War and Game

The army was the pillar of the regime. The key to the success of Napoléon’s Grande Armée was his organizational innovation of making army corps under his command self-sufficient armies. On average, they numbered 20,000 to 30,000 men, usually commanded by a marshal or senior general, and were capable of fighting independently. Each was composed of two or more infantry divisions of about 12,000 men, a brigade of cavalry (about 2,500 men), and six to eight companies of artillery (each about 100 to 120 men). In addition, each corps had a company of engineers, plus a headquarters staff, medical and service units, and supply train for baggage and ammunition. Napoléon commanded that each army corps never be more than a day’s march, about 20 miles, away from any other so they could support each other on the battlefield. The elite of the army was the Imperial Guard, another of Napoléon’s creations—a body of handpicked, seasoned troops, a kind of personal army at the heart of the imperial forces.

The never-ending Napoleonic wars had an impact on many French homes. Military service was mandatory for all able-bodied Frenchmen between the ages of 20 to 25, but rich people could be exempted by paying for a replacement. A reasonable estimate of the number of Frenchmen conscripted between 1800 and 1814 would be about two million out of a population of 28 million. Judged by the standards of 20th-century wars, this was not an excessive proportion. In theory soldiers were eligible for discharge after five years, but after 1804, most discharges were only for serious medical reasons. The veterans were responsible for training new recruits, thereby combining experience and young talent. Promotion was always based on personal merit and valor in combat. Over time, needs changed these basic rules.

The weight of the Napoleonic wars was also a burden on allied and dependent European countries, which were required to supply military contingents. At times Napoléon’s army included soldiers from Italy, Denmark, Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands. In 1804, Switzerland provided 16,000 soldiers. The states of the German Confederation were heavily drawn on for contributions. In 1805 Bavaria provided 30,000 men, Cleve-Berg 5,000 in 1806, Westphalia 25,000 in 1807, Saxony 20,000 in 1812. The Grand Elector of Württemberg, having been a loyal ally of France during the war of 1805, was rewarded by the title of king, but the new realm was obliged to supply a contingent of 12,000 soldiers in 1806. Other smaller states, like Waldeck, Anhalt, Hessen- Darmstadt, Mecklemburg, Lippe, Nassau, Baden and Prussia, had to provide contingents too. When Napoléon decided to invade Russia in 1812, his Grande Armée included soldiers of twenty different European nations. These foreign troops, raised from regular national draftees or volunteers, did not always remain loyal, though. Napoleonic armies also included some foreign mercenary units, notably Irish exiles, deserters and mercenaries (“Wild Geese”). In August 1803 an Irish battalion was formed, growing to regiment size in 1809; it was known as the “Third Foreign Regiment” in 1811, and was disbanded in 1815.

As supplies were frequently lacking, the Napoleonic soldier was often a villainous looter, a pitiless brigand forced to live off the countries he passed through, friend or foe. Yet a military career remained an enviable possibility and high-ranking officers, generals and marshals could build up huge fortunes. Eighteen marshals of France were created in 1804 as Grand Officers of the Empire, receiving army command but also large fiefs and revenues. Napoléon believed, a bit simple-mindedly, that devotion could be bought with money and honors. Besides the large emoluments that went with certain offices, there were also considerable fringe benefits. Marshal Berthier, for example, was the happy recipient of an annual sum of 1,300,000 francs. The Empire believed devoutly in the glories of military life and in romantic if hazardous feats of arms, so Napoléon exploited to the utmost his soldiers’ burning desire to distinguish themselves on the battlefield. He developed to a fine art the cult of personality, and most French soldiers of the ranks worshipped the Emperor. His familiar manner, simple uniform (grey frock, typical bicorne or uniform of a colonel of the guard), and demagogic bonhomie aroused great enthusiasm. Old hands, young ones, and grognards (grumblers) of the Imperial Guard had an almost fanatic reverence and admiration for the Petit Caporal (Little Corporal), as they affectionately nicknamed Napoléon. Many soldiers, rejoicing and basking in the reflected glory of the Emperor, never complained about their efforts and sacrifices, since fame, honors and booty were their rewards. New recruits and veterans, at least those who returned home safe and sound between campaigns, could show off their glittering medals and handsome uniforms. War was inconvenient but for some men it was also glamorous. The deep attachment that existed between Napoléon and his soldiers was not a gratuitous invention, nor a posthumous legend; it was a reality, which continued as long as his victories lasted and in many cases lived on after his fall, exile and death.

In the field of military organization Napoléon largely borrowed from previous theorists and the reforms of preceding French governments, and only developed much of what was already in place. He continued, for example, the Revolution’s policy of promotion based primarily on merit. Artillery was integrated into reserve batteries, the staff system became more fluid, and cavalry once again became an important formation in French military doctrine. Uniforms, although flamboyant and colorful for parade, were often ill-fitting, uncomfortable, inappropriate and inadequate for men in the field. Boots rarely lasted more than a few weeks. Weapons and technology remained largely static through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, but operational mobility underwent massive restructuring. Napoléon’s biggest influence was in the conduct of warfare on the move, and was regarded by the influential military theorist Carl von Clausewitz as a genius in the operational art of war. A new emphasis towards the destruction, not just outmaneuvering, of enemy armies emerged. Since armies could not live off the land indefinitely, Napoleon always sought a quick end to any conflict by a decisive pitched battle. Invasions of enemy territory occurred over broader fronts, which made wars costlier and more decisive—a phenomenon that came to be known as Napoleonic Warfare.

By 1809–1811, the Napoleonic Empire had reached the zenith of its territorial and political expansion. It stretched from the Tagus to the Niemen, from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea. The family-minded Corsican Napoléon, now at the peak of his power, had given Europe a new face and showered wealth and position on his brothers, sisters and close friends, despite their grumblings, constant intrigues, incompetence, sulkings and indiscretions. The Kingdom of Holland had been entrusted to his brother Louis, as Spain had been to Joseph. The Kingdom of Westphalia had been created and attributed to yet another brother, Jérome. Napoléon himself was king of Italy, including Milan and Venice, with his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, appointed viceroy. In Naples, Joseph had been replaced by Joachim Murat, the husband of his sister Caroline Bonaparte. Another sister, Elisa, was made Queen of Etruria (Tuscany), but sister Pauline only received 1,490,000 francs and the castle of Neuilly.

Poland enjoyed a revival, having been turned into a French-controlled hereditary Grand Duchy headed by Marshal Lefèbvre, an old friend and veteran of plebeian origin married to a former washerwoman. The old Holy Roman Empire, created in A.D. 962 by Otto I the Great, had been abolished and replaced by the Confederation of the Rhine, with states, duchies, bishoprics, principalities and small kingdoms “protected” and controlled by France. Napoléon’s policy was a continuation of the policy of Richelieu and Louis XIV: to keep the Germans divided by encouraging the particularism of the client kingdoms and principalities in the Confederation. The satellite states were primarily intended to serve the interests of France, namely to provide the Empire with troops, supplies, and above all money, by means of taxes and forced requisitions. Napoleonic rule was, however, fragile, as it rested on military force. There was no way that the European peoples would have accepted French hegemony of their own free will. Once Napoléon was beaten in Russia, then French rule was rapidly shuffled off.

The parvenu, self-made Napoléon tried to give his dictatorship the trappings of a real monarchy, by creating imperial nobility, setting up his own court where etiquette was rigid and boring, and instituting high-ranking positions such as Imperial Field Marshal, Arch Chancellor, Grand Chamberlain, Arch Treasurer, and other sonorous and empty titles. The megalomaniac Emperor turned state occasions into instruments of propaganda, great public shows and sumptuous trappings of royalty. The image he wanted to project was an inspiring and impressive one, compounded of grandeur, patriotism, honor, and glory. He used every available means of propaganda: press, art, war bulletins, pageantry of nobility, and artful creation of his own legend. Despite the displayed splendor of the Imperial court, after 1804, Napoléon himself led a rather abstemious life in private, eating and dressing simply. Private reality differed greatly from the romantic, heroic, and superhuman portraits of him presented to the public by artists like David, Ingres and Gros.

