A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  Jameson and Rhodes, without explicit approval from the British authorities in Cape Town, bought horses and recruited troopers for a Company expeditionary force into Matabeleland. The volunteers were promised a 2,400-hectare (6,000-acre) farm, 20 gold claims and half the expected booty. In early October, two columns left Fort Victoria and Charter and crossed the River Umniati into Matabeleland; they met up at Iron Mine Hill on 14 October, a force of 700 white troopers, 155 auxiliaries from the Cape and 400 Mashona porters and labourers. Between them they had five Maxim guns, a number of other machine guns and two 7-pound (3.1-kilogram) artillery pieces. On 12 October, Lobengula called a council of his chiefs (izinduna) and ordered the impis to prepare to meet the invading force. He sent a letter to the British High Commissioner in Cape Town claiming that his people were blameless: ‘your people must want something from me – when you have made up your mind to do a thing it is not right to blame it on my people.’

  The letter was not delivered until 22 October, by which time conflict had become unavoidable. The Company columns had to pass through the Somabula forest that day and a force of Matabele waited in ambush for them, only to find that the enemy column had passed well to the left of where they were waiting. On 24 October, the Company force crossed the River Shangani onto a grassy plateau where they set up their fortified camp. At 3.55 a.m. on the following day, an estimated 5–6,000 Matabele warriors led by the izinduna Mjan attacked the camp. They followed a simple tacticof a crescent-shaped frontal assault, some with rifles, most with the short assegai stabbing spear. The Maxim guns barked out a hail of fire that stopped the warriors in their tracks. The elite Insukamini regiment charged repeatedly and bravely at the guns and was decimated. Its wounded commander, Manonda, hanged himself on a tree. The battle was over by 8.30 a.m. ‘I doubt if any European troops,’ wrote one observer, ‘could have withstood for such a long time as they did the terrific and well-directed fire brought to bear on them.’ And indeed, the Maxim machine gun was to go on to reap an even grimmer harvest of European soldiers only twenty years later.

  As the Company column moved towards Bulawayo, on 1 November, a force of 7–8,000 Matabele, including two royal regiments, the Imbezu and Ingubu, attacked the camp set up at Imbembesi. The battle began at mid-day and was over two hours later, with the same result. In the first battle at Shangani only one trooper was killed; in the Imbembesi battle four were killed and seven wounded. The numbers of dead Matabele were evidently very large but have not been recorded. The survivors later admitted that they had not been worried by rifle fire, but could not withstand machine-gun fire that mowed them down like hay. On 4 November, the victorious column entered Bulawayo to find it a smoking ruin. Lobengula had left and a small force was sent off to bring him back. The Shangani patrol, as it has become known, failed to find him, and on 4 December, a small detachment was ambushed and slaughtered by Matabele warriors still willing to resist the loss of their kingdom. Lobengula died the following January, possibly of smallpox, and one after the other local izinduna submitted to South Africa Company representatives. Five Maxim guns had been enough to destroy a powerful African kingdom that tried to block the imperialists’ lust for riches.

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  No. 44 BATTLE OF TSUSHIMA

  14–15 May 1905

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  One of the most decisive naval victories in all history was inflicted by the Imperial Japanese Navy, then barely thirty years old, on the Navy of the Russian Empire, with two centuries of tradition behind it. A large squadron of Russian warships arrived in Japanese waters in May 1905 and was sunk, captured or scattered in a matter of hours, the first time since the start of European imperial expansion that a European navy had been defeated by a non-European power. The Japanese triumph has a number of explanations, but the real key was invention. Japanese shells had much greater destructive power, Japanese range-finders were the most modern available, and the Japanese navy had successfully adopted modern wireless telegraphy.

  The battle came about as a result of a war between the Russian and Japanese empires, which began with a Japanese attack in late January 1904 on the Russian Pacific fleet stationed at Port Arthur, a new Russian base on the Chinese coast that threatened Japan’s recent expansion into the Korean peninsula. The war went badly for the Russians, whose army and navy had to be deployed at the furthest distance from European Russia against a power whose military potential had been completely underestimated. The Russian fleet remained bottled up in Port Arthur, unable to break the Japanese naval blockade. On 15 October 1904, the Russian tsar finally dispatched a squadron of around 50 ships, including almost all Russia’s battleships, old and new, to undertake a 29,000-kilometre (18,000-mile) voyage from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan, where it intended to inflict a comprehensive defeat on the upstart state.

