Those who study warfare will inevitably run into the so-called “great man theory” of history. Simply put, it denotes the study of individual leaders and their abilities. In earlier times, scholars adhered to this school of thought as explaining the entirety of military history to the myopic exclusion of all other factors.

Over time the “great man theory” became less in vogue, and in the present day is looked upon by many scholars as nonsense; they choose to interpret military history purely through the lenses of more abstract factors such as society, technology, gender or economy, for example.

Give the ‘Great Men’ A Chance

While it goes without saying that military leaders can neither exist nor function in a void of social, technological or economic factors, I feel it is worth pointing out that the “great men of history”—notable male leaders, that is—deserve a fairer hearing.

Today, historical focus on notable men tends to be regarded in a dismissive manner, like something old-fashioned or awkward. It seems to me that this is partly due to the fact that the leaders being studied are men, and mostly because many people have apparently lost belief in the potency of individual human achievement. New trends in scholarship suggest that there has been too much focus on men in war history altogether. That is a gross oversimplification. While it is true that the roles of women have been overlooked, that does not make the achievements of men in military history any less deserving of attention.

Importance of Leadership

What is manifest in the lives of the “great men” is a quality universal to all human beings: the power of the individual to change world events. Social factors and technology make for interesting studies but these arenas do not shape themselves. People need leaders, and leaders don’t simply materialize out of nowhere. They come from among us. It is worth looking at who they were, what they did and how, and above all, whether we consider them to have been effective or not. Only by doing so can we educate ourselves.

Why is such an education important? The world is suffering from an acute leadership crisis. I believe there is currently a dearth of good male role models for young people. This deficit is real and troubling. However, there is another critical factor producing this discord. There is a complete lack of focus and discussion in society on the qualities that make good leaders and on the true potential of individuals.

Political and popular culture today encourage us to think in terms of groups with rigidly codified principles of belonging that seem to predestine our behavior, instead of encouraging us to recognize our individual ability to choose our own destiny and change the world around us. 

Need For Future Leaders

This magazine contains a diverse array of military leaders. They were and remain controversial. Whether we decide to admire or dislike them, their actions are worth studying. We at Military History Quarterly (MHQ) invest time in evaluating leadership. In my book “Bernard Montgomery’s Art of War,” and series about Erwin Rommel, I analyze these two battlefield captains. My colleague Jerry Morelock has delivered a masterful study of military leadership in his excellent book, “Generals of the Bulge: Leadership in the U.S. Army’s Greatest Battle,” which tackles competent and incompetent leadership in one of the U.S. Army’s most complex battles. We believe these studies will be of use to future leaders.

It is a fallacy to think that the destinies of “great men” of military history, or leaders of any kind, are written in the stars and that we who read about them are mere mortals who have no hope of ever changing the world for the better. I close with an excerpt from the poem, “The Man From the Crowd,” by Sam Walter Foss. The poem is worth reading in whole; in it, Foss illustrates how people tend to fall into set patterns of behavior, while a leader will show willingness to break the mold and stand out to meet a challenge or fulfill a call to action.

He reminds us that the world needs great men. So let us not hesitate to continue to study and reflect on the lives, strengths, weaknesses and decisions of notable men in military history. 

                     
“Men seem as alike as the leaves on the trees,
As alike as the bees in a swarming of bees;
And we look at the millions that make up the state
All equally little and equally great,
And the pride of our courage is cowed.
Then Fate calls for a man who is larger than men—
There’s a surge in the crowd—there’s a movement—and then
There arises a man that is larger than men—
And the man comes up from the crowd.…

And where is the man who comes up from the throng
Who does the new deed and who sings the new song,
And makes the old world as a world that is new?
And who is the man? It is you! It is you!” 

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

See more stories

subscribe now!

 

On March 30, 1972, the aging revolutionaries in Hanoi’s Politburo abandoned the strategy of protracted struggle and launched an all-out conventional invasion of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). By mid-April, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had committed its entire combat capability—14 divisions, 26 separate infantry regiments, and 1,200 tanks, plus all its artillery regiments and engineer battalions.

The NVA also introduced weapons heretofore not seen in Vietnam: large formations of T-54 tanks; AT-3 Sagger anti-tank missiles; and SA-7 shoulder-fired, heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles. Fighting raged in Quang Tri province near the DMZ, in An Loc 60 miles from Saigon, and in the Central Highlands, threatening Kontum City. The U.S. press named it the Easter Offensive since it began on Holy Thursday, the first day of Easter celebrations for South Vietnam’s Catholic population.   

My Mentor in Vietnam

As in the early 1960s, the only Americans fighting on the ground were a handful of U.S. advisers with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). One of them was Lt. Col. Charles L. “Chuck” Butler, an adviser with the 31st ARVN Regiment, 21st ARVN Division, who I met the first week of May ’72.  

I was a major, just assigned as the adviser with the 6th Airborne Battalion, Vietnamese Airborne Division. The battalion was co-located with the 31st Regiment and was reconstituting after being decimated near An Loc, Binh Long’s provincial capital, 15 miles north. Although I had served a previous tour in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division, I had no advisory training. When I received my orders in January 1972 to return to Vietnam in late April, I requested attendance at an abbreviated Vietnamese language course and adviser training school at Fort Bragg. My assignment officer in Washington, D.C., denied both requests, stating I would be assigned to the MACV staff in Saigon. Little did he know!  

Chuck Butler was a seasoned combat veteran. He had been an adviser in Vietnam from 1963-64 and an infantry platoon leader during the Korean War. He was a true font of knowledge and had a great perspective on the war. His counsel proved to be invaluable to me as I was getting my feet on the ground. Because Chuck was a modest man, I didn’t learn of his heroism in Korea until years later.  

Chuck in Korea

Charles Lewis Butler was a member of the U.S. Military Academy’s class of 1950—670 men who graduated on June 6 that year. He and 197 of his classmates were commissioned in the infantry. Nineteen days later, North Korea invaded South Korea, drawing the United States into a war for which it was ill-prepared. The American defense establishment was gutted in the aftermath of World War II. Rapid demobilization, draconian budget cuts, and an inept management produced a hollow force. To stop the North Korean onslaught and fill the ranks, many members of the USMA class of 1950 were immediately sent to Korea, including Chuck Butler.  

Chuck said goodbye to his new bride, Joan, and on Aug. 20, 1950, was aboard a troop transport sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge. He was assigned to F Company, 7th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division. The division was needed in Korea but was woefully understrength. Due to the severe shortage of infantry lieutenants, recent West Point graduates were sent into battle without any training other than what they received at the Military Academy.  

Chinese communist forces swarmed into North Korea in November 1950. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had discounted the possibility of Chinese intervention, but their appearance in large numbers prompted him to order the withdrawal of United Nations troops north of the 38th parallel. The 3rd Infantry Division was tasked to cover the evacuation of 1st Marine Division and the 7th Infantry Division as they left the Chosin Reservoir and moved to the port of Hungnam on North Korea’s east coast.  

On Dec. 15, Chuck’s platoon was given five tanks and the mission to assist a beleaguered U.S. unit. Then-Lt. Butler described what happened as he led his small force. “We suddenly came around an S-curve in the road and on both sides of us the hills crawled with Chinese. I was hit in the arm…then I was hit in the groin.”  

Unable to walk, he ordered his wounded men placed on the tanks, while he was lifted onto the lead tank. Although gravely injured, Chuck manned a turret-mounted machine gun and provided covering fire, allowing his task force to disengage from hundreds of Chinese and return to friendly lines. Butler was evacuated to Japan and hospitalized for three months. Upon returning to duty in Korea, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross—the Army’s second highest decoration for valor.  

To Vietnam

Twelve years later, in the fall of 1963, Maj. Chuck Butler was in Vietnam, assigned as an advisor with the 9th ARVN Division, operating in the Mekong Delta. The delta region was the agricultural heartland of the RVN; its provinces contained two-thirds of the nation’s population and produced the bulk of its rice crop.  

1963 was a period of great turmoil. President Ngo Dinh Diem failed to stem the growing communist insurgency or increase popular support for his government. Restrictions on religious freedoms ignited a crisis, resulting in Buddhist riots and self-immolations by monks. Diem’s refusal to initiate any liberal reforms in the face of mounting opposition caused President John F. Kennedy to lose all faith in him. It was the last straw for the Kennedy Administration and word was quietly relayed to Saigon that JFK was amenable to a regime change.  

The ARVN generals spent more time plotting coups and jockeying for positions than opposing the communists. The ARVN stayed in their cantonment areas while VC cadres took advantage of their apparent paralysis. Frustration mounted among advisers like Maj. Chuck Butler, who wanted to challenge the enemy. However, no amount of prodding could energize the ARVN. Meanwhile Diem’s government continued to accept U.S. economic and military aid at the rate of $1.5 million dollars per day ($14 million per day in today’s dollars).  

On Nov. 1, 1963, ARVN troops commanded by Gen. Duong Van Minh attacked the presidential residence in Saigon. Diem and his brother, Nhu, escaped and hid in the Chinese quarter of the city. The brothers surrendered the following day, assuming they would be sent into a comfortable exile. Gen. Minh had other ideas and ordered their execution.  

Diem’s death was followed three weeks later by President Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22. It created uncertainty in Vietnam over what the new U.S. policy might be. Immediately, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, issued a directive emphatically stating that he would stay the course in Southeast Asia. LBJ saw the political fallout in 1949 when Mao gained power in China and was determined not to be the president who “lost Vietnam.” ARVN military leaders breathed a sigh of relief.  

Aftermath of Assassinations

In the coup’s aftermath, Minh and his Military Revolutionary Council enjoyed widespread acclaim. The euphoria dissipated when the new rulers showed little aptitude for governing, squabbling over every issue. No progress was made against recent VC inroads or instituting needed reforms. Political instability was perpetuated when a bloodless coup on Jan. 30, 1964, ousted the Military Revolutionary Council.  

Chuck Butler noticed the turbulence created by the revolving door in Saigon. Political loyalties and family ties trumped military professionalism, so generals who were closely allied with the new leadership received choice assignments. They, in turn, brought their loyal subordinates with them to fill jobs throughout the ranks. Butler observed two rounds of leader changes, both of which degraded military effectiveness. When his tour concluded in September 1964, the downward spiral continued, resulting in the commitment of U.S. combat troops in the spring and summer of 1965.  

Opting for a second Vietnam tour rather than retirement, Lt. Col. Butler returned in September 1971. Again he was assigned as an adviser in the Mekong Delta, but this time with the 21st ARVN Division. The unit was responsible for the southernmost portion of the Delta, which contained the famous VC sanctuary, the U Minh Forest. The ARVN had been relatively successful subduing the insurgency throughout the region and pacifying the countryside. Butler was pleased to see the improvement.  

Helping Junior Officers in Vietnam

The senior adviser to the 21st ARVN Division was Col. J. Ross Franklin, a legendary warrior-scholar with multiple Vietnam tours and a doctorate in international relations from American University. He also spoke fluent French. Franklin and Butler were West Point classmates and held each other in high esteem. Both had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross during the Korean War and served together at Fort Benning’s Infantry School after the conflict. Franklin assigned Chuck as his deputy with a primary focus advising the division’s two principal staff officers, the G2 (Intelligence) and the G3 (Operations).  

Within the 21st ARVN Division combat assistance team, Butler gained a reputation for mentoring junior officers. Capt. Ed DeVos, on his first assignment in Vietnam as an assistant adviser with the 33rd ARVN Regiment, was a beneficiary of Butler’s insights. Arriving in December 1971, the captain sought out Chuck Butler and asked him many questions about the role of a junior officer “advising” men who had been fighting their entire adult lives. A recipient of two Silver Stars during the Easter Offensive, DeVos cited his admiration for Butler in his 2020 book, The Last 100 Yards.  

The 21st ARVN Division’s mission abruptly changed on April 7, 1972. President Nguyen Van Thieu convened a meeting of key officials to assess the military situation. The border town of Loc Ninh had just fallen to the communist juggernaut and Binh Long’s provincial seat, An Loc, was the NVA’s next objective. If An Loc fell, there were no forces to stop an enemy advance on Saigon, 60 miles away. Thieu made the unprecedented decision to move the 21st ARVN Division from the Delta to reinforce the defenders of Binh Long Province.  

Even in the face of the largest North Vietnamese offensive of the war, U.S. withdrawals mandated by the Vietnamization program continued. Personnel shortages in division and regimental assistance teams were the norm. Regimental teams were authorized a lieutenant colonel, three captains, and two sergeants but it was not unusual for only one or two Americans to be with an ARVN regiment; the U.S. Army replacement system simply could not keep pace with battle casualties, medical evacuations for sickness, and end-of-tour rotations.  

Rather than allow a key vacancy to remain unfilled, Butler volunteered to be the senior adviser with the 31st ARVN Regiment. Chuck Butler always went to “the sound of the guns.” Still, he remained Franklin’s “go-to” guy for most problems and was in charge of the division assistance team in the senior adviser’s absence.  

By April 12, the division was assembled in Lai Khe, the former base of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, and told to open QL (National Route) 13 to An Loc. The 7th NVA Division had cut the road, further isolating An Loc, now surrounded by two NVA divisions, the 5th and 9th. The 21st ARVN had never operated in the field as a combat division. In its former area, commanders only supervised regimental and battalion operations. Battle-tested SOPs were nonexistent and staff work was shoddy, often lacking clarity. Attacks often failed due to a lack of proper coordination. Commanders at all levels became overly reliant on U.S. airpower, especially B-52 strikes, and were hesitant to move without them.  

Facing Hardcore NVA Forces

Nor had the 21st ARVN previously encountered large formations of hardcore NVA forces that stood their ground and employed heavy artillery in quantities not previously seen. Indirect fire from 130mm and 152mm guns became the major killer of friendly troops. Consequently, ARVN soldiers developed a bunker mentality and literally “went to ground.” Such behavior was particularly prevalent among the leaders.

In a letter to his family, Butler said his ARVN counterpart, Lt. Col. Xuan, only left the regimental command bunker to answer the call of nature. By contrast, Butler regularly checked the troops, usually under fire. Butler’s bravery resulted in the award of the Silver Star, but his example had little effect. No amount of cajoling altered Xuan’s behavior. The commander’s abrogation of leadership responsibilities lowered morale and contributed to inaction.    

While the 21st Division struggled along highway QL 13, I was experiencing a problem establishing a modicum of rapport with the 6th Airborne Battalion commander, Lt. Col. Dinh. He viewed me as useful when we were in a fight because I was the link to U.S. airpower, yet at other times, I was just excess baggage. He was vocal about not needing any tactical input from Americans. Butler attributed this attitude to the impact of Vietnamization. Many Vietnamese, including Dinh, believed they would ultimately be left high and dry by the United States. They were more perceptive than most Americans then serving in Vietnam.  

The Division Fights On

Butler said the specter of our imminent departure and the reduction of our robust logistical system fostered anti-American attitudes. However, he was not overly critical of men who harbored those beliefs. If the intellectual elite in our country and students at Ivy League universities were unable to differentiate between U.S. policymakers and those responsible for implementation of those policies, we shouldn’t be surprised such viewpoints existed here. His observation gave me a new empathy for my Vietnamese counterpart.  

During a moment of levity, Chuck shared his opinion on advisers’ “can-do” attitude. He said it was part of our makeup—but was a blessing and a curse. We tried hard to make improvements, and then felt guilty when our efforts fell short. He left me with the following thought: “Regardless of how hard you try, sometimes you simply can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit!”  

The 6th Airborne Battalion completed rebuilding and retraining at the end of May and was committed back into the Binh Long battle. It fought through the 7th NVA Division’s defenses and linked up with defenders manning the southern portion of An Loc’s perimeter on June 8, 1972. The 6th was the first unit to break the siege and was cited in the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff history of the Vietnam conflict. My relationship with Dinh had vastly improved, thanks to Butler’s sage counsel and my ability to put U.S. bombs on target.  

On June 18, government officials declared the siege of An Loc broken and released the 1st Airborne Brigade (three ARVN airborne battalions, including the 6th) so the unit could join the fighting near the DMZ. Although the siege was officially lifted, the battle was not over. It took from June 18 to June 21 for the paratroopers to fight their way to Tan Khai, six miles south of An Loc. Tan Khai firebase was defended by the 31st ARVN Regiment and provided artillery support for An Loc. It was the furthest advance of the 21st Division and a thorn in the side of the NVA.  

U.S. helicopters were ordered to lift the 1st Airborne Brigade from Tan Khai to Lai Khe so preparations could begin for its air movement north. QL 13 was the designated pickup zone, although airmobile landings near the firebase would attract more NVA incoming artillery fire.  

The Last Time I Saw Chuck

During the lull preceding the arrival of helicopters, I made my way to the regimental command post to see Chuck Butler. Our short reunion was dampened by the news that Lt. Col. Burr Willey, adviser with the 32nd Regiment, had been killed by NVA fire on June 19. Chuck believed helicopters would energize NVA gunners who had forward observers seeded throughout the area.  

Ever concerned about others, Chuck told me to be careful and jokingly said: “The good Lord will look out for you but you have to help Him by not wandering around in artillery fire!” Our meeting was cut short when a radio call informed me the choppers were inbound. We shook hands. I wished him luck and said I hoped to see him again.  

It was a 15-minute flight from Tan Khai to Lai Khe, the 21st ARVN Division command post. When I arrived, Col. Ross Franklin met our flight. He was visibly shaken, with tears in his eyes. He told me that Chuck Butler had been killed when the bunker he was occupying took a direct hit, probably from a 130mm artillery round. I was in a state of disbelief. I told him I had just been with Lt. Col. Butler less than 30 minutes earlier. Ross Franklin said that I was the last American to see him.  

Charles Lewis Butler was 44 years old when he died. He had recently completed 22 years of Army service. He left behind his wife, Joan, and three children, a son and two daughters. He was laid to rest at West Point on July 5, 1972, where his commitment to the profession of arms began years before. Chuck Butler joined the legion of USMA graduates who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. He was one of 333 West Pointers who lost their lives in the Vietnam War. Their service personified the academy’s motto: “Duty, Honor, Country.”  

Although five decades have passed since Lt. Col. Butler was killed on June 21, 1972, it seems like yesterday to me. Memories of him and those times are never far from my thoughts. He was very helpful during my initial days as an adviser and I meant to tell him so when we were together, but I missed the chance. It is a lifelong regret. I continue to mourn the passing of an outstanding soldier, a genuine war hero, and a friend.  

During the 1972 Easter Offensive, John Howard was an adviser with the Vietnamese Airborne Division, serving with the 6th Airborne Battalion and the 11th Airborne Battalion. He serves on the advisory board of Vietnam magazine.

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

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

One of the finest, most revealing and genuinely authentic accounts of the French Army of Napoleon Bonaparte (from May 18, 1804, Emperor Napoleon I) are the memoirs written by an officer who served in it as an infantry captain through numerous campaigns. Entering the French Army as a velite (elite infantryman named after those of ancient Rome) in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, Blaze gained an officer’s commission and then served mainly as a line infantry captain. He participated in the French Emperor’s series of wars waged upon France by a succession of coalitions formed by Europe’s kings and princes who were determined to stamp out the forces of change and reform unleashed by the 1789 French Revolution and spread by Napoleon’s conquests that threatened their regimes. 

Blaze participated in numerous campaigns, from those in Poland (1807) through Napoleon’s defeat in March 1814 in the War of the Sixth Coalition leading to the Emperor’s first exile (to Elba). Particularly revealing to Napoleonic War scholars are Blaze’s recollections in his memoir of the Peninsular War (1807-1814), the brutal struggle fought on the Iberian Peninsula that pitted the occupying power, France, against Spain, Portugal and Britain in fierce combat featuring both conventional and guerrilla warfare (the name itself of the unconventional warfare by which the latter is known originating in the Peninsular War). 

A keen observer with the literary skill to capture his observations in captivating prose, Blaze’s descriptions of bloody combat and its inevitably grim aftereffects seem generations ahead of his time. This excerpt from Blaze’s memoir pulls no punches. 

Marching With Napoleon

People, after having read history, generally think that a battle is like a review at the Champ de Mars, and that one hundred thousand men placed opposite one hundred thousand men amuse themselves in shooting down each other at their ease to the accompaniment of cannon to produce the effect of the double-bass in an orchestra. I am going to explain to them how a battle is fought.

Our army is on the march preceded by its advance guard, composed of light troops. The hussars go like very devils; they trot, they gallop, the enemy flees before them; but soon they stop, our hussars stop also. A village defended by a few hundred men is in front of us, it is ordered attacked by sharpshooters. At the moment that our men enter the gardens, a battalion of the enemy appears which makes them lose ground. We send a regiment to support them, the others send two; we order forward ten, the enemy shows us twenty; each side makes the artillery advance, the cannon growl, soon everyone takes part in the merry-making, fighting goes on, they slaughter one another; one cries for his leg, another for his nose, others cry for nothing, and there is food for the crows and for the makers of official reports.

