Monthly Archives: April 2009

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A belated Anzac Day post.

Here's C. E. W. Bean, the official historian of Australia's involvement in the First World War, on why the infamous Suvla landings on 6 August 1915 didn't cut the Gallipoli peninsula and open the road to Constantinople:

The reasons for the failure, which affected the fate of the Australian and New Zealand forces more profoundly than any other episode in the campaign, may be laid bare by future historians, probing unflinchingly for the causes. Many of the Anzac troops, on whom it left an enduring impression, attributed it partly to the senility of the leadership, partly to the inexperience of the troops, but largely to causes which lie deeper in the mentality of the British people. The same respect for the established order which caused Kitchener to entrust the enterprise to unsuitable commanders simply because they were senior, appeared to render each soldier inactive unless his officer directed, and each officer dumb unless his senior spoke. The men had doubtless the high qualities of their race, among them orderliness, decency, and modesty; they could follow a good leader anywhere as bravely as any troops in the Peninsula. But an enterprise such as that of Suvla demanded more than the ability to follow; it required that each man, or at least a high proportion of the force, should be able to lead; and the necessary quality of decision, which even a few years' emancipation from the social restrictions of the Old World appeared to have bred in the emigrant, was -- to colonial eyes -- lacking in the Suvla troops. Moreover a large proportion of the new force had come straight from the highly organised life in or around overcrowded cities, and as a result they lacked the resourcefulness required for any activity in open country. They lacked also the hardness to set a high standard of achievement for themselves, while that demanded of them by the regimental and brigade staffs was -- to put it mildly -- inadequate for one of the decisive battles of the war. Further, though many reports had been heard concerning the excellent physique of the New Army, the standard in that respect was very uneven. There were in reality two well-defined types, the officers as a class being tall and well developed, but a majority of the men cramped in stature, presumably as the result of life in overcrowded industrial centres under conditions not yet operative to any marked extent in the great cities in Australia.

Hmm, so it's the fault of the British soldier for being 'cramped in nature' and lacking in 'resourcefulness' and 'hardness', unlike the strapping young colonials, of course. At least Bean allows himself an out, in the form of 'future historians'. One of these historians, Robin Prior, argues that -- contrary to received wisdom -- the primary aim at Suvla was actually just to set up a supply base for the northern Allied forces, which it did successfully. Any advances across the peninsula were secondary to this, and in any case were never likely to amount to much given the geography, the forces available and the operational plan. Which last, as it happens, was partly authored by Captain Cecil Aspinall, who later wrote (as Aspinall-Oglander) the British official history of the Gallipoli campaign, where he was quite happy to blame the commander on the ground, the elderly but inexperienced Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford, for the 'failure' of his plan.

Something for me to bear in mind when I talk to my students in a few weeks about the (brilliant but misleading) 1981 film Gallipoli. Especially the scene where the radio operator at the Nek, where waves of Australian soldiers have been uselessly slaughtered in assaults against Turkish trenches in support of the landings, reports that the British at Suvla have met no resistance but, instead of advancing inland, are 'sitting on the beach drinking cups of tea'. Peter Weir probably can't be blamed for portraying the British military, officers and other ranks both, as incompetent when even the official historians are happy to do the same.

See C. E. W. Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, volume 2: The Story of ANZAC from 4 May, 1915, to the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, 11th edition (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941), 715-6; Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 207-9.

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A random thought while sitting in a lecture today: if there is (or can be) such a thing as total war, does that imply that total peace is a meaningful concept?

Firstly, what is total war? One definition, drawn from the ubiquitous set of conference proceedings edited by Stig Förster et al (and more directly, from today's lecture notes), goes something like this. Total war consists of:

  1. total aims: e.g. the destruction of an enemy nation
  2. total methods: e.g. bombing cities
  3. total mobilisation: e.g. conscription for both the armed forces and for labour
  4. total control: e.g. censorship, dictatorship

More briefly, total war is the subordination of every other consideration (law, custom, morality, etc) to the prosecution of war. Total war is an ideal form of warfare, something which can be approached more or less closely, but which can never actually be fully attained. Well, hopefully not, because that would be bad.

