Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 152 i History of War

A mid the fallout of the catastrophic Gallipoli campaign in 1915, from which he described himself an “escaped scapegoat”, Winston Churchill was at one of the lowest moments of his political career. With his reputation in tatters, he resolved to join the British Expeditionary Force in France, and was given command of a battalion. As Peter Caddick-Adams explores in this issue, service on the Western Front would prove to have a major impact on the future prime minister. Experiencing shelling and the difficult, often grisly conditions in the trenches, Churchill earned not only the respect of his men – who were at first sceptical of the fallen politician’s soldiering credentials – but also a form of personal redemption from his failures. His experience of the frontline gave him valuable insight…

CIA analysts gathered around U-2 spy plane photographs taken of Cuban military facilities. With horror, they realised they had just discovered Soviet medium-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles – weapons that were capable of targeting most of the continental US. The next morning, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy briefed President John F Kennedy. A naval quarantine of Cuba, and the closest the world has ever come to all-out nuclear conflict, followed. The Cold War pivoted on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The USA and the Soviet Union looked into the terrifying void and decided to collaborate on limiting horizontal (the number of nations with access to nuclear weapons) and vertical (the size of nuclear powers’ arsenals) proliferation. International agreements followed, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks,…

Brownshirt mobs charged through German streets, burning synagogues and Torah scrolls, destroying Jewish businesses and beating rabbis. Over 90 Jewish people died during Kristallnacht on the night of 9-10 November 1938, and many more died in the following weeks by suicide or maltreatment in captivity. News of the atrocity spread throughout Germany and beyond. In the halls of the Wieblingen Schloss, a country house turned school for girls, Protestant educator Elizabeth von Thadden cried out that she was ashamed to be German. The seasoned diplomat and Great War reservist Otto Kiep read through the Nazi-controlled press’ positive coverage and realised that the Germany he loved, which would have cared about international condemnation, was disappearing. For the handful of high-society Germans dreaming of a return to the old Germany and disgusted…

Hitler’s executioner was one of his earliest supporters – Roland Friesler’s Nazi Party membership started in July 1925 (membership number 9,679). His legal training gave him immediate importance as he began defending party members prosecuted for political violence. When the Nazis gained power, he was the natural choice for a position at the top of the Prussian Ministry of Justice. There, Friesler developed his signature combination of legal mastery and powerful courtroom performance. In 1936, Stalin’s Great Purge began, and Friesler travelled to Moscow to watch the show trials. He carried much of what he’d observed into the People’s Court after being appointed judge president in 1942. That year, 46 percent of People’s Court defendants received the death penalty. It was Friesler’s obsession with his work that led to his…

On 9 May 1945, Generalmajor Siegfried Heine, the German commander in Guernsey, arrived on board the B-class destroyer HMS Bulldog. After a few formalities, including having his identification papers checked, he was led to the wardroom, where he agreed to the unconditional surrender of the occupying forces. After a delegation on HMS Beagle arranged the signing of similar surrender documents in Jersey, the five-year Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands formally came to an end. Yet even a few short hours beforehand, this victory had seemed uncertain. Just the previous day, junior naval officer Kapitänleutnant Armin Zimmermann had warned that safe passage had only been granted to British vessels to discuss armistice terms, as the agreed ceasefire didn’t begin until one minute after midnight on the 9th. In the event,…

KING TIGER FUNDRAISER The Tank Museum aims to raise £1 million to return this Second World War tank to running condition Britain’s leading tank heritage site is looking to its supporters for help with a four-year project to get the world’s oldest King Tiger tank running again. The project follows the enormous success of a visiting operational King Tiger from the Musée des Blindés in Saumur, France. The vehicle’s demonstration at Tankfest 2025 drew massive crowds. The tank targeted for restoration rolled off the Henschel & Son production line in December 1943, the second King Tiger to be built. As such, it has the designation V2. The tank has a unique status as the only surviving Tiger II with a pre-production turret. The production turret replaced the curved armour, which…

DAS BOOT DIRECTED BY WOLFGANG PETERSEN Recommended by Roger Moorhouse After finishing his most recent book, Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War, Roger Moorhouse decided to rewatch Wolfgang Petersen’s submarine classic, a treat he’d been avoiding so as not to influence his writing. “I think it’s brilliant,” he tells us. “It brings out the humanity of the crew. You live the patrol with them.” Das Boot is still regarded as one of Germany’s most significant cinematic achievements. It held German filmmaking’s record for the most Academy Award nominations for over 40 years, eventually usurped by All Quiet on the Western Front. Moorhouse explains the connection between the film and his book: “Weirdly, it didn’t spawn books like mine. The experience of the crews is absent from the narrative. My elevator pitch…

