Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
The Thames rises on the spring line of the Cotswolds, near Circencester in Gloucestershire, and runs 215km to the sea. The Admiralty (MoD now) chart above of the banks and channels at its mouth is ephemeral, like all of the underwater geography laid down by the river in its latest interglacial incarnation. With a 16,000 square kilometer catch-basin, it's not surprising that the Thames has a relatively small discharge of 65.8 cubic meters, compared with, say, the Escaut/Scheldt (120), Meuse/MaaΒ (350), much less the Rhine (2000) --not even that much more than the little Aa (10) or Medway (11)!
It carries enough before it, however, to water London, giving ships and their crews reason to thread their way through the sandbanks and silted shallows at the mouth of the river to the metropolis. The Gunfleet Sands probably do not their name from the weapons the weapons that ships had carried since perhaps the 1300s. They had already carried that name down from time immemorial by the days when the English fleets of the Anglo-Dutch Wars anchored there. Someone would have said something at a time when they were the focus of the Atlantic.
The geologists get all the good words. An "epeiric" is a shelf, or shallow sea, and the North Sea is one. It's cold, thus oxygenated, flooded by the effluent of a wet continent, thus rich. More, the legacy of the 150 million years across which epeiric seas have persisted in this region gives its bottom an ancient history of geologic shaping. It's a maze of channels and banks, up and down, through which the fisherfolk have sought their prey, probably since Viking times. (Indeed, you may recall that that's my explanation for Viking times.) It's said that the Dutch herring fishery employed a hundred thousand men at the dawn of the Early Modern. (I think that it's in Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, somewhere, but I'm too lazy to check carefully.)
I use the deadly "it's said" because it's a made-up number, inspired by envy at the thought of the excise a state could levy on so much fish. N. A. M. Rodger attacks these kinds of numbers lustily, as an exercise in demonstrating what isn't important to Early Modern naval history. The men weren't there in the numbers claimed, and couldn't be used if they were. You're not going to get very far at writing about war at sea, Rodger thinks, without first appreciating that trained naval manpower was scarce. Great power naval war in the North Sea casts its nets into a deep well of local knowledge and a wider floating proletariat for whom war is both curse and opportunity. If there is something universal in its conduct as well (I think that there is), then the North Sea is a world sea.
When I took the hundred thousand men seriously, I tried to calculate how much wheat land the North Sea was equivalent to, and it was on that basis that I challenged my buddy, Gerry Lorentz, to take the east coast of Britain, rather than Bristol in the west, as the nursery of the British marine. It was a fatuous thing to think and say. The maritime acres of the North Sea were like the wheat lands of old Latium, the endless source of such men as were available to build great empires. But it's not quite wrong, either.
But I'm not talking about old times today, but the last great war. By that time, the bread and butter of the North Sea trade was, well, coal and iron and --Oh, Hell, who needs to quote Masefield when you can just link to him? (Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.) Grand Admiral Raeder thought that he could conquer Britain by siege; but it's a funny kind of siege that strikes hardest by cutting a place off Tyne from London, itself from itself.
Everybody! The General needs your help! The rights owners have done a heroic job of making sure that you'll never see White Christmas (1954) on the Youtube, but here's the opening. And here's today's proximate inspiration: "What's to be Done for a General who Retires?"
I know that it's only the foreshortening effect of history that lets me associate a movie released in October 1954 with the relief of Douglas MacArthur in the spring of 1951, but it's all still just slightly creepy.
You know what else is creepy? The foremost military intellectual of the United States Army getting into bed with a sycophant because she liked to go on 5 mile runs with him and talk about, I don't know, "state-building." I didn't compose this post with General Petraeus in mind, but this won't be the first time that I've mused aloud that the Pentagon could do with more engineering and less "counter-insurgency." That's not a knock on five mile runs, and I'm not saying that technocracy can solve the problems of Afghanistan better than grass-roots political organisation at the muzzle end of a Barrett Cal. 50. As I understand it, building roads in Afghanistan is supposed to complement state-building, so if they've failed, they've failed together. There. But I'm not talking about there.
I'm talking about here. Generals are in society. Armies come out of societies, and go back into it. NATO has been fighting a double war in Afghanistan, but it's also been sending soldiers home at the end. What happens to them is important, too. Who these veterans from the wars returning are happens to differ from one kind of war to the next. On the one hand, there's a Special Ops war, all climbing mountains and, I assume, given all the Seal Teams, swimming places. On the other there's a drone war, which is all about autonomous devices synching remotely so that fewer wedding parties get Hellfired.