Napoléon drew support from dignitaries and notables from the middle and upper classes—all those who had risen to social rank owing to the Revolution or thanks to their commercial or financial talents. The never-ending war brought changes to the imperial regime, which became even more despotic. Napoléon ruled by senatus-consult or by decree. Civil liberties were restricted and the press put under surveillance of Fouché, whose police played an increasingly important role. Arbitrary detention was reintroduced, censorship reappeared, and even art, theatre and literature were monitored for “the defense of the country and the throne.”

The Emperor was also careful to woo the masses, and for a long time succeeded in retaining their enthusiasm and loyalty. Whether or not people were happy under Napoléon is an open question, but in spite of censorship that became increasingly petty and intrusive, of the police that became gradually brutal and arbitrary, and of the heavy burden of the wars, hardly anyone, except the die-hards, regretted the Ancien Régime wiped out by the Revolution and from whose ruins had sprung the new Napoleonic rule. Once order had been established, the common people were able to enjoy the fruits of the imperial regime. The increase in the consumption of wine and meat was a clear indication of the improved standard of living. Most tenant farmers and laborers were able to live off the land, the cost of living was rather low, grain harvests were abundant until 1810, and cattle breeding was enjoying a period of steady growth and improvement. The imperial administration worked to introduce new crops (e.g., sugar beet, chicory and potatoes), facilitated industrial innovations, spurred the development of metal industry, gave impetus to textile production (e.g., the loom in the silk industry), and improved networks of communication. The creation through Napoleonic conquests and territorial annexations of a large market for goods encouraged inland trade, facilitated industrial development, and spurred the manufacture of new products. In spite of the Continental blockade and the permanent state of war, the imperial age was a period of economic growth. Fairs, exhibitions and generous state subsidies helped all forms of industry. Napoléon, a great believer in centralized control, was deeply interested in every phase of the nation’s growth, and kept himself informed of every new development. He distributed prizes right and left, encouraged, ordered, visited, criticized. The Emperor’s popularity remained intact, or almost so, among the common people, who were not prepared to renounce glory even though they paid for it so dearly.

All this, of course, had a price and required a great deal of money. The Cour des Comptes (Court of Account) kept a watchful eye on the spending of public funds while the newly created Bank of France stabilized the currency. The greatest expenses incurred were obviously for wars. These were met in part by what today would be called “reparations,” in fact plunder, which became a key aspect of government policy as long as the French armies were victorious. Plunder helped finance war, fed and paid troops, and also assisted the regime to become more firmly established. The demands of war obviously increased the scale of the iron and steel industries, but a widespread industrial revolution and take-off into sustained growth on the British model had to wait until the reign of Napoléon’s nephew after 1851. In the long run it was the wars that ruined the Empire.

According to Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) accounts, Nationalist forces on Taiwan began a reconnaissance program against the mainland in early 1959, using U.S.-made RB-57 reconnaissance aircraft. Because the PLA Air Force had just organized its own surface-to-air missile units, the PLAAF records the October 7, 1959, shoot-down of a reconnaissance model B-57 (RB-57) over Beijing as a successful operation by its newly established air defense missile forces. The PLAAF missile defense forces had become operational only in late September 1959. As a Taiwan-launched B-57 reconnaissance aircraft entered the air defense zone around Beijing around noon on October 10, the PLAAF fired three SA-2 surface-to-air missiles, bringing down the aircraft and ending high-altitude reconnaissance against the mainland with B-57 aircraft. This forced the Nationalist Air Force, with U.S. support, to use U-2 aircraft for military reconnaissance flights over mainland China. The PLAAF had received its first SA-2 missiles from the Soviet Union only in October 1958, just after the Taiwan Strait Crisis of that year.

REFERENCES Kenneth W. Allen et al., China's Air Force Enters the 21st Century (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1995).

Chinese Officials Arrest the Crew of the British Ship "Arrow" as Pirates sparking off the War-typical Imperial British Propaganda Art

Chinese police arrested 12 Chinese crewmen on a Chinese-owned trading vessel, the Arrow, on October 12, 1856. The police suspected the crewmen of piracy and smuggling. In the effort to arrest the crew members, the British flag, flown by the vessel because it was registered in Hong Kong, was torn. The British consul in Canton, Harry Parkes, demanded of Chinese authorities an apology for the damage to the British flag and the release of the Chinese crew members. When Chinese authorities released the crew but refused to apologize for the damage to the British flag, Parkes ordered British naval vessels to bombard the city.

The Chinese responded by burning foreign-owned factories and businesses in Canton. Meanwhile, a French priest was murdered in Canton. The British government dispatched a military expedition to China under the command of Lord Elgin. A French military mission was concurrently dispatched under the command of Baron Gros to avenge the death of the French priest. The Anglo-French forces seized Canton and moved north, up the coast of China, attacking ports and shipping until they reached Tianjin. The Chinese signed a treaty in Tianjin (Tianjin, Treaty of) in June 1858 but took no action to ratify the treaty until the British and French governments took renewed military action with forces still under the command of Lord Elgin and Baron Gros. The combined French and British forces occupied parts of Peking, burned the emperor's Summer Palace (the Yuanmingyuan) in the western suburbs of the city, and drove the emperor out of Peking. The Arrow War ended with the acceptance and ratification of the Convention of Peking by the emperor in 1860.

REFERENCES John K. Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order: Traditional Chinese Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); Sean Glynn and Alan Booth, Modern Britain: An Economic and Social History (London: Routledge, 1996); Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Douglas Hurd, The Arrow War: An Anglo-Chinese Confusion, 1856-1860 (London: Collins Press, 1967); Charles S. Leavenworth, The Arrow War with China (London: S. Row Marston, 1901); Peter J. Marshall, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

PEKING CONVENTION (1860) (Beijing Convention)
The Peking Convention was signed in 1860 between China and Great Britain after British troops attacked Beijing and leveled the Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan). The Convention of Peking ended a post-Opium War engagement that started with the seizure in Canton of the Arrow, a Chinese-owned, Hong Kong-registered ship. The British acted because the Chinese emperor had ignored the provisions of the Treaty of Tianjin (1858), refusing to allow a British ambassador to be resident in Beijing, nor would the emperor agree to exchange ratification of the Treaty of Tianjin in Beijing. Working together, British and French forces occupied the Dagu forts, protecting the approaches to Tianjin, and Anglo-French forces marched to Peking and occupied parts of the city. The emperor finally agreed to ratification and also ceded to Britain the peninsula of Kowloon. Among other provisions, Tianjin was also opened as a treaty port.

REFERENCES Wolfram Eberhard, A History of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953); Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).

On January 28, 1932, in response to weeks of serious anti-Japanese demonstrations and boycotts among the Chinese populace in Shanghai that developed after the Mukden Incident, the Shanghai Municipal Council declared a state of emergency in that city. Troops of the Nationalist 19th Route Army were deployed around the city to protect the foreign concession areas from popular unrest and anti-foreign incidents.

Japan, which had sent troops to Shanghai aboard ships as early as January 18, 1932, landed several thousand marines at Shanghai in three columns on the night of January 28. The Japanese marines advanced to establish protective perimeters around the international settlement area that housed Japan's foreign concessions, along the Huangpu Creek, and to occupy the rail stations in the city. When the Japanese marines encountered elements of the 19th Route Army, which was responsible for security and garrison duties in the Nanjing-Shanghai area, they exchanged fire with the Chinese soldiers in the Chapei District of Shanghai. In retaliation for this incident, the senior Japanese naval officer ordered the Chapei District, which was primarily inhabited by Chinese workers, to be bombed by Japanese aircraft. By the beginning of February, the Japanese had landed 7,000 more marines in Shanghai, and the Guomindang reinforced its 19th Route Army with the Fifth Corps. By February 7, Japan had moved a force of three infantry divisions, 80 ships, and 30 aircraft in Shanghai. Japanese forces there reportedly totaled about 90,000 men, while the Nationalist Army defended with about 50,000 personnel. In fierce battles on March 1-3, 1932, Chinese forces suffered over 10,000 casualties but managed to contain the Japanese forces within the Shanghai area. Under strong pressure from foreign countries, including the United States and England, Japan agreed to a cease-fire, and an armistice went into effect in Shanghai on May 5, 1932. Under the terms of the agreement, the Nationalist government was forced to accept a neutral zone around Shanghai and to withdraw its military forces.

