Category: History

The First Battle of El Alamein

At the end of June, 1942, Mussolini flew to Libya to personally plan his triumphal march into Cairo. Rommel was driving hard across North Africa and it looked as if he would make it to the Suez as long as he was properly supported. To that end, the Italian High Command (Rommel’s nominal superiors, though he reported directly to Hitler and the OKW, annoying the Italians) began siphoning men, material, and equipment from Operation Herkules, the invasion of Malta set for mid-July, to Libya and Egypt. Herkules was fully supported by Rommel, who previously even offered troops for the operation as he understood the necessity for taking Malta in order to secure North Africa. But while chasing the British Eighth Army into Egypt, Malta took a back seat and the invasion was postponed due to lack of supplies. Despite horrific bombing that by July 1942 brought the island to its knees, the Germans wouldn’t take Malta for the rest of the war. 

Gen Ritchie, the commander of the Eighth Army who lost both the Battle of Gazala and Tobruk, wanted to defend the heights at Mersa Matrah, 150 miles inside Egypt, in a glorious face saving last stand against the Germans. The realistic and practical Gen Auchlineck, his superior and Commander in Chief of the Middle East, quickly noted that Mersa Matrah was indefensible against Rommel and just as quickly fired him. Auchlineck took personal command of the Eighth Army and withdrew them east under heavy pressure, all the way back to El Alamein, just 60 miles from Alexandria and the Nile. El Alamein was a bottleneck between the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the impassable Qattara Depression of the Sahara desert to the south, through which Rommel must pass to reach Cairo and the Suez Canal. Rommel was so feared by the British headquarters that the hasty evacuation of Cairo during this time would be forever known in British military history as “The Flap.” Throughout the month of July, Gen Auchlineck’s Eighth Army and Rommel’s PanzerArmee Afrika would duke it out in a brutal battle of attrition for the passes and hills of El Alamein. However, Rommel’s extended supply line all the way back to Tobruk and Tripoli couldn’t keep pace with Auckineck’s shorter supply line to Alexandria and the Germans were halted. The battle turned when New Zealand troops overran Rommel’s all important radio interception company on 9 July, thus depriving him of his most useful and timely intelligence, upon which he depended.

Rommel would go no further.

Down the Rabbit Hole

On 4 July, 1862, writer Charles Dodgeson took a friend’s three young daughters, Edith, 8, Alice, 10 and Lorina, 13 on an afternoon picnic trip into the countryside of south eastern England. In true Victorian fashion, he rowed them down the Thames River. During the trip, he regaled them with a tale of a young girl and her adventures after she had fallen down a rabbit hole. 

The protagonist of the story was named Alice after Dodgeson’s favorite of the three sisters. The girls so loved the story they wanted him to write it down for them when they returned from the picnic. The manuscript he gave them later would eventually be published under Charles Dodgeson’s pen name, Lewis Carroll, as “Alice in Wonderland”.

Mad Hatter: “Have I gone mad?”

Alice: “I’m afraid so. You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”

“I don’t think…” said Alice. “Then you shouldn’t talk,” said the Hatter.

Alice asked, “How long is forever?” “Sometimes, just one second,” replied the White Rabbit

Japan First

In late spring and early summer of 1942, there was an inter-service food fight in the American military: who first, Japan or Germany? It was supposedly settled by Roosevelt and Churchill at the ARCADIA conference in DC in Dec 1941: Germany would be the initial focus of the Allies because of the threat to Great Britain and the USSR, and Japan would be contained with what was left.

However, the Fall of Tobruk, the news of which was given to Churchill as he was meeting with President Roosevelt at the Second Washington Conference, greatly changed the focus in Europe. GEN Marshal, the US Army Chief of Staff, was pushing for an invasion of France for various reasons in 1942. With Churchill visibly shaken with the news of Tobruk, the two leaders began wargaming worst case scenarios, specifically a German-Japanese link up in India. In late June 1942, this wasn’t as farfetched as it sounds today: Japan was chasing British troops out of Burma and into India, India itself was on the brink of revolt, German formations were driving hard on the Caucuses, and Rommel seemed poised to seize the Suez and move on to Kuwait. Roosevelt offered Churchill all the help he wanted and purposely diverted convoys of material, specifically tanks, from the US to Egypt, at the expense of the troop buildup GEN Marshall wanted in England. 

