A Box of Sand

by Charles Stephenson

  19 John Warren S Smallwood born June 1882 in Droitwich, Worcestershire. Information from Ancestry.com. Retrieved 27 January 2013.

  APPENDIX C

  THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN AND THE PRINCIPLES OF WAR

  Clausewitz is often quoted as stating that war is the continuation of politics by other means. If this is so, then the Italian campaign to gain Tripoli cannot be said to have conformed to the maxim. Making war was not a means to an end but rather an end in itself, because all that Italy hoped and wanted to gain could have been achieved politically without fighting. Further, it may be argued, having decided to ignore Clausewitzean principle in that context and fight for the sake of military glory, the Italians went on to disregard other, much more important, principles; the Principles of War.

  There are no universally accepted Principles of War as such because different states, military organizations, and cultures have codified them (if they have done so at all) according to circumstance; the needs of time and place. Having said that, those principles that have evolved, however they may be articulated, represent an attempt to grapple with fundamental truths, and serve as basic guidelines, in relation to the practice of the art or science of military affairs. Indeed, many writers have argued that, however expressed, the Principles of War are essentially timeless; that there is Nothing New under the Sun Tzu.1 There have been many attempts at writing them down. The first, and perhaps the most famous, being the treatise by Sun Tzu known as The Art of War which dates from around 500 years BCE. The somewhat more recent works by Clausewitz, Jomini, et al have also been well studied.

  Current thinking, certainly in western militaries, has decocted all the various theories, wisdom, and experiences into a few general principles (doctrine). For example, the United States military has nine whilst the British have ten. Current US doctrine, and the ruling principles underlying it, has been tabulated as follows:2

  PRINCIPLE

  DEFINITION

  Mass

  Concentrate combat power at the decisive place and time

  Objective

  Direct every military operation towards a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective

  Offensive

  Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative

  Surprise

  Strike the enemy at a time, at a place, or in a manner for which he is unprepared

  Economy of force

  Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts

  Maneuver

  Place the enemy in a position of disadvantage through the flexible application of combat power

  Unity of command

  For every objective, ensure unity of effort under one responsible commander

  Security

  Never permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage

  Simplicity

  Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and clear, concise orders to ensure thorough understanding

  There are no doubt many others, and it may be an interesting, if entirely academic, diversion to take whichever rendition most appeals and compare and contrast it with the conduct of the Italian campaign in Tripoli. So, to steal a line from the unknown author of The Beale Papers, ‘when your day’s work is done, and you are comfortably seated by your good fire, a short time devoted to the subject can injure no one, and may bring its reward.’

  1 Commander Jacques P Olivier, Nothing New Under the Sun Tzu: Timeless Principles of the Operational Art of War. Available from www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vol14/no1/PDF/CMJ141Ep55.pdf

  2 The nine Principles of War, as defined in the Army Field Manual FM-3 Military Operations. Available from: www.wpi.edu/academics/military/prinwar.html

  CHAPTER NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE

  1 Quoted in Walter K Kelly, The History of Russia: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time. Two Volumes. (London; Henry G Bohn, 1855). Vol. II. p. 421.

  2 Sevket Süreyya Aydemir, Makedonya’dan Ortaasya’ya Enver Pa a, Vol. II 1908-1914 (Istanbul; Remzi Kitabevi, 1981) p. 552.

  3 There had been a long period of steady erosion. Since 1878 the Ottoman Empire had lost, or lost control of, a great deal of territory. In that year Cyprus came under British administration, though the Sultan retained sovereignty, whilst Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia became independent and Bosnia-Herzegovina was occupied by Austria-Hungary. Tunisia became a French protectorate in 1881 and the British took effective control of Egypt the following year. Cretan autonomy was imposed, via Great Power intervention, in 1898 and Britain declared a protectorate over Kuwait in 1899. In 1908 Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria gained independence.

  4 Walter K Kelly, The History of Russia: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time. Two Volumes. (London; Henry G Bohn, 1855). Vol. II. p. 421.