  The journey was one of the most remarkable ever undertaken by a naval force. Sailing around the Cape of Good Hope (Britain refused the Russians access to the Suez Canal), the squadron picked up coal and supplies where it could. The journey took seven long months, during which the crews became bored and demoralized, cooped up with poor food and few amenities. In May 1905, the squadron arrived at Cam Ranh Bay on the coast of French Indo-China (now Vietnam), but by this time Port Arthur had fallen to a Japanese attack. The commander of the Russian fleet, Rear Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, a tough, scrupulous disciplinarian, ordered his squadron to break through to Vladivostock, a new port on the Russian Pacific coast, and if possible to avoid an early showdown with the Japanese Navy. Of the possible routes to Vladivostock, the shortest and safest was through the narrow strait of Tsushima that separated Korea from the Japanese archipelago. The ships steamed north, many now in need of repairs, with their keels fouled by the long voyage.

  Rozhestvensky commanded a fleet that on paper should have presented the Japanese with a real challenge. The first column consisted of five new battleships, including the commander’s flagship, Suvorov, and three older battleships; a second column commanded by Rear Admiral Nikolai Nebogatov consisted of four older battleships and three large armoured cruisers. They were supported by another four cruisers, nine destroyers and a number of auxiliary vessels. Against this array, the Japanese naval commander, Admiral Togo Heihachiro, who had done his early training in England, could muster forty ships, including four modern battleships (among them his flagship Mikasa), two armoured cruisers and numerous torpedo boats and destroyers for night attacks. However, the numbers disguised important technical differences between the two fleets. The Russian vessels were slower by several knots, a gap made wider by the fouling of the keels; they carried guns of mixed calibres, while the Japanese favoured heavy guns; wireless communication was poor in the Russian fleet, but was modern and effective for the Japanese; the Japanese had also developed a new explosive, shimosa, which spread fire quickly, and a new thin-cased shell, furoshiki, which burst on impact rather than having to pierce armour plate. Above all, they had the 1903 Barr & Stroud rangefinder, which gave accurate firing at 6,000 metres (20,000 feet), against the 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) of the Russian model. Small though these technical differences might seem, they were to prove vital in the coming battle.

  On the night of 26–27 May, fortunately shrouded in deep mist, the Russian fleet entered the Korean Strait. To Rozhestvensky’s relief, there was no sign of the Japanese. But a scouting cruiser, Shinano Maru, spotted a Russian hospital ship with its lights blazing (as was permitted under international law) and immediately telegraphed to Togo that the Russians were coming. Unable to see where the Japanese were, the Russian fleet continued on its way, aware that unseen dangers were all around. On the morning of 27 May, the crew put on clean underwear, a ritual preparation for possible death; while the officers were lunching and drinking champagne, four Japanese battleships and eight cruisers suddenly appeared out of the mist.

  A Japanese print depicts the height of the action at the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905. Japanese naval vessels had small but important technical advantages
, including higher speeds, heavier guns and better range-finding.

  Rozhestvensky hesitated. He first thought to order his ships line abreast, but found that the manoeuvre would be too complicated in such a short time, and instead the Russian vessels remained in two columns, unable to bring their great firepower to bear on the Japanese fleet as it was invited to cross the ‘T’ of the approaching enemy. Togo exposed his force briefly to fire from the leading Russian ships, but once in position across the front of the Russian columns, his modern ships delivered accurate and deadly fire at the leading craft. The Russian warships in the rear could do nothing for fear that their fire might hit Russian vessels in front of them. They could only watch as superior Japanese gunnery and the new shells destroyed the cream of the Russian fleet.

