My Salamis Campaign: 5

In my previous Salamis post I ventured to disagree with Professor Barry Strauss over his representation of the overnight manoeuvres of the Persian fleet and its position at dawn just before the fighting began. I have been finding his book on the battle, and his other writing on Greek naval warfare in general, all several years more recent than the literature I was previously familiar with, tremendously helpful. However, as I wrote to him (only fair to give advance warning of the public assault on his academic reputation about to be launched from this blog!), “I just find it too improbable that they would have risked moving all the way along the north shore in the way you describe and suspect this is too precise an interpretation of Herodotus's reference to Eleusis in this connection”. Professor Strauss, in his kind reply, said, “Too bad you disagree with me about the Persians' maneuvering. I'll be interested in reading your specific arguments. As you know, improbability is not a strong reason to reject something, since history is full of improbable things. I found the arguments of the older book on la bataille de Salamine by a Greek scholar, cited in my bibliography, convincing on this score”. In his very useful annotated bibliography, Strauss describes this as “the best book-length study, too often overlooked”.

The book is by a Greek naval historian, Professor Constantin N Rados, written in French, and was published in Paris in 1915, so not to be found these days on many library or bookstore shelves! However, there is one copy in Oxford and the Bodleian have it, somewhere deep down, and wafted it to the Reading Room of my choice by their underground railway. I practically had to read it chained to a desk, fortunately on a long enough chain to reach the photocopier, and it is proving a bit of a challenge to my French. But I have already got far enough into it to accept, above all others, the interpretation of the sources that I was challenging – So, Professor Strauss (and Herodotus), you are off the hook, I withdraw my “reservation” unreservedly! Xerxes will now be shown on his golden throne on the Attica shore watching a long line of his ships (two-deep to get the numbers in?), advancing more or less directly away from him, and the prows of the Greeks pulling out to meet them; and the narrative will, of course, reflect this. But I mustn’t get too carried away and risk a comment I picked up on my not very fruitful Googling of Constantin Rados, “l’auteur s’appuie beaucoup (trop peut-être) sur les travaux de Constantin Rados” – I mustn’t lean on him too much. This came from an interesting book review which, in passing, reinforced my decision to brief my Battlescene artist not to show hoplite-marines in body armour: if your ship was rammed or boarded, you generally ended up in the sea and a cuirasse and greaves could not be described as buoyancy aids. By the way, this search also led me to a huge site which has to be a must-visit for any naval history enthusiast with some French.

But I digress – Marcus and I had a great meeting the other day and he seems happy with the way I’m going. However, I still need more picture references for the Battlescenes. This is going to be no problem for the Greek triremes, but harder work for the Phoenicians, the best of the Persian fleet, which must also be depicted (the Greeks had to beat the Phoenicians to win). I have assembled a good deal of verbal information about the differences (for instance Phoenician triremes had higher sides hung with shields, more troops on deck, longer rams, taller sterns, and were built of cedar rather than pine or fir). But visual information that would be of real use to an artist is rather more difficult to come by.

On the BEVs, I was thinking in terms of somehow showing individual ships graphically, but Marcus quickly persuaded me that this would be very demanding on both the artist, and the reader trying to follow the key manoeuvres, supposing it could be done at all at the scale. However, we agreed that the maps definitely needed to include one that conveyed at least an impression of just how crowded that stretch of water was at the height of the battle. And Constantin Rados, uniquely, was there before us, as you can see from the following link

Download Salamine_3rd_phase.pdf

I owe Barry Strauss, for the above advice and for so much good reading on Salamis, and for directing me to the commuter ferry that will enable me to walk the battlefield from Piraeus to Paloukia where the Athenians beached their ships, when I go to Greece in a couple of weeks time. So here is an enthusiastic recommendation for another of his books, The Trojan War. Weaving together Homer’s Iliad, quoted extensively in the unbeatable Alexander Pope translation, and current classical scholarship, latest archaeology and Near Eastern and Mediterranean military history, he grippingly reconstructs a totally believable and comprehensible Bronze Age invasion, with not only Helen, but the rich land of the Troad and, much more valuable, domination of the Hellespont and the sealanes from the Black Sea into the Aegean, its objectives. In the bibliography for this book, as for Salamis, he pleasingly cites Osprey titles, but I think it pleased me most of all that, in the latter, he had tracked down one of our Osprey Military Journal cookery articles!

What happened on MY birthday...?

Well, Phil may have started something with his post on April 24; I had a birthday (rather bigger than his) coming up four days later and thought I should see what I could find. If you want to see what happened in US military history on yours, try this, and here’s my own selection for April 28!  Pity I can no longer enjoy a personal state holiday in Iraq, though I suppose I would have had to go there to get the benefit...

1760 - French forces besieging Quebec defeated the British in the second battle on the Plains of Abraham.

