War and Game

A detail from Storcks painting showing the stern of Admiral de Ruyter's flagship Zeven Provincien on the first day. After four days the Dutch had won an impressive victory, but within the month the English had more than made up for their defeat. Such close and frequent main fleet actions were the main feature of the three Anglo-Dutch wars. The artist was familiar with the Dutch, but not the English, ships. Storck, like his contemporaries, also compressed events in space and time, producing a packed canvas. (Abraham Storck)




Concerned that the French fleet, allied to the Dutch, was about to enter the Channel, the English fleet under Albemarle and Prince Rupert was divided. Despite this Albemarle engaged de Ruyter and fought for two days before Rupert rejoined. Poor discipline cost the English the battle, and a number of ships when impetuous captains rushed into battle without support.



The grounded Royal Prince surrenders to the Dutch on 3 June 1666, the third day of the Four Days battle. This famous old ship had been James 1's prestige vessel, and remained a powerful symbol of the Stuart monarchy. The loss of the ship, which was eventually burnt by the Dutch, was the most serious blow inflicted during the battle. (Van de Velde the Younger)


In early 1666 France declared war on England, complicating the strategic picture. For the new season Charles kept James, the heir to the throne, at Court, leaving Albemarle and Prince Rupert in joint command. They were ordered to divide their fleet following erroneous intelligence that the French Toulon squadron was about to enter the Channel. Rupert took twenty of the most powerful ships to meet this imaginary threat, leaving Albemarle with fifty-six to face ninety-two Dutch ships under de Ruyter.

Albemarle moved into the Thames estuary to wait for the Dutch, and for Rupert. Early on 1 June he found the Dutch anchored off the North Foreland and, during a hasty council of war, persuaded his captains to attack, rather than make for safety in the Swin anchorage, thus opening what became known as the Four Days battle. Surprised by the English attack, the Dutch were unable to exploit their advantage of superior numbers.

Although the impetuous, undisciplined assault of the White Division under Admiral Berkeley led not only to the loss of three ships and the disabling of two more but to Berkeley's death, the Dutch lost Admiral Evertsen and had two ships burned, while two of their admirals were forced to shift their flags into fresh ships when their original vessels were disabled.

On the second day Albemarle's fleet had the better of the fighting, largely driving off the Dutch, before de Ruyter pulled them together and pursued the retiring English. Late on the third day Rupert, who had only belatedly heard of the Dutch advance, came in sight to the west, and as Albemarle manoeuvred to join him the imposing Royal Prince went aground, and was burnt by the Dutch. That evening the English admirals agreed to attack the following day. Although de Ruyter still had sixty-four ships, many were battered and their crews were exhausted. The English had twenty fresh ships. However, Rupert wasted the advantage with an ill co-ordinated and impetuous attack, which left his flagship and her seconds crippled when a more careful approach, relying on the line of battle, would have exploited their superior firepower. Consequently, the English lost another ship that day, and finally retreated when mist began to shroud the area. The English had been beaten, losing prizes and prisoners to the Dutch, but both fleets were too shattered to continue the fight.

Japan, was just a few decades past feudalism when it embarked on a large naval construction program. Unlike the Americans and the Germans, the Japanese had to call upon British technology during this era. The Japanese therefore got off to a better start technologically than the other two naval upstarts. The first two Japanese battleships (Fuji and Yashima), ordered in 1893, were improved Royal Sovereign types built in the UK. They were thus superior to the relatively pioneering (albeit unsatisfactory) U.S. and German battleships. (These first two Japanese battleships did not arrive in time for the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895.) The follow-on Shikishima, Hatsuse, Asahi, and Mikasa battleships, considerably larger than Fuji and Yashima, were also built in Great Britain, this time as improved Majestics. Qualitatively, Japan, like the United States and Germany, would eventually achieve parity with the Great Britain’s naval forces.

Naval ordnance made great strides in the early battleship era. Until 1895, armor-piercing projectiles were solid, just as they had been back during the U.S. Civil War—and with about as little success. But in that year and in 1903, both a British as well as a U.S. company introduced versions of an explosive-filled projectile able to pass through its own caliber steel armor. New fillers, like trinitrotoluene (TNT), also reduced the possibility of these shells exploding when fired and increased the shells’ explosive effect. The various new propellants went under the name of smokeless powder, but they were more smoke less than smokeless.

Gunnery itself had finally begun to emerge from its prevailing primitive inaccuracy. As late as 1900, RN warships had difficulty in hitting a target a little over a mile distant. At Tsushima five years later, the Japanese could engage their enemy at 2.5 miles range— and were proud of it. Generally, although the big naval guns were capable of hitting a target at 6,000 yards, they rarely hit one at 1,500 yards, even in practice. By Jutland, hits were scored at 5 miles or more, but nonetheless, hits on both sides averaged an unimpressive 0.33 percent to 4 percent.

Russian battleship designs, which had in earlier decades followed British concepts, began to display more French influence by the 1890s—worse luck for them. The first Russian pre-dreadnoughts were the three unlucky Petropavlovsks (Petropavlovsk, Poltava, and Sevastopol, completed in 1903–1905—all three would be lost at Tsushima). The last pre-dreadnought Russian battleships were the Imperator Pavel class (Imperator Pavel and Andrei Pervoswanni, both completed in 1910). Although the Russian ironclad/battleship fleet was sometimes used as a bogeyman by the Royal Navy to extract more funds from Parliament, Russian capital ships remained generally inferior to their British counterparts. Their disastrous performance at Tsushima revealed the hollowness of the Russian naval threat. Nonetheless, the Russians were perhaps more quick than any other naval power to adopt technological innovations. For example, Sinope pioneered triple-expansion engines, and Georgi Pobiedonosetz was the first to carry electrically worked turrets and hoists. (A few Russian battleships were the only non–U.S. Navy warships to mount the U.S.-style cage masts.)

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The Russo-Japanese War at sea began disastrously for both sides off Port Arthur. First, the modern Russian battleship Petropavlovsk struck a mine on 13 April 1904 and sank. This was a double-disaster, for the stricken battleship carried down with it Russia’s best admiral, Stephan Makarov. And the mine had not yet finished its deadly work: Little more than a month later, two relatively new Japanese battleships, Hatsuse and Yashima, also struck mines off Port Arthur on the same day and sank with heavy loss of life.

In August, the Russian fleet finally sortied from besieged Port Arthur, the command devolved to Admiral Vilgelm Vitegift, who did not live long enough to demonstrate his abilities. Admiral Heihachiro Togo, despite his four-to-six inferiority in battleships and his awareness that, unlike the Russians, he was commanding Japan’s only battle fleet, did not hesitate to close with the enemy.

The Russians were actually giving a good account of themselves with accurate gunfire when fate entered the battle: A 12-inch Japanese shell ricocheted off the sea and plunged through the roof of battleship Tsarevitch’s armored conning tower, where it exploded. The errant shell wreaked havoc among the crowded Russian officers, killing Vitegift and wounding many others. The battleship’s steering engine then failed, and Tsarevitch began to circle toward the Japanese line. Lacking orders, the Russian fleet broke up in disarray, the fleet second-in-command signaled to follow, and the Russians retreated back to Port Arthur. Togo was frustrated by gathering dusk from following up his lucky shot. Later, Japanese shore batteries at Port Arthur finished off the battleships Poltava, Retvisan, Peresviet, and Pobeda. Sevastopol was scuttled in deep water outside the port, and Tsarevitch sought internment at Tsingtao, China. Port Arthur had become a battleship graveyard.
Moscow then dispatched the 2nd Pacific Squadron, commanded by Admiral Zinovi Petrovich Rohdzsvenski, from the Baltic to the Pacific, halfway around the world, to salvage the desperate situation in the Pacific.

Rohdzsvenski’s main units numbered eight battleships, three armored cruisers, and three hopelessly obsolete armored coast-defense warships. The core of the Russian fleet was represented by the four new battleships of the Borodino class (Borodino, Alexander III, Orel, and Kniaz Suvarov). The Russians again appeared to have a strong edge in numbers, but they were, in truth, inferior in just about every other way, particularly guns, armor, and speed. And Rohdzsvenski’s fleet was also outclassed in the intangibles that really counted: leadership, morale, and training. By the time it met the Japanese, the Russian fleet was completing a debilitating seven-month epic of endurance. Instead of training, the crews had exhausted themselves in repeated coaling stops and were suffering from low morale and heat exhaustion.

