Miyamoto Musashi Defeats Sasaki Kojiro

Miyamoto Musashi, considered by many to be the finest swordsman ever, and the author of “The Book of Five Rings” fought his most famous duel on an island in the straits between Honshu and Kyushu, Japan on 13 April, 1612.
 
He defeated his rival by arriving “late” which gave him three advantages over the hot tempered Sasaki Kojiro. First, his tardiness angered and unnerved his opponent (though he himself didn’t feel tardy). Next, when Kojiro inevitably executed his famous move, the “Swallow Cut”, the sun would be in his eyes, and Musashi could then fatally strike. And finally, Musashi would be able to use the tide to help escape Kojiro’s many students who would undoubtedly attempt to kill him when he won.
 
The duel unfolded exactly as planned. After escaping, Musashi felt a deep sadness that one of the world’s greatest swordsmen was gone, and his instruction lost forever. He vowed to never fight to the death again. It was Miyamoto Musashi’s last duel in which there was a fatality.

The Great Locomotive Chase

On 12 April 1862, Union civilian scout James Andrews and 22 Ohio infantry volunteers hijacked a Confederate locomotive “The General” in Kennesaw, Georgia. The plan was to stop periodically and destroy track, cut telegraph wire, and burn bridges behind them in order to cut supply from Atlanta to the strategically important Confederate town of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Although Andrews cut telegraph wire preventing anyone ahead from knowing of the train, the former conductor of The General, William Fuller, pursued on a hand car with some rebel soldiers (Andrews’ top speed was only 15mph). Fuller eventually commandeered another train and pursued Andrews. Fuller dogged and unrelenting pursuit prevented the raiders from damaging the vital supply route in any meaningful way. Andrews at one point tried to set a car on fire while on a covered bridge to thwart pursuit, but Fuller pushed through before the bridge was too damaged.

The Chase lasted almost all the way to Chattanooga when The General ran out of coal and had to be abandoned. Andrews and the Union soldiers split up but were all eventually captured. They were tried as spies and found guilty of being unlawful combatants and sentenced to hang. Seven, including Andrews, were hung but the rest escaped, six were recaptured but because of the outcry were not hung and later exchanged. Abraham Lincoln’s Sec. of War, Edwin Stanton, awarded the first Medals of Honor to the soldiers who participated in The Chase, the very first being Pvt Jacob W. Parrot of the 33rd Ohio Infantry, due to his particularly brutal time as a prisoner.

The Battle of Vimy Ridge

By the time the Battle of the Somme ended in November 1916, it was by far the most deadly battle in British history. For six miles of territory, the Allies suffered nearly 650,000 casualties. Just to the north, the British prepared for their spring offensive in 1917 around the French city of Arras. The offensive itself was just a diversionary attack for the French Nivelle Offensive which was supposed to break the Germans. The Arras attack looked to be no different than the failed Somme offensive of the previous year.

By some unknown administrative fate, all four divisions of the Canadian Corps came on line opposite the heavily fortified Vimy Ridge. The Vimy Ridge was originally captured in 1914 by the Germans and over the previous two years the French and British suffered 200,000 casualties trying to take it back. Vimy Ridge was just one objective for the Arras Offensive. But for the first time in the war, the Canadians on the Western Front were going to fight for it together.
 
The commander of the Canadian Corps, LtGen Julian Byng, a Briton, and Maj Gen Arthur Currie, the 1st Canadian Division commander and senior Canadian in theater, were keenly aware that any mass casualties in the assault on Vimy Ridge would have a disproportionate effect on the small population of Canada. They had to figure out a way to take the Ridge without the mass casualties that characterized the Somme or Verdun. There was little formal aristocracy in Canada, and unlike Great Britain where the officer corps was primarily based on wealth or title, the officers from Canada were mostly of the same social classes as their men, and even in many cases of the same educational level. The officers and NCOs from Canada were chosen because of their ability to lead, accomplish the mission, and get shit done. For example, Currie, a major general, had just a high school education and was a real estate agent when not in uniform. But unlike his college and public (read: private) school educated peers whose commands were annihilated in the Somme, he knew he had to figure out a better way.
 