This diversion of resources made an invasion of France unfeasible in 1942 (if it ever was). It was obvious that the British, whose full support was absolutely necessary for a cross channel invasion of France, would not focus on France as long as the British Eighth Army was fighting in Egypt. As a consolation, General Marshall threw his support behind Operation Torch, the invasion of Vichy French North Africa in November. Roosevelt disapproved the plan, saying it wouldn’t help the Soviet Union, and told Marshal to keep working on a second front to assist Stalin.

But ADM Ernest King, the Chief of Staff of the US Navy, was concerned about the Japanese advances in the South Pacific and their threat to Australia. In particular he was worried about the recently discovered Operation FS, the proposed Japanese invasion Samoa, Fiji and New Caledonia, and the large airfield being built for it on the island of Guadalcanal. The airfield and Operation FS would cut Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea’s lifeline with the US. (Additionally, it was the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor, not the Germans…) 

In an epic showdown with GEN Marshall and President Roosevelt, ADM King eventually persuaded the President to support his plan to stop the Japanese under the condition that the Navy and Marine Corps would do it themselves with no Army help outside of assistance from MacArthur’s troops fighting in New Guinea. The US Army would concentrate on an invasion of Europe and/or reinforcing the British in North Africa.

Immediately after the meeting, Admiral King cabled Admiral Nimitz, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific the news. And on 8 July 1942, Admiral Nimitz issued his orders to Marine Major General Paul Vandegrifft and the 1st Marine Division, then staged in New Zealand, to proceed with Operation Watchtower: the invasion of the islands of Tulagi and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, set to begin in early August, 1942

The Destruction of PQ-17

For the first six months in 1942, German U boats savaged Allied merchantmen along the American coast and in the Caribbean Sea, in what was known to the German Navy as “Die Glueckliche Zeit” or “The Happy Time”. Generally, the exceptions were the Allied Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union. The dangerous American and British Arctic convoys that delivered much needed war material to the Soviet Union assembled and departed from Iceland (P) for the Soviet ports above the Arctic Circle at Murmansk and Archangelsk (Q). 16 previous convoys had reached the Soviets with varying degrees of success, but the largest and most successful by far was PQ-16 at the end of May, 1942. With Fall Blau (the German operation against the Caucuses’ oil fields) on the immediate horizon, Hitler decreed that the German military increase operations against the next such convoy. PQ-17 departed Hvalfjörður, Iceland on 23 June, 1942.

The British knew of the German intentions from Enigma decrypts and prepared well. The 34 merchantmen of the convoy would have close-in protection from six destroyers, and twelve other corvettes, support ships and anti-submarine and anti-aircraft trawlers. Furthermore, a close cruiser squadron shadowed the convoy to protect and against small surface raiders. To protect against the German battleship Tirpitz, which was in Norway to prevent an Allied invasion of Scandinavia, the British Home Fleet would sortie from Scapa Flow. Finally, after the successful joint operations with the US Navy to supply Malta with fighters in June, the British Admiralty asked for American assistance, and the reluctant Admiral King agreed to provide the battleship, USS Washington, and the carrier, USS Wasp, and their escorts. PQ-17 was the most heavily defended convoy in the North Atlantic so far in the war.

German signals intelligence picked up the departure of the convoy and PQ-17 was spotted by a U-Boat and tracked very quickly. For nearly a week, the convoy endured incessant Luftwaffe attacks from airfields in Norway, and was swarmed by an increasingly larger wolfpack as U boats closed on the area. Nonetheless, the convoy only suffered three ships lost, two of whom were to ice damage, and not from the Germans. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, PQ-17 looked to be another success.