The Japanese squadron numbered only four battleships and eight armored cruisers, but this was a homogenous fleet, with higher speed and morale, and was led by one of the great fighting commanders of the age, Admiral Togo, in his flagship Mikasa. Mikasa had been constructed in Britain, and all of Togo’s warships were foreign- built. On the other side, and unfortunately for them, the Russians’ battleships had been constructed on the usual bizarre French design pattern and were top-heavy and outclassed by Togo’s capital ships.

Although Admiral Rohdzsvenski had hoped to make for the Russian naval port of Vladivostok, Togo cut him off, forcing the Russian fleet to battle. From the start, Togo outfought the Russians. The Japanese fleet dumped coal to tackle their opponents more quickly, whereas the Russians were encumbered by bags of coal everywhere, endangering stability. While the Japanese communicated by radio (this being the first naval battle in history in which radio was used), the Russians relied on signal flags, despite the smoke and haze (Rohdzsvenski feared that his radio messages could be intercepted).

On the afternoon of 27 May 1905, Togo, after sighting his prey, made a daring move to the northeast to cut off the Russians from Vladivostok and to enable him to cross the T. The move also exposed his fleet to Russian broadsides during the long turn. But Russian gunnery was poor (something Togo might well have suspected), and the Japanese were able to make their line-ahead formation unhindered, parallel to the Russians. Now Japanese superior speed and gunnery began to tell, although neither side could gain a complete view. By nightfall, the Japanese had practically destroyed Rohdzsvenski’s fleet; Togo carried on the fight into the night with torpedo-boat attacks.

Dawn revealed that eight of the twelve Russian capital ships in the line had been sunk, including three of the new Borodinos, and the other four captured. (Four cruisers were sunk and one scuttled.) The Japanese lost three torpedo boats. Comparative human casualties also indicate the extent of the Russian disaster: 4,830 Russians killed and a little less than 7,000 captured, as compared to 110 Japanese fatalities. As noted, Tsushima was the first naval battle in which radio was employed, but it was also the last in which underwater torpedoes and aerial weapons did not count. Finally, all attention was focused on the gunfire losses of the Russians, and the three battleships sunk by mines were practically ignored.

Overnight, Russia had ceased to be a Pacific power, replaced by a victorious Japan, which would continue to expand its power in Asia and the Pacific until the conclusion of its disastrous war with the United States. It would be difficult to imagine more convincing proof that Mahan’s great-gun high-seas naval battle could decide the course of empires.

Of the three early battleship era naval battles, only Tsushima repaid detailed studying; the other two were so one-sided that little could be learned except that armor, training, and leadership still mattered. Tsushima was indeed perused in detail by naval architects and officers. All the intricate theories, war-gaming, and writings on the future of naval warfare had been put into practice almost to perfection. Admiral Togo became such a hero that babies in the United States and Great Britain were named for him. Yet Togo’s Mikasa, considered at the time the world’s most powerful warship, would soon be rendered obsolete by Dreadnought.

In 653 be the Assyrians inflicted a decisive defeat on the Elamites at the Ulai River in south-west Iran. On this relief from Ashurbanipal's palace at Nineveh, the Assyrian infantry drive back the Elamites. On the left an Assyrian holds up the head of the king of Elam. On the upper register vultures pick at dead Elamites. In the Iron Age infantry took the offensive and became the ‘queen of battle'. Mass infantry armies gave rise to imperial states of unprecedented size and complexity.



Basalt stele with an Assyrian two-horse, two-man chariot, eighth century. This chariot is transporting an officer. In battle the chariot was still used as an archery platform but at this time was becoming obsolete because of the development of true cavalry.


This spectacular civilization collapsed with astonishing suddenness. Within a few decades, around 1200 BC, practically all the cities and palaces of the eastern Mediterranean basin north of Egypt were sacked and destroyed by enemies. The Mycenaean culture of the Aegean disappeared utterly, except for the hazy recollections of a lost world that turn up in Greek mythology and the Homeric poems. In western Asia the destruction was not so total; the art of writing survived, and city life eventually revived; but the Hittite kingdom was obliterated and nothing replaced it. The kingdom of Egypt survived after beating off many invasions, but lost its empire in the Levant and was never again to be a dominant power in the Middle East.

Egyptian inscriptions have left us the only contemporary records of this mysterious catastrophe. In 1208 BC the pharaoh Merneptah, son of Ramesses II, defeated an invading army of Libyans, who were accompanied by many northern allies, especially the people known to the Egyptians as Ekwesh (Achaeans), with other groups who can be identified as Sardinians, Sicilians, Tyrrhenians (Italians) and Luwians (Anatolians). Twenty years later the Nineteenth Dynasty faded away and was replaced by the Twentieth, which was to be the last of the great dynasties. In 1179 BC Ramesses III defeated invasions on both land and sea by Philistines from the coast of Canaan, accompanied by other barbarians. The inscription commemorating his victories says, 'The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands ... Noland could stand before their arms.' They defeated the Hittites and other countries in the north and then came against Egypt. 'They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth ... ' Hence the invaders are commonly called the 'Peoples of the Sea'; but the Egyptian language had no word for island, and the term 'isles' may be better translated as 'coastlands'. In their inscriptions kings had always portrayed themselves surrounded by hordes of enemies. Now rhetoric had become reality.

It was once thought that massive barbarian migrations must have been responsible for the disasters, but there is no evidence for any large population movements. It was believed that these invasions brought the Greeks or Achaeans (which is what the Greeks call themselves in the Homeric poems) into Greece. But when the Linear B script used in the Mycenaean world was finally deciphered in the 1950s it unexpectedly turned out to be a sort of Greek, which means that the Achaeans of Homer were already in Greece in the High Bronze Age.

There was a tradition, recorded in the Bible (Amos 9:7, Jeremiah 47:4), that the Philistines had originally come from 'Caphtor' (Crete), so it was assumed they were part of the general Volkerwanderung. But the later Philistines, as revealed by archaeology, were as thoroughly Semitic and Canaanite as any people in Canaan, which would later be called Palestine after them; the legend of Cretan origins possibly started with a band of Achaean refugees who settled in Canaan during the upheavals around 1200 BC. The Indo-European invaders who inaugurated the chariot age have been compared to the medieval Normans; the invaders who ended it were more like Vikings, destructive raiders who founded no lasting dynasties and left nothing behind in the cities they ruined, many of which were never inhabited again. It was once thought that they brought iron weapons, but iron was still rare in the Middle East at this time and did not generally replace bronze as the common metal until after 1000 BC. The transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age could have been in some way a result of the fall of the palaces, but could not have caused it.

The end of the Early Bronze Age a thousand years before might be explained in terms of systems collapse. The High Bronze Age societies, however, do not seem to have been under any unusual stresses on the eve of their fall. There is no evidence for general environmental deterioration; and warfare was not becoming more frequent in the thirteenth century, rather the contrary. Pitched battles between Great Kings seem to have been rare in the High Bronze Age. Great Kings were expected to go on campaigns from time to time to show that they were Great Kings, especially at the start of a reign, but these martial demonstrations were largely symbolic. This is virtually admitted in a letter written by the old Hittite king Hattusilis III to a young Assyrian king who had just been enthroned:

I have heard that my brother is grown into a man and goes often to hunt ... My brother, you should not stay at home. Go out into the enemy country and defeat the enemy! But when you go out, go against a country on which you are three or four times superior. 

A young king must prove his valour, but let him pick a small enemy. In addition to keeping up appearances, the raid will serve a useful purpose, as it will overawe his client states and perhaps acquire some new ones. Ramesses II was unusual in selecting another Great Kingdom for his target. But even Ramesses never fought another major campaign after Kadesh, even though he lived on for more than sixty years. The High Bronze Age states, it has been argued here, were the first to be capable of offensive warfare; but it would be wrong to think of warfare as endemic among them, in the sense that it was in classical Greek and Roman times.