Like Brusilov did on the Eastern Front in the previous spring, Currie set out to find a new way to break the German trench lines without slaughtering his men in the process. When the Canadian Corps took the lines opposite Vimy Ridge in October 1916, he sent several officers to the British and French who were then at the end of their respective and disastrous offensives. These officers interviewed the staffs and commanders and conducted their own objective after action review of the Somme and Verdun battles. Needless to say, they weren’t very welcome in many cases, but they learned a great deal from the experiences of their Allies. They came to almost the same conclusions that Bruislov’s staff did the year before, although with some slight differences, mostly due to cultural differences between the armies of both fronts. And Currie, with Byng’s full support, unleashed his staff and the staffs of the other three Canadian divisions to come up with solutions to the problems that plagued the British and French attacks.
 
The first was reconnaissance, or more specifically targeting data for the artillery. The Somme attackers used their artillery directly against the trench lines which was ineffective because the Germans just hid in massive dug outs during the bombardment, only to emerge once the bombardment stopped, or against map coordinates of possible but unconfirmed targets. Currie proposed to use his artillery in a different manner. He wanted to target more exposed German positions, such as artillery concentrations, strongpoints, counterattack assembly areas, and communications hubs instead of churning up earth that would only be immediately reoccupied by the troops from the dugouts. Only the strongpoints would receive the same attention that the trench lines received in the Somme Offensive. But to do that he needed to know where these new targets were. He stepped up the trench raids in the winter of 1916/17, but instead of doing it just to keep his men and the Germans occupied, his trench raids had reconnaissance objectives, and the requirement for prisoners and documents. He did the same with his flyers, and incorporated French techniques for aerial photography which were far superior to the British techniques, and on a much larger scale. Furthermore, he brought on civilian scientists to “sound range” and “flash spot” the German artillery. They set up listening posts that had equipment to measure the strength and direction of their sound waves, or observe artillery flashes on the horizon. These were then triangulated, and the artillery positions identified, which were then confirmed by other means.
 
The wide ranging use of photography and reconnaissance allowed Currie’s men to build large and almost excessively detailed scale models of the terrain on the objectives and in the assault zones. These were then used by the subordinate commanders to plan their assaults in detail, down to platoon level. This was unheard of on the Western Front where the Somme was planned down to battalion objectives with the company as the primary regimental or brigade maneuver unit. By pushing for company objectives with the platoon the primary maneuver unit, this empowered the young platoon commanders and squad leaders, who could actually see and communicate with most of their men. Moreover, the Canadians were a different sort. Like soldiers from the United States, Canadians were a bit more individualistic and free thinking than your average Englishman or Frenchman around the beginning of the 20th century. Currie leveraged this in his push for independent action at the platoon level. As we know now, battles are won by junior leaders. Currie’s detailed terrain models and objectives allowed those junior leaders to walk the terrain and even rehearse movement routes and actions on the objectives with their men, so they all knew what they had to do, down to the lowest private. Moreover, firepower was pushed down closer to the platoons, and even into them. Companies were given trench mortar sections and Lewis (machine) guns in special slings, which proved invaluable in suppressing German machine gun positions, and breaking up local German counterattacks. Currie’s focus on platoons essentially turned the entire Canadian Corps into the equivalent of Brusilov’s specially picked and trained stormtroopers.
 
Prior to the attack, the assault troops were housed in massive “subways” dug out of the soft chalk escarpment that Vimy Ridge and its approaches were part of. (This was also why targeting the defending troops directly with artillery was futile, the German dug outs were numerous and deep.) The subways were had air ventilation, electricity, and some had running water. These subways were close to no man’s land, and had “saps” or small underground tunnels that led toward the German trenches from which the assault troops would emerge. Some of the saps went all the way under no man’s land to the German trench line. Digging the saps was a dangerous business, because of countermining by the Germans and would only be given to the best and toughest tunneling engineers who came to be known as “sappers”. In all 14 subways and their ancillary saps were dug, the smallest subway was 265m long and the longest, 1706m.
 
