by Rick Beyer
The warrior, named Shaka, concluded that the age-old tactic of lofting lightweight spears at enemy formations was next to useless. He devised a new kind of stabbing spear, shorter and heavier, with a bigger blade, which he used to draw close to his enemy and kill them in hand-to-hand combat.
It became known as the iklwa—for the sucking sound it made when it was plunged into and pulled out of a human body.
Shaka Zulu used this new method of fighting to become Africa’s most famous and feared conqueror, as well as one of the great commanding generals of all time. Starting with just a few men under his command, he ended up ruling an empire and commanding an army of more than fifty thousand. He revolutionized warfare on the African continent, introducing bold new tactics and the concept of total war.
The result was the death of more than two million Africans, depopulating a wide swath of southern Africa, just as white settlers were beginning to colonize.
As a boy, Shaka was exiled from his village along with his mother, and he remained unusually close to her. When she died, he ordered thousands of Zulus killed so that their families might mourn along with him. In his deranged grief he ordered that no crops be planted and all pregnant women slain; even milk cows were killed so that their calves might know what it was like to lose a mother.
“NGADLA! [“I HAVE EATEN!”]”
— CRY OF THE ZULU WARRIOR AFTER STABBING THE IKLWA INTO AN ENEMY
Shaka was chief of the Zulus from 1816 until 1828, when he was assassinated by his half brother.
Zulu warriors wielding their iklwa spears while performing a war dance. Shaka also taught his warriors how to hook the left edge of their shield behind an opponent’s shield, then spin him around with a backhand sweep, making him vulnerable to a stabbing thrust.
1825
BUDDING STATESMAN
How a U.S. Secretary of War planted the seed for a Christmas tradition.
Joel Poinsett was an ambassador, a congressman, and eventually Secretary of War from 1837 to 1841. He holds the distinction of being the only U.S. statesman whose name was made into a word in two different languages—meaning two different things.
During Poinsett’s years as ambassador to Mexico, he got a little too embroiled in the political intrigues swirling about Mexico City—some even said he was plotting with revolutionaries who wanted to bring down the government. Mexican authorities grew angry at his heavy-handed interference in Mexican affairs, and they coined a new word to describe his officious and intrusive manner: poinsettismo.
He was eventually asked to leave Mexico . . . but not before he did something that we commemorate every Christmas to this day.
Poinsett was an avid botanist, and he became enchanted with a flower he found that grew only in southern Mexico. The Aztecs called it cuetlaxochitl. He began growing the flowers in his greenhouse, and started shipping samples back to the United States. Eventually the winter-blooming plant became a holiday hit, and the season of peace became a little brighter thanks to the flower that bears the name of a Secretary of War.
Poinsettia.
As Secretary of War, Poinsett helped reorganize the U.S. Army and expanded West Point. He also spearheaded the founding of the Smithsonian. But still, it is with a flower that he made the greatest impact.
A California rancher named Paul Ecke pioneered the idea of marketing the poinsettia as a holiday flower in the 1920s. His untiring efforts to promote the poinsettia over the next forty years made it the ubiquitous Christmas flower it is today.
1836
DAVY’S DEATH
The final moments of an American hero.
For many, the enduring image of the Battle of the Alamo is Davy Crockett fighting like a wildcat to the bitter end. According to one dramatic account shortly after his death, his body was found encircled by “seventeen dead Mexicans, eleven of whom had come to their deaths by his dagger and the others by his rifle and four pistols.”
So goes the legend. What about the truth?
While the 189 Texans who fought at the Alamo were all killed, numerous Mexican soldiers wrote accounts of the battle. They paint a far different picture of Crockett’s last moments.
Mexican general Santa Anna ordered his troops to “give no quarter” when they stormed the Alamo, and the hand-to-hand fighting that followed was bloody and desperate. It lasted until dawn. That’s when Crockett and six other men were found, quite alive, in a back room, to which they had retreated. Crockett, by one account, then tried to talk his way out, telling his captors he had planned to become a loyal Mexican citizen, and had done no fighting at the Alamo.
When the men were brought to Santa Anna, the general was so enraged that his “take no prisoners” directive had been disobeyed, he ordered his soldiers to execute the captives on the spot. “With swords in hand,” wrote one Mexican officer, they “fell upon these unfortunate, defenseless men just as a tiger leaps upon his prey.”
The truth was known within weeks of the battle, and published in many newspapers. But the myth proved far more appealing, and so endures to this day.
That Crockett fought bravely is not in question. A letter smuggled out of the Alamo recounted that during an initial bombardment, “The Hon. David Crockett was seen at all points, animating men to do their duty.” But there is no evidence to support the legend of his fighting to his very last moments.
Mexican general Manuel Fernande Castrillón recognized the famous frontiersman and pleaded with Santa Anna to spare the captives. An indignant Santa Anna refused, saying, “Have I not told you before how to dispose of them? Why do you bring them to me?” Then he ordered the execution.
