MHQ Autumn 2022 by HistoryNet

The truth behind the death of America’s greatest WWII battlefield commander The Rise and Fall of a Confederate General Kharkov’s Four Battles, 1941–1943 ANALYSIS BY CARLO D’ESTE WAS MURDERED?PATTON THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY AUTUMNHISTORYNET.COM2022 MHQP-221000-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1 8/31/22 8:39 AM

H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H HH H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H Alicia, Army Veteran PIN-UPS FOR VETS Gina Elise’s visit: pinupsforvets.com TrHospitalizedSupportingVeterans&DeployedoopsSince2006 Pin-Ups For Vets raises funds to better the lives and boost morale for the entire military community! When you make a purchase at our online store or make a donation, you’ll contribute to Veterans’ healthcare, helping provide VA hospitals across the U.S. with funds for medical equipment and programs. We support volunteerism at VA hospitals, including personal bedside visits to deliver gifts, and we provide makeovers and new clothing for military wives and female Veterans. All that plus we send care packages to our deployed troops. HH PINUPSFORVETS-nocal.indd 22 8/5/21 7:02 AM

Order by Dec. 6 and you’ll receive FREE gift announcement cards that you can send out in time for the holidays! LIMITED-TIME HOLIDAY OFFER CHOOSE ANY TWO SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR ONLY $29.95 TWO-FOR-ONE SPECIAL! CALL NOW! 1.800.435.0715 PLEASE MENTION CODE HOLIDAY WHEN ORDERING SCAN HERE! OR HISTORYNET.COM/HOLIDAYVISIT Offer valid through January 8, 2023 * For each subscriptionMHQadd $15 Vicksburg Chaos Former teacher tastes combat for the first time Elmer Ellsworth A fresh look at hisPlus!deathshocking Stalled at Susquehannathe Prelude to Gettysburg Gen. John Brown Gordon’s grand plans go up in flames Tulsa Race Riot: What Was Lost Colonel andTheVaultJ.One-ManSanders,BrandEdgarHoover’stoFameZengerTrialFreeSpeech Yosemite The twisted roots of a national treasure HISTORYNET.com JUL 2020 H H HISTORYNET.COM JUDGMENT COMES FOR THE BUTCHER OF BATAAN THE STAR BOXERS WHO FOUGHT A PROXY WAR BETWEEN AMERICA AND GERMANY PATTON’S EDGE THE MEN OF HIS 1ST RANGER BATTALION ENRAGED HIM UNTIL THEY SAVED THE DAY In 1775 Continentalthe Army needed weapons— and fast World War II’s Can-Do RACEAWhiteWitnessCitytotheWarRMS THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY An ammunition dump explodes during the April 1972 battle for An Loc. DefeatingStereotypesEnemy White and Black POWs bonded as cellmates The Green Berets Battles that inspired the book and movie TERROR AT AN LOC 9TH CAVALRY’S HEROIC FIGHT TO RESCUE DOWNED AIRMEN Huey Haven Old Warbirds Are Getting a New Museum HOMEFRONT Sweet success for Sammy Davis Jr. JUNE 2022 HISTORYNET.COM HNET SUB AD_HOLIDAY-2022.indd 1 8/30/22 8:34 AM

Pigeon-livered half-wits, a dirty pack of dogs, a sickening disgrace, or the scum of the earth? HOW DID THE DUKE VITORIA?BATTLEAFTERHISREFERWELLINGTONOFTOSOLDIERSTHEOF For more, visit HISTORYNET.COM/MAGAZINES/QUIZ ANSWER: “WE HAVE IN THE SERVICE THE SCUM OF THE EARTH AS COMMON SOLDIERS,” WROTE AN EXASPERATED WELLINGTON IN AN 1813 DISPATCH TO HENRY, THIRD EARL BATHURST, BRITAIN’S SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR. TWO YEARS LATER, HE WOULD EXPRESS A MUCH HIGHER OPINION OF HIS MEN AFTER HIS VICTORY OVER NAPOLEON AT WATERLOO. HOUSE_WELLINGTON.indd 40 6/24/22 9:12 AM

History quite often hinges on “ifs.” If the Continental Army and militia troops had not defeated the British and their allied German troops under Gen. John Burgoyne at the Second Battle of Saratoga (aka the Battle of Bemis Heights) on October 7, 1777, the infant United States of America may not have survived long enough to win the ultimately decisive American-French victory at Yorktown in 1781. (See “Storming Yorktown’s Redoubt,” p. 16) And if America’s most notorious traitor, Maj. Gen. Benedict Arnold, had not valiantly rallied Continental troops to victory at Bemis Heights, that turning point battle might have been lost. But the American soldiers did. And Arnold did. And the victory led to France entering the war on the American side, providing the vital arms, supplies, troops and fleets that turned the tide of the Revolutionary War in the United States’ favor.

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CINCINNATITHEOFSOCIETY

Archaeologists surveying the Bemis Heights battlefield’s Barber Wheatfield sector have unearthed artifacts that are helping historians reconstruct important elements of the battle—such as the exact locations of two cannon under the command the Hesse-Hanau artillery commander, German Captain Georg Pausch. The survey unearthed dozens of 12-pounder and smaller 6-pounder case shot projectiles (shown below) which were small-to-medium sized iron balls contained within a canister—typically made of tin or thin iron. When the case shot’s canister disintegrated after firing, it released its numerous smaller projectiles in a fan-shaped pattern. The murderous effect of this anti-personnel round was to turn a cannon into a giant shotgun. Using GPS mapping, archaeologists discovered that the case shot projectiles were distributed in two, overlapping patterns roughly the shape of a baseball diamond. Following the patterns back to their originating points (near home plate), archaeologists calculated the location of each of Pausch’s cannons that tried unsuccessfully to stop the American troops.

OPENING ROUND

Volume 35, Number 1 Autumn 2022 64 Augsburg’s master armorer, FrauenpreißMatthäuscreated this magnificent suit of armor with garniture accessories for Austrian Emperor Maximilian II circa 1549. A perfect melding of art and function, it could serve in combat or tournaments while extolling its wearer’s exalted rank. VIENNAMUSEUM,KUNSTHISTORISCHESXXXXXXXXXX MHQP-221000-CONTENTS.indd 4 8/30/22 3:52 PM

MHQ Autumn 2022 5 COVER: INTERIM ARCHIVES (GETTY IMAGES), PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER Murdered?34FEATURESWasPatton by Carlo D’Este “A helluva way to die,” a badly hurt Patton gasped. His acclaimed biographer turns detective and reveals what really killed him. 42 ArmageddonDodging by John Grenier In the early-18th century, New France came perilously close to wiping out Britain’s New England colonies. 50 Badges of Honor PORTFOLIO British regimental cap badges are part-history, part-art and infused with rich military tradition. 56 WarriorConfederateForgotten by Rick Britton Whiskey and belligerence marked Shanks Evans’ fighting style. But he alienated both friend and foe. 64 Fashion in Steel by Zita Ballinger Fletcher Steel-plate suits of armor protected in combat while projecting images of power, prestige and authority. 72 The Embattled City by Chris McNab Ukraine’s Kharkov endured four bloody battles as Germans fought Soviets on World War II’s southern Eastern Front. 16151263DEPARTMENTSOpeningRoundFlashbackCommentsAttheFrontExperience Night assault at Yorktown 20 Laws of War Diplomatic immunity’s roots 23 Weapons Check Roman Gladius sword 24 War List History’s unlucky “Hoods” 26 Behind the Lines Honoring Britain’s war dead 30 Battle Schemes U.S. pushes war on Spain 32 Letter From MHQ 81 Culture of War 82 Classic Dispatches Riding with Russia’s Cossacks 87 Big Shots Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. 88 Poetry Band of Brothers 90 Artists Nash’s surreal wars 94 Reviews Selfless service memoir 96 Drawn & Quartered On the Cover General George S. Patton, Jr. (1885–1945), West Point Class of 1909, competed in the 1912 Olympics, created the U.S. Army’s tank corps in World War I, and dominated World War II battlefields in North Africa, Sicily, France, Belgium and Germany. A military genius, he was a public relations disaster; a brilliant intellectual, he used vulgar profanity motivating his soldiers. His unsettling death following a minor accident still fuels conspiracy theories. 72 56 50 3442 VIENNAMUSEUM,KUNSTHISTORISCHESXXXXXXXXXX MHQP-221000-CONTENTS.indd 5 8/31/22 2:51 PM

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Naval history is made when the Union Navy’s USS Monitor battles the Confederacy’s CSS Virginia (formerly USS Merrimac) to a tactical stand-off draw in the waters of Virginia’s Hampton Roads. TODAY: Sunk during a storm off Cape Hatteras on December 31, 1862, the Monitor was examined last May during a NOAA underwater expedition which found the wreck “in an excellent state of preservation.”

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FLASHBACK

MHQ Autumn 2022 7LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

FIRST CLASH OF IRONCLADS, MARCH 9, 1862

FLASHBACK

MHQ Autumn 20228

BABI YAR RAVINE, KYIV, UKRAINE USSR, 1941

During two days, Nazi Einsatzgruppe troops, uniformed German police and Wehrmacht soldiers murder over 30,000 Ukrainian Jews in a ravine near Kyiv. Subsequent Nazi executions there add another 100,000 victims.

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TODAY: On March 1, 2022, invading Russian forces bombarding Ukraine’s capital city hit the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial park with several missiles that exploded near the park’s monuments, killing 5 civilians.

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BATTLE OF EL ALAMEIN, OCT. 23-NOV. 11, 1942

In a turning point of World War II, British soldiers led by General Bernard Montgomery inflict a decisive defeat on Erwin Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika and drive German forces from Egypt. TODAY: The remains of four German soldiers under age 25 discovered in the Qattara Depression south of El Alamein will receive formal burials before the battle’s 80th anniversary in October.

FLASHBACK

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Alexander Kvitko Omaha, Nebraska

Bob Carlsbad,EkstromCA

With all due respect Mark (DePue), I don’t know how the following battle films did not make your list (“War List: 10 Accurate Battle Films,” Summer 2022, MHQ) or at least honorable men tion: Battle of Britain (1969); 12 O’Clock High (1949); The Cruel Sea (1953); and Pork Chop Hill (1959). Maybe your list should have been separated into genres, like: 10 Accurate Air Battle Films; 10 Accurate Sea Battle Films, etc. Another way to “bin” the films could be “most accurate battle films:” films that repre sent a single battle or event (e.g., Dam Busters), and “most accurate campaign films”— films that represent an entire campaign (i.e., Patton) or contain a series of battle events that have been com bined into a single movie. Overall, thanks for providing your list. I thought about my

Ukraine Aflame

favorite battle films, and ways that I could get them on your radar for an entire morning.

FILMS,COMMENTSFOTOS & FATES

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The stunning photograph in the Poetry department of your Summer 2022 issue (“Still Inspiring Freedom,” page 87) showing the bat tle-scared bust in Borodi anka, Ukraine of the coun try’s national poet Taras Shevchenko, is one of the most poignant images of the ravages of war I’ve ever seen. “Shevchenko” appears down cast and truly heartbroken “observing” the wanton dev astation and senseless de struction wrought by Russia’s brutal and ruthless invasion of an independent bordering country. Putin’s egomania has become a clear and pres ent danger to world peace.

Bill DueCORRECTION:Chicago,ThomasILtoanediting

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General George S. Patton, Jr.’s personal photos featured in your last issue (“Portfolio: Through Patton’s Eyes,” Summer 2022, MHQ) struck me as being incredibly re vealing insight into what images of the war the general thought worthy of capturing on film. Especially notewor thy, in my opinion, is the apparent juxtaposition of knocked-out enemy tanks or dead German soldiers with relatively benign images of ancient Greek or Roman ruins—the carnage and death of war interspersed with “snapshots” of “tourist attrac tions!” This seems to demon strate Patton’s ability to com partmentalize his mind—to focus when necessary on warfighting, then suddenly, when an opportunity arises, switch mental gears, forget about the war and indulge in his life-long passion for

Patton’s Pix

Film Faves

studying ancient history. His biographers always note his complex and complicated— sometimes irrational—mind, and his war photos seem to clearly demonstrate that. He was truly a remarkable sol dier and human being.

error in Chris McNab’s “Bloody Stalemate” article (Summer 2022) about the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, “Iran” and “Iraq” were reversed in a sentence, which made the sentence counterfactual. It should have read: “Then, on September 17, 1980, Iraq abrogated the Algiers Agreement, threatening Iran with loss of control of a key access route to the Persian Gulf through the Shatt al-Arab waterway.” MHQ apologizes for the inadver tent error.

Have thoughts about a story in MHQ? Something about military history you’ve always wanted to know? Send your comments and questions MHQeditor@historynet.com.to

@ @MHQMAGAZINEMHQMAG MHQP-221000-COMMENTS.indd 13 8/30/22 3:00 PM

Japan, recall Japanese in the late 1930s as efficient and decent overlords who built elementary schools and public works—although, like the Allies elsewhere, the Jap anese treated them as sec ond-class citizens and limited their employment to cheap manual labor. With World War II’s outbreak, Palauans were commandeered into labor gangs to construct de fenses which took Americans 73 costly days to overcome in September-November 1944. Indigenous Palauans, most of whom were evacuated to the Japanese capital, Koror, or to Babeldaob Island, remem bered the war’s last year dom inated by restrictions, food shortages and disease. Less than 5,000 natives were still alive on Koror when the war ended.InMicronesia, Japan estab lished schools to promote its language and culture—at the expense of the indigenous peoples’. Japanese defenses in the Marshall Islands centered around airbases on the is lands’ tiny land-masses, and consequently the Marshalls people suffered greatly from

starvation and perpetual U.S. bombings of bypassed is lands. Yet, that was only the prelude to the American-con trolled Marshall Islanders’s ordeal. Post-war, U.S., British and French-mandated Pacific islands were used for atomic bomb testing. American atomic tests 1956-1998 in the Marshalls totaled 108,496 ki lotons, for which the U.S. gov ernment ultimately compen sated the Republic of the Marshall Islands $759 mil lion.These are just a few exam ples, among many hundreds, of how the warring powers treated indigenous Pacific is landers. They also paid the price in blood and treasure for history’s most costly war.

and WarriencingSaipan’ssuicideandAmericansconvincedthousandsonandSaipansandsgrowingnewthetonawancouragedinawereactionsvariedAllies.pectedsalsofarea—promptingJapanesehowever,prestige.moneyenlistedsituation-driven—someforfood,someforandsomefortribalAsinNewGuinea,someservedthecontrollingtheirinstancesbeatingsandharshrepriagainstislandersforsusacts“disloyal”totheFurthercomplicatingthePacificislanderinteristhefactnotallindigenous.Acquiringpost-WorldWarImandatetheMarianas,JapanenJapanese,OkiandKoreanfamiliesrelocatetoSaipanandtoPalausassourcesoflandfortheEmpire’spopulation.ThouofJapanesesettledonbeforeU.S.MarineArmyforcesinvadedJune15,1944.Tragically,ofthosecivilians,thevictoriouswouldtorturekillthem,committedleapingoffnortherncliffs.IndigenousPalauans,expeasimilarpost-WorldIinfluxoffamiliesfrom

What happened to the in digenous peoples of the Pacific islands invaded in WWII by the Japanese and by the Allies?

MHQ Autumn 2022 13 (4)AUCTIONSHERITAGE IMAGES)(GETTYFPG

Randall Tacoma,BaylorWashington

ASK IslandersPacificMHQFate

Jon Guttman is MHQ’s research director.

A Papua New Guinea islander watches a U.S. Landing Craft Vehicle unload, Kiriwina Island, 1944.

Your question encompasses a lot of island real estate. Both sides, the Japanese, Australians, New Zealand ers and Americans, carried a lot of cultural-centric bag gage with them when they contested Pacific islands; but its manifestation varied ac cording to time and place. For example, while leading the first Japanese effort to advance down the Kokoda Trail to attack Port Moresby, General Tomitaro Horii in structed his troops, “Do not wantonly kill or injure them [local indigenous people],” and don’t treat them like “pigs” because Horii needed their labor support and co operation. Yet, reprisals with torture and killing were re ported, including one occa sion when Japanese officers ordered 96 villagers slain for being suspected of collabo rating with however,Pacific.”andwatchersproclaimed,miralandandas23propagandapaign,Solomons/GuadalcanalThroughoutAustralians.the1942-1943camtheAlliesmadegreatcapitalciting“loyalhelpers”servingCoastwatchersobservingtrackingJapanesetroopnavalmovements.AdWilliamHalseyeven“TheCoastsavedGuadalcanalGuadalcanalsavedtheIslanders’“loyalty,”wasmorecomplex

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GLAMOUR QUEEN PATRIOT

Hollywood legend Marlene Dietrich was 43—and glamorous as ever—when a U.S. Army Signal Corps photographer snapped this March 13, 1945 photo as the 82nd Airborne Division executed a training jump near Soissons, France. The German-born actress enthusiastically supported the war effort, selling millions in war bonds and entertaining troops during USO tours 1942-1945–later receiving the Medal of Freedom (U.S.), and the Légion d’honneur (France).

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AT THE BATTLEBEHINDWARWEAPONSLAWSEXPERIENCEFRONT16OFWAR20CHECK23LIST24THELINES26SCHEMES30 ARMY)(U.S.NORTONGEORGE

Among the most significant of these was the Septem ber-October 1781 Siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in which Martin, then a 20-year-old sergeant, took part, including one of the most famous actions of the battle. Serving in a unit of sappers, Martin helped dig a line of entrenchments, parallel to the British trenches, which paved the way for Washington’s troops to assault and capture the British strongpoint at Redoubt No. 10 as the French simultaneously attacked and captured Redoubt No. 9. Washington was desperate for this attack to succeed and to show the strength and martial skill of American troops at this stage in the Revolutionary War to prevent Britain from falsely claiming Yorktown was merely a “French victory.” Therefore, the the actions of Martin and his sapper unit were crucial.

In October 1781, Continental Army Sergeant Joseph Plumb Martin was in the vanguard of Washington’s daring night attack capturing a key British fort in the war-winning siege.

The assault and seizure of the redoubts put overwhelm ing numbers of American and French siege artillery cannon within point-blank range to batter British forces into total submission, thereby compelling the British to reluctantly but inevitably surrender. Martin, present at the surrender, noted that the British appeared two hours late to the surrender ceremony and were visibly downcast—albeit seething at the French—when they finally appeared. Ungraciously, the British commander, Lieutenant General Charles, Earl Cornwallis, claiming illness, refused to attend the surrender and sent his deputy instead. “The British did not make so good an appearance as the German forces; but there was certainly some allowance to be made in their favour; the English felt their honour wounded, the Germans did not greatly care whose hands they were in,” Martin noted. “The British paid the Americans, seemingly, but little attention as they passed them, but they eyed the French with considerable malice depicted in their countenances.”

The British capitulation at Yorktown was the last major engagement of the war from October 1781 to the September 1783 Treaty of Paris which ended the American Revolution.

he voices of ordinary American soldiers who took part in the Revolutionary War are seldom heard today. One exception is Joseph Plumb Martin, born in 1760 in Massachusetts and raised in Connecticut. Martin plunged into the war at age 15 in June 1776, serving in the Connecticut state militia and eventually the 8th Connecticut Regiment of General George Washington’s Continental Army. Martin’s memoirs, first published in 1830, reveal the war through the eyes of an “average patriot” present virtually throughout the war at some of the momentous events during the struggle for American Independence.

STORMINGEXPERIENCE YORKTOWN’S REDOUBT

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In the following passage, excerpted from Memoir of a Revolutionary Soldier, by Joseph Plumb Martin, taken from Chapter VII: “The Campaign of 1781,” Martin describes pivotal events at the siege that brought victory and independence.

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One third part of all the [American patriot and French allied] troops were put in requisition to be employed in opening the trenches. A third part of our Sappers [fortifica tion assault specialists] and Miners [tunnelers] were ordered out this night to assist the Engineers in laying out the works. It was a very dark and rainy night. However, we repaired [moved] to the place and began by following the Engineers and laying laths of pine wood end to end upon the line marked out by the officers, for the trenches. We had not pro ceeded far in the business, before the Engineers ordered us to desist and remain where we were, and be sure not to strag gle a foot from the spot while they were absent from us. In a few minutes after their departure, there came a man alone to us, having on a surtout [protective overcoat], as we conjec tured, (it being exceedingly dark,) and enquired for the En gineers. We now began to be a little jealous of our safety,

MHQ Autumn 2022 17 VERSAILLESDECHATEAU

We now began to make preparations for laying close siege to the enemy [the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, Septem ber-October 1781]. We had holed him and nothing re mained but to dig him out. Accordingly, after taking every precaution to prevent his escape, settled our guards, pro vided fascines and gabions [troop movement obstacles], made platforms for the [artillery cannon] batteries, to be laid down when needed, brought on our battering pieces [cannon], ammunition, &c; on the fifth of October we began to put our plans into execution.

being alone and without arms, and within forty rods [about 650 feet] of the British trenches. The stranger enquired what troops we were; talked familiarly with us a few minutes, when, being informed which way the officers had gone, he went off in the same direction, after strictly charging us, in case we should be taken prisoners, not to discover to the enemy what troops we were. We were obliged to him for his kind advice, but we considered ourselves as standing in no great need of it; for we knew as well as he did, that Sappers and Miners were allowed no quarters [no mercy], at least, are entitled to none, by the laws of warfare, and of course should take care, if taken, and the enemy did not find us out, not to betray our own secret.

In a short time the Engineers returned and the afore mentioned stranger with them; they discoursed together sometime, when, by the officers often calling him, “Your Excellency,” we discovered it was Gen. [George] Washing ton [commander of the 8,000-strong Continental and mi litia American soldiers at Yorktown]. Had we dared, we might have cautioned him for exposing himself so care lessly to danger at such a time, and doubtless he would

At the Siege of Yorktown, Virginia in 1781, George Washington’s troops and French allies proved victorious against British forces in a final blow that ultimately turned the tide of the Revolutionary War in America’s favor.

confess I felt a secret pride swell my heart when I saw the “star spangled banner” waving majestically in the very faces of our implacable adversaries; it appeared like an omen of success to our enterprize, and so it proved in reality. A si multaneous discharge of all the guns in the line followed; the French troops accompanying it with “Huzza for the Americans!” It was said that the first shell sent from our bat teries, entered an elegant house, formerly owned or occu pied by the Secretary of State under the British government, and burst directly over a table surrounded by a large party of British officers at dinner, killing and wounding a number of them; —this was a warm [dangerous] day to the British.

MHQ Autumn 202218

have taken it in good part if we had. But nothing ill hap pened to either him or ourselves.

I do not remember, exactly, the number of days we were employed before we got our batteries in readiness to open upon the enemy, but think it was not more than two or three. The French, who were upon our left, had completed their batteries a few hours before us, but were not allowed to discharge their pieces till the American batteries were ready. Our commanding battery was on the near bank of the river and contained ten heavy guns; the next was a bomb-battery of three large mortars; and so on through the whole line; the whole number, American and French, was, ninety-two cannon, mortars and howitzers. Our flagstaff was in the tengun battery, upon the right of the whole. I was in the trenches the day that the batteries were to be opened; all were upon the tiptoe of expectation and impatience to see the signal given to open the whole line of batteries, which was to be the hoisting of the American flag in the ten-gun battery. About noon the much wished for signal went up. I

It coming on to rain hard, we were ordered back to our tents, and nothing more was done that night. The next night, which was the sixth of October, the same men were ordered to the lines that had been there the night before. We this night completed laying out the works. The troops of the line [regular infantrymen] were there ready with entrench ing tools and began to entrench, after General Washington had struck a few blows with a pickaxe, a mere ceremony, that it might be said “Gen. Washington with his own hands first broke ground at the siege of Yorktown.” The ground was sandy and soft, and the men employed that night “eat no idle bread,” [are always active; waste no time] (and I question if they eat any other,) so that by daylight they had covered themselves from danger from the enemy’s shot, who, it appeared, never mistrusted that we were so near them the whole night; their attention being directed to an other quarter. There was upon the right of their works a marsh; our people had sent to the western side of this marsh a detachment to make a number of fires, by which, and our men often passing before the fires, the British were led to imagine that we were about some secret mischief there, and consequently directed their whole fire to that quarter, while we were entrenching literally under their noses.

As soon as it was day they perceived their mistake, and began to fire where they ought to have done sooner. They brought out a fieldpiece or two, without [outside] their trenches and discharged several shots at the men who were at work erecting a bomb-battery; but their shot had no effect and they soon gave it over. They had a large bull-dog, and every time they fired he would follow their shots across our trenches. Our officers wished to catch him and oblige him to carry a message from them into the town to his masters, but he looked too formidable for any of us to encounter.

