WHY MILITARY HISTORY?
As the shelves of Waterstones and the television schedules testify, large sections of the British public are fascinated by military history, and it may be apposite to enquire why. After all, who cares who won the Battle of Beni Boo Ali?[*] Or when the Battle of Vinegar Hill was fought[†]? Is anyone really interested in who fought who in the Whisky Wars[‡], or in the frontier campaigns of Tiglath Pileser III[§]? After all, we British consider ourselves to be a peaceful people, slow to anger and abhorring violence, only resorting to military action when all other means of conflict resolution have been exhausted. That being so, it may be somewhat difficult to explain why, in the 956 years since the Norman Conquest, England and later Britain has been at war for 577 of those years, or for rather more than sixty percent of our entire history since 1066. In case anyone might think that this figure is distorted by medieval dynastic squabbles and civil wars, it may be worth pointing out that in the twentieth century British troops were in action for eighty of those hundred years, and I count only those campaigns for which a medal was awarded – if we count all periods of active service then the figure would be even greater.
As to whom we were fighting during those 577 years, it was just about everybody, and often several campaigns simultaneously on opposite sides of the globe. We spent only twenty-four years fighting the Germans[**], historically generally our allies, fifty-four years fighting the Spanish, fifty-two years fighting the Scots (work in progress?) and 196 years fighting the French[††]. Statistically, therefore, one year in every five we go to war with France. It is perhaps no wonder that they do not like us.
But military history is not only about the study of battles, or generals, or about strategy, tactics, weapon systems and fortifications, but also about ethics, economics, sociology, politics and psychology. Indeed military history is inextricably bound up with the history of the world, the history of peoples, the history of nations, and it is our history that makes us what we are.
Although morality is perhaps more the province of the philosopher rather than the historian, military history does pose some interesting ethical questions. Two nations are at war. One is defeated and surrenders. The five senior commanders of the vanquished army are brought before the victorious general who orders them to be hanged from the nearest tree. A war crime? One might well think so, but the victorious general was Joshua leading the Israelites against the Amorites around 1400 BC as described in the Book of Kings in the Old Testament, so clearly it was a perfectly acceptable way to behave then.
An English army is besieging a town. They breach the wall, attack, and eventually, after hard fighting, capture the town. The surviving defenders are lined up, all the officers shot, one in ten of the Other Ranks executed and the rest sold as slaves to the West Indies. Surely a war crime? Well, perhaps not. This action was Cromwell’s siege and capture of Drogheda in Ireland in 1649, and the accepted conventions of warfare then said that once a breach in the walls had been created the defenders must be given the opportunity to surrender, in which case their lives and property would be spared. If, however, they rejected the offer and the town had to be stormed, with the increased casualties to the attackers, then the captors were entitled to massacre the entire garrison. That understanding held until well into the nineteenth Century, indeed Wellington said that he wished he had enforced it after the capture of Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812 because he might then not have lost so many men besieging Badajoz.
A more up-to-date example is the bombing of Dresden by the Royal Air Force assisted by the United States Army Air Force in February 1945 which destroyed that beautiful medieval city and killed around 35,000 civilians. How could the British do that only three months before the end of the war, and particularly when the deliberate targeting of civilians was forbidden by the Geneva Convention, to which both the UK and Germany were signatories? But, nobody knew the war would end in only three months’ time, the Allies were still trying to get across the Rhine and V2 rockets were still landing on London. The Russians had expressly asked for Dresden to be bombed because it was on the main supply route for the Germans to the Eastern Front, and it was a centre for the manufacture of optical instruments for tanks and artillery. So Dresden was a legitimate military target. In any case the bombing technology of the time was not sufficiently accurate to hit precision targets – military targets – and so for most of the war the only way the British could hit back was to bomb German cities.
War is inseparable from economics. Why do the continentals drink coffee whereas the preferred infusion in England is tea? Before the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars everyone drank tea, but Britain was the richest country in the world and had the largest navy, which dominated the world’s oceans. Britain could continue to import tea, which France could not, hence the switch to coffee which could be obtained overland or a version manufactured from home grown vegetable matter. Similarly Europe still obtains most of its sugar from sugar beet, mainly an animal feed in the UK, while Britain, having captured most of the ‘sugar islands’ in the Caribbean, could continue to import sugar cane or sugar itself.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but that necessity is often a military imperative: tinned food, plastic surgery, physiotherapy, the internal combustion engine, the pneumatic tyre, aviation, computers, satellite navigation in cars have all advanced because of their military applications, subsequently adapted to more pacific purposes.