Unlike Brusilov, Currie had more than enough artillery shells, but unlike the Somme, he wanted to use them in direct support of his assaulting troops in the form of a creeping barrage. Creeping barrages had been used before, but Currie’s had two significant differences. His detailed reconnaissance allowed him to plan the creeping barrage with much more fidelity, and with the terrain models could be rehearsed. These rehearsals brought together the gunners who would fire the barrage with the men who would be walking behind it. This gave the artillerymen much more motivation to be prompt and timely with their adjustments and accuracy, and the heavily laden infantrymen the motivation to keep pace with the barrage, and maintain his part of the unspoken social contract between supporter and supportee not to waste the provided resources. The second difference was a new fuse developed specifically to cut wire. Currie’s investigators into the Somme offensive found that much more often than not, the barrage did not cut the wire. So when the infantry became stuck cutting through the wire, the creeping barrage continued on since there was no real timely communication between the infantry and the artillery directly supporting them. Eventually, the creeping barrage would stop, the defenders would get out of their dugouts and find the infantry still stuck in no man’s land, and massacre them. There were numerous instances in the Somme of a single well placed machine gun that wiped out an entire British battalion in this manner. The wire wasn’t cut because the fuses on the shells didn’t detonate until they burrowed fairly deep into the ground. The ground would then force the explosion upwards and this rarely had a great effect on the wire. The new “106 Instantaneous Fuses” detonated the shells as soon as it struck an object, whether the ground or the wire, and cause the explosion to expand horizontally, which unhinged and cleared the wire.
 
On 20 March, 1917, the initial preparatory bombardment began for the combined Arras Offensive but it was intermittent in order to confuse the Germans as to the main objectives. On 2 April, the main bombardment began as the Canadian Corps’ uncannily accurate artillery pounded the German defenses in what the German on Vimy Ridge came to call the “Week of Suffering”. The German commander wanted to bring up his reserve divisions, but found that as he did, their assembly areas were targeted, so he was forced to keep them 24 km behind the ridge. If the Canadian assault was in any way more effective than the British in the Somme, his counterattack forces would not be able to get there in time.
 
On Easter Monday, 9 April, 1917, several saps and mines were detonated across no man’s land into the German trenches and underneath strong points. Emerging from the subways into a sleet storm, the Canadian soldiers moved behind the meticulously planned creeping barrage. They didn’t need to maneuver or run. They just walked behind the barrage at a quick pace, 100 yards every three minutes. After the creeping barrage finished, the guns moved to counterbattery fire, which according to German estimates, suppressed 83% of all of German batteries.
 
In less than two hours, three of the four Canadian Divisions had captured their initial objectives, and fresh troops were well on their way leap frogging to the next, as the initial assault troops consolidated their positions. Almost immediately, Currie had two “labour” battalions build roads through no man’s land, even though the exploding saps in the initial attack made excellent communication trenches to the ridge. These allowed Currie to reinforce Vimy Ridge and maintain the momentum of the attack.
 
The speed of the assault on Vimy Ridge overwhelmed the German defenses. With the exception of the 4th Canadian Division who had difficulty with several strongpoints unaffected by the initial attack, particularly from a hill nicknamed “The Pimple”, the Canadian Corps seized most of the Ridge by the next day. The Pimple fell two days later on 12 April. The Canadians captured Vimy Ridge at the cost of about 10,000 Canadian casualties, far below the 200,000 casualties of the previous attempts. The Germans considered the battle a draw since there was no exploitation or breakthrough of the Canadian victory. But to the Canadians, the Battle of Vimy Ridge was an all Canadian affair, planned and led by Canadians, and brought to a successful conclusion by the spilt blood of men from all parts of Canada.
 
Before Vimy Ridge the people of the Canadian Confederation were part of the First Dominion in the British Empire. In its bloody trenches, Canadians came of age and became their own nation. After Vimy Ridge, they were citizens of a new country — Canada.

The Bataan Death March

The Japanese were overwhelmed by the number of Filipino and American prisoners of war after their surrender the day before. LtGen Homma, the Japanese commander of the 14th Army decreed that the prisoners were to be treated humanely. But the Japanese code of Bushido, perverted by militarism and nearly unrecognizable from the code practiced by the samurai, said that warriors should fight to the death, and that prisoners were not worthy of honorable treatment. Influential members of Homma’s subordinates and staff ignored him. One staff planner, Masanobu Tsuji, was sent by the Imperial Army General Staff to spy on Homma, directly issued orders for the massacres in Homma’s name. The Japanese guards had nothing but disdain for the 80,000 in their care. The vast majority of the prisoners went through Hell for at least the next five days; for some the March took as long twelve days.
On 9 and 10 April, the prisoners were massed at Mariveles and Bagac on Bataan where they were searched. Any prisoner that had any Japanese souvenirs or money were beheaded or shot. Additionally, the Japanese singled out any Filipino leaders and executed 400 before dumping their bodies in the Pantingan River. Once they were searched, the exhausted and starving prisoners began a sixty mile march to the San Fernando railhead where they would be put on trains for their trip to a prison camp in Capas in western Luzon.