While Crockett carefully cultivated his image as a backwoodsman, he was well on his way to becoming a career politician. He spent four years in the Tennessee Legislature and six in the U.S. Congress before he was voted out of office. He came to Texas in hopes of replenishing his finances and jump-starting his political career.
1839
TEA PARTY
How did Britain’s thirst for tea lead to a drug war in China?
At the beginning of the 1700s, virtually no one in Britain drank tea. By the end of the 1700s, everyone did. The British were gulping down tea as fast as the East India Company could import it from China. It was a national love affair.
But there was a problem. The Chinese weren’t particularly interested in importing European trade goods, so by the early 1800s it required the modern equivalent of a billion dollars a year in hard currency to pay for the tea. Silver and gold were flowing out of England to China, creating a terrible problem in foreign debt.
The solution? The East India Company, in collusion with the British government, became the world’s biggest drug dealer. The company started producing massive amounts of opium in India, and worked out a complex scheme to smuggle it into China to trade for the tea. Opium shipments increased by a factor of 250. By 1839, widespread opium addiction was a serious problem in China.
The emperor of China tried to put a stop to the drug trade that was ruining his country. His agents destroyed British stocks of opium in the trading port of Canton and kicked the British out. But would Britain stand for that?
Not for all the tea in China.
Britain responded by going to war to protect its opium trade. The Opium War was an easy victory for the British, who forced China to let the trade continue for another seventy years.
The result: millions of Chinese addicted to opium in order to subsidize Britain’s love for tea.
One of the consequences of the Opium War was that the British took control of Hong Kong, which remained in their hands until 1999.
The freshest tea commanded the highest price, so the tea trade launched a fleet of “clipper” ships, fast cargo vessels that would race across the ocean, to see who could get the first tea of the season back to London the fastest. One of the most famous was the Cutty Sark, which could carry more than a million pounds of tea, and sail from China to England in under a hundred days.
18
42
SPENCER’S LEGACY
A hanging at sea that led to the creation of the Naval Academy.
Philip Spencer was a fresh-faced twenty-year-old the day he was hanged. Spencer was a screw-up. He had pretty much flunked out of two colleges before his father pulled strings to get him an appointment as a midshipman (an officer in training) in the U.S. Navy. True to form, Spencer promptly got himself kicked off a ship for drinking.
Given a second chance on the brig Somers, he allegedly hatched a plot with some crewmates to take over the ship. Accused of mutiny by the captain, Spencer said he was just joking. “It was only a fancy,” he said.
Spencer and two confederates were chained to the quarterdeck. The Somers was hundreds of miles from port, the crew was angry and resentful, and it seemed to the officers that at any moment the sailors might rise up to murder them and free the three prisoners.
So Captain Alexander Slidell McKenzie ordered that Spencer and his two co-conspirators be hanged from the yardarm.
But Philip Spencer was not just any young man. His father was the Secretary of War, and his hanging shocked the nation. Some accused the captain of overreacting. Others wanted to know how an unqualified teenager could get an appointment as a midshipman, then be put aboard ship with no training.
The public called for reform. Just over two years later, in response to the Somers affair, a naval school was founded to turn midshipmen into well-trained officers. Philip Spencer could never have imagined that his death might pave the way for the creation of the U.S. Naval Academy.
As a student at Union College, Philip Spencer and a group of friends founded the Chi Psi fraternity, which has chapters at thirty-two American colleges and universities today. “He always took a great delight in the initiations, grips, signs, and passwords,” wrote one of his fellow students years later, “and studied how to make them more mysterious and impressive.”
Secretary of War John Spencer was in the forefront of those demanding a court-martial for Captain McKenzie, but a navy court eventually exonerated him. McKenzie’s naval career was effectively over, however, and he was never trusted with command of another warship.
Philip Spencer and his co-conspirators were the last men ever to be hanged aboard a U.S. naval vessel. Spencer was also the inspiration for the title character in Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd.
1849
TERROR FROM THE SKIES
The modest beginnings of modern airpower.
Squadrons of bombers overhead wreaking havoc on targets below—a common feature of modern warfare. But in March of 1849, it was just a crazy idea in the mind of an Austrian artillery officer.
The Austrian army was besieging Venice as part of the War of Italian Independence. The marshy lagoons surrounding the island city made it difficult for the Austrians to bring up their big guns in order to bombard the Venetians into submission. That’s when Lieutenant Uchatius put forward an idea brand-new in the annals of warfare.
Why not drop bombs from the sky?
The Austrians organized two “Aerial Torpedo Squadrons.” Each contained one hundred unmanned hot-air balloons and one hundred bombs, which were equipped with fuses to release the bombs at a predetermined time. Small pilot balloons were launched to determine wind speed and direction, enabling the Austrians to calculate a departure point and fuse time that they hoped would drop the bombs right over Venice.
After months of preparation, the attack began in July. Some of the balloons were launched from a frigate anchored off Venice—the very first projection of airpower from a ship.