Hence the most plausible explanation so far offered for this catastrophe is that it was a result of the transition from chariot to infantry warfare. The High Bronze Age states, because of their exclusive reliance on chariot armies, had always been vulnerable to concentrated infantry attack, but it was a long time before their vulnerability was perceived. Chariots, so deadly to heavy infantry, could easily be disabled by swarms of light infantry with missile weapons. Archaeology suggests that the weapon which accounted for most of the chariots was the simple javelin, most ancient and basic of missiles. This was a poor weapon compared to the composite bow, which was arguably the most effective firepower known before the nineteenth century AD.

But composite bows were expensive machines that took years to make, and the training of an archer took years more. Javelins were cheap and abundant and any active young man could throw them. Active, poor and hungry young men were one commodity the barbarian world produced in unlimited numbers. Many such young men had learned about chariots in the service of the Great Kings, who had long recruited their chariot-runners from the tribes of the deserts and mountains and the islands of the sea.

Some dramatic event must have revealed the vulnerability of the chariot armies. Perhaps it was the Achaean sack of Troy. The city known as Troy VI to archaeologists was destroyed in the late thirteenth century BC, and it is hard to explain the mesmerizing effect of the Trojan War on the later Greek imagination if something similar to that event had not happened. If so, the Achaeans who took Troy should be pictured as tribesmen from the Greek mountains, not the civilized Achaeans of Mycenae and Cnossus, though later legend mixed them up. Legend has it that the Trojans were 'tamers of horses', and that Achilles was killed by an arrow. This would have happened in the last years of Ramesses II (died 1212 BC), under whom the eastern Mediterranean world had enjoyed a long peace. After he died, the news from the north inspired a Berber chieftain to think the unthinkable; that with this new method of fighting Egypt itself might be taken, and for this he recruited great numbers of javelin-men from all over the north. Then the sacking of cities began. It might well seem to the Egyptians that the foreigners had made a conspiracy on their coasts to seize the circuit of the earth.

Kingdoms that survived the collapse had to learn a new art of war. Egypt beat off the invasions by relying on infantry armies. Why Mesopotamia remained immune is not entirely clear, but the Assyrian kingdom served as a shield against invaders from the west, and it is possible that Assyria, a hilly land that had never been counted as one of the major chariot states, may have depended already upon a militia of foot soldiers. The early Iron Age was to be a world of such infantry militias, like the host of Israel in Canaan and the Dorian spearmen of Greece.

By ANTHONY LUTTRELL

At the beginning of the fourteenth century the formal status of the professed members of a military order of the Latin Church had changed little since these organizations had originated in the twelfth century, despite the progressive codification of canon law and the passing of new statutes and other legislation within individual orders. It had become less likely that brethren would be motivated by spiritual enthusiasms or by the prospect of action directly concerned with the recovery of Jerusalem, but most military religious still took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, while all were supposed to live according to their order’s constitution. Each order had a rule which had been approved by the papacy, whose capacity to intervene in an order’s affairs, or even to dissolve it, was demonstrated dramatically when Clement V suppressed the Temple in 1312. Except in Prussia and Livonia, brethren were less likely to confront an infidel enemy and more apt to be seeking a relatively secure if often undistinguished position in local society; it was also increasingly improbable that they would experience a common liturgical life within a sizeable community of religious. The various military religious orders differed considerably from one another, but in general they received knights, sergeants, priests, and sisters, all devoted primarily to the prosecution of an armed struggle against the infidel.

Their members were not technically permitted to take crusade vows, though naturally they participated in crusades fought against the infidel. By 1312 there was a growing distinction between the permanent holy war of the military orders, whose members were not supposed—except in certain specific situations—to fight fellow Christians, and the papally-proclaimed crusade, an occasional event directed against Latin and other Christians more often than against the infidel. The psychological impact of the Templar affair must have been profound, but there was little immediate indication of any decline in recruitment to the other military orders. These orders’ very function had been the subject of widespread criticism and debate, with proposals for their union in a single order or even for the confiscation of all their lands. Furthermore, in 1310 the pope instigated a searching investigation into the gravest complaints against the Teutonic Order’s Livonian activities. In 1309 that order moved its principal convent or headquarters from Venice to Marienburg in Prussia, while in 1306 the Hospitallers initiated their conquest of Rhodes. This piratical invasion, probably not completed until 1309, preceded the attack on the Temple in 1307 and went far to preserve the Hospital from any similar assault.

Though directed largely against Christian Greek schismatics, it gave the Hospitallers a variety of patently justifiable anti-infidel functions and an independence they had not enjoyed on Cyprus. The resulting prestige was cunningly exploited by the master, Foulques of Villaret, who visited the West and raised a papal–Hospitaller crusade which sailed from Italy in 1310 under the master’s command and made conquests against the Turks on the Anatolian mainland. After 1312 the Hospital was occupied throughout the West in an extended process of securing and absorbing the Templars’ enormous landed inheritance which the pope had transferred to it. The Hospital also faced a major financial crisis provoked by its expensive Rhodian campaign and by the extravagances of Foulques of Villaret which led to his deposition in 1317 and to the damaging internal disputes which ensued. The Iberian monarchs were extremely reluctant to accept the fusion of Templar and Hospitaller wealth and strength, arguing persistently that the Temple had been endowed to sustain a peninsular rather than a Mediterranean reconquest; in Castile much Templar property was usurped by the nobility while new national military orders were created in Valencia and Portugal.

Pope Clement V failed to save the Temple, but he did keep most of its goods out of secular hands while defending the principle that lay powers should not judge or interfere in the affairs of military religious orders. The interests of individual orders frequently diverged from papal concerns, but from 1312 to 1378 the Avignon popes encouraged, chided, and sometimes threatened them, acting as a court of appeal for the brethren, settling internal disputes and repeatedly intervening throughout Latin Christendom to protect their interests and privileges. A number of minor orders, such as the English order of Saint Thomas which had a small establishment on Cyprus, abandoned any military pretensions during the fourteenth century. In north-eastern Europe the popes sought to balance the activities of the Teutonic Order, which were difficult to control at such a distance, against the interests of others who were also seeking to convert or persuade pagan Lithuanians and Livonians into Christianity; the brethren were often able to evade the pope’s commands as they quarrelled with the Franciscans, the archbishop of Riga, the king of Poland, and other lay rulers. In 1319 Pope John XXII resolved the constitutional quarrel within the Hospital through the choice of the efficient Hélion of Villeneuve as its new master. From Avignon successive popes pressed for action and reform as Rhodes was developed into a prominent anti-Turkish bulwark. The Avignon popes enormously expanded their curia’s interventions in all manner of ecclesiastical matters and occasionally they sought to influence appointments within the military orders, especially in Italy where they used a number of Hospitallers as rectors to govern the papal provinces. Yet popes were cautiously restrained with respect to the Hospital and the Teutonic Order, and only in 1377 did Gregory XI, who had earlier instituted a universal inquest into the Hospital’s western resources, provide a long-standing papal protégé, Juan Fernández de Heredia, as master of Rhodes. The situation worsened thereafter for all but the Teutonic Order, as popes increasingly interfered in magistral or other elections and temporarily or even permanently alienated the orders’ lands through papal provisions or by way of grants made to favourites, kinsmen, or others.

There was never unanimous consensus among military men about the lessons of World War I. When the adversaries of 1914–18 fought again in 1940, the Germans interpreted their experience as one that taught the need for a rapid and forceful offense. Interpreting that same conflict quite differently, France planned to fight almost purely defensively in the first stages. It would then attack the Germans, who they believed would have worn themselves out assaulting the centerpiece of French strategy, the Maginot line.

Planned in the 1920s and essentially completed by 1935, the Maginot line (named after a French minister of war) was a network of fortifications on the border between Germany, Luxembourg, and Italy. The line was designed and built to serve several purposes. First, the Maginot line would protect French industry in the Alsace-Lorraine region. Second, a strong defensive line would help the French make the most of their available forces while mobilizing their remaining reserves. Finally, it was envisioned that the Germans would go directly for the line, allowing the French to hold them off and inflict heavy casualties. The relatively fresh French would then launch an assault of their own and defeat the Germans on their own territory.

The Maginot line was not an uninterrupted line like the trench system of World War I. Instead, it was a network of steel and concrete fortifications facing the Germans to the east and the Italians to the southeast. Each fort (commonly designated as an ouvrage, or work) was an independent structure; in all there were over 100 of these with additional minor fortifications. Using guns in a variety of calibers, each fort was within the range of another so they not only could fi re on assaulting troops but could also cover other forts in the immediate area. To add further support, there were permanent garrisons of “interval troops,” infantry units that would provide support in the areas between forts.

