Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 43 i History of War

“ THE BATTLE WAS A PYRRHIC VICTORY FOR THE FRENCH, AND THE TOTAL CASUALTIES FOR BOTH SIDES WERE POSSIBLY AS HIGH AS 86,000” 7 September 1812 BATTLE OF BORODINO The Russians were finally forced to fight at Borodino, although Napoleon could only muster 128,000 men. The battle was a pyrrhic victory for the French, and the total casualties for both sides were possibly as high as 86,000. June 1812 CROSSING THE NIEMEN Emperor Napoleon I’s Grande Armée of 450,000-600,000 men crossed the River Niemen into Russian territory, but by September hundreds of thousands of men had already died due to the already harsh campaigning conditions. 16-18 August 1812 BATTLE OF SMOLENSK Napoleon attempted an ambitious manoeuvre to force the Russian Army into a pitched battle, but the result was a…

“WE HAD TO MAKE SURE THE TROOPS DIDN’T RUN AMOK, BUT WENT THROUGH THE SAFE AREAS THAT HAD BEEN TAPED OFF. IT WAS VERY WELL ORGANISED. IT WASN’T LIKE IN FILMS WHERE THEY DASH OFF THESE LANDING CRAFT” The Allied Commonwealth landing beaches on D-Day consisted of Gold, Juno and Sword beaches. Juno was spearheaded by the Canadian 3rd Division and surrounded by the British-led Gold and Sword beaches. Each beach was split into codenamed sectors with Juno consisting of ‘Love’, ‘Mike’ and ‘Nan’. David Teacher landed in ‘Mike’ sector, which meant that he drove his Bedford QL into the heart of the Commonwealth landing grounds at Courseulles-sur-Mer.…

“THE TITANIC BATTLE FOR SUPREMACY IN THE PACIFIC WOULD ONLY COST THE US NAVY ONE OF ITS VALUABLE CARRIERS” OPPOSING FORCES CENTRAL PACIFIC OCEAN 4 JUNE 1942 Dauntless dive bombers from the US aircraft carrier Enterprise spotted the Japanese fleet north of Midway Atoll at 10:05am on 4 September 1942. They closed on it and queued up in a single line at 19,000 feet for their attack. The air group commander barked instructions for the 33 dive bombers to attack the heavy carriers Kaga and Akagi, but in the confusion of battle most of the aircraft went after the 38,200-ton Kaga. 15 minutes later, the metal birds swooped down on their prey. The flight deck of the mighty Kaga was packed with aircraft. Air crews were refuelling Zero fighters and…

“CIRILLO PLANS TO JOIN THE NUER-DOMINATED REBELLION, AND SOME ESTIMATES PUT THE NUMBER OF FIGHTERS IN HIS NEW MILITIA AT 30,000, POTENTIALLY A FORCE FOR TERRIBLE DESTRUCTION” The latest news from Africa’s bloodiest conflict does not bode well for the future. Already the four year conflict, ostensibly between the two largest ethnic groups, the Dinka and Nuer, is creating famine conditions. In February 2017, General Thomas Cirillo Swaka, a member of the Bari ethnic group, resigned as deputy chief of staff of South Sudan’s Army. He has accused President Salva Kiir, a member of the Dinka group, of recruiting militias and engaging in ethnic cleansing. Now Cirillo plans to join the Nuer-dominated rebellion, and some estimates put the number of fighters in his new militia at 30,000, potentially a force…

WHAT WAS THE IDEA FOR CREATING AN EXHIBITION BASED ON THE STORY OF THE SYRIAN CONFLICT? The idea of the exhibition was to complement the series of fantastic photographs that the IWM have by Sergey Ponomarev. The curators at the IWM felt that while the pictures are fantastic, it drops the public into the deep end of the conflict without having much background knowledge. So the broad idea behind it was to give the public a relatively straightforward introduction to the conflict. The way the media reports the Syrian conflict is in a somewhat simplified manner. They tend to reduce it to stereotypes, but what I want to show is that it’s an incredibly complex civil war. It’s both a civil war with domestic actors who have their own legitimate…

“THE FRENCH ARE ATTACKED HALF WAY ALONG THEIR OVERSTRETCHED LINE, WITH THE GREATEST FIGHTING OCCURRING IN THE REARGUARD. 5,000 FRENCH ARE KILLED AND MORALE PLUMMETS” The French invasion of Russia formed the basis of the “best statistical graphic ever created” by civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard in 1869. The map represented the demise of Napoleon’s troops using numbers, distance, locations, coordinates, direction of travel and, most significantly of all, temperature. 1 BATTLE OF SALTANOVKA 23 JULY 1812 NEAR MOGILEV, BELARUS Saltanovka (also known as Mogilev) is the first significant fighting during the campaign. It is a minor French victory that prevents Bagration’s 2nd Army from moving north to join Barclay de Tolly’s 1st Army. 2 BATTLE OF BORODINO 7 SEPTEMBER 1812 BORODINO, RUSSIA Napoleon’s poor performance here denies the Grande…

