Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 151 i History of War

“THE SWEDISH EMPIRE DEFEATS THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE WHEN ITS INFANTRY OVERRUNS THE IMPERIAL CENTRE” 16 NOVEMBER 1632 BATTLE OF LÜTZEN An Allied army led by the Swedish Empire defeats the Holy Roman Empire when its infantry overruns the imperial centre. Swedish losses are higher and include King Gustav II Adolph. Under the new leadership of King Gustav’s confidant Axel Oxenstierna, Sweden continues fighting the Holy Roman Empire as part of the Heilbronn League. 7 NOVEMBER 1941 OCTOBER REVOLUTION PARADE During the Battle of Moscow, Soviet soldiers commemorate the Bolshevik Revolution with a Red Square parade before immediately marching onto the battlefield. In his address to the Red Army troops, Stalin says: “A great liberating mission has fallen to your lot. Be worthy of this mission!” 22-26 NOVEMBER 1943 CAIRO…

Throughout the Cold War the British Army’s main focus was defending northwest Germany with a corps of three armoured divisions. It also sent many troops to counter terrorism in Northern Ireland and relished the unanticipated challenge of the Falklands War. The Army marched to the sound of the guns, with the Parachute Regiment and SAS at the cutting edge. Over the next 40 years, the Army would continue to display this thirst for action and adventure. In the 1980s, its fighting power considerably increased as General Sir Nigel Bagnall led a period of tactical innovation and a revolution in doctrine for armoured warfare. The Thatcher government’s rising defence budget funded new weapons, including Challenger tanks and Warrior infantry fighting vehicles. 1991 – 2003: the new world disorder In 1990 the…

Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia in the summer of 1812 was his final and most audacious bid to secure French imperium over continental Europe. Even two centuries later, the calamity of 1812 continues to command fascination and awe. It unleashed a war of colossal proportions whose outcome proved the very opposite of what the emperor had envisioned. Over six relentless months, the campaign offered scenes of triumph and despair, transcendent courage and brutal depravity. In the grandeur of its conception, the audacity of its execution, and the catastrophe of its end, the war had no analogy until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Its consequences reverberated far beyond the battlefields: it ignited a general uprising in northern Germany and, within a single year, brought about the collapse…

The Battle of Maloyaroslavets, fought five days after Napoleon departed from Moscow on 19 October, marked another decisive turning point in the campaign. On the surface, it was a French tactical victory: Napoleon’s troops seized the contested town after brutal, seesaw fighting. Yet strategically, it was a Russian triumph that extinguished Napoleon’s last faint hope of reversing his fortunes. Denied access to the fertile southern provinces, the emperor was compelled to retrace his steps along the very route the Grande Armée had already devastated during its summer advance. From Maloyaroslavets onward, Napoleon’s “strategic withdrawal” became a retreat. The French abandoned all offensive initiative and sought only to escape Russia. For the Russians, Maloyaroslavets marked a shift in posture. Soviet historians long portrayed it as the beginning of a great counteroffensive.…

Oberleutnant Paul Siebert nursed a glass of vodka in a tobacco smoke-filled officer’s bar in German-occupied Ukraine. He was accompanied by SS-Sturmbannführer Ulrich von Ortel, a man he had spent the evening plying with drink. In a frenzy, von Ortel blurted out: “We will eliminate Stalin and Churchill and turn the tide of the war! We will abduct Roosevelt to help our Führer come to terms with America.” The sturmbannführer had just ruined Operation Long Jump, a plot against the Tehran Conference over a month in the making. Siebert was not in fact a Wehrmacht officer but the legendary Soviet intelligence officer Nikolai Kuznetsov, who quickly broke off the conversation and immediately made contact with Moscow. This October marks the 50th anniversary of Jack Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed. The…

Author: Martin Herzog Publisher: Pen and Sword Price: £29.95 OnSale: Outnow The British SAS burst into the public’s consciousness when they famously brought the siege at the Iranian Embassy in London to a conclusion on 5 May 1980. The pictures of the black-clad troopers on the balcony leaping through windows that had just been blown out became some of the enduring images of the decade. However, for the relatively new West German elite police counterterrorism unit, GSG 9, their moment in the spotlight had come three years earlier with the successful storming of a Lufthansa airliner on the tarmac at Mogadishu Airport in Somalia, freeing 86 hostages unharmed and killing three out of four Red Army Faction (RAF) hijackers. GSG 9 had been created after the massacre of Israeli athletes…

It took three weeks for China’s Nationalist government, the Kuomintang (KMT), to formalise the total surrender of all Japanese forces and civilians in 1945. Although Tokyo announced its decision to the Allies on 10 August it was not until 3 September that Japanese soldiers in China were ordered to lay down their arms, and a few more days passed until a formal agreement was smoothed out. To mark the occasion, a Nationalist general with a sizable retinue was sent to the former capital Nanking, which was still occupied by 70,000 Japanese soldiers. The venue itself was emblematic of modern China’s statehood, being a war college for Nationalist officers. The once-unrepentant General Yasutsugu Okamura and his staff were seated along a table and signed the Act of Surrender that was delivered…

BEYOND BURMA From disastrous beginnings to heroic triumph, this exhibition comprehensively covers the Second World War Burma campaign The National Army Museum is marking 80 years since VJ Day with an exhibition celebrating the multinational army that fought in Burma. The first 21st-century national museum exhibition on the campaign brings together over 180 objects, including diaries, artworks, oral histories, weapons, uniforms and photographs. The exhibition covers the retreat from Burma in 1942, the resurgence of the British in 1943 and the final campaign against the Imperial Japanese Army from 1944 to 1945. Beyond Burma introduces attendees to the terrifying and claustrophobic nature of jungle fighting as never before. A stand-out object is Major Conrad ‘Dick’ Richardson Romyn’s abstract painting And the World was Covered in Darkness, which depicts the chaos…