1856 - Yokut Indians repelled an attack on their land by 100 would-be Indian fighters in California.

1864 - Rear Admiral Porter, stranded above the rapids at Alexandria, advised Secretary Welles of the precarious position in which his gunboats found themselves due to the falling water level of the Red River and the withdrawal forced upon Major General Banks:. . Porter faced the distinct possibility of having to destroy his squadron to prevent its falling into Confederate hands. ". . you may judge of my feelings," he wrote Welles," at having to perform so painful a duty." Only by the most ingenious planning and the strenuous efforts of thousands of soldiers and sailors was such a disaster avoided.

1918 - CGC Seneca saves 81 survivors from the torpedoed British naval sloop Cowslip while on convoy route to Gibraltar. Cowslip was attacked by three German U-boats.

1937 - Saddam Hussein, future president of Iraq, was born in the village of al-Oja near the desert town of Tikrit. His invasion of Kuwait prompted the Persian Gulf War. This became a state holiday under Hussein's rule and was abolished in 2003.

1943 - The German 8th Panzer Regiment counterattacks the British forces that have occupied Djebel Bou Aoukaz. American forces make some gains in "Mousetrap Valley."

1945 - "Il Duce," Benito Mussolini, and his mistress, Clara Petacci, are shot by Italian partisans who had captured the couple as they attempted to flee to Switzerland He and his mistress made it to the Swiss border, only to discover that the guards had crossed over to the partisan side. Knowing they would not let him pass, he disguised himself in a Luftwaffe coat and helmet, hoping to slip into Austria with some German soldiers. His subterfuge proved incompetent, and he and Petacci were discovered by partisans and shot, their bodies then transported by truck to Milan, where they were hung upside down and displayed publicly for revilement by the masses.

1945 - On Okinawa, fighting along the Shuri Line continues. American forces employ tanks, flame-throwers and artillery in an effort to destroy Japanese defensive positions.

1952 - War with Japan officially ended as a treaty that had been signed by the United States and 47 other countries took effect.

1956 - Last French troops left Vietnam.

1967 - Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the Army and was stripped of his boxing title.

1967 - Gen. William C. Westmoreland told Congress the United States "would prevail in Vietnam."

1975 - Operation Frequent Wind evacuation from Vietnam begins.

1993 - Secretary of Defense Les Aspin issues a directive allowing women to fly fighter aircraft in combat.

2004 - CBS broadcast photos on “60 Minutes” showing US abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

"King of England this day I shall die"

The BBC aired a short documentary on the Battle of Bosworth the other day. Advance publicity promised revelations about the true location of the battle with the implication that the fine visitor centre was therefore wrongly positioned on Ambion Hill. However, this is very widely accepted as the site of Richard III’s camp and of his initial position, attacked or at least advanced upon by Henry Tudor. It also offers a good view over the area of lower ground to the south and west over which much, if not all of the battle was fought. So, it remains a sound choice.

Sparse and sometimes contradictory documentary evidence, confusing place names (some simply resulting from the mythology that quickly grew around the bloody end of the Plantagenet era and the tragic death of a demonised king), a changed landscape and limited archaeological evidence will always shroud the precise topography. But what the BBC’s nice film showed, in addition to summarising the main interpretations that currently exist, was the discovery of an important new piece of detail. Core samples and excavation have exposed the edge of the marsh between Ambion Hill and the village of Dadlington that shielded the right flank of Henry’s advance and influenced the line it took. (Both the marsh, once called Redemore after the reeds that would have grown there, and the village have given the battle alternative names.)

This discovery must add some clarity, at least to the bigger picture. Somewhere here too, Richard with his charger bogged down as he attempted to turn the battle by a direct attack on Henry, may have died, fighting bravely to the last. But this fine detail will always be a matter for speculation, because there would certainly have been other marshy areas around the battlefield and there is, of course, no definite information about Henry's position at this critical moment.

No map was shown or clear indication given of the location of the peat bed exposed, but it did appear to be consistent with Christopher Gravett’s assumptions for the bird’s-eye views and mapping in Campaign 66: The Last Charge of the Plantagenets, which was previewed in an early issue of Osprey Military Journal.

Download omj_1_21.pdf

If this important new information has not yet been published, I’m sure it is going to be before long and I look forward to seeing it, and to paying a long overdue visit to the battlefield, less than two hours drive north of home.

The Greatest Generation

Tom Brokaw’s 1998 bestseller celebrated “the greatest generation”, the US citizens who fought in World War II “not for fame or recognition, but because it was the right thing to do". This term repeatedly springs to mind as, more than sixty years on, our newspapers’ obituary pages continue to recall the extraordinary bravery, and combat and other skills that were displayed by so many individual men and women.