Unfortunately, that “unforeseen circumstance” turned out to be the British First Sea Lord, the elderly Admiral Dudley Pound. Normally, as First Sea Lord, Pound would not concern himself with day to day operations of the Royal Navy, but because of the Americans’ involvement and his personal request to King, he tracked the progress of PQ-17 meticulously.

On the morning 4 July, 1942, an RAF reconnaissance plane failed to spot the Tirpitz in the Trondheim fjord in Norway, and this sent a panic in the Admiralty, mostly because of Pound’s involvement and his inevitable demands that the Tirpitz be found. The Tirpitz sortied regularly but Hitler or the head of the German Kriegsmarine Adm Raeder would lose their nerve, and order the valuable and irreplaceable ship back to port. This looked to be the same. (The Tirpitz hadn’t actually left port yet. It wouldn’t do so until the next day and almost immediately turn around for obvious reasons.) But Pound demanded, in conclusive terms, that the Tirpitz was not threatening PQ-17. British naval intelligence was sure this was the case, but had no definitive evidence. The British had come to rely on the Enigma intercepts but those for that morning would not be decrypted until that afternoon. Additionally the overly stressed Pound mistook the analysis of the U boat threat to the convoy as the analysis of the surface threat, which was dire if the convoy scattered as they would have to if the Tirpitz attacked. (Despite the extensive precautions, Pound had little confidence that the British and American battleships would intercept the Tirpitz before it reached the convoy.) When the Enigma decrypts did come in late that afternoon, they only provided circumstantial evidence that the Tirpitz was in port or heading back to port. The British Naval Intelligence couldn’t say with 100% certainty where the Tirpitz was, but also refused to say that the Tirpitz was not a threat to PQ-17, which was what they believed (at least according to the investigation afterwards). 

Pound assumed the worst case despite the evidence, and that night issued three orders directly to the convoy between 2111 and 2133 on the evening 4 July 1942. The first stripped the convoy of its cruisers and destroyers, who proceeded to rendezvous with the battleships for the expected fight with Tirpitz. The second ordered the convoy to disperse its formation, a precaution against surface attack. The third, and fatal, order was to actually scatter the convoy, and for the merchantmen make their way to Archangelsk independently. This order was almost always given by a convoy commander after the escorts were overwhelmed by continuous attack, and never by a commander not on the scene. On 4 July, the Luftwaffe and U boat contacts were numerous, but were handled well, and no enemy surface ships were sighted, much less the Tirpitz. The order to scatter made the individual merchant ships easy prey for bombers and U boats. The order to scatter issued by Pound was a death sentence for PQ-17.

In the perpetual sunlight of the Arctic summer, unbelieving U boat captains and bomber pilots watched with unimaginable glee as the convoy broke apart before their very eyes. There was no possible way for the escorts to protect the isolated and vulnerable merchantmen. Ten merchantmen were sunk the next day, five by torpedoes and five by bombs. Five more were sunk the day after. Destroyer captains shamefully listened to the death cries of their burning and sinking charges, as they uselessly prowled the seas looking for the Tirpitz. In defiance of Pound’s order, several junior captains of minesweepers and corvettes herded merchantmen together for protection, but it was not enough and the convoy still had 600 miles to sail to reach the Soviet port. Several ship crews got creative and painted themselves white with paint intended for Soviet tank camouflage and hid among the ice. One captain loaded the Sherman tanks on his deck with ammunition from another ship and turned his ship into a massive anti-aircraft platform.

For the next week, eleven U boats and three squadrons of Luftwaffe bombers savaged the isolated merchantmen in the freezing waters of the Arctic Ocean. It would be another week after that for the remainder to reach port, after notification from British intelligence that it was safe to leave hiding. Only eleven merchantmen of the original 34 made it to Archangelsk, at the cost of just five German planes. There was such confusion in the North Atlantic that it would take the Admiralty another week just to ascertain the final results.

