fyeaheasterneurope:

unhistorical:

September 7, 1812: The Battle of Borodino is fought.

Two hundred years ago on this day, over a hundred thousand soldiers from Napoleon’s Grand Armée met forces of around the same number from the Imperial Russian Army (under Mikhail Kutuzov) near Borodino, located 120 km west of Moscow. The ensuing battle was the bloodiest single-day action of all of the Napoleonic Wars, resulting in at least 70,000 casualties. Although Borodino was and is generally considered a French “victory”, the Grand Armée sufferedonly slightly fewer casualties than the Russians, and, in hindsight, Napoleon’s losses here may very well have cost him the war. The Russian army retreated following their defeat, leaving the path to Moscow open, so Napoleon trudged on, despite dwindling supplies and a weakened army. By the time he abandoned Moscow and made his retreat out of Russia, the Grand Armée could boast no more than 30,000 soldiers fit for battle, out of the original 690,000.

The battle was immortalized by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (written to honor the Russian defenders who fought at Borodino) and also by Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. 

Incidentally, some really hardcore people reenacted the battle a few days ago. Take a look at the pictures.

Vladimir Putin was there, but surprisingly, he only watched.

Those pictures are great. But I was half-expecting Putin to ride in a T-80 and change history by routing the French. 

A former colleague of mine was a Marine and served in Iraq. He came back without PTSD, and was generally a very cool and nice guy. He was relatively slim, smiled easily, and was easy to chat with. He was generally always slightly aloof and carefree until a serious situation happened, when he was all business. 

He, if I remember correctly, went to the military straight after high school, and he said that it was when he travelled that he learned more about the world than school had ever taught him. He learned basic Arabic, among other things. 

Because I was interested, academically, in his wartime experience, he showed me this video that one of his fellow marines made. They’d served in Fallujah during its rougher period in 2004. 

Warning, this video has some disturbing content, with gore and blood. Some of the video captured is quite fantastic, and some of it is honestly sadistic. I particularly like the video shot of the helicopter rotors blowing everything around them as people run around. You’ll know the scenes which are disturbing when you see them, and they honestly still bother me. I don’t know what would propel someone to take pictures, for personal interest, of dead and mutilated bodies. 

But it’s another personal look at quite recent American combat in Iraq. 

imperialjapanesearmy:

Soldiers of the 5th Infantry Division in Malaya. Japanese Infantry were excellent jungle fighters, giving them a huge advantage in many campaigns in the South Pacific. In the Malayan Campaign, British officers believed the thick Malayan Jungle to be impenetrable. That mistake proved Costly, as the Malayan campaign can be considered the greatest victory in the History of Imperial Japan.

Really it’s one of the most fascinating campaigns of the war. The British were tied to the road, and the Japanese would engage them at the front, then send troops through the jungle to cut them off. When the British realized this, they would pull back further along the road. This happened all the way across the peninsula. 

They did develop beyond this though. In the Burma campaign, the Japanese tried doing the same thing, cutting through the jungle to isolate British forces on the roads. But the overriding tactical lesson of World War 2 is that when cut off, it’s sometimes best to hold your ground instead of panicking. When cut off by jungle encirclements in Burma, the British would hunker down, get supplied by air and have close air support. 

geopolit:

I have been working on this map, collecting news articles and documenting trends over the past couple years, and was surprised when it revealed that the world is deeply divided by two major spheres of influence that dominate and dictate global affairs.

The two major organizations at the center of this are NATO, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) headed by Russia and China. Both are military organizations with each member state promising to protect each others interests and come to aid in the event of war.

This setup creates an interesting situation whereby, at its most basic level, if any two nations from differing alliances go to war, it has the potential, through the domino effect, to bring war to every continent of the world. It is this fear of global conflict that creates such tension points as North and South Korea, Israel and Iran and Pakistan and India.

Ultimately, the global powers of the United States, Russia and China don’t want to go to war but neither is willing to cave to the influence of the other. This simple division of the world helps to explain almost every decision made on the global stage in recent years and will be a good prediction of how nations will interact in the years to come.

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Soo… I’m curious about a few things: 

Firstly, I really don’t think it’s possible to divide the world so neatly into spheres of influence. Not only is it no longer the Cold War Era, but every country frankly has rather complicated politics. I have personal experience in some of these countries, and quite honestly South East Asia, for example, is divided between being in China’s bed as it rises or banding together to resist its influence. 

Vietnam, in particular, has had a hard time warming up to China because, well, China invaded it several times. They haven’t forgotten that. 

Turkey might not be all that approving of its European allies but it IS still part of NATO. It’s certainly not closer to China than it is to the West. 

