Fleet’s patrol torpedo (PT) boats, under the overall command of Commander Selman S. Bowling. That night Bowling’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Robert A. Leeson, gathered the 39 boats then available, organized them into 13 three-boat sections, led them south through Mindanao Strait and dispersed them across the northern end of Surigao Strait.

The prospect of action was music to the ears of the PT boat crews. Their primary mission, however, was to lie low and report whatever they saw coming. As night fell they, rather than aircraft, became the eyes of the Seventh Fleet. The weather deteriorated, with frequent rain squalls affecting visibility, by at 10:46 p.m. a section of PT boats lying off Bohol Island picked up something on their radars. Instead of immediately reporting their discovery, however, the PT boats advanced at 24 knots to attack. They were three miles from their intended targets—still beyond torpedo range—when Shigure, survivor of numerous night actions in the Solomon Islands, sighted them. Suddenly, the crack of big guns rent the night and the Battle of Surigao Strait was on.

The battle begins

With shells splashing all around them, the PT boats made smoke and zigzagged as they tried to close on the enemy. Suddenly Shigure’s searchlight fell on PT-152 and in seconds a Japanese shell set the craft afire and killed one of its gunners. PT-152’s skipper, Lieutenant junior grade Joseph Eddin, steered away, as did his two consorts. One of the latter, PT-130, was also hit, a round passing through it without exploding, but knocking out its radio. Once contact was broken off, PT-130 sped over to the next section of PT boats and relayed its contact report to PT-127, which radioed it to the PT- oat tender Wachaspreague. The news reached Oldendorf aboard the cruiser Louisville at 12:26 a.m.

Meanwhile, more of the PT boats converged on the Japanese, engaging them with their 40mm cannons as well as their torpedoes. PT-151 and PT-146 each fired a torpedo at the heavy cruiser Mogami, but both missed. They and PT-190 then fled, pursued by destroyer Yamagumo.

Satisfied with the way things were going thus far, Nishimura reported to Kurita and Shima that he expected to pass Panoan Island at 1:30 and enter Leyte Gulf. “Several torpedo boats sighted,” he said, “but enemy situation otherwise unknown.”

At 2:05, as Nishimura’s force passed Camiguin Point and turned due north, Leeson’s flagship, PT-134, tried to attack but was driven off by intense gunfire. PT-490 tried to attack a destroyer at 2:07 but was hit. One of PT-493’s torpedoes hung on the rack and as it made smoke to cover PT-490’s retirement, it took three 4.7mm shells, possibly from battleship Yamashiro’s secondary battery; the hits killed two men and wounded five others, including its captain, Lt. jg Richard W. Brown, and his executive officer (XO). One of the shells also punched a hole in its hull, but Petty Officer Albert W. Brunelle, described by a shipmate as a “slight sissified-looking boy whom no one expected to be of any use in combat,” stuffed his like jacket in the hole and kept PT-493 afloat just long enough for the crew to run it onto the rocks off Panaon Island. (After wading ashore Brown and his crew were picked up the next morning by PT-491, but the high tide cast PT-493 adrift and it sank in deep water. Brunelle was later awarded the Navy Cross.)

While the PT boats were faring poorly in their efforts to damage Nishimura’s ships, Oldendorf was deploying his force across the northern end of Surigao Strait in battle formation. On the right flank, off the coast of Leyte Island itself, lay destroyer squadron (Desron) 39 led by Captain Kenmore M. McManes aboard Hutchins, and included Bache, Daly, Beale,Killen and the Australian destroyer Arunta. Backing them up were three cruisers, the American Phoenix and Boise and the Australian Shropshire, along with three more U.S. destroyers, Clayton, Thorne and Welles. In the center was Captain Roland M. Smoot’s Desron 56, comprised of flagship Newcome, Richard P. Leary and Albert W. Grant. Immediately to his north was Destroyer Division (Desdiv) 112 under Captain Thomas F. Conley Jr. on Robinson and including Halford and Bryant. To the south were destroyers Heywood L. Edwards, Leutze and Bennion. Farther south, athwart the passage, was Captain Jesse G. Coward’s Desron 54, made up of his flagship Remey plus Melvin, McGowan, McDermut (flagship of Desdiv 108’s Commander Richard H. Phillips) and Monssen. Also waiting in the first American line, due north of Hibuson Island, lay Oldendorf’s flagship Louisville, along with heavy cruisers Portland and Minneapolis and the light cruisers Denver and Columbia. North of them were the destroyers Aulick, Cony and Sigourney. Last but by no means least, forming the backfield, were Oldendorf’s heavy hitters, the battleships Pennsylvania, California, Tennessee, Mississippi, Maryland and West Virginia.

american torpedoes honing in

The last PT boat attack ended at 2:13 a.m. off Sumilon Island. For the loss of three men dead and 20 wounded, the boats had scored no hits, but they had accomplished their primary mission—pinpointing and reporting the Japanese movement. At 2:25, Lieutenant Carl T. Gleason’s PT-327 spotted the enemy 10 miles away and reported the contact to Captain Coward. He in turn ordered Gleason to clear his PT-boat section out of the way, so that they destroyers could engage the enemy. At 3 a.m. Nishimura’s destroyer vanguard ran into Desron 54 and the main event was on. By 3:01, Coward’s “tin cans” had launched 27 torpedoes and begun a zigzagging retirement. Japanese searchlights pierced the night and shells straddled the Americans, but the shoreline blurred the more primitive radar of the Japanese, and no solid hits were scored.

At 3:09 McDermut and Monssen launched 20 more torpedoes from the west. The Japanese fired at those tormentors, too, but again their shells only managed to straddle the American destroyers. Then the American torpedoes began to strike home. One of Melvin’s “fish” ploughed into battleship Fuso’s No.1 turret and another struck it astern, flooding a boiler room and starting a fire. Even with its speed lowered to 12 knots, it developed a starboard list, and at 3:20 it turned south, doing 10 knots. Massive flooding continued and at 3:45 the ungainly battlewagon went down by the bow. Only about 10 of its 1,630 crewmen survived. Their testimony that their ship sank in one piece, not blown in two as per earlier claims, was confirmed decades later when Fuso’s still-intact remains were discovered.

As the torpedoes from Desdiv 108 commander Phillips’ two ships came at him, Nishimura made a half-hearted evasive turn that allowed his flagship to escape Fuso’s fate. One torpedo struck Yamashiro but failed to slow it down. His destroyers were less fortunate. Soon after taking a hit, Yamagumo blew up and sank. A second torpedo left Michishio dead in the water and another blew Asagumo’s bows off. All three hits came from McDermut in the most successful torpedo spread launched by a U.S. Navy destroyer. At 3:30 Nishimura signaled Kurita and Shima: “Enemy torpedo boats and destroyers on both sides of northern entrance to Surigao Strait. Two of our destroyers torpedoed and drifting. Yamashiro hit by one torpedo but fit for battle.” He then single-mindedly pressed on—straight into the waiting clutches of Desron 24.

Again, the Allies attacked in groups of three, Hutchins leading Daly and Bache to loose 15 torpedoes. Farther up the strait, Australian Commander Alfred E. Buchanan of Arunta led Killen and Beale for the second attack—bringing his trio into a closer, more effective range before sending a total of 14 torpedoes at Nishimura.

Recognizing Yamashiro’s distinctive silhouette, Commander Howard G. Corey of the destroyer Killen ordered his torpedoes set to run at a shallower-than-usual depth, 22 feet, before launching his spread. Four of them detonated under the old battlewagon’s keel, breaking its back. While 5-inch shells pelted his crippled flagship, Nishimura issued a general order: “You are to proceed and attack all ships.” At that point, only heavy cruiser Mogami and destroyer Shigure were in any condition to do any proceeding or attacking, but they dutifully steamed on. Somehow Yamashiro’s crew managed to get their ship underway too, plodding on at 15 knots.

