31 Monday May 2010
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31 Monday May 2010
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31 Monday May 2010
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‘DWI’ Wellington bomber
Following Italy’s coming off the fence her vessels joined German ones in being denied access to Suez. Japanese merchantmen continued to cause headaches for the Canal authorities, being allowed to ply the waterway right up until the outbreak of war in the Far East. They received close attention. Armed guards were placed on board them which, even if they could not prevent a deliberate scuttling, might succeed in preventing a ship being manoeuvred into a blocking position. To guard against a covert approach from the south, aircraft reconnoitred the area between Port Said and Shadwan Island in the Red Sea, a distance of 160 miles. Ships approaching Port Said were boarded by an examination service. Those allowed to pass received a special signal, which was constantly changed and known only to a select few. Vessels proceeding without authority were first to be warned by a shot across their bows and ‘if this is not instantly obeyed, ship is to be sunk by gunfire’. The same procedure was followed at Port Tewfik with the additional safeguard of a boomship across its harbour from sunset to sunrise in view of the southern end’s vulnerability to serious blockage. Examination officers were under instructions to look out for specially fitted ships able to lay mines by tube or drop them overboard from an aperture across the water. These measures worked extremely well, with not one instance of an attempt to sabotage the Canal being reported.
Where Canal defences were most vulnerable, as the Air Staff forecast, was to aerial attack. All the more so because, at this early stage of the conflict, anti-aircraft resources were scarce, the majority of what was available being deployed at Alexandria, Cairo and in the Western Desert. Even six months after Italy entered the fray there were still no anti-aircraft defences between the terminal ports. The Regia Aeronautica mounted air raids against Port Said (which lacked searchlights) and Port Suez in September. Its bombing proved wildly inaccurate, not least because bombs were released from great heights. Vice-Admiral Pipon, the Senior British Naval Officer Port Said, was nevertheless alarmed that enemy aircraft were able to fly over the Canal with impunity at night. To deny them targets he ordered that no ships were to be present throughout hours of darkness. Pipon’s concern was heightened by his realisation of the enhanced importance of Suez:
The Canal itself appears to me absolutely vital to the military war effort in that, should it be blocked, neither Port Said, Alexandria, Malta, Haifa, Crete or Greece could receive the necessary reinforcements and supplies without their being sent from Suez to another port by inland transport, which I understand is already much overworked. The disembarkation at Suez and re-embarkation at a Mediterranean port would also be a cause of grave delay.
Royal Air Force Middle East responded complacently that the Italians were unlikely to mount heavy air raids against Suez. Thus far, solitary aircraft or small formations had been involved; a policy that looked set to continue given that ‘the Italians are reluctant to use flares, probably for fear of giving away their positions’. Only at the end of its missive, and parenthetically, was there any recognition that German aircraft might soon participate. At the start of the Mediterranean war, minesweepers were in short supply. This had led, late in May 1940, to the dispatch from Britain of three ‘DWI’ Wellington bombers, converted to act as minesweeping aircraft through adding a ‘hoop’ and magnetic field generator. After flying across France, they arrived for the outbreak of war and could cover the whole length of the Canal. As it happened, the Italians lacked air-laid magnetic mines and their threat would not materialise until Nazi Germany turned its attention to attacking Suez. On the night of 18–19 January 1941 Luftwaffe bombers duly arrived, beginning the most dangerous period for the defence of Suez.
31 Monday May 2010
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31 Monday May 2010
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30 Sunday May 2010
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30 Sunday May 2010
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30 Sunday May 2010
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30 Sunday May 2010
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The conduct of warfare for soldiers’ profit meant that plundering was common practice. In the wake of the Black Death (from 1348) and the huge expense of King John’s ransom (after 1356), the French peasantry suffered horribly. They rose in revolt (the Jacquerie) in 1358 but, after the 1360 treaty, unpaid mercenary bands ravaged uncontrollably for almost a decade.
The Sienese army sets out to defeat the freebooting Company del Capello at the batde of Sinalunga (1363) in this fresco by Lippo Vanni. It is a well-balanced force of men-at-arms, spearmen, and archers, with the infantry marching to music and the missilemen at least, under unit banners. The heraldry is that of the actual participants.
The danger of military history lies in presenting war in an acceptable form. It is not our intention to glorify war. However, much literature produced for medieval ruling elites did precisely that, in their celebration of martial values. It contains descriptions ranging from sober reportage to fictional deeds of arms. Medieval depictions of military scenes are important sources for arms, armour, and techniques, but the written sources are rarely first-hand, and the visual representations are not ‘photographic’. Some indication of the nature of combat is provided by the gruesome contents of three graves, containing 1,185 corpses from the battle of Wisby (1361), in Gotland, Sweden. The skeletons display the effects of crossbow bolts descending vertically, piercing mail coifs, sword and axe cuts, and blows from maces and morning-stars (spiked balls attached by a chain to a handle). In one case the lower legs were severed, and several skulls exhibited deep cuts. The lower legs below the protection of shields suffered many deep wounds. Many corpses were stripped, but some were buried with their armour, owing to advancing decomposition. The finds are in the National Museum of Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden, and are analysed in B. Thordeman, Annour from the Battle of Wisby, 1361.