Any wounded prisoners who were unable to march were killed. In 110 degree heat, with no food and little water, they trudged on, with the Japanese guards using any excuse to beat or kill them. Any prisoner that fell out was killed. Any prisoner that couldn’t keep up was killed. If not by the guards, then by drivers of Japanese convoys who gleefully drove over the exhausted and/or sick prisoners, or by Japanese “clean-up crews” who followed behind. There would be an orange flash, and the simultaneous sound of a gunshot and the thud of the bullet hitting the body.

The prisoners were forced to sit in the sun when they stopped. Though they passed many places where they could get something to drink (the American and Filipinos had been surviving on the local and plentiful “artesian wells” throughout the Bataan campaign, some were just a few feet off the road), the Japanese refused to them water. Any prisoner that went to a well was shot. Eventually, the heat drove some men mad, and they ran for the wells only to be killed before they got there. They were forced to drink out of the muddy ditches in passing; any who got sick were killed. The prisoners were playthings for the Japanese. One survivor described a Japanese officer who swung a baseball bat at the prisoners using a turn at a crossroads as home plate. Any women on the march were brutally raped, tortured, and killed. If there were too many corpses on the road, the Japanese had the prisoners push them into the ditches on the side of the road and bury them. More than a few prisoners were buried alive just because they couldn’t move.

At San Fernando, they were stuffed into cattle cars so tight they couldn’t sit, or even fall over when the passed out from the stifling heat. The crowded conditions of the march was conducive to the spread of several diseases, dysentery being the worst. As on the march, the prisoners defecated where they stood. Once they reached Capos, they were forced to march nine more miles to Camp O’Donnell, a former US Army and Philippine Army post, converted into a POW Camp. Their ordeal wasn’t over though, disease continued to ravage the survivors, and several hundred more died every day for weeks.

80,000 American and Filipinos started on the Bataan Death March, but only 54,000 arrived.

The Fall of Bataan

In March 1942, LtGen Homma’s Japanese 14th Army was reinforced by troops from the successful operations in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, after being stopped at the Orion-Bagac Line in Feberuary. On 31 March, Gen Wainwright, Gen MacArthur’s successor after he was ordered to Australia, put the 80,000 remaining Filipino and American defenders on the Bataan peninsula on quarter rations. With dwindling food and water, nonexistent medical supplies, no hope of relief, 27,000 sick and the rest exhausted and starving, the end was near.

On 2 April Homma launched his final offensive. He cracked the line within three days, and swept aside the feeble, if courageous counterattacks. From Australia, MacArthur ordered a counterattack by every available soldier, but this was more for media consumption, and completely disregarded the actual situation on Bataan.

On 6 April, Japanese troops occupied Mount Samat, the critical piece of key terrain that dominated the peninsula, and unhinged any remaining defensive lines. American and Filipino troops fled to the rear. On 8 April, MG Edward King, out of contact with Gen Wainwright on Corregidor and the senior surviving officer on Bataan, recognized the futility of any further resistance and requested a surrender. The next day, 60,000 Filipino and 15,000 American exhausted and emaciated soldiers and sailors, and 25,000 civilians surrendered to the Japanese.

Homma was expecting no more than 25,000 prisoners and was surprised to find that he had four times that number. He didn’t give it a thought after the initial reaction and left the details to his staff. His mind was already on the next objective, the island of Corregidor, and that night ordered his artillery to pound the island fortress, as he began planning for its assault.

The Siege of Badajoz Ends

In 1812, the Peninsular War was going in Napoleon’s favor despite fierce resistance from Spanish guerrillas and the Duke of Wellington’s Anglo Portuguese Army. For his imminent invasion of Russia, Napoleon pulled out most of the French troops from Spain which breathed new life into Wellington’s campaign. In the beginning of March, Wellington besieged the strategically important and well fortified town of Badajoz. On 6 April 1812, he assaulted the town before the Army of French Marshall Nicolas de Soult could arrive and bottle up his army. In some of the most savage fighting of the Napoleonic era, Wellington’s redcoats managed to take the town but with extremely heavy casualties.