(2)VERSAILLESDECHATEAU

The siege was carried on warmly for several days, when most of the guns in the enemy’s works were silenced [knocked out]. We now began our second parallel [a subse quent trench line, dug closer to and aligned along the enemy position], about halfway between our works and theirs. There were two strong redoubts [anchoring forts] held by the British, on their left. It was necessary for us to possess those redoubts, before we could complete our trenches. One afternoon I, with the rest of our corps that had been on duty in the trenches the night but one before, were ordered to the lines. I mistrusted [suspected] some thing extraordinary, serious or comical, was going forward, but what, I could easily not conjecture. We arrived at the trenches a little before sunset; I saw several officers fixing bayonets on long staves. I then concluded we were about to make a general assault upon the enemy’s works; but before dark I was informed of the whole plan, which was to storm the redoubts, the one by the Americans [Redoubt #10] and the other by the French [Redoubt #9]. The Sappers and Miners were furnished with axes, and were to proceed in front and cut passages for the troops through the abatis [wooden obstacles], which are composed of the tops of trees, the small branches cut off with a slanting stroke which rendered them as sharp as spikes. These trees are then laid at a small distance from the trench or ditch, pointing out wards, and the butts fastened to the ground in such a manner that they cannot be removed by those on the out side of them; —it is almost impossible to get through them. Through these we were to cut a passage before we or the other assailants could enter. At dark the detachment was formed and advanced beyond the trenches, and lay down on the ground to await the signal for advancing to the attack, which was to be three shells from a certain battery near where we were lying. All the batteries in our line were silent, and we lay anxiously waiting for the signal. The two brilliant planets, Jupiter and Venus, were in close contact with the western hemisphere, (the same direction that the signal was to be made in,) when I happened to cast my eyes to that quarter, which was often, and I caught a glance of them, I was ready to spring on my feet, thinking that they

STORMING YORKTOWN

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French forces’ name, a good watchword, for being pro nounced Ro-sham-bow, it sounded, when pronounced quick, like rush-on-boys. We had not lain here long before the expected signal was given, for us and the French, who were to storm the other redoubt, by the three shells with their fiery trains mounting the air in quick succession. The word up, up was then reiterated through the detachment. We immediately moved silently on toward the redoubt we were to attack, with unloaded muskets [to prevent mus ket-firing from alerting the enemy defenders, although bay onets were fixed]. Just as we arrived at the abatis, the enemy discovered us and directly opened a sharp fire upon us. We were now at a place where many of our large shells had burst in the ground, making holes sufficient to bury an ox in; the men having their eyes fixed upon what was transact ing before them, were every now and then falling into these holes. I thought the British were killing us off at a great rate. At length one of the holes happening to pick me up, I found out the mystery of the huge slaughter. As soon as the firing began, our people began to cry, “the fort’s our own!” and it was “rush on boys.” The Sappers and Miners soon cleared a passage for the Infantry, who entered it rapidly. Our Miners were ordered not to enter the fort, but there was no stop ping them. “We will go,” said they; “then go to the d—l [devil—considered a curse word in that era],” said the com manding officer of our corps, “if you will.” I could not pass at the entrance we had made, it was so crowded; I therefore

All that were in the action of storming the redoubt were exempted from further duty that night; we laid down upon the ground and rested the remainder of the night as well as a constant discharge of grape and canister shot would permit us to do; while those who were on duty for the day completed the second parallel by including the captured redoubts within it. We returned to camp early in the morn ing, all safe and sound, except one of our Lieutenants, who had received a slight wound on top of the shoulder by a musket shot. Seven or eight men belonging to the Infantry were killed, and a number wounded. MHQ

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forced a passage at a place where I saw our shot had cut away some of the abatis; several others entered at the same place. While passing, a man at my side received a ball in his head and fell under my feet, crying out bitterly. While cross ing the trench, the enemy threw hand grenades, (small shells) into it; they were so thick that I at first thought them cartridge papers on fire; but was soon undeceived by their cracking. As I mounted the breastwork, I met an old associ ate hitching himself down into the trench; I knew him by the light of the enemy’s musketry, it was so vivid. The fort was taken, and all was quiet in a very short time. Immedi ately after the firing ceased, I went out to see what had become of my wounded friend and the other that fell in the passage—they were both dead. In the heat of the action I saw a British soldier jump over the walls of the fort next the river and go down the bank, which was almost perpendicu lar, and twenty or thirty feet high; when he came to the beach he made off for the town, and if he did not make good use of his legs I never saw a man that did.

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French assistance proved vital to Washington (shown left) during the struggle. His troops even used the name of French commander Rochambeau (right) as a watchword, with Martin noting it sounded like “rush on boys.”

were the signal for starting. Our watchword was “Rocham beau,” [Marshal de France, Jean-Baptiste, Comte de Ro chambeau, 1725-1807] the commander of the [8,000-strong]

In the ancient world, prior to any formal codification of law pertaining to diplomatic immu nity, religious practices provided the foundations of the protec tions afforded to designated people. Priests or other persons of religious affiliation often served as official envoys be tween states, and their status as clerics was the first basis of immunity. To attack or harm an emissary, even one from a hostile nation, was to risk offending the gods upon whose favor might turn the fortunes of war. So, while the Spartans really did throw a Persian emissary into a well in 491 BCE after he demanded of them “earth and water” as tokens of their submission to the emperor Darius, they quickly re pented of the act after deciding they had insulted the gods by doing it. The Spartans sent their own emissaries to Darius with the offer that he could execute them to remit

The international law of diplomatic immunity in its current form was created in 1961 by the adoption of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The ideas formally codified at Vienna ensured the safe conduct of diplomats to facilitate communication between govern ments, “particularly during times of disagreement or armed conflict.” That language would have been instantly recognizable to statesmen and jurists in both the ancient and medieval eras because their understanding of the concept was much the same, especially as it applied to three distinct cate gories of protected persons: her alds; envoys; and the embassies of official ambassadors.

the offense, but the Persians were by then irrevocably com mitted to war. Athens had dealt with Persian envoys in nearly the same way, but the Athenians were apparently less troubled by the idea of divine retribution for the killing of official emissaries.

n international conflict, most belligerents have long recognized the tangible benefit that exists in mutu ally recognizing and adhering to the idea that cer tain persons should be immune from attack or molestation, even when those people are official representatives of the enemies. This is the concept embodied in the idea of diplomatic immunity, a modern phrase which has actually existed in different constructs for thousands of years.

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The basic concepts of today’s internationally agreed principle of diplomatic immunity were respected in ancient and medieval wars.

By John A. Haymond

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With the ascendance of the Roman Empire, the widely recognized tenets of guaranteeing the safety of diplomatic missions were increasingly codified into law. Drawing on the idea of ius gentium, or “the law of nations,” the Roman jurist Gaius wrote that “the law that natural reason estab lishes among all mankind is followed by all peoples alike, and is called the law of nations as being the law observed by all mankind.” It was an idea that should govern all human conduct, because all humanity recognized its importance, regardless of their societal or political differences. A later Roman jurist, Hermogenianus, developed this concept fur ther by specifying that ius gentium applied in matters of “war, national interests, kingship and sovereignty,” as well as other areas that would today be classified as commercial law. A particularly important detail in the Roman view on the question, one which was to shape nearly every aspect of later medieval thought, was in the idea of the bellum iustum, or “just war.” Roman commentators went to extraordinary lengths to explain why their numerous wars, large and small, were all justified, and one of the essential elements of a just war was that it must be preceded by a formal declara tion of war by duly appointed officials. Once those conven tions were observed, a war was justified and could be prosecuted to the fullest, and most savage, extent necessary, but the persons who brought that declaration of hostility were to be immune from retaliation.

It was considered an egregious offense in both legal and religious terms to harm a diplomatic envoy, even after a state of war existed, but beyond the religious views that dictated proper treatment of envoys, another more prag matic motivation was always in play—reciprocity.

Even the most belligerent of ancient rulers seemed to hesitate to mistreat his enemy’s ambassadors for the simple reason that he wanted his own ambassadors to be able to carry out their diplomatic missions unmolested. The famil iar image of ancient despots ordering the execution of their messengers who were unlucky enough to bring bad tidings

LAWS OF WARFARE’SWAR “UNTOUCHABLES”

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Heralds served several roles in the medieval world, both in times of war and peace, but they were frequently

In the early medieval period, European jurists built upon the Roman concepts of ius gentium and further for malized it under canon law. As the early scholar Isidore of Seville wrote, ius gentium was understood to pertain to nearly all practices of war including occupying enemy ter ritory, fortification of strongholds, the taking of captives in war, the negotiations of treaties, and, most important to this discussion, “the inviolability of ambassadors.” That this was an almost universal truth, he declared, was obvious “because nearly every nation uses it.” This was not to say that all noncombatants enjoyed the same level of protec tions from harm. “The laws of war in the Age of Chivalry knew something about the immunity of noncombatants,” as one historian has observed, “though what they knew they usually ignored.” This was true of civilians and some times even clergymen who were unlucky enough to cross

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was actually more of a domestic issue when it occurred, rather than an international one. Most rulers were careful to safeguard the immunity of foreign emissaries as a prac tical means of ensuring the safety of their own envoys who represented their interests in foreign courts.

an invading army’s path, but it was not usually true of her alds, envoys, or ambassadors. Even in this stage of diplo matic practice reciprocity continued to play its part, especially in the observance of formal truces between com batants. Since one party to a truce was considered released from restraint if the other party broke the agreement first, self-interest continued to be the best check on aggressive impulses.Roman concepts continued to exert strong influences over medieval European ideas of the proper ways to engage in warfare, and the notion of just war remained central to most of the formal wars that pitted one realm against an other throughout the Middle Ages. A Christian king could not claim God’s blessing on his wars against his neighbors unless he first declared his belligerent intentions by means of a formal declaration of war, which in that era took the form of the diffidatio, or formal “defiance,” delivered in person by an officially designated and recognized repre sentative. This was most often the function of the herald.

Teuta, Queen of Illyria (today’s Balkan Peninsula) orders the execution of Roman ambassador Coruncanius. The queen’s flagrant violation of the law of nations incensed Rome, prompting the First Illyrian War (229–228 BCE).

After completing his siege of Harfleur, Henry marched his army through the French countryside enroute to his embarkation port at Calais in a symbolic declaration of his right to the territory he claimed. In response, the French sent three heralds to tell him that they would bring him to battle and de stroy him before he reached safety. One of those heralds was a man named Jacques de Heilly, who had been captured by the English in an earlier battle (in which he was not serving as an offi cially appointed herald) and who had managed to escape and return to France. Carrying the white wand and wear ing a herald’s surcoat, de Heilly clearly did not have any hesitation about walking into the midst of the English army, even though he was recognized and under any other circumstances would have been subject to recapture. If he had broken his parole in order to affect his escape, he would even have faced the possibility of execution if he fell back into English hands. As an official herald, however, he could pass in and out of Henry’s forces without fear of mo lestation, and did so.

In the rough and tumble world of medieval conflict, ambassadors from a hostile nation were often regarded as “legalized spies,” but their immunity was usually consid ered inviolable, even if grudgingly so. A full century before Agincourt, Honore de Bouvet, consellier to the French king Charles VI, wrote, “according to written law, ambas sadors and legates pass in security through a country, and while they are going to the king outside the realm, no man may hinder, disturb, or injure them.” Their protected status was considered unbreakable even in times of extreme provocation, such as when one party to a peace treaty vio lated its terms. The aggrieved party in such a betrayal “could offer no violence to the enemy’s envoys, they being protected by the Law of Nations and declared inviolable and sacred apart from any agreement or a truce and even in the heat of war,” the Spanish chronicler Ayala declared, and concluded, “it is immaterial that the enemy have al ready broken a truce and done violence to envoys sent from the other side to them.” This understanding of diplo matic immunity continued into the Renaissance, as demonstrated by the fact that the Spanish ambassador to the court of Elizabeth I continued to have regular access to the English seat of government even though he represented England’s greatest and most dangerous enemy.

DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY

John A. Haymond is the author of Soldiers: A Global History of the Fighting Man, 1800-1945 (Stackpole Books, 2018) and The Infamous Dakota War Trials of 1862: Revenge, Military Law, and the Judgment of History (McFarland, 2016).

“Heralds lacked the status and were not expected to have the expertise to qualify them to act as ambassadors,” as one scholar notes. To put it another way, heralds provoked the fight; ambassadors negotiated the peace treaties and armi stices that followed the fight. For that critically important role, noblemen and senior clerics were called upon since they were far better versed in matters of law and statecraft, and their rank was a mark of the respect paid to the courts that received them.

These millennia of thought and practice formed the basis for modern concepts of diplomatic immunity formal ized in the 1961 Vienna Convention. MHQ

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tasked with carrying messages of defiance between war ring kings, or between kings who were about to go to war with each other. In an era when dress and insignia carried great significance and were increasingly regulated, heralds carried white wands or batons as a visible sign of the im munity inferred upon them by their positions and diplo matic missions. Henry V’s 1415 campaign into France, which famously culminated in the Battle of Agincourt, offers an excellent example of how scrupulously the pro tections of heraldic immunity were usually observed during medieval warfare.

heralds on that field were also responsible for making the tally of the fallen, taking a record of all men of chivalric rank killed in the fighting. The common rank-and-file sol diers of both armies were less important, other than to ensure that the paymasters could strike their names from the muster rolls.

Heralds held the status of negotiators.notmessengers,protecteddiplomatic

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While heralds held the status of protected messengers, they were not diplomatic negotiators, and their role in that sphere was usually just to secure guarantees of safe conduct for the official embassies that might be sent after them.

De Heilly’s case provides another truth about how he raldic immunity functioned in practice. He was killed a few weeks later in the chaos of the fighting at Agincourt, even though he was then marked as a herald. Whether he was deliberately targeted or struck down by chance in the maelstrom of battle is uncertain.

Just as they were essential to the formal declaration of war, heralds were also integral to the aftermath of battle, whether they were on the winning side or the losing side. After Henry V won the day at Agincourt, he summoned both English and French heralds to determine what the lo cation of the battle was, to set the name by which it would be recorded in both his exchequer records and in the histo ries. The French heralds declared that the battle was indeed an English victory, thereby formalizing the outcome. The

ARMOURIESROYAL MHQ Autumn 2022 23

Few weapons in history have the cultural ico nicity of the Roman gladius sword. For four centuries, the gladius was one of the defining weapons of Rome as both a republic and an imperial power. It emerged in the 3rd-century bce, as Rome sought tactical and technologi cal innovations to counter Celtiberian and Carthaginian enemies. The sword was most likely derived from Spanish models, hence the historical name of its first iteration, gladius hispaniensis, although there has been lively academic debate about its origins. It was de veloped to be used by the infantryman in tac tical combination with a scutum (body shield) and a pilum (javelin), the latter thrown at the enemy before the legionary charged in to close-quarters combat. The gladius hispanien sis had a relatively short double-edged blade, narrowing slightly to a waist before flaring out from near its midpoint, then narrowing into a pronounced point. It was designed for both cutting and thrusting; the legionary would often take enemy spear and sword blows on his scutum, gripped in the left hand, then whip round the defensive barrier to deliver slashing or stabbing attacks, prime target areas being the stomach, groin or even knees, but also upper vulnerabilities such as the arms and neck. During the imperial age of Rome, the gladius went through several recognized variants, including the Mainz gladius with its long triangular point used to penetrate mail, and the Pompeii gladius, which emerged during the second half of the 1st-century ce with parallel cutting edges and a short, stron ger point, better for close-range urban combat and for penetrating plate armor. The replace ment of the gladius with the longer, straight spatha began in the 2nd-century ce, prompted by the rise of cavalry. MHQ

ThePointpoint of the gladius was designed for deep thrusts, penetrationsincludingthrough basic armor types. Straight-arm thrusts avoided the attacker exposing his arms and sides in swinging attacks.

Chris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. His most recent book is US Soldier vs Chinese Soldier: Korea 1951–53 (Osprey, 2022).

DescribedBlade by Polybius as “firm and reliable,” the gladius blade typically varied between 18 and 27 inches and for most of its history was forged from carbon

BothCuttingCuttingsteel.edgesedgessidesofthe blade were sharpened, enabling many options for slashing techniques. Although such attacks tended to deliver non-fatal injuries, these opened opportunities for killing thrusts.

WEAPONS CHECK GLADIUSROMAN

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TheScabbardgladius was sheathed within a leather-covered, wooden scabbard holding the entire length of the blade. Reinforced with metal fittings for durability and suspended from a leather strap, it hung at the waist.

TheHilt hilt ( capulus) comprised a pommel ( obviabis) which was a counterweight to the blade, a bone or wood grip ( pelpate or tenaci), and a guard between grip and blade.

By Chris McNab

Captain Alexander Hood (1758–1798)

HMS Hood was an Admiral class battlecruiser of the Royal Navy, laid down in September 1916 at the height of the First World War. Originally planned as a class of four ships, Hood was the only ship of the four to actually be constructed. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Hood was overdue for modernization; advances in gun nery and range finding made her particularly vulnerable to plunging fire from heavy guns on account of her thin ner deck armor, and problems with her steam condensers meant that she was unable to attain full speed when ma neuvering. In 1941 Hood was dispatched as the flagship of the battle group sent to intercept the German battleship Bismarck. On May 24, the British brought Bismarck and

WAR LIST THE NAME’S THE SAME

John B. Hood served as a Confederate general officer during the American Civil War. He was a bold fighter and excelled as a combat leader at the brigade and division levels, but in more senior positions of command his bold ness verged on aggressive foolhardiness. His appointment to the command of the Army of Tennessee in the last year of the war was a poor choice by the Confederate govern ment, because in a matter of weeks his repeated assaults on much stronger Union forces all but destroyed the ranks of the army that his predecessor, General Joseph E. Johnston, had managed to keep intact in the face of over whelming odds. The poet Stephen Vincent Benet was not far off the mark when he described Hood as “all lion, none of the fox.” Hood was twice severely wounded: his left arm was crippled by shrapnel at the July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, and he lost his right leg at Chickamauga two months later. After the war ended he took up work as a cotton trader and insurance broker in New Orleans, but

in 1878 his business was ruined during an outbreak of yellow fever. Within a single week, Hood, his wife, and his eldest child all died of the disease. His other 10 children were left orphaned.

Captain Arthur Hood (1755–1775)

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Three Hood brothers (Arthur, Alexander, and Samuel) all served in the Royal Navy in the latter half of the 18th cen tury. They were the second generation of the Hood family to go to sea; two of them did not survive to retire from the service. Arthur Hood served aboard the 18 gun sloop of war HMS Pomona in the West Indies. When the Pomona was caught in a hurricane in the West Indies, Hood drowned in the storm. He was the first of the Hood family to die at sea.

The good, the bad and the simply unfortunate have shared the surname “Hood.”

Lieutenant General John Bell Hood (1831–1879)

Rear Admiral Sir Horace Lambert Alexander Hood (1870–1916)

HMS Hood (named for Admiral Samuel Hood)

Alexander Hood was the younger brother of Captain Arthur Hood. On April 21, 1798, Hood was captain of HMS Mars, a 74-gun third class ship of the line, when he engaged the French ship Hercule off the Brittany coast. De spite the two ships being nearly evenly matched in fire power, mounting 74 guns each, the French got the worst of the fight, losing more than 300 men to British losses of 31 men killed and 60 wounded. Captain Hood did not live to savor his victory—he was mortally wounded in the final moments of the battle and died as he was being presented with the French captain’s surrendered sword.

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Another scion of the British Hood family of Royal Navy fame, Horace Hood began his naval career in 1882 at the age of twelve. As a commander of riverine gunboats on the Nile he served in the Mahdist War in 1898, and in 1903 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for action against the Dervishes in Somaliland. By 1908 he was commanding the battleship HMS Commonwealth, and as a flag officer in 1916 he took command of the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron with the rank of rear admiral. On May 31 of that year, aboard his flagship HMS Invincible, Hood led his squadron into action against the German fleet at the Battle of Jutland. In the first exchange of fire Invincible succeeded in fatally damaging the German cruiser SMS Wiesbaden, before she herself was targeted by the combined gunnery of battlecruisers SMS Lützow and SMS Derfflinger. A shell from one of Derfflinger’s 12-inch guns penetrated Invincible’s starboard “Q” turret and de notated its store of cordite propellant, causing a massive explosion that literally cut the ship in half. Invincible went down in minutes. Rear Admiral Hood perished with his ship and all but six of his 1,021 men.

By John A. Haymond

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AlexanderCaptainHood

the Hood Battalion was one of only four of the original eight battalions remaining in the division.

Fort Hood, Texas

Hood Battalion, Royal Naval Division (1914–1919)

A US Army installation named for Confederate Lieutenant General John Bell Hood, Fort Hood is located outside Killeen, Texas. Covering an area of 214,000 acres, it is one of the largest military installations in the world. Founded in 1942, the post has long been a training center for armor war fare and since 1971 it has been home to the famous 1st Cav alry Division. Fort Hood was the scene of social activism and soldier protests during both the Vietnam War and more recently the War on Terror. It also has a troubled history of incidents of scandal and criminal violence, one of the worst occurring on November 5, 2009. A self-described jihadist named Nidal Hasan, who was then a US Army medical corps major, carried out a shooting attack in the post Soldier Readiness Center, killing 13 people and wounding 32. Hasan was sentenced to death by court martial in 2013 and is cur rently on the military death row at the Fort Leavenworth prison. In recent years Fort Hood has gained a grim notori ety for sexual assault and sexual harassment problems, so egregious that in 2020 the Secretary of the Army relieved 14 senior leaders on the installation for “leadership failures.” In May 2022 the Army announced that as part of the decision to redesignate any post bearing the name of former Confed erate soldiers, Fort Hood will be renamed Fort Cavazos in honor of General Richard E. Cavazos, the first Hispanic sol dier to ever hold four star rank. MHQ

The Royal Naval Division (RND), one of the most unique combat units ever fielded by the British military, was an idea conceived by Winston Churchill during his tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty (1911–1915). Initially com prised of sailors from the Royal Naval Reserve and Royal Marines, each of the RND’s battalions were named after famous British admirals such as Hawke, Drake, Nelson, Howe, and of course, Hood. The Hood Battalion fought with the RND in some of the most important battles of the First World War including Gallipoli, the Somme, Gavrelle, and Passchendaele. Twice, the Hood Battalion nearly fought itself out of existence as a combat effective unit, sustaining casualty rates of almost 50 percent until its ranks could be replenished. Even though the RND repre sented only 5 percent of the Royal Navy’s total strength during the First World War, the division’s combat losses accounted for more than 40 percent of the naval service’s total casualties, and those losses occurred on land, not at sea. When the RND was formally disbanded in June 1919,

Rear Admiral Sir Horace Lambert Alexander Hood

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HMS Hood

her escort, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, to bay in the Denmark Strait. The two German ships concentrated their combined fire on Hood Hood sustained repeated hits, and then just before 6:00a.m. she was struck by a salvo that blew up her aft magazine in a catastrophic explosion. Hood went vertical in the water, going down by the stern, and she sank in less than three minutes with a loss of 1,415 men. Only three members of her crew survived.

Lieutenant General John Bell Hood

By Alan Reed

Sir Fabian Ware and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission accomplished a truly monumental task—building and maintaining cemeteries and memorials for Britain’s “honored dead.”

n August 3, 1914, Sir Edward Grey, British For eign Secretary, said to a friend, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” The so-called Great War lasted more than four years at the cost of an esti mated 9.7 million soldiers. The sacrifice of so many called for remembrance of the fallen in each warring nation. In Britain, one man anticipated this need—even during the war’s earliest stages.

Little known and underappreciated, Fabian Ware was born on June 17, 1869 in Bristol, England. His father, a chartered accountant, was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a nonconformist Christian movement. Fabian was educated with strict emphasis on the ideals of duty and piety. At age 18 he became a teacher to fund his university studies after his father’s death.

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The Army reluctantly accepted Ware’s suggestions for better care of graves. In March 1915, the Graves Registra tion Commission was put in place and by October was controlled by the Army as the Graves Registration Unit. Ware was made Temporary Major. General Douglas Haig recognized the merit of the unit’s work, writing to the War Office: “It has an extraordinary moral value to the Troops in the Field as well as to the relatives and friends of the dead at home.”

As casualties mounted, Ware’s focus turned to care and maintenance of graves following the end of the conflict. In January 1916, the National Committee for the Care of Sol diers’ Graves was created. The Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, was president.

1914, Ware visited British war graves in the communal cemetery of Béthune in northern France. There he realized the pressing need to find proper resting places for dead sol diers and to accurately record burials. The Red Cross in Britain was then overwhelmed with requests from relatives about the resting places of loved ones.

Ware became an inspector to schools and wrote books on educational reform. In 1901 he travelled to South Africa to help with reconstruction following the Second Boer War (1899-1902). Establishing himself as a skilled adminis trator, he became Director of Education in the Transvaal. While in South Africa, he de veloped a love for public ser vice. Back in England in 1905, he became editor of the Morn ing Post, covering news of co lonial affairs and supporting social reform. Matters of social reform became controversial and in 1911 Ware left his post, becoming consultant to the Rio Tinto mining company where he put his linguistic skills to good use while negotiating with the French government.

Following the Great War’s outbreak in August 1914, Ware was keen to “do his bit” for his country. Too old to join the Army, he volunteered to go to France to provide humanitarian aid for war casualties. He was put in charge of a Red Cross mobile ambulance unit conveying wounded soldiers to hospitals along the French front. In October

Demands made on the Graves Registration Unit were so great that by spring 1916 it had evolved into a bigger organization: the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries. Promoted to the rank of Temporary Lieutenant Colonel, Ware became its director and managed 700 staff. By now 500,000 graves were registered and 12,000 photo graphs of graves marked by wooden crosses had been sent to families. An important task was securing land from the French and Belgian governments to provide for the addi tional cemeteries. With his linguistic and negotiating skills, Ware was instrumental in acquiring plots at no cost from these nations. He succeeded in obtaining agreements giving Britain control of caring for these cemeteries.