Two recent subjects were not US citizens but they can certainly be included amongst the greatest. The first is Squadron Leader “Hawkeye” Lee and a mention in Aircraft of the Aces 18: Hurricane Aces 1939-40 adds even more colour to the story of his disruption (“Bad show!”) of a Kentish golfer’s peaceful afternoon 20,000 feet beneath the Battle of Britain. To avoid providing Me 109s with extra target practice, Lee coolly plummeted 11,000 feet in free-fall before opening his parachute at 6,000.

The second is Pearl Witherington, a hero of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Warrior 117: French Resistance Fighter portrays her French comrades; she was half French herself and married one of them, Henri Cornioley. A companion title is due on the SOE in November and we may shortly be commissioning an Elite on the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, to complete a nice cluster of titles on the Allied secret agents and resistance fighters who risked and achieved so much on the occupied European mainland.

Doughboy's Letter in a Bottle Pt 2: Dreadnoughts and Gum

I can never resist reading random pages of our old newspapers as I bundle them up for recycling, because I always find something good that I missed. On the same day as my post went up about the story of Sgt Liepmann and his lovingly preserved letter from Aunt Pete, I came across its happy ending.

The story found its way to Sgt Liepmann’s grandson Cecil in Houston, Texas and he has has revealed some great family history linking with the Pilgrim Fathers, the American Revolution, Vickers the great Victorian, Sheffield-based steel and armaments manufacturer, and Wrigley’s gum – Morres Liepmann became a commercial artist between soldiering in World War I and serving in the USAF in World War II, and created the arrow that has featured ever since in Wrigley’s product logos.

COMPETITION RESULTS

Congratulations to:

Stefan Witt in Germany, Ken Wilkinson, Tara McQuitty and Spencer Broadly in the UK and Eddy Robey in the USA who correctly answered the AEF question (John J Pershing) and will shortly be receiving their signed copies of BTO 6 The American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.

Pistols at twelve paces

I went to a book launch the other day.  It could be described as a family affair as the author was my cousin, Giles Hunt, and the book was "The Duel".

This was fought in 1809 between George Canning (His Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and future Prime Minister) and Lord Castlereagh (His Majesty's Secretary of State for War and the Colonies).  One of George Canning's uncles, Stratford, was my great-great-great-great-grandfather: I think I've got that right, one less "great" for cousin Giles.

You need to read the book to find out how these two leading politicians ended up facing each other on Putney Heath at the height of the Napoleonic Wars , and it's an amazing story!  But it set me thinking about duelling as a topic we might add to the list of what we have missed (see Richard's recent post), or more positively, what we could add to the roughly 1500 titles Osprey has already done.  Not strictly military maybe, but duelling pistols and the skill-at-arms involved (or not, in George Canning's case: "I must cock it for him", said his second, "for I cannot trust him to do it for himself - He has never fired a Pistol in his life.") are close enough to Osprey's mainstream.  Add to this an extraordinary honour code, and the protocols of challenging and seconding, pacing out the ground, determining whether one man fired first or that they were to fire simultaneously, or the "satisfaction" that could be arrived at by one or both firing into the air, and we have a rich piece of 18th and early 19th century history. 

On September 21, 1809 each had two, supposedly, aimed shots.  Castlereagh's second hit Canning in the thigh, fortunately passing straight through and missing both bone and artery.  Unlike Canning, Castlereagh had a reputation as a shooter, had "practised with pistols" and "taken the field" at least once.  One of the mysteries of this extraordinary affair is why he missed with his first shot and only winged Canning with his second (another is his insane insistence against all evidence that Canning had personally and maliciously besmirched his "Honor and Reputation").  Back to the family, my late uncle John Gleave, a neurosurgeon, examined Castlereagh's available medical history (better qualified than cousin Giles, a priest, to do this), noting that the duel "manifested paranoia, lack of rational judgement, deterioration of moral standards, and, in that he missed, some loss of fine-control movement".  His considered opinion was that Lord Castlereagh was suffering from syphilis.  The launch was, appropriately, in the Carlton Club , which has portraits of the duellists in the same room and, it is claimed, at the same distance from each other as they stood on Putney Heath.  However, the canvases are around twenty paces apart; the duel was actually fought at twelve.

My Salamis Campaign: Part 4

I am just about ready to submit my Bird’s-Eye View (BEV) and Battlescene efforts to Marcus, the Series Editor I will be working with. We have worked closely before when we were co-editors of Osprey Military Journal. I’m not sure if that makes his power of life or death over my enterprise more or less comfortable, but he’s a nice guy and really knows what he’s about (and I know saying this will not influence his judgment in any way)!