Although the British were victorious, the British troops suffered horribly and Wellington lost control of his soldiers. They began to loot, rape and terrorize the the Spanish citizens of Badajoz. Without the garrison of Badajoz and with most of his troops sent to Russia, Soult could not take advantage of the situation and attack Wellington in the confusion. Only on 9 April did Wellington manage to restore order. Although the Peninsular War would go on for three more years, Badajoz was the last chance the French had to win in Spain, a campaign Napoleon would refer to as his “Bleeding Ulcer.”

The Hump

With the closure of the Burma Road by Japanese advances in Southeast Asia, Chiang Kai Shek was cut off from the vital supplies that were needed to keep China in the war. The only way to supply the Chinese until the Burma Road could be reestablished was via air. To this end the US Army Air Corps’ Corps Ferrying Command (the predecessor to today’s Air Mobility Command) created the India-China Ferry from Assam in Eastern India to Kunming in China. 
The 720 mile trip was the last leg of a 14,000 mile journey from the United States. For example if Chiang needed Widget A, it would be loaded in New Orleans, or later Los Angeles, for the two month trip via convoy to Karachi. From there it would take two months across northern India’s primitive road network or by barge on its rivers to Assam where it was loaded onto requisitioned propeller driven DC-3 cargo planes (or C-46/47s in later years). The pilots would then fly the dangerous route over the Naga Hills of Burma, named for the headhunting tribes that inhabited the “hills” that were hills only in comparison to the Himalayan Mountains (most were larger and more jagged than the Rockies) further on. Then it was over the proper Himalayan mountains to Southern China. The harrowing trips with numerous sharp turns were without charts, by dead reckoning, with unpredictable weather, through violent winds at altitudes as high as 15,000 ft above sea level and with no hope rescue if they crashed.

The first India-China ferry flight of two former Pan Am planes on 8 April 1942 was not actually over the specific part of the trip known as, “The Hump”, that would only come in May after the Japanese captured the Myitkyina airfield which forced the route over the Sansuny Range to avoid Interception. Ironically it didn’t carry supplies for China but for America. The flight carried eight thousand gallons of aviation fuel for use by the Doolittle Raiders who were optimistically expected to land on Chinese airfields after their raid on Japan. 
The first month only brought 146 tons to China. But until they stopped in November 1945, the unescorted trips over The Hump brought 685,000 tons of supplies to China at the cost 594 planes lost to crashes or Japanese fighters. That’s at least one missing presumed dead crew every other day for the rest of the war. Chiang Kai Shek attributed their dedication in the face of such adversity as one of the reasons China stayed in the war. By the end of the war, one aircraft was taking off for China from India over the Hump every three minutes.

The Indian Ocean Raids

Though the Allies didn’t know it, Japan had no intention of invading Australia; they did plan on isolating it after the fall of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands though. Their entire strategy depended on the Allies seeking peace before that was necessary. However, in the longer term, they planned on invading India to create a puppet buffer state under Indian Nationalists and a shoe string operation to occupy Ceylon (Sri Lanka) which dominated the Indian Ocean. With the British, Indians, and Chinese on the run in Burma, Indian antiwar demonstrations and rioting, Gandhi’s recent rebuffs of British guarantees of postwar independence (“a postdated check from a failing bank”), the formation of the Indian National Army under the Japanese, and the Japanese hitherto total domination of the sea, this was much more in the realm of the possible than we assume in hindsight.
On 30 March 1942 Adm Nagumo’s Kido Butai launched Operation C to destroy the recently reinforced British Eastern Fleet located at Trincomalee on the east coast of Ceylon. Once that was accomplished, the Japanese were to establish a submarine base on the Vichy French (a Japanese ally) island of Madagascar to interdict supplies to India, Egypt, and the Middle East.
The British, having partially broken the Japanese naval codes, knew of Operation C beforehand and reinforced the British Eastern Fleet with every available ship. Unfortunately, the British ships were mostly obsolete. The Eastern Fleet’s commander, Adm James Sommerville, had five battleships, but four were un-modernized “R” Class ships from the First World War, and the last, the venerable HMS Warspite was modernized but still obsolete. His battleships, designed to fight the German Navy in the North Sea didn’t have the range to operate in the vast distances in the East, so a secret refueling base was established at the Addu atoll in the Indian Ocean. Sommerville also had two modern fleet carriers and an escort carrier, but the fighters and torpedo bombers were also obsolete; they might have been capable of dealing with German and Italian battleships, but they were no match for the carriers’ planes that bombed Pearl Harbor.
Armed with intelligence of the Japanese attack, Sommerville sortied to meet them. Unable to find the Japanese, Somerville dispatched the escort carrier back to Ceylon while he moved to cover his secret base on the Addu atoll which he now (incorrectly) assumed was the first Japanese target. It was probably for the best because it put his most effective ships well out of range when the Japanese did strike.