The forts were among the most advanced technical structures of the day. Each had large storage areas for ammunition, facilities for food supplies, command centers, fi re control centers, miles of tunnels, small railroads, air-conditioning, electrical power plants, and water supplies. In addition, the guns were mounted in turrets that used a series of complex, highly advanced mechanical devices to change elevation or direction.
The line was strong, it reflected state-of-the-art technologies for the 1930s, and it even made a high degree of military sense. There were, however, drawbacks. Perhaps the most significant of these was that the line did not go all the way to the North Sea. France did not extend the line for several reasons: the expense, the unsuitability of the terrain, and the appearance that France was abandoning Belgium. In fact, the French believed that while the Maginot line was holding, the newly mobilized French forces would join with the Belgians to contain the German advance. Together, probably with British assistance, they would then advance through Belgium and eventually invade Germany. At the same time, the French made an assumption that the very northern end of the Maginot line, which stopped near the Ardennes, would be safe, as the Germans would never launch a major offensive through the rough terrain there.

Although war was declared in September 1939, there was no significant action by either side on the western front until May 1940. This period, known as the phony war, allowed the British and the French to mobilize and bring their troops to hold positions without interference by the Germans. On the morning of May 10, over 100 German divisions attacked the French, British, Belgians, and Dutch. The main German attack went through the Ardennes forests and mountains in Luxembourg, south of Liege, exactly where the French had assumed it would never take place.

Thus, the German tanks and motorized forces went around the extreme left flank of the Maginot line and straight into France. They bypassed the line and did not attack it directly until after the British evacuation from Dunkirk and the surrender of the French government. The Maginot line forts surrendered only when their mobile interval troops had retreated and they were completely surrounded.

The Germans occupied the Maginot forts but did not maintain them. They used them only briefly when the United States attacked some nearby French cities in 1944 and 1945. After the war the French army reoccupied them and used them. In the years of the cold war, they provided headquarters and communications centers that would have provided significant protection in the case of a nuclear war.

In the years between the world wars, the French were not alone in seeing the usefulness of fortifications. Although they would rely upon a highly mobile and powerful offensive, the Germans maintained two lines, one facing Poland (the East Wall) and one facing France (the West Wall, better known as the Siegfried line, which would be used in 1944 against the United States). In addition, Czechoslovakia constructed a line of defenses built with French assistance. Finally, Switzerland had built a complex of fortifications. Although not as extensive as the Maginot or German lines, it was well placed, using the mountainous terrain and command of the few lines of communications through the passes.

The Maginot line has become a symbol. On one level it represents a defense that deluded its builders into thinking they need not do anything else but rely upon what seemed to be an impenetrable defense. It has also become a symbol or a shorthand expression for all of the reasons for France’s defeat in 1940.
The irony is that had it been used properly, that is, supplemented with an acute understanding of what the enemy might do and not what the French wanted them to do, it might have been a symbol of victory. As designed, the Maginot line worked. It was the rest of France’s strategy that failed.

Further reading: Allcorn, William. The Maginot Line 1928– 45. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2003; Kaufmann, J. E. Fortress France: The Maginot Line and French Defenses in World War II. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006; ———. Maginot Imitations: Major Fortifications of Germany and Neighboring Countries. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997; Martin, Benjamin F. France in 1938. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005; May, Ernest R. Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000; Rowe, Vivian. The Great Wall of France: The Triumph of the Maginot Line. London: Putnam, 1959.


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Japan’s military presence in and domination of Manchuria in northwestern China received a major victory with the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Under the Treaty of Portsmouth, Japan was required to withdraw its troops from Manchuria proper but gained a leased territory of the Liaotung (Liaodong) Peninsula in southern Manchuria, renamed the Kwantung Leased Territory, which included the fortress and port of Port Arthur. The army unit assigned to garrison the area and the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway (SMR), as far as Changchun, was named the Kwantung Army. From this date this army became the spearhead of Japanese imperialism in China.

With the railway administration working as a colonial power, running ports, harbors, tax collection, mines, and utility companies, the SMR turned the railway zone into a semiautonomous state, and the Kwantung Army was its security and police arm.

After World War I, Japan gained control of former German holdings at Tsingtao in China’s Shandong (Shantung) Province and deployed 70,000 troops from the Kwantung Army to Siberia to support the Whites in the Russian Civil War. The Japanese sought to expand their empire in Siberia, failed to do so, and withdrew in 1922.

In 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek’s troops were marching on Shandong to break the power of local warlords in the Northern Expedition, Japanese troops were sent to Shandong (Shantung). Soon Chinese and Japanese troops were clashing. Chiang withdrew his forces from the city of Tsinan, but the Kwantung Army attacked it the next day, killing 13,000 civilians.

Chiang turned his troops away from conflict with Japan. Tokyo, however, supported the Kwantung Army, issuing warnings to Chiang and Manchurian warlord Zang Zolin (Chang Tso-lin) not to attack Japanese forces or civilians. However, the new commander of the Kwantung Army, General Chotaro Muraoka, had other ideas, moving his headquarters in May 1928 from Port Arthur to Mukden, Manchuria’s main city, and preparing his troops to take control of the region.

Ready to move, Muraoka and his troops waited, firing telegrams to Tokyo asking permission to move. When Prime Minister Giichi Tanaka refused, the Kwantung Army’s officers were stunned. Muraoka decided to kill Zang Zolin, blasting a bridge as the warlord’s train crossed it on June 4, 1928. The Kwantung Army reported to Tokyo that Zang had been killed by Manchurian guerrillas. The truth came out anyway, and Tokyo could do seemingly little to control the insubordinate army and its officers, who had a lot of support in Japan.

But Tanaka was determined to punish the officers responsible for the assassination plot and recommended so to Emperor Hirohito, who agreed. But when the army as a whole objected, Tanaka temporized. He fired Muraoka and told the public that there was no evidence the Kwantung Army had been involved in the plot. Then Tanaka resigned. The Kwantung Army’s officers had defied Tokyo and gotten away with it.

As the Great Depression wore on, the Japanese economy continued to crumble. Many Japanese army officers, angered by the economic situation, joined secret societies like the Cherry Blossom League, and a group of officers plotted to use the Kwantung Army to seize Manchuria for its rich resources. One of the key men was Colonel Doihara Kenji, who prepared a “Plan for Acquiring Manchuria and Mongolia.”

Chiang Kai-shek, meanwhile, had succeeded in unifying China under the Kuomintang, and Zhang Xueliang (Chang Hsueh-liang), Manchuria’s new warlord, supported the Nationalist, or Kuomintang, government. In 1931 clashes broke out between Korean farmers who were Japanese subjects and Chinese farmers over water rights.

Doihara went to Manchuria and determined that a Japanese attempt to seize Manchuria would result in international condemnation. An “incident” had to be manufactured to make a Japanese occupation of Manchuria seem China’s fault. In 1929 the Kwantung Army began to plot an incident under their new boss, Lieutenant General Shigeru Honjo, with Doihara as mastermind.

Japan’s civilian leaders did nothing to control the insubordinate Kwantung Army. The emperor, however, ordered Major General Yoshitsugu Tatekawa to bring a message from him on September 15, 1931, ordering the Kwantung Army not to take any unauthorized action. Unfortunately for Hirohito, Tatekawa’s assistant, Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto, was among the plotters, and he sent a message to officers of the Kwantung Army to let them know that Tatekawa was coming with imperial orders. When Tatekawa arrived in Mukden on September 17, Kwantung Army officers took the general to a party, where he became drunk.

That night Kwantung Army officers blew up a section of track on the South Manchurian Railway 1,200 yards from a Chinese army that failed to derail the night express. Kwantung Army troops then attacked and shelled the Chinese barracks, killing many soldiers. By 10:00 a.m. on September 18, 1931, Mukden was under Japanese control, Chang’s headquarters were ransacked, and his banks and government offices were occupied, as were a dozen other cities in southern Manchuria in a coordinated attack by Japanese units. Some 12 hours after their blast, Kwantung Army officers displayed to Western reporters the “proof” that the Chinese had tried to destroy the railroad, which was bodies of Chinese soldiers shot in the back lying facedown, supposedly cut down while fleeing the scene. The world was outraged by the political adventurism, and Tokyo was stunned. The emperor reminded Prime Minister Reijiro Wakatsuki that he had forbidden such action, and the foreign and finance ministers also objected. But Wakatsuki did not overrule his generals and colonels. The attack and subsequent conquest of Manchuria were accepted as a fait accompli.