Having failed to score any torpedo hits, McManes of Desron 24 circled around Nishimura’s heavies and encountered the crippled destroyers Michishio and Asagumo, which he engaged with gunfire until Rear Adm. Russell S. Berkey, commanding the right flank of Allied cruisers aboard Phoenix, ordered Desron 24 to clear the area because the American battle line was about to commence firing. As his “tin cans” turned northward, McManes’ flagship Hutchins fired its last four torpedoes at Asagumo. They missed it but struck the drifting Michishio, which blew up and sank at 3:58.

Meanwhile, Nishimura’s dwindling Force C ran into Captain Smoot’s Desron 56, the central element of which attacked in two sections (Robinson, Halford and Bryant, followed by Heywood L. Edwards, Leutze and Bennion. After they launched their torpedoes and retired, Smoot, aboard Newcomb, led Richard P. Leary and Albert W. Grant against the enemy formation while the Japanese were turning from a northerly to a westerly course. Following their gun flashes, Smoot led his destroyers on a parallel course to the right of the Japanese and at 4:05 he fired torpedoes at a range of 6,300 yards.

Smoot then had to retire—via one of two unhealthy escape routes. If he went northward, directly away from the Japanese, he would run afoul of the American battle line. Continuing west could take him clear of the American line of fire, but he would still be under enemy fire. Newcomb’s skipper, Commander Lawrence B. Cooke, recommended the northward option and Smoot concurred. As Newcomb and Leary turned north, a flurry of shells, Japanese and American, descended on them—Oldendorf’s “big boys” had finally entered the fight.

Standing rearmost in Oldendorf’s line, Admiral Weyler’s battleships had picked up what remained of the Nishimura’s force on their Mark 8 radars at 3:23. The range was 33,000 yards and Weyler held fire. At 3:31, when the Japanese came within 15,600 yards of his cruisers, Oldendorf signaled them to commence firing. Weyler’s battle line, then 22,800 yards from their targets, joined in two minutes later.

grant Falls

Yamashiro’s speed was down to 12 knots when Nishimura ran straight into the fiery, Wagnerian climax he seemed to have been seeking. At 3:52, as a deluge of heavy caliber shells fell on and around his flagship, he sent a final, pathetic message ordering Fuso—which, unknown to him, lay far behind, sinking—to join him at top speed.

Of the six American battleships, only one, Mississippi, had not been temporarily sunk or damaged in the Japanese carrier strike on Pearl Harbor, but their moment of revenge did not amount to much of a contest. West Virginia, leading the line, sent the most shells at its target—93 16-inch armor-piercing rounds. Tennessee, which had participated in 11 operations between its resurrection after Pearl and this action, fired 69 14-inch shells, while her sister, California, fired 63. The other three battlewagons, equipped with the older Mark 3 radar sets, had more trouble. Maryland’s resourceful gun crews ranged in on the splashes from the others and sent six salvoes—a total of 48 16-inch shells—at the Japanese. Pearl veteran Pennsylvania, unable to get a fix on a target, did not fire a shot.

The U.S. Navy battleship USS West Virginia (BB-48) off the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Washington, July 2, 1944, following reconstruction (Naval History and Heritage Command).

Yamashiro, in contrast, had no fire control radar and was shooting at the only targets its crew could see—the destroyers and cruisers. None of its 14-inch shells came near Weyler’s battleships, nor did they even score any hits on a cruiser. Only one Allied ship felt its dying wrath: the unlucky destroyer Albert W. Grant.

As the third ship in Smoot’s Desron 56 column, Grant had launched half of its torpedo complement at 4:03. Then, at 4:07, it took a shell hit. Just as it was about to turn north, more shells struck it. Realizing his ship might be sunk, Grant’s skipper, Commander Terrell A. Nisewaner, ordered all its torpedoes loosed at the enemy.

Still the shells came—a total of seven 4.7-inchers from the flailing Yamashiro’s secondary battery and 11 6-inchers from the American cruiser Denver. A hit on the 40mm gun mount ignited ammunition and started a fire. An explosion on the starboard boat davit killed the ship’s doctor, Lieutenant Charles Akin Mathieu, along with five radiomen and almost the entire amidships repair party. All lights, telephone communications, radars and radios were put out of commission. Resorting to a blinker gun, Nisewaner signaled: “WE ARE DEAD IN THE WATER TOW NEEDED.”

Within the stricken destroyer, First Class Pharmacist’s Mate W.H. Swain Jr. improvised a first-aid dressing station in the head and took on the tasks of physician and surgeon. The chief commissary steward, L.M. Holmes, set up a similar medical station in the wardroom, while sonarman J.C. O’Neill Jr. administered morphine and first aid to grievously wounded shipmates. On Holmes’ wardroom table, Radioman First Class William M. Selleck, who had had both of his legs blown off, uttered last words that none of his shipmates would ever forget: “There’s nothing you can do for me, fellows. Go ahead and do something for those others.”

A warrior’s death

Meanwhile, at 4:09, news of Grant’s situation reached Oldendorf’s flagship and word was relayed to the heavy warships to cease fire. Somehow, Grant stayed afloat. Somehow so did Yamashiro, which even managed to raise 15 knots as it turned hard left and retired southward. Ten minutes later, however, the cumulative punishment of shells and torpedoes caught up with the old dreadnought and Yamashiro capsized, taking all but a few of its crew with it. If Shoji Nishimura could not achieve victory, he gained the other alternative—a warrior’s death.

Cruiser Mogami showed even greater endurance than Yamashiro. Set on fire by an avalanche of 5-inch shells from McManes’ destroyers, it turned south, made smoke and loosed a spread of torpedoes at 4:01. A minute later, an 8-inch salvo from Portland killed Mogami’s captain, his XO and all other officers on the bridge, while also hitting the engines and fireroom and bringing the ship to a dead halt.

At 4:13 Richard P. Leary reported torpedoes passing close by. Admiral Weyler, lying 11,000 yards north of the destroyer, prudently turned away, avoiding Mogami’s last deadly volley, but also taking his battleships out of the fight. Making the most of that reprieve, Mogami’s engineers managed to get it underway again, and it retired southward, joined by Shigure. Meanwhile. Passing through a rain squall, Admiral Shima’s Number Two Striking Force was ambushed at 3:15 off Panaon Island by PT-134, but its torpedoes missed.

At 3:20 Shima ordered a starboard turn so that one of his destroyers could stay clear of Panaon and raised speed to 26 knots. As he did so, however, the destroyer was spotted by Lt. jg Isodore M. Kovar and the crew of PT-137, who launched a torpedo at it. PT-137’s “fish” missed its intended target but, as luck would have it, ran right into the light cruiser Abukuma instead. Badly damaged with 30 crewmen dead and its speed reduced to 10 knots, Abukuma had to drop out of formation. For scoring the most notable success of the PT boats that night, Kovar was awarded the Navy Cross.

At 4:10, as Shima headed north at 28 knots with his two remaining cruisers and four destroyers, he encountered what seemed to be two battleships ablaze in the night—more likely the dying destroyers Asagumo and Michishio. At 4:24, having picked up two southbound ships on his radar screen, he ordered his cruisers to launch torpedoes; they fired erratic spreads of eight apiece. That done, Shima made a quick evaluation based on what little information he had. He recalled his destroyers, which had steamed ahead but still could “see” nothing beyond the smoke laid earlier by the American destroyers. He then sent out a radio dispatch to all Japanese units in the vicinity: “This force has concluded its attack and is retiring from the battle area to plan subsequent action.”

die trying

Just then Mogami emerged from the fog. Nachi’s Captain Enpei Kanooka ordered a change in course to 110 degrees, but he had underestimated Mogami’s speed (he thought it was virtually dead in the water) and the two cruisers collided at 4:30.