  5 For a brief version of this see: Richard C Hall, The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913: Prelude to the First World War (London; Routledge, 2000) pp. 7-8. For an in depth account: D W Sweet, ‘The Bosnian Crisis’ in F H Hinsley (Ed.), British Foreign Policy Under Sir Edward Grey (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1977) pp. 178-92.

  6 Richard Millman, ‘The Bulgarian Massacres Reconsidered,’ in The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 58, No. 2, (April, 1980), p. 230.

  7 J A MacGahan,The Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria, Letters of the Special Commissioner of the Daily News […]. With an Introduction and Mr. Schuyler’s Preliminary Report (London; Bradbury, Agnew, 1876).

  8 There is a huge literature on this subject. See for example: Alan Palmer, The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (London; Barnes and Noble, 1994) and Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London; I B Tauris, 2005).

  9 L S Stavrianos, Balkan Federation: A History of the Movement Toward Balkan Unity in Modern Times (Hamden, CT; Archon, 1964).

  10 The evidence that Bismarck actually said this is at several removes, and seems to originate in a speech made by Winston S Churchill in the House of Commons on 16 August 1945. According to Churchill: ‘I remember that a fortnight or so before the last war, the Kaiser’s friend, Herr Ballin, the great shipping magnate, told me that he had heard Bismarck say it towards the end of his life. Churchill was thus recalling a second-hand remark made to him some 31 years previously, which was itself a recollection of a comment made around 17 years before that. Robert Rhodes James (Ed.), Winston S Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963, 8 Vols. (New York; Chelsea House Publishers, 1974) Vol. VII 1943-1949. p. 7214.

  11 ‘The ancient geographic term of ‘Macedonia’ underwent a restoration in the era of modern nationalism. Historically, it denoted a territory the extent of which had varied through the ages. For example, the tenth-century Byzantine province [of] Macedonia, which covered the Thracian districts of modern Bulgaria, had little to do with the Macedonia of antiquity. In the medieval Bulgarian and Serbian kingdoms the term was totally meaningless, nor did it have any place within the administrative vocabulary of the Ottoman Empire. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Macedonia was frequently in the headlines of the European press: it was now understood to correspond roughly to the Ottoman vilayets of Salonika and Monastir (Bitola), as well as the sanjakof Oskiib (Skopje) in the vilayet of Kosov.’ Fikret Adanir, ‘The Socio-Political Environment of Balkan Nationalism: the Case of Ottoman Macedonia 1856-1912’ in Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Michael G. Mulle, Stuart Woolf (Eds.), Regional and national identities in Europe in the XIXth and XXth centuries/Les identites regionales et nationales en Europe aux XIXe et XXe siecles (The Hague; Kluwer Law International, 1998) pp. 240-1. See also: Fikret Adanir, ‘The Macedonians in the Ottoman Empire. 1878-1912’ in Andreas Kappeler in collaboration with Fikret Adanir and Alan O’Day (eds.), The Formation of National Elites (New York; New York University Press, 1992). pp. 161-91.

  12 Adolf Vischer, ‘Tripoli’ in The Geographical Journal, Vol. 38, No. 5 (November 1911) p. 487. Sükrü Hanioglu, ‘The Second Constitutional Period, 1908-1918’ in Re at Kasaba (Ed.), The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in
the Modern World (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2008) p. 86.

  13 Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance (Albany, NY; State University of New York Press, 2009) p. 74.

  14 W S Cooke, The Ottoman Empire and Its Tributary States (B. R. Grüner, Amsterdam, 1968) p. 64.

  15 The CIA World Factbook. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ly.html

  16 Libya was not formally adopted as the collective term for the three provinces until 1929. Lisa Anderson, ‘The Development of Nationalist Sentiment in Libya, 1908-1922’ in Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih and Reeva S Simon (Eds.) The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York; Columbia University Press, 1991) p. 241.