The Science of A General

The science of a general-in-chief amounts to this: to have on a set day, at a given point, as many men as possible. Napoleon said it, and Napoleon was a judge. A general must know which point of the map will be most seriously disputed. It is there that the battle will be fought, it is consequently there that he must bring all his troops by twenty different roads. An order badly given, badly understood, often causes the failure of the finest strategic combinations, to-wit: [Marshal Emmanuel de] Grouchy’s corps which did not reach Waterloo [leading to Napoleon’s final defeat, June 18, 1815]. The First Consul, before leaving Paris, had marked with a pin on the map the plain of Marengo for the scene of a new triumph; the result justified his prevision.

The science of a general consists also in knowing the strength of the enemy at such a point, his weakness at such another. To succeed in this, the service of spies is indispensable. Good ones must be had and they must be well paid. Napoleon gave gold by the handfuls; it was a good investment. We have had generals put to rout because they haggled on the subject of secret funds.

When one approaches a battlefield where the fighting is on, nothing is so discouraging for the young soldiers as the remarks of the wounded who are going back. “Do not go so fast, do not hurry,” they say, to be killed, it is not necessary to run so quickly.’ “The enemy is ten times more numerous than we.”…In vain are they told to be silent; an arm in a sling, a gash across the face guarantee impunity, give the right of insolence, and the jeremiads continue so long as they find someone to listen to them.

Pleasure and Pain

One of these poor devils was passing before us with his head split open and his arm broken. Everyone was moved to pity at sight of him. “How sad!” the men said: “two wounds! what a long road to go to be bandaged!” “You are all fools,” exclaimed the wounded man: “you’ll have more than that presently: I know my fate, but you do not know yours.” You should have seen the faces of the recruits on hearing these remarks, and specially on seeing the first bodies they came across. They went twenty feet out of their way for fear of touching them, soon they came nearer, later they marched over them without ceremony.

Man becomes accustomed to everything, to pleasure and to pain. How often have you experienced that a great grief, a great joy, after two weeks becomes dull sensation, a very ordinary thing? Remember this at your next sorrow, and say: “This will pass as other sorrows have passed.” To prove the truth of my reasoning, I am going to tell you a little story. You know that after the siege of Toulon [August-December 1793], the Republic caused all those who at that time were opposed to it to be shot down. After the guns had thrown down entire lines, a voice called out: “Let all those who are not dead rise! The Republic pardons them!” A few wretched wounded, others whom the grape-shot had spared, deluded by this promise, raised their heads: at that moment, a squadron of butchers (history says a squadron of dragoons; history must be mistaken) rushes on them, sword in hand, completing what the guns had commenced; soon the sun set over this atrocious slaughter. 

On a beautiful night, one of these wretches awakes in the middle of this ocean of bodies; he is wounded in ten places, in the head, in the legs, in the arms, in the chest, everywhere. He rolls over, he drags himself along. “Who goes there?” cries the sentry…”Finish me, you will do me a service; you will perform an act of humanity.’

“I am not an executioner, I tell you.”

“Finish me, I beg of you, all my members are broken, my head is split open, it is impossible for me to recover; you will spare me horrible suffering, finish me.”

Fear and Honor

The sentry drew near, verified the condition of the wounded man; believing in the impossibility of a cure, compassion determined him; had he fired his gun, the post would have taken up arms, he thought it best to use his bayonet, which he thrust into the body of the wretched man. Would you believe it? This man did not die. The next day, while burying all these corpses, a grave-digger saw that he was still alive; he carried him to his home, nursed him, and life returned. All the wounds were cured. That man was M. de Launoy, a naval officer under Louis XVI; he might well have spared himself that last bayonet thrust…

It must not be believed that in the army everyone is brave; I have seen some who could never become accustomed to the sound of the cannon. At Wagram [1809], a soldier of my company had a violent attack of epilepsy which was ended by the whizzing of the first shot.

An officer of my regiment, with thirty years of service, had never been on the fighting line; the sight of a sword made him pale, and he confessed it frankly. “I should very much like to go on the battlefield, but it is not possible, I should fall back at the first gunshot, and it would be a very bad example.” He was usually left behind at the garrison where, however, he made himself very useful by drilling the recruits.  

If everyone was not brave in the army, there were some to be found whose courage was not to be compared to anything; and this in all ranks, in all degrees, from King [Joachim, King of Naples, French Marshal] Murat to the common fusilier, from General [Jean-Marie] Dorsenne to the drummer. I could write ten volumes simply on the truly fabulous acts of bravery of our warriors. I shall mention but one which the entire third army corps witnessed in Spain.

General [later Marshal, Louis-Gabriel] Suchet had just taken Mount Olivo [May 1811] in spite of the predictions of the Spaniards. “The trenches of Mount Olivo,” they said, “will bury all the troops of Suchet, and the trenches of Tarragona all the troops of Bonaparte.” He meets a wounded soldier whom his comrades were carrying to the ambulance: “Victory, victory, Mount Olivo is taken!”

“Are you gravely wounded?”

“No, general, but unfortunately wounded seriously enough to be obliged to leave the ranks.”                   “Well answered, friend. What do you wish as a reward for your services?”

“To be allowed to lead the attack when you take Tarragona.…You promise me this?”  

“Yes.”

On the 30th of June, 1811, that is to say one month after, the general-in-chief was about to storm the place. The troops were forming their columns of attack when a footsoldier in dress uniform, as resplendent as on a parade day, approached Suchet. “I came to remind you of your promise: I wish to lead the attack.”

“Ah! it’s you, my brave fellow, very good; but soldiers of your kind are too rare that I should be wasteful of their blood. Remain in your company; by imparting your noble courage to all, you will render greater service than by having yourself killed alone.”…

“General, I have your word, and I wish to be the first to attack.”

“So much the worse, my brave fellow, so much the worse for us, do as you please.”

The columns start and my foot soldier passes them by twenty paces; he rushes forward in the midst of the grape shot, he is the first to climb the breach, and there, falls riddled with bullets. Picked up by order of Suchet, this brave soldier was carried to the hospital: a breath of life permitted him to see on that same day the entire corps of officers, with the general at their head, who came to visit him. Suchet took off his cross to decorate the breast of the footsoldier who died admired by the whole army. That hero’s name was Bianchelli. [Politician, diplomat, historian François-René] Chateaubriand has said: “Glory must be something very real, since it causes the heart of the one who is only its witness to beat.”

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

See more stories

subscribe now!

 

In 1942, British authorities in Cairo arrested an Egyptian dance superstar for espionage. Her name was Hekmet Fahmi. Allegedly a nationalist with connections to Anwar el-Sadat, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and members of the Egyptian revolutionary Free Officers Movement, Fahmi had gained access to top secret intelligence from a well-informed British lover who worked at GCHQ and had passed this information to a pair of German spies who had managed to infiltrate Cairo.

At least, that was what Fahmi stood accused of. The espionage threat was credible enough for British authorities to put Egypt’s most famous dancer behind bars for more than two years. Her career would never recover. Yet Fahmi’s story remains a captivating part of World War II history, not only because of her alleged espionage but because of the talent that likely worked to her advantage as a spy: Egyptian cabaret belly dancing. 

An Elusive Art

Egyptian belly dance, known as raqs sharqi, has a history stretching back thousands of years. Ancient Egyptian temple reliefs from the days of the pharaohs contain strikingly similar imagery to modern Egyptian belly dancing, such as women dancing wearing hip scarves to the accompaniment of clarinets and drums. While belly dancing expressed itself in different forms over time, including group dancing and male dancing, female belly dancing proved the most enduring and popular incarnation of raqs sharqi. Historically seen as a desirable trait for wives, brides-to-be were taught the art of belly dancing so that they could dance for their husbands. Some women became professional dancers to entertain primarily male audiences. 

Belly dance is a highly disciplined dance style comparative to a sport. It is a full body exercise that requires dancers to move different muscle groups independently. Essential to Egyptian-style belly dance, a scarf worn around the hips accentuates isolated hip and waist movements and adds flair to performances. Aside from complex hip, waist and chest movements, the dance also incorporates fluid arm and finger movements. To gain the amount of flexibility, precision and rhythmic grace to belly dance successfully takes rigorous practice. Once the essential basic movements are mastered, a dancer may weave together endless combinations and improvisations to form complex choreography. The dance can be performed to any type of music and also be highly dramatized if desired. Special types of belly dance performances can include candle dances, sword dances, floor dancing (performed on one’s knees and sometimes bending backwards), and the ever-popular veil dances, all of which require finesse.

Appeal to Foreigners

Foreigners who visited Egypt were captivated by belly dance performances they witnessed. Although Western paintings and illustrations from the 19th century often portrayed “oriental dancers” with colorful garb and bare stomachs, religious convictions saw female belly dancers in Egypt cover up more over time. The essential hip scarves were still worn but bare waists became less common and dance movements became more restricted as time passed. 

Belly dance experienced a Renaissance in the 1920s thanks to the creative genius of Badia Masabni, popularly known as Madame Badia. Originally from Syria, Badia spoke five languages and traveled in many countries throughout the world. Drawing inspiration from French cabaret performances, Badia realized how to create an elegant and exciting new dance style fusing the best of Egyptian belly dance traditions with Western flair.

Cairo’s Favorite Casino

With innovation and entrepreneurial skills, Badia set up a nightclub in Cairo called the Casino Opera, also known as the Casino Badia: an exclusive venue that also functioned as a training school to teach her new style of dance to adventurous young local women. Egyptian cabaret style belly dance was born.

Badia revolutionized belly dance. She introduced sweeping changes to dance costume, modeling her dancers’ costumes on two-piece French cabaret outfits with decorative brassieres, short hip scarves, and plenty of sequins. The dancers performed in high heels and sometimes barefoot. Badia developed new signature moves in the dance; she also allowed the dancers a wider field of movement and mixed signature Egyptian techniques with Latin dance styles and ballet. Badia also upended music, blending Western orchestral instruments like violins, cello and accordion with Egyptian traditional instruments such as clarinets and tabla drums to create powerful and enchanting background music for performances. The results were fantastic. Badia’s new cabaret dance style became all the rage in Cairo and influenced other schools of dance. 

Cabarets offering belly dance performances became magnets for British troops garrisoned in Cairo both before and during World War II. Badia’s Casino Opera was one of the most popular hotspots. Egypt’s King Farouk was a patron as was Randolph Churchill and many other famous personages. Many British soldiers in Cairo were eager to enjoy the company of attractive Egyptian females in nightclubs as well as to drink and socialize. Cabarets like Badia’s Casino Opera in Cairo were great places to mix—and to spy.

During World War II, many Egyptians were sympathetic to the Germans due to a general dislike at living under a de facto British occupation. We will probably never know how many Egyptian women who gained access to influential military and government officials through nightclub entertainment passed information they learned to German intelligence operatives, spurred by a desire to further the cause of Egyptian independence.

Accused spy Hekmet Fahmi herself was trained at the Casino Opera and was one of Madame Badia’s star pupils. Badia herself was rumored to have engaged in espionage, although for whom she may have been spying remains a mystery.

What is clear is that the special dance style that Badia and her proteges wielded to enchant their audiences has had staying power. The Casino Opera debuted many famous Egyptian belly dancers and movie stars, such as Samia Gamal and Taheyya Kariokka,  icons of 1950s Egyptian cinema. These talented and graceful women remain an inspiration for practitioners of Egyptian cabaret belly dance, a style which spread from Cairo all over the world and remains popular today.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

See more stories

subscribe now!

 

For the sick, half-starved inhabitants of Tenochtitlán, island capital of the beleaguered Aztec empire, the new year of 1521 offered only severe hardship and continued bloodshed. Over the past eight months the city’s quarter million residents had suffered through the deaths of two emperors, Montezuma II and his brother Cuitláhuac; the loss of the entire upper echelon of the empire’s military and political elites to a cowardly Spanish massacre; and a 70-day scourge of smallpox that killed tens of thousands and claimed Cuitláhuac’s life, on December 4. His nephew Cuauhtémoc, as 11th Aztec emperor (known as the huey tlahtoani, or “great speaker”) and commander in chief, was left to defend the city against a coalition army of aggrieved Indians and determined Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés.  

After reaching Hispaniola in 1506, Cortés prospered in the West Indies. Several years of civil service in Cuba, in the wake of its 1511 conquest by Diego Velásquez de Cuéllar, had earned him an encomienda, a large estate complete with thousands of indigenous laborers compelled to work in mining and agriculture. Appointed governor of Cuba, Velásquez was planning to finance his own campaign of conquest on the mainland of Mexico when he sent his secretary, Cortés, on a limited mission to explore the coast in 1519. Cortés and several veteran officers, however, opted to pursue a far more ambitious, albeit unsanctioned, undertaking—the expansion of the Spanish empire into Mexico and beyond, in the name of Christianity, while acquiring vast wealth, land and renown for themselves.  

Disembarking at Tabasco on March 12, Cortés and 630 Spaniards moved inland and encountered the Mayans of Potonchán, who answered his request for talks with torrents of arrows, spears and stones that had little effect on Spanish armor. Facing overwhelming numbers, Spanish soldiers armed with harquebuses, crossbows, pikes and steel swords and accompanied by heavy artillery, mounted lancers and war dogs routed some 10,000 attackers, after which the defeated Mayans provided Cortés with 20 women slaves, among them the Nahuatl-speaking Malinche, who became Cortés’ invaluable interpreter, consort and mother of his first son.  

Sailing north along the coast, the Spaniards came ashore near San Juan de Ulúa on April 21 and, in a veiled attempt to legitimize their expedition, founded a new colony at Veracruz “in His Majesty’s name.” Cortés then marched north to Cempoala, home to the Totonacs, where for the first time the conquistador leader moved to exploit a tributary population’s bitterness toward Tenochtitlán. Resentful subjects of the empire since 1480, the Totonacs forged an alliance with Cortés, who directed them to cease paying tribute, which could include military service, gold, foodstuffs, trade goods or captives (some of the latter were enslaved, while others were ritually sacrificed and eaten). After scuttling all but one of his ships (which sailed for Spain carrying slaves and treasure to be presented to Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman emperor), Cortés pushed inland on August 16 accompanied by 800 Totonac warriors.  

Cortés and his host had barely entered Tlaxcalan territory when they were ambushed by a disciplined force of warriors led by their commander in chief, Xicotencatl the Younger. Home to upward of 150,000 people, Tlaxcala was a confederation of four hill provinces united against their Aztec archenemies in Tenochtitlán, who for decades had oppressed them with embargoes on salt, gold and cotton and demands for captives as tribute. After several clashes with the Spaniards, Xicotencatl the Elder and the city’s other lords halted hostilities and invited Cortés into their capital on September 23. Awed by the expedition’s horses and gunpowder weapons, Xicotencatl the Elder, who like Cortés was looking for powerful allies, agreed to an alliance (see “The Warriors Who Nearly Destroyed Cortés—Before Joining Him,” by Justin D. Lyons, online at HistoryNet.com).  

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

See more stories

Subscribe now!

 

On November 8, with 2,000 Tlaxcalan warriors, porters, guides and cooks added to the Spanish ranks (the Totonacs had returned home), Cortés boldly marched into Tenochtitlán, where Montezuma extended the Spaniards a diplomatic if wary welcome. A week later events on the Gulf of Mexico gave Cortés a pretext to act. After Aztec tax collectors in the town of Nauhtla demanded local Totonacs pay their customary tribute and were refused, fighting broke out, and the Aztecs slew several Spaniards and Totonacs. Accusing Montezuma of collusion in the bloodshed, Cortés brazenly arrested the stunned emperor and ordered him to reside in the Spanish quarters under guard. After getting assurances of his safety from Malinche, the shaken emperor acquiesced, allowing Cortés to usurp his host and take effective control of the city for the next six months.  

The Spaniards had amassed eight tons of looted gold and silver when, with Cortés absent from the city, his deputy, Pedro de Alvarado, led an unprovoked attack against celebrants at the Festival of Toxcatl, hacking to death hundreds of senior military and political leaders and their families. The atrocity touched off a violent citywide revolt that trapped the Spanish/Tlaxcalan forces inside their quarters under a rain of spears, stones and arrows from surrounding rooftops. Cortés returned on June 24, 1520, to find Alvarado’s actions had put the entire expedition in peril, leaving the Spaniards no choice but to flee the city with their sick, wounded, artillery and treasure in tow.  

At midnight on the rainy night of June 30, Cortés led his assembled host—1,300 Spaniards and 2,000 allies—from Tenochtitlán onto the Tacuba causeway, heading west out of the city. The van had marched but a quarter mile along the causeway when the escape attempt was discovered. Hundreds of canoes soon filled surrounding Lake Texcoco, bringing the long column strung out along the span under withering missile fire while warriors streamed out of the city on foot to attack the column from the rear. After six terrifying hours Cortés and other survivors stumbled ashore, having lost as many as 800 Spaniards and more than 1,000 allies killed, captured or drowned, along with most of the horses and all the gunpowder, cannons and treasure.  

Incredibly, the crushing defeat—recorded by the Spanish as La Noche Triste (“The Night of Sorrows”)—wasn’t enough to convince the redoubtable Cortés to abandon the campaign. Most of his veteran captains and mounted lancers, his interpreter, Malinche, and shipwright Martin López, the one man who could construct new warships for a return assault on Tenochtitlán, had survived the carnage. Gathering his wounded, hungry forces—about 500 Spaniards and 800 Tlaxcalans—Cortés led the small band 150 miles through hostile territory armed only with swords, crossbows, lances and pikes, reaching Tlaxcalan territory on July 9.  

As Cortés himself recovered from a fractured skull, his fortunes turned for the better. Xicotencatl the Elder refused Cuauhtémoc’s offer of tribute relief and instead agreed to a new “perpetual alliance” with Cortés, while supply ships from Spain and Cuba—the Crown having dismissed mutiny charges against the expedition leader—arrived at Veracruz laden with men, horses, weapons, gunpowder and provisions. In August, backed by 2,000 loyal Tlaxcalans, Cortés captured the mountaintop redoubt of Tepeaca, a critical Aztecan ally, then used it as a base to subdue the surrounding villages. Some towns submitted voluntarily. Others were sacked, their male populations executed, their women and children branded and sold into slavery. By autumn 1520 Cortés was the strongest entity in the vast flatlands between the Popocatépetl and Pico de Orizaba volcanoes and had effectively cut off Tenochtitlán from the Gulf of Mexico. Before leaving Tepeaca, Cortés tasked López with constructing a fleet of 13 brigantines at Tlaxcala using native labor and salvaged hardware, after which the finished ships would be dismantled, carried over the mountains, reassembled and launched on Lake Texcoco.  

Intent on first subduing the cities ringing the lake, Cortés gathered 550 Spanish infantry, 40 horsemen and 10,000 handpicked Tlaxcalans and in late December 1520 marched for Texcoco, still nominally an Aztec ally. As the Spaniards approached, they were met by emissaries from rebel Texcocan warlord Ixtlilxochitl II, who joined the advance with his own warriors and thousands of canoes. Arriving at Texcoco, Cortés and his growing force found it virtually abandoned, its tlahtoani and citizens having fled across the lake to Tenochtitlán. After sacking the city, Cortés pronounced Ixtlilxochitl Texcoco’s new tlahtoani, at a stroke bloodlessly adding another powerful ally to his ranks. The consequent Aztec loss of Texcoco, with its bountiful harvests and strategic location on the lake’s eastern shore, was a crippling blow to Tenochtitlán. As occurred at Tepeaca, the Spaniards’ success compelled the lords of neighboring cities to visit Cortés’ camp and offer their allegiance.  

In early January 1521, on learning that Chalca cities south of the lake were restive, Cortés led 200 Spaniards and 4,000 allies to sack Iztapalapa, while his lieutenant Gonzalo de Sandoval evicted Aztec garrisons from Chalco and Tlamanalco, loosening Tenochtitlán’s grip on the region. At the urging of his two powerful allies, Cortés further isolated Tenochtitlán by subduing Tlacopán, the last city-state of the Aztec Triple Alliance. (In 1427–28 Itzcoatl, the fourth Aztec emperor, had led Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tlacopán to decisive victory in their rebellion against Azcapotzalco, after which the victors had formed the Triple Alliance to share in future wars of conquest. By 1519, after nearly a century of aggressive expansion, the alliance was dominated by Tenochtitlán, its borders stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico south almost to Guatemala, which extracted tribute from nearly 500 cities and towns in the Valley of Mexico and beyond, backed by the constant threat of military force.)  

After Sandoval repulsed a major Aztec attempt to retake Chalco on March 25, Cortés moved to subdue the region south of Lake Texcoco. With 300 infantry, 30 horsemen, 35 crossbowmen and harquebusiers, and 20,000 Tlaxcalan/Texcocan allies he seized Tlayacapan and Oaxtepec, then sacked Cuernavaca (April 13) and Xochimilco (April 16), further isolating Tenochtitlán from sources of supply and reinforcement. After five months of campaigning, Cortés had subdued or accepted the submission of almost all the cities on the lakeshore and in the Valley of Mexico, had received supplies and reinforcements, and was ready to march for Tenochtitlán. Intent on obtaining Cuauhtémoc’s unconditional surrender, Cortés was prepared to destroy the city block by block and let his allies sack it if necessary.  