In early 1917, Ware, supported by the Prince of Wales, presented a memorandum at the Imperial War Confer ence. He suggested setting up an organization involving all countries of the British Empire. This became known as the Imperial War Graves Commission and was established by Royal Charter on May 21, 1917. Ware served as vice chair man, the Secretary of State for War (Lord Derby) was chairman and the Prince of Wales was president.

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BEHIND THE CREATINGLINESHALLOWED GROUND

Ware remarked that “the impression it has created among the soldiers out here is to be regretted.” Allowing the repatriation of bodies went against the idea of brotherhood. It would be appropriate for the majority of officers, if killed, to be buried with their men. Moreover a large-scale opera tion to exhume and transport bodies back to Britain was a potential logistical nightmare and health hazard. Families seeking repatriation would face financial challenges. How ever it is estimated that at least 27 war dead were repatriated.

Frederick Kenyon, the Director of the British Museum, became the commission’s architectural adviser. He travelled to Belgium and France to see the work that needed to be done and recommended that a team of architects be ap pointed. Edwin Lutyens, Herbert Baker and Reginald Blomfield were chosen. After traveling to the battlefields, Lutyens wrote to his wife that “the dotted graves are pa thetic…what humanity can endure, suffer, is beyond belief.”

Yet many people resisted the commission’s approach. Yorkshire housewife Sarah Smith lost her 19-year old son on the Somme in 1918. Distressed that her son’s body would not be returned, she organized a petition in May 1919 and managed to collect more than 2,500 signatures. This petition was sent to the Prince of Wales with an at tached letter. Smith argued, “It has always been the view of

From left: Sir Fabian Ware was the architect of what would become Britain’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which today commemorates 1.7 million war dead; graves of the fallen in World War I were marked with simple wooden crosses before the commission replaced them with engraved white headstones, which proved somewhat controversial.

Another controversy facing the commission focused on grave markers to replace temporary wooden crosses. The traditional Latin cross was rejected since there were non-Christians among the dead. A headstone was sug gested. It would allow space for details known about the sol dier, a religious symbol and a regimental badge engraving.

approved. However the body of William Gladstone, a lieu tenant in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, was repatriated home the following month. He happened to be the grandson of former Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone. This created a stir.

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Kenyon used all his conciliatory skills to bring together different views for the cemeteries into one vision. The overall concept agreed upon was to emphasize equality. No difference would be made between race, rank or religion. These were most progressive ideas in those times. Kenyon hoped that “the cumulative effect of the cemeteries and memorials would express the common spirit of the nation, the common purpose of the army and the common sacri fice of the individual.”

Famed writer Rudyard Kipling who lost his only son John in 1915 was an early supporter. In February 1919, he wrote an article in The Times detailing the commission’s plans.The non-repatriation of bodies proved the cause of na tionwide controversy. In March 1915, French commander General Joseph Joffre banned exhumations of British sol diers in France. Field Marshal Sir John French, then com mander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force,

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Demobbed soldiers became the commission’s first gar deners. Organised into teams with the amusing name of

After war’s end, former battlefields had to be cleared of all debris and trenches needed to be filled in. Royal Engi neers and men of the Chinese Labour Corps performed this task. Many died or were maimed when live munitions exploded.Themost grim and thankless task was retrieving tens of thousands of unburied bodies. The commission tried to identify them whenever possible. In general, an old front line was searched six times. Where fighting had been in tense, areas were searched up to twenty times. By the Armistice, about 600,000 burials had been recorded. From 1918 to 1921 more than 200,000 bodies were recovered, many greatly decayed. When farmers returned to till their fields, corpses were ploughed up. By 1937, bodies were still being discovered at a rate of 20 to 30 per week. Even to this day bodies from the war continue to be unearthed.

Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War and therefore chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commis sion, ended the debate with an inspiring speech. Churchill argued for fellowship in death and the democratic ideals behind the commission’s principles. “Nearly all who have been to see these cemeteries have been profoundly im pressed by their sense of beauty, of repose and of comfort,” said Churchill. Unsurprisingly, Churchill won the day with his powerful words.

Each headstone is 2 feet 8 inches tall, 1 foot 3 inches wide and 3 inches thick. Its top is curved for the practical reason of letting rainwater run off, yet also creates an aes thetically pleasing shape. Known information about the casualty is engraved: name, rank, army number, regiment and date of death. A religious symbol, if appropriate, is also shown. The majority of graves display a cross. Families were able to choose a unique personal epitaph of a maxi mum of 66 words which were approved by the commis sion. Some display classical or poetic references, for example, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” (“it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”). Others are in scribed with personal tributes, such as: “One of the best God could send, splendid memory left behind, mother.” Others include anti-war messages, such as: “Sacrificed to the fallacy that war can end war.” Unidentified casualties were given a headstone with words chosen by Kipling: “A Soldier of the Great War known unto God.”

Accompanied by Ware, King George V toured cemeter ies in France and Belgium in 1922. After returning home, he stated: “In the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent ad vocates of peace upon earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the deso lation of war.” He hoped that “the existence of these visible

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“travelling garden parties,” they moved from site to site in trucks with tents and food supplies.

CREATING HALLOWED GROUND

Sir Reginald Blomfield designed three cemeteries in France. Every cemetery, except for very small ones, in cludes the Blomfield-designed monument called the Cross of Sacrifice—a white stone cross incorporating a bronze crusader sword. For cemeteries containing more than 400 burials, Lutyens created the Stone of Remembrance monu ment, bearing words chosen by Kipling from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Their name liveth for evermore.” It also com memorates “those of all faiths and none.”

The fierce debate was aired in the House of Commons. Supported by Rudyard Kipling, William Burdett Coutts, the Member of Parliament for the City of Westminster pre sented the case for the Imperial War Graves Commission on May 4, 1920, arguing that their vision represented “the union of all, in motive, in action and in death.” Lord Robert Cecil, brother of Lady Selborne and one of the founders of The League of Nations, spoke against the non-repatriation of bodies and uniform headstones.

The aesthetic appearance of the war cemeteries was care fully designed. During 1916, Captain Arthur Hill, the Assis tant Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, visited the Western Front to develop horticultural plans and re marked, “There is nothing more British than grass lawns.” Inspiration was drawn from Impressionist paintings em phasizing texture and colour to create “almost English gar dens” with hardy flowerbeds. The commission planted roses and herbaceous perennials in front of the graves to create perpetual bouquets. The commission chose Floribunda roses, which produce bright fragrant blooms, are extremely hardy and bloom throughout summer until first frost. The commission named the type of rose used in the cemeteries as the “Remembrance” rose. Most headstones are made of Portland stone, a soft white stone with a clean and bright appearance. This garden-like atmosphere was intended to help visiting relatives come to terms with their grief.

every English family that their beloved dead belonged to them alone.” Her petition was unsuccessful. However, she set up a rival organization called the British War Graves Association to pressure authorities and gained the support among the aristocracy. The group’s vice-president, Lady Florence Cecil, lost three of four sons and organised a peti tion with 8,000 signatures for a cross to be used as a grave marker. Leading suffragist Beatrix Maud Palmer, Countess of Selborne, was also involved. She was the sister-in-law of Lady Cecil and the oldest child of former Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, and thus had influential connec tions. She described burials in foreign cemeteries as “the most heartless and unnecessary woodenness” and angrily criticised Ware’s work as “these state cemeteries.”

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memorials will eventually serve to draw all peoples to gether in sanity and self-control.”

From left: The Cross of Sacrifice, shown in France and Belgium, appears in most Commonwealth war cemeteries; visiting a war cemetery in Bethune, France, shown here in 1919, motivated Ware’s mission; the commission’s vision for headstones engraved with regimental crests and surrounded by flowers and herbaceous perennials can be seen at Poelcapelle cemetery and Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery in Belgium.

The commission’s achievements cannot be overesti mated. Kipling claimed the construction of the cemeteries and memorials was “the biggest single bit of work since the Pharaohs and they only worked in their own country.”

In 1918 Ware gained promotion to Major General and, in 1922, was knighted for his remarkable work. In 1936—the year a belligerent Adolf Hitler marched German troops back into the Rhineland—Ware attended a conference at Cologne, Germany about the German War Graves Com mission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge). Ware delivered a speech suggesting that war cemeteries could promote “a blessed healing of wounds” but included a timely warning to his audience about the risk of another war.

Today the commission, renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1960, commemorates 1.7 mil lion war dead in 153 countries—an unequalled enterprise in world history. MHQ

By the early 1920s, 4,000 headstones were being sent to France per week. More than 500 cemeteries had been built by 1927. The largest British cemetery in the world is Tyne Cot Cemetery near Passchendaele in Belgium, which con tains nearly 12,000 graves. By 1937, 1,850 British war cem eteries had been built by the commission. That same year, Ware published a book entitled The Immortal Heritage, in which he detailed the commission’s work from 1917 to 1937. War poet Edmund Blunden wrote in his introduc tion of “the degree of beauty achieved by the creators and guardians of these resting places.”

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At age 70, Ware accepted the post of Director General of the Graves Registration and Enquiries at the War Office when British troops began fighting again in Europe in 1940. Backed by Churchill, he recorded the deaths of civilians during World War II and continued his work as the com mission’s vice chairman until his health failed in 1948. He died on April 28, 1949 at age 79 and was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity in Gloucestershire. A memorial stone to him is enshrined in the hallowed halls of Westmin ster Abbey in London. His wife, Anna, asked to comment on her husband, simply answered: “His life was his work.”

Alan Reed was educated in northern France and London. His father was in the R.A.F. in World War II and worked all his life for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Alan has co-authored four books on the First World War, available at meetatdawnunarmed.co.uk.

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The United States’ victory in the April–August 1898 Spanish-American War made the democratic republic an “imperial power,” acquiring Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from Spain, and annexing Hawaii during the war. Spain’s European neighbors paid close attention. “Drawn especially for readers” of France’s La Dépêche newspaper, this Atlantic/Caribbean map details the geography and illustrates both sides’ forces (army, navy, warships and Cuban insurgents). MHQ

BATTLE EMPIRESCHEMESBUILDING

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MHQ Autumn 2022 31

General George S. Patton, Jr. was seriously injured December 9, 1945 while riding in this 1938 Cadillac Model 75. He died 12 days later.

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ARMY)(U.S.COBISKEY-HAFTMANNOLIVIACAPT.

Moreover,premise.the“Patton was murdered” conspiracy theory

Therefore, given the seemingly improbable—albeit welldocumented with witness testimonies—series of events that unfolded in occupied Germany on Sunday, December 9, 1945 leading to Patton’s eventual death twelve days later on December 21, and the mundane manner in which the death of such a dynamic, legendary, larger-than-life public figure occurred, it now seems almost inevitable that a con spiracy theory would arise regarding how such a seemingly pointless, ignominious end could have occurred without some sinister, outside machinations being behind it. Surely, “dark forces” must have been at work behind the scenes to cause it. Over the years, articles, books and films have pro moted the theory that Patton was murdered, with motives behind the homicide ranging from the sublime to the ri diculous—e.g., he was trying to get us into war with the Soviet Union; he was planning to make a presidential run in 1948; he was “eliminated” to cover up a criminal theft of stolen German gold/money/loot, or some other fanta sy-driven

I’ve had the great advantage of knowing and being men tored by the two distinguished military historians/biogra phers most closely associated with General George S. Patton, Jr.: Professor Martin Blumenson (1918-2005), author of the multiple-volume The Patton Papers; and Carlo D’Este (1936-2020) whose superb biography, Patton: A Genius for War is the best, most meticulously-researched, single-volume source on the life of America’s greatest WWII battlefield commander. Over a dozen years ago, with “Patton was murdered” conspiracy theories once again then swirling around, I asked Carlo (a close friend and “hands’ on” member of Armchair General’s Board of Advisers) to write an article based on his Patton book and exhaustive research, detailing exactly how Patton died. Carlo immedi ately agreed, and the result is THE definitive account of Pat ton’s accident and untimely death recounted in our cover story. Since the conspiracy theories about Patton’s acciden tal death continue appearing from time to time, MHQ pres ents Carlo’s “final word on Patton’s death,” serving as tribute to Carlo on his passing’s second anniversary, and an endur ing testimonial to how truth will always destroy conspiracy theory myth.

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is a prime example of how such theories tend to continually reappear over time. Greatly facilitated by today’s essentially universal access to the internet and even after having been thoroughly debunked by well-researched, extensively-doc umented evidence completely destroying a theory’s premise and alleged “facts,” many of these theories—particularly those involving famous historical figures, like Patton—keep rising periodically from their well-deserved graves. The culprits are often book authors or documentary filmmakers looking to capitalize on the fame of their subjects—they seem to know that there’s a sizable audience out there, ea gerly awaiting the next iteration of a juicy conspiracy theory involving FDR, or JFK…or Patton. In fact, the inspiration for MHQ’s decision to re-publish this issue’s cover story, “Was Patton Murdered?” (p. 34) written by the late Carlo D’Este which was originally published in the November 2010 issue of Armchair General magazine (published by HistoryNet’s predecessor, Weider History Group) was a dis cussion last year with an MHQ reader who said that, after reading some internet articles on the subject, he was now totally convinced that George Patton was assassinated, no doubt about it! Case closed!

War—and politics—continue to provide fertile breeding grounds for conspiracy theories, i.e., fervently-held convic tions that some events appear so unlikely to have happened, or that their outcome and timing seem so suspicious, they must surely have been carefully orchestrated and carried out by a “shadowy someone” (or a cabal of “someones”) work ing anonymously and in total secrecy behind-the-scenes.

—Jerry Morelock

CONSPIRACY THEORY

id President Franklin D. Roosevelt, via presumed foreknowledge—and in collusion with Britain’s embattled wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill—“allow” Japan to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941, thereby dragging the U.S. into World War II? When Lee Harvey Oswald got off three shots within a few seconds from a bolt-action, Italian World War II surplus, M38 Carcano rifle to assassinate John F. Ken nedy in 1963, did he have “fire support” from the “grassy knoll” in Dallas? And was America’s most famous World War II battlefield commander, the often-controversial, po litically-problematic General George S. Patton, Jr., mur dered during what was, essentially, a minor “fender-bender” traffic accident? There are many people today who certainly think some or all of those conspiracy theories are com pletely true. In fact, inventing such conspiracy theories— and many, many more like them—and promoting them ad nauseum often appears an American obsession.

acclaimed historian reveals the truth behind the death of America’s greatest World War II battlefield commander.

By Carlo D’Este

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From top: Patton’s 1938 Cadillac Model 75 limousine’s retractable glass divider was rolled down. Patton’s head likely struck the divider’s steel frame; the damaged right front was later replaced with a 1939 Cadillac front end; Patton gave up his front seat—near the heater—to his hunting dog, moving to the back seat; a 1939 Cadillac Fleetwood ‘stands in’ as an army staff car in a Chiriaco Summit, California Patton Museum.

or decades since General George S. Patton’s un timely death in December 1945 there have arisen all manner of conspiracy theories regarding it. They range from the improbable plot of Brass Target, a 1978 film starring George Kennedy as an over weight Patton who was allegedly assassinated in order to stop his investigation of a gold heist by corrupt American officers (see “Patton’s End on Film,” p. 41), to allegations in a widely-read book that Patton was mur dered as part of a conspiracy orchestrated by the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan to prevent the controversial general from running for president in 1948. The truth of what really happened to Patton is more prosaic.

Patton’slamb.

Sunday, December 9, was typically raw, cold and dismal. About 9:00 a.m. that morning, accompanied by a jeep that would follow behind carrying their guns and a hunting dog, Patton and Gay departed Bad Nauheim in the gener al’s 1938 Model 75 Cadillac, the last of a special, elegant series designed and built to withstand Europe’s primitive roads. After his long-time driver, Master Sergeant John L. Mims, had rotated home, Patton was now being driven by a young enlisted man named Horace Woodring. The new driver was known for two things: his “lead-foot” on the Ca dillac’s accelerator; and a propensity to break Eisenhower’s ban on fraternization with German fräuleins

new position was the command of the Fifteenth Army, consisting of only a small headquarters based in the Hessian spa of Bad Nauheim. A dead-end posting for a fiery combat commander like Patton, Fifteenth Army was nothing more than a “paper” command with the primary mission of writing the official history of the European cam paign. For weeks the unhappy warrior chafed at what he believed was the manifest unfairness of his relief from 3d Army command for having done his job no differently than any other commander in occupied Germany. There is ample evidence of Patton’s intense distress during this frus

After a detour to the Taunus Mountains where Patton indulged his passion for exploring ancient Roman ruins, the two vehicles were stopped at a military police road block in the northern outskirts of the industrial city of Mannheim. Patton, who had gotten soaked touring the Roman ruins, had been sitting in the front seat of the Ca dillac to dry out by the car’s heater. The weather remained icy cold that day and as Patton dismounted to talk to the MP who stopped him he noticed the hunting dog in the jeep was shivering and would freeze to death in that “god damn truck.” Patton ordered the dog transferred to his car, giving the animal his place by the heater in the front seat of the Cadillac while he continued the trip riding in the back seat. This spur of the moment decision to look after the animal’s welfare and move to the car’s back seat began a chain of events that was about to prove fatal for Patton.

This spur of the provewaseventsadecisionmomentbeganchainofthatabouttofatal.

The evening of December 8, however, Patton’s chief of staff, Major General Hobart R. “Hap” Gay decided that what his boss needed was a diversion to take his mind off his troubles. He proposed a pheasant shoot in the Rhine Palatinate, an area known for its rich game. December 9 would be Patton’s last day in Germany and he readily agreed to a trip from which he would never return.

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By December 1945, just seven months after Patton’s superb battlefield leadership had played a pivotal role in forcing Nazi Germany’s surrender, America’s greatest World War II field commander was reduced to leading a “paper army.” In late September 1945 the Military Governor of the Amer ican Occupation Zone in Germany, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisen hower, had relieved Patton of command of his beloved Third U.S. Army, then on oc cupation duty in Bavaria. Patton had become a light ning rod of controversy, both for his public remarks and for his employment of former members of the Nazi party to help restore basic services— although this practice was no different from what other, less controversial, occupation commanders were doing, the press was having a field day with the “scandal.” Eisen hower believed he had to act and Patton became the sacri ficial

trating time and that his life had reached a vital crossroads. He decided to return home to the United States and retire from the Army. Patton’s departure from Europe was sched uled for December 10.

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Medical help arrived within minutes and Patton was rushed by ambulance to the One Hundred Fortieth Station Hospital in nearby Heidelberg. Doctors found Patton, his face a bloody mess from the cut, conscious but suffering from severe traumatic shock, his pulse a faintly readable 45, and a barely obtainable blood pressure reading of 86/60. Examination revealed that he had neither sensory nor motor function below the neck.

At approximately 11:45 a.m., as they were driving through the Mannheim suburb of Käfertal, a U.S. Army two-and-a-half-ton truck suddenly turned left to enter a nearby quartermaster depot. In so doing the truck cut right in front of the Cadillac at the same instant as Patton, his attention riveted on the derelict vehicles littering the area, exclaimed: “How awful war is. Look at the waste.” Momentarily distracted by Patton’s comment, Woodring took his eyes off the road just as the truck traveling at ap proximately ten miles per hour appeared in front of him. Although Woodring slammed on the brakes, it was too late—the Cadillac and the truck collided. The truck’s for midable right front bumper struck the right front side of the Cadillac, smashing the car’s radiator and front fender. Hap Gay, who was sitting in the backseat with Patton, luckily had time to brace himself for the impact. Patton, however, who was sitting unbraced at the time of impact, never saw the collision coming. His body became a “flying missile” rocketing across the spacious back seat area. He was thrust up and forward into the roof, either striking his head on a steel frame that held the glass partition separat ing the front and rear seats in the “closed” position, or on the clock mounted on the partition—probably both.

WAS PATTON MURDERED?

Lying motionless for days on end in a hospital bed, Pat ton’s immobility brought on a small pulmonary embolism in his lung on December 20. If not removed, an embolism will deprive the brain of oxygen and result in death. At this point his doctors thought that at best Patton had about for ty-eight hours to live. Their diagnosis was correct. On the afternoon of December 21, he told his favorite nurse that he was going to die that day. A few hours later he died in his sleep. That Patton had managed to even survive twelve days is attributable to his superb physical condition before the

Accordingaccident.to

Willie, Patton’s bull terrier, mourns his owner’s passing. Sent to the U.S., Willie lived out the remainder of his life (died 1955) with Patton’s wife and daughters.

In the days that followed, Patton was examined by a number of different specialists and consultants. None were even remotely hopeful that he had the slightest chance of ever regaining the use of his limbs. A top neurosurgeon was summoned from the United States and what he found was that Patton was not only paralyzed from the neck down and was having difficulty breathing but also that his bowels and bladder were paralyzed. An operation to re lieve the pressure on his spinal cord would have done nothing to eliminate the paralysis.

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Although neither Gay nor Woodring (nor the dog) were even hurt, Patton had been seriously injured. Pro fusely bleeding from a serious cut across his forehead, Patton exclaimed: “I believe I am paralyzed. I am having trouble breathing.” To Gay he said, “Work my fingers

a sensationalist and, unfortunately, wide ly-read 2008 “conspiracy theory” book called Target: Patton by Robert K. Wilcox, Patton’s accident was staged and he was actually assassinated. A shadowy former OSS operative named Douglas Bazata has outlandishly claimed that he was directed by agency head Donovan to assassi nate Patton. The rear side-window of the Cadillac was al legedly jimmied in advance into a small opening. The plot was carried out on December 9 by himself and a mysteri ous assassin known only as the “Pole” who used a specially designed weapon that fired a shard of metal into Patton’s head making his injury appear to have resulted from the accident. This “Star Wars-like” weapon resembling a rifle, Bazata claimed, “could shoot any projectile—rock, metal, ‘even a coffee cup.’” When Patton failed to die, the Polish assassin (whose name Bazata professed not to have known

for me. Take and rub my arms and shoulders, rub them hard.” As Gay was responding as ordered, Patton de manded, “Damn it, rub them.” At that point, Gay knew something was very seriously wrong with his boss. As they waited for assistance Patton plaintively said, “This is a helluva way to die.”

and who was hired independently of him) allegedly fin ished the job by somehow slipping into the hospital shortly after the accident and administering cyanide. The assassin told Bazata the cyanide he used was made in Czechoslova kia and was “a certain refined form…that can appear to cause embolisms, heart failure and things like that…It can even be timed to kill in a given period such as eighteen to forty-eightCopioushours.”amounts

The claim is also made that the accident was staged and that the driver of the two-and-a-half-ton truck was paid to ram Patton’s car at the precise moment. Yet, with the excep tion of a handful of men on his personal staff, no one had any knowledge prior to the evening of December 8 where Patton would be the next day, what route he would follow or what time he would arrive at his destination. Incredibly, Mr. Bazata asserts that the “assassination” details were plot ted over a period of two days prior to December 9.

of unproven, unsubstantiated socalled “evidence” have been proffered that rely on the as sertions of Mr. Bazata recounted in Wilcox’s book. Even one of the entries in Bill O’Reilly’s popular “Killing” series volumes, his 2014 book, Killing Patton, repeats Bazata’s outlandish claims. Among the unanswered and unanswer able questions that render Bazata’s bizarre story unbeliev able and impossible are these basic facts: Assassination plots take time to develop and meticulous planning to ac complish; Patton’s decision to go hunting on December 9 was not made until the night before and the route he would follow was never announced. Even Patton’s own driver was not alerted until approximately 7:00 a.m. on the morning

According to this spurious “murder” theory, Patton was “evil” and “a threat to U.S. objectives”, a “killer” who should

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From top: Conspiracy theorists claim OSS head, William J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, was a ‘shadowy figure’ behind Patton’s ‘murder’; Major General Hobart Gay, Patton’s chief of staff, suggested the hunting trip and sat beside him during the December 9, 1945 crash; war correspondents with the ever ‘newsworthy’ Patton at a May 1945 press conference.

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of the trip, just two hours before departure. Until encoun tering the MP roadblock outside of Mannheim, Patton was riding in the Cadillac’s front seat—there was no reason for anyone to believe that he would have relocated to the rear of the car until, by happenstance, Patton observed the hunting dog freezing and impulsively made the switch.

Even more absurd and beyond all reason is that William J. Donovan would even contemplate such a vile act, much less recruit an assassin for $10,000 on “orders from way up” on the shaky grounds that “many people want this done.”

sloppiness on the part of the Army has provided grist for the conspiracy theorists’ mills. The Army investigation into Patton’s accident was only perfunctory, and a full-scale formal inquiry was never held. The military police officer who investigated the accident filed a prelimi nary report that concluded both drivers were careless. Years later, as a Virginia state senator, the officer wrote to the Pentagon for a copy of his report—he was told that it could not be located. The Army’s failure to thoroughly in vestigate the fatal accident of so prominent a figure as George Patton is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.

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Perhaps inevitably, these Army failures merely have served to open the door to those who revel in spinning tales of conspiracies, like the ones that swirl around the assassina tion of JFK. To their convoluted logic, a sloppy investiga tion equals “cover up” and a misplaced report becomes a sinister, high level “government plot.”