  17 E W Bovill (Ed.), Missions to the Niger Volume I: The Journal Of Friedrich Hornemann’s Travels From Cairo To Murzuk In The Years 1797-98; The Letters Of Major Alexander Gordon Laing 1824-26 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1964) p. 150. Bornu was a region on the south-west shore of Lake Chad and an important source of slaves.

  18 See: Joseph Wheelan, Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror 1801-1805 (New York; Carroll & Graf, 2003) and Frederick C Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War Against the Pirates of North Africa (Cary, NC; Oxford University Press USA, 2007).

  19 Kola Folayan, ‘Tripoli-Bornu Political Relations, 1817-1825’ in Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria. Volume 5 No. 4, June 1971. pp. 463-71. Kola Folayan, Tripoli During the Reign of Y suf P sh Qaram nl (Ilé-If, Nigeria; University of Ife Press, 1979).

  20 James Henry Skene, The Three Eras of Ottoman History: A Political Essay on the Late Reform of Turkey, Considered Principally as Affecting her Position in the Event of a War Taking Place (London; Chapman and Hall, 1851) p. 77.

  21 ‘Tripoli was always a main Mediterranean outlet of black slaves traded across the Sahara. […] The abolition of slavery and the slave trade in Tunis and Algiers in the 1840s only confirmed this predominance. But it was short lived, for by the late 1850s Tripoli, too, was falling victim to European abolitionist fervour, leaving only Benghazi and lesser Turkish North African anchorages as the sole, unmolested, Saharan slaving outlets on the Mediterranean. They continued quietly to ship slaves to Levantine markets until the beginning of the twentieth century.’ John L Wright, The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (London; Routledge, 2007) p.114.

  22 Leonhard Schmitz, A Manual of Ancient Geography (Philadelphia, PA; Blanchard and Lea, 1857) p. 114.

  23 A H Keane, Asia: Vol. II, Southern and Western Asia (London; Edward Stanford, 1909). Ritter zur Helle von Samo, Das Vilajet der Inseln des Weissen Meeres (Bahr i setid dschezairi), das privilegirte Beylik Samos (Syssam) und das Mutessariflik Cypern (Kybris). Statistische und militärische Notizen aus den Papieren des früheren Militär-Attaches der k.u.k. österreichisch-ungarischen Botschaft in Constantinopel (Wien, C Gerold’s sohn, 1877).

  24 Edouard Driault and Michel Lheritier, Histoire diplomatique de la Grèce de 1821 a nos jours, 5 vols. Vol. II, E Driault, La règne d’Othon. La Grande Idée (1830-1862) (Paris; Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1925) pp. 252-253.

  25 H P Willmott, The Last Century of Sea Power: Volume I, From Port Arthur to Chanak, 1894-1922 (Bloomington, IN; Indiana University Press, 2009) pp. 32-33.

  26 Theodore Ropp and Stephen S Roberts (Ed.), The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy 1871-1904 (Annapolis, MD; Naval Institute Press, 1987) p. 203.

  27 Gabor Agoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2005) pp. 49-50, 178. See also: Gabor Agoston and Bruce Masters, Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire (New York; Facts On File, 2007).

  28 Bernd Langensiepen and Ahmet Güleryüz (James Cooper Ed. and Trans.), The Ottoman Steam Navy, 1828-1923 (London; Conway Maritime Press, 1995) pp. 8-9.

  29 The date according to the Gregorian calendar.

  30 Michelle U Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford, CA;: Stanford University Press, 2011) p. 110.

  31 Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya: State formation, Colonization, and Resistance, 1830-1932 (Albany, NY; State University of New York Press, 1994) pp. 111-3.

  32 See: Aykut Kansu, The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey (Leiden; Brill Academic Publishers, 1997). Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics, 1908-1914 (Oxford; University Press, 1969); M ükrü Hanio lu, The Young Turks in Opposition (Cary, NC; Oxford University Press USA, 1995) N Naim Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Military and Ottoman Collapse (New York; I B Tauris, 2000); M ükrü Hanio lu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908 (New York; Oxford University Press, 2001).