From October to December 1931, the Kwantung Army, now empowered by Tokyo and advised by units of the Japanese army in Korea, expanded conquest of Manchuria, even plotting a coup in October to overthrow the civilian government in Tokyo. This attempted coup was ended when the leading plotters were secretly arrested. In December Wakatsuki resigned. Ki Inukai became the new prime minister, but General Araki, leader of the Kodo Ha faction, became war minister, effectively providing the military’s endorsement to the Kwantung Army’s actions. The Kwantung Army now became an occupation force in Manchuria, and its officers became heroes for all of Japan.

The Kwantung Army continued to seize Chinese territory, taking Rehe (Jehol) province in 1933 and Chahar province in 1934. Officers of the Kodo Ha movement were assigned to the Kwantung Army, strengthening its radicalism; among them was Hideki Tojo, who would become Japan’s prime minister during World War II.
In February 1936, the Kwantung Army showed its powerful influence when a group of Kodo Ha officers attempted a coup d’état in Tokyo. It failed, the ringleaders were shot, and the civilian leaders regained some control over the Kwantung Army.

Leaving Chinese unity under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership, the Kwantung Army set to create an “incident” between Chinese and Japanese forces on July 7, 1937, at a railway junction near Beijing (Peking) in northern China, called the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. This led to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, in which Japan committed unspeakable attrocities, such as the Rape of Nanjing. It became World War II in Asia. The Kwantung Army promised Tokyo victory in three months.

As World War II began and dragged on, the Kwantung Army remained in occupation of Manchuria, “Asia’s Ruhr,” against Soviet invasion. Over time, the army was stripped of most of its equipment and men, which were needed on other battlefronts.

When the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945, and invaded Manchuria, the Kwantung Army had 1 million men under arms equipped with 1,155 tanks, 5,360 guns, and 1,800 aircraft. On paper, this was a match for the Soviets’ 1.5 million men, but the Soviets also fielded 26,000 guns, 5,500 tanks, and 3,900 planes. In addition, the Kwantung Army was short of gasoline, ammunition, and transport.

Yet some of the Kwantung Army’s hotheaded leaders refused to surrender when Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 14, 1945. Commanding general Otozo Yamada refused to obey the Imperial Rescript to surrender, summoned his officers to his headquarters at Changchun, debated the news from Tokyo, and by a majority vote chose to go on fighting.

In the end, the Kwantung Army did obey an imperial command and surrendered to the Soviet Army. Several of its leaders, including Doihara and Tojo, were tried, convicted, and executed at the Tokyo International Court.

Further reading: Harris, Meirion, and Susie Harris. Soldiers of the Sun. New York: Random House, 1991; Hoyt, Edwin P. Japan’s War. New York: Da Capo, 1986; Toland, John. The Rising Sun. New York: Random House, 1970; Tuchman, Barbara W. Sand against the Wind: Stilwell and the American Experience in China. New York: MacMillan, 1970.

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Danelaw encompassed the areas of northeast England where Danish customs had a strong political and cultural influence throughout much of the early Middle Ages. The area included Yorkshire (southern Northumbria), East Anglia, and the Five Boroughs, named for its main centers of settlement: Lincoln, Stamford, Nottingham, Leicester, and Derby. All these territories bore influence of Scandinavian culture from Viking invaders in the late-ninth century, who then became settlers and who drove the political leadership of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into retreat to the south and west.

In c. 865 an army of between 500 and 1,000 Vikings arrived in England and began a systematic attack on the island. Their leaders were three brothers, Ivar the Boneless, Ubbi, and Halfdan, who had allegedly come to avenge the death of their father, Ragnar. They secured horses in East Anglia and proceeded to York, finding that infighting among local Anglo-Saxon leaders made conquest easy in Northumbria. The invaders next attacked west into Mercia and by 869 defeated East Anglia. The following year Halfdan attacked the kingdom of Wessex, seizing Reading and fighting nine pitched battles against Wessex. The Anglo-Saxons won only one battle, and the onslaught devastated the ranks of their nobility. Despite their unequivocal success, when Wessex offered a treaty the Vikings readily agreed and refocused their efforts north toward the kingdom of Mercia.

Throughout the 870s the Danish army continued to conquer territory in England, dividing and redividing the lands they acquired. They split Mercia with a puppet Anglo-Saxon king, Ceowulf, who held the territory on their behalf from 874 to 877 while they completed their conquests. However by 876 Halfdan and his men had occupied and divided Northumbria, settled into farming, and started a permanent settlement. In effect, the Danes had politically removed Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Derby, and Leicestershire from the rest of England. Historians believe that the Danish settlement proceeded in two waves and probably did not displace the English people living in the area. The first wave of Danish settlers came as invaders, increasing in number over time. The second wave came as emigrants from Denmark, who settled in the areas protected by the military forces of the first wave, and who subsequently pushed colonization into new areas.

Early in the winter of 878 a Viking leader named Guthrum launched an attack on the kingdom of Wessex, catching it almost completely off guard and forcing its king, Alfred the Great (r. 871–899), to retreat to the island of Athelney. The Vikings proceeded to conquer the lands of Wessex, while Alfred gathered support and built reinforcements in the southwest, preparing for a counterattack. Later in the year Alfred defeated the Danes at Eddington and drove them back to Chippenham. Eventually Alfred and Guthrum settled their differences and established a treaty for what would become the Danelaw, the main boundary for the division between English England and Anglo-Danish England. The area became a kind of “Denmark overseas,” which Danes organized and administered and which was different from the rest of England in ethnicity, culture, law, language, and social custom. Although the formal division lasted only about fi ve years, through the 11th century Danish law and customs prevailed in this area and the rulers continued to recognize the special and separate nature of Danish England.

The term Danelaw first appears in the time of Canute (1016–35) to distinguish the area’s different legal system, but it is incorrect to categorize Danelaw as a homogeneous territory. The differences in custom, law, and political allegiance varied with the density of the Norse population, but the area’s internal divisions never trumped its separateness from English England. The Scandinavian language permeated the area, as is most commonly observed in the frequent place names ending in by or thorp. Cultural differences also appear in land tenure. Rather than dividing their land into units known as hundreds used to administer the English shires, Yorkshire and the Five Boroughs settlers divided their land into units known as wapantakes. The term, never used in Scandinavia, is related to “weapon taking,” the Viking custom of brandishing one’s weapon to show approval of council decisions and is unique to the Danelaw. Likewise, they divided agricultural land into ploughlands, rather than using the Anglo- Saxon unit known as hide.

The Danelaw’s legal codes also showed a great deal of Scandinavian influence, not only in terminology but in concepts that differed from those of Anglo-Saxon England. For example, in the Danelaw, wergild fines related to a man’s rank, rather the rank of his lord, and the laws punished violations against the king’s peace more severely than in English territories. Courts and legal assemblies reflected Scandinavian roots as well. To investigate crimes, 12 thegns in each wapentake formed a jury of presentment, and the opinion of the majority prevailed in making its decision. They ultimately settled the fate of the accused by ordeal, as in Anglo-Saxon areas, but the notion of a jury of locals charged with investigating a crime was not an Anglo-Saxon concept.
Historians note the positive influence of the Scandinavian culture on the island, from the intensification of agriculture that made Lincolnshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk among the most prosperous shires of the period and the political success of King Canute to the regular commerce that emerged in the North Sea. Although the formal boundary of the Danelaw lasted only a few years, the impact of the Danes on England’s culture, economy, and political system remained strong throughout the Middle Ages.

Further reading: Hart, Cyril. The Danelaw. London: Hambledon Press, 1992; Hollister, C. Warren. The Making of England, 55 b.c. to 1399. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1983; Jones, Gwyn. A History of the Vikings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; Loyn, H. R. The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England, 500–1087. London: Edward Arnold, 1984; Stenton, F. M. Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947.

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Mike Hoare
During the Congo Crisis Mike Hoare organised and led two separate mercenary groups:

* 1960–1961. Major Mike Hoare's first mercenary action was in Katanga, a province trying to break away from the newly independent Congo. The unit was called "4 Commando". During this time he married Phyllis Simms, an airline stewardess.