Its stern damaged, Shima’s flagship slowed to 18 knots. That settled matters for Shima—he ordered his column to retire, joined by the battered Mogami and Shigure, both miraculously able to keep up in spite of their own damage. At 4:55, Lieutenant Gleason’s PT boats tried to pick off Shigure, but it fought them off, scoring a slightly damaging hit on PT-321.

At the northern end of the strait, Oldendorf learned of the Japanese withdrawal and commenced pursuit. As his flagship, Louisville, headed down the middle of the passageway, he ordered his flank ships to move south and sent a message to Admiral Kincaid: “Enemy cruisers and destroyers are retiring. Strongly recommend an air attack.”

Not all of Oldendorf’s destroyers took part in the chase. Claxton found about 150 Japanese in the water off Bugho Point and lowered a motor whaleboat. Despite an officer who urged his men to avoid capture, three survivors were recovered, including a warrant officer who spoke English and confirmed that his ship, Yamashiro, had gone down. At 5:15, Newcomb and Leary went to assist Albert W. Grant, Newcomb putting its medical officer and two corpsmen aboard the crippled destroyer. At 5:20 Oldendorf’s ships caught up with the slow moving Mogami. Louisville, Portland and Denver immediately engaged it. Several direct hits rekindled Mogami’s fires and Odendorf moved on to seek other prey. Mogami was not quite finished, however, as Lt. jg Harley A. Thronson of PT-491 discovered at 6 a.m., when he found it limping south at 6 knots and tried to trail it—only to come under 8-inch fire that caused his boat to “leap right into the air.” Two torpedoes from PT-491 missed the cruiser, while PT-137 was driven off by its secondary guns. Mogami was not only still full of fight, but had sped up, Kovar reported, to 12 or 14 knots.

Another bellicose cripple was Asagumo, as proved when Cony and Sigourney caught up with it. Those destroyers were having a lively exchange of shellfire when cruisers Denver and Columbia arrived and settled the dispute with their 6-inch guns. A battle-scarred veteran of Java and Guadalcanal, Asagumo died game—its after turret spat defiance even when its decks were awash, and its gunners got off their last parting shot just as its stern went under at 7:21.

an unpredictable retreat

Before any further Japanese units would be overtaken, Oldendorf learned of a shocking new development. Advancing unhindered by Halsey’s Third Fleeet—which was pursuing Ozawa’s decoy carriers—Kurita’s main force had rounded San Bernardino Strait and was engaging the escort carriers, destroyers and destroyer escorts of Carrier Task Unit 77.4.3 (also known as Taffy 3) off Samar Island. Cancelling his pursuit of Shima and recalling all ships involved, Oldendorf and the weary sailors under his command prepared to oppose the new, more serious threat. But then the Battle of Leyte Gulf took one more unexpected turn.

In one of naval history’s epic fighting retreats, Taffy 3 managed to fatally cripple three Japanese heavy cruisers, Suzuya, Chokai and Chikuma, at the cost of the escort carrier Gambier Bay, destroyers Hoel and Johnston and destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts. Their desperate courage and sacrifice should have done no more than slow Kurita’s advance, but a series of factors had undermined the Japanese admiral’s faith in his own impending victory. Just the day before, he had lost his original flagship and later had seen one of his most powerful battleships, Musashi, sunk by enemy aircraft. The fight now being put up by Taffy 3’s ships and planes caused him to exaggerate their size to fleet, rather than escort, proportions—a perception rendered no better by the fact that his replacement flagship, battleship Yamato, was driven out of the chase in the process of dodging a spread of destroyer torpedoes and was out of touch with the action thereafter. At 9:11 he ordered his ships to break off contact and to “rendezvous, my course north, speed 20.”

Kurita wanted to regroup, assess damage and decide whether to resume his drive into Leyte Gulf. While he was mulling over the matter, at 10:18 he received a radio dispatch from the destroyer Shigure updating him on the situation in Surigao Strait: “All ships except Shigure went down under gunfire and torpedo attack.” That not entirely precise message, together with Shima’s earlier report that he was retiring from the strait and a succession of messages picked up from the Americans, convinced Kurita that powerful naval units were converging on Leyte Gulf. Realizing that if he stormed into Leyte Gulf his force would end up trapped therein, Kurita decided to withdraw at 12:36 p.m.

The loss of more Japanese ships—including all four of Ozawa’s carriers off Cape Engano—was just the anticlimax to a battle already won by the Americans. And worse was still to come. On the morning of October 25, while the Battle of Leyte Gulf was being decided off Samar, aircraft from Rear Admiral Thomas Sprague’s escort carriers were searching for Shima’s retiring force and 17 Eastern Aircraft TMF-1 Avengers finally found it west of the Surigao Peninsula. At 9:10 they attacked the hapless Mogami and left it dead in the water once more—for the last time. Destroyer Akebono evacuated the cruiser’s gallant crew and sent it to the bottom with a torpedo at 12:30 p.m.

At 3 p.m. Shima’s force was subjected to another air attack in the Mindanao Sea, but got through it with only light damage to the destroyer Shiranuhi. Abukuma, its speed down to 9 knots, was in more serious trouble. Shima ordered destroyer Ushio to escort it to Datipan Harbor in Mindanao. Abukuma was still there at 10:06 on the morning of October 26, when the harbor was attacked by 44 North American B-25 Mitchells and Consolidated B-24 Liberators of the Fifth and Thirteenth air forces, operating from Noemfoor and Biak. They scored several hits on their secondary target and started fires that reached Abukuma’s torpedo room. The explosion that followed blew a large hole in the light cruiser, which sank southwest of Negros Island at 12:42.

Shima’s flagship, Nachi, became a last, belated fatality of the Battle of Surigao Strait. Taking shelter in Manila Bay, it was attacked and sunk there on November 5 by Avengers and Helldivers from the carrier Lexington.

“never give a sucker a chance”

In retrospect, it is easy to dismiss Surigao Strait as a relatively minor element of the epic Battle of Leyte Gulf. Its principal place in history has been a sentimental one—the fight in which the resurrected “ghosts of Pearl Harbor” returned to haunt the Japanese, as well as the last time a line of battleships would ever “cross the T” on an approaching enemy.

Even had they combined, the two Japanese units that entered the strait were outnumbered, outgunned and outmaneuvered. Although their crews performed with outstanding courage and ingenuity, the only competent judgment displayed by their commanders was Shima’s decision to withdraw. Their one chance had been the possibility that their American opponents would commit a major error. But aside from Denver’s and Columbia’s ill-chosen bombardment of Albert W. Grant, neither Jesse Oldendorf nor his subordinates made any serious mistakes that night. The overall performance of his destroyer units was brilliant, almost depriving the big-gun ships any targets. With the added benefit of superior intelligence, courtesy of his PT boats and radar, Oldendorf knew he would win and devoted himself to achieving that victory with minimal casualties. As he put it shortly after the battle: “My theory was that of the old-tie gambler: Never give a sucker a chance. If my opponent is foolish enough to come at me with an inferior force, I’m certainly not going to give him an even break.”

The result was truly a lopsided victory—two Japanese battleships, a cruiser and three destroyers sunk, along with thousands of Japanese casualties, all at the price of one PT boat, 39 American sailors and airmen killed, and 114 wounded. Nishimura and Shima may not have represented the greatest threat to the beachhead at Leyte, but their elimination was significant enough to the invading U.S. Army troops, who they would otherwise have been bombarding. It may be argued, too, that the greatest contribution that Surigao Strait made to the victory at Leyte Gulf was its effect on the uncertain mind of Admiral Kurita off Samar.