REFERENCES George M. Beckmann, The Modernization of China and Japan (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); James Crowley, Japan's Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930-1938 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); F. F. Liu, A Military History of Modern China, 1924-1949 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956).

Minister to Philip V and Ferdinand VI of Spain. One of Spain’s most powerful eighteenth-century ministers, Somodevilla was born into a poor hidalgo, ‘noble’, family in the small northern town of Alescano in the Rioja region. Little is known about his formative years. In 1720, at the age of eighteen, he was working as a civil servant for the navy in Cádiz, where his abilities gained the notice of the royal minister Jose´ Patiño y Morales (1666–1736), then the naval intendant general.

Groomed by Patiño, Somodevilla was promoted to numerous positions within the ministries of navy and war. He earned the title of marqués de la Ensenada in 1736 for his services to the navy in the Italian campaigns that made Philip V’s (ruled 1700– 1724; 1724–1746) son Charles the king of Naples, and he became a secretary of state and of war in 1741. When Jose´ de Campillo (1695–1743) died in 1743, Ensenada succeeded him as first secretary in four of the five secretariats of the Spanish crown: finance, war, navy, and the Indies.
Ensenada and José de Carvajal (1698–1754), first secretary of state, dominated the reign of Ferdinand VI (ruled 1746–1759). Ensenada’s position exemplified the incredible power that individual ministers came to wield in Bourbon Spain as the crown reduced the historic power of the Consejos (‘councils’), an institutional stronghold of the aristocracy under the Habsburgs.

Eighteenth-century Spain is often characterized as the century of Bourbon reform, in which successive kings oversaw efforts to centralize administration and to modernize and rationalize the state. The first Spanish Bourbons, Philip V and Ferdinand VI, were ineffectual rulers, but they promoted talented ministers who worked to reshape Spain as it recovered from the economic crises of the seventeenth century and the political fracture of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Melchor de Macanaz (1670–1760), Campillo, and Patiño instituted ambitious programs to stabilize and consolidate power in the first decades of Bourbon rule. Yet these early ‘‘reformers’’ did little to challenge Spain’s traditional economic and social structures, and historians have identified Ensenada as the eighteenth century’s first real innovator, one whose vision prefigured the more far-reaching projects of Charles III’s reign (1759–1788).

Like his mentor Patiño, Ensenada recognized the importance of improving the military to protect Spain’s interests throughout its empire, particularly its American colonies. He expanded the Spanish fleet and reformed an ailing naval infrastructure. He initiated civil engineering projects and asserted state control of public works at national, regional, and local levels. Dissatisfied with Spain’s scientific and technological stagnation, he sent students abroad and subsidized visits of prominent scientists and thinkers to Spain.

Perhaps Ensenada’s most famous project was his plan to reform the tax system in Castile by eliminating various provincial taxes in favor of the única contribución, a single tax proportional to wealth and applied to every individual. To assess the tax, he directed a vast census, or catastro, of the communities, people, and properties of Castile. The single tax added a social component to economic reform, for the old provincial taxes largely exempted both nobility and church, placing an inordinate tax burden on the poor. The nobility fought and defeated the single tax, however, reacting to the threat that Ensenada and a new class of royal bureaucrats presented to traditional power and local privilege.

Ensenada created enemies within Spain for his policies of national reform, but his role in foreign affairs ultimately caused his downfall. His aggression against the competition of England and its ally Portugal in Atlantic trade, and his support of a strategic alliance with France, alienated pro-English and pro-Portuguese factions within the court and diverged from the policies of Carvajal, who pursued a more neutral course. This court factionalism came to a head during the territorial dispute and subsequent treaty with Portugal over Paraguay in 1750. Ensenada opposed the unfavorable terms of the treaty for Spain, as did the Jesuits. Their protests did not prevent the treaty’s ratification, and only heightened political resentment against them.

In the wake of the Paraguay crisis and Carvajal’s death in 1754, Ensenada became an easy target for his enemies, despised for his vanity and feared for the disproportionate power he possessed. His fall was swift and he was banished that year to Medina del Campo, where he remained until Charles III restored him to court (though not to power) in 1760. He came under new scrutiny for his relationship with the Jesuits in the events leading to their 1767 expulsion from Spain, and he was again exiled to Medina del Campo, where he died in 1781.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Domínguez Ortíz, Antonio. Sociedad y estado en el siglo XVIII español. Barcelona, 1976.
Lynch, John. Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808. Oxford, 1989.
Villa Rodríguez, José. Don Cenón de Somodevilla, marqués de la Ensenada. Madrid, 1878.

Rulers, nobles, and municipalities used fireworks and firearms in city entries, displays, processions, and ceremonies. Militants participating in Catholic League processions in Paris brandished firearms in the late sixteenth century, and municipal festivities at the city’s Hôtel de Ville frequently employed cannonades of artillery. Elite corps of musketeers and bodyguards including the gardes françaises of Louis XIII, Russian streltsy, and Ottoman Janissaries demonstrated rulers’ fascination with firearms.

Firearms shaped European popular imagination in the early modern period as well. Fears of the explosive power of gunpowder animated the English public’s responses to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, while the awesome force of the ‘‘infernal machines’’ (fireships packed with explosives) used by the Dutch against Spanish besiegers at Antwerp in 1585 frightened soldiers throughout Europe. The need to produce firearms inspired new research, knowledge, and techniques. Artists and artisans such as Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and Michelangelo Buonarroti developed designs for fortifications and experimental weapons. Galileo Galilei and many of the leading early modern scientists performed chemical and ballistics experiments related to firearms and fortifications. The horrifying wounds caused by firearms stimulated anatomical research and new medical techniques. The proto-industrial production of gunpowder, firearms, and instruments for siege warfare employed artisans throughout Europe.

The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought subtle refinements and increasing systemization of military changes that had begun earlier. Transitions in infantry weaponry to flintlock muskets and bayonets represented mere technological fine-tuning, simplifying arms procurement, logistical services, drill, and discipline. The Enlightenment brought an increasingly technical, ‘‘scientific’’ approach to firearms production and use, reflected in the military articles in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Military intellectuals theorized military structures, emphasized precision, and introduced standardization. Throughout the early modern period, military vocabulary related to firearms infused modern languages: ‘‘half-cocked,’’ ‘‘firstrate,’’ and ‘‘martinet’’ were just a few of the words that emerged from early modern military practices. The expanding process of industrialization, coupled with the social dimensions of the American and French revolutions, would quickly transform modern warfare as the mechanization of firearms exponentially increased firepower and the scale of destruction in the nineteenth century.

The most important interpretive framework for assessing the impact of firearms on early modern European history has been the much-debated concept of a ‘‘military revolution.’’ Michael Roberts, whose famous essay is reprinted in The Military Revolution Debate, originally articulated the notion of revolutionary changes in firearms tactics, strategy, the scale of warfare, and administrative demands that reshaped European military practices, states, and societies between 1560 and 1660. Geoffrey Parker and other historians have since adopted the concept of a ‘‘military revolution’’ but used it in radically different ways: debates have erupted over the periodization, dynamics, and development of the ‘‘military revolution,’’ and even over whether it existed at all. All of the competing notions of a military revolution support the notion that ‘‘war made the state and the state made war.’’ Governments invested in organizational and bureaucratic developments to support and supply their armies’ ‘‘hungry guns’’ with firearms and gunpowder. Spanish armies used garrisons in Milan and the elaborate transportation system of the Spanish Road to supply their troops. Successive French monarchs patronized and updated the Arsenal at Paris, which manufactured, organized, and supplied French royal artillery throughout the early modern period. States began to develop permanent standing armies, despite some politicized debates questioning the wisdom of such structures. Growing armies and burgeoning state bureaucracies went hand in hand, especially in Louis XIV’s France.