Military history leads us down some fascinating byways. Roman Catholicism is the religion of eight percent of the population of the UK, yet today (2022) it is the religion of twenty percent of the officers of the British Army. This possibly surprising statistic is a result of the Test Acts of 1661 to 1678, and the Act of Succession of 1701 following the so called Glorious Revolution of 1688 which saw off the Catholic James II and replaced him with a co-monarchy of his protestant daughter Mary (Mary II) and her husband William of Orange (William III). It is often claimed that England hated Catholics, but in the opinion of this writer it was not Catholics that England hated but foreigners, which is not the same thing. What did for James was not his Catholicism – his two heirs presumptive were protestants married to protestants – but the production of a son late in life out of his second wife Mary of Modena, from a French client state and whose dowry was paid by the French king. This threatened a foreign, and only incidentally Catholic, dominated succession which sparked James’ removal.
The acts not only excluded Catholics and anyone marrying a Catholic from inheriting the throne[‡‡], but they also barred Roman Catholics from ‘holding an office of profit under the crown’ or attending the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Thus Catholics could not be members of parliament, civil servants or officers of the Royal Navy or army. Catholics were permitted to join the army as other ranks from 1741 (and had in fact joined long before that) but were still debarred from holding commissions as officers. The army, however, was a pragmatic organisation and wanted men who could do the business. It therefore happily commissioned Catholics and every five years an act was put through parliament – usually at dead of night and tacked on to something in which nobody was interested – indemnifying the army for breaking the law. The army was therefore one of the few careers open to Catholic gentlemen, and Catholic schools and Catholic families developed a tradition of supplying officers to the army. While the bar to Catholic officers was removed by the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, forced through by the Duke of Wellington as Prime Minister, against the wishes of the king, George IV, and of large sections of the Tory party, that tradition remains and Catholic schools continue to provide a substantial proportion of each intake of officer cadets to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
Visitors to St George’s chapel in Windsor Castle, or who have looked at royal tombs in Canterbury Cathedral, will have noticed that some royal coats of arms have the French fleur de lys in one, or sometimes two, quadrants, and they may well have wondered what on earth a French symbol is doing on a British monarch’s escutcheon. Phillip ‘the fair’ of France died in 1314, leaving three sons, all of whom ruled after him and none with legitimate male heirs. Philip did have a daughter, however, Isabella, who was married to Edward II of England and by him produced a son, Edward Prince of Wales, the future Edward III. When the last Capetian king, Charles IV, died in 1328 the nearest male relative was Edward, grandson of Phillip the fair and nephew of Charles IV. It was the claim to the French throne as of hereditary right by him as Edward III in 1340 that was the ostensible cause of the Hundred Years War and the placing of the fleur de Lys on the English, and then British, royal coat of arms. That claim was maintained for 461 years until 1801, when as part of the negotiations for the Peace of Amiens, a breathing space in the French Revolutionary (not yet Napoleonic) war, Britain agreed to drop the claim to the French throne and recognise the French republic. Off came the fleur de Lys to be replaced by the white horse of Hanover.
Generals are often accused of preparing for the next war by using the methods of the last, but as we have no crystal ball, and cannot say for certain how a future conflict might develop, it is only by examining the lessons of past campaigns that we can learn and , one hopes, improve. There are no new military problems, only the methods to deal with them change, and a study of those problems and how people overcame them in the past may – indeed should – enable us to avoid mistakes and repeat success. The learning of lessons is essential for military commanders: after all, a politician who gets it wrong my lose an election, a businessman who makes a bad decision may go bankrupt, but a general who fails may be fated to watch foreigners hold victory parades down Whitehall.
Why, however, should members of the public concern themselves with the lessons from military history? Well, for a start, they pay for it, although one of the reasons why much on television and in the media generally about Afghanistan and now Ukraine is inaccurate rubbish is because many of those who opine have no idea how armed forces actually work , nor they do they comprehend the dynamics of the politico/military interface. Perhaps a study of military history might help to form a more accurate analysis.
One must, however, take care. The great Moltke said that ‘it is a duty of piety and patriotism not to destroy traditional accounts if they can be used for inspirational ends’. In our case there are lies, damned lies and regimental histories. The latter are penned by those who love the regiment and will not hear or write a bad word about it. Similarly one must be careful of veterans unless their experience is very recent and not unwittingly embellished by what they think they ought to believe. Even then, most are able to tell you only what they saw and experienced, which is often only a very small part of the whole.
Military History does not stand alone – military, political, economic and social history are all interlinked. Military history is not all about blood and slaughter, although there is plenty of that too, but it is part of our history, the history of our nation. We are what we are as a result of our history. History is like map reading: how do you know where you are if you don’t know where you have been? And how do you know where you are going if you don’t know where you are?
[*]The British Indian Army 1n 1821 v rebellious tribesmen in Muscat.
[†] 1798. British troops v Irish rebels.
[‡] US troops v illegal whisky distillers in 1869.
[§] King of Assyria 745 – 727 BC, the architect of Assyrian expansion.
[**] Two world wars and the War of the Spanish Succession 1701 – 1714 when there were German states on both sides.
[††] In the Hundred Years War only those periods of actual fighting are included.
[‡‡] The marriage stipulation was removed in 2015, but the monarch must still be a protestant.
Excellent! Thank you Gordon