“Murder” theorists also ignore daunting practical prob lems that conspirators would have had to overcome. In 1945, when communications were primitive (telephone and telegraph/teletype), how could such a plot possibly have been set in motion in a matter of hours? How was a plan developed and flawlessly carried out on such absurdly short notice? What evidence exists that Donovan (who was both a friend and admirer of Patton) would even consider such a dubious act? How did the assassin(s) know the route and time of Patton’s arrival at the target location? These and a great many other unanswered questions expose the absurdity of the assassination claims.

“be eliminated.” Based solely on the unsupported claims of Mr. Bazata, are we to believe that honorable men like Don ovan—a holder of the Medal of Honor—and someone above him would order Patton killed on such specious grounds? Inasmuch as Donovan reported only to U. S. President Harry S. Truman, are we also to believe that the President of the United States ordered Patton killed? Or that a weapon that could shoot “even a coffee cup” has ever existed?Unfortunately,

Patton’s flag-draped casket is present at his December 23, 1945 funeral service in Christ Church, Heidelberg. The next day he was buried alongside graves of his soldiers in the Luxembourg American cemetery in Hamm.

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What is equally disturbing is that a respected newspa per like the UK Daily Telegraph would blindly report such

1978, 111 minutes

Patton’s injuries were so acute that his eventual death was inevitable. It was a tragic ending for a gallant soldier whose legacy is now tarnished by sensationalist purveyors of preposterously false history. By the end of 1945, Patton was a very tired and unhappy soldier who wanted nothing more than to retire to his country home in Massachusetts and write his memoirs. Would they have been controver sial? Of that there is little doubt, and his premature death robbed the world of his story. Yet, controversial memoirs are not unique to Patton and preventing their publication hardly seems a sufficient motive for his murder. Omar Bradley’s bestselling 1951 memoir, A Soldier’s Story, for ex ample, was serialized in Life magazine and was scathing in its criticism of both Patton and Eisenhower; yet it did nothing to harm the enduring reputation of either man.

Cast: George C. Scott, Karl Malden, Michael Bates, Karl Michael Vogler

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This thriller sacrifices history for fantasy in a preposterous conspiracy theory plot that has Patton (Kennedy) being murdered by an assassin (von Sydow) hired by a rogue U. S. Army officer (Vaughn). The motive for Patton’s murder in this conspiracy is simply criminal

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner

Brass Target

Patton

1970, 170 minutes

Director: John Hough Cast: George Kennedy, John Cassavetes, Robert Vaughn, Max von Sydow

In this CBS television sequel to the 1970 Patton film, George C. Scott reprises his Oscar-winning role in a story line that presents aspects of Patton’s early life not covered in the 1970 film. The film begins in late-1945 with Patton in disgrace in occupied Germany, reduced to commanding “an army of clerks” at Fifteenth Army. Early in the film, Patton’s December 9, 1945 traffic accident is portrayed and it is generally a historically accurate recreation of the actual event—no “murder plot” theories in this film. Most of the film shows the bed-ridden Patton reflecting on his early life, presented as a series of vignettes via flashbacks. True to real life, the film shows Patton dying of an embolism on December 21, 1945.

Hollywood’s take on Patton’s untimely death runs the gamut from ignoring it to promoting an outlandish “assassination plot.”

This most famous film version of Patton’s life focuses on his World War II exploits from North Africa to the early months of the Allied occupation of Germany. The film garnered seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Scott’s feisty Patton portrayal. Yet it finesses Patton’s December 1945 death by simply ignoring it. Instead, the final scene is merely evocative of the tragic fate awaiting the general. It shows Patton walking his dog, Willie, while Scott’s voice-over relates the story of how ancient Roman conquerors were honored with a parade through the streets of Rome, a slave standing in the chariot behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown above the hero’s head and whispering in his ear, “All glory is fleeting.”

Director: Delbert Mann Cast: George C. Scott, Eva Marie Saint, Murray Hamilton, Ed Lauter

a preposterous claim without rigorously checking the facts. Among the Telegraph’s numerous misstatements was that Patton “was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home” and was killed because “American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost Ameri can lives.” (Daily Telegraph, December 20, 2008) The Tele graph’s article brings to mind 17th-century philosopher Spinoza’s dictum: “He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and what is false.”

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The Last Days of Patton

George S. Patton was a brilliant, opinionated, often irra tional and imperfect soldier; but there is not the slightest evidence that he had any political ambitions or that he posed the slightest threat to anyone. However, it did not take an assassination plot to kill Patton, who had once said that he would prefer to die heroically; instead, it took a senseless traffic accident not unlike those which annually kill some 40,000 Americans. After more than 400 pages of half-truths, what-if’s, undocumented claims and historical mistakes too numerous to count, Target: Patton author Wilcox admits that the alleged plot and assassination of Patton is “not backed by any proof in its darkest possibili ties. But the evidence so far unearthed suggests that it could be true.” It is a sad commentary when history is reduced to mere hearsay. MHQ

greed, not politics. The assassination is an attempt to cover up the theft by the rogue officer and his cohorts of a shipment of Reichsbank gold reserves being transported by rail to Frankfurt in the early days of the occupation of Germany. The gold thieves’ scheme to have Patton murdered to forestall an investigation that might expose them. Meanwhile, an OSS Major (Cassavetes) races the clock and the assassin in an (unsuccessful) attempt to prevent Patton’s murder.

1986, 146 minutes

Patton’s End on Film

Carlo D’Este, (1936-2020), the 2011 recipient of the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, was a renowned historian and best-sell ing biographer. His acclaimed books include Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life and Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945. This article is based on his definitive biography Patton: A Genius for War, and was originally published in the November 2010 issue of Armchair General magazine.

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Puritan New England survived New France’s French and Indian onslaughts during Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), but just barely.

By John

Grenier ARMAGEDDONDODGING LONDONGALLERY,PORTRAITNATIONAL MHQ Autumn 2022 43 The war bearing Queen Anne’s name—the American theater of the War of the Spanish Succession—lasted nearly her entire 1702–1714 reign. MHQP-221000-QUEENANNE.indd 43 8/30/22 3:42 PM

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Most New Englanders had wanted no part of another war in 1702, but as in 1689, when the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697) came to North America where it was known as King William’s War, the pull of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1715) proved too powerful to escape. Throughout the 1690s, the theocrats who domi nated Massachusetts had shown that, while they could offer jeremiads that prophesized the imminent fall of their Chris tian experiment in the New World, they could not lead the defense of New England. Prayer meetings and fast days had not stopped Indians and Frenchmen from penetrating the northern frontier, and multiple attempts to take the war to New France had ended in whimpers of pathos. Some satisfaction came with the death of the savior of New France in King William’s War, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, but his replacements as governor-general, first Louis-Hector de Callière and then Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil, could still call on Canada’s professional soldiers in the troupes de la marine Moreover, the mission Indians who lived in Catholic mis sion towns in the Saint Lawrence River Valley and the mul titude of warriors of the Wabenaki Confederacy (the Abenakis, Maliseets, and Mi’kmaq) on the Maine and Acadia frontiers also offered their services. More worri

some for Boston’s elites, and the settlers and militia who would bear the burden of fighting, they knew they would be without Indian assistance if hostilities broke out. Frontenac had adroitly snapped the Covenant Chain that had made the Iroquois League allies of the English. The Grand Settle ment of 1701 saw the League declare peace with the French in Canada, as well as its neutrality in any future An glo-French struggles. Added to all that, England had pro vided its Puritan colonies with no material help in the first go-round with the French and Indians; no one thought aid would be forthcoming from Europe during this war. New England thus was left to face the disconcerting reality that it would be truly on its own.

ears later, reflecting on the weeks he spent in the summer of 1704 travelling through New En gland to visit and worship with his coreligion ists, Quaker Thomas Story remembered, “it was a dismal time in those parts; for no man knew, in an ordinary way, on his lying down to sleep, but that he might lose his life before the morning, by the hands of a merciless savage.” The passing of time had not clouded his recollections of strife. When Story made his tour of the communities north of Boston, he found their inhabitants, only four years removed from a horrific war with the French in Canada and their American Indian allies, mired in another ghastly conflict. This war—Queen Anne’s War—had become far worse than anything they could recall or conceive. Although Boston stood in no real danger of falling to the Indians or French, the Puritans’ “City upon a Hill,” their model of an exemplary Protestant society that would draw the eyes of the world, faced its greatest existential crisis.

Despite the commencement of hostilities in Europe, Callière thought better of rushing into war as long as the Abenakis maintained a defensive buffer zone between Canada and New England. In the summer of 1702, at Casco Bay, Maine, New England negotiators conceded to the Eastern Indians several points of contention. Callière was hardly prescient, however, when he predicted the En glish would renege on their promises of better behavior; by December, they had. He thereupon asked the Wabaneki Confederacy to join the French the next spring in spread ing terror along the New England frontier. Callière died in the spring of 1703, but Vaudreuil remained fully commit ted to using the Indians as a cudgel to batter the English. Canada’s new governor-general did not exaggerate when he boasted the Indians were “ready to take up the hatchet against the English whenever he gave them the order,” and proved as brilliant a strategist as Frontenac. He would let the English spend the summer in bucolic peace, clearing their lands, building their sawmills and gristmills, and rais ing their crops and animals. Then, at harvest time, marines and Indians would plunder or destroy it all.

In August, Vaudreuil sent Alexandre Leneuf de La Val lière de Beaubassin, an Acadian marine officer, to sack English settlements along the coast of Maine. Beaubassin divided his forces into small, fast-moving teams that oper ated independently and with no instructions other than to lay waste to everything in their grasp. Samuel Drake, New England’s nineteenth-century chronicler of its Indian wars, called the first week of what would become a twomonth-long Franco-Indian campaign of destruction, the “Six Terrible Days.” His “Diary of Depredations” filled pages. One war party killed and captured thirty-nine set tlers at Wells. Another burned to the ground the fishing station at Cape Porpoise. Winter Harbor held out for sev eral days before surrendering to Frenchmen who carried a

did not exaggerate when he lamented, “Maine had nearly received her death-blow.” Vaudreuil had, for his autumn 1703 operations, purposely left New York untouched. The latter’s leaders were reluctant to become embroiled in an other war with Canada, especially with the Mohawks ada mant that they intended to hold fast to the Grand Settlement for fear that an Anglo-French conflict might morph into an internecine struggle with their mis sion-dwelling cousins at Kanawake. Nevertheless, Vau dreuil wanted to keep the pressure on the English. He recognized that, although the Kanawakes might be hesi tant to raid into Maine or unwilling to do so west of Hud son’s River, the English towns in the Connecticut River Valley offered tempting targets. Word of the Wabanaki Confederacy’s smashing success in Maine then reached Montréal, and mission-dwelling Indians, rather than miss out on plunder, offered to raise the hatchet.

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false flag of truce. At Saco Fort, the French and Indians killed eleven defenders and took twenty prisoners. At Spurwick, Indians killed or captured twenty-two mem bers of the Jordan family. The siege at Scarborough was lifted only after militia from further down the coast mi raculously appeared. More disasters, however, were in store for the English following that sole bright turn of events. The small community at Perpooduck Point near Falmouth (now Portland) suffered, per capita, the most. Nine families regularly lived there. In August 1703, the men were off working in the forests cutting timber. The Indians “inhumanely butchered” twenty-five children and women, one of whom, “being big with Child, they knockt her on the head, and ript open her Womb, cutting one part of the Child out; a Spectacle of horrible Barbarity.” All told, French and Indian raiders destroyed settlements along more than forty-five miles of the seaboard. Drake

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Part of the French-allied Wabenaki Confederacy (Abenaki, Maliseets, and Mi’kmaq nations), Abenaki warriors conducted devastating raids from the Canadian border deep into New England colonial territory. The defenders—ill-led, inexperienced, and inadequately-trained militia—proved no match for the Abenakis’ well-honed warfighting tactics and combat skills.”

New England’s response to the French offensives of 1703 and early 1704 fell on the shoulders of scalp hunters and rangers. Massachusetts placed generous bounties on Indian scalps, but few men mentioned venturing across the frontier to collect them. In June and July, Major Benja min Church, who thirty years earlier in King Philip’s War had formed New England’s first companies of rangers, and throughout King William’s War conducted “expeditions” in Acadia, again led his charges against the French settle ments in present-day New Brunswick and in the Minas Basin. In a tit-for-tat for Deerfield, Church burned Mi’kmaw camps, captured as many Acadians as he could, and burned Grand Pré. The final accounting, however, showed that he inflicted little lasting damage. Absent the threat of continued attacks from the enemy such as the Maine settlers faced, the Acadians dusted themselves off and set about rebuilding their homes.

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Church’s raid, and the realization that France harbored no intention of sending him support, led Vaudreuil to con sider a truce with New England. As a tentative first step, he proposed to Massachusetts’s crown-appointed governor, Joseph Dudley, a prisoner exchange. Pierre Maisonnat, Acadia’s most accomplished privateer captain, had fallen

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The militia from Hadley and Hatfield, alerted by the bil lowing smoke fifteen miles to the north, rushed toward Deerfield. After killing several Frenchmen and Indians who had dallied to plunder, they gave chase to Hertel’s main body. The Englishmen—farmers and shopkeepers who were unevenly matched against marines and warriors in a running fight through the forest—thought they had caught the enemy’s rearguard in the meadows north of Deerfield. After a brief skirmish, the Indians appeared to flee. It was, of course, a trap and the English rushed headlong into it. Nine of them were killed and a handful of others wounded.

QUEEN ANNE’S WAR

While New England, it seemed, struggled to find even one competent militia captain capable of defending a fixed blockhouse, Vaudreuil could choose from dozens of bat tle-tested marine officers to lead New France’s military forces. In the end, he appointed Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville to command the 250 men (fifty marines and 200 Abenaki and Kanawake allies) that would prey upon West ern Massachusetts. It was a tremendous honor for the thir ty-six-year-old Jean-Baptiste, an opportunity to live up to the legacy of his father, Joseph-François “The Hero” Hertel de La Fresnière, who had led the brilliant 1690 raid into NewHertelEngland.and his troops arrived outside Deerfield on Feb ruary 28, 1704. His scouts reported that the villagers seemed to be anticipating an attack—the Mohawks had, in fact, warned the English that one was coming—and had taken refugee behind a large palisade. Before dawn on Feb ruary 29, Leap Day in more ways than one, several Indians jumped from the snowdrifts that reached the top of the palisade, disabled the sentry, and opened the village gates. Reverend John Williams later recalled the raiders fell “like a flood upon us.”

Once inside the village, Hertel’s marines and indige nous allies moved from house to house, killing and scalp ing, taking prisoners, and putting to the torch everything in sight. Williams’s home was one of the first to come under attack; raiders killed two of his children and a ser vant, and took he and the rest of his family with an other servant prisoner. The assault ended rather quickly when, unexpectedly, a large group of raiders gathered 109 captives—forty percent of the village’s inhabitants— and retreated. They left behind seventeen burned houses and forty-four English corpses, fifteen of whom had gruesomely died from immolation.

Having learned the hard way that discretion is the better part of valor, the survivors retreated to the still burning ruins of Deerfield. In the process, they left the prisoners to theirThefates.captives’ ordeal on the march to Canada became the stuff of New England horror stories. Several of them man aged to escape in the first days of the trek, but Hertel’s subse quent warning to Williams that any recaptured escapees would be summarily executed put an end to further attempts at absconding. Several others died from both mistreatment at the hands of their captors and the weather. Williams’s wife and infant child were two of the first to perish. Fewer than ninety prisoners made it to Montréal to be eventually ran somed and returned to New England. It proved a sicken ingly bitter pill for Williams to swallow when he learned that his ten-year-old daughter Eunice, whom he had been forced to leave behind when he and his other children were sent to Boston as part of a prisoner exchange in 1706, em braced Roman Catholicism and, at age sixteen, married François-Xavier Arosen, a Kanawake. Despite continued entreaties from her father to return home, she vociferously refused repatriation. The great irony of the “Deerfield Mas sacre”—one not lost on his contemporaries—became that the daughter of the village’s Puritan minister, whose griev ous suffering at the hands of the “Jesuit-corrupted” Kanawakes and Abenakis inspired his captivity narrative, The redeemed captive returning to Zion, stood as the exem plar for New England’s “unredeemed captive.”

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siege weapons, organized several sorties from the fort. In the face of that “spirited” resistance, March retreated all the way back to Boston.

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Sir William Phips and a New England army had sacked Port Royal in 1690 on their way to Québec; New En glanders hoped that another army could surely accomplish at least that in the summer of 1707. John March, a New bury merchant who doubled as a militia colonel, thus as sumed command of several hundred men and sailed for Acadia. Although March’s army outnumbered Port Royal’s defenders, he could not execute much of a siege because, like Phips’s outside Québec seventeen years earlier, his en gineers and artillerists did not know how to bring their heavy guns to bear on the “citadel,” in truth just a dilapi dated earthen and wooden fort. March withdrew his be sieging force after eleven days, perhaps to read up on the basics of early eighteenth-century siege work. On August 22, he started his second siege. Daniel d’Auger de Suber case, Acadia’s governor, concerned that the English may have found a way to properly work their heavy guns as

In the meantime, many of the Eastern Abenaki bands had grown tired of the war. With the English driven from Maine and their impotence in Acadia exposed for all to see, they told Vaudreuil that they no longer saw a reason to raise the hatchet. The governor-general called their bluff and summoned 400 of them for campaign in the summer of 1708. Most of them begged off, which left Hertel with primarily mission Indians to join his marines. These allies, at their rendezvous with the French in New Hampshire, then announced they were unwilling to stray much farther from their homes. Hertel concluded that a raid on Haver hill, the frontier village that some of the same warriors may have attacked eleven years earlier near the end of King Wil

From left: Major Benjamin Church, combat-tested in previous frontier wars, led a successful retaliatory raid against settlements in New France; Deerfield burns on February 29, 1704. One hundred nine residents, 40 percent of the population, were captured. Less than 90 captives reached Canada alive but most were exchanged in 1706.

into English hands; the Puritans therefore saw it as a man ifestation of God’s providence when Vaudreuil offered to swap Reverend Williams and others for him. Once safely back at Port Royal, Acadia’s capital, Maisonnat and his ships’ crews recommenced systematically devastating the New England merchant marine and the fishing fleet that plied the Grand Banks. By the end of 1706, it was appar ent—at least to Boston’s ship owners and their investors— that the French had again outsmarted them.

New England’s Puritan leaders had reached their wits’ end. They raged against New York’s government for failing to join the war, and Cotton Mather, one of Boston’s most in fluential clergymen, excoriated Dudley for agreeing to the truce with Vaudreuil. He leveled claims that the governor and his allies, none more so than Samuel Vetch, had en gaged in illegal and traitorous trade with New France. An ti-government paranoia had paralyzed New England’s attempts to deal with either the French or the Indians.

Help often comes from the most unexpected places. In late 1708, crown officials approved Vetch’s plan to send an army from Albany toward Montréal and an amphibious force up the Saint Lawrence River to lay siege to Québec. Vetch’s was essentially the same scheme that the colonies had tried in King William’s War, but with one important modification: English officers would command the 4,000 professional sol diers and sailors who would conduct the siege of Québec. Most of the colonies were ecstatic, and, in a rare instance of colonial unity, they set about enlisting 3,000 men. The one outlier, New York, had no choice but to participate because the queen had authorized the campaign.

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Over the same period, Queen Anne’s closest advisers developed second thoughts about the potential for an ar mistice. In the spring of 1710, they sent to Nicholson and Vetch six warships and a regiment of marines to pluck the low-hanging piece of fruit at Port Royal. The New England militia begrudgingly mustered again; in late September, 3,500 of them joined the fleet and set out for Acadia. Sub ercase could do little against such an overwhelming force, and he capitulated within days of Nicholson disembarking his army and its accompanying professional artillery offi cers. New England troops occupied Annapolis Royal— Nicholson’s new name for the town and fort—and Vetch assumed the governorship of Great Britain’s newest colony: Nova Scotia.

QUEEN ANNE’S WAR

The French and their indigenous allies descended on the village before dawn on August 29, 1708. Clio seemed intent on repeating herself—houses were burned, captives taken, and thirty to forty settlers killed—before events played out differently. During the militia’s pro forma chase of the raid ers, it killed nine and wounded eighteen marines and Indian combatants in Hertel’s rear guard. Another militia company stumbled upon the supplies the raiders had cached for their trip to Canada. Without food and medicine, the retreat proved as difficult for captors as for captives; back at Mon tréal, the mission Indians let it be known that they had had enough and henceforth intended to sit out the war.

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liam’s War, offered his best, perhaps his only, chance of making productive use of the marines and few Indians pu tatively under his command.

The preparations progressed at a breakneck pace. In April 1709, Vetch and Virginia’s former governor, Francis Nicholson, arrived in Boston. Vetch would take care of the logistics (and skim a nice profit off the top in the pro cess), and Nicholson, an out sider among New England’s constant squabbling parties, would whip the militia into shape. A gland,ActsBritish—afteryet-to-be-named1707andtheofUnion,Scotland,EnandWaleswereoffi

cial joined as Great Britain—officer would direct the Québec thrust. Because no New Englanders possessed the expertise, or stomach, to command the Albany contingent, Nicholson agreed to lead it. By early summer, teamsters had begun carrying supplies to Wood Creek in the south end of the Lake Champlain Valley and 1,500 militia from through out the colonies had poured into Albany. Best of all from Nicholson’s perspective, four of the five tribes of the Iro quois League had renounced their neutrality in the An glo-French war—better the British turn their large army on Canada than on the Mohawk Valley. In Boston, hundreds of

militia arrived in the town, which gave it, for the first time in its history, a quasi-martial air. In all of this, Mather again saw the hand of God at work. The arrival of the British reg ulars, he exclaimed, promised long-suffering Puritan New England its long-awaited Armageddon with Canada. He carried no doubts as to that battle’s outcome.

The regulars never made it to America. London had concluded that peace was on the verge of breaking out, and no point was to be gained in spending resources on an at tempt to take Canada when any treaty ending the long-stale mated European war most likely would return matters to the status quo ante bellum. Eventually, in mid-October, Dudley learned that English officials had cancelled the campaign. The colonies squandered most of the campaign ing season waiting for the British; Vetch and Nicholson had no choice but to disband the militia. Their decision proba bly could not have come at a better time, especially for the soldiers in New York. Smallpox and “putrid fevers” wracked them throughout the summer, morale had reached its nadir, and mutiny loomed. Whether they again would come out for another “Glorious Enterprise” was left for the leadership in Boston to ponder over the winter.

The favorable outcome at Annapolis Royal, plus the arrival in London in 1710 of four “Mohawk Chiefs” who obliquely implied that their people were prepared to help, led the crown to take another stab at Canada. Nicholson would again command the forces arrayed against Montréal; Rear Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker would lead an armada and nearly 5,000 British troops against Québec. This time, Anne’s ministers kept their word, and in late June, Walker and seven redcoat regiments arrived at Boston. Nicholson rushed to Albany, and then to Wood Creek, where he built Fort Anne, assembled another army of New England mili tia, and waited for the Mohawks to arrive. The Puritans again thanked God for their deliverance. Boston’s mer chants decided that the town’s public displays of piety were enough: Walker’s army would have to make do with only

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As England (Great Britain after 1707) and France fought each other in a succession of European wars, their North American colonies inevitably were drawn into the conflicts as the wars’ ‘American theater.’ English colonies along the Eastern seaboard proved especially vulnerable to attacks from New France by French professional ‘troupes de la marine’ and allied Indian nations; after the Treaty of Utrecht ended Queen Anne’s War, British colonies had survived—even expanding to include ceded territory in New France.

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over thirty years of peace—the “Long Peace”—between Great Britain and France in Europe, and a cold war of sorts in the colonies. France doubled down on the Abenakis as its cordon sanitaire between New France and New En gland, recognized Port Royal was untenable and formally transferred it to the British, and began construction of the fortress of Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island to guard ap proaches to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the Grand Banks. Half-hearted celebrations in Boston over the acqui sition of Nova Scotia were short lived, particularly since the crown would devote only the barest resources (one half-strength infantry regiment) to dealing with the Acadi an-Mi’kmaq insurgency that washed over the new colony. Quashing the “rebels” and keeping the Abenakis at arm’s length while expanding the frontier across their lands would be the New Englanders’ responsibility alone. Find ing a modus vivendi with New France became a primary aim of New England’s new generation of military, diplo matic, and business leaders, who, based on the Puritans’ pathetic performance at the helm of state during the war, supplanted them as the dominant players in New England society. The greatest consequence of Queen Anne’s War was transforming New England from a Puritan theocracy to a Yankee stronghold of the British Empire. Within an other generation, Puritan New England would become a relic of the past. MHQ

TERRITORIES CEDED BY FRANCE TO GREAT BRITAIN VIA THE TREATY OF UTRECHT

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Dr. John Grenier is a prize-winning historian of books, including The First Way of War (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and The Far Reaches of Empire (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), and articles on colonial America.

Walker reached England just in time to learn that Brit ain and France had come to peace terms based on a parti tion of the Spanish Netherlands, Britain’s acceptance of a Bourbon on the Spanish throne, and Spain’s award of the asiento, the right of British traders to sell enslaved people in Spanish colonies. With the scribbling of a pen at Utrecht, Queen Anne’s War was over. New England’s efforts had meant nothing. The “Treaties of Utrecht” set the stage for

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the provisions and supplies with which they were willing to part, at prices they refused to negotiate. Sir Hovenden spent July wrangling with army contractors bent on draining the British treasury, and he grew increasingly sour on the entire expedition as the days passed. Nicholson stood pat at Fort Anne, waiting for the Mohawks and word that the armada was outside Québec before he put his army in motion.