The ‘‘military revolution’’ also clearly had global implications. Military changes that began prominently in Europe and the Mediterranean diffused throughout the world as a result of early modern European imperialism and mercantilism. Spanish conquistadores used artillery and European siege tactics to conquer cities like Tenochtitlán (Mexico). Dutch and Portuguese fortifications at ports in Morocco, Goa, and Indonesia secured their trading networks. While the techniques developed in the ‘‘military revolution’’ allowed European states to extend empires over broad areas of the globe, some non-Western states and regions, such as Japan, China, and the Mughal Empire, developed ways of using firearms and fortifications that aided them in resisting European expansion.

At sea, however, the naval dimensions of the military revolution allowed European ships to dominate all of the world’s oceans by the beginning of the seventeenth century. European shipbuilders had begun to adopt artillery as early as the fifteenth century. Venice’s naval Arsenal, which dated from the medieval period, was reorganized to outfit and supply Venetian ships with artillery. The sixteenth century saw the development of the heavily armed sailing ship, or galleon, which packed dozens of guns into multiple decks to produce firepower that no other type of ship could match. Galleons carried gold and silver from mines in the Americas to Spain, but equally well-armed Dutch fleets and English privateers preyed upon them. The Spanish Armada of 1588 showcased battles between two competing designs of galleons. Galleons allowed fleets to pound ports into submission around the world, unless they were well defended by artillery fortifications. State-sponsored permanent navies developed during the seventeenth century, preparing the way for the refined ships of the line and linear naval warfare of the eighteenth century.

The most important interpretive framework for assessing the impact of firearms on early modern European history has been the much-debated concept of a ‘‘military revolution.’’ Michael Roberts, whose famous essay is reprinted in The Military Revolution Debate, originally articulated the notion of revolutionary changes in firearms tactics, strategy, the scale of warfare, and administrative demands that reshaped European military practices, states, and societies between 1560 and 1660. Geoffrey Parker and other historians have since adopted the concept of a ‘‘military revolution’’ but used it in radically different ways: debates have erupted over the periodization, dynamics, and development of the ‘‘military revolution,’’ and even over whether it existed at all. All of the competing notions of a military revolution support the notion that ‘‘war made the state and the state made war.’’ Governments invested in organizational and bureaucratic developments to support and supply their armies’ ‘‘hungry guns’’ with firearms and gunpowder. Spanish armies used garrisons in Milan and the elaborate transportation system of the Spanish Road to supply their troops. Successive French monarchs patronized and updated the Arsenal at Paris, which manufactured, organized, and supplied French royal artillery throughout the early modern period. States began to develop permanent standing armies, despite some politicized debates questioning the wisdom of such structures. Growing armies and burgeoning state bureaucracies went hand in hand, especially in Louis XIV’s France.

The ‘‘military revolution’’ also clearly had global implications. Military changes that began prominently in Europe and the Mediterranean diffused throughout the world as a result of early modern European imperialism and mercantilism. Spanish conquistadores used artillery and European siege tactics to conquer cities like Tenochtitlán (Mexico). Dutch and Portuguese fortifications at ports in Morocco, Goa, and Indonesia secured their trading networks. While the techniques developed in the ‘‘military revolution’’ allowed European states to extend empires over broad areas of the globe, some non-Western states and regions, such as Japan, China, and the Mughal Empire, developed ways of using firearms and fortifications that aided them in resisting European expansion.

At sea, however, the naval dimensions of the military revolution allowed European ships to dominate all of the world’s oceans by the beginning of the seventeenth century. European shipbuilders had begun to adopt artillery as early as the fifteenth century. Venice’s naval Arsenal, which dated from the medieval period, was reorganized to outfit and supply Venetian ships with artillery. The sixteenth century saw the development of the heavily armed sailing ship, or galleon, which packed dozens of guns into multiple decks to produce firepower that no other type of ship could match. Galleons carried gold and silver from mines in the Americas to Spain, but equally well-armed Dutch fleets and English privateers preyed upon them. The Spanish Armada of 1588 showcased battles between two competing designs of galleons. Galleons allowed fleets to pound ports into submission around the world, unless they were well defended by artillery fortifications. State-sponsored permanent navies developed during the seventeenth century, preparing the way for the refined ships of the line and linear naval warfare of the eighteenth century.

First Army’s original plan as it approached the vicinity of Aachen was to breach the West Wall of the Siegfried Line and bypass Aachen in accordance with American doctrinal thinking. Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges, First Army’s commander, saw Aachen as an obstacle, not an objective. Developments would alter that plan, however. The Americans met stiff resistance from the Germans, and Hodges believed he lacked the forces to both contain the Germans within Aachen and continue the attack to the Rhine. So, Hodges decided to reduce Aachen. Aachen’s pre-war population was around 165,000; now only 20,000 or so civilians lived there. Colonel Wilck of the 246th Volksgrenadier Division, with around 5,000 soldiers, assumed responsibility for its defenses, along with elements of the 1421st Fortress Battalion.

Once again, Hitler had ordered a fight to the last man, and Wilck planned on carrying it out. Groups of two to ten Germans defended each house. In addition, the Germans controlled the sewer system and made great use of it to move securely throughout the city immune to artillery and air attack. The 1st Infantry Division under General Huebner received the mission to seize the city, but Huebner had only the 26th Infantry Regiment available with one of its battalions already serving as the division reserve. The regiment’s plan was to attack from east to west with two battalions abreast, 3rd Battalion in the north, and 2nd Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Derrill M. Daniel in the south. It was hoped that this orientation of attack would surprise the Germans whose defenses appeared to be oriented to the south.

LTC Daniel task-organized his companies into combined arms company teams. Each rifle company received three tanks (Shermans) or tank destroyers, two towed antitank guns, two bazookas, one flame-thrower, and two heavy machine gun teams. The companies further task-organized these supporting forces down to the platoon level. He assigned zones of action to the companies who then assigned each platoon a single street. Given that the battalion’s sector was very wide, he maintained no reserve, but planned on repelling counterattacks by shifting his forces laterally across his front. Knowing that urban fighting used tremendous amounts of ammunition, he established an ammunition dump forward and made plans to move it forward again during the attack. His plan called for artillery and mortars to hit the enemy deep in order to isolate the area, pin down reserves, and generally hammer the enemy’s defenses. His battalion adoption of the motto “Knock ’em All Down” should give one an appreciation for how Daniel planned on using firepower. He instructed his men to maintain a heavy volume of fire throughout the attack.

The attack kicked off on 11 October with two days of bombardment by over 300 fighter-bombers and 12 battalions of artillery. They dropped over 200 tons of ammunition onto the city in the first day alone, but patrols that tested the defenses in the early evening found no appreciable lessening of German fire.” On 13 October, the battalion methodically attacked for the next eight days. Like the soldiers in Brest, they quickly found that survival meant staying out of the streets. In addition to using tanks and demolitions to blast holes in building, they also used bazookas to breach walls. Much more so than in Brest, artillery was much more effective. Light artillery and mortars kept the volume of fire up several streets ahead of the attackers, while heavy artillery pounded the Germans further to the rear. The battalion found that they could call artillery fire in fairly close to themselves because the stone buildings protected them from fragments.

Forward observers also experimented with delayed fuzes that allowed rounds to penetrate through several floors before exploding, rather than exploding harmlessly on the roof. One additional use of artillery was rediscovered when the battalion encountered a building that the tank destroyers could not penetrate. The battalion used a self-propelled 155mmartillery piece in point-blank direct fire, leveling one building with one shot. The regimental commander so liked the results, he gave a 155mm gun to 3rd Battalion as well. Under the cover of tank and TD fire, the infantry assaulted a building augmented by the demolitions teams and flame-throwers. The mere threat of the flame-throwers frightened some of the enemy to surrender.