For the BEVs, getting landscape and shoreline details right, has, of course, been important and that’s where I started. But it is the questions of time and space that have become increasingly absorbing, and it has struck me how wrong it would have been to try and write the narrative of the battle before working out how to represent it graphically. The limited, fragmentary and sometimes contradictory source material has been repeatedly drawn upon over the past 130 years to produce distinctly different interpretations. They place the main action in the westernmost or easternmost areas of this 7km stretch of water, or in spaces in between, and offer almost as large a range of accounts of the manoeuvring leading up to the action. I have looked closely at most of these now and also reread the Herodotus, Aeschylus and Plutarch accounts and the important bits in Thucydides (Diodorus Siculus is still a treat in store). They provide us with fragments, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, of the full picture. Some of these fragments are richly detailed and some can even be made to interlock quite convincingly, but there is still an awful lot that has to be filled in.

As Themistocles, the Athenian leader commanding the biggest and best of the several navies that made up the Greek fleet, knew, and Eurybiades, the Spartan who was Greek admiral-in-chief and no sailor, understood, this war was going to be won or lost at sea. Barry Strauss’s The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece – and Western Civilization (title says it all!), a thrilling, scholarly docudrama, zooms in on this fact and vividly illuminates it. Although, with all respect, I think Strauss takes Herodotus too literally, or trusts him too much, when he has the Persians cruising westward to line up on the northern side of the straits under cover of the night before the battle, his realisation is so convincing otherwise. Also, the book's annotated bibliography has been an excellent resource.  On the technical side, my core text is The Athenian Trireme: The History and Construction of an Ancient Greek Warship, but our own Ancient Greek Warship 500-322BC is useful as a compact introduction.

To construct my core narrative of the battle, Campaign-style, I am now trying to coherently combine the historical sources with all the information I can gather on early 5th century naval tactics and the seagoing and combat performance of the trireme. To develop a plausible timescale for each side’s preliminary manoeuvres and the main action, I have to mash together the dimensions of the straits at key points with the data on the ships’ performance, and best assumptions about their requirement for sea-room in action. I want to be confident enough to show graphically how the hundreds of triremes would have been spread out over the straits at different stages of the battle.  This information will also be important in my briefing of the Battlescene artist, because I want one of the plates to depict what Xerxes was seeing from his golden throne as his massive fleet bore down on the Greeks.

Here is some trireme data – Length approx. 40m, beam (width) 5m with oars adding another 6m. Comfortable cruising speed under oars, 6kph. Ramming speed in short bursts 15-20kph with 170 oars at 50 strokes a minute. Sea trials of the modern reconstruction Olympias demonstrated a surprisingly high degree of manoeuvrability, turning, acceleration and deceleration. It has been calculated that an impact speed significantly below top ramming speed was sufficient to punch a hole and spring planking, rapidly disabling the target. The preferred line of attack appears to have been from astern onto the stern quarter, or at 90 degrees into the side.

An orderly initial phase, similar to the opening of a hoplite battle, would generally have been followed by a short period of fencing for openings (like a boxer’s “duckin' & weavin'”) with attempts at larger penetration or envelopment movements, and finally a general melee. This is likened by one of Olympias’s scholar-rowers to a WWI dogfight, in which agility and pilot reflexes were at more of a premium than sheer speed, and the fighting was mostly one- or two-on-one. Battle lines were drawn up with the dual objective of preventing the enemy bursting through or round into a favourable attacking position, and providing the best opportunities to do the same to the enemy. Battles were usually fought close to land, and islands or coasts would have been used wherever possible to secure flanks; and it was desirable to fight close to a friendly shore.

I have seen suggestions that triremes went into battle with just 3m of clear water between them, but I think that could only have worked without disaster in a naval review on a calm day. Custance (see previous post) thought 80m, two ship-lengths, but that seems too open to me, even with a line behind, staggered to cover the middle of the gaps. I believe, for now anyway, that Xerxes would have been looking at lines of 30 or so abreast as they passed in front of his position on the north shore and the tip of Cynosura promontory, but “shock and awe” considerations may have overridden best tactical practice. One central pieces of information, coming down from the very earliest source, the description of the battle in Aeschylus’s tragedy, The Persians, is that their navy’s numerical and qualitative advantage was cancelled out by being confined in too tight a space, which was, of course Themistocles’s master plan…

Doughboy's Letter in a Bottle and a chance to win signed copies!

Nice story in the papers recently about an American Expeditionary Force (AEF) artillery sergeant who buried a letter in a beer bottle in Lorraine in 1918, presumably to keep it safe.  It was from his "Aunt Pete" in Oklahoma.

She had concerns, expressed with Southern directness, about how the enlistment of African Americans was making it very difficult to get staff and urged her nephew to write next time on one side of the paper only, "for your letter was all cut up - you see where they cut out what they didn't want poor me to know, they cut out the other side too".  The French archaeologists who dug it up were actually looking for Merovingians but they are keen to trace descendants of Sergeant Morres V Liepmann of D Battery 130th Field Artillery and his Aunt Pete.  If any of you are reading this, contact mahaut.tyrrell@inrap.fr !