* 1964. Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe hired "Colonel" Mike Hoare to lead a military unit called "5 Commando (Congo)" made up of about 300 men most of whom were from South Africa.His second in command was a young South African paratrooper Capt. GD Snygans. The unit's mission was to fight a breakaway rebel group called Simbas. Later Hoare and his mercenaries worked in concert with Belgian paratroopers, Cuban exile pilots, and CIA hired mercenaries who attempted to save 1,600 civilians (mostly Europeans and missionaries) in Stanleyville from the Simba rebels in Operation Dragon Rouge. This operation saved many lives.

The epithet "Mad" Mike Hoare comes from broadcasts by Communist East German radio during the fighting in the Congo in the Sixties. They would precede their commentary with "The mad bloodhound, Mike Hoare".

Bob Denard
After his discharge from the French navy, Bob Denard was briefly a policeman in Morocco and a demonstrator for washing machines in Paris.  He began his mercenary career, which was to span three decades, in Katanga, probably in December 1961 when he and other foreign mercenaries were brought in by the leader of the mercenaries in Katanga, Roger Faulques. He became famous after rescuing white civilians encircled by rebels in Stanleyville  (The 1978 film The Wild Geese is based on these events). Denard fought there until the secession of Moise Tshombe collapsed in January 1963. Denard and his men then fled to Portuguese Angola.

Denard is known to have participated in conflicts in Zimbabwe, Yemen, Iran, Nigeria, Benin, Gabon, Angola, Zaire and the Comoros, which has been subject to more than twenty coup d'états in the past decades. For most of his career Denard had the quiet backing of France and the French secret service which wished to maintain French influence over its ex-colonies.

In mid-1963 he made his way to North Yemen, which was then in the middle of a civil war between a Nasserist government and royalist tribesmen. The royalists were supported by the Western Europeans and Saudi Arabia. The French and British sponsored a number of mercenaries to train the royalist volunteers in military techniques, and Bob Denard was among those who joined the Imam al-Badr, leader of the royalists.

After about eighteen months Denard returned to the Congo to take employment under Moise Tshombe who was now the prime minister of the central government in Leopoldville. Denard served for two years in the Congo battling rebel supporters of the late Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, who had been murdered in Katanga in 1961 after having been overthrown by rival politicians and severely tortured while in transit. The rebels were backed by the Chinese and Cubans, including Che Guevara while Lumumba's murderers were tacitly backed by the CIA and Belgium. Denard was in charge of his own unit of French mercenaries called les affreux (lit. : the awfuls). Denard helped put down an attempted coup on behalf of Tshombe by Katangan separatists in July 1966. Tshombe had been overthrown while abroad by Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko, the leader of the army, in November 1965.

A year later Denard sided with Katangan separatists and Belgian mercenaries led by Jean Schramme in a revolt in eastern Congo. The rebels soon found themselves bottled up in Bukavu. Denard was wounded in the initial rising and flew out with a group of more seriously wounded men to Rhodesia. In January 1968 he invaded Katanga with a force of a hundred men on bicycles in an attempt to create a diversion for a breakout from Bukavu. The invasion was a farce.

Street fighting in the Congo. The weapons are surplus Second World War issue with which the world was still awash in the 1960s.

The Belgian Congo, which dissolved in a flood of political violence immediately upon obtaining independence in 1960. Belgium had done next to nothing to prepare its colony for self-rule. Its departure was simply a reflection of its own inability to continue bearing the burdens of colonial stewardship. When the Belgians left, political authority was vested in a hastily conceived parliamentary government headed by Patrice Lumumba, the leading figure of the Congolese National Movement. He immediately faced dissention within Congo's security forces, which rebelled against the Belgian officers left behind to train them. Most Europeans remaining in the country fled. A month later the southernmost of the country's six major provinces, Katanga (Shaba), seceded. Lumumba appealed to the Soviet Union and to the UN for assistance. Both sent troops, though not in time to save Lumumba, who was overthrown in a coup and murdered by Katangan rebels.

UN forces finally regained control in Katanga in January 1963, but the appearance that order had been restored was deceptive. When the last UN troops left in June 1964, secessionist violence erupted again, this time in the north and east, under the leadership of a vaguely leftist group called the Popular Army of Liberation, which enjoyed modest backing from the Soviet Union and China. In August the government, now headed by former Katangan separatist leader Moise Tsombe, called upon the United States and Belgium to intervene. Neither was prepared to do so on any scale, though in November 1964 they mounted a combined airborne operation (Belgian paratroops in American planes) to rescue 1,200 Europeans being held hostage by rebel forces in Stanleyville (Kisangani). This operation was co-ordinated with the Congolese Army, now led at the tactical level by white mercenaries recruited by Tsombe. It managed to use the success at Stanleyville to get its feet under itself, and over the next year a modicum of order was restored; whereupon the army's commander, Joseph Mobutu, overthrew the government, expelled the white mercenaries, and established an autocratic regime with himself at its head. He ruled the country, which he renamed Zaire, until he was himself ousted in a coup in 1997.

Katanga was a mineral-rich area, whose provincial identity was a creation of the colonial economy: Its separatist movement was driven by material motives, and was led by Africans linked to European mining interests there. Although it would be fair to describe much of the resulting violence that washed across the rest of the country as tribal in character, this was an exiguous feature: there are over two hundred tribal groups in the Congo (as the country is again known today), all but a few of which are too small to mount a significant rebellion.

Israel's victory in 1948 was a product of superior military organization, superior social cohesion and a well-developed network of support from Jews overseas. Their money made timely arms purchases possible, without which the war might have been lost. As it was, Jewish casualties were heavier than in any of Israel’s later wars, amounting to almost six thousand dead - in relative terms, a toll comparable to Britain's in the First World War.



At the start of 1947, Britain had 100,000 troops in Palestine. The question why had to be faced. Before the Arab uprising in 1936, British policy aimed at the creation of a single Palestinian state in which Jews and Arabs would rule together. Afterwards thoughts turned to partition, an approach grudgingly accepted by the Zionists but not by the Arabs. A number of schemes were produced by Whitehall and the Jewish Agency before the war. As Britain grew weary of its Mandatory burden, this process revived under the auspices of a United Nations committee. Its report was adopted by the General Assembly in November 1947, and called for a Jewish state in three barely contiguous parts, with Jerusalem as an international city The UN vote was a deliverance for the British, but it was an expression of US policy. American opinion had been revolted by the revelation of the Holocaust in Europe, and the Truman administration was unwilling to face the political consequences that would follow a further affront to America's strongly Zionist Jewish community Politics in any case is about choices, and by 1948 there were no good ones left in Palestine.

With the announcement of the UN plan, fighting between Jews and Arabs resumed in earnest, as both sides sought to improve their position in preparation for the showdown to come. Israel declared independence on the day the last British troops left, on 14 May 1948. The next day the armies of five Arab states attacked. The odds of Israel's survival were long, but not as desperate as they might have appeared. Israeli forces, although outnumbered, were better trained than their opponents, and fought under a unified command, an important achievement that required the forcible subordination of the IZL and the LHI to the Hagana, now rechristened the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Neither side possessed much in the way of heavy weapons, which meant that Israeli tactical proficiency counted for even more than it otherwise might have. All combatants laboured under an international arms embargo organized by the US, which the Israelis were more successful at circumventing, having prepared for it in advance. The Jews also fought on 'interior lines', while the logistics of Arab armies, especially those of Egypt and Iraq, were attenuated and vulnerable to attack.

Arab forces, comprised overwhelmingly of peasant conscripts, were tenacious in defence, but showed little capacity for independent action, and had difficulty manoeuvring when in contact with the enemy This was not a reflection upon their personal courage, but upon the low level of social cohesion that prevailed within the autocratic, semi-feudal regimes for which they fought - conditions from which Western-style armies like the IDF have benefited around the world. Finally, Israel's assailants had no common strategy, and squabbled among themselves. They also underestimated their enemy. The Arabs proclaimed a holy war, but it was the Jews, with nowhere to run, who fought one.