Finally, in mid-August, Walker and his armada sailed for the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Inexplicably to Mather and his followers, God appeared to switch sides. On August 23, the British fleet foundered in the fog and currents near Île aux Oeufs. Seven transports and 900 sailors and sol diers succumbed to the St. Lawrence’s chilly waters. Shaken by the disaster, and still irked with the Bostonians, Walker sent the New England troops home while he and the redcoats sailed for Europe. Nicholson heard of Walk er’s catastrophe, and more importantly that the campaign had been called off, on September 19. After burning Fort Anne to the ground, and once his apoplectic rage sub sided, he disbanded his army. In 1690, after Frontenac re pulsed Phips at Québec, the French had named their church “Notre Dame de la Victoire,” but in 1711 they re named it, “Notre Dame des Victoires.”

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BAY HUDSON BAY

UPPER LOUISIANA

TERRITORYBRITISHTERRITORYBRITISH 17131702

European Colonies in North America, Before and After Queen Anne’s War

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Each British Army regiment reflects its unique military lineage in richly symbolic cap badges.

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he cap badge is a special part of British army headdress intended to represent the emblems of unique regiments. Regimental insignia derives from military traditions in the Middle Ages, and thus cap badge designs are a type of heraldry. Cap badges were first worn in 1897 following a period of changes in army headdress. Cap badges are typically made of metal but during World War II the British produced them from plastic due to metal shortages. Each badge is highly symbolic and reflects the history and achievements of the regiment it rep resents. More than just an identifying mark, cap badges connect soldiers with feats from past wars and the traditions of their regiments. Cap badges can include symbols or wording representing battle honors, ancient or heraldic imagery, mottoes, symbols related to the duties of particular regiments, and mythological figures or beasts. They can be worn on berets and slouch hats as well as peaked caps. The tradition continues in the British army today.

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This Australian slouch hat covered with cap badges was worn by General Bernard Law Montgomery in North Africa in 1942. Montgomery wore the cap badges of soldiers he commanded to identify with his men. He later adopted a black tanker’s beret with double cap badges.

By Zita Ballinger Fletcher

BADGES OF HONOR

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OF HONOR

A ROSE FOR SECRECY

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The Hampshire Regiment badge, dubbed “the cat and cabbage,” bears the symbol of the Royal Bengal Tiger due to actions in India and also features the Hampshire rose associated with Henry V. Nicknamed the “Tigers,” the Hampshires were the first British troops ashore on D-Day.

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SHERWOOD FORESTERS

DEATH OR GLORY

The badge of the Sherwood Foresters (Nottinghamshire and Derby Regiment) displays a stag and oak leaves relating to Nottingham and the forest known for its association with Robin Hood. Soldiers of the regiment famously created “The Wipers Times” trench newspaper during World War I.

BADGES

During World War II, soldiers of the Intelligence Corps could be found at Bletchley Park and undertaking covert missions. Their cap badge features a Tudor Rose symbolizing both British heritage and secrecy. The badge has been jokingly referred to as a “pansy resting on its laurels.”

OLDEST TANK REGIMENT

The Royal Tank Regiment is the oldest tank regiment in world history. Its badge features a World War I tank and the motto, “Fear naught,” with laurel leaves and an imperial king’s crown. This badge was famously worn by Bernard Montgomery during World War II on his black tanker’s beret.

THE CAT AND CABBAGE

Among the most famous British cap badges, the skull and crossbones of the 17th/21st Lancers was inspired by the death of General James Wolfe at the Battle of Quebec in 1759. Fatally wounded, Wolfe died victorious. The regimental motto “Death Or Glory” continues in use today.

Britannia, a helmeted woman with a trident, first appeared on Roman coins representing the British Isles. As an emblem of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, she was once allegedly mistaken by Spanish troops for the Virgin Mary, earning the men the nickname of “the Holy Boys.”

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A LEGENDARY STAG

The badge of the Seaforth High landers derives from the legend of Clan Mackenzie’s founder who in 1266 saved King Alexander III of Scotland from a raging stag, allegedly by severing its head. The head, depicted without a neck, is shown above a Gaelic motto meaning, “Help the king.”

WHERE THE FATES CALL

The Royal Berkshire Regiment gained a Chinese dragon as its symbol due to its actions during the First Opium War. This cap badge was frequently worn with a downward red triangle backing to represent a daring attack against Americans during the Battle of Brandywine in 1777.

IN AMERICA AND CHINA

As with most fusilier regiments, the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers cap badge is shaped like a fiery grenade. The image of England’s patron St. George slaying the dragon may derive from service under William of Orange. It includes a Latin motto meaning, “Where the fates call.”

THE HOLY BOYS

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The Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) formed in 1940 and became famous for deep-desert exploration and aiding commando raiders against the Germans in North Africa. The badge is said to have been designed by early recruit Gunner Grimsey based on a scorpion that stung him.

CASTLE OF GIBRALTAR

The Dorsetshire Regiment’s badge displays Gibraltar’s castle for service during the 1779-83 siege, an Egyptian sphinx for the capture of Fort Marabout from the French, and the Latin phrase for “first in India.” The regiment famously fought for Robert Clive at the Battle of Plassey in India.

BOBBY THE ANTELOPE

The Royal Warwickshire Regiment, first formed in 1674, was represented by an antelope. The symbol is said to have derived from a Moorish banner captured during the Battle of Saragossa. Men of the regiment adopted live Indian blackbuck antelope mascots named Bobby for many years.

DESERT EXPLORERS

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The Royal Army Veterinary Corps formed in 1903 and continues to be responsible for care of military animals, performing with distinction in World War I. Reflecting its duty to heal, it adopted the symbol of the centaur Chiron of Greek mythology, known for his mastery of medicine.

A MYTHICAL HEALER

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The sphinx of the Lancashire Fusiliers honors their fight against the French in Egypt in 1801. A laurel wreath recalls their heroism at the 1759 Battle of Minden, where despite heavy losses they disobeyed orders to stand down and broke a charge by French cavalry. The badge is shaped as a flaming grenade.

THE IRON DUKE’S OWN

THE MYSTERIOUS DRAGON

THE RED DEVILS’ WINGS

ANCIENT WELSH SYMBOL

Soldiers of the Parachute Regiment are known for their moniker “The Red Devils” and their cap badge first issued in 1943. The simple design features a winged parachute. British airborne troops earned renown during World War II. Among their notable leaders was General Richard “Windy” Gale.

The most famous member of the Duke of Wellington’s West Riding Regiment was the Iron Duke, who served in and commanded it. After his death, the regiment took his name and heraldic arms on the anniversary of Waterloo. The badge bears his motto, “fortune favors the brave,” in Latin.

MEMORIALIZING MINDEN

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The Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment) originated in 1572, used the symbol of a dragon since 1751 and wore it as their cap badge from 1896. Legends of the dragon’s origins differ but it is said to derive from the heraldic arms of Elizabeth I.

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This unusual leek cap badge is that of the Welsh Guards. The leek is a national Welsh symbol and was allegedly worn by Welsh soldiers in their caps as a means of identification, including by soldiers serving the Black Prince in the Middle Ages. This insignia continues in use today.

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Shanks Evans was a rip-roaring, whiskey-fueled fighter—and his own worst enemy. By Rick Britton WARRIORCONFEDERATEFORGOTTEN MHQ Autumn 2022 57

Nathan George “Shanks” Evans (1824-1868), an 1848 West Point graduate, accepted a South Carolina commission after his rebellious home state’s secession.

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vetted 2nd lieutenant, Shanks served out west with the 1st and 2nd U.S. Dragoons, attaining the rank of captain while gaining a reputation as an Indian fighter. When South Car olina seceded, he resigned his U.S. Army commission, of fered his services to his home state, and on February 27, 1861, was made adjutant general of South Carolina forces with the rank of major.

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Nathan George Evans was born in Marion, South Caro lina, on February 3, 1824. In 1848 he graduated from West Point—a lowly thirty-sixth out of thirty-eight cadets (al though 40 other classmates resigned or were dismissed before graduation)—where his classmates included future Union generals John Buford and John C. Tidball, and where Evans acquired his enduring nickname. A fellow graduate remembered Evans as “a wimble-jointed youth... who from his knock-kneedness was dubbed ‘Shanks.’” Bre

t was early on July, 21, 1861, the morning of the First Battle of Manassas (First Bull Run in the North), and Confederate Colonel Nathan G. Evans was already in a tough spot. In command of a small 1,100-man brigade, Evans was posted behind the Stone Bridge crossing of Bull Run, the extreme left of Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard’s 8-mile-long defensive line. And the Federal build-up in his front had begun early. It started with picket firing. Then, at first light, the enemy deployed 6,000 men opposite his posi tion. At 5:15 a.m., a large Federal 30-pounder Parrott rifle and other rifled cannon opened up on his concealed forces. Overmatched, Evans’ two 6-pounder smoothbores did not return the fire.

Present at the April 12-13 bombardment of Fort Sumter, the following month Evans reported to Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard at Manassas Junction, Vir ginia. Beauregard—after making Shanks a temporary col onel—stationed him on his Bull Run line in command of the 4th South Carolina; the 1st Louisiana Special Battal ion, “Wheat’s Tigers”; two companies of Virginia cavalry; and two 6-pounder smoothbore cannon. These forces comprised Evans’ demi-brigade two months later on the morning of July 21 when, while facing a division-size force, he learned that an enemy turning column of un known strength was on his flank and approaching fast.

Soon, Burnside brought the rest of his brigade into line—three more regiments and two more pieces of artil lery—and another Union brigade jogged up the road and deployed against Evans’ left. Simultaneously, more Federal artillery unlimbered facing his left. Shanks’s 900 men were now facing about 4,500 of the enemy. And another 9,000 were strung out along the road, heading his way. He was still determined, nonetheless, to hold on as long as possible.

When enemy skirmishers advanced, Evans deployed three of his companies along Bull Run. Now shouts and rifle fire echoed throughout the river bottom. Strangely, this combat continued, without intensifying, until 8:30 a.m., when Evans received word from a signal officer that a large Union flanking column had been spotted approach ing Sudley Ford, two miles to his left rear. The time had come for a decision, perhaps the most crucial of Evans’ entire life. He was no doubt grateful that his Prussian or derly was standing by with the one-gallon wooden whiskey jug he called his “barrelito.”

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Colonel Nathan Evans was a thoroughly unique Confeder ate officer. Stern-faced, with a full beard, high forehead, and piercing eyes that made him look like a church elder, he was—to the contrary—rough hewn, arrogant, ill-mannered, and highly disrespectful of orders and authority. His fondness for alcohol was legend ary. But Evans was also absolutely fearless, and in the Civil War’s early days he racked up quite an impressive record. By mid-war, however, his star quickly began to fade.

Shanks made his crucial decision quickly. Sensing that the force in his front was merely a diversion, he “at once decided to quit [his] position” and meet the enemy moving against his left. Leaving four companies at the Stone Bridge, Shanks double-quicked the balance to the south ern slopes of Matthews Hill. There he deployed his infan try to the right of the main road from Sudley Ford. Cavalry and artillery bolstered both flanks. Well-positioned, and well-covered by the reverse slope, Evans’ men were or dered to open fire “as soon as the enemy approached within range of [their] muskets.”

They didn’t have long to wait. At 9:15 a.m., the head of the Federal column—skirmishers from the 2nd Rhode Island, of Colonel Ambrose E. Burnside’s brigade—burst out of the woods and onto Matthews Hill, triggering a vig orous Southern volley. It was unexpected, but Burnside now threw forward the balance of the 2nd Rhode Island, as well as its attached 1st Rhode Island Light Artillery, which unlimbered its rifled guns but 200 yards from Evans’ line—point-blank range. Fortunately for Shanks, the gunpowder smoke that now shrouded Matthews Hill hid his small numbers.

The attack startled the enemy, but it was ill-timed. Re ceiving a close-range volley, Wheat’s Tigers staggered, and then tumbled backward. Its losses were heavy, and included Wheat himself, who took a bullet through both lungs. At first, Wheat’s failed attack seemed to be Evans’ last hurrah. But reinforcements soon arrived, 2,800 men under Briga dier General Bernard Bee, and Colonel Francis S. Bartow, and formed on Shanks’s immediate right. The enemy infan

try was nearby, within a few hundred yards. And the Fed eral artillery was firing furiously. “I felt that I was in the presence of death,” wrote one of Bartow’s men. “This is unfair; somebody is to blame for getting us all killed.”

Around noon, a new Confederate battleline congealed on Henry Hill, centered around a Virginia brigade com manded by Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson (soon to be nicknamed “Stonewall” by General Bee). Southern rein forcements extended Jackson’s flanks, and for that after noon vicious, close-range fighting raged back and forth across the Henry Hill plateau. Further Confederate rein

Robert Knox Sneden’s contemporary (1861-1865) map of the July 21, 1861 Battle of First Manassas (First Bull Run) illustrates Union and Confederate movements in the Civil War’s first major clash. Evans’ aggressive brigade command, outnumbered 5-to-1, heroically bought Confederate commanders crucial time to win the battle.

Federal reinforcements continued to arrive, and yet the Confederates launched another attack. Lurching forward, the Southerners faced a whirlwind of canister and musket fire. It was too much. “[T]he enemy by this time were in such large force that our position was no longer tenable,” wrote Evans, “and I ordered my command, now greatly scattered, to fall back.” The jumbled mob that was Evans, Bee, and Bartow’s commands streamed toward the rear. A few of Shanks’s men later resumed the fight with other units, but Evans’ demi-brigade no longer existed. He had sacrificed his little force but he’d bought precious time for Confederate forces.

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At approximately 10:45 a.m., thinking that he saw a weakness in the enemy center, Evans ordered Wheat’s Tigers to charge. Recruited from street toughs, former con victs, and Irish dockworkers from the port of New Orleans and dressed mostly as zouaves, these ruffians were com manded by the only man who could handle them: Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat, a six-foot-four, 240-pound lawyer who’d fought in Mexico, South America, and Italy. With the massive Wheat out front, saber waving overhead, the battalion surged forward, heading directly toward the Rhode Island guns. As the unit closed within 20 yards, many of the Louisiana rowdies tossed aside their rifles and drew their bowie knives. Others fired, taking down both artillerymen and horses. One Rhode Islander remembered this as “the most terrible moment of this terrific contest.”

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It was now October 21st, three months to the day since First Manassas, and once again Shanks was facing over whelming odds and a flanking force. Once again, he de cided to fight. He blocked the enemy’s division with the 8th Virginia, while he remained on the main road from Ed ward’s Ferry to Leesburg with three Mississippi infantry regiments. To contain the Ball’s Bluff incursion, Shanks sent 200 Mississippi infantrymen and 70 Virginia cavalry men under the overall command of Lieutenant Colonel Jenifer. As the fighting intensified, Evans rushed the 8th Virginia to Jenifer’s support.

Another battle, another wellfought victory for Evans. He’d handled admirably.forcesoutnumberedhis

forcements sealed the deal, however, and by 5:00 p.m. the Union army had disintegrated, the disorganized remains routing in retreat.

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Mid-afternoon, when the battle reached its crescendo, Colonel Baker had his 2,000 troops mostly arrayed across the top of the bluff facing a 10-acre open field. Unfortu nately, the Confederates had him encircled. At 4:30 p.m., Baker was hit by four bullets and immediately killed. In the confusion that followed, a disastrous Union breakout attempt triggered a disorganized retreat. Another Confed erate attack created a panic. “Then ensued an awful spec tacle,” penned a Virginian. “A kind of shiver ran through the huddled mass upon the brow of the cliff... then, in one wild, panic-stricken herd, [it] rolled, leaped, [and] tum bled over the precipice!” In the crazy rush down Ball’s Bluff—further impelled by Southerners firing from above—Union soldiers were impaled on the bayonets of those below. Boats along the river were quickly over crowded and sank. Northerners drowned attempting to swim back to Harrison’s Island. Over the next several days, blackened, bloated, Union bodies floated downstream past Washington City.

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Meanwhile, in the smoky camps outside Washington, Union Major General George B. McClellan was organizing what became his massive Army of the Potomac. He soon took an interest in maneuvering Evans out of Leesburg. When “Little Mac” advanced a 12,000-man division that threatened Evans from the southeast, Union Brigadier General Charles P. Stone ordered a 2,000-man brigade to feint an attack across Edward’s Ferry (thus also menacing

In the July 25 reorganization of General Beauregard’s forces, Evans was given a brigade comprising the 13th, 17th, and 18th Mississippi Regiments. Soon thereafter, when he was officially promoted to colonel—not brigadier general, the rank he thought he deserved—Shanks complained di rectly to General Robert E. Lee (then Confederate Presi dent Jefferson Davis’s military adviser). The disappointing reply read that Lee “could not make the arrangements.”

Evans from the east). Simultaneously, Stone sent a scouting party across the Potomac via Harrison’s Island and Ball’s Bluff (a precipitous 70-foot-high ridgeline fronting the river northeast of Leesburg). When it reported back that this northern route to Leesburg was lightly defended, Stone, the next morning, ordered 400 Massachusetts infan trymen across the Potomac. They quickly encountered Confederate pickets and a brisk skirmish commenced.

In the late morning, Union Colonel Edward D. Baker, a U.S. Senator from Oregon and personal friend of Abraham Lincoln’s, arrived at Harrison’s Island, took command, and made the disastrous decision to ferry more troops into Vir ginia. This was slow-going because of the paucity of boats. Gunfire suddenly ran up and down the lines. Colonel Hunton, now in command on the field, launched an attack that drove the Federals back. Running low on ammunition, he sent a message to Evans pleading for reinforcements. “Tell Hunton to hold the ground,” replied Shanks, “until every damn man falls.” Then Evans dispatched the 18th and 17th Mississippi Infantry Regiments to Hunton’s aid.

On August 11, 1861, Colonel Evans’ brigade was ordered to Leesburg, Virginia, a town just off the Potomac River 20 miles upstream from Wash ington, D.C. There, Shanks also took command of a bat tery of artillery—of the Rich mond Howitzers—the 8th Virginia Infantry Regiment under Colonel Eppa Hunton, and 300 Virginia cavalrymen under Lieutenant Colonel Walter H. Jenifer. Altogether, his forces numbered about 1,800 officers and men.

Another battle, another well-fought victory for Shanks Evans. Though not physically present on the battlefield,

The Confederate victory at First Bull Run (First Manas sas to the South) was exhilarating, but the losses were so bering. Confederate casualties totaled 1,982 men killed, wounded, or missing. Of the Southerners who’d stalled the enemy on Matthews Hill, Evans’ demi-brigade lost 144 men killed, wounded, or captured, while Bee and Bar tow’s losses numbered 686, a brutally high butcher’s bill. Additionally, Wheat was out of action, and General Bee was killed on Henry Hill, as was Colonel Bartow. “It is fit,” Beauregard (promoted to full general on July 21) noted in his after-action report, “that I should... commend to notice the dauntless conduct and imperturbable coolness of Col onel Evans.” Modern-day writers frequently cite Evans’ Matthews Hill stand as one of the main reasons Southern arms prevailed. “Indeed, Evans was virtually alone in the first crucial hours,” wrote historian William C. Davis, “when [the Federal] flanking column had to be stopped.”

SHANKS

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he’d handled his outnumbered forces admirably, identify ing the feints and rushing reinforcements to the actual threat. At Ball’s Bluff, Union losses totaled 1002: 223 killed; 226 wounded; and 553 captured. In contrast, Shanks reported losing 153 killed and wounded, and two takenTheprisoner.praisewas immediate. “The General congratulates you heartily for your brilliant success of yesterday,” read the message from Beauregard. “Sound the bugles, roll the drums, wave the banners, shout out the loudest huzzas, for the gallant Evans and his Spartan band at Leesburg,” added the Charleston Mercury. From the Confederate Congress and the Mississippi Legislature came official thanks: His native state voted him a medal. Evans’ coveted

Six weeks later, at Second Manassas (Second Bull Run in the North), on August 30, Evans—commanding his own

From top: Union artillery fires from the Potomac’s Maryland bank as Evans’ Confederates defeat a Union force at Ball’s Bluff near Leesburg, Virginia, October 21, 1861. He is promoted Brigadier General afterwards; Confederate bodies fill “Bloody Lane” at Sharpsburg, September 17, 1862. Evans called the battle “the greatest I have been in.”

Ordered to South Carolina on the request of the governor, Evans arrived in mid-December. On June 15, 1862, Shanks was put in charge of South Carolina’s First Military Dis trict. In mid-July, in response to Richmond’s call for more troops, Evans was dispatched to Virginia in command of the 17th, 18th, 22nd, and 23rd South Carolina Volunteers, the Holcombe South Carolina Legion, and attached artil lery. Over the next year, this force traveled so many miles that it became known as the “Tramp Brigade.”

promotion to brigadier general followed quickly, dating from October 21, 1861.

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From Kinston Evans’ brigade was ordered to Cape Fear, and from there to Charleston in mid-April. Dispatched in May to Mississippi to General Joseph E. Johnston’s army in its ultimately unsuccessful efforts to help relieve Confeder ate forces which soon thereafter were besieged in Vicksburg. Evans and his South Carolinians saw no action as Johnston dallied, Vicksburg fell on July 4th, and Evans’ command was back in Charleston by late August.

Dead Confederate soldiers, gathered and laid out for burial beside a Union artillery limber and one of its dead horses lie across the Hagerstown Pike from the Dunker church after the Battle of Antietam.

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Ordered to North Carolina in November, Evans, with

his headquarters at Kinston, took command of the Con federate troops between the Neuse and Roanoke Rivers. When a 10,000-man Federal force advanced against him on December 14, Shanks retired behind the Neuse and or dered a bridge burned. Unfortunately, not all of his men had crossed and 400 were forced to surrender. Kinston was subsequently looted by the enemy. Afterwards, stories cir culated that Shanks had been intoxicated at Kinston (as well as earlier during the fighting at South Mountain). Though fully acquitted in February 1863 by a court of in quiry, Evans felt that the negative publicity helped rob him of his much-deserved promotion to major general.

brigade and another under Hunton—participated in the wildly successful Southern attack that crushed the Union left. His South Carolinians suffered 734 casualties in this Confederate victory. “I was under fire the whole time,” he wrote his wife. “The woods in our rear are strewn with the dead Yankees. The stench is awful.”

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On the march to Maryland, Lee’s first invasion of the North and capitalizing on his Second Manassas victory, Evans argued with Brigadier General John B. Hood over the ownership of Federal ambulances captured by Hood’s men. Evans ordered Hood to turn them over to his South Carolinians. When Hood refused—“I did not consider it just,” he later wrote—Evans placed him under arrest. Army commander Lee interceded, however, ordering Hood to remain with his troops. The next month, Shanks’s brigade fought at both South Mountain on September 14, and Sharpsburg (Battle of Antietam) three days later, losing a total of 290 officers and men. “This battle was the greatest I have been in,” he penned his wife after Sharpsburg.

Evans’ court martial for disobedience of orders con vened in Charleston on October 2, 1863. Ripley charged Evans with three counts of disobedience: he’d failed to clear the timber fronting his lines; he’d failed to relocate his headquarters, as ordered; and he’d failed to assist a col onel who was on special duty “collecting boats and water transportation.” Later that month Evans learned that he’d been cleared of all charges, but because Beauregard de clined to publish the court’s findings, he was now officially in a state of military limbo. Pressed about the matter, Beauregard replied that Evans’ units, according to reports, suffered from low morale and poor discipline. Returning Evans to his brigade, stated Beauregard, would further reduce its effectiveness.

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SHANKS EVANS

In January 1864, Beauregard, under orders from the Richmond War Department, finally released Shanks from arrest, but he did not return him to command. Almost cer tainly, this was the consequence of Evans’ well-known al coholism exacerbated by his general cantankerousness. “Evans was difficult to manage and we found him so,” wrote Confederate staff officer (and later Brigadier Gen eral) Moxley Sorrel, notably Lieutenant General James Longstreet’s adjutant-general. Evans was much too fond of whiskey, “and there was the trouble.” Ordered, in March 1864, to take command of his brigade and report, unfortu nately, to General Ripley’s First Military District, Shanks Evans complained, asking to be assigned elsewhere. That opportunity presented itself on April 14 when he was in structed to proceed immediately to Wilmington, North Carolina. He never made it.

After the war, Shanks failed at selling cotton, founded a school in Cokesbury, and eventually became principal of another school in Midway, Alabama. Shanks Evans—the hero of First Manassas and Ball’s Bluff—passed away on No vember 28, 1868, likely succumbing to the lingering effects of his buggy accident. He was just forty-four years old. MHQ

several head wounds, the skin from his high forehead com pletely scraped away. Evans was slow to recuperate. During this period, a rancorous dispute with one of his brigade’s colonels, which unfortunately played out in the newspa pers, further stained Evans’ already tarnished reputation.

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Now Evans’ military career really began to unravel. When he assumed command of the 2nd Sub-Division of South Carolina’s First Military District, he immediately started quarreling with his superior, Brigadier General Roswell S. Ripley (a man whose fractious disposition equaled Evans’ own). Ripley issued orders that Shanks evidently resented. Then, following a tempestuous face-to-face, Ripley wrote Evans that “[N]o departure or delay in executing orders in any way [will] be countenanced.” Feeling he’d been repri manded, Evans wrote back relating his surprise “at the tenor” of his commander’s letter. An even bigger surprise arrived on September 20 when Shanks was relieved of command and placed under arrest. Evans appealed di rectly to Beauregard, then in charge of the defense of the southeast Confederate coast, but this letter produced only a disappointing response.