In all, PQ-17 lost over 110,000 tons of shipping, more than the Admiralty expected to lose if the Tirpitz did attack. This loss included 210 aircraft, 430 tanks, and 3,325 jeeps and trucks; that’s the equivalent of an entire tank division and an entire Soviet air army. Stalin was furious and accused the Americans and British of lying about the number of merchantmen. Admiral King was equally furious and pulled the Washington and Wasp from the Atlantic. He sent them to the Pacific in support of the recently approved Operation Watchtower, the invasion of Tulagi and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The inevitable British investigation found Pound’s orders to scatter the convoy solely responsible for its destruction. But he was not charged as he was the senior Royal Navy officer in the government. He quietly retired for health reasons the next year. 

The jubilant and victorious U boat crews returned to France to bands, parades, and awards ceremonies. The destruction of PQ-17 was the happiest moment of the Kriegsmarine’s Happy Time.

Lafayette, We Are Here

The first combat troops of the U.S. First Expeditionary Division arrived at the port of St. Nazaire, France on 26 June 1917. They were destined for transport to a training area at Gondrecourt in Lorraine, about 120 miles southwest of Paris.

Rumors of the widespread mutinies in the French Army were beginning to spread, and French civilian morale was low. The French government requested that a regiment of American soldiers march through Paris as a show of American support and a visible reminder that more Americans were on their way.

General Pershing initially balked at the idea. The American regiments in France were not the same as the ones initially chosen from the Southern Department months before. In the interim they were stripped of most of their experienced officers, NCOs, and soldiers, who would form dozens of cadres for the rapidly expanding U.S. Army, and were backfilled with raw recruits. Pershing was worried they would not be able march correctly and would disgrace the United States in the eyes of her Allies. Moreover, Pershing was concerned that if they looked unprofessional, it would give ammunition to the British and French generals who were pushing to have American troops serve directly in their armies as replacements, or at the very least have American regiments serve in their divisions, with no larger American formations. However, Pershing relented in the face of the desperate need for a demonstration of American resolve. In any case, he had nothing to worry about.

With the regimental colors and band in the lead, the U.S. 16th Infantry Regiment paraded through the streets of Paris on 4 July 1917. If they marched out of step, no one noticed because the people of Paris mobbed the American soldiers as they wound their way through the streets. The joyous Parisians cheered, wept, and threw flowers at the mostly green American troops parading through their city. But the tall, young, well fed, and eager American soldiers were a stark contrast to the weary and exhausted French soldiers, drained by three years in the trenches, that the Parisians were used to seeing. The men of the 16th Infantry marched on a five mile route through the city to the Picpus Cemetery, the burial place of Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette. At 19, Lafayette was the youngest general ever in the American army and so beloved by George Washington’s that he referred to the young Frenchman as his son. Lafayette arrived to fight for the American Cause almost exactly 140 years prior.

Pershing was asked to address the crowd at tomb of the hero of the American Revolution, but since he didn’t speak French, the task fell to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Stanton, a quartermaster officer on his staff who spoke the language. At the end of his speech, Stanton said, “Lafayette, We are here”. Though often misattributed to Pershing, Stanton’s message expressed the sentiment common among many Americans and Frenchmen at the time – that America was coming to the aid of France in a time of her direst need, just as France did for America in 1777.

After the ceremony, the 16th Infantry Regiment marched back through Paris to their staging area on the other side of the city. There they were billeted in civilian houses and barns as they awaited transportation to Gondrecourt where they began their much needed training to fight the Germans.

