Napoleon Bonaparte's retreat from Moscow, 1812

18^th October 1812 was the day on which Napoleon Bonaparte began his retreat from Moscow, realising for the first time that his dream of dominating the whole of Europe was not going to come true. There were two great turning points in the fortunes of Napoleon’s Empire – the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 had shown that France would no longer rule the roost at sea; the Retreat from Moscow made it clear that the same now applied on land.

Napoleon had marched his army 500 miles into Russian territory from the relative safety of Vilnius (in Lithuania). It had taken twelve weeks across territory laid waste by the Russian peasants who had destroyed anything of use to the French before they abandoned their farms and moved elsewhere.

When the French eventually reached Moscow they found that the same policy had been adopted. This had been a thriving city with a population of 250,000 but now only 15,000 remained. The Russians had set fire to much of the city before leaving, and Napoleon was now the conqueror of piles of smoking ruins that contained very little food or anything else of value.

Napoleon sought to do a deal for a truce with the Russian Tsar, Alexander I, but the latter would not even reply to Napoleon’s letter. After 35 days in Moscow, Napoleon had no choice but to order a retreat. The whole Russian campaign had been a complete waste of time, resources and lives.

The Retreat was worse than the advance because Napoleon’s demoralised army now had to march through the devastated Russian territories in the depths of winter. They also came under attack from marauding Cossacks and gangs of guerrillas who were properly equipped for the conditions, which the French were not. Every fresh raid was another defeat.

The men and horses that died, whether from cold, starvation or enemy action, were left where they fell, their bodies becoming food for wolves.

90,000 men began the Retreat from Moscow but only 20,000 returned to Vilnius. Napoleon could only comment that it was but a short step from the sublime to the ridiculous. He had been defeated not so much by the Russians as by Russia.

© John Welford

The Crusades: Christianity at its worst

On 18^th November 1095 Pope Urban II called on the Christians of western Europe to march to Jerusalem and reclaim the city, together with its Christian holy places, from the Seljuk Turks who were occupying it. This must therefore count as one of those “days that will live in infamy”, of which the world has had far too many.

Pope Urban had been influenced by the stories told by a monk named Peter the Hermit, who had travelled to Jerusalem and witnessed the oppression meted out to resident Christians by the Muslims, and the lack of respect shown to their shrines. The Pope therefore came up with what he thought would be the solution.

An army of 4,000 mounted knights and 25,000 men on foot was assembled, mainly from France, Italy and the states of Germany. They set off for Constantinople full of religious fervour, having painted white crosses on their tunics and shields, but Christian piety soon went out of the window once opportunities for personal enrichment began to present themselves.

The army turned into a pillaging horde once it left its home countries, and any riches encountered on route were likely to be looted and their defenders killed. Pope Urban had declared that anyone fighting as a Crusader would be absolved of penance for sin, and many of the men at arms took this as permission to commit any crimes they felt like. When a city fell to their swords they would shout “God wills it” as they plundered, killed and raped.

Needless to say, many of the Crusaders, who may well have started out with good intentions, saw little point in continuing once their packs were full of loot. Desertions, coupled with battle casualties and disease victims, reduced the army to 1,500 knights and 12,000 foot soldiers when it eventually reached Jerusalem in June 1099.

The city was captured on 15^th July, followed by a massacre of its Muslim inhabitants. It would remain in Christian hands until 1187 when it was recaptured by Saladin who, much to the surprise of the defeated inhabitants, treated them with much more humanity and forbearance than had been shown when the boot was on the other foot.

The Age of Crusades was to last until 1365, with nine crusades being held in total, these having very mixed results. However, it was not an age of which Christianity can be all that proud. Unfortunately, mankind has never learned that claiming to have God on your side is no excuse for behaving in a thoroughly ungodlike way.

©John Welford

Operation Market Garden: Monty's bridge too far

17^th September 1944 saw the launch of Operation Market Garden, the campaign that Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery hoped would end the Second World War by Christmas.

The plan was to complete the Allied invasion of Europe by attacking Germany via the northern route, i.e. through the Netherlands, although this would mean crossing the River Rhine at its widest point.

The plan was to land 20,000 airborne troops behind the German lines near Arnhem, on the far side of the Rhine, capture all the bridgeheads over the river, then hold these positions while ground-based troops caught up. Montgomery was confident that the latter would reach the captured bridges within two days.