Again, I'm trying to pass judgments about morality and efficacy, just highlight two choices for our modernity here in North America and coming down in favour of the technocratic one. You can't demob and invest your pension in a neighbourhood running-up-mountains-and-stabbing-people-to-produce-favourable-political-outcomes shop, whereas people are always blowing up their crappy Vaio laptops and looking for a convenient repair guy. (And by "people," I mean, "Stupid Sony. Never again.") And who knows? If you get your policy right for North America, maybe it'll have an impact on the ground in Afghanistan, too. Weirder things have been known to happen than emulation when you model something that actually, you know, works.*
So the choice, at least here, is between an economy that works, and one that has to find a place for political-operatives-with-bayonets (and sometimes horses). It's not much of a contest, is all I'm saying, and I'm not sorry that General Petraeus is in trouble, but he's not the inspiration for this posting. That would be the fact that the "Boulogne" in "Boulogne-sur-Mer," (terminus of the Coal Wood Road) isn't accidentally similar to the fat city of "Bologna," home of the sausage. They're both vulgarisations of "Bonnona," from "Bonna." I take that fact, and the involvement of Gaius Marius, five times consul, Mark Antony, and, perhaps, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the faithful sword at Octavian's side, and ancestor of Roman emperors in the same parts of the world, as evidence that something is going on. That would be the little historical mystery that tweaked my interest in the first place, and the problem to be explained (bad generals) in this post. It's an attempt to understand them in terms of an economy that works.
The point is that there is a top down interpretations that says that the foundation of the Roman Empire is sufficiently explained by some political stuff that happened.** The causes of an empire that spanned the entire Mediterranean, one further capable of conquering all of the Maghreb, Spain, France, and England in a little over a century are to be found in faction fighting in Rome. On the other hand, there are oak forests sheltering browsing pigs, oblivious to the Mediterranean sun and to the loads of salt coming down to them on the trails in swaying donkey loads.
At 1:05 on 2 November, the last attack goes in. Operation Supercharge is under Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg's 2nd New Zealand Division. Two full infantry brigades, plus an armoured brigade and an exploiting armoured division are attached to the New Zealanders.* Freyberg's outsized personality obscures the correctness of the choice; the New Zealanders have the same institutionalised pattern of success in offensive operations in the open desert as the Australian 9th Division has in positional warfare. The attachment of two British infantry brigades gives the force the depth needed, and might be taken as a comment on the insufficiency of New Zealand's manpower, but the dismal reality of World War II is that every country, big or small, runs out of infantry.
The attack is in three waves. The infantry go in by night to break a hole through the Axis fighting positions that control the minefields, reaching towards the main lateral behind the Axis position, the Rahman Track. This is the break-through by which 1st Armoured Division will break out, at last, to the green hills beyond, but it is not intended to be a rupture. That will be left to the 9th Armoured Brigade (3rd Hussars, Wiltshire and Warwickshire Yeomanry), who will attack into the "funnel" formed by the Rahman Track, a funnel lined with 24 88mm/56 calibre Flak 36 gun, the 7.4 ton monster that has already featured on this blog as an anti-aircraft weapon.
Just as a reminder of where I've already been, let's hold a singular thought in our heads: the 88/56 Flak 36 weighs almost two tons more than the 150mm heavy field howitzer. Model 1918, a gun designed to deliver a 100lb round a somewhat-disappointing 14,000-odd yards. As an AA gun, that's not unreasonable, and not a valid comparison, but that's not how the Flak 36s deployed along the Rahman Track are to be used. (Mostly.) It's there to shoot at tanks. They are going to shoot a great many tanks today.
Nor are the Flak 36s alone. Forward of this arc of deployment are numerous additional, lighter antitank guns, specified by the official historian as including the "37-mm Pak 35/36 . . . 50-mm Pak 38, of 60 calibres . . . . [and] 50-mm Kwk, of 42 calibres. General Playfair omits the serviceable Italian 47mm weapon, but faithfully reproduces the Desert anti-armour trials conducted on these guns in an appendix to the second volume of the official history. (1) 9th Armoured Brigade's charge towards the Rahman Track might call to mind the charge of the Light Brigade, but the analogy is deeply wrong. The brigade's job here is to take ground. This ought to be an infantry job, the GOC concedes, but his command is running out of infantry, and there's perfectly good armour to throw into the battle. Well, not quite, but letting that go, 9th Armoured's job is to charge out of the rising sun and smash antitank guns, allowing the follow-on 2nd Armoured Brigade of 10th Armoured Division break through the Axis position. It doesn't work out like that. 9th Armoured is shattered on the field in the fight, and 2nd Armoured Brigade, perceiving "nothing that could be imagined to look less like a breakthrough," goes into hull-down positions that are sufficiently threatening to call the Deutsches Afrika Korps, plus Littorio Division of XX Corps. Now it is the turn of the Axis armour to attack into the barrels of the guns, tank guns and the new 6 pounder antitank gun, an 1140kg, 57mm weapon. At the end of the fighting, the DAK was so completely written off that Rommel decided to retreat from the El Alamein position. There would be vicissitudes yet. Hitler was no happier than Rommel to lose this advanced position and the prospect of a further offensive towards Egypt once the Russian winter freed air forces for a resumed attack on Malta. At 1:30 the next afternoon, he would call Rommel and give a stop order. In one interpretation, this led Rommel to either dither or dissemble with Machiavellian brioche, and in either case sacrifice Italian units to cover the retreat of German. In the more sanguine Italian reading, it was pretty much irrelevant, since those German units with organic motor transport (most of them) were disintegrating and fleeing westward with no regard for orders from on high.