What is Belarus doing there in blue at all? Last I checked… Luvchenko was anything but pro-Western. 

Also, Africa is really not so cut-and-dry… 

Basically saying, countries may not be pro-Western but that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily pro-China. 

In any case, with development going so fast in so many countries, analysts are still leaning towards a multipolar world. where America is the strongest of several strong nations all with their own spheres of influence. Although the BRIC idea is losing tract, other predictions haven’t quite nudged it off the pedestal… and yet it still poses an interesting hypothetical future. 

Here’s a clip from the film “Gods and Generals” which I watched with my dad a couple of months ago. I don’t know the full details of the battle of Fredericksburg, but a few are generally known, namely that the Confederates were fortified beiphind a wall and on a ridge, while the Union forces attacked over bad ground, piecemeal and uncoordinated. It’s a terrible loss for the north.

While we watched this, and watched the Irish brigade and the 20th Maine charge up to the confederate line and exchange musket volleys, my dad said “why don’t they lie down and shoot?”

But it’s a lot harder to load a musket laying down.

Just going from what I saw of the battle from the film, I figured a Suvorov approach might have worked best.

Aleksandr Suvorov was one of the greatest generals ever, one of the very few in history never to lose a battle. He had a few draws and fighting retreats, but never a loss, over a long career fighting for Russia against the Ottoman Turks and the French in the revolutionary wars. He was famous for an aggressive and mobile doctrine, keeping his men moving fast, and as much on the attack as possible, because there’s no point in waiting for the enemy to be prepared. By attacking unexpectedly, a defender is forced to improvise and abandon their preparations and plans as they react, opening them up to vulnerabilities.

In general an attacker is the one determining the shape of a battle, and a defender is mostly reacting to their moves. Suvorov had a way of moving faster than anyone expected, and turning up where they didn’t expect him. He trained his soldiers to fire once or twice at most, before charging. His philosophy was that bullets can miss, but the bayonet never has to.

So if Gods and Generals is accurate, and the Union men ran their way up to the Confederate wall and just stood in front getting cut up by musket fire… I’d say Suvorov would have been a good inspiration. Defenders behind a shallow wall have the defensive advantage, but that advantage is negated if the attacker is engaging them in melee. They’re then unable to fire on further reinforcements which were coming up. Artillery tends to refrain from firing on their own men, especially since they mostly aimed field artillery by eyeball over open sights.

Really the best thing the Union attackers could have done was close the distance as soon as possible and negate the advantages the confederates had by charging right in.

There are likely greater strategic concerns, considering they were uncoordinated, and a frontal assault on a fortified position is rarely a good idea in any case. I don’t know this battle well, so forgive me for basing my judgment on this. But in the tactical sense, judging solely from the film, regimental and brigade commanders might have done better to do it how Suvorov would have.

There is only one decent Hollywood representation of the Greek phalanx. It’s pretty much the only redeeming part of the film “Alexander.” In all other ways, it was pretty lame. In “300” they don’t even try to show it. Unfortunately YouTube doesn’t let me take clips from “Alexander” anymore so I’m forced to take from… the History Channel… Sigh. 

The phalanx is the first solid military formation making use of, essentially, pikes. The Greeks and Macedonians used sarissas, long spears, as forward barriers, which worked against just about anything. Battles between Greek city states generally involved two lines of phalanxes poking at each other until one side gave way. They would sometimes just try to see how long their lines would stretch and who could outflank the other, because while the phalanx was strong in the front, it was weak in every other side. 

Alexander’s success came from a combined arms approach. Instead of just focusing on the Macedonian phalanx, he had flexible archers, and excellent light cavalry. He would use his phalanxes to lock down an enemy, then use their lines to hide the movement of his cavalry, which would charge around the flanks and envelop an enemy. This is exactly what happened in most of his successes. 

After his death, his successors all generally returned to the focus on the phalanx. And that’s part of the reason they lost to the Romans, who were extremely flexible. 

“300” badly depicts the ancient battle of Thermopylae, where the Spartans and Thespians deployed in phalanx against the much more numerous Persians. The Spartans held out as long as they did purely because of the protection of their flanks by the narrow pass. Not because they were superhuman gung ho badasses. 

When I was a kid, I loved the film “Gettysburg” which centered on the battle of the same name from the American Civil War in 1863. In the third day of the battle, Confederate general Robert E. Lee gambles on a frontal assault on the fortified Union lines across open ground after artillery bombardment, along with diversionary attacks on the flanks. 

My dad, at the time, would vocally say “Why are they walking? Why aren’t they spread out? It doesn’t make any sense! They’re just asking to get slaughtered!” 