General Evans traveled to Richmond in the fall, hoping to receive an assignment that did not arrive until March 17, 1865, when the Confederacy was in its death throes. After President Davis and his cabinet fled Richmond on April 2 as Petersburg fell, Evans briefly joined the fleeing entou rage, helping to escort it to Cokesbury, South Carolina.

On April 16, while he was driving a two-horse buggy through downtown Charleston, a snapped trace caused the equines to rapidly pick up speed. This jolt broke the shaft, and Evans was violently yanked forward, headfirst, onto the unforgiving cobblestones. Onlookers who rushed to his side found him unconscious. He was bleeding from

Rick Britton is a historian and cartographer who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Two photos taken nearly 160 years apart show the ruins of the Stone Bridge crossing Bull Run at Manassas, Virginia in 1862 (top) and, rebuilt, in 2019. Retreating Confederates destroyed the bridge in 1862.

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By Zita Ballinger Fletcher

First developed to protect warriors in combat, full-body steel plate armor evolved into a status symbol for the nobility with multiple functions beyond warfare.

INFASHIONSTEEL From left: Besides a lance rest for jousting, this South German armor from the 1500s also features a helmet with a theatrical visor to allow a wearer to duel in character; ornate etchings, such as these made by a master craftsman in Augsburg, lent extra glamor to tournament armor worn by wealthy aristocrats. MHQP-VIENNAARMOR.indd 65 8/30/22 3:49 PM

From left: This rugged helmet was made for a tournament game called the Kolbenturnier, in which mounted opponents fought to knock the crest from each other’s helmets; this plate armor was designed for a jousting game called the Plankengestech. The latticed grandguard over the left arm formed the target area.

Althoughnaissance.developed initially for military purposes, socalled “suits of armor” took on different roles in society. Indeed, armor became a staple of social life and came to be viewed as a status symbol. Armor in fact performed vari ous functions, and each suit was designed to be ideal for a specific purpose—whether for combat, tournaments, festi vals or merely grand public events.

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which provide useful insights to modern historians. Nota bly, the exhibit provided glimpses of rarely seen items from Vienna’s Imperial Armory, excellent examples of the flexi bility of armor both as a military tool and as a statement ostentatiously declaring the wearer’s elevated social status.

The Vienna Art History Museum (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien) recently provided a highly detailed exam ination of the various forms, functions and types of armor in an exhibit entitled “Iron Men: Fashion in Steel” (Iron Men—Mode in Stahl) which ran from March through June, 2022 and showcased about 170 artifacts. The exhibit was Vi enna’s first major exhibit about armor and sparked detailed studies of European steel plate armor by leading experts

teel plate armor is commonly associated with me dieval times. However, studies reveal that the pro duction of plate armor fully encasing the human body dates back to the early 15th century and reached its zenith a century later during the Re

Suits of plated steel body armor were a European inven tion. Although commonly viewed as heavy and awkward by members of the general public today, they were in fact engineered to provide flexibility in combat as well as per sonal protection. Stefan Krause, curator of the Vienna Art History Museum, writes that a typical suit of steel armor weighed from between 40 to 60 pounds. He contends that

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“While some of these pieces were actually used in the bloodiest conflicts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, others were worn at ceremonies like coronations and pa rades,” wrote Ronald S. Lauder, Director of Vienna’s Impe rial Armory, in a museum book containing scholarly articles focused on the exhibition. “However all of them had one thing in common: breathtaking artisanship is present in every detail.”

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and Austrian artisans in particular took armor production to a whole new level. With special focus on the intricacies of metal-working and engineering, they created workshops that were more like small factories where craftsmen worked in assembly lines and suits of armor were mass-produced— as well as custom made by special order. Notable armorers including members of the Seusenhofer family of Innsbruck, Austria and the Helmschmied family of Augsburg, southern Germany in addition to numerous armorers in Nuremberg, Germany, produced armor en masse and designed custom pieces for high-paying clients. Master armorers were essen tially the managers of these workshop “factories”—although responsible for the armor which carried their unique “brand,” they did not personally create every piece. They were however very involved in designing custom-made pieces by special commission.

From left: Noblemen such as Austrian Emperor Maximilian II provided master armorers with measurements to get the best fit from their steel suits; helmet design, an ancient art, could incorporate crests such as horns; master armorers could alter the color of metal and mimic intricate textile designs to create imposing looks.

Armor production was overseen by master armorers, who honed their craft over many years and sold designs from workshops staffed by multiple employees. German

Steel plate armor was designed to withstand bladed, impact and bow-launched weapons from the early 15th to early 17th centuries, including polearms, swords, war hammers, arrows, crossbows and eventually early, primi tive firearms. However, the advent over time of more pow erful firearms featuring more efficient and reliable gunpowder, along with the development of increasing ly-advanced military technology eventually rendered steel plate body armor obsolete.

wearing a suit of armor is comparable to firefighters, sol diers, or astronauts wearing protective equipment today— for example, the combat load (body armor, weapon, ammunition, water, supplies, etc.) carried by a typical Army or Marine infantryman in field operations today weighs 70 to 100 pounds or more! The Vienna museum’s suits of armor weigh substantially less than their modern counterpart gear, demonstrating that heavy gear can still be efficient, functional and offer mobility.

Plate armor was created from sheets of metal cut and shaped by tools including shears, hammers and chisels. It was formed using various different shapes of anvils. Armor ers also used molds. Steel sheets were usually worked cold, although sometimes bulges in the metal were removed

The best plate armor fit like a glove, encasing its wearer.

Both armorers and their clients came up with creative ways to circumvent distance and get business done. Ar morers sometimes sent paper templates for clients to try on, mark measurements on and return in a “mail-order” type of phenomenon. At other times clients sent pieces of their clothing to armorers. German armorer Konrad Rich ter, based in Augsburg, once used stuffing to fill clothes sent to him by a client to create a well-fitting steel suit. In one unique case, Emperor Charles V of Austria in 1526 created models of his legs using wax casts and molten lead and sent them to Augsburg to obtain custom-made greaves and cuisses from Kolman Helmschmied.

Despite the meticulous craftsmanship needed to make good steel plate armor, expert armorers could accomplish their work with remarkable speed. Records show that Aus trian armorer Jörg Seusenhofer, son of armorer Hans Seu senhofer and nephew of the more eminent armorer Konrad Seusenhofer, could produce an output of 90 pieces of mass-produced steel armor a week at his workshop, with his employees hammering 30 breastplates and backplates simultaneously per day. His famous uncle Konrad wrote in 1514 that he could produce two full suits of armor for a member of Italy’s famous Medici family within a mere two months with some added time needed for gilding. Konrad employed six masters and journeymen for detail work plus six or seven addi tional craftsmen for intensive labor, as well as four grinders and polishers, and support staff consisting of two day-laborers and one blacksmith.

for example, contracted Konrad Seusenhofer to produce a suit of plate armor, which when finished had to be delivered from Austria to England. Master armorers did not usually travel but made exceptions for royalty and heads of state.

Historical records indicate that smithing workshops in Nuremberg also used women to assist with polishing armor pieces and some detail-oriented tasks. Armor workshops often became generational family businesses.

Although it might seem like a finished suit of armor’s appearance was permanently fixed, it could actually be modified later. Clever master armorers sometimes devel oped upgrades called garnitures, which were essentially interchangeable pieces a man could swap out from his suit of armor depending on what activity he was engaging in. For example, pieces in the garniture set could be inter changed for tournament activities such as jousting or hand-to-hand combat on the battlefield. Garnitures were fashioned according to a cohesive design so that they did not appear mismatched when modifying a suit of armor.

Embellishing armor became an art form unto itself. Armor pieces designed for aristocratic clients could be decorated using filing techniques, engraving, gilding, or riveting with copper alloy, and also painted—historical ev idence suggests that painted pieces of armor were more common than previously realized.

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FASHION IN STEEL

through heating, according to Fabian Brenker in the Vienna museum’s exhibition book. Each piece of plate armor was specially crafted to fit and move in unison with other pieces. Master armorers took care to ensure that all pieces fit to gether with precision and did not get stuck, chafe or open up awkward gaps exposing areas of the body when moving. Each piece had to be carefully aligned, and in fact no piece went into the final stages of production alone. Each element of the entire suit proceeded into the final stages of creation in unison. A single suit of steel plate armor could consist of as many as 200 individual pieces.

Master armorers faced a unique challenge in taking the measurements of their clients. The best plate armor fit like a glove, encasing its wearer like a hard but fluid exoskeleton. Measurement was thus essential to producing a truly fine— and perfectly functional—product. However, the high est-paying clients were often royals or nobles who commissioned special suits from across long geographical distances throughout Europe. England’s King Henry VIII,

The appearance of a particular suit of steel plate armor largely depended on its intended use. Wealthy clients com missioned armor for public appearances at specific events such as festivals, ceremonies and tournaments. Some suits of armor served purely decorative functions, while others, such as tournament armor, were intended not only to be festive but functional in combat. Armor also varied based on what type of combat it was intended for. For example, specific types of armor were made for jousting. Yet even jousting armor varied, Krause writes, depending on whether it would be used for high-impact jousting between individuals or jousting skirmishes between groups organized in “teams.”

From left: This plate armor featuring a frowning visor was likely worn for carnival processions; Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I commissioned armor for his son featuring gilded eagles and matching garnitures allowing for 12 different modified versions of the suit.

Mass-produced armor was typically made of cheaper material and made available for common soldiers. It was not usually polished. Custom designed suits, often com missioned by aristocrats, were embellished and at times polished to create mirror-like surfaces. Polishing tech niques included the use of large water-powered whetstones as well as smoothing using files. Extra polishing could be done using leather straps and emery mineral powder.

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Helmets worn with steel plate armor are often pre sumed to offer minimal visibility to knights on the battle field. While it is true that helmet visors provided narrow and limited fields of vision, additional vision was created by breathing holes in the visor. Larger breathing holes were ideal not only for vision but also to allow for inhaling more oxygen. Fewer and smaller openings in helmet visors did not allow for heat and carbon dioxide from exhalation to exit the helmet quickly, and limited breathing of oxygen could result in exhaustion, especially if the wearer was in volved in intense physical activity. Historical records show that improving visor design was an issue and knights re sorted to opening their visors in some instances despite the risk of exposing their faces in battle.

Another practical reason for this tectonic shift in outer wear was the fact that steel does not breathe and is not con ducive to air circulation, thus trapping body heat. Doublets and lighter garments beneath the breastplate functioned to drain heat and perspiration and prevented wearers from becoming easily overheated.

Changes made not only to armor but everyday garments made the male silhouette more visible. While mail was ini tially worn to protect the lower body, detailed armor plates

Steel armor was not only a matter of style but prestige.

“Steel armor was a symbol of strength,” writes Krause. “Few other forms of representation symbolically brought out such an expression of the wearer’s prestige, his dignity, his political and military might—or at least his aspirations towards them.”

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whimsical headgear for festivals. Some common elements used to decorate helmets included plumes of feathers, horns, crowns, wings, or ancient family crests. Gold appli que could also be used to create striking designs on helmets. The Landsknecht fashion trend during the Renaissance saw helmets made to appear like extravagant hats.

Garnitures however were not the answer to every prob lem, and armor was incapable of being modified past a cer tain point. Men could outgrow their armor—particularly in early adulthood and middle age. Although master ar morers could adjust suits of armor that did not fit their cli ents, or which needed some tweaking for comfort, it was simply impossible for even the best armorer to adjust a suit for significant alterations in size or weight. Thus, older ad olescents would have had to forsake a favorite suit of armor after experiencing late growth spurts. Middle-aged men with any notable ex panse in waistline would have been incapable of sur reptitiously squeezing back into a lean suit of armor from their agile youth. Most often, men were required to obtain multiple suits of armor throughout their lifetimes. Commissioning new suits was always expensive, but for soldiers, knights and men who held leadership positions or influence in society, it was necessary.Ceremonial armor could be shaped to imitate the fluid, curving intricacies of cloth, such as sleeves and skirts. Faux buttons and patterns could also be created, not to mention pictorial engravings that told stories in images across the wearer’s body. The creative possibilities were endless. South German Landsknecht mercenaries had a particular influ ence on fashion and also therefore steel armor. Seeking to distinguish themselves as an elite fighting force, they sported fancy clothing with dramatically puffed sleeves, bold colors and feathered hats. These mercenaries essen tially sparked a bouffant fashion craze that spread through out Renaissance Europe and quickly found its way into armorers’ workshops, and consequently into the portraits of nobles, military leaders and heads of state. Rulers and members of the aristocracy were quick to seize on the latest trends and show them off in the form of steel armor—it was a matter not only of style but prestige.

Although developed for military purposes, steel armor also revolutionized textile clothing. Men in Europe usually wore long tunics until about 1350, but a fundamental shift in men’s clothing style occurred during the middle of the 14th century as steel plate armor developed. The use of plated armor also required the use of close-fitting mail shirts. Soldiers and knights had already been wearing padded gambesons under mail or as an alternative to it in the 12th to 14th centuries. However, the development of more form-fitting steel armor pieces in the 14th century made tight padding beneath the steel too restrictive for movement. Quilted arming doublets with chainmail void ers or sleeves came into play, and from 1430 to 1470, padded material was restricted to protect the torso area. Tunics were thus no longer very practical and went out of style as shirts in general became shorter and tighter.

In contrast to plate armor, metal helmets had already been decorated since practically time immemorial, and thus they were not as much of a novelty as steel plate armor. However, like plate armor, helmets adapted in form and function from the 12th century well into the Renaissance. With alter nately ornamental or formidable appearances, steel helmets could appear as intimidating screens on the battlefield or

During the Renaissance, it also became fashionable to create costumes for festivals and tournaments harkening back to ancient times, or to faraway places. Noblemen sometimes cast themselves as heroes of ancient Rome or Greece, or even as mythological creatures, with classical or grotesque helmet designs.

FASHION IN STEEL

Zita Ballinger Fletcher is Senior Editor of MHQ

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Whatever its purpose, every suit of armor constructed for a knight or highborn man was intended to reflect nobil ity of character. Concepts of knighthood influenced mem bers of the gentry, with the result that knights and aristocrats—perhaps alternatively called “gentlemen”—were generally expected to be well-mannered, educated, and dis play social graces. They were different from common sol diers in that they were expected not to engage in undisciplined behavior such as public drunkenness. Brawl ing and disrespect towards ladies were also frowned upon. Thus, bespoke suits of armor created for high-ranking mili tary men and members of the aristocracy were intended not only to symbolize power but to reflect greatness of spirit.

expressing confidence and authority,” writes Viallon.

Steel suits of armor have been underestimated in modern times—incorrectly portrayed in popular films as clunky or dysfunctional relics from a bygone era. However, taking a closer look at the art, function and form of steel plate armor reveals much about not only the ingenuity of European artisans and craftsmen who developed it but also the high spirit of idealism that expressed itself in these sleek, strong bodies of metal. MHQ

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From left: A prominent codpiece and billowing sleeves feature in a 1523 creation by master armorer Kolman Helmschmied; gilded armor made for King Henry III of France likely served a purely decorative function.

known in German as the “modesty plate” (Schamplatte), has a unique history. It appears prominently in suits of armor and representations of Renaissance men. In her detailed study of codpieces in the Vienna museum book, Marina Viallon writes that figures wearing mail breeches with codpieces are depicted in stone funerary effigies from Germany from the late 14th century. Without padded cod pieces, common infantrymen had minimal protection for the groin area in battle. The Landsknechts, whose influence on fashion might have eclipsed their military achievements, began wearing exaggerated codpieces to broadcast virility. The practice spread throughout the aristocracy of 15th cen tury Europe—perhaps since noblemen wished to avoid the awkwardness of outwardly appearing less “virile” than com moners under their command.

for the legs and lower body were engineered, including the codpiece.Thecodpiece,

Codpieces were adapted into steel armor pieces. Al though worn during certain tournament activities, such as during single combat displays, they were never adapted for cavalry armor for practical reasons. Expensive to produce, they were sometimes decorated by gilding or engraving, and symbolized masculine power. “Worn like the prow of a ship, it was part of the body language of the ruling class,

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CITYEMBATTLEDTHE

A German gun crew mans an anti-tank gun on a street in Kharkov during the city’s first capture in October 1941.

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By Chris McNab

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Ukraine’s second-largest city today was one of the most hotly-contested objectives on World War II’s Eastern Front.

The 2022 battle of Kharkiv has a dark and ironic histori cal resonance. Formerly referred to as Kharkov, the city was one of the most violently contested urban battlegrounds on the Eastern Front during World War II. During that conflict Soviet forces, including legions of Russians, expended hun dreds of thousands of lives attempting either to defend or recapture Kharkov from the Wehrmacht. In the process, war rolled back and forth like waves through the city. In total, between October 1941 and August 1943, the city exchanged hands four times. But while the great battles of Stalingrad, Leningrad, and Kursk have become historically seminal, the repeatedly violent strug gle for Kharkov is less prom inent, despite the fact that the city’s fortunes were cen tral to the outcome of war on the southern Eastern Front.

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Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began on June 22, 1941. The immense surge of the Wehrmacht and Axis allies, totalling some 3.8 mil lion personnel, took three axes of advance: northern, cen tral, and southern. In the latter, Army Group South under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt drove deep into the Ukraine, assisted later in the campaign by temporary real locations of units from Army Group Center to the north.

By the end of September 1941, Army Group South was knocking on the door of Kharkov, just 50 miles to the east. The journey to that point had seen German victories that defied comprehension, often achieved through immense pincer actions that took cruel advantage of Red Army op erational inefficiencies. At the battle of Uman on July 15–August 8, for example, the German forces effectively destroyed the Soviet 6th and 12th Armies. But even this catastrophe was dwarfed by the German victory at Kiev (August 23–September 26), a Kessel (“cauldron”) battle producing the biggest encirclement in military history. Most of the Soviet Southwestern Front—some five armies and 45 divisions—was crushed, Soviet casualties totalling more than 700,000 (including more than 600,000 soldiers taken prisoner) and material losses of as many as 800 tanks and nearly 4,000 field guns.

Given the scale of these Soviet defeats in Kharkov’s proximity, the city’s immediate future looked perilous even as its population swelled to more than 1.5 million through a tidal influx of refugees. There was only a token line of resistance provided by battle-depleted divisions holding a thin and unconvincing line around the city. But by this time, there was no intention of performing a last stand at Kharkov. In October, the city began a herculean effort to disassemble, pack, and move the production lines and ma

Aside from its industrial identity, Kharkov was also a city of culture, renowned for its theater, visual arts, film, music, literature and science. Architecturally the city was proud and beguiling, imperious government offices and ornate public buildings crafted in styles ranging from the gothic to the modernist, with regional and national inflections. The suburbs had the full range of urban dwellings, from mid dle-class brick buildings through to basic wooden peasant housing made from wattle-and-daub with thatched roofs.

On the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Kharkov was the fifth largest city in the Soviet Union, with a population of about 850,000. Located in northeastern Ukraine, within quick reach of the Russian border, Kharkov was a critical piece on Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s military-industrial chessboard. It was a gateway city, a major road and rail communications hub connecting Crimea, the Caucasus, and Russia. Through the city’s railyards flowed black gold from the great oilfields of the Caucasus and the products of Ukraine’s immense agricultural lands—corn, wheat, barley, rapeseed, cooking oils. But Kharkov was also a powerhouse industrial zone. It was a center for both tank and aircraft production. During the 1930s, its factories were responsible for the development and production of the BT-5 and BT-7 fast tanks, the T-26 light tank, and the T-35 heavy tank. More significant, from the late 1930s Factory No. 183 (for merly the Kharkov Komintern Locomotive Plant) designed

the T-34 medium tank, destined to become the defining tank of Soviet armored forces (it entered production in the city in September 1940). The Kharkov Aviation Factory produced the Sukhoi Su-2 reconnaissance/light bomber aircraft, while other factories rolled out thousands of farm ing tractors and tracked prime movers for artillery. Add Kharkov’s other products, such as railway engines and elec trical components, and its strategic significance is apparent.

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n February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, be ginning the largest conventional military cam paign in Europe since World War II. In the northern area of operations, the primary target was Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv. The first Rus sian shells exploded within the avenues and apartment blocks on February 24 and within hours there were infantry clashes and armored combat in the suburbs. The city battle intensified through March and April as a vigorous Ukrainian defense held the Russians at bay. By mid-May the Russians had been driven out of Kharkiv. Whether this victory remains permanent or not, remains to be seen, at least at the time of writing.

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The second battle for Kharkov in May 1942 was a radically different affair from the first. The failure of the Wehrmacht to capture Moscow in December 1941 led both sides to re calibrate their ambitions. On the Soviet side, Stalin had been duly encouraged by the results of the winter counter

chinery of about 70 of Kharkov’s most important factories. The deconstructed factories were placed on hundreds of trains that took the industries out to safe locations further east. Kharkov was just part of the great Soviet industrial exodus of 1941, a movement that enabled the Soviet Union to maintain and then formidably increase its production of military materiel in the future fightback years.

The evacuation was complete on October 20, and it was timely. The German assault on the city began just three days later. The German 6th Army had made a major re gional advance on Belgorod and Kharkov, supported by elements of the 17th Army. The formation specifically as signed to capture Kharkov was LV Corps under General Erwin Vierow, composed of the 101st Light Division and the 57th Infantry Division, with assault gun support. The drive on the city began on October 23 with the 101st Light Division in the vanguard.

resistance, and by the next day, October 24, the city was entirely in German hands. Those soldiers and civilians who could flee had done so. Indeed, by the end of 1941 the pop ulation of Kharkov had plunged to about 300,000.

Those who stayed now fell under the black shadow of Nazi occupation. It was a characteristically brutal time, not least because the German casualties inflicted by hundreds of Soviet booby traps in the city incensed the occupiers. The sight of civilian bodies dangling from street lights and balconies became horribly commonplace. Worse was to come. The Sonderkommando 4 (SK4; Special Unit 4) of the Gestapo, under the command of Sturmbannführer Willi Neumann, set to work rounding up Kharkov’s Jews and placing them in hovel ghettos on the edges of the city. They were subsequently murdered in the countryside beyond. An estimated 20,000 Jews met their fate this way between November 1941 and January 1942.

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While the German troops were prepared for an inten sive urban battle, what they received was a walkover. With the main industries evacuated from the city, the Soviets now had a reduced rationale to defend the city, although at this time any defense would have been futile. The Wehr macht therefore rode and marched into Kharkov with little

Although Look magazine’s March 14, 1939 issue map and prophecy incorrectly predicted Europe’s “next war” starting place (it was September 1 in Poland), it emphasizes Ukraine’s vital importance to Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Hitler’s intention to refresh the German offensive spirit in southern Russia and Ukraine became Fall Blau (Case Blue), the vast German summer anabasis towards the Don and Volga Rivers and into the Caucasus, the operation that led to the conflagration at Stalingrad. The year 1942, there fore, was that in which mutual Soviet and German offen sive aspirations met head-on, the resulting fight ultimately deciding the outcome of war in Eastern Europe. Kharkov would be central to the struggle.

concentrated towards the operations in the southern sector, with the aim of destroying the enemy before the Don River, securing the Caucasian oil fields and taking the passes through the Caucasus mountains themselves.

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offensive around Moscow. In early 1942, he began work with the Stavka (Soviet high command) in planning a series of what would be overly ambitious offensives across the full length of the Eastern Front. Marshal Semyon Timoshenko took charge of efforts in the south, which concentrated on the liberation of Kharkov, Donbas, and Sevastopol. In January 1942, his Southwest Front and Southern Front had launched a major assault between Kharkov in the north and Artemovsk in the south. The three-army push resulted in a 60-mile advance before it ground to a halt in the face of trenchant German resis tance. Kharkov remained resolutely in German hands, but a deep Soviet-held salient now bulged out into German lines roughly centered on Izyum, a tactical contour that would have deep significance for what was to follow.

Across the lines, Adolf Hitler’s ambitions were if any thing even greater than Stalin’s. On April 5, 1942, he issued his grandiose Directive No. 51, which spelled out his longterm vision for the Eastern Front:

Pursuing our original plan for the Eastern campaign, the armies in the central sector will hold fast, those in the north will capture Leningrad and link up with the Finns, while those on the southern flank will break through into the Caucasus. Because of the late winter conditions, the availability of troops and resources, and logistical issues, these objectives can be achieved only one at a time. First, therefore, all available forces will be

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The second battle of Kharkov preceded the launch of Fall Blau on June 28, 1942. In May, Army Group South, now under Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, was in the plan ning phase for an offensive that would cut out the Izyum salient. But the Soviets beat them to the punch with an of fensive of their own launched in the sector on May 12. The Soviet plan brought together two Red Army fronts (South west Front and Southern Front), amassing six armies of 765,000 men and 1,500 armored vehicles, all under the supporting barrels of more than 3,000 field guns and mor tars. The operational hope was for two fast blows, a pincer strike towards Kharkov from around Volchansk in the north and from the Izyum salient to the south. All going to plan, Kharkov would be back in Soviet hands within days.

From left: In May 1942, Soviet Marshal Semyon Timoshenko disastrously failed to liberate Kharkov; German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein fought for Kharkov twice in 1943, winning in February-March, losing it in August.