Losses in battle were perhaps twenty to fifty per cent higher on the losing side. The knights’ armour and ransom value meant that most of the dead were commoners, although the French nobility suffered heavily at Courtrai (1328) and Agincourt (1415). Commanders had to lead from the front, so death was always a risk. Harold’s death at Hastings (1066) made it a decisive victory for William. Nor was battle the only cause of death. Emperor Frederick I drowned in a river in 1190. Although Richard I survived a crossbow bolt in his knee in. 1196, in 1199 a similar wound in his shoulder, sustained during a siege, killed him. The barbed arrowhead had to be cut out with no anesthetic, and without antiseptic the wound became gangrenous. Surgery was primitive, as it would remain until the second half of the nineteenth century.
After the sixteenth century, records show how armies wasted away through disease and desertion (see Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution, pp.53-58), and. this must have been true earlier. Armies, with their attendant horses, produced sewage which bred dysentery when they were static, when mustering or during sieges. Professor Bachrach’s speculations concerning the by-products of the Norman army in 1066 illustrate the problem commanders faced, and frequently coped with successfully (Bachrach, ‘The Military Administration of the Norman Conquest’, Anglo-Norman Studies, pp.1-25). Of a list of ninety-eight dead on the Third Crusade, eighty-four apparently died through sickness. An eye-witness reported that ‘by famine and by malady more than 3,000 were struck down at the siege of Acre’ (cited by John Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion, p. 221). Henry V’s army lost at least fifteen per cent of its strength to dysentery at the siege of Harfleur, and more on the way to Agincourt. English casualties in the battle of Agincourt were about five per cent (Christopher Allmand, Henry V, p.211-12). Henry’s own death was caused by the unhealthy conditions of siege lines. Supply and disease were closely related, and most medieval commanders were well aware of the need to supply their armies in the field and to stock their fortresses in wartime.
Few sources dwell on ravaging, the central feature of medieval warfare. Bertrand de Born, a late twelfth-century chivalric writer, greeted the onset of the campaigning season: ‘I love the gay Eastertide, which brings forth leaves and flowers .. .it gives me great joy to see, drawn up on the field, knights and horses in battle array. And it delights me when the skirmishers scatter people and herds in their path:’ (from John Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion, p.243). What this entailed is described in a chanson de geste: ‘Out in front are the scouts and incendiaries. After them come the foragers …soon all is in tumult… the incendiaries set the villages on fire and the foragers visit and sack them. The terrified inhabitants are either burned or led away with their hands tied to be held for ransom…money, cattle, mules and sheep are all seized.’ (Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion, p.118). According to Orderic Vitalis, after William 1′s harrying of northern England in 1069-70, ‘so terrible a famine [fell] upon the humble and defenceless populace, that more than 100,000 Christian folk of both sexes, young and old alike, perished of hunger’. The figure simply means ‘a large number’. This was the deliberate creation of a zone of ‘scorched earth’, but an army a few thousand strong, with its horses and camp followers, was equal to a major town and was a severe drain on provisions. Armies and garrisons .could scour a region for supplies, and the result could easily be described as a ‘desert’. Even in friendly territory, armies often took what they wanted, including labour and carting services from the peasantry. However, war gradually ceased to be a slave-hunt, although this occurred at different rates. In eastern Europe, where scIavus (Slav) displaced the Latin servus as the word for a slave c.900, this development was slower than in the west.
29 Saturday May 2010
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Joseph Cope. England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political, and Social History Series. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009. xii + 190 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84383-468-7.
Reviewed by John Gibney (Independent scholar)
Published on H-Albion (May, 2010)
Commissioned by Brendan Kane
Surviving 1641
The significance of the rebellion that erupted in the north of Ireland in October 1641 is usually defined in two ways: first, in terms of its influence on the crisis that led to the so-called Wars of the Three Kingdoms between 1641 and 1653; and second, in terms of its enduring relevance to sectarian relations in Ireland. Its most powerful legacy was the creation of a paradigm of Irish Protestant suffering, often used to justify repressive measures against an Irish Catholic community collectively assumed to have committed appalling atrocities in the past, and of being inclined to do so again in the future.