Nagumo ravaged the Eastern Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. On Easter Sunday, 5 April, he raided Columbo on Ceylon and destroyed the RAF on the ground and sank the ships in the port. On the 6th, 7th and 8th, the Kido Butai struck targets on the east coast of India, and sank any Allied ship within range, 23 merchant ships. On 9 April, he struck Tricomalee and caught the escort carrier, the Hermes, trying to flee whom he promptly sunk along with her escorts. With still no contact with Sommerville’s main force, Nagumo thought it best to retire after a job well done, if not completely finished, just as he had after Pearl Harbor. 

Sommerville’s Eastern Fleet would be pulled back to Kenya, but their mere existence would prevent further Japanese naval activity in the Indian Ocean in 1942, especially after the upcoming events in the Central and South Pacific in May and June.

America Enters the First World War

The transatlantic telegraph and steam powered ocean transit made the world quite a bit smaller, and brought about the first period of true globalization. For the first time the events across the globe could be read at the breakfast table by ordinary Americans in great detail and relatively soon after they happened. The Zimmerman Telegram and Unrestricted Submarine Warfare by Germany meant that actions by other nations directly affected ordinary Americans. In 1914, the majority of Americans wanted to stay neutral in the latest iteration of the four hundred years long Franco-German struggle for dominance of continental Europe. Less than three years later, the majority of Americans were for intervention.

On 2 April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson broke his campaign promise to “Keep us out of the war” and asked Congress to declare war on Imperial Germany in order to go to “war to end war” and, “The world must be safe for democracy”. On 4 April the Senate voted to declare war and at 3 am on 6 April 1917, the House of Representatives followed suit. That day, President Wilson announced that America had entered the Great War.

The United States was woefully unprepared. The US Army, to include the entire National Guard, was only 208,000 strong. They had just 10,265 men in the US Marine Corps. More Frenchmen and British had been killed (much less wounded) at Verdun and the Somme just the year before than existed in the entire US military. The American army had little experience with units over the size of a regiment since the US Civil War, fifty years before. The War Department had no experience, infrastructure, staff, or plans for the millions of Americans that would need to be drafted in order to stabilize the Western Front.

Nonetheless, the first Americans headed “Over there” in less two months.

The Spanish American War might have introduced us to the World Stage, but now we were starring on it, and would continue to so for the next century. But at the time, we didn’t even know our lines.

The Battle on the Ice

In the late 12th century, the Hanseatic League colonized the upper Baltic around Livonia (modern day Estonia and Latvia), and began converting the pagan Finnic and Ugric peoples there to Christianity. They formed the crusading order The Swordbrothers of Livonia to forcibly convert the pagans. But after a serious defeat in 1236, the Livonian Order merged with another order, the Teutonic Knights.

The Teutonic Knights, who were the most dedicated to the Baltic Crusades (or Northern Crusades, as opposed to the earlier crusades in the Middle East) were themselves defeated by the Mongols along with their uneasy Polish allies at the Battle of Liegnitz in 1241. Checked in the south by the Mongols and the already Catholic Poles, the Teutonic Knights turned north to lands adjacent to their Livonian brothers, and sought to expand their conquests at the expense of the only Russian entity that did not fall to the Mongols, the merchant republic of Novgorod.

Novgorod was not Roman Catholic, but Eastern Orthodox and a legitimate, even preferred target for the Baltic Crusades. The mid-13th Century was the high point of the schism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism; the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople in 1204 from the Byzantines and in 1242 the city and a large portion of the Byzantine Empire was still part of a Roman Catholic state ruled by a transplanted French born nobility. A Teutonic conquest of rich Novgorod would be a serious blow to the primacy of Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe.

However, Novgorod was led by the young and energetic Prince Alexander Nevsky, who even at the age of 21, was a proven battle leader and adept politician. As the last remaining unconquered Kievan Rus holding, he knew the Teutonic Knights would take advantage of its weakness and attack the city. With the main Mongols army temporarily stymied by the vast marshlands to the east, he gathered his militia, some Mongol mercenaries who were left behind and bored, and the households of his boyars, or nobles, and attacked Livonia in the west, before they could do the same to him.