The best combination of tanks and infantry seemed to be two tanks per infantry platoon. “The infantry preceded the tanks by 100 yards, thoroughly searching the houses on both sides of the street. The tanks provided machine gun and tank cannon fire as requested.” The tanks placed fire on all known or suspected enemy positions before the infantry assaulted. This close support provided the infantrymen with a feeling of security, knowing that they had such firepower on their side. Additionally, the infantry knew that they had to “protect their protectors by constant reconnaissance” which they did by assigning four riflemen to the tank commander. These soldiers provided close-in security, acted as messengers, and kept the tankers informed as to where the friendly infantrymen were.

Despite FM 31-50’s dictum to conduct urban fighting at night, the 26th Infantry Regiment conducted its attacks during the day, and used the night to rest, reorganize, and resupply. In the realm of logistics, soldiers also improvised when they realized their wheeled ambulance couldn’t negotiate the roads because of glass, debris, and rubble. The soldiers converted half-tracks into ambulances to give themselves not only some protection from fire, but also some mobility to make it through the cluttered battlefield back to the aid station. An additional headache for the Americans was the Germans’ use of the sewer system to mount counterattacks, move patrols behind their lines, and infiltrate snipers to their rear. As they attacked, the Americans soon learned to locate and seal every manhole cover and sewer grate.

On 21 October, Colonel Wilck surrendered. At the conclusion of the battle, the effects of firepower were seen in that 80 percent of all buildings were either destroyed or badly damaged. Overall, Daniel’s reasons for his success were a slow, thorough search of every area; the use of all available firepower; the use of daylight operations to enhance command and control; the close integration of infantry, armor, artillery, and engineers. In addition, the regimental commander remarked, “We employed common sense, normal tactical principles, and maximum firepower.”

“We employed common sense, normal tactical principles, and maximum firepower.”

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By 1982, the operational maneuver base element for a raid operation had become a reinforced battalion. The wide variety of possible battalion maneuvers included flanking and enveloping attacks as well as air assaults by air assault forces landing from helicopters. The conduct of these raids proved that commanders and forces were accumulating experience and increasing combat mastery. But they did not always result in the desired outcome. Major S. N. Petrov remembers one such incident. Intelligence sources indicated that a group of 40 well-armed Mujahideen were in the town of Sherkhankel .This town was in the area of responsibility of one of the Soviet regiments.

"The 3rd Parachute Battalion, as the alert subunit, was ordered to move to Sherkhankel and destroy the enemy at 0200 hours, 20 March 1982. An artillery battalion and four Mi-24 helicopters were in direct support.

"The battalion commander decided to move at night with an approach march. A combat reconnaissance patrol would move some 300 meters in front of the main body. The march route was down a wide, straight road, along the left side of which stretched an adobe wall. On the right side of the road was a cement- lined canal that was five meters wide and 2.5 meters deep.

"Suddenly, through a firing port cut through the adobe wall, the enemy opened fire with a grenade launcher at the reconnaissance platoon. Practically simultaneously, a machine gun opened fire on the reconnaissance patrol. The machine gun was in the houses, some 150 meters away. The paratroopers, attempting to take up firing positions, fell under the enemy's fire. The battalion commander called for artillery and air support. The assigned mission was blown, however, and the battalion commander belatedly decided to use maneuver to encircle the Mujahideen. The Mujahideen struck a short, powerful blow and then hid, using the system of karez. The battalion had eight KIA and six WIA. Two of the dead were officers. The battalion abandoned further action and returned to base.

"My memory often returns to this tragic moment. I seek an answer to the tormenting question—was there a way to avoid this tragic outcome? Of course, with hindsight, you have 20/20 vision. This aside, I have determined the following miscalculations, which had an adverse effect on the ability of the alert subunit to carry out its assigned mission. First off, the battalion commander did not consider that combat in Afghanistan did not always start where you planned it. It might begin suddenly at any location which is to the enemy's advantage at any time of the day or night. This incident showed how an adobe wall running parallel and close to a road always presented a serious danger for Soviet forces. They provided the enemy secrecy and surprise. This factor was not studied. Second, the battalion column only had security to the front and was moving on a single axis. This made maneuver very difficult. If there is a possibility to move on two roads, with flank security, this may force the enemy to abandon his ambush. Third, in this incident, there was no reconnaissance and the soldiers were not in full readiness to use their weapons."

At this time, the inadequacies of heavy military equipment, which had limited application in mountainous terrain, became apparent. Tanks, BMPs, and self- propelled artillery were road bound and lacked the operational expanse for their employment. Contemporary high-precision jet aircraft were unable to support ground forces effectively with air strikes. Using helicopter gunships, the Soviets were able, for the first time, to establish more effective methods of combating the Mujahideen in the mountains. This use of the helicopters was severely limited later by the introduction of the man-portable Stinger air defense missile. This appreciably decreased the results of operations and combat which frequently did not achieve their projected goals.

The second phase of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan lasted from March 1980 to April 1985. It was characterized by the conduct of combat on a wide scale, mainly by Soviet forces, and sometimes in cooperation with Afghan divisions and regiments. The 40th Army was reinforced with the 201st Motorized Rifle Division and two separate motorized rifle regiments. The overall size of the Soviet force reached 81,800, of which 61,800 were in combat units of the ground and air forces. The force included about 600 tanks, 1500 BMPs, 2900 BTRs, 500 aircraft and helicopter, and 500 artillery pieces of various calibers.

The opposition, having suffered significant military casualties in the first phase of the war, moved their main forces into the mountain region, which is difficult to enter and where it is practically impossible to use modern combat equipment. Further, they managed to blend into the local population. The Mujahideen were able to employ various tactical techniques. Thus, when they would encounter a superior Soviet force, they, as a rule, would withdraw from battle. At the same time, the Mujahideen would never miss an opportunity to launch a surprise strike, usually with a small force. As a rule, during this phase, the armed opposition forces abandoned positional warfare and widely employed maneuver. The Mujahideen could only be forced to accept battle under compelling circum- stances. These circumstances included defense of a base or base region or when the Mujahideen were encircled and had no other options. In this case, the blocked Mujahideen detachments moved into close combat, where it was practically impossible for the Soviets to use their aviation and which sharply restricted their possibility of using artillery, especially from indirect firing positions.

This situation forced the Soviet forces to find new forms and methods to destroy the enemy. They determined that the only way to achieve decisive results was to liquidate the Mujahideen's regional bases. Special attention was focused on this mission. However, to fulfill this mission required a significant amount of forces and equipment. Taking into account that the bulk of the forces were occupied with other missions, it was difficult to pursue this mission with the forces of just one formation. Very often it was necessary to unite forces from several divisions and to form a single operational command (the 40th Army staff). Such a form of military actions were called combat operations or, in the broader realm, simply operations.