  The shells rained down on Suvorov with shattering effect. Soon the captain was mortally wounded; surrounded by six dead officers, Rozhestvensky watched as his flagship burned around him. Finally splinters hit him in the heel and head and he wandered around his ship until he was found, weak and losing blood, and transferred to a Russian torpedo boat. By this time the other three modern battleships were suffering the same massive fusillade: one after the other, Alexander III, Oslyabya and Borodino were blasted into wrecks and sank. The Japanese fleet was hardly damaged at all as the Russians continued to shell wildly amidst the fires and explosions on deck. The gap between the two sides in terms of technology and training was cruelly exposed. At the sight of the destruction of all Russia’s modern battleships, the remaining Russian warships, now under Nebogatov’s command after Rozhestvensky, semi-conscious and delirious, had abandoned his role, tried to break through to Vladivostock. Night fell and the Japanese torpedo boats and destroyers hovered round the Russian warships like jackals circling a dying prey. The battleship Navarin was sunk with just one survivor; the battleship Sisoi Veleki and the cruisers Admiral Nakhimov and Vladimir Monomakh were scuttled by their crew after crippling damage. The following morning, 28 May, Nebogatov found his five surviving ships surrounded by twenty-seven Japanese vessels. He surrendered to Togo, though one Russian captain, unable to swallow the humiliation, took the Izumrud through a gap in the Japanese circle and escaped, only to be wrecked on the coast on the way to Vladivostock.

  The battle destroyed Russia’s navy and established Japan as a major Pacific power. The Japanese lost just 117 killed and 500 wounded, and three small torpedo boats. The Russian squadron lost 4,380 killed and 5,917 captured (including the two commanding admirals); all the battleships were sunk or captured, along with six out of the nine destroyers and four out of eight cruisers. Three cruisers escaped to Manila, where the Americans interned them; only one reached Vladivostock, together with two of the destroyers. One of the cruisers at Manila, Aurora, was to play a part twelve years later in the Russian Revolution when its crew joined Lenin’s Bolsheviks in storming the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. One of the junior officers in the Japanese fleet was Isoruku Yamamoto (who lost two fingers of his left hand from a Russian shell). He later went on to command the Japanese Imperial Fleet in its devastating attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, where training and technology again combined to bring the Japanese a stunning victory.

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  No. 45 THIRD BATTLE OF EDIRNE

  3 November 1912 – 26 March 1913

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  The siege of the Turkish city of Edirne – the former Ottoman capital – in the winter of 1912–13 was a remarkable victory for the small Bulgarian army against that of its much larger Turkish neighbour. But it is perhaps most memorable as the battle in which bombs were dropped from an aeroplane for the first time. Grenades had been thrown at Turkish soldiers by an Italian pilot in the Libyan War of 1911–12, but not bombs. A Bulgarian airman and engineer, Simeon Petrov, modified grenade shells by adding stabilizing fins and a fuse, creating what came to be known as the ‘Chataldzha’ bomb. There is some dispute about who first dropped them. The claim is usually given to the Bulgarian observer, Lieutenant Prodan Tarakchiev, flying in an Albatros F-2 aircraft piloted by Radul Milkov, who is said to have dropped bombs on Karaagac station on 16 October 1912 near the besieged city of Edirne. Another account has Major Vasil Zlatarov dropping the bombs from an aircraft piloted by an Italian volunteer, Giovanni Sabelli, on 17 November 1912. Whichever is correct, the Bulgarian air force, with its twenty-three aircraft, launched the long century of aerial bombing that followed.

  The air attacks took place during the First Balkan War, in which an alliance of Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro took advantage of the fact that the Turkish Empire was engaged in war with Italy in North Africa. The aim was to expel Turkey from its remaining European territory, which stretched from Constantinople to the Adriatic coast of Albania. The war was launched by Montenegro on 9 October 1912, but the armies of the other three allies joined soon afterwards, rapidly driving the Turkish forces from the frontiers. In four weeks, Bulgaria moved its army of 400,000 a distance of 260 kilometres (160 miles) against collapsing Turkish resistance until it was only 65 kilometres (40 miles) from Constantinople on the fortified Çatalca Line. By 3 November, the city of Edirne (Adrianople) was surrounded by the 2nd Bulgarian Army under General Nikola Ivanov, supported by units of the 2nd Serbian Army led by Field Marshal Stepa Stepanovi´c. There were 154,000 troops surrounding the town, together with 520 guns. Inside the city, one of the most heavily fortified of Turkish settlements, were an estimated 50,000 soldiers commanded by Mehmet Sükrü Pasha, but the flight of Turkish and Muslim refugees had doubled the civilian population to 150,000.

