A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  A mushroom cloud rises from the second atomic bomb dropped on Japan on 9 August 1945. The attack on the Japanese port of Nagasaki was made at the last moment when the main target became obscured by cloud. Around 74,000 died as a result of the attack.

  The ruin of Hiroshima was even more complete than the destruction from a firestorm caused by incendiary raids. One bomb obliterated a large part of the city leaving nothing but a radioactive wasteland. Whether the bomb accelerated Japanese surrender is still open to question.

  The effect of the second bomb was to spur Emperor Hirohito into finding a way to surrender without losing his throne and without dishonouring Japan entirely. Historians are divided over whether the atomic attacks really did cause the surrender. The Soviet armed forces began their invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria on 8–9 August and overwhelmed the Japanese Kwantung Army in a matter of days, killing 80,000 soldiers. The last thing the Japanese leaders wanted was to be occupied by the Soviet Union and this may well have been the key factor in deciding on surrender. Army fanatics tried to stage a coup by storming the imperial enclosure, but they were overcome and on 15 August 1945, Hirohito broadcast to the Japanese nation that the war would have to end. A formal surrender came on 2 September in Tokyo Bay on board the American battleship USS Missouri.

  The two bombs opened the nuclear age. By the 1960s, the twin superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had the means to obliterate each other’s cities. An American strike was designed to kill 80 million Russians. Mutual Assured Destruction – MAD, which it surely was – kept a precarious peace, and nuclear weaponry has not been deployed in war since 1945. Since these weapons have never been used, it is difficult to describe what kind of military revolution they ushered in. Conventional warfare, using more and more sophisticated weapons but of lower lethality than nuclear arms, has continued unabated. What the bombs did do was to spark an immediate debate about the morality and legality of using them. The American secretary of war, Henry Stimson, described the choice as ‘the least abhorrent’, compared with the costs of invading Japan or starving her population. In moral terms, however, the atomic attacks returned the world to the military values of much earlier battles in world history, when cities were sacked and burnt to the ground and their inhabitants slaughtered without distinction. Modern though the technology might be, the atomic attacks fit seamlessly into millennia of savage battles lost or won on the back of invention.

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  No. 52 OPERATION DESERT STORM

  17 January – 28 February 1991

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  The brief campaign in which the American-led Coalition compelled the Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein to abandon its occupation of Kuwait was the first test of a whole generation of modern weaponry. The outcome of the final 100-hour battle was made possible by the significant technical margin between the two sides. Nevertheless, as with all innovations, victory also depended on the way in which the forces using them were deployed operationally on the battlefield. Here there also existed a decisive contrast between the two sides.

  The technical gap between the Iraqi and Coalition forces was not the result of simple asymmetric warfare. Iraq had fought a long war against Iran in the 1980s; its army had plenty of battle experience and the Iraqi forces possessed an impressive array of modern weaponry. The army had an estimated 4,200 tanks and 3,100 artillery pieces; the air force had around 700 aircraft and helicopters, while Iraq was shielded by a modern air-defence system, including radar and SAM missiles and anti-aircraft artillery. It was perhaps because of the scale of his forces and the relative modernity of his weaponry that Saddam risked an assault on his tiny oil-rich neighbour, launched by 2,000 tanks and 100,000 troops on 2 August 1990. Invasion of Kuwait was followed by a build-up of forces along the Saudi Arabian border. In the West, fears began to spread at the prospect that Iraq might control one-half of the world’s known oil reserves.

  The Saudi appeal to the United States for protection against a possible Iraqi attack coincided with a United Nations resolution calling on Saddam to withdraw unconditionally from Kuwait. The American commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, established a vast military camp on Saudi soil to set up a defensive line. Desert Shield, as it was called, was composed of units from thirty-four countries in the United Nations, though the largest contribution next to the American was British. Saddam rejected the call for withdrawal, hopeful that the Coalition might fall apart, or lack the public approval to wage actual war. On 29 November 1990, the United Nations issued Resolution 678 setting a final deadline for withdrawal of 15 January 1991. Schwarzkopf moved from defensive to offensive posture and 700,000 Coalition forces arrived in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.

  Schwarzkopf had at his disposal a cluster of new weapons, much of which had not yet seen combat. In almost all cases, they represented an important step beyond the modern weaponry available to Saddam. They included the M1A1 Abrams tank, the M2 and M3 Bradley fighting vehicles, the Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, the Patriot air defence missile system, the F-117 Nighthawk flying wing (capable of avoiding radar), satellite mapping, AWACS, and – among the most important innovations – night goggles and thermal imaging. Thermal imaging and weapons locator systems meant that in many cases the Americans could strike at tanks and artillery before the enemy even knew that they were under attack. The Iraqi air defence system could be destroyed using the F-4 Wild Weasel with its high-speed anti-radiation missiles that locked on to enemy radar. The new range of weaponry rendered Iraq’s sizeable arsenal all but obsolete and showed the extent to which Iraqi intelligence had failed to appreciate that fighting the Coalition would not be the same as fighting Iran.