In the contemporary military-scientific interpretation of the term "operation," an operation is the sum total of coordination and cooperation efforts by aim, place and time of the engagement, battle, and strike, carried out in a Theater of Military Actions (TVD) or on a strategic or operational direction with a single concept and plan for the decision of strategic and operational missions. The experience of the Great Patriotic War demonstrated that the minimum amount of forces required for an operation were 70,000 to 100,000 personnel. In Afghanistan, the understanding of the term operation included several different possibilities and forms in the action of forces. The required size of operational formations and the issue of who would direct the combat actions saw operations devolve down to armies, divisions, and even regiments. As a rule, the conduct of army operations called for a force of one or two motorized rifle, as well as airborne, artillery, and engineer units and subunits—a total of 10,000 to 15,000 personnel. These operations were planned by the army staff and directed by the army commander. Division and regimental operations were conducted by the forces of the division and regiment and directed by their commanders. Combat was conducted over most of the territory of Afghanistan. The incidence of combat was especially intense along the main highway network and in the east along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

South Vietnam 1969 -- On May 13, 1968, 12,234 Army National Guardsmen in 20 units from 17 states were mobilized for service during the Vietnam War. Eight units deployed to Vietnam and over 7,000 Army Guardsmen served in the war zone. Company D (Ranger), 151st Infantry, Indiana Army National Guard arrived in Vietnam in December 1968. As part of the II Field Force, the Indiana Rangers were assigned reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering missions. Operating deep in enemy territory, Ranger patrols engaged enemy units while conducting raids, ambushes and surveillance missions. "Delta Company" achieved an impressive combat record during its tour in Vietnam; unit members were awarded 510 medals for valor and service. The gallant record of Company D, 151st Infantry symbolizes the Army National Guard's performance in Vietnam.  Painting by Mort Künstler



By mid-March 1965 Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were advising the White House that the United States would have to commit its own troops for combat if it wished to forestall a communist victory in Vietnam. Unhappy memories of the Korean War, where U.S. troops had been bogged down in costly indecisive fighting for three years, had made Johnson and his predecessors reluctant to send soldiers to fight in Asia. However, the choice now confronting the president appeared to be between committing troops or enduring outright defeat.

By June 1965 Westmoreland was predicting the likely collapse of the South Vietnamese army, and he recommended the rapid dispatch of U.S. troops to undertake offensive missions against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese anywhere in South Vietnam. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, on a mission to Vietnam in early July, confirmed the need for additional forces. In late July Johnson took the final steps that would commit the United States to full-scale war in Vietnam: he authorized the dispatch of 100,000 troops immediately and an additional 100,000 in 1966. The president publicly announced his decisions at a news conference at the end of July. There was no declaration of war—not even an address to Congress—and no attempt to put the country on a war footing economically. The National Guard and military reserves were not called to active service, even though such a measure had long been part of the military’s mobilization plans.

FIREPOWER COMES TO NAUGHT
Although Johnson and his advisers had painstakingly examined the question of committing military forces to Vietnam— how many should be sent and when—they had given little thought to the question of what the troops might do once they arrived. In contrast to the tightly controlled air war in the North, conduct of the ground war in the South was largely left to the leadership of General Westmoreland. Westmoreland commanded all U.S. operations in the South, but he was reluctant to press for a unified U.S. and South Vietnamese command despite the questionable capabilities of many South Vietnamese generals. Instead, the two allies depended on “coordination” and a continuation of the existing advisory relationship, with every South Vietnamese army unit larger than a company having its complement of U.S. advisers. At the top of the hierarchy, Westmoreland himself served as senior adviser to the chief of the Vietnamese Joint General Staff, Gen. Cao Van Vien. The chronic political instability in Saigon seemed finally to have abated with the installation in February 1965 of a government headed by the army general Nguyen Van Thieu as head of state and air force general Nguyen Cao Ky as prime minister. This arrangement, backed by most of the top military commanders, lasted until 1968, when Ky was eased out of power, leaving Thieu in sole control.

Whatever the status of the South Vietnamese forces, they were clearly relegated to a secondary role as U.S. troops and equipment poured into the country. To support these forces, the Americans constructed an enormous logistical infrastructure that included four new jet-capable air bases with 10,000-foot (3,048 km) runways, six new deepwater ports, 75 tactical air bases, 26 hospitals, and more than 10,000,000 square feet (929,000 sq metres) of warehousing. By the fall of 1965, U.S. Marines and soldiers had clashed with NVA and VC main-force troops in bloody battles on the Batangan Peninsula south of Da Nang and in the Ia Drang valley in the central highlands. The U.S. forces employed their full panoply of firepower, including air strikes, artillery, armed helicopters, and even B-52 bombers, to inflict enormous losses on the enemy. Yet the communists believed they had more than held their own in these battles, and they were encouraged by the fact that they could easily reoccupy any areas they might have lost once the Americans pulled out.

Westmoreland’s basic assumption was that U.S. forces, with their enormous and superior firepower, could best be employed in fighting the enemy’s strongest units in the jungles and mountains, away from heavily populated areas. Behind this “shield” provided by the Americans, the South Vietnamese army and security forces could take on local Viet Cong elements and proceed with the job of reasserting government control in the countryside. Meanwhile, the regular forces of the Viet Cong and the NVA would continue to suffer enormous casualties at the hands of massive U.S. firepower. Eventually, went the argument, the communists would reach the point where they would no longer be able to replace their losses on the battlefield. Having been ground down on the battlefield, they would presumably agree to a favourable peace settlement.

That point seemed very distant to most Americans as the war continued into 1966 and 1967. Washington declared that the war was being won, but American casualties continued to mount, and much of what the public could see of the war on television appeared confusing if not futile. Because Westmoreland’s strategy was based on attrition, one of the ways to measure progress was to track the number of enemy killed. The resultant “body count,” which was supposed to be carried out by troops during or immediately after combat, soon became notorious for inaccuracy and for the tendency of U.S. commanders to exaggerate the figures.

In the provinces just north and east of Saigon, some large-scale operations such as Cedar Falls and Junction City, involving up to a thousand U.S. troops supported by hundreds of sorties by helicopters and fighter-bombers, were mounted to destroy communist base areas and supplies. Though yielding large quantities of captured weapons and supplies, they were ultimately indecisive. The U.S. forces involved in these operations would invariably withdraw when they had completed their sweeps and in due course the Viet Cong and NVA would return. In order to deny the NVA and Viet Cong the use of dense forest to conceal their movements and to hide their supply lines and bases, the U.S. Air Force sprayed millions of gallons of a herbicide called Agent Orange along the Vietnamese border with Laos and Cambodia, in areas northwest of Saigon, and along major waterways. Agent Orange was effective in killing vegetation, but only at the price of causing considerable ecological damage to Vietnam and of exposing thousands of people—both Vietnamese civilians and combatants on both sides of the conflict— to potentially toxic chemicals that would later cause serious, and sometimes fatal, health problems.

Along the DMZ separating North and South Vietnam, the Americans established a string of fortified bases extending from just north of Quang Tri on the South China Sea westward to the Laotian border. These bases were part of a system that also included electronic warning devices, minefields, and infrared detectors designed to check infiltration or outright invasion from the North. The North Vietnamese, pleased to find that the strong-point obstacle system was within range of their artillery, carried out periodic attacks by fire and ground forces against U.S. outposts at Con Thien, Gio Linh, Camp Carroll, and Khe Sanh.

These larger engagements attracted most of the public’s attention, but they were not in fact typical of the war in South Vietnam. Most “battles” of the war were sharp, very brief engagements between units of fewer than 200 men. Many of these lasted only a few hours, often only a few minutes, but nevertheless could result in heavy casualties. Overall, communist casualties far outnumbered U.S. casualties, but the North Vietnamese never came close to depleting their manpower as Westmoreland suggested they would. In any case, the communists could, when necessary, ease the pressure on themselves by withdrawing their forces to sanctuaries in nearby Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Thus, Hanoi, not Washington, largely controlled the tempo of the ground war.