We thought this would be a great chance to give away some signed copies of one of our Battle Orders books on the American Expeditionary Force. We have five signed copies to give away - and all you need to do is send the answer to the following question here.

Q: Who was chosen to command the American Expeditionary Force in World War I?

(ps. For those of you who have been reading my weekly posts on Salamis, don't worry - next Monday you can read the next installment!)

*Competition ends 28 March

Writing an Osprey book - My Salamis Campaign Part 3

Research has been going well. My Bodleian card gives me access to the superb Sackler Library and I already have answers to most of the questions I had lined up a couple of weeks ago, giving me a pretty good idea of what the landscape and coastlines of the island of Salamis and mainland Attica could have looked like from the south-east, the angle I think I have now settled on for my bird's-eye view of the battle. 

I still have to check whether the barleyfields on Salamis and the mainland would have been stubble or plough at the time of the battle, and several additional questions have, not surprisingly, emerged. One thing that could significantly affect the view from the air is the accommodation arrangements for the 100,000+ extra inhabitants of the island (regular population 2-3,000) and the gear and supplies needed to support the Greek fleet. There must have been an extensive spread of tents and other temporary structures along the shoreline between the permanent settlements.

I took it for granted that the battlefield itself, the stretch of water fought over in the straits, would not have changed.  However, I now know that the present-day water level has been shown conclusively to be approximately 5ft higher than it was in 480BC. At the scale I shall be using this will hardly have a visible effect on the shorelines, but it will mean drawing in a small island (shown in some maps of the battle, not in others, and hardly ever mentioned) that is not now visible. This makes the water between the island of Hagios Georgios and the mainland even more of a chokepoint and very likely to have marked the northern perimeter of the Greek postion.  Overall, of course, it means the straits were an even tighter fit than they would have been today (if cleared of modern container ports and bulk carriers) for the battling fleets. 

A session in the Bodleian Map Room equipped me with copies of the contour maps I was looking for; the best available seem to be German Army 1941!  A 1987 British Admiralty map, soundings in fathoms, will also come in useful for sketching out the 5th century shoreline.  And I will be tracing my base map from a very clear drawing of exactly the area I want, just missing that extra island, found in War at Sea: Modern Theory and Ancient Practice by one Reginald Custance. This is a very useful and, I think, unique overview study of several sea battles.  However, I have to be a little cautious with Custance's interpretations.  The book was published in 1919 so "Modern" means World War I, and it took me a while to notice that the scale was in cables and nautical miles!  Reading this, a lucky find on the shelves where I was looking for something else, helped me to arrive for myself at an crucial general insight: it is very important not to overlay present-day conceptions of strategy and strategic thinking, planning, staffwork etc on the military culture of a world in which abstract thought and language were hardly even in their infancy. Herodotus, our main source, was the first known historian, "the father of history" and he wrote about the Persian War decades after it was over.  And the western world (Sun Tzu got there sooner) had to wait decades more for the first thinking and writing on the art and theory of war.

But now, I have most of the information I think I need with some fair visual references, a stack of large sheets of squared paper with tracing paper for overlays, a bundle of pencils and coloured pens, a gallon of correcting fluid and a shaking hand.  The moment of truth cannot be avoided for much longer....  Because I have not been as disciplined as I might have been (OK, I've been having a lot of fun), I have also begun collecting information for the battlescene art brief which I'll be doing next and finding out a lot of interesting stuff about triremes and 5th Century seafighting. The volume of material about the reconstruction and operation of the Hellenic Navy's trireme "Olympias" has been a particularly happy hunting ground.

Writing an Osprey book - My Salamis Campaign, Part 2

Before getting a contract, an Osprey first-timer obviously has to give fair evidence of knowing about his or her chosen subject, and of being able to write. But there is another hurdle to be cleared and this is both highly challenging and, very probably, unique to Osprey.

The visual information, the colour artwork that is at the heart of all Osprey Series titles depends absolutely on the written and visual reference material that the author is required to provide for the artists to work from. In Campaign there are three elements, the battlescenes, the “bird’s-eye views” (BEVs) and the maps. This art brief can often be a bulkier package than the hard copy of the 30,000-word text when it is finally delivered to Osprey. In the words of Osprey's Notes for Authors the references must enable the artist to “produce a convincing colour rendering without either prior knowledge of the subject, or any further research”, and, ominously, “This area is one that authors often have difficulty with... Peter Dennis’s fascinating posts give an idea of how much the artist brings to this vital collaboration.