  The Coalition victory was certainly not a formality, but the new weaponry was tied to an operational plan that also out-thought the Iraqis. Imitating the German Afrika Korps commander, Erwin Rommel, Schwarzkopf planned a frontal assault on Kuwait City to pin down Iraqi forces, while two army corps positioned further west along the Saudi–Iraqi frontier would swing round behind them and cut off their retreat. While the final preparations were in progress, the Coalition air forces began a four-week campaign on 17 January to knock out key military and war-economic targets. A total of 110,000 sorties were flown and 46 aircraft lost, though not one from air-to-air combat. Most Iraqi aircraft flew to Iran while 146 were destroyed on the ground or in the air. The air campaign, Operation Instant Thunder, claimed 1,300 enemy tanks, 1,100 guns and 850 armoured personnel carriers, but the difficulty of identifying targets in urban areas, with a technology still in its teething stage, resulted in the death of more than 3,000 civilians. As the air campaign drew to a close the air forces prepared to support the ground war. The movement of 200,000 troops to the western zone had been kept secret, itself a remarkable achievement, and despite the torture of the few Coalition personnel that had fallen into Iraqi hands. On 24 February, the ground war began, as 575,000 troops, 3,700 tanks and 1,500 guns moved forward against a much-depleted Iraqi force.

  The technical edge supplied by the Coalition’s weaponry devastated the Iraqi defenders, but the speed and scale of success also depended on the operational plan. The two army corps designed to swing round and outflank the Iraqi line moved forward remorselessly, demolishing any resistance in their path. Within hours, 13th Corps had reached the Euphrates Valley and could cut off the Iraqi forces stationed in and around Kuwait. The 7th US Army Corps was slower, hampered by smoke and dust, but it, too, moved irresistibly, opening up space for the British First Armoured Division to swing into place to the north of Kuwait City. The assault on the city was so rapid that the chief problem was coping with the thousands of Iraqi soldiers who surrendered. Iraqi resistance all but evaporated save for a few units of the elite Republican Guard. They fled down the road to the southern Iraqi city of Basra, but they were sitting targets. Two thousand vehicles were destroyed from the air in what came to be called the ‘Highway of Death’. At Medina Ridge north of Kuwait, one of the toughest tank engagements of the battle too
k place, but only one Coalition soldier was killed. The gap in fighting power between the two sides proved unbridgeable.

  This is a US Air Force F-117A Nighthawk ‘Stealth’ ground attack aircraft, one of a new generation of vanguard weapons that changed the way modern battles are fought. The Nighthawk was first flown in 1981 and was used in operations in the First Gulf War. The name ‘Stealth’ comes from its capacity to avoid being detected by enemy radar.

  On 28 February, with Kuwait clear of Iraqi forces and the Iraqi defensive line destroyed, the Coalition announced a ceasefire. On 3 March, in a tent at the Safwan airfield, just inside the Iraqi border, Schwarzkopf dictated the terms of the armistice to Iraqi representatives. The battle was a disaster for the large Iraqi army. Only 7 of its 43 army divisions remained operational, while 3,800 tanks, 1,450 armoured personnel carriers and 2,900 artillery pieces had been destroyed. The best estimate is that 25,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed while 85,000 became prisoners of war. Coalition forces lost 240 dead in combat, 235 killed in accidents and 785 wounded. The battle had provided the opportunity to test weaponry that was state-of-the-art but still in development. When Iraq was invaded twelve years later in the Second Gulf War, the new battlefield bristled with electronic, laser and information technology equipment to which Saddam still had no answer.

  CHAPTER 4

  DECEPTION

  Here, an American landing craft (LCVP) delivers Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division onto the Fox Green Section of Omaha Beach on the morning of 6 June 1944, part of a massive invasion launched by Allied forces against the German defensive line in Normandy. The invasion destination had been successfully concealed from the Germans by a complex deception operation codenamed ‘Fortitude’.

  Deception is as old as battle itself. Perhaps the most important force magnifier is the ability to deceive the enemy of your intentions, the size of the force, even your whereabouts. In the first recorded battle, at Kadesh in 1285 BCE, the Hittite king managed to conceal his entire army before unleashing it on the unsuspecting Egyptians. The story of the mythical battle for Troy is centred on a clever ruse. Indeed, so universal are the many different forms of deception and surprise that it seems remarkable there should be any battles fought at all on transparent terms, with both armies in full view of each other, ready for combat.

  Deception takes a wide variety of forms, though its intention – to throw the enemy off-guard and secure a battlefield advantage – has remained reasonably constant. There are large-scale strategic deceptions in which the true destination of an army (less commonly a navy) is masked in order to present the enemy with a sudden and unexpected menace. Marlborough’s rapid march to the Danube before the Battle of Blenheim is a well-known example; so too Washington’s success in masking his destination before Yorktown. Arguably the most significant was the deception practised for the Normandy invasion in June 1944, when it was imperative that the German army should have no clear forewarning of the invasion area. The deception operation, codenamed ‘Fortitude’, was on an enormous scale and involved the most sophisticated of deception measures; it made possible a successful lodgement in France in unpredictable military circumstances.

  This section of a carved frieze from the Ramesseum Temple at Luxor shows Pharaoh Ramses II deciding how to punish two spies caught from the Hittite army at the Battle of Kadesh. The captives were supposed to supply the Egyptians with false information about their enemy.