So what would total peace look like? I don't think it can simply be the absence of total war; that's just peace generically. Total peace must be total in some sense.
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Joseph Miranda. First Battle of Britain. Decision Games, 2009. A wargame, not a book, included with Strategy & Tactics 255. The German air offensive against Britain in 1917 and 1918. The German player raids British cities and tries to damage civilian morale; the British player tries to intercept the raiders and bomb their aerodromes. It's a long, long time since I've bought a copy of S&T, and I try to avoid buying wargames because I never seem to actually play them, but I couldn't resist in this case, given the subject matter!

Robin Prior. Gallipoli: The End of the Myth. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009. As noted in comments! I doubt it will actually end the myth, as far as Australia is concerned, because it doesn't seemed to be aimed at the Gallipoli story as Australians understand it. Rather, it's aimed at other historians who have argued that the Dardanelles campaign was a good idea badly executed.

Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young, eds. Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History. New York and London: The New Press, 2009. A collection of essays on subjects ranging from British air control in Iraq to the present-day legal questions surrounding the bombing of civilians. Most interesting to me is probably the one by Tetsuo Maeda on the bombing of Chungking (Chongqing) between 1938 and 1943, since it's hard to find much in English on strategic bombing by Japan. I think I actually did a double-take when I turned to the list of contributors and saw that three of them were people from my own university I'd never heard of! That they're philosophers and lawyers only partly excuses this ...

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I've been reading a little about the Dardanelles campaign of 1915; not the famous landings in April but the failed naval campaign which preceded them in February and March. The basic idea was that British and French forces would sweep the Bosphorus clear of mines, knock out the Turkish naval guns on either side of the straits, proceed to Constantinople and then receive Turkey's surrender. In the event, the first two parts of this plan failed rather spectacularly (three battleships were lost to mines in a single day), but even if they hadn't, just how a fleet of warships was supposed to make a country surrender has never been very clear, at least not to me.

It's tempting to see this as a sort of naval knock-out blow. Constantinople, the Turkish capital, would be under the guns of the Allied battleships. Turkey had no significant navy of its own, besides the ex-German battlecruiser Goeben which would have been hugely outnumbered, so the city would be open to a devastating naval bombardment. So perhaps the sheer moral effect of this would cause a collapse. And it seems the Turks feared this. On 18 March, the day of the attempted breakthrough, according to Robert Massie:

Meanwhile, in Constantinople, the government and the populace were convinced that the Allied fleet would break through. All Turks respected the near legendary power of the British navy; no one believed that a collection of ancient forts and guns at the Dardanelles could bar its way. Accordingly, word of the massive bombardment precipitated an exodus from the capital. The state archives were evacuated and hidden; the banks were emptied of gold; many affluent Turks already had sent their families away. The distance from Gallipoli to Constantinople was only 150 miles; most Turks expected that less than twelve hours after they entered the Sea of Marmara, British battleships would arrive off the Golden Horn.1

So if a moral effect was intended, it seems like it was starting to work. But as I say, it's frustratingly unclear in the histories and biographies I have to hand just what the Allies expected was going to happen. There's a suggestion that Kitchener thought the morale of the Turkish army would break; maybe there would be another revolution; or maybe the soldiers eventually landed at Gallipoli could have been used to take Constantinople instead. Of course, there would have been other benefits from forcing the straits: opening the sea lanes to Russia, foremost among them.
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  1. Robert K. Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 464. []

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I've added another biography to the sidebar, that of devil-may-care flying fool Claude Grahame-White. He is probably most remembered today for his daring night flight in 1910 while attempting to win the Daily Mail London to Manchester prize. (His film career seems to have attracted somewhat less attention.) But for me Grahame-White's main significance is as an airpower propagandist and as one of the originators, along with his co-author Harry Harper, of the knock-out blow theory.1

Note the snub to British aeronautics: he was a member of the Aero Club of America in 1937, but not the Royal Aero Club!

  1. And for his involvement with the phantom airship scares: it has been suggested that he was responsible for the Sheerness incident, and he also searched for a phantom airship over London on the night of 5 September 1914. []

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Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko. The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Talks a bit about the Baruch plan, which seems (perhaps naively) to me to be a close relative of the pre-war proposals for an international air force and the international control of civil aviation.