As an absolute condition (not of publication, but of being proposed for publication!), a new author has to produce sample briefing notes that are acceptable to the Series Editors. I already have a rough but quite clear idea what I want to do with the three battlescenes and BEVs at my disposal, so it is now a question of which specimen to tackle first. I am pretty sure I am going to find the BEVs most difficult to do, so that is where I intend to start. Precise positioning of the opposing fleets is not necessary at this stage but the battlefield was not simply a stretch of water. Salamis was a landlocked seabattle and channels, straits, beaches, bays and promontories, and also weather, dictated tactics and the final outcome significantly. The perspective I have in mind at present is something like this. The BEVs therefore need to include quite a lot of land, some of it wild, some of it cultivated and some built-on, all just about visible from the height my bird will be flying at. My research will have to take me back to an image of the island of Salamis and the coastline of Attica in 480 BC.  So, I am now off to the Bodleian just up the road from Osprey, and may be gone some time....

How to write an Osprey book - My Salamis Campaign

I formally retired from Osprey in December but will happily be staying involved in much the same way as I began in 1999, doing various freelance and consultancy jobs. To these I am hoping to add some writing, and I have started work on a proposal to do Salamis 480 BC for the Campaign series.

This will be a direct sequel to the Thermopylae title published in November last year and which we have already had to reprint. In fact, the narrative will begin before that battle with the crucially interlinked naval operations. These led to the first clashes of the Greek and Persian fleets off Artemisium, not far to the east and on the same days as Leonidas’s doomed defence of central Greece on land. The great sea battle, with consequences for western civilisation that make it one of the most important battles in history, followed a few weeks later between mainland Attica and the island of Salamis.

The background to this battle, fought as it was over several hours of a September day and a few square miles of sea by hundreds of war galleys and tens of thousands of men (and one very feisty woman), is as rich and fascinating as the engagement itself. The survival of the fragile Greek alliance was tortuous and miraculous. It was an astonishing victory against the odds, halting the western expansion of the immense Persian Empire. It was made possible, above all, by the leadership, diplomacy, cunning, and strategic and tactical vision of one man, the Athenian Themistocles and his creation, just in time, of the Athenian navy. The capital ship deployed by both sides was the trireme, that extraordinary achievement of pre-industrial technology. And all this is spiced up by what would would be recognised today as “double cross” disinformation and PsyOps activity, and by sophisticated manipulation of religious belief and observance, and the mumbo jumbo of oracles. I have been here before. Many years ago I did a translation of Herodotus’s 5th century account of the Persian Wars; it has been out of print for a while but still has an existence in school stock cupboards and, faintly, here on Amazon. This was published by Cambridge University Press in a series I was responsible for in my first editorial job, commissioned after I’d moved on from Cambridge in the career that finally brought me to Osprey. As with Cambridge, previous employment has given me no privileges as a would-be author! (The second part of William’s series about writing an Osprey Campaign book will follow this time next week – Mike)

Teaching Military History

Back in July Richard set off a lively discussion about the place, desirable and actual, of military history in education with his post "When did military history go out of fashion?"  In the course of this discussion I mentioned that we had invited a distinguished military historian to write a short article making the case for military history as an important piece of the high school curriculum. This has recently been published in RHI , the second issue of an annual magazine for educators published by our North American distributors, Random House.  Scroll down the contents list, which begins impressively with "Thoughts on the Duty and Power of Citizenship" by Barack Obama and look out for Professor Dennis Showalter's powerful contribution, "Teaching War - Providing a Different Perspective to Engage and Challenge Your Students", downloadable like the rest of the magazine.

Random House do not publish textbooks but they have an enormous amount of valuable material to offer teachers and students for classroom and library use and personal study, and RHI is proving very effective as a showcase for all of this, including our own Essential Histories. Working with the Random House Academic Marketing team on book exhibits at teacher conventions and meeting teachers and professors, I have been able to establish for myself that the cause is not hopeless, but there is a lot of persuading to be done!  RHI gets a great welcome and reaches a wide audience in the educational community.  We are delighted and honoured to feature in it and to have the flag carried for military history, and Osprey, by our good friend Dennis Showalter.

300: A war film or just great CGI-ed abs and pecs?