This perception of 1641 as brutal sectarian genocide, perpetrated by Catholic natives on Protestant settlers, was largely distilled from the experiences of the settlers. These had been recorded in the enormous corpus of “depositions” taken from Protestant survivors in the 1640s and 1650s, and eventually bequeathed to Trinity College, Dublin (where they are currently in the process of being published online).[1] The veracity of these accounts has been hotly contested since they were collected. But most modern scholars writing on 1641 have, at some point, used the depositions as source material, most recently in terms of mining them for their insights into the history of a colonial society. In this regard, Joseph Cope’s England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion is no exception, but the subject of its inquiry is one that has been surprisingly neglected: the survivors themselves.
Cope’s book roughly falls into two sections. The first examines the experiences of Protestant settlers in 1641-42, as recorded in the depositions. Surprisingly, these accounts have rarely been examined as narratives on their own terms, and Cope uses them here to vividly illustrate both the localized experiences of certain settlers in Ireland and the means by which they survived the rebellion. The second section deals with the immediate legacy of their survival, most especially in terms of the impact made by Irish Protestant refugees in England. It does so by examining the responses of a variety of clerics, polemicists, politicians, and officials to the past experiences and current plight of these new arrivals.
Ultimately, the perception of 1641 as “a war of religious extermination” (according to the blurb on the cover) is the issue at the core of the book. This interpretation of the rebellion proved potent, as it was disseminated and believed amid the crisis that eventually led to civil war in England. The rebellion in Ireland could be interpreted as merely one episode in the universal struggle between “popery” and the reformed faith; one of the great strengths of Cope’s book is its awareness of this broader, international perspective. More immediately, the flurry of lurid accounts of alleged Irish atrocities that flowed from printer and pulpits in England galvanized opinion there in favor of the refugees who were soon arriving on its western coast. Cope weaves a richly detailed account of how Irish refugees were received in England, and the tensions that this caused at both national and local levels. A key theme of the book is the “discontinuity” between the depositions that reflected the experience of the survivors and the propagandist depictions of 1641 that emerged in its aftermath. The bridge between the two sections is the useful figure of the puritan artisan Nehemiah Wallington, whose horrified responses to (often exaggerated) accounts of the Irish rebellion are used to illustrate the process by which the interpretation of these events began to shape both opinions and, by extension, actions. For Cope, the most concrete English response to the rebellion came in January 1642, when parliament passed the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan to provide for the relief of Irish Protestant refugees. But the money collected through this and other fundraising drives was often siphoned into military coffers, and many Irish Protestants remained out in the cold, so to speak. By the summer of 1643 such charity had been completely discontinued, as the decision was made to concentrate on funding the parliamentarian war effort in Ireland.
Cope has unearthed a great deal of fascinating material, and his suggestive research provides an extremely useful avenue by which to examine both the complexities of the 1641 rebellion itself and the impact it had on the neighboring island. Yet the title is somewhat misleading. In terms of its ostensible, purely English subject matter, this book seems unsure of precisely what it is. Cope is aware of the significance of his subject in both historiographical and actual terms. But the focus of the text is often too narrow. For example, the English response to 1641 involved calls for retribution as much as charity: the 1642 act that Cope devotes so much attention to is only one element of that response. A full study of the significance of the 1641 rebellion in England (let alone Britain as a whole) would have to include not just the subject opened up by Cope, but also a study of the significance of 1641 within the broad theater of the “Wars of the Three Kingdoms” (including the Cromwellian invasion of 1649-53). It would also have to take cognizance of the enduring and iconic significance of 1641 in the rhetoric of English anti-popery. Indeed, Cope’s discussion of the manner in which 1641 was represented to a prospective audience is the weakest aspect of the book; and this is, after all, of fundamental importance to his subject. The manner in which the depositions mutated into printed accounts of 1641 was a complex process, one shaped by the mental frameworks through which seventeenth-century polemicists made sense of their world.[2] And such accounts were the means by which an English audience was most likely to engage with 1641; Wallington was not the only one to be affected by the depictions he had read.
There are also cosmetic issues that, try as one might, remain difficult to ignore. Even aside from its grammatically awkward title, the early sections of the book are marred by some extremely poor copyediting: for a publisher to produce a book at this price without meeting such basic standards is unfair to both author and reader, and is simply not good enough.
But such caveats should not detract from the fact that Cope has written an extremely useful and suggestive book. It is a substantial addition to the existing historiography of the “Wars of the Three Kingdoms,” and will have to play a significant part in any future attempt to make sense of the cataclysm of 1641 and its contested legacy.
Notes
[1]. The pilot Web site for the project can be found at http://1641.eneclann.ie/ (accessed April 21, 2010).
[2]. This is the subject of Eamon Darcy, “Politics, Pogroms and Print: The 1641 Depositions and Contemporary Print Culture” (PhD diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 2009).