  Edirne held a special place in Turkish culture as the former capital of the original Ottoman state and it quickly became the symbol of Turkish resistance to the Balkan League. The press highlighted the plight of the encircled population, short of food and, after the supply was cut off by the Bulgarians in November, short of water, too. The disaster shocked Turkish opinion. One senior officer later recalled that Turkey regarded Bulgaria as a nation ‘that did not know about anything except raising pigs’, but the Bulgarians proved adept and hardy soldiers and were soon being compared with the Japanese or the Gurkhas – famously tough and effective fighters. Conditions in the city quickly deteriorated as salt and sugar disappeared and rations were limited to bread and cheese. Soldiers had little to eat and became, according to one eyewitness, ‘inhumanly emaciated’. On 15 November, the Bulgarian air force initiated another aspect of future air power by dropping leaflets over the city calling on the garrison to ‘come and surrender’. It was two days after this that bombs were dropped for the first time on the town, an inauspicious start to the long history of civilian bombing from the air. The bombing was reported in Turkey as an outrage, but in reality it was only a gesture. On 2 December a delegation came from the Bulgarian lines asking Mehmed Sükrü to surrender. ‘We have not yet given battle,’ he retorted, but three days later a ceasefire was agreed along all fronts.

  This Bulgarian reproduction of the F-2 Albatros aircraft was built in 2012 for the centenary of the 1912 flight by Bulgarian aviators over the Turkish lines at Edirne, which dropped the first primitive aerial bombs. The Bulgarian bomb was later adopted by the German army during the First World War.

  The pause gave the soldiers and citizens in Edirne no respite, since the Bulgarian and Serbian troops remained in place. The garrison expected food to be sent from Constantinople but nothing came, while 180 trains laden with food and supplies passed along the city rail route to supply the besieging forces. In January 1913, unable to accept the surrender of Edirne in a future peace settlement, a group of young officers staged a government coup and rejected the proposals then under consideration. On 4 February the siege began again, with Bulgarian artillery blasting the centre of the city incessantly. ‘Being besieged within a fortress,’ wrote Rakim Ertür in his journal during the battle, ‘is an experience that resembles none other on earth – neither prison, nor exile.’ The hungry population begged and stole food, increasingly anxious about what surrender might
mean. By late March, the Bulgarians judged that the garrison was too weak to resist any longer. On 24 March, the troops covered the metal of their uniforms and weapons with tissue to deaden noise and to conceal their gleam, and that night stormed the city. They captured the fortified enclave and the following night captured the fortress in the city centre. Mehmed Sükrü surrendered the following morning. The Bulgarian army allowed three days of looting and violence against the population, no doubt a deliberate echo of the Islamic law that specified this exact length of time for seizing booty. For centuries the victims of Turkish atrocities, Bulgarians could see no reason not to repay their enemy in the same coin.

  Edirne was to pass to Bulgarian rule following agreements reached in a peace conference in London, but the Balkan states fell out over their territorial gains and while Bulgaria was under attack from her recent allies, Turkish forces crossed the newly agreed frontier and reoccupied Edirne on 22 July 1913. It has remained in Turkish hands, except for a brief Greek occupation in 1920–22, ever since. One of those who reoccupied the city was a young colonel, Mustafa Kemal, destined to go on to become modern Turkey’s first ruler. The ‘Chataldzha’ bomb also enjoyed a later reputation. The design was passed on by the Bulgarians to the German army and became the prototype for German bombs in the First World War. What began as a modest and militarily insignificant engineering experiment grew, within a generation, into the most destructive weapons yet devised.

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  No. 46 THIRD BATTLE OF CAMBRAI

  20–21 November 1917

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  The tank is one of the most significant inventions in modern war, but it took some time before the primitive and slow contraptions built during the First World War developed into the fast, heavily armoured, battle-winning vehicles of the wars that followed. Combined with battlefield aviation, the tank brought a renewed flexibility and striking power to modern armed forces. The first time the tank-air combination was used was at the Battle of Cambrai on the Western Front in November 1917, when the British attempted to unhinge the apparently impregnable German defences of the Hindenburg Line. It was not an entirely auspicious start, but nonetheless it marked the advent of a new age of war.