I missed seeing 300 when it was breaking box office records and provoking rather unmerited heavyweight controversy. Our recent discussion about war movies, the publication of our Campaign title on Thermopylae, my personal interest in the period and its wars, and its release on DVD prompted me to buy a copy. I wanted to find out if 300 could be classed as a war movie at all and to know where I would place myself against the extreme range of critical opinions it aroused. I was not surprised that Frank Miller’s involvement and Zack Snyder’s direction, also featuring gigabytes of graphical computer muscle, successfully delivered a gorefest that fully captured the look and feel of the graphic novel. By these quite narrow but technically demanding criteria, I think it is a good movie and I was entertained. But history or military history? All those prosthetics and orc teeth left over from Lord of the Rings, the stretch rhinoceros and the GM elephants, the Mutant Ninja Turtle Immortals, those Mamluk grenadiers, that ultra-camp Xerxes... I could go on and on, and many have. It is a fantasy movie, an Xbox demo even. As such, it grossly misrepresents Achaemenid Persia, one of the greatest civilizations and cultures of the ancient world. It is also wonderfully inventive about aspects of the Spartan way of life, military, domestic and political, but with some astonishing lapses into accuracy which touch upon some of the truly nasty side of it. This would not have been allowed in a movie with the post-9/11 agenda some have attributed to this one.
Stretching to judge 300 as a war movie, I found one tiny moment that did, maybe, authentically recreate, reconstruct, re-enact the world-shaping warfare of 480–479 BC. At this point, the camera darts around the feet in the front two rows of the phalanx as the Spartans lean into their shields and heave against the much more numerous but less heavily-armed Persians, and drive their spears into them. Shortly before, Leonidas gives a brief lecture on the working of the phalanx (the hoplite method of war which would bring final victory for Greece a year later). Here, just for a moment, I got a very real sense of what it was like to be there (though the pecs and abs would have been sculpted in bronze not in CGI-enhanced flesh). Good war movies sustain this effect for rather longer. For a while, Steven Spielberg was looking at Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire – that to me would be the perfect starting point for a fantastic war movie about Thermopylae.

War Music – Beethoven's Battle Symphony et al

Following on from Joe's post about the music of war, I heard Beethoven’s 10th Symphony the other day (he actually seems to have slipped in between the 7th and the 8th). This is his fascinating Battle Symphony, or Op.91 Wellingtons Sieg oder Die Schlacht bei Vittoria, if you must. Ludwig originally wrote it as a bit of a pot-boiler to be played on the panharmonicon, an ingenious “mechanical device capable of imitating various orchestral sounds” but then made a full instrumental piece out of it, including military brass and drums, also muskets and louder bangs. On the advice of the entrepreneur who commissioned the piece, he went for popular appeal with English audiences, flushed by Wellington’s recent great victory at Vittoria in 1813. The piece starts with the two armies approaching each other and the British advance to “Rule Britannia” and later switch to “God save the King” whilst the French play “Marlbrook s'en va-t-en guerre”, a bit ironically. This got me thinking that it would be good to know if the impressive and distinctly different drum tunes were true to what would have been heard on the battlefield. Was I hearing “Old Trousers”, the typically witty squaddy slang for the French pas de charge? I came across a couple of re-enactor groups, the 79th Camerons and Drum, Bugle and Fife of the Napoleonic Wars and I am hoping they will have the answers!
I think I read that Old Trousers was an onomatopoeic depiction of the repeated crash and roll that Napoleon’s drummers produced as the columns went forward, but I suspect there is a better technical or musicological description. There may even be some recordings out there. Then I’ll just have to go and buy myself a drum!
This has also set me thinking about the whole topic of music, both to communicate and inspire, and musical instruments, including the voice, on the battlefield. We get plenty of help visualising (tens of thousands of Osprey images for a start!) it, but I would love to hear the pipes and trumpets the Greek phalanxes marched to, or the Roman Legions’ bucina, and, yes, of course, the rebel yell!
This is as far as I have got with the latter, courtesy of Company H, Texas 4th Infantry:

“One of the most detailed descriptions came from J. Harvie Drew, a soldier in the 9th Virginia Cavalry. He gave this transcription of the rebel yell: Woh--who--ey! Who--ey! Who--ey! Woh--who--ey! Who--ey! (The best illustration of this "true yell" which can be given the reader is by spelling it as above, with directions to sound the first syllable "woh" short and low, and the second "who" with a very high and prolonged note deflecting upon the third syllable "ey.") Others rendered the yell as "yai, yai, yi, yai, yi" and "y-yo yo-wo-wo." From these examples, it would appear the yell was both multi-syllable and also composed of pattern that was repeated several times”.

I’m not sure which the neighbours will appreciate most, the drumming or the yelling!

Sniper Aces

I have been enjoying an early copy of our lead summer title Sniper, in bookstores this month. It chronicles the evolution of the US marksman and his weaponry from colonial times to the present. There is evidence that sniping and counter-sniping took their place on the battlefield at least as early as King's Mountain in 1778. It is well-documented that a skilled shooter, usually a trapper, woodsman or mountainman, could achieve astonishing accuracy with a long musket over ranges that far exceeded the average reach of military-pattern muskets, especially when in average military-pattern hands. At a time when the latter, with luck, "could strike the figure of a man at 80 yards" the former could be confident of a headshot at 200 yards and the "Kentucky" rifle has been proved to be highly effective even at 600 yards, confirming fascinating contemporary accounts that are quoted in the book.