MAIN ARMAMENT The 88mm KwK 43 L/71 high velocity gun was the most powerful weapon of its kind mounted in a tank during World War II. The L/71 entered production in 1943, and was introduced with the Tiger II, or King Tiger. Its barrel length of 6.43 metres was over a metre longer than the 88mm L/56 mounted on the Tiger I, and its muzzle velocity reached an astonishing 1,000 metres per second. New armour-piercing rounds, larger than those of the L/56, were also developed. An anti-tank version of the L/71, the PaK 43, was mounted on tank destroyers or field artillery carriages. SECONDARY ARMAMENT A pair of MG 34 machine guns, capable of a high rate of fire compared to contemporary Allied weapons, was installed for protection against enemy…

The German penchant for over-engineering and precision craftsmanship, disruptions due to relentless Allied bombing, excessive costs that strained a wartime economy, and chronic shortages of critical raw materials conspired to limit the production and performance of the Tiger tank and its progeny during World War II. While the Tiger earned a reputation second to none among the legendary tanks of the 20th century, fewer than 2,000 Tiger I and Tiger II tanks were completed from 1942 through 1945. In comparison, the United States produced nearly 50,000 M4 Sherman tanks and Soviet factories manufactured more than 60,000 of the superb T-34 and T-34/85 tanks. Although the Tiger may have held a decided advantage in tank versus tank combat, the sheer weight of Allied numbers prevailed. The battle of the tanks was…

Manufactured by Bedford Vehicles, a subsidiary of Vauxhall Motors, the QL was one of the most widely produced trucks of the war with 52,247 being manufactured between 1941-45. Bedford was contracted by the British War Office to produce a three tonnes 4x4 general service truck in 1939 and it took only a year to develop from prototype to production, which was an impressive feat in a time of national crisis. The QL was designed to use its four-wheel drive on rough terrain but it could also convert to front wheel drive on hard roads to ease the wear on tyres and the gearbox. It was known for its flexibility and could be used in a variety of roles. A QL could act as a troop carrier, field kitchen, tanker, cargo,…

01 MIDWAY ATOLL US-held Midway Atoll consisted of Eastern Island, where an airstrip was located, and Sand Island, which housed a seaplane base, radar installations and fuel dumps. Nimitz toured Midway in early May to inspect its defences, and afterwards reinforced it with aircraft, troops and heavy weapons from Pearl Harbor. 02 THE IJN ATTACKS At 6:30am, Japanese dive bombers screamed down on Eastern Island to drop their single-bomb loads on the airfield, while level bombers dropped high-explosive ordnance on the infrastructure on Sand Island to the west. US antiaircraft batteries shot down 11 Japanese aircraft. 03 ASSAULT ON IJN CARRIERS Japanese lookouts spotted American dive bombers at 10:20am over the carrier group. The Americans caught the Akagi, Kaga and Soryu carriers at peak vulnerability; however, they did not see…

“THE LYNX IS ALSO CONSIDERED THE WORLD’S FIRST AEROBATIC HELICOPTER, CAPABLE OF PERFORMING LOOPS AND OTHER MANOEUVRES” During the mid-1960s, the British military turned its attention to the Westland WG 13, a multipurpose civil and naval utility helicopter. Military observers believed the type might perform well as a replacement for the Westland Wasp and Scout helicopters then in service and possibly outperform an alternative, the American-built Bell UH-1 Iroquois. In 1967, Britain and France signed an agreement to develop helicopters, and French manufacturer Aérospatiale joined Westland with a 30 percent stake in the development of the widely successful design that became known as the Westland Lynx. The first flight of the Lynx took place on March 21, 1971, and it was accepted for service with the British armed forces six…

The Second Boer War was a grim and controversial conflict. Between 1899-1902, tens of thousands of people died during the British Empire’s attempt to annex the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. It was a conflict characterised by imperial blunders, guerrilla warfare and, most chillingly for the new century, the widespread use of deadly concentration camps. Despite the awful realities, the British public were consumed by a wave of patriotic jingoism in the face of dogged Boer resistance and fascination with the war grew, even among children. Perhaps the most famous impact of the war on British children was the subsequent creation of the Boy Scout Movement by the Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, but there was also an immediate impact on young people. Schoolchildren were educated in…

G.I.’S ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND Taken: c. February 1954 Marilyn Monroe poses atop the turret of an American tank while on her visit to Korea in 1954. During her four-day visit, for which she interrupted her honeymoon with husband Joe DiMaggio, the New York Yankees baseball star, Monroe performed ten shows for thousands of troops. A DEAD END Taken: c. 2001 Angolan government soldiers stand guard at a roadblock marked with a human skull. After Angola gained independence from Portugal in 1975, civil war erupted between the ruling party, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The 27-year civil war killed half a million people. LAST ORDERS Taken: 10 December, 1944 Pilots of a Special Attack…