And yeah, it failed badly. 

So that does nevertheless beg the question: in films set in the 18th and 19th century, why do we see men bunch up in tight formations when they’re fighting with guns against each other, with artillery and all that other destructive stuff flying around? 

There are good reasons for this, and a few bad ones. 

The first is that your average soldier was an uneducated peasant, in most countries. You could only make them worthwhile by drilling them to fight practically on automatic, because battles are scary and people will run. They had to react automatically to orders, and not think about them. This is much easier in a tight formation. 

The second is that early gunpowder weapons were really really inaccurate. Even in the 18th century, for the most part there was no real such thing as aiming. Smoothbore barrels, like early muskets, were smooth on the inside. The bullet, when fired, would literally bounce around in the barrel before it exits the muzzle and gods alone know where it will end up. Rifled guns, which mean that the inside of the barrel is grooved in a spiral fashion which make the bullet spin as it exits, were much more accurate but much more expensive and time-consuming to make. 

So the way you can guarantee the effectiveness of arming men with muskets is to group them up tightly, face them all in one direction, and when they shoot, they have a better chance to hit something in front of them. “Ready, Aim, Fire” is not part of their routine, because there’s no point to aiming. They would generally just point it high, because gravity would drop the bullet over range. 

And the third reason is that tactics were inherited from the medieval and renaissance period, where tight formations were important for maintaining cohesion, and defense against cavalry. The threat of cavalry was still very present, and a tight formation of infantry still had a better chance of fighting them off. The tragedy of this is that tactics just didn’t move quickly enough to adjust to the increasing destructiveness of technology. 

By the American Civil War, cavalry had mostly lost its shock value. Horses were too vulnerable to increasing numbers of rifles, faster firing artillery, and more. They found they were acting more as scouts and dragoons, the latter meaning they ride to an area, then dismount and fight, rather than fighting from horseback. 

Looser formations were also used in these periods, as scouts, skirmishers and sharpshooters. They generally considered themselves an elite, and given less discipline and more independence. The Prussian “Freikorps” were intentionally recruited from brutish or aggressive men, and allowed to keep their beards. They were expected to be flexible, mobile, and work without specific orders. 

So would a change in tactics have saved Pickett’s men at Gettysburg? Probably not. A change in strategy maybe, as has been argued, but the training for the day largely worked as well as it could have.

The Purpose of Pikes 

When I watched The Two Towers, the first thing that occurred to me at the end was “… Huh. That shouldn’t work at all.” 

I mean, it’s great cinema, but it shouldn’t really work. 

And by that I mean that last charge by the Rohirrim into the Uruk Hai lines outside Helm’s Deep. 

When they charge, they give the Uruks a chance to form up with their pikes. And the way pikes work is actually more psychological than physical. 

When cavalry charges, the most important part of it is the point of impact. That, and the terror of its coming, is supposed to break apart tight infantry formations and get them running. And when men on foot run, men on horse have all the advantage. 

Pikes present a barrier that horses will generally not break. They will very rarely charge directly into obvious danger. Men may conquer their fears and be carried along by the knowledge that their fellows are there with them, but horses don’t work that way. A horse will buck and break when presented with a wall of pikes several men thick. The long length of pikes means that the effective danger is also thick in front of the pike line. 

A horse charge will very rarely break a tight and determined group of infantry. That’s why flexibility is key to medieval and ancient battle. 

Now, don’t anyone tell me “Yeah, but Gandalf shined his light thing” yes, it probably had a morale effect, and maybe he burned them or something, and the Uruks didn’t have long spears, but in purely tactical terms the Rohirrim were at a substantial disadvantage. You should never charge spears head on, and horses won’t. You want infantry surprised, panicked and disorganized. 

The best thing to do is to keep their attention focused in one direction, and then charge them from a vulnerable side in surprise. The Rohirrim had a chance to do this, since the Uruks were focused on the siege. If they had gotten closer and just charged without any pomp and drama, it would have been far more effective. 

The same goes for the portrayal of of Pelennor Fields in Return of the King. Glorious charges are lovely and beautiful on screen, but they also get a lot more people killed. 

And I enjoyed it. There are some inaccuracies, which were famous when it released. Most importantly the apparent coldness of British officers over the Australians. While Australia had a few excellent generals, most armies of the first world war famously had generals and officers who saw little flexibility outside of massing a lot of men and charging them into withering machine guns and artillery.

But the film is about Australia, so a little inaccuracy for the purpose of patriotism is, oddly, acceptable. Films like this can tell you a lot about a culture, because they tend to portray what people find important. Gallipoli is a film about a battle that, while unsuccessful, resonated deeply into Australian pride, and separated them from the rest of the British empire and commonwealth.