Cortés received good news when he returned to Texcoco: The brigantines were ready. Averaging 50 feet in length (Cortés’ flagship, La Capitana, was 65 feet long), each was armed with two guns and carried a captain, 12 oarsmen, six harquebusiers and six crossbowmen. The Spaniards launched them on Lake Texcoco on April 28. Cortés organized his remaining forces into three infantry divisions under Alvarado, Sandoval and Cristóbal de Olid, their objective to seize control of the main causeways into the city. Each division was allotted some 150 foot soldiers, 30 horsemen, 15 crossbowmen and harquebusiers and a detachment of native allies numbering around 8,000. Thousands more Texcocans and Tlaxcalans would follow Cortés’ brigantines in a flotilla of canoes commanded by Ixtlilxochitl, and the combined fleets would support the land assaults, blockade the city and destroy enemy vessels.  

Alvarado and Olid departed Texcoco first, arriving at Tlacopán on May 25. The next morning they rode to Chapultepec, on the lake’s western edge, broke through the Aztec defenses and destroyed the aqueduct there, permanently severing Tenochtitlán’s source of fresh water. Over the next 75 days the city’s citizens would have to rely on grossly inadequate supplies of brackish water extracted from wells and springs.  

Versus Armor

Tipped with razor-sharp obsidian points like that above, Aztec spears and arrows had little effect on Spanish armor. Cortés’ men carried harquebuses, crossbows and swords and were supported by artillery, mounted lancers and war dogs. That said, they were few in number.

With his ground units deployed, Cortés committed the brigantines to the fight on June 1. Observing smoke signals rising from the tiny island city of Tepepolco, warning Cuauhtémoc of the Spanish advance, Cortés landed with 150 men and wiped out that city’s entire garrison. Setting off once more, Cortés’ warships smashed through a flotilla of 600 Aztec canoes sent to intercept them, the brigantines’ high decks thwarting boarders and providing cover for harquebusiers and crossbowmen to fire and reload. “Nothing in the world gave me such joy as to see all 13 sails with a fair wind scatter the enemy,” recalled Sandoval, who observed the engagement from Iztapalapa. Following in Cortés’ wake, the Texcocan canoes destroyed any Aztec canoes that remained afloat. Exploiting his success, Cortés sailed on and seized the key fortress of Xoloc, on the southern causeway from Iztapalapa to Tenochtitlán. Olid then joined Cortés and Sandoval at Xoloc, further improving their strategic situation.  

For his part, Cuauhtémoc was directing operations from a canoe in the lake, sending waves of Aztec warriors armed with spears and steel arrows (fashioned from Spanish swords retrieved from the lake) against Cortés, Sandoval and Olid at Xoloc and Alvarado at Tlacopán. Meanwhile, Aztec laborers erected fortifications, opened breaches along each causeway to close the roads to Spanish horsemen and planted sharp stakes in the lake’s shallow waters to pinion the brigantines. The emperor’s aggressive tactics and vast manpower reserves made Cortés’ advance slow and costly.  

In mid-June, however, Sandoval sailed north of the city and blocked the last open causeway, leading from Tlatelolco (a subject of Tenochtitlán since 1473) to Tepeyac. Tenochtitlán was surrounded, cut off from all supplies, food, water and hope.  

On June 10 and again on the 15th, as Sandoval and Alvarado pressed their respective attacks along the northern and western causeways, Cortés led Olid’s division on major assaults into the city from the south, encountering fierce Aztec resistance before withdrawing. A pattern soon emerged: Escorted by the brigantines, the Spaniards and their allies advanced each morning as far as possible into the city and fought all day before falling back to their fortified camps in the evening, destroying buildings along the way. Aztec laborers appeared each night to again dig ditches in the causeways, forcing the attackers to fill them in again the following day. By late June the besiegers were penetrating into the city at will, though Cortés was well aware of the danger of being ambushed and trapped inside the city. The tenacity of the defenders—facing land and water assaults daily on three fronts—was astounding.  

As Aztec fortunes waned, more of its former allies joined Cortés, including contingents from Huexotzinco and Xochimilco. Morale inside the city plummeted when no festivals were held or crops were planted in June. The lack of able-bodied commoners available to sow crops brought on starvation and finally famine.  

An increasingly desperate Cuauhtémoc abruptly changed tactics and moved his remaining warriors to the neighboring island suburb of Tlatelolco, whose narrow streets and fortified marketplace precinct were better suited to urban warfare. Believing the Aztecs were fleeing, Cortés led a three-pronged attack against Tlatelolco on June 30 that he hoped would end all resistance. After initial gains, the attackers fell into an ambush and, with their withdrawal route blocked, suffered a stinging defeat in which some 20 conquistadors and 2,000 allies were slain. Worse yet, dozens of Spaniards and allied warriors were captured and ritually sacrificed. After watching their comrades slaughtered, most of the remaining allied warriors melted away, leaving Cortés to fear another Noche Triste.  

In the final crisis of the campaign Cortés dispatched Spanish/allied contingents to aid two of his new allies against Aztec threats. Two quick victories restored the strategic advantage to Cortés, and the indigenous army that had abandoned him returned, leaving Cuauhtémoc unable to exploit his victory. After his allies returned, daily incursions into both Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlán proper resumed, and though several brigantines had been lost, the allied fleets still controlled Lake Texcoco, and the blockade of the city remained in place.  

By mid-July conditions within Tenochtitlán were appalling. Sick, starving refugees filled the streets, tribute was being interdicted and most of the chinampas (floating gardens) that provided the bulk of the city’s food had been destroyed. On their daily sorties the attackers had taken to dismantling entire city blocks, tearing down temples and houses to give Spanish horsemen room to operate and crossbowmen and harquebusiers fields of fire.  

By month’s end Aztec attacks on the Spanish camps had ceased and exhausted laborers were no longer able to sever the causeways. Aztec prisoners reported that the city’s inhabitants were starving, and Cuauhtémoc had resorted to conscripting women to fill his ranks. Early on July 27 Cortés was at Xoloc when he saw smoke rising from Tlatelolco’s main temple, a sign Alvarado had overrun the last Aztec line of defenses there and captured the great marketplace, ending all organized resistance. Cuauhtémoc refused to surrender, though, prolonging his people’s suffering, and it wasn’t until August 13 that he was apprehended while fleeing across the lake with his family. With Tenochtitlán reduced to smoking ruins, the Aztec empire had ceased to exist. Brought before Cortés, Cuauhtémoc was tortured in a futile attempt to discover the whereabouts of any stashed gold, then was forced to play the role of puppet ruler before being executed on false charges in 1525.  

After reaching Tenochtitlán in September 1520, smallpox claimed almost 100,000 citizens’ lives. In the ensuing decades epidemics of measles, whooping cough, mumps, influenza and typhus helped reduce the population of central Mexico from the more than 8 million when Cortés landed to little more than 1 million a half century later. The steady depopulation of the Taino peoples of Hispaniola due to disease and overwork—their numbers fell from 200,000 in 1492 to 90,000 in 1515—forced its Spanish governor in February 1510 to authorize the transport of 250 African slaves from Spain to work its gold mines. In August 1517 Charles V authorized the governor to import 4,000 more. Meanwhile, in the two centuries after 1492 some 750,000 people left Spain to escape poverty or seek adventure in the New World.  

With almost no oversight from the mother country Cortés and his men acted as a law unto themselves, destroying and founding new cities and turning entire conquered populations into indentured servants, their legacy one of conquest, colonization, depopulation and exploitation. Indeed, at their peak fully a quarter of all imperial Spanish revenues would be bullion from Mexico and Peru; 180 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver reached Spanish shores from the New World between 1500 and 1650, fueling Spain’s rise as a superpower and funding Charles V’s wars in Italy and against the Protestant Reformation.  

The conquest of central and southern Mexico was followed by the violent subjugation of the rest of Mesoamerica—comprising the modern countries of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Belize—and parts of South America. Gradually, Franciscan friars arrived to spread Christianity, bureaucrats replaced the conquistadors, and in 1535 Antonio de Mendoza became 1st Viceroy of New Spain. “The conquistadors, who put an end to human sacrifice and torture on the Great Pyramid in Mexico City,” wrote historian Victor Davis Hanson, “sailed from a society reeling from the Grand Inquisition and the ferocious Reconquista and left a diseased and nearly ruined New World in their wake.”  

John Walker is a California-based freelance writer and a Vietnam War veteran. For further reading he recommends Tenochtitlán 1519–21: Clash of Civilizations, by Si Sheppard; Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest, by Fernando Cervantes; and Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power, by Victor Davis Hanson.

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

subscribe today

In late October 1917, a detachment of German mountain troopers weary from hard Alpine fighting on the Isonzo front were crossing the river Torre with a group of Italian prisoners. The ordinarily calm waters of the river had swollen into a raging flood after constant heavy rain. Suddenly an Italian prisoner was dragged away by the current. Screaming and flailing, he whirled downstream, sinking under the weight of the large pack he was carrying. An unexpected rescuer came to his aid. The battle-hardened German officer who had defeated the Italian’s comrades and overseen his capture went galloping after him. Driving his horse straight into the torrent, the German risked getting washed away as he drew the helpless prisoner, hanging onto one of his stirrups, to safety.

The German officer was young Oberleutnant Erwin Rommel, and this act of compassion was typical of him. It would be a cornerstone of his career during two world wars in which contempt of one’s enemies and xenophobia were idealized by authorities in power in Germany. Surprisingly, Rommel chose to write about this rescue and other similar anecdotes of humanity in his 1937 World War I memoir, Infantry Attacks! Then a military instructor, Rommel intended to use the book as teaching material for future soldiers training to fight in the Wehrmacht—during a dark era when popular culture in Germany was at its most unmerciful. His original German text offers valuable insights about his outlook and approach to war that censorship and mistranslation had hidden from history.

A Controversial Character

Erwin Rommel is one of the most controversial figures in World War II and German history. Awarded Imperial Germany’s highest decoration for valor, the Pour le Mérite, for his impressive actions as a junior officer during World War I, Rommel reached the pinnacle of his fame during World War II as a brilliant Panzer leader in the 1940 conquest of France and as the daring “Desert Fox” who fought—and ultimately lost to—British and Allied troops in North Africa from 1941 to ’43. Rommel would go on to direct the fortifications of the Normandy coast in preparation for the Allied invasion of France, and command Germany’s Army Group B during the D-Day landings in 1944.

Rommel never joined the Nazi Party nor did he receive any Party decorations, despite the fact that joining would have boosted his career—as it did conversely for Ferdinand Schörner, also a professional soldier, World War I veteran and Pour le Mérite recipient who opted to become a Nazi Party member.

Despite the best efforts of Nazi propaganda to cast Rommel as a hardline ex-SA storm trooper, which he was not, and Allied efforts to depict him as a coldblooded fascist thug, Rommel confounded the expectations of both sides with his unpredictable and humanistic behavior during the war. He disobeyed Adolf Hitler’s infamous Commando Order of 1942 demanding that all Allied “irregular” troops captured were to be delivered to Heinrich Himmler’s security services for immediate execution. Numerous Allied POWs attested to Rommel’s humane treatment of them.

Among them was Capt. Roy Wooldridge of the British Army’s Royal Corps of Engineers, who credited Rommel with saving his life. Wooldridge was captured by a German U-Boat crew while on a secret 1944 mission to scout obstacles around the Normandy coast.

Although Wooldridge was told by interrogators that he would be shot, Rommel unexpectedly summoned Wooldridge, sparing him from a firing squad and sending him off to France after giving him a beer and a pack of cigarettes. “When I got to the prisoner of war camp, a German guard who spoke English said, ‘You’re a very lucky man. If you hadn’t been to see Rommel you would have been shot as a saboteur,’” Wooldridge told the BBC in 2014.

Plotting Against Hitler?

Disillusioned with Hitler’s leadership as early as 1942, Rommel became part of a group of German Army officers conspiring to remove Hitler from power. Contrary to common perceptions, there was not an absence of German Resistance nor did such resistance only come into existence when the war appeared to be closing in around Germany in 1944; pockets of dissent had existed within Germany’s military from much earlier and became more active over time.

Having burned many of his personal papers, particularly from early 1944, to protect himself and others, Rommel’s activities against Hitler—particularly his knowledge or lack thereof regarding Claus von Stauffenberg’s failed July 20 assassination attempt—remain debated.

What is indisputable is that Hitler and other leading Nazis perceived Rommel to be a threat and acted quickly to get rid of him. Severely wounded by a plane that strafed his staff car in Normandy on July 17 and left him with a fractured skull, Rommel was executed on Hitler’s orders on Oct. 14, 1944. Representatives of Hitler came to Rommel’s home and threatened to harm his family unless he agreed to commit suicide—immediately. With the house surrounded by Gestapo and SS men, Rommel complied, and took cyanide he was given on an isolated roadside less than 15 minutes from his driveway. Nazi officials concealed the cause of Rommel’s death, initially claiming he had succumbed to wounds from a “car accident” without mentioning a plane strafing.

Doctors who examined Rommel’s body were threatened to falsify his cause of death. Authorities transformed Rommel’s funeral into a propaganda spectacle to rally public support for Hitler. Witnessing Rommel’s executioners use his funeral as political theater was a lifelong source of pain and anger for Rommel’s then 15-year-old son Manfred, aware of the true cause of his father’s death. News of Rommel’s demise was initially celebrated in the Allied press. The darker story emerged after the war was over.

Since then, Rommel has been the focus of endless debate—celebrated, reviled, doubted and admired. Was he a hero? A hopeless fence-sitter? A would-be assassin? A military genius or a blunderer? Although this author is prepared to venture well-researched opinions on these matters, that is not the purpose of this article. Instead, readers of this story are invited to cast an eye back to the start of Rommel’s career and the experiences he recorded in the original German text of his 1937 book, Infantry Attacks! (Infanterie Greift An), which provides valuable clues about Rommel’s philosophy and ethos.

Censoring Rommel

The book is inextricably bound up with the story of Rommel’s life and had a propelling effect on his career. It launched him to the heights of military command, unlocked barriers to armored warfare, and paved his road to Africa and Normandy—and, most fatefully, brought him into contact with Hitler, the man who sealed his doom. It was also poorly translated into English. The U.S. Army produced translations of the book in 1943 and 1944, which were heavily redacted and contained errors. Phrases and entire passages were removed. All color and emotion were drained from the original language. This changed not only the content but the tone of the writing.

With Rommel’s personality scrubbed out of the book, readers were left only with a bare skeleton of his work. That bare skeleton has shaped perceptions of Rommel among English readers. It might appear to anyone picking up the U.S. Army’s rendition of Rommel’s writing that he was a bland technocrat who produced one of the most convoluted and tedious war memoirs written by any officer who ever dared to pick up a pen. The contrast between the common 1944 English translation, which is about as exciting as reading an encyclopedia, and the otherwise dashing figure of Rommel is enough to leave a person baffled.

Although Rommel was a meticulous teacher of troops and intended his experiences to be used as a textbook—a blend of memoir with “lessons learned”—the original German book has much more historical value than the tactical teachings it contains, which so far have been the only thing that most English readers have been able to appreciate about it.

Nothing in the material that was censored contained gory, obscene or political language, but ordinary passages for any soldier’s wartime memoir. Many removed passages were ones in which Rommel came across as more relatable or sympathetic on a human level, such as his anecdote of finding a wounded Frenchman by a mountain hut who is subsequently tended by Rommel’s troops, his care for his horse, and friends’ funerals.

Working to produce English translations in the middle of World War II, the U.S. Army also removed passages that they may have worried would intimidate Allied soldiers or civilians, such as some passages describing soldiers’ deaths, violence, or grim scenes. Some praise for German troops was removed, as well as a reference in which Rommel clearly states that he has no fear of Russians. The Russians—allies in World War II, of course—in that sentence were conveniently changed to “Romanians.”

Clues About Rommel From His Writing

Rommel’s use of the German language makes for interesting study. His writing is distinctly straightforward with a colloquial South German twist. Patterns of expression emerge. As an author, Rommel showed a tendency to remove direct references to himself from his own narrative. While this is not unusual in the German language, the lengths that Rommel went through to avoid focus on himself is unique—especially when it comes to describing the hardships of battle or frontline conditions.

Although he didn’t hesitate to describe himself in decision-making, he tended to make difficult or uncomfortable situations into “we” and “us” experiences, or simply speak of the tribulations of war in a more abstract sense. It is clear that Rommel did not wish to complain nor describe his own sense of suffering, but referred to himself as part of a group—and above all, focused on the sacrifices of his comrades. This attitude can often be found in the memoirs and statements of war veterans who wish for others to focus on the deeds of their friends around them rather than on themselves.

A sense of deep affection for his comrades is manifest in Rommel’s writing. He referred to his troops in endearing terms, in many cases as “mein Häuflein”—meaning “my little flock,” as if they were a flock of sheep who need to be tended or a small handful of something to be looked after. He stressed his feelings of responsibility towards his men, particularly in situations where they were in danger and he felt compelled to protect them; in one instance, Rommel risked his entire force to save a group of their comrades who were stranded amid enemy forces, taking a “one for all, all for one” type of attitude.

Rommel wrote tributes to fallen comrades, recording their achievements, deaths and funerals. He later revisited former battlefields and photographed his friends’ graves. Additionally, Rommel devoted what sometimes seems like an inordinate amount of energy into building fortifications to protect his men from harm, spending much time analyzing and improving shelters and dugouts. The amount of effort he put into improving structures for defense suggests that Rommel was actually more cautious and circumspect on the front than he is commonly perceived to have been.

‘Homeland’ not ‘Fatherland’

Thought-provoking word choices pop up frequently in Rommel’s writings. While it has been assumed that Rommel had no taste for music or literature, his narrative contains several references to songs and culture, including an ironic reference to a scene from a Richard Wagner opera.

It’s also worth noting that Rommel never used the word “Vaterland” (“Fatherland”) to describe Germany, instead preferring to use “Heimat”—a folksy term meaning “homeland” which wasn’t quite German nationalists’ cup of tea. While the term “Vaterland” was often used by the Nazis to stress the concept of Germany as a strong unified country under Hitler’s rule, “Heimat” is an old-fashioned term that can refer to one’s native region and is non-political. Since the book was published within the Third Reich, when Nazism and support for Hitler were encouraged on every level of society, Rommel had no reason not to appeal to mainstream Nazi political sentiments in his book; indeed, it might have made his work more popular. Yet the book contains no mentions of a Führer nor a “new Fatherland”. 

Rommel was a native of the Swabian Alps, and after serving as an infantryman on the Western Front early in World War I, was selected to become part of the Württemberg Mountain Battalion, an elite unit of Gebirgsjäger troops—German army mountain rangers. These rangers are highly mobile, extremely resilient and adaptable, and trained to maneuver and fight in all manner of harsh mountain environments. They were and continue to be among the most elite units in German-speaking nations. Entitled to great cultural esteem due to their abilities and affinity with the mountains, they are entitled to wear the symbol of the Edelweiss flower.

Training troops For the Wilderness

The Edelweiss, whose name means “noble white,” is a legendary bloom known for growing in the most austere mountain environments and being difficult to reach. It is a symbol not only of beauty but of hardiness and resilience. Still worn by Gebirgsjäger troops today, the Edelweiss patch was also a hard-earned symbol that Rommel was entitled to wear. It is visible on his cap in several of his World War I photos.

Rommel’s writings reveal his strong sense of identity as a mountain ranger, which arguably has never been properly appreciated by historians. Although he built strong bonds with his men in the trenches of the Argonne, one of the singular events in World War I that truly had a transformative effect on Rommel and his future leadership was his becoming a mountain ranger. Within this close-knit group, Rommel quickly developed a strong sense of pride, along with confidence in harsh training and an attitude of fearlessness. Camaraderie and the tests of combat convinced Rommel that, together, he and his men could accomplish nearly anything.

The Rommel that emerged as a skilled commander of mountain rangers was the same Rommel who would become the “Desert Fox” in North Africa—a man who excelled in the wilderness and at molding soldiers into masters of mobile combat, who could all withstand not only battle but the very elements of nature. An intense spirit of individuality, pride and elite group identity, as well as feelings of a close personal bond with Rommel as their commander, remained with many Afrika Korps veterans for their whole lives. The seeds of this future success are clear to be seen in Rommel’s proud and emotional writings about his love for the mountain troops.

Themes and Slang

Nature forms a major theme in Rommel’s narrative. He had a special flair for describing natural environments such as forests, trees, mountains, and geographic features, as well as elemental forces like thunder, lightning, clouds and different types of storms. Even in the midst of grim battles, Rommel somehow appreciated his natural surroundings and found a way to draw attention to it in writing. His writings on nature are poetic, highly descriptive and sometimes romanticized. In one instance, for example, Rommel compared meadows to the Elysian Fields of Roman mythology.

Despite Rommel’s sense of poetry about nature, his writings  abound with slang common to soldiers’ memoirs. Rommel wrote with an understated and ironic sense of humor, and—with a sly attitude similar to the Civil War’s “Gray Ghost,” Col. John Singleton Mosby—clearly enjoyed taking enemies by surprise and chasing fleeing foes. Rommel’s writings on action are far from clinical. Gunfire “rips through” things, men are “gunned down,” and planned actions will be a “piece of cake”—or even “fun”. Rommel’s mix of slang, irony and hard-edged soldierly humor is characteristic of the memoirs of many military professionals.