The result was another catastrophic encirclement for the Red Army. There were ghastly scenes as the panicked Soviet troops, abandoning their vehicles and armor, at tempted to break out to the east, but German artillery and air power scythed down their ranks. By the end of May, the masses of Red Army troops who were still alive had sur rendered. Instead of the offensive reclaiming Kharkov, all it had achieved was adding some 240,000 Soviet soldiers to the casualty lists and depriving the Red Army of c. 1,000 tanks. It was clear that Soviet offensive capabilities were still rudimentary in both planning and execution, and equally that the Wehrmacht remained a first-rate army just as capable fighting in defense as well as offense. Kharkov, meanwhile, remained in German hands, and would do so until events of February–March 1943 brought a change of ownership, albeit a temporary one.

German Panzer IV tanks advance to attack positions on July 1, 1943. Four days later, history’s greatest tank clash, the Battle of Kursk, began. The Soviets followed their Kursk victory by liberating Kharkov August 23, 1943.

The German counteroffensive, feared by many in Stavka but ignored by Stalin, came on May 18, codename Opera tion Fridericus. Group Kleist, consisting of the 17th Army and 1st Panzer Army, drove into the Izyum salient from the south, while the 6th Army squeezed downwards from the north. By this time, the salient was crammed with the Soviet 6th, 9th, and 57th Armies and a mixed infantry and armor force known as Group Bobrin. On May 23, the German pincers closed at the base of the salient around Balakleya, and while the 9th Army had by this time largely

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The offensive was launched on May 12 at 6:30 a.m. Fol lowing a rippling artillery and aerial bombardment, the infantry and armor mass pressed forward, the outer hulls of the tanks thickly clustered with riding troops. Both arms of the pincers made penetrations, especially in the south. But some Soviet commanders, such as Military Commis sar of Southwest Direction Nikita Khrushchev (the future Cold War Soviet leader), were looking at the evolving tac tical map and sensed that they were falling into a trap. Two thirds of the offensive’s armor had been poured into the Izyum thrust, which aimed to take Krasnograd before swinging northwest to assault Kharkov itself. The problem was that the initially encouraging advances against weaker Romanian units were producing ever extending and more vulnerable flanks, whereas in the north some 14 German divisions had stopped the advance relatively quickly. The Izyum salient was beginning to look like an unsustainable bulge ready to be snipped off.

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escaped, the other Soviet units were trapped in an area measuring roughly six square miles.

By the end of the January 1943, everything had changed on the Eastern Front. Fall Blau had been brought to a crashing end in the destruction of the German 6th Army at Stalin grad. The Soviet counteroffensive, Operation Uranus, encir cled Stalingrad and showcased a more confident Red Army. In the south, Soviet forward momentum had carried it across the Don River and was making further advances to the west. Kharkov once again loomed into Stalin’s sights.

In the southern sector, Stavka looked to make two

major offensive drives. Operation Zvezda (Star) aimed to retake Kharkov and Kursk with Lieutenant-General Filipp Golikov’s Voronezh Front. To the south, the Southwestern Front under Lieutenant-General Nikolai Vatutin was tasked with moving through Voroshilovgrad, Donetsk, and reaching the Sea of Azov. This offensive was desig nated Operation Skachok (Gallop). Together, the offensives dangled the possibility of driving the Germans back beyond the Dnieper River.

Against all expectations, the Germans had reached the outskirts of Kharkov by March 7. By this time, Kharkov itself was principally garrisoned by the 62nd Guards Rifle Corps and troops of the 3rd Tank Army, plus an NKVD brigade. Alongside civilian laborers, the troops had turned Kharkov into something approaching a fortress city, with anti-tank ditches, street obstacles, gun emplacements, and interlocking fire positions. T-34 tanks were used to create mobile direct-fire artillery. Unlike in 1941, this time the Red Army was not going to relinquish Kharkov without a fight.

Zvezda and Skachok were launched on January 29 and February 2 respectively. The German Army Group B (Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs) and Army Group Don (Field Marshal Erich von Manstein) struggled to resist an onslaught across a huge front, fighting with divisions al ready thinned out and exhausted from months of combat.

Unlike the previous effort to take Kharkov, the early 1943 offensive initially had an aura of unstoppability. The Vo ronezh Front took Volchansk, Belgorod, Oboyan, and Kursk, and had moved into the outskirts of Kharkov by February 11. The main forces defending the city were divi sions of the SS-Panzer Corps. This Waffen-SS formation was new to the Eastern Front, but it contained three of the Waffen-SS’ most venerable and formidable combat divi sions—the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (LSSAH), Das Reich, and Totenkopf—fighting under the umbrella of Army Detachment

For Manstein, it was clear that Stalingrad.anothercouldKharkovbecome

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Although few at the time might have perceived it, the retak ing of Kharkov was one of the final major German victories on the Eastern Front. From July 5 to August 23, the Wehr macht fought the Red Army in the titanic struggle at Kursk. It was the largest clash of armor in history (and also a mas sive, often overlooked, infantry battle). For the Germans, the outcome of the battle was arguably a tactical defeat, but certainly a strategic one—all subsequent German offensives were essentially localized efforts to slow the gathering pace of final defeat.

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Corps began a bold drive south from Krasnograd to Pavlo grad, cutting across the forward edges of the Soviet push by the Southwest Front. Once the corps reached Pavlograd by February 24, it hinged north and, now accompanied by forces of the 4th and 1st Panzer Armies, began a northern drive back towards Kharkov. Although the fighting was unforgiving, and both sides were taking heavy casualties, the Red Army soon found itself going into reverse.

THE EMBATTLED CITY

The German offensive phase of the third battle of Khar kov was a crowning achievement in Erich von Manstein’s career as a commander. On February 19, the SS-Panzer

From March 8, the Waffen-SS and German Army troops wrapped around the perimeter of Kharkov and began to push down its streets. The resistance was fierce. The Waffen-SS and Army troops had to clear the streets and buildings one by one, often making the advances hunched behind tanks and half-tracks as mobile pillboxes. But for the Soviets, the fact that by March 15 the city was virtually encircled indicated that a prolonged defense was pointless. With the 62nd Guards Rifle Division acting as a covering force, the surviving Soviet defenders made a breakout to the east on March 18. Kharkov’s traumatized citizens were now back under German rule.

The Kursk battle changed the immediate future of Kharkov. The Soviets retained the Kursk salient, and now the German-held territory north and south of this salient became objectives for Soviet counteroffensives. Stalin was eager to wind up the offensive dynamo in these sectors, even as the final acts of Kursk were playing out. From July 12, the northern sector, centered on Orel, was assaulted by the massed armies of the Western Front and Bryansk Front. Orel would fall by beginning of August, by which time the Red Army unleashed another great offensive against the southern sector below Kursk. Operation

Manstein’s move incensed Hitler, who actually flew to the nearby town of Zaporozhye to challenge Manstein face-to-face. The army commander held his ground, saying that it was more imperative to counter the Soviet drive to wards the Dnieper, but he also convinced Hitler that char acteristic Soviet over-extension was raising the possibility of a counterattack to reclaim Kharkov. Hitler approved the plan, his decision-making speeded by the fact that Soviet advances were raising the possibility that his very own po sition might soon be surrounded.

Lanz.For Manstein, it was clear that Kharkov could become an other Stalingrad if he didn’t withdraw his forces from the city. Unfortunately for him, Hitler forbade such a move, the German leader now firmly in the “not one step back” phase of his strategic thinking. Yet against Hitler’s orders, Manstein sensibly pulled his troops out from the lines in and around Kharkov. For the first time since October 1941, Kharkov was back in Soviet hands.

The rolling power of the offensive brought a quick result with the capture of Belgorod on August 5. Kharkov would be more obstinate. The Soviet ground attack swung wide to the west, evidently in the attempt to envelop Khar kov and cut off routes of retreat. The German forces were showing tenacity in defense, inflicting casualties many times greater than their own. Yet Manstein, of course, saw the writing on the wall, and from August 12 began to for mulate plans for a retreat with his senior commanders. With weary predictability, Hitler forbade any retreat, but the unsustainable pressure of the offensive meant that

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The forces surging toward Belgorod and Kharkov, and driving on to the Dnieper, were truly vast. The Voronezh, Steppe, and Southwest Fronts contained more than 1.2 million men and c. 3,000 tanks, an offensive thunderclap that broke unequally over German forces numbering about 200,000 men and several hundred armored vehicles. Manstein (leading 6th Army) and his subordinate com manders knew the Soviet offensive was coming, and had readied their defenses. The three main defensive forma tions were Army Detachment Kempf on the northern and eastern approaches to Kharkov (with XI Corps in the city itself), three Waffen-SS divisions to the west and south of city, and the 4th Panzer Army to northwest. The arrival of additional tanks, assault guns, and 8.8cm flak guns just prior to the battle bolstered the German capabilities. But Kursk had taken its toll. Nearly all German units and for mations were understrength, ammunition stocks were low, and logistics into Kharkov were precarious. Furthermore, the Germans were now fighting an enemy growing ever

Polkovodets Rumyantsev is also known as the Belgorod–Kharkov Offensive, after its two key objectives.

Clockwise from left: German occupiers march through Kharkov’s Dzerzhinsky Square (November 1941); A January 1942 posed photo shows Soviet soldiers in the Kharkov sector several months before the second battle for the city (May 1942); German infantrymen pass by a burning farmhouse outside Kharkov, June 1942.

The Belgorod–Kharkov Offensive, the fourth and final battle for Kharkov, roared into life on August 3, 1943. There were notable changes in the Soviet game-play, aside from the mass pressure applied by armor and infantry. Air power, for example, was used influentially by a resurgent Soviet Air Force. Constant aerial missions were flown deep behind the German lines to interdict road and rail supply to the frontlines; 2,300 ground-attack sorties were flown between August 6 and 17 alone.

more confident and, crucially, more competent.

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Colonel-General Erhard Raus, commander of XI Corps, formed a powerful defensive line of armor and antitank guns on high ground on the northern flank. Soviet tank and infantry formations were virtually massacred in their initial attempts to break this line, harried also by bombing and strafing runs from Ju 87 Stukas. In total, the Red Army would lose more than 1,800 tanks during the Belgorod–Kharkov Offensive. But the German defensive line was more about keeping open a corridor of retreat than it was about defeating the enemy. German casualties grew ever greater, ammunition ran low or out, and logistics collapsed. The defense was simply unsustainable and pointless, and on August 21 Manstein gave the order to pull out of Kharkov. Two days later, Soviet forces entered the city permanently.

But perhaps the most important evolution across the

battles of Kharkov was within the Red Army, rather than within the German forces. Put simply, between 1941 and 1943 the Soviets learned how to take the theory of modern war and put it into practice, aided by the vast acceleration in the production of military materiel. (As an example of the latter, in 1942–43 Germany manufactured 18,243 tanks and self-propelled guns; the Soviets produced 48,535.) Key improvements in Soviet warfighting by 1943 included: more coordinated armor/infantry operations; better use of ground-attack air power; more productive intelligence gathering; skill in deception operations; less political inter ference in command-and-control structures; more devas tating use of artillery. The dreadful losses the Soviets suffered at Kharkov, and indeed in all the battles up to the end of the war, still exposed the weakness of a mass, cen tralized army with low levels of education and often poor training, just as they did the tactical excellence of the German soldier. But the Red Army, by the last battle of Kharkov, had become professional enough to drive through to its goals, even if part of the reason for success was the willingness to embrace persistent attrition on both sides. Thus the Soviets could lose numerous local battles, but win the war. Applied to the situation in the Ukraine today, that lesson is still worth our consideration. MHQ

events would play out against Hitler’s self-deluded wishes.

Chris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. He is the author of the forthcoming book Waffen-SS Soldier vs. Soviet Rifleman: Rostov-on-Don and Kharkov 1942–43 (Osprey, 2023).

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This nightmare landscape littered with dead Soviet soldiers and destroyed vehicles (Kharkov–Izyum sector, May 1942) illustrates the hellish combat German and Soviet forces endured during the four battles of Kharkov, 1941–1943.

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The four battles for Kharkov can be used as a benchmark for the fortunes of wider German and Soviet forces in 1942–43. These were years of change. In 1941, Germany was in the ascendant, and Kharkov was captured with ease. In 1942, Kharkov was the objective of a new-found Soviet offensive spirit, but the spirit wasn’t matched by command competence and by tactical or operational ability. In 1943 in the third battle of Kharkov, Manstein demonstrated that the Wehrmacht was still capable of reversing Soviet gains, but by the fourth battle its capacity to keep doing so had been fatally weakened by attrition and a succession of withering defeats.

IMAGES)(GETTYIMAGESHERITAGE MHQ Autumn 2022 81 REVIEWSARTISTSPOETRYBIGDISPATCHESCLASSICOFCULTUREWAR82SHOTS87889094 Via artifacts and displays, The Mexican American Military Experience exhibit at the First Infantry Division Museum at Cantigny Park in Wheaton, Illinois, west of Chicago, reveals “Through all the conflicts in our nation’s history, Mexican Americans were among America’s patriots.” The 61 Hispanic Medal of Honor recipients—from the Civil War to Afghanistan—attest to their courage and patriotism. The exhibit features a Distinguished Service Cross, representing one of two of andawardssecond-highestAmerica’svalorwon(KoreanVietnamwars) by the Army’s first Hispanic general, Texas-born Richard E. Cavazos (1929-2017). The exhibit runs through 2022’s Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15–October 15), closing November 7. Visit military-experienceexhibit/the-mexican-american-fdmuseum.org/ MHQP-COWINTRO-DSC.indd 81 8/31/22 4:31 PM

In 1906, after his release from Japanese imprisonment as a POW, McCullaugh published With the Cossacks: Being

CLASSIC DIVERSITYDISPATCHESONTHE MARCH

Francis McCullaugh (1874-1956), born a British subject in Omagh, County Tyrone, Ireland, was a prolific journalist, author, and war correspondent, principally but not exclusively for James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s New York Herald Active during the first third of the 20th century, McCul laugh apparently did not shy away from getting close to the fighting. He personally covered—and usually then published books about his experiences—numerous worldwide hotspots: the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War alongside Russian troops (With the Cossacks, 1906); unrest following the Russian Revolution of 1905 (New York Times feature articles, 1906); the 1908-1909 Ottoman Empire’s Young Turk Revolution and Abdication of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (The Fall of Abdul Hamid, 1910); the 1911-1912 Ita lo-Turkish War in Tripoli (Italy’s War for a Desert, 1912); the 1918-1922 Allied Siberian Intervention in the Russian Civil War (A Prisoner of the Reds, 1921); the 1926-1929 Cristero War in Mexico (Red Mexico, 1928); and the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War (In Franco’s Spain, 1937).Perhaps the Irishman occasionally got a little too close to the action: he was made a prisoner of war by the Japanese in March 1905, and was taken captive by Bolshevik Red Army forces in Siberia during the Russian Civil War. Nevertheless, McCullaugh lived until age 82, passing away in White Plains, New York, in 1956.

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The war also demonstrated the deadly folly of launching massed, human-wave attacks against positions heavily defended by modern firepower and well-protected by extensive fortifications, a lesson the Russian Army failed to learn in this war and which World War I armies on both sides failed to heed in 1914-1918. Although the bloody land battles fought by Russian and Japanese troops in Manchuria (notably the February–March 1905 Battle of Mukden, involving a total of 600,000 troops and producing 165,000 casualties) caused the war to drag on for 18 months, it began and was settled by naval battles. The stunning Japanese victory at the Battle of Tsushima Straits in May 1905 sealed Russia’s fate and stands as one of the most decisive naval battles in history. Mediated by U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the war was signed on September 5, 1905. Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation.

Pacific Squadron and some warships from Vladivostok’s Siberian Military Flotilla).

It was one of the inmetforcescompositemostthatevertogetherAsia.

The genesis of the following classic dispatch was in late 1903 while McCullaugh was living in Japan and working for an English-language newspaper, The Japan Times Realizing the ever-increasing likelihood of war breaking out between Japan and Russia over both nations’ competing claims in Manchuria and Korea, McCullaugh responded by studying the Russian language, relocating to Port Arthur (today, Lüshun Port, China), and securing a job with the Russian newspaper, Novi Krai (New Land). Port Arthur, leased from China by Russia, was then the major Russian naval and military base in the Far East, home port to nearly 50 vessels of all sizes (battleships, cruisers, torpedo boats, gunboats, minelayers) of Russia’s Eastern Fleet (1st

To Japan, Port Arthur, therefore, was an inviting target, and a surprise Japanese naval attack (without a prior formal declaration of war—sound familiar?) the night of February 8-9, 1904, initiated the Russo-Japanese War. McCullaugh quickly parlayed his Russian connections into a correspondent’s assignment with the Imperial Russian Army—specifically, accompanying Lieutenant General Pavel Mishchenko’s 7,500-man East Baikal Cavalry Brigade as it moved from Mongolia into Manchuria, fighting not only regular Japanese forces but also encountering Chinese “Honghuzi”—irregular mounted robbers and bandits recruited by the Japanese to harass, sabotage, and attack Russian forces.

By Francis McCullaugh

The 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War was not only a stark preview of what the brutal combat nine years later in World War I would be like, it shocked European powers when upstart Japan humiliated the Russian Empire, one of the West’s major powers. The war featured virtually all of the weapons and tactics used later in the Great War: maga zine-fed rifles; rapid-firing machine guns; barbed wire; extensive trenches and fortifications; and indirect artillery fire (extended-range artillery using an artillery forward observer, linked to the firing battery via wire or radio communications, to accurately adjust fire onto a target).

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the Story of an Irishman Who Rode With the Cossacks Throughout the Russo-Japanese War (London, Eveleigh Nash). It is a 400-page book recounting in great detail his experiences accompanying Mishchenko’s cavalry brigade during the several months between his joining and his capture by the Japanese in March. The book’s Chapter IV, “Mishchenko’s Raid,” describes the cavalry brigade’s ultimately unsuccessful 12-day excursion in mid-January 1905 attempting to destroy millions of rubles worth of Japanese supplies at Yingkou, a Manchurian port city near the base of the Liaodong Peninsula (Port Arthur is at the peninsula’s tip). The raid failed, and Mishchenko’s cavalry brigade suffered heavy casualties. However, as the brigade of numerous Cossack and dragoon regiments set out on the raid, McCullaugh provided a vivid, highly-detailed, and extremely colorful description of the incredibly diverse collection of nationalities and fantastic array of disparate ethnic groups that then comprised the Imperial Russian Army as a whole. Certainly, it validates McCullaugh’s claim that “The advance of Mishchenko’s [brigade in] three columns was the best thing from the spectacular point of view which I saw during the war.”

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HUN RIVER, MANCHURIA, Sunday, January 8, 1905—

The day before we started [on General Mishchenko’s Yingkou Raid] was the Russian Christmas Day [January 7], which, like good Christians, we observed by eating “kootia” [ceremonial rice dish] and “varenookha” [honey/fruit-in fused “moonshine”] and by holding high revel. Strangely enough, it was in the midst of this revel that I first heard of the [January 2] fall of Port Arthur. Colonel Orloff had ridden in, late at night, and his first words, uttered in a low tone to a brother officer, were “Port Arthur is fallen, is fallen.” But few of the officers and none of the men knew it until weeks had elapsed. Mishchenko had with him, in ad dition to his twelve regiments [seventy-two cavalry squad rons] of dragoons and Cossacks, twenty-two cannon, that is almost three batteries. Two of these batteries fired melanite [explosive shell], the rest shrapnel. All of them were, of course, horse batteries, six horses pulling each gun. There were, besides, four Maxims [machine guns] with the Dagestan regiment, but these useful little guns were never, I think, used during the advance southward. We marched in three columns. The right column, which consisted of the Primorsky, Nerjinsky and Chernigovsky

By 1904, Imperial Japan’s rapid transition into a modern industrialized nation three decades after the 1868 Meiji Restoration produced an outstanding navy and an army of well-led, superbly armed, highly-disciplined soldiers.

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Dragoons and the Frontier Guards, was commanded by General [Alexander] Samsonov, and until the main force reached the Taitsze [River] it traversed the west bank of the Liao-ho [River]. The central column consisted of the Zai baikal [Transbaikal] Cossacks, that is, of the Verkhnyudin sky and Chitinsky regiments, and of the Ural Cossacks. It was commanded by General Abramov, the leader of the Ural Cossacks, and General Mishchenko accompanied it. The left column consisted of the Don Cossacks and of the Caucasian brigade. It was under the command of General Tyeleschov and was followed by the Zaibaikal battery, the soldiers of which bear in front of their black busbies a metallic scroll commemorating their bravery during the [1900] Boxer troubles.

On the afternoon of the first day all our different col umns met at a village called Sifontai, east of the Hun River, and what a picturesque gathering that was! When I attempt to catalogue the different forces which composed it, I feel inclined, like Homer, to call upon the daughters of Jove to assist me, for of myself I am not able to do justice to so vast a subject. It was one of the most composite forces that ever met together in Asia, a force worthy of “the mighty behe moth of Muscovy, the potentate who counts three hundred languages around the footsteps of his throne.” It comprised Buryats, Tunguses, Bashkirs, Kyrgyz, mountaineers from Dagestan, Tartars, Cossacks of Orenburg, Cossacks from the Don, children of the men who had won such victories in Italy under [Alexander] Suvorov, who had captured Napoleon [October 25, 1812, but rescued by French gren adiers] at Maloyaroslavets, who had chased Jerome Bona parte from his [Westphalian] throne, who had pitched their tents in the Champs-Elysees [1814-1815], Buryats, whose race has produced “the most terrible phenomena by which humanity has ever been scourged . . . the Mongol Genghis Khan,” descendants of the men who had followed the Scourge of God, flat-nosed Kalmyks whose very name recalls that great flight to China which [Thomas] De Quincey has immortalized [Revolt of the Tartars], descen dants of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, that semi-religious order of bloodthirsty celibates who made their lair in the islands of the lower Dnieper River.

Mishchenko’s force seemed to contain within it all the elements of a Yellow Peril, combined with a faint hint of a Moslem Peril. Their green banners embroidered with red inscriptions in Arabic—all texts from the Koran—the Cau casians rode past on their graceful Arab steeds. Among them was a representative of every race and language in the Caucasus. They were those Mohammedan mountaineers who held Russia at bay for a century. All of them were splendid at single combat, and bore swords of the best tem pered steel. The young men were often singularly hand

Lieutenant General Pavel Mishchenko (1853-1918), an ethnic Cossack himself, commanded the several thousand cavalrymen of the East Baikal Cossack Brigade accompanied by McCullaugh from January to March 1905.

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uary 12. As is well known, each Russian regiment of foot has attached to it about one hundred cavalrymen. As, under the conditions which then prevailed at the front, these horsemen were unnecessary there, they were all drafted for the time being into Mishchenko’s detachment, which there fore amounted in all to some 7,500 men. From this force different parties were from time to time detached for the purpose of cutting the railway. The four Maxims went with the Dagestan regiment of the Caucasian brigade, but it was not the Caucasians who were supposed to work these guns. Trained men had been brought from St. Petersburg for that purpose. They were under the command of Captain Chap lin, a promising young officer who had served in the artil lery at Warsaw, but who was unfortunately the first man to fall on the occasion of this expedition.

Besides, there was the mounted infantry, a fine body of men who should alone have carried Yingkou station on Jan

if Russia did a wise thing in sending these men out to Manchuria at all, for if there is any truth in the

the saddle and was telling his still prancing steed, in tones with more of admiration in them than of anger, that he “was naughty, very naughty.”

Many widely varied Cossack units, like this Krasnoyarsk Regiment at its Siberian camp at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, comprised the brigade that carried out Mischchenko’s Raid. It failed disastrously.

However they may rank as regular soldiers, there can be no doubt that in private life these Mohammedans are fierce. The first day I spent with them I saw one man draw his sword on another over some dispute about fodder. An officer, who was standing by, wearily told him to put up his weapon. “Reserve it for the Japanese,” he said, and then he resumed an interrupted conversation about the latest opera at Bayreuth.Idonotknow

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some, with figures like Greek statues, oval heads, bold noble profiles, large dark eyes, delicately chiseled lips, and most murderous dispositions. It is impossible for me to give an idea of the proud dignity of their bearing, the grace of their movements and the fire of their look. They had got amongst them an extraordinary and valuable collection of fine Circassian swords and daggers, with damascened blades, often inlaid with gold, and always channeled so as to let the blood spurt out. Latin invocations to the Blessed Virgin inlaid in some of the blades seemed to indicate that they had changed hands as often as the poignard [Cauca sus stiletto-like dagger] to which [Mikhail] Lermontov de votes one of his poems [“The Dagger” 1838]. The sheaths of their numerous daggers terminated in a metal-drop tip suggestive of blood. Their carabines they carried in covers of sheepskin with the hair outside, and they had also on their stirrups sheepskin covers, which are admirable pro tections against the cold. Later on, I regretted exceedingly not having got such stirrup-covers myself.

The same thing always happened when a Caucasian mounted his horse. One caught sight of him poised for a moment on one stirrup while the horse reared and pranced; then there was a flop of variegated petticoats, a jingle of spurs, a rattle of weapons, and the rider had tumbled into

None of those Caucasians spoke any Russian, a fact which detracted seriously from their value as scouts. To make matters worse, there were in our little force of Cauca sians about fifteen completely different languages, and it was very seldom that a man spoke more than two or three of those languages at most. The Russians explained this di versity of tongues by saying that every invader of Europe had passed through the Caucasus, leaving amid these mountains a handful of his people who immediately pro ceeded to form a new community, until, finally, that coun try became the ethnological museum it is today.