In this, it reminded me a lot of Passchendaele, which i saw first. I’m pretty sure it took a lot of its inspiration from Gallipoli. But while Gallipoli also spent quite a lot of time on screen off of the battlefield, it had interesting characters who were engaging, and time was spent regarding training and bonding while in Egypt. You get to see them race to the pyramids and even climb them. It’s better scenery than old Calgary, which is all you see in Passchendaele, with two main characters who were boring and annoyingly whiny, respectively. The main characters in Gallipoli embody what Australians like about themselves and take pride in: independence, self-reliance, an optimistic nature, strong spirit, stuff like that. I didn’t see anything for Canadians to be proud about in their national culture in Passchendaele.

That battle, and Vimy Ridge, are to Canada what Gallipoli was for Australia. The Canadians took pride in professionalism and their success where others failed. But you just don’t see it in the film. That movie won’t be half as remembered as Gallipoli has been.

Waltz with Bashir

This film is about an Israeli filmmaker’s journey to rediscover the events he lived through in the 1982 occupation of Lebanon. 

It’s got a strong visual style, and is the most accurate portrayal of war I have seen. It’s terrible, chaotic, and tragic, focusing on morality and responsibility in that chaos of wartime. 

Anyone interested in the study of conflict should watch this. 

Remembering Remi Ochlik

The award-winning photography of the photojournalist killed in Syria.

One of the saddest affairs of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 was the sacking of Smyrna (now named Izmir). 

This was a city on western Anatolia with long Greek roots going back to Ancient Greece. However, over the centuries the city had Ottomanized: it was home to Jews, Turks, Arabs, Armenians as well as Greeks. By all reports, it was an incredibly charming city and what they called “the jewel of the Levant.’ 

However, its Greek heritage made it part of the great ambition of the Greeks since their independence: the Big Idea of reclaiming ancient Greek territory. They talked often of reclaiming Western Anatolia, with Constantinople to be restored as the capital of their Hellenic ideal. 

I’m not sure anyone really talked about what they would do about the Turks who had, by now, also been living there for centuries. I don’t think they cared. 

When the Greeks landed at Smyrna, ostensibly as part of the Allied occupation forces after the end of the First World War, they quickly sought to occupy their desired territory. They kicked up a fuss for the local Greeks, landing at the spot the medieval Crusaders landed at, enticing them to maim, kill, mob and burn the Turkish quarter. 

They did this all over Western Anatolia, raping, defiling and burning their way through the Muslim Turks. They destroyed mosques, crucified children, raped women, and so on. 

So when the war turned against them, and the Turkish Nationalist army under Mustafa Kemal fought them back across a land covered with devastation, many of the Turks felt like they should only return the favour. And so Greek populations across Western Anatolia were also raped, defiled, and burned. Orthodox churches were burned, Greek girls were raped, and so on. 

It’s still not clear who started the fire in Smyrna, and Kemal issued orders to maintain discipline, but it would be fair to say that no one could have stopped the Turkish soldiers from being butchers by that point. 

Allied warships from the British, French, Americans and Italians waited off the harbour to evacuate their own citizens, and were restricted from rescuing the fleeing Greeks. Every sailor has a heart for drowning people though, and they soon took it on themselves to rescue people. They’re still blamed for having waited as long as they did, though. 

It’s not quite clear how many people died in the fire, the killings or drowning in the harbour, but estimates vary from 2,000 to 10,000. 

General Georgios Hatzianestis was a Greek commander during the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922. 

Important context is that at the end of the First World War, the various Allied governments plotted to cut up the defeated Ottoman Empire. The British were occupying Palestine, Iraq and Jordan, the French took Syria and Lebanon… and David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, had long been hinting to the Greeks that if they entered the war on their side, they’d consent to the Greeks occupying Western Anatolia. 

The Greeks were preoccupied with a Big Idea to reclaim their ancient territory and glory. And so they invaded, hoping to present the Western Powers with a fait accompli. They didn’t really know that at the same time Mustafa Kemal was organizing his Turkish nationalists, which the country increasingly rallied to instead of the Ottoman government in Istanbul. 

In the last months of the war, Georgios Hazianestis was in charge of this debacle. And this unfortunate man was not the most mentally stable of commanders. Supposedly, at times he wouldn’t stand to greet visitors because he was sure that his legs were made of glass and if he moved them they would shatter. By the time he took over, the war had already gone against the Greeks. 

For their defeat in the war, he and five others were tried for high treason and executed in 1922.