** It was left for Allied forces to police the battlefield, attempt pursuit with the not-uncommon result after great battlefield victories of much straining with little concrete result, and deal with an almost immediate attempt to downplay the victory; it was no great deal, inasmuch as the Axis position was logistically unsustainable; it was pointless, as Operation TORCH was coming; Rommel just decided to retreat, as opposed to being defeated, or, conversely, was only really defeated because of the Hitler stop order. Above all, Montgomery was a terrible general, since he didn't pursue hard enough. This extreme example of the "what have you done for us lately" argument relies entirely on ignorance of the actual chronology of the pursuit, and comes to us above all from Air Marshal Tedder, and seems explicable (to me) as political spin emanating from Cabinet opposition to Churchill, but that's just me. That is, I'm going to stress the importance of El Alamein as a political battle, although not at the expense of the considerable achievement of writing off an entire Axis army not entirely dissimilar in size to the force about to be entrapped at Volgograd. (Okay, 100,000 versus 300,000, but a larger proportion of armoured forces.) And I should also note that the battle kicked the Axis off Egypt's back porch. We now know that 1942 was the 'end of the beginning,' that there would be no resumption of the attack eastwards. We should also, however, bear in mind that it was the end of the beginning because the Allies beat the Axis at battles like El Alamein. On 3 November, the Axis army that occupied the El Alamein position was large and powerful. It was about to receive 2500 tons of POL, and its nominal unit strength was as great as that of the Allied force that opposed it. Given an infusion of manpower and the steady improvement of its rearward logistics through the upgrade of Tobruk port, it could still advance into Egypt. By the evening of 4 November, muster rolls taken at rally points in the rear show that it had disintegrated. On 11 December, it was in the position in the bend of the Bay of Sirte where it had stopped Allied advances twice before. This time, a single outflanking move tumbled it eastward all the way to Tunisia, and it was lucky to get away at all. Alamein wasn't just a defeat. It wrote off the German-Italian Armoured Army Africa for months. Monty, Alanbrooke, and Churchill are vindicated. Poltics and strategy are hard to separate, sometimes. Only what the hell happened? How did it come to this? At least when Gandalf and Eomer attack out of the rising sun, the blinding light of day dazes the Uruk-Hai and breaks the pike line. It could happen. 9th Armoured Brigade, we are told, was just silhouetted for the antitank fire. If an example of a failed armoured charge into the guns is needed, the DAK and Littorio's action of the next day will serve just fine.
That's the staff illustrator for Herbert Wrigley Wilson's History of the Great War, again. It's the lost weeks between the Marne and Ypres again, and he's trying to show us what battle looks like, 28 years, almost day by day, before the Battle of El Alamein. The French defenders form a thin rouge-et-bleu line, while the Germans come on in columns of companies. It would be a familiar sight on an eighteenth century battlefield, and there is a reason that the illustrator would expect a fight in late 1914 to look the same way. It comes down to the weapons. Machine guns and artillery have deep but narrow dispersal patterns. Attacking in wide but shallow formations minimises their fire effect. The tactical answer to this is platoon fire, which spreads fire in conforming shallow-but-wide dispersal. To cram enough defending infantry in to give that fire, you need a continuous line. At which point the fire of both sides is so ill-developed that the battle comes to be decided at the point of the bayonet.
Did it happen like that in the fall of 1914? No, it didn't. As even Nineteenth Century tactical manuals accepted, modern rifles were deadly enough that the attack wouldn't go in. instead, the attackers would balk and go to ground, engaging the defenders in a fire duel. As their fire built up, the defenders would follow suit. A hasty attack might carry the attackers through, or end with them routing. If neither happened, the men would dig trenches right out from underneath of them, and the mobile battle would be over. The illustrator, I think, foreshadows the trench line rather than depicts it. It's more likely that the French position has formed along an irrigation ditch than that the big, round-shouldered excavation in the drawing is recent. Which, as we know, is what actually happened in 1914. Four years of bloody stalemate, a trench line that stretches across Europe, Verdun, the Somme, bloody shambles, the vain dream of the green fields beyond, all of that.