  33 Bernd Langensiepen and Ahmet Güleryüz (James Cooper Ed. and Trans.), The Ottoman Steam Navy, 1828-1923 (London; Conway Maritime Press, 1995) p. 17.

  34 Mark Kerr, Land, Sea, and Air: Reminiscences of Mark Kerr (New York; Longmans, Green, 1927) p. 122.

  35 Francis Yeats-Brown, Bloody Years: A Decade of Plot and Counter-Plot by the Golden Horn (New York; Viking Press, 1932) p. 43.

  36 G P Gooch and H W V Temperley (Eds.), British Documents on the Origins of the War: 1898-1914, Volume V, The Near East, the Macedonian Problem and the Annexation of Bosnia, 1903-1909 (London; HMSO, 1928) p. 282-3.

  37 Minute by HC Norman (Quoting Harold Nicolson to Hugh O’Beirne), War Office, September 12, 1910. G P Gooch and H W V Temperley (Eds.), British Documents on the Origins of the War: 1898-1914, Volume IX, The Balkan Wars, Part I, The Prelude: The Tripoli War (London; HMSO, 1933) No 177, p. 202.

  38 Miranda Vickers, The Albanians: A Modern History (London; I B Tauris, 2000) pp. 63-5. Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: a Modern History (London; I B Tauris, 2004) p. 104.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1 Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1920 (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2007) p. 1.

  2 Quoted in: Luciano Cheles and Lucio Sponza, ‘Introduction: National Identities and Avenues of Persuasion’ in Luciano Cheles and Lucio Sponza (Eds.), The Art of Persuasion: Political Communication in Italy from 1945 to the 1990s (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 2001) p. 1.

  3 The Holy Alliance was formed to preserve reactionary powers. See: William Penn Cresson, The Holy Alliance: The European Background of the Monroe Doctrine (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1922).

  4 Paul Ginsborg, Daniele Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848-49 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. 324.

  5 Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848-1851 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2005) pp. 242-4.

  6 See: Denis Mack Smith, ‘The Revolutions of 1848-1849 in Italy’ in R J W Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (Eds.) The Revolutions in Europe, 1848-1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 55-82.

  7 See: Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic Thought in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1975).

  8 Edyth Hinkley, Mazzini: The Story of a Great Italian (New York; G P Putnam’s, 1924.) p. 123.

  9 Arnold Whitridge, Men in Crisis: The Revolutions of 1848 (New York; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949) pp.114-193.

  10 A J P Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary (London; Hamish Hamilton, 1948) p. 93.

  11 J A S Grenville, Europe Reshaped, 1848-1878 (Oxford; Blackwell, 2000) p. 151.

  12 For accounts of this episode, and for the next section generally, unless otherwise stated, see: Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796 (London; Allen Lane, 2007) pp. 199-200. Alan Cassels, Ideology and International Relations in the Modern World (London; Routledge, 1996) pp. 72-3. Michael Graham Fry, Erik Goldstein and Richard Langhorne, Guide to International Relations and Diplomacy (London; Continuum, 2002) pp. 123-4. Shepard B Clough and Salvatore Saladino,
A History of Modern Italy: Documents, Readings, and Commentary (New York; Columbia University Press, 1968) p. 101. Frank J Coppa, The Origins of the Italian Wars of Independence (London; Longman, 1992). William Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Times of Cavour (Boston, MA; Houghton Mifflin, 1911) Vol. I. pp. 527-532. Arnold Blumberg, A Carefully Planned Accident: The Italian War of 1859 (Cranbury, NJ; Associated University Presses, 1990). Mack Walker (Ed.), Plombières: Secret Diplomacy and the Rebirth of Italy (New York; Oxford University Press USA, 1968)

  13 William Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Times of Cavour (Boston, MA; Houghton Mifflin, 1911) Vol. II. p. 52-3.

  14 Richard Brooks, Solferino 1859: The Battle for Italy’s Freedom (Oxford; Osprey, 2009) p. 87.