Humane Treatment of Enemies

Another factor that stands out throughout Rommel’s book is his humane treatment of enemies. The amount of times that Rommel gave his enemies opportunities to surrender rather than shoot them is surprising—in fact, there are several cases when, as Rommel gained opportunities to surprise formidable enemy forces, readers might fairly wonder if opening fire might have been a more practical battlefield measure than yelling at foes to give themselves up.

Rommel however made a constant habit of requesting surrenders even when it seemed clearly inconvenient or downright dangerous to do so. He frequently spoke with prisoners afterwards and gives them cigarettes. In a mirrorlike foreshadowing of events at St. Valery during World War II in 1940, Rommel invited captured officers to have a meal with him. As in 1940, the captured officers were understandably too upset by their situation to appreciate this gesture. But it’s worth noting that this naïve attempt at magnanimity was one that Rommel would repeat in World War II.

Young Rommel also helped enemy wounded, and in one instance intervened to stop his own men from harming POWs. It’s worth mentioning that Rommel, in describing these anecdotes and choosing to include them in his military textbook, risked coming across as “weich,” or “soft,” in Nazi Germany. His anecdotes of showing kindness to enemies did not correspond to the general sense of bloodthirsty nationalism whipped up by Kaiser Wilhelm II during the First World War nor the iron-hearted cruelty advertised as being “strong” in Hitler’s Germany. Rommel could arguably have gotten farther by describing himself being merciless rather than being empathetic.

If anything, the passages attest not only to Rommel’s inner principles but his independence. As a military instructor during the Third Reich, Rommel must have been aware of the values that the regime wanted to instill in future soldiers, but instead chose to set an example of humanity for his students even if it did not match popular ideology. His behavior also forms a continuum with what Allied POWs witnessed during World War II—that Rommel’s compassionate treatment of POWs was not part of any postwar mythologizing, but was rather a real part of his character that was evident when he was a young man.

World War I had a profound impact on Rommel. Haunted by his experiences, Rommel would return to his former battlegrounds, form a veterans’ group, write about, teach about and dwell on his battlefield experiences for the rest of his life. He also wore his Pour le Mérite medal, earned among his beloved mountain troops, constantly until it chipped and faded. There are many more insights to be gained about Rommel’s early transformation into an effective war leader from his memoir—too many to describe in one article. However, what truly stands out is that, contrary to the commonly read, clinical English translations produced during World War II, Rommel was a gifted writer who expressed more about ethics in war than has been previously realized.

Zita Ballinger Fletcher is Editor of MHQ and the author of Erwin Rommel: First War, A New Look at Infantry Attacks, published in 2023.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

See more stories

subscribe now!

 

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

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

See more stories

Subscribe now!

 

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.

subscribe today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

See more stories

Subscribe now!

 

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

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

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

Paul von Hindenburg

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

Erich Ludendorff

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

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

Ferdinand Foch

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

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

Philippe Pétain

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

Sir Douglas Haig

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

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

John J. Pershing

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

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

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

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

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.

subscribe today

I shall sup tonight in Baltimore—or in Hell!” Thus spoke British Maj. Gen. Robert Ross, who commanded His Majesty George III’s land forces opposite the nascent United States’ third largest city on Sept. 12, 1814. It was no mere boast, as just three weeks earlier the redoubtable Irish warrior, supported by Rear Adm. George Cockburn, had routed the American army at Bladensburg, Md., and torched federal buildings (including the White House) in the capital at Washington, D.C.—surely the most shameful humiliation in U.S. history. Whether or not Ross supped in Perdition that September night, two sharpshooting leatherwork apprentices serving in the Maryland militia, Daniel Wells and Henry McComas, enshrined as the “Boy Heroes of North Point,” ensured Ross did not eat in Baltimore or anywhere else this side of Hell ever again.  

During the American Revolutionary War wary Patriots constructed a small earthwork at Whetstone Point, the tip of a peninsula flanking the entrance to Baltimore Harbor. In 1794, recognizing the importance of safeguarding that major port, President George Washington persuaded Congress to appropriate funds for a 20-gun battery and small redoubt at the point. After the 1798 outbreak of the Quasi-War with France work continued on a new brick-and-masonry structure, complete with a magazine and barracks. Its defenders named it after Irish-born Baltimorean James McHenry, Washington’s secretary of war. The garrison became increasingly crucial after the United States declared war against Great Britain on June 18, 1812, in protest of the Royal Navy’s seizure of American trading ships and impressment of sailors as the “by any means necessary” British battled the existential threat of Napoléonic France.  

In 1813 the British launched a widespread terror campaign in the Chesapeake Bay, landing marines, sailors and soldiers across the region to raid and pillage. After burning Washington, the British set their sights on Baltimore. Under the adept leadership of Samuel Smith, however, the city proved a difficult nut to crack. Smith, a 62-year-old American Revolutionary War veteran and major general of the Maryland militia, organized defenses and constantly drilled his troops. In September the British landed nearly 5,000 men under Ross and Cockburn northeast of the city. However, after the subsequent Battle of North Point, where Ross fell, they were rebuffed at the city’s earthworks, manned by at least 10,000 American Regulars and 100 cannons. It appeared the British would need the Royal Navy to enter Baltimore Harbor in support of the attack. But Fort McHenry and its 1,000 defenders blocked the way and would have to be eliminated.  

On Sept. 13, 1814, a Royal Navy fleet, spearheaded by five bomb ships and a sloop equipped with rocket launchers, commenced a bombardment of Fort McHenry, hurling upward of 1,500 shells at the garrison over the next 25 hours. When the fog and smoke cleared at “dawn’s early light” the next morning, Fort McHenry and its defenders were still there, having resisted British landing attempts and the storm of shot and shell at the cost of only four dead. Flying “o’er the ramparts” was the inspiring symbol of their victory—a 30-by-42-foot American flag (the Stars and Stripes) made the previous year by Baltimorean widow Mary Young Pickersgill at the request of fort commandant Major George Armistead. Francis Scott Key, an American attorney who’d been temporarily detained aboard a British ship in the outer harbor, witnessed the bombardment and was inspired to write a poem he called “Defense of Fort M’Henry,” later put to the music of a British drinking song and renamed “The Star-Spangled Banner.”  

After the War of 1812 Fort McHenry was upgraded, with expanded buildings and additional outer defenses. Supporting it was nearby Fort Carroll, designed and constructed by Army engineer Robert E. Lee. During the Civil War Fort McHenry was a prison for both captured Confederate soldiers and pro-Southern Marylanders held after President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Serving as prison chaplain was Father James Gibbons, future founding chancellor of Washington’s Catholic University and archbishop of Baltimore. The fort declined in strategic importance in subsequent decades, though its grounds hosted a sprawling Army hospital during and after World War I. In 1931 Congress adopted “The Star-Spangled Banner’ as the national anthem, in turn prioritizing the preservation of Fort McHenry, whose upkeep was transferred to the National Park Service. In 1939 it was designated a national monument and historic shrine, the only one of the more than 400 existing NPS units.

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.

subscribe today

As Germany crumbled in fire and rubble in the final months of World War II, Adolf Hitler issued orders for four famous Germans to be held hostage—not living Germans, but dead ones. All of them had died before the war had even started; two, in fact, had died in the 1700s. 

The unlikely quartet of corpses consisted of two Prussian warrior kings—Frederick William I and Frederick the Great—plus the late German Weimar Republic President Paul von Hindenburg and his unassuming wife Gertrud. The bodies would be hauled cross country, transported by sea, dragged up mountains, carted through forests and eventually entrenched in darkness, where bewildered American soldiers accidentally stumbled upon them in April 1945.

Yet the story of the kidnapped corpses did not end there. The U.S. Army would soon discover that the dead could be just as troublesome as the living. 

Kidnapping Hindenburg

In view of Germany’s catastrophic military situation, most logical people would not have seen much point in the Third Reich’s focus on famous corpses. Yet Nazi officials placed uncanny emphasis on the dead. Deaths, funerals and memorial events were used for propaganda from the earliest days of the Nazi regime. The Nazis showed a total lack of respect for dead individuals as well as a perverse interest in human remains. Bodies of famous historical figures were frequently dug up, analyzed, poked at, made into centerpieces for speeches and heaped with swastika wreaths. One of the chief tomb violators was Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, whose minions became expert grave robbers in pursuit of famous bones and artifacts. Hitler and Goebbels became masters of funeral ceremonies, creating spectacles for dead compatriots that were less memorial services than political rallies.

Two famous Germans treated to funerary theatrics were the Hindenburgs. Mustachioed Prussian Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg went down in history as the lackluster second President of the Weimar Republic who appointed Hitler as Germany’s Chancellor and opened the door to one of the darkest chapters in world history. Little could he have known that the “Bohemian corporal” he infamously shook hands with would someday uproot his remains—and those of his late wife, Gertrud, who lay buried at the family estate.

When Hindenburg died, Hitler decided that the old man needed to go out in style—preferably with a boom of propaganda to impress the living. Therefore the deceased Field Marshal—along with Frau Hindenburg, unceremoniously dug up to come along for the ride—was hauled to the Tannenberg Memorial, a gargantuan stone temple in the plains of East Prussia partially designed to commemorate a 1914 battle and mostly designed to make Germans forget that the Teutonic knights had lost the first Battle of Tannenberg centuries earlier in 1410.

The memorial sported no less than eight towers and enough space in the middle for a large crowd and probably several orchestras. In 1934, during a long and elaborate ceremony in which the memorial brimmed with wreaths and glittering uniforms enough to make one’s eyes water, the Hindenburg couple were buried in their very own tower. It was complete with a statue of Hindenburg himself, who had expressly wished to be buried with his wife at home. For the pair to end up entombed in the wilderness of East Prussia was similar to being buried at a frontier outpost like Fort Apache.

The Hindenburgs weren’t the only dignitaries whose last wishes would be ignored. Destined to accompany them in a posthumous adventure were two famous kings of Prussia’s Hohenzollern dynasty—Frederick William I and his son Frederick II, known as Frederick the Great. Both kings had attained fame for extraordinary military achievements. Neither king had intended to keep traveling after death. Frederick the Great left instructions in 1769: “Bury me in Sans Souci [Potsdam]…in a tomb which I have had prepared for myself…” Yet the two royals were not destined to rest in peace.

A Salt Mine…and Red Crayon

As the Allies closed in across Germany in 1945, all four bodies ended up taking a wild ride to avoid being captured by combatants in a conflict they had taken no part in during their lifetimes. On Hitler’s orders, both Hindenburgs were pried out of the tower at the Tannenberg Memorial and shoved onto a ship; it was assumed that the Russians wouldn’t react well upon finding the memorial and realizing the fiercely anti-Russian Field Marshal was stuffed into its walls.

The cruiser Emden hauled the Hindenburg coffins to Berlin, where they were joined by the coffins of the royal Fredericks Senior and Junior. From there, the coffins were packed off cross-country to the rugged mountainous region of Thuringia, where they were intended to remain hidden underground until the time was appropriate for an underground Nazi resistance movement to bring them to the surface.

On April 27, 1945, men of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps shuffled wearily through the formidable Thuringian Forest and set to work clearing out a wickedly deep salt mine near the town of Bernterode. Navigating a network of tunnels stretching on for about 14 miles, they came across not only hidden ammunition reserves but a passageway sealed with rubble. Digging through six feet of debris, they found a secret chamber containing tapestries and valuable paintings. They also discovered four giant coffins staring back at them.

The soldiers were baffled. Thankfully the Germans had seen fit to label the coffins by writing the names of the dead on them in red crayon.

A Delicate Problem

Moving the coffins proved a hellish task. European dignitaries were often buried in sarcophagi forged of metal alloys. This process would seal the body in an airtight vacuum and prevent rapid decomposition, instead prompting a process of natural mummification. Such sarcophagi weren’t intended to be mobile—in fact they were, quite reasonably, built to stay in one place. It took the Americans an hour to get Frederick the Great’s casket, which weighed no less than 1,200 pounds, into an elevator for removal.

The U.S. Army trucked the bodies to a castle at Marburg, where the dead dignitaries were kept under guard in a cellar and stared at by wary soldiers for a year until the U.S. State Department, who classified the corpses as “political personages,” arrived at a decision about what to do with them. Lt. Gen. Lucius Clay, deputy U.S. governor in occupied Germany, was told to bury the dead in a dignified manner and delegated the task to Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section Unit (MFAA), also known as the Monuments Men.

It turned out to be what the Monuments Men considered one of their strangest duties. They found that entombing the dead German dignitaries was almost as complicated as trying to make hotel arrangements for them. To bury these characters required navigating European history, international diplomacy and the wishes of next of kin—who were awkward political personages themselves.

No Room For Dead Militarists

The first version of the plan entailed that the Americans would take the two King Fredericks and their British cousins would relieve them of the Hindenburgs. A little bit of research would be required to decide appropriate locations—which would not become rally spots for any stray Nazis. After the logistics were settled, local German authorities were supposed to do the actual burying. The burials had to be kept secret.

Things went downhill quickly. The British were shocked to learn of the corpse problem and were “quite distressed” by the idea of having to put on a funeral for the infamously warlike Paul von Hindenburg, according to a 1950 article in Life magazine. After consultations in London, the British made it clear that Mr. and Mrs. von Hindenburg were not welcome to even set one skeletal foot in their zone, much less be buried in it. The U.S. Army scouted around for suitable old family castles to bury the two Prussian King Fredericks but inevitably found the properties in the possession of the French. The French, understandably, had no desire to do any favors for the two Hohenzollern kings.

Fourteen months later, the hapless Americans were still the unwilling guardians of four famous dead Germans and hoped to bury them like any other dead people. Debates were held about whether to bury the lot together or separate them. Many churches had been bombed so available real estate for private funeral services was scarce. Castles bustled with billeted troops and jazz orchestras.

The Americans eventually agreed not to split the lot but instead to bury the bunch together in St. Elizabeth’s church in Marburg, an ancient local church down the road from where the bodies were already being kept in a cellar. Before the burials took place, the Monuments Men decided to share the news with living relatives and ask for their approval as a kind gesture.

A Wedding or a Funeral?

The Americans had no trouble contacting the son of the Hindenburg couple, Maj. Gen. Oskar von Hindenburg, but matters got complicated when the proud Prussian signed his military title on a hotel registry and, to his great indignation, was promptly arrested. The Monuments Men secured his release. Unsurprisingly, he was fully supportive of his parents being given a normal funeral after the posthumous misadventures they had endured.  

Things got off to an awkward start with Crown Prince Wilhelm, the son of Kaiser Wilhelm II who had become infamous during the First World War. The Crown Prince, then age 64, was the head of the Hohenzollern family and thus the closest relative of the two King Fredericks. He found himself in the French zone, where the French guarded him peevishly and wouldn’t let him leave their sight. To clear the matter up while maintaining official secrecy, the Monuments Men sent the prince a message telling him that an American officer would come visit to discuss an important family matter, accompanied by the prince’s youngest daughter, Cecilia.

The Crown Prince assumed that the private family matter was something rather intimate when he saw Cecilia appear with U.S. Army Capt. Everett Parker Lesley Jr., known as Bill, of the Monuments Men. When Lesley broached the topic of holding the ceremony in a church, the suspicious father refused to give his permission.

“We are acting under orders from the Secretary of War!” rejoined Lesley. “What on earth has the Secretary of War to do with you marrying Cecilia?” demanded the prince. Lesley, astounded, explained he wasn’t there for marriage but for a funeral. The stern prince was overcome by laughter.

The Last Stop

After some problems digging in the church to clear room for the coffins, and some wandering tomb lids that almost got shipped to the Russian zone, the top-secret funerals were ready to happen. The Monuments Men expected it all to go quietly with nobody the wiser. Family members would attend but nobody else was supposed to know. However, on the day of the private burial ceremony, the Americans were mildly horrified to find about 500 Germans gathered around the church to watch.

The unlikely quartet of German dignitaries were buried together in Marburg, where they remained unobtrusively until the Hohenzollern family plucked their two King Fredericks out in 1952 and hustled them into a family castle. In August 1991, the two kings’ bodies were carted out again—this time they came full circle, returning to the starting point of their adventure at their original resting place in Potsdam. Their (hopefully) final reburial took place with a lavish televised ceremony following German Reunification.

The Hindenburgs remain in Marburg in a dignified but inconspicuous place, as the Monuments Men intended. Locals find the presence of Paul von Hindenburg a little bit awkward—even if the church pastor has expressed sympathy for the deceased’s overlooked wife.  

But, like them or not, nobody can think of a better solution than the Americans did in 1946. Local mayor Thomas Spies told Hessenschau news: “From the city’s viewpoint, there is no reason why Hindenburg should rest here, but of course the man has to be buried someplace.” 

The two frogmen slipped into the dark cold waters of the English Channel and started swimming towards the shore. The sea was lumpy and the pair could feel the current pulling them further east than they wished. The rain was torrential and all they could see was the lighthouse beam as they swam hard for land. They came ashore opposite the village of La Rivière, staggering up the beach at a crouch, relieved that they were screened from the lighthouse’s beam by buildings and trees.

For a few moments Maj. Logan Scott-Bowden and Sgt. Bruce Ogden-Smith recovered their breath in the lee of some groynes. From the buildings above them they could hear revelry. It was the last day of 1943 and the Germans were seeing in the New Year with plenty of beer and song. 

The two Englishmen set off down the beach, heading west for nearly a mile towards the original landing spot. The intelligence briefing had stated the beach was not mined. On this stretch of the Normandy coast the strong tides and shifting sand meant they would not stay in position. The rain was now nearly horizontal, a filthy night but a perfect one for their task.

Checking his map, Scott-Bowden announced that they had reached their place of work. They were to take samples of sand from the beach in an area designated in the shape of the letter ‘W’. The sand was collected by an auger, which, when inserted into the sand and given one half turn, dredged up a core sample. These were collected in twenty 10-inch tubes held in a bandolier worn by one of the men.

Ogden-Smith and Scott-Bowden worked swiftly, moving up and down the beach, taking samples but glancing now and again east to check that no Germans were clearing their groggy heads with a stroll down the beach. With their samples stashed in the bandolier, the pair left the beach and began wading through the breakers. But the wind had picked up and they were flung back into the sea. They tried again but without success. Apprehension began to rise. If they were caught on the beach with their bandolier the game would be up?

A Secretive Special Forces Unit

This was one of the most crucial moments of the war.  Ogden-Smith and Scott-Bowden ran up the beach. With the lighthouse beam to help them, they worked out the wave pattern. On the third attempt they made it through the surf and swam furiously towards the recovery boat. Suddenly Scott-Bowden heard a cry through the wind. Turning, he saw Ogden-Smith waving an arm. “I swam back somewhat alarmed, thinking he had either got cramp or his suit had sprung a leak,” recalled Scott-Bowden. “When I got close, he shouted ‘Happy New Year!’”

Bruce Ogden-Smith and Logan Scott-Bowden belonged to one of the most secretive special forces units in the British army. To those who served it was known by its acronym, COPP, short for Combined Operations Pilotage Parties. 

COPP was the brainchild of Lieutenant-Commander Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott, who had joined the Royal Navy between the wars, partly inspired by tales he’d heard as a young boy from his uncle Henry. He’d served in the First World War and had taken part in the disastrous Dardanelles campaign of 1915, when the Allies had attempted to knock Turkey out of the war by landing on the Gallipoli peninsula. It had been a bloody failure. Thousands of British, Australian and New Zealand troops were slaughtered attempting to establish a beachhead on clifftop ridges well-fortified by Turkish soldiers. Had the British planners been better briefed about the peninsula they might not have risked such an audacious amphibious assault. To Willmott’s dismay, the British military appeared not to have learned their lesson when the Second World War started. The Norwegian campaign in 1940, in which Willmott participated, was hampered by the Royal Navy’s ignorance of the fjords as they attempted to land British troops. 

Beach Surveillance

In early 1941 Willmott was appointed navigation officer for a planned invasion of Rhodes, a strategically important island in the Mediterranean Sea. There was scant intelligence on the approach to the beaches or shoreline itself. Might there be sandbars or rocks just under the water? Were the beaches mined? Were they suitable for vehicles? Were there accessible exit points so soldiers could quickly move inland? Answers to these questions had to be found. 

Willmott requested permission from Rear Adm. Harold Tom Baillie-Grohman, in charge of overall responsibility for planning the assault, to carry out a reconnaissance from a dinghy. It was a time in the war when the British, fighting a lone battle against the Axis forces, were at their most inventive out of necessity.

Small raiding units, dubbed ‘private armies’ were being formed with the encouragement of Prime Minister Winston Churchill: the commandos, the Long Range Desert Group and the Special Boat Section [SBS], the latter commanded by Maj. Roger Courtney, an adventurer before the war who had canoed the length of the White Nile in Africa. Courtney was only too happy to paddle Willmott ashore. Their reconnaissance proved invaluable, revealing perilous aspects of the shoreline that would have hampered any amphibious assault. 

Private Armies?