For further reading: Leyte Gulf, by Mark E. Stille, Bryan Cooper’s PT Boats, Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol.XII, Leyte; and Theodore Roscoe’s Tin Cans.

When Communist Forces Turned to Tank Warfare to Seize South Vietnam

Jon Guttman — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 16:12:55 +0000

After years of wearing down its South Vietnamese and American opponents with a mixture of guerrilla and light infantry tactics, North Vietnam cast them aside for a thoroughly conventional invasion in 1972, with both sides putting an unprecedented emphasis on armored warfare. William E. Hiestand does a comprehensive survey of the equipment, organization, doctrine, and combat practices of the North Vietnamese Army and the South’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam in No. 303 of Osprey’s “New Vanguard” weaponry monographs, Tanks in the Easter Offensive 1972.

Ironically, by 1972 the ARVN armored element had evolved markedly since the early 1960s, when it inherited its armor from the departing French, only to be used more for instruments of political rivalry, with M24 light tanks cynically dubbed “voting machines” and their crewmen “coup troops.”

Well trained and motivated, the ARVN tankers made the most of their M41A3 Walker Bulldog light tanks—essentially enlarged M24s with higher velocity 76mm guns—but worked most effectively with their limited supply of M48A3s, which could outfight the NVA’s T-54s in long-range duels. Although aided by South Vietnamese and American air support that their opponents lacked, the ARVN armored units were handicapped by corrupt senior officers and a fighting doctrine that spread them too thinly over the three fronts on which they had to fight.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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Despite their formidable arsenal of Soviet- and Chinese-built T-54s and amphibious PT-76 and Type 63 light tanks, the NVA tankers plunged into the South with a rather inflexible doctrine that often caused them to hesitate when they should have followed up. They also showed that they had much to learn about coordinating their tanks’ operations with their infantry and artillery.

When evaluating the performance of both sides, however, the author rightly reminds the reader that in practice the Easter Offensive was not determined by tanks or armored personnel carriers alone. The campaign saw extensive allied use of the M72 light anti-tank weapon as well as the debut of the TOW (tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided) missile.

The NVA soldier, already experienced at using the RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) and recoilless rifle, also made deadly use of newly introduced AT-3 Sagger anti-tank guided missiles. As for the undisputed air power backing the ARVN, the NVA tankers had to rely on a new generation of self-propelled anti-aircraft guns alongside its ubiquitous 12.7 and 14.7mm machine guns.

Profusely illustrated with photographs and profiles, Tanks in the Easter Offensive 1972 offers a fascinating evaluation of two armies adapting their combat doctrines to new-generation weapons, very much as they went along, while the Cold War powers who armed them observed with interest of their own.

Tanks In the Easter Offensive

The Vietnam War’s great conventional clash
by William E. Hiestand, Osprey, 2023

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World War II’s Most Savage Submarine Commanders

Jon Guttman — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 16:19:38 +0000

The stealthy nature of submarine warfare brought with it a dicey redefinition of what constitute war crimes. In Sea Wolves, Tony Matthews focuses on what he calls “four of the most dangerous submarine commanders of the Second World War.

Japanese captains Hajime Nakagawa and Tatsunosuke Ariizume and German Heinz Eck went past sinking their prey to machine gun life rafts and even took civilian crew aboard for the sole purpose of obtaining intelligence and then torturing and killing them.

The fourth, Alexander Marinesko, captain of the Soviet submarine S-13, sunk the converted liner Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945 and killed nearly 10,000 crew and passengers, the greatest loss of life at sea in history—and followed that by sinking Steuben, with almost 5,000.

Aided by the bitter memories of the few survivors, Matthews devotes most detail to the victims, while noting that only one of his four villains could truly be said to have been brought to justice.

In the case of his one Allied killer, however, his description of the circumstances behind Wilhelm Gustloff’s tragic end do not argue convincingly for condemning Marinesko, who could not have known how many children and civilian refugees were mixed in with Nazi political and military personnel being evacuated before the oncoming Soviet army that night.

From the evidence the author presents, one is led to wonder whether such an accusation would have been leveled at an American submarine skipper torpedoing a Japanese transport.

SEA WOLVES

Savage Submarine Commanders of WW2
by Tony Matthews, Pen & Sword Maritime, 2023

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Clothes May Not Make the Man, But These Commanders’ Personal Effects Are Instantly Recognizable

Jon Guttman — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Like it or not, war can sometimes be a fashion statement. Among the multivarious uniforms that distinguish one unit from another, senior officers may indulge in the privilege of distinguishing themselves with individual touches—to be identifiable to their own troops, though hopefully not to the enemy. History records Hannibal Barca going to battle dressed as a common soldier, less conspicuous to his Roman enemies but still recognizable to his men. During the Napoléonic wars the namesake French emperor, Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher and British Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, favored the casual route, confident they’d be recognized by the right people when it counted. For every such low profile, however, there were extroverts who, aided by singular flourishes, went the distance to be unmistakable to all.

By World War II General Douglas MacArthur had his own formula down with this combo of crushed hat, aviator glasses and corncob pipe. These signature personal effects are preserved for posterity in the collection of the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Va.

From 1943 on British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery made his presence known with this black Royal Tank Regiment beret trimmed with gold braid. The beret is on display at the Imperial War Museum in London.

Reminiscent of the way Roman centurions distinguished themselves with transversely aligned crests on their helmets, Napoléon Bonaparte wore his bicorne hat (like this one in the collection of Berlin’s German Historical Museum) ear to ear across his head.

After being persuaded to quit the field at Mollwitz on April 10, 1741—and almost losing the battle as a result—Prussian King Frederick the Great made a point of always accompanying his men into the fray. At least three of his uniform coats have been preserved, including this one, also in Berlin’s German Historical Museum.

Theodore Roosevelt was already making a name for himself and his pince-nez spectacles by 1898 when he added the headgear of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry “Rough Riders” to his trappings. This slouch hat of the “Cowboy President” hangs at New York’s Sagamore Hill National Historic Site.

When rendering this 1772 portrait of then Colonel George Washington—the earliest known depiction of the future president—Charles Willson Peale captured the hilt of this sword now preserved at Mount Vernon, Va. Washington is believed to have worn the sword when he resigned his commission as commander in chief in Annapolis, Md., in 1783 and when inaugurated on April 30, 1789.

On May 14, 1916, during Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa into Mexico, 2nd Lt. George S. Patton Jr. used this ivory-handled .45-caliber Colt Single Action Army revolver in a gun-fight with three Villistas and claimed two of them. Patton’s “Peacemaker,” with twin notches on the grip, is preserved in the General George Patton Museum of Leadership at Fort Knox, Ken.

Clotheshorse George Armstrong Custer made an impression during the Civil War with his far-from-standard-issue black velvet uniform and continued to dress as he pleased on the frontier as lieutenant colonel of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment. In his wardrobe was this buckskin coat, on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

When assigned to the trenches near Ploegsteert, Belgium, in 1915–16, Lt. Col. Winston Churchill of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers took to wearing a French Adrian helmet. When visiting the Western Front as World War II British prime minister, Churchill relied instead on this Mark II Brodie steel helmet (whereabouts unknown).

Free French General Charles de Gaulle’s kepi, preserved in the Musée de l’Ordre de la Libération in Paris, kept him in the Allied public eye from 1941 to ’44.

Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s campaign hat, also on display at the National Museum of American History, reflects 1858 Army regulations with its gold general’s cord and silver “U.S.” on black velvet.