The raiding into Livonia in the cold March of 1242 brought the Teutonic Knights out of their castles before many of the “summer soldiers” (the crusaders, adventurers, and mercenaries that arrived every spring to loot and rape their away across the Baltic until it got cold.) could arrive. Nonetheless, the Teutonic Knights could muster 100 heavily armored brothers (easily the best trained and best equipped knights in Eastern Europe at the time), 800 superior German and Danish knights, and about 1800 Estonian, German, and Danish infantry.

Nevsky greatly outnumbered the Teutonic Knights but most of his army was of much lower quality. His best troops were the druzhina, the body guards and household companions of the boyars. That thousand was (very) roughly equivalent to the German and Danish knights if a bit more eclectic and not nearly as disciplined. His most numerous troops were the city militia of Novgorod and Finnic-Ugric tribesmen who knew the Teutonic Knights all too well. Though unarmored for the most part, combined they were a formidable mass at nearly 3500 men. Finally, Nevsky had 600 Mongol horse archers.

When the Teutonic Knights attempted to put an end to the embarrassing raids, Nevsky withdrew. The Teutonic Knights assumed that although Nevsky greatly outnumbered them, the poor quality of his troops wouldn’t be able to withstand a charge by the heavily armored knights. But Nevsky was just executing the time honored Russian tactic of withdrawing until turning and facing their attacker on the ground of their own choosing (See every invasion of Russia ever). On 5 April, 1242, Nevsky stopped marching and formed on the east bank of the frozen Lake Peipus.

By withdrawing to the east bank of the frozen lake, the Teutonic Knights were forced to charge across the ice to reach the Russian army. Nevsky drew up his men in three ranks with the tribesmen in front, the city militia behind, and the cavalry in the third, screened by the first two. The knights thundered across the lake and charged directly at the Russian infantry. Their target was Nevsky, as the army would disintegrate without him. However, their slipping and sliding on the ice lessened the blow significantly. The tribesmen and militia held despite horrendous casualties. In many places the ice broke under the immense weight of the charging knights. Fortunately for them Lake Peipus was shallow at the point where the battle was fought, so they didn’t drown. But many knights found it difficult to maneuver in the freezing water up to their stirrups or even knees, whether while engaging the spear and polearm wielding infantry dancing about the unbroken ice, or attempting to force their way through the unbroken ice to engage the infantry on shore. The surviving accounts of the battle describe the knights growing exhausted just from killing infantry, but they never broke. Moreover, the Knights never got close to Nevsky: he commanded from a position behind where he could effectively direct the battle in the Eastern tradition, unlike the Teutonic commander who was in the thick of the melee.

Once the Knights were committed, Nevsky then released some of his cavalry to flank the Knights to the south, while the horse archers did the same to the north. He kept the cream of the druzhina to await a suitable moment for a devastating counterattack. The Teutonic Knights saw the maneuvers, but the ice and the numerous infantry kept them from responding effectively. The horse archers in the north were particularly effective as the lighter horses were much more nimble on the ice, and the heavily laden knights could not effectively come to grips with the Mongols, who picked off the Danish knights at their leisure. The northern flank of the Teutonic line broke.

Nevsky ordered the remaining druzhina to charge into the gap. The Teutonic Knights were surrounded, and it was clear to everyone on the “field” of battle that the Knights’ cause was lost. Individually, then in groups, they began to cut their way out. The infantry routed and “countless Estonians were killed”. In their haste many perished when they traversed patches of thinner ice to avoid the pursuers and plunged into the icy water, which was much deeper the further they were away from the eastern shore.

Alexander Nevsky’s victory at the Battle on the Ice ended the Teutonic Knights’ ambitions on Russian territory. Once the Mongol threat subsided, they would eventually turn on Lithuania and Poland. Ten years after the battle, Nevsky was crowned Grand Prince of Vladimir, the supreme ruler of all Russians, and in 1547, he was canonized by the Eastern Orthodox Church. In 1938, the campaign and battle was immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet propaganda film, “Alexander Nevsky” which became very popular during the Second World War, even though it was taken out of circulation when Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were allies between August 1939 and June 1941.