Not all British senior officers approved of ‘private armies.’ Some regarded these units as unbecoming of the British military and it was another 18 months before Willmott was authorized to raise a naval reconnaissance force. It took the shambles of the Dieppe Raid in August 1942 to convince the British that better reconnaissance was imperative for future operations. Intelligence about the Dieppe coastline had been so poor that the British planners were reduced to studying prewar postcards of the coastline for clues about its topography. Three thousand Canadians and British commandos were killed or captured because of this ignorance, plus three killed in action, five wounded and three POWs of the 50 U.S. Army Rangers that took part while assigned to a commando unit.

Willmott’s unit gathered intelligence for Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of Vichy-controlled French North Africa in November 1942. As a consequence, the following month the force was expanded and officially designated COPP. 

Scott-Bowden was recruited to COPP as Willmott’s second-in-command in May 1943, a few months before Sub-Lt. Jim Booth. Scott-Bowden was a soldier but Booth volunteered from the Royal Navy, where he’d tired of life as a junior officer mine-sweeping in the North Sea. “I’d heard nothing of COPP prior to my arrival,” recalled Booth in a 2017 interview with the author. “But it was soon apparent that I was among a different breed. They were mad, really, but in a nice way. I think for most of us the motivation for volunteering was to do something different.”

New recruits to COPP underwent training at Hayling Island, off the south coast of England near Portsmouth. Willmot was ruthless in weeding out those men he judged to be deficient physically or mentally for his unit. “He was very nice but bloody tough,” said Booth. “During the autumn and winter of 1943, he led us in training every day. He was methodical in our navigational training because he knew the problems caused by poor navigation.” While Booth completed his training, Willmot and Scott-Bowden were told to report to Combined Operations HQ in London in December 1943. 

Invading France

The planning for the invasion of France was underway. A 50-mile stretch of Normandy coast had been identified as a potential beachhead. But there were concerns. “Scientists had anxieties about the beach bearing-capacity of the Plateau de Calvados beaches for the passage of heavy-wheeled vehicles and guns, particularly in the British and Canadian sectors,” said Scott-Bowden. In ancient times there been peat marshes close to the sea. These had been covered with sand over the centuries, but the Allies feared that peat was often accompanied by clay, which could be catastrophic for a large invasion force. 

The Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington wanted a conclusive estimate of how much beach trackway would be required for the invasion force. Ogden-Smith and Scott-Bowden undertook a trial run on Dec. 22, 1943 on a beach in Norfolk, eastern England. It was an opportunity to gain valuable practical experience of using the auger to collect samples. It was also a chance for COPP to prove to sceptical Allied planners that they could do their work undetected by sentries. Having proved their point, the pair sailed to Normandy on New Year’s Eve and the real thing was as fruitful as the dress rehearsal.

“[Lt.] General [Omar N.] Bradley commander in chief of all the American [D-Day assault] forces… having heard that we had examined the British beach [Gold] wanted Omaha Beach—as it came to be known—to be examined too,” remembered Scott-Bowden.

Omaha Beach

Omaha Beach was five miles west of ‘Gold’ beach. Bradley and his planners already knew it posed a formidable challenge to a putative invasion force. The beach was exposed, rising gently to a low sea wall, beyond which was a no-man’s land of marshy grassland. It was overlooked by bluffs, steep in places, which were cut by five valleys, the only exit points for vehicles and all heavily guarded by German concrete bunkers. COPP was instructed to bring back as much intelligence as they could about ‘Omaha’ beach in an operation codenamed Postage Able. Ogden-Smith and Scott-Bowden were again part of the team, accompanied by Willmot. 

However, there was a significant difference to this mission compared to the one undertaken on New Year’s Eve. This time the audacious men would be traveling in an X-craft—a midget submarine that COPP had been conducting training on for several weeks in Loch Striven, a sea loch off the west coast of Scotland.

The X-class, or X-craft submarines were powered by 4-cylinder 42 hp diesel engines of the type used in London double-decker buses, and a 30 hp electric motor. Its maximum surface speed was 6.5 knots (a knot less when submerged). The midget submarines were usually crewed by three: the commander, pilot and engineer. Some also carried a specialist diver/frogman as a fourth member of the crew. “The X-craft were 52 feet long and 5 feet in diameter,” Jim Booth recalled, adding that they could remain at sea for to 10 days. The worst aspect of the midget submarines, certainly for the six-foot Booth, was their size. “The facilities were very cramped,” he remembered. “You had a bunk, cooking facilities, a gluepot for a hot meal, and you could just about stand.”

COPP had two midget submarines—X-20 and X-23—and it was the former that sailed from Portsmouth for Omaha beach on Jan. 17, 1944 under the command of Lt. Ken Hudspeth. It was a joint effort, his pilotage skills and the navigation of Willmot. “To reach the destination precisely, at [low] speed and in the strong cross-rides of Baie de Seine, was a measure of Willmott’s remarkable navigational skill,” commented Hudspeth.

At 2:44 p.m. on Jan. 18, the midget submarine was about 380 yards from the beach. It was nearly high tide. The vessel beached at periscope depth in 8 feet of water on the left-hand sector of ‘Omaha’ beach. Willmott took a couple of bearings to be sure of their position, then turned over the periscope to Scott-Bowden. “I took a quick general view and was astonished to see hundreds of [German] soldiers at work, and how hard they were working,” he recalled. “From our low-level view and pointing slightly up due to the slope of the beach, it was often possible to see under the camouflage netting and so verify the types of [gun] emplacement being constructed.”

Inside the Submersible

That night, Scott-Bowden and Ogden-Smith swam ashore to get a closer look. “We examined the beach with our augers over a wide area as planned,” said Scott-Bowden. The pair had special instructions to investigate the shingle bank at the back of the beach to determine if it might impede the progress of armoured vehicles. “It appeared to have been man-made and was above normal high water,” noted Scott-Bowden. “There were masses of wire immediately behind and a probable minefield. We each took one stone.” The next night the pair carried out another beach reconnaissance.

During daylight on Jan. 20 the midget submarine moved along the coast, observing different areas of the beach through the periscope. Then in the late afternoon they sailed for England. It was another two hours before Hudspeth felt it safe to surface, to the relief of the five men on board (the fifth was the engineer officer). Willmott recorded in his journal that the air was “very bad (none fresh for 11 hours) and everyone showed signs of distress.”

They reached Portsmouth at 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 21—after no less than five days inside X-20. Several high-ranking officers were on the quayside to greet them but when the rear hatch was opened “the reception committee took a large step back.” Scott-Bowden didn’t blame them. The stench had been unbearable. A midget submarine was no place for a soldier.

The midget submarine had gathered vital intelligence on what became known as Omaha Beach for the planning for D-Day. Its role in assisting with the invasion of Normandy was not over. A new destination for X-20 was Juno Beach, the middle of the three Anglo-Canadian landing sectors with Gold to the west and Sword to the east. Arriving off the coast on June 4, the submarine acted as a beach marker for the main amphibious assault as they approached on the morning of D-Day.

COPP’s other midget submarine, X-23, was tasked with performing a similar task at Sword beach, the eastern extremity of the invasion task force. The crews of both vessels had been ordered to Portsmouth with their craft at the end of May. “We booked into the wardroom and so we knew it [the invasion] was imminent,” said Jim Booth. “Everything had been done in the greatest secrecy, however, and while we had done a lot of training, we had no clue to the date of the invasion or the location.”

On the morning of June 2, the skipper of X-20, Lt. George Honour, assembled his crew, which comprised Booth, Lt. Geoff Lyne (chief navigator), George Vause (engineer), and First Lt. Jimmy Hodges (diver). The invasion was on, he told them. They would depart in the evening. Their operational orders were to sail the 90 miles to Normandy and then lie on the bottom of the Channel a mile off Sword beach until the early hours of D-Day on June 5. Then they would surface, erect their masts with their lights shining seaward, activate their radio beacons and guide in the invasion fleet. 

Switching on the Beacons

Booth’s job was to climb into a dinghy and erect the masts and switch on the beacons. The operation was codenamed “Gambit,” a word Honour explained to his men was a chess move in which a piece is risked so as to gain advantage later. The men laughed sardonically.

The rest of the day was one of frenetic activity as they loaded the midget submarine with equipment: 2 small CQR anchors, three flashing lamps with batteries, several taut-string measuring reels, two small portable radar beacons, an eighteen-feet-long sounding pole and two telescopic masts of similar length. Twelve additional bottles of oxygen were hauled down the access hatch, to complement the vessel’s built-in cylinders, and three RAF rubber dinghies were also brought on board.

A handful of submachine guns and revolvers (and false identification papers) were stashed inside the sub in the event they were forced to abandon the vessel and make for Nazi-occupied France. At 9:40 p.m., X-20 and X-23 sailed out of Portsmouth and rendezvoused with two naval trawlers that towed them part way across the Channel. 

The submarines slipped their tows at 4:35 a.m. June 3 and headed independently towards their respective beaches. X-23’s orders was to position itself at the point where the amphibious Duplex Drive Sherman [DD-swimming] tanks were to be launched onto Sword Beach. The pressure on the shoulders of Lt. Lynne, the navigator of X-23, was therefore immense: a slight error in position could have appalling ramifications.

The chief pre-occupation of X-23’s skipper, George Honour, was their oxygen supply; to conserve it as best he could he carried out a procedure every five hours of what submariners call “guffing through”—coming to periscope depth and raising the induction mast, then running the engine for a few minutes to draw a fresh supply of air through the boat. This brought obvious risks, particularly as they would lying just off the enemy coastline. 

At 8:30 a.m. June 4 Honour wrote in his log: “Periscope depth, ran to the East. Churches identified and fix obtained.” They had arrived at their position off Sword beach. The churches they could see were those at Ouistreham. Booth peered through the periscope. On the beach was a group Germans playing football. “Poor buggers don’t know what’s going to hit them,” he muttered.

Enough Oxygen?

In less than 24 hours the invasion would be underway—or so they thought. But when they surfaced at 1:00 a.m. Monday June 5 and hoisted their radio mast, they received bad news. “The postponement was sent out in a broadcast,” remembered Booth. “There were several messages and the phrase to let us know invasion was off was ‘Trouble in Scarborough’. [Scarborough is a coastal town in eastern England]. That caused a bit of tension because we didn’t know the length of the postponement and we weren’t sure we would have enough oxygen.” X-23 remained on the surface until 3:00 a.m. June 5. The men enjoyed the stiff wind on their faces and the fresh air in their lungs. 

Reluctantly they climbed back inside their 52-foot submarine, closed the hatch and bottomed. Honour said the lack of oxygen inside the midget submarine left him feeling like he’d drunk “a couple of stiff gins.” He added: “It was murky, damp and otherwise very horrible.” X-23 surfaced at 11:15 p.m. on Monday, June 5. They began their wireless watch. The weather was still foul.

The crew believed the invasion would again be postponed, but the message they received confirmed it was on. They dived once more, then surfaced at 4:45 a.m. on Tuesday June 6. The sea was too rough for Booth to launch his rubber dinghy so instead he rigged up the lights above the submarine. The lights flashed the letter D for Dog for 10 seconds every 40 seconds from 140 minutes before H-hour—the start time of the assault.

“We had a few problems with the boat because it was rocking and rolling,” recalled Booth. “We secured the main one, a green light, and also some red and white lights, and then because it was so cold and miserable out on deck we went down below and put the [tea] kettle on.” The radio beacon had also been activated. There was nothing else to do but have a cup of tea and wait. The tension was as unbearable as the foul air they breathed. Aircraft began bombing the German coastal positions. Soon the guns of the naval armada joined the bombardment. 

Invasion Day

Booth and his comrades went back on deck just as dawn broke on June 6. For several minutes they peered south through the murk, straining to see the armada they knew was coming their way.

“Suddenly we saw them,” recalled Booth. “It was a case of ‘bloody hell, look at that lot’! It was literally ships as far as the eye could see. A very spectacular sight.”

As the invasion fleet loomed into view another danger confronted X-23—being sunk or shelled by one of their own vessels. The commanding officer of the destroyer, HMS Middleton, Lt. Ian Douglas Cox, was standing on his ship’s brige when “a small submarine suddenly loomed out of the faint mist.” He and his lookout assumed it was an enemy vessel. Middleton gave orders for ‘full ahead.” “As we gathered speed to ram her, a figure stood up on the conning tower waving a large White Ensign,” he recalled. “We laughed nervously and sheared away.”

X-23 avoided any further unpleasant encounters and made its way to HMS Largs, the headquarters ship, where it rendezvoused with a naval trawler. A relief crew exchanged places with Booth and his comrades, who gratefully boarded the trawler. The operation had lasted 72 hours—of which 64 had been spent underwater. The men craved fresh air as much as they did sleep. Operation Gambit had indeed been a risk, but above all it had been a success.

The COPP force and the midget “X-craft” submarines were vital to the success of the D-Day landings, anddeserve more credit than has yet been given to them. Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of German-occupied France on the Normandy coast, was the single most complicated human endeavor undertaken before the “computer age,” and its success is due to the incrediblecoordination of all branches of service of the Allied powers.

Popular history and films tend to focus on the June 5–6, 1944 airborne operations and the deadly ordeal the infantry assault troops suffered and endured at bloody Omaha Beach, but the ultimate goal of the operation—establishing a secure Allied foothold on the European continent in the face of fierce German resistance, was only achieved by the total commitment and supreme effort of every single member of all Allied forces taking part—on land, sea and in the air. This article recounts only one of those efforts.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

See more stories

subscribe now!

 

Nazi wives and lovers tended to be mediocre women. They were not especially gifted or brilliant. They were content to be used as tools for their partners’ purposes—and to make the most of their proximity to power. That might surprise you. You might have expected Nazi-advertised attributes like “blonde,” “athletic,” “Nordic,” or “motherhood” to have had something to do with why certain women ended up in relationships with Adolf Hitler and his inner circle.

While it’s true that several top Nazis tended to be partial to blondes, they chose female partners for reasons of exploitation rather than personal admiration. Hitler, for example, scorned marriage and children, instead preying on naive teenage girls he could dominate; one such relationship was with his half-niece Geli Raubal. 

In most cases, the exploitation was mutual. While the Third Reich touted the ideal of “noble” and “simple” housewives, reality shows the women who stood at the prow of the Third Reich were anything but. They were willing to court monstrosity for money and privilege. Some became sadistic: like Brigitte Frank, who wore furs stolen from displaced Jewish women, or Unity Mitford, who toured a Jewish family’s apartment she wanted to confiscate while the owners wept in front of her. 

Nazi propaganda made people forget that attributes like blondeness, athleticism and motherhood are ordinary. In a world where mediocrity became an ideal, women who otherwise stood no chance of success were able to transform themselves into goddesses, thriving in an atmosphere of cruelty, materialism and superficial glamor.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

See more stories

subscribe now!

 

On the first day of the Allied offensive on the Somme River of northern France in July 1916 the British suffered 57,470 battle casualties, making it the bloodiest single day in that nation’s military history. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, realized he must change tactics. Thus, he gave orders that all the newfangled tanks that had reached the Western Front be employed in a subsequent assault on German-held French villages dubbed the Battle of Flers-Courcelette. A dozen Allied infantry divisions and all 49 available tanks attacked the German front line that September 15. The tanks psychologically shattered the Germans, instilling in them a fear they termed “Panzer Angst” and prompting many to flee. Those who held their ground found that their most potent weapons—artillery shrapnel and machine guns—were useless against the lumbering armored beasts. In the first three days of fighting the British captured more than a mile of German-held territory.

Thanks for the British success was due in part to an unlikely early proponent of armored mechanized warfare—Winston Churchill.

That summer Churchill’s service as commander of the 6th Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers had come to an end. He’d been serving on the Western Front for the past six months after having taken a break from politics. The reason for that break was his undeniable link to the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in Turkey. As first lord of the Admiralty, Churchill had been among the chief advocates for opening another front in the Dardanelles. In the wake of the sub-
sequent military fiasco, Churchill temporarily left politics and resumed his previous commission as a British army officer. What he witnessed in the trenches refocused his attention on a technological innovation he’d championed in the Admiralty—an armored vehicle that could break the stalemate on the Western Front.

Winston Churchill’s service to Great Britain as a cigar-chomping, no-nonsense prime minister during World War II has been the subject of countless books, articles and films. Less well known is his service as a British army officer after his graduation from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. As a young cavalry officer he saw active duty in the far reaches of the empire, including Cuba, India and the Sudan. After having served some five years, he resigned his commission to pursue politics and was elected a member of Parliament in the House of Commons. While Churchill served primarily as a politician for the rest of his life, he never abandoned his interest or involvement in military matters.

In 1911, after a decade in public office, Churchill was appointed first lord of the Admiralty by Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. Winston had always expressed a keen interest in naval matters, as a member of Parliament often pushing for increases in defense spending for the Royal Navy. As first lord he pushed for higher pay for naval staff, ramped up production of submarines and beefed up the nascent Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). Churchill encouraged the navy to determine how aircraft might be used for military purposes, coined the term “seaplane” amid debate in the House of Commons and ordered 100 of the latter for naval use. His advancements were timely. Three years into his appointment as first lord Britain entered World War I.

With the onset of war Churchill grew increasingly obsessed with the Middle Eastern theater. Hoping to relieve Ottoman pressure on Allied Russia in the Caucasus, he proposed a combined naval expedition against Turkish gun emplacements in the Dardanelles. Churchill hoped a successful outcome there might enable the Allies to seize the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), force Turkey out of the war and allow British naval forces to transit the Bosporus Strait into the Black Sea. Churchill anticipated that Romania, a neutral nation bordering the Black Sea that harbored hostility for its Austro-Hungarian neighbor, would ultimately allow Allied troops to use its territory to open a southern front against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Allied representatives signed off on Churchill’s ambitious plan, and in February 1915 an Anglo-French fleet dubbed the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force sailed to commence a naval bombardment of Turkish defenses in the Dardanelles. On March 18 the Allied fleet, comprising 18 battleships and an assortment of cruisers and destroyers, launched its main attack against Turkish defenses at the narrowest point of the Dardanelles, where the straits between Asia and Europe are only a mile wide. The British first ordered civilian-crewed minesweepers into the straits, which soon retreated under significant artillery fire from Ottoman shore emplacements, leaving the minefields largely intact. At the outset of the attack the French battleship Bouvet struck a mine, capsized and sank within minutes; just 75 of its crew of more than 700 survived. The British battlecruiser Inflexible and pre-dreadnought battleship Irresistible also struck mines. Inflexible was severely damaged and compelled to withdraw. Irresistible was lost, though most of its crew was rescued. Sent to Irresistible’s aid, the battleship Ocean was damaged by shellfire and then struck a mine, sinking soon after its crew abandoned ship. Also damaged by shellfire, the French battleships Suffren and Gaulois had to withdraw. With his combined fleet bloodied, Rear Adm. John de Robeck, the British commander, ordered a withdrawal.

Churchill and others in favor of opening a southern front remained determined. If the Turkish emplacements could not be silenced by naval gunfire, then a ground invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula would serve the purpose. The planned assault called for Allied forces to conduct amphibious landings and then attack the Ottoman forts from the landward side. Initiated on April 25, the landings targeted several beaches on the peninsula. The Allied assault was conducted primarily by British and Commonwealth soldiers, including Australian and New Zealand troops, but also included a French contingent.

Organized on short notice, the amphibious assault suffered from a dearth of intelligence regarding enemy defenses and lacked accurate maps. Seeking to overcome both shortfalls, planners turned to seaplanes from No. 3 Squadron of Churchill’s vaunted RNAS. Unopposed by the small Ottoman air force during the preparation phase, the squadron initially provided aerial reconnaissance. Once the invasion was under way, the planes conducted photographic reconnaissance, observed naval gunfire and reported on Turkish troop movements. The squadron also conducted a handful of bombing raids in support of Allied ground troops.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

See more stories

Subscribe now!

 

One handicap Allied planners were unable to overcome was the fact Ottoman forces held the high ground in the interior beyond the beachheads. The Turks knew their own geography and had modern artillery and machine guns provided by their German allies. The campaign devolved into a stalemate, with the Allies unable to break out from the beachheads, and the Turks unable to overrun them. A rare Allied highlight of the campaign was that Churchill’s Royal Navy was able to interdict most enemy merchant shipping seeking to resupply Ottoman forces in Gallipoli. That alone might have ultimately forced Turkey to sue for peace. But the Allied situation at Gallipoli soon devolved after Bulgaria joined the Central Powers. In early October 1915 the latter opened a land route through Bulgaria, connecting Germany and the Ottoman empire and enabling the Germans to rearm the Turks with modern heavy artillery capable of devastating the Allied positions. Germany also supplied Turkey with the latest aircraft and experienced crews.

‘Darth’ Tanker

Actually harking back in appearance to medieval Japanese samurai armor, this 1916-issue leather British tanker’s helmet with mask was designed to protect its wearer from head injury. When leather proved too flimsy, British tankers switched back to the steel Brodie helmet.

Seeing no realistic way to turn the situation to their favor, the British Cabinet made the difficult decision to evacuate in early December 1915. While Churchill hadn’t been the sole proponent of the disastrous campaign, he’d been among its most vocal, thus many ministers of Parliament held him personally responsible. The following May the prime minister agreed under parliamentary pressure to form an all-party coalition government on the condition Churchill be removed from his Cabinet position.