America Passes Into Its Next Era

By 1826, the American “Era of Good Feelings” that came about after its perceived victory in the War of 1812 was over a decade old. The underdog victory over the British, the collapse of the Federalist Party after the treasonous Hartford Convention, and the defeat of Native Americans at Tippecanoe, Fallen Timbers, and Horseshoe Bend, which opened up the West, led to an era when the people referred to themselves not as “Virginians” or “Pennsylvanians”, but as “Americans”. The American System survived the Panic of 1819, the worst of America’s early recessions, stronger than before. Francis Scott Key’s “The Defense of Fort McHenry” was being sung in taverns across the country to the tune of an old British drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven”. But the Era of Good Feelings among Americans was not destined to last.

Some people in America still believed they were entitled to the fruits of other men and women’s labor and expertise without just compensation. Moreover, they believed that those same people were considered property and that their Natural and Unalienable Rights were the product of a man made government, not the Providence of God or whatever deity they worshiped. Ergo, these slaves did not benefit from the Rule of Law as promised in the US Declaration of Independence and codified in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The issue of Slavery (and to a lesser extent initially, the treatment of Native Americans in this vein) would dominate politics for the next thirty years.

By the mid-1820s, many of the American Founding Fathers had passed on. And most could not reconcile “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” with the institution of Slavery. The divisiveness was personified by two men, the best of friends and sometimes the worst of enemies, who were both on their deathbeds in July of 1826.

John Adams was America’s 2nd President and the product of strong independent rural Massachusetts’ farmers who saw human bondage as repugnant. John Adams never owned slaves, and he felt that slavery was economically inefficient (free men are always more productive than slaves) and would eventually cease. Nonetheless, he was not an abolitionist because he felt that abolitionism was antithetical to American unity.

His friend, Thomas Jefferson, the ironic author of the above passage in the Declaration of Independence and America’s 3rd President, was the product of an “enlightened” Virginia aristocratic class and a slave owner. A self-described racist, Jefferson felt that freed slaves had no place in American society, simply because of the cognitive dissonance of the passage of “all men are created equal” and the issue of Slavery. Jefferson believed that that inherent problem would cause freed slaves to become embittered with their masters and lead to the dissolution of the Union. He favored colonization of the inevitably freed slaves or their reparation back to Africa or the West Indies, as done by James Monroe and the creation of Liberia.

Both men wrestled with the issue of Slavery their entire lives. They led America through her most trying times, and defeated the greatest empire the world had ever seen despite overwhelming odds, not once but twice. But they could never agree on the issue of Slavery. For nearly six decades, they shepherded the nascent American state to the point where it could defend itself against any external threat. Unfortunately, they could not solve its most serious internal threat.

On 4 July 1826, two of America’s greatest proponents were near death, one 83 years old in Monticello Virginia, and the other 90 years old in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Exactly 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was read aloud on the steps of Pennsylvania State House, and printed for distribution at John Dunlap’s printing shop, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other.

Despite all of their accomplishments, there was much work left to do. Care for the American experiment passed to a new generation. The children of the Revolution, epitomized by the Tennessean adventurer, politician and soldier Andrew Jackson, would have to tackle the issue of Slavery. The children of the War of 1812, personified by Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S Grant, would have to settle it.

The Battle of Arbedo

The town of Bellinzona was the chokepoint between the Swiss cantons above the St Bernard Pass in the north and the Po Valley via the Ticino river valley to the south. In 1419, during the confusion after Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti died, several cantons of the Swiss Confederation bought the town from the Duchy of Milan, ostensibly to protect trade. Instead, Bellinzona became a staging area for the aggressive Swiss to raid vulnerable Milanese possessions. In early 1422, an exasperated Milan forcibly took the town back. The Swiss invaded.

The rise of the Duchy of Milan in the early Renaissance was due to the wealth and efforts of the powerful and ambitious Visconti family, and the military prowess of their chosen commander, the condottiero (a contracted mercenary warlord) Francesco Bussone of Carmagnola. Over the years, Bussone made short work of Visconti and Milanese rivals in northern Italy, but he’d be put to the test by the Swiss.