These include a backwoods shooting match (with the "Tennessee" rifle) in which the target, at a closer range of 30 paces, was the muzzle of another rifle and most contestants shooting off-hand (standing upright with nothing to rest the gun on) and, of course, with "iron" sights, achieved between two and four hits out of five.

At about the same time as I read this chapter, I came across a story in USA Today about the evoultion of tennis racquet technology since the wooden frame peaked in the 1970s. Modern pros (some not even born in the 70s) tried out old-style models, commented on their limitations compared to today's but marvelled at the skill it must have taken past stars to produce the tennis they did. What could they have achieved in their prime with a modern racquet? The same question can be asked of the Tennessee or the Kentucky and the sharpshooters of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Barrett and its 21st century engineering, optics and electronics. But, as with tennis stars, the qualities that make an ace sniper have not changed over time, however far the tools of the trade have evolved. I'd say these are fieldcraft, wiliness, patience, keen senses and dexterity of the expert hunter, generally coupled with a cool pragmatism. The sharpshooter observed by a British officer, uncomfortably in range at the Battle of New Orleans, "a tall man... dressed in linsey-wolsey with buckskin leggings and a broad-brimmed felt hat", would find plenty in common with today's kevlar-helmeted specialist, but likely they'd both be men of few words!

Battlefield Touring

Reading about Gettysburg the other day made me think of the place. Often a historic battlefield is fairly featureless, sometimes no more than a few fields or a hillside, making it very hard (for me anyway) to visualize the action or get any real feeling of the drama enacted there, beyond the resonance of the names. Gettysburg is not like that. A few years ago I was able to spend a morning on the “great battlefield of that war” and with the help of a CD guide and a hire car, covered all the key points around the Union “fishhook”. I expected to have little difficulty picking out the distinctive features and topography and understanding their significance on the ground, but I was surprised at just how clear it all was. What a defensive position to arrive at by accident! But, if the Confederates had been better coordinated and moved more decisively before the Union had settled into it… “alternate history” anyone?

Devil’s Den and Little Round Top, and approaching and climbing the first few yards up Culp’s Hill were highlights of an extraordinary experience. Standing roughly where Longstreet stood, or more probably sat on his horse, as he launched Pickett’s Charge (strangely named after the otherwise undistinguished general who commanded less than half the troops in it and did not give the order for it) was most affecting of all. I wished I had time to make the gentle country walk out of the woods across the sunlit open fields and up onto Cemetery Ridge (no problems with that name!). We had lunch with one of the park rangers, who had a truly scholarly yet passionate knowledge of the battle, and whose chiseled features and crisp turnout turned my colleague’s knees to water. I asked him rather vapidly what it felt like down there in the shallow valley between the two ridges. “Very quiet” was his answer.

Gettysburg is superbly preserved, both as a historic exhibit and as a memorial; “dedicate… consecrate… hallow” were and remain the exact words. Three days is probably the right amount of time to spend there, and on horseback not in a car. We could not do the battle justice in our single Campaign volume. I would love us to do it in three books, one for each day, just as we eventually followed up CAM 1: Normandy 1944(still selling well as an overview of the whole campaign after 17 years!) with four titles on D-Day itself, organized by beaches, Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold & Juno.

I think a chronological arrangement would work best for Gettysburg but I’d be interested in any other suggestions for slicing the battle into multiple volumes. It would also be interesting to share personal experiences of battlefields; how easy it was to visualize the action and what it felt like to be there. The lines are open!

Civil War Stories and Characters

I have just joined James Reasoner's Civil War Battle Series at Gettysburg, the sixth in his ten-book chronicle of the fortunes of a Virginian family. It isn't "Cold Mountain" on the home front nor "The Killer Angels" in the line of fire, but it's an enjoyable, well-crafted read and you don't need to have worked through the earlier titles to make sense of the interweaving storylines that are picked up and continued, but not concluded in this episode. One or two simple maps plotting the marches towards the accidental encounter at Gettysburg would have enhanced the closing chapters for me, but I will definitely be joining the Brannon brothers again on their journey from Manassas to Appomatox. (Don’t tell me, but do they both complete it? I left Will in a very bad way, hit by a sharpshooter at the very end of the battle...) However, for a full-on historical narrative of the Gettysburg campaign and battle, I have to turn to the incomparable Stephen W. Sears for the best Civil War book, fiction, non-fiction or in-between, I have so far read: Gettysburg. The stories and the characters are what attract me most in military history and it seemed odd to me that in the Reasoner novel, the real-life personalities (from Lee – Robert E, but we see a lot more of Fitz – downwards) are less convincing than some of the created ones. I found them more convincing in The Killer Angels, but that was before I read the Sears' book. In Sears’ Gettysburg they really live. But I think fiction can be a great way of getting into these characters’ heads, so I'm interested to hear who you think does it really well (and then add them to my Amazon wishlist...).