The War of Israeli Independence culminated in a series of bilateral ceasefires in 1949. It would be thirty years before any Arab state was prepared to accept the outcome as final, for reasons that were to some extent apparent on a map. Although Israeli forces had seized territory beyond what was allotted to the Jews by the UN, the result was still a state with barely defensible frontiers and no strategic depth. When the fighting stopped, most Israelis still lived within range of someone else's artillery. The war also created 700,000 Palestinian refugees, whose presence became a burden and a reproach to Israel's foes. Most Palestinians would be consigned by their hosts to nominally temporary camps, there to await Israel's eradication. These became bases for terrorism, and forcing beds for Palestinian national identity. Although 160,000 Arabs became citizens of Israel after the war, those who left were not allowed to return in the absence of a general settlement. Their places were eventually taken by half a million Jews, fleeing Arab lands where they had once resided in peace.

Israeli strategy would be dominated by these geographic and social facts. Terrorism and harassing bombardments became facts of life, and were met by reprisals and counter-terrorism. Although it was possible that such clashes might escalate into something larger, they did not threaten the new state's existence in themselves. Real danger lay in the prospect of conventional defeat. Disaster was most likely to result from being taken by surprise at the outset of a new war. If, as Clausewitz said, the essence of the defensive is awaiting the blow, this was an attitude denied to the Israelis, who could not retreat in order to trade space for time. Nor could Israel afford protracted conflict. Its defence required the mobilization of large civilian reserves, who could not be withdrawn from the economy indefinitely. IDF doctrine evolved to meet these requirements, emphasizing rapid deployment and mechanized operations designed to carry the battle into the rear of the enemy. To this was added an exceptional intelligence service, and a pronounced sensitivity to any change in the military capabilities of surrounding states.

In such circumstances, the line between forward defence and preemptive attack is easily transgressed, as it was in 1956, when Israel joined Britain and France in an effort to topple the government of Egypt; and again in 1967, when a series of ominous actions by Israel's neighbours provoked one of the most compelling demonstrations of Blitzkrieg yet seen. A key figure in both conflicts was Gamal Abdel Nasser, who came to power in Egypt following a military coup in 1952. Nasser's ascendancy was aided by Israel's victory, which radicalized the politics of the losers. Syria suffered a military coup a few months later, and did not achieve a stable government again until the arrival of Haffez Assad in 1970. In July 1951, King Abdulla of Jordan, the Arab leader most disposed to peace with Israel, was assassinated by an agent of the Mufti of Jerusalem. Nasser rose up on a similar wave of bitterness and humiliation. His aim, often stated, was to unite the Arab world behind his leadership, and transform Egypt into a power capable of effecting Israel's destruction.

The Suez Crisis of 1956
The Suez Crisis of 1956 was precipitated by the convergence of Egypt's efforts at military and economic modernization. The previous year, Nasser had negotiated the withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Canal Zone. This disturbed the Israelis, who regarded the British presence as a check on Egyptian aggression. Egypt also obtained a massive shipment of arms from Czechoslovakia, thus providing the Soviet Union with its first major foothold in the region. This dismayed the US. The Israelis knew that Egypt sponsored terrorists working out of the Palestinian camps in the Gaza Strip, and chafed at Egypt's closure of the Strait of Tiran, a vital corridor for Israeli commerce. The US disliked being played against the Soviets, and in July 1956 withdrew funding for Nasser's pet development project, the Aswan Dam. Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal, whereupon the British and French, who had constructed it, prepared to take it back.

Israel was by then convinced that a major Egyptian attack was coming, and was planning to open the Strait of Tiran by seizing Sharm aI-Sheikh. Yet it was reluctant to act without an ally. It found one when France approached David Ben-Gurion's government about participating in the operation it was developing with Britain. All three eventually agreed that Israel would mount an attack across the Sinai Peninsula, calculated to provide a pretext for British and French intervention along the canal.

All this misfired except the Israeli attack, which began on 29 October and swept the Egyptian Army out of the Sinai in five days. By the time British and French forces landed at Port Said on 5 November, however, international opinion, led by the US, had hardened against their action. A UN ceasefire was declared the next day, with the canal still in Egyptian hands. Nasser's prestige soared, despite his having been saved by the Americans. Israel achieved some of its objectives: the Strait of Tiran was opened, and terrorism from Gaza abated. But it had to give up the Sinai, and accept the reassurance afforded by UN peacekeepers in lieu of the Anglo-French cordon it had hoped to see between itself and its most dangerous enemy.


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MICHAEL B. OREN


Fifty years ago, at dawn on October 29, 1956, Israeli paratroopers under the command of Colonel Ariel Sharon dropped into the Mitla Pass deep in the Sinai Peninsula, twenty-five miles from the Suez Canal. The action was the first phase in a plan secretly forged by representatives of France, Britain, and Israel, triggered by Egypt’s nationalization of the canal three months before. According to the scheme, the paratroopers’ landing would provide a pretext for the French and British governments to order both Egypt and Israel to remove all of their forces from the canal area. The Europeans anticipated that Cairo would reject that ultimatum, thus allowing them to occupy the strategic waterway. Israel dutifully executed its part of the scheme, smashing the Egyptian army in four days and conquering all of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. The Anglo-French armada, however, was late in arriving, and soon withdrew under intense international pressure. The Suez War -- known in Israel as the Sinai Campaign, or Operation Kadesh -- was over within a week, but the battle over its interpretation was merely beginning.

Numerous books and articles have been written about the Suez Crisis, the first post-World War II crisis to pit nationalism against imperialism, and the West against the Communist bloc. Historians have long agreed that the invasion was an unrelieved catastrophe for Britain and France, precipitating their expulsion from the Middle East and their decline as great powers. By contrast, the first three decades after the crisis saw debate over Israel’s fortunes in the war, with some scholars asserting that Israel had benefited from the destruction of the Egyptian army, the opening of the Straits of Tiran, and the strategic alliance with France. Starting in the 1980s, however, a movement of self-styled New Historians, dedicated to debunking the alleged “myths” of Israeli history, depicted the Sinai Campaign as no less disastrous for the Jewish state. “Israel… paid a heavy political price for ganging up with the colonial powers against the emergent forces of Arab nationalism,” wrote Avi Shlaim of Oxford University. “Its actions could henceforth be used as proof… that it was a bridgehead of Western imperialism in the… Arab world.”

Twenty years later, Shlaim’s analysis of the 1956 war has become universally accepted in academia, and not only among revisionists. In a New York Times article marking the fiftieth anniversary of Suez, Boston University’s David Fromkin, author of the widely acclaimed study of the origins of the modern Middle East, A Peace to End All Peace (1989), similarly portrayed Israel’s victory as Pyrrhic. “Israel compromised itself through its partnership with European imperialism,” Fromkin alleged, echoing Shlaim. “The more Israel won on the battlefield, the further it got from achieving the peace that it sought.”

Those who have challenged the magnitude of Israel’s victory in 1956, however, fail to take into account the incompleteness of Israel’s triumph in its 1948 War of Independence. Customarily, states that win on the battlefield dictate the terms of the peace. But while Israeli forces had repulsed the invading Arab armies and compelled them to sue for truce, Israeli negotiators failed to transform that military accomplishment into a diplomatic device for ending the conflict. The armistice agreements that Israel signed with its four neighboring Arab states between February and July 1949 did not, for example, extend recognition or legitimacy to the Jewish state; nor did they endow that state with permanent borders. Further complicating this anomalous situation, the agreements created various demilitarized zones of uncertain sovereignty along Israel’s frontiers -- at the foot of the Golan Heights, for instance, and in Nitzana, along the Sinai-Negev border. Most deleterious of all for Israel, the armistice did not provide for peace. On the contrary, the agreements allowed the Arabs to insist that a state of war continued to exist between them and the “Zionist entity.” This state of war, the Arabs argued, enabled them to fire at Israeli settlements in the demilitarized zones, to conduct an economic boycott of the Jewish state, and to blockade Israeli ships and Israel-bound cargoes through the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran. Arab states engaged in a relentless anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, designed to prepare their publics for a “second round” with Israel, this time to annihilate it. Propaganda did not suffice for some Arab countries, however, like Syria and Egypt, which sponsored cross-border terrorist (Fedayeen) attacks like that which killed eleven Israelis at Maaleh Akrabim in March 1954.