The defense of the fertile but isolated alpine valleys and plateaus forged a tough and independent Swiss people protected by formations of soldiers that differed in composition from their traditional enemies whom surrounded them on all sides. The relative lack of horses in the central Alps saw the prominence of infantry among its minor nobles. Moreover, the defense of the narrow passes against armies that relied upon the heavily armored mounted knight, gave rise to the extensive use of the halberd among the Swiss. A halberd is essentially an axe head attached to the top of a six to nine foot pole, with a spear head, a hook opposite the axe head, and a butt spike. Against horsemen it was a fearsome weapon: one could receive the charge with the spear point, chop the horse with the axe head, or pull the rider off the saddle with the hook, and finally quickly finish the vulnerable knight on the ground with the spike. In the 14th century the halberd was for all intents and purposes the Swiss national weapon, and they fielded forests of them.

In early April 1422, Bussone attacked the invading Swiss army with his mounted knights. The Swiss handily defeated them and continued on toward Bellinzona. But Bussone was a professional and wasn’t going to let the Swiss besmirch his so far untarnished reputation. He reorganized his army around defeating the halberd. He dismounted most of his knights and equipped them with pikes. Whether or not Bussone was influenced by the rediscovery of Ancient Greek and Roman texts that characterized the Renaissance in Italy by doing so is a subject for scholarly debate; the fact remains that Bussone’s new pikemen would not have been out of place among Alexander the Great’s sarrissa equipped phalanxes 1600 years before.

On 30 June 1422, Bussone met the Swiss outside the town of Arbedo. It was not be a repeat of the previous battle. The Milanese pikemen had an asymmetric four to six foot reach advantage over the Swiss halberdiers. The Swiss attempted to use their crossbowmen, the traditional counter to polearm wielding formations that were vulnerable to missiles, but they were chased back into the mass of halberds by the remaining Milanese knights. Bussone brought up his own crossbowmen, who poured fire into the flanks of the Swiss halberdiers.

Unable to mass their own crossbowmen, and possessing no cavalry to counter the Milanese crossbowmen, the Swiss were slowly but surely ground down by the pikemen. The Swiss took massive casualties, and could do nothing except retreat or be annihilated. They were saved from total destruction due only to a group of foragers who appeared on the Milanese flank and Bussone mistook them for another Swiss formation. The Milanese reformed against the new “threat”, and the defeated Swiss escaped.

The Battle of Arbedo checked Swiss ambitions in Italy for decades. However, they also took notice of the reasons for their defeat. Thereafter the Swiss almost universally adopted the pike as the new weapon for their infantry, and the halberd as a weapon wielded by the officers and file leaders.

For the next hundred years, phalanxes of mercenary Swiss pikemen would dominate warfare in Italy and Western Europe.

Fall Blau

By early 1942, Germany had used up its oil reserves and was suffering significant oil shortages. Despite extensive interwar investment into synthetic oil plants, 75% of Germany’s oil was supplied by the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. In March of 1942, Romania ministers informed Hitler that they could not meet Germany’s planned oil needs for 1942. On 4 April 1942, Hitler signed Fuehrer Directive 41 which made seizing the Caucasus oil fields a priority.  This would also have the added benefit of denying the oil to the Soviets, and was desperately needed by the German economy.

Despite being at war for almost three years, and engaged in hostilities with Great Britain, the Soviet Union and now America, the German economy was still not on a war footing. Furthermore, the larger amount of territory that needed defended combined with the losses of men and material in the past year, especially during the nearly incessant Soviet winter counterattacks, reduced the capacity of Germany military to conduct offensive operations. Unlike Operation Barbarossa the year before, the Wehrmacht could no longer launch a general offensive in the East on three axes. Therefore, Fall Blau (Case Blue in German), the German offensive in 1942 would focus on Army Group South at the expense of the center and north. Army Group North would continue its limited attacks on Leningrad, while Army Group Center stood fast in front of Moscow.