Author: Andrew Bayliss Publisher: Profile Books Price: £25 Released: Outnow Andrew Bayliss explores the history of Sparta, from its earliest times down to the defeat at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE, in 13 straightforward chapters. Bayliss (associate professor in Greek history at the University of Birmingham) correctly points out that we must use caution for all our surviving sources on Spartan history – most written by non-Spartans, some by their adversaries and some very late in date. Our understanding of the Spartans is therefore cloudy before it even begins. Attempting to understand Sparta is nonetheless a worthwhile endeavour since it still pervades many modern ideas. The author touches on a wide range of these, from modern film and literature to video games, and even MP Mark Francois’ comparison…

Biting wind whipped across tussock grass and stung the cheeks of 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment as they marched through the early morning darkness towards an Argentine bunker system at Goose Green on 28 May 1982. The 19-year-old Private Barry ‘Baz’ Grayling and his best friend, Lance Corporal Gary Bingley, joined a machine gun team for the assault. A volley of machine gun fire from two Argentine positions on the company’s left flank put a halt to the advance. Grayling and Bingley volunteered to lay down suppressing fire. Unsure of the exact position they were aiming at, they tried to manoeuvre into the right location to return fire, but found themselves too close to one of the enemy machine guns. Without a moment’s hesitation, Grayling and Bingley charged. “It was that…

As the 1960s drew to a close, MI5 and the CIA were panicking after the KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had convinced intelligence leaders that the KGB had penetrated their agencies and governments. MI5 conducted investigations against its former Deputy Director General Graham Mitchell and Director General Roger Hollis, and Prime Minister Harold Wilson was also under suspicion. The threat from outside seemed less concerning, even though British intelligence had observed a 700 percent increase in KGB officers in the country. It estimated that 30-50 percent of those working for the Soviet diplomatic mission were intelligence operatives. Outside the dust and peeling paint of MI5’s creaking Leconfield House headquarters, London was swinging. Into the hedonism, bright lights and colourful fashion came Oleg Lyalin, a handsome, charming and endlessly womanising KGB…

The practice of probing your enemy’s defences is as old as war itself, and is a useful way of testing the opposition’s readiness, responses and tactics. This comes under the umbrella of ‘reconnaissance’, which can be defined as ‘military observation of a region to locate an enemy or ascertain strategic features’, although the reference in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (see opposite page) is more relevant to this article. Localised incursions help provide a better understanding of your enemy’s disposition and willingness to engage, but on a strategic or international level they can be very dangerous, easily escalating into a more serious conflict. Borders are recognised by international treaties, although often contested. Probes or incursions across land borders by conventional forces are unambiguously hostile and are usually met with…

Major Winston Churchill first crossed to France in army uniform 110 years ago, on 18 November 1915. His contribution to the First World War is traditionally measured by his Gallipoli campaign, when he was first lord of the Admiralty, political head of the Royal Navy. However, his subsequent wartime career was of far more value to the nation. First commissioned on 20 February 1895, serving with the Malakand Field Force, charging with the 17th Lancers at Omdurman and fighting the Boers in South Africa, by 1914 Churchill had more military background than anyone else in Cabinet (except Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, brought in as secretary of state for war on 5 August, but who had no experience of Cabinet government). He had also kept his hand in as an officer…

HANNAH VON BREDOW THE COUNTESS The granddaughter of Otto von Bismarck and widow of Prussian cavalry officer Leopold von Bredow. She never remarried and bore sole responsibility for raising her five daughters and three sons, whom she kept isolated from the regime. Von Bredow was a member of the Confessing Church. ELIZABETH VON THADDEN THE HOST A Protestant headmistress and member of the Bekennende Kirch (Confessing Church), an organisation resisting attempts to align the Church with National Socialism. She was driven by her Protestant aristocratic background, defined by a sense of duty and selflessness towards those less fortunate than her. ARTHUR AND IRMGARD ZARDEN THE CIVIL SERVANT AND HIS DAUGHTER A leading figure in Germany’s tax legislation, Arthur Zarden had risen to state secretary in the Reich Finance Ministry. The Nazis…