However, the strength of German resistance was much greater than had been anticipated and the plan went wrong both with the airborne and ground assault. Capturing the bridges took much longer than expected and the armoured divisions moving north towards Arnhem could only move painfully slowly.

An attempt to reinforce the airborne troops went disastrously wrong when a division of Polish paratroopers landed on the wrong side of the river.

Eventually the signal was given to withdraw and the surviving troops escaped back across the Rhine, some of them having to swim. 17,000 Allied troops were killed, wounded or captured, and the generals were forced to think of a different way of achieving their objective.

The title of the 1977 film based on the campaign was entirely appropriate – “A Bridge Too Far”.

© John Welford

The Altmark incident, 1940

The United Kingdom declared war on Germany on 3^rd September 1939, but it was not until May 1940 that most people in Britain were aware that there “was a war on”. This period of relative inactivity became known as “the phoney war”.

However, the word “relative” is important, because there was action at sea right from the start, including the sinking of a British aircraft carrier (HMS Courageous) within weeks of war being declared, with more than 500 lives being lost.

Another naval action occurred on 16^th February 1940. HMS Cossack pursued a German supply ship, the Altmark, and forced it to run aground in a Norwegian fjord (see photo). The action had two unexpected consequences.

The first of these was that when the Altmark was boarded and its hatches opened, the Royal Navy sailors discovered that the ship was carrying around 300 British merchant crewmen who had been rescued and captured when their ships had been sunk earlier the previous year by the German battleship Graf Spee. They were being transported to Germany where, given their civilian status, they could not have expected the treatment accorded to accredited prisoners of war. They could have found themselves working for the rest of the war in German factories as virtual slave labour.

HMS Cossack returned to Britain with the rescued seamen, leading to much rejoicing on the part of the British people. However, the incident was seen by the Norwegians as an act that violated their neutrality, and by Germany as a threat to their supply route for Swedish iron ore. The second consequence of the incident was therefore that Hitler pushed his already planned invasion of Norway to the top of his list of priorities and delayed plans to invade France and the Low Countries.

The rescue of the British merchant crews led to a new catchphrase. When the hatches of the Altmark were opened and the crewmen discovered, the Royal Navy sailors announced “The Navy’s here”. Winston Churchill used this in a speech in London when he announced that, to Nelson’s famous signal “England expects that every man will do his duty” should be added the words “The Navy’s here”.

© John Welford

The Boston Tea Party, 1773

16^th December 1773 was the day of the “Boston Tea Party”, which is generally regarded as the opening move of the American Revolution.

It cannot be denied that the British government mishandled the colonial problems that it faced. In short, the colonies were costing more to administer and protect than they were producing in benefit for the home country. When the Seven Years War ended in 1763 the British were faced with having to maintain a standing army in the American colonies that was being paid for by taxing their own population to the hilt. The colonies had to be made to pay their own way.

The methods that the British government used to achieve this end may have seemed logical at the time but they did not go down well with the colonists who were far more concerned about their own situation than the bigger picture of the British Empire – naturally enough. The colonists saw no reason why they should pay any sort of tax to the home country, but the British parliament, equally logically, saw no reason why the colonists should expect a free ride at Britain’s expense.

A whole series of financial impositions was made on the colonies, of which the duty on tea was only one. A complicating factor was that the company that controlled Britain’s trade in tea, the British East India Company, had been given permission to send tea to the colonies tax free and charge what they wanted for it rather than going through a middleman.

This move was resented by the colonists, who saw it as a move to establish a trade monopoly, despite the fact that the tea that was being delivered to Boston in December 1773 would have been offered for sale at a lower price than previously, due to the relaxation of the full duties that would otherwise be paid, although there was a still a residual duty. It was the very fact that some duty was still payable that offended the Bostonians, because the principle was thus established that the British government had the right to levy charges on the colonists.

The whole issue of “no taxation without representation” was something of a smokescreen, because it ignored the fact that what was at issue here were duties and not taxes. It made no sense to demand seats in the parliament of a country that levied import duties on the purchasers of its goods, because this would apply to the citizens of any country doing the importing, but this was not an argument that would have cut much ice with the American colonists for whom the tea issue was the final straw.

As it was, an organised mob of about 60 Boston citizens, led by Samuel Adams, dressed themselves as Mohawks – to add an element of theatre to the proceedings – and boarded three ships in Boston Harbour to tip 342 tea chests overboard.

The British response to the incident was “overboard” in another sense, in that repressive measures were taken to force the rioters to pay for the lost tea. It was this attempt to punish the colonists of Massachusetts that really lit the fuse that would lead to revolution, rather than the Tea Party itself.