Due to extensive German deception operations, Stalin had expected the Germans to continue on towards Moscow and was taken completely by surprise by the German advance south east across the Ukrainian and Russian Steppe. After defeating several wasteful Russian spoiling attacks, on 28 June 1942, Fall Blau launched 1.3 million German, Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian troops towards the Caucasus Mountains and the Volga River. Four armies supported by eleven panzer divisions of Army Group South assaulted southeast with the final objective of seizing the oil fields at Maykop, Grozny, and Baku in the Caucasus Mountains and around the Caspian Sea. They did so with three axes of advance. The first was clearing the Crimean peninsula and capturing Sevastopol which had been under siege for many months. The second and main effort would be the strike towards the Caucasus for the oil fields. And the third axis was an advance on the Volga River in a supporting effort to protect the flank of the Caucuses.

The initial advance was wildly successful, especially so in areas supported by the Luftwaffe.

The High-Water Mark of Burgundy: the Siege of Beauvais

In the confused French dynastic struggles after the Hundred Years War, Charles the Bold, who was the Duke of Burgundy and brother in law to both the King of England and King of France, was more powerful than his liege lord, Louis XI of France. The Duchy of Burgundy at the time consisted of most of modern Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and significant parts of France. At the conclusion of the truce made with Louis at Peronne in 1468, Charles seized some towns on the Somme, and in 1471 Louis declared him treasonous. The hot tempered Charles, who at this point saw no reason why Burgundy shouldn’t be an independent kingdom like France, England, or Austria, invaded. His intent was to unite with another rebellious vassal of Louis’, the Duke of Britanny. Their combined might could easily defeat the French king’s army.

The Burgundian army of Charles the Bold was the most modern fighting force of its time. Charles’ father Philip the Good learned the hard lessons of the Hundred Years War, when armies with small cores of disciplined full time professionals consistently out maneuvered and outfought much larger feudal levies. The Burgundian system was still based on feudal levies, but Charles demanded a large measure of discipline, training, and equipment from the men mobilized by his vassals. They were more recruited than conscripted. Those nobles whose men didn’t meet the standard faced fines, censure, and even confiscation of territory. Furthermore, he also reorganized his army into a combined arms formation of traditional, if updated and codified, medieval lances (a knight, squire, a sergeant at arms, all mounted, and three mounted archers, supported by a page and three foot soldiers: a handgunner, a crossbowman, and pikeman), professional mercenary halberdiers and pikemen (mostly Germans), and professional bowmen and crossbowmen (usually Welsh, or English, with Italian crossbowmen). Most importantly though, his army was integrally supported by cannon, which were relatively mobile for the time. Battles in the Middle Ages were rare; sieges were not. Charles’ inclusion of gunpowder units separated him from Louis XI’s similar reforms. The Burgundian army therefore looked more like a large and well drilled condottieri company that specialized in seizing fortified towns, than a traditional feudal army.

After crossing the frontier, Charles captured several French towns, and those that resisted paid the price. On 27 June 1472, Charles’ vanguard reached the town Beauvais and expected it to promptly surrender, based on his reputation alone. But the town resolve was stiffened by a tiny force sent by Louis, and by the remaining defenders of Roye, the town Charles sacked just two weeks before. Beauvais was heavily fortified, but the garrison was small and lacked cannon.

The competent and able commander of Charles’ vanguard immediately recognized that he had to storm the town quickly or Louis would be able to mass on the area and the Burgundian advance would be halted. He unleashed his cannon, created several breaches, and smashed one of the town’s gates, before he ran out of ammunition. That the Burgundian vanguard even had cannon surprised the defenders. The professional Burgundians rushed into the gaps.

The small French garrison could not hope to repel the attackers, but they received help from an unexpected quarter, the townspeople of Beauvais. They had heard what had happened to Roye and the other towns, and they were determined not to share the same fate. The men joined the French soldiers in the breaches and at the gate, though not on the walls because the Burgundian ladders were just a bit too short, a grievous oversight.