For the Arab states, the Palestine War, as they called it, had never really ended. Yet they were not alone in regarding Israel as an impermanent and unwanted presence: The Great Powers -- the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union -- routinely treated Israel as a passing phenomenon and ignored its fundamental interests. Indeed, for the Powers, Israel was little more than what United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called “a millstone around our necks.”

The period of 1948 to 1956 was one of profound upheaval in Great Power diplomacy in the Middle East. The United States was on the one hand striving to oust the old colonial powers, Britain and France, from the region, while on the other working with its European allies to prevent Soviet penetration. In response to the American threat, Britain and France sought to strengthen their alliances with local states -- Britain with Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq, and France with Syria and Lebanon -- by guaranteeing their security and selling them modern arms. Israel, which was in no Power’s interest, was completely left out of these arrangements. Worse, Israel’s clashes with Egypt in 1949 and Jordan in 1956 nearly resulted in direct conflict between the IDF and British forces.

Viewed antagonistically by both Britain and France, Israel was hardly valued as an asset by the United States. The Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower owed nothing to the Jewish vote, and was closely aligned with State Department Arabists and American oil companies active in the Middle East. Apart from parade items such as helmets and batons, the United States adamantly refused to sell arms to Israel, even laboring to prevent Israel from purchasing weaponry from its allies. Such transactions, the administration reasoned, would push the Arabs into the Soviet sphere and endanger vital oil supplies.

For their part, the Soviets had also thrown their support behind the Arabs. Though they had provided crucial diplomatic and military backing to the Jewish state in 1948, the Soviets, having secured their objective of ousting the British from Palestine, proceeded to change sides. By 1951, they were unremitting in their hostility to Israel, and after Stalin’s death in 1953, the Kremlin adopted a policy of nurturing “bourgeois nationalist” regimes opposed to the West, such as those of Egypt and Syria.

America and Britain reacted to the Soviet threat by trying to organize Middle Eastern states into a regional defense organization similar to nato. The alliance, known first as the Middle East Defense Organization (medo) and later as the Baghdad Pact, was to include Iraq, Jordan, and hopefully Egypt. Israel, though it repeatedly petitioned for admission to the group, was continually rejected.

Moreover, while actively fortifying the Arabs, the Powers also implicitly upheld their own interpretation of the armistice. They refused, for example, to pressure the Arab states to end their economic boycott and blockade of Israel or to stem armed infiltration. Rather, they condemned Israel’s attempt to establish settlements in the demilitarized zones, to send ships through the canal and the straits, and to retaliate against Fedayeen strongholds. They also opposed Israel’s construction of a national water carrier that would transfer Galilee water to the Negev, thus facilitating the desert’s settlement. The Negev, the Americans and the British determined in 1949, would eventually be detached from Israel and transferred to Arab sovereignty as part of a land-for-peace deal. Indeed, an Anglo-American plan, inaugurated in 1954 and codenamed “Alpha,” called for the transfer of large swaths of the Negev to Egypt as a means of incentivizing it to join medo; the Egyptians, in turn, would grant non-belligerency -- not peace -- to Israel. Though Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rejected Alpha, American and British leaders were prepared to exert immense pressure on him to implement the plan should Cairo accept it.

Indeed, the Egyptians had long demanded the Negev as a land bridge between them and the Arab world. In secret meetings with Israeli diplomats after the armistice, Egyptian representatives repeatedly demanded that Israel forfeit all of the Negev -- 62 percent of its territory -- as the price of ending the conflict. But the Egyptians were also express in stating that peace with the Jewish state was inconceivable for the foreseeable future. That position remained unchanged after the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952 and the ascendance of Colonel Gamal Abd el-Nasser to power. Though Nasser continued the secret contacts with Israel, at one point even exchanging letters with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, at no time did he waver from the demand for all of the Negev, or change his rejection of immediate and full peace. In fact, starting in December 1954, Nasser embarked on a campaign to extend his primacy over the entire Arab world -- an effort that required escalated hostility toward Israel and intensified opposition to the West. He proceeded to tighten the blockade and boycott of Israel, to order the Egyptian army to occupy parts of Nitzana, and to set up Fedayeen units to operate out of Gaza. He also declared war against the Baghdad Pact, rejecting Alpha and signing, in September 1955, the largest-ever Middle Eastern arms deal with the Soviet bloc.

This, then, was the regional and international situation that Israel confronted in the period before the Sinai Campaign. Surrounded by Arab states that were conducting acts of war against it -- indeed, were arming themselves to obliterate it -- Israel had no allies, no diplomatic support, and no reliable supplier of weapons. Moreover, saddled with tens of thousands of new immigrants, many of them indigent, and a near-bankrupt economy in the wake of a devastating war that had killed 1 percent of its population, Israel was scarcely capable of maintaining its existence, much less of defending itself against Nasser, a regionally beloved and lavishly armed leader committed to its destruction. “O Israel! Weep… and await your end at any time now,” declared the Egyptian-run Voice of the Arabs radio in 1955. “The Arabs of Egypt have found their way to Tel Aviv.”

Israel’s plight indeed seemed hopeless when, suddenly, in July 1956, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal. The event prodded the French, who had begun to view Israel as a possible ally against Nasser and his support for Algerian rebels, to open secret discussions on a joint operation in Egypt and undertake to arm the IDF. The French, in turn, urged the British to cease threatening the Israelis and join in the clandestine talks. The result was the Sevres agreement, named after the Paris suburb in which it was surreptitiously signed. According to the document, Israel agreed to commence hostilities against Egypt. One month later, Sharon and his paratroopers descended into the Mitla Pass and the Sinai Campaign began.
The fighting was brutal, but the Israeli forces succeeded in crushing Nasser’s troops with their newly supplied Soviet arms, conquering all of the Sinai and Gaza, and reaching the Suez Canal. Though a combination of Soviet military and American economic threats eventually persuaded Ben-Gurion to evacuate these territories, in return he received American pledges for Israel’s future defense, along with the deployment of UN peacekeepers along the border with Egypt and in Sharm al-Sheikh, overlooking the Straits of Tiran. Finally freed of the danger of Egyptian attack and strengthened through commerce with Asia by way of the straits, Israel enjoyed a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. It took advantage of those years to absorb waves of new immigrants and to galvanize its civil society. Many Israelis who lived through that time remember the decade after 1956 as the most halcyon in their lives, and in their country’s history. And though Nasser unilaterally evicted the UN force in May 1967 and again blockaded the straits, the security guarantees Israel had obtained from the United States in 1956, and the international commitments it received regarding the inviolability of its borders and shipping rights, proved essential to generating support for Israel in the Six Day War.

Equally important, at least, was the permanence that Israel achieved as a result of the Sinai Campaign. In the aftermath of the war, the Powers ceased to regard Israel as a temporary entity whose territory could be bargained off to the Arabs. There would be no more Alphas, no more attempts to deprive Israel of the Negev or of any other part of its sovereign land. Nor did the United States endeavor to block Israel’s acquisition of modern arms, which continued to flow from France. Indeed, with French assistance, Israel built the nuclear reactor that endowed it with capabilities unequaled except by those of the world’s greatest powers.
Finally, though Israel did, by virtue of its collusion with Britain and France, confirm the Arab charge that the Jewish state was little more than a beachhead for imperialism, in truth that charge exists far more in the minds of contemporary Western historians than in Arab thinking of the late 1950s. An examination of Arab broadcasts and newspapers from the period reveals no substantial change in Arab hostility toward Israel -- it was absolute before the war, and no less total after it. Similarly, the war could not have lessened chances for the success of a peace process that simply did not exist and, according to Nasser, would not for many, many years.

Contrary, then, to the conventional wisdom in academic circles today, Israel emerged from the Sinai Campaign economically, diplomatically, and militarily strengthened. It had forged vital alliances and earned the respect, if not yet the affection, of the Great Powers, while also enhancing its citizens’ security. The situation that existed after 1948, in which Israel was denied legitimacy, permanence, and such fundamental rights as safe borders and freedom of shipping, had ended. The 1956 war allowed Israel to realize, finally, the unfulfilled aspirations of 1948, and in this represents the culmination of Israel’s fight for independence.
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Michael B. Oren is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center and a Contributing Editor of Azure. He is the author of Six Days of War (Oxford, 2003) and Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (Norton, 2007). His last contribution to Azure was “Jews and the Challenge of Sovereignty” (Azure 23, Winter 2006).