It was an idea ahead of its time. The bombs did little damage to Venice, and when a fickle wind blew some of the balloons back over Austrian lines, the operation was halted for good. The day of the bomber was still ahead, but a thoroughly modern tool of death and destruction had been born.
Eventually, after the balloon bombing failed, the Austrians managed to bring up their guns and bombarded Venice the old-fashioned way. The city surrendered shortly afterward.
The Russians actually tried to become the first aerial bombers in 1812. Emperor Alexander I ordered the construction of a huge fish-shaped balloon capable of carrying men and explosives. The idea was to hover over Napoleon’s headquarters and drop a bomb on it. The fins designed to steer the balloon, however, could not be made to work, and the attempt was abandoned.
The initial idea for the aerial bombardment of Venice was to control the balloon bombs with long copper wires, using an electric battery to launch the bomb from the ground once the balloon was over the target. But this proved to be impractical.
1854
THE ART OF WAR
Painting a picture of military failure.
The cadet had suffered his share of problems at West Point. Truthfully, the main reason he was there was because his widowed mother wanted him to become a career military officer like his late father.
His first year, he got enough demerits to be kicked out. But the superintendent of the academy, a soon-to-be-famous colonel named Robert E. Lee, was kind enough to forgive some of his demerits and allow him to continue.
In his second year he fell gravely ill, and Colonel Lee had to write his mother to come get him. After he recovered, though, he passed all his exams, even coming in number one in his drawing class. Things were finally looking up.
And then, at the end of his third year, came the fateful exam. It was an oral exam, in chemistry, and it may go down as the shortest oral exam in West Point history. The instructor asked the young man to discuss silicon.
“Silicon is a gas,” began the cadet.
“That will do,” the instructor interrupted him. With four words the cadet had managed to fail chemistry and flunk out of West Point. “Had silicon been a gas,” he said later, “I would have been a Major-General.”
But what the military world lost, the art world gained. The cadet put his skill at drawing and painting to good use, becoming one of America’s most renowned artists: James McNeill Whistler.
And his mother, Anna, who wished for him a career in the military? She is remembered as his most famous subject:
Whistler’s mother.
Apparently, a girl Whistler was painting had an accident and was no longer available to pose. Whistler asked his mother to fill in. After posing standing for several days, she became so exhausted that Whistler let her sit down, and completed the painting with her sitting. He eventually had to pawn the painting for cash. It is now displayed at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Other famous West Point flunk-outs include author and poet Edgar Allan Poe and 1960s drug guru Timothy Leary.
1854
DRESSED TO KILL . . . OR BE KILLED
The military fiasco that was a fashion boon.
The Charge of the Light Brigade took place during the Battle of Balaklava in the Crimean War. Both battle and war have been largely forgotten, but the charge lives on, thanks to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous poem.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
There was some confusion about the orders, and 673 British cavalrymen were sent on a doomed charge up a long valley with Russian artillery firing on them from all sides.
Theirs not to reason why;
Theirs but to do and die.
In less than twenty minutes, the Light Brigade was decimated. More than two hundred men were killed. Militarily, it was a terrible blunder. But it quickly captured the imagination of the British public, who regarded it not as a disaster, but as something glorious and noble. The commander of the Light Brigade, James Thomas Brudenell, was lionized as a national hero.
He also inspired a piece of clothing we still use today.
Brudenell bought his men button-down collarless sweaters they could wear under their uniform to keep warm. After the battle, the style became all the rage, and it was named after him.
Never heard of the Brudenell sweater, you say? That’s because it was named after his title. Thomas Brudenell was an earl. In f
act, he was the seventh Earl of . . . Cardigan.
Everyone remembers the Charge of the Light Brigade, but no one recalls the Charge of the Heavy Brigade from the same battle. Tennyson wrote a poem about that too, but it’s virtually unknown. Maybe that’s because the Heavy Brigade scored an easy success instead of a romantic failure.
Cardigan’s superior officer, who gave the order for the charge, was also a fashion inspiration. After he lost an arm at the Battle of Waterloo, Lord Raglan began wearing a capelike coat with sleeves extending to the neck. The raglan sleeve is still a popular style today.
It was eight years before the Crimean War that a British officer named Harry Lumsden made fashion history of his own. Tasked with organizing an elite unit of Pashtun tribesmen in India, Lumsden decided to forgo the army’s traditional scarlet uniforms and outfitted his men in something less obtrusive: lightweight clothing the color of mud. The uniforms were named after the Hindu word for dust: khak. And that’s how khakis were born.
1855
OVER THE HUMP?
How the West was almost won.
Imagine this Old West scene: the cavalry rides to the rescue, on the backs of their trusty . . . camels? It might have come to pass if an unusual army experiment had turned out differently.
In 1855, U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis convinced Congress to give the army thirty thousand dollars to import camels for military use. Davis believed camels might prove more useful than horses and mules in the harsh, desert-like conditions that prevailed across much of the western United States.