Unceremoniously booted from his appointment as first lord of the Admiralty, Churchill took a break from politics and resumed frontline service as an army officer. In January 1916 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and given command of the 6th Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers. After training, the battalion deployed to a sector of the Belgian front. For more than three months they experienced continual shelling and sniping while preparing to meet the expected German spring offensive. As the Germans were focused on taking Verdun, Churchill’s sector remained relatively quiet. In May the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers were absorbed into the 15th Division. Churchill didn’t seek a new command in the division, instead securing permission to leave active duty and return to politics. But his military contributions were far from over, and the seeds of an earlier endeavor were about to bear fruit.

In 1914, when the war slipped into stalemated trench warfare, First Lord Churchill had fished about for solutions and came to believe an armored motorized vehicle of some sort was the answer. Seeking ownership of the technology on behalf of the Admiralty, he’d labeled such futuristic armored vehicles “landships.” Eventually conceding the technology was more appropriately an army initiative, Churchill transferred £70,000 (more than $8 million in today’s dollars) from the navy to the army to develop what became known as the tank.

The man most often credited with having invented the tank is Lt. Col. Ernest D. Swinton. Appointed at the outset of the war by Secretary of State for War Horatio Herbert, 1st Earl Kitchener, as the official British war correspondent on the Western Front, Swinton moved back and forth between France and England and to and from the front lines. Witnessing the death, destruction and deadlock of trench warfare, he initially conceived an armored variant of the American-made Holt caterpillar tractor. While Kitchener proved lukewarm over Swinton’s armored tractor, it resonated with First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill, who in February 1915 ordered formation of an exploratory Landship Committee, tasked with developing the technology.

Under Churchill’s ministry oversight were naval air squadrons based in Dunkirk, France. Perpetually at risk of enemy attack, the squadrons were ably defended by armored car squadrons. Thus, Churchill recognized the importance of and need for armored forces. He kept abreast of developments as the Landship Committee experimented with armored vehicle designs. The initial versions were essentially wheeled automobiles with bolted-on armor. However, it soon became clear wheeled variants could neither traverse trenches nor function properly in mud. Churchill’s Admiralty experimented with attaching bridging equipment to such vehicles, but the results proved disappointing. Swinton’s Holt caterpillar tractor proved far more promising. Offering greater grip and more weight-bearing surface, the tracked vehicle was just the ticket for crossing the no-man’s-land between trenches.

On June 30, 1915, Churchill arranged a demonstration of a prototype tractor’s ability to cross barbed-wire entanglements. A manufacturing company working on the project eventually produced the Killen-Strait armored tractor. Capped with the superstructure from a Delaunay-Belleville armored car, its tracks comprised an unbroken series of steel links connected by steel pinions. Churchill and David Lloyd George, then head of the Ministry of Munitions, were present for tests of the Killen-Strait. The promising results prompted Lloyd George to assume the responsibility for producing a steady supply of landships once the Royal Navy settled on a satisfactory design. For his part, Churchill was a total believer, convinced the new machine would enable Allied forces to readily traverse the muddy, shell-pocked landscape of the Western Front and smash enemy defenses.

Meanwhile, Swinton managed to persuade the newly formed Inventions Committee in the House of Commons to fund development of a small landship. He drew up target specifications for the new machine, including a maximum speed of 4 miles per hour on flat ground, the ability to perform a sharp turn at top speed, reversing capability, the ability to climb a 5-foot earthen bank and the ability to cross an 8-foot gap. Additionally, the vehicle was to accommodate 10 crewmen and be armed with two machine guns and a 2-pounder cannon. Though the landship was no longer under the purview of the Admiralty, Churchill went out of his way to write Asquith in praise of Swinton’s developments.

Under Swinton’s oversight, the prototype landship, nicknamed “Little Willie” had 12-foot-long track frames, weighed 16 tons and could carry a crew of three at a top speed of just over 2 miles per hour. Its speed over rough terrain, however, dropped considerably. Moreover, it was unable to traverse trenches more than a few feet wide. But while the initial trials proved disappointing, Swinton remained convinced a modified version would prove a breakthrough weapon.

Its manufacturers immediately began work on an improved tank. The resulting Mark I, nicknamed “Mother,” was twice as long as “Little Willie,” keeping the center of gravity low and helping its treads grip the ground. Sponsons were fitted to the sides to accommodate two 6-pounder naval guns. During initial trials in January 1916 the tank crossed a 9-foot-wide trench with a parapet more than 6 feet high.

With that, Swinton decided it was time to demonstrate the new tank to Britain’s leading political and military figures. Thus, on February 2, under conditions of utmost secrecy, Secretary of State for War Kitchener, Minister of Munitions Lloyd George and Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald McKenna gathered with other key personnel to see the Mark I in action. Lord Kitchener remained unimpressed and skeptical of the tank’s potential contribution toward victory. Fortunately for the Allies, Lloyd George and McKenna, the two with oversight of the government purse strings, did recognize the Mark I’s potential and by April had placed orders for 150 tanks. Churchill was ecstatic.

Foreshadowing the German Wehrmacht’s Blitzkrieg tactics, Churchill believed the army should wait to field the Mark I until factories had rolled out 1,000 tanks and then employ the shock value of a combined armor assault to win a great battle. Though Field Marshal Haig harbored doubts about the value of tanks, the British Expeditionary Force commander did order all available Mark Is to assist during that summer’s Somme Offensive. Unfortunately for their advocates, many of the tanks broke down, and the British army was unable to hold on to its gains.

Truth be told, the tank’s debut was not as great a success as the British press reported it to be. Of the 59 tanks that had arrived in France, only 49 were in good working order. Of those, 17 broke down en route to their line of departure for the attack. It must be noted that Swinton had cautioned commanders to carefully choose fighting ground that corresponded with the tank’s powers and limitations. Had they followed his recommendations, the initial results would have been better. Regardless, the sight of the tanks created panic and had a profound effect on the morale of the German army.

For his part, Colonel John Frederick Charles “J.F.C.” Fuller, chief of the British Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps (later Tank Corps), was convinced his machines could win the war and persuaded Haig to ask the government for another 1,000 tanks. Churchill, who by then had returned home as a politician, did everything he could to endorse Haig’s request.

Meanwhile, Fuller and others refined tank operating procedures, and just over a year later, during the Cambrai Offensive, Haig ordered a massed tank attack at Artois. Launched at dawn on Nov. 20, 1917, without preparatory bombardment, the attack wholly surprised the Germans. Employing more than 400 tanks, elements of the British Third Army gained up to 5 miles that first day, an incredible amount of territory to be captured so rapidly on the stalemated Western Front. Churchill’s belief in the tank as a combat multiplier had been validated. The British army remembered his tireless efforts, and at the outset of World War II it named its primary infantry tank, the Mk IV, the Churchill.

Retired U.S. Marine Colonel John Miles writes and lectures on a range of historical topics. For further reading he recommends Thoughts and Adventures, by Winston S. Churchill; A Company of Tanks, by William Henry Lowe Watson; and Eyewitness and the Origin of the Tanks, by Ernest D. Swinton.

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

subscribe today

Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery is the most maligned general who served in World War II. Historians have labeled him arrogant and insufferable, heaping fuel onto the fire of their scorn by accusing him of military incompetence. A particular phrase attributed to Winston Churchill about him—one that has become trite due to its thoughtless repetition—refers to Montgomery as being “in defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.” Those cavalier words are often used—unjustly—to sum up Montgomery’s entire legacy. 

Bernard Montgomery was, in fact, a brave and self-sacrificing man who deserves far more respect than most historians seem willing to give him. Montgomery could fairly be described as cocky, but the majority of history’s great battlefield commanders are. It is necessary for a good general to possess a certain combination of boldness, confidence and aggressiveness to be an effective leader in battle. A shrinking violet makes a poor general.

Not a Narcissist

One of the most common charges leveled at Montgomery is that he was a narcissist. He was definitely not. Nor was he a “psychopath,” as some on the Internet have disgracefully called him. A narcissist is a toxic, self-centered person; a psychopath is dishonest and callously shows no empathy for others.

That was not Monty. I actually think it is difficult to find a top World War II general who was more selfless in his actions or who showed more personal empathy for his troops than Montgomery. He devoted himself heart and soul to the Allied cause without seeking personal comfort or respite—despite the fact that he had lost his home and all of his worldly belongings to German bombing. He did not flinch from the fight nor try to make things easier for himself. He threw himself into battles wholeheartedly and projected that cheerful swagger, which many people continue to mistake for hubris, for the very deliberate purposes of rallying his troops against German forces and to combat Nazi propaganda.

His hands-on and compassionate care for the men of the British Eighth Army restored their waning energy and transformed them into a close-knit and effective fighting force he aptly referred to as a “family.”

Montgomery’s care for his men and rejuvenation of the Eighth Army’s morale—accomplished with genuine compassion and personal attention to others’ basic human needs—is something that neither a narcissist nor a psychopath could ever have achieved, and is an accomplishment that even his fiercest critics have not been able to dispute.

Honest despite Criticism

Bernard Montgomery did not have an easy life, and his courage in admitting to his imperfections and the difficulties he faced made him the target of much derision. It would have been easier for a public figure of his fame—especially in socially self-conscious Britain—to fabricate a happy childhood and be “more agreeable” altogether. Indeed Monty faced pressure from relatives to “keep up appearances.”

Yet Montgomery did not care about appearing awkward. He publicly rejected and criticized his Christian fundamentalist mother, with whom he cut ties. He candidly disagreed with other Allied commanders on matters of strategy during World War II; this was not backbiting, but divergences of opinion he aired openly and which he overcame with firm soldierly obedience. He was frank in his memoirs, yet tempered his criticisms with great magnanimity and fairness, and did not descend, as did several of his military contemporaries, to personal attacks.

Being true to and open about his beliefs was one of Monty’s greatest virtues.

Montgomery’s willingness to be disagreeable, to stand against the tide of public opinion and peer pressure, made him many enemies. It also makes him a true example of courage of conviction, and a model worth following.

Independent Yet Loyal

Montgomery was a strong, wild horse of a man who wouldn’t let anybody control him. If he truly believed in something, he wore his heart on his sleeve.

This sense of fierce independence commonly rears its head among the great Scots-Irish fighters of Northern Ireland, a region often called Ulster. Robert Blair “Paddy” Mayne became a Special Forces legend because of that spirit. Field Marshal Alan Brooke was known to glare rebelliously back at Prime Minister Winston Churchill when inner principle demanded it.

“Stiff-necked Ulstermen,” grumbled Churchill of Brooke’s occasional cussedness, adding that “there’s no one worse to deal with than that!” However it is the individual greatness of these men—not only their great fearlessness and independence, but also their great and profound loyalty—that made all the difference to attaining victory.

Behind all the hype around the supposed intolerableness of Montgomery is the story of a simple and dedicated soldier who suffered and sacrificed much, complained little, and utterly spent all for the good of others. He was a warmhearted and brilliant man who never stopped trying to make a positive difference for his country, his troops and the world at large. His memory deserves to be honored.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

See more stories

subscribe now!

 

For two nights have waited on quayside lying on ground, finally in shattered steel box numbed by noise of bombing. I was sleeping fitfully, almost despairing, woken every few minutes by the Scumbarda battery blazing away to keep Jerry awake, and reflected I was living worse than a tramp, absolutely filthy. Unbathed for eight days, clothes not off, ditto, gradually losing all gear, and no home—choice either crowded, dusty, smoky, overcrowded tunnel on hill or overcrowded Iti [Italian] naval headquarters, where Itis having nothing else to do but rush in and out, although bombers miles away. Then wake with start to find a destroyer alongside, and troops slid down chute, scrambled down ladders, ammo dumped ashore. “Well done, arrival of these troops should make all the difference.”

Such were the candid, if dismal, impressions of Leonard Marsland Gander, the only Allied war correspondent on the Greek island of Leros during a five-day battle for its control, as recorded in his notebook on Nov. 15, 1943. Whomever Gander quoted regarding the landing of British reinforcements was overly optimistic. They would make no difference whatsoever.

Leros is one of 15 main islands among 150 smaller ones that constitute the Dodecanese archipelago in the southeastern Aegean Sea, which in the fall of 1943 was the unlikely setting for a series of air-sea landings by German forces. Two months later defending British troops were subjected to a humiliating defeat, with some islands remaining under German occupation until war’s end in Europe. The story of their capture is illustrative of history echoing as seemingly no one in authority listened.

The Dodecanese, populated mainly by residents of Greek extraction, fell under Ottoman rule in the 16th century. The islands then came under Italian administration in the wake of the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12. In the early stages of World War II Il Duce Benito Mussolini joined forces with German Führer Adolf Hitler, the latter seemingly unstoppable in his occupation of neighboring countries. By the spring of 1943, however, the Axis was faltering. The Soviets had stemmed the German advance into Russia, and that May Axis forces surrendered in North Africa. Soon after, the Allies landed in Sicily and on the Italian mainland, and American-led forces began pushing north toward occupied Europe. In July the Italian populace turned against Mussolini, replacing him with Maresciallo Pietro Badoglio. An armistice followed in September.

Having anticipated events, Hitler initiated Fall Achse (Operation Axis) to forcibly disarm Italian forces and assume control of the territory they held.

Given the upheaval, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill considered it an opportune time to open a new front in the eastern Mediterranean. He and others felt such a move would add to the mounting pressure against Germany and might even encourage Turkey to join the Allies. It was a strategy fraught with impediments and considered by many—Britain’s American allies in particular—a waste of time and resources. Churchill was undeterred.

Paramount to his plan was the seizure of Rhodes with its critical airfields. Italian co-operation was essential. Accordingly, a military mission was tasked with preparing the way for the main assault. Commandos of the British army’s Special Boat Section (SBS) would spearhead the occupation of other islands. Churchill approved the plan on September 9. “This is a time to play high,” he wrote. “Improvise and dare.”

Unfortunately for the British, their invasion plans were pre-empted that very day when the 7,500-strong Sturm-Division Rhodos turned on their erstwhile allies and wasted little time in taking control of Rhodes. In so doing the Germans captured some 40,000 Italians, thus quashing British hopes of significant Italian assistance in the Dodecanese. Nevertheless, there was optimism in the British camp they might still occupy and retain some of the lesser islands. Kos, Samos and Leros were duly secured and garrisoned, primarily by troops of the newly re-formed 234 Infantry Brigade, the battalions of which had arrived in the Middle East after having endured the 1940–42 siege of Malta. Also manning some of the island outposts were detachments of the SBS and the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). Already on Kos were 3,500-plus cooperative Italians, including the majority of two infantry battalions.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

See more stories

Subscribe now!

 

Of the British-occupied islands only Kos was suitable as an airbase. Soon arriving on-island were Supermarine Spitfire VBs of No. 7 Squadron of the South African Air Force and No. 74 Squadron of the Royal Air Force, with some 500 ground support personnel. Anti-aircraft defense was provided by army and RAF gunners equipped with 40 mm Bofors and 20 mm Hispanos, respectively. The British also garrisoned the island with 700 soldiers—mainly of 1st Battalion, the Durham Light Infantry—to counter any German landing attempts. Troops were dispersed between the main airfield at Antimachia and in and around the town of Kos. On the eve of battle some 100 troops of the RAF Regiment arrived as reinforcements.

In mid-September 1943 the Germans in central Italy were forced to pull back in the wake of the successful Allied landing at Salerno. But the situation in the southeastern Aegean was altogether different.

On September 23 Generalleutnant Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, commanding 22 Infanterie-Division, received orders to seize Kos and Leros. Müller made Kos his first objective, targeting it with a combined sea and airborne assault code-named Unternehmen Eisbär (Operation Polar Bear). At his disposal were transport ships and landing craft, air transports, bombers and all-important fighter cover. Additional landing forces included Luftwaffe paratroopers and paratroopers and other units drawn from the special forces Division Brandenburg.

At 0500 hours on October 3 Müller launched Eisbär, the first wave of assault troops coming ashore at Marmari beach in northern Kos. Further landings followed along the rugged southeast coast. Shortly after 0700 hours the Brandenburg paratroopers dropped in on southwest Kos. The Germans rapidly pushed toward their objectives, overrunning each in turn and arriving on the outskirts of town by dusk. That night demoralized remnants of the British garrison withdrew south to high ground. All that remained for the Germans the next day was a mopping-up operation. For the Italians it represented the latest in a series of defeats. But for the British it was a disaster, for without Kos there was no longer any possibility of providing crucial air support for those islands still in British hands.

The Germans next turned their attention to Leros. On September 26 Luftwaffe aircraft began targeting key installations and shipping at Portolago (present-day Lakki). The commander of the British 234 Brigade, Maj. Gen. Francis Gerard Russell Brittorous, had previously commanded the 8th (Ardwick) Battalion of the Manchester Regiment (Territorial Army) in Malta. Known for his punctilious observance of parade ground discipline, “Ben” Brittorous was an unpopular officer. On one occasion, as he rode in his jeep past a number of LRDG men on a break from training, he harangued them for having failed to salute him. According to one present, the general was apoplectic. “So you think yourselves tough, do you?” Brittorous hollered. “I’ll bloody well give you something to be tough about!”

Shortly afterward Captain John Olivey and 48 other LRDG troops left Leros in a pair of Italian speedboats with orders to occupy the tiny German-held island of Levitha, little more than 20 miles to the southwest. It was an ill-conceived and hastily conducted operation, launched without reconnaissance or preparation. Five LRDG men were killed during the failed assault, while most of the remainder were captured. Only Olivey, a fellow officer and five others made it back to Leros.

Eventually, a senior officer was sent on a pretext to British headquarters in Cairo to report on the relationship between Brittorous and subordinates, and on November 5 Brigadier Robert “Dolly” Tilney arrived on Leros as the new fortress commander.

POW Tag

Emblematic of the failed 1943 Allied campaign to seize the Italian-held Dodecanese islands in the wake of Italy’s signing of an armistice is the above German-issued POW identification tag. Most Allied prisoners spent the duration of the war in camps in Germany.

By then there was a substantial British presence on the island, including 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Fusiliers (the Faughs); Company B of 2nd Battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment (the remainder of which was on Samos); 4th Battalion, Royal East Kent Regiment (the Buffs); and 1st Battalion, King’s Own Royal Regiment (Lancaster), plus artillery and supporting sub-units and detachments of the LRDG and SBS. The British garrison comprised some 3,000 troops of all ranks.

The Italian garrison numbered some 5,500, including an infantry battalion, two heavy machine-gun companies and part of a maritime reconnaissance squadron.

Müller’s assault on Leros, code-named Unternehmen Taifun (Operation Typhoon), commenced early on November 12. The assault force was split into three. The initial wave comprised four seaborne Kampfgruppen (combat groups) and a Luftwaffe parachute battalion. A second wave stood by with anti-aircraft and artillery units and heavy infantry weapons. Additional troops and Brandenburg paratroopers were held in reserve near Athens. (On November 13 the Brandenburg Fallschirmjägerkompanie would conduct its third operational jump within six weeks.)

It had been Müller’s intention to land each group simultaneously and seize control of central Leros before its garrison could react. But unforeseen circumstances and a determined resistance meant only certain elements of the invasion force made it ashore, and not all of them at their intended points. At around 1430 hours on the 12th German bombers and cannon-armed floatplanes escorted inland more than three-dozen Junkers Ju 52/3m transports carrying Kampfgruppe Kühne. Hauptmann Martin Kühne’s 470 paratroopers immediately established themselves in and around the central drop zone between Gourna and Alinda bays. In the north infantrymen led by Major Sylvester von Saldern quickly achieved their objectives and held, albeit temporarily, the high ground on and around the dominating Clidi feature to within 500 yards of the coast at Alinda Bay. Having established themselves in central Leros, the Germans had effectively divided the island in two.

Fighting continued for five days, each side losing and retaking ground in a series of seesaw actions. Meanwhile, the British ferried in additional Royal West Kents from Samos, and the Germans also brought in reinforcements. Despite their superior numbers, the British were greatly disadvantaged without air cover, while the Germans had Junkers Ju 87D-3 Stuka dive-bombers on call from dawn till dusk.

Both sides suffered from inadequate signaling equipment. The Germans sought to overcome that issue by adhering to their original plan, whereas the British seemed unable to cope, constantly having to adapt to the changing situation, using runners to try to maintain contact. Invariably, messages got through too late, if at all. Officers received conflicting and confusing orders, and men were flung into the attack, sometimes with little or no idea of their objectives. British communications eventually broke down altogether, and with it evaporated what remained of command and control.

On the morning of November 16, with the Germans on the verge of overrunning brigade headquarters on Mount Meraviglia, Tilney withdrew with his staff, hoping merely to shift his command post south to Lakki.

At 0825 hours the Germans intercepted a signal from fortress headquarters to general headquarters in Cairo. It advised the situation was critical; German forces supported by Stukas and machine-gun fire were reinforcing the Leros peninsula, and defensive positions on Meraviglia had been neutralized, leaving British troops demoralized and facing a hopeless situation. The message was translated, duplicated in leaflet form and airdropped over German positions with additional words of encouragement from Müller: “Now, let’s finish them off!”