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

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At the Outset of WWI, Winston Churchill Gave ‘Little Willie’ His Marching Orders

Jon Guttman — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Specifications:

Length: 26 feet 6 inches
Height: 8 feet 3 inches
Width: 9 feet 5 inches
Track width: 20½ inches
Weight: 16 tons
Armor: 10 mm
Power: Rear-mounted Daimler-Knight 6-cylinder, 105 hp tractor engine
Maximum speed: 2 mph
Main armament: 2-pounder Vickers gun in rotating turret (not installed)
Crew: Five

When World War I settled into static trench warfare, even the most advanced armored cars were effectively immobilized by the Western Front’s combination of muddy terrain, trenches, barbed wire, heavy machine guns and artillery.

To meet such challenges, in February 1915 British First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill formed a Landship Committee tasked with designing an armored vehicle capable of mastering mud, bridging an 8-foot gap, climbing a 5-foot earthwork and other specifications outlined by British army Lt. Col. Ernest Swinton. Under the guidance of mechanical engineer Major Walter Wilson of the Royal Naval Air Service and agricultural engineer Sir William Tritton, the committee purchased twin “creeping grip” track assemblies from the Bullock Tractor Co. of Chicago, Ill., and fitted them beneath a boxlike crew compartment of riveted steel plates. Powering the vehicle was a Daimler-Knight 6-cylinder, 105 hp tractor engine provided by Tritton’s Foster & Co., of Lincoln, England. On discovering the Bullock tracks were too small to accommodate the vehicle’s weight, Tritton designed longer, wider tracks. He also added twin rear wheels to facilitate steering. A proposed round turret packing a 2-pounder Vickers gun was never installed.

Officially known as the No.1 Lincoln Machine or Tritton Machine, the prototype landship was nicknamed “Little Willie” (a derisive name then applied to Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia). When not undergoing testing, it was kept under the strictest wraps, a backstory claiming it was a new mobile “water tank.” The abbreviated tank reference became universal for Little Willie’s descendants.

Little Willie was found to be top-heavy, but by that time a better design was in development, with a rhomboid-shaped track running above and below the superstructure and 6-pounder guns in sponsons on either side. Nicknamed “Mother,” the improved variant was further refined into the Mark I tank, which first saw combat at the Somme on Sept. 15, 1916. Today the tank’s forebear, Little Willie, is in the collection of the Tank Museum in Bovington, England.

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

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Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

Mystery Ship: Can you identify this winged Quasimodo?

Jon Guttman — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 14:35:29 +0000

As France began to recover from World War II, its once-formidable aviation industry was revived just as the jet age was forcing a major reappraisal of aircraft design. Jet experiments began producing a fascinating variety of aircraft, ranging from the sublime to the absurd to the just plain weird. One such product of those pioneer years, the Sud-Est Aviation Grognard, looks almost grotesque in retrospect, but there was logic behind it.

When the Armée de l’Air issued a specification for a jet ground-attack plane in 1948, Sud-Est’s engineers were ready with a concept they’d been working on since 1945. First flying on April 30, 1950, after a somewhat protracted development, the Sud-Est SE.2410 was intended to have two SOCEMA TGAR 1008 turbojet engines, but for the time being it used a pair of Hispano-built Rolls-Royce Nene 101 turbojets producing 4,940 lb. of thrust each, for a projected maximum speed of 645 mph, a 530-mile range and a ceiling of 38,050 feet. To maintain symmetry and controllability if one powerplant failed, the engines were stacked one atop the other midway down the fuselage, with the upper staggered slightly ahead of the lower. There was one large dorsal intake up front and two exhausts in the rear. (This arrangement proved to be a rarity among jets but was used with success on the English Electric Lightning interceptor.) The pilot sat up front, an ideal position for ground attack, but with a framed canopy rather than one of the bubble canopies that were already demonstrating their superior visibility and reduced drag. A final odd touch was the tailplane, which was mounted low on the aft fuselage, looking like an afterthought but kept well clear of the exhausts.

The SE.2410 was 51 feet 6 inches long and 17 feet tall. The wings, set at a 47-degree angle, were 45 feet 6 inches in span with a wing area of 495 square feet. Its armament was to have included two 30mm DEFA cannons, which were never installed, as well as four 550-lb or two 750-lb. bombs or up to 12 rockets. It could also mount up to four Matra T-10 air-to-air missiles under the wings, which did gain the Grognard a niche in aviation history as being the first French airplane to fire air-to-air guided missiles.

Given its role in support of ground troops, Sud-Est’s design team nicknamed it the Grognard (“grumbler,” an affectionate term for Emperor Napoleon I’s elite “Old Guard”). A lot of its test pilots and ground crewmen, however, were inspired by its compact but less-than-graceful layout to call it le Bossu (“hunchback”).

Sud-Est planned to advance the Grognard with three more prototypes but ended up producing only one more. Making its maiden flight on February 14, 1951, the SE.2415 Grognard II was 2-seater with radar and an operator, whose altered center of gravity was countered by reducing the wing sweep to 32 degrees. Given the altitudes at which the crew were expected to operate, the cockpit was not pressurized.

While the first prototype had flown well from the start, the Grognard II experienced tail flutter and was damaged in a belly landing. It was the rapidly accelerating state of the art, however, that ultimately brought the project to an end. In 1952 the Armée de l’Air altered its requirements for something more versatile and Sud-Ouest Aviation produced the goods with a newer, more promising design that entered service in 1954 as the SO.4050 Vautour (“vulture”). The Grognard continued to fly as a test bed and Grognard II soldiered on the ground as a target until 1954, when both aircraft were scrapped.

A Look at the Dreyfus Affair: Why Was This Soldier Betrayed?

Jon Guttman — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 18:14:26 +0000

As a housekeeper for the German Embassy in Paris, Marie Bastian had two tasks. She was expected to gather the day’s paper trash twice a week…unless she recognized something worth pocketing to pass to her other employer, Maj. Hubert-Joseph Henry of the Section de Statistiques (“statistics section,” the innocuous-sounding title for French counterintelligence). Making her rounds on Sept. 26, 1894, she noticed a handwritten note in French lying torn up in the wastebasket of German military attaché Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen. She wasted no time in taking it to Henry, who passed it to his superior, Lt. Col. Jean Sandherr.

Pieced together, it proved to have only minor military secrets. Far more serious was the evidence of its origin. Someone in the French General Staff was passing secrets to the Germans.

A Spy In Their Midst

It had been 23 years since the Franco-Prussian War, in which the Second Empire of Napoleon III collapsed and the collection of kingdoms and duchies that brought it down united into a single entity called Germany. Peace had reigned since then between the French Third Republic and the German Second Reich, but each power eyed the other suspiciously.

Behind a seeming high point in European civilization, spy games went on as secret agents from all the powers sought out any foreign secrets that might give them an edge, should another war ever break out. Although the French army had recovered from its humiliating defeat, it remained insecure to the brink of paranoia. This new revelation seemed to suggest that the paranoia was warranted.

What became known as “The Dreyfus Affair” exposed discriminatory attitudes in French society. German military attache Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen received intelligence reports from a double agent; Picquart defied his superiors by seeking the truth; Sandherr was determined to rest the blame on Dreyfus.

Sandherr had been aware that someone was leaking information to Schwartzkoppen, but the note was the first solid evidence to fall into his hands. Matching the handwriting against documents among the General Staff, he found at least two specimens that seemed to match. Since the intelligence being passed was a list of new artillery components, including technical details for a hydraulic brake in a new 120mm howitzer and modifications to artillery formations, Sandherr narrowed the search down to an artillery captain on the staff: Alfred Dreyfus.

Soldier and Patriot

A thorough examination of Dreyfus suggested dubious spy material. Born on Oct. 9, 1859 in Mulhouse, Alsace, he was the youngest of nine children whose father had risen from a street peddler to a textile manufacturer. When the Germans seized Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, the Dreyfus family moved to Basel, Switzerland, then to Paris. There Alfred chose to pursue a career in the army, enrolling in the Ecole Polytechnique to study military sciences.