Like the ground war in the South, the air campaign against the North continued to grow in scope and destructiveness but remained indecisive. By the end of 1966, the United States had dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than it had dropped on Japan during World War II and more than it had dropped during the entire Korean War. Yet the bombing seemed to have little impact on the communists’ ability to carry on the war. North Vietnam was primarily an agricultural country with few industries to destroy. Many of the necessities of Hanoi’s war effort came directly from China and the Soviet Union, which competed with each other to demonstrate support for Ho Chi Minh’s “heroic” war against U.S. imperialism. The Soviets provided an estimated 1.8 billion rubles in military and economic aid and sent 3,000 military advisers and technicians along with sophisticated weapons to the North. China spent an estimated $2 billion in assisting Hanoi; at the height of its effort, it had more than 300,000 engineering, medical, and antiaircraft artillery troops in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Even when bombing knocked out more than 80 percent of the North’s petroleum-storage facilities during the summer of 1966, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reported no discernible shortages of petroleum or disruption of transportation. While the air raids continued, North Vietnam progressively strengthened its air defenses with the help of the latest radars, antiaircraft guns, missiles, and modern jet fighters supplied by the Soviets and Chinese. By the end of 1966 the United States had already lost almost 500 aircraft and hundreds of air crewmen killed or held as prisoners of war.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff were of one mind concerning the situation facing the Eighth Army. Even before meeting Hindenburg, Ludendorff had taken the responsibility of ordering the Eighth Army to begin a concentration against Samsonov’s Second Army. Only a solitary German cavalry division sat opposite Rennenkampf’s First Army, which Ludendorff believed had been bloodied badly enough by the Battle of Gumbinnen to keep it from moving quickly in the near future. Hindenburg quickly approved the new dispositions, and upon arriving at Eighth Army headquarters the two generals discovered that the army’s operations chief, Lt. Col. Max Hoffmann, had independently divined the same general strategy and had begun preparations for a concentration against Samsonov.

Moltke made one other decision, and this one has remained controversial ever since. Believing that he had more than enough strength to take Paris, he removed two corps from the right wing of the German approach in France and sent them east. These two corps would serve as protection for East Prussia in the event that the Eighth Army’s bold offensive operations against the Russians failed. The two corps, however, spent late August in transit from west to east. As a result, they were unavailable for either the Battle of the Marne or the developing battle against Samsonov.

Samsonov, for his part, was almost entirely in the dark about developments in front of him. Russian communications were so primitive that Zhilinski had to send many of his messages via telegraph to Warsaw, where they were decoded and driven by automobile north over uneven roads to Samsonov’s headquarters. On August 24, as the British were holding at Mons in Belgium, Zhilinski told Samsonov that only “insignificant forces” were in his sector. Samsonov therefore pushed the center of his line forward, dangerously exposing his flanks to a peril he did not know existed.

The German high command sensed that the geographic and personal fissures between the Russian armies presented a golden opportunity. After some initial hesitation, the aggressive François led the attack on August 27, cutting off the lines of retreat for the Second Army’s left and center. He continued his attack on the Russian rear the next day, again disobeying an order, this one from Ludendorff to help a threatened German reserve unit. With little solid information on his situation, Samsonov moved slowly and failed to check the alarm growing in Russian ranks. By August 29, the Second Army was entirely encircled. Realizing the calamity he now faced, Samsonov broke down. After telling his staff, “The emperor trusted me. How can I face him after such a disaster?” he disappeared into the woods and committed suicide.

Leaderless, surrounded, and without hope of reinforcement, the Russians panicked. In many places, the German ring was too thin to resist a determined Russian attack, but none materialized. Of the 135,000 Russians trapped in the pocket, only 10,000 escaped. More than 100,000 Russians surrendered, along with 500 of their precious artillery pieces. Despite its numerical superiority, the Russian Second Army had performed miserably and suffered a crushing defeat. The size of the immense Russian Army meant that the rout only affected four of the nation’s thirty-seven corps, but the psychological ramifications of the loss far outweighed the material ramifications. The Russians grew pessimistic, believing that they could not beat the more skillful Germans, a conclusion that many in France and Britain shared.

The German Eighth Army high command suggested calling the battle Tannenberg, after the nearby site of a battle half a millennium earlier in which Polish and Lithuanian knights had defeated the Teutonic knights. Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hoffmann believed that the Germans had reversed the humiliation that their ancestors had suffered against the Slavs. None of the three men lacked for self-confidence. They boasted that they had planned and executed one of the greatest victories in military history. They soon grew secure in the dominance of German methods and organization over those of a foe for whom they had neither professional respect nor humanitarian sentiment. Perhaps most important, Russia’s size no longer intimidated them.

“We have a feeling of absolute superiority over the Russians,” Hoffmann said that fall. “We must win, and we will.”

Flush with their great success, the Germans decided to turn north and perform the same trick again, this time against Rennenkampf’s First Army. Uncertain about what was happening to his south and with his supply lines threatened by the German garrison at the fortress of Königsberg to his north, Rennenkampf moved slowly and cautiously. Zhilinski informed him on August 30 of the magnitude of Samsonov’s defeat, but Russian headquarters incorrectly guessed that the Germans would next move south toward Warsaw. To spoil that effort, Zhilinski directed Rennenkampf to move forward into East Prussia.

An offensive disposition temporarily exposed Rennenkampf’s flanks. For the third time in less than a month, François’s aggressive, almost reckless, behavior placed him in the center of events. Marching his men seventy-five miles in four days, he surprised the Russian left and drove it back. Rennenkampf, however, did not panic as Samsonov had. A veteran of the Boxer Rebellion who gained favor with the tsar in 1905 by brutally seizing parts of the Trans-Siberian Railroad from revolutionaries, Rennenkampf had survived several personal bankruptcies and four failed marriages. He was not a stranger to crisis, and he kept his head despite the increasing deterioration of his strategic position.

Anxious to avoid Samsonov’s fate, he directed two divisions to fight a rear-guard action in order to allow the remainder of his army to get away safely. From September 10 to 12, his army retreated more than fifty miles back into Russia. In what became known as the Battle of the Masurian Lakes, the First Army lost almost 150,000 men and 150 guns. The Germans pursued the retreating First Army into Russia, losing the advantage of railways on the German gauge. Heavy rains soon gave Russia some breathing room, allowing Rennenkampf to regroup and counterattack at the Augustowo forest on October 1, driving the German forces out of Russia. The kaiser’s bad luck continued. He had joined the Eighth Army too late to witness the victories of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, but arrived at Augustowo just in time to escape a Russian cavalry charge.


The opening moves in the east had bloodied the Russians, but their massive human reserves remained. The Germans had inflicted two great defeats on them, but by the time winter set in, the Russians had managed to redeem themselves by clearing their homeland of German troops. This achievement was small comfort to their British and French allies, who increasingly saw the Russians as incurably incompetent. If the Allies wanted to keep the Russian front active, they would have to provide the Russian army with direct material assistance and as much advice as the Russians would accept. According to an old Russian proverb, Russia is never as strong as she looks, but Russia is never as weak as she looks. That maxim accurately reflected both Russia’s dire situation in the north at the end of the 1914 and its ability to withstand more punishment.


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The movement of the great powers in eastern Europe in 1914 depended in large measure on the speed with which the Russian army completed mobilization. Simply put, mobilization is the time between a nation’s decision to prepare its armed forces for war and its completion of those preparations. Russia had an immense army of more than 6 million men, but it was stretched out across the landmass of the largest state in the world. Prewar investments (much of it by French firms) to improve the Russian railway network had helped to increase its speed and efficiency, but the Russian transportation infrastructure remained woefully inadequate for the task of mobilization.

Once organized, the Russian army still faced myriad problems. Its leadership was riven by ideological, social, and personal fissures; several of its senior military officers were barely on speaking terms. In addition, the same transportation difficulties that delayed mobilization ensured that even when the Russians had the materiel they needed, the right weapons rarely reached the right units at the right times. Most of Russia’s fortresses were obsolete, and the nation retained such a faith in cavalry (a faith soon shown to be anachronistic) that in the early days of the war, wrote one historian, “railways that might have sent infantrymen speedily to the front were loaded, instead, with horses and fodder for them.”

Russia had many impressive soldiers, but it had many more who owed their positions to court intrigue or personal connections. Alexei Brusilov, one of Russia’s most competent officers, noted that in the years leading up to the war the promotion system did not value “independence, initiative, strong views and [strong] personalities.” The average Russian infantryman’s worldview had not prepared him to understand the war or his place in it. Brusilov noted that the Russian draftees from the interior of the country had no idea why they were fighting. “Practically no one knew who these Serbians [on whose behalf Russia had ostensibly entered the war] were; they were equally doubtful as to what a Slav was.” Despite some anti-German sentiment in the Cabinet, few Russian soldiers thought much about Germans, and fewer still hated them. Members of the upper strata of society had little anti-German sentiment, as the tsar’s friendly exchange of telegrams with his cousin the kaiser reflected. Several members of the Russian court, including the tsarina, were demonstrably pro- German.