“TWICE RECOMMENDED FOR THE MEDAL, DAVIS’ PAPERWORK WAS EITHER LOST OR DELIBERATELY SUPPRESSED” On the morning of Friday 2 March 2023, retired US Army Colonel Paris Davis stood tall in full dress uniform before an audience gathered in the East Room of the White House. The 83-year-old veteran was there to receive the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration awarded by his country, for acts of extraordinary heroism during the Vietnam War. President Joe Biden, addressing the room, called the ceremony “what may be the most consequential day since I’ve been president”. He described Davis as “courage in the flesh”, a soldier whose heroism embodied the highest ideals of military service. As Biden observed, the ceremony marked a moment of historical reckoning. Davis is one of the relatively few…

RHINELAND HITLER’S LAST DEFENCE 1944-45 A DETAILED STUDY OF THE BATTLES AND CAMPAIGNS THAT BROUGHT THE WAR IN THE WEST TO AN END, REPLETE WITH MAPS AND PHOTOGRAPHS Author: Anthony Tucker-Jones Publisher: Osprey Publishing Price: £25 Released: Outnow British historiography covering the end of the Second World War in the West tends to leap forward from the defeat at Arnhem to land unbidden at Nazi Germany’s final capitulation, following Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker. The months in-between are rarely covered, apart from a blip around the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes, which is rightly seen as mostly an American affair. Anthony Tucker-Jones’ Rhineland seeks to bridge that gap and describe in detail a host of almost forgotten battles that were often fought in the depths of a freezing…

Authoritarian regimes and dictatorships have an uneasy relationship with the past. One hallmark is their weaponising of history, in reshaping the past and deleting anything inconvenient. For much of its life, the Soviet Union destroyed whatever traces it could find of the pre-revolutionary era; under Joseph Stalin, it even deleted its own people from books and photographs. So when we come to the Crimea – that diamond-shaped 10,000-square-mile (25,900-square-km) peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea – we should not be surprised its history and ownership is much disputed by the current Russian regime under Vladimir Putin. It was originally peopled by warrior Scythians, who were replaced along the coast in places like Chersonesus, Balaklava, Yalta and Kerch by Greek traders and colonists, themselves absorbed by the later…

The man who discovered the tea party began life in acute poverty in Western Pomerania. Yet Herbert Lange would be the son who rose above his family’s hardship. His intelligence brought him to law school in 1930, but he lasted just two years. Like many other young Germans, Lange was seduced by Nazi promises to overturn the old order that had given him nothing. In 1933, he joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary arm and began working for the Kriminalpolizei five years later. Immediately after the invasion of Poland in 1939, Lange joined the Gestapo and became involved in the Nazi genocide. He was put in charge of Fort VII concentration camp, tasked with testing the efficacy of execution by carbon monoxide poisoning against Zyklon B. Lange then went into the…

The opening sentence of the fourth-century BCE Athenian historian and philosopher Xenophon’s description of the Spartan constitution says it all. When explaining that Sparta had become the most powerful state in Greece, as a result of the laws imposed by the mythical Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus, Xenophon observes that Sparta was able to attain such fame and power despite being “among the scantest populated” city-states in Greece. He was well aware that Sparta’s greatest strength was having between 6,000 and 9,000 wealthy citizens, all of whom bought into the system. But he also knew that the small size of this Spartan in-group was Sparta’s great weakness – such a small number of fighting men could only take them so far. After conquering and enslaving their neighbours in Messenia in the seventh…

On the outskirts of Nuneaton in Warwickshire, Joseph Grant has organised his collection of Second World War militaria into a small private museum. Among the collection is an impressive range of deactivated weapons including rifles, machine guns, tank shells and grenades, alongside uniforms, medals, helmets and documents. Visitors have the unique opportunity to handle many of these artefacts. One highlight is Grant’s twisted and scorched MK 108 cannon port, purchased at a British military fair. It once flew with the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, but was torn from the fuselage during a crash. Grant displays it alongside a 1.2in (30mm) shell. Each MK 108 shell had a three-ounce (85g) explosive payload, enough to bring down heavy Allied bombers after a few hits. Other Wehrmacht artefacts in the collection include…

Author: Nick Higham Publisher: Bloomsbury Price: £22 Released: Out now Nick Higham’s spirited and gripping account takes us through a forgotten battle of the First World War. At the end of the conflict, Britain plotted to block the advance of the Turks, hold back the Bolsheviks and secure vital oil supplies from Baku. The protagonists of this little-known episode included such colourful characters as Lionel Dunsterville, the inspiration for Kipling’s Stalky, who commanded the expedition; Scottish aristocrat and diplomat Ranald MacDonell, who smuggled millions of roubles for the war effort; the seemingly indestructible soldier Edward Noel; the brilliant inventor Toby Rawlinson; and Reginald Teague-Jones, a spy who printed his own currency and would eventually emerge as an author at the age of 99. As the First World War drew to…