In 1880 he was commissioned a sub-lieutenant and from then until 1882 studied artillery at Fontainebleau before being assigned to the 31st Artillery Regiment at Le Mans and then the 1st Mounted Artillery Battery of the First Cavalry Division in Paris. In 1885 he was promoted to full lieutenant and in 1889 served as adjutant to the director of the Etablissement de Bourges with the rank of captain.

Emile Zola’s editorial “I Accuse” protested his innocence.

Dreyfus married Lucie Eugènie Hadamard on April 18, 1891. Three days later he was admitted into the Ecole Superieure de Guerre (war college), from which he graduated ninth in his class in 1893. He was assigned to the headquarters of the Army General Staff—and ran into the first serious career obstacle stemming from his being the only Jewish officer on the staff.

One of his evaluators, Gen. Pierre de Bonnefond, gave him high marks for his technical acumen but lowered his overall score with a zero rating for “likeability” (what in modern U.S. Army jargon amounted to an “attitude problem”), adding that “Jews were not desired” on his staff. Although admitted to the staff, Dreyfus and some supporters protested Bonnefond’s blatant bias—an act that would be used against him when he came under investigation.

Dreyfus Framed

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Despite two of three examiners expressing doubts as to the similarity between Dreyfus’ writing samples and the handwriting on the note, Sandherr made it the cornerstone of his evidence against the captain. On Oct. 15, Dreyfus was ordered to appear at work in civilian clothes and was questioned by a self-styled handwriting expert, Maj. Armand du Paty de Clam, who, feigning an injured hand, asked Dreyfus to write a letter for him. Dreyfus did, giving no indication that he recognized the message he was transcribing as the same one to Schwartzkoppen. Upon his completing it, Du Paty fleetingly examined both documents and informed Dreyfus he was under arrest.

After four days of a secret court martial, Dreyfus was convicted of treason on Dec. 22 and sentenced to life imprisonment. At a public ceremony on Jan. 5, 1895, he was publicly stripped of every accoutrement on his uniform and had his sword broken before being sent to serve his life imprisonment at the penal colony on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. His last statement before being taken away was: “I swear that I am innocent. I remain worthy of serving in the army. Vive la France! Vive l’Armée!”

As Dreyfus was led away, he faced a barrage of insults, not only from brother officers but crowds stirred up by army provocateurs to undermine any sympathy for the traitor. The emphasis was on his religion, the most common cry being “Death to the Jews!” One Hungarian correspondent covering the event for the Austrian Neue Freie Presse took special notice.

Although he then believed Dreyfus guilty, he commented on the nature of the aftermath in his diary in June 1895: “In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism…above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.” Despairing of his co-religionists ever finding acceptance anywhere in Europe, Theodor Herzl turned his thoughts toward the idea of their finding a homeland of their own.

In Search of Justice

While Dreyfus endured heat, insects, malaria, dysentery and all the horrors that gave Devil’s Island its dreaded reputation, his older brother Mathieu spent all the time, energy and money at his disposal to have Alfred’s case reexamined, seemingly in vain. One appeal after another was rejected. The French army staff, obsessed with maintaining an image of infallibility, was not about to reconsider its rush to justice against the homegrown “foreigner” in its midst.

When Sandherr, promoted to colonel, left the Section de Statistiques to command the 20th Infantry Regiment at Montauban on July 1, 1895, his successor, Lt. Col. Marie-Georges Picquart, was instructed by Assistant Chief of the General Staff Charles-Arthur Gonse to find more incriminating evidence to ensure that Dreyfus stayed right where he was.

Picquart, however, proved to be of different moral fiber. Investigating more on his own than his superiors authorized, the more he found the less the case against Dreyfus rang true to him—especially in March 1896, when he found a telegram from Schwartzkoppen, intercepted before it left the embassy, addressed to the actual author of the note.

Dreyfus is depicted at his trial proceedings. Many of the officials charged with dispensing justice turned out to be biased against him.

That and other handwritten documents revealed a more precise handwriting match than Dreyfus’s. The handwriting was traced to Maj. Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, another staff officer who had served in intelligence from 1877 to 1880. In a scenario common in the world of espionage, Esterhazy had fallen deeply in debt and sought a way out by selling secrets to the Germans. Confronted by Picquart on April 6, he made a full confession. Picquart submitted his revised report, with a recommendation that the Dreyfus case be reexamined.

A Military Cover-Up

The response was hardly what he expected. His demand ran into brick walls at every turn from senior officers like Chief of Staff Gen. Raoul le Mouton de Boisdeffre and Minister of War Gen. Auguste Mercier, who remained determined that army intelligence not be sullied with having to admit that a mistake led to a miscarriage of justice. In regard to letting the real traitor slip away, Gonse went so far as to say, “If you are silent, no one will know.” “What you say is abominable,” replied an outraged Picquart. “I refuse to carry this secret to my tomb.”

Picquart’s strong sense of justice led to his undergoing a series of transfers “in the interest of the service,” first to a unit in the French Alps and ultimately to command the 4th Tirailleurs Regiment in Sousse, Tunisia. In a further attempt to discredit his findings, Boisdeffre and Gonse ordered Picquart’s deputy in the Section de Statistiques, Maj. Henry, to fortify Dreyfus’ file with more incriminating evidence. This Henry did on Nov. 1 by producing what he declared to be further correspondence between Dreyfus and the Germans. However, when Boisdeffre and Gonse brought the most incriminating letter to then-Minister of War Jean-Baptiste Billot, they realized that it was a forgery clumsily created by Henry himself.

Dreyfus’ innocence was becoming too clear to deny. Yet Billot joined Boisdeffre and Gonse in agreeing that the verdict must stand—and to persecute Picquart, “who did not understand anything.” Henry conjured up an embezzlement charge against his former superior and sent him an accusatory letter. This only brought Picquart back to Paris, armed with a lawyer.

Dreyfus was imprisoned in a tiny cell on Devil’s Island, where he despaired of ever being released. His family never gave up on his cause.

Far from being buried, by mid-1896 the Dreyfus case had grown into a cause célèbre attracting partisans on both sides. Most French journals upheld the guilty verdict and opposed a retrial, reinforcing their arguments with accusations that Jews could only be expected to betray any country they inhabited.

Besides the army, the partisans who came to be called “anti-Dreyfusards” were mainly conservatives, nationalists and traditionalists. The tradition they conserved was hundreds of years of antisemitism that had supposedly ended with the Revolution and the Rights of Man, but which the General Staff tacitly encouraged in its ongoing campaign to keep the brand of traitor on Dreyfus. Among the foremost civilian mouthpieces was Edouard Drumont, whose publication La Libre Parole became an open forum for anyone with bile against Jews in general.

The Spy Escapes

In spite of all this, a growing cross-section of the French intelligentsia began taking up Dreyfus’ case. The first of these “Dreyfusards” was anarchist journalist Bernard Lazare, who after examining the existing evidence published an appeal from Brussels, Belgium. The conflict between of the Revolution’s ideals and the revival of old prejudices in “defense” of a Catholic France came to virtually split the entire country in two, breaking up lifelong friendships even in the world of impressionist art. Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Paul Signac and Camille Pisarro, for example, were Dreyfusards, while Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were anti-Dreyfusards.

With evidence of Esterhazy’s guilt and Dreyfus’ innocence leaking into public scrutiny, the General Staff took a new step to address the matter head-on. On Jan. 10, 1898, it tried Esterhazy before a closed military court, Mathieu and Lucie Dreyfus’ appeals for a civil trial having been denied. The three army-supplied “experts” testified that Esterhazy’s handwriting did not match that on the bordereau. The next day, after three minutes of deliberation, the court acquitted Esterhazy and all officers present cheered. Dreyfusards protested in the streets, to be beaten down by mobs of rioting anti-Dreyfusards and antisemites.