The Germans, for their part, feared nothing about the Russian army except its size. Dennis Showalter’s characterization of the Russian army as a clumsy heavyweight boxer with neither fancy footwork nor timing is apt. The Germans saw themselves as a skilled middleweight capable of taking advantage of their larger, but slower, opponent. Even their allies questioned the ability of the Russians to provide any meaningful military assistance in the event of war. Most prewar French and British observers of the Russians thought their ally’s operations primitive and their support structure insufficient for the demands of modern warfare.


The Russian army also suffered from immense problems on the home front. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 had resulted in the creation of an elected parliament, but had done little to compensate for the fragility of the Russian state. While few people in 1914 predicted the magnitude of the revolution that assailed the country in 1917, many believed that the structure of the Russian state was far too weak to survive a prolonged war. Ironically, this weakness led many members of the Russian aristocracy to support the war in the hopes that a national emergency might rally the Russian people around the tsar and the status quo.

All of these problems notwithstanding, Russia surprised even itself with a vigorous effort in the days and weeks following the tsar’s mobilization order of July 30. Hundreds of thousands of Russians, disproportionately from the cities, volunteered for military service, and the number of reservists who failed to report to their units as ordered was substantially lower than the Russians had estimated. One week after issuing the mobilization order, the tsar received leaders of the parliament’s major political parties, many of whom had been openly hostile to him. They agreed to set aside political differences and join together to support the war. Even Russia’s most vicious anti-Semites praised the nation’s Jews as fellow subjects with a common interest in winning the war.

Geographically, Russia sat in a position that offered both challenges and opportunities. Russia’s western border included the Polish salient, a 100-mile-long bulge that stuck out into the German border with Austria-Hungary. It therefore sat exposed to a joint enemy attack, but it also gave Russian planners the option of attacking north into the German province of East Prussia, the traditional home of the German aristocracy, or south over the Carpathian Mountains into the agricultural heartland of Hungary. Russian planners were divided over which option offered the better chance of success. Almost all Russians thought the Austro- Hungarians would be easier to defeat, but the mountainous terrain of the Carpathians was a drawback. An attack into Germany, however, would provide the most help to France; and if Germany were defeated, Austria-Hungary would likely have no choice but to surrender.

Unable to decide between the two options, the Russians chose a flexible war plan, called Plan 19. It contained two variants: an “A” variant against Austria; and a “G” variant, which involved an attack into East Prussia. The key to Plan 19 lay in a staged mobilization. Unlike the Germans, the Russians chose not to wait until all their units had mobilized before beginning offensive operations. Twenty-seven Russian divisions were ready for combat within fifteen days; another twenty-five divisions prepared to join them eight days later. Less than two months after the decision to mobilize, the Russian army had ninety divisions in the Polish salient and twenty more in Trans-Caucasia to guard against the contingency of the Ottoman Empire’s entering the war.

The success of the mobilization notwithstanding, Russian efforts in East Prussia faced problems before they even began. The tsar had convinced his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai, to assume command of the Russian armies. Nikolai had an impressive military career that dated to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. He had been responsible for many of the important military reforms that the Russian military had implemented in the wake of the disaster in 1904–1905. In 1909, however, as the result of another of the innumerable Russian inner-circle rivalries, the new War Minister, V. A. Sukhomlinov, had relegated Nikolai to a secondary role. His marginalization had been so complete that when Nikolai accepted the job of commander-in-chief on August 2, he had to be briefed about Plan 19, because he was not familiar with its details. Although he felt unable to decline his nephew’s request, he felt completely overwhelmed by his new responsibilities.

Nikolai ordered Russian armies into the field before mobilization had been completed, placing immediate pressure on both Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Russian First and Second Armies were charged with invading East Prussia. The First Army’s commander, Pavel Rennenkampf, was a Baltic German by ethnicity; his ancestry later led to misguided charges that he had pro- German sympathies and that his failures had resulted from treason rather than bad leadership. Rennenkampf had been promoted through the Russian General Staff system and had ties to both the tsar and Nikolai. Second Army commander Alexander Samsonov, by contrast, had been a protégé of Nikolai’s adversary, Sukhomlinov. The rivalry between Nikolai and Sukhomlinov had filtered down to their protégés and had grown so deep that it became standard Russian practice to assign a second in command from the General Staff to an army commander from the War Ministry and vice versa, to minimize the negative consequences of the rivalry between the factions. A widely circulated story that Rennenkampf and Samsonov had exchanged blows on a railway platform during the Russo-Japanese War was not true, but the mutual dislike between the men was intense enough that people who knew the two men easily believed it.

The man most directly responsible for overcoming these problems, Northwest Front Commander Yakov Zhilinski, could hardly have been less well suited to the task. An aggressive advocate of Plan 19’s G option, he had more ambition than aptitude. He owed his position in large measure to his understanding of French plans and needs. He was, however, a difficult man to work with and held the remarkable distinction of being unpopular with both the Sukhomlinov and the Nikolai cliques. Throughout the campaign in East Prussia, he failed to coordinate the movements of the First and Second Armies, with disastrous results.

These disasters likely would have come even earlier than they did if the Germans had not sent seven of their eight armies west instead of east. Facing a numerical inferiority of four to one, German Eighth Army commander Max von Prittwitz decided to lure Rennenkampf into East Prussia and attempt to destroy his First Army. Fighting in East Prussia put the Germans on familiar terrain and allowed them to be supplied by German trains; Russian rail lines used a different gauge. The existence of a sixty-mile chain of lakes known as the Masurian Lakes limited the avenues of Russian approach, forcing Rennenkampf to go around the lakes to the north while Samsonov went to the south, thus neutralizing the Russians’ numerical superiority. The Germans had planned and rehearsed an active defense in East Prussia for years; Prittwitz’s staff knew exactly what it was supposed to do.

The plan was sensible enough, but the improbably named German I Corps commander Hermann von François did not care for it. His hatred of Slavs overrode his sense of obedience and on August 17, 1914, he disobeyed his superior and advanced toward the Russian border. Rennenkampf had by then crossed into East Prussia but, short of supplies and with his men weary from a week of marching, had ordered a halt for August 20. François’s staff intercepted a radio transmission carrying the order to halt, which the Russians had not bothered to encode, and convinced Prittwitz to allow him to attack the resting Russians at the town of Gumbinnen, about twenty-five miles west of the Russo-German border.

The fourteen-hour battle that resulted provided Russia with an early, if short-lived, boost of confidence. Although Russian artillery support was crude and infantry tactics even cruder, Rennenkampf’s superior numbers forced François to admit that he lacked the strength to force the Russians back across the border. Samsonov’s Second Army, meanwhile, continued its advance south of the Masurian Lakes, threatening the German Eighth Army with envelopment. Prittwitz thought the situation serious enough to contact Moltke, who was then engaged with the German advance through Belgium. He told Moltke that to prevent envelopment he was ordering a general retreat of the Eighth Army almost seventy miles to secure positions behind the Vistula River.

While many of Moltke’s decisions in August 1914 appear mistaken in retrospect, his reaction to Prittwitz’s call does not. He immediately relieved Prittwitz of his duties and called upon sixty seven- year-old Paul von Hindenburg, then in retirement after completing an impressive fifty-one-year army career. Hindenburg had spent much of his retirement on his estate in East Prussia, occupying himself with the details of various Russian invasion scenarios of his homeland. Enthusiastic, intelligent, and physically imposing, he had been impatiently waiting for an assignment since the outbreak of the war. He was the perfect choice to assume command of the Eighth Army. In another inspired move, Moltke ordered Erich Ludendorff, the hero of Liège, to join Hindenburg as his chief of staff. The two met for the first time on an eastbound train from Hanover on August 23.