With the hand to hand fighting concentrated in the breaches and gate, the French archers and crossbowmen had free reign on the walls. They were supplied with a steady stream of arrows and bolts by the town’s women and children, who quickly joined in, throwing whatever was at hand: stones, boiling water, logs, and especially torches. They threw so many torches at the Burgundians that they caught the suburbs of the town and the remains of the gate on fire. This created an inferno through which Charles’ army had to pass. Nevertheless, the Burgundians continued the assault.

In the afternoon, it seemed Beauvais was lost, despite the efforts of the courageous townsfolk. The Burgundians seized a breach and began spilling onto the walls and into the town. However, the women and children threw themselves at the invaders with whatever they had: axes, knives, sticks, and torches. They kept the line from breaking, but the French were slowly pushed back. Just when it seemed the people of Beauvais would break, they looked up and saw an amazing sight: a young woman hacking her way across the wall.

A soldier was attempting to place the Burgundian flag on the wall above the breach to signify a breakthrough, and Jeanne Laisné, the daughter of a local peasant, attacked him with her father’s hatchet. She wounded the flag bearer and fought with such ferocity that he fell off the wall into the moat below. The sight of the French woman flinging a heavily armored man at arms into the moat and capturing the ducal banner of Burgundy electrified the resistance. The French defenders held on just long enough for two hundred lances sent by Louis to arrive in time push the Burgundians back out of the town. That night and the next day Louis’ army converged on Beauvais and the townpeople began the laborious process of repairing the breaches. They couldn’t repair the gate, so they tore houses down and turned the gatehouse into a bonfire. The Fires of Beuvais burned so hot that the gate was impenetrable to the Burgundians for nearly a week.

More French troops arrived and managed to enter the Beauvais before Charles could properly invest the town. The furious duke attempted to bombard the town into submission, but the French continued to valiantly fight on. The charred suburbs turned into a no man’s land where Burgundians were ambushed, assaults were disrupted, and skirmishes killed and wounded Burgundian troops that Charles’ could ill afford to lose. Every man he lost at Beauvais was one more that couldn’t fight against Louis’ main army then in Brittany.

By the end of July, Charles had 120 dead, including 20 lords killed leading charges, and more than three thousand wounded, many of whom eventually died. Heavy rains flooded his camp, and the moves to dryer ground made the encampment susceptible to raids by the people of Beauvais, killing and wounding even more. On 20 July 1472, Charles decamped and moved into Normandy.

Charles the Bold would never link with the Duke of Brittany and eventually returned to Burgundy after looting and pillaging his way across Normandy. His bid to establish the Kingdom of Burgundy at France’s expense came to nothing.

In contrast, Louis XI consolidated his power. In gratitude, he rewarded the town of Beauvais for its heroic stand. He exempted the town from many of his taxes, and relaxed many of the rules his nobles had placed. Louis inaugurated an annual parade through the town to honor the defenders, one in which the women and children march ahead of the men in honor of their ingenuity and sacrifices; a tradition that continues to this day. In particular, he rewarded Jeanne Laisné whom he christened Jeanne Hachette for her bravery, and exempted her family and her descendants from taxes for eternity.

The Invasion of Russia

French Emperor Napoleon I and his La Grande Armee of over 600,000 French, Polish, Italian, German, Prussian, Austrian, Swiss and Spanish troops, crossed the Nieman River into Russia on 24 June 1812. Napoleon officially wanted to protect Polish lands from Russian invasion but actually wanted to incorporate Russia into his Continental System and prevent Russian trade with Great Britain. Napoleon would eventually capture Moscow, but in accordance with their scorched earth practices, the Russians would burn it to the ground. Without winter quarters and no way to supply himself, Napoleon retreated. Six months after the invasion began, horrific losses in attritional battles with the Czar’s armies, Cossack raiders, lack of supply, and winter weather reduced the La Grande Armee to a shadow of its former self. On 14 December 1812, only 27,000 French troops would recross the Nieman. It was the beginning of the end of the Napoleonic era.