Dreyfus suffered on, but the trial’s real victim was Picquart, who was discredited, subsequently arrested for “violation of professional security” and imprisoned in Fort Mont Valérien.

Having been publicly exonerated, Esterhazy was discretely discharged from the army and exiled to Britain via Brussels. Settling in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, he lived out his life comfortably until 1923.

Esterhazy was proven to have been the real spy. Henry deliberately fabricated evidence against Dreyfus and was found dead in prison. Famed writer Emile Zola led efforts to exonerate Dreyfus with vehement essays but met with an untimely death.

The Dreyfusards swiftly changed tactics, doubling down on Lazare’s use of the press with a vehement 4,500-word open letter to President Félix Faure by novelist and social critic Emile Zola in the Jan. 13, 1898 issue of the newspaper L’Aurore. It was aimed directly at the high command’s perfidy with a title suggested by fellow journalist Georges Clemenceau:“J’Accuse!”

Clemenceau himself was equally accusatory when he declared, “What irony is this, that men should have stormed the Bastille, guillotined the king and promoted a major revolution, only to discover in the end that it had become impossible to get a man tried in accordance with the law.” Others who took up Dreyfus’ cause included Léon Blum, Anatole France, Marcel Proust, Sarah Bernhardt and even Mark Twain.

A Forgery discovered

J’Accuse exposed all that was known of the army’s morally corrupt handling of both Dreyfus and Esterhazy and included the General Staff members involved by name. L’Aurore’s circulation was normally 30,000 but it sold 200,000 copies on Jan. 13. The anti-Dreyfusards’ reaction was so violently negative that Zola needed a police escort to walk to and from his home. On Jan. 15 Le Temps called for a new public review of Dreyfus’ case. Minister of War Billot struck back by filing a public complaint against Zola and Alexandre Perrenx, manager of l’Aurore, for defamation of a public authority, which was approved by the Chamber of Deputies by a vote of 312 to 22.

Held at the Assises du Seine between Feb. 7 to 23, the trial ended with Zola condemned to the maximum sentence, a year in prison and a 3,000-franc fine. Again, the verdict was accompanied by street riots against Zola and against Jews. After another trial on July 18, Zola took friends’ advice and exiled himself to England for the following year. In the process, so much of the Dreyfus Affair was exposed to public scrutiny that Zola’s two courtroom defeats ultimately amounted to a tide-turning victory.

France got a new minister of war, Godefroy Cavaignac, who was eager to prove Dreyfus’ guilt but was completely in the dark about the high command’s obstruction of justice. He ordered the case files examined and was astonished to find out how much evidence had been withheld from Dreyfus’ defense.

On Aug. 13, 1898 one of his staff, Louis Cuignet, holding a key document before a lamp, noticed that the head and foot were not the same paper as the body copy. The forgery was soon traced to Major—now promoted to lieutenant colonel—Henry.

Alfred Dreyfus, in uniform on right, undergoes a retrial at Rennes in 1899 in which he was still found guilty but had his sentence reduced; he then received a “pardon.” His supporters fought for justice and he was declared innocent in 1906.

A court of inquiry was called for Esterhazy, who admitted his treason and revealed the high command’s collusion in framing Dreyfus. On Aug. 30 the council questioned Henry in the presence of Generals Boisdeffre and Gonse. After an hour of interrogation from Cavaignac himself, Henry broke down and confessed to having falsified the evidence. He was promptly arrested and imprisoned in the Fort Mont Valérien. The next day he was found with his throat cut. Nobody found a straight razor on his person when he entered his cell. How it got there—and whether his death was suicide or murder—remains a mystery.

With the news reports of Henry’s act of deceit, the anti-Dreyfusards declared him a martyr. Lucie Dreyfus pressed for a retrial. Cavaignac still refused, but the president of the council, Henri Brisson, forced him to resign. Boisdeffre also resigned and Gonse was discredited. While the partisans continued to struggle, sometimes violently, new revelations were gradually shifting the political landscape. A growing number of French Republicans recognized the injustice that hid behind the military’s veneer of “patriotism.”

Pardoned?

On June 3, 1899, the Supreme Court overturned Dreyfus’ verdict and sentence. Dreyfus himself had little or no access to news of the maelstrom brewing in the wake of his arrest. It was days later that he learned that he was being summoned back to France.

On June 9 Dreyfus departed Devil’s Island—only to be arrested again on July 1 and imprisoned at Rennes, where he was to undergo his retrial. This began on Aug. 7, presided over by Gen. Mercier, who was still determined to maintain the guilty verdict, and attended by as much popular rancor as before. On Aug. 14 one of Dreyfus’ lawyers, Fernand Labori, was shot in the back by an assailant who was never identified. As the original case against him crumbled, the president of the council, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, sought a compromise.

Although five of the seven court members upheld the original verdict, on Sept. 9 Waldeck-Rousseau declared Dreyfus guilty of treason “with extenuating circumstances” and reduced his life sentence to 10 years. The next day Dreyfus appealed for another retrial. Eager to put the “affair” behind France, Waldeck-Rousseau offered a pardon. Exhausted from his time on Devil’s Island, Dreyfus accepted those terms on Sept. 19 and was released on Sept. 21. Still, being pardoned implies guilt. Dreyfus’ supporters remained unsatisfied with anything short of exoneration. Beyond France, protest marches broke out in 20 foreign capitals.

Not Guilty

Among other literary responses, Zola added to his previous essays, L’Affaire and J’Accuse! with a third, Verité (truth). On Sept. 29, 1902, however, Zola died, asphyxiated by chimney fumes from which his wife, Alexandrine, narrowly escaped. In 1953, the newspaper Liberation published the dying confession by a Paris roofer that he had blocked the chimney. Dreyfusards like socialist leader Jean Jaurès kept up the pressure for the next several years.

Dreyfus, facing left, later served in World War I and fought on the Western Front.

On April 7, 1903 Dreyfus’ case was investigated once more—and eventually its conclusion was finally reversed. On July 13, 1906 he was declared innocent. He accepted reinstatement in the army with the rank of major, backdated to July 10, 1903, and was also made a chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. He commanded the artillery depot at Fort Neuf de Vincennes until June 1907, when he retired into the Reserve. Also exonerated was Georges Picquart, who rejoined the ranks, was promoted to brigadier general and served as Minister of War from 1906 to 1909. He died in a riding accident on Jan. 19, 1914.

On June 4, 1908 Dreyfus found himself literally the target of residual antisemitic hatred. As he attended the transfer of Emile Zola’s ashes to the Pantheon, journalist Louis Grégory fired two revolver shots, slightly wounding him in the arm. Although apprehended, Grégory was acquitted in court.

The question of Dreyfus’ loyalty to his country got a final test when World War I broke out. Returning from the reserves at age 55, he commanded an artillery depot and a supply column in Paris but as the French army suffered heavy attrition in the field, in 1917 he transferred to take up an artillery command on the Western Front, fighting at Chemin des Dames and Verdun. His son, Pierre, also served as an artillery officer, being awarded the Croix de Guerre. Two nephews also became artillery officers but were both killed in action. The only other major player in the Dreyfus Affair to see combat during the war was Armand du Paty de Clam.