On October 30th, 1942, as the desert wind blew sand through the battlefield of El Alamein, and the fighters rested in their trenches, listening to Radio Belgrade and letting air mail flimsies comfort them with the thought that someone loved them (third verse: "Afric's burning strand"), the planners of the staff were meditating on the same theme. Yesterday, General Alexander and Colonel McCreery had escorted the Minister of State for the Middle East to Montgomery's battle headquarters, and the minister hinted that it might be time for the general to share his plan for managing the shutting of the battle down with him. The GOC and his chief of staff indignantly denied that a stalemate was in the offing.
Which is why, at 2200 hours on October 31st, when the dead walk the streets of Vancouver to the sound of the fireworks, the Australians of 2/24, 2/32, and 2/48th infantry battalions, supported by 2/3rd Pioneer Battalion, plus 40th Royal Tank Regiment, mounted in Valentines, and 360 guns, went forward at the northern extreme of the battlefield, just south of the sea. They were to clear the coast road and cut off 125th Panzergrenadier Regiment, then turn and take up defences facing west and south on the far side of the railway embankment and accept Armoured Army Africa's counterattack if they could not.
They did. They held it. The battle wasn't over yet, but it might as well have been.
The odd part here is that the whole story of 1914--18 suggests that the attack was the hard part. There were theorists who grandly announced that offensive action was stronger than defence in the years before 1914. We mock their folly today --and then fall into exactly the same thinking when it is time to celebrate this great Australian tactical victory of 1942.
McCaw's of Alberta wants you to know that they're very good at what they do, which is take dirt from one place and put it in another.
In Ironbottom Sound, Naval Battle of American sailors are turning the cliche that dismisses their achievements on its head, and winning surface battles by overcoming terrible matérieldeficiencies with desperate courage, while the carrier boys watch their margin dribbleaway. Not only that, they are transforming those deficient systems into war-winning weapons, at the front. (Or nearly so. New Caledonia counts, right?) If David Noble's picture of the way that Numerically-Controlled manufacturing saw the triumph of butt-crack showing blue collar technicians over would-be managerial, white-shirt wearing engineers in the postwar era is at all accurate, it has its precursor in the men reaming out the innards of Indiana and making the gun mountings and directors work, one added-resistor-to-a -Selsyn circuit at a time.
Meanwhile, in the ruins of Stalingrad, the Red Army holds the sky suspended.
And on the desert sands of North Africa, Bernard Montgomery, queruluous, patronising, all-too-aggressive when he least needed to be, will save the ministry. It's the least heroic challenge of the turning point, and perhaps the most important. I honestly can't say that Churchill's replacement would have led Britain out of the war, but it's the way to bet. It won't have to happen, though, because "Brooke's man"(1) is going to win.
No surprise, right? One way of counting troops shows that Eighth Army had 220,000 to 58,000 Germans; 1029 tanks to 249; 892 guns to 552; 1451 antitank guns to 1063. (Barr, 276). This isn't a battle. It's taking the fat kid's lunch money and then laughing while he scrambles for his inhaler.
Of course, you can do the count in other ways, and I've already maligned Niall Barr by leaving the Italians out of the Axis head count, as he does not dismiss the Italian contribution, as some do.
So here's the official historian's version of the count:*
Commonwealth
German
Italian
Combined Axis
Combat manpower*
195000
50000
54
104000
Infantry Battalions
85 incl. 8 MG, 2
Recce
31
40
71
Armoured Cars
435
192
Tanks “other than
light”
1029
496
Field and Med
Artillery
908
200
260–300
460–500 +18 Germ.
Hvy
Anti-tank guns
1451 (849 6pdrs)
850 incl. 86 88s
300
1150
*Playfair, 4:30,
notes that “The figures available do not permit of an accurate comparison of
fighting strength, but if the fighting strength of the Eighth Army is taken at
195,000. . . . German about 50,000". . . .and.. . . . “Italian, 54,000.”
Eighty-five battalions against 71! (Is it news to anyone that Axis combat battalions were seriously understrength?) Also, you can parse the tank count this way: 170 Grants, 252 Shermans, 216 Crusader IIs, 78 Crusaders, 119 Stuarts, 194 Valentines, so that the Commonwealth advantage in "cruiser" tanks is 715 to 496. Which isn't fair, either, since the Italian "tanks other than light" are the size of Stuarts, not Crusaders. But there you go. I've successfully trimmed Now we're talking a glorious victory of the English spirit. You know, gardens and green and tiny trains in twee county towns...
That's the Danube on the left, the Sava on the right. Since that might be confusing, here is Google Earth, picking out the route from Venice to the White City:
And now that we're oriented, here's the town and its rivers, with the road from Venice coming in from the left:
At this scale, you can see the Sava entering the Danube from bottom left, and the course of the relief canal that cuts out the meander on which Belgrade sits. I would imagine that if you descended the Danube in flood three hundred years ago, it would be a matter of choice whether you found the city on the blue Danube at all.
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