To make our crowd still more variegated, there was a full-blooded negro in it. He had been born in the Cauca sus, spoke only Russian, and seemed to be exactly on an equality with his white comrades-in-arms. With the excep tion of Burtin, I was the only non-Russian at this memora ble trysting-place in the valley of the Liao-ho.

However much I might try to persuade myself that the Cossack is a thing of the past, I could not fail to be im pressed by this great gathering of the men who guard the Russian frontier from the shores of the Pacific to the shores of the ebony [Black] and amber [Baltic] seas, and whose very designation, recalling the names of great rebels like [Ivan] Mazepa, Stenka Razin, [Yemelyan] Pugachev, the “False Dimitri,” made me see, dimly, gigantic upheavals more Asiatic than European, and made me hear faintly, as at a great distance, the hoof-beats of innumerable hordes of horsemen galloping over the steppes. The Cossacks cannot fail to be interesting, for they are the only reminder we have left of the time when the population of Europe was fluid and nomad.

How many shades of Christianity, Mohammedism, La maism, and Buddhism there were amongst us I dared not inquire. When at set of sun I saw the Mohammedan pray with face turned towards Mecca, I felt as if I were in a Turk ish army. When I saw the Russian kiss the collection of ikons and crucifixes that he wore around his neck, I felt as if I were among Crusaders. When the indolent Mongol laughed at both Mohammedan and Christian, I felt that I was back in my own century. We were an overflow from the great Muscovite crucible, in which all sorts of strange undi gested elements boil and bubble without ever uniting. MHQ of

The names of the officers with whom I rode were all historical. Some of them are borne by the oldest Cossack families—Grekoff, Plaoutine, Platoff, Kaznetzoff, Krasnoff. One young colonel from the General Staff, who accompa nied us bore the name of that gigantic barbarian who loved Catherine the Great and who strangled her Imperial hus band. He is a polished diplomatist, a great linguist, a land owner, a courtier, an influential man at headquarters. He rode on this occasion a horse which was almost worth its weight in gold, and, according to his invariable custom on such occasions, carried in his pocket a copy of one of Shakespeare’s plays. His knowledge of English literature and of every nuance of expression in the English language is extraordinarily extensive.

accusations of barbarity the Japanese have made, these Caucasians must—although nearly all of them are “princes”—have been the guilty parties. They are decidedly picturesque, it is true, but they are not much good against plain unimpressive foot soldiers.

The Russian non-com missioned officers amongst these Caucasians belong to the Cossacks of Kuban and Terek, the “line of the Cau casus,’’ names of rivers which recall bloody battles and the memory of the unhappy Lermontov. Up till a short time ago they fought continuously against these fierce Tcherkasses [North Caucasus ethnic group], whose arms and equip ment they have adopted, and whose very features they seem to have borrowed—a fact which is explained by a venerable custom these Cossacks still have of massacring all the men in an “aul” [fortified village] and conveying the best looking women to their “Stanitsy“ [Cossack military settlements] in order to marry them.

At the head of the Caucasian brigade was Prince Orbe lian, of an ancient Georgian family, which claims to be de scended from two Chinese princes who obtained in 240 A.D. the protection of Artaxerxes, whose son Sapor trans ferred them with their followers to Armenia. Prince Orbe lian did not, however, take part in the raid, being sick at Harbin, but his place was taken by an equally picturesque figure, Prince Nakhchivansky, a Mohammedan nobleman.

Then again, they came to Manchuria under a misappre hension. They thought the war with Japan would be run on exactly the same lines as the war with China [Russia’s June-November 1900 invasion and occupation of Manchu ria]; and they cannot be blamed for falling into this mistake, since their officers also thought so. As soon as they had as certained that the Japanese were not naked savages, armed with bows and arrows, they got discontented and wanted to go home, but were refused permission to do so, whereupon many deserted and were imme diately caught and shot.

Like the Transbaikal and unlike the Ural or Don or Black Sea Cossacks, these Caucasians have no lances, but depend altogether on their good sabres. Among them rode the grandson of Imam Schamil [Imam of Dagestan 1834-1859], who within the memory of living men troubled Russia with a guerrilla warfare [during the Caucasian War 1817-1864], which he conducted with a genius and energy scarcely par alleled in history. The St. George’s Cross, which the aged standard-bearer of the Dagestan regiment wore, was won on the day that Schamil surrendered [September 1859].

The colonel of the regiment to which I was attached was called Bunting, and was of English descent. One of the offi cers, a polite and well-educated young man from the Guards, was of Tartar descent, as his name, Turbin, indicates. An other was young [Frenchman, Ferdinand] Burtin, at one and the same time lieutenant in the Arab cavalry of France and centurion in the Mongol Cossacks of Mishchenko.

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DIVERSITY ON THE MARCH

None

Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., a trailblazing warrior and combat fighter pilot and commander in World War II and Korea, became the U.S. Air Force’s first African-American brigadier general in 1954. His father, a “Buffalo Soldier,” overcame racial prejudice to become the U.S. Army’s first AfricanAmerican brigadier general (1940). Born 1912 in Washington, D.C., the younger Davis entered West Point in 1932, persevered through bigotry, and graduated 35 of 275 cadets in 1936. Among the first African-Americans admitted to pilot training (1941), he was an original Tuskegee Airmen pilot. Davis flew 67 World War II combat missions, commanded the first African-American air unit (99th Pursuit Squadron), and later the famed 332nd “Red Tails” Fighter Group. In 1953, he led an F-86 Sabre Jet wing in Korea, and commanded 13th Air Force during the Vietnam War (1967–1968). He was promoted four-star general on the USAF retired list (1998), died aged 89, July 4, 2002 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

BIG SHOTS

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Shakespeare’s “Henry’s” pre-battle speech is a masterpiece of leadership and psychological manipulation, playing upon all the emotions and motivations of why men fight, despite facing certain death. “Henry” first dismisses pleas for more men by asserting, “The fewer the men the greater share of honor.” Next, he appeals to his soldiers’ vanity, assuring them their battlefield heroics will be eternally remembered and they “Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d.” Finally, he pledges to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with them, sharing their fate, since “he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother.” Shakespeare may never have led men in desperate battle, but he knew instinctively how to do it!

William Shakespeare

In his historical play (written circa 1599), King Henry V’s, first line, Shakespeare’s “chorus” invokes “a Muse of fire” for burning inspiration capturing the play’s drama. He most famously succeeds in his renowned “St. Crispin’s Day speech,” magnificently imagining how Henry must have inspired his greatly outnumbered “band of brothers” (6,000 Englishmen—mainly longbowmen backed by dismounted, armored men-at-arms—facing 15,000-20,000 French mounted knights), cut-off and surrounded deep inside France, to ignore the overwhelming odds and seize victory from certain defeat.

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APOETRYMUSE OF FIRE

In the historical Agincourt battle, October 25, 1415, the stunning against-the-odds English victory (6,000 French dead—10 times Henry’s losses—plus 2,000 French knights captured for ransom) was wrought by the deadly efficiency of Henry’s longbowmen (protected from French cavalry by sharpened stakes) and a timely downpour creating a muddy quagmire “killing ground” on the English battle line’s front.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is universally acclaimed as the English language’s most famous writer and greatest dramatist, authoring 39 plays and 157 poems (overwhelm ingly sonnets). England’s acknowledged national poet, even his plays are judged poetry—written in iambic pentameter, principally blank verse, sprinkled with block prose passages. An astute observer of the human condition, Shakespeare’s peerless genius brilliantly plumbs its depth and breadth.

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Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host That he which hath no stomach for this fight, Let him depart; his passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his purse: We would not die in that man’s company That fears his fellowship to die with us.

King Henry V Act IV, Scene III—The English Camp Henry responds to his cousin, Earl Westmoreland’s wish for more soldiers.

O do not wish one more!

This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered, — We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

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If we are mark’d to die, we are enough To do our country loss; and if to live, The fewer men the greater share of honor, God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,

And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors, And say, To-morrow is Saint Crispian: Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say, These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.

rt has chronicled wars about as long as they have been fought. Usually created by the winners, war art generally focused on the genius of the coun try’s military leaders or the heroism of its fighting men. Accuracy in depicting the experience of war has tended to take second place to propa ganda inspiring the masses; but by the 1800s a degree of authenticity in uniforms, weaponry and mise-en-scène became the preferred norm.

On September 10, 1914, Nash enlisted in the Home Ser vice, as a private in 2nd Battalion, the Artists’ Rifles, 28th London Regiment of Territorials. His initial duty was pri marily to guard the Tower of London and in December he married writer and women’s suffragist Margaret Odeh. Aside from the occasional Zeppelin raid on London, the war seemed a distant Channel away, but that sheltered sol dier’s life changed again in August 1916, when he under went officer training, and after earning his commission, in February 1917 Second Lieutenant Nash got his first frontline deployment with the Hampshire Regiment at St. Eloi in the Ypres salient.

Through often nightmarish images, Paul Nash’s paintings reveal the bitter truth of the horror soldiers—and the land itself—endured in two world wars.

By Jon Guttman

saw Nash back in Ypres, now with an

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As he once put it, “My love of the monstrous and magical led me beyond the confines of natural appearances into unreal worlds.” Nash also wrote poetry and plays, and gave shows of his paintings in 1912 and 1913 before achieving wide public success with his Tree Topped Hills in the summer of 1914. That same summer, however, was to set his budding artistic career down a different path as the June 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo followed by a succession of declarations of war set Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Russia, France, Germany, Bel gium and Britain on the road to mutual Armageddon.

Nash initially tried to follow his maternal grandfather’s profession, but failed the Naval Entrance Examination and instead pursued art at several schools, including St. Paul’s School, the London Council School of Photo-Engraving and Lithography, and the Slade School of Arts. He was poor at drawing figures, but developed an enthusiast’s flair for landscapes, especially those with an ancient background.

From top: Nash was fascinated by landscapes—as this one, Wittenham (1935) demonstrates—leading to his early, pre-World War I, artistic fame; The nightmarish landscape in The Menin Road (1919), Nash explained, shows “the sinister district of ‘Tower Hamlets,’ perhaps the [wars] most dreaded and disastrous locality.”

The horrific battlefield reality of World War I changed that. As individual valor became a struggle for survival under a deluge of industrialized mass destruction, the twentieth century’s surrealism cultural movement in art, literature and other media—an attempt to portray reality via the unconscious mind’s “super-truth” (surreality) using bizarre, fantastic and grotesque dreamlike or nightmarish images—became just as relevant and acceptable a means of capturing war’s true nature as the best researched and most meticulously “realistic” artwork of the nineteenth. Argu ably, the most famous example of surrealist painting de picting war is Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s cubist-influenced summation-in-metaphor of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Yet another example of art capturing a surreal vision of war is the prodigious body of work chronicling two world wars by the English artistic polymath Paul Nash.

The Flanders sector was between offensives when Nash arrived and although he knew of the past carnage inflicted on the area, he wrote that with the spring the land seemed to be slowly healing itself. On May 25, however, Nash fell into a trench and broke a rib, necessitating his hospitaliza tion in London on June 1. A few days later his regiment took part in an assault on Hill 60—and was slaughtered. Nash fully realized that an arbitrary twist of fate—his acci dental injury—had saved his life. While in hospital, he worked up 20 sketches he’d made, most of which were spring landscapes, into more polished works in ink, chalk andNovemberwatercolors.1917

SURREALARTISTS VISIONS OF WAR

Nash was born in Kensington, London on May 11, 1889, the son of barrister William Harry Nash and Caro line Maude, the daughter of a Royal Navy captain. When his mother began showing signs of mental illness, in 1902 the family moved to Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, hoping the rustic atmosphere would improve her condition. It didn’t—Caroline died at age 49 in a mental institution in 1910—but it was in Buckinghamshire that Paul began his love affair with landscapes, particularly the iron age hill forts atop Wittenham Clumps, an early inspiration to which he would frequently return.

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In 1921, Nash collapsed and underwent a week of drift ing in and out of consciousness, a condition that the doc tors classed as “emotional shock.” His asthma and the death in June 1921 of one of his best friends, Claud Lovat Fraser, may well have contributed to his condition. He sought re covery in the natural world, his output including overviews of the coasts of Kent and Dorset, Chiltern and Sussex downs, Romney Marsh and the ancient sites in Avebury, Wiltshire. In the process, they reflected his increasingly surrealNashapproach.andhis wife had to scramble for their living throughout the interwar years, but Nash was helped con siderably by his talent and education in design, and his ver satility in its use. Besides its being a fundamental part of his abstract, surrealist artistic style, he applied it profitably to such practical items as book jackets, book plates, ceramics, fabrics, posters and even a complete bathroom. Another application was inspired by another friend and colleague, actor, director and theater designer Gordon Scott, who got

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Although Nash’s abstract depictions of what he saw were well received, they betrayed an ambiguity toward the ordeal that the soldiers on both sides had to endure. His landscapes, once a celebration of nature, now constituted an accusation of what he regarded as the war’s desecration of nature. On November 16, he intimated to his wife: “It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist in terested and curious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting for those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy Disillusionmentsouls.”

notwithstanding, Nash, like his com batant brother officers, carried on with his front-line art ist’s duties right to the end of the war, and after being discharged he and his wife moved to Dymchurch in 1919. In that same year The Menin Road went on a delayed public exhibition. Commissioned by the Ministry of Information

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in 1918 as a tribute to the heroism and sacrifice of the Brit ish soldiers for the “Hall of Remembrance”—a memorial that ended up never being built—the painting’s human subjects were, typically, all but lost in the landscape, which artist-critic Wyndham Lewis described as “an epic of mud.”

assigned batman and chauffeur, and an official commission to create propagandistic art. The British offensive around Passchendaele (July–November 1917) had been going on for three months and the landscape that he had earlier viewed with such hopeful optimism now showed the effects of incessant rain, flooding, and devastating artillery fire.

Nash’s abstract Battle of Britain (1941) was his attempt ‘to give the sense of an aerial battle in operation over a wide area and thus summarises England’s great aerial victory over Germany, during the Blitz.’

By 1944 the fortunes of war had turned in the Allies’ favor, and Nash marked the occasion with one of his most abstract works, Battle of Germany. Contrasting with the faraway, inviolable moon—a stabilizing, natural presence in many of his landscapes dating back to World War I—a German factory is subjected many times over to the manmade horrors that the Luftwaffe had previously visited on British cities.

After a second world war broke out in 1939, Nash was appointed by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to resume his work as a full salaried artist, this time attached to the Royal Air Force. Nash created a great number of paintings during the war’s first year, several of which de picted shot down German aircraft, his subjects ranging from recovered shot-down Messerschmitt Me-109s to the more abstract Battle of Britain, contrasting the free contrails of British fighters with the more orderly German forma tions, and Totes Meer (dead sea), in which a Channel sea scape is encrusted with the carcasses of German aircraft.

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The last 18 months of Nash’s life were spent in Dorset in what he called “reclusing melancholy.” Although his asthma prevented him from flying in aircraft, he had been coming to terms with death using aerial metaphors, stat ing that souls of the dead were “winged creatures...not unlike the ghost moth.” Paul Nash died aged 57, of heart failure related to his years of asthma at Boscombe, Dorset on July 11, 1946. MHQ

Nash to adapt his style to the stage. During the 1930s he was a contributing art critic for The Listener. Although he never called himself a modernist, Nash established himself in abstraction and surrealism by 1933, when he became a driving force in the formation of the British modernist group Unit One.

Jon Guttman is MHQ Research Director and the author of numerous books on World War I aviation, most recently Aerial Foreign Legion (Aeronaut Books, 2021) and Grim Reapers (Aeronaut Books, 2016).

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Although his works were well-received by the public, the Air Ministry did not take approvingly to Nash’s mod ernist style, nor to his unwillingness to concentrate on por traits of aircrewmen. In December 1940 the WAAC canceled his full-time contract; but its chairman, Kenneth Clark, appreciated Nash’s talents enough to be left aghast at his own committee’s decision. In January 1941 Clark per

The totally abstract ‘smoke and explosions’ in his Battle of Germany (1944) ‘are violently animated where forms are used arbitrarily and colours with chromatic percussion with one purpose, to suggest explosion and detonation.’

suaded the WAAC to lay aside five hundred pounds for his work in aerial combat, starting with two series of watercol ors, Raiders and Aerial Creatures

Ever since the Continental Army came into being on June 14, 1775, America (the United States of America after July 4, 1776) has been protected and de fended by countless legions of officers and enlisted men who’ve dedicated their lives to performing years of self less service to the republic. Most of them have served, essentially, anony mously—for every famous Dwight D. Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, or George S. Patton there are thousands whose names are known and remem bered only by their families, descen dants and service buddies. Throughout this country’s history, these dedicated men and women formed the backbone of America’s military forces—ground, air and the sea services.

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The fact that their names never became famous is, to them, of no great consequence. Fame and renown are not why they faithfully served for years-long careers. To them, it was a “calling” (historians use the phrase “military priesthood”) that drew them to dedicate the most productive years of their lives to selfless service to their country. Even though we’ll likely never read or hear many of their names, those of us today enjoying the free doms they protected—and sometimes fought, bled or died to preserve—owe them a debt that can never be repaid.

ASERVICESELFLESSREVIEWSVietnamMemoir

By Philip Gioia 376 Reviewed2022.Stackpolepages.Books,$29.95byJerry Morelock

Gioia’s account of his selfless service in two Vietnam tours is detailed and typical of the experiences of a combat

One of these members of the legions of the “selfless service unknowns” is Philip Gioia, author of Danger Close!: A Vietnam Memoir. Gioia, a Virginia Mil itary Institute (VMI) 1967 graduate, served on active duty in the Army from 1967–1977. He did two combat tours in Vietnam: his first with 82nd Air borne Division, February-April 1968 (then medically-evacuated for wounds); and his second in 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) April 1969-April 1970 (again medically-evacuated, this time for malaria). During his two tours, Gioia received two Silver Stars for valor, a Bronze Star with “V” for valor, and two Purple AlthoughHearts.marketed as “A Vietnam Memoir,” that doesn’t capture the book’s true nature. In fact, Gioia doesn’t get to Vietnam until page 214 when he arrived at Chu Lai under mortar attack via U.S. Air Force C-141 transport during the 1968 Tet Offen sive. His riveting Vietnam combat ac counts are compelling, exceptionally revealing of the war’s combat experi ence; yet, focusing only on Vietnam sells the memoir short—it’s much more than just another “Vietnam memoir” among an ever-expanding number in that crowded genre.

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he leaves Army active duty in 1977) in short (from paragraph-length to sever al-pages-long), single-topic descrip tions revealing memorable events and notable experiences shaping his up bringing, character and values. The effect of this unusual format creates a “life diary” of Gioia’s first 30-some years. Each of the memorable vignettes describing events and experiences es sentially is a revealing “diary entry,” so by the time he enters VMI in 1963 readers understand why he chose the path of military selfless service. The “life-diary entry” format, although un usual,Gioia’sworks!father was a career Army Transportation Corps officer who, due to Italian language fluency served in World War II’s Office of Strategic Ser vices (OSS). Therefore, Gioia grew up a “military brat”—child of a career ser vice member. Although frequently moving growing up (living in New York, Japan, Italy, West Point, Virginia, Alabama), the experience exposed him to the wider world and taught him self-sufficiency while, importantly, in ternalizing the guiding concepts “Duty, Honor, Country.” Readers will com pletely understand his decision for mil itary service as he’s commissioned an Infantry 2nd Lieutenant upon his 1967 VMIGioia’sgraduation.entryonto active duty at Fort Bragg, North Carolina with the 82nd Airborne Division is superbly-re counted, and his detailed, several-chap ters-long accounts of experiences at Fort Benning, Georgia, at the 3-week Airborne School, followed by the gru eling, physically- and mentally-de manding 9-week Ranger course at Benning, Dahlonega (“mountain” phase), and Eglin Air Force Base, Flor ida (“swamp” phase) is the absolute best, first-person account of these two demanding army training courses I’ve ever read (this reviewer attended both). Advice to anyone wondering what “Jump School” and “Ranger School” are really like is: Read pages 120-188 of Gioia’s book!

In fact, Gioia’s book is greatly en hanced by an unusual format. Al though presented in chronological order divided into 22 chapters, he es chews most books’ “standard” narrative format. Instead, Gioia’s book presents his life (from his 1946 birth into an Ital ian-American family in Greenwich Village, New York City to shortly after

infantry officer troop leader. Yet each of the approximately 3 million Americans who served in Vietnam (ground, air and naval) uniquely experienced the war and Gioia can only recount how he fought and endured his own Vietnam War. Phil’s superb Danger Close! does that exceptionally well.

The Battle of Carrhae is usually noted as a classic case of a mighty Roman army ineptly led to disaster against Parthian horse archers fighting in their element. In No.382 of Osprey’s “Cam paigns” series, a British antiquity histo rian mines the primarily Roman chronicles to reconstruct Carrhae 53 BC. What emerges is indeed a mis match of military resources and doc trines, but above all a tragedy of politics and treachery. The death march to the Mesopotamian traderoute town lying between two hitherto allies began with the return of Marcus Licinius Crassus to the Roman consul ate. In spite of his central role in de stroying Spartacus’ slave army in 71 BCE, Crassus’s prestige was in decline alongside two rising political rivals: Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus; and Caius Julius Caesar. Crassus only declared war on the Parthians to add a conquest to his laurels, an act raising so many hackles in Rome that Crassus was compelled to use his considerable wealth raising his own army of merce naries, many of them foreign.

CHINESE PrimerESPIONAGE:COMMUNISTAnIntelligence , by Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil (Naval Institute Press, $32.95)

Using hundreds of Chinese sources to reveal the history and current state of Chinese Communist intelligence operations, the authors present an unprecedented look into the murky world of Chinese espionage.

Jerry Morelock is MHQ Editor.

By Nic Fields 397 Reviewed2022.Ospreypages.Publishing,$24.byJonGuttman

JOHN BROWN’S RAID: Harper’s Ferry and the Coming of the Civil War, October 16-18, 1859, by Jon-Erik M. Gilot and Kevin R. Pawlak (Savas Beatie, $16.95).

GRANT AT 200: Reconsidering the Life and Legacy of Ulysses S. Grant, edited by Chris Mackowski and Frank J. Scaturro (Savas Beatie, $29.95).

New & Noteworthy

WHEN HELL CAME TO SHARPSBURG: The Battle of Antietam and Its Impact on the Civilians Who Called It Home, by Steven Cowie (Savas Beatie, $34.95).

Jon Guttman is MHQ Research Director

THE LAST WORDS: The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley (Charleston Athenaeum Press, $24.95). Reveals in their own written and spoken words at the war’s conclusion what commanders and soldiers on both sides really thought they had been fighting for in Ameri ca’s bloodiest conflict.

THE NORMANS: A History of Conquest, by Trevor Rowley (Pegasus Books, $16.95.) Comprehensive account of how, from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries, the Normans conquered England, Ireland, Wales and much of Scotland, then founded kingdoms ringing the Mediterranean.

Essays by leading Grant scholars celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of a man who had a towering impact on U.S. history, offering fresh perspectives on his military and presidential careers.

While the Roman Republic teetered on disaster at the hands of three ambi tious egos—until Carrhae reduced the rivals to two—the Arsakid kingdom of Parthia also measured its leaders in coups détat, exiles and murder. Such was how Orodes II became king when

Describes the events and subsequent nationwide repercussions of the daring, 36-hour attack and standoff at the U.S. arsenal by fiery abolitionist Brown and his 19 followers.

NARVIK 1940: The Battle for Northern Norway, by David Greentree (Osprey Publishing, $24.00). One of the publisher’s “Campaign” series, the book covers the naval battles and land operations by Norwegian, British, Polish, French and German forces to control the iron-ore port in northern Norway.

Crassus marched on his realm and that environment explained why, after his charismatic general Surenas won the battle, Orodes had him put to death as a potential rival. Indeed, Orodes would later die at the hands of his son, mur dered by his wife 35 years later. But, re gardless of which side, there would ultimately be no winner among Car rhae’sHistoriansprotagonists.estimate 5,000 to 10,000 members of Crassus’ army survived in Parthia. This book also investigates the intriguing possibility of Chinese histo rian and court official Ban Gu ( CE 32-92) that some of those survivors, or their offspring, were selling their swords to Han armies—and that their descendants live on in western China. A worthily mysterious ending to a battle with intrigue at every turn.

RUSSIAN inWARFARE:INFORMATIONAssaultonDemocraciestheCyberWildWest , by Bilyana Lilly (Naval Institute Press, $34.95) Analyzes how the Russian govern ment uses cyber operations, disinfor mation, protests, assassinations, coup d’états and other secret operations to destroy democracies from within, and what can be done to defend against Russia’s onslaught.

Details how the bloodiest day in American history, September 17, 1862, shattered the lives of the town’s and the surrounding area’s civilian population by following the struggles of individual families.

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Carrhae, 53 BC: Rome’s Disaster in the Desert

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“My God, where are you going with our Eiffel Tower?” pleads a tiny French soldier in this circa 1914–18 moraleboosting German postcard. The giant smiling German replies, “I want to plant it at the Brandenburg Gate!”

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