In 1919 Dreyfus’ honors were upgraded to Officier de la Légion d’Honneur. He died on July 12, 1935, aged 75, and was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery. For all the French military’s efforts to make it go away, the Dreyfus Affair long outlived its namesake, leaving behind a number of political, legal and social aftereffects. In France it held up a mirror that showed two psyches—which would recur five years after Dreyfus’ death with new evocative names, such as Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Laval. Sadly, it still hasn’t gone away.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

This American Banker Adopted His Adult Coworkers to Rescue Them From Saigon

Jon Guttman — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 12:35:00 +0000

There has been no shortage of literature about the North Vietnamese Army’s final advance on Saigon and the many and varied means by which the last withdrawing Americans got various South Vietnamese out of town before the Presidential Palace sprouted the gold star on a red and blue field of the Viet Cong (soon to be permanently replaced by the gold star on red of a united Socialist Republic of Vietnam). Each is about as personal as every participant’s story. Ralph White’s memoir Getting Out of Saigon is no exception—which is to say that it’s its own sort of exceptional.

White was an employee at Chase Manhattan Bank’s Bangkok branch when higher-ups gave him a special assignment in April 1975: Keep Chase’s Saigon branch open as long as possible and, if (well, when really) the communists prevailed, get out with all the senior staff he could. White had been in Vietnam before, in 1971, but his principal assets for this assignment were that he was young (27), competent, single, and most of all expendable. Fortunately for him, he also seems to have been open minded, resourceful and, when it came to sorting out the right people to assist him from among what he called “delusionals,” “pilgrims,” and “realists,” he was a quick study.

While the American ambassador to South Vietnam and chief “delusional” Graham Martin clung to the illusion that Saigon could never fall to the communists—who were a few days’ march away—White got a different perspective from the brother of a teenaged prostitute who greatly appreciated his efforts to get her out of the country and into a better life. Her brother happened to be a Viet Cong and he gave White all the help he could as well as a summation of the “bloodbath” to come: “Not happening. They just want us to leave. They want their country back. As far as they’re concerned their choices have narrowed to capitalist occupation or communist independence. This day has been inevitable since President Truman turned down Uncle Ho’s pleas for help against the French.”

Even with that cold comfort, White faced obstacles aplenty on his own side when he took it upon himself to get all the Vietnamese Chase employees out of the country—a challenge that came down to knowing the right “realists” and finding the right vehicles for passage by water or air (both, as it turned out). In the course of an intriguing tale worthy of Graham Greene—which White fully realized he was now living—the author learned as he went and got by with a little help from his friends. While admitting that he took some artistic license with the dialogue, White adds that, “The events related herein are entirely true.” What emerges from his memory is a bona fide page-turner. —Jon Guttman

Getting Out of Saigon: How a 27-Year-Old American Banker Saved 113 Vietnamese Civilians

by Ralph White.Simon & Schuster, 2023, $28.99

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This book review appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Vietnam magazine.

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Precision vs. Propaganda: Some Painters Meticulously Researched Their Masterworks — Others Not So Much

Jon Guttman — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 13:30:00 +0000

The earliest depictions of war served one purpose: to emphasize the invincible might of the leaders who commissioned them. A stroke of accuracy might be useful toward establishing credibility, but only so long as it served the warlord’s purposes. Pharaoh Ramses II, for example, employed what amounted to a private propaganda bureau to back up his claims to godhood. Witness Egyptian depictions of his 1274 bc victory at Kadesh. His Hittite opponents commemorated it as their victory, though in reality it ended in an inconclusive standoff. Over the subsequent millennia war artists have wrestled with the matter of balancing accuracy and the lionization of their subject, who was very often the supporting patron.

However effective a depiction of battle may be in its own time, posterity often brings out the nitpickers. Often even the most well-meaning attempts at accuracy miss something. Just as often errors, accidental or deliberate, can be glaring. In any case, the advocates of historicity have their own leg to stand on in their conviction that a true act of valor can and should stand on its own merits.

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

One of French First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte’s military coups was his spring 1800 crossing of the Alps to surprise the Austrians in Italy. In 1850 Paul Delaroche, aided by Adolphe Thiers’ 1845 account of the crossing, depicted a sensible, if not terribly heroic, Napoléon picking his way through Great St. Bernard Pass on a sure-footed mule appropriated from a convent at Martigny and led by a local guide. Contemporaries critiqued Delaroche’s realistic approach for having failed to capture its subject’s spirit. Ironically, he ended up selling a smaller copy of the painting to Queen Victoria of Britain, who presented it to husband Prince Albert on his birthday, Aug. 26, 1853.

Between 1801 and ’05 one of the future emperor’s most devoted admirers and propagandists, Jacques-Louis David, painted five versions of the crossing, all showing Napoléon atop a rearing charger behind an outcrop carved with his name and those of his illustrious martial predecessors Hannibal and Charlemagne.

German muralist Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s epic 1868 canvas The Naval Battle of Salamis reflects a recurring problem whenever artists weigh accuracy against epic—namely, fitting everyone into the available space. Painted for display in Munich’s palatial Maximilianeum, his depiction of the 480 bc clash squeezes in Themistocles, Xerxes, Artemisia of Caria and even a few Greek gods. “The Sea Battle of Salamis 480 BC”. Painting, 1862/64, by Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1804–1874). Oil on canvas, approx. 5 × 9m. Munich, Maximilianeum Collection.

Similarly, in his 1849 painting The Conquest of the Teocalli Temple by Cortés and His Troops (Aztec Temple in Tenochtitlan, 1520) German-American painter Emanuel Leutze had many points to make, historicity being beside the point.

In his 1770 work The Death of Wolfe Benjamin West depicts mortally wounded British Maj. Gen. James Wolfe achieving martyrdom as he learns of his victory at Quebec. Joining Wolfe’s nattily dressed officers is a contemplative British-allied Indian, though none were present.

Rendered in 1851, Leutze’s iconic Washington Crossing the Delaware, with its all-inclusive crew of Continentals and Patriot volunteers setting out to attack the Hessians at Trenton, N.J., on the morning of Dec. 26, 1775, transcended several egregious errors. For example, there was no Stars and Stripes flag until June 1777; the crossing was made around midnight amid a snowstorm over a narrower stretch of river; and General George Washington’s men crossed in larger, flat-bottomed Durham boats.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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Painted for the U.S. Navy in 1962, Vladimir Zveg’s Battle of the Virginia Capes, 5 September 1781 is forced by space constraints to close the combatant ships to point-blank range. Another gaffe is the Union Jack, whose red Cross of St. Patrick was not added until 1801.

Henry Arthur McArdle was obsessed with the March 6, 1836, Battle of the Alamo and tried to have things both ways—capturing the fight down to the most minute detail, but succumbing to the urge to glorify the Texians’ last stand. The artist’s 1905 Dawn at the Alamo depicts Jim Bowie (at left with knife in hand, though he was bedridden at the time) battling Mexican troops alongside David Crockett (in shirtsleeves at right) and William Barret Travis (larger than life atop the battlements).

Few battles have been so widely painted as George Armstrong Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Bighorn (known by American Indian victors as the Greasy Grass), but only in recent years have reasonable renditions emerged. Painted the year of the battle, Feodor Fuchs’ version includes such hokum as a fight on horseback (the soldiers were dismounted), the use of sabers (not taken) and Custer’s fancy dress jacket (vs. buckskin).

This Ethiopian depiction of the March 1, 1896, Battle of Adwa—the first decisive African victory over a European power in the 19th century—lacks perspective and depicts a set-piece battle, complete with an intervention by Saint George. Missing are such details as the Italian blunder of having split their army in three. Another mistake is the green, yellow and red Ethiopian flag, colors not adopted until 1897.

In Charles Hubbell’s depiction of the April 21, 1918, death of German fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen the all-red Fokker Dr.I is correct, but by then the flared Maltese cross had been replaced by the straight-armed Balkenkreuz. Of course, Canadian Sopwith Camel pilot Roy Brown never got that close. Regardless, the bullet that killed the Red Baron in fact came from a Vickers gun fired by an Australian foot soldier.

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