But Meraviglia’s defending troops managed to stem the German advance, encouraging Tilney to return and try to restore order from chaos. It was hopeless. That afternoon a renewed German effort resulted in the capture of Tilney and staff. Elsewhere, British soldiers unaware of developments felt they held the upper hand, an opinion shared by many of those opposing them. The brigadier, however, concluded further resistance was futile and, to avoid further unnecessary bloodshed, called for an end to the fighting.

Samos, the final obstacle to Germany’s conquest of the Aegean, was abandoned by the British and fell without a fight on November 22.

Müller reported German casualties during the battles for Kos and Leros as 1,168 dead, wounded and missing, though actual figures are probably higher. The Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe also incurred considerable material losses during the two-month period of operations.

Allied losses tallied more than 5,000 army personnel (most of whom were captured), 500 naval personnel killed or missing and further losses among aircrews. The Germans had sunk three Allied submarines, 15 ships and various other craft, and damaged at least 10 other vessels. The Allies also lost more than 100 aircraft, including 11 American planes, with 28 more damaged.

The Italians suffered most of all. Of nearly 4,000 mainly Italian prisoners of war aboard the German-operated transports Gaetano Donizetti and Sinfra, some 3,400 went down when both ships were sunk that fall in separate Allied actions. Many more were lost while in transit outside Aegean waters.

In the end the Dodecanese mattered little, if at all, in the bigger picture. Anticipating the inevitable backlash from critics, Churchill recommended the foreign secretary adopt an evasive policy when the matter was raised in Parliament: “Not advisable to reflect in detail on such questions as to why the lessons of Crete in 1941 had not been learned.”

On November 20 the Cairo-based Egyptian Mail headlined events in Russia. Four days earlier, before Tilney’s surrender on Leros, correspondent Gander had been evacuated.His report on the island’s capture made P. 2 of the Mail.

Anthony Rogers is the author of several books about wartime events in and around the Mediterranean, including Churchill’s Folly and Swastika Over the Aegean. For further reading he recommends War in the Aegean: The Campaign for the Eastern Mediterranean in WWII, by Peter C. Smith and Edwin R. Walker.

The Loss of Oria

A tragic irony of the Italian armistice is that so many of the nation’s captured and surrendered troops failed to make it home alive. More Italians perished while in transit to destinations in the Reich than died fighting in the Dodecanese.

On Feb. 11, 1944, German guards on Rhodes crammed more than 4,100 Italian prisoners aboard the commandeered Norwegian steamship Oria for passage to Piraeus, Greece. A victim of rough seas and, it is suspected, poor navigation, Oria ran aground the next day off Patroklos,
an island in the Saronic Gulf some 25 miles southeast of Piraeus. The ship foundered, taking with it nearly all the passengers and crew. The Kriegsmarine initially reported that only the ship’s captain and 14 Germans had been saved. Later estimates suggest 21 Italians also survived the sinking, which ranks among the worst maritime disasters in modern history. —A.R.

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

subscribe today

When the Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945, the United States military had custody of a staggering number of enemy prisoners of war: 4.3 million total worldwide, with more than 400,000 held in prison camps inside the domestic United States. German personnel represented the single largest group of prisoners. However not every soldier in German uniform who fell into American hands—whether through capture, surrender, or exchange of custody with another ally—was actually a German citizen.

Between 1939 and 1945, tens of thousands of Frenchmen, Poles, Dutchmen, and Norwegians wound up in German uniform, either voluntarily or through coercion. Nearly a million Soviet citizens, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Cossacks had served in the German military for a myriad of reasons, plus many more millions of captured Soviet soldiers held as prisoners of the Germans were now in American or British hands; it was they who would represent one of the thorniest problems among the former allies in the war’s aftermath.

Forced Repatriation?

Prisoner of war issues during WWII were at least notionally governed by the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, but the conduct of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union demonstrated all too clearly the limitations of international conventions and laws of war. The Soviet Union was not a signatory to the 1929 Convention; Japan signed it but never ratified it; Germany was a full signatory. The legal distinction between them was largely irrelevant, because those three nations were categorically guilty of the worst treatment of prisoners of war of any belligerents during that conflict.

As many as 3 million Soviet soldiers died in German captivity. Japanese treatment of captured Allied soldiers was infamously brutal, with a death rate estimated at 27.1 percent among prisoners of Western armies (the mortality rate for American POWs in Japanese hands was more than 30 percent). Japanese treatment of Chinese prisoners was even worse, with a nearly 100 percent death rate—only 56 Chinese prisoners were officially recorded as being released from Japanese custody at the end of the war, for the grim reason that Imperial Japanese forces killed most Chinese prisoners outright. The Soviets, at the end of the war, held as many as 3,060,000 German POWs. How many of those men died in captivity is debated, but of the 1.3 million German military personnel listed as missing in action, the vast majority of them are assumed to have died as Soviet prisoners. More than 50,000 Japanese POWs perished in Soviet prison work camps after the war was over.

The end of the conflict precipitated one of the most controversial episodes related to international conventions on prisoners of war: the question of forced repatriation. 

The 1929 Convention stipulated that “repatriation of prisoners shall be effected as soon as possible after the conclusion of peace.” What it did not account for, or at least did not anticipate, was how a nation should handle prisoners of war who did not want to return to their nation of origin. 

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Soviets insisted that all Soviet citizens held as prisoners of war by the Germans or liberated from German custody by the Western Allies were to be repatriated without exception. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Soviet government announced a policy that labeled all its soldiers who fell into enemy hands—whether by capture or surrender—as traitors. Order 270 issued August 16 that year, explicitly stated that Soviet soldiers’ only option was to fight to the last. To be taken prisoner, especially if one was a commander or political commissar, would be equated with desertion and defection to the Nazis. Stalin supposedly said, “There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors.” With that attitude in mind, Soviet insistence on repatriation of their captured soldiers did not sound particularly benevolent.

More than 800,000 Soviet soldiers had in fact changed sides once in German hands for a variety of reasons. After the grim years of the Great Terror of the 1930s and Stalin’s purge of the Red Army before the war, there was no shortage of Soviet citizens in the military who loved the Motherland but genuinely hated Stalin and the repressive USSR government. Stalin was especially unpopular among Ukrainians, Cossacks, and other ethnic groups who had suffered in the years following the Bolshevik victory in the 1917-1923 Russian Civil War.

Some senior Red Army officers, such as Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov, seem to have become turncoats for self-serving reasons, but led thousands of rank-and-file soldiers into peril. Other Soviet soldiers in German custody, faced with near-certain slow death by starvation and slave labor in prisoner of war camps, chose what seemed to be the lesser of two evils and signed on for what they were told would be labor battalions in German service, only to find out too late that they were deployed as frontline combat formations or as guards in Nazi death camps. 

A Promise at Yalta

The problem was that when the Soviets at Yalta extracted the promise from their British and American counterparts to repatriate all Soviet citizens, there was no consensus as to who fit that definition. The Soviets insisted that persons from the Baltic States and eastern Poland, annexed by the USSR in 1939-1940, were Soviet citizens, but neither the U.S. nor Great Britain recognized that claim. Nor had the Allies anticipated the problem of what to do with Soviet prisoners who did not want to return. The 1929 Convention made no provision for that situation, and it did not specifically allow a detaining power to grant asylum to prisoners in its control who asked to not be returned to their country of origin. 

As the war drew to its close, British and American officials, in both the civilian governments and military command structures, were confronted by this question: did the uniform a soldier wore determine the nation to which he should be repatriated? If a Soviet citizen fought in a German uniform and was captured as a German soldier, did the Geneva Convention say he was a member of the German armed forces and protected by that service as a prisoner of war, or was he a Soviet combatant who should be returned to his country of origin?

Legal specialists in the British Foreign Office argued “it was the uniform that determined a soldier’s allegiance and no government had the right to ‘look behind the uniform’ of any POW.” Part of the thinking behind that decision was a desire to avoid reprisals against British and American prisoners still in German control.

Unfortunately, they also had to worry about the risk their countrymen then in German POW camps faced from their own ally, the USSR. As Soviet forces advanced in the east and began overrunning German prison camps containing American and British prisoners, Britain and the U.S. wanted to do nothing that might cause the Soviets to delay the repatriation of those men. Previous Soviet behavior had repeatedly demonstrated this was no idle concern. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, told Churchill, “It is most important that they [British POWs] should be well cared for and returned as soon as possible. For this we must rely to a great extent upon Soviet goodwill and if we make difficulty over returning to them their own nationals I am sure it will reflect adversely upon their willingness to help in restoring to us our own prisoners.”

Even so, some of the language coming out of the Foreign Office in London was starkly coldhearted. As one Foreign Office official stated in an official memo, “This is purely a question for the Soviet authorities and does not concern His Majesty’s Government. In due course all those with whom the Soviet authorities desire to deal must be handed over to them, and we are not concerned with the fact that they may be shot or otherwise more harshly dealt with than they might be under English law.” This attitude did not sit well with many British military officers, but it became the policy of repatriations as the war ground to a halt.

“A Battle of Discourtesy”

The same debate caused problems between civilian and military leaders on the American side. In early 1945 Gen. Dwight Eisenhower grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of good faith cooperation from his Soviet counterparts on POW negotiations—the Soviets demanded much but conceded nothing. It eventually got so bad that Eisenhower suggested to the Chief of the U.S. Military Mission to the USSR in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Maj. Gen. John R. Deane, that he should simply stop cooperating with the Soviets until they proved more willing to collaborate as allies should. Deane said this would be pointless; there was absolutely no chance, he said, of “winning a battle of discourtesy with Soviet officials.” 

Statesmen in Washington also grumbled about the push to give into Soviet demands on the repatriation issue. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson vehemently opposed the idea of “turning over German prisoners of Russian origin to the Russians.” He put it bluntly: “First thing you know we will be responsible for a big killing by the Russians. … Let the Russians catch their own Russians.” The U.S. Attorney General agreed on grounds of legal precedent. “I gravely question the legal basis or authority for surrendering the objecting individuals to representatives of the Soviet Government….Even if these men should be technically traitors to their own government, I think the time-honored rule of asylum should be applied.”

But like the British, the Americans were most concerned about the fate of their own POWs who fell into Soviet control, which overrode all other issues. Edward Stettinius, the U.S. Secretary of State, expressed this clearly in a communique in February 1945 when he wrote, “The consensus here is that it would be unwise to include questions relative to the protection of the Geneva convention and to Soviet citizens in the U.S. in an agreement which deals primarily with the exchange of prisoners liberated by the Allied armies as they march into Germany… we believe there will be serious delays in the release of our prisoners of war unless we reach prompt agreement on this question.” By “agreement” he meant capitulating to Soviet demands, but there seemed no simple solution.

The Soviets knew very well their British and American allies were vulnerable on this point, and they kept the pressure on in a manner that was nothing less than outright coercion. That January, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle glumly told Stimson, “the Russians have already threatened to refuse to turn over to us American prisoners of war whom they may get possession of in German internment camps.” That threat was very much in plain view when Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Repatriation Agreement with Stalin at Yalta the next month.

Asylum Would not be granted

By the end of February nearly 370,000 Soviet POWs were in the custody of British and U.S. forces in Western Europe, and a great many of those were taken while wearing the uniforms of the German military. In accordance with the Geneva Convention, Allied command had at first issued orders that forced repatriation would only apply to POWs and Displaced Persons (DPs) who identified themselves as Soviet citizens. That arrangement did not last long.

On May 23, representatives of the Soviet High Command and Supreme Headquarters Allied European Forces signed the Leipzig Agreement, which specified that, “All former prisoners of war and citizens of the USSR liberated by the Allied Forces and all former prisoners of war and citizens of Allied Nations liberated by the Red Army will be delivered through the Army lines to the corresponding Army Command of each side.” The operative word was “all.” Washington passed instructions on to its military commanders in Europe that they were to hand all Soviet citizens over to the custody of the Red Army “regardless of their individual wishes.”

Asylum would not be granted, not even for persons whose status all but guaranteed that they would be executed as traitors when they were returned to Soviet control. Mass repatriations followed, and by the end of September 1945, 2,034,000 former prisoners identified as Soviet citizens were given over to the Red Army, sometimes by use of military force.

Nothing in the 1929 Geneva Convention provided for the forced repatriation of prisoners who did not want to return to their government’s control, so the American and British decision to comply with Soviet insistence on the matter was not compelled by law or treaty obligation. It was, instead, an unpopular course of action driven by the need to protect their own soldiers from an ally whose brutality was in some cases nearly as bad as that of their common enemy. 

Refusal to Release Prisoners

By citing the 1929 Geneva Convention in its insistence that Britain and the U.S. had to repatriate all Soviet prisoners whether they wanted to return or not, the USSR’s position was duplicitous in the extreme. The Soviets had refused to join the Convention themselves, but that did not prevent them, during the Yalta negotiations, from pointing to Article 75 with its requirement that “repatriation of prisoners shall be effected with the least possible delay after the conclusion of peace.”

The diametric contrast between the wording of that article and what the Soviets themselves did in practice was absolutely appalling. The Soviet Union kept nearly 1.5 million German prisoners of war as forced labor for an entire decade after the war ended. The last of them were not repatriated until 1955. “Fragmented archival sources,” as historian Susan Grunewald says, “imply that the Soviets primarily held onto German POWs out of economic necessity caused by the war’s destruction.” As many as 560,000 Japanese prisoners were held by the Soviets until 1950 under the same excuse. The USSR used those men to rebuild a national infrastructure damaged by the war, but such practice was directly contrary to the spirit, if not the actual letter, of the very international convention that the Soviets cited when it suited their purposes.

Soviet refusal to release their prisoners after the end of WWII directly influenced the drafting of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 when it replaced the 1929 Convention. Article 118 (Release and Repatriation) begins with the sentence, “Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.” At that time, there was still no end in sight to Soviet delaying tactics.

The 1960 Commentary on the Convention discusses Article 118 in refreshingly simple language: “This is one of the most important Articles in the Convention and is intended to remedy very unsatisfactory situations. As a result of the changed conditions of modern warfare, the belligerents have on two occasions, and without expressly violating the provisions of the existing Conventions [of 1929], been able to keep millions of prisoners of war in captivity for no good reason. In our opinion, it was contrary to the spirit of the Conventions to prolong war captivity in this way.” It then explains in detail that the Geneva Convention (III) is interpreted to mean that forced repatriation is unacceptable, and that a Detaining Power has the right to grant asylum to prisoners it holds in any situation “where the repatriation of a prisoner of war would be manifestly contrary to the general principles of international law for the protection of the human being.” 

Both interpretations exist today precisely because of the long shadow cast by Soviet policies on the repatriation of prisoners at the end of the Second World War.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

See more stories

subscribe now!

 

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.

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

subscribe today

In February 1943 the Waffen-SS came to Yefremovka, Ukraine, a tiny, ethnic Cossack village west of Kharkov in the USSR’s Ukrainian SSR. Specifically, the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) descended upon the unprotected and totally defenseless village—then a Soviet collective farm. When the LSSAH left hours later, nearly 1,000 old men, women and children from that village and hundreds of others rounded up from surrounding hamlets had been brutally murdered, including more than 100 civilians who had been herded into Yefremovka’s small local Orthodox church.

Trapped inside the church, they were horrifically and mercilessly burned to death. Two of the few survivors of this massacre—a mother (my wife’s grandmother) and her 8-year-old daughter (my future mother-in-law)—survived only because a Wehrmacht (German Army, not SS) transport driver warned them to hide in an underground root cellar while—risking his own life had his humanitarian act been discovered—he deliberately parked his truck over the cellar entrance to conceal them during the massacre. This disgusting mass slaughter was exactly the manner in which Hitler’s vaunted Waffen-SS consistently fought World War II.

Killers, Not Soldiers

From the very beginning of the war, these cold-blooded killers, masquerading as soldiers in uniform, murdered their way through combat on the war’s Eastern and Western fronts, starting with the May 28, 1940 Wormhoudt Massacre in France during which the LSSAH forced 87 British and French POWs—captured while serving as rearguard to the heroic Dunkirk evacuation—into a barn, then tossed hand grenades inside slaughtering 81 and wounding 6 of the helpless POWs. Countless other examples of Waffen-SS war crimes abound throughout the whole war.

Indeed, shortly after the Normandy invasion, from June 7–17, 1944, the 12th SS Panzer Division (Hitlerjugend) murdered 158 Canadian POWs. The Waffen-SS’s most notorious war crime atrocity was the infamous Dec. 17, 1944 “Malmedy Massacre” at Baugnez Crossroads, Belgium where LSSAH’s Kampfgruppe Peiper brutally executed 84 unarmed POWs, primarily G.I.s of the 7th US Armored Division’s 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion.

A few US soldiers survived and escaped the slaughter. When I interviewed one of the massacre’s several survivors four decades later, he somewhat ashamedly, but understandably admitted, “Even today, I don’t like Germans very much.”

The same day as the Malmedy Massacre, Hitler’s Waffen-SS proved to be “equal opportunity murderers” with another massacre of U.S. POWs not far away. The LSSAH perpetrated the “Wereth Massacre,” the beating, torture and execution of 11 Black soldiers in two batteries of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion near Wereth, Belgium.

These horrific atrocities are only some examples of the Waffen-SS’s numerous war crimes, which happened throughout the duration of the war from start to finish—especially on the Eastern Front where their fanatical embrace of Hitler’s racial lunacy classified “Slavs” and Jews as “subhumans” who the Waffen-SS routinely murdered.

Misguided “Fan Base”

Yet perhaps the most disheartening aspect of the Waffen-SS’s story is that, starting a few decades after World War II, an admiring, fawning “Waffen-SS fan base” has emerged, mainly amongst younger military history buffs in the U.S. and the UK who celebrate the widely-acknowledged tactical/operational expertise and genuine military prowess of the Waffen-SS, but who stubbornly ignore the disgusting record of war crimes of these “killers in uniform”.

Having no “skin in the game” as the World War II generation did, these Waffen-SS “fans” admire them chiefly because the Waffen-SS had “cool” camouflage uniforms and innovative tanks and small-arms weapons. Sad and sorry reasons to celebrate and admire war criminals.

Waffen-SS vs. Soviet INfantry

UK-based author Chris McNab’s mission in writing another meticulously-researched, expertly-written, and highly informative book in Osprey Publishing’s excellent “Combat” series is not to detail the endless examples of the homicidal Waffen-SS’s countless war crimes—his job in this dual examination and insightful analysis of two opposing combat formations is to compare and contrast, within the context of the Rostov-on-Don and Kharkov battles of 1942–43, the composition, arms, equipment/weapons/tactics, training and combat records of both opponents, and to present and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each combatant formation.

As usual, McNab—a regular author for MHQ—does an outstanding job in accomplishing that mission in only
80 pages.

BOOK TITLE GOES HERE

Book subtitle or blurb goes here.
by Chris McNab, Osprey Publishing, 2023

get it on amazon

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

Of course, McNab brings out the contrasting ideological motivations and inspirations of the elite Waffen-SS units and the standard Soviet rifleman—the USSR’s version of what in the U.S. could be called the typical “G.I.”—particularly pointing out that while each member of the Waffen-SS swore an oath to Adolf Hitler personally, his Red Army counterpart pledged to “my last breath to be faithful to the people, to the Soviet Motherland, and the Workers-Peasants’ Government [aka The Soviet Union].”

Waffen-SS fighters fought for Hitler, waging a racially fueled war of aggression and conquest, while Red Army soldiers fought to defend their homeland against a ruthless enemy invader murdering his way across their nation.

How the Tables Turned

McNab’s expert analysis clearly reveals that in the beginning of the Eastern Front clash between the two combatants the more tactically skilled and better-trained, ideologically-motivated Waffen-SS volunteers held the early advantage over their mostly conscripted Soviet riflemen opponents defending their country, families and homes.

However as the war dragged on, Red Army soldiers and, importantly, their commanders and leaders at all levels—most of them fortunate survivors of Stalin’s disastrous Red Army purge of 1936–1941 but inadequately prepared for warfare in June 1941—learned valuable lessons in fighting, commandership and the tactical-operational art.

Arguably, the eventual Red Army victory in May 1945 over Hitler’s legions as the Soviets snuffed out the last vestiges of Nazi resistance in the rubble of Hitler’s capital, Berlin, might be attributed to a triumph of Soviet “mass” (overwhelming numbers of troops and weapons) over a more skilled but greatly outnumbered German opponent—as Stalin famously said, “Quantity [mass] has a quality all its own.”

Yet Red Army commanders had learned via blood and sacrifice from 1941–1945 how to fight and above all how to win against Hitler’s best. The Waffen-SS, clearly, were ruthless killers, but they inarguably were excellent teachers.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

See more stories

subscribe now!

 

When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived at the Quebec Conference (code-name QUADRANT) in August 1943, he had a special guest with him. He was a small intense, rather odd-looking man, as Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces, recalled: “You took one look at that face, like the face of a pale Indian chieftain, topping the uniform still smelling of jungle and sweat and war and you thought ‘Hell, this man is serious’.”