© John Welford

The Albigensian Crusade, 1208

On 14^th January 1208 a Papal legate was murdered, thus triggering one of the most terrible demonstrations in history of what happens when people use their religion as an excuse to commit evil deeds.

The medieval Church, led by the pope in Rome, was on the lookout for heresy in all its forms. Any group or sect that did not toe the line was not to be tolerated. This is an unfortunate consequence of religion in all its forms – once you have convinced yourself that you are right, everyone else must therefore be wrong, and if you are fanatical enough there is only one punishment for being wrong, which is that the heretics must not be allowed to live.

The target in 13^th century France was the group of Christian puritans known as the Cathars, who were concentrated in the cities of Toulouse and Albi in the southwest. The problem with the Cathars was not so much their devotion to a peaceful and saintly life in which the distractions of the world were set to one side, but the fact that they dared to criticise the Catholic Church for its greed and corruption and their refusal to pay the papal taxes that were part of that corruption.

Pope Innocent III (see picture) sent his legate, Pierre de Castelnau, to Toulouse to demand that Count Raymond suppress the Cathars on pain of excommunication. The Count gave in to the demand and sent the legate on his way, but de Castelnau had not gone far before he was set upon and murdered by a knight in the service of Count Raymond.

It is unlikely that Count Raymond had ordered the killing, but that did not affect the reaction of Pope Innocent who ordered, in effect, the destruction of the entire Cathar community.

This campaign became known as the Albigensian Crusade, because the town of Albi was one of its main targets, and ironically it was by far the most successful (in terms of outcome matching aim) of all the Crusades launched by the Church at that period in history.

The task of wiping out the Cathars was assigned to a French nobleman named Simon de Montfort, who set about his task with ruthless efficiency. City after city was laid waste and the population slaughtered down to the last man, woman and child, although some did manage to escape.

When it was pointed out to Simon that not every inhabitant of a city under siege was a Cathar, and many were loyal Catholics, his response was that everyone should be killed anyway, and the task of sorting out good from bad should be left for God to sort out when their souls got to the Pearly Gates.

Even after the crusade had succeeded in destroying the supposed threat from the Cathars, Simon carried on with the genocide and was only stopped by a rock that was projected from a mangonel on the walls of Toulouse, a weapon which legend states was operated by a group of young women who were desperately trying to defend their city after most of the men had been killed.

The whole episode was a revolting example of what happens when fanaticism holds sway. Examples from much more recent times bear witness to the fact that the worst atrocities seem to occur when religion is a motive.

© John Welford

General Wolfe takes Quebec, 1759

On the morning of 13^th September 1759 the British general James Wolfe executed the move that would finally upon the door to making Canada part of the British Empire rather than the French one.

The French fortress of Quebec took full advantage of the geography of the area in that the cliffs alongside the St Lawrence River guarded it on one side. The steep wooded bluffs, although not particularly high, would surely be enough to dissuade any attacking force from approaching directly from the river.

However, General Wolfe found an unguarded path that zigzagged its way up the cliff to the level area above, known as the Plains of Abraham, and under cover of darkness he was able to get seven battalions of men, some 4,800 in all, arrayed along a front a mile long. All he had to do now was wait for the French, 12,000 strong, to turn up.

When they did, at about 9.00am, Wolfe gave orders not to fire until they were within 60 yards. The volleys that were then unleashed were enough to send the French back to their fortifications. The fortress surrendered on the 18^th, by which time most of the French forces had retreated upriver.

General Wolfe was badly wounded during the battle, as was his opposite number the Marquis de Montcalm. Wolfe died the same day, Montcalm the day after.

Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of European powers fighting to gain control of far distant lands, in military terms it was a brilliant stratagem on Wolfe’s part. The tactic of sneaking round the back to attack the enemy where least expected was not original to Wolfe, whose education would have included stories such as that of the Battle of Thermopylae in ancient Greece, in which the Persians adopted a similar move. Likewise, Wolfe’s example was to prove useful to later generals, such as Douglas Macarthur during the Korean War in 1950, when he surprised the North Koreans at Inchon by landing in an “impossible” place.

The daring of Wolfe’s attack on the Plains of Abraham made him a posthumous folk-hero among the British, with many statues and works of art appearing as a result. Of the latter, the painting by Benjamin West entitled “The Death of General Wolfe” (as shown) is probably the best known.

© John Welford