“THE FACT THAT THEIR EMPEROR HAD SURVIVED, ALONG WITH THE PRECIOUS SEED (IN OFFICERS AND EXPERIENCED MEN) FROM WHICH A NEW ARMY COULD BE GROWN, WAS A MUCH MORE PALATABLE VERSION OF EVENTS” The invasion of Russia turned into a nightmare for Napoleon’s Grande Armée, but it could actually have ended on an even more downbeat note — the total destruction of the army and the capture of Napoleon. This faintest of bright spots amid the gloom of a truly disastrous campaign has sparked intense debate ever since, with historians unable to agree on whether it was a victory for the Russians or the French. Only a fraction of Napoleon’s army returned from its ill-fated Russian adventure, and the enormity of the defeat was famously depicted in the Carte Figurative…

The Tiger – no other tank of World War II is better known. The nimbus of the infamous German heavy tank and that of its successor, the mighty King Tiger, is still unbroken and as powerful as it was 72 years ago. Today, it is still known for its fabled ‘invincibility’, for the power of its mighty 8.8cm gun and, especially in modern, revisionist historiography, for its legendary ‘unreliability’. Yet on the Eastern Front, and to a slightly lesser extent in the western theatre of war, Tiger-equipped German units performed surprisingly well. The true story of the Tiger is hidden somewhere between those extremes, and is best told by those who used and also faced the gigantic German war machines on the battlefield. THE HEAVY TANK BATTALIONS “A concentration of…

“I THINK THE TIGERS OFTEN GET A MYTHICAL STATUS BECAUSE THEY ARE SUCH LOVELY MACHINES AND WELL MADE AND IT’S FORGOTTEN THAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY WENT TO WAR IN THEM” In a world-first, The Tiger Collection is a thrilling new exhibition where tank-lovers can explore every iteration of this iconic behemoth – including the museum’s own Tiger 131 – all under one roof. Opened in the spring of 2017, the exhibition also presents first-hand veteran testimony, from men who fought both alongside and against Tiger tanks during WWII. As one member of the Tiger family is physically absent from the exhibition (the Sturmtiger), video game developer and publisher Wargaming is stepping in with cutting-edge augmented reality technology to fill the gap. This will provide visitors with a hyper-real Sturmtiger CG model…

“THERE WERE THOUSANDS OF SHIPS AND LANDING CRAFT, BATTLESHIPS, DESTROYERS, AIRCRAFT FLYING OVERHEAD… THE NOISE WAS UNBELIEVABLE. WHEN THE NAVY STARTED BOMBARDING… IT WAS HORRENDOUS” 6 June 1944. Nearly 7,000 vessels containing 132,000 ground troops cross the English Channel to take part in the Allied invasion of western Europe: the largest naval, air and land operation in history. Nothing less than the liberation of a brutally suppressed continent is at stake and after years of intense planning, failure is not an option. Five assault beaches on the Normandy coast must be taken, including one primarily reserved for Canadian forces: Juno Beach. However, in the vanguard of this sector is a 20-year-old British member of the RAF Beach Squadrons. Sitting in the cab of his truck and laden with supplies, the…

“IWM IS MARKING ITS CENTENARY BY EXPLORING EVOLVING GLOBAL ISSUES, PARTICULARLY THE DEVASTATING CONFLICT IN SYRIA, AS PART OF ITS ‘CONFLICT NOW’ STRAND OF EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS” The Imperial War Museums (IWM) were established in 1917 to reflect and record WWI, which at that time was an ongoing conflict. 100 years later IWM is marking its centenary by exploring evolving global issues, particularly the devastating conflict in Syria, as part of its Conflict Now strand of exhibitions and events. Conflict Now features the opinions of individuals who have seen, experienced and worked in areas of conflict, which include artists, photographers, refugees, war correspondents and citizen journalists. Running from 27 April-3 September 2017 at IWM London, Syria: A Conflict Explored will feature two exhibitions called Syria: Story Of A Conflict and…

Since its military debut in the late 1970s, the Westland Lynx has been a popular multirole helicopter with British forces as well as the militaries of over a dozen other countries. Along with the improved Super Lynx introduced in the 1990s, the helicopter continues in service with the armed forces of countries including Germany and France, although the British military has begun to replace it with the AgustaWestland AW159 Wildcat. The Lynx gained fame during the Falklands War of 1982. The HAS.2 anti-submarine variant was carried aboard several Royal Navy warships and introduced electronic surveillance measures while serving as decoys against Argentine Exocet anti-ship missiles. On 3 May, Lynxes from the destroyers HMS Coventry and HMS Glasgow executed the first firing of a Sea Skua missile in combat, heavily damaging…