Brig. Orde Wingate had spent the first two months of 1943 in the Burma jungle, leading a guerrilla campaign against the Japanese that achieved little in terms of material damage: a few bridges blown, some railway lines cut and a few dozen enemy soldiers killed. The real significance of what Wingate and his 3,000 Chindits had achieved was psychological: they had attacked the vaunted Japanese army in its own territory.

The exploits of the British Special Forces unit were splashed across American newspapers, with the Ogden Standard-Examiner calling it “one of the greatest epics of the war” and the Waterloo Daily Courier hailing Wingate for his innovation in using aircraft for resupply. “Cuttingan army off from its base and penetrating deep into enemy territory is an exceedingly dangerous maneuver,” said the paper. “But the ability to summon supplies by radio and receive them from the air makes such a maneuver more feasible. It may be that the Wingate expedition in Burma is only the forerunner of a new kind of warfare.”

Going Behind Enemy Lines

Churchill took the 40-year-old Wingate to the Quebec Conference for exactly that reason: to show to his American allies that a new kind of warfare had been launched in Burma, what Wingate called “Long Range Penetration.” The brigadier addressed the American delegation on Aug. 17, and told them in his conclusion that “long range groups should be used as an essential part of the plan of conquest to create a situation leading to the advance of our main forces.”

The next day Wingate had an audience with Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was so impressed that he authorized the deployment of American ground troops in Burma for the first time.

The official telegram of authorization from Washington was sent Aug. 31 to Lt. Gen. Joseph Stilwell. In February 1942 Stilwell had been posted to Burma as head of a small U.S. military mission to help train the Chinese army. It had not gone well. Stilwell and his men had been forced to flee the advancing Japanese on foot, trekking 140 miles north to India. In 1943 he was back in the China Burma India Theater, in charge of Northern Combat Area Command. Stilwell’s instructions were to recruit a total of 2,830 officers and men, all of whom had to be volunteers and “of a high state of physical ruggedness.” The force—codenamed “Galahad”—needed to be ready for combat deployment in February 1944: “Only 3,000, but the entering wedge,” Stilwell wrote in his diary on September 2. “Can we use them! And how!” Stilwell’s triumphalism was short-lived. On learning that Galahad would be under the command of Wingate–a man he considered (as others did), “an exhibitionist”—he raged: “That is enough to discourage Christ.”

On New Year’s Day 1944 General Order Number One redesignated Galahad the 5307th Composite Regiment (Provisional). As one of their officers quipped: “Where’d they ever get such a number? It sounds like a street address in Los Angeles.” That wasn’t the only change afoot. 

Working with Chinese Allies

The 3,000 Americans had arrived in India by troopship from San Francisco at the end of October 1943. They established a base at Camp Deogarh and that autumn they had been driven hard by their two commanding officers, Lt-Cols. Francis Brink and Charles N. Hunter. They had also benefited from instruction from Wingate’s Chindits, who were camped nearby and training for a second operation behind the lines in Burma.

“The Chindits were really tough guys, they put us through our paces,” recalled Bernard Martin, one of the American volunteers. “We went on these long marches with 50lbs on our back, and sometimes in the middle of the night they would start firing their weapons shouting ‘we’re the enemy, we’re the enemy!’. We had to react. They taught us well.”

Stilwell meanwhile was preoccupied with planning an offensive against the Japanese in Burma. On Dec. 18 Chiang Kai‐shek, China’s Generalissimo, agreed to allow him to command the 22nd and 38th Chinese divisions in the imminent invasion, the first time an American would lead Chinese soldiers into battle.

It was a three-pronged invasion. The Chinese Y [Yoke] Force would push into north-east Burma, and the British IV Corps would attack from the West across the Chindwin River. The third thrust would come from Stilwell’s two Chinese divisions, attacking down the middle. Stilwell’s force would be up against the elite Japanese 18th Division under the command of Lt. Gen. Shinichi Tanaka.

The offensive was launched on Dec. 24, 1943. The fighting was intense. In the first week Stilwell’s two Chinese Divisions lost 750 men killed or wounded, but they pushed back the Japanese. Emboldened by his initial gains, Stilwell demanded of Adm. Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia Command, that the 3,000 Americans of Galahad be placed under his direct command. Mountbatten gave Stilwell his wish at the Delhi Conference on Dec. 31.

New Leaders

Stilwell wasted no time in stamping his mark on his new force. As well as changing its name, he also changed its command, dismissing Brink and demoting Hunter to the second-in-command. The new C.O was announced on Jan. 4: 40-year-old Brig. Gen. Frank Merrill. It was a contentious decision, not least because Merrill was not physically robust, and Stilwell knew it. Merrill had been part of his military mission to Burma in 1942 and had collapsed with heart trouble during the retreat to India. Hunter was a combat soldier and his own man; Merrill was neither. What he was, however, was a yes-man, which was why Stilwell wanted him in command of the 5307th.

The news of Hunter’s demotion disappointed the men. “It had been our hope all along that Hunter would be the man who would be anointed to command us and carry us into combat,” reflected Lt. Sam Wilson, at 20 the youngest of the 5307th’s officers. “He put the unit together, trained the unit, got us into fighting fettle, and then we became a political football between the British…and Stilwell.”

Hunter and Merrill had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. in 1929; that was about all they had in common. Hunter, born in Oneida, New York, in 1906, was a sinewy man with a temperament to match his tough physique. A contemporary described him as: “Very muscular with no excess fat. His athletic appearance and firm facial features created an aura of authority.” Hunter joined an infantry regiment on leaving West Point and served three years in the Philippines and two and a half in Panama, two postings where he gained valuable jungle training. In 1942 he was appointed Chief of the Rifles and Weapons Platoon Group of the Weapons Sections at Fort Benning, a frustrating role for a man who craved a combat posting. Hunter’s opportunity came with the formation of Galahad. “I had been selected from all other volunteer lieutenant colonels because of my extensive tropical jungle experience,” he recalled.

Merrill, in contrast, was a frail child who grew into a frail young man. He was accepted into West Point on the sixth attempt after the Academy finally agreed to overlook his poor eyesight. His peers at West Point nicknamed him “Pee-Wee” and mocked him in his yearbook entry. “We refuse to make predictions as to Pee-Wee’s future, for it is ever changing,” it ran. “First of all, his goal was to be a lawyer, then a politician, and last a soldier. Even this is slightly uncertain.” Merrill was never cut out to be a combat soldier. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1932 with a Bachelor of Science in military engineering and in 1938 he was sent to Tokyo as the Military Attaché. He then joined Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff in the Philippines and was appointed to a similar role under Stilwell when he arrived in Burma in March 1942.

But what Merrill lacked in physical strength he made up for in mental agility. Lt. Sam Wilson regarded his new C.O as “brilliant, innovative and probably a better strategic thinker than Hunter.” 

Birth of the “Marauder” legend

On Jan. 20, 1944 a posse of American war correspondents were invited to watch the 5307th undergo some training exercises at their Deogarh camp. Frank Hewlett of United Press described them as “the roughest, toughest bunch of infantrymen the U. S. army has ever put together.” His colleague from Life magazine, James Shepley, was just as taken. There was a hitch, however, and that was the name. The 5307th didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. As Merrill gave the correspondents a lift in his jeep to the Betwa River to see how mules carried their supplies across water, Shepley had an idea: why not call the unit “Merrill’s Marauders”?

A week later the Marauders had been reduced through the rigors of training to a strength of 2,600 and began the 1200 mile move east to Assam, in northeast India just across the border with Burma. Eight hundred tons of supplies had already made the journey, including radio equipment, medical supplies, crew-served weapons and 400 mules. These animals were a recommendation from the Chindits, who had found them tough and hardy on their first operation in Burma. Capable of carrying 200 lbs of equipment each, the mules’ biggest advantage over horses was that they ate the bamboo leaves in Burma whereas a horse required a larger amount of daily fodder. A few Marauders had been given a crash course in how to handle the animal from “Mule-skinners” of the 31st QM Pack Troop.

The Marauders didn’t linger long in Assam. Late in the evening of Feb. 7 the 1st Battalion was the first of the three Marauder battalions to hit the trail toward Burma. The men were wearing a dark green cotton herringbone twill uniform and either calf-high rubber-soled canvas boots or standard combat shoes for footwear, some with and others without canvas gaiters. Their backpacks contained essential equipment such as mess gear, blanket, poncho, spare socks and boxed, dried food combat rations.

In the vanguard of the 1st Battalion column was Lt. Sam Wilson’s Intelligence & Reconnaissance platoon (I&R). Each battalion had an I&R platoon, whose job it was to blaze a trail, reconnoitering the dense jungle for the signs of the enemy and also for good bivouac sites and suitable areas for air drops. The men chosen for these platoons had to have initiative, endurance and awareness. Few Marauders possessed these qualities in more abundance than a 25-year-old sergeant from California called Clarence Branscomb, a veteran of the Guadalcanal campaign. Over the course of 11 brutal days in January 1943 the 6 ft Branscomb had shown himself a superb exponent of jungle warfare. “I enjoyed fighting,” he reflected. 

Marching Into Burma

The Marauders marched across the Indian border into Burma and bivouacked at Shingbiyang on Feb. 18, enjoying what would be their last proper hot meal for months. Fifteen miles southeast was Stilwell’s HQ at Ningam Sakan, and it was there that Merrill received his orders for the forthcoming operation.

The Chinese 22nd and 38th divisions were slowly but steadily pushing the Japanese back from the Hukawng Valley. A pivotal role was being played by the Chinese 1st Provisional Tank Group under the command of Col. Rothwell H. Brown. They were driving south along the Kamaing Road toward Maingkwan, the main Japanese base in the valley. In front of a map at his HQ, Stilwell pointed to the village of Walawbum, 15 miles south of Maingkwan, and told Merrill this would be the site of their attack. The Chinese would launch a frontal assault on Walawbum, while the Marauders would cut their way through the jungle, and hit the enemy on their eastern (right) flank. Before setting off, the Marauders received a resupply by air. The C-47 transport aircraft of the First and Second Carrier Units dropped containers from a height of 400ft or less which were suspended from color-coded parachutes: blue for ammunition, white for rations, and green for medical supplies.

The honor of leading the Marauders as they deployed fell once more to Wilson’s 1st Battalion I&R platoon, which headed south on the morning of Feb. 24 to reconnoiter the villages to the east. The I&R platoons of the 2nd and 3rd Battalions, under the command of Lts. William Grissom and Logan Weston, set out a few hours later on the same trail before turning south and seeking out the enemy’s flank. 

A Savage Environment

The terrain in northern Burma was savage: hills carpeted in forest and jungle, and rivers that were wide and powerful. The nights could be cold, giving way to a dawn mist and then intense heat as the sun climbed. The ground was thick with rotting vegetation and the air was damp and humid. The environment was a breeding ground for disease and abundant in menacing wildlife such as tigers, snakes and the creature the Marauders would come to hate most of all: the leech. Leeches, remembered Capt. Fred Lyons, were these “horrifying grayish-brown parasites that bury their heads in your veins and suck till they are bloated several times larger than normal size with your blood.” They were about an inch in length and would suck the blood from victims until dropping off on their own accord. They got everywhere: ears, noses and even testicles. 

For Wilson and most men in his I&R platoon, Burma was an overwhelming sensory overload. They had never encountered such an inhospitable environment, nor had they ever met the enemy face to face. Wilson did not have the arrogance of youth, however, and readily tapped into the experience of his veteran sergeant Clarence Branscomb, who told him the average Japanese soldier was “tough, capable and skillful.” 

Wilson didn’t have long to wait for his introduction to the enemy. “We were moving along a trail parallel to a river when we came to a kind of open glade,” he recalled. “I saw some horses by the river so I walked toward them. About halfway across the Japanese hiding along the river bank opened up on me. Shot my canteen off my belt and riddled my pack. I fell to the ground stunned.” Wilson recovered his senses and saw a Japanese mount one of the horses. “I opened my full-bore carbine on him and hit him with the first round but kept pumping rounds into him as he was sliding off the horse. Then a grenade came sailing through the air.”

Wilson flicked away the grenade. It exploded in the long grass but the force of the blast knocked him cold for a few seconds. He regained consciousness and saw a Japanese “running at me with his bayonet.” Wilson raised his weapon, squeezed the trigger and heard the click of an empty magazine. “Back to my left rear, maybe 30 or 40 yards away, Sgt.  Clarence Branscomb stood up and hit the charging [Japanese] in the chest with three quick rounds,” remembered Wilson. “He practically fell on top of me.”

Race To The River

The Marauders met the Japanese in force for the first time on March 4. The previous evening Lt. Logan Weston had led the 3rd Battalion’s I&R platoon across the Numpyek river with orders from Lt-Col. Charles Beach, the battalion commander, to protect their north flank as they advanced toward Walawbum. Weston and his men were now effectively isolated from the rest of the 3rd battalion deep inside Japanese territory, and the enemy was aware of their presence. 

Gen. Tanaka, commander of the 18th Division, ordered the bulk of the 55th and 56th Infantry regiments to move south and “destroy” the Americans threatening their flank. At daylight on March 4 the Japanese approached Weston’s platoon bivouacked close to a swamp. Weston let them advance and then gave the order to fire. “The enemy soldiers hit the ground and fanned out, crawling closer and shooting ferociously,” said Weston. “They chattered among themselves, some seemed to be giving orders.”

Weston called over his Nisei (a Japanese word meaning Second Generation American) interpreter, 23-year-old Henry Gosho from Seattle, one of 14 Japanese-Americans who had volunteered for the Marauders. In between the mortar shells and small arms fire, Gosho heard the orders shouted by the Japanese officer and translated them for Weston. They were attempting to encircle the Americans. Forewarned, Weston began withdrawing his platoon across the Numpyek but not before his radioman had sent a message to the 3rd battalion dug in on the other side of the river, requesting suppressing mortar fire.

It was now a race to get over the river. The Americans jumped into the water and began wading across, urged on by Weston who stood in the middle of the Numpyek counting his men as they passed. Two had been badly wounded and were being carried on litters constructed from combat jackets and bamboo poles. It took time to get them into the water. The shrieks of the pursuing Japanese got closer. Then a 3rd Battalion platoon under the command of Lt. Victor Weingartner appeared on the far bank and opened fire. PFC Norman Janis, an Oglala Sioux and one of the sharpest shots in the outfit, spotted a Japanese crew setting up a Nambu Type 92 7.7mm machine gun. Janis raised his M1 Garand rifle. “He squatted down behind the gun so I shot for his head,” remembered Janis, who did not miss. “Another one got in his place, I hit him, got him out of the road.” Seven Japanese soldiers tried to pull the the Nambu’s trigger, but Janis killed them all.

Weston and his men got safely across to the eastern bank but the Japanese would not give up the chase. “They just kept coming across and we kept shooting at them,” said Weingartner.

The Japanese launched a fresh assault across the Numpyek early on March 6. It was repulsed with more heavy losses for the attackers; they came again in the afternoon with the same result. “I respected the Japanese very much, or the soldiers I did,” reflected Bernard Martin, a radioman with the 3rd Battalion. “They weren’t afraid. But they had poor commanders. The Japanese always launched frontal attacks. On several occasions they could have outflanked us but their commanders were stupid. On this occasion this officer appeared in shiny boots and pressed pants, waving his sword, and leading a charge across the river.”

“We’re The Marauders!”

The officer was killed along with an estimated 800 of his men in the two days of contacts with the Marauders. American casualties amounted to eight dead and 37 wounded. “Gen. Stilwell has sent a message that he is pleased,” Merrill informed his senior officers at a staff conference on the evening of March 7. “Between us and the Chinese, we have forced the Japanese to withdraw farther in the last three days than they have in the last three months of fighting.”

It was during the fight at the Numpyek River, recalled Martin, that the “Merrill’s Marauders” moniker was adopted by the men. “It was Lt. Col. Beach who told us that the newspapers were calling us Merrill’s Marauders,” he said. “We liked that name…when we were screaming abuse at the [Japanese] across the river we started yelling, ‘We’re the Marauders”.’ 

The man himself, Merrill, was beginning to feel the strain. He had been lightly admonished by Stilwell for not exploiting the casualties inflicting on the Japanese by the 3rd battalion and allowing them to withdraw south. 

The Chinese pursued the Japanese into the Mogaung Valley down the main trail while the Marauders swung east through the jungle to attack them in the rear. Hunter led a mixed force of the 2nd and 3rd battalions to block the enemy retreat when the Chinese launched their assault. They clashed with the Japanese at first light on March 24 between the Kamaing Road and the east bank of the Mogaung River. The first Japanese banzai attack came just after 7:30am and the sixteenth and last was in mid-afternoon. “I had bodies piled up so high in front of my machine guns that I had to get out and kick the bodies out of the way so we could fire our machine guns,” remembered Lt. Phil Piazza. Just before 4:00pm a flight of P-51 fighters attacked the Japanese positions, the cue for the 2nd Battalion to withdraw across the Mogaung. They had lost two men, the Japanese around 200. 

Hunter wanted only a temporary withdrawal before counter-attacking his weakened enemy. He radioed Merrill and requested permission to advance south with the 3rd Battalion and capture the lightly-held town of Kamaing. “I was disappointed when instead of getting permission to attack I was told to withdraw,” said Hunter. “This golden opportunity should have been seized and exploited with all resources available.”

To Capture An Airfield

Merrill was a sick man by now, and on March 28 he suffered a heart attack at his HQ in the hilltop village of Nhpum Ga. He was evacuated by air. Hunter assumed command. He led the Marauders for the next six weeks, two of which entailed the besiegement of the 2nd Battalion in Nphum Ga.

When the siege was lifted on April 9, Easter Sunday, all three battalions of the Marauders were exhausted. The final tally for holding Nhpum Ga revealed it had cost the Americans 52 dead and 163 wounded (the Japanese lost 400 men) but by now many of the Marauders were riddled with disease. By April 16, more than 100 soldiers of the 2nd Battalion had been flown out suffering from amoebic dysentery, malnutrition, skin diseases and fevers. For the 1,600 Marauders who remained, there were fresh uniforms, their first mail in two months and the chance to lie in the sun doing nothing. Above all, there was the knowledge that their mission in Burma was over, as they’d been promised by Merrill weeks earlier. 

Stilwell had other ideas. He saw an opportunity to capture the airfield at Myitkyina from the Japanese. This would deny their fighter planes a base from which to attack American cargo aircraft flying over the Himalayas “Hump” to resupply China from India. It would have to be a surprise attack if it were to succeed. He ordered Hunter to lead his men on a 70-mile march up and through the 6,100-ft Naura Myket Pass, which was unguarded by the Japanese because they considered it impassable.

Hunter set out at the head of the 6000-strong Myitkyina Task Force (which also comprised two Chinese infantry regiments) on April 28. “Raining,” wrote Staff Sgt. James McGuire in his diary. “6:30am started hiking, went up 2600 ft, really a tough climb. We have 6000 ft mt to go over and it’s really raining and muddy. Bivouacked at village, water scarce. The path is a 20% incline.” That first day set the pattern for what radioman Bernard Martin described as “a trail of sadness.” It took the Marauders and their Chinese allies nearly three weeks to reach the airstrip at Myitkyina during which time they lost men to combat, disease and exhaustion.

On the evening of May 16, Hunter ordered Wilson’s I&R platoon to recce the airfield. Wilson was too sick with amoebic dysentery to lead the mission so Sgt. Clarence Branscomb selected two men and they set out for the airfield. The intelligence they brought back was described by Hunter as “remarkable” and the next morning he launched a successful assault on Myitkyina airfield.

Broken Promises

Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the capture of Myitkyina “a brilliant feat of arms,” and Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, issued an Order of the Day addressed to Stilwell in which he declared the seizure “a most outstanding success…the crossing of the 6,100-foot Naura Myket Pass is a feat which will live in military history. Please convey my personal congratulations and thanks to all ranks.” 

But Stilwell didn’t. Nor did he keep his promise that the Marauders would be evacuated as soon as the airstrip had been captured. Bitterness grew among the Americans, as did the casualty list as more Marauders succumbed to sickness. When they were finally relieved on Aug. 3, few remained of the 2,600 who had marched into Burma six months earlier: 93 had been killed in combat, 30 had died of disease and 301 were wounded or missing. An additional 1,970 Marauders had been hospitalized with sickness. It was claimed only two men from the original 3,000 volunteers went through the whole Burmese campaign untouched by sickness. Master Sgt. Joe Doyer was one and Charles Hunter the other.

Hunter had objected to Stilwell about the broken promises and their general mistreatment—criticism that ultimately harmed his career. He died in 1978 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, largely overlooked by the American public compared to Frank Merrill, whose name is forever associated with the Marauders. Only the men themselves knew the truth. “He got the credit for the thing, got his name in it, but he never did anything,” said Clarence Branscomb of Merrill in 2013. “Hunter was doing the job at Mitch [Myitkyina] that Merrill should have been doing.”

Wilson was more charitable toward Merrill, but shared Branscomb’s view of Hunter. “An excellent tactician, an absolutely super troop leader,” he reflected. “A better name for the outfit would probably have been Hunter’s Harbingers or Hunter’s Hawks, or something like that rather than Merrill’s Marauders. But as you know, history doesn’t always work like that.”  

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

See more stories

subscribe now!

 

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.

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.

subscribe today