Author: Malcolm Gaskill Publisher: Allen Lane Price: £25 Released: Outnow Malcolm Gaskill knew two things about his Great Uncle Ralph’s wartime adventures: he’d been a prisoner in Italy and he’d cut his way out of a train with a knife and fork. Apart from that, he had faded into family folklore, lost to view, until one afternoon in an English country garden a chance conversation set Gaskill on his uncle’s trail. It’s a vividly told journey of rediscovery, uncovering Ralph’s past as a soldier, prisoner, fugitive and partisan in wartime Italy. “I knew a bit about Ralph, though I’d never met him,” the author writes. “A soldier in North Africa, a military policeman, he’d escaped from a prison camp and hid in a farmhouse. That was all I remembered, and…

Director: Baltasar Kormákur Starring: James Norton, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Emily Beecham Release: Streaming now on BBC iPlayer “Harold!” It’s the first word in King & Conqueror, shouted across an impressively gritty battle. “William!” comes the answer, establishing the protagonists for any historically challenged viewers within the first two minutes. But the Battle of Hastings is a flash forward. As William and Harold advance upon each other for their final confrontation, the battle stops and we step back in time, moving “years earlier” as the inter-title informs us, while the black-and-white film stock switches into colour. Except it’s not really colour; it’s that washed-out rinse of medieval mud grey that filmmakers have decided best represents the 1,000 years between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Borgias. And the heart…

HIT FOR SIXERS 17 September 1976 British soldiers in riot gear and supported by two Saracen armoured personnel carriers move towards rioters on the Lower Falls Road, Belfast. The British Army deployed Alvis Saracens extensively during The Troubles, where they were nicknamed ‘Sixers’. After arriving in Northern Ireland, the army retrofitted Saracens with additional armour, crew seatbelts and passenger harnesses, protection that proved effective against roadside improvised explosive devices. Saracens continued to be used into the late-20th and early 21st century, including during the Gulf War and the 2003–04 Indonesian offensive in Aceh. GROUNDED FOR GOOD 14 May 1945 Men of the Third Infantry Division of the United States Seventh Army examine a captured Focke-Wulf Fw 190 and Messerschmitt Bf 110 at Bad Aibling airfield. Luftwaffe crews had ensured most…

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The campaign of 1812 illustrates with cruel clarity the paradox of many other military ventures: winning battles, yet steadily losing the war. Nowhere was this tension more evident than at Smolensk and Borodino, two engagements that epitomised both Napoleon’s brilliance and his failure. At Smolensk in August, he finally seemed on the verge of securing the decisive clash he had pursued since crossing the Niemen. At that ancient fortress city, the Russian armies barred the road to Moscow. In a brilliantly conceived operational plan, Napoleon came close to achieving his objective. Yet the result was hollow: the French stormed the burning stronghold while the Russian armies, battered but intact, slipped away into the interior. Smolensk underscored the crucial flaw in Napoleon’s approach to the war - he could take towns…

Roger Moorhouse describes the Type VII U-boat as “a submersible rather than a submarine” because the electric motors, the vessel’s powerplant underwater, only had charge for about 24 hours. Type VIIs, of which about 700 were built, spent the majority of their patrols on the surface, using their diesel engines for power and to charge the batteries. U-boats only dove for attacks and to evade counterattacks. This inability to operate underwater for extended periods was one of several consequences of the Treaty of Versailles’ ban on Germany constructing new U-boats, which led to the development of a primitive vessel. Germany was forced to create a design from the obsolete First World War Type UB III, only a minor leap from 1910s technology, as Moorhouse explains. “They got around [bans] with Dutch…

The McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom is a true classic of aviation and one of the greatest warplanes ever designed. Work began in 1953 and the first prototype flew in 1958 – today the type is still in service with several air forces around the world. It was the United States’ first allweather, multi-role, missile-armed aircraft. The Phantom has proven capable of excellent service as an air-superiority fighter, ground-attack aircraft, reconnaissance platform and at the Suppression of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD), most famously as the legendary ‘Wild Weasel’. During the Vietnam War the Phantom led the way in multiple roles, including as a dogfighter and in beyond-visual-range (BVR) engagements with the first generations of air-to-air guided missiles. Phantoms shot down over 150 North Vietnamese aircraft while serving with the US Air…

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION WITH INTRODUCTION FROM PETER JAMES Author: Jack Higgins Publisher: Penguin Price: £9.99 Released: Out now Historical novels are not the usual genre of books reviewed across these pages, but we hope our readers will indulge us this special review for a very special title. A book which may not need a great deal by way of introduction, it’s one which will surely have been read by many of those who subscribe to History of War. It’s a book of such significance that its republication in the form of a special 50th anniversary edition really demands a second look at this absolute classic. Originally published in 1975, The Eagle Has Landed is a truly iconic Second World War page-turner about an audacious Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill on British…

In June 1855, a Russian army of 25,000 besieged the city of Kars in Ottoman Anatolia to relieve the pressure on Sevastopol. The Turks, demoralised by defeats to the Russians, left the defence of Kars in the hands of Brevet Colonel William Fenwick Williams, British commissioner with the Ottoman Army in Anatolia. His garrison performed brilliantly, repelling three major attacks. Williams reflected: “They fell dead at their posts, in the tents, and throughout the camp, as brave men should who cling to their duty through the slightest glimmering of hope of saving a place entrusted to their custody.” By late October, deep snow covered the ground surrounding the city. There would be no Ottoman relief force. After six months under siege, disease, famine and a shortage of ammunition forced Williams…