  These examples constitute what might be called ‘grand deception’. In most other cases, deception operated at a more mundane level, though with effects just as significant. Spreading rumours and misinformation to confuse the enemy or to stimulate overconfidence or fear is a stratagem that goes back millennia. The outcome of the Battle of Carrhae depended on a double agent working for the Parthians who lured the Roman army into a trap. Before the Battle of Hohenfriedberg, Frederick II had sent infiltrators into the enemy area to spread the rumour that he and a scattered army were retreating, while in fact he was concentrating his army for another deception, an arduous night march to catch the enemy army at dawn before it could organize a defence. The use of ‘deserters’ who arrive in an enemy camp with misleading news from the other side was commonplace, and perhaps explains Stalin’s reluctance on the eve of the Barbarossa invasion to believe the news of an imminent attack brought to Soviet lines by German deserters who claimed to be communists.

  Deception can also take the form of simple concealment or surprise, dictated by geography as much as by strategic planning. The use of ambush, or the exploitation of a topographical feature regarded by the enemy as a secure barrier, has been commonplace. Spartacus and his band of runaway slaves climbed down the sheer side of Mount Vesuvius against all expectations, just as General Wolfe’s men climbed up the cliff face to the Plains of Abraham to surprise the French. Shrewd use of cover by Wellington at Waterloo gave Napoleon a misleading view of British strengths and disposition, while a ravine or narrow valley was an ideal site to conceal an ambush against an unwary or overconfident enemy, of which there are many examples.

  The only way to prevent the effect of deception in battle was to have excellent intelligence on the enemy and his intentions. This is a feature that has varied widely over time. In a great many battles, such intelligence was impossible to procure, or was carelessly neglected. Right at the start of the historical record of battles, at Kadesh, Pharaoh Ramses II captured two enemy scouts and tortured them into revealing information, though too late to prevent a surprise attack by the Hittite king. Scouting parties were commonly sent out to find enemy soldiers who could then be compelled to reveal the whereabouts or plans of the enemy, if they knew them. But these could also be planted to supply misinformation. For a commander it was difficult to judge the extent to which intelligence was to be trusted. Deception depended on creating this sense of uncertainty so that battle could be joined with a psychological advantage to the attacker. It could not guarantee victory, but time and again it has balanced out uneven odds or tipped the scales or, as at Troy, quite literally opened the gates to victory.

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  No. 53 THE FALL OF TROY

  c.1200 BCE

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  The most famous deception operation in all history is the wooden horse of Troy. After laying siege to the city for ten years, so the story goes, the Myceneans (Greeks in the modern account) finally packed up and rowed away, leaving a giant wooden horse as a tantalizing gift for the Trojan people. After much argument about its purpose, the Trojans hauled the horse into the city and spent the night carousing in victory. A handful of enemy soldiers hidden inside the horse climbed out, overwhelmed the guards at the gate and let in their comrades who had rowed back unseen to the shore a few miles away. Troy was burnt to the ground, its people butchered and its treasures stolen.

  How much of this story could be true? It has come down to us as myth, allegedly written by the blind Greek poet Homer in the eighth century BCE, hundreds of years after the events occurred, if they occurred at all. There is no historical record of the famous names – King Priam of Troy, the Greek heroes Achilles and Ajax, and the beautiful Helen, wife of the Greek king of Sparta, Menelaus, whose kidnapping by the Trojan Prince Paris was the reason for the siege in the first place. The very site of Troy itself was unknown until it was excavated for the first time in 1871 by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. It has been excavated many times since, and a much better understanding has been gained about the city, its hinterland and the civilization in which it flourished.

  Troy certainly existed as a place. It was known by the Hittites, who inhabited Anatolia (now modern Turkey) as Wilusa, called Wilion by the Greeks, and then Ilion (after which Homer’s Iliad is named). It lies on the western shore of modern Turkey, overlooking the Dardanelles Straits. It was rebuilt many times after sackings, earthquakes or fires. It lived on trade and was, by the end of the second millennium BCE, a wealthy city with solid walls and defences and a population of perhaps 7,500 people. The r
ulers of Troy dominated a region known as the Troad, which supplied food and horses. The peoples of the region probably acted as Troy’s allies when the city was threatened. Most archaeologists argue on the basis of the evidence that the siege of Troy took place at some point around 1200 BCE. A layer of fire damage has been unearthed to show that the city was gutted around that time, together with an arrowhead that is identifiably Greek.

  If the Trojan War did take place, it is a plausible supposition. The Mycenean Greeks were a seafaring, violent and piratical people. They lived from raiding and stealing and trade, and their sturdy vessels, illustrated on archaeological finds, would have brought them easily to the shores of the Troad, while Troy’s reputation as a centre of wealth was a likely magnet. Most research suggests that the ten-year siege with its tumultuous battles outside the city probably never took place. The story of the war derived from Homer and the so-called ‘Epic Cycle’ of six other Greek poems written around the same time, used literary devices to convey the epic story – 10 years or 100,000 men were figures of poetic speech, not reality.